When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.

The post Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly appeared first on P2P Foundation.

From the shownotes to the video:

When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.

The post Tractor Hacking: The Farmers Breaking Big Tech’s Repair Monopoly appeared first on P2P Foundation.

°

Introduction

A hacker needs to have an idea where he/she wants to go.

Therefore I started to outline when invited to @ZK/U Berlin a scenario of the Open Source Circular City to inspire hacking for it.

Why?  

There is not only one way to a circular city and more than just one potential version of it. The political process that will shape it has just begun. I can think of a circular city where everybody is surveilled and controlled by infrastructure set up and run by big corporations. There are forces pushing for this. The scenario below is supposed to set a positive utopia against that and to inspire a positive action plan.

Quality

The scenario paints a big picture, it defines a mainframe. But all things in it are possible to start right now, small, with little resources – but seem scalable! The text always shares ideas how to get things started right now. And those ideas also look like people could find the motivation to put them into action because it can create power, opportunities or rewards for them.

Seven Layers:

The scenario consists of seven layers. Each layer is about one aspect of the city. Once you have understood two or more layers you can look for interactions between them and find even more details and ideas about life in the Open Source Circular City.

Of course seven layers don’t create an exhaustive picture of a city. Cities are too complex to be processed in a single brain anyway. So you have to make a selection. The selection below reflects what inspires me.

LAYERS (Chapter):

1. Reversibility Facilities: Where to (re)process products?

2. Transparency IPO: How is circularity enabled with communication?

3. Nature & Food: What is the role of the biosphere in the city?

4. Mobility: How do space and supply work?

5. People: How people spend time and create social structures?

6. Products: How do circular products work?

7. Buildings: Can buildings support circularity?

The first two layers are a bit hard to understand maybe – but you can jump between layers or skip them.

Work In Progress!

The scenario is work in progress. It is supposed to grow over time. During our stay at ZKU there was only time to create a text and illustrate a few ideas with drawings. We are looking for more support from institutions and partners to actually implement some of these ideas and to create more. Please get in touch. And follow us on Twitter or Facebook to get a notification when the scenario is updated.

The inspiring place at ZK/U where the scenario development was started.

Layer 1

Reversibility-Facilities

Wherever you read this right now: Look up and look at the products around you.

Imagine that they are all designed circular. They:

• are made to be repaired,
• consist of parts that can be – and will be – reused and refurbished,
• are composed with fully recyclable materials!

Great. Those atoms around you are ready to stay in the city, forever!

Now we need places in the city where the circularity of them can be fulfilled. Where repairing, reusing and recycling is put in action.

Reversibility-Facilities  

Let’s call those places ‘Reversibility-Facilities’. They are probably something between a second hand market, a repair shop, a factory, a research facility and a Fab-lab.

The products around you and those places build a network that takes care of the city and its inhabitants including you. This means your connection and responsibility to the products might be different. You don’t throw products away. You interact with future feedstock of your city.

At the beginning there would be only a few products fit for this. To identify and separate them they could carry a sign, for example an ‘(R)’. As a citizen you know about the different quality of (R)-marked products and that they can be fully reprocessed for you at the Reversibility Facilities. It is a network of products and facilities constantly rebuilding itself to support you. This network is visible and communicates to you, and it includes you (see layer 2: transparency). ‘(R)’ is a message of opportunity!

Details

A few details.

• Database also with unregistered things: There are products in the world today that are already circular. If the Reversibility Facility finds out how to circulate them properly they can put them into the public database of (R)-fit products. You can look up for your products if they fit and how to circulate them.

• Openness / Open Source: Openness (Open Source) plays of course a huge part in this (see also Layer 2: Transparency). The product information must be open to allow the reprocessing and reusing across cities and facilities. Maybe you can get your (R) certification only when your product is open? But, yes, maybe … if you thrown in a huge pile of lawyers, complicated contracts, meetings, confidentiality agreements, extra-code, emails, meetings and so on it could be possible to arrange an (R) certification also for a closed source product. But it would be much more expensive to get your (R) probably then. And it might turn out to be impractical or impossible.

• Collecting It: How do things get to the Reversibility Facilities? Large objects and products you could probably resell there. A deposit system is something that might work for some things. Smaller stuff you could collect in ‘reversibility bins’ and the city allows Reversibility Facilities to ‘harvest’ those bins.

Alternative idea to the one above: Take the logo of your local waste management company and turn it into a sticker: ‘Future property of – Company Name –’.

Resource-Piggybank stickers on public bins.

And Now?

How do we get it on the road?

The layer asks for complex infrastructures and networks probably unlikely to be installed top down! But maybe you can start this small and bottom up also? How about:

• A NETWORK: A group of companies with circular products could join forces and set up a first small Reversibility Facility for their products. That facility runs marketing campaigns, offers consulting and helps other companies to put their products into the network. Maybe this is easier to start with products with shorter life-cycles. Combine it with a crowdfunding campaign to get it on the road and more importantly get attention for it.

