Comments on manufacturing as the next big hobby
Paul D. Fernhout
manufacturing systems, relating that to the "end game" of capitalism, and
what all that might mean to manufacturing as the next big hobby.
====
From:
http://www.sherlinedirect.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=185
"""
For many years Sherline has offered its machines "CNC-ready" with stepper
motor mounts for others to install their own or aftermarket motors and
controls for computer control. Due to numerous customer requests for a
"turn-key" system, Sherline now offers a system that is even more complete
than most, and at a ground-breaking price. In addition to your choice of
5400 or 2000-series mill with stepper motors, Sherline's system includes a
new Microtel computer with the Linux operating system and EMC 4-axis
software pre-installed on the hard drive. All cables are included so that
you can unpack the machine and computer, plug in the cords, boot up and be
ready to start working on CNC projects. The Enhanced Machine Controller
(EMC) was developed by the National Institute of Science and Technology for
high-tech military jobs. It has since been simplified for home and shop use
by a dedicated group of users and is available as "open source" software.
Sherline has added special enhancements that tailor the program to be even
more suited for use with a small tabletop mill. Some of EMC's features are:
* Tool path compensation
* Backlash compensation
* Backplot program to show tool path
* Uses industry standard g- and m-codes
* Capable of using either inch or metric dimensions
In addition, Sherline adds value to the package by providing detailed use
instructions written by Joe Martin, one hour of free technical support on
the software and a one-year warranty on the hardware for non-production use.
"""
The free controller software they now use:
http://www.linuxcnc.org/
I've been thinking about getting one of these for many, many years (well,
along with a lathe) as a turn-key system. Here is their about US$5000
package with both mill and lathe, but unfortunately I think you need to
unplug one from the computer to use the other as there are only four drivers?
"8600/8620 - Ultimate CNC Machine Shop"
http://www.sherlinedirect.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=190
But, I've never been able to justify/afford the cost and the
climate-controlled but safe *space* to put it in (given these things can
spew metal chips everywhere and the winters here are pretty cold for stuff
in a garage).
That computer case seems way too big. Why not something smaller that still
has slots? Maybe there is some reason.
So, between ShopBot Buddy, Sherline's Ultimate, and a CupCake CNC plastic
extrude, all together for under $15K or so total (the price of a small
recreational boat, motorcycle, or fancy snowmobile and trailer), you can
have a set up that mills, lathes, and extrudes small things, and also
handles larger materials (and run almost all of them at once. :-) Throw in
another $10K and you could get the bigger 3D Systems V-Flash 3D printer.
I can wonder if one would still want the Sherline if one had the ShopBot
system with an indexer? I expect the Sherline would be more precise for
small things? Besides, if the ShopBot system broke, you might need the
Sherline to fix it. :-) Seriously, I find life very different with multiple
computers around me that just one. With just one, if it has problems, I
can't go on the internet to look up technical support or download patches. I
can't telnet into the problem computer. I can't test things from a different
OS (well, there is virtualization, granted). I'd expect the same thing will
be true for a while -- people will want to have several different versatile
tools, and will use each one sometimes to fix another.
I'm not sure how much this $15K differs in capacity from a complete fablab
(which I thought was more like $50K but has other tools)?
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/faq/
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/about/fab/inv.html
A fab "lab" is going to have a different emphasis from an individual's fab
"shop"? It might be nice to have a rough ordering of things to purchase if
you were on a budget and going one thing at a time, especially assuming you
had a computer. For example, maybe the $1000 CupCake CNC package to get
started, then a papercutter ($300), then a CNC lathe or mill ($3K), then a
ShopBot system, and so on.
A fablab video tour:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTW6PmfkABE
Clearly, from the fab lab site, it seems a lot of people are interested in
using fablabs for a lot of reasons (like artists).
In trying to get the current cost of a fablab, I also saw this:
"Counterinsurgents Should Consider A "Fabrication Cell""
http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/07/counterinsurgents-should-consi/
"For now, consider the implications of the fact that a suite full of
inexpensive machines -- say between $5,000 and $25,000 in cost -- can be
used to fabricate just about anything, given a little training on the
machines and a good bit of ingenuity."
When I wrote a paper for Frank von Hippel's graduate class in Science and
Public Policy about communities that could make their own stuff, he was very
concerned (he worked in nuclear non-proliferation issues). It's interesting
how the same tools that might make the world a less tense place might also
make it a tenser place, depending on the dominant perspectives and
assumptions from which they are used.
Again though, now I see the dynamic at play of venture-funded profit-driven
industries racing to put 3D printing in everyone's home and office, but at
the same time that will shift the dynamics of the entire society. What is
very unfortunate is that I'd expect almost no one in the government can find
it easy to say ahead of time something like, "well, this is obviously how
manufacturing is going over the next twenty years, and it's going to
transform everything about our society, let's do something sensible about
this transformation in terms of a post-scarcity policy agenda and support
the development for all in a peaceful way". Like we should have done with
ending oil dependency based on Amory & Hunter Lovin's "Brittle Power" book,
but did not (and have Iraq etc. instead). Instead, it's business as usual to
the very end, even as we are, IMHO, in the "end game" of conventional global
capitalism as we know it. (We may still have capitalism afterwards, who
knows, but it is not going to look like what we have now, if people can
print most of their own consumer goods.)
And we don't even *need* better technology. Ted is right in pointing to an
unrealized potential of what we have now. It is there, right now. Sherline,
ShopBot, CupCake, V-Flash, and so on. And they don't even need to be
self-replicating to be significant. They just have to be cheap.
My family has a lot of kids toys (too many), and today I was looking around
at the fire trucks and construction toys and so on, and thinking, I could
have printed a lot of this with the CupCake (maybe it is too slow?) and
printed most of it with the V-Flash or something similar (parts of the
bigger things that snapped or fastened together). And while those toys were
bought over a course of years, for someone with a kid born right now, it is
approaching being cheaper to buy a 3D printer like the V-Flash (especially
given other uses) than to buy a lot of toys. Maybe it is not there yet, but
it is getting close. You can see how in five years of continued progress, it
might be. And, even if toys printed at home were more expensive (toner cost?
electricity cost?), what kid is going to pass up getting exactly the toy
they want when they want it? And it cuts down on packaging and shipping.
And, in theory, some of the thermoplastics might be easily recycled. So, you
could scan the toys for their current state of wear before they are
shredded, and you could print them again if later desired.
And, one might even see synergies, like where people make personal youtube
videos and make custom action figures to go with them, rather than the mass
marketed movies and figures. So, profit-driven connections between things
fueling "The War Play Dilemma" might be broken too.
http://www.amazon.com/War-Play-Dilemma-Childhood-Education/dp/080774638X
"As violence in the media and media-linked toys increases, parents and
teachers are also seeing an increase in children’s war play. The authors
have revised this popular text to provide more practical guidance for
working with children to promote creative play, and for positively
influencing the lessons about violence children are learning. Using a
developmental and sociopolitical viewpoint, the authors examine five
possible strategies for resolving the war play dilemma and show which best
satisfy both points of view: banning war play; taking a laissez-faire
approach; allowing war play with specified limits; actively facilitating war
play; and limiting war play while providing alternative ways to work on the
issues."
The authors argue war play has gone up immensely since media deregulation in
the 1980s under the Reagan Administration, as kids are now saturated both
with violent media and the action figures that go with it which tend to lend
themselves to only one style of play. But, a diversity of media and toys
might help break that connection, and let kids learn a larger variety of
options for dealing with conflict.
If I total up the various generations of printers I or my family have
purchased over the last thirty years, from screechy Commodore dot matrix
tractor feed (US$800 in 1980 or so) to HP DeskJet (US$800 in 1988 or so) to
lots of others (including a $800 color picture printer fifteen years ago
that a dog ate the toner for, luckily no ill effects), to an OfficeJets,
that adds up to a bunch of money on printers. But each generation has gotten
better and faster. It seems $800 has been a common price point (with
inflation, the value of that $800 has been dropping, of course). Why did I
buy so many 2D printers? Computer screens were smaller then and less sharp.
I sent more printed letters instead of email. The printers wore out and it
was cheaper to get a fancy new one that was faster with more features than
to try to fix the old one (a couple HP ones tend to stop grabbing paper well
after a while, as the rubber rollers presumably wore down). We wanted
integrated systems to save table space instead of a separate fax.
Anyway, I'm not convinced 3D printers for the home can do much more than
print toys directly (unless you have a home shop to do more stuff with them,
like casting), but at what point is making toys a good enough reason to
motivate the more affluent households to buy them? And then see prices drop?
I do wonder about health effects of the plastics used or of outgassing, for
toys. So, that might be a showstopper. But, even in that case, wooden toys
made by a ShopBot system are another alternative.
Just for reference, you can use online services to make custom toys even now:
http://www.toybuilders.com/
"From 1 toy to a million we can create anything you can imagine from a
sketch, image, concept or 3D digital files."
But, seeing the toy produced at home seems more compelling. And likely
cheaper, ultimately. And you won't have to ask for a "quote" first as with
that site.
So, that's another possible source of funding for open manufacturing --
foundations concerned about these issues of how kids grow, who might help
facilitate the production of designs for a variety of toys (or media plus
toys) for various social and developmental needs which can be printed at
home based on the family's choice.
One related thought. The percent of the workforce involved in agriculture in
the USA has gone from 90% or so two hundred years ago to 2% today (plus
industrial support), *but* gardening is now the most popular recreational
activity, as more than half of all people garden. Manufacturing has dropped
from 30% of the US workforce around 1950 to 12% today (plus importing
offshored manufacturing), *but* one could still expect manufacturing to,
like gardening, become a pleasant hobby for most people. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Kevin Carson
> One related thought. The percent of the workforce involved in agriculture in
> the USA has gone from 90% or so two hundred years ago to 2% today (plus
> industrial support), *but* gardening is now the most popular recreational
> activity, as more than half of all people garden. Manufacturing has dropped
> from 30% of the US workforce around 1950 to 12% today (plus importing
> offshored manufacturing), *but* one could still expect manufacturing to,
> like gardening, become a pleasant hobby for most people. :-)
Does the word "hobby" even accurately apply? When a large percentage
of total vegetable consumption comes from home production, and veggies
can be home-grown more cheaply (in terms of total production and
distribution costs) than bought from agribusiness, I think it can be
classified more accurately as simple subsistence horticulture. It's
certainly done for the most part outside the cash nexus, and for
direct consumption--but then, by definition so was much subsistence
farming two hundred years ago. I'm all for totally obliterating the
idea of "hobbies" as a term for home production, when we're feeding,
clothing, and otherwise supplying our own needs with our own labor
more efficiently than working to buy the stuff.
--
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html
Paul D. Fernhout
> On 5/25/09, Paul D. Fernhout <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>
>> One related thought. The percent of the workforce involved in agriculture in
>> the USA has gone from 90% or so two hundred years ago to 2% today (plus
>> industrial support), *but* gardening is now the most popular recreational
>> activity, as more than half of all people garden. Manufacturing has dropped
>> from 30% of the US workforce around 1950 to 12% today (plus importing
>> offshored manufacturing), *but* one could still expect manufacturing to,
>> like gardening, become a pleasant hobby for most people. :-)
>
> Does the word "hobby" even accurately apply? When a large percentage
> of total vegetable consumption comes from home production, and veggies
> can be home-grown more cheaply (in terms of total production and
> distribution costs) than bought from agribusiness, I think it can be
> classified more accurately as simple subsistence horticulture. It's
> certainly done for the most part outside the cash nexus, and for
> direct consumption--but then, by definition so was much subsistence
> farming two hundred years ago. I'm all for totally obliterating the
> idea of "hobbies" as a term for home production, when we're feeding,
> clothing, and otherwise supplying our own needs with our own labor
> more efficiently than working to buy the stuff.
I'm not sure what percentage of people who garden get most of their calories
or vitamins that way. Surely there are some who do, but much of gardening is
ornamental, too. But the interesting thing is that many people still just
want to be out there growing things. Growing lawns is also another big thing
almost every family in suburbia does -- but it is still agriculture of a
sort too.
In the same way, one might expect a lot of early home manufacturing might be
mass customization (even just hemming pants legs to the right length is that
sort of thing in a way.) But, once you can buy cheap but fancy tools to do
minor things, you start thinking about doing major things with them too.
Still, you have a great point about what "hobby" means as our culture
changes to people having a greater capacity to subsist with *style* using
local tools.
"Survival with Style"
http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0491029411/0491029411___4.htm
Maybe we should be talking about how subsistence living gets transformed to
stylish living without the middleman? :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Patrick Anderson
There seems to be two approaches:
1.) Technological: Create tools (microfactories) that are cheap enough
that they can be individually owned so we can avoid the difficulties
of co-ownership.
2.) Organizational: Create a social contract that helps humans co-own
the Means of Production that is too expensive for them to own
individually.
Number 1 will make some impact.
But if desktop manufacturing is all we need, then why do people suffer
for lack of good, wholesome, organic food?
The microfactories for making food (fungus, plants and animals) have
always been cheap enough for individual ownership, and yet we still
fail because most people simply do not have the time or skills
necessary to deal with all of that complexity.
<rant>
Why must I pay nearly twice the price for pickles without yellow #5
(derived from coal-tar, very bad for young males, illegal in some
countries), or for peanut-butter without hydrogenated oils, or for
bread that is only 3 or 4 ingredients instead of looking like the
answer-sheet to a undergrad Chemistry test?
Is lacing foods with poison is somehow cheaper? If there were a God,
I would call upon it/her/him to DAMN such filth!
</rant>
For some reason there are many who want to avoid admitting the value
in allowing artisans to specialize in their fields of interest. We
only look at the 'bad' side of specialization ~ the factory slave
pulling the lever ~ when there is also a 'good' side that would let a
car mechanic have "at cost" access to the tools he needs to work on
the machinery he knows how to deal with, and that he receives a sense
of fulfillment and accomplishment. The same for dentists and doctors
and airplane pilots and computer programmers and cooks, etc.
We will never move appreciably forward until we are brave enough to
face and clever enough to solve the mystery of co-ownership that the
Capitalist currently use against us.
Kevin Carson
<pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> I'm not sure what percentage of people who garden get most of their calories
> or vitamins that way. Surely there are some who do, but much of gardening is
> ornamental, too. But the interesting thing is that many people still just
> want to be out there growing things. Growing lawns is also another big thing
> almost every family in suburbia does -- but it is still agriculture of a
> sort too.
It's probably a spectrum, with cities like Shanghai and Havana that
grow most of their own vegetables at one end. But the U.S. in the
past has been much closer to that end of the spectrum (around 40% of
vegetables were grown in Victory Gardens during WWII), and I suspect
it's probably 20% or more now.
> In the same way, one might expect a lot of early home manufacturing might be
> mass customization (even just hemming pants legs to the right length is that
> sort of thing in a way.) But, once you can buy cheap but fancy tools to do
> minor things, you start thinking about doing major things with them too.
