Robert Paterson's Weblog

Why there is hope that you can make a living and have a good life today

What is the economy that will give us all hope - real hope that we can have a good life? I think that it is what I call the Networked Artisan. This is a person who makes things by their own hands but uses often the new tools to do this and the network to connect and sell to a community that can be next door or across the way.

It can be a micro farmer like Amy and Verena at Heart Beet Organics on PEI who operate a 2 acre farm using large greenhouses to produce veggies 10 months of the year. 

As part of the pattern for all Networked Artisans, they sell direct to customers and create close personal relationships with them. Farmers markets grew by 17% last year. Food will be at the core of this new personal movement. Trust is at the heart of it.

In the UK there are web hubs springing up that make it easier and easier for customers to become part of this. 

This is Big Barn. Check it out and see how amazing it is. 

Are you a knitter? There are 3 million knitters in an online community called Ravelry. Here they compare projects, help each other and sell things to each other. It is a vast tribe of knitters. 

Here is the link. 

Underneath all of this is a new market. This is the market of the people who no longer trust the corporate offering. They know that they lose control and that they are often lied to. This is why food is a wedge. For as people learn how the processed diet is so bad for them AND how they have been misled as to its safety, they seek food that they can trust.

How big is this market?

2.5% of a population are the Innovators who jump in early. In America that is about 8 million people.

13.5% are the Early Adopters - that is about another 40 million. 

So nearly 50 million people are ready for this kind of offering. That is a huge market for a small artisan. A market that the Big Corporates cannot reach and compete in any more. They will be excluded over time.

Meanwhile, all the technology that is taking away the jobs in that sector, is helping the New Artisan. You have rock bottom communication costs. You have top flight tools. Want an ecommerce tool - Woo Commerce. Want CRM - Paupress. Want to publish a book - pressbooks.  Want make a prototype - 3D printers. Each year, the tools get better and cheaper.

And most importantly as we see in Ravelry and Big Barn, we see the online aggregators getting better. You have an appartment - Airbnb. You make fountain pens - Etsy. 

The next wave are going to be local aggregators like this new one for Portland.

Soon every commnity will have such a site. It will get easier and easier to become part of this.

The future is here now. The empowered person in the empowering network of people who want trust and meaning back in their lives.

So what do you do?

My first book - You Don't Need a Job - explores this shift in detail. If you want to know more abouyt what is going on and how to become part of this, then please give it a whirl. 

Related articles

Which cultural world do you live in today - Which will be best for you?

Greece: The odyssey - 21st Century style - and ours too?

Horse meat scandal 'an opportunity in adversity' for artisan food firms

Self Publishing - The Heroic Age - Like Blogging 2000 - 2004

The jobs are still going away - what to do? I offer you a survival manual

Source Zero Hedge

90 Million Americans are no longer looking for a job

This chart shows labour participation. There is no sign of any change. The job is not coming back.

We are starting to understand why this is not just a "normal" recession. It is structural. A global workforce pushes labour costs down. The shoe maker in Maine competes with the labour pool in China. The lawyer in New York competes with the  lawyer in Mumbai. It is also about technology. The lawyer in Mumbai competes with software that offers you and I the simple contract. IBM are developing software that will give you a better diagnosis than your doctor. No one in the job world is safe.

So what to do? My advice is to stop making getting a job or keeping yours the only focus. Don't over invest in getting the credential for the job.

 There is another mindset and another world of work out there that is not at risk the way that the job is. It is a world that offers you great freedom and health too.

It is the world of the network and skilled person doing something personal in this network.

You Don't Need a Job is a survival manual for our time.

It is the first of a series that explores the real new economy that is based on the network. You Don't Need a Banker to Get Credit explores crowd sourcing and the new credit system that relies on your social world too. My latest book, You Don't Need Medicine to get Healthy - shows how to take charge of your health. One of the most powerful forces of illness is the loss of control that we get from having a job!

I am just starting on You Don't Need a School to get and Education - I hope you can see the pattern. The network will replace the institution. The job is at the centre of the institution. 

I hope that I can help you.

Related articles

Even Doctors will be replaced by computers - The end of jobs as we know them

What will replace the Job? The Networked Artisan!

What is an education for in a "Post Job" world?

Practical steps to get and to stay healthy - You can live like your ancestors

Makers by Cory Doctorow - A Lord of the Rings Culture War Ahead - My Review

Here is my review on Amazon.ca

"Makers worked for me as a novel and as a view of a likely future. So if all you want is a great read, this is it. But if you want to also see what the struggle will be like as the new decentralized, more personal and more human world of the Maker emerges - this is the bible!

The central theme that I found in the book was the conflict between the worldview of the "Suit" and the worldview of Perry the main protagonist who is a Maker.

The suits are in the background as a archetype. Some are allies of the heroes. But the true Villains are still in the corporate world who are trying their best to survive the Maker revolution. The central "Villain" of the book, Jimmy, uses all the normal trappings of the old world to attack the new. In other words he uses the law and in particular copyright. But even he begins to see that what he really wants to do is to create and not to destroy. The secondary villain, a rip and burn journalist, Freddie, can only destroy and is in the end destroyed.

