Ford, the King & the Open Grid.

The heritage of Ford in our vision of the welfare state remains quite heavy. As automotive industries struggle, other collaborative models emerge and offer other visions of distributed wealth and organization.

The automotive industry is not in a good shape. 2008 was the 100th anniversary of General Motor as well as the year the company went bankrupt. Yet an other reason to question the automotive industry model a bit more, just enough to go until questionning the production model itself that Heny Ford did set up a century ago.

But because his ideas turned out to be the one we are still following up to now in the Western world, for car manufacturing and for most of the other business we run, we thus acknowledge the fact that Ford’s ideas at his time ought to be more relevant than any other production models that arose before or after him. From where we stand, winner takes all.

1. From Ford industry to the Welfare State

What we are being taught is that Ford succeeded to combine together Taylor’s labor division in order to increase productivity and the mass consumption society in order to sell off the production. Even though workers had what Marx and Weber coined a truly ‘alienating job’, they could still envision the goal of their pain, the freedom provided by the Ford T and later models.

The famous quote from Ford — « If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. » — states the fact that at that time, because the average men was not aware of new propulsion technologies, he would never have answered ‘a car’. Through out the history of human technologies, there have been some technological breakthrough ; from stone use to the bronze and the iron, the steam power to engine, to electricity, the cord phone to the GSM phone to data driven mobile devices, and so on. Each breakthrough is what we nowadays call a ‘revolution’. Rather radical. A point of no return.

A century ago, thanks to some western entrepreneurs like Ford, we happened to switch from the animal powered traction our ancestors mastered from the neolithic era to the fuel engine powered traction.

As a matter of fact, since stone carving or metal casting, newly discovered technologies have allowed people to increase their production skills or their efficiency. Nevertheless, a specific technology always embeds some boundaries over which improvements have little impacts on the outcome efficiency. No matter what you feed your horse, it will never ride faster than 60km/h and on a very short distance. A car engine may allow that, until a certain limit again.

Even if ‘new technologies’ are tools that brings along with them some benefits for the same task — let’s say, moving faster to somewhere and on long distances — they bring contre-benefits too — let’s say, car congestion, C02 and particule emission, not to mention geopolitical issues about oil. Assuming that people want to move faster allowed Ford to state that these people are not aware of the newly available technologies that could allow them to do so more efficiently.

From the factory, the Fordist idea have been applied and fine-tuned at the scale of countries. First in the USA as a solution to the 1929 crisis — combining a mass production system to a state intervention to spur consumption — they have spread in Europe together with the Marshall plan after WWII. The mass production system grew in a context of mass consumption and demographic boom. The Ford system is characterized by a production standard — of processes and tasks — and a consumption standard — the growth of production and nominal income allowing the rise of spending power. This is what we perceived as the ‘social integration’ enabled by labor.

After 2008, we must acknowledge that this model might be out-dated. As Stiglitz noted, median household income had declined over the past decade while GDP per capita had gone up. Moreover, the congestion of cars and other devices in the Western world create a pharaonic amount of waste and pollution. Every industries and governments have now to take into account sustainability, both of the environment and of the local economy.

In the automotive industry, those are two particularly problematic issues. The electric car for instance, said to me less carbon consuming, appeared to be more than a simple change of engine. When you switch to electric energy, you switch mobility ; you don’t use the same energy providers, not on the road but at home, you don’t need as much maintenance as petrol engines, which remain one of the major income for car manufacturer, and so on.

Regarding the congestion, many car sharing services have emerged, from peer-to-peer car pooling to daily car sharing. But once again, even if car manufacturer are trying to work on the idea of a ‘service based car’ since decades, they did not yet succeed to address these uses. One of the main reason is that they keep on focussing on ‘selling cars’ instead of ‘providing mobility’. The GERPISA director shared a brilliant vision about this topic.

One of the reason of their difficulties to move on is that the Ford system, hierarchic and task based, is very robust and lacks of agility. A century ago, this was already the reason why Ford himself rose the income of its workers to 5$/day ; it was made to reduce the turn-over and thus reduce the cost of constantly training people for really specific tasks. Some post-Taylorism model tried to bring more agility to this production lines, but without much success so far.

In the Western world, the automotive industry remains one of the largest ; in France it counts for 3% up to 10% of the working population according to the way you calculate. Beyond the car manufacturing, Ford’s vision was about productivity and a new society model. He envisioned his own company like a society and became a pioneer of the ‘Welfare society’. Ford is also known for his support to Hitler’s party and, once elected, to the Nazi government. He was keen on structured homogeneous society. Mass produced.

Ford’s ideas keep on structuring most of our industrial sectors and our consumption based society. But if his model run out of steam, or if we tend to work ‘officeless’, will all our welfare system collapse?

