Due to time constraints I'm gonna be brief (ok, I intended to. Fuck
it.), and I'm gonna write in English so this can reach a wider audience.
Perhaps. Or not. "Be wary what you wish for" they say, eh? Anyway!
DISCLAIMER: THis stuff is full of opinions. Don't grow attached to them,
cause I don't. I make a lot of jokes, and when people tell me I'm
crossing the Red Line, I tell them that animu was pretty rad.
I kind of eye affectionately the (xirdal's?) Cupcake makerbot that's in
the hackerspce, myself working with a clone of the dual-headed wooden
Replicator, and did some stuff with 2X, and that model starts to show
some bad design decisions.
By 'did stuff' I mean like, pulled it apart and went at it with a file,
lathe, drill press, sandpaper, etc. Come to think of it, I rarely print
anymore, and my relationships with printers became more intimate. It's
kind of fitting that the Hackerspace is located in a dungeon. Ahem.
So.
I'm a latecomer to every party (1). The early makerbot printing hype
passed before my eyes unnoticed. I was observing it from a distance, not
sure what it was about, and whether it would be nice/good/beneficial to
participate.
Now I know it was about a direction.
I browsed old galleries, followed old links, read old blogs... and it
looks like a postwar landscape. In a kind of a sad way, but then again,
I enjoy post-apo muchly.
So we had a wonderful team. Hoeken and Pettis were a very good pair,
regardless of what people seem to think about Pettis, and what Hoeken
may be doing out in China. A hardware guy and a marketing guy, a great
brand... and suddenly you have a lot of people developing things for a
de facto corporation! I mean, the way they scaled up was amazing. And
the amount of research and development was crazy awesome. And
Thingiverse was a brilliant idea that hit the spot. And they were on a
right path, perhaps one to parallell Elon Musk's (except he was only one
guy).
They could have changed the way hardware was developed. There was a lot
of dedication from the user base, a lot of belief, a lot of wanting
more, a lot of participating in something bigger, and a lot of making
something awesome. And it was all heading the right way, seemingly,
following Hoeken's vision of a machine that can make stuff (not only
print, mind you).
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off
the sho... Well, ok, I've seen mods of this device that were brilliant.
They were gamechangers. They are from, what, 2009? Those things didn't
feel like free gold,jewels and uranium, they felt like cheat codes, even
when you find them 5 years later! Those were the things that went 'holy
fuck'(2) in my head for 72 hours duration at 7 hertz. And they were
usermade, often modelled with software I would't touch with a
dick-tentacle ripped out of alien cloaca, stiffened with wire and
wrapped in paper towels.
(Note the alliteration. I couldn't do that if this were not English.)(3)
Now, if you look at that landscape, it's all there, like juicy, fruitful
ruins of dead cities. (4)
Beause there is no one who could pick up what Makerbot left off. Many of
their solutions are beginning to be cloned, successful, and closed
source. I could name companies. There are several. Oh, Opensource?
Cannot patent? Sorry dear friend, but this is not how it works. I could
patent my mom's tits, and she would have to shave them off, or face a
$6M lawsuit. Well, she would win, eventually...
... but not until she paid up the costs. See a hook here? Or, should I
say, a bandsaw?
Skeinforge, oh god, this is a 3d printer... printu...
printing...person's? dream. I could do things to it that the Shortbus
movie is too prude to show. It's years ahead of everything out there,
and it's from 2012 (last update, last time I checked). I remember people
being hyped about Slic3r and then Makerware and Cura, and now I am
delighted to see how many battle hardened 3d printerers (rererers)
return to this glimmering sapphire of duct tape, paper bags, styrofoam
and wood glue, and produce the most amazing results. Hell, this bunch of
Python scripts now sits behind several closed source applications, or is
bundled with them contary to the license, AND NO ONE GIVES A
HAMSTERFISTFUCK.(5)
It's all out there, all those ruins plundered by everyone, closed into
black boxes, driven to their enclaves like war loot, and sold as dumb
shiny blobs with a sticker "NEW"!. And Ultimaker disappeared somewhere,
or maybe they are outside of this Fallout mind-map of mine. I don't feel
that there is this soul of making crazy stuff surrounding them as it was
with Makerbot, I appreciate what they do, but it feels like careful
marketing more and more.
