An Open-source Civilization Starter Kit

This was a nice story to wake up to this cold and wet Sunday morning. File under "people changing the world." Marcin Jakubowski gets a Ph.D. in physics and decides to start a farm on thirty acres of land. When his tractor breaks, he doesn't take it to the tractor place, he gets a welding torch. After messing around with the welding torch for a while, he builds a tractor of his own."A tractor is basically a solid box with wheels, each with a hydraulic motor," he says. He starts thinking about the fifty most important machines for civilization and how to make them. This leads to participation in The Open Source Ecology Project,  a network of designers and engineers developing open source access to detailed plans on how to build these fifty machines at a fraction of the cost of buying them from established manufacturers. They call this the Global Village Construction Set. One of the machines makes bricks out of dirt. Jakubowski becomes a fellow of TED, the nonprofit purveyor of popular videos about new ideas in Technology, Entertainment, and Design. You can see his TED video here. A quote: "Our goal is a repository of published design so clear, so complete, that a single burned DVD is effectively a civilization starter kit...if this idea is truly sound, then the implications are significant. A greater distribution of the means of production, environmentally sound supply chains, and a newly relevant DIY maker culture can hope to transcend artificial scarcity."

This ideas are not new. I grew up in a house that had more than one Whole Earth Catalog or CoEvolution Quarterly laying around. Is Jakubowski just another voice in the conversation put forward mid-century by folks like Gary Snyder and Stuart Brand? Different factions of the back-to-the-land movement have different attitudes about technology. I remember a fellow from the North Carolina mountains (whose name now escapes me) who used no gas-powered machinery on his farm. I like Jakubowski's presentation and the NPR article because I think they get the technology just right: using the digital component of the wiki in order to better distribute access to the best products of the industrial age, such as ovens, windmills and circuit boards. Why am I writing it up in a blog devoted to landscape architecture and geospatial science? Because planning human affairs in space at the landscape level is fundamentally about distribution, and that is the focus of Jakuboski's presentation. That is why the aerial shot of the village is so effective at the end of his talk.