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GREENHOUSE THAT DESALINATES ITS OWN WATER: A DESALINATING GREENHOUSE

Posted on September 4, 2022 by Brewster Kahle

An idea. Combine two things to solve a big problem: Solar Water Still and
Greenhouse– greenhouse that runs on salt water.

A “solar water still” is often a tent that has salt water at the base and
captures the evaporated water and drains it into a bucket.   Solar stills are
“the simplest device that are used to obtain freshwater using solar energy as
the sole energy supply”.

What if that tent were also a greenhouse, and the fresh water was used to water
the plants?  The plants could be in a raised bed that is above the pool of salt
water that was under the full floor. This inexpensive construction would be
decidedly low tech– low energy inputs, and low maintenance, but we would be
growing plants using saltwater.

Then the Desalinating Greenhouse would be a hothouse that grew plants in the
freshwater humid warm air and watered with the evaporated water. There would no
complicated reverse-osmosis desalinization system or electric energy to drive
it– just use salt water to grow freshwater vegetables.

Combine a Solar Water Still:

Solar Water Still for Desalinization

with a Greenhouse:

Generic Greenhouse that could be used as a large solar water still as well

Then we are using the sun to create the freshwater for the plants out of the
saltwater. The salt water needs to be supplied and saltier water needs to be
removed, but this is a simple pump if there is nearby salt water.

A Solar Still generates .06 gallons to .09 gallons (1/2 to 3/4 lbs) of water per
day per square foot, and the peak water use in a greenhouse is 0.3 to 0.4
gallons of water per day. So we need maybe 2-3 times more salt water pool space
than growing bed. This does not seem unusual in raised bed greenhouses.

This could be done anywhere there is salt water.  Say coastal regions, on
islands that are notoriously short of fresh water, and floated out in the open
ocean (living the seasteading dream 🙂 ).   You would need to pump the water to
the greenhouse and return the more salty water, but this is low-tech.

Seastead dream

Maybe we could grow fish in the salt water and get some aquaculture going. 
(This is not “aquaponics” since that uses the nitrogen from the fish to
fertilize the plants, but since these are salt water fix, we can not pour that
water on the plants.  A freshwater pool with fish could be a fun add-on if
things get mature.)

I bet this whole thing has been tried, as almost everything has, but maybe the
coming crisis of fresh water will propel development.   There is a paper about a
similar system but seems more complicated than it needs to be:

Complicated combination proposal— I believe we can do better

Another proposal that is a bit less complicated:

Another proposed concept

But I think we can do better. Any ideas, anyone interested in trying?

Posted in Food | 4 Comments


IMAGINING THE INTERNET: EXPLAINING OUR DIGITAL TRANSITION

Posted on January 13, 2022 by Brewster Kahle

Imagining the Internet: Explaining our Digital Transition was designed as a
google doc, so that is the best way to view it.




IMAGINING THE INTERNET: 


EXPLAINING OUR DIGITAL TRANSITION

Judy Kirpich, 1981 for VM Software

A digital wave is upon us, changing our lives, our occupations, our family
relationships, our sense of what it is to be a person. The Internet, as a
technology, is playing a large role, but what its impact is and what it will be
is little understood. I have been looking at the images people have made of the
Internet and the concepts and metaphors used to describe it in order to see how
people communicate what is happening. Largely, I have been disappointed in what
I have seen. I do not think we have the language to process what is happening in
a way that facilitates critical thinking and productive debate. While the
individual ways we have portrayed the Internet are often descriptive of what is
happening at the moment, maybe taken as a whole, or as a trajectory of
portrayals, we might be able to see where the digital wave could lead—or should
lead.

There is productive feedback between engineering and the imagination. To the
extent that we can shape the Internet, what should that shape be? We imagine a
future to engineer it, yet the products of the engineering process in turn
direct and expand our imagination of the possible. What will the Internet
become? An automated library? An indexed set of images? Video telephone calls?
An immersive game? All of these were possibilities and all have now been
realized. As users were introduced to these services, some dominant metaphors
emerged to explain the novel experience of being online. I suggest these images
are useful to track over time as it gives us insight into our evolving
understandings and desires. 

To that end, this is a timeline of metaphors and images we have made for the
Internet, an evolution of sorts. As with biological evolution, eras overlap, as
there were mammals during the time of the dinosaurs.

As a tour through history of imaginings of the Internet it might help us
understand where we are going, and more to the point, where we think we should
go. 

Personally, in 1980, I imagined an Internet eventually centered on the computer,
but useful powerful computers. Working in an artificial intelligence laboratory
led me to think that computers will be increasingly autonomous and
interconnected. To bring up these computers—in a way like offspring—I thought we
needed a large number of people to interact with them and teach them, so they
could learn from us. This in turn required that the machines be worthy of our
attention. If we got there, there would be a merging of people, computers, and
the library. 

Those were the heady days of artificial intelligence, but the computers of the
day were clunky accounting machines. So there were steps to go. A group of us
built the fastest supercomputer of the mid-1980s to help build this vision of
artificial intelligence, but even those computers could only hold dozens of
digital books in their 32 megabytes of main memory. But this was a first step in
teaching the computers by encoding books and newspapers. The goal was to have
the machine search, find patterns, and make deductions by “reading” all books. 

We wanted to bring the library to the computer, and the computer to the library.
This longer vision, was just that, an unrealized vision. Whether it will turn
out to be correct, only time would tell. Thirty-five years have now passed and
technology and society has evolved, but the future and the proposals for the
future are still unfolding.

Before starting the tour, I would like to point out an artist’s vision that
seems to have missed the mark: WAIStation I and II by Nam June Paik in 1994
which used the name of the Internet publishing system I invented, WAIS. The
sculpture is shaped to mimic a broadcast tower, but one made out of televisions
and computer parts. I do not think this represents the interactive,
participatory aspect of WAIS or the early Web of the 1990s. The vision is too
centralized in comparison to what we imagined. But, it is interesting to see how
others mapped the last generation of technology onto the emerging technologies
and how visions are often wrong. I am reminded that our future may be foretold,
but it is not inevitable.




Internet as Library

An aspirational image of the Internet came long before the Internet was built:
that of a ‘Great Library.’ The dream of a reference collection that would be
searchable and where footnotes could be instantly followed to other works. This
idea blossomed into hypertext, Wide Area Information Servers, and then into the
World Wide Web.

H. G. Wells’ collection of essays in 1936, World Brain, noted that “the time is
close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit
with his projector in his own study at his or her convenience to examine any
book, any document, in an exact replica.”





For H.G. Wells, the resulting “World Encyclopaedia” would serve a political
goal. “It might act not merely as an assembly of fact and statement, but as an
organ of adjustment and adjudication, a clearing house of misunderstandings; it
would be deliberately a synthesis, and so act as a [test] and a filter for a
very great quantity of human misapprehension. It would compel men to come to
terms with one another.” Such a resource would be comprehensive and flexible
enough to match individuals’ intellectual growth. It would foster and enable
education from the creative wonder of childhood through the technical and social
needs of adulthood. 

