Archive for category Development

The Napster Moment of Manufacturing

Jan 27

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Copyfight, Development, English, Hardware | No Comments

These are my outline notes from my talk at the Me Craft/You Industry symposium in Enkhuizen, Netherlands, today. The conversation afterwards, at the end, to a large degree revolved around the questions of whether we are ready for a “Napster moment”, whether it will ever come, and whether it’s actually a question of industrial paradigms or economic waveforms. I’m tempted to think that the fact that the symposium is called “Me Craft/You Industry” rather than “Me Kondratiev Wave/You Faddish Harmonic” suggests that this is actually a question of underlying paradigms much rather than simply economic fluctuations.

The topic is craft production and its relationship to industrial production, and by and large humanity consists of people who think that industry is great but it needs more craft, people who think craft is great but it needs more industry, and, in some edge cases – you know who you are – people that think both craft and industry are completely unteneble as production paradigms and we need something different.

There’s a way everybody can come happy out of this, but in order to get there we need to talk about something radically different from manufacturing for a moment and talk about something far more contentious. Then we’ll swing back at it at the end and have a go at centralization, just because we can and because it’ll be fun.

Now. Anybody who grew up in the late 1990′s used Napster, or at least heard of it. You know. The evil file sharing system which allowed lots of people to copy the work of Britney Spears and spread it all over the Internet.

Most of the time, when we look back at Napster, we see it as a failed attempt at liberation of the cultural output of humanity at best and a thoroughly illegal system for violating intellectual monopolies and threatening the hegemony over culture at worst. But regardless of where one stands on filesharing, it’s a fun metaphor that Cory Doctorow pointed out the relevance of: Very rarely do we think of Napster as a system by which a few million teenagers reinvented the music industry over the course of roughly 6 months – the leading edge of the Napster adoption curve – and during that time they built the largest database of human creativity that has ever existed, and they did it for free.

The cultural significance of this is massive. It is hard to imagine the world as it is today without the Napster moment. It turned the tables in many ways, both legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, and wherever you stand on any of those, at least your Internet connection is alarmingly fast now. The advent of Napster and its many successors produced massive upwards pressure towards faster Internet connections, more consumer control over cultural output, and a shift from passive consumption of culture to an active consumer culture. In fact, that variate alone is enough to explain most of the change in the structure of the music industry since then, although they will never admit it. In 1989 Stephan Weiswasser of ABC predicted that “you aren’t going to turn passive consumers into active trollers on the Internet.” How wrong he was.

The Napster moment, for music, was simply the democratisation of music – the moment at which it was ripped away from corporate interests and structurally enforced state protectionism and spread around all of the streets.

But the key here is not directly that of cultural liberation, because that had already been going on since the very day that culture became enshackled. However, the technology to record and distribute things like music had been incredibly terrible for a very long time then. Back when wax rollers were used to store music, in order to make 10 copies, the artist needed to perform the music 10 times – the concept of mastering did not exist. Slowly we moved from there to a digital age, but even then, prior to Napster, although it was possible to share files online, but it was difficult and required a lot of technical knowledge. Further, it was subject to scaling constraints – whether it was a musician encoding a song onto a wax roller or an FTP server providing the latest tunes, there was only so many requests they could service. So in that sense, “the Napster moment” is the large-scale democratization of filesharing through P2P technology.

But this isn’t about Music. Metaphor complete. Now let’s think about this in terms of industry, craft, and manufacturing.

The beginning of the Industrial revolution marked the beginning of a process by which the ability to craft and subsist was made economically unviable by massive improvements in productive capacity. This led many farmers, homesteaders and others to relocate to towns and cities, which started to grow. Eventually this led to a disenfranchised urbanized working class which had no control over any productive capacity to speak of. Formerly crucial crafts such as knitting were outcompeted by industrial methods and pushed into the realm of hobbyism, while the new class of industrialists owned more and more, produced more and more, yet contributed less and less to the process themselves. Some of the craftsmen rebelled against this trend in England between 1811 and 1815, but sure enough those of them that didn’t get hung got sent ot Australia.