Mass customization -> small-scale industry is certainly one plausible
development path. Another, described by Karl Hess in Neighborhood
Power, is retail -> repair -> small-scale manufacturing. He argues
that cooperative retailers in local economies will find it economical
to custom manufacture replacement parts for mass-produced appliances,
and from there will proceed to manufacturing partial and entire
appliances on their own.
> Still, you have a great point about what "hobby" means as our culture
> changes to people having a greater capacity to subsist with *style* using
> local tools.
> "Survival with Style"
> http://www.webscription.net/chapters/0491029411/0491029411___4.htm
I think the term "hobby," in this culture, distinguishes the trivial
things done in "ownlife" from the important things done for school
assignments (as children) and for one's wage employer (as adults).
Eliminating the distinction, and categorizing them all as ways that we
meet our own needs, will eliminate the mystique of importance attached
to large, hierarchical organizations, and also encourage people to
critically evaluate such organizations as means to their own ends
rather than as authority-bearing institutions entitled to some sort of
special respect.
Perhaps only tangentially related, I was doing some work on a computer
station at Kinko's just after Christmas, and a young mother with two
small children was trying to get some work done at a neighboring
station in between their interruptions. She promised she would take
them out to ride their new bikes as soon as she had time, and
mentioned all the work projects she had to get finished. One of them
asked "Why don't you get a job like everybody else?" She said, "But I
work at the Arts Center, and do this and that" (it sounded like she
was a freelancer of some sort), and one of her kids responded "That's
not a *job*, that's just a bunch of stuff you do."
Paul D. Fernhout
> But if desktop manufacturing is all we need, then why do people suffer
> for lack of good, wholesome, organic food?
>
> The microfactories for making food (fungus, plants and animals) have
> always been cheap enough for individual ownership, and yet we still
> fail because most people simply do not have the time or skills
> necessary to deal with all of that complexity.
Well, that's a really good point. And you're right that organic agriculture
is a knowledge intensive industry.
Some of it is, plain and simple, the results of decades of propaganda, stuff
about the value of synthetic insecticides and massive amounts of chemical
fertilizer, when those are more often in practice addictive things for the
farmer (destroying healthy soil and healthy ecosystems, and leading to
topsoil loss) that also decrease the nutritional quality of food.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution#Criticisms
http://www.grist.org/article/Less-tasty-and-not-as-good-for-you
"[T]hree recent studies of historical food composition data found apparent
median declines of 5% to 40% or more in some minerals in groups of
vegetables and perhaps fruits; one study also evaluated vitamins and protein
with similar results."
It also took decades of propaganda to convince most mothers to bottlefeed
their babies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestl%C3%A9_boycott
"The Nestlé boycott is a boycott launched on July 4, 1977, in the United
States against the Swiss based Nestlé corporation. It spread quickly
throughout the United States, and expanded into Europe in the early
1980s.[1] It was prompted by concern about the company's marketing of breast
milk substitutes (infant formula), particularly in less economically
developed countries (LEDCs), which campaigners claim contributes to the
unnecessary death and suffering of babies, largely among the poor.[2] Among
the campaigners, Professor Derek Jelliffe and his wife Patrice, who had
contributed to establish the World Alliance for Breastfeeding Action (WABA),
were particularly instrumental in helping to coordinate the boycott and
giving it ample visibility throughout the world."
But there are two reasons why open manufacturing is different than open
agriculture.
One difference is that open agriculture requires significant amounts of
sunny land (with water and good soil). The history of the world in recent
centuries includes all sorts of episodes of forcing individuals out of
ancestral lands and either into cities or onto more marginal lands (and
justifying it also by propaganda). Open manufacturing requires very little
space so it can be done even in cities, and while it does require power, raw
materials can often come from scrap.
Another difference is that agriculture takes some skill appropriate for the
particular microclimate and soil etc. Much of that has been lost, and also
the seeds that grow well in an area may be harder to get. A big part of open
manufacturing is in a sense "deskilling" what now requires a lot of manual
dexterity and wide-ranging knowledge, as well as providing computer-assisted
training for what remains (web pages, wikis, community forums, meetups). And
again, some of the manufacturing knowledge may be more generally applicable
and easily discussed globally than local agricultural knowledge to some
degree. We found that when we did our garden simulator -- my wife looked
through dozens of gardening advice books and found many of them disagreed
about many things -- some of it was no doubt superstition, but other things
had to do with assumptions about climate and soils and local pests.
Much of the global population does still subsist on local agriculture. At
least the part that has not gone to the cities to change their cultural
prospects.
Incidentally:
"Unemployment forces Chinese migrants back to the countryside; Factory to
farm: millions who had enjoyed a taste of city freedom are returning to
their villages"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/17/china-crossroads-migrants-tania-branigan
Still, your point still has truth to it. And there are parallels -- it is
cheaper to produce a lot of food in terms of human labor using tractors and
pesticides than organic methods which tend to be more labor intensive even
if more reliable and with less negative external costs. And the same is true
for a lot of manufacturing, and even more true, because the difference
between a machine making one thousand paper clips a minute and a person
bending one paperclip in a minute is enormous, even if it might take a while
to get such a machine set up.
> Is lacing foods with poison is somehow cheaper?
Preservatives increase shelf life and reduce spoilage, allowing less
frequent deliveries and less write-offs. Color may increase visibility and
sales and so profit margins. So, yes, it is cheaper for the producer. They
don't have to pay the negative externality of consumers of the product
getting cancer or suffering from disrupted hormonal systems because it is
next to impossible to prove any direct connection from a specific low dose
of something to a problem noticeable ten years later (if the company was
even still in business).
But this issue of the producer not having to pay for negative externalities,
and the consumer not understanding the consequences for themselves or third
parties, is a fundamental problem of lightly-regulated capitalism. We need a
cradle-to-cradle ethic for manufacturing, plus greater transparency in
productive processes. As you mentioned in the part I snipped, we can get
improvements by doing everything at home, or by changing the way
collectively organized production works.
> For some reason there are many who want to avoid admitting the value
> in allowing artisans to specialize in their fields of interest. We
> only look at the 'bad' side of specialization ~ the factory slave
> pulling the lever ~ when there is also a 'good' side that would let a
> car mechanic have "at cost" access to the tools he needs to work on
> the machinery he knows how to deal with, and that he receives a sense
> of fulfillment and accomplishment. The same for dentists and doctors
> and airplane pilots and computer programmers and cooks, etc.
>
> We will never move appreciably forward until we are brave enough to
> face and clever enough to solve the mystery of co-ownership that the
> Capitalist currently use against us.
That's a great point about artisanship. Some of the roots of human happiness
are definitely helping others, having a sense of flow in what you are doing,
and feeling like you are growing in your abilities.
So, how many core different artisanships does it take to make an interesting
and healthy and vibrant society?
And is the notion of an "expert" misleading? Lots of people have taken pride
in a high degree of self reliance (often in rural areas where it is needed
anyhow either from lack of money or lack of availability of timely
services). How good do most things really need to be useful? The excitement
about RepRap and DIY CNC might be to, as I said, in some sense deskill some
things to the point where they can be done well enough even at home to meet
most people's expectations.
Big airplanes can already fly themselves. Software and robots are already
assisting doctors, and some programs can do a better job of things like
diagnosis in specialized areas than an individual MD because they have a
huge database of evidence based medicine to draw on. Speaking as a computer
programmer, the field would be better off with 90%+ of programmers leaving
the field, not that I would begrudge anyone the enjoyment of programming;
the fact is, the world already has too much software (and of the wrong
sorts), even if a few key applications may still be needed that have not yet
been written.
More general robot systems may even also deskill some tasks like putting in
a filling, or other technologies like ozone might help change the nature of
dentistry. (Better design can often substitute for hand-eye coordination.) I
don't know how well that ozone idea really works, by the way, it is still
somewhat controversial:
"British Experts Question Value of HealOzone Treatment"
http://www.dentalwatch.org/questionable/healozone.html
But I use that as an example of how new technologies might change the nature
of activities we do.
Again though, I don't want to take away from anyone doing what they want to
do, growing in knowledge, experiencing flow, and having a sense of
satisfaction from helping others. Those are all good things. How to have
them without vast negative externalities of our current economy is a challenge.
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
>> Maybe we should be talking about how subsistence living gets transformed to
>> stylish living without the middleman? :-)
>
> There seems to be two approaches:
>
> 1.) Technological: Create tools (microfactories) that are cheap enough
> that they can be individually owned so we can avoid the difficulties
> of co-ownership.
>
> 2.) Organizational: Create a social contract that helps humans co-own
> the Means of Production that is too expensive for them to own
> individually.
Redefine "stylish" as being something to do with being off-grid?
Yea, I get your point though.
Personally, I think the killer-app of the coming hardware revolution
won't actually be hardware - it will be software. Similar to the way MS
Office allowed every typist in the world to have their own printing press.
3D design is simply too difficult at the moment. An interesting angle on
this was the thing that turned up on replicatorinc.com a while back
http://replicatorinc.com/blog/2009/02/75-creative-uses-of-the-spore-creature-creator/
Toys again. Toys and Weapons, one of my favourite concepts.
Missing the point again. Sorry - but until we've solved the Difficulty
Of Using The Machines problem, any solution will need to be something to
do with co-ownership. Or something that operates at a "village" level.
> Is lacing foods with poison is somehow cheaper?
Yes - once you get into economy-of-scale-ville. While we still have this
window of opportunity where we're essentially using free oil to mine the
soil.
> For some reason there are many who want to avoid admitting the value
> in allowing artisans to specialize in their fields of interest. We
> only look at the 'bad' side of specialization ~ the factory slave
> pulling the lever ~ when there is also a 'good' side that would let a
> car mechanic have "at cost" access to the tools he needs to work on
> the machinery he knows how to deal with, and that he receives a sense
> of fulfillment and accomplishment. The same for dentists and doctors
> and airplane pilots and computer programmers and cooks, etc.
Yea, absolutely. The only jobs that should be automated out of existence
are the ones that no one likes doing.
The economics around artisanry are complicated though - by the fact that
(at the moment) "unique" is massively more expensive than mass-produced.
I've been pottering round with Ponoko.com recently - using it to make
Golden-Mean calipers. I've done the numbers - and the cheapest I can do
them for (given the weirdness of the retail/wholesale formula) is about
$75. In terms of complexity, they're the sorts of things you could pick
up for about $12 in a DIY colloso-store... and in a $1 shop? well, $1,
more or less.
I know the reality behind these numbers involve the weirdness of retail,
externalised costs, and western consumers being shielded from the
consequences of their economic formulas... but that's the day-to-day
reality that we're faced with.
n
Paul D. Fernhout
> On Tue, May 26, 2009 at 3:45 PM, Paul D. Fernhout
> <pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
>> Maybe we should be talking about how subsistence living gets transformed to
>> stylish living without the middleman? :-)
>
> There seems to be two approaches:
>
> 1.) Technological: Create tools (microfactories) that are cheap enough
> that they can be individually owned so we can avoid the difficulties
> of co-ownership.
>
> 2.) Organizational: Create a social contract that helps humans co-own
> the Means of Production that is too expensive for them to own
> individually.
>
> Number 1 will make some impact.
Another comment on this issue.
Basically, I explain belaw why the US government should fund the
construction of 21000 huge flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at
a cost of US$50 billion, because is imperative for national (and global)
security reasons, to accommodate various social and economic trends. :-)
====
While it seems like your scenario #1 (desktop microfactories) will
ultimately have the biggest effect in the long therm (the Star Trek
Replicator working on a nanotech level), scenario #2 (organizational) has a
lot of possible variations.
One of them is the large neighborhood shop with a lot of flexible machine
tools. A few variations have been mentioned here in that direction (Men's
Shed, FabLab, TechShop, or even my old Sunrise self-replicating corporate
model from twenty years ago, which was partially inspired by books like
David Morris' "Neighborhood Power: The New Localism").
http://www.mensshed.org/
http://fab.cba.mit.edu/
http://techshop.ws/
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunrise-sustainable-technology-ventures.html
The digital fabrication revolution makes these local shops potentially much
more capable and economically interesting than ten or twenty years ago.
ShopBot is one example of such a tool, but all sorts of other processes are
going digital too. We're seeing the increasing intermingling at some points
of the digital and physical worlds. And we're seeing ever cheaper computing
costs drive down costs for physical things made by such systems.
As I see it, what actually prevented this happening ten or twenty years ago was:
* offshoring to cheaper labor markets like China (goods) and India
(services), although even decades earlier Japan was a cheap labor market,
* the rise of cheap container shipping powered by cheap oil,
* cheap illegal immigrant labor in the USA for agriculture and industry, and
* the near doubling of the US labor market as women entered the workforce in
big numbers, which depressed wages while driving up prices bid by two-income
families.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2004/11/two-income-trap
Otherwise we might have seen an even bigger increase sooner in automation in
US manufacturing. Instead, from my time around robotic labs in the 1980s,
there was hardly any interest in automation in the 1980s in a big way. The
military saw it of use in special situations perhaps and funded places like
CMU. Big companies saw much bigger returns in putting in shop floor computer
networks to put in extensive tracking of part flows, to get the most out of
cheap human labor. And redesign for cheap assembly by cheap unskilled labor
was important too.
There is almost nothing in robotics we have now that we did not have in the
1980s as far as making something like a ShopBot system, except computers and
sensors are a lot cheaper now. I don't mean to put down ShopBot Tools's
design work -- there is real innovation there as a system
-- what I am saying is that we could have had ShopBot-like systems
everywhere in the 1980s if industrialists had been motivated by expensive
labor prices or a demand for higher quality and customized products driven
by rising wages. Instead, for the reasons I listed above, US wages stopped
rising in the 1970s and manufacturing workforce in the USA dropped to about
one third of what it was in the 1950s, both by some increases in
productivity and from lots of offshoring to places with cheaper labor. Only
massive increases in debt papered over the possible social unrest.
As global prices rise, and global transportation costs spike for oil and
piracy, and at the time as countries realized the critical nature of
manufacturing for global security, we may see a resurgent interest in cheap
local manufacturing done through automation.
As a parallel, many countries have been content for years with importing
Microsoft products, but now they are realizing the security risks and
economic risks of not using open systems like GNU/Linux and Open Office,
whatever the immediate costs of switching to open systems might be. In
yesterday's news, just one more datapoint:
"Microsoft's Bulk Deal With New Zealand Collapses "
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/26/0155209&from=rss
""The latest 3-year, pan-government deal that Microsoft has been
establishing with the New Zealand government since 2000 has collapsed,
opening the doors to the wider use of open source software in government."
Tthe US sees the inverse of that for importing manufactured goods and
energy. The US has become critically dependent on risky supplies of
essential items. That dependency also opens it to economic attacks (a
devaluation of the dollar) as well as physical attacks (at shipping ports,
through poisoned toys, etc.). Because of that *fear* (and also the
profitability to some of keeping the USA dependent and promoting fear),
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
the USA has adopted the role of world *bully*, to try to ensure the world
stays stable in a way that seems favorable to key US elite constituencies.
