[p2p-research] [Open Manufacturing] Re: Fwd: A joint statement on P2P and post-scarcity thinking

[Nathan Cravens]

Thank you Paul Fernhout for your deeply sourced responses. Let's hope
someone reads them! If I knew you to be unavailable for some reason, I would
have desperately made my best attempts to dig into your research and mimic
your approach.
I appreciate you as a contributor, as this ensures room for others to be
more creative, as I'd like to believe I am attempting at the very worst.

On Sun, Sep 13, 2009 at 7:54 AM, Herbert Snorrason <methanal at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> Nathan Cravens wrote:
> > exchanges fascism for tyranny
>
> So, you're a tyrant, but Franz wants to be a fascist?
>

I can be stubborn, but to call me a tyrant far exceeds my creditability
here, though I will oblige Marcin Jakubowski of the title, so he might wear
that signifier more proudly. I'm really much too playful to be a tyrant; as
that gets old after a while. You may want to be a tyrant too, but that may
turn difficult these days without being laughed at; if not now; that will
soon be the case. . . Don't mind if I fall into your rhetorical fallacy once
more?


>
> Assertions without backing have no value.


The web has all the backing you need. Try it sometime.
That likens to saying I can say 'whatever' because the evidence is in the
library.
Or like saying the sun will rise because it has risen before.

Maybe I just find rhetoric boring? Do you like how I continue to prove your
point? Interesting isn't it? This must mean I like you, Herbie.


> You are at least as guilty of
> that as the authors of the statement.


Just to make it exceedingly perfect and clear, the argument I am addressing
is 'that post-scarcity should be removed from the Global Village and P2P
Foundation list of things to do' is a bad idea and will only ensure
'struggle' within the existing "who pays" system as Rodney Brooks calls it;
a system that is ending.

I have located roughly enough of all the parts necessary to integrate and
surface a fully automated general manufacturing whole; discovered with only
a few days of search on the web. You could have easily accomplished this. To
create the machine may well not exceed the cost of a fab lab in its first
articulation, about the price of a luxury sedan, after R&D and patent
negotiations. That is a rough estimate at present and is subject to change
once the details are better pinned. This means the parts to create this
fully automated manufacturing device exists today; only; they are yet
properly integrated into a whole, similar with the issue of software
comprehension between other software as Rose-Hartzog will address with
FLOWS.

I am seeing from my tiny netbook screen that we're very close to overcoming
boundaries almost as soon as we see a need to address them. I will have my
peers confirm the list of materials I've compiled are adequate enough to
produce this device before I present the parts requirements to the open
manufacturing and p2presearch lists at least.

For now, I will direct your receptacles to this one video; which is very
telling of the advances in robotics generally as it displays a hand that can
do what a human can do, but better, with touch sensing that can grasp
objects safely and more quickly. The visual system is also rather amazing to
see operating with the hand; as it can do amazing tricks; like throw a
cellphone from its own hand up into the air and catch it. Isn't that neat?
This video alone demonstrates, if you can imagine it, the fantasy of having
a fully automated general fabrication robot which could easily instruct the
user how to fabricate the object, including a replica of itself--and would
you know it?--this fantasy will work in practice. Its only a matter of how
we use our imagination and address our boundary rights from here on:

High-speed robotic hand: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KxjVlaLBmk

So there you go, some good 'ol evidence.

Once my peers and I have better addressed parts requirements and build the
first prototype, after the results and potential becomes more apparent,
we're likely to attract a self organised development team, as my primary
target audience are those within hackerspaces, and these along with
the initial developers will produce better designs so the machine can make
its own parts from less processed parts or materials until the machine can
make anything, including the machine itself, from simple raw materials from
any local area. The outcomes from this logic are self explanatory; its just
a matter of proving it with forthcoming evidence. . .

With that finally expressed, the statements of Franz-Bauwens to me seem like
silly talk, perhaps in order to preserve some vague notion of dignity in
manual labor.

