GENOMICON

1) Neural Network made out of stem-cells made from a foreskin

More insane than Mary Shelley could ever dream of – but all in the name of art etc. It reminds me a bit of the “machine” at the end of Britannia Hospital

So that’s cool.

Elsewhere…

New York City’s Community Biolab is offering a course on how to create DIY Mutant Worms.

Elsewhere…

Genome Compiler

Drag and drop software for hacking DNA – which you can then send off to labs, to have the thing made. Pretty impressive… although I still haven’t a clue what any of this stuff means. I feel about as illiterate as normal people do when faced with computer code.

Their vast eternal (ted-talk) plan here

Finally – interesting article about how The Parma Industry deprives people in the developing world of medicine that exists, and fails to even research really horrific diseases… because there’s no money in them.

“I don’t work for millions of people in Africa.”

The stagnation caused by “IP” again… but it talks about quite an interesting idea – “bounties” for curing diseases… de-coupling research from manufacture. Corporations or researchers or whatever get (for example) $2bn for curing a disease, the resulting cure then being released to the world. No fucking “IP” nonsense, no extortionate $100,000 price-tags. Instead we get what previous generations managed to pull off… the complete eradication of polio… of smallpox… of the killer-diseases we’re faced with today – bearing in mind, that when child-mortality comes down, the birth-rate comes down faster.

Seems like a really good idea. It also talks about a github for medical research – an international R&D treaty… which is so obviously a good idea it’s ludicrous that it didn’t happen long ago – but it’s getting blocked by the US govt.

So something needs to be done about that really. Corporate usurpation of democracy. By whatever means necessary, this has to stop.

It’s got to be done doesn’t it.

There’s a war going on – currently being conducted domestically by corruption of the law-making process, and internationally waves by secret IP treaties. Each one of these is an attack. In the early 20th C, it would have been foreign battleships on the horizon. In the early 21st, it’s “delegates”… “negotiators”… meeting behind closed doors, stitching up the planet for a global aristocracy. It’s information enclosure.

At the moment, there seems to be an arms race between The Law (which has nose-diving legitimacy) and Technology. It’s a class-war, and it’s the same class war that has been waged for generations. For thousands of years. Spartacus fought it his way, we’re fighting it ours. We’ve got a head-start… provided by previous generations etc. Yesterday’s Union guys. The Suffragettes… back and back.

So with that as a backdrop… the reason the Internet is what it is (as opposed to an interactive cable-channel) is because it was created by hippies… open computers on an open network. The pipes are agnostic of their content – which is a two-edged sword, but the evils of open-systems (an aid to various types of crime, including the sick end of porn) is far far

less evil than what happens when “those on top” are allowed to have too much power.

So… apropos of that… here’s a bunch of stuff.

1) we need to P2Pify everything – I think that this is going to require an open-source “black box” with an API. Something that can handle the cryptography/mechanics allowing designers and less heavy-duty programmers (like me) to build whatever the hell they want on top.

I came across this: tent.io – which looks like it might be a step in that direction, but they have “tm” and © symbols everywhere… and talk about “owning” information… and any protocol which has the idea of “information ownership” built into its DNA, should be rejected outright. Like the W3C trying to build DRM into HTML5

Then again, they say Tent is generic and decentralized. That means anyone can build any kind of app and host their own Tent server if they want. There are no limits or central authorities to censor or intermediate communication, invade privacy, or take control.…. so they’re thinking along the right lines.

I might need to have a play with that… see how it goes.

2) we need to de-mainfraimify the cloud – this kickstarter project has promise

But they’ve adopted a rental (aka: unearned income) model for their hardware, so although they aced their kickstarter campaign, I don’t think this one has wheels.

3) BitTorrent Sync

This is pretty cool – I’m now using it instead of dropbox to share files between my (linux) laptop and (windows xp) laser-cutter laptop. I think this could be an open way of solving the same problem as above. It’s really simple, and it’s really fast.

So… new project: I’m going to get:

– a raspberry PI $35 (plus another $100 cables, wifi dongle, wireless keyboard etc)
– a 500gb hard drive (could be a lot higher, but I don’t need a lot higher)

… and that’s all I think. Connect it up to the TV, which needs to be released from the shite that is broadcast TV anyway.

