things that stick

From Bre Pettis: "In December of 2008, a group of hackers was sitting on the floor with faces aglow with laptop light cruising the internet and skyping friends in and listening to death metal. It was 12 days before 25c3. Astera and I had a conversation that went something like this:

B: There should be a book.

A: Yes, there should.

B: We have 12 days.

A: We can do it.

The twelve days we had was until CCC started. We figured we would have it done by then. We contacted all the hackers we knew around the world and put the word out. We expected to get about a half a page of writing from each space. We reckoned that it would be a 25 page pamphlet. We also reckoned that it be easy for folks to write up a little summary within a few days of what it was like to get their hackerspace started and get back to us.

Within a week we had been scorched by a flame war, gotten a lot of both written and photographic material submitted and it seemed likely that the book would happen. Then the submissions kept coming… and coming. The hackerspaces around the world told each other about the project and many groups sent some writing in describing the beginning of their hackerspace. Word had even gotten round to groups that didn’t have a space yet and they were sending us descriptions of their pre-beginnings too!

The 12 days came and went and still the submissions kept coming. After a few months submissions had trailed off and Astera came to NYC and began designing the book. She’s a pro and it shows. This book looks beautiful because she took the material and somehow made it fit together aesthetically, not a trivial task. Jens Ohlig jumped into the process last year to help push the editing process forward. Remember, in our minds it was going to be a project that would take less than two weeks and it turned into something epic. It’s been a long wait and I hope you’ll think that it’s worth it.

This book documents where the hackerspace movement was in December of 2008. In that way it’s a bit of a time capsule. It’s not an exhaustive book, but we hope there are enough stories in here to show that all your excuses for not starting up a hackerspace are invalid. Each group faced down their own dragons to bring their hackerspace into existence including floods, rats, and drama. If they can do it, so can you.

We did this because we wanted it to exist and so it is a reward in itself. If you feel moved and want to support hackerspaces, we suggest contributing to the Wau Holland fund which helps make awesome things happen for hackerspaces. We would also like to thank everyone who submitted photographs and writing, this is your book.

After these years, the book is finally free in the world as a pdf. Download it, read it, and share it. We’re open to the idea of making it into a real physical book and if you’re interested in making that happen, let us know.

Build, Unite, Multiply!

All the indications are that adaptive responses have failed in terms of both size and speed to restrain the steady rise in oil prices seen after 2003. The only break in the steady oil price increase occurred as a result of the 2008 economic crisis and the subsequent ‘Great Recession’.

Graph 3 Shows the development of oil prices and illustrates the $10/year trend (red line)

The conclusion appears to be that:

Unless and until adaptive responses are large and fast enough to constrain the upward trend of oil prices, the primary adaptive response will be periodic economic crashes of a magnitude that depresses oil consumption and oil prices. These have the effect of shifting consumption from incumbent consumers—the advanced economies—to the new consumers in the developing economies.

This is exactly what happened in the last recession when between the start of the recession in January 2007 and its effective end in 1Q 2011 demand rose by 4.3 million b/d in the non-OECD area and fell by 4 million b/d in the OECD area.

The end of a detailed article about Peak Oil by an industry analyst.

A woman was hogtied and disemboweled, her intestines protruding from three deep cuts on her abdomen. Attackers left her topless, dangling by her feet and hands from a bridge in the border city of Nuevo Laredo. A bloodied man next to her was hanging by his hands, his right shoulder severed so deeply the bone was visible.

Signs left near the bodies declared the pair, both apparently in their early 20s, were killed for posting denouncements of drug cartel activities on a social network.

"This is going to happen to all of those posting funny things on the Internet," one sign said. "You better (expletive) pay attention. I'm about to get you."

"The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by the respected if controversial author, Joe McGinniss, claims Palin was seen snorting cocaine off the top of a 55-gallon drum while snowmobiling with friends. It also alleges she smoked marijuana with a professor while at Mat-Su College in Alaska.

The book, scheduled for release in the US next week, quotes a Palin family friend as alleging that Palin's husband, Todd, also used cocaine and that he was "on the end of the straw plenty"."

