Welcome

The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity. --Paul Fernhout

If you can dream it: (even if they are dreams you picked from seeing ideas elsewhere, picking some good stuff from among some dystopian bad stuff in a movie)

Me around 1976 with my parents and a model of a Silent Running Drone robot made out of Togl's. The arm and gripper could be actuated by strings and a bellows.

You can probably build it: (well, at least somewhat, and if you have some support and encouragement and luck... :-)

Me with one of my line of ROSCOE (Remotely Operated Self-Contained Operational Entity) robots at the Robotics Futures Expo in 1980, where Isaac Asimov called me a "Rotten Kid". :-) ... Luck, resources, and encoragement includes having a helpful father who knows how to use machine tools to get a gripper and some brackets made -- though I did the electronics, programming, and much of the scrounging myself. That's a rolling bar with an upside down salad bowl on top. The gripper design is taken from a triple-fingered sugar cube tong (my father machined it at work on his lunch hour). The robot could repeat patterns of motions input through a joystick, and could also be directed to do motions via typed commands in English and German. Out of the blue, an earlier version (predating R2D2, but similar looking) had won a Navy Science Award at a local science fair (maybe in part as I described it as a "nuclear material transporter" inspired by something I saw at Brookhaven National Labs' nuclear reactor, and the Navy encourages nuclear sorts of things -- so began my first unintentional ambivalent entanglement with "National Security". The relays sometimes would stick and overheat and start to smoke and I'd have to bang the interface box to unstick them, but at least the opto-isolators (carefully sorted through from from Radio Shack packages to get the rare higher current ones) kept the computer safe from other mistakes. The Radio Shack stores in the area seemed to recognize me and my father as a pair, going in to buy various parts. Not that there is anything really very expensive in the robot system, other than the PET computer. Still, it would not have been possible without my father's help and involvement. Thanks, Dad, for helping me realize some of my dreams. I hope you are on to better things. And I can also thank various school teachers for help along the way, too, especially Jack Woelfel (who also had a computer company and loaned me PETs), Joe Maurer (who let me in early to use the school computers), David Gray (who stayed after to run the computer club), and Dr. Farabaugh (who taught the junior high science class I built a first robot for).

What is next to dream, design, and to build?

Artwork derived from NASA artwork by Rick Guidice on Space Colonization blended with a modified version of the Land-use plan artwork by Richard Iriga from the Development Art collection using The GIMP under Debian GNU/Linux (Yes, I know about the dangers of the "Second System Effect". And from first hand experience, all too often. :-)

Unfortunately, my robotics career sort of derailed in the late 1980s alongside the AI winter, when I foolishly left a good job managing the Princeton Robotics lab, and then had repeated problems at graduate schools trying to get a PhD related to space habitats. I also got more involved with computer graphics and desktop software (which are just cheaper and easier to work on, and I never was much of a machinist). I've mainly been writing, thinking, reading, and programming ever since. Sometimes I really miss the hands-on work. The Open Skutter Project is a recent idea of mine, but I don't have much time/resources to pursue it, except maybe a little for fun with my kid someday. But the economic, social, and security issues raised by robotics and other automation have still long been on my mind (along with issues related to better designs and, now, voluntary social networks), and I have written a lot about those things. So, robotics has continued to play a big part in my life, indirectly. And certainly the confidence of some early success in dreaming and doing has been useful, even when later (harder) things haven't worked out or have taken a long time to realize.

Most are in the form of (long) emails I have written to one mailing list or another. In deference to the common complaint that email should only be used for short posts, I'm going to start putting long things here in public and linking to them. Still, I have always seen email as a distributed knowledge system, where, long or short, you read things or not as you wish. Sort of like the ideas for a "Social Semantic Desktop". But, sigh, I have to admit that email is in practice not there yet. And some people still use "digests" and old email tools. :-(

