Degrees of Freedom Update 4: "The Where" and Second Preorder Sale!

Hi friend, 

I’m spending the month back in Bristol, UK: the city where much of Degrees of Freedom was written. As such, I thought this would be a great time to talk about the specific locations in Bristol where I worked on the book, and how the history of Bristol parallels the writing in Degrees of Freedom.

Before I get to that, let me also alert you to this book’s second preorder sale! While the book will be free to read in digital form upon launch, this is a great way to buy a physical copy at reduced price if you’re a bibliophile like me.

Preorder Sale… and how to read the book for free!

Degrees of Freedom is now available for pre-order on websites like Bookshop.org ($90), The MIT Press Bookstore ($75), Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. Of special note, Barnes & Noble Rewards and Premium Members get 25% off all pre-orders from July 8th through 11th with coupon code PREORDER25, and Premium Members get an additional 10% off, meaning that for the next three days, the book is ~$56, ~$49 for B&N Premium members. So, if you’re hoping to buy a physical copy of the book, I’d recommend pre-ordering it via B&N this week.

However, $49 is still a lot for a book for most people, so while I’d love for you to use this opportunity to preorder the book at a more reasonable price, please remember that once the book is published, the PDF version will be available FOR FREE on the MIT Press website. Once the link to the Open Access version is up online, I'll share it in this newsletter.

PREORDER NOW WITH CODE PREORDER25 →

“The Where” of Degrees of Freedom

Okay, with that out of the way, let’s talk about where I wrote Degrees of Freedom!

On an early morning in August 2023, I stood in the rain on Cabot Hill, watching the skies. As I watched, one, then two, then a flood of colorful orbs emerged over the forested hills and sailed toward me. It was the opening launch of the Bristol Balloon Fiesta, an annual event that sees over 100 hot air balloons flown over the city. Despite the stormclouds in the sky, the atmosphere was one of eager anticipation: great things were coming. The Balloon Fiesta was a magical welcome to Bristol; and also marked the start of what would be four months of writing, writing, writing, as I took the rough notes I’d drafted over the preceding eight months, and turned them into a cohesive manuscript.

Bristol is a harbor town ten miles inland along the River Avon from the Bristol Channel, which separates Wales from the English counties of Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset. We’d chosen Bristol for both personal and professional reasons. We’d fallen in love with the city after visiting it a year prior when passing through en route to London from a week in Wales. But beyond its charm, Bristol was also home to the Bristol Robotics Laboratory — one of the largest robotics centers in the world.

Bristol is a city known for its engineering history. Two of its key sights are the stunning Clifton Suspension Bridge (the longest bridge in the world of its time) and the S. S. Great Britain (the largest ship in the world of its time), both designed by the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who designed the Great Western Railway as well as the first transatlantic steamship.

The museum that sits alongside the S. S. Great Britain is dedicated to the life of Brunel, and features a two-story tall relief of Brunel alongside exhibits discussing the positive and negative dimensions of the complicated character. Looking up at Brunel from the exhibit floor, its easy to see why Bristolians like W. Grey Walter (who created some of the first mobile robots in 1950) would be inspired to pursue their own works of engineering in continuation of Brunel’s legacy.

On the other hand, I was aware that this larger-than-life history obscured some of the broader context surrounding the S. S. Great Britain, whose construction was financed by wealthy men whose families had made their fortunes in the slave trade, and who were especially flush with cash after having been massively compensated by government reparations accompanying the abolition of slavery.

This simultaneous awareness of past glories and horrors was salient throughout Bristol. Much of my writing took place, for example, in two cafes (Society Cafe and Watershed Cafe), which face each other across the Bristol Harborside. The Bristol Harborside is absolutely gorgeous; a tree-lined stretch of stone walkways lined with bars and cafes. Yet like the S. S. Great Britain, the beauty of its construction was only made possible through riches bestowed on the city by its participation in the slave trade.

While landmarks like the Bristol Harborside remind us of the glories and horrors of Bristol’s past, they also represent sites of activism, signaling the ways that Bristol is pushing forward to create an exciting, just, and equitable future.

Bristol has a long history of activism, protest, and counterculture. This is visible in the city through the street art and graffiti that can be seen throughout the city (Banksy got his start in Bristol, after all), and through intersecting subcultures like its notably inclusive skater scene.

At the other end of the harborside sits the plaza where Colston’s statue once stood. Today it is a site of gathering and community — and at times a site of more explicit protest and activism.

Between these two endpoints sits the Watershed Cafe: an independent film center, bar, and cafe, that regularly hosts conferences and community events, and which is home to the Pervasive Media Studio: an intentionally diverse and inclusive creative technology center that hosts monthly technology exhibitions and weekly public seminars on efforts to leverage the city’s engineering and artistic prowess to create a more just and equitable future for the city. One of the events hosted at Watershed during my time there in 2023 was the Festival of the Future City, which brought together community members, leaders, and activists from across Bristol to envision what future of Bristol they wanted to build together. As part of this event, a ~175 page hardcover book of essays on the future of Bristol (which you can read here) was distributed for free at the Watershed. The collection of essays is a fascinating look into how the city sees itself, acknowledges its historical legacy, and the range of solutions its community members envision as they work to move forward together.

Overall, I found Bristol to be not only a beautiful and vibrant city, but also an inspiration, and a template for how a community can collectively acknowledge its legacy of slavery, and work together to intentionally push toward a more equitable future. I hope that Degrees of Freedom can spur the same change in the robotics community, by acknowledging the ways that robotics is similarly grounded in a legacy of slavery, and by showing the ways that roboticists might move forward together to subvert rather than reinforce the power structures it has inherited from that legacy.

Thanks for reading,

Tom

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