I think the comments here have diverged into /r/philosophy more than the original post so let's try and drag this back.

What OP is describing is exactly the sort of cultural revolution many Post-Industrial futurists have been anticipating since, at least, the 1960s. It's what the Tofflers were actually talking about in the Third Wave series. (which was largely mis-interpreted) One of the most detailed visions of the culture and lifestyle that may result was explored in the book Bolo'Bolo by Swiss activist author P.M. in 1983.

/r/futurology's rather narrow high-tech pop-futurology focus misses a lot of what's going on today, in particular the current P2P/Commons movement that emerged from the Open Software and Open Data movements to inspire a global wave of contemporary Social Enterprise and alternative production research and development. In fact, this is the actual origin of Bitcoin that so many bitcoiners themselves are oblivious to. It originated in P2P Foundation discussions in digital currencies and exchange alternatives to money as a way to facilitate the development of social production networks--exactly what OP is referring to.

The central premise of Post-Industrial futurism is the idea that the core paradigms of the Industrial Age are being undermined by the evolution of the very technologies they depend on. The ultimate effect of the evolution in production technology is to not only obsolesce workers but also capital--because the machines are not just getting smarter, they're getting smaller, more flexible, lower in minimum production volumes toward production-on-demand, and cheaper. A key paradigm of Post-Industrial culture is 'demassification' in opposition to the 'massification' that was a key paradigm of the Industrial Age. A visible effect of cultural demassification is what's lately called the Long Tail phenomenon; where, thanks to new technology, markets stretch out into long spectrums of product diversification such that the 'tail' of the market--the spectrum of things with small market shares--collectively amount to a much larger portion of the whole market than the 'head' of most popular things with big market share. Long before the term was coined, Toffler suggested that variations of this kind of phenomenon are emerging culture-wide. The ultimate evolution of production is not just Total Automation but to transition away from corporate industry at big scales and great distances depending on big capital to an embedded local utilities infrastructure and/or personally owned production.

An undercurrent to the spectrum of 'Open' movements, the Fab Lab/Maker movement, and, of course, P2P is an idea called 'unplugging'; the term first coined by futurist and Global Swadeshi advocate Vinay Gupta. It's the idea that the emerging technologies of personal industrial production--personal computing and mobile communications, digital fabrication, urban farming, household solar energy, etc.--are increasingly offering the prospect of being able, with slowly increasing ease, to supplant subsistence dependence on the market economy. And in his short story The Unplugged, Gupta describes a near-future community that has coalesced to cultivate this technology for this purpose (centered on the open development of a kind of high-tech self-sufficient prefab house), realizing unplugging as a new option on a kind of early retirement. This is much the same future imagined by P.M. in Bolo'Bolo, albeit in a more low-tech form. P.M. saw this future not so much a product of technology as of the kinds of cultural shifts (much as Toffler described) leading to increasing reliance on local community and social production in the face of failing infrastructures due to a failing Westfalian state model. (hence P.M.'s vision of a world where Industrial Age nation states break into innumerable 'bolo' communities) A growing number of Makers are actively pursuing this vision. This is what Open Source Ecology and their Global Village Toolkit project are all about. The current 'creative class' is increasingly interested in the prospects of intentional communities, in part because they are no longer interested in waiting to realize an ideal lifestyle in retirement. They want to live well now and are becoming aware of the tools to realize that with.

So, what happens when a very large number of people start realizing the potential for this option and start dropping out of the market economy in favor of social production and personal production? Some have suggested runaway labor cost inflation, a compulsion to total industrial and economic automation, a global digital network playing The World Game by itself, and the ultimate end of Capitalism and the Westfalian state. In other words, a Post-Scarcity civilization. In this situation many imagine a new kind of social currency to emerge. A social credit system that facilitates access to above-average resource use based on an expectation of the social value of one's personal activities. This is a common fixture of near/post Singularity SciFi. Often it takes the form of a digitally tracked numeric value that functions like credit. I tend to envision this in the more sophisticated form of a pairing of social-semantic networks to the digital resource management network to create a social credit system rooted in an understanding of the person and their relationship to society rather than just a numerical popularity score. A Digital Tao.