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Printcrime by Cory Doctorow CC-NA-NC-SA 2.5
The coppers smashed my father’s printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da’s look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da’s customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals—performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn’t mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma’s trunk, the one she’d brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he’d been brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car, while a spokesman told the world that my Da’s organized-crime bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least twenty million in contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.
I saw it all from my phone, in the remains of the sitting room, watching it on the screen and wondering how, just how anyone could look at our little flat and our terrible, manky estate and mistake it for the home of an organized crime kingpin. They took the printer away, of course, and displayed it like a trophy for the newsies. Its little shrine in the kitchenette seemed horribly empty. When I roused myself and picked up the flat and rescued my peeping poor tweetybird, I put a blender there. It was made out of printed parts, so it would only last a month before I’d need to print new bearings and other moving parts. Back then, I could take apart and reassemble anything that could be printed.
By the time I turned eighteen, they were ready to let Da out of prison. I’d visited him three times—on my tenth birthday, on his fiftieth, and when Ma died. It had been two years since I’d last seen him and he was in bad shape. A prison fight had left him with a limp, and he looked over his shoulder so often it was like he had a tic. I was embarrassed when the minicab dropped us off in front of the estate, and tried to keep my distance from this ruined, limping skeleton as we went inside and up the stairs.
“Lanie,” he said, as he sat me down. “You’re a smart girl, I know that. Trig. You wouldn’t know where your old Da could get a printer and some goop?”
I squeezed my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my palms. I closed my eyes. “You’ve been in prison for ten years, Da. Ten. Years. You’re going to risk another ten years to print out more blenders and pharma, more laptops and designer hats?”
He grinned. “I’m not stupid, Lanie. I’ve learned my lesson. There’s no hat or laptop that’s worth going to jail for. I’m not going to print none of that rubbish, never again.” He had a cup of tea, and he drank it now like it was whisky, a sip and then a long, satisfied exhalation. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
“Come here, Lanie, let me whisper in your ear. Let me tell you the thing that I decided while I spent ten years in lockup. Come here and listen to your stupid Da.”
I felt a guilty pang about ticking him off. He was off his rocker, that much was clear. God knew what he went through in prison. “What, Da?” I said, leaning in close.
“Lanie, I’m going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone. That’s worth going to jail for. That’s worth anything.”
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Just fucking why lol? How braindead do you have to be? It’s just fundamentally impossible to prevent actual criminals or terrorists from simply ignoring this and making guns.
Is this to permanently prevent individuals to build their own stuff? Like the next manufacturing revolution has to be kept out of the hands of the proletariat?
SupraMario@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The logic behind all gun laws.
Yes.
HiTekRedNek@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And drug laws for that matter.
AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
I’m not against sensible gun control laws like background checks. And if you want to shoot guns for fun keep them at your local shooting range, or for hunting at your local hunting club. In an “armory”. That works just fine in most of the world.
Manufacturing a gun requires serious effort and it’s not just clicking a button. But it is impossible to completely prevent, and it’s braindead to try. Not a single gun death will be prevented by this law, unlike gun control laws which do work - at least outside the US.
4am@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Yeah just like they hate that we complain about them online and can see how widespread the sentiment is
They want control of all social media and news, they don’t want us having our own hardware anymore, they want everyone to have to only post under their real name and they want our homes and vehicles and fucking light poles to scan our faces, match them to our IDs, and record a map of everywhere we have been and when, who we associated with, what we said, and what we are doing.
And we have to rent the privilege from them.
RamenJunkie@midwest.social 3 weeks ago
Yes, its the second one, no matter what they say.
Making your own stuff, or worse, repairing things thst they SLAVED over perfect plamned obsolecence for??? How dare yee not CONSUME.
blargh513@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
As a person who probably spends WAY too much time fixing my old worn out crap because I’m a cheap fuck, I never got into 3d printing.
The reality is that for fixing things, I am rarely at a point where I would need to design and create an entirely new thing. Buying commodity crap is almost always faster and cheaper. I’m not saying that 3d printing should be outlawed and certainly not that we should not care. We should all care deeply, even if this doesn’t impact you directly (as is the case with me).
The only point I would make is that 3d printing is not likely to make a meaingful dent profit made from people like me who fix a lot of junk. It’s a lot easier and faster to just hit the hardware store for a box of fasteners, some wood, PVC, whatever to cobble something up. For stuff like auto repair (which I do way too much of), I don’t think I could print the stuff I would need. Most of the crap I would need would have to be precisely measured for fit, waterproof, heat proof, vibration proof and will often have a handful of separate parts therein. I just replaced a wiring harness for my mass air flow sensor. It has four wires and a wide plastic connector with the four pin terminals inside and a part that slides forward to lock it in place. I bought one for 9 bucks, it came the next day. If I had to design something like that, I’d need to either get the schematic for the original or do a 3d scan, maybe someone already did and it exists, maybe they did not. Then I print the main part, print the second part for the locking slider, put em together, hope I don’t crack one in the process. Then I need to buy the individual pin terminals that are pre wired or make new ones. Can’t print wires that I’m aware of.
Killing off 3d printing as a way to boost profits of selling crap to those of us who fix our own stuff seems like it would be a drop in the damn ocean. I presume it’s just another form of social control. It won’t stop people printing out ghost guns, I doubt it would stop hobbyists and inventors from doing stuff. People have been making shit long before 3d printers.
The whole thing just seems massively stupid, I cannot understand what they would hope for. It almost seems like this would backfire and people would start figuring out some awful thing they could 3d print and use against people like this.
Caltrops?