I stress, again, that just because everything is fully automated does not
mean people will not want to do anything anymore and decide instead to
destroy the planet; as that seems the unclarified assumption from that view
in regard to post-scarcity; which as Paul F. mentions may be true in
Transhumanist/Singulatotalitarian/libertarian circles, but certainly not the
small patch of post-scarcity talk as described by Bishop, Fernhout, Cravens,
and Hunting which is, from what I've seen, a prevailing view in the
p2presearch list circle at present; and why I totally flipped when
Franz-Bauwens framed post-scarcity so dimly. I think were it not for that
pesky Franz: Bauwens: who I know to be a good kid in his own right, would
not have gotten mixed up into all this trouble; if only it were not for that
Franz character mucking things up. ;p Bad Franz! Very bad Franz!! You just
stop that!

I love playing drums and piano. No amount of listening to the most beautiful
music (though I enjoy that too with love) comes close to that feeling and
experience of playing what sounds come from the actions. I will continue to
do so, when the proclivity surmises, no matter how well a robot can
out-perform me. We are born to do stuff, to want to experience the acts and
variations of attract and detract in the environment of competitive and
cooperative attractions and detracts; and sometimes destractions; (or
however you like to frame it) and that will not change unless someone wants
to tinker with themselves for some reason.

Yet, you seem to think that you
> have made a convincing argument against it. Oddly enough, your methods
> are reminiscent of the way bolsheviks and fascists presented their
> political arguments: They asserted that things are as they see them, and
> rejected everyone else's view as flatly wrong and counter to the
> interests of humanity. That, by itself, makes me extremely wary of your
> position. I won't try to counter your individual points. Your style of
> "argument" makes that pointless.
>

I suspect you say this with such sassiness because you respect Franz and
Michel more than myself; and you would like for them to pat your head. I'm
not jealous.


> iQIcBAEBAgAGBQJKrOtrAAoJECyv6W5meoWEDY4P/i/93hk0ZaiBZnw3GscdU5bT
> D70eUrUw7BP2NZ97XVG54cAMNJTyLcFGUdtOIzfn2hswWUNJErBr1ep3kV3LN1ZR
> lmBj8oQa2Zmm8ZOAH9UGnQw8il4SB46mnuhvYVk2OIdirYu8QK01OgtL6LL/M9J1
> bhUgikdFMXIrSBlX2QakT2FcmBiqv5iIFyOQtRX5qfAx9Xhv2sIEEmb0XRTkHTkH
> JRpJohbpcktlekMFhrA/xVpxaeEQ0cCkv33dIKVgZbs//i+WMVHrZ88YvDT24eOF
> 1dufgxE/ONLVFO4uYuGoqpmbr13w3bQXtr+77lCiOhdGvu3TQ1pCQ5Xfyim1PSCN
> dmtHhV0/jx2jOJKTy7MvHNp6hwVrbIwivFsse4gmAkAVP4TJW3QfPuYQqDfhfKav
> qkXNQp+lUZusrp4enN0wj040yJ5y0Y5T59XxaQPAuLKmHx5OijeENy+ZSjS9CwuQ
> itGFDI5H+K4LgF0K3dZm3W58i6+JUvJxhA5UUka58dain7gSfpeSNhYMz5vO25dw
> /XeMhpbxnpKOeWemnXUyEz6cLkeQWE0LhntUQKeeWxkTwQmnZCN2pyFpzqRTlWQv
> y05Grc/Mh19nD7XXjyLbroZIMiKTpuGV7JPSXP52QiL+jDd8rIhAaJ/P7zXrJZI9
> 4L9QAXafA22p7t6yK2yA
> =dFa3
>

As clarified and descriptive as that may be, I reject such notions
as inadequate, as it is an attempt to describe what cannot possibly be
represented adequately in words or metrics no matter the detail of the
phenomenon the representation claims to have observed. It was worth a try I
guess, but that was a futile attempt none the less, as well intended as it
may have been. That is not to say I don't view you poorly for trying.


Nathan
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/attachments/20090914/25fa057e/attachment.html>