The Exports of Grandma's House

In a previous blog post I mentioned my discovery of Chinese science fiction and how it has become a manifestation of a new cultural soft power.  As part of that discovery, I stumbled a few months ago on a delightful short story titled, "Summer at Grandma's House" (" 祖母家的夏天"), written by Hao Jingfang (郝景芳).  (See this also to get a fuller picture of Ms. Hao.)  The story is ostensibly about the process by which a young college student's struggle to identify his future direction in life is resolved during the student's summer stay with his grandmother.  The grandmother is not the central figure in the story.  However, she does play a major role, and thus we get a rather full glimpse of what sort of person she is and what she does with her life.  It is that glimpse which attracted my attention to the point that the young man's story became almost secondary to me.  For it is the picture of Grandma that illustrates some of the themes which my blog has addressed over the last four or five years, and especially during the last two years.  So let's go to Grandma's house together, shall we?

First, although it's only incidental to the story, let's take a look at the house itself.  The story describes the house as a "little two-story bungalow...at the foot of the mountain, its red roof hidden in the dense treetops."  As I tried to visualize the scene, the word "bungalow" caught my attention, as this was a word which I had heard in conversation from time to time over the years, yet whose definition had never been explained to me.  (To add a bit of confusion, it appears from Google's translation algorithm that the original Chinese phrase could also be translated "villa."  But in my mind, that translation ruins the picture somewhat.  What do computers know anyway?)  So I looked up "bungalow"... and discovered that the word has more than one definition.  The definition I liked best (which also matches the description of the house in the story) is "a small house or cottage that is either single-storey or has a second storey built into a sloping roof (usually with dormer windows), and may be surrounded by wide verandas." - Wikipedia.  Think of something like this, except that the roof color is wrong:

A rather ordinary house, no?  But let's consider the things Grandma did in that house.  For Grandma was a biologist/biochemist who had been a college professor before her retirement and who now had a lab on the second floor of her house.  In other words, although the house looked quite ordinary, there were extraordinary things going on inside it.  The manifestation of hidden extraordinariness extended even to the furnishings of the house, whose front door opened by pushing on the side closest to the hinges and farthest from the doorknob, where the oven looked like a refrigerator, where what looked like a table lamp was actually a mousetrap, ...

The extraordinariness of Grandma is seen most strongly in her lab and the experiments she does with things such as transposons and photosynthesizing bacteria.  Her research has implications and consequences which I won't get into now, in order not to ruin the story for anyone who wants to read it.  But there are high-level conclusions which we can take from Grandma's work.  Here is a woman who has devoted herself to learning to engage in beautifully good work to meet necessary needs, as Titus 3:14 says.  Moreover, the work she does requires the possession of rare and valuable skills.  As Cal Newport has pointed out in his books So Good They Can't Ignore You and Deep Work, it is the possession of rare and valuable skills that meet genuine needs that gives the possessor a certain social, cultural, and economic power.  (Disclaimer: although I have enjoyed Cal Newport's early work and writings, I think he has begun to go off the rails a bit during the last few years.  Being friends with people like Joe Rogan is morally sketchy in my opinion, to say the least.)

Therefore we see that the cultivation of rare and valuable skills in the pursuit of beautifully good work is the means by which people build their own internal power, and it is the means by which communities and peoples - especially those peoples who have been historically oppressed - build their own collective power.  And this power can be built in small spaces and ordinary settings like the second floor of an elder woman's small bungalow.  In fact, it can be built in spaces even tinier and more prosaic than this.  (Want examples?  See this and this.  That second link is from a Filipina accountant and describes her home business space.)

The cultivation of this kind of power is a big step toward individual and collective self-sufficiency.  But when we think of self-sufficiency, we must shed a bit of cultural baggage that has been introduced into the societies of the developed world over the last decade or so.  I no longer believe that self-sufficiency is achievable by going entirely off-grid, due to the fact that we must all live in societies whose members must each pay some of the collective cost of maintaining those societies.  Thus, I am not really impressed by the late Jules Dervaes and his family, nor am I impressed with their "Path to Freedom" house and the rather extravagant claims they have made about their lifestyle - a lifestyle which they attempted to support by trademarking the English phrase "urban homestead" in order to force people to pay royalties to them.  Moreover, I have never really believed in the claims of people like Tim Ferriss who boast of being able to achieve retirement before 40 by building passive income streams.  The promise of "passive income" seems immoral to me, as does the type of character who chases after such a promise.  Such characters frequently get taken to the cleaners during their quest.  (See this for a humorous take on the subject.  And don't quit your day job!)  Sooner or later, both people and societies come to realize that those who have actual power are the people who produce valuable things that people actually need.  This, for instance, is why nations dominated by "service economies" are potentially weaker than nations that are dominated by manufacturing economies, unless the services offered support the production of beautifully good and necessary work.

Therefore, those of us who want the power we need to live unmolested in a hostile world must give ourselves to learning, and to self-education when other avenues of education are denied us.  As the Good Book says, "And let our people also learn to engage in beautifully good work..."  We may have to give up a number of evenings and weekends in our pursuit.  And we must learn to protect the fruits of our labors in order to make sure that those fruits are not stolen from us.  For we live in an age of dishonesty.  Therefore we must learn to be strategic.

Digital Fabbers, Resilient Communities and The Flow Of Stuff

Here's the next installment of my study of digital fabbers and their role in building communities that are resilient in the face of resource constraints and economic contraction. My interest in this subject is not merely academic. Rather, I am confronting this study as a man who realizes that the world has become a very messed-up place, and that the country I live in has become a particularly messed-up nation. I consider these issues in much the same way that a man's interest in aerodynamic principles might be sharpened by being in a seat on a turboprop flying through an ice storm.

