Adrian McEwen on Wed, 12 Jun 2019 16:35:00 +0200 (CEST)


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

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 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 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-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of John Preston <wcerfgba@riseup.net>
Sent: 11 June 2019 17:39:00
To: nettime-l@mail.kein.org
Subject: Re: <nettime> 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). 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:
>
> 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
>
> ciao
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