Edit: I was wrong, this is not the app. Though it contains ton of relevant information. Link to the app itself. Fun fact: As of right now, when searching Kagi for "villageos", the article is...
Edit: I was wrong, this is not the app. Though it contains ton of relevant information.
Are you sure this is the same thing described in the article? The article describes something built in Unreal Engine. The thing this site is linking to is just a Miro board.
Are you sure this is the same thing described in the article? The article describes something built in Unreal Engine. The thing this site is linking to is just a Miro board.
Yes, that was definitely me jumping to premature conclusion. Still interesting, but not same. I do wish that I could see more of what the article mentioned, as it seems to be mostly a hype cycle...
Yes, that was definitely me jumping to premature conclusion. Still interesting, but not same.
I do wish that I could see more of what the article mentioned, as it seems to be mostly a hype cycle for getting more funding for series A.
I feel a little conflicted about this. On one hand: the app is cool, and if it's intended for incremental progress in existing urban/suburban landscapes, then that's neat. I wholeheartedly agree...
I feel a little conflicted about this. On one hand: the app is cool, and if it's intended for incremental progress in existing urban/suburban landscapes, then that's neat. I wholeheartedly agree with the thesis that modern societies are built on extremely brittle foundations. I figure that modern cities bidirectionally rely on modern industries: minor disruptions to either system cause the other to collapse in a chain. It's much worse in a sense, since we're capable of rapidly building massive chains with single points of failure all along them: Evergreen in the Panama canal; Helene hitting the Baxter, NC IV fluid plant; bird flu wiping out monoculture chicken flocks in 2022 and 2024; etc..
Resiliency is key, but it costs money. It's historically been trivial to hide that your industry is cutting corners by removing redundancies, buffers, and safeties in order to increase profits. Especially in the modern era of regulatory capture (preventing inspections to catch this, or legislation to address loopholes) and oligopolies (the industry is "too big to fail" and gets bailed out, or fires thousands of people to move to greener pastures). So yeah, agreed with the author on that front.
On the other hand, I disagree with the new single points of failure that they're introducing. I'm not sure if it's fluff for the article, but per this quote (highlights are mine):
Their core planning tool, VillageOS, can help conceive residential infrastructure incorporating everything from clean water systems and housing to renewable energy, organic food production, and even robotic and autonomous systems.
If the goal is to start from scratch and avoid the failure modes from p1 of this rant, then the highlighted objectives seem to run counter to them: they presume an external, advanced industrial production pipeline that is outside of their analysis that can feed the ecovillage with machinery and electronics. Not to mention medical concerns (both diagnostic/treatment and pharmaceutical), which doesn't seem to have come up at all.
I'm not sure if I have a great solution to that problem, but it still seems present in this one.
We have a solution: Not leaving it to a market that expects returns on investments. You take a materialist stance: It is a need that must be fulfilled, so we will fund it by taking money from...
Resiliency is key, but it costs money
We have a solution: Not leaving it to a market that expects returns on investments. You take a materialist stance: It is a need that must be fulfilled, so we will fund it by taking money from other for-profit endeavors to insure it happens. Or you know, fund stuff by printing money for it rather than granting it to banks.
It costs a lot of money to build and maintain societal infrastructure that is better removed from profit expectations: Drinking water, education, healthcare, and housing, to name a few.
I’m not sure what materialist means! Below is Oxford dictionary’s definition [1], but I’m not sure how it applies to my argument. Which, put succinctly, is that ignoring industrial production and...
I’m not sure what materialist means! Below is Oxford dictionary’s definition [1], but I’m not sure how it applies to my argument. Which, put succinctly, is that ignoring industrial production and manufacturing when designing sustainable human population centres fundamentally leads back to the resiliency issues that the author is trying to address (albeit at a potentially reduced rate). How you build the robots which make your ecovillage’s agriculture sustainable w/o falling back on imported labour is not something I feel should be external to their analysis. My concern is that they haven’t looked at the full system, and are focusing on the fun part (urban planning).
We have a solution: Not leaving it to a market that expects returns on investments.
Er, sorry, I think my post was too long and confusing? I don’t disagree with the sentiment behind anything you’re saying. My intention behind the part of my post I think you’re quoting wasn’t to justify the status quo; I’m agreeing that it is a bad thing that we keep failing to invest in infrastructure, resiliency, etc.
