My newsletter started out covering 3D printing in 2024. I moved on to other topics, but a story on The Verge pulled me right back.
Across the US, a loose network of about 40 people with 3D printers has shipped over 200,000 whistles to 48 states. Communities use them to alert neighbors when ICE agents are nearby. The cost to print one: roughly two cents.
One of the makers, Kaleb Lutterman in Minneapolis, prints on a Bambu Labs P1S. Exactly the same machine, that I own. I’m just happy there’s no need for these whistles here. He fits 100 whistles on a single plate, runs a batch in about seven and a half hours, and gets 800 whistles out of $15 worth of filament. Most of the people involved don’t know each other’s real names. They coordinate loosely and ship for free.
Whatever your stance on the politics, the technology angle is hard to ignore. A few hundred dollars’ worth of equipment in someone’s living room can produce functional objects at scale, overnight, for nearly nothing. No factory, no supply chain, no lead time. Hard to shut down.
When I was writing about 3D printing two years ago, I was mostly thinking about replacement parts, household gadgets, and fidget spinners. I didn’t expect it to show up in this context. But the same properties apply: it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s decentralized. A distributed network of hobbyist printers can produce hundreds of thousands of identical objects in weeks, without any coordination overhead worth mentioning.
3D printing has quietly arrived in enough homes to matter. Good reminder.