Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Felipe Fonseca]

Hey nettimers,

With the risk of being too late to the party, I want to thank everyone
involved in this discussion. It was only last week that I had time to read
it, and it came just on time, as I have just moved to the UK to join the
OpenDOTT programme in Dundee (https://opendott.org) as a PhD student. I
wasn't so sure a couple weeks ago, but now it seems my contribution to the
project may somehow be related to a critical perspective on the so-called
maker culture, and perhaps trying to think of a commons of material
resources in city-wide contexts. It would be great to reconnect to whoever
is interested in reuse, repair, upcycling and other ways to seek healthier
(and more magical indeed) ways to relate to objects/things.

Jaromil, thanks for the mention. There is an improved version of that
medium post here - https://is.efeefe.me/stuff/gambiarra-repair-culture , as
well as a couple other texts on similar themes.

All the best, now away from Bolsonaroland but pretty close to Brexitburg.

efe


Em sáb, 22 de jun de 2019 às 16:19, Garnet Hertz 
escreveu:

> I made a Google Form to collect ideas in regards to an organization to
> fill the gap left after Make threw in the towel and closed their doors. The
> full responses are included below. At this point, it looks like something
> will be organized for sure... or at least I'll be starting up something. 
> Thanks
> to Mitch Altman, Karen Marcelo and members of Nettime for sharing. There
> are piles of good ideas here: which of these do you think are the most
> important?
>
> Here are the raw, unedited responses to the question *"If you were
> running an open source maker-oriented organization that filled the gap left
> by Maker Media ceasing operations, how would you run it and what would you
> focus on?"*
>
> 76 responses:
> • Model it after dorkbot but instead of having meetings it can be geared
> around smaller regional Faires
> • I would run it as a non profit and make sure that there are people from
> all over the world representing. Not only so US focused.
> • Focus on low tech and tech critism...as much as possible far from
> western culture...let say the gambiara creative movement in LATAM (brazil)
> or Cuban style repair culture
> guerilla, community envisioned and run publications/workshops/happenings
> without the 'red tape' so often discussed as part of the Maker Media
> legacy. so, no forced branding, no forced commonalities (other than perhaps
> a shared manifesto), no minimum number of participants or fundraising
> requirement for it to be a 'real' event of the community, and much less of
> a focus on attracting, and then satisfying, corporate sponsors.
> • Should be about critical making, open source, skill sharing, critical
> thinking and more...
> • I think the most important thing is to help local people meet up with
> each other in person. This should go far beyond people who already go to a
> hackerspace - this is something that Make did well by bringing together all
> sorts of people from children, university students, hackers, artists, etc.
> I don't think this has to be large scale.
> • Member-run co-operative; leadership positions only for women; women-only
> days; focus on understanding biases built into technologies and imagining
> ways around this (critical technical practice)
> • Money. Without money you can’t go far
> • Projects how tos. Wait. That's Instructables. Never mind.
> • cats, and i'd not run it... i would do unconferences, get space, and
> allow people, provide limited scheduling facilities.
> • Support groups with least access to money, education, and resources to
> setup, lead, and run such an entity.
> • I would focus on local groups with local, f2f contacts and a
> (funding-)mechanism to facilitate the exchange of primarily people as
> visiting makers instead data-platforming and global marketing.
> • A mostly decentralised movement that prioritises shared ideas over
> branding, focusing on providing easy-access models for small, local
> communities to start shared spaces and hold events.
> • I'd make an organisation of organisations, and invite contributions from
> different organisations. If I was making a publication, I think I'd go with
> an interview format and I'd interview two or more organisations at once -
> inviting them to discuss their operations, their experiences and their
> hopes, together.
> • Ideally, a new organization would be a resource, and not an
> organization. I think open-source maker communities are singular to the
> their local communities and their local interests. A global community that
> allowed the specificity of local/regional interests to shine is more
> important to me than an 'engineered' (imposed?) idea of maker-dom. I
> enjoyed the broad definition of making that Maker Media cast, but I think
> the organization was actually dominated by specific technologies and
> approaches to technology. I'd like to see an organization that could get
> past that.
> • I would focus on 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Garnet Hertz]

I made a Google Form to collect ideas in regards to an organization to fill
the gap left after Make threw in the towel and closed their doors. The full
responses are included below. At this point, it looks like something will
be organized for sure... or at least I'll be starting up something. Thanks
to Mitch Altman, Karen Marcelo and members of Nettime for sharing. There
are piles of good ideas here: which of these do you think are the most
important?

Here are the raw, unedited responses to the question *"If you were running
an open source maker-oriented organization that filled the gap left by
Maker Media ceasing operations, how would you run it and what would you
focus on?"*

76 responses:
• Model it after dorkbot but instead of having meetings it can be geared
around smaller regional Faires
• I would run it as a non profit and make sure that there are people from
all over the world representing. Not only so US focused.
• Focus on low tech and tech critism...as much as possible far from western
culture...let say the gambiara creative movement in LATAM (brazil) or Cuban
style repair culture
guerilla, community envisioned and run publications/workshops/happenings
without the 'red tape' so often discussed as part of the Maker Media
legacy. so, no forced branding, no forced commonalities (other than perhaps
a shared manifesto), no minimum number of participants or fundraising
requirement for it to be a 'real' event of the community, and much less of
a focus on attracting, and then satisfying, corporate sponsors.
• Should be about critical making, open source, skill sharing, critical
thinking and more...
• I think the most important thing is to help local people meet up with
each other in person. This should go far beyond people who already go to a
hackerspace - this is something that Make did well by bringing together all
sorts of people from children, university students, hackers, artists, etc.
I don't think this has to be large scale.
• Member-run co-operative; leadership positions only for women; women-only
days; focus on understanding biases built into technologies and imagining
ways around this (critical technical practice)
• Money. Without money you can’t go far
• Projects how tos. Wait. That's Instructables. Never mind.
• cats, and i'd not run it... i would do unconferences, get space, and
allow people, provide limited scheduling facilities.
• Support groups with least access to money, education, and resources to
setup, lead, and run such an entity.
• I would focus on local groups with local, f2f contacts and a
(funding-)mechanism to facilitate the exchange of primarily people as
visiting makers instead data-platforming and global marketing.
• A mostly decentralised movement that prioritises shared ideas over
branding, focusing on providing easy-access models for small, local
communities to start shared spaces and hold events.
• I'd make an organisation of organisations, and invite contributions from
different organisations. If I was making a publication, I think I'd go with
an interview format and I'd interview two or more organisations at once -
inviting them to discuss their operations, their experiences and their
hopes, together.
• Ideally, a new organization would be a resource, and not an organization.
I think open-source maker communities are singular to the their local
communities and their local interests. A global community that allowed the
specificity of local/regional interests to shine is more important to me
than an 'engineered' (imposed?) idea of maker-dom. I enjoyed the broad
definition of making that Maker Media cast, but I think the organization
was actually dominated by specific technologies and approaches to
technology. I'd like to see an organization that could get past that.
• I would focus on positive technology that attempts to help us instead of
just consumer goods
• Community building by featuring projects by makers through events and
publications.
• I'm not sure if it needs a replacement, aren't the maker faires run
independently? Also a printed magazine isn't something that many technology
interested people buy in 2019. A website that collects nice projects and
tutorials would be enough.
• Education of kids. the best energy seemed to be in helping people learn
• On content by the community (electronic media) and events
• I would run it as a collective that will use their power to make an
impact in society. Use the power of us, humans to make our home planet
better. I would focus on philosophy and ideas, since ideas are bulletproof
and no one can’t take them away.
• n my market no matter the name of a brand, people do not come because the
brand comes to create community
• Non-profit, volunteer-based, brutally and radically self-sustaining.
• a bit like hackaday but with a broader focus
• Celebrating and sharing builds.
• I currently part of a maker oriented NGO in Mexico, and our experience is
that there are a lot of oportunities to fund and create open content. We
get 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Molly Hankwitz]

Hello Iain, et al,

If I have contributed with my post regarding the passing of Maker - as no
big deal - this creating maker-doubt by underscoring the lack of
environmental consciousness in a kabillion plastic parts (heating seals and
whales applaud) my comments were not intended to squelch the beneficial
maker-flow when it comes to tinkering, or imaginative play. Indeed, so
important to almost all practices! However, I would not blame the
screen...attachment to which may be causing a slow-down in nettime’s
success as smartphone users run to real and material life for refuge. Let
the maker-urge flow...let the commercialization of maker, fall. Maker’s
best attribute imho is its, forgive me, horizontality as a movement
touching everyone from seniors and hospital wards to high end computer labs
and and universities.
The maker-ethos is fantastic, even if one never gets anywhere but treads
maker-water for ages.

It was/is some post-industrial attempt to reunite hand/eye/heart/brain with
material—arguably problematically conceived, even anti-digital thinking
tied up with that. Can we not balance resistance to the virtual life
through engagement with digital life as opposed to rejecting or pushing it
away? So, if making did celebrate a kind of naive, non-expertise, then has
it produced a generation or two of dummies with eyes wide open to new
ideas? Maybe not. Maybe rather refocused elements of creativity, which
along with “sharing” can be critiqued as belonging to and defined by varied
economies from the anarchical to the communist to the neo-liberal.

