LostNotFound said:
He's right there, modern chip fabs cost billions to set up and use the most advanced tech on the planet. Basically because they are now manufacturing products with features on the scale of 100 billionths of a meter, and you need these products to make your humble desktop PC work.
You can't just knock that sort of thing up in a workshop - the tech requirements are quite incredible. You can however put together the already-manufactured components - cpu, memory, cdrom, etc - to make a PC in your bedroom. Maybe the difference is causing confusion?
It was me who pointed out that I put together my own PC. The point was not that chips themselves aren't complicated to make, but that a PC itself is a combination of many, many small processes which are already split up between competing companies across continents - and at least part of the assembly process can be done at home. 10 years ago, putting a PC together at home would have been pretty formidable, 25 years ago, no chance. The idea, which it appears I didn't get across very well, was that although technology may require centralisation in one direction, it can also lead to decentralisation in another.
Anyway, neither myself nor Bernie Gunther have argued that everything needs to be done on a small scale, just that it should be done on the smallest scale possible. If the smallest scale possible is fucking huge, then there's no reason why it couldn't be co-ordinated democratically.
Outside of chip manufacture, which I'm quite happy to accept requires big plants, most large concerns are that size due to economies of scale - not because they need to be.
If you look at all the waste of resources involved in UK supermarket distribution networks - which are based on selling food as far from it's source as possible, as old as possible, in order to utlise cheap labour (like cutting southern European salads, in West Africa, for sale in Northern Europe), you'd be mad to suggest that kind of model has any benefits outside the framework of capitalism.
Another example of potential decentralisation from high levels of technology is in that Loren Goldner article I posted; potential of using satellite phones widescale in countries with no telegraph cable. The technology is far more complicated, but if applied on that scale might use far less resources to implement, would be much quicker to set up, etc. etc. It requires satellites of course, and more technology in the phones, but weighed up against hundreds of thousands of miles of cabling, often to remote locations...
