I’ve noticed over the decades I’ve been following technology a particular pattern in the development and spread of certain technologies:

First comes the idea, then comes the early implementations funded by big money and restricted to a lucky few. Then takes form that can be easily reproduced in quantity, then it becomes cheap and easily available. Now its interesting. This is the pattern that has become famous with the development of personal computer, but it does not only apply to that technology. It is a very common path, perhaps even the majority follow this road in one way or another, and at varying speeds.

• There is of course computers, which were giant machines for military and large companies, to now, where you can get a computer in a chip with a whole development environment for $35 like the Arduino.
• There is a similar trend with social video hosting, first it was the big, centralized players like YouTube, now you can easily have the same features in your own Wordpress blog, and there are far to many video blogs to count.
• Wireless communications is another example. 20 years ago, few people would have thought it possible that for less than $100, non-technical people could set up their own wireless communications system. With the arrival of WiFi, few people with computers believe that they could not have one for themselves.

In relation to this, there is the FLOSS model. An open, incremental development model means that the work of creating a new technology can be split up into lots of little parts that many people can do in their spare time. Therefore, no huge organization with lots of capital needed. It is interesting to watch this process first hand with the Makerbot 3D printer. It is a kit that is orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else on the market (its about $800, most commercial ones are $15,000 or more). Their whole machine is open source hardware, and their customers are also quite actively contributing to its development. They have been very open about the machines capabilities, it is still very much in development, yet they have a growing customer base.

So the Iran elections are in the news big time, it is indeed fascinating to watch the large crowds of people gathering in the protests. Large protests can be a great exercise in the power of the people, but they can also be a highly effective propaganda tool. I hope that what is happening in Iran will lead to more power in the hands of the Iranian people. I have been fascinated by a number of aspects of the western response to it, ranging from people declaring their support for the protests to calls for military action. How many people making these calls really know anything about the people they are supporting?

Our very own 2004 presidential election was also prematurely called by a politicized government body we call “Supreme”: the Supreme Court. Bush v. Gore stopped the vote recounts and declared Bush president on a 5-4 party line vote, with the dissenting opinion saying that the Supreme Court should not have even taken the case. Yet we continually represent Iran’s Supreme Leader as some sort dictator. It seems that is a convenient way to represent the Axis of Evil, but the reality is different. It turns out that Iran’s assembly can recall the Supreme Leader, which some people are saying that Rafsanjani is trying to do.

I have no claims to understanding Iranian politics and that is exactly my point. I also believe that we should not be involved, especially considering what the U.S. has done. We are directly responsible for killing Iranian democracy, installing Iranian fascists and Nazis to power, and bringing back the Shah, a true tyrant. If you want to more, read about the CIA’s Operation Ajax in 1953.

Egypt under Ptolemy had much of the ingredients for the industrial revolution, including a functional model of a steam engine in 100 A.D. So why did it take until 1700 A.D. for the steam engine to actually start being used? The ancient Egyptians had a multitude of slave labor, so they had no incentive to spend lots of time and effort developing the steam engine. This highlights a major driving force of innovation that many people do not want to hear about: high wages.

The Capitalist orthodoxy has declared that expensive labor thwarts innovation. How can a business afford to buy all that fancy innovative technology if they are paying their workers well? I think a much better question is: how can we better utilize that well paid employee? So you could pay low wages and have a lot of people doing menial tasks. Or you could pay solid wages and have good, well educated people working very productively.

Each business would have to employ a lot less people in this model, but isn’t that the whole point? If each business can do the same work with much fewer people, then we’ll all be better off since we’ll all be so much more productive.

You can see a sign of this in how countries calculate produtivity per person. American employees get high productivity scores partially because they work long hours. When you look at productivity per hour, European workers are more productive.