Making or making do? Challenging the mythologies of making and …morganya.org/research/Ames_JoPP_making.pdf · 2018. 7. 2. · that hacker culture is in fact deeply indebted to the

The Journal of Peer ProductionNew perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change

Issue #12: Makerspaces and Institutionshttp://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316

© 2018 by the authors, available under a cc-by license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | 1

MAKING OR MAKING DO? CHALLENGING THE MYTHOLOGIES OF MAKINGAND HACKING

Morgan G. Ames, Silvia Lindtner, Shaowen Bardzell, Jeffrey Bardzell, Lilly Nguyen, Syed IshtiaqueAhmed, Nusrat Jahan, Steven J. Jackson, Paul Dourish

While scholars have critically examined the discourse that ‘hacking’ and ‘making’ are empowering practices ofindividualized technological production and innovation, these stories have largely retained American culturalassumptions. Drawing from fieldwork in Bangladesh, Taiwan, Vietnam, Paraguay, and China, we discuss makingand hacking via alternate sociocultural histories, visions, and aspirations. We do this through the lens of ‘makingdo’: using the materials and competencies on hand to create objects or processes that aid in everyday life, withcreativity and innovation countering precarity and marginalization. We intend to decenter the idea of a unifiedhacker/maker movement, the idea that this movement presents sites of individualized empowerment andselfrealization, and the implicit placing of both within dominant American values. We show that making andhacking can instead express more ambivalent projects, ranging from assertion of local needs and values tosituated forms of coping with the depredations and displacements of a neoliberal world.

Keywords: making, hacking, mythology, ideology, ISTC, hacker culture, OLPC, Shenzhen, shanzhai, free/open-source software, FOSS, infrastructure, cosmopolitanism, marginalization, peripheries, resistance

By Morgan G. Ames, Silvia Lindtner, ShaowenBardzell, Jeffrey Bardzell,

Lilly Nguyen, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, NusratJahan, Steven J. Jackson, Paul Dourish

INTRODUCTIONA common mythology amongst ‘hackers’ paintsthem as self-reliant renegades who, like the equally-mythic cowboys of the American West, employ amix of determination and technological prowess totame a new frontier. Much has been written tooverturn this one-sided view in order to demonstratethat hacker culture is in fact deeply indebted to theAmerican techno-political landscape of the Cold War(Edwards 1997; Turner 2006). Yet, the hacker’srevolutionary imaginary continues to inspirecontemporary understandings of hacker culture(Levy 1984; Thomas 2002; Coleman 2014).Likewise, ‘making’ has been widely promoted as an

empowering practice of individualized technologicalproduction and innovation (e.g. Anderson 2014;Johnson 2014). Applying visions of hacker culture(particularly its expression in the open sourcesoftware movement) to the design of hardware,many advocates of the ‘maker movement’ believethat principles of open sharing, peer production, andhands-on tinkering are central to the future ofeconomic, social, and technological development(Sivek 2014; Anderson 2014). Stories about makingand hacking often share a largely American-centricrevolutionary rhetoric, one that portraystechnological know-how and craftiness as crucial inliberating individuals from corporate monopolies andbureaucratic state structures. “If you can’t hack it,you don’t own it” is a phrase commonly used in bothcircles to articulate this notion that technologicalmaking and hacking empower individuals to fightthe establishment.

This paper introduces stories of making and hackingrooted in alternate sociocultural histories, visions

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and aspirations. Drawing from fieldwork inBangladesh, Taiwan, Vietnam, Paraguay, and China,we discuss values, visions and practices that do notneatly fit the Western-centric metanarrative of themaker or hacker as countercultural revolutionary.While revolutionary ideals of making and hackingsometimes figured in our sites, they weresimultaneously reworked and often challenged aspeople attempted to situate their work both locallyand in relation to global networks of technologyproduction. Grounded in our sites and specificengagements, we see making and hacking throughthe lens of ‘making do.’ By making do, weunderscore the pragmatic situatedness within theconstraints of everyday life, where creativity andinnovation rub against precarity andmarginalization.

We find that practices of ‘making do’ constitute aconstructive alternative framing to the dominantdiscourses of innovation and creativity thatsurrounds contemporary visions of making andhacking. While these practices are sometimes tingedwith longing for cosmopolitan futures or aspirationsfor a better life, we suggest that maker and hackerpractices can be better understood as using thematerials and competencies on hand to createobjects or processes that aid in everyday life. Theethnographic sites that we present discuss practicesof making and hacking as ‘making do’ in Dhaka,Bangladesh; Taipei, Taiwan; Hanoi, Vietnam;Asunción, Paraguay; and Shenzhen, China. Althoughwe engage with non-Western making and hacking,‘making do’ certainly also applies to Westernmaking and hacking, as we will outline in this paper.We wish to emphasize here that we do notinherently equate ‘making do’ with the subaltern orso-called non-Western world. On the contrary, weattempt to tease out how across class, culturalspecifics, and local contingencies, hacking andmaking unfold as ‘making do’ in relation toglobalized processes of technology production.

In Dhaka, Syed Ishtiaque Ahmed, Nusrat Jahan, andSteven Jackson found deep entanglements betweenpractices of making and infrastructure (or lack

thereof) as residents of an informal settlementcobbled together unofficial links to surroundingservices in the face of constant precarity. In Taipei,Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell describe howanother informal settlement was displaced even asthe city government used the neighborhood’shomes and culture in order to celebrate the “makermovement.” In Hanoi, Lilly Nguyen details thecomplex relationship between logics of productionand reproduction in a group of local ‘hackers’promoting open-source software. In Asunción,Morgan G. Ames found that a similar tension existedamong a local hacker group who felt the pull towardoutward-facing cosmopolitanism even as theyattempted to create a “made in Paraguay” ethicamong up-and-coming programmers. Finally, SilviaLindtner describes how Shenzhen, a manufacturingcity in the South of China, is in the process of beingremade as a central hub in global circuits of makingand technology innovation. Taken together, thesecases highlight themes of precarity and exclusionfrom global discourses on the one hand, and themesof nationalism, resilience, and at times hope on theother.

