The above video is an overview of her work given shortly after she won the prize. Crooked Timber also has a good discussion:

Lin’s work focuses on the empirical analysis of collective goods problems – how it is that people can come up with their own solutions to problems of the commons if they are given enough room to do so. Her landmark book, Governing the Commons, provides an empirical rejoinder to the pessimism of Garret Hardin and others about the tragedy of the commons – it documents how people can and do solve these problems in e.g the management of water resources, forestry, pasturage and fishing rights. She and her colleagues gather large sets of data on the conditions under which people are or are not able to solve these problems, and the kinds of rules that they come up with in order to solve them.

In other words, Elinor went out in the world and studied the use of common resources in real situations, rather than starting with the supposition that everybody acts in purely self-interested fashion all the time. The concept of self-interest has been at the core of economic theory since Adam Smith first postulated the “invisible hand” of the market, and it really does correctly predict a great deal of human economic behavior. But it doesn’t explain everything, and overuse of that assumption leads to predictions that simply aren’t true.  (Besides which, it’s a mistake to conflate a theoretical model with a moral stance, take note Wall Street.)

From a really nice NPR interview with her:

The core is still an individual, but the individual is a little more complex than the caricature of “me first always”. The “me first always” caricature model can be used, mathematically, to predict outcomes when the problem is pure private goods and you have a highly competitive market. But we have to also understand that humans are more complex than immediate material self-interest as the only goal. So humans learn norms and ways of expressing themselves, and the importance of love of brothers and sisters and their spouse, and members of their community. Then, instead of taking my individual interest only into account, an individual outside of a really narrow market situation can take the broader community into account.

Which is something that hippies have been saying since, I don’t know, the invention of sitting around and getting stoned together, but Elinor puts academic rigor behind that — the kind of careful analysis that is necessary if you are government policy maker and it’s your job to figure out how use the natural resources of your country in a sustainable way.

For the immediately curious, here‘s a bit of her thinking:

Analysing the design of long-enduring common pool resource (CPR) institutions, Elinor Ostrom (1990) identified eight design principles which are prerequisites for a stable CPR arrangement:

1. Clearly defined boundaries

2. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions

3. Collective-choice arrangements allowing for the participation of most of the appropriators in the decision making process

4. Effective monitoring by monitors who are part of or accountable to the appropriators

5. Graduated sanctions for appropriators who do not respect community rules

6. Conflict-resolution mechanisms which are cheap and easy of access

7. Minimal recognition of rights to organize (e.g., by the government)

8. In case of larger CPRs: Organisation in the form of multiple layers of nested enterprises, with small, local CPRs at their bases.

Further revelations await in this 2000 paper of hers, “Collective Action and The Evolution of Social Norms.”

Here’s a list of things that professional journalists do:

• decide what should be more broadly known
• decide what should be more deeply investigated
• collect information from sources both public and private
• check that information for factual accuracy
• construct narratives to make sense of that information
• produce content to convey those narratives
• publish and market that content

This list is by no means definitive or exhaustive. It’s just illustrative, a starting point for a thought experiment. Who could do each of these things best? And what tools to do they need to do it?

Having a network of people producing journalism around a newsroom is not a new idea. Jeff Jarvis has been discussing networked journalism since at least 2006, and naturally I think he’s on to something. In this essay I want concentrate on process and roles. If cheap networks make new types of collaboration possible, they also set the stage for new types of specialization. I think one of the problems of the traditional, mainstream media newsroom is that it it tries to handle the entire journalistic process internally, even the parts that it’s not actually very good at.

An example

On November 25, a video appeared on YouTube which appears to be the testimonial of a young woman recently fired from the credit card collections division of Bank of America. She had been allowing the bank’s most desperate customers to enroll in fixed-payment debt recovery schemes. Many of these customers are currently paying 30% interest as a result of recent rate hikes, so this was a great kindness. It was also against company policy.

The video is powerful. It’s an amazing first-person testimonial of the greed and heartlessness of large corporations.

So is this journalism?

Not quite yet, according to the traditional definitions. It’s a powerful story only if it’s true — and even if it’s true it may not be the whole story. I haven’t checked the video out myself, such as by trying to contact this woman, or calling Bank of America to see if anyone by that name ever worked there. And even if her description of events is accurate, I wonder what fraction of deeply indebted Bank of America credit card customers are denied access to debt relief programs, and on exactly what grounds. What about at other banks? What could be done that isn’t being done to address this situation, if it is a situation, and by whom?

A professional journalist on the story would answer these questions. They would make the calls, keep a notebook of what they found, select the most relevant points, and publish a full account of what they discovered as quickly as possible, or at least as full as time and word limits permitted. Good stuff nonetheless. And here the conversation with most pro journalists ends. “If paid professionals don’t do this, who will?” A pro might say that this video isn’t journalism at all.

The obvious problem with the “this isn’t journalism” line of thought it that denies the value of what this woman has done. She may not be a “journalist”, but she’s certainly participating in a journalistic process.

Focus on the economics

I’m going to approach the question of how journalism “should” be done by asking how to produce it as cheaply as possible.

In general I’m not convinced that efficiency is the goal. Markets fail too often for that. But journalism is currently very inefficiently produced in a rather obvious way: lots of reporters covering the same story. Even if only one reporter covered any given story, I still suspect that a traditional newsroom would be wildly inefficient, compared to what is possible in the age of the internet.

If solid journalism in the public interest is cheap to produce, we as a civilization can afford a lot of it. And I think we do want a lot of it. Transparency from those in power is important (and this applies both to governments and corporations) but it will always be possible to adhere to the letter of the disclosure law, rather than the spirit. Keeping track of what the hell is actually going on is always going to be a required function in a free society.

(I write this from corruption-laden Indonesia, where it’s alarmingly difficult to keep tabs on the powers that be.)

My suspicion is that the same shift that has destroyed the traditional, publishing monopoly-based business model for news organizations can also drop the cost of production quite dramatically. How? Cheap communication networks and specialization — the same factors that have been increasing productivity in all fields for the last several centuries. Let’s look at who might perform each of the journalistic functions I listed above.

Decide what should be more broadly known

This was previously the role of the editor in collaboration with the reporter. The editor assigns stories, or the reporter comes up with them. The decision of what to report on relies on “news judgement”, which has been described to me by one old wire-service hack as “tribal.” Different publications have different ideas about what counts as news. And this is great — Wired should cover different stories than the Wall Street Journal.

