The Utopian Economists Vocabulary

Asceticism
The adjective “ascetic” derives from the ancient Greek term askesis (practice, training or exercise). Originally associated with any form of disciplined practice, the term ascetic has come to mean anyone who practices a renunciation of worldly pursuits to achieve higher intellectual and spiritual goals. Via Wikipedia
1. the manner of life practices, or principles of an ascetic.
2. the doctrine that a person can attain a high spiritual and moral state by practicing self-denial, self-mortification, and the like.
3. rigorous self-denial; extreme abstinence; austerity.
Via Definition.com

Bio-Survival Tickets (see also Money)
As civilization has advanced, the pack-bond (the tribe, the extended family) has been broken. This is the root of the widely diagnosed “anomie” or “alienation” or “existential anguish” about which so many social critics have written so eloquently. What has happened is that the conditioning of the bio-survival bond to the gene-pool has been replaced by a conditioning of bio-survival drives to hook onto the peculiar tickets which we call “money.”
Concretely, a modern man or woman doesn’t look for survival security in the gene-pool, the pack, the extended family. Bio-survival depends on getting the tickets. “You can’t live without money,” as the Living Theatre troop used to cry out in anguish. If the tickets are withdrawn, acute bio-survival anxiety appears at once.
Imagine, as vividly as possible, what you would feel, and what you would do, if all your sources to bio-survival tickets (money) were cut off tomorrow. This is precisely what tribal men and women feel if cut off from the tribe; it is why exile, or even ostracism, were sufficient punishments to enforce tribal conformity throughout most of human history. As recently as Shakespeare’s day the threat of exile was an acute terror signal (“Banished!”cries Romeo, “the damned use that word in Hell!”)
In traditional society, belonging to the tribe was bio-security; exile was terror, and real threat of death. In modern society, having the tickets (money) is bio0security; having the tickets withdrawn is terror. -Robert Anton Wilson, Prometheus Rising

Convivial Society-
In a society in which power-both political and physical-is bounded and spread by political decision there is place not only for a new flowering of products and characters, but also for a variety in forms of governance. Certainly, new tools would provide new options. Convivial tools rule out certain levels of power, compulsion, and programming, which are precisely those features that now tend to make all governments look more or less alike. But the adoption of a convivial mode of production does not of itself mean that one specific form of government would be more fitting than another, nor does it rule out a world federation, or agreements between nation-states, or communes, or many of the most traditional forms of governance. I restrict myself to the description of basic structural criteria within which the retooling of society can be achieved…
As an alternative to technocratic disaster, I propose the vision of a convivial society. A convivial society would be the result of social arrangements that guarantee for each member the most ample and free access to the tools of the community and limit this freedom only in favor of another member’s equal freedom.
At present people tend to relinquish the task of envisaging the future to a professional élite. They transfer power to politicians who promise to build up the machinery to deliver this future. They accept a growing range of power levels in society when inequality is needed to maintain high outputs. Political institutions themselves become draft mechanisms to press people into complicity with output goals. What is right comes to be subordinated to what is good for institutions. Justice is debased to mean the equal distribution of institutional wares…
The conditions for convivial work are structural arrangements that make possible the just distribution of unprecedented power. A postindustrial society must and can be so constructed that no one person’s ability to express him- or herself in work will require as a condition the enforced labor or the enforced learning or the enforced consumption of another. -Ivan Illich

Convivial Tools
Tools are intrinsic to social relationships. An individual relates himself in action to his society through the use of tools that he actively masters, or by which he is passively acted upon. To the degree that he masters his tools, he can invest the world with his meaning; to the degree that he is mastered by his tools, the shape of the tool determines his own self-image. Convivial tools are those which give each person who uses them the greatest opportunity to enrich the environment with the fruits of his or her vision. Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.
Hand tools are those which adapt man’s metabolic energy to a specific task. They can be multipurpose, like some primitive hammers or good modern pocket knives, or again they can be highly specific in design such as spindles, looms, or pedal-driven sewing machines, and dentists’ drills. They can also be complex such as a transportation system built to get the most in mobility out of human energy-for instance, a bicycle system composed of a series of man-powered vehicles, such as pushcarts and three-wheel rickshas, with a corresponding road system equipped with repair stations and perhaps even covered roadways. Hand tools are mere transducers of the energy generated by man’s extremities and fed by the intake of air and of nourishment.
Power tools are moved, at least partially, by energy converted outside the human body. Some of them act as amplifiers of human energy: the oxen pull the plow, but man works with the oxen-the result is obtained by pooling the powers of beast and man. Power saws and motor pulleys are used in the same fashion. On the other hand, the energy used to steer a jet plane has ceased to be a significant fraction of its power output. The pilot is reduced to a mere operator guided by data which a computer digests for him. The machine needs him for lack of a better computer; or he is in the cockpit because the social control of unions over airplanes imposes his presence. Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
Some institutions are structurally convivial tools. The telephone is an example. Anybody can dial the person of his choice if he can afford a coin…
At its best the library is the prototype of a convivial tool. Repositories for other learning tools can be organized on its model, expanding access to tapes, pictures, records, and very simple labs filled with the same scientific instruments with which most of the major breakthroughs of the last century were made. -Ivan Illich

