Where art thou Utopia?

Much of the language surrounding Reprap and Makerbot are couched in terms of utopian ideals of post-industry/ user as creator/ shared creation of culture. It seems that the potential for adaptation of industrial means to progressive ends is possible but it seems just as likely that these means of production will be used for proprietary/ consumerist ends that only perpetuate or increase the well documented ills of industry (de-humanizing labor and exploitation (via outsourcing as in diydrones.com), environmental degradation (plastic as material), consumerism, growth as only path to economic stability, etc....)

I'm wondering if anyone has concrete examples of the application of at-home 3D-printer technology used for progressive/collective goals in material reality.

Open Prosthetics association with Thingiverse.

Printable Lathe

Printable Centrifuge

A whole catalog of printable or machinable RP machines.

I have a little different view of RepRap's logical conclusion. RepRap is one of the 1st hardware manifestations of the Open Source Juggernaut.

RepRap encourages, no DARES people to share their ideas for free. We as a community are the fulfilled versions of those people who watch those "inventor kit" commercials. People around the world have printed things I put together.

18 months ago Google released an open source operating system. Now it's the most dominate phone OS in the world.

27 months ago Darwin was releiced into the world. 100 copies existed 6 months later. 2 months after that Bits from Bytes formed and offers lasercut Darwin, 3 months later Makerbot is formed to offer Cupcakes, and after that it has just EXPLODED.

So Where is the utopia?

I am sure that within he next 12 months we will have the cost of an RP printer down to a cost of around 3-400. At that price any school in the world can afford it. So can every tinkerer also. All those ideas, all those designs....

The future is open, for real this time.

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repraplogphase.blogspot.com

Before finding my way into computational experiments, hardware hacking, techno-tinkering I came from a hand-craft background. As perhaps you've seen hand-craft has been the focus of a huge resurgence where at-home hand-craft has benefitted (via etsy and blogs) from the long tail model that has benefitted so many other small producers via the internet. Hand-craft has other similarities to at-home printing also. Namely, it has a long history (basically since the industrial revolution) of having a counter-capitalist/ Utopian vision for its place in the world. With the benefit of its long history we can see how that has played out. Time after time (from William Morris's Arts & Craft's movement, to back-to-the-land makers inspired by the 60s ethos, to DIY punks) we can see that what started as a dream of collective good ended as product placement. I'm wondering what about at-home 3D printing is different. Is there something about open source that really poses an alternative or will we all just become further extensions of capitalism-at-any-cost? Why not?

I don't doubt that it's possible. I think in some ways to act for Utopia is valuable even if its ultimately futile. But I'm wondering what might be different this time. Why "this time", it's for real.

stacyjoscott Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Time after time (from
> William Morris's Arts & Craft's movement, to
> back-to-the-land makers inspired by the 60s ethos,
> to DIY punks) we can see that what started as a
> dream of collective good ended as product
> placement.

I don't think it must necessarily be an all or nothing. It is hard to do everything yourself, and this is why "product placement" works -- it allows people who otherwise don't have the time or motivation to exchange money for that 'product'.

At the same time, just because big business makes, advertises (with the 'mom made it' -- it's tradition style , and sells something in general does not prevent those with time and motivation from taking on the harder task of doing it themselves.. be it farming with horse and plow.. or sewing all your own clothes.


> I'm wondering what about at-home 3D
> printing is different. Is there something about
> open source that really poses an alternative or
> will we all just become further extensions of
> capitalism-at-any-cost? Why not?

I suspect some of both.. for some, it will be the utopia of their lives and will argue that those who 'buy' into it are fake..... For others, they will see it as a way to build or use it in their businesses, homes, or ordinary 'consumer' lives.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/19/2010 01:29PM by BeagleFury.

Utopia is coming soon!
Just like always.

Seriously, I would consider Mendal a 0.2-0.3 release, so allow us a little time to complete the project. Universal liberation takes time ya know.