Then I think I’ll start writing little apps for it. Possibly with…

3) Unhosted – which is a set of tools for writing applications that run on your local browser, pointing to databases that can live anywhere. There are a bunch of example apps… some of which are pretty impressive… given how young the tech is.

I played with this a while back… got as far as “hello world”… seemed to work well enough.

Anyhoo – a little set-top device like this could kill a whole bunch of birds with one stone… the two main ones being P2Ping the cloud, the other being eclipsing the idiocracy of broadcast TV.

4) BrCKs

Which looks quite good… what would be quite cool would be the storage thing I was on about, sitting on tip one of these… turned into a mesh network. Something with the potential to bypass ISPs altogether… not that I’ve got anything against ISPs… it’s just that they do seem to be turning into a target for the forces of old and evil.

I have a feeling that this might be another one of those “got to happen” things, that we’re going to be pushed into by the arms-race we’re currently in. Mesh Networks could well become The New P2P.

Which brings us back to Raspberry Pi…

Who’d have ever thought that this could turn out to be a giant-killer. I have a funny feeling it might be though… or something like it. The 3D printed gun guy with his “Liberator” is still trying to fight WWII… although if he’s a proper libertarian, then he’s probably got his head back in 1776 – they’re so desperate to borrow legitimacy from the (subtly rewritten) past, that they’ve started aping the language… but I think the real liberator here… the real disruptive, democratising tech, will not be a little gun, it will be a little computer. An ugly duckling.

And no one will see it coming.

Been away for a while. Shit’s been getting complicated. Not sure what this post is about yet. Meantime, here’a a picture.

and a video

I’m quite pleased about this one, because this critter has been around for ages… a printable microcopter… and usually what happens with cool inventions on the web, is that they get a lot of blog traffic, and then nothing happens ever again. Like all good robotic advances that are cool, but not immediately useful, this one is (bless) going to be used for search and rescue.

–

But that’s not what this is about.

1) Talking to my friend the other day about why I haven’t posted in a while. When I started this blog there would be some new thing to write about every couple of days. Then a year or two ago it was about 5. Now it’s hundreds. I’m not that interested in merely echoing… I try to make meta-observations, and those are harder to do, because the rate with which my observations become irrelevant is speeding up.

2) Cody the 3D Gun printing guy (who has something of the Unibomber about him… ie: he’s swapped out his empathy/compassion software, and replaced it with MS-DOS era game-theory)… Cody the 3D printing guy has just developed an entirely 3D printed gun that is probably less safe than the stamped metal single-shotters they dropped over France in WWII

The fact that Cody has also seen fit to call his gun “The Liberator”

is probably not a coincidence… but is growing out of the warped (goebbels-like history-rewrite) that sees socialists as nazis, and that America is about to turn into a Muslim communist dictatorship. People who like to throw the word “Liberty” about are deeply suspect. It’s a word loaded with snow-blind right-wing spin… just like it was back in the 18th/19th Century when it was used to justify slavery.

So now these particular files have been “seized” (which is like going down to the beach and seizing the seashells) by the State Dept.

This gun is not really a gun though. It’s symbolic feint and counter-feint. Guns are kindof retro. Imagine this is 1913… 100 years ago. WW1 and WW2 (tanks, planes, radar) and Communism and the flu epidemic and lego and television and the internet… the explosion of technology that was the 20th Century haven’t happened yet… but people will still have talked about “the 20th C” as though they knew what they were talking about. I have forebodings about history repeating… because a lot of the ideological utopianism of that period is being faithfully re-enacted by people who think history is dates and battles… to be fan-ficked to suit “beliefs”. Mix that with Austerity and we’re right back where we were in 1913. 1932.

And it’s speeding up. Tech has changed more since the 1960s than it has in the last 1000 years. My dad learned to read using slate and chalk. Today kids “aren’t taught” how to use iPads… partly because by the time they leave school this tech will be obsolete anyway.

So guns are retro – if anything, the weapon here is not the gun, but the printer.

