Authors: Jeremy Rifkin
A 3D-printed automobile is produced with a very different logic. The automobile can be made from nearly free feedstock available locally, eliminating the high cost of rare materials and the costs of shipping them to the factory and storing them on-site. Most of the parts in the car are made
with 3D-printed plastic, with the exception of the base chassis and engine.
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The rest of the car is produced in layers, which are “added” one onto another in a continuous flow rather than being assembled together from individual parts, meaning less material, less time, and less labor are used. A six-foot-high 3D printer poured out Urbee’s shell in only ten pieces, with no wasted material.
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Three-dimensional printing does not require huge capital investments to tool the factory floor and long lead times to change production models. Simply by changing the open-source software, each vehicle can be poured and printed to the customized specifications of a single user or batch of users at little additional cost.
Because the 3D printing factory can be located anywhere where it can plug into an IoT infrastructure, it can deliver vehicles locally or regionally for less expense than shipping vehicles across countries from centralized factories.
Finally, the cost of driving a 3D-printed car, using locally harvested renewable energy, is nearly free. The fuel cost for the Urbee is only $0.02 per mile—or one-third the cost of driving a Toyota Prius.
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A Makers Infrastructure
Until now, the Makers Movement has been more about hackers, hobbyists, and social entrepreneurs playing with new ways to print out specific objects for personal and general use. The movement has been driven by four principles: the open-source sharing of new inventions, the promotion of a collaborative learning culture, a belief in community self-sufficiency, and a commitment to sustainable production practices. But underneath the surface, an even more radical agenda is beginning to unfold, albeit undeveloped and still largely unconscious. If we were to put all the disparate pieces of the 3D printing culture together, what we begin to see is a powerful new narrative arising that could change the way civilization is organized in the twenty-first century.
Think about it. The DIY culture is growing around the world, empowered by the idea of using bits to arrange atoms. Like the early software hackers of a generation ago, who were motivated to create their own software to share new information, DIY players are passionate about creating their own software to print and share things. Many of the things that 3D hobbyists are creating, if put together, make up the essential nodes of a do-it-yourself TIR infrastructure.
The really revolutionary aspect of 3D printing, which will take it from a hobbyist subculture to a new economic paradigm, is the impending “Makers Infrastructure.” This development will spawn new business practices whose efficiencies and productivity take us to near zero marginal costs in the production and distribution of goods and services—easing us out of the capitalist period and into the collaboratist era.
Among the first to glimpse the historical significance of a “Makers Infrastructure” were the local grassroots activists who constituted the Appropriate Technology Movement. The movement began in the 1970s and was inspired by the writing of Mahatma Gandhi, and later E. F. Schumacher, Ivan Illich, and—if it’s not too presumptuous—a book I authored called
Entropy: A New World View.
A new generation of DIY hobbyists, most of whom were veterans of the peace and civil rights movements, loosely affiliated themselves under the appropriate technology banner. Some preached a “back to the land” ethos and migrated to rural areas. Others remained in the poor, urban neighborhoods of major cities, often squatting and occupying abandoned neighborhood buildings. Their self-proclaimed mission was to create “appropriate technologies,” meaning tools and machines that could be made from locally available resources, that were scaled to steward rather than exploit their ecological surroundings, and that could be shared in a collaborative culture. Their rallying cry was “think globally and act locally,” by which they meant to take care of the planet by living in a sustainable way in one’s local community.
The movement, which started in the industrialized countries of the global North, soon became an even more powerful force in the developing countries in the global South, as the world’s poor struggled to create their own self-sufficient communities at the margins of a global capitalist economy.
