Maker Culture Liminality and Open Source (Science) Hardware
Maker Culture Liminality a instead of making anything great again, keep experimenting!
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18617/liinc.v13i1.3875Keywords:
Maker culture, Open source hardware, Politics and design, Global SouthAbstract
Maker culture defined as a set of Open Source Hardware (OSHW) tools (Weiss 2008; Mellis & Buechley 2011; Ames et al. 2014), DIY practices (Ratto & Boler 2014; Ames et al. 2014; Lindtner et al. 2016) and promises of digital, automated and distributed fabrication (Gershenfeld et al. 2004; Ratto & Ree 2012) or democratized science equipment (Pearce 2014; Pearce 2012) remains an ambiguous object of our recent political and design fantasies. On one side, there is a surge of government and policy interests in the so called "maker movements" in the U.S., China, Singapore, Taiwan, and EU leading directly to the present nationalist calls for "Making (XYZ nation) great again". On the other, maker projects and activities (Arduino tinkering, building 3D printers, setting up a DIYbio lab infrastructure) remain niche, exploratory and private, even when they are part of the informal, transnational networks (Vertesi et al. 2011; Kaiying & Lindtner 2016), which I call "geek diplomacy" (Kera 2015). Without clearly stating any local or transnational agenda, the DIY makers productively and creatively negotiate the various dichotomies between individualism and collectivism, local and global interests, nationalism and cosmopolitanism. They connect politics and design through "liminal," meaning individual and exploratory, experiences of prototyping and tinkering which differ greatly from the knowledge and skills acquisitions or prototyping common in the industrial or academic context. To explain this liminality in the maker culture, I extended Gabriella Coleman's (2012) pioneering work on the paradoxes of hacker (and open source software) movement. The decentralized and transnational networks of makers and hackers are examples of (technological) communitas and liminality (Turner 1969), which negotiate various conflicting goals and agenda behind making, technology and globalization. The maker culture can serve isolationist and cosmopolitan agendas at the same time, even embrace the open source rhetoric while remaining partially patented, pirated and hybrid. It mobilizes the Global South hopes of low cost technologies while performing the Silicon Valley clichés and using migrant slave labor in China, but also African conflict minerals. Rather than empowering some idealized notion of the subject, community or even nation, it demarcates the limits and conditions of our understanding of governance and its relation to production, making, and design.
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