Shared Machine Shops

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Concept

Maxigas and Peter Troxler:

In the last years we have witnessed an incredible proliferation of shared machine shops in a confusing number of genres: hackerspaces, makerspaces, Fab Labs and their more commercial counterparts such as TechShops, co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators.

These are currently "fringe phenomena" because they play a minor role in the production of wealth, knowledge, political consensus and the social organisation of life. Interestingly, however, they also experience the same core transformations as contemporary capitalism. That is, for the individual: the convergence of work, labour and other aspects of life. On a systemic level: the rapid development of algorithmically driven technical systems and their intensifying role in social organisation. Finally, as a corollary: the practical and legitimation crisis of modern institutions, echoed by renewed attempts at self-organisation.

Arguably, hackers occupied such an ambiguous position since the beginning of hackerdom, but shared machine shops represent a new configuration. They appear as embodied communities organised in research and production units of physical and logical goods; they even appear to escape the subcultural ghetto as educational institutions, museums, and libraries start to integrate them into their ambit. They are eminent laboratories in both their practices and products: as experimental forms of social institutions, and as the developers of technological prototypes projecting new visions of the future. Industry actors, state authorities and policy makers have recognised such milieus as prolific grounds for recruitment and new organisational models, which in itself warrants critical attention."



Discussion

Cited by Kevin Carson [1]:

(from pp. 96-98)

"Karl Hess also discussed community workshops--or as he called them, "Shared Machine Shops"--in Community Technology.

- The machine shop should have enough basic tools, both hand and power, to make the building of demonstration models or test facilities a practical and everyday activity.... [T]he shop might be... stocked with cast-off industrial tools, with tools bought from government surplus through the local school system... Work can, of course, be done as well in home shops or in commercial shops of people who like the community technology approach.... Thinking of such a shared workshop in an inner city, you can think of its use... for the maintenance of appliances and other household goods whose replacement might represent a real economic burden in the neighborhood.... ...The machine shop could regularly redesign cast-off items into useful ones. Discarded refrigerators, for instance, suggest an infinity of new uses, from fish tanks, after removing doors, to numerous small parts as each discarded one is stripped for its components, which include small compressors, copper tubing, heat transfer arrays, and so on. The same goes for washing machines....

Cited from the book: Karl Hess, Community Technology (New York, Cambridge, Hagerstown, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Sydney: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1979


Special Issue of the Journal of Peer Production

* Special Issue 5. Shared Machine Shops. Edited by Maxigas (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) and Peter Troxler (International Fab Lab Association, Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences). Journal of Peer Production, October 2014.

URL = http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machine-shops/

"Despite the marketing clangour of the “maker movement”, shared machine shops are currently “fringe phenomena” since they play a minor role in the production of wealth, knowledge, political consensus and the social organisation of life. Interestingly, however, they also prominently share the core transformations experienced in contemporary capitalism. The convergence of work, labour and other aspects of life — the rapid development of algorithmically driven technical systems and their intensifying role in social organisation — the practical and legitimation crisis of institutions, echoed by renewed attempts at self-organisation.

Each article in this special issue addresses a received truth which circulates unreflected amongst both academics analysing these phenomena and practitioners engaged in the respective scenes. Questioning such myths based on empirical research founded on a rigorous theoretical framework is what a journal such as the Journal of Peer Production can contribute to both academic and activist discourses. Shared machine shops have been around for at least a decade or so, which makes for a good time to evaluate how they live up to their self-professed social missions.

Here is an executive summary:

  1. Shared Machine Shops are not new.
  2. Fab Labs are not about technology.
  3. Sharing is not happening.
  4. Hackerspaces are not open.
  5. Technology is not neutral.
  6. Hackerspaces are not solving problems.
  7. Fab Labs are not the seeds of a revolution.


TABLE OF CONTENTS

  • Editorial Note: We Now have the Means of Production, but Where is my Revolution? by maxigas and Peter Troxler [html]
  • Digitally-Operated Atoms vs. Bits of Rhetoric by Peter Troxler and maxigas using sources by Ursula Gastfall, Thomas Fourmond, Jean-Baptiste Labrune and Peter Troxler
  • Critical Notions of Technology and the Promises of Empowerment in Shared Machine Shops by Susana Nascimento
  • Distributed and Open Creation Platforms as Key Enablers for Smarter Cities by Tomas Diez
  • Fab Labs Forked: A Grassroots Insurgency inside the Next Industrial Revolution by Peter Troxler
  • Cultural Stratigraphy: A Rift between Shared Machine Shops by maxigas


PEER REVIEWED PAPERS

  • Technology Networks for socially useful production by Adrian Smith
  • The Story of MIT-Fablab Norway: Community Embedding of Peer Production by Cindy Kohtala and Camille Bosqué
  • Sharing is Sparing: Open Knowledge Sharing in Fab Labs by Patricia Wolf, Peter Troxler, Pierre-Yves Kocher, Julie Harboe, and Urs Gaudenz
  • Feminist Hackerspaces: The Synthesis of Feminist and Hacker Cultures by Sophie Toupin
  • Beyond Technological Fundamentalism: Peruvian Hack Labs and “Inter-technological” Education by Anita Say Chan
  • Becoming Makers: Hackerspace Member Habits, Values, and Identities by Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell, and Jeffrey Bardzell
  • Shared Machine Shops as Real-life Laboratories by Sascha Dickel, Jan-Peter Ferdinand, and Ulrich Petschow