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Marshall Brain wrote about this in his online novel Manna. The later chapters concerning the "Australia Project" bear a striking resemblance to the never-implemented 1930s-era theory of Technocracy (The actual main Technocracy site is rather ill-organized).

Society based on the stable joule, not on the unstable dollar.

http://www.technocracy.ca
http://www.technocracyinc.org/MainIndex.htm

Me too! These guys have my vote. I don't know if the basics of life would really be free (no replicators yet!), but we sure as hell don't need to be working 40+ hours a week for them. Where's all that money ("productivity") going? Stockholder dividends, advertising, 9-figure CEO salaries. Fuck that shit.

But what do we use robots for? Vacuming, charming kids with robotic dogs and cats, cell phones for communicating frivilous chit-chat.

It has always been thus. Pick up an issue of Electronic Engineering Times or EDN or whatever. Ooooh, a new 64-bit CPU. What is it being used for? A game console, of course.

But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary in order to be able to distribute the vast amount of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even developed a soundly logical and rational model of society that would allow this to work.

The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody, but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air, it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to because it will be scarce.

So the question is not a matter of when will technology be advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough people that this kind of life is already possible, and circumvent political and corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all their "power" and "control"?

There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.

We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein

But political and business leaders won't let it. Scientists and engineers in the 1920's and '30's determined that not only was this type of society possible, but also but also necessary in order to be able to distribute the vast amount of wealth that machines were capable of producing for us. They even developed a soundly logical and rational model of society that would allow this to work.

The problem of course is that in order to enact this "society of abundance," you need to abolish all the relics of scarcity. Mostly this means money, and by extention, political control of technology. Think of what happened in the Great Depression. Factories were producing so many products (like food) that there was plenty for everyone, but because the money used to distribute it was still scarce, the value dropped below the margin of profitability. No one could make money selling it, thus no one made money. Add to that people losing jobs to these machines and you have a society that has enough for everybody, but no one can afford even the dirt-cheap prices. You can't sell air, it's too abundant. If we pollute it enough, however, we will be able to because it will be scarce.

So the question is not a matter of when will technology be advanced enough so that this can happen, it's how can we tell enough people that this kind of life is already possible, and circumvent political and corporate attempts to stop it from happening because they will lose all their "power" and "control"?

There is a reason that the most popular social movement of the '30's nad '40's is now completely unknown to people today. It's because it just might work.

We are at the dawn of a new world. Scientists have given to men considerable powers. Politicians have seized hold of them. The world must choose between the unspeakable desolation of mechanization for profit or conquest, and the lusty youthfulness of science and technique serving the social needs of a new civilization. - Albert Einstein

The only reason we don't have an economy of abundance right now is because scarcity is enforced. That's right, technology in manufacturing became sufficeint to undermine the purchasing power to validate scarcity pricing during the Great Depression. Look at this this chart; production skyrockets due to everyone using more and better automated equipment, therefor supply increases. This same equipment requires fewer and fewer people to do the same job (man-hours per unit of production), putting people out of work, so they spend less, therfor demand dwindles. Anyone with any basic economics knows that both these factors will reduce price, and in this case a lot! Hence, crash of 1929 and Great Depression. Our distributive mechanism failed to keep up with the times.

Of course, we've appeared to recover since then, but only through massively regulating the economy, as well as, and more importantly, going massively into debt. Scarcity economies require constant growth, especially ones on life support like ours. You have to keep the people working somehow. This is why we have such a huge service industry, as well as workers in monumentally inefficient jobs! We can have machines build a good quality house in a day, and cheaply, but still I see two guys working on one for over 8 months just so they can have paychecks.

It's not neccessary anymore! Even Jeremy Rifkin has pointed out that work as we know it is obsolete, too bad he couldn't see that reforming a dead system won't save it. The trick, once you have an economy of abundance, is to give it away. No lie, it's just freedom of information and peer-to-peer and OSS and all that. Of course, you need a mechanism to do that, and one that will allow people to keep the system operating, and thankfully that's already been done. Technocracy is a purely scientific means of measuring the productive capacity of a nation and optimising the efficiency to a) increase production and therefor income and standard of living, and b) decrease the amount of physical labor involved to produce that abundance. Back in the 1930's it was calculated that we had sufficient productive capacity to provide everyone in North America with a quite high standard of living (some estimates as high as $70,000/year modern equivilent) while only having to work 16 hours a week at a job you like, with benefits such as free education (all levels) and free health care. Imagine what we could do today! They didn't even have computers back then! It was definately an idea ahead of it's time (at least as far as acceptance goes).

It's quite a well thought out and detailed system, despite the brief introduction I can give. But it's worth looking into. It's not really a new political system (in fact it doesn't use politics at all), but more of a technology.

Here are some good short bits about Technocracy, for a good starter. There's also plenty of other info (including FAQ and forums) on that site, as well as lots of archival material here.

All we have to do is make the conscious decision to make this move, and our lives will benefit tremendously. It's the perfect governemnt for all OSS and P2P supporters! All we're doing right now is letting the corps get even more rich and powerful and waiting for the next time the economy collapses. It can't keep growing forever, after all.

The real reason that the US has been so 'successful', aside from it willingness to spend debt money, is that fact it resides on the most resource rich continent in the world (a fact that the US is trying very hard to change), as well as its willingness to embrace technological change. This conclusion (among others) was discovered by the research of not one individual, but a team called the Technical Alliance, now called Technocracy Inc. They seem to have a firmer grasp of our economic situation that do most economists.

-Murdoc

It's possible. Check out the Technocracy - and no, this isn't some evil White Wolf RPG/Illuminati NWO agency hellbent on taking over the world. Check 'em out.