Each preceding society built the foundations of the next. Collectivization of production and distribution is made a simpler and easier task than it would have been under feudalism precisely because markets have already socialized and stitched together production. It’s the distribution that is privatized, and this is because ownership of capital is individual. Socialism is a historic progression on this.
This kind of shit has programmed people to be defeatist. People built technology companies. They didn’t grow out of some place that is inaccessible to workers.
What’s a new TSMC fab cost these days? 48 billion dollars?
Leaving aside the whole “money” thing, that 48 billion represents hundreds of thousands of peoples’ work across very different industries just to build the thing, before even getting to the production of the chips.
How do you get all of those people to cooperate with you and to follow a common plan under anarchism? Under communism (in the soviet sense) at least you can force them. In capitalism, you can force them by paying them.
What’s a new TSMC fab cost these days?
Americans: “You need tens of billions of dollars to build high tech equipment competitive on the global market”
Also Americans: “Intel, here’s tens of billions of dollars. Build me high tech equipment.”
Intel: pocketing the money for shareholders “No.”
Also Also Americans: “Hey, what are we even doing with all this high tech equipment, anyway?”
sound of Flock Camera, Data Center, and Predator Drone factories rumbling
How do you get all of those people to cooperate with you and to follow a common plan under anarchism?
I imagine the same way you do it under capitalism. By offering them stack in the work product and a prominent place in society while the construction/manufacturing takes place.
The big hang-up for modern Anarchists is that they don’t have a large pool of wealth from which to employ people, secure resources, or host the kind of social events that elevate public status. And - in theory at least - that’s what union organizing and worker mobilization is intended to achieve.
The capital is free, folks. You can just seize it. When you all work together, there’s very few people left who can stop you.
Under communism (in the soviet sense) at least you can force them. In capitalism, you can force them by paying them.
Under communism (in the Soviet sense) you mobilize a bunch of disgruntled and impoverished WW1 veterans to overthrow the government with the guns and bombs they bought to fight the Germans.
Under capitalism, you force people by not paying them.
In the modern western system, it’s definitely an open question as to how you transition. We don’t have millions of Bonus Marchers to tap into as a revolutionary militia. And we don’t have control of the financial services that would let us lock out corporate raiders and predatory debt-holders.
At some point, what we need is a large and well-organized network of dissidents, ready to strip the wiring out of the defunct state and repurpose it to our own uses. But those lines of communication - nevermind the will to power - don’t exist (to my knowledge anyway).
“The common plan” is not synonymous with “the organisational structure” or “the company”.
The common goal is to build a chip fabrication plant.
The expertise to do this is plentiful and the desire to do this are common. If tomorrow the technology were fully open and available and not guarded behind trademarks and trade secregts and if the detailed instructions are available to all what else is there to stop people from doing the building?
The people who want to cooperate with the other people to build the plant… can?
If the people do not want to, there is nothing that will force them. Why should they be forced?
what else is there to stop people from doing the building?
The actually difficult bit? Getting hundreds of thousands of people to agree on a common plan where each has a role.
You’d need the people mining the raw materials, the people refining them, the people creating the optics, the people creating the machinery that uses the optics to do lithography, the people operating all the machines…
The stuff that’s guarded behind trademarks and trade secrets and whatnot is the easy bit for an anarchist commune to achieve. Like I said in another comment, all you need for that is a few thousand specialized engineers. Things in the physical world require an order of magnitude or 2 more people and that’s where things get hard without hierarchy.
It had to be recognised this doesn’t happen in a vacuum. The raw materials are already being mined and people are refining them and people already creating optics and so on. All of these people already exist in the world and there thousands of people in hundreds of universities and schools that are eager to do this.
I am expecting that you assume this can happen only in a command and control structure as today rather than the free association of people which is why it would surprise me that after anarchism is achieved that medicine collapses and technology collapses. I hope that people continue what they are doing (in ASML for example) because they love what they do. The hammers are not taken to industry like luddites.
The discussion then is not could this work (because people do this today and people want to continue to do this today and more people want to do this in the future) but instead the allocation of resources and tasks. Our understanding of how to connect and collaborate and create have evolved many since Engel in 1840s manchester factory.
