manufacturing

“I want my enviroment to be a product of me.”

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Yesterday I fixed the toilet.

The handle had been giving us trouble for  a while; it used some antiquated metal contraption to connect to the flush valve. The handle bar was connected to the pull rod by Christmas ribbon. But finally the rod completely separated from the flush valve, leaving things awkward for a couple days.

I wasn’t sure if I knew what I was doing. My handiwork has been limited to cutting pieces of wood and putting nails into them. One time I cut some pipe for a home garden, though I’m pretty sure I just held the pipes so they wouldn’t fall to the ground. But the toilet was in need of assistance.

My girlfriend suggested we just tell the landlord and get him to fix it. “Nonsense,” I said, “it will be $20 at most, and we should figure out how it works anyways.” Translation: I should figure that out. But off I went to Home Depot, and found the flush valve assembly I needed for just over $5. Rather serendipitously, when I got home the City of Chicago had shut off water to our block because of a frozen pipe and burst main up the street. So the tank drained, I bent the existing assembly out of the way (having no pliers), and installed the new flapper.

The object of my designs.

When the water came back on eight hours later, I was finally able to test the repaired toilet. It worked! It was better than before, too; the handle never seemed to stick in the down position.

Whenever that toilet gets a flushed, I crack a little smile. I did this. Not the landlord, not my dad, not a friend – me. And that feeling, that sense of triumph and accomplishment – however fleeting – is something that has been conspicuously absent from my life. I would imagine it’s been absent from others’, as well.

I mean, how often do we get the chance to do anything that ends with tangible, visible results? When are we able to contribute, even in small fashion, to our everyday surroundings? We’re convinced, nay, compelled to sit back and let others do everything for us. To not assist bystanders in lieu of those with “professional” qualifications. To “vote” in elections where no one responds to us and nothing ever changes.

The agency has been revoked from our lives. For a brief moment I was able to improve one tiny aspect of my own. If only there was a way to exercise that power at all times.

Two Steps Back

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Do you get the feeling that we’re slowing down? I mean that in the entropic sense, that humanity may have gone as far as it can and is now contracting. Look at how far we’ve come since the year 1910 – two world wars and all the carnage and technological progress they produced, rocketry and space exploration (we put a man on the moon), the rise of computing, Moore’s Law, all the conveniences of modern life. And yet, where are the big breakthroughs?

John Horgan recently wrote in Scientific American about “scientific regress,” fields of science that are not just slowing down as a result of diminishing returns, but that are actually retreating from their own discoveries. Infectious disease is back, including some that were on the brink of eradication. The Concorde, fastest commercial jet in history, was entirely scrapped, and there are no plans to replace it. Even science itself has come under fire – evolution has shifted from common knowledge to a disputable “theory.”

Research and technologies without ‘practical’ application never get off the ground. Hence the hole in the ground that could have been America’s own Large Hadron Collider. Who knows what CERN’s will discover? Alexander Fleming was just studying some bacteria. He ‘invented’ penicillin. Or consider the Vela satellites used to detect nuclear explosions on Earth, which ended up discovering the existence of Gamma-ray bursts. Even the most mundane of new technologies can have serendipitous results, and that’s why continued innovation and discovery is so important. But we’ve stopped.

Even in terms of military procurement – and let’s not forget that ARPA and DARPA brought us the internet and the global positioning system – we’re taking steps backwards in the name of fiscal sanity. Not that balanced budgets are an ignoble pursuit, but we’re voluntarily ending production of the most advanced fighter in the world (the F-22) in favor of its slightly less capable cousin (the F-35). Production of the F-35 itself will be notably slashed. With Britain retiring the Harrier and the F-35B variant in jeopardy, the novel technology of VTOL aircraft may itself not be long for this world.

Meanwhile, the Russian-designed contemporary of the F-35, the Sukhoi Su-35, is making waves, with China about to become a major purchaser of the technology. It takes ages for a new system to come online – the Airbus A400M military transport just now making maiden flights has been in the works since 1982! And even the new weapons systems intended to create capabilities where there are none – the Marine Corps’s Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle comes to mind – are being canceled.

We don’ produce anything any more. The picture of our economy, especially vis-a-vis China, is that of a junkyard. We have a resource economy now, where we ship raw materials out for “more skilled” hands to mold into a finished product. These products are things that just fuel our consumerism, a consumerism wherein we look forward to things breaking just so we can feel the rush of buying something new.

We put so little energy into real long-term thought. Everything we do as a society is all about the quick buck, the near-term gain, what we can see and hold and spend now. Politics continue to be an internal, mind-numbing struggle with no winners and no vision beyond the next election. And of course today’s politicians won’t be living with the consequences of their decisions (there’s still time to atone, though). As the Great Society gets rolled back, the New Deal is next. And what then, the gains of the Progressive Era?

It’s not like I don’t understand why – when you don’t even have a paycheck to look forward to in the next week, every day becomes its own micro-scale struggle just to get to the next one. But it’s not impossible to take care of today’s problems and plan for the future. I’ve previously called for stronger leadership, or a real public works plan, or maybe some British-style openness and transparency (and when the Brits are leading the way in those fields, you just know something’s gone horribly wrong somewhere). These things are not impossible. And they’re not too expensive. I don’t care how bad the deficit looks; no one cares (no, really, outside of a vocal few, it’s not the most pressing concern). It’s certainly a problem, but we have the chance to solve other problems while still looking to the future.

