Let me first preface by noting that I am a pitifully disorganized 23 year old architecture student, and that my academic endeavors into philosophy, economics and geopolitics have been, although fervently perused, a rather schizophrenic personal network of insights and gleanings from an extensive free-time spent watching the history channel, reading books, articles, manuscripts, and pouring through endless google and wikipedia searches. By that, I am admitting fully that I am nothing that approximates a scholar in these areas by any means, just a disenchanted dreamer with a compulsive habit for reading.
It strikes me, that life has become a drag. Some will struggle through classes, find a job, placate stuffy old men and massage egos for the better part of their existence to pay off student loans, a house, a family, a divorce, before waiting to die in some living cemetery in florida. Countless millions more around the world will die in an agonizing and tireless bondage wishing their fates were so lucky. Freedom, even in its metaphysical sense, will become tantalizingly distant from daily life. It will draw away from ones eyes and hands in idle beta thought in supermarkets, it will drain away from their arms and legs working mines in africa and assembly lines in asia. Even the great heads of nations and corporations will loose the sensation in their mouths and fingertips as they pass their assets to number-crunchers and market models. Life will be an act of spectation, humanity as a trauma victim, leaving their body.
I was interested to read recently about the Rhodes-Milner Group(sorry I cant find a better link) in several quirky books and articles by conspiracy nuts, who seem to postulate that our own John Ruskin was the architect and inspiration for the whole of current global economic scheme. Regardless if the Trilateral Commission or any other secret boardroom of shadowy figures have any actual influence over global politics, the link between Freemasonry, contemporary global economics and the cult of architectural thought is pretty intriguing. Is it possible that a single man with nothing but an eye for art and material production could set in motion or even generously contribute to the formation of such a trunk thought process? That a ruling few, simply by controlling loans, should effectively contrlol all material production and enslave the unwitting millions?
I have also been closely interested in open source economics which seems with burgeoning meta-projects like linux and wikipedia to be outright defying the generally accepted laws of capitalist economics, in that a loose, unhierarchical network of individual writers and programmers, without direct financial motivation could, in terms of cost of development to outright usability of product, generously out-perform vast and tenacious corporate armies of hired programmers. Ive been congealing this idea that the reason the open source works on the internet is that the cost of copying a design construct is so low that the base unit of human work is the design construct itself. I wonder then, if every process that is repeatable is automatable, then is it possible that the days of humans engaged in laborious, repetitive tasks are finally, truly numbered? Even in the material world? And that given a system where design innovation is the primary unit of human work, that the open source is destined to reign supreme? No more bosses? No more leaders? No more careful balance of power based on the wealth of the few but a pure democratic environment where a persons worth can be measured only in the unquantifiable connective tissue of design-love?
Ive only just recently begun to play in my head with how such a system might be instigated, some kind of design-school/company where design tools were shared, where freely organized and unhierarchical design teams could come together over mutual interest to develop constructs of everything from oceanographic models to education programs to building and structural systems, and send those constructs directly to automated production and implementation at rates no fixed corporate structure could match. How quickly could we slash through product design markets? or the fossil fuel monolith? or space exploration?
Even at such a wishy-washy stage of thought as Ive pulled together on this in the last few weeks or so I have been having serious misgivings. Even if my loftiest dreams were remotely within the realm of possibility, would I feel right to unleash such a virulent cancer upon what is, I admit, a relatively stable and comfortable social organization for what would clearly disintegrate into a new-babylon anarchic horror show? Where every movement of every day your very social survival depended upon competing at an individual level with the design talents of every other human being on the planet? Are all dreams of individual freedom destined to be swallowed and assimilated by the exponential growth of this collective monster weve created?
anyway, that was a ridiculous ramble. To whomever is able to make heads or tails of it your patience is much admired and appreciated...
i've been working on a project all night, and i came to archinect to hopefully cheer me up. your first paragraph made me want to take a dirt nap. thanks oe, for what i needed in life at this precise moment was to not be looking anywhere but at my (micro)station. back to work now.
