As my regular readers are aware, I keep harping the theme that political action is usually futile, or costs more in effort than the payoff is worth. As Charles Johnson has argued, one can circumvent privilege and the coercive laws it depends on for a tiny fraction of the effort required to change such laws through the political process.
Rather than waste time and heartache fighting to remove subsidies and regulatory protections from big corporations, or seeking government permission to engage in the forms of economic and social organization we want, we should put our efforts into simply building the kind of society we want to live in.
One of the best examples I’ve seen of such an effort is the Open Source Ecology project, with its Factor e Farm demonstration site, near Kansas City. Under the leadership of Marcin Jakubowski, OSE is attempting to create the technological building blocks for low-cost, decentralized, diversified local economies. It aims to create the basic production machinery for such an economy, along with the basic tools of daily life. This project is extremely relevant to the needs not only of relocalized industrial economies in the West, but of village economies in the Third World.
The project envisions a Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) of fifty tools, including open-source computer numeric controlled (CNC) machine tools like lathe, drill press, milling machine, router, cutting table, and 3-D printer, along with an induction furnace for smelting, aluminum extractor from clay, bio-plastic extruder, and circuit fabrication mill.
Tools for daily life include a wind turbine (scalable up to 50 kw) and steam generator, threshing machine, hay bailer, the LifeTrac tractor, the CEB (compressed earth block) Press, cement mixer, sawmill, backhoe and bulldozer, the Power Cube (a multi-purpose hydraulic power unit), soil pulverizer, and well-drilling rig.
Factor e Farm’s progress to date is nothing short of spectacular.
Most of the CNC tools have been prototyped and there’s an on-site Fab Lab. The LifeTrac and CEB Press are in serial production. All designs are open source, free to anyone who wants to put them into production anywhere in the world.
In addition, the project feeds itself with a large permaculture operation.
OSE’s True Fan support network provides $7,000 a month in funding. The project recently obtained a $60k donation, and has $100k on the way from the Kauffman Foundation to be used for “production scaling and fabricator training for enterprise replicability.”
Present funding levels permit concurrent development of ten GVCS projects at a time, and Jakubowski projects completion of the entire package in 2012.
The beauty of it is, the homebrew nature of the tools means they’re extraordinarily cheap compared to their commercial counterparts. A 3-D printer or cutting table can be produced with on-site labor for a few hundred dollars in materials. The other great thing is, small-scale production in a garage factory renders patent laws virtually null and void. Like copyright laws, patents were designed for an age when reproduction was expensive and controlled by a handful of corporate gatekeepers. The transaction costs of detecting violations and enforcing patents against knockoffs by neighborhood factories producing on such a small scale are far more than the effort is worth.
Such technology will likely replace a growing share of traditional manufacturing, as local garage factories fill in the gaps left by the collapse of corporate supply and distribution chains in the coming age of $200/barrel petroleum.
More importantly, it’s ideal for a Third World village economy. The extremely low cost of the production machinery means that for $10,000 or not much more, just about any tool or consumer good needed in a Third World village or favelah — aside from a few things like microprocessors — can be manufactured on the scale of local demand. And this local, diversified economy can survive independently of international capital markets and giant fleets of container ships.
This technology is not merely destroying, but totally obliterating, the ostensible rationale — the extremely high capital outlays required for mass-production machinery — used to justify Third World models of development based on exporting raw materials, supplying sweatshop labor, and begging for economic colonization by rich foreign corporations. The micromanufacturing revolution reverses the technological shift that originally led to the wage and factory systems — it enables a shift from expensive, product-specific machinery back to affordable, general-purpose tools.
Soon the people of a Third World village will be able to say to the transnational corporations: “No thanks! We’ll use our raw materials and crops for our own benefit now — and use our labor to produce for ourselves. Your services are no longer required.”
Translations for this article:
- Spanish, Swadeshi de Alta Tecnología.
Citations to this article:
- Kevin Carson, Staying away from economic colonisation, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Nation, 07/25/11
- Kevin Carson, High-tech Swadeshi, Dhaka, Bangladesh New Age, 07/20/11
Too cool for words. Thanks again for the exciting and inspiring news, Mr. Carson!
It is likely that the most important thing is not the plans themselves, but the culture and community needed to support a localized economy. Very soon, the gov't and the corps will no longer be able to meet our needs; then we will see if we can learn how to meet our own needs in community with each other. The problem is not technological, but spiritual.
I'm a total fanboy of the OSE project. I know you've mentioned it in your book, and I'm glad to see it being talked about here. I'd love to see OSE shops or hackerspaces popping up all over the place in the next few years. I think it's feasible.
You would have done better to avoid the term “Swadeshi” in the title, or also to provide a plain English paraphrase there (in the body of the article is too late).
Aluminium production is one of the activities that does benefit from economies of scale and from not being done locally. This is because high quality ores occur in particular locations different from cheap energy supplies, and both their mining and refining are easier on large scales, and the materials are light enough to ship cheaply.