Fab on a mass production level is harder due to cost, but there are smaller scale examples, and there’s tons of software examples. There’s also a handful of worker-owned tech companies in the US, and there’s Mondragon in Basque.
Looking at how absolutely parasitic hardware companies are today (Nvidia, for example), we’re better off with less of them, especially since the only way they can maintain existence is through destroying society and the planet. When that level of wealth is funneled into a singular entity, it becomes a cancer cell.
Agreed, there are literally people fab-ing chips (microfabrication) in their own houses in very small scale. Makerspaces are great for fun stuff like this.
If the cost keeps going higher, I will expect a lot of shops to pop up. More realistically, current companies might be shooting themselves in the foot in the long run as the rest of the world makes more repairable components and electronics. I know we just dismantled a couple of PCs 10+ years old and sold the RAM/Hardrives for profit.
Nvidia is irrelevant anyway when it comes to our ability to have good processors. AMD and Intel also make CPUs and GPUs, as does Apple. All you need is a few thousand highly specialized engineers. Software is even easier, there are many single person projects that accomplish quite a bit and small teams can do even more.
The part that’s nearly impossible without hierarchy is the manufacturing side. TSMC, a company with nearly 100,000 employees, can’t even do it all themselves, they still need ASML’s machines and ASML needs parts from Zeiss, etc. Remember that the cost pretty much represents how many people you need to get to do something, majority of it comes down to wages in one part of the supply chain or another. For all of its failings, there’s one thing capital is good at: Getting a bunch of people working on a singular goal (so the capitalist could profit off it of course)
Mondragon is impressive, but it still functions via a profit motive and not a single branch of it is anywhere near as complex as semiconductor manufacturing.
Remember that the cost pretty much represents how
many people you need to get to do somethingscarce the resources is and how high the demand is, majority of it comes down towageslicensing of intellectual property and patents in one part of the supply chain or another.FTFY lol. I don’t really know what the ratio is of parasitism and actual work is, and I assume it is almost unknowable currently. Things like securing access to some mind, then making sure through cartels or lobbying to drive up the price of resources to make more profit. Presumably ASML is guarding their secrets very much and massively profiting off of it.
Oh no what would we do if we didn’t invent the processor oh no. Blud life was alright in the 90s and we didn’t have wifi. Y’all gonna have your brain in a vat and your body sent to the mines and call it progress
This is literally a post about making processors lmao
I was pretty addicted to video games in 1992?
We do make our own electronics. And then we attach them to explosives that fly thousands of miles to blow up elementary schools.
What? You mean paying just the material cost for an iPhone? Less than 10 bucks? You’re being mean with those poor shareholders :'( How do they would support their families that way? WORKING? D:
Hey that’s not fair! It’s like $100!
You’re right, actually for Apple it’s like $25
I’d be really surprised if it’s that low. I get that it’s low but no way it’s under $100. It’s always been at least that.
I wonder if it’s technically possible to grow electronics in a vat or tray using biological cells that have the entire schematic encoded into their DNA. Some kind of biology that can grow copper traces and organic semiconductors in a sugar soup. And then dies and leaves a PCB or integrated circuit behind. Maybe much slower but much larger chips where you can just fill some trays with activated goop and let them grow for a week into “compucilium”.
Then you could design the DNA for such biomanufacturers and just sell it in ketchup packets for people to grow their own computers. Just add sugar and water and mix well lol. This would truly “democratize” electronics.
It’s a cool idea and I would love to see it too. But you would be better off making something entirely different that leverages the strengths of biological computing instead of trying to make an integrated circuit. Past 1980s node sizes we rapidly got so small its well below the size of a cell or even complex proteins. Our current technology is roughly the size of DNA itself, and proteins are monstrous in size by comparison and tend to wiggle around like jello due to Brownian motion at molecular scales.
