Recently there’s been a lot of issue with Mitch Altman’s announcement about how he’s not going to volunteer for MakerFaire this year. In the past he’s run the soldering station and taught many people how to solder. There’s one thing that Mitch said about running an Open Source Business that I remember and that is this.
“Don’t do business with people that you don’t like”
That’s pretty simple. Mitch doesn’t like the US Military and is following his rule of not working with them or people directly connected with them. DARPA is a part of the US Military and it has numerous projects that benefit the US Military. In addition to this, DARPA is currently looking to work more closely with Hackerspaces to do projects that benefit its mandate.
Now, I have many problems with this, and here are some of them:
- Nation-States interfere with the concept that Hackers are free from nationality. This is a belief that I share with many members of the Hackerspaces movement, and with other groups such as the Chaos Computer Club. By taking DARPA money, that hackerspace is stating that their national affiliation is more important than having solidarity with their fellow hacker. This leads to fucked up shit like Cyberwar, which I personally loathe, because I think it’s a stupid term that will get some poor kid killed because he DoSed over a US Govt webpage some day and happened to be in the wrong country.
- This is a country that isn’t my country. I am a Canadian citizen, and while Canada is a member of NATO, and has a standing, voluntary military, the situation is very different than in the United States. While Stephen Harper is trying to promote the military, the fact is that I don’t support the Canadian Military, and I am pretty ambivalent to other military forces. That being said, I do agree with the Canadian Government’s decision to not sell certain things to the US military that are strategic value, and I do think giving strategic advantage to another country through DARPA would technically be treason.
- In the United States, the military is often trying to recruit children so when they are old enough, they are willing soldiers who will fight in their wars. This could be through sports programs, or recruitment drives that target poor youth, but given the fact that the military wants to increase their engineering abilities, they will also try to recruit engineers. I think the US has enough ways to recruit.
Those are my personal beliefs about this. While the military of a country is very important when it comes to disaster recovery and defensive purposes, I mostly see the activities of the Canadian Military related to economic conquest and imperialism. The Internet, the thing that people are using as an example of why DARPA is all good, was invented as a disaster response system in the case of a nuclear war. It wasn’t invented for porn, or any of the other purposes it was today, nor should the military get all the credit for the benefits fo the internet.
That being said, while I won’t be involved in organizing MakerFaire SF, and I won’t be submitting anything to MakerFaire, I do plan to attend MakerFaire SF as an attendee so that I can witness what happened there, and how DARPA impacted the event, and I suspect that I’ll probably have a good time doing so, and here is why.
Make Magazine is a For-Profit Enterprise of O’Reilly Publishing.
I personally don’t see the Maker movement as a movement per-se like progressive social justice movements. For one, it’s very a-political and it doesn’t have an emphasis on any sort of intrinsic social justice roots. While spaces like Noisebridge and to a lesser extent Vancouver Hack Space have a lot of attributes that were directly taken from radical spaces such as infoshops, they both often don’t discuss the ethics of technology often enough. Eleanor Sattia has eluded to the politics of privilege in Hackerspaces in her essay Playing with the Built City when discussing Third Spaces, and we all know about the infamous article by Monochrom about Hacking the Spaces that divided the Hackerspaces list early on.
Instead, I see the Maker movement as the commercial movement that has rode above the grassroots global hackerspaces movement. The Maker Movement has very often flown the flag of American exceptionalism when it has served its purposes, with its target audience very much in the United States. O’Reilly, the parent company, operates in a similar fashion, with all conferences in the United States, and this is the world that they operate in. O’Reilly is representative the mainstream educated political opinion in the United States, but they are a for-profit company that very much wraps itself in an American flag when it becomes profitable to do so.
This can be seen with the introduction of Detroit Maker Faire, and the sponsorship and involvement of Ford at MakerFaire SF and how that pushed the bicycle displays from the main area where the food vendors were to near the parking lot where most people weren’t. The fact is that O’Reilly is going to have DARPA at MakerFaire SF, and that they’re going to be front and centre, and I bet they’re going to be paying money to do it.
Now, is this selling out the Maker movement? I don’t think so, since the Maker movement was a commercial enterprise. I think what’s more important is separating out what’s the grassroots hackerspaces movement from the Maker noise. Some people may see this with boycotts, but I personally think that it’s important to observe what’s going on, which is why I’ll go this year. Next year, I’ll probably go to the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair instead, but who knows.
