[p2p-research] [Open Manufacturing] important appeal: social media and p2p tools against the meltdown

[Kevin Carson]

On 3/4/09, Nathan Cravens <knuggy at gmail.com> wrote:

> What I have to present addresses the three questions asked by the author of
> 'Social Media vs. the Economic Recession'. Housing may need to be
> manufactured out of Fab Labs at first until rent based vacancies are too
> rampant, lowering prices down to practicality. Our contact to solve the
> housing issue is Larry Sass. From
> http://otherexcuses.blogspot.com/2009/01/social-media-vs-recession.html:

> practical/financial (e.g. how do I pay the rent/avoid my house being
> repossessed?)
> emotional/psychological (e.g. how do I face my friends? where do I get my
> identity from now I don't have a job?)
> directional (e.g. what do I do with my time? how do I find work?)
> Here's an idea package to add to the TO DO NOW list:
>
> The Open Cafe / Community Supported Agriculture / Fab Lab Alliance
>
> Open Cafes:
> The physical hub for activity. A place where meals are prepared by people
> for people to eat for zero money. Its hip and empowering to dine/work/have a
> chat here.
>
> Community Supported Agriculture:
>  Enough participants work in DIY gardens or community farms and donate the
> produce to the Cafe and or from government issued food cards. (I play both
> sides for the same aim)
>
> Open Source Fab Labs:
> Cafes align with OS Fab Labs to fill out the resource necessity gap to
> further save financial cost.

#

It’s an excellent model for community resilience–simultaneously a
cushion that could enable the unemployed to subsist outside the wage
system and form the nucleus of a future post-mass production economy
centered on production outside the wage system.

A few points:

The Fab lab concept should be expanded to include all forms of
small-scale production tools affordable by individuals. This would
include well-equipped home workshops with conventional machine tools,
as well as intermediate-sized tools like the multimachine. This
broader conception would coincide with the community workshops
advocated by Colin Ward, Karl Hess, etc.

Local agriculture should place a premium on alternative water sources
(esp. rainwater conservation with cisterns), edible permaculture
landscaping, etc., for resilience against drought and other forms of
climate change associated with global warming.

And adding housing as a fourth and separate category, rather than only
related tangentially to the other functions of the Cafe, would fill a
big gap in the overall resiliency strategy. It might be some kind of
cheap, bare bones cohousing project associated with the Cafe (water
taps, cots, hotplates, etc) that would house people at minimal cost on
the YMCA model. Squats in abandoned/public buildings, and building
with scavenged materials on vacant lots, etc. (a la Colin Ward), might
tie in with this as wel

Vinay Gupta’s work on emergency life-support technology for refugees
is also relevant to the housing problem: offering cheap LED lighting,
solar cookers, water purifiers, etc., to those living in tent cities
and Hoovervilles.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html