Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

I got a great reply to a post that I think I’ll use as an entry point into discussing something I’ve been avoiding. The Icelandic financial crisis is just a small and fairly insignificant part of the global financial meltdown if counted in pure dollars and cents, but yet for me being here and witnessing it first hand it’s extremely hard to keep an objective view of things. For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a fairly substantial essay which covers my opinions on the theoretical and practical aspects of the world financial situation as a corollary to its central theme, which is the way in which our society as a whole is improperly structured. Because my efforts are being poured into that essay and keeping up with what’s going on over here, this discussion will be much less theory and lots more practice, pertaining to Iceland specifically rather than the failures of the world economy or global power structures.

So on with James’ comments:

I’ve been regularly checking for updates on your blog particularly since the financial crisis hit Iceland seemingly more mercilessly than anywhere else. I’ve been eager to hear your particular perspective on events that are unfolding in your country. I knew that Iceland would be exposed to the downturn in the markets because of its dependence on world trade to meet its most basic needs, but had never expected to witness the severity of the current crisis.

Let’s start at the beginning. No, let’s not. Let’s start at a point in history. Let’s say 1783.

In 1783 one of the largest geological events in recorded history occurred when Lakagígar errupted in what is known as Skaftáreldar. The volcanic plume rose up to the stratosphere which plunged the ash-covered country into darkness, killing crops and livestock and inducing a famine. The dark cloud spread far and wide, and some historians have even attempted to draw a causal relationship between Skaftáreldar and the beginnings of the French Revolution (1786-1799), although direct evidence for this is slim; however, it is a fact that Europe that year and in years following experienced unusually cold winters, leading to an interesting variety of drawings of people ice-skating on the Thames.

In 1783 it became clear that Iceland’s dependence on foreign imports was not indeed as great as was supposed. That year and in following years of course there was a strong need for imported goods, but prior to that the level of self-sufficiency had been largely ignored.

Fast-forward to 1808. After the destruction of Copenhagen by the British in 1807 and the following blockade on all Danish ships that lasted until 1809, there was very little in the way of ship traffic to Iceland. The entire year 1808 not a single ship arrived in Iceland from abroad, and resultingly no supplies arrived. In 1809 three ships made it to Iceland early on in the year, and famine was averted, but the level of dependency on imported goods, especially foodstuffs had increased significantly in the previous two decades.

In following decades the Icelandic Independence movement started to come to be, with a long lineage of patriotic poets in Copenhagen writing at length about the beauty of the homeland. By the 1880’s there was a substantial movement in Iceland for independence, similar in momentum to the current Faeroese and Greenish struggles, and in an act of placation Iceland was granted a constitution in 1874, which was renewed in 1918 at the end of World War I when Iceland got home rule. In 1944 after Denmark had been under German control for several years Iceland declared independence.

Here is where something strange happened. Iceland had been fighting for independence for upwards of a century, and when finally it became a reality, what happened? Did we have a social uprising like the French? No. Did we write a new constitution like the Americans? No. In fact, the issue passed without much debate and the constitution handed to Iceland by the Danes in 1818 was only changed slightly, in the exaggeratory words of one: “Striking out King and writing President in its place.”

The constitution was accepted temporarily for the term of one year. In 1945 it was accepted agai and it’s been left mostly untouched until this day.

In short: Iceland has become increasingly dependent on other countries through the years and decreasingly capable of making hard political choices. So what has the Icelandic government been doing since we gained independence?

After WWII Iceland received a lot of money through the Marshall Plan, which was smartly deposited and stored for a while. In the 1980’s the money was used to buy trawlers for the Icelandic fishing fleet, which greatly increased the value of the economy, pushing Iceland into inflation of around 80% in the mid-1980’s. The ’80’s were marked in Iceland by several things - the Reagan-Gorbachev meeting, quotas on currency trading that limited individuals quite severely and companies much less so, a housing loan system where the loans were eaten up by the inflation leaving home-owners happy but the banking sector distraught.

When I was newly born, in the middle of this turmoil that was the ’80’s, there was a general workers strike that had the government rationing out perishables such as milk to families. During this strike, I’ve heard, my father impersonated U.S. Air Force personnel to enter the air force base at Keflavík and smuggle powdered milk out for me. This is what I’ve heard.

You can imagine this kind of situation, it was fairly easy to enact positive change. So in the following years lots and lots of laws were passed, slowly pushing this fledging nation from an unstable nanny-state into a ultramodern capitalist economy. Regulations were relaxed, rules were dropped, and starting around the mid-1990’s under Davíð Oddsson’s governments, slowly every single government agency worth its salt started to be privatized, starting with the banks and the telephone company.

The banks were largely bought up by wealthy businessmen on the one hand and the families of those who sat in government on the other. More or less 80% of the wealth produced in the 90’s can be loosely traced to ten families that were very active in the original independence movement around the early 1800’s. That’s the way it is here. Small communities are very frequently controlled by minuscule cliques that have consolidated their power for centuries. No use crying over it really, there’s not much that can break that kind of spell. (I’m not saying this to be conspiratorial - that would not be useful. I’m saying this to point out the queerness of, say, the current minister of Justice being the son of the former prime minister, who happens to be the son of a former prime minister… point at another democratic nation where that’s happened.)

