On a farm in Missouri, a radical experiment in self-sufficiency (2013)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
But now comes the but.
I can't help feeling like he's focusing on the wrong scale, in a way that seriously impedes the likelihood of success. Let's be clear: the material basis he's living on is pretty shitty. He shits in a bucket? Freezes at night? That's the norm only in rural areas in developing countries, and his current focus isn't even on improving those things: other priorities trump it.
And that's directly because of the scale, which is too small. A group of a couple dozen people, even brilliant and hard-working people, simply cannot generate even the basic amenities of modern life, given contemporary knowledge and technology. But a town or smaller city? Problems that now seem insurmountable with his approach become routine.
I totally get that it seems awesome to re-invent the world from scratch, with a group of buddies and passionate volunteers. But it's ultimately escapist. It seems to me like open sourcing cheap manufacturing methods with a target economic scale of the metropolitan area would do a lot more to build a genuinely liberatory society. Sure, you end up more alienated from the material basis you live on than with his approach. But it's a much smaller transition--dare I say, a more agile one--than from global hyper-economies to hyper-local economies. And advances there would easily lend themselves to the hyper-local economies he desires.
Then again, I'm here bloviating, while he's out there doing stuff. Godspeed.
http://theorganicsister.com/on-composting-toilets-and-humanu...
Think of this as a startup. The basic concept is interesting. A decade on, it's clear that the execution was botched. The article indicates at least the following problems:
- Trying to do too many things, and ending up doing them badly, rather than doing a few things well. Take a look at the list of machines being built, and the "percent completed". None have reached 100%, and only four are over 75%. This is after ten years. - Employee retention problems. (A major problem with any volunteer effort.) - Founder not into delegation.
This has been done before, better. There's a classic series, "Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap" (http://www.amazon.com/Build-Your-Metalworking-Shop-Scrap/dp/...) from 1982. You start with charcoal, sand, wood, and metal scrap, set up a forge, and cast parts. With the forge, you make parts for a lathe. That's book 2. Book 3, a metal shaper. Book 4, a milling machine. Book 5, a drill press. Book 6, precision tools so you can do accurate work. It's a lot of work, but people have successfully followed those directions and made machine tools.
Further back, there are the Foxfire books, from 1962 (http://www.amazon.com/The-Foxfire-Book-Dressing-Moonshining/...). This was the bible of the hippie "back to the land" movement. A number of communes were set up using those books.
We had chickens when I was young (about four, five?) and goats when I was a bit older.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1405345101/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qi...
(It would be nice if Amazon could offer cleaner URLs for sharing.)
I do this a lot by cleaning up the URL by hand. Use dp/ followed by the ISBN number, like so:
The following are valid on the UK store:
http://amzn.co.uk/dp/1405345101
http://amazon.co.uk/The-New-Complete-Book-Self-Sufficiency/d...
and on the US store they have even shorter variants:
This is the mechanical equivalent of a series of quick hacks. I don't think anyone expects these machines to last long or work without frequent maintenance. As I read it, the goal is only to enable a small community to be self sufficient; the machines should last long enough for them to accomplish their purpose. When they inevitably break down, the tools and materials will exist to repair or replace them, and the community will have the knowledge to do so.
The kind of up-front planning and precise design that you reference works when you have a large organization with a large pile of capital that is willing and able to spend the time and money to do something right the first time. This is optimal when that environment is present, but impossible for a small community of semi-skilled workers and farmers. The whole point is that the approach described in the article should work in the absence of professional skills.
Transmissions can have a variety of problems that render them unusable without repair, but my first response to "it's leaking" would not be "spend $2000". Rather, it would be "spend $40 for another 5 gallons of hy-tran".
I think this guy just wanted to design and build some tractors. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
It describes him as having a laser focus, but as other commenters have said many projects are not finished and they are not self sufficient for food.
If you want to make open source sustainable tech you ret a warehouse and buy parts and do it. If you want to live sustainably off the land you buy John Seymour's "Self Sufficiency" book and buy a cow and some chickens amd plant crops.
The article talks about making things "from scratch" - but doesn't really define what that means. They're not smelting steel or winding their own motors. So, some things can be bought. The article doesn't mention what is bought. The tractor is a grwat example - farming is dangerous partly because of the machinery. A tractor is a tool and people tend to want their tools to be reliable and efficient. Learning how to repair older tractors is probably more useful than building a dangerous bad tractor.
The article doesn't explain whether he's learning from other people's experience.
Even the bit about living off rabits and chemical slop - he has to have the gloop-food because you can't live off rabbit (although they are tasty) but I'm not sure from the article whether he knows this.
Having said all that I freaking like the idea he has and I do wish him well. My criticism is mostly of the article than him.
The HabLab had been connected to the local water system
after a well ran dry, and in May it was hooked up to the
electrical grid. “It was an emotional trauma,” Jakubowski
said, and, he insisted, a temporary measure. “When we have
windmills and solar power up and running, that will end.”
I wish them good luck in the future. I think the influx of veterans, who seem to have a more task-oriented approach, may save the GVCS as a practical project, but that will be by throwing out the insistence that it will be created by a society that practices the ideals of the GVCS project from the get-go.
Also, I always want to remind folks of an immensely successful experiment in communal living, the Hutterites (who love technology, by the way, unlike the Ahmish):
There's wide adoption of technologies which improve upon, but don't radically alter, a traditional technology. For instance, many communities accept the battery powered lantern in place of a gas lantern.