The problem is that the news media are not very good at consulting their audiences when developing news judgement. Letters to the editor, unsolicited tips to reporters, and the occasional marketing survey are all very narrow and unreliable back-channels.

This is not about tailoring a product to audience demand. It’s about service to the community, which news organizations need to engage with every tool at their disposal. It’s also about trust and authority, which works differently in the social media era. When Wikipedia goes through convulsions of public discussion about every major editorial change, will audiences really trust organizations that claim to decide the public interest behind (mostly) closed doors?

The possibilities for improvement are many, but there are blatantly obvious and simple things that could be done immediately. Facebook and other social media sites have well-publicized and lively forums where users debate the future of the product. News organizations do not.

Decide what should be more deeply investigated

Reporters are tasked with coming up with interesting questions, then getting them answered. The seasoned reporters I’ve had the pleasure of engaging are typically very knowledgeable folks, very bright and very widely read (or the equivalent contemporary expression — widely surfed?) But they are not experts in every field. They will always lack the context and detailed knowledge that allows them to perceive certain key questions. Similarly, who gets to decide whether a story is followed up or dropped?

Spot.us is an interesting attempt to let the audience vote with its wallet. Readers submit ideas for investigative stories, which freelance journalists then write pitches for, describing the work they propose to undertake asking for a specific amount of money. Other readers donate money to those pitches they want to see executed. The site has so far mostly been used for political issues in California.

HelpMeInvestigate.com takes the process a step further. Readers submit questions — a current example is “How much of the rent charged for University of Birmingham halls is actually spent directly on related costs?” — and then readers work together to answer them. The site acts as a clearinghouse for facts uncovered so far.

Professional reporters need to be embedded in systems like this. While it is true that many of the questions that people ask are going to be uninteresting — or easily answered from existing sources — not every idea is going to be bad. There’s been lots of talk and many products designed to help organizations track and manage their collective knowledge. For journalism, such systems need to extend outside the newsroom into the audience.

Collect information from sources both public and private

This is where traditional journalists are both strongest and weakest. A huge part of the value of a career reporter is the network of contacts and sources they build up over a lifetime. Simply put, it’s their job to cultivate relationships with knowledgeable and powerful people. This means the pro reporter has an irreplaceable investigative role to perform.

But the professional journalist is hardly the only person who can publish otherwise unavailable information. This is precisely the role that the woman in the video was playing: we didn’t have any reports of what had happened at Bank of America, now we do.

The fact that her report is unconfirmed does not mean that it is not valuable. Information of all grades is valuable.

On the internet, filtering comes after publishing, as Clay Shirky has noted. This concept is an inversion of traditional journalistic practice, but it is necessary because the journalist cannot be the filter for the entire web. Filtering must be collaborative to scale. Remember that there is no such thing as “automated” filtering: Google Search results may be returned by an algorithm, but that algorithm uses the manually placed links on the web to determine what content is relevant.

Filtering is also the key to finding facts in thick documents, of which there are now many. That buried government report is critical, especially as governments practice increasing data transparency. A blog post saying “hey, page 283 of this document is interesting” may not seem like a story to a reporter. Another blog post referring back to the first one even less so. In fact, both posts are extrmely valuable, because they are filtering mechanisms.

Publish first, ask questions later is the rule of the web. This applies to journalists too: facts or reports that aren’t immediately usable in a story should be considered for rough-and-ready publication anyway, such as through micro-blogging — or, better, by making the newsrooms files open wherever possible. This not only increases transparency, it allows users to build on the reporter’s work.

Check information for factual accuracy

Some facts can only be checked by making calls to highly-placed sources. Other facts can be confirmed by anyone with a telephone. And a great many others can be confirmed online. Only the first category of facts can only be checked by a career journalist.

Bloggers draw attention to unconfirmed reports or documents all the time with remarks like, “this is interesting. Can anyone confirm it?” I’d like to see reporters distributing more of their workload in this way, especially for material that isn’t immediately needed for a deadline.

Asking for help is one way that the work gets to the people who can do it best.

Saying that something needs to be fact checked is almost as valuable as checking it. It draws attention. It puts a pencilled-in question mark above an item that everyone else can see. Wikipedia, the greatest collaborative fact checking system of all time, recognizes this point with its famous “citation needed” tag.

We are entering the era of transparency in fact checking. It’s no longer enough to be right; the audience has to be able to understand why you are right. Compare the links and footnotes on the Wikipedia and New York Times articles for “Global Warming.” Meanwhile, Associated Press stories are still entirely plain text — no reference links at all.

Construct narratives to make sense of information

Everybody in the world wants to be part of narrative construction, if the number of active blogs is any indication. Career journalists have an advantage in that they are (hopefully) intimately familiar with the facts and history of a particular topic. But if smart readers are given deep access to those same facts (transparency!) I don’t see why the reporter’s narrative/interpretation is going to be any better than anyone else’s.

The days when a single publishing organization can set the agenda are over, though God knows Fox tries. Audience members who are broadly connected to each other in real time for free will negotiate the narrative among themselves, thank you very much. Taking part in this negotiation is not something a newsroom can charge for.

Refereeing the negotiations, providing the forum, or filtering the conversation might add value, if done properly. This is different than yelling your own point of view, however nobly constructed.

Of course, opinion columnists are popular. But they don’t seem to be profitable, or at least something that can be charged for. Both the New York Times and The Economist put their opinion outside their paywalls.

Produce content to convey those narratives

Demand Media Inc. pays an average of US $15 for an article of a few hundred words, and $20 for an original short video clip. They currently produce thousands of items each month, and aim to be producing a million items per month by next year. Article topics are assigned automatically by an algorithm that computes the expected search-engine ad value of all future hits to that page.

We are witnessing the beginning of industrial content production. Yes, it’s cheap, poor-quality stuff. That doesn’t matter, in exactly the same way that most of us now wear mass-manufactured clothing. My mass-produced clothes are actually pretty good these days, and in just this way the quality of industrially produced content is going to come up as producers figure out the efficiency issues.

High-quality, artisanal content — sparkling writing, slick video production — will always have higher value, but the market for it is in the process of collapsing. Polished is good, but is it necessary to the journalistic mission? As one blogger put it, “it’s casual Friday on the web.”

