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I have a stupid question: Are there any Marxist takes on the future of 3D printing? Say, in the near future, there is an advancement in 3D printing to the point where anyone can own and operate a 3D printer that is capable of creating anything built out of plastic and metal (both of these technologies already exist). And, assuming that at least 40% of people could afford their own printers.
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Nov 22, 2020 03:30
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I think that's overestimating the sorts of things that household 3d printer is capable of, or likely to become available or affordable for the foreseeable future. You're not going to get much in the way of electronics, or heavy machinery, or even most tools that require durability and strength. You can machine parts from shared templates, but there's still a lot of technical skill and knowledge to actually assemble them into most useful things.
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Nov 22, 2020 03:46
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1. What is the response of capital? Will they make these machines cheap enough for everyone to afford? Capital seems pretty keen on price fixing, but that usually takes a long time for them to arrange.
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Nov 22, 2020 03:52
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I don't know that there are necessarily many specific parts needed by many people that are not already mass produced and available for cheap from a hardware supplier. I suppose you might have some suppliers of specialist parts try to take a similar approach to the RIAA or whatever and try to copyright their poo poo, I dunno. The way capital has reacted to anything else electronic that makes things that were scarce trivial to produce, I guess. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:55 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 03:53
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fool of sound posted:I think that's overestimating the sorts of things that household 3d printer is capable of, or likely to become available or affordable for the foreseeable future. You're not going to get much in the way of electronics, or heavy machinery, or even most tools that require durability and strength. You can machine parts from shared templates, but there's still a lot of technical skill and knowledge to actually assemble them into most useful things. Computers used to be loving terrible. They were the size of a room, you programmed them by hole-punch cards, and they could barely do anything. However, now every single person walks around with at least 1 computer attached to themselves. They power our washing machines and televisions and radios and workplaces. And it has changed a lot. What happens when the same revolution happens to 3D printers?
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Nov 22, 2020 04:06
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Computers used to be loving terrible. They were the size of a room, you programmed them by hole-punch cards, and they could barely do anything. However, now every single person walks around with at least 1 computer attached to themselves. They power our washing machines and televisions and radios and workplaces. And it has changed a lot. What happens when the same revolution happens to 3D printers? I mean in some theoretical future where there are sci-fi fabricators that can turn raw materials into more or less whatever a la Subnautica or something, it seems unlikely that capital isn't going to have bigger, better ones that can make things more cheaply or more cutting-edge than home models could.
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Nov 22, 2020 04:17
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Mm, if you did achieve that I think you would be more likely to see some things replaced with printer shops you can go to and get stuff printed, and that would fold a lot of the cheap plastic crap you would normally have produced in a factory in china into some sort of on-demand print shop that just buys massive amounts of feedstock and prints as people order. Essentially the difference between phones and printers is like, communication is extremely scalable and the content generates itself, the more you can talk the more a lot of people will talk and the more things you will find to talk about and ways to do it. But printing is... not like that. How much metal and plastic crap can you really need? How much of it will you be able to afford? How much is likely to be discouraged as environmental laws get stricter and raw materials become harder to acquire? Also phones are largely solid state and build upon general computng technology and electronic miniaturization, whereas 3d printers are by definition not that and I don't know that their technology really has any other applications, being sort of an evolution of existing machining technology which is already quite specialized. So I would expect that their application is likely to be largely in that field along with cnc mills and the like. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:32 on Nov 22, 2020 |
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Nov 22, 2020 04:25
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Computers used to be loving terrible. They were the size of a room, you programmed them by hole-punch cards, and they could barely do anything. However, now every single person walks around with at least 1 computer attached to themselves. They power our washing machines and televisions and radios and workplaces. And it has changed a lot. What happens when the same revolution happens to 3D printers? The trite answer is that the exact same happens with them that happened with computers: there's a few years or a decade of a renaissance cottage industry of 3d printing, then a few well-capitalized dickbags monopolize the breakthroughs in the field that matter to profitability, then that cottage industry gets absolutely loving obliterated by a period of rapid acquisition and integration until all that's left of it a scant couple of decades later are toys for hobbyists.
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Nov 22, 2020 07:17
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I have a stupid question: There are many appliances that are collectively operated by modern apartment buildings. In my region those are heating, satelite dishes and clothes driers. And I do think that 3D printers could be operated at the same level, and so should paper printers. What is stopping that is capitalist individualization and landlords. On the other hand the soviets tried to collectivise kitchens in the name of efficiency and communality and nobody enjoyed the results.
