A little known irony about Thomas Jefferson and his agrarian ideal: successful farm ownership during his presidency was entirely dependent on seed sharing.
There were no Stokes Seeds catalogues for early U.S. immigrants. Settlers used what they brought with them from the Old Country or what they acquired through trade with others. But this was a new land, with a different climate and soils. Many of those early crops failed as the seed proved ill-suited for the realities of their new home.
Affluent landowners pooled their resources to overcome these hurdles, importing seed and adapting it to the New World’s environment. These seed saving and sharing networks were called “societies.” Seed did not become widely available to farmers, other than through their personal networks, until 1819. In that year, the secretary of the treasury called upon all U.S. ambassadors and military officers stationed overseas to collect seed from their posts and bring it back so it could be shared freely. This officially became the responsibility of the U.S. Patent Office in 1839, after the commissioner of patents, Henry Ellsworth, secured funding from Congress to collect and distribute agricultural seed and statistics.
How was this facilitated? The U.S. Postal Service. Ten years in, the program was distributing 60,000 packages of seed annually. By 1855, the millionth seed parcel had been sent.1 The U.S. Department of Agriculture took up the practice with its formation in 1862. This was one of the agency’s early charges: the procurement, propagation, and distribution of plant varieties for the nation’s farmers. By the end of the century, the agency was shipping approximately 1 billion free packages of seed annually.2
There were seed companies during the 1800s, such as Stokes Seeds, which started in 1881. But most seed businesses were short lived. The fact that the seed reproduced itself meant companies had little incentive to invest in increasing a plant’s vigor or yield, given that it could be replicated for free. Once an improvement was made, and the seed sold, everyone had access to it. Try getting rich off that business model.
The American Seed Trade Association was founded in 1883. After decades of lobbying, the group was able to convince Congress to end the free seed program in 1924. It is no coincidence that around that time the first hybrid seed entered the market: hybrid corn.
Hybrid corn outperformed traditional varieties by 100 percent, with yields in the early twenty-first century 400 times greater than those reported in the 1930s.3 Its seed also came with an added benefit, from the industry’s perspective, at least. Hybrid corn’s progeny never achieved the same yields as did the parent plant. This made the innovation a boon to seed companies. Farmers could have saved the seed if they wanted to. But why? The money saved would have been more than offset by the money lost at market. Farmers using second-generation hybrid seed could expect yields lower than those of crops from traditional seed varieties. (They could have tried to produce their own hybrid seed, but the formulas have always been a trade secret.) This marks the start of the commercialization of the seed industry, now one of the most concentrated sectors of the entire conventional foodscape (the image in figure 5.1 comes from 1917).
We have come a long way since the days of free seed programs and seed societies. Post offices have disappeared from the seed sharing landscape. Yet, another community pillar is now opening up seed “ownership” to everyone. The library.
As libraries around the country expand their collections to include e-books, digitized audio media, and online video streaming materials, many are also making available to patrons some of the oldest technology of all: seed. Until recently, the checkout procedure at seed libraries looked something like this: you selected seed to take home, grew them, harvested the fruits, and made sure to return some seed from your harvest to the library. That was pretty standard procedure until a number of seed libraries across the nation were served with cease and desist letters. Turns out that process is illegal in certain states. Yes, in some states you can legally buy and grow marijuana, but if you hope to start up a seed sharing library, be prepared to have state agents knocking on your door.
The most unsettling case that I know of occurred in 2014, when the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture informed a seed library that it was breaking a law—the state’s Seed Act of 2004. The seed library, its officials were told, fell under the definition of a “seed distributor,” which meant it needed to start acting like one. It was required to meet stringent labeling requirements. The labels needed to be in English and had to clearly state the plant’s species name or commonly accepted name. For hybrid varieties, the label needed to state whether the seed had been treated. Finally, labels were required to include the name and address of the seed sharing entity. As a seed distributor, the library was also told it must conduct germination and purity analyses. The process was quite a bit different from the way the library was used to handling things, when seed was treated like books. Some seed samples were bought, others donated. Once seed was obtained, the library slapped a bar code on it and sat it on a shelf.