Molly lurker Hankwitz

On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 11:08 AM Iain Boal  wrote:

> Parhaps the historical vogue for ‘making’ was a wishful reaction of
> passive bodies - TV’s couch potatoes - bound even tighter to the screen by
> the novel technics of interactivity, viz. enhanced passivity. I recently
> heard that 10 year olds in California are averaging 7 hours a day stroking
> glass. Can this be true?
>
> Iain
>
>
> On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:20, Richard Sewell  wrote:
>
> Sam - it's a self-description that works well for people who find
> themselves doing several of those things, and don't want to be pigeonholed
> into doing just one.
>
> Garnet makes the same mistake, I think:
> " Language typically expands into a rich lexicon of terms when a field
> grows, and the generality of ‘making’ is the polar opposite. Ceramicists,
> welders, sculptors, luthiers, amateur radio builders, furniture makers and
> inventors have been conflated into the singular category of makers, and the
> acceptance of this shift seems to indicate that any form of making is novel
> enough in popular culture that it is not worth discerning what is being
> built."
>
> If you're making some ceramics and some robots and some lutes, it just
> doesn't work to call yourself a luthier.  You could think of the term as an
> acceptance that some people will be making all sorts of things, not going
> along with the traditional commercial specialisation of making skills.
>
> Yes, it might mean that you get paid less, but then it's not really a
> description of a job, it's a description of an activity that's often
> happily not commercial.
>
> One of the things about Make that made me sad was that it tended to
> presume that everybody aspired (or should aspire) to turn their making into
> some kind of business, and that was often missing the real point of the
> making. It assumed that if you liked to cook a nice dinner you'd be even
> happier running a restaurant.
>
> R.
>
> On 18/06/2019 21:11, Sam Dwyer wrote:
> > It was always fated to be a high poser and huckster zone, because if you
> were really good at making stuff, wouldn't you consider yourself an
> engineer or a designer or an artist first?
>
>
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Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Iain Boal]

Parhaps the historical vogue for ‘making’ was a wishful reaction of passive 
bodies - TV’s couch potatoes - bound even tighter to the screen by the novel 
technics of interactivity, viz. enhanced passivity. I recently heard that 10 
year olds in California are averaging 7 hours a day stroking glass. Can this be 
true?

Iain 

 
On 18 Jun 2019, at 14:20, Richard Sewell  wrote:

Sam - it's a self-description that works well for people who find themselves 
doing several of those things, and don't want to be pigeonholed into doing just 
one.

Garnet makes the same mistake, I think:
" Language typically expands into a rich lexicon of terms when a field grows, 
and the generality of ‘making’ is the polar opposite. Ceramicists, welders, 
sculptors, luthiers, amateur radio builders, furniture makers and inventors 
have been conflated into the singular category of makers, and the acceptance of 
this shift seems to indicate that any form of making is novel enough in popular 
culture that it is not worth discerning what is being built."

If you're making some ceramics and some robots and some lutes, it just doesn't 
work to call yourself a luthier.  You could think of the term as an acceptance 
that some people will be making all sorts of things, not going along with the 
traditional commercial specialisation of making skills.

Yes, it might mean that you get paid less, but then it's not really a 
description of a job, it's a description of an activity that's often happily 
not commercial.

One of the things about Make that made me sad was that it tended to presume 
that everybody aspired (or should aspire) to turn their making into some kind 
of business, and that was often missing the real point of the making. It 
assumed that if you liked to cook a nice dinner you'd be even happier running a 
restaurant.

R.

On 18/06/2019 21:11, Sam Dwyer wrote:
> It was always fated to be a high poser and huckster zone, because if you were 
> really good at making stuff, wouldn't you consider yourself an engineer or a 
> designer or an artist first? 


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Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Minka Stoyanova]

Adrian,

I definitely agree that criticality should be included at all levels/ages
of tech education; I only specifically addressed future generations because
I find that we are more likely to overlook that aspect when teaching young
people. Perhaps this is because we erroneously assume that they are not
able to understand those levels of nuance? -- I am not sure. It's something
that I am trying to work on in New Orleans with NOLA_Code but also through
my connections with maker-spaces (Makers of NO), developer meetups (NOLA
Hack Night), and immersion schools (Operation Spark and Tech Talent South).

I think wiki.hackerspaces.org is a great model, but I also wonder about how
such spaces could be better maintained. As an example, for years Gumbo Labs
(really an email list that never actually resulted in an active space) was
listed there, after any and all activity was ancient history. The list
would occasionally get a random email from someone traveling through
Louisiana, and they were connected to more active alternatives. Maybe
though, that's the exception as opposed to the rule. I have always found in
Europe at least that the hackerspaces.org map and list was a great entry
point into spaces that were at least open to visitors and had an open
community approach.

I would also like to see the projects/resources side of a online resource
like hackerspaces.org be more robust. Maybe that means a less comprehensive
list of ongoing "projects" and more of a database of profile-based
resources (hackerspaces meets github?)? Perhaps projects, ideas, or
resources could be organized based on their application (inspiration,
education, outreach, collaboration, etc...)

Moreover, I feel like hackerspaces.org represents a small, but active,
community of engaged (old-school) hacker/maker/open-source advocates that I
certainly enjoy finding/sharing with, but maybe does not seem so open to
newcomers or to a more (racial, gender, and age) diverse potential
audience?

Is there a way to expand the reach of that kind of space without:
A. requiring a much more robust system of curation/community management --
or maybe that's exactly what is needed (a la Wikipedia?)
B. replicating the top-down (hegemonic?) marketing/branding approach we
have already criticised in the Maker Media approach?

...thinking... thinking...
Minka




On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 8:04 PM Adrian McEwen  wrote:

> 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 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Richard Sewell]

Sam - it's a self-description that works well for people who find 
themselves doing several of those things, and don't want to be 
pigeonholed into doing just one.


Garnet makes the same mistake, I think:
" Language typically expands into a rich lexicon of terms when a field 
grows, and the generality of ‘making’ is the polar opposite. 
Ceramicists, welders, sculptors, luthiers, amateur radio builders, 
furniture makers and inventors have been conflated into the singular 
category of makers, and the acceptance of this shift seems to indicate 
that any form of making is novel enough in popular culture that it is 
not worth discerning what is being built."


If you're making some ceramics and some robots and some lutes, it just 
doesn't work to call yourself a luthier.  You could think of the term as 
an acceptance that some people will be making all sorts of things, not 
going along with the traditional commercial specialisation of making skills.


Yes, it might mean that you get paid less, but then it's not really a 
description of a job, it's a description of an activity that's often 
happily not commercial.


One of the things about Make that made me sad was that it tended to 
presume that everybody aspired (or should aspire) to turn their making 
into some kind of business, and that was often missing the real point of 
the making. It assumed that if you liked to cook a nice dinner you'd be 
even happier running a restaurant.


R.

On 18/06/2019 21:11, Sam Dwyer wrote:
It was always fated to be a high poser and huckster zone, because if 
you were really good at making stuff, wouldn't you consider yourself 
an engineer or a designer or an artist first? 



#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
#is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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#  @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

[Garnet Hertz]

Yeah - the diversity in Make thing is extensive and a long-running issue. I
did a 10 zine series called "Critical Making" (
http://conceptlab.com/criticalmaking/) in 2012, with one whole issue
dedicated to criticizing the diversity of Make. See the following:

-
http://conceptlab.com/criticalmaking/PDFs/CriticalMaking2012Hertz-Make-pp01to10-Altman-DoFundingSourcesMatter.pdf
-
http://conceptlab.com/criticalmaking/PDFs/CriticalMaking2012Hertz-Make-pp11to16-Dougherty-MakerspacesInEducationAndDARPA.pdf

Leah had called out Make publicly in 2013 - you can see the talk here:
http://edstream.stanford.edu/Video/Play/883b61dd951d4d3f90abeec65eead2911d -
it's great. I had also made a sticker campaign in 2012 that made fun of the
lack of diversity in Make (among other things including military funding,
etc.) - http://conceptlab.com/made/. A number of us were hammering at Make
for a while - but they never really took us seriously - my sense is that
they sort of viewed us as complainers.

When the controversy around Naomi Wu happened - Dale (founder/CEO of Make)
in 2017 tweeted out that he didn't think Naomi was a real person that did
all of her own work/projects etc, which is basically sacrilege in the DIY
community:
https://all3dp.com/make-magazine-founder-apologizes-for-accusing-naomi-sexycyborg-wu-of-not-being-a-real-person/
-
Make was already in a financial tailspin by at least 2016 (that was the
first I personally had heard from Maker Faire organizers that "this may be
the last Maker Faire"), or at least they were walking on thin ice at this
point. Naomi has a significant social media following (currently ~900k
YouTube subscribers) and took issue with Dale's accusations. In general,
the community rallied behind Naomi and I think Dale saw his corporate life
flash before his eyes and swiftly apologized and put her on the cover of
the next issue of the printed magazine. He knew that most of his income
came from rich white guys - see
https://cdn.makezine.com/make/bootstrap/img/etc/Maker-Market-Study.pdf for
the details - this was an Intel report around 2013 that confirmed this,
which only cemented their focus on rich white men. It's all sort of a soap
opera (which I think is sort of fascinating in an ethnographic kind of way)
but in my opinion, Dale had lots of fair warning about diversity and
getting in bed with the military. I had told this to Dale's face a number
of times. He sort of mumbled and said he was just trying to keep a business
afloat, which was likely true, but not really sufficient if he cared about
the actual community.

In my mind, Dale's problem is that he wasn't a maker. He was a publishing
and marketing guy - and he was very brilliant at it - but he literally
didn't know how to use a hammer. I watched him at Foo Camp at O'Reilly
headquarters try to use a hammer for about a half hour - it was absolutely
painful to watch. In short, I don't think he actually understood it. He was
fascinated by it, but never really understood what drives people to make
stuff - he always misinterpreted (hacking and art) as "fun". In the history
of how innovations spread (Everett Rogers, et al:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion_of_innovations) it's absolutely
true that there are catalyst individuals that know little about the
technology they are evangelizing (maybe Alexander Graham Bell) - in my
mind, the lack of knowledge around the thing they're evangelizing
substantially empowers them to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries in
productive ways. Dale was definitely one of those people.

Garnet

On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 9:07 AM Geoffrey Goodell  wrote:

> (Dear nettimers, this is my last message in this present batch, I promise!)
>
> Someone from MIT shared with me the following, which I quote verbatim.  It
> specificallly identifies the poor leadership of Dale Dougherty as an
> explanation for the trouble with Make.  I have no idea what the board of
> Make
> thinks of this but suggest that they should be considering it carefully:
>
> --xx--xx--
>
> There has been a long history of people criticizing Make for a lack of
> diversity along a variety of lines (gender, racial, etc), including loud
> critic Dr. Leah Bueckley, former MIT Media Lab professor:
> https://www.edsurge.com/news/2013-10-29-make-ing-more-diverse-makers
>
> I had a better article somewhere, but I think this blog post summarizes the
> Naomi Wu incident reasonably well.
>
> http://mike-ibioloid.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-bizarre-case-of-naomi-wu-vs-dale.html
>
> Dale has spent 15 years brushing off these critiques, and it was only after
> this THIRD apology for the Naomi incident (because apparently it took him
> that long to have a woman read the apology before he posted it!) that he
> promised to increase diversity of Make.
>
> Overall, I think that the kernel of the idea of Make was good, but it was
> the classic startup problem - the correct person wasn't leading it.  Dale
> wasn't able to increase his vision beyond a classical version of 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Sam Dwyer]

To the extant that makerism(!) was a movement, it is under-appreciated that
the widespread availability of 3d printers happened after the patents held
by Stratasys (parent of Makerbot) on Fusion Deposit Modeling expired in
2009, and the price of 3d printers plummeted from $10,000 to a little more
than $200.

