Abstract:
3-D printing as a socialist path to distributed power?
In a recent Guardian article, ‘The Tech Utopia Nobody Wants’, J. R. Hennessy outlined a growing backlash against the techno-elites-Silicon Valley coders, engineers and the corporations they work for such as Google, Facebook and Amazon. Hennessy cited the latest examples of techno-hubris: the proposed replacement of restaurant staff in San Francisco with iPads; the suggestion by a Google engineer that food stamps be replaced by ‘Soylent’ (joke presumably intended)-a nutritional sludge that would sustain people more efficiently than actual food; the ongoing hostility towards wearers of Google Glass, whose use invites ‘the kind of casual sociopathy which leads a person to become a surveillance camera’. More notorious perhaps was Facebook’s ’emotion contagion experiment’ where, without consent, researchers manipulated the newsfeeds of users in order to measure mood changes. Hennessy argues that the backlash represents the desire of people to ‘structure their own lives’ and reject the ‘ideological assumptions underpinning the personal tech revolution’. One could list countless other examples of people feeling disempowered by new technology-the almost unfettered scope of info-surveillance by governments and corporations, the displacement of jobs by machines, the creation of oppressive IP laws that limit communication and information-sharing, the pernicious consequences of digital-rights management (DRM) technology that prevents users from controlling the things they buy. There is a mounting sense that at the heart of the information revolution there is a denial, rather than an enhancement, of humanity.
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