The New Yorker, after many years of “Makers Faires” and
Make magazine and the cultural movement celebrating
home-usable technologies of object creation,
lets loose the hound of digital grumpus and cultural critic
Evgeny Morozov to take a long piss and dump on it. Why, the maker
movement is no revolution!
Why doesn’t Morozov like makers? He just doesn’t, that’s all.
They have pretensions to revolution, but look around: people still
have jobs, mostly, if they need them. What these techniques or
ideas might mean to bring joy or fulfillment to those who embrace
them on a personal level isn’t really worth thinking about; these
digital freakazoids with all their talk of hacking and making are
just a little bit vulgar, aren’t they?
Morozov quotes Stewart Brand, avatar of the ’60s generation
version of the “makers movement” with his Whole Earth
Catalog, disapprovingly: “A hacker takes nothing as
given, everything as worth creatively fiddling with, and the
variety which proceeds from that enriches the adaptivity,
resilience, and delight of us all.”
And what’s the matter with that? Well, the “brutally honest”
part is that, well, it apparently doesn’t lead to some apotheosis
of a socialist revolution where no one needs to work anymore.
(Though the technologies Brand has hyped have done a hell of a lot
more to change the quality and physical stress of a great deal of
the work people do in modernity than a socialist revolution has
ever managed.)
Forget the personal–all that matters is the political. “In the
absence of a savvy political strategy, the maker movement could
have even weaker political and social impact than [advocate and
former Wired editor Chris] Anderson foresees,”
Morozov writes.
But its impact needn’t be “political” or “social”–the very idea
behind the movement doesn’t require this. It is about expanding
choice and power in how people choose to live and relate to the
world of objects–it needn’t, and probably shouldn’t, get any more
“political” or “social” than that.
Yes, as Morozov points out, governments are out in the market
spending massive amounts of money for its goals, and DARPA has
found that “makers” can help them, and so they hire them. This need
have no impact on how an individual chooses to use and incorporate
maker tools or philosophy in his life.
Morozov has the usual problem of the
socialist-leaning intellectual complainer of modernity–he
doesn’t really want to spend a lot of time spelling out what he
does want (no one has to work, because, well, the state will take
care of it) so he just moonily bitches about the ways other people
choose to find fulfillment and joy.
Because, damn it, no matter how cheap and ubiquitious
communication and tools become, everyone still isn’t
equal!
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.Simply put, if you need to raise money on Kickstarter, it helps
to have fifty thousand Twitter followers, not fifty. It helps
enormously if Google puts your product on the first page of search
results, and making sure it stays there might require an investment
in search-engine optimization. Some would view this new kind of
immaterial labor as “virtual craftsmanship”; others as vulgar
hustling. The good news is that now you don’t have to worry about
getting fired; the bad news is that you have to worry about getting
downgraded by Google.
It’s ultimately kind of gross (as was this
earlier New Republic attack on Kickstarter)–social
criticism as “I don’t like it and I don’t get it.” Parts of
Morozov’s article work as relatively limp and voiceless and thin
reporting on a phenomenon that is far too well along in the culture
to be receiving this kind of “look at this!” level reporting from a
supposedly serious magazine.
But there is a big point–the one atop Morozov’s head:
Seeking salvation through tools alone is no more viable as a
political strategy than addressing the ills of capitalism by
cultivating a public appreciation of arts and crafts. Society is
always in flux, and the designer can’t predict how various
political, social, and economic systems will come to blunt,
augment, or redirect the power of the tool that is being designed.
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.
Don’t seek joy, fulfillment, or power in your personal choices,
in the day to day moments of your life and your relation to its
things, experiences, and economy: work rather toward convincing a
small elite above you to institute rules to force other people to
do whatever they think is right with those other people’s time and
resources. Don’t just Make–remake society (that is, everyone
else)!
And my favorite lefty sneer, of the “if someone is making money
off of it, it’s bad” variety:
For all her sensitivity to questions of inequality, [old Arts
and Crafts advocate Mary Dennett] also believed that, once “cheap
electric power” is “at every village door,” the “emancipation of
the craftsman and the unchaining of art” would naturally follow.
What electric company would disagree?
Well, sneers the politico-aesthete Morozov, electric power might
be, ahem, useful, but you do realize a
corporation is selling it to you? Need I say more?
Apparently not, this is the essay’s slambang conclusion.
That Morozov found such a prominent place for this weak tea in
the New Yorker is just one more tired and limp volley in
an ancient old east coast vs. new west coast cultural wargame of
long standing, the old literary staid literary political types vs.
the new vibrant frontier markets and “personal liberation” types,
but it doesn’t make this piece’s existence in “America’s best
magazine” any more defensible.
Morozov doesn’t try to prove Brand’s judgements of cultural
impact of giving people tools, digital or physical, to make and
shape their world wrong–he just points at them and doesn’t like
them.
It’s OK that he doesn’t like them. Morozov doesn’t have to make
anything he doesn’t want to make. He can happily not-hack the rest
of his lifelong days; he needn’t make toys for his kids or drones
for his entertainment or 3D print anything at all. He can even stop
paying his electric bill.
But that tools for personal fulfillment that he doesn’t care for
exist and flourish makes the world a better place–for everyone but
him, apparently. And you know what? That’s OK too.
For more insights into Stewart Brand’s work as an apostle for
the tools of cool, see
my 2006 review of a book about him, From
Counterculture to Cyberculture, and my 2010
interview with him.
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