Physibles and all thing "Aaaaarrrr"

thepiratebay.org
 

While most people would relate this alphanumeric string with very strong emotions, very few would actually try to observe it as a intelligent organism. Growing and evolving everyday as a vigilante helped by the collective wisdom of its several hundred thousand users. I can relate it with a lot of social markers and a means to compute the magnitude of a lot of abstract concepts.

“Who watches TV on TV anymore”

-Eric Van der Woodsen (Gossip Girls)

I overheard this line while my ex-girlfriend was watching “Gossip girls” in India on her iPad2 which was  being streamed onto it from her dell laptop.  [ this line itself says a lot of things to the right professional ] Television shows are ripped and made into torrents and put on the world wide web for all to consume. For some people torrents are the next big thing since irc. This is where the pirate bay comes in. Pirate bay is one of the worlds most prominent public tracker and is used by millions of people from all over the world everyday to enjoy digital content. I can use this site to understand (within a specific demographic) which TV series is most popular or what kind of sites does a user browse on his computer or what kind of people are watching a particular movie or series and a lot of other things. You can deduce a very high quality qualitative leads from this site.

But what caught my eyes lately is the fascinating new area or rather category in this website. As seen in my title for this post its called a physible. Curious on what kind of thing is it. Lets first see what the official piratebay blog has to say about it.

We’re always trying to foresee the future a bit here at TPB. One of the things that we really know is that we as a society will always share. Digital communication has made that a lot easier and will continue to do so. And after the internets revolutionized data to go from analog to digital, it’s time for the next step.

Today most data is born digitally. It’s not about the transition from analog to digital anymore. We don’t talk about how to rip anything without losing quality since we make perfect 1 to 1 digital copies of things. Music, movies, books, all come from the digital sphere. But we’re physical people and we need objects to touch sometimes as well!

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.

We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.

Posted 01-23 01:24 by WinstonQ2038

Now I didn’t expect these kind of things on piratebay. There are sites like thingiverse which deal with these same things but piratebay takes it to a whole new level. I started thinking about the potentially widespread use of this kind public sharing. Schematics and virtually an object being at disposal of anyone and everyone with a 3-D printers which are becoming more and more commonplace and technologically advanced everyday.

Couple this with the vigilante nature of piratebay and the anonymity it provides to people who have a whole lot of spare time to waste. I can see it as a shady bar where schematics for the latest car from pinafarina can be exchanged for 3d scan of a lingerie model from Paraguay or even a top secret component of wmd. You can call me a cynic but I see the potential generated by this segment more on the negative side.

However, the world is a free place and to each his own. This is a logical and rational extension of the digital world. With the advent of new technology , existing ones always articulate itself to support them. Sometimes they combine together to form new meanings and uses. Physibles is an example of  an entirely new arena which is still in its infancy.

I have a feeling that being in the design industry and being a technology alchemist myself, I am going to see this little baby grow into a much larger movement in the near future. And before we can enjoy the benefits mentioned in the fourth paragraph by WinstonQ2038 we are going to see a lot of monsters crawling out from underneath our beds.

 

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This post originally appeared 
here 
https://apurvrdx.wordpress.com/2012/01/28/physibles-and-other-things-aarrrrrrrr/