Land and Capital; Invention and Automation
Patrick Anderson
Many posts to this list seem to suggest Manufacturing will be Open -
that we will fulfill our goal of Open Manufacturing by increasing the
quantity and quality of value through invention and automation.
Better technology can be good, but I am concerned these long term
goals are overshadowing the importance of the mundane but inescapable
requirements for Land and Capital required to implement such ideas.
When I say 'Land' I am mostly talking about finite resources of the
planet such as surface area, genetic variety, fossil fuels, metal
ores, radio frequency spectrum, etc.
When I say 'Capital' I am mostly talking about tools and solutions
built from those finite resources such as a shovel made from steel and
wood.
So my question to each of you is:
Do you see Open Manufacturing requiring some amount of Land and
Capital to begin and to continue?
And if so, how will we gain control of those physical resources in
order to do what has eluded humanity for so long?
But if not; if you see OM as being purely a matter of increased
productivity through better and more available designs, then how will
we stop the corporations&governments from overcharging us so much
profit&tax that they keep us contained even as they now do?
Thanks,
Patrick
Vinay Gupta
Patrick my primary approach to this has been to work with commodities
which are already very, very cheap and use expired patents as much as
possible - tape, polyiso insulation boards, more generally standard
4x8 panels, open source software etc. There just aren't many premiums
on that stuff - we may be paying 2x the cost of manufacture, but the
*return on investment* most of those companies are getting is right
around the rate of inflation plus some small change that people won't
invade the market space to try and split with them.
There are a lot of holes that are big enough for N hogs, but not N+1,
and if those hogs have a little extra space ( just under 1/N units of
space each, to be precise) good for them, and we only over-pay by a
fraction.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
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"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Nathan Cravens
When I say 'Land' I am mostly talking about finite resources of the
planet such as surface area, genetic variety, fossil fuels, metal
ores, radio frequency spectrum, etc.
When I say 'Capital' I am mostly talking about tools and solutions
built from those finite resources such as a shovel made from steel and
wood.
So my question to each of you is:
Do you see Open Manufacturing requiring some amount of Land and
Capital to begin and to continue?
And if so, how will we gain control of those physical resources in
order to do what has eluded humanity for so long?
The workings of Factor-E Farm are rather 'Land' oriented with design and production intended to sustain small groups of twelve at a financial cost of roughly $5k per person.The working model Marcin calls neocommercialization (http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Neocommercialization) is capitalist in the sense community infrastructure is sold with goods purchased from the market to afford a post-capitalist, off the grid lifestyle for those that opt-in.An open source tractor and compressed block press are a few items already constructed. Here's a product list: http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=OverviewAs this package develops a more 'stupid proof' infrastructure to sustain larger groups it can minimize financial entry cost from $5k per person to $500 per person, $50, ect until the gig is finance free, liberating the world from economic slavery.When open manufacturing creates the physical equivalent of a Unix or Firefox, like an OpenBeer that's easier to acquire and tastes better than any and all ClosedBeer, market activity may not continue in the beer sector, yet capitalism will remain alive and well until more general or dynamic personalised manufacturing methods create any material object easily with open design without finance.Land itself may well be the last market (scarce entity) considering such daunting tasks as manufacturing habitable space itself...
But if not; if you see OM as being purely a matter of increased
productivity through better and more available designs, then how will
we stop the corporations&governments from overcharging us so much
profit&tax that they keep us contained even as they now do?
OM operating today will want to work with business and government in the same manner Google, a multi-billion dollar company, runs on Linux, free software.
Its in government or corporate interest to continue dependence on corporate or government for provisions. If an OM method enhances these proprietary forums, they will be used. In order to stay in the competitive game or sustain governance, OM like RepRap or Factor-E Farm will become a more favorable choice to the Easy Bake or Ticky-Tacky Suburbian Houselet when open material production is more accessible than proprietary forms.
Here are some examples of this sort of open/proprietary synthesis:
1) An Easy Bake oven that runs off crank power, recipes freely available online, food given freely by local participants of freeconomy (http://www.justfortheloveofit.org/)
2) A Bus may need difficult to manufacture sensory equipment to be purchased from a private firm to make the vehicle autonomously driven. Though designs are open, remaining parts may require payed human effort for local manufacture which requires a fee.
Capital has a lifespan; it will end eventually, because enough people want to live freer lives than they have before and will make that possible by creating more voluntary ways of living, ending scarcity on all fronts and therefore capital itself. Open Manufacturing will provide an essential material base for this end. Government will become self regulating, dependent on the mutual contract of each social network (i.e. peer governance). Considering tolerance levels, if a contract is broken, a different social network aligned with a user's views will be available. Land or habitual space will need to remain constant with population growth for human life to continue. I would conclude that enough people are willing and able enough to continue human life indefinitely.
Nathan
Charles Collis
Just some thoughts:
It could well be that the rise of open-source in the physical world will coincide with natural reduction in costs and increased efficiency from competition in the commercial world as systems become more sophisticated and automated.
We might see the possible emergence of transparent, open-source co-operatives that end up out-competing for-profit organisations in all sorts of areas of the economy and (inter)national infrastructure operations. (There may also be hybrid models where for-profits harness ideas from the community to become more competitive further driving costs towards zero).
Joseph mentioned co-operatives previously too and Patrick himself had some interesting comments in a conversation we had a few days (http://www.adciv.org/User_talk:PatrickA).
It will probably be that as in the software world, the open alternatives gradually rise out from the proprietary world slowly displacing it - using (at least initially) resources and capital from people who operate in both worlds. Then as it becomes more successful (and egalitarian) it may become obvious that this is the way to go and more and more people, organisations and governments 'gift' resources and land (perhaps) to an increasing physical commons (one can live in hope!).
On the land front I've often wondered about the possibility of having automated production facilities that produce large-scale rafts to create 'land' that floats on the oceans - this could be used for anything from agricultural space to energy gathering facilities to mining operations over the vast abyssal plains in international waters. (I'm not sure of the authenticity of the source but have heard that some commercial prospectors looking to harvest manganese nodules in international waters were partly stymied by the International Seabed Authority that demanded that profits were shared with developing nations - maybe a situation that can be taken advantage of by 'open' non-profit ventures).
Another angle is the RepRap project which is seriously looking at using biopolymers that can be made from starchy crops and so that communities in developing countries do not having to rely on material from commercial sources (and can be recycled and re-used on site too).
It may be that the carbon concentration in the atmosphere are too low to be practical, but another technical possibility needing very little landspace is to 'mine' carbon from the atmosphere to make materials to build anything from houses, machinery, goods and electronics (using conducting and semi-conducting CNTs). Neatly reducing greenhouse gases into the bargain (too neat perhaps).
As we increasingly design for disassembly and have better automated recycling, useful materials could mostly stay within a closed loop vastly reducing what has to be dug or pumped out of the ground. There is no reason why eventually we couldn't get into the high 90s percent of materials being recycled and re-used.
I'd better stop before I ramble on too much longer.
Charles.
http://www.adciv.org
Bryan Bishop
> As we increasingly design for disassembly and have better automated
> recycling, useful materials could mostly stay within a closed loop
> vastly reducing what has to be dug or pumped out of the ground. There
> is no reason why eventually we couldn't get into the high 90s percent
> of materials being recycled and re-used.
Yes; for instance, a while back I began designing a suite of tools for
automated mining of abandoned mines. Clearly, these robotic tools
aren't going to appear out of nowhere, but as it turns out these make
surprisingly good engineering projects for university students and so
on, so there's ways to ride as an extra on otherwise normal operations.
