Makers and the related  activities are more often observed in vibrant cities, encapsulating diverse communities of designers, engineers and innovators. They flourish around luscious spaces and events, where talent and ideas are abound. Pioneer cities, like Barcelona, Madrid, London, Copenhagen and Amsterdam, have gradually evolved to prominent centres of the maker culture.

But what about places where these elements are less eminent? It is often said that some of the most advanced technologies are needed in the least developed places. And here the word “technology” conveys a broader meaning than mere technical solutions and enhancements of human capacities. Etymologically, technology derives from the ancient Greek words “techne”, i.e. art or craft, and “logos”, which refers to a form of systematic treatment. In this sense, technology is practically inseparable from the human elements of craftsmanship, ingenuity and knowledge. Elements that are as embedded in our very existence, as the practice of sharing with our neighbours. Especially in situations of physical shortage and scantness, solidarity and cooperation are the most effective survival strategies.

This is the case of a small mountainous village in North-Western Greece called Kalentzi. It is situated in the village cluster of Tzoumerka, a place abundant in natural and cultural wealth, yet scarce in the economic means of welfare. The local population mostly depends on low-intensity and small-scale activities combining arboreal cultivation, husbandry and beekeeping. Investment was never overflowing in the region, let alone in today’s Greek economy in life support.

A local community of farmers assembled around a practical problem: finding appropriate tools for their everyday activities. Established market channels mostly provide with tools and machinery that are apt for the flatlands. Acquisition and maintenance costs are unsustainably high, while people often have to adapt their techniques to the logic of the machines. They begun with simple meetups where they created a favourable environment to share, reflect and ideate on their common challenges and aspirations, facilitated by a group of researchers from the P2P Lab, a local research collective focused on the commons.

Soon the discussion was already saturated and they started building together a tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground. Several tools and methods have been used for this task for ages, though each one with its associated difficulties and dangers. Some farmers climb on ladders to hammer the poles, while others use barrels. However, it’s the combined effort of hammering while maintaining one’s balance that is particularly challenging, whereas there are often two people required for the job.

Interesting ideas were already in place to solve this problem. Designs were drafted on a flipchart with a couple of markers and the ones more available brought some of their own tools, like a cut saw and an electric welder, to build a prototype.

That has been the birth of Tzoumakers: a community-driven agricultural makerspace in Tzoumerka, Greece. Tzoumakers is more than an unfortunate wordplay of “Tzoumerka” and the maker culture; it is about a unique confluence of the groundbreaking elements of the latter, with the rich traditional heritage of the former. A distinctive synthesis that transcends both into a notion that seeks to create solutions that are on-demand and locally embedded, yet conceived and shareable on a global cognitive level.

It is important to emphasise that Tzoumakers is not a place that develops new tools ‘in house’. Rather it builds upon the individual ingenuity of its community and remains open for everyone to participate in this process. Through collective work, field testing and representation new tools may be released and further shared to benefit others with similar problems. Many of the necessary innovations are already there; the role of Tzoumakers is to collect, formalize and disseminate them.

But it’s also important to understand that Tzoumakers, much like its tools and solutions, cannot provide ready-made blueprints for solutions to be simply copy-pasted elsewhere. The same applies to the projects that have been its inspiration, such as L’ Atelier Paysan and Farm Hack, which cannot convey one unified cosmopolitan vision for the agricultural sector. The same process of connection, collaboration and reflection has to be followed on every different context, whether rich or poor, vibrant or desolate, in abundance or scarcity. But it is this combination of human creativity, craftsmanship, meaningful work and sharing that arguably embodies a true, pervasive and “cosmolocal” spirit for the maker culture.

Notes:

Tzoumakers and the P2P Lab are supported by the project “Phygital: Catalysing innovation and entrepreneurship unlocking the potential of emerging production and business models”, implemented under the Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg V-B “Balkan – Mediterranean 2014-2020”, co-funded by the European Union and the National Funds of the participating countries.

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This is a story about people who build their own machines. It’s a story about people who, due to necessity and/or conscious choice, do not buy commercial equipment to work their lands or animals, but who invent, create and adapt machines to their specific needs: for harvesting legumes, for hammering poles, for hitching tools onto tractors.

The machines are just one part of our story, and this article will talk about encounters between people, tools and knowledge and it will take us to various places: Paris and Renage in France, Pyrgos and Kalentzi in Greece, and Tallinn in Estonia.

