For once we thought it would be nice to look at a culture of building things up, rather than the slow collapse of everything around us that we normally discuss. We find this culture in a huge variety of different fields from repair in the home to hacking and building in farming fields to careful experimentation on our bodies to filling in gaps in the beauty world to digging deep into the source code of the software that runs everything. In so many worlds this vibrant idea of "let's do it ourselves" has empowered people, spurred innovation, saved lives, and helped to end the alienation that society so frequently forces on us in our modern economic system. This week is everything DIY as Ashes Ashes digs into the culture of creativity and seeks to learn why this idea is so powerful and pervasive.
Subscribe now on: iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher | Soundcloud | Spotify | RSS | or search "Ashes Ashes" on your favorite podcast app.
(This is a machine translated transcript, we know it sucks, we'll fix it soon!)
Thank you Alexey for this awesome transcript!
[0:07] I'm David Torcivia.
[0:09] I’m Daniel Forkner.
[0:10] And this is Ashes Ashes, a show about systemic issues, cracks in civilization, collapse of the environment, and if we're unlucky, the end of the world.
[0:20] But if we learn from all of this, maybe we can stop that. The world might be broken, but it doesn't have to be.
[0:32] Daniel, you know, this show gets a little bit depressing at times: every week we're here talking about just whatever awful subject we can come up with to share just how broken the world is to all of our listeners – it gets to be a lot after a while.
[0:46] Right, we cover some dark topics, the type of topics that can induce existential dread. Contemplating these systems that are really out of our individual control, sometimes it's hard to come to terms with, come to peace with if you will.
[1:00] Exactly. And so this week we decided it would be fun if we tried something slightly different in our usual show. And I know we've been playing around with the format a lot I guess this year but this one will be fun. And that what we're going to do is we're going to look at some people who are trying to buck these trends: these are movements, these are ideas, these are ways of trying to step out of all these destructive practices that we keep talking about in every episode and turn to the outside and say: well, how can we make this better our own way? We're going to focus on just one particular area in which people are doing this and that is the world of do-it-yourself.
[1:32] It's important to remember that there are so many people around the world stepping outside of the current system in many ways: you know, whether that's fixing up old furniture as opposed to going to the latest furniture superstore to find new cabinets and new tables every time you move or if it's people that are figuring out how to develop their own technology to solve security problems or to solve privacy concerns or even hack their own body, David. And in addition, I went ahead and reached out to a friend of the podcast Moriah King to talk about some of the ways that people form communities around the need to provide products and services that the money-driven corporate world doesn't always provide. There's that idea that we come to a lot, David, that you know the free market is supposed to meet the needs of everybody, you know, the free hand of the market is always going to direct resources in the most efficient way possible to meet everyone's needs but I think we have found out at this point that that's really not true, right? The market is more than willing to bulldoze a wildlife habitat to build some short-term development, it's more than willing to place people in food deserts at the expense of their health and what they need to survive. And so very often people must turn to themselves and the people in their community to solve the needs that the economy won't.
[2:58] Daniel, it's a really grand intro in I love that idea about building communities around these alternative forms of consuming and construction really, cause a lot of this is building your own things, going your own way. But I mean it doesn't have to be that grand and that complex all the time, I have a stupid do-it-yourself story that happened to me just this week that maybe I can share here.
[3:21] Alright, David, let me guess: you encountered some, some cameras on the streets of New York City doing some facial recognition nonsense to put your face in a database, so you organized a bunch of activists in your area to create some technical open-source-free-software-virus to take those cameras down, you all went back to the apartment where you live and you celebrated it over a round of beers.
[3:46] Well, that sounds like a pretty good fantasy, I would love to have done that. Although as a total aside, those mysterious surveillance cameras you're talking about are much more easily defeated with a sticker over the camera than with a complicated piece of software, though I'm saying this entirely theoretically and not telling people to print off stickers and put them on top of these things because it's really easy and that would be bad.
[4:10] Let me ask you a question, David, theoretically if someone had a bunch of 2-inch by 2-inch square stickers they got from one of their favorite podcast providers featuring, you know, the artwork of fellow listeners, would those stickers work? Could you put those stickers on a camera to prevent facial tracking?
[4:30] You absolutely could, though I don't know if I want the Ashes Ashes name all over these things publicly, cause it's definitely going to be chased back to me and I don't want all my staff seized by NYPD.
[4:44] I'm willing to take that risk.
[4:46] Maybe, maybe in the Ashes store we can start printing just solid black stickers, maybe that would be a fun, fun thing to be making. We’ll talk about in the future, Daniel.
[4:56] We could sell them for premium, for like 15 bucks a pop.
[4:59] What if we just had white stickers that we stock? Like no prints on it anything, we call it the Privacy Patch?
[5:06] Oh, that's good, the Privacy Patch.
[5:09] There's a market there. Ok, wait, we’re already distracted. So no, this was not what I was doing, it's much less fun than that, it's getting hot in New York, the temperature is finally rising. And I know it’s been hot in Atlanta for a while, but down in Atlanta you have central air, up in NY we don’t in most of our places. And as guilty as I am for using AC and hastening on our climate change apocalypse, it's hot, so it was time for some AC, so I got my window unit out of storage and I put it in my window but in that process, I realize: oh no, this has gotten moldy and gross – and I definitely don't need mold blasting through my window unit straight into my lungs. Now typically you would say: well, you know, it's mold, you never going to get it out, it's time to buy a new window unit. But my window worked perfectly fine, it was still blowing out cold air, there was no problem with it, it was just dirty.
[6:01] So I decided I was going to do it myself and I grabbed a tarp, laid it down in the middle of my apartment and disassembled the entire air conditioner: pieces everywhere, I had like a big bucket of bleach I was soaking everything in bleach just to like sterilize, I cleaned it all off. And it was actually humongous pain in the ass because this unit was really not made to be disassembled which is kind of disappointing. And I think a good focal point of the show where we have these competing incentives where on one side the companies don't really want us to take apart or to be able to easily repair their products because that means it's one less future sale, they would love it if I just looked at this machine, saw it was dirty, said: okay, time to chuck it and buy a new one – see it as disposable, throw it out, the refrigerants are going into the environment, now we have this extra piece of trash, all this energy that went into mining out the metal to make this complicated machine and then transport it halfway around the world would be wasted by just purchasing a brand new machine. It seems like a sin against the environment to do that.
[7:02] But they did not build this in a way that makes it easy for me to repair it, I had to let go in with special tools and pull these bits and pieces of part, there's no assembly directions anywhere online, I was just really on my own. And as I took it apart I realize some of this was built in a way to break itself or try to break itself if you're not careful when you disassemble it. Even the act of trying to repair it is sort of filled with booby traps along the way to make that impossible, or at least very difficult to do. And that adversarial approach to engineering where you are designing a products not to be easily repaired, if they can be repaired at all, is really fucking dirty and I think very much shows the competition between the consumer who just wants a product that works and if it breaks easy to fix and the producer who says: buy as much as my shit as possible, I don't care why you need to buy it, even if my product breaks and you can't repair it, that's fine because it's another sale.
[7:55] Yeah, maybe we should do an episode on planned obsolescence because I think there's two sides to that. And one is the obvious one that people think about which is that a lot of our commodities and our product are just built to literally break. You know, there was that news that came out about Apple recently that apparently, they had been deliberately causing older models of iPhones to lose battery faster so that it would encourage people to buy new ones and, of course, people are very familiar with their phones, once it gets to a certain age it seems to stop working correctly. And we’ve seen like the interesting trend with car manufacturers kind of designing the cars so that independent mechanics can't really work on them, right? There's a lot of car engines that can only be fixed or accessed in certain ways by unlocking code with some kind of computer key, some programming that can only be given by an authorized dealer contract with that manufacturer, it is a way of increasing the revenue for those companies. But the other side of that which you kind of touch on is in a lot of cases trying to fix your own product violates the warranty if you have one, this is very common with Apple's phones for instance. If you try to open it, just the very act of opening your phone can automatically violate and terminate that warranty. And that's just another way I guess that companies ensure to the best of their ability that you will become dependent and rely on them and, of course, always be purchasing that new product.
[9:20] That warranty thing is very common like you mentioned. But I think it is worth noting here that oftentimes you see all those stickers and stuff like: if you remove this sticker, open this piece, the warranty is void – a lot of times those are just empty threats and there have been some court cases that showed that they can't deny your warranty just for doing these things. I mean you can do certain fixes that do violate warranties, but just because something says warranty void, doesn't always mean that that's true. I don't know if anybody wants to try and go through the process of actually fighting for the rights in this but it is very common for companies to threaten or overexaggerate their capabilities in denying you the claims of being able to just repair these products that you’ve already purchased and owned. This is a battle that's actually going on right now for those of you that follow this field called Right to Repair which is the idea that if I buy something, I should be able to repair it or upgrade it or update it or whatever, cause it's something that I own. So it's sort of, you know, I paid to own this, I'm not renting it from anybody, it's mine. But there are increasingly like you mentioned with Apple, Daniel, companies who don't want you messing with their stuff. Which is weird to think about because they don't own it anymore, they sold you the product, you as a consumer should be able to do whatever you want. You know, if you own a house, you shouldn’t have to consult with the builder of the house if you want to like to paint a wall, you should just be able to do that because it's your house, you own it, you bought it.
