As we have painfully learned from the previous industrial and digital revolutions, technology is not entirely value-neutral, meaning neither good nor bad. Under the social and economic system of capitalism, most technological innovation has been driven by the desire to maximize profits, reduce space/time limitations (i.e. how long it takes to make and deliver a commodity or service), and eliminate labor costs. So, while it is true that the technology does not determine its own use (not yet anyway), its application and value have largely been determined by a small subset of humanity. We want to make sure that we change this equation with the Third Digital Revolution. How we structure the ownership, control, and use of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution will either aid humanity in our collective quest for liberation, or deepen still our species’ inhumanity towards itself and our dear mother earth. One thing is painfully clear, and that is if these technologies remain the exclusive property of the capitalist class and the transnational corporations they control, these tools will not be used for the benefit of the overwhelming majority of humanity, but to expand the profits and further consolidate the power of the 1% that rule the world. Under their control, these technologies will lead to a crisis of global unemployment on a scale unseen in human history. The end result will be a global dystopia, a social nightmare predicated on massive poverty, lawlessness, state repression, and ever greater human disposability rather than the potential utopia these technologies could potentially enable.

Confronting the Challenges: Class, Race, Gender, and Ecological Limitations

GYASI WILLIAMS (LEFT) AND AMALYA LIVINGSTON OF THE COMMUNITY PRODUCTION INITIATIVE.

In order to make the future that we want, we have to openly confront the stark problems already at the heart of the Third Digital Revolution, and there are several glaring problems already in plain sight. Despite great efforts toward democratizing the Third Digital Revolution by making much of the technology “open source”, historically oppressed and disenfranchised communities remain excluded. The same access gulf seen in the current “digital divide” is being replicated and deepened. Instead of a ubiquitous transformation, with equal access and distribution, what in fact is emerging is a “fabrication divide”.

This divide is layered, multi-dimensional, and compounded. The first and obvious barrier to access is cost. Those who can afford the machines will eventually be able to produce whatever they want, while those who can’t will remain dependent on the inequitable market, the forces that manipulate it, and the increasingly antiquated methods of production they employ to produce their consumer goods. While this revolution is spurred on by the dropping cost and rapid development of fabrication technology, indigenous and working-class Black and Latin-x populations will still find themselves at least a step behind as the cost of early adoption will continue to advantage the already privileged.

The issues of cost and accessibility lead directly to a discussion of class. The working class is almost always alienated from the market mechanisms that enable people to take the best advantage of emerging technology. Further still, the dismantling of society by the neoliberal project has eroded the bonds of social solidarity and eradicated the safety nets created through working-class political victories. The emergence of the Third Digital Revolution within this socio-political context will only widen the inequality and access gaps that already exist. For example, the recent elimination of net neutrality combined with years of starving public schools of funding and eviscerating city services ensures that libraries and any other public services that once helped to counterbalance the technological gaps experienced by the working class during the latter half of the 20th century are becoming ineffective or altogether nonexistent.

While there has been a great deal of public discussion about the advance of the Third Digital Revolution and what benefits and threats it potentially poses, there has been little discussion about racial inequity within the Third Digital Revolution. Without a major structural intervention, the Third Digital Revolution will only exacerbate the existing digital divide. Again, here the problem is layered and compounded, for the advances in automation and artificial intelligence that the Third Digital Revolution will advance will disproportionately eliminate many of the low-skill, low-wage manual labor and service sector jobs that historically oppressed communities have been forced into over the last several years. Given some projections of massive job loss due to automation, there is a real question about whether the potential benefits this transformation could have will outweigh the severe pain and loss Indigenous, Black and Latinx working-class populations will face as this technology advances.

Even less discussed than the class and race-based impacts of the Third Digital Revolution are the gender disparities that are likely to deepen if there is no major intervention in the social advance of this development. Despite recent advances, it is no secret that women are grossly under-represented in the technological and scientific arenas[2]. The question is, how can and will the gender inequities be addressed in the midst of the social transformations stimulated by the Third Digital Revolution? Will the existing gender distribution patterns remain, be exasperated, or will they be eliminated?

