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jon

Hi everyone. My name is Jon and I am doing research for my dissertation, DIY Infrastructure, in Digital Media at Georgia Tech. Put broadly, I am investigating individuals and small groups who are creating new infrastructural systems or modifying existing ones. I have a set of questions which I have attempted to ask Marcin and others, but I haven't been able to get any responses. I thought it might be a good idea to reproduce them here and see if anyone has any thoughts. Thanks.

Edwards defines infrastructure negatively, as that without which modern societies could not function. Do you agree with this definition? How would you define infrastructure?

To what degree is your work a critique of modern life being contingent on infrastructure?

To what degree is your project about exposing the workings of current infrastructure?

Does the design of infrastructure require a different sort of thinking about time constraints and the time allotted for implementation than more conventional design projects?

Is the system that you are developing resilient or vulnerable to disruption in ways that other infrastructures are not? Why or why not?

To what degree does your work involve regulations and their enforcement? For example, are the machines in the GVCS designed to be compliant with any governmental regulations? Your work may be seen as a challenge to existing regulatory frameworks or it may rely on existing regulations. Is the relationship one of antagonism, cooperation, or avoidance?

How does the design of the components of the GVCS differ from the design of other products, services or systems?

Do you think your project could “scale up” and function as a suitable replacement for large scale infrastructure? Or, do you view it as establishing a complimentary or alternative infrastructure? In the case of the former, what sort of things–both technical and social–would have to happen? Are we witnessing the birth of new infrastructural systems or are we just seeing more robust variance in local adaptation?

In what ways does your work challenge existing conceptions of the scale of infrastructure?

Do you think that existing infrastructure is valorized, or viewed less critically than it should be because people are so dependent upon it? Can you offer any examples from your own work or the work of others to support your answer?

To what degree is your work contingent upon existing infrastructure? For example, your work seems to rely on information sharing through the internet, which is reliant on the existing electrical grid. What is the relationship between your work and existing infrastructure?

The GVCS includes machines designed by others such as the RepRap. To what degree is GVCS development a collaborative process? How is that collaboration mediated and what is your role and the role of others?

How did you decide that there would be 50 components of the GVCS, and how did you determine the components? What sort of research went into this process? For example, were there any components which were omitted from an earlier iteration or included in a later one?

The writing here: http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Evolve_to_freedom seems to portray existing infrastructure as coercive or exploitive. This echoes what the philosopher Ivan Illich called a radical monopoly, a situation in which the ubiquity of a tool or service is so great that its use becomes compulsory, thus creating social control through design.⁠ For example, the automobile possess a radical monopoly in many cities like Los Angeles or Atlanta. How do you insure that your own designs, if fully implemented, would not be coercive? To what degree is infrastructure inherently coercive and to what extent is it liberating?

AlanAvans

While I can't drill down to specifics at the moment in answer to the question of some coercive basis for design of infrastructure, I do think there is place for the a discussion of design and justice. My perspective on what is just is based upon a metaphysics that requires defense of a commons. My definition of this commons is roughly something along the lines of "that which may be properly regarded to be the shared inheritance of all humanity." Land for example, but there are other elements of humanity's cultural inheritance.

Ill-designed systems tend to have unjust results. For this reason we may justly use what our more 'liberatarian' and 'anarchist' brothers and sisters might call coercive means of redress, including the use of the courts. Being small 'r' republican in perspective I have no problem unleashing a sheriff and his deputies and the entire judicial system on Monsanto for example for the purpose of defending our farmers and communities from corporate enclosures. Be that as it may I think we can all be supportive of the concept of counter-hegemonic means of sticking it to THE MAN. Any design that would tend to alienate people from the Commons through all manner of enclosure might be regarded as being unjust in much the same way as a system of slavery involving ones own self-sale into chattel slavery via 'voluntary' bi-lateral contract with ones would-be Lord and Master might be regarded as unjust precisely because it is alienating.

Design, whether undertaken by a 'radical monopoly' or by counter-hegemonic insurgent efforts like GVCS do present people with choices to make about what path they will ultimately follow. red pill? blue pill?

Matt_Maier

...I have attempted to ask Marcin and others, but I haven't been able to get any responses.

> Yeah, that's not surprising. Maybe you could contact the people who added their email addresses to the community needs assessment http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Community_Needs_Assessment_Volunteers

Edwards defines infrastructure negatively, as that without which modern societies could not function. Do you agree with this definition? How would you define infrastructure?

> Sounds good. Although it's got a big hole where "modern" goes. I'd probably add something about the political/cultural structure necessary to pool resources and organization. It's not infrastructure if there's a lot of duplication.

To what degree is your work a critique of modern life being contingent on infrastructure?

> Well, my work is a critique on the infrastructure itself. There's nothing wrong with depending on it. The problem is that it doesn't work as well as it could/should.

To what degree is your project about exposing the workings of current infrastructure?

> Not much. The workings aren't a secret, they're just really boring. Anyone who wants to see how a nuclear power plant works can walk right in. All they'll see are a bunch of transformers and pumps. There is a song about tractors being sexy, but I'm like 90% sure it's a euphemism. In fact, you could probably define infrastructure that way. It's infrastructure if it is, at the same time, vitally necessary to survival and excruciatingly boring.

Does the design of infrastructure require a different sort of thinking about time constraints and the time allotted for implementation than more conventional design projects?

> Absolutely. No matter how good the next generation of infrastructure is, change is so expensive it has to be measured in decades. Unless there's a war or something, then you can cut it down to less than a decade in some cases.

Is the system that you are developing resilient or vulnerable to disruption in ways that other infrastructures are not? Why or why not?

