Great stuff! I'm looking into aspects of that sort of approach for a more P2P-oriented system (Pointrel). It's terrific to have a wonderful open source example. Much of the work that goes into a lot of these things is thinking through the design (and iterating it, analogous to pressing an the arguments in your "Make the Case".:-) Which suggests your approach could also be used for software engineering or to reflect back on itself? Thanks for all your hard work.
I have to agree with your sentiment. And "Nature Deficit" disorder is part of it, but that does not explain why most kids may not understand what a bootloader is on a computer or whatever if they are indoors a lot around computers. I guess I was lucky to just come in at the edge of things (my first computer was a 6502-based KIM-I, and my first languages were Assembler, Commodore BASIC, and Forth). Still, anyone can run a Virtual Machine on their PC and watch what happens with a simulated computer booting up.
Maybe this is related?:-) From:
"Ignorance, Apathy, and Greed" http://www.progress.org/fold21.htm "The causes of social problems exist on many levels. When we ask why social problems such as poverty, unemployment, crime, and war exist, each time we determine a cause, we can ask "why" again, as children often do until they are hushed. Poverty exists because some folks can't find jobs or the jobs pay poorly. But then why is the wage level so low? Because of the tax and land-tenure systems. Why do we have those systems? Because special interests pay to legislate it. Why do special interests get away with it? The voting structure lets them. Why does that structure exist? The voters don't demand to change it. Why not? When we dig down through all the layers to the roots of the causes, we find three fundamental causes of social problems: ignorance, apathy, and greed. The ultimate remedy for social problems therefore must confront all three root causes. It does little good to just run down the street shouting "share the rent!" or "stop war!". Uttering a slogan does no good unless it arouses sympathy."
Here is something related I posted on how my perspective may be different because my mother lived through the German bombing and invasion of Rotterdam and subsequent intentional starvation: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755090&cid=33264228
While small, that's an encouraging trend towards DIY and an encouraging hopeful scene.
At the other end of trends, you may find some other links through your local historical societies. I've found that mine is a place where there are people who are interested in how things work (or worked) in various ways (mostly older women in that crowd, but some older men who know a lot about machinery and industry). These are people who know all this sort of stuff: http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/index.html My father was a Merchant Mariner for twenty-something years, then a machinist and tool-maker, so I've learned some stuff from watching him.
While I agree with your parallels on the rest of the points, on basic income, while you make a good point, in general, it means something a little different (essentially, it means social security for everyone young or old as a substantial check from the government every month acknowledging their right as a citizen to the fruits of some of the industrial commons, as a formal government program to deal with rich/poor divides, the concentration of wealth, the lack of jobs, etc. in a systematic way still within a capitalist framework). http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
My mother lived through the Nazi invasion of Rotterdam (and related firebombing) as well as the Hunger Winter. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_winter To me, fascism is not entirely just an abstract point, like having private radios be illegal, because I grew up in the remaining PTSD shadow of it (my mother emigrated to the USA after the war, as did my father). These things happen, and in part for the social dynamics outlined in that article on the pre-WWII Germans. Anyway, when the original article by Eben Moglen is essentially about preventing fascism in the USA through technology, talking about the history of fascism is not off-topic. I provide links for references, to distinguish this from just one person's random opinion. Follow them or not if you want. As has been said, those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it. If my post is tl;dr, I guess this site by someone else is really too long::-) http://www.historyisaweapon.com/
One other link::-) http://www.progress.org/fold21.htm "Social reformers must first eliminate their own ignorance to educate themselves to gain knowledge of the basic causes and remedies for social problems, including the economics, politics, and ethics of the problems and solutions. Then when they educate others, they must at the same time invoke their antipathy to the problem and arouse their sympathy with the remedy. When the masses are roused with sympathy and armed with knowledge of the remedy, the few greedy opponents will either be swayed themselves to join the righteous battle, or be overwhelmed by the greater force of the righteous revolution. To remedy social ills, replace ignorance, apathy and greed with knowledge, sympathy, and charity. "
And I'm not saying I don't respect Eben Moglen, or what he says there. Sure, he lays out great ideas, ideas worth doing.
But he is still misguided. The war he is proposing to fight mainly with distributed home-based technology to ensure some privacy through encryption can't be won. As long as we have an economic system based mostly on greed (and also ignorance), everything he tries to do will fail, if only because, after he wins, greed will buy new laws from ignorant people and put him in jail, and then greed will go house to house and pull every one of those wall warts out, getting neighbors to turn in neighbors who have them ("If you see something, say something"), same as people with radios were turned in in various countries in WWII. See:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, But Then It Was Too Late" http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
He should know that ISPs will be able to track down every one of those things in short order, if only by hiring a million people out of the 20 million or more unemployed in the USA to go house-by-house with blanket search warrants and portable packet sniffers looking for "unlicensed" equipment. And other countries will find the things even faster. So, his approach is, at best, a slightly delaying and confusing action. Greed and ignorance will win unless we directly address greed and ignorance (well, even addressing greed and ignorance indirectly and subtly may be OK, too.:-).
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/genoaII.php to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
Now, might such a public intelligence system run well on a system of wall warts like he describes? It probably would. But it does not absolutely need them. So, while they may be useful, the conception of cooperative sensemaking and cooperative design of a better future is by far more important.
And here is a document I put together that decribes four heterodox economic alternati
"Besides Wi-Fi signals, could there possibly be any other logical explanation for kids having more symptoms of illness on school days than at home on weekends or in the summer?" Vitamin D deficiency could help explain this. Treatment details: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml Why the US RDA is ten times too low: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml Vitamin D deficiency also may contribute to autism: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml Basically, between long school days, more TV and video games at home, driving instead of walking, fears of the outdoors and stranger abductions, and dermatologists saying to fear the sun (but not suggesting adequate vitamin D supplements as essentially malpractice), most kids are vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D is involved in the regulation of thousands of genes. Delete a big chunk of your genome and see how you feel.:-(
Yes, so true, "Think Globally, Act Locally, Plan Modestly" (the last part gets left off). People dispute who coined it, though I saw the phrase with all three attributed to Renes Dubos. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally
And it can be a tension where to focus, because, the fact is, some people do make policy (bureaucrats or congresspeople), although, it's also true that good examples that get duplicated can help shift policy (eventually), or, as you suggest, just bypass government as a grassroots movement.
But "externalities" (like passing on pollution or risk) mess up so much of the microeconomics of local planning, and IMHO that's where government may need to step in with some "resource-based planning". From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality "In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices[1], incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit. A benefit in this case is called a positive externality or external benefit, while a cost is called a negative externality or external cost."