Publish and market content

It’s no longer useful to think of a news organizations as publishers, because their irreplaceable role has nothing to do with making information available to the public; that’s just a necessary sub-product, handled mostly by the telecommunications industry.

Marketing is the more interesting role. If a story has no value if it has no impact, then people need to know about the hot stories. Obviously social media offers unique opportunities here, and most online news sites have a decent array of “share this” buttons below each item.

This is a start. It is not enough. The possibility for personalized news is huge. I have yet to see a Facebook application that delivers me useful news and social recommendations for news. Both The Huffington Post’s Social News and The New York Times’ TimesPeople applications seem to be DOA due to a combination of technical and marketing mistakes, and besides they only filter stories on their own sites — which strikes me as incredibly presumptuous. TwitterTime.es, which aggregates the links that my friends have tweeted from all sources, is a lot closer to what I have in mind.

Social Journalism

I imagine a system where the traditional journalistic functions of a newsroom are distributed throughout a community consisting of newsroom staff and audience. The audience is going to be unpaid, let’s assume. (Paying your audience doesn’t seem like a sustainable business model.)

The audience can report information. The audience can check information. The audience sometimes even creates good content. Above all, the audience filters information for each other and for the journalist — not just the smattering of stories produced in the newsroom, but every story and piece of a story that they can find online or in their lives. And every scrap of information that the newsroom can give them access to, in its files and archives.

Salience is mostly decided by audience, not editor. I find it quite startling that when web audiences assemble their own news using sites such as Digg and Reddit, their is very little overlap with mainstream media. It’s even more surprising to me that in a recent ten-country survey, not even journalists ranked stories in agreement with the prominence they were given in the media. The current news agenda-generating process serves no one at all, apparently. As we say on the internet, ur doin it rong.

Instead, the editor needs to ask the audience to filter the ongoing discussion around the best use of society’s very scarce and expensive reporting resources.

The audience performs all of these roles — surfacing facts and checking them, filtering, setting agendas — because it’s in their interest, and because the newsroom makes it really easy for them. This requires software.

Social Software

Journalism needs its own killer social media application to organize all of this, and it hasn’t been invented yet. Social software is architecture and environment: different types of software are conducive to different types of behavior in its users. The resulting social system is the combination of the software and the community that is nurtured on top of it.

Social systems can produce things. Flickr produces a tagged database of photographs. YouTube produces videos. Facebook has produced the personal information of 350,000,000 people. Twitter produces global, real-time conversation. Wikipedia produces the most extensive encyclopedia in history, and makes it available free.

Wikipedia is worth examining very closely, because it may be the closest live example of how social journalism software could work. Users create topics, then edit them collaboratively. Less well known are the conflict-resolution procedures that Wikipedians use to resolve editorial disputes. These progress from discussion on each article’s talk page to informal mediation to binding arbitration. All of these activities are organized and staffed by volunteers.

The Wikimedia Foundation, of which Wikipedia is the flagship product, does not edit content or (usually) engage in dispute resolution. They provide the infrastructure. This is both the software itself, and the rules the govern the community. For example, Wikimedia is ultimately charged with maintaining the editorial policies that they believe will produce the best possible product. These policies are set in consultation with the user community, of course.

Wikimedia employs about 30 full-time staff. This represents an astounding amplification of effort and money. Imagine what an engaged community of readers could do around a single professional newsroom. For maximum amplification, the journalists in the newsroom must perform only those functions that no one else can do.

To accomplish this, the software has to be designed so that it can be used by a community to produce news without any professional journalists. A neighborhood, an organization, or a town should be able to use a social journalism software tool to track and inform itself, supplying any combination of paid and volunteer labor that it deems appropriate. Only when newsrooms give as much capability as possible to their audiences will they understand where the crucial gaps lie that professional journalists must fill.

When won’t this work?

There are many cases where the work of journalism is still going to look a lot like it always has.

First there is the issue of access. Stories that are primarily about the actions of elites who restrict access will need to be covered by accredited professionals — such as the White House press pool. Similarly, professional journalists are often allowed across police lines, into conferences, and in other restricted situations. Accreditation is necessary in such circumstances, and the current system of career journalists working for recognized institutions is probably a reasonable way of deciding how to apportion limited access.

Reporting across language and cultural barriers or from dangerous places will also require professionals. I spoke last week with a reporter who covered the massacres in the Philippines for the BBC. This required contacting authorities in another country, working with translators, and most of all having worked in Asia long enough to have the address book and understand how to operate. It’s not the sort of story that a community of interested followers can generate from the other side of the world. For this reason, I suspect that professional foreign correspondents are likely to be irreplaceable for some time.

Finally, the whole notion of networked journalism rests on the availability of the network. Here in Indonesia, internet access is still slow, expensive, and not widely used. That makes traditional centralized journalism both necessary and profitable, for the time being.

And there are doubtless other cases. Again, the fundamental shift that needs to take place is for professional journalists to try to do only those things that absolutely require their services.

So what does the newsroom do?

I would like to see the newsroom at the center of a system of social news production. The newsroom provides experienced journalists who have fat address books and access to elites. The newsroom designs, produces, and evolves a specialized social media application that allows its audience to self-organize to perform all of the functions that do not strictly require newsroom staff.

Jay Rosen refers to newsrooms as “closed” journalism and blogging as “open” journalism, and sees them as complementary processes that produce different things. I think the lines need to be a little more blurred.

It is true that newsrooms sometimes need to protect sources and keep certain facts private until the broader story is clear — or sometimes keep things secret forever. This is part of the game of getting people to talk. But whenever something does not have to be secret, it should be public. As much as possible, the newsroom should not have access to bigger files or better tools than the audience. Rather than the simple “inside” and “outside” that exists today, I imagine a journalistic source/article/fact/notes tracking system that has fine-grained privacy controls.

Using this shared system, journalists make their data, notes, and tools public whenever possible, so that the audience can help them. The newsroom now owns a sophisticated information tracking and filtering system which acts as a focal point for the aggregation of journalistically interesting material. The audience provides reports and facts. The audience checks facts. The audience interprets facts. Sometimes the audience creates content. The audience provides expert guidance. The audience assembles itself into communities around an issue, identity or topic. The audience constructs narratives and decides on its questions and its goals.

