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I mean stuff is happening… and we’re told that we’re on a brink of a robotics revolution – but as far as I can see, we’re basically at the same point we were when I started this blog about 2.5 years ago – and it does appear to be resembling Karl Pilkington’s take on technology “everything that needs to be invented has been, and now we’re just messing about”.

Nothing wrong with that I suppose. If you do a youtube search for “hexapod” say, and sort by date-published, people are making these things at a fairly fast rate.

Maybe these things take time… I mean I saw my first computer when I was 16 – in 1979… a thing about the size of a fridge, with an oscilloscope screen. Two years later, my school had them… these things

Four years later (1986) I was working in a bank looking after an IBM mainframe… and desktop computers were starting to creep in – all Dos based.

Two years later (1988) I was working for a computer company – which had 60 staff, and two desktop computers between all of us. We had typists.

Four years later (1992), I did a piss-take, govt-funded, get-me-back-to-work training session… still using Dos-based desktops… but windows ones were in the background.

1994 – working at Auckland University, NZ – every desk had one – and the internet was starting to creep in. It was so small in those days that the University used to download and cache it. I bought my first PC for home huse.

And that was (god forbid) 17 years ago. Now it’s 2011, and I have literally spent more time in front of a computer in the last 10 years than every other activity, including sleeping combined. The web has… a) provided me with the technology and b) become such a problem, that I’ve felt driven to make this:

The web has become so pervasive that it’s starting to interfere with our physical brain-structures.

Now that is a revolution – and it took (as far as I’m concerned) about 20 years to kick in – in fact it didn’t really kick in until it had stopped being a computer-revolution and started to become a communications revolution. Abundant, cheap, global point-to-point communication. That is the thing that’s interfered with brain-structure.

So maybe this is year 3 of a 20-year process… maybe not. The thing about communication, is that we all need to do it a lot, all the time. We don’t need to be making stuff that often… unless it’s stuff like vegetables or electricity. Physical artifacts? Nah. The only reason we have so many physical artifacts now is that we’ve been conned into it – because the prime-driver of our culture is advertising. So we buy stuff. We buy stuff to reward ourselves for… working – for the 1% who take 40% of the money.

Which brings us to the next revolution – the real one… the one that has been the cause of me writing so little of late, because it makes everything else seem trivial. The Great Correction… but more on that later.

Thinking Machine *** Honourable Mention Prix Ars 2008 *** from Masahiro Miwa on Vimeo.

via

Interesting because it’s ternary rather than binary, but is still a Turing-Machine.

Is “makerness” old hat yet? This thing is… from the context of how I felt about this stuff a couple of years ago – amazing… A programmable Rube Goldberg machine that plays music. That is amazing – but it kindof feels like yesterday’s news already. Rube Goldberg Machines are so Ok-Go-Video, nerd-viraly.

You know what the big problem with “maker culture” is? It’s the same problem that geek-culture has always had. There’s no sex in it. The male-female ratio is about 20 to 1. Nerd-culture has been given a mega-boost, because the internet, and then the blogosphere was written by nerds… so stuff that nerds like floats to the top. Stuff that nerds are good at floats to the top. I mean the sub-title of Slashdot (goes off to check it) is “News for Nerds. Stuff that matters”.

It don’t matter to girls. If you want girls, you’ve got to do art. Or music. Music is even better because the social milleau is so much more engaging. Personally, I’ve found hanging around in bars to be a waste of time as far as that goes – although you do get to be quite drunk, which is fun for a while. Eventually, I’d hoped I’d meet someone at an AA meeting – but that was all blokes as well, so I only went the once. Nice people though. The sorts of people you’d like to have a beer with.

But anyway, don’t take advice from me. Just don’t spend your whole life watching television – now that really is a waste of time.

I’m going to Australia in Feb. That’ll be something to do.

To rekindle the innocent joy of simply doing stuff. Making something.

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3D printed house cockups from the future. Probably.

