The Obama administration recently announced the creation of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII) in Youngstown, Ohio — a “public-private” consortium of manufacturing firms, universities, community colleges and nonprofits from the Ohio-West Virginia-Pennsylvania Tech Belt coinvesting with the federal government. The seed money, $30 million from the US Department of Defense, will be matched by $40 million from the consortium.
“The winning consortium,” reads the White House press release, “is led by the National Center for Defense Manufacturing and Machining and consists of leading research universities like Carnegie Mellon and Case Western Reserve University, world-class companies like Honeywell, Boeing, and IBM, innovative small manufacturers like M7 and ExOne, and community colleges spread across Eastern Ohio and Western Pennsylvania.”
When this story came to the attention of the Center for a Stateless Society, our immediate consensus was that the federal government, in pursuing this initiative, is working to regulate, cartelize, and enclose the market for additive manufacturing technologies. A major goal of the “partnership” will be to get ahead of the open source manufacturing movement by patenting everything under the sun that might conceivably advance 3D printing — then set the licensing fees high enough that only entrenched manufacturers can take advantage of it. And of course the Defense Department tie-in will be used to create export restrictions.
It’s interesting that popular press coverage of additive manufacturing (“3D printing”) technology focuses so heavily on the potential of such technology to shift a major share of manufacturing away from corporations and into homes and neighborhoods. Some of the most innovative work in 3D printing and other forms of desktop manufacturing technology comes from open source hardware movements whose goal is to take advantage of the liberatory potential offered by radical cheapening of the means of production.
The natural result of such technology, absent massive state intervention to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat on behalf of the corporate economy, is radical democratization of production. The original technological rationale for the wage system and the factory system was the shift in production technology from cheap, individually affordable craft tools to extremely expensive specialized machinery that only large institutions could afford to acquire — and hire wage laborers to operate.
Open source 3D printing, along with other forms of cheap desktop machine tools, offers to reverse this shift. Open source CNC machinery possesses the same qualities as craft tools of two or three hundred years ago: Cheap, general-purpose, flexible, and amenable to small-scale production on a demand-pull basis.
This means an outright end to the material rationale for the wage system and factory production. It’s a death warrant for giant corporations, and the basis for a revolution in economic democracy: Relocalized production primarily under worker control. So it’s natural that the old corporate dinosaurs would be desperate for deliverance from this fate. And Obama’s project is clearly intended to offer just such deliverance.
Decades ago, Joseph Schumpeter wrote that the corporate economy was characterized by “creative destruction.” Even when production units were naturally very large and innovation tended to be carried out by large-scale industrial cartels, technological progress would cause the giant corporations of an obsolescent industry to be supplanted by new industries. What he forgot to consider was the possiblity that control of R&D and patents might enable incumbent industries to secure control of the successor technologies — in which the “creative destruction” would become a lot less creative and a lot less destructive.
The whole aim of US economic policy under both Democrats and Republicans is essentially Hamiltonian: To counter the radical deflationary threat of abundance and ephemeralization through artificial scarcity. To prevent technologies of abundance from deflating the economy, destroying trillions in exchange value, making most investment capital superflous and radically reducing work hours, it’s necessary to make them artificially expensive and raise the capital outlays and overhead required to adopt them. This is a way to create artificial outlets for the surplus investment capital the rentier classes have lying around, and to enclose progress as a source of rents for the propertied classes.
Fortunately, it won’t work. If you think the music industry has a hard time combating file-sharing, just wait till the old-line manufacturing companies try to prevent hundreds of thousands of hardware hackers in neighborhood garage factories from replicating “pirated” industrial designs on CAD files from The Pirate Bay.
This is a desperate, last-ditch effort by the rentier classes, the lords of scarcity who’ve lived off our sweat for five thousand years, to stave off their inevitable demise. We’ll put their bleeding heads on our battlements.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Obama’s Last, Desperate Attempt to Save Capitalism, Batesville, Arkansas Daily Guard, 08/30/12
just wait till the old-line manufacturing companies try to prevent hundreds of thousands of hardware hackers in neighborhood garage factories from replicating “pirated” industrial designs on CAD files from The Pirate Bay.
Sounds reminiscent of Cory Doctorow's "Makers" book. I quite enjoyed that one.
Yep. I meant to throw in a Makers reference about micromanufacturing destroying the corporate economy, but I forgot.
My recent post New Book in the Works
I'd never heard of it before, but after reading your references to Doctorow's book, I just reserved it at my local library. Thanks.
With the current high profile of 3D printing etc. one should not lose sight of the huge expansion in long-established industrial techniques, hitherto associated with large scales, at a craft or hobby level. I think, as a mere example, of backyard aluminium-founding. The advance there has little to do with the technology itself – that goes back a century and a half – but the peripheral technology that has allowed individual enthusiast founders to communicate with one another, not least to explode among themselves the myth that aluminium foundries are necessarily huge operations.
The thing to pick up on here is that a lot of these phenomena are un-self-conscious and very much product-oriented. The people do it because they want the product, their way, not because of any desire to advance this or that social/cultural/political agenda. Indeed many of the craftspeople with whom I converse have a characteristically matter-of-fact way of seeing things and a consequent distrust of political theory of any kind, except perhaps a reactionary conservatism that quite contradicts their basically subversive activities. But that is no reason to leave them out of the equation.