These cases destabilize several aspects of dominantvisions of making and hacking. First is the idea thatmaking and hacking are tied exclusively to Westernhistories of Internet culture and to political andsocial concerns central to Western knowledgeeconomies. Drawing from sites around the world,our research shows that rather than there being aunified global maker/hacker movement, thesepractices are diverse and situated, entangledsimultaneously with local, national, and globalprocesses. Second is the idea that making andhacking are sources of individualized revolution,echoing New Communalist notions of the utopianpotential to withdraw into groups of like-mindedpeers rather than engage with larger sociopoliticalapparatus (Turner 2006). The entanglements ofagency and precarity throughout our cases presenta very different social and political sensibilitymotivating these practices. Third is the implicitnotion that making and hacking echo thesocioeconomic stability and market orientation of





middle-class sensibilities and values, with scrappyentrepreneurs overcoming odds and collecting TED-worthy wisdom along the way (Kuriyan, Ray, andToyama 2008; Negroponte 2006). By showcasingthe wide variety of activities that can fit under therubric of ‘making’ and ‘hacking,’ we assert thatbeyond their heroic narratives of empowerment andself-realization, making and hacking can expressother and more ambivalent projects, ranging fromassertion of local needs and values to situated formsof coping with the depredations and displacementsof a neoliberal world.

BACKGROUNDThis paper builds on prior work that providesalternative accounts to dominant stories and visionshacking and making. Ames et al. (2014) questionthe claim that making, hacking, and DIY contributesto the democratization of technology innovation,suggesting that what counts as making in researchand popular media is closely aligned with acombination of middle class privilege and corporateinterests. Lindtner, Greenspan, and Li (2015)challenge the dominant vision that maker and digitalfabrication tools will single-handedly revamp thecreative economy into a manufacturing-centricinnovation age. Toombs, Bardzell, and Bardzell(2015) use feminist care ethics as a wedge to revealdiscrepancies between U.S.-based maker self-descriptions, characteristically articulated in termsof libertarian self-empowerment and individualism,and the powerful undercurrents of communitymaintenance manifested in hundreds of acts of careperformed by makers. Similarly, Roedl, Bardzell, andBardzell (2015) challenge the common claim thatmaking has high potential for sustainable IT bydemonstrating the substantial technical, legal, andpolitical barriers makers face, and arguing that thereis little research to suggest that makers actuallyhave to the capabilities to overcome them.

Our work together began in 2012, when IntelCorporation funded the Intel Science andTechnology Center for Social Computing (ISTC-Social) with the charge to conduct both empirical

and theoretical work around emerging practices atthe nexus of technology and culture. One of ISTC-Social’s research themes identified early on was thecultural and collaborative practices around making,hacking, creativity, do-it-yourself (DIY), repair work,and other forms of hands-on technology production.As a group of both industrial and academicresearchers, we were interested in the way thatapparently “new” modes of technological productionwere a site for the articulation of rhetorics ofinnovation and a specifically “digital” way of re-encountering production logics.

Interestingly, in the earliest discussions about theCenter’s research activities, the Maker movementwas dismissed by some in Intel as embodying a setof amateurish and hobbyist perspectives that wereat odds with the images of industrial reliability andprofessional expertise that Intel sought to project.Before long, though, Intel began publicly endorsing‘making’ by providing funding for maker-relatedactivities. In the fall of 2013, CEO Brian Krzanichintroduced the Galileo Board, an “Intel inside” andArduino-compatible microcontroller platform, aimedat branding Intel as a champion of the makermovement (Johnson 2014). Intel discussed thegrowing importance of making to the company in aDecember 2014 special issue of IEEE’s Computermagazine, co-edited by a group of Intel researchers.Its introduction recounts the story of Krzanich’shome-made fire pit to demonstrate that the“making” ethos extends throughout the corporation(Johnson 2014).

This change of heart came as other corporations,from Google to Ford, approached the increasinghype around the maker movement as anopportunity to open up new markets and revampbroken economies and educational systems,borrowing both people and rhetoric (Ames andRosner 2014) from the decades-older ‘hacker’movement (Levy 1984; Thomas 2002). For instance,in his 2013 State of the Union Address, US PresidentBarack Obama lauded 3D printing and relatedmaker tools and approaches as enablers in therevamp of the American manufacturing industry to





guarantee “that the next revolution inmanufacturing is made in America.” The ShanghaiDivision of the Chinese government similarlyendorsed making starting in 2011, funding theconstruction of 100 makerspaces as so-called“innovation houses” (Lindtner, Hertz, and Dourish2014).This constituted a particularly opportunemoment for us to study in depth what motivatedstakeholders as diverse as Intel, local and nationalgovernments, policy makers, and passionate geeksto get on board with making and endorse it as anenabler of personal fulfillment, education, andeconomic and social change. As we will tease out inthis paper, we began to see how making andhacking were less about these kinds of radicaltransformations and more sites for ‘making do’without challenging larger institutional changes andneoliberal structures of capitalism, production, andinvestment.

Our emergent framing of ‘making do’ reflects afundamental commitment that our various projectshave made to interpret making/hacking as multiplysituated – geographically, economically, politically,materially, and historically. An engagement withmaking or hacking, wherever and however ithappens, does not arise out of nowhere, and to theextent that maker/hacker practice embodiesparticular approaches towards expertise, materials,community, and cycles of consumption, it does so inways that are specific to each locale in which it isenacted. What we see across our cases below is thatdespite our sites’ varying positions with regards toaccess to global networks of finance and resources,they all displayed a form of “coping,” a making-domentality not just towards technology production,but life and work writ large. While this plays out in avariety of ways, none conform to the utopianism orindividualized revolution as characterized by themaker and hacker mythology.

The bulk of this paper focuses on our five cases,each drafted by the researcher(s) who conductedthe fieldwork described. The order of the papersrepresents a narrative continuum frommarginalization to centrality in global hubs of

technoculture. The first two cases about Bangladeshand Taiwan describe the powerful dynamics ofdispossession for those along the very margins ofthe neoliberal order. The following cases of Vietnamand Paraguay reveal the dialectics ofcosmopolitanism and localism as new technologicalsites find themselves in closer proximity to globaltechno-culture. Lastly, the case of China shows thechanges to hacking and making ideologies as newgeographies assert their centrality. We concludewith a theoretical discussion of the common themesacross all of our cases.

METHODSWhile we have conducted our fieldworkindependently – each case below will state theauthors who were involved – we share ananthropological methodology and a critical-historicalorientation in interpretation. As such, we embraceour own reflexive position as ethnographer-participants in our fieldsites, and the narrativereflects this positionality, at times referring to theresearcher involved with that case specifically. Ateach site, the authors conducted ethnographicresearch that included full-time, immersiveparticipant observation and dozens of in situinterviews across several months (18 months inBangladesh, several months and counting in Taiwan,several months in Vietnam, seven months inParaguay, and several years and counting inShenzhen). All data were collected in compliancewith the authors’ respective institutional reviewboards. Initial case-specific analysis was done by therespective researchers, using grounded theorytechniques for the reflexive analysis of ethnographicdata that are standard in anthropology.