With such a comprehensive reference work, and the shared capacity to utilize it,
humankind could realize the dream of World Peace, even as the political and
economic engines of two world wars fast-tracked scientific progress in the name
of industrial warfare. Interestingly, 65 years later, Wikipedia (2001) would
come a long way toward realizing this vision of an encyclopedia built on the
idea that a crowdsourced consensus would emerge on every topic. 

The architect behind the U.S. government’s military research program in World
War II—most notably of the Manhattan Project—also articulated the coming of
searchable, comprehensive, and affordable knowledge. In a 1945 paper in The
Atlantic, Vannevar Bush (as appeared) describes the “Memex,” a desk-sized
contraption that was based on indexed microfilm. In such a system, “the
Encyclopaedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox” and “a
library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk.” In
addition to the alphabetic and chronological indexing of a typical library, the
Memex would enable associative indexing between documents through annotations
and notes, thus better approximating the working of the mind. 

The Memex was not, however, connected to computing power or network concepts1.
As a tool, it was analog. 

The great library idea was primed to go digital. Ted Nelson in the 1960s picked
up on the idea of interlinked texts that began with the idea of living footnotes
that illustrate the history and interconnections of ideas within our written
canon. These concepts were beautifully illustrated in Literary Machines, as
Nelson wove a narrative of the backend system that would support the future
information networks he knew were coming. 



His “2020 Vision” of 1980 predicted 

> “…there will be hundreds of thousands of file servers—machines storing and
> dishing out materials. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous
> users, able to read from billions of stored documents, with trillions of links
> among them.
> 
> All of this is manifest destiny. There is no point in arguing it; either you
> see it or you don’t. Many readers will choke and fling down the book, only to
> have the thought gnaw gradually until they see its inevitability.
> 
> The system proposed in this book may or may not work technically on such a
> scale. But some system of this type will, and can bring a new Golden Age to
> the human mind.”

These images of a global interconnected library shaped the early Internet
technologies of WAIS and the Web, even to the point where the inventor of the
Web, Tim Berners-Lee called files of text “pages,” and leveraged some of the
ideas of Ted Nelson’s hypertext in the development of links. 

There have been many distinct projects to later realize this vision of a library
on the Internet. The Google project, when at Stanford, started as a digital
library project and was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Digital
Libraries Initiative in 1994.

In this context, the Internet Archive, founded in 1996, was built to be both the
library of the Internet and the library on the Internet. Its mission—Universal
Access to All Knowledge—embodies the long defended democratic ideal of the
public library as made possible by the networked reach of the Internet which
allows the Archive to serve as a local library for users with a browser
anywhere. The symbol of the Internet Archive is the Greek parthenon, with its
reference to the Greek/Egyptian Library of Alexandria.



As the Internet has been adopted as a primary reference source for users
everywhere, as well as a primary publication platform, there has been a
questioning of preservation of ‘born digital’ materials.



Internet Archive artist in residence Jeremiah Jenkins wrestled with this concept
of digital permanence in his piece “Browser History” (2017). In this work, he
cast web pages into clay to make “cuneiform web pages.” He has buried several
copies in different deserts around California. He asked “how to preserve the
internet for a very distant future? The oldest clay tablets have survived more
than 5000 years.” 

If the library metaphor was as aspiration of the information that would soon be
available at our fingertips, the early imagined model of service delivery was
more limited. It was static, desk-bound, caught in a single computer, or tied to
a central, vetted repository. As the Internet developed, however, we began to
see collective knowledge as more networked. 


PORTRAYING THE NETWORK

The ARPANet, the first network to implement the TCP/IP protocol, took “net,”
derived from network, as its name. Early schematics illustrated the known nodes
and the connections that bridged them. Because there were so few nodes, this was
relatively simple. But it showed the new internet as a communications service
connecting specific end users. 



The network metaphor worked so long as all the nodes were known. But as more
people joined and new services became available, the models of the Internet had
to become more abstract. As the Internet started to be used outside of academia
in the early 1990s, many images of the Internet were basic and functional, but
helped bring a wider public to understand the technologies. Illustrations from
New York Times describing WAIS in 1991 show how multiple sources of information
held at multiple points could be tapped through a national network. The network
itself, however, was a black box. 



These services began to interact with one another in an ecosystem, and what took
place within the national network began to be communicated. Writers, such as
John Quarterman in his 1989 book “The Matrix” chose a matrix model for
communicating the structure of the Internet. Others chose to list the services
and demonstrate their relationships with simple arrows. Other diagrams grew to
be cellular in their look, depicted on paper as colorful collages. NSCA Mosaic,
which provided unified access to a set of Internet services including Web, WAIS,
Gopher, and FTP, earned its name as a literal mosaic of integrated services.

2



As that ecosystem developed, both of networks and services, users began to
experience a more integrated online world. But where was that experience taking
place? As a 1994 network MCI commercial described, the Internet and its
information “will not go from here to there. There will be no more there. We
will all only be here.”



But where was here? McLuhan predicted a “global village,” but in the early 1990s
the Internet was being described as a mysterious space.



Internet as Cyberspace

“Cyberspace” is a metaphor for the Internet made popular in the early 1990s.
This definition from a 1993 proto-Wikipedia says “The word ‘cyberspace’ was
coined by the science fiction author William Gibson, when he sought a name to
describe his vision of a global computer network, linking all people, machines
and sources of information in the world, and through which one could move or
‘navigate’ as through a virtual space.” 

This captured the idea of a place or space, but of a different kind. Bruce
Sterling in 1992 described our first experiences of cyberspace as tied to the
telephone. “Cyberspace is the `place` where a telephone conversation appears to
occur. Not inside your actual phone, the plastic device on your desk. Not inside
the other person’s phone, in some other city. _The_place_between_ the phones.
The indefinite place _out_there_, where the two of you, human beings, actually
meet and communicate.” 

John Perry Barlow, before 1992, said “Cyberspace is where your money is.” 

This cyberspace was markedly different from the networked metaphor. The emphasis
was no longer on the nodes, but on what happened between them. Cyberspace was
distant, not of this world. It was big, star-studded, traced and defined by the
movement of ideas and information. 

Just as in the original 1960s Star Trek ventured into “Space, the final
frontier,” cyberspace was to be explored by brave, cutting-edge adventurers who
could log in. 

Carl Malamud wrote a book in 1993 titled “Exploring the Internet: a Technical
Travelogue.” The book was researched through interviews around the globe with
the engineers and thinkers actively building the Internet. I am proud to be in
it. The book captured the sense of adventure inherent in discovering and
building a new place. 



After the first major Internet interface program, NSCA Mosaic, came to be called
a “browser,” the next browsers embodied this metaphor of exploration directly.
Netscape Navigator’s logo (1995) placed the user at the helm of a ship steering
among the stars. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (1995) holds the ‘explorer’ word
in its name, and Apple’s Safari (2003) also signifies adventure and has a logo
of a compass.



