 Right now we're going to hear from three inspiring speakers who are going to start bringing this idea of the commons Into our collective vocabulary, and they're going to be exploring three different aspects of what that might mean So it's my pleasure to welcome Craig Ambrose to the stage Good morning. I'm Craig Ambrose. I write code with Inspiral Craftworks And I grow food and await the zombie apocalypse at Atomiteco Village on the South Island So we've got people who are going to inspire you in a sec with ideas for a wonderful and open future It's my role this morning to play the role of the ghost of Christmas past Drag you back a few hundred years and tell you some tales of things that didn't go so well I'd like you to join me on a bit of a journey with me to the 18th century perhaps imagine yourself living in 1700 Unless you're one of the 1% you probably work in a manual trade of some sort possibly farming possibly some sort of manufacturing Industry at this point is distributed But specialized you probably work in a cottage industry in a small building and by the end of that century things will have completely changed I know in this crowd we have lots of entrepreneurs and Startup folks who love to use the word disruptive and this is the start of the industrial revolution So this is the era of disruptive technologies What do you think the first disruptive technology of the industrial revolution is? Give you a clue it's not this one Everyone thinks of the steam engine as being important, but 50 years before James Watt invented this steam engine Not that one, but a steam engine This was the first major disruptive technology of the industrial revolution. It doesn't look very exciting It's a stick with a bit of wool in the middle. It's called a flying shuttle And it's it's used for weaving. It's an upgrade for your loom So if you're weaving on a loom loom is used for making cloth that has Threads of yarn that it arranges in one direction called the warp separates them for you and you have to pass a stick with some wool around it through to make the weft which give you some cloth the difference in using a flying shuttle is that The shuttle sits at one end of the loom you yank it with a string it flies through to the other end and you catch it the other end So it makes you a lot faster and it means you can weave cloth that's wider You don't have to have cloth that's only as far as you can reach and this dramatically changes the textile landscape in Britain Textile production at this time is is distributed across the landscape if you're a weaver Then you probably work in either a small workshop or you travel from farm to farm to do your weaving Just about every farm will do some sort of fiber production. So in Britain, we've got wool. We've got cotton and linen and It's gender segregated the men of the farm might shear the sheep the women and young girls will spin the wool on a on a hand spinning wheel and A man typically will come and weave it Possibly a traveling weaver who'll come and set up a loom on the homestead for a few weeks We've all the the family's yarn up into cloth and that becomes one of the Lasting stores of wealth for this farming family because just about every other product to the farm Is perishable whereas the this this cloth that you've made this is your store of permanent wealth the The difference now that the flying shuttle has been invented is that this weaver who comes they're weaving twice as fast now I Don't mean twice as fast just in that in that bit I mean the yearly production is twice as much and you can imagine But that that that's quite an incredible technology. That's the sort of technology that really enriches the commons saves people labor and drudgery because it Achieves this massive efficiency gain not with any new power source. It's not burning coal doesn't require you to upgrade the operating system of your loom It doesn't require you to throw away your loom and get a new one It's just a clever idea You can build this that little stick at home or you can ask your village joiner to make it for you And now you are twice as fast. So that's that's the sort of technology that enriches our commons But when it's implemented The effect is like you might imagine if I provided a way for you to get to work in the morning twice as fast That doesn't mean you get to sleep in more typically generally over time What it means is you're now expected to look for work twice as far away So society tends to adapt to eat up any efficiency gains that we make and The benefit to these technologies and usually not distributed evenly to the people who need them I didn't really want to talk about that so much though, but to emphasize The economic and social implications that this disruptive invention created with half of the weave Well with all the weavers now working twice as fast and effectively half of them now out of work in a century We're being out of work typically leads to debtors prison There's tremendous social pressure To see the other parts of the weaving supply chain go faster So we want to get this wool spun twice as fast now so that we can use that surplus capacity We've got in the weaving industry There was a race if you like to develop a machine that could spin the wool Faster than the young girls at the farm working away on the spinning wheel by hand And this is the first machine that was invented. This was