The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (14 page)

Two other trailblazers, Zach “Hoken” Smith and Bre Pettis, created a website called Thingiverse—owned by MakerBot Industries—in 2008. The site is the meeting place for the 3D printing community. The website holds open-source, user-created digital design files licensed under both the General Public Licenses (GPL) and Creative Commons Licenses. (These licenses will be discussed in greater detail in part III.) The DIY community relies heavily on the website as a library of sorts for uploading and sharing open-source designs and for engaging in new 3D printed collaborations.

The Makers Movement took a big step toward the democratization of digitally produced things with the introduction of the Fab Lab in 2005. The Fab Lab, a fabrication laboratory, is the brainchild of the MIT physicist and professor Neil Gershenfeld. The idea came out of a popular course at MIT called “How to Make (Almost) Anything.”

The Fab Lab was born at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms that grew out of the MIT Media Lab with the mission of providing a laboratory to which anyone could come and use the tools to create their own 3D-printed projects. Gershenfeld’s Fab Foundation charter emphasizes the organization’s commitment to open-access, peer-to-peer learning. The labs are outfitted with various types of flexible manufacturing equipment, which includes laser cutters, routers, 3D printers, mini mills, and the accompanying open-source software. Setting up the fully equipped lab costs around $50,000.
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There are now over 70 Fab Labs, most in urban areas in highly industrialized countries, but many, surprisingly enough, are in developing countries where access to the fabricating tools and equipment creates a beachhead for establishing a 3D printing community.
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In remote areas of the world, unconnected to the global supply chain, being able to fabricate even simple tools and objects can greatly improve economic welfare. The great majority of Fab Labs are community-led projects managed by universities and nonprofit associations, although a few commercial retailers are beginning to explore the idea of attaching Fab Labs to their stores—so that a hobbyist can buy the supplies he or she needs and then use the Fab Lab to create the product.
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The idea, says Gershenfeld, is to provide the tools and materials anyone would need to build whatever they can envision. His ultimate goal “is to create a
Star Trek
-style replicator in 20 years.”
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The Fab Lab is “the people’s R&D laboratory” of the Third Industrial Revolution. It takes R&D and new innovations out of the elite laboratories of world-class universities and global companies and distributes it to
neighborhoods and communities where it becomes a collaborative pursuit and a powerful expression of peer-to-peer lateral power at work.

The democratization of production fundamentally disrupts the centralized manufacturing practices of the vertically integrated Second Industrial Revolution. The radical implications of installing Fab Labs all over the world so that everyone can be a prosumer has not gone unnoticed. Again, science-fiction writers were among the first to imagine the repercussions.

In
Printcrime
, published in 2006, Cory Doctorow described a future society in which 3D printers could print copies of physical goods. In Doctorow’s dystopian society, a powerful authoritarian government makes the 3D printing of physical copies of goods illegal. Doctorow’s protagonist, an early prosumer, is imprisoned for ten years for 3D printing. After serving his prison sentence, the hero realizes that an overthrow of the existing order is best accomplished not by just printing a few products, but rather by printing printers. He proclaims, “I’m going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone. That’s worth going to jail for. That’s worth anything.”
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Fab Labs are the new high-tech arsenals where DIY hackers are arming themselves with the tools to eclipse the existing economic order.