And then slowly scaling up to large scale open source, philanthropic
economics. This is what I've been intending with the do-it-yourself
bioreactor projects that allow home-grown synthesis of DNA and other
biological systems, from in vitro meat and other sorts of tissue
engineering to just running ecoli farms for vitamins. Although I admit
that recently the manufacturing and materials side of thing has been
capturing my attention much more thoroughly.
> On the land front I've often wondered about the possibility of having
> automated production facilities that produce large-scale rafts to
> create 'land' that floats on the oceans - this could be used for
> anything from agricultural space to energy gathering facilities to
> mining operations over the vast abyssal plains in international
> waters. (I'm not sure of the authenticity of the source but have
> heard that some commercial prospectors looking to harvest manganese
> nodules in international waters were partly stymied by the
> International Seabed Authority that demanded that profits were shared
> with developing nations - maybe a situation that can be taken
> advantage of by 'open' non-profit ventures).
Re: automated manufacturing of the floatable land masses. There was a
group about a decade ago that was going highly public with their plans
for this, and I think Eric knows these guys personally, with some sort
of affiliation with the Artemis Society. Was it Project Atlantis? I've
forgotten by now, but it was a good initiative that dropped off the map
because of bankruptancy or somesuch. Anyway, I don't believe they were
thinking about manufacturing everything from scratch or with such
bootstrapping, so perhaps it's time to revisit the originals behind the
ideas.
Also, if any of us is secretly Lex Luthor, we could just use, you know,
crystals.
> It may be that the carbon concentration in the atmosphere are too low
> to be practical, but another technical possibility needing very
> little landspace is to 'mine' carbon from the atmosphere to make
> materials to build anything from houses, machinery, goods and
> electronics (using conducting and semi-conducting CNTs). Neatly
> reducing greenhouse gases into the bargain (too neat perhaps).
John Wilke at WPI was talking with me about his plans for the mining of
oxygen from the other side of the atmosphere for space travel. This
would allow orbital LOX mining and thus energy to go fetch precious
metals from the asteroids and moons of our nearby vicinity. I know that
space travel sounds far out there, but there are a number of
do-it-yourself open source groups doing extreme high powered amateur
rocketry, such as the sugar-rocketry groups and nanocubesat people. Not
to mention NASA's landing on an asteroid. I don't know about
coordination and finding asteroids to land on, but I do recall seeing
many public astronomical databases. Heh, even the rocketry group on my
campus has a ham radio setup communicating back and forth with their
satellites. Sadly, they hitch rides with commercial payloads on
somebody else's rockets.
I urge everyone to go look into synbioss and imagine plugging it into
some inventory software or homegrown bioreactors to allow anybody to
design and nearly immediately implement synthetic biological systems --
that sort of manufacturing is blasting off significantly faster than
our "abandoned mines" mining ideas and so on. (I mentioned it in a
previous email.)
I'd like to start with those (currently imaginary) inventory systems to
do dynamic routing of power, energy, and infrastructure building blocks
like materials as well as designs. Maybe one day we can use my
biodiesel bioreactors to get the energy for transporting the
inventories back and forth between locations of Happenings ..
A man can dream, can't he?
- Bryan
________________________________________
http://heybryan.org/
Engineers: http://heybryan.org/exp.html
irc.freenode.net #hplusroadmap
Bryan Bishop
> John Wilke at WPI was talking with me about his plans for the mining
> of oxygen from the other side of the atmosphere for space travel.
> This would allow orbital LOX mining and thus energy to go fetch
> precious metals from the asteroids and moons of our nearby vicinity.
> I know that space travel sounds far out there, but there are a number
> of do-it-yourself open source groups doing extreme high powered
> amateur rocketry, such as the sugar-rocketry groups and nanocubesat
> people. Not to mention NASA's landing on an asteroid. I don't know
> about coordination and finding asteroids to land on, but I do recall
> seeing many public astronomical databases. Heh, even the rocketry
> group on my campus has a ham radio setup communicating back and forth
> with their satellites. Sadly, they hitch rides with commercial
> payloads on somebody else's rockets.
John Wilkes.
Context --
http://heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/LEO_Atmospheric_Gas_Harvester_final___John_Wilkes.html
Not that it matters so much in the previous discussion though.
Josef Davies-Coates
> So my question to each of you is:
> Do you see Open Manufacturing requiring some amount of Land and
> Capital to begin and to continue?
Yes, of course.
> And if so, how will we gain control of those physical resources in
> order to do what has eluded humanity for so long?
Depends on the context but there are three pretty common options:
* buy it
* squat it
* get the gov't (or other public institutions e.g. universities) to
give it to you (or access to it)
There a hundreds, probably thousands of community groups and co-ops
who already have their own land and capital.
Like I mentioned before the Co-op Group in UK has a turnover of over
£9 billion. Mondragon Group is Spain is their 5th biggest company.
Even in the USA, millions of people are members of co-operative credit
unions etc.
Also, here in the UK there are also networks like the Development
Trust Association: http://www.dta.org.uk/
Patrick: from my perspective you are basically saying we need
Development Trusts:
Development trusts are:
* community owned and led
* cultivating enterprise
* developing community assets
* transforming communities for good
And/ or Community Land Trusts (as many members of the DTA are):
"A Community Land Trust is a mechanism for the democratic ownership of
land by the local community. Land is taken out of the market and
separated from its productive use so that the impact of land
appreciation is removed, therefore enabling long-term affordable and
sustainable local development. The value of public investment,
philanthropic gifts, charitable endowments, legacies or development
gain is thus captured in perpetuity, underpinning the sustainable
development of a defined locality or community. Through CLTs, local
residents and businesses participate in and take responsibility for
planning and delivering redevelopment schemes." -
http://www.communitylandtrust.org.uk/
More good CLT links at http://delicious.com/uniteddiversity/clt
You are also saying we need to support the whole co-operative and
solidarity economy movement (which is massive and growly)
For more see:
http://delicious.com/uniteddiversity/solidarity+economy
http://delicious.com/uniteddiversity/cooperative
Here is a question for you Patrick: are you trying to set-up a CLT or
Co-op in your local community? And if not, why not?
Also (but this is to everyone), would you agree to put 1% of your
income into a co-operative legal entity whose sole purpose was to help
develop existing and new community land projects/ ecovillages/
intentional communities etc (mainly via buying land and a revolving
loan fund to support capital infrastructure projects on community land
projects of all types)?
I ask because that is what I am in the process of setting up...
Cheers,
Josef.
--
Josef Davies-Coates
07974 88 88 95
http://uniteddiversity.com
Together We Have Everything
Eric Hunting
finishing my Buckminster Fuller Challenge entry and struggling with
the physical ordeal of the change of seasons.
A complex question for which there are no straightforward answers. I
think that's probably why it produces, in the various forms it
appears, a tendency to argument.
The simple answer is, yes, open manufacture does still require land
and capital. Where things get complicated is in the questions of how
much, in what form, and under who's control. There is a basic notion
in Post-Industrial culture that the overhead of subsistence decreases
with the advance of technology as a function of miniaturization,
recycling, and sophistication in design. The basic premise behind the
idea of 'more with less'. Open manufacturing is rooted in this in
terms of the notion that progressive miniaturization and versatility
of the tools of production coupled to design that maximizes the
efficiency of those tools and the use of the end product lowers the
overhead of resources -land and capital- required to produce any
particular artifact and thus, across some spectrum of artifacts and
goods, a change to the overhead of maintaining standard of living.
There is an expectation that at a certain level of technology and
refinement it is possible to achieve a kind of personal industrial
'singularity' -a point where the subsistence needs of an entire
household can be met by a handful of portable appliances perpetually
recycling some nominal finite amount of resources with little to no
external input. A point of 'closed loop living' or DCELS -domestic
closed environment life support. At that point the intrinsic value of
land and capital collapse and are thus no longer profitable to
control. The less we need from the 'market' the more everything on the
market shrinks in price toward free. That may be a VERY long way off.
