Ken MacLeod recently interviewed Cory Doctorow on his near-future sci-fi novel Makers (I reviewed it here), about a micromanufacturing economy arising in the ruins of the old mass-production economy.

The old-line corporations, in an economic environment where there was no conventional industry to invest in because most existing capacity was idle, turned to dumping their suplus capital as seed-money into garage micromanufacturing start-ups.

The problem, Doctorow said, was that the start-ups wouldn’t scale up.  There was no way to make money off them, because most of the ventures were simply tweaking other people’s designs and producing knockoffs.  So the micromanufacturing boom quickly went bust, because by its very nature cheap micromanufacturing technology eats up its own source of rents.  When the production technology itself is so cheap that you can stock a garage factory with the equivalent of six months wages for an old-line factory worker, and industrial designs are available for free as “pirated” [sic] CAD/CAM files at a torrent site, there’s nothing to enclose as a source of rents.

So instead, after the old-line industrial corporations withdrew in disgust, the garage manufacturers continued to develop on their own in a way that “kind of blends industrial manufacturing and its logic with cooperative manufacturing…, and almost artisanal or agrarian sense of… manufacturing….”  As MacLeod commented, Doctorow had applied the same logic to physical goods production that already applied to software production.  One of the similarities between the two forms of production, Doctorow pointed out, was that micromanufacturing labor — like software production and artisan labor — was decoupled.  That is, individual workers aren’t tightly coupled to the pace of a single production process, set by the machinery on an assembly line.  The worker might do a bit of one kind of work now, a bit of another kind of work for a while, and then return to another task when she felt like it — provided she completed the order when it was expected.

This resembles MacLeod’s description of the lifestyle of Highland crofters — or J.M. Neeson’s description of the lifestyle of commoners living in cottages on the fen or waste before the Enclosures — who in turn, MacLeod has said, could be a prototype of workers in Marx’s communist utopia.

In The Sky Road in particular, the society of the far-future Scotland was one based on imagining an area that I know reasonably well and the kind of people that I know quite well — not as individuals but as a social type, if you like. A lot of these highlanders are Heinlein’s omnicompetent man — they can turn their hand to anything. They’re also rather like Marx’s doodle about the post-class society where you could hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and be a critic after dinner without ever being hunter, fisherman or critic. That is literally what these guys are like.

.

…The highlanders are often people who own a croft, work for wages during the day and go poaching in the evening, and who read a lot. They are people who’ve never really been hammered into industrial society and therefore have a flexibility. They’ve got to…. If you have people who are not mangled by the division of labour being part of a much larger market as they are now, they can do all that stuff.

Doctorow’s hope, he said, is for a “largely bloodless post-industrial revolution” — i.e. without the bloodshed of the Industrial Revolution, and perhaps even “stanching the blood” of the recent model of industrial development, like tens of millions of Chinese workers leaving farmland in the north to live as guest-workers in sweatshops.

This kind of post-industrial revolution was the theme of my most recent book, The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto.  The idea is that cheap CNC machine technology, by erasing the entry barriers for self-employed manufacturing, is destroying the basis of the wage system and making it impossible to collect rents  from artificial scarcities.  The wage system originally reflected the shift from affordable, general-purpose artisan tools to expensive, specialized machinery that only a large institution could afford.  Now micromanufacturing technology is reversing this shift, so that a garage full of open-source tools can be bought for the equivalent of a few months of a factory laborer’s wages.

Asked about his follow-up novel, For the Win (I reviewed it here), Doctorow described it as similarly “aspirational,” exploring the potential for new forms of labor organization.  In the recent world of cowboy capitalism, labor has been screwed because capital is mobile and easily pick up and move from country to country, shutting down shops and abandoning workers who were paid too much or who had a pesky union.  But when all businesses rely on the same Internet, Doctorow said, the union workers in a closed shop can make contact with their replacements in the new Third World shop, and attempt to make common cause with them.  The same networked technologies and platforms that make physical production less dependent on place also facilitate workers’ ability to organize among themselves across geographical lines.

The model of networked labor organization I promoted in “Labor Struggle:  A Free Market  Model” overlapped with Doctorow’s in many regards.  More broadly, though the desktop and network revolutions are enabling “superempowered individuals” to fight bureaucratic, hierarchical institutions on a much wider front.  With access to cheap ubiquitous computing, network communication, and free platforms, functions are coming within the reach of individual capabilities that previously required large institutions.  This is the subject of my current writing project, The Desktop Regulatory State.

At one time, enormous capital outlays for production machinery meant that only large institutions could afford to aggregate the funds to buy the machinery for physical production.  And these large manufacturing corporations could only be constrained by the action of other large, centralized institutions — what J. K. Galbraith, in American Capitalism, called “countervailing power.”  But just as the desktop and network revolutions first destroyed the basis of large institutional power in the informational industries, and cheap garage manufacturing technology is destroying the basis of large institutional power in manufacturing, the desktop and network revolutions are now destroying the entry barriers for countervailing power.  Put together a digital age version of Wobbly open-mouth sabotage with Frank Kernaghan’s Culture Jamming, corporate campaigns by networked organizations like the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers’ Association, and multiply it all with a generous helping of the Streisand Effect, and you can ruin a corporate malefactor’s whole year.