(2011-01-07) Carson Homebrew Industrial Revolution Book

Kevin Carson's Homebrew Industrial Revolution is available now as Printed Book ISBN:1439266999 and free EBook. Resilient Community, Desktop Fab, etc.

Mar'2011 update: *The subject of my previous book — The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low Overhead Manifesto — was the way in which falling capital outlays required for both information and material production was eroding the rationale for large organizations, and shifting the balance of power toward individuals, small groups and networks. In particular, I focused on the radically reduced capital outlays required for manufacturing were giving rise to a low-overhead micromanufacturing economy in which the large quantities of land and capital to which the privileged classes had access were becoming increasingly irrelevant, and the material basis for the factory system and wage employment was collapsing.

In this book (The Desktop Regulatory State - The Countervailing Power of Networks and Super Empowered Individuals), my subject is how the same phenomenon is empowering individuals against the large, powerful institutions — both state and corporate (BigWorld) — that previously dominated their lives. The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries: software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them. (Network Economy)

The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list. The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.*