• A LARGE COMPANY: The first Reversibility Facility could start with research: Put already existing circular products into a public database. Start with bio waste and grow it from there. This could be piloted by a waste management company in a large city. They just add extra experiments. And sell the knowledge how to set up a space like that afterwards. The City Factory by BSR (Berlin Waste Management Company)!

Layer 2

IPO Transparency!

Bear with me. This might look a bit complicated for a moment. I was looking for something that would be quicker to explain. But the IPO model is still the most convincing idea to me! So it is worth it:

Transparency!

Transparency is key for circularity. To repair, reuse and recycle products and structures you need to be able to find out how they are made. But what is a good universal format to make things transparent in order to support their circularity? The IPO model might be the key. Imagine the following as a very simple software as easy as the Google search bar:

IPO model

In the IPO model you use a table to describe how something is made. The table has three columns: Input, Process & Output. An example:

A complex process or product can be described with several tables linked to each other. Where does the hot water in our example above is coming from?

As you can see in the example the trick is to list also all (!) Outputs. Because in an IPO system you can look up for each Input and each Output in what other tables it is used.

This allows you to discover unexpected uses. Alternatives to wasting it become visible. Did you know that you can use coffee grounds to grow mushrooms or produce cups for example:

With a system like this you can identify circular solutions quickly.

The more people use and feed this system the more solutions will pop up. And the faster we can identify problems. Which ingredients and processes always lead into a dead end (a landfill or toxic waste for example)?

You can click yourself through the tables and go into infinite depth how something is created. Water is an output of burning Hydrogen for example and hydrogen is an outcome of supernovas. Go and pick up the basics whenever you need them.

There are many ideas what you can add to a software with this basic functionality.IPO is the ultimate MacGyver-Tool. It enables us all to engage creatively with a circular built environment and open data about it! But for our scenario and the transparency question its enough. Let’s just assume there is an IPO representation about everything! It would be transparent how it is made and what you can do with it for everyone including the Reversibility Facilities!

It is important to add that the IPO representations talk about a product in general! Not about individual copies of it in individual households. IPO is not surveillance system! You are free to do with your stuff what you want to. IPO just brings up suggestions.

Augment the city with IPO! Put a glass window on a tree and describe the tree with IPO. Do the same with other things in the street or write directly on them. (Add the logo and link to the software as well.)

(Critique) Find garbage in the street or take it out of containers and write very big the name of the company that has produced the item on it. Place it prominently and ugly looking in the street. Take a picture and post it in social media!

And Now?

How do we get it on the road?

We are on it There is a basic and very raw prototype ready and a team that wants to continue to work on it. We just need a little bit of funding to develop it properly. You can help us to fund it or build it or just take the idea and start to work on it yourself.

ipotables.net

Layer 3

Nature (& Food) In The City

Nature has to play in an open and circular city many different roles. Two angles to look at it:

Food

If we grow more food directly in the city we can reduce transport and energy consumption. Companies will explore urban gardening more professionally and scalable. Someone told me that there is a company in Berlin growing editable mushrooms in cellars for example and farmscrapers/vertical farming is at least a popular idea.

Enlarge the board on your windows on the outside of the building to have more space to grow things – The inhabited farm-scraper.

Transform a car into a large and prominent greenhouse and park it in your street. Put a brand on the outside that is related to your street – so people will like it more/identify with it. Research the minimal ‘vehicle’ requirements to be allowed to use a parking space.

(Critique) Create signs “Here grow strawberries for you” and put it on parking cars in the city.

It is pretty easy to make foam used in construction look like mushrooms. Plant mushrooms in your street. Use really dark and clean soil. The champignon farm outside your door.

Diverse Biosphere & Education

Nature is good to teach people about circularity and makes also a great social catalyst (see layer 5). Less cars in the city means less toxins and more space to foster a richer biosphere. Let’s turn the city as a colorful botanical garden! The transparency systems we will run to support circularity in our products (see layer 2: transparency) can also be used to make the processes in our biosphere visible and therefore offer us new ways to interact with it and connect to it.

Put sign up in quiet streets like you see in a national park a nature protection zone. “Worm protection area”, “insect breeding zone” etc.

Transform the city into a botanical garden. Put signs up with latin names of the cities vegetation (1 / 2). / EXTENDED: Write and upload a kit about how to create sustainable circular signs to that people can do the same thing world wide – and it can become a movement.

And Now?

How do we get it on the road?

The urban gardening movement has produced a lot of knowledge and solutions in the past decade. Now it is time to professionalize this and make it scalable. One idea how to do it is shared here on our page: The Urban Food Gardener Startup.

The urban food gardener startup.

‘City Strawberries’ make a good marketing campaign for everyone who advocates for a sustainable city.

