The Critical Engineering Manifesto
 

https://criticalengineering.org/

The Critical Engineering Working Group
Berlin, October 2011-2019
Julian Oliver
Gordan Savičić
Danja Vasiliev

THE CRITICAL ENGINEERING MANIFESTO

0. The Critical Engineer considers Engineering to be the most transformative language of our time, shaping the way we move, communicate and think. It is the work of the Critical Engineer to study and exploit this language, exposing its influence.

1. The Critical Engineer considers any technology depended upon to be both a challenge and a threat. The greater the dependence on a technology the greater the need to study and expose its inner workings, regardless of ownership or legal provision.

2. The Critical Engineer raises awareness that with each technological advance our techno-political literacy is challenged.

3. The Critical Engineer deconstructs and incites suspicion of rich user experiences.

4. The Critical Engineer looks beyond the "awe of implementation" to determine methods of influence and their specific effects.

5. The Critical Engineer recognises that each work of engineering engineers its user, proportional to that user's dependency upon it.

6. The Critical Engineer expands "machine" to describe interrelationships encompassing devices, bodies, agents, forces and networks.

7. The Critical Engineer observes the space between the production and consumption of technology. Acting rapidly to changes in this space, the Critical Engineer serves to expose moments of imbalance and deception.

8. The Critical Engineer looks to the history of art, architecture, activism, philosophy and invention and finds exemplary works of Critical Engineering. Strategies, ideas and agendas from these disciplines will be adopted, re-purposed and deployed.

9. The Critical Engineer notes that written code expands into social and psychological realms, regulating behaviour between people and the machines they interact with. By understanding this, the Critical Engineer seeks to reconstruct user-constraints and social action through means of digital excavation.

10. The Critical Engineer considers the exploit to be the most desirable form of exposure.

Download English language version of Manifesto as a printable PDF
(sha256sum 1b542dc224800f6266334f96b13ba65ea6ecac1cd058d913ae c8910f6ce3d09f).

Copyright Oliver, Savičić, Vasiliev 2011-2017, GNU Free Documentation License v1.3.

Critical Engineering intensive training | Announcement Newsletter

Workshops: NETWORKSHOP, UNIX CLI, OTHERNET

Mostly, a European group of computer engineers it seems to me, they collaborate with artists, activists, and writers. Here is a short video presentation from, I think, a 2018 conference by the group.

https://vimeo.com/294955998

And this interview with one of the authors of the "manifesto" ...

Critical Engineering: An interview with Julian Oliver · Avant.org

Oliver's final comment in the interview, which is mostly about technological transparency, is this:

"Engineering needs to break up with its own narrative that it exists only in service to science and industry. Engineering has a utility addiction and there needs to be at least some measure of a dialogic, critically productive relationship with the practice. It’s a dangerous world if engineering is not allowed to become a critical practice — a discursive practice that can own its cultural heritage and impact."

Is that a threat? This strikes me as slathering a thick layer of politics onto engineering. Remember Gamergate?
Maybe instead of 'exploiting' and 'exposing' just design specifications?

I hold R. B. Fuller's engineering philosophy in higher regard. Quoth the DDG:

No, not a threat. More like a concern, maybe almost a fear, about what engineering introduces into human life if it does not have a critical practice. "Critical" here has a somewhat particular meaning that, while not political in the narrower sense of party politics or government, is nonetheless about power in social and economic life. It is a different perspective than what Fuller seems to be about. Critical perspectives would not be looking for a singular "planetary" context with prescriptive implications, as referenced in one of your links re: Fuller. That would be because of assumptions embedded in the definition of the context. Similarly, "common sense" would not be a prescriptive rhetorical figure because of how notions of common sense are cultural and constructed, even though they seem natural to us.

By exploit, I think they mean a pathway for software hacking. But I am not sure.

I find this working group interesting, but I do not post it here to endorse it or promote it. I would say though, that the emergent field Fuller seemed to be about would be a field of activity these "critical engineers" are also interested in. Your identification of the overlapping field of interest between the two is neat.

It's the thin edge of their wedge. Monkey-wrenching and trolling.

I'm just going by what you posted about them. But I can see the pattern.

End Federal Funding for Critical Theory in Higher Education
Created by M.L. on June 20, 2020
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/pet...gher-education
It's only a petition. They have one month to get 100,000 signatures.

edit:
Currently listening to Joe Rogan interviewing Brett Weinstein. It about critical theory and how 'science is racist'. https://youtu.be/pRCzZp1J0v0

Fuller didn't consider a singular context, he re-considered "an Integral of Truths". He rewrote the Lord's Prayer every night as a self-discipline.

