What You Can Do Now: A Builder’s Guide to the Transition
“Heroes are a symptom of a failing system. A healthy civilization doesn’t need heroes. It needs builders. Millions of them.” — From the Epilogue
If you’ve read Unscarcity, you’ve encountered Maria’s journey from house cleaner to civilization builder, Richard’s transformation from bunker billionaire to mentor, Douglas’s calculation that led him out of his panic room and back to his family. These are individual stories—but they’re symptoms of a larger pattern.
The book asked questions. This guide starts answering them.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: waiting for someone else to build the future is why we’re in this mess. The labor cliff isn’t politely pausing while governments form committees. AI capabilities are doubling roughly every year while our institutions move at the speed of continental drift. In 2025 alone, 76,000 workers have already lost their jobs to AI, and 41% of employers worldwide plan to reduce their workforce in the next five years due to automation. That’s not a distant warning—it’s the avalanche already moving.
So the question isn’t “when will someone fix this?” The question is: what are you building?
The Math of Collective Action
Let’s get one thing straight: individual action won’t save civilization. Neither will waiting for collective action to materialize. The answer is both, simultaneously, at scale.
Consider the math. If 1% of Americans—3.4 million people—each contributed ten hours per month to building transition infrastructure, that’s 408 million hours annually. For context, that’s equivalent to 200,000 full-time workers. The entire Peace Corps, multiplied by forty. Except these aren’t volunteers in distant countries—they’re neighbors building the local resilience that will matter when the old economy seizes up.
The Free Zones described in the book don’t appear from nowhere. They emerge from thousands of small experiments that prove abundance-based coordination works better than scarcity-based competition. Every tool library started, every open-source contribution, every skill shared, every community strengthened—these are the atoms of the transition.
The good news? The atoms are multiplying. In 2024, one billion contributions were made to open-source projects on GitHub alone—a record high. Worker cooperatives have tripled in the US over the past decade, now numbering 751. Community land trusts have grown to over 300 organizations stewarding nearly 44,000 permanently affordable housing units. These aren’t hippie experiments anymore. They’re the infrastructure of what comes next.
For Individuals (Today - 2030)
Build Local Resilience
The first step is strengthening the foundations of your immediate community. This isn’t prepper isolation—it’s building the social infrastructure that will matter when employment becomes optional.
Join or start a tool library. The Portland Tool Library model shows how shared access to physical tools builds community while reducing individual ownership burden. You’ll learn practical skills, meet neighbors, and create the kind of mutual aid network that will matter during the transition. Plus, you’ll discover the revolutionary insight that nobody actually needs to own a circular saw. They need circles cut in things.
Participate in community solar projects. Energy abundance is a cornerstone of post-scarcity. Community solar lets you support the transition to renewable energy even if you rent or can’t install rooftop panels. You’re not just saving on your electricity bill—you’re building the distributed energy infrastructure the Foundation requires. Every kilowatt-hour from the sun is one less that needs to come from a system designed around artificial scarcity.
Learn practical skills. Repair, growing food, first aid, basic construction, fermentation, sewing—these aren’t “survival skills” for collapse scenarios. They’re the baseline capabilities of a resilient human being. When AI handles most knowledge work, physical making becomes both more valuable and more fulfilling. The repair café movement isn’t nostalgia—it’s prototype.
Build relationships with neighbors. Know the people within a five-minute walk of your home. This sounds trivial, but most people can’t name three neighbors. In a society organized around cars and screens, that’s not surprising—but it’s also a critical vulnerability. Strong local networks are the foundation of federated governance. You cannot coordinate at scale if you can’t coordinate at the block level. The MOSAIC starts with knowing who lives next door.
Support Open Infrastructure
The infrastructure of abundance must be open by design. Proprietary systems concentrate power; open systems distribute it. This isn’t ideology—it’s physics. A closed system can be captured; an open one can only be forked.
Contribute to open-source projects. Especially AI governance tools, coordination protocols, and transparency infrastructure. In 2024, 1.4 million new developers joined open-source communities—many working on AI projects. Even small contributions (documentation, bug reports, testing) build your reputation in the emerging contribution economy. Your GitHub history may matter more than your resume in ten years. Actually, scratch that—it probably already does.