The editors no longer get to decide what goes on the front page. This not only matches the reality of how people consume information online, it’s implied by personalization. Besides, editorial curation of content won’t scale. A journalistic system has to be designed so that the audience — each of many audiences served by the same huge steam of content — can bring the most relevant content to the front. The audience filters, and from this filtering the newsroom also learns what is important to the audience.

I believe that the correct goal of the editor is not the production of stories but the management of the ecosystem of journalistic production, including reporters, community, software, files, and processes.

No doubt I am wrong in the details of how all of this has to work. No doubt there are ways in which this scenario is too optimistic. But I’ve yet to hear of anyone seriously attempting it.

Yet we in the industrialized world seem astonished that our parents could afford the houses that we cannot.

The economics of sustenance farming in the face of rising population are immediately clear, yet we do not take the general lesson. We still act like we have infinite resources. Our population is still increasing, yet land, water, oil, and every single mineral is finite and running out. A 2007 article in New Scientist discusses this more cogently than anything I’ve ever seen, including the above chart “How Long Will It Last?”

We need to apply the same thinking to energy. I am not talking about running out of oil. The oil will run out, of course, and not before we do tremendous environmental damage — I, for one, am planning on hitting the world’s great beaches sooner rather than later. But when the oil is gone, it’s simply gone. Unlike copper or plastic, energy cannot be recycled in any way (in fact energy is the limiting input in recycling everything else.) We have no choice but to switch to sunlight for our ongoing power needs. And sunlight, like land, will have to be divided smaller and smaller among more and more of us.

I’m currently looking for an apartment in Hong Kong. On my own I can afford about 200 square feet. I saw a place where the Indonesian nannies live; there were six people in this space, crammed into bunk beds barely narrower than the one tiny room. I was shocked, until I realized that I had arrived in the future. It’s not going to get better. We’re already out of space, but soon we will feel the energy pinch. One day soon, electricity, transport, and hot water are going to be just as rationed as real estate (by each of us individually, because of the cost.)

An engineer named Saul Griffith has done the calculations. To meet the current world population’s current energy requirements, we would need to collect the incident sunlight over an area about the size of Australia. That’s a stupendous amount of solar power to build. It will be a very long time before it is built, if ever. More fundamentally, the physical relationship between incident sunlight and land area brings us right back to passing ever-smaller fields to our children. (By the way, nuclear power won’t help: even without building more power plants we will run out uranium some time in the next century. And wind power, wave power etc. are actually solar driven.)

We will never see the easy material affluence of our parents; we have entered the zero-sum game phase of land- and energy-measured wealth where the only way to get more is to take from someone else (as evidenced by the increasing wealth inequality in industrialized countries over the past few decades.) We can no longer teach our children to expect more than their parents. It’s all a lie; barring insane technological shifts or catastrophic population reduction, the future is high density.

The big house of the American Dream, which is also the big house of the aspiring middle-class everywhere in the world, is over.

Theoretically, desktop manufacturing technology then spreads exponentially, until everyone can make whatever material objects they need from downloaded plans, for only the cost of feed plastic.

The dream is best explained in this excellent little video:

It’s hard to overstate the fundamental shift that would come with truly widespread desktop manufacturing. Right now all of the objects we use are manufactured somewhere far away and shipped to us, and the designs are expensive and slow to  change. Instead, imagine if everyone had a household appliance, perhaps fed by spools of plastic and metal wire, that could manufacture just about any object from plans downloaded from the internet. It’s hard to see how private designs could compete with millions of amateur object designers geeking out over their widgets for the benefit of humanity, which means that designs for all the basic desirable objects would be freely available.

Want a new phone? Download the latest Android phone plan from the Open Handset Foundation. That’s cool, but the really cool thing is this: everyone in the world could have one for the price of plastic. More to the point, everyone in the world could have e.g. irrigation pumps, car parts, light switches, medical devices, essentially all the trappings of modern technology.

It is of course debatable whether or not an increase in humanity’s use of energy-consuming technology is a good idea at this time. However, it seems to me unconscionable to deny it to the world’s poor just because we got there first. Further, one could also replicate the parts for home biomass reactors, electric cars, and other advanced energy devices — regardless of whether or not anyone can make a profit selling such items commercially.

New versions of the replicator with enhanced production capabilities (now with integrated circuits!) would be designed to be manufacturable using existing models. This means that manufacturing technology would itself spread virally. To bootstrap this, all you need are a few basic self-replicating machines, then the technology passes from friend to friend until the whole world is saturated and capable of producing all future upgrades.

But we are nowhere near that dream. There’s a lot of promise to desktop manufacturing, but I’ve come to believe that the RepRap approach is probably not the right one. And I’m going to try to explain why.

Back to reality. Today the RepRap team has succeeded in designing and building a cheap 3D printer which prints in plastic only and can produce about 50% of  its own parts. This is a historic event, and should not be underestimated. However, producing a new machine still requires a lot of basic hardware such as metal rods and screws, and also more exotic components such as specific integrated circuits and stepper motors. In RepRap’s evolutionary analogy, these raw parts (as well as plastic filament feedstock) are the naturally produced “vitamins” that the RepRap consumes from its environment in order to reproduce. As time goes on, the team hopes to produce designs for upgraded RepRap machines that can manufacture more of their own parts, and not incidentally the parts for more complex objects too. For example, they hope to be able to deposit metal films with the next generation machine, which would allow the RepRap to produce electrical wiring and basic circuits.

All very lovely, but it’s time to examine the reality of this technology. Today we have a prototype design, and a vibrant community of people experimenting with and working on self-replicating desktop manufacturing. Good. But we are not by any means on the threshold of a viral explosion of manufacturing capability, because the machines are not self-replicating exponentially as hoped. A very insightful post from a site called The Clanking Replicator explains the situation:

By the second quarter of 2008 Vik Olliver had managed to print a full parts set for a Darwin with his own Darwin machine. Then a very curious and totally unexpected thing happened. Fully 6 months went by before a Darwin replicated again, this time in Canada. By that time, however, by Dr. Bowyer’s estimate of the population of Darwins was in the low thousands. What had happened?

Basically, Darwin morphed into a fully industrial product. It began with the controller boards being outsourced for production by the Reprap foundation and has culminated with a shippable kit purchasable for US$1,100  requiring little more than the sort of assembly you’d be expected to apply to something bought from Ikea. What is getting built out there in its thousands, to use Dr. Bowyer’s metaphor, is 100% vitamins – 0% replicated parts.

