By Kali
Akuno and Gyasi Williams, for Cooperation Jackson and the Community Production
Cooperative
The Third
Digital Revolution[1],
a revolution in cyber-physical integration and personal fabrication, is
changing the world, and changing humanity, culturally and physically, in the
process. The Third Digital Revolution is
marked by technological and knowledge breakthroughs that build on the first two
Digital Revolutions, and the three Industrial Revolutions that preceded them,
which are now fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds - including
the human body. The main technologies of
this revolution include advanced robotics, CNC (computer numeric control)
automation, 3D printing, biotechnology, nanotechnology, big data processing,
artificial intelligence, and of course these autonomous vehicles we’ve been
hearing so much about of late. As a result of these developments, soon millions
of people will be able to make almost anything with their personal computer or
smartphone and fabrication technology in their own homes. Truly, a new era of technological innovation
is upon us. One that could enable many
of the social freedoms envisioned by scientists and science fiction writers for
over a century.
As we have painfully
learned from the previous industrial and digital revolutions, technology is not
entirely value neutral, meaning neither good nor bad. Under the social and economic system of
capitalism, most technological innovation has been driven by the desire to
maximize profits, reduce space/time limitations (i.e. how long it takes to make
and deliver a commodity or service), and eliminate labor costs. So, while it is true that the technology does
not determine its own use (not yet anyway), its application and value have
largely been determined by a small subset of humanity. We want to make sure that we change this
equation with the Third Digital Revolution.
How we structure the ownership, control, and use of the technologies of
the Third Digital Revolution will either aid humanity in our collective quest
for liberation, or deepen still our species’ inhumanity towards itself and our
dear mother earth. One thing is
painfully clear, and that is if these technologies remain the exclusive
property of the capitalist class and the trans-national corporations they
control, these tools will not be used for the benefit of the overwhelming
majority of humanity, but to expand the profits and further consolidate the
power of the 1% that rule the world.
Under their control, these technologies will lead to a crisis of global
unemployment on a scale unseen in human history. The end result will be global dystopia, a
social nightmare predicated on massive poverty, lawlessness, state repression,
and ever greater human disposability rather than the potential utopia these
technologies could potentially enable.
Confronting
the Challenges: Class, Race, Gender, and Ecological Limitations
In order to
make the future that we want, we have to openly confront the stark problems
already at the heart of the Third Digital Revolution, and there are several
glaring problems already in plain sight.
Despite great efforts toward democratizing the Third Digital Revolution
by making much of the technology “open source”, historically oppressed and
disenfranchised communities remain excluded.
The same access gulf seen in the current “digital divide” is being
replicated and deepened. Instead of a
ubiquitous transformation, with equal access and distribution, what in fact is
emerging is a “fabrication divide”.
This divide is
layered, multi-dimensional, and compounded.
The first and obvious barrier to access is cost. Those who can afford the machines will
eventually be able to produce whatever they want, while those who can’t will
remain dependent on the inequitable market, the forces that manipulate it, and
the increasingly antiquated methods of production they employ to produce their
consumer goods. While this revolution
is spurred on by the dropping cost and rapid development of fabrication technology,
indigenous and working class Black and Latin-x populations will still find
themselves at least a step behind as the cost of early adoption will continue
to advantage the already privileged.
The issues of
cost and accessibility lead directly to a discussion of class. The working class is almost always alienated
from the market mechanisms that enable people to take best advantage of
emerging technology. Further still, the
dismantling of society by the neoliberal project has eroded the bonds of social
solidarity and eradicated the safety nets created through working class
political victories. The emergence of
the Third Digital Revolution within this socio-political context will only
widen the inequality and access gaps that already exist. For example, the recent elimination of net
neutrality combined with years of starving public schools of funding and
eviscerating city services ensures that libraries and any other public services
that once helped to counterbalance the technological gaps experienced by the
working class during the latter half of the 20th century, are
becoming ineffective or altogether nonexistent.
While there has
been a great deal of public discussion about the advance of the Third Digital
Revolution and what benefits and threats it potentially poses, there has been
little discussion about racial inequity within the Third Digital
Revolution. Without a major structural
intervention, the Third Digital Revolution will only exacerbate the existing
digital divide. Again, here the problem
is layered and compounded, for the advances in automation and artificial
intelligence that the Third Digital Revolution will advance will
disproportionately eliminate many of the low-skill, low-wage manual labor and
service sector jobs that historically oppressed communities have been forced
into over the last several years. Given
some projections of massive job loss due to automation, there is a real
question about whether the potential benefits this transformation could have
will outweigh the severe pain and loss Indigenous, Black and Latin-x working
class populations will face as this technology advances.