This trend is still going on. Now that human intervention has been minimized and trivialized in factories, the same is happening in retail. Salespeople are being replaced by artificial autonomous agents. Modern capitalism is an existence whereby humans compete against indefatigable machines on a free market.

But yet, this is changing. A persistant interest in reversing the trend of centralization has slowly pushed the boundaries. Free Software has pushed the boundaries. Increasingly, open manufacturing models are pushing the boundaries.

We currently have the early P2P industrial tools, such as Repraps, laser cutters, CNC mills. We have Fab Labs and hackerspaces, but they’re still somewhat hard to use and they are by no stretch of the imagination widespread or democratized. Hackerspaces and maker labs are still geeky and artsy and hackish, and that’s fine for now, but we still need a Napster moment in manufacturing.

Now, to speculate on what that moment will look like is as impossible as it would have been for Stephan Weiswasser to speculate on Napster in 1989. I’d love to try, though. Despite that we don’t know what that moment will look like, in terms of technology, there are a few things we can assume based on previous examples:

  1. It will suck. It’ll be slow and buggy, it’ll suffer from all sorts of scaling issues, it’ll look like crap, and it won’t actually be very good, but it’ll get better.
  2. It will be good enough. It won’t be pretty but it’ll get the job done and everybody who uses it will have countless suggestions for its improvement. As Vinay Gupta has pointed out, “Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing badly.”
  3. It will have a precipice-adoption curve: massive exponent on the leading edge, mostly by young people, suddenly empowered. The emphasis on young people is important. Most people probably won’t “get it”. I’m sure a lot of the people who attend conferences like this will, but there’s not enough of us. There are however lots of bored kids in suburbs.
  4. It will have a P2P social structure, rather than a hierarchical command-and-control structure as we’re used to from industry. In that sense, it will have more in common with craft production, despite retaining industrial output levels. That factor also means that there will be a much higher dynamic range for production – it is less likely that Sloanist economies of scale will apply.
  5. It will be attacked massively by entrenched interests. The attacks will range from smear campaigns (“You wouldn’t download a chicken sandwich!”) to legal actions based on existing laws to the creation of new draconic legal instruments to protect existing industrial production methods. Historical examples of this include the Frame Breaking and Malicious Damage Acts of 1812 in England, from the historical perspective, whereas the more modern ACTA treaty and things like SOPA.
  6. There will be martyrs. People like Peter Sunde and the other founders of the Pirate Bay, people like Aaron Swartz and Pablo Soto. People who, for one reason or another, the various industries decide to make an example of.

[Note: I ran out of time at the talk-equivalent of here. It's hard to fit a fully formed argument into 10 minutes!]

One foreseeable difference between the Democratization of Industry compared to the Democratization of Culture is the scope of severity. Giving everybody access to all the music in the world changes music but it doesn’t change the world. People still need to eat and have shelter, they still need clothes and other essentials. Therefore, social exclusion from the capacity to use BitTorrent will stifle culture, but it won’t necessarily create a dangerous “societal badlands” situation. In short: poor people will not suffer too much.

However, when the Napster Moment happens for manufactured goods, we’re talking about a rather severe situation where the chasm between rich and poor (or rather, the haves and the have-nots, in terms of access to this technology) grows exponentially forever. In terms of political economy, everybody who has not the ability to download (and eat) the chicken sandwich stands to be eternally disenfranchised.

There are solutions to this problem:

First, we can try to make sure that the technology, when it comes into existence, is of a nature that it is inherently copyable. This is a design feature of RepRap – people are thankfully already thinking this way, and Von Neumann showed some pretty convincing maths that suggested that any Universal Constructor must necessarily be able to construct a Universal Constructor. But more importantly, these devices need to be legally unencumbered so that it is socially and legally possible to replicate the devices.

Second, we can try to give as many people in the world access to the existing technology and the knowledge of how to use it and what to expect in the future, such that when such a technology comes along, they’ll not only be less surprised by it but inherently acclimatised to it.

Which gives us the very weird result that the piracy-oriented file-sharing part of culture may be requisite to social justice in a P2P manufacturing world. There might be lots of other ways, but considering the last few hundred years of history and the fact that we have only managed to come up with craft, industry, and P2P, it’s fairly ovious that in any direction where the result is not an open and free peer-to-peer result there lies madness.

