Liberty Starts At Home ( Part V ) Technology, Community Education, Standards

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This is part V of a serial publication of my Essay, "Liberty Starts At Home--- Secure People Make Secure Community. In the previous posting, we discussed community health care, particularly among the lower working class. In this posting we discuss issues with outside control of technology and education.

 

The most important aspect of technology is that the local community understand and be able to maintain its own infrastructure free of outside control. If a community cannot comprehend, create, or maintain the technology required in its daily life, outside forces can, intentionally or not, control the local economy and disrupt it at will. The local availability of tools and the education required to use them defines the industries in which local workers can participate. This can be as basic as access to reading and writing limitting the advancement of post-civil war blacks to the United States' current dependency on foreign chip manufacture and foreign oil.

 

Sources of energy are important considerations here but can be approached from two directions: the community taking control of outside energy sources required for their operation (imperialism in the Middle East) or the community adapting its technology to fit available resources (domestic ethanol, biodiesel, coal, solar, etc, or conservation and efficiency improvements). The second option, that of adapting local technology, is more stable in the long term than military or economic conquest.

 

Even if tools and energy sources are available and cheap, they are useless without the education required to deploy them. When community members must travel for education, only those who can afford it can be educated. Further, someone from the community who is educated elsewhere may or may not come back

and the expertise may never be integrated into the local economy. Communities with local education opportunities retain and amass the knowledge needed to increase the stability and prospects of the whole. Going back the example of Reconstruction-era blacks, many communities of freed slaves banded together to create local schools and share knowledge. They could not teach what no one knew, but at least everyone in the community had access to the sum of its knowledge. Anyone who returned with outside knowledge raised the bar for the entire community.

 

The modern equivalent of these communal schools is the Adult Education Center which appears in many cities either as an University extension or religious ministry. Members of the local community teach other members of the local community everything from computer skills to cooking. In the countryside, craft circles, agricultural societies (e.g. a beekeepers association) and agricultural extensions fill this niche. As a whole, however, these efforts are funding starved, short on volunteers, and made up mainly of the older

generations.

 

Further, many critical skills, such as automobile maintenance, are deliberatly made difficult to acquire. A vintage Volkswagon Beetle, for instance, was designed for end-user maintenance. This is not the case with a modern Ford Topaz. Not only is the technology more complex, but manufacturers attempt to patent or copyright computer interfaces to their maintenance systems to stifle end-user repairs. A secure community exerts pressure on manufacturers to produce maintainable and standards conforming tools, but this only works when the community is otherwise strong enough to say "No."

 

Mechanization is often a death knell to small business in any community. Increasing dependence on tractors, for instance, destroyed and is still destroying many small farms. Dependence on a tractor requires a large capital investment, then creates a dependency on foreign fuel, parts, and depending on local capability, maintenance. Fluctuations in any of these things can destroy a farm, usually by forcing default on the loans which made the purchase of the tractor possible in the first place. Large commercial operations get enough use out of a tractor to quickly pay off its investment and they have the resources and clout to affect the pipeline of parts and fuel. A horse, while less efficient and having its own trade-offs, is locally produced and locally maintained, generally fueled by local resources.

 

Many times local regulations can force businesses to mechanize against their will. Dairies outside Seattle Washington, for instance, are required to have stainless steel milking equipment which costs tens of thousands of dollars, all in the name of public health. Many small dairies which have been around for decades have wooden equipment which can be locally produced and maintained. These dairies do not have enough animals that tens of thousands of dollars for equipment could ever be paid off. Large dairies, which benefit from economy of scale, buy the equipment and force their smaller competitors out of

business.

 

It stands to reason therefore that communities intent on preserving small business must be very careful in regulating technology lest they hand large corporations, generally not locally owned, effective monopolies. Regulation always carries a non-trivial cost which must be balanced against legitimate public needs. Generally, outcome based standards ("There must be less than n parts/million of a certain contaminant.") are better than technology based regulation ("You must have steel components.").

 

In summary, then, a secure community must be able to provide its own educational resources, must rely primarily on locally produced technology or energy, and must force outside suppliers to produce maintainable and standards conformant tools. A community can only wield this kind of influence, the power to say "No" to vendors, if it is secure otherwise, or willing to suffer through a painful transition.