Reprap in wired blogs as an imaginary gadget

[blog.wired.com]

Bruce sterling has given the reprap something of a mauling in his blog on the wired site. Though he seems to make issue more with some of Adrian's more abstract stuff about Darwinian Marxism and gone to say from there that the whole project is just people being loud about a crappy lab experiment.

I'm pretty sure Mr Sterling just went and found the one thing on the whole site that most people wouldn't go with and used that as a basis of his entire refutation of the project. Mentioned nowhere are some of the fantastic parts built, or the fact it's still pretty early days yet we've still achieved replication more advance than any known project previously(at least that I'm aware of.

The thing is that the area of the site he seems to be quoting is from the philosophy page, not the technology basis ones. The fact that human influence on philosophy and society almost always come from technology for the last dozen millennial seems to be glazed over by Sterling(geography is important, and religion is the only other major force I see that humans create). The philosophy might be somewhat shaky to some(we'll put that aside, though the word metaphysical made me get a little worried) but the tech is what's most important, and he seems to just go right past that and say the entire project is nothing more than hubris from Adrian and co.

I'm not sure he refuted the project. At first blush it looks that way, but a second reading will reveal that he's mostly just quoting and has little to say of his own about it.

It may be that he feels like Adrian's words condemn themselves or it may be that he's just making sure that we get publicity from a much wider audience.

My overall reaction is to take the Hollywood stance, viz, there's no such thing as bad publicity.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

I agree. When I first read it he seemed to be bashing the goals of the project; however, if you read he post introducing his "imaginary gadgets" it puts a different spin on it.

IMO, I still think Sterling needs to have his journalism degree shoved into the shredder. I'm not really convinced that he's really projecting the potential of the RepRap; it feels like he wasn't even trying at all to write a real article.

But I'll be fair; it's just a blog and we're free to ignore it. It's the Internet--go take everything you read with a big ol' salt lick a-piece. Not much interests me regarding e-magazines, and Wired.com is at the bottom of the list.

Yeah, I dropped my subscription to Wired about 4 years ago. It's so 20th century. Like anybody even cares what some stupid journalist thinks.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/19/2009 06:48PM by Forrest Higgs.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

While I love Sterling's fiction, I find his non-fic work very uneven. This piece seems to be a demo piece for how to misuse the cut and paste function in place of actual thought. 1.-Copy a chunk of someone else's writing 2.-add parenthetical snarky comments 2.5-upload 3.-PROFIT!!!

Seriously, as far as I can see his argument is that RepRap is a failure because it isn't perfect, doomed to remain forever pointless because it cannot today create a functioning duplicate of itself from rocks and air. The amazing thing is he manages to argue this while quoting Adrian's explanations to the contrary.

As for the "Utopian" aspect of Adrian's argument for RepRap, while some people find it off-putting, I feel that if you're going to have a hobby, you might as well save the world while you're at it. Can RepRap change the fundamentals of modern economics and social systems? It's a long shot. On the other hand a 2% chance of solving some of the fundamental problems of human existance is something worth striving for.

Well, that was a weird read. His basis for calling Reprap imaginary from a single read seems to be because it can't self-assemble; it's actually explicitly 'scoped out' in the parts he quotes from and also draws his conclusion from which makes it all the more puzzling.

I think the majority of us would be quite happy if we could have the Reprap self assemble but that is at best a possible future design goal, not a current one so he seems to be a bit sloppy with separating out the cool future possibilities (which are of course by definition imaginary) from the here and now real world instantiations of Darwin Repraps.

Reading the article again confused me all over again. His opening paragraph does seem to hit the nail on the head as far as the project as a whole goes:

'The Reprap is a lab experiment. It can also be classified as a genuine prototype for an impossible device, a quixotic gesture by idealistic technicians, a conceptual-art machine, an open-source project forever in permanent beta, a realization of "Darwinian Marxism," and a cheap tabletop factory that is more or less capable of slowly making small plastic objects.'

Of course, most of that can be said of any open-source project with an ethos of being world-changing e.g the whole Linux ecosystem.

What makes the difference is the frozen states/release points that are developed along the way which make a connection with the real world and allows normal people to use it while the developers beaver away at the next version.

Using Bruce Sterling's categories it may actually make sense to say the Reprap project is imaginary, and yet that it has produced 'real' products in the form of the Darwin Repraps.

If you read the other blogs in the series [blog.wired.com] (start at the bottom) you get a slightly different feel for what he is saying. It still leaves me confused as to whether he wrote the post to deride the Reprap project but it opens up the possibility that he was just wanting to draw the reader's attention to it.

At the very least we are in august company with the "Antikythera Device" or "Metonic Kalendar" which is a very old handheld device (it may have been made around the time of Archimedes) that is designed to show the past and future positions of the moon, sun, and possibly the five visible planets, and also display the time of eclipses and of the Greek Olympic games.

All in all, I think it was a very muddled post.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/2009 04:58AM by Reece Arnott.

I think that guy forgot something:

1. First of all, it is possible to get a larger scale of reproduction than we have now. I am sure about this one, but it needs some investigation. I am sure that there are more things from the reprap that can actually be made out of plastic (instead of steel, but then the reprap would cost more).

2. Mutation. If we have a program that can create/edit plastic reprap parts, then we can also instruct the machine to constantly improve itself. This would mean that the machine can learn from its errors, thus evolving into a better one.

3. If you have 5 servo's and plastic you can already make a robot arm, attach it to the reprap, and the reprap can also assemble itself...

