21–30 of 106 posts
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without that bait-ish title it takes on a much less derisive tone, although it uses some questionable phrasing.
maybe ello just sucks and i'm not seeing it.
The cybermart description matches exactly my memory of Sim Lim Square from when I lived in Singapore, except that place is immense and you could get the best naan you've ever had in the basement.
The best naan is to be had in Japan, where every single Indian restaurant seems to have what looks like a stone wood fired pizza oven (and there are many that run all you can eat naan lunch specials). Living in Beijing, I'm so bored of cybermarts. Also, if you want to find the makers here, try wangjing and CAFA (central academy of fine arts) rather than Zhongguancun (where all the e-markets and grand tech universitie…
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On the other hand, your comment seems to be responding to some article which hypothetically would have said that the Chinese couldn't make things, or that their making things didn't count.
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Shirky is actually making the case that China has plenty of maker-ness – just not in the form of a self-conscious, self-congratulatory capital-M 'Maker Movement'. That seems to be roughly your view, as well – but for some reason you'd rather take offense?
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But even that I disagree with. Not on the impressive infrastructure that China seems to have for makers (which is worthy of envy, in my opinion), but on the "never went away" point, because it never went away in the West either. The maker movement is a shiny version of what came before. Before the Arduino there was the PIC and BASIC Stamp, before that people built stuff with discrete TTL logic, before that people built analog circuits, and on and on... Every aspect of the maker movement, aside from perhaps 3D printers, has pre-maker movement roots. In other words the maker movement is a popularising movement, a rebranding of what came before. There's nothing wrong with that, I'm glad more people are being encouraged to create, but I do not appreciate people trying to rewrite history to bolster their own narrative.
There's a lot of insight here, but I question whether "Maker excitement" vs. "non-excitement of traditional crafts" should be attributed to gender. The way I see it there are plenty of crafts like woodworking that are less "gendered" than jewelry-making and knitting but still wouldn't gather any interest with a Make magazine readership. The overall point though, that electronics were in particular made obscure at som…
(Digression: another dynamic, thrusting young blogging/social networking system without permalinks for the comments? How absolutely darling. To think that WordPress, Blogger and nearly every sad, dumpy old-wave blogging system had this one figured out back while the WTC was still standing. Strangely appropriate given the topic of this conversation.)
There is a downside to hacking-as-livelihood. Many workers are overworked. They hack for a living, but seldom have time to hack for fun. This is especially true among software developers. There are far fewer activities organized around programming than in the West. Occasionally there are weekend hackathons, but few professional programmers have the heart to participate. They are looking to spend time with family or e…
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I think Shirky is saying that "Maker culture" in the US (and Canada, etc) is dominated by people doing stuff mostly in their spare time, being self-congratulating, and looking up to the occasional person able to make a career from "Making". In contract, he says, to China, where this activity does exist but is dwarfed by the actual people who Make Stuff who are far more competent than the typical "Maker culture" hobbyist, and they generally do make a living off it.
> The Maker community in China is MASSIVE.
This is exactly what Shirky is saying -- in some sense he's lambasting "Maker culture" as being the bullshit self-congratulation, and he's saying that in China there are real people making real things, that they are actually making much more stuff by comparison to the "Makers" that make up "Maker culture" in the US, etc.
That's my read, anyway!