The End that Hasn’t Happened

May 22

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Development, English | Comments off

As everybody now knows, Harold Camping was wrong. Big surprise. For the record, I can also pull arbitrary dates out of my ass and assign cosmological significance to them, and I don’t need a civil engineering degree or almost two decades of consideration to do so. Early reports do show Camping himself to be missing, but after his radio station allegedly spent over $100 million on an advertising campaign for what is effectively vaporware, I’m not surprised – either he’s hiding in the mountains with a fat wad of purloined money, or he’s worrying that the tripple mortgage will foreclose. Either way, I don’t think even the most deranged person would dare to show his face in public for a while, although I may be wrong on that count.

The thing that hasn’t been reported on as much as the end that didn’t happen is the end that did happen, and the end that hasn’t happened yet. Varying figures estimate deaths related to hunger to be between one per second and one per three seconds, yielding between 28000-85000 deaths on rapture day alone due to insufficient access to food. A report from UNICEF Canada estimated that around 30000 children die each day from preventable diseases, which is to say diseases such as pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, malaria and measles, for which there exist effective vaccines or other medicines. For all of these people, the End of the World is happening right now, or it has already happened, or it will happen in the near future. In the time it has taken you to read this far into this article, we can estimate about one hundred deaths from these two things alone, let alone all of the other stuff that’s going on in the world.

Now, let’s ignore the hundreds of idiots who spent their life savings on buying advertisements for the End of the World. Let’s pretend that that money couldn’t have been put to better use. Let’s just focus on Harold Camping and his  $100 million dollars of advertising money. What could that money alone have accomplished?

Based on WHO’s 2015 price projections on vaccine costs, a full set of vaccines, which is way more than most people would ever need, will be $76.61, so that would be enough to inoculate over 1.3 million people, probably closer to 2.5 million in reality since not all vaccines are needed everywhere. Room to Read claims that “$2,500 funds 10 years of education for girls that otherwise would not have the opportunity to attend school.” That means those $100 million could fund 40000 girls to achieve an elementary school education, which would go a long way towards raising quality of life, preventing disease, and making societies sustainable.

The irrigation costs for farmland have dropped to roughly $200 per hectare with drip irrigation, which is efficient in its use of water. That means about 500000 hectares could be irrigated for that money – just slightly less than the surface area of Rhode Island, for context. At a rough and probably understated back-of-an-envelope estimate of 3000 kg cereal yield per hectare per year, that’s 15000 tons of food, which is enough to feed about 20000 people per year – assuming an average American’s diet!

Whenever I see this kind of insanity I always have an urge to run the figures. All of the above are estimates should be taken with a grain of salt, specially since many if not most aid organizations have an amazing knack for having baseline operations costs running as high as 80 cents on the dollar, so most of the money donated to charity never actually gets spent on anything charitable. Often this is due to mismanagement, absurdly high fundraising costs, lack of interest in actually achieving its goal, or simply because the charity is set up as a way to launder money – this is not as rare as it sounds. [On a freakish side note, Family Radio's assets are valued at $83 million and it operated at a $33 million deficit last year... but it's still a four star charity. Blow the trumpet, warn the people, indeed!]

Despite all of this, it really is possible to do good. I’m very skeptical about dumping money or goods into developing economies, as it will often destroy internal markets, but exporting knowledge and things that aren’t emerging in the local market anyway or funding critical infrastructure is a very good idea. For a few years I’ve wanted to set up a project where engineering undergrads are funded to spend their summers building infrastructure and educating locals.

But seriously. If even half of the money spent on nonsense things like political campaigns or religion was spent on fixing the world’s problems, we’d be seeing a very different world very very quickly.

