With a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a doctorate in physics from the University of Wisconsin, Jakubowski had spent most of his life in school. While his peers kick-started their shiny new corporate careers, he followed a different path after he finished his degree in 2003: He bought a tractor to start a farm in Maysville, Missouri, eager to prove his ideas about abundance. “It was a clear decision to give up the office cubicle or high-level research job, which is so focused on tiny issues that one never gets to work on the big picture,” he says. But in just a short few months, his tractor broke down—and he soon went broke.
Every time his tractor malfunctioned, he had no choice but to pay John Deere for repairs—even if he knew how to fix the problem on his own. John Deere, the world’s largest manufacturer of agricultural equipment, continues to prohibit farmers from repairing their own tractors (except in Colorado, where farmers were granted a right to repair by state law in 2023). Fixing your own tractor voids any insurance or warranty, much like jailbreaking your iPhone.
Today, large agricultural manufacturers have centralized control over the market, and most commercial tractors are built with proprietary parts. Every year, farmers pay $1.2 billion in repair costs and lose an estimated $3 billion whenever their tractors break down, entirely because large agricultural manufacturers have lobbied against the right to repair since the ’90s. Currently there are class action lawsuits involving hundreds of farmers fighting for their right to do so.
“The machines own farmers. The farmers don’t own [the machines],” Jakubowski says. He grew certain that self-sufficiency relied on agricultural autonomy, which could be achieved only through free access to technology. So he set out to apply the principles of open-source software to hardware. He figured that if farmers could have access to the instructions and materials required to build their own tractors, not only would they be able to repair them, but they’d also be able to customize the vehicles for their needs. Life-changing technology should be available to all, he thought, not controlled by a select few. So, with an understanding of mechanical engineering, Jakubowski built his own tractor and put all his schematics online on his platform Open Source Ecology.
That tractor Jakubowski built is designed to be taken apart. It’s a critical part of the GVCS, a collection of plug-and-play machines that can “build a thriving economy anywhere in the world … from scratch.” The GVCS includes a 3D printer, a self-contained hydraulic power unit called the Power Cube, and more, each designed to be reconfigured for multiple purposes. There’s even a GVCS micro-home. You can use the Power Cube to power a brick press, a sawmill, a car, a CNC mill, or a bioplastic extruder, and you can build wind turbines with the frames that are used in the home.
Jakubowski compares the GVCS to Lego blocks and cites the Linux ecosystem as his inspiration. In the same way that Linux’s source code is free to inspect, modify, and redistribute, all the instructions you need to build and repurpose a GVCS machine are freely accessible online. Jakubowski envisions a future in which the GVCS parallels the Linux infrastructure, with custom tools built to optimize agriculture, construction, and material fabrication in localized contexts. “The [final form of the GVCS] must be proven to allow efficient production of food, shelter, consumer goods, cars, fuel, and other goods—except for exotic imports (coffee, bananas, advanced semiconductors),” he wrote on his Open Source Ecology wiki.
The ethos of GVCS is reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural publication that offered a combination of reviews, DIY manuals, and survival guides between 1968 and 1972. Founded by Stewart Brand, the publication had the slogan “Access to tools” and was famous for promoting self-sufficiency. It heavily featured the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, an American architect known for his geodesic domes (lightweight structures that can be built using recycled materials) and for coining the term “ephemeralization,” which refers to the ability of technology to let us do more with less material, energy, and effort.