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E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work Small Is Beautiful (1973) champions the idea of smallness and localism as the way for meaningful interactions amongst humans and the technology they use. Technology is very important after all. As Ursula Le Guin (2004) puts it, “[t]echnology is the active human interface with the material world”. With this essay we wish to briefly tell a story, inspired by this creed, of an emerging phenomenon that goes beyond the limitations of time and space and may produce a more socially viable and radically democratic life.
We want to cast a radical geographer’s eye over “cosmolocalism”. Antipode has previously published an article by Hannes Gerhardt (2019) and an interview with Michel Bauwens (Gerhardt 2020) that have touched upon “cosmolocalism”. Cosmolocalism emerges from technology initiatives that are small-scale and oriented towards addressing local problems, but simultaneously engage with globally asynchronous collaborative production through digital commoning. We thus connect such a discussion with two ongoing grassroots developments: first, a cosmolocal response to the coronavirus pandemic; and, second, an ongoing effort of French and Greek communities of small-scale farmers, activists and researchers to address their local needs.
Cosmolocalism in a Nutshell
Τhe most important means of information production – i.e. computation, communications, electronic storage and sensors – have been distributed in the population of most advanced economies as well as in parts of the emerging ones (Benkler 2006). People with access to networked computers self-organise, collaborate, and produce digital commons of knowledge, software, and design. Initiatives such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and myriad free and open-source software projects have exemplified digital commoning (Benkler 2006; Gerhardt 2019, 2020; Kostakis 2018).
While the first wave of digital commoning included open knowledge projects, the second wave has been moving towards open design and manufacturing (Kostakis et al. 2018). Contrary to the conventional industrial paradigm and its economies of scale, the convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing machinery (from 3D printing and CNC milling machines to low-tech tools and crafts) has been developing commons-based economies of scope (Kostakis et al. 2018). Cosmolocalism describes the processes where the design is developed and improved as a global digital commons, while the manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check (Bauwens et al. 2019). The physical manufacturing arrangement for cosmolocalism includes makerspaces, which are small-scale community manufacturing facilities providing access to local manufacturing technologies.
Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, cosmolocalism emphasizes applications that are small-scale, decentralised, resilient and locally controlled. Cosmolocal production cases such as L’Atelier Paysan (agricultural tools), Open Bionics (robotic and bionic hands), WikiHouse (buildings) or RepRap (3D printers) demonstrate how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development.
Two Cases of Cosmolocalism
While this essay was being written in March 2020, a multitude of small distributed initiatives were being mobilised to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Individuals across the globe are coming together digitally to pool resources, design open source technological solutions for health problems, and fabricate them in local makerspaces and workshops. For example, people are experimenting with new ventilator designs and hacking existing ones, creating valves for ventilators which are out of stock, and designing and making face shields and respirators.
There are so many initiatives, in fact, that there are now attempts to aggregate and systematise the knowledge produced to avoid wasting resources on problems that have already been tackled and brainstorm new solutions collectively.[1] This unobstructed access to collaboration and co-creation allows thousands of engineers, makers, scientists and medical experts to offer their diverse insights and deliver a heretofore unseen volume of creative output. The necessary information and communication technologies were already available, but capitalism as a system did not facilitate the organisational structure required for such mass mobilisation. In response to the current crisis, an increasing number of people are working against and beyond the system.
Such initiatives can be considered as grassroots cosmolocal attempts to tackle the inability of the globalised capitalist arrangements for production and logistics to address any glitch in the system. We have been researching similar activity in various productive fields for a decade, from other medical applications, like 3D-printed prosthetic hands, to wind turbines and agricultural machines and tools (Giotitsas 2019; Kostakis et al. 2018).
The technology produced is unlike the equivalent market options or is entirely non-existent in the market. It is typically modular in design, versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make reproduction easier (Kostakis 2019). Through our work we have identified a set of values present in the “technical codes” of such technology which can be distilled into the following themes: openness, sustainability and autonomy (Giotitsas 2019). It is these values that we believe lead to an alternative trajectory of technological development that assists the rise of a commons-based mode of production opposite the capitalist one. This “antipode” is made possible through the great capacity for collaboration and networking that its configuration offers.
Allow us to elaborate via an example. In the context of our research we have helped mobilise a pilot initiative in Greece that has been creating a community of farmers, designers and fabricators that helps address issues faced by the local farmers. This pilot, named Tzoumakers, has been greatly inspired by similar initiatives elsewhere, primarily by L’Atelier Paysan in France. The local community benefits from the technological prowess that the French community has achieved, which offers not only certain technological tools but also through them the commitment for regenerative agricultural practices, the communal utilisation of the tools, and an enhanced capacity to maintain and repair. At the same time, these tools are adapted to local needs and potential modifications along with local insights may be sent back to those that initially conceived them. This creates flows of knowledge and know-how but also ideas and values, whilst cultivating a sense of solidarity and conviviality.
