Virtual Intentional Communities?

[Ken_J]

This started as a sort of laugh, thinking about hippie communes but technologically empowered and separated around the country or world. But the more it rattles around my brain, the more it seems possible.

people with access or production or resources or raw materials sending them to each other who then hand make stuff for the community members, owning shares in farm animals, having a vertical farm plot in a massive multi plot vertical farm warehouse facility.

with cad and 3d printers people could send objects over a network, and repair and replace things for members of the community from a distance.

community meetings held via video meeting software.

I mean it's crazy, and it would have many of the same issues that intentional communities have, but frankly it doesn't feel as impossible as it really should.

but then I don't know enough about communes to say whether I'm missing something.

[caltrek]

Doesn't seem very crazy to me. In fact, it seems to be the way we are going. Unless perhaps you are implying an abolishment of currency and a replacement by a system of barter. Money is itself a resource that gets traded. That is to say converted into stock, bonds, consumer merchandise, etc.

So, a publicly held corporation is actually pretty close to what you describe, with emerging technologies added into the mix.

Also, there may be more communes and co-ops out there than you realize. I briefly worked for a nonprofit that gave technical assistance to a small number of producer co-ops in our area. Some farmland owned by that now defunct nonprofit is still in the hands of a successor nonprofit agency and is still used for training purposes. Spain is home to one of the largest producer cooperatives in the world. In China, I presume that a lot of communes and cooperatives started under Mao's regime are still in operation, although under the strict and watchful eye of China's central government, and so on and so forth.