Let us begin our journey in Greece. In Pyrgos (southern Crete), there is a small group of people called Melitakes (the Cretan word for ants) interested in seed sovereignty and agroecology. It is a group that cares about organic farming and that tries to form a small cooperative. One of the things the group does is to plant legumes in between olive-trees or grapes. While olive trees are abundant in Greece, the land in between individual trees is usually not cultivated due to the distance necessary to avoid shading and foster the growth of the trees. So the idea was quite simple: use the unused land. However, the members of the group soon faced a specific problem: it’s hard to harvest legumes by hand and there are no available tools to do this arduous job in a narrow line between olive trees. On the market, there are only big tractor accessories, suitable for such a job, and only for large crops. That is why the group sought the help of a friend in a nearby village, a machinist, to help them out. He liked the idea. He saw it as a challenge and started to develop a tool (see picture 1). At that time, there were no concrete ideas or talks of ‘open sourcing’ the tool and of ‘do-it-yourself’ (DIY) practices. The situation was rather a pragmatic one: ‘there is a need for a machine that does not exist in commerce, we need a person to build it… and that’s what we did, supporting that person as much as we could, during the process’.

DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Several weeks later, the two authors of this article met in Paris: Alekos, who knew about his compatriots who built the legume-harvesting machine met Morgan, who knew about l’Atelier Paysan, a French cooperative specialized in the auto-construction of agricultural equipment, based in Renage. Alekos explained his plans: carrying out his PhD at Tallinn University of Technology on convivial technologies, getting to know l’Atelier Paysan, and ‘implementing’ some ideas in Greece through creating a makerspace for building agricultural tools within the framework of an EU funded programme called Phygital. Morgan explained the trajectory of his research on/with l’Atelier Paysan: his involvement in a collaborative project on user innovation since 2015 and his analysis of l’Atelier Paysan through looking at the politics and materialities of open source technologies in agriculture. After their discussion about theoretical approaches, methods, concepts and fieldwork, it was time for Alekos to meet l’Atelier Paysan ‘on the ground’ by participating in a 5-day workshop to build two tools for organic grape crops.

Alekos gained several kinds of knowledge via the workshop. Practical knowledge on working with metals, cutting, and welding. He also gained theoretical knowledge from l’Atelier Paysan: its organizational structure, the problems faced (and how they are solved), the financial setup and how to run workshops (see picture 2).

Construction of the charimaraîch (a wheelbarrow/wagon adapted for market gardening). Source: l’Atelier Paysan

L’Atelier Paysan is one of the few collectives specialized in such activities (other notable collectives being Farmhack and Open Source Ecology). L’Atelier Paysan has developed a range of practices and tools for ‘liberating’ agricultural tools: a website, workshops, a book, video tutorials, and open-source plans. In their recent article, Chance and Meyer (2017) have analyzed l’Atelier Paysan by retracing their history and form of organization, studying how they enact the principles of open source in agriculture, and by describing their tools within their economic and political context.

When Alekos got back in Greece, he visited the Melitakes group again. He explained how l’Atelier Paysan works – its practices, philosophies, and ethics – and the various tools that have been designed and built. While thinking about the future development of Melitakes’ tool and its possible diffusion through some of the standards developed by l’Atelier Paysan, the collective faced a new problem: none of them was a mechanical engineer. None of them thus could draw the design of the components of the legume harvesting tool in situ. Yet this was a crucial step for digitizing the design and making it accessible online. So they sought the help of architects for how to best illustrate each part of the machine. Subsequently, they dismantled the tool, took photos of each component (more than 300 photos in total) in the correct angle (90 degrees) and with a tape measure visible on each photo. They also used big pieces of paper to trace some complicated parts (see picture 3). And they started looking for persons who, based on the pictures and imprints, would be able to (digitally) draw the mechanical design of the tool.

The plan, at the moment of writing this article, is to draw the plans of the tool, open source them by publishing them on the Internet under a Creative Commons type of license and then organize workshops to teach people to build it. So while the full story about the legume-harvesting tool has yet to be written, some features can already be told: a practical problem has been translated into a technical tool; this tool has been disassembled and photographed in order to make it ‘drawable’ and thus available via Internet. The hope, for the future, is that many more people, in many more places, will be able to build this tool, further improve it and share the improved design with the global community. But alongside the tool, something else will travel and be reinforced: the principles of agroecology and the practices of open source.

