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

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.

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.

On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 11:08 AM Iain Boal <boal@sonic.net> 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 <richard@jarkman.co.uk> 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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