Quote 7-11-2014

by Miles Raymer

“Until now, the Makers Movement has been more about hackers, hobbyists, and social entrepreneurs playing with new ways to print out specific objects for personal and general use.  The movement has been driven by four principles: the open-source sharing of new inventions, the promotion of a collaborative learning culture, a belief in community self-sufficiency, and a commitment to sustainable production practices.  But underneath the surface, an even more radical agenda is beginning to unfold, albeit undeveloped and still largely unconscious.  If we were to put all the disparate pieces of the 3D printing culture together, what we begin to see is a powerful new narrative arising that could change the way civilization is organized in the twenty-first century.

Think about it.  DIY culture is growing around the world, empowered by the idea of using bits to arrange atoms.  Like the early software hackers of a generation ago, who were motivated to create their own software to share new information, DIY players are passionate about creating their own software to print and share things.  Many of the things that 3D hobbyists are creating, if put together, make up the essential nodes of a do-it-yourself TIR infrastructure.

The really revolutionary aspect of 3D printing, which will take it from a hobbyist subculture to a new economic paradigm, is the impending ‘Makers Infrastructure.’  This development will spawn new business practices whose efficiencies and productivity take us to near zero marginal costs in the production and distribution of goods and services––easing us out of the capitalist period and into the collaboratist era.

Among the first to glimpse the historical significance of the ‘Makers Infrastructure’ were the local grassroots activists who constituted the Appropriate Technology Movement.  The movement began in the 1970s and was inspired by the writing of Mahatma Gandhi, and later E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, and––if it’s not too presumptuous––a book I authored called Entropy: A New World View.  A new generation of DIY hobbyists, most of whom were veterans of the peace and civil rights movements, loosely affiliated themselves under the appropriate technology banner.  Some preached a ‘back to the land’ ethos and migrated to rural areas.  Others remained in the poor, urban neighborhoods of major cities, often squatting and occupying abandoned neighborhood buildings.  Their self-proclaimed mission was to create ‘appropriate technologies,’ meaning tools and machines that could be made from locally available resources, that were scaled to steward rather than exploit their ecological surroundings, and that could be shared in a collaborative culture.  Their rallying cry was ‘think globally and act locally,’ by which they meant to take care of the planet by living in a sustainable way in one’s local community.

The movement, which started in the industrialized countries of the global North, soon became an even more powerful force in the developing countries in the global South, as the world’s poor struggled to create their own self-sufficient communities at the margins of a global capitalist economy.

Particularly noticeably, at least in hindsight, is that a decade after the Appropriate Technology Movement emerged, a distinctly different movement of young tech-hobbyists came on the scene.  These were the geeks and nerds of IT culture who shared a love of computer programming and a passion for sharing software in collaborative learning communities.  They made up the Free Software Movement, whose aim was to create a global Collaborative Commons (that movement will be considered in greater detail in part III).  Their slogan was ‘information wants to be free,’ coined by Stewart Brand, one of the few who bridged the Appropriate Technology Movement and hacker culture.  (The Whole Earth Catalog, which Brand edited, helped elevate the Appropriate Technology Movement to a broader cultural phenomenon.)  What’s often lost in Brand’s remarks on the software revolution is the rest of the utterance, which he delivered at the first hackers conference in 1984:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.  The right information in the right place just changes your life.  On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.  So you have these two fighting against each other.

Brand saw early on the coming contradiction between intellectual-property rights and open-source access.  That contradiction would eventually frame the battle between capitalists and collaboratists as the marginal costs of sharing information approached zero.

The Appropriate Technology Movement was decidedly low-tech, interested in both rediscovering and upgrading effective traditional technologies that had been abandoned or forgotten in the rush into the Industrial Age and developing newer technologies––especially renewable energies.  They favored the simple over the complex and technology that could be replicated from scratch using local resources and know-how, so as to stay true to the principle of local self-reliance.

The hackers were of a different ilk.  They were the young, often brilliant engineers and scientists at the leading edge of the IT revolution––the very epitome of high-tech culture.  Their gaze was global rather than local and their community took shape in the social spaces of the Internet.

What the two movements had in common was a sense of shared community and an ethical belief in the value of collaboration over proprietorship and access over ownership.

Now, 3D printing brings these two pivotal movements together, since it is both extremely high tech and appropriate tech.  It is, for the most part, employed as an open-source technology.  The software instructions for printing objects are globally shared rather than privately held, yet the material feedstocks are locally available, making the technology universally applicable.  While 3D printing promotes self-sufficient local communities, the products can be marketed on websites at nearly zero-marginal cost and made accessible to a global user base.  Three-dimensional printing also bridges ideological borders, appealing to libertarians, do-it-yourselfers, social entrepreneurs, and communitarians, all of whom favor a distributed, transparent, collaborative approach to economic and social life rather than a centralized and proprietary one.  3D printing brings these various sensibilities together.  The social bond is the deep abhorrence of hierarchical power and the fierce commitment to peer-to-peer lateral power.”

––The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism, by Jeremy Rifkin, pg. 99-101