Interestingly I think you could probably make a green PCB process though. Currently we use ferrous solutions to etch copper which need to be neutralized and wreak Havok on waterways if they aren’t. I think making a biological biofilm that eats copper in certain areas and not others could work? It would be slower though, and honestly PCBs require some pretty intense feature sizes (not as bad as ICs but still really challenging) for things like tiny blind vias on extremely small traces. (Btw vias are like bridges from one layer of a circuit board to the next. A through via goes all the way through. A blind via is hidden within internal layers inside of a board)
Where I think this could be really cool is masking out vias and having your microbe drill for you over time. Surprisingly a large part of a PCB’s cost is tungsten drill bits. It’s still the fastest and most accurate way to drill fiberglass for forming vias but it’s slow when you need to do hundreds or thousands per board. For extremely small vias the bits get insanely expensive and fragile too.
Yeah I’m not clear about the scales. The article I linked talks about 1-3nm scale quantum dots semiconductors. I think the scale also influence performance like clock rate and waste heat production. So this idea might just be impossible, or only viable for pretty large and slow devices. For microcontrollers it might be enough though. And this might be able to make use of 3D better than lithography and be more compact.
I do imagine that biological cells could become the real “nanobots” that could be used for fabrication. Like nanobots might never be real because if they could work they’d already have evolved in nature. But maybe we could program cells to grow in very specific and complex shapes in a vat for fabrication, and different areas turn into different colors and material properties. This kinda must be possible. An alternative to injection molded plastics. PCBs could definitely work, although there might be a reason why they stick with fiberglass if the drill bits cost so much lol. I can also imagine this for “organ 3D printing”.
Not sure if such a thing can exist but bio-computing is already a thing
Yeah I think the bioelectric computers still require “living hardware”, I imagine something more like fungal mycelium growing in highly complex patterns and then drying out.
After digging a bit, microbes and fungi can create copper nanoparticles for something like conductive ink, but it’s unclear if that could actually create solid traces instead of separate nanoparticles.
Insanely there is already research on Microbial synthesis of chalcogenide semiconductor nanoparticles: a review - PMC (“Chalcogenide semiconductor quantum dots”). I know some of those words lol.
It’s clearly sci-fi but it would be insane if we managed to suddenly “contract” the hypercomplex economic supply chain of IC fab manufacturing into simply producing goop in vats that turns into electronics and computing hardware. Even just a rather simple grown microcontroller would be incredible. It would allow a small country to be more autark from global economic entanglements, more local instead of global.
I mean, maybe you can but I sure can’t. I’m fine with any work using a computer, but my best guess at how thin smooshed rock on other rock + electricity turns in to pictures on a monitor is that very small witches are doing it.
Youre quite close. Its very small switches that are doing it
I sort of understand on an intellectual level, but I can’t accept it emotionally. Billions of yes/no left/right stacked on top of each other turns in to a movie, or video game, or people bitching at each other online. I’ve seen some of the old 10kb video challenges and get that it’s technically possible to do that… but at the same time I can’t accept that anyone can actually do that.
They do realize we could just make our own electronics right?
Genuine question: how would a semiconductor fab be build in anarchist ideologies?
Same way it’s done now, only with the profit staying with the workers. Anti-capitalism is not anti-infrastructure or anti-technology or even anti-commerce. It’s just anti-private-ownership of the above.
I know, that’s why I asked how would it be build under anarchism, not under anti-capitalism.
My question was really how could something as logistically complex as a semiconductor fab be build without some organization to coordinate it.
But as @BeatL@pawb.social said if anarchism = no unjust hierarchy then that is no problem. As there is still a organization coordinating things just not an unjust one?
I admit I’m not very knowledgeable about anarchism.
I don’t really associate anarchism with the global supply chains necessary to build and run a semiconductor fab. But I suppose I am mistaken then?
A common misconception is that we need hierarchy to handle complexity. The best way to handle complexity is by increasing the amount of decision makers. Just look at how the open source community can compete with professional software companies despite not having any hierarchy,
The hierarchy is not set in stone, but I wouldn’t say there isn’t one. Otherwise, anyone could merge anything into any repo. And yes, not one repo needs to be “the official” one, but they de facto are, until some people decide to split out for some reason.