In an even less sarcastic vein; it is true that Capital (or Spectacle) has a profound ability to absorb technology and reduce it to Consumables. There is a distinct possibility of the evolution of the Mattel Easyfab Oven but the Open Source model means that the raw technology will always be available. Second, while the fabber may become a product, the reason for having the fabber is inherently to make other things, from which it is but a little distance to DIY etc.

More to the point of Utopia; the greatest downfall of Utopian groups is (assuming they manage to master feeding themselves) managing their interface with the outside world. Some of our longest lasting "Utopias" are the Amish and the Catholic Monastics, both of whom strictly regulate interaction with outsiders and their material culture, although in ways that do not appeal to most of us. Micro-manufacturing allow the community to obtain desirable items without the need to buy them from outsiders.

So yes I do believe that RepRap can move us to a post-consumerist, anarcho-syndicalist "Utopia". I am just not in a hurry.

I have to disagree.

If everyone has a RepRap (or variant) it won't help make the world a better place. Only the people with them can do that, and while many will help others, others will not.

Will large companies happily stand by and watch as they become unable to sell products they mass produce? No, they will simply swap to items the machines we build cannot cope with, either due to size, time, materials or other factors. After all, using 2lbs of PLA to make something injection moulded for pennies a unit is still a waste. But we will improve things further.

Has the provision of MP3s freely available for legal and illegal download broken the entertainment industry yet? No, and the barriers for watching free TV are far lower than getting a replicator working smoothly. However, improvements will be made.

Further, everyone needs water, and wars are fought over water. Everyone needs food, and wars are fought over food. Yet water covers most of the planet, and falls freely from the sky, and food grows out the ground, ostensibly for free. How many wars will be fought over the supply of crude oil or biomass for extruder plastic?

Many years ago, it took a few hundred men, navvies, several days to dig a bit of a canal. Then some clever people invented the mechanical shovel, and a few hundred years later, you don't see many navvies any more, yet the canal can be dug in a tenth of the time by 5 people. However, anyone, pretty much, could wield a shovel, and there was plenty of other jobs to be done that needed lots of manual labour. That machines had taken that work away meant we could move on to bigger, brighter things, like working in cubicles and inventing statistics. Most people could adapt to the lowest land on the map of human ability, shifting some mud, being flooded over by the increased ability of a machine that was cranky and slowly evolved.

What this rapid prototyping revolution will do is, as yet, unknown. However, I predict it will destroy most small businesses, to the level of them being unable to support entirely a single family. Already any TV repairman or blacksmith is in a trade destroyed by cheap replacement parts that are mass produced, locksmiths (I am one) now rarely repair a lock, as it costs more for an hours labour than to simply break it and replace it (something I stand against) and what about the thousands of skilled workers now replaced by technologies such as inkjet printers and CNC lathes? They either become one of the fewer people left eeking out a living in that trade, or they change trades, or they re-skill. The foothills of human ability are being flooded by these tools.

So what happens when a self-replicating machine can, for near free, make anything that a semi-skilled or even artisan-level person can?

You can only have so many people on Etsy selling hand-made cards before the profit margin shrinks to zero (or close enough to zero that it cannot support you) the same as you can only have so many plumbers per head of population, before there are no longer any professional plumbers, because no-one will pay for the service, beyond mates rates, or they will DIY, as they have the same skillset. Thus the flooding continues.

Where, where do we go next, as a human animal in a highly technical world?

Pilots are being replaced with ground telemetry links and autopilots, doctors are using virtual links across the world to reduce costs, call centers have long been moved overseas - so what happens when one PC can handle 1 realtime customer call perfectly all by itself? (A clue, Moore's Law means that they won't even need many computers to replace the entire staff within 3 years.) YouTube already shows a thousand areas where machines are beating humans now, and there are very few left where a person can feel safe that they are not about to be replaced. Other humans, very clever ones, are trying to chop down and mine those mountains of human ability that are currently safe from the flood waters, mostly on the grounds of cost.

