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

[James Wallbank <james@lowtech.org>]

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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