The Third Digital Revolution, like its predecessors, will undoubtedly make fundamental shifts not only to human society but to the planet as well, many of which have yet to be anticipated. One likely shift that must be examined is the potential of accelerated environmental catastrophe. Currently, 3D printing is all the rage, and for good reason. It inspires the imagination and hints at a future where we are able to download or create a file that will allow us to fabricate just about anything that we can imagine. The key question that hasn’t been asked is how will humanity manage personal fabrication on a mass scale? The earth’s resources are finite. Nevertheless, capitalism has ingrained in us an infinite desire for commodities. While the methods of production under capitalism have been horrifically destructive to the environment, there is no guarantee that the appetites that have been programmed into us over the last several hundred years will suddenly accommodate themselves to ecological balance and sustainability if we are suddenly given the ability to fabricate what we want in the privacy of our own homes. There is a great deal of consciousness-raising and re-socialization about our ecological limits and responsibilities, accompanied by major policy shifts, that must be done to prevent the resource depletion and massive fabrication waste that is likely to result from this technology becoming broadly adopted.

All of these challenging facets of the coming Third Digital Revolution must be addressed, and quickly. The Third Digital Revolution is emerging in a society with immense inequality and imbalance with regard to the integration of existing technology from the previous Industrial and Digital Revolutions. As these historic developments converge into the Third Digital Revolution, the concern is that not only will this inherited inequity continue but will be drastically deepened for all of the reasons listed above. Those of us seeking to realize the potential of the Third Digital Revolution to help our species realize its full potential, must create the means to combat this deepening inequity, and democratize this transformation. If we can do that, we may very well be able to lay the foundation for a democratic and regenerative economic order, one that could potentially eliminate the extractive, exploitative, and utterly oppressive and undemocratic system that we are currently subjected to.

Those who seek to assist in democratizing the technology of the Third Digital Revolution must understand that any initial investment at this time is risky. The road ahead is not clear. What we do know is that we cannot afford to leave the development of this technological revolution solely up to actors like Amazon, Google, Walmart, or the US Department of Defense. In their hands, it will only serve to further extract profits from the majority of humanity and maintain the imperial dominance of the US government through force of arms. However, finding capital players willing to make “non-extractive” investments that center on tech justice, cooperative business innovation, and production driven to fulfill human need over profit realization are hard to find. There are many organizations experimenting with getting this technology out to vulnerable populations to aid us from falling further behind the technological access gap, but none of us really know what will work initially, nor when the technology will be at a significantly advanced stage to truly replace the existing mode of production. The stakes are high, as are the risks at this stage. Nevertheless, we must struggle, as all early adopters should, to not only avoid being left out in the cold but to help guide the development in a democratic and egalitarian manner.

Creating the Future, Taking Risks, Co-Constructing Solutions

Early adopter risk-taking is exactly what Cooperation Jackson is embarking upon with the launch of our Community Production Center and Community Production Cooperative[3]. Our aim is to make Jackson, Mississippi the “city of the future”, a Transition City anchored in part in the practices of a “Fab City”[4] that would transform our city into an international center of advanced, sustainable manufacturing utilizing 3D printing and other innovative tools of the Third Digital Revolution. The only way we are going to come anywhere close to attaining anything like the utopia these technologies promise is by democratizing them and subjecting them to social use and production for the benefit of all, rather than the control and appropriation by the few.

The democratization of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution, both in their ownership and use, is one of the primary aims of Cooperation Jackson. To realize this aim we struggle for Tech Democracy[5] and Tech Justice first and foremost by educating our members and the general public about the promises and perils of the technology so that people can make informed decisions. We suggest this as a general framework of struggle. The next course of action we suggest is the pursuit of self-finance to acquire as much of this technology as we can, with the explicit intention of controlling these means of production and utilizing them for the direct benefit of our organization and our community.

Another course of action we suggest and are embarking upon is organizing our community for political and economic power to expand and reinforce our Community Production efforts. Our aim is to gradually make Community Production ubiquitous in our community, with the explicit intent of gradually replacing the exploitative and environmentally destructive methods of production in use at present. A related course of action is to utilize our political power to make demands on the government, the capitalist class, and the transnational corporations to remove the controls they have on the technology, like exclusive patents, in order to make these technologies publicly accessible. Another essential demand on the government is to make massive investments in these technologies to make them public utilities and/or commons[6]and to ensure that the corporations make restorative investments in these utilities for the public good.

