System Reset is a feature-length documentary which explores this story of change in our economy. Shot in London, Amsterdam and Barcelona, this film is a DIF 2018 exclusive. It features some of the leading thinkers in materials, economics, the commons movement, FabLabs, digital citizenship, urban planning and architecture. Don’t miss your opportunity to see them collectively weave a picture of how our economy could operate.

The post System Reset to Sustainable Manufacturing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I.

The story opens at a communist party in an unspecified post-industrial town in Ontario sometime in the late middle of this century, from the first-person perspective of Hubert, Etc. A communist party, you should understand, is not an institution but a social event: something like a rave at an abandoned factory where, along with dancing, drinking, drugs, and hookups, illegal acts of post-scarcity are committed. In this case, which is presumably typical, the temporarily recuperated facility is a furniture factory with machinery that’s apparently user-friendly enough a random assortment of intoxicated teens and twenty-somethings can get it up and running and turn out fairly large runs of shelving, beds, or whatever. Using the abandoned machinery and large amounts of abandoned feedstock, one communist party can “do enough furnishings for a couple thousand families” in one evening. The next party is scheduled for a feedstock plant in a neighboring town to keep the supply chain going. And so on.

As Natalie — an attendee at the communist party who becomes a main character — describes it, the whole point of it all is post-scarcity.

Look… at all this. On paper, this place is useless; the stuff coming off that line has to be destroyed. It’s a trademark violation: even though it came off an official Muji line, using Muji’s feedstock, it doesn’t have Muji’s official license, so that configuration of cellulose and glue is a crime. That’s so manifestly fucked up and shit that anyone who pays attention to it is playing the wrong game and doesn’t deserve consideration.

The larger setting is a society in which technology has become so cheap and productive that Muji, the company the factory belonged to, can relocate every few months as its tax holiday ends in one location and another would-be host offers it a bigger subsidy, and abandon the machinery every time as not worth the cost of moving. The main thing standing in the way of this ultra-cheap machinery being unleashed to provide the necessities of life for virtually free to everybody is the patents and trademarks of Muji and companies like it. Machinery is abandoned because it’s cheaper to replace on-site than to move, but communist parties are routinely shut down by police drones enforcing Muji’s monopoly on the right to actually produce things with processes that would otherwise be too cheap to meter.

For those outside the zotta class (and a few million or so of their hired overseers and providers of professional services to them and their overseers), the whole society is made up of precarious laborers who hold on to temp gigs for a few months at a time, with their first few gigs typically being unpaid.

It’s a fictional illustration of Peter Frase’s hypothetical anti-Star Trek scenario, in which matter-energy replicators can produce anything — including other replicators — at zero marginal cost, but capitalists can continue to extract scarcity rents from post-scarcity technology through ownership of patents on the replicators and the designs. That’s the trend in today’s actually-existing capitalism, where the rapid cheapening of production technology means capital’s main source of profit is ceasing to be physical control of the means of production, and profit is instead derived from legal control over the conditions under which people are allowed to produce. The ultimate outcome, if they get their way (which they won’t), is an economy where profit comes not from ownership of the means of production, but from making us sign a EULA to use tools we already own.

The personification of this mentality is Natalie’s zottarich father Jacob Redwater (“zottarich” denoting, in a society where inflation has dovetailed with the concentration of wealth to make astronomical numbers necessary, a level of wealth beyond giga-, tera- and petarich). After bailing his daughter out of trouble in the aftermath of the communist party, he defends the logic of the system in language that’s quite familiar.

Natalie looked grim. “…That factory we switched on last night. It was worth more as a write-off than it was as a going concern. Some entity that owned it demanded that it sit rotting and useless, even though there were people who wanted what it could make.”

“If they wanted the factory, they could buy the factory, Jacob said. “Then make things and sell them.”

“I don’t think these people could afford to buy a factory,” Hubert, Etc said….

“That’s what capital markets are for,” Jacob said. “If you’ve got a plan for profitably using an asset someone else isn’t using, then you draw up a business plan and take it to investors. If you’re right, one of them will fund you….”

“What if no one invests?” Hubert, Etc said….

Jacob took on the air of someone explaining a complex subject to a child. “If no one wants to invest, that means that you don’t have an idea worth investing in….”

“Don’t you see the circularity there?” Natalie said. If you can’t convince someone to turn on the factory to make things that people need, then the factory shouldn’t be turned on?”

“As opposed to what? A free-for-all? Just smash down the doors, walk in and take over?”

“Why not, if no one else is doing anything with it?”

The talking-to-a-toddler look: “Because it’s not yours.”

Jacob’s logic is even more circular than Natalie points out. In any rational society, the factory would be considered abandoned. And obviously, running the abandoned factory to produce furniture at near-zero marginal cost isn’t worth investing in, because the main source of profit is using the state to prevent the factory from being used. In a society where production costs next to nothing, profit results from the right to prevent production that can’t be sold for a monopoly price.

“What do you think about breaking into private property and stealing what you find there?”….

“No one was using it…. The hydrogen cells’d filled up. So the windmills were going to waste. The feedstock was worth practically nothing.”

Natalie said, “What’s the point of having private property if all it does is rot?”

“Oh, please. Private property is the most productive property. Temporary inefficiencies don’t change that. Only kooks and crooks think that stealing other property is a valid form of political action.”

But Jacob’s circular logic is necessary, as Natalie points out.

He wants to be the one percent of the one percent of the one percent because of his inherent virtue, not because the system is rigged. His whole identity rests on the idea that the system is legit and that he earned his position in it fair and square and everyone else is a whiner.

That same desire, in the real world, is the reason billionaires like the Koch brothers pour so much money into pet right-libertarian think tanks just to churn out second-hand pablum justifying their wealth. And it’s a successful strategy, at least with some people; all you have to do is check the reply threads under any social media post critical of Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to see dozens of sycophants saying some variation of “Who cares? It’s his money — he earned it” or “If you don’t like it work harder and earn some money of your own.” And beneath this meritocratic myth is an even uglier Hobbesian myth.

“…I think that the tragedy of human existence is our world is run by people who are really good at kidding themselves, like your father. Your dad manages to kid himself that he’s rich and powerful because he’s the cream and has risen to the top. But he’s not stupid. He knows he’s kidding himself. So underneath that top layer of bullshit is another, more aware belief system: the belief that everyone else would kid themselves the same way he does, if they had the chance….

“His beliefs don’t start with the idea that it’s okay to kid yourself you’re a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that it’s human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie, so if he doesn’t, someone else will, so he had better be the most lavishly self-deluded of all, the most prolific taker of cookies, lest someone more horrible, immoral, and greedy than he gets there first and eats all the cookies, takes the plate, and charges rent to drink the milk.”

I suspect there’s yet another, equally twisted layer to this ideology. Deep down they believe that if people are left to their own devices, without being kept busy with the requirement to work in order to survive, they’ll run wild and wreck all the progress that people like Jacob Redwater have painstakingly built up over the millennia. People are naturally self-centered, short-sighted, and amoral, and stable societies are only possible when equally amoral — but more intelligent — elites keep them in line. It’s necessary to destroy abundance in order to preserve society.

In the same conversation Hubert, Etc disposes of Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” with the contempt it deserves.

“Sounds like bullshit to me.”

“Oh, it is…. It’s more than mere bullshit. It’s searing, evil, world-changing bullshit. The solution to the tragedy of the commons isn’t to get a cop to make sure sociopaths aren’t overgrazing the land, or shunning anyone who does it, turning him into a pariah. The solution is to let a robber-baron own the land that used to be everyone’s, because once he’s running it for profit, he’ll take exquisite care to generate profit forever.”

“That’s the tragedy of the commons? A fairy tale about giving public assets to rich people to run as personal empires because that way they’ll make sure they’re better managed than they would be if we just made up some rules? God, my dad must love that story.”

“It’s the origin story of people like your dad,” Hubert, Etc said….

II.

In a discussion of alternatives for reform, none of which seems to be satisfactory or politically viable, Hubert, Etc raises the question that the rest of the book spends answering: “What about walkaways?…. Seems to me that they’re doing something that makes a difference. No money, no pretending money matters, and they’re doing it right now.” Hubert, Natalie, and their friend Seth decide to check it out.

In keeping with convention for this genre, the reader is introduced to the utopian society through the eyes of the three outsiders and learns its mechanics along with them.

The walkaway society — which apparently emerged a decade or so earlier — exists in areas on the margins of neoliberal capitalism, mainly in rural or decaying places not worth enforcing territorial control over, and using waste or abandoned materials similarly not worth enforcing ownership of. Its largely post-scarcity and communistic economy is an ad hoc mix of high-tech open-source hardware hacking, p2p organization, and vernacular materials and design.

The Belt and Braces Inn, where the three travelers initially make contact with walkaway society, is our introduction to its basic principles. It’s a sort of combination restaurant/pub, hostelry, community hub, and co-living space. The Belt and Braces was built from scavenged materials located by surveillance drones, and put together according to an evolving wikified design by stigmergically organized, permissionless labor using a modified version of UN High Commission on Refugees software.

You told it the kind of building you wanted, gave it a scavenging range, and it directed its drones to inventory anything nearby, scanning multi-band, doing deep database scrapse against urban planning and building-code sources to identify usable blocks for whatever you were making….

These flowed into the job site. The building tracked and configured them, a continuously refactored critical path for its build plan that factored in the skill levels of workers or robots on-site at any moment.

