Getting the toothpaste back in the tube

In my no doubt peculiar view, an ebb-point in the recent history of industrial design of consumer goods was reached when, in one of those moments of pervasive group fashion that flourish like a secret underground fungal growth beneath the expressions of commercially creative people, it was silently agreed that the tops and caps of squeeze tube and plastic bottles should not be figured as discrete items but had to be formed as continuing projections of the form of the tube or bottle.

The benefits brought to us by this demonstration, if ever one were needed, that forms follows not function but form, are a greater consumption of plastic, the near impossibility of screwing caps back on almost depleted tubes, and the ability to stand bottles and, more importantly, tubes on their ends. The last has become almost necessary with tubes, since they have become mostly made of plastic not metal, in pursuit of the expression and use of the last contents of the tube - but only until the advent of the 3D printer produced tooth paste tube squeezer when we finally reach the sun-lit uplands of individual digital empowerment. However, that leaves unaffected the true reason for standing tubes on their ends, which is supermarket shelf display - as witnessed by the fact that labels are often printed that way up. But when we finally but everything online even that becomes redundant.

So will the tide ever turn? Is the pope a catholic? - they might ask in the pub bar. Or can you get the toothpaste back in the tube? Well, you could quite easily before the tube was made of plastic.

Alchemy in our time

It's the 3D printer and the internet. Between them they promise the new perpetual motion: perpetual knowledge and perpetual product, each feeding off itself in the new miracle of limitless creation. Never mind about the second law of thermodynamics (c.1850), look around you: it is self-evident we are headed for perpetual motion, not the heat death of the universe, in which  death is not that of Christian eschatology in which we all fry but the state in which thermodynamic differences may no longer be exploited to perform work. Not a bang; not even a whimper. Energy is the ability to perform work, as I was told in my physics lessons long ago.

But are we? Perhaps the internet is the entropy of knowledge - and the 3D printer heralds not so much the creation of everything out of nothing as the creation of nothing out of everything. An American college student has invented (and intends to market) a miniature desktop plastics recycling plant that will grind your domestic plastic rubbish and render it as cheap filament for your desktop 3D printer, thus enabling you to create for yourself all you need for survival and fulfilment from the dross in your own household - from the cradle to the cradle. The only drawback is that plastics can be reused endlessly (maybe, but maybe not, unable to survive repeated reheating) only if they are kept pure, without mixing the endless different types. So not only does 3D printing herald the end of the mixture of materials that has characterised the most sophisticated art and artifacts for generations (no bejewelled skulls here), but it must sort our plastic waste into reverse purity.

Yet meanwhile, here in my country, we find there is horsemeat in our burgers, our nationwide high-street chain for video rentals has gone into administration, Europe's most charismatic philosopher brings us less than startling news that democracy will not survive austerity as a functioning orderly political system, the most widely used insecticide has for the first time been officially labelled an "unacceptable" danger to bees feeding on flowering crops whilst its manufacturer (Bayer) warns against "over-interpretation of the precautionary principle", the head of BP announces that peak oil theories are becoming 'increasingly groundless' and that carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise. Despite Google today celebrating the 112th aniversary of the birth of the inventer of the ice-resurfacer, it seems too early for entropy to panic.

The heat death of the universe