To parallel your mountain bike example, about 25 years ago, my interest in the Pointrel System for semantic data storage when studying with George Miller may have been part of the spark behind his WordNet, as I mention here: http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en WordNet eventually became a core part of Google through AdSense. I haven't seen a dime.:-) But, as a "positive externality", I can now use Google, which is an amazing free-to-me service. So, like your mountain bike example, I got a lot out of participating in that economy of the free exchange of ideas in that sense, indirectly. So, you've outlined an example of your participating through design in a "gift economy".
BTW, if you were working in the automotive industry in the 1960s, you're probably due for a "basic income" about now through Social Security, too.:-)
As I said, all these four major alternatives overlap some (gift economy, basic income, resource-based planning, and local subsistence communities). People are just not talking about them as an interacting whole yet. But I feel some mix of them is a good way forward.
You wrote: "I think I was the only person in Detroit to see it coming. I looked at what japanese cars were out there, the build quality, mileage, price, etc.then looked at the insane detroit horsepower wars with ancient car designs, just throw more pushrod engine at the situation.. I went "these people are all loony tunes crazy" and quit."
I guess part of the problem with predictions is where does it leave the individual who believes them when it is so out of step with what everyone else believes? There you felt you needed to quit your job because your accurate beliefs were so far out of touch with the self-delusion (though presumably you moved onto something better, but for many, that may be the end of a profitable career). In the 1970s, Amory Lovins was one of the people who predicted oil shocks and said, all externalities considered (including security costs and pollution), renewables where cheaper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
For some people, they turn that prediction into money through investments (though it takes money to make money, plus business savvy, luck, connections, etc.). Although sometimes that entails other ethical compromises.
"From Predators to Icons; How to succeed as an entrepreneur : The New Yorker" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/9b81e569f28d8739
But for most people, there is not much you can do with that knowledge (other than, as you did, on a very local scale). My wife had a related metaphorical idea, of moving above the scene of the world and having a great vision of what was "reality", but then that vision not always being that helpful when you come back to Earth. As I said elsewhere, what good does it do to the fly to know the chemical composition of amber? Still, there may be some use, since people are not flies and have more capacity to act (like you did, to improve your local self sufficiency). A related post by me that touches on some of that: http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db
Still, as I heard recently, talking about alternative stuff can help create small communities of practice, that are working towards common goals, or at least inspire others to think about stuff going on in that area. For example, Home Power Magazine has long been an inspiration to me.
Also, the trends are not all bad. I predict that between curing vitamin D deficiency (Dr. Cannell) and people eating more whole foods (Dr. Fuhrman) the USA may save upwards of a trillion dollars a year in medical costs. Just one supporting point:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade" http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html So, that's good news to go with the bad. The future is a mix of both. What's really crazy is that, if you realize that, giving health care (including nutritional counseling and access to whole foods) to everyone in the USA is really affordable.
"Eat an Apple (Doctor's Orders)" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/business/13veggies.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=business
So, it is sad to see all the misinformed arguing and all the needless suffering, whether of sick people with preventable disease, accomplished machinists and toolmakers who lose their chance to make lots of useful stuff, or even kids suffering in prison-like schools. http://www.thewaronkids.com/ One alternative public school is documented here (and AERO lists many alternatives)
Mostly boils down to get your vitamin D, eat whole foods, appreciate nature and community and the infinite, and be nice and cooperative and sharing and curious, and have both roots and wings as Henry Ward Beecher said.:-) Or essentially, as Robert Fulghum said:
"All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten (or by homeschooling:-)" http://www.peace.ca/kindergarten.htm (Well, at least if you use sprouted grains or other whole foods to make the cookies mentioned there and also make your own almond milk.:-)
I posted on that here: http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005081.html And here: http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html "So, were people perhaps denied Vitamin D as an example of a public institution being funded by public dollars privatizing research results? Something Princeton itself does and encourages. If people were somehow getting less Vitamin D because of the societal consequences of patents (including competitivenesses among researchers, but also making techniques to costly to use or delaying their widespread adoption), it is possible the the consequences of proprietary knowledge from just this one issue might have cost our global society many trillions of dollars and untold personal suffering. Enough money to fund endless researchers making more free knowledge. Enough to fund endless chairs of Computer Science, instead of just the one Phil endowed before he died. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin got a little bit bigger, and so did PU. Obviously, I'm all for the Vitamin D researchers at the University Wisconsin as well as other universities getting all the resources they need to do good work, even Princeton.:-) But, there may be a huge problem here with public funding strategies or research. The proprietary approach to research knowledge may literally have been costing trillions of dollars a year (in current dollars) for decades taken across the globe. For the past fifty years, at two trillion a year in excess medical costs, this might add up to US$100 trillion in excess medical costs due to such medical knowledge being proprietary and researchers not cooperating more. Of course, then the huge public health bills are used to justify *increasing* the proprietary aspects of medical knowledge to create more artificial scarcity -- which is a tremendous and sad irony. "
We live in a somewhat passive solar home, and do a bit of organic gardening (but we can't bear to cut down the beautiful trees where we are to have a bigger spot to garden or more sunlight, although I agree with you about the economics of that -- plus, doing stuff outdoors also saves on entertainment expenses and, as you allude to, gym memberships.:-)
Karl Marx and his fans (like Simon Clarke in "The Global Accumulation of Capital and the Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form") http://www.riff-raff.se/en/furtherreading/clarke_global.php predicted an extension of credit to keep capitalism going just before it collapsed (whatever one can say about his proposed cures, a lot of Marxian diagnosis of problems with capitalism was accurate).
Someone just recently sent me this summary about Simon Clarke's writings: "The stages he addresses and ultimately rejects as being too vaguely defined to be considered as true periods are: Mercantilism, Liberalism, Imperialism, Social Democracy, and Monetarism. He identifies (in 1992 or before) monetarism as either being a new phase or (as it turned out) a reassertion of free-market Liberalism that will cause overaccumulation, the solution to which will be imperialism and extension of credit, which will only delay a deeper recession or depression. That's nearly a 20-year-out economic prediction that turned out to be very accurate! (Granted, he didn't offer dates, but he predicted some of the most critical events.)"