When people are in trouble, it is only natural for their attention to be focused on evaluating potential solutions to their trouble. The world in general, and the United States in particular, face a number of very severe predicaments caused by the end of a cheap resource base for our industrial economy, the destruction of the environment due to that economy, and the resulting contraction and disintegration of that economy. Yet our leaders (and many of the common citizens) are proceeding cluelessly into the future, lost in wish-fulfillment fantasies. I see what's coming, and I want to make my passage through the coming trouble as easy as possible.

So I'm looking at John Robb's concept of “resilient communities” and the prominent role played by continually advancing technology (especially the digital fabber) in these communities, and I've been wondering, “can these concepts save me and my community from some serious trouble?”

In previous posts on this blog, we considered small, home-made digital fabbers (microprocessor-controlled automatic fabricators of machined parts) as a means of jump-starting small-scale manufacturing in the United States, a country which over the last several decades has outsourced the majority of its manufacturing to low-wage countries, and which is now heavily dependent on imports. The most laid-back promoters of digital fabbers point out their potential to empower local communities to make for themselves the goods on which they rely, without having to depend on regional or international trade networks. This is a benefit, as declining energy supplies and economic contraction will likely cripple large-scale or global trade networks.

The more enthusiastic promoters of digital fabbers tout them as a key step along the path to “superempowerment” of individuals and small groups. Digital fabbers enable small groups or individuals to make most or all of the things that are now provided by large corporations or governments. This democratization of manufacture is very similar to the democratization of the creation of artistic media (movies, songs, recordings, published writings) which occurred because of advances in microelectronics and digital communication.

According to some of the sources Robb quotes, the technologies with potential to drive the advance of resilient communities do not have fundamental constraints such as energy use that limit progress. This is because they achieve the expansion of their capabilities by miniaturizing functions, thus enabling more to be done in a smaller space with fewer resources. (Microelectronics are a prime example of this, with the size of discrete transistors, diodes, etc., shrinking all the time, so that the number of components that can fit on a chip increases exponentially as time passes – “Moore's Law” in action.)

Robb has speculated that this miniaturization might also be applicable to non-electronic systems – in particular, social systems organized on the community level might evolve to foster an exponential increase in wealth creation for the members of such communities. Such social system improvement would be enabled by, and dependent on, the continued availability of cheap, highly capable microelectronics and digital communication. (For instance, see “RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Fabrication Networks.”) These communities would be able to “enjoy the benefits of globalization without being vulnerable to its excesses.”

Can technology-driven “resilient communities” such as those envisioned by Robb deliver on such promises? I don't have a definitive answer. But I do have a few cautionary observations. First, I question the digital fabbers that would form the backbone of relocalized manufacture. We have already seen that they cannot yet make their own microelectronics. We have also seen that the making of silicon-based microelectronics is very energy intensive. Organic electronics don't require nearly as much energy to make, but they also don't perform nearly as well as silicon-based devices, and they require the use of exotic materials like nanotubes in order to boost their performance to levels approaching that of devices made of ultrapure silicon. The exotic additives to organic electronics also have high energy costs and require manufacturing facilities almost as elaborate as those used to make silicon devices. This means that even communities that had local small-scale fabricators would still depend on large-scale, centralized manufacturing facilities for some of the goods used by them.

But let's say that we were able to make digital fabbers that could make nearly anything, and could fit in the average suburban garage (right next to the washing machine and just behind that exercise machine you no longer use). We are immediately faced with a second question: where do we get the feedstocks used by the fabbers to make their goods? For instance, let's say I want to fabricate steel tubing for use in bicycle frames. I need a source of steel for the fabber to work on. Who will provide the steel? Or the plastic for fabbed plastic parts? Or the other feedstocks? What if some of these feedstocks require large amounts of concentrated energy for their production? If I want to make things out of aluminum castings, for instance, I must realize that producing raw aluminum as a feedstock requires large amounts of energy in mining bauxite ore, and in separating the aluminum in that ore from the other components. Then someone must deliver the finished aluminum to me. In a future of declining energy, how much raw material and what kinds of raw material will be available even for local manufacturers (let alone the big guys) to turn into finished products?

Next, how do local communities who possess their own means of production prevent the draining of wealth from themselves? It's fine to talk about relocalization as a means of keeping wealth within local communities. But we must realize that this is a reasonable goal only if the primary factor in the flow of wealth is the choice of the members of the community in spending that wealth. Now, however, we are seeing that the flow of wealth within communities and between communities and the larger world is no longer within the control of the members of those communities. Relocalization was a defensive response by communities to the sucking of wealth out of those communities by the super rich who were far removed from these communities. But the goals of relocalization have been overruled by the super-rich, who have enlisted the government as a tool to continue siphoning wealth from communities in order to concentrate that wealth within their own hands.

There are two obvious examples of this: the continued bailouts of the financial sector by the U.S. government, approved by politicians from both parties over the objections of their constituents; and the proposed “health care reform” legislation in Washington which would force all Americans to buy private health insurance. As the fortunes of the rich are threatened by the contraction of the global economy, they will increasingly use the government as a tool to extract wealth from the rest of us. This will mean the passage of laws designed to force ordinary members of ordinary communities to continue paying arbitrary “rents” of one form or another to the rich. As long as this happens, no community can achieve “resilience,” if resilience is defined by enjoyment and possession of material wealth in a technology-driven community.

I guess my main issue with John Robb's vision is that sooner or later, technology runs up against limits. Our limits are arriving fairly quickly. Soon we will not have access to large quantities of highly refined, specialized feedstocks for high-tech goods. A declining energy supply, combined with the exhaustion of available ores and other materials, will lead to scarcity of these things. I think that communities that are resilient (in the way I am now thinking of resilience) will be made of people who know how to reuse, how to hack things that already exist, and who are wise enough not to need or want shiny new stuff all the time. Such communities will be able to exist in the absence of globalism, which is a good thing, since I don't think anyone will be enjoying the benefits of globalism for much longer.