[10:39] But somewhere along the line we got this strange idea, and it's usually intersection with software and products, where that because these software things are connected maybe to some central server or they might get updates every now, that if you mess with any sort of product that is connected to the software, then you might be violating your rights, you might be voiding your warranty, you might not be able to be allowed to purchase anything from this company anymore. And we see this happening right now in a very long played out battle between John Deere, the tractor company, and various farmers around the United States and the world. And what John Deere has done, they sell these very elaborate expensive tractors, you’ve probably seen a John Deere Green, maybe if you live in the suburbs you've seen the grass dads driving around on their green tractors on their like a little like quarter-acre lots for some reason. But these tractors, they get extremely advanced, they can go as hundreds of thousands of dollars, they can be mostly automated to do whatever work they want themselves, they could be accurate down to the centimeter level in terms of the GPS and whatever other train triangulation they use.
[11:46] I drove a tractor once, David, I was on my aunt’s farm and, you know, spend the day mowing her pasture and then, it was a stick shift I believe, I hit the wrong gear next to a fence and drove straight through the fence.
[12:02] That's, at least you didn’t roll it, tractors are actually pretty dangerous, they are easy to roll and lots of farmers have met their end that way.
[12:09] Right, I mean, it kicks fast, you know, it has a lot of inertia, a lot of momentum.
[12:14] Yeah, they are big heavy dangerous things, I'm not even kidding here, tractors are legitimately dangerous but useful tools, I guess, that we have to deal with.
[12:22] Still feel bad about that, I'm sorry, my aunt if you're listening.
[12:26] Well, fences aside, these tractors are an important part of day-to-day life on the farm and they're hard workers and consequently they break a lot, you know, life isn't easy on a farm, there’s a lot to do, these things are used constantly and they do break down. But John Deere has decided that you're not allowed to fix them yourself, you need to take it to an authorized John Deere repair place where John Deere charges just ridiculous sums of money in order to allow you to repair things oftentimes that are basic and could be fixed by the farmers themselves for cents on the dollar at their own farm.
[12:56] And this is even further with the software that allows all the automation and special of these tractors which enterprising technical farmers have figured out ways to modify, to update, to fix problems that John Deere has left in their software. In some cases, they created entire communities or even little individual hardware chips that can be plugged into their John Deere to modify, to make it an even better product. And John Deere hates this, they don't want anybody modifying their things, they don't want anybody fixing the mistakes they’ve left in their software, they’d rather you, the farmer be stuck with the problems John Deere has decided they going to leave with you if it can protect their IP if it can protect their ability to charge as much as they want for these services on their products. And there are a lot of interesting groups that have spun up trying to fight this. Right now John Deere has won most of the legal cases preventing farmers for making these modifications, but there is a movement called Right to Repair which is the idea that hey, I bought this, it's my product, I should be able to do whatever I want with it and that includes repair, modify whatever. And this is an idea that's starting to find a lot of momentum, find its way into a lot of states who are introducing legislation to support it.
[14:03] As of last year none of these have passed yet, I'm not actually sure, we should probably double-check this, Daniel, if any have passed at this point. I think in the next year or two we’ll start seeing this spin out in a lot of states, this Right to Repair. And it won't carry just for the John Deere tractors but it will also include things like your iPhone, your computer, those things that said warranty void if removed if you enter to fix it. That idea will be gone, we will actually be able to properly modify, repair and then take control of these products that we’ve already purchased. And it's really exciting, and this idea of being able to own and improve stuff has spun off larger clever communities, especially in the agricultural world. There’s a group of people called Farm Hack, we’ll link to this on the website, and they figured out all sorts of awesome clever ways to produce things for their farms, to make things work better and oftentimes in more sustainable ways than companies like John Deere are doing. John Deere wants to sell you a new product, a new model every year, they want you to buy these big expensive things, they want you to lease them – whatever. And people are realizing increasingly, partially driven by the very do-it-yourself nature of the permaculture and homesteading communities, that wait, we can make a lot of this stuff ourselves, we can make it a lot cheaper and we can make it a lot more sustainably than these large companies are doing, and then we can take these ideas, the ways that we figured out how to create these things and we document it and share it with a bunch of other people. So Farm Hack community has created their own operating system to help automate things on the farms, they've created little cheap computers you can build that will do things like automatic irrigation, they've designed all these things you can 3D-print and build will like pluck feather from your chicken or allow you to have no-till seed drills that you can drag behind the tractors – all these clever little modifications that would never be commercially viable because they don't make the companies a lot of money but work really great in the farm for doing things in a sustainable way. And they’ve created these, it’s a community with which they can share it and share it among each other, improve upon it, modify it, make it better and make sure it works for their particular unique situation. It's really exciting to see this community explode recently, and I really encourage you to check out this website even if you aren't a farmer, which is how much clever stuff people are doing. And innovation like this is so exciting to see because I feel it’s been stifled recently, where somebody comes with a clever idea, they patent it, they lock it down to prevent anybody else from modifying and they build this wall of intellectual property around it. And so other people instead of being able to look at that, improve upon it, modify it, make it customized to their unique situation just have to wait for it to fall out of patent or somebody to sell it or it to be cloned by somebody else. And instead, we seeing like this incredible innovation, people building off all these new ideas or seeing an idea and saying, wait, that inspires me to make something else. And the entire farming community and our agriculture and consequently our entire civilization are benefiting from this process, and it's really driven by this idea that hey, I can do this myself. And I don't know where we see that more noticeably than the agricultural community but it is really inspiring and that's something I want to get across from this episode.
[17:07] Yeah a lot of these projects that you can find on Farm Hack just seem so complicated to me. And it's just another reminder that people who are putting in the work in agricultural spaces, you know, they deal with such complex systems, and I don't know where this idea came from that people who live out in the country who engage in farming are not educated or not intelligent. When I look at the types of innovations people are coming up with on small farms, I am blown away by the creativity, the intelligence that goes into these systems. On the topic of making repairs and do-it-yourself electronics and other goods, David, my mom actually brought my attention to something called a Repair Café, you ever heard of these?
[17:49] Is it like a maker space thing? Like what differentiates a Repair Cafe from like a hobby tech space?
[17:57] I mean, there's honestly probably a lot of similarities, but there's something called the Repair Cafe Foundation which was set up to help support local groups set up their own repair cafes which is this concept of let's meet in a restaurant or let's meet in a coffee house once a week, once a month whatever and we'll open this space for people to come and bring, you know, household goods whether that's electrical, their toaster, their bicycle – whatever. And people from the community who have expert knowledge or at least hobbyist knowledge of fixing these things come and they help people, you know, repair their stuff. It started in the Netherlands in 2009 and has since grown to 1500 official repair cafes in over 33 countries. But it's an interesting concept that I think anybody can model. And it's interesting you bring up John Deere, David, because there are a few symbols that really capture this idea of American patriotism and a lot of these symbols revolve around corporations. I was at a store the other day looking at the display that was very, let’s say patriotic in nature, you know, featuring a lot of American flags, and they were selling knives with all these logos on it. You know, one knife had the American flag, there were a couple that had logos of the different branches of the US Military, and there's one knife that had the Ford Motor Company logo and another knife that had the John Deere logo on it.
[19:22] And I guess it makes sense in a way that John Deere, this tractor company, would be seen as this symbol of patriotism, of American identity, right? Because tractors connect to the farm and what could be more patriotic than the very land that makes up a country, right? And what could be more patriotic than taking care of that land and growing the food that supplies the nutrition for all the people in a country, right? This is something Wendell Berry talks about is that to be a patriot is to steward the land. But then, of course, the irony here is what you're talking about: it’s these companies then turn around and kind of take advantage of that loyalty by extracting as much money as they can, by preventing people from really being in power to do the work that they need to do. And this is one of the reasons why agriculture is so destructive because it's so expensive. And what we truly need in terms of sustainability, in terms of food security, in terms of, you know, stewarding this land so that it can take care of us for generations to come, what we need is a diversity of small farmers who are engaging in regenerative agriculture. But that's priced out so often by these industrial-scale models that have priced out these smaller farmers and which rely on huge influx of capital to afford the land, to afford these high-priced tractors, to afford the chemicals that go into growing this food, right, so maybe it's time we rethought what symbols we should use to describe what it means to be proud of our country. But, David, maybe we should shift gears a little bit.
[20:51] Yeah, Daniel, I think that's a great idea. And this feels like the perfect place for you to intro us to a little call you had with a friend of the podcast Moriah King about an alternative area of do-it-yourself and an area that most of us might not expect. So why don’t you go ahead and play that call right now for us, Daniel?
[21:10] Alright, so we have Moriah King on a line, how are you, Moriah? Thanks for joining us.
[21:14] Hi, I am well, thanks for having me.
[21:16] I want to start by playing you a clip, okay? [Clip with upbeat music plays]
I toss them in a blender so it would get completely pulverized, add a bit of water or aloe vera juice and blend! Now grab a rice strainer with tiny holes and place it over a bowl. I pour the blended avocado mixture into the strainer. Then I grab the strainer by the handle and gently tap it against the bowl up and…
[21:43] Okay, do you know what that was Moriah? That was a clip of a woman on YouTube explaining to people how to mix in a blender avocado, bananas, aloe vera, some other stuff so that they could then take that and put it in their hair.
[22:00] She must be talking to black people, like black women.
