CloudFactory CultureOrganization

Culture and Organization
ISSN: 1475-9551 (Print) 1477-2760 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gsco20
The cloud factory: Making things and making a

living with desktop 3D printing
Johan Söderberg
To cite this article: Johan Söderberg (2016): The cloud factory: Making things and making a living
with desktop 3D printing, Culture and Organization, DOI: 10.1080/14759551.2016.1203313
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Download by: [Gothenburg University Library] Date: 21 August 2017, At: 05:39
CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2016.1203313
The cloud factory: Making things and making a living with desktop
3D printing
Johan Söderberg
Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science, Göteborg Universitet, Göteborg, Sweden
ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper presents a case study of an open-source 3D printer called ‘Rep- Received 8 May 2015
Downloaded by [Gothenburg University Library] at 05:39 21 August 2017
rap’. 3D printing derives from computer numerical control machinery, a Accepted 9 June 2016
technology first introduced against a background of industrial conflict.
KEYWORDS
This historical fact reactualises labour process theory as a theoretical social factory; 3D printing;
resource. However, the hobbyists in the Rep-rap project are located makers; free labour; putting-
‘outside’ the typical setting studied in labour process theory, that is, the out systems; sharing
workplace. The case study is, therefore, suitable for examining the limits economy
of labour process theory. Its key tenet regarding structured antagonism
between labour and capital is put to the test when the ‘point of
production’ is located in a community and ‘labour’ consists in non-
remunerated contributions by hobbyists (i.e. non-employees). Drawing
on theories of the social factory and free labour in the cultural sector,
the article argues that this is changing as hobbyists, fans, makers, etc.,
are put to work by start-up firms and venture capital in the so-called
“sharing economy.”
Introduction
The paper presents a case study of an open-source 3D printer called ‘Rep-rap’ developed by a com-
munity of hobby-engineers. Rep-rap is but one project among many aiming to refit computer-aided
machine tools for home use. Laser cutters, lathes and computer numerical control mills are being
developed by hobby communities. A stated goal of many of these projects is to transform the
way things are made, and thereby how people make a living. In reference to ‘cloud computing’,
this vision is spoken of as ‘moving the factory into the cloud’ (Bowyer 2006). The case study examines
two initiatives where users of 3D printers have reinvented themselves as self-employed ‘cloud
factory’ workers. The first initiative emerged spontaneously from the Rep-rap community, when
hobby-engineers began selling parts for 3D printers that they had printed on their home-built
machines, and a handful supported themselves in this way for a year or two. The second initiative
was orchestrated by the company Makerbot Industries in an attempt to resolve bottlenecks in its pro-
duction line. Former customers were approached to use their Makerbot 3D printer to make a critical
component used in the production of new 3D printers. The experiment lasted for only a couple of
months.
Despite the brevity of the initiative, it is a sign of a broader trend where ‘communities, crowds and
clouds’ are being put to work by firms and venture capital. The hobby-engineers I refer to as being
part of a community, whereas I define the former customers of Makerbot 3D printers as a crowd, the
two being differentiated by their relative autonomy vis-à-vis the firm putting them to work. If all
autonomy is subsumed under capital’s valorization process, it qualifies as a ‘cloud’, instantiated, for
CONTACT Johan Söderberg johan.soderberg@sts.gu.se

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 J. SÖDERBERG
example, by the microworkers enrolled by Amazon Mechanical Turk (Irani 2015). Makerbot Industries’
experiment was terminated long before the firm had attained such a level of assimilation. What
makes the case study stand out is that it covers one of the first attempts to crowdsource the manu-
facture of material goods. The backbone of this attempt is a single key technology, namely computer-
aided machine tools, later to metamorphose into 3D printers. Computer-aided machine tools were
introduced into the heavy manufacturing industry half a century ago with the primary aim of under-
mining unions (Noble 1986). This observation underlines my central claim in the article, namely that
signs of discord in the ‘cloud factory’ should be interpreted in the light of a longer history of industrial
relations and labour conflicts.
My theoretical point of departure is a synthesis between autonomist Marxism, from which I have
borrowed the concept of the ‘social factory’, and writings on how the free labour of users and fans is
exploited by firms in the computer and cultural industries. This theoretical synthesis has been pro-
posed and expounded many times before (Gill and Pratt 2008). A third interlocutor, invited to the
debate by Steffen Böhm and Chris Land, is labour process theory. Böhm and Land extol this
school of thought for its empirically grounded approach and its historical sensitivity, something
they find lacking in the social factory/free-labour synthesis. There is much common ground
between scholars who adhere to the free-labour thesis and those wedded to labour process
theory. Whereas the former muse over communities put to work by firms, the latter look at how
regular workplaces are passed off as communities. In both cases, the same Gramscian question
arises: how is consent organised at the point of production? In spite of the shared vantage point,
the two schools do not talk to each other. Böhm and Land explain the lack of dialogue by the insis-
tence of labour process scholars on the workplace as the primary investigation site, and their neglect
of the community (Böhm and Land 2012; but cf. Thompson 1990; Edwards 2010, 32).
I concur that much could be gained if these perspectives were cross-bred. Böhm and Land are also
right to suggest that labour process theory is put to the test when the ‘point of production’ is out-
sourced to communities. In this case, ‘labour’ consists of non-remunerated, voluntary contributions
from users, fans, hobbyists and audiences. This dissolves the bipolar conflict over work hours and
monetary remuneration that characterises the regular workplace. In the workplace, the relation
between an employer and an employee is one of structural antagonism. To say that antagonism is
structural is to say that a conflict of interest exists between the parties, irrespective of their subjective
experience of the relation. It is from this elevated vantage point that labour process scholars pose the
Gramscian question indicated above. This is a bone of contention between them and their opponents
in the post-structuralist camp.1 Post-structuralist writers foreground heterogeneous and contingent
identity formations over antagonistic, bipolar conflicts. Evidence of this precedence is easy to come
by in studies of communities and subcultures, but harder to find in studies of workplaces. Conse-
quently, it is the former site of investigation that the post-structuralist opponents of labour
process theory have spotlighted (Grint and Woolgar 1997). Conversely, this explains why labour
process scholars cling to the workplace as the preferred investigative terrain. In this article, I will
do exactly the opposite. I take the empirical field of investigation favoured by the post-structuralist
writers, that is, the user community, in order to argue the priority of structural antagonism as an axis
of bipolar conflict and identity formation.
My line of argument goes as follows: structural antagonism reasserts itself across the hetero-
geneous identity formations of users (fans, hobbyists, etc.). This happens gradually as spontaneous,
bottom-up experiments with making a living from communities are rendered systematic by start-up
firms and venture capitalists. As physical manufacturing is moved from the regular factory into the
cloud factory, labour conflicts move with it.
Reflection on method
The case study consists of 18 interviews that were selected to cover the key actors in the Rep-rap
project. It includes almost all the hobby-engineers who at one time or another belonged to the
CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION 3
core developers’ team. In addition, interviews were conducted with the founders of four start-up
firms selling derivative 3D printers, all of which played key roles in the establishment of a desktop
3D printer market, namely, Bits-from-Bytes, Makerbot Industries, Ultimaker and TechZone. The
material was gathered over a two-year period in England, Belgium, Netherlands, Sweden,
Germany, New Zealand and the USA. Three of the interviews were conducted over phone. Some
respondents were consulted on multiple occasions. A secondary source of information was the dis-
cussion forums dedicated to the project and blogs where developers share their ideas. The persua-
siveness of the case study hinges on its strategic positioning within the theoretical debates alluded to
in the introduction (cf. Flyvbjerg 2006).
Theory: structured antagonism in the social factory

