An Escape from Mass Production

Sol_r_Punk@slrpnk.net · 1 year ago

An Escape from Mass Production

solbear@slrpnk.net · 1 year ago

Great read, thank you for that! I’ve written down some of my thoughts. Feel free to point out if I’ve misunderstood you, or if there is something you think I am wrong about.

On 3D-printing

I believe you are onto something in terms of creating more things ourselves on-demand, and I do think local additive manufacturing will be more common in households down the line, and not reserved for hobbyists. I am in the process of selecting a 3D-printer for myself, and in that process I have also begun envisioning many use cases for it. However, I have some concerns over how this will actually play out:

While I am fairly tech savvy, and I have no doubts I can learn what I need to learn in order to design and produce what I need, I wonder what it would take for e.g. my mom to be comfortable with, and get utility from, 3D-printers. We have lived in a specialized society for so long that the vast majority of people are almost exclusively consumers, and do not create anything anymore and even the thought of doing things yourself can be daunting. You mention open source designs and being able to build further upon it, and while I love the idea, I think (for now and at least the short-term) that most people would be fully dependent on a large repository of available designs that can be printed as-is. This smells like yet another area where we would see the emergence of a tech behemoth with a firm monopolistic grip offering a fancy platform with all the bells and whistles, with the ensuing enshittification that is sure to follow: tech lock-in to certain brands and “ecosystems”, limitations to design inspection and modification, algorithmic manipulation to buy/print things we don’t really need, etc. How would we guard ourselves against this and make sure that people would be free to use it to their own benefit, and not end up in the same kind of platform hellscape that we’ve seen for social media platforms, online retailers etc. already?
On-demand printing would certainly reduce overproduction of certain goods, as big retailers wouldn’t need to keep large stocks to ensure availability. In certain industries, this overproduction is massive, and if it could be removed, it would be great. But do we not risk local overproduction? Say that 3D-printing of fabrics becomes viable do to at home, and at a low cost (comparable or lower to those horrible ultrafast fashion brands). What is to stop us from continuing the gross overconsumption that the average consumer engages with today? Especially if the dystopic vision of a tech behemoth running the show presented above comes into fruition. A new dress for every occasion, can’t be seen to wear the same outfit more than once, or else your status takes a hit. Failed prints could also generate a lot of unusable scrap. There would in any case need to be in place robust recycling procedures, preferably local. This would need to account for different materials, plastics, metals (and sorting by alloy), and it would need to handle removal of any contaminants that could affect the quality of the recycled product (dirt or other foreign material that has come from use, this is at least easier with scrap material from a failed print as it should not be dirty).
As you point out, this can’t work for everything. There are quite a lot of goods that require specialty production methods that cannot be replicated at home. I think manufacturing at some levels of complexity higher than what can be achieved with a home printer could probably be handled by community facilities with larger scale equipment and perhaps maintenance and operations staff. But more high-tech things, which my understanding of a solarpunk vision requires, such as photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, batteries and semiconductor components, requires large scale manufacturing. So that won’t disappear, but by their own use of additive manufacturing, their own supply chains could be shortened quite a lot by producing more components in-house. If your assumption that we remove the concern for profit, than there wouldn’t be any barrier to doing this, and I think that would be very beneficial.

Consequences for overproduction

What do you think can be done in regards to overproduction of goods? Should there be consequences for producing more than can be consumed? Do you think capitalism can be tamed in such a way?

I think yes, of course there should be consequences for producing more than can be consumed. The fact that there is none, other than whatever monetary losses they are impacted with from this wastefulness, which obviously is not enough to keep them from doing it, highlights one of the main problems with how capitalism works in our world: the real cost of transactions are seldom accounted for, which results in wastefulness and other poor choices from a sustainability point of view. Large-scale production often yields enormous economies of scale benefits, to the point where the marginal cost of production is barely anything. Doesn’t matter to them if they produce way more than they can sell, because it doesn’t cost them anything anyway. However, with high margins on sales, they might get a huge profit benefit from producing more in case it sells well. Leftovers we just dump in a river somewhere, not our problem anymore.

Can it be tamed however? In principle, more and smarter regulations would help. They would need to be widely agreed upon by several nations, as otherwise corporations could avoid the regulations by flagging out. In practice? I think we’re a long way from this being straight-forward. Corporate interests have way too much to say in politics, especially in the US, and before that problem is solved I think there is a limit to how efficient regulations can be. I also believe that it is difficult to get the required corporation across several countries for the kind of regulation that would be needed. I think EU does some good things here, although they sometimes miss the mark completely for the sake of compromise, and in some areas are chasing the completely wrong types of regulation that are detrimental and not beneficial to our society.

Sol_r_Punk@slrpnk.net · 1 year ago

Hey, thanks for the great reply! Sounds like you are absolutely picking up what I’m putting down, which is awesome because sometimes I forget to mention that I’m, in a way, working from the end goal backwards, so sometimes concepts can be a little on the vague side since the details haven’t been fully worked out yet, which is why I love your reply. Now to tackle your points:

(1) I would say even in the long term that we’d still be dependent on a large repository of available designs, however, these will not be provided via some tech brothel bent on being some end-all-be-all of what you use. Instead, they will be refined designs that have been continuously improved upon by the community at large. Likely at this point, waste will be minimized and functionality will be focused. I know not everyone will want to use the same thing, or have the same design, so I’m thinking there could easily exist a base model that gets the job done, but designed with customization in mind so that later down the road you can add in a different colored insert, or a different handle configuration. Whatever might suit you best, but likely won’t need to make every model to try what’s best. Which does lead me to your second point:

(2) I also share the concern with personal overproduction, and there needs to be a way to ensure that people don’t go ham with trying to print every single option for simply no other reason then because they can. The best way, so far, that I’ve come up with combatting this is by making everyone responsible for providing their own base material for the design. Kind of like in an RPG where you need to somehow acquire the base materials to craft an item, I envision a similar system. Which at this point I should point out that I’m approaching this from a post-monetary society, and I know not everyone agrees that can happen, but it would keep people from just buying and hoarding resources. Instead there are a myriad of other ways where materials can be acquired, either through getting it yourself, asking for help, recycling old parts, collective agreement with others, etc., but that should effectively help limit overproduction as people will tend to be more careful with how they “spend” their resources. (Post point, with some exotic material, it can safely be assumed that we’ve extracted enough from the Earth that recycling can be the way from there. Otherwise, modifications will have to be made to designs in order to live within the constraints)

(3) I hadn’t really fleshed out this point, but agree 100% with where you are taking it. I don’t think we’ll be able to escape our dependence on electricity generation, at least not with my current understanding of physics, so we’ll still need ways to create and store electricity for the world. Anything we can do to help supply chains be more self sufficient is a step in the right direction. I know there is some concern that we can’t always wait for a part to be printed, but if it’s mission critical and people are half competent at planning, there will be spares available for backup.

I really wish there was some consequence for overproduction, and I agree that corp interests are far too entrenched in politics to get anything like that done short term. It’s frustrating, and I don’t think governments would help anyways. Production creates jobs, and more jobs = a better economy (or so the theory goes) so it suits them to side with the corporations (until the shit hits the fan anyways). I’m hoping through individual empowerment we can eventually suck enough power away to start making some real changes.

Anyways, loved the thoughts you put out and feel free to refute anything I put out if it seems off point. As much as I’d like to be a subject matter expert in everything, I’m not!