Next Week’s Maker Faire in San Mateo Could Be Bay Area’s Last | Hacker News Reader

Next Week’s Maker Faire in San Mateo Could Be Bay Area’s Last

sfchronicle.com

81 pointsctulek45 comments

It's a shame - in 2008/9/10 it was really something to see, but as a few other commenters have said, it's (and a lot of the maker movement for that matter) have declined a bit.

I personally think this is due to the infantilization in part of a lot of media outlets, where the emphasis has been placed on getting the ideas into the most hands possible instead of folks who'd actually benefit. Focusing the faires around 3D printing geegaws and cosplay items is fine if you want to make numbers, but you get consumers and the followons, and not creators from that.

You can think of it in the same vein as Marvel movies or Harry Potter books - low content, low thinking media that raises insane amounts of money based on appealing to the mass market and the wannabe 'geek' crowd that doesn't tend to do much innovating except in consumption methods.

The HP books didnt really start as a means of appealing to a mainstream crowd though...

They are young adult fiction, which is like saying that cars weren't built for driving. I'm not sure what you intend they were written as then, as they surely aren't literature.

Surely they are literature in the broadest sense of the word.

I suspect the intended distinction is between literary fiction and genre fiction, which is a quirky socioeconomic split that seems to be particular to the realm of novels and their authors. Basically, authors of literary fiction are regarded as masters in pursuit of True Art rather than baser desires like popularity or commercial success.

The Harry Potter books are children’s literature. Not young adult. At least the first four or five are.

Notice how they’re almost all divided into very episodic chapters. That’s because children’s novels are generally built for reading maybe a chapter or two at a time. Maybe before bed or during reading time in a classroom.

Also those books are very much literature.

Then what was it? I get that it holds a special place in peoples' hearts, but her best on offer was Azkaban and the transition from 04 to 06 is evidence that she started writing for the screen. She had a great idea. She had excellent response. She got bamboozled by billions and what could have been an English language epic became a pop culture touch point. Look at the desperate cloying for more bux via the continued franchise prequel, replete with woke characters and a-canonical bullshit. To top it off, she's one of the few people to become a billionaire and lose said status (and before anyone throws out the "muh charity" defense, her becoming less able to be generous doesn't help in the long run). HP was deligitimized by appealing to the LCD. To circle back, it obviously started as an appeal for attention; that is true of all art. But by trying to capture the world, she lost her frame, thereby relegating herself to the pop culture rubbish heap.

The culture has changed a lot. Geek originally described loners with unreasonable passion and knowledge about a specific niche. Now it's a codeword for capitalist cattle. It's the Big Bang Theory crowd that turned consumerism and brand loyalty into a point of pride: I wonder what Nietzsche would say about that.

I'd almost argue that we need to find a new word for it but at this point there's not much to it. I've had the discussion a few times about how Big Bang Theory is basically a minstrel show about smart people instead of your choice of minority group and while some folks get the comparison, most just glaze over.

"Yeast life" works for me. Mass consumerization of everything from neck tattoos and facial piercings to "geek culture" is covered by the phrase.

> loners with unreasonable passion and knowledge about a specific niche. Now it's a codeword for capitalist cattle.

Reminds of open-source contributors doing it for the passion. People never made open-source software to make money back in the day...

Just curious: these... people, who made open-source not for money but for something else, what was typically their means for livelihood? They were software engineers in their day jobs?

Man, some discipline these guys had, to juggle it all so well.

My favourite sketch show did something about this and he's spot on.

John Finnemore: You are not a geek - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thsRk9fuIdU

I was really sad to hear about NIMBY being pushed out of Oakland too, because it's another example of how areas get absorbed and change (and a little bit more of SF maker culture affected).

The trend of interesting innovation / culture / community starting as a movement and turning into a zoo (in the sense of people not part of it wanting to pay to have a look) is kind of how everything happens.

Settlements of humans that are now cities, gentrification within cities, hacker spaces and makerspaces ending up full of business people and less technical people...