The B&B power source was hydrogen fuel cells, recharged by wind-driven electrolysis of waste water.

As mentioned before, not only the construction process, but all day-to-day activities were governed by walkaway society’s combined ethos of permissionlessness and freedom from work ethic: “You’re not supposed to covet a job, and you’re not supposed to look down your nose at slackers, and you’re not supposed to lionize someone who’s slaving. It’s supposed to be emergent, natural homeostasis….” As explained by Limpopo, a veteran member of B&B: “Asking someone if you can pitch in is telling them that they’re in charge and deferring to their authority. Both are verboten. If you want to work, do something. If it’s not helpful, maybe I’ll undo it later, or talk it over with you, or let it slide.”

Another illustration of the technological basis of the walkaway economy is a community built in the relatively early days of walkaway culture, as recounted by Limpopo:

We’d built rammed-earth houses on the escarpment, two dozen of them. Real refu-luxury: power, water, fresh hydroponics, and soft beds. Took about three hours a day each to keep the whole place running. Spent the rest of the time re-creating a Greek open-air school, teaching each other music and physics and realtime poetry. It was sweet. I helped build a pottery and we were building weird wheels that did smart adaptic eccentric spinning in response to your hands and mass, so that it was impossible to throw a non-viable pot.

The harshest bit of the three new walkaways’ introduction to the new society was discovering their travel gear had been ripped off. Limpopo took that as a teachable moment for explaining the minimalist ethos of traveling light, keeping information backed up, and treating physical goods as replaceable.

The latter point was driven home by their visit to the community fablab, more or less standard for all walkaway settlements, where they replaced their stolen gear. The process involved shopping through the fablab’s large inventory of designs for just about any kind of good anyone could imagine, adding the selections to a checkout basket along with size and other options specified, and executing the production cycle (which usually took a few hours). It could be done faster, “but this rate allows us to use feedstock with more impurities by adding error-correction passes.” The inventory included medicine produced by wet-printers.

Communications infrastructure was largely ad hoc and with high degrees of latency; connectivity was sporadic, often involving large data dumps when broken connections were routed around or relay airships came into range and reestablished connection.

Some of the best R&D in the world took place at the various Walkaway U campuses.

For a decade, word around the world’s top research institutions was that the most creative, wildest work happened in walkaway. It leaked into default: Self-replicating beer and semi-biological feedstock decomposers that broke down manufactured goods into slurries ready to be dumped into printers. A lot of radio stuff, things you could only pull off through cooperative models of spectrum management, where any radio could speak in any frequency, all radios cooperating to steer clear of each other, dynamically adjusting their gain, shaping their transmissions with smart phased arrays.

One reason for walkaway’s superior technology is the absence of the proprietary capitalist restraints on progress.

“You know, when the first walkaway prostheses projects started, most of the people contributing had lost an arm or a leg in Belarus or Oman, and were tired of paying a loan shark for something that hurt and barely worked and could be remotely repossessed by an over-the-air kill-switch if they missed a payment. But once they got here and started living, realized how much had been left on the table by conservative companies that didn’t want to get into a patent fight and didn’t see any reason to add advanced functionality to something that you didn’t have any choice about, they got radicalized.

“They stopped saying ‘I just want to make an arm that’ll get through the day,’ and started saying ‘I want an arm that does everything my old arm did.’”

As Cory Doctorow has noted, he intended walkaway society’s discouragement of work ethic and reputation-scoring as a deliberate contrast to the Bitchun Society of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where a reputational mechanism (“whuffie”) was used to allocate scarce goods like personal attention, preferred locations, etc. As explained by Limpopo:

“If you do things because you want someone else to pat you on the head, you won’t get as good at it as someone who does it for internal satisfaction. We want the best-possible building. If we set up a system that makes people compete for acknowledgement, we invite game-playing and stats-fiddling, even unhealthy stuff like working stupid hours to beat anyone. A crew full of unhappy people doing substandard work. If you build systems that make people focus on mastery, cooperation, and better work, we’ll have a beautiful inn full of happy people working together well.”

III.

A question that always arises, in discussions of interstitial projects that involve “building the new society in the shell of the old,” is how the old and new society get along and whether the old society just lets it happen. Will neoliberal society shut down post-capitalist experiments like it did Allende’s Chile? Will US or EU drones and mechas destroy server farms in Iceland to enforce global copyright accords, or engage in house-to-house fighting to stamp out federations of commons-based municipal projects in Europe?

In this case the old society — “default,” in walkaway slang — largely ignored walkaway society for most of its history until around the time of the story. There were sporadic attacks by state military forces on walkaway settlements, variously justified as reprisals for “harboring fugitives,” “terrorism,” and “intellectual property violations.” But they were mostly just that — sporadic. Walkaway society served as a safety valve for the surplus population of default society, without seriously challenging the zottas’ economic exploitation of those who remained in their jurisdiction.

But in the time-frame of Walkaway, there’s been a sharp uptick in the number and severity of government and corporate military attacks. The reason for the change is that walkaway scientists — themselves in large part deserters from default institutional science who find the walkaway atmosphere more congenial — are on the verge of achieving a breakthrough in human immortality before their counterparts in default. Since the whole zotta project involves withdrawing into fortified city-states, space platforms, and other stately pleasure domes — and ultimately achieving immortality while they abandon the rest of the human race as superfluous — the idea that a bunch of dirty fucking hippies might beat them there is intolerable.

What’s more, the idea that the zottas might speciate into a separate immortal race, on top of all the other indignities they inflict on humanity, is undermining their legitimizing ideology and rendering subject populations less governable. Hence the zottas are even more desperate to ensure that they reach the goal first.

“It’s one thing to imagine a life of working to enrich some hereditary global power broker when you know you got eighty years on the planet, and so does he…. But the thought of making those greedy assholes into godlike immortals, bifurcating the human race into infinite Olympian masters and mayflies, so they not only get a better life than you could ever dream of but they get it forever…”

She sighed. “They’re scared. They keep raising salaries, doesn’t matter. Offering benefits, doesn’t matter. Stock, doesn’t matter. A friend swears some zotta was trying to marry him into the family, just to keep him from defecting… It’s a race: either the walkaways release immortality to the world, or the zottas install themselves as permanent god-emperors.”

Researchers at Walkaway U successfully scan and upload a human mind to computer hardware for the first time, figuring out how to keep the personality running on a meta-stable basis without existential meltdown spinning into an out-of-control positive feedback cycle.

The prospect of human immortality is the ultimate development of the walkaway ethos of minimalism and non-attachment. Any physical good can be replicated in a fab lab in hours. Settlements can be rebuilt from scavenged materials bigger and better in a matter of months if they’re taken over or destroyed (as the B&B was at one point in the story). And now the same promises to become true of the human body as an accessory to consciousness. It will be possible to literally “walk away” from anything and start over.

Watching the new B&B conjure itself had been a conversion experience, a proof of the miraculous on Earth. They’d walked away from the old B&B when those assholes had shown up, and pulled a new one from the realm of pure information. That was their destiny. Things could be walked away from and made anew; no one would ever have to fight. Not yet — they couldn’t scan people at volume, couldn’t decant them into flesh. But there would come a day… when there would be no reason to fear death. That would be the end of physical coercion. So long as someone, somewhere, believed in putting you back into a body, there would be no reason not to walk into an oppressor’s machine-gun fire, no reason not to beat your brains out on the bars of your prison cell….

IV.

Of course the zottas realize this as well. With indisputable news of walkaway’s achievement of human immortality, the previous generation’s Cold War between default and walkaway turns very hot. Walkaway settlements all over the world are raided, obliterated, and have their populations either exterminated or taken into captivity.

At the same time, the dramatic rupture and sense of revolutionary momentum motivates entire cities within default jurisdictions — Akron, Liverpool, Minsk, and others — to go rogue and transform themselves into revolutionary walkaway communes. Take Akron, for instance:

Walkaways did a coordinated mass squat on the whole downtown, 85 percent of which was boarded up and underwater…. They’d flown under the radar, smooth and coordinated. One day, Akron was haphazardly squatted by homeless people, the next, a walkaway army reopened every shuttered building, including fire stations, libraries, and shelters. Factories turned into fabs, loaded with feedstock, powered by eggbeater fields that sprung up overnight, electrolyzing hydrogen from sludge flowing in the Little Cuyahoga River, feeding hydrogen cells that walkaways wrestled around in wheelbarrows.

Default was caught off guard. Connecticut flooding had FEMA and the National Guard tied up. The contractors who backstopped FEMA couldn’t use their normal practice of hiring local talent as shock troops. By the time they mobilized, their entire recruiting pool was walkaway.

It gave the Akron walkaways — they called themselves an “ac-hoc,” said they were practicing “ad-hocracy” — a previous week to consolidate. By the time default besieged Akron, they were a global media sensation, source of endless hangouts demonstrating a happy world of plenty salvaged from a burned husk with absentee owners.

The effect of the first genuine walkaway cities is revolutionary. Until the outbreak of open warfare, walkaway “tend[ed] to be a building or two, a wasp’s nest wedged in a crack in default,” in order to avoid presenting anything default would consider a threat to be destroyed.” The emergence of walkaway communities on the scale of Akron amounted to “walk towards.” In response to Limpopo’s prediction that the government would nuke Akron before allowing it to stand as an example, another B&B member — Tam — replied: “Seriously, fuck that. The point of walkaway is the first days of a better nation. Back when that was more than an eye roll, it was a serious idea. Someday, walkaway and default will swap places.”

