I’m doing a Substack Live with Marcin Jakubowski on Wednesday, 3 September at 6:30pm UK time to talk about open source philosophy, the Future Builders Academy and visions for a new economic reality.
Is your country in the middle of a housing crisis? If so, you might be used to high rents, growing wealth inequality and constant stream of politicians and pundits wringing their hands as they try to explain how we got into this mess.
If you listen closely, you’ll notice they’re often skirting around an uncomfortable truth. Housing crises happen when we don’t build enough houses. But why don’t we build enough houses?
The politically inconvenient reason is that existing home owners aren’t incentivised to support house construction. The more houses on the market, the less your home is worth. Construction is also expensive, mired in red tape, and takes a long time.
The system is fundamentally broken. Market forces incentivise us to get on the property ladder, and then to set fire to the rungs beneath us so that nobody else can climb up. Moloch needs a good home to rest his cloven feet, after all.
I hadn’t thought deeply about the alternatives until I met Marcin Jakubowski. Marcin heads up Open Source Ecology, a not-for-profit best known for creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open-source library of the fifty machines required to build a small, sustainable civilisation. Check out Marcin’s TED talk here.
OSE has developed a revolutionary approach to house construction, and we were introduced by a mutual friend because Marcin needed to get the word out. I was amazed when I heard what it was, and after working with Marcin over the last few months I’ve felt increasingly excited about what they could achieve.
The average home in the US costs around $180,000 to build, involves dozens of contractors and proprietary designs, and takes at least six months. Open Source Ecology can build the same home with a ‘swarm’ of 24 people for $100,000… in just five days. Here’s one of their houses for sale on Zillow.
Now, they’ve launched The Future Builders Academy to train people how to build houses like this. If you want to start a new career and contribute to a better social and economic paradigm, this might be what you’ve been looking for.
You might be at the start of your career (or know a young person who is), or thinking of transitioning from what you’re doing now into something more meaningful and AI-resilient. Alternatively, you might want to learn how to build your own home and avoid a huge mortgage. The Future Builders Academy is open for submissions, and you can find out more here.
Kainos has teamed up with OSE to launch the Future Builders Academy, including producing this film, naming the academy, giving Open Source Ecology a rebrand and creating an upcoming social media campaign.
A shout out to design director Al Duckworth for the rebrand, Whetham Allpress for editing the film, and Perry Sinclair for the upcoming social films and campaign (keep an eye on the Open Source Ecology Instagram and YouTube)
If you have a project you want to communicate to the world, get in touch with us on info@studiokainos.com