Laumulega vegið að frelsinu

Sep 24

Posted by Smári McCarthy in Copyfight, Development, Free speech, Icelandic, Politics, Press freedoms | Comments off

Ég kom heim í gær frá Budapest, þar sem ég var á ráðstefnunni Internet at Liberty 2010. (Hér er liveblog frá Jillian C. York af umræðum sem ég tók þátt í um verndun þjóðaröryggis í samhengi við tjáningarfrelsi á netinu; hér er upptaka af því). Þar kynntist ég svo mörgu góðu fólki að ég hef ekki enn getað áttað mig almennilega á því – ég þakka Google og Central European University fyrir að hafa haldið ráðstefnuna og boðið mér að vera með.

Á ráðstefnunni var fólk frá 71 landi, og meðal annars var verulega stór hópur af fólki frá löndum eins og Azerbaijan, Túnis, Egyptalandi, Íran og Indónesíu, fólk frá stöðum þar sem það getur verið tekið af lífi fyrir að hafa skoðanir. Þar var mikið rætt um getu ríkisins til að ritskoða, getu ríkisins til að fangelsa fólk og beita því alvarlegum líkamlegum refsingum, pynta það og svelta. En allt þetta var rætt í samhengi við það að nú höfum við Internetið, ótrúlegt verkfæri sem gerir jafnvel fólki í slíkum löndum kost á að láta heyra í sér. Internetið gaf þessu fólki ekki rödd, þau höfðu rödd. Internetið gaf þeim bara gjallarhorn.

Þegar maður heyrir í svona fólki er auðvelt að fara í þann ham að við höfum ekki yfir neinu að kvarta á vesturlöndum, en staðreyndin er sú að þó svo að fólk sé ekki myrt og pyntað á vesturlöndum fyrir skoðanir sínar, nema í afar takmörkuðu mæli, þá er ritskoðun og frelsissvipting enn stunduð, bara með mun gætilegari hætti.

Nýlegt dæmi: Gallo-skýrslan var samþykkt á Evrópuþinginu í fyrradag, þrátt fyrir hávær mótmæli frá frjálsa samfélaginu. Meðan málfrelsissinnar sendu mörg bréf á þingmenn og báðu um að skýrslunni yrði hafnað með öllu, þá var hópur um hundrað kvikmyndagerðarmanna sem sendi bréf sem studdi upptöku skýrslunnar – þar voru nokkur fræg nöfn á borð við László Kovács, David Lynch, Ibolya Fekete og Attila Janisch. Það sem kom þó í ljós við nánari rýni er að László Kovács dó fyrir þremur árum, og margir aðrir sem voru nöfn á því blaði höfðu aldrei heyrt um Gallo skýrsluna, hvað þá skrifað undir hana.

Það sem gerir Gallo skýrsluna hættulega er að hún leggur til að höfundalagabrot verði gert sakhæft. Sem stendur eru hugverkalagabort nær allsstaðar tekin sem einkamál frekar en sakamál, sem þýðir að viðurlög eru sektir og aðeins í örfáum löndum fangelsisvist, en verði þetta gert að sakamálum þá þýðir þetta að ríkinu ber skylda að reka öll slík mál fyrir dómstólum, til hins ýtrasta, jafnvel í þeim klunnalegu tilfellum þar sem að, til dæmis, barn syngur popplag á bekkjarkvöldi hjá sér í skólanum án þess að greiða rétthafa, og fólk sem fundið sekt fer á sakaskrá og mun til dæmis ekki geta boðið sig fram til þingsetu eða álíka. Fangelsun verður þá staðalbúnaður í refsingum við slíkum brotum.

Þetta kann að virðast fullþungt. Það er vegna þess að þetta er það. Með þessari stefnu er verið að setja fólk sem deilir þekkingu og menningarafurðum á milli sín á sömu hillu og nauðgara, morðingja og dópsala. Einhverjir munu halda því fram að þetta verði aldrei svona slæmt, að þetta sé formsatriði og að tíu ára skólastelpur verði ekki ákærðar fyrir að láta vinkonur sínar frá USB lykla með nýjasta Justin Bieber lagið, en það er enginn grundvöllur fyrir slíkum fullyrðingum – lög um sakamál eru einkar skýr á svona atriðum; yfir alla brotlega skal réttað. Sem betur fer er þetta langt frá því að verða að lögum í Evrópu, en Gallo skýrslan leggur til að IPRED2-tilskipunin verði tekin upp sem allra fyrst til að stemma stigum við ólöglegri starfsemi sjóræningja á netinu, enda geti slíkt komið í veg fyrir mikið tekjutap hjá útgáfufyrirtækjum.