Most of these essays and emails are reflections of the same commom core themes in the areas of free software and the emergence of a post-scarcity society. That post-scarcity society is developing based on ideas like:
* "imagine",
* "the internet",
* "3D printing"
* "automation",
* "voluntary simplicity",
* "non-violence and conflict resolution through infinite games and transcending problems using imagination",
* "realizing compulsory schooling to turn children into soldiers is evil",
* "realizing just-in-case learning is mostly obsolete as cheap networked computers are changing things globally ",
* "constructivist education and learning-on-demand in a community are the educational way forward",
* "unschooling at home and freeschooling somewhere else",
* "the future of the public school is to become more and more like the public library",
* "money is a sign of poverty",
* "financial obesity isn't pretty",
* "a few can maintain for the many out of altruism (and perhaps showing off :-)",
* "self-replicating space habitats can support quadrillions of people around the Solar System, so there is room for everyone -- even the unborn",
* "the history of the USA isn't pretty, but it is well worth studying in detail",
* "mutual security makes more sense that unilateral dominance",
* "we need a balance of meshwork & hierarchy and of altruism & selfishness to build a healthy diverse universal society",
* "the Debian project as the flagship of the F/OSS movement is an example of the way forward", and
* "rethinking work to be play".

So, these ideas are mostly what you will find here. Over and over and over again. :-)

Essentially, here is the beginnings of an index into all the details and links to other people's writings to show why I believe these things. Each email or essay was written as I developed my understanding of these ideas over the past decade or two. And each was generally written to address some issue someone else raised on a mailing list, and I replied to each in isolation. So, here are many of those replies in one place.

But, rather than wade through all that, here are three of my most recent long essays which pretty much sum up the main ideas and links:
* The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era (about 10 pages)
* Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (about 200 pages)
* Post-Scarcity Princeton (about 40 pages, a condensed version of the essay above)
The first essay was written earlier, and is more abstract and theoretical. The second essay was written afterwards, and is more specific to Princeton University and also is a bit of a memoir about personal growth. The third is a condensed version of the second with most of the personal and Princeton-specific comments removed.

Here was my statement of purpose for graduate school at Princeton, related to developing self-replicating space habitats:
* Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988

And here is information about a couple ventures I tried to bring together after PU graduate school under the name of Sunrise (both as a non-profit and a for-profit); both fizzled, but there is also information there how those ideas scaled down to what I have done recently.
* Sunrise Sustainable Technology Ventures

Here are a shorter and longer version of comments to grantmakers and donors on copyright and patent policies for a Post-Scarcity Society (originally written in response to a request for comments by the Markle Foundation):
* An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society
* On Funding Digital Public Works

Here is something I put together about moving beyond a jobless recovery (saved from deletionists on Wikipedia as a Google Knol as it represented a person-month or more of work to organize all these heterodox economic ideas and references, plus some interesting contributions by others; I especially liked the way the chart of four future heterodox possibilities came out with a basic income, a gift economy, local subsistence, and resource-based planning):
* Beyond a Jobless Recovery: A heterodox perspective on 21st century economics

Health care advice I posted to Slashdot about things like vitamin D and Dr. Joel Fuhrman's "Eat to Live":
* Vitamin D, whole foods, fasting, walkability...

Here are two creative-writing pro-peace postings I made to the (now defunct) Pacifica Radio forums in 2003:
* The Lion and the Butterfly
* The Lion Memo (with apologies to C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters)

Here is a satire about what our society would look like if the law was like what lawyers recommend for everyone else:
* Microslaw

Here is a fable I wrote about thirty years ago about a knight who becomes whatever he wrote in a book (sort of like many self-defined Transhumanists aspire to :-):
* The Problems of Being Self Determining

Here is a five minute parable I made and put on YouTube:
* The Richest Man in the World: A parable about structural unemployment and a basic income

Here is why even millionaires should support a "basic income" and related taxes to help build a better society for everyone:
* Basic Income from a Millionaire's Perspective?

