The first part of the word (ephemeron) means temporary. Sarx means flesh(used in religion to mean the body of christ). So i dont get how you went from the one to the other.. 2011/10/27 Kevin Carson <[email protected]>

The following brain dump came to me as I was driving, and I'm keying it in here at the brew pub. I cc'ed this to Andy and Francesca, since it's sort of in their bailiwick. What I'd like help with is reducing this to a more succinct and coherent principle with fewer moving parts. And I'm especially interested in how it applies to distributed activist movements like OWS.

Paul Hawken and the Lovinses stated a general principle that when load-bearing infrastructures are built to handle the load at peak demand, about 80% of the unit cost comes from the added infrastructure that comes from the 20% increased usage that comes from the tiny fraction of the time when the infrastructure experiences peak load. They gave the specific example of home heating, where enormous savings could be achieved by scaling capacity to handle only modal usage, with additional demand handled through spot heating.

More generally, centralized infrastructures must be scaled to handle peak loads even when such loads only occur a small fraction of the time. And then they must amortize the extra cost, by breaking user behavior to the needs of the infrastructure.

At the opposite pole is distributed infrastructure, in which most of the infrastructural goods are distributed among the endpoints, relations are directly between endpoints without passing through a central hub, and volume is driven entirely by user demand at the endpoints. Since the capital goods possessed by the endpoints is a miniscule fraction of the cost of a centralized infrastructure, there is no incentive to subordinate end-users to the needs of the infrastructure.

The classic example is Bucky Fuller's own: the replacement of the untold millions of tons of metal in transoceanic cables with a few dozen one-ton satellites. The entire infrastructure consists of satellite dishes at the endpoints commuinicating -- via free, immaterial ether! -- to the satellites.

Likewise projected systems which replace the fiber optic backbone with satellite connections and last-mile meshworks.

Also the enormous infrastructure tied up in the civil aviation system's central hubs and batch-and-queue processing, as opposed to small jets flying directly between endpoints.

Another example is mass-production industry, which minimizes unit costs by running its enormously costly capital-intensive machinery at full capacity 24/7, and then requires organizing a society to guarantee consumption of the full output whether consumers want the shit or not -- what's called "supply-push distribution." If consumers won't take it all, you soak up surplus output by destroying it through a permanent war economy, sinking it into an Interstate Highway System, etc. -- or maybe just making stuff to fall apart.

The opposite of mass-production is distributed production on the Emilia-Romagna model, with the capital infrastructure distributed to the point of consumption and output geared to local demand. The transnational corporate model of outsourcing is an attempt to put this new wine in old bottles. It distributes the production facilities, but does so on the basis of local labor cost rather than the location of market demand. So it still relies on the centralized wholesale/retail infrastructure of warehouses on wheels/containerships, scaled to peak load, to transfer goods from the distributed production sites to the point of final consumption. The pure and adulterated distributed manufacturing model, OTOH, does away with this infrastructure by siting production at the last-mile network of consumption.

My last example, the one I suspect is more functionally related to distributed activism models, is the distributed model of stigmergic organization in Wikipedia or in open-source design as described by Eric Raymond. Individual contributions are coordinated entirely by endpoint users, coordinating their efforts with the finished body of work, without the intermediary of a centralized institutional framework as in old-line activist organizations.

BTW, what's a good word for the opposite of "ephemeralization"? Maybe something that riffs off of gnostic concepts like sarx/sarcos? If so, does this mean that Alfred Sloan was the Demiurge?

-- Kevin Carson Research Associate, Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Super-Empowered Individuals http://desktopregulatorystate.wordpress.com Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html

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