Technology for Luddites
Lugares Abandonados is a fascinating blog documenting abandoned buildings in Spain.
There are quite some photo reportages about factories, and this one in particular is noteworthy: a forgotten flour mill with part of the machinery still in excellent condition.
The author does not reveal any location for any of the buildings on the blog.
“The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. Key features of the GVCS: Open Source – Low-Cost – Modular – User-Serviceable – DIY – Closed-Loop Manufacturing – High Performance – Heirloom Design – Flexible Fabrication.”
“A modern, comfortable lifestyle relies on a variety of efficient Industrial Machines. If you eat bread, you rely on an Agricultural Combine. If you live in a wood house, you rely on a Sawmill. Each of these machines relies on other machines in order for it to exist. If you distill this complex web of interdependent machines into a reproduceable, simple, closed-loop system, you get these 50 machines.”
The GVCS is a work-in-progress. See the wiki, the blog and (the best introduction) the movie.
Related: How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware.
“It is necessary explicitly to call attention to my full recognition of the useful part which the essential factories play in supplying us a plenitude of these things at low prices so as to anticipate the charge, certain to be made, that I see no good in any factories at all”
Read more: This Ugly Civilization, Ralph Borsodi (1929). Via Ran Prieur.