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Dude making plastic from gen-engineered plants. Algae’s the future though because you don’t need dirt. As someone in the comments said ” It seems the scientists have been taking about this sort of thing, and perhaps more importantly biodegradable plastics for quite a while but nothing ever comes of it” which you could also say about almost everything else.

View of earth from a UFO… or in this case, an FO. The person in the photie is in an Astronaut band

which is not (as far as I can gather) rocket science.

Google Voice, gets onto the iPhone (a doomed platform) and Androids can now be used as money. The smartphone revolution proceeds apace…

… but remember kiddiwinkies, that THE killer-app of the network, is the ability to bipass the legacy, scarcity economies – that will relentlessly try to turn the abundance of the web into restricted, “owned” territories. eg : 1, 2, 3 – and that’s just from today.

That is why apple doesn’t just suck, but why it’s evil and repugnant. Oh… and the Beatles are finally on iTunes – an event that took longer for the greed-heads to agree, than it took for Rock and Roll to evolve the beatles in the first place… and if (as it is) the copyright on recorded works is 50 years, all of the beatles stuff will become public domain in the next 3-10 years.

Only they’ll change the laws, because (as Dave from Blur once said) The Industry is attempting to rob society of its birthright… so as a special anniversary, I’m going to pirate the entire EMI catalogue and give it away to everyone I know. It’s owned by a fucking bank now anyway.

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I used to know this guy (Dave Newton) (Actually I still know him) who amazed (and confused) me back in about 1987, because he didn’t listen to any music made before 1980. I was gob-smacked, because in my opinion, ALL the best music was made before 1980.

I’m beginning to see his point though – the shock of the new. I’m only really interested in new stuff now. The past is over. The past is about a petabyte of digitised files – tied up in legalistic barbed-wire, and are basically locked out of the recombinant culture (and culture IS recombinant).

Well legally anyway – so we’ll just do it fucking illegally… but the present is so much more alive than the past.

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I seem to be going through a particularly negative phase of late.

Not sure why. Possibly because I’ve been working overtime for months now… and the vast bulk of anything I earn is spent before it even turns up… and it sure seems to turn up slow. All the projects that I’d rather be working on are being deferred in favour of never-ending bug-fixes, and the hard-ware infrastructure is falling apart at the seams.

Fucking treading water, and it’s not only November, its 1/2 way through November… so I owe a load of tax already that I can’t afford to pay. The first decade of the 21st Century has about a month and a half to go. Are we happy? Not really no… feeling entirely disenfranchised – and am… (as a consequence) looking for a fight.

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

(via Ponoko (and whoever thought that making a link called “latest” was a good idea is flat, custard-pie-in-the-face wrong))

Neat though innit. In a nutshell.

There is alas an alternative vision:

Whassat? I hear you say. Laptop with some bits?

Not entirely – that’s the future, where everything is 1/2 fucked.

The fan in my main laptop has broken and it will no longer boot… so… that picture is an old machine I had lying around, with the main machine’s hard-drive connected via USB and sitting in an antistatic bag, glowing eerily. If you look closer you’ll notice that the trackpad has gone… hence the mouse… and the power plug is actually hand-molded out of polymorph because the off-the-shelf ones are deliberately unreliable and proprietary so you have to keep buying new ones.

The warm pink tone comes from a 1000 watt arc-lamp bounced off the ceiling.

In addition to this, the sound doesn’t go and the camera-card slot doesn’t work, so there needs to be a third machine to read cards and to provide music (or just white-noise) via headphones… which are an absolutely necessity for drowning out other people. Without them you’d go insane.

On top of that… my main camera (canon t2i) is now a bit fucked – the screen at the back is cracked and the card-holder no longer clicks properly so it can only read certain cards… the music laptop has been fucked for about a month, but I managed to fix it by pulling the ram out and putting it back… and my main 1TB eSata backup drive has simply stopped without offering any clues as to why.

