Bill of Rights, Bill of Obligations, Bill of Materials

Assemblies, Subassemblies and Intermediate Assemblies of Civilization

Rights versus rights. Obligations versus obligations. Materials versus materials.

What is possible is not independent of what we believe to be possible. The possibility of such developments in the practical world depends upon their being grasped imaginatively by the people who make the practical world work.

—Neil MacCormick

In The Bill of Obligations, Richard Haass argues that for American democracy to survive, or better yet thrive, the very idea of citizenship must be revised and expanded. The Bill of Rights is at the center of our Constitution, yet our most intractable conflicts often emerge from contrasting views as to what our rights ought to be. As former Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer pointed out, “Many of our cases, the most difficult ones, are not about right versus wrong. They are about right versus right.” The lesson is clear: rights alone cannot provide the basis for a functioning, much less flourishing, democracy.

But there is a cure: to place obligations on an equal footing with rights. The ten obligations that Haass introduces here are essential for healing our divisions and safeguarding the country’s future. These obligations reenvision what it means to be an American citizen. They represent commitments that are made to citizens and to the country to uphold democracy and counter the growing apathy, anger, selfishness, division, disinformation, and violence that threaten us all.

The author highlights the idea of rights and their limits and the causes and consequences of democratic deterioration. He provides a primer of the structure and history of American democracy and how rights came to occupy so central a place within it. The obligations outlined by Haass are as follows:

1. Be informed

2. Get involved

3. Stay open to compromise

4. Remain civil

5. Reject violence

6. Value norms

7. Promote the common good

8. Respect government service

9. Support the teaching of civics

10. Put country first 

In an earlier rendition of material intelligence, I touched on the core idea of confederation as pertaining to the American experiment, and also put forward eigenfederalism as the foreseeable final state of the natural progression towards a minimum energy United States. Battles between federalists and antifederalists led to amendments to the leading law of the land, namely the Bill of Rights. The reason I find this codex so fascinating is that with the increasing proliferation of digital tools to define, describe, predict, and prescribe physical phenomena with increasing precision and accuracy, collectives of individuals will inexorably form– they may already have– around the creation of assets in digital space, and the instantiation of these in physical space. Think fabless design.

If you can accept this axiom, the next logical question is then, how do you trivialize the obtainment– and increase the rate of sourcing of– the physical resources and processing capabilities needed to create the comprehensive list of parts, items, assemblies, subassemblies, intermediate assemblies, documents, drawings, and other materials required to create a product?

A bill of materials (BOM) is an extensive list of raw materials, components, and instructions required to construct, manufacture, or repair a product or service. A bill of materials usually appears in a hierarchical format, with the highest level displaying the finished product and the bottom level showing individual components and materials.

There are different types of bills of materials. Engineering BOMs are specific to engineering used in the design process; manufacturing BOMs are specific to the manufacturing used in the assembly process.

By extension of that logic, how does the American layman actively explore the sample space of materials in civilization’s Overton window to make the right decisions in materials selection confidently, outside of dominant designs?

Take this one step further, and the aforementioned collective of individuals will have to come to grips with the reality of moving materials– both old and novel– formerly outside of the politically acceptable range of building blocks into the mainstream via scalable distributed synthesis, processing and facile logistics, to be able to churn out products with increasing complexity at a granular level.

My final query is then how to increase the cycle time of this loop till we get to a point where it becomes trivial to decouple the different geographies to which people are confined to and the intelligence they are able to harness to exploit the land (before conquest even becomes an option).

I argue that the technocapital machine is not as effective in passive mode when it comes to this, and that this requires a Palantir with sights set on the material basis of civilization, constantly running genetic algorithms till we achieve more complex reliable building blocks with higher levels of scalable dimensional control across all length scales.

On the ‘nanoscale’ between individuals and governments, small indie collectives must be empowered to use high-leverage tools to design in the digital space, but must also be allocated prototyping, manufacturing and distribution in a set of seamless protocols that incentivize a new type of creator economy.

Scientific research and development often occurs in starts and stops: insights and innovations grow rapidly out of new research fields, but over time, the low hanging fruit is picked off, bottlenecks arise, and progress dwindles. Overcoming these bottlenecks can be extremely rewarding because of the potential to trigger a cascade of follow-on research. Yet, university labs and commercial organizations are not always incentivized to tackle these challenges. Academic incentives disfavor medium- to large-scale teamwork across disciplines and projects with a low possibility of publishable results, while commercial profit motive precludes the production of public goods, so projects that fall in between academic and commercial incentives often go untouched.

