Death of Maker
Maker Faire promoted, as many have pointed out, an
artisanal/technological relationship and hands on DIY production and
in areas of education and experimentation. All great!
They tried to be inclusive with low-cost materiality and open access
workshops and free-timed events, but underlying this effort was the
perpetually ignored issue of class; presumed capacity to afford the
25.00US ticket, and parking fees in San Mateo, or own a car or ride a
train ride to be part of it from small towns or near by cities of San
Jose and San Francisco here in the West. I’m sure there were such
caveats of inclusion in NY Maker Faire as well. That Maker ethos
spread to many cities and had such great public relations is certainly
excellent. The project tried to be inclusive with its appeal to
generic materials, organicism, and everyday technology but there were
inhibitors and ultimately the Maker Faire, at least, was a
middle-class, largely white, and increasingly commercial event. For
contrast, Gray Area and Intersection's Urban Prototyping 'fair'
(2012?) was in the streets - with techno-artists 'making' or
demonstrating all over San Francisco's middle Market St area - with
great exposure to all kinds of publics.
That said, great upshot of widespread Maker movement/campaign,
publication; experimental-like idea promotion and heralding of
“non-expertise”as means to learn, and the putting of collaboration
within reach of many has been the growth of“maker spaces” in public
sector zones. This surely helps counteractsome class issues which
evolve from pricing and historic exclusion in tech and the arts such
as public library systems, (SFPL has The Mix, teen space),our K-12
public schools (Hoover MS built a Maker-space), storefronts (there are
several walk-in and work, including Double Union, also in SF, which is
trans/LBGTQ space) and maybe even websites such as Adafruit (though
not sure of timeline) emerged during the Maker heyday.
How these spaces will survive and change without umbrella Maker
movement, or leading publication, remains a question.
Disney got involved with Maker Faire, and that should tell everyone a
lot.
One hopes the spirit of ‘making’ and ‘collaboration’ promoted to
non-technologists and to many outsiders of the arts/technology fields,
will have subtle and lasting repercussions in the next wave - and will
continue to permeate education and beyond.
How has “Maker” influenced European education?
https://www.urbanlibraries.org/member-resources/makerspaces-in-libraries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_makerspace
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/03/everyone-is-a-maker/473286/
http://redtri.com/new-york/hands-on-nycs-best-makerspaces/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00048623.2016.1228163
http://eprints.qut.edu.au/73071/1/73071.pdf
https://researchbank.rmit.edu.au/view/rmit:22717/n2006043067.pdf
https://www.edutopia.org/blog/designing-a-school-makerspace-jennifer-cooper
Molly
On Fri, Jun 14, 2019 at 8:34 AM Minka Stoyanova
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Hello all,
I've really been enjoying this discussion in the wake of Make's
dissolution. As noted, the corporatization, whitewashing, and
delocalization of potentially critical and creative diy approaches
was certainly a problem with the "maker movement" as defined by
Make. I also completely agree that the focus on 3D printing over
CNC, laser cutting, or (even) traditional building is a problem.
I'm excited about Garnet's proposals for a new direction/umbrella
for critical approaches as well as Adrian's proposals, that recall
arts and crafts ideas for 21st century problems.
I wonder though, about the educational angle. My own local
makerspace as well as local non-profits that aim to bring tech
education to young people (often underserved) relied on the Make /
"maker" phenomenon for tools, educational resources, and funding.
Perhaps making an LED blink isn't really interesting for a
critically-minded artist; as a critically-minded artist, I
certainly feel that way. But, it's certainly a stepping stone for
tech education. Make had a significant role in that sphere.
However, I see an potentially interesting/exciting new direction
that could come of the dissolution of Make's stronghold in the
realm of education. Tech education could be more than "teaching
electronics to kids" -- which is /very/ important, in my opinion.
It could (and I think, should) include teaching critical
approaches to technology, teaching media literacy, critical
thinking, and environmental thinking. I think the discussion here
could point towards ways of bringing those perspectives into what
was, under Make, a largely naive approach.
Is there a space in what Adrian and Garnet's proposals for youth
education? ...for educating the next generation? ...or, for aiding
the educators of the next generation?
Minka
(trying to contribute and not just "lurk" so much)
On Thu, Jun 13, 2019 at 6:56 AM James Wallbank <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Responses both to Richard, Adrian and Garnet - great points!
(Hope this doesn't make things difficult!)