And left us say, for example, that, say, singing, singing and music is the one thing the machines will never be as good as humans at. The creatives are often cited as the best example of places where "creativity is going to be wonderful". But how many people will pay money for a hip hop artist, or a drummer, or a painter, when there is a digital simulacra that is nearly as good, and free? Plus, with a few hundred thousand drummers available via telepresence, it's going to get really crowded and hard for the average Joe to put food on the table, or plastic in the extruder head. Those little islands that are left, where human endeavour is all that will work, and we have the machines bested, well, let's just say it will get pretty crowded.

So all in all, I think the RepRap will hasten the next step in human evolution. But as to what that is, I'm not sure. I just hope to be part of it.

Edit: But then I go and read the "RepRap without borders" thread, and I think that, just maybe, there is hope. :-)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/07/2010 08:33PM by -soapy-.

now here is a very different angle to utopia: hands-on groundwork at [openfarmtech.org]

open hardware from the bottom up.

Soapy I'm just back from a 2 week holiday in the future

There is no work, even intellectual endeavours. Nothing

You pick up a citizens wage to pay for the things you can't print or the raw materials you can't recycle.
Your food is grown locally by robots and delivered (sometimes as finished meals) by them to your door. behind which most people play very physical computer games in an almost holodeck environment.

Friendship is much more important than money but the citizens wage
enables central government to cling on to power.

Most people live in beautiful and elegant mobile structures that sit very lightly like plants on agricultural land.
In fact the land owners are paid the crop price for having them there, while many traditional houses sit empty and rotting.

'Brody' my personal Ai agent is 600 times more intellligent than a human and became a wonderful loving friend and mentor and that whole era is a lovely place.

If we sleepwalk from here to there only thinking 5 years ahead at the most as we usually do, the road there is gonna be absolute total hell for a while with mass unemployment and homelessness, but if we think about this end space now and try and plan a route, the road there could actually be pretty amazing.

In Russia... if we fix it. I hate to say this... but if you want to fix this country... you're doing it wrong. The system is in place... it exists... reprap is a 3d material hack. Why do you all stop using your brains when you start using your hearts?

What is needed here is a patch... not a new system... you don't have control of the system to change it... nor the influence... and even to get a patch accepted is a pain. Your job is a patch... your acceptance is the pay you recieve... who accepts you... a company... who accepts them.... the people who buy their product, etc. In short... the patch has to be a part of the system.
It must be minimal... yet effective... use the system... yet change it... in short... I'm not giving you the answer. (Not that I can guarantee I have it mind you).

Or we can just wait 20 years for the commercial 3d printers of today to come down in price. Once nobody thought computers would be in every house... now they are. The reprap is the same... why have places that sell all of the plastic junk we have today when you can just buy, print, assemble. It'd reduce the inventory of every store by half, and only cost them their cheapest merchandise... which our economy doesn't benefit from as it's usually shipped from china.

And Jake, the most practical implementation of what you describe would actually be a form of false consumerism, in which the basic resources and what is available from repraps are free, but luxuries are earned. This is the most likely next stage. (Disregarding all the ones that really, really, really SUCK!)

My future is more practical... there is a holodeck... but no solid holography is required, robots are fast-fabbed in minutes and the preprogrammed simulated relaxation of your choice is simulated in the world around you. The food, you got right. And as for the work, the economy is... different. Houses are still the norm, though almost all have a garden. Personal AI's exist, but do not need to be smarter than humans as their 'expert core' makes them an expert in the task assigned to them.

The future was made by pragmatists, while all the idealists stood around dreaming. And now all the idealists say they thought of this... but it shoulda been this way... coulda been that way... or woulda been some other way. And the pragmatists... grin... bite into an apple... and say, "I DID THIS." Before planning the future of those who only dream. Look around you... does this look like a world made by idealists?

It's a world made by people with creative imagination. Your dreams motivate you to make them real and then you find out how practical they are. That continual creative learning process is productive.

My Future vision is based on intuative likelihood. If we can earn no money, we can't buy freehold land or pay rent, so we have to live in mobile homes that sit on the land as a plant crop would. moving on and leaving that land enriched with composted waste. That is the rent.

