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Hi list!
3 months (112 days) ago magius wrote:
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000293.html
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000262.html
This is really interesting. For the record: RepRap
stands for
*Rep*licating *Rap*id Prototyper.
There are two things I find most interesting. The
first is the lack of
connection to the Free Software experience. I read
the comments in the
links above and in none of them Free Software is
mentioned as an
example. It would be great if this changes.
The second is the lack of economic / labor theory
involved in here.
I'll expand on this a bit here.
- From the citation in
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000293.html:
This prompts the intriguing idea that it should be
possible to
design an RP machine that is capable of making
nearly all its own
component parts. Such a machine would have a
number of novel
characteristics. For example, it does not matter
how much the first
machine costs. The second and all subsequent
machines will only cost
as much as their raw materials and their assembly.
Well, what are raw materials after all? Indeed, IMHO
there is very
little you can really call *raw* materials. For
instance all the
material found in the ground needs a certain amount
of human labor to
dig them, process them, transform them and so on.
Probably pure air is
the only real raw material which can be used without
any further human
labor.
So the assembly and the raw materials mentioned
above are basically
the same: human labor. The only difference is that
in the "raw
material" the human labor is crystallized while in
the assembly you
see it in its fluid form.
In capitalism crystallized labor and crystallizing
labor is the basis
of everything. Money is nothing else than a
representation of
crystallized labor. Capitalist modernization is
nothing else than
replacing fluid labor (aka work done by workers) by
crystallized labor
(aka work done by machines).
In capitalism money is the means to organize this
whole process on the
basis of exchange. This makes it possible that
individual pieces of
work are combined afterwards and so make sense on a
societal level.
Looking at it this way I can not see what is so
special in the RepRap
project. It is a next step in replacing liquid labor
by crystallized
labor. This is, however, what we see all the time.
The difference to the standard capitalist model is
that it tries to be
autonomous. After all self-replicating is the most
extreme form of
autonomy. Though I can see that this is a
tantalizing idea for many
people - which might be seen as a value in itself -
I wonder whether
this is something we should wish for from an Oekonux
perspective.
The level of productive interaction in society
developed by capitalism
is something to be kept and not reversed. Well, even
for the RepRap
the more important stuff is the digital knowhow in
the plans. This is
something which the project seems to see as a
resource which can and
shall be developed on a societal level. But where is
the point in for
instance not using standard chips just for the sake
of
self-replicating? I can't see any.
The point Christof Beaupoil made on Oekonux and the
Oekonux
conferences that many things can be build from 99%
standard parts I
for one find more intriguing.
Mit Freien Gr��en
Stefan
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