I think that, taking a longer perspective, the key question we
have to ask is whether the "Maker Movement" contains (or even
could contain) potential genuinely to transform and empower
localities. Relocalisation was one of the big sales pitches
for the internet (remember all that breathless talk of working
from home, and a new layer of prosperous digital artisans?)
yet what we see, twenty five years later, is hyper-centralisation.
Just as an example, we used to use the apartment above
"Makers" for AirBNB. So British people, visiting us in
Sheffield, could pay people in San Fransico for the right to
transact with us. Partly in response, we've taken the step of
scrapping the apartment, breaking through the ceiling of the
shop, reinstituting the staircase, and opening up two more
floors to local commerce, culture and micro-industry!
But can we make that decision make sense? Are we just utopian
silly-billies, prepared to waste our resources on subsidising
local culture - or can we make it pay at least as much as we
made from our previous activities?
Only by fairly universal engagement can Making begin to
address the sorts of global issues that posters like Adrian
and Garnet have identified (resource usage, poor resource
recovery, social inequalities, alienation...). And to get
fairly universal engagement, it HAS TO PAY.
Richard, you say "my point of view the greatest value of the
maker movement has been an explosion of people making things
that don't entirely make sense and that are not intended as
commercial ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point."
If we maintain that the quirky, fascinating, but ultimately
unprofitable experiments are the core value of the Maker
Movement, then be prepared to accept that it WILL wither and
die - or rather, simply retreat into the world of hobbyists
orbiting academic institutions. Throughout history there have
been movements that have resulted in things that don't
entirely make sense - it hasn't needed the Maker Movement to
make that happen. Are you in danger of conflating the
experimental excrescences of creative young people with what
we're now calling "making" (that intersection of the physical
and the digital that's made possible by affordable digital
manufacturing equipment and dirt-cheap, programmable
microelectronics)?
I believe that the Maker Movement points to value an order of
magnitude of greater - a contextual change, in which
localities are transformed and empowered as they take on the
skills, the engagement and the tools to make their own quirky,
responsive and particular products and emergent cultures
suitable for their own needs.
But just because something is fairly universal, that STILL
doesn't mean that it has potential to revitalise localities.
This is where I have an issue with 3D Print. Take, as an
analogy, inkjet printing. Inkjet printing is almost universal
(who doesn't have one, two, or more inkjet printers
languishing in their attic or office storeroom?) but the only
jobs that this creates are manufacturing and selling Inkjets
and Ink. Despite the ubiquitous distribution of hardware, the
(often diabolically networked) software, combined with
proprietary ink cartridges, means that all the profits are
spirited away from where YOU live.
The product of an Inkjet printer is good enough for you to
frame and put on the mantelpiece (until it fades and you print
out another one), but they probably aren't good enough to
sell. These types of technology give you the illusion that you
are a producer (of nice colour reproductions), when actually,
you are a consumer (of ink). I think that 3D Printers
currently have a similar economic effect - they're the end of
the value chain. You can print out pirate space marines, (or
marine space pirates, come to that) and use them for your
tabletop battles, but that doesn't mean you can sell them
legally, or at at a price that makes sense. You're the end of
the value chain.
On the other hand, you can feed laser cutters or CNCs with an
incredibly wide range of materials, from a vast range of
suppliers. And crucially, those materials have purposes OTHER
THAN being fed into a laser cutter or CNC. If you also have a
cheap planer-thicknesser, then almost any recovered wood
product can be your raw material.
These questions of microeconomics may get us away from the
fascination of the amateur hackathon - and researchers may
feel less immediately excited - but they matter for the shape
of the bigger picture in the longer term.
There's a whole other post - in fact, a whole thread - to be
made about Making and Open Source. Is Open Source (as distinct
from local, personal sharing) actually the thin end of the
"globalised business as usual" wedge? I'll leave it for now.
All the best,
James
=====
On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell wrote:
James - I think from my point of view the greatest value of
the maker movement has been an explosion of people making
things that don't entirely make sense and that are not
intended as commercial ventures. That's not an issue, that's
the point. They are learning that they can pull ideas out of
their heads into the real world, they are learning to
envision things and then make them and then learn from them,
and they are making their own marvels
I'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds of
enterprises that have sprung out of the world of makers, but
only a small fraction of the people that want to make things
actually want to make it into a business. It's one of the
things about Make's approach that I never really got on with
- the idea that there was a sort of admirable or even
inevitable progression from making things for yourself to
starting a business.
