Hi friends,
I remember having a conversation with kitty (BCC'd) years ago about
"Minimum X". That particular conversation was geared toward visual
layouts such as those which used to be popular on Tumblr, with the
innards from a piece of luggage spread out neatly over a level surface.
I think we also pondered a web app which would support creating those
layouts. We also discussed personal catalogs of one's personal effects.
Although "Minimum X" has come to mean something completely different
for me, it originally had something to do with identifying the most
useful (or perhaps beautiful) objects at a variety of scales:
- backpack
- luggage
- bicycle
- car
- #vanlife
- house
I still find this imagery interesting, in terms of what we require to
live functionally and what we can do without. Somewhere inside, most of
these categories have gotten smaller thanks to the chunks of technology
which float around our lives. Other internal components have yet to
shrink into wonderfully boring commodities like phones and laptops and
batteries and induction plates.
## Commodity Lifestyle
I'll speak a great deal more about commodity philosophy somewhere else,
but in short the idea that's been kicking around my head for ages is
this: Why do we own precious things at all?
Most things these days are pretty standardized. Electronics,
especially, carry the same properties which convinced Bezos that an
early Amazon shouldn't initially sell housewares (or statues or tools
or anything else they carry now) but instead restrict itself to books:
they're always the same size and weight, when it comes in the mail it
either works or it doesn't. These days, our electronics also have few
moving parts.
There are a few things in my Minimum X Version 1.0 luggage spread,
mentioned above, that are still special to me: my glasses and contact
lenses, medicine / supplements, and perhaps my clothes if I prefer a
specific fit. These things are inherently precious and I cannot simply
buy commodity replacements if mine are lost, stolen, or destroyed in a
fire.
Beyond that, most of our possessions are interchangeable. Kitchenware,
power tools, furniture, exercise equipment, electronics, cars,
bicycles, and so forth.
The boring (but perhaps useful) idea behind Commodity Philosophy is to
move as many things as possible out of the "Precious" category into the
"Commodity" category. We can do so in one of four ways:
1. Reduce our expectations
2. Limit the options
3. Raise the baseline
4. Convert physical objects to data
Reducing our expectations would be to get rid of ideas like "I must
have **this** TV." In 2020, probably any TV is good enough for whatever
it is we want TV for. If a TV is still precious to you, swap "TV" for
anything in your life you'd be willing to commoditize because a less-
than-ideal alternative is still good enough.
Limiting the options is probably not something we'll do intentionally,
as individuals or a society. We've all seen the "Before the iPhone /
After the iPhone" images. Once you have a pocket-sized Star Trek tablet
thing, all the phones are going to look and behave roughly like that.
Today, I could hardly care less what phone I own.
Raising the baseline brings up society's oppressed to enjoy an assumed
Minimum (there it is) which is higher than it was before. For example,
in a country where no one cooks over cowshit, the cheapest stove anyone
owns will be gas, induction, or electric. A more luxurious example
might be sound systems: in the same way that we may find burning cow
dung, coal, or cheap wood offensive because it is hazardous to the
chef's health, we may one day find objectionable the very idea of
permitting the economy to supply low-quality speakers to the general
population. B&O might still exist, but at a minimum, no one would find
even the cheapest of speakers grating to their aural senses.
Converting physical objects to data is the most organic and the hardest
to force. Communication is now very much an online activity.
Entertainment, taxes, work, photography, where I store my jazz album
masters. AirBnb kinda-sorta-but-not-really converts physical space into
data... but we'll probably see AirBnb die a natural death (perhaps
soon, if the current virus climate continues) and something more
sophisticated and generally applicable grow out of the soil its body
fertilizes. I don't know why I can't rent other peoples' power tools,
TVs, or furniture online yet... that seems like an easy enough thing to
do. It's quite likely that a market will emerge when the Boomers die
and all the toys they've spent a lifetime accumulating wind up in the
hands of us stunted lot as inheritance. Most of us won't know how to
run a table saw and renting it out may prove more profitable than
selling it on Craigslist/Kijiji/OLX/equivalent. Hard to say, though.
I'm getting off-track here.
## Global By Default
In this day and age systems, processes, and ideas which do not work on
a global scale are simply not very interesting. I think humanity still
indulges in the craving for newer, better, flashier things... but the
fact of the matter is, there's a glass ceiling. A hyperloop is only
cool to me if I want to squirt myself between San Francisco and San
Jose every single day... or Bangalore and Mysore. I'm pretty sure I
don't want to do that.
Those sorts of innovations will still occur, of course. But they're
sort of antithetical to Minimum X... unless everyone can ride the
Hyperloop (and by "everyone", I mean all humans) it's Not Minimum
Anything.
It is my strong opinion that although Hacker Villages can certainly
strive for local building materials and techniques, whatever we do
should be as broadly applicable as possible. The immediate upside of
this is figuring out how to build infrastructure **cheaply**.
## Minimum House
I was struck the other day by an image of some shipping container
houses kitty sent me. They weren't temporary housing but rather
Affordable Housing, the euphemism we apply when we mean Houses for Poor
People.
Why isn't all housing "affordable"? At least the baseline, certainly,
feels like it should be "affordable"... if it's not, we've instantly
created slums and homelessness by the very lack of that concept. There
is no need to implement our Unaffordable Housing to see how it co-
creates the slums -- they're already there on paper, a part of the
blueprint.
Of course, there are ground realities to building a house. A house
can't be built for $1000 (Rs. 75,000 as of June 2020) because the
materials and labour cost more than $1000... fair enough. But if
there's one thing that experimenting with off-grid structures has
taught me, it's that we are in **desperate** need of new building
materials. Maybe some of the financing that goes into next-day shipping
and fantastic space adventures would be better invested in building
materials more sophisticated than what we had in 1962. The building
material market is definitely a commodity market... but only in the
most self-serving way. The materials aren't recyclable and they barely
perform the task... all at prices which amount to a lifetime of
savings.