Hackers are just beginning to turn their attention to 3D printing of some of the many components that make up the IoT infrastructure. Renewable energy harvesting technologies are at the top of the list. Xerox is developing a special silver ink that could be substituted for the silicon that is currently used as the semiconductor within photovoltaic (PV) solar cells. The silver ink melts at a lower temperature than plastic, which could allow users to print integrated circuits into plastic, fabric, and film. DIY printing of paper-thin PV solar strips could allow anyone to produce their own solar harvesting technology at an ever-diminishing cost, bringing solar energy a step closer to near zero marginal cost. Xerox’s silver ink process is still experimental, but it is indicative of the new infofacturing possibilities opened up by 3D printing.
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Making 3D printing a truly local, self-sufficient process requires that the feedstock used to create the filament is abundant and locally available. Staples, the office supply company, has introduced a 3D printer, manufactured by Mcor Technologies, in its store in Almere, the Netherlands, that uses cheap paper as feedstock. The process, called selective deposition lamination (SDL), prints out hard 3D objects in full color with the consistency of wood. The 3D printers are used to infofacture craft products, architectural designs, and even surgical models for facial reconstruction. The paper feedstock costs a mere 5 percent of previous feedstocks.
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Other feedstocks being introduced are even cheaper, reducing the cost of materials to near zero. Markus Kayser, a graduate student at the Royal College of Art in London, has invented a Solar Sinter 3D printer that prints glass objects from sun and sand. The Solar Sinter, which was successfully tested in the Sahara Desert in 2011, is powered by two PV panels. It is
also equipped with a large lens that focuses the sun’s rays to heat sand to a melting point. The software then directs melted sand to form each layer, creating a fully formed glass object.
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Filabot is a nifty new device the size of a shoe box that grinds and melts old household items made out of plastic: buckets, DVDs, bottles, water pipes, sunglasses, milk jugs, and the like. The ground plastic is then fed into a hopper and into a barrel where it is melted down by a heating coil. The molten plastic then travels through nozzles and is sent through sizing rollers to create plastic filaments which are stored on a spool for printing. An assembled Filabot costs $649.
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A Dutch student, Dirk Vander Kooij, reprogrammed an industrial robot to print customized furniture in a continuous line using plastic material from old refrigerators. The robot can print out a chair in multiple colors and designs in less than three hours. His 3D printer can turn out 4,000 customized chairs a year.
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Other printers of furniture are using recycled glass, wood, fabrics, ceramics, and even stainless steel as feedstock, demonstrating the versatility in recycled feedstocks that can be employed in the new infofacturing process.

If infofacturers are going to print furniture, why not print the building the furniture will be housed in? Engineers, architects, and designers are scrambling to bring 3D-printed buildings to market. While the technology is still in the R&D stage, it is already clear that 3D printing of buildings will reinvent construction in the coming decades.

Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis is a professor of industrial and systems engineering and director of the Center for Rapid Automated Fabrication Technologies at the University of Southern California. With support and financing from the U.S. Department of Defense, the National Science Foundation, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Khoshnevis is experimenting with a 3D printing process called “contour crafting” to print buildings. He has created a form-free composite-fiber concrete that can be extruded and that is strong enough to allow a printed wall to support itself during construction. His team has already successfully constructed a wall that is five feet long, three feet high, and six inches thick using a 3D printer. Equally important, the viscous material does not clog the machine’s nozzle with sand and particles during the infusion process.

Admitting that this is only the first step, Khoshnevis nonetheless gushed that the printed wall is “the most historic wall since the Great Wall of China.” He added that after 20,000 years of human construction, “the process of constructing buildings is about to be revolutionized.”
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Khoshnevis says that the giant printers will cost a few hundred thousand dollars each—a small price for construction equipment. A new home could be potentially printed at a cost far below standard construction because of the cheap composite materials being used and the additive infofacturing process, which uses far fewer materials and human labor. He
believes that 3D-printed building construction will be the dominant industry standard by 2025 around the world.

