In the opening pages of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe describes “a thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead too, and a whole necktie made of Indian beads. No shirt, however, just an Indian bead necklace on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it.” This guy is Stewart Brand: a Stanford-trained biologist, ex-army paratrooper, turned Ken Kesey cohort and fellow Merry Prankster who was about to become the voice of one of the most potent forces for abundance the world had yet seen: the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) innovator.
The story goes like this: a few months after Wolfe’s book was published, in March 1968, Brand was reading a copy of Barbara Ward’s Spaceship Earth and trying to answer a pair of questions: How can I help all my friends who are currently moving back to the land? And, more importantly, how can I save the planet?
His solution was pretty straightforward. Brand would publish a catalog in the vein of L. L. Bean, blending liberal social values, ideas about appropriate technology, ecological notions of whole systems thinking, and—perhaps most importantly—a DIY work ethic. This ethic has a long history, dating back at least as far as Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay “Self-Reliance,” resurfacing again in the Arts and Crafts renaissance of the early twentieth century, then gaining even more steam with the hot-rodding and home improvement movements of the 1950s. But the late 1960s marked the largest communal uprising in American history, with conservative estimates putting the number at ten million Americans moving back to the land. All of these transplants soon learned the same lesson: agrarian success depended on one’s DIY capabilities, and those capabilities, as Brand so clearly realized, depended on one’s access to tools—and here tools mean anything from information about windmills to ideas about how to start a small business. “I was in the thrall of Buckminster Fuller,” Brand recalls. “Fuller had put out this idea that there’s no use trying to change human nature. It’s been the same for a very long time. Instead, go after the tools. New tools make new practices. Better tools make better practices.”
Out of all of this was born the Whole Earth Catalog (WEC). The first version, published in July 1968, was a six-page mimeograph that began with Brand’s now-legendary DIY statement of purpose: “We are as gods and we might as well get good at it,” and then a selection of tools and ideas to facilitate exactly this kind of personal transformation. Because so many people were then interested in such ideas, the catalog had the downstream effect of uniting once-disparate DIY-ers into a potent force. As TED founder Richard Saul Wurman explains: “This was a catalog for hippies that won the National Book Award. It was a paradigm shift in information distribution. I think you can draw a pretty straight line from the WEC to a lot of today’s culture. It created an aroma that was sniffed by an awful lot of people. It’s so pervasive that most don’t even know the source of the smell.”
At the center of that scent was the WEC’s embrace of personal technology: most importantly the PC. Brand is credited with inventing the term “personal computer,” and while some of this had to do with his scientific background, more had to do with the Stanford Research Institute. In 1968 SRI was both at the cutting edge of computer research and located just around the corner from the Menlo Park offices of the WEC. Brand was a frequent visitor. On these trips, he was exposed to the computer mouse, interactive text, videoconferencing, teleconferencing, email, hypertext, a collaborative real-time editor, video games, and more. Brand saw the amazing potential of these tools and, in the pages of the WEC, told the world about what he’d seen.
“Stewart is singlehandedly responsible for American culture’s acceptance of the personal computer,” says Kevin Kelly (who was a WEC editor before founding Wired magazine). “In the sixties, computers were Big Brother. The Man. They were used by the enemy: massive, gray-flannel-suit corporations and the government. But Brand saw what was possible with computers. He understood that if these tools became personal, it flipped the world around into a place where people were gods.”
Brand’s marriage of self-reliance and technology helped shape the DIY innovator into a force for abundance, but just as important was the movement’s adoption of two more WEC principles. The first was what would later become known as the “hacker ethic,” the idea—as Brand famously put it—that “information wants to be free.” The second was the then-strange notion that business could be a force for good. “Brand united the idea that you can do it yourself with new Utopian society,” explains technology writer Howard Rheingold. “He really believed that given the right tools, any change was possible.” And, as a man named Fred Moore discovered, the personal computer was exactly the right tool.
The DIY innovator did not become a force for abundance overnight. The notion took some coaxing. It took a serious equipment upgrade. And, mostly, it took the help of a longtime political activist turned DIY innovator named Fred Moore.
In the early 1970s, Moore realized there was power in networking. If he could find a way to connect all the key players in all the various left-leaning movements operating in America, perhaps those movements could really become a force for reckoning. He started keeping records of the players and their contact information on three-by-five-inch note cards, but there were so many of them that he was soon overwhelmed. He suspected that his database would be significantly more effective if he could use a computer to manage it, but how to afford a computer was the real issue. Because Moore didn’t have enough money to buy a machine of his own, in 1975 he decided to start a hobbyists club to help him build one.
