I am a producer, but in order to produce, I am also a consumer of raw and semi-raw materials.

Often, I can recycle those raw materials (I pick up used instruments and audio gear, I repair old computers) or I will soon be able to do so (I want to get a grinder and an extruder for turning failed prints in to new filament, for example.)

We live in an age of abundance. There are millions of blank CDs and DVDs out there. We could stop making them for a while, and be okay with the overstock.

But eventually, the Overstock won't be enough.

We need to be able to make CD-Rs in our basements. We need community owned CPU factories.

The Raspberry Pi enables me to make All Kinds! Of Neat Things! but it depends on an international shipping infrastructure and the goodwill of several corporations.

We need a community made pi. We need a #comrade64

But see, even that leaves out the fact that current computer chips come out of a massive industry of mining and manufacturing.

There is so much money changing hands. And so many precious and valuable resources that we are running out of. And the human cost is enormous. Even if we manage to get a community/public owned chip foundry, we're left relying on and exploiting the existing capitalist infrastructure for collecting raw materials. (Think of the human cost.)

And we've made So Many of these things already. How many of you have more CPUs than people in your home? (Most of you, if not all of you.)

I have my laptop, two tablets, my phone, my server, my projector, my TV, my gameboy, the router, my microwave, and even my coffee maker has a CPU in it, etc.

Not to mention the dozens of discarded machines I've adopted. The Pentium 4, with it's 4GB of ram that only gets booted when I need to test something on Windows XP.

We throw away cell phones all the time. I probably have four or five that are 5-7 years old.

Old android devices that are hardly good for anything anymore, just gathering dust in a drawer.

And Cellphone recycling? It's a joke. So much human labor, so many places for people to get hurt, or to get it wrong.

The Social revolution will require CPUs. Will require computers. Will require technology. But we're going to have to find new ways to do those things. (And that won't be easy!)