Look at what I found — a seven minute Youtube video from 2011 with only 19[+] views!

Rethinking_The_Lord's_Prayer_by_Buckminster_Fuller .flv

Somebody is clearly pretty defensive about discourses on ethics and power. I'd say that ethicists can contribute quite a lot to the economy if they prevent wasteful and destructive errors. And ethics in engineering is a part of the curriculum in at least some engineering schools it seems. To me, EM's interest in fuel economy is also an ethical interest. My interest in efficiency of these vehicles is not just the money but a bunch of other interests and priorities, too. Many are simply personal values (learning, for example). EM discussions on efficiency often critically analyse marketing, regulation, and design in order to understand them intrinsically but also to consider what is valuable or desireable for drivers, the environment, or the economy. Those are at least potentially ethics conversations on The Good, benefit, beauty, or right and ought. That seems to be part of what Fuller was about in the descriptions you provided and it's clearly an implied aspect of this "critical engineering" idea.

I look at this manifesto as having language and assumptions with a particular humanist flavor. There are professional standards and legal requirements for due diligence especially in Quality Assurance. I have a Judeo-Christian world view which has led me to measuring human activity by how it improves Safety, Productivity, Quality, and Respect. Technology as material objects have no sense of morality. Economic and social goals that employ technology have moral implications.

'Ethicist' is moving the goalpost. The information you provided suggests critical theory is involved. So I looked deeper:

https://discourse.criticalengineering.org/

This sounds more like 2600 or the Chaos Computer Club. ...without looking further.
Procrustean Bed much?

The hacking aspects of the Critical Engineering working group are less interesting to me than something else, which I think I see related to your point here, Grant-53. It's not just that humans use technology. It is also that the technology becomes a big part of our economic and social context--almost as if it is using us. Cars almost dominate everyday life in Southern California, where I live, and so I can almost feel what they mean when they write that technologies expand "into social and psychological realms, regulating behaviour between people and the machines they interact with..." I am less interested in digital code than in the whole machine, especially these cars we hack and use as the basis for this online community. There have always been profound moral implications to cars in our culture: like the machine-mediated sexuality and competition in the movie "American Graffiti."

critical theory
 

I'd be more than happy with critical thinking. If the general population could master that, providing for the general welfare would fall into place by default.
But that's exactly why a Ronald Reagan would wittingly defund it, killing it in the crib.
Some would rather that light not be shined into certain darkened corners.

Ponder the distinction between critical thinking and critical theory. Words matter. It's like the distinction between anarchy and anarchism.
Say What?

We have 'a Ronald Reagan'. He's talking about going to Mars.

This is critical thinking, in the sense of analysis of power and the implicit and connotative meanings of public rhetoric on engineering and its marketing. That by the way is what the point about "rich user experiences" would be pointing toward, if I understand correctly. We are routinely marketed new technologies with an emphasis on rhetoric thickly layered with connotations of freedom or convenience or labor saving. But the full meaning of new technologies, especially in the software department it seems to me, is often obscured. The ethical and power implications. How our place as individuals in society changes. The full range of such things is rarely if ever as fully disclosed or discussed.

I would rather we not bring political figures or parties into this. Critical thinking is not a party issue. And the "manifesto," such as it is, is not about such politics per se. It is about ethics and the analysis of power.

The hair you appear to be splitting is exceedingly fine. Thinking critically about this theory...
Rather than best practices then, it's a lever to dismantle the status quo.

thinking / political
 

If we had critical thinking, it would cover everything they seem to be concerned with.
As to 'politics', I was just commenting on a historical fact, written about by critical thinkers like Carl Sagan and Michael Shermer, germane to the discussion.

Certainly germane. Tell me more. I just don't wanna debate political figures or politics or petitions for federal action. I meant no offense. This is about the ideas these self-described "critical engineers" raise as the the ethical and power relationships between people and technology. I placed it in this subforum hoping we could discuss core EM interests in light of the manifesto. For example, the way cars are increasingly treated like smart phones, and we hackers not permitted access to the ECU or software as in the 1990s and early 00s. Or how fuel economy is marketted as a product of a gasoline or gas additive purchase when a host of simple--free--hypermiling techniques are far better. I think that manifesto is very EM relevant.

"dismantle the status quo" is your characterization. It is not what they wrote. They wrote about exposing the influence of engineering. I think they mean software especially, it seems.

Well... Yeah... So?

Maybe they independently reinvented the language and tropes of the intersectional left. It is so far from Synergetics and Humanism I don't see a path back.