Of course default responds by brutally suppressing the rogue cities. The US army and private contractors advanced in force with drones, mechas, and armored vehicles, officially in the name of fighting “the Four Horsemen” always used to justify state terror by imperialist nations: “pornographers, mafiosi, drug dealers, and terrorists.”

The two dozen buildings targeted by air strikes included a hospital, on the pretext that it was producing biological warfare agents. In reality it was printing out ebola and H1N1 vaccines without licenses. Missiles and aerostats also took out the city’s Internet with strikes on the fiber optic infrastructure and wireless routers. Next, the “boots on the ground phase,” tasing and tear gassing by “pacifier bots,” ensued.

But the assault on Akron only caused efforts to escalate on the walkaway side. Akron itself didn’t just roll over, and the repression inspired a worldwide support network to engage in resistance.

That was the push; then came the pushback. The walkaways and Akronites who’d assumed control of the city planned for this kind of shock/awe. They had bunkers, aerostat-seeking autonomous lasers, dark fiber backups that linked up to microwave relays far out of town, offline atrocity-seeking cameras that recorded footage automatically when the network went dark, crude HERF weapons that stored huge amounts of solar energy whenever the sun shone, ready to discharge in a powerful whoomf the moment they sensed military spread-spectrum comms.

Once the word got out about Akron, there was online pushback, too. Walkaways all over the world battered at the comms and infrastructure of the contractors in the vanguard, the DHS, the DoD, the White House internal nets, the DNC’s backchannels, Seven Eyes chatter nets — the whole world of default super-rosa and sub-rosa connectivity. Walkaway backbones prioritized traffic out of Akron, auto-mirrored it across multiple channels.

The walkaway propaganda machine was also going full-blast, with suicide drones capturing and transmitting footage of atrocities despite default’s efforts to censor events in Akron from the mass media and control the narrative. Soldiers and private mercenary contractors were identified from video footage and doxxed, and open letters sent to their families to shame them. The doxxings often started a chain reaction of defections and destroyed morale.

Kids left home, leaked their parents’ private documents implicating their superiors, publishing secret-above-secret rules of engagement with instructions to use lethals when cameras were off, to buy evidence, or implicate insurgents in atrocities. Sometimes parents disowned children who’d done zottas’ dirty work, publicly disavowing slaughter. It split families and communities, but it also brought new ones together.

The ripple effect resulted in general strikes, and mass demonstrations in major cities on a scale sufficient to absorb all police resources — after which new demonstrators continued to pour into the streets. In some places walkaway prisoners were freed when guards simply unlocked the doors and abandoned their jobs.

Meanwhile, Akron itself was rebuilt after the jackboots withdrew from the scene.

The new Akron, built on the site of the leveled buildings, refused to be a graveyard. The people who’d flocked to it to rebuild after the army and the mercs and the guardsmen had joined returning locals to build new kinds of buildings, advanced refugee housing straight out of the UNHCR playbook, designed to use energy merrily when the wind blew or the sun shone, to hibernate the rest of the time. The multistory housing interleaved greenhouses and hydroponic market-gardens with homes, capturing human CO2 and giving back oxygen. They were practically space colonies, inhabited by some of the poorest people in the world, who adapted and improved systems so many other poor people had improved over the disasters the human race had weathered. The hexayurt suburbs acted as a kind of transition zone between default and the new kind of permanent walkaway settlement, places where people came and went, if they decided that Akron wasn’t for them.

Akron wasn’t the first city like this — there was Lodz, Capetown, Monrovia. It was the first American city, the first explicitly borne of the crackdown on walkaways. It put the State Department in the awkward position of condemning a settlement that was functionally equivalent to many it had praised elsewhere.

The wave of all-out violence between default and walkaway — popularly named World War Default — was followed, after an interval of turbulence, by the Walkaway Decade. Default more or less folded on its efforts to violently eradicate walkaway society, although the zottas persisted in their strongholds (“walled cities, the Harrier-jet-and-mountaintop set”) and default society persisted to a greater or lesser degree as contested terrain. Projects on the Akron model continued to spread among rust-belt towns like Gary, some of them technically the property of holding companies that had bailed them out of bankruptcy. All kinds of default facilities were simply abandoned and converted to walkaway use, like an enormous private prison complex outside Kingston, Ont. previously owned by TransCanada. The refurbishment project “followed a template that was developed and formalized in the stupidly named ‘Walkaway Decade.’”

Some walls came down, others went up. They’d build rammed-earth machines and add sprawling wings and ells, almost certainly an onsen, because that was de rigueur at anything walkaway bigger than a few people.

The rhythm of the place would change. On days when the sun shone or the wind blew, they’d run coolers with abandon, heat huge pools of water for swimming and bathing, charge and loose drones and other toys. When neither were around, the buildings would switch to passive climate control, the people would switch activities to less power-hungry ones.

Iceweasel (formerly Natalie) tries to tell a resurrected Limpopo, several years after the war, how much things have changed.

“Limpopo,” Iceweasel said, softly. “It’s not like that anymore. Default isn’t the default. I know what it was like. It looked like war, they were going to lock us away or kill us. It changed. The zottas went to war against each other, fought for control over countries whose people refused to fight for any side, walked away with us, turned refugee living into the standard. It was the people who stayed in one place and claimed some chunk of real estate was no one else’s became weirdos. Everyone else hit the road when those people showed.

…“There are enclaves of people who pretend that it’s normal and things will go back the way they were or were supposed to be soon. These days, it’s not about armed conflict, it’s war of norms, which of us is normal and who are the crazy radicals.”

Walkaway culture is destroying nation-state governments’ ability to control their own people all over the world. An attempted Iranian invasion of Iraq failed because most of the troops on both sides were involved in a Gulf-wide walkaway affinity group. The Iranian pilots landed their jets in Kurdistan rather than carry out their bombing missions; infantrymen refused to fight and some officers deserted along with them. The same thing occurred on the Iraqi side, with the minority of soldiers who attempted to obey orders being disarmed by their comrades. Rumors circulated that generals on both sides had given orders to drone mutinous troops, but had tried to avoid drawing further attention to themselves after drone operators refused to obey orders.

An anti-climax of sorts occurs when TransCanada sends an army of private mercenary contractors to reclaim its private prison complex, presumably as a trial run for restoring default control of other walkaway enclaves. But the transition was already too far-gone for the attack to succeed. Things had reached a tipping point where most mercenaries were one or two degrees of separation from a walkaway relative, and they were relentlessly propagandized to defect. Many of them did, and gradually coalesced into a separate group within view of the standoff. At the same time, walkaway broadcasts of the attempted assault and the scale of damage to the facilities caused TransCanada share value to implode. In the end, the confrontation was brought to an end by a crowd of hundreds of civilians, accompanied by the walkaway private cops in full body armor, marching into the prison complex and simply surging past the paralyzed besieging forces and forming a human chain around the buildings. Some of TransCanada’s remaining mercenaries defected, and the rest retreated to their APCs and left in defiance of orders.

The story resumes a generation later, when walkaway scientists have developed the ability to download human consciousness back into cloned bodies. Iceweasel, who died of cancer, awakens in a new body and is greeted by Hubert, Etc in a more recent body of his own. The clear implication is that the conflict is long over, and walkaway is the new default.

V.

Doctorow has mentioned being influenced by Rebecca Solnit’s work on spontaneous grassroots disaster relief and mutual aid in writing this book. It comes through in Limpopo’s expression of faith that humanity will reach a tipping point towards default because “covered-dish people” outnumber “shotgun people”:

“If there’s a disaster, do you go over to your neighbor’s house with a) a covered dish or b) a shotgun? It’s game theory. If you believe your neighbor is coming over with a shotgun, you’d be an idiot to pick a); if she believes the same thing about you, you can bet she’s not going to choose a) either. The way to get to a) is to do a) even if you think your neighbor will pick b). Sometimes she’ll point her gun at you and tell you to get off her land, but if she was only holding the gun because she thought you’d have one, then she’ll put on the safety and you can have a potluck.”

And the abundance of walkaway society turns people into covered-dish types. “There’s not any reason not to be one when we can all have enough, so long as we’re not fucking each other over.”

That’s borne out by certain accounts of history, by the way. In Riane Eisler’s typology, foraging groups and neolithic agrarian villages were, under normal circumstances, relatively egalitarian “cooperator societies.” “Dominator societies” — with authoritarian social hierarchies, harsh punishment of dissent, strict gender roles, and patriarchal sky-father religions — arose among nomadic peoples living under harsh scarcity conditions in marginal deforested or desertified environments. These people saw existence as a zero-sum game and turned to conquest. It’s a plausible hope — one I cling to, at least — that conditions of abundance and security will eventually heal the worst authoritarian tendencies in our society and lead to the predominance of a better type of human.

VI.

Cory Doctorow is by far the best author of near-future post-scarcity fiction I know of (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Makers and some short stories I reviewed on my postscarcity blog), and of some amazing stories about networked resistance and information freedom movements as well (Pirate Cinema and For the Win!, and a subplot of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town). About the only thing of his that ever just fell flat with me was Rapture of the Nerds, co-authored with Charles Stross. Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time), Neal Stephenson (The Diamond Age), Daniel Suarez (Daemon and Freedom(TM)) and Bruce Sterling (The Caryatids) have written brilliantly on similar themes, some of their work very nearly as good. But none has been remotely as prolific as Doctorow on specifically post-scarcity themes while maintaining such consistent quality.

