This article describes the testimonies of two arts and crafts collectives during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. These collectives, open to victims and refugees of the war, emerged as creative spaces during a time of significant social unrest. As participants learned to make and produce arts and crafts, these activities encouraged individual expression and allowed them to heal traumatic experiences. By describing the aspects that motivated and discouraged the involvement of participants over time, we show how the individual and collective aspects of making are important for the sustained participation of the people who engage in maker culture. We draw comparisons between the struggles of these historical movements and of current embodiments of the maker culture, in order to draw conclusions regarding how making can be a personal catalyst in the face of social hardship, the importance of economic sustainability in maker initiatives and how unjust gender dynamics take place in these spaces. The ability to compare and learn from these historical initiatives serves to unpack maker culture as a social asset that can be described beyond the mere use of digital tools and to repurpose it as a more inclusive concept that takes into account narratives from a broader range of expressions of making.

March 4, 2021

Histories of Technology Culture Manifestos

Their Function in Shaping Technology Cultures and Practices

Ellen K. Foster

Page range: 57-84

Abstract

Taking impetus from a collaborative conversation about writing a feminist repair manifesto, this article is focused on examining radical feminist manifestos, new technology manifestos, and their intersecting themes and influence upon cyberfeminist manifestos. Its theoretical underpinnings include histories of repair and maintenance and the manifesto as technological form. As a practice, repair and theorisations of repair regarding technology take into account invisible labour and create a relationship of care not only within communities, but in relation to everyday technologies. Since this work to write a feminist fixers’ manifesto was inspired by the iFixit Repair Manifesto, the NYC Fixers Collective manifesto, as well as manifestos from radical feminist technology movements, it seemed appropriate to consider and critically engage the function of manifestos in these various maker and digital technology communities, as well as the history of radical feminist manifestos in response to cultural oppression. By looking more deeply at specific historical instances and their function, I aim to uncover the importance of such artefacts to give voice to alternative narratives and practices, to subvert systemic oppressions while at other times reproducing them in their form. I argue that there is power in iterating and proliferating manifestos with a critical stance and work to establish the knowledge-producing and world-making potentials of manifesto writing.

March 4, 2021

From Hacking to Making

The Commodification of Spanish DIY Spaces Since the 1990s

David Cuartielles Ruiz, César García Sáez

Page range: 85-106

Abstract

This article explores the history of contemporary Spanish Do-It- Yourself (DIY) spaces (hacklabs, hackerspaces, fab labs, makerspaces and after-school academies) and the growth of each type since the 1990s. The development of these types of spaces is reflected against the commodification and commoditisation of DIY in Spain. The article argues that the removal of the political layer of the early Spanish DIY techno-tactical movements allowed a higher degree of dissemination within society in general, while reducing the emancipatory potential of these new spaces. However, the analysis of the degree of commodification and commoditisation of types of spaces in relation to the amount of spaces per type shows an anomaly for makerspaces. The authors reflect upon this anomaly and whether a data set enlargement could correct it. For their analysis, the authors constructed a data set of events of the Spanish DIY history through the design of an ad hoc mixed method. Tracing events and spaces could not be done in a simple way due to the long time span of the study: older spaces existed in the pre-social network days, and new ones exist only in dedicated platforms for niche communities of practice. This method of tracing events and spaces is another contribution of the article as it could be used to make similar causality analyses of historical data in other case studies.

II. Entering the Field

March 4, 2021

Tracing the History of DIY and Maker Culture in Germany’s Open Workshops

Regina Sipos, Kerstin Franzl

Page range: 109-120

Abstract

This article presents preliminary research findings on the history of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and maker culture in Germany. It aims to identify historical, political, economic and societal shifts that have led to the existence of approximately 1000 makerspaces of various kinds in Germany today. The article summarises the beginnings of DIY in the 20th century in West Germany and East Germany. It focuses on how infrastructures supporting DIY were created out of necessity and economic considerations, how tools and spaces were offered as public service, the influence of counterculture movements and expression of political views through DIY and finally the use of DIY as a meaningful way to spend newfound leisure time and the phenomenon of state-funded vocational educational spaces. It aims to inspire further research elucidating the connections between broader societal contexts and DIY throughout the past century and its effects on maker culture today.

March 4, 2021

“What You Can Invent over the Weekend” and the Recurring History of Corporate DIY

Samantha Shorey

Page range: 121-132

Abstract

At the emergence of the contemporary American maker movement, O’Reilly’s Make: magazine positioned making as a method of innovation beyond the system of industrial research and development. These narratives emphasised the value of hands-on, material engagement for inspiring novel ideas and building inventive minds. This Do-It- Yourself (DIY) spirit was positioned as inherently oppositional to the corporate groupthink of “do as you’re told”. Today, dominant public discourses tend to emphasise the power of digital fabrication tools - collapsing much of the innovative potential of the maker movement into a single set of material practices and thus limiting the analytic field of making research. In this “Entering the Field” format article, I explore two maker texts: early issues of Make: magazine (published between 2005 and 2007) and a collection of pamphlets produced by the General Motors Information Rack Service throughout the 1950s. These pamphlets were distributed for free in order to inspire and advance General Motors (GM) employees. Through connecting these collections, I both extend and complicate an industrial history of making as a source of innovation. I argue that, more than any particular set of tools, it is DIY practice that defines the core of Make: magazine’s vision of making. However, as the pamphlets at GM illuminate, these practices are never fully outside of industries that benefit from the betterment of makers. Taken together, these stories reveal DIY as alternately challenging and contributing to corporate logics - a cyclical process that yields a current cultural moment in which makerspaces are installed in the ground floor of offices at Google, Facebook and, unsurprisingly, GM.

III. In Conversation with …

March 4, 2021

Makers and Design in South Africa

Technology and Craft Cultures and their Antecedents

Felix Holm, Suné Stassen, Cindy Kohtala, Yana Boeva

Page range: 135-152

March 4, 2021

The Exhibition of People’s Technology, 1972

Peter Harper, Simon Sadler

Page range: 153-184

IV. Moments in Alternative (Hi)stories

March 4, 2021

The Craft of Small Wind Turbine Making

The Windmills of Scoraig and the Alternative Technology Movement in the UK

Kostas Latoufis, Aristotle Tympas

Page range: 187-192

March 4, 2021

Made in the Russian North

Narratives of Inventiveness from the Geographic Periphery

Svetlana Usenyuk-Kravchuk

Page range: 193-196

March 4, 2021

Czech DIY

A Historically Contingent Landscape

Petr Gibas, Blanka Nyklová

Page range: 197-198

March 4, 2021

Halasuru Traverses

Alternative Local Histories

Anupama Gowda

Page range: 199-202

March 4, 2021

The Trade Educators’ Syndicate

Making 10 Retirement Lathes in the Twilight of Australian Manufacturing

Jesse Adams Stein

Page range: 203-206

March 4, 2021

Politics of Patents

Researching, Making and Wearing Alternative Histories of Clothing Inventions

Kat Jungnickel

Page range: 207-210

March 4, 2021

Biographical Notes

Page range: 211-214

About this journal

Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory. The newly established journal provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself.

The journal is a research platform for those who are interested in the interdisciplinary field of digital media studies. It involves topics such as New Materialism, Gamification, Surveillance and Privacy, Big Data, Sensory Ethnography, Quantified Self, Extimacy, and Digital Cartography. This however, is a non-exhaustive list, and new topics will continuously supplement these themes due to the dynamic of the research field. The journal’s goal is to create a cross-disciplinary repository on the interconnection between research fields such as media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies, sociology, gender studies, anthropology, game studies, media/art history and information science.