Seed acts are generally well intentioned. At one level, they protect consumers from unscrupulous seed vendors—thus the laws are both well intentioned and needed in exchanges motivated centrally by a desire for profit. Yet that does not describe the circumstances surrounding, or motivations underlying, seed libraries. Their seed is not for sale, and exchanges are not commercial. Instead, behaviors are governed by norms rooted in trust, reciprocity, and empathy. This is a far cry from the dog-eat-dog corporate world, where shareholder happiness and market share are priorities number one and two.
Back in Pennsylvania, tensions flared when the Cumberland County commissioner, Barbara Cross (her identity is a matter of public record), found a way to drop the t-bomb into the conversation. “Agri-terrorism is a very, very real scenario,” she was quoted as saying in an interview, adding, “You’ve got agri-tourism on one side and agri-terrorism on the other.”4 As you could imagine, being identified as potential terrorists did not go over well among the activists trying to make seed saving and sharing legal in the state.
The seed library was eventually allowed to remain open, after it was agreed that gardeners would not be required to bring seed back to the library. Stipulating that patrons must return seed would have made the loan a transaction, technically speaking, not a giveaway.
Where, then, does the library get its seed, if not from the community? The seed provided must be commercially packaged. Not exactly a fairy-tale ending, I know. To their credit, officials of the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture did tell library officials that they could host seed swap events and still remain in compliance with the 2004 Seed Act, thus creating opportunities for real seed sharing.
The Pennsylvania case is but one of many dealing with seed libraries. Others had more hopeful resolutions.
In September 2016, Assembly Bill 1810 was signed into law in California.5 The bill, known among seed saving activists as the Seed Exchange Democracy Act,6 amends the “seed law” chapter of the state’s Food and Agricultural Code to exempt seed libraries from burdensome testing and labeling requirements.
Marvin, a self-described “seed sharing activist, gardener, and attorney,” helped craft A.B. 1810. Like others I spoke with in the seed library movement (my term, but those involved seemed to like it), Marvin was quick to point out that seed sharers are “as far from being agri-terrorists as one can be.” He continued, crescendoing until the final word, which came out in a falsetto, “This has everything to do with increasing biodiversity and reducing food insecurity, and yet people have the gall to call us terrorists?”
With that, he grabbed the laptop on his desk and slid it toward himself. He typed for a few seconds before turning the screen to face me. “Critics of seed libraries need to be honest with who they’re really looking to protect,” he said, back in his normal baritone, while pointing at the screen. I was being shown a legal document. Across the top, in a fancy calligraphy font, were the words “In The Supreme Court of the United States.” I was looking at a legal brief, filed by twenty-one different agriculture industry organizations, for the 2013 Supreme Court case Bowman v. Monsanto Co.
It was a U.S. Supreme Court decision in which the Court unanimously affirmed the decision that the patent exhaustion doctrine does not give farmers the right to plant and grow saved patented seed without the patent owner’s consent. “Look here.” Marvin was pointing at the screen. “It reads, and I quote, ‘Early seed breeders had little incentive to make costly investments in developing more productive plants because the free seed program crowded private breeders from the marketplace.’” With that, he slammed the laptop shut. “That’s what we’re up against, the idea that seed sharing of any sort cuts into their precious market share. Seed companies don’t care about improving food security. They’re just looking after their bottom line.”
With more than 300 seed lending libraries in existence in the United States, the subject of their legality is starting to be scrutinized by state authorities. “As with anything,” Marvin told me, “the government generally doesn’t bother with enforcement if there’s only a few random cases here and there. Now that seed libraries are becoming a thing, a movement, agencies are beginning to take notice. They’re not flying under the radar anymore.”
Fortunately, activists have a lot of models to draw from as they challenge the idea that seed lending libraries are the legal equivalent to seed distributors. The recently passed California law follows similar laws passed in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Illinois, all in a matter of eighteen months. In North Carolina, seed libraries are legal thanks to a blanket seed sharing exemption that applies to all nonprofits. Alabama has on the books an exemption for anybody who sells up to $3,000 worth of seed, which means you are even allowed to sell a small quantity of seed if you want.
With the end of our interview in sight, I asked Marvin to sum up the main takeaway from his experiences: a background that ranged from helping to get A.B. 1810 passed to consulting with seed activists in other states. He had obviously given the topic some thought, because while he answered immediately, what he said had an equal mix of lament and bite to it. “To think seed libraries are essentially illegal in some parts of this country tells you something about what our priorities are. We’re a nation built on seed sharing. But we’ve moved so far in the other direction.”