So, agreeing with others, it is a good diagnosis by Marx and fans, up to a point, but poor prescription for current day events, as this essay says from 1971 by Murray Bookchin (someone more into decentralization):
"Listen, Marxist!" by Murray Bookchin http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/listenm.html
A fan of Charles Fourier suggested to me that everything good about Marx came from the earlier Fourier. And Fourier was more into self-reliant living (though at a village level). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
By the way, a bit unrelated, but on cars and oil,:-) here is a post by me on why luxury safer electric cars should be given out free to everyone in the USA in order to lower taxes (so, sometimes redesign of a magic bullet is cheaper::-)
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user" http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
And that does not even take into account using the cars as part of a smart grid, or the possibility our electric and natural gas use might go *down* if we stopped refining oil into gasoline: http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm "So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
The question is, why did mainstream academics ignore or laugh at someone like Amory Lovins for so long? http://www.oilendgame.com/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power "The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
So, basically renewable have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s when you include all externalities (pollution, health consequences, military, risk), but those costs are not paid at the pump, but on your taxes, your health care bill, or paid by ongoing suffering or problems faced by future generations. But instead we have endless economists parading about for decades shouting at us that renewables (solar thermal, wind, geothermal) are too costly, when it turns out that is actually a total lie (it's like saying that not changing the oil in your car is cheaper because it costs $20 for an oil change and you don't need it *today* and your rich uncle will buy you a new car anyway if the engine dies in this one). Meanwhile, Portugal just does renewable energy anyway:
"Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover" http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/earth/10portugal.html As does China:
"Our One-Party Democracy" http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html But I know of someone who said she helped design a totally solar house in NJ that got bought and bulldozed by an oil company decades ago...
I'm sorry to hear that. This is what little help I can provide:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671 "When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed--but this is perhaps Moore's best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher. (Gail Hudson)"
See my comments in this thread here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866 in the article on the CIA developer going open source. One point I make is that the USA spends literally billions of dollars on developing ways for people in the intelligence community to make sense of a deluge of information; why should such tools not be FOSS and available to every person to help think through complex issues and improve their local community? See also Doug Engelbart's aspirations for Augment. I am working on such FOSS tools here as I have spare time: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Something I wrote on that begins: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html "Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
So, the answers are out there even without people cooperating to make some magic bullet. The cooperation through basic publications and the hard work of a few key people like Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman putting together such information has made huge difference. Now if just more people would pay attention to these findings -- but unfortunately there is not much profit in emphasizing getting mdoerate sunlight exposure (or taking cheap supplements) and eating right, so that is another part of the partadigm problem of a for-profit health care and R&D system.
Moderate exercise and some other things can help too (see Dr. Andrew Weil for the bigger picture of the holistic side fo health, though his nutrition advice is not quite as good as the above links) but again, there is not the huge profits in that as, say, doing triple bypasses.
See: "The IBM Personal Speech Assistant" http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10.6203&rep=rep1&type=pdf "In this paper, we describe technology and experience with an experimental personal information manager, which interacts with the user primarily but not exclusively through speech recognition and synthesis. This device, which controls a client PDA, is known as the Personal Speech Assistant (PSA). The PSA contains complete speech recognition, speech synthesis and dialog management systems."
Seriously though, that was ten years ago on research hardware, and this is great progress for a commercial and affordable advice with a large vocabulary. It probably works better than what we built then. And I still think software patents are a bad idea.:-) "Scalable low resource dialog manager" http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6513009.html
Now, if only someone would do in a big way an idea I was pioneering at IBM Research back then on using speech to interact with display walls built using a network of hundreds of otherwise obsolete laptop computers (I only tested using nine though). I hope Google comes out with that soon, too.:-) I wanted to create something like that to help design space habitats that could duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore.:-) The idea was that speech would be a good interface modality when you were walking around in front of a display wall, rather than trying to carry a keyboard around with you (although you might still want a pointing device). Anyway, it would also be a good use for all those soon-to-be-obsolete iPads and Android pads in a few years when the next great version of them comes out. I just hate to see an old computer go to waste, even if they are often energy hogs relative to the next generation.
An excerpt from that last post: """ So, in that context, what would be the implications of different political actors getting hold of really good free and open source intelligence tools, ones that build on, say, WordNet and other open source code and data? [Comments on some of the implications of other three letter agencies, the Netherlands, China, North Korea, Al-Qaeda, and the general public getting hold of this software...] "Think Globally, Act Locally, Plan Modestly" as René Dubos said. Better FOSS intelligence tools could help everyone do that, so in balance, I feel they will likely be a good thing, even though we will still need to do a lot more, and, it is true, some conflicts of values and assumptions may not be reconcileable, even with more thought (although we may get better at still finding some commonalities and figuring out how to co-exist even then). """
Here is more on this issue of the global distribution of free and open source software to all the countries of the world, even ones now deemed "competitors" or "unfriendly".
When I was an undegraduate psychology major at Princeton University, my advisor was George A. Miller. This was in the early-to-mid 1980s just before he started working on WordNet -- which was funded in large part by three letter agencies after George "retired". WordNet is also an "open source" project to which, in my less humble moments, I like to think I played a little role in sparking with my own crude explorations on semantic networks as a student of his, as discussed here: http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en
WordNet, being open source, is no doubt used by governments around the world, including in China or maybe even North Korea. WordNet is also at the core of much of Google's AdSense profit making (not that I ever saw a dime from that.:-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller But, what I have seen from that is being able to use Google -- a great service run on essentially a global supercomputer that has let me create all sorts of essays about ways forward for our society, such as: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery So, I and many others have greatly benefited from the open source nature of WordNet and what that made possible, far more than if I or George or someone else had a bunch of money in the bank from some proprietary semantic network system that otherwise had sat on the shelf.
George never talked politics with me -- maybe as a consequence of always being pestered by other people to tell of his days working alongside Noam Chomsky (like working on joint papers, etc.).:-) The only time he said anything remotely political in my presence that I can recall was, in the days after "The Day After" movie (a PU prof had helped with the special effects) in the corridor near his office outside the men's bathroom in Green Hall. He seemed a bit upset or angry, IIRC another faculty member was there that he might have been talking to about this, and he said how stupid it was that the first thing the US or USSR military planned to do in a military confrontation was blind the other's satellites, which essentially would ensure the conflict would escalate, because there would be no way the other side could tell what was going on, and they would probably just assume the worst and shoot off all their missiles. I think he may have just read a newspaper article about that.
I feel George has made the world a much better place by creating WordNet -- and a world less likely to shoot off all its nuclear missiles. Whatever the sparks behind WordNet which he started at around age 65 (and I'm sure there were many sparks, as he hung out with lots of people doing semantic network stuff, like Alan Newell and Herbert Simon), he put in year after year of hard work, and structured it based on years of his research into how humans understand language and also how dictionaries work (or should work). He made something open source back when hardly anyone was doing that (and I myself was more interested in proprietary things and being the next, well, Bill Gates was not that big then, but whoever was ultrarich with a big company etc.). As a measure of my own personal growth from those times, in part from George's example, here is a recent video I ma
AC wrote: "Instead of selling our spooks the software, he instead essentially chose to give it away to all the spooks in all the countries who want it? Let's see where that gets him... I'm guessing it'll be a back room with no windows the next time he's at the airport."
