Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

There is frequent talk of computers and cellphones converging and becoming readily available for use in the developing world. Let’s analyze that statement with regard to time, financial incentives of companies such as Nokia, and the economic prospectus for the developing world as it is.

Currently two billion people have access to cellphones, which are providing a severe jump in infrastructure all over the place. It is expected that within the next five to ten years every human on earth will have access to a cell phone. This is based on direct trend analysis without much regard to means, but let’s take it as a given.

If this is the case, then most likely what will happen in the short term is that older phones used in the west will trickle down the line to be sold or given away second hand in developing countries - now I’m not talking about places like urban areas in India, where almost everybody already has a cellphone, but rather places like the Indian province of Kerala, or perhaps Burma or rural Thailand, or even Malawi. So second-hands filter down, infrastructure is raised, all the while in the west our cell phones become like 1990’s level supercomputers, with big screens, fast uplinks and high levels of interactivity.

This is not a bad way of doing it, and what’s probably going to happen is that the cell phone emergence in the developing world will cause a massive positive feedback loop of innovation and economic growth. Couple that with appropriate technology and you’ll see numerous other trends:

• Decreased fatalities due to smoke from open fires, malnutrition, simple bacterial or viral infections, and that kind of poverty related death.
• Decreased birth rate, connected to higher quality of life, availability of contraceptives, and lower infant mortality rate.
• Increased global food output
• Increased levels of organic farming on a global scale
• Far higher average GDP globally, and less scedasticity overall

But this is all grounded on the added functionality expected of cellphones during this inevitable convergence, e.g. built-in global positioning, fast internet access, high resolution screens, USB host inputs on devices, all of which could provide for things like:

• Location specific agricultural instrumentation and satellite based fertility analysis provided directly to farmers on the land, so they can get specific recommendations for plantation.
• SmartAID - cell phone based expert system for first aid and disaster response; essentially a simple AI strapped onto a Wiki, channeled through a cellphone.
• Cellphone based microcredit/mutual credit banking systems.
• Identity management, voting registration and direct democracy.
• Public safety announcements, etc.

For some of these any modern cellphone, dating back to 1998, will do. But for many of these services you need to be far further along the convergence pathway.

Which is why rebooting tech is a smart idea.

With $10 in parts today you can build a 20 MHz network-capable computer that’s roughly equivalent to a cheap home computer of the early 1980’s. Connect it to either a TV or a cheap LCD screen, for example a Nokia 3310 screen (pictured), and a keyboard, and you’ve got yourself a really simple teletype terminal.

So, instead of waiting patiently for the convergence to reach developing rural areas, which is 10-20 years from now at current rate, you use what exists to push general computing into 1980’s level tech. Make it available to people, and you’ll have an emergent hacker culture.

Now, for text only teletype terminals to interface with the best resources of the day, we’re going to need a few things:

• BBSWikipedia - a small C application that runs natively on AVR microcontrollers, for example, that can download Wikitext directly from Wikipedia or other Wikis, parse it, and display it on a 80×25 type display (or less!), with links active but images omitted and tables severely simplified. This could be just a port of Links, but then it would have to have significantly improved offline caching support, because
• we really need stable Internet connections; and while this could mean waiting for proper broadband penetration in rural areas, it more likely means backing up a bit and using cellphones as dial up modems for a while. At any rate, we can’t assume the existence of persistent network connectivity for a while, so people must have a way to back their shit up while offline so that they can schedule downloads and stuff.

Essentially, what I’m talking about doing is making a cheap platform for 1980’s style tech and use technological paradigms of the era as a migratory step until there’s something better. Something better will arrive a lot faster than it did the first time round, that’s almost certain, but having something workable really fast is definitely a win.

How insane is this idea?

The new Global Swadeshi Dialogue is up. It’s about one and a half hours of me and Vinay talking about really hard core stuff.  I hope it’s worth the watch.

My colleague Frosti got a big picture of himself in Fréttablaðið today, along with a pretty neat article:

(Click to enlarge)

My good friend Elisabeth Carlson did an article for the Swedish Grøn Ungdom magazine which comes out soon, wherein she interviewed myself along with Haakon Karlsen jr. from the MIT Fab Lab in Lyngseidet, Norway and Jasper Darmark from the Malmø Fab Lab in Sweden. I’ll post a link when it’s up, but be warned, it’s in Swedish

Here are Elisabeth’s questions and my answers, which were used for the article:

Is Fab Lab going to save the world? If so, in what way?

Yes and no. “Saving the world” is a bit vague. What Fab Labs are going to do is break a lot of the assumptions that our society makes about scarcity on the one hand and the boundaries between the activities of individuals and institutions on the other hand.

Fab Labs represent a peer-to-peer model for technological empowerment, education, design, and production, by taking technology that used to cost billions of kronas and bring it down to an intermediate level, cheap enough that every town or every school should be able to afford one. Thirty years from now we’re hoping that everybody can have a molecular assembler in their home, but until then Fab Labs are bringing the technology to people and democratizing innovation.

So that’s one side of the “saving the world” issue. Another interesting one came up yesterday during a discussion. Fab Labs are all over the place, with new ones popping up all the time. They’re all connected in a large informal network, and they all have access to the same digital design tools. One thing that we can do with regards to climate change is to create cheap but powerful networked sensor packages that take measurements of temperature, air pressure, humidity, and various light spectrums, for example, and aggregate them into a global database. This database would grow fairly organically and could become something of a grassroots climate change watchdog system. Knowing exactly what the problem is is one of the first steps towards fixing it, and this can help with that.

How is your work approving, are you just trying to find money for the project or are you building the lab? how is it going to look like when it is finished?

