A crash course in changing the world.
"Did you realize that it takes 1.7 kilograms of materials to make a microchip -- a total 630 times the mass of the final product? Did you know the amount of waste matter generated in the manufacture of a single laptop computer is close to four thousand times its weight, and fifteen to nineteen tons of energy and materials are consumed in the fabrication of one desktop computer? I would like you to consider the true impact of what you do, when you are 'changing the world' as you like to say."
And thus began my transformation.
When you start to pull on that thread -- measuring the true lifecycle impact of the things you own, the food you eat, the work that you do -- a lot of things come unraveled. We live in a complex world, and of course you can't just stop it all. We still need cities and corporations and financial systems and the Internet, and we need food systems that can feed our ravenous billions. But you can become mindful of the costs, and you can seek to improve the value of things. You can learn to grow, to code, to fab, to build communities, to keep bees. I pulled, and I struggled with the unraveling, and then I learned. I'll spare you the dark details, but it was a long road and bumpy.
So now I know things and share them. I learned python and mandarin and fabML. I learned to deploy lightweight sensor nets and visualize pollutants in my city. I learned to stage massively multiplayer augmented reality art games. And I learned to dance like a dervish in the desert, driving hard against the African polybeat, swept up in the quest to level up my life.
(photo credit Bert van Dijk)
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