The common themes we discovered across our siteswere borne from discussions among ISTCparticipants about the dimensions of ‘making’ ineach of our fieldsites and what they might tell usabout the ‘maker movement’ more broadly. Wequickly realized that all of our narratives troubledthe utopian mythology of ‘making’ in some way, andwe used this as a lens to each revisit our own





fieldnotes and interview transcripts to explore thistheme more deeply in each of our sites. Thisintegrative method – of finding common threadsacross individual ‘cases’ and using these commonthreads to reflect on broader social theories – fitswith the ‘extended case method’ (Burawoy 1998). Inaddition to providing a robust ‘reflexive’ frameworkas an alternative to the demands of ‘positivist’science – demands that are incompatible withreflexivity – the extended case method provides ameans to integrate the grounded and specificfindings in each case into broader patterns of sociallife and social change – in our case, to reflect on themultifaceted practices of ‘making’ and ‘hacking’across the Global South as a way to trouble thehegemony of the ‘California Ideology’ and otherSilicon Valley-centered narratives.

HACKING INFRASTRUCTURE:DISPOSSESSION, RESISTANCE,AND ENGAGEMENT IN URBANBANGLADESHOur first case works toward visions of making thattake seriously their engagement with settled worldsof infrastructure, power and inequality, including intheir rawest and most brutal form. Over 18 months,authors Syed Ahmed, Nusrat Jahan, and StevenJackson worked with residents of the SouthBegunbari neighborhood, a low-income residentialarea of downtown Dhaka, Bangladesh within thewider Tejgaon industrial district that houses many ofthe populations serving more affluent parts of theurban core. Like similar districts around the world,large parts of South Begunbari are not supposed toexist. They hold no security in the eyes of the statefor whom the area and its residents are, simply,illegal. This precarity is matched in the lifeexperience of its residents, the vast majority ofwhom have gone through repeated experiences ofdisplacement and resettlement, whether of therural-to-urban variety widely prevalent inBangladesh today, or via forcible and/or economiceviction from other urban areas. Many of them face

eviction yet again as parts of the neighborhood arebulldozed to make way for the Hatirjheel WaterfrontDevelopment Project, set to remake the urbaninfrastructure and experience of Dhaka through newtransport arteries, flood control, waterfrontreclamation, and green space development.[1]

What does it mean to ‘make’ or to ‘hack’ – and tohack infrastructure – in an environment such asthis? As a largely illegal settlement, South Begunbariis not supposed to have infrastructure at all, at leastof the forms central to the modern infrastructuralideal: electricity, water, sewage, and road networks(Graham and Marvin 2001). But as an island in anadjacent sea of higher status and more formallyrecognized entities, infrastructure surrounds andpermeates South Begunbari. Roads and power linescrucial to the urban grid transect the area. Drainageand sewer mains central to urban flood control andwater purification run throughout. As most of thesesystems offer no formal entree or on-roads to theresidents of Begunbari themselves, these residentsdo what might be expected, connecting to extantinfrastructures through a variety of hacks, taps, andfixes. Cheap plastic pipes run overhead andunderfoot, bringing water and sewage back andforth between households and the formalgovernment lines. Electrical lines run up, along,between, and through buildings, forming a jerry-rigged network to which almost all of the localresidents are connected, and which registers in theofficial system as unaccounted-for drains and losses.Much of this work is done collaboratively, makingextensive use of a homegrown cohort of electricians,plumbers, carpenters and builders. Their skillslargely derive from work in the more formalinfrastructure sector – including even the large-scaledevelopment projects that have periodicallythreatened South Begunbari and similar areas withdisplacement. To walk through South Begunbaritoday is to see infrastructure on display, in ways setapart from both the oft-noted ‘invisibility’ ofinfrastructure (Star and Ruhleder 1995) and its moresymbolic and/or performative dimensions (Larkin2013).





The richness and ingenuity of this work is attestedto both by its effectiveness – South Begunbarifunctions well using these informal arrangements,hacks, and workarounds – and by the robustness ofthe informal infrastructure sector, which constitutesone of the most important and reliable economicengines of the neighborhood. Viewed in its mostpositive light, this is a story of creative technicalengagement that goes some (if small) way towardssoftening the stark lines of infrastructural exclusionotherwise in force here. This may not be hacking ormaking in its most typical or pristine form – at leastas measured against the types of hackingdiscourses that tend to dominate Silicon Valley-typecelebrations of the same – but it may in fact behacking in one of its more consequential andglobally common forms. For the same reason, it isprobably also a story of under-valorized innovation,and another argument for why western-centereddiscourses of innovation really ought to get outmore often.

But it is no less the case that this creative technicalengagement proceeds from a place of vulnerability,not strength. These hacks remain light and fragilecreatures, subject to all kinds of limits, reversals andbreakdowns. The cheap plastic pipes often leak andbreak, and water and sewage periodically overflowsonto the street. The voltage of the electricityfluctuates abruptly, and unpredictable andsometimes extended power outages characterizelife in the area. And complaints from nearby legalresidents often bring officials to check the lines anddemand the disconnection and dismantling of illegalconnections.

More broadly, while these hacks and fixes may helpextend the reach of infrastructure or blunt the sharpedge of its exclusion, at the end of the day they dolittle to change the underlying conditions ofmarginality and disempowerment from whichinfrastructural exclusions flow. For this reason, theylive more comfortably in the pragmatic languages of‘coping’ and ‘making do’ than in more heroic notionsof alternatives or resistance that are sometimes (if

erroneously) assigned to such sites. If ‘making,’ thisis making under (severe!) constraint. If hacking, it’shacking without heroism. If infrastructures, they areinfrastructures without standing – and all thevulnerability and precariousness that lack ofstanding implies.

MAKING THE DISPOSSESSED INTAIWANBuilding on the same marginalized kinds of ‘making’as featured in the first case, our second case,drawing on ongoing work by authors Shaowen andJeffrey Bardzell, further articulates a site of tensionbetween a decades-old instance of making-as-coping and the recently recognized and celebrated“Maker Movement” in Taiwan, showing how avalorization of the latter led to the dispossession ofthe former. At the conclusion of the Civil War inChina in 1949, several dozen Kuomingtang soldierswho fled to Taiwan established an off-the-gridcommune called Treasure Hill in the outskirts ofTaipei beside a water utility plant. Over the years,they attracted a number of workers from the waterplant to live there as well. Using natural andreclaimed materials, they built a few hundred smallhouses, (illegally) piped in water from the waterutility plant, farmed the land for vegetables, andkept pigs. Over several decades, they grew untilthere were more than 500 individuals in over 200households in the community in 1991.