This was the birth of the Homebrew Computer Club, a collection of tech hobbyists who gathered at the Community Computer Center in Menlo Park to swap circuits and stories. Early members included fabled hackers such as John Draper (Captain Crunch), Osborne 1 creators Adam Osborne and Lee Felsenstein, and Apple cofounders Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Moore never lost sight of his activist past and was constantly reminding people to “give more than you take”—which was a fancy way of saying “Share your trade secrets”—but his members took it to heart. The Homebrew Club believed in building amazing machines, selling its creations (hardware), and sharing its intellectual property (software). As John Markoff explains in What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, nothing has been the same since:
The Homebrew Computer Club was fated to change the world … At least twenty-three companies, including Apple Computer, were to trace their lineage directly to Homebrew, ultimately creating a vibrant industry that, because personal computers became such all purpose tools for both work and play, transformed the entire American economy. With Ted Nelson’s computing power-to-the-people rallying cry echoing across the landscape, the hobbyists would tear down the glass-house computing world and transform themselves into a movement that emphasized an entirely new set of values from traditional American business.
With his championing of the DIY innovator, Stewart Brand had sparked a match, and the Homebrew Computer Club was part of the resulting conflagration. But it was not the only part. As we shall see in the next section, because I came of age at a time when DIY innovators had already transformed big business and big science, the idea of taking the space race out of the hands of government didn’t seem entirely impossible. “The WEC not only gave you permission to invent your life,” Kevin Kelly once said, “it gave you the excuses and the tools to do just that. And you believed you could do it, because on every page of the catalog were other people doing it.” So while making off-world travel a DIY enterprise might not be easy, the reverberations of the WEC gave me exactly what they gave so many other people: the courage to try.
The argument that sits at the core of this chapter is that because of people like Stewart Brand and Fred Moore—and because the quality of our tools has finally caught up to the scope of their vision—small groups of dedicated DIY innovators can now tackle problems that were once solely the purview of big governments and large corporations. While I’ve seen this happen repeatedly, no example is more illustrative than the story of Burt Rutan.
Rutan is a tall man, with a wide brow, gray hair, and a pair of muttonchops to rival Neil Young. Before he retired in 2010, he ran a design and test flight facility called Scaled Composites. In 2004 Scaled responded to the Ansari X PRIZE (more on this later) and did something that every major aerospace company and government agency thought impossible: changed the paradigm of human spaceflight.
In America, our relationship with the final frontier began in the spring of 1952, when the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA)—which would later become NASA—decided it was time to go up, up, and away. The aim was to fly an airplane faster and higher than anyone had ever gone before, with an official goal of Mach 10 (ten thousand feet per second) and one hundred kilometers straight up (into the middle of the mesosphere). The result was the X-series of experimental aircraft, including the X-1, which carried pilot Chuck Yeager through the sound barrier, and the X-15, which carried Joe Walker so much farther.
The X-15 was an extreme machine. Built from a nickel-chrome alloy called Inconel X, the plane could withstand temperatures hot enough to melt aluminum and render steel useless. It “took off” from California’s Edwards Air Force Base, strapped beneath the wing of a B-52. The bomber carried the X-15 some forty-five thousand feet into the air, then dropped it like a rock. After falling a safe distance away, the rocket plane fired up its engines and went bat out of hell through the sky—which is what it took to get pilot Joe Walker off this planet.
Walker’s departure took place on July 19, 1963, the date he flew the X-15 past the one-hundred-kilometer mark, becoming the first man to fly a plane into space. It was an incredible feat, and one that required an incredible effort. It took two major aerospace contractors employing thousands of engineers to build the X-15. By 1969, the program had cost about $300 million—more than $1.5 billion today. But this was the cost of flying to the edge of space until Burt Rutan came along.
Rutan didn’t start out wanting to build spaceships, he started out building airplanes. He built a lot of them. Extremely lucky airplane designers work on three or four machines over the course of a career. Rutan, on the other hand, is prolific. Since 1982, he’s designed, built, and flown an unprecedented forty-five experimental aircraft, including the Voyager, which made the first nonstop, non-refueled flight around the world, and the Proteus, which holds the world record for altitude, distance, and payload lift. Along the way, Rutan also developed a serious frustration with NASA’s inability to truly open the space frontier.
In his mind, the problem was one of volume. “The Wright Brothers lifted off in 1903,” he says, “but by 1908, only ten pilots had ever flown. Then they traveled to Europe to demonstrate their aircraft and inspired everyone. The aviation world changed overnight. Inventors began to realize, ‘Hey, I can do that!’ Between 1909 and 1912, thousands of pilots and hundreds of aircraft types were created in thirty-one countries. Entrepreneurs, not governments, drove this development, and a $50 million aviation industry was created.”
