Cloning machine

[RedWorker]

How would the invention of a machine which can clone any object (food items included) affect capitalism and revolution? Suppose two scenarios, it could be restricted to big capitalists or get to customers with an affordable price.

[ckaihatsu]

Where does the source material (feedstock) come from, and how difficult / materially expensive would it be to produce?

Also how difficult / materially expensive would it be to produce the cloning devices themselves, and what would be the relations of production around their fabrication?

In the case that the means of cloning are monopolized, we would expect to see a decrease in price and increased availability as the technology gradually becomes de-monopolized (think phone service or broadcast television here), but the economic relationship would continue to resemble that of rentiership since people wouldn't be able to clone items for themselves.

If the cloning technology more-resembled today's 3D printing, then people *could* acquire their own machines and presumably the feedstock material wouldn't be too expensive (after some time).

Even with such household prowess, though, the proletarian revolution couldn't just be *sidestepped*, as you're alluding to, because the institution of private property would remain, and people would continue to be under duress to pay the expenses of rent, transportation, taxes, etc. Also anything that *couldn't* be readily cloned / 3D-printed would continue under proprietary control, for mass production and profit, and would effectively be a direct appropriation of wages -- especially if the items were regularly consumed on a mass basis, or 'socially necessary'.

[Loony Le Fist]

In order for a machine like this to underminine capitalism it would have to be capable of turning almost anything into anything else. Though it could be a two step process. A machine (or process) that breaks down waste material into a generic feedstock, then a machine (nanoassembler) that can be fed a blueprint and outputs a finished product. Eventually this could be scaled to a point where you have assemblers constructing other assemblers and dissassemblers. Something like this is an extreme threat to capitalism. As would be anything that could lead to post-scarcity. This very fact makes it unlikely to be developed under capitalism.

[ckaihatsu]

Also, as a matter of logistics, how would the *energy* for this machine be supplied -- ?

If it continues to be provided from industrial oligopolies then the economic relationship continues to be that of rentier-serf (wage-slave).

If people are able to provide sufficient energy for their own cloning machines themselves -- as from wind and/or solar -- then I agree that such technology would pose a direct threat to bourgeois interests since it would effectively undercut proprietary-ness, the way today's digital communications technologies inherently freely distribute limitless bits of information with negligible costs of duplication.

Whether it would or wouldn't be developed by capitalism's dynamics, I'll remind of this quote:


"We will hang the capitalists with the rope that they sell us."

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin

[tuwix]

How would the invention of a machine which can clone any object (food items included) affect capitalism and revolution? Suppose two scenarios, it could be restricted to big capitalists or get to customers with an affordable price.

Scenario #1: Nothing happens.
Scenario #2: Industry collapses. Massive unemployment and probable revolution.
Unfortunately the socialist revolution isn't only option there...

[PhoenixAsh]

The material basis of society would change and therefore the relationship to the means of production would change as well as the depending class structure.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Theres a cool old jacobin article about this https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/

[ckaihatsu]

The material basis of society would change and therefore the relationship to the means of production would change as well as the depending class structure.


This is inherently a contradiction, though -- there could *be* no class structure if there was no *material basis* for it -- an 'Internet of Cloning Things' would mean that no one *could* have any privilege over material acquisition any more, than anyone else, especially if the energy supplies for cloning were fully free and accessible.





Theres a cool old jacobin article about this https://www.jacobinmag.com/2011/12/four-futures/





[Money] is a form of status that depends on the material deprivation of others. It is therefore to be expected that even if labor were to become superfluous in production, the ruling classes would endeavor to preserve a system based on money, profit, and class power.


And this is *another* inherent contradiction -- 'profit' implies 'labor', so if labor is freed from any *compulsion* to labor, because the materials for life and living become freely available, then there would be no labor available to provide for the function of profit.





Given all these troubles, one might ask why the rentier class would bother trying to extract profits from people, since they could just replicate whatever they want anyway. What keeps society from simply dissolving into the communist scenario from the previous section? It might be that nobody would hold enough licenses to provide for all of their needs, so everyone needs revenue to pay their own licensing costs. You might own the replicator pattern for an apple, but just being able to make apples isn’t enough to survive. In this reading, the rentier class are just those who own enough licenses to cover all of their own license fees.


This part both assumes a totalitarian regime of intellectual property -- ridiculous in practice -- *and* it assumes that people wouldn't be able to afford the means of life and living, at some modest level, in a material environment of push-button material cloning.

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

He's hypothesizing a possible form of barbarism with your quote about money, materials for life have not become freely available due to the totalitarian regime of intellectual property you mentioned. As to the possibility for that regime, it does sound ridiculous at face value but its actually not all that hard to imagine.

