This is a story about people who build their own machines. It’s a story about people who, due to necessity and/or conscious choice, do not buy commercial equipment to work their lands or animals, but who invent, create and adapt machines to their specific needs: for harvesting legumes, for hammering poles, for hitching tools onto tractors.

The machines are just one part of our story, and this article will talk about encounters between people, tools and knowledge and it will take us to various places: Paris and Renage in France, Pyrgos and Kalentzi in Greece, and Tallinn in Estonia.

Let us begin our journey in Greece. In Pyrgos (southern Crete), there is a small group of people called Melitakes (the Cretan word for ants) interested in seed sovereignty and agroecology. It is a group that cares about organic farming and that tries to form a small cooperative. One of the things the group does is to plant legumes in between olive-trees or grapes. While olive trees are abundant in Greece, the land in between individual trees is usually not cultivated due to the distance necessary to avoid shading and foster the growth of the trees. So the idea was quite simple: use the unused land. However, the members of the group soon faced a specific problem: it’s hard to harvest legumes by hand and there are no available tools to do this arduous job in a narrow line between olive trees. On the market, there are only big tractor accessories, suitable for such a job, and only for large crops. That is why the group sought the help of a friend in a nearby village, a machinist, to help them out. He liked the idea. He saw it as a challenge and started to develop a tool (see picture 1). At that time, there were no concrete ideas or talks of ‘open sourcing’ the tool and of ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) practices. The situation was rather a pragmatic one: ‘there is a need for a machine that does not exist in commerce, we need a person to build it… and that’s what we did, supporting that person as much as we could, during the process’.

DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Several weeks later, the two authors of this article met in Paris: Alekos, who knew about his compatriots who built the legume-harvesting machine met Morgan, who knew about l’Atelier Paysan, a French cooperative specialized in the auto-construction of agricultural equipment, based in Renage. Alekos explained his plans: carrying out his PhD at Tallinn University of Technology on convivial technologies, getting to know l’Atelier Paysan, and ‘implementing’ some ideas in Greece through creating a makerspace for building agricultural tools within the framework of an EU funded programme called Phygital. Morgan explained the trajectory of his research on/with l’Atelier Paysan: his involvement in a collaborative project on user innovation since 2015 and his analysis of l’Atelier Paysan through looking at the politics and materialities of open source technologies in agriculture. After their discussion about theoretical approaches, methods, concepts and fieldwork, it was time for Alekos to meet l’Atelier Paysan ‘on the ground’ by participating in a 5-day workshop to build two tools for organic grape crops.

Alekos gained several kinds of knowledge via the workshop. Practical knowledge on working with metals, cutting, and welding. He also gained theoretical knowledge from l’Atelier Paysan: its organizational structure, the problems faced (and how they are solved), the financial setup and how to run workshops (see picture 2).

Construction of the charimaraîch (a wheelbarrow/wagon adapted for market gardening). Source: l’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is one of the few collectives specialized in such activities (other notable collectives being Farmhack and Open Source Ecology). L’Atelier Paysan has developed a range of practices and tools for ‘liberating’ agricultural tools: a website, workshops, a book, video tutorials, and open-source plans. In their recent article, Chance and Meyer (2017) have analyzed l’Atelier Paysan by retracing their history and form of organization, studying how they enact the principles of open source in agriculture, and by describing their tools within their economic and political context.

When Alekos got back in Greece, he visited the Melitakes group again. He explained how l’Atelier Paysan works – its practices, philosophies, and ethics – and the various tools that have been designed and built. While thinking about the future development of Melitakes’ tool and its possible diffusion through some of the standards developed by l’Atelier Paysan, the collective faced a new problem: none of them was a mechanical engineer. None of them thus could draw the design of the components of the legume harvesting tool in situ. Yet this was a crucial step for digitizing the design and making it accessible online. So they sought the help of architects for how to best illustrate each part of the machine. Subsequently, they dismantled the tool, took photos of each component (more than 300 photos in total) in the correct angle (90 degrees) and with a tape measure visible on each photo. They also used big pieces of paper to trace some complicated parts (see picture 3). And they started looking for persons who, based on the pictures and imprints, would be able to (digitally) draw the mechanical design of the tool.

The plan, at the moment of writing this article, is to draw the plans of the tool, open source them by publishing them on the Internet under a Creative Commons type of license and then organize workshops to teach people to build it. So while the full story about the legume-harvesting tool has yet to be written, some features can already be told: a practical problem has been translated into a technical tool; this tool has been disassembled and photographed in order to make it ‘drawable’ and thus available via Internet. The hope, for the future, is that many more people, in many more places, will be able to build this tool, further improve it and share the improved design with the global community. But alongside the tool, something else will travel and be reinforced: the principles of agroecology and the practices of open source.

Imprinting of some complicated parts from the DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Our second story begins in a village called Kalentzi in Northern Tzoumerka region, Greece. The local community of farmers (called Tzoumakers) had another practical problem: finding an appropriate tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground. Several tools have been used for this task for ages. But not without its difficulties and dangers: there are farmers who climb ladders and hammer the poles, and others who climb on barrels to do the job. But the combined efforts of hammering the poles into the ground and, at the same time, maintaining one’s balance on the ladder/barrel proves difficult – plus, you need two people to do the job. That is why several local farmers and makers got together, tried to find a solution and set up a plan to build a tool that can do the job without the need for acrobatic moves by making it possible for one person to hammer the poles while standing firmly on the ground (see picture 4).

Testing the newly constructed tool for hammering fencing-poles from the Tzoumakers group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

The next phase, after the current prototyping of the tool, will be the design of a booklet that will include a detailed presentation, an explanation of the usefulness of the tool, a list of all the equipment and material needed, instructions for building the tool (and the risks thereof), drawings and pictures.

It is time, now, to move back to France and give more details about l’Atelier Paysan. The first tool construction workshops took place in 2009 by a group of innovative organic farmers that was eventually formalized and structured into the cooperative l’Atelier Paysan in 2014. At that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already begun situating its practices theoretically, by mobilizing various vocabularies and concepts (agroecology, open source, social/circular economy, common good, appropriate technologies, etc.) as well as various authors and academics (André Gorz, Jean-Pierre Darré, etc.). Active collaboration with several academics in the social sciences was sought from 2015 onwards.

By that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already perfected its general methodology: doing its TRIPs (Tournées de Recensement d’Innovations Paysannes / Tours to Make an Inventory of Peasant Innovations); developing tools via testing, prototyping, upgrading and realizing workshops; and ‘liberating’ the collectively-validated tools via publishing detailed plans and tutorials on the Internet. One of its most prominent tools is the quick hitch triangle, which replaces the usual three-point linkage between a tractor and the tool to be fixed behind it. For the quick hitch triangle, l’Atelier Paysan has produced a 10-minute video, taken many pictures, issued a 47-page booklet, drawn several plans – all of which are freely available on its webpage (see picture 5).

Design, making and testing the quick hitch triangle from the l’Atelier Paysan. Source: l’Atelier Paysan.

It is important to stress a key feature: it is not l’Atelier Paysan that develops new tools from scratch ‘in house’; rather, they actively look out for individual farmers’ innovations. Only thereafter, through collective construction work, after testing the tool in the field and various processes of representation (plans, pictures, videos), are the tools released. Put differently, while user innovations are already there, ‘in the field’, the role of l’Atelier Paysan is to collect, formalize and disseminate these innovations.

In Greece, the situation is somewhat similar: local peasants already have several ideas in mind for tools that they would like to materialize. The idea is now to continue building tools with the local community, a practice that is usually experienced as positive and empowering. Ideas – like seeds – need fertile ground. Yet, a model like the one from l’Atelier Paysan, cannot simply be copy-pasted to another country and another context unmodified: a thorough understanding of both realities is needed. For example, in Greece, there are no public funding streams available for such endeavors, and the specific plants, soils, and morphologies of the country also call for specific, locally adapted tools. Apart from the political and natural peculiarities, socio-cultural characteristics also differ. For example, farmers’ skills are not the same in Greece than in France, and the collective memory and experience of building cooperatives in Greece is different. The conditions under which people can cooperate have their local ‘flavours’ rooted in habits, perceptions and social imaginaries. Therefore, l’Atelier Paysan’s model can act as an inspirational starting point but needs to be adjusted through continuous local experimentation.