This is Softoffice by Lars Spuybroek of Nox, an interactive, flexible studio space for creative development of TV and web programming. (more can be found at noxarch.com ) From an article on the project:
"SoftOffice is a building in which work and play are closely interwoven. Half of the building is reserved for young children to play with interactive environments (that are also present on the web); the other half is for adults to work in a 'flexi-office', where no-one has a specified workspace and where the environment is intended for functional, formal conduct and informal, creative conduct such as writing, discussing, and presenting.
...
In calculating the desired surface are for an office for 60 people performing different functions (marketing, administration, online production, offline production, management, origination), one would normally require 900 square meters. If one studies the occupancy rate of spaces that incorporate time-space relationships, however, one begins to see a largely different usage over time in the dynamics of office culture. This dynamic structure allow us to make an office area with 625 square meters. But it is not only the quantifiable office space that has to change - leaving the structure the same while reducing it by a third would not do any good. The spaces and furniture of the office need not be designated to a particular person, nor strictly designated for a type of work, but destined in essence for a state of mind. The active programme is a continuum of expansion, (communicative behavioral types) and contraction, (the necessity to shut off, to discuss, meet or write, either in small groups or alone).
...
In contrast to the office space, the childrens space -the 'Scape' - is a field or landscape of objects where a substantial part of the movement is propelled by mock-ups from childrens television programmes. Where the adults in the office find a lateral freedom in a longitudinally oriented system, the young childrens movement in the scape is gravitational and spiraling. They move around and around the mediated objects. For other areas a different approach is needed a place where the building comes alive and interacts with the children, which we call 'Glob'. Glob is a world designed by globally networked children and is present in the building and on a website. Glob is a 'living organism' (some of its responses are calculated by genetic algorithms) that has the special ability to interact with children and will grow, love and play. Glob creates and experiential environment of the children and touches their senses; together they will create drawings, music, and stories."
Which strikes me only as a pre-conscious seed for this emerging paradigm in productive organization. Without repetitive material tasks, without the economic advantage of mass labor, it no longer makes sense for productive organization to be fixed and centralized under an all powerful hierarchy. If a product can be developed in ones basement and then digitally transmitted directly to production in collectively operated CNC production facilities, marketed and ordered on the web and sent by mail, what economic sense does it make to have a vast rigid corporate hierarchy and centralized investment structure unable to get out of its own way?
I'm not sure, but it seems like you are mixing up the economics of architecture with its (intended) performance. Consider the difference between the environmental/aesthetic effect of the proposed "globs" with the amount of work: planning, designing, control, tendering and production, that would go into one of them. Somehow architecture which proposes to be flexible (most of the time meaning that it looks fluid) often creates more rigid systems than the simplest box.
One again, to preface, I think most conspiracy theorists are nuts. What interests me is not weather there is a literal controlling secret society silently pulling the strings, but is weather perhaps these conspiracy theorists correctly identified Ruskin as the modern translator of Masonic ideals into an actual economic ideology that served as the founding script of the power-elite social structure we inhabit today. If that is so, it implies that architects, being ideally located between ideology and material production, have a vast and incalculable power to influence the daily life of all people.
What if, for instance, there was a place, be it a simple box or a curvy soft-office, where seasoned designers and ordinary people alike could simply show up, sign up for a design workshop for that day, and collectively aid in the design of a product. The design coordinator for that product could ration compensation for thier trouble in whatever manner he or she though would bring the kind of help they needed, and then they would all go to work temporarily renting a shared space and shared design resources. That initial prototype or design construct could then be sent to automated production in facilities that are also time-shared, marketed and sold on the web, and the designers themselves would reap the per-unit profits. Since the initial investment is minimized to the man-hours spent by the designers themselves, just as is so in the open-source programming world, there is no need for a vast, clunky, and wasteful investment structure. Furthermore, there is no need for a static corporate hierarchy to coordinate labor, because all risk is assumed by the designers themselves. You can show up and work on your own to make a painting for one day, or join up with a team and invest several months or years into making a movie or a solar cell. Every day you are fired, and everyday you are hired again, so you always get out what you put in, and you have total freedom to do whatever you like from one day to the next. Now of course there are additional costs, development costs for some products, even with time-shared resources, will often exceed an individual designers ability to pay up-front and they will have to make offers to investors. But given the huge reductions in superfluous infrastructure, and the huge increases in individual design ownership and control, the total investment composite is still solidly in the hands of a decentralized group of individuals rather than a controlling few.