What might a different flavor of community resilience look like? In a future blog post, I might just give you a small picture of that. Meanwhile, though I don't think Mr. Robb even knows I exist, I hope he reads my little series of ruminations on his ideas. It would be interesting to hear his answers to some of my questions.

Small-Scale Manufacturing and Digital Fabbers - Organic and Printable Electronics

This post continues our evaluation of the use of small digitally-controlled “fabbers” for small-scale manufacturing as a response to energy decline and economic collapse. Digital fabbers are a key part of the strategy which thinkers such as John Robb have for creating “resilient communities” that can weather the changes wrought by globalism and the hollowing-out of nation states by criminals, “terrorists,” and the extremely rich. (Mr. Robb's vision for resilient communities is driven primarily by the continued availability of cheap, advanced electronic technology. For an example of this, see Global Guerrillas: RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Technological Acceleration.)

I have only limited time for a post this week. Therefore I will give a brief summary of the things I've found relating to a vital component of digital fabbers: the microelectronics that control them. An advanced industrial society that depends on the localized, decentralized manufacture of the things it needs must be able to produce most or all of its necessary goods in this way. This applies to its electronic and microelectronic devices as well. In the last couple of posts, we have examined inorganic, silicon-based microelectronics manufactured in the ways currently employed in commercial industry.

This has revealed that the conventional manufacture of conventional silicon-based microelectronics uses large amounts of energy and costly equipment. The energy and equipment are necessary in order to produce the ultrapure silicon compounds that comprise the nanocomponents contained in most chips. According to a paper by Nestor Gonzalez Brasero of the Fundacion Telefonica, it takes 1.6 kg of fossil fuel, 72 grams of chemicals and 32 liters of water to produce a 32Mb DRAM chip whose final weight is only two grams. In 2005, 81 million desktop computers were manufactured in China, at an energy cost of 54 terawatt-hours.

It seems reasonable to assume that our expectation of the increasing availability of ever more advanced and cheap silicon-based microelectronics will one day hit a dead end. This is especially true for silicon-based components made in the standard way. Thus there has been a great deal of interest in the promise of electronics that can be made from organic compounds or other materials that don't require the high energy inputs and large-scale manufacturing plants needed to make ultrapure silicon wafers. From the turn of the 21^st century various industry groups, researchers and labs have announced their interest in creating electronics, usually using inexpensive organic semiconducting compounds, that can be built by simple ink-jet printing onto a plastic substrate.

My digging around the Web has turned up the following facts:

• The semiconducting property of certain organic chemicals has been known since at least the 1970's. In fact, melanin, a component of dark or tanned skin, is itself a natural organic semiconductor with some surprising switching properties.

• Organic semiconductor electronics are now being used in some flat-panel displays. (The Pioneer Corporation has been producing a car stereo with an organic electronic display since 2001.)

• Organic semiconductor electronics are being studied for use in printable RFID tags.

• Organic semiconductor electronics are nowhere near fast enough to compete with crystalline silicon electronics at present. This is because charge transport velocities in organic semiconductors are orders of magnitude slower than in many silicon-based components. Their low charge transport velocity translates into switching speeds much lower than conventional silicon microelectronics.

• Organic electronics require airtight protective coatings without which their performance degrades rapidly. In any case, their actual useful lifetime is limited to just a few years, and they will degrade whether they are used or not.

• In order to create printable microelectronics with speed and performance comparable to conventional silicon-based chips, researchers are having to augment their organic electronics with metal atoms or to resort to the use of exotic materials, such as carbon nanotubes or silicon nanofibers. This detracts from the initial promise of low cost and easy fabrication of organic electronics. The making of these exotic materials still requires the same sort of high-energy, large-scale manufacturing plants that are now typical of silicon-based microelectronics. In addition, manufacturing of industrial-grade carbon nanotubes creates some serious potential pollutants.

I don't have a good handle on the energy cost involved in making organic electronics, as the technology is still in its infancy and many companies now doing research aren't interested in divulging their secrets. But I do have a couple of hunches. First, I suspect that printable and organic electronics are not yet ready to lead some next-generation “digital revolution.” Secondly, I think that large-scale, energy-intensive centralized manufacturing will still be required for many years in order to produce the fast, high-performance electronics of the sort that could power decentralized, localized manufacture of high-tech components and systems. This is a natural consequence of the need to use a lot of energy to turn high-entropy, highly disordered materials into materials with a high degree of order on a submicroscopic scale.

In short, I expect that the widespread manufacture of microelectronics will continue to remain an energy, resource and capital intensive process, although cheap, low-energy alternatives will be preferred for devices that don't have to be especially fast. It is here that printable and organic electronics can make a difference, as long as their users don't expect too much. Because of the requirement for energy and resources, I think the availability of cheap and powerful silicon-based electronics will decline as time passes. Devices based on silicon microelectronics will get more expensive. (And even if we ignore the probability of global energy decline, I think there's still "a ways to go" before you 'll be able to “print” a laptop in your garage using your own handy-dandy digital fabber ;) )

There's more to say, but I'm out of time. (Gotta get away from this computer screen!) I'm including a bunch of links below, for anyone who wants to dive in to this subject further. Enjoy.

For Further Reading

• The Promise Of Organic Electronics | Product Design and Development

• 'Alarming' Use Of Energy In Modern Manufacturing Methods

• Considerations ON DEVICE DESIGN AND MANUFACTURE. The problem of Rapid Obsolescence

• Toxic Byproducts of Carbon Nanotube Manufacturing

• Carbon nanotubes-semiconductor networks for organic electronics

• Organic Electronics Integration for RFID Sensor Networks

• Organic Electronics

• Organic Semiconductors, Organic Metals, and Conductive Organic Polymers

Small-Scale Manufacturing and Digital Fabbers - The Question of Electronics

One of the consequences of the decline of available fossil-fuel energy is the contraction of our large-scale, global industrial economy. The decline in supplies of fossil fuels will make globalism prohibitively expensive as time goes on, due to the ever-increasing energy cost of shipping bulk-manufactured goods thousands of miles from their point of manufacture to their point of final sale. Many elements of modern society will therefore only survive via the revival of local, small-scale manufacture of goods.