The final leg of our trip brings us back to our respective academic homes (in Paris and Tallinn), to our keyboards to write this article, and to the theorizations that we are currently working on. Our stories have been about the work – and sometimes difficulties – that go into transporting ideas, machines, practices, and knowledge from one site to another. This is not a simple move, it is not just a matter of copy-pasting an idea, a practice or a technology from one place to another. Ideas, practices, and technologies are not immutable objects, but they are, in a sense, ‘quasi-objects’. In order to move ideas and technologies, they need to be transformed, disassembled and reassembled, translated, represented, adjusted. It is only via a variety of interlinked actions – imagining, testing, photographing, drawing, theorizing, sharing, rebuilding – that objects can travel and multiply. For these technological devices to be open, ‘convivial’ and low-tech, they need to be opened up in several ways. Our argument is that this opening up is both a technical practice and a social endeavor. Our stories are thus not only about the practices of open sourcing agricultural tools, but also about the (geo)politics, ethics, aesthetics and collective dimensions thereof.

(Note: the authors of the article would like to thank Luis Felipe Murillo, Evan Fisher, Chris Giotitsas and Vasilis Ntouros for their suggestions and comments. Alekos Pantazis acknowledges financial support from IUT (19-13) and B52 grants of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, COST Action CA16121 project and the Phygital project which is funded via the Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg V-B Balkan – Mediterranean 2014-2020)

Lead Image: L’Atelier Paysan

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There is an important role for international trade and global exchange of goods and services, but not when it comes to meeting basic regional needs. Wherever feasible we should meet our needs as locally or regionally as possible and restrict the global exchange of goods to those that cannot be produced in a particular place.

Open innovation and knowledge-sharing at a global scale will be an important part of the process of re-localizing production and some global companies are already beginning to explore how to reinvent themselves as facilitators of the shift towards ‘distributed manufacturing’ and ‘the circular economy’.

Since 2013, together with Forum for the Future, I have been involved in conceiving and implementing a long-range innovation project for the Belgian manufacturer of ecological cleaning products and detergents Ecover. The project uses the unique island conditions of Majorca as a test field to explore how a global company like Ecover can help to facilitate a shift towards localized production for localized consumption based on local material and energy resources and in collaboration with local business partners. In the process we studied the potential of the Majorcan bioeconomy to deliver — in a regenerative way — enough biological raw materials (from waste streams) to produce cleaning products for the local market.

The island is particularly dependent on imports of consumer products and food, due to the increased demand caused by 16 million tourist visits each year. While the long-term sustainability of such mass tourism is more than questionable, these visitor numbers provide the economic engine that can finance the transition towards local production, food and energy infrastructures.

Ecover and ‘Forum for the Future’ collaborated with an on-island network of multi- sector stakeholders to create a showcase that, if successful, could serve as a transferable example and a model for a region-focused shift towards a renewable energy and materials-based circular economy (see Glocal, 2015).

Slide from one of my presentations about the Mallorca Glocal project with Ecover and Forum for the Future

We learned some very important lessons. Simply embarking on the process of co-creating an inspirational experiment like this and involving diverse stakeholders in it contributed to the wider transformation towards a regenerative culture. The conversation about re-localizing production and consumption on Majorca has started.

The regional experiment aimed to take a step towards a circular economy based on re-regionalizing production and consumption. It was motivated less by the potential for short-term economic success and more by the power of experimentation as a way to make sure we are asking the right questions. It catalysed a local design conversation while Ecover explores how it could reinvent itself as a global knowledge and business partner with a wide network of regional collaborators enabling distributed manufacturing and promoting regional economic development.

The transformation of our systems of production and consumption is a creative design challenge that will require whole-systems thinking and transformative innovation at its very best. The resulting disruptive innovations will ultimately make the existing system obsolete.

We were effectively trying to redesign production and consumption of chemical products, creating a local product by trying to operate more like an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, materials are sourced locally and assembled in non-toxic processes based on renewable energies.

The promise of this regionalized production system is a more diverse regional economy that generates jobs, encourages efficient use of regional waste streams as resources of production, helps local farmers get a good price for the food and biomaterials they grow, creates resilience by increasing self-reliance, reduces dependence on expensive imports, and contributes to the effort to quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by reducing transportation of feedstock and finished products.

The first steps towards achieving this are already being explored in many industrial ecology projects around the world (see Chapter 6). Even if some of these current projects are hybrid systems that still rely on fossil energy and non-renewable material resources, they are achieving increases in material and energy efficiency by connecting previously separate industrial processes in ways that turn one industry’s waste (whether material streams or waste heat) into another industry’s resource of production. They are second horizon(H2) stepping-stones to renewable energy-powered regenerative systems.

Unleashing the full potential of such ecosystems of production and consumption based on integrative industrial design requires regional collaboration across all sectors and all industries. The synergies that can be generated when previously separate industries are linked through ecological design thinking are substantial.

The book Blue Economy summarizes a number of such ground-breaking design solutions that are being implemented or are in advanced stages of development (Pauli, 2010). It offers inspiration for green entrepreneurs to get involved in H2+ transformative innovation.

The overall shift is away from a fossil fuel-based industrial system with centralized production facilities that rely on bringing raw materials from all corners of the Earth only to then distribute the finished products globally again. This wasteful system is based on outdated industrial design solutions developed during the first industrial revolution where the economics of mass-manufacturing meant bigger was better, and cheap abundant fossil fuels and non-renewable materials were taken for granted.

Currently, the vast majority of our consumer products contain petroleum-based materials. During the first half of the 21st century we will witness the transformation of this global system of production. We will begin to co-create a material culture that relies on locally available materials, green (plant-based) chemistry and renewable energy sources for regional production and consumption.

Integrative design based on whole-systems thinking and the kind of nature-inspired design solutions explored in the next two chapters will help us create ‘elegant solutions predicated by the uniqueness of place’. This is how my mentor Professor John Todd, a pioneer in his field, defines ecological design. Such solutions are an elegant blend of the best of modern technology and a rediscovered sensitivity to place, culture and traditional wisdom. New technologies are opening up a 21st-century, design-led re-localization enabled by global resource-sharing and cooperation.

Distributed manufacturing is becoming a reality as new 3D printing technologies enabling additive manufacturing at a small scale are developing rapidly alongside revolutionary approaches to open innovation based on peer-to-peer collaboration, the spread of ‘Fab-labs’ and a new maker culture, breakthroughs in material science, as well as diverse bio-economy projects. Much work is still needed in the area of developing locally grown and regenerated feedstock for 3D printing technologies.

The Open Source Ecology project started by Marcin Jakubowski demonstrates how inventors and technologists are already collaborating globally to recreate regional means of production that are increasingly independent of the centralized mass-production systems of multinationals.

The project’s aim is to create the ‘Global Village Construction Set’, an open-source design and engineering library of detailed blueprints that will enable people with basic engineering and technical skills to create the 50 most important machines needed to build a sustainable civilization. We are beginning to ask:

How can we implement the global shift towards increased regional production for regional consumption?

How can we create effective systems of open-source innovation that enable people globally to share know-how and design innovations?

How can we ensure that re-regionalizing production and consumption will happen within the bioproductivity limits of each particular region, and strike a balance between growing food and growing industrial resources regionally?

How can we make 3D printing technologies sustainable by ensuring that they use locally produced, renewable and up-cyclable feedstock in environmentally benign ways, powered by decentralized renewable energy?

How can we use bio-refineries and advanced fermentation technologies to facilitate the shift from a fossil fuel-based organic chemistry to a solar- powered, plant-based and non-toxic chemistry in order to re-invent our material culture?

An early lesson we learnt in Majorca is that a successful bioeconomy requires widespread collaboration between sectors. Policy interventions are needed to regulate access to biological resources and their sustainable (regenerative) production and use. With limited bioproductive potential within a particular region, we must find ways to create ecosystems of collaboration that optimize the use of available resources.

Regenerative design solutions require whole-systems design conversations across all sectors of society. From these conversations a guiding vision will emerge. This vision can be made reality, one place at a time, by all of us. [At the time of writing, the Ecover Glocal project is not advancing, due to a lack of funding. It created a network of collaborators and planted a vision that is likely to be taken up again in the future.]

Image Source

[This is an excerpt from my book Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

Photo by POC21 – Proof of Concept

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But open source projects tend to exist in somewhat of a paradox. They are propelled by extremely skilled and well-educated people, but the financial compensation for projects is often low or nonexistent. Even though they are sometimes used by communities of many thousands or millions of people, the output of projects is often expected to be free of charge. While open source methods are responsible for many profound innovations in our lives, most societies have yet to understand or appreciate the meaning of “open source.”

