geeks

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at tsoft.com
Fri Sep 15 20:34:16 PDT 2000


the Other Martha Steward of geekdom sez:

yeah, but chuck's focus was, intially, the luser not the employee. and that's where the problem lies in his analysis because to take it seriously we'd all have to start baking our own bread and sewing our own cloths and pounding our laundry on rocks by the river. and, if not that extreme, then chuck would expect us all to want to know and care about every technological thing we use: cars, microwaves, lights, televisions, phones, vcrs, answering machines. and that is a little bit dippy because chaz baby, then we wouldn't have time to advance free love as the corollary part of the coming revo! :)

---------------

Kelley,

You forget something critical. I am a mechanic in a wheelchair repair shop. We can fix or make just about anything. So I repair whatever can be dragged into the shop--or that I can figure out how it works or at least how it broke. Most of my other jobs have been centered around some kind of technology, starting with art school. Art majors learn how to make things and that's why they end up in blue collar gigs for the rest of their lives.

And yes I wash my clothes in the bathtub and hang them out on a line between apartments to dry. But this latter gig is hardly bizarre since the lines were re-strung on an old pulley system that hadn't been used since maybe the fifties---by my former Chinese neighbors who were FOB. We got along pretty well. Henry Liu's (different Henry than used to be on Lbo) wife used to work in a ceramics factory making a huge variety of dishes---everything from high priced hand painted dinner sets to restaurant sets for export. Henry was an industry trained engineer who worked on making the high temp/pressure ovens used for making silicon chips. These were highly skilled people who knew a lot about their respective trades. But once they got here, their knowledge and skills were worthless because they didn't happen to exactly fit into the production systems used in the US. As a result, Henry worked in the clean rooms despite the fact he was an engineer and his wife did maid work despite the fact she was once a highly skilled production designer. The idea that I had college degrees and was a mechanic used to be a source of suspicion---they didn't understand how that could be---although they recognized that the US had no use for the traditional arts, since Henry's wife had specialized in re-creating traditional hand painted designs and now cleaned houses. But they thought their own condition was the result of the language barrier. Of course that was partly true--along with a background of discrimination and suspicion. But the concrete problem was that their technical skills were not exploitable here and so they were condemned to lower skilled jobs.

We used to treat each other to dinners. They showed me some traditional techniques and I tried to introduce them to spaghetti, beef stew, and one of my favorites, a baked rigatoni/mozzarella/vegetable dish. They were never very impressed with my efforts and basically didn't like this heavier food. But my stir fry technique sure improved under Henry's scornful eye. I used to make pizza for a family owned take out place in high school and so we could trade restaurant stories. Henry and his wife made all their own food including the pastry. They were a little like what you imagine a household was like several generations before WWII.

When Henry was between jobs he used to work as a cook with our landlord who is also a cook (once upon a time farmer)--in addition to his rents. In any event one day Henry came over and wanted help stringing up the clothes lines, so that's when I realized I was dropping five or six bucks a week on laundry--I didn't have a job so I was pinching pennies and got into the habit. I used to alternate around Henry's wash schedule so the lines would be free.

They moved down to Fremont to be near San Jose were he worked, after their daughter graduated from UC and moved out. He was a good neighbor and had a cheerful way, which made it easy to live next to each other--there is a whole art to living well in a crowded building and he had that down--a kind of communal sense of responsibility for minor things like the trash, the wash lines, up keep of the shared back porches, etc.

In any event I admired certain things about Henry and the way his family conducted their lives. What was interesting to me was that they had not been exposed to all the consumer goodies and knew basically nothing about them. On the other hand, they had a complete household routine that didn't relie on anything beyond some very plain necessities. Their three main appliances were the stove, refrigerator and the electric rice cooker.

Our stoves would make you laugh. Mine must date from the early thirties before such advances as thermostats, temperature gauges, or pilot lights. Henry had a slightly newer model. Both our refrigerators were bought at the used (as in very used) appliance place on San Pablo Ave. The seedy old black guy who runs the place assured us they would last forever---and that was more than ten years ago--so he was right. Actually, I knew he was telling the truth because he was basically doing the same kind of work as I do, and I saw all the right stuff in the shop. What I really wanted but couldn't find were the twenties style with the coil on top and the electric motor that smelled like ozone--like the kind I had in Iowa City. Now that would have been a find.

I watched a couple of episodes of the 1900 House and laughed my ass off. Klueless in the extreme. Henry and his family could have moved in there with no problem at all. Forget the corset and the rest of that ladies home companion bullshit. We would have re-worked that idiot boiler and had plenty of hot water in a day (or no house, if it blew). It turns out that my shop buddy Larry (native american/puerto rican) grew up in a house with a wood stove like that one. There were actually a fair number of these monsters around here. I rented a cabin on the Russian River once that had one. Even drunk, me and two other wine sotted buddies kept it going enough for hot showers at night. The mornings were rather grim though.

So, yeah, part of the revolution is getting the fuck out of Dodge in as many small ways as possible. And the ways to do that are all around. Part from Henry, part from Larry, part from Loi (the Vietnamese guy in the shop--also a master fixit guy. He and his cousin outfitted a basic bus service in Ho Chi Minh City from junked US Army trucks. First they re-worked the engine and drive train from other junks. Then, they build a bus-like back end to mount on the H frame in the rear with welded in benches. The tires and batteries were the big problem. So they cut the tops off the batteries, scraped the lead off the fiber-board plates, re-smelted it and poured the lead into fired clay molds made from the original grid pattern, and then re-attached these to the fiber backings and reassembled the batteries, heat sealing the tops back on. The best tires were re-enforced with other tires cut down to fit inside the better ones. This is some serious make-do. They started earning too much money with their bus service and they got closed down. So their next project was to rehab a river boat for ocean travel to Malaysia).

A little here and a little there. Pretty soon you have almost contact at all with about eighty percent of what consumes most people's lives---and more important, what capital depends on in order to exploit the earth and all its people--the unconscious consumer.

So, it may not be the revolution, but if and when that arrives, I know people who know how to re-make and re-construct a lot of a technical society from the ground up. This is really what I mean by re-appropriating the means of production. Now I don't advocate any particular person, say Kelley learn how to re-construct a battery. That's also not really the point either. Everybody has something they know well or have developed---it is pursuing that, whatever it is, that is the route to re-appropriation.

The point is to build a community of people who hold the knowledge/skill base for as much of society as possible. In this sense, then Charles B's quote, fits right in:

``I do think it would be good if every class conscious worker ( material or immaterial) could take on the lawyerly intellectual style of being responsible for figuring out or understanding big problems , and acting decisively to solve them. Every party member should , in theory, be able to step up and lead. The kind of meglomanicial /take charge confidence and boldness that lawyers have too much ( workerly criticized and reworked , of course) would help in knocking the bourgeoisie on their asses.''

And so does Yoshie's:

``Those who have chronic illnesses and permanent disabilities tend to become more knowledgeable about their own illnesses & disabilities and often about the practice of medicine in general also, sometimes their knowledge surpassing run-of-the-mill medical practitioners (e.g., Carrol, Marta Russell). They might build an activist movement, beginning with particular issues & expanding from them (e.g., the movement of persons with disabilities, ACT-UP, etc.).''

On the other hand Yoshie says:

``On general principles, I agree with Kelley, in that we don't have time to keep up with every innovation in every science & technology.''

Remember through all the smoke and mirrors, that originally Kelley was on a rant over geeks, hackers and cyberspace. My suggestion was that any one interested in that world should get an open source OS, install it in a throw away box, and see for themselves what all the noise is about. Consider it field work.

Chuck Grimes



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