So I don’t see it as a lack of a hierarchy, more as a consensual hierarchy similar in some ways to a democracy. But hey I may be completely off!
A opt in hierarchy can be accepted in anarchism, because you are not coerced by it. If there is a project and you want to add your feature, but they dont allow it, you can just soft fork and maintain your feature separately from the main project.
Not sure if that counts since anyone can fork a project.
TCC allows merging anything. There has been vibecode and such but it all seemed to have been either reverted or rewritten, like on a wiki.
See also: my other reply on this page.
The best way to handle complexity is by increasing the amount of decision makers
Spoken like someone who has never witnessed the horrors of design by committee
That is not true big successful Open source products have a decision maker. Linus for the kernel as an example…
OSS has an hierarchy though. They are called maintainers.
Yeah but thats not a dominance based hierarchy. They cant tell others what to do.
Good specs and motivated people at the right place… As we do now in high complexity IT environments. The major struggle we got in production are people being unmotivated, as it should in this system. But if you only have people doing it for the love systems would be far different.
Organization != domination hierarchy
and without the enslavement.
cc @themightycat@ani.social
easy, anarchy is no unjust hierarchy. So to convert X to anarchy, you remove the subordination principe. If the task need a boss, make it temporary and rotate often. Share knowledge and ideas. Make sure everybody is having the best time it could under the conditions we are in.
Sure you can be a filthy filthy radical and open source the machines, vulgarise the jobs and how to use the tools. Decorate the wall with slogans like “justice for all”. Bring diverse peoples to the fab and see solutions to problems you never accounted for emerge. See peoples from around the world challenges themselves to use less and less chemicals and/or reuse them.
If you want to check, open source can cover hardware. A famous one is Prusa (3d printer).
I’ve thought a lot about this before. Updoot because it’s a good question.
Basically, if an anarchist society still has access to all of the books and such for long enough, someone somewhere eventually will figure it out. Blowing them glass bulbs is surprisingly uncomplicated once you have metallurgy (tutorial), you don’t even have to use mercury for the vacuum if you happen to have a regular factory built compressor nearby (will one from a fridge work? nobody knows, nobody tried), which you can then rebuild later. Build some circuits using wood + nail and metal wires as the PCBs, do random things to see how it reacts and learn from it. Now, electricity itself and metallurgy are fun but out of scope for this explanation.
While that is happening, people can reuse existing TV boxes, routers and such. Someone could do a tiny C program or something to distribute data over the existing computers or something, then advertise it over (real life) bullet-in boards. Ironically, I suggest more distributed solutions (whenever possible/feasible of course) over something like this site, or usenet (R.I.P., now just full of piracy). Non-technical people can get their friends to help with using that. People who where previously sysadmins for ISPs and stuff should then probably allow just port scanning IPv4 to discover other people, and/or the v6 multicast (well, hopefully they can figure that out if they haven’t been “docker-washed” or whatever). Now, once someone figured something out, they share it with the comrades and “advertise” it using that solution. Or again, just the real life bullet-in boards.
If there are enough good minds, they can then proceed to basically skip “regular” transistors and diodes (and maybe even real PCBs, although some already do that at home) and go straight for the micro fab. Now, it requires many fields of science. Like first, you need to take a few buckets of sand, containing rocks and shells and shit (literally), then purify it. Like, really really really fucking pure. This is where my personal level of expertise ends but I am sure that eventually some talented people in their own respective fields can meet up and think of something over an afternoon. From what I know (probably wrong), this basically involves melting it in a vacuum, unmelting, melting, unmelting and so on, then from the piece that formed you have to cut off the edges where all of the impure stuff ended up. Now, you need to make patterns on it. This guy figured it out but gave in and started a company. Basically, instead of the template you shine light through, you could substitute an office projector for something really shitty scale and really shitty reliability, but functional. The rest is mostly chemistry… idk I don’t speak chemistry.
Now, you can go get someone who speaks transistor logic to implement some really shitty instruction set in hardware. I am sure it wouldn’t be too complicated to address map a teletype for some I/O. First few programs can be in ROM right inside the CPU (with redundant bytes of course given how shitty the manufacturing is) for testing, until RAM is figured out.