Imprinting of some complicated parts from the DIY legumes harvesting machine by Nikos Stefanakis and the Melitakes group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

Our second story begins in a village called Kalentzi in Northern Tzoumerka region, Greece. The local community of farmers (called Tzoumakers) had another practical problem: finding an appropriate tool for hammering fencing-poles into the ground. Several tools have been used for this task for ages. But not without its difficulties and dangers: there are farmers who climb ladders and hammer the poles, and others who climb on barrels to do the job. But the combined efforts of hammering the poles into the ground and, at the same time, maintaining one’s balance on the ladder/barrel proves difficult – plus, you need two people to do the job. That is why several local farmers and makers got together, tried to find a solution and set up a plan to build a tool that can do the job without the need for acrobatic moves by making it possible for one person to hammer the poles while standing firmly on the ground (see picture 4).

Testing the newly constructed tool for hammering fencing-poles from the Tzoumakers group. Source: Alekos Pantazis.

The next phase, after the current prototyping of the tool, will be the design of a booklet that will include a detailed presentation, an explanation of the usefulness of the tool, a list of all the equipment and material needed, instructions for building the tool (and the risks thereof), drawings and pictures.

It is time, now, to move back to France and give more details about l’Atelier Paysan. The first tool construction workshops took place in 2009 by a group of innovative organic farmers that was eventually formalized and structured into the cooperative l’Atelier Paysan in 2014. At that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already begun situating its practices theoretically, by mobilizing various vocabularies and concepts (agroecology, open source, social/circular economy, common good, appropriate technologies, etc.) as well as various authors and academics (André Gorz, Jean-Pierre Darré, etc.). Active collaboration with several academics in the social sciences was sought from 2015 onwards.

By that time, l’Atelier Paysan had already perfected its general methodology: doing its TRIPs (Tournées de Recensement d’Innovations Paysannes / Tours to Make an Inventory of Peasant Innovations); developing tools via testing, prototyping, upgrading and realizing workshops; and ‘liberating’ the collectively-validated tools via publishing detailed plans and tutorials on the Internet. One of its most prominent tools is the quick hitch triangle, which replaces the usual three-point linkage between a tractor and the tool to be fixed behind it. For the quick hitch triangle, l’Atelier Paysan has produced a 10-minute video, taken many pictures, issued a 47-page booklet, drawn several plans – all of which are freely available on its webpage (see picture 5).

Design, making and testing the quick hitch triangle from the l’Atelier Paysan. Source: l’Atelier Paysan.

It is important to stress a key feature: it is not l’Atelier Paysan that develops new tools from scratch ‘in house’; rather, they actively look out for individual farmers’ innovations. Only thereafter, through collective construction work, after testing the tool in the field and various processes of representation (plans, pictures, videos), are the tools released. Put differently, while user innovations are already there, ‘in the field’, the role of l’Atelier Paysan is to collect, formalize and disseminate these innovations.

In Greece, the situation is somewhat similar: local peasants already have several ideas in mind for tools that they would like to materialize. The idea is now to continue building tools with the local community, a practice that is usually experienced as positive and empowering. Ideas – like seeds – need fertile ground. Yet, a model like the one from l’Atelier Paysan, cannot simply be copy-pasted to another country and another context unmodified: a thorough understanding of both realities is needed. For example, in Greece, there are no public funding streams available for such endeavors, and the specific plants, soils, and morphologies of the country also call for specific, locally adapted tools. Apart from the political and natural peculiarities, socio-cultural characteristics also differ. For example, farmers’ skills are not the same in Greece than in France, and the collective memory and experience of building cooperatives in Greece is different. The conditions under which people can cooperate have their local ‘flavours’ rooted in habits, perceptions and social imaginaries. Therefore, l’Atelier Paysan’s model can act as an inspirational starting point but needs to be adjusted through continuous local experimentation.

The final leg of our trip brings us back to our respective academic homes (in Paris and Tallinn), to our keyboards to write this article, and to the theorizations that we are currently working on. Our stories have been about the work – and sometimes difficulties – that go into transporting ideas, machines, practices, and knowledge from one site to another. This is not a simple move, it is not just a matter of copy-pasting an idea, a practice or a technology from one place to another. Ideas, practices, and technologies are not immutable objects, but they are, in a sense, ‘quasi-objects’. In order to move ideas and technologies, they need to be transformed, disassembled and reassembled, translated, represented, adjusted. It is only via a variety of interlinked actions – imagining, testing, photographing, drawing, theorizing, sharing, rebuilding – that objects can travel and multiply. For these technological devices to be open, ‘convivial’ and low-tech, they need to be opened up in several ways. Our argument is that this opening up is both a technical practice and a social endeavor. Our stories are thus not only about the practices of open sourcing agricultural tools, but also about the (geo)politics, ethics, aesthetics and collective dimensions thereof.

