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Build Yourself. | Tristan Copley Smith

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    Right now the world's productive power is controlled by a few giant corporations.
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    The products are expensive, their designs are secret, and to make things worse,
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    we are now seeing these same companies engineer their products to fail over time,
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    simply to increase profits.
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    I saw this problem and I thought we have all the tools available to make this machinery for ourselves
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    and with the internet we can distribute our designs for next to nothing.
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    So, I bought some land, and started building it.
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    From our location in Missouri, we are developing low cost modular tools,
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    that anyone can build and we are sharing our designs on the internet, free of charge.
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    People who need equipment are typically the ones who can least afford it.
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    The applications are anything from 3rd world development
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    to a dying farming community, to standard economic enterprise.
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    The point is that we make equipment available to everyone who needs it.
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    OpenSource Ecology is a project, it's... in practice we are working on the Global Village Construction Set.
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    Which is a set of the 50 industrial machines that it takes
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    to build a small civilization with modern comforts.
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    It's everything that you need to provide your energy, food, housing, and other technologies.
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    Very little true collaboration really happens, when we have the patent system, and it's like:
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    "I'm gonna pounce on you if gonna try to learn from me and do better than I did!"
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    The beautiful thing about the open-source development method is that, you produce the plans,
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    you give a lot to the community, and then stuff starts coming back.
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    And then products will be better and better, everybody wins.
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    Other day I got an email, someone who has built the compressed earth-brick press.
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    Wow! Hey that looks exactly like mine!
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    I forget exactly how I ran into open-source ecology
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    but I think I was destined to find it
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    just from my interest in natural building and open-source.
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    I just seemed to make sense to use this machine here for building our house.
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    So then I saw the designs looking at how I was going to build it,
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    I noticed that some of the code could use improving
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    and the board that does the controlling could also use some improving.
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    There's actually quite a few people who
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    would have never thought that they could build a house.
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    And by kind of like showing them: "Hey look, I've never built a house before"
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    "I've never done hydraulics before, but it seems to be working."
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    A lot of times we think this kind of work is impossible, to build your own living environment.
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    For me it's been the most transformative experience.
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    I've learned that I can do it and I want to show that to others.
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    What if everybody were to join together to make the best products,
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    most robust products that are open-source
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    that anyone has access to producing them.
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    And therefore you can run an economy in a collaborative way
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    as opposed to a competitive, wasteful way.
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    We can build this kind of stuff.
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    This mythology of incompetence or the power control
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    that got us to think that we can't do things for ourselves
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    but, we have the power.
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    So I would inspire people to go out and build yourself.
Title:
Build Yourself. | Tristan Copley Smith
Description:

BUILD YOURSELF. is a Semifinalist in the $200,000 FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition and is in the running to become the $100,000 Grand Prize Winner. It could also be named an Audience Favorite if it's among the ten that receives the most votes. If you love it, vote for it. Click on the VOTE button in the top right corner of the video player. Note that voting may not be available on all mobile platforms, and browser cookies must be enabled to vote.

In the farmlands of Missouri, an unlikely Polish physicist is developing affordable, easy to build industrial machines and sharing his designs on the Internet for free.

Director / Producer / Editor - Tristan Copley Smith
Director of Photography / Effects Editor - Drew Cox
Music Composer - Nicolas Singer
Animation - Robert Wallace
Sound Editor - Michele Caruso
Featuring - Marcin Jakubowski, Zach Dwiel
Special Thanks - Aaron Makaruk, Aaiden Williamson, Gabrielle LaBlanc, Graham Robertson, Yoonseo Kang, Parker Bonnell
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Video Language:
English

English subtitles

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