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It's a part of everyday life in a city like Bangalore, Dust.

But what's funny about getting so accustomed to living with a thin (sometimes thick) layer of black soot all over everything is that I *wasn't* accustomed to this for most of my life. And I almost forgot what it was like to live somewhere that wasn't constantly choked in dust.




Above is a photo of dust the way I remember it as a kid: Fluffy Dust Bunnies made mostly of white dust consisting of tiny threads from clothing and dead skin cells. I think this is healthy dust. The above photo is about one month's worth of dust accumulated on the floor of our bedroom (gross, I know... we should be cleaning more often than that -- but look how little there is!).

One hard constraint I'd suggest we impose on a village location is that it mirrors these dust levels. And that no action of ours (things like improper paving and burning stuff) contributes to increased levels of black dust. Good for your floors, good for your feet, good for your lungs... somewhat difficult to find in reasonable proximity to a major city in India. But I think we can do it.

<3
-steven

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I am currently trapped in a hotel in Himachal Pradesh. At present, we are on the upward slope of the First Wave of the CoVID-19 pandemic. This will be a phase of my life I look back on in a very specific light, I'm sure.

Curiously enough, we were on our way to Sikkim to finally "settle down" after over a year of traveling. This means that, although we didn't make it, we do have a couple desk-fulls of computer equipment and one solid library shelf of actual dead-tree books. One thing we do not have is our own kitchen. This is unfortunate during a highly contagious pandemic but every morning as I stand anxiously over the pot of chai in our shared kitchen, I find myself pondering over the properties of kitchens a great deal. Here are some of those thoughts.

I mentioned in the Canon thread that I think Bertrand Russell's In Praise of Idleness (the book of essays, not necessarily the title essay) is well worth a read. In it, he discusses what a world of automation and fully-distributed workforce might look like. At the time, women were largely not members of the workforce but Russell was prescient enough to take the equal participation of all adult members of society for granted -- to him, it was only a question of time. He envisioned societal clusters not unlike the gated communities so prevalent in India today. However, rather than gated versions of the nuclear family spliced with traditional Asian multi-generational households, he wasn't focused on the family unit. Instead, he was specifically interested in child care and food preparation.

The Kitchen is a cradle of mental and physical health. It is obviously where raw ingredients mix to form the nutrient-rich meals that keep us alive. Any of us who have indulged in unhealthy diets as a part of adult life understand the immediate and frighteningly acute value of healthy food. Let us define adulthood as the time beyond that window of life between the teenage years and the late twenties when the body can survive on almost any garbage input as long as it is majority carbon-based. Perhaps this sensation can act as an approximation of adulthood itself: Eating trash makes one feel like trash. But the mental health provided by the kitchen is more than a direct consequence of reciprocity between the brain and the gut. The kitchen is where the best house parties finish, at 4:00 AM. The kitchen is where your mother let you taste half-finished-but-sufficiently-sweet dessert preparations. The kitchen is the physical origin of waffles and dosas (or other cultural equivalents of complex carbohydrates which demand the constant attention of the Kitchen Master). The kitchen is where my brother's classmate with a far more traditional country upbringing took a beating with a large wooden spoon after eating an entire "Jethro Bowl" of his mother's fresh-picked raspberries.

I find it almost impossible to cook for one. When I'm alone, I tend to prepare food as if it were for a family of eight then reheat and repurpose that preparation over the course of three or four days. I've found I'm not alone in this. Dinner is where we discuss the day with family, meet a blind date, take a business meeting, encounter new friends with old. Not all food is social but it's natural for us to consume the majority of it that way. Russell suggested that these tendencies lend themselves to communal meal preparation and communal dining, by default. He wasn't suggesting doing away with personal kitchens or making communal meals mandatory for a small colocated society of people. He simply felt that people would gravitate toward this were the option presented.

In Russell's vision, the adults of the community share responsibility for managing the kitchen, buying groceries, and preparing the food. There exists a hacker village (of a sort) near Igatpuri known as U Ba Khin Village and in that village they have a variation of this. While I'm still not sure what I think of a village built exclusively for Vipassana meditators, I do like the idea of a shared kitchen and dining hall. They have hired the cooking staff, I believe, but some of the shared kitchen principles remain the same: communal eating, specific meal times, healthy food.