This is not communism, in fact its less communistic than what we live in today, because ownership is always retained by the individual instead of by banks or a small board of investors. It is communistic only in respect to the use of time and space, and not in respect to ownership or enforced will.
Anyway, sorry these are so long, I again applaud the patience of anyone willing to read and point out flaws, but considering the tolerance for per corells incessant madness I suppose I dont look so bad ha ha,
Well, you should not see yourself as a pitiful 23 years old at all. You strike me as someone with substantial imagination to look beyond the next formal manipulation in design.
Have you read Andrew Saint's chapter on the medieval architect? I thought what you just said related that chapter as the 'prequel' to your story. It is not as hyperbolic as yours so don't get too bored.
Personally, I feel that this whole Post-Fordistic flux of time and space is overestimated than it really is out there. We are combating serious trenchant human nature here: so in a world where there could be a vastly different structure, you still have some control freak unwilling to relinguish his or her stranglehold even if most things are automated (see the fountain pen thread: I am one of them so don't throw your darts in my direction!).
Following this point, people like Castells and Harvey are fine fine scholars but they are too hyped up by the entire generation of HTC folks controling the upper echelon of architecture schools. It is quite sad to see how an entire generation of good minds are corrupted by neo-marxist doctrine still bent on using callsigns of regime and hegemony.
I think the world is alot more optimistic if we abandon the teleological pessimism of 'exploitation' and 'competition' and move on.
would be interesting to see how much of the utopian flux-time world could be realised. Interesting idea though.
To play the devil's man, you should know that most of the open-source projects are handled by a fixed (time, location, whatever) core group of workers who control the project and ensure the original intent is maintained. Small contributions are made by individuals and they make an enormous difference, but what is really interesting about the open-source format is the possibility for unexpected redirection. Because there is no legal protection it is possible for the job to split in two directions when a splinter group forms its own opinions and decide the final product should be something different from the original. Apparently this has happened a few times. Wonder what that could mean for other types of design projects...
btw, eceonomically the only real open-source success story is Red-Hat. Most open-source projects to date were multi-million dollar losers. Don't know if that was the market or intrinsic flaw.
maybe a few things will help oe's idea become realized.... i think my statements are shallow enough to not be annotated with explainations
1. brain washing (ideally the entire human population)
2. a space traveling machine (speed of light) to minimize the effects of geography
3. a chip implanted in our brains, to make everyone just as articulated in every subjects as all others
4. a total redefinition of the idea of production... maybe everyone shoud be shizophrenic
5. controlled population
i m writing with the biased opinions of current economical, social, and cultural factors unwillingly implanted in my brain... so maybe oe's model could work... being that we dont live at the present...
Thanks for your comments, I admit you had me reaching for my google with some of your references, but I'll do my best to respond.
I suppose what I am concerned with is not competition or even exploitation, but simply repetitive, beta thought patterns -the atrophy of individual consciousness and will. Inevitably of course, human life is a symbiosis of individual and collective will, but the structure that binds the two need not be one of static enforcement. I dont believe that spontaneous, adaptive, uncontrolled use of space and resources is overestimated at all, in fact it is the true substance of life! It is true that were this homo-ludenic organization to catch on, the entrenched establishment would employ every tool at its disposal to contain or subvert it, but under a paradigm in which idea and design construct are the new currency of value, the dinosaur of static corporate hierarchy will find itself simply unable to compete with the speed of self-motivated innovation. If large centralized corporations do emerge, they are likely to be similar to ebay or travelocity; not exclusive providers of products themselves, but organized marketplaces for individual trade.