Cyberspace was increasingly populated with explorers, laypeople, and the now
native hackers who viewed it as their primary intellectual home. In the 1996
Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, again from John Perry Barlow, he
warns “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel,
I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you
of the past to leave us alone.” 

Made visual, there were many maps made of “Cyberspace” as the interconnections
were visualized in artistic renderings. A swirl of relationships was colored and
mapped, but unlike the early network schematics, the emphasis of these
renderings was on the interstitial place between the nodes, the new virtual
place where everything happened. 

The peacock map posters became a staple of classroom and dorm walls. The
earliest of these renderings, from 2000, is a visual not unlike the early
universe just after the Big Bang. Matter is not yet organized. The 2003 Opte
Project, digital artist Barrett Lyon’s open source project to visualize the
metaphysical space of the Internet, shows the formation of large scale structure
within the web as it expanded. The artwork was later featured at MoMA. 



That structural formation was further depicted by the 2016 Internet Archive
Webverse project, an interactive version of cyberspace rendered by Owen Cornec
and Vinay Goel for the Archive’s 20th anniversary. In this portrayal, the
universe is made up of websites as stars, and the distance between the stars,
was made by the number of interconnecting links. This visualization highlighted
“galaxies” centered around Yahoo, or Facebook, or the somewhat separate
constellations of Chinese and Russian websites. Cyberspace, and our
understanding of it, has become vast but somewhat structured.


SETTLING THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER

At about the same time as the “cyberspace” image, there was a related, but
interestingly different metaphor for the Internet as the “Frontier,” as located
on land, albeit wild land. The Internet was now real estate, and we were
homesteading it. The technical language of the components also changed. WAIS and
FTP had “servers”, while the World Wide Web had “sites.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation was founded in 1990 to defend the civil
liberties of those participating in, working on, and communicating in the new
digital media landscape.

On the frontier, rules were being made by these new communities. Just as
individuals had long trudged toward physical frontiers—from the Western United
States to Australia and the Russian far east—to build a new life, to recreate
their identity, to realize a utopia, or otherwise find fresh inspiration from
the tradition-bound cloth of the old world, there was a mass migration to the
Internet, provoking many experiments in governance. 

Here there was a tension, always, between the utopians—the ‘open world’—who
wanted to build a new form of community online, the resource capitalists who
wanted control of the metaphorical real estate to support their businesses, and
the less nimble governments. The frontier was where these actors interacted as
the norms, law, and values of the Internet were first forged. 

As example, ‘moderators’ of chat rooms imposed order on those within their
‘boards’ and ‘rooms’. Services evolved rules of behavior with takedown and other
policies enforced by ‘admins.’ 

Anonymity added a key dimension to this sense of freedom, as individuals could
choose an identity distinct from their day-to-day identity. They could choose
more than one identity even, if they liked. Roles were fluid and experimental
and, at first, separate from the flesh and blood person “IRL” (In Real Life). As
a famous New Yorker cartoon from 1993 put it: “On the Internet, nobody knows
you’re a dog.”



But as the frontier was populated, the real estate was fenced off and guarded.
This process encouraged a remarkable amount of investment in the Internet, both
from the private and public sectors. 

As a landed metaphor for interconnection, Al Gore popularized the concept of an
‘Information Superhighway’ to encourage a network that was not privately owned
as part of his legislative push for the High Performance Computing Act of 1991.
In doing so, he codified what was to become another long-running metaphor for
the Internet. 

The superhighway would connect people and businesses through a virtual road
system, open to carry any information for anyone. The language of highway
infrastructure translated well in Washington, D.C., as governments were then
comfortable with their role in financing and building basic infrastructure. This
superhighway was never realized in whole due to intense lobbying by cable
companies and other entrenched private interests. 



This metaphor, as the Stan Eales3 cartoon depicts, shows how conception of the
Internet had, for the moment, forgotten its roots as a digital library, with the
curation and publications standards traditionally associated with print
authorship and canonical knowledge. The types of information traveling along the
superhighway would be a much broader swath of human experience. 

The language of roads became increasingly useful in proposing the role for cable
companies and Internet Service Providers in this new land. As their power
consolidated, the metaphor has easily lead to conversations of possible “speed
limits,” “tolls” “on and off ramps,” and “fastslow lanes.” 

With the metaphor of the Internet as real estate which could be settled,
propertized, built upon, and fenced off, Larry Lessig coined the term “Creative
Commons” in 2001 to represent a form of open space, or park, for parts of our
virtual world.



Surfing the Web

“Surfing” the World Wide Web, a common expression by the mid-1990s, is not a
landscape image but rather an expression of what it feels like to use the
Internet. In this image4, the Internet and World Wide Web were not places to
explore, but rather a sport you played. The Internet was an activity, an
experience.



The phrase was derived from ‘channel surfing’ on cable television, but by the
year 2000, use of the phrase to describe using the web overtook its television
use. 

A key attribute to this metaphor, however, is what it indicated about the ratio
of reading and writing on the Internet for most people. Although publishing
systems existed for non-technical users—the term “blog” entered the lexicon in
1997, LiveJournal was launched in 1999—the term surfing represented the average
user as shredding sportily atop the information wave below, rather than
contributing to that wave or living in the ocean. Authorship was still more
formal, and most users were consumers rather than participants in the creation
of knowledge or content. Moreover, surfing was not a continuous activity. Just
like surfers on the California coast, users would surf the web, hang up their
digital wetsuits, and return to everyday life.

But another digital wave was on its way that would significantly shift the way
the Internet was imagined. As the Google Ngram viewer shows, the surfing
metaphor peaked in 2004 just after the rapid rise of first Friendster, then
MySpace and the founding of Facebook in 2004. As social networks became popular,
the experience of being online was about to become immersive. New metaphors were
needed, lest we drown.



The Facebook

In Star Trek, the Next Generation, a new alien being was introduced— “the borg.”
The borg was made up of people augmented by technology that networked them into
a single large being. This global brain was not a hero, but a villain. The borg
worked as a collective hive-mind, augmented with ‘artificial intelligence.’
While separate beings, there was no individuality amongst the members of the
borg. From the cradle, the borg’s young were always connected via implants glued
to the side of their head. A famous line from the borg is ‘resistance is
futile.’ The interconnected world could not be escaped.



Cell phones, which became widely used in the 1990s, allowed people to stay
connected. First they were connected with voice and text, and in the 2000s with
pictures, video, the Internet, and social sites5. With the wide adoption of cell
phones, the expected response time to a message shrunk considerably. In fact,
for younger people the social expectation was that one had to be responsive
immediately. To meet this expectation one had to stay connected. One had to be
always on. 

Furthermore, by moving to cell-phones the Internet services like Facebook were
often no longer anonymous. Your real-world identity was now exposed and
interconnected; reputations online and off were now tied.



Increasingly, people became “glued to their phones” as the apps incorporated
news, camera, and chat functions and the phones became widespread.