The creation of small-scale, do-it-yourself digital fabricators (referred to from here on as “fabbers”), has been promoted as a key to the revival of modern-day small-scale manufacturing. According to many fabber proponents and enthusiasts, the rise of fabbers promises to do for manufacturing what inexpensive consumer entertainment electronics did for the creation of media. Whereas cheap consumer electronics enabled everyone to be a potential creator of art, education or entertainment, fabbers might enable everyone to be a potential creator of useful manufactured goods.

But for fabbers to serve as a true long-term solution to the breakdown of centralized industrial production, they must be able to create everything needed for sustainable localized economies – including parts to make more fabbers. To the extent that the making of fabbers requires parts or components that can only be made by large-scale plants in today's economy, to that extent fabbers are not really sustainable. One item of concern is thus the microelectronic components used to control fabbers, as these microelectronic controllers are now made in large, energy-intensive semiconductor chip plants. There are many issues of concern for those who want to try making microprocessors on a small scale, such as the very demanding and exacting conditions required for manufacture (vacuum chambers, ultrapure materials and clean rooms), and the energy required to achieve these conditions.

These conditions apply to all semiconductor-based microelectronics, though their impact varies depending on whether we are considering organic or inorganic semiconductor materials. Today's post will consider manufacture of inorganic semiconductor microelectronics. In this post, I do not promise to come to definite conclusions, but rather to raise important questions. It seems to me that these questions are too often not addressed by those who enthusiastically promote a “fabber revolution” as a solution to economic collapse. My posts on this topic are designed to provoke a conversation on this subject. There are four questions which I'd like to see addressed:

The Question of Energy

Almost all semiconductors in use at present are inorganic. (Liquid-crystal displays, some flat-panel screens and some RFID tags are notable exceptions.) Most inorganic semiconductor electronics are silicon-based.

In its natural form, silicon is literally dirt-cheap. However, the silicon found in sand and dirt is not nearly pure enough for use in high-speed electronics. The process of purification is not nearly as cheap. Metallurgical grade silicon (98 percent pure and above) is created by the reaction of high purity silica with other materials in an electric arc furnace heated to over 1900 degrees C. A method also exists for extracting pure silicon (purity greater than 99 percent) from silica by molten salt electrolysis. But this process also requires high temperatures (around 900 degrees C).

Electronic-grade silicon must be millions of times purer than 99 percent pure. The processes of this purification start with the aforementioned metallurgical grade silicon as a feedstock. They are all very energy-intensive, with the Siemens process (Chemical Vapor Deposition) having the highest energy requirement. Getting from beach sand to electronic-grade silicon is not cheap!

Once the silicon is at the right purity, it must be doped with trace elements in order to produce the desired semiconducting properties. This process is also energy and equipment-intensive, and requires a vacuum chamber containing pure silicon rods heated to 1000 degrees C. Many of the dopant chemicals are extremely poisonous, and some are also explosive.

Once the properly doped silicon has been created, it is cut into wafers which are etched and deposited with other dopants and contact metals in vacuum chambers in order to make the final microelectronic chips used in almost all modern digital devices. The processes of this manufacture are all quite expensive, both in labor, capital (machinery required) and energy. Modern digital devices are as cheap as they are simply because not much semiconductor material is needed anymore in order to make chips of great computational power. Yet energy is generally becoming more expensive as time passes, and shortages of dopant materials are also beginning to appear.

The Question of Dopants (And Other Exotic Materials)

The dopants used to alter the conducting properties of silicon and other semiconductors are themselves hard to find, hard to mine and relatively scarce in many cases. Antimony is one such dopant, used for both silicon and germanium semiconductors, and it has found extensive use in newly developed rewritable memory for digital devices. Most of the remaining antimony in the world is produced by China, and there is no U.S. domestic antimony production. Gallium is another material whose manufacturing users experienced a recent shortage, as was the case with indium also. Thallium is yet another metal whose supply has become constrained at nearly the same time that demand for the metal has increased. Many dopants and other industrial metals have witnessed Hubbert production peaks and are now in decline.

It may be that the electronics industry will experience a dead end in the use of certain elements within the next few decades, as the available supplies of these elements run out. This will mean a stop to the making of microelectronics that depend on these elements for doping. If continued advances in electronics are to continue, the industry will have to find alternatives to expensively produced inorganic semiconductors doped with scarce materials.

Hope On The Horizon? (The Promise of Exotic Materials)

Within the last few years, there have been exciting announcements of the discovery of exotic forms of common materials, forms whose properties hold the possibility of creating wonder microelectronics which don't need exotic dopants. One such development is the creation of silicon nanotubes, which have recently been fabricated into dopant-free nanotransistors by crossing the nanowires over each other and adding tiny metal contacts known as “Schottky contacts.”

However, the creation of these exotic nanowires requires a correspondingly exotic process. The first step is the production of silane from metallurgical grade silicon at a temperature exceeding 300 degrees C. The resulting silane is pyrophoric and explosive, and must be carefully handled. Then the silane is passed over a metal catalyst in a special chamber heated to at least 400 degrees C. This step is what produces the silicon nanowires. While the process can yield nano-transistors and other nano-components that do not require dopants, the process itself is still quite energy-intensive. One publication states that the silicon nanowire breakthrough may lead to “printable electronics” that can be produced by an inkjet printer. I myself am a bit skeptical. If someone could kindly explain to me how this would work, I would happily listen.

