Periodic updates from Queerious Labs on projects, events, political ramblings.
2020-05-25
by beka
One of the first subprojects we’re working on as part of ReFactor is a loom. We decided on a loom partially because it’s a nice, complex piece of machinery with a bunch of different aspects that are tied to the path dependence problem, but also partially because it’s arguably the machine that kicked off the First Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.
This is going to be a short blog post giving an overview of the loom as it’s currently conceived, and we’ll add some more posts documenting its progress and the changes to the design that we end up making.
As always, all of the designs for these projects are on GitHub. The loom in particular is here.
read more...2020-05-23
by beka
The ReFactor project emerged out of a handful of conversations folx were having both as part of the Queers Read Leftism reading group and outside of it.
The main goal of the project is to ask how the current technology we use for production of goods – whether that’s clothing, shelter, food, energy, water, or whatever else – has been shaped by the particular path through capitalist industrialization since the late 1700s. Once we have a good sense of where that has happened and how, we can then go on to ask a second question, namely, how can we refactor our technology, taking full advantage of modern tools and resources, to eliminate the centralization of production, and the deep interdependence of our tools on one another.
read more...