Marcin responded to a query on when open manufacturing could be more efficient than the current model favouring large-scale concentration:

“General conditions favor large. We need to identify and tackle those. Those are the legal and financial infrastructures, which are difficult to deal with. There is subsidy and monopoly creation, financial non-transparency, and many other institutions. We could get into a deep study of those, so the simple alternative is to have David beat Goliath by efficiency.

Efficiency is an easy solution. Combine a masterful repository of open source design with low cost flex fab (I believe we can get a full CNC fab lab, with CNC laser cutter, at $5-10k), and publicly-supported manufacturing. Then we beat China because of transport costs and other inefficiencies. Combine the concept of crowd-funding for at cost production with Community Supported Manufacturing. You have then wide microenterprise for many large technology items and electronics.

I just don’t see how anyone compete with publicly-supported manufacturing that results in at-cost production, such as with the CEB press. The consumer gets the most. The producer gets the high value of labor. The only possible question could be someone with much deeper pockets beating such businesses out – but the behemoth can’t possibly provide the same quality or service because it will end up going out of business if it makes truly lifetime, quality products. So there’s a point of strategic importance. The only result i can foresee is that the quality of life goes up, and the promise of technology being liberating is truly realized.

The items that will be made more efficiently in one-off flexible production are CEB machines, cars, renewable energy items, tractors, and other large items. That is, if they are made lifetime design, design for disassembly, and other good ecological qualities.

For small items, like chickens, lettuces, or sheets of paper, only public consciousness will make the smaller production feasible. That’s where quality, organic, ecological production – which costs more than mass production – will have to be demanded by people. The other way to crack these is community supported operations (CSA, CSM) where the customer buys a package up front.

The essential condition that favors large is capitalization. Equipment and its maintenance is what makes people specialize. Noone could manage a large, integrated equipment base, because of costs of those poor, nonecological, typically hard to fix, and throwaway items. Until now. This is central to my work: to produce especially those items that are used in production and industry. My program is to show that a small farm can replace the equivalent of factory farms and factories. For that, a manageable equipment base is essential to perform state-of-art agriculture or fabrication operations. Impossible, until today’s information and design sharing.

The economic incentive has to be made to people – the feasibility of honest microenterprise social ventures or community supported operations. But I’m afraid that is difficult, as it requires an ethical perspective – and most people lack the personal conviction to make that their livelihood. The only way this can be promoted is by showing that it’s doable, and setting up commons infrastructures to help support such activity.

Then one evaluates what scale is most appropriate, all exernalities internalized – including principles of distributing wealth – and we arrive at the right number. I can tell you for CEB, one-off production will be most effective from the analysis so far, and I think for example, the shipping charges would make it inefficient for China competition. And I can tell you, that for most enterprise, there is no need to have it as large as it is today – unless we are willing to stomach the political instability, resource conflicts, and poor distribution of wealth that are inherent to such large scale.

Therefore, in summary, my solution to the favoring of large over small is to make the enabling infrastructure for production accessible on the small scale. That’s relatively easy, and doable today – that’s why i keep calling on poeple to get off their ass and just get involved in that process. It’s the low-hanging fruit. And i must emphasize that new money systems can follow after the creation of decentralized production – we can’t use new money systems, i don’t think, with the old production mechanisms.”