After taking the weekend mostly off (I hardly hacked, just barely kept up with email and was on irc for only a handful of hours) I'm feeling refreshed. Laziness in doses has its merits. Namely, to give one the energy and hunger for action that keeps laziness as a general state of being at bay. ;)
Today is a writing day for me. I have two documents that I've started that must be completed by today. One is for the membership of KDE e.V. and should be arriving in their mailboxes sometime tomorrow. The other is for my keynote presentation at the Student Summit for Sustainability in Zurich later this month.
I love to write code, I love to design, I love to write, I love to listen to and make music and I love to consider the deep mechanics of complex systems (which makes humans a wonderfully fascinating topic). The problem is that I love to do all these things quite a lot, and so whenever I spend too much time on one of them to the neglect of the others I find myself "itching" for "something". Usually I find that "something" is one of the other topics of love in my life.
When I sat down at the computer this morning I knew it was going to be a day full of writing, but it wasn't until I actually started into it that it occurred to me that I have had a writing day in far too long and that I was just itching for it.
So while I probably have mountains of code to write, design ideas to ponder and far more questions about complex systems than I could ever hope to untangle in ten life times ... today I sit and indulge in the process of stringing words together.
I hope you all are having an equally enjoyable Monday. If not, be sure to put aside some time for something you love today. I find that even fifteen or twenty minutes of such "indulgence" is usually enough to smooth out an otherwise frustrating day, and when I forget that bit of wisdom I lose entire days to darkness.
Hugs ... aseigo.
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8 comments:
Sustainability is fiction. There has only been one civilization, ever, to achieve sustainability, and those were native Americans. Unfortunately, their civilization got wiped out by another that didn't care about sustainability. To live in complete harmony with the land is to never make progress.
At best we can "mitigated impact". This means budgeted and planned development (which is still not sustainable over the long run). It involves making anti-capitalist and anti-consumer decisions. In order to limit our impact we must limit our manufacturing. This means making few things and innovating less. For example, rather than making digital cameras of 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 megapixels, we standardize on 1, 6, and 16 megapixels. This helps prevent the latest-and-greatest consumerist churn.
I find it ironic that they ask a software expert to a sustainability conference where computing has created huge negative environmental impacts. We (I am a software guy too, and equally implicate myself) ensure this churn with more and more complicated software, needing more pixels and megahertz and cores. Electronics uses some of the most toxic chemicals of any industry. Discarded PCBs contaminate ground water supplies. What does leave North America usually ends up in some 3rd world country poisoning the people there.
Computing will never be sustainable. But it will be perpetual.
Aaron, I hope your speech is ground breaking. What ever you say, I pray that it isn't hypocritical. I think the best thing you could say is forget a new Mac or Vista computer. Take an old computer and put KDE on it. That would be the message that helps the environment the most. And maybe that's your speech, KDE on and-me-down hardware as a way to help blunt the environmental impact of computing while having the latest and greatest software.
Aaron,
Just on a sidenote... I've installed the latest version of what will become 4.2. The OpenSUSE guys were that kind to provide a repository for this. And I have to say I'm so impressed by KDE 4.2! It looks really awesome, the little details... Just great.
Thanks for your inspiring work and thanks to all KDE developers.
Regards Harry
"Sustainability is fiction. There has only been one civilization, ever, to achieve sustainability, and those were native Americans."
oh my. where to start with this.
it's a fiction, but it happened once? ;)
moreover, numerous American civilizations self-destructed or were wiped out by environmental calamity that they didn't manage well.
some (most, all? dunno) of those that did live in harmony did so due to constraints such as their population size or evironmental resource scarcity.
i'd also note that such native populations can be found all over the world, not just the Americas.
there is a great mythos surrounding "The Noble Native American", but its' a bit more complicated (and a whole lot more real, interesting and important) than that mythos.
anyways .. sustainability is a goal, not a destination and for me the goal is to be less self-destructive and more systems aware in our actions.
"To live in complete harmony with the land is to never make progress."
the first half of that sentence and the second half are not connected quite as certainly as you note.
right now our progress comes at the expense of harmony almost without exception because as a general rule we don't consider the systems we live in as we progress.
not all societies are like this. the study of cell phone adoption by Quakers in North America is a really interesting tale of purposeful progress.
it really isn't so much "progress" as "unmitigated progress without thought to the systems in which we exist in" that is the enemy of harmony.
if we consider evolution to be the natural improvement of response to environment, then evolution progresses while maintaining (though adjusting) harmony of a system. so it is possible.