invented by James Hargraves in 1764 and this is called a spinning Jenny the The legend has it that that mr. Hargraves was watching his daughter spin on a spinning wheel and the spinning wheel Tipped over sideways and he noticed that it it still kept spinning For a little while and it certainly still worked while horizontal So that's probably not true But this has a horizontal wheel you crank it by hand and it pulls through rather than just one bobbin It pulls through in this case 16 bobbins of all at a time It's limited doesn't have a person's hands to help do the job And so it can only do certain types of yarn not as not as strong So you can't make warp thread out of it for weaving but you can make the weft thread That's the one that goes the other way so half of all Half of all thread production can now be done on this the um The the spinning Jenny was invented, you know somewhat in secret Mr. Hargraves decided not to patent this invention patents were around at the time and um instead just built a few of them and had His workshop working faster than everybody else and tried to keep it a secret He must have known that perhaps James K who invented the flying shuttle that we saw earlier Had patented his invention and really spent the rest of his life trying to enforce that patent unsuccessfully Ended up dying a pauper in France after a life of legal battles so the um The Hargraves who invented the spinning Jenny He ended up just selling his yarn More cost-effectively which went well for a while Until eventually the the low prices of yarn in his town meant that he angered a lot of the hand we hand spinners who broke into his house smashed all his machines and chased him out of town This is the next machine. Maybe 10 years later. This is the spinning frame So this is this invention is credited to Richard Arkwright now later Sir Richard Arkwright He collaborated with with James K who we heard of earlier and um Thomas High in Nottingham to produce this machine Arkwright unlike the others wasn't an inventor or a woodworker He was more of a businessman and entrepreneur. He didn't really invent these things himself In fact, it was it was later alleged that he largely stole other people's inventions to come up with this um, but this this machine is Is a much more mature technology than the last one we saw it's got Rollers that replace the hands when we we spin by hand So the the first machine just dragged the yarn through tight bits of wood This one has rollers running at differential speeds It it can really spin any sort of yarn and this is really the start of of uh industrial textile production operates on much the same principle as a modern ring ring spinner, which is used pretty much up until the late 20th century so this technology Is this a perhaps a better example of the sort of thing that is valuable for our society to create this This machine now out of patent and in the commons It is yours if if you want to spin some wool into thread for some reason Don't go and get a spinning wheel build one of these this is this is your machine And it's it's much more efficient than a spinning wheel and you can you can still make this for much much the same complexity if you really want to The um this machine of course was was patented by art. Right. He had a lot more business sense and um when we uh When we let someone have a patent for a machine like this, we're we're essentially rewarding them for this contribution they've made to our common technological understanding so the the idea is that a a patent is Necessary incentive for invention that people won't come up with inventions like this unless we award them some special reward the trouble with the With using patents for this mechanism Is we're awarding them The the right to license the machine which they used to get money, but also by doing so they get control so This we're looking here really at one of art rights early prototypes not one of his production machines So you can you can turn this machine by hand or attach it to a small water wheel or a horse Um, and that would have been useful in in any village across new zealand We could imagine The folks who are working in in small mills or out of cottage workshops would have been able to spin their yarn Five or ten times faster with this machine and go and do other things But once arkwright had perfected his machine had his patents granted He didn't let people use this machine So that's that's how the patent was used as a mechanism of control He said you can license this patent if you have a machine that has 500 bobbins a thousand bobbins not not 16 like this not some hand crank machine But a giant machine that you put in a factory and that means that you need to be a wealthy industrialist Or a landed gentry in order to be able to afford this Certainly arkwright had his own mill And um ended up partnering in several others And arkwright's mill is really that epitome of the industrial revolution when we think of william blake's dark satanic mills Belching pollution and providing an unsafe and horrific place to work. That's very much what it was like william's richer arkwright's um crompton mill had 1200 employees Two-thirds of which were young children And they worked 12 hour shifts The the idea of involving children in the Production of textiles was not new. They would have been working in textiles on the farm at home But doing so in a