[Stoves] Fwd: [Dewayne-Net] Evgeny Morozov's New Yorker put-down of the Maker movement misses the point

Jonathan P Gill jg45 at icloud.com
Thu Jan 16 16:47:53 CST 2014


Critique of Morozov article on Makers.

Regards,

Jock

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne at warpspeed.com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Evgeny Morozov's New Yorker put-down of the Maker movement misses the point
> Date: January 11, 2014 at 9:08:49 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net at warpspeed.com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net at warpspeed.com
> 
> Evgeny Morozov’s New Yorker put-down of the Maker movement misses the point
> The critic of all things "Internet" turns his baleful eye on the revolutionary do-it-yourself masses
> By ANDREW LEONARD
> Jan 7 2014
> <http://www.salon.com/2014/01/07/meet_the_anti_maker_evgeny_morozov/>
> 
> It is a peculiarity of Evgeny Morozov, the foremost critic of our Twitterific age, that he could write 4,000 words in the New Yorker disemboweling the “Maker” movement without giving any indication whatsoever that he had ever talked to a single Maker or even so much as attended a Maker Faire.
> 
> It’s peculiar, but not surprising. This is Morozov’s self-admitted shtick. He grapples with the arguments that people make about things, instead of the people or the things themselves.
> 
> For a hands-on, do-it-yourself phenomenon like the Maker movement, the Morozov approach has some obvious drawbacks. It is one thing to claim, as Morozov does, that the Makers, like their forebears in the Arts and Crafts movement in the 19th century, will be “doomed” by their “reluctance to talk about institutions and political change” into “channelling the spirit of labor reform into consumerism and D.I.Y. tinkering.” Morozov might well be right in this. The Makers may not unleash the “revolution” that so many Maker evangelists claim is inevitable. And where there is hype, there is a myriad of opportunities for a man bearing a sharp lampoon.
> 
> But by confining himself to attacking the overweening Maker rhetoric, Morozov misses the fun. And by missing the fun, he misses the point.
> 
> I went to a Maker Faire last year and delighted in rubbing elbows with an excited crowd — diverse in age, class, race and gender — that exulted in getting its hands dirty with everything from 3-D printers to Lego sets to knitting needles to giant Tesla coils. I did not need to parse the political implications of this happy hubbub for its implications for the future of the working class to understand that there was something obviously healthy about the energy bubbling over at the Faire. Compared to your typical amusement park the gathering was an anarchic, collectively engineered, upwelling of nerdy positivity. You didn’t come to the Faire to be entertained. You came to entertain yourself. You came to learn and teach and play.
> 
> Is a third industrial revolution in the offing? I don’t know. But what is indisputable is that the tools of production are cheaper to obtain and easier to use than ever before — and that development must have some sort of significance.
> 
> Morozov does not directly deny that the means of production have been made more affordable. But he elides this absolutely crucial point by saying that the difficulties of gaining access to capital or expensive tools have been replaced by the difficulty of getting the attention necessary to make your Kickstarter dreams come true.
> 
> [snip]
> 
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
> 
> 

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