Punk Manufacturing: The next revolution

bernardlunn.wordpress.com

26 points·prbuckley··3 comments

This reminds me of Makers, Cory Doctorow's new book. It takes place in a not so distant future where corporations fund tiny startups of a few hackers each to create products. It ends up becoming a revolution of sorts, with the millions of unemployed americans jumping to create.

It's awesome to see ordinary people use technology the way they did before things went digital. To be able to fix, modify and reuse components of devices they own. To understand how something works and learn from it. The values that inspired the free software movement applied back to real life.

Good spotting since the author of this particular blog post looks to have perhaps lifted the whole "punk manufacturing" thing from a Doctorow interview from last December.

The article actually provides a nice counterpoint to this idea:

"...while there are clear parallels to punk in the 1970s and its DIY ethic, Doctorow argues that punk used DIY to reach a destination, to accomplish something a look, or music whereas with Making it's the process that matters. Technology enables makers to network like never before and provides the tools cognitive, social and physical that allows them to share ideas to improve and build on their inventions."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/dec/07/cory-doctorow-ma...

I never read that Doctorow article but will now and the book sounds fun. But he is wrong if he thinks punk was about reaching a destination. I was there. It was about energy (or in his words, process).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com