““By then you could say Makerbot was the flagship Maker company. And by now I had made up my mind about their “movement.” At first it seemed like maybe we, the DD crew and the Makers, were fellow travelers, mining a similar vein of the bedrock of the American spirit of self-reliance and independence. But all their talk . . .
This carnival barking about the “Next PC Revolution,” “The Third Industrial Revolution.” These startup ringleaders, bloggers, and “early adopters” were together a union of peddlers of middle-class ideology. What would you build? Can you imagine the future? Don’t feel lost, just look at the graph. You are here. Breathe in. Now.
“Feel for yourself that sense of achievement and exhilaration when you see before you the finished object of your own labor, and how that object has in turn made you more than you otherwise had been.”
But nobody here truly meant to give you a revolution. “Making” was just another way of selling you your own socialization. Yes, the props were period and we had kept the whole discourse of traditional production, but this was parody to better hide the mechanism.
We were “making together,” and “making for good” according to a ritual under the signs of labor. And now I knew this was all apolitical on purpose. The only goal was that you become normalized. The Makers had on their hands a Last Man’s revolution whose effeminate mascots could lead only state-sanctioned pep rallies for feel-good disruption.
The old factory was still there, just elevated to the image of society itself. You could buy Production’s acrylic coffins, but in these new machines was the germ of the old productivism. Dead labor, that vampire, would still glamour the living.”