Richard
On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote:
Hi Adrian,
I'm really interested in this comment:
"There are people in the space who see it as a way to
bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be
exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the
culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from
that."
My view is that the key to wider adoption of superlocal
making is not just to allow, but to encourage people to use
your space to bootstrap their startup, and find some way to
that the space benefits via that.
In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for others for
money, so there's nobody we like better than people who are
bootstrapping a startup and shifting lots of product! As
peoples' micro-enterprises take off, we make, they pay, and
they take away items of greater value than we charge.
Everyone's winning!
The issue, it seems to me, is that many makers want to make
"just out of interest" and manufacture fascinating things
that just don't make economic sense. For us, having a shop
in front of our workshop really helps - when you put
something on the shelf, you can start, quite easily, to see
what price it must have to sell (not always lower than you
hoped, BTW). Typical maker products, chock-full of sensors,
logic and LEDs, often cost more than people will pay for them.
Getting to grips with the reality of products, and the hard
facts of economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music playing,
colour changing light-bulb retails for £6!) starts people
thinking about "the new economy". Things people are prepared
to pay a sensible price for are ludicrously specific and
particular. They're about them, their lives, and their
particular context.
This flies in the face of just about everything we've been
taught (and how we've been taught) about making: look for
the common factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to
generalise solutions, methods to scale up. Perhaps we need
to start thinking about the unique, the special, the "only
works here and now". Perhaps the things that the new
artisans will manufacture in each locality will be not just
the hard to replicate at scale, but the pointless to
replicate at scale.
Cheers,
James
P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime somewhat premature?
=====
On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
There are people in the space who see it as a way to
bootstrap their startup, and there is a risk that it can be
exploited by someone only out for themselves, but the
culture of the space mostly manages to protect itself from
that.
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On 13/06/2019 03:55, Garnet Hertz wrote:
This discussion is great - I just subscribed with Chris's
message to me - it's nice to connect with like-minded people
around this topic. I've obviously been hanging around the
wrong places online (like Facebook).
"maker as a disconnection to class struggle" - I could talk
about this for YEARS - or at least thousands of words (see
below if you don't believe me):
In my view (and I know I'm preaching to the choir here) is
that the maker movement was primarily an attempt to
standardize, spread and commercialize what artists and
hackers were already doing into a “Martha Stewart for Geeks”
by Make magazine. The founders literally used "Martha Stewart
for Geeks" as their vision - this isn't a metaphor. My book
project, for example, looks to articulate one of the many
strands of this scene that predated making — DIY electronics
in art — and it reaches back nearly a hundred years. As many
of you know, it has a totally fascinating history. Other
strands include hacker culture since the 1970s, the free
software movement since 1983, ubiquitous computing since
1991, open source hardware since 1997, the explosion of craft
practices since Y2K, the Arduino platform since 2003, the
FabLab movement since 2005, and the material turn of
philosophy over the past several decades — all of these are
maker movements, and most of them are more of a social
movement than what Make has envisioned. The maker movement as
articulated by Make lacks fuel of its own and offers little
of unique cultural value beyond giving us the nondisciplinary
label of the ‘maker’ in 2005. Make magazine organized,
promoted and ‘platformed’ the maker movement as its brand,
but the leadership of makers came from other sources (as
noted above).
What is most interesting about the idea of making is not the
term itself — it is the pieces of hacking, craft, DIY culture
and electronic art that were left out of constructing the
idea of the "maker" (at least in North America), which was
largely carved out by Maker Media to serve its private
business needs related to selling magazines and event
tickets. Maker Media very clearly sanitized things from the
hacker scene (maker = hacker - controversy) and from the
art/DIY scene (Dorkbot, especially - which I ran in Los
Angeles at the time). The newer understanding of ‘making’ is
not really an all-encompassing term for all, but is focused
on a specific subset of ideas, primarily exists in a limited
geography of influence, has a limited ecosystem of tools, and
follows a specific form for projects that are considerably
different and more constrained than the ‘making’ that existed
before. The scene envisioned by Maker Media was almost
exclusively focused on producing work as a leisure pursuit,
which is a total misunderstanding with how many hackers or
artists work.