Layer 4

Transport, Mobility & Space

The car free city is already a popular idea. Cars are one of the most unsustainable things regardless if they run on fossil fuels or electricity. Cars consume resources, cause emissions, steal space and they transform the space between our houses into dangerous death zones!

But there is hope. Some research is predicting that the combination of car sharing and self driving cars could allow us to get rid of 90% of all cars and maintain the same amount of car mobility (95%+ of its time a car just parks). And there is lots of room to make public transport and alternatives like (e)bikes better and more attractive. Cities like Shanghai show how to do it: Make driving and parking a car in the city crazily expensive and create also other incentives for a car free life. Imagine how much free space this would create.

So the vision for mobility in this layer is foremost a vision about a city with less cars and a lot of free space to be used for example by nature (layer 3) or people (layer 5) and to decrease our need for car-mobility even more.

(Critique) Put incomplete chalk drawings like from kid on the street and next to it the outlines of a dead body like on a murder site.

And Now?

How do we get it on the road?

To some extend this is a question about changing public opinion about cars. Here are some ideas how to do that. Combine them to get even better results:

• Politically: Raise taxes for using a car in the city is something politics can do. Raise fees for parking cars is another: You should not just pay for parking in shopping areas but everywhere including in front of your house! Put down the speed limit is a third thing: 20km/h or maybe even 15km/h! Make it painful and senseless to drive your own car in the city. Running campaigns is a fourth thing politics could do. Reduce the number of parking spots to make driving a car an even bigger pain in the … In general: Owning and using a car in the city should face the same destiny as smoking – it is something bad for your and the health of others.

Hack existing Parking spot signs: “Parking only allowed from 0:30 – 2:00”.

Add signs to the street. Make it even just 5 km/h per hour. Make them look like street art or like they were created DIY by parents!

• Improve Public Transport & Bike Riding: Make public transport more beautiful, more comfortable, more spacy (how about a wagon with extra space for families) or more fun (gamify it etc.)  / /  Walking and bike riding could be supported better also! Here is a funny example of a project proposal from Berlin called RadBahn that points to better tracks for bikes.

How about a campaign by the public infrastructure company of a city: Get a 50% deposit for a whole year public transport ticket when you sell your car! (You proof that with your tax sheet – no tax anymore for a car.)

Another public transport campaign: Each ticket transforms itself into a lottery ticket. You can win a prize. (A friend of mine told me that there are examples where this idea was implemented.)

.

• Reduce, Avoid, Hack: If we make smarter use of the systems and infrastructures already in place we can substitute even more cars. How about using train tracks for other vehicles, how about delivering packages with the subway, how about a kit to transform every bike into an e-bike? How about + + +  ?

A lot of car traffic in cities today is package delivery from online purchases. How about adding an extra wagon to the train to deliver packages? On the platform is a packet station. So you’d go to your closest subway station and pick up your package.

Upgrade bikes to e-bikes.

• New Uses Of Space: Cars have been occupying the space between our buildings for a very long time. Most people never saw this space! And so they never created ideas what to do with it. Therefore using it for parking cars seems natural and unchallenged. To put ideas for this space into peoples head is important for change. Show people what is possible! Parking Day is an international movement often presenting ideas: Turn the city into a gym, a playground (Layer 5), a botanical garden or field (Layer 3) or?

• Campaigns: Campaigns can play a role in getting the public connected to the idea of a car free city. Campaigns can be created bottom up by grassroots, artists or activists or top down by large companies or even the state. Companies that run public transport systems or provide car sharing could have the interest, reach and money for impactful campaigns. Campaigns can focus on the negative side of cars in the city or on the positive side of a car free city. / / * Campaigns run by big companies and focussing on positive aspects will probably have the strongest impact – also on politics! (The car lobby is strong and those who are in power are not often seen in public transport. It’ll take big companies to step up here.)

(Critique) How long are cars in your street occupying space without moving? Find out. Use chalk to mark where they are staying and write down the colour and brand of car. So everyone can see what is changing and what not.

(Critique) Set up a fake parking ticket machine and write on it about “compensation fees for taking away the beautiful place on the street from children and adults for better uses.”

• Openness! Or: HowTos: While maybe campaigns need to be run top down for strong impact it is still the citizens who need to occupy the space with alternative ideas after all! We need available tutorials how to install and run new uses of the space. Those will also involve administrative work and dealing with government and regulations. And it will involve teaching or encouraging people to hack things! Activities from here will feed back to all of the above.

Let’s free the space one step at the time! How about allowing cars only to park on one side of the street and free the other side up for alternative uses – climbing frames and so on. Do a 50% campaign for your street! / This project would involve to create a 50% campaign kit and tutorial which would allow every street to run a campaign: start to collaborate and get politically active to make their street a 50% street. Bottom up change!

