But Makerbot has another dimension that the other initiatives don’t. When they launched Makerbot, Mayer, Pettis, and Hoeken also created a website called Thingiverse.com. Here, Makerbot users share all the information about the things they have designed and made with their 3D printers. Along with photographs, they upload the actual computer model files for such inventions as a Tube Squeezer—a slotted plastic sleeve designed to get out that last bit of toothpaste.8 Then other users comment, recommend modifications, and upload their own files. Through this process of critique and development, the community slowly pushes the boundaries of what is possible with the Makerbot. Currently, there are about 4,000 designs available for download on the site.
Given that the spirit of open source and the hacker’s love of taking things apart are built into the Makerbot’s DNA, it was only a matter of time before the Thingiverse community turned its attention to the machine itself. Because of its naked components, the machine already had an aura of being unfinished. Now hackers began to graft on additions and enlargements, turning the Makerbot into a mechanical Frankenstein. A user who calls himself Zydac came up with a simple, bright red prop to lift up the roof of the Makerbot and make it taller. His Z-Axis Extender Kit means that there’s no longer a real height restriction on objects that can be printed on the Cupcake CNC.
It became clear that several components of the Cupcake CNC Makerbot could be made on the machine itself and that there were people willing to do this, and do it better. So although they had rented a factory space in Brooklyn, Makerbot Industries also began farming out the manufacturing of Cupcake CNC components—to their own customers. Bre Pettis is right in calling the Cupcake CNC “the first truly crowd-sourced product in the world.”9
As a result, the Cupcake CNC has changed quite a bit in its short life. Many components are now available in two or three versions. The tenth batch of 3D printers, which shipped out in February 2010, was different enough from the first batch to warrant a fresh set of assembly instructions. Another major overhaul seems to be planned for early next year: A new forum has been set up on Thingiverse for community members to pool ideas for the next Makerbot. The machine’s nakedness begins to make sense: At this rate of growth, it would only keep outgrowing its clothing.
In the midst of all this messy rhizomatic development—with multiple improvements and models being co-developed and manufactured—something wonderful happened. In June 2010, a hacker called Webca uploaded all the files and instructions required to print 150 components of a Makerbot on a Makerbot. “The RepRap is not the only 3d printer that can replicate itself; now the Makerbot can too,” he claimed. 10 Several enthusiastic commenters jumped in with glee, posting photographs as evidence that they had successfully replicated Webca’s achievement. Inevitably, the conversation slowly turned to modifications. “Is there any reason why you couldn’t use it to make bigger versions of itself?” asked a hacker called Oopster. “After all, the electronics will all be the same size regardless, so what else would need to be bigger?”
Technically speaking, however, the aforementioned electronics are the undoing of Webca’s claim because they have to be manufactured on another machine. So the Makerbot hasn’t quite satisfied Queen Christina’s demand. But given that the electronics can be sourced quite easily (as so many of Webca’s followers have done), the Makerbot can, in a sense, give birth to more Makerbots. And more importantly, it can give birth to better Makerbots. Within a year of showing that slide at the Gnomedex conference, Bre Pettis and his noisy little machine have already left Star Trek behind.
But it is still very hard to imagine a Makerbot in every household, and all of us actively engaged in manufacturing of some kind. Makerbot’s vision of democratic desktop manufacturing is still only a revolution-in-the-making, if that. Within their own world, however, a dedicated community of hackers seems to be outgrowing our future before we can even conceive of it.
(Fig 1.) The MakerBot Cupcake CNC http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/004214.php
(Fig 2.) Tube Squeezer, obijuan’s derivative of Starno’s design http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:4598
(Fig. 3) Zydac’s 3D printed extensions for the Makerbot http://blog.makerbot.com/2010/11/10/supersize-your-3d-printer/
(Fig. 4) Webca’s Makerbot, with components printed on the Makerbot http://www.thingiverse.com/image:17144
2. A Hacked World
If one had to choose a patron goddess for hackers, it would have to be Metis. The first wife of Zeus and the mother of Athena, Metis was the original goddess of wisdom and magical cunning. In Greek, her name could be loosely interpreted as tricks of the trade, the kind of insider knowledge one gathers through doing.11 The French philosopher of the everyday, Michel de Certeau, translates metis as “ways of operating”: “clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things, hunter’s cunning, maneuvers, polymorphic simulations, joyful discoveries, poetic as well as warlike.”12
Certeau proposes that in modern societies the means to actually produce things are held by a few, and the majority of people are marginalized by being reduced to the role of consumers. Yet when we go shopping for food, we don’t just buy what is available. We form our own strategies and tactics, maneuvering between the demands of the recipe, the tastes of the people who will eat the food, and what is actually on the shelves. The decision to replace one ingredient of the recipe with another takes but a moment. Thus, even as consumers, we create our own spaces to re-assert ourselves.13 These specific ways of using—the strategic possibilities of metis—are what we produce.
One can argue that the first group of people who called themselves hackers were, in fact, using an extreme form of metis. These original hackers were students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1959, who found all kinds of unauthorized ways to use a computer given to MIT by IBM. Within a few years, an unwritten Hacker’s Ethic emerged out of their work, and a commitment to manipulate and improve any status quo became a sort of guiding principle for all future digital hackers, well into the 1980s.14
Already by 1975, hacker groups like the Homebrew Computer Club in California had moved to hardware hacking, manipulating electronics rather than software. The first Apple computer was in fact a direct descendant of this wave of hacking.15 Steve Wozniack built Apple 1 completely by hand in 1975 and brought it in to show to the Homebrew Club. Wozniack gave away the instructions for that first Apple for free. In Wozniack’s words, “Eventually Steve Jobs came and said, ‘Why don’t we build it for them?’”16 The rest is history. The success of Apple II and significant investments in the company changed everything. And if Apple’s ex-CEO John Sculley is to be believed, equally instrumental in the early transformation of this hacker-founded company was Steve Jobs’s penchant for industrial design.17
Meanwhile, vast simplifications in electronics technology in the 1990s made it easier for hackers to start manipulating consumer products. In 2005, Dale Dougherty, a co-founder of O’Reilly Media, which published computer books, founded a DIY magazine called Make. “People had started to take things apart, like the early TiVo cable boxes,” Dougherty explains, “and I thought the future of computing would not just be in computers, but it would be out in the world