3) Talking to another friend about Zombie targets that really bleed being sold at an NRA conference… and one of the 15 different models was female, so the feminists found an excuse to cry “sexism” – which is utterly ridiculous… here they all are – does that look sexist to you? Personally I felt sorry for The Germans… or the fact that terrorists look like Religious Arabs or that the “straight” zombies look kindof gay. Just wheel out the same axe you were trying to grind last week. The world is a mirror that bites your arse.

What this (actually) is, is someone bringing video-games into actual reality… video-games growing from movies, which grow from books, which grew from folklore etc… when google-glass gets underway, reality is going to have fantasy mixed with it even more… and as we speak, Americans sitting behind screens in Nevada are playing video-games that kill real people in Pakistan.

It’s not just that “the internet of things” is allowing the internet to escape into actual-reality (my parents now have a car, with a computer… that “won’t let you do things”)… the entire collective insanity of human culture is increasingly blending into reality… and if you think this is going to be limited to “billboards coming to life” a la Minority Report, then you’re still in 1913 (opining about the 20th Century as though you know what you’re talking about)

4) Where the fuck is Craig Venter? His TED talk about gen-tech saving the world by making synthetic oil was 5 years ago and fuck-all has happened. The only sign of the gen-tech revolution that sees 100 new “breakthroughs” in the blogosphere every day, that I can actually buy (and that is the “photos or it didn’t happen” litmus test) is a recent kickstarter project making glow-in-the-dark-plants – that has pulled down $300,000 already

(this video has nothing to do with that)

5) Quantum computing.

A while ago I was going to write a blog post about this – because the numbers are truly mind-boggling… because as you add “transistors” you get an increase that isn’t exponential, but is “factorial” – an increase based on permutations and combinations – and if I’ve got this right, if you managed to make a device that has the same number of transistors as CPUs in 2013… billions… then you’ve got a device capable of making A LOT of simultaneous calculations… and by A LOT, I mean if you attempted to make a (10px font, 3 digits per cm) decimal representation of this number it would literally be about 50 miles long. It’s a number bigger than all of the atoms in the universe.

Now… this isn’t storage, it’s calculations. If it were possible to store numbers that big, then we could simulate our entire universe. We could big-bang it, and let it unfold in a test-tube. We don’t have storage for this… but we’re getting closer to creating a CPU that could handle the maths.

And maybe there is no storage. Maybe the whole thing is just generated on the fly – maybe that is why matter appears to only go to the trouble of actually existing if it’s observed.

6) There are murmurings out there from the world of physics, that the universe can be modelled as (or is behaving like) a neural network.

If the universe is actually behaving more like a creode-system than a Newtonian clockwork billiard-ball game… ie: if the laws of nature are actually not fixed, but are habits… probabilities that grow in a dimension of possibility… then… there’s a whole swathe of ridiculed pseudo-science (eg: homoeopathy) that loses some of it’s ridiculousness because what it is, is a type of ritual-magic. And what science itself is, is a type of ritual-magic… but one based on stronger morphogenetic patterns – so it doesn’t have to exist in some shadow-plane of inherently untestable placebo.

7) I’m not the only one who finds fractals terrifying.

(this one is understood to be real… ie: not generated by a computer – though you are just looking at a digital representation of a bit-pattern right now)

Not sure why – but it’s got something to do with vertigo. If you look deeper, eventually you expect the detail to stop… you know… like it would if it were a simulation rather than a generative process.

9) Scientists are about to test whether or not we’re a simulation – sitting inside someone else’s quantum computer.

10) that’s enough for now.

…

So… various people have talked about The Rapture Of The Nerds… emergent consciousness growing out of more complex networks, and computers self-building smarter versions of themselves in a feedback loop that leaves human intellect back with the trilobites…

… as though it’s a good thing. It’s only (possibly) a good thing if you survive it. I see all these pieces coming together… unstoppable information (3d printed guns, human organs, drugs, thunder)… godlike computing power… reality escaping into the real… humans-out-of-the-loop automated generative art as creativity. The acceleration into complexity… into boundary dissolution. Ego-loss is the final self-defence mechanism.

