Brendan: You said recently that you quit Facebook a few weeks ago. Why did you decide to do that?
Douglas: Facebook is weird. At first I didn’t enjoy Facebook. For me it was a business thing. I don’t like the fact that my friends from second grade, who I’ve spent 20 years getting away from, now show up in my present.
My future is being cast back to me in the form of ads generated by big data engines that know what I’m going to do before I even know I want to do it. There’s this sense of temporal compression on my now. That’s present shock.
In addition, I don’t trust Zuckerberg and his company. I’ve seen the way sponsored stories work. I don’t like the idea that my face and name might be used to promote something that I liked, or that something that I liked, liked.
I don’t like being there — as an author, arguing for people to have media literacy and digital literacy — I don’t like being there asking for likes from people that are going to make them vulnerable to be the flow-through for sponsorships that I may or may not even know what they are.
Brendan: I wanted to ask you about 3D printing, because when I was reading through your book it struck me that, in a lot of ways, 3D printing is kind of the tangible way of living in the present.
How do you view 3D printing, going forward? Do you think this is going to take off? A lot of people are saying this could be bigger than the Internet. What do you think about 3D printing?
Douglas: 3D printing is a taste of things to come. It may be a baby, baby taste. It may be to local decentralized manufacturing what the typewriter is to the Internet because right now we’re talking mostly about plastic and metal, and where do you get the plastic, and how does it work? But it helps people envision decentralized manufacturing and production.
It will end up going one of two ways. Either people are going to get a free 3D printer from Jeff Bezos — he’s going to stick it in your garage and you’re going to be able to use it as long as you’re buying your plans and printouts from Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) — or it’s going to be some kind of MakerBot, open source thing that will really flip stuff open.
The real question, though, is what ends up going in the printer? It’s the cartridges. What are we using? If it’s some high-cost, bizarre polymer that requires Africans to dig it out of a slave cave and then ship it over here, then you don’t really change anything.
Brendan: Yeah. It’s definitely going to be interesting to watch. You see Stratasys, Ltd. (NASDAQ:SSYS) and 3D Systems Corporation (NYSE:DDD) stock just going straight up.
Douglas: It is. It’s interesting, but there are people that are buying 3D because it’s the only stock they can buy.
Brendan: Exactly.
Douglas: Nothing against NASDAQ, of course, but once something’s on the public exchange it’s kind of over. It’s kind of already happened. They’re already done their exit. They’ve already left.
If you really want to invest, and this is what’s interesting — I talk about this in the book too — is how to begin to think about local investing, about real-time local investing. How to see what’s going on in your community, how to set up…you don’t need alternative currencies to do that.