But, unfortunately, global bullying has its own security risks from "blowback".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blowback_(intelligence)
"Blowback is the espionage term for the violent, unintended consequences of
a covert operation that are suffered by the civil population of the
aggressor government. To the civilians suffering it, the blowback typically
manifests itself as “random” acts of political violence without a
discernible, direct cause; because the public — in whose name the
intelligence agency acted — are ignorant of the effected secret attacks that
provoked revenge (counter-attack) against them. [1] Specifically, blowback
denotes the resultant, violent consequences — reported as news fact, by
domestic and international mass communications media, when the actor
intelligence agency hides its responsibility via media manipulation.
Generally, blowback loosely denotes every consequence of every aspect of a
secret attack operation, thus, it is synonymous with consequence — the
attacked victims’ revenge against the civil populace of the aggressor
country, because the responsible politico-military leaders are invulnerable."
And the USA has had decades to accumulate blowback potential. 9/11/01 was an
example, an indirect blowback for the kind of thinking that caused 9/11/73
in Chile (although in that case, mostly blowback for intervention in Saudi
Arabia and the rest of the middle east). See also:
"Blowback"
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20011015/johnson
It's an amazing tribute to the rest of humanity's forgiveness and compassion
and forbearance (whatever religious or secular faiths different people have
around the world) that so little has happened in terms of blowback to the
USA. Judged by our own standards, like with Iraq, where the US maintains
that a country having leadership we judged bad or might someday be a
potential threat to US interests means that the country may be invaded and
the civilians slaughtered and displaced in huge numbers (supposedly
unintentionally but statistically certain), the USA is on precarious moral
ground. But rather than translate that fear of attack into positive action
for reasonable national security objectives and maybe even making amends
internationally, the USA so far has focused mainly on more global bullying
and a slide towards a domestic police state to monitor and perhaps suppress
dissent asking for change and accountability. Examples are "watch what you
say" advocated by the previous President's Press Secretary, the infiltration
of local peace groups and non-profits,
http://www.democracynow.org/2003/10/9/peace_group_infiltrated_by_government_agent
and enshrining bullying into US military doctrine focusing on unilateral
security instead of mutual security:
"U.S. Military Seeks Space Dominance Strategy"
http://www.space.com/news/space_control_021015.html
In an age where anybody can build a cruise missile in their garage,
"Build Your Own Cruise Missile "
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/29/1857212
it seems like we need a better way forward than fragmentation and fighting
over narrowly perceived self-interest.
But there is at least one other path. Jimmy Carter outlined it in 1979 when
he talked of two paths, but the USA as a nation chose the wrong one for the
last thirty years:
Jimmy Carter: "Energy and the National Goals - A Crisis of Confidence"
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/mp3clips/politicalspeeches/jimmycartercrisisofconfidence.mp3
"""
We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One
is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation
and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right
to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of
constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.
It is a certain route to failure. All the traditions of our past, all the
lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another
path -- the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values.
That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take
the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.
Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and
it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of
energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control
again of our common destiny. In little more than two decades we’ve gone from
a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use
comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our
excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our
economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which
have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It’s
a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This
intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence
and the very security of our nation.
"""
The same thing Jimmy Carter said about energy independence could be said
about manufacturing independence.
And, as Amory Lovins and Hunter Lovins said about energy in 1982, I'd
suggest the same applies to manufacturing these days given the potential of
local digital fabrication:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"""
Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security is a 1982 book by Amory
B. Lovins and L. Hunter Lovins, prepared originally as a Pentagon study, and
re-released in 2001 following the September 11 attacks. The book argues that
domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident
or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a
resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured
in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001
edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current. [2]
"""
I saw the same thing in organic agriculture in the 1980s. Organic methods
were overall cheaper to our society, but conventional farming practices were
subsidized in various ways (from land-grant universities focusing on
developing innovations for big farms, to limited liability for pesticide
health effects, to crop support payments for conventional growing
strategies, to the subsidy of the interstate highway system and various
subsidies for fuel for trucking lettuce from California to New York).
Ted Hall mentioned here (2/21/09 8:36 AM) a wood working shop in the UK
using a ShopBot to serve its local community:
"Unto This Last"
http://www.untothislast.co.uk/
Look at their slogan: "Furniture Cut To Size; Local craftsmanship at mass
production prices"
From their about page:
http://www.untothislast.co.uk/about.html
"Having no [finished] stock, we can already offer you more than 100 product
lines from a very small location. Adding finish and size options, we have a
growing catalogue of more than 2000 products to choose from. Our
organisation simplifies logistics and cuts costs: we do without warehousing,
transportation or packaging. This is we can propose prices competing with
mass-production on a considerably reduced footprint. "
They are being competitive even with all the subsidies around them for
shipping and mass production. That shows the amazing potential of today's
technology, and it will only get more competitive as it continues to improve.
And also from that page: "Unto This Last is the title of a book written in
1860 by John Ruskin. He advocated a return to the local craftsman workshops,
having a few doubts about the human cost of the Industrial Revolution.
Thanks to today's technology, we make distributed manufacturing happen -
with a competetive edge. If you continue to support our approach, we plan to
grow by duplicating our workshop in other locations, for your convenience,
and the pleasure of making things differently."
Now, that self-replicating shop model was my model twenty years ago with the
Sunrise ideas, but I see now that while as a franchise it might work, there
is a deeper more networked thing going on in our society with communications
and imitation that suggest once people see a working model of local
manufacturing, they will copy it in their own way. Also, we may well want a
somewhat hierarchical model with some mass-production of core "vitamins" of
systems like electronics or certain materials for various reasons.
Right now, there is no one 3D printing machine that does everything. There
may not be one for ten or twenty years (maybe longer). But, right now, one
can imagine something beyond a FabLab that is a quite serious flexible
manufacturing center, doing mass customization of open designs.
I've seen a couple "model shops" of big corporations and universities (like
the one in IBM Research Yorktown Heights), and they can make a lot of stuff
in a relatively small shop footprint.
There is no reason why every community in the USA (or the world) should not
have a flexible manufacturing center in it for short-run production use,
general messing-around hobby use, and for formal and informal educational
use. There are already successful businesses on that model doing things like
local ceramics.
It would be a prudent "national security" thing to do, to underwrite the
installation of big FabLabs everywhere in a country. The FabLab costs about
US$50K or so. But let's scale that FabLab cost up to a million dollars US
for each lab by the time you build (or buy or rent) a building and put in
more machine tools of a greater variety.
Here is some information about the USA:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=509183
"There are more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. ... there are 18,443 cities,
towns, villages, and other such governing groups in the United States."
So, let's say we put a big FabLab-inspired center in each county (US$10
million each to be really big) and one smaller one in every town, village,
etc. (for US$1 million each). Maybe big cities will get several ones for
each neighborhood.
How much would that really cost?
Well, at the county level that would be about US$10M * 3000 = US$30 billion.
At the town level, that's about US$1M * 18000 = US$18 billion.
Put that together, and you get US$48 billion for 3000 huge county FabLabs
and 18000 big town FabLabs. (Note, costs might go down if we mass produced
machine tools for this.)
Sounds like a lot, right? Forty eight billion US dollars. Wow.
But it it compared to other things? What is it worth it to ensure the
continuity of our civilization in all sorts of disasters? What it is it
worth to encourage an entire new generation of entrepreneurs for a
resurgence of local manufacturing? What is it worth to transform a society
and bring it hope again?
Well, let's put that US$50 billion in perspective of various other things.
From:
http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/50.aspx
"50. Estimated 1998 spending on all U.S. nuclear weapons and weapons-related
programs: $35,100,000,000"
So, just one year of defense spending on just the nuclear weapons aspect is
about the same amount.
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
"Although construction on the Interstate Highway System continues, I-70
through Glenwood Canyon (completed in 1992) is often cited as the completion
of the originally-planned system. The initial cost estimate for the system
was $25 billion over 12 years; it ended up costing $114 billion (adjusted
for inflation, $425 billion in 2006 dollars) and taking 35 years to complete."
So, for one tenth the cost of the interstate highway system, we can have
flexible manufacturing easily accessible everywhere in the USA. (And of
course, reduce some wear-and-tear on the highway system. :-)
The drug war costs about US$40 billion a year directly:
http://www.drugpolicy.org/library/factsheets/economiccons/fact_economic.cfm
How many people would not be addicted to drugs if they had more interesting
things to do with local manufacturing or starting a small business?
The USA spends about US$50 billion a year on agricultural subsidies:
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/07/post-30.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_subsidy#United_States
Though only about US$8 billion of that goes directly to farms each year.
(These figures are a little hard to figure out because the agriculture
industry is so complex, so that's just a ballpark estimate.) But, clearly,
with agriculture only employing 2% of the workforce, that's a lot of
subsidy. Why should distributed manufacturing not get that kind of subsidy?
I've lost track of all the handouts and bailouts that are going to the big
three auto companies at various times (there were earlier ones last year for
conversion to eco-vehicles too). I'm guessing those are totaling US$30
billion by now? Here is one recent comment on just GM:
http://www.autoficial.com/?p=563
"Right now on Washington, the White House is preparing to General Motors for
bankruptcy procedings, as soon as, next week according to The Washington
Post. The procedure may give GM an extra $30 billion in federally secured
loans to help put the devastated automakers priorities in order. Combined
with the already $15 billion in bail out cash, this puts the total cost to
the American tax payer close to $45 billion. That’s a big chunk of change in
an already overly stressed economy."
So, here we see the US government spending about the same amount of money it
would take to put amazing decentralized manufacturing facilities across the
USA within a few minutes drive for most, but instead the US government is
spending the same amount to prop up just one manufacturer with a failing
business model going into bankruptcy anyway.
Of course the bailouts of the US banking system are already in the trillions
of US dollars; the cost to put a real physical economic stimulus everywhere
is a tiny fraction of that (like 1%, with maybe another 1% to pay for ten
years of operating costs if they were not pay-as-you-go?).
Nathan pointed out this article to me:
"Capitalism Hits the Fan: The current crisis did not start with finance,
and it won't end with finance. "
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2008/1108wolff.html
"But in the 1970s, the world changed for the American working class in ways
that it hasn’t come to terms with—at all. Real wages stopped going up. As
U.S. corporations moved operations abroad to take advantage of lower wages
and higher profits and as they replaced workers with machines (and
especially computers), those who lost their jobs were soon willing to work
even if their wages stopped rising. So real wages trended down a little bit.
The real hourly wage of a worker in the 1970s was higher than what it is
today. What you get for an hour of work, in goods and services, is less now
that what your parents got. ... The American working class had to do a
second thing to keep its consumption levels rising. It went on the greatest
binge of borrowing in the history of any working class in any country at any
time. Members of the business community began to realize that they had a
fantastic double opportunity. They could get the profits from flat wages and
rising productivity, and then they could turn to the working class
traumatized by the inability to have rising consumption, and give them the
means to consume more. So instead of paying your workers a wage, you’re
going to lend them the money—so they have to pay it back to you! With
interest! ... Over the last thirty years, the boards of directors of the
United States’ larger corporations have used their profits to buy the
President and the Congress, to buy the public media, and to wage a
systematic campaign, from 1945 to 1975, to evade the regulations, and, after
1975, to get rid of them. And it worked. That’s why we’re here now. And if
you impose another set of regulations along the lines liberals propose, not
only are you going to have the same history, but you’re going to have the
same history faster. [Samantha should like that point. :-)] The right wing
in America, the business community, has spent the last fifty years
perfecting every technique that is known to turn the population against
regulation. And they’re going to go right to work to do it again, and
they’ll do it better, and they’ll do it faster. So what do we do? Let’s
regulate, by all means. Let’s try to make a reasonable economic system that
doesn’t allow the grotesque abuses we’ve seen in recent decades. But let’s
not reproduce the self-destruct button. This time the change has to include
the following: The people in every enterprise who do the work of that
enterprise, will become collectively their own board of directors. For the
first time in American history, the people who depend on the survival of
those regulations will be in the position of receiving the profits of their
own work and using them to make the regulations succeed rather than
sabotaging them."
See also another thing Nathan pointed me to:
"The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online" by Kevin Kelly
http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism
"The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux
was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and
top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of
collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with
scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This
political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those
older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a
borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is
designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is
decentralization extreme. Instead of gathering on collective farms, we
gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop
factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks,
and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless
politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that
matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer
production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of
free goods."
Well, until we get "China on our desktop" as RepRap promises, we can at
least have "China in our county or village" with one of these facilities.
Perhaps you might design something at home on a desktop computer, test it at
a national supercomputing facility, then send the design to the local
facility to get fabricated and pay for materials, parts, and labor. Or, you
might bring your own materials, parts, and labor, and pay for machine tool
time and cutting bit wear etc..
One such supercomputing facility, by the way:
http://www.rpi.edu/research/ccni/
"This center is an important resource for companies of any size — from
start-ups to established firms — to perform research that would be
impossible without both the computing power and the expert researchers at CCNI."
Obviously, there are existing companies that do some of that flexible
manufacturing from local designs, like emachineshop.com:
http://www.emachineshop.com/
or ToyBuilders.com:
http://www.toybuilders.com/
But they are not the same as having the facility local to create a sense of
real face-to-face community around it.
These facilities could have cafes, and libraries with rooms of computers
with design tools, and teach courses, and have helpful people hanging
around, and so on. They could be "People's Sheds" instead of just "Men's
Sheds". :-) They could become the "leet" places for kids to hang out in the
afternoons and evenings. :-) Especially if some were based at or near schools.
Yeah, there could be DIYBio labs there too. Safer ones than doing stuff at
home. Yes, with more official supervision, too. That Meshwork-Hierarchy
balance idea by Manuel de Landa again.
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
Anyway, I'm sure there would be all kinds of economic issues with the
government creating such facilities (is it fair to existing manufacturing
businesses?), but the point is, from a government financing point of view,
it is easily doable. It is comparatively trivial. And if we had these tens
of thousands of facilities, then there would be a tremendous value in a free
and open shared library of designs for making stuff in them. And we would
see that, driven by Kevin Kelly's "digital socialism". :-)
And of course, others have had similar ideas before. :-)
"ORE Incubators for Iran"
http://www.presstv.com/detail.aspx?id=78926§ionid=3510302
"ORE Incubators are a simple mechanism, but where they unleash the creative
thinking of humankind. They are huge research centers where inventors,
leading-edge indigenous/endogenous scientist/engineers/technologists create
and make new things with eminent world leading scientist's et al. They are
manned and managed by the best scientists that a nation can offer, but not
in a totally scholastic term, but in creative thinking and inventive terms -
the knowledge-based hands-on mentality. Overall, therefore to give you a
perspective of the size and purpose of a typical ORE Incubator, they are
circular in construction which allows major inventions and technologies to
be developed logistically, wheeled in and out and where the overall floor
area is approximately 11,000m2.
