The Breaking Time

Open Notes: Tech giants, North Korea, and convenient dystopias

Your next iPhone, made in sunny North Korea

• Google Exec Eric Schmidt recently returned from North Korea. While ostensibly a humanitarian and diplomatic mission, it's hard not to see in the wary welcomes for Kim Jong-Un's "knowledge-based economy" and the broaching of an end to sanctions as the beginning of North Korea becoming a China-style source of cheap labor for the tech industry. In fact, it's already being discussed.

• It's not that tech companies can't make good money if they pay their workers well and don't use Dickensian sweat shops; plenty do. But to make really whopping Apple-level amounts of cash requires really cheap labor, and that's easier in places where people are desperate and don't have any political power. Hence FoxConn.

• China's getting more prosperous and more restive, so the cost of doing business there might well go up, especially given growing labor unrest. Sooner, rather than later, escape hatches will be needed.

• The extreme irony of Stalinist states and the chic business sector finding that they need each other.

• Google's little-discussed yellow badge workers. While hardly laboring under North Korean conditions, it definitely points to a willingness to have an underclass even closer to home. Companies, whatever the ideals of their founders, are a structure set up for making money, and over time everything else becomes secondary.

• Combined with the slow collapse of the social safety net and real wages, give these trends a few decades and you could see more tech companies having large numbers low-wage employees closer to home, especially as the original founders age and they become more established institutions.

• William Gibson's line about the future not being evenly distributed applies to the future's nightmares as well (ask a Somali). It turns out the shining tech-fueled tomorrow might not just coexist with industrial dystopia, but require it.

Why we can build the f'ing Pyramids

Not aliens, just us.

The other evening, I was visiting my friend David Gray (who designed our logo) and we stumbled upon one of those terrible documentaries on the Pyramids that channels ostensibly devoted to learning regularly churn out.

Inevitably, these documentaries bribe a good actor to lend their authoritative voice to narrating a torrent of pseudoscience, coincidence and insinuated bullshit that basically boils down to "humans with such simple tools couldn't possibly have built such wonders! It must be aliens!"

I've always found these documentaries particularly loathsome because of how badly they underrate human capability. At their heart is the same insulting assumption as the "nobles must have written Shakespeare" tripe: poor or primitive people can't possibly create amazing things.

David, who expected a more historical look at the topic, grumbled and turned it off. Within minutes, he found this:

That's Kelvin Doe, a 15-year-old from Sierra Leone who's built his own batteries and transmitters from pieces he salvaged from the trash. He's even founded his own damn radio station. 

Awed, we watched for a while, before David finally spoke.

"And that," he said. "is why we can build the f'ing pyramids."

Amen.

There is no Normal

It's my pleasure to welcome m1k3y to the Breaking Time. Our longtime readers might remember him from our comrades in future dissection, Grinding, and as the other side of the Grinder Dialogues from this site's early days. Here he brings us an energetic, eclectic look at the roots of "normal."

Are you a wizard? Seriously, this is a legitimate question. I recently finished reading Alan Moore's incredible, highly mythic comic series Promethea, and it concludes with a very simple message: all we have ever done is sit by some evolution of the campfire — television is just the latest progression — and tell each other stories, literally imagining the world into existence. Unless you've only sat there passively spellbound, you've been a wizard your whole life, from the moment you mastered the first art, the first technology: language.

Our lives are constructed from language, and the words we use matter. One of these most powerful, spelt, words is Normal. 

Mr. Forbes' powerfully simple axiom, the tagline for this blog, is "There is no They." Last year, as part of our ongoing dialog, I took the liberty of extending it, to what I dubbed its first corollary: There is no Normal.

What is normal? What makes it a word of power? It's that subject that I seek to explore here, in what will be an occasional series of posts examining this subject from a variety of angles. Today, we start with pharmacology and history.

The need for an infrastructure army

I wish I knew the photographer on this one. If y'all do, I'll happily add it.

Hurricane Sandy's struck, and while the devastation isn't as bad as a Katrina-level catastrophe (partly thanks to vastly superior emergency response), it's still estimated in the billions. With climate change and decaying infrastructure, this is going to happen again; the Onion has it nailed.

There are some things centralized institutions like governments are actually really good at, and marshaling massive resources (more than any locality could generate) to build big, useful things or deal with emergencies is one of them. Things like Sandy are going to happen more often, and that makes infrastructure and disaster response more important than ever.

I remember people complaining when the Deepwater Horizon spill happened that BP was in charge of fixing it, instead of the government. Some of them took this as an example of collusion or incompetence, and there was certainly plenty of that going around leading. But the truth was more mundane: there simply wasn't a well-equipped naval unit ready to stop that kind of disaster. 

After Sandy left, I wondered again why that is. Why don't we take some of that pile of cash being wasted on crap like the F-35 or the Crusader and spend it on elite disaster-response units and infrastructure building? After all, disasters (man-made or otherwise) are capable of causing as much damage in terms of lives and economic loss as a terrorist attack, and the military is already intertwined with disaster response. Militaries are also quite good at creating pressure-cooker cultures to deal with specific, dangerous tasks.

