[p2p-research] Is the future of distributed manufacturing in China?

[Ryan Lanham]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 8:55 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> thanks Ryan, very useful comments
>
> would you consider yourself an optimist or a pessmist (forbidden answer:
> "I'm a realist" <g>)
>
>
>
Hi Michel,

You know me too well...I am a realist!

BUT given your constraint, I am increasingly optimistic.  The Make Magazine
culture is rising fast and it is moving into biotech and electronics at a
furious rate...particularly in the Pacific rim.

I think the future increasingly looks Chinese.  It is small systems based,
low margin and high tech.  It looks more like the Middle Ages in economic
terms than now.  Big firms are screwed.  They need major money projects
which draw competitors and their are fewer barriers to entry so Google and
Apple beat each others brains out and the consumer mostly wins.  Soon this
will happen in medicine and similar areas.  Big drug firms are dying for
similar reasons.  Everything is going small.

There will be great poverty in places that "drop out."  The answer is
tinkering, co-ops, tech learning and investment, and innovation.  The answer
is decidedly not, low work, low merit-based sharing systems.  That will lead
to great suffering...as it has for some time.

My advice to developing places is make stuff rich people want.  Brazil,
Switzerland, Northern Italy, Finland, parts of France and Germany, Belgium,
Malaysia, Singapore, parts of Japan and China, California, Vermont, North
Carolina, parts of Texas and a few others are doing this.

Those stuck on anti-colonial and anti-capitalism modes of discourse will
bring extreme pain and poverty to those they seek to "serve."  Those who
build tech and know-how and then give it away are heros.  Our friend Sam and
his associates are the model.  We need to replicate that 50,000 times.  The
red shirts are the evil.  Their pain and hope is just, but their methods and
approaches are destructive.  The answer is the co-op in the Andies...work
hard, work smart, be innovative, have fun, tinker, make and enjoy a life of
the mind in a rapidly changing world where information is readily available
to all.  I think people are starting to do that...giving up on social
security systems, etc. and government hand-outs and overpaid civil service
and university jobs that add little or no value.

Ryan
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