I think we’re creating a massive hallucinogenic trip. I think that’s what The Rapture of The Nerds (if it ever happens) will resemble. The Garden of Earthly Delights – with a giant AI (like google) hooked into a global network of bio-tech capable fabrication devices… just making shit up. What happens when The Free Spaghetti machine starts making Spaghetti Monsters. Stuxnet meets spam meets fabricators. More than a single imagination can draw a circle around. The dissolution of the boundary between inner and outer space… and meantime, the forces of “control” are losing their minds, going down to the beach, trying to seize the seashells.

If linear time is a useful navigational aid, but essentially an observational fallacy… and what we actually have/are is some great big “thing” with a big-bang at one end… and something else at the other… just floating in some higher-dimensional space… then what is “the other”? Hard to say – but something we do know about it, is that information-density and complexity are accelerating exponentially… possibly factorially… and we’re starting to get into an era where our controlling institutions are going insane.

And it’s only 1913.

Cool – you can laser-etch hexagonal bolt-holes 1/2 way through acrylic sheets by repeatedly rastar-etching slowish speed, highish power… on my machine (little 60W machine) speed=100, power=70 – 2 passes. Not particularly fast (each one takes about 4 minutes)… but it allows you to do the formerly impossible… each time identical to the last.

For circular holes, I’ve found it’s a hell of a lot faster to cut a dense spiral than it is to etch a circle.

In other news, I just made this:

(via)

From Festo who constantly make amazing things. This looks like a solution looking like a problem to me, but those are some of my favourite things.

On that note, check out this tape-art:

Kinetic art without the kinesis.

… and this…

Which is so cool I can hardly stand it.

Everybody else seems to be talking about bitcoins, so I will too.

I have a slightly different perspective from the (ahem) pundits though, in that I have actually been using the things (as a buyer and a merchant) for years now. About this time last year, I bought a case of beer for 12 bitcoins which today would be worth $1680.

And I understand how they work… unlike ANY of the old-school economists, who also failed to predict the 2008 crash, and who just went along with what it was acceptable to say. The more “established” an economist is, the more likely they are to be wrong about bitcoins. This has been the pattern so far. You might as well ask the doddering self-entitled satin-tour-jackets wearing old twats from the RIAA about torrent protocols.

These people are from the past. They can be ignored.

So.

Thought 1)

The price of them is going up exponentially. Lots of people are saying this is a bubble. “It’s a bubble” they say.

I’m not so sure.

Think of Skype… or bittorrent or MySpace or HTML or jQuery or Kickstarter or cellphones or longbows or literacy etc etc. All incredibly successful platforms, that disrupted the fuck out of what went before. They measure their success in numbers of users, numbers of downloads etc. Their growth is exponential, but nobody says “they’re a bubble”… why not? Because their “unit of success” is not also a unit of money. They’re only called bubbles when this changes.

So… any currency that succeeds is going to have what resembles bubble behaviour built into it, because it’s money that’s being measured. This doesn’t mean it’s a bubble. This doesn’t mean it isn’t… but… IF something turns up that replaces fiat money, then it’s going to look like a bubble, when it’s actually a massive tectonic shift.

So don’t count on bitcoin being a bubble.

People wanting to build bitcoin up as a plarform, should start measuring its success in terms of numbers of users or numbers of transactions. Something decoupled from the market rate.

Thought 2)

It hasn’t started yet.

There are a bunch of different killer-benefits of bitcoin, that aren’t being taken advantage of by those with the most to gain. My Golden Mean Caliper business for example is able to offer a 7% discount to people buying with bitcoin because in CC fees and currency-exchange fees, that’s what it saves me.

Businesses haven’t yet twigged that they can double their profit margins by cutting out the credit card companies.

The Black Economy hasn’t really cottoned onto it yet… there are huge advantages to being able to transfer, instantly, under the radar large anonymous payments. Someone, somewhere, the other day said that bitcoins where “eternally traceable”… every transaction is stored forever in the blockchain… but obfuscating this would be trivial (and free) compared to the difficulty of traditional layering/money-laundering.