The initial self-replicating manufacturing machine, code named Darwin, has so far completely failed to spread virally. People are building this prototype device, but not by using another 3D printer. I want to examine why, and what this means for the future of desktop manufacturing.

First of all, the machine is far from “self replicating” from the user’s point of view. What you get when the existing design “replicates” is a set of plastic parts for a new machine. To this must be added metal hardware, integrated circuits and electronics, and stepper motors. Then the whole must be assembled by someone already skilled in making machines (here I must disagree with the Clanking Replicator post to say that assembling a RepRap still seems to me quite a complex undertaking, the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to attempt without jeweler’s screwdrivers and a multimeter.) This is hardly a consumer item. To press the evolutionary analogy, its niche is limited to hardcore geeks. This might still allow exponential growth to saturation of that niche, but desktop manufacturing is not going to transform the world until it goes solidly mainstream.

This means a consumer product. The RepRep must be no harder to reproduce and assemble than Ikea furniture; if the directions are longer than a page, you’re going to lose 95% of your market immediately. Further, the parts that cannot be desktop manufactured must be ridiculously common. You need to be able to get them at the hardware store, even in places where hardware stores are very limited (especially in such places, if we’re seriously going to consider transforming Africa.) Stepper motors are far too difficult to obtain, even in developed countries.

The RepRap team recognizes this, and is trying hard to make the machine simpler to obtain in at least two ways. First, the second generation system promises to be simpler, with fewer parts, a more robust mechanical design, and easier assembly. Second, they are looking into ways to expand the types of parts that the RepRap can print. Metal film deposition is an obvious way to go, because then the RepRap could print its own wiring and circuit boards. With time, the team hopes to further simplify the replication process.

Except, why not just buy the parts as a kit? Or even fully assembled as an industrial product? Although the exponential replication story is a beautiful solution to the problem of distributing desktop manufacturing technology, do we really care? Modern civilization is already extremely good at getting an object into the hands of absolutely everyone, everywhere. The towns ringing the Sahara desert may not have electricity, but they sure as hell have Coca-Cola, and usually motorcycles too. No one not a geek is going to care about trying to self-replicate a machine until that process is easier (and cheaper) than buying a finished model at Wal-Mart.

Which brings us to the second major problem I see with the RepRap concept: none of it matters at all until the thing is actually useful. This means making thing that people want other than parts for more RepRaps. Under the heading What Can It Make? the RepRap website shows us a fly swatter, a pair of child’s plastic sandals, a coat hook, an iPhone-to-dashboard mounting bracket, a strainer, a plastic ring, various brackets, a couple of gears, and a crappy martini glass. I understand that this is first generation technology, and it is very cool to make this stuff at home, but is there really any non-geek demand for a machine that can make these sorts of objects?

In my opinion, the RepRap community has so far focussed far too much on the coolness of a self-replicator, and not nearly enough on what it could be good for. For a research project, this is fine. However, the RepRap will never achieve viral status among the general public unless it’s actually useful to people who don’t care about technology. Which, for the purposes of this discussion, is everyone.

Now, 3D printers are just the thing for low-volume runs and prototypes, which is why such machines have traditionally fallen under the category of  ”rapid prototyping.” It’s a great technology, and I am very glad to see someone attempting to bring the price down. But it will not be a widely adopted consumer technology until it’s a better way to get stuff than going to the store or ordering it online. This means designing lots of useful things that are cheaper or easier to manufacture on the desktop than they are to obtain through the usual channels. Unfortunately, those places where consumer object distribution is most limited (it’s hard to get a martini glass in the Sahara) are exactly those places where it would be hardest to get parts for a home-built desktop manufacturing machine. Put bluntly, the RepRap team does not yet have a product that someone wants.

I have in mind a detailed analysis of common consumer items and their availability. Small plastic widgets are manufactured by the millions in China, and so are of interest only if specialized and currently difficult to obtain. But this is the market niche that high-end rapid prototyping machines already occupy, so no go. We won’t be desktop-manufacturing plastic spoons any time soon. More promising are assemblies of several parts, such as toys and small machines. Maybe spoons aren’t interesting, but I wonder if an entire suite of kitchen utensils on demand would be, including egg beater blades and corkscrews, or an entire set of model cars lovingly 3D modeled by online enthusiasts. After that, we rapidly get into objects that a RepRap cannot hope to produce. No one will be manufacturing their own light bulbs or microwaves any time soon.

Except that asking about the manufacture of existing objects is a little deceptive. Current consumer goods have been designed to optimize the cost per unit when thousands or millions are produced in a single factory. Desktop manufacturing imposes a different economics: the relevant parameters are raw materials cost, printing time, manual assembly time, and of course the requirement for parts that cannot be fabricated on the current generation of printers. An analysis of what could be made on the desktop must also be an analysis of how existing classes of objects could be redesigned to be amenable to desktop manufacturing. It’s not just about building a printer, but about redesigning the entire manufacturing supply chain and inventing entirely new fabrication methods. Want to reduce the external parts count? Perhaps new types of printable plastic fasteners can replace screws. Is the thing too complex for the user to assemble after printing? Integrated monocoque designs might be the answer. As far as I know, no one has yet tried to design a monocoque toaster.

This sort of research will also answer questions about what capabilities are most sorely missing in the current generation of printers. The ability to fabricate electronics is obviously desirable, and metal film deposition seems like a good first step. But is it really? The key criterion when evaluating any new capability must be how many useful objects could be fabricated. Asking what fraction of the parts in a RepRap could be made by a RepRap is only interesting when desktop manufacturing technology starts to become competitive with standard manufacturing techniques for complex electro-mechanical objects.

Which brings us to cost. I love the idea of downloading the design for whatever I want, but I still don’t think I’m going to print the vast majority of things I need. For plastic spoons, an injection moulding machine plus international shipping is going to be cheaper than desktop manufacturing for a long, long time. This gives desktop manufacturing a potential advantage for complex objects or short runs, especially if the labor of assembly can be avoided by automated production. Unfortunately, complex objects and minimal manual assembly are precisely what current desktop manufacturing technology is worst at. I can imagine a very advanced machine that can make its own integrated circuits and assemble them too, perhaps with its own little robot arm that is controlled by the downloaded manufacturing program. Awesome, and one day potentially a cheaper way to get one’s hands on that hot new laptop design, but that capability is a very long way away. Instead, the desktop manufacturing research program needs to ask itself what sorts of objects are not only useful and possible in the near term, but expensive to manufacture or distribute by conventional techniques. As an analogy, anyone can now print a book on their laser printer, yet we still buy bulk-printed books.