"""
So, just like the USA had a (ficticious) "missile gap" with the USSR during
the Cold War, well now maybe the USA has or will have a (ficticious?) "shop
gap" with Iran. :-)
Now, we know there may well be too many conflicting interests in the USA to
do this. It's easy to raise US$35 billion a year if you are going to hand
much of it to a few big companies like GE's (past) nuclear weapons division,
because those few big companies are easily approachable and can (legally)
influence legislation. It's a lot harder to think about putting in anything
that benefits the average person in the USA, especially given, as I
mentioned, aspects of it would be unfair to existing businesses (a
legitimate issue of equity, to be harming the very innovators taking risks
in these directions).
It's also easy in the USA to pay for negative external costs of "free
market" businesses:
"Governments' Drug-Abuse Costs Hit $468 Billion, Study Says"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/28/us/28addiction.html?ref=us
"Government spending related to smoking and the abuse of alcohol and illegal
drugs reached $468 billion in 2005, accounting for more than one-tenth of
combined federal, state and local expenditures for all purposes, according
to a new study. Most abuse-related spending went toward direct health care
costs for lung disease, cirrhosis and overdoses, for example, or for law
enforcement expenses including incarceration, according to the report
released Thursday by the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, a
private group at Columbia University. Just over 2 percent of the total went
to prevention, treatment and addiction research. The study is the first to
calculate abuse-related spending by all three levels of government. "
But it is hard to get any funds for "cradle-to-cradle" manufacturing or
systematic "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science" that might reduce
external costs.
And of course, it is easy to find the support to prop up an antiquated "just
in case" compulsory schooling model that everyone knows is on its last legs,
to the tune of US$53.6 billion. And, it's even OK to do that in ways where
"domestic" stimulus money just goes abroad, given many of the products the
US buys are made abroad, as are more and more of the services:
http://www.syracuse.com/opinion/index.ssf?/base/opinion-5/1243500940198750.xml&coll=1
"Just think: When a state uses federal money to upgrade computer systems,
for example, it hires contractors, employs workers and buys materials. The
state not only receives a new computer system, but reaps the downstream
benefit of those contractors, workers and material providers spending money
in the local economy and growing their business. As President Obama said, "I
think the ripple effects of this (stimulus) package won't be entirely
documentable, but I think it will be significant." But the stimulus effect
is virtually lost on state projects shipped overseas. If a state upgrades
its computer systems with workers in India, the ripple effect will be felt
not on Main Street, but rather in on some avenue in India. Although there is
something to be said for trade, the immediate concern is domestic stimulus.
The allure of inexpensive offshore contracting must yield, at least in the
short-run, to reviving our struggling economy by investing in domestic
workers and industries."
But, it is hard to get money to make public schools more like public
libraries, open to everyone without compulsion, where if you don't like a
teacher or librarian, you just avoid them.
So, the USA continues to drive its economy off a cliff, and prop up the old
guard, at the cost of trillions of dollars, even as the old guard's business
model seems like senility in an age of what Kevin Kelly called "digital
socialism".
Still, another country with a weaker less established manufacturing sector,
and one where "socialism" is not such a dirty word, like Venezuela or Cuba
(or maybe even South Africa, Greece, or France) could also do something like
this. And then, that country (or countries) might leap ahead in
manufacturing on both a local and a global basis, because a playful populace
is an empowered populace. And the USA *used* to be like that in the 1950s too:
"Make Magazine's Dale Dougherty explains what a "maker" is and why its so
important to America"
http://makerfaire.com/#part3
Or, someone politically savvy might get the US machine tool industry to
lobby for it somehow (except for any "self-replicating" aspect. :-)
I should add that what I outlined for the USA does exist to a degree
already. Many universities, technical schools, high schools, and community
colleges have shops (even as shop courses have fallen by the wayside in many
places). The US government (or state and local) has already funded the
basics for such an infrastructure, most of it already in nice well
maintained buildings connected by high speed internet. If university centers
expanded their manufacturing missions, and if public high schools and their
shops became more like public libraries in some ways, where the public could
go when they wanted to use the facilities and "learn on demand" or do
"research and development", then there might be something of a political
base in the USA to start from.
Anyway, we'll see the transformation anyway, as you say Patrick, with your
option #1 of a flexible 3D printer on the desktop (probably by 2030 at the
latest). But we could have it starting by 2010 (next year) with a big push
by the government. Here is the (scary) political authorization in our
society that often seems to only do big things for militaristic
scarcity-obsessed and conflict-obsessed reasons:
http://www.answers.com/topic/defense-production-act-of-1950
"A law passed on September 8, 1950, during the Korean War, to expand
production and secure economic stability in the United States. It included
provisions on inflation and stabilization, rent control, agricultural
prices, defense mobilization, and taxes and appropriations for defense use.
It established the Joint Committee on Defense Production to supervise the
act's implementation."
From:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Production_Act
"""
The Defense Production Act (Pub.L. 81-774) is a United States law enacted on
September 8, 1950, in response to the start of the Korean War. It was part
of a broad civil defense and war mobilization effort in the context of the
Cold War. Its implementing regulations, the Defense Priorities and
Allocation System (DPAS), are located at 15 CFR §§700 to 700.93. The Act has
been periodically reauthorized and amended, and remains in force as of 2007.
The Act contains three major sections. The first authorizes the President to
require businesses to sign contracts or fulfill orders deemed necessary for
national defense. The second authorizes the President to establish
mechanisms (such as regulations, orders or agencies) to allocate materials,
services and facilities to promote national defense. The third section
authorizes the President to control the civilian economy so that scarce
and/or critical materials necessary to the national defense effort are
available for defense needs. The Act also authorizes the President to
requisition property, force industry to expand production and the supply of
basic resources, impose wage and price controls, settle labor disputes,
control consumer and real estate credit, establish contractual priorities,
and allocate raw materials to aid the national defense.
"""
Now, I'm not a nationalist "rah rah" flag waver, but the fact is, I live in
the USA as does much of my extended family. What is best is to find
something that promotes *both* US national security as well as global
security. If the USA goes down the tubes, so does the life of most everyone
I know personally. This is a page has a picture of what happened to my
mother's home during WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz
So, I know stuff like that can happen, even seemingly out of the blue, when
people can't learn to get along or reach reasonable accommodations or share
in compassionate ways. Even though I was born about two decades later, I've
lived the human consequences of the Rotterdam Blitz every day of my life in
various ways (although it took me years to see it), as have *many* *many*
others in the world from other conflicts. Here is an alternative:
"Global Mindshift: A one minute video of a wombat telling it like it is."
http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
And even for US Americans who become expatriates and live abroad, if people
in the USA think an unstable North Korea or Pakistan with a handful of
nuclear weapons is a worry, well, a collapsing USA with a thousand times as
many nukes and other stuff, coupled with a sense that *it* is the victim,
seems like a lot more of a worry to the globe and to its own citizens.
From the most cursory knowledge of military weapons systems, the US has in
its arsenal non-nuclear weapons that can do to towns very quickly from one
truck what the German military did to my mother's hometown of Rotterdam from
planes. As was said in the Triple Revolution Memorandum in 1964:
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"""
New forms of weaponry have been developed which cannot win wars but which
can obliterate civilization. We are recognizing only now that the great
weapons have eliminated war as a method for resolving international
conflicts. The ever-present threat of total destruction is tempered by the
knowledge of the final futility of war. The need of a “warless world” is
generally recognized, though achieving it will be a long and frustrating
process.
"""
The ironic thing about WWII was that the German people had within themselves
the seeds for such greatness -- essentially the best universities, the best
poets, the best manufacturing, the best recycling, the best innovators, even
the best Jewish intellectuals -- but because of a scarcity ideology (and a
shutting down of playfulness) they threw it all away and plunged the world
into many years of darkness. The same innovative spirit that Germany showed
in some parts of waging a world war could have made Germany itself a
paradise had it been applied locally. Why did they not do that?
Maybe they got too serious? :-)
From:
http://everything2.com/title/Homo%2520Ludens
"""
"The playful person", a 1938 book by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga
(1872-1945). He coined this term, as against Homo sapiens and other ad-hoc
ones like Homo faber (crafting humans), to stress how much the concept of
play was central to human exploration of life, and came into our culture,
laws, art, science, and so on. It was one of his last works. He spent his
last few years a prisoner of the Nazis. The full title of the book is Homo
Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture.
"The spirit of playful competition is, as a social impulse, older than
culture itself and pervades all life like a veritable ferment. Ritual grew
up in sacred play; poetry was born in play and nourished on play; music and
dancing were pure play....We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization
is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play...it arises
in and as play, and never leaves it."
"""
We, as a society, need decentralized manufacturing facilities (like FabLabs)
where everyone in our society can "play" with these new technologies, to
develop new ideas, new assumptions, new businesses, new life-affirming
connections with a global community, and so on.
I'd suggest, at this point, decentralized manufacturing and a
reconsideration of our basic economic models given "divide by zero" errors
in our basic economic equations from ever cheaper computing is a critical
national security priority for the USA. This is still all too true:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/need.htm
"The Joint Committee on Defense Production notes that American industry is
tailor made for easy disruption. Its qualities include large unit scale,
concentration of key facilities, reliance on advanced materials inputs and
on specialized electronics and automation, highly energy- and capital-
intensive plants, and small inventories. The Committee found that correcting
these defects, even incrementally and over many decades, could be very
costly. But the cost of not doing so could be even higher -- a rapid
regression of tens, or even hundreds of years in the American economy,
should it be gravely disrupted."
But, then again, maybe I am just being impatient. :-) Your (Patrick's)
scenario #1 (desktop microfactories) will happen soon enough even without
the version of your scenario #2 (neighborhood flexible manufacturing
centers) I outlined above (short of global war over scarcity ideology, and
we don't know whether that will happen, it just is a continual low level
risk). If we can just hold out another twenty or thirty years, we may see
global abundance for all as well as in the USA through #1. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
Permafacture
>>Here are some general comments on the cost of current small CNC
>>manufacturing systems, relating that to the "end game" of capitalism, and
>>what all that might mean to manufacturing as the next big hobby.
"end game of capitalism", as the next big hobby.
The human capacity to feed ourselves through growing plants is not a
hobby on the rise, but a connection being lost. We can clearly do it,
but it has been happening less and less. Its possible that 10% of my
acquaintances derive a solid portion of their diet from their own
harvest, but most of those 10% percent are pretty much farmers.
a lack of technology or documentation is not the cause. The capacity
for everyone to have open source micro controller run hydroponic
gardens in their isolated apartment buildings would only complicate
things. You can grow everything you need easily outside with minimal
attention (Masanobu fukuoka)
In the same way, i don't know what legitimate diy manufacturing
ambitions are cut short by lack of CNC machinery. Perhaps to cut the
scrolls for a scroll compressor. But i dont know many willing to turn
a piston on a lathe for a diy engine, and having cnc won't make that
any easier.
> 1.) Technological: Create tools (microfactories) that are cheap enough
> that they can be individually owned so we can avoid the difficulties
> of co-ownership.
> 2.) Organizational: Create a social contract that helps humans co-own
> the Means of Production that is too expensive for them to own
> individually.
that synthesize proteins to match a scientifically determined diet.
Also, it is a social contract for co-ownership, and not a very
interesting one at that. Nor very economically competitive. Or do
you have micro fleas that go harvest silica from mud and smelt it into
silicon and, with it, build computers and more nano bugs? and
everything is easy and free?
The process of human civilization happening in this world every day is
too expensive to be borne individually. An individual human being,
extracted, is not actually anymore a human being.
Humans in collectives finding a new relationship to technology is, for
me, the only interesting path. This new relationship is not a
realization of the idealized wal-mart in box, but a co-operation to
cast the pieces of a gingery lathe (and later barbeque on the coals),
so that pistons can be turned and pipes threaded. It is not skill that
is lacking, but vision, or gumption. Until that spirit is discovered,
printing custom cmos boards for slaves and toys is nothing new.
Vinay
(just curious)
Vinay
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
http://hexayurt.com - free/open next generation human sheltering
http://hexayurt.com/plan - the whole systems, big picture vision
Gizmo Project VOIP : (USA) 775-743-1851
Skype/Gizmo/Gtalk : hexayurt
Icelandic Cell : (+354) 869-4605
"If it doesn't fit, force it."
sasha
concept I like but not sure its a good term.
Sasha
Vinay
Oh, that's exactly what it is - I should know, I invented the term to refer to the process of manufacturing goods from permacultural inputs in renewable ways - the example I gave in the first conversation about it was smelting glass using permaculture-harvested fuels.
I was just curious who'd picked the term up and was using it as their email address.
Vinay
Paul D. Fernhout
>>> Here are some general comments on the cost of current small CNC
>>> manufacturing systems, relating that to the "end game" of capitalism, and
>>> what all that might mean to manufacturing as the next big hobby.
>
> Interestingly, that's maybe as far as homebrew fab labs go for the
> "end game of capitalism", as the next big hobby.
>
> The human capacity to feed ourselves through growing plants is not a
> hobby on the rise, but a connection being lost. We can clearly do it,
> but it has been happening less and less. Its possible that 10% of my
> acquaintances derive a solid portion of their diet from their own
> harvest, but most of those 10% percent are pretty much farmers.
All too true. :-(
From:
http://chiefmarketer.com/cm_plus/weeding_through_numbers/
"The National Gardening Association (NGA) reports that while an average of
80 million U.S. households -- three out of four -- have participated in one
or more types of indoor and outdoor do-it-yourself lawn and garden
activities annually for the last five years, that number has shown a decline
in two of the last three years. Fewer than half of all households did their
own lawn care last year, and even fewer have a flower garden (36%) or a
vegetable garden (22%)."
But, part of post-scarcity economics is that, as with Debian GNU/Linux,
using post-scarcity tools like agricultural robots (or tractors), a small
number of people can easily produce enough for everyone.
That said, there are a lot of benefits to local agriculture and a connection
to the natural world in some way.
Yes, though, I agree it is safer if more people know how to grow their own
food if the want to. That's a big reason we wrote our free garden simulator
(another reason was as a step to a space habitat simulator).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/
Also, historically, in hunter/gatherer times, the world was so productive
per person (there being so few people 50000 years ago), that people did not
have to farm or garden much to have all the food they wanted and more. So,
people have spent most of their evolution in "pre-scarcity" times in that sense.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
"The hunter, one is tempted to say, is "uneconomic man". At least as
concerns non subsistence goods, he is the reverse of that standard
caricature immortalised in any General Principles of Economics, page one.
His wants are scarce and his means (in relation) plentiful. Consequently he
is "comparatively free of material pressures", has "no sense of possession",
shows "an undeveloped sense of property", is "completely indifferent to any
material pressures", manifests a "lack of interest" in developing his
technological equipment."
It's been argued the reason we have so much technology now is simply because
we need it, with rising populations and depletion of what in the past were
key resources. So, technology, in that sense, is a sign of distress.
Still, it is nice to contemplate Gaia giving birth through the space
program, and a "noosphere" is a completely new thing too, it seems.