If open source projects do not always make money, what propels them to continue growing? How does an open source project get started, and how does it evolve? What are some things to embrace and avoid when working on open source projects? The following noteworthy initiatives offer some instructive answers.

Open Source Ecology

The ambitious goal of this small organization is to develop fifty open source industrial machines that can be used to build a civilization from scratch. This includes everything from bread ovens to ploughs and 3D printers. In each case, the idea is to make useful tools out of cheap, accessible parts and share how to do so on the Internet.

OSE is the brainchild of Marcin Jakubowski, whose original mission to start a sustainable farm was hindered by the fact that proprietary agricultural tools are expensive and difficult to repair. To help his farm and his wallet, Marcin began building his own tools like a tractor and a press to make compressed earth bricks useful for building. He documented his work rigorously on a blog and YouTube channel, catching the attention of other tinkerers who began contributing time and resources to support Marcin’s efforts.

Marcin’s goals evolved quickly from developing a farm, to inventing an ecosystem of modular open source tools called the Global Village Construction Set. The project aims to supply anyone with designs and tutorials to build their own machines, thus enabling people to become more autonomous as farmers and less dependent on industrial producers. Adopting radical open principles, Marcin began documenting his work on a public wiki, including theories, detailed plans, and even financial information. A successful crowdfunding campaign and a supporter subscription system helped fund early development, but for the first few years, the project was often financially precarious.

After building a productive following of hundreds, several successful prototypes, and a community living space onsite, OSE’s proof of concept seemed to be emerging. The project received several lucrative grants to continue development, and an invitation to speak at the celebrated TED conference.

Although OSE was attracting a lot of attention, its infrastructure, both in terms of governance and the physical space at his farm in Maysville, Missouri, was not able to deal with the flow of people wanting to collaborate. Marcin’s brainchild needed other brains to grow, but living conditions were poor and he lacked basic skills in community management. After several fallouts with OSE collaborators, he became seen as unappreciative of the community and the organization evolved into a one-man show where credit for the work of many seemed to be going only to Marcin. This was obviously harmful to the collaborative environment, and led to an unhealthy, disempowering dynamic within the community. OSE needed structural stability, but with the team constantly changing, the project began to suffer. However, the vision and goals were compelling enough that money and people continued to pour in.

Currently OSE seems to be stabilizing, but the lofty ambition of developing fifty Global Village Construction Set machines still seems far off. This is the story of a project that evolved organically, but perhaps too fast and without stable governance. With a focus on machines and not on people, the vision has suffered, but there remains great potential for its future, should these issues be resolved.

Perhaps OSE’s most profound achievement is the influence it has had, which reaches far beyond the thirty acres of farmland in Missouri. In pioneering open agriculture and engineering with such ambition, new shoots are rising to adopt and spread these methods, as seen in robust collaborative projects such as Farm Hack.

WikiHouse & Open Desk

As recent graduates in 2011, architects Alastair Parvin and Nicholas Ierodiaconou found themselves hired by an innovative London design practice called Zero Zero Architecture. Both shared a passion for open design and were given the opportunity to experiment with their ideas.

While exploring CNC [computer numerical control] fabrication, the two architects and their team used automated printer-like technology to design files that could be fabricated from plywood, which in turn allowed them to develop a construction system made of large, flat wooden pieces. These pieces could be assembled quickly and with unskilled labor to make the structural shell of a home.

After publishing the Wikihouse construction system as open source files available to anyone, the project encouraged others to adapt its creations for different environments. They released a manifesto outlining the core principles of the organization, and invited people to sign up in their own individual chapters. This allowed a collaborative network to form without compromising anybody’s autonomy. The community, twenty chapters strong in 2015, is able to connect with the project without requiring management from Wikihouse and its small team. Wikihouse is now registering as a nonprofit foundation, using grants and pre-made kits to fund development.

Open Desk is an online platform developed by Alastair and Nicolas for selling furniture that is designed and produced through open source principles. Although structured as a for-profit company, Open Desk is a collaborative community of designers, makers and buyers. Designers propose furniture designs that can be made using the same plywood fabrication technique used by Wikihouse. The proposed designs are voted upon by the community, and if demand is high, they are added to the official product line. Users have the choice to either download the files and make the product themselves (for a small fee) or buy a prefabricated product though the site. Orders are assigned to a fabrication facility local to the client, and revenues are split three ways between the designer, the manufacturer and Open Desk.

The system is not entirely open source because use of the designs must be purchased (albeit only for a small amount) and they come with licenses that prohibit commercial reproduction of the products (although noncommercial, personal copying is allowed). This has been done in an effort to protect and incentivize Open Desk’s designer community.

Open Desk and Wikihouse were intentionally founded on open principles in an effort to foster communities of designers and users. By changing the traditional model of design and manufacturing, they are allowing for global collaboration linked to local production, slowly inverting the standard “producer to consumer” production model to something more participatory, innovative and accessible.

Public Lab

Public Lab is an organization that creates cheap, open source hardware and software tools to help citizens document and investigate environmental problems together. It began in 2005 when a group of loosely affiliated activists set off to Louisiana in the wake of the BP oil spill. There, they began documenting coastal oil pollution using low-tech kite mapping techniques. Over the past few years, the organization has grown into an international community whose members are working to understand their natural environments with greater scientific precision, and to hold to account those responsible for damaging them.

Public Lab describes itself as a community supported by a nonprofit organ­ization. Through their store, they sell low-cost open source monitoring kits, which are legally considered donations. This allows them to secure foundation grants while also earning revenues from sales of their monitoring products. As an open source hardware developer, Public Lab provides guides on how anyone can make their tools at home for free.

Public Lab’s real value is not in the tools, but what is done with them. The balloon mapping kit, for example, allows users to create exceptionally high-resolution aerial photographs (to map oil pollution or coastal erosion) for exceptionally low costs. The images can then be uploaded to Public Lab’s website where users can stitch them together using open source software, and where the maps can be analyzed by the community. The resulting images (if good enough) are even scraped by Google and added to their mapping services. (This is an example of how open-platform corporations often appropriate things from the commons for their own profit-making purposes, and why many digital commoners are now turning to Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses.)

Public Lab is a fine example of how a dedicated community with useful open-source tools can populate a digital commons with valuable data. The website is heavily editable in the manner of a large public wiki/notebook hybrid so that everyone’s work is documented. The community is motivated by a curiosity or concern, and the Public Lab website gives people access to the tools and information they need to help investigate. The resulting discoveries can be documented, shared and used to lobby for political change.

Jeff Warren, one of Public Lab’s cofounders, calls this “speaking the language of power.” Rather than petitioning for change through traditional means of protest, which may or may not be respected by authorities, the hard scientific data produced by the Public Labs community gives it powerful factual justifications to launch official investigations.

Public Lab is a project which evolved organically from a group of activists who realized they were developing an important new form of community activism based on the power of open data, open hardware and open source software to influence government policymaking and enforcement.

Conclusion

What motivates these projects to contribute to our commons? I think the answers vary a great deal. Open Source Ecology is driven by a desire for autonomy in farming. Wikihouse wants to lower barriers to custom design. Open Desk is expanding creative designs and localized production. Public Lab is pioneering new forms of effective, scientific activism.

. There is another salient force here: a recognition that business as usual often serves to separate us from what is really important and cannot create the scale or speed of change needed to address the multitude of challenges we face in the modern world.

Tristan Copley-Smith (US) is a documentary filmmaker and communications expert aiming to empower positive disruptions in technology and society. He has worked with organizations like Wikileaks and Open Source Ecology to build supportive followings and communities, and is cofounder of the Open Source Beehives citizen science project.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Photo by Will Scullin

Photo by oranginaaaa

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Now, a few weeks after, I still have a feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach anticipating the next four years. But I’m a lot less terrified (although I never forget that for a lot of less privileged folks it’s always been a Black Iron Prison, and the downside possibilities of a Trump presidency are a lot scarier for them).

For one thing, it looks like there are significant structural constraints on a fascist power grab, no matter how authoritarian Trump is. The biggest single constraint is that (as Benjamin Studebaker points out), unlike Hitler, he can’t take advantage of Article 48 in the German Constitution to declare an emergency, criminalize the Democratic Party and remove court oversight of cases involving civil liberties.

And Trump didn’t get elected because either he, or the white nationalist ideas of his strongest supporters, were especially popular. In fact he’s probably going into office with the highest negatives of any new president in the past century. He got a minority of the popular vote, and was able to beat Clinton mainly because she was such a lousy candidate in her own right that Democratic voters stayed home by the millions.