But in the mean time we have the near-term means of achieving, through
this active pursuit of miniaturization and demassification, some very
radical improvements in the efficiency of the way the world works and
thus improve the nature of people's lives. It may often seem right now
like the proverbial prisoner digging at his cell walls with stolen
cutlery, but it's making progress.
There is most certainly a problem with the overly concentrated control
of resources in the world today and this does indeed present a
potential roadblock in the cost-competitiveness of independent
production -with the Powers That Be potentially seeking to take their
margin at the 'front end' (cost of resources) rather than the 'back
end'. (cost of goods) But this is a problem that can be potentially
addressed through the demassification of economics as a consequence of
the demassification and localization of production, compelling global
resource markets towards, as I described in another discussion, trade
in commodities in progressively smaller units rather than finished
goods. Competition at the front end is much greater than at the back
end largely because resources tend to be generic -the same in nature,
form, and quality from place to place- and commodities markets are
exceptionally efficient, resulting in increasingly globally consistent
prices with more rapid market capitulation the more commonplace the
commodity. The highly variable and abstractly defined value of human
labor is ultimately what drives the market -is what all 'profit' is
measured in and what all currency is based on. All profit is thus debt
measured in future labor. Localization of production tends to pull
labor off the market and drive its value toward infinity because the
more you can make independently the less you need to work for a
salary. This can potentially produce a collapse or deadlock in the
market because without labor there is no means to stockpile profit or
wealth, thus driving the profitability of resources to zero no matter
what their scarcity relative to each other. Rich people don't
stockpile steel and oil in their basements. We can only speculate at
how this will play out in real-world economic terms but, as I noted
elsewhere, there's an expectation that the end result of this is a
shift in perception of property from commodity to bandwidth. In other
words, we stop treating resources as commodity items bought on a
market and more like access to a free stream of supply akin to the
Internet and maintained, like municipal water systems, as a community
service. The end form of a resource-based economy.
And it will not be sufficient that the community of independent
producers simply make end-products. Though it is little explored at
present, this technology will most certainly be employed in the
production of resources and 'refined' and 'stock' materials as well. I
suspect we will likely see a situation where, for some time,
traditional mass production persists in the area of producing stock
materials -largely because there is a great lag in the rate of
progress in recycling technology. (the universal recycler is as
important a technology as the universal fabricator, but so far the
concept isn't given a lot of attention because it's technically MUCH
more difficult a challenge) This certainly does present a potential
control problem but, as I said, these companies must live with the
higher efficiencies of a competitive commodities market and a world
where labor becomes infinitely expensive. And they will be perpetually
under assault by both direct competition and cooperative nepotism from
the bottom-up. So they may not be able to lord it over us the way
Industrial Age systems have to date. Already there is much independent
competition in the materials market. Most artisan woodworkers, for
instance, do not buy lumber from conventional lumber mills supplying
housing contractors or from typical hardware stores. Their products
just plain suck, you can't be sure where they come from or how legally
it was harvested, the species selection is poor, and they're very
often chemically adulterated in ways the sellers are too stupid to
even know or care about. So there has grown up, in the US at least, a
large community of small local lumber mills that specialize in selling
to the professional craftsman and artisan trade. Some of these have
surprising sources, for instance a number of them specialize in
underwater salvage of logs from the bottoms of northern rivers, lakes,
and bays used in 19th century logging operations. This lumber is
highly prized because we've so depleted the world's forests that
lumber of that quality is simply impossible to find anywhere. Such
independently produced lumber may be more expensive but it's going
into products that sell for many times more than crap from Wal-Mart
and are designed to last a lifetime and appreciate in value with age,
so long-term they're a bargain.
There is a great deal of untapped resources still left unexploited and
free for the taking because their concentrations are not sufficient to
interest large industry or because they are combined in various forms
of waste. Consider the example of 'hobbyist' gold and gemstone miners
today. Many areas long abandoned by 'industrial scale' exploitation
are still capable of keeping small independent operators going
indefinitely. The full potential of such things remains unexplored.
For instance, phytomining which would allow the 'farming' of heavy
metals and silicates from toxic soil. We can even farm concrete in the
form of the constituents of geopolymers. We've also geographically
homogenized the distribution of some sparse resources through our
waste, presenting future prospects of local sourcing through
recycling. In the near future we'll be mining the land fills -perhaps
on an independent operator basis in the manner that mining is done in
communities like Coober Pedy Australia. (which I've always been
fascinated with because of its underground architecture) I think it
was a text of Eric Drexler's that once described a future scenario
where boy scouts used their wilderness treks as prospecting missions,
deploying nanoprobes from walking sticks as they traveled to search
for hidden pockets of Industrial Age toxic waste that would be GPS
tagged and later mined out in a non-destructive manner. Nanotechnology
advocates are often quick to point out that the air we breath alone
has enough carbon in it to build a civilization out of -if we could
ever figure out a way to gather it. We already do this do some extent
through farming, which can produce a great deal more than just food.
There are a variety of ways in which we could produce the materials
for a home within the space on which we might build it in a reasonable
amount of time. It really doesn't take very much to break the backs of
current resource hegemonies, as big and powerful as they seem, as long
as you can attack them in the logistics. With the recent energy
crisis, the increase of gasoline prices to $4 a gallon in the US saw a
definite shift in consumption behavior. It was small. Indeed, you
couldn't measure this in terms of a net decrease in consumption on a
worldwide basis -only in a decrease in the pace of its rate of growth!
And yet that alone was enough to push OPEC into consternation, and
probably pull the plug on some of those lunatic building projects in
the UAE...
Even given the limits of current technology, miniaturization is
altering the demand for and use of resources. Typical new industrial
facility sizes are steadily shrinking relative to their productivity.
New farming technology is enabling greater production from smaller
land area with lower resource overhead. We can now containerize
farming and go vertical. Even New York city is planning farming sky-
scrapers. And we even have a practical -in some contexts- option to
manufacture any amount of land on demand on the open sea and from
renewable materials sourced at sea. That is currently at a rather high
cost of about $1000 per square meter (less with volumetric structure)
based on pneumatically stabilized platform systems but that will also
steadily shrink with advancing technology. Theoretical food
productivity of the oceans as a basis of farming is potentially 50
times that of land in terms of raw protein production per unit area.
Theoretical energy potential based on latent solar thermal energy in
Equatorial waters is enough to support a civilization several orders
of magnitude larger than current, even at current poor efficiency
levels. We haven't even begun to tap this overlooked potential. In my
recent Buckminster Fuller Challenge entry I proposed a plan for OTEC
based settlement development with the goal of producing 1000
equatorial settlements built incrementally over some 50 years based on
the reinvestment of their own profits. (about a billion dollars per
year per OTEC with settlements having up to 12 of them) Those 1000
settlements, each about the size of a small rural town a few
kilometers across and hosting a few thousand people, would cover the
entire civilization's demand of energy, generate four times the food
production of the sum total of the planet's arable land, and stop
Global Warming cold. 50 years from now building such things may
practically be a homesteading project in cost and labor overhead. The
Earth may often seem tapped to its limits given the poor efficiency of
older technologies and the often engineered scarcity of overly
concentrated economics but in the context of these new and emerging
technologies, we're still at the tip of an iceberg.