Even less
discussed than the class and race based impacts of the Third Digital Revolution
are the gender disparities that are likely to deepen if there is no major
intervention in the social advance of this development. Despite recent advances, it is no secret that
women are grossly under represented in the technological and scientific arenas[2]. The question is, how can and will the gender
inequities be addressed in the midst of the social transformations stimulated
by the Third Digital Revolution? Will
the existing gender distribution patterns remain, be exasperated, or will they
be eliminated?
The Third
Digital Revolution, like its predecessors, will undoubtedly make fundamental
shifts not only to human society, but to the planet as well, many of which have
yet to be anticipated. One likely shift
that must be examined is the potential of accelerated environmental
catastrophe. Currently, 3D printing is
all the rage, and for good reason. It
inspires the imagination and hints at a future where we are able to download or
create a file that will allow us to fabricate just about anything that we can
imagine. The key question that hasn’t
been asked is how will humanity manage personal fabrication on a mass
scale? The earth’s resources are
finite. Nevertheless, capitalism has
ingrained in us an infinite desire for commodities. While the methods of production under
capitalism have been horrifically destructive to the environment, there is no
guarantee that the appetites that have been programmed into us over the last
several hundred years will suddenly accommodate themselves to ecological
balance and sustainability if we are suddenly given the ability to fabricate
what we want in the privacy of our own homes.
There is a great deal of consciousness raising and re-socialization
about our ecological limits and responsibilities, accompanied by major policy
shifts, that must be done to prevent the resource depletion and massive
fabrication waste that is likely to result from this technology becoming
broadly adopted.
All of these
challenging facets of the coming Third Digital Revolution must be addressed,
and quickly. The Third Digital
Revolution is emerging in a society with immense inequality and imbalance with
regard to the integration of existing technology from the previous Industrial
and Digital Revolutions. As these
historic developments converge into the Third Digital Revolution, the concern
is that not only will this inherited inequity continue but will be drastically
deepened for all of the reasons listed above.
Those of us seeking to realize the potential of the Third Digital
Revolution to help our species realize its full potential, must create the
means to combat this deepening inequity, and democratize this
transformation. If we can do that, we
may very well be able to lay the foundation for a democratic and regenerative
economic order, one that could potentially eliminate the extractive,
exploitative, and utterly oppressive and undemocratic system that we are
currently subjected to.
Those who seek
to assist in democratizing the technology of the Third Digital Revolution must
understand that any initial investment at this time is risky. The road ahead is not clear. What we do know is that we cannot afford to
leave the development of this technological revolution solely up to actors like
Amazon, Google, Wal-Mart, or the US Department of Defense. In their hands it will only serve to further
extract profits from the majority of humanity and maintain the imperial
dominance of the US government through force of arms. However, finding capital players willing to
make “non-extractive” investments that center on tech justice, cooperative
business innovation, and production driven to fulfill human need over profit
realization are hard to find. There are
many organizations experimenting with getting this technology out to vulnerable
populations to aid us from falling further behind the technological access gap,
but none of us really know what will work initially, nor when the technology
will be at a significantly advanced stage to truly replace the existing mode of
production. The stakes are high, as are
the risks at this stage. Nevertheless,
we must struggle, as all early adopters should, to not only avoid being left
out in the cold, but to help guide the development in a democratic and
egalitarian manner.
Creating
the Future, Taking Risks, Co-Constructing Solutions
Early adopter
risk taking is exactly what Cooperation Jackson is embarking upon with the
launch of our Community Production Center and Community Production Cooperative[3]. Our aim is to make Jackson, Mississippi the
“city of the future”, a Transition City anchored in part in the practices of a
“Fab City”[4] that would transform our
city into an international center of advanced, sustainable manufacturing
utilizing 3D printing and other innovative tools of the Third Digital
Revolution. The only way we are going to
come anywhere close to attaining anything like the utopia these technologies
promise is by democratizing them and subjecting them to social use and
production for the benefit of all, rather than the control and appropriation by
the few.
The
democratization of the technologies of the Third Digital Revolution, both in
their ownership and use, is one of the primary aims of Cooperation
Jackson. To realize this aim we struggle
for Tech Democracy[5]
and Tech Justice first and foremost by educating our members and the general
public about the promises and perils of the technology so that people can make
informed decisions. We suggest this as a
general framework of struggle. The next
course of action we suggest is the pursuit of self-finance to acquire as much
of this technology as we can, with the explicit intention of controlling these
means of production and utilizing them for the direct benefit of our
organization and our community.