[22:03] Yeah, this is a black woman. Now, why would anybody be putting avocado and banana in their hair?
[22:09] Do you really want the details like what are the benefits of adding avocados and bananas and things to your hair like, do you want the technical?
[22:17] So when I do my hair, okay, so I'm, you know, I have short straight hair, I get in the shower, I put a little bit of shampoo in my hair and my hand, I rub it in my hair and then I rinse it out and then I get out of the shower and my hair is done. Are you telling me that for some people there's more to it than that?
[22:34] Is this a serious question? [Laughs] Of course there's more to it than just getting in the shower, putting a little shampoo in your hair and then jumping out and shaking your head and you're all good to go.
[22:45] Okay, well, I did say, you know, there’s avocado, and you guess that it was a black woman, what is it about black hair that requires that extra step?
[22:53] Well it's not just black women's hair but if it's more around the different types of hair. So there's straight hair, there's wavy hair, there’s curly hair and then there's like curly coiled hair, then there’s coil hair. And some people like to say that, you know, when your hair is straight, it’s easier for the natural oils on your scalp to flow all the way down with gravity, to float all the way down to the ends of the routes, to keep the whole strand of hair moisturized. But when you have tightly coiled hair or hair that grows up and not down, you don't have gravity that's moving the nice natural oils on your scalp. So there's different needs and I was saying that to say that usually people with coil and tightly curled, their hair tends to be drier and tends to need more oils and more things to seal in the moisture so that it's not difficult to manage so that it doesn't break off. And so that's one of the reasons why she's adding the banana and the avocado, it's for like a deep conditioning treatment. And, you know, all hair needs this but coil hair, black hair needs just a lot more than someone with straight hair.
[24:04] Okay, alright. So that well that explains why some hair benefits from having avocado in it or some kind of extra oil or fat, but it doesn't explain why she was doing in a blender at home. You know, when I want shampoo, I just go to, you know, the grocery store and I pick up my Head & Shoulders or my Old Spice, you know, whatever it is that I use. Why can't you just do the same?
[24:28] Right. Well, so I'm not sure how old this video is but if it's maybe five years or six, maybe seven years ago, there really weren't many products for black hair or for people with coils. There were few options and most of those had some unhealthy additives and chemicals in it like sulfates and parabens which actually dry out the hair more, which if like I just said earlier we don't want to put a shampoo or, you know, a conditioner that's going to dry out the hair more because we're trying to put in moisture, not take it out. So she's doing this as a way to give her hair what it needs.
[25:12] So we’ll call this do-it-yourself hair care products, have you ever done this before?
[25:17] Oh yeah, hundred percent. As a child, my mom was really careful not to add chemicals like a perm to my hair, she really wanted me to embrace my natural hair, but also she just didn't want to put those chemicals on my scalp which, you know, can seep into your scalp and have some nasty effects long term. So as a child and I have an older sister so even into high school I always had someone to do my hair for me, so I never really had to figure out, you know, what product to use. We actually used the same one product Creme of Nature, I used the same shampoo and conditioner throughout my childhood and into my late teen years. Now it was one of the earlier brands specifically for black hair. But then, once I went to college, I didn't have anyone to do my hair and, you know, I didn't know how to straighten my hair with a straightener or a heat tool. And so I had to learn: okay, my hair is dry, what do I do? I should also mention that during my early childhood years and teenage years and even into my college years having natural hair wasn't trending as much, most people have perms and then more people started to have weaves and things. But actually wearing your natural hair just wasn't as much of a thing. So the first thing I could think of was: okay, go to YouTube, maybe there's someone else out there who has natural hair and who is sharing their advice with other people.
[26:51] So what did you find on YouTube?
[26:53] Yeah, so I found the woman that you played was naptural86 but she has a very different, and this is another issue, is that black hair is not one kind of hair, it’s not one kind of curl, it's so different, and again, there's so many different needs, so her hair is very different from mine, it’ much longer than mine and not as tightly coiled as mine. So actually we don't have the same needs. But what I learned from her is that if the products are not in the aisles, if it's not there, you can make your own things if you know the basic ingredients and some basic properties of some of the ingredients. So for example eggs are great for protein, not to eat, but it adds, it can strengthen your hair shaft. So if your hair is breaking more and it needs a little strength, then you can make a mask, a hair mask using eggs. Olive oil is just all-around really great, you can use it, you know, to seal your hair, to keep in moisture, you can also add it to say your avocado, your banana to make the mix creamier, easier to apply. Bananas are also good for moisture, honey is very good. Honey and olive oil is just a winner combination for like deep conditioning and restoring that moisture that your hair may have lost. Another thing I noticed from YouTube, it is just a community, the community around people who are looking for advice on how to take care of their hair when their products are not in the store.
[28:23] And, you know, from watching YouTube videos I then found two blogs, they were just such a great source for, you know, reviews on the few products that were available at the time. And of top of my head, it was probably like mainstream, there are probably only maybe nine brands that were specifically for curly-coily hair and now today there's, man, there's so many, like maybe around 30 or 40 and that's mainstream, that's not including all of the other like independent, DIYers who sell their products locally.
[29:00] You mentioned growing up having to turn to YouTube to figure out how to take care of your hair and there weren't the products available, why do you think that was? Why do you think that the shelves didn't stock more than 9 brands?
[29:12] Well, to be honest, that's a great question. I'll say two reasons: the first reason is black purchasing power. You know, products are made to be bought and they're made for the people who can consume and have the money to consume. The second part would be just a history of black hair and black trends. I would say around 2010-2011 a lot of things started to change for black hair, but prior to that time, most women had perms or most women had weaves. And I know for my mom's generation, they primarily have perms, it was just assumed that if you're a black woman, you would not wear your natural hair, you would wear your hair straight, you know, like white women because it was more acceptable. And yes, to some degree it was easier to maintain and manage. And so the second reason would be just a history of black hair and black beauty.
[30:12] I didn't do any research on black hair but I did find some interesting history of black makeup in America. And in particular, I want to get your thoughts on this one company. So there was a company called Valmor products, it was founded in 1926 in the south of the United States. It was run by a Chicago chemist named Morton Newman, he was white.
[30:40] Making products for black women? Makeup products?
[30:44] Yes, that’s correct. Let me tell you what he made first before you get on your high horse there, Moriah, they made a number of beauty products that were aimed at black women but they were marketed as ways to make black women appear more white.
[30:57] Like lighter in complexion.
[30:59] So there's one ad, for one of their face powders, this was in 1946 and the ad showed an image of a man smiling at a woman and underneath it read, “Is your complexion dark and sallow? Here's the secret for having a lighter, brighter, more lovely looking skin in just a few seconds – use Sweet Georgia Brown Face Powder. It is specially made to give tan and dark complexions the brighter attractive beauty that everybody admires.”
[31:28] Wow. You did say the 1940s but the sad thing is skin lightening products are a huge thing right now, not just in Africa, the continent, but also here in America. I really hope you and David would consider doing an entire episode on just the beauty industry and its intersections with capitalism, because the power and the value associated with the notion of beauty and who's beautiful is very contrived and, to be quiet honest, is meant to be commodified. Back to the quote, it really reminds me of this amazing black female sociologists named Tressie McMillan Cottom, and she wrote a book called Thick: And Other Essays. It's more of her personal thoughts and reflections on her life, her career as a black female researcher and all the different things that intersect with that. But her first essay Thick was just amazing. And is it okay if I read a quote from her book?
[32:31] Absolutely, we love quotes and excerpts here on Ashes Ashes.
[32:36] And I'm just going to read like just the main highlights but I do encourage all of you listeners to buy her book and read it.
[32:42] You heard it, folks.
[32:44] “Predominant standards of beauty center on the white female body. And as a dark-skinned black woman, I exist outside that kind of beauty. Beauty, as we know it in western civilization, is exclusionary, it is not meant for everyone. The structure of who can be beautiful, the stories we tell about beauty, the value we assign beauty, the power is given to those with beauty, the disciplining fear of losing beauty excludes the kind of blackness I carry in my history and my bones. Beauty has an esthetic but it is not the same as aesthetics, not when it can be embodied, controlled by a powerful interest and when it can become commodified.”
[33:28] I think that's very true and I think that also intersects with the purchasing power. So when products are made and marketed towards black consumers, it is normally to have them either try to conform to what the common notion of beauty is or to try to be the other that contrasts against the notion of beauty. And as a black woman who's always been natural and having lived abroad also for a number of years, I've always had to be conscious of my hairstyle, because I think this sums it up pretty well: I remember when I was in China, I was attending a wedding that I was invited to, and on this day for some reason I decided to not have an afro, I decided to like braid my hair down, just because it was easier. And I show up to the wedding and my friend who invited me said, “oh thank goodness that you didn't wear your hair how you normally do because it would have taken the attention away from the bride.” And to be honest, you know, the attention that is attracted by black hair because it's big, because you can do so much with it, you can style it in ways that aren't as, I guess, considered normal, there are these like beauty rules, unspoken beauty rules: you need to tame your hair, your hair needs to be professional. And Dr. McMillan Cottom talks about how whiteness must have blackness, how can you be white without having a counter? And you can read that, I encourage you again to read the book for yourself, maybe you agree with some things and maybe you don't agree with her using these binaries. But she brings up some interesting points and she uses the binaries to go into discussions of how capitalism feeds off of beauty because if you say this kind of person with these attributes of beauty, you can market it to both the person who would be considered beautiful and the person who's not. But those groups of people who embody beauty, you can tell them: hey, you're beautiful, but why don't you add a little more here? And then for the other, it's like: okay, you're not beautiful, you don't embody beauty, how can you? You can perm your hair.
