Hello all, I was wandering how would a production of things like microchips, solar panels and motors (and other electrical components) be managed in a anarchist, solarpunk society?
Any ideas and further reading will be helpful.
Hi! Fabber here with a love for DIY and open hardware and who wants to free the world of proprietary techs.
First thing to realize is that the process to produce these things is not magic. They are known, available and free to use. You can create (vastly inefficient and oversized) transistors, solar cells, batteries or motors in your garage. It is actually kind of a sport in the hackerspace community to show how far you can go in building your own stuff.
In order to get better quality, you will need to automate these manual processes and build the machines that create the components. Turns out people are on it too. The 3d printing movement did not deliver its promises (yet) but it did deliver a set of sturdy and cheap open frameworks to build small scale machines.
From there you have people going in both direction: making tools to create more complex components and also exploring how to create the simpler ingredients (like copper wire for the motor windings).
Economy of scale will also make sense in an anarchist society so I do think we would still settle on one big machines for one component that feeds a whole area, but it being open, it being easily duplicable, would make a lot of experiments possible, would allow people to tune the production for their specific needs and who knows, at one point we may reach the point where it makes sense to have modular factories (able to produce a lot of different things, at a lower pace) spread over the world rather than mass-producing factories (produces very fast but only one type of item) feeding the whole world market.
I am pushing for tinkerers to get more interested in machines design, in automation design. We need open source factories that can produce the components of open source factories. That’s the seed I am working towards.