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Nov 22, 2020 15:28
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VictualSquid posted:On the other hand the soviets tried to collectivise kitchens in the name of efficiency and communality and nobody enjoyed the results. This was also done in the UK and people loved the results
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Nov 22, 2020 15:37
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Re: 3D printers, I think it useful to think about technological development under capitalism. I'm not expert but these are my thoughts. 'Pure' science has historically been driven by public investment and bodies. The circulation between investment and profit is too slow.* Capital has inserted itself at the point of technological development, turning 'pure' science into useful tools. Technological development as driven by capital is not aimed primarily at the development of new consumer products, but at labour saving technology. Labour is the largest cost to capital, and because it isn't fully subordinate to capital, the biggest threat. Computers were developed by and useful to capital because they allowed for higher skill labour to be replaced. It is the same with the development of 3D printer technology. It is useful to capital because it is labour saving, part of the process of manufacture -> machinofacture. If 3D printer eventually becomes a consumer product, capital will confront that. But as has been seen with computers it is unlikely to present a threat to capital. Computers as a widescale product has not reduced society's reliance on capitalist production but increased it. The digital economy, e-commerce, smart homes. More of our lives are subject to commodity relations. I think it is likely to be the same with 3D printers. But the technology behind 3D printers is useful to capital because it increases profits by decreasing costs, and reducing labour power, not because its potential as a consumer product. In that regard it doesn't pose a threat to capitalist production. * I think it's probable that capital is more involved, and will become more involved, in pure science as the rate of circulation speeds up. i.e. investment in science leads to technological development leads to increased profit rates.
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Nov 22, 2020 17:39
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If 3D printers become so reliable, small, cheap, and gain capabilities like they ability to print complex machines and solid state electronics (lmao but for the sake of argument let's say), then the most probable analogy is capitalist monopolization of other digital content. Your best case there is a thriving black market in pirated designs underlying a capitalist-dominated legal market, and a fringe of hobbyist open source designs. Your worst case is that the people who build and sell the 3d printers are smarter than the people who started the home computing revolution (ie, use the iphone as their model rather than the x86), add a bunch of drm poo poo to make it super hard for a consumer to print anything that didn't come from the app store, and then lobby to some degree of success to make it illegal to bypass those controls. The theoretical possibility of open hardware 3d printers being readily available to consumers will remain just as far away as open mesh networking for smartphones and Linux taking over the desktop. The economic power of capital is totalizing and I don't know why tech fetishists think the next big thing will follow different rules than the current or previous ones. Duck Rodgers posted:Technological development as driven by capital is not aimed primarily at the development of new consumer products, but at labour saving technology. Labour is the largest cost to capital, and because it isn't fully subordinate to capital, the biggest threat. Yeah, the most likely future created by magic 3d printing technology is that it lets capital dispense with most of those expensive factories (and their workers), warehouses (and their workers), distribution networks (and their workers), and stores (and their workers). All you need is a designer working from home, a consumer printing at home, and a supply chain for feedstock that will probably be free to the end user* after that it's pure profit baby. Now you figure out a way to make all those designers self-employed and paying you a percentage to put their own designs on the app store and oh I just figured it out. *with your Amazon Prime Printing subscription. Feedstock only valid for Prime Printing designs.
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Nov 22, 2020 19:22
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VictualSquid posted:I would say that "makerspaces" are the most socialist thing to evolve from the techbro movement. programming is shockingly collective in practice, stack overflow and the entire open source movement are extremely encouraging as a completely practical example of communistic organising
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Nov 23, 2020 01:21
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as The Oldest Man said, the pessimistic outlook on a breakthrough in personal 3D printing is that it's going to be used to cut out a lot of common items that you currently buy from retail stores and instead you'll have to print them out yourself, except the 3D printer is only going to work with proprietary raw material and you have to pay for a subscription to the blueprint service.
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Nov 23, 2020 01:55
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V. Illych L. posted:programming is shockingly collective in practice, stack overflow and the entire open source movement are extremely encouraging as a completely practical example of communistic organising Also NextStrain. People who decry horizontal organization as useless for large-scale or highly specialized work lack imagination.
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Nov 23, 2020 04:12
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Would sure be nice if we didn't have proprietary shite leading to people recreating the same technology over and over again.
