Colorado passes Gun Control Laws

[Rhyfelwyr]

Right. I'm talking about the notion of every household being able to make whatever they want. It won't happen the way Rhyf fears, for good or ill. Cash-flow will always influence what a family can or can't make, and even in a society where every home was making something there would still be a division of labor. Certain families would make certain things for certain people and so forth. It wouldn't even need to be organized, it would just happen.

And more importantly, the government will severely restrict what can be made at home sooner or later. The laws that do the restricting will probably be influenced by lobbyists from the industries being threatened, rather than by the minds of the people voting on the law. So.. here in the USA, at least, I don't see much changing any time soon.

Well we won't know for certain until we know more of the particulars about the technology, but I certainly think that you are underestimating the social and economic impact it could have.

Pape brought up the printing press and noted its revolutionary role - now, consider the impact that just a handful of these across Europe has, and then consider that we are talking about having such a revolutionary device in potentially every household! As technology grows, its social impact seems to have a exponential, rather than a linear relationship.

You say it will be like the cottage industry and that there will be a division of labour - but that really is dependent on these printers being quite limited. What if downloading a print plan takes moments? What if you can programme it to print all the pieces for one product in order, leaving them ready for you to assemble? For all I know they might already do that.

And like gaelic cowboy said, "monetisation is not the primary driver IF all needs can be met". For the technology to be financially exploited, it would have to be rigidly controlled, and what would be the point anyway if it provides endless material wealth? All anybody would need is their little printer and that can have all the material goods they desire.

[/SPOIL]

I'm guessing such a world might be more flat than pyramidal, and fads and fashions are as old as the hills so I wouldn't worry there.

Such a place would be more like some of our earliest neolithic societies possibly even hunter gatherer.

We differentiate ourselves within the group by putting a chicken bone through our nose or or we replicate a cool new handheld gaming system( we have seen all this before).

It's nice when somebody can engage with my ramblings!

I see where you are coming from, but I think there would be some important differences in my case from your comparison. What you described is a pre-materialist society - where the production of material goods was so small that these goods remained expressions of natural human relations (eg, I'm from x family so I have a chicken bone through my face, or whatever).

In my dystopia, it's a post-materialist world - it is post-materialist in the sense that in the absence of any other social relations, materialism and material goods are no longer something distinct from the society that they exist in - materialism ceases to be the phenomena it once was. Material wealth is so abundant that it has no value as material wealth - it is just a form of social expression. But rather than expressing natural social relations as in the pre-materialist society, material goods form the actual basis of social relations. Like I said earlier, people will not identify by community or faith etc, but by the mass culture that they buy and reflect in their material possessions. Whether it's their clothes, or their CD's, what they collect, or whatever.

A strange and scary world...

Also, I should note that I came up with the terms pre or post materialism by myself, maybe other people use them for what might be other meanings, but that is coincidental. I'm not meaning to identify with them.