So Trump’s starting out already as unpopular as Bush was on the eve of 9/11, when he was widely written off as a one-termer. And he’s only likely to drop further in popularity once he enters office. He’s no longer competing against another unpopular politician — he’s only running against himself now. With every gaffe, every display of incompetence or disorganization, every policy failure, he will only become more unpopular.

The likelihood of a successful fascist power grab is further limited by Trump’s own lack of interest in governance, and the incredible levels of division and disorganization among his subordinates.

Trump himself seems to have been surprised — and somewhat dismayed — by his victory on November 8. To all appearances, he wants only to hide out in Trump Towers, talk to his staff by phone half an hour a day, and speak to the occasional rally. And of course, leave all the wonky stuff like policy briefings and, you know, actually paying attention to things or anything that looks like work, to his subordinates.

As for those subordinates, they’re split between fascists or extreme social conservative authoritarians like Bannon, Pence, Giuliani and Clarke, and mainstream Republicans like Priebus. And they’re essentially working against each other, operating in broken-back fashion with no clear central direction.

It’s a fair guess that significant factions within the Deep State (the permanent apparatus of the CIA, NSA, Pentagon and State Department) will be hostile to Trump from the outset. There were credible rumors of this in 2004, in response to Bush’s bullying of the intelligence community and cherry-picking of intelligence, his incompetence in Iraq, and the administration’s treatment of Richard Clarke and Valerie Plame. This time we can plausibly expect the war of leaks and sabotage to be even greater — along with more generalized sabotage and public relations warfare by the rest of the civil service. And given Priebus’s lack of administrative experience, and the incompetent ideologues Trump is selecting for his other Cabinet positions, it’s safe to say this gang of clowns will be eaten alive by bureaucratic warfare.

And that’s not even considering the likely feuds that will erupt when Paul Ryan and the Congressional Republicans discover Trump’s not interested in a conventional GOP austerity agenda.

Getting back to the whole fascist power grab thing, probably the scariest plausible scenario is someone like Giuliani, Clarke and/or Arpaio being put in charge of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and/or FBI. And the potential for Senate Democrats not only to filibuster Trump’s nominees but to take advantage of the Senate’s weak party discipline and secure a flat-out rejection by peeling off a few Republican votes, looks quite good.

On the whole, the structural possibilities for authoritarian clampdown were much greater after 9/11, when 90% of the country rallied around Bush and the Democratic Congressional leadership seemed ready to rubber-stamp a Reichstag Enabling Act, were probably much greater than they are now.

The same constraints on Trump’s ability to consolidate power or to achieve his agenda, along with the likelihood that his unpopularity will only increase, make it a pretty good bet that he will be swept out in 2020. Outside the 20-30% of the public who are Trump’s most diehard supporters — fully deserving of the “deplorables” label — the American public consists entirely of people who either voted for Clinton, held their nose and voted Trump because they considered him marginally less repulsive than Clinton, or considered both Clinton and Trump to be so repulsive that they voted third party or stayed home.

Isolating Trump and his hardcore base from the other 70-80% of the population, and shifting Trump’s reluctant voters to outright hatred of him, shouldn’t be very difficult at all — he’ll do most of the work for us himself. And it’s a pretty safe bet that all those 2008 and 2012 Obama voters who cost Clinton the election by staying home will not be staying home in 2020.

The marginal Trump voters who only just barely voted for him will start getting buyer’s remorse pretty quickly as soon as the first fuck-ups in office get started. The Democrats and independents who hated Trump but were too disgusted with Clinton to bother voting will be lined up around the block in 2020 just to get him out and replace him with somebody, anybody. It will be the national body politic’s analog of projectile vomiting to get rid of a toxin.

Win or lose, Trump was bound to bring to a head the civil war within the GOP that will result in its collapse into a regional party of angry white men.

And meanwhile, we’re seeing the beginnings of a generational shift in the Democratic Party. In the 2016 primaries something like 70% of Millennials supported Sanders against Clinton, and their alienation from Clinton was probably a major contributing factor to her defeat. And he got roughly 45% of the total primary vote to her 55%. By 2020 another four-year cohort of Boomers and their elders who disproportionateley supported Clinton will have died off and been replaced by a cohort of young people, which will shift the balance further to the left. Already, in some of the states where Sanders won the primaries, there have been successful efforts to shift control of the party machinery from Clinton to Sanders backers. So even if — as is almost certain — the coalition that removes Trump still has the Democratic Party at its core, it will be a coalition significantly to the left of the one that nominated Clinton.

So what can we do in the meantime?

I. Resist, Resist, Resist

According to Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free, a sense of normalcy prevailed during Hitler’s early consollidation of power that most people today would find hard to believe. Each new step was incremental, seemingly minor when taken in isolation, and presented by the authorities as a matter — often a regrettable mater — of necessity. Usually the new step was taken without much in the way of public notice or objection. And if there was any significant public uproar, the government would temporarily back off and try again later.

So clearly, our first task is to fight the sense of normalcy at every step, and at every step to organize and add our voices to the largest possible public outcry in protest.

Fortunately, this is easier than usual in the present situation. To repeat my points above, Trump is more unpopular going into office than any president-elect in living memory, public opinion is highly polarized, and his popularity is almost guaranteed to go down steadily from his first days in office.

What’s more, it’s no exaggeration at all to say that Trump himself is cartoonish in his thin-skinned reaction to any form of opposition or criticism. He’s a thin-skinned ignoramus who has spent his life in a protective bubble, surrounded by people who are afraid to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear. As Trump himself said, regarding leaked DNC memos in which Neera Tanden and others made critical comments on Clinton’s “sub-optimal political instincts,” he’d have fired anyone who talked to him that way.

This is a man who still mails pictures of his hands to a journalist who commented on his short fingers over twenty years ago. The Clinton campaign was able to use this personality trait against him to great effect. It was enough to simply mention someone whose criticism the Trump campaign wanted to deflect attention from, and Trump himself — rather than simply ignoring it and letting the news cycle move on — would spend the next week reminding the press about the issue by obsessively venting his sense of personal grievance on Twitter. The kinds of mockery on Saturday Night Live that seven previous presidents all accepted as part of the job have him tweeting in outrage at all hours of the night.

As comic creator K. Thor Jensen observed on Twitter, “It’s becoming ever more obvious that Trump will lash out and shit the bed whenever he feels any pressure, so PRESSURE HIM CONSTANTLY.”

Trump was reportedly not just dismayed, but floored, by the mass demonstration against his appearance in Chicago last march. When his election was met with a nationwide wave of protests, he responded with tweets about how “unfair” it was — followed the next morning by mealy-mouthed praise for the protestors’ public spiritedness and a promise to “unify” the country. Look back on that bit above about the Nazis pulling back temporarily in the face of public outrage.

So we need to swarm the authoritarian state every single time it steps across the line, not only with sheer numbers but with the maximum possible horizontal cohesion across civil society, and between social sectors and movements. The classic model of “community campaigns” against corporate malefactors, resurrected by OURWalmart, is a good example. So are Occupy, Black Lives Matter and NoDAPL, and the nationwide solidarity networks in support of them. The wave of demonstrations after the election, and the planned demonstrations and general strike for Inauguration Day, are hopeful signs for the future.

Every time the feds coordinate another attempted crackdown like the November 2011 assault on Occupy camps — roundups of undocumented immigrants, mass arrests of Black Lives Matter activists, etc. — every major city in America needs to be shut down. And every local police station, mayor’s or governor’s office cooperating in such an action needs to be so swarmed by demonstrations, phone calls, faxes, emails, and social media storms as to be paralyzed into inaction.

And as C4SS Director William Gillis says, the swarming needs to be extended to mainstream politicians and media outlets that waver in their opposition or help to normalize creeping authoritarianism. “Force those politicians and apparatchiks supposedly in the opposition to hold an absolute line, as if it were life and death (because it is).” When the New York Times or CNN quotes a Trump lie as straight news without prominently identifying it as a lie, the authors and editors need to be swarmed on social media — every single time — until they dread the inevitable deluge of critical responses from their readers more than they do losing “access” to the White House.

II. Exploit Divisions Within the System

The first order of business is to exploit the formal divsions — between parties, functional branches of the federal government, and the various geographical levels of government — within the state.

I’m not even going to get into ideological divisions within the anarchist community about whether we should soil our hands through political involvement. Lobbying to help draft legislation, or running candidates in the electoral processs, is mostly a waste of time for anarchists. Pressuring, from outside, the weakest links in the system most certainly is not.

