The Desktop Regulatory State

Kevin Carson does a wonderful job of documenting their existence and potential uses by anarchists in his exhaustive studies The Homebrew Industrial Revolution and The Desktop Regulatory State. They include free and open-source software, open-source hardware, small-scale fabrication laboratories, micro-manufacturing, 3D-printing, and countless examples of commons-based peer-production online. Most of these liberatory technologies already have an innate tendency towards decentralist and participatory usage, given their human-scale, relative simplicity, and operations which don’t require a strict division of labour between specialist technicians and workers carrying out rote instructions; as we...View all