Already in the 1970s, when computer engineering emerged as a regular profession, labour process
theory scholars commented on the peculiarities of the labour process of programming. Although
it was a marginal phenomenon at the time, the scholars recognised programming as a precursor
of big things to come (Kraft 1977; Hayes 1989; for a recapitulation, see Ensmenger 2004). Arguably,
the same insight can be extended to free software programming. The major difference between pro-
prietary software and free software programming is that the latter activity is not confined to firms or,
in other words, contractual employment relations. A sizeable proportion of the code is produced in
the hacker community, that is, by unsalaried non-employees. That being said, the computer industry
has learned how to tap into voluntary, non-remunerated contributions, as when, for instance, IBM
invests in GNU/Linux development. This model of putting communities to work has been adopted
in many other branches of industry (Terranova 2000; special issue: Banks and Deuze 2009). For
instance, gamers and ‘modders’ engage in the development of products for the video game industry
(Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 2009), animé fans contribute to the diffusion of TV shows by translat-
ing subtitles (Lee 2011) and advertising agencies rely on customers for the branding of products
(Arvidsson 2005). The list could easily be extended (for collected works, see Burston, Dyer-Witheford,
and Hearn 2010; Scholz 2012).
How should the many examples where firms rely on input from user communities be conceptu-
alised? Scholars who subscribe to the free-labour thesis have looked for inspiration to autonomist
Marxism (for an overview of this literature, see Gill and Pratt 2008).2 Especially promising is the
notion of the ‘social factory’ (Tronti 1979) or the ‘factory without walls’ (Negri 1989), which argues
that the factory as a bounded site of production has been dissolved, and that the whole of society
is organised as a factory. With it, the notion of (employed) work as an activity bounded in time
and space and, more to the point, an activity framed by contractual wage relations, has also dissolved.
Every moment and every place where affects and subjectivities are produced has been subsumed
under capital’s valorisation process (Morini 2007).
In addition to the free-labour thesis and autonomist Marxism, Steffen Böhm and Chris Land
have summoned labour process theory as a third participant in the debate. It offers a longue
durée perspective and an empirical approach to workplace studies that are lacking in the other
two research communities. For such a three-party dialogue to commence, however, labour
process theory scholars must give up their nostalgic attachment to the workplace and waged
employment. This narrow analytical focus has prevented the adherents of labour process theory
from taking the measure of recent transformations in the capitalist labour process (Böhm and
Land 2012).
Although I generally concur with Böhm and Land’s analysis, I find that they have glossed over the
difficulties of their recommendation. Those difficulties hark back to the old sticking point about the
organisation of consent at the point of production or, differently put, how first workers/actors, and
then scholars, make (or fail to make) sense of consent to work. If labour process theory has something
to offer in this triad, it consists precisely in its insistence on filtering theoretical musings through
empirical inquiries into workers’ experiences. Conversely, a common – and justified – critique levelled
4 J. SÖDERBERG
against autonomist Marxism (Barron 2013) and writers subscribing to the free-labour thesis (Postigo
2009) is that their theoretical musings are detached from empirically grounded research.3 Indeed, the
‘free-labour’ thesis hinges on an argument about the structural dependency of the culture industry
on non-remunerated, volunteer contributions from fans, a claim typically made in contradistinction to
the fans’ self-understandings (Postigo 2009).
Lurking behind this discussion is the much debated question of whether social scientists may infer
structures (of exploitation, e.g.) from an elevated, theoretical vantage point that sees beyond the
horizon of the actors (cf. Boltanski 2009). This is the fundamental bone of contention between
labour process theorists and their opponents in the post-structuralist camp, where the latter pre-
scribe a strict ‘follow the actors’ approach. The post-structuralist position is an outlier that helps
me define the boundary of the proposed synthesis between autonomist Marxism, free-labour scho-
lars and labour process theory. Their differences aside, all three schools agree that social relations
between labour and capital are characterised by structured antagonism (Thompson and Smith
2001, 57). The word ‘structured’ is key, because it asserts that the antagonism in question is not a
kaleidoscopic ‘war of everyone against everyone’. What might appear to the untutored eye to be indi-
vidual strife and competition is deep down, to the trained eye, a bipolar conflict between labour and
capital reflecting the social whole of capitalist relations. This implies a divergence between the spon-
taneous self-understandings of the workers/actors and theoretically informed reflections. Arguably,
the gap has widened with the foundering of class-based politics, the notion of class having
receded from public debate and nowadays being rarely evoked outside of a few university
departments.
It is against this background that the self-confinement of labour process theory to studies of the
workplace should be understood, especially workplaces in the lower tier of the labour market where
class antagonism is the sharpest. Provided that the investigation is restricted to the workplace, struc-
tured antagonism can be defended on almost logical grounds: one side is being paid a salary, while
the other side is paying it. Crucially, the object being exchanged in this monetary transaction is inde-
terminate. The power to labour over an agreed period of time is infinite in potential, but limited in its
realisation. This installs indeterminacy at the heart of the contractual agreement (Braverman 1998,
37–39). From this follows an incessant need to assert control over the labour process. As will be
argued later on, the Makerbot Industries’ experiment with putting-out their production of 3D printers
to former customers was terminated prematurely because this need for control could not be satisfied
in the still embryonic cloud factory.
Even if the argument about structured antagonism can be defended on logical grounds, this does
not tell us how antagonistic relations are experienced and interpreted by the parties concerned. Harry
Braverman famously bracketed this question when laying down the foundations of labour process
theory.4 To second-wave labour process scholars, in contrast, the organisation of consent at the
point of production was the central preoccupation (for an overview, see Thompson and van den
Broek 2010). Andrew Friedman qualified Braverman’s thesis by asserting that control can be exercised
in more varied and complex ways than by top-down command. Managers often assert their influence
over the workplace by giving workers ‘responsible autonomy’ (1977). Richard Edwards introduced a
typology of forms of control in the workplace that he claimed had emerged historically in capitalism.
Initially, hierarchy in the firm was enforced in direct personal relations. This form, which he called
‘simple control’, was gradually replaced with more structural forms of control enacted through tech-