jump
This starts to get at one of the key problems of early open source, which is that if all designs are publicly owned, the development of difficult, focused, high-end, design innovation suffers because a design that takes decades to develop and millions or billions of dollars can be stolen and sold out from underneath the developers and the investment is lost. So how can the open source world and the closed source world coexist? Well in the programming world, it was the transition from the General Public License to the Open Source Definition; where in the GPL denies users of cooperatively developed software the ability to impose license restrictions in redistribution, the OSD allows for-profit software modules to be bundled with open source modules without 'infecting' the private modules with public denial of licensure. If this were understood in terms of product design, it would be like providing a legal framework for a designer to combine several patented components with publicly developed design ideas without either denying the patent holders of royalties or the public designer of the capacity to develop his or her adaptation.
So yes, (in a long, round about way) there would and should be total freedom for a single designer or 'fixed core' to coordinate underlings and freely developed innovations into a cohesive vision, and they should even have the right to put patents on the components they themselves developed with the flexibility to add public designs to them.
miyaki
Heh, I dont know how helpful brainwashing or controlled population might be, remember the whole idea is to encourage a network of greatly divergent individuals and not homogeneity. But I have been thinking of some important binding ideas to hold this thing together which I dont know hopefully I'll pull together when Im not struggling through finals and whatnot...
Speaking of which, no, I dont go to cal, I go to a bad school because I waste far too much time on things like this ha ha
Caleb
heh, trust me, lately Ive been thinking about it ;)
oe's on vacation right now, but you can email either one of us about it. The character of the project has been evolving quickly in the past months, but some kind of test is definately going to be necessary,
Unfortunately, it is human nature for somebody to develop and instill a hierarchical system over a group…
You may think that this ideal utopian model would work great and I used to fantasize about a similar system, but the shitty thing is that capitalism has developed people that take the initiative to do and those that leech..
I see the open source parallel as interesting but the medium of computer programming is completely different than that of architecture. The fascinating notion of computer production design and innovation is that you don’t need any raw materials or labor except your computer and your programming skills…Architecture is the collaboration of many different entities including suppliers, contractors, ect…We do not control the supply of material and thus the system wont work..
We dont think of this thing as utopian. It isnt perfect, it might not even be 'better' in terms of making more people 'happy'. It is just an idea that has the potential to produce a strong system, a system that offers much more in the way of personal freedom and mobility. The open-source metaphor I believe is simply evidence that all things being equal, within a system where 'copies' require no extra labor, a heterogeneous design process has the potential to be more efficient than a structured hierarchical one, because you no longer need masses of underlings doing repetitive tasks. Everyone becomes their own specialist, making their relationships to every other specialist much more flexible. Youre absolutely right, architecture does require many different fields, more than contractors and suppliers you need chemists and programmers and lawyers and philosophers. With exponential infrequency however, we will cease to need laborers. We wont need kids pounding nails or digging ditches, we wont need cad monkeys agonizing over repetitive details or accountants crunching numbers that a program could automate. Suddenly capital no longer becomes a product of, and therefore dependent upon, labor, but it becomes a measure of creative impulse and human value.
oe - on that open source design thing - there is a premis similar to that in a fiction novel by Chris Carlsson called "after the deluge" about post economic San Fransisco sometime like 200 years from now - really off the wall, good book. Essentially people work "try-outs" and continually move around before becomming "Lifers" - not socialist though surprisingly. It does raise issues of ownership and responsibility in a society like this.
good rambling here. So much ado about nothing though! But seriously its interesting to see the minds that this forum seems to have on it. I'm intrigued by what makes sense to me and enjoying what doesnt
Aug 23, 05 11:11 pm ·
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on Ambition and Misgivings
Let me first preface by noting that I am a pitifully disorganized 23 year old architecture student, and that my academic endeavors into philosophy, economics and geopolitics have been, although fervently perused, a rather schizophrenic personal network of insights and gleanings from an extensive free-time spent watching the history channel, reading books, articles, manuscripts, and pouring through endless google and wikipedia searches. By that, I am admitting fully that I am nothing that approximates a scholar in these areas by any means, just a disenchanted dreamer with a compulsive habit for reading.