In retrospect, the maker scene rode two major waves: the
Arduino and 3D printing. I see its death as partially a
result of never being able to find a third wave. Maker Media
was also constructed as a relatively financially heavy
structure that needed a lot of fuel to survive -- it wasn't
an artist collective. In terms of financial waves, the
Arduino provided vital technological, social and ethical glue
that massively helped Make magazine launch. The Ardunio
technical platform provided an accessible and uniform venue
for sharing project prototypes, and its open source hardware
provided a novel and exciting blueprint for how physical
electronic objects could be prototyped and distributed. The
Arduino and Make had a symbiotic and intertwined relationship
with each other, with Arduino providing the hardware, mindset
and seed community for Make, and Make providing media
coverage and scores of fresh users for the Arduino hardware
platform.
A similarly intertwined relationship formed a few years later
between consumer-level 3D printing and Make magazine and its
affiliated Maker Faire. In hindsight, the 3D printing
movement was synonymous with the maker movement between 2009
to 2013, and this impact is still felt today. Of the many
projects and companies involved in the rapid expansion of
inexpensive 3D printing after 2009, MakerBot was central —
and Make magazine largely served as its promotional sidekick.
The maker movement is somewhat significant in that it
highlights how alienated contemporary western culture has
become from the manual craft of building your own objects,
and how wholly absorbed it has been enveloped in consumer
culture. The maker movement works counter this alienation,
but does so with considerably broad strokes — almost to the
extent that making anything qualifies as being part of the
movement. Instead of looking at the maker movement as a large
interdisciplinary endeavour, it can also be interpreted as a
re-categorization of all manual fabrication under a single
banner. Language typically expands into a rich lexicon of
terms when a field grows, and the generality of ‘making’ is
the polar opposite. Ceramicists, welders, sculptors,
luthiers, amateur radio builders, furniture makers and
inventors have been conflated into the singular category of
makers, and the acceptance of this shift seems to indicate
that any form of making is novel enough in popular culture
that it is not worth discerning what is being built.
If looking at what typically constitutes a social movement,
Make magazine’s maker movement never fit the bill. For
example, Glasberg and Deric define social movements as
“organizational structures and strategies that may empower
oppressed populations to mount effective challenges and
resist the more powerful and advantaged elites.” If we ask
what oppressed population Make magazine serves, it clearly
doesn't have one. If looked at from an economic perspective,
Make’s readership contains considerably more powerful and
advantaged elites than the oppressed: the publication’s own
statistics claim that its audience has a median household
income of $125,000 USD, over double the national US median of
$59,039. Make’s maker movement is primarily a pitch to sell
empowerment to the already empowered — in a 2012 Intel-funded
research study on makers, “empowerment” is identified as a
key motivator for the affluent group, and Make primarily
sustained itself by catering to this audience until it
realized that 3D printing and the Arduino weren't everything
they promised to be. Or maybe people finally realized that
they had enough 3D printed Yoda heads and blinking LED
Arduino projects -- and that building stuff of cultural or
design value was actually quite difficult.
If anybody else is interested in reading a draft of my book,
just fill this out: https://forms.gle/1F8787aJqSSapjPW9 -
I'll mail out about a dozen physical hardcopies in exchange
for harsh feedback.
I'm also still collecting thoughts about a "Post-Making" type
of organization here: https://forms.gle/JBM6DDFT7436p43G9
Some of the responses are as follows:
* Model it after dorkbot but instead of having meetings it
can be geared around smaller regional Faires
* I would run it as a non profit and make sure that there are
people from all over the world representing. Not only so US
focused.
* Focus on low tech and tech critism...as much as possible
far from western culture...let say the gambiara creative
movement in LATAM (brazil) or Cuban style repair culture
guerilla, community envisioned and run
publications/workshops/happenings without the 'red tape' so
often discussed as part of the Maker Media legacy. so, no
forced branding, no forced commonalities (other than perhaps
a shared manifesto), no minimum number of participants or
fundraising requirement for it to be a 'real' event of the
community, and much less of a focus on attracting, and then
satisfying, corporate sponsors.
* Should be about critical making, open source, skill
sharing, critical thinking and more...
* I think the most important thing is to help local people
meet up with each other in person. This should go far beyond
people who already go to a hackerspace - this is something
that Make did well by bringing together all sorts of people
from children, university students, hackers, artists, etc. I
don't think this has to be large scale.
* Member-run co-operative; leadership positions only for
women; women-only days; focus on understanding biases built
into technologies and imagining ways around this (critical
technical practice)
And if anybody has made it this far down the page, I'm
interested in talking to people working at universities that
are working in this field.
