Archive

Stacktivism & The Means Of Not Dying

History of tech­nol­o­gy is the his­to­ry of civ­i­liza­tion. The pri­ma­ry con­cern of all humans through­out his­to­ry has been not dying. So the way that we have coped to mit­i­gate this risk of not dying is by build­ing infrastructure.

Infrastructure and Systems for a Nine Billion World

This is a com­plete­ly new kind of design chal­lenge. There’s no way that you can take the civ­i­liza­tion we have and re-scale it for 110 kilo­grams of cop­per per human per life­time. You have to think in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent way if you’re going to oper­ate inside of this frame­work where you take the sus­tain­able har­vest of the Earth and you divide by nine billion.

Bad Nomadism

Sketching the talk out last night, I decid­ed […] to sum­ma­rize briefly, reflect­ing back on every­thing that I’ve built recent­ly. It can kind of be sum­ma­rized as the infra­struc­ture by which I (and oth­ers) wish to live does­n’t exist; so we’ve no choice but to build it our­selves.” I kind of describe this and a lot of the oth­er things I do at this present moment as being the soft end of stacktivism.

Waste is a Design Flaw

[A]ll these hid­den infra­struc­tur­al and mate­r­i­al costs go into the stuff that we just use very very quick­ly. We just kind of con­sume them, we don’t think about them, we just want to go on with our lives. When you start actu­al­ly sort of pick­ing away, look­ing at it all, you real­ize how shock­ing it is.

Seeing the Stack

It’s this infra­struc­ture that is unseen, because it is infra-structure, it is under the struc­ture. And when you start think­ing about this mas­sive web of tech­nolo­gies that keep you alive, the only inter­faces we have on a day-to-day basis are tap, turn, flush. Everything else is hid­den and unseen.