{"id":29803,"date":"2016-09-04T14:54:11","date_gmt":"2016-09-04T21:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/?p=29803"},"modified":"2016-12-04T06:47:21","modified_gmt":"2016-12-04T14:47:21","slug":"abolish-artificial-scarcity-kevincarson1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/abolish-artificial-scarcity-kevincarson1","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Abolish artificial scarcity\u2019: @KevinCarson1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Predicting an economic \u201csingularity\u201d approaching<\/a>, Kevin Carson from the Center for a Stateless Society writes in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution<\/a><\/i> (2010) we can look forward to a vibrant \u201calternative economy\u201d driven less and less by corporate and state leviathans.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

According to Carson, \u201cthe more technical advances lower the capital outlays and overhead for production in the informal economy, the more the economic calculus is shifted\u201d (p. 357). While this sums up the message of the book and its relevance to advocates of open existing and emerging technologies, the analysis Carson offers to reach his conclusions is extensive and sophisticated.<\/span><\/p>\n

With the technology of individual creativity expanding constantly, the analysis goes, \u201cincreasing competition, easy diffusion of new technology and technique, and increasing transparency of cost structure will \u2013 between them \u2013 arbitrage the rate of profit to virtually zero and squeeze artificial scarcity rents\u201d (p. 346).<\/span><\/p>\n

An unrivalled champion of arguments against \u201cintellectual property\u201d, the author believes IP to be nothing more than a last-ditch attempt by talentless corporations to continue making profit at the expensive of true creators and scientists (p. 114\u2013129). The view has significant merit.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe worst nightmare of the corporate dinosaurs\u201d, Carson writes of old-fashioned mass-production-based and propertied industries, is that \u201cthe imagination might take a walk\u201d (p. 311). Skilled creators could find the courage to declare independence from big brands. If not now, in the near future, technology will be advanced and available enough that the creators and scientists don\u2019t need to work as helpers for super-rich corporate executives. Nor will the future see such men and women kept at dystopian, centralized factories.<\/span><\/p>\n

Pointing to the crises of overproduction and waste, together with seemingly inevitable technological unemployment, Carson believes corporate capitalism is at death\u2019s door. Due to \u201cterminal crisis\u201d, not only are other worlds possible but \u201cthis world, increasingly, is becoming impossible\u201d (p. 82). Corporations, the author persuades us, only survive because they live off the subsidies of the government. But \u201cas the system approaches its limits of sustainability\u201d, \u201clibertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms\u201d are destined to \u201cbreak out of their state capitalist integument and become the building blocks of a fundamentally different society\u201d (p. 111\u2013112).<\/span><\/p>\n

Giant corporations are no longer some kind of necessary evil needed to ensure wide-scale manufacture and distribution of goods in our globalized world. Increasingly, they are only latching on to the talents of individuals to extract rents. They may even be neutering technological modernity and the raising of living standards, to extract as much profit as possible by allowing only slow improvements.<\/span><\/p>\n

And why should corporations milk anyone, if those creators are equipped and talented enough to work for themselves?<\/span><\/p>\n

The notion of creators declaring independence is not solely a question of things to come. While Kevin Carson links the works of Karl Hess, Jane Jacobs and others (p. 192\u2013194) to imagine alternative friendly, localized community industries of a high-tech nature that will decrease the waste and dependency bred by highly centralized production and trade, he also points to recent technologies and their social impact.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cComputers have promised to be a decentralizing force on the same scale as electrical power a century earlier\u201d (p. 197), the author asserts, referring to theories of the growth of electricity as a utility and its economic potential. From the subsequent growth of the internet, blogging is replacing centralized and costly news networks and publications to be the source of everyone\u2019s information (p. 199). The decentralization brought by computers has meant \u201cthe minimum capital outlay for entering most of the entertainment and information industry has fallen to a few thousand dollars at most, and the marginal cost of reproduction is zero\u201d (p. 199).<\/span><\/p>\n

The vision made possible by books like Kevin Carson\u2019s might be that one day, not only information products but physical products \u2013 everything<\/i> \u2013 will be free. The phrase \u201cknowledge is free\u201d, a slogan of Anonymous hackers and their sympathizers, is true in two senses. Not only does \u201cinformation want to be free\u201d, the origin of the phrase explained by Wired<\/i> co-founder Kevin Kelly in What Technology Wants<\/a> <\/i>(2010), but one can acquire knowledge at zero cost.<\/span><\/p>\n

If the \u201ctransferrability\u201d of individual creativity and peer production \u201cto the realm of physical production\u201d from the \u201cimmaterial realm\u201d is a valid observation (p. 204\u2013227), then the economic singularity means one thing clear. \u201cKnowledge is free\u201d shall become \u201ceverything is free\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNewly emerging forms of manufacturing\u201d, the author indicated, \u201crequire far less capital to undertake production. The desktop revolution has reduced the capital outlays required for music, publishing and software by two orders of magnitude; and the newest open-source designs for computerized machine tools are being produced by hardware hackers for a few hundred dollars\u201d (p. 84).<\/span><\/p>\n

Open source hardware is of course also central to the advocacy in The Homebrew Industrial Revolution<\/i>, especially as it relates to poorer peripheries of the world-economy. It is through open source hardware libraries of the kind advocated by Vinay Gupta<\/a> that plans for alternative manufacture as the starting point in an alternative economy for the good of all become feasible.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I argued in my 2013 Catalyst booklet<\/a><\/i>, not only informational goods will face the scandals of being \u201cleaked\u201d or \u201cpirated\u201d in future. The right generation of 3D printers, robots, atomically-precise manufacturing devices, biotechnology-derived medicines and petrochemicals<\/a> will all move \u201cat the speed of light\u201d as the father of synthetic biology J. Craig Venter predicted<\/a> of his own synbio work.<\/span><\/p>\n