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This highlights the very real challenges that home fabrication poses to
contemporary industrial regulation, when faced with the emergence of small-scale
manufacturing centers that are neither willing nor able to comply with the many
safety and environmental regulations that have been developed for factories and
industrial centers. In a fi ctional world where the most popular beverage is “Ebola
Cola…you drink it…it eats you!” the fact that home replication is heavily regulated
at the engineering level stands out as a signifi cant commentary on the possible
dangers of this technology.
The technology underlying the fabrication system results in different companion
technologies within a design fi ction. Makers in the world of Transmet rely on
nanoscale reconfi guration in order to operate—they take raw material and rearrange
its molecules to create new things. In contrast, the replicators in Star Trek rely on
energy-to-matter conversion to create physical objects from energy templates.
Related technologies in Star Trek are the teleportation systems and the holodeck,
both of which use variations of this technique. Because making in Transmetropolitan
relies on nanotechnology, the possible related design fi ctions are very different.
Perhaps the most interesting additional use for nanotech in Transmet is a “post-
singularity” scenario where humans upload their consciousness to clouds of nano-
technological “Foglets.” These post-human consciousnesses exist distributed across
millions of microscopic robots, which are capable of manipulating other matter at
the atomic level, in essence turning people into sentient “Maker Clouds” (Fig.
11.7
).
Unlike the replicators of Star Trek, the Maker does not result in a post-scarcity
economy. While Makers
can
recycle garbage, it is indicated that they operate much
better if fueled by “base blocks.” In Transmetropolitan Issue #9, Spider Jerusalem's
neighbor demands the exorbitant fee of two base blocks in exchange for agreeing to
watch Jerusalem's mutated two faced chain-smoking cat (Ellis and Robertson
1998
). Rather than becoming
less
materialistic, people in Transmet are portrayed as
becoming more concerned with material pleasures than can be easily imagined.
11.3.3
The Diamond Age
: The Feed
Occupying something of a middle ground between the future worlds depicted in
Star Trek and Transmetropolitan, Neal Stephenson's
1995
novel
The Diamond Age
takes place in a future version of earth revolutionized by nanotechnology advances
that permit commonplace matter replication at both the domestic and industrial
level (Stephenson
1995
). Matter compilers are connected to “the Feed,” a stream of
confi gurable matter organized like the current day electrical grid, powered by
centralized “Sources” which deconstruct air and water into constituent molecules
for the raw Feed material.
Source Victoria's air intakes erupted from the summit of the Royal Ecological Conservatory
like a spray of hundred-meter-long calla lilies…The lilies sprouted from a stadium-sized
cut-crystal vase, the Diamond Palace, which was open to the public. Tourists, aerobicizing
pensioners, and ranks of uniformed schoolchildren marched through it year in and year out,
