[ALARM SOUNDING]
Come on.
Warning.
Copyright violation.
God--
Remain calm as authorities arrive.
Here's an idea.
Everything would be better open source.
Remain calm as authorities arrive.
Copyright violation.
Remain calm as authorities arrive.
Here's an idea.
Copyright violation.
Being a maker, constructing things from scratch,
turning what one has into what one doesn't, fearlessly
voiding warranties, is an activity
beyond being simply crafty or handy,
and it appears to have some staying power.
In 2011, "Make Magazine" founder Dale Dougherty
said we are all makers.
This year, Bre Pettis, the co-founder of MakerBot
said the same, and no shortage of orgs
and [INAUDIBLE] echoed the sentiment.
What does that mean, though?
We are all makers.
Well, Dougherty sort of Americlaims making,
talking about how America and its economy
was built by makers, people disinterested
in the status quo who sought to fashion
something new and unexpected out of available materials.
Both Dougherty and Pettis talk about how there is presently
more knowledge and capability for creating things
than ever before.
Makers seize upon a spirit of openness and availability
and innovation to create new things.
Maybe for money, but probably just
because they love to, and can.
And they share their discoveries with their community.
If you mix the internet with 3D printing, CNC milling, laser
cutting, and microcontroller programming,
and you had a dash of emphasis on creativity
and entrepreneurship, you end up with our situation,
one that apparently can't not produce makers,
or I guess make makers.
But like Dougherty says, this practice isn't really new.
Pettis talks about how our maker movement
has its roots in a post-World War II home workshop culture.
Yet here we are celebrating the nascent maker movement.
If making is old hat, how is a making resurgence possible?
What happened?
Well, a million things.
The Industrial Revolution, followed
by the digital revolution, the increase
in specialized knowledge required to make,
the relatively low availability of that knowledge, the growth
of global markets, labor, manufacturing and shipping,
an emphasis on convenience and consumerism.
But we are going to focus on only a couple
of these things, namely specialized knowledge
and its availability.
And to do that, we're going to talk for a minute about-- no.
No.
Yes.
Tractors.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So first, some groundwork.
Pun intended.
One, tractors are important to farming-- uh, duh-doy.
Two, tractors are expensive.
Also, uh, duh-doy.
This means that when your tractor breaks,
you're going to want to repair it instead of buying a new one.
In this way, tractors are unlike microwaves or 90% of things.
More on that later.
And three, time is money.
So it would make sense that farm staff
would fix their own tractors.
It's quicker than taking your tracker to the tractor guy,
or waiting for the tractor guy to come to your tractor.
This is a pretty standard trope for the semi-modern practice
of working the land.
There is a person or persons who possess
the necessary mechanical skill to keep a tractor running.
Overalls are involved, probably a clutch of wrenches,
some clanking, swearing, a grease stain, and then aha,
she is back up and running again.
However, as it turns out, this is becoming
less and less possible.
The modernization of tractors, like the modernization
of 90% of things, has involved computer chips and sensors,
processors and data ports.
Your normal run-of-the-mill farmer, as it turns out,
can't fix those things.
Now I know we don't normally think
of farmers as a technologically-savvy group,
but let's give them some credit.
The problem isn't necessarily that farmers
don't know how to fix high-tech gizmos,
it's that they aren't allowed to.
Because if they did, they could wind up breaking copyright law
and getting slapped with a fine, or worse, tending
to the pastures at the big house.
The hard end of software into modern tractors,
like that in many modern cars, Blu-ray technology, and even
here on YouTube, is, as of filming,
protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
or DMCA.
Leet haxing the firewall protecting
the mainframe of your trusty tractor is punishable by law.
And so a licensed repair technician
must leet hax it for you.
That is slow, and it's expensive.
It's bad for business.
The tractor, which at one point was
kept functional by ingenuity, know-how and probably more
than a little luck or persistence,
has become a black box housing more black boxes.
Are there benefits to tractor modernization?
Sure.
I would guess otherwise today's high-tech tractors
are the cyborg bee's knees, but written nowhere
is a law which states technological advancement must
come at the price of user access.
This, I think, is the basis for a feeling
that there is a resurgence in making.
We'll look back on the late 1950s
through the early 2000s as a significant period
of transition, one resulting in more technological capability
and greater degrees of complexity, one where
at first the presence of that technological capability
outpaced a widely-held intimate understanding of the technology
itself.
But as tech and, increasingly, code literacy
become skills recognized as necessary to interact
with the everyday world, that complexity
could become mitigated.
And where licenses and restrictions
placed on our technology make that literacy useless,
we may feel increasingly justified
in some righteous reverse engineering.