[35:43] Or in other words, you can buy Sweet Georgia Brown to lighten your skin. Well, I do think, you know, you mentioned we should do an episode, I think that would be an interesting topic the way, you know, these capitalist structures perpetuate very exclusive beauty standards. And it is interesting that quote you read about how beauty itself can be exclusionary. And this is what we talked about with resources and economic extraction, that wealth is accumulated through exclusion. And going back to this idea that the free market will always meet somebody's needs, I think you kind of provide another example of how that's never going to be true, that the reason why products haven't existed for black people and their very specific hair is because one of the reasons being, what you mentioned, purchasing power. And there will always be under capitalist structures people who are marginalized, who don't have that purchasing power, because that is exactly the mechanism through which capitalist accumulation occurs – by excluding people from resources so that you can accumulate more for a small group of people. And it's interesting to hear that quote from Dr. Cottam saying how beauty itself is then replicated. You know, those who accumulate the most well then they get to determine what is beautiful and they get to exclude other people from that standard. But I guess that's where the YouTube do-it-yourself community enters itself and saying: well, okay, fine, if you at the top won't give us, you know, the products that we need to express our natural selves then we will figure out how to do that on our own.
[37:12] Yeah, people are very resourceful and that's one thing I really enjoyed about the YouTube community, it’s just I learned principles about how to not just survive but find things that meet your needs outside of the supermarket and outside of the convenience store. And, you know, those principles are still impacting me to this day. When I lived in China, I mean, there was no market there for me because it's China. But learning that I can use olive oil to condition my hair or even for a dry scalp, learning that I can crack an egg and mix it with a little honey and also olive oil to condition my hair, helps a lot.
[37:53] Now I don't do that, to be honest, I don't make my own products as often anymore because they are available in supermarkets and drug stores. But with this new availability, it has changed, for me personally, it has changed the way I find community around my hair. Now the same YouTube bloggers I used to look up to and rely on for advice on how to take care of my hair, now they're all being sent marketing packages with full-size products for them to use on their hair and to market now to the people who have and who still do, you know, trust their recommendations. And not all bloggers are the same, some bloggers really only promote their products that they have used on their hair and that they think works, and then there are some who, you know, they get a sweet deal, they get free products, they get kickbacks from your purchases. So it's kind of a blessing and a curse to have 20-30 different brands or products: yes, there are many more products that are making it easier for mothers to do their young daughters’ hair and for women like myself to get the product that they need, on the other hand, you know, I do feel more overwhelmed with: okay ,which product should I get?
[39:12] What's interesting to me, we talk a lot on the show about how our economy degrades the quality of communities through these like Faustian bargains of commodities to solve short-term needs at the expense of the type of social relationships that would have existed to provide that in a more sustainable and natural way. And sounds like this is just another area where that's a challenge.
[39:34] With all that being said, I still know that there's a growing community of black women who still prefer to make their own products because they know it's safe, they know whatever they make through trial and error, it is fun, it is enjoyable to get your hands messy. It is also really encouraging when you make your own products and you see that there are things that work for your hair and that you can make them. It's also encouraging to learn not just for yourself but to learn for other people and to share with other people. In 2012 I did what is referred to as the big chop and I did: I cut off all my hair and, as my hair grew longer and throughout different phases, it was just so beautiful to learn how to take care of myself. And throughout that process, I also had women who saw my hair and watched it grow as well and would ask me for advice because they were considering really embracing their natural hair and they want to know: what do you do? Oh, I can make this? Oh, you recommend using mayonnaise on my hair? I remember helping my sister what we refer to as transition which is to go from chemically treated hair to natural hair. So they're always would be people who prefer to make their own products because it's enjoyable, it's helpful and it's just such a rich way of giving other people and giving adding value to your community and those around you.
[41:03] That's what it always comes down to, the community.
[41:06] One last thought, I would like to just encourage people to embrace sometimes not being able to easily find what you need. It is different if it's medicine or something that you can't really make but for body care, skincare, haircare, you know, I think sometimes it's okay to lean into: well, the market doesn't have what I need. So I would just like to encourage people to maybe just find one thing and try some of that, you don't lose anything.
[41:33] Maybe I'll blend some avocado tonight, try it out for myself, thanks so much, Moriah.
[41:38] Thank you, Daniel.
[41:40] I wanted to pick just real quick at the end of that phone call which I wasn't there for. But I notice at the very end that Moriah mentioned that some things may be difficult to DIY yourself, particularly medicine. And we’re going to get to in just a moment about how that's not entirely the case, there's a lot of really interesting things going on there. But before we get to that point, I think you had a story you wanted to kick off about how many just different interesting areas there are that are DIY, Daniel.
[42:07] There's so many realms that we can talk about in do-it-yourself and I actually have a story of my own.
[42:13] Okay, let's hear your story.
[42:15] So this was actually several years ago. You know, I was fresh out of college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do in the world, hadn't really started thinking about some of the systems that we talk about. So I decided, you know what, I'll just go travel the world for 6 to 8 months and just figure my life out, right? So I did the whole backpacking, you know, live in hostels, hitchhike around, that kind of thing and I found myself in Austria and I needed to get to Morocco. And for whatever reason I was freaked out because I thought I needed all these vaccines, you know, I thought that if I don't get the right vaccines, they are not going to let me into Morocco, yada yada. So I set out to find a doctor that would administer whatever vaccines I needed. And I had to look these up online, you know, I needed X vaccine, Y vaccine, you know, an accusation against this disease. And I went to the hospital, there was a language barrier, I couldn't find anybody though who would give me vaccines. Eventually, I found myself at the pharmacy, David. I said I need vaccines, where do I go? And they say: “Oh, I know just what you need,” – they to go behind the counter and they grab a couple of boxes, they bring it to me and they say, “Here you go, here’s your vaccines.” And I said, so this is it?
[43:23] I said, “Are you going to give it to me?” They said, “No they're yours, you know, whatever.” “So I'm supposed to do it?” and they like, “Well, we don't recommend it, but I mean it's not illegal.” So I go back to my hostel, I search up on YouTube how to give yourself a vaccine, then I went to the bathroom and I pulled my shirt sleeve up and gave myself a couple of shots. And that was what opened the door for me, David, into do-it-yourself biohacking. I very much felt like a biohacker that day.
[43:56] Giving yourself a shot, what have you done since then in terms of biohacking, Daniel? I'm really curious. What the extent of your biohacking? Are you’re like cybernetic now, you have like bionic arms and stuff or what?
[44:09] You mean when I said that this opens the door for biohacking? Right, well, besides the vaccines, David, I haven't done much since then but I am thinking a lot about things that I could do.
[44:22] Big talk. What would you do? What is your first cybernetic upgrade?
[44:27] We hear a lot about CRISPR, you know, genetic modification, splice some genes into yourself and all of a sudden your muscles will grow faster, bigger, stronger. But I don't think I would start there, David.
[44:41] Okay, where would you start?
[44:43] I'm trying to think of something. [Both laugh]
[44:42] You know, while you are trying to figure out where you are going to start biohacking yourself here, Daniel, you talk such a big game, and then I press the questions and you can't answer them. I guess in a weird way when you think about it, all these people who are doing steroids at home or in the gym, like buying them illegally in the market, they are in a sense sort of these do-it-yourself biohackers, the black market has sort of forced them to do this outside of the mainstream, for better or for worse, for themselves. Though, of course, you know, every Hollywood actor you see that gets buff is probably doing it so on steroids, a lot of the people you see at the gym are actually on steroids, there is a huge amount of people in this country if you especially getting into the fitness scene, who are on steroids and it's just a common, accepted thing.
[45:33] And that really is a weird do-it-yourself community. If you ever read through these threads or these forums of people who are talking about their anabolic steroid use, they're all like scientists, they are sitting out there charting out like their blood levels and like: you know, we'll do this and you have to apply it in this way and we have to cycle these types of things and use these exact amounts. And again, you know, talking about these communities, you wouldn’t expect people to be so like detailed and strict and educated in this stuff, in terms of farming and the same is absolutely true in terms of bodybuilders. Please don't get me wrong, I'm not here condoning steroid use, there's a big problem with it especially in young kids who feel pressure to do this in high school or shortly after.
[46:14] But this is a do-it-yourself community that is spring up because they don't have an alternative to this because in this case instead of the companies preventing them from doing it, the state itself has decided that this is something that should not be allowed, so they've created their own black market do-it-yourself world of it.
[46:29] And actually, there's a huge industry in fitness for supplements and pre-workouts that are completely unregulated. And these things come on and off the shelves like hotcakes: they come on, they have this new formula, then it turns out that they had steroids in them and that's why they were so effective, they get banned. I actually know somebody, David, and this is an anecdote, but they got ahold of a pre-workout that was, you know, passed around in the gym, they used it for a few days and they're like: man, this is the most amazing pre-workout I've ever had. They just went to the gym and crushed it, they had the most amazing workout, and then it turns out it was banned because it had traces of…
[47:06] Meth?