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So there it is. A future where everything is made out of the cheapest stuff possible, so is a bit shit and breaks after a month. A future where everything is so fucking complicated than nothing can be fixed… everything is cobbled together from the parts that still work.

Makes this highly admirable thing… The Cult of Less… a bit of a non-starter, because you need to have lots of backup stuff, or else you’re fucked. And I truly want to live with less… I’m a techno-gypsey. I live from one wifi-connection to the next… portability is a virtue… but vital infrastructure needs backup because… well it’s vital. My main machine won’t be repaired for at least 6 days… 6 days without a laptop is enough for me to go out of business… or at least seriously damage it. Canon will take over a month to repair my camera – so I need to get a backup before I send it off to them.

Everything’s falling apart and we can’t afford to fix it, so we need to hoard junk.

The ruin of the unsustainable… isn’t our new frontier, it’s… what we have left. Toxic waste is in the blood.

Further out though… see that blue hard-drive in a bag? Every time I get a new laptop, that’s what happens to the old machine. It winds up with its brain taken out… sitting next to the new machines, glowing eerily… kindof obsolete, but there might still be some useful information on it.

As I am now, so you shall be… when I finally go, my brain will wind up in a jar, glowing eerily, plugged into the next machine… kindof obsolete, but there might still be some useful information on it.

I keep buying stuff and being utterly gob-smacked at how cheap it is. See these headphones

$19. That’s $19 NZ dollars – which is about $14 USD – and if I know anything about retail, it’s that the markup is generally 100% – so they wholesale at $7… which means if you take away all the import stuff… Jesus, what are they making them in China for? I mean have you seen what actually goes into these things? The wires themselves are as complicated as fuck – 3 ply coated with some unscratchable coloured insulating stuff and covered with rubber etc.

People go on about the self-fabbing revolution, and maybe it is a revolution – but even factoring in slave-labour, and externalisation of clean-up costs, I’m not sure that it can quite compare to the revolution in making complicated stuff really cheap. It’s insane.

Still – Banksy’s take on the Simpsons above… and so below…

That’s a particularly insane example – but do a search for Chinese Factory on Youtube…

There are hundreds of things like this…

I keep going on about the web-end of “the human-machine symbiote”… but looking at Chinese factory work videos… it’s manual as well – people are part of the machine. Just parts – with humans gradually being replaced by metal and plastic and silicon. It’s like that old sci-fi thing where a person’s body parts are replaced with mechanical spares… until eventually there’s no human left. We’re doing the same thing at a societal level. Firstly assimilating people into the machine as parts, then systematically replacing them with more efficient mechanical parts.

It’s a crap machine. It’s prime focus is selling beads to the unsophisticated natives of London and Los Angeles and Auckland and Tokyo… in exchange for… debt… aka slavery, aka time… and the value of human-time grows less with every passing year. We owe everything, and there’s nothing we can give back that’s worth anything. Except land I suppose. More slavery.

We’ve got to break this.

I’m hitting something of a psychic impasse here – not sure if it’s down to being interested in making movies now – so spending time on that… or trying to do 7 freelance jobs at the same time… or… dunno. I’ve been doing this here blog for about 2 years (I think) now – started off making a couple of posts a day. Am now lucky if I make one a week.

The blog I was writing before this – I suddenly just went “Fait Accomplit” and stopped doing it.

Another thing is that I wrote my own RSS client which basically aggregates all of my feeds into a thing that looks like Opera’s rendition of RSS… but it pulls in videos and images as well… basically presents a (beautiful) magazine of stuff that I’m interested in. It sits on my local machine… I’m the only one that sees it. But… having done that, re-blogging stuff now seems a bit echo-machiney. Unless I’m adding or interpreting, I don’t really feel like there’s a lot of point – my initial breathless excitement having waned a little.