As you can imagine, it is hard to point at any one moment where everything started to build up to what’s playing out now. There’s no entry point, there’s nowhere where everything started slipping. Rather, the economy continued to boom as more and more was privatized and put into the hands of the same few hundred people, and the nation sat placated and enjoyed itself. Now free of import restrictions, everybody had two jeeps - not SUV’s, but proper four wheel drive six seater guzzlers on 36 inch tires. Everybody had a second home, and went on frequent trips to the Canary Islands. Everybody had loans atop of loans atop of loans. And with the exception of the last of those, by ‘everybody’ I don’t mean everybody. Most just barely get by.

So what caused the Icelandic financial crisis? Greed, corruption, all that jazz. But more importantly, it was the Little Country that Could, a kind of morbid Nietzcheesque miricle, and as is always the case with small economies that go to far too fast, over-leveraging was the ultimate downfall.

Was it any fault of Iceland’s, per se? Well yes, of course. It was the fault of the government for not taking preventive measures, it was the fault of the central bank, who’s chairman just happens to be the guy who made Iceland the way it is today, it was the fault of the vulture capitalists and the bastards who own everything. But much to the contrary of what can be heard from the various speakers at the protests that have been going on for eight weeks running, this is also the fault of everybody who stood idly by and didn’t question what was going on. For some, for the minimally educated people living in tiny villages working dead-end jobs and drinking their wits away every weekend - not be cause they can’t do better, because the culture they live in expects exactly that and naught else from them - I will grant them the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t take a lot of economic theory to see why the CC-PP game sucks ass, but you actually do have to think about it. The rest… the people at the universities who think for a living, the number crunchers at the banks who had everything they needed to see this a decade away, they’re all just as guilty as the government. The government they elected.

There’s been a lot of pointing fingers and placing guilt during this entire thing; but that just isn’t the point. What we need is to figure out what we did wrong and how we can do it differently, and if you read the literature of the time when all this shit was beginning, you might find the answer. It’s there. It’s astoundingly blatantly obvious. Just look.

I find it interesting that the coverage of Iceland’s woes always fail to show that in April, Iceland’s markets, banks, and currency were faced by speculative attacks by foreign hedge funds after the unwinding of the subprime market in the U.S.
http://tinyurl.com/5ngv6m

The speculative attacks were quite grim indeed. There was talk as early as May, as far as I remember, of British vulture capitalists and stock breakers doing all sorts of dodgy short-selling and asset shifting that might not even have been strictly legal. The joke of tomorrow: Q: How do you bankrupt a country? A: Ask an Englishman.

The U.S. Subprime market was also a bit of a fuckup. It was an example of what happens when value dithers into infinitesimal degrees, to the point where nothing of the original value is actually encapsulated within the traded good. The fact that the U.S. Subprime market started this chain reactions will hopefully live in the minds of whichever group of dimwits gets the job of figuring out how the post-Bretton Woods system is going to work.

I personally think this economic crisis was engineered for a threefold purpose. a) to use it as a justification to push through trade negotiations via the WTO. b)to force relactriant BRIC nations to pull down their remaining “trade” barriers to the Western Nations so that as during the 1980s US and European multinationals will be able to buy the and resources of vulnerable nations at pennies on the pound , and c) to regulate the world’s banking system in the interests of a more consolidated industry and a cartel of nations rather than just the United States and Great Britain.

Quite. Remember, it’s not paranoid to think they’re out to get you. It’s only paranoid to think that they’re working together. And to think that they actually know what they’re doing is very naïve indeed. The fact is that the smartest people in the financial sector are just that: the smartest people in the financial sector. That’s not really saying a lot. They honestly don’t have much of a clue what’s going on, they’re just very adept at surfing the waves without getting wet.

I have my own thoughts on this. One is that certain elements within the Icelandic goverment and possibly the EU would like nothing more than for Iceland to become an EU member, because a country with the natural resources of Iceland signing them off to an aged troll of a continent like Europe with no real reciprocal advantage is the Bruxelleite’s wet dream. Weeks ago I sighed deeply when at the protests I saw people waving the EU flag as if it was a good idea. I sidled up to them and asked them if they suffered from a severe form of retardation. They claimed they didn’t. To my mind though it is criminally stupid to think that anybody’s interests are better served by moving more power to fewer people who are farther away and share less common interests.

So you can imagine my elation when today at the protests I saw a guy with a EU flag with a big cross over it, and nobody else with EU flags. I’m not sure if it was just too cold out for the EU people or whether there’s been some change of sentiment, but I’m hoping it’s both.

If your keeping abreast of international news you would know all of these things are being negotiated in various political and economic forums.

I get very little news of real global events I’m afraid, and our government is very good at keeping us in the dark. I’d appreciate any feeds you can provide me with to keep informed of the real issues.

I believe it to be engineered as the current crisis mirrors the last last economic crisis in the 1970-1980s almost perfectly save its unfolded so much faster.

The Council on Foreign Relations wrote a detailed economic and political analysis during the mid 1970s as part of their “1980s project” that aired the notion of introducing a global credit/currency system based on relations hyperregional currencies a la the US Dollar and a European currency and advocated the abolishment of national currencies through undermining national sovereignty through “controlled disintegration” of the world economy. Heres a telling excerpt here.

“In a tiered system the tasks for American statecraft will be great. What is being requested is that a form of collective leadership be developed in the management of the interanational economy to replace the individualistic leadership of the United States that has prevailed since World War II.”
-Edward L. Morse

“The obvious danger in such a regime resides in its potential instability. Some limited loosening is by no means unequivocally undesirable. It can be seen as a rational response to the earlier tendency, which was most manifest in the 1960s, for economic integration to run far ahead of both actual and desired political integration, thereby forcing countries into suboptimal policy choices. A degree of controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate objective for the 1980s and may be the most realistic one for a moderate international economic order. A central normative problem for the international economic order in the years ahead is how to ensure that the dis-integration indeed occurs in a controlled way and does not rather spiral into damaging restrictionism.”

