[p2p-research] decentralizing open source bike production?

[Patrick Anderson]

On Fri, Sep 4, 2009 at 10:36 AM, Samuel Rose<samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

> many easily modifiable bicycle design cores (plus a standard way to
> contribute more cores) that people can download and fabricate


Fabricate?  What the hell does that mean?  I don't have access to the
Physical Sources required for fabrication!

How are we, the people supposed to fabricate without land, buildings,
tools, etc.?  That is the question the article is asking.

How can you (and so many others on these lists) so readily brush aside
the difficulty of *instantiating* these designs?

We, the people do not have the Physical Sources required for 'fabrication'.

Sure design is important.  But that is only a (very small) part of the problem.

The complexity of designing a bicycle is on the verge of trivial.

The primary difficulty is access to the mass, time, space and energy
required to 'host' that design in physical reality.

Most people on these lists seem to think we will fix this in the
future through rep-rap robots.  Quit dreaming.

We can address this *now* with current technology by "getting
together" and co-owning those Physical Sources for the purpose of
product instead of profit.

But such an approach has a massive psychological barrier: we have been
convinced/hypnotized into believing production cannot occur unless
profit is treated as a reward for those that organize.

Eventually we will see that product alone (in this case bicycles) is
enough of a reason for we, the people to *own* Physical Sources (such
as the land, buildings and tools needed to build bicycles) needed for
production, but until then we will ignorantly beg those that intend to
charge us a price above costs (the Capitalist profiteers) to "do the
right thing" when they have a big reason not to: for profit decreases
as abundance increases, so it is clear they will never do *our* will,
for to do so would put them out of the business of keeping us
dependent upon them!