nical and bureaucratic means, which were preferable because they were harder to detect (1979). On a
similar note, Michael Burawoy stressed that a ‘factory regime’ is only viable if it relies on a mixture of
despotic and hegemonic strategies. The extent to which industrial relations take on an openly con-
frontational and thus despotic character depends on societal institutions and state policies, that is to
say, societal factors operating above and beyond the particular workplace (Burawoy 1979; 1983; cf.
Degiuli and Kollmeyer 2007).
What these writers have in common is that they assume from the outset the presence of antag-
onistic identities. It is the failure of this antagonism to translate into open hostilities that calls for an
explanation (Prasad and Prasad 2001). Indirectly, or – in the case of Burawoy – explicitly, such an
explanation draws on the Gramscian idea of hegemony. The attraction of this concept is easy to
see: that which first appears to be a pacification of industrial relations turns out to be its very oppo-
site, a total subjugation of countervailing resistances and intensified exploitation. But this intellectual
position is also vulnerable to the objection, repeatedly framed by post-structuralist opponents of
labour process theory, that the vanguard claims for itself complete interpretative power over the
practitioners, by smearing ‘false consciousness’ over an infinite diversity of viewpoints (Knights
1997; Berg 1998).
It is this problem that is exacerbated when the analytical focus is shifted from workplaces to com-
munities of users (fans, hobbyists, etc.). Such a shift is prompted by Böhm and Land’s observation that
user communities are being put to work by companies. In a few cases, the link is very direct, when
volunteers are engaged to perform tasks that previously were done by waged employees (Terranova
2000). Although the enrolment of communities into the work process is still a marginal phenomenon,
it is on a continuum with a trend that has fermented inside the regular workplace. Starting with job
enrichment programmes in the 1980s, employees are today encouraged – or compelled – to express
their individuality and to have fun in the workplace (Dickson 1981; Ramsay 1985). Besides the too-
obvious-to-mention manipulative aspects of such rhetoric, it testifies to capital’s drive to valorise
more and more of the worker’s qualities: their personality, their social skills and their tacit knowledges
(Thompson, Warhurst, and Callaghan 2001; Fleming and Sturdy 2010).
It is in the community, and not at the workplace, that the production of such affects and subjec-
tivities are most likely to flourish. With Böhm and Land, we can say that because autonomy is struc-
turally necessary for the production of value, productive activity is being moved outside the relation
of contractual employment, with its overt antagonism. It is the coerciveness of working for remunera-
tion that renders the wage relation counterproductive (2012). It follows that theoretical musings
about structured antagonism lack critical support in the interpretations typically given by
members of such communities. Labour process theory reaches its limits when it is applied to sites
of production where, to put it provocatively, consent has been organised so effectively that respon-
dents do not recognise what they are doing as work, nor identify themselves as workers. The workers
are beguiled into thinking of themselves as users, fans and makers.
This is to suggest the existence of a gap between the subjective experience of being free and
objective conditions of economic exploitation. My forecast is that this gap will close as user commu-
nities are put to work in a more systematic fashion in the so-called sharing economy. A sign of this is
the class action lawsuit against America online (AOL) by some of the 14,000 volunteers who had been
engaged to maintain the company’s services on the Internet. When the company unilaterally changed
the policy, many volunteers felt that they had been wronged. In the class action, the former volunteers
argued that they had done work equivalent to employees and should be compensated accordingly
(Postigo 2004). The volunteers in the AOL case stopped considering themselves as volunteers and
adopted the identity of exploited workers. However, as Postigo notes in a later paper, they only did
so after the relationship with the company had broken down (2009). The overwhelming majority of
users (fans, hobbyists, etc.) hold on to their heterogeneous identities even after their voluntary
efforts have become a source of value for capital. An ethnographic ‘workplace’ study of gamers
who earn their living from selling goods collected in online games makes this point compellingly.
The respondents could not tell if they were gamers or self-employed workers (Lee and Lin 2011).
Relating the case study of a cloud factory to the social factory concept
The empirical case mobilised in support of my theoretical argument points to an embryonic infra-
structure for ‘cloud manufacturing’, whereby crowdsourcing can be exported from the Internet to
the making of physical objects. This development took place in two steps; first, spontaneously by
hobbyists driven by any number of motives, and subsequently, by a firm for the sole purpose of
value extraction. The experiment was terminated prematurely, but it is nonetheless suggestive of
6 J. SÖDERBERG
the kind of infrastructure the ‘crowd factory’ requires. Hence, the case study serves to illustrate my
claim regarding the existence of a trend towards the systematisation of the means by which user
communities are put to work. Whether this will push the identity formation of the members of
those communities in the direction of heightened conflict and antagonism, only time will tell.
The experiment in ‘cloud manufacturing’ is offered as an empirical instance of the concept of the
social factory. It is understood that the hobby-engineers’ vision of a cloud factory and the theoretical
concept of a social factory diverge in important respects. The theoretical concept is broadly outlined
to include the production of many kinds of affects and subjectivities that are not a part of the engin-
eers’ vision. Where the two overlap, however, is in the idea of manufacturing being distributed
outside the confines of the wage–labour relation. This is also where my study runs at a tangent to
a second body of theoretical literature concerning the extraction of surplus value from audiences.
Much of this debate has pivoted on diverging interpretations of Marx’s concept of value (Fuchs
2010; Arvidsson and Colleoni 2012). Here, I want to engage with the same questions but at a
lower level of abstraction. As a final caveat, I note that an exhaustive discussion of this topic
would have required a discussion of many related phenomena, such as teleworking (Dimitrova
2003) and the crowdsourcing of tasks on the Internet (Felstiner 2011; Brabham 2012). I have
limited myself to 3D printing for the sake of brevity.
The Rep-rap project constitutes a bridge between the methodologies, values and aspirations of
the free software community and the history of computer-aided machine tools (Noble 1986).5
Later in the article I will discuss another historical parallel, that between the Makerbot Industries
initiative and the pre-industrial putting-out system. Labour conflicts played a pivotal role in the
making of both computer-aided machine tools and the putting-out system. My central argument
is that this historical lesson is actualised anew when the same technology is made a cornerstone
of distributed cloud manufacturing.
Summary of the open-source 3D printer ‘Rep-rap’ project