-Fred Hirsch and Michael Doyle

Yeah. The worrying thing about all of this is that there might be somebody somewhere with a very well plotted out plan. But I think it’s just a bunch of greedy beggars in smoky rooms trying to figure out how the fuck to keep people from figuring out that they’re just as lost as the rest of us. More on conspiracy theories later. Right now I’m going to get back to trying to find a way out of this mess.

I’ve often said that “capitalism will eat itself,” referring to how capitalistic progress will inevitably lead to self-defeat, which I hope will lead to a post-scarcity economy and greater personal freedoms for everybody.

I never thought much about the wording, but now I’ve realized it was oddly prophetic, and I have photographic evidence. Yes, that is the vice-chairman of the Independence Party (minister of education) with toast with the logo of the Independence Party, Iceland’s most right-wing ultra-capitalist party.

It was a silly joke we had at the office the other day. Frosti suggested that we make her some toast with the laser, and the mayor was going to give it to her. We churned out a few slices and made, we hope, a lasting impact.

Being silly is important, and the ability to be silly should not be taken for granted. A lot of people are feeling very unsettled these days, specially in Reykjavík where the spectre of bankruptcy and unemployment is overshadowing many or most happy thoughts. Being able to have a good laugh with one of the most stressed out people in the country over a piece of sliced bread kind of means that we’re all still human at the end of the day and we shouldn’t worry too much about imaginary organizational structures like the economy.

So take this as a suggestion: Go outside and be silly. Get a funny hat. Wear a pink track suit to work. Scuba gear to the cinema, your coat on backwards, or use a novelty oversized cucumber in place of a cellphone. We all deserve a good laugh. Let’s laugh at the economy, let’s laugh at being serious, let’s laugh at the situation our collective greed has landed us in, let’s laugh at capitalism and all the other stupid ideas that people hold on to.

Let’s laugh. Okay?

Great speech.

Margur spyr sig hvort lífræn ræktun borgar sig. Í greininni Organic agriculture and the global food supply eftir Perfecto, et al, eru rannsakaðar 293 uppskerur sem nota ýmist lífrænan eða ólífrænan áburð í bæði þróunarlöndum og þróuðum löndum. Þar kom í ljós að þróunarlönd gætu að jafnaði haft meira upp úr notkun lífræns áburðar en ólífræns en öfugt sé farið að jafnaði með þróaðari lönd.

Ennfremur sýnir rannsóknin að ef alfarið væri skipt í lífræna ræktun á heimsvísu myndi matvælaframleiðsla heimsins vel duga fyrir alla íbúa jarðar, jafnvel þótt íbúafjöldinn aukist verulega.

Þá gætu mörg þróunarlönd á borð við Cameroon og Mali allt að sexfaldað uppskeru sína með því að nota lífrænar ræktunaraðferðir.

Eftir allt hafarí síðustu ára liggur við að hvert mannsbarn á Íslandi þekkji framleiðsluferli áls að einhverju leyti: Bauxít, álríkt málmgrýti sem er aðallega fenginn úr yfirborðsnámum í Ástralíu, Kína, Brasilíu og nokkrum öðrum löndum, er flutt til annarra landa þar ýmist orka eða vinnuafl er ódýrt, þar sem hún er hreinsuð með gríðarlega orkufreku ferli: fyrst er málmgrýtið hitað í þrýstitönkum upp í 150-200°C og blandað við natríum hýdroxíð (svokallað Bayer ferli) og þannig er rauðleitur leir að nafni gibbsít einangrað. Gibbsítið er svo hitað upp í 1000°C, en þá bráðnar það, og þá er það rafgreint með ærnum tilkostnaði með svokölluðu Hall-Héroult ferli. Einhver afbrigði af þessu ferli eru til og margt fleira sem kemur til, en þetta er sæmileg nálgun.

En hér skal staldrað við. Hví bauxít? Aðeins lítið brot þess áls sem finnst á jörðinni er bundið í þessa tilteknu gerð málmgrýtis, en stærsti hlutinn er bundinn í mun algengara grjóti á borð við andalúsít, kyanít og öðrum alúmínósilikötum. Eina raunverulega ástæðan fyrir því að bauxít er notað er vegna þess að úrvinnsluferli þess hefur verið mest notað sögulega og var eitt af þeim fyrstu sem uppgötvaðist.

Önnur aðferð sem hefur verið mun minna notuð var þróuð til að vinna ál úr leirtegund sem heitir kaolín. Grundvallaratriðið í þeirri aðferð er að hægt er að sleppa rafgreiningu alfarið og ná álinu með einföldu efnaferli: Leirinn er mulinn og hann kalsíumbættur við c.a. 750°C. Því næst er vítissódi blandaður við það og álið flýtur upp. Ferlinu er lýst mun nánar í Bandarísku einkaleyfi 4388280, sem rann út árið 2003, en auðvitað eru svo til fræðibækur sem lýsa þessu líka.

Hvort að þessi aðferð skili frá sér minna af gróðurhúsalofttegundum og annarskyns mengun en rafgreiningarferlið veit ég ekki, en þó tel ég það víst að þar sem að þetta ferli er mun orkusparnara væri hægt að reisa álver án þess að þurfa að reisa stórar raforkuvirkjanir.