Now, let's consider the question of how and why it is that design
matters so much in this. Basically, design impacts the logistics of
production of use and thus alters the overhead in resources of that
production and use. Often pre-existing production systems dictate
design but when you can change the nature of the end-product you
change the nature of how it's produced. The most obvious demonstration
of this is the technology of digital media epitomized by the MP3 music
file format, which has radically changed the nature of the delivered
end-product of music and, in less than a decade, radically changed the
structure, physical footprint, and resource overhead of the music
publishing industry. It is currently repeating this process with the
video media publishing industry and may soon do likewise on a vastly
larger scale with the print media industry. Since initiated by Thomas
Edison's phonograph. the recorded music industry has become an
extremely vast and global 'hard' industry consuming massive volumes of
materials and energy and producing massive amounts of pollution and
toxic waste along with its products. It was also enjoying ridiculously
huge profit margins relative to production overhead due to the high
capital costs and scarcity of production tools which was funneled into
massive 'star machines' focused on the cultivation of star performers
that, in a business sense, improved their profit margins further by
minimizing the diversity of music demand and thus creating a lower
diversity in mass production of records. Most of the overhead in most
forms of publishing is in the creation of a new title, not in its mass
production. So all forms of publishing tend to try and minimize the
'diversity demand' by focusing marketing on star talent and creating a
hard time for the wannabes who might compete with them for market
share. Music, SciFi novels, even college textbooks, you see the same
thing. The late Kurt Vonnegut used to say that he felt ashamed to be a
writer because of how easy it was to do when he started, compared to
how hard it became for others later. This is a derivative of a very
old Industrial Age principle. Economy through standardization. You can
get any color you want, as long as it's black, as Henry Ford famously
said. Sometimes industries do this by simply limiting what they will
offer. Other times they try to control _what_you_want_ by limiting
what you know of what you could have or how you define quality and
value -much like politics... (this is why I can't go to auto shows
anymore. The state of current car design just makes me want to go
Shonen Bat on everybody)
The first sign that digital media technology would disrupt this
situation was the CD which drastically lowered the minimum capital
cost of title creation, production, and publishing creating an
opportunity for a radical expanse of music publishing entrepreneurship
that the music industry first dismissed by virtue of higher unit
production costs -overlooking the simple fact that the buy-in was now
radically lower and that the rest of the world didn't need the
outrageous marketing overheads of their traditional star machines. The
result was the emergence of a Long Tail phenomenon in the market where
diversifying music tastes created a situation where the largest
individual portions of the market -the top sellers- suddenly
represented a minority of the whole value of the music market. Always
being a fan of the unconventional, I was very familiar with one of the
entrepreneurial pioneers of this shift; Shanachie Records, which
started out in the late 70s as an Irish music speciality producer and
them moved into diverse overlooked music genres with the advent of the
CD. Located in a defunct old-era masonry industrial building in Newton
NJ, one of those classic decrepit eastern towns where it looks like
the clocks all stopped in 1945, they relied entirely on marketing by
weird radio stations like my favorite WFMU and sold primarily through
mail order -though when I was a kid (a very strange kid...) I used to
go there in person to peruse their warehouse in search of things like
CD's by R.Crumb and the Cheapsuit Serenaders or early 20th century
jazz and folk, Tuvan throat-singers, Gaelic revival, Sufi, African,
Indian, etc. You couldn't buy this stuff at the mall. Nobody else in
the industry was selling stuff like that -and then a decade on
everyone was as the Long Tail emerged. Then came the MP3 and the
advent of the complete collapse of the standard industry production
and distribution models. The industry could have embraced this
technology but, still in denial, they responded to it like cartoon
jungle natives confronted by a Polaroid camera. It's no wonder this
resulted in the infamous and hopelessly desperate response of the
creation of the RIAA. But the star machine is now dead. All the
industry is really doing is fighting to squeeze the last drops of
blood out the steadily shrinking turnip at the head of a steadily
lengthening market tail. Though the old industry hegemony managed to
very briefly stall and complicate its realization, the comprehensive
Internet-based production, marketing, and distribution of music has
now been effectively achieved and the publishing and retail store
distribution of music in any form of 'hard' media is well on the way
to being completely eliminated, at a vast but as yet unassessed
savings in the material, energy, and pollution overhead of the music
industry. Though my own weird tastes still routinely stump the likes
of the iTunes Store, today we have access to more music in more
variety made by more publishers than ever in history and soon at a
tiny fraction of the resource and energy overhead of its publishing
even in Edison's day. And that shift took just 20 years!
This is the real promise of open industry and Post-Industrial
technology. It's not simply about localization, or pursuing some form
of ideal personal self-sufficiency, or empowering people to make
things themselves. It's about inducing these kinds of comprehensive
evolutionary shifts across the civilization's infrastructure by
changing the nature of our artifacts and thus the nature of their
production, and thus the nature of the logistics of our civilization.
This is where it has impact on the Big Picture, on how economics
works, on our impact on the environment, our demand and choice of
energy, on our utilization of resources, and on our modes of living.
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
Christian Siefkes
That sounds pretty cool, and I would like to learn more--can you post your
Challenge entry somewhere?
Best regards
Christian
--
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- chri...@siefkes.net ---------
| Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
| Better Bayesian Analysis: | Peer Production Everywhere:
| http://bart-project.com/ | http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
Crypto regulations will only hinder criminals who obey the law.
Eric Hunting
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
recall, was HQd in Florida. The proposed Atlantis design was for
something very akin to Florida or Dubai coastal condominium
developments but built atop a concrete static float system composed of
very large hexagonal floats whose design derived from a rotomolded
polyethylene marina module design that one of their members had
founded a business on developing. it was intended for deployment off
the Florida coast. I can't recall if they were exploring automated
construction. Founded more-or-less as a Libertarian group, the
organization was very popular for a while but seemed to suffer an
ideological breakdown and fizzled out, though still maintains a web
site. (http://www.oceania.org/)
Oceania was considered a competitor to The Millennial Project devised
by Marshal Savage, though TMP, written as a classic space futurist
work in the style of Gerard O'Neill's The High Frontier or Robert
Zubrin's On To Mars, is a more comprehensive program of sea and space
development. The original TMP featured a marine development 'phase'
and specific OTEC based settlement project called Aquarius that
similarly featured a hexagonal float design. Originally, the structure
was to be semi-automated in fabrication based on a technique called
Electrolytic Sea Accretion which was developed by the late -and very
eccentric- marine architect Dr. Wolf Hilbertz. Secrete, as it was
called, is produced by creating a rebar structure of magnesium alloy
which serves as an electrode onto which calcium carbonate accumulates
by electrolysis in sea water, thus allowing structures to be cultured
or grown underwater and then raised for assembly. Hilbertz had his own
marine settlement concept based on the technique called Autopia Ampere
that was once featured in a Popular Science magazine article. Though
proving potentially practical in small applications like self-healing
concrete piers and artificial induction of reef growth, his patent
claims proved to be something of a hoax and this fabrication concept
has since proven incapable of any large scale applications.
The TMP program is currently supported by the Living Universe
Foundation (formerly the First Millennial Foundation -US government
bureaucrats have some peculiar aversion to NPOs with the word
'millennial' in their names...) which I've been a member of for many
years and am currently working on a wiki project for called TMP2 that
is revising and technically updating the original program (http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
). It now has about 180 articles and a handful of illustrations. I've
radically revised the Aquarius concept, which is now based on the use
of wave-absorbing Pneumatically Stabilized Platform systems as
developed by Float Inc.(http://www.floatinc.com/) and proposed for use
in off-shore airport, shipping terminal, and military base
development. Based on conventional steel-reinforced masonry, PSPs are
modular and can potentially be automated in their fabrication in a
conventional mass production precast concrete approach -though they
are still quite large. Each PSP cell is about the size of a cluster of
6 ISO shipping containers and a basic PSP module needs at least 4
cells. I proposed the same structural system for the Luz Azul project
in my Buckminster Fuller Challenge entry, using these structures as
the basis of industrial scale OTEC and mariculture facilities.
