Advances in biotechnology and micro-robotics have shrunk the industrial base of society down to the scale where anyone can make almost anything. With self replicating matter printing systems, and adolescent with a biological printer and laptop becomes a species level threat. Additionally, such systems place an unprecedented burden of self control on their users, who are now free to satisfy any psychological desire. It is for these reasons that the anti-transhumanist society has classified self replicating microscale and nanoscale biological robotics as a third order narcotic (first order being simple drugs, and second order being mechanical modifications of the mind and sensory hacking). Third order narcotics are technologies and concepts that impair, subvert, and eliminate traditional limitations within which the human reward system is evolved to operate, and therefore represent an existential threat to our society.

Proponents of self replicating nanotechnology point out that if you scale down the industrial base of society to the point where it can reproduce like a biological entity, the means of manufacturing will be decoupled from the global power networks and hence immune to their vices. The social and financial media have become sufficiently complex to support replicators which undergo Darwinian selection. It has been argued that the entire anti-transhumanist movement is the physical manifestation of these semi-sentient financial derivatives, which have organized their human components in a struggle for survival.