I N THE LORD OF THE RINGS, J.R.R. TOLKIEN ment. Urban idealists also found themselves ill-
contrasts the bucolic “hobbit sense” of the Shire equipped and unprepared to deal with the hardships
with the noxious industrialism of Mordor: “The of living an essentially preindustrial agrarian life.
one small garden of a free gardener was all his need Today, freedom and technology no longer stand
and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own in juxtaposition. A CNC lathe or milling machine can
hands to use it, not the hands of others to command.” be built for $500. Raw materials can be prepared in
Communal in structure, nonmechanical, and homemade foundries. Solar power and wind turbines
inhabited by individual craftsmen and farmers, the make it possible to live comfortably off the grid.
Shire clearly parallels preindustrial England. Its Open source software is ubiquitous, and hard-
ravaging bears an epic similarity to the transforma- ware is following the same path. The pages of MAKE
tions that have taken place in our own world since illustrate the countless sophisticated devices that
the Industrial Revolution. can be built without a factory. The internet allows
As was abundantly clear in Tolkien’s time, to for worldwide collaboration on a level never before
control the means of production is to control life. possible. Goods can be exchanged between indi-
Industrial capitalism placed this control in the vidual craftsmen without the need for distribution
hands of a wealthy elite; communism placed it with networks and middlemen.
the state. Whether at the Carnegie Steel Company Advancements in personal fabrication at the
or the Lenin Steelworks, and whether the bullets MIT Center for Bits and Atoms hold the greatest
came from the Pinkertons or the Red Army, the promise. Their aim is to produce a personal fabri-
power over life and death did not rest with the indi- cator that can manufacture anything from a doll
vidual but with a hostile external force. to a precise replica of itself. The current MIT Fab
The distributists of the early 20th century reject- Lab (see MAKE, Volume 01, page 23), which has
ed both visions. “Too much capitalism,” wrote G.K. been deployed in nine countries, is itself an impres-
Chesterton, “does not mean too many capitalists, sive feat. The equipment can be assembled for
but too few.” Drawing upon the principles of sub- $20,000; the software is open source and free. For
sidiarity and solidarity put forth by Pope Leo XIII’s the price of a new car, it’s already possible to estab-
social encyclical Rerum Novarum, the distributists lish an effective personal fabrication laboratory.
sought a society where each individual provided Tools such as these have the potential to person-
both his own labor and his own capital. The small alize the Industrial Revolution — to place the means
garden of Sam Gamgee was the distributist ideal. of production not in the control of select capitalists
Distributist principles took root all over the or of the state, but with every individual seeking
world, but the luxuries of the Industrial Revolution to partake in the act of creation. Like the soil, the
triumphed over the freedom of the homestead. A machine yields in response to the labor of our hands.
similar phenomenon occurred in the 1970s, with the
introduction of Schumacher’s economic treatise Tom Owad ( owad@applefritter.com) is a Macintosh
Small Is Beautiful and the back-to-the-land move- consultant in York, Pa., and editor of applefritter.com.
References:
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