thoughts of the driverSteinn Eldjarn Sigurdarson on tech, tel, digital freedom and possibly his life..

Today my friend Smári P. McCarthy pointed out to me his recent writeup on digital fabrication, Digital Fabrication as a Catalyst for Freedom. For those who are not familiar with the promise of digital fabrication and how it may affect the world, I suggest you read this paper, Atoms from Bits The Digital Revolution in Manufacturing, and for the really lazy, I’ll sum it up: Digital fabrication is the process in which an object is constructed physically from digital information (a CAD document for example), now we are on the cusp of an age where digital fabricators, or “fabbers”, are within the reach of regular people to build, own and operate. Couple that with cheap raw materials, and you have a scenario for a substantial reduction of scarcity, seeing how scarcity is a major factor in how the free market and our global economy functions, this could have widespread consequences.

In effect, the digital fabrication technology is the first step towards a world just-about as equally unencumbered by material costs and scarcity, as the world of software is today, and the success of Free Software stands as a shining monument to what happens when abundance and socialism meet — great benefits for everyone. [Ok, I'm a little biased, but I'm right ]

But the beauty of Smári’s article lies not in any detailed technical descriptions of how “fabbing” works, or any overly long and elaborate dreamlike paragraphs on what the future may hold, but how important it is that when the time comes, and technology has delivered us into abundance, that our political and economical thinking adapts to the new scenario, so that everyone indeed benefits and the inequality existing today recedes further into the dark ages as it should. I think Smári puts it best;

Nothing fundamental will change in our perception of the physical world by our being able to assemble a stuffed turkey atom-for-atom. We already have access to stuffed turkeys, so we already know what having them does for us as a people. Yes, certainly, there will be new options available to us, like growing skyscrapers out of diamonds, but that is not where the greatest entry point for discussion of digital fabrication lies. Rather, it is in the economical impact, which is hard to quantify.

Digital Fabrication as a Catalyst for Freedom on Smári’s blag.