DIF vs DIY vs DIT

Do It For me: alius-poiesis, the top-down delegation of making

Do It Yourself: auto-poiesis, the closed loop of self-making

Do It Together: sym-poiesis, the open loop of together-making

Artisanal labor’s radical history

Bellamy’s 1888 “Looking backwards”: a centralized Marxist future:

An “industrial army” works at heavily automated, government-owned factories

Criminals are given involuntary medical treatment.

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Morris’ 1890 “News from Nowhere”: an artisanal anarchist future:

No government, no money, no marriage;

“the men have no longer any opportunity of tyrannising over the women”

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Labor in Morris’ DIY future

• "But do you think," said I, "that there is any fear of a work-famine amongst you?"
• "No, I do not," said he… "it is each man's business to make his own work pleasanter and pleasanter, which of course tends towards raising the standard of excellence, as no man enjoys turning out work which is not a credit to him, and also to greater deliberation in turning it out.... and there is such a vast number of things which can be treated as works of art.

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Again, if art be inexhaustible, so is science also… many people are excited by its conquest of difficulties, and care for it more than for anything else.”

Red/Black divide and artisanal labor

1871: Bakunin insists on replacement of the state by federations of self-governing workplaces and communes (as he sees Paris), which would maintain their own autonomy.

1872: Marx, at meeting of the socialist International Working Men's Association, expels Bakunin and his anarchist faction, claiming they wanted a secret organization within the international.

1872: The Jura Federation provides a meeting place at St Imier for an alternative, anti-authoritarian International Working Men's Association (“the second international”).

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How did an obscure village in the Swiss mountains come to be the wellspring of an international anti-authoritarian movement?

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Kropotkin and the Watchmakers

In a little valley in the Jura hills there is a succession of small towns and villages, of which the French-speaking population was at that time entirely employed in the various branches of watchmaking. …The very organization of the watch trade, which permits men to know one another thoroughly and to work in their own houses, where they are free to talk, explains why the level of intellectual development in this population is higher than that of workers who spend all their life from early childhood in the factories. … The egalitarian relations which I found in the Jura Mountains, the independence of thought and expression which I saw developing in the workers… appealed far more strongly to my feelings; and when I came away from the mountains, after a week's stay with the watchmakers, my views upon socialism were settled. I was an anarchist.

Fritz Zuber-Bühler (1822-1896),

“a Jura watchmaker and his family”

New Left in 1960s

• Old left -- Marxist links btn labor and state
• New left -- Hippies, Civil Rights, Women’s Movement, AIM, Environmental movement, etc.
• Groovy Science

New Alchemy Institute

Fundamental Fysiks Group

Whole Earth Catalog

John Lilly; Timothy

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John Lilly

Timothy Leary

Buckminster Fuller

Lynn Margulis

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Geodesic Domes

Solar Energy

Psychedelic Drugs

Cybernetics

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DIY in 1970s-1980s

• Zines and punk culture
• Richard Stallman writes EMACS (1976)
• Apple computer: write your own software
• Environmental Movement: composting, recycling, etc.
• Squatting and punk culture
• Richard Stallman finalizes GPL 1985

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1988: Scott Crump makes a toy frog for his daughter using a glue gun loaded with a mixture of polyethylene and candle wax.

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1992: Crump sells the first low-cost 3D printer

DIY in 1990s-2000s

• Linux, FreeBSD, Python (1991)
• MIT: Center for Bits and Atoms launches FabLab (2001)
• Massimo Banzi (2005) Arduino
• Make magazine (2005)
• First Maker faire (2006)

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DIY traditions in the global south

• Chindōgu, a Japanese term for deliberately "un-useful" inventions, created as a hobby and entertainment.
• Redneck Technology An American term of similar meaning for innovations or improvisation using locally available materials
• Gung-ho, a technique of guerilla industry employed at the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives in WWII
• Kludge, an American-English term of similar meaning
• System D in French, is a shorthand term that refers to a manner of responding to challenges that requires one to have the ability to think fast, to adapt, and to improvise when getting a job done

STS on self-organization

• Evelyn Fox Keller: slime molds
• Sherry Turkle on “bottom-up” programming styles
• Isabelle Stengers, with Ilya Prigogine

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Why so rare?