On Wed, Jun 12, 2019 at 4:23 PM Adrian McEwen
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Good question. Can you see my hands waving from over
there? :-D There
is much still to conjure up, I feel like I'm stood
looking around and
saying "where we are now doesn't seem all that great.
What about that
ground over there, that looks like it could be better,
what if we head
that way?"
It seems to me we are facing many challenges: the climate
emergency;
labour conditions; plastic everywhere; wealth inequality...
Assuming we want to do something about all (or even some)
of that,
there's lots of work to be done.
The hair shirt environmentalism didn't succeed in the
70s, it's even
less likely to succeed now, so we need new ways of
continuing to make
(at least a proportion of) the luxuries we're used to
(Bruce's last
viridian note [1] is my go-to on that matter) without
just outsourcing
it to huge sweatshops in China.
How do we wean ourselves off plastic? Maybe we return to
more
traditional materials like wood, glass, ceramics,
textiles. Apple is
CNC milling its laptops out of blocks of metal, so we
could do similar
with wood. Or look at the experiments in materials from
groups like
Materiom [2].
What happens when container ships can no longer burn oil
to get around?
Maybe that skews economics back to more local production?
If we're repairing our products more then every town will
need a bunch
of people who can design replacement parts and make the
repairs. The
old Dyson vacuum knocking around DoES Liverpool has
custom shapes of
nozzles 3D printed and its on-off button is a 3D printed
replacement -
not to Dyson's exact shape, but perfectly functional.
Over time we'll
build a commons of parts for everything, but there'll
always be
customisations and variations.
Open hardware will then have an advantage because the
schematics and
designs will all be already available for that.
We have pick-and-place machines to assemble our
electronics. The geeks
are working out how to build the desktop versions, maybe
it's only a
matter of time before they can start designing the
inverse - machines to
selectively unsolder parts and sort them into bins for reuse.
That might not be economically viable to begin with,
maybe a citizens
dividend will give some people enough of an income that
they can decide
it's more interesting and useful than a job in a call centre.
These are all baby steps, and there are holes in my
arguments you can
drive a bus through; but they're steps in the right
direction and the
more of them we take, the more momentum will build into
attacking the
related ones that seem insurmountable now. How do we
scale it all
quickly enough? By sharing how we're doing it so others
can join in and
share their improvements.
Makers aren't the answer to everything, but I think
there's an
opportunity for us to provide an important piece of the
puzzle.
Cheers,
Adrian.
[1]
https://web.archive.org/web/20160407032751/http://www.viridiandesign.org/2008/11/last-viridian-note.html
[2] https://materiom.org/
On 12/06/2019 21:31, Richard Sewell wrote:
> Adrian - I'd agree with all of that - but can you say a
bit more about
> the last bit:
> "working out how we carry that forward into ways to
manufacture
> everything else"
>
> R.
>
> On 12/06/2019 21:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
>> I think the points both of you make are important.
Everyone should
>> have the agency (if they choose to use it, not
everyone has to be a
>> maker) to make whatever they like /and/ we should be
helping those
>> who want to build businesses around their making to do
so and succeed.
>>
>> In DoES Liverpool the more commercially-minded makers
benefit from
>> the experiments and skill-sharing of those "just"
pursuing an
>> interest; and the culture of knowledge- and
skill-sharing goes the
>> other way too, along with a greater contribution to
the financial
>> cost of running the makerspace.
>>
>> James, I think I did a poor job of crafting the
sentence you quoted.
>> As I said earlier in my post "we /did/ deliberately
choose to
>> encourage more businesses", and they do benefit the
space. Your
>> point elsewhere about the utility of laser-cutters
over 3D printers
>> is borne out in our experience too, with there being
six more
>> laser-cutters in the city as a direct result of
businesses getting
>> started using ours and then outgrowing our facilities
and buying
>> their own (and of those, four of them are businesswomen).
>>
>> The makerspace (/maker movement) doesn't need to
protect itself
>> against businesses, it needs to protect itself against
bad actors
>> acting badly.
>>
>> If we're going to find a route to a future where an
open-source,
>> collaborative mindset and widely distributed (and
cost-effectively
>> scaleable) manufacturing allows a panoply of
individual and
>> earning-a-good-living making, we need to carve out
spaces and time
>> for that to take shape. The risk is that it's
co-opted into a
>> business-as-usual mainstream.