To the extent that executive power grabs, especially odious political appointees or noxious pro-corporate legislation can be slowed down or stopped by Democratic obstruction, it is imperative that we take advantage of it. The nomination of a figure like Giuliani or Clarke for FBI or Homeland Security (or Trump’s actual choice of Sessions for Attorney General), should result not only in the swarming of the Senate telephone system with demands that every single Democrat either grow a backbone or look forward to our votes for a left-wing challenger in the primaries (we don’t actually have to even vote — just threaten it), but the swarming of moderate Republicans with demands to break ranks and help Bork the nominee.

Legal challenges to lawless executive actions and police state legislation, at all levels of the federal court system, are also important. So are acts of resistance at the state and local level, like LA, NY and Philadelphia’s promises to remain sanctuary cities and de Blasio’s stated intent of destroying databases that could be used to identify undocumented immigrants. Those who enage in such actions should be met with praise and encouragement, and those who collaborate with the Trump regime should be attacked and organized against on exactly the same terms as Trump himself. That means doxxing and publicly shunning mayors, police chiefs, etc., and randomly swarming them at their homes, country clubs, offices, favorite restaurants and places of worship — until they’re afraid to show their faces in public.

But the most important divisions within the system that we can exploit are inherent in any authoritarian system, by virtue of its own authoritarianism. Authoritarian systems, by their very nature, cannot afford to be permissionless. Because they are built on fundamental conflicts of interest between their leadership and those who carry out the day-to-day tasks of running the machinery, they cannot afford to trust their subordinates with any autonomy or discretion. Those who possess all the Hayekian distributed knowledge about the situation at hand, must be hamstrung by official procedures, because both they and the leadership know that their interests are diametrically opposed.

This means that, regardless of the functional role of the state in the capitalist system, it must be governed internally by standard operating procedures even when those procedures impede the political purpose of the state. Indeed many of the functionaries without whom the state could not keep running elevate adherence to such procedures above all else.

At the same time, the official legitimizing ideology — something without which no system of authority could survive — serves, to the extent that the state’s functionaries are genuinely socialized into it, as a further source of internal dissension.

Taken together, standard operating procedures and the official legitimizing ideology can be used to monkey-wrench the state. As I argued elsewhere, lobbying the state for positive reforms within the system is usually not cost-effective.

But outside pressure on the state as a side-effect of shifts in public consciousness and culture — and using that pressure to exacerbate and encourage the divisions that inevitably emerge within all elites — may be very fruitful indeed.

The same is true of the judiciary and particular segments of the state bureaucracy. Playing by their rules is a fool’s errand, as a means of advancing a positive libertarian agenda. But exploiting their rules against them is a powerful, low-cost weapon to impede their functioning.

The state, like a demon, is bound by the laws and internal logic of the form it takes. As that evil goddess said in Ghostbusters, “Choose the form of the destructor.” When a segment of the bureaucracy is captured by its own ideological self-justication, or courts by the letter of the law they pretend to enforce, they can be used as a weapon for monkey-wrenching the larger system. Bureaucrats, by following the letter of policy, often engage in de facto “work-to-rule” against the larger system they serve.

The state, like any authoritarian hierarchy, requires standing rules that restrict the freedom of subordinates to pursue the institution’s real purpose, because it can’t trust those subordinates. The state’s legitimizing rhetoric, we know, conceals a real exploitative function. Nevertheless, despite the overall functional role of the state, it needs standard operating procedures to enforce predictable behavior on its subordinates.

And once subordinates are following those rules, the state can’t send out dog-whistles telling functionaries what “real” double-super-secret rules they’re “really” supposed to follow, or to supplement the countless volumes of rulebooks designed to impose predictability on subordinates with a secret memo saying “Ignore the rulebooks.” So, while enough functionaries may ignore the rules to keep the system functioning after a fashion, others pursue the letter of policy in ways that impair the “real” mission of the state.

At the same time, socialization to the official legitimizing ideology can be a source of cognitive dissonance within the machinery of authoritarianism. Vinay Gupta argued that this results in a “moral asymmetry in warfare”: “In a conflict, the side which can bear to define it’s goals clearly can then plot a strategy to attain them. It can win.  You can’t win a war who’s purpose you cannot bear to define…”

This makes the system vulnerable both to loss of morale, and to outright defections from within, as we appeal to the individual consciences of state functionaries — to quote Gillis again, “working on counter-narratives and messaging, because we sincerely won’t win an actual ‘Let’s Imprison All The Dissent’ situation without at least some of the armed forces and militias having a crisis of conscience and rebelling against the Red Tribe.”

We, on the other hand, can organize permissionlessly because our movement consists of self-organized, stigmergic networks in which each person joins for their own reasons and participates voluntarily. There is no conflict of interest such as those that characterize authoritarian hierarchies, because no one is treated as a means to someone else’s end, and nobody is able to use authority to benefit at anyone else’s expense. We know what we’re fighting for and what we’re fighting against; it’s a fight we chose to take part in, eyes wide open, because of our own values.

And because we operate permissionlessly, every individual in a network can immediately develop innovations in response to the immediate situation as she sees them, share an innovation far and wide, use the feedback to develop new iterations of the innovation, with everybody’s ideas instantly becoming the common property of the network to be further developed by anyone with the skill and motivation to do so. In the meantime, in the authoritarian hierarchies we confront, every new iteration in this cycle is slowed down by the requirement for signoffs and approval, and degraded by interference from pointy-haired bosses. So we go through endless iteration cycles of development, feedback, improvement, feedback, etc., that instantly pass into our common toolkit, while we fight an enemy with the kind of stupidity parodied in the movie Brazil. We develop innovations and generational improvements with the speed of replicating yeast, and act many times faster than the enemy can react to us.

The advantage this puts us at, I described here:

We fight a system whose very nature is defined by exploitation, extraction and conflict of interest, which can therefore only function by deceiving its component members, threatening them with force, or impeding their use of their own full knowledge and judgement. We, on the other hand, fight to supplant it with a system based on reciprocity, solidarity and self-determination, and on the willing and fully informed participation of everyone involved. Who will win? It’s no contest.

III. Defend the Most Vulnerable

It’s no secret that a Trump administration will be a much bigger threat to some of us than to others. Trump has announced his attention of deporting at least a couple million undocumented immigrants — supposedly those with criminal records — early in his term. He’s called for a national registry of Muslim citizens and residents, citing FDR’s internment of Japanese-Americans as a favorable precedent. He’s praised the authoritarian tactics of the NYPD under Bloomberg and Giuliani, called for nationwide “stop-and-frisk” profiling, and is closely associated with mouth-frothing authoritarians like Sheriff David Clarke who regard Black Lives Matter as a “terrorist” movement and ISIS ally. The corporate thugs building the Dakota Access Pipeline and the police thugs backing them up have stopped even pretending to respect the minor scruples Obama has displayed, and resumed full-bore construction in confidence that they and other pipeline projects will have a blank check under Trump to ethnically cleanse Native Americans from their ancestral lands for the sake of fossil fuel company profits. And finally, Trump has surrounded himself with people — Vice President-elect Mike Pence chief among them — who support violently rolling back all the social gains that LGBT people have made over the past generation, as well as attacking what’s left of women’s reproductive freedom after years of chipping away at Roe v. Wade.

The first order of business — something decent people shouldn’t even have to mention as a matter for discussion, but unfortunately we do — is for us to all agree that nobody is expendable. Recent calls by Freddie DeBoer, Mark Lilla and their ilk to “pipe down with the gay and trans stuff, because we don’t want to offend working class whites” are despicable.

This is a situation were Niemoller’s “First they came for the communists,” etc. quip comes into play. So does the Wobbly slogan “An injury to one is an injury to all!”

Besides being morally repugnant, treating “identity politics” as being in a zero-sum relationship to “class” is strategically just plain stupid. A “color-blind” and “gender-blind” economic agenda of opposition to the capitalist state, without addressing the needs of the most vulnerable among us, will simply leave divisions to be exploited by our enemies.  That’s what happened in the ’30s, when the big southern land-owners exploited racial divisions within the tenant farmers union movement and split it right down the middle between black and white sharecroppers. That’s why employers have historically employed racial minorities and foreigners as scabs. If you don’t treat the concerns of the most marginalized groups seriously, why should they have any loyalty to you?

Either we treat class/economics and “identity politics” as mutually reinforcing parts of a common struggle against all forms of unjust authority and exploitation, or we’ll lose them both.