That's certainly a possible sentiment that may well reflect how some in the intelligence community will feel about this general topic of free and open source intelligence tools. Still, as I posted in another thread here: "Moving beyond tool/use distinction and irony" http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33189078 """ As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach. """
See also my comments in a different thread of this same article; a short excerpt: "Moving beyond tool/use distinction and irony" http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33189078 """ As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach. """
WWWWolf, I agree with the moderation that your comment is insightful. And we do have to make moral choices about how we use our tools, as well as moral choices for how we distribute the fruits of our labors with tools (why I support a "basic income" for all, for example).
But there are at least two other aspects to this, and they relate to the point you made in your last sentence: "Perhaps it'd be best to see exactly how those best ideas that were leeched off of good honest scientists are put to action - maybe that'll help us build nicer things for nicer purposes."
One is Langdon Winner's point (such as in his book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought") about moving beyond a tool/use distinction (e.g. "knives can be used for good or bad") and looking at how we create complex socio-technical systems that embed assumptions about social organization, intent, acceptabilty, and other things into them. In that sense, the choices we make about what to research, how to build things, and what priorities to set are very much political choices about how we want our social world to be, even if they may not seem so at the time. So, for example, if we research and work towards centralized nuclear power plants, we've made a different statement about how we want society to operate, how accessible technology should be, and what are acceptable risks and to whom, then if we research and work towards, say, solar panels on every roof, or for that matter, long-lasting non-maintenance nuclear batteries. (Although distributed solar and even small-scale home or neighborhood nuclear batteries still may have very different implications on recycling, proliferation, weaponization, privacy, and monitoring).
For example, it is well known that a previous CIA director, R. James Woolsey, supports the development of an electric car infrastructure. See, for example: http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052702303411604575168130469848598.html Whatever else one might say about the CIA policies under his tenure, electric cars are a fundamentally more democratic technology than gasoline-powered cars because they would would eliminate the USA's dependence on foreign oil (also reducing the need for a big US military to defend long oil supply lines), and electric cars would be easier for the average person to service given less parts or to recharge at home using local renewable energy production.
Diesel engines, which can be powered by local biofuels, have some of these aspects, too -- which was part of why Rudolf Diesel intentionally invented them. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine "Though best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited heat engine that bears his name, Rudolf Diesel was also a well-respected thermal engineer and a social theorist. Diesel's inventions have three points in common: they relate to heat transfer by natural physical processes or laws; they involve markedly creative mechanical design; and they were initially motivated by the inventor's concept of sociological needs. Rudolf Diesel originally conceived the diesel engine to enable independent craftsmen and artisans to compete with industry.[8]"
Stirling engines also have some of these attributes. So the choice to research and develop electric cars, diesel cars, or stirling engines is, in that sense, fundamentally different in social implications than a choice to improve gasoline-fueled cars (given gasoline takes oil to make, and big refineries). On the other hand, research on, say, producing gasoline safely at home from vats of sunlit algae would have more democratic implications.
It would be nice to have open source (in the OSI and FSF sense) collaborative software tools for public intelligence that help scientists, engineers, and the general public discuss and thin
Slashdot Mirror
Great stuff! I'm looking into aspects of that sort of approach for a more P2P-oriented system (Pointrel). It's terrific to have a wonderful open source example. Much of the work that goes into a lot of these things is thinking through the design (and iterating it, analogous to pressing an the arguments in your "Make the Case". :-) Which suggests your approach could also be used for software engineering or to reflect back on itself? Thanks for all your hard work.
Also related by me on P2P aspects of structured arguments and public intelligence:
"Why Eben Moglen is misguided..."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755090&cid=33260502
I have to agree with your sentiment. And "Nature Deficit" disorder is part of it, but that does not explain why most kids may not understand what a bootloader is on a computer or whatever if they are indoors a lot around computers. I guess I was lucky to just come in at the edge of things (my first computer was a 6502-based KIM-I, and my first languages were Assembler, Commodore BASIC, and Forth). Still, anyone can run a Virtual Machine on their PC and watch what happens with a simulated computer booting up.
Maybe this is related? :-) From:
"Ignorance, Apathy, and Greed"
http://www.progress.org/fold21.htm
"The causes of social problems exist on many levels. When we ask why social problems such as poverty, unemployment, crime, and war exist, each time we determine a cause, we can ask "why" again, as children often do until they are hushed. Poverty exists because some folks can't find jobs or the jobs pay poorly. But then why is the wage level so low? Because of the tax and land-tenure systems. Why do we have those systems? Because special interests pay to legislate it. Why do special interests get away with it? The voting structure lets them. Why does that structure exist? The voters don't demand to change it. Why not? When we dig down through all the layers to the roots of the causes, we find three fundamental causes of social problems: ignorance, apathy, and greed. The ultimate remedy for social problems therefore must confront all three root causes. It does little good to just run down the street shouting "share the rent!" or "stop war!". Uttering a slogan does no good unless it arouses sympathy."
Here is something related I posted on how my perspective may be different because my mother lived through the German bombing and invasion of Rotterdam and subsequent intentional starvation:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1755090&cid=33264228
Still, there are exceptions with some younger people, like the "open manufacturing" community I am involved in.
http://www.openmanufacturing.net/
Which includes indirectly the RepRap, MakerBot, Maker, etc. scenes:
http://www.makerbot.com/
http://www.makerbot.com/
http://makezine.com/
http://100kgarages.com/
While small, that's an encouraging trend towards DIY and an encouraging hopeful scene.
At the other end of trends, you may find some other links through your local historical societies. I've found that mine is a place where there are people who are interested in how things work (or worked) in various ways (mostly older women in that crowd, but some older men who know a lot about machinery and industry). These are people who know all this sort of stuff:
http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/index.html
My father was a Merchant Mariner for twenty-something years, then a machinist and tool-maker, so I've learned some stuff from watching him.