The idea of building an open-source desktop 3D printer for home use was first formulated in 2005 by
Adrian Bowyer, at the time a lecturer in the engineering department at Bath University in the UK. The
project soon begun to attract hobbyists from all around the world. One of them, Vik Olliver in Auck-
land, New Zealand, put together the first proof-of-concept for a Rep-rap machine. Using Meccano
parts for the mechanical construction, he positioned a glue gun over a rotating table to produce cylin-
ders of dried glue (Olliver 2005). The glue gun gives an idea of the principle behind this manufactur-
ing technique, where components are built by extruding plastics in multiple layers. 3D printing has
been used in industry for decades, but the cheapest commercial-grade machine was selling for
20,000 Euros at the time when the hobbyists started their project. In comparison, the material for
building a Rep-rap 3D printer in the early days cost a few hundred Euros. Although desktop 3D print-
ing is rather limited in comparison to industrial grade 3D printers, the development potential is vast. It
already offers a versatile approach to making complex shaped objects without demanding skill or
capital investment on the part of the user. For this reason, 3D printing is key in the overall palette
of home manufacturing tools (Söderberg 2013).
Both the technical concept of the Rep-Rap 3D printer and the sociopolitical claims made on its
behalf hinge upon the idea of a machine that is capable of self-reproduction. This idea is manifested
in the ambition to use the already existing stock of 3D printers to produce more 3D printers. Besides
the nuts, screws and bars of the machine, that is, general-purpose and off-the-shelf parts, the 3D
printer consists of a large number of uniquely shaped components which cannot be found in a hard-
ware store. Hence, the technical concept of self-reproduction served initially to resolve a practical
problem of getting hold of specialised parts. In 2008, Adrian Bowyer and Vic Olliver announced
that they had built the first ‘true’ Rep-rap machine. That is to say, they had made a 3D printer
using plastic parts printed on a 3D printer of the same kind. Excluding nuts and bolts, the Rep-rap
machine is able to print roughly half of its own parts. The aspiration is to develop a machine
capable of printing an ever larger percentage of its own parts. Unsurprisingly, the feasibility of this
goal has been challenged on technical grounds (Perens 2008). If nothing else, however, the goal
of having a machine capable of producing as many of its own parts as possible serves as a benchmark
for measuring the technical progress of the project. As a side effect, the technology is improving to
the point where it can print many other kinds of useful and trivial consumer goods. This is how the
hobbyists envisage that their technical concept will translate into disruptive social change. Referring
to the way in which intellectual property and associated business models have been undermined by
filesharing technologies, hobbyists hope that 3D printing will have a similarly disruptive effect on
markets, ownership structures and the industrial set-up for manufacturing physical goods (Bowyer
2009-11-24; Olliver 2010-05-04). The development of a cheap, user-friendly and near-ubiquitous
machine tool is expected to unleash political disruption by extending the possibility of ‘critical
making’ to everyone (Ratto, Wylie, and Jalbert 2014).
Initiative 1: From gift-giving to self-employment in the Rep-rap community

