From TPB’s blog:
We’re always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets evolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it’s time for the next step.
Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.
We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.
“The Pirate Bay’s new “physibles” section seeks to spread digital 3D blueprints that people can, in theory at least, “print” at home, using 3D printing. If you’ve never heard of that before (and who would blame you?), 3D printers are machines that accept a blueprint for, say, a mug or a model car (or, as in this demo, a wrench), and then actually produce it using liquid plastics or by layering materials on top of one another. It isn’t quite like saying “Earl Grey, hot” as one would to the replicators from Star Trek, but it’s far out there stuff that will only get better and cheaper over time.
The Pirate Bay and their future-fancy visions are looking to push the idea into the public consciousness a bit. And good for them, ’cause it’s a funny, if slightly unsettling little concept that’s worth thinking about. After all, as local writer Tim Maly points out in a delightfully provocative set of ideas, the mass spread of 3D printing and digital plans enables a kind of “teleportation.” To wit, in a few decades from now, it may not be totally insane to say “Oh, do you like this purse? Here, let me email it to you.” (Depending on the purse in question, of course.)
Sure, it’s all vastly premature. But as Fast Company suggests, the very notions of property, both intellectual and physical, get upset if you can just download objects willy-nilly. Think about it: our economic system is largely based on the idea that, given our inability to create everything we need, we exchange currency in order to receive the things we need. If that becomes even slightly less necessary, you can see where this might go. Will high-end consumer goods still be desirable when there is no line between “authentic” and “fake?” Will labour still need to be outsourced when machines are cheaper than (uh, brown) people? How does capitalism, which is based on trading goods for money, even work when all you really need is a 3D printer?
But even if this is all totally impractical and far-fetched right now, it does point to the fact that the ambivalent revolutionary potential of digital is not simply in “how we consume music” or “look up facts,” but may actually be about our economic system and how we live our day-to-day lives”