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When my mother was a kid living in Brooklyn, New York, she would spend a few weeks during the summer in Brentwood, Long Island. Her Uncle Jack and Aunt Rose had an acre or two of land where they raised goats, chickens, and rabbits. They also had a large vegetable garden. My mom loved leaving the city and spending time out "in the country"
When I was a kid we would occasionally pay a visit too. Uncle Jack had suffered a stroke and was really a sedentary, silent presence by then, but Aunt Rose was still an energetic host, cooking Italian favorites and pies. I enjoyed playing with the few rabbits she still kept in Uncle Jack's hutches.
I didn't know at the time that Brentwood was originally founded as a Utopian enclave called Modern Times
Modern Times was a Utopian community existing from 1851 to 1864 in what is now Brentwood, New York. Founded by Josiah Warren, the community based its structure on Warren’s ideas of individual sovereignty and equitable commerce.
It was a strange place, sort of reminiscent of the hippie communes of the late 60s and early 70s. Self sovereignty ruled. There were no laws, rules, marriages, or conventional money. Josiah Warren, who grew disenchanted with socialism because it failed to respect private property, came up with this notion of money:
He believed that goods and services should be traded according to how much labor was exerted to produce them and bring them to market, instead of according to what individuals subjectively believed them to be worth. Therefore, he proposed a system to pay people with certificates indicating how many hours of work they did.  They could either exchange the notes at the local time stores for goods that took the same amount of time to produce, or they could exchange their labor notes with other residents for an equivalent amount of labor.
Sadly, the community failed. Still, I was fascinated by this quirky commune long before I discovered bitcoin. I'm not sure how strong the analogy is, but I now feel that his ideas of self sovereignty and "proof of work" do echo a sort of pre bitcoin philosophy.
Maybe it's a reach? You can read more about the community here:
Very interesting, thanks. I love hearing about these types of utopian communities. It's fascinating how often people have tried to create heaven on earth. This particular payment system that they tried to used sounds wacky and probably a part of why it failed.
The arrangements of marriage were, of course, left entirely to the men and women themselves. They could be married formally or otherwise, live in the same or separate houses, and have their relation known or unknown to the rest of the village. The relation could be dissolved at pleasure without any formulas. Certain customs had grown out of the absence of marriage laws. Secrecy was very general, and it was not considered polite to inquire who might be the father of a newborn child, or who the husband or wife of any individual might be. Those who stood in the relation of husband or wife wore upon the finger a red thread; and so long as that badge was visible the person was understood to be married. If it disappeared the marriage was at an end.
I lived at a commune for some time, many decades ago. Very interesting experience, I might write it up on a stacker news post someday.
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Please do write about your experience. I've also always been fascinated by these types of projects. I grew up in a small hippie town, but not a commune.
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You definitely should. I find these Utopian attempts fascinating. I'm sure others do too.
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While bartering horticultural products based on labor hours is a workable and equitable system, it falls apart completely when applied to services and advanced knowledge work, where quantification is nearly impossible. I have fond memories of my childhood in the village, where people would trade goods. In fact, I knew people who lived almost entirely without money.
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64 sats \ 4 replies \ @Lumor 3 Sep
TIL @siggy47 was a tacit descendant of the free love practitioners within a pro-self-sovereign community that unfortunately believed in the communist labor theory of value. 😉
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I'm looking for fellow travellers.
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64 sats \ 2 replies \ @Lumor 3 Sep
Met an older guy once who biked from NY to New Hampshire and talked of intentional communities. He seemed sympathetic but also cautious about the prospect of them ever working in the long run.
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Was he part of the libertarian Free State Project?
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64 sats \ 0 replies \ @Lumor 4 Sep
He was definitely an admirer, but pretty sure he still lived in NY.
Think he was talking about having a fish-farm in the basement together with vegetables as food sources.
Sound like someone you know? :)
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This is a super cool idea but the issue with their value exchange is work isn't well measured by time. It is measured in production. I could spend 100 hours on a DIY home project and someone like gnilma who is a master craftsman could probably do it in half the time and twice as good.
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Right. That's why the analogy isn't perfect. That might have also been a reason the project failed, although the free love jealousy thing probably played a large factor too.
