Steve Quilley Log
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10/11/25
Followup to U Waterloo Lecture
Invite all the high profile bloggers to a build. House - looks conventional. Skid steer - Mad Max busts the disbelief. Make sure someone videos.
Chris, Mary, Kevin and Paul, Dougald and Marcin
You may not have seen this Instagram from Marcin Jakubowski which achieved 17 million hits in a week. I’m not on Instagram, but that seems like a lot. https://www.instagram.com/p/
I’m taking the liberty of putting you in touch with Marcin. His open-source ecology, project — of open-source hardware and a decentralized DIY economy — is finally taking off and he has some serious financial backing. He’s kind of taking that EF Schumacher/Gandhi/Illich vision and integrating it with the potential of IR4.0. You almost certainly know the project
I think — Mary and Paul — that if there is a small path that allows humanity to thread the needle between our creative nature and ‘the machine’ or transhumanism, this is probably the kind of political economy that might allow it. And Kevin and Chris — if there is a small farm/distributist future that can avoid Marx’s ‘sack of potatoes’ problem and reconcile a distributed self-sufficient, low-overhead, family-based ‘livelihood' economy (as opposed to the corporate Market or the State) with a level of high-tech innovation, then it will probably look something like this.
Anyway, you probably know all of this. Marcin was up in Waterloo and we are trying to hustle a Canadian Future Builders Academy into existence. You may not have seen this instagram which achieved 17 million hits in a week. I’m not on Instagram, but that seems like a lot. https://www.instagram.com/p/
Marcin: Ruth Ganowski will put you in touch with all the Doomer Optimism people — and I think they have a conference coming up. I’m pretty sure that Paul, Chris, Mary and Kevin know them — or have standing invitations to their events. Dougald Hine is a long time collaborator of Paul Kingsnorth (on the Dark Mountain Manifesto) - founded the School of Everything and if he had a Polish name would almost certainly be your first cousin. His website and stuff is here.
Just FYI — here are links to the bits of their work that are most closely aligned with or relevant to your more practical agenda.
Kevin Carson s Home Brew Industrial Revolution and Desktop Regulatory State
Dougald Hine: At work in the Ruins.
Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine: The Unmaking of Humanity — the tag line is great for you, because you’re trying to change our relation with machines to make humanity human once again.
Mary Harrington’s Feminism against Progress - Mary writes for Unherd — often against transhumanism and on the warped technics of our relation to technology
Chris Smaje - has moved from defending small family farms against the 'technocratic save nature even if that means binning humanity crowd’ (a famous duel with George Monbiot towards a more overtly distributist vision — Finding Lights in a Dark Age: Sharing Land, Work and Craft
I haven’t got a contact for Matthew Crawford (Shop Class as Soul Craft) but he’s someone else to out into the mix
I hope none of you mind the cold call and circular. I was basically suggesting to Marcin that he get you guys all together to build a house from scratch in a week and have you write about the process — or something like that. We were talking and it occurred to me that all of you have a philosophical thread that runs back to Lewis Mumford, Patrick Geddes and William Morris…..the technics thing
Anyway, I rushing this off in haste because my blasted sheep have got out again and are apparently heading up the road to a neighbouring farm. I’m really the shoddiest farmer ever.
All best Steve
Dr Stephen Quilley
School of Environment, Resources and Sustainability
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1