Shifts and Devices

I have run across several thinkers lately that draw the Open Source rabbit out of the black hat of current affairs, offering free/libre software culture as a model for future political and social organization. A couple of examples:

The Upside of Down – Thomas Homer-Dixon

Thomas Homer-Dixon delivers a well-crafted presentation covering creative responses to environmental crisis and energy descent. He focuses on collective action under the impetus of “catagenisis” – catastrophically induced creative system change. There is a very interesting comment on Open Source Democracy in the questions at the end, a theme that is expanded in his book.

Presentation Link: http://wacsf.vportal.net/?fileid=4658
Book: The Upside of Down: http://www.theupsideofdown.com/

Software and Community in the Early 21st Century – Eben Moglen

Another great online presentation viewing the world in broad terms – and directly from an open source perspective – delivered at Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle, by Eben Moglen.

It is a brilliant and idosyncratic synthesis, positing the free software movement as the fundamental transformative technology of the new millennium. Eben draws on an eclectic mix of history, socialism, free-market and post-market economics. His thesis is flawed only by the minor inconvenience that software is not the fabric of reality–unless you are attending a Plone conference.

His view is that in the 21st century production happens not in factories, but in collaborative communities, and that this fundamental shift in the control of the means of production changes everything. Eben goes further to hypothesize that the forces that have confronted each other over social justice for generations are now more evenly matched than ever before, based on the efficiencies of open source community-based technologies, and the emergence of information and education replicated freely, without proprietary ownership.

Presentation Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NorfgQlEJv8
Review: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives//005626.html

The Design Imperative – Jeff Vale
And an excerpt from Jeff Vail’s recent essay:

If we choose to pursue technics as a means of maintaining or improving our quality of life, how should we organize this pursuit? I have three suggestions: decentralized, open source, and vernacular.

Let’s start by taking discrete examples of places that produce a quality of life seemingly disproportionate to their energy consumption. There are countless examples, but because it has a long tradition in this area in American popular culture, I’ll choose the Tuscan village.

…

How is the Tuscan village open source? Tuscan culture historically taps into a shared community pool of technics in recognition that a sustainable society is a non-zero-sum game. Most farming communities are this way – advice, knowledge, and innovation is shared, not guarded. Beyond a certain threshold of size and centralization, the motivation to protect and exploit intellectual property seems to take over (another argument for decentralization. There is no reason why we cannot share innovation in technics globally, while acting locally: in fact, the internet now truly makes this possible, leveraging our opportunity to use technics to improve quality of life.

URL: http://www.jeffvail.net/2007/04/design-imperative.html

An overview of the state of the electrical grid, with a look ahead to the construction of a future digital-quality grid. Here is an excerpt:

Consider the wastage inherent to the electrical system bringing the image of this report to your computer screen. Roughly two-thirds of the energy produced to power your computer was lost as waste heat in the centralized generation of electricity; it was simply vented into the atmosphere. Of the remaining third, line losses during transmission and distribution misplaced another roughly seven percent bringing the electricity to your wall outlet. And finally, half of that energy was lost as waste heat converting the 110-volt alternating current to the 12-volt direct current your computer (and countless other digital devices) needs in order to operate free of the even minor power fluctuations that can adversely affect digital circuitry. So in this example for every 100 watts of electricity generated, only about 16 actually get used. Imagine the waste attendant to the server farms of the five largest search engines in the US, which combined are estimated to continuously operate more than 2 million servers.

That is not to say the Digital Age will entail a shift from alternating current to direct current. Rather, the shift will be from an inefficient, slow, outdated mechanical switching to a focused, faster, more intelligent system employing electronic devices to improve monitoring capabilities and load capacities while smoothing fluctuations and increasing the reliability of the existing alternating current.

Read the whole story, written largely from an investor’s viewpoint, at http://www.safehaven.com/article-7298.htm
This makes a cheery counterpoint to Odulvai Gorge Theory, the “Electrical Engineering as a Dismal Science” approach that focuses instead on the difficulties of maintaining a complex and chaotic grid into the future:

The theory is defined by the ratio of world energy production (use) and world population… It states that the life expectancy of Industrial Civilization is less than or equal to 100 years: 1930-2030.

World energy production per capita from 1945 to 1973 grew at a breakneck speed of 3.45 %/year. Next from 1973 to the all-time peak in 1979, it slowed to a sluggish 0.64 %/year. Then suddenly – and for the first time in history – energy production per capita took a long-term decline of 0.33 %/year from 1979 to 1999. The Olduvai theory explains the 1979 peak and the subsequent decline. More to the point, it says that energy production per capita will fall to its 1930 value by 2030, thus giving Industrial Civilization a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years.

Should this occur, any number of factors could be cited as the causes of collapse. I believe, however, that the collapse will be strongly correlated with an ‘epidemic’ of permanent blackouts of high-voltage electric power networks worldwide…

From the aptly named Dieoff.org web site at http://dieoff.org/page224.htm. See Wikipedia for an overview and additional links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olduvai_theory