Synergetics seems interesting, but I don't yet see how it’s related to either critical assessments of human relationships mediated by technology or to engineering. I am not saying it isn't, but you didn't offer your sense of the connection. What's the connection? Even more, what's a Synergetics-inspired take on the modding and hypermiling that we do on EM? Maybe it's a stretch to try and make these connections....

Re: your “so" question... I just want to avoid political discussions. This thread is not for a political discussion. "Intersectional left" is political rhetoric. I hope its possible to talk about power, ethics, technology, and public knowledge about technology without running up flags for the left and the right. We have enough of that in life. I'm not promoting “critical engineering.” I just think they're into an interesting interdisciplinary thing.

To account for Synergetics would be to recount the inspiring story of what one individual —'Guinea Pig B' he called himself— was able to do.
https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/biography/guinea-pig-b

He was a new England Transcendentalist like his aunt. He was considered the Ur-environmentalist. He wanted flying cars.

https://ecomodder.com/forum/member-f...f5307910-o.jpg

As for the politics — I didn't want to use the word left but I was lazy. I don't have words (*cough*Frankfurt School Marxist*cough*) to describe the systematic dismantling of the statues and institutions that have brought us to this point in history.

Washington freed his slaves (on his deathbed) and Jefferson created the Navy that stopped the Barbary pirates (the ISIS of their day). That all happened before the creation of political parties, and the somewhat illusory division they have engendered.

They aren't really that far apart but there is no middle ground. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, but freebeard, though flying cars are cool, maybe, there is no analysis of power in the project and no repositioning of the reader to analyze the world we must drive through tomorrow and the day after. And while Fuller surely felt confident that his age knee the laws governing the universe well known, I am not sure physicists of our age would say the same, now that they have experimentally demonstrated "spooky action at a distance."

Here is another cool project--not as advanced as Fuller--that would be a failed critical engineering project, if it were one. But I think this could be as cool as anything the critical engineering group has attempted, like cleverly repurposing iPhone innards.

Were these guys to disassemble some of this crap and make something more useful from it, or make a fuel saving device that works and then reveal the damage it might do, or explain hypermile practices, or the placebo effect or confirmation bias or something... it may or may not be more "critical" but it would be more creative. I think there is a successful, unique opportunity in such demos, actually. But better, teach people not to trust the package or the store that sells it because the scam is revealed at a deeper level than just "look, it does not work." The scam is that any such simple device will be effective, safe for the car, and legal.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Eevg-SCQpng

'Flying car' was misdirected, he called it an 'omni-directional transport'. Amphibian would have come before flying. And of course flying cars are a Bad Idea.

Rather than theories of political power, Fuller was concerned with the power of the sovereign individual.

The only contemporary that he wasn't dismissive of was Albert Einstein. Synergetics falsifies Euclid [FFS].

' CLOSED'
 

I believe that this is where this thread is headed if we were to fully explore it.
The adult conversation necessary to cover and accurately characterize the spectrum of players involved would place it far outside of bounds of comfort for many participants. Civility would be a near-impossibility.
I'm leaving now. Best to all.

EcoModder not ready for flying cars?

OP could petition the authorities to move it to The Lounge.

Not closed yet?

I'd pointed to humanism at Permalink #17:



I think the tension between individually and collectively is at play here. Critical Theory works for the collective, Synergetics for the individual.

The closest analog I see to Fuller's philosophy at the moment is Eric Weinstein's Unitary Geometry. But I don't see what, if any, common ground may exist between the two. Here's Eric Weinstein giving it his best shot with Joe Rogan: Eric Weinstein’s Controversial New Approach to Theoretical Physics

He resorts to sports analogies. 'The stands and the pitch' is parsable but doesn't convey the difference between 4 and 14 dimensions. Fuller would point out that it takes 6 (or 12) restraints to immobilize something in 'four dimensions'. I'd love top see a rap battle between the two of them. Best comment:
More to the point of the social implications of advanced technologies:

Again, I just don't want to have a conversation politics, which is where "political power" and "sovereign individual" and "collectivity" takes us. I respect your interest in that stuff, freebeard, but I don't want to touch hot buttons like that. This is a general efficiency discussion focused on self-consciously critical thinking about technology and our relationships with it. Fuller is a pretty good example, I am learning.

Buckminster Fuller seems to me to have keyed his work to much more than just individuals. His vision of future technologies was a vision of a different future for all. That is a technological vision that is also a social vision. The Dymaxion was also a high fuel economy car, and it was not conceived as a production prototype. It was an idea promoting concept car and a deconstruction/reconstruction of the concept of a car. Hardly a practical or safe road car, the thing is almost better understood as the marriage of art and technology. That is not entirely different from this Critical Engineering gig, which emphasizes hacking ideas and objects of technological dependence for demonstrations that make people think differently and more conscientiously about their lived experience with technology.

