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Build Your Own Computer

Being smarter than anyone else about important but narrow issues of software design didn't prevent us from being almost completely blind about the interactions between technology and economics that were happening right under our noses.

Eric Stephen Raymond, The Art of Unix Programming (2001), p. 75

Presently

Trump won the 2024 election and this is a good thing for America. To be completely honest I was not expecting this to happen until the very end - I always had known he was always going to be the more popular candidate, and his campaign strategies were very well made this time around, but, with the fraudulent votes from 2020 to be repeated, I figured, the other party could make up as many fake votes as they want and there is nothing Trump can do about it. My mind was changed about this the last two weeks before the election. "Too big to rig" came about, thankfully.

I was worried greatly about the future of the world before Trump got elected. A more geopolitical able China, a less geopolitical able America, possibility of war in the Pacific, finished goods from Taiwan and Japan and South Korea being cut off... An internally destabilized America, with an unskilled, uneducated, illegally immigrating population ravaging America's resources and funding... Having seen myself and lived near the destabilization already rampant in the inner cities in America, and worried about that "escaping containment"... I was worried about a scenario where the pace of innovation would have been slowed down dramatically and the cost of a finished good like a laptop or computer or monitor would have become horribly expensive. Going to space and expanding human frontiers? Forget it!

On the Computer

Who invented the computer? These monoliths of human invention... This laptop I write into is composed of the inventions of thousands... UNIX and C, the transistor, the microprocessor, the LED, Von Neuman Architecture... How many people were directly involved of the production of this laptop? Again, thousands, at least... Naturally the production of these machines creates some of the largest and most involved production channels in history... One that spans multiple continents...

Computers are very important machines. Using a computer my entire life has never ceased to be an awe-inspiring experience for me. As I learn more and more about how these machines work, and how they came to be, I become more and more amazed at how they work and human ingenuity. It took thousands of minds to come together across time to create this form. This significant form, that can take what happens in the universe and is able to put it into some abstract form, to codify it (not as in computer coding languages for humans, but as in a stored form of information, 0s and 1s), to take our messy world and turn out from it some replicatable, definite, preservable form... Do that enough times and you get worlds within the world... Do that with funny things like human language and codify it enough many times over and you become able to make a funny text emulator of the world... These new machines, that Dario Amodei called "Machines of Loving Grace"... ¹

It would be a tragedy if humans could no longer make computers. Producing these insanely complicated machines requires complicated supply chains and logistics that have so many points of failure. In the presently section in this piece I briefly talked about how production lines could become disrupted and stop. In the on the character of Americans section I discuss how Americans are prone to overproducing things that are not necessary and how this periodically leads to economic collapse and goods shortages. Any disruption to the complicated, fragile global economy would mean humans will no longer be able to produce these machines and will have to resort to scavenging whatever they have. So, while we still have these technologies available and working, it becomes worthwhile to figure out how to drastically simplify the production of these machines so that a small community of a few people will be able to construct and use computers and computer tools that can interface with computers from the industrial era.

Investigation - Computer Simplification

Computer Simplification is predicated on the idea that a community of self-sufficient, self-determining people ought to be able to construct their own computer parts, interfaces, and ideally (though this is probably impossible) whole computers using materials in their environment and thus be independent of industry. The core components will likely always require some massive hegemony of an industry to create - microprocessing chips, semiconductors. But, if computers are machines used to transfer information between people, and these machines are so important that they ought to be preserved through any effort, and if people are to be self-determining, then as much as possible people should seek to be able to create their own parts. The massive industry in place to manufacture computers is fragile, destructive to the environment, has undesirable effects on the composition of populations, and is anti-self-determiniative, so here I aim to bring computer production to as small of a scale as possible which I have determined to be one analogous to a small self-contained village. In this village there are people responsible for procuring raw materials such as metals, and all the things to forge metals including furnaces, rubbers from tree saps, wood, paint, dyes, and more. It is worth considering whether or not to include oil on this scale, as part of me wants to keep the oil in the ground, so I think we will skip the oil for now. In a catastrophic society-collapsing scenario, in a population of competent, agreeable, and likely homogeneous people, this scale of coordination can reasonably be expected to still exist.

Since a complete start-to-finish computer cannot reasonably be expected to be produced at a scale, I will instead investigate the production of an interface with a pre-existing computer with a terminal (the mechanical terminal).

This expectation of a small in-trading unit would be predicated on a sufficiently intelligent population capable of implementing technical standards and protocols (such as HTTP 1.1²) so their devices can reliably communicate with eachother. Predicated, again, on the loss of access to such information being a risk (such as the destruction of internet infrastructure), so thus requiring redundancy in the memories of each person. A more reliable method would be the distribution of crucial documents over flash drives (but how to view these documents, when the tools to view them have are not available? A chicken and an egg problem), but as a complete last fail-safe these documents should exist in the memories of people.

The rest of this piece remains incomplete at time of publishing.