"This means budgeted and planned development (which is still not sustainable over the long run)"
why isn't that sustainable?
"It involves making anti-capitalist and anti-consumer decisions."
it involved makes anti-corporate-facism decisions, but not anti-capitalist or anti-consumer. you need to re-examine the meaning of both words, i think.
it is pro-capitalist to ensure sustainable processes. management literature, and not the left wing pinko variety but the centrist traditional business variety, is littered with this.
and keeping harmony is pro-consumer. they may not individually get as much cheap crap *right now*, but we may each get a LOT more good quality product over a much longer period of time. that's certainly pro-consumer.
"This means making few things and innovating less. "
you are right, it does. not all things are worth making and not all things are worth innovating.
the atomic bomb is a good example of that.
a more "grey" example is the rise of the personal music player. right now, in the form it takes within our society, it does more to segregate and disenfranchise people from their community around them than anything else. this is a social problem, however, not an industrial problem.
"For example, rather than making digital cameras of 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 megapixels, we standardize on 1, 6, and 16 megapixels."
i don't think that follows at all.
"I find it ironic that they ask a software expert to a sustainability conference where computing has created huge negative environmental impacts."
it's not ironic at all. my presentation will be about how we can create a more socially responsible industry around computing. obviously i won't have carte blanch answers, but i will have suggestions with data to back them up.
you're also focusing a wee bit much on the environmental aspect of sustainability, a topic which also encompasses social and cultural issues.
"What does leave North America usually ends up in some 3rd world country poisoning the people there."
here we agree =) it's sad, unfortunate but unnecessary. we can fix these issues.
"Computing will never be sustainable."
never say never when it comes to human ingenuity. we simply need to want to or be forced out of necessity to do something, and it's remarkable what we can do.
instead of saying "it never will be" ask "how can it be" and then go help make that happen.
the only way it will never be sustainable is if people with your point of view are allowed to run the system. that's something i can't get behind and spend my time, my life trying to help make sure doesn't (continue to) happen.
"Aaron, I hope your speech is ground breaking."
thanks; i doubt it will be _ground breaking_ but i think it does give practical yet hopeful light on solutions many feel are hopeless.
many of my friends work in social services or at jobs engaged in social issues, and the topic of technology and its impact on society and the planet is one that i've received more than the occasional "sharing of insights" on.
one of the reasons i became devoted to F/OSS as i have is in an attempt to address such valid concerns with my own actions and life. it is, after all, all that i can personally do. but it is what we each must do. anything else is a self-betrayal.
"What ever you say, I pray that it isn't hypocritical."
hopefully not =) probably some will say it's a bit "too pragmatic" in places.
"Take an old computer and put KDE on it."
i need a computer to work on, and my work requires a modern system. if i can't work, people get less Free software. and i like to keep the numbers of computers i run to just what i need.
i've actually wanted a new laptop for probably a year or so now. that's the consumer in me talking, though, and i know it. this laptop, while showing it's age in places (the keyboard is a mess with letters wearing out; i type too much on it =/) it's fully functional and so i'm not going to replace it for a while either.
i also do need something half-ways presentable, however, as i pitch to people who are slightly less .. interested in such topics but who i'm trying to convince to use Free software. the sort of people whose decisions can affect the results of what thousands and occasionally millions end up using.
i'm not about to create a dog and pony show charade by showing up with a computer that i don't actually use, either. that would be hypocritical.
i will be talking about real world cases where hardware savings are realized, however. that isn't the main thrust of the presentation, though.
"That would be the message that helps the environment the most. And maybe that's your speech, KDE on and-me-down hardware as a way to help blunt the environmental impact of computing while having the latest and greatest software."
the presentation, while it does cover that issue, is about sovereignty and fairness in a world run on software. that means a lot more than only the environmental impact issue. that's an important one, no doubt, but so is access to information for all, privacy, security and the right to personal and societal sovereignty. in fact, all these issues are bound up together; one leads to the other.
you mentioned how our computer garbage ends up polluting other nations. that only happens because those nations are poorer than the nations that spew out that "garbage", and it only happens in the horrible ways it does (humans prying things apart with their hands in open environments!) because proper tools are not available to them. even more "upstream" from that is we create toxic garbage, an issue we need to innovate solutions to. and innovation requires participation. and participation increases with access to information, communication and basic human rights. and those things increase with Free software.