In a proper Hacker Village, it seems a communal kitchen could serve a wide number of purposes. If I think about our time at the fortyfourforty cabin over the past eight years, a massive amount of time goes into food: keeping the right masalas, managing dry and wet goods, keeping a balanced diet, using vegetables at an opportune time, trying to bake things over an open fire, timing our trips to get propane refills (a standard propane canister is much smaller than an LPG cylinder), and so forth. When a larger number of people show up at the cabin, the one place we all centre on is the kitchen. If I fantasize about the next building we'll construct, it's a comfortable shared kitchen with a huge window to the ocean view.

There is a huge urban appeal these days in spending long periods of the day working or reading a book in a cafe. The space often shares parallels with a shared kitchen: the smell of books, the smell of food and coffee and tea, the smell of fresh-baked bread, the murmur of other people, comfortable furniture, and perhaps a window into the kitchen itself. Warmth. Comfort. If I think of a concrete instance, say the upcoming hacker village near Salem in Tamil Nadu, I'm increasingly convinced that a shared kitchen may prove to be one of the most valuable pieces of social infrastructure. A community of four houses probably doesn't merit a cafe... but it could very well merit a kitchen.

Of course, here in the hotel^H^H^H^H^H^H homestay we are facing a different set of issues during the CoVID-19 outbreak. A shared kitchen is actually a bad thing right now and there are design elements which can either exacerbate that situation or take pressure off. The most important are the lessons we learned while volunteering in the kitchen at Dhamma Suttama (a Vipassana centre between Montreal and Ottawa). This was a large commercial kitchen designed to feed up to 200 students. I was surprised initially when we were told not to dry anything. There were plenty of towels. The reasoning was to avoid cross-contamination. Canada is almost always under the weight of one strain or the other of the flu virus and this lesson from the health authority was strictly adhered to: Let all the dishes air dry. This comes in my mind every time we clean up after preparing or eating a meal. Use plenty of soap, rinse thoroughly, air dry, clean all the surfaces with disinfectant. As an added design bonus of air-drying, the drying rack and storage of utensils becomes a singular concept and we've found it surprisingly comfortable to make daily use of a shared kitchen smaller than most kitchens we're accustomed to.

In an early hacker village (again, let's say the hills outside Salem) it will benefit the community to centralize other expenses as well. The kitchen is a huge energy sink, between the stove, the fridge, a water purifier, and potentially a kettle or other appliances. Centralizing this can really help to get a small village off the ground if the residents are keen to stick to self-generated energy like wind and solar. Perhaps not in Tamil Nadu, but further north (and definitely in Canada) it is helpful to have some sort of heat both for water and the physical space. Depending on the season and the temperatures, passive heat can do wonders here: Solar hot water is better than ice-cold water in the sink during wintertime and passive solar with a large, south-facing window (remember the kitchen I'd like to build at 4440?) keeps the indoors of the kitchen warm and comfortable. Passive can also include insulating materials. The Japanese Vipassana centre has huge insulated flasks where they keep hot water and hojicha for anyone, 24-hours-a-day. An individual kitchen may not merit a 10 litre super insulated flask of hot water but a shared kitchen might as this would certainly reduce fuel costs over time.

If a hacker village were in full swing right now, the shared kitchen is obviously not an ideal default while trying to keep social distance. However, if someone in the village were to fall sick, the shared kitchen potentially provides a space large enough to cook meals for them, separately, and deliver food to their house in the situation where they don't have someone to take care of them. In times like these, a shared ktichen becomes the "covid kitchen" and it can be treated with the same preference for over-cleaning and high levels of sterility that a commercial kitchen would be.

In many ways, I wish we'd gotten one of these projects* off the ground just a little earlier. A hacker village might perhaps be the best place to ride out a pandemic. This is another topic entirely, but it feels as though the desire for a home -- and for many of us, a Home Base -- is really a sensible impulse that deserves a lot of consideration in terms of minimums: Just what is a Minimum House? How quickly and cheaply can we build one? Ten? A topic for another day.

Stay safe everyone. Use plenty of soap.