Support organizations building open alternatives. Mozilla, Internet Archive, Signal, Wikimedia Foundation, Open Source Initiative, Creative Commons—these organizations are building the commons that abundance requires. Donate money if you can, time if you can’t. The global open-source market hit $34.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $40 billion in 2025. That’s not charity—that’s civilizational infrastructure.
Choose open standards over proprietary lock-in. Use Signal instead of iMessage. Choose open-source software where viable. Support protocols over platforms. Every time you choose openness, you strengthen the infrastructure of the transition. Closed platforms are designed to extract value from you; open protocols are designed to create value through you.
Share knowledge freely. Write blog posts about what you’re learning. Answer questions on Stack Overflow. Contribute to Wikipedia. Create tutorials. The more freely knowledge flows, the faster abundance arrives. Information wants to be free, but it needs help getting there.
Prepare Your Career
The labor cliff is coming. AI capabilities are improving roughly 100x annually in compute efficiency. Entry-level white-collar jobs are already disappearing—January 2025 saw the lowest job openings in professional services since 2013, a 20% year-over-year drop. The question isn’t whether your job will change—it’s how to position yourself for the transition.
Develop skills that complement AI rather than compete with it. Focus on judgment, creativity, coordination, emotional intelligence, and physical making. AI can generate code; it can’t decide what’s worth building or navigate the politics of getting stakeholders aligned. Computer and mathematical occupations—among the most AI-exposed—are already seeing steep unemployment rises. But positions requiring human judgment, physical presence, or genuine relationship-building? Those are holding.
Build reputation in transparent contribution systems. GitHub, Wikipedia, open research, peer-reviewed publications, conference talks—anywhere your contributions are visible and verifiable. The transition economy values demonstrated capability over credentials. In a world where AI can pass any test you can pass, the question becomes: what have you actually built?
Learn to work with AI tools effectively. Understanding how to prompt, verify, and integrate AI output is becoming as fundamental as typing. The people who thrive won’t be those who avoid AI but those who use it as leverage. Think of AI as an extremely capable but occasionally delusional intern—you need to know when to trust it and when to verify.
Consider trades and physical skills alongside digital ones. Plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, carpentry—these combine AI-augmented design with physical execution in ways that will remain valuable throughout the transition. And they’re harder to offshore or automate than most office work. A robot can write your email, but it still can’t fix your toilet. (Give it five years, though.)
Financial Preparation
Traditional financial advice assumes employment-based income continues indefinitely. That assumption is cracking like thin ice.
Reduce dependence on employment income where possible. Build multiple income streams. Reduce fixed expenses. Develop skills that let you generate value outside traditional employment. This isn’t about side hustles—it’s about optionality. The person with one income stream and high fixed costs is maximally vulnerable to disruption.
Invest in resilience, not just financial assets. Skills, community, health, relationships—these are the real wealth in a transition period. A diversified investment portfolio won’t help you if your community has no social cohesion or you have no practical skills. Compound interest on stocks doesn’t matter if there’s no grocery store you can walk to.
Consider cooperative ownership models. Worker cooperatives, housing cooperatives, community land trusts—these structures align with the federated, abundance-based future better than traditional corporate or individual ownership. They’re also more resilient during economic disruption. Worker co-ops consistently outperform conventional businesses in protecting revenue and supporting workers during crises.
Understand that traditional retirement planning may not apply. If we achieve genuine abundance in the next 20-30 years, the entire concept of “saving for retirement” becomes obsolete. If we don’t, your 401k won’t save you anyway. Focus on building systems that work in multiple futures, not optimizing for a single scenario. Hedge across possible worlds, not just asset classes.
For Communities (2025-2035)
Start Small-Scale Experiments
Free Zones begin as experiments that prove the model works. Your community can start now. The beauty of experimentation is that it doesn’t require permission from anyone—just people willing to try.