2. Other types of wealth

The way Ford’s assumption is phrased — « If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. » — legitimates the idea that the average people do not know yet how to gain efficiency in their daily labor, and thus that they basically don’t know what they want.

In traditions and folklore are embedded knowledge and know-how about how to live a decent life. They’ve become proletarianized. As B. Stiegler reminds us this study from A. Sen, Bangalis remain thanks to their social structure remain more ‘able’ than Harlem inhabitant and therefor have a longer life expectancy. But this sentence from Ford has been since a ‘coup de grâce’ to the know-how tradition may have carry for centuries. As if people should better relay on modern models, based on pure science and labor division, to live a better life rather than on traditional models, based only on experiences and community cooperation.

This idea would be true if efficiency was the only relevant aim they should pursue, but is it?

Recently in Thaïland, I had the opportunity to visit some community projects such as Doï Tung and the Sufficient Economy projects. Both of these have been initiated by the Thaï royal family, queen Shirikit and his majesty Rama IX. Since decades already, the king and his team of experts did put up some learning centers and other local food and craft production projects to help farmers to settle back in countryside instead of living poorly in the outskirt of larger cities.

To roughly sum up the Sufficient Economy ideas, I could state that it embeds some moral issues — such as how ‘to define what is sufficient for oneself’, thus being less dependent on global market ressources values — and some sustainability target — such as ‘preserve the soil and better manage the water flow in order to better produce organic food’. From an ‘farang’ (i.e. a Westerner) point of view, it nails down to diversify the production types and combine plants, in order to gather and ensure a living. So what? How come farmers don’t know these basics?

In Thaïland like in any other part of the world that was, or still remains, rural, centuries of what we call traditions piled up a large amount of knowledge to better manage the community’s life. As for farmers, having some chickens and vegetable garden for them, next to some cattle, crop field and orchard had become a basic knowledge. The farmer could then for instance recycle waste, collect seeds and have natural fertilizer. And in Thaïland like in any other place where farming has turned into agriculture business, this knowledge has somehow been lost.

In Western Europe, what we name the ‘green revolution’ happened shortly after the WWII. At that time, western governments and banks have encouraged farmers to upgrade their equipment by giving them access to loans for them to buy tractors and more land. Going for mono-culture on a larger scale, farmers could no longer handle by themselves the process and had to relay on machine, on artificial fertilizer and seeds suppliers in order to meet the larger amount they then had to produce. By changing scale, they also changed their work, they specialized, from farmers to agriculture business owners. And their number decreased ; from more than 50% of the french working population at Ford’s time down to 2% a century later. In Thailand, rural population still accounts for around 60% of the working population.

Just a couple of decades after the ‘green revolution’, former farmers are now dependent on global stock markets to define the price of their production, and on global corporation to estimate the cost of their labor. In other words, the machines, the loans and the supply chain did not always help them to live better. Instead, they have become a piece of a larger production process from which they were now dependent. Ford’s system.

In Thailand, the rubber production sector did experience some crisis when the raw material price went down, and the King’s project did gain some more traction again. The royal projects — or like the Transition model, the Colibri or the SAFER I know of in France — aim at teaching more sustainable ways both for the environment and for the farmer’s community.

Interestingly, and similarly to what I encountered in the emerging collaborative economy and other similar initiatives, the Sufficient Economy works at a household scale. It is not ment to scale up and become a multi-billion corporation. The learning centers enable average people to learn how to manage a small scale production space. Moreover, these training centers will remain resource centers for them and also a way to connect with other places following the Sufficient Economy ideas. A bit like the Peer-to-Peer Economy or the Collaborative Economy aim at ‘putting the initiative of the economical life into the hands of the civil society’.

But how could it be possible to sustain the level of comfort of our modern lifestyle with an agriculture based society? Shall we all go back to live a traditional rural life and give up our modern lives?

3. Combining Taylor and tailored

Regarding the king’s project, the Sufficient Economy, it appears to me to be neither modern nor traditional. It doesn’t bloom from traditional ways of thinking by the fact that he and his team set up some contemporary knowledge and know-how for farming, based on scientific R&D and overseas knowledge. And it doesn’t leads to modern lifestyle by the fact that it does encourage people to find their sufficiency level rather than aiming at scaling up their business. It sound similar to Bauwens’ words of ‘scope, not scale’. But from a French perspective, where you must be either traditional either modern, it is quite confusing at the first sight.

When visiting India for the first time in 2012, I remember witnessing what looks to me as the transition between tailored goods and taylorism mass produced goods. For instance, while in the western world we are provided a wide range of prêt-à-porter clothes and we somehow end up dressing up in a quite uniform way, in India people still go and buy tailored clothes for which they choose the shape, the cloth, color and the pattern. Even if tailors may have a quite large shared database of shared designs, people would go for the conventional one and eventually, the crowd will as well dress up in a quite uniform way.