Layer 5

People

A good part of living in a sustainable circular economy is to consume less and as a result of this produce less. Throw in automation and AI and we have a lot of people out of work with free time to explore different things.

Maybe from an understanding of the biological and technological ecosystems a greater sensitivity for our body will enter the bigger mainstream: Yoga, sports, walks, healthy nutrition become even more popular. We can spend time to repair things or create/make some of them ourselves. Go for long walks and explore your city or even a whole country! I am sure people can find good ways to spend time in sustainable ways.

‘Obligatory Passages’ or: Maintaining Democracy In A Digital Age

When people can decide for themselves what they do, where they go and who they meet what will happen? The internet showed us that people have the tendency to lock themselves in to ‘filter bubbles’. If you can pick you tend to chose what you already know about and what fits your world view and comfort zones. People feel best amongst people that are like them!

Work life on the other hand makes us meet across bubbles! The university professor has an interaction with the package delivery employer at the door. But when a robot is delivering the package where will those two people meet? Will they be locked in to their peer groups if they design their day? For a democracy this could become a problem. How can people reasonably live together in a society and understand each others decisions if they don’t know about each others existence?

But work is not the only ‘obligatory passage’ in our world. School is an important one. Public space is another. To understand what an obligatory passage is think about your school. You had to go there almost every week and meet a very diverse group of people. But after school you met your friends – people that were closer to you. But in school there were all the others too. “Strange People.” But you learned about them. For many people school is the most diverse social setting they were ever part of. Math nerd, art fan, handy person, fashion freak … the smart and the less smart all on the same school trip in the woods. A miniature version of a complex society.

How can the city organize public life in a way that citizens meet across bubbles? A good way to do this is to create ‘obligatory passages’. The new public space offered by car free streets (see layer 4) is a good place for them. Make people do things in public! And let them do it in an open fashion! Yes. Openness is key here as well! Put a sign up next to your yoga class when the class will be open and new people can approach to ask questions and so on.

The Reversibility Facilities (see layer 1) could make a good obligatory passage for example. Maintaining our shared circular infrastructure together.

Turn the city into A Gym or A Holiday Resort, or a … (more: How to do city hacking) Invent a discipline, run a different tournament each week in a different street each week…

Add signs like on hiking trails all over the city. A place to discover!

Picknick instead Parking.

A non-shopping mall to discover and test all kinds of fun activities that aren’t shopping things. (I am sure there must be examples for this idea. If you know them pls. send and email.)

Billboards for repairing things. Repairing is cooler! / more

And Now?

How do we get it on the road?

Following what was said above: Design obligatory passages, try to make them inclusive and let people run activities there in an open fashion. And make those obligatory passages about not consuming!

But other than that: To explore circularity people need a lot of free time they can use guilt free and out in the open to develop new resource light ways to give live a meaning. But our society isn’t ready to grant this. So currently it is about small steps to free up time and make experiments and invent work free sustainable resource light lifestyles our culture will accept. Here are things to do or that would help:

• Politics 1 – Rent: Rents might become the biggest problem! In most cities rents are already to high to explore a resource light life with unpaid work on a basic income for example. When only full time and hard working people can afford to live in a city, the sustainable circular city and living in it won’t be developed. The permanent increase of rents need to be stopped and positive examples need to be supported. Not just for the circular city. (See Idea ‘The Circular House’ below for more!)

• Politics 2 – Basic Income Vs 0.1: In Germany we have a social security system: If you are out of a job for a long time you’ll get support by the state called “Hartz IV”. This pays for your health insurance, gives you a bit of money for your daily expenses and covers your rent (if it is not too high). But people on Harts IV get a lot of pressure from the state! So there is no room to openly explore resource light lifestyles and put a positive spin on it. Putting away this pressure would be a good first step. Maybe you can hack this yourself? (See idea below for more.)

This won’t work everywhere. But in Germany, where I am located, we have a welfare system called Hartz IV. You get basic financial support from the to cover your daily expenses, rent and health insurance. It is not much. But if you don’t have a resource intense life-style, like a circular one, it can be enough. Use it to become a ‘Circularity Worker’. Life a resource saving lifestyle, live a happy life without lot’s of stuff, and talk openly about it, blog about it, present it on the street. Set up a forum where circularity workers can meet and help each other to invent their life and deal with the state (welfare system). Put a positive spin on working less and receiving something like a “basic income” already. | A good way to start this as a hack is to set up a website and a forum for it, print flyers and hand them out in front of the Jobcenter (The place where you have to go from time to time if you receive welfare from the state). /// Those people are already living this life’s. But they can’t talk openly about it and can’t put a positive spin on it. Let them be heroes and researchers!

• Job Sharing: Job Sharing is already something people do. You split one job in two half time jobs for two people. In cities many people look for jobs that are only part time. Hack your company! Explain it to your boss. Invent workflow that allows job sharing.