Community land trusts. Remove land from speculative markets while preserving individual use rights. This separates housing from investment in ways that reduce cost and increase stability. Community land trusts have grown to over 300 organizations in 48 US states, up from 289 in 2021, now stewarding nearly 44,000 units of permanently affordable housing. In New York City alone, CLTs have multiplied tenfold in twelve years. This isn’t alternative—it’s emergent standard.
Time banking networks. Hour-for-hour skill exchange that values all contributions equally. This builds the social infrastructure for reputation-based coordination while meeting real needs today. Switzerland has a national time banking program where young people volunteer assisting seniors in exchange for credits they can use when they themselves age. China is rolling out similar programs to cover 90% of seniors by 2025. The future of elder care might not be institutional—it might be reciprocal. See time-banking economics for implementation details.
Skill-sharing cooperatives. Formalize mutual teaching and learning. Someone teaches bicycle repair; someone else teaches bread baking. Everyone’s expertise matters, and the community becomes more capable as a whole. This is the Guild system described in the book, at embryonic scale.
Local mutual aid networks. Structured systems for helping each other during emergencies, transitions, or just daily life. Childcare swaps, food sharing, equipment loans, skill assistance—mutual aid is abundance at human scale. It’s also how humans survived for most of history before we outsourced reciprocity to markets.
Build Coordination Infrastructure
The technical infrastructure for federated coordination can start small and scale up. The MOSAIC doesn’t get built from the top down—it gets built from the bottom up.
Local mesh networks. Internet access that doesn’t depend on corporate ISPs. This builds digital resilience while creating the foundation for federated communication protocols. When the central systems fail—and they will fail—mesh networks keep communities connected.
Community resource libraries. Tools, books, seeds, equipment—anything that can be shared rather than owned individually. Start with one category and expand. The Portland Tool Library began with a few neighbors sharing ladders. The global makerspace market hit $1.4 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $3.8 billion by 2033. That growth is driven by people realizing that access beats ownership.
Shared maker spaces. 3D printers, laser cutters, woodworking tools, electronics benches—equipment that’s too expensive for individuals but affordable when shared. These become the production infrastructure of local abundance. With an estimated 3,000-4,000 makerspaces worldwide, this isn’t fringe anymore. It’s infrastructure.
Cooperative childcare and eldercare. The most valuable “infrastructure” is care work. Cooperative models distribute this labor while building intergenerational community bonds. They also demonstrate that care work is a commons problem, not an individual market problem. The Maya understood this. Time banks understand this. The Foundation will make it universal.
Prepare for the Labor Cliff
The transition will be disruptive. Communities that prepare now will weather it better. The ones that pretend disruption isn’t coming will discover—too late—that unemployment doesn’t care about your optimism.
Community emergency funds. Pooled resources to help members through unemployment, illness, or transition periods. This is social insurance at human scale, with transparency and accountability that national programs can’t match. Call it a micro-foundation—the principle is the same.
Skills training programs. Not job training for careers that won’t exist, but skill building for capabilities that will matter: repair, coordination, conflict resolution, teaching, elder care, food production. The 77% of new AI jobs that require master’s degrees represent a substantial skills gap. But they’re not the only jobs that will exist. Someone still has to grow the food, fix the plumbing, and help grandma navigate her augmented-reality interface.
Local food production. Community gardens, vertical farms, food forests—systems that increase local food security while building community. Food abundance reduces vulnerability to economic disruption. A neighborhood that can feed itself is a neighborhood that can weather any storm.
Mental health support networks. The transition will be psychologically challenging. Peer support groups, conflict resolution training, grief processing circles—these aren’t luxuries but necessities. Purpose collapse is a real risk when employment disappears. The book warns about the Universe 25 outcome—the mice who had everything but fell apart anyway. Human support systems are the vaccine.
For Tech Workers Specifically
You’re building the tools that will either enable abundance or entrench scarcity. Every line of code is a vote for one future or another. Choose carefully.
What to Build
Open-source AI governance tools. Systems for transparent decision-making, bias detection, and accountability. The AI that coordinates abundance must be open and auditable. Over 60% of AI projects now integrate open-source models. The fight for AI governance is happening in codebases, not just courtrooms.
