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by skadamat·2y ago·view on hn ↗
We sorely need more serious experimentation with computing & computing cultures and IMO Hundred Rabbits is a great example of this. Instead of talking about ideas, they practice what they preach.

As with most experiments, we can observe and borrow shadows of their ideas into our own life hopefully!

2 comments
I appreciate people who dare to experiment with their life style.

The boat idea would perhaps too lonely for most people, but it would be nice to see folks experiment with re-inventing communes/new types of forming communities.

There is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.

The minimalism idea of their VM resonates with me and remindes me of Niklaus Wirth, who had similar values and pushed things even further (designing his whole hardware + OS + language all by himself).

>here is strictly no reason for each person to own a TV, PC, dishwasher, washing machine, etc. - most of that could be shared so as to reduce electronic waste and increase sustainability.

This sounds nice in theory, but doesn't work out well in practice. You get a tragedy of the commons situation where people don't take care of the equipment and it gets broken, or dies early. Also, some people are just really bad with handling and taking care of things: some people will buy some item, and then you look at it again years later and it's in pristine condition. But look at another person's identical item after that time and it's either destroyed, or looks really beat-up. Maybe they're too rough with it, maybe they never clean it, maybe they don't maintain it, but I've noticed some people just seem to destroy everything they use.

Also, trying to share many things doesn't work out in practice because people want to use them at the same time. You can see this at places like laundromats; you can't expect people to wake up at 2AM to do their laundry. People usually like to watch TV at the same time too. So you need enough equipment to handle peak times.

And sharing a PC? What do you do when someone in your commune insists on clicking on every potentially malicious attachment on your shared Windows PC?

This is a overgeneralization and a sad belief to hold on to. There are many many communities which share resources where things do not fall into tragedy of the commons. There are communal houses, coliving spaces, makerspaces, people co buying second homes, tool libraries, heck! libraries themselves. There is a whole advertising culture that is trying to reinforce the "we couldn't possibly share things" narrative, I urge you to go out and experience alternatives!
Nothing "sad" about it; it's true. There's no shortage of accounts on the internet of someone loaning a tool to their neighbor and then either not getting it back, not getting it back for months or years, or getting it back broken or otherwise damaged. You can't trust random people to take good care of your stuff.

Co-buying second homes? How many people are involved in a transaction like that? That's not communal at all, that's a partnership. Of course you can be selective with whom you partner and only partner with someone trusted, plus you both have a strong economic interest in taking care of the property. Same with your so-called "communal houses": it's not like dozens or hundreds of people are going to live in a house. Makerspaces, etc., can screen their members, and keep track of who does what to penalize people who abuse things.

Libraries have occasionally had trouble with people abusing books (ever seen a loaned-out book with folded-down corners, or writing in them?). However books don't need nearly as much care and maintenance as complex machinery (i.e. power tools) so of course you don't have to worry about it as much, and normal libraries budget and plan for books having a limited lifetime anyway. Extremely rare and valuable books aren't left out for random people to handle either.

There's a way to fix this, it's called an "extended family".

But that's, like, the Patriarchy. That would really harsh our buzz, so we need to reinvent, in a broken and stupid way, what previously worked fine for tens of thousands years.

Serious question, have you lived on a commute or community living environment that wasn't a college dorm?
Nyc has buildings that function as co-ops. You have your own apartment in a building that you own shares of. Everyone pays for amenities like laundry and maintenance together
Dishwasher and washing machine, sure.

TV? Meh. Who gets to decide what we all watch?

PC? GTFO. That's mine. Hands off. That means you, too, Satya.

> We sorely need more serious experimentation with computing & computing cultures

Indeed.-

PS. If we stop and examine, our entire computing "paradigms" have been - mostly - driven, propelled forward by "industrial", commercial, business productivity (use cases) ...

... but what would have happened / will happen were these paradigms to emerge (and emerge mainly) from art, creation, play, instead?

I think modding communities are a reasonably good analog to this. Up until someone realized you could change the alpha channel of wall textures to make them transparent, the way to get a custom skin in Counter Strike Source (and 1.6), was to drop a file into your install directory.

The game would check for files named the same as it's default resources, read them in for use instead of the original. But then people started using the aforementioned transparent walls in competitive matches, and so a new variable was introduced to force the use of the defaults.

The next game (CS:GO) provided skins through a marketplace, including the use of loot-crate mechanics, the prices of in demand items sky rocketed, they are now used as currency for hackers and online gambling, and the online skin gambling sites have been caught advertising fraudulently through streamers. "rare" skins can sell for tens or hundreds of THOUSANDS of dollars.

In short, a great feature got exploited, commercialized, more exploited, and inspired a great amount of profiteering and sketchy business practices while ruining community aspects of a whole genre of entertainment (lots of copycats).

What I'm trying to say, is I think those paradigms most likely would have been co-opted by third parties in the name of greed and profit, destroying the communal and humanistic aspects of them in short order.