Marcin Jakubowski told
Bloomberg Businessweek he's "
conducting a civilization reboot experiment" on his 30-acre compound near Maysville, Missouri, which he calls, Factor e Farm. He wants the farm to produce its own food, energy, and tools and raw materials for making those tools, a quest he started in 2007 when he "began working on a minimum set of machines to necessary to sustain modern civilization." In doing so, he wants to prove that people can live without corporations.
Okay, but when did this economic development-related entry morph into something from a survivalist blog? Oh, this posting's about economic development. Jakubowski expects people around the world to "use his tools, spurring an explosion of innovation as people take his tractors and drills and build even better ones." And will they know about his tools? They'll know about them thanks to Internet, which Jakubowski is using to "open-sourcing" his entire production system for all to see, copy, and improve.
Sounds crazy? Well Jakubowski's picked up a global following after 1 million people viewed his
TED talk on
YouTube. South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth's foundation contributed $360,000 to farm and about 500 people who donate $10 a month to "subscribe" to the Jakubowski's farm. The Businessweek article describes the farm's successes and failures, including a greenhouse that grows nothing but weeds and the farm's continued reliance on Wal-Mart for food.
But consider Jabukowski's method for spurring innovation: "open sourcing." The farm is "just one node in the network he envisions. The answers will not come from him or the farm. Other people will improve the designs, and, in time, "a distributed enterprise will arise--a society in which the people will have taken back control of technology and lowered the basic cost of existence by several orders of magnitude."