Love,
Steven

* One of the year-round, home-base villages. Fortyfourforty exists... but you wouldn't want to spend a winter there yet. :P

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This came up today as I was thinking about something else I'll send to the list shortly:

"In Praise of Idleness" - Bertrand Russell

I actually don't particularly recommend the title essay. It's fine, but not the material I'm thinking of. The rest of the essays all tie into one another in a very cohesive way and I think Russell's perspective is a helpful one -- he wrote most of these essays during the uptick of the industrial revolution, long before women entered the workplace and quite a while before the American nuclear family was decided on as the go-to social structure for societies in Level 4 countries.

I don't necessarily agree with Russell's ideas but I think they're worth considering, piecemeal, when evaluating how we want to build our homes, feed our families, and raise our kids.

-s

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I'm replying to the thread to give Cherry an SMTP hook (he says the groups.io web forum is broken... boo-urns).

Cherry, I bet a lot of people would? be interested to hear what you have to say, if you want to copy/paste the email you sent me into here? :)

-s-

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I was chatting with Ragul about different locations for setting up shop today (mostly around land prices) and stumbled upon this while looking into the climates of different regions:



...I really like how locations are categorized by climate classification. Seems like an interesting way to hunt for locations which meet climate criteria first and foremost, since a number of these places are completely unknown to me. For anyone who's still fully in the fantasy stage, pinning down a livable climate or two is probably a meaningful first step. As someone who grew up in a climate best described as "6 months of the year, if you go outside maybe you'll die so stay indoors all the time and burn tons of gas to keep the house a safe temperature" I really appreciate the value of *starting* with temperate climates. ;)

I'm curious if folks have stumbled upon other climate resources like this? It seems like a more sensible, data-driven approach than my current brainless, blindfolded-darts strategy of daydreaming out loud:

"Kodaikanal seems nice... have you ever been to Coonoor? Or Kotagiri? Is there somewhere like Coorg... but cheaper?" etc.

I'm sure there are a lot of data-driven systems here I've never even thought to consider.

How do you folks think about this stuff?

-steven

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Given that the terminology graduated to household usage surrounding the release of Windows 95 and the years of PnP failings that followed, it's understandable that the idea of plug-and-play, where the user is assumed to know little or nothing about the internal workings of a black box that "just works" every time, is kind of at odds with the Hacker Ethos [1] but there's a lot to be said for IJW as a design goal for any system... hacker-driven or otherwise.

Some infrastructure can easily (though optionally) come from inside a village: furniture, garbage incinerators, some vegetables [2], maybe even some clothes. However, by and large, infrastructure constructed within the village will be composite:

• sewers made from imported pipes
• networks built from imported electronics
• bicycles built from imported parts
• solar and wind setups built from imported panels, turbines, and batteries
• etc.
  

But I'm increasingly intrigued by plug-and-play options. For example, the MaxOak Bluetti EB240 is about 20% of a PowerWall 2:



A PowerWall is (arguably) not plug-and-play but this thing definitely is. In this form factor, it's restricted to uses like camping or mains backup. But I really like the idea of PnP architectures which scale up. This is sort of a USB Lithium battery pack on steroids. If it were modular, you could perhaps make a stack of these for a home's solar storage or electrical backup, with enough juice to power the fridge and a hotplate.

Whether power for a home or neighborhood is entirely off-grid, micro-grid, or fully on-grid with backups, it seems that there will never be a way around clean energy storage. The fewer the dials and knobs and inverters, the better the solution is, in my opinion.

Another, more hacker-friendly, example of PnP infra on a much (much) larger scale, is the Global Village Construction Set:



...their wiki is still active, so I assume the project is still going on. But I also imagine a middle ground between a hard-line "open hardware everything" and an a la carte model which invests in real machines or outsources to get the initial buildings and public infrastructure up and running (if it doesn't already exist in the chosen location). If someone settles on a location and buys some property, I'd rather see them up and running than swimming in molasses to adhere to a platonic ideal. I would consider the fortyfourforty cabin project to be "swimming in molasses" in this very sense, though 4440's nearly-arbitrary platonic ideal is basically "zero recurring costs".