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Nov 23, 2020 04:14
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I have a stupid question: There is nothing a 3d printer can do that is worth a poo poo. Hope that helps. Oh wow I can print a lovely model after ducking with a plate for 45 minutes.
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Nov 23, 2020 04:44
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Eh they're OK for prototyping afaik, though you can often get a similar effect with a cnc mill and some plastic. I suppose the additive approach means you don't need as good a machine as you would for a mill.
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Nov 23, 2020 04:46
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OwlFancier posted:Would sure be nice if we didn't have proprietary shite leading to people recreating the same technology over and over again. Yeah, but in a way the technology question is a microcosm of the capitalist business cycle as others noted above. There’s another step which people don’t notice as much - widespread adoption of open source standards. If enough people use a technology (e.g. web server) that the proprietary technologies start to impede capital then there’s a strong incentive for capital to invest in open source solutions to get more capitalist juices flowing. Why does Facebook fund React for example? It creates new business opportunities for them in the future (more startups with a similar tech stack to acquire) and more programmers who know how to use their stack. Google also funds Tensorflow and similar to get more engineers who can produce useful machine learning products. In a way this is exactly the sort of thing Marx was talking about when he talked about capital building the instruments of its own destruction. The main issue with this is that now we have an attention economy, building infrastructure for web apps isn’t profitable without the backing of megacorps because your audience tends to be niche and unwilling to pay for development costs - ie the price of labour. Until there’s some kind of incentive or non-corporate grants program beyond “donate to my patreon” for open source developers the potential of open source tech will be suppressed by the massive financial incentive to work on proprietary tech.
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Nov 23, 2020 04:47
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It seems likely that they are more energy intensive than just regular milling but maybe for all our dumb little plastic bullshit it's betterer than shipping from china.
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Nov 23, 2020 04:54
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Problem with #1 from the OP: humans are not rational at all. Otherwise post looks good! Nah OP said people 'are not only rational,' when in fact they're not rational at all. NaanViolence fucked around with this message at 06:43 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 23, 2020 06:14
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It's almost like that is literally the point of the first two paragraphs in the post. That the process by which people are influenced by their environment doesn't matter as long as you can observe trends in how they are. The idea that what individual humans think doesn't matter is what makes it materialism.
OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:33 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 23, 2020 06:29
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human garbage bag posted:It doesn't make sense for company executives to encourage abusive managers because that would lower the productivity of the employees, and hence the amount of labor that can be exploited. Humans aren't rational. That includes company executives.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:42
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If humans were not capable of rationality then we wouldn't have a concept of it. But it again does not really have anything to do with the theory whether any given human is or isn't.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:46
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NaanViolence posted:Humans aren't rational. That includes company executives. Stop half assedly responding to three week old posts.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:52
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NaanViolence posted:Problem with #1 from the OP: humans are not rational at all. Otherwise post looks good! Cool, I guess your sentence means nothing at all, when I look at it, it just melts into a mass of lines and blobs that I can't understand at all because reasoning doesn't exist.
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Nov 23, 2020 06:55
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fool of sound posted:Stop half assedly responding to three week old posts. 🤣🤣🤣 (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Nov 23, 2020 06:59
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How! posted:There is nothing a 3d printer can do that is worth a poo poo. Hope that helps. For what it's worth, I 3D printed a lot of throw-away lab equipment type stuff at one point, because if I needed a custom fit for a certain sized item, it was just plain easier to make a CAD model and wait a few hours, and then get to business. But YMMV I guess!
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Nov 23, 2020 08:37
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V. Illych L. posted:programming is shockingly collective in practice, stack overflow and the entire open source movement are extremely encouraging as a completely practical example of communistic organising every now and again I reflect on how much free material and encouragement is out there for learning programming there is an ethos of free poo poo in the culture that has not yet been totally subsumed by capital
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Nov 23, 2020 21:34
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Peel posted:every now and again I reflect on how much free material and encouragement is out there for learning programming i agree that people do and would write code without being paid for it, but open source is absolutely subsumed by capital, free software is a footnote, and the effort to train more programmers is motivated to reduce the value and power of current programmers, not out of passionate belief in the unachieved liberatory possibilities of personal computing.
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Nov 23, 2020 21:47
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Rappaport posted:For what it's worth, I 3D printed a lot of throw-away lab equipment type stuff at one point, because if I needed a custom fit for a certain sized item, it was just plain easier to make a CAD model and wait a few hours, and then get to business. But YMMV I guess! Oh that makes a lot of sense. I’m just a blue-collar idiot so I couldn’t find much use for it. I bought one because my wife used to carve her jewelry molds from wax, and it was a painstaking process. So I thought it would help her expedite that process, but it’s basically just a big doorstop now.