We also think that public/community partnerships should be pursued on a municipal level to establish direct community ownership over these technologies to help ensure that vulnerable populations and historically oppressed communities gain direct access, with the prerequisite being where these communities are sufficiently organized and possess a degree of political power within the municipality. Public/community partnerships could also be essential towards capitalizing these democratic pursuits, by enabling the community to use both its tax wealth and various vehicles of self-finance to build out the necessary infrastructure in a manner that will ensure that it remains in the community commons or public domain. It is essential that these types of pursuits be public/community partnerships, with the community being organized in collective institutions like cooperatives, credit unions, community development corporations, etc., and not your typical public/private partnerships that will only remove this infrastructure from the commons or public domain as soon as possible in our neoliberal dominated world.

Further, given the steady decline in union membership, density, and overall social and political power, coupled with the ever-growing threats of automation, mechanization, big data, and artificial intelligence to the working class as a whole, we want to appeal to the various unions, in and out of the AFL-CIO, as the most organized sector of the working class in the US, to take the challenges of the Third Digital Revolution head on. In fact, we think organized labor should be leading the charge on the question of Community Production, as it is in the best position given its resources, skills and strategic location in society to steer the Third Digital Revolution in a democratic manner. In this vein, we want to encourage organized labor to utilize the tremendous investment resources it has at its disposal to start creating or investing in Community Production Cooperatives throughout the US to further the ubiquitous development and utilization of the technology to help us all realize the benefits of a “zero-marginal-cost society”[7] to combat climate change and eliminate the exploitation of the working class and the lingering social and material effects of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, etc. It is time for the cooperative and union movements, as vehicles of working-class self-organization, to reunite again, and Community Production units could and should be a strategic means towards this end.

Finally, we have to keep pushing forward-thinking universities, particularly public colleges and universities, and philanthropists to also provide support to community production development efforts seeking to democratize control of this technology early on.

These are the core elements of what we think is a transformative program to utilize and participate in the development of the Third Digital Revolution for the benefit of our community and the liberation of the working class and all of humanity. We want and encourage other historically oppressed communities throughout the United States to follow this path, Jackson cannot and should not follow this path alone.

Supporting Cooperation Jackson and the Center for Community Production

If you agree with this analysis, in whole or in part, we need your help to bridge the Fabrication Divide. Cooperation Jackson is seeking broad public support for the development of our Community Production Center. We are aiming to raise $600,000 to complete the purchase of the facilities, build out them out, and equip them with all the utilities and equipment needed to create a dynamic Production Center. You can help build the Center for Community Production by becoming a National Donor or Investor and recruiting others to do the same. The $600,000 figure does not have to be daunting, if we can recruit 600 people to donate and/or invest $1,000 each, we can easily meet this goal. So, let us not be swayed, but moved to organize to turn this vision into a transformative reality.

[1] We draw our primary definition of the Third Digital Revolution from the work of Neil Gershenfeld, particularly his more recent work “Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution”, co-written with Alan Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld.

[2] For more detail on the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering, and math fields see, “Women still underrepresented in the STEM Fields”, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/10/21/women-still-underrepresented-in-stem-fields.

[3] We derive our notion of Community Production from Blair Evans and INCITE FOCUS based in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see INCITE FOCUS https://www.incite-focus.org/ and “Green City Diaries: Fab Lab and the Language of Nature” http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/greencity1113.aspx.

[4] Fab City is a concept that grew out of the Fab Lab Network. For more information on this concept and emerging network see http://fab.city/about/.

[5] We are adopting the concept of Tech Justice from LabGov, which describes itself as the “laboratory for the governance of the city as a commons”. For more information see http://www.labgov.it/.

[6] We utilize the notion and definition of the Commons utilized within the Peer 2 Peer Network. For more details see “What it the Commons Transition?” at https://primer.commonstransition.org/1-short-articles/1-1-what-is-a-commons-transition.

