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

[Richard Sewell <richard@jarkman.co.uk>]

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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