(Note: the authors of the article would like to thank Luis Felipe Murillo, Evan Fisher, Chris Giotitsas and Vasilis Ntouros for their suggestions and comments. Alekos Pantazis acknowledges financial support from IUT (19-13) and B52 grants of the Estonian Ministry of Education and Research, COST Action CA16121 project and the Phygital project which is funded via the Transnational Cooperation Programme Interreg V-B Balkan – Mediterranean 2014-2020)

Lead Image: L’Atelier Paysan

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From the shownotes to the video:

When it comes to repair, farmers have always been self reliant. But the modernization of tractors and other farm equipment over the past few decades has left most farmers in the dust thanks to diagnostic software that large manufacturers hold a monopoly over. In this episode of State of Repair, Motherboard goes to Nebraska to talk to the farmers and mechanics who are fighting large manufacturers like John Deere for the right to access the diagnostic software they need to repair their tractors.

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To do this we must of course define the commons. We generally agree with the definition that was given by David Bollier and others and which derives from the work of Elinor Ostrom and the researchers in this tradition.

What are the Commons and P2P. Click here to enlarge.

In this context, the commons has been defined as a shared resource, which is co-owned and/or co-governed by its users and/or stakeholder communities, according to its rules and norms. It’s a combination of a ‘thing’, an activity, commoning as the maintenance and co-production of that resource, and a mode of governance. It is distinguished from private and public/state forms of managing resources.

But it’s also useful to see commoning as one of four ways of distributing the fruits of a resource, i.e. as a ‘mode of exchange’, which is different from the more obligatory state-based redistribution systems, from markets based on exchange, and from the gift economy with its socially-pressured reciprocity between specific entities. In this context, commoning is pooling/mutualizing a resource, whereby individuals exchange with the totality of an eco-system.

A number of relational grammars, especially that of Alan Page Fiske in Structures of Social Life, are very useful in that regard, as he distinguishes Authority Ranking (distribution according to rank), Equality Matching (the gift economy, as a social obligation to return a gift), Market Pricing and Communal Shareholding.

Kojin Karatani’s book about the Structure of World History is an excellent attempt to place the evolution of these modes of exchange, in a historical context. Pooling is the primary mode for the early tribal and nomadic forms of human organization, as ‘owning’ is counter-productive for nomads; the gift economy starts operating and becomes strongest in more complex tribal arrangements, especially after sedentarisation, since the social obligation of the gift and counter-gift, creates societies and pacifies relations. With the onset of class society, ‘Authority Ranking’ or re-distribution becomes dominant, and finally, the market system becomes dominant under capitalism.

Let’s now reformulate this in a hypothesis for civilisational, i.e. class history.

Class-based societies that emerged before capitalism, have relatively strong commons, and they are essentially the natural resource commons, which are the ones studied by the Ostrom school. They co-exist with the more organic culturally inherited commons (folk knowledge etc..). Though pre-capitalist class societies are very exploitative, they do not systematically separate people from their means of livelihood Thus, under for example European feudalism, peasants had access to common land.

With the emergence and evolution of capitalism and the market system, first as an emergent subsystem in the cities, we see the second form of commons becoming important, i.e. the social commons. In western history we see the emergence of the guild systems in the cities of the Middle Ages, which are solidarity systems for craft workers and merchants, in which ‘welfare’ systems are mutualized, and self governed. When market-based capitalism becomes dominant, the lives of the workers become very precarious, since they are now divorced from the means of livelihood. This creates the necessity for the generalization of this new form of commons,distinct from natural resources. In this context, we can consider worker coops, along with mutuals etc… as a form of commons. Cooperatives can then be considered as a legal form to manage social commons.

With the welfare state, most of these commons were state-ified, i.e. managed by the state, and no longer by the commoners themselves.There is an argument to be made that social security systems are commons that are governed by the state as representing the citizens in a democratic polity. Today, with the crisis of the welfare state, we see the re-development of new grassroots solidarity systems, which we could call ‘commonfare’, and the neoliberalisation and bureaucratisation of the welfare systems may well call for a re-commonification of welfare systems, based on public-commons partnerships.

