By Gabrielle Kennedy / 02-02-2012

It’s hard to explain exactly what Smári McCarthy does.  “I am not a designer,” he says although he has dabbled in graphic design, operated a FabLab studio, was once a mathematical artist.

Activist might be the best label.  Via lectures, social media and a blog, he communicates about the philosophy of making things and the rights people should enjoy when interacting digitally.  “I am interested in access to information and free speech,” he summarises.

In Holland to present at the Me Craft/You Industry (#mcyi) symposium in the Zuiderzee Museum in the old town of Enkhuizen, McCarthy addressed a capacity crowd on what we need to be thinking about now in order to prepare for a digital manufacturing reality.

He criticized the industrial revolution for its unintended consequences and argued that it has disenfranchised the individual from his or her ability to create things.  

Beyond mere talk, he also does projects.  One in Afghanistan, for example, entailed the digital production of a Wifi generator using plywood and chicken wire.  

During an interview with Design.nl prior to the symposium it quickly became clear that McCarthy is a rare voice in the high-tech jargon infested world of open source and digital manufacturing.  He even manages to use the omniscient “and one day we will be able to print out our chicken sandwiches” example without sounding too fictional.  He can walk one through the process of how digital manufacturing technology can (and no doubt will) operate in the not too distant future.  “All it means is that a machine will be able to make anything atom by atom,” he says.  “Now we have technology like C & C Milling machines we can’t move backwards.  It can only become more advanced from here.”

But for it to work on a social level, more needs to be done to facilitate the sharing of ideas.

Like everyone on the open source wave, McCarthy is dead against copyright.  “To me it is just weird,” he says.  “It is one of the few monopolies we allow in society.  We have competition rules that ban monopolies and people are fined millions for infringements, yet people have become OK with the idea of a monopoly over our cultural heritage.”

What happened to the music industry in the late 90s will always remain the definitive example.  “Not everyone liked Napster,” McCarthy says, “over about six months it took a couple of million teenagers to build the largest cultural data base that has ever existed.  And they did it for free.  No surprise that it was shut down by corporate interests.”

Each successive Napster movement has become more decentralized making control more and more difficult.  “We have definitely become better at subverting copyright,” McCarthy says.

Personally McCarthy is ambivalent about online piracy but finds it interesting to think about what Napster might look like for manufacturing.

“It will happen,” he says.  “I’d say it is safe to assume that the first version will suck.   It will be ugly, it will be buggy, and it won’t do everything we want it to do.  It will also be shut down quickly by external interests.  At the same time it will change the way we think about the distribution of goods.”

Especially once technology catches up.  Right now the engineering is quite basic.  Four forces are known to man -  gravity, electromagnetism, the weak forces that bind atoms together like water, and the strong forces that hold atoms together at the sub atomic level.        

“But so far we are not doing very much more than squirting molten plastic at something,” says McCarthy.  “We are stuck in the iron age dreaming of the silicon age. Much more needs to be known about how to use the strong nuclear force and we still need a way of storing accurate models, like material representation of things in the computer.”

This is where McCarthy’s maths background comes back into play.  “To realize any of this, we need more understanding of the maths,” he says.  “I’m not smart enough to solve the problems, but with my know-how and network I can nudge people who are in the right direction.”

Making room for customization and freeing up the system so that individuals can become creative again is no simple task. “What’s interesting now is to think about how to democratize the ability to be creative and productive,” McCarthy says.  “It is about the creative individual trying to survive versus the industrialists who want to maintain their stranglehold on the economy and to control the creative output of everybody.”

McCarthy’s take on the Luddite movement is an interesting one.  He posits that it wasn’t anti-technology but rather against the use of technology to subvert craft production.  “They did not want people who did not care about craft pushing those skills out of the market,” he says.

Not that he has the answers.  But a second industrial revolution is imminent and will result in people having more control over what surrounds them.  That is all good.  But it is a system with the potential to divide the world even more than it currently is.

“Before the industrial revolution Europe and Africa were not really that different in terms of capacity,” McCarthy says.  “The upcoming digital revolution in production has the potential to create an even greater divide between people with access versus those without access.  The result would be the establishment of an underclass far more sinister than the developed/non-developed divide we have now.”

Let’s call it a capacity disequilibrium.  “More than physical access we need an awareness to prevent this technology being used against people.”

Digital production in its most perfected embodiment could reduce scarcity and solve social problems.  

“Just imagine a world ruled by innovative people, McCarthy says.  “Not by rich people or by a ruling class.  To be rich you need to have more then everyone else.  To be a ruler you need people to rule, but there is no structural limit on how many people can be innovative.  It is not utopia, but it is decentralized power, which has to be better.”

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