Kevin A. Carson - The Desktop Regulatory State

For most of the past two hundred years, the trend has been toward increasing capital outlays for most forms of production. The cost of the basic capital equipment required for productionthe mass-production factory, the large printing press, the radio or TV stationwas the primary justification for the large organization. The economy was dominated by large, hierarchical organizations administering enormous masses of capital. And the astronomical cost of production machinery was also the main justification for the wage system: production machinery was so expensive that only the rich could afford it, and hire others to work it.

In recent decades weve seen a reversal of this trend: a shift back from expensive, specialized machinery to inexpensive, general-purpose tools. Although this is true of both material and immaterial productionas attested by the recent revolution in garage-scale CNC machine toolsit was true first and most dramatically in the immaterial sphere.

The desktop computer is the primary item of capital equipment required for entering a growing number of industries, like music, desktop publishing and software design. The desktop computer, supplemented by assorted packages of increasingly cheap printing or sound editing equipment, is capable of doing what previously required a minimum investment of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the words of Yochai Benkler: declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the worlds populationon the order of a billion people around the globe.(Of course since that passage was written the proliferation of cheapening smartphones has probably expanded the latter figure to include over half the worlds population.)

The growing importance of human capital, and the implosion of capital outlays required to enter the market, have had revolutionary implications for production in the immaterial sphere. In the old days, the immense outlay for physical assets was the primary basis for the corporate hierarchys power, and in particular for its control over human capital and other intangible assets. In many information and culture industries, according to Benkler, the initial outlay for entering the market in the days of broadcast culture was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars or more.

Since the introduction of the mechanical press and the telegraph, followed by the phonograph, film, the high-powered radio transmitter, and through to the cable plant or satellite, the capital costs of fixing information and cultural goods in a transmission mediuma high-circulation newspaper, a record or movie, a radio or television programhave been high and increasing.

The broadcast era media, for instance, were typified by high-cost hubs and cheap, ubiquitous, reception-only systems at the end.... [P]roduction in the information and entertainment industries was restricted to those who could collect sufficient funds to set up a hub. In other words, as the saying went, freedom of the press was great so long as you could afford to own a press.

The networked information economy, in contrast, is distinguished by network architecture and the [low] cost of becoming a speaker.

The first element is the shift from a hub-and-spoke architecture with unidirectional links to the end points in the mass media, to distributed architecture with multidirectional connections among all nodes in the networked information environment. The second is the practical elimination of communications costs as a barrier to speaking across associational boundaries. Together, these characteristics have fundamentally altered the capacity of individuals, acting alone or with others, to be active participants in the public sphere as opposed to its passive readers, listeners, or viewers.

Today most people in the developed world, and in a rapidly growing share of the developing world, can afford to own a press.

In the old days, the owners of the hubsCBS News, the Associated Press, etc.decided what you could hear. Today you can set up a blog, or record a podcast, and anybody in the world who cares enough to go to your URL can look at it free of charge (and anyone who agrees with itor wants to tear it apartcan provide a hyperlink).