Welcome

These are some writings I have made over the years.

Most are in the form of (long) emails I have written to one mailing list or another. In deference to the common complaint that email should only be used for short posts, I'm going to start putting long things here in public and linking to them. Still, I have always seen email as a distributed knowledge system, where, long or short, you read things or not as you wish. Sort of like the ideas for a "Social Semantic Desktop". But, sigh, I have to admit that email is in practice not there yet. And some people still use "digests" and old email tools. :-(

Most of these essays and emails are reflections of the same commom core themes in the areas of free software and the emergence of a post-scarcity society. That post-scarcity society is developing based on ideas like:
* "imagine",
* "the internet",
* "3D printing"
* "automation",
* "voluntary simplicity",
* "non-violence and conflict resolution through infinite games and transcending problems using imagination",
* "realizing compulsory schooling to turn children into soldiers is evil",
* "realizing just-in-case learning is mostly obsolete as cheap networked computers are changing things globally ",
* "constructivist education and learning-on-demand in a community are the educational way forward",
* "unschooling at home and freeschooling somewhere else",
* "the future of the public school is to become more and more like the public library",
* "money is a sign of poverty",
* "financial obesity isn't pretty",
* "a few can maintain for the many out of altruism (and perhaps showing off :-)",
* "self-replicating space habitats can support quadrillions of people around the Solar System, so there is room for everyone -- even the unborn",
* "the history of the USA isn't pretty, but it is well worth studying in detail",
* "mutual security makes more sense that unilateral dominance",
* "we need a balance of meshwork & hierarchy and of altruism & selfishness to build a healthy diverse universal society",
* "the Debian project as the flagship of the F/OSS movement is an example of the way forward", and
* "rethinking work to be play".

So, these ideas are mostly what you will find here. Over and over and over again. :-)

Essentially, here is the beginnings of an index into all the details and links to other people's writings to show why I believe these things. Each email or essay was written as I developed my understanding of these ideas over the past decade or two. And each was generally written to address some issue someone else raised on a mailing list, and I replied to each in isolation. So, here are many of those replies in one place.

But, rather than wade through all that, here are three of my most recent long essays which pretty much sum up the main ideas and links:
* The true cost of a Princeton-style education in the OLPC era (about 10 pages)
* Post-Scarcity Princeton, or, Reading between the lines of PAW for prospective Princeton students, or, the Health Risks of Heart Disease (about 200 pages)
* Post-Scarcity Princeton (about 40 pages, a condensed version of the essay above)
The first essay was written earlier, and is more abstract and theoretical. The second essay was written afterwards, and is more specific to Princeton University and also is a bit of a memoir about personal growth. The third is a condensed version of the second with most of the personal and Princeton-specific comments removed.

Here was my statement of purpose for graduate school at Princeton, related to developing self-replicating space habitats:
* Self-Replicating Space Habitat graduate school purpose and plans from 1988

And here is information about a couple ventures I tried to bring together after PU graduate school under the name of Sunrise (both as a non-profit and a for-profit); both fizzled, but there is also information there how those ideas scaled down to what I have done recently.
* Sunrise Sustainable Technology Ventures

Here are a shorter and longer version of comments to grantmakers and donors on copyright and patent policies for a Post-Scarcity Society (originally written in response to a request for comments by the Markle Foundation):
* An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity Society
* On Funding Digital Public Works

Here are two creative-writing pro-peace postings I made to the (now defunct) Pacifica Radio forums in 2003:
* The Lion and the Butterfly
* The Lion Memo (with apologies to C.S. Lewis' The Screwtape Letters)

Here is a satire about what our society would look like if the law was like what lawyers recommend for everyone else:
* Microslaw

Here are some ideas on a tensegrity robot I thought of, disclose here to prevent patenting the core idea:
* Tensegrity Robot

Here is something I posted to the Project Virgle mailing list:
* A Rant on Financial Obesity And Project Virgle and an Ironic Disclosure :-)

I haven't put the rest up yet, but I may, someday, in my idleness. :-) Until then, you can find them by reading emails or other things I have posted publically:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22paul+fernhout%22+slashdot
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22paul+fernhout%22
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=kfsoft%40netins.net
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&q=pdfernhout%40kurtz-fernhout.com

The first essays are about education in part because that is what I have been doing for years, educating both myself and others about these "powerful ideas". Plus most people in the world might enjoy seeing the flagship of global capitalism run into an iceberg. :-) As long as there are stylish lifeboats for all.

I have worked on-and-off towards a project now called Open Source Communities Organizing Manufacturing Knowledge (OSCOMAK) as well as related ideas:
http://www.oscomak.net/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/SSI_Fernhout2001_web.html
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/KFReviewPaperForSSIConference2001.pdf
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/AchievingAStarTrekSociety.html

I would like to implement than on a Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/

I am concerned about how our society can transition from a scarcity-oriented one to a post-scarcity one in a non-violent way that brings abundance for all globally. One major thing I am concerned about is post-scarcity technology (like nuclear, biotech, nanotech, robotics, AI, communications, bureaucracy) wielded by people still focused on scarcity issues.

I have been programming for three decades, which generally has been how I have earned my living. In the 1980s, I became more interested in ecological issues, in part through interacting with people in a local Unitarian Universalist Social Concerns Committee in Princeton, NJ. I was program administrator for the Natural Organic Farmers Association of New Jersey for one season, and did other organic agriculture related things (volunteered at an organic farm, worked as a cashier at an organic foods store). That non-profit work led to writing a (free) garden simulator to help people better learn to grow their own food. http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ That was a labor of love by my wife and I, and beyond prompting me to go to graduate school in Ecology and Evolution (where my wife and I met), it took over six person years to complete. It could still be vastly improved. Working on our own, we only scratched the surface of what is possible.