Thought 3)

Yup, it fluctuates, but the drivers are pointing up rather than down. Since I moved to NZ from the UK, 5 years ago, my income has been slashed by a 1/3rd because of the downward trajectory of the GBP against NZD. Bitcoin may fluctuate wildly, but fiat currency is ALREADY a losing proposition, that is systemically geared in the downward direction. The £10 you have now is going to buy less this time next year. The main way of maintaining the value of your money within the fiat economy is by “investing at interest” becoming a usurer yourself, and feeding the beast that is fucking it up for everyone.

Thought 4)

If you’re going to siphon money into bitcoin, do it at a flat rate, at a regular interval. This is known as the Dollar Cost Averaging Strategy.

Whenever I’ve tried to day-trade with bitcoins, I’ve lost money. I even wrote a program to spot differences in the UK/US markets and transfer money backwards and forwards between them… this didn’t work – partly because…

Thought 5)

The bitcoin markets fucking suck.

This is the big weak point at the moment. MtGox is the facebook of bitcoins – it is a big single-point of failure… and it’s an accident waiting to happen, and if bitcoin is going to crash again, it’s likely to be due to money fleeing MtGox.

Meanwhile, the only UK exchange stopped taking bank transfers. New Zealand? Very difficult… you’ve got to turn up to a bank in person (which means putting on trousers, leaving the house), hand over the money in person, wait for it to clear, then “buy” from a market that seems to have about 4 people selling.

In a digital economy, this is ridiculous.

What is needed is something with a reputation-system (like Ebay), with a search-engine for buyers/sellers… a bit like Napster. Probably in a similar way that bitcoin clients store the entire blockchain (down the track when this gets to be too big, there are plans to only store “recent” transactions, or allow people to download a meta-blockchain)… there needs to be a P2P reputational block-chain. So people are still essentially anonymous to each other, but if you want to buy $1000 worth, rather than trusting some complete unknown with $1000, you can split the purchase across 100 people, who have proved trustworthy to other people in the past.

Each movement of fiat money into BTC in other words need not rely on a single node, but can be split across a number of sellers (a bit like seeds in a bittorrent system)

Thought 6)

I’m attempting to blog outside, and the sun has come out and now I can’t see the screen.

That is all.

Thought 7)

No that’s it, I’ve stopped.

Thought 8)

Just wait until The Chinese get hold of it… at the moment, I import stuff from China via Alibaba / Aliexpress – and a BIG chunk is taken by Western Union… money transfers between here and China are really expensive (and a pain in the arse, trying to fit Chinese addresses into fiddly paper-forms… that you have to leave the house to fill in)… and the Aliexpress sellers really play the margins. Being able to knock 7% (or whatever) off their foreign sale price… or add that to their margin is going to be a serious competitive advantage.

It’ll be an unstoppable force… and 1/2 the people on Aliexpress also sell their stuff on ebay. I would have thought ebay would be reluctant to use BTC, because it’ll compete with Paypal… but then again, they could well find themselves competing as a whole, with sites (like Aliexpress) that have a permanent 3%-5% advantage.

From Festo, Creators of the finest robotic eye-candy in the world

We saw this documentary about creative thinking on the BBC the other day, who are spaz-chariots because they think they can “control information” – so lock their “content” up geographically… which, means if you’re outside the UK, you need a VPN (try airvpn.org (who take bitcoins)), so their DRM slows you down for at least 30 seconds.

But it’s an interesting documentary… hopefully someone will put it on the open-web at some point… and so I’ve been thinking about creativity and insight etc a fair bit recently, because the sort of creativity that I need for digital problem-solving seems to be different from physical problem-solving… and I’m moving from being a programmer to a cottage industrialist.

Physical takes time… and it’s less analysis/coding, and more “flash”. At the moment I’m playing with an auto balancing thing… a motor that moves a weight… to counterbalance a tilt.

Simple enough… but there are questions… eg,

- to use a lead screw (pictured) or belt?
- where to put the battery?
- how to make the design pleasingly symetrical
- what to make the weight out of etc…
- how to build the slider for the weight.

So I play with this in my mind for a bit… did a couple of inkscape drawings… then about a day later, realised that I could use the battery as the weight.

And then a bit later realised that I could use two batteries and have the motor in the middle.

And then realised that the weights don’t have to move at all… just the “pivot” attached to the motor, and the motor moves. Power fed to it on the rails that it runs on.