[7] We have adopted the notion of a “Zero-Marginal Cost Society” from Jeremy Rifkin and his work, “The Zero-Marginal Cost Society: the Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”.

The post Countering the Fabrication Divide: The Third Digital Revolution and Class, Race, Gender and Ecological Limitations appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Open source projects seem to lack the ability to scale, remaining hobbyist or academic. Successful products are “curated” and pounded with marketing, yet, a community focus on making a product intuitive and beautiful, while demoing the product as a lifestyle, because it is worth having, would be ideal?

As Cravens points out, open-source product design is still practically implemented, for the most part, within a capitalist paradigm of production for profit in corporate-owned facilities (the classic example is Elon Musk’s various manufacturing ventures).

Open-source organization is ideal for the design of industrial products, because digital design can be done stigmergically (the same modular, granular approach to leveraging small contributions that characterizes Wikipedia) by self-selected individuals designing components to plug into a larger platform ecology. Physical production, on the other hand, is a cooperative venture that requires at least some degree of administrative coordination by a number of people engaged in a common process. Members of an open-manufacturing ecology can’t just manufacture components and sub-assemblies when they feel like it, and let them lie around until other groups of people also feel like producing the remaining necessary parts and assembling the final product. In the meantime, the shelves at Sears and Walmart are being stocked with goods — of inferior design and higher price though they may be — that are made to order in a timely fashion.

So the question is, what’s the catalyst that will drive cooperative production of physical goods on a P2P model at the local level, so organized as to meet the real material needs of real human beings in a timely and efficient manner, and to provide an alternative preferable to going to Sears or Walmart?

In my opinion it’s the present-day approach to commons-based peer production as a lifestyle choice or ideal, which Cravens seems to set forth as an alternative to hobbyist production, that’s the problem. Societies undergo phase transitions to fundamentally new ways of organizing things only when the new technologies that were previously adopted as the lifestyle choice of those who could afford to secede from the existing system, as a matter of choice and privilege, are instead adopted as a means for survival by those who no longer have the choice of surviving in the existing system.

Technologists sometimes use the term “killer app” for a practical application that suddenly drives widespread adoption of a technology that had previously been sitting around for a considerable length of time, with nobody much paying any attention to it outside of hobbyist groups.

The “killer app” concept applies on the macro scale as well, to the adoption of new organizational and technological paradigms on a society-wide basis. Because of path dependency and culture lag, the technological feasibility of organizing society on a new basis tends to predate the phase transition to a society actually organized around the new technologies. That phase transition occurs only when the new technologies are widely perceived as offering the solution to real popular needs. And when it does occur, it is usually non-linear and is much faster than anyone anticipated when the tipping point is reached.

Ultimately material implementation of open source design projects will come from local network nodes composed of people colocated in physical space, who are driven by their own immediate material needs. In other words, our society and economy will shift to more liberatory, decentralized and abundant ways of organizing and producing things only when people see them as the obvious solution to real and immediate problems.

Resilient forms of organization are adopted in the face of turbulence and uncertainty. Large, centralized hierarchies of the kind that reached their peak in the 20th century — large oligopoly corporations and nation-states — function optimally only in environments that are controlled so as to artificially reduce complexity and render society predictable to managers and planners.

When complexity and uncertainty reach levels beyond the ability of hierarchical institutions to control, such institutions quickly begin to break down in the face of unmanageable turbulence. And societies — or rather, the people making them up — react to that turbulence by adopting new, more resilient organizational forms that are decentralized, networked and hardened at the end points.

At the same time, historically speaking, in periods of economic dislocation where increasing shares of the population have been unemployed or underemployed, and long-distance industrial supply and distribution chains have broken down, people have responded by relocalizing production and shifting the process of meeting their own material needs from the wage system to direct production for use in the social economy.

And when social safety nets and wage employment break down together, people tend to coalesce into self-organized social units for mutual aid of the kind described by Pyotr Kropotkin and E.P. Thompson, and institutions for pooling costs, risks and money incomes among extended families or multiple households.

