Spontaneous Shields: A Postcapitalism Story
In the early days of the pandemic, back around when the first lock-downs started, there was a gross shortage of personal protective equipment. We can all recall the images of emergency-room doctors having to wash and reuse disposable masks, and nurses wrapping each other in garbage bags. This was the harbinger of the various other shortages to come, as just-in-time supply chains failed and the invisible hand of the free market was caught setting fire to dumpsters behind the gym.
The market — as we have learned — is not responsive enough to absorb sudden changes in priority. But fortunately other groups were there to take up the slack.
The members of Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale California — a non-profit community maker space — brainstormed what they could do to help on their Slack channel. In consultation with local hospitals they put together the digital plans for face shields that could be 3D printed and assembled using commonly-available materials.
This bottom-up grassroots effort pulled in more and more volunteers using their own 3D printers to mass-produce the masks. The parts, printed at people’s homes using inexpensive raw materials, were delivered anonymously to the Maker Nexus facility where volunteers assembled and delivered the masks to hospitals already overflowing with COVID-19 patients.
Some members, again working independently but coordinated by Slack, were able to begin injection-molding the parts by starting with the same digital model. This ramped up production even more.
Ultimately the volunteers made over 80 thousand face shields.
This story could be one of the founding myths of postcapitalism.
- Life-saving products were urgently needed and capitalist industry could not provide them because it wasn’t immediately profitable.
- Volunteers and hobbyists used the internet to self-organize and to form a consensus on an optimal solution.
- They shared and refined a digital file, performing many distributed experiments until it also evolved into a sufficiently optimal form.
- The file was widely copied and anyone with the capacity to print it joined the effort.
It was driven by need, organized using organic networks, designed using digital models and common standards, and realized by concerned volunteers.
This is a proof of concept of a postcapitalist economy.
Of course plenty of non-profit and volunteer organizations exist in order to do the necessary things that capitalism will not do — taking care of the extreme poor, providing emergency aid in famines and other disasters, etc. But those organizations typically follow the blueprint laid down by capitalism. The owners fund-raise to accumulate capital; they hire an org-chart full of executives and managers, recruiting volunteers to fill laborer positions; and they execute a top-down plan using centralized resources.
This effort was entirely different.
It exploited all the efficiencies of the digital ecosystem. Rather than a top-down organization they used social media to create a loose network of willing collaborators. Naturally people with more experience and with a greater talent for coordinating would step into leadership roles, but these relationships were arrived at cooperatively by mutual agreement.
Production was decentralized. The 3D printers involved were all different makes and models, and the feedstocks were of varying materials from multiple different vendors. The only thing that was the same for everyone was the digital files. The printers were all built to accept an open source standard for 3D models, and many of them used open source software to drive the print heads. The result was interchangeable parts of high quality.
No money changed hands at all.
This is the postcapitalist economy in miniature, and the Maker Nexus story shows us that it’s not only possible, but that it will emerge naturally when capitalism cannot deliver. Individuals will self-organize to volunteer to solve the problems that capitalism can’t using the tools offered by digitalization.