I think a lot of our EM hacking for fuel efficiency is like that, too. Or almost like that. My own car is part art and part technological (not especially good as either, I know).

Here is another great YouTube channel. Here is a dude breaking down and reusing Tesla's "power wall" branding, using the detritus of disposable electronics, making highly functional stuff. His EV VWs are cool, too, speaking of "general efficiency discussion"! In this video he does some cool teaching. He is a hacker, and a great one. It is not Fuller and it is probably not critical engineering, but it is close to the latter in some ways, I think.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BIYPr4eKFFQ

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcM...uSa49DJFYltOTwAn hero to us all*.

Car Hacker's handbook.

http://www.opengarages.org/handbook/...kers_cover.png

I watched the first few seconds of JehuGarcia. I've been following him since he stitched together that Frankenstein 23-window and drove it to Buses by the Bay. A very inspirational person.

* You don't want to plunge into Critical Path or Synergetics I&II cold. He wrote a children's book [Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale (1975)]. The book that open the World's eye was [Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1968) ISBN 0-8093-2461-X]

Else you can TL;DR and go to [Cosmography: A Posthumous Scenario for the Future of Humanity (1992) coauthor Kiyoshi Kuromiya, ISBN 0-02-541850-5]

The Car Hacker's Handbook was interesting enough to distract me from the research & writing I get paid to do.

In their introduction they offer up their own "manifesto" (though they don't call it that). Here are the six points in what they call the reasons "Why Car Hacking Is Good for All of Us." Some of it is quite like the C.E. Manifesto in spirit, though its not the same, for sure.

1) Understanding How Your Vehicle Works
"You’ll be better able to diagnose and troubleshoot problems."

2) Working on Your Vehicle’s Electrical Systems
"Automotive electronics systems are typically closed off to all but the dealership mechanics... Learning how your vehicle’s electronics work can help you bypass this barrier."

3) Modifying Your Vehicle
"Understanding how vehicles communicate can lead to better modifications, like improved fuel consumption and use of third-party replacement parts."

4) Discovering Undocumented Features
"Discovering undocumented or disabled features and utilizing them lets you use your vehicle to its fullest potential." This will piss off the automakers because it is implicitly an assault on their profits. Those switch-on electronic features are probably often upgrades they want you to pay extra for. Must be wickedly profitable.

5) Validating the Security of Your Vehicle
They write in part that "if you learn how to hack your car, you’ll know where your vehicle is vulnerable so that you can take precautions and be a better advocate for higher safety standards."

6) Helping the Auto Industry
This one seems to have been written for the lawyers and the PR people of the world. Somebody tell Pollyanna to ring the dinner bell.

So much of the spirit of this list is in my mind similar to what one sees in the C.E. Manifesto and in some of what I am reading about Buckminster Fuller. They all place an emphasis on individual and common good (more like Fuller but also like the CE statement) and there is a transgressive attitude (more like the C.E. statement but Fuller also had transgressive tendencies). All three are not all that interested in profits.

I think they're all very much like the ethos here on EcoModder, where in pursuit of fuel economy, fun, and ecological benefits, we hack mechanically, aerodynamically, and electronically.

A quote from Fuller by a writer of a recent book about him:
"To make the world work for 100 percent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/buckmi...ilicon-valley/

That quote is Bucky in a nutshell.

I'm glad you see the connection between the three.

Car Hacker's Handbook is in the spirit of the free and open source software movement. The big proponents there are Richard Stallman and Eric S. Raymond. What do you think about this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8
Eben Moglen has quite a play list.

The world we live in today was created when Tim Berners-Lee set aside endless riches and put the intellectual property of HyperTextMarkupLanguage in the public domain.

Would Buckminster approve?
 

https://ecomodder.com/forum/attachme...1&d=1593972675

"The Turtle" is a collaborative prototype truck that certainly has aspects of engineering for the common good. These workers in Kumasi, Ghana define an efficient car is one that does not break often, is simply engineered for ease of repair, and can carry heavy loads across rough roads all day. But maybe the truck does pretty good on fuel, too. It is quite small and slow.

A master craftman on the site with whom the film makers spoke:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oRmdpGPdwCo

Here is one of the car builders talking about test driving the car:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4t660pz5Evs

The project started about 2013 when two Dutch film makers went to Ghana to follow automotive waste exports from the EU. They end up in one of Ghana's grassroots industrial districts. There they meet workers and collaborate on a vehicle that the local workers view as relevant and maximally useful.

