| 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
      https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/List_of_Hackerspaces to help them to
      find their local space.  A similar resource for other maker
      activities and a communal culture of sharing it with people might
      get us 80% of the way there...? Cheers, Adrian. [1] https://lpoolmakefest.org/ [2] https://www.penkethhigh.org/spark/ [3] https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/neston-high-school-makers [4] https://microbit.org/en/2017-10-23-libraries/
 
 On 14/06/2019 23:05, Molly Hankwitz
      wrote:
 
      
      
        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  
 
        
        
          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)
 
            
            #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without
          permission
              
                #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use
              without permissionResponses 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:
 
  #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial
                    use without permissionThere 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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                  in Subject:
 
 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.
 
 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. 
 
                    
                    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 HertzCanada
                              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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