Free software is *not* the answer. (shocking! ;) it is, rather, a tool that can be put to work as *part* of a set of answers to the problems we face. but it is a tool that is uniquely suited to these problems, unlike proprietary offerings (which do pretty much the opposite).
as an interesting appendix to it all, the open source model shows that there are economically sustainable methods of innovating that do not exclusively serve capitalist interests, but accommodate such interests while respecting human rights, freedom to engage and innovate and not creating (new, anyways) have/have-not gulfs.
there is much doubt in the world at large that such systems are possible. and so we hear people call for the all out destruction of our societies, which is unlikely to happen and which would just as likely create even *more* problems if it did happen.
so ... F/OSS is in many ways a ray of demonstrated hope. it is a new way of solving existing problems better. and it is absolutely a tool waiting to be used by those who are most concerned about issues of sustainability of all sorts.
@Aaron: I see Monday really is a writing day!
A fantastic response to my slightly antagonizing article! I am glad you're speaking and not me!
While I respect and agree with many of your points, the one follow-up comment I want to make is about "anti-capitalist / anti-consumer" slant. And that is corporations are not about sustainability. They have quarterly or annual reports which better be pointing up for them. The companies don't have motivation to be sustainable. They are only motivated to beat the competition. Therein lies the churn. Ideas like planned obsolescence irritate me to no end.
I see you and I are both attracted to the socio-economic enabling aspects of F/OSS. :-) But really I don't see how any F/OSS will help when you have to worry about the local war lord. For so many poor countries there is nothing to do with an XO laptop. Maybe they can get into a city and get some education, but something is still missing... I often wonder what that something is. Why did the US turn out differently? Why were we able to work and build a great country from nothing? Why can't these other countries do it?
For the poorest of the poor, I'd love to see an Arduino put to work to control a pump or irrigation system or some other automation that helps feed or shelter these people. This is where I think F/OSS can have the biggest difference. Adding a little automation in these places can make a huge difference.
@b10663r: "corporations are not about sustainability"
you're right, they aren't. neither are individuals, for that matter. it's an ethical choice we must each make. and corporations are made up of people.
what seems to get lost in translation between "one person" and "a whole bunch of people" is rational decision making. it is deferred most often to the lowest common denominator thinking through a mind numbing process of instituionalization and dehumanization of all topics big and small.
that said, there is nothing inherent in the concept of corporations, or any other organized cooperative, that prevents ethical decision making.
it's the people we put at the top (and the middle) and the incentives we (society) lay out for them. we tend to put the most ruthless people at the top (mostly by letting them self-select with very little oversight and virtually no check/ballance; and while board of directors have become more powerful relative to the CEO in the last decade, let's face it: it's a case of the fox watching the hens)
i believe the certain *kinds* of corporations, as defined by their internal structure and practices, are inherently unethical and can never bring about ethical practices internally or externally. they are built for destruction.
unfortunately, the way we have built the rules for the game we call capitalism those structures are highly optimized for "winning" (in terms of competitive success).
those rules need to change.
back to Free software, it changed the rules of the software business. so it is possible, even when there's a monopolist to fight and people with megabucks (and the odd judge and politician) in their pockets.
"But really I don't see how any F/OSS will help when you have to worry about the local war lord."
F/OSS can't help in all situations, you are quite correct. air lifting boxes of Linux into a war zone probably won't do much.
*but* if delivered before there is war (or during a rebuild process) it can grant greater access to information (affordability, localization and adherence to open standards being three of the ways this happens) and i believe that open education and communication between citizens of a land is the surest way to ensure sense and balance.
this is why dictators always grasp control of the media and why non-dictatorship governments try and "spin" things so hard. they know that information and communication are powerful.
beyond protection from the war lord, however, giving people the ability to identify and solve their own problems, even mundane ones such as how to best band together into farming collectives to deliver affordable food with efficiency, create more stable societies.
stable societies rarely are overrun by warlords.
the slime of humanity that rise to power only to abuse it and the people they rule do so most often by taking advantage of a suppressed and downtrodden people desperate for relief, any relief, and who are willing to believe in any story that ends in them being better off in the end.
and just to reiterate, Free software can not fix all these ailments in and of itself. but it is one very important tool.
it's the gutenberg press of our time.
