Institute For The Future

Stewart Brand on squatter innovation

Stewart Brand (the subject of a great new book by Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, by the way) is interviewed in Business Week about "Learning from Informal Urban Economies."

 

What's interesting is that nations have figured out that squatters simply aren't going away. They're realizing they have to be finessed rather than crushed. An interesting parallel is open-source culture. In the high-tech world, the street finds uses for things.... Squatters operate in the same way. Just getting by takes a lot of creativity. And now nations and businesses are seeing, perhaps thanks to the open-source movement, that everything that isn't a crime has an application....

Sometimes, when money isn't the most important thing and wowing peers is the main event, innovation occurs.

 

The short slide show is also worth a look.

The article resonates with a couple TYF pieces from last year, particularly the social cities and light infrastructure essays. And Doubtless Brand (echoing Prahalad, Clay Christensen, Muhammad Yunus, and others) is right that much can be learned from squatter cities, favels, etc.. The concept of the "base of the pyramid" is already well-established; still, as always, Brand's take on the idea is interesting, even vivid.

One thing about the piece, though, that struck a discordant note: its take is a bit "We [in the Bay Area] Are the World." It describes Sausalito as a squatter community-turned-gentrified San Francisco suburb. Favelas are like Burning Man, the struggle to get electricity is like coding Linux, people hauling water to their homes is entrepreneurship.

 

[T]he street finds uses for things. The Internet is rife with things people are doing for free.

And then someone figures out how to make it commercial. Linux applications are a great example. There's so much innovation and creativity in free domain. And large numbers count. Events such as Burning Man produce a lot of creative things. Sometimes, when money isn't the most important thing and wowing peers is the main event, innovation occurs.

Squatters operate in the same way.

 

Metaphors are inescapable, but trying to understand the world on its own terms is a worthy ideal. However, I suspect that this kind of approach is inevitable when writing about Brand: the article describes the WELL as "an online community that's a predecessor of MySpace."

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