At every step, in every struggle, those of us with the most privilege should be lending our social capital and material resources to those with the least. That means white folks passing the mic to People of Color and amplifying their voices, uniting in solidarity with their struggles, and raising our own voices in protest and doing our best to obstruct when the state engages in repressive actions against immigrants, Muslims, and black people. It means the same acts of solidarity from straight cis males when the targets are women, gays and trans people. It means listen first and hardest to the racially and sexually marginalized in fights for economic justice, and first and hardest to the most economically marginalized members of movements for racial and gender justice.

It can mean things ranging from pro bono legal work, to those with tech skills sharing them with marginalized populations in need of things like encryption technology (or local wireless meshworks, if the Internet itself is compromised). It may even come to safe house networks.

In every case, it means — to repeat — that no one is dispensible. The repressive state will not isolate and peel off one marginalized group at a time. When it comes for one of us, we must treat it as an attack on all of us.

IV. Build for the Future

Douglas Rushkoff, in the latest edition of his email newsletter (“When Memes Fail Us,” November 27), argues that the very same forces — both structural, and in Trump’s own personality — that impede any fascist consolidation of power will also hasten the process by which the American national government becomes a hollowed-out state, so that creating the building blocks of the successor society will accordingly become that much more important.

On the bright side, I think running a government as large as ours is really hard. Trump’s obsession with his Twitter feed will keep him more than occupied over the next months of his presidency. The bigger issue is whether his hiring of people who have never worked in their assigned fields before (Ben Carson at HUD?) will lead to large parts of the government simply not working. It’s not a good moment to count on FEMA, the FTC, or Department of the Interior.

But a paralyzed, incompetent federal administration will simply require people to develop more local mechanisms for economic recovery, social cohesion, and mutual aid. This means red and blue people working together to maintain the basics of civil society, from food supply chains and healthcare to education and peaceful streets. With neoliberalism and supra-national corporations at bay for a moment, we may actually have more of an opportunity to develop bottom-up alternatives than we’ve had for a long time. The Depression spawned local currencies, farm cooperatives, and new mechanisms for distributed prosperity. Those of us with a foot in the real world stand a chance of building similar tools and networks, today.

The three previous sections all deal with approaches that, no matter how urgent, are mainly defensive. Our primary purpose, to which the bulk of our efforts are directed, continues to be the same as it has been: Building the new society within the shell of the old. And this is a program that will proceed apace, regardless of which political party is in power.

A Clinton administration would no doubt have been a more congenial environment in which to pursue this agenda, without either the increased threat of repression or the increased material pressure from social austerity and unemployment. But if anything, this material pressure will drive the rate at which we develop and adopt the building blocks of post-capitalist society, as a simple matter of necessity.

Historically, it has always been in times of greatest economic pressure — from high unemployment or austerity — that the working class and marginalized populations have been most likely to find ways of meeting a greater share of their needs in the informal or social economy, through direct production for use, barter, sharing and the like. And it’s in such periods that they’ve been most innovative in creating self-organized institutions for pooling risk, cost and income, and sharing the spare capacity of capital goods like cars, power tools and the like.

Most recently, we’ve seen it in the areas of the European periphery hardest hit by the austerity policies of the European Union, like Greece and Spain. There’s been a huge impetus to the adoption of local barter currencies, hackerspaces, and all kinds of local institutions like cohousing projects for minimizing individual living costs and providing a social safety net.

Such expedients have been recommended by anarchists and socialists of the decentralist or libertarian variety for years, as means for working class survival and reduced dependence on the vagaries of capitalist employment. Self-help efforts — the school breakfast program, daycare centers — have also been used by groups like the Black Panthers Party to increase community autonomy and provide a social safety net directly accountable to the people it serves.

Back in the 1960s, Colin Ward supported things like neighborhood workshops and the informal exchange of services like childcare as means of self-help and solidarity for the unemployed and underemployed in the UK. The Radical Technology group in the UK did a great deal of practical work in developing technologies for relocalized production, soil-intensive horticulture, alternative energy, and so forth. The Adams-Morgan Organization in Washington DC experimented with arrangements similar to those recommended by Ward (along with DIY solar heat, basement trout farms and the like) in the 1970s, as recounted by Karl Hess in Community Technology.

In Neighborhood Power, Hess went on to advocate a model of community economic bootstrapping built around neighborhood workshops, repair shops and storehouses for defunct appliances, auto parts and leftover building materials. He promoted an economic development model that went from keeping appliances in repair, to custom-machining spare parts, to networked production of entire appliances — a model of economic development through progressive import substitution much like that advocated by Jane Jacobs.

This was, in fact, the origin of the Japanese bicycle industry, as Jacobs described it. European and American manufacturers were unwilling to locate bicycle factories in Japan in the early 20th century, so imported spare parts were extremely expensive. Local repair shops began to custom machine the most commonly demanded spare parts. Gradually the shops sorted themselves out into an ecosystem in which more parts were locally produced, individual shops specialized in particular parts, and networks of shops between them were capable of manufacturing most or all of a complete bicycle.

A community economic development model based on progressive import substitution, first through repair shops and custom machining of spare parts, then production of complete appliances, and of direct production for use outside the wage system, is many orders of magnitude more feasible today than it was in the 1970s. Open-source CNC cutting tables, routers, 3D printers, induction furnaces, and other machinery scaled to garage or tabletop production, most of these tools costing a few hundred dollars in materials, can together produce goods of a kind that used to require a mass-production factory. The Open Source Ecology project, with its demo site at Factor e Farm, has designed and prototyped most of an open-source Global Village Construction Set that includes not only such manufacturing tools, but farm and construction machinery (tractor, sawmill, compressed earth block machine, etc.).

The development of such cheap machinery, along with open-source production of information and culture, and highly efficient soil-intensive horticulture techniques with high outputs from limited areas like rooftops and vacant lots, has formed the basis for economic models centered on commons-based peer production. And these models, in turn, form the basis for proposals (like those of Negri and Hardt in Commonwealth, Holloway in How to Change the World Without Taking Power, and Mason in Postcapitalism) for creating the new society through exodus, letting the old state and corporate machinery rot and rust away, rather than trying to capture it through insurrectionist assault.

Conclusion

So to summarize, our task in the short term, on an emergency basis, is to impede to the best of our ability any attempt to expand state repression, and in particular to defend those most vulnerable among us.

In the medium and long term, it is what it has always been:  To identify the building blocks of the future society currently being developed within the existing capitalist-state society, including both liberatory technologies and new cooperative social institutions, that offer to free us from the control of and dependence on the capitalist state; and to hasten their continuing development, their coalescence together into a coherent whole, and the phase transition to a society built around this new kernel of post-scarcity technologies and cooperative self-organization.

Our short-term task, of necessity, is to protect ourselves against the state, and the capitalist and social reactionary interests it serves. Our ultimate task, our real task, is to build a society in which they can no longer touch us.

Cross-posted from C4ss.org

The post Where Do We Go From Here? Strategies for post-Trump Realities appeared first on P2P Foundation.

On Patents, Open Source Design and Reciprocity

I previously blogged on open source and IP here and I wanted to revisit this in a more concise way to focus in on the limitations of open source and commons approaches in the context of patents.

The Benefits of Open Source Design

Developing a product or technology in an open source way offers advantages to society and also the development team. For the core team they have the many eyes of the community on the key development issues, a form of giant, distributed R&D department. Building a strong network of collaborators and a vibrant community which will contribute to varying degrees also acts to build a market and a brand for the core team (whether they be a company, charity or foundation). For society, commonly held knowledge resources are created which has a great value both as an educational resource and making technologies available to communities around the world. It adds resilience and sustainability to our communities by allowing technologies to be re-purposed appropriately and also more easily maintained to minimise waste.

The Open Source Ecology project is a great example of this resilient commons based approach that is strictly open source in its approach. Their values statement encapsulates this:

“The end point of our practical development is Distributive Enterprise – an open, collaborative enterprise that publishes all of its strategic, business, organizational, enterprise information – so that others could learn and thereby truly accelerate innovation by annihilating all forms of competitive waste. We see this as the only way to solve wicked problems faster than they are created – a struggle worth the effort. In the age where companies spend more on patent protectionism than on research and development – we feel that unleashing the power of collaborative innovation is an idea whose time has come.”

The funding model for OS Ecology seems to be based around two main sources, crowdfunding/donations and charging for educational workshops teaching others to build and use the machines they have designed.