"For so many poor countries there is nothing to do with an XO laptop."
indeed; in general the XO laptop was a wrong headed and bad project from the beginning. i said so when it was starting out after i met with some of the management involved a few times to some of my friends and colleagues, many of whom couldn't believe i'd be against such a "noble" project. ;)
"something is still missing... I often wonder what that something is"
i don't think you or i are able to know this. the people who are there do, though. they just need the tools to discover the answers they already have inside them.
i went to school in a poor community (homeless kids showing up without adequate clothing let alone any food or school supplies, drugs, gangs, gambling rings on campus, etc... ) and they kept trying to do stuff "for" us. nothing really worked out too well.
then they gave us a "small" budget (a few 100k USD) and told us to plan and spend it however we saw fit. but they gave us a process which we had to follow to come up with that budget planning.
it was an inclusive, community based, consensus driven process that nobody but we ourselves who were directly impacted by the spending (parents, teacher, administrators, custodians, community residents and students each had to be represented equally!) made the decisions.
i ended up presenting the budget on behalf of the steering committee to the State Government committee overseeing the appropriation process. i was in grade 10 at the time, i believe.
anyways, never before or since have i seen money more wisely spent on exactly what was needed. the projects that came out of that process not only all were successfully implemented but had visible positive impacts that lasted for years.
they never tried the "experiment" again, which is sad, because since the school (and community around it) has slid back even further into problems. (i visit whenever i return..)
the lesson i took from that is that we need to stop trying to solve each other's problems from afar.
we need to make it possible for others to solve their own problems. that means giving them tools, resources and then stepping the hell away.
when problems span across the great divides or include everyone on the planet, it seems that usually is the result of localized failures building up into regional or global proportions.
at that point we need different, more drastic and less "grass roots inclusive" measures ... but we also need to learn how to *prevent* those problems from bubbling up in the first place.
and i personally believe those solutions lie in people closer to the effects of the solutions helping to create those solutions themselves.
tie those people into networks that span the world to share information, successes, failures and other resources and who knows what might be possible ... and what start to become impossible as well.
"Why were we able to work and build a great country from nothing?"
guts, balls, communication and not accepting "but it's the system, can't do anything about it!" as an answer.
they were an agrarian society mostly made up of dissenters and misfits who took on the super power of the day. they used anonymity to discuss controversial issues and created networks of communication. they changed the status quo of warfare for their heritage and went guerilla and grass roots.
then they learned from it and the people themselves on the ground wrote a constitution protecting themselves *from* themselves. they realized that the troubles of strong central government without representation were not solvable "with the right people"; the needed an improved system that fit *them* and they made one. flawed and imperfect, but better than what was and one that at least fit *them*.
unfortunately, Americans eventually stopped molding their government from the bottom up and adjusting it to fit their needs and be representative of the people by engaging the people directly and the country has become the home of despots and obesity, the land of the megacorp-sans-ethics and other such unfortunate things.
"Why can't these other countries do it?"
imho:
if Britain was (representative of) the status quo in the 18th century, the US is (representative of) the status quo today.
the systems it currently espouses as a nation are flawed and broken for our contemporary needs.
unfortunately, unlike the Britain the 18th century, you can't just rally up some rifles or find a new continent anymore. there are no more new continents and the arms race got a little out of hand last century making armed uprisings a little antiquated.
even worse, however, is that unlike the age and place that the founding fathers found themselves in, our downtrodden and poor are often kept in abject poverty without adequate access to basic human needs let alone the basic level of information and communication required to make localized improvements possible ala the American revolution and following through eventually to the rise of the American power.
education, information and communication are the oldest, and the newest, arsenal. it is critical for us to allow people access to the tools of equality so that they can make their world for themselves. nobody can do it more successfully for them as log as they have the right tools to do so.
the only more important tool than the human act of communicating with empathy is hope and belief in the possible.
without hope of some meaning there is no reason to strive, be it to failure or success.
without belief in what is possible, it will never occur to even try in the first place.
we have successfully robbed much of the world, at home and abroad, of hope and belief. we traded them for iPods, 64 oz ThirstBuster sodas that cost a buck at the local 7-11 and the charlatans who pretend to speak for a God that their own actions run counter to.