I'm not saying this is a problem, although I know it's often sad when you're a part of the community, but that the cycle of interesting bits of culture kind of being absorbed and in some ways killed but in other ways captured into the world happen all the time.

It's really interesting to watch. I'm currently living in Amsterdam which is trying to reduce tourism (local politicians do things like remove the famous Amsterdam sign). I don't think it'll work. Too many people benefit from the money and the world wants a piece of it.

I think for some Brexit is a futile attempt at trying to hold on to British Club even though Britain will inevitably evolve and change with migration, technology, tourism, knowledge etc.

> Harry Potter books - low content, low thinking media

This seems like knee-jerk lit-snobbery. "It's popular and accessible, so it can't be any good."

I first went to Maker Faire in 2012 or so, and it was incredible - the variety I saw was unreal, with so many smaller and interesting projects. I've gone three more times since then, and each time it's been less and less inspiring.

More uniformity, more emphasis on unrelated consumer products like pre-prepared food offerings, less emphasis on interesting electronics kits. Maybe I became jaded, but maybe Maker Faire has tried to target a lower and lower common denominator in an effort to boost revenues.

It seems geared towards foodies and kids.

Yes, the last maker faire I went to had what I both loved, and hated, about it summed up in two adjacent booths.

One was a young girl teaching passerbys to sew a purse together using recycled jeans and fundraising for animal rescue missions.

The adjacent booth was to pay $15 for a "crystal therapy healing and ionic rebalancing" session.

I think they should have split the event into Maker Faire for adults and Maker Faire for kids / family. Also have more hands-on workshops and less infomercial tech talks.

I only went as a sponsor a few times as part of a small 4 person company, but each year the fees increased to the point that you almost had to sell stuff with obscene markups (not low volume hobbyist stuff) and they started only caring about the very large sponsors.

Our last year there (somewhere around 2012), they had this fancy "sponsors only area" that had free food/beer/etc and took up a large amount of floor space (it was at least 20'x20') that otherwise could have gone to actual makers exhibits.

I think what happened is that they started chasing sponsors, when they should have been focusing on the makers, and vetting that the sponsors were doing something attendees would be interested in directly (eg: no large java booths).

I helped present a Tesla coil demo at one of the first Maker Faires (maybe 2006 or 2007?) and it was an absolute blast. It was also decidedly no frills, focused on the artsy, crazy, creative projects. I don't recall much, if anything, in the way of commercial products.

I wonder if it would be financially tenable if they scale it down and get back that home grown feel. Then again the bay area is a very different place now.

Only one I attended, I remember this. Thank you for the fun time.

This is such an epic, annual celebration of learning and creativity. Losing it would be a tragedy.

How do the economics not work out here? 100-150K visitors/year, each dropping (on average? $20 for entrance ticket)?

Don't they require commercial presenters to pay for their space?

How much does it cost to rent the San Mateo Fairgrounds?

I can't find any info on how much the event space actually costs, but based a few tidbits from the article it sounds more like the organization that runs the faire let expenses get out of control. If they laid off 8-10 people, that means they had significantly more than that, all of whom were ostensibly drawing a salary on top of likely increasing event space costs.

There’s actually tons of other costs besides renting the space. Many exhibits require large amounts of electricity and space. Not every exhibitor can fit within a small booth. Not to mention liability insurance, since some exhibits have things like fire.

As a exhibitor myself, I've seen how the event has changed over the past few years, and the loss of sponsors such as Intel have definitely hit them. I just hope the event can continue, it's really the highlight of the school year for me and my peers.

The tickets are pricier than that. $25 for students and $40 adults... https://makerfaire.com/bay-area/BUY-TICKETS/

Right. I was assuming many of the 150k visitors are there as presenters or have some sort of ticket discount. Either way, that's not chump change.

It's been terrible for years, the last time I went a major automaker had taken over a huge swath of parking lot and was giving test drives, I think it was Chevrolet IIRC.

Long ago it was full of grassroots makers showing off their DIY stuff but it quickly became a commercialized trade show targeting these folks and their audience as consumers instead of hosting them.

I'm heartbroken that Halted closed. Is tinkering with physical stuff in the bay area dead?