Concluding Questions:

The promoters of one particular fabber project state that their concept is the key to “wealth without money,” and that a society supplied by fabbers can “create wealth with a minimal need for industrial manufacturing.” They even talk of a society that is able to provide its own stocks of raw materials by turning crops into polymer feedstocks for fabrication by their fabbers, so that a cycle of wealth could be perpetuated (while reducing greenhouse gas emissions at the same time – a neat bargain!).

I remain unconvinced (but not dogmatically so). I think that, at least as far as energy and the resource-intensive microelectronics needed to run these fabbers, their promoters have overlooked the effects of looming scarcity, and the difficulties posed by the breakdown of our present industrial society. Has anyone made a do-it-yourself garage fabber that can make silicon nanowires? How about a DIY garage fabber that can even make metallic silicon? Are there fabbers that can make high-quality vacuum deposition chambers? Are there fabbers that can dope pure silicon without the risk of toxic gases leaking out and poisoning a few households in a neighborhood? Has anyone rigorously addressed the problem of obtaining large supplies of metallic silicon in an energy-constrained future? (This is the BIG question.) Most importantly, how much energy will all of this take? How long will we retain access to that kind of energy? The future I envision for electronics looks rather different from that of the optimists, but I would welcome further discussion and enlightenment on this subject, including some more rigorous numerical analyses.

The next time I address this topic, we will consider organic (polymeric) electronics. Stay tuned...

Sources:

• “Silicon” – Wikipedia

• “Materials and Processes for Silicon Technology” - University of Kiel, Germany

• “Metals Shortages” - Scitizen

• “NamLab Creates Dopant-free Transistor” – Printed Circuit Design And Fab, 1 October 2009

• “Nanowires key to future transistors, electronics” – PHYSORG, 26 November 2009

• “A Breakthrough in Silicon Nanowire Synthesis” sdf – Sensors Magazine, 6 November 2009

• “Wealth Without Money (BackgroundPage <>Reprap)” – Reprap.Org, 24 February 2006

A Place In Fabland?

Several months ago, I wrote a series of posts discussing small-scale manufacturing as part of a strategy of adaptation to economic collapse due to Peak Oil. My position then was that small-scale manufacturing would primarily be employed to make the simple low-tech tools needed for a much simpler life. In this role, it would enable us to continue to have reasonable access to things such as hand tools and bicycles. I had not seriously considered small-scale manufacturing as a means of maintaining widespread access to the gadgets that define modern life in advanced industrial society. But that was before I knew much about the global community of “fabbers.” As I wrote my earlier series, I devoted a small amount of space to the fabber phenomenon, but I didn't have time to do it justice. A couple of news articles over the last month have caused me to turn back again for a more complete exploration of this subject.

According to Wikipedia, a digital fabricator (also known as a “fabber” or “fab”) is basically a “small, self-contained factory that can make objects described by digital data.” According to many enthusiasts, fabbers have great potential for democratization of the means of production in industrial society. This is because of the following advances:

• The invention of small, inexpensive machines capable of producing three-dimensional parts

• The digital definition of three-dimensional part manufacture as an act of three-dimensional printing

• Increases in computational power of consumer electronics, including PC's and printers

• And lastly, the invention and widespread availability of new materials that can be easily formed, machined and “printed” into parts, in ordinary, non-clean room environments.

All of these things are now being combined into machines that promise to do for manufacturing what cheap and powerful consumer electronics have done for media. As powerful and inexpensive consumer electronics have combined with the Internet to turn everyone into a potential creator of entertainment or news or art, so the digital fabber revolution promises to turn everyone into a potential creator of useful manufactured goods. Just as the consumer electronics revolution has weakened the power of traditional producers of media, so the fabber revolution has the power to displace traditional, capital-intensive, large-scale manufacture of goods.

Thus some fabber enthusiasts tout these machines as technological miracles that will enable every garage to be a high-tech small-scale manufacturer of high-tech products. These devices are put forward as the definitive answer to our present economic collapse, and the key to continued prosperity over the long haul. But are they all these things after all? Are they any of these things? If fabbers are the miracle that their enthusiasts claim, this leads to a near-term future that potentially looks quite different from the darker future of enforced simplicity and technological retreat envisioned by many collapse-watchers.

What role will the fabber revolution play in the near-term future of industrial society, particularly in the First World? How will the fulfillment of that role affect our society farther on, over the next several centuries? Do fabbers have the potential to preserve widespread access to highly advanced manufactured goods? Or are there limits on all advanced industrial activity that ensure a collapse of industrial society? I'm sure that everyone has their own, instinctive, gut-level answer to these questions. Yet such gut-level responses must be examined to determine whether they are fact-based or merely faith (or sometimes, wish) based.

I don't know that I will be able to offer a definitive answer to these questions. But I thought a good starting point would be to lay out what we already know about fabbers, and to put forth pertinent questions that would have to be answered in order to accurately define the true potential of fabbers in dealing with our present collapse. My observations and pertinent questions are listed below, in outline form:

1. What can fabbers make now? (These are things whose manufacture has been reliably and repeatedly demonstrated.)

• Gross machine parts made of plastic and some metals

• Rudimentary control components, such as “printed circuits”

• Objects d'art

2. What things can fabbers not make now?

• Ultrapure microelectronic substrates (that is, substrates made from inorganic materials like silicon)

• Inorganic microelectronic circuits (maybe a fabber will be developed that can do this, but it requires creating ultrapure “clean room” conditions inside the average Joe's garage)

• Other fabbers. (They can make most of the machine tool parts, but they can't yet make the microelectronics used in control of fabbers.)

• Note: if fabbers are only practically useful when they have great computing power (needed for rapidly fabricating complex parts in 3D), then one won't be able to use a fabber to build another fabber until a fabber can also produce all of its own control circuitry and microprocessors.

3. What will fabbers will need in order to be self-replicating (or build their own replacements), with present-generation computational abilities?

