Means of production

Perhaps the most important conceptual prop for postcyberpunk's deliberate conflation of digital rights with civil rights – that which opens up the post-scarcity premise in a way both novel and eerily plausible – is the cross-breeding of free-software principles and ethics with the technological novum of nanofabrication. The basic idea of a Clarke's Law device that could magically assemble material objects out of thin air is itself, of course, not a new one; the post-scarcity techno-utopia has been a staple trope of sf since the Golden Age. But the development of real-world nanotechnology late in the twentieth century lent some immediacy to the premise, providing a new theoretical basis for thinking about how such machines might actually function, and about what their socioeconomic and political impacts might realistically be.

The first major attempt to develop a direct link between the nascent science of nanotech and on-demand manufacturing applications was also among the first sf novels to be hailed as properly ‘postcyberpunk.’ Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age (1995) portrays a late twenty-first century economically and geopolitically transformed by the ‘Feed’: an infrastructural network that delivers streams of individually sorted molecules to ubiquitous public and private ‘matter compilers’ programmed to assemble the raw materials into useful objects. While such products are made available free of charge, the social effect of their availability is not revolutionary but profoundly conservative; the architecture of the Feed network intentionally mirrors, and in a very real sense undergirds, the hierarchical organization and the global hegemony of the neo-Victorian civilization which controls it. Against this top-down Western model of systems engineering and social control, Stephenson opposes the subversive emergent technology of the ‘Seed,’ a nanofabrication protocol that operates independently of any external grid, courting Singularity by extricating nanotech manufacturing from the grip of neo-Taylorist command-and-control systems.