44 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
44 lines
3.0 KiB
Plaintext
Ephemeralization against the bureaucracy
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<p>Segway inventor Dean Kamen unveils his next act, and it’s a doozy.<br />
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He’s invented two devices to address the <a href='http://money.cnn.com/2006/02/16/technology/business2_futureboy0216/index.htm'>power<br />
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and clean-water</a> problems in the Third World — essentially, a<br />
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rugged still and a generator that burns cow dung. But the real<br />
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challenge to conventional thinking is Kamen’s (rightly) contemptuous<br />
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dismissal of conventional development economics, and his plan to<br />
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end-run govenments.</p>
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<p><span id="more-262"></span></p>
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<p>What makes Kamen’s invention possible is the phenomenon Buckminster<br />
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Fuller called ‘ephemeralization’ — the replacement of bulk<br />
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matter by design information as technologies get smaller, lighter, and<br />
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more clever. Of course the most dramatic example of this is the<br />
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microchip, and the huge number of ways computer-mediated<br />
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communications increasingly substitute for pushing around matter and<br />
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energy — but the phenomenon is everywhere. I haven’t seen the<br />
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blueprints for either device, but does anyone want to bet against the<br />
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proposition that they’re a helluva lot smaller, lighter, and more<br />
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ingeniously designed than their nearest functional equivalents would<br />
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have been in 1960 or 1980?</p>
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<p>No? No takers? I didn’t think so. Modern life is so saturated<br />
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with ephemeralization that we hardly notice it any more. Think about<br />
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the weight difference between your first cellphone and the one you<br />
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have now — then think about how they compared to the big old<br />
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Bakelite-encased wireline handsets of the 1960s. As we learn how to<br />
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ephemeralize more and more of our technology, we downsize and<br />
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decentralize it because that’s the cheap and effective way to go.<br />
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Entire countries are now opting out of building telephone landlines.<br />
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Why bother, when cellphone towers are cheaper and less obtrusive?</p>
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<p>Kamen is taking the next logical step: downsizing and<br />
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decentralizing the power and water infrastructure. And look at the<br />
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way he plans to do it; not by enlisting governments, but by tapping<br />
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local entrepreneurialism. Says Kamen: “Not required are engineers,<br />
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pipelines, epidemiologists, or microbiologists,” says Kamen. “You<br />
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don’t need any -ologists. You don’t need any building permits,<br />
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bribery, or bureaucracies.”</p>
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<p>Yeah, baby! Techno-libertarians like me have been saying for<br />
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thirty years that the free market would someday simply compete the<br />
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State out of existence. Kamen, bless him, is actually setting out to<br />
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<em>do</em> it — or, at least, to demonstrate that the heavyweight<br />
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physical and bureaucratic infrastructure many of us think we need to<br />
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provide ‘public goods’ like clean water and power is an actual hindrance<br />
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rather than a help. Today, Third-World villages; tomorrow the world.</p>
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