The heaven-storming vision behind the Rep-rap project at the time of its inception was to supplant
markets and firms by creating an alternative infrastructure where the ‘means of production’ are
decentralised to users. Rants against centralised mass production and business monopolies persisted
even as the anti-capitalist rhetoric took on a more entrepreneurial tone. Elsewhere I have examined
the ideological transformations of the Rep-rap project (Söderberg 2014). Because of space limitations,
I bracket this aspect here, and focus instead on the economic and technical practices of the hobbyists.
The ambition of creating a decentralised infrastructure for physical production took concrete form in
the design of a ‘self-reproducing’ 3D printer. On a more pragmatic note, this design choice was
necessary in order to move the project forward at a time when nobody could supply the hobbyists
with custom-made parts. It can be instructive to take a closer look at this attempt to ‘bootstrap’ the
Rep-rap project in the absence of a market. It points to the difficulties of realising the grander, political
visions of the project, that is, supplanting markets and firms in toto. More to the point, it shows how
antagonistic labour relations crystallised inside the Rep-rap community, although without being
articulated as such by the hobbyists.
To kick-start the dissemination of Rep-rap machines, a so-called factory consisting of four 3D prin-
ters was set up at the Bath University laboratory in 2009. The printed parts were distributed to people
in the community at the cost of the plastic material and shipping. People who had received parts
from the Bath factory were encouraged to produce a second batch for someone else in the commu-
nity, a moral obligation that was promoted on the Rep-rap website and on the forum. Occasional
postings on the forum announced that spare parts were available free of charge to fellow hobbyists.
This suggests that the model worked up to a point. Progress was slow, and plans were sketched out
to systematise this decentralised model for diffusing 3D printers. The ‘loaner programme’ and the
‘Rep-rap Union’ were two such initiatives. The idea was that local Rep-rap user groups and hacker-
spaces would act as relays in a globally spawning distribution network of 3D printers. The attempt
to formalise a moral economy for distributing printed parts in order to expand the community ran
into the same chicken-and-egg problem as that which hampered the spread of the machine itself.
One of the core developers in the project explains the difficulty thus:
Everyone prints out a set of parts and passes them on. But that has not worked because nobody received any
parts in the first place. For example, I made my own using that machine [pointing at a Rep-strap]. Or people
bought them from places like BitsfromBytes and Makerbot. So they don’t feel any obligation to start printing
free parts for people. If someone received a set of free parts, then they got a moral obligation to print some
parts and pass them on. But hardly anybody received any parts so that process has not started up really.
(Chris Palmer 2010-03-17)
In the absence of norms in the community mandating the sharing of printed parts, market incentives
filled the void. A contributing factor was the high prices commanded by printed parts in the early
8 J. SÖDERBERG
years, as illustrated by one angry complaint posted on the Rep-rap forum. The writer declared that he
had stopped participating in the loaner programme after he had discovered that parts that he had
given away for the cost of shipping and plastic material were then offered on e-Bay for more than
200 dollars (Reprap general forum 2011-07-21). Experiences of this kind ensured that e-Bay
became the central distribution mechanism for Rep-rap parts. As well as resolving the distribution
problem, this contributed to establishing an ethos of self-employment and micro-entrepreneurship
among the members of the community. Almost every developer in the core development team sold
parts or 3D printers on an on–off basis. Many of them dedicated a couple of 3D printers in their
homes to the task of printing parts for sale on e-Bay. This practice was endorsed by the community
because it converged with the overriding priority of getting more machines ‘out there’, a precondi-
tion for enlarging the member base of the Rep-rap project.
For a number of years, the Rep-Rap community grew at an exponential rate (de Bruijn 2010). This
success, however, cannot be put down to the decentralised distribution network for 3D printers. The
curve took off in early 2009 following the launch of two spin-off firms: Bits-from-Bytes and Makerbot
Industries (Clanking Replicator blog 2009-01-16), both founded by former members of the core devel-
opment team. The road from start-up garage firms with high street cred to subsumed partners in con-
glomerates with global span was covered at dazzling speed. Bits-from-Bytes was acquired for an
undisclosed sum of money by a multinational company, 3D Systems, in 2010. Makerbot Industries
received 10 million dollars in venture capital the year after, and was later bought by another multi-
national company, Stratasys. Enticed by this commercial success, a vast number of new start-ups were
created, TechZone, MendelParts, MakerGear, Ultimaker and Ultimachine, to mention the most impor-
tant firms in the second wave. Most of them sold slightly modified, branded versions of the Rep-rap
3D printer. The start-ups depended on the Rep-rap community for continued development, technical
support and marketing, in a way that the larger firms did not (Anders 2011-09-19). What the firms
gave back to the community was to supply 3D printers as integrated, fully assembled kits. The cus-
tomer was thus spared the hassle of finding out which components were up to date, compatible and
locally available. In addition to selling the 3D printer, some of the firms offered filament and hard-to-
get, specialised parts, such as custom-made electronic boards and extruder heads. This service sig-
nificantly lowered the threshold for acquiring 3D printers, and is the factor that contributed to the
exceptional growth rates of the Rep-rap community in the years up to 2009.
In addition to the internal dynamics of the project, the increased importance of self-employment
and entrepreneurship within the Rep-rap community can be related to broader shifts in the economy,
affecting the hobbyists indirectly. This aspect was stressed by Ian Adkins, one of the two founders of
Bits-from-Bytes, in his explanation of why he had decided to start a firm, unlike many of the core
developers in the Rep-rap project:
If you look at the people involved in the core team which are driving it forward, most of them I would say are
semi-retired or don’t have children. They are people that have the time and energy they can put into it which
they don’t need a return on. (Ian Adkins 2009-11-26)
The discretion enjoyed by a minority of ‘affluent hobbyists’ over how to spend their time was not
unconditional. Many of the Rep-rap developers joined the project as students and were later con-
fronted with the necessity of making a living. At least three of the core developers I talked to said
that they had changed priorities after the financial crisis in 2008, with ensuing austerity measures
and worsening employment prospects for themselves or their children. Once the decision was
made to get a return on the investment of time and energy, different design criteria imposed them-
selves on the development process (Söderberg 2010; Olliver 2010-05-04).
As perceived and actual business opportunities in the consumer market for 3D printers soared, the
level of tensions within the Rep-rap community rose, too. The gap widened between developers,
chiefly preoccupied with moving the technology forward, and others better placed to monetise
those advances. As a consequence, both firms and individuals became more protective of their
ideas after the first commercial breakthroughs. Accusations of breaches of the licence – which
requires that design improvements be made publicly available – were legion on the Rep-rap forum
(Hitter 2011-09-11; Prusa 2011-09-19; Pettis 2011-09-20). These frictions were exacerbated by a more
‘existential’ fear, namely that one of the start-up companies would grow into everything that the
project had set out to combat in the first place, that is, centralised mass production and undue con-
centration of market power. Looking back, this is indeed what happened. In the early days, however,
many of the hobbyists were convinced that the market in 3D printers would eventually be under-
mined by the ability of users to modify and manufacture the parts for 3D printers in their homes.
As a developer working at the Bath laboratory put it:
Having a machine that can print itself, by definition, the cost of it must reduce drastically, because pretty much
no-one can make any profit on it. And having it open source means it is cheap to develop. (Jones 2009-11-26)
To some extent, this claim can be substantiated by the falling price of the plastic parts. At the outset,
acquiring customised plastic parts made up the lion’s share of the costs of a Rep-rap machine.
Although the plastic material in itself is worth less than 20 Euro, a print-on-demand firm could
easily charge 350 Euro for customising those parts. Hence, it was a major breakthrough for the
project when the printer became reliable enough to make its own plastic parts. A continuous
stream of process innovations in the Rep-rap community contributed to bringing down the price
of plastic parts. This might be taken as confirmation of the proposition above: the open design of
the machine and the permissive licence hindered the consolidation of market power in the
market for low-end 3D printers.
As prices fell for parts sold on e-Bay and catered to by self-employed hobbyists, heated debates
erupted over the merits of some of the process innovations contributing to this falling trend. One of
those debates concerned the introduction of cast parts, which threatened to replace printed parts.
Washington University’s mechanical engineering department had come up with the idea of
casting parts for the Prusa 3D printer, which made it easier to provide all the students in the class
with their own set of parts. Using a mould, 13 sets of parts could be cast in the time it took to
make a single set of printed parts. Shortly after, this step towards automating the Rep-rap production
line was raised by an order of magnitude with the creation of a master for making the moulds used to
make the parts. Both the moulds and the masters were soon up for sale on e-Bay. Coming full circle,
these masters were then redesigned so that they could be printed on a Rep-rap 3D printer. The pre-
dictable outcome of this spurt of automation was that cast parts were now sold at a price close to that
of the plastic material. In the commentary section of the blog hosted by the University of Washington,
grievances about the price squeeze were voiced by Josef Prusa, inventor of what was at one time the
most popular line of Rep-rap 3D printers. Intriguingly, his complaint is reminiscent of a labourist pos-
ition in the 1970s and 1980s debate over numerical control machinery tools. This time, however, it
was not the wages of unionised machine operators that were at stake, but the sales of the self-
employed members of the Rep-rap community:
Thing is, that selling parts kinda supports the further development. Someone sells parts makes some money on
that and he can invest them back. Now with these printable masters, and I must say they look nice, there will be
pile of ‘fotons’ making moulded parts which will take the price down even more and it will slow down the devel-
opment. (Open 3DP 2011-02-15)
The complaint by Josef Prusa could not but provoke angry rebukes from his peers. He was taken to
task for wanting to obstruct the forces of technological progress. In line with a long tradition of engin-
eering thought, falling prices were here understood to be a neutral gauge of technological efficiency
(Layton 1986, name withheld, 2014). Engineering culture provides the hobbyists with a frame of refer-
ence through which to make sense of the tensions in which they are caught up. Conflicts have fer-
mented as firms and multinationals assert control over a consumer market in desktop 3D printers
previously dominated by self-employed hobbyists. While the price for printed parts sold by hobbyists
over e-Bay has been undercut by fierce competition and automation, the prices and market share of
branded, commercial, closed-source 3D printers are soaring. The way hobbyists (users, fans, etc.)
10 J. SÖDERBERG
make sense of these conflicts is the Gramscian question par excellence: how is consent organised in
communities that have been put to work by start-ups and venture capitalists?
Initiative 2: From a community put to work to a ‘cloud factory’