Of everything Doctorow has written, this book is my favorite. I can’t recommend it highly enough,

Photo by Urban Isthmus

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Its main objectives are to foster the development and recognition of emerging European Maker and Design culture by supporting makers, their mobility and circulation of their work, providing them with international opportunities and highlighting the most outstanding talent; improve the connections among makers, designers and the market, providing thus tools, strategies, guides, contents, education, events, networks in order to enable them to commercialize their creations; stimulate and develop a genuine Europe-wide programming of Maker activities in order to contribute to the development of a vibrant and diverse European Maker and Design culture that can be experienced by a broad range of audience across Europe and beyond as well as to enhance the creation of work and of financially sustainable business activities by makers and designers.

P2P Lab has the pleasure to collaborate with DDMP by organising a cultiMake event concerning the crowdsourcing of open source agricultural solutions.

Partners: Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalonia (ES), Fab City Grand Paris (FR), Pakhuis de Zwijger (NL), HappyLab (AT), Polifactory – Politecnico di Milano (IT), Machines Room (UK), P2P Lab (EL), Republica (DE), Dansk Design Center (DK), Fab lab Berlin (DE), Fab Lab Budapest (HU), Innovation Center Iceland (IS), Foreningen Maker (DK).

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CERN is home to some of the largest and most complex scientific equipment on the planet. Yet back in March, scientists gathered there for a conference about DIY laboratory tools. Scientists in poorly funded labs, particularly in the global south, have used DIY tools for many years. But well-resourced institutes are increasingly interested in the collaborative possibilities of open labware. Citizen scientists are also using it to build instruments for tasks like environmental monitoring, which can then be used to support community demands for justice from polluters.

It is not only scientists – citizen or professional – who are going DIY. An open hardware movement of hobbyists, activists, geeks, designers, engineers, students and social entrepreneurs is creating ingenious versions of all sorts of technologies, and freely sharing the know-how through social media. Open hardware is also encroaching upon centres of manufacturing. In August, for instance, the global gathering of FabLabs met in Shenzhen (already host to Maker Faires) to review how their network can help to decentralise design and manufacture.

The free software movement is cited as both an inspiration and a model for open hardware. Free software practices have transformed our culture by making it easier for people to become involved in producing things from magazines to music, movies to games, communities to services. With advances in digital fabrication making it easier to manipulate materials, some now anticipate an analogous opening up of manufacturing to mass participation.

One online community has been developing DIY book scanners. These enable you to build a machine for automatically photographing book pages; and then download free software to process the images into a file. Having digitized your books, you might go further by sharing the files online (taking care to post anonymously to a site relaxed about copyright law).

The list of open hardware available to people continues to grow. The Open Source Ecology group is even developing a Global Village Construction Kit of tools for self-sufficiency, from machine tools to housing to tractors and beyond. A ‘global commons’ of accessible tools is emerging.

Open hardware can be serious business too. Take RepRap: a 3D printer community whose open source practices enabled its rapid growth. Its evolution took a controversial turn when members of the Resistor hackerspace in New York decided to commercialize their version of the RepRap, and protected aspects of its design through intellectual property. Their Makerbot business was subsequently bought for $400 million by 3D printer manufacturer Stratosys; a move which provoked fierce criticism from open hardware advocates.

Hobbyists have always tinkered with technologies for their own purposes (in early personal computing, for example). And social activists have long advocated the power of giving tools to people. The Whole Earth Catalogue was an early proponent of the liberating potential of digital technology. Then there were the dog-eared Appropriate Technology manuals that a generation of aid workers carried into the developing world in the 1970s and 1980s. Other antecedents include Victor Papanek’s Nomadic Furniture and Walter Segal’s self-build housing. We can compare these with their digital heirs at Open Desk and WikiHouse. Open, community-based technology workshops are not so new either.

So is this just old wine in new bottles? We think not. Open hardware lowers the barriers to participation in rapid prototyping in ways that earlier activists would find astonishing. And with community-workshops popping up in many towns, and online sharing platforms proliferating, the possibilities for doing technology differently are genuinely exciting.

Nevertheless, older experiences hold important lessons for the new. Our research into grassroots innovation movements, old and new, brings insights that activists today would be wise to consider.

The immediacy and connectedness of open hardware does not nullify the need for real skills in technology development. There remains a craft element to even the fleetest of digitally enabled tools. Experienced designers, engineers and machinists know the importance in understanding not just the tools themselves, but also the materials they work with. Practices that respect materials across their whole life cycle become imperative. Sustainable open hardware shifts the focus to making sufficiently, design for repair and repurposing, upcycling objects, and valuing the craft therein. Just because we can make almost anything, doesn’t mean we should.

And the materials involved are not simply physical. They are social too. If open hardware is to be genuinely inclusive, then its practices must actively empower people to become involved. Notionally accessible tools need to become actually available, and people need to feel confident using them. This requires social skills in community participation, as well as technology skills.

FabLabs are fantastic at combining face-to-face developments with online networks. These hybrid spaces contribute important infrastructure for open hardware. But maintaining infrastructure needs investment. Existing institutions, such as schools, museums, local governments, universities, and corporations are helping fund open workshops.

These institutional links bring the political dilemmas of open hardware to the surface. Is it really transforming technology development, or simply a refreshing input for business as usual? Education institutions see cool ways to induct people into conventional science, technology and manufacturing jobs. Local governments get excited about the entrepreneurial possibilities. Corporations see a reservoir of design prototypes offered up by the free labour of enthusiasts.

It is important to keep sharp open hardware’s more transformational edges, on agendas such as dismantling intellectual property and releasing investment for alternative business models. Only through a mix of craft, politics, and the support of social movements, will open hardware fully realise its potential to democratise technology.

Adrian Smith is professor of technology and society at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and a member of the ESRC STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability) at the University of Sussex. Dr Mariano Fressoli is a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina) and STEPS Latin America. Their new book, Grassroots Innovation Movements, includes chapters on social technology, fablabs, hackerspaces and makerspaces.

Originally published on theguardian.com

Photo by LarsZi

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São Paulo’s authorities join a range of civic bodies casting an eye over the – potentially – empowering possibilities of FabLabs. Yet these initiatives raise many issues: who, exactly, is being empowered by access to tools? What kind of technological citizenship and forms of urban governances do they support, and why? To start unpicking these questions, it is instructive to look to Barcelona where a program to open an Ateneu de Fabricació Digital in every city district has been running for two years.

A brief history of digital fabrication workshops

FabLabs are part of a larger global movement of community-based digital fabrication workshops. These spaces also include hackspaces and makespaces, and are typically equipped with both contemporary versatile technologies – CAD, 3D printers, laser cutters, routers – as well as traditional machines and tools including lathes, drills, sewing machines, and welding equipment. Emerging from the free culture and autonomist movements, community workshops have moved into hardware hacking, using tools that allow their members to modify, personalize, and manufacture anything from toys and vehicles to wind turbines and home energy systems (FabLab Barcelona even made a prefab eco-house). Members share ideas, design, code and instructions online – what gets designed in one workshop can theoretically be made in any other in the world.

The growth in FabLabs might seem like an organic outgrowth of this people-led movement. Its roots, however, come from an outreach initiative of MIT’s Centre for Bits and Atoms, who had intended to gradually roll out FabLabs in a few countries. Technology carries unexpected consequences, and the model soon took on a life of its own as other groups decided that yes, they would quite like to set up their own fabrication labs independently of MIT. Right now, there are around 440 FabLabs across 33 countries.

Barcelona and the Ateneus Project

And so to Barcelona, which opened its first FabLab at the Institute of Advanced Architecture Catalunya (IAAC) in 2006. Originally intended for relatively closed use – for students, prototyping, and architectural commissions – the lab garnered global attention for its pioneering vision of urban governance. More than simply making new widgits, IAAC founder, and now City Architect, Vicente Guallart envisioned maker-citizens using new tools such as 3D printers and open source designs as a means of taking an active, material role in city development.

This image of the technologically empowered civic citizen appealed, and FabLab Barcelona’s model went on to provide the template for the Ateneus program as part of the city leaders’ vision for transforming Barcelona into a smart, self-sufficient city. Supported by Barcelona’s civic leaders, each Ateneu receives public funds to run popular local events – family days and school visits; training courses and social innovation programs: everything necessary to equip citizens with the digital fabrication nous necessary to ‘materialise their ideas and create their worlds’ (according to the Ateneus slogan). By this vision, high-tech public infrastructure will make it easier for Barcelona’s citizens to lock into a global ‘maker’ network – uploading designs which folks, say, in Singapore, might use; or collaborating in prototyping with FabLabs in São Paulo, adapting ideas produced globally to fit their own local needs.

What does a citizen of this exciting new world look like? Technologically active, certainly, and willing to embrace digital fabrication tools, yes – but in a relatively trouble-free and depoliticised way? In adopting the term ‘Ateneu’ for their workshops, city authorities have evoked a Catalan tradition of social centres where people used to meet up, build bonds, and debate issues about the type of society they want – but which in this case civic leaders wish to associate with selectively.