I know a handful of super-hackers, so I sat down and thought about what they have in common. Their defining quality is probably that they really love to program. Ordinary programmers write code to pay the bills. Great hackers think of it as something they do for fun, and which they're delighted to find people will pay them for.

Great programmers are sometimes said to be indifferent to money. This isn't quite true. It is true that all they really care about is doing interesting work. But if you make enough money, you get to work on whatever you want, and for that reason hackers are attracted by the idea of making really large amounts of money. But as long as they still have to show up for work every day, they care more about what they do there than how much they get paid for it.

Economically, this is a fact of the greatest importance, because it means you don't have to pay great hackers anything like what they're worth. A great programmer might be ten or a hundred times as productive as an ordinary one, but he'll consider himself lucky to get paid three times as much. As I'll explain later, this is partly because great hackers don't know how good they are. But it's also because money is not the main thing they want.

What do hackers want? Like all craftsmen, hackers like good tools. In fact, that's an understatement. Good hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. They'll simply refuse to work on projects with the wrong infrastructure.

When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work-- that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge.

Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I've known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.

What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.

When Fisher and Smedley set up their original Think Tank in 1955 they were practically alone. Now politics in Britain is dominated by Think Tanks, and almost all of them are copies of what Fisher and Smedley first invented. They are ideologically motivated PR organisations masquerading as the sort of scholarly institute that Hayek first suggested to Antony Fisher

And what's more, most of these Think Tanks, whether on the left or right are peddling Hayek's ideology in some form another - a managed and technocratic version of the free market as the central dynamic of society.

They have different versions of this - and they vary in how the government should use its power to bring this about, and how far it should extend into society - but at bottom they are all pushing the same fundamental idea. There is no alternative vision on offer. And this points to a very strange fact. That while all the think tanks constantly promote new concepts of how to micro-manage today's free-market technocracy, none of them have come up with a genuinely new grand idea for a very long time.

And the question is whether most Think Tanks may actually be preventing people thinking of new visions of how society could be organised - and made fairer and freer. That in reality they have become the armoured shell that surrounds all politics, constantly setting the agenda through their PR operations which they then feed to the press, and that  prevents genuinely new ideas breaking through.

 

Meanwhile the managed free-market system that Antony Fisher, Major Oliver Smedley, and Professor Hayek dreamed of has triumphed. And just as Smedley wanted, back in 1966, the elite doesn't change and isn't threatened by the real pirates and privateers. The system has maintained the protected position of the ruling elite in this country.

The real victor at the end of the second world war had been the ideology of science. A new, powerful group of technocrats had risen up in America, Britain and the Soviet Union who had used scientific ideas to plan and organise the war effort. They now believed they could apply the same methods in peacetime - to transform their societies.

State planning was technocratic and was thus seen as the way forward. Old conservative ideas of free trade were seen as traditional and non-scientific, and thus bad.

 

Hayek's solution was to turn this round. He made the idea of the free market technocratic as well. He transformed it from being a fusty old set of prejudices and traditions into a scientifically based free-market system for the modern age.

He did this by turning Adam Smith's idea of the Invisible Hand into a cybernetic system of information exchange. He said that all the knowledge of a society is dispersed among millions of people. But each person only knows just a few fragments of the whole, and no one person can know or comprehend all that knowledge. Instead those millions of people are constantly sending "abstract signals" to each other, and out of that comes the "pricing system". And out of that comes order without central control.

He even gave the whole theory a new science-like name. He called it Catallaxy.

Here are some sections of Hayek being interviewed in 1977 - they give a good sense of his technocratic and almost robotic vision of society - what he calls "a self-directing automatic signalling system".

But Hayek didn't see himself as a robot but as a revolutionary - he believed that power must be seized in order to create what he calls a "stabilisation crisis" in Britain in order to bring about his new world.

The key to making this system work, Hayek said, was allowing information to flow freely around society. Governments tried to do the opposite - to control the flow of information so they could manage the signals.