I don’t recall seeing the phrase “rent seeking behavior” before I saw people talking about it here. After that, I was surprised how often the idea came to mind when reading or listening to the news. The trend is as insidious as it is pervasive. Direct economically aware push-back seems rare. There are some examples though. Recently, there’s this
On Wednesday, the five FTC commissioners unanimously adopted a policy statement supporting the “right to repair” that pledges beefed-up enforcement efforts and could open the way to new regulations.
“These types of (repair) restrictions can significantly raise costs for consumers, stifle innovation, close off business opportunity for independent repair shops, create unnecessary electronic waste, delay timely repairs and undermine resiliency,” FTC Chair Lina Khan said. “The FTC has a range of tools it can use to root out unlawful repair restrictions, and today’s policy statement would commit us to move forward on this issue with new vigor.”
A twitter thread by @RealSexyCyborg brought a lot of stuff together for me. She takes an in-your-face approach to many topics, most of which I don’t know enough about to evaluate her opinions, but her technology expertise is undeniable. Thread focuses on 3D printing but she mentions a range of products and services.
Canon, HP, Stratasys, the big names- they wanted in. But they lost & we fucking won- we didn’t ekk out a little slice of the pie like Linux, @adrianbowyer’s RepRap derivatives won on a vast scale. We absolutely dominate. We kicked their asses so hard they’re scared to try again.
Summary
We’ve got this one little corner of hardware with no Jobs. no Edison, all Woz and Telsa. Our team for once. 3D printing is owned by the hackers the way nothing else is. And dealing with people who don’t get why it’s not injection-molded, cartridge taking, Big Box Store garbage- -why it does not have a massive markup for slick marketing and “genius bars”- is exhausting.
Look we get it- you want all your technology to be indistinguishable from magic, you don’t want to hack, or learn, or explore. You can go buy that- but why tear down others who want to?
VR, you know you’re fucked right? You’re going to have ads beamed straight into your eyeballs, tuned by the best AI Facebook can bring to bear on your distracted brain. And you’ll have zero choice but to play by proprietary rules if you want access to that entire medium.
Your phone? Is fucked. Binary blobs all over, locked baseband modem, no privacy protection, governments saying what apps you can use. General computing? @doctorow has written about the war on that and checkout what’s been going on if you think you’ll own your hardware much longer
Cars? Tesla set the model- pay to unlock features of the car you thought you owned but can’t do anything to. You think every other manufacturer isn’t pivoting to recurring income? You think your politicians paid by their lobbyists are going to stop them?
Software? Fusion360, Adobe Creative Cloud, John Deere tractors- a tradesperson can’t even own their own tools anymore. We’re all sharecroppers. Everything is rented.
But 3D printers- we OWN that shit. You got a $200 Ender-3? You’re 100% offline, 100% Open Source toolchain. You can 3D print everything from Gingery patterns for a full hand-scraped post-apocalyptic machine shop to an FGC-9 semiautomatic in case anyone tries to take it from you.
Every single thing we own is being taken, put in the cloud, and rented back to us. Willingly. Because no one wants to know how to do anything beyond a narrow scope. We’re a world of carpenters willing to rent sharp chisels and saws rather than learn to sharpen them ourselves.
3D printers- you know almost all come with a toolkit? So you can fix it yourself. You know how rare that is? No, you don’t throw it away. Ever. No, it’s not all glued together into a glass slab. You just, fix it. It’s all metal, you can fix it and run it indefinitely.
Millions of people do this, even if they’ve fixed nothing else in their lives. They live without instant returns, drop shipping, call centers in India and genius bars. They just, fix it themselves. And that can suck sometimes, but it’s overall a very, very good thing.
And again, if you don’t get that, don’t see why, didn’t have a problem with tying your Facebook account to Oculus, great- buy a Makerbot or something. But we’ve got this one thing left that we own- don’t put so much time and effort into tearing it down.
Anyway, really makes me want to get a 3D printer. I’m starting a list of ideas for stuff to fabricate.
