Re: <nettime> The Gentrification of Hacking: How yuppies hacked the

[Jaromil <jaromil@dyne.org>]

dear nettimers,

spot on the topic, in Rome's university La Sapienza yesterday researchers and
students were protesting with a peaceful sit-in... against the Maker Faire!
http://ilmanifesto.info/alla-sapienza-contestata-la-maker-faire-una-vetrina-per-il-business-sullinnovazione/

besides the fact the faire is blocking the access to some spaces of the
university with costly tickets, they also criticize the overall marketing
oriented nature of the event, where they say that the "business approach of the
Maker Faire is an actual contradiction of the philosophy of sharing and
cooperation that originated such initiatives"

the newspaper elaborates well on the arguments with some quotes and overall
bashing of the "capitalism 2.0" speculative attitude towards immaterial
commons. Of course, beware, this is a communist newspaper :^) yet the only to
cover such an interesting story... does one really needs to be a communist to
be critical in this ultra-lib ultra-opt(imism) world we are living in? seems so

For the occasion I recommend this publication of the D-CENT project, titled
"Managing the commons in the knowledge economy" (1.4MB download)

http://dcentproject.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/D3.2-complete-ENG-v2.pdf in
particular chapter 4.7 starting at page 71, titled "The maker movement. A
return to dawn in the logic of the commons?" which concludes with:

""

Authors like Andrà Gorz even made it the prototype of a new social way of
production based on the possibility to interconnect craft workshops founded on
the common throughout the whole world, to treat software like a common good of
humanity, like the free software movement does, to replace the market with what
it is necessary to produce, how and to what purpose, to fabricate all that is
necessary locally and also to make large complex facilities through
collaboration with many local workshops. Transport, warehousing, marketing and
factory assembly, which represent two thirds of current costs, would be
eliminated. An economy beyond wage relation, money and commodities founded on
the pooling of the results of an activity conceived of from the beginning as
common, is heralded to be possible: an economy of gratuitousness. (Gorz, 2008,
118-119).

This utopian vision of Gorz's has many affinities with the experience of the
Transition Town Movement promoted by Rob Hopkins. The Transition Movement, as
Gauntlett (2011) emphasises, is formed of community initiatives that try to
transform society into resilient communities organised according to the maker
logic in order to face the environmental challenges tied to climate change,
limited resources and alterations in the world of work brought on by the
economic crisis. One of the main characteristics of the Transition Movement is
that of believing that all these problems can be faced through co-production
and community collaboration. It is no coincidence that the two fundamental
principles of the movement are:

a) individuals have immense quantities of creativity, talent and ability;

b) if individuals acted as a community they would be capable of creating a way
of life that is significatively more connected, more vibrant and more
fulfilling than the one we live in.

Even though it is more recent even the maker movement seems to be in turn
crossed, like the free software movement, by divergent tendencies on an
economic level and on that of political philosophy. The model of resilience and
autonomy incarnated by the radical makers community in California of whom Gorz
and Lallement are spokesmen, is opposed in this way by a logic of integration
in the large circuits of industrial production and commerce (Landeau, 2014) or
again approaches according to which the decentralised production of the makers
could come close to the realisation of a market of perfect competition (cf.
Anderson, 2012).

""

These and other good reads on this list put forward a deep, still forward
looking, view on what was, can be and is becoming yet another commons-based
movement in the age of a necrotizing capitalism. Yet all this thinkering
(nettime included!) seems to stay pretty much in the domain of the
intellectualoids, while the masses are shoved the zombie-rethoric of
californian ideology in every way possible, now even printed in
cheap-but-three-dee toxic plastic in the very premises of a university.
Ad maiora!

ciao

-- 
Denis Roio aka Jaromil   http://Dyne.org think &do tank
  CTO and co-founder      free/open source developer
åå  6113 D89C A825 C5CE DD02 C872 73B3 5DA5 4ACB 7D10


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