Targeting Different Technology Levels

How do we get from where we are to where we need to be? There’s a whole world of planning and organizing implied by that question, but what I want to focus on now is quantifying the kinds of inputs and supply chains that we can assume to be available to our means of production.

Our future way of life will hopefully have more circularity, producing modular reusable components out of what is already available. But that’s not where we are today. Personally, I have a modest amount of money, both hand and power tools, ready access to a hardware store, several commodity or hobbyist small compute units, and and a non-functioning but repairable 3d printer. For anything else – for example specialty components – I can get them online at a price. I imagine that this is a pretty common circumstance in my part of the world, but of course everywhere I look people are becoming increasingly impoverished, so let’s consider this a relatively high end.

Others needing to make stuff may just have access to raw materials and a few hand tools. And specialty components cost much more if you’re in an area suffering from exchange rate imbalances. Furthermore, if we ever find ourselves “bombed back to the stone age” or stranded or otherwise cut off from capitalist supply chains, we need a path to get back to a higher technology level.

This is not to say that everything has to be high technology – you’ve probably seen those folks on youtube building forest houses and temples out of mud with basic tools. This would very much be toward the lower end of available technology. But even those folks sometimes need medicine that can’t easily be made out of mud.

So my two main targets are:

• Consumer: ready access to a hardware store, some access to specialty parts
• Minecraft: basic hand tools and access to organic raw materials (wood, vines)

I want a full roadmap for uplifting ourselves from either of these scenarios towards the goal, which is a fully equipped semi-automated workshop, able to make anything you need from whatever raw materials are locally available.

At this point, you probably have some objections. Are we really talking about fabricating anything, all the way up to actual computers, from scratch, in a small workshop?! How is that in any way realistic?

Well, eventually, yes. And the whole fab setup will be open source all the way down. But let’s walk before we can run. Whatever technology level you’re currently at, there will be a set of things you can make for yourself, and a (usually much larger) set of things that you can’t. Into that landscape I want to introduce recipes that allow you to expand the former and shrink the latter.