You are the Maker Faire – So what more do you want?

As we are talking about Italy in the 2000s, police violence came as an almost expected result for those students who were asking “Who is this Maker Faire for?”, feeling excluded from a private event sponsored by big electronic firms. This violence also came as a weird ending, in contrast with the peaceful and nerdy image of the fair, which in recent years has been a key meeting point for the construction of a new social and work identity based on technologies. One of the organisers and guru of the global maker movement, Arduino’s Massimo Banzi, defined the makers with the daring overstatement “Italy's oil” - that is to say an opportunity for the whole country to develop economically.



So is it self-destructive madness to think that the Maker Faire is an achievement worthy of protest? After all, looking for a way out to leave behind job insecurity has been for several generations an Italian youth’s obsession. In order to escape from a fate of marginality - recalling a mantra which is repeated at all levels within the country - one should build up an individual, flexible and entrepreneurial subjectivity that can be put on the market. This is precisely the promise which is put forward by the Maker Faire: a future of wealth and emancipation based on technological innovation and the acceptance of this flexible identity. The latter is built on the same rhetoric at play for start-ups, co-workings and freelance work. Makers are the perfect example of the role played by technologies in the emergence of this innovatory and flexible subjectivity.

The Maker Faire is based on a deterministic vision of technologies, according to which technological innovation is in itself good, progressive and liberatory. However this is not done in a banal way, as on the contrary the Faire questions which technologies should be considered appropriate to give rise to personal success and also social progress. This is precisely the point that the La Sapienza students did not fully grasp: digital craftsmen produce small-scale and user-friendly technology, which can be modified and adapted and is sometimes even open source. They help build the myth of a personal type of technology, that is out of the reach of bureaucratic control and the interests of big firms: that is to say a home-made sort of technology which is friendly and community-based, and through which anybody can become an innovator. You are the maker. Of course, this is done precisely with the money and the support of major global high-tech companies. Nevertheless, the sponsoring of multinationals such as Intel should not come as a surprise: Maker Faires have always been closely linked to Silicon Valley firms. Purely considering this relationship as a contradiction or an appropriation attempt is not enough.

The Maker Faire showcases a model of technological innovation which is partly derived from hacker movements and is in favour of free culture, but has also become a key part of high-tech corporate culture. This model produces profits by exploiting technological innovation but also opens doors so that innovation can or must come into being in an open form - thereby involving those flexible and innovatory individuals who are ready to take on a part of company risk and give up old fashioned wishes such as job security or the demand to redistribute wealth. However we must also talk about the special role played by the approach to technology. The Maker Faire spreads the idea that technology is something that consumers should be able to modify and tailor to suit their needs. It is not only about exploiting technology created for political purposes. To quote a typical example, Indymedia - one of the first information websites everyone could contribute to by posting a news item – was started in the midst of the protests which blocked the Seattle World Trade Organisation summit in 1999. Indymedia has been a direct source of inspiration for social networks such as Twitter, which are not based on the same type of technology but on the same principle.

But contemporary digital capitalism is based more and more deeply also on the principle according to which technologies should themselves be made flexible enough to suit everyone's needs and therefore be re-adapted and used for purposes which are different from the ones they were initially designed for. “Who is this Maker Faire for? For everyone!” tweeted the organisers as an obvious response to the protests in Rome. Undoubtedly, other issues linked to the growth of entrepreneurial subjectivity hide behind this promise of open and direct involvement in the world of technological development. For instance, what is not said is that a very low percentage of makers actually manage to gain profits, let alone earn an income.

Nonetheless the Maker Faire - just like the rhetoric of start-ups - is inserted (almost) perfectly onto the social fabric of the generations struggling with job insecurity. These generations feel disillusioned and cheated by politics, by the production sector and trade unions, and by the generations who preceded them. Yet at the same time they are looking for a means of liberation. In the absence of political representation and adequate forms of solidarity, the answers that are most accepted culturally are those promising that our individual fate will be handed over to us, so that we can regain control over technology rather than politics. In such a fate everybody fights by themselves rather than collectively, within the market and its turbulent ups and downs.