Tearing Up The Grid

(This is Part II of a post I started below. Read here first.)

So what new ways are we going to find to live in this country? Boy, the mint I could make if I knew. But I would like to suggest (decidedly not predict) that we rediscover one of the few virtues of the feudal era: the idea of the Commons.

During the late feudal period, large parts of the feudal estates were held "in common", meaning that there was general access to them. This was not, as is often mistakenly believed, a free-for-all where anything was allowed. Quite the opposite - people were killed for letting their ox graze too long. Of course, the Commons were destroyed during the Enclosure movement, when private lords took over common lands to graze sheep. This heralded the rise of England as an agricultural exporter. It also disenfranchised a vast population. Before Enclosure, roughly one-third of England was common land, and many peasants literally lived and died by what they could glean from the commons. This first great era of privatized probably killed more than a few peasants. It was also urged on and justified by the likes of John Locke, who argued that the Commons were mere "wastes" that could be put to better use by wealth-seeking lords. Seems familiar.

The Commons withered, but didn't die entirely. Many aspects of our lives today are regulated as a Commons - radio frequency spectrum is probably the best example. The government of Canada "owns" the spectrum, but lets broadcasters use it. In exchange, the government maintains the right to regulate broadcast standards. Similar examples of a Common ethic can be found in other areas. However, by and large we live in a privatized - or Enclosed - world.

But do we need to? I used the example of Gaviotas to show how a small group of people could use local energy and materials to meet most of their needs. Of course, our "needs" in the west go beyond food, shelter and water. We need electricity, communication, education, manufacturing, and on and on. Surprisingly, recent developments may allow us to have the best of both worlds - small, local and autonomous communities with a high level of comfort and technology.

I've dealt a bit with solar power already, so I won't go in to too much detail. But it should be said that Canada is still a colder, dimmer place than most of the rest of the world. That said, it's still not like we live in caves. If we are draconian about rooting out waste, and are intelligent in how we use our solar energy, I think it's quite possible we could all be living in an energy Commons. One of the biggest things to remember is that even the best solar panels are only about 20% efficient. The other 80% goes out as heat. Of course, most of what we use energy for is heating of one form or another, so capturing that other 80% can make a huge difference in our energy budget.

Recent developments in reverse osmosis membranes similarly allow us to recycle a lot of our wastewater. These advances were originally developed to provide places like California and Israel with abundant drinking water, and are currently used by the US Army to provide water to troops in hot climates. Another few years, and they should be available for home use in places without regular water. As the price comes down, it may make more sense to built homes entirely off the municipal water grids - those pipes aren't free, after all. A home could store all the water it needs, recycle what it has, and make up the inevitable losses from rainwater (or, in the Canadian case, snowmelt.) Providing clean water is becoming very profitable (after regular droughts in the American west) so the market has been very competitive, and RO membranes are only one of a number of competing technologies.

As for solid waste, many homes are now opting for composting toilets - basically, all the toilets in your home flush in to a central composter. Most of the mass in human waste is water any way, so drying it out allows you go months without having to empty the composter. When you do have to empty it, don't worry - the dry compost ready for use is stored separately from the still wet crap. The compost, of course, can be used for growing a community's food.

Of course, this is just the basics. But the point is that with relatively little new technology, we can meet a community's basic needs. Of course, once we extrapolate a bit further, we can see some truly revolutionary changes. The first is that these homes would be entirely autonomous of the municipal grid for energy and water. This means that they can be built anywhere. This was yet another of Bucky Fuller's attempts at wealth, which failed as people rebelled against the look of his Dymaxion Home - or a "Machine for Living". Bucky's idea was to mass-produce housing at a cost similar to a car. It was entirely feasible even in the 1950s, but was kind of space-agey in look, and unfamiliar to people.

As solar power comes down in price, and water and food can be largely produced locally, a huge portion of the stuff we move around doesn't have to be moved around anymore. If we can make oil obsolete by building a modern "Solar Democracy" as Amory Lovins calls it, not only will the planet benefit, but huge amounts of energy will no longer need to be expended in moving things around. One of the biggest energy hogs is the oil industry itself, which probably spends more energy just moving oil around than ever gets to the pump. The final step would be a decline in material prices to build greenhouses for food. But drive through the countryside in Southern Ontario sometime - greenhouses are already being built all over the place for fruit and vegetables. They currently compete with Mexican and Californian produce, but as gas prices go up, we can expect Mexican broccoli to get priced out of the market.