The Fab Lab project in Iceland is being run by the Icelandic Innovation Center (www.nmi.is), with special support from the ministry of Industry. So now that funding isn’t a major issue - it’s always an issue I’m afraid - we’re focusing on building the lab itself and making battle plans for the next year.

When we’re finished building it it’s going to be in a very public place and hopefully we’ll have a flux of people dropping in off the street with great ideas. That the lab should become a hub where great people and great ideas should meet up is our goal. Hopefully there will be a lot of economic activity coming from this, but education is our primary goal at the moment.

Who owns FabLab? Is it Neil? Or is it some kind of board who owns it together?

Nobody “owns” Fab Lab. It started out as a project at Neil’s lab at MIT, the Center for Bits and Atoms, and it started out as an accident. What happened is that when they did an outreach project as part of a grant fulfillment they found themselves overwhelmed by people who wanted to do   stuff in labs. Before long they were popping upp all over the place.

Each individual lab is owned by somebody in the local environment. The San Diego lab is owned by a NGO called Heads on Fire. The Vestmannaeyjar lab is owned by the Icelandic Innovation Center. The South African labs are owned by the South African government. In Barcelona the lab is owned by the Institute for Advanced Architecture in Catalonia. Different labs have different owners, and different owners have different focuses: Barcelona focuses on arts and design, the lab that’s being built in Jallalabad, Afghanistan is mostly focused on healthcare, with a sideline to try to spur economic growth and self-sufficiency (or, as Ghandi said it, swadeshi).

Still, it´s not a  matter of destroying the massproduction in the world by replacing it, it is more a way how to make your own dreams come true.i e the scream-machine, the girl seems very satisfied with it, but maybe just for a while, what will happen afterwards? Will people still invent STUFF instead of maybe think about what is REALLY missing in their lives i e love.. relations.. family and so on. ???

Mass production isn’t threatened by Fab Labs at the moment. In the future, when molecular assemblers become a reality, there will be far less need for industrial era style mass production; content production (designing objects) and giving/selling them on the Internet has the potential to replace mass production.

Personal fabrication is interesting, but I think it won’t be the key thing forever. While everybody wants to be unique, /things/ aren’t a very good way to express their uniqueness - love, relationships, art, and so on are a far better way to do that.

But there’s a distinct hacker element to all of this. Why design an object in a world of abundance, if not for the love of it? Why work with people half way across the world if not to make new friends and deepen relationships? Fab Labs are about technology, yes. But at the end of the day we always have to remember that technology is about people. Whenever technology is diminishing our ability to love, play, live free and create in harmony with other humans, it is failing its goal.

Since the industrial revolution we’ve seen it fail over and over again - technology being used against people, for example. But what always characterizes malign technology is that it’s not built by individuals but by institutions where group intellects govern. Fab Labs, by democratizing the act of production, are a potential solution to this. If technology is about people, then let the people have the technology.

Is there some kind of timeline of what happened with FabLab since the beginning, in 2001?

Not really. It’s a story worth compiling and telling, but so much has happened that I don’t think there’s really any one person who could objectively compile that story at the moment.

I don´t remember how many hours you get paid for working with fablab every month,please tell me again

A standard working month in Iceland is 173,3 hours, according to national union agreements. I work full time on Fab Labs now, but I get most of my best work done outside the “office hours”, when I’m sitting around having conversations with great people figuring out the next steps. It’s all about people.

Apparently the business journal Viðskiptablaðið ran an article on the Fab Lab yesterday. I can’t find it on their website though. There’s been a lot of media coverage recently, which is good. Now we just need to get the lab operational so that we can make ourselves worthy of people’s attention.

This morning I’ve been translating and writing tutorials and tech guides in Icelandic for the lab. If there’s one thing that there’s never enough of, it’s good documentation. I hope what I’m making isn’t bad - I’m taking care to use illustrations as much as I can, but there’s so much content that needs to be covered that just writing it coherently is a huge task.

This afternoon I’m going to look into electronic components again, try and get that sorted as soon as possible. It is well and truly amazing how much effort it takes to get some relatively simple things done.

After a discussion with Amy last night I’ve spent a couple of hours reading about gears, specially in reference to Carl’s little gears.py program, which is a neat piece of work.

The most interesting thing, one that got me to go all whiteboard, was the involution. To illustrate, a picture from Wikipedia:

This is one of the reasons I’m getting increasingly interested in mechanical engineering. Yes, I just said that. *shudder*. Electrical engineering is interesting too. Damnit.

Anyway, the purpose of the gear exercise wasn’t for me to learn about gears, but rather to make a Kokompe module (based on Carl’s code) that generates arbitrary gears. If I manage to pull that off in the next two days, I win at life.

There was an article about the Fab Lab in Morgunblaðið yesterday. I only heard about it this morning, and the article has been syndicated on Eyjafréttir:

Nýsköpunarmiðstöð Íslands ætlar að setja upp stafræna smiðju, Fab Lab (Fabrication Laboratory), með tækjum og tólum í Vestmannaeyjum í sumar. Smiðjunni er ætlað að gefa frumkvöðlum, nemendum, almenningi og starfsmönnum fyrirtækja og stofnana tækifæri til að þjálfa sköpunargáfuna og láta hugmyndir sínar verða að veruleika með því að hanna, móta og framleiða hluti með aðstoð stafrænnar tækni.

Link

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?

Fab Labs were featured on the Icelandic TV channel Stöð 2 last night. I took a clip and shoved it onto YouTube, I tried to contact Stöð 2 to ask permission but I couldn’t get through… I hope they don’t mind. (If you’re from Stöð 2, and you do mind, please let me know and I’ll take it down myself. No reason to get nasty; I spliced in the opening intro and did my best to give fair attribution. That said, I doubt Stöð 2 contacted CNN about using the Principal Voices clip, so I guess we’re even. :P)

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.