Dylan Tweney at VentureBeat.com has something to say about the intersection between 3D printing, the American pioneering spirit and current countermovements in contemporary culture and politics.
“We have a consumer product that’s anti-consumerist,” MakerBot Industries founder Bre Pettis told me at CES 2012, where I captured the short video below. “When you get a MakerBot, you have an alternative to buying things. You can download them … or you can design something and make it custom yourself.”
(...) I’m convinced that the people who have embraced the DIY movement have tapped into the core of what makes the United States great: Self-reliance, experimentation, innovation and a non-dogmatic reverence for facts. Over the decades, innovators tinkering in metaphorical (or literal) garages have played important roles in the development of electricity, radio, computers and, now, the internet economy.
DIY, or at least a willingness to take initiative for doing things on one’s own, outside the usual structures, has also played a role in political life, with grassroots organizations like MoveOn.org and loosely organized movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street drawing much of their strength from people’s iconoclasm and sense of self-sufficiency.
Dylan’s Desk: Saddle your horses and fire up the 3D printer
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