Peter Joseph is basically a systems left post‐scarcity guy.

His politics are not Marxist in the classical sense, nor anarchist, nor social democrat. He’s part of that lineage that tries to synthesize:

• ecological economics + full systems thinking

• post-scarcity automation idealism

• anti-market, anti-money critique

• but without proposing a party, a revolution, or a class struggle model

He is most similar to the “Resource Based Economy” worldview, but more macro-sociology educated and more media theory literate.

What he believes in (core pillars):

1) Markets are structurally obsolete
He thinks price/signaling is fundamentally too crude for a technologically complex world, and that markets generate perverse incentives (planned obsolescence, inefficiency, status competition, etc.)

2) Technology can coordinate provisioning better than markets
Not in a “central planning computer solves everything” Soviet way, but in a cybernetics / operations research way: large scale dynamic system modeling (“Project Cybersyn” vibes but more techno-optimistic).

3) Socio-technical design > ideology
He is explicitly anti “left vs right” as containers. He views both as branches of 18th–19th century political culture that assumed material scarcity.

4) The problem is the game board, not bad actors
His core claim: capitalism forces even good actors into destructive behaviour. This is why he likes systems modeling and likes to talk about behavioral economics and complexity.

5) He is anti-reformist in the conventional sense
He thinks you can’t just regulate capitalism or tax it well. He thinks the entire political economy operating system must be replaced.

But — and this is important — he is NOT a revolutionary in the Leninist sense.
He isn’t calling for seizure of the state, mass party organization, or militant confrontation.

He basically wants a design transition:

• decommodify fundamentals (health, housing, essentials)

• move to access over ownership

• heavily automate structural provisioning

• use cybernetics to manage resources globally

• shift culture toward collaborative values (he’s quite big on social psychology, ideology critique, media critique)

His influences:

• Jacque Fresco (most obviously)

• cybernetics (Stafford Beer etc.)

• ecological economics (Herman Daly, Kate Raworth)

• Gabor Maté style trauma social psychology

• to a small extent Buckminster Fuller (aesthetically / rhetorically)

His enemies / targets:

• mainstream economics

• advertising and manufactured desire

• private property ideology

• nationalism (he’s very planetary)

• partisan polarization

TL;DR
Peter Joseph is a planetary post-scarcity cybernetic socialist, but he refuses the label because he thinks existing left/right language is part of the disease. He wants a technical design transition away from markets, toward public cybernetic resource planning, with automation de-linking survival from labor.

(1) Physically / materially possible?
Yes.
There is nothing about our energy capture, automation potentials, cybernetics, operations research, etc. that in principle forbids post-scarcity provisioning being coordinated without markets.

We already do non-market cybernetic provisioning in narrow domains:

• global packet routing (the internet)

• airline gate scheduling

• supply chain optimization inside firms (Wal-Mart and Amazon are centrally planned internally via software — they are mini command economies)

• grid management / load balancing

Non-price coordination works when the constraints are known and computable.
So in principle, yes.

The sticking point is not physics.

(2) Politically / socially feasible?
Almost certainly no — at least not in any near time horizon.

Peter Joseph’s blueprint presupposes a species-level willingness to:

• give up property as primary organizing norm

• relinquish competitive positional consumption

• trust a planetary cybernetic coordination system

• shift cultural value away from domination/status

In other words, his system goal requires an anthropological revolution first.

He never proves how you get from here → there.

This is where his dream breaks.

Historically:

• transformations in mode of production occur because the old mode becomes unbearable AND a new class has enough power to impose alternatives.

Peter Joseph’s vision has:

• no class agent

• no historical mechanism

• no path of transition

He basically has an end state but no politics of means.

So: physically viable, politically implausible.

A deeper issue

Post scarcity theorists always under-account for status.

“Scarcity” isn’t just material; it is rank.

Humans make artificial scarcity (luxury goods, exclusivity) even when material abundance exists. That’s the G. Veblen / Bataille / Bourdieu insight.

A world where provisioning is solved does not eliminate “why would I prefer X over Y” or “am I more valuable than him/her/them.” It just shifts the arena.

He is right that capitalism enforces perverse incentives,
but he underestimates that humans generate perverse incentives even if capitalism vanished — because some of those incentives are baked into social primate biology.

So the honest answer

His ideas should be treated as a regulative ideal — like Kant’s regulative ideals — a north star.

They help diagnose:

• how capitalism scaffolds pathological incentive structures

• how markets are information-poor relative to computation

• how we could do technical provisioning differently

But as a program for actual political transition:
it has no engine.
No force.
No agent.

It remains a moral architecture, not a political project.