• Campaigns: Hack Your Life: There are already campaigns and there is fantastic material out there from activists and NGOs showing people how to have and consume less and life a better life. Repair things with IFixit for example. Or live without plastics. But there is always room for more.

The CIRCULAR HOUSE is a project supported a real estate company or a tycoon that want’s to do something good for the world. As a resident you pay a very small rent or no rent at all. You become a resident by applying with a ‘project’. The project is a certain sustainable and circular life-style! You explore it in an open fashion: you blog about it and create tutorials so that others can do the same. Once accepted you are allowed to stay for 5 years in the house. Projects like this could be spread across the city. Hack into the heart of a real estate company or house owner to get this project off the ground.

Layer 6

Products / Things

We spoke already a bit about products in layer one and two: They are circular designed and transparent, and this means they communicate to me and include me differently through their transparency.

A good way to approach circular design is modularity. We might see a lot more modularity. And an interesting path to explore modularity and hacking is: ‘PreUse’.

‘PreUse’

I want to introduce you to the term PreUse (created by ReFunc, look also for PreCycling, from Umschichten). PreUse means you use a thing or product for something other then intended but you leave it intact so the initially planned use is still possible. Examples:

‘Hugo’ – a PreUse modular toy construction kit for kids (using regular nuts and bolts) developed by us on the side while staying at ZK/U.

A brick to support a board. Found @ZK/U Berlin

A street light at a staircase inside of a building. Found @ZK/U Berlin

A frame from pipes and car tires as gym equipment. Found @ZK/U Berlin

A pipe holder from pluming to support atelier curtains. Found @ZK/U Berlin

Some examples of PreUse are good hacks! They point to circular modularity that is already there and ready to use! And it can give us an idea for how some things will look and work in the circular city. Less objects and parts in the city reduce the complexity for the Reversibility Facilities (layer 1)

In one of the example above the pipe holders are perfectly designed to work as pipe holders. But as curtain holders they are a bit ugly. It is just a tiny step to change the design so that the object has the perfect look for both jobs.

Some more examples of PreUse? Contribute to a bigger collection HERE!

Excursus: Packaging

Packaging is something many people see and experience everyday – as a garbage problem. So here are some “hacking” ideas how to deal with packaging or avoid packaging in the circular city.

• Restaurants! Going out to eat reduces the need for packaging and allows to use less energy to feed the same number of people. And this helps also with the obligatory passages of layer 5.
• Deposit boxes for more things (deployed bottom up) –> a Preuse mindset
• PreUse & modularity in packaging! Make packaging that can be used also for other things and therefore collected and sold – a PreUse Deposit System (More here)

Read More Here [LINK] or below on slide 25.

And Now?

How do we get it on the road?

We need to start building those solutions one by one and make them popular. And politics need to support this. Campaign for it. Necessary support, inspiration and opportunities (synergies) for this can come from trying to implement the solutions of layer 1 and layer 2.

Layer 7

Buildings

I lack a bit of imagination or interest for buildings. But I feel there should be something about buildings in a scenario about the Open Source Circular City.

ReUse is interesting for buildings! Shopping malls can be turned into community centers, parking houses into farmscrapers and so on. When setting up these buildings for their new uses do it with a PreUse mindset. Prepare already for alternative uses after that.

[IMG & HACKS to add]

Dedicate space in buildings for circular processes and activities: Collect phosphate, do wormcomposting, grow mushrooms or other food etc.

[IMG & HACKS to add]

Another interesting questions for buildings or built infrastructure is to find ways to make it generate energy. 

Use the wind that occurs between some buildings to generate energy for them.

There are are plenty of ideas for sustainable and circular architecture. Increase density for more efficient use of energy is one I like.

And Now?

How Do We Get There?

How about a seal or tax incentives for circular buildings?

That’s it! Have fun finding the connections between the layers yourself. Send us ideas or hacks if you like and we are happy to include them.

The scenario above is all we were able to develop during our short residency at ZK/U Berlin. The plan is ready. Now let’s find a funding source to do more! Get in touch with ideas, interest or motivation!

Reposted from City Is Open Source shared under CC-BY-SA

The post The Open Source Circular City – A SCENARIO for City Hackers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

As reported by Jason Koebler in Vice Motherboard, lots of American farmers frustrated by John Deere’s licensing terms are now turning to Ukrainian and Polish hackers to buy software fixes. They want to be able to fix and modify their own legally purchased tractors. (“Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors with Ukrainian Firmware,” March 21, 2017.)

This very type of problem inspired hacker Richard Stallman to invent free software in the late 1970s. When an experimental laser printer donated to MIT by the Xerox Corporation kept jamming, Stallman tried to develop a software fix so he could help everyone who used the printer. He quickly discovered that the source code for the machine was proprietary — a stupid, self-serving limitation that prevented him from helping his colleagues.

