Wisconsin’s NPR show To the Best of Our Knowledge just broadcast an impressively wide ranging show about copies and copying including discussions with a variety of people about architectural mimicry in China; identical twins; apocalypse memes; biotech dilemmas … and my own take on the topic. My own thoughts turn increasingly to the issue of 3-D printers, which especially when linked to a 3D scanner, really radicalize what kinds of objects ordinary people can now copy in their home. With nanotechnology slowly moving from hypothesis to reality, and the possibility of making copies that are accurate at the atomic level, the kinds of confusion of original and copy that we see happening today are going to increase exponentially. Which again raises the question: why do we copy? What do we really want? And how does copying fit or not fit into the broader political-economic framework that we live in?
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