In particular, what we can discern about the development of productive forces in today’s society does not confirm that socialism is in any sense a necessary result of current or foreseeable developments. That the working class will foment a revolution against capitalism may be a central tenet of Marxism, but given the indisputable revolution in technology over the past thirteen decades, I see contemporary productive forces pointing to a much different conclusion than Marx imagined.
Now that communism and industrialism are dead, I can no longer blame Marx for the fact that he is known to us mainly as an apostle of industrialism’s discontents. As you know, his work was invoked to rationalize some of the greatest abuses of state power during the twentieth century; Lenin, Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, and the murderous Pol Pot all claimed to have been inspired by Marx. I find it ironic that Marx’s identification with the underachieving and unskilled continues to resonate with erstwhile followers, particularly academics, while his deeper and more interesting insights are resolutely ignored.
The Antiquated Labor Theory of Value
Like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Karl Marx embraced the labor theory of value, which is actually an “energy theory of value.” During the long centuries when almost all economic activity was powered by human somatic energy, it was more apt to postulate that economic value was indeed created by the hard labor of workers whose muscle power animated commerce and production.
This was all to change, however, as the Industrial Revolution led to the widespread adoption of exogenous hydrocarbon energy to power the economy. A recent, authoritative estimate by Tim Morgan (author, The End of Growth) concludes that 99 percent of contemporary economic activity is powered by exogenous energy, while less than 1 percent represents human, somatic energy conversion.3
Far from making the somatic energy contribution of the working class more crucial to the functioning of society, a great expansion of the use of exogenous energy, along with increased automation, has made labor less important. If the last century and a third since Marx died has proven anything, it is that the value created by unskilled work pales in comparison to that created by the entrepreneurial imagination.
More to the point, the advent of the information economy has arguably antiquated “the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, the art, and even the religious ideas of the people” have been informed. As you will realize, that quote is lifted directly from Engels’s eulogy for Marx, quoted at the top of this chapter. Engels proclaimed, “Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution and organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human nature.” Clearly, by giving priority to Marx’s insights related to the evolution of society, Engels implied that they were among Marx’s more interesting and important contributions. I agree.
Forget the invocations of class struggle, based upon the fossilized notions of the labor theory of value, as well as Marx’s observations and projections of megapolitical conditions (though he didn’t call them that), particularly scale economies in the production process as they appeared in the middle of the nineteenth century. A lot has changed since then.
If Marx’s deeper insights mean anything, it is that the whole nature of the economy, government, law, religious ideas, and yes, concepts of economic justice, are destined to evolve as the megapolitical foundation of production and the organization of violence change.
What Marx Missed
Marx could not have added, because it was outside of nineteenth-century technological imagination, that the 3-D printer gives you individual sovereignty, minimal government, and true free market capitalism.
This is what I believe you will see for yourself in the years to come after the terminal crisis of US hegemony. Given that we’re at the threshold of a redefinition of social relations, based on a change in how things are produced, it is an open question whether a reincarnated Marx would see his invocation of socialist revolution as an anachronism today, as I do.
I am not pretending to evaluate priorities among Marx’s inner thoughts. It may well be that he was more committed to socialism than to the “law of development of human history.” Be that as it may, my point is that the integration of digital information into the production process introduces new factors that should have pointed even Marx toward a realization that the channels of history would open in new directions unforeseen in the nineteenth century.
The Information Age implies a radical devolution of power. It will expose diseconomies of scale embodied in anachronistic forms of bureaucratic, big-business capitalism. And it will even more emphatically undermine the returns to complexity embodied in the overgrown nation-state. It is beyond the scope of this analysis to detail a full litany of the implications of this revolution in human affairs. But broadly and simply, as epitomized by 3-D printing (additive manufacturing), information technology implies that economic and political power will devolve back to the individual. Market forces will replace politics and crony capitalism in determining the distribution of income.
One-size-fits-all mass production in sprawling industrial complexes like River Rouge has already begun to give way to customized production individualized to suit you. The production process will devolve further to a micro scale, even to a personal level. Your work will not be commoditized; it will be whatever you want it to be. You will invent it. Any dissatisfaction it entails will be tempered by the fact that you cannot strike against yourself and a 3-D printer.
Indeed, it is very likely that your worldview will be informed by customized information feeds tailored explicitly to meet, and reinforce, your tastes and requirements. The world you live in will literally be “your world” to a degree that was never conceivable in the past.
When Lord Rees Mogg and I wrote The Sovereign Individual on the eve of the millennium, we anticipated that the coming Information Age would mean that “predatory violence will be organized more and more outside of central control. Efforts to contain violence will also evolve in ways that depend more upon efficiency than magnitude of power.”4
The evolution of 3-D printing provides a compelling illustration that there is an inexorable technological imperative undermining the nation-state in the twilight of American hegemony.