This sort of copyright control has frequently crippled machinery over the decades. The basic point is to protect a company’s market power and proprietary control — a form of power usually protected by law.  Under US law, for example, bypassing “digital rights management,” or DRM, systems on DVDs, CDs or websites is against the law.

In the case of land vehicles such as tractors, a legal exception was carved out under US copyright law in 2015. But John Deere was able to evade that provision by requiring farmers to sign a new licensing agreement when they buy a tractor.  The license prohibits “nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevent[s] farmers from suing for ‘crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software,’” Koelber writes.

Most computer users have become accustomed to the annoying End User Licensing Agreements, or EULAs, which most people click-through and ignore.  (Are you actually going to read through 15 pages of legalese or hire an attorney to re-negotiate the license?)  The EULAs are essentially “contracts of adhesion” – one-sided agreements drafted by sellers to give them greater control over how their product may be used after its purchase and to limit sellers’ legal liability.  Contracts of adhesion purport to be freely made agreements between seller and buyer, but of course, they are nothing of the sort.  They are highly complex pseudo-contracts that reflect only the interests of the seller, which uses its raw market power or technological dominance to foist ridiculous terms on hapless consumers.

So if it’s harvest time and your tractor doesn’t work, the license insists that only an authorized John Deere dealership can fix or modify your tractor.  And if company technicians aren’t available, or 50 miles away, you’re out of luck.  Some farmers fear that the license gives John Deere so much legal authority that it could remotely shut down their tractors that have violated the license agreement.

The Vice Motherboard article describes a movement among farmers to push for “right to repair” legislation:

“If a farmer bought the tractor, he should be able to do whatever he wants with it,” Kevin Kenney, a farmer and right-to-repair advocate in Nebraska, told me. “You want to replace a transmission and you take it to an independent mechanic—he can put in the new transmission but the tractor can’t drive out of the shop. Deere charges $230, plus $130 an hour for a technician to drive out and plug a connector into their USB port to authorize the part.”

“What you’ve got is technicians running around here with cracked Ukrainian John Deere software that they bought off the black market,” he added.

Kenney and [Nebraska hog farmer] Kluthe have been pushing for right-to-repair legislation in Nebraska that would invalidate John Deere’s license agreement (seven other states are considering similar bills). In the meantime, farmers have started hacking their machines because even simple repairs are made impossible by the embedded software within the tractor. John Deere is one of the staunchest opponents of this legislation.

The John Deere EULA is just another example of how corporate players are making commoning illegal.  Code can’t be shared; it must be monopolized and monetized.  Farmer Kluthe has modified his John Deere to run on methane derived from pig manure, but it likely violates the EULA.  Richard Stallman would understand the frustration.

Although right-to-repair legislation would be a significant advance, I recently ran across another option:  an open source tractor.  The Oggún Tractor, completely open source but for its drive train, was introduced in November 2016 by an Alabama-based company called CleBer.  The Oggún Tractor — a fairly basic tractor that is intended for small-scale and family farms – sells for $12,500.

One of the founders is Horace Clemmons, who, as a veteran of the US computer industry, understands the value of open standards and open source development.  CleBer eplains that its business model is motivated by

“the fact that 80% of the world’s farmers can’t afford a tractor. Open System Manufacturing (OSM) changes that by being a customer based business model, not a stockholder based business model.

Open System Manufacturing is grounded in the idea that farm technology can advance more rapidly than it does today and get cheaper every year. While farmers do not currently see this reality for their tools, nearly everyone has seen this reality in the form of cell phone technology that becomes more useful and affordable every year. We have seen these benefits because of Open System Software and Computing. Why not apply the same concept to farm equipment?”

As an open source tractor, the Oggún uses common, off-the-shelf parts; uses the same components and subcomponents in multiple pieces of equipment; uses locally sourced parts, where possible; uses simplistic designs that allow the user to make unique adaptation and modifications.

“Our goal is to provide an affordable foundation that allows the people closest to the problems to innovate unique solutions that work for them and their community,” says the company literature.  “It’s not just a tractor, ‘it’s a way of thinking.’” Part of the thinking behind the Oggún tractor is to help revive make local and regional farming at smaller scales.  The low-cost, open source tractor should be especially attractive to farmers in the global South.

There are, of course, other open source agricultural equipment projects such as Open Source Ecology and Farm Hack. However, a difficult problem with those projects is how to capitalize the designs and make them commercially available.  It’s hard to get capital for projects that don’t own intellectual property (i.e., a patent in a proprietary technology). CleBer seems to have solved that through the mission-oriented investments of its two founders, who want to revive small-scale farming in the US, Cuba and elsewhere.

The Oggún tractor is still a very new tractor and one aimed at a very specific market segment of farmers. Still, the fact that it exists at all as a commercial enterprise is remarkable – and its potential, if taken to different levels, could be amazing. There are a lot of owners of John Deere equipment who would surely prefer not to be buying illegal software from eastern European pirates, but helping to build a new, more innovative ecosystem of open source alternatives.