Ekki það að við þurfum neitt á fleiri álverum að halda. Í skjölum frá Century Aluminum sem ég kom höndum yfir fyrir nokkrum mánuðum (látum það liggja milli hluta hvernig það átti sér stað) kom skýrt fram að í dag væri framleiðslugeta þeirra frekar langt umfram eftirspurn á heimsmarkaði, og var eingöngu vegna framleiðslutaps í Kína árið 2006 sem þeir náðu að halda niðri vörulager sínum. Væntanlega verður töluvert framleiðslutap á þessu ári líka, en miðað við 7% árlega aukningu á eftirspurn á áli á heimsvísu – tala sem þeir gefa sér – munu þeir samt ekki lenda í framleiðsluvanda fyrr en eftir tæpan áratug. Svipaða sögu má sennilega segja af Alcoa og öðrum álrisum.

Í dag er áætlað að hvert mannsbarn í Kanada standi fyrir um 27 kílóa neyslu á hreinu áli á ári. Miðað við sömu neyslu hér á landi má gera ráð fyrir að á meðalævi, um 80.7 ár skv. Hagstofu Íslands, sé hver einstaklingur ábyrgur fyrir um 2,2 tonnum af áli. Sú tala heldur áfram að hækka. Bandaríska stofnunin CRI áætlar að aðeins um 52% álumbúða fari í endurvinnslu á lífsferli sínum, en miðað við að um 20% áls fer í umbúðir af þessu tagi er hægt að búast við um 220 kílóum af áli sem má finna í sorpgryfjum landsins fyrir hvern einstakling á Íslandi eftir tæp hundrað ár.

220 kíló af hreinu áli, urðað. Það er slatti.

Mannkynið reiðir sig í sífellt auknum mæli á ál sem eitt af undirstöðuefnum samfélagsins. Þó tekur það senn að breytast vegna framfara í koltrefjaefnum. Koltrefjar eru mun léttari og sterkari en ál, og hafa auk þess meiri tilheygingu til að sveigjast en að brotna – gjarnan er talað um að efnið sé meira “lifandi”, jafn asnalega og það hljómar. Þetta þýðir þó að flugvélar á borð við nýju Boeing 787-Dreamliner vélina, sem smíðaðar eru úr koltrefjum í stað áls, eru í fyrsta lagi mun léttari, og í annan stað eru mun minni líkur á að eitthvað brotni í þeim. Dreamliner þoturnar eru með það sveigjanlega vængi að ef að vélin lendir einhverra hluta vegna í frjálsu falli geta vængirnir svignað þar til þeir snertast fyrir ofan vélina, sem er mun jákvæðari hegðun en að þeir brotni hreinlega af.

Sömuleiðis eru bílar sem smíðaðir eru úr koltrefjum mun þolnari gagnvart árekstrum. Minniháttar dældir laga sig bara. Auk þess, við árekstur, þá tekur koltrefjagrind á sig mikið af afli árekstursins eins og hlaup, sem eykur öryggi bílstjóra og farþega til muna. Brotþol koltrefja er um tólf sinnum meiri per fermeter en í stáli. Það hvað koltrefjarnar eru léttar gerir það einnig að verkum að eldsneytisþörfin er mun minni. Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) áætlar í bók sinni, Winning the Oil Endgame, að eingöngu 6% afls í venjulegum bíl fer í það að koma bílstjórnaum milli staða – afgangurinn er varmatap í vél, núningur bílsins við jörðina, og svo afl í að yfirvinna massa bílsins sjálfs. Með því að gera bílinn 50% léttari mætti minnka eldsneytisþörf um 68% samkvæmt RMI.

Íslendingar hafa verið á álfylleríi í langan tíma og það er byrjað að hafa verulega slæmar afleiðingar fyrir okkur með tilliti til efnahags, mengunarmála og ímyndar Íslands út á við. Nú finnst mér vera tvennt skynsamlegt í stöðunni. Annað væri að taka nýjum álverum með miklum fyrirvara og leggja áherslu á að skoðuð séu mun vistvænni og orkusparneytnari framleiðsluferli á þeim álverum sem nú eru til – það ætti ekki undir nokkrum kringumstæðum að vera nauðsynlegt að reisa fleiri vatnsfallsvirkjanir á Íslandi á næstu áratugum, enda ætti frekar að reyna að minnka orkuþörf fyrirtækja og heimila. “Mjúk orka” er ódýrari fyrir alla.

Í bókinni Small is Profitable sýnir höfundurinn, Amory Lovins, með afgerandi hætti að engin raforkuvirkjun sem framleiðir meira en 100 MW hafi nokkurntíman verið arðbær til lengri tíma litið þó svo að skammtímaávinningurinn sé ef til vill nokkur. Kárahnjúkavirkjun hefur rafmagnsframleiðslugetu upp á 780 MW, og miðað við samninga ríkisins við álrisana væri allótrúlegt ef að kostnaðurinn við að reisa virkjunina myndi skila sér til baka á líftíma hennar.

Hitt, sem væri hægt að gera, væri að skoða möguleika á að stofna koltrefjaverksmiðjur á Íslandi. Framleiðsla koltrefjaefna er raunar í dag frekar óvistvænt ferli, en eflaust mætti bæta það mjög mikið með góðu hugviti. Það væri firra að reiða efnahag Íslands á ál nú þegar koltrefjar hafa möguleika á að taka við af stórum hluta þeirra verkefna sem ál er notað í.

