Hacked Matter¶
Contrary to appearances, I haven’t spent (much) of the weekend on retaliation against Kuznicki. Instead, I was peripherally involved in the Hacked Matter II conference, held in Shanghai’s Knowledge Innovation Community, where the state-of the-art discussion of 3D printing (additive manufacturing), DIY Bio, open-source hardware, and related topics takes place.
Like the personal computing and subsequent Internet revolution, these new copying technologies have massive decentralizing implications, and have already picked up impressive momentum. Key-note speaker Massimo Banzi (of Arduino) has already managed to get packaged chip boards into vending machines. By historical analogy, this range of physical stuff-hacking technologies seem to be somewhere in the late ’70s or early ’80s garage tinkering and pong stage, which suggests that a decade or two could be needed for their creative destruction potential to manifest.
To a far greater extent than was seen in its digital predecessor, the level of technological accomplishment is utterly outstripping high-level conceptual analysis. There’s room for an interesting (and dark) historical theory about this, but that’s probably best left for another occasion. Suffice to say, for now, that this wave of industrial change is probably more inherently ‘out of control’ than any we have seen before, due in part to its deep invisibility (which its tangibility reinforces, rather than contradicts).
The open-source aspect, which is hegemonic in the field, means that there’s a lot of eighth-baked hippy-utopian social theory kicking around, but since this is pitched at an exclusively micro-economic level it isn’t truly toxic. It was the same in Californian 1980s IT, and the bad consequences then were strictly limited, for decades (although the present Silicon Valley culture has clearly inherited some dysfunctional memes, which become malignant once the connection with government gets made). The IP topic isn’t being thought-through very rigorously, perhaps because the “propertarians” have such opportunities to resolve them silently, by default. It’s a law of modernity that incentive problems never get resolved in theory, but only tweaked through selection, in practice.
The “Future Now” panel I participated in was the most speculative. It included Zach Hoeken Smith (of Makerbot, HAXL8R), whose energy-level was positively terrifying, and Anil Menon (SF writer), whose work I will be definitely following up on. Paul Dourish (UCI) added the voice of social responsibility, but he had some nice things to say about bacteria. Between the realized hardware on display and the kind of things we were talking about there was an abyss of yet-unformulated technical theory, which I would expect to see crystallizing over the next five years or so. This is where the distributed technologies for self-replicating machines are being put together, and there’s plenty to talk about.
ADDED: More on 3D-manufacturing at UF2.1.