The post Encrypted Tractors – and the Open Source Solution appeared first on P2P Foundation.

If we really do make subtle micro-gestures that betray ourselves to one another, then we must, on some level recognize those signs in others. Sure, some con-men and actors have gotten really good at masking their dishonesty or misdirecting our attention. But many of us have gotten really good at missing the signals we don’t want to see, or lying to ourselves about someone’s truthfulness against our own better judgment.

I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the illusion of secrecy we’ve been working under all along.

Subconsciously, anyway, we all pretty much always know when the other is lying. At best, all we do by lying is add noise to the signal, trigger alarm bells in the other person’s unconscious defense mechanisms, and push people away from us in the long run. So why bother to lie at all? Whatever it is we think we’re hiding, everyone already knows, at least deep down.

In an age when well-founded fears of government or corporate invasions of our privacy loom, I can’t help but wonder if the net is simply breaking the illusion of secrecy we’ve been working under all along. The abuses of our private information notwithstanding, could we be looking at a larger shift toward greater honesty?

Don’t get me wrong: It sucks that companies and agencies pore through our data, and sort it algorithmically to predict our future choices before we know them ourselves. Our social-media feeds steer us toward the paths most consistent with our big-data consumer profiles, reducing our spontaneity and manipulating us away from individual agency and unpredictable outcomes.

But the other side of the dynamic is that in order to get us to acquiesce to all this exposure, the sorts of things we are ashamed or afraid to disclose become less aberrant. Hell, marijuana is becoming legal. Gay people are allowed to get married. Transgender kids are getting bathroom rights in high school. How many people who were once afraid of what their email archives or web searches reveal to law enforcement or future employers can now say, “What do I have to hide? Pot’s not a crime, anymore.”

And as we’ve been reminded once again over the past few weeks, digital technology exposes abuses by individual police officers as well as systemic bias. There’s just no hiding anymore.

In the earliest days of the net, I remember young ravers telling me that the internet was itself just the clumsy precursor to the real connection we would one day experience through telepathy and other evolutionary advances. By their logic, the exposures we’re contending with today – whether it’s your girlfriend seeing that email to your ex, or your employer finding out you smoke pot – won’t be matters of technological surveillance. That’ll just be how things are when we’re all truly connected.

No, we’re probably not evolving toward an organically shared, telepathic “uni-mind” anytime soon. In fact, what these optimistic young net enthusiasts were imagining may actually be closer to an honesty we experienced long ago – before our media gave us so many opportunities to obfuscate the truth, hide from one another, and lose the intimacy we shared.

Before the invention of writing, for example, people could communicate only face to face. To lie to someone in person is a whole lot harder, on many levels, than writing a false note. While communication could be extended through time and space, it no longer had the interpersonal reinforcement of one’s spoken promise. It was more a matter of the law, and how to get around it.

Likewise, the printing press changed people’s once unquestioning relationship to the word of God and the actions of government. Ads on radio and television sold mythologies and pitched lifestyles that were unattainable lies. To accomplish this, these media alienate us from one another and ourselves.

The net offers to do the opposite: reveal truths. And while at first these may be crude truths like political scandals or illegal acts, those might actually be easier to deal with than the personal truths we hide from one another. Think honestly for a minute. How devastating would it be for certain people in your life to know all the secrets your online activities could tell them? And at the same time, this very fear is an indication of just how much we are living our lives in shame, secrecy, and isolation? How much might be released – and gained – if we could break through those boundaries?

In one of the most intimate moments of the first season of Mr. Robot, a TV show about cyber espionage, the highly alienated, vigilante hero hacker confesses to his therapist. He spills everything he knows about her from hacking her personal emails, web searches, and social media connections. He knows her heartaches, her porn preferences … her very soul. It’s a horrifying moment, but also the most profound human connection we see our hero make over the course of the series. True intimacy.

As he apologizes, in his way, for the invasion of privacy, he adds, “But I’ve helped a lot of people. I want a way out of loneliness, just like you.

Could part of the reason why this show is resonating so much with people – particularly those of us who spend so much time and energy on things digital – be that we share some measure of his sense of isolation and despair? Perhaps digital technologies don’t isolate us from one another so much than previous media, but they remind us of how much we do and don’t share with one another. Even the chronic oversharing we see on social media may be one small indication of a repressed, almost bulimic urge to release everything, to everyone.

I would never advocate compromising our digital privacy – particularly in an environment where selective enforcement, illegal government spying, and corporate manipulation are rampant. It’s simply not safe out there. But

Besides, everybody already knows.