The ironic disclosure in the essay above on "financial obesity" is that in the process of trying to dig ourselves out of the vast amount of money we borrowed for living expenses to finish our free garden simulator project (we did it, but it took years of working for IBM Research and others afterwards), I helped my wife develop decision support tools to help decision makers see issues from multiple perspectives. This included supporting business decision makers, non-profit decision makers, as well as national security analysts for multiple governments.

Yes, some of *those* people -- who are not all bad, even if they are often caught up in systems that feel beyond their control (including advising uncurious people like the past president, where you have ten minutes in a limousine to explain the entire history of the Middle East and why invading Iraq is a *really* bad idea, let alone moving onto Syria and Iran etc. afterwards). How do you get an idea into the thick skull of someone who believes in something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_of_evil
Still, yes, those organizations are often involved in bad things:
http://www.betterworldlinks.org/index.php?cat=3730
But helping prevent more of that was part of the whole point (at least on our side).

Frankly, most government staff are bureaucrats sincerely interested in doing a good job to make the world a better, happier, safer, more abundant place (as they see it, which can be from a narrow perspective, thus the point of our work, on multiple levels). We tried to find a path that supported both national security and mutual global security, through a process of constructive engagement, helping decision makers see the world from a bigger point of view. Not easy at all. And the potential to be a real ethical quagmire. And sadly, that can leave us with few friends, as we could be seen as tree hugging info hippies by the rightist war-leaning bureaucrats, and compromising-traitors-to-the-cause to the leftist anti-war advocates. And even I can wonder how much we were making a difference and how much we were being used. It's hard to transcend a political system that makes little sense anymore in an age of abundance, where both left and right are two sides of a coin, a coin that is of less and less value as money (and war that springs from the profit-motive) becomes slowly obsolete.

My wife is developing a free and open source version of related software here:
http://www.rakontu.org/
It is called Rakontu ("tell a story" in Esperanto) to help communities (and organizations, groups, families) share and work with raw stories of personal experience for mutual understanding, conflict resolution and decision support.

What I see happening today isn't even really the failure of global capitalism (focused on creating and managing scarcity) so much as the transcendence to a new society (focused on creating universal abundance). A society where *everybody* (apparent slacker or not) gets as a right of birth at least the frugal basics of fresh air, clean water, organic food, quality shelter, 3D printing, health care, internet access, and education, and yet also still has a song in their heart unlike, say, living in the old gray USSR (and hopefully love in their family, too; see: :-)
"All I Really Need" by Raffi
http://www.last.fm/music/Raffi/_/All+I+Really+Need
That's quite a challenge, obviously, but it is happening; the only issue IMHO is how we as a community decides to relate to that trend. As I see it, we are in the end game of global-capitalism-as-we-know-it, if only due to 3D printing.

This all suggests that our biggest danger as as society is in putting the *tools* (some being useful as weapons) of a post-scarcity civilization into the hands of scarcity-preoccupied minds. (Especially ones following outdated military dogmas like unilateral security instead of mutual security.) As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of atomic weapons, everything has changed but our thinking. This site is put up towards that end, changing our thinking, through helping change our collective mythology, especially in the non-profit sector.

These changes in thinking may be big sometimes, and they may be small sometimes. For example, here is an essay and book review about the "The War Play Dilemma" showing how this issue of how we address conflicts is woven into our parenting and play.

More that anyone, I need to thank my wife of more that fifteen years (Cynthia Kurtz) for helping make me a better person by putting books and ideas in my way (like Zinn or Loewen or many others), and also for her boundless patience and generosity in giving me time to write all this.

More about me: Around 1998, my wife and I released three pieces of educational software which are still available at our original web site. You can also read about the history of these pieces of software. I worked for IBM Research and also at IBM's Internet Media Division as a contractor for a while afterwards. I am currently a part-time stay-at-home Dad (trading off with my wife), and I spend my idle time writing email and essays like these, as well as developing free software. I have been working on the OSCOMAK, OpenVirgle, Pointrel, and PataPata projects. I've posted a lot to the Open Manufacturing list. I also have posted stuff on sustainability, space habitats, F/OSS issues, and programming to various news groups, as well as slashdot and elsewhere. You can contact me at pdfernhout at kurtz-fernhout.com . Including "Paul" in the body of the email will help bring it to my attention.

Oh, yeah, and I'm embarrassed to admit I have a degree from Princeton University in Psychology (until they hopefully revoke it after noticing some of the essays on this site. :-). I transferred there from SUNY Stony Brook. And I got a Masters in Biology as a consolation prize for going back to Stony Brook and taking a spin through their Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I also met my wife). Plus I've spent time before that around other academic PhD programs (including CMU CS & Robotics, NCSU Industrial Engineering, and the Princeton University CE&OR program) which I did as a volunteer or ultimately for which I did not receive a degree as one of the disciplined (enough) minds. Guess I was lucky in the end. :-) Hardly anyone back then took me seriously when I talked about self-replicating space habitats and computerized technology libraries; go figure. :-)

For some of the many sources of inspiration in my life, see: http://www.oscomak.net/giving_thanks.html

--Paul Fernhout

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify material from this site under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Also, feel free to quote short sections with linked attribution in emails or on web pages.

Note that I sometimes include material (quotes) I consider covered under "fair use" -- whether that material's inclusion can still be considered "fair use" in derived works in other contexts outside this site is a potential issue for such future authors to resolve for themselves.

Note: no license ever grants permission to modify text a person wrote, or to selectively quote it, in such a way as to intentionally misrepresent what a person said and then attribute the changed text back to them. There are other laws and ethical principles that cover that kind of stuff.

Since most of the stuff here represents my opinions, it might take some rewriting to make them yours :-) or to make them into something more abstract.

Last update: June 20, 2009