Re: <nettime> The Maker Movement is abandoned by its corporate sponsors;

Hi Chris, Bruce and others,

I'm interested in talking to people about an open source alternative to Make - I think this is a real opportunity to improve things and make them more interesting. In 2016 I wrote that the fad of the maker movement was over - http://disobedientelectronics.com - my critique is that Maker Media was usually caught up in the 'gee whiz' of technology without much thinking about its social or cultural impacts. It was great at getting started, but did little to address the idea of what something like the Arduino or 3D printing was actually good for. I saw the maker scene at a crossroads between technology, commerce and culture - but it never really understood the culture of that scene. It consistently thought that artists and hackers were doing stuff for fun, which was a core misunderstanding.

I think Make did a ton to help out this scene, but they also were quite maker-brand-oriented that whitewashed a lot of interesting things (experimental art, hacktivism, strange design work, hacker culture, interactive art, electronic music, etc.). I think having the Maker Faires so centralized (paying licensing fees that were unaffordable, etc.) was a way to kill something that could have been significantly more organic, distributed and interesting. It certainly helped consolidate the scene under the banner of 'maker', though. I think Make really did bring a lot of great stuff into the spotlight, but it was following the wrong 'franchisey' paradigm that was an odd fit for DIY culture. Open source would have made more internal sense, I think. At its core, I don't think the leadership at Make really understood DIY electronic culture. They were fascinated by it, but never really understood it. For example, from the very start Dougherty saw Make as a "Martha Stewart for geeks" (literally his words: http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/01/why-we-spun-out-maker-media.html).

Granted, I've been critical of Make from the start. I was running an event called Dorkbot SoCal in Los Angeles that Mark Frauenfelder (founding editor) would go to, and we discussed the publication before it started - I was also in issues 1 and 2. In my mind, they took the Dorkbot model from LA and SF (Karen Marcelo of Survival Research Labs) and scaled it up and toned it down into Maker Faires. It doesn't really matter at this point, though - but the scene existed long before Dougherty, Frauenfelder and O'Reilly came along and started Make. It will continue long after as well. Maker Media rode two major waves: the launch of the Arduino two years before Make launched in 2005 gave it its first boost, and the consumer 3D printer boom between 2009 and 2012 gave it its second boost. It just simply didn't have a third boost - or it never figured out what all this making was =for= "" leisure pursuits.

On a slightly different note, I have a book under contract from MIT Press that fills out a history of this work that goes back almost a hundred years. If members of the nettime list (you!) want to see an early draft of the book, I'm happy to share it in exchange for your harsh and honest feedback on the manuscript - just send me an off-list email.

In summary, I'm very much interested in talking to people about their ideas about an open source alternative to what Make offered - both ideas for publications and events. These could be extremely lightweight or more involved - but I'm inclined to go with a lightweight model.

I've made a form to collect feedback here: https://forms.gle/vRvz1Fg6rKbEUnNX7 - you can also just email me with your ideas. At this point, I think it would be good to get a group of people together that want to share ideas and have a few live group video chats to discuss things - and I'd love for nettime people to be involved.

Thanks,

Garnet

On Mon, Jun 10, 2019 at 5:40 AM Chris Csikszentmihalyi <robotic@gmail.com> wrote:

Thanks for the heads-up, Bruce.

2019 has given me little to be enthusiastic about, and I sense it will get a lot worse, but I see this as possibly good news. O’Reilly is the key noun here. He saw a growing set of uncoordinated activities across a variety of sectors: the increasing availability of CNC machines; the FAB agenda from MIT; various alienations with mass production and a renewed interests in craft production in rich countries, etc. So, as Tim is so good at doing (as with "open source') he branded it and found a publishing market for it, including advertisers like Autodesk. Dale was the great enthusiast who fed the engine and proselytized the masses. As disclosure, I was in Make last year, and many of my students were featured from the second issue onward. I have always been deeply ambivalent about it.

For many of us, the concern was that, as with "open source," O'Reilly's colonization would strengthen the commercial and neoliberal dimensions of what fell under the new Make umbrella, at the expense of the less-easily monetized ones. In some ways, this goaded people to tighten their narrative about what they liked about locally and counter-culturally produced material culture, as Garnet Hertz did with his zines [http://www.conceptlab.com/criticalmaking/]. But in most ways it exposed a lot of people to the idea of getting involved in material production in an anodyne, corporate-friendly way. Make's culture co-opted anything threatening to markets, and encouraged a false consciousness that might change how but not what is made. Not to say that the "Make" hegemony was complete, but it was strong. Even those of us with older and very different platforms suddenly found ourselves living in his maker (conceptual) space.

My main concern now (apart from the people now unemployed) is: if the "Make" enterprise collapses, what might be the collateral damage? Will the more organic threads it co-opted suffer?