Finally, it seems to me that the RepRap team is trying to solve two problems at once, and is unclear about their separation:

1. Developing a useful desktop manufacturing capability
2. Getting that capability into the hands of everyone

The self-replicating exponential growth ecological analogy is a beautiful conceptual solution to #2, and it is also a useful technological driver for #1 because a 3d printer is a pretty complex thing to print. The RepRap team is also proud to be distributed, open-source, etc. and this is an admirable approach to #1.  However, these are far from the only solutions to these two problems.

Starting with the distribution problem, a moment’s thought reveals that it’s already extremely well solved! Getting a physical object to whoever wants it wherever they are is all but trivial at this point in history. We do already this with everything from soft drinks to mobile phones (and believe me, everybody has both.) The problem is not getting the object to people, it’s making it as cheap as possible to do so. This means that driving down the cost of desktop manufacture is the key goal; self-replication is only interesting if it’s cheaper than assembling it in China and shipping it.

As for the technology development problem, there are lots of approaches other than distributed and open source. Many basic technologies have come out of government research programs (such as jet engines and the internet) and private enterprise is of course reknowned for efficiently producing and distributing innovation. So rather than distributed global self-replication, how about this plan: figure out a way that someone can make money off of the idea, at least for a little while. Do the research discussed above and write a business plan. Take the core RepRap team and add to them the best mechanical engineers, manufacturing specialists, and consumer product designers that the world has to offer. Take the plan and the team to your favorite venture capital firm, and ask for a few hundred million dollars. I’m willing to bet that a well-funded team of crack personnel could solve the daunting technical problems of useful desktop replication much faster than the current distributed organization, and the debt to the VC would provide a strong incentive to build something that people actually wanted. This doesn’t immediately imply monopoly: open-source the design if you like, and make money off being the first to get there. There is no shortage of potential ethical business plans.

If the goal is to develop desktop replication technology to a useful state and get it into the hands of as many people as possible as quickly as possible, then I am not at all sure that self-replication is a useful near-term design goal. I do love the idea, and I believe that, eventually, self-replication will become a useful manufacturing strategy. I also really like the upgrade bootstrapping concept, where each new generation of manufacturing machine is designed to be fabricated on the last. This is an approach that will allow advances in manufacturing technology to spread at the speed of information. But we’re not there yet. Those working on desktop manufacturing technology today will need to concentrate on cost and usefulness, probably for many years to come.

(graphic from ihatebillboards.com)

You raved about advertising last night, and it was so easy to believe that you were wrong. Now I see that we were standing in the only spot where I could win. Next to a life-size replica of the mousetrap game, you told me that no one works for free. You said Wikipedia is going to fail because experts will never donate their time. Silhouetted in the apocalyptic glow of home-made fire art, you were preaching, saying advertising is the only option we have, saying commerce is the only real thing.

Sure, I said, deadpan. We all gotta eat. 

I was smirking, but today is Monday. At rush hour, I know I’m going against the tide. I spend a lot of time with very busy people who, economically speaking, don’t produce shit. The work I sometimes do has the cachet of underground. You have to know the right warehouses. It’s exclusive, but mostly it’s exclusive because you have to be willing to put your excess wealth into making your own culture. But what we do, it never put up skyscrapers. It has no market. It never built Rome, or railroads. You know better. You put such power into logos that the Khoasan Road bootleggers label their shoes “Nike” and the first hamburger place in Cambodia uses McDonanld’s colors. 

But this isn’t about globalization. It’s about you.

Back when we met, click-through was a means, not an end. We sat on the B-school lawn and told ourselves that the older generation were fools, that they had no idea what was good in life. We would only put our creative energies into projects we believed in, even if we weren’t quite sure what those might be. We were never going to work in a cubicle. We would never pitch a campaign to make insurance sexy. Then you got the offer you couldn’t refuse, and every new offer was a hard line pushed out a little bit further. You began to eat well, to afford health insurance, to think about having a family. The shine came off poverty, the outlines of reality shifted, and with them, the possible.

Now you sit in meetings where people say “monetize” without irony.  

You take in the company meeting and nod your head to the stock price. You tell me that open source is ridiculous, because actually Google funds Firefox and Ubuntu funds Linux. And Web 2.0 is for connecting with people — the people you want money from. And Facebook is for demographics, and viral marketing is culture, and when you did edit Wikipedia, you wrote:

A lifestyle brand provides a powerful supplement to the core identity of the customer.

When I read that, I knew the final person you’d convinced was yourself. You think you’re doing a good thing. And you’re probably right. The world really does work this way, because everywhere I’ve ever been, aspiration means money. And money means getting people to buy.

But you’re safe here, tonight. No one is watching. They don’t care if you believe, only if you deliver. So have another drink and let’s say it out loud, together, cut through and admit it: nobody actually likes advertising.

LOL! Worth staying with it until the end.

Other references I’ve found today in trying to understand what the hell the US government is doing:

Jeffrey Sachs (possibly best known as the author of The End of Poverty) discusses Geithner’s asset buying plan here: 

There are countless preferable and more transparent courses of action. The toxic assets could be sold at market prices, not inflated prices, making the bank shareholders bear the costs of the losses of the toxic assets. If the banks then need more capital, the government could invest directly into bank shares. This would bail out the banking system without bailing out the bank shareholders. The process would be much fairer, less costly, and more transparent to the taxpayer.

And I have finally, finally found a detailed, clear, and well-documented primer on how we got into this mess in the first place. In fact it’s an entire online supplementary chapter to Stanford Professor Charles Jones’ macroeconomics textbook. It clearly explains basic concepts like bank balance sheets, liquidity crises, the role of the federal interest rate, leverage, etc. and goes through a detailed history of the last two years from a macro-economic point of view. Lots of graphs too, the recession in pictures! Highly recommended.

Despite spending the last several days reading up on Treasury Secretary Geithner’s plan to buy bad bank assests, I now feel only marginally better prepared to judge whether this is a good idea or not. Of course, no one is asking me, but I still think it’s a big problem that I can’t evaluate this plan, because the fact that we live in a democracy means that citizens need to be able to understand what their government is doing. 

