[p2p-research] ecotechnic future

[Kevin Carson]

On 7/21/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

Since this draft post seems to be a pretty comprehensive framework for
the discussion, in lieu of my writing a separate post could you plug
my comments (partly edited from my on-list comments) in with everybody
else's?

Michel Bauwens originally solicited my comment on Greer's views from
the standpoint of a tie-in with Lewis Mumford's thought.  But to the
extent that, like Dave Pollard, he sees assorted Peak Everything
crises leading to a post-tech future, I feel Greer is best treated as
a foil or straight-man for Mumford.

Digital technology and the network revolution are at the heart of
what's creating the potential for a low-impact, less
resource-intensive economy.  Green and high-tech are allies against
mass production and the mountains of deliberately obsolete goods
piling up in our landfills, and against the globalist economic model
of truck/containership warehouses linking points of production and
points of consumption thousands of miles apart.

If any single thing reduces the need for fuel, it will be shifting
wherever feasible from the movement of material to the movement of
information.  Despite all the talk of how big the carbon footprint of
server farms is, compare it to the carbon footprint of the low-hanging
fruit they could replace:  replacing business air travel with
teleconferencing, replacing most white-collar commutes with working at
home, the sharing of digital designs with relocalized neighborhood
manufacturers, etc.  If it's looked at in those terms, then the
servers and communications infrastructure are worth their weight in
gold, and will (along with freight trains) be given all the rationed
fuel they can use even when fossil fuel ouput is at 20% of present
levels.

Greer's point, that the desirability of the Internet does not mean it
will survive, might seem to be a telling objection to my views on the
significance of telecommuting and teleconferencing.  But it misses the
point of Mash's argument quoted above:  to the extent that the
Internet is a loose network of lots of modular local systems, it's
quite likely that local meshwork systems may survive indefinitely as
community "intranets" of sorts.  Given that, the capacity of central
trunk lines and servers for connecting them are not an all-or-nothing
thing but a more-or-less thing.  In fact his own example of the Roman
courier relays--which survived in modular, local form in the
cities--works against him in this regard.

Greer is entirely correct that the "job" as primary vehicle for work
is likely to disappear or become drastically reduced in significance.
But the rapid evolution of micromanufacturing technology, with
networked/flexible manufacturing using affordable general-purpose CNC
tools for craft production, is currently driving just such a shift.
We're seeing a reversal of the economic forces that created the "job"
two hundred years ago:  a shift back from expensive mass-production
machinery to individually affordable craft tools.

And I think Greer seriously underestimates the resilience of society.
The development of micromanufacturing and decentralized production
technology means that a much larger and growing portion of the total
prerequisites for meeting our consumption needs can be produced
locally.  Projects like Factor e Farm are in the process of expanding
the technologies available for continuing this shift even more
rapidly.  And the larger the share of the prerequisites for production
that are modular and scalable and locally reproducible, the smaller
the share of the prerequisites for production will remain as weak
links.   Arguably, the smaller the number of weak links, the more
plausible it is that the market will shift dwindling resources to
maintaining these weak links.

The significant thing about the slow collapse of the Western Roman
empire in my opinion is that the component parts of production
technology that were modular and scalable to the village or town
economy survived.  It was emergent or wholistic relationships between
these components that collapsed.  And we're in the middle of a
revolutionary shift toward modularity and scalability in share of our
total prerequisites for production unequalled since the beginning of
the Industrial Revolution -- and amounting in many ways to a reversal
of the increasing brittleness entailed in mass-production society, on
the same scale as the original increase.

The more energy resources are freed up by market pressures toward
relocalization and shortening of supply-distribution chains, where it
is possible to do so, the more resources will be freed up for shifting
to redundant cushioning mechanisms for the reduced number of weak
links.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html