The homebrew industrial revolution

What Hacker News says

1. norea-armozelJul 2017
   You should read Homebrew Industrial Revolution by Kevin Carson, particularly his break down of the Industrial Revolution. Mostly the IR was driven by state actors or those who could influence them such as with the UK's Enclosure Act which forced peasants to work in factories and in the US with the transcontinental railroad which was lobbied for by industrial interests on the East coast who wanted a slice of the West coast pie of regional production/consumption. Basically, everything up to this point is the result of capitalism and its owners who are protected from market forces of regional and local production/consumption which would follow more closely than what we have today where companies literally throw away brand new shoes and electronics to keep their prices high.
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2. sirponmDec 2025
   Oops I forgot to respond to the other things you mentioned. That list of removed obstacles is technically correct, but it misses that those things were mostly subsidized

   1. Regarding transportation, the interstate highway system and the containerization infrastructure (ports, dredging, naval security) were massive state subsidies to long-distance distribution. If Walmart had to pay the full property tax and maintenance cost of every mile of road their trucks used, their economies of scale would evaporate instantly. The state artificially lowered the cost of long distance shipping below the cost of local production. That isn't efficiency, but the taxpayer subsidizing the inefficiency of moving a toothbrush 3,000 miles. (Carson called these "diseconomies of scale")

   2. The Uneeda Biscuit era of mass production created a crisis in that high fixed costs meant factories had to run 24/7 to be profitable, they couldn't wait for orders but had to force product onto the market. This required the state to intervene again via imperialism and arguably the creation of a consumer culture to absorb the surplus in the form of advertising and other means.

   3. Computers are the most ironic part; Computers and CNC tools actually destroyed the rationale for the large factory, made it possible for a garage shop to produce with the same precision as a General Motors plant ("Homebrew Industrial Revolution" book by Kevin Carson again which in my mind is not one of his most defensible but it's still interesting).

   I would argue that IP was the main reason that small shops didn't take over. As physical capital costs dropped, the state ramped up IP laws (patents/copyrights) to protect corporate hierarchies from the decentralization computers should have caused. I think that Big Tech isn't Big because of hardware efficiency but because of the state-enforced monopoly on information

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3. kragenAug 2022
   Maybe if the objective is preservation, instead of each person saving an entire copy of libgen locally, people [in a country where this is legal] should save N-of-M shares of it. 51.50 TB in a 5-of-M shares setup would be under 11 TB per share; if M were 16-32 or so, and the community remained sufficiently active to replace the shares held by lapsed participants, it would have a good chance of surviving the next big historical period of book-burnings.

   A 2TB disk apparently costs about US$40 right now (https://www.mercadolibre.com.ar/disco-duro-interno-western-d... for example) so this is a contribution of about US$200 per participant. Plus the risk of being arrested in the future for possessing forbidden information, of course, but maybe the fact that you can't decrypt it without four other participants would reduce that risk.

   Of course it's also worthwhile to keep plaintext copies of books you actually read, or might want to read, or want to pretend you actually read. My copy of Kenneth Snelson's Art and Ideas is 41 MB and 174 pages (US$0.0008, 240 kB/page); my copy of Boole's Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences is 19 MB and 356 pages (US$0.0004, 53 kB/page); my copy of Kevin Carson's Homebrew Industrial Revolution is 3.8 MB and 399 pages (US$0.00008, 9.5 kB/page). If you were to devote a single terabyte to books for yourself at 10 megabytes per book, you'd still have room for 100'000 books, quite a nice library by any historical standard, even if it's small compared to all of libgen. Perhaps a small group of people [again, in a country where this is legal] participating in a distributed storage system could preserve significant fractions of libgen in such a way even in the face of disaster.

   I think it's reasonable to weight such preservation efforts toward lighter-weight books, but I also think it's easy to screw that up, for example by keeping only books under 30MB, which throws away all the decent scans of many books, leaving only worthless epub versions.

   At this point, though, it might be more important to create durable physical artifacts encoding this incomparable treasure; many historical events have obliterated communities of learning, leaving only artifacts. The Cambodian Killing Fields are one recent example, but we can also point to the Spanish Catholic zealots burning the khipu and the Maya codices; the Boxers burning most of the last copy of the Yongle Encyclopedia; Qin Shi Huang's Burning of the Books and Burying of the Scholars; the Christians' prohibition on the Egyptian religion, which brought to a close the millennia-long knowledge of hieroglyphs; and Sulla's conquest of Syracuse, in which Archimedes was killed and his knowledge of the integral calculus was lost until Newton.

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4. norea-armozelAug 2015
   This reminds me of the book by Kevin Carson titled New Homebrew Industrial Revolution. He outlines in the beginning of the book how modern economics depends on mass consumption due to our mass production systems. But if mass consumption can't be subsidized by cheaper interest rates or cheaper energy costs (as stated in the summary) then we're boned.

   Carson gives the alternative as a local industrial base that fits itself to local consumption similar to how flour mills operate. No need to force New York to consume as much as San Francisco.

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