As mentioned above, in the beginning, the stated aim of the Rep-rap project was to supplant markets
and firms with self-sufficient production networks of users. Perhaps out of zeal to achieve this goal, or
perhaps doing it just for fun, the hobbyists asked no remuneration for their efforts. However, those
efforts helped to produce the very opposite of the initial objective; that is, it led to the emergence of a
consumer market in 3D printers and firms catering to that market. The firms owe their existence to
the hobbyists who devoted their spare time to developing the functionalities of the machine, exchan-
ging know-how and creating new consumer demand for the product by spreading the word. That
being said, it is only in hindsight that the hobbyists can be said to have been put to work by the entre-
preneurs and the venture capitalists. The Rep-rap community coordinated its collective effort inde-
pendently of any of the firms. The hobbyists did so out of many different motives, in which profit
maximisation was but one goal. It is because of their autonomy from profit-maximising firms that I
describe the Rep-rap hobby-engineers as having been part of a ‘community’.
This status changed, however, as the consumer market for desktop 3D printers expanded. The two
largest firms at the time, Makerbot Industries and Bits-from-Bytes, set up user groups around their
branded versions of the Rep-rap 3D printer, thereby splitting the original Rep-rap community. Con-
currently, the technology matured so that low-level, routine tasks could be assigned to less adept
users of 3D printers. This suggests an emerging division of labour between the community of
hobby-engineers and a second tier of consumer-users, which I elect to call the ‘crowd’. Whereas
the former direct their own labour, while furnishing venture capital with product innovations (the
so-called open innovation model), the latter lack such autonomy and are remunerated for doing pie-
cework. In line with Harry Braverman’s reasoning about the indeterminacy of the output of con-
tracted work, as discussed above, the outsourcing of work to the crowd has to be accompanied
by tight control over the distributed labour process. With the spread of user-friendly digital pro-
duction tools, coupled with new methods of monitoring, the infrastructure needed to expand crowd-
sourcing to physical manufacturing is in the making.
This outline scenario is substantiated by an initiative by Makerbot Industries. Originally, the Maker-
bot Industries production facility was located in a red brick building in Brooklyn. The way the Maker-
bot 3D printer kits were assembled for shipping was reminiscent of a nineteenth-century workshop.
About a dozen people were stationed across the shop floor, piecing together components by hand.
Unsurprisingly, production capacity fell consistently behind the soaring demand for the company’s
products. Orders were placed on a waiting list and customers had to wait months to get their kits
delivered. At that time, the company was still wedded to open-source ideals and the design of the
machine was openly disclosed. In some cases, impatient would-be customers would build their
own Makerbot 3D printer following instructions found on the Internet (Wattendorf 2011-09-18).
This was tolerated, if not encouraged, by the company, though the company struggled to separate
legitimate customers from home-builders, as both drew on its customer service. On the upside, this
practice gave Makerbot Industries an idea for resolving bottlenecks in the production process. One
particularly troublesome bottleneck was caused by four pulleys used in the mechanical construction
of the 3D printer. In the summer of 2009, three interns were hired just to make this component. When
the interns went back to school, the production of pulleys stopped. Makerbot Industries made the
following announcement on their blog:
If you’ve got a 3D printer, you can print 608 pulleys for the MakerBot, and MakerBot Industries will buy them from
you for a buck each, with a minimum batch size of 30 for obvious reasons of scale. In time, MakerBot wants to
move more of their manufacturing off their factory floor and into the cloud. Future versions of the MakerBot
will have first their pulleys, and eventually a hefty fraction of their parts, made by other users. (Thingiverse
2009-08-11)
The firm offered one dollar for each pulley. Several thousand pulleys were produced in this way. Bre
Pettis, co-founder of Makerbot Industries, estimates that the firm sold 500–600 printers with pulleys
made by former customers, or ‘makers’, as the company calls them. Besides producing the parts in
question, the makers engaged in process innovations. For instance, the pulleys were redesigned
so that they could be printed seven at a time and then snapped off a single tray. This is reminiscent
of the moulds and masters that exerted downward pressure on the incomes of the self-employed
Rep-rap hobbyists. The open licence and the imperative of sharing information now worked in
favour of Makerbot Industries. If the individual maker had decided to keep the innovation secret,
he/she could have monetised his/her relative advantage vis-à-vis the other makers. What happened
instead was that process innovations were quickly disseminated, and associated cost advantages
were monopolised by the firm. Makerbot Industries’ initiative was hailed on websites and blogs sym-
pathetic to this idea as a step in the direction of decentralised manufacturing. More importantly, the
company was saved from gridlock in its orders. In spite of this success, the experiment was termi-
nated after just a couple of months (Pettis 2011-09-20), as Makerbot Industries switched back to cen-
tralised, mass production methods, while outsourcing parts of its production to China. Two years
later, the company broke with the open-source philosophy to which it had previously held allegiance.
A new, tinker-proof design was launched, with the result that customers could no longer be recruited
by the firm to make spare parts.
The initiative, though short-lived, invites us to draw a parallel with the history of the putting-out
system, a comparison made often favourably by commentators who cheered the Makerbot Industries
initiative. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the putting-out system – under which families
in the countryside were contracted to produce goods for merchants – became the dominant mode of
manufacturing in many regions in Europe. The merchants provided the raw materials and sometimes
the instruments of labour. The putting-out system was well suited to the variations in the intensity of
agrarian labour and the fluctuations in market demand. Another advantage stressed by historians
was that the merchants could circumvent the guild regulations enforced in the cities. Despite the
advantages, this decentralised mode of production was eventually overtaken by centralisation,
that is to say, by factories. This development was not linear: factory production could sometimes
give new impetus to the putting-out system. In fact, the putting-out system never disappeared com-
pletely with the advent of full-scale industrialisation. It has been reinvented in new forms and is still
widespread in some regions, predominantly but not exclusively in the global South (Littlefield and
Reynolds 1990). Nonetheless, it is evident that at some point factory production became the
prime mover, a historical fact lamented by the original Rep-rap enthusiasts. There are two contending
positions among historians to explain this outcome.
Much historical evidence has been mustered by historians who stress the impact of the introduc-
tion of centralised power sources such as waterwheels and steam engines. According to this view, the
factory system overtook the putting-out system principally because centralised power sources greatly
reduced the need for, and cost of, labour (Jones 1982; Landes 1986). The countervailing position
emphasises the difficulties of controlling a geographically dispersed manufacturing process. Crucially,
smallholders were not entirely dependent on the merchants for their subsistence, so they could pace
their work as they saw fit, rather than being compelled to maximise or shrink output levels in
response to market fluctuations. Furthermore, the contracted labourers became ingenious at cover-
ing up faults in the end product, sometimes caused by their siphoning away some of the raw
materials supplied by the merchant. Scholars holding the latter position contend that centralised pro-
duction was advantageous chiefly because the labour process could be placed under stricter control.
Efficiency-enhancing innovations, such as centralised power sources, were developed at a later date,
chiefly as a by-product of the investment already poured into factory sites (Marglin 1974). This brief
account puts the Makerbot Industries initiative in historical perspective. The pulleys in question had
to be produced to meet certain tolerances. This caused a concern for quality control, as illustrated by
a more acid posting on the company blog:
12 J. SÖDERBERG
When we make them, the bearing press fits into the pulley and yours should too! Don’t forget to check the pulley
for bearing fit before sending them off, because we certainly will! (Makerbot website 2009–08–06)
Reflecting on the experiment, Makerbot Industries co-founder Bre Pettis recalls that quality control
was not an issue at the beginning, since questions could be dealt with personally over the phone.
Contact with each and every maker became untenable, however, as the volumes continued to
grow. In autumn 2009, sales jumped from 20 machines a month to a couple of hundred. In other
words, the experiment did not scale up (Pettis 2011-09-20). Referring back to Richard Edwards’ pre-
viously mentioned typology, the initiative came up against the limits of simple control, that is, control
through personal relations. Concurrently, the means of establishing structural control over a labour
process that had been dispersed in the cloud were still missing. One indication of how that could
have been rectified is BotQueue, a development project started by another co-founder of Makerbot
Industries, Zach Hoeken Smith. BotQueue was a virtual control terminal that could operate several 3D
printers at a distance in multiple locations (Smith, private email 2016-04-15). Although it was
designed to solve problems other than the control issue relating to the manufacture of the
pulleys, feedback control over a remote machine – as David Noble taught us many years ago –
can easily be extended to technical control over the machine operator. BotQueue and similar
bottom-up initiatives to develop the technical infrastructure of the cloud factory remain isolated
and limited. They are a foretaste of things to come. What is missing is a legislative framework tailored
to the new occupational structure, in which the employee has been replaced by the ‘maker’.
At this point, a final reference to Marglin’s historical account of the putting-out system may
