How to Redesign our Communities for the Internet Age

(IEET intern Edward Miller is guest blogging at Sentient Developments this month.) There is a long list of crises that we need to face and I won’t waste time boring you by listing them. As our brightest minds admit they were wrong, I hope that I can say, without qualification, that big changes in our thinking are required. Unfortunately, we haven’t made that “Change” even though we now have some new faces in power, and a bunch of old faces out of business or in prison.

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Posted by Forrest Higgs  on  07/04  at  12:01 AM

I've been working on the Reprap project for over three years now.

While you notice that...

"We are too busy answering phones, producing ad campaigns, and writing paperwork."

I wonder whether you have actually been working on anything substantive to bring around the changes you think are proper or have you restricted yourself to just "writing paperwork" at the situation?

Posted by EmbraceUnity  on  07/04  at  02:31 PM

Hello Forrest,

Thanks so much for your work on RepRap. I'm a secret admirer of yours... actually not so secret since we've spoken on IRC.

I actually am working on building a RepRap which I will be donating to Factor e Farm. If only my surface mounting equipment which I ordered from MakerBot would show up.

http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/?p=652

Of course, even if I were a complete hypocrite, all of my arguments must stand on their own merit.

Don't worry though, until such time as I am able to start or join a resilient community, I will be doing things much more hypocritical than writing paperwork.

For example, writing software for the very people whom I claim are destroying the world by patenting genetic code.

Of course I do very strongly believe in this cause, and recognize my own personal responsibility in helping create change. Anthony Giddens's idea of the Duality of Structure is what really brought that home for me in a systems theoretic perspective.

I am now a vegan and spend nearly all of my free time working towards, donating to, writing about, and promoting this cause. Hopefully RepRap and projects like it afford me the opportunity to donating an increasing share of my time to these activities, as opposed to work.

Half of all jobs currently are either harmful or irrelevant, and half of the rest can already be done better by robots. Unfortunately, we are too stupid on a societal level to organize accordingly and thus require self-replicating projects like RepRap before we can reach a post-scarcity future.

Posted by Frank  on  07/08  at  12:10 AM

See another IEEE post for an interesting counterpoint to this article:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/mijic20090707/

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