Particularly noticeable, at least in hindsight, is that a decade after the Appropriate Technology Movement emerged, a distinctly different movement of young tech-hobbyists came on the scene. These were the geeks and nerds of IT culture who shared a love of computer programming and a passion for sharing software in collaborative learning communities. They made up the Free Software Movement, whose aim was to create a global Collaborative Commons (that movement will be considered in greater detail in part III). Their slogan was “information wants to be free,” coined by Stewart Brand, one of the few who bridged the Appropriate Technology Movement and hacker culture. (
The Whole Earth Catalog
, which Brand edited, helped elevate the Appropriate Technology Movement from a niche subculture to a broader cultural phenomenon.) What’s often lost in Brand’s remarks on the software revolution is the rest of the utterance, which he delivered at the first hackers conference in 1984:
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
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Brand saw early on the coming contradiction between intellectual-property rights and open-source access. That contradiction would eventually
frame the battle between capitalists and collaboratists as the marginal costs of sharing information approached zero.
The Appropriate Technology Movement was decidedly low-tech, interested in both rediscovering and upgrading effective traditional technologies that had been abandoned or forgotten in the rush into the Industrial Age and developing newer technologies—especially renewable energies. They favored the simple over the complex and technology that could be replicated from scratch using local resources and know-how, so as to stay true to the principle of local self-reliance.
The hackers were of a different ilk. They were the young, often brilliant engineers and scientists at the leading edge of the IT revolution—the very epitome of high-tech culture. Their gaze was global rather than local and their community took shape in the social spaces of the Internet.
What the two movements had in common was a sense of shared community and an ethical belief in the value of collaboration over proprietorship and access over ownership.
Now, 3D printing brings these two pivotal movements together, since it is both extremely high tech and appropriate tech. It is, for the most part, employed as an open-source technology. The software instructions for printing objects are globally shared rather than privately held, yet the material feedstocks are locally available, making the technology universally applicable. While 3D printing promotes self-sufficient local communities, the products can be marketed on websites at nearly zero marginal cost and made accessible to a global user base. Three-dimensional printing also bridges ideological borders, appealing to libertarians, do-it-yourselfers, social entrepreneurs, and communitarians, all of whom favor a distributed, transparent, collaborative approach to economic and social life rather than a centralized and proprietary one. 3D printing brings these various sensibilities together. The social bond is the deep abhorrence of hierarchical power and the fierce commitment to peer-to-peer lateral power.
It’s not surprising that 3D printing is catching on in the most advanced industrial economies. While U.S. companies grabbed a quick lead in the new technology, Germany seems poised to catch up in the next several years because its 3D technology is viewed as an infofacturing model tailored for a distributed, collaborative, laterally scaled TIR infrastructure.
Germany is far ahead of the other major industrialized nations in advancing the IoT technology platform for 3D printing to plug into and play. As already mentioned, the country has surpassed the target of producing 20 percent of its electrical power with distributed renewable energy and is projected to generate 35 percent of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020.
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Germany has also converted 1 million buildings to partial green micropower plants in the past ten years. E.ON and other power and utility companies are currently installing hydrogen and other storage technologies across the transmission grid. Deutsche Telekom is testing the Energy Internet in six regions of the country, and Daimler is establishing
a network of hydrogen fueling stations across Germany in preparation for the company’s launch of fuel-cell vehicles in 2017.
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Because they can connect into an IoT infrastructure across Germany, 3D printers can take advantage of the efficiencies and productivity potential afforded by the new Internet of Things. This allows German infofacturers to leap ahead of the United States, where 3D printing firms find themselves adrift in an inefficient and outdated Second Industrial Revolution infrastructure whose productivity capacity has long since peaked.
Germany’s small- and medium-sized engineering companies have long been regarded as the best in the world in precision engineering, making them ideally positioned to lead in the advancement of 3D printing. Ten German companies are already out front in the development of 3D printing. EOS and Concept Laser, both based in Bavaria, are among the world-class players.
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The German approach to shifting into a TIR infrastructure is both conventional, relying on a top-down implementation of the Internet of Things, and lateral, with local communities transforming their buildings to micropower plants, installing micropower grids, and introducing e-mobility transport.