Khoshnevis is not alone. The MIT research lab is using 3D printing to explore ways to create the frame of a house in one day with virtually no human labor. That same frame would take an entire construction crew a month to put up.
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Janjaap Ruijssenaars, a Dutch architect, is collaborating with Enrico Dini, chairman of Monolite, a U.K.-based 3D printing company. The two Europeans have announced that they will print out six-by-nine-foot frames made of sand and inorganic binder and then fill the frames with fiber-reinforced concrete. They hope to have a two-story building up in 2014.
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Dini and Foster + Partners, one of the world’s largest architectural firms, have teamed up with the European Space Agency to explore the possibility of using 3D printing to construct a permanent base on the moon. The buildings would be printed using lunar soil as the feedstock. The goal is to construct lunar habitats with locally sustainable materials found on the moon in order to avoid the logistical cost of shipping in materials from Earth. Xavier De Kestelier of Foster + Partners says that “as a practice, we are used to designing for extreme climates on Earth and exploiting the environmental benefits of using local, sustainable materials—our lunar habitation follows a similar logic.”
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The plan is to use Dini’s D-Shape printer to pour out the lunar buildings, each of which would take about a week to construct. The buildings are hollow, closed-cell structures that look a little like a bird skeleton. The catenary dome and cellular walls are designed to withstand micrometeoroids and space radiation. The building’s base and inflatable dome would be delivered by spacecraft from Earth. Foster explains that the layers of lunar soil, called regolith, would be printed out by the D-Shape printer and built up around the frame. Foster architects have already used simulated material to construct a 1.5-ton prototype building block. The first lunar building would be printed at the moon’s south pole, which is exposed to ample sunlight.
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While the 3D printing of buildings is in the very early stages of development, it is projected to grow exponentially in the coming two decades as the production process becomes increasingly efficient and cheaper. Unlike conventional construction techniques, where the cost of designing architectural blueprints is high, construction materials are expensive, labor costs are steep, and the time necessary to erect the structures is lengthy, 3D printing is not affected by these factors.

Three-dimensional printing can use the cheapest building materials on Earth—sand and rock, as well as virtually any kind of discarded waste materials, all from locally available sources—thereby avoiding the high cost of traditional building materials and the equally high logistical costs of delivering them on-site. The additive process of building up a structure layer by layer provides a further savings on the materials used
in construction. The open-source programs are virtually free, in contrast to the considerable time and expense involved in having an architect draw up blueprints. The building frame is erected with very little human labor compared to traditional construction and can be put up in a fraction of the time. Lastly, the marginal cost of generating electricity to power the 3D printer could approach zero by relying on locally harvested renewable energy, making it conceivable that, at least in the not-too-distant future, a small building could cost little more than what it takes to round up the rocks, sand, recyclable material, and other feedstock nearby.

Whether on the moon or here on Earth, human beings will need transport to get around. The first 3D-printed automobile, the Urbee, is already being field tested. The Urbee was developed by KOR EcoLogic, a company based in Winnipeg, Canada. The automobile is a two-passenger hybrid-electric vehicle (the name Urbee is short for
urban electric
), which is designed to run on solar and wind power that can be harvested in a one-car garage each day. The car can reach speeds of 40 miles per hour.
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If long driving distances are necessary, the user can switch over to the car’s ethanol-powered backup engine.
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Granted, the Urbee is just the first working prototype of the new TIR-era automobile, but like the introduction of Henry Ford’s first mass-produced, gas-powered internal-combustion engine automobile, the nature of the vehicle’s construction and power source is highly suggestive of the kind of future it portends for the economy and society.

Ford’s automobile required the construction of huge centralized factories to accommodate the delivery and storage of materials that went into the car’s assembly. Tooling the assembly line was highly capital intensive and required long runs of the exact same mass-produced vehicles to ensure a proper return on investment. Most people are aware of Ford’s flip response when a customer asked him which color he could choose for the automobile. Ford replied, “Any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”
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The subtractive manufacturing process on the Ford assembly line was highly wasteful, since bulk materials had to be cut and shaved before the final assembly of the automobile. The car itself was made up of hundreds of parts requiring both time and labor to assemble. It then had to be shipped across the country to dealers, again resulting in additional logistical costs. And even though Ford was able to use the new efficiencies made possible by the Second Industrial Revolution to create vertically integrated operations and achieve sufficient economies of scale to provide a relatively cheap vehicle that put millions of people behind the wheel, the marginal cost of producing and using each vehicle never got close to zero—especially when you factor in the price of gasoline.