It strikes me, that life has become a drag. Some will struggle through classes, find a job, placate stuffy old men and massage egos for the better part of their existence to pay off student loans, a house, a family, a divorce, before waiting to die in some living cemetery in florida. Countless millions more around the world will die in an agonizing and tireless bondage wishing their fates were so lucky. Freedom, even in its metaphysical sense, will become tantalizingly distant from daily life. It will draw away from ones eyes and hands in idle beta thought in supermarkets, it will drain away from their arms and legs working mines in africa and assembly lines in asia. Even the great heads of nations and corporations will loose the sensation in their mouths and fingertips as they pass their assets to number-crunchers and market models. Life will be an act of spectation, humanity as a trauma victim, leaving their body.
I was interested to read recently about the Rhodes-Milner Group(sorry I cant find a better link) in several quirky books and articles by conspiracy nuts, who seem to postulate that our own John Ruskin was the architect and inspiration for the whole of current global economic scheme. Regardless if the Trilateral Commission or any other secret boardroom of shadowy figures have any actual influence over global politics, the link between Freemasonry, contemporary global economics and the cult of architectural thought is pretty intriguing. Is it possible that a single man with nothing but an eye for art and material production could set in motion or even generously contribute to the formation of such a trunk thought process? That a ruling few, simply by controlling loans, should effectively contrlol all material production and enslave the unwitting millions?
I have also been closely interested in open source economics which seems with burgeoning meta-projects like linux and wikipedia to be outright defying the generally accepted laws of capitalist economics, in that a loose, unhierarchical network of individual writers and programmers, without direct financial motivation could, in terms of cost of development to outright usability of product, generously out-perform vast and tenacious corporate armies of hired programmers. Ive been congealing this idea that the reason the open source works on the internet is that the cost of copying a design construct is so low that the base unit of human work is the design construct itself. I wonder then, if every process that is repeatable is automatable, then is it possible that the days of humans engaged in laborious, repetitive tasks are finally, truly numbered? Even in the material world? And that given a system where design innovation is the primary unit of human work, that the open source is destined to reign supreme? No more bosses? No more leaders? No more careful balance of power based on the wealth of the few but a pure democratic environment where a persons worth can be measured only in the unquantifiable connective tissue of design-love?
Ive only just recently begun to play in my head with how such a system might be instigated, some kind of design-school/company where design tools were shared, where freely organized and unhierarchical design teams could come together over mutual interest to develop constructs of everything from oceanographic models to education programs to building and structural systems, and send those constructs directly to automated production and implementation at rates no fixed corporate structure could match. How quickly could we slash through product design markets? or the fossil fuel monolith? or space exploration?
Even at such a wishy-washy stage of thought as Ive pulled together on this in the last few weeks or so I have been having serious misgivings. Even if my loftiest dreams were remotely within the realm of possibility, would I feel right to unleash such a virulent cancer upon what is, I admit, a relatively stable and comfortable social organization for what would clearly disintegrate into a new-babylon anarchic horror show? Where every movement of every day your very social survival depended upon competing at an individual level with the design talents of every other human being on the planet? Are all dreams of individual freedom destined to be swallowed and assimilated by the exponential growth of this collective monster weve created?
anyway, that was a ridiculous ramble. To whomever is able to make heads or tails of it your patience is much admired and appreciated...
i've been working on a project all night, and i came to archinect to hopefully cheer me up. your first paragraph made me want to take a dirt nap. thanks oe, for what i needed in life at this precise moment was to not be looking anywhere but at my (micro)station. back to work now.