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Nov 23, 2020 21:59
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V. Illych L. posted:programming is shockingly collective in practice, stack overflow and the entire open source movement are extremely encouraging as a completely practical example of communistic organising The best decision ever made re: copyright was that code, as in the actual code that is written, cannot be subject to copyright. It can still be owned, sold, and licensed, but if you reverse engineer a proprietary system, your reverse engineered system is fine and legal. Standing on the shoulders of giants is absolutely, 100%, how programming works, and that's the major reason that it's as powerful as it is. "Learn to code" is absolutely a capitalist dipshit war-cry, but a lot of the folks pushing it are too short-sighted and uninformed to know that the process of learning to code will inevitably put one in touch with a lot of very, very left systems and people. Peel posted:every now and again I reflect on how much free material and encouragement is out there for learning programming It's fascinating; as I've gotten better with writing code, I've been more and more open to both helping folks learn and working through problems with people. There is a genuine sense of "paying forward because of the folks who helped me" that code just puts into the brains of a lot of folks. The other way folks end up is very, very aggressively locking down everything they create; they are universally awful to work with, and these days companies can choose experts who aren't awful to work with. Somfin fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 23, 2020 22:00
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I spent three years working with 3d printers and even have a paper published on a design with micron resolution. I despise 3d printers, 3d printing and haven't touched one since. Anything you can do with one you can do better with a CNC mill at your local maker collective.
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Nov 23, 2020 22:58
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Doc Hawkins posted:i agree that people do and would write code without being paid for it, but open source is absolutely subsumed by capital, free software is a footnote, and the effort to train more programmers is motivated to reduce the value and power of current programmers, not out of passionate belief in the unachieved liberatory possibilities of personal computing. Yeah agree. Capitalisms motivation in the development of new technology is to reduce labour costs/power, not (primarily) to make new products. Why should I, as a capitalist, hire a bunch of expensive programmers to develop statistical software when I can just use R and do away with (most of) my programmers. I guess open source is a threat to capitalists that make software (SAS replaced by R or whatever), but for other capitalists, open source is free labour.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:10
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This is a dumb question, probably for Crumbskull in particular. I know I could just How do worker coops raise funds for start up costs? Do banks view these as higher risk loans because they won’t be as obsessively focused on profit (and therefore loan repayment) as a private business? Is it harder to secure funding for a worker coop or just a different process? How would it work in a socialist country? Nationalized banks?
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Nov 24, 2020 00:03
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:This is a dumb question, probably for Crumbskull in particular. I know I could just https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA1m1MMDj1g I will never stop posting Richard Wolff.
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Nov 24, 2020 00:07
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we've made public banks legal in california, and we're starting one here in SF.
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Nov 24, 2020 00:14
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Doc Hawkins posted:we've made public banks legal in california, and we're starting one here in SF. Could you give a little more detail on what that means? I thought Cali just went full anti-worker?
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Nov 24, 2020 00:55
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Doc Hawkins posted:i agree that people do and would write code without being paid for it, but open source is absolutely subsumed by capital, free software is a footnote, and the effort to train more programmers is motivated to reduce the value and power of current programmers, not out of passionate belief in the unachieved liberatory possibilities of personal computing. this seems to be talking about something else than i, at least, was thinking about, which is the willingness to put poo poo up for grabs for whoever - there's a titanic array of libraries, advice and code bases available to any idiot with a compiler and an internet connection, which is genuinely excellent stuff i do not believe it to be possible to run a non-capitalist enterprise under capitalism; someone will always find a way to extract value, especially from the commons. it's still a genuine marvel that the commons exist and persist like they do
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Nov 24, 2020 03:45
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V. Illych L. posted:this seems to be talking about something else than i, at least, was thinking about, which is the willingness to put poo poo up for grabs for whoever - there's a titanic array of libraries, advice and code bases available to any idiot with a compiler and an internet connection, which is genuinely excellent stuff the funny thing about that is that because it's just 'free' without any ideology attached to it, there is a tendency for people to draw the wrong conclusions. There's a reason IT people are often either libertarian or radical left - either they've seen only the superficial 'freedom', or they've realised the way the IT community operates like a mutual aid/sharing community.
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Nov 25, 2020 12:18
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