Here are some ideas on a tensegrity robot I thought of, disclose here to prevent patenting the core idea (although I see now that others have had similar ideas before, so this is just left here for fun):
* Tensegrity Robot

Here is a way to improve education in New York State, rebuild the state's economy, and help NY families by creating a basic income for families from the money currently given to NY schools (and why this is good even for teachers and school administrators):
* Towards a Post-Scarcity New York State of Mind (through homeschooling)

Posts I made to the p2presearch list concerning education (it would take years to read through all the embedded links on Gatto, Holt, Goodstein, Schmidt, Honigman, Lewellyn, etc.):
* [p2p-research] College Daze links (was Re: : FlossedBk, "Free/Libre and Open Source Solutions for Education")
* [p2p-research] The Higher Educational Bubble Continues to Grow
* [p2p-research] Rebutting Communique from an Absent Future (was Re: Information on student protests)

I haven't put the rest up yet, but I may, someday, in my idleness. :-) Until then, you can find them by reading emails or other things I have posted publicly:
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=site%3Alistcultures.org%2Fpipermail%2Fp2presearch_listcultures.org+fernhout
    http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22paul+fernhout%22+slashdot
    http://www.google.com/search?q=%22paul+fernhout%22
    http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=kfsoft+fernhout
    http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&q=pdfernhout%40kurtz-fernhout.com

The first essays are about education in part because that is what I have been doing for years, educating both myself and others about these "powerful ideas". Plus most people in the world might enjoy seeing the flagship of global capitalism run into an iceberg. :-) As long as there are stylish lifeboats for all.

I have worked on-and-off towards a project now called Open Source Communities Organizing Manufacturing Knowledge (OSCOMAK) as well as related ideas:
    http://www.oscomak.net/
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf
    http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

I would like to implement that on a Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop I am slowly working towards:
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

The Pointrel System is an RDF-like triple store implemented on the Java/JVM platform, supporting related social semantic desktop applications to create, use, exchange, and organize informational resources for a reasonably joyful and secure world.

I am concerned about how our society can transition from a scarcity-oriented one to a post-scarcity one in a non-violent way that brings abundance for all globally. One major thing I am concerned about is post-scarcity technology (like nuclear, biotech, nanotech, robotics, AI, communications, bureaucracy) wielded by people still focused on scarcity issues.

I have been programming for three decades, which generally has been how I have earned my living. In the 1980s, I became more interested in ecological issues, in part through interacting with people in a local Unitarian Universalist Social Concerns Committee in Princeton, NJ. I was program administrator for the Natural Organic Farmers Association of New Jersey for one season, and did other organic agriculture related things (volunteered at an organic farm, worked as a cashier at an organic foods store). That non-profit work led to writing a (free) garden simulator to help people better learn to grow their own food. http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ That was a labor of love by my wife and I, and beyond prompting me to go to graduate school in Ecology and Evolution (where my wife and I met), it took over six person years to complete. It could still be vastly improved. Working on our own, we only scratched the surface of what is possible.

Here is something I posted to the Project Virgle mailing list that in part touches on the issue of Google's identity as a scarcity vs. post-scarcity organization:
* A Rant on Financial Obesity And Project Virgle and an Ironic Disclosure :-)

The ironic disclosure in the essay above on "financial obesity" is that in the process of trying to dig ourselves out of the vast amount of money we borrowed for living expenses to finish our free garden simulator project (we did it, but it took years of working for IBM Research and others afterwards), I helped my wife develop decision support tools to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. This included supporting business decision makers, non-profit decision makers, as well as national security analysts for multiple governments.

Yes, some of *those* people -- who are not all bad, even if they are often caught up in systems that feel beyond their control (including advising uncurious people like the past president, where you have ten minutes in a limousine to explain the entire history of the Middle East and why invading Iraq is a *really* bad idea, let alone moving onto Syria and Iran etc. afterwards). How do you get an idea into the thick skull of someone who believes in something like this:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil
Still, yes, those organizations are often involved in bad things:
    http://www.betterworldlinks.org/index.php?cat=3730
But helping prevent more of that was part of the whole point (at least on our side).