So maybe we need to see pretty pictures:
This is Softoffice by Lars Spuybroek of Nox, an interactive, flexible studio space for creative development of TV and web programming. (more can be found at noxarch.com ) From an article on the project:
"SoftOffice is a building in which work and play are closely interwoven. Half of the building is reserved for young children to play with interactive environments (that are also present on the web); the other half is for adults to work in a 'flexi-office', where no-one has a specified workspace and where the environment is intended for functional, formal conduct and informal, creative conduct such as writing, discussing, and presenting.
...
In calculating the desired surface are for an office for 60 people performing different functions (marketing, administration, online production, offline production, management, origination), one would normally require 900 square meters. If one studies the occupancy rate of spaces that incorporate time-space relationships, however, one begins to see a largely different usage over time in the dynamics of office culture. This dynamic structure allow us to make an office area with 625 square meters. But it is not only the quantifiable office space that has to change - leaving the structure the same while reducing it by a third would not do any good. The spaces and furniture of the office need not be designated to a particular person, nor strictly designated for a type of work, but destined in essence for a state of mind. The active programme is a continuum of expansion, (communicative behavioral types) and contraction, (the necessity to shut off, to discuss, meet or write, either in small groups or alone).
...
In contrast to the office space, the childrens space -the 'Scape' - is a field or landscape of objects where a substantial part of the movement is propelled by mock-ups from childrens television programmes. Where the adults in the office find a lateral freedom in a longitudinally oriented system, the young childrens movement in the scape is gravitational and spiraling. They move around and around the mediated objects. For other areas a different approach is needed a place where the building comes alive and interacts with the children, which we call 'Glob'. Glob is a world designed by globally networked children and is present in the building and on a website. Glob is a 'living organism' (some of its responses are calculated by genetic algorithms) that has the special ability to interact with children and will grow, love and play. Glob creates and experiential environment of the children and touches their senses; together they will create drawings, music, and stories."
Which strikes me only as a pre-conscious seed for this emerging paradigm in productive organization. Without repetitive material tasks, without the economic advantage of mass labor, it no longer makes sense for productive organization to be fixed and centralized under an all powerful hierarchy. If a product can be developed in ones basement and then digitally transmitted directly to production in collectively operated CNC production facilities, marketed and ordered on the web and sent by mail, what economic sense does it make to have a vast rigid corporate hierarchy and centralized investment structure unable to get out of its own way?
OE, i'm very intrigued w/ your free mason/NWO link i have'nt had time to read the entire thing, but tell me what u think.
some of the stuff has very large implications, some sounded plausible and some not so plausible.
I'm not sure, but it seems like you are mixing up the economics of architecture with its (intended) performance. Consider the difference between the environmental/aesthetic effect of the proposed "globs" with the amount of work: planning, designing, control, tendering and production, that would go into one of them. Somehow architecture which proposes to be flexible (most of the time meaning that it looks fluid) often creates more rigid systems than the simplest box.
One again, to preface, I think most conspiracy theorists are nuts. What interests me is not weather there is a literal controlling secret society silently pulling the strings, but is weather perhaps these conspiracy theorists correctly identified Ruskin as the modern translator of Masonic ideals into an actual economic ideology that served as the founding script of the power-elite social structure we inhabit today. If that is so, it implies that architects, being ideally located between ideology and material production, have a vast and incalculable power to influence the daily life of all people.
What if, for instance, there was a place, be it a simple box or a curvy soft-office, where seasoned designers and ordinary people alike could simply show up, sign up for a design workshop for that day, and collectively aid in the design of a product. The design coordinator for that product could ration compensation for thier trouble in whatever manner he or she though would bring the kind of help they needed, and then they would all go to work temporarily renting a shared space and shared design resources. That initial prototype or design construct could then be sent to automated production in facilities that are also time-shared, marketed and sold on the web, and the designers themselves would reap the per-unit profits. Since the initial investment is minimized to the man-hours spent by the designers themselves, just as is so in the open-source programming world, there is no need for a vast, clunky, and wasteful investment structure. Furthermore, there is no need for a static corporate hierarchy to coordinate labor, because all risk is assumed by the designers themselves. You can show up and work on your own to make a painting for one day, or join up with a team and invest several months or years into making a movie or a solar cell. Every day you are fired, and everyday you are hired again, so you always get out what you put in, and you have total freedom to do whatever you like from one day to the next. Now of course there are additional costs, development costs for some products, even with time-shared resources, will often exceed an individual designers ability to pay up-front and they will have to make offers to investors. But given the huge reductions in superfluous infrastructure, and the huge increases in individual design ownership and control, the total investment composite is still solidly in the hands of a decentralized group of individuals rather than a controlling few.