It is in the developing world, however, that a Makers infrastructure is evolving in its purest form. In poor urban outskirts, isolated towns, and rural locales—where infrastructure is scant, access to capital spotty, at best, and technical expertise, tools, and machinery virtually nonexistent—3D printing provides a desperately needed opportunity for building a TIR Makers infrastructure.
Marcin Jakubowski, a graduate of Princeton University with a doctorate in fusion energy from the University of Wisconsin, is one of a growing number of socially motivated young inventors who are beginning to put together 3D blueprints for creating a TIR Makers infrastructure anywhere in the world. Jakubowski began by asking a rather simple question: What does any community need in the way of materials and machines to create a sustainable and decent quality of life? He and his team, who are impassioned advocates of open-source appropriate technology, have “identified 50 of the most important machines that allow modern life to exist—the tools we use everyday—everything from a tractor to a bread oven to a circuit maker,” to farm, build habitats, and manufacture things.
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The group’s primary focus is on the tools of production. The goal is to create open-source software that can use locally available feedstock—mainly scrap metal—to print all 50 machines, giving every community a “global village construction kit” to make its own TIR society.
Thus far, Jakubowski’s open-source ecology network of farmers and engineers have used 3D printing to make prototypes of 8 of the 50 machines: “bulldozer, rototiller, ‘microtractor,’ backhoe, universal rotor, drill press, a multi-purpose ‘ironworker,’ . . . and a CNC torch table for the precision cutting of sheet metal.”
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All the designs and instructions for 3D-printed
machines are open sourced on the group’s website for anyone to replicate. The team is currently working on the next eight prototype technologies.
Building a modern civilization from “scratch and scrap,” from the ground up, would have been unthinkable a generation ago. While open-source ecology is taking an integrated, systemic approach designed to create an entire ecology of machines for making a modern economy, other 3D printing groups, including Appropedia, Howtopedia, and Practical Action, are serving as repositories for open-source, 3D printing designs that will allow do-it-yourselfers to print a whole range of machines that are essential to build a TIR Makers economy.
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Three-dimensional printing of key tools and machines for farming, building, and manufacturing, by themselves, can do very little. To be useful, they have to be plugged into an electricity infrastructure. The real revolution comes when the 3D Makers Movement connects all the “things” in a 3D Makers economy to an Energy Internet. When that happens, the economic paradigm changes. Connecting 3D-printed things via an Energy Internet gives every community a mini-IoT infrastructure that can reach out nodally and connect contiguous communities across regions.
Microgrids—local Energy Internets—are already being installed in communities in the most remote regions of the world, transforming economic development overnight. In India, where 400 million people, mostly in rural areas, are still without electricity, the microgrid debuted in a big way in July 2012 when the country experienced the worst power blackout in history, leaving 700 million people without electricity. While much of the nation went into panic mode, one tiny village in rural Rajasthan enjoyed business as usual, without as much as a flickering of the lights. The villagers’ newly acquired televisions stayed on, their DVD players worked, their buttermilk machines kept churning, and the fans kept them cool, all thanks to the green microgrid.
Just months earlier, a small start-up company called Gram Power, run by a 22-year-old social entrepreneur named Yashraj Khaitan, a graduate of the University of California, and Jacob Dickinson, a colleague, set up India’s first smart microgrid in the tiny Indian village of Khareda Lakshmipura. The local electricity microgrid is powered by a bank of solar panels connected to a brick substation. Inside the substation are batteries that allow the village to store power during the night or when there is cloud cover. A small computer transmits data back to the company’s offices in Jaipur. Wires on wooden poles transmit the electricity from the substation to scores of homes around the village, providing green electricity for more than 200 residents. Each home is equipped with a smart meter that informs the user how much electricity is being used and what it is costing at different times of the day.
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Green electricity is far less expensive than electricity from India’s national grid, and it eliminates the burning of highly polluting kerosene that is responsible for respiratory and heart diseases common throughout India.