Photo by Isengardt

The post Everybody Knows: From information abuse to more honest societies appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We are all hackers now, apparently—or are trying to be. Guilty as charged. I am writing these words, as I write most things, not with a pen and paper, or a commercial word processor, but on Emacs, a command-line text editor first developed in the 1970s for that early generation of free-software hackers. I had to hack it, so to speak, with a few crude lines of scripting code in order that it would properly serve my purposes as a writer. And it does so extremely well, with only simple text files, an integrated interpreter for the Markdown markup language, and as many split screens as I want. I get to feel clever and devious every time I sit down to use it.

Thus it seemed fitting that when I was asked to join a “philosophy incubator” with a few fellow restless young souls, I was told the group’s name—and that of the book we’d be publishing w?ith an internet startup—was Wisdom Hackers. Hacking is what this generation does, after all, or at least what we aspire to. The hacker archetype both celebrates the mythology of the dominant high-tech class and nods toward the specter of an unsettling and shifty subculture lurking in the dark. Edward Snowden is a hacker hero, but so is Bill Gates. The criminals and the CEOs occupied the same rungs on the high school social ladder, lurked in the same listservs, and now share our adulation.

To hack is to approach a problem as an outsider, to be unconfined by law or decorum, to find whatever back doors might lead the way to a solution or a fix. To hack is to seek simplicity, elegance, and coherence, but also to display one’s non-attachment—by way of gratuitous lulz, if necessary. Wisdom is not normally a feature of the hacker’s arsenal (they prefer cleverness), but evidently some of us have come to sense that even this generation of hackers will need to pick up some wisdom along the way.

But why hack in the first place? That is, why we should always need to use a back door?

For me this line of questioning began in 2011, the year of leaderless uprisings, starting with Tunis and Cairo and ending with police raids on Occupy camps, a civil war in Syria and a seemingly endless series of revelations spawned by Wikileaks. I followed these happenings as much as I could. I happened to be the first reporter allowed to? cover the planning meetings that led to Occupy Wall Street, and I stayed close to those early organizers as their illicit occupation became a global media fixation, then long after the fixation passed. Through them—and their sudden and surprising success—I tried to obtain some grasp of the spirit of 2011, which was elusive enough that it couldn’t be organized in some simple list of demands, but also intuitive enough that protesters around the world, in hugely different kinds of societies, found themselves saying and doing a lot of the same things.

I keep coming back to the slogan of Spain’s homegrown occupation movement of that year: “Real democracy now!” This had uncanny explanatory power from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park. Whether under Mubarak or Bush and Obama, young people around the world have grown up in societies they were always told were democracies despite repeated and undeniable signals that it was not: police brutality as a fact of life (whether by secret police or militarized regular ones), an unrelenting state of exception (whether by emergency law or the war on terror), and corruption (whether by outright graft or the mechanisms of campaign financing). When a system is broken, we resort to improvised solutions, jury-rigged workarounds, hacks. No wonder, then, that the mask of the amorphous hacktivist collective Anonymous became a symbol of the uprisings.

For 2011’s movements, however, the initial virality and the rhetoric of direct democracy turned out to mask a generation unprepared to deal with power—either wielding it or confronting it effectively. The young liberals in Tahrir may have created Facebook pages, but it was the Muslim Brotherhood’s decades of dangerous, underground, person-to-person organizing that won the country’s first fair elections. Even the Brotherhood would soon be massacred after a coup unseated them in favor of the military. “The army and the people are one hand,” Egyptians had chanted in Tahrir. With similar historical irony, the same might have been chanted about the internet.

In the Arab world, the 2011 endgame has included the rise of the Islamic State. Hacking every bit of social media it can get its hands on, the militants formerly known as ISIS emerged as a potent remix of al Qaeda’s guerrilla anti-colonialism and Tahrir Square’s utopian confidence, of Saudi-funded fundamentalism and hardened generals left over from Saddam’s secular regime. These disparate apps have been hacked together into one thanks to hashtags, an elusive leader, a black flag, and gruesome vigilantism.

I reject the often-uttered claim that the 2011 movements lacked purpose, or reason, or demands. Their fascination with hacking, and the vital fecundity that enchanted them, attest to the widely felt longing for a deeper, somehow realer global democracy. But what they share also had a hand in bringing them down. The allure of certain hacker delusions, I believe, played a part in keeping the noble aspirations of that year from taking hold, from meaningfully confronting the powers that now pretend to rule the world.

Ours is a generation of hackers because we sense that we aren’t being allowed in the front door. Most of us have never had the feeling that our supposed democracies are really listening to us; we spend our lives working for organizations that gobble up most of the value we produce for those at the top. We have to hack to get by. Maybe we can at least hack better than whoever is in charge—though that is increasingly doubtful. We become so used to hacking our way into the back door that we forget that there could be any other way.

I don’t want to hack forever. I want to open up the front door—to a society where “democracy” actually means democracy and technology does its part to help, where we can spend less time hacking and hustling and more time getting better at being human. Tech won’t do it for us, because it can’t. Hacking isn’t an end in itself—wisdom is.

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