I think I’d like to see some big movements – or focus on tectonics, rather than the flotsam and jetsam that rides on the top. I’m also a little tired of “Inspirational Speaking” being the new rock and roll. I think someone (not me) should go through all the TED videos and compare the Standing-Ovation-Quotient with the And-Then-Fuck-All-Happened Quotient. Because I’m getting a fairly strong sense that there are a lot of standing ovations – for what should be world-changing shit… and nothing’s happening. I’m sick of this whole aspirational self-help-book vibe. Someone on twitter a couple of days back said “Money is a random coincidental by-product of doing what you love“. Oh yeah. People love that stuff. Pity it’s bullshit.

Another thing is that I’m losing interest in the Nerdosphere. The Geekosphere. There aren’t any women in it. There are one or two, but… nowhere near enough. Most of my main drinking-buddies have been women. I don’t share this nerdoid-stepford-wife take on women that a lot of the geekosphere seems to have. I miss the perception and social-cunning.

Maybe I’m just burnt-out. It’s been on the cards for a while.

So… where to from here?

Dunno. Regroup.

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It’s probably not interference – I mean your brain is shaped by what you do – weeding the garden for 50 years would give you certain sensitivities / habits etc… and I think the Catholic Church probably ought to admit that sexual abstinence probably isn’t a good idea. It probably isn’t interference, rather a part of how brains work… adapt etc.

These are physical changes – your brain’s software is hardware. Wetware. Neurons are physical things.

That Douglas Coupland wrote a book a while back called jPod – which was about programmer geeks etc – and it went on about Autism quite a lot… I can’t remember whether he thought that programming caused autism or autistic people are attracted to programming… but he was spot on. He reckoned this was why geeks generally don’t like being hugged – it’s just too much information – it’s like someone yelling in your ear with a loud-haler.

Personally, I’m finding salad problematic – and these days have to ask that it’s all separated out into its individual components – it’s just chaos other wise. It does my head in. I don’t even like looking at it.

I haven’t been able to read a book in years… I hardly ever get through a movie without checking my emails or various info-feeds. I have supernatural powers of focus – if it’s programming… and I have the attention-span of some sort of scatty cartoon field-mouse the rest of the time.

That Rands dude wrote this thing a while back called The Nerd Handbook – which is worth reading. It’s absolutely (again) spot on – especially the bit about “Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head.”

100%. There’s something about programming, or maybe the web in general that causes a kind of hyper-focus… particularly if you’re juggling a load of different feeds and tasks at the same time. The word “whatever” isn’t (for us) a teenage attitude problem, it’s like a reflexive protection amulet. It takes a microsecond to flick up and deflect stray incoming information.

Is it healthy? Probably not. The web is a ferociously left-brained type of machine. It’s very Yang. That’s why geeks are addicted to coffee. It’s Yang as well.

I think I need to be stricter with my computer-free days… every time I try it, I wait up until midnight… checking the time, checking the time, checking the time… until I can log in again and catch up. I’ve tried meditating. That was good – but it’s about as likely to happen as physical excercise, which I also don’t do.

Still… Pizza for tea. That’s something to look forward to. Dominos have started doing Garlic Prawn flavour. Marvelous.

So a couple of weeks ago, I got drunk and had a fracas with Umair Haque on twitter, in which I said:

All of your b-models are vague bollocks . Face it dude, you’re pretty much only good at criticsing the obvious.

and he replied

those aren’t my b-models. they’re everybody else’s. you just called about 100 smart people idiots. now crawl back into your hole.

Now Hemingway always used to say to me “always keep a promise sober, that you made drunk”. So I do.

A word about Umair.

I stumbled across his blog thing a couple of years back (at the height of the Bush insanity) and was so impressed that I sat down and read the whole thing from start to finish. I’ve never done that with a blog before or since. He had an amazingly prescient, articulate and refreshing take on what was going on.

Something you notice though is that… in the comments, people were (increasingly) asking “So what do we do about this? Tell us master, what must we do?” – and no answer was forthcoming.

