[hackerspaces] Does the maker culture get the step on the hackers culture?

[hellekin]

On 07/03/2014 09:58 PM, Mark Janssen wrote:
>
>   Not impossible, but I'd like to hear your plan.
> 
*** Three words: Chaos Computer Club.

Not everything in life is a business, fortunately.

The core difference between hack* and make* places, lies exactly at this
point.  Maxigas has been writing extensively on the topic, and might
weigh in in this thread.  In a nutshell, he asserts that hacklabs are
politically motivated (anarchist tendency) and oriented towards
independent media production, hackerspaces are community motivated (left
wing politics), and security oriented, and that makerspaces, fablabs,
co-working spaces, etc. are more or less co-opted venues where the
community is not as important as the (eventually commercial) technology.

According to this criteria, I guess the Metalab would have started as a
hackerspace, and slowly derived towards... Something else (an
incubator?).  So, I guess, like for every label, the cut isn't so clear,
and we must keep in mind that except for obviously commercial spaces
riding the wave of hackerspaces without any of the community aspects
(e.g. "tech shops"), most spaces belong to one or more of the
above-mentioned labels.

To reply to the original question, I think makerspaces, and physical
tools in general, bring an interesting dimension, and enable easier
commercialization of products coming from hackerspaces.  Sooner or
later, the politically-motivated spaces--read: community-operated, *and*
interested in being part of the larger civil society--will come up with
products according to their interests, that will relegate commercial
venues to their commodity business segment, away from the innovative
ebullition of hackerspaces.  Some products already emerged from
hackerspaces, such as the Peachy Printer, to give just an example.
Typically hackerspaces products like the the TV-Be-Gone are less common
than purely technical products. But they belong to technology--as in
technique-related-to-society, not just "innovation".

I remember visiting Raumsfahrtagentur, while they were splicing genes
out of sausages to demonstrate that products supposed to be kosher and
hallal were in fact containing pork.  That's not about the machine, but
about how you use it, and for what purpose.

My 2 Satoshi.

==
hk