Autonopedia >

The reference for all who prefer to manage their own lives and work toward personal and collective autonomy.

Autonopedia is for all who love to know, who like to explore, to create, to tinker, to find things, ways and disciplines for making life better without messing it up.

Autonopedia is about sharing our time, our knowledge, our inventiveness, our endeavors and our labour - with each other. And by doing so out of our respect, love, need, or merely joy, rather than profit or greed, and thereby helping to build a much better world.

By taking on personal responsibility for our actions and our community we become capable of sorting our own lives, without governments or bosses telling us what to do and wasting our time on endless rules and regulations.

By producing most of our requirements within the community, there is worthwhile employment for all, we have a higher quality of produce and standard of life, instead of big business demanding all our time on labour, and our resources on shoddy goods and worthless services.

Small communities have served the human race well since before the rise of so-called "modern civilisation" and are the true path to proper civilisation. The best way to run a community, to serve a community and deal with community problems and matters, is, at the community level.

There are many inventive souls, who do things for the love, necessity, practicality or just because it can be done, those geniuses who often have to work with minimum resources, often against all odds and do what's required, without a thought toward "personal profit".

Like all the people who give the world freeware and the honorable contributers to the open source software movement, there are people in all walks of life and persuasions who love to create for fun, or for friends or community, or just because it can be done or needs to be done

Far to often though, this human inventiveness and labour is subverted into providing a profit for the few with little regard for those who really provide the effort.

More and more 'things' have to be invented or designed in order to be sold to us, not because we really need them, but just so that some people can make a profit. 

We are very good at inventing, designing and making things, so isn't about time we all started to put these skills toward truly useful, life enhancing and honorable pursuits and stop exploiting everything and everyone?

So many things we take for granted (in industrial societies at least) have their origins with so called "amateurs"..... i.e. Those who don't ask a wage (and/or those who don't receive a proper wage for what they do!).

These people are often taken for granted, good ideas are taken and commercialised without due respect to their origin and often claimed as a new innovation. They are then even sold back to the communities they came from, making profit for the producers.

Most, if not all of the everyday tools and technology in our lives (along with much of our food), comes from places unrelated to us, often across the the other side of the planet. This situation is quite absurd.

Most communities, in reality, have enough resources, and skills, (or potential skills), to maintain a viable and indeed comfortable existence, without all the trappings of so-called "modern society".

Remember also that there are thousands of small communities around the world who have to survive on their own resources and skills. They do not have the facilities and material wealth that are taken for granted in developed countries. They have no money to spare, if any at all, for the accepted trappings of life that are often considered 'normal' in modern society. For them, the only way is to do it for themselves, and with locally available resources.

Autonopedia is for all 'Third World' communities also, in fact may be even more so than the rich industrialised ones, - but who knows, there are many things that can happen, that could change the comfortable way of life in these societies too, so there is no excuse to be complacent!

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate.

Act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

Specialization is for insects."

Robert Heinlein

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This is a Not For Profit site and is aimed at Not For Profit projects & institutions.

Whilst reproduction and dissemination of the information on this site is actively encouraged anybody caught making a buck out of it without our express permission are likely to find themselves in trouble!!

There is a difference, it may be said, between profit and fair wage. For someone to use this information to make something for, or inform another person, then a fair wage would cover their time and expense that it took to complete that task and be comensurate with the level of mental or physical energy that person had expended.

To charge over and above this is profiteering i.e. making money out of it! To take this information and sell it, or use it for manufacturing based on shareholder satisfaction etc., is also profiteering.

Disclaimer

The material on this site has been compiled from a wide range of sources both on-line and off-line and from a large number of independant contributers.

Although the majority of the material in Autonopedia is either retrieved from the public domain, written especially for Autonopedia or is provided with the permission of the copyright holder, it is not always possible to verify the original authorship of supplied material.

Any copyright holders or their agents who find their material in Autonopedia are invited to contact the editor. The material in question can then be either; credited in favour of the copyright holder and/or their agent's and links provided as desired, or altered so as not to breach copyright and the original removed.

There is awful lot of information that really belongs to everyone but some people may make claim to it in one way or another, so therefore, if it is by nature:

Then we may publish it under the terms of 'Fair Use' if subject to copyright etc.

Fair Use Notice

It is possible that some sections of the Autonopedia web site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Although we try to avoid direct use of copyrighted material we may make such material available in our efforts to advance the understanding of humanity's problems and hopefully to help find solutions for those problems.

We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. A click on a hyperlink is a request for information.

Consistant with this notice you are welcome to make 'fair use' of anything you find in Autonopedia. However, if you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

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