My recent post The Future Machine
Welcome to capitalism, Kevin Carson. What did you expect? Looks like gee-whiz technology isn't the savior of the working class, and capitalism by itself won't magically produce a petit-bourgeois utopia. Whoda thunk it. We've already seen this with computers and networking: decentralized communication networks like IRC, email, Usenet, etc., which worked perfectly fine, were displaced by centralized social networks like Myspace and Facebook. This is because in a market economy money must be captured somehow, either by the direct sale of commodities or by advertising commodities that can be bought elsewhere. The latter requires surveillance to monitor consumer preference and control to shape it, which is why Facebook is both Orwellian and profitable. Furthermore, since social networks were able to capture so much surplus value, they were able to invest in increasing ease-of-use, making them much more popular than the more difficult decentralized communication networks and eventually displacing them.
Diseconomies of scale for servers are no problem for capitalists: they just own a whole bunch of servers and rent them out as a "cloud." Peer-to-peer is similar. Many video game companies, like Blizzard, use Bittorrent to distribute updates to their games. Vudu and some other online video rental services use Bittorrent to stream DRMed videos for a few bucks a pop. Why you didn't see this coming for 3D printing is beyond me, especially since manufacturers have already been using 3D printing for decades. That said, pirates have it much easier than home 3D printers, which means 3D printing will lack the mass base that piracy has and pose less of a threat to mass production. Piracy does not require raw materials which means it lacks the per-unit transaction costs which are intrinsic to 3D printing. Also, on a computer, every file is essentially the same: just a sequence of bits. Material goods are nowhere near as uniform, which means that a 3D printer is much less versatile when compared to a computer.
Another thing you forget is that the capitalist class is by no means opposed to self-provisioning, as Michael Perelman showed in The Invention of Capitalism. Self-provisioning means lower wages, because it decreases the cost of living and thus the value of labor. It also means less government expenditure on welfare and thus lower taxes. So if the Homebrew Industrial Revolution ever comes, it will not destroy capitalism, but merely preserve it through the Age of Austerity.
I think you may be a bit optimistic. Media are easy to pirate and subvert normal licensing restrictions. The physical 3D printers take up physical space and are easier to track down.
I gave this a thumbs up because it highlighted some good points; the effect of Facebook, Myspace, and other "social networks" in centralizing the internet. Facebook and Myspace rely on the sort of deceptive branding that Naomi Klein described in "No Logo"; it hides their shadier activities related to privacy. The cloud angle is something that made me nervous as well, but you phrased it pretty well. "Cloud" is just marketing speak. They're server farms, pure and simple. The popularity of tablets are also disconcerting; they're little more than pretty terminals hooked up to servers elsewhere. The other discomforting thing is how Myspace & Facebook encourage themselves to reveal their identities, making them vulnerable to being targeted. Twitter is the same. Google also deceptive with their whole "don't be evil" thing.
However, I still don't despair. Gee-whiz technology by itself will not bring down the system. Only political action can make a difference, in the sense of direct action & consciousness raising. However, even things like Facebook can be used as powerful tools, provided one does it right. I also think that social networks may collapse in a dotcom style bust; they seem to rest on little more than advertising and wishful thinking. Media piracy itself is not a cure all; I am noticing a shift in social norms where people are starting to consider piracy a bad thing. This, however, may change.
Still, homebrew manufacturing should be pursued. The formation of co-ops, unions, garage factories, should proceed. But these groups must organize to defend their interests against state and capital. Self-provisioning, combined with the use of that time for political action and production for the local area can fight state and capital.
It is important to remember that state and capital contain within them contradictions; even facebook and the like are not without them. These contradictions must be exploited.
One more thing: Capitalists start opposing self-provisioning the moment people stop coming into work or buying their products.
Furthermore, increased welfare expenditures are not opposed either, provided capitalists believe it will purchase stability. It's a trade-off. From the 1950's to the 1970's, they were fine with the welfare state so long as they thought it would keep workers from striking or minimize the power of the strike. However, the social unrest during the 1960's changed their tune, and suddenly it seemed as if affluence was no guarantee of their power and profits. So, they started opposing welfare and the tamed labor unions. The same applies to education and the like.
The period from the 1950's to the 1970's was also a time of mass consumption, which had to come with mass production. This mass consumption was subsidized as well.
Neoliberalism is defined by the subsidization of accumulation, as opposed to consumption. Now, consumption is still subsidized to a degree. The welfare state was never completely dismantled.
Now that I think of it, perhaps Perelman might be wrong about the lower wages. With fewer people competing on the job market, wouldn't wages for those who stay be higher? If self-provisioning gets to the point where people can drop out of the labor market, or even run small micro-businesses, then wouldn't labor get scarce? This means that they would have to offer higher wages; this would work for a time, but the independence conferred from not being a wage worker is addictive.
This doesn't mean other actions are not needed. Just another angle to think about.
Yet another thing.
The main reason why there isn't a mass base is the cost. Most of the cost lies in manufacturing, which brings us to an issue you overlooked; the effects of patents on inventions, manufacturing tecniques, not mere copyright.
If there were not patents on machines or the know-how to make them, this disparity would quickly resolve itself.
Cavoyo, KC is not ignorant of those matters, the way you make out, if for no other reason than that people like me have already warned him of many of these issues (drawing on historical analogies for some of the precedents, though I drew readers’ attention to Damon Knight’s SF novel A for Anything too). Rather, he is here pointing out these topical threats that are just now becoming visible (rather than inferred), and he is coming from a place that is optimistic if the threats can be mitigated and/or eluded. The hope is real, and his awareness of what threatens it is too.
Null Void, that threat to users of cheap labour from self-provisioning is real, only they already have the tools to deal with it. It is just precisely the problem colonialists faced in “getting the natives to work” while those still had subsistence resources, and they worked out some thoroughly effective ways to deal with it, e.g. regressive poll taxes and hut taxes. You might want to think about the table I provided at Negative Payroll Tax: how to reverse our present approach of paying people to be unemployed and of penalising employers and about the description of how typical colonialist policies worked here (I actually entered that myself, from a book of mine):-