[47:08] …cocaine in it.
[47:08] Oh yeah, okay, that'll do it too. So where's your biohack, Daniel?
[A short pause]
[47:17] Okay, well, while you're still figuring out your biohack, your next step after this world of biohacking in your words has been open for you. Let’s talk about people who actually are biohacking in an also illegal way, just like these steroid users, but in a way that actually allows them to really live. There's a community that has been built around the fact that at some point a manufacturer just made a mistake. So in the world of diabetics, there’s a lot of different types of diabetes, there’s a lot of different needs for it. But there is a product that allows you basically to automatically inject insulin at different amounts throughout the day in order to make sure you're always at a proper regulated amount. It automatically test you, you don't have to constantly be pricking your finger and then trying to adjust it outside of that. And it really dramatically improves peoples’ lives.
[48:06] But these products oftentimes don't have the best software, they're oftentimes difficult to use, they're very expensive. A lot of peoples’ insurance doesn't cover them. And then at some point, a manufacturer fucked up and they made one of these products that had a bad security system, and hackers realized this and they were able to basically hijack the interface between this insulin pump and this glucose monitor and basically make it better.
[48:34] They started loading their own software onto this and they were able to create a system that is dramatically better than what was available publicly from these large companies that were pouring billions of dollars into these products, in their research and marketing. People found out about this and now there's an entire huge 3rd party do-it-yourself community built around finding these old insulin pumps, buying them off eBay, oftentimes now for hundreds of dollars because they're in such high demand, loading this custom software on it and then living a better life because of that. The people who are using this find that it's much much much better than commercial alternatives. The company that created these pumps originally has now locked it down and their newer products aren't so easily hackable. But people still prefer the community ones that are DIY, made by people themselves. Obviously, this is a minefield for the FDA, they don't want people using this, just what they see as non-corporate software, because there's no liability there, right? So on a typical system, if there's a problem, somebody dies because of these pumps. They can blame whoever made the pump, this medical manufacturing device company and there’s a legal liability for it. But if somebody downloads, you know, software onto a pump that they buy off eBay and there's a problem and something happens, who do we blame? Who's that fault is here? It's difficult, it is legally ambiguous. So FDA is obviously not all about this which is why we don't see people making publicly available open-source design community pumps, pancreatic systems.
[50:01] But the fact of the matter is: just because a large company isn't behind the software, doesn't mean that it's any worse. And in so many cases this community design software is much better because they are much more coders looking at all this stuff, digging through it, finding bugs, contributing more to it and oftentimes these coders are much better than the ones employed by the companies who introduce, quite frankly, all these bugs and problems in the first place. In the company's eyes, there is a very narrow need for them to make sure the software is right, it just has to not kill people, anything beyond that is something that they don't necessarily want to try and improve upon cause there's no profit motive. Maybe you make a better version, but you tie it only to newer pumps. So if people want to upgrade, they have to move to a newer thing. But in the open-source, free software community, they’re not bound by these profit incentives, they can just continuously improve these pumps that already exists, make them better, make people's lives better just because that's the right thing to do because that's what their motivation is. And consequently, they are putting way more work into these products. And I'm just like very briefly brushing over these stories, they are really amazing, you can find a couple of links about them on our website ashesashes. org. But there is a very vibrant community that is sort of in jeopardy right now because they're running out of these pumps they can hack to put information in. But this means that, you know, people's lives are at stake here, people don't want to go back to other pumps, because their lives are materially worse. And this is because the profit motives of the company and because of the fear the state has over their lack of regulation, which is misguided at best, is threatening, you know, the very way of life of people, they’re threatened to make their standard of living much less. And in some cases possibly even doom some of these people who are currently living basically functional, fully functional lives to possibly death if they can't afford these newer pumps, they can't afford the alternatives, that they can't test themselves enough. And that's the reality of the situation, this DIY community has made such a positive impact in so many people's lives. And it's because they can escape the profit motive, because they can look past that and just focus not on customers or consumers but on people's lives, on patients. Daniel, how’s that biohacking going?
[52:09] Well, David, while you were rambling on about a bunch of nerd computer topics stuff, I was searching up top 10 biohacking ideas, so.
[52:18] You’re going to steal somebody's top 10 list for your biohacking ideas?
[52:22] No no, this is my idea, totally my own. But so you know there's a lot of research coming out about the gut microbiome. And there’s a lot of emerging research pointing to the idea that the microbiota in our gut plays, you know, just a tremendous number of roles in our health, everything from regulating our digestive system to even integrating with our central nervous system to control what kind of cravings we have for certain foods. So I think my first biohacking project on myself would be a way to replace the microbiota in my gut for ones that will really crave healthy food, that I would have these craving for broccoli and carrots and really wholesome whole foods which would really give my nutrition a big boost. There actually is a method for doing this, David, it's called FMT, right now it's only prescribed to treat a bacterial infection, but theoretically, you could use FMT to replace the bacteria makeup in your gut for the more beneficial ones that you've identified.
[53:34] That's actually pretty slick but I sort of am wondering what does FMT stands for.
[53:40] Oh, it stands for f. microbiota transplantation, David: basically you just take some bacteria from someone else, you liquefy it, then you consume it and it goes to your gut.
[53:53] How do you get bacteria from someone else? Where you getting that, are you scooping it out of them? Have you not gotten that far?
[53:59] You kind of get into the details here, David.
[54:04] Okay, you’re not the details man, I got it.
[54:05] I'm just talking broadly, you know, it’s f. microbiota transplantation.
[54:09] Wait, but that's not all the letters, what does F stand for?
[54:12] Mmm?
[54:13] The F.
[54:14] The F?
[54:15] Yeah, what's the F stand for?
[54:16] Mmm, that’s a biological term, fecal.
[54:20] Fecal? This is just a poop transplant? I mean I’m aware of poop transplants but I didn't realize there's like a DIY. I'm not going to work through the details on that.
[54:31] Yeah actually Josiah Zayner did it, David, that famous biohacker? So he became like a celebrity biohacker, got his PhD in Biochemistry from the University of Chicago. He spent two years at NASA doing research after the Robotics Department, was in and out of the hospital a lot for some personal issues and decided that the doctors weren't fixing him, so he was just going to figure out a way to do it himself. And that's one of the experiments he did on himself as the FMT. Apparently, it did solve some of his, you know, problems. But as a side effect, it gave him a new craving for cookies.
[55:08] Well, I guess, that's a little bit of research that is proving that it's not my fault that I'm craving junk food, it's my gut biome, so. Well, let me shift a little bit away from fecal transplants but stay on the top of the medical, I just want to quickly brush over a couple of other really cool DIY things that are happening here that are really absolutely fighting this huge entrenched pharmaceutical and medical industry that makes so many Americans lives in particular just a miserable living hell. We on this show have previously talked about the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective who are a group of people, hackers, chemists, mathematicians, medical doctors – all these people who have come together and realized: hey, you know, we can build a better pharmaceutical medical world and we could do this in the comfort of our homes and we can allow anybody to participate in this process. They got their first notability from the creation of those homemade EpiPens, you probably seen them before, replacing these products that cost hundreds of dollars, that are made by companies that love to jack up the price into something that you can make at home for as little as $30 - $35, potentially allowing, you know, thousands of people's lives to be saved.
[56:14] Four Thieves Vinegar Collective has also built these DIY 3D-printed and Raspberry Pi computer ACRs which is an automated chemical reactor, which is basically a drug lab at home. And they figured out different ways that you can very safely load in plans, add the reagents and the precursors, and it gives you all sorts of active drugs, they've figured out how to make certain antibiotics, they figured out how to make prophylactics for HIV-AIDS, they figured out how to make a Narcan to help with opioid overdoses, they figured out how to make certain abortion pills that are going to be very important for allowing people in communities that don't have access to these pills to be able to generate them at home without anybody being wiser, of course, highly illegally. And they are doing really interesting things with these things that they're making as well. So the prophylactics, for example, they are distributing them into their communities, they're making sure junkies have this. So they're actively taking this stuff into their own hands, distributing it, making sure people's lives are being saved right now. And, oh boy, does an FDA and the pharmaceutical companies want them all punished which is why they operate with such secrecy. But the point is that there is a huge vibrant community of people devoting hundreds of thousands of hours of their own time and intelligence. And these are people who are multiple degree holders, you know, PhDs, doctorates, nobody's being paid for any this, they're just volunteering their time to make the world a better place. And they do so in a safe way that offers alternatives to these systems that we built up that are so abusive and exploitative and oppressive in our day-to-day lives, in this case, the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry which we talked about at length, Daniel, just how many lives have been destroyed? And I don't want to undersell also the fact that yeah, of course, they save lives, but oftentimes at what cost, you know? Here in the United States medical bankruptcy is the number one form of bankruptcy by a long shot. So much money goes into insurance, into pushing all this stuff forward that any alternative that we have that realize: hey, we can take some of this medicine and put it back in our hands, because really it’s our bodies, we are the ones that should be first and foremost responsible for them – and that's a huge sort of mental shift it is really being pushed by these biohackers, by these people who are creating these alternatives to what we would normally think could only be possible in this large, very advanced, expensive labs and making sure that people who would never have access to this kind of technology or treatment suddenly do.