In many ways, Treasure Hill is similar to SouthBegunbari, in that the community was largelyinvisible and dependent on creative hacks to tapinto city infrastructure, with similar disruptions ofservice and breakdowns faced by residents of SouthBegunbari. But Treasure Hill also differs in two keyways: first is that the village, located on thebackside of a steep hill facing away from the city,gradually became swallowed up by the city, and itsreal estate value went from negligible to significant.Second, and presumably related to the first, is thatthe Taipei City Government decided to intervene –not merely to make the residents disconnect their





illegal taps, but to renovate the village, bringing itup to code, and reincorporating it into the city.

The initial idea had much to recommend it. Couchedin the “Creative Taiwan” cultural creative industriespolicy initiative, Treasure Hill not only would bebrought to modern building and safety standards(crucial for a hillside community in a country subjectto major earthquakes and typhoons), but it wouldalso be integrated sustainably into Taipei’seconomy. The idea was to create a “Symbiotic ArtSettlement,” bringing together the poor residents ofTreasure Hill with young and rising artists. TreasureHill would be an urban park, a tourist attraction,creating opportunities for makers, artists, andresidents alike. It was to be a grand experiment in“urban acupuncture” – a carefully targetedintervention designed to improve the economic andcultural health of the city in a focused and skillful actof urban healing.

But between the initial planning and the eventualexecution of the renovation years later, thisoptimistic vision became a much less pleasantactuality. Two issues in particular madeimplementation more difficult than anticipated: first,the policy environment shifted, and the Treasure Hillrenovation was now subject to a new policyframework. Second, the government overestimatedthe number of residents who would be willing torelocate, which led to serious frictions betweengovernment and residents, including sometimesviolent protests and the eventual forceddispossession of many of the residents. Today,Treasure Hill is indeed an urban park and touristattraction. It hosts Taipei OpenLab, one of the mostconspicuous and successful maker spaces in thecountry. But for the new makers to move in, the old“squatters” – whose making included hundreds ofhouses, a utility system, a farm system, and muchmore – had to be moved out.

We read this case as a government policyimplementation intended to develop the economyby democratizing technology innovation through,among other things, maker labs in artist villages,

themselves renovated as tourist sites, bringingconsumers directly to the makers and artists. Itreveals some of the sociopolitical costs and ironiesinvolved in policy initiatives intended to supportmaking.

We begin by focusing on the link betweensupporting making and dispossession.Anthropologist Athena Athanasiou argues thatdispossession refers to “processes and ideologies bywhich persons are disowned and abjected bynormative and normalizing powers that definecultural intelligibility and that regulate thedistribution of vulnerability” (Butler and Athanasiou2013). In the case of Treasure Hill, the initialintentions of the government were to create asymbiotic society in which its impoverishedresidents would not be dispossessed, but would stayin Treasure Hill. The intention was to incorporate – inmultiple senses – this village back into the city:physically, socially, economically, andinfrastructurally. The original plans to create thissymbiotic community would have been among thefirst urban experiments of its kind in the world(Wang 2010; Chang 2004). However, thegovernment committed to the project without thebuy-in of residents it needed to proceed, andchanging politics and budgetary constraints appearto have decreased the benefits of the renovation,worsening its situation with the residents. Forexample, government promises to locate residentsin public housing turned sour when residents feltthat the public housing was worse than the housingthey built for themselves on Treasure Hill; that theywould be separated from one another, breaking upthe community; and when those eligible for thepublic housing turned out to be fewer than thenumber that the government needed to move out.

The precursor to this physical dispossession was aset of discursive moves by city planners that re-construed the residents into a new, anddisempowered, subject position. For the manyveterans living on Treasure Hill, their living bodiestransitioned during this period from “war heroes”and “community members” to “squatters” and





thence to “welfare recipients,” depending on howthe space was construed as a place (i.e., acommunity-settlement, a derelict structure needingintervention, and finally a cultural park). Once re-construed as squatters, the residents were subjectto government authority, paving the way for theirphysical removal from the site and eventualconversion into welfare recipients, living ingovernment housing for the poor.

Another way the government discursively containedresidents (intentionally or not) was to create a policynarrative around the creative economy and urbanrenewal, guided by a set of principles, institutions,and procedures that structurally disabled thearticulation of those residents who were seen asirrelevant to this economy. In this particular case,their voices were heard anyway, thanks to protestsand press coverage, the involvement of non-governmental organizations, and the work ofacademics in the Graduate Institute of Building andPlanning at National Taiwan University. Once heard,residents’ voices offered a powerful counter-narrative to the city government narrative, revealinggaps and confounds in the city’s narrative.

The residents’ counter-narrative showed that whatcounted as making must operate inside thedominant socioeconomic system in order to bemaking. That is, otherwise indiscernible acts ofcreativity and value creation were treated inradically different ways – one is valorized andinvested in, while the other is dismantled andremoved – in spite of the fact that both sets of“makers” worked with local materials, activelysought to build community through making,contributed towards the increasing real estate valueof the land, creatively innovated new designs, andoriented themselves in service of Taiwan.

One odd consequence is that the residents, by beingdispossessed of their homes on Treasure Hill andmoved to “legitimate” housing, had their citizenship“regained” – at the cost of starting at the bottomrung of society, but nevertheless within society.That is, through this process they were “made” into

citizens. This adds an interesting wrinkle todispossession theory: in the quote above,Athanasiou wrote that the dispossessed are“abjected,” and while that happened here, it wasnot the whole story. The “abject” refers to parts ofourselves that are no longer “ours” – sweat, urine,and even corpses after death – which commonlyrepel us. It is easy enough to see how the residentsbecame abjected as Treasure Hill became redefinedfrom derelict slum to cultural park, and indeed theywere expelled from the site during itstransformation. But their reincorporation into societyas (poor) citizens in housing projects suggests thatthey were not merely abject from the point of viewof the government.

Technological change is often celebrated, seen as asign of progress. Yet such change is oftenpredicated on doing away with older ways of life.The Treasure Hill renovation project dramatized thisdynamic in an especially visible way. But it also callsattention to ways that technological change can alsobe seen as contiguous with the past. Here we referto the similarities between the “making” of thevaunted “maker movement” motivating some ofthese policy initiatives and the “making” that peoplehave always done through ‘making do’ withavailable materials as part of everyday life. In thiscase, the “maker movement” seems to play bothways, posing as a revolutionary new paradigm ofcomputing on the one hand, while fortifying itspractices with skills and ways of life from the past.Unfortunately, as Treasure Hill shows, this discursivedouble-move has all too real body consequences, asthe old residents of Treasure Hill not only lost theirhomes but also lost their status as makers.

