[p2p-research] Open Source Manufacturing

[Kevin Carson]

Dear Mr. Keegan:

As a member of several mailing lists frequented by Vinay Gupta and
other open-source manufacturing enthusiasts, I thoroughly appreciated
your sympathetic treatment in the recent Guardian article.

You might be interested, if you're not already familiar with it, in
Michel Bauwens' Foundation for P2P Alternatives, which does a lot of
work on open-source manufacturing models.  Wiki:
<http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Foundation_for_P2P_Alternatives>
Blog: <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/>

You might also be interested in Open Source Ecology's "Factor E Farm"
demo project in the Kansas City area, which is developing an "Open
Village Construction Set" (including CEB Press, tractor, solar
steam-powered generator, sawmill, multimachine, etc.)  Most of the
machinery (including the multimachine itself) can be produced with the
multimachine, and powered either by the generator or by using the
tractor as prime mover.  So the entire package, once prototyped and
demonstrated, is virally replicable.
OSE Wiki: <http://openfarmtech.org/index.php?title=Main_Page>
Factor E Farm blog: <http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/>

There's one statement in your article I'd qualify:

"Open source hardware doesn't have the same power as software if only
because the final product, as opposed to the designs, can't be
replicated for no extra cost as software can."

OS hardware may not ever quite reach the "free beer," as opposed to
"free speech," version of free.  But most of the cost of manufactured
goods, arguably, is artificial.  It results from embedded rents on
artificial property like trademarks (what Tom Peters gushingly calls
"ephemera" and "intellect," as opposed to actual cost of labor and
materials), and from legally mandated requirements for minimum
capitalization (e.g., "safety" regulations whose main effect is to
mandate minimum overhead costs and erect barriers to small-scale
production in the informal and household economy using spare capacity
on capital goods we already own, so that the only way to operate
profitably with the mandated overhead is to engage in large batch
production).  Eliminate all this, so that the capital equipment for
manufacturing is individually affordable and larger amounts of capital
can be microfinanced and crowdsourced, and we're a long way toward
making the boundary between "free speech" and "free beer" a lot more
permeable

Right now most of our economy is still built around Sloanist mass
production, with artificially inflated capitalization and inventory,
and all the push distribution and planned obsolescence required to
keep the wheels turning and avoid idle capacity.

Do away with the subsidies to centralization, the protections against
competition, and the barriers to small-scale production, and most of
it would be replaced with small scale production.  A good part of this
would be an informal and household economy of microbreweries,
microbakeries, microindustry using multimachines, etc.  The rest would
be distributed manufacturing on the Emilia-Romagna model (small-batch
production with general-purpose machinery, on a demand-pull basis,
with modular product design for ease of repair and recycling).  About
the only things left for centralized manufacturing would be stuff like
microprocessors and the few heavy internal combustion engines that
would still be needed in a decentralized economy, stuff that it's
simply physically impossible to produce on a distributed basis.

This was the subject of a quarterly paper I did at Center for a
Stateless Society: <http://c4ss.org/content/78>


Best,
Kevin

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS): http://c4ss.org/
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