factory setting was it was an invention very much of arkwright's and His mill set the tone for the next century or two centuries of what um industrial manufacturing would look like His mills a great big brick construction in the gateway Sits a cannon loaded with grape shot Which is of course An anti-personnel weapon for tackling crowds who want to come in and destroy his machines Because of the effect they had on the landscape This is another example of a Industrial scale textile technology from late in the 18th century. This is actually not an arkwright frame. This is a spinning mule um The difference is just that it has a giant carriage that that reciprocates goes forwards and backwards and this This mimics the the effect that you do with a spinning wheel when you bring your hand in and out to draft The yarn and it lets us spin longer fibers and finer yarns But otherwise is fairly similar and similarly was only licensed for large mills You can this one's a perhaps a really good example of the sort of livelihood problems of this generative There's two main jobs working in this mill. The first one is the child who is working cleaning the floor in there The mill this thing will be as long as this auditorium this rack on wheels goes in and out fairly slowly The child has to go in clean the fallen yarn and debris off the floor And ideally get out before the mill comes in and crushes them because you can't turn it off not easily The the other main trade is the doffer who Has to when the bobbin is finished Take that off reattach the next yarn while the machine is still in motion, which is mostly safer except that It turns out and this machine was in operation until about the 1920s Turns out that the these bobbins spinning and lubricated at waist height are throwing out oils and a lot of these workers died of scrotal cancer So all throughout the history of textile machinery. We have machines that are invent invented For social purposes other than the well-being and right livelihoods of the workers and other than distributing fairly the The result of their efficiency gains The result of this of course was social unrest. So we've all heard about luddites And the term luddite gets used these days to mean someone who's anti technology So the luddites were people in britain rebelling against this industrialized form of textile production and trying to break the machines Hence the reason why i correct how to cannon There wasn't really a person called ludd. It was more of a character on their posters who they They were associated with but the um The luddites weren't it would be incorrect to characterize the luddites as being anti technology The luddites are really anti control We've seen how these new technologies they could have been ennobling and instead they were used perhaps through legal mechanisms as a means of centralizing control and giving Much of the wealth and the efficiency returns they generated to the plutocrats rather than the workers so the uh the luddites Fought many battles through the 18th century and the early 19th century and ultimately lost um and uh The machines that they were fighting Were clever ideas but In the end resulted in negative effects the um the purpose of um The purpose of these technologies was to enrich society and the um The purpose of our intellectual property law that we associate with them was to reward their inventors Um, but it's clear that if we're going to do that We need to find ways to do that other than handing them control over what turns out to be really important sectors of society Textile production in this time period is just about the most important economic sector in britain Maybe just after food and so by handing control to the patent holders We've effectively allowed them to shape the entire socio economic system So we need better mechanisms for doing that If we imagine doing the industrial revolution again Which is something I see a glimmer of perhaps in the maker movement and other aspects of the open source community Then we could imagine doing so with different goals From that first spinning wheel, which people might have been using in the start of the 18th century through to now The modern ring spinner and beyond that the modern spinners that uses a vortex of air to spin the fibers. There are so many Orders of magnitude of efficiency gain. I'm not quite sure how much more efficient a modern machine is But I would not be surprised to hear it was a thousand ten thousand times more efficient We've gained so much efficiency there That we can sacrifice some to meet some other goals if we wanted If we were to redesign the industrial revolution with a set of goals based around not just efficient production, but Right livelihood safe livelihood Not mindlessly specialized mechanical livelihood, then we could do so and invent machines that um that do meet human needs This is intended to be an example about Uh the the commons and open source, but if you're actually interested in the textile production As per what I'm talking about, uh, I do have a website up at open source textiles and a facebook page If you want to join in the conversation There are a few people working in the open hardware space in this area very few There have been two Kickstarter funded open source textile machines in the last five years So there's stuff going on and you're welcome to participate in that. Thank you very much