Í Ungverjalandi voru margir æfir yfir þessu – ég horfði á einn vin minn bókstaflega snúast í hringi öskrandi af reiði þegar hann frétti að þetta hafði verið samþykkt. Sá hinn sami er Ungverskur málfrelsisbaráttumaður sem á við ögn stærra vandamál að etja þessa daganna.

Þannig er að um tuttugu ár síðan að Ungverjaland varð að því lýðræðissamfélagi sem það er í dag, en fall kommúnismans leiddi til þess að mikil uppsveifla var í hægri-pólitík, með meðfylgjandi kynþáttahatri, íhaldssemi og þjóðernishyggju. Hægri öfgaflokkurinn sem nú ræður ríkjum í Ungverjalandi er með um 67% sæta á þjóðþinginu, og hefur því getu til að breyta lögum eftir hentisemi, en hefur auk þess getu til að breyta stjórnarskránni eftir hentisemi, þar sem þar í landi þarf ekki að slíta þingi til að henni sé breytt, heldur eingöngu að aukinn meirihluti (tveir þriðju) samþykki breytingar.

Nú er verið að skrifa nýja stjórnarskrá fyrir landið bak við luktar dyr, og verður hún tekin upp í mars 2011 að öllu óbreyttu. Stjórnarskráin mun að öllum líkindum fara án vandræða í gegnum þingið nema verulegar sviptingar verði á næstu mánuðum, og svo mun forsetinn, sem er einnig gæðingur sama flokks, samþykkja hana, og stjórnarskrárdómstóllinn sem mun sinna kærum vegna breytinganna er einnig fullskipaður vinum ríkisstjórnarinnar.

Þegar maður hittir Ungverja á næstu mánuðum er viðeigandi að segja við þá: “ők szar” (borið fram “yk sar”).

Það er erfitt að gera sér í hugarlund hvað muni standa í nýju stjórnarskrá Ungverja, en það er ljóst að það verður ekki allt fallegt og gott. Sumir eru vongóðir, enda verið að skipta úr stjórnarskrá frá kommúnistatímabilinu sem er varla mikið betri, en eins og einn Ungverji komst að orði við mig, þá er það eina sem hefur bjargað landinu frá því að steypast í glötun það að ríkisstjórnin getur ekki gert upp við sig hverja þeir hata mest, gyðinga, sígauna eða homma. Krafa evrópuþingmanna frá þessum flokk um að Trianon sáttmálinn yrði felldur úr gildi og Ungverjaland fengi sín gömlu landamæri aftur var að sjálfsögðu hundsuð, en hún lýsir vandamálinu ágætlega.

Hér er á ferðinni svolítið undarlegt vandamál. Meðan að stríðsástand var í Evrópu og allt það slæma sem var að gerast var uppi á yfirborðinu, þá gat fólk gert sér grein fyrir vandamálunum án mikils erfiðis. Nú er stöðugleiki og lífsgæðin há, og því horfa Evrópubúar og Amríkanar á miðausturlönd, mið- og suðaustur-Asíu og Afríku til að sjá hvar allt er slæmt. Fyrir vikið er samfélagið okkar mjög veikt fyrir því að fólk vegi laumulega að frelsi okkar.

Það versta við þetta er að þegar skerðingar eiga sér stað hér vestra, skorið smátt og smátt á réttindi okkar, þá magnast áhrifin annarsstaðar. Þegar menn eins og Kadafi, Kadyrov og Ahmadinedjad eru gagnrýndir fyrir allt það sem þeir gera illt, þá geta þeir í auknum mæli sagt, “hah, þið sakið okkur um mannréttindabrot og hlúið svo að ríka fólkinu ykkar meðan þið fangelsið þá fátæku…”

Þetta er snúið. Auðvitað er þetta snúið. En við verðum að vera vakandi og meðvituð, og berjast til síðasta manns.