Now contrast this with human spaceflight. Since Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin in 1961, only one spaceplane and a handful of rockets have carried humans into space: X-15, Redstone, Atlas, Titan, Saturn, Shuttle, Vostok, Voskhod, and Soyuz. All government owned and operated. As of April 2010, forty-nine years since spaceflight became possible, about three hundred manned flights have taken a total just over five hundred people into space—an unacceptable total, in Rutan’s mind.
“When Buzz [Aldrin] first walked on the Moon,” he says, “I’ll bet he was thinking that in forty years we’ll be walking on Mars. But we’re not, and we’re not close. Space travel is still primitive. Our rate of spaceflight is pathetically low: less than one flight every two months. Rather than go on to Mars, we have retreated to low Earth orbit. We serially abandoned former launch capabilities, and now the only spaceship we have, the Space Shuttle [the Shuttle program ended in 2011], is the most complex, most costly, and most dangerous. Why is the space program making acronyms for engineering welfare programs instead of having the courage to fly hardware? We have the courage here at Scaled.”
This is not just egotistical chatter. Rutan backed up his words with action, beating the behemoths at their own game. His human-carrying spaceplane, imaginatively called SpaceShipOne, outperformed the government’s X-15 in every measure. Rather than costing billions and requiring a workforce of thousands, in 2004 SS1 took flight with only $26 million and a team of thirty engineers. Instead of just one astronaut, SS1 boasted three seats. Forget a turnaround time measured in weeks, Rutan’s vehicle set a record flying to space twice in just five days. “The success of SpaceShipOne altered the perceptions of what a small group of developers can do,” says Gregg Maryniak, director of the James S. McDonnell Planetarium in Saint Louis. “Everyone had grown to believe that only NASA and professional astronauts could travel into space. What Burt and his team did was demonstrate that all of us will have the chance to make that trip in the near future. He changed the paradigm.”
A few years after Burt Rutan changed the paradigm for spaceflight, Chris Anderson did the same thing for unmanned air vehicles (UAV). Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired and, not surprisingly, something of a geek dad. About four years ago, he decided to spend the weekend with his kids building a LEGO Mindstorms robot and a remote control airplane. But nothing went as planned. The robots bored the kids—“Dad, where are the lasers?”—and the airplane crashed into a tree right out of the gate. While Anderson was cleaning up the wreckage, he began wondering what would happen if he used the LEGO autopilot to fly the plane. His kids thought the idea was cool—for about four hours—but Anderson was hooked. “I didn’t know anything about the subject,” he says, “but I recognized that I could buy a gyro from LEGO for $20 and turn it into an autopilot that my nine-year-old could program. That was mind blowing. Equally amazing was the fact that an autonomous flying aircraft is on the Department of Commerce’s export control restrictions list—so my nine-year-old had just weaponized LEGO.”
Curious to learn more, Anderson started a nonprofit online community called DIY Drones. In the beginning, the projects were simple, but as his community grew (currently to seventeen thousand members), so did their ambition. The cheapest military-grade UAV on the market is the Raven. Built by AeroVironment, this drone retails for $35,000, with the full system for $250,000. One of DIY Drones’ first major projects was an attempt to build an autonomous flying platform with 90 percent of Raven’s functionality at a radically reduced price. The members wrote and tested software, designed and tested hardware, and ended up with the QuadCopter. It was an impressive feat. In less than a year, and with almost no development costs, they created a homebrew drone with 90 percent of the Raven’s functionality for just $300—literally 1 percent of the military’s price. Nor is this a one-off demonstration. The DIY Drones community has developed one hundred different products in the same way, each in under a year, for essentially zero development cost.
But homebrew UAVs are only the beginning. Anderson’s decision to hack his kids’ toys puts him squarely amidst the burgeoning Maker Movement. Built around a desire to tinker with the objects in our daily environment, most date the origin of this movement to 1902, when the first issue of Popular Mechanics hit the stands. By the 1950s, tinkering had become a middle-class virtue. “Fix your house, fix up an old boat, fix up an old car,” says Dale Daugherty, founder and publisher of Make magazine. “Tinkering was a way for a guy with a modest income to improve his life.”
With the advent of the computer, hacking code became more fun than hacking objects, and the movement dropped underground, resurfacing as the bedrock ethos of punk-rock culture, later a mainstay at events like Burning Man. Over the past ten years, though, a leap from software back into hardware has occurred. “These days,” says Daugherty, “there’s a hands-on imperative. People are really passionate about getting access to and control of the technology in their lives. We’re back to hacking the physical.”
