alt Hacker News>> The central promise—that distributed digital fabrication would bring manufacturing back to America, that every city would have micro-factories, that 3D printing would decentralize production—simply didn’t materialize.
> never heard that.
This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...
> This book was a big deal, promised it ("Makers, the next industrial revolution") https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/makers-chris-anderson/11109...
Interestingly, I am not aware that this book was really popular or well-known in Germany (I honestly hear about this specific book for the first time, though I am aware that some marketers (who in my opinion did not really understand the Maker scene or 3D printing) made such claims).
Instead, at that time, in Germany nerds were getting excited about understanding how to build 3D printers (in particular partially self-replicating ones (RepRap)) and how 3D printing
- could be used to make yourself much more independent of the discretion of part manufacturers (i.e. some part is broken? Use a CAD system to re-design it and 3D-print your re-design),
- makes you capable of building stuff in small scale "that should exist", but no manufacturer is producing,
- enables part designs that are (nearly) impossible to manufacture using any other existing technology, and thus basically enables you to completely reimagine and improve how nearly every produced part that you see around you is designed,
- ...
I would say that the mentioned nerd visions of this time have at least partially been implemented and/or are on a good way towards this goal. It's just that the practical implementations did not come with a spectacular change in the overarching mindet of society, but rather are highly important, but not (necessarily) revolutionary changes in the lifes of people who want these changes to be part of their life.