3-D Printing and a Smaller Container of Capitalism
My expectation of a more profound devolution—that which could be distinguished from the systemic chaos that typically accompanies the destruction of old institutions when capitalism outgrows its container in a shift of hegemony—arises from optimism that microtechnology will provide for the emergence of a revolutionary new regime of free market capitalism within a smaller city-state container. Some of this optimism is informed by my appreciation for the productive megapolitical potential of 3-D printing.
The megapolitical implications of 3-D printing were demonstrated in the early spring of 2013 at a shooting range outside of Austin, Texas. While the duly elected members of the US Senate were busily debating stauncher restrictions on gun control, a University of Texas law student went to the shooting range where he loaded an AK-47 with a thirty-shot magazine. And blasted away.
The law student was not content to rest his freedom to bear arms on the Constitution. Instead, he showed that the freedom to bear arms is supported by the “metaconstitution,” informed by the megapolitical reality of 3-D printing. You see, while Congress was deliberating legislation to ban high-capacity magazines, the law student had created his own thirty-shot magazine on a 3-D printer. Much to the dismay of Congress, it was also shown that functioning guns could be created using a 3-D printer. Many people tend to think of 3-D printing as a kind of irrelevant novelty, a process for making cheap plastic toys—it is anything but.
3-D printing can be used to create metal parts through a process known as direct metal laser sintering (DMLS). Items can be created that involve intricate geometries and fine detail. Yes, you could make a plastic gun. But you could also build one from a variety of materials including stainless steel, cobalt chrome, bronze
, titanium, aluminum, and nickel alloy. A crucial advantage of 3-D products is that they can be customized to the individual needs of specific consumers, transcending the constraints of mass production. This idea is exemplified by Invisalign, a company that uses computer images to customize invisible braces, tailoring them to fit the mouths of individual consumers.
A group of ecologists is now in the design phase for building an automobile, the Urbee 2, using 3-D printing. On one hand, in my opinion, it is one of the ugliest vehicles ever conceived. On the other hand, it promises to get hundreds of miles to the gallon, and it provides an emphatic example of the potential for high-value microproduction using 3-D printing.
Another surprising application of 3-D printing is the creation of replacement body parts. A liver created through 3-D printing techniques has functioned for forty days in a laboratory, matching the performance of a real liver.
3-D Printing Still in Its Infancy
Bear in mind as you consider these illustrations that 3-D printing is still in its infancy. It remains a painstakingly slow process, as products are built up layer by layer. Continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) promises to increase the speed of 3-D printing by tenfold. In a March 2015 NBC News article, Joseph DeSimone, a chemistry professor at the University of North Carolina and founder of Carbon3D, explained that CLIP can quickly produce parts with amazing properties within tens of minutes, as compared to hours.5 It is reasonable to suppose that 3-D printing will become more efficient over time, so more of its potential will be realized.
As ever-greater amounts of digital information are incorporated into the production process, 3-D printing will seem to be the postmodern equivalent of Aladdin’s lamp. In the not-too-distant future, you will be able to make anything you please with a 3-D printer—from guns to toys and from automobiles to replacement body parts. To say this is revolutionary is an understatement.
Among other things, it will greatly increase the competition between jurisdictions for mobile capital. Almost any economic activity will be capable of being conducted any place on the planet where individuals can enjoy safety and security from violence. Among other advantages, 3-D printing permits even high-value production to happen in relatively small spaces. You no longer need facilities on the scale of River Rouge to produce an automobile. A barn or perhaps a large garage could suffice.
Because it will no longer be necessary to operate at a large scale, there will be less “hostage to fortune.” It will no longer require you to live or work in jurisdictions that impose high costs in order to earn a high income. This means that competition will force governments to downsize voluntarily or collapse. More likely than not, big, complex, and costly nation-states will be replaced by a rich variety of more modest and manageable experiments in governance at a smaller scale.
The Moat Makes a Comeback?
This also implies that the moat will make a comeback. As the costs of projecting force rise, among the areas that will most readily provide the promise of protection from systemic chaos are islands and other regions with easily defensible topography.
Another feature of information technology that minimizes the leverage of violence is that, unlike the industrial facilities that made Hitler and Stalin drool, the tools of the information economy have little hostage value in and of themselves. While you might be able to recover trace amounts of precious metals from salvaging the gold, palladium, silver, and platinum from circuit boards of computers, the attractions of doing so are limited, as evidenced by the fact that 150 million computers will end up in landfills, according to a 1996 Wall Street Journal piece by D. P. Hamilton and Dean Takahashi.6 A 3-D printer could be Aladdin’s lamp to someone who knew what to do with it. But to an illiterate thug, it would be only a relatively cheap piece of electronic trash. The lower the leverage for violence, the smaller jurisdictions will tend to be.
