Big fan of They Might be Giants. Through them I learned that John Flansberg has started blogging and one of his entries was about 3D printing. The conversation is the sort of arm’s length simple discussion anyone could have: 3D printing cool. 3D printing guns scary (subtext: guns bad). I should be past getting excited whenever someone starts another conversation about 3D printing, after all it’s likely 10,000 people are hearing about this for the first time daily, but this is 50% of They Might Be Giants and I love They Might Be Giants.
The thing I take away from this is that 3D Printing is a disruptive technology. It’s not just disruptive to manufacturing and invention, it’s disruptive to itself. Consequently those 10,000 people who are hearing about it today are doing so in the midst of a controversy that will shape their future opinions of 3D printing. The only thing that can be done is to keep doing cool, original things so that the prevailing opinion is on the side of “this is awesome.”
And for the record, I think the media’s spin on the defense distributed guys is wrong. What DD is doing is just as awesome as the guy taking scans of his family with a Kinect. We’re all hobbyist makers. What they happen to want to make is guns. There have been hobbyist gun makers ever since there have been guns. And they want to be open and share what they’re doing, just like everyone else. Personally I think the folks making printable marital aids taint the craft more than dd, but that’s not the boogy monster d’jour.
