[p2p-research] ecotechnic future

[Michel Bauwens]

hi kevin,

i hope you don't mind, but your considered response is long enough to
warrant a separate post,

Michel

On Fri, Jul 23, 2010 at 9:56 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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