Svo auðvitað mætti líka spyrja sig hvort að stóriðja sé nokkuð svo sniðug. Minni framleiðslueiningar og staðvær framleiðsla eru hugmyndir sem hafa margsannað sig á síðustu áratugum. Þessi tilhneyging til að vilja hafa allt stórt er byggt á þeim algenga misskilningi að stofnkostnaður sé fasti eða vaxi mjög hægt þegar skalað sé upp, eins og allir starfsmenn fyrirtækisins Goretex gætu útskýrt mjög vel.

Margar mítur eru til, sérstaklega hvað snýr að iðnaði. Ef að það er einhver lexía sem við hefðum öll gott af því að læra, þá er það að mjög mikilvægt sé að spyrja sig réttu spurninganna. Hvað stóriðnað, virkjanagerð og mengunarmál varðar á Íslandi þá hafa menn verið að spyrja kolrangra spurninga allt of lengi.

Nokkrar heimildir og ýtarefni:

• Small is Profitable eftir Amory Lovins (PDF)
• Winning the Oil Endgame eftir Amory Lovins (PDF)
• CRI - Aluminum recycling rate
• National Encyclopedia - South Africa - Mining
• Extraction of Aluminum from Clay - US Patent 4388280
• Hall-Héroult process - Wikipedia
• Hagstofa Íslands
• “Vafasöm gögn” frá Century Aluminum
• Viðtal við Marcin Jakubowski: Global Swadeshi Dialogues 1
• Samtal við Marcin Jakubowski, Open Farm Tech
• Myndir: Ýmsar heimildir. Afsakið höfundarréttarbrotin.

Samkvæmt rekstrarkostnaðarlíkani FÍB má gera ráð fyrir að einkabíll sé ekinn um 30000 km á ári að jafnaði. Fjöldi skráðra einkabíla á Íslandi 31. desember 2000 var 158936 og hefur aukist verulega síðan. Í gær hækkaði verð á bensínlíter um 6 krónur, sem þýðir að hækkunin í gær, m.v. 9.5 lítrum á hundraðið sem meðaleyðslu á bensíni, hljóðar upp á 7.5 milljónir króna á dag í aukaleg rekstrarútgjöld fyrir Íslenska einkabílaflotann.

Það eru um 2.7 milljarðar á ári.

Nú mætti ef til vill skoða það fyrirfram að spara um 27 milljarðar til tíu ára miðað við engar hækkanir á bensínverði með því að fjárfesta 10 milljörðum í að breyta helming bílaflotans í vetnis-, metans- eða rafmagnsbíla og koma fyrir áfyllingastöðvum fyrir allt ofangreint um allt land. Skynsamlegt? Já.

(ATH að hér er BARA verið að tala um sex krónu aukninguna frá því í gær!)

Marcin and Vinay did a great dialogue over on Global Swadeshi, out today. Check it out.

In response to my podcast of the other day, Fenn asked:

How should one go about building a post-scarcity society in a patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate?

There’s no easy way to answer this, as the answer is neither obvious nor uniquely defined. I can posit three suggestions that I think are deeply related:

1. First, one of the things that will inevitably happen over the next decade, which has been going on for the past three decades, is that the idea of copyright will change. We are accustomed to an extremely rigid system for copyrights, born out of a greed which no longer really has any place in the realms of man in our new digital reality. Those who wish to uphold the old form of copyright are increasingly having to criminalize children and family folks, and any system which marginalizes the majority of the population (by stamps of unethicality, criminality, or whatever) is doomed to die (in the cybernetic sense) eventually.
2. Second, there has been a lot of talk about manufactured scarcity on Global Swadeshi recently, and in a number of other places. This has relevance here: We already live in a post-scarcity society on a number of levels. We haven’t achieved full cornucopia yet, but for all intents and purposes nobody should be want of anything. The only thing stopping us from having this kind of global equality is the patent-and-copyright-encumbered intellectual climate of which you speak. But that intellectual climate isn’t self-organizing. Rather, it’s a result of the assumption of scarcity, which leads people to believe they can’t survive without property, which leads to greed. This may sound simplistic, but it needn’t be more complicated. So if you want to build a post-scarcity world, start by breaking the current system and replacing it with something better. This can be done in a number of ways and I don’t support any single one more than any other, but as a rule the less violence applied the better.
3. Third, there is the option of doing the subversive hack. Nokia, amazingly, heralded this in the hardware market by saying that their patents were free for use in free/open source projects without royalties, and that they would not allow companies that did not follow the same guideline to use their patents. This was a big win, and completely parallel to the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons licenses. Basically, these licensing schemes are viral in nature, and the more you spread the meme the stronger it becomes. Because of this I have been discussing open hardware licensing with a number of ‘big guys’ over the last couple of months, and I happen to know that Richard Stallman and Neil Gershenfeld have been discussing this issue (Neil told me the other day…).

Or, taken into short form:

1. Just wait, the problem will solve itself.
2. Encourage the problem to solve itself by political activism. (And btw, anarchism is the way to go)
3. Push for subversive licensing methods and adopt free hardware licenses that are hostile towards patents.

On the third note, I think I’ll take the liberty of posting a few highlights of the mails thrown back and forth under the topic “Open Hardware License” a couple of months ago. I hope nobody minds.