Opening up Ateneus

The first Ateneu opened in July 2013, in an abandoned silk ribbon factory in the Les Corts district. A further 20 workshops are planned to some degree for later down the line. In speaking to me, the Ateneus network director stressed how embryonic and exploratory the programme is. A community workshop for digital fabrication is a strange concept for public administrators to get their heads around. Councils traditionally produce conventional public services for people to receive and consume; conversely, Ateneus offer a space where citizens do the producing. Simply convincing city bureaucracies to experiment with this concept is already an achievement.

Whilst setting-up is also relatively straightforward – installing machinery, running courses – the real challenge comes in weaving the workshops into the everyday fabric of the local community. It takes time to build familiarity, confidence and commitment amongst neighbours, and considerable resources and patience on the part of the city authorities before the possibilities loaded onto Ateneus can be realised.

The experiences around the Ateneu in Ciutat Meridiana highlight these tensions. Ciutat Meridiana is the poorest neighbourhood in Barcelona – unemployment exceeds 20 percent, and family incomes are one third of city averages. The neighbourhood association is constantly in battle with the council over changes to social services, and resisting evictions from mortgage lenders.

So what, exactly, does a high-tech, MIT-inspired workshop, with no immediate role in alleviating the daily crisis of people’s lives, have to offer the neighbourhood? Very little, it would seem – at least initially. The people of Ciutat Meridiana needed food, not 3D printers, and the project didn’t help itself by siting the workshop in a building that neighbours were already using as a food bank. (The Mayor’s support for Ateneus also counted for little in a neighbourhood that felt ambivalently towards him). Rather than embracing the project, locals were alienated and occupied the Ateneu in protest. Negotiations ensued, eventually leading to two conditions of agreement – the food bank was re-established, albeit elsewhere in the neighbourhood; and the Ateneu would emphasise training and work for young people.

Ciutat Meridiana shines a light on the tension between what citizens wanted from their city now, and what city-leaders envisage for future citizens. Even if local stakeholders are engaged beforehand, as happened with the first Ateneu in Les Corts, opening up a workshop is the easiest part of the project. Embedding the facility into community life is more challenging by far.

Making other forms of citizenship

Whilst the Ateneu program is being rolled out, other self-organised and spontaneous workshops are also flourishing across the city. Over in Ciutat Vella, the Maker Convent offers open and informal training programmes for their machinery. Vailets Hacklab run courses for kids in a variety of locations, and now including the Ateneus. Similarly, the Fab Café, run by the Makers of Barcelona and other groups, offer workshop space, education, and tools for anyone walking in off the streets. The ethos of these spaces borrows heavily from a Silicon Valley-esque, Kick-started, ‘can do’ form of urban entrepreneurship, in which people happily share enthusiasm for digital fabrication and explore new forms of collaboration together. Whether citizens suffering precarious employment and other economic hardships wish to embrace this form of citizenship is perhaps a moot point.

Despite the public imaginary of hackspaces as user-led spaces, neither the Ateneus nor these other makerspaces are particularly grassroots phenomena. One test for whether the Barcelona civic vision of digital fabrication workshops can co-exist with grassroots activities will come with Can Batlló, a massive disused textile mill proposed as a potential site for an Ateneus workshop. Can Batlló is in the Sants district of Barcelona, and working-class Sants has a long tradition of political and community organisation – including many squats and social centres – and a history of their own autonomist and co-operative activities.

In response to the economic crisis, Sants activists have already occupied and renovated Block 11 of Can Batlló. The building has been converted into an autonomous, self-organised community centre and co-operative working space, housing a library, carpentry workshop, bar, urban gardening space; and the Sants activists have aspirations to seed local, co-operative economic activity for the neighbourhood through the centre.

If activists are already involved in this type of community building, does a project like Ateneus offer anything more than a shiny technological patina to the process? Or could an Ateneu provide useful tools that unlock wider possibilities, and plug the district into a global community of design activists experimenting in digital fabrication for DIY urbanism and commons-based economic development? The association of Ateneus with Mayor Trias’s smart city vision has been considered by critics to be the latest in a series of city makeovers, prioritising international capital markets and speculative investments in the city over the real needs and aspirations of its residents. According to Ivan Miró, an activist from the Ciutat Invisible co-operative, the smart city is merely a different brand of the same neo-liberal model of urban regeneration, whose democratic and local economic credentials are deeply suspect. In Barcelona, the council’s (sometimes violent) evictions of long-established squatted social centres have deepened suspicions of the smart city plan, and heightened antagonism with the city’s grassroots activists.

Making is political

The Ateneus programme, with city-leaders’ notions of an orderly cultivation of technological citizenship, has unintentionally uncovered very different forms of citizenship in action, and the role that tools play in them. Ateneus are trying to establish themselves in a context where people feel the strain of economic crisis, and increasingly question whose interests are truly being served by future visions of their city.

Many in the wider ‘maker’ movement can be reluctant to engage in politics overtly, as to do so would appear to constrain the notion of giving tools to people in a way which offers them unconstrained agency around their purposes, deployment and use. Yet, as I have explored in my work on community workshops in London in the 1980s, these types of ‘making’ spaces are always opened in very specific social, political and economic contexts. Such contexts already influence the relative ease and kinds of support available for putting tools to particular purposes. If communities are truly to be liberated to debate, use, and resist tools in a way that they see as appropriate (rather than those encapsulated in elite visions), one must engage with the politics of these contexts. This is something that earlier advocates of providing tools for the people have made very clear – think of William Morris and his argument for socialism, or Murray Bookchin on post-scarcity anarchism.

Deployed sensitively, the Ateneus programme could provide important spaces for exploring technology, citizenship, and urban governance in very practical ways, supporting diverse forms of neighbourhood-led development. The programme is still young, and patience is required. The longer-term promise of Ateneus rests with it becoming a community resource owned by the neighbourhoods in which it sits, rather than tied up with the patronage of local politicians. São Paulo, and wherever else public authorities become involved in community workshops, including here in the UK, should take note: bringing tools to people requires skilful community development as well as skills in digital fabrication. A controlled opening up of urban governance and experiments in cultivating particular forms of citizenship is not an easy task.

Originally published in the Guardian in 2015. Lead image by Adrian Smith.

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“We got to do something now, the company are not going to do anything and we got to protect ourselves”, proclaimed a shop steward at Lucas Aerospace when filmed by a 1978 documentary by the Open University.

He was explaining the rationale behind the so-called Alternative Corporate Plan, better known as the Lucas Plan. It was proposed by shop stewards in seventies England at the factories of Lucas Aerospace. To stave off pending layoffs, a shop steward committee established a plan that outlined a range of new, socially useful technologies for Lucas to build. With it, they fundamentally challenged the capitalist conception of technology design.

Essentially, they proposed that workers establish control over the design of technology. This bottom-up attempt at design, where not management and capitalists but workers themselves decided what to build, eventually failed. It was stopped by management, sidelined by struggling trade unions and the Labour Party, and eventually washed over by neoliberalism.

The seventies were a heady time, the preceding social-democratic, fordist consensus ran into its own contradictions and died in the face of a triumphant neoliberalism. With it, experiments such as the Lucas Plan died as well. Today, however, neoliberalism is in crisis and to bury it we should look back to precisely those experiments that failed decades ago.

Technology’s neoliberal crisis

One part of the crisis of neoliberalism is the crisis of its technology. The software and information technology sector, often denoted as “tech”, is facing widespread criticism and attacks, with demands for reform stretching wide across society.

Even an establishment publication such as The New York Times now publishes a huge feature headlining: The Case Against Google, about Google’s use of their near monopoly on search to bury competitors’ sites.

Other controversies revolve around companies such as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter making use of insights into human psychology to make people interact with their products more often and more intensely. This involves everything from gamifying social interaction through likes and making the notification button on Facebook red, to the ubiquity of unlimited vertical scrolling in mobile phone apps.

This has a number of consequences. Studies show that the presence of smartphones damages cognitive capacity, that Facebook use is negatively associated with well-being and that preteens with no access to screens for some time show better social skills than those with screen time.

In public discourse, this combines with fears that social media might harmfully impact political processes (basically Russia buying Facebook ads).

Or, as ex-Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya stated:

The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works, hearts, likes, thumbs-up. No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.

Early employees and execs at Facebook and Google even created the Center for Humane Tech that will propose more humanised tech design choices. Their website states:

Our world-class team of deeply concerned former tech insiders and CEOs intimately understands the culture, business incentives, design techniques, and organizational structures driving how technology hijacks our minds.

Part of this are the usual worries about intergenerational change, technology and centrism starting to fall apart, but there is a core truth in the worries about social media: design of technology is political.

Technologies are designed by capitalist firms, and they do it for capitalist purposes, not for maximising human well-being. In the case of social media, it is designed to pull as much attention as possible into the platform and the ads shown on it.

As Chris Marcellino, a former Apple engineer who worked on the iPhone, has said:

It is not inherently evil to bring people back to your product, it’s capitalism.

The Lucas Plan

This brings us back to the Lucas Plan. At a time where the design of technology is under unprecedented scrutiny, a plan that pushes for workers’ control over it might be an answer.

The Plan was a truly remarkable experiment at the time. The University of Sussex’s Adrian Smith explains:

Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, “one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company” (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’.

The Lucas Plan eventually failed because of opposition from management, the trade union hierarchy and the government. Lucas Aerospace subsequently had to restructure and shed much of its workforce. Nevertheless, the plan provides great lessons for our current predicament.

