RESILIENT COMMUNITY: FABRICATION

It's normally assumed in most projections of a localized future (driven by disruption, expensive energy, etc.) that consumer products become very rare. Either they are too expensive (usually due to the vast expense globalized transport/delivery) or too infrequently available (due to disruptions) to support current lifestyles. However, in the longer term, that doesn't need to occur. In resilient communities that undergo the transition, a revolution in manufacturing currently underway (we are only at the very start of this journey) may provide a solution. What is it? Personal fabrication. It's a method of low cost and small scale production for anything from 3-D objects up to and including intelligent systems (it will get even more effective as the costs are driven down and capabilities increase in concert with Moore's Law). It has enormous promise and will likely provide a way for resilient communities to not only stay completely "modern," but even advance economically and in quality of life faster than communities dependent on traditional centralized sources of production.

I'm going to spend much more time exploring the limits and implications of this in the future (particularly in my upcoming book on the Resilient Community). In the interim, here's a broad/high level overview to get your head wrapped around the concept.

Personal fabrication is a method of manufacturing that has been recently popularized and accelerated by MIT (specifically MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms). Essentially, it takes rapid prototyping machines (which have been around since the early 90's) and combines them with easy to use design software to create a small local manufacturing shop that can produce a wide variety of original products. Here's an explanation of what personal fabrication is from the center's director, Neil Gershenfeld (read the entire article if you get a chance).

NOTE: Again, this has applicability to both development and counter-insurgency (although, over a longer time horizon). It also may be transformational in terms of warfare. Think DIY (do-it-yourself) weapons systems.

PS: I am on Twitter.

Comments

[Nathan]

Excellent article. If you have a computer with CAD software, you can spend $5400 and get a small CNC machine to fabricate any component up to 19"x7"x5".

http://www.cncmasters.com/CNC%20Jr%20Mill.htm

Equipment like this is an advantage both to the small-scale guerrilla producing weaponry, as well as to the local community for production of machinery and spare parts in response to "black swans" affecting the transportation networks.

[moon]

Regarding DIY and personal fabrication, here's a tangent line of research:
BioBricks Foundation
OpenWetWare
Registry of Standard Biological Parts
Drew Endy at MIT Biological Engineering

[Kevin Carson]

Excellent article. But you don't need anything as high tech as 3-D printers or other desktop manufacturing technology for the kind of resilience you describe.

A very resilient decentralized manufacturing economy can be achieved by substituting old-fashioned general purpose machinery, as described by Murray Bookchin 30 years ago (in Post-Scarcity Anarchism).

Bookchin's treatment of general purpose production machinery dovetails very well with Jane Jacobs' account of the origins of the Japanese bicycle industry. According to Jacobs, bicycles in Japan at the turn of the 20th century were all Western imports. Because of the shortage of spare parts, bicycle shops had to custom machine the parts to repair them. Over time, different shops specialized in particular parts, and developed what amounted to complete bicycle production operations networked between a number of separate shops.

When Peak Oil shuts down much of the centralized corporate economy, small local machine shops and even the better equipped backyard hobby shops will probably find themselves custom machining the parts necessary to keep appliances and vehicles running. Local economies will spring up around repair, recyling and remanufacturing, and gradually evolve into independent production based on peer network design and coordination.