Those are two different paths though, two different systems of producers and supply chains. One owned and vertical, the other one shared and horizontal. Similarly, I could whiteness in India locally built buses and industrially assembled coaches. The price of goods will depend on the infrastructure cost and the labor cost ; while the first one shall decrease, the second one is ment to rise. To keep the price of goods on the same level, industries will create new versions of that range of good in order to finance the production line and credit the investors. The price of tailored goods will more likely reflect the skills of the craftsman, tools and technology investment blending within it.

From the Sufficient Economy projects, while I am expecting to see a new post-fordism model, it turns out to be more a redefinition of what it means to live well — sufficiency — and how to built a system to make it sustainable — an economy. The sufficient economy is rather close from what economist name the ‘subsistance economy’, local and not scalable, creating community wealth that is not money driven.

But compared to the integrated Fordist model, I would argue that at the age of online communities, the collaborative grid of contributors — local, shared, horizontal — appears asan alternative to the production lines of corporations — productivist, owned, hierarchical.

4. Peers turning Off Grids into Open Grids

In Ford’s vision, the one benefiting from the progress is the society, not the individual. May it be work conditions, car accident or alienation, as Virilio states , the worker-consumer is just one of the collateral damages.

Instead, in the Peer-to-peer economy, the idea is that the beneficiary is the individual himself and his community. They are the share holders. Up to a certain scale, they become contributors and remunerate contributions.

Nevertheless, some large services like Uber or AirBnB seem to end up concentrating wealth and power in such a way that neither the individual nor the community do own his future.

The Peer-to-Peer Economy gather a bunch of new productive communities. Not that there were none before ; coop, association, or even corporation are in a way productive communities themselves. But local communities like the Turtle Car in Ghana , or online ones like WikiSpeed, work as ‘open air factory’. Or in the financial domain, complementary money like the Wir in Switzerland or crowd founding services like KickStarter . Or like the network of Royal Project farms, the web of fablabs and makerspaces, and online open source ressources like Open Desk or Open Source ecology, the enduser is not only a downloader but also a contributor. Or in food distribution like ParkFoodSlopCoop, where customers contribute 3h/month to get better price on local organic products. All these community based industries are becoming a source of interest in the way they may create and distribute wealth outside the existing market, wealth that is not only money.

To use the image of the electric and service based car, the customer might become something more than a customer, but a contributor ; local energy provider, car sharing provider, carpooling driver, delivery man, and so forth. Each of his activities are targeted at the ‘community of contributors’ more than at a ‘global market’. This is one aspect that make these services attractive, because peers regain part of the power on how to make a living. But no matter how radical these communities may sound at first, none of them are aiming at living ‘off grid’. The resilience idea they carry lead them to rethink a ‘open collaborative grid’.

Of course I don’t have the solution to how to save the automotive industry. Nevertheless, it seems interesting to see emerging these ‘open grids’, collectively owned grids over patented grids that are supply chains. As if nowadays, thanks to education level and digital tools, we may rethink the city as a ‘shared platform’ — like Chesky states.

5. The ingredients of our future

To conclude, I would say that ‘efficiency’ new technologies bring along cannot only be about ‘productivity’. The wealth of society are based on many other indicators, including how distributed it is. In that sense, ‘Grids’ stand for the way governance, contribution and remuneration are organized : horizontal network of contributors over work division, connected communities of individuals over purely consumer society, open and shared knowledge over patented and owned production processes.

When we say that the Fordism was a ‘revolution’, I wander whether there has ever been a ‘revolution’. As is it impossible to define a proper frontier between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’, like with any other new technologies, when spreading they just blend into the present time. ‘We have never been modern’ wrote Latour, we are just constantly renewing together with our peers what constitutes our common ‘traditions’.

Nevertheless, there is no way back ; no one can decently ignore how Ford succeeded to embody Taylor’s idea and a consumer society vision. But rather than a ‘revolution’, it is more like a new ‘ingredient’ in our traditions. An ingredient that blends and that we cannot take out of the way we now look at the world. An ingredient that slowly took over other traditional flavors and local spices to become the fondation of our new shared vision of the world. It has become part of our tradition in a way.

If Fordism was an ingredient a century ago, what are new ingredients we can collect from the emerging peer-to-peer economy? Tools such as the Internet or the Open Source knowledge? Social organizations such as horizontal contribution? Ideas such as Sufficiency? Perception such as the limited stock of the biosphere?

It’s up to us to choose the ideas we want to embody within our traditions.