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Maker

DistributorlonJQUIUUAt last, Tolkien me ets capita lism.By Tom Owad

I N THE LORD OF THE RINGS, J.R.R. TOLKIENcontrasts the bucolic "hobbit sense" of the Shirewith the noxious industrialism of Mordor: "Theone sm all garden of a free gardene r was all his needand due . not a garden swo llen to a realm: his ownhands to use it, not the hands of others to command."

Communal in structure, nonmechanical. andinhabited by individual craftsmen and farmers, theShire clearly parallels pre indu strial E ngland. Itsravaging bears an epic similarity to the transforma-tions that have taken place in our own world sincethe Industrial Revolution.

As was abundantly clear in Tolkien's time, tocontrol the means of produ ction is to control life.Industrial capitalism placed this contro l in thehands of a wealthy elite: com mu nism placed it w iththe state. Whether at the Carnegie Steel Companyor the Lenin Steelworks, and whethe r the bulletscame from the Pinkertons or the Red Army , thepower over life and de ath did not rest with the indi-vidual but with a hostile external force.

The distributists of the early 20th century reject-ed bo th visions. "Too much capitalism." wrote G.K.Chesterton, "does not mean too many capitalists,but too few." Drawing upon the principles of sub-sidiarity and solidarity put forth by Pope Leo Xlll'ssocial en cyclical Renim Novamm, the distr ibutistssought a society where each individual providedboth his own labor and his own capital The smallgarden of Sam Gamgee was the distributist ideal.

Distributist principles took root all over theworld, but the luxuries of the Industrial Revolutiontriump hed over the freedom of the homestead . Asimilar phenomen on occurred in the 1970s, with theintroduction of Schumacher's economic treatiseSmall ft Beautiful and the back-to-theland move-

ment. Urban idealists also found themselves ill-equipped and unprepared to deal with the hardshipsof living an essentially pre indu strial a grarian life.

Today, freedom and technology no longer standin juxtaposition. A CNC lathe or milling machine canbe built for $500 . Raw materials can be prepared inhomemade foundries. Solar power and wind turbinesmake it possible to live comfortably off the grid

Open source software is ubiquitous, and hard-ware is fol lowing the same path. The pages of MAKEillustrate the countless sophisticated devices th atcan be built without a factory, The internet allowsfor worldwide collaboration on a level never beforepossible. Goods can be exchanged between indi-vidual craftsme n withou t the need for distr ib utionnetworks and middlem en.

Advancements in personal fabrication at theMIT Center for Bits and Atoms hold the greatestpromise. Their aim is to produce a personal fabri-cator that can manufacture anything from a dollto a precise replica of itself, The current MIT FabLab (see MAKE. Volume 01, page 23). which hasbeen deployed in nine countrie s, is itself an imp res-sive feat. The equipment can be assembled forS2 0.000 : the software is open source and free. Forthe p rice of a new car, it's already possible to estab-lish an effective personal fabrication laboratory.

Tools such as these have the potential to person-alize the Industrial R evolution to place the m eansof production not in the control of select capitalistsor of the state, but with every individual seekingto partake in the act of creation. Like th e soil, th emachine yields in response to the labor of our hands.Tom Owad (owadfSapplefrttter.com) is a Macintoshconsultant in York. Pa., and editor o< applefriUet com.

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