Reports in 2013 were that the there were Dutch institutions interested in the project and an industrial training program. But it does not look like the project went any further than prototype.

I have been to a couple smaller such industrial sites in Ghana. They are amazing.

Reminds me of Gordon Murray's OX.
How about: https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WikiHouse

Two things about these two projects:
1) The reporting on both essentially stops, or tells a story of a stalled project in recent years as they try to secure backers who never materialize, it seems. The major stumbling block for both in terms of moving forward to production and distribution is relations of power.
2) The OX seems designed by outsiders to Africa, and the Turtle by insiders, and yet they have some similar ideas in some respects, as you noted, freebeard.

Okay, a third point...

3) Noticing the production/distribution challenges the Turtle team seemed to pivot to a strategy of adapting to the hardware that already gets routinely dumped on Africa as waste by wealthier countries... they designed a chassis concept that could accept parts from the three most popular SUVs alreay on the streets of Ghana. Smart.

If anyone is interested I am working on streamlined cargo bikes with a bike shop in Ghana. I will post in the Alternative Transportation thread.

I am interested. For what it is worth, I have been there twice for a couple weeks each time (work releated research trips). I have friends and contacts there. Wanna learn more about what you are into. Very interested. I will check out the other thread.

I found the video displaying the CAD "three-way" or "all-in-one" chassis design. Basically, the chassis can accept parts from all three of the most common SUV vehicles in Ghana without modification (supposedly): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OdqIHJN4GeE

One would think that the mounting points for motor, trans and suspension are relatively similar. The frame on the Ranger has predrilled holes that remained the same for 20+ years regardless of powertrain options. Mounting brackets between the options/years vary.

Yeah. I would bet the information behind this CAD did not come from the Dutch artists who created it. The workers in the Suame Magazine in Ghana would have all this knowledge from constant reassembly of delapidated vehicles dumped into their salvage yards by wealthier countries. I like to to think the workers taught the artists. A good collaboration that needs funding to proceed, but there again are the relations of power engineered into the supply chains.

Graphics technician. The only art involved was picking the colors. I'm sure the Dutch had some input, even if it's only cheer-leading.

'Power' or relations of facilitation?

I understand why you would ask the question, and I like to think in terms of facilitation, too, as an alternative to command or domination. But the distinction assumes there is a fascilitation that would be free of interpersonal power. It's really almost impossible to have such a strong distinction, especially in situations of really significant power differences. Those workers in the Suame Magazine have an autonomy that is attractive (though it comes with dangerous working conditions and poverty). But when wealthy Dutch filmmakers and designers show up talking about developing an African car and promoting it to other even wealthier people in Europe, these workers will turn their attention to the project. Facilitation therefore can no more escape the context of power than could efforts to command the labor directly. See what I mean?

A question I would have for these Dutch artists: were the workers in the Suame Magazine paid for developing and building the car? Depending on the answer, I would have followups... most importantly, how did the SMATI Turtle project develop? What are the details of the story?

I think a cooperative collaborative formal company with such workers that would return big benefits to them if successful would be cool. That does not seem to be what happened here[, but I think it would have been better "critical engineering" practice].

That's why in minarchist or [small-L] libertarian systems enforcing contracts is one of the three necessary functions.

The first time I tried to form a business with other people, we chose Cooperative over Corporation or Partnership (the fourth form is Sole Proprietor). It fell apart over power tripping among equals.

Such power tripping can happen in almost any startup enterprise. It is common for new private schools to struggle horribly within five years over internal disagreements as to authority, direction, and curriculum. Plenty of business partners in startup corps don't end up getting along, either, and somebody gets forced out. Meanwhile there are also examples of long-term successful worker-owned cooperatives around the world. Some of the most notable would be the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, the Brukman Factory in Argentina, and the Edinburgh Bicycle Cooperative. But I don't see any shame if a coop disbands after some years ...when it's time to move on... move on.

Buckminster Fuller was part of the Black Mountain College in North Carolina. That school was owned by the faculty and run democratically: Black Mountain College: A Brief Introduction - Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center ...he taught students for a while... hd them build an early version of his domes...

This EM site has cooperative aspects: we all make the content quite equally, though we don't own it. We do some pretty good "critical engineering" around here, even if it is all low-tech hacking.

Wikipedia is a version of that open democratic cooperative enterprise, too... not "worker owned cooperatives" but so what. Wikipedia is great "critical engineering" in that its "workers" have learned not just subject matter but about hacking "encyclopedia." They have reinvented editing and its all free and open to all. Over the years, the quality of wikipedia's content has improved greatly. It is a go to source and not a bad one.