We’re already seeing all these background conditions in spades. Capitalism is experiencing a number of steadily worsening terminal crisis tendencies. Thanks to Peak Oil and other crises of peak resource inputs, capitalism has reached the limits of extensive growth based on endless addition of artificially cheap, subsidized energy and other material inputs, mostly obtained through colonial enclosure and looting with the help of the state.

Along with the end of artificial abundance of material inputs, capitalism is hit from the other side by an equally devastating crisis: an end to the artificial scarcity of information — not only the open-source production of information as a counter-model (e.g. Wikipedia largely destroying the revenue of Britannica) but the growing unenforceability of copyrights and patents. Digital file-sharing has put an enormous dent in the revenue of proprietary content industries. And cheap micro-manufacturing technology means that production will be dispersed to hundreds of thousands of neighborhood shops, so that the transaction costs of enforcement render patents meaningless, and downloading pirated CAD/CAM files becomes as commonplace as downloading mp3s is now.

Industrial capitalism’s chronic tendencies towards surplus investment capital and excess capacity are being rendered much worse by the implosion of capital outlays required for material and immaterial production. The crisis of surplus capital that had been temporarily ended by WWII was resumed around 1970; even increasing financialization and political attack on labor’s earlier gains, which capital resorted to as a response, was insufficient. The desktop computer revolution and the Internet reduced the required capital outlays for production by two orders of magnitude or more in the information industries. The micro-manufacturing revolution (especially in its open-source hardware manifestations) has similarly reduced the capital outlays required for physical production. That means that the problem of finding enough profitable outlets to fully absorb available investment capital, already serious, has become insurmountable.

Meanwhile, the United States reached peak wage employment in 2000 — even before the Great Recession — and labor force participation has declined steadily ever since. Among those still in the labor force, a steadily growing percentage are underemployed, and employment has shifted from secure full-time jobs to low-paying service jobs and precarious temp or gig economy work.

The combination of new production and communications technologies, along with new forms of organization, presents a level of insupportable complexity that the old-style hierarchies of corporation and state are able neither to limit, contain or adapt to.

States are unable to effectively respond to terrorist networks organized on a stigmergic, open source model. Their ability to anticipate and prevent attacks is near zero, thanks to the virtually insurmountable problem of false positives and the inferior agility of bureaucratic hierarchies. This means that chronic disruption from the potential of terrorist attacks will further degrade transportation infrastructures, power grids, and supply and distribution chains.

The rise to power of right-authoritarian governments in Europe and the United States means that nation-states are more useless than before as a source of solutions to these problems, and if anything add to the level of turbulence from which ordinary people need protection. And fiscal exhaustion and austerity, along with the ongoing disintegration of the corporate-centered economy, means that state- and employer-based safety nets are disappearing.

Put all these things together and the “killer app” for adopting post-capitalist technologies of abundance and libertarian counter-institutions becomes clear:  SURVIVAL.

The cyclical crises which provided the material incentive for previous waves of adopting alternative technologies, are eclipsed by the scale of necessity entailed in the new era of systemic crises we’re entering. But at the same time as the material necessity for adoption surpasses anything in our collective memory, the sheer potential for abundance and freedom in the new technologies is also beyond our previous experience.

Decades ago, Jane Jacobs, Colin Ward and Karl Hess all argued for industrial relocalization and decentralized production as means of community economic bootstrapping, and for enabling the unemployed and underemployed to produce directly for use in the social economy.

Jacobs presented the growth of the Japanese bicycle industry at the turn of the 20th century as a classic example of import substitution. Because existing bicycle manufactures in America and Europe were unwilling to open production facilities in Japan, Japanese bicycle repair shops frequently resorted to custom-machining their own replacement parts. This eventually grew into a networked industrial ecology where different shops specialized in different parts that were in particularly high demand, and finally entire bicycles could be produced by such networked shops.

Karl Hess argued similarly in Neighborhood Power that people in poor communities could pool their individual power tools and machinery in neighborhood workshops, and pursue a gradual course of import subsitution starting from the first step of custom-machining the most needed replacement parts for home appliances that corporate manufacturers had either stopped making or price gouged customers for. From this beginning, they could apply the savings to expanding into larger product ecologies and meet a growing share of their need for manufactured goods outside the cash nexus.