I don’t happen to agree that printing public money for industry barons so they can metaphorically repair the damage they caused by tearing the copper out of the walls is the right approach, but that might be a quibbling point and not the thrust of your comment?
[1]:
a person who considers material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.
"greedy materialists lusting for consumer baubles"
You'll probably understand what the person you're replying to means better by looking up "materialism" rather than "materialist" -- though I'm surprised the OED didn't include another definition...
You'll probably understand what the person you're replying to means better by looking up "materialism" rather than "materialist" -- though I'm surprised the OED didn't include another definition for "materialist" that directly links there. Oxford dictionary requires a subscription so I can't check it directly, but the type of materialism the person you replied to almost definitely means is definition 1c in Merriam Webster:
a doctrine that economic or social change is materially caused
the Marxist theory that maintains the material basis of a reality constantly changing in a dialectical process and the priority of matter over mind
While the term "materialist" is technically ambiguous even within philosophy, since it's used for multiple different definitions, in practice those definitions are used in such different contexts that it's usually pretty clear which is meant if you're already familiar with all the definitions. For example, the definition you quote is a noun describing a type of person (the adjective version of this version would just be "material" as in the song "Material Girl"), so it couldn't be what is meant when someone refers to "a materialist stance," and the other philosophical definitions aren't really relevant here the way the Marxist theory is.
Historical materialism is one of THE big Marxist theories that most leftists are exposed to on at least a shallow level even if they haven't read Marx themselves, so it's not an obscure term, but it's easy to be unfamiliar with it if you aren't a leftist.
I probably should have chosen better words, but I was short on time. (For @kacey too) But yes, the lefty take (specifically applying concepts of historical materialism) is more or less correct....
I probably should have chosen better words, but I was short on time. (For @kacey too)
So, to draw from awful lot of content that I'm probably misremembering at least somewhat, my gist might better be explained:
Base your economics around solving the material need, not figuring out how to meet the material need within the existing framework for economics. (And again, apologies if I'm not using the best wording here)
In practical terms that might be applied in short order: Have the government print money to get the projects that need to be done, done. Figure out how to balance the sheet later. Which is kinda a principal behind Modern Monetary Theory, which the Keynesians like to scoff at.
Mmhm, gotcha, and agreed! I suppose I'm not sure how this tangent was formed, since I had assumed you were taking issue with something I said in my original comment? Which -- and just to clarify...
Mmhm, gotcha, and agreed! I suppose I'm not sure how this tangent was formed, since I had assumed you were taking issue with something I said in my original comment? Which -- and just to clarify once more; apologies for all the clarifications -- was a critique leveled at Aaron Frank (author of that post on Singularity Hub), and perhaps transitively at James Ehrlich, for insufficiently analyzing the problem of sustainability in the built environment.
If they'd said "and then all the externalities to our analysis will be solved by a powerful government entity pulling the big money lever", I could at least critique that. But the absence of it makes it seem like I'm either reading a poorly paraphrased argument for the value of ecovillages (and by extension, VillageOS), or that the original argument was deeply flawed from the get-go.
(edit) (and just underlining this one more time too, I also agree that governments spending their way out of infrastructural holes is reasonable. I would further suggest that most folks don't have any desire to investigate the interplay between national debt, market economies, and infrastructure, so discussing this at all is often fraught)
I think it's because I latched on to the quoted phrase, so I wanted to expand to essentially say "but money has no object when a goal needs done." The idea of permaculture ecocities do seem...
I think it's because I latched on to the quoted phrase, so I wanted to expand to essentially say "but money has no object when a goal needs done." The idea of permaculture ecocities do seem feasible, but they do somewhat require rethinking a lot of presumptions of what cities must be. I do agree a lot does seem to be another game of "hide the externalities from the wealthy," but that's more American than apple pie.
most folks don't have any desire to investigate the interplay between national debt, market economies, and infrastructure, so discussing this at all is often fraught)
There is probably a disproportionately high number of us here on Tildes. But yes it is fraught.
Aah, thank you! I was just working off of a Google search for "definition materialism", since I only knew of the term as used vaguely in philosophy. I also don't intentionally expose myself to...