It may be a stretch to relate Star Trek’s ‘borg’ and the rise of the always-on
cell-phone Facebook feed, but the timing aligns. While introduced in 1989 the
borg became, by TV guide’s 2013 user poll the 4th favorite villain, possibly
reflecting a level of anxiety during that period of loss of identity through
always-on interconnection of the rise of the smartphone at the same time.

As this always-connected reality became commonplace some artist’s depictions
shifted from being negative and borg-like to becoming matter-the-fact. In
Sherlock (2011) and Nerve (2016), talk bubbles and apps became visible parts of
movies. The Internet, in these depictions, has come to surround us, to augment
us.



As voice commands with our phones started with Siri in 2010, then acquired by
Apple and now always-listening home assistants (Amazon’s Alexa in 2014, and
Google’s Home in 2016), people are interacting with the Internet in more
intimate ways. Movie depictions of assistant robots such a Real Human (original
Swedish version 2012) are coming to be more day-to-day than the threatening
“others” of Blade Runner (1982/2017) or Westworld (1973/2016).


ALGORITHMS

In the 2000s, the Internet services developed into “platforms” such as Facebook
(2004), YouTube (2005), Instagram (2010), Twitter (2006) that were multifaceted
digital environments optimized by algorithms designed to hook users through
individually tailored content. Now, some fear these algorithms are running
us—telling us what to do, what to think, who to vote for. 



A brilliant video from 2004 predicted the rise of algorithms in creating
personalized information ‘bubbles’ in a fictional future system called EPIC
that, by 2014, has taken over the media landscape. It is worth quoting at
length:

> “EPIC produces a custom content package for each user using his choices, his
> consumption habits, his interests, his demographics, his social network, to
> shape the product. 
> 
> A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up. People who sell their
> ability to connect, filter, and prioritize the contents of EPIC. We all
> subscribe to many editors. EPIC allows us to mix and match their choices
> however we like. 
> 
> At its best, edited for the savviest readers, EPIC is a summary of the world
> deeper, broader, and more nuanced than anything ever available before. 
> 
> But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia,
> much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational. But EPIC is
> what we wanted. It is what we chose. And it’s commercial success preempted any
> discussions of media and democracy, or journalistic ethics.”

This video, as a piece of art, utilized newsreel-style matter-of-factness to
describe one potential future that viewers in 2018 may find eerily familiar. As
traditional journalism was swamped by a wave of free, or seemingly free, content
from blogs—often less well researched, more opinion-driven, and less guided by
journalistic ethics—the way consumers got news shifted markedly. The U.S.
presidential election of 2016 supercharged this conversation as fake news,
hyper-targeted ad buys, and big data analytics were applied to selling
candidates and stories. While this prescient video from 2004 could have informed
the evolution of technology, I fear it did not in this case. The video itself
has not been widely cited since its introduction in 2004.

The power of algorithms to control us is featured prominently in the previously
mentioned movie Nerve (2016). In it, teenagers are lead by their phone apps into
dangerous situations. The interesting twist in this depiction is the phone apps
are completely driven by other users and crowd-written software algorithms. In
such a world, who can be held responsible? The individual is hostage to the whim
of the crowd. We, the collective, are the ones driving this based on a mixture
of technology, networks, and anonymity. 



Feeling “gamed” is spreading. Uber and Lyft have automated surge pricing when
their analytics identify a supply and demand imbalance in a particular area.
When a threshold is tripped, their programs automatically incentivize drivers to
go to certain areas or drive at certain times of day. These algorithms force
their drivers into characters in the form of a game. I asked a driver, point
blank, as he talked about getting some reward for working an extra hour, if he
felt ‘gamed’ or ‘played.’ 

He answered, ‘absolutely.’

Consciousness of being surveilled by companies and governments is growing,
sometimes to improve the “user experience” and sometimes to control a
population. This growth of mass surveillance was not always obvious. In 1985,
David Byrne sang “In the future there will be so much going on that no one will
be able to keep track of it.” He was right that no person could keep track of
it, but machines can, and increasingly are, keeping track. Building a profile of
billions of people is not a difficult task at this point for companies or
governments. 

Rendering the effects and possibilities of Big Data and algorithmic “deep
learning” in artworks and language that most people can understand is in early
stages of evolution.


MACHINES VIEWING US

Where is this going? What can we say about what comes next? 

Trends that are emerging include decentralized systems such as bitcoin and the
decentralized web, immersive virtual reality games, and augmented reality.
Creative imaginings are starting to emerge.

One of these emerging trends that I would like to highlight is the switch from
imagining what the Internet looks like to people, to how people look to the
emergent machines. 

In this depiction, the Internet is not being explored by us, not being
controlled or surfed by us, or even controlling us, but rather the machines,
that make up the Internet, exist on their own and learn from the world. This is
a view that while the Internet needed us to bring it up, it will soon not need
us, and will, in fact, outgrow us.

Trevor Paglen created an eerie and beautiful piece with the Kronos Quartet in
2017 in which while the audience watched the string quartet perform, the
machines did as well. The machine started by figuring out where the performers
were and what they were doing. As the concert progressed, the machine decomposed
the images it saw and analyzed them in real time. Computers interpreted the
images, using algorithms to figure out if the performers were sad, what they
were holding. Displays projected the machine’s interpretations of what was
happening, so that the humans in the audience could see what the machine was
thinking and how it reacted to the musicians on-stage. 

Wired Magazine called it unsettling and indeed it was. For perhaps the first
time, a human audience sat alongside an artificial intelligence audience, both
interpreting a string quartet performance. Sitting side by side with the
machine, the humans were no longer in control, but nor was the computer trying
to control them. The computer, in this artwork, is there to watch and enjoy the
performance.

Other artworks depict what the Internet has come to think of people. Notably in
the Matrix (1999) where the networked Artificial Intelligence, Mr Smith, says:

>  “I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. 
> 
> It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re
> not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a
> natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not.
> You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource
> is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area.
> There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. 
> 
> Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this
> planet. You’re a plague, and we are the cure.”

The AI, in this rendering, calls us out for our moral shortcomings. 

Or in 2001, a Space Odyssey (1968) depicts briefly how we might appear to HAL as
the crew is confronting HAL about an error. It is a fish-eyed view of us, but
one that engages perceptively the crew as they go about their task. 

A much longer scene at the end of the movie is a shot of the spaceman when he
finds himself is in a sterile white room, presumably on Jupiter. This room might
be thought of as a kind of cage in a zoo, where the spaceman is given what he
needs to live but is contained. One shot in the movie has a view looking down on
the man and the room from a surveillance camera-like angle. Humans ending up in
a zoo tended by a higher being is certainly one view of how the Internet and
Artificial Intelligence can evolve.