Frustrated, Marvin clenched both hands into a fist until his knuckles turned white. He continued: “When we create laws, we don’t think about how they impact sharing because sharing is now so far from our minds and from what we do. That’s not right.”
Brice, with his Vans shoes, fedora, purple hair, and bright green glasses, did not look like your typical seed saver. I met with him outside at a picnic table, under the shade of a large oak. The tree dripped with life, its branches days away from erupting with leaves that would mark another year, a new ring in its core a testament to a long life. Spring. In another month, the seed in Brice’s hand would begin its metamorphosis. Within a single lunar phase, it would be breaking through the soil.
I started the interview by asking Brice about what drew him to seed saving. “This is about the most precious resource of all.” He was not talking only about the seed packet clenched in his hand. He lifted both arms up, giving me flashbacks to watching The Price Is Right as a kid, when a contestant was being shown a prize for the first time. He was clearly talking about, well, everything—the seed, the property we were on, the people attached to this space, and the knowledge attached to those people. “It’s about setting knowledge free. With that you can do anything, which is precisely why Big Food has done everything it can to lock it up.”
When talk turns to the sharing economy, attention is often directed to the sharing of things—goods, food, equipment, even land and buildings. What tends to get missed is that peer-to-peer sharing works only when those peers know what they’re doing.
I was sitting with Brice on the grounds of the Seed Savers Exchange. SSE is tucked up in the northeastern corner of Iowa, a mere fifteen-minute drive to the Minnesota border. (It is also a twenty-five-minute drive, in the other direction, to my hometown, where my parents still live.) SSE consists of an 890-acre farm, known as Heritage Farm. A nonprofit organization, SSE maintains a collection of more than 20,000 heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable, herb, and plant varieties, plus over 1,000 varieties of heritage apple trees. It is one of the largest nongovernmental seed banks in the United States. It is a living seed bank: every year, SSE grows out selected varieties—hence the name, Heritage Farm—to refresh its supply.
With its barn, gardens, gravel drive, and wildlife, this is not your typical seed bank—a far cry from the Fort Knox—like facility near my office at Colorado State University, where the U.S. federal seed vault is located. This government operated facility—the building is nondescript, beige, and dotted with security cameras—looks about as welcoming as a federal prison, which is basically what it is, for a very specific class of nonhuman inmates. SSE, meanwhile, expects and even welcomes visitations and freely releases members from its general population. But more than that, it promotes cohabitation and collaborative learning. Its aim is not just to lock away the “assets” but also to share them, bringing people, seed, and experiences together.
Brice and I stood in front of the visitors’ center. With its red paint and white trim, the newish building looked like a barn. “I’ve been coming to the Exchange since the 1990s and have attended most of the events,” he said. “We’re a family, and I’m including these little guys in that group.” Brice looked down at the seed in his open hand. One day they would produce Dragon’s Tongue beans, beautiful yellow pods streaked with purple.
Brice went on to tell me about how members request seed from one another, either online through a members-only portal, or by more conventional means, like by picking up a phone and asking for them. This led to a discussion about SSE sponsored events, spurred on by a question about how members (and seed) get to know each other. So many events: Start with Seed; Apple Grafting School; Spring Plant Sale; Spring Garden School; The Garden Ecosystem; Weed Dating (get it, Weed Dating—ha!); Conference and Campout; Seed School; Community Appreciate Day; Cooking with Heirlooms; Benefit Concert; Seed Stories Workshop; Harvest Festival; Winter on the Farm.7
Later that day, I met Sarah. Claiming to be in her mid-sixties but looking a solid ten years younger, she had been coming to SSE events since the late 1990s. Sarah owned and operated a bed-and-breakfast in Milwaukee, raised chickens, and, not surprisingly, was an avid gardener. When she reached out her hand to shake mine, I was struck by the juxtaposition of well manicured, painted nails and the dirt caked under some of them.
Sarah spent a good deal of our conversation emphasizing, in her words, “how knowledge does not take a backseat to seed here; the two are inseparable.”
It is one thing to share an object. In some respects, sharing things is the easy part—though, as we saw with seed libraries, what should be simple can quickly become difficult, especially when vested interests are thrown into the mix. Seed requires know-how to be of any use. Sarah again: “You can’t just look at a seed and know how deep it ought to be planted, or how much water it needs, or how much space between each is needed, or what soil type it works best in. Gardening is as much an art as it is a science. You have to do it before you really know what works in your garden.”