Transparent contribution tracking systems. Think GitHub for everything—systems that make contribution visible and verifiable without centralized control. This is the infrastructure of Impact and reputation-based coordination. A billion contributions to open-source projects in 2024 proves it can scale.
Decentralized coordination protocols. Tools that let communities coordinate without central authorities. Federated governance requires federated infrastructure. The MOSAIC needs protocols, not platforms.
Tools that reduce rather than increase dependence. Build systems that empower users, teach skills, and increase autonomy. Avoid tools that create learned helplessness or vendor lock-in. Ask yourself: does this tool make users more capable, or more dependent?
What to Avoid Building
Surveillance infrastructure. Even if it’s legal and profitable, surveillance concentrates power in ways that undermine the transition to abundance. Every tracking system you build makes federated governance harder. The panopticon is not compatible with the Foundation.
Addiction-optimizing systems. Engagement metrics, infinite scroll, algorithmic feeds designed to maximize time-on-site—these exploit human psychology for profit. They’re incompatible with a society organized around Fundamental Freedom. The attention economy is extraction at its most intimate.
Tools that concentrate power. Platforms that create network effects that lock in users. Systems that extract data without providing proportional value. Algorithms that make decisions without transparency. If it creates a moat, it creates a trap.
Black-box decision systems. AI that can’t explain its reasoning, algorithms that hide their logic, systems designed to be opaque. The Civic Layer requires transparency—Axiom II: Truth Must Be Seen. If you can’t audit it, don’t build it.
Where to Work
Cooperatives and mission-driven organizations. Companies structured around purpose rather than profit maximization. Your work directly builds the transition infrastructure. Worker co-ops now employ over 6,400 people in the US alone, with average wages more than $7 above minimum wage.
Open-source foundations. Linux Foundation (with over 100,000 developers contributing to 68 hosted projects), Apache Software Foundation, Mozilla, Wikimedia—organizations that steward the digital commons. These are the institutional models for the future.
Companies aligned with abundance values. Benefit corporations, B-corps, or traditional companies with genuine commitments to openness, transparency, and distributed power. They exist; find them. Look for contribution logs, not just press releases.
Or: use corporate salary to fund transition work. Take the high-paying surveillance capitalism job, live frugally, and use your free time and resources to build abundance infrastructure. This is legitimate, though psychologically harder than working somewhere aligned with your values. Call it the EXIT Protocol for labor—convert dying-system wages into living-system infrastructure.
For Teenagers
If you’re 15 now, you’ll be 25 in 2035—right in the middle of the transition. The world you’re preparing for doesn’t exist yet. The world your parents prepared for is disappearing. Your career counselor is navigating with obsolete maps.
Skills That Will Matter
Understanding AI capabilities and limitations. Not how to program AI (that’s increasingly automated), but how to evaluate its outputs, understand its biases, and use it as a tool rather than an oracle. AI will write most code by the time you’re 25. The question is whether you can direct it wisely.
Critical thinking about information. In a world of AI-generated content, the ability to evaluate sources, detect manipulation, and reason from first principles is more valuable than memorizing facts. Any AI can tell you what—the skill is knowing whether to believe it.
Collaboration and coordination. Most work in the future will be project-based collaboration between humans and AI. The ability to build consensus, resolve conflicts, and coordinate distributed teams will matter more than individual brilliance. The lone genius is a myth anyway; the future makes it obvious.
Physical making and repair. 3D printing, electronics, woodworking, gardening, cooking—any skill that creates value in the physical world. When AI handles most knowledge work, making becomes both more valuable and more meaningful. Atoms are harder to automate than bits.
Emotional intelligence and conflict resolution. As automation handles routine decisions, the hard problems become human problems. The ability to navigate complex social dynamics, build trust, and resolve disputes without authority will be invaluable. Robots will handle logistics; humans will handle relationships.
What School Won’t Teach You
How to learn continuously outside institutions. Schools teach you to learn inside their structure. Real learning happens when you can identify what you need to know and teach yourself. YouTube, documentation, experimentation, mentors—these will matter more than degrees. The credential is the learning, not the certificate.
