Nathan Cravens

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

@nwcrav | Contact || Nathan's Music at Mixcloud & Soundcloud. My self-released album: Salvation. Gearing up for the next production cycle: Seeking collaborations with singer-songwriters and instrumentalists. || Founder Open Manufacturing Discussion. If you are into hardware, I highly recommend the discussions at OSHWA and the open source hardware incubator, Wevolver.

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

Reading Lists

• List of 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.

Recommended Books

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 Revolution.

The best book, in my view, would be this: 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.

Recently Read

• How to Fix the Future. Andrew Keen
• New Human Rights Movement. Peter Joseph
• Ours to Hack and to Own
• Better Angels of Our Nature. Steven Pinker
• Shareable's Sharing Cities
• Coming Apart. Charles Murray
• Lost Connections. Johann Hari
• Autoimmune Solution. Amy Myers
• Eat Dirt. Dr. Axe
• Immortalist. Alan Harrington

Soon to Read

• Anything by James Burke, the historian and futurist of technology
• 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 so many more to list. .

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

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.

Executive Studies

• 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

• 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

Precariat

• Remote: Office Not Required. David Heinemeier Hansson. Jason Fried

Right Society

• Dictionary of Alternatives. Martin Parker, Patrick Reedy, and Valerie Fournier
• Lost Connections. Johann Hari
• Cybernetic Revolutionaries. Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile. Eden Medina
• 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
• How to Fix the Future. Andrew Keen
• New Human Rights Movement. Peter Joseph
• Books concerning existing alternative projects such as Zapatistas and Rojava

Resistance & Revolution

• 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

• Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Yuval Noah Harari
• 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
• 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

• 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

• FAB. Neil Gershenfeld
• Regenesis. 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

Inspiration

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

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

Life Systems

Help people help themselves.

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

• 128gb flash drive for $20
• 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

• 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

Learn to Code

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

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

Child Education

• Child Home Education

Music 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

User Contributions

• User Contributions