Distributed Market Substitution

A condition whereby full open-sourcing of a product and its enterprise infrastructure results in substitution of centralized, proprietary production with distributed, open source, flexible, small enterprise. The goal is to regenerate the economy from one based on military and environmental destruction, where life support systems are being compromised in nature and human rights suffer on the social front. Currently, there is a disconnection between humans and their environment, and this disconnect is both a symptom and a cause of ongoing environmental destruction and the military economy. Both the military economy and environmental destruction are driven by fears of survival - which go back to material security of civilization.

Solving material security is a central theme of Open Source Ecology's work.

How does one justify the grand connection between ecocide and human rights issues - and the distributed economy? It is that by creating a distributed economy, we create an agile and adaptable system that strives for a balance between human activity and natural life support systems. See more about this topic at How Economic Localization Can Be the Greatest Measure for Safeguarding the Environment

The key enabling point is that open source affords unprecedented efficiencies that are not possible in traditional business models - due to the inefficiencies of Competitive Waste.

The idea is to distribute wealth more equitably by enabling thousands of producers to bring small enterprise back to communities. This can happen for most of light manufacturing, as well as a significant fraction of the primary sector + heavy industry. OSE is working on demonstrating this feasibility. Light manufacturing can happen in open source microfactories in communities.

The idea is that as barriers to entry are lowered, and product design is designed-for-flexible-fabrication in open source microfactories. To lower entry barriers, productization and marketing capacity is developed to assist in distributed production. If these capacities are developed, then a 1000x or more wider production of the specific good can occur. The logic behind this is that the most robust production is local production, as it creates unjobs in a decentralized + distributed scenario. The incentive behind this is enterprise startup in communities. This can happen as open design becomes available - as open source microfactory technology becomes available - and barriers to entry are lowered - such that the value chain shifts to efficiency (no competitive waste, no transportation, local and recycled materials). It is theorized here that global supply chains cannot compete with truly efficient local production because local production enables improved lifecycle stewardship.

Examples

• Global supply chain of shoes ($300B market) can be substituted by 300,000 local brands worldwide producing 3D printed shoes, each running a $1M/year operation.