Then there's the Nexus Project proposed by California architect Eugene
Tsui. (http://www.tdrinc.com/) Nexus also proposed the use of Seacrete
construction but in this case for a continuously mobile settlement
(what I like to call an 'arcoliner') employing an extremely elaborate
design based on Tsui's trademark zoomorphic organic architecture. This
seemingly hallucinogen-inspired design is quite elegant but may not be
possible to construct with any known technology -least of all the
seacrete process. Tsui is very fond of very large arcology-scale
organic structures which seem to defy any current engineering and may
only be possible far into the Diamond Age. Currently, free-form
organic architecture is largely limited to structures made of simple
ferro-cement no more than a few storeys high. (http://www.geocities.com/flyingconcrete/index.htm)(http://www.erdhaus.ch/main.php?fla=y&lang=en&cont=earthhouse)(http://www.habiter-selon-lovag.com/index_flash.htm
)
There was also a rather peculiar and controversial project called New
Utopia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Utopia) which was long being
promoted by an eccentric businessman by the name of -I kid you not-
Prince Lazarus Long. (named for the character in Robert Heinlein
novels) NuUtopia was intended to be a pilings-supported complex built
atop Misteriosa Bank in the Caribbean. (and, yes, that is a real place
despite that Jules-Verne-esque name http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misteriosa_Bank)
Intended as a Libertarian tax haven refuge for the elderly rich and
a center for anti-aging medical research which would be run as a
principality benevolently ruled by Long himself, its proposed
architectural design could be described as a spectacularly hideous
combination of Venice, Las Vegas, and Miami. Like the Atlantis
Paradise Island Resorts on steroids and LSD. Strange as this concept
was, NuUtopia gathered many supporters and seems to have had some
popularity among members of the early Xist (transhumanist) movement,
which started out with a demographic of mostly aging wealthy Randian-
Libertarian Omni magazine subscribers keen on biotechnology and
alternative medicine. (prior to the influence of folks like Ray
Kurzweil) However, Long fell afoul of the SEC as a consequence of some
conflict with his architect and his claims of recognition by the UN
proved dubious. In the fall-out the organization dwindled, though some
die-hards still surface on-line from time-to-time with variations of
the New Utopia name promoting businesses based on unusual -sometimes
scary-looking- marine luxury housing and resort complex designs.
Another organization known as Seasteading.org (http://
seasteading.org/) has also been promoting marine settlement based on a
frontier homesteading model. Originally pursuing concepts of built-up
floating islands, they've since adopted a concept of pylon buoy or
SPAR structures as proposed by myself and oceanographer Bob Ballard
for relatively small mid-ocean habitat structures. (in the past I've
discussed the notion of various forms of these structures as the basis
of novelty vacation housing and hotels, marine research facilities,
wind farms, telecommunications structures, down-range telemetry
systems, marine launch facilities, and self-contained OTEC plants) I
tend to be of the opinion that the idea of homesteading on the sea, as
opposed to building whole communities of some scale, is a bit too
challenging given current technology -transportation in particular.
We're still a long way off from the practical personal long-range VTOL
aircraft. But their proposals are quite plausible otherwise and the
organization has many things in common with the general EcoTech and
independent industry movements.
The Artemis Project and Society (http://www.asi.org/) is a program
working toward the permanent settlement of the Moon and has formed a
commercial venture called The Lunar Resources Company. They have a
very plausible and highly detailed development plan based largely on
the use of the Spacehab module which was developed for Space Shuttle
missions and ISS development by SpaceHab Inc. (http://
www.spacehab.com/) Now that the Shuttle is on the way out, it's not
clear if they will still be using this. SpaceHab Inc, itself no longer
mentions this habitat module design on their own sites and now seems
completely focused on space-related services.
Eric Hunting
so I've made a page to archive it on the TMP2 wiki.
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Luz_Azul_Buckminster_Fuller_Challenge_Entry
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
Paul D. Fernhout
idea for one design instead of the LUF TMP 2.0 open source Wiki idea itself:
http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page
By the way, here is my BFI proposal (posted earlier to this list), for OSCOMAK:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/c2bda71ba04a31a0
I had paid the entry fee for this year before I saw Appropedia had entered
last year and not been chosen to win, otherwise I probably would not have
submitted an entry (since Appropedia is a great project and somewhat
similar). I thought I'd get my money's worth of advertising the project, in
any case at that point thought. :-) So I can see why you might have chosen a
specific project to enter rather than developing a supporting tool, if that
was the reason.
--Paul Fernhout
Eric Hunting wrote:
> It appears the BFC won't have an entry archive site up for a long time
> so I've made a page to archive it on the TMP2 wiki.
>
> http://tmp2.wikia.com/wiki/Luz_Azul_Buckminster_Fuller_Challenge_Entry
>
>
Eric Hunting
covering a vast number of topics. It's the story of the cultivation of
a whole civilization. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge was limited to
ideas rooted solely in off-the-shelf technology, immediately
realizable, related primarily to environmental or social issues, and
which were the most 'trimtab'; leveraging the most global impact from
a single project. So I felt it necessary to narrow the focus to OTEC -
which is basically one machine that solves three of the world's
biggest problems at once. I don't hold out much hope for my entry,
though. The way it's setup this year, with this preliminary review
round that discourages descriptions and encourages submitting image
files, it definitely favors the people with professional graphics.
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
marc fawzi
What if you could get 500 people from this list and other lists (about similar topics) together and convince everyone to contribute $20 and vote on the most promising proposal (with some criteria, e.g. must be realizable as a prototype for less than $10K)
Someone said "together we have everything" and that's very true.
People can empower themselves by getting together and each agreeing to commit a tiny amount of resources (time, money, ideas, etc)
;)
Eric Hunting
particular case, scale. Here your 500 participants would have to be
able to put up six million dollars each. Maybe somewhere in the UAE...
OTEC itself is already a well demonstrated technology with many
prototype plants having been built and run successfully, particularly
around the time of the 70s Energy Crisis. The reason it has remained
obscure is that it could never be brought down to a grass roots
implementation scale like solar panels and wind turbines and so the
renewable energy community ignored it much as the old energy
capitalists did. All the rest of its supporting technology is likewise
ready to go. So this Luz Azul concept is beyond proof of technology.
It's at the level of functional deployment. That means a 'prototype'
project with a price tag of about 3 billion dollars, of which about
$200 million would go into an OTEC plant whose main feature is an
intake pipe 9 meters wide and 900 meters long. This is the heart of a
community structure the size of a modest town -and all that is one-
third of the full scale and cost. That's the catch with setting up
shop on the open sea. The technology to do it isn't particularly new
or difficult. Luz Azul could have been built in the 1950s. It's just
that the minimum scale of everything is huge just to be able to deal
with the open sea environment.
Crowdsourcing could definitely work in the same role that I would
intend to use the BFI Challenge prize for; raising the money to found
the company that seeks to raise the money for the prototype, paying
for an architectural design competition and initial in-depth
engineering whose results one would use to try and assemble the
corporate consortium needed for the project. It would be a tough sell,
though, because the mainstream environmentalist movement has largely
drunk the extremists' anti-technology kool aid and it now seems
generally that it would rather sit around and wait for 'nature to run
it's course' in the form of the Great Malthusian Die-Off. They're even
ignoring their past heroes like James Lovelock now. There's an EcoTech
(Bright Green) movement re-emerging in defiance of this dead-ender
mentality (originally emerging among European architects, industrial
designers, and renewable energy entrepreneurs in the 90s), but it's
still a bit weak and disorganized right now. I don't know if it's
really coherent enough for projects like this. Mortgaging this project
to a corporate consortium for a decade is not necessarily my preferred
way to go, to say the least, but it may be some time before things on
this gigantic scale get doable on the grass roots community scale.
