Maker Movement
Description
" the Maker Movement, a push to re-imagine the objects we own rather than throw them away.
Although the movement started with just a few techno geeks, artists and hobbyists, it has attracted thousands over the decades. A record 65,000 people waited in traffic for two hours to get to the Maker Faire in the San Francisco area this spring. Make Magazine now has a circulation of 110,000.
Maker's Law
On a basic level, the movement is about reusing and repairing objects, rather than discarding them to buy more. On a deeper level, it's also a philosophical idea about what ownership really is.
"If you're not able to open and replace the batteries in your iPod or replace the fuel-sender switch on your Chevy truck, you don't really own it," (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92508461&ft=1&f=17)
Discussion
On the need for Maker Incubator Communities
Eric Hunting:
"Though I certainly can't blame people for pursuing things for fun, I've sometimes been a little frustrated by the triviality of a lot of the things you see in the sites like the Make and Instructibles blogs when there's this tremendous need for functional and quality/performance-competitive alternatives to corporate consumer products -particularly in the developing world as a means to improve standard of living and challenge colonial economic hegemonies. Coming to learn about things like the ill-fated Africar project, the Hutterite communities (one of the three branches of the Anabaptists, but with a very different attitude towards technology compared to the Amish), and the tinker communities of the Pashtun region with their remarkable ability to replicate by hand modern factory-produced weaponry I came to realize that barriers to standard of living improvement are often as much the result of Industrial Age patterns of design favoring high-capital-cost tools/processes as it is basic economic situations. I started asking myself questions like, if tinkers can make a functional clone of an AK-47 by hand, why, when they're so cash-poor, are they buying portable generators and refrigerators from China and second-hand Toyota pick-ups from Japan? The answer may be designs that are deliberately intended to be dependent on tools like three storey multi-million-dollar steel presses when there are alternative ways to design things that still work as well even if they don't fit mass production logic. Designs that associate a technology exclusively with a high-capital production method because it secures market control or simply because no other alternatives have ever been explored. This is what Tony Howarth (unfortunately incompetently, perhaps because there was no Open Source model in those days) was trying to address with the Africar. He observed first-hand how western vehicle designs just turned into junk when taken out of their western environmental and economic context and realized that a practical vehicle for the rest of the world needed to be designed to be compatible with very different local physical and economic infrastructures. I've sometimes suggested that the reason auto companies were so reluctant to introduce hybrid cars, and then grudgingly introduced them in the most ridiculously and unnecessarily over-complicated forms, may be that they fear this is a technology so flexible that they can't control it. Once the mechanical power train is gone, you can make a car with anything and your choices of power plants and fuels radically expands. You can just-about build a hybrid car now from almost-commodity components like a computer and that's a scary prospect to corporate dinosaurs used to relying on very exclusive components production/distribution to suppress bottom-up competition. This, I suspect, is also why Volkswagen deliberately killed the Bug. It was too successful, too ubiquitous, and when it got to the point where the only component left that wasn't being made by unauthorized producers somewhere in the world was the bare chassis, they pulled the plug. The Bug was very close to doing to VW what the PC did to IBM -and it's too bad they caught on too soon because the whole world might be different if they hadn't.
So it occurred to me that it would be very interesting to try and create a situation where people had a practical need to replicate as much of the western standard of living 'package' as possible using designs suited to the smallest scales of tools and simplest methods of fabrication possible. I'm not talking about pursuing some ideal of total self-sufficiency by adopting a neo-primitive lifestyle of altruistic self-sacrifice. The idea of absolute autonomous self-sufficiency is fantasy and asceticism is vanity. Even the first colonists in Alpha Centauri will be downloading their favorite TV soap operas and computer games. Nor am I talking about a 'junk world' community based entirely on adaptive reuse, though some adaptive reuse would certainly be practical. There should never need to be a sacrifice in comfort, performance, or beauty just to make things in a different way. I just want to see how much of the Good Life you can pull off without a distant factory given current technology and what the personal freedom/quality of life dividend of that would be. How far can we reduce the exchange between a community and the rest of the world to an input of just commodity components and foodstuffs or raw materials? What spectrum of in-community skills are needed to optimize industrial self-sufficiency? How much cultural and economic impact might the global export of designs from this community have?" (email contribution August 2008)