While I agree with your parallels on the rest of the points, on basic income, while you make a good point, in general, it means something a little different (essentially, it means social security for everyone young or old as a substantial check from the government every month acknowledging their right as a citizen to the fruits of some of the industrial commons, as a formal government program to deal with rich/poor divides, the concentration of wealth, the lack of jobs, etc. in a systematic way still within a capitalist framework).
http://www.usbig.net/whatisbig.html
My mother lived through the Nazi invasion of Rotterdam (and related firebombing) as well as the Hunger Winter. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotterdam_Blitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunger_winter
To me, fascism is not entirely just an abstract point, like having private radios be illegal, because I grew up in the remaining PTSD shadow of it (my mother emigrated to the USA after the war, as did my father). These things happen, and in part for the social dynamics outlined in that article on the pre-WWII Germans. Anyway, when the original article by Eben Moglen is essentially about preventing fascism in the USA through technology, talking about the history of fascism is not off-topic. I provide links for references, to distinguish this from just one person's random opinion. Follow them or not if you want. As has been said, those who study history are condemned to watch others repeat it. If my post is tl;dr, I guess this site by someone else is really too long:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/
One other link: :-) http://www.progress.org/fold21.htm
"Social reformers must first eliminate their own ignorance to educate themselves to gain knowledge of the basic causes and remedies for social problems, including the economics, politics, and ethics of the problems and solutions. Then when they educate others, they must at the same time invoke their antipathy to the problem and arouse their sympathy with the remedy. When the masses are roused with sympathy and armed with knowledge of the remedy, the few greedy opponents will either be swayed themselves to join the righteous battle, or be overwhelmed by the greater force of the righteous revolution. To remedy social ills, replace ignorance, apathy and greed with knowledge, sympathy, and charity. "
And another link, while I am at it, too:
"What Social Science Can Tell Us About Social Change"
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/change/science.html
OK, I just read the transcript here: http://www.softwarefreedom.org/events/2010/isoc-ny/FreedomInTheCloud-transcript.html
And I'm not saying I don't respect Eben Moglen, or what he says there. Sure, he lays out great ideas, ideas worth doing.
But he is still misguided. The war he is proposing to fight mainly with distributed home-based technology to ensure some privacy through encryption can't be won. As long as we have an economic system based mostly on greed (and also ignorance), everything he tries to do will fail, if only because, after he wins, greed will buy new laws from ignorant people and put him in jail, and then greed will go house to house and pull every one of those wall warts out, getting neighbors to turn in neighbors who have them ("If you see something, say something"), same as people with radios were turned in in various countries in WWII. See:
"They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45, But Then It Was Too Late"
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html
He should know that ISPs will be able to track down every one of those things in short order, if only by hiring a million people out of the 20 million or more unemployed in the USA to go house-by-house with blanket search warrants and portable packet sniffers looking for "unlicensed" equipment. And other countries will find the things even faster. So, his approach is, at best, a slightly delaying and confusing action. Greed and ignorance will win unless we directly address greed and ignorance (well, even addressing greed and ignorance indirectly and subtly may be OK, too. :-).
Do I have an alternative? Yes I do. As I outlined here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
where I wrote the following paragraph:
As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for things like a basic income, all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach)
http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA/genoaII.php
to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete.
Now, might such a public intelligence system run well on a system of wall warts like he describes? It probably would. But it does not absolutely need them. So, while they may be useful, the conception of cooperative sensemaking and cooperative design of a better future is by far more important.
And here is a document I put together that decribes four heterodox economic alternati
My own attempt at such a standard protocol: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
It is based around transaction of lists of RDF-like triples.
"Properly designed protocols last a long time. Applications are obsolete within weeks or months."
Mod parent up (even being an AC).
The Pointrel approach towards that by me: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
But see also NEPOMUK etc. http://semanticweb.org/wiki/Semantic_Desktop
Working towards use as FOSS public intelligence tools: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866
"Besides Wi-Fi signals, could there possibly be any other logical explanation for kids having more symptoms of illness on school days than at home on weekends or in the summer?" :-(
Vitamin D deficiency could help explain this.
Treatment details: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
Why the US RDA is ten times too low: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDPhysiology.shtml
Vitamin D deficiency also may contribute to autism: http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/autism-information.shtml
Basically, between long school days, more TV and video games at home, driving instead of walking, fears of the outdoors and stranger abductions, and dermatologists saying to fear the sun (but not suggesting adequate vitamin D supplements as essentially malpractice), most kids are vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D is involved in the regulation of thousands of genes. Delete a big chunk of your genome and see how you feel.
Yes, so true, "Think Globally, Act Locally, Plan Modestly" (the last part gets left off). People dispute who coined it, though I saw the phrase with all three attributed to Renes Dubos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_globally,_act_locally
And it can be a tension where to focus, because, the fact is, some people do make policy (bureaucrats or congresspeople), although, it's also true that good examples that get duplicated can help shift policy (eventually), or, as you suggest, just bypass government as a grassroots movement.
But "externalities" (like passing on pollution or risk) mess up so much of the microeconomics of local planning, and IMHO that's where government may need to step in with some "resource-based planning". From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality
"In economics, an externality (or transaction spillover) is a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices[1], incurred by a party who did not agree to the action causing the cost or benefit. A benefit in this case is called a positive externality or external benefit, while a cost is called a negative externality or external cost."
To parallel your mountain bike example, about 25 years ago, my interest in the Pointrel System for semantic data storage when studying with George Miller may have been part of the spark behind his WordNet, as I mention here: :-) But, as a "positive externality", I can now use Google, which is an amazing free-to-me service. So, like your mountain bike example, I got a lot out of participating in that economy of the free exchange of ideas in that sense, indirectly. So, you've outlined an example of your participating through design in a "gift economy".
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en
WordNet eventually became a core part of Google through AdSense. I haven't seen a dime.
BTW, if you were working in the automotive industry in the 1960s, you're probably due for a "basic income" about now through Social Security, too. :-)
As I said, all these four major alternatives overlap some (gift economy, basic income, resource-based planning, and local subsistence communities). People are just not talking about them as an interacting whole yet. But I feel some mix of them is a good way forward.
BTW, a two minute video on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BLzvF6G4Ns
You wrote: "I think I was the only person in Detroit to see it coming. I looked at what japanese cars were out there, the build quality, mileage, price, etc.then looked at the insane detroit horsepower wars with ancient car designs, just throw more pushrod engine at the situation.. I went "these people are all loony tunes crazy" and quit."
I guess part of the problem with predictions is where does it leave the individual who believes them when it is so out of step with what everyone else believes? There you felt you needed to quit your job because your accurate beliefs were so far out of touch with the self-delusion (though presumably you moved onto something better, but for many, that may be the end of a profitable career). In the 1970s, Amory Lovins was one of the people who predicted oil shocks and said, all externalities considered (including security costs and pollution), renewables where cheaper:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
For some people, they turn that prediction into money through investments (though it takes money to make money, plus business savvy, luck, connections, etc.). Although sometimes that entails other ethical compromises.