Frankly, most government staff are bureaucrats sincerely interested in doing a good job to make the world a better, happier, safer, more abundant place (as they see it, which can be from a narrow perspective, thus the point of our work, on multiple levels). We tried to find a path that supported both national security and mutual intrinsic global security, through a process of constructive engagement, helping decision makers see the world from a bigger point of view. Not easy at all. And the potential to be a real ethical quagmire. And sadly, that can leave us with few friends, as we could be seen as
"tree hugging info hippies" by the rightist war-leaning bureaucrats, and seen as "compromising-traitors-to-the-cause" by the leftist anti-war advocates. And even I can wonder how much we were making a difference and how much we were being used. It's hard to transcend a political system that makes little sense anymore in an age of abundance, where both left and right are two sides of a coin, a coin that is of less and less value as money (and war that springs from the profit-motive) becomes slowly obsolete, yet all the time still living in a crumbling economic system while you have to make a living. Somebody should make a game about that. :-) Basically, our lives. :-)

A favorite related quote from Manuel DeLanda is from: "Meshworks, Hierarchies, and Interfaces"

"To make things worse, the solution to this is not simply to begin adding meshwork components to the mix. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to make hierarchies into villains and meshworks into heroes, not only because, as I said, they are constantly turning into one another, but because in real life we find only mixtures and hybrids, and the properties of these cannot be established through theory alone but demand concrete experimentation. Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible. On the other hand, the mere presence of increased heterogeneity is no guarantee that a better state for society has been achieved. After all, the territory occupied by former Yugoslavia is more heterogeneous now than it was ten years ago, but the lack of uniformity at one level simply hides an increase of homogeneity at the level of the warring ethnic communities. But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of reality itself seems to call for. To paraphrase Deleuze and Guattari, never believe that a meshwork will suffice to save us."

My wife had been developing a free and open source version of related software here:
    http://www.rakontu.org/
It is called Rakontu ("tell a story" in Esperanto) to help communities (and organizations, groups, families) share and work with raw stories of personal experience for mutual understanding, conflict resolution and decision support. But, like everything, especially everything new, it is not perfect, and she doesn't have infinite resources to rework it. So, she wrote a blog post suggesting people at least Steal these ideas: :-)

I spent part of last year building an open-source web application for story sharing and sensemaking in small groups. It's called Rakontu. This was a dream that began in 1999 (when I first started working in organizational and community narrative) and has been growing ever since. I used up years of savings to do it, and I was able to build far less than I would like to build someday, but I had a grand time and I'm glad I did it. I wrapped up the project about a month ago and posted an excerpt from a lessons-learned document for the project.

The ironic disclosure also relates to my comments on slashdot (August 2010):
"The need for open source sensemaking tools (Score:5, Interesting)"
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1746980&cid=33177866

I'm slowly making some related efforts with the Pointrel System, to try to integrate her ideas and others (like about structured arguments). We had discussed her using the Pointrel System for Rakontu when she started (which was, as usual, a work-in-progress), but decided that Google App engine would be a more widespread and well-supported platform for Rakontu (including providing free hosting). I instead worked independently on an evolutionary music application for the Android called Musical Phrases. That turned out to be a bit of a mistake for a few strategic reasons, including lack of synergy and lots of frustrations with a work-in-progress Google App Engine (though App Engine seems to have improved lately). At the moment, for want of a better name, I'm calling the combined system "Twirlip". While I like the evolutionary music ideas (similar in some way to PlantStudio), I can see my interests are more in creating (and using) text-heavy information management tools bordering on collective AI, and always have been. Plus, I remain really conflicted about the notion of having a paid Android app (even if I have promised to put the source under the GPL three years after each version is released.) At the time, it did not seem like services and such related to the Pointrel System itself might have much of a revenue stream (as our non-basic-income fiat-dollar economy collapses. :-) But, now I can see that there may be something there, in terms of gaining support for such open sensemaking tools. As I wrote in that slashdot thread:

As with that notion of "mutual security", the US intelligence community needs to look beyond seeing an intelligence tool as just something proprietary that gives a "friendly" analyst some advantage over an "unfriendly" analyst. Instead, the intelligence community could begin to see the potential for a free and open source intelligence tool as a way to promote "friendship" across the planet by dispelling some of the gloom of "want and ignorance" (see the scene in "A Christmas Carol" with Scrooge and a Christmas Spirit) that we still have all too much of around the planet. So, beyond supporting legitimate US intelligence needs (useful with their own closed sources of data), supporting a free and open source intelligence tool (and related open datasets) could become a strategic part of US (or other nation's) "diplomacy" and constructive outreach.