The discussion started with Michel Bauwens asking about Open Hardware Licenses, or more generally, Open Source Physical Objects,

What do we need to have “economically-significant, replicable, open source physical production efforts?”, i.e. true Distributive Production. Marcin Jakubowski proposes a set of OSE Specifications to judge such efforts.
Key entries: Free Hardware Design, Open Development, Open Customization ; Open Design, Open Hardware, Open Innovation, Open Source, Open Source Product Design, Open Source Hardware
See also: Citizen Product Design; Co-Creation; Co-Design ; Desktop Manufacturing ; Peer Production Entrepreneurs ; Self-organized Design Communities
Open Source for Appropriate Technology: Instructables, Honeybee Network, Appropedia, Howtopedia, Demotech
Sixteen Key Technologies for an Open Habitat. Marcin Jakubowski [3]
Key organizations: Open Design Foundation ; Open Hardware Foundation
Typology by degree of openness: Closed Hardware; Open Interface, Open Design, Open Implementation
The Open Source Product Design platform has a list of Open Design projects
MAKE magazine “has managed to regenerate a previously static culture of do-it-yourselfers at a feverish pace”
The Village Forum focuses on how we design and build our habitat.
The P2P-Design Delicious tag monitors the topic

Vinay Gupta said:

The issue is patents. Open Source derives it’s power from copyright law - they use the property right of “copyright” and then pool it by using the GPL and other such licenses which rest on copyright.

Patent is a huge pain in the ass. You could do an open source patent pool, but that’s a very expensive and hard to manage undertaking.

So… one option is to work in the domain of no property rights - public domain - which is where a manufacturing technology goes if it is disclosed without patents, or is patented but the patent has expired.

But then what if you publish your design, then somebody makes a small tweak which kind of perfects your design, and then patents their tweak - without a patent on the original item, you can’t require them to release their changes for general use, because there’s no property right that you hold which applies to their work.

A problem, for sure, in terms of doing Open Manufacturing in the same vein as Open Source.

And later followed up:

I’m not sure we need an open hardware license. I’m also pretty sure that we need to investigate other approaches to protecting IP other than copyright and patent, because neither one really expresses the essence of what we’re trying to get at here. Copyright and Patent are two forms of Imaginary Property: we could easily create a third form of Imaginary Property that suited our needs, although it wouldn’t have legal status unless new laws were passed, or old ones amended.

To which I responded:

The problem with Open Source licenses on physical objects is that even though they might do the trick in a legal context, it isn’t what they’re designed to do, so the wording is all wrong. It’s like selling vodka as a disinfectant. It’ll do the job marvelously, but a lot of people will remain skeptic.

Conversely I think doing an “Open Hardware License” would be missing the point to a certain degree - the boundaries between hardware and software are bound to grow increasingly fuzzy as we draw closer to digital fabrication (let alone molecular assembly), and even if we lump those two together we’d be neglecting all the other kinds of “intellectual property”, such as ideas, etc.

I consider patents to be harmful by design. Their original purpose, to spur innovation, worked to a certain degree but it certainly doesn’t scale (much like the republic) - as soon as you have a certain number of innovators, they find their options limited by the number of existing patents, and the patent system becomes counterproductive. Bounty based systems may be better for certain purposes, but this is an issue I haven’t seen anybody nail properly yet.

Which brings me to my point: What we need isn’t just a new license, it’s a new terminology for dealing with “objects”, both physical and imaginary, something that encompasses both snugly, fits in with modern legalese and does the job patents were originally intended for without artificially stifling innovation or stepping on anybody’s toes.

Once we have that kind of framework, a license that applies in general terms to all these things will probably follow somewhat naturally, and that has the potential to handle software, hardware, biomass or whatever humans need to possess.

Marco Fioretti joined the conversation, with:

A much more effective and easier to implement solution may be to simply:

- reduce duration in time of patents
- do not allow them in some fields: software, living things…

if it ain’t completely broken, that is if there is an intermediate
solution that puts an end to all or almost all the harmful
consequences, why make the effort to fix it completely?

Michel Bauwens then replied:

Concerning the new terminology, are you aware of Spimes as a concept,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Spime, explained in this video,
http://p2pfoundation.net/Bruce_Sterling_on_the_Internet_of_Things_and_Spimes

The only beef I would have with Bruce Sterling’s concept is that it relies
on paying for online designs, which I think is not realistic,

some other license related links:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Talis_Community_License

http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Design_License_Agreement

Here is the perspective of the TAPR open license people, taken from
http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence

I hope Lawrence is not objecting to being copied on this, busy as he must
be?

Michel

From http://www.tapr.org/OHL.

You can download pdf versions of the proposed licenses through this site.

“The TAPR Open Hardware License (”OHL”) provides a framework for hardware
projects that is similar to the one used for Open Source software. This
isn’t as straight-forward as it seems because legal concepts that work well
for software (such as copyright and copyleft) don’t neatly fit when dealing
with hardware products and the documentation used to create them. The OHL
deals with Documentation, which describes a project using elements such as
schematic diagrams, CAD/CAM files, and Gerber files, and Products which are
based on that Documentation.

Like open source software licenses, the OHL permits Documentation to be
used, modified, and distributed to third parties. Unlike software licenses,
it also addresses how Products based on the documentation can be made and
distributed. The OHL’s requirements are aimed at encouraging the community
to develop, use, and improve open source hardware — and to prevent others
from turning that hardware into closed, proprietary products.