In the past, a lot of human learning went into hunting/gathering. Then to
agriculture. Then to industry. Now it goes to information (blogs, facebook,
mailing lists). But, as the digital and physical intermingle, like with
digital fabrication or with simulations of real things (gardening, physics,
designs), maybe it all will come full circle again?
> a lack of technology or documentation is not the cause. The capacity
> for everyone to have open source micro controller run hydroponic
> gardens in their isolated apartment buildings would only complicate
> things. You can grow everything you need easily outside with minimal
> attention (Masanobu fukuoka)
So true.
Although, I've been thinking, that with electric heat, I might as well heat
with hydroponic lights and have fresh winter vegetables pretty much for
free. :-)
Well, you can grow stuff if you have land, but many people don't anymore
(like city dwellers).
http://www.wri.org/publication/content/8840
"""
# Most people now live in urban areas. Three quarters of the population of
the United States is urban, and one quarter is rural.
# Fewer than half of the people living in urban areas live in central
cities. More than half live in suburbs.
"""
Granted, for the people in suburbs, they could tear up their lawn.
http://lawnstogardens.wordpress.com/
It used to be that more people lived in rural areas, and urban areas were
often less built up. New York City used to have farms in Manhattan.
Though people talk about bringing farms back to Manhattan. :-)
"Will There Ever Be Vertical Farms In Manhattan?"
http://www.infrastructurist.com/2009/03/23/will-there-ever-be-vertical-farms-in-manhattan/
It takes a lot of power for lighting, of course. But with advanced computing
leading to advanced materials science and advanced physics, all along the
lines of better post-scarcity technology, electric power may become pretty
cheap in the future (whether fusion, solar, closed-loop fission cycles,
something unexpected, etc.).
> In the same way, i don't know what legitimate diy manufacturing
> ambitions are cut short by lack of CNC machinery. Perhaps to cut the
> scrolls for a scroll compressor. But i dont know many willing to turn
> a piston on a lathe for a diy engine, and having cnc won't make that
> any easier.
I can hope that making it easier to make things is going to make it possible
for more people to play with making stuff again. :-)
Will that be the case? I don't know for sure. You're right that CNC work
right now takes a lot of skill and time.
And even space. Right now, I don't have a shop. I'd like one, but the small
climate-controlled building we might otherwise have for that is used by my
wife for an office. Unfortunately, we have no basement.
But even that small structure (300 square feet or so of floor space on
contrete, low ceiling, wood walls) would be pretty small for a shop. Lathes
and mills tend to spit metal chips everywhere. They require open areas
around them for safety (jumping out of the way). Various standard
manufacturing processes like require ventilation or are dangerous to do in
places with wood walls (welding). Then there is having room for stock and
subassemblies. Not many people have a lot of spare climate-controlled room
available for a good shop (unless they have a business using the shop).
(More on this later with your other excellent point on community.)
I have room in the house for a 2D printer though, and I would make room for
a 3D printer. So, rather than needing an entire building, I could just put
it in a corner or on a table.
It is a bit like the difference between when people used to need to have a
printing press of some sort in a special room or building to do typeset
documents, but now everyone can print at home in color with a device
sometimes even smaller than a sheet of paper.
Everybody prints now, but we no longer consider that manufacturing or of
much interest to think about. Twenty five years ago, printing in 2D at home
was a *big* thing (though some home offices had 2D copiers and faxes). And
twenty-five years before that, for most people, it was inconceivable to
think of printing at home (beyond using a typewriter and carbons).
The biggest thing cut short by ready access to CNC machines is learning and
building a confidence in having some control over the future.
>> 1.) Technological: Create tools (microfactories) that are cheap enough
>> that they can be individually owned so we can avoid the difficulties
>> of co-ownership.
>
>> 2.) Organizational: Create a social contract that helps humans co-own
>> the Means of Production that is too expensive for them to own
>> individually.
>
> I read #1 in the context of apartment hydroponic gardens, or nano bots
> that synthesize proteins to match a scientifically determined diet.
> Also, it is a social contract for co-ownership, and not a very
> interesting one at that. Nor very economically competitive. Or do
> you have micro fleas that go harvest silica from mud and smelt it into
> silicon and, with it, build computers and more nano bugs? and
> everything is easy and free?
Why not? But I'd expect it would be more like you could print many things in
materials that you could either "unprint" or grind up to use again.
I have only to look at a tree to see a process that everywhere is taking
minerals from the earth, along with water, air, and sunlight, and produced
shaped mass (wood) that is very useful to work with and also easily
recyclable. Why should humans not be able to do the same with some sort of
other technology?
> The process of human civilization happening in this world every day is
> too expensive to be borne individually. An individual human being,
> extracted, is not actually anymore a human being.
In general, I totally agree. Humans are human in company. They can only grow
as children in company (ideally, healthy villages).
Our current system splits us apart all to often. A dystopian vision from 1909:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops
"Each individual lives in isolation in a standard 'cell', with all bodily
and spiritual needs met by the omnipotent, global Machine. Travel is
permitted but unpopular and rarely necessary. The entire population
communicates through a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine
called the speaking apparatus, with which they conduct their only activity,
the sharing of ideas and knowledge with each other."
I feel like a university model is actually a potentially very interesting
one for future communities, a group of people sharing various complex
physical plant in a face-to-face way with a variety of housing options and
always something interesting going on, and nearby fields for experiments and
agriculture. In that sense, a university in a rural or suburban setting like
Iowa State in Ames, IA or Cornell in Ithaca, NY, might be how many people
live in the future if give a choice (among a larger variety of
possibilities, of course). A university is sort of like a huge cohousing
project.
http://www.cohousing.org/
And I think those communities would be even nicer if the college aspects
were not so dysfunctional (grading, "disciplined minds", age segregation,
constant churn of people, and so on), but rather somewhat calmer communities
with that same kind of shared infrastructure, and the same feel of abundance
many universities have (given other people are usually paying for them. :-)
> Humans in collectives finding a new relationship to technology is, for
> me, the only interesting path. This new relationship is not a
> realization of the idealized wal-mart in box, but a co-operation to
> cast the pieces of a gingery lathe (and later barbeque on the coals),
> so that pistons can be turned and pipes threaded. It is not skill that
> is lacking, but vision, or gumption. Until that spirit is discovered,
> printing custom cmos boards for slaves and toys is nothing new.
That's a great vision.
As with Manuel de Landa, we might see lots of experiments in that direction,
trying to balance meshwork and hierarchy. But, as he also suggests:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of
data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to
promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that
may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common
data-structure may make possible. "
So, it may well be that a widespread standard 3D printer makes possible a
lot more variety of social interactions that humans are more comfortable
with than, say, mostly isolated suburban houses with housewives living in
quiet (or not so quiet) desperation, and the rest of the social dysfunction
that goes with that isolation.
Still, some people like being monkish. Some people like living in nature
apart from others much of the time. So, I think we would see a diversity of
possibilities. But I would expect *most* people would want communities like
you suggest.
And then there is room for really good and big shared machine shops, full of
the big potentially dangerous toys many people may want to play with
(presses, ShopBot routers, welders, electroplating vats, forges, furnaces,
etc.) as well as the people who can show you how to use them as safely as
possible. Yes, I think that would be more fun that a home shop.
But really, people might want both, a small home shop for puttering and also
a big common one also with permanent work areas. This is sort of like I both
use a home computer and also use the Google search supercomputer.
Thanks for the interesting comments.
--Paul Fernhout
Permafacture
printing that can print in metal and bind it to other substances?
3D printing is interesting, but I'm not holding my breath for it to
replace lathes and mills and foundries. I think the issue is that
people really have very little interest in technology, such that it
has to be very cheap and very easy inorder for them to interact with
it. Don't get me wrong, people love consuming things, especially
conspicuously, but inorder for the average person to make something of
use (or even fix their bike), it would have to be a nearly mindless
pushing of a few buttons on a fabrication machine.
Without a connection to the essence of technology, fabricating
machines just produce trash (which is ideally 100% recyclable since no
one will want to repair or maintain the products as useful
technology). On the other hand, people faced with the capacity to
make relevant things for themselves that they would not otherwise have
experience little difficulty learning how to weld and cut threads on a
lathe.
Someone said something about agriculture takes space but manufacturing
not so much. If you were to try to produce energy on your
permaculture land, I think you'd find that your small garden is
dwarfed by the land you'd need to fuel the smelting any amount of
steel.
Vinay:
I am elliot, friend of marcin (Went out to factor e for the solar
turbine project). I'm in austin now organizing my interests into a
group of my own. very much about casting glass with locally grown
fuels. Mostly, getting efficent solar thermal collection down and
utilizing molecular sieves for all of their wonderful properties (ie:
purify methane from a digester and feed the co2 to algae. the same
molecular sieve then becomes increasingly full of oxygen from
photosynthesis which is used in some other process before being purged
with steam and put back in the methane tank.) is the first order of
business.
<a href="http://www.permafacture.org"> A Permafacture Institute </a>
for the simultaneous study of scrubbing flue gasses for their useful
acids, and a promotion of natural philosophy and critical thought (a
la Masanobu Fukuoka, Robert Pirsig, Martin Heideggar, Herbert Marcuse,
Benjamin Franklin, etc.)
I'm trying to keep the speculation down and focus on what can actually
be done, on what there is an need for and an interest in. Then later
we can harvest a lightning strike to make 500 lbs of acetylene or
something.
-elliot
Kevin Carson
>
> So open manufacturing doesn't rely on CNC but on theoretical 3d
> printing that can print in metal and bind it to other substances?
>
> 3D printing is interesting, but I'm not holding my breath for it to
> replace lathes and mills and foundries.
From what I've read as a non-tech person, I get the impression that it
will be useful mainly for producing casings, circuit boards, solid
non-mechanical objects, and the like. Probably not moving parts.
But with the multi-machine, and with the progressive miniaturization
and imploding cost of small CNC machine tools, we can probably expect
a quantum revolution in the potential for small-scale manufacture in
households and small shops replacing most heavy industry.
Vinay
link on there somewhere crediting me as the originator of the term?
Thank you! Nobody (including me) has done very much with it, so I hope
you'll make some impact!
Vinay
Paul D. Fernhout
> So open manufacturing doesn't rely on CNC but on theoretical 3d
> printing that can print in metal and bind it to other substances?
I'm sorry I gave that impression. I think widespread 3D printing is a big
upcoming thing, but it is not the only thing going on right now.
There is a lot going on, as shown by the recent Maker Faire.
http://www.makerfaire.com/
And of course various Make-type blogs.
Here are some other trends besides 3D printing:
* The development over the last ten years of fancy sewing machines that can
automatically make button holes and do other things.
http://www.i4u.com/article5014.html
"Brother announces in Japan a new line of sewing machines that can
automatically create comic embroidery featuring characters from the Peanuts,
Disney or Hello Kitty. ... Brother also will sell software to convert
digital photos into embroidery. Great, now you can stitch your mug shot on
all your black t-shirts."
* The spread of needlepoint patterns over the internet.
* The explosion in amazing Lego creations, many powered by Mindstorms NXT,
with videos on youtube:
" (“lego” results 1 - 20 of about 195,000)"
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_type=&search_query=lego
* The robot competitions (US First, etc.) which also often brings people
into machining.
* The vast numbers of virtual 3D models that are being made of all sorts to
be used in creating images and 3D worlds and games. As time goes by, those
3D models get easier to fabricate digitally in various ways.
* The increase in do-it-yourself movies using things like stop motion.
"the oh lego" :-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fU1jTK5dRsM
* Even how we take it for granted now we can take a digital picture and
print it out within a minute -- something that used to be only available to
people with a home dark room, and then, usually only in black and white.
* Seed savers coordinated through the internet.
http://www.seedsavers.org/
* Papercraft design repositories on the internet with designs you can print
out in 2D and cut and fold into 3D, along with cheap automatic cutters.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=papercraft
* The easy availability of all kinds of battery powered hand tools like
cordless drills of ever increasing quality for use in home repairs, as well
as DIY superstores like Home Depot and Lowes.
* The spread of cheap home machine shop CNC with stuff like EMC2 Linux CNC.
Or the relative affordability of something like the ShopBot CNC router for
small shops.
* The slow spread of more digitizing technologies for taking 3D shapes and
motions and bringing them into the computer.
* The wide availability of a lot of amazing $100 or so robot toys, including
a resurgence in interest of small flying devices made possible by small
parts and better batteries.
* And Bryan would have me add DIYBio, no doubt. :-)
So lots of positive trends that each are isolated, but together add up to a
lot of stuff happening, often learned about or enabled with plans through
the internet.
Still, on the other hand, it's very difficult to do much work yourself on
many modern cars, in part from more common front-wheel drive and the
integration of drive train and engine into a tight engine compartment (even
if you had the hand tools and electronics and programs). So, that's a big
step back. But electric vehicles may not have that problem, although they
are likely to require a lot less maintenance anyway. :-)
Anyway, there is a lot going on besides 3D printing. But 3D printing (or the
Star Trek replicator) is easier to explain as a big picture idea, and in the
next twenty to thirty years, I think it will be the one single change that
is most noticeable, even if at first 3D printing is mainly just an enabling
technology for other things as Kevin pointed out (molds, cases, models,
maybe some toy parts). But even now people are printing food, circuits, and
medical things (like frameworks for growing bones and organs).
Still, at $10K, the V-Flash 3D printer is a pretty amazing toy for anyone
that could afford it (to make other toys): "With the V-Flash® Desktop
Modeler, you get strong durable prototypes with excellent surface quality
and feature detail – all this conveniently on your desktop."
As are CupCakeCNC, RepRap, and Fab@Home in the $1K to $3K range, though the
quality there is not so high yet I'd expect as something like the V-Flash,
but the satisfaction might be higher for DIY types.
For comparison:
http://www.articlealley.com/article_665070_10.html
"""
The Laser Printer was invented at Xerox in 1969. [Forty years ago.]
Commercial laser printers were first integrated into use by way of the [IBM]
model 3800 in the year 1976. [Thirty three years ago.] It was used by
businesses to print high-volume documents like mailing labels and invoices.
All in all it was a very primitive version of the modern day printers and
was quite large. One of the first laser printers that were specially
designed for use with an individual computer was the Xerox Star 8010 that
was released in 1981. [Twenty eight years ago.] The biggest problem with
this printer was the expense. Their price was around $17,000 which actually
made it unaffordable for most individuals and business so its use was
limited to a relatively smaller number of businesses.
"""
So, I'd say that's about where we are with single-toner 3D printing, about
that situation of twenty eight years ago for laser printers more or less, or
maybe a little beyond it (*conservatively*, given we may see unexpected
things any year soon, coming at printing from other angles). But then came
price drops, size reductions, increase in quality, multiple colors,
variations with ink jet and other printing technologies, and so on.
