"Why I Am Not a Maker"

Deb Chachra, engineer, teacher, sometime Making Light commenter, on what's wrong with the notion of "maker culture", and why she doesn't identify as part of it.

The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture--that it is intrinsically superior to not-making, to repair, analysis, and especially caregiving--is informed by the gendered history of who made things, and in particular, who made things that were shared with the world, not merely for hearth and home.

Making is not a rebel movement, scrappy individuals going up against the system. While the shift might be from the corporate to the individual (supported, mind, by a different set of companies selling a different set of things), it mostly re-inscribes familiar values, in slightly different form: that artifacts are important, and people are not. [...]

[C]oders get high salary, prestige, and stock options. The people who do community management--on which the success of many tech companies is based--get none of those. It's unsurprising that coding has been folded into "making." [...] Code is "making" because we've figured out how to package it up into discrete units and sell it, and because it is widely perceived to be done by men.

But you can also think about coding as eliciting a specific, desired set of behaviors from computing devices. It's the Searle's "Chinese room" take on the deeper, richer, messier, less reproducible, immeasurably more difficult version of this that we do with people--change their cognition, abilities, and behaviors. We call the latter "education," and it's mostly done by underpaid, undervalued women.

When new products are made, we hear about exciting technological innovation, which are widely seen as worth paying (more) for. In contrast, policy and public discourse around caregiving--besides education, healthcare comes immediately to mind--are rarely about paying more to do better, and are instead mostly about figuring out ways to lower the cost.

Worth reading in its entirety. Deb's email newsletter Metafoundry, from which this was reprinted, is a constant stream of similar insight, and is thoroughly recommended.