Technology is political, yet its design is ultimately in the hands of capitalist firms. The Lucas Plan shows that workers, particularly in the more technically-oriented layers, have the skills and resources to design alternative technologies to those proposed by shareholders and management.

Workers’ control over the design of technology is thus a way to make it more ethical. Many of the problems we encounter with modern-day information technology are caused by unrestricted capitalist control over it, and workers’ control can be a necessary counterweight to push through human-centered design choices.

Composition

So how to build a modern-day Lucas Plan? Developing a plan reminiscent of the Lucas Plan for modern times needs, first and foremost, to be based on the present-day class composition of the workers in tech.

Tech, and more precisely sectors focused on information technology and software, have a notoriously dual composition. On the one hand there are the (generally) highly paid top-end workers, mostly composed of programmers and people employed in fields such as marketing and management. On the other hand there are large armies of underpaid workers employed in functions such as moderation, electronics assembly, warehouse logistics or catering.

The first group has very peculiar characteristics. They are often taken in by the classic Silicon Valley ideology consisting of “lean startup” thinking, social liberalism, and the idea that they are improving the world. Materially, they are also different from large sections of the working class. They earn extremely high wages, are often highly educated, possess specific technical skills, are given significant stock options in their employers’ companies and are highly mobile, notorious for changing jobs very easily.

Besides that, many also have an aspiration to start their own startup one day, in line with Silicon Valley ideology. This adds a certain petty-bourgeois flavour to their composition.

Yet these workers also have their grievances. They are often employed in soul-crushing jobs at large multinationals, some of which (for example Amazon or Tesla) have the reputation of making them work as much as they can and then spitting them out, often in a state of burn-out.

On the other hand, there are subaltern sections of tech workers. These people moderate offensive content on Facebook, stack Amazon boxes in their “fulfillment centres”, drive people around on Uber and Lyft, assemble electronics such as iPhones or serve lunches at Silicon Valley corporate “campuses.”

These workers are generally underpaid, but conduct the drudging work that makes tech multinationals run. Without Facebook moderators watching horrible content all day, the platform would be flooded by it (and Facebook would have no one to train their AI on); without the fleet of elderly workers manning Amazon warehouses, packages would not get delivered; without the staff on Google and Facebook campuses, they would look a lot less utopian.

This section of workers can also be highly mobile in regards to jobs, but less from possibility and more from precarity. They also have fewer ties to the tech sector specifically— whether they work at the warehouses of a self-styled tech company like Blue Apron or the warehouses of any other company matters less for them than it does for programmers.

This bifurcation holds real problems for a modern-day Lucas Plan. If we simply move the control over the design of technology from management and shareholders to a tech worker aristocracy, it might not solve so much.

Yet there are some hopeful tendencies we can build on. Tech workers in Silicon Valley have started to bridge the divide that separates them, with organisations like the Tech Workers Coalition starting to help cafeteria workers organise.

A Guardian piece on their organising even observes some budding solidarity between these two groups arising:

Khaleed is proud of the work he does, and deeply grateful for the union. At first, he found it difficult to talk about his anxieties with coworkers at the roundtable. But he came to find it comforting: “We have solidarity, now.” A cost-of-living raise would mean more security, and a better chance of staying in the apartment where he lives. Khaleed deeply wants to be able to live near his son, and for his son to continue going to the good public school he now attends.

When I asked Khaleed how he felt about the two TWC Facebook employees he had met with, his voice faltered. “I just hope that someday I can help them like they helped me.” When I told one of the engineers, he smiled, and quoted the IWW slogan. “That’s the goal, right – one big union?”

This is precisely the basis on which a modern-day Lucas Plan should be based: solidarity between both groups of tech workers and inclusion of both. The Lucas Plan of the 1970s understood this. The main authors of the Plan were predominantly to be highly-educated engineers, but the people making the products were not. Hence they tried to bridge this gap with proposals that would humanise working conditions as well as technology, and by including common workers.

A shop steward, an engineer, would declare during a public meeting after showing how company plans decided how long bathroom breaks could be:

We say that that form of technology is unacceptable, and if that is the only way to make that technology we should be questioning whether we want to make those kinds of products in that way at all.

Furthermore, the humanisation of work inside tech companies, and not just the end product of it, would also positively impact the work of the core tech workers. In essence, it would serve as the glue to connect both groups.

A Lucas Plan today would thus analyse the composition of tech workers at both sides of the divide, include both of them and mobilise them behind a program of humanisation of labour for themselves and humanised technology for the rest of society.

How to do it?

The practical implementation of workers’ control over design decisions can base itself on already existing policies and experiences, mainly reformist co-determination schemes (where trade-union officials are given seats on corporate boards) or direct-action oriented tactics (where management power is challenged through workplace protest and where workers establish a degree of workplace autonomy).

The choice of these tactics would need to be based on local working class experiences. In some contexts co-determination would make more sense; in some cases direct action would take precedence. In most cases a combination of both will most likely be required.

The first option is a moderate one. Workers’ representation on the boards of companies has been common in industrialised economies, and particularly continental Europe. Even Conservative PM Theresa May proposed implementing it in 2017, before making a U-turn after business lobbying.

As TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has stated:

Workers on company boards is hardly a radical idea. They’re the norm across most of Europe – including countries with similar single-tier board structures to the UK, such as Sweden. European countries with better worker participation tend to have higher investment in research and development, higher employment rates and lower levels of inequality and poverty.

Expanding the control of these boards to also deciding what products to produce and how to design them in technologically-oriented companies—both software and more traditional industrial companies—would radicalise the non-radical idea of workers representation on company boards.

A second, more radical option, is the establishment of workplace control through organising. A good example of this are the US longshoremen who at certain times of their existence controlled their own work.

As Peter Cole writes in Jacobin:

West Coast longshoremen were “lords” because they earned high wages by blue-collar standards, were paid overtime starting with the seventh hour of a shift, and had protections against laboring under dangerous conditions. They even had the right to stop working at any time if “health and safety” were imperiled. Essentially, to the great consternation of employers, the union controlled much of the workplace.

The hiring hall was the day-to-day locus of union power. Controlled by each local’s elected leadership, the hall decided who would and wouldn’t work. Crucially, under the radically egalitarian policy of “low man out,” the first workers to be dispatched were those who had worked the least in that quarter of the year.

Imagine a programmer at Facebook refusing to make a button red because research shows it would not increase the well-being of users, and being backed up in this decision by a system of workplace solidarity that stretches throughout the company.

From bees to architects

Mike Cooley, one of the key authors behind the Lucas Plan, was fired from his job in 1981 as retaliation for union organising. Afterwards, he became a key author on humanising technology. He also worked with the Greater London Council when—during the height of Thatcherism—it was controlled by the Labour left, and where current Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell earned his spurs.

Just as McDonnell bridges the earlier, failed, resistance to neoliberalism, with our current attempts to replace it, Cooley forms an inspiration for post-neoliberal technology. In an 1980 article he concluded:

The alternatives are stark. Either we will have a future in which human beings are reduced to a sort of bee-like behaviour, reacting to the systems and equipment specified for them; or we will have a future in which masses of people, conscious of their skills and abilities in both a political and a technical sense, decide that they are going to be the architects of a new form of technological development which will enhance human creativity and mean more freedom of choice and expression rather than less. The truth is, we shall have to make the profound decision as to whether we intend to act as architects or behave like bees.

These words ring true today more than ever.

About the author: Felix Holtwell In real life, Felix is a tech journalist. After dark, however, he edits the Fully Automated Luxury Communism newsletter, a newsletter about the interactions between technology and the left. You can follow him on Twitter at @AutomatedFully.

Photo by OuiShare

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This book, in the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability series, looks at how six grassroots innovation movements around the world have developed and what challenges they face.

Download the Accepted Manuscript of Chapter 1 (pdf, Open Access)

Innovation is increasingly invoked by policy elites and business leaders as vital for tackling global challenges like sustainable development. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that networks of community groups, activists, and researchers have been innovating grassroots solutions for social justice and environmental sustainability for decades. Unencumbered by disciplinary boundaries, policy silos, or institutional logics, these ‘grassroots innovation movements’ identify issues and questions neglected by formal science, technology and innovation organizations. Grassroots solutions arise in unconventional settings through unusual combinations of people, ideas and tools.

Grassroots Innovation Movements examines six diverse grassroots innovation movements in India, South America and Europe, situating them in their particular dynamic historical contexts. Analysis explains why each movement frames innovation and development differently, resulting in a variety of strategies. The book explores the spaces where each of these movements have grown, or attempted to do so. It critically examines the pathways they have developed for grassroots innovation and the challenges and limitations confronting their approaches.

With mounting pressure for social justice in an increasingly unequal world, policy makers are exploring how to foster more inclusive innovation. In this context grassroots experiences take on added significance. This book provides timely and relevant ideas, analysis and recommendations for activists, policy-makers, students and scholars interested in encounters between innovation, development and social movements.

This book is part of the STEPS Centre’s Pathways to Sustainability book series.