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One of the services my business used to offer was refinishing and polishing marble (and other stone) floors. I like to use this project as an example for these kinds of discussions because it is a very time consuming job but the skill sets of people working it vary drastically.
You need to have one primary person that is running a rotary machine with a diamond embedded pad on it essentially scratching the surface of the tile. This person will also be the one later polishing the tiles with a paste. This person needs to know what the hell they are doing. You also need one more person who has a good idea of what they are doing because they will be the one to clean up the tiles after it has been scuffed up and they will ensure the excess paste is cleaned off after polishing process as well. They need to have a idea of what the tiles should look like before and after polishing. Then you have one or two more guys doing the grunt work. Getting clean water, moving equipment and tools, scraping gum and other gunk off the floor before the machine gets to it.
All parties might work 20 hours on a project but we would typically pay the main guy 35 an hour, the second guy 25 an hour and the ones doing the grunt work 17-20 depending how experienced they were, how long they had been working with us and if they did other types of projects with us etc.
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Excellent. This information is very interesting.
In most cases, nothing comes from nothing. From what I have learned, almost always, in order not to be absolute, there is a precedent or several precedents for the emergence of a project. To say that SATOSHI NAKAMOTO took that precedent into consideration for the creation of Bitcoin would be speculative, but I believe they have similarities.
Of course, Bitcoin is not destined to fail, you always learn from the past, and Bitcoin as a project goes beyond the economic aspect, it has in the developers a group of people committed to the improvement of the project, the miners are hard workers and all of them, in addition to their ethical and conscious commitment, receive the corresponding stimulus for the work they do (PoW)
That community lasted 13 years. Bitcoin is already 15 and still has a lot to give.
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64 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 2 Sep
I now feel that his ideas of self sovereignty and "proof of work" do echo a sort of pre bitcoin philosophy.
Maybe it's a reach?
I don't think so. Proof of work is a digital abstraction of something humans value and self sovereignty is also something we value. I'd be surprised if such things weren't discovered a bunch of times.
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43 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 2 Sep
I bet communes are really fun for awhile. Something about the intent brings us together in a way that's hard to reproduce otherwise. When Bitcoiners talk about citadels they often sound like communes. Only without giving stuff away for free I'm not sure they'll grow anything like communes.
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43 sats \ 1 reply \ @SatsMate 3 Sep
Thanks for sharing! Was there a core reason why the community ended up failing? The way I look at modern day utopian communities is closer to the Amish. I know life for them can be hard, but it seems like they don't use money and rely a lot on trade and the resources of this earth to get things done.
Timing and labor are good metrics for value, generally. I imagine this place failed in part because you cannot be an island during mass social change--The Civil War was such a time and everything was re-arranged due to it.
By the way, are you sure your Mom's uncle and aunt weren't in a movie called Titanic?
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They may have been extras.
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I was one of those once. Classic baseball film.
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The Natural? Field of Dreams?
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Yep the old memories of oura
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Cool beans. This really goes to show that the current fiat system isn’t the only way in which labour is valued. There are other ways of being.
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I do think there's a similarity to the Bitcoin world. I think Galt's Gulch stems from a similar impulse. It's something like, "If we can just start over with the right institutions, we can fix everything."
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43 sats \ 1 reply \ @plebpoet 2 Sep
reminded me of this book Walden Two
This fictional outline of a modern utopia has been a center of controversy since its publication in 1948. Set in the United States, it pictures a society in which human problems are solved by a scientific technology of human conduct.
The author, B. F. Skinner, was one of the first to set up successful behavioral conditioning experiments. Influential guy. I started this book, but got a little bored
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@ek's post about transcendentalism reminded me of Modern Times, although I couldn't find any direct connection: #669132
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It did not last forever but then again I was not aware of the existence of utopian community. Proof of work was made clearer by this wonderful piece of work. It made me realize that my first initial deposit in a bank is somewhat equivalent to proof of work but it also defeats the purpose of proof of work since it is centralized and fractional.
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the community failed.
Didn't failed. Infiltrators were dismantling it from inside because was against the gov ideals...
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The archive link is broken. Use this link to read more about the community: https://www.longislandpress.com/2014/09/07/where-brentwood-is-today-once-stood-long-islands-own-utopia/
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