Kevin A. Carson — The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (2010)
Carson traces how industrial capitalism’s dominance depended on historically specific conditions — state-backed intellectual property, subsidized transportation infrastructure, and regulatory capture — that artificially inflated the optimal scale of production and distribution. As those conditions shift (cheap microelectronics, open-source software, desktop fabrication, networked coordination), the efficiency gradient reverses: small-scale, distributed, low-overhead production becomes increasingly competitive.
Drawing on the history of the first industrial revolution, craft production networks, and the emerging open-source and maker movements, Carson argues we are entering a “homebrew” era in which the means of production are being progressively democratized. The parallels to Mumford’s neotechnic frame are explicit: the current technological moment favors decentralization as the paleotechnic moment favored centralization.
For OM: Carson provides the political economy argument that accompanies OM’s neotechnics thesis — distributed ledger technologies are not merely ideologically preferable but technologically adequate to the current production moment, which has fundamentally shifted away from the economies of scale that once justified centralized industrial organization.