I look at people who have built houses which required the wealth of
their entire lifetime to construct and wonder what will happen if the
house is destroyed in a manner the insurance company won't cover.
Better re-live your life so you can accumulate another half-million
dollars in spare capital, I guess? Seems inefficient.
---
If we revisit the solutions, we can explore how each one of them will
help us here. Reducing our expectations, when it comes to housing, is
mostly a social endeavour. Living in a McMansion as long as some human
beings remain homeless, in slums, and in "temporary housing" will need
to come to be seen for the disgraceful act that it is. Figuring out our
high water mark (and bringing it down) is a job for each of us to fight
out individually. Owning multiple homes, similarly, will likely come to
be seen as the wasteful indulgence of the bourgeois. (I'm under no
misconception that any of us on this list feel righteous enough to
place ourselves outside that category, by the way. This isn't a
criticism of others.)
In the Hacker Village, it's possible we could simply adopt the Filipino
phrasing used to curb this sort of behaviour: "You're getting fat."
Someone brings home an overpriced, petrol-guzzling SUV like those that
were popular in the 90s? "Boy, that car is making you fat." And so
forth.
At this stage, "limit the options" is actually the opposite of what we
want -- at least in terms of materials. In Canada, all houses are built
in the same manner: wooden boards of two inches by six, nailed into a
skeleton, tacked onto multiple layers of sheathing, stuffed with
insulation, and closed with the most inane building material of all
time from the inside (gypsum). In India, your options are bricks and
concrete or rocks and concrete. Or if you're fancy, just concrete.
India doesn't have the insulation concerns (heat loss) that Canada has,
but running air conditioners all day in an uninsulated house is still
incredibly wasteful. We can do better here and it would benefit us to
explore a number of options with an open mind.
One option I personally do _not_ have any interest exploring is that of
materials which themselves cannot become a commodity. These buildings
tend to be rather shit anyway... mud huts built by hippies with straw
roofs, which keep out neither rain nor mosquitoes and barely create a
distinction between "outdoors" and "indoors". No thanks. Hacker
Villages can justifiably revisit older technology with the intention of
modernizing it, but let's not send ourselves back to the cradle of
civilization in the name of eco-friendly construction.
"Limit the options" can be applied here: If what you're building will
be impossible (or extremely unlikely) for your neighbours because it
can't be reproduced, maybe it's a bad idea. Reproduction is a good
thing. Though it can of course remain a back-burner thought during an
experimental stage when you're not sure if what you're building is even
worth reproducing yet.
The most important aspect is this idea of "raising the baseline",
though the other three approaches are bundled up in that. This is one
thing the American suburbs, for all their horrors, have done well:
cookie-cutter construction. Those houses are cheap (though not cheap
enough) and although they tend to be poorly made, a new house is a
relatively straightforward task. In the Hacker Village, it would be
quite fun to have a go-to construction method for a Minimum House that
any new resident could jump on for a fixed price. The lower the price,
the more accessible that sort of housing becomes for the world's
poorest populations. If the price goes low enough, perhaps governments
can even supply this housing as a basic need, like water.
There is an important intersection here. For a Minimum House to be
realistic, we must all identify a very specific watermark: how far can
we reduce our expectations, with the goal of raising the baseline to
that point?
An easy test is the question, "would I live here?" -- if you wouldn't,
it's not a Minimum House. It's quite likely that your Minimum House
isn't the same as someone else's. That's okay. And on a global scale
it's quite likely that your Minimum is much higher than the majority.
That's also okay. That just means you don't think the work of
"affordable housing" is done when everyone lives in a shipping
container because you demand better for humanity. Good for you. If a
shipping container isn't good enough for you, it's not good enough for
Minimum House. And this is a very reasonable constraint as long as we
keep in mind that we've raised our watermark.
Our own ideals will shift and mutate over our lives so our own Minimum
House won't be the same from one year to the next. This is also okay.
It's probably a bit surprising to see how little variation really
exists in housing options and a globally-comfortable baseline is
probably roughly the same in everyone's head already: A bedroom, a
bathroom, a toilet, a kitchen, a place to eat, an open indoor space(s)
for exercise, recreation, and work. The room sizes and HVAC systems may
change slightly but they're unlikely to change wildly.
One caveat: Although I have a lot of respect for the Tiny House
movement, it has nothing to do with Minimum House. A Tiny House is a
neat way to push well below the watermark, on a personal level... and
it keeps us honest about "what do we really need?" but we will never
see an entire planet full of Tiny Houses and we should not indulge a
fantasy based on such wishful thinking.
[ Unsolicited Reminder: Wishful Thinking = Bad. ]
When it comes to Minimum House, the jury's still out on how data will
shape the future of our villages and cities but it does seem likely
that our Hacker Villages might build a dozen extra furnished Minimum
Houses in lieu of a traditional hotel that people could book for
temporary stays.
## Minimum X
Raising the baseline can apply to anything, and it should. If we feel
something is necessary to survive, we should provide that to everyone
if we feel their life has any value:
Minimum Water
Minimum Air
Minimum Food
Minimum Land
Minimum House
Minimum Car (hopefully "car" = public transportation here, but)
Minimum Healthcare
Minimum Education
Minimum Communication
etc.
This is obviously a concept which is needs to be implemented at a
higher level than that of a village or city, but even at the urban and
municipal levels, it feels like it wouldn't take much to bring an
entire population up to a globally-acceptable baseline once that
baseline is decided.
Take care, everyone! Curious to hear if you have any responses to this.
Love,
Steven
Steven Deobald