Who manufactures this theoretical cloning machine? 1 firm with a patent? The state? Or would it be an open source piece of hardware? 3 different answers leading to three different societies, or rather 2 as the first would not be much of a departure from our own reality. The existence of these technologies alone does not mean anything to us, only our relationships to them which is exactly what the author is trying to explore with that article.

[PhoenixAsh]

This is inherently a contradiction, though -- there could *be* no class structure if there was no *material basis* for it -- an 'Internet of Cloning Things' would mean that no one *could* have any privilege over material acquisition any more, than anyone else, especially if the energy supplies for cloning were fully free and accessible.

Very well. I was under the impression that it was yet to be decided if it was freely available to everybody.

In that situation there would be a class shift like previous periods pivoting towards the reflection of the new relationship towards the means of production.

In the scenario that it would be freely and publicly available...then yes...it would be very possible that class society would seize to exist. But if skill and knowledge would be involved in replicating complexer things...this could also lead to a new hierarchy.

[ckaihatsu]

He's hypothesizing a possible form of barbarism with your quote about money, materials for life have not become freely available due to the totalitarian regime of intellectual property you mentioned. As to the possibility for that regime, it does sound ridiculous at face value but its actually not all that hard to imagine.


Well, you're equivocating here -- is a totalitarian regime over intellectual property worth imagining, or isn't it -- ?

Could a class-divided world society realistically / plausibly exist on the basis of a police state over (technologically freely duplicatable) digital goods, and freely-clonable material objects -- ?

I'll pause here to assert that the realm of digital goods would be inherently inseparable from the domain of clonable objects, just as digital 3D models for reproducible 3D-printing objects are today -- presumably whatever could be cloned would have a *digital specification* for such, and these digital analogues of materials would undoubtedly flow over the Internet of the future. (So, obviously, if one could somehow procure a digital model of a clonable object, one could *create* that object, given the machine, the feedstock material, and the required energy.)





Who manufactures this theoretical cloning machine? 1 firm with a patent? The state? Or would it be an open source piece of hardware? 3 different answers leading to three different societies, or rather 2 as the first would not be much of a departure from our own reality. The existence of these technologies alone does not mean anything to us, only our relationships to them which is exactly what the author is trying to explore with that article.


I'll less-than-subtly *blast* the premise of this way of thinking -- it's obviously from the all-too-common *philosophical* origins of rational thought, which are invariably biased to the *humanistic* side of the equation ('social relations'), to the negligence of the *material* factor ('means of production') that's inherently involved.

One firm with a monopolistic patent would *require* the state for the *enforcement* of this monopoly, and even then such a hold would hardly be secure, due to the inevitable diffusion of the technical means amongst the larger population, and the inevitable opening of the market to competition due to market competition, by definition.

And if there *was* a totalitarian-type police state to maintain a class division, over intellectual property, by force, this kind of authority would be proportionally undermined to the extent that intellectual property owners, of whatever individual patents, freely and intentionally put their own works into the public domain -- at a *minimum*. (Many other real factors would additionally cut against such monolithic control.)

This whole 'cloning machine' thought-experiment is valuable because it's essentially asking us to look at the technological side of things *only*, *independently* of social relations -- if the cloning machine itself was clonable (like some 3D printers of today), the feedstock material was freely accessible (since it, too, could be cloned from whatever inputs), and the energy for the production was free (wind and/or solar, etc.), then the only conclusion possible is that no one could ever leverage material ownership of the essentials of life and living, over anyone else. If it came to it, everyone could just freely clone weaponry as they saw fit, and the numbers themselves would play out, for a decisive socio-political conclusion of open-source *everything*.





Very well. I was under the impression that it was yet to be decided if it was freely available to everybody.

In that situation there would be a class shift like previous periods pivoting towards the reflection of the new relationship towards the means of production.

In the scenario that it would be freely and publicly available...then yes...it would be very possible that class society would seize to exist. But if skill and knowledge would be involved in replicating complexer things...this could also lead to a new hierarchy.


I'll respectfully take issue with this fallback position of yours of 'cultural capital' -- it's inherently problematic because it situates skill and knowledge in some kind of *idealistic* realm, where it's somehow limited to specific individuals only, as in a craft guild of old.

Today's and tomorrow's reality is / will be one of an 'information revolution', where even hallowed halls of *academia* have no proprietary advantage over any given person in society. Those who want to learn and do, in the direction of their own, uncoerced personal proclivities, will be intellectually able to do so, without any dependence on any intermediary.

So, in a nutshell, if cloning abilities were 'freely and publicly available' then 'skill and knowledge' would *not* be an issue whatsoever in replicating more-complex things, because as soon as either the *information* for that ability, *or* the unique *object* itself got into the hands of the public, then *anyone* could perform the same cloning step as the *creator themselves*, for the exact same result -- the unique material object.