The OHL does not address software, nor does it address firmware or code
loaded into programmable devices such as FPGAs. These fit much more closely
into a software licensing model than do the physical objects that the OHL
attempts to cover, and we encourage developers to use open source licenses
like the GPL for them.

One important, and unique, component of the OHL is a patent immunity
provision. In short, the OHL requires each person who uses the Documentation
to promise that they will not sue others who make Products based on that
Documentation for infringement of any patent they control. This ensures that
the community is protected from patent claims by those who benefit from the
community’s contribution.

Another unique aspect of the OHL is a provision to provide feedback about
modifications. Open source software licenses steer away from obligating
those who make modifications to pass those changes back to earlier
developers or other users. For a number of reasons, particularly our belief
that hardware fixes and improvements, especially for safety issues, should
be made known to those who may be making or using Products, we felt that a
public feedback provision would be valuable.

At the same time, we wanted to minimize the burden of such a provision, and
the loss of privacy that would result from requiring developers to provide
their email addresses. So, TAPR will provide a mechanism to report
modifications to a central archive that will be visible to anyone. The
requirement is structured so that if the mechanism fails (if, for example,
TAPR should disappear), the rights granted by the OHL will not be affected.

The Open Hardware License allows Products to be used for any purpose. An
alternative version, the TAPR Noncommercial Hardware License, is identical
to the OHL but limits Products to noncommercial use only. While open source
licenses normally don’t allow restrictions on use, there is a big difference
between software and hardware that we believe justifies offering this
option.

While there is no real cost in compiling or copying open source software,
someone who wants to make Products available to others confronts upfront
costs of making circuit boards and obtaining parts. It’s often
cost-prohibitive to do this in small quantity, so the developer who wants to
make his or her Product available, even on a non-profit basis, has to make a
substantial up-front investment. That investment is at risk if others can
compete commercially with him. The Noncommercial Hardware License addresses
this concern. ” (http://www.tapr.org/OHL)

[edit<http://p2pfoundation.net/Open_Hardware_Licence?title=Open_Hardware_Licence&action=edit&section=2>
]
Context and Commentary

From Instructables at http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/

“Recently, people over at tapr.org released drafts of open-source hardware
licenses. I got the following message from Jonathan Kuniholm at Duke asking
for comments on the drafts: “I have spoken with each of you regarding our
interest in the infrastructure for the sharing of hardware designs. An
organization with its roots in amateur radio and open source software has
released a draft of two open hardware licenses ( http://www.tapr.org/OHL ).
I believe that the inspiration is primarily electronic hardware, but the
concept addresses issues we have encountered in our work with The Open
Prosthetics Project and its parent organization, the newly incorporated
Shared Design Alliance.

We have been interested in the ways that we might protect those who choose
to share designs for public good from the possibility of having those
designs patented out from under them or otherwise removed from the public
domain, as well as helping them avoid the cost and time delays of patent
protection for efforts from which they are not trying to profit. These draft
licenses also address liability issues, which are another can of worms. I
would be interested to hear thoughts from folks more knowledgeable than I
about the effectiveness and potential pitfalls of such measures, given the
difference between the issues surrounding physical designs and patents (for
which there is currently no open license option outside of patent-related
measures), and those surrounding items traditionally protected by copyright,
which can currently be released under Creative Commons or GNU licenses (
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ , http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html,
http://www.fsf.org/ ).

The TAPR folks have invited comment on their draft, and I think that this is
as good an effort as I’ve seen so far. If you have interest or expertise in
this area, please submit comments through the TAPR site, and please forward
this to anyone else you know who may be interested.” (
http://www.instructables.com/forum/EEMFZXN1G5EXCFLKHF/)

I piped up again, saying:

Thanks for that link, I wasn’t familiar with Spimes. But I’ll agree with your beef. I had a conversation with my good friend Dhananjay Gadre of the Netaji Subhas Institute of Technology in India about exactly this issue - I was pitching to him a concept I had for a “Sourceforge for Objects”, like the flipside of Make Magazine that was intended as a warehouse for digital design patterns. Originally, I had intended for authors of objects to be able to have people pay for downloads, going for the GNUesque stance of “free as in free speech, not as in free beer” trend.. but Dhananjay objected, pointing out a very important fact:

- Most innovation done in the world today is being done By the developed world For the developing world, and this is clearly the wrong way to do things. Enabling people running a collective warehouse of digitized objects to demand money from one another for use of their intellectual possessions would only widen the gap between the developing and developed, instead of reversing the innovation cycles and putting the power in the hands of those who need it, which is essentially my end goal.

In the end I came up with two methods of addressing this. On the one hand ask for donations rather than demanding money. The other method was applying a PPP-valency matrix to pricing schemes. Let me coin the term: A PPP-valency matrix is a NxN matrix, V, of the ratios between regional PPP’s (with tr(V) = N, and prod(V) = 2N, by design.).. the concept is to take the “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” mantra and apply it to the actual economy, so the amount of money you get from objects is relative to the ability of people to pay for them. The problem with this method is it’s extremely hard to implement in a way that doesn’t beg for abuse, and after doing a few paper napkin Monte Carlo simulations (yes, I’m a geek), I’ve seen that there’s an inherant feedback loop in this thing that could cause instability in the long run. It can be fixed, but I’m not sure how.

Regarding Spimes on a more technical level, there’s an AI point here. Searching physical reality for objects is NP-hard. If we were to apply Bruce Sterling’s idea at face value, we’d end up with a world where you Google your toaster, and it just goes through all known reality searching for the RFID that matches your toaster. This would be stupid.

