Internal Notes for Barn Futurism Vignette
by Charles Rosenbauer
The vignette takes place in the countryside. Lots of fields and trees.
Almost every house has a barn. Some barns are agricultural in purpose, but in general they are simply large utility buildings — personal capital, optimized for the spaciousness that rural areas provide. They can be used for a variety of purposes: agriculture, storage, social events, workshops, startup workspaces, and more.
Barns also have the opportunity to be beautiful in a way that generic, rectangular, gray sheds are not. They are practical buildings, but may have more care put into their design, as well as having a history of diverse barn aesthetics to take design ideas from.
Rural areas are filled with people who often have actively chosen not to live in the city. In a world where the majority of people live in the city, this often results in more than a few very strange people living in the country, and the increased isolation and barrier to communication that this lifestyle provides (at least as an option for those who choose to live it in that way) can support eccentricities. There may be a few very strange people who live in the area who are occasionally the subject of stories.
Rural areas may also be filled with the kind of people who desire large amounts of space. Collectors and hoarders, who perhaps may serve as valuable sources of diverse, old machinery and items, though often some repairs may be necessary. Salvage and scrapyards are common as well. Old traditions and technologies often survive longer out here; antique stores and historical societies aren’t too uncommon. Seeing someone using some surprisingly old machinery may not be out of the ordinary; my dad owns and regularly uses a cement mixer that’s close to a century old. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.
Some of the technologies of today may be old-fashioned items in people’s collections of the future.
Not everyone in the countryside is a hermit, of course. Meeting people is less regular; socialization is more intentional. When things are more spread apart, people must drive and travel frequently, often fairly far. Sparse traffic and high speed limits make long-distance travel reasonably quick, and self-driving cars may in fact work well in such areas, at least in places with suitable terrain.
Some social events, such as bonfires, can occur regularly, weather permitting. Some other events may be seasonal and based on conditions of the people involved; for example, someone who owns a number of apple trees may have an annual apple-pressing party. Fishing and hunting events may revolve around the seasons for these things. Food-related events, particularly focused on bulk production of niche food items, are a valuable social technology. People come together to make some food together — perhaps apple cider, sauerkraut, some kind of sausage from a niche animal someone farms or hunts — and help to produce the food while socializing, and at the end can take some of it home.
Many rural people own heavy equipment. If you live in the city, it may be pretty uncommon to know someone who owns a tractor, or a skid-steer, or an excavator, or a cement mixer, or a dump truck. In the countryside, it may be uncommon to not know such a person. Much of this equipment may be somewhat old and heavily repaired. While perhaps you can pay someone to do work for you, in many cases barter may suffice. “I’ll pour cement for your new shed if you cut down this tree for me and buy me some beer” is the kind of exchange to expect.
The vignette takes place near a freight railway, along which numerous barns connect. These specific barns are primarily industrial and agricultural, with a few startups. Medium-scale business within the reach of small-scale teams and even families is possible, and perhaps even common out here. The freight train is much slower than most cars and trucks in the area, and is mostly optimized for efficiency. It carries bulk goods cheaply between local companies on the line, as well as to nearby shipping ports, where much longer-distance transport is easy.
Today, US freight rail costs approximately $0.04 per ton per mile. Moving a ton of cargo 50 miles costs $2. A 20-foot shipping container has a weight limit of 28 tons, or approximately $1.12 per mile to transport. With electric rail that utilizes cheaper electricity and regenerative braking, this cost is likely to be much lower.
It’s likely that modern freight rail is far from exploiting computational logistics to its full potential, and a great deal of additional use cases could be provided by leaning into this more heavily. Digitally-controlled railroad switches could route trains with much greater flexibility, and autonomous cranes could load, unload, and sort containers automatically. Two-lane rail with regular switches would permit bidirectional traffic and routing around stopped trains. It’s not uncommon for trains today to make stops directly at major factories, and with an increased logistical budget this may be able to support a larger number of smaller stops.
If the supply of freight rail increases over time and the cost to operate it drops, the distance that things can be shipped affordably increases. This also means that the complexity of supply chains, which may involve shipping things back and forth between many different locations, can also increase. Lower rail costs can result in lower prices, but may also allow for less efficient strategies as well. Some companies may rely on longer trains for more efficiency; others may benefit from shorter trains that make more frequent stops, even if costs are somewhat higher.
It may also make sense for supply chains to consolidate onto individual rail lines; companies can ship things relatively short distances to other companies on the same rail rather than shipping things much further distances to a company much further away. The rails are lined with both large manufacturers for large-scale production and small barns for startups and bespoke manufacturers.
The highest-complexity and longest supply chains will likely still rely heavily on much cheaper water transport, as well as cheap, bulk commodities such as ore, lumber, steel, and grain.
The startup in the vignette is imagined to be aiming to eventually fill a role like an old manufacturing company such as Allis-Chalmers, which manufactured a very wide variety of machinery across mining, agriculture, construction, power generation, textiles, and many other industries. The “amphibious vehicle” idea specifically came from a line of amphibious ATVs that they produced in the 1980s; these vehicles are still in use and continue to have demand, despite the company that produced them being defunct for decades. The startup is starting small, and focusing on niche products such as amphibious vehicles. We are assuming they are being produced in Texas because of local supply chains and then being shipped out to some place like Florida.
The event in the vignette is imagined to be a blend between Silicon Valley and rural social technologies — like a hackathon meets a county fair. In many cases, the dynamics of a particular type of social event may be shaped by practical constraints; there may be many idealistic approaches to sharing innovations that are made impractical by the business realities of production, though these may take very different forms when it comes to, for example, software. Rural areas often maintain a much larger vocabulary of social technologies, and may be able to blend something that works in the tech sector with a wider variety of tools if it suits their needs.
It’s also imagined that computing technology — both hardware and software — has become much simpler and easier to use and tinker with, though this will likely be expanded upon in greater depth in future stories and vignettes.