After food, water and energy, what's next? How about manufacturing? Bruce Sterling recently wrote a column in Wired magazine about MIT's desktop manufacturing project, colloquially called "Fab Labs", in which a computer is hooked up to an exacto knife (more or less) and told to start cutting 3d objects out of plastic. So far the process is only good for simple shapes, but that covers a huge range of the stuff in our homes. The entire project is run on Open Source software, and the long term goal is to build a Fab Lab that can build itself - and presto, we've got a decentralized, local, open source industrial base. Or, if you prefer, a manufacturing commons. Of course, we won't be able to build everything locally - computer chips are a bit too precise for a Fab Lab, I bet. But electric cars are immensely simple vehicles - with third- or fourth-generation Fab Labs, who knows? In any case, we can drastically cut the amount of stuff we have to move around by making it locally - a key way to survive the end of cheap oil, and a good idea for the earth in any case.

(If you're getting bored, hang on - we're almost there. Don't make me turn this thing around!)

Open Source software would, by necessity, play a huge role in any future commons. It doesn't make any sense to build all this autonomy in to the system if we have to pay royalties to Microsoft, after all. One of the interesting stories of the last year is how far Open Source has spread. Palm is now moving to OS for its devices. Firefox and Thunderbird are getting rave reviews, and for the first time ever Internet Explorer is losing market share. Serious people are talking about 2005 being the year that Windows starts losing share on the desktop front, as Apple rolls out a new cheap iMac and various Linux companies begin marketing Windows alternatives. Some of the leaders in this process have been the Asian governments, who realize that they'll never build an information economy if XP costs them $200 a license. China has been very vocal in preferring Linux to Windows.

I don't think Open Source is going to stop there, though. Rather, Open Source is just one aspect of what Lawrence Lessig calls "Free Culture", the desire for people to exchange ideas and culture with as little interference as possible. In this fight, it's us versus big copyright holders. Four centuries after Enclosure began, there are still those who want to wall off what belongs to everyone. I'm not against copyrights at all, by the way. I just think it's absurd to make them eternal absolute rights, which is where we're moving. Frankly, Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain. End of story.

Of course, the problem is that culture isn't free, nor is the means to access culture. Which brings me to an article in today's this document by the New America Foundation really inspires me. With currently existing or impending technologies, we could have a totally wireless data infrastructure capable of providing TV, Internet, Phone, whatever. For an early idea of what this might look like, take a look at this. Instead of being a metered and controlled medium, we suddenly have the possibility of a Digital Commons.

Of course, when all these technologies get combined, you get some really interesting results. Want to build a town in the middle of nowhere? Bring in some trucks with some fab labs and solar panels, build all the homes you need, put up some antennas and download the instructions to start making more complicated things - water heaters, fridges, whatever. The data comes over your free Internet, the instructions are free, you just pay for material (which could be garbage, if you're not picky) and energy (which is solar.) Suddenly, people are living in sustainable homesteads all over the place, wherever the real estate is cheapest. More significantly, our lives have been "unplugged" in the sense that each community would be more-or-less (probably less for the near future) self-sufficient.

How would people live? I haven't a clue. But once they can meet all their basic needs, I imagine one answer would be "however they want." All this probably sounds utopian, or like some of the Internet Triumphalism that reigned not too long ago. But I never said this was a prediction. The future is never as good as we want it to be. And people will still live in larger cities. But most of these technologies are just as good for solving the problems of large cities. I imagine we'll see some of these things come to pass. Other will either be impractical or have only finge appeal. Maybe no one actually wants to live in Chuchill, Manitoba. Still, the possibility is there. The real reason I felt the urge to write all this was to try and refute some of the wackier voices out there, who think that the end of oil is going to mean some survivalist/Mad Max world. I think we'll get along all right, we'll just have to get smarter.