Al and I were talking on the podcast about Dan Maloney’s recent article about how lead and silver are refined, and the possibility that someone could fully understand modern cell phones. This led Al to question the complexity of the built world we live in. If you think hard enough about what’s around you right now, you can probably recreate about 0% of it from first principles again.
In my opinion, lead smelting and mobile phone manufacturing are two sides of the same coin. The process of extracting lead from galena is simple enough to understand, but in practice it is laborious and dangerous. Cell phones, on the other hand, are so complex that I’d wager that no one could describe them in enough detail to recreate all the parts. That’s why mobile phones are manufactured by companies with hundreds of engineers and decades of technology experience. The only way to build a mobile phone is to divide complex tasks into many subsystems.
Although lead smelting is simple in principle, it is prohibitively expensive in practice, making it a bad DIY project. Building a mobile phone from scratch doesn’t make sense in principle, but ironically, it’s actually perfectly doable if you’re willing to accept some abstractions.
In fact, last week we saw an almost entirely open source build of a simple smartphone, and the secret to making it work is knowing the limits of DIY. For example, a cell modem is a black box. It’s an abstract device that can send and receive data and handles the wireless part of the phone, which would take forever to design from scratch. However, you don’t need to understand its inner workings to use it. Knowing where your project’s DIY limitations are and whether you’re willing to accept abstractions and move on is key to seeing your project through.
Of course, in an ideal world, you’d want your cell modem to be like smelting lead. This makes sense in principle, but it’s not worth DIYing in practice. And of course, there are people who can hack cell modem firmware or do radio engineering. But despite my strong DIY urges, I have to admit that the inherent complexity of the module makes it worth treating it as a black box. Perhaps this is the practical limit of DIY.
