i don't think it's controversial to state that beginning immediately when 3d printing became a thing, for every person who actually Does Something Productive with it, it generated like 90-100 people who just do it to do it, who are just remelting god's own hydrocarbons into fancy new shapes and wondering if austrolopithecus is smiling on them, and that's cool, a part of me wants to sneer at it but that's just elitism; the fact of the matter is that they're getting horned up for bringing new unlife into the world and who can get mad about that. feels wild to have something Be where something Wasn't
and i think to some extent that's why the Piracy Boom of the late 90s and 2000s happened. not just because we suddenly had internet connections that would have bankrupted a nation five years earlier that were being massively underutilized by our parents who loaded a Single Webbed Page and then played fake online poker on it for 900000 hours; it was also because, when you put a worthless frys electronics Great Quality disc in the drive and smashed that burn button, a few minutes later, you had Windows. you had Age of Empires.
it wasn't, and then it was. you hadn't Created, per se, but you'd had a hand in the world changing. suddenly a whole ass video jame was in your hand, and you could put it in a CD binder (this is a lie. you put it on an empty CD spindle, or on your desk, and left it there) and then you would have it. it might actulaly be better that people can make little creatures now instead of endlessly pirating software they don't want, now i think about it
