I wrote a reply on H+ Magazine for some reason, see below:<br><br><a href="http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/02/24/open-source-party-2-0-liberty-democracy-transparency/">http://hplusmagazine.com/2011/02/24/open-source-party-2-0-liberty-democracy-transparency/</a><br>
<br>"""<br><h3><span>One</span> Comment</h3>
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Submitted by <span class="fn n"><a href="http://heybryan.org/" rel="external nofollow" class="url url">kanzure</a></span> on February 24, 2011 at 3:42 am.<span class="meta-sep"></span> <span class="edit-link"><a class="comment-edit-link" href="http://hplusmagazine.com/wp-admin/comment.php?action=editcomment&c=15673" title="Edit comment"></a></span> </div>
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<p>The
way I see it, open source paints a larger trend, not one of mere
transparency in our current politics, but rather a complete
re-envisioning of society entirely.</p>
<p>This is why we have individuals like Patri Friedman (<a href="http://seasteading.org/" rel="nofollow">Seasteading Institute</a>)
working on a “startups of governments” framework. Transhumanists have
known Patri for some time now. He was recently re-elected to the board
of Humanity+ and has presented at these conferences before. His
borrowed concept is to make land out on the high seas available to
“entrepreneurial governments”. What would an entirely open source
seasteading distribution look like? There’s been no doubt that Debian
and Ubuntu have been huge forces in the free software world– will
Seasteading Institute be as influential in development?</p>
<p>This is also why we have Marcin Jakubowski (<a href="http://openfarmtech.org/" rel="nofollow">Factor E Farm</a>)
working on the global village construction set. He’s creating the
Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high
performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY
fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to
build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. Holy crap, mount
that on Patri’s friggin’ seasteading platform. Marcin presented at H+
Summit 2009 in Irvine, California. His farm out in Missourri has sort
of been like a Zeitgeist or Venus Project for people who have an urge
to get down to business. He’ll be presenting at TED sometime this year.
And he really, really deserves his TED talk.</p>
<p>This is why we have Adrian Bowyer (University of Bath) working on <a href="http://reprap.org/" rel="nofollow">RepRap</a>,
an open-source 3D printer that hopes to one day make all of its own
components. It’s not really just Adrian now, but thousands of
developers and hundreds of repraps and derivatives, even businesses
like Makerbot Industries and MakerGear. This technology has ignited
global, open development. Humanity+ (this blog) thinks that open
technology development has tremendous acceleration benefits, especially
in <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing" rel="nofollow">open manufacturing</a>. I helped organize the Gada Prizes at Humanity+ including the just-recently-announced <a href="http://gadaprize.org/" rel="nofollow">Grand RepRap Prize</a>.. and there’s $80,000 at stake.</p>
<p>This is why Robert Freitas (<a href="http://imm.org/" rel="nofollow">Institute for Molecular Machinery</a>) has provided hundreds of hours of research in his book <a href="http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm" rel="nofollow">Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines</a>. For many of the reprappers it (and <a href="http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/" rel="nofollow">Advanced Automation for Space Missions</a>) has been a guiding star in both mechanical devices but also <a href="http://diyhpl.us/cgit/nanoengineer" rel="nofollow">nanotech</a>. I flip through these almost daily now.</p>
<p>Christopher Kelty once published an interesting seed of an idea
about recursive republics- societies that continuously use their
technologies to update their mandate in a giant feedback loop. At
least, that’s the thought he came to after chronicling the <a href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7707585592627775409#" rel="nofollow">historical trends in the free software movement</a> ... er, which isn't his video.<br>
</p>
<p>((On a related note, it’s always amused me how Chris Peterson @ <a href="http://foresight.org/" rel="nofollow">Foresight Institute</a> was more involved in <a href="http://opensource.org/" rel="nofollow">open source</a>
back in the late 90s. There’s a few edge cases in the transhumanist
communities, but in general, it seems that the futurists missed out on
open source. To be fair, open source isn’t easy to make. It’s hard
work. But nobody is going to hand-deliver you the future. <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1040581998/biocurious-a-hackerspace-for-biotech-the-community" rel="nofollow">Biocurious</a>
(the open source, DIY biohacking hackerspace) is ran by a few
transhumanists, so the future is looking bright for the Bay Area
transhumanists.))</p>
<p>The future of “open source politics” is going to be about technology
development. Don’t like your current government? You’ll get to spawn
off a spore and take a recent version of technological civilization
with you- for yourself, your family and your friends to go with you, if
they think your proposed system is worth leaving (just don’t
“fork-and-forget”! ah, GitHub’s one weakness). That’s the power of open
source. But there seems to be a chasm or disconnect between the events
and trends I’ve outlined... and the article’s take on Open Source, which is definitely crippling in dangerous ways.<br></p>
<p>BTW: I’ll be in the Bay Area at the end of the month in case anyone wants to hang out or, you know, feed me.</p>
<p><b>Edit</b>: Also, there’s a BIL meetup in Long Beach, California on
March 3rd-5th. Joseph Jackson has been recruiting lots of DIYbio folks
to talk about directed evolution, EEG, open source hardware projects, a
mass spectrometer project, etc. etc. (<a href="http://bilconference.pbworks.com/" rel="nofollow">deets</a>)</p>
<p>- Bryan<br>
<a href="http://heybryan.org/" rel="nofollow">http://heybryan.org/</a><br>
1 512 203 0507<br>
<a href="http://irc.freenode.net">irc.freenode.net</a> ##hplusroadmap</p>
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