The Interoperation  

While I'm a regular reader of both Technology Review and almost everything Viridian Pope Emperor Bruce Sterling writes, I must admit I'd missed this story - "The Interoperation" - in Tech Review recently. Until, that is, I came across it at Laurance Aurbach's "Pedshed". Here's his review (from which I also learnt that Laurance did the original design for the Viridian web site):

“The Interoperation” is a short story by Bruce Sterling, award-winning science fiction author and futurist. Sterling has always been one of the most canny and entertaining prognosticators of architectural futures, and this latest work does not disappoint. “The Interoperation” deftly and fondly sends up starchitecture, obsolescence, digitization, networking and the vagaries of fame. It explores the design process more deeply than his previous fiction. Like most works by Sterling, the story is shambling, episodic and lacking in coherent structure.

While Sterling has in the past been skeptical of Peak Oil and Kunstler’s Long Emergency thesis in particular, note that “The Interoperation” is set firmly in an imagined post-Peak Oil era. Travel is mostly by bike and train; cross country trips are rare; recycling is a pillar of the economy; and sustainability saturates business practices thoroughly.

The Costa Vista Motel was the first, last, and only building that Yuri Lozano had created as a certified, practicing architect. It had been “designed for disassembly,” way back in 2020. So today, some 26 years later, Yuri had hired the giant deconstruction-bot to fully reclaim the motel’s materials: the bricks, the solar shingles, the electrical fixtures, the metal plumbing. The structure was being defabricated, with a mindless precision, right down to its last, least, humble hinges.

…

Nowadays, Preston spent his lonely hours grooming architecture websites. There he gamely removed the moronic popular commentary and tried to drum up some intelligent interest in the doctrines of Arts & Crafts, Futurism, the modern movement, the postmodern movement, and New Urbanism.

These were architectural schemes that long-forgotten people had created with pencils on paper. No proper 21st-century person could tell these primitive notions apart. Still, some critic was bound to take a keen interest in such efflorescences of human genius, and it was bound to be some weedy obsessive like Preston Mengies.

…

The Church of Computer-Human Symbiosis was an aging group of California hacker cranks who had inherited the vast fortune of a vanished social-software company. They had long been Roebel’s ideal patrons, for they were crazily rich, all-forgiving, and incapable of judgment.

Over the decades, Roebel had built the cult an awesome set of monumental churches. His temples were top-end architecture glamour hits; glossy photo books about them weighed down coffee tables on six continents.

Nobody ever worshiped in the amazing churches Roebel had built, because the cult was too crazy and scary. Furthermore, the roofs leaked and all the utilities malfunctioned. Still, that didn’t much matter to the cultists. They were serenely indifferent to such earthly concerns, since they spent most of their waking lives playing immersive simulation games.

…

Yuri recalled that ClearWorks had been programmed by just one guy. It was the brainwork of a single geek, some embittered dissident from the early CAD business. The name of this lonesome genius was Greg Something, or Bob Something, or Jim Something, and he was the type of arrogant, self-aggrandizing, utterly unworldly, Unix-bearded software-genius figure who wanted to create a programmatic universe all by himself.

Greg-Jim-Bob had never managed that feat, but he’d managed to create ClearWorks. That program had become a legend among its users. All the cognoscenti and digerati and designerati vied to praise ClearWorks. Of course, nobody actually used it. If you gave people the tools that were perfect for their jobs, they’d have nothing to do but their jobs.

The whole secret of the network revolution was that it connected everybody, and it therefore caused everybody to do everybody else’s jobs.

…

Yuri had begun to sense the way the programmer thought. No geek from 30 years ago could ever think like a modern builder. Though he had a cunning intuitive arsenal of cool ways to assemble his sand, he lacked any cool ways to disassemble his sand.

It was as if he thought that real buildings went up in some Platonic cyberspace where gravity, friction, and entropy had never existed. Where the passage of the years was just an abstraction. The author of ClearWorks was pure geek, so he didn’t realize that when you meshed bits and atoms, you had to respect the atoms. Bits were the servants of atoms. “Bits” were just bits of atoms.