This is not communism, in fact its less communistic than what we live in today, because ownership is always retained by the individual instead of by banks or a small board of investors. It is communistic only in respect to the use of time and space, and not in respect to ownership or enforced will.
Anyway, sorry these are so long, I again applaud the patience of anyone willing to read and point out flaws, but considering the tolerance for per corells incessant madness I suppose I dont look so bad ha ha,
Well, you should not see yourself as a pitiful 23 years old at all. You strike me as someone with substantial imagination to look beyond the next formal manipulation in design.
Have you read Andrew Saint's chapter on the medieval architect? I thought what you just said related that chapter as the 'prequel' to your story. It is not as hyperbolic as yours so don't get too bored.
Personally, I feel that this whole Post-Fordistic flux of time and space is overestimated than it really is out there. We are combating serious trenchant human nature here: so in a world where there could be a vastly different structure, you still have some control freak unwilling to relinguish his or her stranglehold even if most things are automated (see the fountain pen thread: I am one of them so don't throw your darts in my direction!).
Following this point, people like Castells and Harvey are fine fine scholars but they are too hyped up by the entire generation of HTC folks controling the upper echelon of architecture schools. It is quite sad to see how an entire generation of good minds are corrupted by neo-marxist doctrine still bent on using callsigns of regime and hegemony.
I think the world is alot more optimistic if we abandon the teleological pessimism of 'exploitation' and 'competition' and move on.
did you go to CAL oe?
would be interesting to see how much of the utopian flux-time world could be realised. Interesting idea though.
To play the devil's man, you should know that most of the open-source projects are handled by a fixed (time, location, whatever) core group of workers who control the project and ensure the original intent is maintained. Small contributions are made by individuals and they make an enormous difference, but what is really interesting about the open-source format is the possibility for unexpected redirection. Because there is no legal protection it is possible for the job to split in two directions when a splinter group forms its own opinions and decide the final product should be something different from the original. Apparently this has happened a few times. Wonder what that could mean for other types of design projects...
btw, eceonomically the only real open-source success story is Red-Hat. Most open-source projects to date were multi-million dollar losers. Don't know if that was the market or intrinsic flaw.
maybe a few things will help oe's idea become realized.... i think my statements are shallow enough to not be annotated with explainations
1. brain washing (ideally the entire human population)
2. a space traveling machine (speed of light) to minimize the effects of geography
3. a chip implanted in our brains, to make everyone just as articulated in every subjects as all others
4. a total redefinition of the idea of production... maybe everyone shoud be shizophrenic
5. controlled population
i m writing with the biased opinions of current economical, social, and cultural factors unwillingly implanted in my brain... so maybe oe's model could work... being that we dont live at the present...
lets start a secret society to begin the implamentation...oh sh!t...
BE
Thanks for your comments, I admit you had me reaching for my google with some of your references, but I'll do my best to respond.
I suppose what I am concerned with is not competition or even exploitation, but simply repetitive, beta thought patterns -the atrophy of individual consciousness and will. Inevitably of course, human life is a symbiosis of individual and collective will, but the structure that binds the two need not be one of static enforcement. I dont believe that spontaneous, adaptive, uncontrolled use of space and resources is overestimated at all, in fact it is the true substance of life! It is true that were this homo-ludenic organization to catch on, the entrenched establishment would employ every tool at its disposal to contain or subvert it, but under a paradigm in which idea and design construct are the new currency of value, the dinosaur of static corporate hierarchy will find itself simply unable to compete with the speed of self-motivated innovation. If large centralized corporations do emerge, they are likely to be similar to ebay or travelocity; not exclusive providers of products themselves, but organized marketplaces for individual trade.
