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

[James Wallbank <james@lowtech.org>]

Fascinating to hear about personal engagement in Making, Graham!

I, too, have been personally, hands-on involved in Making since Access Space's turn towards digital manufacture, and the interface of the physical and the digital, since around 2010.

(For those of you who aren't aware of Access Space, it started as a "DIY Media Lab" which I and various friends who had accreted around "Redundant Technology Initiative" (lowtech.org) in 2000. It re-interpreted donated digital debris as resource, rebuilding computers, installing free operating systems, making them available to participants, and encouraging and supporting creative, self-directed projects.)

Part of the motivation behind Access Space was our hope that digital engagement and skills had the potential to empower. This proved to be the case in the early 2000s, and numerous time-rich participants engaged with Access Space, taught themselves and each other technological skills, and became web designers, graphic designers, technicians or even better-known artists. (Though whether "art" is, in the context of networked global capital, a viable or empowering career for a statistically significant proportion of its participants is, I suggest, in question.)

By 2010 we'd seen far less business incubation, and proportionately fewer participants able to self-teach to a level that it made a real difference to their life prospects or creative leverage. We saw that hardware and software skills devalued as pre-installed devices became cheaper, and that the digital realm was becoming dominated by global digital services, including social media, that, while they didn't do a great job, diverted the vast majority of potential digital design clients away from bespoke, local service providers.

In short, the window of opportunity suggested by the first phase of the graphical internet was closing. While, in 2000, speed-reading an HTML primer, combined with a little design flair, a few copywriting skills, and some sales confidence could make you a web designer in a month, in 2010 this was no longer the case.

We concluded that when any new technology is introduced, there's a period of opportunity, before that technology has become fully adopted or systematised, in which the individual can get involved, and (in a short time, with a level of skill only one page ahead of their clients) can empower themselves, converting an interest into saleable skills, products or resources.

We've seen the same window open and close with blockchain (which I believe to be illusory, unproductive, and, in the end, simply gambling). A vanishingly few people made money though cryptocurrency trading, but now it's dominated by grinding Ponzi schemes, viral mining fiddles, or blockchain is being repurposed by multinationals. The moment of opportunity for the individual has passed.

At Access Space we saw Fab Lab or "Maker Technologies" as a more genuinely productive line of approach, and, even though many of the technologies had been around for a decade or more, saw that the window of opportunity had not yet closed. As technology requiring significant physical engagement and investment (you need to buy real-world machines and materials!) the timescale of its adoption and exploitation by capital would be far slower.

So at Access Space we raised money (thanks EU structural funds!) and bought a CNC, a Lasercutter, a 3D Printer, Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, a digital embroidery machine... and set about a research partnership to explore the potentials of these technologies for creating local jobs and enterprises.

In the end, for those not in the highfalutin' and disconnected academic realm (sorry, researchers - you're my friends really!) a key element of whether a technology is empowering or not is "Can you get paid for using it?"

And "using it to engage and educate" doesn't count - actually using it to create product or paid-for service is key. In Access Space's particular case, we took the position that we didn't care about "industrial transformation", nor "increasing supply-chain efficiencies". We cared most about actual, tangible jobs in Sheffield, not abstract (however numerically significant) jobs in San Fransisco or Shenzen.

The research engaged with local makers, both individuals and startup enterprises, and concluded that the technology we looked at with most potential to generate local jobs and enterprise was lasercutting, and the one with the least potential was 3D Print. Even seven years later, we still agree.

This failure, it seems to me, to engage with the economics of making is exactly what's thus far marginalised the "Maker Movement". It's also true of the Fab Lab - while it's a powerful context for education, the economics of fabbing just don't work.

To give a simple example: one of the Fab Lab founding principals its to engage with a wide range of materials and processes, on a wide range of scales. For a business to become profitable, the imperative is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE. To optimise manufacture, it's necessary to reduce the number of processes, and minimise the variety of materials. In terms of marketing, the key is to focus on a particular product and market. It is supremely irrelevant to a person who wants to buy a new pair of shoes to know that you can also make customised wifi amplifiers, repair bicycles, design lamps or sell toy robots.

Shoe advertisers (physical or digital) sell shoes, not "Anything... uhh... including shoes".

The Maker Movement comes out of academia, where the core product is learning. To the business world, high skill is the enemy. Skilled processes are expensive - you want your highly skilled people to be doing as much as possible, over as wide an area as possible, so you can employ as few of them as possible.

So, with this context, my wife Lisa and I opened "Makers". It's a shop, where we make things. You can commission us to make things, or come and make things with us. We run educational workshops, too - but it's not the mainstay of our business. We did this with the intention of further exploring the opportunities afforded by digital manufacture, with a view to uncovering the sustainable business models that might emerge from it. Having just done two and a half years of research into the employment potentials of digital manufacture, I thought we might have a head-start.

Makers is now coming up to its fourth birthday, and we haven't gone bankrupt yet. (Not to show off, but that fact alone apparently puts us into the top 5% of UK retail!) We've discovered a whole load of stuff about digital and analogue making, the economics and sustainability of local manufacture, that we just didn't know, and we've not seen the wider Maker Movement really touch upon.

We've rejected whole categories of product lines, and focussed on particular processes and products to make our living. We still make a wide range of things, and we're constantly experimenting with new ideas, but bearing in mind that we need to create things that aren't characteristic of the typical maker-space product ("really fascinating, but I have no use for it!"). The objects we make must have the key characteristic that people are prepared to put their hands in their pockets and buy them - for a sensible price - and that means that they must be appealing.

We have a range of clients for our making services, including individuals and businesses. For individual clients, we're typically making home decor, but for micro-businesses we're at the cutting edge of business incubation - people come in with an idea (often its something crafty, with a very specialist market) and we help them design and produce their products.

But... get this... around 80% of clients who commission us to make things, or make things with us, are women. It's a completely different demographic from the typical "maker dude" who inhabits our friendly neighbourhood makerspace. Our repeat making clients are often making money out of making - we're helping to design and manufacture stuff that they sell. There's also an interesting line of products that helps people to sell - signage, packaging, point-of-sale displays.

We're also thinking about how making impacts on our locality. Traditional retail is in freefall - but we're finding that shops are being replaced by "makey" and "crafty" services. Our shop was (twenty five years ago) a greengrocer. Now it's "Makers". On our little block of 16 shops we see computer and phone repairs, a dressmaker, bicycle repairs, baking, and of course, a barber and takeaway food shops. Very nearby we find micro-brewers, woodworkers, picture framers, upholsterers, photographers...

These sorts of services seem, over time, to be replacing the once ubiquitous mini-marts and retail outlets that have been displaced by online shopping.

Recently, we've been a research partner in research into making (MakEY - Making in Early Years) which has been very interesting, but again does what academia is wont to do - assume that the product is learning. In my view, far from being over the hill, making may now be transforming from academic and hobbyist interest to actual economic models. I think it has huge potential to revitalise localities and communities, and I urge researchers to get involved. (Will lecture for food!)

But let's lose the glamour - and start thinking about real products, real places, and real business models. Want an example of "sustainable superlocal digital manufacture"? How about key cutting? Yeah, it's not so cool now, is it?

All the best,

James
=====

On 11/06/2019 18:43, 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:
> https://medium.com/@felipefonseca/repair-culture-65133fdd37ef
>
> 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
> https://tazebao.dyne.org/venture-builder-eu.html
>
> ciao
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:

#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: