In the call for the special issue for the EAEPE Journal, we can find the word "scenario." The question is if the authors can imagine scenarios in which "potential strategies for the appropriation of existing capitalist infrastructures […] in order to provoke the emergence of post-capitalist infrastructures" can be described. Obviously, the call verges on the border of science fiction-and this is not a bad thing. Diverse strands of media studies and science and technology studies have shown (e.g., Schröter 2004; Kirby 2010; Jasanoff and Kim 2015; McNeil et al. 2017) that not only the development of science and (media) technology is deeply interwoven in social imaginaries about possible outcomes and their implicated futures, but there is a whole theoretical tradition in which societies as such are fundamentally constituted by imaginary relations (Castoriadis 1975/2005). But in all these discussions, one notion very seldom appears: that of an "imaginary economy," meaning a collectively held system of more or less vague or detailed ideas, what an economy is, how it works, and how it should be (especially in the future; but see the somewhat different usage recently in Fabbri 2018). The aim of the paper is to outline a notion of "imaginary economy" and its necessary functions in the stabilization of a given economy, but even more so in the transformation to another economy-how should a transformation take place if there's not at least a vague image where to go? Of course, we could also imagine a blind evolutionary process without any imaginary process but that seems not to be the way in which human societies-and economies-work. Obviously a gigantic research field opens up-so in the proposed paper, only one type of "imaginary economy" can be analyzed: It is the field that formed recently around the proposed usages and functions of 3D printing. In publications as diverse as Eversmann (2014) and Rifkin (2014), the 3D printer operates as a technology that seems to open up a post-capitalist future-and thereby it is directly connected to the highly imaginary "replicator" from Star Trek. In these scenarios, a localized omnipotent production-a post-scarcity scenario (see Panayotakis 2011)-overcomes by itself capitalism: But symptomatically enough, questions of work, environment, and planetary computation are (mostly) absent from these scenarios. Who owns the templates for producing goods with 3D printers? What about the energy supply? In a critical and symptomatic reading, this imaginary economy , very present in a plethora of discourses nowadays, is deconstructed and possible implications for a post-capitalist construction are discussed.

2014

The Arts and Crafts Movement of late 19th century England professed to democratize art and the production wares. The most prominent character of the Movement was poet, craftsman and socialist William Morris. I claim that today open source philosophy and peer production combined with 3D printing technology represents a similar philosophy about the democratization of production as the 19th century Arts and Crafts Movement. 3D printing is a nascent technology which allows the physical rendering (prototyping) of computer models. As The Arts and Crafts Movement was opposed to machines, I try to ascertain to what extent the Movement’s opposition toward the machine extends and what it is based on. Therefore, I discuss the machine’s two-sided role as, on the one hand, the destroyer of art, and on the other hand, the saviour of art. The Arts and Crafts Movement and 3D printing along with its related philosophies are connected by their endeavour to make the production of wares more accessible to ordinary people. They also share ideas about co-operative work, the strive for quality instead of profits, and a kind of socialism. In the upcoming future, if current trends persist, it is foreseeable that progress toward an Arts and Crafts vision of society will take place. The concepts of art, handcraft and machine work have been, and still are, in a state of constant change. This entails that other related concepts will change, too, such as the concepts of authenticity and uniqueness, which are definitive concepts of the era of handmaking, and they will begin to denominate new, contemporarily more relevant phenomena. My discussion of Lewis Mumford’s concepts (Megamachine, polytechnics, monotechnics) details that the role of the machine as the destroyer or the saviour of art is contingent on the ideology of the man who wields power over the machine. In this light the Movement’s opposition toward the machine appears more as opposition toward the prevailing capitalist system rather than as simple Luddism. I study the Arts and Crafts Movement through the texts of its members paying special attention to the writings of its father character William Morris. As 3D printing is still an emerging field of technology my study material, aside from academic articles, also includes news articles, popular literature, lectures and interviews that I have conducted myself. Study material on peer production and open source is based on academic literature. This thesis falls under cultural criticism in which I apply comparative analysis.

2013

2017

3D printing is not only a diverse set of developing technologies, it is also a social phenomenon operating within the political imaginary. The past half-decade has seen a surge of "futuring" activity and widespread public attention devoted to 3D printing, which is typically represented as a harbinger of economic revival and political transformation. This article explores how 3D-printed futures are imagined across a broad political spectrum, by undertaking a multidisciplinary analysis of academic and popular literature. Three influential political imaginaries of 3D printing are identified: the maker-as-entrepreneur; the economic revival of the nation state; and commons-based utopias. In spite of stark contrasts in political alignment, these imagined futures share one important thing: an increasing awareness of design, making, and production. This insertion of design into design history and theory, as it potentially enables an increasing public comprehension of the profound significance of design in the world, in both historical and contemporary terms.

This article sketches out the relationship between 3D printing and sets of metaphorical imaginings associated with this technology. In the first part of the article I outline the psychotechnographic approach taken by Steven Connor (2017) in his recent work on imaginary machines. Connor's work focuses on accounting for the metaphorical feedback loops between the things humans make and how such things are imagined, both before and after coming into being. In the following section I examine the themes of replication and transportation. These are two key technological fantasies associated with 3D printing and the infrastructure it is suited to exploit and influence. In the final section, I consider the interaction between 3D printing and broader sets of trends, which Peter Sloterdijk (2016) puts forward as characteristic of late capitalist societies. I cull examples from current uses and speculative hopes for the technology with the aim of showing how its manifestation bears the imprint of the identified fantasies and trends. In conclusion, I suggest that 3D printing will have the most intense influence where its affordances harmonise with existing trends, and that efforts to shape its applications for the purpose of social good will benefit from closely attending to both the practical and expressive possibilities enabled by the technology.

Design & Culture, 2022

The 3D printer is a “projection screen” for the eco-social maker movement. It signifies a desire for networked collaboration, ecological and social participation, political empowerment, and socioeconomic transformation. Yet the 3D printer is not producing anything that fulfils such a comprehensive and disruptive potential. While it has become a profound agent for a commons-based future that aims to solve the global challenges of modernity, it is a tool, rather than an agent of the maker movement. This article explores the utopian potential of the 3D printer within the discourse of commons-based future-making. Along with a wide range of academic and popular literature, the sociotechnical motives of a commons-based imaginary are analyzed and discussed in their historical construction and social order. Indeed, the 3D printer revitalizes longstanding desires for social transformation, giving them fresh impetus. Because of its interpretative flexibility, the 3D printer has become a “weak desire machine” that allows members of the maker movement to express their utopian desires. On the one hand, the 3D printer helps make utopian desires tangible and negotiable. On the other hand, the 3D printer tends to promote a techno-positivist approach that oversimplifies social change, losing sight of alternatives and ambiguities.

Additive manufacturing has spread widely over the past decade, especially with the availability of home 3D printers. In the future, many items may be manufactured at home, which raises two ethical issues. First, there are questions of safety. Our current safety regulations depend on centralized manufacturing assumptions; they will be difficult to enforce on this new model of manufacturing. I argue that consumers are not capable of fully assessing all relevant risks and thus continue to require protection; any regulation will likely apply to plans, however, not physical objects. Second, there are intellectual property issues. In combination with a 3D scanner, it is now possible to scan items and print copies; many items are not protected from this by current intellectual property laws. I argue that these laws are ethically sufficient. Patent exists to protect what is innovative; the rest is properly not protected. Intellectual property rests on the notion of creativity, but what counts as creative changes with the rise of new technologies.

Gobernanza y regulaciones de internet en América Latina, 2018

While transformative technologies such as Artificial Intelligence have drawn much attention from academia and the media over the years, the subtler development of additive manufacture has yet to be acknowledged as having substantial weight in the shaping of our future. In this chapter, we attempt to understand how the combination of an ever expanding Internet with the increased availability of 3D printers will bring opportunities of improvement for the developing world. After pondering over the paradox of globalization that leads raw materials to be shipped across the world only to return as finished goods, we proceed to make our analysis based on empirical research and technology that is already beyond proof of concept stage, looking at examples from the construction, health and food sectors. With this data in hand, our investigation moves towards understanding the intersection between the consequences of wider scale 3D printing, a global communications network, and intellectual property rights. We outline a few possible policy routes to turn these developments into benefits for the developing world, while taking into consideration questions such as that of job relocation. Our conclusion is that before the world is caught off guard by additive manufacture and policies are enacted in a reactive manner, it is the responsibility of actors engaged in relevant arenas to advance meaningful discussion on the subject, while there is still time for the shaping of a more sustainable logic for our productive system.