Danny Hillis, my mentor, as we were working at Thinking Machines in the early
1980s often said, “We want to build a machine that will be proud of us.” We were
bringing up the next generation. In my conversations with Carl Feynman at that
time, we thought if we were going to be bringing up our new overlords, they
should at least read good books. While not of the Internet yet, the computer we
were building did share the recognition of the importance of the network, of the
interconnections, of the links. The machine we were building was called the
“Connection Machine” where the connections between the processors were seen as
important as the tens of thousands of processors themselves. The difference
between this machine and the Internet was that these processors were not yet
spread around the world.

This imagining of a machine’s view of us, a machine that is distinct from us, a
machine that has evolved beyond us, brings me around to my original ill-formed
vision in 1980 of what I could help make the Internet become: a network of
people, the library, and machines. I did not see it in a light glorifying or
terrifying, but rather as a major inevitable project that could be built well or
badly, and I could help build it well. In that way it could be a major positive
step forward. 

Will this future unfold or be some other future altogether, we do not know. But
technology reflects those that build it and those that imagine it, and so far
that is still us.

1 A later book by Noah Wardrip-Fruin brought together many of these early
imaginings of medium to come and was summarized in the introduction, Janet H.
Murray: “The engineers draw upon cultural metaphors and analogies to express the
magnitude of the change, the shape of the as yet unseen medium. The storytellers
and theorists build imaginary landscapes of information, writing stories and
essays that later become blueprints for actual systems… Gradually, the braided
collaboration gives rise to an emergent form, a new medium of human expression.”

2 Photo links left, middle, right.

3 Cartoonist, Stan Eales replied to our inquiry, “In response to your question
about how I came to draw the cartoon… well, I suppose I wanted to show that the
internet has superseded traditional knowledge, just a a superhighway/motorway/
autobahn supersedes traditional, meandering roads. While the new route may take
us places fast, the sheer speed of travel means that we will miss things along
the way. Do we risk eroding critical thinking in favour of speed and quantity of
information. But are we able to process all of the information coming at us? Is
the internet too fast; built beyond the capacities of the human brain to
assimilate and process information.

But, the cartoon can also be seen the opposite way. For those who wish to get
off the superhighway, the traditional, old fashioned means of getting
information are still available. Despite the domination of the internet, people
still read books, they still go to the cinema, they still listen to the radio,
they still have real sex rather than virtual sex. Despite the domination of fast
food, people still make home-cooked food. There is room for everyone. Cinema
didn’t die once television was invented. The ‘information superhighway’ is just
a tool. It’s how you use it that counts. If you are a speed freak and depend on
it from getting everywhere, then you risk losing out on some of the finer points
in life.”

4 A page of many images of “surfing the web”
https://www.thehairpin.com/2011/02/people-literally-surfing-the-web/

5 The Apple iPhone was introduced in 2007, and by 2012 ‘smartphones’ dominated
more than 50% of the mobile phone market. With the iPhone came the rise of
‘applications,’ or more simply ‘apps’. The Facebook was introduced in 2004,
mobile support came in 2007, and a dedicated app in 2008 with the launch of the
Apple’s App Store for iPhone.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Imagining the Internet: Explaining our
Digital Transition


DPAYMENTS ON THE DWEB NOW POSSIBLE? MATH BREAKTHROUGH

Posted on November 16, 2020 by Brewster Kahle

One of the goals of a new World Wide Web: the Decentralized Web was to help
people make money by publishing on the web. There are approaches to this such as
Coil, but the vision in the paper has not been done. The idea was to be able to
post a file to the DWeb and then have people pay for it and then unlock it, all
without a central authority. Decentralized payments on the decentralized web.
Not only has it not been done, it may not be possible… until now (maybe).

Here is the scenario I could not figure out: Can my son make a decentralized
website for his new album where one of the songs is free, but the others cost
something? Sounds easy– you post the first song unencrypted, and the others
encrypted. Then if you put a bit of bitcoin or ether or something in a slot,
then you get a key to the encrypted files. Yes, you could then unencrypt the
files and then post them again, thus making a black market for the files, but
that is hard to avoid without DRM and that has its own problems.

An existing way to do this is to host your files on iTunes or Amazon and they
will deliver unencrypted copies to those that pay. This works, but it puts lots
of power into the hands of those websites. In fact, those companies have gotten
very rich doing this service for people.

Can we have a decentralized way to distribute keys based on some event on a
blockchain? This has been frustrating, but the answer, so far, seems to be No.
The reasoning is that in a centralized system, one would go to a website, make a
payment or prove you made a payment and the website would send you a key to
unlock the files. The website would makes sure the payment was made, and send
one and only one key based on that payment to the purchaser. Ok, some of these
pieces are understandable how to do in a decentralized way. It is possible to
post the payment on a blockchain with a public key of the purchaser, so the
vendor could the use the public key to protect the decoding key so only the
purchaser gets it. So far so good. But, there has to be a vendor that can issue
the key, therefore the vendor has a secret that should only be shared or used
when issuing a key.

This works when the secret is in one place. But if the code for issuing the key
were on a contract-based blockchain such as Ethereum, then anyone could see the
code and get the key without paying. You could even have the secret in several
places, and ones that are distinct from vendor– think escrow agents, but that is
klunky work-around.

So you say, what is the breakthrough? Well, I read a piece about some
cryptologists having discovered the “Crown Jewel of Cryptography” that may make
this possible.

> For example, suppose you have a program that carries out some task related to
> your bank account, but the program contains your unencrypted password, making
> you vulnerable to anyone who gets hold of the program.
> 
> Computer Scientists Achieve ‘Crown Jewel’ of Cryptography

Their system allows that program to be distributed with an encrypted version of
the password to be used in all ways like the one with the unencrypted password,
thus solving the problem.

To put in the our example: the program that issues keys to the music files can
be distributed to anyone and they can not find the internal secret because it is
encrypted. But, you say, then anyone can run that program and generate the keys
to unlock the music files so people do not need to pay. But this is where I hope
the contract systems in blockchain systems comes in (but I could have this
wrong). I am hoping that the program also has a test to check for an event
happening on the blockchain, such as a payment is made, then when the program is
triggered and proceeds to encrypt the music decoder key with the purchaser’s
public key. The purchaser can then use their private key to unlock the message
and get the music decoding key. The purchaser rocks out to the music and my son
gets paid.

I do need help in understanding if this if contracts can do this: when an event
happens on the block chain, then a piece of code is triggered to run
successfully. If that event did not happen on the blockchain, then the program
would not run successfully.


If I understand these two pieces, the “Crown Jewel” and blockchain contracts,
then we can make DPayments on the DWeb work.

And that is a major step forward!

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on DPayments on the DWeb now possible?
Math breakthrough


HIRING AMERICANS IS HARD FOR DISTRIBUTED ORGANIZATIONS: HOW THE FEDERAL AND
STATE GOVERNMENTS CAN FIX IT

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Brewster Kahle

The Internet Archive has over 90 employees in the United States, but they reside
in 17 different states and even more counties. While distributed workforces are
becoming common, it has become so painful to deal with the federal, state, and
county regulations that we will soon be paying to outsource the headache.  We
are not the only ones straining under the burden, but there are some possible
fixes.

