Direct Ownership
Ghandi leverages political power thru DIY
Spiritual Capital
I store my meat in the belly of my brother.
Sobering Numbers
Direct Ownership of Infrastructure
Marcin Jakubowski is the mastermind behind the Open Source Ecology project. He got an engineering PhD and set up camp building a tiny vision of utopia in rural Missouri. I went to his farm and it looked a little scrappy at first, but upon entering a mud brick shelter I saw a nice metal shop and a couple completed tractors. Jakubowski claims that we can have all the amenities of modern civilization, including microchips, all supported by a population of 1000. This is pretty amazing considering the factory of 1000 workers that was necessary to make your socks. His main piece of work so far is the OSE tractor. It’s an open source tractor design that ends up costing 8 times less than its John Deer equivalent. I was thinking about that tractor an awful lot as I spent the next week digging a big hole the old fashioned way.
Sea Faring
Our (US) sprawling military is a major asset to the country. By asset I mean it can be liquidated and exchanged over the open market. In the event of government collapse the implements of violence and social control that we’ve accumulated in mass, don’t simply disappear. Historical precedence tends towards a scenario where rogue generals faction off and collaborate with political interests as mercenaries locally and abroad. For this reason, one should consider a strategic and safe location to wait out political instabilities. Everything is speculation at this point and we simply can’t predict how things will go down. An old boss of mine is collecting Nazi uniforms and guns to gear up for the end. There are more people like him that might go haywire. The ocean might be nice. Are pirates more dangerous than militias? I knew a Tazmanian sailor who once encountered a team 7 foot tall, ripped, pitch black men with AK47s and Oakly sunglasses on the open seas. His ship and crew didn’t look rich enough, so they weren’t robbed at gun point. The oceans have long been an anarchists realm. OpenSailing will use a software that accounts for political instability, fishing, weather and so on, to suggest favorable locations for OS agents. Conditions will shift unpredictably in a social or environmental crisis. It’s great to establish a communications network in advance that strategically account for the challenges nomadic life. Maybe look to migrant workers for life style solutions that are tried and true. Maybe look to present day refugees who have already been put out through the systemic movements of our infrastructure. The trailer home is an invention that emanated from the traditions of poverty and disaster. OpenSailing has some pretty good ideas:
Debt Strike
Everyone is in debt. Some people have $500,000 in medical debt from a simple accident that will never be paid off. In a sense many people are preparing to never pay back their loans in full. On a day to day basis there are many systems installed to pester you into compliance. Fail to comply and: you’ll never be able to buy a house, put your name on a utilities bill, sign a lease, work over-the-table, etc. If you try to live for free, say…in an abandoned building, you’ll eventually be met with guns. I was security guarding a celebration for a bankruptcy firm who had enjoyed exquisite profits with the declining economy and it all dawned on me for some reason. They were blasting Celebrate Good Times C’mon over dorky office humor videos, orchestrating collapse in a way that most thoroughly benefited a handful of elites in every failing corporation they dealt with. It dawned on me that if you stay on this narrow path, it really does seem hunky dory. See a prisoner locked up for weed sales and say, “you should’ve become a bankruptcy specialist like me”. I know a lot of people who are paying back student loans with drug money, having graduated from such prestigious institutions as Yale…but that’s beside the point. The world will look really great if you tread the narrow path. It represents peace, but not freedom. So to reveal to a bankruptcy specialist the violent thread that binds us, I would prescribe a simple sit. Just sit in your apartment, stop handling money, and meditate. Count the days till men with guns show up and eventually force you into compliance. Tell them you’re meditating or praying or what ever, and see what happens. The sheriff will say “son, we have to remove you” so people with money can be installed in your place. You can’t blame the landlord because he’s in the same position. You can’t blame the banker that contracted the sheriff, because he’s in the same position. You can’t blame the sheriff either. You can’t blame the good money bearing people who will replace you, because they’re just doing what’s expected. If anyone in this hierarchy fails to comply, they will be systematically terminated by the immune system of money (the police). What’s at the end of the chain of command? Who’s on top, or is it a loop that feeds incomprehensibly back into society, to keep the source hidden?
Henry Thorough already did the whole no-rent prison bit, so as long as you believe him, you won’t have to try it yourself. It’s arguable that resources are indeed scarce, land is not abundant, and humans should be pitted against each other economically as a virtualized death simulation. With cavemen, archaeological evidence suggests that half of human death was caused by other humans over resource scarcity.
When Kubric cuts from the bone to the satellite, the orbiting nuclear warhead, he’s saying that human technological development was catalyzed by resource scarcity, it’s impetus ultimately violence and death. After the ice age humans drove the Mammoth and Great Sloth to extinction, and with their meat, grew exponentially. We the superhunters, were masters of our environment. With no natural predators to buffer population, we became predators of one another. So an economy is virtualized death, as social implementation of survivalist forces. You can rise and fall with less poignancy than the death that nature offers. It’s all fun and games, but we’re still very much connected to brutal and real death.