CONTENTS

Part 1: Overview
1. Introduction
2. A Conceptual Framework for Studying GIMs
Part 2: The Cases 
3. Movement for Socially Useful Production
4. Appropriate Technology Movement
5. Peoples’ Science Movements
6. Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Fablabs
7. Social Technologies Network
8. Honey Bee Network
Part 3: Lessons
9. Grassroots Innovation Movements: Lessons for Theory and Practice
10. Conclusions: Constructing Pathways for Sustainability with the Grassroots

Order the book from Routledge (you can get a 20% discount by using the order code FLR40)

Photo by eoringel

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Experimentation with radically open and collaborative ways of producing knowledge and material artefacts can be found everywhere – from the free/libre and open-source software movement to citizen science initiatives, and from community-based fabrication labs and makerspaces to the production of open-source scientific hardware. Networked digital infrastructure – including ever-faster internet access in far flung places – makes these experiments more possible.

Though diverse, these initiatives have important things in common: they create or recreate knowledge commons, and attempt to get a broader array of actors involved as ‘agents’ in innovation.

In a new working paper, ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’, researchers in STEPS America Latina, the STEPS Centre and SPRU reflect on what these emerging practices might mean for helping to cultivate more equitable and sustainable patterns of global development. For many commentators and activists such initiatives promise to radically alter the ways in which we produce knowledge and material artefacts in ways that are far more efficient, creative, distributed, decentralized, and democratic. But can open and collaborative approaches fulfil this promise?

Challenges for open and collaborative practices

The key to answering this question is a set of challenges about the knowledge politics and political economy of the new practices. What depths and forms of participation are being enabled through these new practices, for instance? In what senses does openness translate to the ability to use knowledge? Will open and collaborative forms of production create new relations with, or even transform, markets, states, and civil society, or will they be captured by sectional interests?

Sharing and sticky knowledge

To take one example, a key assumption underpinning many open and collaborative initiatives is that knowledge and information can be shared, then used, modified or further developed, among actors who are far apart from each other (either geographically or institutionally). In effect, this is a promise to radically redistribute access, power and agency over the way that knowledge and materials are produced.

For those in the global South, this is an intriguing prospect. Many developing countries are characterized by acute knowledge dependencies, very narrow production structures, and constrained scope for innovation. In many cases, global firms have control over the frontier of knowledge and technology. So sharing knowledge openly and collaboratively across nations ought to give more options for innovation and participation for people in those countries.

The problem is, though, that knowledge is ‘sticky’: it is immobile, or at least costly or difficult to move from one setting to another. There are several aspects to this; each of which complicates further the challenge of ensuring widespread, equitable internet access and digital information flows.

One aspect to knowledge stickiness is that knowledge possesses important tacit dimensions, particularly in the form of skills and competences. These are most readily shared and learnt in apprentice relationships and through social practice, they often take years to develop, and they are extremely difficult to codify or render explicit, and so are not easily shared through digital networks. Tacit knowledge and the skills to put knowledge to material effect in development are, however, critical to producing and utilizing any and all forms of knowledge. Even successfully using databases of codified information requires skills to select, interpret, and practically use what is relevant.

Some areas of open and collaborative production cope more effectively with knowledge ‘stickiness’. For instance, absolutely central to the success of the open and highly collaborative international Green Revolution in plant breeding (albeit in pre-internet days) were long and intensive international exchanges and field training of thousands of young scientists.

More recently, community-based makerspaces have managed to combine digitally shared, non-proprietary knowledge platforms, with collaborative physical spaces that enable shared learning by doing and using locally. They may, as a consequence, manage to get around many of the problems posed by the immobility of tacit knowledge and the need to re-interpret appropriately and re-embed codified knowledge in local practices.

But other practices, such as citizen science initiatives or the sharing of scientific information via open access repositories may struggle to overcome these kinds of challenges without analogous developments locally. In such circumstances, meaningful access to knowledge and the ability to participate effectively in its (re)production and use are likely to remain very limited.

The obstacles are not necessarily insurmountable, but they do require careful attention to how sharing and collaboration is practiced on the ground, and to the development and distribution more generally of capabilities in knowledge production and use.

Three challenges

Our paper as a whole highlights three sets of challenges in the emerging field of open and collaborative production.

One, as in the example above, concerns the ways in which important attributes of knowledge itself limits aspirations for a more democratic innovation culture.

A second concerns the operation of power internal to the process of producing open and collaborative knowledge. Can open and collaborative production transcend existing hierarchies, asymmetries in the distribution of resources and capabilities between collaborators, and wider patterns of social privilege and structure?

A third concerns the nature of political and economic power within the wider settings and structures in which initiatives in open and collaborative production are situated. Put somewhat crudely, will the new practices constitute ‘novel inputs for existing processes’ or ‘novel inputs for transformed processes’?

None of these three challenges is insurmountable, as we conclude in our paper. But they do imply that any promise in the open and collaborative practices will be realised through accompanying, wider developments. These must be attentive to issues of local capabilities (material and social) in diverse contexts, and include the capability to grapple with issues of relative power and autonomy.

The authors of this blog post are co-authors of the working paper ‘Open and Collaborative Developments’(STEPS Working Paper 98). You can read the abstract here and download the paper (PDF, 900KB).

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It was in January 1976 that workers at Lucas Aerospace published an Alternative Plan for the future of their corporation. It was a novel response to management announcements that thousands of manufacturing jobs were to be cut in the face of industrial restructuring, international competition, and technological change. Instead of redundancy, workers argued their right to socially useful production.

Around half of Lucas’ output supplied military contracts. Since this depended upon public funds, as did many of the firm’s civilian products, workers argued state support be better put to developing more socially useful products.

Rejected by management and government, the Plan nevertheless catalysed ideas for the democratisation of technological development in society. In promoting their arguments, shop stewards at Lucas attracted workers from other sectors, community activists, radical scientists, environmentalists, and the Left. The Plan became symbolic for a movement of activists committed to innovation for purposes of social use over private profit.

Of course, the world is different now. The spaces and opportunities for democratising technology have altered, and so too have the forms it might take. Nevertheless, remembering older initiatives casts enduring issues about the direction of technological development in society in a different and informative light: an issue relevant today in debates as varied as industrial policy, green and solidarity economies, commons-based peer-production, and grassroots fabrication in Hackerspaces and FabLabs. The movement for socially useful production prompts questions about connecting tacit knowledge and participatory prototyping to the political economy of technology development.

In drawing up their Plan, shop stewards at Lucas turned initially to researchers at institutes throughout the UK. They received three replies. Undeterred, they consulted their own members. Over the course of a year they built up their Plan on the basis of the knowledge, skills, experience, and needs of workers and the communities in which they lived. The results included designs for over 150 alternative products. The Plan included market analyses and economic argument; proposed employee training that enhanced and broadened skills; and suggested re-organising work into less hierarchical teams that bridged divisions between tacit knowledge on the shop floor and theoretical engineering knowledge in design shops.

The Financial Times described the Lucas Plan as, ‘one of the most radical alternative plans ever drawn up by workers for their company’ (Financial Times, 23 January 1976). It was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979. The New Statesman claimed (1st July 1977) ‘The philosophical and technical implications of the plan are now being discussed on average of twenty five times a week in international media’. Despite this attention, shop stewards suspected (correctly) that the Plan in isolation would convince neither management nor government. Even leaders in the trade union establishment were reluctant to back this grassroots initiative; wary its precedent would challenge privileged demarcations and hierarchies.

In the meantime, and as a lever to exert pressure, shop stewards embarked upon a broader political campaign for the right of all people to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, one of the leaders, said they wanted to, ‘inflame the imaginations of others’ and ‘demonstrate in a very practical and direct way the creative power of “ordinary people”’. Lucas workers organised road-shows, teach-ins, and created a Centre for Alternative Industrial and Technological Systems (CAITS) at North-East London Polytechnic. Design prototypes were displayed at public events around the country. TV programmes were made. CAITS helped workers in other sectors develop their own Plans. Activists connected with sympathetic movements in Scandinavia and Germany.

The movement that emerged challenged establishment claims that technology progressed autonomously of society, and that people inevitably had to adapt to the tools offered up by science. Activists argued knowledge and technology was shaped by social choices over its development, and those choices needed to become more democratic. Activism cultivated spaces for participatory design; promoted human-centred technology; argued for arms conversion to environmental and social technologies; and sought more control for workers, communities and users in production processes.

Material possibilities were helped when Londoners voted the Left into power at the Greater London Council (GLC) in 1981. They introduced an Industrial Strategy committed to socially useful production. Mike Cooley, sacked from Lucas for his activism, was appointed Technology Director of the GLC’s new Greater London Enterprise Board (GLEB). A series of Technology Networks were created. Anticipating FabLabs today, these community-based workshops shared machine tools, access to technical advice, and prototyping services, and were open for anyone to develop socially useful prototypes. Other Left councils opened similar spaces in the UK.

Technology Networks aimed to combine the ‘untapped skill, creativity and sheer enthusiasm’ in local communities with the ‘reservoir of scientific and innovation knowledge’ in London’s polytechnics. Hundreds of designs and prototypes were developed, including electric bicycles, small-scale wind turbines, energy conservation services, disability devices, re-manufactured products, children’s play equipment, community computer networks, and a women’s IT co-operative. Designs were registered in an open access product bank. GLEB helped co-operatives and social enterprises develop these prototypes into businesses.

Recalling the movement now, what is striking is the importance activists attached to practical engagements in technology development as part of their politics. The movement emphasised tacit knowledge, craft skill, and learning by doing through face-to-face collaboration in material projects. Practical activity was cast as ‘technological agit prop’ for mobilising alliances and debate. Some participants found such politicisation unwelcome. But in opening prototyping in this way, activists tried to bring more varied participation into debates, and enable wider, more practical forms of expression meaningful to different audiences, compared to speeches and texts evoking, say, a revolutionary agent, socially entrepreneurial state, or deliberative governance framework.