Hiring in Canada is easier and less expensive than in the United States, meaning
that the federal government, each state and many counties should make changes to
become competitive.  

The real reason the US and states should make changes is to make a better home
for their residents, but some will be motivated by making it a better home for
businesses.  Luckily, changes would benefit both businesses and individuals.

The rules might have made sense at a different time when companies hired many
people in one location. But they do not make sense now– now that more
organizations are becoming distributed. The non-profit organizations I work with
are struggling with this issue and many are looking to outsourcing organizations
of different flavors to deal with our governments.

The problems start with a lack of universal healthcare. If we did not put this
administrative burden on companies and nonprofits, it would greatly ease hiring
employees. It is not just the expense for the insurance– it is all the
administration, yearly rebidding, managing many plans, and across the whole
United States. Many people that do not want universal healthcare say they are
“pro-business,” but in fact it is hurting United States businesses and families.
It is hard for me to understand.

Then there are state regulations– if we want to hire a person in a new state, or
someone wants to move to another state, then we have to register to do business
there. Every state has a different unemployment rate as well as a different base
rate to be taxed on. We also have to do seemingly endless forms and audits for
workers compensation and taxes. And some counties or burroughs have their own
regulations and taxes. A national payroll service helps (which is costly, by the
way) but the screams of agony from the HR department for other administrative
tasks have been growing over the years.  We often do not hire someone because
they lived in a state where we did not already have an employee.

Then there are some bizarre regulations, like the definition of employee versus
contractor. We may want to hire someone to work a few hours, but this can be too
hard in California because of the expansive rules. This is being debated now in
the case of Uber and Lyft, but let me give a different, recent, and real
example.

I help support a five-person arts organization that pays teachers to teach
specialized crafts. Some of  these teachers work only a few hours a year. At
first they were contractors, but then one of the teachers applied for
unemployment to the state of California which then launched a disruptive
investigation and found every one of these teachers were employees in their eyes
and fined the organization tens of thousands of dollars. The level of paperwork
now required to have someone work for 2-3 hours per year is absurd. And many of
the teachers were mad because they did not think of themselves as employees nor
want to be. Lets figure out the benefit we are trying to achieve and go straight
for it rather than the catch-all system that often does not fit our current
environment.

Another bizarre regulation is that a nonprofit has to register to raise money in
each and every state if they put a donate button on a website. Each state is
bizarrely different. There are firms that outsource this registration function
which is a tax on our non-profits. This is dumb. States should not penalize
nonprofits in this way.

What should the United States do?  Universal Health Care.  Universal Retirement
Accounts that are not attached to companies.  In general, stop assuming we are
living in factory towns with employment for life, and therefore change the
regulations to reflect our current world.

What should states do? How about uniform regulations for companies with fewer
than 50 employees in a state before jumping in with non-standard regulations?
One uniform regulation for all small businesses could be defined and state
legislatures could adopt. Then states would have the incentive to adopt the
uniform rules for small businesses in order to be attractive to small businesses
which are becoming increasingly distributed.

Distributed organizations are becoming more common– lets not penalize those that
want to hire United States residents.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Hiring Americans is hard for
distributed organizations: How the federal and state governments can Fix It


UBER…. BUT DECENTRALIZED?

Posted on August 26, 2020 by Brewster Kahle

What would it take to make an app that would work like Uber, but without the
corporate entity?  And without the high percentage that goes to Uber.  Hum…  
Let’s take some of the needed parts…

 1. Hailing a driver: a rider wants to know the driver is safe, closest, and the
    price. 

 * On the safety issue, let’s suppose a really good reputation system (see
   below).
 * “Closest” can be done by integrating a good map app (see below). 
 * And a price– this could be as simple as a set function of per-ride, per mile,
   and per minute. 

 2. Paying a driver: could be as easy as crypto/bitcoin being paid part as the
    ride starts and the rest as it ends. But there could be more complicated
    parts of this where there is a 3rd party that takes a bit, that may pay the
    app developer (see below).   If there is a 3rd party, don’t we have Uber? 
    Maybe, but could be much lighter weight.  There are also contracts in
    ethereum that could help with arbitration in the case of disputes.

 3. A reputation system: Seems we need a strong reputation system.  Yelp, it has
    been said, has been corrupted, and it is difficult to avoid this. Reddit?
    Slashdot?  Maybe a mixture of up-vote/down-votes from anyone, and mixing in
    social network to favor your friends, or maybe subscribing to aggregators of
    reputations…  

 4. Map App: Google has nailed this, but I bet a rideshare app puts lots of load
    on it.  We might need a per-ride payment to go to the map provider.

 5. Price and payment: could be one price per ride, and this has advantages.  
    What if a rider could pre-tip, or a driver could pre-discount?  That might
    help those that do not have good reputations yet.  Does a rider pick between
    drivers, and vice versa? Since  bitcoin is not widely used yet… how about
    google/apple pay?  Venmo? Paypal?  Some of these have evolved pretty
    anonymous payments.

 6. Evolving the app: what if there were many apps competing for the riders and
    drivers– what if it evolved into a system where the apps were somewhat
    compatible so a driver could run many apps at once and they would compete
    for her business.  Then the apps would need reputations as well, and they
    could evolve different algorithms.  Does the app provider get a piece of the
    action?

If this could work, it could mean rapidly evolving ecosystem with many players
at every level. 

It could go very wrong– a great movie that shows this is Nerve (worth
watching).  It could be used for escort services and other match-making
functions.

Anyway, I like the mental excersize of ______ but decentralized, where _____ is
your favorite cool thing. Google Docs, Tesla, Slack, WordPress, Internet
Archive…

(and has this already been done?)

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments


LIBRARIES VS BOOKSTORES? NO, FALSE DICHOTOMY. THEY ARE DIFFERENT ANIMALS

Posted on July 28, 2020 by Brewster Kahle
Internet Archive in San Francisco
Barnes and Noble Booksellers

There is a recent written attack on libraries that I find odd and somewhat
dangerous– libraries overlap too much with new-book bookstores. At first I
thought it was trolling, but I now believe it is sincere. More worrisome is that
anti-library lobbying is generally growing in strength but their attacks on the
concept of libraries have been more implied and disguised, until recently. Maybe
it is time to think a bit about what a library is and what they are for.

First of all, there are lots of types of bookstores and lots of types of
libraries, so a short post will not be comprehensive, but hopefully
illustrative.

I love bookstores, and I am fond of online and offline bookstores, used
bookstores, quirky bookstores, bookstores of bestsellers. Basically, I love
books, I buy lots of them. Lots.

I love the book arts, where the form of the book is the art. My wife, Mary
Austin, helped start the San Francisco Center for the Book. If you are
unfamiliar with book arts, it is a treat– I suggest you dive in and create your
book.