F/OSS proves that people can still work hard at something because they care.
it proves that there is hope, even against the ridiculous odds this broken system builds against the individual.
it proves that there is a way to give people access to tools of communication on their terms, not ours.
these are the kinds of examples of practical hope and belief that this world needs so that perhaps others may think, "You know what, screw them, the tea goes into the harbor!" or "Screw them, I'll go get my own salt whenever I damn well feel like it!" too.
(what is it with oceans+food that make such stirring symbols of uprising? =)
"I'd love to see an Arduino put to work to control a pump or irrigation system or some other automation that helps feed or shelter these people. This is where I think F/OSS can have the biggest difference."
much more so than than an XO, absolutely. and i think if we gave them a chance to tell us that, they would. =)
we just need to give them both the chance to say such a thing and the means to say it with such that we can hear it.
"Adding a little automation in these places can make a huge difference."
+1 to that ...
@Aaron. So True.
There was a fantastic quote from a Buddhist about the U.S. Constitution, it was to the affect that it protects the wrong things. It rewards greed and then protects it. Buddhism calls for the rejection of greed, a complete revaluation of our lives. But not everyone can do that, even if told to.
Hi all
I'm the architect and one of the organizers of the Student Summit for Sustainability 2009 in Zurich. I'm also environmental scientist and an open source user/lover/promotor.
It's nice to see that our conference already has an impact. ;-) Thanks both of you, Aaron and b10663r, for the interestig discussion in the comments. I would like to add some random though which guided us in designing the conference.
Sustainability is more than just about protecting the environment or reducing CO2. We only achieve a sustainable development when the three pillars: Society, Environment and Economy are balanced. (from the most common definition) There is no sustainability if any of those three areas is laking.
I don't see sustainbility claims as an argument against economy but as a criticism to the way it's works today.
Here an extract from our conference abstract:
Today’s global economic and political institutions do not promote sustainable development. Indeed, huge efforts have to be made to achieve what are only
very minimal levels of sustainable development. Why is this so?
The conference thesis is that today's institutions do not provide the necessary incentives but that the latter even work against sustainable development.
Many technologies and concepts have been developed that would help achieve sustainable development but they are not implemented at a significant scale. Yet, the way the institutions of the world function is not a given natural law, but the product of many decisions taken during the last decades. Our conviction is that global institutions could and should set the right incentives such that sustainable development will be the result of motivations intrinsic to
the system.
(The complete conference abstract can be downloaded here: http://wiki.project21.ch/images/d/d6/S3-Conference_Abstract.pdf)
According to the traditional economic theory there is no way FOSS could work successfully. This because it sees materialistic incentives (money) as the only thing motivating people to do something. Our world today is build on this idea.
But FOSS works and it becomes better and better. We see the FOSS movement as a very prominent example that things could be done differently, in a better, more sustainable way.
I believe that FOSS has a lot to do with (and for) sustainability.
It is based on competitive cooperation rather the (destructive) competition. The fact that large corporations work together i.e. on the Linux Kernel and still compete on the market is very positive. It reduces the duplication of efforts and allows for a better use of brain and time ressources.
It reduces dependencies on a single providers and lock-ins (yes, I agree that large corporation often do not act sustainably at all). The knowledge becomes property of the humanity.
It allows for local adaptation if there is a need for and time to do it.
I even think that the Open Source Mouvement has the power of a revolution. To a certain point it has already revolutionized the IT sector. But the values of FOSS are very well aplicable to other areas and the society as a whole. We can already see non-IT open source products emerge and also open collaboration processes gain importance, especially in the area of development and policy making.
There are many more things about Open Source and Sustainability I would like to think and write about. I'm still in discovery mode.
I'm really looking forward to interesting discussions at the Summit and I hope to see a lot of FOSS people at the Kick-off day. It takes place Monday, 26 January at the Audimax of ETH Zurich.
@Aaron: don't forget to bring you guitar! :-)
Stop wasting your time with long posts and get back to the netcast!!
;-)
PS: I like the long posts too. I just like the netcasts more!
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