Beautiful.
Yesterday I was walking through the forest, a bit lost. I opened my phone (GrapheneOS powered) with OSMand and found my way.
Both are free and open source. Yes, the operating system and the navigation software. But so are maps. Imagine that someone went to the same forest, with a gps recorder and walked all the paths just to contribute to a free and open source database.
These days we have open weights AI, my mum is 3D printing something for a friend. It's an amazing world that was easy to imagine, but it was much harder to actually believe that this is how the world turns out.
Over from the bird by Eric S. Raymond:
You can just make things.
This is my massive white-pill about the revolution in small scale manufacturing that's going on right now.
The immediate trigger is a story I read about a guy who was annoyed that his wife needed a wheelchair, and the designs were all crappy and hideously expensive and made in China. So he booted up a small factory that now builds custom wheelchairs, delivering them for about $1,000 a pop, undercutting the Chinese by a factor of five.
The context, though is something that's been going on since the first mass market 3D printers in 2009. We've had more than a decade now in which many of the people who would have become part of the hacker culture I came up in back when software was the cutting edge have been learning how to use FDM printers, desktop CNC mills, laser cutters, EDM machines, and all kinds of physical fabrication techniques that you can set up in a garage or a basement.
The lesson has had time to sink in. If you're clever about it, you can hack matter the way we learned how to hack code - high speed, low drag, flexibly and playfully.
You can just make things. Without bimpty-bump millions of dollars of startup capital. With the new tech you can start small, turn a profit on boutique items, and scale up organically.
SpaceX is part of this story, using rapid iterations of custom designs made with 3D printing in sintered metal to continuously improve and simplify their rocket engines. So are Defense Distributed and the other semi-underground firearms-fabrication anarchists. So were the people who figured out how to garage-build respirators during the COVID panic. And now so is JerryRigEverything, the YouTuber who built a wheelchair factory.
The software revolution of a quarter century ago was fueled by Dennard scaling driving down the cost of compute power and wide area networking. Suddenly you could do things on a desktop that had taken raised floors and dedicated computer rooms just a few years before. Hackers grabbed these new possibilities and ran with them. I helped the movement understand itself.
I see something very like that happening again now. But instead of the demassification of software, we're seeing the demassification of manufacturing. The new hackers are being playful with atoms rather than bits. But the same spirit is there; I can feel it every time I wander into a makerspace.
These kids are not going to be stopped. There's too much fun to be had. Too many brains chasing every problem in sight. If my hacker culture didn't still exist it would make me all nostalgic to watch them.
But no. The old hacker culture and the new one flow together at the edges. The apprentice I'm teaching systems programming has a side-hustle printing models for mail-order customers. The kids put their part designs in public repositories; they didn't have to discover open source and distributed collaboration, they grew up absorbing both through their pores.
(Which has the accidental result that though I'm not leading things and writing manifestos this time, I'm one of their culture heroes anyway. That feels nice, I won't deny it.)
And you ain't seen nothing yet.
FDM and other small-scale fabrication technologies are attracting enough attention to improve at a torrid pace. There are obvious synergies with robotics and deep learning that haven't kicked in yet. Or, maybe they already have in somebody's garage, and we'll find out about it next week or next month.
It's a swarm attack, a disruption from below, and lots of conventional large-scale manufacturing outfits are going to suffer the fate of massified Chinese wheelchair factories - they just don't know it yet. They'll be undercut by cheaper, lighter, faster, smarter, custom, and localized.
Somewhere, Buckminster Fuller is whispering "ephemeralization" and smiling.
