Jake Read

MAS Prosem 2020

Because of its very concreteness, people tend to confront technology as an irreducible brute fact, a given, a first cause, rather than as hardened history, frozen fragments of human and social endeavor.
David F Nobel Forces of Production 1984
The Specialmatic “is designed to permit complete set-up and programming at the machine.” It would allow the machinist to gain the efficiency benefits of automation while retaining “full control of [their] machine throughout its entire machining cycle.”
American Machinist Magazine

management > labour

  • deskilling (remove intelligence)
  • union-busting (remove agency)
  • capital intensity (remove humans)
We have a good deal of experience as to how the industrialists regard a new industrial potential [...] Industry will be flooded with the new tools to the extent that they appear to yield immediate profits, irrespective of what long-term damage they can do.
Norbert Wiener 1950

real problems

  • inflexible manufacturing systems
  • insecure supply chains
  • lack of skilled labour
  • wealth inequality
  • job loss
can a just, equitable manufacturing model out perform the old guard?
delete management / labour distinction
build your own tools
run your own shop
collaborate in the open

hardware is hard

  • capital
  • time
  • heterogeneity

software is easy(er)

  • access to tools
  • access to education
  • infrastructure homogeneity
  • integration of solved problems
  • collaborative models

the 'research'

  • open hardware designs
  • modularity all-the-way-down
  • open systems assembly protocol
!