So I think what Umair has done (see Bruce Sterling talk from a couple of days back). He’s taken the Richard Feynman 2.0 approach to problem solving – which is basically to crowd-source it.

And maybe this is the best approach… but what’s it come back with?

Looks to me like a series of manifestos with names like “Wisdom Manifesto“, “The Awesomeness Manifesto”

“Awesomeness”? What is this? Bill and Ted? Please.

The content of these manifestos looks to me like a touchy-feely feel-good fest for this emergent tribe of “Smart People”. Or Umair’s Army of Textarea Sycophants. Whatever. The content of these manifestos looks to me as much to do with what the audience want to hear, than what will actually wind up being used. Everything is memetics – but the memosphere for Umair’s “Solutions” is different from the memosphere where any solution will need to take hold.

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It’s not that easy.

Umair like my other greatest fan, Douglas Rushkoff has this truly inspiring talent at pointing out what’s wrong, but when it comes to creating solutions…? Meep.

All that comes back is a selection of anecdotes that people have tried which have sortof worked… but which aren’t (as you may have noticed) exactly spreading like Islam in the Desert.

Because I think… ideas can be smart (ie: well adapted) – but people? Some of the stupidest people I know are smart people.

There seems to be this repeating pattern of someone writing a book that becomes famous, based on a single “smart” idea – the author acquires the laurels of Smartdom, and then they have to write another book.

And it kindof sucks. A bit.

So you start to get an inkling that maybe this person isn’t quite as smart as was once supposed – and really the difference between the Rock-Stars of Smart, and the less exalted tiers of suffering humanity comes down to… luck.

Everything is memetics. Any “solution” to our problems won’t emerge from “smart people” figuring them out on behalf of the stupid, they’ll precipitate out on their own, as adaptations to changing conditions – and they’ll be as easy for an illiterate living in a bullet-holed breeze-block shell in Turano to figure out, as some Ivy League Professor, and his flock.

In fact my guess is that it will be the Turano-dwellers who figure it out first.

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Because I think Smart People are over-rated. You hear a lot about them: “Smart People”. It’s become the TEDoid-memosphere’s stamp of quality. Smart People are the Intel-Inside.

Check this out.

Those are smart people. I know who almost all of those people are. That whole thing fills me with a deep sense of foreboding – because although these people are all famous multi-millionaires/billionaires etc etc, I don’t have a lot of faith in Smart People. I have more faith in Local Knowledge.

Experience. The well-spring of human existence. You will learn more from getting drunk and going out on a crack-bender with a homeless Iraq-war veteran than you will by networking with smart people. I know this because I’ve done both, and I know enough to know that I know fuck-all – and in a lot of really important ways, I’m less smart than the homeless crack-addict vet.

Smart people thinking up smart solutions for the rest of us. You see that photo at the top? That’s a 12 year old kid who’s made a shelter for homeless people – because he’s never actually sat drunk on a shop-front in Parkway in Camden, and found out that if you’re begging there, some cunt with a Stanley knife comes by and collects “tax” from you.

Maybe the new boss will be better than the old boss. Maybe these Empires of Intelligence will see us all… able to… “live”. But I have my doubts, because (as Vinay Gupta points out) The Internet isn’t democracy, it’s meritocratic feudalism. Once again, the people who are making decisions, are sheltered from the consequences of what they decide. As Vinay (kindof) says: “you really need to live in a Hexayurt for a year” etc – and none of these smart people are living in hexayurts.

That’s part of the reason I like Bruce Sterling I think. He moved to The Favela – if that’s what Belgrade was back in the day – and he’s got a wonderful habit of not telling people what they want to hear. I love him for his lack of hope.

So um… give me local knowledge any day.

I don’t buy it. Not any more – back in the days of Bush, when the air was clogged solid with stupidity it seemed like a breath of fresh air… but now…

I don’t buy it. I think the title on the video below says it all “1000 remarkable people gather in Monteray, California” (breathless crescendo / roll of drums)

Really? That’s not only a party to which I’m not invited, it’s also a party where I would feel like a total cunt even attending… to think of myself as a “remarkable person”. Oooh. Aren’t I special. If only I can persuade other special people I’m special then we can all hang about have self-satisfied, special conversations.