"From Predators to Icons; How to succeed as an entrepreneur : The New Yorker"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/9b81e569f28d8739
But for most people, there is not much you can do with that knowledge (other than, as you did, on a very local scale). My wife had a related metaphorical idea, of moving above the scene of the world and having a great vision of what was "reality", but then that vision not always being that helpful when you come back to Earth. As I said elsewhere, what good does it do to the fly to know the chemical composition of amber? Still, there may be some use, since people are not flies and have more capacity to act (like you did, to improve your local self sufficiency). A related post by me that touches on some of that:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/6819187b74f4b7db
Still, as I heard recently, talking about alternative stuff can help create small communities of practice, that are working towards common goals, or at least inspire others to think about stuff going on in that area. For example, Home Power Magazine has long been an inspiration to me.
Also, the trends are not all bad. I predict that between curing vitamin D deficiency (Dr. Cannell) and people eating more whole foods (Dr. Fuhrman) the USA may save upwards of a trillion dollars a year in medical costs. Just one supporting point:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html
So, that's good news to go with the bad. The future is a mix of both. What's really crazy is that, if you realize that, giving health care (including nutritional counseling and access to whole foods) to everyone in the USA is really affordable.
"Eat an Apple (Doctor's Orders)"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/13/business/13veggies.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=business
So, it is sad to see all the misinformed arguing and all the needless suffering, whether of sick people with preventable disease, accomplished machinists and toolmakers who lose their chance to make lots of useful stuff, or even kids suffering in prison-like schools.
http://www.thewaronkids.com/
One alternative public school is documented here (and AERO lists many alternatives)
LOL. :-)
More long stuff by me: :-)
"Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics"
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
"[p2p-research] Rebutting Communiqué from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-November/006005.html
Mostly boils down to get your vitamin D, eat whole foods, appreciate nature and community and the infinite, and be nice and cooperative and sharing and curious, and have both roots and wings as Henry Ward Beecher said. :-) Or essentially, as Robert Fulghum said: :-)" :-)
"All I really need to know I learned in Kindergarten (or by homeschooling
http://www.peace.ca/kindergarten.htm
(Well, at least if you use sprouted grains or other whole foods to make the cookies mentioned there and also make your own almond milk.
I posted on that here: :-) But, there may be a huge problem here with public funding strategies or research. The proprietary approach to research knowledge may literally have been costing trillions of dollars a year (in current dollars) for decades taken across the globe. For the past fifty years, at two trillion a year in excess medical costs, this might add up to US$100 trillion in excess medical costs due to such medical knowledge being proprietary and researchers not cooperating more. Of course, then the huge public health bills are used to justify *increasing* the proprietary aspects of medical knowledge to create more artificial scarcity -- which is a tremendous and sad irony. "
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005081.html
And here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"So, were people perhaps denied Vitamin D as an example of a public institution being funded by public dollars privatizing research results? Something Princeton itself does and encourages. If people were somehow getting less Vitamin D because of the societal consequences of patents (including competitivenesses among researchers, but also making techniques to costly to use or delaying their widespread adoption), it is possible the the consequences of proprietary knowledge from just this one issue might have cost our global society many trillions of dollars and untold personal suffering. Enough money to fund endless researchers making more free knowledge. Enough to fund endless chairs of Computer Science, instead of just the one Phil endowed before he died. Meanwhile, the University of Wisconsin got a little bit bigger, and so did PU. Obviously, I'm all for the Vitamin D researchers at the University Wisconsin as well as other universities getting all the resources they need to do good work, even Princeton.
Wow, that all sounds pretty neat and mostly a lot of "hard fun".
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
And related:
"Mortgage Free!: Innovative Strategies for Debt Free Home Ownership"
http://books.google.com/books?id=U8olv7h0of4C
"How to Survive Without a Salary: Learning How to Live the Conserver Lifestyle"
http://books.google.com/books?id=ImmgMBhdeHkC
"Life After the City: A Harrowsmith Guide to Rural Living"
http://books.google.com/books?id=Fmq19Hv1fqYC
We live in a somewhat passive solar home, and do a bit of organic gardening (but we can't bear to cut down the beautiful trees where we are to have a bigger spot to garden or more sunlight, although I agree with you about the economics of that -- plus, doing stuff outdoors also saves on entertainment expenses and, as you allude to, gym memberships. :-)
Karl Marx and his fans (like Simon Clarke in "The Global Accumulation of Capital and the
Periodisation of the Capitalist State Form")
http://www.riff-raff.se/en/furtherreading/clarke_global.php
predicted an extension of credit to keep capitalism going just before it collapsed (whatever one can say about his proposed cures, a lot of Marxian diagnosis of problems with capitalism was accurate).
Someone just recently sent me this summary about Simon Clarke's writings: "The stages he addresses and ultimately rejects as being too vaguely defined to be considered as true periods are: Mercantilism, Liberalism, Imperialism, Social Democracy, and Monetarism. He identifies (in 1992 or before) monetarism as either being a new phase or (as it turned out) a reassertion of free-market Liberalism that will cause overaccumulation, the solution to which will be imperialism and extension of credit, which will only delay a deeper recession or depression. That's nearly a 20-year-out economic prediction that turned out to be very accurate! (Granted, he didn't offer dates, but he predicted some of the most critical events.)"
I'm adapting the following from a reply on that.
Just one more datapoint on that predicted "extension of credit":
"Debts Rise, and Go Unpaid, as Bust Erodes Home Equity"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/12debt.html?src=me&ref=business
as "capitalism hits the fan" (a talk by a Marxist economist)
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
So, agreeing with others, it is a good diagnosis by Marx and fans, up to a point, but poor prescription for current day events, as this essay says from 1971 by Murray Bookchin (someone more into decentralization):
"Listen, Marxist!" by Murray Bookchin
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/bookchin/listenm.html
A fan of Charles Fourier suggested to me that everything good about Marx came from the earlier Fourier. And Fourier was more into self-reliant living (though at a village level).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier
Here is a document I put together forty years after Murray Bookchin wrote, and two hundred after Charles Fourier:
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
The document suggests that there are four majo
Thanks.
By the way, a bit unrelated, but on cars and oil, :-) here is a post by me on why luxury safer electric cars should be given out free to everyone in the USA in order to lower taxes (so, sometimes redesign of a magic bullet is cheaper: :-)
"Why luxury safer electric cars should be free-to-the-user"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/09eb7f4c973349f2?hl=en
And that does not even take into account using the cars as part of a smart grid, or the possibility our electric and natural gas use might go *down* if we stopped refining oil into gasoline:
http://www.evnut.com/gasoline_oil.htm
"So I can get 24 miles in my ICE on a gallon of gasoline, or I can get 41 miles (at 300wh/mile) in my RAV4EV just using the energy to refine that gallon. Alternatively - energy use (electricity and natural gas) state wide goes DOWN if a mile in a RAV4EV is substituted for a mile in an ICE!"