Crop Mob-is simply an innovation in farm work and organizing. Taking the old idea of community labor, a small group of farm interns created a new model, a model of organizing that takes experienced and novice farmers (and other interested folks) and puts them in a shared space at a particular farm at a particular time. Within this space, the group tackles a set of tasks using the directions given by the host farm and the experience each person brings to the space. At the end of a few hours of work they share a meal. Along with the meal is the extended value of a shared experience, an experience unique for each participant. – Trace Ramsey

Dematerialization- (see also ephemeralization) This is a twist on the idea of ephemeralization. Think of being able to download the plans for the electric car you want and being able to “print” it out. Manufacturers don’t produce products, but produce reproducible (and we hope, hackible) plans. Imagine a whole collaborative community that usurps corporate producers just as there is open software and may be made appropriate (hacked), products may become open and appropriate (see appropriate technology). More practical to today, you can print out non-material plans for patterns of clothing, furniture, etc. or download music, movies, pictures, and produce or play them where you need them. Today there are 3-D printers that can produce 3 dimensional objects.

Visit the Treehugger blog to see more examples of Dematerialization.

Détournement- (See also Culture Jamming)
In détournement, an artist reuses elements of well-known media to create a new work with a different message, often one opposed to the original. The term “détournement”, borrowed from the French, originated with the Situationist International; a similar term more familiar to English speakers would be “turnabout” or “derailment”…via Wikipedia

See Adbusters for a current examples of détournement.

Ephemeralization

Buckminster Fuller coined the word ephemralization. He described it this way: “The principle of ephemeralization shows we can accomplish more and more functionality with less and less energy, material and time investment, “we are now able to do so much with so little that we can provide for the basic needs of 100% of humanity without disadvantaging anyone.” Another more common way of stating it is “doing more with less” or at least doing the same with less. The compact fluorescent bulb uses less energy than the conventional light bulb, the personal computer uses less material and has more power than the original room load of processors that used to crunch the numbers—that’s not to say this process doesn’t have its own unintended consequences, but that’s another story.
“Ephemeralization, which constantly does more with visibly less–as does, for instance, the one-quarter-ton communications satellite outperform 150,000 tons of transoceanic cables–has not as yet been formally isolated, recognized, and discussed in print as such by any economists. Until economists recognize it, ephemeraliztion cannot be popularly comprehended and be adopted in public policy formulations.” -Buckminster Fuller, Utopia or Oblivion

Frugal
“We looked up ‘frugal’ in a Merriam-Webster dictionary and found ‘characterized by or reflecting economy in the expenditure of resources.’ That sounds about right–a serviceable, practical and fairly colorless word…But when we dig deeper, the dictionary tells us that ‘frugal’ shares a Latin root with frug(meaning virtue), frux(maeaning fruit or value) and frui (meaning to enjoy or have the use of). Now we’re talking! Frugality is enjoying the virtue of getting good value for every minute of your life energy and from everything you have the use of.
…It’s transforming. Frugality means we are to enjoy what we have. If you have ten dresses but still feel you have nothing to wear, you are probably a spendthrift. But if you have ten dresses and have enjoyed wearing all of them for years, you are frugal. Waste lies not in the number of possessions but in the failure to enjoy them. Your success at being frugal is measured not by your penny-pinching but by your degree of enjoyment of the material world
…Isn’t that hedonism? While both have to do with enjoying what you have, frugality and hedonism are opposite responses to the material world. Hedonism revels in the pleasures of the senses and implies excessive consumption of the material world and a continual search for more. Frugal people, however, get value from everything–a dandelion or a bouquet of roses, a single strawberry or a gourmet meal. A hedonist might consume the juice of of five oranges as a prelude to a pancake breakfast. A frugal person…might relish eating a single orange, enjoying the color and texture of the whole fruit, the smell and the light spray that comes as you begin to peel it, the translucence of each section, the flood of flavor that pours out as a section bursts over the tongue…and the thrift of saving the peels for baking…
Another lesson we can derive from the dictionary definition of ‘frugal’ is the recognition that we don’t need to possess a thing to enjoy it–we merely need to use it. If we are enjoying an item, whether or not we own it, we’re being frugal. For many of life’s pleasures it may be far better to ‘use’ something than to ‘possess’ it (and pay in time and energy for the upkeep). So often we have been like feudal lords, gathering as many possessions as possible from far and wide and bringing them inside the boundaries of the world called ‘mine.’ What we fail to recognize is that what is outside the walls of ‘mine’ doesn’t belong to the enemy; it belongs to the ‘rest of us.’ And if what lies outside our walls is not ‘them’ but ‘us,’ we can afford to loosen our grip a bit on our possessions. We can gingerly open the doors of our fortress and allow goods (material and spiritual) to flow into and out of our boundaries.” -Vicki Robin & Joe Dominguez, Your Money or Your Life

