Nathan Cravens

SCLCS. SGM.
Nathan Wilson Cravens
Latest Publication: Why Don't Machines Do the Work?

@nwcrav | Contact || Nathan's Music at Mixcloud & Soundcloud. Self-released album: Salvation. Always seeking music collaborations. || Founder Open Manufacturing Discussion which has yet to achieve its goals; still floundering (or flourishing) in hobbyism, startup incubators, government research, and academia. If you are into hardware, see discussions at OSHWA and the open source hardware incubator, Wevolver. Finally, subscribe to The Prepared.

Most recent non-fiction publications: The Humanoid Machinist. . or, What is Art? | From Big to Small: Open Fabrication, Modular Production, & Programmable Matter|
An Ode to Platform Cooperativism: The Quest for Greater Freedom | Introducing a Rescue Package for Refugees

Readings

Reading (Mostly) Lists

• Notable Inventors (Wikipedian List)
• Words I Like
• Open Culture. Marilyn Monroe's Library. With great links to other book lists.
• Technology Review Best Books of 2016
• Verso Press. Emerging Futures: A Bookshelf
• Shareable's Top 21 New Books for Summer 2016
• Non-Fiction Book Lists by Intelligence Expert and Radical Open Source Advocate, Robert Steele
• Required Reading by Top US Universities. Source: Open Syllabus Project
• David Bowie's top 100
• CFR Foreign Affairs 2015
• Warren Buffett's Favorite Books
• For Designers
• For Science

Timelines

• List of Timelines. Wikipedia
• Sound Synthesis
• From Prehistory to Plato
• Anti-Capitalist Dictionary: People
• How The Web Was Born
• London. A Biography.

Suggested Readings

Below, a Curated Selection by Your Occupy Librarian. (Last stationed 2011-12 in London)
Publishers showing support of the movement via book donations included Zed, Verso, Pluto, AK, and Freedom Press.
The highest praise and support should go to The Radical Grandmother Brigade. They are the Life Blood & Heart of Civilization.

The best book, in my view, would be: The Ultimate History of the Universe, authored by Superintelligent AI based on the reader's biofeedback, and narrated by a flawlessly simulated Buckminster Fuller. . . For now: the works of Will and Ariel Durant.

Ordered accordingly.

Book Hauls

• The Growth Delusion
• TED Talks. Chris Anderson
• We Have No Idea
• 1001 Ideas That Changed Everything

Recently Read

• Fear: Trump in the White House. Bob Woodward
• Immortalist. Alan Harrington [So rarely is non-fiction written so well crafted as to be poetic]

Soon to Read

• Utopia for Realists
• The Wikileak Files: The World According to US Empire
• The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger
• And too many more to list; the stack always increases and will never end. .

Reference Shelf

• The Dictionary of Alternatives: Utopianism and Organization. Martin Parker, Valerie Fournier, Patrick Reedy
• Design School Wisdom. Brooke Johnson
• Dictionary of Latin Phrases. Jon R. Stone
• Engineers Databook. 4th Edition. Clifford Matthews
• Architect’s Pocket Book. 4th Edition. Charlotte Baden-Powell
• Programming Robots with ROS. 1st Edition. Morgan Quigley. Brian Gerkey. William D. Smart

Futures Studies

• Superforecasting. Philip E. Tetlock. Dan Gardner
• Singularity is Near. Raymond Kurzweil
• Foundations of Futures Studies. Volumes 1&2. Wendell Bell

U.S. Politics

• Democracy for the Few. 9th Edition. Michael Parenti
• 935 Lies. Charles Lewis
• Griftopia. Matt Taibbi
• Hoodwinked. John Perkins
• Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire. Niall Ferguson
• The WikiLeaks Files: The World According to The US Empire. Julian Assange
• Clinton Cash. Peter Schweizer
• Fear: Trump in the White House. Bob Woodward

World Order

• The Dictator's Handbook. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Alastair Smith
• Business as a System of Power. Robert A. Brady
• World Order. Kissinger
• World as It Is. Chris Hedges
• World Systems Analysis: An Introduction. Immanuel Wallerstein
• Trouble in Paradise. Slavoj Žižek