How to build reputation through contribution. Your contribution history on GitHub, Wikipedia, open research, or community projects is more meaningful than your GPA. Learn to work in public and let your work speak for you. Impact is earned, not assigned.
How to work in non-hierarchical teams. Most schools and jobs are hierarchical. The future is federated. Learning to coordinate without bosses, build consensus, and self-organize is a skill you’ll need to develop outside traditional institutions. The MOSAIC has no CEO.
How to find meaning beyond career achievement. If employment becomes optional by the time you’re 30, what will give your life purpose? This is the most important question you can ask, and school won’t help you answer it. Chapter 2 of the book is your preview—but you’ll have to write your own version.
Questions to Ask About Your Future
What would I do if money wasn’t a constraint? Not “what would I buy” but “what would I build, learn, or create?” The answer reveals what genuinely matters to you, which is the foundation of purpose in an abundance economy. This question stops being hypothetical sooner than you think.
What skills do I want regardless of career? Music, carpentry, cooking, martial arts, languages—skills you’d pursue even if they never made money. These are the skills that will bring meaning when career pressure disappears. They’re also the skills that make you interesting.
What communities do I want to be part of? Geographic communities, interest communities, mission communities—humans need belonging. Which communities do you want to strengthen? Your answer shapes where and how you invest your time. In the MOSAIC, community choice is the fundamental choice.
What problems do I want to help solve? Not what career pays well, but what challenges matter to you. Climate change, education, mental health, scientific research, art, governance—there’s no shortage of meaningful work. What calls to you? That calling doesn’t disappear when money does.
The Mindset Shift
The key insight that changes everything: You’re not preparing for a future that might happen. You’re building the future through your choices today.
Every tool library you join makes abundance more real. Every open-source contribution builds the commons. Every skill you learn and share increases collective capability. Every community relationship you strengthen creates the social infrastructure for federated governance.
The Free Zones don’t appear because someone decrees them. They emerge because thousands of people make choices that demonstrate abundance-based coordination works better than scarcity-based competition. Your choices matter. Your experiments matter. Your willingness to try different ways of organizing matters.
This isn’t about individual heroism or waiting for the perfect moment. It’s about steady, incremental building toward a world that’s better than the one we have. Some experiments will fail. Some will succeed beyond expectation. The point is to try, learn, and share what you discover.
The book describes a 28% probability of the “Trojan Horse” outcome—the transition working roughly as designed. That probability isn’t fixed. It’s a function of what we build. Every tool library, every cooperative, every open-source contribution, every community strengthened nudges those odds upward.
The transition is coming whether we prepare for it or not. The question is whether we build the infrastructure for abundance ahead of time, or scramble to create it in crisis. Every day you spend building resilience, strengthening community, supporting open infrastructure, and developing meaningful skills is a day invested in a future worth living in.
Start where you are. Use what you have. Build with who’s around you.
The future is made of these choices.
Join the Conversation
This guide—like the book it accompanies—is a starting point, not an endpoint. The ideas here will evolve as they meet reality.
- Share what you’re building and what you’re learning
- Challenge assumptions—the framework only gets stronger through honest critique
- Connect with others running similar experiments in their communities
- Ask questions the book didn’t answer
Maybe the EXIT Protocol is too generous to elites. Maybe the timelines are off. Maybe we’ve missed failure modes. The history of proposed utopias is full of blueprints that looked perfect on paper. The only way to avoid that fate is to keep testing ideas against reality and updating when they break.
The transition isn’t something that happens to us. It’s something we build together. What are you building?
Related Articles
- Free Zones: The Geography of the Transition - How experimental communities demonstrate abundance models
- Civic Service: Earning Your Stake - How contribution creates belonging in the transition
- The Portland Tool Library Model - Practical example of abundance at neighborhood scale
- Time Banking Economics - Hour-for-hour skill exchange as transition infrastructure
- Return to the Book - Unscarcity chapter summaries and deep-dives
Statistics sourced from: GitHub Octoverse 2024, US Federation of Worker Cooperatives, Lincoln Institute of Land Policy CLT Survey 2024, World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report 2025, Verified Market Reports Makerspace Analysis 2024.
