by Zoë Pollock
Michael Wesch imagines they'd change us:
It strikes me that for better or worse, a world of 3D printing may have some remarkable implications for “identity” in a society in which people define themselves by the stuff they own and display. In our society you don’t just wear skinny jeans, a v-neck, and an iPod playing Foster the People. You wear those things so that people know that you are the type of person who would wear those things. Our rooms, especially the rooms of youth, are filled with identity markers. So what happens when most of those things are made by you? What happens when we don’t leave the heavy lifting of identity craft up to the corporations and brands that currently serve as the Legos we use to build? What happens when we print our own Legos?
Christopher Mims tempers the excitement:
There is a species of magical thinking practiced by geeks whose experience is computers and electronics—realms of infinite possibility that are purposely constrained from the messiness of the physical world—that is typical of Singularitarianism, mid-90s missives about the promise of virtual reality, and now, 3-D printing.
As 3-D printers come within reach of the hobbyist—$1,100 for MakerBot's Thing-O-Matic—and The Pirate Bay declares "physibles" the next frontier of piracy, I'm seeing usually level-headed thinkers like Clive Thompson and Tim Maly declare that the end of shipping is here and we should all start boning up on Cory Doctorow's science fiction fantasies of a world in which any object can be rapidly synthesized with a little bit of energy and raw materials. This isn't just premature, it's absurd.
Tim Maly reminds Mims how 2D printers started out the same way; now they're cheap and common at work and at home.
The Dish 