Makerbot wasn't central to the proliferation of inexpensive 3d printing –
that's the propaganda talking. Really, it was China, which literally
proliferated the stuff.

"The Maker" of last decade was a picaresque identity that you could adopt
for yourself while 3d printing models of R2D2 (see you at ye olde faire!),
cast onto children or the unemployed if you were a politician or educator,
or generally try to sell people into if your business was providing the
craft supplies. It was always fated to be a high poser and huckster zone,
because if you were really good at making stuff, wouldn't you consider
yourself an engineer or a designer or an artist first? Even if you're just
making stuff for yourself or your friends and family – why would you ever
embrace an identity that makes a fetish of its own amateur alienation? That
embraces powerlessness? Such a thing is *tres Gen Ex, lol. *

As young(ish) person who makes a living in part by selling 3d printed
objects, I can tell you that being labeled a maker means that you get paid
less. The dream was always a lie: "they" hoped to do the same thing to
invention and design as "they" have done to "content creation."

The Maker movement is survived by its rather ruder parents, America First,
Made in China 2025, and the global phenomenon of "dude where's my future?"

Cheers2,
Sam




On Sun, Jun 16, 2019 at 12:09 PM Geoffrey Goodell 
wrote:

> (Dear nettimers, this is my last message in this present batch, I promise!)
>
> Someone from MIT shared with me the following, which I quote verbatim.  It
> specificallly identifies the poor leadership of Dale Dougherty as an
> explanation for the trouble with Make.  I have no idea what the board of
> Make
> thinks of this but suggest that they should be considering it carefully:
>
> --xx--xx--
>
> There has been a long history of people criticizing Make for a lack of
> diversity along a variety of lines (gender, racial, etc), including loud
> critic Dr. Leah Bueckley, former MIT Media Lab professor:
> https://www.edsurge.com/news/2013-10-29-make-ing-more-diverse-makers
>
> I had a better article somewhere, but I think this blog post summarizes the
> Naomi Wu incident reasonably well.
>
> http://mike-ibioloid.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-bizarre-case-of-naomi-wu-vs-dale.html
>
> Dale has spent 15 years brushing off these critiques, and it was only after
> this THIRD apology for the Naomi incident (because apparently it took him
> that long to have a woman read the apology before he posted it!) that he
> promised to increase diversity of Make.
>
> Overall, I think that the kernel of the idea of Make was good, but it was
> the classic startup problem - the correct person wasn't leading it.  Dale
> wasn't able to increase his vision beyond a classical version of monetizing
> making.  By not welcoming (and also actively discouraging) a bunch of his
> audience, he limited some of the scope of the Maker movement.
>
> --xx--xx--
>
> Best wishes --
>
> Geoff
>
> On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 04:02:26PM -0700, Garnet Hertz wrote:
> > 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
> > > 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Geoffrey Goodell]

(Dear nettimers, this is my last message in this present batch, I promise!)

Someone from MIT shared with me the following, which I quote verbatim.  It
specificallly identifies the poor leadership of Dale Dougherty as an
explanation for the trouble with Make.  I have no idea what the board of Make
thinks of this but suggest that they should be considering it carefully:

--xx--xx--

There has been a long history of people criticizing Make for a lack of
diversity along a variety of lines (gender, racial, etc), including loud
critic Dr. Leah Bueckley, former MIT Media Lab professor:
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2013-10-29-make-ing-more-diverse-makers

I had a better article somewhere, but I think this blog post summarizes the
Naomi Wu incident reasonably well.
http://mike-ibioloid.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-bizarre-case-of-naomi-wu-vs-dale.html

Dale has spent 15 years brushing off these critiques, and it was only after
this THIRD apology for the Naomi incident (because apparently it took him
that long to have a woman read the apology before he posted it!) that he
promised to increase diversity of Make.

Overall, I think that the kernel of the idea of Make was good, but it was
the classic startup problem - the correct person wasn't leading it.  Dale
wasn't able to increase his vision beyond a classical version of monetizing
making.  By not welcoming (and also actively discouraging) a bunch of his
audience, he limited some of the scope of the Maker movement.

--xx--xx--

Best wishes --

Geoff

On Sat, Jun 15, 2019 at 04:02:26PM -0700, Garnet Hertz wrote:
> 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 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Garnet Hertz]

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

[Adrian McEwen]

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: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Molly Hankwitz]

Death of Maker


Maker Faire promoted, as many have pointed out, an artisanal/technological
relationship and hands on DIY production and in areas of education and
experimentation. All great!


They tried to be inclusive with low-cost materiality and open access
workshops and free-timed events, but underlying this effort was the
perpetually ignored issue of class; presumed capacity to afford the 25.00US
ticket, and parking fees in San Mateo, or own a car or ride a train ride to
be part of it from small towns or near by cities of San Jose and San
Francisco here in the West. I’m sure there were such caveats of inclusion
in NY Maker Faire as well. That Maker ethos spread to many cities and had
such great public relations is certainly excellent. The project tried to be
inclusive with its appeal to generic materials, organicism, and everyday
technology but there were inhibitors and ultimately the Maker Faire, at
least, was a middle-class, largely white, and increasingly commercial
event. For contrast, Gray Area and Intersection's Urban Prototyping 'fair'
(2012?) was in the streets - with techno-artists 'making' or demonstrating
all over San Francisco's middle Market St area - with great exposure to all
kinds of publics.


That said, great upshot of widespread Maker movement/campaign, publication;
experimental-like idea promotion and heralding of “non-expertise”as means
to learn, and the putting of collaboration within reach of many has been
the growth of  “maker spaces” in public sector zones. This surely helps
counteract some class issues which evolve from pricing and historic
exclusion in tech and the arts such as public library systems, (SFPL has
The Mix, teen space),  our K-12 public schools (Hoover MS built a
Maker-space), storefronts (there are several walk-in and work, including
Double Union, also in SF, which is trans/LBGTQ space) and maybe even
websites such as Adafruit (though not sure of timeline) emerged during the
Maker heyday.


How these spaces will survive and change without umbrella Maker movement,
or leading publication, remains a question.

Disney got involved with Maker Faire, and that should tell everyone a lot.


One hopes the spirit of ‘making’ and ‘collaboration’ promoted to
non-technologists and to many outsiders of the arts/technology fields, will
have subtle and lasting repercussions in the next wave - and will continue
to permeate education and beyond.


How has “Maker” influenced European education?



https://www.urbanlibraries.org/member-resources/makerspaces-in-libraries


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_makerspace


https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/everyone-is-a-maker/473286/


http://redtri.com/new-york/hands-on-nycs-best-makerspaces/


https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048623.2016.1228163


http://eprints.qut.edu.au/73071/1/73071.pdf


https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:22717/n2006043067.pdf


https://www.edutopia.org/blog/designing-a-school-makerspace-jennifer-cooper



Molly

On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 8:34 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 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Minka Stoyanova]

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 commercial ventures. That's not an
> issue, that's the point."
>
> If we maintain that the quirky, fascinating, but ultimately unprofitable
> experiments are the core value of the Maker Movement, then be prepared to
> accept that it WILL wither and die - or rather, simply retreat into the
> world of hobbyists orbiting academic institutions. Throughout history there
> have been movements that have resulted in things that don't entirely make
> sense - it hasn't needed the Maker Movement to make that happen. Are you in
> danger of conflating the experimental excrescences of creative young people
> with what we're now calling "making" (that intersection of the physical and
> the digital that's made possible by affordable digital manufacturing
> equipment and dirt-cheap, programmable microelectronics)?
>
> I believe that the Maker Movement points to value an order of magnitude of
> greater - a contextual change, in which localities are transformed and
> empowered as they take on the skills, the engagement and the tools to make
> their own quirky, responsive and particular products and emergent cultures
> suitable for their own needs.
>
> But just because something is fairly universal, that STILL doesn't mean
> that it has potential to revitalise localities. This is where I have an
> issue with 3D Print. Take, as an analogy, inkjet printing. Inkjet printing
> is almost universal 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[James Wallbank]

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 commercial ventures. 
That's not an issue, that's the point."


If we maintain that the quirky, fascinating, but ultimately unprofitable 
experiments are the core value of the Maker Movement, then be prepared 
to accept that it WILL wither and die - or rather, simply retreat into 
the world of hobbyists orbiting academic institutions. Throughout 
history there have been movements that have resulted in things that 
don't entirely make sense - it hasn't needed the Maker Movement to make 
that happen. Are you in danger of conflating the experimental 
excrescences of creative young people with what we're now calling 
"making" (that intersection of the physical and the digital that's made 
possible by affordable digital manufacturing equipment and dirt-cheap, 
programmable microelectronics)?


I believe that the Maker Movement points to value an order of magnitude 
of greater - a contextual change, in which localities are transformed 
and empowered as they take on the skills, the engagement and the tools 
to make their own quirky, responsive and particular products and 
emergent cultures suitable for their own needs.


But just because something is fairly universal, that STILL doesn't mean 
that it has potential to revitalise localities. This is where I have an 
issue with 3D Print. Take, as an analogy, inkjet printing. Inkjet 
printing is almost universal (who doesn't have one, two, or more inkjet 
printers languishing in their attic or office storeroom?) but the only 
jobs that this creates are manufacturing and selling Inkjets and Ink. 
Despite the ubiquitous distribution of hardware, the (often diabolically 
networked) software, combined with proprietary ink cartridges, means 
that all the profits are spirited away from where YOU live.


