Comments on: How 3D Printing is rooted in the history of the progressive and democratic Arts and Crafts Movement https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/how-3d-printing-is-rooted-in-the-history-of-the-progressive-and-democratic-arts-and-crafts-movement/2015/02/20 Researching, documenting and promoting peer to peer practices Fri, 13 Mar 2015 07:42:02 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.15 By: Øyvind Holmstad https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/how-3d-printing-is-rooted-in-the-history-of-the-progressive-and-democratic-arts-and-crafts-movement/2015/02/20/comment-page-1#comment-1118865 Fri, 13 Mar 2015 07:42:02 +0000 http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=48673#comment-1118865 JMG about 3D printers:

“The impact on the prosthetic imagination on the crisis of our time is almost impossible to overstate. I wonder, for example, how many of my readers have noticed just how pervasive references to science fiction movies and TV shows have become in discussions of the future of technology. My favorite example just now is the replicator, a convenient gimmick from the Star Trek universe: you walk up to it and order something, and the replicator pops it into being out of nothing.

It’s hard to think of a better metaphor for the way that people in the privileged classes of today’s industrial societies like to think of the consumer economy. It’s also hard to think of anything that’s further removed from the realities of the consumer economy. The replicator is the ultimate wet dream of externalization: it has no supply chains, no factories, no smokestacks, no toxic wastes, just whatever product you want any time you happen to want it. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that lies behind Stewart Brand’s fantasy of “decoupling”—and it’s probably no accident that more often than not, when I’ve had conversations with people who think that 3-D printers are the solution to everything, they bring Star Trek replicators into the discussion.

3-D printers are not replicators. Their supply chains and manufacturing costs include the smokestacks, outflow pipes, toxic-waste dumps, sweatshopped factories, and open-pit mines worked by slave labor mentioned earlier, and the social impacts of their widespread adoption would include another wave of mass technological unemployment—remember, it’s only in the highly mediated world of current economic propaganda that people who lose their jobs due to automation automatically get new jobs in some other field; in the immediate world, that’s become increasingly uncommon. As long as people look at 3-D printers through minds full of little pictures of Star Trek replicators, though, those externalized ecological and social costs are going to be invisible to them.

That, in turn, defines the problem with the externalization of the human mind and imagination: no matter how frantically you manipulate abstractions, the immediate world is still what it is, and it can still clobber you. Externalizing a cost doesn’t make it go away; it just guarantees that you won’t see it in time to do anything but suffer the head-on impact.”

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.no/2015/03/the-prosthetic-imagination.html

]]>