provide some insight. He mentions a clause in the English Parliamentary Act of 1777 which
allowed policemen to search a workman’s home on suspicion of embezzlement. He quotes several
more examples to the same effect: when production is decentralised to peoples’ homes, factory dis-
cipline must be upheld outside the factory walls, that is, through the judicial system (Marglin 1974,
94). This lesson will take on new force as the means are developed to scale up experiments with
decentralised ‘cloud’ manufacturing. Once the means of production have been signed over to
users (hobbyists, hackers, fans, makers, etc.), the means of destruction are in their hands, too. This
is pretext enough for the introduction of the kind of invasive legal powers that a distributed
labour process would require.6 In one sentence, structured antagonism, far from being confined to
contractual employment relations in the workplace, comes to permeate the ‘social factory’.
Conclusions
The Rep-rap case study has been presented in support of the theoretical synthesis proposed by Böhm
and Land. With the autonomist Marxist ‘social factory’ concept, empirical observations of how
hackers, fans and users (in short, unwaged non-employees) are being put to work by firms and
venture capitalists can be raised to a higher level of generality. The labour process theory tradition
contributes a historical perspective and an empirically grounded approach to the study of these
phenomena. Concurrently, the article takes issue with a remark by Böhm and Land where they
commend the post-structuralist opponents of labour process theory, along with the autonomist
Marxists, for having drawn analytical attention to the broader activities that produce value outside
the workplace. This objection is pivotal to my argument and I, therefore, conclude with a
summary of its tenor.
In the post-structuralist camp, the appeal for the investigation of multiple sites where subjectiv-
ities are produced goes by the name ‘indeterminacy of subjectivity’ (cf. O’Doherty and Willmott
2001), where what is described as ‘indeterminate’ is identity formation. The point is to deny that
the identity of the employee is overdetermined by a bipolar, antagonistic relation to his/her
employer. Commenting on this, Böhm and Land express regret that the ‘indeterminacy of subjectiv-
ity’ thesis has not yet been linked with the political economy of capital’s valorisation of subjectivity
(2012, 227). In making this remark, Böhm and Land show that they have not understood why
post-structuralist writers abandoned workplace studies in the first place, and why core labour process
scholars cling to it. To the latter, structured antagonism is integral to the relation between an
employee and an employer, by dint of one side being paid a wage, and the other side paying.
This holds true irrespective of individual testimonies to the contrary. In contrast, studies of the
user community are more likely to come to the conclusion that identity formations are contingent
and multiple, that is, non-antagonistic and non-dialectical (Grint and Woolgar 1997; Berg 1998).
My counter-proposition in the article is as follows: as occasional experiments with making a living
from communities are rendered systematic by start-up firms and venture capital, a division of labour
crystallises between communities of developers, crowds of users and clouds of piece-rate workers.
They are differentiated by their relative degree of autonomy from, or, in other words, subsumption
under, capital’s valorisation process. The autonomy of a community is upheld through norms,
licence agreements and information commons, concomitantly setting limits to profit maximisation.
As conflicts unfold over this autonomy, dialectics will be superimposed onto the contingent and het-
erogeneous identity formations of users (fans, makers, etc.). I predict that the precept of structured
antagonism will find more support in the self-understandings and testimonies of users, the more sys-
tematically they are put to work by firms. A case in point is AOL volunteers suing the company over
labour rights.
The experiment with making things and making a living with desktop 3D printing came to a pre-
mature end, long before latent conflicts were manifested in litigation. Nevertheless, tensions grew as
firms asserted control over a consumer market in 3D printers. This transition is exemplified by Maker-
bot Industries’ appropriation of the original idea of using existing 3D printers to make more 3D prin-
ters. First deployed on a moral economy basis by the Rep-rap community, then metamorphosing into
a means of self-employment, it culminated as a putting-out system integrated into the Makerbot
Industries production line. What was lacking at the time was a virtual control system for coordinating
such a geographically distributed assembly line, exemplified by BotQueue, and a judicial framework.
Nevertheless, the case study provides a pointer to how communities, crowds and clouds can be put
to work in a systematic fashion in the production of physical goods. The history of 3D printers in
numerically controlled machine tools underlines my claim that new kinds of industrial conflicts will
surface in the ‘cloud factory’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. When I speak of ‘post-structuralist writers’ in this article, I do not mean each and every author who has been
inspired by that intellectual current. I refer strictly to scholars who level anti-foundationalist arguments against
labour process theory, who are found both in Organization Studies (O’Doherty and Willmott 2001; O’Doherty
2009) and in Science and Technology Studies (Grint and Woolgar 1997; Berg 1998). Interested readers are directed
to one of the many summaries of this long-winded debate (Wardell 1990; Tinker 2002; Friedman 2004). I will only
call attention to the philosophical load borne by the post-structuralist watchwords ‘heterogeneity’ and ‘multi-
plicity’, words that pointedly target the Hegelian dialectical procedure of opposing identity to non-identity
(Bonnet 2009). Ultimately, this is what is at stake in the argument developed in the current article: when user com-
munities are put to work in a systematic fashion, the heterogeneous identity formation of users (fans, makers, etc.)
will be subordinated to the bipolar and antagonistic nature of the employee–employer relation.
2. For the sake of brevity, I do not enter into the debate surrounding the flagship of autonomous Marxism, Hardt and
Negri’s trilogy (2000; 2004; 2009), which has attracted critiques both from ‘conventional’ Marxist positions (Kicillof
and Starosta 2007) and from positions closer to the autonomous Marxist tradition (Caffentzis 2005). Suffice it to
say here that the problems with autonomous Marxism are also acknowledged by scholars who draw inspiration
from it in their writings on free labour (Gill and Pratt 2008).
3. Also, the notion of the ‘social factory’ has attracted critiques. According to Thompson, this concept was not devel-
oped from sustained, theoretical reflection, but rather grew out of tactical considerations specific to 1970s Italy.
The autonomous Marxists had stopped organising workplace struggles because those sites were dominated by
14 J. SÖDERBERG
trade unions and the Italian communist party, so the notion of the social factory painted this tactical decision with
a Marxist gloss (Thompson 2005, 77). One of Thompson concerns – there are many – is that the all-inclusive
notion of the social factory and its corollary, the ‘social worker’, collapse analytical categories. Intriguingly, the
same objection has been raised against the free-labour thesis. David Hesmondhalgh insists on reserving the
term exploitation for employees who are compelled to work to earn a living. The term loses its meaning if it is
applied to contributions freely made by fans and hobbyists. In his view, having precise terms for making analytical
distinctions is paramount if we are to develop a coherent and pragmatic analysis of political struggles (2010). I
concur, but insist nonetheless on the possibility of interpreting the ‘social factory’ concept in line with the old
debate on how to situate the sphere of production within the ‘full circuit of capital’. This debate was prompted
by the growing importance of consumption and finance for the labour process (Ramsay 1985).
4. Braverman has attracted much criticism for the way he delimited his inquiry, though the critics have not always
taken into account the purpose and context in which he wrote (cf. Tinker 2002, 273). A case in point is the objec-
tion that Labor and Monopoly Capital failed to give an adequate description of workers’ everyday resistances to
management rule, what has become known as ‘the missing subject’ (O’Doherty and Willmott 2001; O’Doherty
2005). This lacuna can be put down to the disappearance of articulated class-based politics in the time that
has passed since Braverman wrote. What he took for self-evident and thus left implicit is something that has
become almost unimaginable to scholars today: workers developing a revolutionary class consciousness (Rowlin-
son and Hassard 2001, 102, 107).
5. The introduction of numerical control machine tools became a touchstone for labour process theory. Numerous
studies took issue with David Noble’s argument, for instance, by demonstrating that union mobilisation and
national differences in political cultures played a decisive role in modulating the effects of this technology on
machinists’ skills and autonomy (Senker and Beesley 1986). The difficulty of assessing skill was often stressed
(Wood 1987). When one task is automated, the need for decision-making and skills shifts to another level of
the production process (Wilson 1988; Jones 1997). Despite those and many other qualifications, David Noble’s
central claim stands unchallenged, namely, that union-busting motives contributed to the decision to invest in
numerical control technology (Noble 1986, 235; for a reassessment, see: Scranton 2009).
6. The ramifications of this question became clear to me when I was given a demonstration of how cash-strapped
hobbyists made one critical component for the extruder head, the nozzle. In the original, Darwin model of the
Rep-rap machine, the nozzle was built from metal (brass) parts. In order to give those parts the right shape,
the hobbyists used an improvised lathe made from an electric drill and a drill clamp. They called this tool the
‘Afghan lathe’, since it is allegedly used in Afghanistan to make weapons (Olliver 2010-05-04). The scenario
that 3D printers would be used to produce arms has been discussed since the Rep-rap project first started. As
of 2011, there exists a proof of concept (Fordyce 2015). In that year, a design file for the lower receiver of a
semi-automatic rifle was uploaded on Thingiverse, a repository owned by Makerbot Industries.
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Interviews
Adrian Bowyer, 2009-11-24. Initiator of the Rep-rap project, Bath, UK.