Bits came and went at the flick of a switch, but atoms had deep and dark and permanent physical laws. Atoms didn’t go away when you shut down the screen. When you lacked a responsible way to deal with the atoms, you were a menace to yourself and all around you.

The story draws from the Cradle to Cradle mindset and Bruce's vision of what we need to do to implement it - "the internet of things" (and the spimes and blobjects that inhabit it), described in his book "Shaping Things".

Bruce himself has a post at Beyond the Beyond - "The Last Time We Flunked Out At Sustainability" - on a Canadian art exhibiton called "1973: Sorry, Out of Gas".

Curated by Mirko Zardini, CCA Director and Chief Curator, with Giovanna Borasi, CCA Curator of Contemporary Architecture, the exhibition presents an unprecedented exploration of the architectural response to the 1973 oil crisis.

The exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas and its accompanying catalogue are the first to study the architectural innovation spurred by the 1973 oil crisis, when the value of oil increased exponentially and triggered economic, political, and social upheaval across the world. Featuring over 350 objects including architectural drawings, photographs, books and pamphlets, archival television footage, and historical artefacts, the exhibition maps the global response to the shortage and its relevance to architecture today.

The research and innovations of thirty years ago are of particular relevance in the context of contemporary concerns about diminishing energy resources. While influential at the time, much of the innovative work of architects, engineers, and activist groups of the period was forgotten once financial markets and energy distribution systems adjusted, and political focus diminished.

Today, however, a new sense of urgency is emerging, provoked by the reality of a deteriorating environment and a finite supply of fossil fuels. “It is of vital importance to consider the radical yet, in many cases, little-known work from the 1970s as architects today struggle to address similar issues,” said CCA Director and exhibition curator Mirko Zardini. “By providing insight on the forerunners of many contemporary approaches to sustainable living, the exhibition aims to increase public awareness and encourage contemporary research in the field.” ...

Kiashu has an interesting post at The Oil Drum looking at the potential for a peak oil inspired shift from what he terms "wasteful industrial society" to the "ecotechnic society" - "The Freezing Point of Industrial Society".

When will fossil fuel industrial society end?

When oil costs $240-$1,500 a barrel for several years.

One says to me, "I wonder that you do not lay up money; you love to travel; you might take the [railway] cars and go to Fitchburg today and see the country." But I am wiser than that. I have learned that the swiftest traveller is he that goes afoot. I say to my friend, Suppose we try who will get there first. The distance is thirty miles; the fare ninety cents. That is almost a day's wages... Well, I start now on foot, and get there before night... You will in the meanwhile have earned your fare, and arrive there some time tomorrow, or possibly this evening... And so, if the railroad reached round the world, I think that I should keep ahead of you...

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

What was true in 1845 when Thoreau wrote that is not true today in the developed West, but is still true in the Third World. Fuel was still expensive enough that a journey of a day's walk taken by mechanical means was more expensive than a day's labour. Resources were more expensive than labour; now in the West labour is more expensive than resources, while in the Third World labour is still very cheap. But will it always be so?

This piece considers that industrialisation could only happen with cheap fuels, and by looking at the countries of the world, tries to figure out just how cheap fuel has to be before lots of people start using it – before a country can industrialise with fossil fuels. The flipside to this is seeing how expensive fuel must be before it deindustrialises. This then gives us a clue to if and when will industrial society will end. ...

Kiashu's post included a link to this article from Dave Dubyne at Language Matters - "Saving the Go-Go Juice" - which talks about how China already practices quite a bit on on-site recycling on construction sites.

Speeding down the brand new four-lane highway at 100 kilometres per hour, I saw plenty of farm workers harvesting heads of cabbage. In the western world a truck would follow the workers as they proceeded through the fields to collect the harvest, but here the truck stays parked and the produce is walked to the truck. Everything is brought to a central area. The truck stays in the same spot until full — engine off instead of idling and moving - and then heads to the wholesale market.

