Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel
James: I think part of the problem w Make / Maker Faire is that it was at a crossroads of hacker culture, electronic art and commerce (and several other things) - but it conflated and misunderstood almost all of them. Maker Media only took all of this stuff and put it under the banner of leisure without really understanding industrial design, what motivates artists, how to sell stuff, etc. - it started and stopped as an exercise or demo - and it lacked the fuel to move beyond this. The stuff you're doing in Sheffield looks amazing - it's really encouraging to see that you've kept this running. It's a great idea to include a storefront. As an update to the idea about starting some form of a new organization, I'm talking with Karen Marcelo (Survival Research Labs), Johannes Grenzfurthner (monochrom) and Mitch Altman (TV-B-Gone, Noisebridge) on Tuesday - we're going to kick around a few ideas. I'm not thinking of a replacement for Maker Faire or Make magazine - Adrian: I think a messy cluster is best - but I see some value in putting a few ideas forward to try to bring people together. I found the dorkbot network very useful and interesting, for example. I'll report back with more ideas in about a week, Garnet On Fri, 14 Jun 2019, 8:33 am Minka Stoyanova, wrote: > Hello all, > > I've really been enjoying this discussion in the wake of Make's > dissolution. As noted, the corporatization, whitewashing, and > delocalization of potentially critical and creative diy approaches was > certainly a problem with the "maker movement" as defined by Make. I also > completely agree that the focus on 3D printing over CNC, laser cutting, or > (even) traditional building is a problem. I'm excited about Garnet's > proposals for a new direction/umbrella for critical approaches as well as > Adrian's proposals, that recall arts and crafts ideas for 21st century > problems. > > I wonder though, about the educational angle. My own local makerspace as > well as local non-profits that aim to bring tech education to young people > (often underserved) relied on the Make / "maker" phenomenon for tools, > educational resources, and funding. Perhaps making an LED blink isn't > really interesting for a critically-minded artist; as a critically-minded > artist, I certainly feel that way. But, it's certainly a stepping stone for > tech education. Make had a significant role in that sphere. > > However, I see an potentially interesting/exciting new direction that > could come of the dissolution of Make's stronghold in the realm of > education. Tech education could be more than "teaching electronics to kids" > -- which is *very* important, in my opinion. It could (and I think, > should) include teaching critical approaches to technology, teaching media > literacy, critical thinking, and environmental thinking. I think the > discussion here could point towards ways of bringing those perspectives > into what was, under Make, a largely naive approach. > > Is there a space in what Adrian and Garnet's proposals for youth > education? ...for educating the next generation? ...or, for aiding the > educators of the next generation? > > Minka > (trying to contribute and not just "lurk" so much) > > On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 6:56 AM James Wallbank wrote: > >> Responses both to Richard, Adrian and Garnet - great points! (Hope this >> doesn't make things difficult!) >> >> I think that, taking a longer perspective, the key question we have to >> ask is whether the "Maker Movement" contains (or even could contain) >> potential genuinely to transform and empower localities. Relocalisation was >> one of the big sales pitches for the internet (remember all that breathless >> talk of working from home, and a new layer of prosperous digital artisans?) >> yet what we see, twenty five years later, is hyper-centralisation. >> >> Just as an example, we used to use the apartment above "Makers" for >> AirBNB. So British people, visiting us in Sheffield, could pay people in >> San Fransico for the right to transact with us. Partly in response, we've >> taken the step of scrapping the apartment, breaking through the ceiling of >> the shop, reinstituting the staircase, and opening up two more floors to >> local commerce, culture and micro-industry! >> >> But can we make that decision make sense? Are we just utopian >> silly-billies, prepared to waste our resources on subsidising local culture >> - or can we make it pay at least as much as we made from our previous >> activities? >> >> Only by fairly universal engagement can Making begin to address the sorts >> of global issues that posters like Adrian and Garnet have identified >> (resource usage, poor resource recovery, social inequalities, >> alienation...). And to get fairly universal engagement, it HAS TO PAY. >> >> Richard, you say "my point of view the greatest value of the maker >> movement has been an explosion of people making things that don't entirely >> make sense and that are not intended as
Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel
Minka, I don't think you go far enough - we should be teaching critical thinking and media literacy to most of the adults, as well as the next generation. That's been part of what I've been trying to do locally, to varying levels of success; and not just me - I think Liverpool's artistic community (with a decent strand of tech/media artists) has helped lots in that, along with a bunch of us older techies who've been-there-done-that with the VC startup approach (and seen it both succeed and fail). I tried to convey some of that to an audience of teachers at the Makernoise maker-education conference last year - my slides and notes are at https://doesliverpool.com/slides/makernoise-talk-we-dont-need-another-hero/ However, you've prompted me to realise that while part of my standard patter as to why we founded DoES Liverpool is that "the more people in the city who know about the possibilities of these new technologies, the more interesting businesses and projects and stuff will come out of it", I should be weaving in something about critical-thinking into that too. Molly, the UK maker scene also skews heavily middle-class. I think that's something that James (I think) and I are partly railing against with stressing the importance of it needing to provide a way to earn a living. It's something I've been conscious of, but have made limited inroads into addressing. The Liverpool equivalent of Maker Faire, the (upcoming, come and visit on the 29th!) Liverpool MakeFest [1] has always been run in collaboration with the city's library service and filled central library with all manner of makers and crafters. It's vehemently free to enter, and being spread through the library means all manner of other members of the public encounter it. It coincided with Armed Forces Day a couple of years back, resulting in a regimental brass band milling round the stands; another time I explained the items on our display to a woman in her mid-80s with failing eyesight who visits every Saturday morning to read the papers and suddenly encountered a mass of people there too. She had some of the fanciest tech in the place, with a little hand-held camera that could read text out to her through headphones, or "a black box holding a little bloke on a deck-chair who reads things out to me" as she put it. In the UK there seems to be a decent amount of influence from the maker movement into education. No doubt helped by Raspberry Pi and micro:bit, but from others too. There are definitely elements of the tech-startup Make approach, but the more inclusive grassroots approach seems to be winning out. The founders of Liverpool MakeFest have been evangelising making in education, and encouraging makerspaces in schools - one of them, Caroline Keep, is Times Education Supplement teacher of the year, and set up Spark Penketh makerspace [2] in her school; and it's slowly spreading to other schools - nearby Neston High has a makerspace with a precious plastics shredder and are currently fund-raising to build a sit-on Strandbeest out of recycled milk bottles... The library services in the UK are also running with the maker activities - Denise Jones from Liverpool libraries is advising other librarians on the MakeFest model, leading to MakeFests in Stoke-on-Trent and Chester and more in planning; and Amy Hearn over in Huddersfield started micro:bits in libraries [4], leading to lots of libraries around the country having kit you can borrow like you would a book. Finally, to pick up Garnet's questions about 'a "Post-Making" type of organization'. I realise I'm projecting /my/ biases onto it, but I'm more interested in which organisation/s/ could replace Make, or even better, how do we build a broad coalition of organisations and initiatives to replace Make? As you point out Garnet, the various Dorkbot groups pre-date Make; there are now lots of makerspaces and hackspaces to provide (at least a start on) physical spaces for making; in the UK we've got a growing set of MakeFests to do some of the public outreach and celebration; there are the European hacker camps to give more inward-focused gatherings. Why replace one not-representative-of-all-of-us over-arching organisation with another (with all the politics and "but I've been making far longer than so-and-so" that we'd all succumb to), when we could promote a slightly messier and more diverse alternative. I don't really know what that would look like, and I can see there's a hole to be filled (in the US at least, maybe outside the UK too) in how the community organises replacements for (mini-)MakerFaires, but that needn't speak for all of making. It might not need to be much beyond a wiki somewhere that people can list themselves as maker or maker-adjacent groups, projects, spaces, events... I'm regularly checking out (or pointing people at) https://www.hackspace.org.uk/ or