REPRODUCTIVE LOGICS OFFREE/OPEN SOURCE SOFTWAREIN VIETNAMOur third case turns to how the logics of ‘hacking,’upon which the logics of ‘making’ draw, areunderstood in a free/open source softwarecommunity in Hanoi, Vietnam, based on the ongoing





research of author Lilly Nguyen. In place of thelogics of software ‘production’ (focused contributingcode to the global free/open source softwaremovement), it finds that the evangelism andtranslation within Vietnam that this group engagedin could be better understood using logics ofreproduction, with elements of masculinizednational pride on the one hand and global yearningand marginalization on the other.

The ethnographic fieldwork featured here took placebetween 2009 and 2011, and consisted ofparticipation observation through attendingmeetings, organizing workshops and events,working on translations of free/open source softwareapplications such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Firefox,and socializing and “hanging out” with thiscommunity of geeks. Lilly wanted to betterunderstand the larger social and cultural work thatwas taking place through the technical practices ofproducing free/open source software.

To Lilly’s surprise, her initial assumptions andinterest in software production required immediatereconsideration when she very quickly discoveredthat the primary activities that brought thiscommunity together were evangelizing andtranslation. Both evangelism and translation weredecidedly non-technical practices and, at first blush,their socio-cultural qualities appeared to conform toreproductive logics; that is, of “merely” transferringfree/open source software from English intoVietnamese. In fact, this distinction of contributingnew code as the ur-labor of free/open sourcesoftware was held by many of the Vietnamesefree/open source software enthusiasts she met whoone day hoped to be able to “contribute back to theinternational community.” For now however, thiscommunity was focused primarily on bringingfree/open source software into Vietnam.

How then were we to make sense of these lowlyregarded practices? For this community of men (andthey were all male), their goals for free/open sourcesoftware was primarily oriented around establishinga national community. These men saw themselves

as representing Vietnam among the widerinternational community of free/open sourcesoftware advocates. In turn, these men sawthemselves as leaders and created a culture ofparochial masculinity around these technicalartifacts. The aesthetics of leadership coincided withthe gravitas of politicality, given the heavy-handedhistory and monopoly of the Communist Party on allthings labeled “politics.” As such, these men weremotivated by the prospect of social recognition athome, access to new ideas and the English-speakingworld, and most importantly to the validation andlegitimacy such access conferred. It is within thiscultural-discursive-aesthetic environment in whichevangelism and translation made sense for thesemen.

As a distinct rhetorical practice, evangelism allowedthese software advocates to enact their positions asmoral leaders. Evangelism aspires to impact, tochange in action, and to ultimately convert newfollowers. The work of organizing meetings andconferences, of preparing talks and demos was donewith the intent of promoting free/open sourcesoftware in the hopes of bringing the good word to abroader and unknowing Vietnamese public.Moreover, this evangelism conformed to scripts androles of masculine authoritative leadership. Oneparticular quality of this aesthetics of authoritativeleadership was a strident moralism. When Lillyinitially met Long, she was very impressed by hispoliteness. As a young man in his early 20s, Longwas looking to find his way in the world. As Long andLilly worked together on various free/open sourcessoftware projects, this moralism became much moreapparent and served as the primary lens in which hesaw the world.

Our work together consisted of planning and givinga talk on the One Laptop per Child project inVietnam. We disagreed sharply on the tone of thetalk. Long insisted that we had to outline a clear-cutstrategy for implementation and success. While myimpulse was to speak in less strident terms, Longhad a different idea. Sitting in the air-conditionedcomputer lab at the local university, Long spoke





quickly and vigorously, insisting that what theproject needed was a centralized group who wouldbe responsible for localizing the project in itsentirety. We debated this for several minutes.

What became clear as we spoke was his insistenceon a vision of teleological success that wassingularly defined. Long was convinced that withouta central group directing and organizing, the projectwould most certainly fail. As an aspiring advocate,Long felt that it was his job to provide a face ofexpertise and success. Long’s aesthetic judgmentconformed to the rhetorical habits of the largerVietnamese free/open source software community.Like the other software evangelists, Long aspired tobecome a leader and an authoritative figure in thecommunity. He very quickly learned to speak in thesame fashion as the older men.

In addition to evangelism, translation was a vitalpractice for this community. Translation wasimportant to provide Vietnamese-language softwarefor the majority of non-English speaking Vietnamesepeople. Like other technological evangelists, thesemen aimed to generate public awareness offree/open source software through translation in thehopes of growing a community of users. As the focusof their attention and time, prioritizing translationmade sense to the moral purpose of nation andfreedom.

However, the work of translation was problematic inthat it did little to render the Vietnamese free/opensource software community visible to the globalcommunity of free/open source software geeks.Free/open source software advocates regularlyrepeated the term ‘success’ in a future tense thatclearly indicated a concern with lagging behind therest of the world. During their public talks,evangelists oscillated between confidentperformances of teleological success with boldstatements like, “Free/open source software inVietnam will be a success!” to more ambivalentdiscussions of the challenges to free/open sourcesoftware in terms of competing with unlicensedsoftware and public unfamiliarity. The language of

success reflected a deep-seated anxiety forvalidation and recognition from the broader globalcommunity, though such recognition remainedevasive.

Though they identified with the rhetoric, values, andidentities of the global free/open source softwarecommunities they interacted with online andoccasionally met in person, many of the Vietnameseparticipants saw themselves as separate from theEnglish-speaking open source community, unseenand unappreciated. And neither evangelism nortranslation brought these ‘geeks’ the globalrecognition they sought. Both practices served totransform this group of men into distinctly nationalsocio-technical leaders (moral technologicalleaders), but kept them invisible to the globalcommunity. This lack of recognition was exemplifiedby an American free/open source softwaredeveloper who visited Vietnam during my fieldwork.This man worked for a notable free/open sourcesoftware company and happened to visit Vietnamfor a vacation. When Lilly asked him if his companyhad any specific interest in the Vietnamesefree/open source software community, he flatly saidno and explained, “They don’t contribute new code.”Here, the logics of production that defined his ownAmerican-centric worldview of free/open sourcesoftware served to reinforce the marginalization ofthose doing work for the free/open source softwarecommunity, but in ways that were not recognized as‘valid’ by him.

In conclusion, we want to articulate some questionsthis research raises. How can one reconcile theconundrum that these men face: their desire forglobal recognition and yet their attention andpreoccupation with practices that render theminvisible to these communities and thereforeincapable of such validation? More broadly, whatvision of ‘local’ is being presented here, and what isat stake? As this account illustrates, technologieslike free/open source software, though claiming totranscend culture, clearly shape how peoplenegotiate their cultural differences. We have seenthat the free/open source software movement can





‘other’ in a way that only allows for two options:either to overcome one’s locality to be able to speakfor all (through contributing code), or to speak onlyfrom your located position, but one that is devalued.This binary construction is certainly not unique tofree/open source software, but symptomatic of amuch larger problematic condition of culturaldifference in the supposed “post-racial” era we livein.

