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Making It

Jan 10, 2024, 15 min read

Making It

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Summary

tools and “making things” was supposed to turn everyone into a craftsperson and give them the power to change things. Unfortunately a lot of movements in this area failed to take into account the political and economic structures that allows someone to be a craftsperson without strings attached. With technology, “hackers” were supposed to be a new set of people that seized power from institutions and gave it back to individuals. Despite the intentions, the term was co-opted and

Questions

What does it take then to create a “maker movement” that successfully changes the political and economic standards?

How do you free people from the control of platforms so that tools can “de-institutionalize” us. What does a world of de-institutionalization look like? Is it the utopia we want or a fancy dream?

What does a world look like where we can peek inside the tools that empower us and shape them?

how do you get people to look at things like you can change them and how do you shape the political structures to support that when incentives are malaligned

Highlights

  • The cause of the Arts and Crafts movement would be achieved, he maintained, only “when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher.”
  • “The employed craftsman can almost never use in his own home things similar to those he works on every day,” she observed, because those things were simply unaffordable. Economics, not aesthetics, explained the movement’s failures. “The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
  • the Arts and Crafts movement no longer represented a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it, turning into a “revivifying hobby for the affluent.”
  • Around Berkeley, it was Free Speech Movement, “power to the people.” Around Stanford, it was “Whole Earth Catalog,” Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, people like that, and they were just power to people. They just wanted to power anybody who was interested, not “the people.” Well, it turns out there is no, probably, “the people.” So the political blind alley that Berkeley went down was interesting, we were all taking the same drugs, the same length of hair, but the stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.
  • He distinguished the hackers from the planners, those rigid and unimaginative technocrats, noting that “when computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over.” For Brand, hackers were “a mobile new-found elite.” He seemed to have had a transcendental experience in that lab: “Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” Computers were the new drugs—without any of the side effects.
  • In a later edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” Brand reminisced about its mid-seventies heyday, when it recommended two products: the Vermont Castings Defiant woodstove and the Apple personal computer. The odd juxtaposition made sense to Brand. “Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual.”
  • “With over half of the American workforce now managing information for a living, any apparent drone drudging away on mainstream information chores might be recruited, via some handy outlaw techniques or tool, into the holy disorder of hackerdom. A hacker takes nothing as given, everything as worth creatively fiddling with, and the variety which proceeds from that enricheth the adaptivity, resilience, and delight of us all.”
  • “de-institutionalization of society” enabled by the personal computer,
  • In contrast to jabbering, feckless politicians, hackers offer hope for the most hopeless endeavors. “I’d like to see the spirit of hackerdom improve peace in the Middle East,” the influential technology publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly proclaimed a couple of years ago.
  • For Anderson, it’s the democratization of invention—anyone can become an app mogul these days—that defines the past two decades of Internet history. Owing to the maker movement, he thinks, the same thing might happen to manufacturing: “ ‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.” Every inventor can become an entrepreneur. Indeed, he anticipates a Web-like future for the maker movement: “ever-accelerating entrepreneurship and innovation with ever-dropping barriers to entry.”
  • Hatch and Anderson alike invoke Marx and argue that the success of the maker movement shows that the means of production can be made affordable to workers even under capitalism. Now that money can be raised on sites such as Kickstarter, even large-scale investors have become unnecessary. But both overlook one key development: in a world where everyone is an entrepreneur, it’s hard work getting others excited about funding your project. Money goes to those who know how to attract attention.
  • Whereas Stewart Brand wanted citizens to replace politics with savvy shopping, Illich wanted to “retool” society so that traditional politics, with its penchant for endless talk, becomes unnecessary.
  • For Jobs, who saw computers as “a bicycle for our minds,” it was of only secondary importance whether one could peek inside or program them. ^70b140
  • Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have done better to advocate reinstitutionalizing it: pushing for political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and decentralization of power they associated with their favorite technology.
  • Bookchin’s critique of the counterculture’s turn to tools parallels Dennett’s critique of the aesthetes’ turn to education eighty years earlier. It didn’t make sense to speak of “convivial tools,” he argued, without taking a close look at the political and social structures in which they were embedded.
  • We carry personal computers in our pockets—nothing could be more decentralized than this!—but have surrendered control of our data, which is stored on centralized servers, far away from our pockets. The hackers won their fight against I.B.M.—only to lose it to Facebook and Google. And the spooks at the National Security Agency must be surprised to learn that gadgets were supposed to usher in the “de-institutionalization of society.” ^e60a0d

title: Making It author: Evgeny Morozov url: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/making-it-2 date: 2022-02-15 source: pocket tags: media/articles

