Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel
Is the death of Make the rebirth of nettime? ;-) Mostly joking, but given this has turned a few lurkers into posters (me included), maybe we just need some different topics to be discussing? I'm enjoying the contributions (and nice to bump into some friends as fellow-lurkers!). It's nice to see general agreement that maker culture isn't dead, and Make did a lot to popularise making and it's a shame to see it go, especially for those whose livelihoods are caught in the fallout. However, I'm not too disappointed for another datapoint that the maker movement doesn't mesh well with the Californian Ideology of VCs, startups (and now "scaleups"). Maybe these conversations in the aftermath will help give oxygen to the people trying to work out what replaces capitalism (or capitalism-as-is); maybe we can help find the others building new commons, and new institutions to help us all. As Garnet points out, many of those people/initiatives predate Make - my contributions started around the same time, but have always taken a different tack (although still business-friendly). Tom, I try not to sit in my own maker enclave, although it's tricky to do when you're already balancing earning a living and bootstrapping a community of makers. When we set up DoES Liverpool [1] we /did/ deliberately choose to encourage more businesses as well as the hobbyist or making-as-culture/art/fun/activist side of things; we figured that Liverpool didn't need another anarchist/left-wing group or meeting space, but did need more ways for people to make a living. I don't normally frame the shared access to tools as collective ownership of the means of production, but it could be put that way... There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from that. It's far from perfect, and there is much work still to do, but there are sub-groups looking at recycling and maintenance, and we're friends with other groups across the city (and further afield) similarly feeling their way to a better future - Homebaked Anfield's [2] community co-operative bakery and housing; Granby Four Streets [3] activist housing renewal; Little Sandbox's [4] education-focused makerspace camped out in part of the library in one of the city's poorer neighbourhoods... I struggle to properly explain how and why such a disparate collection of activities hold as much promise and potential as I belive they do. Maybe there won't be a big behemoth success story that we can all point to and go "look at X, that shows the maker movement has worked", maybe instead there'll just be a multitude of people collaborating, making things for themselves and for others and for fun. (Rebecca Solnit's recent post seems useful in thinking about how we talk about that [5]) Cheers, Adrian. [1] https://doesliverpool.com [2] http://homebaked.org.uk/ [3] https://www.granby4streetsclt.co.uk/history-of-the-four-streets [4] https://littlesandbox.co.uk/ [5] https://lithub.com/rebecca-solnit-when-the-hero-is-the-problem/ On 12/06/2019 11:11, Tom Keene wrote: I'd also like to add some thoughts here as a non-poster on Nettime. I was recently contacted by some old friends, some of whom I haven't seen since I was 16 years old. These friends were part of London's early squat party scene. This scene was distinct from 'raves' heard so much about in the mainstream press, where the mantra of "free party faceless techno" reacted against the notion of superstar DJ's worshipped by dancers. Rather, DJ's and sound-makers tended to be dimly lit, out of view, and amongst the dancers. The free party scene was born out of punk, black sound system culture, a DIY ethos, and the drug ecstasy. My friends learnt how to build sound systems and their own sound-making equipment. I shared my soldering skills my grandad had taught me while sitting on his knee. I also shared woodworking skills I gained from my dad and learnt from friends far more skilled than him. My friends understood generators used to power a rave, and the equipment of building sites because that's where their parents (and some of them) worked and continue to do so. Those that didn't understand electronics, helped move equipment, played records, painted banners, many of who attended art school and were from middle-class backgrounds. I didn't think much about class back then, or my own middle class background (which I often attempted to hide), but the free party scene was an important meeting point of different academic, class, and (to some extent) race backgrounds - anybody could afford to go to a free party and anybody could contribute. I always found maker culture slightly strange when it gained prominence, it seems far removed from the maker culture of my then, predominantly working-class, friends
Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel
ps the things that the new artisans will manufacture in each locality will be not just the hard to replicate at scale, but the pointless to replicate at scale. Cheers, James P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime somewhat premature? = On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote: There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from that. # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: --- This email has been checked for viruses by AVG. https://www.avg.com # distributed via : no commercial use without permission # is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel
and you print out another one), but they probably aren't good enough to sell. These types of technology give you the illusion that you are a producer (of nice colour reproductions), when actually, you are a consumer (of ink). I think that 3D Printers currently have a similar economic effect - they're the end of the value chain. You can print out pirate space marines, (or marine space pirates, come to that) and use them for your tabletop battles, but that doesn't mean you can sell them legally, or at at a price that makes sense. You're the end of the value chain. On the other hand, you can feed laser cutters or CNCs with an incredibly wide range of materials, from a vast range of suppliers. And crucially, those materials have purposes OTHER THAN being fed into a laser cutter or CNC. If you also have a cheap planer-thicknesser, then almost any recovered wood product can be your raw material. These questions of microeconomics may get us away from the fascination of the amateur hackathon - and researchers may feel less immediately excited - but they matter for the shape of the bigger picture in the longer term. There's a whole other post - in fact, a whole thread - to be made about Making and Open Source. Is Open Source (as distinct from local, personal sharing) actually the thin end of the "globalised business as usual" wedge? I'll leave it for now. All the best, James = On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell wrote: James - I think from 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 commercial ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point. They are learning that they can pull ideas out of their heads into the real world, they are learning to envision things and then make them and then learn from them, and they are making their own marvels I'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds of enterprises that have sprung out of the world of makers, but only a small fraction of the people that want to make things actually want to make it into a business. It's one of the things about Make's approach that I never really got on with - the idea that there was a sort of admirable or even inevitable progression from making things for yourself to starting a business. Richard On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote: Hi Adrian, I'm really interested in this comment: "There are people in the space who see it as a way to bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from that." My view is that the key to wider adoption of superlocal making is not just to allow, but to encourage people to use your space to bootstrap their startup, and find some way to that the space benefits via that. In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for others for money, so there's nobody we like better than people who are bootstrapping a startup and shifting lots of product! As peoples' micro-enterprises take off, we make, they pay, and they take away items of greater value than we charge. Everyone's winning! The issue, it seems to me, is that many makers want to make "just out of interest" and manufacture fascinating things that just don't make economic sense. For us, having a shop in front of our workshop really helps - when you put something on the shelf, you can start, quite easily, to see what price it must have to sell (not always lower than you hoped, BTW). Typical maker products, chock-full of sensors, logic and LEDs, often cost more than people will pay for them. Getting to grips with the reality of products, and the hard facts of economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music playing, colour changing light-bulb retails for £6!) starts people thinking about "the new economy". Things people are prepared to pay a sensible price for are ludicrously specific and particular. They're about them, their lives, and their particular context. This flies in the face of just about everything we've been taught (and how we've been taught) about making: look for the common factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to
Re: WG: Fwd: Re: Forms of decisionism
[I'm really enjoying the discussion in this thread, thanks all!] If we do end up with a new vastly distributed factory then the question becomes how do we build a similarly distributed and decentralised system to orchestrate it? There are already many startups (3dhubs.com, WikiFactory, OpenDesk...) staking out their fences to enclose the commons... sorry, building platforms to enable this brave new world. How do we celebrate and encourage the messier, less homogenous (and so harder for consumers to engage with) decentralised solution, rather than cheer the next wave of Uber-like businesses to roll through a new section of the economy? Cheers, Adrian. On 25/07/16 20:03, Ludger Eversmann wrote: The question if there is a way to kickstart effective demand again and all in all to return to the Golden 1960-1970's in terms of strong parliaments, strong labor unions and productivity gains going in high proportions to wages (and resulting demand) may be difficult to answer; allthough in my view there are a lot of indications that support the assumption that it will not, and beyond this question the fact is more and more drastically drawing attention that ecology won't stand a strong and sustaining growth of consumation of ressources. <...> # distributed via : no commercial use without permission #is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