And I love libraries– academic and public, subscription libraries (yes, there
are 21 of them in the United States– you should join one or many), digital
libraries and special libraries. Ever been in a “special library”? Yes it is a
thing. They are really fun, for instance the Linda Hall Library in Kansas City,
Missouri.

A bookseller of new books wants their customer to find the right new book to
buy, bring home, and read.

A library is all about context, a library helps their patrons come up with new
ideas and connections whether by reading a whole book or a few pages of lots of
books– new and old. Libraries offer historical newspapers and new newspapers,
and from distant lands and opposing points of view. And libraries have experts
on tap: reference librarians.

To do all this, librarians work hard at “information about information”, or
metadata, to provide context. Libraries strive for comprehensive collections in
their areas of expertise not just the popular– they keep old editions because
they can be important context. Libraries typically offer many types of media:
books, recordings, moving images, archives. 

In this way, a library helps people come up with ideas and connections, and if
the ideas and connections are novel, and then get recorded, then they can be
added to the library. Libraries help readers, many of whom become writers, whose
works can then be made accessible, forever, in libraries.  The great circle of
knowledge creation and preservation.

As Jim Gray said “Libraries are engines of research.” They are not the research,
they power the research. To research something, a person does not need to buy
all the books on the subject, new and old– rather, there is a more efficient
way– they can go to the library.

Booksellers offer books for sale, and thank goodness books are still for sale
(don’t get me started on restrictive licenses on ebooks).

Librarians offer access and preservation.

Both are valuable, both are necessary, and they are different.

-brewster
Digital Librarian
Internet Archive



Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments


10 YEARS TRYING 7 APPROACHES TO PROVIDING AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR NON-PROFIT
WORKERS, HERE ARE THE RESULTS SO FAR

Posted on June 28, 2020 by Brewster Kahle
San Francisco Scanning Center with stimulus support

The Great Recession started in 2008 and everyone suffered– the Internet Archive
hired 146 out-of-work parents, leveraging an Obama stimulus welfare-to-work
program to scan books  for the visually impaired.   I had employees polled as to
how they were doing financially, and the answer was… Bad.

This was the kicker:  30-60% of their income went to rent.  Yikes, and turns out
to be typical across the country.  So I set out to find a way to fix this, at
least for non-profit workers. I read Graeber’s book Debt (fabulous, must read
book), and started on experiments.

Over the last 10 years, I have personally tried 6 approaches, and seen another,
here are the short versions:

Foundation House for non-profit workers in San Francisco

1. Foundation Housing:  this is permanently affordable employee apartments–
about $900-$1000 a month which is about 1/2-1/3 of market based rent in San
Francisco. The way we did this is to have it be permanently debt-free (no
mortgage), and have the fee to live in an apartment covering all other costs.
Since this is like faculty housing or a monastery, people leave the housing as
they leave the non-profit sector. We bought an apartment building (as a form of
endowment) in San Francisco with 11 units, trying it out.  Three out of 11
apartments now have non-profit workers.  It is working pretty well, but not
saving the Archive much money but giving security to people.  On the other hand,
one employee said they felt a bit trapped because they can not afford to move
out and stay in San Francisco.  Most employees don’t want to move in because
they already have apartments they are happy with, so it is not serving a huge
need.  But still, I think we should do more of these. It can be done with a
careful investment strategy so it does not cost much to buy the buildings. News
report.

2. Silent loan: lent someone enough money so they could make a down payment, and
I changed no interest.  There was no paperwork, and was in their bank account
for years before they found their house.  So it helped them out, and they are
thankful but it is not scalable.

3. 20% mortgage helper: I am on the board of a non-profit that has done this
program where $1m was set aside to help people with getting a mortgage on a
house within biking range of the office– the 20% help is 0 interest while they
work there, but then it goes up to market rate when they leave the non-profit.
When they leave, they are expected to pay it back by refinancing.  It has worked
out well as housing prices have gone up.  Unknown when things go down. When it
started there was great enthusiasm as it allowed many to buy in San Francisco
and feel supported.  Recently there has been grumbles about it, not sure why.

Internet Credit Union before it was closed by NCUA

4. Made a credit union to make a bank “that doesn’t suck.”  (that was our
original unofficial motto) and to help finance sustainable housing. Well, we
worked at it for 5 years, one and a half years to get the initial charter
through the system, and then the regulators spent three and half years crushing
us out of existence.  They really really do not want new credit unions or new
ideas in the banking area.  The National Credit Union Association should be shut
down– the US credit union industry blossomed and grew before the NCUA was
started in 1972. NYtimes report.

5. Build a building next to the Internet Archive.  We have the empty lot to do
it in and we hired an architect but it came out to cost so much we postponed.

6. Co-owning a house– this is different from a loan, it is more like a share of
ownership and sharing the risk and reward. Up to half of the appraised value, in
cash, is given to the owner so they continue to afford to be in the area. When
they eventually sell, then that proportion of the proceeds is returned. This has
been tried with a couple of close friends and they used it to pay off their
mortgage, so they own their half outright. This is working well so far, but have
not had any sell their house yet. This is more secure for the resident owner
than a mortgage in the case of the value of the house declining, or if they lose
the ability to pay the loan, in this co-owning case they do not have a mortgage
so they do not get foreclosed on and have to leave their house. But there is
financial risk to me in doing this approach.

7. Remote work.  The Internet Archive actively recruits outside of the bay area
and encourages people to not relocate. Many San Francisco employees have now
moved away but kept their jobs.  This has worked more often than not.  We have
been hiring remote workers for the last 3 years and now a majority of people are
not in the Bay Area.  And with the covid pandemic, we are going “remote first”
so we are all remote, and the exception is the ones that are in San Francisco. 
We have been adapting to remote management, which is not easy.

Of all the approaches, the one working the best is #7: Remote Work.  Get good at
it, and we won’t have the housing stresses of San Francisco.

I expect others are trying different approaches– please share them– we need to
find ways to keep non-profit workers happy, productive and financially secure.

Posted in Housing, Uncategorized | 10 Comments


ZONE TRIP #5? INVENTING A DESIRABLE PHYSICAL WORLD IN PANDEMIC — AUGUST, 2020

Posted on April 22, 2020 by Brewster Kahle
Wedding photo, 1992 Black Rock

San Francisco is best when it is inventing utopias (executing on it sometimes
goes astray, but stay with me).

In our Covid/Pandemic world we are all pushed into virtual classes, virtual
work, virtual relations.  Lets face it, we can only stretch virtual so far.

Let’s invent a physical world, and a desirable fabulous sharing wonderful world,
in the age of Pandemic.   Together.

Burning Man is cancelled this year.  But it was an inspiration– I went in 1990,
the first year in the desert– 80 people. It was called Zone Trip #4 in the
paragraph in the Rough Draft physical newsletter– show up, be it, no
spectators.  No tickets, no city planning, no directions, no rangers, no
sherpas.   Make it happen, we were it.   It was so great that Mary and I invited
our friends there to be our wedding in 1992 when there were 400 people and
getting married at Burning Man was not a thing, nor would it be for years.