You have to do it before you really know what works in your garden. If you are a gardener, you know what Sarah is talking about. Saving and sharing seed is like riding a bike, in that you have to do it to know it. Try telling someone how to ride a bike who has never ridden one before. It doesn’t work. Similarly, understanding seed requires in-person help, someone who can (sometimes literally) hold your hand as you get a feel for the process.
Peer-to-peer sharing is one piece of this. But what we also need, especially when talking about food, is peer-to-peer mentoring. Sarah again: “The most successful food sharing platforms—and for me, I define ‘successful’ as those that improve food access and food sovereignty—the successful ones need to provide access to skills as much as goods.” For emphasis, she pointed two of those earth-encrusted, painted fingernails at my chest.
Good point. Who cares if communities share seed, or whether or not seed libraries are legal, if no one knows how to garden or to prepare the produce once harvested? Sharing cannot be just about an exchange of idle stuff, though that is how it is typically framed by advocates—for example, “Got stuff lying around? Share it!” We need to recognize that wanting access to someone else’s idle stuff is predicated on knowing what to do with it once you have it.
Sarah was also involved in the Open Source Seed Initiative. The initiative, commonly known as OSSI, was “inspired,” to quote from the group’s website, “by the free and open source software movement that has provided alternatives to proprietary software.”8 To be a part of the initiative, breeders promise that the seed they help produce will be available to other breeders and that the seed can be saved and planted in future seasons. As you will recall, patents and technology agreements outlaw these elements when it comes to most commercial seed.
Launched in 2014, OSSI has grown into a global network of university scientists, not-for-profit organizations, farmers, and freelance plant breeders. Within its first month of existence, over two hundred orders flowed in from eight countries.9 In June 2015, after a three-day meeting near Hyderabad, India, Apna Beej (Hindi for “Our Seeds”) was formed, an OSSI sister organization—also known as Open Source Seed System India (OSSSI).
This brings me back to Sarah’s earlier point about how seed and knowledge are inseparable. One problem with the corporate control of seed is that we are not talking only about locking up seed, which is problematic enough. When you have more than one-third of a vegetable’s genetic material privatized, as in the case of carrots, it becomes difficult for breeders to innovate. The companies holding those patents will claim that patents stimulate innovation. But the fact is, unless a trait is wildly profitable, there is no incentive for seed firms to use it. Necessity isn’t really the mother of invention. Profit is. One of the most problematic aspects of placing all our eggs in the private sector (i.e., profit motivated) basket is that those most in need of food access and innovation—the poor—will never see its benefits. Why? It’s a matter of simple economics. Catering to that population alone will never make shareholders rich.
Patents also lock away knowledge and discourage the community building that happens when that know-how is shared. As Sarah put it, “No one just saves seed. If you save seed, you also talk with others about the seed they have, the traits that work, about planting and fertilizer schedules.” With that, she reached deep into the front pocket of her jeans—forearm deep, which made it look as if she were scratching her knee. After a few seconds of digging, she pulled out a handful of small yellowish seed. Millet, I thought. (It was, I later learned.) Her hand immediately went to mine, in a “Here, take it!” gesture. She added, “And you share it.”
Here is to saving, sharing, learning, and growing communities as much as plants.
Multiple-choice question. A hacker club is (A) a group of slasher film aficionados; (B) a whacking device with a sharp edge; or (C) a network of like minded software and hardware enthusiasts. If the answer isn’t obvious, it soon will be.
A quick internet search can verify their abundance, though, as I learned, not all hacker clubs announce their identity online—a fact that might seem anathema to us on the outside when talking about an organization that celebrates 1s and 0s. “Free 1s and 0s: that’s what we want,” is what a hacker club regular living in Toronto told me. “Free as in unencumbered, not the antonym of expensive,” she added, reminding me also about how her club rejects what she later referred to as the “Google ethos”—a reference to a company that makes billions on algorithms that are as secretive and secure as nuclear launch codes. “Free” for hackers means something quite different from what it does for Google execs.
You learned earlier how those 1s and 0s, especially when housed in a piece of “smart” farming equipment, are far from free and even further from freeing. And yet, there is a lot of talk about how precision farm equipment and Big Data are revolutionizing agriculture, in a good way, we’re assured. I am not convinced that this promise squares with reality. Who is really profiting from this revolution? Eaters? Farmers? Nope. Companies? Bingo.