I though they believed many technologies disrupted happiness, because it took away from peoples interactions with each other. Or something like that. Which quite frankly is a totally plausible theory. Other than medicine/health technology I don't think there's a lot of proof other tech makes us happier directly. (Obviously someone needs to use a computer to make drugs, grow enough food, but it doesn't have to be them)
Wait a second. "Except" in this context means to refuse. The word you want, "Accept", means to give consent. Normally a malaprop like this is benign, but this one reverses the meaning of the sentence in which it appears.
His OSE - https://www.youtube.com/user/marcinose/videos
Looks like the initial ambitions have been scaled back to what they use to be, at least in time frame.
Also their FB Photo stream has lots of interesting work in process pics:
If you want to build from earth, there's rammed earth construction. It's even simpler than compressing earth into bricks. You set up wood forms, as if pouring concrete, put in about 4" of dirt, and pound it into sandstone. This can be done by hand, or with an air hammer.
All this works if the soil composition is reasonably suitable. There are simple tests. (Too much clay is bad.) It's usually possible to find nearby sources for suitable dirt.
This guy seems to be re-inventing the wheel.
"It took him two months and seven thousand dollars, most of it donated, to build the tractor."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it does.
Also, if you find the topic interesting, I highly recommend the techno-thriller duo of books, "Daemon" and "Freedom(TM)" by Daniel Suarez. They end up touching on this topic, by the second book.
OTOH, a part of me feels this effort more resembles idealism driven by a historical scarcity event. I suspect this emotional subroutine could be fueling his mission, rather than the logical post-apocalyptic rationalization he puts forth.
However, I'd question the overall rationality of this. I mean we're on a path of accelerating technologization, AI, robots etc, and this guy wants to head back to the bronze age. So while there's a certain charming appeal to his vision, one should consider being a simple land dweller has traditionally not worked out so well, for those less advanced cultures. [1]
I don't think he wants to head back to the bronze age. The reverse seems to be true; he wants a future where everyone has vast knowledge and a wide set of skills, and everyone has his own CNC multimachines, robots, all that. Why not AI?
But to achieve that, you need to take a few steps back from the technology that is currently operative in large corporations with the capacity to invest millions into it. If they can bring the price point down and simplify the machines enough that they're accessible to everyone, then the capability to produce more and more advanced technology is spread wide. Through open source design, people would share recipes, ideas and improvements into these homemade devices; technology would advance faster and it'd be easier to get machines that solve special problems for which the solution right now would be far too expensive because there's no mass market for it.
"he wants a future where everyone has vast knowledge and a wide set of skills, and everyone has his own CNC multimachines, robots, all that"
It is a nice fantasy to imagine everyone everywhere being self sufficient, but unlike the movies, a single person does not have the time nor the mental capacity to become an expert at everything. Specialization begat the modern world (and vice versa).
Mao had a great idea to make everyone self sufficient by forging steel in their back yards to instantly industrialize. No one knew what they were doing properly, so you got massive quantities of nearly useless scrap, fueled by wasting previously productive inputs. The parallels are striking.
But if people actually strived for it, and their lives began in communities where building, maintaining and operating your own machinery is a part of life, most people could actually actually know heck of a lot about them.
This might sound insanely far to urbanites, but this is par for the course for anyone living outside of the suburbs. I grew up 2 hours outside of DC. Driving 30 minutes (which equals 30 miles) to do your shopping once a week was not uncommon.
Now, being in DC, I've had to adapt. Thirty miles is an hour, at least, probably closer to an hour and a half. It feels ludicrous. To not be able to travel wherever I want, whenever I want, in a predictable amount of time, is very disconcerting. And don't get me started on public transit. Travel is either long or short. Long is over 4 hours and involves me being a passenger and getting work done while I'm doing it. Short is anything else. Anything over half an hour for short travel is unacceptable for me. I can't make money during short travel.
I've been keeping track of--and secretly hoping my urban-born wife would volunteer for--the Global Village Construction Set project for years. It's had some progress issues, but ultimately the reasoning is sound. For the same reasons we love FOSS in the software development world, Jakubowski is pushing towards an earlier time when fixing your own truck was not outlandishly difficult.
But I do have to say this:
>> He likes things to be scheduled,” his fiancée, Catarina Mota, a forty-year-old scholar of open-source technology, says. “I’ll say, ‘I want to go buy some bread.’ He’ll say, ‘What time?’ ”
Is concerning. I've personally found that people who couldn't be flexible in one aspect of their life were unlikely to be flexible in most other aspects. In other words, the people I know who like strict schedules, or readily admit to "hating change", are the most likely to harbor rather deep-seated, irrational prejudices of some kind. And it just continues with stuff like this:
>> We foresee an equal playing field of competent, well-organized, small-scale, decentralized republics after the borders of empires dissolve.”
No, I'm sorry, that's not how civilization works. If you read between the lines of the "big government" scare mongering, that's all it's talking about--big versus little government. And the "little" that such people talk about is not one that is more just, free from corruption, it's the road back to feudalism. Large, federalist government has provided us a means towards equality and justice unlike any the world has witnessed prior. There is a reason developed countries don't expect their police to be "funded" through "voluntary donations" aka bribes.
Being able to service your own equipment is orthogonal to discarding 250 years of hard-learned facts about government.
Those two concepts are fairly vague and subjective, but assuming they have increased, what makes you think that large federalist governments are the cause, rather than, say, the industrial revolution, medical breakthroughs, or population growth?
See http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?trid=976 - "Rybalchenko is currently seeking ways to detect similar bugs that can appear when many processors work simultaneously on the same task but fail to coördinate properly and begin competing instead."
and http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428330/startup-has-lang... - "In 2000, he helped develop the Captcha—the test that websites use to distinguish humans from spam-spewing robots by asking them to reënter blurred or distorted strings of letters and numbers.")