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The Bambu Lab Scandal Proves How Much We Hate The Internet
The place we used to love is now the one we fear the most. Is your 3D printer still yours?
The 3D printing community has just exploded. In part, rightly so, on the other hand, it was inevitable. Bambu Lab, the brand behind some of the best affordable 3D printers out there, decided to push an update that would turn the otherwise quiet makers very-very loud and with that proving once again that the very technology we all paid insane amounts of money just a couple of decades ago to access, we now fear more than love. I’m talking, of course, about the internet.
Technical details aside, for the most part, the internet started out as a passive “organism”. Users — you, me, and anyone else who could afford dial-up and DSL connections, stared at information presented on largely static sites. It was a one-way consumption affair. But then Web 2.0 happened, access to the internet got so cheap even developing countries often boasted gigabit bandwidths, and IoT devices started popping up like mushrooms.
Within just a couple of decades, we went from looking at the internet to the internet looking back at us. A reciprocal consumption of sorts.