THE TENSIONS OF HACKERCOSMOPOLITANISM INPARAGUAYThis case draws on ethnographic engagements withprogrammers and students in Paraguay to explorethe ways in which hacker imaginaries emerge at theintersection of entrepreneurial practice, languagepolitics, innovation discourse, and national reform.Through seven months of fieldwork with a OneLaptop per Child (OLPC) project in Paraguay in 2010and 2013, author Morgan G. Ames found that theself-identified hackers involved with the project – asprogrammers, teachers, evangelists, or students –often navigated a tension between cosmopolitanismand local engagement, seeking to legitimate theirwork in relation to hacker circles in the UnitedStates on the one hand, but wanting to demonstratethe uniqueness of their approaches on the other.

As detailed in (Ames 2014, 2016, 2019), Paraguay’sOLPC project started strong in 2008, when twoyoung Paraguayans secured funding from a varietyof sources to bring OLPC’s “XO” laptops to Caacupé,a provincial town of 43,000 about 50km east of thecapital Asunción. Under the banner of “ParaguayEduca,” they distributed 4000 laptops to all studentsand teachers in ten schools in Caacupé in spring2009, and another 6000 to all students and teachersin the remaining 36 schools in the area in spring2011. They invested heavily in social and physicalinfrastructure, most notably full-time teachertrainers in every school to promote laptop use in theclassroom, and were celebrated as one of the mostsuccessful OLPC projects. But the project all but died

when they were unable to secure adequate fundingpast 2012, downsizing to a skeleton staff anddiscontinuing most of their initiatives.

One of the founders, Raúl, was a skilled and hard-working programmer – and, Morgan was told,grandson of a prominent Paraguayan politician. Herecruited Martin, an equally-skilled friend from hisalma mater, a private Catholic university inAsunción, to do software development for ParaguayEduca in the early days of the non-profitorganization’s work. The two were among only ahandful to contribute code ‘upstream’ to the mainsoftware build. Illustrating the inherent ‘making-do’nature of software development as a practice, theytested new software builds on a sixth-grade class inCaacupé. They filed and fixed bugs and addedfeatures that the Boston-based development teamdid not think of, not being in the ‘field’ themselves:among other contributions, they developed acomprehensive open-source inventory system totrack laptops and repairs(https://github.com/tchx84/olpc-inventario), whichhas been used in other OLPC projects.

Though South American programming and open-source communities had been gaining strength andvisibility for some time (Takhteyev 2012; Chan2014), Raúl and Martin’s contributions attracted theattention of OLPC developers and the internationalhacker community, some of whom spent time withthem in Paraguay. First, Daniel Drake, a Britishhacker who had just left OLPC as the organizationfell apart from infighting, volunteered for ParaguayEduca for six months in 2009, programming withRaúl and Martin and taking intensive Spanishlessons. He was followed by a nine-monthvolunteering stint by Italian-born hacker and formerOLPC employee Bernie Innocenti in 2010,overlapping my fieldwork. Finally, Walter Bender,OLPC’s former President of Software and Contentwho had left to independently develop the laptop’ssoftware in 2008, made several brief visits as well,one during my 2010 fieldwork.

Though Raúl and Martin were skilled software





developers, we attribute this attention to more thanthe quality of their code. What was remarkableabout these two programmers was how similar theywere in interests and lifestyle to programmers inSilicon Valley, where Morgan has lived since 1999. Inaddition for their passion for One Laptop per Childand open-source software, they loved watchinganime and made nerdy technical jokes. Theyreferred to one another by their online handles(‘rgs,’ ‘tincho’). Their pseudo-apolitical technicalworldview, epitomized by the “Hacker Ethic”(Thomas 2002), was immediately legible to Morgan,a former programmer whose social circles remainedprogrammer-heavy. As part of the cosmopolitanelite in Asunción accustomed to global travel – andproficient English-speakers – Raúl and Martinstudied and worked in Europe after their stints withParaguay Educa. Raúl then moved to Silicon Valleyto work for Facebook and Twitter, and Martinreturned to Asunción to contribute to OLPC’ssoftware and mentor students through GoogleSummer of Code.

This group also attracted the attention of students inCaacupé, who were otherwise excluded from thewell-connected and powerful circles in the capital inwhich the founders ran. In 2010, less than tenpercent of Caacupé residents had computers(though most had television), and the most commonemployment by far was subsistence farming. A smallsubset of students (numbering perhaps one dozen,all male but one) who were eager to please thesepowerful figures found this contact with Asunción’selite and international visitors exhilarating. Based ontheir experiences, many of them said they aspiredto be ‘hackers’ themselves, pinning onto thisimaginary less the specific politics of free softwareor the Hacker Ethic – which were largely outside oftheir experiences and concerns – and more apathway to travel, financial security, or societalenrichment. At the same time, they lacked theresources to pay for education or find employmentoutside of their provincial town. Though OLPC andParaguay Educa told these students that all theyneeded was to work hard, this ignored the intenselyhard labor that many in the town did every day, with

no betterment in their prospects. In short, they bothvastly underestimated the structural and societalobstacles in the way of a future in ‘hacking’ forthese students.

One precocious family epitomized both this potentialand these limitations. When Morgan met them, theelder son and daughter, in seventh and sixth gradesrespectively, showed her the video game they wereprogramming in Scratch. Their mother’s perceptivecomments about laptops, media, learning, and childdevelopment suggested a home culture rich incritical thinking, and she was one of the most ardentboosters of the laptop program. However, she wastoo embarrassed of her house, which she said wasonly half-built, to let Morgan interview them athome. She showed her pictures of exposed rebarwhere walls were meant to go up, of rickety bunkbeds where her children slept (and where one of thefamily’s beloved OLPC laptops accidentally met itsdemise). While she hoped for the best for herchildren and let them believe the mythology thathard work could lead to cosmopolitan hackerfutures, she confessed that she suspected that theywould follow in her footsteps: a local teacher, withfive children by her thirtieth birthday, who routinelyworked twelve-hour days. To her, the laptops andcritical thinking were not means to a better life butends in themselves, a way of ‘making do’ with thecircumstances they found themselves in.

The consequences of this marginalization, and theshallowness of the recommendations to overcome it,was particularly salient at a programmingcompetition Morgan observed in November 2013.The two teams from Caacupé were the only onesfrom public schools and the only ones from outsideAsunción. Though the students had arisen at 4am totake public buses to the capital, they were buoyant,talking about how they would leverage their first-prize trip to California into jobs in the States andprospects for their families. Morgan’s hopes forthem were much more subdued, as she had beenwatching them struggle to spell basic Pythoncommands like “print” and “input” in English forseveral weeks. Their mentors waited outside during





the competition itself, then joined the competitorsupstairs for some talks while the winners weredetermined.

