there are people in state legislatures right now in the usa – and we mean right now, while you’re reading this – drafting bills that would require your 3d printer to scan every file before it prints. not because you did anything wrong, but because someone, somewhere, might.

let’s be specific about the machinery of this stupidity. you bought a 3d printer. maybe you even assembled it on your kitchen table or your workbench at 2am (because sleep is for people without deadlines). and now some bill drafted by a lobbyist who has never touched a soldering iron or run a slicer says that the machine has to phone home before it is allowed to make anything. yes, every file you design, every prototype you hack together, every broken bracket you replace in the dark because the replacement won’t ship for three weeks will be logged, scanned, and judged by software that cannot tell a trigger guard from a guitar bridge. we have arrived at the point where the tools are expected to narc on their owners, and the owners are expected to say thank you.

nobody demands that home depot bolt a surveillance camera inside every circular saw, and we don’t make drills keep diaries. the principle is not complicated: tools belong to the people who use them. the moment you surrender that, you are not a citizen with a workshop… you are a tenant in someone else’s panopticon, paying rent on equipment that was already yours. because you just know that not only will you have to submit files for review but that the review service will demand a monthly maintenance subscription.

the people pushing these bills are counting on you not thinking about it too hard, but surveillance does not prevent harm, it prevents trust. it tells every maker, every student, every small-batch manufacturer running a shop out of their garage that they are suspects first and citizens second. for what the machine they own is theoretically capable of. and that chill, that slow, bureaucratic frost settling over every workbench in the country, will only deter the creativity and tinkering. the authorization service will go down on a long weekend and now you’re stuck unable to keep iterating on your design: the exact process that built every useful thing you’ve ever held in your hands.

an instrument can create, and it can prototype. it can liberate a sixteen-year-old kid in with no machine shop from not having the right part for their projects, art, and class work. but only if we refuse to let fear turn our workshops into crime scenes.

good night, and good luck printing.

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CNBC story from 2016:

At a recent public appearance at the Utah Tech Tour, in a conversation moderated by Utah’s Senator Orrin Hatch, Apple CEO Tim Cook pointed out that Microsoft had tablets on the market decades before Apple.

Cook emphasized his company’s timing coming to market with new products to underscore the idea that it’s nearly impossible for a company to be the best, the first and to make the most of a given product. [...]

“It doesn’t bother us that we are second, third, fourth or fifth if we still have the best. We don’t feel embarrassed because it took us longer to get it right,” says Cook.

“For Apple, being the best is the most important and trumps the other two by far.”

This has been one of Apple’s guiding mantras for decades, and it has served the company very well. But it stops holding water when they promise to be first, but then aren’t first and aren’t the best.

If you only ever promise A, B, and C — and never mention X, Y, or Z — even when competitors ship their versions of X, Y, and Z first, your silence speaks for itself. Either you don’t think X, Y, and Z are important, or, you think it’s worth taking more time to get them right. But if you promise A, B, C, X, Y, and Z, and then only ship A, B, and C, you just look lost when competitors ship X, Y, and Z.