It is a commonly-held truism that technology is “neutral” and that it is the use we put it to that makes it good or bad. This ignores the reality that some technology is more accessible than others. Consider the printing press. A. J. Liebling’s famous quote from The New Yorker that “Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” makes point. I might also add, “owns a press and and has a large distribution network”, but you get the idea. Let us also consider the technology of large-scale irrigation. Originally developed in Mesopotamia, this technique demanded large, complex networks of canals to move the water to where it was needed. These canals, cut in the rich aluvium laid down by the Tigris and Euphrates, needed constant upkeep by gangs of workers. Managing this system required the development of the world’s first complex bureaucracies.

And here we come to a point once made by technology critic Jerry Mander: technology is not neutral, he argues, because certain technologies favor certain kinds of political structures. We’re not talking liberal versus conservative here, but political structures that are highly centralized versus more distributed, smaller, and local. Centralized bureaucracies demand enough concentrated power to impose their will on the areas they control. This holds for both large-scale irrigation and newspaper or publishing house printing presses.

In the case of presses, however, recent history shows what can happen when a once centralizing technology becomes available to more people. In the mid-80’s the Macintosh first made “desktop publishing” possible, even though it was more a case of “desktop typesetting and layout” might have been a better name for it. The “publishing” part was in place thanks to the Xerox machine, but it allowed anyone with a desktop computer and a laser printer to produce documents that looked professionally typeset–once some of the basic understanding of page design found its way into the general population.

This minor revolution continued with the development of blogs, podcasts, internet radio, text messaging, peer-to-peer file transfer, print-on-demand books, and related technologies. The result is that people with good ideas (or at least popular ones) can now compete at least on a small scale with big media and big publishing. Not everyone is happy about this, perhaps because it is now harder for large media outlets to push bad journalism on their audience. This is not to say that they don’t still generate industrial quantities of BS, it’s just not as easy for them to get away with it and the declining market share for newspapers and major news networks is due at least in part to this downward migration of the technology to publish. But the less obvious effect of this is that political power that attends the control of information is redistributing itself. I see various efforts by major suppliers of internet access to compromise net neutrality or lawsuits or legislation brought by people in power and aimed at curtailing the free speech of bloggers as an attempt to stem this hemmoraging of clout.

If you are at all web savvy, most of the above constitutes a review. The theme of the redistribution of political power driven by downwardly migrating technology is, I will argue, starting to manifest itself in other technical arenas. I will further argue that this is a very, very good thing.

But let’s move outside the realm of information technology for a moment. Other technologies are moving downward and spreading out. For example:

Microcontrollers. These are computers on a single chip, nestled on a small circuit board. “So what?” you may ask. These computers are relatively inexpensive, easy to program, and can be tasked to perform all kinds of tasks, both simple and complex. They can twinkle an array of LEDs in a piece of clothing in a pleasing pattern, or they can govern the behavior of a system of machinery or coordinate the acquisition of data from a suite of sensors hanging from a home-made high-altitude balloon. Microcontrollers have been around for some time, but they have not always been the most approachable of technologies. Now companies like Arduino are making it possible for just about anyone to start playing with these things. The Maker community has embraced microcontrollers and done some remarkable things with them.

Grid Beam. This is not so much a product as a way of thinking about small-scale engineering and prototyping. It involves the use of components that resemble the pieces of an Erector Set, which means you can construct a bewildering array of items and, if need be, change the design on the fly. Grid beam can be used to build furniture, storage units, vehicles, frames for machinery, support alternative energy projects… just about damn near anything. (Disclosure: I recently wrote a review of a new book on this subject How to Build With Grid Beam, soon to appear in The Citizen Scientist). The significance is that this system makes it extremely easy for one inventor to convey a design to another by just sending a few photographs. This makes it possible for a design to quickly make its way to a large number of people.

Grid beam is also very inexpensive because you can disassemble old projects and reuse the components to build something new. This factor alone makes grid beam a key element of what might be called “desktop engineering.”

3D Printers or “Fabbers”. These are machines that are just like a printer, except they lay down layer after layer of material and gradually build up small objects in three dimensions. These objects can be anything renderable in plastic (metal is still too complex and expensive for small scale operations, but stay tuned), based on a computer file giving the dimensions and features. It is possible, in other words, to undertake a limited form on “desktop manufacturing”. There are open source versions of this technology out there now; for about $500 you can get the pieces needed to build one of these things in your garage or basement. At the very simplest form, you get a packet of plastic parts and a CD-ROM with some software. You take a computer, load the software, print out the instructions for building the machine out of scrap bits of whatever plus the specialized plastic parts. And once your machine is working, the first thing you do is have it make two more sets of those specialized plastic parts. One to use as spares for your machine, and another to give to a friend along with a copy of the CD. In a very real sense, this is a machine that can kinda, sorta make copies of itself.

Taken to a higher level, this technology could revolutionize much of our culture. On-site fabrication at the home or neighborhood level removes the need for shipping anything that could be made on a fabber. It allows users to spread ideas for new devices and products in ways that used to be limited to things like freeware or shareware. And speaking of software, we can’t conclude this list without mentioning:

Linux: Actually, I’m using Linux as a catch-all phrase for open-source software in general. Although Linux has not quite toppled the towers of Microsoft as some had expected (or hoped), it is a viable alternative to the stodgy, exasperating, crudeness that is Windows (does it show that I prefer Macs?). Linux is a powerful, robust, and FREE operating system with software that can do just about anything, and it has spawned an unimaginable plethora of applications and ideas. The open-source model is finding its way into all kinds of endeavors, from Wikipedia to “open source warfare” (for another time, perhaps). It’s an effective, though unlikely, model that is changing the world.

And all of these technologies (among many others I could probably name), they are flattening hierarchical political structures.

Will massive, top-down political structures go away entirely? No, I doubt it. There will always be those who need that kind of Grand Pooh-Bah presence in their lives. But they will no longer be the only option. Small scale, healthier, saner communities can grow up around these softer, smarter, more exact and humane technologies.