Things are expensive. But in the long long term, doing nothing and stagnating will be even more costly. We need to keep building, inventing, dreaming, knocking over test tubes accidentally, leaving petri dishes next to each other, and to stop arguing over today. Tomorrow is more important.

Think big. Think bold. But most importantly, think ahead.

On Value

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Recent headlines like this:

And this:

And this:

Are enough to make you ask: why are we still pretending that these people produce anything of value whatsoever? That their hyper-inflated ‘MegaJob‘ salaries are anything close to realistic compensation? When will we publicly acknowledge that the vast majority of the American finance sector is completely full of shit and damages the reputation and capabilities of this country?

Manipulation of numbers produces nothing. It contributes nothing. If you want to do that, download R and make a graph. But don’t make $500,000 a year to do nothing.

Supposedly the recession is ‘over’ and we’re beginning to recover. But if ‘recovery’ means restoring the finance sector to its previous pedestal atop the grand pantheon of economic bullshit, then that kind of recovery leaves us worse off than we were before. Nothing has changed. It could take ten years to restore unemployment levels to what they were before the recession, and all the while new immigration will be rewriting the face of the country. Much as Elizabeth Warren tries (bless her heart) to change the culture of Wall Street, she is fighting a losing battle. Who would voluntarily surrender an obscene paycheck ‘for the good of the nation’?

We have never been particularly good as a country at rewarding the right kind of work – at paying firemen and manufacturers and miners and the other types of employees that produce something tangible. But the current state of inequality is mind-boggling. And for those like Matt Ridley, who would seek to lull us into a sense of complacency by comparing human life not to that of our parents, not to that of the last three decades, but to the entirety of human history, that’s not where we get out benchmarks for today. We misplaced our priorities a long time ago; are we ever going to find them?

Ah, Recursion

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It’s a synthesis of everything I love: a makerbot made of LEGO, printing… more things made of LEGO.

The recursiveness is great. But so is the premise. Is that potentially the tipping point for the Maker Revolution? When 3D printers can create copies of themselves? Think about how much easier it would be to get started: a whole community just has to pitch in for one machine. It’ll either revolutionize the already-revolutionary concept, or bring about the singularity. Either way, though.

Africa Takes Flight

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Nigerian Mubarak Muhammad Abdullahi's homemade working helicopter.

In a delightful example of the DIY ethos, and bearing more than a slight resemblance to the John Robb school (not to mention Cory Doctorow), amateur engineers in Kenya, Somaliland, and Nigeria are cobbling together their own aircraft out of spare parts and discarded hulks.

And that includes both fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. The above helicopter was crafted from “scrap aluminum and parts of a Honda Civic, a Toyota, and a Boeing 747.” And it actually flies, too – at an altitude of 7 feet.

Via io9.

This Was Once a Country Where People Made Things

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Aside from the usual terrible, terrible commentary both at YouTube and the site I found this at, it’s an excellent ad (at least for the first 40 seconds). It doesn’t matter if you’re from the East Coast, the Rust Belt, the Bible Belt, the New West, the “Left Coast,” or whatever. It’s America. And it restores a little bit of your faith in it.

We used to make things. And now we do once more? Well, we should be.

Via Isegoria.

Making and Doing

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For anyone currently in London (and by currently, I mean in early May), Cory Doctorow is giving a free talk at Nettlefold Hall in West Norwood on May 8. RSVPs are required, though – send an email to readersandwriters@lambeth.gov.uk.

Along similar Doctorovian lines, I read a post in The Art of Manliness, of all places, bemoaning the “modern immaturity” of men, and encouraging us to “create more, consume less.” Consumerism is, after all, a passive activity that reduces all willpower to an illusory choice – “the weakening of man’s free agency.” It’s an indictment both of consumerism and of any kind of forward thinking:

The problem with consumerism is that it heavily emphasizes choice, to the complete exclusion of the idea of living with that choice. Choose, choose, choose. But what happens after your make that choice?

Definitely worth reading and considering in all contexts – be it manliness, resilience, or otherwise.

Just Do It Yourself

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Rapidly spreading around the internet right now is Chris Anderson’s article in Wired, “Atoms Are the New Bits.” Anderson talks about the spread of small-scale garage manufacturing, thanks to the advent, miniaturization, and drastically falling prices of 3D printers and the like. Works on the level of resilience, decentralization, sustainability… a win-win for everyone.

It’s definitely got me excited for the coming microindustrial revolution (or is it an industrial microrevolution?). I may very well need to invest in a MakerBot.

A garage renaissance is spilling over into such phenomena as the booming Maker Faires and local “hackerspaces.” Peer production, open source, crowdsourcing, user-generated content — all these digital trends have begun to play out in the world of atoms, too. The Web was just the proof of concept. Now the revolution hits the real world.

In short, atoms are the new bits.

Not everyone is quite so excited. But Joel Johnson might be the only naysayer. He does have a slight point – outsourcing some manufacturing to China is nothing new. Shlok Vaidya likes it except for the emphasis on China, and has further reading for you. John Robb loves it, of course (and is even more concerned with the business implications). Bostonist is proud of local Local Motors.

I know what I want for Christmas.