I see the maker movement as the reappearance
of a population willing and maybe
even able to fix a tractor, or build their own from scratch.
Except tractors are no longer just tractors,
they're a particularly modern, complicated amalgam
of mechanical, technological, and manufacturing know-how
bound up in some highly restrictive ideas
about intellectual property.
Making, I think, is at the crossroads
of curiosity, craftiness, and more than a little impatience.
It's a response to a world that feels mass-produced,
where relatively few things are personal, open, or available.
And in this way, I think we can also
view making as very related to hacking, a frustration
with unavailability paired with a desire to create.
[SHOUTING]
Shut up and get in the car.
Which brings us to the larger question suggested
by this modern maker movement.
Is our technology too locked down?
Would it be better, faster, more interesting-- I don't know,
create more jobs-- if that wasn't the case?
Should everything be open source?
Open source is a licensing and development model mostly
associated with software.
Open source software has its source, its inner workings,
open to the public.
Open source software may even allow people
to base new software on that code,
and then distribute the results.
Well-known open source software includes
Bitcoin, Apache, WordPress, Mozilla, and BitTorrent.
The first MakerBot replicator was open source.
Weirdly and unfortunately, the second one isn't.
Which is to say many, many things,
not just software, have what could be considered a source
to be opened.
One might open source the design and construction of machines
and robots, cars or buildings, even sculptures or pieces
of music.
Poetry and philosophy might be tough to open source.
But heck, we can try.
Really there's a point at which open source is merely
design and construction intersecting with transparency.
And that, I think, is what so many of us
are interested in seeing more of in the world.
Now before we get too much further,
I hear fingers on keys writing comments
questioning economic sustainability.
And I'm glad you're asking.
Open source is not synonymous with free.
One can, and people do, charge money for that
which has been open sourced.
There's also the sometimes confusing distinction
between open source and free software.
Free software is not monetarily free, but rather is open source
and requires no permission at all
to do with whatever you like.
Something open source but not free
might have certain restrictions on use or distribution.
In the interest of time, we are not going to dwell on this,
and just say, for simplicity's sake, available knowledge,
freely licensed or not, would be a great start.
This, I think, is the hallmark of the maker movement, using
technology and the internet to collect and spread
knowledge and capability that increases
the transparency of mechanical, technological,
and manufactured goods.
The maker movement has, to me, always
felt like the investigative reporting
for the interior of objects.
And out of that investigation comes
all of the power and agency we associate
with knowledge or ability.
Imagine a world, I think the maker movement suggests,
where we don't have to fight to gain that knowledge,
where our technology can admit that, as Kevin Slavin said
in a recent video for the MIT Media Lab,
it should be as varied and unique as each of its users.
Why wouldn't you make space for four SIM cards,
to use as many carriers as you want to?
What if we were able to easily make it that way,
as is the case in places like Shenzhen, China?
Imagine a world where our technology and machinery
are restricted out of the box, maybe,
but with a little ingenuity and some YouTube
tutorials, infinitely customizable, because each
and every inch of their inner workings, their source,
is open and available.
And if you access it, there's no threat
that the feds are going to just bust through your skylight.
We're sort of on our way there.
After some turmoil, it's officially
legal to jailbreak your mobile phone.
Congress is voting on the tractor issue in a couple
months.
But on the whole, our technological landscape
is fenced in by markets and ideas
about intellectual property that widely encourage and support
restriction.
And on that landscape, behind that fence, a tractor,
that's not running, because no one is allowed to fix it.
What do you guys think?
Should everything be open source?
And is that, in some way, related to the maker movement?
Let us know in the comments, and I will respond to some of them
in next week's comment response video.
In this week's comment response video,
we talk about your thoughts regarding Rick, Morty,
and Paul Feyerabend's idea of an anarchic scientific method.
If you want to check that out, you can click right here,
or find a link in the dooblydoo.
And I know we just came back, but we are going
to be taking another week off.
So the next time that you see my face
on your YouTube on Idea Channel will be not next Wednesday,
but the Wednesday after that.
We are going to be doing an episode about trigger
warnings in classrooms.
So consider this your, I guess, trigger
warning for a discussion around trigger warnings.
This week's episode was brought to you
by the hard work of these tractor hackers.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit links
in the dooblydoo.
And the tweets of the week, which
came one right after the other, are from sublimebombast,
who points us towards an AV club piece about the kind of hidden
heart of "Rick and Morty," and also
one from Questionor, who includes a web comic about how
what we normally call mad scientists
are actually usually mad engineers.