I will try to make a generator for you mister Sterling, a van der graaff generator to be precise... If possible out of reprap pieces.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/20/2009 11:13AM by Mr. Seeker.

One thing can be said. I don't think anybody read Sterling's blog entry. Inevitably, when we get a mention in a serious internet site like wired (Alexa rating about 1,200-1,300), we get a good uptick in visits. If you look at reprap.org's Alexa rating for 2/18 and subsequent days there is zip, nada...

[www.alexa.com]

That's a shame.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

Given the amount of help I have received in the software forum, I am inclined to agree that Reprap is an imaginary lie.

-julie

sheep Wrote:
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> Given the amount of help I have received in the
> software forum, I am inclined to agree that Reprap
> is an imaginary lie.
>
> -julie

It isn't. It's just a bastard to get running. That's why I wrote my own. Mind, I expect somebody else trying to use mine would have similar comments to make.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

It's imaginary till you manage to put in enough effort to make it real...like most things in life, it isn't free nor is it easy.

Demented

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[www.urbansurvivalists.com]

My biggest problem with his article is that he has, intentionally, turned off comments at the bottom of the blog posting. This was fine with his previous posting(s) that deal with the work of long dead people, but it strikes me as dirty pool (for lack of a better phrase) to malign an active project and then make sure no-one can respond.

As for his "Arguments" (and I use that term loosely), he manages to invalidate his main case in the beginning of the article by simultaneously claiming that it's "imaginary" because it can't fully self replicate while also posting Professor Bowyer's statement that Reprap isn't intended to be fully self replicating. He can't have it both ways. The rest of the post devolves from there into a referendum on Dr. Bowyer's personal philosophy as expressed on the project page. He ignores the fact that this has nothing to do with the, supposed, subject of the article (whether the Reprap is an imaginary invention).

In the end, Dr. Bowyer's philosophy has nothing to do with the Reprap itself. That's the beauty of an open source project, the results are there for anyone to make use of regardless of whether they agree with the original project creator's beliefs (with the, possible, exception of his/her belief on which OS license to use).

Colecoman1982 Wrote:
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>
> In the end, Dr. Bowyer's philosophy has nothing to
> do with the Reprap itself.
>

ROTFLMAO! The hell you say!

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

I didn't mean to cause any insult. Of course, Dr. Bowyer's work is what caused this project to exist in the first place and probably wouldn't have happened were it not for his philosophical beliefs.

What I meant was that, as an open source project, the philosophical beliefs of the original designer become moot for anyone that disagrees with them and, as such, should have no bearing on the merits of the invention itself. Personally, I may not agree 100% with his stated beliefs but I find their goal admirable. However, if a hardcore capitalist were to come along and found a way to use the Reprap project documents/designs to further their interests then Dr. Bowyers philosophy would have nothing to do with weather or not that person could make use of it (as long as they abide by the, limited, restrictions of the GPL and Creative Commons License).


Again, my apologies if my wording made it seem like I was suggesting that Dr. Bowyer's stated beliefs were unimportant to the Reprap as a project, it's history, or this community.

Colecoman1982 Wrote:
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>
> However, if a hardcore
> capitalist were to come along and found a way to
> use the Reprap project documents/designs to
> further their interests then Dr. Bowyers
> philosophy would have nothing to do with weather
> or not that person could make use of it (as long
> as they abide by the, limited, restrictions of the
> GPL and Creative Commons License).
>
LOL! Hasn't happened yet, and I've put the question to some pretty able capitalists.
>
> Again, my apologies if my wording made it seem
> like I was suggesting that Dr. Bowyer's stated
> beliefs were unimportant to the Reprap as a
> project, it's history, or this community.
>
No offense was taken. The smileys should have told you that.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

> LOL! Hasn't happened yet, and I've put the question to some pretty able
> capitalists.

It has, to some extent. I forget the name, but there was that education technologies company that was selling kits based on the Reprap design (I remember them because there was a miscommunication about whether or not they were giving proper attribution for the designs they were using and they, unfortunately, are going through some rough time financially).

I see Reprap as being very similar to Linux when it first started. At first, no one was really interested in it except computer geeks and political philosophers like Richard Stallmann. It was an interesting concept, but it wasn't finished enough to be useful for most people. However, once it was polished enough, uptake increased exponentially. Today, it's not uncommon to see someone use Linux as money makeing vehicle. A good comparison to the shallowly capitalistic example I gave in my previous post might be all the people that have taken copies of Red Hat Linux or Ubuntu and re-released them as their own distro with little more that a Find/Replace operation run on all the source replacing "Red Hat" or "Ubuntu" with . I have no doubt that with the energy this community shows it will get to that point sooner rather than later.

> No offense was taken. The smileys should have told you that.

He he, I did see the smileys but wasn't 100% sure. :-) I also realized, after you pointed it out, that the way I worded my statement might be read in a way I didn't intend it. I find it never hurts to apologize for possible misunderstandings.

Ironically, we had a somewhat similar issue here at my job. Someone had posted a big sign on my bosses door saying "VAN IS DEAD" (as the department van had broken down). As I'm getting ready to leave, I noticed a commotion as one of the cleaning crew is pulling one of the facilities guys over to see the sign. It turned out that because the cleaning guy didn't speak good English that the way the sign was written had made him think that another employee, named Van, had passed away. The facilities guy and I had to explain to him that "dead" in this case mean "broken down". In that case, I found it rather humorous since no one had actually died and I had, coincidentally, made a joke to my manager a few hours before asking him "who is van?".