digital fabrication, sustainable technology, small scale democracy and speculative fiction
{ Monthly Archives }
Out of risk of dropping off the radar, I here post something, just to let you know I’m alive, and I really want to read Cory Doctorow’s new book, Little Brother. Currently chomping through Charlie Stross’ Glasshouse, and doing quite a bit of my own writing too. More blogs later!
Earlier today the protests in Reykjavík escalated into a riot. For the last couple of weeks truck drivers have staged numerous protests against government taxation of petrol. While I honestly can’t say I’m supportive of their cause or their methodology per se, I do admire their persistence and support their civil disobedience.
That said, the matter took a strange turn today when in the middle of a discussion police officers provided truck drivers with a faceful of mace, starting an all out riot. Several people were arrested. I don’t know the details or how exactly it was started, and the Icelandic media are portraying the story severely variably and generally incorrectly, stating amongst other things that teargas was used, which was not the case, and that a police officer was severely injured, which does not appear to be the case. Icelandic bloggers aren’t helping the uniformity much either. If somebody can tell the story as it happened, it would be good.
All in all, this event was interesting for a few reasons. First, it marked the first occasion of police violence towards protesters in this particular cause. The police and their supreme commander, minister of justice Björn Bjarnason (who happens to be one of the most ignorant people I’ve met) have been under fire in the media recently for having shown such lenience towards the drivers while having shown general brutality towards members of Saving Iceland and other environmental organizations during the last three years, protesters objecting to the coup d’état in the Reykjavík city council earlier this year, the members of Falun Gong who were illegally imprisoned and later deported during Jiang Zemin’s visit to Iceland a little under four years ago, and various other event of various sizes leading back to when Iceland joined NATO in 1949. It should be noted that during this time period, 1946-2008, one political party, the Independence Party, has been in power almost consecutively.
I don’t know what’s going to happen. The Icelandic government has recently agreed to found a “department of defense”, further militarizing the only nation on Earth without armed forces (handily excluding coast guard and swat team). The minister of justice wants to form a rather large “police reserve”. And so on and so on.
The extremes of authoritarianism and anarchism are starting to pull the world apart. Even here. And while I know that the anarchists - the more liberally oriented group - will win, this is still a fight that we have to participate in. Freedom won’t be free.
The OOXML got a ‘yes’ vote from Norway. Here is why. It is amazing what power bureaucrats have over the decision making process of allegedly democratic nations. “Political standardism” suggests that once a standard has been accepted by a nation it should be universally upheld - but in light of the decision making process demonstrated so thoroughly in this case, and very likely in various other cases throughout the history of international standards, one has to consider that standardization is also potentially harmful.
Consider that when I plug an electrical appliance into a wall socket I can safely assume that I will get 220 volts of current from it. It is standard. If I’m in America, I can assume 110 volts. Any variation from the standard is very specially signaled - and while one could always check what current each wall socket has (and make the assumption that it won’t suddenly change at a whim from the power company), the reason we choose not to is to minimize the amount of sanity checking we need to do in our increasingly complex environment. (Here I could go tangential into infinity on why ISO 9000 is a terrible idea.)
So we use standards to minimize noise in the communication channel that is physical reality. If the standards change regularly they have failed us. If they are contrary to reality, they have failed us - i.e., if a standard is unimplementable, bares little resemblance to the way things actually are, or does not encompass the full extent of reality. (example: RFC1918 defines three unroutable networks, but in reality there are four: 192.168.0.0/24, 10.0.0.0/8, 172.0.0.0/16 and 169.254.0.0/8. The last is de facto but not de jure.)
So of what use is OOXML? It is subject to whimsical changes by Microsoft, it has been shown to be unimplementable in reality (without resorting to certain undocumented hacks), and since it is harder to implement than competing standards such as ODF, in reality it is more likely to increase noise than decrease it. (As any fly on the wall in my office can attest to.)
Margt áhugavert má sjá um það gerviréttlæti sem við búum við með því að glugga í fjárlög Íslenska ríkisins. Ég fór að grenslast í tölurnar eftir að ég heyrði margítrekað að Ingibjörg Sólrún vildi gjarnan setja á stofn varnarmálastofnun á Íslandi til þess að verja okkur fyrir öllum þessum innrásarherum sem eru stöðugt að ráðast á okkur, og að hún vildi eyða í það 1.5 milljarða króna. Ég vildi vita hversu mikið eða lítið það þætti á mælikvarða þjóðarinnar.
