Maker Culture is a movement centered around building stuff not because you particularly need it, but because it’s fun to build stuff. It’s like an ultra-late-modern consumer-producer synthesis or something like that. It’s not particularly green: for example, there are environmental economies of scale to producing stuff centrally in big factories.

A weaker form of Makerism is the desire to open things up and take things apart – a common desire even in people who have never heard of Make Magazine nor Instructables. The desire to have source code to the programs you use – for them to be open source – is a special case of this. One of the arguments in favor of open source is that it allows you to maintain programs* that have been abandoned by the original producer (“abandonware”).

The other day someone gave me some speakers. The switch that turned them on stopped working after a while. I figured switches are sometimes fixable, so I removed the screws to take a look at the inside. The case was glued shut (I have no idea why it had screws). Given the herculean effort it would take to attempt a fix that might not even work, I plunked down $20 for another set of disposable speakers made in China. The earth wept.

Perhaps the government should legally require all consumer goods to be user-serviceable and repairable. It would be a step in reversing our culture of disposable goods. I would like to see the Maker community lobby for this.

* There’s no such thing as a program that doesn’t need maintenance:

A well-used door needs no oil on its hinges.
A swift-flowing stream does not grow stagnant.
Neither sound nor thoughts can travel through a vacuum.
Software rots if not used.
These are great mysteries.