Fuck that. I’d rather hang out with people with interesting angles on self-hatred than puffed up tossers being intelligent.

Still… I am/was quite interested in what people had to say – so once got as far as the entry form to attend one of these events – but then found that they only wanted “remarkable” people to attend… and you had to detail why you were so remarkable. All of a sudden I wanted nothing to do with it.

So anyway, enough about that. I thought this was quite interesting

apart from the fact that it’s

a) TED – which to me seems like some sort of uber-touchy-feely-smug-fest where remarkable people can give standing ovations to other remarkable people and…

b) … they all go home, and a year later, fuck all has happened.

c) It’s Microsoft, and nobody cares about Microsoft

d) Because there seems to be this new genre of Science Fiction – now that bringing your product to market before the bugs are fixed is no longer competitive… it’s “Product Concept” which may or may not be a mockup, may or may not work… whatever… it doesn’t really matter, because the only thing that DOES matter, is the flash of INSPIRATIONAL attention in the eternal here and now. 2 weeks later everyone will have moved on to something else.

e) Still, thanks for the embed – I couldn’t find it on youtube etc.

f) and he seems like a nice bloke. I mean most people are etc..

No – I found this interesting because if you tried to do this in a shopping mall anywhere in the UK, the privately-owned police would immediately arrest you. They’re allowed to do that now. They can issue on the spot fines apparently.

It would be interesting though – all those millions of CCTV cameras… I mean a lot of them are paid for with our taxes… why should we have access to the feeds? It’s not like CCTV cameras actually reduce crime anyway – they’re a total waste of time and money, although I suppose they do give the police something to do. Keep them out of trouble etc. Keep them off the streets.

You could actually fly around in the system like the Australian CCTV Doom stitchup from a couple of weeks back. We could all be ghosts in the machine – swimming through Victoria Railway Station like lost sperm, all disconnected, alone, and… impotent. Omnipresent Impotence. God in is own image. Isn’t that what you wanted? To be? Not to be?

I’m also interested in this from the point of view of the increasingly immersive quality of entertainment… and this vacillation between reality and fantasy – in not just entertainment, but also war. And sex.

For some reason it makes me think of sleep-paralysis… floating around in this environment that is indistinguishable from reality but you can never get past the surface. And the slightly disturbing notion that reality itself is just a surface.

Look up from the screen now.

What you see out there is an insane blizzard of electrons and quarks… photons, photons, photons… forces and waves – and almost all of which is empty space, but your brain takes the sensory input, filters it and gives you a model that allows you to negotiate it.

But really, you’re seeing the model. You’re sitting there in a room inside your own head.

I’ve been noticing a number of Web 2.0 equivalents of late… or Web 3.0 maybe… the long (is it long yet?) anticipated “Internet of Things”, for which I’m seeing a lot of gushing enthusiasm but precious little in the way of a Killer App. Well, not for we jaded, prozac-stuffing westerners anyway.

So.

Exhibit 1) www.moq7.com

Someone’s invented a better clothes-peg generating a buzz of enthusiasm from those who monitor such things, as to how this thing would be tooled?

What interested me though was the site it came from… www.moq7.com, professing to be a discount pre-seller of next-generation products… the idea being that you submit a bit of money into escrow, and if a threshold is past where it’s actually worth making the thing, they will.

Which is a great idea – a friend of mine has been proposing this as a music-industry model for years. I think it’s a goer… only it ain’t going.

Not sure how long this site has been up – since 2008 presumably… I can remember there being a bit of a buzz over it a while back over the launch of a money-clip made out of money… and while I’m all in favour of art for art’s sake, lets have an Emperor’s New Clothes moment here shall we? Selling magnets taped to bank notes? Come on. That’s taking the piss. Honestly, what problem is being solved here? What value is being created?