Batist Leman, 2009-11-12. Promoter of Rep-rap in Flanders. Initiator of a hackerspace in Ghent, Belgium.
Bre Pettis, 2011-09-20. One of three founders of Makerbot Industries, the second oldest company selling Rep-rap deriva-
tives. New York, USA.
Chris Palmer, aka Nophead, 2010-03-17. Made key contributions to the extruder head, among other things. Holds the
record in selling Rep-rap printed parts. Manchester, England.
Ed Sells, 2010-05-07. Former PhD student of Adrian Boweyr at Bath. Principal architect of the Mendel Rep-rap design,
Auckland, New Zeeland.
Erik de Bruijn, 2009-11-11. Core developer of Rep-rap and founder of the firm Ultimaker, Eindhoven, Netherlands.
Forrest Higgs, 2011-11-03. Former core developer of Rep-rap, initiator of Tommelise 3D printer. phone interview.
Gustav Nipe, 2009-12-23. Promoter of Rep-rap in Sweden. Initiator of the Swedish Pirate Partys’ “Pirate factory”, Lund,
Sweden.
Ian Adkins & Iain Major, 2009-11-26. Founders of Bites-from-Bytes, the first firm based on selling Rep-rap derivatives,
Clevedon, UK.
Josef Prusa, 2011-09-19. Principal architect of the Prusa Rep-rap design, New York, USA.
Lambert Anders, 2011-09-19. One of two founders of Techzone, New York, USA.
Lawrence Kincheloe, 2009-11-10. Promoter of open manufacturing. phone interview.
Markus Hitter, aka Traumflug, 2011-09-11. Maintainer of Gen 7 electronics. phone interview.
Nick & Bruce Wattendorf, 2011-09-18. Promoters of Rep-rap in the New England area, built the third Rep-rap Darwin
machine in the world, New York, USA.
Rhy Jones, 2009-11-26. PhD student of Adrian Bowyer at Bath. Developes multiple materials for printing. Bath, UK.
Vik Olliver, 2010-05-04. Built the first proof-of-concept of Rep-rap, among many other things. Auckland, New Zeeland.
Internet resources cited in the article
Thingiverse (2011) http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:11669.
Hydraraptor http://hydraraptor.blogspot.com/.
Clanking replicator http://www.3dreplicators.com/.
Open 3DP/University of Washington http://open3dp.me.washington.edu/2011/02/prusa-mendel-and-the-clonedels/.

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ISSN: 1475-9551 (Print) 1477-2760 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gsco20

The cloud factory: Making things and making a

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ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

CONTACT Johan Söderberg johan.soderberg@sts.gu.se

Theory: structured antagonism in the social factory

Summary of the open-source 3D printer ‘Rep-rap’ project

Initiative 1: From gift-giving to self-employment in the Rep-rap community

Initiative 2: From a community put to work to a ‘cloud factory’

University of Minnesota Press.

Adrian Bowyer, 2009-11-24. Initiator of the Rep-rap project, Bath, UK.

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