Free Beer
Free Beer is a collection of essays I wrote along with Rasmus Fleischer, Jeremiah Foster, Stefan Larsson, Mike Linksvayer, Henrik Moltke, Nikolaj Hald Nielsen, Denis Jaromil Rojo, Johan Söderberg, Victor Stone and Ville Sundell. It was edited by Stian Rødven Eide.
My contribution to the book is titled “The End of (artificial) Scarcity” and is the last essay in the book. An excerpt:
Was industry not intended to replace the human hand with machines, transforming hard labour into a caretaker’s affair of relative ease, letting machines fulfil our every want and desire in plenty, letting us all lead comfortable lives of affluence? Or was the industrial revolution a purely technical issue, hackers of yore making things that did suave stuff just because they had a strong desire to solve technical problems? Doubtful. As technocentric as hacker culture tends to be, hackers have politics up to here. Look at the free software movement, look at Wikipedia. When technically minded individuals come together to address problems, be they technical or political or social, they do so with a fervour that makes people’s heads spin.
The book is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license, and is available for free download or for print-on-demand purchase from Lulu.com.