Several Paraguayan entrepreneurs spoke abouttheir apps and gave advice while we waited. Much ofit boiled down to “Learn English,” as not only theprogramming cultures visible in Latin America butmost programming languages themselves wereAnglo-centric (and, indeed, Morgan had seen first-hand how much of a handicap not knowing Englishwas for programming in Python). At the same time,they celebrated the submissions that Paraguayanprogrammers had made to regional app contests.Assuming that all in the room were from elitebackgrounds like they were, they spoke ofleveraging private school educations into strong SATscores, and strong SAT scores into college in theUnited States or Europe. Nobody mentioned themany barriers – financial, social, gendered – thatmight be in the way (nor did the Caacupé teams feelat all strange that their teams had no girls). Whenresults were announced, it was one of the privateschool teams who came in first – the team that hadwon the previous year.

This account points to a multifaceted ‘hacker’identity in Paraguay, yet still one that is deeplyinfluenced by privilege, infrastructure, and proximityto cosmopolitan cores and international networks.While anthropology has deconstructed notions ofcenter and periphery (Rouse, n.d.; Vessuri 1987),the technological elite in Paraguay re-inscribed theircentrality and the peripherality of those they werehelping through their project. Telling, too, was howParaguay Educa othered those they were helping.They were proudly Paraguayan, but the Paraguaythey lived in – with full-time staff and manicuredgardens behind glass-topped fences – was a worldapart. While they were passionate about the projectand wanted to do good in the world, they gossipedabout children’s unwashed faces and lack of shoes,or the trash along the sides of streets in a town withno garbage service. They thought nothing of pullingchildren out of school or of interrupting classroomtime for photo opportunities.

THE SHENZHEN IDEOLOGYAll four of the cases above have discussed howmaking and hacking practices may be marginalizedin various ways, whether locally, globally, or both.Our fifth and final case turns to author SilviaLindtner’s ongoing work in Shenzhen, China, whichin recent decades has shifted from a marginalposition to the center of global electronicsmanufacturing. At the heart of this shift is the highlysuccessful manufacturing culture of shanzhai (山寨),which is fundamentally a culture of ‘making do,’even as others attempt to overlay more utopianimaginaries on it. Drawing from long-termethnographic research about making, hacking andmanufacturing in China since 2010, Silvia exploresthis remake of the city of Shenzhen once known as asite of cheap and low quality production as the new“Silicon Valley for Hardware.” Since 2012, withcollaborators at Hacked Matter(www.hackedmatter.com), she set out to study thevarious cultures of making and entrepreneurshipthat intersect in the South of China. She found thatwhat attracts hardware enthusiasts and corporateinvestors to Shenzhen is a unique manufacturingculture that in many ways shares the values andprinciples of open source hardware enthusiasts, butdiffers in its mentality of ‘making do’ – making andhacking out of necessity, without the ideologicaltrappings of freedom or empowerment oftendiscussed in the West.

In 1979 the Chinese government declared Shenzhena Special Economic Zone (SEZ). Coinciding with theoutsourcing boom in the West, Shenzhen’s SEZstatus attracted foreign companies to open upmanufacturing facilities in the South of China. Overthe years, these manufacturing facilities grew in sizeand number, and in the shadows of large-scalecontract manufacturers emerged a dense web ofmanufacturing businesses, catering towards lesswell-known or no-name clients with smallerquantities. With roots in piracy and copycatproduction, this manufacturing culture was oftenreferred to as shanzhai in Chinese (Lindtner,Greenspan, and Li 2015). Shanzhai manufacturing is





characterized by speed to market, enabled by aculture of open sharing applied to manufacturing.Ideation, prototyping, and design happen alongsidethe manufacturing process, and products aredesigned in relation to the demands of a fast-changing market. Rather than spending months oryears deliberating over the next big hit, shanzhaiproducers build on existing platforms and processes,iterating in small steps. In this way, shanzhai bringsnew products to the market with remarkable speed.For instance, a new mobile phone can go fromconceptual designs to production-ready in 29 days.

Even as this manufacturing network grew, fewtechnology researchers or people in the informationtechnology media sector paid much attention toShenzhen. This began to change around 2012, whena growing number of makers, hackers,entrepreneurs, artists, designers, and geeks begantraveling to the coastal metropolis, often motivatedby the aim to turn their maker prototypes and ideasinto end-consumer products. Well-known examplesof these made-in-China devices are the virtualreality goggles Oculus Rift, recently bought byFacebook for over two billion USD, or the Pebblesmartwatch. The local government and many of thecapitalists and entrepreneurs who invest in theregion – Intel being one of them – promoteShenzhen as the “Silicon Valley for Hardware.”

In 2013, Intel announced investment of 100 millionUSD in Shenzhen’s “China Technology Ecosystem(CTE),” Intel’s nomenclature for shanzhai. This wasin response to the crucial role that Chinese andTaiwanese companies such as MTK, Allwinner, andRockchip played in enabling shanzhai production byproviding affordable yet powerful chip technology.These companies had significantly grown in marketshare, overtaking Intel in the non-iPad tabletmarket. As visions of making as site of innovationspread, Shenzhen has become known as thetechnocultural ecosystem that was meant to helpdeliver on the promises of the global makermovement by elevating local manufacturing culture.Part of my research then was motivated by aninterest to understand what it was about Shenzhen

and about shanzhai production in particular thatcaught the attention of big internationalcorporations, governments, and independentmakers and entrepreneurs.

Silvia found that at the heart of shanzhai was thecreation of so-called “public boards,” or gongban (公板), which were production-ready circuit boardsdesigned for either end-consumer electronics orindustry applications. For instance, one of theregion’s largest distribution houses produces about130 gongban per year. It did not sell any of them,but gave them out to potential customers for free,alongside a list of components that and designschematics that went into making the board. Thecompany then made money by selling thesecomponents. As such, it was in their interest tosupport as many companies as possible to come upwith creative “skins” and “shells” (called gongmo inChinese) compatible with their boards. Theircustomers would take a gongban of their liking as is,or would build on top of it. The boards weredesigned so that the same board could go into manydifferent casings – for instance, one board couldpower many different smart watches and anotherboard many differently shaped mobile phones. Inother words, the gongban public board functionsimilar to open source hardware platforms popularin the maker movement (such as Arduino), butrather than supporting consumer tinkering, it wasused as part of the manufacturing process.