Like wanting a piece of cake on your boss's birthday party.
And in the end, all this stifles development, pushes us back into our
human condition.
When my kids grow up, I'm gonna tell them a story, along the lines of
"Once upon a time we had a hardware equivalent of Linux that got sold to
a big corporation that could have became Redhat, but they chose to
become Microsoft, and it's another 40 years since they decided to
release something opensource."
********
But it all proved a point. Today we have full-metal-frame printers that
look nice and cost tons of money. And people buy them. The fun thing is
that they are in no way better than the second lasercut generation of
the makerbots. I've printed those things to death. Several deaths
actually, break it fix it, as the saying goes. I could print anything on
them. While the closed ones? Well, they go like bouncers in a night club
when you grab the wrong kind of ass one time too many. Protip: you don't
get a refund, unless you count the bruises.
Hell, when I pay for it, I want to grab ass all I like!
I'll stick with my opensource stuff that makes those squealing startup
efforts sound like a pig farm fed tortillas.
The amount of R&D and released projects and clones this hardware model
has to offer is unprecedented. Makerbot was the first working open
source firm, and after all that time, I think I'm fairly certain I've
pinned down most of the elements that made it tick (in b4 tock, in b4
Intel). It has proven that the open company model, the
prosumer-participating company model, the let's-do-stuff-together and
our-clients-are-a-part-of-us model has amazing benefits to offer. It's
like crowsourced design thinking(6).
What I'm worried about is how much fucking time is it going to take this
species to discover that cooperations makes things 600% more awesome?
A single then-opensource company pushed the development of a device
stagnant for 30 years to unprecedented levels within 3-4 years, on a
limited budget.
Once it went closed-source, the market divided, shit gone closed source,
development not only became stagnant but actively REGRESSED.
It will take 3 to 4 generations of closed source FFF printers to match
what Makerbot was before it was sold.
*********
Now, what's worrisome is that the Makerbot was a one of a kind company.
OK, PeachyPrinter may be another, but time will tell. Most people at
hackerspaces are more interested in their corporate jobs and their
Dells/Thinkpads or in staying homeless and angry than actually BETTERING
THE HUMAN CONDITION. I would even say that they are actively
UNCOOPERATIVE, they are like an amorphous liquid that fucking STAYS
LIQUID for, like, fucking EVER, be it polar winter or equatorial
monsoons. And if they do finally harden, we get Makerbot, that breaks
easily under tension (or repeated stress. Like amorphous metals. Durr
hurr.)
I am not satisfied with this state of affairs.
I am majorly pissed, actually. Pissed, disillusioned, and busy working
my ass off to the limits (dis?)allowed by biology, for this shit will
not stand.(7)
Bring it on, world, we'll have a topless battle and I will gouge your
eyes out with my nippless, because they're as hard as hell, and I'm not
gonna take it anymore! (yes, this is a movie reference, no don't goggle
it, I'm a duckduckfag, in b4 Amazon. All is futile, go watch External
World).
**********
(1) and I always bring a taser
(2) in Christian mythology Angels don't have sex organs, you have to
carve your way in.
(3) if anyone tells you that studying Arts is useless, show them this
message. My state educated me to my full ability when it comes to
writing these things. Poland, you're the best, even if your english is
funny.
(4) I didn't mean the corpses you sick fuck.
(5) Ok, I give, but that could possibly put me in conflict with animal
right activists.
(6) I hate... uh, ok, I'm sceptical towards this term, it was annexed by
the wrong kind of people. To both those terms actually, it feels like
they blanket-cover more shit than content. We should let it dry in the
sun for a while and pull off the blanket, the shit would stick and we'd
end up with the real deal. I wonder if you could commercialize this
process in chemistry. Or sociology. Or eugenics...
(7) Unless you imagine alternate history with Columbus and the egg...