Making It

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • The cause of the Arts and Crafts movement would be achieved, he maintained, only “when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher.”
  • “The employed craftsman can almost never use in his own home things similar to those he works on every day,” she observed, because those things were simply unaffordable. Economics, not aesthetics, explained the movement’s failures. “The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
  • the Arts and Crafts movement no longer represented a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it, turning into a “revivifying hobby for the affluent.”
  • Around Berkeley, it was Free Speech Movement, “power to the people.” Around Stanford, it was “Whole Earth Catalog,” Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, people like that, and they were just power to people. They just wanted to power anybody who was interested, not “the people.” Well, it turns out there is no, probably, “the people.” So the political blind alley that Berkeley went down was interesting, we were all taking the same drugs, the same length of hair, but the stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.
  • He distinguished the hackers from the planners, those rigid and unimaginative technocrats, noting that “when computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over.” For Brand, hackers were “a mobile new-found elite.” He seemed to have had a transcendental experience in that lab: “Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” Computers were the new drugs—without any of the side effects.
  • In a later edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” Brand reminisced about its mid-seventies heyday, when it recommended two products: the Vermont Castings Defiant woodstove and the Apple personal computer. The odd juxtaposition made sense to Brand. “Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual.”
  • “With over half of the American workforce now managing information for a living, any apparent drone drudging away on mainstream information chores might be recruited, via some handy outlaw techniques or tool, into the holy disorder of hackerdom. A hacker takes nothing as given, everything as worth creatively fiddling with, and the variety which proceeds from that enricheth the adaptivity, resilience, and delight of us all.”
  • de-institutionalization of society” enabled by the personal computer,
  • In contrast to jabbering, feckless politicians, hackers offer hope for the most hopeless endeavors. “I’d like to see the spirit of hackerdom improve peace in the Middle East,” the influential technology publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly proclaimed a couple of years ago.
  • For Anderson, it’s the democratization of invention—anyone can become an app mogul these days—that defines the past two decades of Internet history. Owing to the maker movement, he thinks, the same thing might happen to manufacturing: “ ‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.” Every inventor can become an entrepreneur. Indeed, he anticipates a Web-like future for the maker movement: “ever-accelerating entrepreneurship and innovation with ever-dropping barriers to entry.”
  • Hatch and Anderson alike invoke Marx and argue that the success of the maker movement shows that the means of production can be made affordable to workers even under capitalism. Now that money can be raised on sites such as Kickstarter, even large-scale investors have become unnecessary. But both overlook one key development: in a world where everyone is an entrepreneur, it’s hard work getting others excited about funding your project. Money goes to those who know how to attract attention.
  • Whereas Stewart Brand wanted citizens to replace politics with savvy shopping, Illich wanted to “retool” society so that traditional politics, with its penchant for endless talk, becomes unnecessary.
  • For Jobs, who saw computers as “a bicycle for our minds,” it was of only secondary importance whether one could peek inside or program them.
  • Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have done better to advocate reinstitutionalizing it: pushing for political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and decentralization of power they associated with their favorite technology.
  • Bookchin’s critique of the counterculture’s turn to tools parallels Dennett’s critique of the aesthetes’ turn to education eighty years earlier. It didn’t make sense to speak of “convivial tools,” he argued, without taking a close look at the political and social structures in which they were embedded.
  • We carry personal computers in our pockets—nothing could be more decentralized than this!—but have surrendered control of our data, which is stored on centralized servers, far away from our pockets. The hackers won their fight against I.B.M.—only to lose it to Facebook and Google. And the spooks at the National Security Agency must be surprised to learn that gadgets were supposed to usher in the “de-institutionalization of society.”

title: “Making It” author: “Evgeny Morozov” url: ”https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/13/making-it-2” date: 2023-12-19 source: pocket tags: media/articles

