FABBING and the future

Fabbing, a.k.a. 3D printing, a.k.a. "rapid prototyping" is a tolerably well-known technology. The printer prints one layer of plastic at a time to create any shape you can design. It could be used to make simple things like glasses frames, toys, utensils, replacement parts for appliances, etc. I am really excited about using a rapid prototyper to make small sculptures. Yay!

Thanks to Logan for sending me this article.

It explains that in a number of years affordable fabbers will be available to average consumers. Yay! We can dissipate more electricity, use up more petroleum, create more non-biodegradable junk to fill up the world! That is, if the country isn't conquored by cyborgs, wiped out by global warming, disease, beelessness, etc...



The most exciting thing about fabbing is not mentioned in the article (of course, neither is the fact that these things will only be afforable to the very rich for a long while). That is the copyright issue. The article mentions a few practical applications, and one that seems rather silly because it relates to entertainment - the example given is to go to the Mattel website, download the content that instructs the fabber how to manufacture a Barbie doll, use a program to graft an image of some familiar person's face onto the Barbie, and print it out. That is all well and good, but it seems silly to pay for Barbie's design when I am making her myself. The design is just information, and information should be free. Practically, it should be super-easy to go onto a file transfer site, perhaps illegal, and download this information so as to avoid paying Mattel. And I can alter Barbie's anatomy... Along with mp3s, books, movies, and images, many small plastic objects will be pirateable. Horray for the end of copyright!

Fabbing also raises the issue of mass-production. I have been thinking a lot about how the mass-produced media (think NY TImes, evening news, NPR, etc.) results in shared experience, commonality, a sense of a cohesive culture. Despite the violent, cohersive aspects of mass media there are some positives - shared knowlege makes in-depth conversations possible, enabling national debate about timely issues. The internet does not function like this - it is decentralized - many media sources for many different individual interests. Products like toys, tools, and clothes are artefacts that convey information - perhaps they are more subtle than mass media, but they also can be a forum for commonality, or cohersion for that matter (Barbie being a good example). What happens when people pursue their own interests and do not develop a sense of commonality from mass media and products? For that matter, will people ever want to give up mass-produced objects? Isn't part of commodity fetishism the fact that products are all alike, look untouched by human hands, and are generally replaceable? Isn't that where the aura comes from?

Before mechanical mass-production people could churn out several of the same product, but it would invariably have some element of human touch, some individuality and therefore was an expressionistic object, a product of unalienable labor, and that is why we value such simple objects today as folk art. Most of the time people did not produce many of the same thing, but produced items only when they were needed for personal use. This required that people have diverse skills, and without written instructions and long-distance communications, the same basic problems were approached in many different ways, producing solutions that had great variety in functional form. There was great commonality in how each culture, separated in physical space, created similar objects.



My question is - what will post-industrial culture really look like? How will it function? If everyone has a fabbing machine they will be able to create their own individual designs, modify ones they find, or at least choose the one they like best. Perhaps there will be much more variety. But I doubt that people will learn how to use their hands, or create novel solutions to age-old problems when functional, satisfying products can be downloaded in a jiffy. What will happen to commodity fetishism - the product will be machine-produced, but not mass-produced. Seems like a new paradigm for sure! Will a loss of commonality mean a fractured culture? Will people be less interested in the fate of their fellow humans, their suffering, their needs, their opinins, their masterpieces? Will copyright every really die? And if so, how will artists, craftsmen, designers, writers, musicians, etc make money to live?

I think one of the answers that seems unmentionable has something to do with the potential ability of society at this point in history to provide enough food and products to meet everyone's basic needs. This is called post-scarcity and is rather an elephant in the room. The reason this kind of talk is taboo is because it doesn't make any sense within the context of the capitalistic system into which we have been cowed by communist-authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and contemporary crypto-fascism. The end of copyright logically comes at the same point in history as post-scarcity, but we are behind quite a bit here, so the innovations are coming out-of-phase. Perhaps our species is not capable of cooperating to end scarcity, but much of our new technology for sharing information is going to be rather out-of-context in our capitalistic world of false-scarcity, and this will naturally create conflict. We are going to have to address this in tandem with addressing copyright.

Steal from the rich! Give to the poor!