Komst ég þá að því að Íslenskar Orkurannsóknir hafa rekstrartekjur upp á 800 milljónir króna árlega og rekstrarútgjöld upp á 770 milljónir, sem þýðir tekjur upp á 30 milljónir árlega. Fallega gert af þeim. Nýsköpunarmiðstöð Íslands kostar ríkið um 338 milljónir á árinu 2008, en heildarreksturinn kostar rétt tæpar 900 milljónir - afgangurinn af peningunum koma inn í gegnum útselda vinnu, styrki, og annað þvíumlíkt. Tækniþróunarsjóður kostar íslenska ríkið 580 milljónir á árinu. Orkustofnun kostar 513 milljónir, en heildarrekstrarkostnaður er 1.1 milljarður. Í þessum flokki, yfir heildina litið, eru c.a. 1.3 milljarðar krónur. Þessar stofnanir sem bera ábyrgð á orku- og tækniþróun Íslendinga kosta því aðeins minna en að koma upp varnarmálastofnun.
Alþingi kostar skattborgara um tvær milljarðar árlega. Í sundurliðuninni kemur fram að “Alþingiskostnaður” telur um 800 milljónir og “Almennur rekstur” um 800 til viðbótar, án þess að farið sé neitt dýpra í það.
Vegagerðin er dýr: 9 milljarðar króna, þar af eingöngu 263 milljónir greiddar úr ríkissjóði og um 5 milljarðar innheimtar af ríkistekjum. Umferðarstofan kostar ríkið 474,5 milljónir króna, siglingastofnun 858,8 milljónir, hafnarframkvæmdir 2 milljarðar. Við eyðum alveg töluvert í samgöngur, sem er ágætt.
Ferðamenn eru mjög mikilvægir fyrir okkur nú á dögum. Alþingi finnst það líka, og því fær Ferðamálastofa 365,5 milljónir úr ríkissjóði. Fangelsismálastofnun kostar 1 milljarð.
Háskóli Íslands fær 6.54 milljarða úr ríkissjóði, meðan hinar ýmsu stofnanir hennar taka tæpan milljarð í viðbót. Háskólinn á Akureyri fær 1.2 milljarða, Kennaraháskólinn 1.6, Háskólinn á Bifröst litlar 275 milljónir, Listaháskólinn 586,7 milljónir. Einkarekni Háskólinn í Reykjavík fær 1.858 milljarða króna á árinu 2008.
Meðal menntaskóla gildir þvílíkt jafnræði að MR fær 450 milljónir, MA 455 milljónir, ML 144 milljónir, MH 643 milljónir, MS 400 milljónir, MÍ 226 milljónir, ME 241 milljón, MK 668 milljónir, Kvennó 287 milljónir, Framhaldsskólinn í Vestmannaeyjum fær 164,2 milljónir úr ríkissjóði og Menntaskóli Borgarfjarðar fær 89,7 milljónir. Einkarekni Menntaskólinn Hraðbraut fær 173,2 milljónir úr ríkissjóði.
Landsbókasafn Íslands fær um 600 milljónir króna í rekstur sinn á árinu meðan Ratsjárstofnun fær 822 milljónir. Íslenska ríkið eyðir 1.4 milljörðum í þróunarmál og alþjóðlega hjálparstarfsemi, en bara 1.5 milljarða í Þjóðkirkjuna - eða 4 milljarða ef sóknargjöld eru meðtalin. Sem betur fer er heilum 282 milljónum varið í málefni fatlaðra.
Ég veit ekki. Kannski er ég bara svona vitlaus, en einhvernveginn finnst mér eins og verið sé að eyða rosalega miklum peningum í kolvitlausa hluti? Áherslurnar virðist vera á röngum stöðum. Hvernig er hægt að réttlæta fjögurra milljarða króna rekstur á Jesú Kristi og svo einhverja milljarða í viðbót til að Ingibjörg geti farið í tindátaleik þegar að menntamálin eru í rugli (og einkaaðilar duglegir að maka krókinn), minnihlutahópum mismunað harðlega, og rannsóknarafköst okkar vart mælanleg á heimsmælikvarða?
Hvað haldiði?
(ATH: margar tölur rúnaðar upp eða niður um einhver brot. Áreiðanleg heimild um allar tölur er á Fjárlagavefnum)
I have said this before: Technology is about people. Why does this catch-phrase seem so important to me? Because, simply, it stabs so many holes in the fabric of that which we have come to accept as truth.