• Feedstocks of ultrapure materials

• A source of electric energy

4. Ultrapure inorganic materials as a restricting condition

• Energy, Silicon and the Siemens process (and other processes). (All processes now used for purifying silicon and associated dopants, and combining these materials into appropriate semiconductors, require large amounts of energy. As access to fossil-fuel energy declines, these processes will become increasingly expensive.)

• Other microelectronic ingredients, like dopants, are increasingly scarce

• Less-pure forms of these materials are less and less remarkable, until in the limit, they are no more remarkable than the natural states of these materials. Useless for high-speed electronics below a certain level of purity. (Example: a galena crystal, commonly found in nature, can be used to build a crude AM radio receiver. But it takes much purer materials to build high-speed, high-performance microelectronics.)

• If energy is the limiting factor in producing these materials, energy is a limiting factor in a “fabber” revolution.

• Has any work been done in recycling microelectronics, beyond simply reclaiming the metals used in them? What is the energy cost in extracting and re-purifying the silicon, metals, dopants contained in an IC or larger chip?

5. Question: In a resource-constrained future, can suitably fast microelectronics be printed using less exotic materials? Can these be easily programmed to provide the sort of production control currently exercised by the electronics in today's fabbers?

• Answer: polymeric organic semiconductor materials are being developed for use in possible thin-film, printable microelectronics.

• Transistors and integrated circuits have been made with these organic semiconductors. How fast can they be made to operate? Current silicon-based MOSFET's can be switched at speeds well over 1 GHz (one billion cycles per second). Can organic transistors and microcircuits be made as fast? At present, they are not. (Circuit speed is a factor in processor speed, and thus in the speed with which a fabber controlled by such a circuit can turn out complex parts.)

• Are there impending resource limits on organic semiconductors?

6. In the spirit of the Precautionary Principle, are there any moral or ethical or other downsides to the fabber revolution? Are there potential negative outcomes or uses of this technology that haven't been widely forseen?

Anyway, those are the points for consideration that I was able to think of in a short time. Over the next several weeks, I may try to take a stab at a few of them, as time allows. Unfortunately, time doesn't allow this weekend, as I worked a bit extra on Friday and I have to go in again tomorrow for a few hours. If anyone else wants to take a stab at tackling these questions, feel free.

For further reading, check out these links:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very-large-scale_integration

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_fabrication

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopants

• http://seekingalpha.com/article/55959-the-tellurium-supernova

• http://www.coolcomputing.com/article.php?sid=3334

• http://www.laserfocusworld.com/display_article/206960/12/none/none/Feat/Semiconductor-ink-advances-flexible-displays

• http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/homemade/0

• THALLIUM (a PDF from the USGS)

• “http://reprap.org/pub/Main/HintsForUsingTheStratasysDimensionRPMachine/DesignforRPmanufactureStratasysDimension.doc”

• “Wood's metal - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”

Big And Small Business - The Muscular Widget-Sellers

Imagine, if you will, a group of widget-makers and widget merchants in a particular country. Let's say that some of these widget-makers are actually large firms that employ over a thousand people, whereas some of them are very small outfits run by a husband and wife and a couple of children. Let's also say that most people in the widget business in your country believe that it is imperative to grow as large as possible, and to capture as much market share as possible. Those who believe thus might also believe that it is acceptable to use any means available to achieve growth and to wipe out competition.

Now let's say that the making of widgets requires great physical strength for the purpose of assembling heavy parts that are hard to handle. Let's also say that some of the biggest names in the widget business are outsourcing their production to countries whose labor costs are extremely low, in order to boost production per dollar spent and to increase company profits. The only problem is that the workers in these countries are not very strong, since they only get a dollar a day and often go hungry. Thus some widgets sold in your country begin to fail prematurely, causing widget users to stub their toes and smash their thumbs.

Now stubbed toes and smashed thumbs hurt (and make their sufferers mad), so these victims start complaining to the government. But the biggest names in the widget business have bought off most of the legislators and officials in the government, so when public pressure forces these officials to do something about the problem of widgets that break, they naturally don't attack the source of the problem. Instead, they draft a law which states that "in view of the danger to citizens from breaking widgets (and more importantly, in view of the danger to the widget business from the perception of danger posed by defective widgets), our Government will now require all businesses engaged in widget-making to demonstrate that the personnel in their firms have the necessary physical strength to make widgets. We do therefore establish a Widget Physical Fitness Administrator with full authority to test each widget firm's physical fitness."

The Administrator then issues a decree that each firm collectively or each sole proprietor must do a thousand push-ups every time they ship a certain number of widgets (say, a thousand push-ups for every hundred widgets). Moreover, each batch of a thousand push-ups must be completed within five minutes. For the personnel of Circle D Widgets and General Widgets, this is easy, since there are at least five hundred project managers, deputy vice presidents, marketing directors, project engineers, and lawyers at each firm. As soon as the Administrator visits their firm, they all drop down and knock out one push-up each. But the proprietors of Little Widget On A Hill have a much harder time, since this firm is comprised of a middle-aged hobbyist (who goes to the gym religiously every day), her couch-potato husband (who handles the paperwork), a couple of grade-school grandkids (whom the hobbyist takes along when she goes to the gym), and a ten-year-old calico cat. How long do you think Little Widget On A Hill will be able to stay in business?

Small-Scale Manufacturing - The Japanese Example, And A Few Last Comments

The issues now being faced by the members of our modern society are so serious that a proper discussion of these issues must include a healthy discussion of practical answers to practical problems. Mere theorizing or philosophizing won't do – although it certainly is entertaining sometimes. The search for practical examples has led me to study case histories of the use of small-scale manufacturing in various countries. Japan is one such country, and it was the subject of a report titled, The Japanese Experience In Technology, authored by Takeshi Hayashi of the United Nations University, and published in 1990. (The entire report can be found here: http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu36je/uu36je00.htm#Contents.)