Both Hess and Ward argued for such neighborhood workshops as means for the unemployed, underemployed and those on limited government benefits to produce directly for their own use as a supplement or partial alternative to the wage system.

And again, these three all wrote against the technological background of the 1950s, 60s and 70s. They predated the development of CNC machine tools scaled to medium-size shops, that fueled the rise of networked manufacturing in Emilia-Romagna and Shenzhen — let alone the development of open-source tabletop CNC tools during the present explosion of micro-manufacturing technology. A collection of open-source tools like cutting table, 3D printer, router, bending machine, induction hearth, etc., costing several months skilled blue collar wage and housed in a neighborhood shop, can produce the kinds of goods that once required a million-dollar factory. Even for a multi-family unit of a few households, the potential is becoming real to produce a huge share of total consumption needs through a shared workshop and intensive horticulture.

The towns that sprang up in late Medieval Europe were basically favelas or squatter communities that coalesced at strategic crossroads and fords, populated by runaway peasants. These squatter communities, with their networked guilds — originally democratic self-governed communities of craft workers — were the site of Europe’s real first industrial revolution. Lewis Mumford called it the “Eotechnic” phase of technological history. The industrial revolution we’re familiar with from the history textbooks developed steam as a source of motive force, and developed many of the specific applications for machine production. But the most important prerequisite — clockwork technology for the transmission of power — had already been developed in the guilds and monasteries.

The new communities around which the post-capitalist abundance economy crystalizes may likewise be favelas, squats and “de-industrialized” Rust Belt neighborhoods. As a shrinking share of the population has sufficient or regular hours of paid employment to meet its needs, and as abandoned malls and unfinished housing developments host unofficial communities of people who are otherwise homeless, such centers may of necessity be the first adopters of micro-manufacturing technology, along with community gardens and off-grid power sources.

The decay of steady, secure employment and the shift to precarious freelance and temp employment is also leading to a huge outgrowth in experimentation with revived guilds, freelancers’ unions and cooperative temp agencies. Such organizations provide collective bargaining services on the model of the old longshoremen’s hiring halls, certiify skill and provide continuing training on the guild model, and offer to provide temp workers on a cooperative basis without the middleman.

And as the old national governments either succumb to fiscal exhaustion and austerity, or are actually taken over by the likes of Trump, we also see an increasing shift towards horizontal networks of local platforms that bypass national governments altogether (and abandon them as irrelevant). The most notable example is the assorted municipal movements in Spain which grew out of M15 which, despite right-wing control of the national government, are creating rich ecologies of commons-based and cooperative institutions in the major cities. In the United States, the Evergreen initiative in Cleveland and the solidarity economy initiatives in Jackson under the late mayor Chokwe Lumumba. In the present atmosphere we can expect such local initiatives to increase in importance, and to proliferate along with horizontal ties between them. We can expect them also to link up with networked movements for resistance to repression and neoliberalism — movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #NoDAPL, local remnants of Occupy, copwatch and Black Panthers armed patrols, and the like, as well as local initiatives like community land trusts and barter currencies.

There’s an old saying that the first casualty of a plan is contact with the enemy. We have to negotiate transition in the scenario that we have, not the one we would like to have. Two months ago I fully expected the transition process we’re discussing to take place against the more congenial background of a Clinton administration. Eight years of a caretaker regime by the old dying neoliberal party establishment she represents, a demographic transition within the Democratic Party to a majority of Millennials who are both more socialistic and more libertarian (and with more Green and Pirate sympathies) than the Boomers they’re replacing, and the implosion of the GOP into an irrelevant regional party of elderly white rageaholics. Today we can expect the transition to occur against a background more fraught with danger and repression. But the economic dislocation from Trump’s trade wars, and the increased rate at which social safety nets are dismantled, may if anything increase the value of social and economic counter-institutions as lifelines for survival.

And the basic forces driving the transition — the political, material and technological exhaustion of the old capitalist system, and the irrepressible post-capitalist system which is emerging from it — are just as inevitable either way. The transition may be rockier. But we’ll get there.

Photo by Hans-Werner Guth

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