Reprap artists
You know what it's like when you need to buy a tap washer, or a small
plastic bracket, and you go to some big hardware chain to find that
they will only sell you the product in packs of ten? You know why
they're doing it of course, because it's not worth their while to sell
them individually. You also know that the other nine you've had to buy
are going to end up, either lost in the back of the shed, or lying
fresh and un-degraded in landfill for many times the lifetime of the
appliance, or even of yourself, your house, your city or your economic
system. While you're ruminating on this absurdity, your expensive
digital camera fails because of a tiny piece of plastic which must have
been deliberately designed to break, something that ought to be
replaceable but isn't, except by buying a whole new camera and
scrapping the old. Such, you conclude in disgust, are the peculiar and
pointless ways of capitalist production and economics. So much energy,
so much waste, so little useful result.
Those with overachieving memories may recall Pathfinders, back in
August 2005, excitedly discussing the advent of 3D printers, which
heralded the possibility of downloading and printing your very own tap
washer, bracket or camera casing. The state of the art back then was
less-than-durable wax and plaster, and the cost exorbitant. Well,
things have moved on. Now they are working in durable plastic, and last
month the Cheltenham Science Festival saw the first 3D printer capable
of printing most of the parts necessary to make itself, in other words,
a self-replicating machine (New Scientist, June 7). The replicating
rapid-prototyper or Reprap, version 1, the 'Darwin', can only do
plastic, and the metal struts and electronics still have to be bought
off the shelf. It is a far-cry yet from the developers' own dream of
creating the first Universal Constructor, an all-singing, all-dancing,
cellular-based creation device first proposed by John von Neumann back
in the 1940's. The range of things Reprap can make is hardly enough to
inspire enthusiasm in anyone but technogeeks and ironmongers, but the
next model being planned, the Version 2 Mendel, is expected to be able
to print metal parts and electrical circuits too.
So why all the excitement, over a gizmo that can knock out the
odd plastic sprocket or the various parts of another sprocket-making
gizmo? There are several reasons. Innovation and design in an
industrial manufacturing environment typically requires a retooling for
each new model, and expensive one-time only prototype production costs,
thus acting as a huge financial drag on the pace of development. The
technology of micro-production in so-called fab labs in the last ten
years has changed this, yet the cost of the fabrication machines, in
tens or hundreds of thousands of pounds, has still been beyond the
reach of most designers. Now that 'fabbers' are becoming cheap enough
for even home amateurs, the pace of technological design may well
accelerate geometrically. And not only that, the design process itself
will benefit from Darwinian-type evolution as the ease of
try-it-and-see approaches potentially leads to unplanned and unforeseen
breakthroughs.
Another reason why
we should be excited is that the designs and specifications for these
cheap fabbers are not proprietary but are offered free to anybody under
the terms of the GNU General Public Licence, with a view to
'democratising' design and construction. If you want one, you can have
one yourself, for just the cost of the materials. This is the first
time that the Open Source movement has broken out of the digital world
into the concrete world of things, and although 'open source' isn't
always the same as 'free gift', the two traditions of cooperative
endeavour and free access are so welded together that this development
inevitably raises a new and very interesting possibility, a new spectre
perhaps to haunt not just Europe but the whole of advanced capitalism.
The spectre in question is the
potential of free or near
zero-cost production, the antithesis of the closed market, slayer of
scarcity, enemy of poverty, destroyer of profit. And in case anyone
thinks that is just fanciful talk, a quick glance at the Reprap
homepage at www.reprap.org shows that the developers of these machines
have not failed to foresee the possible long-term radical implications.
Describing Reprap, somewhat immodestly, as a 'project to save the
world', the developers claim as their ringing slogan the words 'Wealth
without money'. Now there's a socialist idea if ever there was one.
Even so, the range of likely products issuing forth from this
technology is not startling, and socialism will not come about simply
because the bottom has suddenly dropped out of the plastic coat hook
market. What really needs to happen for capitalism to be under threat
is for the machinery to go super-small. An open-source revolution in
nanotechnology could quite likely wreck the market system altogether,
as it would make possible the production of almost any conceivable item
in chemical vats at almost zero-cost, plus the replicators to create
them, and most significantly, stupendous amounts of food reprocessed
from junk biomass. The difference is that nanotechnology is still
hugely expensive, probably decades away from self-replicating machines,
and entirely proprietary.
It shouldn't really need saying, but technology won't save the
world by itself, and not even a revolution in production will
necessarily change anything unless social attitudes change too. Still,
the idea of giving not selling is catching on fast, and it's now
spreading beyond the domain of software into the material world.
Socialists have long said that there is no need for global scarcity,
even with today's technology. But if tomorrow's technology further
reinforces the potential of global abundance, perhaps we might finally
see the world usher its steam-age economic system into well-deserved
retirement.
| 4 |
Socialist Standard July 2008 |