From Stallman we take the Four Freedoms approach to owning your technology, but in this case, the non-patented commodities like screws and plywood give us an non-restrictive foundation to build on, unlike most computing equipment. But we have to run naked, without patent or copyright protection, because neither is suitable for hexayurts - patent is too expensive for us to use to defend the freedom of the hexayurt, so we use defensive publication to thwart attempts to patent the goodness!
From Gandhi comes the fundamental goal: everybody in the world gets a bowl of rice and a place to sleep, everybody in the world owns what they need to survive. At the deepest core: we accept poverty as a fact, but we insist on universal human dignity regardless of wealth. That means that everybody works and everybody eats, no exceptions. Gandhi’s goals are much broader and subtler, but I’m a lump-hammer type of a guy, so I just took the simple stuff and started to do it with whatever meager capabilities I could bring to the table. I get by mostly on luck and persistence. Because of the meditation practice it’s all personal to me: I feel like everybody’s kids are my kids, like the whole world is crying out for some basic common sense, and I can’t separate myself from what is happening to and in the world. And I have to live with that, every single day.
From Fuller comes the potential of engineering as a spiritual practice: build what is good, commit no evil, design the options we need to lift ourselves out of suffering and into safety, not in a transhumanist way, at least not at first, but in a simple housing-water-and-sanitation type way. I think that Bucky’s techno-utopian political strategy is good, but without Gandhi’s deep humanity and deep humility, I’m not sure any good was ever going to come of it.
“Tools To Not Die With: An Interview with Vinay Gupta, creator of the HexaYurt”
by Woody Evans for boingboing, 10.24.2011