Or well, scaled back significantly in comparison to a decade ago.

Definitely a trend. There's also the TechShop bankruptcy and the subsequent "TheShop.build" clusterfuck, MotoGuild shutting down, etc.

Yes. Maker spaces in Silicon Valley are doing very badly. I was a TechShop member for most of a decade. They went bankrupt, in a very messy way. I'm currently a "TheShop.build" member, at least for a few more days. They closed their San Francisco location months ago, despite it still being listed on the web site. The San Jose location got a 3-day notice of eviction from their landlord, but they seem to have survived that for now. Rumors of unpaid employees, and former employees removing equipment they'd loaned to the shop indicate that the end is probably near.

The new nonprofit shop, Maker Nexus, is below critical mass. Only 50 or so paying members. (I tried to join, but their outsourced signup site can't send me a confirmation email. So I didn't join.)

What happened? The "maker movement" fad declined. Etsy changed their policies - you no longer have to make it yourself; you can outsource manufacturing. TechShop SF used to have six CNC laser cutters busy cranking out "handmade" crap for Etsy. That stopped. The rest of the place mostly turned out stuff for Burning Man. Rising rents forced shops out, of course.

TechShop tried to pivot to "STEM" or "STEAM" education. In practice this meant teaching middle schoolers to wire up Arduinos. That's fine, but a huge mismatch with the tools available at TechShop.

Autodesk's previous CEO, Carl Bass, thought 3D printing was going to be a big deal, and put money and software into TechShop. His successor decided that wasn't happening and pulled the plug.

It's been a long time since there were people building parts for X-Prize entries.

I don't think there's any public space in Silicon Valley which has everything you need for surface mount soldering. Which is embarrassing.

Circuit Launch has hot air rework stations, apparently.

I'd hope so. Those are cheap. Since their business is supposed to be electronics prototyping, they should have considerably more than that. Like a prototype pick and place machine like a Liteplacer, a surface mount soldering oven, and the setup for using a stencil to apply solder paste. But no. Just basic bench tools.

I once tried to sign up there. I drove up to Oakland, and even though I'd made an appointment, no one was there to let me in and nobody answered the phone or door. Then my car was rear-ended on the freeway, and when I pulled off at the next exit, the other car kept on going. So I had to report a hit and run. While I was doing this someone approached me and hassled me in what seemed to be the run-up to a mugging. Got rid of him and drove back to the Peninsula.

If those guys were on the other side of the bay, I'd be using them.

Oh no, what happened to Moto Guild? The San Jose location is a treasure and has been expanding the space to include more service bays in the last year or so.

The SJ/SV and SF locations appear to be open recently looking at recent photos taken there and there’s recent posts by the owners on their Facebook pages.

Whoa! Seems like Halted was sold to Excess Solutions[1], and that Excess Solution has a retail store[2]. This is really great news! I too was heartbroken. What a great place to visit, geek out about history, and buy cool things.

[1]: http://www.halted.com/ [2]: http://www.excesssolutions.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?category...

Hackerspaces still exist, it is doing OK.

I am the only one I know in the Bay Area who has at least the bare minimum tools for tinkering. Given the way housing is here, I consider it a luxury.

I had a dream to move back to the Bay Area and put a mill and lathe and surface grinder and all the other good stuff in a garage for tinkering after my PhD, but it seems any job that would pay enough for me to afford such things would probably not leave me the free time to enjoy having the shop.

The real limiting factor would be space to store the machines and tools. The cost per square foot of real estate is expensive.

And WeirdStuff too :( It's all moved on line... even the market places in Shenzhen are less than half full because everything (even phone repair) is on line.

I was there last month, looked just as full as it had ever been - Seg is getting more consumerish - the place I used to go to to get test fixtures made is now an aisle of drones - more already made stuff than just parts in places but not really all that different

Not just halted but there were many surplus shops not long ago. It understandable, manufacturing is largely gone and with it the surplus.

Good. It's become an over commercialized, over crowded mess.

There's something ironic about a "Maker Faire" that depends on a commercial organization with many employees.

Managing events is hard work.

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