Finance

• A FINANCIAL HISTORY of the UNITED STATES. 3 Vols. Jerry W. Markham
• All the Presidents' Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power. Nomi Prins
• How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour. Les Leopold
• All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. Bethany McLean. Joe Nocera.
• Makers and Takers. Rana Foroohar
• The Shifts and the Shocks. Martin Wolf
• Lords of Finance: The Bankers who Broke the World. Liaquat Ahamed

Executive

• Zero-to-One. Peter Thiel
• The Upstarts. Brad Stone
• The Rise of Superman. Steven Kotler
• Exponential Organizations. Salim Ismail et al.
• Made in America. Sam Walton
• BOLD: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World. Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Ben Horowitz
• The Lean Startup. Eric Ries
• Getting More: How to Negotiate to Achieve Your Goals in the Real World. Stuart Diamond
• Power: Why Some People Have It—and Others Don't. Jeffrey Pfeffer
• Speakrets. Ruth Sherman
• Kanban

Automation

• Economic Singularity. Calum Chace
• The Glass Cage. Nicholas Carr
• The Second Machine Age. Erik Brynjolfsson. Andrew McAfee
• The Internet Is Not the Answer. Andrew Keen
• Rise of the Machines. Martin Ford
• Androids and Intelligent Networks in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Artificial Slaves

Philosophy

• 50 Philosophy Classics: Thinking, Being, Acting, Seeing. Tom Butler-Bowdon

Precariat

• Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers Are Disrupting the Digital Economy. Trebor Scholz
• Remote: Office Not Required. David Heinemeier Hansson. Jason Fried

Social Justice

• Dictionary of Alternatives. Martin Parker, Patrick Reedy, and Valerie Fournier
• Guide to Political Revolution. Bernie Sanders
• Lost Connections. Johann Hari
• The Soul of Man under Socialism. Oscar Wilde
• PostCapitalism. Paul Mason
• Critical Path. Richard Buckminster Fuller
• Free is Cheaper. Ken Smith
• Workshops Tomorrow. Kropotkin. Colin Ward
• Envisioning Real Utopia
• Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. Nick Srnicek
• How to Fix the Future. Andrew Keen
• New Human Rights Movement. Peter Joseph
• Utopia for Realists. Rutger Bregman

Resistance & Revolution

• Cybernetic Revolutionaries. Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Eden Medina
• Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook. Mark Bray
• Translating Anarchy: The Anarchism of Occupy Wall Street. Mark Bray
• Revolutionary Suicide. Huey P. Newton

Heterodox Economics

• Debt: The First 5000 Years. David Graeber
• Lewis Hyde. The Gift
• The Enigma of Capital. David Harvey
• Carlota Perez. Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• Raj Patel. The Value of Nothing
• Robert Theobald. The Guaranteed Income
• Robert Freedman. Marx on Economics

Inequality

• Spirit Level
• Wealth and Poverty of Nations. David S. Landes

History

• American Connections. The Founding Fathers. Networked. James Burke
• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Yuval Noah Harari
• Better Angels of Our Nature. Steven Pinker
• The Story of Civilization. Eleven Volumes. Will & Ariel Durant
  • Our Oriental Heritage
• Why the West Rules—For Now. Ian Morris
• Empire: Rise and Demise of the British World Order and Lessons for Global Power. Niall Ferguson
• A History of Modern Europe. Albert S. Lindemann
• Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism. Peter Marshall
• A Secret History of the World. Jonathan Black
• Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune. Kristin Ross
• The Robber Barons. Mathew Josephson
• Paul Clark & Julian Freeman. Design
• Paul Lafargue. Evolution of Property
• David Petegorsky. Left-wing Democracy in the English Civil War: Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger Movement
• Martin Cohen. Political Philosophy: From Plato to Mao
• Anthony Hall. Earth into Property
• Noam Chomsky. Occupy