Aah, thank you! I was just working off of a Google search for "definition materialism", since I only knew of the term as used vaguely in philosophy. I also don't intentionally expose myself to much political ideology online, and I intentionally run away screaming from groups that try to boil my entire being down to a 1d line, whichever one we're talking about 😅 (or worse yet, two points on it).
I read through the Wikipedia articles on those topics and they were very interesting! I'd heard the term Marx before, fading into the horizon as I sprinted over the hills to another politics-free zone, so it was cool to do some reading on the topic :) definitely a lot of interesting ideas there.
This reminds me of fictional UN Refugee software described in Cory Doctorow's novel, Walkaway. The system was described as running on any available hardware, using people and drones to survey an...
The system was described as running on any available hardware, using people and drones to survey an area for resources, broken buildings, trash-heaps, anything usable and automating the design of the best possible living shelter and ultimately full-life-supporting infrastructure possible to the extent that available local resources would allow, directing tasks to people with AR goggles and such to coordinate construction.
Honestly it's an awesome concept and one I can absolutely see becoming reality. It sounds like VillageOS is going somewhat in the direction of that concept.
Edit: I was wrong, this is not the app. Though it contains ton of relevant information.
Link to the app itself.
Fun fact: As of right now, when searching Kagi for "villageos", the article is result 1, the app is result two, and this topic is result 5.
Are you sure this is the same thing described in the article? The article describes something built in Unreal Engine. The thing this site is linking to is just a Miro board.
Yes, that was definitely me jumping to premature conclusion. Still interesting, but not same.
I do wish that I could see more of what the article mentioned, as it seems to be mostly a hype cycle for getting more funding for series A.
I feel a little conflicted about this. On one hand: the app is cool, and if it's intended for incremental progress in existing urban/suburban landscapes, then that's neat. I wholeheartedly agree with the thesis that modern societies are built on extremely brittle foundations. I figure that modern cities bidirectionally rely on modern industries: minor disruptions to either system cause the other to collapse in a chain. It's much worse in a sense, since we're capable of rapidly building massive chains with single points of failure all along them: Evergreen in the Panama canal; Helene hitting the Baxter, NC IV fluid plant; bird flu wiping out monoculture chicken flocks in 2022 and 2024; etc..
Resiliency is key, but it costs money. It's historically been trivial to hide that your industry is cutting corners by removing redundancies, buffers, and safeties in order to increase profits. Especially in the modern era of regulatory capture (preventing inspections to catch this, or legislation to address loopholes) and oligopolies (the industry is "too big to fail" and gets bailed out, or fires thousands of people to move to greener pastures). So yeah, agreed with the author on that front.
On the other hand, I disagree with the new single points of failure that they're introducing. I'm not sure if it's fluff for the article, but per this quote (highlights are mine):
If the goal is to start from scratch and avoid the failure modes from p1 of this rant, then the highlighted objectives seem to run counter to them: they presume an external, advanced industrial production pipeline that is outside of their analysis that can feed the ecovillage with machinery and electronics. Not to mention medical concerns (both diagnostic/treatment and pharmaceutical), which doesn't seem to have come up at all.
I'm not sure if I have a great solution to that problem, but it still seems present in this one.
We have a solution: Not leaving it to a market that expects returns on investments. You take a materialist stance: It is a need that must be fulfilled, so we will fund it by taking money from other for-profit endeavors to insure it happens. Or you know, fund stuff by printing money for it rather than granting it to banks.
It costs a lot of money to build and maintain societal infrastructure that is better removed from profit expectations: Drinking water, education, healthcare, and housing, to name a few.
I’m not sure what materialist means! Below is Oxford dictionary’s definition [1], but I’m not sure how it applies to my argument. Which, put succinctly, is that ignoring industrial production and manufacturing when designing sustainable human population centres fundamentally leads back to the resiliency issues that the author is trying to address (albeit at a potentially reduced rate). How you build the robots which make your ecovillage’s agriculture sustainable w/o falling back on imported labour is not something I feel should be external to their analysis. My concern is that they haven’t looked at the full system, and are focusing on the fun part (urban planning).
Er, sorry, I think my post was too long and confusing? I don’t disagree with the sentiment behind anything you’re saying. My intention behind the part of my post I think you’re quoting wasn’t to justify the status quo; I’m agreeing that it is a bad thing that we keep failing to invest in infrastructure, resiliency, etc.