The Limits of Open Source Design & the Need for Reciprocity

Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation however emphasizes the need for reciprocity, suggesting, “the more communistic the licence, the more capitalistic the outcomes”. Making the case here that with open source projects eg. Linux, a profit maximising company can come in and make massive profits using the commons resource of the stable body of code at the centre of the Linux project.

This means that the value of the commons provided by free labour is being exploited by private companies and that they are not then obliged to give back to the commons to sustain it financially.

To this end, Dmytri Kleiner, has proposed the Peer Production License (PPL) whereby free use is granted to non-profits and coop entities, but commercial entities which make no contribution have to pay a license fee. Michel Bauwens has termed this an example of a Commons-Based Reciprocity License (CBRL), which has been further developed into Copyfair. These proposals suggest a means to create a self-sustaining commons of knowledge that accepts wider community contributions and at the same time provides for funds to enhance and grow a core team of curators for the project.

 The nature of IP – Copyright and Patents Are Very Different

Importantly, however, for the discussion of the application of open source in physical designs, a CBRL/copyfair licence would be based on copyright, as with creative commons or copyleft style arrangements. Now, copyright is an automatic right in most countries, so in adopting a copyleft, copyfair or other licences you are then disposing of a recognition of ownership that you already have.

Patents, on the other hand, are territorially based and ownership is granted by the relevant state authorities following a relatively lengthy procedure with very real financial costs. This is largely incompatible with distributed open innovation particularly as secrecy (non-disclosure) must be maintained up until a patent is filed.

This means that an open source physical design could have the schematics and drawings of a design’s implementation covered by a CBRL but in terms of fundamental principles which would be patentable, the commons could not be protected in this way.

In fact, when we look around at the more popular open source design and open source hardware projects, such as the Ultimaker,  the (original)Makerbot or Reprap, they are all based on expired, existing patents. They do not, in general, propose new technologies that would be patentable, though interestingly, when Makerbot was bought out by stratasys, it then filed a patent and released a range of closed-source models to the market. This eventually led to conflict with the original supportive community that had grown around the original open source Makerbot. Makerbot were accused by the community of stealing ideas and attempting to patent them, an enclosure of the commons. The community reacted with the hashtag #takerbot on social media.

 Pragmatic Conclusions

Reliance on copyright and copyleft in a classic Open Source project leaves collaboratively produced product innovations in the paradox highlighted by Michel Bauwens: that the more communal the license, the more commercial interests can exploit them without contributing to sustaining the innovation process that generated them.

If an open source project were conducted in secret, however, it would not be able to leverage the network benefits of the distributed development resource of the online community and would be forced back into the standard model of investment, patent acquisition and defence.

Conversely, if a development is carried out in a truly open model with disregard for how patents work, the open community could find its work enclosed at a later date by a proprietary patent as seen with the Makerbot community.

As a practising designer and engineer I am looking to launch a technology project and I want to embed the values of open source communities in its development. In particular, I want to ensure that the technology is not used for military applications.

I have come to the conclusion that a patent is needed to establish a “property” which I can then licence at a lower fee to non-profits in a way that reflects the goals and spirit of the CBRL. The core technology will then be a basis for an open source community platform around which developments and applications grow. Any licensing fees to larger profit-maximising companies will then feed directly back into sustaining this platform. The challenge then is to reach the stage of obtaining patents in key territories without requiring external investors who do not share these goals.

The post Patents and the Limits of Open Source Licenses appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Just as importantly, the article argues that this is not a technocratic change, but a holistic and integrative endeavour, with crucial psycho-spiritual aspects. They introduce Terror Management Theory, which stresses how the fear of death drives human behaviour and institutions, and how consumerism plays into it, while the ReMaker Society has the potential, through the new culture that it is developing in the physical places of collaborative ‘maker’ culture, to create a new way to deal with the fear of death, that is actually compatible with a sustainable society.

By Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak, Kaitlin Kish:

“In the context of the reMaker society, we also propose a psychological framework for understanding the gap between knowledge and action noted above, and perhaps more importantly, for producing a potentially meaningful way to address it. For starters, it seems likely that part of the solution must come about by better understanding the role of consumer culture in bolstering self-esteem and ontological security (Laing, 1961; Giddens, 1991). One useful point of departure in this regard is Terror Management Theory (TMT), an empirical psychological framework validated by experimental data from over 300 published studies.

(Greenberg, Solomon, and Pyszczynski, 1984). Based on the work of Ernest Becker (e.g. 1973; 1975), TMT contends that human beings possess the same biological imperatives to survive as all organisms, but also possess the mental capacity to anticipate [and dwell upon] their inevitable death, and more generally to understand the significance of mortality. The combination of an instinctual will to survive with the knowledge of inescapable finitude is a source of potentially crippling anxiety. In order to cope with existential terror, we create and subscribe to meaning systems which allow us to believe that we are special, or in Becker’s parlance, that we are more significant than “worms and food for worms” (Becker, 1973, p. 26). To achieve this, we engage in ‘hero projects’ – culturally sanctioned practices that increase feelings of belonging, social recognition and self-worth. Furthermore, social systems provide avenues for ‘immortality projects’ through which individuals can live on in perpetuity, literally (perhaps through a religious conception of an afterlife) or symbolically (Lifton, 1983), in the form of a legacy.

TMT has been used to great effect to examine the impact of non-rational drivers in consumption habits (e.g. Arndt et al, 2004) and climate change denial (Vess and Arndt, 2008; Dickinson, 2009). One consequence of modernization is that the in the context of individualized, mobile urban societies, processes of disenchantment, cultural relativism and secularization have undermined cohesive, culturally-sanctioned and shared hero/immortality projects. Even markers as basic as ‘being a good mother’ or ‘living like a good Christian’ no longer function as effective hero/immortality projects. Consumerism has become the lowest common denominator and signifier of last resort. Conspicuous consumption, style and the ownership of things have become highly visible and universally understood markers of prestige and self-worth (Becker, 1973; Kasser and Sheldon, 2000; Arndt et al., 2004). It is the endless cycle of consumption that serves at once to distract us from our mortality whilst providing us with highly visible indicators of success and prestige. Owning a large house, expensive car, or even the latest smartphone (O’Gorman, 2010) are all means for quantifiably demonstrating success within a capitalist system. This may partially account for why people continue to buy into the logic of passive consumption even when they are aware of its negative impacts on workers, local economies, and the environment: the self-esteem boost gained through consumption and ownership may overwhelm any moral quandaries regarding working conditions, sustainability, or the environment (Dickinson, 2009). Thus, one way to counter the logic of passive consumption may be to provide alternative sources of meaning and self-esteem – hero/immortality projects that privilege making and repurposing over buying and throwing away. This is a central aim of the reMaker society: not directly to replace or upend globalization and capitalist hegemony, but to offer a meaningful alternative to the logic of passive consumption. The concept of the reMaker society seeks to link the potential of open source technics, the DIY ethos, and maker-spaces, to an alternative vision of political economy and psychologically informed understanding of green hero/immortality projects.”

An assessment of the Open Source Ecology project in psycho-spiritual terms

“One of the most high-profile experiments in open source, participatory design and fabrication is ‘Open Source Ecology’(OSE) – a project that has been the focus of much hype and perhaps excessive expectation. Founded in 2003, OSE hopes to “see a world of prosperity that doesn’t leave anyone behind” (Open Source Ecology: About, 2014). At its core, OSE designs and provides open source blueprints for a ‘Global Village Construction Set’ (GVCS), described as “a set of the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist” (Open Source Ecology: GCVS, 2014). These include tractors, earth-brick presses, ovens, and circuit makers. OSE calls their pieces of machinery ‘lego’ as they can be interchangeable and designed to fit user needs. One of the primary goals of the GVCS is to provide an alternate means for procuring equipment essential for self-sufficiency at a fraction of the cost of retail machines. For instance, according to OSE’s website, a John Deere Utility Tractor may cost upwards of $44,487; a tractor built according to OSE’s designs, however, may only cost $9,060 (Open Source Ecology, 2014). By implementing a system which emphasizes modular design, individuals do not need to purchase manufacturer specific components or pay exorbitant labour costs; instead, they are potentially able to construct, repair and modify their equipment when necessary.