Peer Production

• Shareable's Sharing Cities
• Ours to Hack and to Own
• Network Society & Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. Michel Bauwens. Vasilis Kostakis.
• Wealth of the Commons. David Bollier (Ed). Silke Helfrich (Ed).
• Governing the Commons. Elinor Olstrom
• Clay Shirky. Here Comes Everybody
• Chris Anderson. The Long Tail
• Matt Mason. The Pirates Dilemma
• Richard Sennet. Together: Rituals, Pleasures, and Politics

Innovation

• Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Kelly Weinersmith. Zach Weinersmith
• Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World. Mark Miodownik
• Economic Singularity. Calum Chase
• Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication. Neil Gershenfeld
• Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. George Church
• Telomerase Revolution. Michael Fossel
• Made in the USA: The Rise and Retreat of American Manufacturing. Vaclav Smil
• Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization. Vaclav Smil
• The Master Algorithm. Pedro Domingos
• How We Got to Now. Steven Johnson
• The Quest for AI. Nils J. Nilsson
• Marvin Minsky. Emotion Machine
  • CSAIL. Marvin Minsky. Emotion Machine
• Steven Johnson. Where Good Ideas Come From
• Atul Gawande. The Checklist Manifesto

Science

• The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life. 2nd Ed. Richard Dawkins. Yan Wong
• Pale Blue Dot. Carl Sagan

Inspiration

• Jazz Guide: 1001 Best Albums. Brian Morton. Richard Cook.
• Alan Watts. In My Own Way

Health

• Autoimmune Solution. Amy Myers
• Grain Brain. David Perlmutter

Newsletters (E-mail!)

• The Download. Tech News. MIT Tech Review
• The Prepared Manufacturing News.

Podcasts

• James Burke on The End of Scarcity
• History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps

Documentaries

• The Shock Doctrine 2009 Documentary by Naomi Klein
• Hypernormalization by Adam Curtis 2016
• Class Divide - New York City Poor and Rich Children and Their Families - HBO - 2016
• PBS Frontline Two American Families 2013
• PBS NPR - Poverty in America Documentary 2017

Toward Post-Scarcity: Free & Open Life Systems

Help people help themselves. Why buy when you can make it for less or free? Please email me suggestions!

Platforms & Interactive Models

Seeking open fabrication plans to make almost anything. Platforms are needed to accelerate material based innovation.

• Instuctables
• TinkerCad?

Planning & Incubation

• ROC: Refugee Open Cities
• RegenVillages
• Wevolver. Open Hardware Incubator
• Thingtracker: Sharing designs and projects in the maker community.
• POC21: Over 100 "makers" develop 12 off-grid technologies
• Envienta Open Source Ecology
• Qetema Smart City

Food

• Grove: Indoor Auquaponic Gardening System
• MIT City Farm

Housing

• Tiny House Movement
• Open Building Institute's Sustainable Housing Project
• Wikihouse
• Eco-BLAC: Bricks made from landfill without emissions

Energy

• Pedal Power Generation
• HomeBiogas
• OSE Solar
• Zenman energy
• Solarflower

Communications

• Owncloud on the Raspberry Pi Zero, Super small Personal Cloud Storage Server
• Koruza: Free Space Optical hardware for 1Gbps mesh networking up to 100 meters
• Google Loon: Providing Internet to all of Sri Lanka
• IBM Watson Personality Insights service

Augmented Reality

• ScopeAR Beams An Expert To You Through Augmented Reality

Computer Hardware

• Nyami Open Source GPU
• The $5 Computer: Raspberry Pi Zero.
• Jetson TX1. 256 CUDA cores delivering over 1 TeraFLOPs of performance.
• Intel & Micron: 3D XPoint: 1,000 faster than modern storage

Robotics

• Duke University engineers just built a robot that’s 10,000x faster at planning motion
• Co-bot Round-up
• Actuated Telerobotics "Researchers from MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering have designed an interface that takes advantage of a human's split-second reflexes allowing a humanoid to maintain its balance and complete tasks."

Automation

• Amazon’s Clever Machines Are Moving From the Warehouse to Headquarters
• VIDEO: Future of Work Conference 2016
• Millions of SE Asian jobs may be lost to automation in next two decades: ILO
• Changying Precision Technology Company factory in Dongguan "...production per person has increased from 8,000 pieces to 21,000 pieces. That's a 162.5% increase. The increased production rate hasn't come at the cost of quality either. In fact, quality has improved. Before the robots, the product defect rate was 25%, now it is below 5%."