My frequent point here is that this 3D printing revolution is so *obvious* a
trend, which such obvious parallels, and yet our society is acting like
business-as-usual and economic-supply-chains-as-usual will last forever,
without re-evaluating assumptions about education, Social Security funding,
employment policy, national security preparedness, the meaning of fiat
dollars when consumer spending now drives so much of our economy but may
drop immensely in a couple decades as people print more stuff at home,
projecting costs for health care, and so on, for all sorts of post-scarcity
implications. What does it mean for childhood, for example, when all toys
are essentially free (assuming the toner is recyclable)? What does it mean
for security when anyone can print a gun? What do existing mortgages mean
when printing a new house is cheap? What does it mean when anyone can print
just about any medicine? What does it mean when any medical lab can print
replacement organs? And what is the difference between a society whether all
or most of the designs are open and free, as opposed to a society where 3D
printing designs are all locked down as closed proprietary products?
But, even if I am wrong about 3D printing, with all these other trends, we
may at least see flexible neighborhood machine shops way beyond TechShops in
scale within twenty years.
http://techshop.ws/
"TechShop is a 15,000 square-foot membership-based workshop that provides
members with access to tools and equipment, instruction, and a creative and
supportive community of like-minded people so you can build the things you
have always wanted to make."
And that will be a revolution in itself, even if only a small fraction of
the population learn to use them. That's why I suggest the goverment just
embrace it:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/07204d7025a50265?hl=en
"Basically, I explain [below] why the US government should fund the
construction of 21000 huge flexible fabrication facilities across the USA at
a cost of US$50 billion, because is imperative for national (and global)
security reasons, to accommodate various social and economic trends. :-) "
But, I have to admit, maybe that is just because *I* want one nearby. :-)
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
> The human capacity to feed ourselves through growing plants is not a
> hobby on the rise, but a connection being lost. We can clearly do it,
> but it has been happening less and less. Its possible that 10% of my
> acquaintances derive a solid portion of their diet from their own
> harvest, but most of those 10% percent are pretty much farmers.
Well that's certainly been the trend of the last 50 odd years... but the
trouble with basing predictions on trends of the last 50 (or more years)
is that on the whole they're exponential, and we've just hit a phase
where a lot of them seem to be going from basically horizontal to
basically vertical.
So... Once Were Warriors Land in NZ has just turned up this
http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3592/features/12933/seeding_for_success.html
What have we got? An economic system that's made whole swathes of the
population effectively worthless - and is systemically designed to drive
down the value of the rest. The "working poor" working 2 jobs just to
survive?
I can see things changing re: growing your own - and I can see them
changing on the basis of independence, dignity and cross-generational
connection (in fact they probably won't work (communally) without
cross-generational connection)
According to the WHO, 1/5 of the people on this planet are clinically
depressed. Sooner or later, we're going to twig that working our arses
off to support landlords and banks (and pretending to ourselves we're
really doing it to buy shiny plastic things) isn't really doing us a lot
of good.
> a lack of technology or documentation is not the cause. The capacity
> for everyone to have open source micro controller run hydroponic
> gardens in their isolated apartment buildings would only complicate
> things. You can grow everything you need easily outside with minimal
> attention (Masanobu fukuoka)
Unless you happen to be living in a city, and then it becomes incredibly
difficult.
I think part of the problem with the growing-your-own thing is that we
see everything through a lens of economic expediency - and food is
cheap. The amount of money you'd wind up saving is pathetically small
compared to how much you pay your bank or landlord.
Really, I can't see a way out of this... without getting rid of banks
and landlords.
The other part of the problem is that the conduits of our culture have
been (for our whole lives) paid for by advertising - so the whole
culture has become about consumption. It's the meaning of life.
The internet is knocking the stilts out from under that one though, so
who knows. Maybe we can unyoke ourselves from this incredibly narrow set
of motivational drivers.
Permafacture
there are interesting technologies. I personally would be interested
in openly distributed cmos printing capacities: computers printing
computers. though in reality i think such a system would be very
unreliable and incredibly aggravating/wasteful due to failure. This
is based on my experience with trying to get Linux to function
consistently. you think agriculture is a knowledge intensive
practice...
But in general most of these innovations are not going to be
economically significant. I mean, they may become billion dollar
industries and drive many businesses into bankruptcy. What people buy
and how they buy it will forever be changed. But essentially there is
no change.
The entire music industry is collapsing because of the internet. yet,
in a certain way, that is in a way which is essential, which is
pertaining to the essence of human society, not much has changed. I
don't believe we can make judgments about the future based upon
recorded history, or even recent memory. Still...
> > You can grow everything you need easily outside with minimal
> > attention (Masanobu fukuoka)
>
> Unless you happen to be living in a city, and then it becomes incredibly
> difficult.
Francisco could do more than you might think, and Berkley or Oakland
folks better than that.
http://newsociety.com/blogs/index.php/2009/02/09/the-integral-urban-house-self-reliant-li
The increasing number of people migrating to phoenix, though perhaps
ultimately screwed when water gets tight, have abundant grey water
potential and lots of land that could be cared for.
But grey water is sooo lower class, as is eating food you had to grow
yourself, or worse, that grew by itself and you just picked it on the
way home. someone needs to dye the oranges bright orange (preferably
with certified organic dye) and then wax and buff them, throw out the
oddly shapen ones. then its food.
The biggest difficulty is paradigmatic; our perception of how life is
supposed to function. Once you get past the everyone for themselves
dog eat dog city paradigm and squeeze a couple more people into a
house, have someone living in the back yard, cook communal meals,
share a room with a non-romantic life partner or otherwise reconstruct
your human relationships, then options appear.
> I think part of the problem with the growing-your-own thing is that we
> see everything through a lens of economic expediency - and food is
> cheap. The amount of money you'd wind up saving is pathetically small
> compared to how much you pay your bank or landlord.
>
> Really, I can't see a way out of this... without getting rid of banks
> and landlords.
to do so is lacking. Though you are not saving much money by growing
your own food, it is the keystone of a life without landlord and bank
and of a community fulfilling most of its own needs internally. The
expenses that dwarf the cost of food are mostly unnecessary, or at
least are only culturally necessary.
The internet, by the way, is not deconstructing these cultural
necessities nor helping anyone to determine their own life outside the
forces of propaganda or whatever.
My point though is that the limitations are not technological. The
'end game of capitalism' will not be influenced by technology. To the
contrary, the social contract of isolationism breeds a style of
obsessive innovation that constructs elaborate tools to extend and
deepen the terms of the contract. yes, the forces precipitating any
sort of end game would also generate a new technology, but I wouldn't
just trust that some technology i read about on a blog has any
liberating potential unless I met the community working with those
tools and saw what reality tunnel they were operating in.
Open manufacturing for me requires that tools be designed and built
within a community that is already operating by a new contract, or at
least beginning to modify the existing one.
Nick Taylor
>> Unless you happen to be living in a city, and then it becomes incredibly
>> difficult.
>
> One can do a lot on a small plot in a city. Even residents in San
> Francisco could do more than you might think, and Berkley or Oakland
> folks better than that.
Even the butler was poor...
Why are we talking about San Franciso? That's not where we live. We live
in London, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Sao Paulo etc etc. We live in
Europe or Asia, Africa maybe. South America. Sure, some of us live in
wealthy (sub)urban North America, but not many.
Personally, I'm from the UK, and believe me, you cannot easily grow
things outside with minimal attention because every square centimetre of
the place is owned by someone else.
>> Really, I can't see a way out of this... without getting rid of banks
>> and landlords.
>
> which anyone could accomplish for themselves.
Really? How?
The median UK wage is around 23,000 a year and the average house price
is over 220,000... about 30% of the 60M population don't own their own
homes. What are they going to do? Move to Scotland? The Scots don't want
them there. Never have.
How is the 14% of the (60M) population living below the poverty line
going to get away from banks and landlords?
Just out of curiosity like.
Nick
Bryan Bishop
<pdfer...@kurtz-fernhout.com> wrote:
> Permafacture wrote:
>> So open manufacturing doesn't rely on CNC but on theoretical 3d
>> printing that can print in metal and bind it to other substances?
>
> I'm sorry I gave that impression. I think widespread 3D printing is a big
> upcoming thing, but it is not the only thing going on right now.
>
> into machining.
What? Do you have any references on these robotics competitions
bringing people into machining?
Paul D. Fernhout
Permafacture
> Why are we talking about San Franciso?
American city (except new york) is a vast expanse.
>We live
> in London, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Sao Paulo etc etc. We live in
> Europe or Asia, Africa maybe. South America. Sure, some of us live in
> wealthy (sub)urban North America, but not many.
areas seem to be the most difficult to grow food in. In the poor,
rural United States of course, agriculture is easier.
> Personally, I'm from the UK, and believe me, you cannot easily grow
> things outside with minimal attention because every square centimetre of
> the place is owned by someone else.
capacity for transportation. I imagine one day urban flight will
become the dominant migratory pattern. The logical set up from my
perspective is everyone lives on the resources they use, then we can
adequately guage how much space there is for people. Its true, Cities
are poorest possible places if you are hoping to live amongst people
providing for themselves directly.
> >> Really, I can't see a way out of this... without getting rid of banks
> >> and landlords.
> >
> > which anyone could accomplish for themselves.
>
> Really? How?
>
> going to get away from banks and landlords?
new types of relationships.
I don't own any land. I certainly never will. But its a failing
paradigm that says everyone needs to own land for themselves. thats
the reality tunnel of bankers and landlords. How could you get away
from it by buying deeper into it? I've had enough opportunities to
believe that if i want land i can have it. It just wouldn't be "my"
land, it would be communal.
For example, a collective here in austin tx was donated 10 acres of
brownfield (literally a dump) which they cleaned up by hand, selling
the recyclable metal and finding uses for the old tires and concrete
slabs. The land was not developable before and the previous owner
took the tax write off. They are a non-profit and so dont pay
property taxes. The land is theirs, without bankers or landlords or
even paying jobs.
I am certainly below that average uk wage (less than 10,000 American
dollars a year), but I could have land to grow food on, built a
structure on, create a community on. all that is necessary is that i
be ready to use it, to participate in it. If you want a house with a
yard and a fence, tough luck these days. If you want acres and acres
to grow food in, you can have it in a snap (ok, more like years).
Also, i didn't mean to start the "but what about this hypothetical
person who has a wife and kids and can't just go off willy nilly"
conversation. Some folks have it rough. I, though poor, am very
privileged. I am economically poor with a BS in physics and a
diversity of experience in agriculture and naturalism. But I think
forming MORE alternative collectives, and generating more shared
spaces is beneficial all around. Refining how we form these spaces,
and developing tools within them and for them is the appropriate
direction.
Don't cut me out of the conversation because I am privileged. I
cannot become otherwise, nor would it benefit anyone for me to. But I
can still participate in the world in a way which isn't mocking and
humiliating to the majority of the people here. I can take steps to
participate in a dialog with people of all sorts of backgrounds, and
develop ideas relevant outside this country.
Given this, I further emphasize that the means of production will
never be so cheap that the poorest in india will be printing out their
own sirloin steaks.
Paul D. Fernhout
> We have built a ridiculous situation for ourselves with so much
> capacity for transportation. I imagine one day urban flight will
> become the dominant migratory pattern. The logical set up from my
> perspective is everyone lives on the resources they use, then we can
> adequately guage how much space there is for people. Its true, Cities
> are poorest possible places if you are hoping to live amongst people
> providing for themselves directly.
While there is a lot of truth to this, especially in times of social break
down, someone like the late Jane Jacobs would not see it this way.
"Cities and the Wealth of Nations" by Jane Jacobs
http://www.amazon.com/Cities-Wealth-Nations-Jane-Jacobs/dp/0394729110
The big question is, what does it mean for people to "provide for
themselves"? Part of this is also the meshwork/hierarchy issue of Manuel de
Landa (again. :-)
Both rural areas and cities are networks of people and facilities. In the
past, with communications and transport being harder, cities had enormous
advantages over rural areas from a density of people and facilities leading
to more productive interactions in relation to industry and information.
Cites are essentially the self-replicating creatures of our economy (in
theory). Where do tractors come from? In a sense, cities, where they would
often be designed and produced. Where did agriculture come from? Jane Jacobs
argues it comes from cities, which were at first trading posts and
population hubs relying on local hunting and gathering, and then someone
noticed seeds grew if they were planted and you could keep flocks of
self-replicating animals. Even big manufacturing plants in one industry
rural towns were usually set up by people from cities. And when setting up
any venture in a country without much infrastructure, the activity will be
much more likely to succeed if it is done in or near a city. Otherwise a
whole host of little problems come up that are endless hurdles -- where to
get electricity? Where to get someone who knows how to weld? Where to get
welding equipment? Where do you get welding supplies? Where do you get the
metal to weld? Where do you get someone who knows how to solve some tricky
material problem with welding unusual things? And so on... Where do you get
replacement ball bearings? Where do your packaging material come from? Where
are people who will buy your finished goods? There can be answers to all
these in a rural area, but it may be much harder (at least in the past) to
manage all those hurdles in a timely basis, compared to just using either
the yellow page phone directory in a city or the cities informal social
networks.
So, one should not discount the vast productive power of cities as they
shape the landscape around them to suit their needs. That is Jane Jacobs
point -- that it is cities that shape the fate of "city supply regions" to
meet their needs or whims. Even living many hours from New York City, I can
see how that city is shaping the local rural economy where I am in very
significant ways.
Fans of cities might even go so far as to suggest it is the *cities* that
provide for themselves, and the rural areas are dependent on them. Sure,
most cities don't grow all their own food, but food is just a part of a
stylish life.
That said, the internet shifts the balance some back to rural areas. Along
with many other insightful pamphlets about society and technology, Control
Data CEO William C. Norris wrote a pamphlet about this around 1980, "Back to
the countryside via technology". Looks like it is available in this book:
http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED186018&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED186018
I had been corresponding with William C. Norris in the late 1980s through
early 1990s about among other things putting his stuff in digital form (and
even scanned some stuff he had sent me, but not released it) but I let that
correspondence fall off when I met my wife and never really got back to it.
While he said he had no money for an intern, until I met my wife I had been
about to suggest I spend that summer working for his group for free. He had
a small foundation that was very interested in flexible distributed
manufacturing, mostly from the point of reinvigorating small farms and rural
areas. He remains one of my heroes for his accomplishments and his ambitions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Norris
http://www.stthomas.edu/openingdoors/norrisInstitute/William_C._Norris_Bi.html
In googling his bio, I see looking now that some people are trying to
preserve that legacy:
http://www.stthomas.edu/business/centers/norris/default.html
"The William C. Norris Institute continues the legacy of the founder of
Control Data Corporation by supporting the start up and growth of visionary
companies in Minnesota. The Institute's seed capital fund invests in
innovative technology-based companies that are in the early stages of
commercializing proprietary products and services."
But times change. Too bad that $5 million does not instead go into open
manufacturing research instead of proprietary startups. If William C. Norris
was a young guy today, I'm sure the guy who saved his family farm by feeding
his cattle stuff like tumbleweed (or was it thistle?) when everyone said it
would kill the cows, would be doing open source today. He was a "maverick".