Oh look, my new chip draws boobs on paper!
Then you, again, go share your findings with the society and find someone who still has a RISC-V design or something downloaded. Now, that might get good enough to run a multi user operating system (this will make sense soon). As much as we hate the C stdlib and all of it’s tech debt, I am not sure if anyone will be up for redoing all of that (yet). I have been shilling OpenBSD a lot lately, but for something like this I would imagine NetBSD would be more fitting. Plan 9’s stdlib is MUCH better (and there’s a functional WIP RISC-V port), but to properly use that you will need pointing and CRT tech so it’s kind of a circular loop there, and it’s also not as accessible due to being mostly GUI and due to having lots of single letter commands/shortcuts to remember across the included programs. Although whatever you can get your dirty hands on (I am being slightly pessimistic (or realistic, even) and assuming not having access to the internet at this stage, the one and only as we know for being controlled by the big IANA). Fork the OS you got. Most tools have been generally designed around some level of hierarchy, although for source control, git and compatibles (got…) remain best (thanks, Torvalds 2005). The reason is sharing patches over plain text, and more importantly applying them, becomes trivial (if you add a signature/checksum, even more so, as you now know it wasn’t corrupted or line converted or anything). Allow anonymous editing like for TCC to minimize said hierarchy (maybe invent a better solution later, like something distributed with proof of work for voting if a patch gets in or not… too bad all of this terminology has been taken by crypto bros). Speaking of TCC, that’s a nice ass compiler, should probably use that to avoid hogging the tiny brain you’ve just built for others. “What others”, well…
Here’s the part where a multi-user OS starts making sense. As soon as networking starts to network, put it right onto the usual networks with existing repurposed computers from before. Let it be like a pubnix, or “shell provider” if you like calling it that. Let people fuck around, find out (“help I deleted authorized_keys”), maybe even discover backdoors and other bugs. While that is happening, go improve, go make more, go offer some units IRL to especially interested people. Obviously, share the hardware designs, so someone also especially dared could do the office projector thing, while someone else is trying to figure out how to replace the said office projector with something more DIY.
And basically, there you go. Now, this is technically possible under de-facto capitalism; although I am not sure if anywhere on this planet right now exists a community of especially dared, IRL connected and unoccupied enough in time people.
EDIT: figured someone might want to use this text.
License
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE Version 2, December 2004 Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar <sam@hocevar.net> Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed. DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION 0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.Hey, you seem to know your way around hardware better than I do. Whats your toughts on collapse OS?
Sounds pretty cool, although it wouldn’t bring progress too much forward without networking or anything, although someone might find it useful for calculations and stuff. Once setup, it’s like a little Commodore 64 but with a weird quirky programming language. TempleOS is basically the same thing but with God’s support. The linked “public domain books” page, although very much incomplete, is pretty useful. I have all of the archive.org torrents for them (although some can’t reach 100%, thanks archive.org).
I think I would rather leave low level stuff to people like you. This stuff is making my head ache just by looking at it 🥴
Cool, thanks. Although this is a very surface level of understanding, not enough to do any of that. If it wasn’t clear, what I described needs multiple people with deep understandings of the specific parts. Like, I said “implement this shitty instruction set in hardware”. How - I don’t fucking know. I don’t speak transistor logic. Well, I haven’t tried much, but still.
Also, I take my words back on CollapseOS, having a microcontroller bootstrap other ones is useful in the sense that you can then use the microcontrollers as part of the fab machinery while also not hoarding the real (capitalist) computer and letting someone else use it.
HAHA BUT iFUNNY IS A CORPORATE PLATFORM
I wonder how many components there are in my phone that were produced in communist China
Is that a green haired slave owner?
It’s supposed to be
blooda laurel crown, but it is very badly drawn.Oh, I see.
It’s a Roman with laurels
That would first need factories, and masons, pipe cutters, oh, pipes, blocks, so forth and so on.
Workers make these things, not capitalists.
Sure, but they could be run for progress/common benefit, not “making money”
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