Shared Automation Infrastructure as a Local Techno-Commons
Discussion
Carlos Perona:
"Shared centres co-owned by local businesses could still operate as private rental firm for outside businesses. In fact, this would make them more financially self-sustaining and would benefit the local economy, as firms move from lease-paying participants to co-owners and acquire a claim on residual value and on surplus rental income from non-owners/non-coop members. In addition, technician, operator, safety and other jobs created at the centre valorise that local economy.
Automation infrastructure, including of robots and software, thus becomes a local commons, not a remote platform extracting subscription fees from the local economy. We reinvent the commons, in a sense, and connect local identity to local property-owning enfranchisement even as we transition away from our addiction to importing foreign labour, with its identity-corroding effects. The principle according to which to be a member of a community must entail being a co-owner of that community (which I have explored elsewhere in Towards an Embodied Citizenship) finds a modern expression, one which naturally distributes the wealth created by automation in a given sector and region among locals organically connected to it (without need of centralized government tax-and-redistribution).
Another expression of this principle, of course, involves that other great technological advancement of our age, A.I., which should be open-source, fragmented, and re-trained on national and personal data, able to run offline on affordable hardware, rather than as a centralized subscription service owned by a foreign Cloud-capitalist class (see my essay Algorithms and Egregores). The same argument applies to large Cloud platforms in general, which, at present, suck liquidity out of the national economy even as their use becomes ubiquitous and indispensable for many businesses (see Big Tech’s Parasite Class).
Apart from reducing reliance on migrant labour, then, automation ought to ultimately increase local purchasing power in precisely those (rural and tourism-dependent) regions where investment in advanced infrastructure and technology tends to lag, that is, rural and tourism dependant regions, as well as in urban centres. In terms of political messaging, this marries immigration restrictionism to that ever-more prominent concern over wage stagnation and rising tide of economic populism. Identity not merely as what excludes others, but as what includes you.
As a conscious return to once widespread communal property arrangements, these initiatives express a recurring yearning in the collective political imagination: the desire to return to past forms in new ways. “Archeo-futurism,” the Japanese communist thinker Kojin Karatani’s “Mode D,” the “neo-retro,” and so on. As such, they should pay close attention to what features made land and infrastructure commons sustainable over the generations. Perhaps the most exhaustive study of this was carried out by Elinor Ostrom in her “Governing the Commons,” who identified several design principles, among which is the need for a clear in-group/out-group distinction: Only members of a community should have access to community property and enjoy a say in it how that property is managed. It is also the case that generational rootedness and common descent generally predict attachment. Here, identity and concern for demographic security meet the concern for widespread and communal ownership.
“Automation First” serves as a tangible policy expressing the principle that to be a member of a community (including a nation) should entail owning a piece of it: technological advancement or economic forces do not shape human community and remake our identities, but are subordinated and integrated into these identities."
(https://europos.substack.com/p/automation-first-making-remigration)