Instead of Conclusions, a Call to Arms
We are not geographers. However, the implications of cosmolocalism for geography studies are evident. The spatial and cultural specificities of cosmolocalism need to be studied in depth. This type of study would go beyond critique and suggest a potentially unifying element for the various kindred visions that lack a structural element. The contributors (and readership) are ideally suited to the task of critically examining the cosmolocalism phenomenon and contributing to the idea of scaling-wide, in the context of an open and diverse network, instead of scaling-up.
Cosmolocal initiatives may form a global counter-power through commoning. Considering the current situation we find ourselves in as a species, where we have to haphazardly re-organise entire social structures to accommodate the appearance of a “mere” virus, not to mention climate change, it is blatantly obvious that radical change is required to tackle the massive hurdles to come. Cosmolocalism may point a way forward towards that change.
Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 802512). The photos were captured by Nicolas Garnier in the Tzoumakers makerspace.
Endnote
[1] Volunteers created the following editable webpage where, at the time of writing, more than 1,500 commons-based initiatives against the ongoing pandemic have been documented: https://airtable.com/shrPm5L5I76Djdu9B/tbl6pY6HtSZvSE6rJ/viwbIjyehBIoKYYt1?blocks=bipjdZOhKwkQnH1tV (last accessed 27 March 2020)
References
Bauwens M, Kostakis V and Pazaitis A (2019) Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London: University of Westminster Press
Benkler Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press
Gerhardt H (2019) Engaging the non-flat world: Anarchism and the promise of a post-capitalist collaborative commons. Antipode DOI:10.1111/anti.12554
Gerhardt H (2020) A commons-based peer to peer path to post-capitalism: An interview with Michel Bauwens. AntipodeOnline.org 19 February https://antipodeonline.org/2020/02/19/interview-with-michel-bauwens/ (last accessed 27 March 2020)
Giotitsas C (2019) Open Source Agriculture: Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Kostakis V (2018) In defense of digital commoning. Organization 25(6):812-818
Kostakis V (2019) How to reap the benefits of the “digital revolution”? Modularity and the commons. Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance 20(1):4-19
Kostakis V, Latoufis K, Liarokapis M and Bauwens M (2018) The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases. Journal of Cleaner Production 197(2):1684-1693
Le Guin U K (2004) A rant about “technology”. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html (last accessed 27 March 2020)
Schumacher E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row
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]]>From energy co-operatives in Spain that are literally bringing power to the local level, to a small school hidden deep in the English moors that is redesigning the study of economics, to a vast coalition in North America that is challenging domination by the 1%, this episode of Upstream explores the movement for a new economy.
Our story begins in 1984, just outside of the G7 World Economic Summit in London, where a small group convened a counter summit to challenge the ideas and theories that dominated mainstream economics. We follow the ripples of this seminal event as they radiate out through the world and on into our current era of Trump & Brexit.
This lineage traces back to the work of the renegade economist E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977). You’ll hear from him, as well as many of the other people and organizations on the cutting-edge of this broad movement that is working to revolutionize the way we think about what the economy is, the way economics is taught, and the way we embody new economics in practice.
Featuring:
Tim Crabtree – Senior Lecturer at Schumacher College
Aniol Esteban – Program Director of The New Economics Foundation
E. F. Schumacher – From the archives of the Schumacher Center for New Economics
Satish Kumar – Founder of Schumacher College & Editor of Resurgence & Ecologist Magazine
Jonathan Dawson – Coordinator of the Economics for Transition M. A. Program at Schumacher College
Kate Raworth – Author of Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist
Katherine Trebeck – Senior Researcher at Oxfam
Eli Feghali – Director of Communications and Online Organizing for the New Economy Coalition
Andres Montesinos – Coordinator at Som Energia
Isabel Benitez – Coordinator of the New Economy & Social Innovation Forum
Music:
Lanterns (theme music)
Amonie
Tapes and Topographies
Owu Kou Woo
Haunted Haus
Cover image by Robert Raymond
This episode is presented in partnership with The New Economy and Social Innovation Forum (NESI), taking place in Malaga, Spain in April 2017. For more information visit neweconomyforum.org.
For more from Upstream, visit upstreampodcast.org
Facebook.com/upstreampodcast
Twitter: @upstreampodcast
Instagram.com/upstreampodcast
A version of this post was originally published at Shareable.