Open Manufacturing has a very long way to go before it can start
easily building things whose individual parts are as big as houses. It
certainly will some day, but I fear not in time to forestall some of
the more drastic impacts of Global Warming. I'd like to try and buy
Tuvalu, the Maldives, Micronesia, and the like time for a fighting
chance. That means getting this started in 5-10 years.
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
Patrick Anderson
>> must be realizable as a prototype for less than $10K
Eric Hunting wrote:
> a 'prototype' project with a price tag of about 3 billion dollars
Hi everyone!
I'm pondering how to apply this towards our current economic woes -
especially as this Depression becomes 'Great'...
I wonder what it means to each of us for Manufacturing to be Open.
My vision of OM is primarily about understanding and then solving the
difficulties of joint-ownership of 'collective' property that is too
expensive or just not meaningful for individual-ownership. But maybe
this is not so important to others here?
Could agriculture - the most rudimentary and yet most important
manufacturing of all - ever be Open even if only using tools already
available? I'm not saying we must restrict ourselves to old
technology for any reason beyond staying grounded in a realistic goal.
But as a matter of understanding what others expect/require here, is
it possible to meet the definition of 'Open' even when simply using
traditional genetics, techniques and tools that are cheap enough for
us to actually begin?
What is the criterion of 'Openness' if 500 people invested $10-$100
toward beginning a traditional farm using off-the-shelf equipment?
How do we insure such a venture is Open to begin with, and that it
continues to remain Open over time?
What is 'Open'?
Patrick
Eric Hunting
knowledge and use of the technology and the production of artifacts
associated with it are not controlled by any individual or company, be
it for the sake of profiteering or sometimes for the sake of social
and political control through dependency. By extension, open
manufacturing relates to the means of industrial production based on
open technology. The term 'open' relates to the freedom to copy, use,
and modify something without repercussions from anyone in the chain of
creation behind it.
Your comparison of the cost of a crowd-sourced project to my projected
cost of the Luz Azul facility prototype seems to imply that you are
wondering what cost-scale is appropriate to an open industrial project
and therefore what constitutes a relevant topic of discussion. In
fact, there is none. Luz Azul isn't intended to be an open project,
largely because I am skeptical that the current open industrial
technologies and the community around them are capable of projects of
such size. (eventually, but not quite yet) I only mentioned the
concept because I thought it might be of casual interest to readers
here. But if it were intended as an open project, it would have no
projected dollar cost. Only a projected 'resource cost'. This might
relate to a particular dollar cost on a particular market but in fact
these resources need not necessarily come from any market. They might
be provided 'free' by people who want to support the project and can
provide these resources themselves instead of buying them -as with
open-source software where the primary resource is people's time and
coding skill. Put an annual dollar value on the current collective
Linux program and it might be many tens of millions of dollars. But
ultimately that dollar figure would be meaningless. So the appropriate
scale of an open project is a function of the relative size of the
overall interested community, their individual resources, and their
degree of personal industrial sophistication -which are probably all
pretty low at this point but ultimately could be highly variable. (you
never know, there _might_ be an industrialist from Dubai with a
sophisticated technical background and command of lots of family-owned
industries who wants to do something with his life more responsible
than build skyscraper-sized rich-folk's follies and who just happens
to be lurking on this forum. The odds are astronomical, but it's not
entirely impossible)
It's certainly appropriate to suggest a certain 'practical' scale for
projects relative to the known current size and nature of the
community and to put dollar figures on them based on the not-
necessarily-erroneous assumption that most readers here aren't quite
yet Makers on the level of Burt Rutan or Dean Kamen and would have
only money, and just a little of it, to contribute. I can't see
anything wrong with such a suggestion. But that would be a limitation
determined by the nature of the community, not anything inherent to
the concept of open manufacturing itself. Things on the scale of
Hoover Dam may very well be open projects some day.
The issue of of joint-ownership of collective property is most
certainly relevant to the concept of open manufacturing but probably
isn't immediately integral to the definition of it. It relates to it
in the sense that joint ownership is a way for a community to acquire
the access to an industrial capability that is out of the reach of the
individual. This may be employed to the effort of open industrial
development but whether that development is open or not is immaterial
to the means by which it was acquired. The openness depends on the
dependencies that are retained in the process and end-product. So it
becomes a matter of degree, not an absolute condition.
Can one make open source software using programming tools that are
proprietary? Yes, as long as the end result retains no future
dependencies on that proprietary tool. (in the case of low-level
programming tools, it usually doesn't. In the case of high-level tools
like Flash or PowerPoint or interpreted languages with exclusive
instructions, it can)
Can an artifact be open design is it is made with non-open machine
tools? Yes, as long as it retains no later dependencies on those
specific tools for its duplication, modification, or repair. Is open
manufacturing open if it's not exclusively based on open tools? It's
end-products may -or may not- be by their design. After that it's a
matter of degree based on the nature of the tools.
Can farming be open if it is using non-open tools or materials?
Farming itself as a general concept and technology is open, it's
origins lost to antiquity. No one owns it. But, again, the degree of
dependency is the key. In some cases the end-product of farming is not
actually open. Use of GM crops often come with contractual strings
attached about the end-use of crops, such as prohibiting attempts at
seeding for subsequent generations of crops or tissue culturing where
seeding isn't possible. (GM crops are often sold single-gender as both
a means to prevent them from 'going wild' and as a kind of copy-
protection that makes the farmer dependent upon the seed dealer for
every crop. See the recent stories of Indian farmer suicides...)
Generally, proprietary industrial farming technology is designed to
create economic dependency. Using the mechanism of farm financing to
amortize the cost of expensive tools and products over a presumed
enhanced future productivity, companies coerce farmers into paying a
virtual royalty on future productivity for protracted periods of time -
one they often cannot ultimately pay given that ubiquitous adoption of
these technologies must ultimately produce a decline in the market
value of farm commodities being sold to pay the debt for this
technology. And, of course, the smaller the farm the higher the
interest rates. Debt is the primary killer of farms. Open farm tools
and technology may not necessarily be cheaper and eliminate debt.
That's a separate matter to their proprietary status and who controls
their use and distribution. This is where community ownership
interfaces to this.
So 'open' has nothing to do with project scale or price tag. It's
about the paths of the chains of economic dependency. Not about who
owns it but about who owns the rights to control it and profit on it.
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com
marc fawzi
Thank you for elaborating.
I was posing it as a general question.
<<
"It would be a tough sell,
though, because the mainstream environmentalist movement has largely
drunk the extremists' anti-technology kool aid and it now seems
generally that it would rather sit around and wait for 'nature to run
it's course' in the form of the Great Malthusian Die-Off"
>>
By the way, I know you, Paul and others here are excellent at envisioning and articulating the next paradigm shift, the next frontier, etc.
For my work in the last <40 days on the renewable-energy-backed currency (see the latest here: http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Social_Currency_Model) I have noticed that my ability to recruit serious collaborators (game developers in this case) rose significantly only in the last day or two as the idea started becoming very coherent, having gone through a lot of discourse as well as 'filtering' kind of distractions (that paradoxically enhance the signal)
So as it relates to this discussion about raising funds, I'm finding out that the more coherent and well thought out the idea becomes (at all levels, from all angles, etc) the more easy it is to find collaborators, and eventually supporters who would invest in it because they believe in the idea itself, separate from its author.
I'll catch up with your idea/proposal to BFI. I'm sure I'll gain new insight from it.
Thanks,
Patrick Anderson
On Dec 5, 4:24 pm, Eric Hunting <erichunt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The general definition of an open technology is one where the
> knowledge and use of the technology and the production of artifacts
> associated with it are not controlled by any individual or company, be
> it for the sake of profiteering or sometimes for the sake of social
> and political control through dependency.
control we need in order to move forward (Freedom) and the 'negative'
control you describe here (Power).