> That's exactly the right focus. Open source, as a technology design philosophy, is superior to closed source because it is both quicker to innovate and inherently distributed. Both are necessary for a system to have any hope of resiliency.

Matt_Maier

To what degree does your work involve regulations and their enforcement? For example, are the machines in the GVCS designed to be compliant with any governmental regulations? Your work may be seen as a challenge to existing regulatory frameworks or it may rely on existing regulations. Is the relationship one of antagonism, cooperation, or avoidance?

> We're big on ethics. That being said, no one knows. It's as simple as that. I've put out some feelers and have yet to find anyone who has any idea what the legal landscape looks like now, let alone what it might look like in the near future.

How does the design of the components of the GVCS differ from the design of other products, services or systems?

> The GVCS is (will be) unique in that it will basically re-derive agricultural and industrial infrastructure from scratch. This will allow us to avoid all the mistakes and proprietary solutions of the past. By doing all of it, all at the same time, we can do things that are incredibly valuable but would never have any purpose when done independently. A word you'll see over and over again in the GVCS is "universal." A good example is the Universal Rotor. When people independently (time and space) develop machines they maximize the performance of that one individual machine, which means they produce thousands of different rotors. By creating a "kit" of parts we can maximize the performance of the infrastructure system as a whole because all the different machines are designed to work together. The performance lost at each individual machine, when compared to a custom machine, will more than be made up for by the performance gained at the system level. A gain in performance that will benefit all, but cannot be manifested by the Invisible Hand of the market. The performance improvement can only be realized when profit is not a primary consideration. The benefit of the GVCS will be that it reduces the need for money, rather than that it makes money. A fundamental departure from the existing paradigm. It's not about the components, it's about the philosophy and the holistic system.

Do you think your project could “scale up” and function as a suitable replacement for large scale infrastructure?

> I dunno. Personally I doubt it. If you consider a mesh of small, interlocking infrastructures that renders single-point-of-failure, monolithic infrastructures obsolete then maybe.

In what ways does your work challenge existing conceptions of the scale of infrastructure?

> I'd like to see just how small infrastructure can get. With the proliferation of knowledge and cooperation the internet allows I suspect we can make things much more local than they are now.

Do you think that existing infrastructure is valorized, or viewed less critically than it should be because people are so dependent upon it?

> I think our infrastructure has simply grown too large for us to grasp intuitively. The people who study it professionally have been sounding the alarm for decades. The non-professionals who bother to research the issue are quickly overwhelmed by the scale of it. They either give up or find they can't clearly communicate it to the average person. Like i said before, it's boring. I think people just assume someone is taking care of it.

To what degree is your work contingent upon existing infrastructure? For example, your work seems to rely on information sharing through the internet, which is reliant on the existing electrical grid. What is the relationship between your work and existing infrastructure?

> Standing on the shoulders of giants. What we do is entirely dependent on existing infrastructure. Joe Justice of Team Wikispeed has a good soundbite in one of his videos where he points out that the FREE tools his team used to collaborate globally weren't available even five years ago. What we're doing was outright impossible a decade ago. I'd say our work is less about replacing or reinventing existing infrastructure and more about consolidating and open sourcing it. Most of the stuff we depend on is so old it's been out of any and all patent protection for decades. It now belongs to the human race as a whole and we're trying to do our part to make the knowledge accessible and useful.

The GVCS includes machines designed by others such as the RepRap. To what degree is GVCS development a collaborative process? How is that collaboration mediated and what is your role and the role of others?

> I've been, or am, a part of RepRap, Makerbot, Amahi, OSE and Wikispeed. One thing I've learned about open source projects is that they are a grab-bag of organizational styles. The only consistent thing I've seen so far is that open source is all about personal relationships/communication. It sort of inherently resists any other form of collaboration. If anything, RepRap is the odd-man-out because it's NOT an organization. All the others have a person or legal entity at their core. As for the GVCS specifically, how it is "mediated" is still a point of debate. Marcin is in charge and his thoughts on the subject continue to evolve. What progress I've been a part of (it's a big project) has been all one-on-one communication.

How did you decide that there would be 50 components of the GVCS, and how did you determine the components?

> Marcin would be the final authority on answering that. My understanding is that it's an arbitrary list that was "good enough" and continues to evolve. For example, here is some discussion about possible changes http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/GVCS_Changes and here is a recent blog post discussing possible changes http://blog.opensourceecology.org/2012/03/spring-2012/

How do you insure that your own designs, if fully implemented, would not be coercive?

> That's taken care of by the open source part. The GVCS will provide alternatives; it will not completely replace for-profit infrastructure. It can't and it shouldn't. People who manage infrastructure (server farms for example) buy into open source technology because it is free as in speech (not beer). You can do whatever you want with it. You're not beholden to any one supplier. A core competency of open source technology is that it's not JUST a solution, it's also an education. How it works is right there for anyone to see. If they start to question why, or how, or when, or anything like that, they can get the answer and then do whatever they want with it. Thus, if an open source tool becomes so ubiquitous it's coercive, well, someone will just modify it so that it's no longer coercive.

jon

Thanks so much for taking the time to create these thoughtful responses. Whats really interesting is how different projects and practicioners intersect and diverge. So far I've completed or arranged interviews with projects as diverse as Village Telco, Cloacina, Feral Trade, and Fluid Nexus. I hope that one thing that comes out of all of this is a sort of independent survey of DIY Infrastructure projects that practicioners can refer to. More later, and thanks again.

Matt_Maier

I'm looking forward to the results of your research/analysis. If I might be so bold as to critique it before it's written, I suggest clearly separating the engineering from the ideology. I've noticed that people are likely to confuse the two topics. A tool is just a tool; it is not inherently a part of any particular motivation or goal. Why people work on this stuff should be considered apart from what they're working on.

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