So, I doubt today he would be creating proprietary businesses, especially
since there are so many mainstream examples (Red Hat, Google, Sun, even his
old rival, IBM) who are building businesses around open systems. He would be
doing something beyond open source software, like open manufacturing. :-)
And thinking about or correspondence, I can see that was part of the gulf
between us. He came from an age of market based business entrepreneurship
(though he also talked about public/private partnerships, where the
government subsidized worthy goals). I was more of the age of free
information and self-replicating machinery. Too bad we never built a bridge.
Because that's exactly what we need now -- a bridge between those two worlds.
--Paul Fernhout
Permafacture
These things are brought to cities. Very dense cities are not only
incapable of growing their own food, but of producing their own energy
and providing their own minerals (metal oxides for smelting or
ceramics/glass). no one knows how large a city is, because it has
tendrils reaching all over, pulling in produce and coal and mineral
deposits.
I Like society were people are close together, where there are people
from many back grounds and resources from all over. I just think there
is a more natural scale for this, so that people congregate closely
enough that there is still room for dense agriculture and for
harvesting whatever energy is needed for production locally. I think
by decreasing our energy requirements we can get people pretty dense
and still not depend on imported resources. Building houses
appropriate for the area, riding bicycles, adopting less intensive
manufacturing, etc.
Paul D. Fernhout
>> where to get electricity? (...) Where do you get the metal to weld?
>
> These things are brought to cities. Very dense cities are not only
> incapable of growing their own food, but of producing their own energy
> and providing their own minerals (metal oxides for smelting or
> ceramics/glass). no one knows how large a city is, because it has
> tendrils reaching all over, pulling in produce and coal and mineral
> deposits.
Jane Jacobs might have suggested that this is like saying gardeners cannot
grow their own food because they do not have green skin and instead need to
rely on raised beds of soil outside their houses, where their grubby hands
reach in to snatch carrots. :-) From a city's perspective, what they are
doing in their supply regions is growing their own food. :-)
Let's try this thought experiment. Every day, 2% of the cities population
drive out into the countryside to do farming in land around the city. Then
they drive back to the city at night. Would this not be a city taking care
of itself? OK, so the 2% of the US that does agriculture probably lives
entirely on the farm, but that is just ecologically saving gasoline, right? :-)
Some of this is a matter of perspective. :-)
Now, as with gardeners who spray pesticides all over the place, including
spray that drifts onto their neighbor's yard, and which get into the
groundwater, one may very well question the external costs (environmental,
and social) of how cities do that. But that is a different issue than saying
cities are not in some sense taking care of themselves.
> I Like society were people are close together, where there are people
> from many back grounds and resources from all over. I just think there
> is a more natural scale for this, so that people congregate closely
> enough that there is still room for dense agriculture and for
> harvesting whatever energy is needed for production locally. I think
> by decreasing our energy requirements we can get people pretty dense
> and still not depend on imported resources. Building houses
> appropriate for the area, riding bicycles, adopting less intensive
> manufacturing, etc.
I agree that scale and infrastructure is an interesting thing to explore. I
like the book "Ecocity Berkeley" that has suggestions in that direction.
http://www.amazon.com/Ecocity-Berkeley-Richard-Register/dp/1556430094
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainable_city
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
> Also, i didn't mean to start the "but what about this hypothetical
> person who has a wife and kids and can't just go off willy nilly"
> conversation.
Well no, and I'm not talking about that either - I'm talking
demographics, not hypothetical anecdotes. 14% of people living below the
poverty line is not hypothesis. It is data, so:
>> Really, I can't see a way out of this... without getting rid of
>> banks and landlords.
>
> which anyone could accomplish for themselves.
Is bollocks. They can't. Free land isn't available in the quantities
required, sorry.
How many people in Europe live above the first floor, without access to
a garden? This isn't a hypothetical person with wife and kids, these are
demographics. This is an entire (literally) strata of a population, the
density of which means that "moving back to the land" can't happen...
without huge expense to those involved... and where is the money going
to go? Yup. Banks and landlords.
A single donation of 10 acre of rubbish-dump in Texas is too rare an
event to say that "anyone can accomplish it".
But while we're in the arena of the anecdotal, how are you going to get
your acres and acres of free land "in a snap" then?
> Don't cut me out of the conversation because I am privileged. I
> cannot become otherwise, nor would it benefit anyone for me to. But I
> can still participate in the world in a way which isn't mocking and
> humiliating to the majority of the people here.
I'm not cutting you out of any conversation, I'm just pointing out that
you're imagining "solutions" which bear no relationship to the realities
that most of us face.
n
Paul D. Fernhout
> How many people in Europe live above the first floor, without access to
> a garden? This isn't a hypothetical person with wife and kids, these are
> demographics. This is an entire (literally) strata of a population, the
> density of which means that "moving back to the land" can't happen...
> without huge expense to those involved... and where is the money going
> to go? Yup. Banks and landlords.
>
> A single donation of 10 acre of rubbish-dump in Texas is too rare an
> event to say that "anyone can accomplish it".
>
> But while we're in the arena of the anecdotal, how are you going to get
> your acres and acres of free land "in a snap" then?
There are community gardens:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=community+gardens
From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_garden
"""
A community garden is a single piece of land gardened collectively by a
group of people. [1] Community gardens provide access to fresh produce and
plants as well as access to satisfying labor, neighborhood improvement,
sense of community and connection to the environment. [2] They are publicly
functioning in terms of ownership, access and management, [3] as well as
typically owned in trust by local governments or nonprofits. A community
garden brings your community closer. A city’s community gardens can be as
diverse as its communities of gardeners. Some choose to solely grow flowers,
others are nurtured communally and their bounty shared, some have individual
plots for personal use, while others are equipped with raised beds for
disabled gardeners.[4] Community gardens encourage an urban community’s food
security, allowing citizens to grow their own food or for others to donate
what they have grown.[5] The gardens also combat two forms of alienation
that plague modern urban life, by bringing urban gardeners closer in touch
with the source of their food, and by breaking down isolation by creating a
social community. It has also been found that active communities experience
less crime and vandalism.[6]
"""
I toured the ones that Marty Johnson and his Isles, inc. had helped create
in Trenton, New Jersey.
http://isles.org/main/
"""
In 1990, the land where Barbara had been gardening was converted into a
hospital parking lot, so Barbara and her neighbor started looking for a new
gardening spot. They found a property at 10 Cole Street, owned by the
Trenton Sheet Metal Company, which was being used for dumping. When the
company eagerly granted permission, Barbara and the other gardeners got to
work. They cleaned and fenced the area and enhanced the soil with dirt from
the construction of the new parking lot. At the beginning, they used oxen to
plow the land. Quickly the number of gardeners expanded to 18, and Barbara
became the head gardener. The gardeners grow both flowers and vegetables.
Produce that ranges from cabbage, collards and tomatoes to black-eyed peas,
watermelon, mustard greens, and okra is shared among the gardeners, senior
citizens in the community, and church groups. The gardeners represent
several cultures, and by working together, they learn tolerance and
acceptance of each others’ customs. This builds a sense of community and
partnership. The garden also beautifies the neighborhood and nurtures a
sense of pride, and the presence of gardeners keeps crime down in what would
otherwise be a difficult neighborhood.
"""
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
>> But while we're in the arena of the anecdotal, how are you going to get
>> your acres and acres of free land "in a snap" then?
>
> There are community gardens:
> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=community+gardens
Which beings the grand total of "donated wasteland" anecdotes to two.
When I was last living in the UK, I lived in a terraced house split into
7 flats - about 20 people in a single house in other words. What is
that? 3 acres to support? Same story with my Sister in Sydney. Same
story with the place that I stay in Tallinn.
You really think that there are enough friendly wastleand owners for
this to actually be a viable model for "anybody" being able to get rid
of their relationships with landlords and banks?
I'm not saying that this isn't a marvellous thing for people to be
doing, but the idea that it's indicates anything in the region of a
viable social model that will allow us to "support ourselves" is bollocks.
Charity is not a solution. You've got even fewer rights there than you'd
have under a feudal system 800 years ago.
Vinay Gupta
At the end of the day, all politics eventually comes down to land
rights.
Vinay
--
Vinay Gupta
Free Science and Engineering in the Global Public Interest
if you are in a flu-effected area. It protects us all.
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"If it doesn't fit, force it."
Patrick Anderson
> Charity is not a solution.
I agree.
How about this approach: buy land outside of city-limits.
$1000/acre is not uncommon for such undeveloped land.
Get 1000 people together to fund that purchase.
It would be a slow start, but having full ownership eliminates the
banksters, and becoming an actual city gives us the opportunity to
structure city taxes more in-line with Henry George's LVT.
It is a fairly "big step", but is it unrealistic?
Patrick Anderson
Paul D. Fernhout
>
>>> But while we're in the arena of the anecdotal, how are you going to get
>>> your acres and acres of free land "in a snap" then?
>> There are community gardens:
>> http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=community+gardens
>
> Which beings the grand total of "donated wasteland" anecdotes to two.
Well, Isle alone has done dozens within Trenton. And such things have been
done in other cities.
Some schools are doing it:
"Wasteland Turns Into Garden Oasis "
http://www.bitc.org.uk/media_centre/news/wasteland_to_oasis.html
"A consultation between local residents and school children led to The
Arkwright Meadows (AMC) taskforce being set up. Their vision was to develop
a section of land and create an educational horticulture project that also
provides a recreational facility for the surrounding community. ... To date,
69 volunteers have provided nearly 400 hours of support to the project. They
worked along side local school children, planting bulbs, hedges and trees.
Groups of employees have given their time, manpower and enthusiasm to help
create the garden and support their local community."
Another related movement that is a little edgier:
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_gardening
"Guerrilla gardening is political gardening, a form of direct action,
primarily practiced by environmentalists. It is related to land rights, land
reform, and permaculture. Activists take over ("squat") an abandoned piece
of land which they do not own to grow crops or plants. Guerrilla gardeners
believe in re-considering land ownership in order to reclaim land from
perceived neglect or misuse and assign a new purpose to it. Some guerrilla
gardeners carry out their actions at night, in relative secrecy, to sow and
tend a new vegetable patch or flower garden. Others work more openly,
seeking to engage with members of the local community, as illustrated in the
examples that follow. It has grown into a form of proactive activism or
pro-activism."
> When I was last living in the UK, I lived in a terraced house split into
> 7 flats - about 20 people in a single house in other words. What is
> that? 3 acres to support? Same story with my Sister in Sydney. Same
> story with the place that I stay in Tallinn.
Well, that sounds about right for the number of people you can totally
support per acre (about eight), depending on the climate and how intensively
you cultivate. Even there, usually you are bring fertilizers from outside
the land onto the land.
Related:
"Biosphere 2 Not Such a Bust"
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/biospheresci/
"Agriculture. According to Nelson, the the agriculture system was arguably
the most productive half-acre of land in farming history. Sure, they lost a
lot of weight, and ate so little as to produce an early human study of
caloric restriction, but they did survive for two years on a half-acre
output. And contrary to most extraterrestrial-farming thinking, it used
old-fashioned soil. "You need a soil that’s rich and uses compost," said
Abigail Alling, a Biosphere 2 inhabitant and director of research. "You
can’t do it on hydroponics alone. (See "Soil in the agricultural area of
Biosphere 2" and "Crop yield and light/energy efficiency in a closed
ecological system: two laboratory biosphere experiments.")"
There were eight people there:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosphere_2
So, that's sixteen people per acre, though they tapped into emergency food
supplies at the end.
London has a density of 200 people per acre at the center to 50 people per
acre at the periphery. So, if London had a top intensive agricultural level,
it could grow from about one tenth of its food in the center to one third of
its food at the periphery. Not that I'm suggesting it do that -- it's in the
nature of cities to be intense about some things and push others to the side.
But this all misses part of the point. The most expensive part of
agriculture is fresh vegetables and fruits. Grains are not very efficient to
grow in home gardens. You might only grow ten percent of your calories in a
home garden (and some vegetables like celery might be negative calories to
eat :-), but they may still be very expensive calories full of essential
nutrients. The most profitable small organic farms have only an acre or so
and supply fresh vegetables to city restaurants and be located near the
city.
http://www.examiner.com/x-8317-Philadelphia-Home-Gardening-Examiner~y2009m5d19-SPIN-Gardening-Using-Small-Plot-Intensive-Gardening-to-increase-yield-and-save-money
"‘SPIN’, an acronym for ‘Small Plot Intensive’, is a model for organic
gardening that employs techniques adapted from Small Plot Intensive Farming
(professional, sub-acre farming) and can greatly improve yields in backyard
or community gardens. By employing specific planting and harvesting methods
a home gardener can consistently bring a more than adequate supply of fresh
organic vegetables to the dinner table throughout the growing season."
Apparently there is a book about it:
http://www.spinfarming.com/whatsSpin/
"""
SPIN-Farming is a non-technical, easy-to-learn and inexpensive-to-implement
vegetable farming system that makes it possible to earn significant income
from land bases under an acre in size. Whether you are new to farming, or
want to farm in a new way, SPIN can work for you because:
* Its precise revenue targeting formulas and organic-based techniques
make it possible to gross $50,000+ from a half- acre.
* You don't need to own land. You can affordably rent or barter a small
piece of land adequate in size for SPIN-Farming production.
* It works in either the city, country or small town.
* It fits into any lifestyle or life cycle.
SPIN is being practiced by first generation farmers because it removes the
two big barriers to entry - land and capital - as well as by established
farmers who want to diversify or downsize, as well as by part-time hobby
farmers.
"""
Part of that economic equation is that the value of a head of lettuce is
much higher in a city than in a rural area.
And the camaraderie from doing that as a community is valuable too.
Conventional economists consistently ignore the value of community in their
cost/benefit calculations. They get other things wrong too, and is suggested
here would make a good workforce for city-based intensive agriculture: :-)
"Should People Just Ignore Economists?"
http://mises.org/story/3436
"""
What Good Are Economists Anyway?" asks BusinessWeek's April 27, 2009 cover
story.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_17/b4128026997269.htm
The article makes the important point that, since most economists failed to
predict the current crisis, the worst economic collapse in nearly 80 years,
we need to consider whether or not their work has any value. ... "If you are
an economist and did not see this coming, you should seriously reconsider
the value of your education and maybe do something with a tangible value to
society, like picking vegetables."
"""
An interesting general idea is the number of people who can be supported by
natural systems in a hunter/gatherer way. There you can go from a dozen
people per acre in highly productive estuaries and islands by shores
(relying on the bounty of the sea), to ten acres per person farther north to
one thousand acres per person in the frozen north. Those figures are
approximate from a hazy memory. The key idea is that there are different
levels of productivity as far as what humans can extract from them
sustainably that relate to climate. Intensive agriculture would be affected
some by this, but you could also use greenhouse to alter the climate.
Anyway, that ratio is one reason I might argue that humans are basically
coastal animals, like seals. :-)
Which is why artificial islands like "Aquarius" (see below) might be a the
next big thing in real estate bubbles. :-)
> You really think that there are enough friendly wastleand owners for
> this to actually be a viable model for "anybody" being able to get rid
> of their relationships with landlords and banks?