The Japanese Experience report shares a motivation and point of view typical of many reports written over the years on appropriate technology and small-scale industry deployment in the developing world. That point of view is the study of appropriate technology and small-scale industry in helping Third World nations achieve a higher level of “development,” i.e., similarity to modern First World society. In other words, the goal of such studies is to help devise strategies for “modernizing” these nations. Thus the citizens of these nations are judged according to how receptive they are to complex First World technology, how adaptible their indigenous small-scale technologies are to First World economic goals, and the ability of small-scale manufacturers in these countries to participate in and compete in a modern, interconnected, global economy. This First World bias is also seen in the way these studies judge indigenous small-scale enterprise according to the First World criterion of “efficiency” – maximum production with maximum profits and minimum cost per unit of production.

It is all but certain that we in the First World are facing a future of economic contraction, of simplification, of a return to a lower standard of living, due to economic collapse, resource shortages and environmental degradation. The studies mentioned above regarding small-scale industry might not therefore seem obviously useful in showing members of an advanced society the strategies and paths for preparing for the future we now face. Yet by reading between the lines and looking at the data in some unexpected ways, we can learn much.

First, the good news: According to the Japanese Experience report, small-scale industries assumed an increasingly prominent role in Japanese gross domestic product after the oil shocks of the 1970's. These oil shocks, along with increasing competition between producers, drove a number of large-scale factories out of business, and “...transformed the mass production system into a system producing high-quality goods in small quantities to meet market needs and to diversify risks.” Secondly, Japanese small-scale factories (with 20 or fewer workers) accounted for 87.3 percent of all Japanese factories in 1980. They employed 20.1 percent of all workers and contributed 12.6 percent of the total national output. Factories with fewer than 100 workers made up 98 percent of all Japanese factories, and employed 58 percent of all workers.

Small-scale industries in Japan also rapidly adopted modern urban industrial technology, aiding their competitiveness in international markets. Workers who mastered key components of an industrial process employed by a large manufacturer were in many cases able to go into business for themselves as subcontractors to their former employers, providing the materials or semi-finished goods produced by the process component they mastered. As the technical understanding of these workers increased and they were able to afford more complex technology, so the range of parts and base components that they could offer to larger manufacturers also increased.

In short, Japan had a long tradition of traditional, small-scale craft industry, which became the small-scale industrial foundation of Japan's 20^th Century modernization. Japanese small-scale manufacturing has been proven to be a most fitting means of providing desired goods to customers without overproduction and waste – a very important characteristic in an era like the one we are now facing, an era of scarce resources and high costs. Moreover, Japan retained its small-scale manufacturing tradition and culture until 1990 at the very least.

But now for the not-so-good news. Japan's culture of small-scale manufacturing has not been immune to the effects of globalism. The removal of trade barriers and the global spread of neoliberal economics has meant the outsourcing and shrinkage of Japan's manufacturing base. In much the same way that cities like Detroit are typical of American deindustrialization, Japanese cities that were manufacturing powerhouses are now shrinking, as noted in a paper titled, “City Shrinkage Issues In Japan” by Yasuyuki Fujii. (Source: http://www.mizuho-ir.co.jp/english/knowledge/shrinkage0405.html) And according to the 2009 online edition of the CIA World Factbook, only 27.9 percent of Japan's labor force works in industry at present.

Japan is thus losing a key component of self-sufficiency. As with other First World nations, the largest sector of the labor force is now the service sector. As the global economy continues to collapse, the value of the “service industry” will diminish in a very obvious way, and the demand for necessary, useful, “made-at-home” physical goods will rebound. Hopefully, the Japanese will have retained enough knowledge of their small-scale craft-industry tradition to revive that tradition when it becomes needed again.

And now for a few last comments on small-scale manufacturing and appropriate technology. I think it's fairly obvious to most people by now that the First World is facing a drastic change of lifestyle due to economic shrinkage and resource depletion. It's also becoming obvious to many that we can't “fix” the global economy so that it starts growing again, nor can we invent some technological fix that will enable us to enjoy lifestyles of continually increasing consumption. Small-scale industry and appropriate technology should be viewed as aids in adapting gracefully to a poorer future, and not as a means of escaping that future.

But there has been a great deal of talk in the blogosphere lately concerning the miniaturization of complex industrial processes. In an earlier post I mentioned the Fab@Home wiki (http://fabathome.org/), a site dedicated to development of desktop-sized computer-aided manufacturing devices (“fabs”) that can “print” 3-dimensional objects. These devices can be built from scratch for as little as $300, and there are those who say that such devices can be set up to reproduce themselves – even down to the level of reproducing the computer circuitry (CPU) that guides the workings of a fab. Alternatively, there are those (like this source: http://future.wikia.com/wiki/Desktop_Semiconductor_Foundry) who predict the development of desktop-sized semiconductor foundries as early as 2010. This is important, because of the major role that microelectronics plays in everyday life in our society. Those who talk of these things speak excitedly of how such devices will allow communities in First World cities to become resilient and self-reliant once again by manufacturing their own goods, and how this will aid us in our quest for an ever-rising standard of living, even as we face issues like declining resources.

I have a different view. I see an upcoming limit to human advancement in microelectronics, a limit dictated by declining energy supplies. For while it is true that final fabrication of highly complex, miniature integrated circuits can be shrunk to a process that fits on a desktop, it is also true that producing the blank silicon wafers that are the feedstock of such a fabrication still requires enormous amounts of energy. Silicon is derived from sand, which is silicon dioxide. The silicon and oxygen atoms in silicon dioxide are held together by very energetic bonds which require a lot of energy to break if one wants to obtain pure silicon. The first step therefore is to melt sand by heating to a temperature of over 3000 degrees F in the presence of carbon. Then the resulting silicon is refined further. Among the processes for this second-stage refining is the Siemens process, which requires heating silicon to a temperature of 2102 degrees F, although newer processes have been invented which run at lower temperature. Still, the refining of electronics-grade silicon is very energy-intensive.