And then I realised that I didn’t need to use a belt at all… I could laser-cut a “solid belt”, ie: reinvent the rack and pinion.

All of which took about 4 days… some of it was involved with drawing pictures, some of it by playing with batteries and bits of pipe etc… but most of the brainwave type events happen at non-descript times… wandering about. Making coffee. Demonstrably Not Working.

You kindof know when you’ve got something right though, because the design shrinks. It’s like an alchemical “coagula / solve” thing… out of the chaos comes a smaller, purer and stronger version of what was there before. The drawing above may not look simpler, but it can be entirely made with things I happen to have… without needing flex-shaft couplers or linear bearings etc.

…

So I see this BBC program, that says that insights/creativity… the “out of the blue” moments, are increased by putting yourself in weird situations (which explains why hallucinogens boost creativity)… combined with doing mundane tasks, that distract the analytical/visual part of your mind.

There’s a distraction involved… a shutting down of left-brained consciousness, if I’ve got that right… and that kindof makes sense.

…

Something else I’ve noticed though – is sometimes when creativity flows, it really flows – it’s like falling out of a tree and hitting every branch. I’d noticed this song-writing when I was younger I’d secret myself away from the world (no phone; no tv; no people) for a week or two… and after a couple of days, the ideas would come so fast I couldn’t deal with them… “striking sparks in every direction”. Sometimes they were good, sometimes they weren’t… but there were so many, it didn’t matter – there was flow. It was all experiment.

I can recognise the vibe… the sort of output that’s created in various REM records from back in the day… New Automatic for the People for example. In fact I seem to recall Wendell Gee was what Michael called one of his “vomiting songs”, which if you don’t like REM will resonate, but what he meant was that the lyrics just chucked up in 5 minutes.

And Country Feedback, which is fucking cosmic, seems to have come from a similar place.

And I recognise this up-chucking of lyrics. For me it’s the only way they can be written. They ONLY come out of the flow

I think a lot of it is to do (for me at least) with not being too invested in one particular song/project because you’re working on about 5 at the same time. It doesn’t have to be The Ultimate American Novel… you can just bin it if you want because so much else is going on.

Creative blockage often comes about by being too invested in one thing. Here’s a simple example: asking people to make up a password. Often they just sit there stuck, because they’re trying to think of a word that’s the very essence of their being. I used to work in IT support – I’ve seen this a lot. People get writer’s block trying to make up a single word.

…

So I’ve become interested in this stuff again… and started experimenting.

What I’ve found works quite well… is to be alone… preferably for a day or two. For me creativity doesn’t happen when other people are around. Then sit in front of an entire evening’s worth of art-movies… eg: “Cosmopolis” by David Cronenberg… or Hal-Hartley… lyrical word-heavy things that you’re not really paying attention to…. just drift in and out of.

Don’t have a computer on. In fact don’t look at a computer all day. Sit with pen and paper nearby, and a guitar and tape machine or whatever with a 6 pack of beer… which you drink at the rate of about 1 an hour… and 1/2 pay attention to the movie… words and phrases… bits of music… ideas float out of it. Don’t think about the film… think about other stuff.

Works for me. It flows.

I’ve also found that if I’ve got a really tough concept to crack, lie in a dark room… ie: before you go to sleep, having just taken an hallucinogenic-level hit of THC. You need to be able to light-on, and write stuff down when it comes, but I find it distracts the over-organising part of your brain, and allows you to make connections between things that weren’t previously connected.

…

(the remsters when they were kids)

CAD is hard.

The micro-manufacturing revolution isn’t going to happen unless people get A LOT of help with the cad side of things… so for a while I’ve been keeping 1/2 an eye on a sort of Lego-Layer… a layer where people can “make their own designs”, out of pre-made parts, where the heavy-lifting CAD-wise has been done.

Enter Sandboxr.

Which firstly is quite a nice looking website, looks like bootstrap, but appears to be (bless) table-based, so who knows what it going on there. That aside, this is How To Do It, I think. Big and Simple.

Nice looking prints as well – which is (apparently) why they need $120k from Kickstarter. To get their own colour 3D printer.