[58:34] It's interesting how this idea has kind of taken over our perceptions of what medicine should or even can be, right? This idea that, when it comes to medicine, nothing should be done, no one should touch that knowledge unless you have some kind of legitimizing certification or education. And of course, no doubt, there are certain operations, there are certain procedures, there are certain chemical formulas and recipes for things that absolutely require specialized knowledge.
[59:06] But it doesn't mean that we should accept the idea that we have no power to take care of ourselves. And I think Four Thieves Vinegar Collective really highlights this in really intelligent ways and we talk about them a lot more in-depth in episode 47 - Painkiller. And the point there being made is that so often we know exactly what we need, we know exactly what our bodies need, so very often, but yet we are forced because of the way market logic has invaded the medical community, we are forced to go to some doctor, some provider, pay a bunch of money, pay a bunch of premiums in insurance just to access that for someone to just give us what we already knew we needed. And I think for anyone unconvinced, a good place to start in terms of challenging the ideology around intellectual protection, copyright, and patents, around these ideas and in general would be the episode we did on intellectual property rights, the history of that and how it has been kind of evolved over time to serve the needs of corporations and people who are not acting in our best interest as a public, but merely want to preserve their ability to control knowledge and to control cultural heritage for profit. And that's episode 33 - All Rights Reserved.
[1:00:26] Yeah, that's actually one of my favorite episodes and I was really excited to be able to share those ideas with people, so you haven't listened to that, check it out, it's not regular doom porn but it is interesting and important nonetheless. But I mean, we talked about this actually in that episode as well, but if you're really trying to get to the nitty-gritty big DIY community in this world, outside of, you know, the very obvious stereotypical pictures of hackerspaces and people going in and designing all this new stuff. I mean, there is nothing more DIY and community-based than the free software movement, the idea that all these computer programmers from around the world can come in and treat new products that ultimately honestly run most of the world right now. In fact, this podcast, website if you visit that is brought to you and made possible by in huge parts with this open-source free software. If you run into any sort of computer, whether it's Windows or whether it's a Mac, or obviously if it's going to be Linux, then you are in large part running something that is made possible through the use of this community created free software. The servers you visit, the major websites and then obviously the large tech companies that profit off of them, companies like Google, like Facebook are all made possible by the millions and hundreds of millions of hours, probably billions of hours people have put into writing software in a large community of people writing software to be released for free. Free not just in terms of cost, but also in ethics as we’ll talk about in just a moment, and not being paid enough process but doing it because they love it, because they feel like they have to do this in order to build a better world.
[1:02:01] And I mean there's a lot to dig into here and I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, so Daniel and I actually reached out to the listener to the show who's also one of our fantastic research assistants, who will send us links and help us collate information for all these episodes cause we have so much research to do every single week. And he is a major proponent and sort of a significant figure in this free software foundation, I'm sure he's going to be embarrassed that I’ve said that. But let's turn it over to him, Daniel.
[1:02:31] My name is Michael Verrenkamp, I am a committee member for Free Software Australia. The website is free software.org, there is a US alternative which is fsf.org, and if you're in Europe, there’s fsfe.org. We’re an advocacy group for freedom in computer software and more broadly computer hardware. Basically, so that the uses control their machines and their software and not someone else. Because you're either: the computer controls you or you control the computer. And in the modern world, you rarely control your computer. You get some hints that you control it, there’s the keyboard and the mouse. But ultimately, the software behind it's doing the real work. And if you have no control of what that's doing, then the machine isn't yours.
[1:03:23] Well, that sounds scary, but when you say the machine isn't mine, like what do I actually have to worry about in that case? As long as it browses Facebook where I can read my emails then I should be fine, right?
[1:03:34] It's one of those things because software is so vague, it's like a black box, you don't actually see how it works. It's just you see this program, it says I'm an email client or I'm running Facebook, but behind the scenes, it can be doing all sorts of things like, so if it’s an email client, it could be sort of going through your computer, seeing what your contacts are and not just keeping it for you but sending it off to a third party like Google, for instance, collects all your emails, it scans it for all the contacts, all the keywords and they're doing all this and they don't explicitly say that they are doing it. But if you run your own free software program, somebody else can actually verify what's doing, they have the source code, they are free to modify, check it. And if it's doing something that they are not quite sure is really good for the user, they can rip it out and share it with the community and say**, let's fix the email program and enjoy a secure email program.
[1:04:36] Maybe define what free and open software is?
[1:04:39] We came up with 4 requirements for free software, it comes down to the four essential freedoms. Freedom one is the freedom to study the program, how it works, that means you have the source code, which basically looks like a big sheet of algebra. It's a human-readable code that allows many people to actually understand what's doing. Cause when you get a program that is binary, almost no one can read it and it can take many weeks and months to figure it out. The second freedom is the freedom to share the program. So if you give me something, if it’s really good and you’re a friend and I’m going to be good to you and say: hey, there is this great program, I can give it to you and no one can tell me that I can't do that. The third freedom is the freedom to modify the program. So that if you have the source code, you can add stuff to it, you can take things out that you don't like or you can get somebody else in your community to do that, you can pay them to do it, there's nothing wrong if I'm making money off doing this or paying somebody to do this. And the four freedom is the freedom to share this modified, which once you have all four of these freedoms, you can operate programs in operating systems and machines in the way that means that the developers don't have the power of you – you have the ultimate decision.
[1:05:59] It's so much like the constitution. It doesn't mean absolute freedom that you can do anything you want but does mean that you will never be locked down permanently.
[1:06:10] So what it is about the structure of open and free software that allows those four freedoms to take place? What sets it apart?
[1:06:17] So it comes down to software licensing. This is where it's not a technology problem so much more as an ethical and moral problem. You wouldn't even install most proprietary non-free programs, you usually get the installation thing that then comes up with this big wall of corporate text which is all bold and unreadable, you just scroll to the bottom, you just click agree and you just sign away all these rights. Well, in the free software community licensing is a really powerful thing. And the big key, one that we use, this one is called the GPL, it stands for the GNU public license which is an operating system that was built for this free software community. And it protects those four freedoms, it's designed to give you rights rather than take them away.
[1:07:01] And so if a program has the four freedoms, it's under the GPL, you can be sure that this program can never be locked down to be controlling you rather than letting you use it as you please. So say if I get a video editing program. Yeah if you give it to me and I get the source code with it, I'm free to study it, modify it, share it and share the modified. For a video editing program that’s fairly trivial. But for something more important say like a web browser, you want to make sure that thing is actually working for you and not somebody else. And there's a community, many people can check over, they still make sure that's not sending data to third parties, government agencies, for instance, or just Google alone is bad enough. They'll do it for you, ensuring that you have these four freedoms is the big thing, and the licensing is the big thing that ties that all together. Because without that, there’s no legal backing.
[1:07:56] So it kind of sounds like a peer-review thing, right? Where, you know, if I'm handed a piece of software from Google and it says, “oh, we respect your privacy,” I kind of have to take them by their word, right? But if it's open-source software and it comes with that guarantee that I know that there's a whole community that went into making that, it's very possible for anybody with the technical skills to verify that, to change it if it doesn't. And so I know that this was reviewed by people who care about it as opposed to just I have to take corporations by their word.
[1:08:30] Absolutely, I think the term is trust but verify. Google can say whatever they want, they can say: yes, trust us, this works. But without other people to verify, it's basically just words and almost meaningless. The term is: security through obscurity is not security at all. And having the community not only build it but also verify is the big powerful thing. With enough eyes, every problem becomes shallow. So every bug, every security problem, every potential issue of data leaking can eventually be vanished. If somebody comes in and maliciously adds functionality that is very bad, could be doing all kinds of things, maybe destroy your computer, I don't know, the community has the power to actually remove it and fix it. If you were proprietary non-free software and there's an issue like this, you're powerless, you cannot change anything, you just have to wait for the big business at the top to make the change and hopefully fix it. And you have to trust them that they fixed it. And if there's no profit motive for them to do this, it's very little chance that they will do this. Proprietary software in that sense is a power-play, it basically ties you into the system that they dictate and you have no control to liberate yourself and keep it running as you please.
[1:09:50] It's a good way to put it.
[1:09:52] It reminds me of like the Equifax breach and like what you said about the profit motive, you know, if I’m a big corporation, I may know that there's a security risk with my software but I can just ask my finance department like hey, come up with a risk calculation and if the risk is, you know, 1% that we have this data breach and it's going to affect X number of people, and this is how much we face in fines, does it shake out that we actually want to spend the money to fix that? And so that profit motive might not even be there, even though the awareness of some kind of fatal flaw with the software is known.
[1:10:25] The Equifax thing was actually interesting because apparently rumors, and it makes sense, was they steered clear of all this open-source free software because if it was open and out there that then they would be responsible for fixing it, yeah so they will have responsibilities, the will have to take the fall. But if it was proprietary, they could just say: well, we didn't know and we couldn’t fix it, so that's not our problem. It's exactly the profit thing that makes sure that these things aren't fixed unless it's going to happen. It's one more horrible parts of the corporate world being used directly where their user is exposed to it.
[1:11:06] Michael, I'm wondering if you could talk for a moment about the free software community. And you mentioned earlier that just because the word free is in there doesn't mean that people aren't getting paid or money isn't exchanging hands here. But I mean a lot of the open-source community is done unpaid, it's a hobbyist community and a lot of it are people who are working on these things in their spare time. And maybe you can help our listeners understand why would anybody do that?