If ready availability of complex microelectronic devices is an indicator of a society's level of technological advancement, I see a time in which our advancement will go into reverse. For as fossil-fuel availability declines, so will the energy available for manufacture of energy-intensive products such as ultrapure silicon. This means a decline of availability of devices that are controlled by complex microelectronics, such as...desktop fabs. Either such devices will become increasingly unavailable to the general public as time passes, or they will become rapidly more expensive, or both. A time may come in which only a select few have access to the latest and greatest computerized manufacturing technology. Those of us without access to the most advanced microelectronics will be forced to rely on our wits and our skills to make things of value.

But this is just my “two cents.” If any readers have alternative insights or arguments, feel free to comment.

Small Scale Manufacturing - Practical Resources

I had originally intended to discuss sources of practical knowledge in small-scale manufacturing at a later time. This week, however, I've been getting a lot of very good feedback from readers in the U.S. who are interested in small-scale manufacturing. Some of these people are even operating their own small-scale enterprises. So I thought I'd list the resources mentioned by these readers, in addition to listing a few other sources I have discovered.

First, there is the Open Source Machine site (http://opensourcemachine.org/), a source mentioned on another website by two posters who call themselves Fleam and Jokuhl. The Open Source Machine site is dedicated to providing potential manufacturers with small, easily-built manufacturing machines that can be made from recycled and reused parts. Plans for these machines are developed for free and published on the Web without copyright or royalty or intellectual property restrictions, so that anyone can use them. One of their projects is called the “MultiMachine,” described as “...a humanitarian, open-source machine tool project for developing countries.” The neat thing about the MultiMachine is that it provides many metalworking functions in one device that can easily be made from used vehicle engine parts. The Open Source Machine project site also has links to plans to build other machines, including plans to build an air compressor from scrap.

The Fab@Home wiki (http://fabathome.org/), contains information on buying or building desktop-sized“fabs” (computer-aided manufacturing devices) that can “print” 3-dimensional objects. Some of these fabs have been used for making watchbands, bicycle chainrings and sprockets, and bottles.

Then there is the Open Source Ecology Wiki (http://openfarmtech.org/), a site created by Marcin Jakubowski and others. Marcin has dedicated himself to advancing the field of open-source appropriate technology, and his wiki is a compilation of tools and knowledge useful to those who are trying to build safety nets to replace the present breaking economic arrangement. He also has a blog, http://openfarmtech.org/weblog/, and there is a podcast interview with him available at http://agroinnovations.com/component/option,com_mojo/Itemid,182/p,39/lang,es/.

There is also a site run by “Greg in MO,” who left a comment on my first post on this blog concerning small-scale manufacturing. He has a garage business which manufactures clothes drying racks and hand tools. He has some interesting insights on simplifying the manufacturing process so that it can be in essence, a “cottage industry.” His site is www.easydigging.com.

The Practical Action website (http://practicalaction.org) is hosted by the Practical Action group, “...a development charity with a difference,” which focuses first on development of local peoples in the Third World, then on matching appropriate technologies to their needs. They have a lot of technical information available for use, covering such topics as climate change adaptation, agriculture, construction, crop and food processing, manufacturing, information and communication, waste and recycling, and much more.

Village Earth (www.villageearth.org) is a “consortium for sustainable village-based development,” whose website also contains links to many appropriate technology resources, especially those related to small-scale industry. Payment is required to access some of their resources, however.

The AfriGadget site (www.afrigadget.com) is a blog which details the ways in which Africans are “...solving everyday problems with African ingenuity.” One post describes how an Ugandan woman made a homemade cell phone charger. Other features of this blog include its emphasis on “grassroots reporting” by Africans concerning African issues and African responses. These people are actually doing the things I detailed in an earlier post, “A Safety Net Of Alternative Systems – Citizen Media.” They also have posts on reuse of metals in the Kenyan ironworks industry, and the fabrication of hand tools.

Lastly, I would be remiss if I did not mention the work of bloggers Jeff Vail (www.jeffvail.net) and John Robb (http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/), who examined the topic of small-scale manufacturing in great detail long before I did. (See http://www.jeffvail.net/2008/06/rhizome-platform-design.html by Jeff Vail and http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/09/resilient-com-1.html by John Robb.) Their particular focus is on the “fab” machines I mentioned above. My only concern with these machines and others is that new, ready-made machines of this type may be out of the price range of many Americans, who would be forced to build such machines from scrap and used parts if they wanted to manufacture things as these machines do – as 3-dimensional “prints”. I think, however, that I may have a solution to that concern, as follows:

There are plenty of old computers that are not being used anymore because constant “innovations” and “enhancements” to the proprietary products made by major commercial software vendors requires constant changes to the hardware people use. These “enhancements” rapidly render older machines obsolete. However, these old computers can be put back to use for a wide range of applications, if they are run using a Linux or open-source Unix operating system. They can also be programmed with open-source software to function as the controllers in a computer-aided manufacturing process. There are also old appliances being discarded even though they have perfectly good single-phase motors. The relays needed to operate such motors could be scavenged from old relay panels used with legacy programmable logic controllers that are replaced with new models in industrial plants. An enterprising tinker with a knack in computer programming and systems integration could make his own “fab” from an old computer and the motors from such things as a refrigerator, a house fan, a blow-dryer, etc. As long as the parts made by such a fab were not critical to life and limb (no cardiac stents or jet aircraft parts, for instance), the things made by such a fab would probably be perfectly adequate.

Of course, there would be the need for machine interlocks and kill switches to make the fab safe. This would not only be to meet codes and OSHA requirements, but to prevent the very real possibility of losing body parts in the works of the fab. An understanding of good machine safeguarding principles would therefore be essential. But it might be possible for someone to construct their own homemade fab for less than $1000.