Now, I am no economist and I have no idea how to run a bank — much less all the banks. However, I am smart, interested, and I’ve done my homework, including previously reading a first year economics textbook (covering both micro- and macro-economics) and several other interesting books (1,2,3) on how markets work or don’t. In short I have been the model of a concerned citizen, and I still have no idea what is going on. This is partially because the situation is very complex, but it is also because there is no way a private citizen can get access to the data that would clarify matters — large banks will barely share their balance sheets with the government, much less me.

This is a problem. It means that the government, financial, and academic communities have not paid nearly enough attention both to basic economics education, and to transparency in real-world business. It is therefore impossible for anyone else to check their assumptions and restrain their huge power. Lest this sounds like unhelpful complaining, I promise to make a concrete suggestion for improvement by the end of this post.

I find it useful to compare the question of bank bailouts to climate change. Like the worldwide recession, climate change presents a policy problem of global scope that needs to be handled right the first time. And like the global economy, climate change is a ridiculously complex problem, depending on the long-term interplay of hundreds of variables interacting through physical laws that most people have never head of. Because I was once a physicist, I can appreciate the basic science involved, and I can even make credible sense of specialist papers in the field. However, I don’t have to: the most cursory investigation of the topic quickly leads to the IPCC reports, a series of massively collaborative international summaries of current knowledge. There is no such authoritative primer for the economic crisis.

The best I have been able to find is Baseline Scenario’s Financial Crisis for Beginners, a collection of articles and interviews on various aspects of the problem. On the Geithner plan in particular, I have also found Brad DeLong’s FAQ to be quite helpful. Unfortunately, his (good) opinion of the plan is not universal: noted (and Nobel-winning) economist Paul Krugman disagrees. There’s a lively debate in the New York Times editorial pages today, and so it goes…

The core of the plan is this: the US Treasury will provide loans to allow investors to buy up bad bank assets — mortgages that might not be repaid, that sort of thing — as a long term speculative investment. This will, in theory, make the troubled banks more solvent, which should encourage them to start lending again. The potential problem is this: the loans will be “non-recourse“, which means that investors don’t have to repay the loans if these assets really are worth little or nothing. It amounts to the government insuring financiers to take more risk — for free.

This galls me, but it actually makes sense if you believe that the root of the current problem is that everyone is scared to take risk, and thus businesses can’t get loans, etc., which is the well-reasoned position of yet another prominent economist. It doesn’t make sense if you believe that some of these bad assets are just that: worthless debt that will never be repaid, such as mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them in the first place. In this view, the pre-crash boom was just a pyramid scheme that finally collapsed.

Which view is right? I have no idea. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. The major papers seem more interested in covering the politics of who said what (see, e.g. this from the NYT) than getting deep into the complexities of what is actually going on. This isn’t helpful; it’s little more than celebrity gossip, yapping about what the stars are doing. It’s akin to talk-show pundits arguing about climate change — which, sadly, also happens frequently.

So where is the IPCC report for the financial crisis?  Where is the graph that shows that lending has collapsed? Where is the excruciatingly careful analysis of the relationship between credit and unemployment? What percentage of which assets at which banks are now considered to be bad? I know these things must exist — I surely hope they do — but I do not have the time, expertise, or connections to track everything down. Thus I want a careful overview, but I also want the citations, because requiring that claims be documented is a really good way of keeping people intellectually honest. Lacking this, what reason do I  have to believe anything that anyone is saying?

One of the clearer, more careful resources I’ve found is the Congressional Research Service report “Causes of the Financial Crisis.” Ironically, this document, like all CRS reports, was not meant for members of the general public, and it had to be leaked to the fabulous OpenCRS.com for us to get at it. And in this summary I find the most refreshingly honest sentence:

While some may insist that there is a single cause, and thus a simple remedy, the sheer number of causal factors that have been identified tends to suggest that the current financial situation is not yet understood in its full complexity. 

If we are at all serious about democracy, then public education about complex topics must be a specific goal. This is a goal that goes hand-in-hand with greater transparency, because it is not possible to make convincing arguments about data that is secret. We need to be treated like adults, not children: the level of economic discourse in the current press is scarcely high-school level, complete with whispered secrets and gossip about who is popular. At best, the major players in this game — the US government and financial institutions — have been negligent in educating the public on the functioning and dys-functioning of the economy; at worst they are playing politics to protect their power and money. Nor have academia or well-informed bloggers stepped in to fill the vacuum.

Again, what is needed is a meticulously documented argument as to 1) what happened and 2) what can be expected to fix it. The truth may be that we simply don’t know what happened or what will happen next — but even if this is so, I want to know why those in charge believe what they believe. Lacking such a detailed, evidence-based narrative, it is simply not possible to be an informed citizen. The worst part is, I’m not sure that our professional legislators currently understand any more than I do. Transparency and good education benefit us all.

Okay, but how did I end up on this side and not that side?

I went through this in Russia last year, when I was hosted in Moscow by a global warming skeptic; apparently it’s politically popular there to deny global warming, which sounds like a slight to Russia except when you remember that it’s politically popular here, too. But anyway, I was plunged headfirst into the debate with an ambitious little snot of a web-startup wannabe millionaire (“You should see our new offices! The Mafia used to operate out of there! They still visit someimes.”) Running through the arguments in great detail (as I previously reported here) I was forced to ask the very pertinent question, why do I believe that global warming is real, and man-made, and a serious problem?

The quick answer is that I believe the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, but that’s also just ink on paper. Why do I trust them?

It has to do with process. To begin with, I know what the IPCC process actually is. They have devoted almost as much dead tree to how they reached their conclusions as to the conclusions themselves. In short, they collected something like 600 climate scientists from 40 countries, locked them in a library with a complete and current set of all relevant academic and scientific publications, and threw raw meat at them through the bars until they reached consensus. Actually, that’s not quite how it happened. Some of them were vegetarians.

The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report was then further reviewed by another 600-odd people, corrected, argued over, politicized, and finally published. Although there is no way to guarantee against bias in the author and reviewer selection process, at least a very diverse range of viewpoints could be expected to be represented, and at least the people involved have some reason to know what they’re talking about, having spent significant chunks of their lives asking questions about the ecosystem. This is as global and as sincere an effort to answer a question as humanity has ever seen, and it was all meticulously open and transparent.