OSE is an ambitious organization with lofty, world-changing aims. When asked about his goals in an interview with Make magazine, OSE’s founder, Marcin Jakubowski, responded that “we’re trying to reinvent civilization” (Kalish, 2012). We see this rhetoric at play in the organization’s “Vision” statement as well:

This work of distributing raw productive power to people is not only a means to solving wicked problems – but a means for humans themselves to evolve. The creation of a new world depends on expansion of human consciousness and personal evolution – as individuals tap their autonomy, mastery, and purpose – [t]o Build Themselves – and to become responsible for the world around them. One outcome is a world beyond artificial material scarcity – where no longer do material constraints and resource conflicts dictate most of human interactions – personal and political. (Open Source Ecology, 2014)

Although certainly an interesting idea the GVCS remains an aspiration. With the possible exception of the Earth Brick Press, the open hardware is nowhere sufficiently robust and replicable as to compete with commercial products. Our own OSE powercube workshop, run by Tom Griffing in August of 2014 at the DIYode makerspace in Guelph, Ontario, Canada, produced only one partially functioning machine that was not sufficiently robust, reliable and replicable to displace the mainstream equivalent. Nevertheless, the project is important not only in exploring the technical potential of open-architecture manufacturing, but because it intimates an equally paradigmatic change in the psychological relation to the processes of production and consumption. The rationale implicit in this project is that this form of relocalization can link local livelihood and bioregional manufacturing, to ecological and communitarian hero/immortality projects, i.e. that an open-source and community-based approach to the design and fabrication of everyday material culture could become the basis for ontological security (Laing, 1962), the re-enchantment of everyday life (Berman, 1989) and a more active, less-consumption oriented pattern of life. Taken together, the technology, the open architecture collaboration, the model of distributive political economy and alternative vehicles for meaning-making, provide the basis for a truly alternative basis for modernity. Both as i.) a prefigurative model of a future society and ii.) a model of activism and social entrepreneurship in the present, the real potential of OSE is as a nascent hero/immortality project.

In OSE we see the belief that the power of networked communication and the open source ethos are truly emancipatory. At least in principle, they not only provide people with a means towards self-sufficiency, but also evoke a world free of ‘artificial material scarcity’ – a leading cause of hunger, poverty, and war. These are lofty and noble claims, to be sure. However, whether or not OSE’s vision to ‘reinvent civilization’ ever comes to pass, it is nevertheless an example of the sort of movement which characterizes the reMaker Society. The ethos of OSE is not so much anti-capitalist as pro-self-sufficiency. Unlike the immortality ideology of Western capitalism, where prestige and self-esteem are attained through purchases and the logic of passive consumption, OSE provides its participants and adherents the chance to use their skills and knowledge to build something tangible and, potentially, of lasting worth. From the perspective of TMT, OSE provides participants with an alternative vehicle for the accrual of prestige, self-esteem and ontological security.

So what sort of experience does a typical OSE workshop provide? Interested individuals—usually in their twenties or younger—travel to OSE’s farm in rural Missouri, where they participate in a variety of workshops, equipment builds, and brainstorming sessions. The farm is largely off-grid, meaning modern amenities such as clean water, heating, and wireless internet are either non-existent or unreliable (Eakin, 2013). In an interview with New Yorker magazine, one volunteer summed up the reasons for foregoing the conveniences and, frankly, safety of contemporary, first-world life: “I was looking for a way to affect the economic system with technologies—a classic how-to-change-the-world mentality” (Kang, qtd. in Eakin, 2013). Likewise, another OSE participant who built a Compressed Earth Brick Press via OSE’s online documentation, noted the rewards which come from contributing to the project: “It was like, finally, for the first time in my life I knew what I had to do…. It was kind of like giving birth. It was like, ‘Oh my gosh. We built this, we did this and here’s the result”’ (Slade, qtd. in Kalish, 2012). In the same New Yorker interview referenced above, Jakubowski notes what he calls the “Ikea effect, which is that you like something that you build more than something else [i.e. something purchased]…There’s a deep drive in humans to create their own existence” (Eakin, 2013).

These testimonials exemplify the sense of meaning and ontological security potentially offered by making. To return to Becker (1975), ‘What man [sic] really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning’ (p. 4). In this context, projects like OSE offer a potential salve to the Marxian/Weberian/Durkheimian problems of alienation, disenchantment and anomie. Through participating in an OSE workshop or build, volunteers are able to directly see and benefit from the fruits of their labour (e.g. by drinking the water from a freshly dug well); to find meaning in a radically different understanding of ‘the good life’; and to consolidate deep connections with co-producers. Furthermore, since OSE provides its materials freely accessible online, participants know that their contributions will be viewed by others for potentially years to come, further adding to the opportunity for a digital legacy i.e. an ‘immortality project’.

This is not to suggest that OSE is not without very obvious problems. For starters, living off-grid brings a whole host of logistical and even health challenges, and many workshop participants simply lack the technical skills needed for the workshops to function efficiently, meaning timelines are pushed back or people quit prematurely (Eakin, 2013). Furthermore, at this point the near utopian DIY, off-grid rhetoric of OSE cannot fully mesh with the reality that the project is necessarily completely dependent on commercial components and services – not least the Internet, computer technology, rare earth metals sourced from China. Even in a more limited sense, the OSE farm has had to purchase commercial equipment, such as a bulldozer, and pre-fabricated windows (Eakin, 2013). We also want to emphasize that OSE and maker-culture broadly is only one potential alternative model for economic praxis and self-esteem accrual, and that at this point, any economic or environmental impacts are nominal. Nevertheless, if viewed as a move towards something rather than a fully realized vision, OSE and related groups possess the potential to provide the alternative models of localized economics, self-esteem accrual, and meaning making noted above. In short, OSE may be viewed as an early example of what a small-scale reMaker Society might look like.”

* Article: Finding an Alternate Route: Towards Open, Eco-cyclical, and Distributed Production. By Stephen Quilley, Jason Hawreliak, Kaitlin Kish. Journal of Peer Production, Issue #9: Alternative Internets, 2016 (available here).

Photo by Sean Church

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The basic premise, distilled through a lot of experimentation, is that a 700-square-foot starter home, including an aquaponic greenhouse, could be constructed in five days for less than $25,000 in materials. While that budget puts the actual construction in the hands of the owner, the Open Building Institute has plans to train builders to organize apprentice laborers to handle the modular, rapid-build projects. It’s a good, old-fashioned, community-based barn-raising for the 21st century that could even be staged as a workshop. OBI’s hope is that this “turnkey service” will add a mere $10,000 to the price tag of the starter home.

Eco options included in the OBI design package are solar panels with a grid-tie inverter, LED lights, biofiber insulation, rainwater collection systems, and much more.

Jakubowski (founder of Open Source Ecology) and Mota (founder of the Open Building Institute) have recruited a group of world-renowned advisors and contributors from all over the world to help things along. Still, they are hoping to raise $80,000 via Kickstarter to pull the toolkit together.

The goals of off-grid, closed-loop, self-sufficient living is similar to the RegenVillages project, which has gotten a lot of press recently including here on Shareable, but is fully committed to making all technology open source.

Cross-posted from Shareable.net

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The interview was conducted by James Corbett.

From the show notes:

“You wouldn’t download a house, would you? Of course you would! And now with the Open Building Institute, you can! Join us today as we talk to Marcin Jakubowski of Open Source Ecology and Catarina Mota of the Open Building Institute about how they are bringing their vision of an affordable, open source, modular, ecological building toolkit to life. We discuss the free, open source library of modules that form the basis of the building’s design, how the institute will train others to start designing and building their own homes, and how you can find out more information and help the collaborative effort.”

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From their blog:

“We figured out a new lifestyle, focusing on households. A laterally scaled socioeconomic model begins at the tiniest piece of our society: the individuals and the families. To make our model time and cost-effective, we bring domestic developments under one roof.

In modern times – especially in large cities – to get food and water, energy, household objects, furniture and so on, in a reliable form subject to a lot of conditions. ENVIENTA was born as a Do it Yourself, community-based solution package for the 21st century, which provides share of know-how, resources, products, food and water for the members.

And as an open source model, it offers business plans to anyone for free, as well as full transparency.”

There is a very slick (possibly too slick IMO) video about the project:

And they have a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe which I suggest is worth supporting. If a mainstream-oriented project like this can help to spread the word about integrating open source design and technology into our daily lives, it could be an important initiative. More about what they plan to do with the crowdfunding income:

“On our new website we’ll share the open source planning process, with version tracking. Searchable building techniques, collaborating experts, constructors, 3D printer hubs according to your location, all of these, with calculating the cost of your investments will be available on mobile, to propose the lists of available solutions in your region. It can be also a project organizer for groups. With the help of our new website and mobile application we build a maker movement – a community from innovative experts to bring commons-based peer-production into reality by building and managing ENVIENTA project centers around the world.”

The Envienta website is here.

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