The product of an Inkjet printer is good enough for you to frame and put 
on the mantelpiece (until it fades 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:

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Graham Harwood]

Garnet, Tom and all

Thanks for that contribution - it unfolds maker from a north American 
perspective and would be happy to hear about the historical connections. 
I'm always in ore of how North Americans share - whatever you want to 
make fix - deconstruct their is always an enthusiastic North American on 
youtube.  Thanks also for Toms comments on class, squatting and free 
parties and sound systems. It has revived this conversation for me as I 
thought we would see the usual silence pregnant pause after the word 
class is mentioned. Without wanting to stray to far

"The maker movement is somewhat significant in that it highlights how 
alienated contemporary western culture has become from the manual craft 
of building your own objects, and how wholly absorbed it has been 
enveloped in consumer culture. The maker movement works counter this 
alienation"

I think Maker Magazine did little to address the implicit alienation 
involved in technical objects. In part because the genealogy of the 
alienation and technical objects problem reveals other politics. The 
implicit alienation involved in technology enslaving humans is a 
recurrent European theme in popular films “It is out there, it can’t be 
bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with, it doesn't feel pity or 
remorse or fear, and it absolutely will not stop…”(1984, Terminator) It 
appears in popular science  Stephen Hawking “...automation of factories 
has already decimated jobs in traditional manufacturing, and the rise of 
artificial intelligence is likely to extend this job destruction deep 
into the middle classes, with only the most caring, creative or 
supervisory roles remaining.” And appears in the weird and eerie 
machines of Boston Dynamics, a USA military funded robotics company, 
that has been working hard to propagandise an approach to robotics and 
marketing that encourages anthropomorphism in machines, that will 
eventually autonomously kill. This form of alienation finds its mirror 
in technology as slave, appendage, tool, agent of our will to order the 
material universe through an extension of skill, thought, sense.

An important and vital part of this alienation is the notion of the 
slave found everywhere in technical master slave systems. A Slave in 
Classical Greece times was seen as techne and the slave masters of old 
thought they could replace the rebellious black bodies through technical 
process.(introduction of steam engines in sugar plantations) Both 
technology as slave or enslaver place technology outside of the 
consideration of it being treated as essentially human. Both forms have 
been described as implicit or explicit alienation by Gilbert Simondon in 
On the mode of Technical Objects and Lewis Mumford in Pentagon of Power 
tried to address this issue around the middle of last century. In 
different ways they both thought that this alienation would allow 
powerful groups to use technical forms to construct different versions 
of societies of control. What I'm trying inarticulately to say is that 
the interconnections of slavery and technical objects  needs to be a 
theme of critical technical practice. Alienation can be sidestepped for 
now by considering technical objects as social cognition in the way that 
Hutchins see's it "Cognition in the Wild", or how we become 
collaborative with machines to make different organisms in a more then 
human world.

On another note - concerning consumerism. Gong farmers, Nightmen, 
Dustman, sewage workers and refuse(d) collectors have worked tirelessly 
in the shadows of history struggling to get rid of dirt, seamlessly 
removing it to where it offers to be less threatening, toxic and 
polluting or at least they remove it from the eyes who inhabit the 
idealised urban scape - this also includes those gadgets that are 
readily discarded. Contemporary capitalisms waste can be thought of as 
an intentional part of the productive cycle of consumerism. (See Brookes 
Stevens 1968 -> planned obsolescence) Consumerism itself of course is a 
stand in for a system that allows individual identity to be formed and 
reformed by the products consumed. Waste disposal is what, invisibility 
makes the modern possible while banal fecal taboo's aid such a process 
to create a phycology that keeps waste and those who work it in the 
shadows. This excreting down stream so to speak, makes visible a 
clearing, a modern hygiene, enabling a separation of the ordered city 
(the new gadgets that make me me today) from chaotic nature, human from 
their animal selves.

On a different note, I'm not sure what kind of penetration Rasberry Pi's 
made in north America but in my local area the Southend Linux Users 
Group ran Raspberry Jams which brought together critical makers, school 
age geeks, circuit board manufacturers. The gender and age mix was 
relatively good and they could have anything from 200 to 500 people in 
attendance - they were led by Derek Shaw (I can put you in touch if that 
useful) 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Richard Sewell]

Adrian - I'd agree with all of that - but can you say a bit more about 
the last bit:
"working out how we carry that forward into ways to manufacture 
everything else"


R.

On 12/06/2019 21:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
I think the points both of you make are important.  Everyone should 
have the agency (if they choose to use it, not everyone has to be a 
maker) to make whatever they like /and/ we should be helping those who 
want to build businesses around their making to do so and succeed.


In DoES Liverpool the more commercially-minded makers benefit from the 
experiments and skill-sharing of those "just" pursuing an interest; 
and the culture of knowledge- and skill-sharing goes the other way 
too, along with a greater contribution to the financial cost of 
running the makerspace.


James, I think I did a poor job of crafting the sentence you quoted.  
As I said earlier in my post "we /did/ deliberately choose to 
encourage more businesses", and they do benefit the space.  Your point 
elsewhere about the utility of laser-cutters over 3D printers is borne 
out in our experience too, with there being six more laser-cutters in 
the city as a direct result of businesses getting started using ours 
and then outgrowing our facilities and buying their own (and of those, 
four of them are businesswomen).


The makerspace (/maker movement) doesn't need to protect itself 
against businesses, it needs to protect itself against bad actors 
acting badly.


If we're going to find a route to a future where an open-source, 
collaborative mindset and widely distributed (and cost-effectively 
scaleable) manufacturing allows a panoply of individual and 
earning-a-good-living making, we need to carve out spaces and time for 
that to take shape.  The risk is that it's co-opted into a 
business-as-usual mainstream.


A raft of new artisans succeeding at an arts-and-crafts movement for 
the modern day is a good step in the right direction, and we need to 
be working out how we carry that forward into ways to manufacture 
everything else.


Cheers,

Adrian.

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 generalise solutions, 
methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start thinking about the 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Adrian McEwen]

I think the points both of you make are important.  Everyone should have 
the agency (if they choose to use it, not everyone has to be a maker) to 
make whatever they like /and/ we should be helping those who want to 
build businesses around their making to do so and succeed.


In DoES Liverpool the more commercially-minded makers benefit from the 
experiments and skill-sharing of those "just" pursuing an interest; and 
the culture of knowledge- and skill-sharing goes the other way too, 
along with a greater contribution to the financial cost of running the 
makerspace.


James, I think I did a poor job of crafting the sentence you quoted.  As 
I said earlier in my post "we /did/ deliberately choose to encourage 
more businesses", and they do benefit the space.  Your point elsewhere 
about the utility of laser-cutters over 3D printers is borne out in our 
experience too, with there being six more laser-cutters in the city as a 
direct result of businesses getting started using ours and then 
outgrowing our facilities and buying their own (and of those, four of 
them are businesswomen).


The makerspace (/maker movement) doesn't need to protect itself against 
businesses, it needs to protect itself against bad actors acting badly.


If we're going to find a route to a future where an open-source, 
collaborative mindset and widely distributed (and cost-effectively 
scaleable) manufacturing allows a panoply of individual and 
earning-a-good-living making, we need to carve out spaces and time for 
that to take shape.  The risk is that it's co-opted into a 
business-as-usual mainstream.


A raft of new artisans succeeding at an arts-and-crafts movement for the 
modern day is a good step in the right direction, and we need to be 
working out how we carry that forward into ways to manufacture 
everything else.


Cheers,

Adrian.

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 generalise solutions, 
methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start thinking about the 
unique, the special, the "only works here and now". Perhaps 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 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Richard Sewell]

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 generalise solutions, methods to scale 
up. Perhaps we need to start thinking about the unique, the special, 
the "only works here and now". Perhaps 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.



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Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Carsten Agger]

On 6/11/19 5:27 PM, Jaromil wrote:
> dear Bruce and nettimers,
>
[...]
> 3. the "shamanic" value that can be embedded in uses of technologies,
>as opposed to the sanitized and rational interpretation given by
>designers in the west. Techno-shamanism is something Fabi Borges,
>Vicky Sinclair and other good folks in Bricolabs have been busy for
>ages!

Thanks for mentioning this, Jaromil!

Yes, the maker movement has been largely oblivious to the shamanic and
spiritual aspects and uses of technology, which also affects the very
definition of "technology" as a concept. We ay have our modern
technology, but the indigenous peoples have their ancestral technologies
which are in many ways superior to our own when it comes to interacting
with this our planet; *and* which combine with modern technologies in
many interesting ways.

At the moment, we in the technoshamanistm network (myself, Fabi Borges,
Rafael Frazão, Raísa Innocêncio and a number of others) have an ongoing
collaboration (since 2014) with the Pataxó village of Pará near Monte
Pascoal. These indigenous people are, in a way, the original makers:
They build their own houses and grow their food themselves - in these
modern times, this extends to fixing their own motorbikes and buggys.

Our current project is to raise money for a collaborative effort to
create a health centre in the village. The purpose is partly to offer
facilities for visiting nurses and doctors (so the Pataxó might be
attended, at intervals, without travelling too far), partly to create a
centre for indigenous healing methods. These structures will be built by
a communal effort in November, in which people are invited to
participate - to lend a hand, but also to learn from the Pataxó and
their ways. 

If you feel this sounds like a good idea and would like to help it
happen, feel free to chip in at the end of this link:

https://www.catarse.me/mutirao_da_saude_pataxo_2019


In the meanwhile, if you want to get a sense for who the Pataxó are and
what kind of work we do in the technoshamanism network, feel free to
check out the pictures from the festival we did with the Pataxó, back in
2016:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/22405820@N08/albums/72157673936765924


Best

Carsten


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#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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#  @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

[James Wallbank]

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 generalise solutions, methods to scale 
up. Perhaps we need to start thinking about the unique, the special, the 
"only works here and now". Perhaps 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:

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Adrian McEwen]

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

[James Wallbank]

Fascinating to hear about personal engagement in Making, Graham!


I, too, have been personally, hands-on involved in Making since Access 
Space's turn towards digital manufacture, and the interface of the 
physical and the digital, since around 2010.



(For those of you who aren't aware of Access Space, it started as a "DIY 
Media Lab" which I and various friends who had accreted around 
"Redundant Technology Initiative" (lowtech.org) in 2000. It 
re-interpreted donated digital debris as resource, rebuilding computers, 
installing free operating systems, making them available to 
participants, and encouraging and supporting creative, self-directed 
projects.)