Sure, they can live in the ocean on self-replicating islands. :-)
"The Living Universe Foundation: The Aquarius project"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Universe_Foundation
And community gardens can be thought of as a prototype of that.
Isles, Inc. was originally conceived of as a group that would take desert
islands and make them into sustainable and self-reliant places to live.
(The founder, Marty Johnson also went to Princeton and took the same course
from the same radical professor that I did, Prof. Steve Slaby, one of the
few professors there without a PhD and who was an open socialist.)
> I'm not saying that this isn't a marvellous thing for people to be
> doing, but the idea that it's indicates anything in the region of a
> viable social model that will allow us to "support ourselves" is bollocks.
You need to start somewhere. "Think Globally, Act Locally, Plan Modestly."
Groups like Isles are making a really important difference in real people's
lives. As in helping people be happier and healthier and reducing the amount
of local crime.
> Charity is not a solution. You've got even fewer rights there than you'd
> have under a feudal system 800 years ago.
This might be better under the parallel thread on foundations.
Charity is not a solution to what? Proofs of concepts? Helping some people?
Helping create the core technology for self-replicating islands? Using the
non-profit form with a board of directors to provide governance, like with
Debian GNU/Linux's parent organization, SPI? What is charity not the
(possible) solution to?
As I see it, if the Gates Foundation poured its US$50 billion or so in
charitable assets into developing open self-replicating flexible
manufacturing and related sustainable communities (seed saving etc.), within
a decade we all might have have an elegant workable solution to transform
the world. Instead, they try to get rid of Polio etc., which is a nice thing
to do, but pales in significance to a global transformation they could
accomplish using charitable post-scarcity dollars.
Here is a charitable foundation ("The Beldon Fund") just closing that poured
all its assets into environmental issues over the last ten years.
"Why Spend Out"
http://www.beldon.org/content/spend-out-strategy
I went on a job interview there nine years ago, but did not get the MIS
director position. I think part of it was my suggestion essentially that
using Microsoft products instead of GNU/Linux was in some sense betraying
the cause of social justice and local decision making they were otherwise
trying to foster. Something I wrote to them in 2000: "Also, while it is
understood one needs to choose one's battles, making the effort down the
road to transition from monopolistic proprietary systems (Microsoft) to open
systems (like Linux, Mozilla, Apache, Samba, and so on) might be a good
symbolic gesture regarding an open participatory future, and also make good
long term operational sense."
I guess foundations want to focus on one thing at a time. But there remains
an inconsistency there.
Also, by the weirdest coincidence I was just picking up the phone to make a
call as they called me about the job interview, so it did not ring on their
side and I picked up a phone without a dial tone but a voice on it, which
was very confusing on both sides. That has never happened before or since
that I can recall.
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
I think it's more realistic - but the initial thing was that we're
basically trapped by banks and landlords.
If (just for the sake of it) we forget everything we already know.
Forget what has gone before, start from 0...
... we've got this system where the majority of us are essentially
slaves. We have this situation where we're having to work huge chunks of
our lives to pay people who are creating no value, and the only reason
this occurs, is that they've managed to grab part of our "hierarchy of
needs" before we have.
So we've got this situation, where "to support ourselves" outside of
this, we're forced to find bits of wasteland in the cracks in the
system... at the periphery. We The People. Pigeons.
And from a traditional perspective, this seems reasonable... but really,
why the fuck should we? Is this really the best we can do?
I don't recognise any particular moral reason why banks and landlords
should even exist - especially now that we're all going to have to
retire 5 years later to pay for their bailouts... so they can continue.
Is that realistic? That we've all had our terms of slavery extended by 5
years so this chronically dysfunctional and exploitative system can
continue?
Yep, that's realistic. In fact it's so realistic, that it's already
happened... and in the UK at least, everyone's become so distracted by
the court-intrigues of political petty-theft that they've forgotten
about it already.
And within that context, yes it is realistic that the only way out of
this is that people should band together and buy their own land for
allotments... although given the size of the UK allotment waiting list,
I'd suspect that there might be a reason why this isn't happening...
possibly because the price of land is closer to £10,000 an acre.
--
I read on the internets that an acre can support about 7 people... if
farmed very intensively by the um... Japanese. That's what they manage
to achieve, the rest of us (apparently) not so much. 1000 people per
acre might not be a realistic "getting off at the bottom" point,
although it's certainly a step in the right direction.
Don't get me wrong - I'm massively in favour of, and inspired by these
stories of between-the-cracks survival... I just keep thinking "why the
hell should we have to? Can't we organise things better than this?"
Paul D. Fernhout
I knew there was a better reference that I just saw again:
http://www.cncinformation.com/CNC_DIY/CNC_DIY.html
"""
Hobbyists get into CNC for many different reasons. It really has a lot to
offer as a hobby. There are many challenges to it and that is what draws in
many people. This is not something you do just to pass the time. There is a
result in mind. Some people make it to Hobby CNC through a side door. They
come from areas like Combat Robot and RC Modeling. There are many small,
precise parts in these hobbies, which CNC is perfect for. There are also
many enthusiasts that like to customize things so they need a way to make
unique parts that they can't get anywhere else.
"""
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
> Charity is not a solution to what? Proofs of concepts? Helping some people?
> Helping create the core technology for self-replicating islands? Using the
> non-profit form with a board of directors to provide governance, like with
> Debian GNU/Linux's parent organization, SPI? What is charity not the
> (possible) solution to?
People supporting themselves.
Paul D. Fernhout
OK, but it has really almost always been in the last 100,000 years more
about communities supporting themselves. And communities don't work without
some good will and altruism (and granted, maybe some self-interested exchange).
But a lot of that is changing as the productivity of modern technology make
it possible for the few to support the many for fun. At least, that is the
promise of modern technology, as Debian GNU/Linux hints at.
--Paul Fernhout
Nick Taylor
>>> Charity is not a solution to what? Proofs of concepts? Helping some people?
>>> Helping create the core technology for self-replicating islands? Using the
>>> non-profit form with a board of directors to provide governance, like with
>>> Debian GNU/Linux's parent organization, SPI? What is charity not the
>>> (possible) solution to?
>> People supporting themselves.
>
> OK, but it has really almost always been in the last 100,000 years more
> about communities supporting themselves. And communities don't work without
> some good will and altruism (and granted, maybe some self-interested exchange).
This has absolutely nothing do with what I'm attempting to point out -
which is that living at the mercy of wealthy interests is not a viable,
or desirable model.
> But a lot of that is changing as the productivity of modern technology make
> it possible for the few to support the many for fun. At least, that is the
> promise of modern technology, as Debian GNU/Linux hints at.
You're trying to conflate atoms with bits; they're not the same thing.
Linux is not a model (or even a potential analogy) for anything physical.
Paul D. Fernhout
>>>> Charity is not a solution to what? Proofs of concepts? Helping some
>>>> people? Helping create the core technology for self-replicating
>>>> islands? Using the non-profit form with a board of directors to
>>>> provide governance, like with Debian GNU/Linux's parent
>>>> organization, SPI? What is charity not the (possible) solution to?
>>> People supporting themselves.
>> OK, but it has really almost always been in the last 100,000 years more
>> about communities supporting themselves. And communities don't work
>> without some good will and altruism (and granted, maybe some
>> self-interested exchange).
>
> This has absolutely nothing do with what I'm attempting to point out -
> which is that living at the mercy of wealthy interests is not a viable,
> or desirable model.
While there are undoubtedly some cruel psychopathic wealthy people (same as
there are some cruel psychopathic poor people), and certainly being wealthy
in a world with so many poor people is easily corrosive to the soul, much of
the wealth held in the USA is held on behalf of old women. Women live longer
than men and tend to inherit everything when their spouse dies. In general,
a lot of the rich/poor disparity (not all) is related to old/young issues.
(Even in the USA, who are the people who are wealthy with health care? Old
people, while young people with children have no default coverage.)
So, even with an L-Curve asset distribution, the issue is more complex that
"wealthy interests". Some of it has to do just with Grandma's beliefs (and
fears) about the world her grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in, as
well as her fears about her own future.
Example:
"Generation gap? About $200,000"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-05-20-cover-generation-wealth_N.htm
"The growing divide between the rich and poor in America is more generation
gap than class conflict, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal
government data. The rich are getting richer, but what's received little
attention is who these rich people are. Overwhelmingly, they're older folks.
Nearly all additional wealth created in the USA since 1989 has gone to
people 55 and older, according to Federal Reserve data. Wealth has doubled
since 1989 in households headed by older Americans. Not so for younger
Americans. Households headed by people in their 20s, 30s and 40s have barely
kept up with inflation or have fallen behind since 1989. People 35 to 50
actually have lost wealth since 1989 after adjusting for inflation, Fed data
show. Older people have always been wealthier than younger ones. What's
changed is the disparity between the generations. Old people have been
racing ahead, helped by government retirement benefits. Young people are
running in place, partly because they're delaying careers to get more
education."
So, I'm essentially suggesting the USA is already a matriarchy. :-)
Anyway, how do we get Grandma to see that an abundant future for all is good
for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren?
A lot of old women are really sharp. Some will get it. Matriarchy worked in
some Native American societies like the Iroquois. The problem is today's old
woman has trouble thinking about the seventh generation, or at least how to
connect current choices with that future -- which is no surprise as we all
do, given the culture we live in, as well as the rapid changes in our society.
We need better tools for seeing those consequences of our actions. Computer
simulation can help some with that. That was one reason for our garden
simulator -- so people could (in theory) see the long term consequences of
their gardening choices.
Anyway, just try it. Replace "the wealthy" with "grandma" for a time, and
see if it changes your thinking about society. Example, changing what you
wrote above: "This has absolutely nothing do with what I'm attempting to
point out - which is that living at the mercy of [Grandma] is not a viable,
or desirable model."
The fact is, living at the mercy of Grandma is a viable social model that
has worked for hundreds of generations -- if Grandma is hip. :-) And, if
she, along with other Grandmas and Great-Aunts, an so on, thinks about
things unto the Seventh Generation. And if together all the old women boot
out leaders who are not doing the same.
(This is not meant to disenfranchise childless older women, who actually may
be even more engaged in society than Grandmas as Great-Aunts and volunteers.)
Jane Jacobs and Ursula K. Le Guin are two examples of older women who are
role models.
Face it, if we are to survive as a society, it may just be old women who
save us from ourselves. :-) Or at least, a partnership of the young and the
old. That's easier to talk about than a partnership of the rich and the poor
(even if it is mostly the same thing).
(This is not to say some old women aren't trouble. Just like some young
people are too. :-)
>> But a lot of that is changing as the productivity of modern technology
>> make it possible for the few to support the many for fun. At least,
>> that is the promise of modern technology, as Debian GNU/Linux hints at.
>>
>
> You're trying to conflate atoms with bits; they're not the same thing.
> Linux is not a model (or even a potential analogy) for anything physical.
See, that's where open manufacturing can make a big difference. :-)
Atoms are becoming more and more like bits. And bits are becoming more and
more like atoms.
"The Center for Bits and Atoms"
http://cba.mit.edu/
Digital fabrication is bridging the gap between bits and atoms. And ideally,
the designs should be free and open.
--Paul Fernhout
Kevin Carson
> I think it's more realistic - but the initial thing was that we're
> basically trapped by banks and landlords.
> I don't recognise any particular moral reason why banks and landlords
> should even exist - especially now that we're all going to have to
> retire 5 years later to pay for their bailouts... so they can continue.
I strongly suspect that before the financial and economic collapse
runs its course, the banks' and real estate speculators' claims on
vacant lots and abandoned properties will be unenforceable. As was
the case with the recuperated Argentinian factories, the title holders
will simply abandon them (because they are too expensive to maintain
and they don't want to pay back taxes) as part of an overall process
of skipping out of town when they become insolvent and want to hide
from a lot of angry creditors and tax collectors.
I believe there have already been a few cases where the local sheriff
announced a policy of putting foreclosure evictions on the back
burner, being smart enough to perceive that while the occupant and the
house would both likely still exist in five years time, the bank might
very well not. And I expect the phenomenon to expand if foreclosures
continue to increase. Ditto for local governments who don't see the
point in evicting squatters from abandoned or condemned buildings, or
evicting neighborhood vacant lot gardeners.
> ... we've got this system where the majority of us are essentially
> slaves. We have this situation where we're having to work huge chunks of
> our lives to pay people who are creating no value, and the only reason
> this occurs, is that they've managed to grab part of our "hierarchy of
> needs" before we have.
>
> So we've got this situation, where "to support ourselves" outside of
> this, we're forced to find bits of wasteland in the cracks in the
> system... at the periphery. We The People. Pigeons.
>
> And from a traditional perspective, this seems reasonable... but really,
> why the fuck should we? Is this really the best we can do?
> Don't get me wrong - I'm massively in favour of, and inspired by these
> stories of between-the-cracks survival... I just keep thinking "why the
> hell should we have to? Can't we organise things better than this?"
Probably. But it's a question of getting from here to there. And the
first step for the counter-economy emerging within the bowels of state
capitalism (or functioning as its future gravedigger, or whatever
lefty metaphor you want to use) is to latch onto the abandoned or
waste or underutilized materials of state capitalism and making more
efficient use of them than the state capitalists can.
People using soil-intensive techniques on the scraps of land available
them use it several times more efficiently than conventional
agribusiness interests. People pooling capabilities of community
workshops and garage shops can remanufacture or repair old appliances
for a fraction of the cost of buying new ones, and in general
rehabilitate the castoffs of state capitalism for a tiny fraction of
what it costs the state capitalists to manufacture new ones. People
working out of household microenterprises, with virtually zero
overhead because they're using their own ordinary capital equipment
that they already owned anyway, can supply each other with bread,
sewing services, and the like. All this will have a huge effect in
reducing people's total need for hours of wage labor, and reducing the
percentage of needs supplied through the state capitalist system.
This, in turn, will increase the bargaining power of labor and mean
that state capitalist industry has a growing amount of idle capacity,
and over time can obtain less and less of the labor it needs at a
profitable wage. And this, in turn, will cause the value of the
ruling class's land and capital assets to collapse, so that the
counter-economy can gradually buy them up at pennies on the dollar and
expand their own operations. The vast tracts of worthless, unused or
underused land and lots of underused plant and equipment sitting idle
on the capitalists' hands will be the last thing to fall to the
countereconomy, like the U.S. Embassy in Saigon.
Kevin Carson
> How about this approach: buy land outside of city-limits.
>
> $1000/acre is not uncommon for such undeveloped land.
>
> Get 1000 people together to fund that purchase.
>
> It would be a slow start, but having full ownership eliminates the
> banksters, and becoming an actual city gives us the opportunity to
> structure city taxes more in-line with Henry George's LVT.
This is essentially what Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities movement
aimed to do: buy up several thousand acres of cheap rural land and
found a new town (including a ring of garden space to supply its food
needs), and then fund the town (as a private, voluntary entity) and
pay off the debt incurred buying the land by taxing the rapidly
appreciating land value created by all the new economic activity.