As I’ve mentioned before, there are lots of ways of skinning that sort of cat. If the other ways aren’t used much these days, that’s precisely because current circumstances make the current ways more convenient and cost effective. But to the extent that all this changes that, it’s a shift that favours the other ways – some of which are still in use in fields like taxi regulation that are still hard to handle by direct policing (licensed operators cover the overhead of being in the field as they are there operationally anyway, and they have an incentive to report unlicensed ones because of the economic value of the privilege of being licensed). Another way is “take away the water, the fish die” – ban related activities that are easier to get at that are needed to support the target activity, even if that hurts unrelated activities (the way the Venetians simply banned agriculture around their harbours on Crete to prevent harassment by Ottoman irregulars). So, if the new things ever became material rather than niche activities, they would indeed be countered, possibly after a time lag that would give the misleading impression that no counter was possible.
PML: I'm afraid I've forgotten where you wrote about this earlier. Could you give some specific examples of what you consider the most effective ways to use this principle against patent violations by micromanufacturing — and more importantly, ways that an encrypted darknet economy could counter them? Thanks.
KC (freemarketanticapitalist) wrote:-
I can only be that specific about actual, historical cases of these methods being used, which by their very nature don’t apply to micromanufacturing and similar. For that, I can only list the comparable, analogous situations and then extrapolate to that target area. So, first, here are some of those:-
– Noel Perrin‘s book Giving up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543–1879 is one of the best detailed comparable cases. The Japanese elite eliminated the threat from modern weapons and tactics, not by banning them with the risk of merely driving them underground to pop up later, but by co-opting and taming their practitioners, who continued to exist rather than being abolished, and served to crowd out any others while their own work was kept away from its ordinary use. Follow that link and then search further for full details.
– Contrary to the parallels some libertarians draw between the internet and Gutenberg’s press (strictly speaking, the crucial invention was moveable type, not the printing press) each making free flow of information impossible, that simply wasn’t what happened in most countries when the press came in. Mostly, privileged printers under the eye of (say) the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul’s Cathedral outcompeted others and so kept output under the eye of censors (relics of this survive to this day, in the form of the University Presses in England). In Shakespeare’s day, that carrot and stick approach worked via tame theatrical troupes – read biographies of him and his contemporaries for more detail, and see if you can chase up the court case in which a licensed troupe had the privilege of taking on boy actors and tried to extend it to kidnapping a boy to be an actor.
– Brad Delong is apt to quote “the Cossacks work for the Czar”, in rebutting people who think that bad policy and practice are not condoned at the top levels and would be corrected if only the grass roots could get through to the politicians. He is right about that, but quite wrong in the history he thinks supports his position. The Cossacks do not work for the Czar, and never did, but for the Cossacks; they were, themselves, the descendants of those who had got out from under repression at an earlier period, much as the “maroons” (from the Spanish “cimarrones”) or “bosnegers” (from the Dutch, literally if politically incorrectly “bush niggers”) were descended from black slaves who had escaped into remote areas like Jamaica’s cockpit country and assimilated the remnants of the indigenous peoples (see also the Black Seminoles – though those were extirpated rather than accommodated). The Cossacks and the maroons did not and could not prevail easily against the authorities, or vice versa, so they came to a similar modus vivendi in each case: treaties of de facto toleration and internal autonomy, in return for assistance in kicking away the ladder they had climbed up by denying the same to others and helping to repress those others. That meant maroons catching runaways and Cossacks carrying out pogroms – but as Quislings, not as underlings.
I could go on, but won’t. The analogy to protecting patents against pirate micromanufacturing is, they can’t knobble all the pirates, but they don’t have to. All they have to do is privilege a few by making life easier for them, on condition of spotting and harassing any others and of not plying their trade in a manner or on a scale that would rock the boat. One way that privileging could be done might be via controlling access to “vitamins”, the parts and materials that can’t or can’t conveniently be micromanufactured from simpler things, e.g. it is likely that computer chips would be like that for at least a while. Or – analogous to the genocide of the Black Seminoles – complete extirpation can be done with enough time and enough effort, at the price of preventing everything of the general sort as the pirate micromanufacturing; it would all be caught.
All this is ambiguous. The control methods do work, but only for their limited purposes (accommodation) or with their associated side effects (blanket extirpation). At the same time, accommodation does mean limited, niche survival; negotiating it might be all that was needed, at any rate to be going on with so as to be still around when circumstances change (just look how well Captain Morgan did by going straight). And, if authority has its own limits for other reasons, there can be niches where it cannot apply these reliable methods. For instance, what really meant that information became free after Gutenberg’s press came along wasn’t that but the availability of the equivalent of the 1960s’ pirate radio stations: places like Amsterdam and Basel that couldn’t be targeted for privileging that were also close enough to controlled areas for publications made there to reach the controlled areas. (The pirate radio stations were also suppressed by a combination of controlling their needed resources and providing privileged alternatives, incidentally.)
So, in conclusion, the (incompletely successful) ways to counter the other control methods appear historically to be: to find and offer authority a mutually acceptable accommodation (probably including co-operating against others); and/or, to operate from safe haven areas where authority can’t apply resource control or privilege competitors to squeeze you out. “Safe haven” should be thought of metaphorically, rather than necessarily meaning something geographical; this is the only way that “encrypted darknet” stuff might matter, by offering something that worked out that metaphorical way. There is no guarantee that any counter of these sorts could be found and would work well enough.
Thanks for the explanation, PML.
My recent post New Book in the Works
P.S. Your counter-countermeasures dovetail with a lot of stuff James Scott wrote about.
My recent post New Book in the Works