Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

I have said this before: Technology is about people. Why does this catch-phrase seem so important to me? Because, simply, it stabs so many holes in the fabric of that which we have come to accept as truth.

The assumptions made constantly and persistently in our social, political, and economic environments have been left untouched for so long that many or most no longer think to question them: While mathematicians quarrel endlessly over the truth value of the axiom of choice, in any other field – particularly those fields which touch on our personal freedoms the most – the axioms laid out unknowingly by the thinkers of the last generations are never questioned deeply. While many will disagree with Smith or Marx, none or few would disagree with those assumptions that both made and neither mentioned.

Scarcity.

Throughout history, throughout politics, social theory and economics, one of our purest unquestioned assumptions has been that of scarcity: The inherent limit on available things. And within certain dogmas prevalent in the western world, the more immediately dangerous counter-assumption of the infinity of nature.

This assumption did make sense, at first, just like Euclid’s axiom of parallel lines made sense, at first.

Before the industrial revolution the human species simply did not have enough technology to actually make a significant impact on our natural environment: While the odd forest would disappear and the odd mine would deplete, there would always be another forest and another mine. There were enough fish in the sea, there were enough buffalo on the prairies.

Likewise, we did not have enough technology to immerse ourselves in relative cornucopia – fishing and hunting was hard work, farming was a slow and difficult process. The trees certainly didn’t chop themselves down.

But with the mechanization of our fundamental processes, a development starting with the plow and continuing on into the unforeseeable future, we started to make an impact, our rate of fabrication grew, as did our rate of consumption, and now we have reached a time when nobody need starve, but many do.

Many do starve. Many are want of water, food, clothing, education. And yet despite all our technology there are three billion humans who live in abject poverty. That’s half of our species. One billion live off less than one US dollar a day.

Yet it has been estimated that roughly half of the agricultural produce of the western world goes to waste. Why is this?

The truth is that while we have, as a species, transcended in a number of ways many of those scarcities that may define us, we have built a plethora of systems to deal with these scarcities that have refused to give way to more egalitarian systems. The assumption of scarcity has caused us to build systems of ownership, systems of priority, property, greed. The obvious solution to the problem of famine is to redistribute that which would otherwise go to waste – transport that which is not needed to where it is needed. Or in Marxist parlance: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.

This idea was hardly meant to be enacted at a personal level, but rather at a societal level, where varying resources of different places would supplement each other; where geography would be a function of possibility rather than desperation. Where humans could move forward in synergy.

Smith saw the same problem and found a similar solution, albeit far less egalitarian: the free market was intended as a negative feedback loop on a global scale, an ideal for maximizing the potential of each environment by leveraging value: a concept that we cannot accurately model, for it is fickle. And while the idea of the free market is truly a beautiful one, I have yet to see a market that is truly free.

Indeed, in a free market one would have expected the problem of distribution of agricultural produce would solve itself, on a system-wide scale, eventually. But it hasn’t. Everybody and his mother has had a go at explaining why: Perhaps Africa is too poor (despite having immense landmass and far more natural resources than Europe). Perhaps Asia is too uncivilized (despite having several thousand years more experience in that field than the west). Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Perhaps people are looking in the wrong places, laying blame where it doesn’t belong. On this subject I could talk endlessly.

But in all this exposition on the assumption of scarcity, I have not once mentioned digital fabrication, the subject of this flurry of words. So now I shall.

People must realize that digital fabrication is not a revolution. It is not a wishing wand that will make the problems of the world go away. It is merely a technology, a greatly hyped one at that. Trust me – I have contributed greatly to the hype.

Digital fabrication, the idea of building machines that can assemble anything from the atom on up, including copies of themselves, is a natural progression of the industrial revolution. It is a natural step from where we are now. It’ll take a while to come into fruition, but it is interesting today for two distinct reasons.

The first is that, unlike the so-called digital revolution that put a computer on every desk and changed the way we do communication and computation, the effects of the advent of digital fabrication have been predicted to some degree since von Neumann. And while even the most absurd predictions have certainly underestimated the effect of being able to make anything at the touch of a button, at the end of the day this is just another technology. It will change how we live, but not who we are.

Nothing fundamental will change in our perception of the physical world by our being able to assemble a stuffed turkey atom-for-atom. We already have access to stuffed turkeys, so we already know what having them does for us as a people. Yes, certainly, there will be new options available to us, like growing skyscrapers out of diamonds, but that is not where the greatest entry point for discussion of digital fabrication lies. Rather, it is in the economical impact, which is hard to quantify.

Which brings us to the other thing: although we somehow managed to emerge from the industrial revolution with two major economic theories, both of which are built on the same faulty assumptions, it will be the economics that will have to be largely rewritten in a post-scarcity world. The technologies that have been popping up over the last two decades in free peer-to-peer distribution have become a model for this: suddenly you can share anything that can be converted into a digital data stream, be it music, movies, or the recipe for your Grandmother’s famous stuffed turkey. It will be having to face the potential digitization of everything that will be the coup de grace for our current models.

Capitalism will not work, for there will be no capital. Communism will not work, for there will be no need for the commune.

Rethinking scarcity is difficult, and I don’t think it’s something that the true believers of the current economic models are mentally equipped to do. People who have become indoctrinated into a certain type of thinking will always have a great difficulty thinking outside of that particular box. But the 12 year olds who are sharing music today, the hackers who made this all possible, the people who are heralding the digital fabrication movement, the free software, free hardware and free culture movements, these are the people who will break the arbitrary rules made up by those who didn’t think hard enough before making assumptions. These are the people who can really make a difference.

And you know what? These people are you.