>>
>> A raft of new artisans succeeding at an
arts-and-crafts movement for
>> the modern day is a good step in the right direction,
and we need to
>> be working out how we carry that forward into ways to
manufacture
>> everything else.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Adrian.
>>
>> On 12/06/2019 17:35, Richard Sewell wrote:
>>> James - I think from my point of view the greatest
value of the
>>> maker movement has been an explosion of people making
things that
>>> don't entirely make sense and that are not intended
as commercial
>>> ventures. That's not an issue, that's the point. They
are learning
>>> that they can pull ideas out of their heads into the
real world,
>>> they are learning to envision things and then make
them and then
>>> learn from them, and they are making their own marvels
>>>
>>> I'm very much in favour of startups and the kinds of
enterprises
>>> that have sprung out of the world of makers, but only
a small
>>> fraction of the people that want to make things
actually want to
>>> make it into a business. It's one of the things about
Make's
>>> approach that I never really got on with - the idea
that there was a
>>> sort of admirable or even inevitable progression from
making things
>>> for yourself to starting a business.
>>>
>>> Richard
>>>
>>> On 12/06/2019 16:19, James Wallbank wrote:
>>>> Hi Adrian,
>>>>
>>>> I'm really interested in this comment:
>>>>
>>>> "There are people in the space who see it as a way
to bootstrap
>>>> their startup, and there is a risk that it can be
exploited by
>>>> someone only out for themselves, but the culture of
the space
>>>> mostly manages to protect itself from that."
>>>>
>>>> My view is that the key to wider adoption of
superlocal making is
>>>> not just to allow, but to encourage people to use
your space to
>>>> bootstrap their startup, and find some way to that
the space
>>>> benefits via that.
>>>>
>>>> In our case at "Makers", we manufacture for others
for money, so
>>>> there's nobody we like better than people who are
bootstrapping a
>>>> startup and shifting lots of product! As peoples'
micro-enterprises
>>>> take off, we make, they pay, and they take away
items of greater
>>>> value than we charge. Everyone's winning!
>>>>
>>>> The issue, it seems to me, is that many makers want
to make "just
>>>> out of interest" and manufacture fascinating things
that just don't
>>>> make economic sense. For us, having a shop in front
of our workshop
>>>> really helps - when you put something on the shelf,
you can start,
>>>> quite easily, to see what price it must have to sell
(not always
>>>> lower than you hoped, BTW). Typical maker products,
chock-full of
>>>> sensors, logic and LEDs, often cost more than people
will pay for
>>>> them.
>>>>
>>>> Getting to grips with the reality of products, and
the hard facts
>>>> of economies of scale (a wifi enabled, music
playing, colour
>>>> changing light-bulb retails for £6!) starts people
thinking about
>>>> "the new economy". Things people are prepared to pay
a sensible
>>>> price for are ludicrously specific and particular.
They're about
>>>> them, their lives, and their particular context.
>>>>
>>>> This flies in the face of just about everything
we've been taught
>>>> (and how we've been taught) about making: look for
the common
>>>> factors, ways to increase efficiency, ways to
generalise solutions,
>>>> methods to scale up. Perhaps we need to start
thinking about the
>>>> unique, the special, the "only works here and now".
Perhaps the
>>>> things that the new artisans will manufacture in
each locality will
>>>> be not just the hard to replicate at scale, but the
pointless to
>>>> replicate at scale.
>>>>
>>>> Cheers,
>>>>
>>>> James
>>>>
>>>> P.S. Was talk of the death of Nettime somewhat
premature?
>>>>
>>>> =====
>>>>
>>>> On 12/06/2019 15:20, Adrian McEwen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>> There are people in the space who see it as a way
to bootstrap
>>>>> their startup, and there is a risk that it can be
exploited by
>>>>> someone only out for themselves, but the culture of
the space
>>>>> mostly manages to protect itself from that.
>>>>>
>>>> # 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:
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
>>>> # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON
is in Subject:
>>>>
>>>> ---
>>>> This email has been checked for viruses by AVG.
>>>> https://www.avg.com
>>>
>>>
>>> # 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:
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>>> # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact:
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>> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use
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>> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics
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[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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in Subject:
>
>
> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without
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> # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics
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--
Dr. Garnet Hertz
Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts
Emily Carr University of Art and Design
520 East 1st Avenue, Vancouver, BC, Canada V5T 0H2
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