The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production. The “physical production sphere” itself has become far less capital-intensive. If the digital revolution has caused an implosion in the physical capital outlays required for the information industries, the revolution in desktop production tools promises an analogous effect almost as great on many kinds of manufacturing. The radical reduction in the cost of machinery required for many kinds of manufacturing has eroded Stallman’s distinction between “free speech” and “free beer.”

Clearly, the emergence of cheap desktop technology for custom machining parts in small batches will greatly lower the overall capital outlays needed for networked physical production of light and medium consumer goods.

The above comes from a great 38-page overview essay by Kevin Carson where he reviews current trends to more distributed manufacturing, often based on open source design, as well as a new type of machinery.

* Essay: The Homebrew Industrial Revolution. Kevin Carson. C4SS, 2009

In this excerpt, go to the original for the excellently sourced citations, Kevin discusses the importance of modularity.

Kevin Carson:

“Modular design enables a peer network to break a physical manufacturing project down into discrete sub-projects, with many of the individual modules perhaps serving as components in more than one larger appliance.

According to Christian Siefkes,

– Products that are modular, that can be broken down into smaller modules or components which can be produced independently before being assembled into a whole, fit better into the peer mode of production than complex, convoluted products, since they make the tasks to be handled by a peer project more manageable. Projects can build upon modules produced by others and they can set as their own (initial) goal the production of a specific module, especially if components can be used stand-alone as well as in combination. The Unix philosophy of providing lots of small specialized tools that can be combined in versatile ways is probably the oldest expression in software of this modular style. The stronger emphasis on modularity is another phenomenon that follows from the differences between market production and peer production. Market producers have to prevent their competitors from copying or integrating their products and methods of production so as not to lose their competitive advantage. In the peer mode, re-use by others is good and should be encouraged, since it increases your reputation and the likelihood of others giving something back to you…. Modularity not only facilitates decentralized innovation, but should also help to increase the longevity of products and components. Capitalism has developed a throw-away culture where things are often discarded when they break (instead of being repaired), or when one aspect of them is no longer up-to-date or in fashion. In a peer economy, the tendency in such cases will be to replace just a single component instead of the whole product, since this will generally be the most labor-efficient option (compared to getting a new product, but also to manually repairing the old one).

Siefkes is wrong only in referring to producers under the existing corporate system as “market producers,” since absent “intellectual property” as a legal bulwark to proprietary design, the market incentive would be toward designing products that were interoperable with other platforms, and toward competition in the design of accessories and replacement parts tailored to other companies’ platforms. And given the absence of legal barriers to the production of such interoperable accessories, the market incentive would be to designing platforms as broadly interoperable as possible.

This process of modularization is already being promoted within corporate capitalism, although the present system is struggling mightily—and unsuccessfully—to keep itself from being torn apart by the resulting increase in productive forces.

As Eric Hunting argues, the high costs of technical innovation, the difficulty of capturing value from it, and the mass customization or long tail market, taken together, create pressures for common platforms that can be easily customized between products, and for modularization of components that can be used for a wide variety of products.

And Hunting points out, as we already saw in regard to flexible manufacturing networks in C4SS Paper No. 4, that the predominant “outsource everything” and “contract manufacturing” model increasingly renders corporate hubs obsolete, and makes it possible for contractees to circumvent the previous corporate principals and undertake independent production on their own account.

– Industrial ecologies are precipitated by situations where traditional industrial age product development models fail in the face of very high technology development overheads or very high demassification in design driven by desire for personalization/customization producing Long Tail market phenomenon [sic]. A solution to these dilemmas is modularization around common architectural platforms in order to compartmentalize and distribute development cost risks, the result being ‘ecologies’ of many small companies independently and competitively developing intercompatible parts for common product platforms —such as the IBM PC. The more vertical the market profile for a product the more this trend penetrates toward production on an individual level due [to] high product sophistication coupled to smaller volumes…. Competitive contracting regulations in the defense industry (when they’re actually respected…) tend to, ironically, turn many kinds of military hardware into open platforms by default, offering small businesses a potential to compete with larger companies where production volumes aren’t all that large to begin with. Consequently, today we have a situation where key components of some military vehicles and aircraft are produced on a garage-shop production level by companies with fewer than a dozen employees. All this represents an intermediate level of industrial demassification that is underway today and not necessarily dependent upon open source technology or peer-to-peer activity but which creates a fertile ground for that in the immediate future and drives the complementary trend in the miniaturization of machine tools.

In other words, the further production cost falls relative to the costs of design, the greater the economic incentive to modular design as a way of defraying design costs over as many products as possible.

Hunting added, in an email to the Open Manufacturing list, that this process—

– “the modularization of product design, which results in the replacement of designs by platforms and the competitive commoditization of their components”— is the reason why computers, based on platforms for modular commodity components, have evolved so rapidly compared to every other kind of industrial product and why the single-most advanced device the human race has ever produced is now something most anyone can afford and which a child can assemble in minutes from parts sourced around the world.

Michel Bauwens, in commenting on Hunting’s remarks, notes among the “underlying trends… supporting the emergence of peer production in the physical world,” the ‘distribution’ of production capacity, i.e. lower capital requirements and modularisation making possible more decentralized and localized production, which may eventually be realized through the free selfaggregation of producers.

Modular design is an example of stigmergic coordination. As defined in the Wikipedia entry, stigmergy is

– a mechanism of spontaneous, indirect coordination between agents or actions, where the trace left in the environment by an action stimulates the performance of a subsequent action, by the same or a different agent. Stigmergy is a form of self-organization. It produces complex, apparently intelligent structures, without need for any planning, control, or even communication between the agents. As such it supports efficient collaboration between extremely simple agents, who lack any memory, intelligence or even awareness of each other.

The development of the platform is a self-contained and entirely self-directed action by an individual or a peer design group. Subsequent modules are developed with reference to the platform, but the design of each module is likewise entirely independent and self-directed; no coordination with the platform developer or the developers of other modules takes place. The effect is to break design down into numerous manageable units.”