Making It

rw-book-cover

Metadata

Highlights

  • The cause of the Arts and Crafts movement would be achieved, he maintained, only “when the philosopher goes to work and the working man becomes a philosopher.”
  • “The employed craftsman can almost never use in his own home things similar to those he works on every day,” she observed, because those things were simply unaffordable. Economics, not aesthetics, explained the movement’s failures. “The modern man, who should be a craftsman, but who, in most cases, is compelled by force of circumstances to be a mill operative, has no freedom,” she wrote earlier. “He must make what his machine is geared to make.”
  • the Arts and Crafts movement no longer represented a radical alternative to the alienated labor of the factories. Instead, it provided yet another therapeutic escape from it, turning into a “revivifying hobby for the affluent.”
  • Around Berkeley, it was Free Speech Movement, “power to the people.” Around Stanford, it was “Whole Earth Catalog,” Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, people like that, and they were just power to people. They just wanted to power anybody who was interested, not “the people.” Well, it turns out there is no, probably, “the people.” So the political blind alley that Berkeley went down was interesting, we were all taking the same drugs, the same length of hair, but the stuff came out of the Stanford area, I think because it took a Buckminster Fuller access-to-tools angle on things.
  • He distinguished the hackers from the planners, those rigid and unimaginative technocrats, noting that “when computers become available to everybody, the hackers take over.” For Brand, hackers were “a mobile new-found elite.” He seemed to have had a transcendental experience in that lab: “Those magnificent men with their flying machines, scouting a leading edge of technology which has an odd softness to it; outlaw country, where rules are not decree or routine so much as the starker demands of what’s possible.” Computers were the new drugs—without any of the side effects.
  • In a later edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog,” Brand reminisced about its mid-seventies heyday, when it recommended two products: the Vermont Castings Defiant woodstove and the Apple personal computer. The odd juxtaposition made sense to Brand. “Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual.”
  • “With over half of the American workforce now managing information for a living, any apparent drone drudging away on mainstream information chores might be recruited, via some handy outlaw techniques or tool, into the holy disorder of hackerdom. A hacker takes nothing as given, everything as worth creatively fiddling with, and the variety which proceeds from that enricheth the adaptivity, resilience, and delight of us all.”
  • de-institutionalization of society” enabled by the personal computer,
  • In contrast to jabbering, feckless politicians, hackers offer hope for the most hopeless endeavors. “I’d like to see the spirit of hackerdom improve peace in the Middle East,” the influential technology publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly proclaimed a couple of years ago.
  • For Anderson, it’s the democratization of invention—anyone can become an app mogul these days—that defines the past two decades of Internet history. Owing to the maker movement, he thinks, the same thing might happen to manufacturing: “ ‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.” Every inventor can become an entrepreneur. Indeed, he anticipates a Web-like future for the maker movement: “ever-accelerating entrepreneurship and innovation with ever-dropping barriers to entry.”
  • Hatch and Anderson alike invoke Marx and argue that the success of the maker movement shows that the means of production can be made affordable to workers even under capitalism. Now that money can be raised on sites such as Kickstarter, even large-scale investors have become unnecessary. But both overlook one key development: in a world where everyone is an entrepreneur, it’s hard work getting others excited about funding your project. Money goes to those who know how to attract attention.
  • Whereas Stewart Brand wanted citizens to replace politics with savvy shopping, Illich wanted to “retool” society so that traditional politics, with its penchant for endless talk, becomes unnecessary.
  • For Jobs, who saw computers as “a bicycle for our minds,” it was of only secondary importance whether one could peek inside or program them.
  • Instead of deinstitutionalizing society, the radicals would have done better to advocate reinstitutionalizing it: pushing for political and legal reforms to secure the transparency and decentralization of power they associated with their favorite technology.
  • Bookchin’s critique of the counterculture’s turn to tools parallels Dennett’s critique of the aesthetes’ turn to education eighty years earlier. It didn’t make sense to speak of “convivial tools,” he argued, without taking a close look at the political and social structures in which they were embedded.
  • We carry personal computers in our pockets—nothing could be more decentralized than this!—but have surrendered control of our data, which is stored on centralized servers, far away from our pockets. The hackers won their fight against I.B.M.—only to lose it to Facebook and Google. And the spooks at the National Security Agency must be surprised to learn that gadgets were supposed to usher in the “de-institutionalization of society.”

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