Fabrication

• VIDEO: Aether 3D Bioprinting Demonstration
• Mayku Desktop Fab Beyond 3D Printing: From Headphones to Smartphones
• 3D printing metals without lasors
• Voxel8: 3D Printed Electronics
• WASP: LDM Extruder: 3D Print Ceramics

Sensors & Scanning

• Array of Things
• 3D Scanning Forum
• 123D Catch: Make 3D Models with Photos
• Bevel: $49 3D Scanner

Modeling

• 3D Brain Model

Software

• RISC-V
• 'InVision raises $55M in Series D funding to make product design collaborative'
  

http://tcrn.ch/28LDG86

"Ultimately, InVision’s goal is to be for product-based communication what Slack is for general corporate communication and Atlasssian or GitHub is for engineering-based communication. And this funding will certainly help them achieve that goal a little bit faster."

Transportation

• Autonomous Vehicles: Insurance Rates Would Plummet

Common Stores

• Freeshops
• Tool Librarys

Social Enterprise

• GreenPath Food: Helping smallholders sell internationally
• Protoprint: Recycled plastic into filament for 3D printing

Interstellar Colonization

• Breakthrough Starshot

Nathan's Non-Fiction Writings

Articles at Medium

• United States to Empower Europe
• What Do We Need From Technology & Ourselves
• The Telerobotic Fulcrum

Benevolent Technocracy

• Public Resource Mechanics

Political Economy

• The Sixth Revolution?
• An Urban Singularity: The Combining of Global Cities as a Unitarian Architectural Project
• A Universal Commons Code of Ethics
• Hard Takeoff
• Free Markets and Free Use Commons
  • Financial commons
• Effortless Economy
• Mutually Assured Production

Technology

• Public Resource Network
• Automated Distribution Systems
• Global Localization and Manipulation Engine
• Open Manufacturing
• The Holistic Problem of Manufacturing
• Universal Grid Computing
• General Manufacturing Robotics

Business

• The Supremist Corporation Manifesto

Interviews

Text

• Occupy London's library provides shelf help

Education

• Child Home Education
• Learn to (Ruby) Program by Chris Pine
• Learn Python the Hard Way by Zed Shaw

Music Artists I Like

Tim Hecker, Field Rotation, Deru, Carbon Based Lifeforms, Andy Stott, Tool, Pentangle, John Luc-Ponty, Infected Mushroom, DJ Sasha, Alice in Chains, Slowdive, Arvo Part, Wagner, Vivaldi. Too many more to name.

Tracks

Chill

• Phil France - Circle
• Tim Hecker - Castrati Stack
• Daso - Meine
• James Holden - Nothing (93 Returning Mix)
• Jan Blomqvist - The Space In Between (Ben Böhmer Extended Remix)
• Ben Böhmer - Promise You (Original Mix)
• Portico Quartet - A Luminous Beam
• Victoriya - For You
• Phelian - Lost
• Azaleh - Moonlight
• Nick Warren - Renaissance - The Masters Series (Part 19)
• Sasha - Scene Delete [Full Album]
• Sasha - Involv3r Continuous Mix

Funky Chill

• KOKOROKO - ABUSEY JUNCTION // WE OUT HERE
• Rubba - Way star

Trance

• Aurosonic & Frainbreeze and Katty Heath - All I Need (Progressive Mix)
• Saltwater (Original) by Chicane
• Ferry Corsten - Eternity

House

• London Grammar - Hey Now [Arty remix]
• AuRa / CamelPhat - Panic Room (Club Mix)

Progressive House

• Lumidelic - Through The Door (Original Mix)
• Maiga - Vincenzo (Original Mix)
• Leonety - Evening Embrace (Lumidelic Remix)
• Alex H - A New Beginning (Original Mix)
• Mark & Lukas - Eye Of The Storm (Original Mix)
• Alex H - Where Stars Collide (Original Mix)

Jazz Mix

• Miles Davis - So What

User Contributions

• User Contributions