Monsanto has an uncanny knack of being able to identify the next “big thing” in agriculture. There is no crystal ball at company headquarters in Saint Louis, Missouri, I assure you. This knack is all about power: market power, to be precise. When you control as much of the input sector as this company does, you get to dictate what the next big thing is by your investments—a case of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
The company was at the forefront of the petrochemical and biotech revolutions; not surprisingly, it made massive investments in these areas before they took off. It should come as no surprise, then, to learn that Monsanto is poised to profit massively when Big Data becomes the toast of the town in conventional agriculture circles, which it already has, thanks in no small part to the company’s hard-fought acquisitions.
Monsanto moved early and deftly to position itself as an industry leader, and it has acquired numerous farm data analytic companies since 2012. For instance, it shelled out $930 million in 2012 to acquire the Climate Corporation, which produces a popular software platform that enables farmers to practice so-called precision agriculture. The package gives users access to algorithms that show historical trends of soil moisture and crop level weather patterns going back thirty years. The product allows farmers to plug in different seed and receive an estimate, before planting season has even started, of their likely yields that fall. I have had farmers liken the technology to a crystal ball, though, as with the seeing-stones (the palantíri) in The Lord of the Rings, possession comes with risks.
Monsanto has stated that its Climate Pro sensors on harvesting equipment generate roughly seven gigabytes of data per acre. The United States has close to 100 million acres of corn in cultivation and another 80 million acres of soybeans. Do the math. That is a lot of data to be potentially entrusted to the company.
Of course, who owns all that data is a tricky question to answer. When you ask industry insiders, they will shoot back, without hesitation, “The farmers.” Regardless of whether or not that is true, they know the ramifications of being anything but definitive about the point. Their market share depends on farmers at least believing Big Ag will not swoop in and snoop in on their farm. Farmers are understandably anxious about the subject. According to a recent report by the American Farm Bureau Federation, nearly three-fourths of the farmers surveyed said they were concerned that “others could use their information for commodity market speculation without their consent,” and more than eight of every ten admitted to having no idea what the companies were doing with their data.10
Their concern appears warranted, at least according to some legal professionals. “While the raw data belong to farmers, the second it gets run through a proprietary algorithm, which is where the real magic happens, it enters a gray area,” to quote one attorney who specializes in these issues. This is exactly why farm hackers fight to make data that are free, algorithms included, so as to eliminate even the possibility of a legal gray area.
Among the hackers I spoke with, access is more than a procedural artifact. For them, it was not enough simply to be legally allowed to tinker with a tractor’s code. True access requires capabilities, such as the know-how to access code and then to do something meaningful with it. While the exemption to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, or DMCA (mentioned in chapter 1), legally allows owners—but only owners—to tinker with their tractors’ code, the fact that most lack the know-how to do this makes the exemption, for all practical purposes, meaningless.
I learned about Allen and his device through a Google search—the search engine might not be freeing, but I cannot deny its usefulness. I was curious about all the homemade “farmbots” out there, pieces of “smart” gardening technology that direct equipment to expel seed, water, and fertilizer in precise amounts. Allen had developed his own and was devoted to sharing it with the world.
Allen had been cutting wood before I arrived. Sitting in the kitchen of his house outside Flagstaff, Arizona, I noticed a mix of cool mountain air, wood, and two-cycle engine exhaust exuding from his clothes. A self-proclaimed “hacker foodie,” Allen had constructed a “bot” for gardeners, which he described as a “complete garden monitoring and automation system, a digital green thumb for those not born with one.” Like others I had seen, Allen’s system allowed users to monitor various elements of their garden, from soil moisture to sunlight, temperature, precipitation, soil nutrient levels, and water drainage. Unlike those others, Allen’s bot is built by users themselves, thanks to detailed instructions available online through various forums, though he was quick to deflect recognition, claiming it all to be the result of a community effort.
Allen was critical not only of firms that work with zeal to “enclose” what he called the “knowledge commons”—a reference to the legal process in England, and its colonies, of enclosing communal landholdings, thus restricting access to the proper owners. He also seemed equally frustrated with how food activists often think and talk about technology: “critically, as if there were only one way to farm, assuming Amish mores toward machines and the digital age.”
