Re: <nettime> The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors;

On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 6:56 AM James Wallbank <james@lowtech.org> 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 (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:

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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On 13/06/2019 03:55, Garnet Hertz wrote:
This discussion is great - I just subscribed with Chris's message to me - it's nice to connect with like-minded people around this topic. I've obviously been hanging around the wrong places online (like Facebook).

"maker as a disconnection to class struggle" - I could talk about this for YEARS - or at least thousands of words (see below if you don't believe me):

In my view (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) is that the maker movement was primarily an attempt to standardize, spread and commercialize what artists and hackers were already doing into a “Martha Stewart for Geeks” by Make magazine. The founders literally used "Martha Stewart for Geeks" as their vision - this isn't a metaphor. My book project, for example, looks to articulate one of the many strands of this scene that predated making — DIY electronics in art — and it reaches back nearly a hundred years. As many of you know, it has a totally fascinating history. Other strands include hacker culture since the 1970s, the free software movement since 1983, ubiquitous computing since 1991, open source hardware since 1997, the explosion of craft practices since Y2K, the Arduino platform since 2003, the FabLab movement since 2005, and the material turn of philosophy over the past several decades — all of these are maker movements, and most of them are more of a social movement than what Make has envisioned. The maker movement as articulated by Make lacks fuel of its own and offers little of unique cultural value beyond giving us the nondisciplinary label of the ‘maker’ in 2005. Make magazine organized, promoted and ‘platformed’ the maker movement as its brand, but the leadership of makers came from other sources (as noted above).

What is most interesting about the idea of making is not the term itself — it is the pieces of hacking, craft, DIY culture and electronic art that were left out of constructing the idea of the "maker" (at least in North America), which was largely carved out by Maker Media to serve its private business needs related to selling magazines and event tickets. Maker Media very clearly sanitized things from the hacker scene (maker = hacker - controversy) and from the art/DIY scene (Dorkbot, especially - which I ran in Los Angeles at the time). The newer understanding of ‘making’ is not really an all-encompassing term for all, but is focused on a specific subset of ideas, primarily exists in a limited geography of influence, has a limited ecosystem of tools, and follows a specific form for projects that are considerably different and more constrained than the ‘making’ that existed before. The scene envisioned by Maker Media was almost exclusively focused on producing work as a leisure pursuit, which is a total misunderstanding with how many hackers or artists work.

In retrospect, the maker scene rode two major waves: the Arduino and 3D printing. I see its death as partially a result of never being able to find a third wave. Maker Media was also constructed as a relatively financially heavy structure that needed a lot of fuel to survive -- it wasn't an artist collective. In terms of financial waves, the Arduino provided vital technological, social and ethical glue that massively helped Make magazine launch. The Ardunio technical platform provided an accessible and uniform venue for sharing project prototypes, and its open source hardware provided a novel and exciting blueprint for how physical electronic objects could be prototyped and distributed. The Arduino and Make had a symbiotic and intertwined relationship with each other, with Arduino providing the hardware, mindset and seed community for Make, and Make providing media coverage and scores of fresh users for the Arduino hardware platform.

A similarly intertwined relationship formed a few years later between consumer-level 3D printing and Make magazine and its affiliated Maker Faire. In hindsight, the 3D printing movement was synonymous with the maker movement between 2009 to 2013, and this impact is still felt today. Of the many projects and companies involved in the rapid expansion of inexpensive 3D printing after 2009, MakerBot was central — and Make magazine largely served as its promotional sidekick.

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, but does so with considerably broad strokes — almost to the extent that making anything qualifies as being part of the movement. Instead of looking at the maker movement as a large interdisciplinary endeavour, it can also be interpreted as a re-categorization of all manual fabrication under a single banner. 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 looking at what typically constitutes a social movement, Make magazine’s maker movement never fit the bill. For example, Glasberg and Deric define social movements as “organizational structures and strategies that may empower oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and resist the more powerful and advantaged elites.” If we ask what oppressed population Make magazine serves, it clearly doesn't have one. If looked at from an economic perspective, Make’s readership contains considerably more powerful and advantaged elites than the oppressed: the publication’s own statistics claim that its audience has a median household income of $125,000 USD, over double the national US median of $59,039. Make’s maker movement is primarily a pitch to sell empowerment to the already empowered — in a 2012 Intel-funded research study on makers, “empowerment” is identified as a key motivator for the affluent group, and Make primarily sustained itself by catering to this audience until it realized that 3D printing and the Arduino weren't everything they promised to be. Or maybe people finally realized that they had enough 3D printed Yoda heads and blinking LED Arduino projects -- and that building stuff of cultural or design value was actually quite difficult.

If anybody else is interested in reading a draft of my book, just fill this out: https://forms.gle/1F8787aJqSSapjPW9 - I'll mail out about a dozen physical hardcopies in exchange for harsh feedback.

I'm also still collecting thoughts about a "Post-Making" type of organization here: https://forms.gle/JBM6DDFT7436p43G9

Some of the responses are as follows:

* 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)

And if anybody has made it this far down the page, I'm interested in talking to people working at universities that are working in this field.

On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:23 PM Adrian McEwen <adrian@mcqn.net> wrote:

Good question. Can you see my hands waving from over there? :-D There
is much still to conjure up, I feel like I'm stood looking around and
saying "where we are now doesn't seem all that great. What about that
ground over there, that looks like it could be better, what if we head
that way?"

It seems to me we are facing many challenges: the climate emergency;
labour conditions; plastic everywhere; wealth inequality...

Assuming we want to do something about all (or even some) of that,
there's lots of work to be done.

The hair shirt environmentalism didn't succeed in the 70s, it's even
less likely to succeed now, so we need new ways of continuing to make
(at least a proportion of) the luxuries we're used to (Bruce's last
viridian note [1] is my go-to on that matter) without just outsourcing
it to huge sweatshops in China.

How do we wean ourselves off plastic? Maybe we return to more
traditional materials like wood, glass, ceramics, textiles. Apple is
CNC milling its laptops out of blocks of metal, so we could do similar
with wood. Or look at the experiments in materials from groups like
Materiom [2].

What happens when container ships can no longer burn oil to get around?
Maybe that skews economics back to more local production?

If we're repairing our products more then every town will need a bunch
of people who can design replacement parts and make the repairs. The
old Dyson vacuum knocking around DoES Liverpool has custom shapes of
nozzles 3D printed and its on-off button is a 3D printed replacement -
not to Dyson's exact shape, but perfectly functional. Over time we'll
build a commons of parts for everything, but there'll always be
customisations and variations.

Open hardware will then have an advantage because the schematics and
designs will all be already available for that.

We have pick-and-place machines to assemble our electronics. The geeks
are working out how to build the desktop versions, maybe it's only a
matter of time before they can start designing the inverse - machines to
selectively unsolder parts and sort them into bins for reuse.

That might not be economically viable to begin with, maybe a citizens
dividend will give some people enough of an income that they can decide
it's more interesting and useful than a job in a call centre.

These are all baby steps, and there are holes in my arguments you can
drive a bus through; but they're steps in the right direction and the
more of them we take, the more momentum will build into attacking the
related ones that seem insurmountable now. How do we scale it all
quickly enough? By sharing how we're doing it so others can join in and
share their improvements.

Makers aren't the answer to everything, but I think there's an
opportunity for us to provide an important piece of the puzzle.

Cheers,

Adrian.

[1]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160407032751/http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008/11/last-viridian-note.html

[2] https://materiom.org/

On 12/06/2019 21:31, Richard Sewell wrote:
> 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
>>>> 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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--

Dr. Garnet Hertz
Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 0H2
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