Printing Utopia: The Domain of the 3D Printer in the Making of Commons-Based Futures

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.