According to journalist James Fallows, the first sprigs of maker culture as a social movement - often demarcated by the Maker Faire in 2006 in San Francisco, but with a longer history descending from twentieth-century hacker and countercultural movements - was a response to the resounding sentiment that 'America doesn't make things anymore'. This grave matter at the centre of con - temporary US politics, and perhaps all advanced economies, is the well-discussed deindustrialisation of…
The burgeoning maker culture or maker movement has been heralded as a lot of things, not least a postcapitalist, utopian revolution capable of breathing life back into stagnating First World economies, redistributing wealth opportunities and even rescuing the environment. With some stylistic crossover with hipster culture, the two are often confused, having developed around the same time and with some ideological overlap (prizing the handmade, slow production and connection of maker to product, for example).…