Arthur C. Clark might be right about military ultimately driving human progress….or not. Monkey’s are stupid. If I was a monkey I would just walk to the next watering hole so I didn’t have to fight the other monkeys. If all the watering holes of Earth were eventually occupied, I would open a dialogue about how to use the water better. We’d eventually figure out how to make an irrigation channel. Bam! Ingenuity opens up channels of water thousands of times bigger than those militaristic monkey’s could ever conjure. Onto the next paradigm. Thousands of years later, all the tap-able waters have been tapped and the monkeys start beating the drums of war again, having forgotten the lesson of technology. For intelligent people resources are not scarce. There are two paths to take at the waterhole. Develop a better weapon to kill the competition, or develop a better way of using water so everyone can drink.
Which of these two mantra’s best encapsulates America’s situation? Our economy has been wildly inflated by military action. For the poor, joining the army is the only viable solution for living a semi-decent life. Our education system is a massive failure with entire cities shutting down their public schools ie. Kansas City. The same forces driving the military industrial complex, drive the prison industrial complex, a shining crystallization of virtualized death in a violent scarcity based economy. Bush was just a scam to extort the middle class, the wealth of generations flushed down the toilet (I mean Dick Cheney’s mouth). Techno start up companies, and anything related to the internet, perhaps exemplify the types of innovations that occur when well educated people have disposable income. With a crushed middle class, you will no longer see innovation coming from “the little guys”. From what I’ve seen, many people with good education and unique vision end up as wage-slaves performing increasingly esoteric tasks for the Ultra Wealthy, instead of investing in themselves and the world immediately around them. So, we see scarcity as the norm, and violence as the primary means of resolving scarcity. As cave men, we never would have thought to dig an irrigation channel. Wrapped up in a frenzy, the only perceived route is to kill or be killed.
Debt Strike is a way to target the source of this problem. There’s a hierarchy that points in one direction, and implies a source. If money is power and they say we’re all in the red, with negative power (instead of 0 power)….does this mean you’re forced to do the opposite of what you would do given power? Destroy the things you love? Charge money for things you would love to give away for free? You like open fields of grass, so you try to find the darkest office to spend you time?
Social convention stripped away, we are walking flesh bags full of desires we have inherited via biology. Put me on a desert island with a richman, and I feel no obligation to him. I could retrieve fruits for him as he is feeble, with the promise of one day being rescued and repaid my services. Brought back to the land where his worth is written on a piece of paper and stored in a drawer, the land of cops, he could pay me handsomely in return. I don’t think we’re getting rescued, so I’m not giving anyone fruits unless they’re my friend, and the Earth is a beautiful desert island floating through space, like those dime store folders we fawned over in elementry school, so lets enjoy the shit out of it and do what we want. Do what you want, you ole flesh bag you.
Do you really owe your college $200,000 for six years of education or is this some fucked up fantasy role playing game you were born into? The sick dungeon master pitted you against astronomically huge numbers, like that whole multi-trillion dollar debt thing. I’m going to will it away.
So, Debt Strike is a way of willfully manifesting your desires. A tiny group of Dungeon Masters has discretion over the lives of 7 billion. They make choices for us. I was once overdrafted $1000 by the bank. The same bank awarded me a studio for about the same value so I broke even and those people got to pat themselves on the back for needlessly interjecting themselves in my life. The guy that owned the bank once curated an art show featuring portraits of Bloods gang members. As him and his son walked around the exhibition I overheard them trying to figure out what the bandannas were for. What have we lost in this exchange? The most culturally alienated people I’ve ever seen have some how seized the reigns of my culture.
I’d prefer to buy my own studio and never go thru the jurying process, granted it worked in my favor. I’d prefer to buy my own food, instead of submitting my finger prints to a federal database during my food stamps application process. I’d prefer our democratic representatives hadn’t sold off all public utilities to private interests under heavy lobby, so the cost of maintaining these systems was accurately reflected in the price. I’d prefer, I’d prefer. The frontline in this battle widens as the service industry bloats with wage-slaves necessitating their own existences by interjecting in every facet of what used to be routine money-less exchanges. The tickets given out by a traffic cop just cover the overhead of employing that cop. Just the other night I was subject to an illegal search just for walking down the street. They were very rude and unprofessional. Another time, I tried to enjoy a bottle of wine with my girlfriend while watching the sunset and two cops rolled up, told us we were endangering ourselves and ticketed us.
The system can be dismantled so I can drink wine and watch the sunset again.
Emergent Systems in Architecture
Instead of DISASTER lets call it CHANGE and accept that all things must change. Recent changes have revealed weaknesses in the infrastructure that holds everything together but we are, for the most part, still in tact. We are in a position to design and build new infrastructure that anticipates change, whether its nature’s change or the market’s change. This is the goal of TSAZ.
In short, TSAZ is a quick assembly, highly portable, CNC fabricable, modular home with interchangeable parts for dynamic reconfiguration. Rearranging your neighborhood should be easy, like rearranging the furniture in your living room. Since the parts are cut from computer models, these models can be distributed and refined by an open source community allowing a synergistic backwards compatible development process (comparable to how Open Source software like Linux is developed).
