All Hail the Vectors of International Productive Chaos

New article up on The Brutalitarian. I know few know or are interested in what that is, but that's okay, because I'm going to sum up the article here. Just because I thought you should know:

Adrian Bowyer (and many others across the Internet in conjunction) is/are building the RepRap—a replicating rapid prototyper. It is an exploration of rapid prototype technology, with the purpose of building a prototyper capable of building the same prototyper: in other words, capable of building replications of itself. Poor fellow cited Marx in one of his essays about the philosophy of the project, so I was already bent to reply, if the concept wasn't awesome enough.

Here are pieces of the article, in the general flow of ideas. Obviously it sounds much more witty and philosophical in its entirety.

...Bowyer takes his inspiration from this logic project, converting it into a technological proposal: what would be necessary to make a machine capable of building itself? The difficulty, he says, is the “need for it to be able to self-assemble as well as self-replicate.” He therefore takes the biological model of symbiosis as his solution, suggesting it might be more feasible and simpler for humans and the machine to work together for the benefit of each other: “to make a universal constructor that could manufacture its component parts, but that left assembly to people.” This is an important and under-utilized fact of the “biomimetic” model which has been a part of design throughout history—no organism is a unit, unto itself. The very name “organism” lends itself to discussion of systematic approaches, schematic models, and functional compartmentability, but its real existence is much more dynamic...

...But if these economies of biology are so all-encompassing, isn’t it a bit redundant to speak of “biomimetics”? How could a cuckoo, in pushing another bird’s eggs out the nest and replacing them with its own, be said to be mimicking or perverting nature? Isn’t that nature itself? What about a human using an oar—is it more like a flipper, or our own human hand? We now know we are hardly the only species to use tools—so if we take our inspiration for our tools from nature, are we “aping” nature, according to the archaic term, or simply being humans at our most natural?...

...What would ERR look like on the thousandth iteration of a thinking, fabricating robot, making other thousands of robots with that ERR included, expanding and increasing the ERR as more robots are created?...

...This is not a reason against experimenting with iterative, self-replicating production. It is simply one possible stumbling point to think about as we suggest making our production more “natural”. After all, nature creates hurricanes, plagues, cancer, and the destructive potential of humanity. If you could turn back the clock and keep humanity from ever leaving the trees, or inventing guns, or the A-bomb, would you? This is not an important philosophical question, merely a game. But if we begin to automate the “decision” of producing, by making machines capable of doing so at will, we will be in the position of asking our descendants’ version of this hypothetical question ourselves, when we are in the position to do something about it...

...The RepRap is not digital production, but it establishes ability for scaling production in similar magnitude to the near infinite power of digital reproduction. As said before, if one RepRap can make one additional RepRap a day, in a month one might have half a trillion of them. Clearly there is little market in selling items capable of producing themselves. The limit of our productive power, (and what’s more, the worker’s productive power) is now reduced to the resources necessary, and Bowyer and his team have many good ideas in this category: bio-synthesizable plastics, fully recyclable materials, and an open-source design philosophy. The idea is a good one—by putting the means of production directly into the hands of the producer (interestingly enough via a physically tautological, though not logically tautological production process) production relations can be re-formed from the ground up on the digital model....

...Revolution, it seems, is precisely what Bowyer is after despite his opposition to violence, and rightly so. His project would revolutionize manufacturing, and what’s more, revolutionize our understanding of production by evolving our productive relations: in fact, our entire humanity as producing beings. Violence is a potential outcome. Economic and environmental destruction are also real risks. But these always have been possibilities; we just like to forget about them, abstracting them in our minds to simple errors from “the way things are supposed to work.” They would need to be considered in the vanguard if we are going to shake up our relations with production....

And so forth. His project is amazingly interesting: both in its philosophical scope, and also simply by the fact it is so simple, yet so ambitious. Refuting the faulty concept of intellectual property is only the beginning--I see what other's might call "the singularity" looming in such a machine. Of course, I believe the singularity is ridiculous (a subject for another post), most simply because it will happen through billions of machines working independently--a productive chaos rather than a productive unity. Here, my friends, in the RepRap, is that productive chaos. Bring it on.