A Free World - as in beer. Digitalization for Everybody: How robots, 3D Printers and new organizational models could bring us free things is a 2019 book, written by Daniel Barón de Oca, describing how free goods could be produced in the near future.
The book is divided in four parts, which present different concepts of the Incentive Based Circular Commons Production model.
In our present world, almost all goods and services are not available for free because they are regarded as scarce. But why things are scarce today? There are several different types of scarcity, and they require different strategies to be reduced, with the final goal to abolish scarcity almost completely. Key concepts are automation, a re-definition of labour and circular economies. At the end, the authors explain why our market-based economy currently isn’t designed to provide us non-scarce or free goods, so we have to look for an alternative path.
The emergence of the World Wide Web has brought us a couple of really free immaterial goods, the most well-known being free/libre software and free informative products like Wikipedia. Most of these things share a common organization and production model - Commons-based Peer Production. But it seems difficult to adopt this production concept to physical goods because of the need of materials and a production infrastructure. However, the first steps are already been made with the Open Design model and concepts like Fab Labs and Open Source Ecology.
There are a series of challenges to create a production infrastructure for free things. But we do not need to build it up everything at once. A modular concept, where every step of production can be built up separately can make this huge task much easier. A new breed of financial products based on the crowdfunding model could provide strong incentives to fund the infrastructure, and necessary human labour can be organized in a way where it becomes attractive to participate.
How can we condense these concepts to a roadmap to build up the Free World? The authors identify three phases leading from the initial liberation of knowledge, which already takes place in the Open Source movement, up to the free provision of all essential goods for human life. There are a series of problems that could make the process more difficult, but they are very probably solvable. At the end, the book presents ways for everyone to contribute to make reality this vision.
The book was originally written in Spanish and is/will be available in its original language (Mundo Gratis) and in German (under the name Zukunft Gratiswelt), in early to mid 2019. An English translation is planned for late 2019 or 2020.