Beyond that though, it’s quite a neat parametric system… and I think this slider-thing is going to be the way things go. I think this because I’ve written a couple of really simple versions myself, that I’ll launch, once I get a DRM key for my laser cutter (I’m having to buy LaserCutter 5.3 (which sucks) twice (which sucks)).

Still… pretty neat… trivial, but pretty neat. They’re aiming to be a showcase for designers… to flog copies of their wares… which I don’t have a problem with because they’re actually selling physical instantiations, rather than selling copies of bit-patterns (a practice which should be roundly mocked)

…

So it looks like the 3D Printing gun guy is attempting to set up a Pirate Bay of 3D Printing…

… although to be fair, The Pirate Bay is already the Pirate Bay of 3D printing… though without the bells and whistles that Defcad claim to eventually offer.

I kindof like where this guy is coming from…
and I kindof don’t.

This bit is good:

“But with 3D printed firearms, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, drones, and medical devices, the stakes will suddenly get much higher. Because 3DP is not about reviving manufacturing jobs or competing with assembly lines on cost. It is not about disrupting manufacturing. It is about disrupting copyright, IP, and regulation. It is about printing items whose prices have been set to infinity. It is about disrupting man-made forms of artificial scarcity”

Good on him – making a stand over something that needs to be made a stand over “it’s about disrupting copyright”…

… but disrupting regulation? That is not such a good idea. If it wasn’t for regulation we’d still be dumping CFCs into the Ozone Layer. Corporations/Industry need to be regulated – every bit as much as drivers need to be dissuaded from driving drunk. The trouble with this guy is that he appears to be a libertarian, and libertarians are idiots.

He also appears to be a Little-American Libertarian which doesn’t bode well. Insular conservatives who don’t seem to realise that there’s a world outside the US. So he makes a big deal about donating 50% of the proceeds from a deliberate rounding-error to VFW… aka “Veterans of Foreign Wars”. Got bad news for you sunshine: The “Foreign” bit is where 95% of the people on this planet, and therefore The Internet live. The Internet is not American. The revolution is not American. It’s all of us… and the rest of us don’t want grown-up teenage-boys running around with guns… whether they’re stay-at-home gun-nuts, or soldiers “defending their country” by attacking other people’s.

Americans get duped into worshipping their soldiers by politicians trying to deflect criticism from insane budgets and insaner wars. Donating money to US ex-soldiers may play well to the home-crowd, but the rest of the world would really just prefer that US military would stop attacking people. I’m guessing a fair few Americans feel the same.

And then there’s the video of course. That kindof sinks the whole notion:

He watches too much television. Compare and contrast to the movie about the Pirate Bay guys… sometimes they’re smart, sometimes they’re stupid but they are who they are. They don’t sound like they’re trying to do voice-overs for History Channel programs about UFOs visiting the Ancient Egyptians. I think he’s going to come a cropper… because he’s pretending to be something he’s not… but what he’s pretending to be, so many people (so badly) want, that he’s being forced to become it… and the thing about the excoriating gaze of the internet, is that LSD-like, it will find your cracks, and blow them 40ft apart if you’re putting on an act. The Koby guy went to pieces; Julian Assange did not. To live outside the law, you must be honest.

Though to be fair, he comes across a lot better in this… but anyone who talks about “Liberty” is (these days) buying into something fake. It’s a very odd notion of freedom, which we once heard a great deal of in defence of the slave-trade. There’s something Orwellian about the way they need to say “Liberty” rather than “Freedom”. Again, “Liberty” appears to be a very conservative American idea, loaded with revisionist history… and one which the Koch brothers put a great deal of money into. It reeks of bullshit.

So I can see this ending messily – which is a pity, because the actual “thing” he’s making might be very worthwhile, and I really admire the no-quarters stand he’s making.

But give me the Pirate Bay any day.

Hand Carved, Glitch Furniture

The New Aesthetic might conceivably be meeting high-art at last

I’ve always had a bit of a problem with “Art that you have to plug in”… which is what a lot of digital stuff is, if it’s not just collage. Something carved though? Even if it is carved with a machine? that’s something else. I don’t think this guy’s stuff is machine-carved though.

Is is the new Was.