AI researchers fit into two categories these days: the people who want the AI’s to understand everything, know where everything is, and use deep searching to solve their problems, and the people who want the AI’s to understand context. The first group would just search the entire space for matching concepts. The latter group would narrow the search down to kitchens at first and expand only if necessary. The problem is, despite the best efforts of smart people ranging from John Von Neumann to John McCarthy to Noam Chomsky, we still don’t understand the nature of “context” well enough to actually implement this kind of thing. And actually understanding context might lead us to a far smarter way of doing this that is currently obscured by our limitations.

… after which the conversation pattered out into pointless chit-chat. We didn’t reach any useful conclusion, but I think there were a lot of very good points in there. What I’d like to do is get the big names in the game to stick their noses together and come up with a Much More General Public License - one that doesn’t just apply to software, but to anything. If that seems unreasonable, then I’d settle for a GPL-lookalike that addresses the key issues of free/open hardware, which is definitely one of the things that’s going to be hardest to fix for the purposes of a post-scarcity future.

In the end, it doesn’t matter how the game has been played so far, or that it’s being played unfairly, but only that we are in the unique situation that we can change everything, forever, by playing the game right now. In a world where everything can be a bitstream, what are we going to do?

There is a morbid take on the rules of life:

1. You must participate
2. You cannot win
3. You cannot break even
4. You cannot quit

Although I love the futility for its own sake, I think there’s a loophole a lot of people have missed.

For the last hundred-or-so years, most production has been controlled by corporations, that function by leasing time from people they called employees and using that manpower to achieve certain goals, which were not necessarily the goals of the employees. Rather, the goal of the employee was to provide himself and his family with resources required to survive.

Employees do not care where those resources come from, although in recent years there has been a signifiant trend towards employees seeking job satisfaction: wanting to play a bigger part in their contribution to the corporate goals in exchange for greater rewards both physical and spiritual.

This has emphesised the flaw in the corporate economy: the corporate market was not designed for people but for companies, and to survive within it as individuals these ambitious people must sacrifice their beliefs and primary goals (i.e., feeding their family) in order to fulfil the corporate agenda.

But as we have seen with more modern corporations such as Amazon, Google and Facebook, there exists an innovative group of people, who collectively are known to each others as “hackers”, who strive to change the rules.

Kobayashi Maru: If you cannot win the game, change the rules.

These people have been circumventing the regular methods of corporate governance and dilligence, creating in their stead a corporate entity wherein the person comes first. They are still bound by the arbitrary conditions placed upon them by the legal framework they function within, but to an ever increasing degree they are free. The market is being taken over by people. Real people.

This leads us to a stunning conclusion: Not only is technology about people, markets are about people. In the words of the Cluetrain Manifesto: Markets are conversations. Markets thrive when their entropy is maximized, and their entropy is controlled by end user interest. That is to say, if there exists a product that nobody is interested in, there will be very little activity in the vicinity of that product.

Note I said “end user”. Calling any member of a market a “consumer” ignores the contributions that member makes to the market. No market could exist without end users, it’s true, but likewise no market could exist without producers. To wit, most end users are also producers.

We are taking over. The time of the corporation is ending. No longer will we allow all our time to be governed only by artificial needs. We are end-users, but we are also producers. We demand that corporations respect that. That they bow to the will of the people. Because in the end that’s all you are: a collection of people working towards a common goal. If you can’t get every unit within to agree on that goal and benefit directly from it, you’re going to lose a lot of very valuable synergies. And we don’t care.

Chris Anderson’s speech at Nokia World is pretty good. It’s a hefty 46 minutes and 46 seconds, but it’s a lot of good thoughts. Link. It’s all about post-scarcity economics, which is something people should be paying some attention to since we’re rapidly emerging into a post-scarcity era in several fields.

One interesting thing he touches on is the result of digital fabrication on physical manufacturable complexity. It’s something I hadn’t considered. I’ve been so focused on the fact that digital fabrication will eventually eliminate scarcity, say by allowing people to download a turkey sandwich off the Internet if they’re hungry¹, that I didn’t stop to consider in detail the whole array of things that we can do today that we will be able to infinitely better in the future.

He also touches on flights, and how much like Edinburgh taxi drivers the low cost airlines are getting “kickbacks” from destinations in exchange for pushing people in their direction. The low cost airlines use this to a varying degree; EasyJet can do this to a far greater extent than Iceland Express - simply because Iceland Express doesn’t have the same distribution system or market focus as EasyJet. But nevertheless, what’s happening is that to an increasing extent airlines are figuring out two truths that not even Howard Hughes could have envisioned: firstly, the price of getting the plane from one place to another need not be covered by the passengers, and secondly, … okay. Never mind. This one’s a bit complicated. Can’t get it out properly. It has to do with the pricing scheme most airlines employ being stupid. You’d have to know a bit about how airlines work to understand it anyway, and most of my readers probably do not.

Anyway. His key point is: give the product away and get revenues off something completely different that nobody would have imagined they were really paying for. I can agree with that, because it has a spiraling effect of some note. If all companies start paying each other for services, but giving their products to the end users… oh. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.

I’m not sure I agree with everything Chris Anderson says though. Although he’s definitely on the right track, he tends to get stuck in the mud of the old and increasingly faulty capitalistic system of reasoning. But he’s so close to the crux of the thing that the naysayers will start opening their eyes and the people who really have the potential to understand what’s going on will manage to extrapolate beyond the dithered Friedmanism.