Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 37

Kat Braybrooke & Adrian Smith

Makerspaces are open community workshops for peer production which offer the technical tools and training to experiment with making, learning, and hands‐on participation around material cultures. Makerspace networks provide people with skills and access to versatile design and fabrication technologies, as well as traditional hand‐tools; and they provide social spaces that foster communities who share an open and collaborative ethos interested in the possibilities that democratized design and fabrication technologies might offer personally, socially, economically and culturally. However, as well as being spaces of creative and transformational possibility, makerspaces also experience many of the tensions of our current conjuncture. Some makerspaces have become synonymous with neoliberal business‐as‐usual, where a kind of entrepreneurial citizenship is prototyped through the exploitation of precarious labor by businesses and institutions. Peer production in makerspaces sits in tension with pressures to enclose, commodify, and compete to provide profitable inputs into global manufacturing circuits. This chapter explores the dynamics of makerspaces as spaces of possibility, tension, post‐automation, and liberation, examining in particular how institutional encounters prompt makerspaces to interpret, reinforce, and challenge prevailing socio‐technical regimes in society.