Part of the motivation behind Access Space was our hope that digital 
engagement and skills had the potential to empower. This proved to be 
the case in the early 2000s, and numerous time-rich participants engaged 
with Access Space, taught themselves and each other technological 
skills, and became web designers, graphic designers, technicians or even 
better-known artists. (Though whether "art" is, in the context of 
networked global capital, a viable or empowering career for a 
statistically significant proportion of its participants is, I suggest, 
in question.)



By 2010 we'd seen far less business incubation, and proportionately 
fewer participants able to self-teach to a level that it made a real 
difference to their life prospects or creative leverage. We saw that 
hardware and software skills devalued as pre-installed devices became 
cheaper, and that the digital realm was becoming dominated by global 
digital services, including social media, that, while they didn't do a 
great job, diverted the vast majority of potential digital design 
clients away from bespoke, local service providers.



In short, the window of opportunity suggested by the first phase of the 
graphical internet was closing. While, in 2000, speed-reading an HTML 
primer, combined with a little design flair, a few copywriting skills, 
and some sales confidence could make you a web designer in a month, in 
2010 this was no longer the case.



We concluded that when any new technology is introduced, there's a 
period of opportunity, before that technology has become fully adopted 
or systematised, in which the individual can get involved, and (in a 
short time, with a level of skill only one page ahead of their clients) 
can empower themselves, converting an interest into saleable skills, 
products or resources.



We've seen the same window open and close with blockchain (which I 
believe to be illusory, unproductive, and, in the end, simply gambling). 
A vanishingly few people made money though cryptocurrency trading, but 
now it's dominated by grinding Ponzi schemes, viral mining fiddles, or 
blockchain is being repurposed by multinationals. The moment of 
opportunity for the individual has passed.



At Access Space we saw Fab Lab or "Maker Technologies" as a more 
genuinely productive line of approach, and, even though many of the 
technologies had been around for a decade or more, saw that the window 
of opportunity had not yet closed. As technology requiring significant 
physical engagement and investment (you need to buy real-world machines 
and materials!) the timescale of its adoption and exploitation by 
capital would be far slower.



So at Access Space we raised money (thanks EU structural funds!) and 
bought a CNC, a Lasercutter, a 3D Printer, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, a 
digital embroidery machine... and set about a research partnership to 
explore the potentials of these technologies for creating local jobs and 
enterprises.



In the end, for those not in the highfalutin' and disconnected academic 
realm (sorry, researchers - you're my friends really!) a key element of 
whether a technology is empowering or not is "Can you get paid for using 
it?"



And "using it to engage and educate" doesn't count - actually using it 
to create product or paid-for service is key. In Access Space's 
particular case, we took the position that we didn't care about 
"industrial transformation", nor "increasing supply-chain efficiencies". 
We cared most about actual, tangible jobs in Sheffield, not abstract 
(however numerically significant) jobs in San Fransisco or Shenzen.



The research engaged with local makers, both individuals and startup 
enterprises, and concluded that the technology we looked at with most 
potential to generate local jobs and enterprise was lasercutting, and 
the one with the least potential was 3D Print. Even seven years later, 
we still agree.



This failure, it seems to me, to engage with the economics of making is 
exactly what's thus far marginalised the "Maker Movement". It's also 
true of the Fab Lab - while it's a powerful context for education, the 
economics of fabbing just don't work.



To give a simple example: one of the Fab Lab founding principals its to 
engage with a wide range of materials and processes, on a wide range of 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Tom Keene]

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 who put so much effort and gained so much expertise from 
their/our culture of making. Maker culture seemed to have lost its memory of 
earlier times. I'm reminded of a recent Keynote made Dr Johan Soderberg at a 
conference in the University of Nicosia in Cyprus which has a burgeoning 
maker/hacker culture in country dived by war. Johan quoted the socialist arts 
and crafts activist William Morris (1834-1896) "workers continue under a 
different name" to discuss how struggles are re-named to become something else. 
He suggested swapping the word 'worker' with 'hacker' or 'maker' to highlight 
how re-naming can erase the collective memory of a struggle. 

I think maker culture needs to re-connect with earlier struggles. The DIY 
culture of free parties connected to the squatter movement, housing struggles, 
road protests, women rights, globalism, and the Liverpool dockers. It 
politicised youngsters like me. The maker movement seems very distant from 
political struggles these days. Perhaps I am just starting to show my age, 
nostalgia for times past, or simply don't get out enough because of my young 
kids. However, last night I attended a residents association meeting on a 
housing estate in north London that faces demolition. I live on a housing 
estate that faces a similar fate. I undertake my research, making, theorising, 
and activism where I live because it connects with a tangible struggle. Let's 
ask why maker spaces (or should we rename them) don't tend to exist in such 
environments and what they lose by remaining in their own enclave?

Tom K 


On Tue, 11 Jun 2019, at 6:45 PM, Graham Harwood wrote:
> 

> I just want to interject a little into the Post-Maker universe. 

> 

> I work a lot these days with the maritime, a technical culture of wooden boat 
> repair that in Essex, I also worked a lot with people who restore old 
> telephone exchanges and people who build steam engines - through having run a 
> free media space in 00 ties were we hacked, pirated recycled at will. Among 
> the many things that are interesting about these technical cultures is that 
> they produce value for those engaged in the process - but this value has only 
> a limited relation to the accumulation of capital. The maker phenomena could 
> be seen in this context as a way to monetise the non-discursive technical 
> cultures - a tinkering world that has an unbroken line back to at least the 
> enlightenment but probably before. In 1799 the *Royal Institution of Great 
> Britain* was established to put science to work for particular class and keep 
> the theoretical away from a populace that presented a threat (the demon of 
> the French revolution) - The Royal Institution was a place where an artisan 
> class built technicals object but where not allowed in, or allowed to 
> lecture. Faraday had to have elocution lessons, learn how to eat properly 
> before being allowed to lecture and even then had to be deemed a genius to 
> escape the his class background and address gentleman. What Im trying to 
> suggest is that non-discursive technical tinkering exist within many 
> technical cultures and long may it remain so. 

> 

> I'll tag on a little introduction this I wrote. 

> 

> 

> “The science which 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Graham Harwood]

I just want to interject a little into the Post-Maker universe.


I work a lot these days with the maritime, a technical culture of wooden boat 
repair that in Essex, I also worked a lot with people who restore old telephone 
exchanges and people who build steam engines - through having run a free media 
space in 00 ties were we hacked, pirated recycled at will. Among the many 
things that are interesting about these technical cultures is that they produce 
value for those engaged in the process - but this value has only a limited 
relation to the accumulation of capital. The maker phenomena could be seen in 
this context as a way to monetise the non-discursive technical cultures - a 
tinkering world that has an unbroken line back to at least the enlightenment 
but probably before. In 1799 the Royal Institution of Great Britain was 
established to put science to work for particular class and keep the 
theoretical away from a populace that presented a threat (the demon of the 
French revolution) - The Royal Institution was a place where an artisan class 
built technicals object but where not allowed in, or allowed to lecture. 
Faraday had to have elocution lessons, learn how to eat properly before being 
allowed to lecture and even then had to be deemed a genius to escape the his 
class background and address gentleman. What Im trying to suggest is that 
non-discursive technical tinkering exist within many technical cultures and 
long may it remain so.


I'll tag on a little introduction this I wrote.



“The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their 
construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the 
worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an 
alien power.” Karl Marx(1858)


In 1958 the French philosopher Gilbert Simondon published On the Mode of 
Technical Objects to address just this form of cultural alienation implicit in 
the quote above. He writes, among other things, about two ways in which people 
come to know technical objects. He says technology viewed from a child's eye, 
which I imagine he is seeing as, naive and innocent we gain an implicit, 
non-reflective, habitual tendency. A baby strapped into a buggy, is given a 
parent's mobile phone and is happily learning to play a game but cannot yet 
utter the words to express these interactions. Simondon then imagines an 
inverse, a trained adult engineer, reflective, self-aware using rational 
knowledge that is elaborated through science. Something like an Apple engineer 
who creates closed technologies imagining its users still strapped in that 
buggy unable to articulate their critical needs. Simondon seeks out another 
form of relationship with technical objects which he finds in the Enlightened 
Encyclopaedism of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (Encyclopédie 
(1751–1777)) in which concrete knowhow is abstracted and assembled into a 
technical orchestra. Contemporarily, is it worth considering our networked 
technologies in this mode of encyclopaedism? An evolving off-grid, red-neck, 
student, coder, geek pedagogy producing technical information, hacks, howto’s, 
shakedowns, and open source code repositories, that respond to an evolving 
technical culture. This technical republic is nothing new, it’s genealogies can 
be traced to and beyond the amateur experimentalists of the London Electrical 
Society and William Sturgeon (1783 - 1850) and the artisanal formation that 
knowledge can be contained in the object built and it’s functioning is its 
explanation.


Is a tinkering internet a critical technical republic? A social space that 
potentially can break down the state actors with encryption, corporations by 
opening up software and proprietary technics by hacking them open, making 
things public? Is the marginal technics in a teenagers dirty bedroom, the dank 
basement of a bored salaryman, the ham radio garden shed a strategy to unfold 
the clean room and its magic men in white coats? Or is this largely a white 
male space that has eradicated other forms of objectivity and subjectivity from 
view? How can we attempt to instate a devolved technics that refuses misogyny, 
racialisation and yet envisages technology outside of the paradigm of human 
slave or potential human enslaver.


Harwood



From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org  on 
behalf of John Preston 
Sent: 11 June 2019 17:39:00
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re:  The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate 
sponsors; throws in the towel

On the mention of recycling I just wanted to mention the Precious
Plastic (https://preciousplastic.com/) project, which is very much in
this vein and currently active. Looks good, I'd like to build a
recycling machine and melt down some plastic at some point.

On a more local and mainstream level, my town has a show that sells
'upcycled' furniture which has been done up (new handles, repainted with
flower motifs etc). 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[John Preston]

On the mention of recycling I just wanted to mention the Precious
Plastic (https://preciousplastic.com/) project, which is very much in
this vein and currently active. Looks good, I'd like to build a
recycling machine and melt down some plastic at some point. 