[1:11:29] Yeah, so you've hit a key point. When we use the word free, there's a bug in the English language and that we've assigned two different meanings to one word. It means freedom as in free speech on free as in free hat. But it doesn't mean you don't get paid for it, you are free to charge for this stuff. There's no restriction on making money. And a lot of people really do get paid to make free software. It is usually through big companies like IBM who have a whole group that works on building free software because it benefits them who use this technology. So a good example would be the GNU operating system which is called GNU/Linux, most just abbreviate it to Linux but that misses the point of the whole system. This is where the community basically went: we need an operating system. So they built all the various parts. And the idea is that everyone shares all the source code that they all modify, they will all put together and build a full system that’s independent of any one single controlling point. So the GNU offering a system really used to be a key piece of the free software movement at the moment. But it's not a necessary thing, like any software can be made free software. But as far as an operating system goes, it's the big daddy. These Linux, GNU/Linux systems, they basically power the Internet. Almost every big server farm runs on this stuff, you'll see big companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple – they all are running the stuff in the back end. And it’s all community-powered, which just kind of a shame to see that they appropriate for themselves. But that’s also an example of just how much the community coming together can produce something of huge value and power. Just a few years back there was a study. And they basically went through one of these distros, these combinations of programs in GNU/Linux called Debian. And in 2011 they found that if you tell how much the code was worth, Debian as one system worth $18 billion. It just shows how much effort’s being put in just for the sake of the community as well as the other companies contributing to this.
[1:13:38] Yeah and one of these large open-source software companies called Red Hat, which is responsible for one of these major GNU/Linux distros, just sold to IBM, like you mentioned, for $34 billion so there is a lot of money in this industry even though it is free software.
[1:13:55] I’m not a fan of big businesses because they see free and they realize they don't have to pay much, they're willing to take it but they're not willing to contribute back much. Or at least they will put out the image that they are but then they move in different ways behind the scenes. Like Microsoft, for instance, since they put up a big slide saying “We love Linux!” and then they start suing people for patent infringement on the back end because yeah, they don't really want to contribute to it. I've also noticed these big companies, they don't mention it is free software, it’s always open source because that doesn't bring the ethics in, it doesn't mention the GPL because that brings in the ethics as well. And GNU, it's tied in with all this. It mentions ethics through GPL and free software so they don't really like to associate with it. But they put out the image that they are friendly towards it but they really aren’t.
[1:14:48] What do you mean, just because I can run Ubuntu commands in the middle of my Windows 10 terminal doesn't mean that Microsoft loves Linux?
[1:14:56] They like the keeping people tied into the windows, that's for sure.
[1:15:02] I mean, I don't get the joke, because I'm like, I don't know how to program or anything, I failed all my STEM classes in school. You know, my perspective was always that with the open-source community, these are people who, they know how to program, so they benefit from this software that they as a community are developing but me as someone who, you know, I pretty much rely on the software that I can download on my computer or that comes with it, you know, Windows or whatever. I just never imagined I would be benefiting in any way from that type of work. But it sounds like maybe the development of open source and free software does take a bit of technical skill but I can benefit from that if I'm using a product or using hardware that has that installed. And should I as a consumer be demanding from the companies that I purchased from that they are more friendly towards open source software? It sounds like that's something that I would benefit from knowing that, you know, the hardware that I'm using or the computer programs I'm using, that the developers behind that can access that in an open and free way and verify what the companies are telling me about it and probably even improve upon it.
[1:16:08] You hit on the key point there. While a lot of this stuff that I talk about is focused more on developers who like source code and modifying it, very few people can actually do that. I'd say in a hundred people, maybe one in a hundred actually would even consider looking at it, so you have to rely on the community of those people to ensure that what’s actually being checked. Also these operating systems, they’re now hundreds of millions of lines of code, no one person in their lifetime could ever check out for all this. So it's basically, as far as a programmer perspective is, that's important, but the end-user is really the key point. And that is that having multiple people check other people's work means that you can build a system that's more likely to respect other people. Because if one programmer knows that they going to have all this cut checked over by another 10, they are less likely to put malicious functions in, they still potentially could, but they know they'll probably going to be checked out, found out and then kicked out of the community.
[1:17:11] And so this will ultimately lead to a system that's more likely to respect people's privacy, their freedom to move with this software and change it and making it the thing they actually want to use. How many other big companies release their programs as free software? I think that's a really key thing. Like mobile phones is a good example. Android has a lot of free software in it but there’s also a lot of stuff stacked on top that is proprietary, we don't know what it is doing with that nor how it works. Say like 2 billion people use this system unknowingly and we have no way of checking if it's doing what's it actually saying, how much is actually leaking out, spying on us. This is where it becomes really important, the community as a whole, the global community will benefit from having this checked out by other people.
[1:18:01] I think it's a really important point to take away from this is that, even if you aren't a programmer or somebody who works with computers even in your day-to-day life, you are benefiting from the work all these people are doing and the ethos of keeping it all free and respecting your rights, even as somebody who’s not actively checking through this code for vulnerabilities or contributing to new projects or whatever. It's still respecting you and you’re part of this process, it is a very inclusive way of looking at things rather than seeing you as a customer to be exploited, they’re seeing you as an inclusive member of the community.
[1:18:36] Oh, exactly and even if you can’t do it yourself, you can either convince somebody or pay somebody to contribute some change you want, there is nothing stopping you from doing that.
[1:18:47] You mentioned earlier how open source software follows the core values, the four freedoms of, you know, distribution, the ability to use it how you want and see what's behind the hood. Do you think those four freedoms or similar values could apply to different models of living in our lives today, you know, even outside the technology? What are some other things we could apply this value system to?
[1:19:11] I'll make one quick correctional term there. While we've been saying open source, open-source kind of misses the point on the user, it's split off from free software in 98. The idea was to strip all the ethics and morals out of it just to make it more business-friendly, that's the reason why I still call it free software. It's very confusing, open-source turned out to be really good for search engines compared to free software but it does solely miss the point. Yeah, that's a minor technicality at this point. As for move it to other fields, there are different movements like the things like open knowledge movements and them, so like a documentation and written works and that should be free to modify and change and share, Creative Commons is a good example of way like written works, video works, audio works could be shared and be done freely. It's the closest I've seen and even then that still sort of on the information side. Once it hits the physical world, so like chair designs and all that, it's a very different and I'm not an expert on that, you have to find somebody that is. So you should just stick to the software and to some degree the data side of things. One key point that doesn't get mentioned is IDRM. Speaking of works that should be free to share and modify. Digital Rights Management or Digital Restrictions Management as it’s usually called is way like certain works like video, audio, text – they are locked down with encryption using proprietary programs which means they control the works and they can be taken away from you anytime. Or if you use them on a different system, you're breaking the law by doing this. Yeah, you can’t share it with friends which is ultimately a good thing. And so this has been a big problem of the last 20 years especially since there was a Digital Millennium act came in enforcing this. But free software, you can either, if it's actually open free software, they allow to see the source code, you can work around that DRM, strip that out, or even better yet, just get works that don't have this restriction in the first place that try to treat you like a decent person.
[1:21:25] I don't know, I get a rush out of stripping DRM out of things.
[1:21:28] You’re doing good work then. [All laugh]
[1:21:32] So, Michael, you've left us with a lot to think about. What are some next steps that I can take as someone who, like I said, I just boot up my regular Windows computer, should I be looking at some free and open software to run on my computer, should I support the community in another way, how can I help myself, should I download Linux and try to figure out how to use that? What do you think?
[1:21:54] I’ll say there’s several levels. At the very beginning, like if you're using Mac OS or Windows, at least try at some free software. Like if you using QuickTime, use VLC or something like that, it's a free alternative. And see if you can move all your productivity and all that over the free software. If you can do that then at that point the operating system is just the easy next step because you already running free software. You can just drop the bottom thing that’s running underneath it and then you don't have to deal with Apple updates anymore, you'll be up to date for the next 20 years.
[1:22:30] Yeah, that's the second step is trying to get onto GNU/Linux system that will respect your freedoms. But actually, you can install it at pretty much any computer except for, there's some, not many anymore, some tablets like some Chromebooks in that way they've locked it down so that you can’t install your own software, but if you have the option to do that, after that there is next step of going to the 100% fully free software route which is the fully Libra which is freedom software, which you can find at fsf. org/distros which is the American side of the free software community. And they'll give you a recommendation of Linux distros that will be one hundred percent free. Now, this will leave some issues with some drivers on a lot of machines that won't have like wireless or some graphic stuff but that's the goal you should be heading for. Your mileage may vary.
[1:23:27] Yeah, Michael kind of lays it out really well, David, I don't think we could add that much to it. But the more I think about the purpose of open and free software, the more it just seems like a no-brainer to me. You know, he describes the process through which basically any developer, any person can verify that what software is supposed to do is actually doing that. It kind of to me sounds like the peer-review process that many academic papers go through.
[1:23:55] Minus all the tight IP controls that that happen in the academic journal world which I guess we'll talk about it some point.