Just as mass production gave rise to big government, I believe that microproduction will give rise to “microsovereignties,” small states on the scale of cities and provinces rather than continental economies. Remember, there were 300 city-states in Italy alone in 1250. Their time will come again.
My friend Peter Thiel and some other high-tech tycoons have jumped the gun on this twenty-first-century development by laying plans to create a work space for incubating high-tech companies beyond the laws of the United States. Their project, Blueseed, will be an artificial island hosting a startup community for entrepreneurs. It will be launched on a cruise ship anchored in international waters, twelve nautical miles from the coast of San Francisco. This location will allow start-up entrepreneurs from anywhere on the globe to launch or grow companies near Silicon Valley, without the need for US work visas. The ship will be converted into a coworking and coliving space, with high-speed Internet access and daily transportation to the mainland via ferryboat. To date, over 1,500 entrepreneurs from 500 startups in more than 70 countries have expressed interest in living on Blueseed. Think of how much more attractive this option will be when San Francisco becomes a city-state.
After five centuries during which the scale of governance, the scale of warfare, and the organization of business dramatically rose, pushing the development of capitalism into ever-larger “containers,” times have changed. That long historical trend has been short-circuited by the invention of microprocessing and the advent of the information economy, as reflected in the paradigm example of 3-D printing. Bear in mind, however, that 3-D printing is only one manifestation of a revolutionary process that is replacing much of the material supply chain with digital information.
Nanotechnologies, Hard AI, and Artificial Life
Other crucial manifestations of the greater incorporation of digital information in the production process include advanced robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and distributed manufacturing. On the far horizons of dramatic consequences are nanotechnologies and artificial life. It would be difficult from this distance to properly define a limit to the sweeping implications of nanomachines. Eric Dresler, in his pioneering study of nanotechnology, Engines of Creation, wrote, “The hand that rocks the AI cradle may rule the world.”7 He could well be right, but an adequate treatment of the consequences and risks of nanotechnology employing self-replicating molecular engines would call for a book in itself. For example, Ray Kurzweil, inventor, futurist, and CEO of KurzweilAI, foresees a future synthetic neocortex engineered with nanobots to amplify brainpower:
20 years from now, we’ll have nanobots—another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology—that go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our synthetic neocortex and the cloud, providing an extension of our neocortex. Now today, you have a computer in your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access that for a second or two in the cloud. In the 2030s you’ll be able to connect to that directly from your brain. I’m walking along, there’s Chris Anderson, he’s coming my way, I’d better think of something clever to say. I’ve got three seconds—my 300 million modules in my neocortex won’t cut it—I need a billion more. I’ll be able to access that in the cloud. Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking.8
Moore’s Law Becomes a Misdemeanor
Here I interrupt the majestic trajectory of Kurzweil’s thought with an observation about diminishing returns as they involve the escalation of computational power. Moore’s Law, named for Intel cofounder, Gordon Moore, states that the number of transistors in an affordable dense integrated circuit will double approximately every two years.
Note that Moore’s Law, like the concept of EROEI, incorporates affordability as important dimension for understanding. The exponential growth of computational power, up about a millionfold since Moore formulated his law almost half a century ago, would not have been so exciting if the cost of acquiring this computational ability had multiplied by even one thousand.
That would have prohibited developments like the iPhone, the iPad, and the w
ide dispersal of computational power. My son Arthur would be spending more time reading books and less time playing Minecraft. Recently, the doubling period has stretched out to about 2.5 years. In other words, this implies that the progress in the world over the next decade attributable to extra computing power will be just half of what it otherwise would have been.
Among many implications, Ray Kurzweil’s projections in The Age of Spiritual Machines that the operation of Moore’s law will result in “computers achieving the memory capacity and computing speed of the human brain around the year 2020”9 now look to be postponed, along with the singularity—the moment when the rising intelligence of computers leads to a merger of man and machine—Kurzweil had that sketched for 2045. But if computational compounding is halved and then halved again in each of the next three decades, we may just have to do a little more thinking for ourselves.
Kurzweil is a man of formidable intelligence with a record of success in technology development—he foresees hard AI within twenty years. Even if the date proves to be postponed, this is equivalent, as Peter Thiel suggests, to a credible forecast that aliens from space will land on earth within the foreseeable future. If you knew that flotillas of flying saucers were soon to hover overhead, looking for a good place to park, what would you think?
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