Death or Life are the choices that Cory Doctorow puts out for us.

We see that the pragmatic world of Ford is actually all about destruction and constraint. It is why, I think, that so many people today just cannot work that way anymore. In Makers we see that the old focus is all about death. In Makers we also witness the joy of creation and of participation. The Character of "Death Waits" is the embodiment of the darkness of the old - he is a Goth - and the awakening of the creator as we see him broken physically by his persecutors rise to discover his own worth. And talking about creation and life, Cory writes one of the most erotic love scenes in literature in Makers as well.

My bet is that in 20 years time, we will look at this book in the way that many looked back in the late 1990's at the early work of Arthur C Clarke. We will see that Cory has shone a clear light into the issues that will be central for our future. A future that will see the clash of culture between the forces of true darkness and the forces of hope and life. If Tolkien was the metaphor, CD is the searchlight on the conflict that is arising. We live once more in a time like the Reformation where the world will be divided not by national boundaries but by cultural boundaries.

There will be no middle ground. This is not about left or right. It is about what is human or not. I hope that much of the left and right can find common ground in what is human.

Read this book!"

In a real revolution like this one - Watch out for the Inquisition #Makers

We laugh at the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition. But it was no laughing matter to reformers or the innocent of the time. It was a tool of the establishment of the day to crush dissent.

Well it is here today. All the fuss about copyright is its battleground. In the guise of protecting rights, it crushes the new.

We have seen this in digital media. This has been but a skirmish. Wait until 3D Printing takes off and all who make things in factories feel the threat! Here is the Economist on this threat with a warning for the new Makers: (HT Michael Rose)

"Rallying under the banner of piracy and theft, established manufacturers could likewise seek to get the doctrine of "contributory infringement” included in some expanded object-copyright law as a way of crippling the personal-manufacturing movement before it eats their lunch. Being free to sue websites that host 3D design files as “havens of piracy” would save them the time and money of having to prosecute thousands of individuals with a 3D printer churning out copies at home.

Some also expect incumbent manufacturers to try to stigmatise CAD file-types, in the same way the record companies hounded the bit-torrent and MP3 formats as piracy tools. That could slow the mainstream adoption of 3D printing and imply that anyone uploading CAD files to a public site was somehow infringing on rights, notes Cory Doctorow, a Canadian science writer who blogs for Boing Boing.

Today’s 3D printing crowd—tucked away in garages, basements, small workshops and university labs—needs to keep a keen eye on such policy debates as they grow. “There will be a time when impacted legacy industries [will] demand some sort of DMCA for 3D printing,” says Mr Weinberg. If the tinkerers wait until that day, it will be too late."

Assange - Wilkes - Liberty and Deja Vu

So the British Government threaten to take away the diplomatic immunity of the Ecuador so that they can extradite Assange! What will that do to the world of diplomacy?

As we watch what could be a major event, it might help to know that ALL of this has happened before and that the Assange of the time, John Wilkes won the battle.

Back then it was illegal to print the proceedings of Parliament. It was also illegal to speak ill in public of the King. Wilkes did both. Protected by the immunity of being an MP he survived this - even he was wounded in a duel.

So they got him on a sex charge! Yes for writing a porn poem, he was declared an Outlaw. You can read more about his extraordinary story here. He did go to prison. But in the end he was vindicated and even became the Mayor of London.

My sense is that history is on Julian Assange's side.

 

3D printing - Coming to a restaurant near you soon - Yes Food Printing

Even in your kitchen!

HT fab@home

What is 3D Printing Making Now

 

The best over view of 3D printing yet - why we need a Fab Lab on PEI

Lisa Harouni in this TED Talk - show clearly how 3D printing works - where we can apply it now and where it will be in the future.

Right now there are uses in Dentistry, Architecture, Engineering. It is easy to use our imgaination to see the future too.

But for a place like PEI to find a place in this - the foundation of the new industrial revolution, we need a pool of young for who this is their normal.

Why I am working on getting a Fab Lab here on PEI to offer the space for our young to master this.

 

3D Printing - The Makerbot

Close to the price of a PC

3D Printing is here on PEI and your kid can learn all about it

20 years ago I spent $2,000 on Tandy Computer for my son James. It was a lot of money then. It’s a lot now! But it was the best thing I ever did for him. Aged 11 then James dived in and mastered what was going on. His life was transformed.

Those who are “naturals” in the use of computers now are in a favoured place in our economy.

This process is repeating itself with 3D Printers. Here is Tom Haan and Mauren Kerr who are working in our schools now to help your kids. I hope that we can get behind them and this so that most kids on PEI can learn how to use this exciting technology – where we can make things the make way that we can design 2D today.

So here is Tom and Mo – see how excited the kids are!!!!

 

via queenstreetcommons.org

Watch this space - working hard to make this available to as many kids as possible on PEI