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At last, Tolkien meets capitalism. By Tom Owad

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N THE LORD OF THE RINGS, J.R.R. TOLKIEN contrasts the bucolic "hobbit sense" of the Shire with the noxious industrialism of Mordor: "The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due. not a garden swollen to a realm: his own hands to use it, not the hands of others to command." Communal in structure, nonmechanical. and inhabited by individual craftsmen and farmers, the Shire clearly parallels preindustrial England. Its ravaging bears an epic similarity to the transformations that have taken place in our own world since the Industrial Revolution. As was abundantly clear in Tolkien's time, to control the means of production is to control life. Industrial capitalism placed this control in the hands of a wealthy elite: communism placed it with the state. Whether at the Carnegie Steel Company or the Lenin Steelworks, and whether the bullets came from the Pinkertons or the Red Army, the power over life and death did not rest with the individual but with a hostile external force. The distributists of the early 20th century rejected both visions. "Too much capitalism." wrote G.K. Chesterton, "does not mean too many capitalists, but too few." Drawing upon the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity put forth by Pope Leo Xlll's social encyclical Renim Novamm, the distributists sought a society where each individual provided both his own labor and his own capital The small garden of Sam Gamgee was the distributist ideal. Distributist principles took root all over the world, but the luxuries of the Industrial Revolution triumphed over the freedom of the homestead. A similar phenomenon occurred in the 1970s, with the introduction of Schumacher's economic treatise Small ft Beautiful and the back-to-theland move44

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ment. Urban idealists also found themselves illequipped and unprepared to deal with the hardships of living an essentially preindustrial agrarian life. Today, freedom and technology no longer stand in juxtaposition. A CNC lathe or milling machine can be built for $500. Raw materials can be prepared in homemade foundries. Solar power and wind turbines make it possible to live comfortably off the grid Open source software is ubiquitous, and hardware is following the same path. The pages of MAKE illustrate the countless sophisticated devices that can be built without a factory, The internet allows for worldwide collaboration on a level never before possible. Goods can be exchanged between individual craftsmen without the need for distribution networks and middlemen. Advancements in personal fabrication at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms hold the greatest promise. Their aim is to produce a personal fabricator that can manufacture anything from a doll to a precise replica of itself, The current MIT Fab Lab (see MAKE. Volume 01, page 23). which has been deployed in nine countries, is itself an impressive feat. The equipment can be assembled for S20.000: the software is open source and free. For the price of a new car, it's already possible to establish an effective personal fabrication laboratory. Tools such as these have the potential to personalize the Industrial Revolution — to place the means of production not in the control of select capitalists or of the state, but with every individual seeking to partake in the act of creation. Like the soil, the machine yields in response to the labor of our hands. Tom Owad (owadfS applefrttter.com) is a Macintosh consultant in York. Pa., and editor o< applefriUet com.

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