I don’t happen to agree that printing public money for industry barons so they can metaphorically repair the damage they caused by tearing the copper out of the walls is the right approach, but that might be a quibbling point and not the thrust of your comment?
[1]:
You'll probably understand what the person you're replying to means better by looking up "materialism" rather than "materialist" -- though I'm surprised the OED didn't include another definition for "materialist" that directly links there. Oxford dictionary requires a subscription so I can't check it directly, but the type of materialism the person you replied to almost definitely means is definition 1c in Merriam Webster:
Merriam Webster also helpfully links to the term "historical materialism" here, whose definition contains more detail:
this definition similarly links to the term "dialectical materialism":
While the term "materialist" is technically ambiguous even within philosophy, since it's used for multiple different definitions, in practice those definitions are used in such different contexts that it's usually pretty clear which is meant if you're already familiar with all the definitions. For example, the definition you quote is a noun describing a type of person (the adjective version of this version would just be "material" as in the song "Material Girl"), so it couldn't be what is meant when someone refers to "a materialist stance," and the other philosophical definitions aren't really relevant here the way the Marxist theory is.
Historical materialism is one of THE big Marxist theories that most leftists are exposed to on at least a shallow level even if they haven't read Marx themselves, so it's not an obscure term, but it's easy to be unfamiliar with it if you aren't a leftist.
I probably should have chosen better words, but I was short on time. (For @kacey too)
But yes, the lefty take (specifically applying concepts of historical materialism) is more or less correct. Here was one of my major entry points to the concepts
So, to draw from awful lot of content that I'm probably misremembering at least somewhat, my gist might better be explained:
Base your economics around solving the material need, not figuring out how to meet the material need within the existing framework for economics. (And again, apologies if I'm not using the best wording here)
In practical terms that might be applied in short order: Have the government print money to get the projects that need to be done, done. Figure out how to balance the sheet later. Which is kinda a principal behind Modern Monetary Theory, which the Keynesians like to scoff at.
Mmhm, gotcha, and agreed! I suppose I'm not sure how this tangent was formed, since I had assumed you were taking issue with something I said in my original comment? Which -- and just to clarify once more; apologies for all the clarifications -- was a critique leveled at Aaron Frank (author of that post on Singularity Hub), and perhaps transitively at James Ehrlich, for insufficiently analyzing the problem of sustainability in the built environment.
If they'd said "and then all the externalities to our analysis will be solved by a powerful government entity pulling the big money lever", I could at least critique that. But the absence of it makes it seem like I'm either reading a poorly paraphrased argument for the value of ecovillages (and by extension, VillageOS), or that the original argument was deeply flawed from the get-go.
(edit) (and just underlining this one more time too, I also agree that governments spending their way out of infrastructural holes is reasonable. I would further suggest that most folks don't have any desire to investigate the interplay between national debt, market economies, and infrastructure, so discussing this at all is often fraught)
I think it's because I latched on to the quoted phrase, so I wanted to expand to essentially say "but money has no object when a goal needs done." The idea of permaculture ecocities do seem feasible, but they do somewhat require rethinking a lot of presumptions of what cities must be. I do agree a lot does seem to be another game of "hide the externalities from the wealthy," but that's more American than apple pie.
There is probably a disproportionately high number of us here on Tildes. But yes it is fraught.
Aah, thank you! I was just working off of a Google search for "definition materialism", since I only knew of the term as used vaguely in philosophy. I also don't intentionally expose myself to much political ideology online, and I intentionally run away screaming from groups that try to boil my entire being down to a 1d line, whichever one we're talking about 😅 (or worse yet, two points on it).
I read through the Wikipedia articles on those topics and they were very interesting! I'd heard the term Marx before, fading into the horizon as I sprinted over the hills to another politics-free zone, so it was cool to do some reading on the topic :) definitely a lot of interesting ideas there.
This reminds me of fictional UN Refugee software described in Cory Doctorow's novel, Walkaway.
The system was described as running on any available hardware, using people and drones to survey an area for resources, broken buildings, trash-heaps, anything usable and automating the design of the best possible living shelter and ultimately full-life-supporting infrastructure possible to the extent that available local resources would allow, directing tasks to people with AR goggles and such to coordinate construction.
Honestly it's an awesome concept and one I can absolutely see becoming reality. It sounds like VillageOS is going somewhat in the direction of that concept.