Across the mesoscale, focused research organizations (FROs), are a new type of non-profit research organization designed for this middle ground. FROs are structured like start-ups with tightly coordinated, medium-sized teams that allow them to engineer and scale solutions in a way for which university labs are ill-suited. FROs focus on solving well-defined challenges to produce public goods that are neither profitable nor publishable: processes, tools, and datasets that enable the use of new research methods and accelerate the pace of scientific research. Successful large-scale research collaborations of the past like the Large Hadron Collider and the Human Genome Project could be considered similar such projects since they produced tools and datasets that enabled new particle physics and genomics research, though they’re of a far larger size and scope. While we may only fund one or two such large scale projects in each generation, there are plenty of mid-scale problems that could be economically solved with a FRO.

Maximizing the number of meta-experiments in technocapitalism leads to novel assemblies, and subassemblies of civilization such as these, so it is important to ask what the Bill of Materials look like:

1. Be aware (of the range of engineering materials)

2. Get involved (in materials science, manufacturing, robotics and chemical engineering)

3. Stay open to compromise (because eventually, a million materials can meet your requirements, however complex they may be)

4. Remain civil (because there will be no need to fight over critical materials)

5. Reject violence (and blood diamonds; those are made in the lab now)

6. Value norms (by grokking tacit knowledge that accrues from others’ experience and age, questioning regulations not grounded in physics, really understanding product design, materials requirements planning, and enterprise resource planning; cost minimization will eventually be less of a profit driver and aesthetics are all you need)

7. Promote the common good (the common good being the eventual ubiquity of all engineering materials, their complements and substitutes available for indie product designers to rearrange into products to be sold)

8. Respect the research apparatus, and the near-infinite derivatives of subassemblies (such as focused research organizations) that shall arise to solve foundational engineering problems for the thrill of it.

9. Support the teaching of applied physics, computational sciences, and toolmaking

10. Put civilization first, but project (engineering) leadership through your respective countries by solving global problems such that the only individual course of action worldwide is to self-actualize.

Here is an excerpt from Howard Bloom’s The Lucifer Principle that argues that social groups are the primary "unit of selection" on genes and human psychological development. Perhaps, social groups could be primary units of materials selection, and not just the free markets.

“Think of the brain as a society—a society of subassemblies cooperating to learn about the world. A society is a brain, a learning device that works according to the principles that drive a neural net. For the communal learning machine operates by turning up the pace of elements that are needed and shutting down the speed of those that aren’t. Their job is gathering information, weighing it, and spreading it to each other. For [materials], as we will soon see, are the extinguishable junction points in the neural net, the disposable elements that make the social [manufacturing] machine work. The only way to assure a win is to place a tremendous number of bets. The strategy is one of the favorite ploys of the network mind. For any evolving system, innovations and strategies that focus resources into the system, while at the same time stabilizing the web of energetic interconnections of that system, will be selected for.

[This future we must self-correct towards shall consist of infinite subassemblies of people designing infinite subassemblies of atoms with rapid distribution and impeccable reliability]. One imperative: Gather a group together and awaken them with these words. Take all those who find themselves in the condition that I describe and weld them into a mighty force that will impose its dominion on [the material basis of civilization]. The successful meme, like any parasite, has barbs with which to prevent the would-be rationalist from shaking it out of his system.”

If the Bill of Rights spells out Americans’ rights in relation to their government, and the proposed Bill of Obligations delineates ways by which Americans can be held accountable to their inalienable rights, then the Bill of Materials must be American leadership and accountability codified at a quantum-mechanical level, and a radical ownership of the material basis of civilization, in a decentralized, massively parallel format, with room in set regulations and standards for emergent effects in rapid prototyping and scaling to pan out. The very idea of what it means to be an American citizen must further be updated in this sense.

The appeal of prophets often lies in their ability to paint a picture of an irresistible Utopia and to convince us that this better world is almost within our grasp.

The truth is less Utopia and more Polytopia (with less physical warfare, and more material warfare).

The future is less BYOB (bring your own bill) and more BYOW (build your own world).

It is less Sid Meier’s Civilization VI and more Infinite Dimensional Minecraft.