[p2p-research] mass production and p2p production, was ecovillage and communities

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Franz Nahrada wrote:
> We must tackle with the problem of mass production already today if we are
> to seriously to discuss a new reality. P2P society is imminent, global
> villages are a very plausible prevailing lifestyle, and they are in need
> of many special products and tools which can much better be brought about
> in mass production. The "father" of the perception of this empowerment,
> Alvin Toffler, has rightfully observed in his bool "The Third Wave", that
> the whole notion of re-empowerment comes out of industrial products that
> allowed us to liberate ourselves from a "worker" role and assume a
> "producer" or rather "prosumer" role. While Toffler did not really foresee
> that prosumers are not isolated entities but organize in new
> agglomerations, from crowdsourced to active to self-determining
> communities, he very well understood that there is an intrinsic relations
> between tools and micro-markets, a new ongoing division of labor etc.

Just a little side note that I went to a talk by Alvin Toffler in North 
Carolina around 1987, when I had written as essay called "The Vertical 
Corporation" (after reading Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology), and in 
the open mike questions afterwards I asked him what he thought about 
vertically integrated companies (essentially, intentional villages) to the 
point where they had their own currencies, and he said he had not thought 
about that. :-)

Still, I think ultimately, as Manuel de Landa suggests, real systems will be 
some mixture of meshworks and hierarchies, or local production and 
participation in distribution networks.

So, and I've written some on this elsewhere, I feel it likely we will have 
production facilities of different sizes for different things. And it is 
true that high speed printing (like of thin film solar panels) can often be 
the cheapest production method, so we may see things like that; and anything 
taking a lot of heat like a steel mill or glass plant might also see 
centralization out of practicality.

That will hold for an industry until we reach the point of technology where 
any advantages there will be negligible relative to the disadvatages of 
inconvenience. For example, almost nobody sends their own documents to a 
central printing facility at a computer center these days; they use a local 
laser printer, even though the cost per page including paying for the 
printer is somewhat higher -- but it saves the trouble of walking over to 
the computer center, and it also is more private and secure in a sense.

Anyway, one may rightly ask where we are on different technological curves, 
compounded by the fact that we can make substitutions -- if steel and glass 
still require a lot of heat and centralization, we might use ceramic and 
plastic in villages to avoid that.

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/