And the physical has never been more hackable. Think of it this way: less than five years after Burt Rutan spent $26 million beating the aerospace giants at their own game, DIY Drones took them down with volunteer labor, a few toys, and a couple hundred dollars’ worth of spare parts. “It’s radical demonetization,” says Anderson, “a true DIY story about using open-source design to reduce costs a hundredfold while keeping ninety percent functionality.” The aerospace industry, Anderson feels, is ripe for such demonetization, and his vision should make some of the stodgier companies very nervous. “Two orders of magnitude in cost reduction was easy,” he says. “We’re now going for three.”
For exactly these reasons, the Maker Movement has serious abundance potential. Cheap drones can ferry supplies to places such as Bangladesh, where monsoons wash out roads, or to Botswana, where roads don’t exist. Matternet, a Singularity University (SU) 10^9+ company, is planning an AI-enabled network of UAVs and recharging stations housed in shipping containers scattered throughout Africa. Orders are placed via smart phone. For villages disconnected from the global transportation network, this means that everything from replacement parts for farm machinery to medical supplies can now be shipped in via an autonomous QuadCopter—for less than six cents per kilogram-kilometer.
Conservation is another possible use for low-cost autonomous platforms. Knowing how many tigers are left in Siberia is critical to developing a protection plan, but with an area 7.5 million square miles, how do you count? A fleet of DIY drones could do the counting for us, or patrol rain forests for illegal logging, or hundreds of other suddenly affordable applications.
And UAVs are only one technology. Makers are now impacting just about every abundance-related field, from agriculture to robotics to renewable energy. Hopefully, you’ll find this inspirational. One of this book’s key messages is that anyone can take on a grand challenge. In less than five years, Chris Anderson went from knowing nothing about UAVs to revolutionizing the field. You too can start a community and make a contribution. And if software and hardware aren’t your flavors of choice, how about wetware? As we shall see in the next section, groups of high school and college students have set out to hack the very stuff of life itself and launch the DIY bio moment.
In the early 2000s, a biologist named Drew Endy was growing increasingly frustrated with the lack of innovation in genetic engineering. Endy grew up in a world where anyone could purchase transistor parts at RadioShack, snap them together, and they worked just fine. He wanted the exact same off-the-shelf reliability from DNA. In his mind—and in the minds of many genetic engineers at the time—there was no difference between cells and computers. Computers use a software code of 1s and 0s, whereas biology uses a code of As, Cs, Ts, and Gs. Computers use compilers and storage registries; biology uses RNA (ribonucleic acid) and ribosomes. Computers use peripherals; biology uses proteins. As Endy told the New York Times: “Biology is the most interesting and powerful technology platform anyone’s ever seen. It’s already taken over the world with reproducing machines. You can kind of imagine that you should be able to program it with DNA.”
In 2002 he came to MIT as a research fellow and met a few other folks who shared this view. The following year, alongside Gerald Sussman, Randy Rettberg, and Tom Knight, Endy founded the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition: a worldwide synthetic biology competition aimed at high school and undergraduate students. Their goal was to build simple biological systems from standardized, interchangeable parts—essentially DNA sequences with clearly defined structures and functions—and then operate them within living cells. These standardized parts, known technically as BioBricks, would also be collected in an open-source database accessible to anyone who was curious.
IGEM may not sound all that unusual, but ever since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix in 1953, the business as usual of biotech meant mammoth companies such as Genentech or Human Genome Project–sized government efforts, both requiring billions of dollars and thousands of researchers. All Endy and his friends did was teach a monthlong class to a handful of students.
These students were divided into five teams and asked to design a version of E. coli bacteria that blinked fluorescent green. A number of the teams were successful. Their homemade bacteria went from a nondescript blob to a glow stick at a rave in a month’s time. More successes followed. By 2008, iGEM teams were creating genetic gizmos with real-world applications. That year, a team from Slovenia took first place with immunobricks: a designer vaccine against Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria responsible for most ulcers. By 2010, following the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, a winning team from Delft University of Technology created the “alkanivore,” which they described as a “toolkit for enabling hydrocarbon conversion in aqueous environments”—or, in plainer language, a bug able to consume oil spills.
What’s more incredible than the sophistication of this work is its rapid rate of growth. In 2004 iGEM had 5 teams that submitted 50 potential BioBricks. Two years later, it was 32 teams submitting 724 parts. By 2010, it had grown to 130 teams submitting 1,863 parts—and the BioBrick database was over 5,000 components strong. As the New York Times pointed out: “IGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision—without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started.”