Since the emergence of the Internet, and especially since the invention of web (the launch of the web browser in October 1993), we see the birth, emergence and very rapid evolution of a third type of commons: the knowledge commons. Distributed computer networks allow for the generalisation of peer to peer dynamics, i.e. open contributory systems where peers are free to join in the common creation of shared knowledge resources, such as open knowledge, free software and shared designs. Knowledge commons are bound to the phase of cognitive capitalism, a phase of capitalism in which knowledge becomes a primary factor of production and competitive advantage, and at the same time represent an alternative to ‘knowledge as private property’, in which knowledge workers and citizens take collective ownership of this factor of production.

To the degree that cognitive or network-based capitalism undermines salary-based work and generalized precarious work, especially for knowledge workers, these knowledge commons and distributed networks become a vital tool for social autonomy and collective organisation. But access to knowledge does not create the possibility for the creation of autonomous and more secure livelihoods, and thus, knowledge commons are generally in a situation of co-dependence with capital, in which a new layer of capital, netarchical capital, directly uses and extracts value from the commons and human cooperation.

But we should not forget that knowledge is a representation of material reality, and thus, the emergence of knowledge commons is bound to have an important effect on the modes of production and distribution.

I would then emit the hypothesis that this is the phase we have reached, i.e. the ‘phygital’ phase in which the we see the increased intertwining of ‘digital’ (i.e. knowledge) and the physical.

The first location of this inter-twining are the urban commons. I have had the opportunity to spend four months in the Belgian city of Ghent, where we identified nearly 500 urban commons in every area of human provisioning (food. Shelter, transportation)^[1].

Our great discovery was that these urban commons function in essentially the same way as the digital commons communities that operate in the context of ‘commons-based peer production’.

This means that they combine the following elements:

1) an open productive community with

2) a for-benefit infrastructure organisation that maintains the infrastructure of the commons and

3) generative (in the best case) livelihood organisations which mediate between the market/state and the commons in order to insure the social reproduction of the commoners (i.e. their livelihoods).

In our vision, these urban commons, which according to at least two studies ^[2] are going through an exponential phase of growth (a ten-fold growth in the last ten years), are the premise for a further deepening of the commons, preparing a new phase of deeper re-materialization.

We can indeed distinguish four types of commons according to two axes: material/immaterial, and co-produced/inherited.

Ostrom commons are mostly inherited material commons (natural resources); inherited immaterial commons, such as culture and language, are usually considered under the angle of the common heritage of humankind; knowledge commons are immaterial commons that are co-produced and finally, there is a largely missing category of material commons that are produced. We are talking here of what is traditionally called ‘capital’, but in the new context of an accumulation of the commons, rather than a accumulation of capital for the sake of capital.

Let’s see the logic of this.

In pre-capitalist class formations, where the land is a primary productive factor, natural resource commons are an essential resource of the livelihood of the commons, and it is entirely natural that the commons take the form of the common governance of natural resources tied to the land.

In capitalist formations, where the workers are divorced from access to land and the means of production, it is natural that the commons become ‘social’; they are the solidarity systems that workers need to survive, and they are the attempts to organize production on a different basis during the rule of capital, i.e. they can also take the form of cooperatives for production and consumption.

In an era of cognitive capitalism, knowledge becomes a primary resource and factor of production and wealth creation, and knowledge commons are a logical outcome. But the precarious workers that are in exodus from the salaried condition, cannot ‘eat’ knowledge. Therefore, the commons also take on the form of urban infrastructure and provisioning systems, but must ultimately also take the form of true physical and material productive commons. The commons are therefore potentially the form of a mode of production and industry appropriate to the current conjuncture. During a time of market and state failure regarding the necessary ecological transition, and heightened social inequality, commoning infrastructure becomes a necessity for guaranteeing access to resources and services, to limit unequal access, but also as a very potent means to lower the material footprint of human production.

Therefore, current urban and productive commons are also the seed forms of the new system which solves the problems of the current system, which combines a pseudo-abundance in material production which endangers the planet, and an artificial scarcity in knowledge exchange, which hinders the spread of solutions.

The knowledge commons of cognitive capitalism are but a transition to the productive commons of the post-capitalist era.

