The #1 thing I’ve been getting over the past couple of years is that Mark Frauenfelder is a horrible, horrible human being.
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I would imagine there must be a couple (every group has bad apples) but I can’t imagine many self-described makers who wouldn’t be a fan of teachers. A lot of us ARE teachers. A huge part of making is sharing with/learning from others what you know.
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[quote=“jansob1, post:62, topic:50587”]
A huge part of making is sharing with/learning from others what you know.[/quote]
That is the purpose of Maker Faires, Make magazine and any number of meet-ups and classes.
The Original Author is making a lot of assumptions to bash the concept of Maker to fit her thesis.
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I like how you pretend you get to tell other people what to say, and then call them pretentious. You’re a peach.
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Is she bashing the concept? If so, does her opinion somehow change anyone’s enjoyment of anything they enjoy, and if so, is that reasonable? I submit stefanjones that you were responding to someone who may not be here fully in good faith.
And really people. It’s an opinion. It’s not about you. Some people will always point and laugh at you. If they don’t you’re probably doing something very wrong or very very very boring.
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But if she’s allowed an opinion, isn’t everyone? Is hers more valid?
what would lead you to believe anyones opinion is ‘more valid’?
I don’t. Which is why I think it’s okay that people are offering dissenting opinions.
I don’t know if there’s much point, mind. 
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I also think it’s okay.
I also happen to think at least one participant (not you) is fucking with people, riding a high horse along a low road, or maybe just not seeing his/her own behavior the way I do. It happens.
But this bugs me:
Not to be a dick, it’s just… today… maybe… consider it… maybe today it’s you (jansob1) who is the fault finding sensitive zealot. dude.
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Engineering doesn’t have an impartial relationship with reality; it’s carried out by humans. At every point in the process at which they make contact with it, there will be a political impact. It’s not to put away Marx in favor of your handbook or vice versa, so much as to make an effort to understand their impact on each other. Because of this, articulated political stakes will always be important, especially if the thing in question is considered a “movement”. It’s easy for people involved in engineering to get a little tunnel-vision, but how people’s lives are affected by ideological programs is not immaterial.
This is why complaining about how darn political things are is a little like complaining about science getting in the way of personal belief systems: just because it proposes a rebuke to your system that–even for just a second in consideration of your fellow humans–stops you, personally, from immediately doing what you want when you want to because you can doesn’t mean it’s wrong.
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Yes. And?
Which leads into a maze of competing sociopolitical hypotheses and a quagmire of mutually exclusive ideologies. Then you end up with more talking than making, and the result is what we too many often see in the “soft” “sciences”.
Ideology-pushers love to say these things.
Just-make-it is not an ideology. Unless you cram some in. Which you don’t have to because it helps nothing.
A day has 86400 seconds. By attending for “just a second” to every possible relevant issue there would not be time left to sleep. And you don’t want to deal with sleep-deprived engineers.
And there is the issue of conflicting ideologies, with one input resulting in multiple incompatible outputs, which further expands the problem space. And you wonder people are irked when you wag this at them?
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Dude. That, to me, is obtusely the opposite of his point.
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Of course they are. Not saying they aren’t.
I thought it was silly of Make to try to spin off “craft” into a separate publication in the first place. And the pink branding of it was just irritating. (The website now has the logo in a color that reads as light tomato red but the magazine logo was definitely pink.)
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Unlike the author, I DO call myself a “maker”, and up until a few years ago I didn’t have a good word to thoroughly describe it. IMO most of the arguments the author makes are based on bad assumptions of what “making” is.
- Makers do NOT typically make things for the sole purpose of selling what they make.
- Making is NOT a sub-culture of the tech industry, it is a sub-culture of HUMANITY.
- Making is not just about creating something new, it’s also about repairing something rather than throwing it away; it’s about re-purposing something to do a different task; it’s about improving something to perform a task BETTER.
- Making is mostly about atoms, not so much about bits. It’s about working with your hands, but not just performing a service. It’s about learning, and about teaching others what you learned.
- Other makers I’ve met have been far from elitist, and would welcome anyone that has an honest desire to learn regardless of gender, race, creed, orientation, or social class.
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and cult members like to ignore them.
Of course it is. Even the phrase “just-make-it” is a directive.
This is an absurd exaggeration that translates to maker culture being unquestionable doctrine.
If really the gist of your point is that things that are hard to think about should not be thought about because they’re hard to think about, I don’t have anything further to say
There’s a cogent argument for post-humanity!
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“Not to be a dick”…is exactly what people say just before they act like one.
Insinuating that someone is somehow “not here in good faith” simply because you disagree is childish and trollish.
Good day to you, Sir or Madam.
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I know I’m not alone in finding that it really, really helps to have language to explain what’s going on with social phenomena. A clunky as “gender” as a verb is, it’s a useful way to conceptualize what’s going on with, for instance, cross-stitch as opposed to model railroading. When you can talk about it, it’s less resistant to change. Having and using precise language isn’t mental masturbation, it’s part of seeing what’s in front of your eyes.
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My impression too that she missed the point of what “maker” is supposed to mean: she missed the encouragement of hands-on experience and the lack of deference to specialization. I still thought the article was useful in that it suggests that the message is getting muddied. People who didn’t participate in the movement at its beginnings–or at least watch it arise–are confusing it with something else. That something else is maybe tech culture in general or the rhetoric of “job creators.” If you think that the “maker” idea’s a good one, it’s useful to see how an observer has misread it.
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Wow, that kinda makes me sad. Not that it’s bad to have a craft zine, and maybe the intent was to make it easier for people who consider themselves crafters to get in to the “maker movement” which by all rights includes crafts. But to make it so gender explicit seems anathema to the values of the people who are behind that publication.
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