Friday, 24 September 2010

I Pencil \\ Open-source working

I know the deadline has passed but if this task is anything like the one we did last year the blog will continue to be useful throughout the whole project so I thought I'd post this anyway.

Who knows how to make a pencil?

In 1958 the Economist Leonard E Read wrote his essay "I, Pencil".  In it he proposed that there was not a single person on the planet who knew how to, or had the skills to make a pencil.  Initially it sounds like a ridiculous statement to make, but actually as you read further you begin to understand what he means.

As a society we have become so interdependent that we have surpassed the capacity of the human brain.  As a result our cities have become interconnected by a dense network of various forms of infrastructure - roads, rail, cables, satellites - and we function on a just-in-time logistics model that is seemingly efficient, although in actual fact it is far from it.

Increasingly, this infrastructure is created for non-corporeal uses i.e.  the Internet.  As the internet becomes more and more integrated into our lives, so too does our ability to work together.  We are becoming increasingly inter-reliant to the extent that a new form of non-capitalist economy is emerging in the form of open-source working.  This provokes the question; is there a way of rooting this kind of online collaboration back into the physical realm?  Also, can this be done in a way that is up to the fast pace of change, and that is socially and environmentally beneficial?

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