Malthusian Catastrophe- Thomas Malthus (1766-1834).
In 1798, Thomas Malthus wrote and had published An Essay on the Principle of Population in 1798. Essentially, Malthus attempted to suggest that human population growth outstrips food production. The catastrophe occurs when population collapses. Malthus’ ideas were an important influence on Charles Darwin’s theories of Evolution. Malthus wrote in response to certain Utopian writers.

Money-
A medium of exchange is a good which people acquire neither for their own consumption nor for employment in their own production activities, but with the intention of exchanging it at a later date against those goods which they want to use either for consumption or for production. Money is a medium of exchange. It is the most marketable good which people acquire because they want to offer it in later acts of interpersonal exchange. Money is the thing which serves as the generally accepted and commonly used medium of exchange. This is its only function. All the other functions which people ascribe to money are merely particular aspects of its primary and sole function, that of a medium of exchange.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Prosuming-
During the First Wave most people consumed what they themselves produced. They were neither producers nor consumers in the usual sense. They were instead what might be called “prosumers”…A more revealing way of thinking about the economy, therefore, is to think of it as having two sectors. Sector A comprises all that unpaid work done directly by people for themselves, their families, or their communities. Sector B comprises all the production of goods or services for sale or swap through the exchange network or market…the production of goods and services for the market mushroomed to such an extent that Second Wave economists virtually forgot the existence of Sector A. The very word “economy” was defined to exclude all forms of work or production not intended for the market, and the prosumer became invisible. This meant, for example all that all the cleaning, scrubbing, child-rearing, the community organizing, was contemptuously dismissed as “non-economic,”…prosuming involves the “de-marketization” of at least certain activities and therefore a sharply altered role for the market in society. –Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave

Radical Monopoly-
[T]ools can also be made overefficient…They can upset the relationship between what people need to do by themselves and what they need to obtain ready-made. In this second dimension overefficient production results in radical monopoly…By radical monopoly I mean a kind of dominance by one product that goes far beyond what the concept of monopoly usually implies. I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. Cars can thus monopolize traffic. They can shape a city into their image—practically ruling out locomotion on foot or by bicycle in Los Angeles. They can eliminate river traffic in Thailand. That motor traffic curtails the right to walk, not that more people drive Chevies than Fords, constitutes radical monopoly. What cars do to people by virtue of this radical monopoly is quite distinct from and independent of what they do by burning gasoline that could be transformed into food in a crowded world. It is also distinct from automotive manslaughter. Of course cars burn gasoline that could be used to make food. Of course they are dangerous and costly. But the radical monopoly cars establish is destructive in a special way. Cars create distance. Speedy vehicles of all kinds render space scarce. They drive wedges of highways into populated areas, and then extort tolls on the bridge over the remoteness between people that was manufactured for their sake. This monopoly over land turns space into car fodder. It destroys the environment for feet and bicycles. Even if planes and buses could run as nonpolluting, nondepleting public services, their inhuman velocities would degrade man’s innate mobility and force him to spend more time for the sake of travel. –Ivan Illich

Useful Idiot
“The C.I.A. has a term–useful idiot–that describes someone who is working for them and doesn’t know it. I find it a very useful yoga to stop once a day and ask, ‘Am I a useful idiot?’ You never know.” Robert Anton Wilson The Acceleration of Knowledge: The Jumping Jesus Phenomena