On a more local and mainstream level, my town has a show that sells
'upcycled' furniture which has been done up (new handles, repainted with
flower motifs etc). Recycling and maker culture is great but I'd like to
see more projects which are local or community oriented: this is
essential to truly address the problem of waste. We separate glass in my
borough, maybe we could feed that into local double glazing firms, or
something else.

*stopping here before I ramble on for 10KB*

John

On 2019-06-11 16:27, Jaromil wrote:
> dear Bruce and nettimers,
> 
> On Sat, 08 Jun 2019, Bruce Sterling wrote:
> 
>> *Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version of popular
>>  mechanics.  Fifteen years is not too bad a run by the standards of
>>  an increasingly jittery California Ideology.  Now what? — Bruce S
> 
> Felipe Fonseca has seen it coming years before and express it well:
> https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/repair-culture-65133fdd37ef 
> 
> he wasn't alone: for those of us who were into the "recycling" and DIY
> scene in the late nineties, the Make magazine circus was the sort of
> poison to kill a movement by sugar coating and extraction aka
> franchising. While doing that for 15 years, there are a three points
> it missed to address IMHO:
> 
> 1. the right to mod your hardware, esp. video-games which represent
>the vast majority of new hardware sold and thrown away around the
>globe
> 
> 2. the "peripheries of the empire" aka South of the World (remember
>Bricolabs?) where DIY is *amazingly* developed in various forms.
>As usual, we have learned nothing from that, just advertised us
>westeners doing it better and with more bling.
> 
> 3. the "shamanic" value that can be embedded in uses of technologies,
>as opposed to the sanitized and rational interpretation given by
>designers in the west. Techno-shamanism is something Fabi Borges,
>Vicky Sinclair and other good folks in Bricolabs have been busy for
>ages!
> 
> so then, what now? I believe the functional need of aggregating places
> for "hacker culture" is lowering: everything can exist virtually as
> software, more or less. Machinery + franchising have a too high
> production cost compared to their output, not sustainable at all. Also
> moving hardware around is a *big* effort and the only ones lowering
> overhead costs for new players are in China (...Aliexpress).
> 
> Plus the acceleration of hardware production resulted in way less
> sustainability especially in relation to obsolescence: buy a part now
> then ask if it will be still available in 20 years! you'll be
> presented an NDA to sign and then discover there is just a 3-4 years
> plan behind it. Spare parts anyone? Meanwhile is almost 2020 and there
> is no service to print and sell-on-demand USB sticks with stuff on:
> what a contrast if you think of the CD/DVD on-demand industry of 15
> years ago! which partially resists only on garage music productions.
> 
> So, software still offers possibilities, but will it produce a
> cultural shift? I doubt it will do more than what it did already in
> crypto, which is already highly controversial and poisoned of a sort
> of unstable sugar coating mixed with toxic financial capitals.
> 
> At last, looking at the new generations, the bling is what really
> counts: I guess most "fablabs" could be converted to
> "fashionlabs". Personally I'm planning to revamp dyne:bolic which
> besides running on old computers and modded game consoles did one
> thing which is still actual: it was a media production studio. The
> best part of "maker culture" was its cultural expression, mined for
> its value until exhaustion; but isn't it harder to express cultural
> values using hardware? Much easier with music and videos etc. they
> also travel easier.
> 
> For more *practical examples* of projects who may inspire new
> horizons: you are all invited to an event we (Dyne.org) are setting up
> in Amsterdam on the 5th July. We will fill the stage with many new
> faces: 16 projects we awarded with EU funding for their pro/vision of
> "human-centric" solutions, purpose driven and socially useful. Hope to
> see some of you, we will also have a new call end of year, its about
> 200k EUR equity free so lets engage in new sustainable challenges
> https://tazebao.dyne.org/venture-builder-eu.html
> 
> ciao
#  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

[Jaromil]

dear Bruce and nettimers,

On Sat, 08 Jun 2019, Bruce Sterling wrote:

> *Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version of popular
>  mechanics.  Fifteen years is not too bad a run by the standards of
>  an increasingly jittery California Ideology.  Now what? — Bruce S

Felipe Fonseca has seen it coming years before and express it well:
https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/repair-culture-65133fdd37ef 

he wasn't alone: for those of us who were into the "recycling" and DIY
scene in the late nineties, the Make magazine circus was the sort of
poison to kill a movement by sugar coating and extraction aka
franchising. While doing that for 15 years, there are a three points
it missed to address IMHO:

1. the right to mod your hardware, esp. video-games which represent
   the vast majority of new hardware sold and thrown away around the
   globe

2. the "peripheries of the empire" aka South of the World (remember
   Bricolabs?) where DIY is *amazingly* developed in various forms.
   As usual, we have learned nothing from that, just advertised us
   westeners doing it better and with more bling.

3. the "shamanic" value that can be embedded in uses of technologies,
   as opposed to the sanitized and rational interpretation given by
   designers in the west. Techno-shamanism is something Fabi Borges,
   Vicky Sinclair and other good folks in Bricolabs have been busy for
   ages!

so then, what now? I believe the functional need of aggregating places
for "hacker culture" is lowering: everything can exist virtually as
software, more or less. Machinery + franchising have a too high
production cost compared to their output, not sustainable at all. Also
moving hardware around is a *big* effort and the only ones lowering
overhead costs for new players are in China (...Aliexpress).

Plus the acceleration of hardware production resulted in way less
sustainability especially in relation to obsolescence: buy a part now
then ask if it will be still available in 20 years! you'll be
presented an NDA to sign and then discover there is just a 3-4 years
plan behind it. Spare parts anyone? Meanwhile is almost 2020 and there
is no service to print and sell-on-demand USB sticks with stuff on:
what a contrast if you think of the CD/DVD on-demand industry of 15
years ago! which partially resists only on garage music productions.

So, software still offers possibilities, but will it produce a
cultural shift? I doubt it will do more than what it did already in
crypto, which is already highly controversial and poisoned of a sort
of unstable sugar coating mixed with toxic financial capitals.

At last, looking at the new generations, the bling is what really
counts: I guess most "fablabs" could be converted to
"fashionlabs". Personally I'm planning to revamp dyne:bolic which
besides running on old computers and modded game consoles did one
thing which is still actual: it was a media production studio. The
best part of "maker culture" was its cultural expression, mined for
its value until exhaustion; but isn't it harder to express cultural
values using hardware? Much easier with music and videos etc. they
also travel easier.

For more *practical examples* of projects who may inspire new
horizons: you are all invited to an event we (Dyne.org) are setting up
in Amsterdam on the 5th July. We will fill the stage with many new
faces: 16 projects we awarded with EU funding for their pro/vision of
"human-centric" solutions, purpose driven and socially useful. Hope to
see some of you, we will also have a new call end of year, its about
200k EUR equity free so lets engage in new sustainable challenges
https://tazebao.dyne.org/venture-builder-eu.html

ciao



-- 
  Denis "Jaromil" Roio  https://Dyne.org think  tank
  Ph.D, CTO & co-foundersoftware to empower communities
  ✉ Haparandadam 7-A1, 1013AK Amsterdam, The Netherlands
  ✩ Profile and publications: https://jaromil.dyne.org
  턞 crypto κρυπτο крипто गुप्त् 加密 האנוסים المشفره
  ⚷ 6113D89C A825C5CE DD02C872 73B35DA5 4ACB7D10

#  distributed via : no commercial use without permission
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#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
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#  @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

[Kat Braybrooke]

Hello all, and thanks to Chris for the extra heads-up,

I'm also usually a lurker here rather than an active participant - but so
many interesting points have been made that I had to share my small 2c.

As Chris mentions, my own work with Adrian Smith and the Journal of Peer
Production [1], with Tim Jordan [2] and others has examined unexpected
manifestations of maker cultures, especially those outside of the U.S.
Silicon Valley bubble, and in particular the power relations of spaces for
making themselves. I am especially interested in (and continue to be
inspired by) how these encounters provide grassroots communities with
opportunities to 'hack from within' by virtue of their relations with
institutions.

My PhD research into spaces for making in large museums in London like
Tate, for example [3], found that while it may appear at first that the
spirit of the U.K.'s early maker cultures of the 1990s and 2000s are
co-opted when they are diffused into institutional territories (a point
easily made when we look at the legacies of Make Magazine, Tech Shops and
other U.S. diffusions) this is not necessarily the case in other regions -
because the circumstances of their practices, and the histories by which
they have emerged, are different.

I thus find it less than constructive to generalise the future(s) of a
diverse (and often conflicting) set of materially-engaged cultures and
subcultures of maker/crafter/fixers who work in myriad settings around the
world, each with their own motivations, problems and opportunities.
Comparing maker cultures and spaces in China with those in India, for
example, will tell us a very different story than focusing only on the
state of things in the U.S., the U.K. or Canada. In second-tier cities in
China, for example, certain maker/crafters are increasingly working to
articulate what a 'circular economy' might look like in ways that reimagine
the production-consumption models of their own local contexts, rather than
those suggested by Western actors - and because I feel there is something
important to be learned from this, I will be returning to Chengdu this July
with a team of makers/researchers to examine the possibilities further.

I've appreciated reading everyone's thoughts on this thread, as it is very
close to my heart also. Like Garnet, I will really welcome the emergence of
post-Make projects and gatherings that explore the open source / grassroots
sides of maker culture(s), and support the already-existing work of
communities who are envisioning making/crafting/fixing practices on their
own post-hegemonic (and quite possibly other-than-Western) terms.

