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.)

@vfrmedia There's no reason the people can't have microscopes and robots.

We just need to be able to get to that point.

Computers today are smaller and faster than they have ever been (this has been true every year for as long as there have been computers) but to what end?

What would it hurt if we made them a little bulkier? Or even a little slower?

@ajroach42 I'm aware of FOSS hardware makers in Australia working directly with their Chinese counterparts for more ethical hardware production (and indeed young Chinese who have entire electronics factories, robots and all, in their shared housing!)

It would not hurt at all if some computers were bulkier/slower especially such things as embedded systems dedicated for a single task, that are not required to go online directly and/or harvest data for marketers..

@vfrmedia See, that's super neat.

I want to see more of that.

I should spend some time poking around the FOSS hardware scene.

@ajroach42 unfortunately much is only discussed in Chinese (which alas I do not understand) and folk making many cool gadgets are also stuck behind Great Firewall and worried about Western copyright issues, but this Asian American chap explains a lot of the culture in his blog (these are much smaller scale factories than Foxconn etc).

https://www.bunniestudios.com/

For more "Western" projects (that you might want to start with) look at Sparkfun, Arduino etc..

@vfrmedia I'm pretty familiar with sparkfun, arduino, and adafruit. If I have components, I can make interesting hardware.

The question becomes: where do I get the components?

@vfrmedia I think maybe my point is becoming confused.

I can assemble an arduino, a recycled Nokia screen, and some switches in to a useful device.

I could make the switches myself, if I wanted. I don't think I could make the Nokia screen, but they are easy enough to find right now, and not hard to recycle.

Heck, even resistors and capacitors and what have you can be made by hand, with enough patience.

But I couldn't manufacture an arduino.

@vfrmedia I can't make flash memory, I can't make LCD screens, I can't make RAM.

Outside of huge factories, no one can.

I'm trying to figure out what, if any, of those components could be manufactured in a garage, or recycled out of existing components. Eventually this is going to matter.

@ajroach42 components from computers made up to mid 1990s are probably recyclable although recovering and reusing SMD components really is a challenge (although something CN manages)

Another factor is that very few of the semiconductors are made in USA or Europe any more (so skills how to make them are dwindling if not lost altogether)

@vfrmedia I guess, if we're going that route, what we need are modern motherboards (with access to USB, etc), and modern software for older x86 processors.

A 486 with 512mb RAM isn't going to be a 3D video rendering powerhouse, but if we could break it out of the rest of those ancient components, it could be a serviceable workstation.