To understand where this revolution might go, take a look at “Splice It Yourself,” a DIY bio call to arms penned by University of Washington synthetic biology pioneer Rob Carlson in the pages of Wired:
The era of garage biology is upon us. Want to participate? Take a moment to buy yourself a molecular biology lab on eBay. A mere $1,000 will get you a set of precision pipettors for handling liquids and an electrophoresis rig for analyzing DNA. Side trips to sites like BestUse and LabX (two of my favorites) may be required to round out your purchases with graduated cylinders or a PCR thermocycler for amplifying DNA. If you can’t afford a particular gizmo, just wait six months—the supply of used laboratory gear only gets better with time. Links to sought-after reagents and protocols can be found at DNAHack. And, of course, Google is no end of help.
Certainly the media has loved this story. Between Carlson’s call to arms and the success of the iGEM competition, there have been dozens of articles claiming the next Amgen was going to come out of some teenager’s garage. Even more articles appeared claiming that terrorists would soon be creating bio bugs in basements—although Carlson and others believe that the situation is not as bad as many suspect. (We explore this further in the “Dangers of the Exponentials” appendix.) Whatever the case, the era of homebrew genetics has arrived. High school kids are creating new life forms. The last frontier of big science has fallen to the DIY innovator.
If the DIY innovator is taking on big government science programs, then the social entrepreneur is the DIY-er taking on big government social programs. The term itself was coined in 1980 by Ashoka founder and legendary venture capitalist Bill Drayton to describe individuals who combine the pragmatic, results-oriented methods of a business entrepreneur with the goals of a social reformer. The idea was a little ahead of its time. It took another ten years for technological evolution to catch up, but with the generation of information and communication technology that arrived in the late 1990s, Drayton’s idea became a real force for abundance.
After the explosion of the Internet, websites like DonorsChoose.org, Crowdrise, and Facebook Causes began to champion issues that had once been sole property of international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. Take Kiva. Launched in October 2005—and named for the Swahili word for unity—this website allows anyone to lend money directly to a small business in the developing world via a peer-to-peer microfinance model. By early 2009, the site had grown to 180,000 member entrepreneurs receiving $1 million in loans per week. As of February 2011, a Kiva loan was being made every seventeen seconds, for a total amount lent of more than $977 million. And while Kiva’s interest rate is nonexistent, its repayment rate is over 98 percent—meaning that it is not only changing lives, but, as Time magazine pointed out in 2009, “Your money is safer in the hands of the world’s poor than in your 401(k).”
Kiva is only one example. The movement has seen massive growth in the past ten years. By 2007, this third sector employed around 40 million people, with 200 million volunteers. And by 2009, according to B Lab, a nonprofit that certifies purpose-driven companies, there were 30,000 social entrepreneurs in the United States alone, representing some $40 billion in revenue. Later that same year, J. P. Morgan and the Rockefeller Foundation analyzed the potential of impact investing (in other words, backing social entrepreneurs) and estimated an investment opportunity between $400 billion and $1 trillion, with profit potential between $183 billion and $667 billion.
All told, this force has produced some very real results. KickStart, started in July 1991 by Martin Fisher and Nick Moon, demonstrates how two individuals can make a significant and measurable impact. Founded to give millions of people the technological means to lift themselves out of poverty, this nonprofit has developed everything from low-cost irrigation systems, to inexpensive presses for creating cooking oils, to devices to make earthen blocks for affordable home construction. These techs are then bought by African entrepreneurs who use them to establish highly profitable small businesses. In 2010, KickStart-backed businesses accounted for 0.6 percent of Kenya’s GDP and 0.25 percent of Tanzania’s GDP.
An even bigger example is Enterprise Community Partners, which the magazine Fast Company called “one of the most influential organizations you’ve never heard of.” This organization is a for-profit/nonprofit social entrepreneurial hybrid specializing in financing affordable housing for the poor. Over the past twenty-five years, it has helped revitalize some of America’s poorest neighborhoods, including Fort Apache in the Bronx and San Francisco’s Tenderloin, but its bigger accomplishment was creating a low-income housing credit that accounts for some 90 percent of affordable rental housing in the United States. One reason that social entrepreneurs are considered an end to big government social programs is because, with this single credit, Enterprise has outperformed the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on its core issue for more than two decades.
And these are only a few of the grand challenges that DIY innovators are now beginning to solve. Currently their impact is being felt at every level of our pyramid, but before telling the rest of that story, let’s first turn our attention to the next force for abundance: the technophilanthropists.