There is a moral here.

One of the great things that thorough education teaches you — any education — is just how deep the rabbit hole of knowledge goes. It’s a smart person who realizes how big and complex and subtle any real discipline is; and I am absolutely at a loss to answer the tricky questions of someone else’s field, be they about global warming, the effectiveness of acupuncture, or whether cutting taxes will really help with unemployment (or not.) The only truly universal approach, our only hope for living in a world too big for reason, is to learn to evaluate how any given body of knowledge decides what is true and what is not true. In painful depth and detail.

The method, philosophy, and process of coming to believe: that is everything. I can’t say I even understand this process in myself, let alone an entire civilization, but I can say with conviction that it’s my favorite field of study.

I’m in Kathmandu and thinking of you. I visited the Swayambhunath temple this afternoon, up on its hill overlooking the valley. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful, and it opened me up in the way only real beauty can, cut through all the jaded traveler in me. I haven’t been home since we worked together a year ago – you know that. It will be time for me to return to San Francisco soon. But what I wanted to talk to you about today is the two little boys that accompanied me to the temple and back.

You know how it goes – they sort of attached themselves to me and the one with better English elected himself my guide. Which is fine; they were lovely kids, very bright and very entertaining and fun to play with. They especially appreciated when I made monkey noises to scare off the touts trying to sell me prayer flags and singing bows. So we went up the 365 steps, and I stood on the terrace at sunset and marveled at the completely splendid Stupa, and the panoramic view of this ancient Pagoda city being eaten by its own slum suburbs. When we began the long walk back from the temple, it was very dark. Kathmandu has blackouts for three hours every afternoon.

I knew it was coming. They were shy about it.

“Excuse me, can you buy me some milk?”

“No.”

“Some milk, only.”

“No, sorry. I know this one.” You too, my international friend, you know this hustle. The milk powder turns out to be strangely expensive, and the kids sell it back to the shopkeeper later.

Some chatting in Nepali among themselves. A few minutes later, “Some food?”

“You’re hungry?”

“Yes.”

“Then you should go home. You are children, go home and ask your parents to feed you.” I  wanted so badly for the world to work this way.

“Okay… we need also kerosene.”

“Again, this is your parents’ job.”

“Kerosene is very expensive.”

“I know that.”

I must admit I don’t have your patience, Jenafir. I don’t have your lifetime of practice with compassion. Every day I try to give at least a smile to all the desperate people who ask me for help; most days I fail. It gets to me.

“Look. Are you my friends or are you beggars?”

“We are your friends!”

“Then stop begging from me.”

“Please help us. We are hungry.”

“That’s it. I’m leaving.” And I walked away. I sure showed them a lesson. It felt terrible.

I calmed myself, turned around, motioned them over. I asked them to sit with me on some steps as night fell. Unhealthy dogs wandered in the street, and a kerosene lantern glowed red inside the shack across the road. Still no power.

“Listen,” I began, “what do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want to do?”

No answer.

“Do you want to, um, build buildings? Or be a policeman? How about flying an airplane, would you like that?”

It took a long time for him to answer. I had to repeat the question, give more examples.

“I want to be shopkeeper.”

“A shopkeeper! That’s great… but, are you sure? You sure you wouldn’t rather be an airplane pilot?”

“I don’t know how to fly an airplane.”

“No. But you can go to school and learn.”

A flash of a smile. That’s all I wanted. Just for a second I wanted him to believe that he could be whatever he wanted. I don’t even know if it’s true, but I wanted him to believe that.

“You can learn anything you want,” I pressed on, probably uselessly. “You can choose to be anything you want.”

Silence.

“So why do you choose to be a beggar?”

“I am not a beggar.”

“You keep asking me for things without offering anything in return. That makes you a beggar.”

Silence.

“Will your parents be angry that you did not get money from foreigners today?”

“No.”

“Do you do this every day?”

“No. Only it is finished school exams now. Sometimes we have holidays.”

And that was it. The two children chatted amongst themselves but wouldn’t speak to me further. I told him I was going if he didn’t want to talk to me. He wouldn’t meet my eye. Did I shame him? Did I go too far and crush that spark I hoped I saw?

I walked off into the gloom, over the unpaved unlit roads, dodging rickshaws and bicycles and scooters, with that same old fury. Furious with the world, with him, with myself for handling it so badly. Empty and opened and full of ache at the same time. Realizing that I know very little about communicating with children. Wondering what you would have done, my friend. Wondering, again and always, what might actually make a difference in their lives. Wounded to see a spirit so young already crushed. Wondering if they would ever burn like I was burning right that second. Beginning to cry in the dark.

And so it is with us, and the many stories about what happened to our economy and how it might be fixed. It’s not that an event like the current financial meltdown is not understandable; it’s just that really understanding what happened and how to make it better requires a lot of training and knowledge that most people lack. Without this background, anything we might be able to say about our economic problems is necessarily a fable, a narrative about one-dimensional heroes and villains with names such as “GDP” and “sup-prime loan.” But if we must have stories, they should be good stories. We want stories that have some relationship to reality, that will expand fractally into the right explanations if we choose to look deeper into any particular point

With that caveat, I present to you the best short explanations I’ve been able to find about the current crisis.

First, how did the economy get this way? Kiplinger’s Personal Finance has a lovely short explanation, which begins

1. It all began with cheap money. To prop up ailing economies early in this decade, central banks in the U.S. and Japan kept interest rates unusually low, which encouraged speculation. In the U.S., the Federal Reserve lowered the federal funds rate — the rate that banks charge each other for overnight loans and a barometer for the cost of borrowing money on a short-term basis — from 6.5% in 2000 to 1% by mid 2003. Cheap money quickly ignited a sharp rise in home values in virtually every corner of the country.

And then, what is the point of the bailout package, and how is it supposed to work? For this I turn to Berkeley economist Brad Delong, who recently wrote an excellent Q&A.

Q: What do you think of this plan? Is it what needs to be done?

A: I think the Paulson-Dodd-Frank plan as it is emerging is much, much less effective than it could be. But it is still much better than doing nothing, which is kind of like being poked in the eye with a sharp stick.

I do not say these are truth. I say only that they are plausible stories, ways into thinking about this mess. These are not really answers, just provocations to the right sorts of questions.