My intuition is that this is more an opportunity than a danger to less commercial, more transformative initiatives around material culture. The hype of Make has certainly brought a lot of people increased access. It helped a few important retailers (Sparkfun, Adafruit Industries) to increase their visibility; these companies differentiated themselves from the upstream engineering-focused companies (Digikey, Mouser) by providing solid educational material, and kits and tools specifically made for beginners. But unless the larger STEM fever breaks -- unlikely since it is driven by the US military and the US tech industry -- I don't see a sudden disappearance of these companies. Projects like Arduino existed before Make, and while Make no doubt boosted sales, there will continue to be art/design/engineering crossovers making free projects. Of more concern, Make and Maker faires also did help quite a few maker spaces to be created, giving them guidance and exposing them to peer networks. Offering better cooperative templates seems a key area where some other free/libre initiatives could step up.

I have argued before that maker spaces could be much more transformative (dangerous) if they could facilitate a strong interaction with local issues, knowledge, and economics. The "maker movement" has been an impediment to this; projecting from the Bay Area it emphasized laser cutters over labor, technical fascination over criticality, and reinforcing rather than questioning solutionist approaches. Perhaps now some other platforms can fill the vacuum from below. Scholars like Cindy Kohtala, Kay Braybrooke, Adrian Smith, and Silvia Lindtner have all been doing great work in these areas; see for example:
http://digicults.org/callforpapers/cfp-alternative-histories-in-diy-cultures-and-maker-utopias/

In the spirit of including new voices on Nettime, I'm bringing these experts in through bcc. Garnet is, I believe, on Nettime and I'd love to hear his thoughts, or maybe he could update us on his new projects.

Chris.

PS Felix & Ted, while I love the idea of refreshing Nettime, have you thought of approaching Tim O'Reilly? I'm sure he could rebrand it as a Nettime 2.0. Just remind him: time is money, and net is better than gross.

On Sat, Jun 8, 2019 at 3:21 PM Bruce Sterling <bruces@well.com> 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

Maker Media goes broke
https://hackaday.com/2019/06/07/maker-media-ceases-operations/

Over the years we’ve had the dubious honor of bidding farewell to numerous companies that held a special place in the hearts of hackers and makers. We’ve borne witness to the demise of Radio Shack, TechShop, and PrintrBot, and even shed a tear or two when Toys “R” Us shut their doors. But as much as it hurt to see those companies go, nothing quite compares to this. Today we’ve learned that Maker Media has ceased operations.

Between the first issue of Make magazine in 2005 and the inaugural Maker Faire a year later, Maker Media deftly cultured the public face of the “maker movement” for over a decade. They didn’t create maker culture, but there’s no question that they put a spotlight on this part of the larger tech world. In fact, it’s not an exaggeration to say that the shuttering of Maker Media could have far reaching consequences that we won’t fully understand for years.

While this news will surely come as a crushing blow to many in the community, Maker Media founder and CEO Dale Dougherty says they’re still trying to put the pieces together. “I started the magazine and I’m committed to keeping that going because it means something to a lot of people and means something to me.” At this point, Dale tells us that Maker Media is officially in a state of insolvency. This is an important distinction, and means that the company still has a chance to right the ship before being forced to declare outright bankruptcy.

In layman’s terms, the fate of Make magazine and Maker Faire is currently uncertain…

***

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/07/make-magazine-maker-media-layoffs/

Financial troubles have forced Maker Media, the company behind crafting publication MAKE: magazine as well as the science and art festival Maker Faire, to lay off its entire staff of 22 and pause all operations. TechCrunch was tipped off to Maker Media’s unfortunate situation which was then confirmed by the company’s founder and CEO Dale Dougherty.

For 15 years, MAKE: guided adults and children through step-by-step do-it-yourself crafting and science projects, and it was central to the maker movement. Since 2006, Maker Faire’s 200 owned and licensed events per year in over 40 countries let attendees wander amidst giant, inspiring art and engineering installations….

“Maker Media Inc ceased operations this week and let go of all of its employees — about 22 employees” Dougherty tells TechCrunch. “I started this 15 years ago and it’s always been a struggle as a business to make this work. Print publishing is not a great business for anybody, but it works…barely. Events are hard … there was a drop off in corporate sponsorship.” Microsoft and Autodesk failed to sponsor this year’s flagship Bay Area Maker Faire….

# 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:

--
Chris Csíkszentmihályi
ERA Chair & Director Critical Technical Practice Group
Professor
Founder, RootIO Project

rootio.org | robotic@gmail.com | edgyproduct.org

"Art means… to resist the course of a world that unceasingly holds a gun to mankind's chest."
--Theodore Adorno