Automating amateurs in the 3D printing community: connecting the dots between ‘deskilling’ and ‘user-friendliness’

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.7.1.0124
• Pages: 124-139
• Published date: 01 July 2013
• Date: 01 July 2013
• Author: Johan Söderberg

124 Working online, living ofine: labour in the Internet Age

Automating amateurs in the 3D printing

community:

connecting the dots between ‘deskilling’ and ‘user-

friendliness’

Johan Söderberg

Johan Söderberg is a post-doctoral researcher at

Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés (LATTS) and

Institut Francilien Recherche Innovation Société (IFRIS), at

Paris-Est/École des Ponts, France.

ABSTRACT

In this paper a case study of an open source, home-built 3D printer called

‘Rep-rap’ serves as an entry point to the deskilling debate. This debate has

centred on Harry Braverman’s proposition that deskilling is a general trend,

given the prevalence of capitalist relations of production, or, differently put,

contractual employment relations. The origins of 3D printing can be traced

back to numerically controlled (NC) and computerised numerically-controlled

(CNC) machinery and can even be seen to incorporate ‘material traces’ of

these. Both technologies are based on the same principle: guiding a machine

tool with the help of software. NC and CNC machines were introduced in the

midst of industrial conicts and served as a touchstone in academic debates

for and against the deskilling thesis during the 1970s. The open source, home-

built 3D printer, in contrast, is being developed by a community of hobbyists.

By denition, these hobbyists are located outside of contractual employment

relations. Still, they are striving to make the 3D printer user-friendly, or, in other

words, to deskill the user. Reecting on this difference, this paper sets out to

incorporate some of the critiques of the deskilling thesis in order to advance an

updated, Bravermanian position on user-friendly technology.

Introduction

In this paper, I present a case study of a group of hobbyists developing an open source

3D printer.1 Previously (Söderberg, 2010a), I have described the political aspirations of

the 3D printing community, rooted in a longer history of utopian engineering thinking.

My focus here is on how considerations about skill and deskilling informed the design

1 My case study is based on 18 interviews with core team developers and other key promoters of

the open source 3D printer. e interviews were conducted in England, Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden,

Germany, New Zealand and the United States, with three interviews conducted over the phone. Some

respondents were consulted on multiple occasions. A second source of information has been the discussion

forums dedicated to the project and blogs where developers share their ideas.

Work organisation, labour & globalisation Volume 7, Number 1, Summer 2013 125

choices of the hobbyists. I emphasise this aspect in order to re-examine the deskilling

thesis in Harry Braverman’s classic Labor and Monopoly Capital. e deskilling thesis

lays down the principle that, given capitalist relations of production, i.e. wage labour

relations, there is a general trend towards deskilling. e relevance of my case study

for revisiting this question is suggested by the fact that the 3D printer derives from

computer numerical control (CNC) machinery. e principle behind both the CNC

machines and the 3D printers is that a machine tool is guided by soware (as opposed

to being guided by a human worker). e deployment of this technology in the heavy

manufacturing industry in the second half of the 20th century served as a touchstone

in debates for and against the deskilling thesis. e open source 3D printer provided

me with a novel entry point to an old debate that was framed by the contractual

employment relationship. is framing of the issue is not surprising, considering the

centrality of the workplace for core labour process theory scholars (ompson & Smith,

2001; ompson, 2010) Indeed, it might seem as if my chosen point of departure, a

community of hobbyists, disqualies me from drawing any conclusions about labour

process theory. e relevance of my case study to labour process theory rests on recent

studies showing that the labour of users, fans and audiences is being put to work by

rms (Gill & Pratt, 2008; Burston, Dyer-Witheford & Hearn, 2010; Scholz, 2012). As a

result, calls have been made for labour process theory to be synthesised with theories

about the exploitation of free/volunteer labour in the cultural sector (Böhm & Land,

2012), and Marx’s theory of value is being re-examined in the light of this trend (Fuchs,

2012). is body of empirical and theoretical work provides the background for

situating the 3D printing community in a larger, historical transformation of the labour

process and occupational structures. It allows me to incorporate some of the critiques

of Braverman’s deskilling thesis, especially the stress placed on contingency by post-

structuralist writers, in an updated, Bravermanian position on user-friendly technology.

The debate over the deskilling thesis

e publication of Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital in 1974 met with a torrent

of criticism issued from a variety of academic camps. Fieen years later, Gibson Burrell

summarised the debate and suggested that the book had caused such a stir because of

its timing. Most of the British critics had taken aim at Braverman’s generalisations. His

general, theoretical claims were tested against and contrasted with the many variations

which they found in their own, minutely-executed case studies at one or another

workplace. Counter-tendencies and/or individual exceptions to the rule proved the

deskilling thesis wrong. Evidence was not lacking to show that skills could be preserved

or even increased by the introduction of new technologies (Attewell, 1987; Wood,

1982). Burrell attributes this kind of refutal to a pre-modern and empiricist intellectual

tradition that protested against Braverman’s modernist style of reasoning. But this was

also a decade when post-modernism was in the ascendance. Labour process theory

provided an iconic example of a modernist grand narrative against which the young

post-modernist scholars could assert their ideas (Burrell, 1990). Scholars subscribing to

this line of thought have protested that the introduction of machinery cannot be said to

have resulted in a lowering of the skills of workers. eir reasoning is that the identity