This critique, he pointed out to me more than once, lumps corporate control with technology itself. We know that corporate control in conventional foodscapes is a huge problem. We also know that technology—fossil fuel dependent technology, no less—has historically displaced labor and made wholly unsustainable farming practices possible. But to say technology itself is the problem? Allen wasn’t having any of it.
“There’s this misconception that all of us looking to change our food system are a bunch of Luddites.” Changing his speaking style, he imitated the detractors: “Oh, they’re against bioengineered seed and genetically modified animals; they’re against all technology.” Back to his original voice, he continued, “We’re not against technology”—“we” being fellow hackers. “What we’re against is technology that makes you dependent on someone else.”
Open source farmbots and farm hacker clubs illustrate an underappreciated collaborative resistance against the highly proprietary revolution currently under way in conventional foodscapes. As I mentioned earlier, farmers are the original do-it-yourselfers, and a lot of them are eager to expand their fix-it expertise to include digital technologies, code included. I was struck, for instance, by how many farmers and gardeners knew what an Arduino board is—not exactly a lot of them, but more than a few. (For those unfamiliar with this piece of hardware, it is a microcontroller board used in open source applications. It also happened to be the brains of Allen’s bot.) Relatedly, there was a strong desire among farmers, both big and small, to share this know-how so farmers could once again become DIYers when it comes to smart farm equipment, even commercial equipment.
Before we parted ways, Allen made a few phone calls. He was trying to get me some details about a hacker club meeting to be held in San Francisco the following week. I had mentioned that I would be in the Bay Area, and he brought up this group, which met twice a month, every first and third Tuesday, and generously offered to put me in contact with some of its members. I left Allen’s house with a newfound appreciation for Arduino boards and the phone number of a new hacker contact living in Oakland, California, whom I called that night from my hotel room to set up a meeting for the following week.
Fast-forward six days …
It was not until entering the building that I learned it housed a software firm. The environment gave the evening a distinctly techy feel. It was a very inorganic experience, which was curious, given that we were talking about agriculture. That is not to say it was cold. Quite the opposite, in fact, thanks its convivial, warm, and inviting atmosphere.
The agenda for the evening, beginning at 6:00 p.m. and expressed using the twenty-four-hour system, was broken up as follows: 18:00–18:30, networking; 18:30–18:45, introductions; 18:45–20:45, hacking; 20:45–21:00, group share accomplishments. During “hacking” time, participants could self-select into any number of groups: compilation of plant growing information; planting software; vertical farming automation software; aeroponics; and hydroponics, to name a few.
What struck me most about this space was just how arbitrary separations are between “high” and “low” technology—a realization that ought to give us pause when resorting to dogmas about how new technologies are inferior to old ones, or vice versa. Seed, Arduino boards, and USB cables are technologies best learned in the company of others: material artifacts that cannot function fully, and freely, without attention to sharing know-how.
At one point during the hacker club meeting, Julie, one of the organizers, helped me properly solder pin headers to a microcontroller. “You see, it’s like this,” she told me as the scent of burning solder filled our nostrils. It took a light touch, which she communicated to me by first resting her hand on mine. I did eventually get the hang of it. But I remember thinking how glad I was to have someone literally hold my hand through the learning process. It was not a task I would have mastered as quickly by watching an instructional video on YouTube.
I had a lot of encounters like that during those three hours. Some involved the smell of solder, others the feel of a stable, well-constructed hydroponic stackable system, still others the look of blue-red-pink-purple-effect LED indoor grow lights when properly positioned above one’s plants. The experience involved technologies that were perfectly legal and widely available. I daresay many were even inexpensive. Even so, this access did not result in my being able to put any of them to work, at least not before that night.
“It’s about the conditions in which technology is born.” Those were Julie’s parting words, prior to our goodbyes, which in this case involved a hug and her giving me my very own Raspberry Pi 3 64-bit processor. She didn’t say any more. But then again, she did not need to. I saw and felt it; heck, I even smelled it—the nose pinching, ironlike smell of solder is not soon forgotten.
Sharing has to be more than making sure others have access to stuff. Without the requisite knowledge that allows that stuff to be put to work, what good is it? Practicing technology and therefore playing a role in making it, especially in the presence of others, helps ensure against an “access” predicated on technologies that hoover wealth, when what they should be doing is dispersing it.