jump
This starts to get at one of the key problems of early open source, which is that if all designs are publicly owned, the development of difficult, focused, high-end, design innovation suffers because a design that takes decades to develop and millions or billions of dollars can be stolen and sold out from underneath the developers and the investment is lost. So how can the open source world and the closed source world coexist? Well in the programming world, it was the transition from the General Public License to the Open Source Definition; where in the GPL denies users of cooperatively developed software the ability to impose license restrictions in redistribution, the OSD allows for-profit software modules to be bundled with open source modules without 'infecting' the private modules with public denial of licensure. If this were understood in terms of product design, it would be like providing a legal framework for a designer to combine several patented components with publicly developed design ideas without either denying the patent holders of royalties or the public designer of the capacity to develop his or her adaptation.
So yes, (in a long, round about way) there would and should be total freedom for a single designer or 'fixed core' to coordinate underlings and freely developed innovations into a cohesive vision, and they should even have the right to put patents on the components they themselves developed with the flexibility to add public designs to them.
miyaki
Heh, I dont know how helpful brainwashing or controlled population might be, remember the whole idea is to encourage a network of greatly divergent individuals and not homogeneity. But I have been thinking of some important binding ideas to hold this thing together which I dont know hopefully I'll pull together when Im not struggling through finals and whatnot...
Speaking of which, no, I dont go to cal, I go to a bad school because I waste far too much time on things like this ha ha
Caleb
heh, trust me, lately Ive been thinking about it ;)
pharoh is profiling...
oe's on vacation right now, but you can email either one of us about it. The character of the project has been evolving quickly in the past months, but some kind of test is definately going to be necessary,
Life can be understood better when one masters the art of brevity & clarity.
OE: In the utopian flux-time world, who cleans the bathrooms?
Its a serious question. Who does the jobs that people don't want to do? We can't automate everything....
Unfortunately, it is human nature for somebody to develop and instill a hierarchical system over a group…
You may think that this ideal utopian model would work great and I used to fantasize about a similar system, but the shitty thing is that capitalism has developed people that take the initiative to do and those that leech..
I see the open source parallel as interesting but the medium of computer programming is completely different than that of architecture. The fascinating notion of computer production design and innovation is that you don’t need any raw materials or labor except your computer and your programming skills…Architecture is the collaboration of many different entities including suppliers, contractors, ect…We do not control the supply of material and thus the system wont work..
We dont think of this thing as utopian. It isnt perfect, it might not even be 'better' in terms of making more people 'happy'. It is just an idea that has the potential to produce a strong system, a system that offers much more in the way of personal freedom and mobility. The open-source metaphor I believe is simply evidence that all things being equal, within a system where 'copies' require no extra labor, a heterogeneous design process has the potential to be more efficient than a structured hierarchical one, because you no longer need masses of underlings doing repetitive tasks. Everyone becomes their own specialist, making their relationships to every other specialist much more flexible. Youre absolutely right, architecture does require many different fields, more than contractors and suppliers you need chemists and programmers and lawyers and philosophers. With exponential infrequency however, we will cease to need laborers. We wont need kids pounding nails or digging ditches, we wont need cad monkeys agonizing over repetitive details or accountants crunching numbers that a program could automate. Suddenly capital no longer becomes a product of, and therefore dependent upon, labor, but it becomes a measure of creative impulse and human value.
346. Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.
oe - on that open source design thing - there is a premis similar to that in a fiction novel by Chris Carlsson called "after the deluge" about post economic San Fransisco sometime like 200 years from now - really off the wall, good book. Essentially people work "try-outs" and continually move around before becomming "Lifers" - not socialist though surprisingly. It does raise issues of ownership and responsibility in a society like this.
good rambling here. So much ado about nothing though! But seriously its interesting to see the minds that this forum seems to have on it. I'm intrigued by what makes sense to me and enjoying what doesnt
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