In this new form of material commons, which are heavily informed and molded by digital knowledge commons (hence ‘phygital’), the means of production themselves can become a pooled resource. We foresee a combination of shared global knowledge resources (for example, exemplified by shared designs, and following the rule: all that is light is global and shared), and local cooperatively owned and managed micro-factories (following the rule: all that is heavy is local).

This cosmo-local (DGML: design global, manufacture local) mode of production and distribution, has the following characteristics:

• Protocol cooperativism: the underlying immaterial and algorithmic protocols are shared and open source, using copyfair principles (free sharing of knowledge, but commercialization conditioned by reciprocity)
• Open cooperativism: the commons-based coops are distinguished from ‘collective capitalism’ by their commitment to creating and expanding common goods for the whole of society; in Platform coops it is the platforms themselves that are the commons, needed to enable and manage the exchanges that may be needed, while protecting it from capture by extractive netarchical platfors
• Open and contributive accounting: fair distribution mechanisms that recognize all contributions
• Open and shared supply chains for mutual coordination
• Non-dominium forms of ownership (the means of production are held in common for the benefit of all participants in the eco-system.

In our opinion, the current wave of urban commons, is a prefiguration of the coming wave of scaled up material commons for the production and distribution of value in post-capitalist systems.

All artworks by Mario Klingemann.

^[1] See: http://wiki.commons.gent for a directory of these commons, classified by provisioning system, in Dutch.
^[2] The first study pertains to the Netherlands, and is a booklet with the text of a lecture by Tine De Moor, entitled ‘Homo Cooperans, delivered at her inauguration as Professor of Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective, August 30, 2013:

The second study concerns the Flanders: Burgercollectieven in kaart gebracht. Van Fleur Noy & Dirk Holemans. Oikos,2016: http://www.coopkracht.org/images/phocadownload/burgercollectieven%20in%20kaart%20gebracht%20-%20fleur%20noy%20%20dirk%20holemans.pdf

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Four years ago, Thomas Piketty published his best-seller that tried to provide a working model for capital in the twenty-first century. The reasons why Piketty failed to accomplish some of his goals have been well explained by David Harvey.

I’d like to shed light on a new process that has been neglected by both Piketty and Harvey. For those who wish to understand “capital in the twenty-first century”, studying a rising form of production is of paramount importance. Following the format of ‘capital’, I call this emerging phenomenon ‘phygital’.

What is capital?

Capital is a process, not a thing, which results in social relations. Put simply, it is a process in which money is used to make more money. This process is situated in a specific context where the capital owners develop multifaceted relations with the rest of the people and their habitat.

The owners of a company profit by developing relations with their employees, partners, suppliers, customers, natural environment etc. How value is created and wealth is accumulated in the hands of the very few is a complex process. However, to quote the Encyclopedia of Marxism, “the issue is to understand what kind of social relation is capital and where it leads”.

I shall argue the same for another process, named ‘phygital’.

What is phygital?

‘Phygital’ is a process whereby ‘physical’ (material production) meets the ‘digital’ (production of knowledge, software, design, culture). It encapsulates digitally enhanced physical reality and production, to show how the influx of shared knowledge changes and improves production.

First it was Wikipedia and the myriads of free and open-source software projects. They demonstrated how people, driven by diverse motives, can produce complex ‘digital artefacts’ if they are given access to the means of production. Now we are also observing a rich tapestry of initiatives in the field of manufacturing.

For example, see the Wikihouse project that produces open source designs for houses; the OpenBionics project that produces open source designs for robotic and bionic devices; or the FarmHack and L’Atelier Paysan communities that produce open source designs for agricultural machines. Digital technologies enable people to cooperate in a remote and asynchronous way, and produce designs that are shared as digital commons (open source). Then the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures (from 3d printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts) and with local biophysical conditions in mind.

Similar to capital, phygital is a process that results in social relations. However, it is a process in which shared resources (commons) are used to produce more shared resources (commons). The kind of social relations can thus be very different to capitalism. And it may lead to a post-capitalist economy and society.

Do we really need another new term?

No, not necessarily. But we need a new paradigm, informed by the past, which can address most of the problems that capitalism has been creating, for the benefit of the many and of the environment. Towards that end, discussions around and experimentation with post-capitalist alternatives are necessary.

I believe that new ideas should ideally be described by using already widely understood terms so that the message is effectively communicated. However, I cannot come up with a better term that would describe this conjunction of the digital with the physical. If someone can, may this brief essay serve as inspiration.

Originally published in Open Democracy.

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