On the scale of the home, the big issues are: (1) clean water (2) a place to poop and (3) energy. There are a number of drop-in solutions to water purification but digging or drilling a well is still always a task. As is water testing. Incinerating toilets are certainly a drop-in solution to waste but I doubt anyone would choose to go that route over a normal flush toilet, assuming there's enough space for a septic field.

I am curious if anyone knows of other plug-and-play and/or modular infrastructure components, big or small. If someone chooses to set up shop somewhere and finds they're struggling with one of these three main bits of infra, having a drop-in solution to bootstrap themselves is always handy.

Take care!
-steven

[1] It's my intention to lean on this terminology, as an expansion of the Hacker Ethic defined in Steven Levy's book "Hackers", in future posts. I'll try to describe the expansion soon.

[2] Is a carrot patch "infrastructure"? You decide.

On Wed, 12 Feb 2020 at 02:47, Steven Deobald <steven@...> wrote:
[snip]

And if we build within a village, we can help each other out. :)

All this sounds fair. I'll try to jump in on some of the threads when I can.

Cheers,
Arun

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Arun dropped me a message yesterday mentioning that he has some thoughts but wasn't sure he wanted to post them to the list. His hesitation is that "whoever does the work will end up deciding how it will/should be". (I hope he doesn't mind me quoting him.)

I totally agree.

It would be pretty naive of us to believe that a mailing list was going to set the direction for construction of a single house, much less an entire village or city. I think the mailing list can serve a few purposes:

1. Brainstorming. Generally, I've been thinking about this stuff for years now, but I mostly think about it in a box by myself. The more I run into other people who are thinking about it, the more I want to have a broader conversation. I'd like to avoid doing the Calvin & Hobbes Design An Ice Castle thing where we fantasize about unrealistic scenarios. But there are always new ideas worth discussing that other people maybe haven't had the time or inclination to explore. For example, Kamal sincerely brought up the idea of standing up a local cellular tower when we were discussing this in Maitri Collective, months back. That's a concept that's never even occurred to me -- I always assumed villages would rely on the same telecom infrastructure as the surrounding towns.

2. Broadcasting. It's hard to keep up with energy storage hardware, radical construction techniques, and air purification systems (as a few random examples) much less sort out the hype machine from functional solutions. I don't want to live in a mud hut crawling with bugs but I'm open to the idea of using local materials if they build a house that will last 50+ years. Maybe someone on the list knows about construction materials that I don't. Or maybe someone's running a local experiment (AQI, water purification, mesh networking, library models, who knows)... here's a place to discuss the results.

3. Connecting. If someone's seriously considering a construction location, here's a place to tell like-minded people and possibly get a couple houses nearby each other. Ragul and Kamal are seriously considering a spot outside of Salem (TN). I'm super excited about the Nilgiris but I hadn't heard of Salem's climate, so that was cool. I'm on the lookout for spots in North India but everything good (so far) seems to be in Himachal or Sikkim... where none of us can legally buy land. If someone kicked something off up there, I'd be tempted to follow.

4. Educating. I've learned some really helpful stuff from my friend Sandy, who built a cabin next to the fortyfourforty.com property in Nova Scotia. He's researched off-grid hardware and construction techniques much more than I have. I'm hoping this can become a pool of resources for people across all sorts of disciplines, not just off-grid plumbing and electricity. YouTube videos about reforestation or ground-breaking books ostensibly about architecture (I'm thinking Alexander, obviously) are just as valuable. Economics are another example: Ragul was shocked when he learned that 20 acres of land in Nova Scotia costs $20,000 (10 lakh rupees). The economics of rural Japan are just as shocking. and the Japanese government is finally opening the borders.

5. Encouragement. Self-doubt plagues all of us and it's easy to file away these ideas as silly and unrealistic. It helps to know other people who are experimenting or even just hearing from folks who think this stuff is cool.


Arun is spot on that the list won't determine what actually gets built. It's possible that people on the list will never even meet each other, so it's undesirable (and unrealistic) to expect that we'll construct some sort of manifesto or even a guidebook. Those things might exist in 30 years... but as a reader, I'd hope the author built something herself before putting pen to paper. Initially, the weight of reality (the truth on the ground) will set direction. We still have a gasoline generator at the fortyfourforty.com property because our solar is eaten up by refrigeration. We're still struggling to filter the manganese out of the well water for drinking. Etc. Infrastructure is expensive in Canada so our cabin 90% off-grid but not winter-capable yet. The fun thing about all this stuff is that it's just one more data point that other people can build off of by hearing about it on the list.