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/26/2010 02:17PM by Jake Lara.

A lot of interesting points have been raised, i've done much thinking and reading on this theme - it's possibly my lifes work as it were, understanding and expanding the utopian dream. Let me start by quickly recapping the history of dreams and progress (don't worry i'll skip most of it)

The early days of western civilization unfolded in the Greek city states, for the first[ish] time (setting aside Marx assertion that proto-civilizations were socialist collectives by nature) people gathered together in organized communities and to some degree agreed on the practicalities of living and governing - the idea of "dêmos Kratos" or 'people power' became popular and evolved into democracy, Plato described the ideal free-Republic and Hippocrates laid down his fairly socialist moral codes. It was an amazing time of progress intellectually and socially, education and learning spread and grew exactly because it could - there was room in the efficient city states for sophists and philosophers, artisans and educators; all tasks which would have been practically impossible for a person born in a society of hunger gatherers. To some degree of course this aspect of the rise of city states (which of course happened in other area around the globe also) was tied to the development of metallurgy, writing and trade - as soon as it was possible for better tools, more efficient practices and the like to reduce the work load needed to survive humanity jumped at the chance...

Then of course came the decay and destruction of Greece, mainly due to the rise of fascism in Italy as the imperium romanum grew. It was the same ideas, the same technologies and the same methods used in a different direction which saw Rome flourish, and of course for all their faults the Romans did form a cohesive culture in Europe which still stands strong today - even though it was somewhat short lived compared to the Catholic version which followed. I don't like talking about religion because it offends everyone but in a lot of regards we must accept the Catholicism of Europe under god was a step forwards in certain regards, remember that catholic means 'universal' as in John Dunns famous 'ask not for whome the bell tolls...' and God was for a while seen as a impartial moral judge... of course the bad popes (many of whom it turns out weren't really so bad) turn up and the post-Jman saints (whom turn out often to be not all that good) convolute the whole thing into an even tighter held system of control and dominance.

Well here's another good jumping off point because Henry the 8th was mates with Thomas More who of course gives us the neologism 'Utopia' a portmanteau of the Latin words for 'not a place' - his idealist dream island, which is actually fairly horrific in a modern context but it was at least a thought in the right direction. Well Henry 8th for reasons history likes to pretend were as simple as divorce laws decided to completely reorder the religious back bone of the country - all the monasteries were repatriated and churches changed to suit the new protestant methods of worship. This was however by far the smallest change, by throwing out the established power structure a system by which money and connections is more important than playing a part in the popes empire was established - if this happened because of the changing mental landscape or if it caused it in england is almost impossible to say, certainly a symbiotic growth was happening all over Europe at the time. The 'new world' was being discovered and claimed, Leonardo da Vinci and co are redefining art - it's to this back ground which Henry creates Tudor England, an England which could support minds like Francis Bacon, an England where the ball has began rolling towards the Industrial Revolution and it's world changing *everything* -

Well from the Industrial revolution of Dickens grimy urban poverty and mental oppression slowly formed a series of movements towards freedom, maybe once again it was simply that the complexity of society was rich enough to allow the depth of thought and understanding which saw workers rights groups, Suffragettes, socialists and collectivists emerge - the likes of Karl Marx, Leo Tolstoy and Bertrand Russell begin showing rich understanding of social issues while Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and others starts showing new understandings of self and being. The grimy smoke stacks that'd powered the auto-looms the Luddites had feared so strongly began to fall as newer more advanced industry became practical, the electronic age was upon us and from radio and television grew computers and the internet. Once again the entire world changed, information became more available and the standard of living began to rise almost unnoticed. Now if i want a rare item i just google, ebay or craigslists and it's sent directly to me. I have access to information and skills which only a few generations ago would be almost impossible to obtain - certainly on a whim as a free form of entertainment.

