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One of my favorite sci fi books on this subject is Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. The awesome part is that the book is about the manufacturing revolution that follows the 3d printer. Always two++ steps ahead, that guy.

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In Diamond Age it was interesting how the control of the printing material ("the source"), and designs was used for a new form of colonialism.

The former can easily be controlled in reality as well, but I wonder whether the open source ethos will be able to keep designs free.

I think the command & control aspect of the Industrial age happened because of the need for and the benefits of economies of scale. There was a need to marshal together huge pools of capital, equipment, management structures, assembly lines, etc. With 3D printing and additive manufacturing, there is the hope of bringing peer-to-peer production that has successfully been implemented in software, information, culture & other intangibles, to the tangible physical realm. This is the direction we should be heading to, not the other way around of trying to apply Industrial age property laws and scarcity paradigms to the abundant fractal scalability of peer-to-peer production.

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