And if we build within a village, we can help each other out. :)

-steven

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I keep imagining a spectrum on which a new village might fall prey to outmoded ideologies. I actually think the landscape is more complex than a simple one-dimensional spectrum, with many dimensions of varying importance. But the simple spectrum looks something like this:

Unsustainable (ex. Chicago Suburbs) <-----------------> Hippie Crap (ex. Auroville v.1)

We saw an interesting talk at JLF by a guy who grew up in Auroville, moved to the US, then moved back to Auroville as an adult. He made a very strong case against "intentional communities" and although he didn't say anything revelatory, it was helpful to hear him call out the ideals which repeatedly fail in Auroville and other intentional communities: getting rid of money and adopting a subsistence or favour-based lifestyle is objectively a bad idea, for example. I think just about any isolationist ideals will fall under this umbrella.

It's possible to plot any given concept along this spectrum if we look at it a little more abstractly:

Outsourcing <-----------------> Isolationism

(Again, this clearly isn't the only conceptual spectrum. There's planned-vs-organic, revolutionary-vs-incremental, etc. But this spectrum really flags the traps of past experiments.)

I think one of the bigger mistakes we could make early on would be adopting some radical construction techniques. If there's one thing I've learned from working on the cabin, it's this: Having a functional home base is GREAT. Those initial aspects of the hierarchy of needs can be captured with some measure of independence: water, sewage, energy. But we should expect these things to require a lot of external help. Digging a well? Hire a bore well machine or an earth mover (depending on the well depth). Sewage is pretty flexible, but expect that you'll prefer the comforts of home over humanure or a pit toilet before attempting those things. Energy is either the grid or solar from China. During construction, it might be a diesel generator.

Of course, if we lean too far in the direction of "outsourcing", we're again just building summer homes or suburbs: Buy land, hire contractors, connect to grid power, and forget about the consequences of anything we're doing. There's a balance to be had, here, and I think this is where the conversation is the most valuable: Where do people want to be on this spectrum? Is positioning ourselves on the spectrum something we want to try to do collectively or would each home choose its level of independence (from grid services) on its own?

There are aspects I lump into "the grid" that most people don't, traditionally: food, clothing, bedding, furniture, etc. Some of these intentional communities from the 60s and 70s really pushed hard to avoid external consumption of any kind. Personally, I find this a little silly. But I'm sure many people think a goal of a modern, energy-independent village is also silly (I don't).

Curious what other folks hope to get out of this, or if this is even a spectrum that matters to everyone.

<3

-steven

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Leaning on the term "hacker" requires stretching the definition a lot. There are a lot of circular dependencies here, not least of which is figuring out what exactly this mailing list is for. I think it's safe to assume we'd all like to live somewhere that is welcoming to small business owners, artists, scientists, and educators -- none of whom likely identifies with the term "hacker".

I'm fond of the "village" suffix, despite the long-term incremental goal of creating cities. As far as our intentions are concerned, we can't really say "let's build a city" because that's not how cities are built. Cities grow organically out of smaller and smaller structures, and it's entirely possible (and perfectly okay) that a {hacker} village might plateau before it even reaches the state of "town" or "small city". You could start smaller -- at the scale of an individual home, say -- but the idea demands some level of collaboration and cooperation or we're just talking about buying a summer house or a retirement home.

Anyway, we can reboot or rename the list later (groups.io seems to provide both options). For now, the list subscriptions are moderated, which will hopefully curb Ankur's concerns about "cryptocurrency hacker dudebros" filling the list with unproven techno-garbage. ;)

{Hacker} Villages => What would you prefer they be called?

-steven

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I propose two initial hacker villages: one in North India, one in South India. Land is expensive, infrastructure and construction (the hard part) is cheap.

#3 Japan?

Canada comes later (cheap land, expensive infra).

Europe after that (expensive land, expensive infra).

I don't know when South America happens.

<3S

PS: I'm not assuming any of us will have more than one home, much less five homes.