Another course
of action we suggest and are embarking upon is organizing our community for political
and economic power to expand and reinforce our Community Production
efforts. Our aim is to gradually make
Community Production ubiquitous in our community, with the explicit intent of
gradually replacing the exploitative and environmentally destructive methods of
production in use at present. A related
course of action is to utilize our political power to make demands on the
government, the capitalist class, and the transnational corporations to remove
the controls they have on the technology, like exclusive patents, in order to
make these technologies publicly accessible.
Another essential demand on the government is to make massive
investments in these technologies to make them public utilities and/or commons[6] and to ensure that the
corporations make restorative investments in these utilities for the public
good.
We also think
that public/community partnerships should be pursued on a municipal level to
establish direct community ownership over these technologies to help ensure
that vulnerable populations and historically oppressed communities gain direct
access, with the prerequisite being where these communities are sufficiently
organized and possess a degree of political power within the municipality. Public/community partnerships could also be
essential towards capitalizing these democratic pursuits, by enabling the
community to use both its tax wealth and various vehicles of self-finance to
build out the necessary infrastructure in a manner that will ensure that it
remains in the community commons or public domain. It is essential that these types of pursuits
be public/community partnerships, with the community being organized in
collective institutions like cooperatives, credit unions, community development
corporations, etc., and not your typical public/private partnerships that will
only remove this infrastructure from the commons or public domain as soon as
possible in our neoliberal dominated world.
Further, given
the steady decline in union membership, density, and overall social and
political power, coupled with the ever growing threats of automation,
mechanization, big data, and artificial intelligence to the working class as a
whole, we want to appeal to the various unions, in and out of the AFL-CIO, as
the most organized sector of the working class in the US, to take the
challenges of the Third Digital Revolution head on. In fact, we think organized labor should be
leading the charge on the question of Community Production, as it is in the best
position given its resources, skills and strategic location in society to steer
the Third Digital Revolution in a democratic manner. In this vein, we want to encourage organized
labor to utilize the tremendous investment resources it has at its disposal to
start creating or investing in Community Production Cooperatives throughout the
US to further the ubiquitous development and utilization of the technology to
help us all realize the benefits of a “zero-marginal cost society”[7] to combat climate change
and eliminate the exploitation of the working class and the lingering social
and material effects of racism, patriarchy, heterosexism, ableism, etc. It is time for the cooperative and union
movements, as vehicles of working class self-organization, to reunite again,
and Community Production units could and should be a strategic means towards
this end.
Finally, we
have to keep pushing forward thinking universities, particularly public
colleges and universities, and philanthropists to also provide support to
community production development efforts seeking to democratize control of this
technology early on.
These are the
core elements of what we think is a transformative program to utilize and
participate in the development of the Third Digital Revolution for the benefit
of our community and the liberation of the working class and all of
humanity. We want and encourage other
historically oppressed communities throughout the United States to follow this
path, Jackson cannot and should not follow this path alone.
Supporting
Cooperation Jackson and the Center for Community Production
[1] We draw
or primary definition of the Third Digital Revolution from the work of Neil
Gershenfeld, particularly his more recent work “Designing Reality: How to
Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution”, co-written with Alan
Gershenfeld and Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld.
[2] For more
detail on the gender gap in the science, technology, engineering and math
fields see, “Women still underrepresented in the STEM Fields”, https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/10/21/women-still-underrepresented-in-stem-fields.
[3] We
derive our notion of Community Production from Blair Evans and INCITE FOCUS
based in Detroit, Michigan. For more information see INCITE FOCUS https://www.incite-focus.org/ and
“Green City Diaries: Fab Lab and the Language of Nature” http://www.modeldmedia.com/features/greencity1113.aspx.
[4] Fab City
is a concept that grew out of the Fab Lab Network. For more information on this
concept and emerging network see http://fab.city/about/.
[5] We are
adopting the concept of Tech Justice from LabGov, which describes itself as the
“laboratory for the governance of the city as a commons”. For more information
see http://www.labgov.it/.
[6] We
utilize the notion and definition of the Commons utilized within the Peer 2
Peer Network. For more details see “What it the Commons Transition?” at https://primer.commonstransition.org/1-short-articles/1-1-what-is-a-commons-transition.
[7] We have
adopted the notion of a “Zero-Marginal Cost Society” from Jeremy Rifkin and his
work, “The Zero-Marginal Cost Society: the Internet of Things, the Collaborative
Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism”.
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