Hello World!

Ok so this year I got a jump on the new year resolutions. A new blog! Here I hope to embark on a journey to discover new means of production, and how to make them.

Perhaps you’ve heard somebody say “Seize the means of production!” Perhaps you have some understanding of what they meant by that. But what is or are the means of production? Why and from whom would anything need to be seized?

Some things you might need, you can make for yourself with just bits and bobs you find lying around. There are many other things that you could make yourself, if you have the right tools and know how to use them, and of course you’ll need suitable raw materials. And then there’s a vast world full of things that you couldn’t make from raw materials, even with the right tools. Perhaps you’d need a factory, or a large trained workforce, or a supply chain of parts that you can’t make yourself.

This is not the way humankind evolved. For most of human history, most things that you might need could be fabricated by hand or with small tools or in a small workshop, using commonly available materials. Why, you might ask? Because we only had our hands and small tools and small workshops, and because recipes using rare materials are less likely to be passed down to the next generation.

How can we get back to a situation in which most of what we need can be fabricated locally in a small workshop? I don’t want us to go back to having no machines, but any tools or machines or parts we rely on will also need to be locally fabricated.

In this blog, I’ll be exploring and hopefully mapping out how to get from whatever situation you find yourself in, to being able to automatically and sustainably fabricate almost anything you might need, from scratch. That’s the goal – wish me luck!