Maybe I should put some of my stuff up on it.. see what happens… but to be fair, although I’ve been playing with Ponoko for quite a while now, apart with the possible exception of Golden Mean Calipers, I haven’t made anything that I’d actually call useful.

So maybe that’s the answer to the recent query (from someone I can no longer find), “What’s the biggest barrier to mass customisation?”. It’s simply that we can’t think of anything to make. We solved most of our manufacturing problems ages ago… and yea, being able to design then print a working whistle (albeit one that looks like it’s been chiseled out of wax) might be an impressive proof-of-concept, we (as a species) solved the whistle problem a long, long time ago… this is also “evidence of concept” that we’re not exactly setting the world on fire here with Stuff That People Actually Need.

Exhibit 2) www.cloudfab.com

Which looks like comparison shopping for digital-fabbing plants… which I think may be in the same arena as what Ponoko are aiming to do – by making their software available to anyone with a laser-cutting shop. Outsourcing manufacture to the cloud as it were. Makes sense – if you’re dealing with physical stuff, then simply “knowing what’s available, and where to get it” seems to be 9/10ths of the law. It makes double sense if like the Makerbot lot, you’re getting your customers to make Makerbot parts for you.

There’s quite a nice roundup of the various technologies available here, though not a lot on location/who’s going to do the work etc.

Exhibit 3) www.shopster.com/… which looks like a site where you can sell other people’s products… or have yours sold by other people. I might have a go at this one actually because I find it a lot easier to make things than to sell them… the only catch-ette being, I’m a software guy which means I’m location-agnostic. If I start making physical things then I’m tied to a specific address. Unless I get someone else to do it of course. That would be ok. Make themselves useful etc.

So anyway… this could be a goer as well, but the “featured” sellers department leaves me feeling a certain un-put-my-finger-on-able unease. It reminds me of the electrical-gear shops in Tottenham Court Road in London where everything seems to be for sale and although all the shops are different, they have this distinct vibe of being run by a massive cartel of excited and shifty Indian pirates. One of the “featured shops” (for example) has a sideline in Gadget Models. Another one sells spy-gear.

Which kindof clashes with the Web 2.0 at-the-front vibe, but there you go.

Exhibit 4) Open Structures

This looks quite cool actually – or has potential at least. It looks like an attempt to create a cross between Lego and Ikea… standardised parts and connectors that people can use to build whatever they like, so long as it’s made entirely out of right-angles. The site has only been up for a month or so, and the first post in their blog is still in Latin (bless)… and I think it should stay that way. It’s like a “hello world” moment, and a backhanded testament to Cicero who originally wrote the thing… “lorem ipsum” being a musing on ethics… all very heavy and meaningful etc… now famous for precisely the opposite reason – it’s meaningless.

Anyway, Open Structures has a bit where you can upload your own components and share them etc… a small handful there already, most of them not for sale, but there you go.

I think this might be a way forward – out of the situation we have at the moment where there’s mass-customisation potential, but people aren’t really using it that much. Building blocks are good. If everything was made out of building blocks we wouldn’t have landfill sites filled with old “consumer-durables”… or “consumer-utterly-undefuckingstructables” as they will come to be known, 500,000 years from now when they still haven’t biodegraded.

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So anyway… random thoughts, apropos of very little again… but circling around feelings of doubt about the “crowd-sourced-manufacturing-revolution” that is all the rage at the moment… because the BIG problem with it, is that we (jaded, prozac-stuffing westerners) have kindof satisfied our “product-acquiring” needs.

So the anticipated shift from “buying stuff” to “spending even more $$$ than it would to buy stuff, making it ourselves” isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. Really, home-fabbing is another way of acquiring stuff… and the acquisition of stuff, although it may be our raison d’être as prescribed by mainstream (ie: marketing) culture, ain’t really doing it for us is it.