- Kat

[1] http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-12-makerspaces-and-institutions/
[2]
https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/dcs.2017.3.issue-1/dcs-2017-0103/dcs-2017-0103.xml
[3] https://twitter.com/codekat/status/1016260539192893440

_
Kat Braybrooke | @codekat  | codekat.net
Visiting Scholar | IRI-THEsys
 | Humboldt-Universität
zu Berlin
PhD Candidate | Digital Humanities Lab  |
University of Sussex




On Tue, Jun 11, 2019 at 5:51 AM Garnet Hertz  wrote:

> Hi Chris, Bruce and others,
>
> I'm interested in talking to people about an open source alternative to
> Make - I think this is a real opportunity to improve things and make them
> more interesting. In 2016 I wrote that the fad of the maker movement was
> over - http://disobedientelectronics.com - my critique is that Maker
> Media was usually caught up in the 'gee whiz' of technology without much
> thinking about its social or cultural impacts. It was great at getting
> started, but did little to address the idea of what something like the
> Arduino or 3D printing was actually good for. I saw the maker scene at a
> crossroads between technology, commerce and culture - but it never really
> understood the culture of that scene. It consistently thought that artists
> and hackers were doing stuff for fun, which was a core misunderstanding.
>
> I think Make did a ton to help out this scene, but they also were quite
> maker-brand-oriented that whitewashed a lot of interesting things
> (experimental art, hacktivism, strange design work, hacker culture,
> interactive art, electronic music, etc.). I think having the Maker Faires
> so centralized (paying licensing fees that were unaffordable, etc.) was a
> way to kill something that could have been significantly more organic,
> distributed and interesting. It certainly helped consolidate the scene
> under the banner of 'maker', though. I think Make really did bring a lot of
> great stuff into the spotlight, but it was following the wrong 'franchisey'
> paradigm that was an odd fit for DIY culture. Open source would have made
> more internal sense, I think. At its core, I don't think the leadership at
> Make really understood DIY electronic culture. They were 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Garnet Hertz]

Hi Chris, Bruce and others,

I'm interested in talking to people about an open source alternative to
Make - I think this is a real opportunity to improve things and make them
more interesting. In 2016 I wrote that the fad of the maker movement was
over - http://disobedientelectronics.com - my critique is that Maker Media
was usually caught up in the 'gee whiz' of technology without much thinking
about its social or cultural impacts. It was great at getting started, but
did little to address the idea of what something like the Arduino or 3D
printing was actually good for. I saw the maker scene at a crossroads
between technology, commerce and culture - but it never really understood
the culture of that scene. It consistently thought that artists and hackers
were doing stuff for fun, which was a core misunderstanding.

I think Make did a ton to help out this scene, but they also were quite
maker-brand-oriented that whitewashed a lot of interesting things
(experimental art, hacktivism, strange design work, hacker culture,
interactive art, electronic music, etc.). I think having the Maker Faires
so centralized (paying licensing fees that were unaffordable, etc.) was a
way to kill something that could have been significantly more organic,
distributed and interesting. It certainly helped consolidate the scene
under the banner of 'maker', though. I think Make really did bring a lot of
great stuff into the spotlight, but it was following the wrong 'franchisey'
paradigm that was an odd fit for DIY culture. Open source would have made
more internal sense, I think. At its core, I don't think the leadership at
Make really understood DIY electronic culture. They were fascinated by it,
but never really understood it. For example, from the very start Dougherty
saw Make as a "Martha Stewart for geeks" (literally his words:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/01/why-we-spun-out-maker-media.html).

Granted, I've been critical of Make from the start. I was running an event
called Dorkbot SoCal in Los Angeles that Mark Frauenfelder (founding
editor) would go to, and we discussed the publication before it started - I
was also in issues 1 and 2. In my mind, they took the Dorkbot model from LA
and SF (Karen Marcelo of Survival Research Labs) and scaled it up and toned
it down into Maker Faires. It doesn't really matter at this point, though -
but the scene existed long before Dougherty, Frauenfelder and O'Reilly came
along and started Make. It will continue long after as well. Maker Media
rode two major waves: the launch of the Arduino two years before Make
launched in 2005 gave it its first boost, and the consumer 3D printer boom
between 2009 and 2012 gave it its second boost. It just simply didn't have
a third boost - or it never figured out what all this making was =for=
beyond leisure pursuits.

On a slightly different note, I have a book under contract from MIT Press
that fills out a history of this work that goes back almost a hundred
years. If members of the nettime list (you!) want to see an early draft of
the book, I'm happy to share it in exchange for your harsh and honest
feedback on the manuscript - just send me an off-list email.

In summary, I'm very much interested in talking to people about their ideas
about an open source alternative to what Make offered - both ideas for
publications and events. These could be extremely lightweight or more
involved - but I'm inclined to go with a lightweight model.

I've made a form to collect feedback here:
https://forms.gle/vRvz1Fg6rKbEUnNX7 - you can also just email me with your
ideas. At this point, I think it would be good to get a group of people
together that want to share ideas and have a few live group video chats to
discuss things - and I'd love for nettime people to be involved.

Thanks,
Garnet


On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 5:40 AM Chris Csikszentmihalyi 
wrote:

> Thanks for the heads-up, Bruce.
>
> 2019 has given me little to be enthusiastic about, and I sense it will get
> a lot worse, but I see this as possibly good news. O’Reilly is the key noun
> here. He saw a growing set of uncoordinated activities across a variety of
> sectors: the increasing availability of CNC machines; the FAB agenda from
> MIT; various alienations with mass production and a renewed interests in
> craft production in rich countries, etc. So, as Tim is so good at doing (as
> with "open source') he branded it and found a publishing market for it,
> including advertisers like Autodesk. Dale was the great enthusiast who fed
> the engine and proselytized the masses. As disclosure, I was in Make last
> year, and many of my students were featured from the second issue onward. I
> have always been deeply ambivalent about it.
>
> For many of us, the concern was that, as with "open source," O'Reilly's
> colonization would strengthen the commercial and neoliberal dimensions of
> what fell under the new Make umbrella, at the expense of the less-easily
> monetized ones. In some ways, this goaded people to 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Molly Hankwitz]

Hi - I’m an occasional poster - on list for 21 years. Crustacean period of
deep internet networking. Nettime is go-to site for reading when other news
and info cease to bring about the right kind of karate chop to the
mega-brain of capital. 

Maker...was cool at start. Grew as result of backing. Became a repository
for Valley steampunk, Burning Man type grandiosity and the new, then old,
and not so evil evil, of
tiny plastic parts and plenty of them for industrial scale DIY “learning”
and “play” —then co-opted by noticeably more green, family groupings and
clean interests rather than cutting edge interactive , although the early
years of 3D printing and VR were visible 15 years ago...and one DID see
some cool salvage craft and at one point, years ago, every hackerspace
between SF and SJ was there...in addition to massive LEGO works.

No big loss though, from an environmental perspective.  When “making”
became all about bulk plastic and glue sticks and tiny diode
jewelryhmm. Not so interesting or sensible. Seals and whales applaud
end of this industry.

The magazine should morph into another publication.

Molly
Ps hi Alice



On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 7:06 AM Alice Yang  wrote:

> Responding to this because of the last call for lurkers to participate
> more :)
>
> I became of the maker movement through education and saw it mostly as an
> education trend, which meant that it was a bunch of millennial and gen x
> people trying to read what gen z wants and needs for the imaginary future.
>
> in my experience with gen z, they’re not that interested in robotics and
> technological diy projects are. their parents are, because it fuels a
> fantasy of both nostalgic authenticity and grassroots technological
> crafting. I would compare it with the 8 bit aesthetic.
>
> Gen z just seems interested in technology in a different way. most of the
> middle schoolers didn’t get the concept of attaching a document to an email
> because they don’t see the internet as a place with parts. However, they’re
> very good at creating unique subcultures using the constantly shifting
> language of the web. also, they’re already better at checking out so they
> don’t have to fetishize pre technology.
>
> IDK, could just be talking out of my ass. But making your own robots have
> always seemed like the type of project parents force on their kids who
> would rather be playing fortnite or building their social media brands.
>
> ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ
>
>
> On Jun 10, 2019, at 7:06 AM, Dr. Peter Troxler (p) <
> peter.trox...@ps-culture.net> wrote:
>
> Interesting times indeed.  I am not shedding tears over the demise of
> PrintrBot or Radio Shack (which reappeared as a “brand”), and certainly not
> of Toys “R” Us (Dutch Intertoys met the same fate) — and neither does the
> demise of TechShop or Maker Media really make me cry.
>
> It is intriguing to see that Moore’s law [1] apparently did not hold for
> either the “tool-up” welding gyms (TechShop) [2] nor for the mediatisator
> of the “maker movement” (O’Reilly through Maker Media) [3].
>
> So indeed, now what …
>
> Anything “Make(r)” is licensed by Maker Media — and I guess that
> administrators will hardly be able to project enough revenue from these
> licenses to sustain the brand.  Is there anyone on the horizon who would
> want to monetise “Make”?
>
> Maybe it is finally farewell to that optimistic vision of the future where
> technology and craftsmanship merge, dreaming of becoming the next paradigm
> of industry.  Making as a consumer pastime has peaked.  It never made it
> from the early enthousiasts to the mass market.  Probably, making is too
> hard, to time consuming, to demanding on the average consumer’s attention
> span.  Making, too, never made it from the imagined breeding ground for
> even more tech start-ups to "the revolution that can help us create new
> jobs and industries for decades to come” [4] — Chris Anderson knows of
> "five companies that have managed the "Maker -> Pro" path successfully,
> becoming good businesses without losing their Maker cred” [5].
>
> As we say in Dutch, van een kale kip kun je niet plukken (you can’t get
> blood from a stone) — a business model that is partly based on licensing
> the brand to an industry of makers and maker spaces who in general struggle
> to survive themselves is not exactly a promising prospect. Subjecting those
> who — by the gospel — are supposed to be independent thinkers to strict
> franchising regulations when they want to throw their party (aka Maker
> Faire) is unlikely to create a loyal base of business partners.  Many Mini
> Maker Faires defected Maker Media to become “independent” festivals —
> citing “red tape” (the franchising agreement), license fees, insurance
> issues as reasons, and some found it easier to attract local government
> subsidies acting independently from a US-American company.
>
> Maybe this time it is the children eating their own revolution?
>
> Or maybe “making” as we knew it has just had its 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Alice Yang]

Responding to this because of the last call for lurkers to participate more :)

I became of the maker movement through education and saw it mostly as an 
education trend, which meant that it was a bunch of millennial and gen x people 
trying to read what gen z wants and needs for the imaginary future.

in my experience with gen z, they’re not that interested in robotics and 
technological diy projects are. their parents are, because it fuels a fantasy 
of both nostalgic authenticity and grassroots technological crafting. I would 
compare it with the 8 bit aesthetic.

Gen z just seems interested in technology in a different way. most of the 
middle schoolers didn’t get the concept of attaching a document to an email 
because they don’t see the internet as a place with parts. However, they’re 
very good at creating unique subcultures using the constantly shifting language 
of the web. also, they’re already better at checking out so they don’t have to 
fetishize pre technology.