Harvesting, planting and fertilizing are all done by hand, with dozens of workers in each field at a time. Pesticides and fertilizers are applied by hand walking with a pack sprayer on the back, a completely manual pumping system. Irrigation is similar: workers load water into buckets of various sizes and carry it to the plants or pour it into the irrigation troughs. Again, most of the fuel usage is taken out of the farming process. I only ever saw tractors called tuo-la-ji - a two-wheeled machine doing work in place of humans - and that was plowing the fields.

As I was passing one of the millions of construction sites in China, I stopped to check out the Chinese style of demolition and re-cycling. One front-end loader is used to break the walls, foundations or unmovable pieces into smaller workable segments. The rest of the work is done by hand. Men and women with bamboo-handled sledgehammers break the cement, brick and tiles from the metal re-bar hidden side. The metals are removed on the premises, separated on premises and loaded onto various trucks waiting at the entrance of the construction site. Work is continually in progress, with pieces of various metals tossed into ever-growing piles of multi-colored scrap. Most striking was the pile of re-bar: It looked like a giant bird’s nest that could have comfortably accommodated two very large elephants.

Each truck collected different metals and scrap. One small pick-up truck was full of wires; another was full of pressure gauges and valves; yet another was full of aluminum window frames. The steel collection truck was loaded with pipes, re-bar and beams. All the while a continuous line of workers carried baskets of cement debris and metal-less chunks of bricks, heaving their contents into a waiting flatbed for non-metal debris only.

My immediate thoughts were to compare western-style demolition at a construction site and the amount of fuel each society uses to accomplish the same end result: to clear a lot for a new building. In the West, many more machines would be loading trucks with debris containing both metal and cement. That waste would be taken to a second location where it would be broken and separated. From there, after separation, the loads of cement debris and metal would be loaded onto separate trucks and delivered to their ultimate destination. Notice the difference? A Chinese construction site is the re-cycling factory.

Garbage collection is also something to behold. In the West we use trucks to roll through the city and collect rubbish from our individual homes, businesses and dumpsters. Here, it is done manually, as men and women move handcarts around the city using a flat-headed shovel to scoop up the trash. These filled carts can hold 25 to 50 kilos per load. When the carts are full, they are pushed or pulled to a central location where the rubbish is dumped into a waiting truck. In my neighborhood, a line of full trash carts snaked its way down the street to the collection site, mingling with buses and cars in the bicycle lane while waiting to unload.

These comparisons reminded me of a time in Hawaii when I went to pick up a Peruvian friend to go surfing. As we pulled out of the parking garage, a landscaper was using a gasoline-powered blower to clean up the grass clippings. He laughed and said to me, “That’s American style: take a broom and put a motor on it.”

Links:

* Beyond The Beyond - Spime Watch: Automated Custom Manufacturing
* Beyond The Beyond - The Fuzzy Tail » SlideShare
* Beyond The Beyond - Indian intellectuals storm police headquarters, free colleagues. "Note: do not arm Communist party apparatchiks to repress grumpy peasantry. Use legal system, that is what it is there for."
* Open The Future - Village Greens. Jamais' take on Shellenberger and Nordhaus. Go and read it.
* Beyond The Beyond - Backlash Comparison: Who's Nuttier, Apple Fanatics or Ron Paul Enthusiasts?. Hmmm - I like Wired, but what they did to Al Gore in 2000 was unforgivable and they seem to be up to the same tricks with Ron Paul now. What gives ? That said, the contributions of some RP supporters in this and in a lot of other discussions do have a tendency to sound like the rantings of deranged maniacs (without the charm of genuinely gonzo writing), which isn't helping his cause much...
* Beyond The Beyond - Greenwater EcoMercs. "Greenwater. When you like your green activism in khaki green. It's a kind of Naomi Klein shock doctrine thing, only they kill the guys who don't hug trees.". Image below by Jamais Cascio - from his collection on Flickr.