The assumptions made constantly and persistently in our social, political, and economic environments have been left untouched for so long that many or most no longer think to question them: While mathematicians quarrel endlessly over the truth value of the axiom of choice, in any other field – particularly those fields which touch on our personal freedoms the most – the axioms laid out unknowingly by the thinkers of the last generations are never questioned deeply. While many will disagree with Smith or Marx, none or few would disagree with those assumptions that both made and neither mentioned.
Scarcity.
Throughout history, throughout politics, social theory and economics, one of our purest unquestioned assumptions has been that of scarcity: The inherent limit on available things. And within certain dogmas prevalent in the western world, the more immediately dangerous counter-assumption of the infinity of nature.
This assumption did make sense, at first, just like Euclid’s axiom of parallel lines made sense, at first.
Before the industrial revolution the human species simply did not have enough technology to actually make a significant impact on our natural environment: While the odd forest would disappear and the odd mine would deplete, there would always be another forest and another mine. There were enough fish in the sea, there were enough buffalo on the prairies.
Likewise, we did not have enough technology to immerse ourselves in relative cornucopia – fishing and hunting was hard work, farming was a slow and difficult process. The trees certainly didn’t chop themselves down.
But with the mechanization of our fundamental processes, a development starting with the plow and continuing on into the unforeseeable future, we started to make an impact, our rate of fabrication grew, as did our rate of consumption, and now we have reached a time when nobody need starve, but many do.
Many do starve. Many are want of water, food, clothing, education. And yet despite all our technology there are three billion humans who live in abject poverty. That’s half of our species. One billion live off less than one US dollar a day.
Yet it has been estimated that roughly half of the agricultural produce of the western world goes to waste. Why is this?
The truth is that while we have, as a species, transcended in a number of ways many of those scarcities that may define us, we have built a plethora of systems to deal with these scarcities that have refused to give way to more egalitarian systems. The assumption of scarcity has caused us to build systems of ownership, systems of priority, property, greed. The obvious solution to the problem of famine is to redistribute that which would otherwise go to waste – transport that which is not needed to where it is needed. Or in Marxist parlance: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
This idea was hardly meant to be enacted at a personal level, but rather at a societal level, where varying resources of different places would supplement each other; where geography would be a function of possibility rather than desperation. Where humans could move forward in synergy.
Smith saw the same problem and found a similar solution, albeit far less egalitarian: the free market was intended as a negative feedback loop on a global scale, an ideal for maximizing the potential of each environment by leveraging value: a concept that we cannot accurately model, for it is fickle. And while the idea of the free market is truly a beautiful one, I have yet to see a market that is truly free.
Indeed, in a free market one would have expected the problem of distribution of agricultural produce would solve itself, on a system-wide scale, eventually. But it hasn’t. Everybody and his mother has had a go at explaining why: Perhaps Africa is too poor (despite having immense landmass and far more natural resources than Europe). Perhaps Asia is too uncivilized (despite having several thousand years more experience in that field than the west). Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
Perhaps people are looking in the wrong places, laying blame where it doesn’t belong. On this subject I could talk endlessly.
But in all this exposition on the assumption of scarcity, I have not once mentioned digital fabrication, the subject of this flurry of words. So now I shall.
People must realize that digital fabrication is not a revolution. It is not a wishing wand that will make the problems of the world go away. It is merely a technology, a greatly hyped one at that. Trust me – I have contributed greatly to the hype.
Digital fabrication, the idea of building machines that can assemble anything from the atom on up, including copies of themselves, is a natural progression of the industrial revolution. It is a natural step from where we are now. It’ll take a while to come into fruition, but it is interesting today for two distinct reasons.
The first is that, unlike the so-called digital revolution that put a computer on every desk and changed the way we do communication and computation, the effects of the advent of digital fabrication have been predicted to some degree since von Neumann. And while even the most absurd predictions have certainly underestimated the effect of being able to make anything at the touch of a button, at the end of the day this is just another technology. It will change how we live, but not who we are.
Nothing fundamental will change in our perception of the physical world by our being able to assemble a stuffed turkey atom-for-atom. We already have access to stuffed turkeys, so we already know what having them does for us as a people. Yes, certainly, there will be new options available to us, like growing skyscrapers out of diamonds, but that is not where the greatest entry point for discussion of digital fabrication lies. Rather, it is in the economical impact, which is hard to quantify.