The question is, why did mainstream academics ignore or laugh at someone like Amory Lovins for so long?
http://www.oilendgame.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
"The book argues that U.S. domestic energy infrastructure is very vulnerable to disruption, by accident or malice, often even more so than imported oil. According to the authors, a resilient energy system is feasible, costs less, works better, is favoured in the market, but is rejected by U.S. policy.[1] In the preface to the 2001 edition, Lovins explains that these themes are still very current."
So, basically renewable have been *cheaper* than fossil fuels since the 1970s when you include all externalities (pollution, health consequences, military, risk), but those costs are not paid at the pump, but on your taxes, your health care bill, or paid by ongoing suffering or problems faced by future generations. But instead we have endless economists parading about for decades shouting at us that renewables (solar thermal, wind, geothermal) are too costly, when it turns out that is actually a total lie (it's like saying that not changing the oil in your car is cheaper because it costs $20 for an oil change and you don't need it *today* and your rich uncle will buy you a new car anyway if the engine dies in this one). Meanwhile, Portugal just does renewable energy anyway:
"Portugal Gives Itself a Clean-Energy Makeover"
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/10/science/earth/10portugal.html
As does China:
"Our One-Party Democracy"
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html
But I know of someone who said she helped design a totally solar house in NJ that got bought and bulldozed by an oil company decades ago...
Science and technology is shaped in large part by strong economic interests. A book about the politics of the telephone including how companies fought municipalities that wanted buried cables instead of telephone poles everywhere:
http://books.google.com/books?id=0yE-CP4SmlYC
A professor who writes about these sorts of things:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langdon_Winner
An essay in the Atlantic on "The Kept University":
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/03/press.htm
Still, the original article on Alzheimer's researchers cooperating bucks the trend, so I can hope for
I'm sorry to hear that. This is what little help I can provide:
"Dark Nights of the Soul: A Guide to Finding Your Way Through Life's Ordeals" by Thomas Moore
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Nights-Soul-Finding-Through/dp/1592400671
"When it comes to spiritual growth, we humans are solar-seeking beings; eager for the bright lights of clarity and the bliss of illumination. Paradoxically, we all need to walk through the shadow of the dark night in order to discover a life worth living, according to psychotherapist and spiritual commentator Thomas Moore. Unlike depression, which is more of an emotional state, Moore calls the dark night a slow transformation process, which is fueled by a profound period of doubt, disorientation and questioning. Ultimately, a journey into the dark night will reshape the very meaning of your life. As a self-proclaimed "lunar type," Moore is comfortable leading his clients and readers into the shadows, where ambiguities and mysteries lurk around every corner. He describes the dark night journey in stages, starting with feeling distant from your life even as you continue to go through the motions. The second phase is "liminality," meaning living on the threshold between the known self and the unknown self. This is perhaps the most uncomfortable phase as the dark night may "take you away from the cultivation and persona you have developed in your education and from family learning," he explains. After dwelling in this murky darkness, there's a stage of "re-incorporation," in which one integrates the profound inner transitions into daily life. Like a tour guide to the underworld, Moore leads readers through all these phases, offering tools and rituals for making the journey more tolerable or at least more meaningful. He also speaks to the many arenas and stages of life in which we might find ourselves stumbling through the dark, with chapters on marriage, parenting, sexuality, creativity and health. The scope is ambitious, and at times the structure seems disjointed--but this is perhaps Moore's best contribution since Care of the Soul, proving once again that he is a wise and formidable spiritual teacher. (Gail Hudson)"
See my comments in this thread here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866 in the article on the CIA developer going open source. One point I make is that the USA spends literally billions of dollars on developing ways for people in the intelligence community to make sense of a deluge of information; why should such tools not be FOSS and available to every person to help think through complex issues and improve their local community? See also Doug Engelbart's aspirations for Augment. I am working on such FOSS tools here as I have spare time:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Something I wrote on that begins: http://www.pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html
"Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
I sent a longer version to the Markle Foundation in 2001, two years before this open partnership on Alzheimer's started: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html
Maybe it helped?
By the way, adequate vitamin D and eating organic whole foods heavy on vegetables, fruits, and beans (with a few selected supplements like B12 and DHA) may help delay Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia greatly; see:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/cat-alzheimers-disease.html
So, the answers are out there even without people cooperating to make some magic bullet. The cooperation through basic publications and the hard work of a few key people like Dr. John Cannell and Dr. Joel Fuhrman putting together such information has made huge difference. Now if just more people would pay attention to these findings -- but unfortunately there is not much profit in emphasizing getting mdoerate sunlight exposure (or taking cheap supplements) and eating right, so that is another part of the partadigm problem of a for-profit health care and R&D system.
Moderate exercise and some other things can help too (see Dr. Andrew Weil for the bigger picture of the holistic side fo health, though his nutrition advice is not quite as good as the above links) but again, there is not the huge profits in that as, say, doing triple bypasses.
See: "The IBM Personal Speech Assistant"
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.10.6203&rep=rep1&type=pdf
"In this paper, we describe technology and experience with an experimental personal information manager, which interacts with the user primarily but not exclusively through speech recognition and synthesis. This device, which controls a client PDA, is known as the Personal Speech Assistant (PSA). The PSA contains complete speech recognition, speech synthesis and dialog management systems."
Seriously though, that was ten years ago on research hardware, and this is great progress for a commercial and affordable advice with a large vocabulary. It probably works better than what we built then. And I still think software patents are a bad idea. :-)
"Scalable low resource dialog manager"
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6513009.html
Now, if only someone would do in a big way an idea I was pioneering at IBM Research back then on using speech to interact with display walls built using a network of hundreds of otherwise obsolete laptop computers (I only tested using nine though). I hope Google comes out with that soon, too. :-) I wanted to create something like that to help design space habitats that could duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore. :-) The idea was that speech would be a good interface modality when you were walking around in front of a display wall, rather than trying to carry a keyboard around with you (although you might still want a pointing device). Anyway, it would also be a good use for all those soon-to-be-obsolete iPads and Android pads in a few years when the next great version of them comes out. I just hate to see an old computer go to waste, even if they are often energy hogs relative to the next generation.