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In his 1973 bestseller Small Is Beautiful, the British economist E.F. Schumacher outlined a concept that would come to be known as “appropriate technology.” This meant, in essence, adopting technologies that actually suit the needs they’re meant to address and the contexts in which they’re meant to operate. He was worried chiefly about technological overkill in international development, but it’s an idea that resonates elsewhere. In sum: Use the tool that fits the need.
Not incidentally, Schumacher converted to Catholicism two years before the book appeared; appropriate technology has everything to do with the Catholic (and common-sensical) concept of subsidiarity, which calls for simple, local problem-solving whenever possible. Catholic personalism, too, looks askew at any technology that furnishes more demands on its humans than the human needs it satisfies.
The concept of appropriate technology raises all sorts of questions about the use and proliferation of technology in the world today. Why do we invent labor-saving robots when there are people in need of work? Why do we build enough bombs to make the planet uninhabitable for the survivors? Why do we sell selfie sticks when there are plenty of other tourists around to take our picture for us?
My anxiety here is less dire than any of those. But it bugs me nonetheless. (As the title of Schumacher’s book suggests, perhaps seemingly small things matter more than we realize.) My anxiety, right now, is the perverse and pervasive overuse of PDF documents.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It first appeared in 1993 as a proprietary specification controlled by Adobe Systems. The goal was to allow people to pass around digital documents in such a way that they’d look the same no matter what computer they were loaded and printed on. In order to do that, the idea was, a document had to be very rigidly structured, with a defined size and all the fonts and images packaged together. This made eminent sense at a time when lots of people still printed out all their emails, when the computer was thought of as a document’s temporary waystation before reaching almighty paper. PDF’s popularity became good business for Adobe.
Many of us nowadays, however, have the gizmos sufficient to make screen reading quite practical and pleasant. We have light, portable tablets and phones. We can scale text to a comfortable size and, with the right software, choose a color scheme that’s easy on the eyes. At least until we open a PDF. Then, all of a sudden, we’re squinting to make out the text of an 8.5″ x 11″ page scaled to the size of a prayer card. And if you’re expected to fill out forms or “sign” the document, too, my condolences if you’re not running precisely the same version of Adobe Acrobat as was used to make the thing. (This is almost impossible for me, since Adobe stopped supporting Acrobat for Linux operating systems in 2013.) The kinds of interactivity PDF is expected to perform these days has made the specification hideously complex. It was first intended, after all, to become a printout.
On a daily basis, someone sends me a PDF file that I’m expected to read — perhaps an article or a book, or a form they’d like filled out. I don’t blame the senders; this is the way of things. For the same reason, I assign PDFs as readings to my students, wishing I had something better. Inevitably I try to read the thing on my computer or phone, and the shape of the file is at war with the shape of my screen. It begs to be printed.
Another way is possible. A far more appropriate technology for many of the things PDFs are used for today is EPUB — the non-proprietary, open ebook format employed by just about all digital-book sellers except Amazon. Based on HTML, EPUB can embed fonts and graphics like PDF, but it can also scale effortlessly to whatever screen it appears on. HTML is built for interactivity, so it’s only natural that the new version of EPUB can handle dynamic forms and scripts, too. EPUB files can be read not only on desktops, laptops, and smartphones, but on energy-saving ereaders.
Like PDFs, EPUB documents are designed to be seen and not edited, so they have that veneer of a finished publication to them. But nobody ever sends me EPUBs. Even Pope Francis’ latest encyclical is available on the Vatican website only in HTML and PDF. I had to convert it myself with Calibre so that I could have the reading experience the text deserves.
Technically speaking, EPUB is a fairly simple and adaptable format — just a webpage, really, with some extra goodies — but adoption has been slow, limited mostly to the book industry. It can do so much more than just ebooks. In theory, it should be fairly easy to export a robust EPUB from any word processor (complete with formatting and a table of contents), though only a lucky few word processors support this. Most popular EPUB reading software — like iBooks and Nook — seem mostly built to get you to buy more ebooks. Exceptions like the open-source FBReader demonstrate how well-suited EPUB is for an adaptable, distraction-free reading experience. Perhaps commercial imperatives are getting in the way of appropriate technology that digital readers deserve.
I don’t pretend that Schumacher proposed his noble doctrine with my reading habits in mind. And PDF remains a sensible format for people intending to print something. It also works pretty well for presentation slides. But it’s a far-too-common, far-too-bloated obstruction for just about anything else. Appropriate is beautiful.
Originally published in America Magazine
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