[ 2024-05 ]
{Originally published as part of my RISD thesis project One of One of a Kind}
Underlying this work from the beginning has been a vague belief of mine that the tools of the post-Fordist network society we live in (software of all kinds and the internet) are leading to a decentralization of many of the structures that make up the modern world. As the production of cultural artifacts is democratized through digital technologies, people will become less and less willing to tolerate universalizing institutions whose values are mismatched with the particularities of their lives. Through the research I’ve done for this project, looking into the Middle Ages, the Arts & Crafts Movement, along with more contemporary thinkers like Ivan Illich, Christopher Alexander, and Jaron Lanier, I’ve come to believe this decentralization is ultimately a largely good and necessary development, a potential undoing of many problems that have grown alongside industrial globalization. It ultimately means more creativity, more agency, more equal distribution of the creation of culture.
In 1911, in a series of articles for Vanity Fair titled “The New Renascence”, G. K. Chesterton laid out his vision for Distributism — a social philosophy that advocated for the widest possible distribution of ownership of the means of production and a return to a more local, human scale society. It was a dual critique of capitalism and socialism as two sides of the same coin — a centralization of power and agency, either in industrial corporations on the one hand, or in the government and large public institutions on the other. Chesterton, grounded in a Catholic understanding of personalism and subsidiarity, thought society had become too industrial, overbearing, and worst of all extremely boring. Distributism never quite caught on, and the next century has seen power and agency become more centralized than ever in global institutions, corporations, and the governments of dominant nations.
The new digital tools I’ve been focusing on in this work are leading to some interesting experiments that are trying to head in the opposite direction. The maker movement along with open design and tools like the 3D printer have been trying to decentralize our manufacturing base. The crypto/Web3 movement is centered around tech that enables digital ownership, which has led to a slew of experiments in community-owned Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs. NounsDAO, an NFT project started in 2021 in part by a pseudonymous RISD grad known as All Seeing Seneca, has funded online public infrastructure projects, short films, esports events, and many other projects. It operates from a shared treasury, which at one point had nearly $50 million in it, all governed by the collective vote of its members.