I posted yet another two comments in a different thread in this article, that I will point to here:
"Strategic advantage vs. diplomatic initiative"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33190792
"On different actors using OS intelligence tools"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33193588
An excerpt from that last post:
"""
So, in that context, what would be the implications of different political actors getting hold of really good free and open source intelligence tools, ones that build on, say, WordNet and other open source code and data? [Comments on some of the implications of other three letter agencies, the Netherlands, China, North Korea, Al-Qaeda, and the general public getting hold of this software...] "Think Globally, Act Locally, Plan Modestly" as René Dubos said. Better FOSS intelligence tools could help everyone do that, so in balance, I feel they will likely be a good thing, even though we will still need to do a lot more, and, it is true, some conflicts of values and assumptions may not be reconcileable, even with more thought (although we may get better at still finding some commonalities and figuring out how to co-exist even then).
"""
Here is more on this issue of the global distribution of free and open source software to all the countries of the world, even ones now deemed "competitors" or "unfriendly".
When I was an undegraduate psychology major at Princeton University, my advisor was George A. Miller. This was in the early-to-mid 1980s just before he started working on WordNet -- which was funded in large part by three letter agencies after George "retired". WordNet is also an "open source" project to which, in my less humble moments, I like to think I played a little role in sparking with my own crude explorations on semantic networks as a student of his, as discussed here:
http://groups.google.com/group/openvirgle/msg/231e63e966e932df?hl=en
WordNet, being open source, is no doubt used by governments around the world, including in China or maybe even North Korea. WordNet is also at the core of much of Google's AdSense profit making (not that I ever saw a dime from that. :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Armitage_Miller
But, what I have seen from that is being able to use Google -- a great service run on essentially a global supercomputer that has let me create all sorts of essays about ways forward for our society, such as:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post-scarcity-princeton.html
http://knol.google.com/k/paul-d-fernhout/beyond-a-jobless-recovery
So, I and many others have greatly benefited from the open source nature of WordNet and what that made possible, far more than if I or George or someone else had a bunch of money in the bank from some proprietary semantic network system that otherwise had sat on the shelf.
George never talked politics with me -- maybe as a consequence of always being pestered by other people to tell of his days working alongside Noam Chomsky (like working on joint papers, etc.). :-) The only time he said anything remotely political in my presence that I can recall was, in the days after "The Day After" movie (a PU prof had helped with the special effects) in the corridor near his office outside the men's bathroom in Green Hall. He seemed a bit upset or angry, IIRC another faculty member was there that he might have been talking to about this, and he said how stupid it was that the first thing the US or USSR military planned to do in a military confrontation was blind the other's satellites, which essentially would ensure the conflict would escalate, because there would be no way the other side could tell what was going on, and they would probably just assume the worst and shoot off all their missiles. I think he may have just read a newspaper article about that.
I feel George has made the world a much better place by creating WordNet -- and a world less likely to shoot off all its nuclear missiles. Whatever the sparks behind WordNet which he started at around age 65 (and I'm sure there were many sparks, as he hung out with lots of people doing semantic network stuff, like Alan Newell and Herbert Simon), he put in year after year of hard work, and structured it based on years of his research into how humans understand language and also how dictionaries work (or should work). He made something open source back when hardly anyone was doing that (and I myself was more interested in proprietary things and being the next, well, Bill Gates was not that big then, but whoever was ultrarich with a big company etc.). As a measure of my own personal growth from those times, in part from George's example, here is a recent video I ma
AC wrote: "Instead of selling our spooks the software, he instead essentially chose to give it away to all the spooks in all the countries who want it? Let's see where that gets him... I'm guessing it'll be a back room with no windows the next time he's at the airport."
That's certainly a possible sentiment that may well reflect how some in the intelligence community will feel about this general topic of free and open source intelligence tools. Still, as I posted in another thread here:
"Moving beyond tool/use distinction and irony"
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33189078
"""
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
"""
See also my comments in a different thread of this same article; a short excerpt:
"Moving beyond tool/use distinction and irony"
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33189078
"""
As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.
"""
WWWWolf, I agree with the moderation that your comment is insightful. And we do have to make moral choices about how we use our tools, as well as moral choices for how we distribute the fruits of our labors with tools (why I support a "basic income" for all, for example).
But there are at least two other aspects to this, and they relate to the point you made in your last sentence: "Perhaps it'd be best to see exactly how those best ideas that were leeched off of good honest scientists are put to action - maybe that'll help us build nicer things for nicer purposes."
One is Langdon Winner's point (such as in his book "Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-control as a Theme in Political Thought") about moving beyond a tool/use distinction (e.g. "knives can be used for good or bad") and looking at how we create complex socio-technical systems that embed assumptions about social organization, intent, acceptabilty, and other things into them. In that sense, the choices we make about what to research, how to build things, and what priorities to set are very much political choices about how we want our social world to be, even if they may not seem so at the time. So, for example, if we research and work towards centralized nuclear power plants, we've made a different statement about how we want society to operate, how accessible technology should be, and what are acceptable risks and to whom, then if we research and work towards, say, solar panels on every roof, or for that matter, long-lasting non-maintenance nuclear batteries. (Although distributed solar and even small-scale home or neighborhood nuclear batteries still may have very different implications on recycling, proliferation, weaponization, privacy, and monitoring).
For example, it is well known that a previous CIA director, R. James Woolsey, supports the development of an electric car infrastructure. See, for example:
http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052702303411604575168130469848598.html
Whatever else one might say about the CIA policies under his tenure, electric cars are a fundamentally more democratic technology than gasoline-powered cars because they would would eliminate the USA's dependence on foreign oil (also reducing the need for a big US military to defend long oil supply lines), and electric cars would be easier for the average person to service given less parts or to recharge at home using local renewable energy production.
Diesel engines, which can be powered by local biofuels, have some of these aspects, too -- which was part of why Rudolf Diesel intentionally invented them. From Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diesel_engine
"Though best known for his invention of the pressure-ignited heat engine that bears his name, Rudolf Diesel was also a well-respected thermal engineer and a social theorist. Diesel's inventions have three points in common: they relate to heat transfer by natural physical processes or laws; they involve markedly creative mechanical design; and they were initially motivated by the inventor's concept of sociological needs. Rudolf Diesel originally conceived the diesel engine to enable independent craftsmen and artisans to compete with industry.[8]"
Stirling engines also have some of these attributes. So the choice to research and develop electric cars, diesel cars, or stirling engines is, in that sense, fundamentally different in social implications than a choice to improve gasoline-fueled cars (given gasoline takes oil to make, and big refineries). On the other hand, research on, say, producing gasoline safely at home from vats of sunlit algae would have more democratic implications.
It would be nice to have open source (in the OSI and FSF sense) collaborative software tools for public intelligence that help scientists, engineers, and the general public discuss and thin