I have recently begun calling these "positive control" and "negative
control" to denote the two very different ways property ownership can
be used.
This difference is often blurred by those trying to understand (for
instance) the effects of the GNU GPL. I often read complaints
(usually as reader-comments to some blog/article post) that the GNU
GPL disallows a distributor's 'Freedom' (actually Power) to remove the
Freedom of others.
People who dislike the terms of the GNU GPL often point to the Public
Domain or licenses such as Apache or BSD that allow a distributor the
Power of withholding the Virtual Sources of Production (source code
and supporting files/scripts) from those who receive the Objects
(products or outputs) of that production.
This is described carefully at: http://GNU.org/philosophy/freedom-or-power.html
"'Freedom is being able to make decisions that affect mainly you.
Power is being able to make decisions that affect others more than
you. If we confuse power with freedom, we will fail to uphold real
freedom.'"
I am pointing this out to help you understand what I mean and why I
continue talk about property ownership of Physical Sources.
I do not want us to use Land and Capital for the negative control
against others for Power, but I do want us to use those material Means
of Production for the positive control we need for our own Freedom.
I know this seems boring to many of you, and I suppose you think some
government or corporation will suddenly hand-over some Land and
Capital with no strings attached.
I don't understand how we could be so naive in that regard. How long
will we wait for these handouts? We are running out of time as our
economy based on keeping price above cost continues to crumble.
We can use regular property ownership for control in the positive
sense which can bring about User Freedom in the physical realm, but
such an arrangement is brittle because of the originator's
unfortunately almost automatic drive to use that property against
others for the Power required to perpetuate profit.
The second step (after collectively buying some ground and tools) is
to apply a legally binding social 'contract' to those Physical Sources
of production (analogous to what the GNU GPL Copyright license does
for Virtual Sources of production) so that Consumer (User) Freedom can
be insured across time.
But I suppose this is terribly boring when we could be dreaming of
nanobots on Mars until we awake one morning to find we don't have
access to something as rudimentary as Wheat and Chickens because we
simply do not OWN the land, tools, seeds, buildings, fuel, etc. needed
to insure that production occurs for our own use. The corporations
that own the Physical Sources of the Wheat and Chickens we finally eat
are in it for the sole purpose of perpetual profit attained by using
negative control (Power) against us in that we (the consumers) do not
gain any ownership of Physical Sources for ourselves even when we pay
a price above cost...
> The issue of of joint-ownership of collective property is most
> certainly relevant to the concept of open manufacturing but probably
> isn't immediately integral to the definition of it. It relates to it
> in the sense that joint ownership is a way for a community to acquire
> the access to an industrial capability that is out of the reach of the
> individual.
> This may be employed to the effort of open industrial
> development but whether that development is open or not is immaterial
> to the means by which it was acquired. The openness depends on the
> dependencies that are retained in the process and end-product. So it
> becomes a matter of degree, not an absolute condition.
will address this issue.
> Can one make open source software using programming tools that are
> proprietary? Yes, as long as the end result retains no future
> dependencies on that proprietary tool.
shelf 'proprietary' tools to ramp-up with. I have talked to Marcin
about this, but he mostly disagrees.
> Can an artifact be open design is it is made with non-open machine
> tools? Yes, as long as it retains no later dependencies on those
> specific tools for its duplication, modification, or repair. Is open
> manufacturing open if it's not exclusively based on open tools? It's
> end-products may -or may not- be by their design. After that it's a
> matter of degree based on the nature of the tools.
etc.) of those tools, and more than the Virtual Sources of the
products made.
Being truly 'Open' in a material sense also requires the end-user
(consumer) of those products have "at cost" access to the Physical
Sources of that production.
Will you claim a manufacturing process is 'Open' even if the owners of
the physical machines needed for that instantiation are using negative
control (Power) to stop the consumers from making "at cost" copies?
> Can farming be open if it is using non-open tools or materials?
> Farming itself as a general concept and technology is open, it's
> origins lost to antiquity. No one owns it.
DNA, etc.).
What about the *Physical* Sources such as surface area (land), Water,
off-the-shelf tools, heirloom seeds containing Public Domain DNA...
We can never do more than dream without Physical Sources.
> But, again, the degree of
> dependency is the key. In some cases the end-product of farming is not
> actually open. Use of GM crops often come with contractual strings
> attached about the end-use of crops, such as prohibiting attempts at
> seeding for subsequent generations of crops or tissue culturing where
> seeding isn't possible. (GM crops are often sold single-gender as both
> a means to prevent them from 'going wild' and as a kind of copy-
> protection that makes the farmer dependent upon the seed dealer for
> every crop. See the recent stories of Indian farmer suicides...)
can use negative control (Power) against us. They think they are so
royal that they should receive royalties. But again, this is only
about the *Virtual* part of those things.
I agree we should avoid the filth of these pirates (a pirate is one
who steals value from the community), but even if we do, we are still
only halfway there because we do not yet know how to handle the
collective ownership of Physical Sources required to 'host' the few
lifeform varieties that are still in the Public Domain in a Freedom
preserving manner. That is the purpose of the mentioned contract.
> Debt is the primary killer of farms. Open farm tools
> and technology may not necessarily be cheaper and eliminate debt.
> That's a separate matter to their proprietary status and who controls
> their use and distribution. This is where community ownership
> interfaces to this.
potential debt among so many consuming owners that it can be paid off
quickly. But this is a very difficult road while we continue to use
debt-based currencies...
> So 'open' has nothing to do with project scale or price tag. It's
> about the paths of the chains of economic dependency. Not about who
> owns it but about who owns the rights to control it and profit on it.
purchasing Physical Sources of production to become the owners
ourselves (just as the GNU GPL can only be applied through Copyright
holdings), but then to 'temper' that ownership with a legally binding
contract or Terms of Operation that insures positive control (Freedom)
is retained while negative control (Power) is disallowed.
Notice the GNU GPL accomplishes this goal by requiring every end-user
(consumer) gains at cost" access to the Virtual Sources of production.
Couldn't we do the same with at contract over our own property that
requires every consumer (end-user) gains at cost" access to the
Physical Sources of production?
It seems clear to me that one approach to fill that requirement would
be to treat any consumer payment above cost (what is usually called
profit) as an investment from that very same consumer toward more
Physical Sources of production so that Consumer would slowly gain his
own property ownership in the farms and factories needed to supply him
with the products he needs and wants.
Sincerely,
Patrick
Paul D. Fernhout
> I am pointing this out to help you understand what I mean and why I
> continue talk about property ownership of Physical Sources.
>
> I do not want us to use Land and Capital for the negative control
> against others for Power, but I do want us to use those material Means
> of Production for the positive control we need for our own Freedom.
>
> I know this seems boring to many of you, and I suppose you think some
> government or corporation will suddenly hand-over some Land and
> Capital with no strings attached.
Patrick-
I think it's no so much that people disagree or don't see what you are
talking about (although we can always quibble about specifics, and those can
be big quibbles) as that to discuss a solution we need to move to a greater
level of detail.
Here is a dystopia/utopia sci-fi story on that theme you might like to read,
and it goes into some detail about exactly the issues you raise:
"Manna"
http://www.marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
"The government had finally figured out that giving choices to people on
welfare was not such a great idea, and it was also expensive. Instead of
giving people a welfare check, they started putting welfare recipients
directly into government housing and serving them meals in a cafeteria. If
the government could drive the cost of that housing and food down, it
minimized the amount of money they had to spend per welfare recipient.