We can talk about things like decentralizing electric power or making communities more resilient, but anyone facing a sizable catastrophe knows that it's simply beyond the ability of any local area to handle. This is one area where "send in the army" actually makes sense.

Open Notes: Rural cyberpunk

2011 fire in the Great Dismal Swamp, seen from space. The fire was caused by drought, making the swamp's peat especially flammable. Image from NASA.

Awhile back, I made an off-the-cuff comment on Twitter about "rural cyberpunk." Visiting where I grew up this week (map above), I think there's a lot more there than initially met the eye, and it's time for some open, if haphazard, notes on this particular theme, mixing past, present, and twenty-minutes-from-now future:

• Landscapes full of abandoned buildings from variety of eras. Half-built bedroom communities, unfinished suburbs down the road from generational family homes.

• Relentless salvaging of old machinery to feed or mix with newer. Creative rigging of second-hand or "outdated" technology into rough but extremely reliable forms. Abandoned industrial equipment as resource. Constant repair/re-use.

• Blackwater. The world's most infamous private mercenary army, founded and originally based in Moyock, NC. Original training grounds on 3,000 acres of the Dismal Swamp.

• Farms as ground zero for backyard/grey market gene splicing. After all, it's not that different from what farmers have done for centuries: adapt technology and natural processes to alter forms of life. Use to find workarounds on killer seeds, etc. (farmers are also adept at slipping around central authority that gets in their way).

• Pervasive personal weaponry and a higher-than-average number of ex-soldiers from a variety of wars.

• Backroads dotted with towns largely ignored by larger governments. Weak or non-existent official social safety networks.

• Same lack of bigger institutions or gov, along with lack of attention from larger cities/culture providing appealing haven for people that want to be ignored — plenty of opportunity where no one's looking. Widespread surveillance is nigh-impossible in rural areas.

• Historical role of Northeastern NC (and many similar rural areas) as refuge for fleeing slaves, indentured servants, remaining natives during country's early history. Pockets of deep anti-Confederate/government sentiment during Civil War. 

• Juxtaposition of international ports and nearby complete wilderness. Revival of old smuggling routes along canals, inlets, and sounds. A lot of homes in this area have a small dock by a waterway. Evolution of decentralized black market distribution network for areas increasingly left out of "the future."

• Infrastructure neglect and the brunt end of climate change.

• Interesting things emerging from the area's "everyone" is ignoring or dismissing.

• Last, but not least, 'ol William Gibson's Twitter handle is, coincidentally, GreatDismal. The Dixie Flatline lives. ;-)

Feel free to add your own contributions or thoughts on this theme in the comments.

3D printed guns (kinda/maybe/not yet)

May you live in interesting times. Photo via the 33rd Square.

I've said for a while that the day 3D printers can crank out firearms is going to be interesting, in the Chinese curse sense of the word. Late last week the New Scientist (among other outlets) has this:

Last week we learned that handcuffs could be unlocked with a 3D printed key; now "HaveBlue", a member of the AR15.com gun enthusiast forum, which is named after a common semi-automatic rifle, claims to have carried out the first successful test-firing of a 3D-printed gun.

HaveBlue did not print an entire gun but only a part called the lower receiver, which serves as a frame for the other components of the gun. This component is the only gun part regulated for sale under US law and as such must carry a serial number - unless it's made by a private individual for their personal use, so HaveBlue is not breaking any laws.

Making gun parts used to be impossible for most people, of course, but computer files for AR-15 components have been available online for some time. HaveBlue claims to have combined a 3D-printed receiver made from hard plastic with parts from an ordinary pistol and successfully fired more than 200 rounds. "To the best of my knowledge, this is the world's first 3D printed firearm to actually be tested, but I have a hard time believing that it really is the first," HaveBlue said.

Worth noting that this, for the moment, is a claim, though at first glance it seems a fairly plausible one. But I don't doubt 3D printing most — or eventually all of a gun — is on its way.

Just as I was thinking "holy shit," this conversation wended my way on Twitter:

That's Deb Chachra, weighing in on the issue and its implications. As she's a talented engineering professor, I tend to trust her thoughts when it comes to the difficulty of manufacturing the materials in a 3D printer, and that's usually struck me as the main hurdle. The evolution of reliable, accurate modern firearms is a relatively recent phenomenon, after all, and that's partly because manufacturing good guns ain't easy.

Still, weaponry's one of those basic things that has a way of up-ending power balances in unpredictable fashion. There's a reason I included the durable, easily-modified AK-47 in my list of Durable Infections that changed the world. Yes, in the United States it's far easier to buy guns than many other countries (we have about 270 million here) but we still have some control regimes, and the day someone can crank out serial-numberless guns those are thrown into disarray.

Elsewhere in the world, the potential for disruption is far greater. Assuming it will take awhile to make the trickier components through 3D printers, even the ability to quickly repair or keep older weapons in service for a longer time is a pretty significant change. Earlier this year, one of the emerging Syrian rebel groups claimed that their main challenge was a lack of weapons. Think how a steady supply of older rifles combined with a few gunsmiths and slightly more advanced 3D printers to get their weapons up to snuff could change their odds.

Is that scenario too fanciful? Am I missing something here? Let me know in the comments, I have a feeling this isn't the last time we'll see this issue.