1. The low church is not interested, because of Marxist suspicions against anything that sounds like a free market
2. The high church is not interested, because it sounds too “collaborationist”—too much like it actually believes in the science of self-organization

Two sides of STS

Political (“low church”)

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• 1960s: biased science critique, biased technology critique: Mumford, Carlson, Commoner, etc.
• 1970-80s: Critique of science-as-usual: Science itself as authoritarian power (e.g. Merchant, Keller). 1980-2000s
• 1990s-2000 Cultural studies: Sandra Harding's "strong objectivity" Haraway, Barad, etc.
• 2000-present Re-emergence of interest in alternative practice (doing, making), collaboration with scientists (upstreaming); multispecies ethnography, etc. �

Apolitical (“high church”)

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• Fleck
• Kuhn (paradigms)
• Relativist critique of science (Feyerabend, Collins)
• Constructivist (Knorr-Cetina, Bloor, Scott, ).
• Latour; ANT.
• New Materialisms

Next gen STS on self-organization

Autopoiesis on Barad, Haraway, etc.

Open source in Kelty

Appropriating Technology (Eglash et al)

DIY on “critical making” (Ratto, DiSalvo, etc.)

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STS

Political (“low church”) arguments against self-organization studies

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1. When applied to humans, this is nothing but neoliberalism
2. When applied to non-humans, it is science projecting neoliberalism into nature
3. We need to hold corporations accountable; self-org promotes a lack of responsibility
4. Social problems are caused by lack of regulation (unregulated science, technology development, etc.). Self-organization is against regulation.�

Apolitical (“high church”) arguments against self-organization studies

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1. It is our job to reveal the hidden ways that society constructs science. Since self-org is discovered by science, we cannot possible use it as an explanation or discovery ourselves.

Which means I have an excuse for doing an introduction to self-organization

in an STS grad seminar

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What isn’t self-organization?

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Top-down: someone in charge organizes stuff

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Military—general, commander

Corporation—CEO

Catholic church—Pope

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Suburban layout—architect

Automotive design—designer

Computer chip--engineer

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Fine art—artist

Orchestra-conductor

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What is self-

organization?

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Bottom-up: the stuff organizes

itself:

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Biological evolution

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Flocks and swarms: bees, birds,

whales, wolves, etc.

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Crowdsourcing: WWW, Wikipedia,

Open Source, etc.

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Subsumption architecture (robotics),

Molecular self-assembly (nano),

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Why do dictatorships love linear order?

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Why do dictatorships love linear order?

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Why do democracies accept disorder?

What about in-between?

top-down bottom-up

• This spectrum exists for many other systems: eg human nervous system combines

centralization (brain vs peripheral ns) with self-organization (neural nets)

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• Note that thinking about social structures can help us think about natural structures

How disorganized can self-organization be?

Toss a handful of particles in the air: “self-organized” but without order. Trival case

Sand waves from wind action: a quasi-ordered emergent pattern.

Significant case.

Self-organization tends to be a more salient description when describing systems between total order and total disorder

Salt crystal forms from evaporating water. Completely ordered. Trivial case.

Top-down tools Bottom-up tools

Top-down tools Bottom-up tools

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• A gas made of 15 million molecules randomly crashing about?

OR

• A school made of 15 fish gracefully swirling though water?

Most theories of self-organizing systems fall under the rubric of “Complexity Theory.”

But what is the distinction between Complexity Theory and Theorizing Things that are Complicated?

Which is more complex?

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Emergence is global behavior of a system resulting from collective interactions of loosely coupled components.��Temperature: an emergent property of swarms of molecules. But temperature is based on the average velocity of molecules (E=3kT/2). Linear relation, you can use statistics.

Flocking: an emergent property of swarms of animals (birds, ants, fish, etc.). Flock movements are not well characterized by averages or statistics. They are nonlinear, adaptive, anticipative, have memory. They have synergy: the whole is greater than the parts.

“Complicated” just means there is so much going on we can’t keep track of it

Complexity: synergistic emergent behavior; often adaptive (hence “complex adaptive systems”).

But we can go even deeper

• At the heart of self-organization lies recursion
• Recursion is also at the heart of many social ideals: democracy, freedom, egalitarianism.
• Therefore it should be no surprise that some of the founders of self-organization in science were also activists for self-organization in society.