IDK, could just be talking out of my ass. But making your own robots have 
always seemed like the type of project parents force on their kids who would 
rather be playing fortnite or building their social media brands.

ʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ

> On Jun 10, 2019, at 7:06 AM, Dr. Peter Troxler (p) 
>  wrote:
> 
> Interesting times indeed.  I am not shedding tears over the demise of 
> PrintrBot or Radio Shack (which reappeared as a “brand”), and certainly not 
> of Toys “R” Us (Dutch Intertoys met the same fate) — and neither does the 
> demise of TechShop or Maker Media really make me cry.
> 
> It is intriguing to see that Moore’s law [1] apparently did not hold for 
> either the “tool-up” welding gyms (TechShop) [2] nor for the mediatisator of 
> the “maker movement” (O’Reilly through Maker Media) [3].
> 
> So indeed, now what …
> 
> Anything “Make(r)” is licensed by Maker Media — and I guess that 
> administrators will hardly be able to project enough revenue from these 
> licenses to sustain the brand.  Is there anyone on the horizon who would want 
> to monetise “Make”?
> 
> Maybe it is finally farewell to that optimistic vision of the future where 
> technology and craftsmanship merge, dreaming of becoming the next paradigm of 
> industry.  Making as a consumer pastime has peaked.  It never made it from 
> the early enthousiasts to the mass market.  Probably, making is too hard, to 
> time consuming, to demanding on the average consumer’s attention span.  
> Making, too, never made it from the imagined breeding ground for even more 
> tech start-ups to "the revolution that can help us create new jobs and 
> industries for decades to come” [4] — Chris Anderson knows of "five companies 
> that have managed the "Maker -> Pro" path successfully, becoming good 
> businesses without losing their Maker cred” [5].
> 
> As we say in Dutch, van een kale kip kun je niet plukken (you can’t get blood 
> from a stone) — a business model that is partly based on licensing the brand 
> to an industry of makers and maker spaces who in general struggle to survive 
> themselves is not exactly a promising prospect. Subjecting those who — by the 
> gospel — are supposed to be independent thinkers to strict franchising 
> regulations when they want to throw their party (aka Maker Faire) is unlikely 
> to create a loyal base of business partners.  Many Mini Maker Faires defected 
> Maker Media to become “independent” festivals — citing “red tape” (the 
> franchising agreement), license fees, insurance issues as reasons, and some 
> found it easier to attract local government subsidies acting independently 
> from a US-American company.
> 
> Maybe this time it is the children eating their own revolution?
> 
> Or maybe “making” as we knew it has just had its days?  Black Mirror has 
> mainstreamed an antagonistic view of technology since its appearance on 
> Netflix.  School strikes highlight other issues on the minds of (some) pupils 
> than drones and robots made from plastic and running on Lithium batteries.
> 
> Time will tell.
> 
> Peter Troxler
> 
> 
> [1] http://www.worldaffairs.org/events/event/1812#.XP0MltMza5M
> [2] 
> https://www.boerneneshovedstad.dk/media/1332/maker-movement-manifesto-sample-chapter.pdf
> [3] 
> http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/working-paper-series/EWP40.pdf
> [4] 
> https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/18/remarks-president-white-house-maker-faire
> [5] https://twitter.com/chr1sa/status/1137453284204007425
> 
>> On 8 Jun 2019, at 16:21, Bruce Sterling  wrote:
>> 
>> *Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version of popular mechanics.  
>> Fifteen years is not too bad a run by the standards of an increasingly 
>> jittery California Ideology.  Now what? — Bruce S
>> 
>> 
>> Maker Media goes broke 
>> https://hackaday.com/2019/06/07/maker-media-ceases-operations/
>> 
>> Over the years we’ve had the dubious honor of bidding farewell to numerous 
>> companies that held a special 

Re: The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Dr. Peter Troxler (p)]

Interesting times indeed.  I am not shedding tears over the demise of PrintrBot 
or Radio Shack (which reappeared as a “brand”), and certainly not of Toys “R” 
Us (Dutch Intertoys met the same fate) — and neither does the demise of 
TechShop or Maker Media really make me cry.

It is intriguing to see that Moore’s law [1] apparently did not hold for either 
the “tool-up” welding gyms (TechShop) [2] nor for the mediatisator of the 
“maker movement” (O’Reilly through Maker Media) [3].

So indeed, now what …

Anything “Make(r)” is licensed by Maker Media — and I guess that administrators 
will hardly be able to project enough revenue from these licenses to sustain 
the brand.  Is there anyone on the horizon who would want to monetise “Make”?

Maybe it is finally farewell to that optimistic vision of the future where 
technology and craftsmanship merge, dreaming of becoming the next paradigm of 
industry.  Making as a consumer pastime has peaked.  It never made it from the 
early enthousiasts to the mass market.  Probably, making is too hard, to time 
consuming, to demanding on the average consumer’s attention span.  Making, too, 
never made it from the imagined breeding ground for even more tech start-ups to 
"the revolution that can help us create new jobs and industries for decades to 
come” [4] — Chris Anderson knows of "five companies that have managed the 
"Maker -> Pro" path successfully, becoming good businesses without losing their 
Maker cred” [5].

As we say in Dutch, van een kale kip kun je niet plukken (you can’t get blood 
from a stone) — a business model that is partly based on licensing the brand to 
an industry of makers and maker spaces who in general struggle to survive 
themselves is not exactly a promising prospect. Subjecting those who — by the 
gospel — are supposed to be independent thinkers to strict franchising 
regulations when they want to throw their party (aka Maker Faire) is unlikely 
to create a loyal base of business partners.  Many Mini Maker Faires defected 
Maker Media to become “independent” festivals — citing “red tape” (the 
franchising agreement), license fees, insurance issues as reasons, and some 
found it easier to attract local government subsidies acting independently from 
a US-American company.

Maybe this time it is the children eating their own revolution?

Or maybe “making” as we knew it has just had its days?  Black Mirror has 
mainstreamed an antagonistic view of technology since its appearance on 
Netflix.  School strikes highlight other issues on the minds of (some) pupils 
than drones and robots made from plastic and running on Lithium batteries.

Time will tell.

Peter Troxler


[1] http://www.worldaffairs.org/events/event/1812#.XP0MltMza5M 

[2] 
https://www.boerneneshovedstad.dk/media/1332/maker-movement-manifesto-sample-chapter.pdf
 

[3] 
http://www.lse.ac.uk/media-and-communications/assets/documents/research/working-paper-series/EWP40.pdf
 

[4] 
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/06/18/remarks-president-white-house-maker-faire
 

[5] https://twitter.com/chr1sa/status/1137453284204007425 


> On 8 Jun 2019, at 16:21, Bruce Sterling  > wrote:
> 
> *Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version of popular mechanics.  
> Fifteen years is not too bad a run by the standards of an increasingly 
> jittery California Ideology.  Now what? — Bruce S
> 
> 
> Maker Media goes broke 
> https://hackaday.com/2019/06/07/maker-media-ceases-operations/ 
> 
> 
> Over the years we’ve had the dubious honor of bidding farewell to numerous 
> companies that held a special place in the hearts of hackers and makers. 
> We’ve borne witness to the demise of Radio Shack, TechShop, and PrintrBot, 
> and even shed a tear or two when Toys “R” Us shut their doors. But as much as 
> it hurt to see those companies go, nothing quite compares to this. Today 
> we’ve learned that Maker Media has ceased operations.
> 
> Between the first issue of Make magazine in 2005 and the inaugural Maker 
> Faire a year later, Maker Media deftly cultured the public face of the “maker 
> movement” for over a decade. They didn’t create maker culture, but there’s no 
> question that they put a spotlight on this part of the larger tech world. In 
> fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the shuttering of Maker Media 
> could have far reaching consequences that we won’t fully understand for years.
> 
> While this news will surely come as a crushing blow to many in the community, 
> 

The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors; throws in the towel

[Bruce Sterling]

*Well, so much for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 version of popular mechanics.  Fifteen 
years is not too bad a run by the standards of an increasingly jittery 
California Ideology.  Now what? — Bruce S


Maker Media goes broke 
https://hackaday.com/2019/06/07/maker-media-ceases-operations/

Over the years we’ve had the dubious honor of bidding farewell to numerous 
companies that held a special place in the hearts of hackers and makers. We’ve 
borne witness to the demise of Radio Shack, TechShop, and PrintrBot, and even 
shed a tear or two when Toys “R” Us shut their doors. But as much as it hurt to 
see those companies go, nothing quite compares to this. Today we’ve learned 
that Maker Media has ceased operations.

Between the first issue of Make magazine in 2005 and the inaugural Maker Faire 
a year later, Maker Media deftly cultured the public face of the “maker 
movement” for over a decade. They didn’t create maker culture, but there’s no 
question that they put a spotlight on this part of the larger tech world. In 
fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the shuttering of Maker Media could 
have far reaching consequences that we won’t fully understand for years.

While this news will surely come as a crushing blow to many in the community, 
Maker Media founder and CEO Dale Dougherty says they’re still trying to put the 
pieces together. “I started the magazine and I’m committed to keeping that 
going because it means something to a lot of people and means something to me.” 
At this point, Dale tells us that Maker Media is officially in a state of 
insolvency. This is an important distinction, and means that the company still 
has a chance to right the ship before being forced to declare outright 
bankruptcy.

In layman’s terms, the fate of Make magazine and Maker Faire is currently 
uncertain…

***

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/07/make-magazine-maker-media-layoffs/

Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting 
publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, 
to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations. TechCrunch was 
tipped off to Maker Media’s unfortunate situation which was then confirmed by 
the company’s founder and CEO Dale Dougherty.

For 15 years, MAKE: guided adults and children through step-by-step 
do-it-yourself crafting and science projects, and it was central to the maker 
movement. Since 2006, Maker Faire’s 200 owned and licensed events per year in 
over 40 countries let attendees wander amidst giant, inspiring art and 
engineering installations….

“Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees 
— about 22 employees” Dougherty tells TechCrunch. “I started this 15 years ago 
and it’s always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print 
publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works…barely. Events are 
hard … there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship.” Microsoft and Autodesk 
failed to sponsor this year’s flagship Bay Area Maker Faire….

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