What I see happening today isn't even really the failure of global capitalism (focused on creating and managing scarcity) so much as the transcendence to a new society (focused on creating universal abundance). A society where *everybody* (apparent slacker or not) gets as a right of birth at least the frugal basics of fresh air, clean water, organic food, quality shelter, 3D printing, health care, internet access, and education, and yet also still has a song in their heart unlike, say, living in the old gray USSR (and hopefully love in their family, too; see: :-)
      "All I Really Need" by Raffi
      http://www.last.fm/music/Raffi/_/All+I+Really+Need
That's quite a challenge, obviously, but it is happening; the only issue IMHO is how we as a community decides to relate to that trend. As I see it, we are in the end game of global-capitalism-as-we-know-it, if only due to 3D printing.

This all suggests that our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially ones following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. This site is put up towards that end, changing our thinking, through helping change our collective mythology, especially in the non-profit sector.

For more details on how recognizing this irony may help us transcend militarism, see my comments here:
* Recognizing irony is key to transcending militarism

And I recognize that is an idea it is going to take the CIA, NSA, and the rest of all those three letter agencies a while to get used to, to be hopeful, since our lives rest in the interplay of various factions in such agencies. :-) CNC Machinist job related to custom bicycles & CIA version & comments

These changes in thinking may be big sometimes, and they may be small sometimes. For example, here is an essay and book review about the "The War Play Dilemma" showing how this issue of how we address conflicts is woven into our parenting and play.

More that anyone, I need to thank my wife of more that fifteen years (Cynthia Kurtz) for helping make me a better person by putting books and ideas in my way (like Zinn or Loewen or many others), and also for her boundless patience and generosity in giving me time to write all this.

More about me: Around 1998, my wife and I released three pieces of educational software which are still available at our original web site. You can also read about the history of these pieces of software. I worked for IBM Research and also at IBM's Internet Media Division as a contractor for a while afterwards. I am currently a part-time stay-at-home Dad (trading off with my wife), and I spend my idle time writing email and essays like these, as well as developing free software. I have been working on the OSCOMAK, OpenVirgle, Pointrel, and PataPata projects. I've posted a lot to the Open Manufacturing list. I also have posted stuff on sustainability, space habitats, F/OSS issues, and programming to various news groups, as well as slashdot and elsewhere. You can contact me at pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com . Including "Paul" in the body of the email will help bring it to my attention.

Oh, yeah, and I'm embarrassed to admit I have a degree from Princeton University in Psychology (until they hopefully revoke it after noticing some of the essays on this site. :-). I transferred there from SUNY Stony Brook. And I got a Masters in Biology as a consolation prize for going back to Stony Brook and taking a spin through their Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I also met my wife). Plus I've spent time before that around other academic PhD programs (including CMU CS & Robotics, NCSU Industrial Engineering, and the Princeton University CE&OR program) which I did as a volunteer or ultimately for which I did not receive a degree as one of the disciplined (enough) minds. Guess I was lucky in the end. :-) Hardly anyone back then took me seriously when I talked about self-replicating space habitats and computerized technology libraries; go figure. :-)

For some of the many sources of inspiration in my life, see: http://www.oscomak.net/giving_thanks.html

--Paul D. Fernhout

Twitter: pdfernhout
YouTube: pdfernhout
Commercial: http://www.artificialscarcity.com/ :-)

Copyright 2008, 2009, 2010 Paul D. Fernhout

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    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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Since most of the stuff here represents my opinions, it might take some rewriting to make them yours :-) or to make them into something more abstract.

Last update: August 26, 2010