Similarly today, Hackerspaces and FabLabs, involve people working materially on shared technology projects. Social media opens these engagements in distributed and interconnected forms. Web platforms and versatile digital fabrication technologies allow people to share open-hardware designs and contribute to an emerging knowledge commons. The sheer fun participants find in making things is imbued by others with excited claims for the democratisation of manufacturingand commons-based peer production. Grassroots digital fabrication (pdf) rekindles ideas about direct participation in technology development and use.

Wherever and whenever people are given the encouragement and opportunity to develop their ideas into material activity, then creativity can and does flourish. However, remembering the Lucas Plan should make us pause and consider two issues. First, the importance placed on tacit knowledge and skills. Skilful design in social media can assist but not completely substitute face-to-face, hand-by-hand activity. Second, for the earlier generation of activists, collaborative workshops and projects were also about crafting solidarities. Project-centred discussion and activity was linked to debate and mobilisation around wider issues.

Workers at Lucas Industries, Shaftmoor Lane branch, Birmingham, 1970. Photograph: /Lucas Memories website, lucasmemories.co.uk.

With hindsight, the movement was swimming against the political and economic tide, but at the time things looked less clear-cut. The Thatcher government eventually abolished the GLC in 1986. Unionised industries declined, and union power was curtailed through legislation. In overseeing this, Thatcherism knowingly cut material and political resources for alternatives. In doing so, the diversity so important to innovation diminished. The alliances struck, the spaces created and the initiatives generated were swept aside as concern for social purpose became overwhelmed by neoliberal ideology. The social shaping of technology was left to market decision.

However, even though activism dissipated, its ideas did not disappear. Some practices had wider influence, such as in participatory design, albeit it in forms appropriated to the needs of capital rather than the intended interests of labour. Historical reflection thus prompts a third issue, which is how power relations matter and need to be addressed in democratic technology development. When making prototypes becomes accessible and fun then people can exercise a power to do innovation. But this can still struggle to exercise power over the agendas of elite technology institutions, such as which innovations attract investment for production and marketing, and under what social criteria. Alternative, more democratic spaces nevertheless for technology development and debate.

Like others before and since, the Lucas workers insisted upon a democratic development of technology. Their practical, material initiatives momentarily widened the range of ideas, debates and possibilities – some of which persist. Perhaps their argument was the most socially useful product left to us?

Adrian Smith researches the politics of technology, society and sustainability at SPRU and the STEPS Centre at the University of Sussex. He is on Twitter @smithadrianpaul. A longer paper on the Lucas Plan is available at the STEPS site.

Originally published in The Guardian.

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Abstract

Critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of makerspaces, that is to say, those emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices; exercise community-based forms of governance; and utilize local manufacturing technologies. A bird’s-eye-view of the history of makerspaces is provided tracing their roots back to the hacker movement. Drawing from secondary sources, their community-building, learning and innovation potential is briefly discussed. Makerspaces, this essay argues, can serve as hubs and vehicles for citizen-driven transformation and, thus, play a key part in a more inclusive, participatory and commons-oriented vision of the smart city.

Excerpts

Introduction

Urbanization is a trend of our times, with the largest share of the human population globally living in cities; a trend that is only increasing. Cities are economic centers that through the consumption of massive resources lead to heavy environmental impact as well as to social contestations and conflicts. This creates the need for new conceptualizations for a city that will be able to deal with the current issues in more imaginative, inclusive and sustainable ways.

In this paper, critical approaches to the smart city concept are used to begin highlighting the promises of emerging urban sites that promote sharing practices and commons-based peer production.

In light of the rise of the collaborative commons, i.e., shared resources, the concept of urban “makerspaces” is discussed. The latter are community-led, open spaces where individuals share resources and meet on a regular basis to collaboratively engage in creative commons-oriented projects, usually utilizing open source software and hardware technologies. Through the intersection of digital technologies and urban life, several initiatives have emerged that attempt to circumvent the dependence on private firms or governments to provide solutions.

What is the community-building, learning and innovation potential of makerspaces towards a more inclusive, commons-oriented smart city?

Community-building potential

Makerspaces can be viewed as community-run hubs that connect citizens not only of the same city but also of other cities worldwide. Approximately 66% of the UK-based makerspaces collaborate with other UK-based or foreign makerspaces on a regular basis, while 46% contribute to commons-oriented, open source projects which normally have a global orientation. Yet, individuals are more engaged and committed to one local makerspace. Further, two of the top reasons people use makerspaces are socializing and learning. Hence, makerspaces can be platforms that cultivate relationships and networks, building social capital, i.e., “social networks and the attendant norms of trust and reciprocity”.

However, claims around the potentialities of makerspaces are still speculative and depend on how individuals associate with such places. While makerspaces have been built in ethnically and geographically diverse environments, there is yet a lack of racial and gender diversity within many of them. For instance, membership is predominantly male in 80% of UK makerspaces and 77% of China’s makers are male. Additionally, 81% of U.S. makers are male with an average income of $106,000. These are indications that participation in the maker movement is heavily dominated by affluent men.

As an attempt to correct this lack of diversity, some feminist and people of color-led makerspaces have emerged, such as Mz Baltazar’s Laboratory in Vienna and Mothership Hackermoms in Berkley (feminist spaces created in 2008 and 2012 respectively) or Liberating Ourselves Locally in Oakland (a “people of color-led” space created in 2012). However, such strategies have been met with controversy, since they are deemed to go against the principle of openness.

Learning potential

The learning potential of making coupled with open learning environments; project-based learning; informal tinkering; and peer collaboration can motivate the social learning and personalized involvement of participants. Makerspaces exhibit the aforementioned characteristics and, thus, show great promise as emerging learning hubs. That is why makerspaces have recently generated much interest in diverse educational circles. For example, several libraries and museums have created spaces with the aim to empower creative activity, resource-sharing, and active engagement with making, materials, processes, and ideas in relation to their collections and exhibits.

It appears that makerspaces offer the capacity for informal community activity as well as a proper learning environment with a focus on productive processes rather than skill-set building. Varying activities may be combined (like programming and hardware building and even manufacturing tools development), following the approach of constructionism.

Nevertheless, inclusivity and participation in such educational activities is not assured. Although more than 50% of UK makerspaces offer support, courses and tool inductions, the majority of makers are well-educated and technologically-confident. Likewise, 97% of makers in the U.S. have attended or graduated from college, while 80% say they have post-graduate education. Thus, to facilitate learning for diverse users, makerspaces should be staffed by qualified educators who are knowledgeable about theories of teaching and learning as well as about user needs and behaviors.

Innovation potential

In makerspaces people innovate and learn together by making things and using the Web to globally connect and share designs, tutorials and code. They offer creative environments where sustainable entrepreneurs, potentially with diverse motives and backgrounds, can meet and interact and thus benefit from synergies and the cross-pollination of ideas. Moreover, in makerspaces designers can come together and collaborate in participatory explorations during the use phase by prototyping, adding small-scale interventions and, therefore, moving from a “design-in-the-studio” to a “design-in-use” strategy.

Several innovative entrepreneurial endeavors and start-ups have emerged through makerspaces. This article refers to some prominent cases with the aim to provide an overview of the most mature examples that cover a wide spectrum of areas, from ICT and local manufacturing technologies to farming, culture and neuroscience.

In all, makerspaces should not be viewed merely as experimentation sites with local manufacturing technologies but as places “where people are experimenting with new ideas about the relationships amongst corporations, designers, and consumers”. The review of makerspaces-related innovation illustrated that they mainly produce user-led, incremental product and process innovations. Some of the aforementioned projects and eco-systems, such as the RepRap- or Arduino-based eco-systems, may represent both the Schumpeterian and social-oriented understanding of innovation. They seem to create win-win situations for both instigators/entrepreneurs and society, and inaugurate commons-oriented business models which arguably go beyond the classical corporate paradigm and its extractive profit-maximizing practices.

Conclusions

Are makerspaces a manifestation of the “new spirit of capitalism” that has successfully incorporated and adapted several of its various critical cultures? Or could we consider makerspaces as sites with non-negligible post-capitalist dynamics? Both possibilities still exist.

If we subscribe to the idea that at least some makerspaces can be seen as CBPP in practice, then, makerspaces may belong to a new form of capitalism but, at the same time, also highlight ways in which this new form might be transcended. If the dominant discourse of the “smart city” project is aligned with a neoliberal, corporate vision for urban development, then the “makerspace” could simultaneously be a source of legitimacy for the project and also serve as an institution for citizen-driven transformation.

An alternative vision for the smart city may be possible through a commons-oriented approach, geared towards the democratization of means of production. The basic tenet of this approach encourages citizens to participate in creating solutions collectively instead of merely adopting proprietary technology. In addition to virtual connections observed in several sharing economy initiatives, makerspaces can be the physical nodes of a collaborative culture. Further, they can serve as a new “design template”, where knowledge/design is developed and shared as a global digital commons while the actual customized manufacturing takes place locally, thus initiating a decisive break from the current production model.

Full title: “Making (in) the Smart City: The Emergence of Makerspaces”.

Originally published at Telematics & Informatics.

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