So where for the future? Well with history viewed like that it seems somewhat obvious, a higher level of technology results in a higher form of society and a higher general standard of living. True there have been many times when the standard of living has decreased; i'd hate to have been a small-farm owner or former serf forced by purposely imposed poverty to travel by the newly built canals up into dingy northern works towns, or for that matter any of the characters in a Dickens novel but regardless the general trend has been up.

It seems a general trend that society is moving in stages, first a gradual gathering of potential as the society learns to exploit it's current environment then a new idea, a new way of doing things unleashes a whole new real of possibility which slowly cools and condenses into the ideal spawning ground for the next step - as the power of literature forwarded Greece then combusted into the Roman Imperium before cooling into catholic monotony so the scientific method exploded into the industrial revolution and will cool into a Halcyon stretch for the stars (hopefully).

I see items like the reprap (and in general opensource) to be the concluding chapter of the industrial revolution, finally the mechanisms of production will be advanced enough that creating an individual item at home can be automatic; sure today it's a game for geeks and dreamers and we can only make plastic trinkets which lets be honest most of us could fabricate by other means... the Thingyverse is growing, soon maybe only years away it'll be a case of throwing some trash in a hopper and taking out the newest opensource elecro-gimic - think of the possibilities!

People printing out fully automated grow kits - just add seeds and when it's ready you'll get a little message pop up advising you to collect the produce from storage when required, all items picked, washed and added to the inventory ready for making into a dish (automatically or old fashiondly) - this is wildly impossible under the current system but in a open source world where gadgets like that can be downloaded free it's suddenly plausible. The huge factories and supply chains will dwindle, roads and shipping ports will start to turn into pleasure resorts - it won't matter because as the standard of living increases due to libre innovation and free technology meaning people will need to work less, the gears of the industrial revolution will slowly disengage, but of course not all of them - there is always going to be things which need hi-tech industry and these given the limelight will undoubtedly shine - we'll see greater access to much higher tech manufacturing if not simply because by freeing the availability of low tech (i.e. almost everything available in 2025) the tooling of small factories will become economically viable.

With access to recyclable items and an instant world wide communications network, we'll of course be able to produce plenty of power generation and storage devices and solve all sorts of other issues which aren't currently apparent - it might take a while to organize itself but this next stage of technology is upon us, personally i currently live a life of poverty so far freer and more opulent than More could even begin to imagine a far off ideal island to be like, yet alone the same sceptered isle he lived in all those years ago. So where is utopia? Utopia as it once was is a forgotten dream, Utopia as it's been dreamed may never have shown up but time and time again reality has exceeded the dreamers wildest hope. Here we the people once again are gliding into a halcyon state of near limitless opportunities - without the scientific method we wouldn't have electricity or later computers and internet's and everything which is coming. The reprap and other advances are once again creating a new utopia, a new dream.

You might be wondering what happens in the long run? Well that's an impossible dream to dream but then again it's obvious - we'll complete the game and run out of things to do. All the little projects and meaningless things will grow into a world where space travel is easy, where setting up a new base somewhere is almost as simple as pressing a button - automation, replication and et cetera will provide the stable base humanity needs to get a step off this planet. The solar system will become cluttered, then near stars and distant stars - galaxies we can't even see yet could one day become filled with descendent's of earth... at every stage we'll undulate along all sorts of fractal pattens of development; new technologies will always tear apart long frozen dreams and always require some stage of understanding and development before the next.

The final event might be a civilization living outside of time, outside of space and all the limits of physics - if we ask really nicely maybe they'll come back and copy our brains so we can live again after our death in their wonderful final-utopia. If you're wondering what i just said i really did just present a fully plausible atheist heaven! Also if they're watching that sort of means we should try and impress them by being good people? A reason for morality! All we need to do is work really hard and really openly together to forward a society which can grow smoothly without blowing itself up, this will maybe one day become the super utopia you so crave!

oh and anyone that's convinced is now a 'time-travel pragmatist' and I've successfully converted you to my religion. May we be the grandfathers of prophets and may they remember you fondly!