Re: Unlike Us links on social media and their alternatives
Following an earlier thread -- There are some infrastructures that directly address the points raised below. In particular, technology infrastructures that put control in the hands of users will generally involve users running free-software code on free-software platforms that they control and trust. This might seem like an insurmountable challenge, but it is not; it can be done with sufficent support from institutions. Whether this (infrastructure) support takes the form of project funding, regulation, educational initiatives, or some combination thereof, remains to be seen. Addressing the challenges of metadata privacy and traversal of barriers established either for censorship or for price discrimination is a bit harder. However, efforts are underway, in the form of projects to build software and peer-to-peer overlay networks. The most accessible examples involve onion routing. (I believe strongly in Tor, as I have indicated earlier. Objectors should note that there are alternative onion routing architectures such as I2P. As long as we are speaking theoretically, feel free to substitute the onion-routing architecture of your choice.) My specific responses are below: On Mon, Apr 29, 2019 at 03:14:19PM -0700, Morlock Elloi wrote: > This is a promising direction. It's impossible to guess/infer at the first > attempt what the platform should do, but it's almost obvious what it > shouldn't. What we need is a requirements document, the one not produced by > techies, as for one reason or another they tend to make bad choices. At this > point I wouldn't worry what's 'possible' or 'impossible'. Just imagine the > ideal system and then work back to MVP. It may take some time, so the > stamina is paramount. > How can this be done? I would postpone this discussion at this point, as it > leads to multiple dead-ends due to diverse (in)competences of participants. > Instead, we should reach some kind of consensus how the ideal system should > behave. The rest is a technical problem. Agreed. Let's first specifically identify the key problems that need solving: (1) We require a way for individuals to converse directly with each other, at a distance (which is to say electronically), in a manner that does not expose information about their conversations to third parties. Three forms of communication are perhaps most essential: (1a) long-form correspondence (mail). (1b) real-time text messages (both bilateral and group chat). (1c) real-time voice conversations (phone calls). (2) We require a way for individuals to exchange digital content such as files and calendars, with the same requirements as (1) above. (3) We require a way for individuals to coordinate their activities (projects, logistics, meetings, with the same requirements as (1) above. > Nextcloud is promising, but there is an infrastructural anomaly that has to > be fixed first - direct addressability of every human (smartphone, home > computer, etc.) without intermediaries, directories, assistants. Without it, > only users with real IP numbers can freely participate (DynDNS is a > centralized service prone to corruption). It's explained in the paper I > peddled earlier ( https://cryptome.org/2019/02/elbar.pdf ) For exactly the reasons Morlock offered in a separate thread [1], network carriers will always have an interest to control the flow of information across a network. Potential interests include censorship and extraction of surplus, for example via price discrimination or tax. The problem of direct addressability of devices is just one manifestation of such control. Strategically, users of a network that wish to avoid such control will need to shield knowledge about their use of the network from the intermediaries, hence the need for onion routing. Tor onion services [2] can be used to create directly accessible services on any device that supports Tor. So it is possible to run web servers, or indeed any other TCP-based Internet services, via a Tor onion service, not only on workstations in homes and businesses that have not paid for a static IP address, but indeed on laptops and smartphones as well. Web servers available as Tor onion services can run Nextcloud too. Suggest that because it is folly to assume that we will be able to trust Internet carriers not to block, monitor, or otherwise interfere with our traffic, we can expect to use onion routing for this in the first instance. This is not to say that those of us with static IP addresses should not feel free to run Nextcloud services directly on the Internet, at least as long as we are allowed to do so cheaply, which may come to an end before long. I would like to suggest that using Nextcloud to solve challenges (1), (2), and (3) above will require essentially everyone to run a Nextcloud instance. This is certainly possible, but there are no doubt more practical ways to achieve (1a) and (1b). > Exactly. Let's do the effort and come up with white paper describing what >