Which brings us to the other thing: although we somehow managed to emerge from the industrial revolution with two major economic theories, both of which are built on the same faulty assumptions, it will be the economics that will have to be largely rewritten in a post-scarcity world. The technologies that have been popping up over the last two decades in free peer-to-peer distribution have become a model for this: suddenly you can share anything that can be converted into a digital data stream, be it music, movies, or the recipe for your Grandmother’s famous stuffed turkey. It will be having to face the potential digitization of everything that will be the coup de grace for our current models.
Capitalism will not work, for there will be no capital. Communism will not work, for there will be no need for the commune.
Rethinking scarcity is difficult, and I don’t think it’s something that the true believers of the current economic models are mentally equipped to do. People who have become indoctrinated into a certain type of thinking will always have a great difficulty thinking outside of that particular box. But the 12 year olds who are sharing music today, the hackers who made this all possible, the people who are heralding the digital fabrication movement, the free software, free hardware and free culture movements, these are the people who will break the arbitrary rules made up by those who didn’t think hard enough before making assumptions. These are the people who can really make a difference.
And you know what? These people are you.
Vinay blagged:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/print/4109
IEEE article suggesting that Metcalf’s law (value of a network equals the square of the number of users) is wrong, and the truth is more like n log(n).
Seems to me like this ought to be something one can check with, say, sale prices or other financial performance metrics.
I immediately had a thought on the subject: It may well be the case that both are right. That is to say, Metcalf’s law may be a “maximal value theorem”, while the IEEE article suggests a “mean value theorem”.
Let’s face it: Networks are rarely fully utilized, and indeed most networks grow more slowly as more users join them after a certain threshold point - one that your yacht club has far surpassed, and your national democracy has always been far beyond, but one that Facebook doesn’t seem to have slammed into (yet), and one that seems far off the horizon for the Internet in general.
The core question, I suppose, is one of connectivity: how well are individuals within the network connected and how strongly are the possible synergies within the network being utilized? If we assume that n log(n) is the average utilization, then we are talking about full utilization in small groups (under 4 people), but on average there is less than 7% utilization of possible communication pathways by the time you hit Dunbar’s number (150 individuals).
There’s definitely something there worth looking at.
Thanks to Herbert for pointing this out.
I’ve not been blagging a whole lot for the last couple of weeks. Sorry. Everything has been rather hectic. I’ve got plenty to rant about though, perhaps I’ll start catching up during this week.
I just got back to Reykjavík from a road trip around Iceland, wherein I visited my friend Alli for his 40th birthday in Egilsstaðir and dropped by Akureyri and visited my sister there briefly. It was fun to finally see the east coast of Iceland - it had long been a bit of a weak point in my otherwise glorious travels.
But okay. Later on today I’m going to Vestmannaeyjar, and it looks like I’ll be back in Reykjavík for the weekend. The following two or three weeks I’m probably going to be tossed about a bit, organizing the Fab Lab in Vestmannaeyjar, doing some job training somewhere, and trying to mix in as much madness as I can, generally.
There is some pressure on me to visit a small town near Aberdeen, Scotland, in May, but so far I’m not very hopeful I can make it. I’d love to go and am working on it. That, and a few other items that are vague possibilities, make up this dream schedule:
In between doing these things I’m hoping I’ll have time to do a lot of interesting work, both relating to Fab Labs in general, specifically the Kokompe and Callooh projects and getting the Vestmannaeyjar lab up - hopefully another one in Ísafjörður or Reykjavík too - and finishing my novel The Dream Machine (which has been lying very close to completion way too long and just needs a couple of evenings of power writing to finish up the bulk of it) as well as rewriting and fixing The Digital Fabrication Primer (as well as finding a new name for it!)…
The good thing about being in Vestmannaeyjar is there’s not an awful lot to do besides work and enjoy nature. Since the weather hasn’t been very good I’ve just been hobbled up at the office fairly late every evening, or catching up on my knitting or other creative projects, as well as doing some work on trying to decompose the time series describing trends in the north Atlantic puffin population in Vestmannaeyjar into component waveforms that can then further be analyzed to infer the major causes for population fluctuation… it’s fun to do biological mathematics every now and then, but don’t expect any Nature articles from me! Perhaps as the weather gets better I’ll have an increasingly stable platform for cool innovative stuff, and I hope a lot of inspired people will come and visit me.
