Make Magazine has started to publish my old “Make Free” columns online; today, they’ve posted “Untouched By Human Hands,” in which I speculate about whether (and when) big manufacturing companies will start to produce fake “hand-made” objects, and what makers might do in response.
Will the 21st-century equivalent of an offshore call-center worker who insists he is “Bob from Des Moines” be the Guangzhou assembly-line worker who carefully “hand-wraps” a cellphone sleeve and inserts a homespun anti-corporate manifesto (produced by Markov chains fed on angry blog posts from online maker forums) into the envelope?
I wouldn’t be surprised. Our species’ capacity to commodify everything — even the anti-commodification movement — has yet to meet its match. I’m sure we’ll adapt, though.
We could start a magazine for hobbyists who want to set up nostalgic mass-production assembly lines that use old-fashioned injection molders to stamp out stubbornly identical objects in reaction to the corporate machine’s insistence on individualized, 3D-printed, fake artisanship.
(Image: Weaving by the Pool, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 87739302@N00’s photostream)