Nanosocialism From Free Information and the Natural Commonwealth

In the broadest and most practical sense, nanotechnology is the manipulation of matter on a very small scale - a nanometre being 10^-9 metres. The utopian goal is the manipulation of atoms or molecules for the fabrication of products (molecular nanotechnology). The earliest ideas for nanotechnology were proposed in 1959 by Richard Feynman in his talk, There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom, with the term itself coined by Norio Taniguchi in 1974, of the Tokyo University of Science in the paper "On the Basic Concept of 'Nano-Technology'". An especially important popular science contribution was Eric Drexler's Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, published in 1986, and which has been followed up by a second edition as a free ebook in 2006, Engines of Creation 2.0.

There has been some succesful commercialisation of nanoscale products including the use silver nanoparticles as an antibacterial agent, nanoparticle-based transparent sunscreens, and carbon nanotubes for stain-resistant textiles and, in the broader sense, developments in molecular modelling have seen more advanced developments in the fields of computer-aided drug design. Further progress in the technology is expected to witness significant applications in medicine, electronics, and energy production. At the same time, concerns have been raised of environmental toxicity and even speculative doomsday scenarios, such as runaway self-replicating von Neumann machines. In 2004 the Royal Society wrote an influential report on Nanoscience and nanotechnologies: opportunities and uncertainties which covers many of these issues, with recommended appropriate regularity practices to account for such risks.

Whilst regulation through democratic authorities policy with expert advice is a necessary part of the most optimal treatment of nanotechnology, it is not a sufficient in itself as it does not deal with the issues around political economy. In a general sense, the current model of nanotechnology is one of democratic capitalism. This assumes social-democratic interventions for public regulative purposes but encourages private investment in research towards that provides patent ownership of discoveries. In many cases this includes the use of public funding to provide such private property rights, often under the guise of strategic investment in the 'national interest', which should be interpreted as the collective interest of the ruling class. Such a model of nanotechnology will improve the general state of wealth overall, but will do so in a sub-optimal manner.

An alternative is nanosocialism, derived from the term coined by David M. Berube in 1996. Berube argues from a perspective of a revolutionary and disruptive transformative technology of molecular nanotechnology. It does a very good job at describing some of the major issues which would confront the general logic of contemporary capitalism in such a situation. However the technology described remains a distant prospect and importantly, Berube only touches upon a transitional programme in terms of political economy. A stronger grounding of nanosocialism is actually offered in the most unlikely source of the roleplaying game supplement, Transhuman Space by David Pulver in 2002 which correctly identifies that a necesary precursor of nanosocialism is freedom of information, achieved through the "nationalisation" of intellectual property by "the state" with free distribution.

Redefining "nationalisation by the state" as "public ownership in trust", as the former has a more specific definition, there is much validity in such a scheme. In transition it should certainly be emphasised that the results of publically funded research should be released under a public license, which would allow for replication at the cost of information transfer, and would provide a springboard for the reallocation of resources currently wasted in replicated research, patent conflicts etc, used for monopolistic purposes which also resulted in vastly inflated consumer prices. But another aspect, overlooked by Pulver, is the role of natural resource ownership. It is a reality that some natural resource materials will be better than others for particular nanotechnological manipulation, as it is with any chemical or physical transformation. Thus different resources will command different prices which will induce inefficient and monoplistic speculative holdings. As these will be determined by variable market price, the usual mitigating proposal of land value taxation applies.

It is a combination a factors that can create the most optimal solution to both the current usage and potential future of nanotechnology. A regulatory environment to provide contingencies against negative externalities is certainly necessary in the existential sense. The use of public funding to provide research and with the results released under public license is also necessary for optimal development, as this will create positive externalities and improved resource allocation. Finally, the use of an LVT scheme to mitigate speculative hoardings of scare natural resources which would also act as to retard development. From contemporary improvements in leukemia and HIV designer drugs through to the optimistic possibilities of deriving goods straight from molecular manufacturing, the union of these approaches will provide the best result which can come under the term, "nanosocialism".