... Because no one had a window, they could really pack people into these
buildings. Each terrafoam dorm building had a four-acre foot print. It was a
perfect 417 foot by 417 foot by 417 foot solid brown cube. Each cube
originally held exactly 76,800 people. Doubling this to 153,600 people in
each building was unthinkable, but they were doing it anyway. On the other
hand, you had to marvel at the efficiency. At that density, they could house
every welfare recipient in the entire country in less than 1,500 of these
buildings. By spacing the buildings 100 feet apart, they could house
200,000,000 people in a space of less than 20 square miles if they had
wanted to. At that density, they could put everyone in the country without a
job into a space less than five miles square in size, put a fence around it
and forget about us. If they accidentally dropped a nuclear bomb or two on
us, we would all be gone and they wouldn't have to worry about us anymore. "
Here's details of the dystopia side happening even as we speak:
"Fears For [Massachussets'] Robotics Industry"
http://www.wbur.org/news/2008/81608_20081201.asp
"""
BRADY-MYEROV: Actually the jobs right now are in biotech -- 45,000 of them.
But the robotics field is at an early stage and is growing, even in this bad
economy. Hart would like state help to move to a larger warehouse space. His
small company also makes military robots, but he's fighting an effort from
Congress to move the funding and his company to Michigan.
BRIAN HART: Our difficulty now is the money has been shifted to Michigan as
part of this last defense bill and a political machination on the part of
Carl Levin, so we're afraid we're going to be forced to move to Michigan to
stay viable in the field.
BRADY-MYEROV: Michigan Senator Carl Levin is a key player in what's shaping
up to be a robotics war. He's the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services
Committee and he calls the military robotics movement miraculous.
Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy is next in line on the committee. Quinn of
Foster Miller says California, Pennsylvania, Georgia and especially Michigan
want what Massachusetts has.
BOB QUINN: Michigan is in serious trouble as a state, and indeed Senator
Levin...
BRADY-MYEROV: He reaches for a photo of the senator with him and their robot.
BOB QUINN: They are trying to duplicate what MIT and other Massachusetts
universities have done to stimulate business growth.
BRADY-MYEROV: Senator Levin moved the military's robotics procurement center
to Michigan. Foster Miller and iRobot have since opened offices there.
iRobot which is still headquartered in Bedford is in two robotic sectors,
military and service. You may have heard of one of their products, the
Roomba, a self propelling vacuum cleaner.
"""
OK, that's what some politicians consider "miraculous" -- building killer
robots. :-(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalek
And we supposedly elect such people to lead us?
So, reading between the lines, the future of Detroit in Michigan is possibly
not self-driving cars as I would hope; it is quite possibly repurposing
those assembly lines to turn out self-driving tanks and other military
robots to ensure the continuing inequity you decry.
An example of the details of this technology (see the picture):
"Roomba-Maker Unveils Kill-Bot"
http://blog.wired.com/defense/2007/10/roomba-maker-un.html
"The makers of the cuter-than-cute robotic vacuum cleaner are rolling out a
new machine: A big, fast-moving, semi-autonomous 'bot capable of killing a
whole bunch of people at once."
I wish I was making this stuff up, but I'm not. Those are real politicians
saying that stuff and real products rolling off the assembly line. People
thought I was a bit speculative (to be polite :-) to be talking about this
issue in the 1980s after hanging out at CMU and seeing the developing
relation of the military and the roboticists there (not all, but most of the
heavy hitters there were military funded). But we continue to see it unfold.
I left the field over this issue, and I have loved robotics since my early
years (and I have prizes in the field from my teens, won a Navy Science
Award briefcase for it ironically for the design of a nuclear material
transporting teleoperated robot, etc.). I'm sad to be out of that field
because there is the potential for a more productive human/robot
co-evolution. Or, at least, for any possible robot overlords to be
friendlier to humans than ones explicitly designed for the "miraculous"
purpose of killing people. :-(
Except for the competitive aspect of this contest, here is the good news
about robotics:
"Robotics isn't just for geeks anymore "
http://www.timesunion.com/AspStories/story.asp?storyID=747571&newsdate=12/11/2008
"Lilianna Maxwell, 12, left, and Mary McColgan, 9, right, both of Albany,
work on a robot during the 2008 First Lego League Tech Valley Challenge. ...
Rob Richardson, education manager for Intel's Massachusetts operations who
attended the event, said Intel believes the tournaments teach teamwork and
collaboration valuable in the high-tech workplace. "It brings kids
together," Richardson said. "Kids really want to work together to achieve a
common goal." ..."
It's a race. And the Manna story shows the two extremes. Where we end up
between those extremes is still to be decided in part by our collaborative
open manufacturing efforts (and the efforts of many others in many other
contexts).
Anyway, we can try to move to the details of either surviving that race or
transcending it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
"In short, a finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending
the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing
the play."
I'm sure that would make Ben happier, too. :-)
Anyway it's not boredom. It's more that "the devil is in the details".
http://www.goenglish.com/TheDevilIsInTheDetails.asp
"When the hard part of what you are trying to do is in the many small
details, you can say "the devil is in the details." Example: "I thought I
would be able to write that article in two hours, but it ended up taking me
five. The devil was in the details." The devil is known for always make life
difficult for man in many small ways. Example: "I can sketch a basic outline
of the plan for you and it may look very simple, but the devil is in the
details.""
These trends are playing themselves out over the next twenty to thirty years.
Anyway, how about just assuming some people had access to land and capital.
What would they do next? In detail?
--Paul Fernhout
marc fawzi
Anyway, we can try to move to the details of either surviving that race or
transcending it...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finite_and_Infinite_Games
"In short, a finite game is played with the purpose of winning (thus ending
the game), while an infinite game is played with the purpose of continuing
the play."
>>
I'm working on such a game (latest base model v0.33.1: http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Social_Currency_Model ... New interesting comments here)
:/
Sooner or later, we'll get it right, but we may have to undo ALL the learning (aka "education") we've had since birth, one layer of illusion at a time.
marc fawzi
I do not want us to use Land and Capital for the negative control
against others for Power, but I do want us to use those material Means
of Production for the positive control we need for our own Freedom.
>>
To me power is the energy to move, the energy to create, the energy to communicate, the energy to make a difference.
It's connotation in the mind of others is different: it means coercive power.
So based on this hint, I've re-adjusted my own use of the word power to "conform" with the majority's use of it, which is very unfortunate but also necessary in that I am integrating others experience of energy (when used for evil, bad) into my own experience of the English language to avoid tripping over that wire.
:)
Updated my model of new money to substitute "power" with "energy"
http://p2pfoundation.net/P2P_Social_Currency_Model
Language has killed more people than religion.
Patrick Anderson
> To me power is the energy to move, the energy to create, the energy to
> communicate, the energy to make a difference.
>
> It's connotation in the mind of others is different: it means coercive
> power.
Unfortunately word definitions are never static nor universal. For
instance, I just noticed this from the P2PFoundation wiki:
"'A film project about the *power* of mass collaboration, government
and the internet'" (emphasis added)
marc fawzi
I'm thinking of a new type of language that is centered around the fact that some basic things that all life forms understand that are not computable (semantically, logically, geometrically, set-theoretically, etc), like "what is life?" or "what is real?" or "what is wisdom?" or "what is happiness?"
I've tried defining these basic things in this updated post
And then everything else, all other words in the language, would be the "experiential wrapper" that create our _experience of_ reality...
The hope of course is to create an experience of _shared_ reality much more efficiently and effectively than using a language that does not recognize non-computables concepts (which meaning is already known to every life form out there but is obfuscated by our need to wrap reality into our own experience)
In this sense we don't really need a new language but a new way of using the existing language, and that actually does apply to maths too, and if it that was the case in maths we wouldn't have paradoxes involving the definition of "what is true." :)