Shared Machine Shops

Description

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

More Information

• special issue of the Journal of Peer Production on Fab Labs and similar places: "Shared Machine Shops: Beyond Local Prototyping and Manufacturing"