[1:24:03] Right, that's a big problem there. But the idea that you could see the methodology behind something, see the data, see the logic behind what's going on and then to take it one step forward with this free software, to be able to edit it, tinker with it, experiment with that. Why wouldn't we want that? Why would we want a company to lock this type of knowledge and information down to only a handful of developers who are only interested in modifying software in a way that monetarily benefits a company? It just seems like we would have a more diverse world in terms of the tools and technologies available to us like those people doing those Farm Hacks that you mentioned, David. As opposed to just being forced to choose from the very limited options that companies are willing to offer us. Have you done any do-it-yourself software projects yourself, David?
[1:24:54] I am by no means a good programmer or even at a point where I would call myself a programmer, but I do have some commits on some projects people might know. I have some Pi-hole stuff, some commits to that, various software packages for installing on servers, my GitHub name is somewhere in those. So yeah, I’ve contributed a little bit to this community, I've been a little bit of work. I've written a little bit of documentation and it's fun, it's very rewarding in a certain way. But I mean that's what drives a lot of this stuff, Daniel, it’s just like getting that little bit of reward and feeling like you're helping people out. Just as a total random another way that we do this, I mean, in this show frequently we have sound effects and things like that and we get these sound effects by and large from the website called freesound, which has all sorts of uncopyrighted sound effects, ambiances, background noises – all sorts of things that people just record and upload for free for other people to use under various Creative Commons licenses because we enjoy field recording, because they enjoy getting these sound effects, because they enjoy helping other people do the same. I've uploaded a lot of stuff up to there, I'm not sure if we have as Ashes Ashes, I don't know if you have personally, Daniel. But there’s something fun about giving back to people so other people can take, you know, your little contribution and make something bigger and better out of it.
[1:26:12] It makes a better world out of it. And that's really what's great about this DIY communities, it is not just being able to own things yourself, not to be able to just avoid all this waste and mindless consumerism, but the fact that your contributions, if you pass them on, allow somebody else to make something even bigger and better. And that's what really drives this forward. It fosters innovation in a way that happens without this competition that so many people say is necessary for innovation. But I find, in my personal experience, that collaboration is much more innovative than pitting people against each other. And that's really what drives a DIY community: hey, let me take this and oh, you working on that, that's great, let me take this; oh, this makes me think about this thing, I'll try this instead. And next thing you know you know, everybody's better off for that process, you don't need competition for innovation, in fact, a lot of times it prevents that from happening because people are trying to be secretive, to block stuff, you get a lot of fraud from this, like we just saw with Theranos where these people are so competitive and try to be so innovative they end up literally risking people's lives, killing people.
[1:27:16] Collaboration is key and that is really what drives the DIY community. Not everything is these large projects, sometimes DIY stuff is very simple and it is not about you know pushing stuff forward, it is just about making sure you're being responsible. You see this in like the mending community where: hey, there's a rip in my jeans, I love these jeans, they still look great, I'll just patch it. You know and everyone being okay with the fact that patching your own jeans looks cool and that it's fun to do and it's easy and you can patch it in interesting ways, maybe post a picture that inspires somebody else to do it and that makes the world a little bit better because we know how polluting the fashion industry is. And the less waste that we can create with their old clothes, the better off we all are. There's so many ways that this is positively impacting us on so many incredible levels. And take that away from this episode, do something yourself.
[1:28:08] And one thing I'd like to clarify because we mentioned competition last week in our episode on university models episode 75 – Business. School. And one thing I kind of wish I had been more specific about is when we say competition, we're not saying that competition, in general, is bad, but what we're talking about is a very market-driven competition where people are excluded from resources. And a good counter-example of that is the fashion world where this goes back to our episode on intellectual property, the one I mentioned earlier, but the fashion industry is one that does not have a lot of intellectual property, right? You know, you can't put a patent on a specific design, you can't patent the suit coat, you can't patent the T-shirt, you can't patent the polo shirt. But in every other industry that's exactly what we do. But if you notice when it comes to design and when it comes to creativity, what is more creative than the fashion industry? There is absolutely competition going on and yes, there are these corporate models, there is the exclusion going on, but in terms of design and then in terms of creativity, there are ways to compete with other people that can still be collaborative, that can still be supportive, but yet does not rob people of the ability to live. It does not rob people of the ability to enjoy a roof over their heads.
[1:29:28] And I think, going back to the university models that we talked about last week, when we say competition is driving up student debt, is eroding the ability for universities to focus on research, what we're talking about is the erosion of Public Funding for those universities so that the only way they can keep their lights on is to compete with each other for student fees. And that's what's driving the amenities arms race, it's not that we disagree with competition in the sense that students shouldn't compete with each other in terms of ideas and creativity, what we’re talking about is his very contrived competition where people are essentially playing musical chairs with limited resources that don't have to be limited but are done so intentionally so that those who are accumulating that money can do so more easily by simply pitting their competition against each other. There are so many ways that people could compete in a collaborative nature, to improve the technology we have to work with. You know, you have your GitHub profile, I'm sure you would get a kick out of seeing a lot of your source code is being shared, right? And if you had another friend who is also in the GitHub community the two of you might say: hey, I'm going to make this improvement, I bet it's going to be more popular than yours and you can have this little fun competition. But at the end of the day, that competition isn’t stealing resources from your colleague.
[1:30:45] Yeah, exactly. And I think we've mentioned this before, oftentimes now I think especially as we go forward and so much of innovation is based around data, this siphoning off of that data from each other, data that can be used to train machine learning, neural nets, that means we are all getting worse products because these companies aren't sharing, because they're being overly competitive, they're making a product actively worse for us, to consumers. So this thing that's supposed to drive innovation, to drive better projects, like you mentioned, competition is doing exactly the opposite, is making everything that much worse. But I've been rambling I think for a little bit too long here, Daniel, and there's a lot of just all over the place comments throughout this episode. I'm so fascinated by this idea of people deciding they want to do something or be great or create something or fix something just because they can. And defying this idea that it's much easier to be consumer, instead let's all be somebody who creates or fixes or repairs or makes the world a better place by not buying something new. Which brings us, I guess, to the end of this episode with the what can we do? And there's so much that we talked about throughout this, I mean, we’re not going to be at home biohacking, we’re not going to be designing new ways to synthesize insulin at home. We’ll leave that to the chemist and the medical doctors, the mathematicians among us. For many of us, it could be something as simple as, like I did the other day, repairing a product that you thought was broken or isn't perfect anymore and you can make it brand new with just a little bit of elbow grease and some time.
[1:32:13] For me the biggest takeaway on the concept of do-it-yourself is the community aspect of that. You know, Moriah touched on that a bit, and we see this in so many communities whether that's the open free software community, the farm hacking community, do-it-yourself works best ironically when those resources are shared, when that knowledge is shared. And we have to remember that this the systemic issues we talk about are dark, they can seem so daunting, they're so above our power to change them, we have to remember, this is something we talked about in Tear Up, Tear Down talking about protest models that so often great change occurs because something at the local level occurred and that model was replicated by people elsewhere. And do-it-yourself communities are a perfect place where new models of doing things can be incubated and then replicated across spaces. And these types of small-scale actions and communities absolutely will have an impact.
[1:33:11] You know, I'm reminded that during the Great Wars we had 42% of all the food that Americans ate at that time came directly from the local gardens that people were growing. There's so much power at the local level, we have the ability to organize ourselves, to solve our problems and in solving our problems figure out the best way of doing that. What is the best way to organize? What is the best way to share resources? What is the best way to diversify our backyard in terms of species? What's the best way to get together to repair our home goods? What's the best way to design software? We can all do this as a community, we don't need someone from an institution that has created this aura of legitimization to tell us. We are the ones that can come up with our solutions and those are going to be the models by which we go into a better world. And I think that should give us great encouragement. Anything you're doing in your local community is powerful and has the potential to spark global change, it's going to take all of us, and any small part we can play is important. So never discount yourself.
[1:34:17] Beautifully said, Daniel. As always, that’s a lot to think about and we hope you'll do something about it as well. You can find out more about all the topics we‘ve talked about today, read in detail about all these DIY communities on our website, as well as find the full transcript of this episode at ashesashes. org.
[1:34:36] A lot of time and research goes into making these episodes possible and we will never use ads to support the show. So if you like it, would like us to keep going – you, our listener can support us by giving us a review, recommending us to a friend, visiting us at patreon.com/ashesashescast, every little bit helps. Or you can buy some listener designed stickers at our swag shop ashesashes. org/shop. And as always, you can send us an email at contact at ashesashes. org. We encourage you to send us your thoughts, we read them and we appreciate them.
[1:35:14] You can also find us on all your favorite social media networks at ashesashescast. We have a great Discord community in an online chat program that you can join and be a member of at our website, just click on the Community button – Discord, that’s the invite link. And now we have a great phone number they can call and leave your thoughts, leave messages, we're going to integrate these into this show, we already have a couple that we are figuring out the best way to build episodes around them, thank you so much to all those who reach out and give us a call. If you want to be one of these people with an idea, with a rant, with whatever it is, give us a call! The number is 31399-ashes, that’s 313-992-7437, we hope to hear from you. Next week we're refocusing on the doom and despair we hear around us. All of you climate change fanatics, don't worry, it's not going to be positive episode all the time, but we promise we are going to make a little twist on this, so you'll definitely want to tune in for that. Until then, this is Ashes Ashes.
[1:36:09] Bye.
[1:36:10] Bye-bye.
[1:36:11] Wait, so this was the, this was an optimistic show, but you actually talked a lot more than me, does that mean that I'm the pessimist and you're the optimist?