A Call for an Open-Source Economy
We stand at a critical moment in human history. Our technological capabilities have advanced to the point where material abundance for all is now possible, yet our economic systems remain rooted in paradigms of scarcity and competition.
The New Enlightenment offers a completely different future, not by rehashing old ideologies, but by embracing the revolutionary potential of automation and cybernetics.
But just as inevitably, powerful forces on the left and right also are beginning to harness them, to their own ends of totalitarian control which rations and controls who gets resources in the name of ideology.
Beyond Capitalism and Marxism
The resource-based cybernetic economy we propose transcends both capitalism and Marxism, rejecting their shared foundational assumptions:
We reject the capitalist premise that market mechanisms and profit motives are the optimal means of resource allocation. In an age of computational abundance, direct calculation of needs and resources has become not only possible but demonstrably more efficient than the chaos and waste of market systems. Capitalism’s artificial scarcity, enforced through property rights and monetary barriers, represents not freedom but an outdated technology of rationing.
We equally reject all labor theories of value, whether Marxist or otherwise. In an automated world, human labor is no longer the primary source of economic value, nor should it be the basis for resource entitlement. When machines can produce abundance with minimal human input, systems that distribute resources based on labor contribution become not only obsolete but actively harmful.
The New Enlightenment stands opposed to:
- Market fundamentalism and its artificial scarcities
- Class-based analysis and revolutionary politics
- State control of economic activity
- Labor as the measure of economic value or entitlement
- Commodity production and exchange as organizing principles
The Cybernetic Alternative
Instead of markets or central planning, we propose a system organized around:
1. Resource Calculation Through Technology
Modern computational systems can directly calculate resource availability and needs without relying on price signals or central planners:
- Global resource tracking and allocation
- Real-time feedback systems
- Needs-based distribution without monetary gatekeeping
- Algorithmic optimization of resource use
2. Automated Production and Distribution
The productive foundation of the open-access economy is a highly automated system that:
- Provides necessities without requiring human labor
- Distributes goods according rather than purchasing power
- Operates transparently and democratically
- Eliminates unnecessary work through advanced technology
3. Governance Through Participation
Decision-making in the open-access economy is:
- Distributed rather than centralized
- Based on real-time data and feedback
- Accessible to all participants
- Focused on human flourishing and environmental sustainability
Implementation Through Demonstration
The New Enlightenment wishes to build the future in the present through concrete actions that demonstrate the superiority of resource-based coordination.
This is revolution through construction, creating the new world within the shell of the old.
Build the Digital Commons
The first step will be the creation of open-source infrastructure for resource tracking, needs assessment, and cybernetic coordination that any community can adopt.
Every algorithm, every protocol becomes a shared tool for liberation from artificial scarcity.
Global resource databases, predictive systems, and coordination platforms enable communities to share abundance across traditional boundaries.
Local demonstration projects serve as living laboratories where cybernetic resource coordination replaces market relationships. Here, automated systems provide necessities while human creativity is unleashed for art, care, innovation, or just simple leisure.
These pilot communities become connected nodes in a growing network, each success attracting others seeking alternatives to competitive struggle.
As more communities adopt resource-based coordination, benefits multiply exponentially. Each successful implementation strengthens the entire network, making participation more attractive. The tipping point arrives through practical demonstration that cybernetic abundance simply works better than artificial scarcity.
Unlike political movements that can be suppressed, the New Enlightenment creates irreversible improvements in human organization. Once communities experience post-scarcity coordination, they will not want return to systems of competitive limitation.
The Dark Alternative(s)
The same technologies that make an open-access economy possible can be , and already are, being deployed to intensify control, inequality, and mass obedience.
The Dark Enlightenment is the first dystopian fork: a technolibertarian vision where Silicon Valley’s worst impulses:
hyper-individualism, wealth concentration, and anti-democratic elitism, are scaled into societal architecture. Here, automation and AI do not liberate, but serve as tools to entrench private monopolies, dismantle democratic oversight, and treat the population as data-fodder.
Work is automated, but survival still depends on income. Abundance exists, but is locked behind platforms, subscriptions, and algorithms optimized for profit, not wellbeing.
Yet this is not the only dark road.
The second fork is its authoritarian mirror: the technocratic state, as exemplified by the Chinese model of digital governance. Here, surveillance infrastructure, social credit systems, and AI-enhanced bureaucracy promise “efficiency” in exchange for total submission. Technology becomes a tool of political conformity. Obedience grants access to services and resources; dissent leads to digital erasure. This is not a glitch, it is the design. The promise of abundance is conditional, monitored, and revocable.
In both dark futures, technology is captured by power, whether private or state, and used to reinforce hierarchy, not dismantle it.
Against both of these dark currents, the New Enlightenment stands as the only viable, humane alternative, one that uses the same technologies not to concentrate power, but to dissolve it.
Where the Dark Enlightenment hoards information, the New Enlightenment builds open coordination tools.
Where authoritarianism uses data to punish, accessism uses it to liberate.
Where both systems manage people for control, we build systems that serve people, without control.
The New Enlightenment offers the only free and viable alternative.
Join the New Enlightenment
The resource-based cybernetic economy is neither capitalism nor socialism, neither market nor state.
It represents a fundamental departure from all economic systems based on scarcity, labor valuation, or monetary exchange.
Join us in building the infrastructure of abundance, a world where technology serves human needs directly, without the distortions of market mechanisms or the rigidity of central planning. The future remains unwritten, and the New Enlightenment offers the pen to all who would join in creating it.
For a world beyond markets and beyond labor!
The New Enlightenment begins now.