Ephemerisle has same “lets invent the world we want to live in” feel– 400 people
on the delta trying to stay afloat, literally.  Inventive, dangerous, and
wonderful.

Both early Burning Man, and Ephemerisle are all about adapting to a difficult
environment, and with panache.

So…   how about Zone Trip #5: Pandemic?   In this case we start with a large
chunk of desert, and then we invent a temporary utopia that works in the age of
Pandemic– staying safe and loving it.  

With lots of inventors.   Everyone an inventor.

 * Maybe someone brings a traincar of rice, a truckload of beans.   
 * Maybe someone figures out what a school is, what a school means, what a
   school teaches.   
 * Maybe there is a glass-cube restaurant.
 * Maybe pandemic fashion takes a positive turn– a full-length clear isolation
   tube-dress 3ft in diameter.
 * Romancing while social distancing?
 * Virus free camp.
 * Recovered camp.

What could you add to the world?

Cacophony newletter entry for Zone Trip 4, first Burning Man in the desert. 1992



Wedding album– inventing a world



Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Zone trip #5? Inventing a Desirable
Physical World in Pandemic — August, 2020


HELPING MAKE HOUSING AFFORDABLE WITH “NON-INTRUSIVE JOINT OWNERSHIP”

Posted on December 24, 2019 by Brewster Kahle

We have been trying Foundation Housing with an apartment building in San
Francisco, and while we like that structure for many reasons, we are now trying
something else, this time more personal that others might want to try: joint
ownership of a house. The couple times we have tried it with friends and family,
they have credited this with allowing them to stay in the expensive Bay Area, so
deemed a success. It has also not changed our relationship with these friends
and family (as would being their landlord or bank) which has been what we
wanted.

We are trying “non-intrusive joint ownership” of houses by owning a stake in a
house that others live in. It is non-intrusive since it is a “silent” ownership
share. This is distinct from co-signing on a mortgage and reverse mortgages in
ways I will touch on later.


Let me explain our current approach, and please, if you have further ideas
please comment below.


It could be any % of the house, but we have tried 50%, so I will describe it
that way. A lawyer has written the documents to make this work.


It is structured as a “tenancy in common,” where each owns half the house, let’s
call one the “Resident Owners,” and the other the “Equity Owner.” The Equity
Owner pays the owner (could be the Resident Owner or the seller) one half of the
value of the house based on current appraisal, purchase price, or something
agreed upon. Then each owns half of the house and this is registered with the
deed with the county. We have not tried this, but the Resident Owners could
mortgage their half if they wanted to, but the bank would not have a claim on
the Equity Owner’s share. We have discouraged mortgages because of how they have
gone wrong, but we believe it is possible in this structure.


The Resident Owners uses the whole house and pays all the taxes and upkeep (and
is required to keep it up). If there are any additions or improvements, it does
not change the half-half share. 


This whole arrangement is unwound when the house is sold and the proceeds are
split half-half, or the house can be appraised and the Resident Owner can buy
out the Equity Owner’s share. The sale happens when the Resident Owners decide
to sell the property, the Resident Owner dies, or, if owned by a couple, when
the later of the original Resident Owners dies. Therefore the Equity Owner can
not force the Resident Owners to sell, unless, I guess, if the Resident Owners
default on their obligations.


To grant it stability to both parties, the Residential Ownership share is not
inheritable and is non-transferable and has to be their primary residence. This
makes sense to us, as the Equity Owner, since we wanted to help these particular
people stay in the Bay Area. In another step towards stability, the Equity
Owner’s interest is not transferable either, when the later of my spouse and I
die, then the share goes to our family foundation. This non-transferability of
the Equity Owner stake is based on my bad experience, decades ago, of my student
loan being sold by my town’s savings and loan bank to an aggressive lender.


This has turned out to be non-intrusive, and in fact, pretty invisible: after it
is set it up there have not been discussions about it. This is how we have
wanted it: to help our friends and family but not change the nature of our
relationship.


This differs from co-signing someone’s mortgage as that approach does not
decrease payments for the Residential Owner except, perhaps, to make it so they
could get an favorable mortgage in the first place. It also differs in that the
co-signer takes on the risk of default bringing in an entanglement we wished to
avoid.


This differs from reverse mortgages in that it is a share of the house, where a
reverse mortgage is a loan that is secured by the house. Loans have interest,
and fees, and if you fail to pay, you lose your house. There are many stories of
these going wrong. Where this joint ownership structure will surely have ways it
goes wrong, we have not found them yet.


If you have experiences with this, or have any questions, please write in a
comment below.



Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Housing | Comments Off on Helping Make Housing
Affordable with “Non-Intrusive Joint Ownership”


THE GAME OF OLIGARCHY

Posted on November 30, 2019 by Brewster Kahle

You should try this game.

I just invented and played a game today with my family, and it worked great– it
was fun and we learned an important lesson. Similar to the game “Monopoly” which
shows that one person ends up monopolizing even though you think the rules are
“fair,” the game of Oligarchy shows that the “free market” leads inexorably to
one person getting all the money and everyone else going broke. And fast.

The reason this is important is that it disproves one basic tenet of the
free-market idea– that it is a game with many winners. Rather the free market,
without redistribution, puts everyone (except one) in debt bondage, and quickly.
We joked that those that were run out of money had to sell organs. Our game
broke up into social classes– it was not worth it to the rich to play with the
poor. It was all very real for a simple game.

All of this is based on a paper in Scientific American, Is Inequality
Inevitable? Wealth naturally trickles up in free-market economies, model
suggests, which has been a mind-blower for me: it is so simple and disproves the
Libertarian premise.

We played 4 rounds with 6 people in about an hour:

 * each gets a pad of paper and pen and writes $100 at the top, that is their
   pot of money
 * each gets a coin to flip

Then each player picks another player agrees to gamble on a flip of a coin, they
agree on which wins on heads, and tosses. The stake of the gamble is set at 50%
of the lesser of the pots of that pair. So in the beginning, when everyone has
$100, the gamble is $50.

Then the players pick another player (or the same player) to do another round.
This proceeds.

What is amazing is that even through each toss is “fair” in that it is a 50-50
chance to win a straight amount of money, the results shows one player wins all
the money, and really quickly.

Two nephews and their partners, Mary and I played 4 rounds in about an hour and
we discovered social classes (we called the broke ones “organ sellers”), feeling
of righteous empowerment based on being successful (even though it was
completely random), but also that “free market” ended with all-but-one-of-us in
a bad situation really quickly.

Try it, it is fun. And read the article, it is startling– free-market without
redistribution goes to Oligarchy very very fast. This book on Sumerian and
Babylonian economics shows it has always been this way, so people developed
peaceful reset mechanisms with debt forgiveness and Julilee: …and Forgive Them
Their Debts by Michael Hudson.

[And now you can see it played automatically!
http://hackerfactor.com/oligarchy-game.php Go Neal!]







Posted in Uncategorized | 12 Comments
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