As also described in (Lindtner, Greenspan, and Li2015), several China-based makers andentrepreneurs have begun to mobilize Shenzhen’shistory and current transformation of shanzhaiculture to challenge Western claims of what countsas making and hacking, what counts astechnological expertise, and what counts asinnovation. They articulate what we might call the“Shenzhen ideology.” In many ways reminiscent ofthe articulation work performed by hackers, writers,capitalists and artists from the West Coast of theUnited States in the 1960s and 1970s that defined aparticular “heterogeneous orthodoxy for the cominginformation age; the Californian Ideology” (Barbrook





and Cameron 1996), the makers, writers, capitalistsand artists who travel to Shenzhen today are in theprocess of articulating and so doing remaking thecity and its history of computing from a place ofcheap copycat production into a global hub ofhardware innovation. This remake is envisioned tobe accomplished by combining the pragmatistentrepreneurship culture of shanzhai with theplayfulness and creativity of the maker ethos. Thesevisions of an updated manufacturing culture, freedof its copycat history, have proliferated and figure ininternational mass media outlets, blogs produced bystart-ups, and texts written by venture capitalists;today Shenzhen is often portrayed as the crux toimplementing one of the central visions of the globalmaker movement – the rise of the third industrialrevolution. With taglines such as “The Silicon Valleyfor Hardware” and “Hollywood for Makers,” thesearticulations of the Shenzhen Ideology have not onlybrought international media coverage and foreigninvestment, but have also drawn attention fromlocal and national Chinese governments interestedin the city’s capacity to build up new incubatorprograms, cultivate a generation of entrepreneurs,and create mass innovation – or a “mass makerspace” (众创空间) as the 2015 government policy iscalled.

Despite the co-option of the term in globaltechnology discourse, shanzhai is not a story fromthe margins. Shanzhai production is a multi-millionUSD global business deeply embedded incontemporary processes of industrial production. In2014 alone, 2 million smart bracelets and 1 millionsmart watches were made in Shenzhen anddistributed to markets across China, Africa, India,South America, Europe and the United States, wherethey often sold as no-name brands in Wal-Mart orbuilt up new brands such as Xiaomi and Wiko. Thecreativity of shanzhai production lies in its approachto business rooted in the open production describedabove that has already drastically shaped globalmarkets of trade, finance, and electronicconsumption. Shanzhai culture challenges any linearstory of China’s progress as embodied in theimaginary of Shenzhen as the “Silicon Valley of

Hardware,” and questions dominant stories of whatcounts as design, innovation, and techentrepreneurialism – and where it is to be located. Itis yet to be seen if shanzhai culture will resist themost recent call for its innovation upgrade andpurge of its copycat history.

CONCLUSION: WHITHER MAKINGAND HACKING?Making and hacking have long been understood inrelation to a particular, often Western-centric,technological imaginary (Ames and Rosner 2014).With its origins in a countercultural ethos, makingand hacking are envisioned to disrupt existingmodes of capitalist production in order to open uppossibilities for new technologies and a new set ofplayers. While making and hacking have beencritiqued as sites of class elitism and genderinequality (Dunbar-Hester 2008; Hicks 2013; Amesand Rosner 2014; Ames et al. 2014; Toombs,Bardzell, and Bardzell 2015), their origins are rarelycontested.

In this article, we have explored alternate historiesand practices of making and hacking that do notinherently equate them with countercultural logicsof the West. Though our examples may come fromthe global margins, we argue that all practices ofmaking and hacking, even ones that appear toconform to utopian rhetoric, are in fact ‘making do.’This avoids an overreliance on framing makinginherently as ‘countercultural’ and rejects the binarydebates of maker/hacker culture as either adisruptive force or co-opted into the system.Instead, in the cases presented here, people balancehope and precarity, agency and marginalization –they cope with the situations at hand, using thematerials and competencies available to them.

What does this tell us about hacking and making inSilicon Valley, often considered the center of hackerand maker culture? We argue that even those at thecenter are learning to cope with the alienation thatcan accompany the reorganization of production and





work practices. There, too, we see elements ofmarginalization and exclusion – regarding evictions(e.g. The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project 2014),soaring costs of living (e.g. Kim-Mai Cu 2015),gender/race inequity (e.g. Ryssdal 2015), or mentalhealth (e.g. Eisner 2015; Huang 2015), for instance –and of ‘making do’ with these circumstances.‘Making do’ may seem more apparent at the so-called periphery, but there are elements of makingdo in all practices of making and hackingeverywhere.

Thus, our framing of ‘making do’ reflects anunderstanding of making/hacking as multiplysituated – geographically, economically, politically,materially, and historically. Each of our casesdemonstrate that an engagement with making orhacking emerges as a response to specificcircumstances, and one that looks both backwardstowards prior experiences and forwards towardsconcrete futures and/or alternative aspirations. Forexample, we saw in Taiwan and China that asmaking is being increasingly monetized, practicesand sets of expertise that were previouslyconsidered as ‘backwards’ or even holding thenation back in modernization processes (such ascraft or manufacturing) are now reframed asprogressive, empowering and liberating. At thesame time, other kinds of making/hacking, such asinfrastructure hacking in Bangladesh, hacking at themargins in Paraguay, or “reproductive” hacking inVietnam, remain outside these progressive andliberating frames.

The empirical cases that we have presented allow usto theorize what is implied by our shift of attentionfrom ‘making’ to ‘making do.’ First, it signals theway that making (and hacking before it) emergeswithin specific contexts and with particularcharacteristics that embed it in its locale.Making/hacking, as a practice, responds to localneeds, is adapted to local topographies of materialsand practices, and yet unfolds in relation to globalimaginaries. It makes use of local physical,economic, and human resources. It is embedded inlocal circuits of people, objects, capital, and skill,

and it takes on a particular character within a locallandscape of production forms. This is not to dismissthe contemporary hype that surrounds making andhacking that we alluded to at the outset, of acountercultural technological vanguardism andsavior of broken educational systems andeconomies – our point is that we need to see thisitself as a local and contingent account of making.Our examination of other makings highlights thehistorical, political, and economic specificities ofthose Western accounts.

Second, it signals that acts of making are neversingular nor complete. ‘Making do’ implies a senseof approximation, partiality, and most importantlyongoing-ness. It is done and done again, completeonly for current needs, and part of a cycle ofsuccessive approximation and accommodation. Bymoving away from a focus on the results of making –for example, a packageable technology or servicethat can be the basis of a startup, subsequentlybought out by a major corporation, and then massproduced and marketed – and towards one ofmaking as an accommodation to immediate needs –themselves in flux and never fully “solved” – ourscope includes more of object lifecycles and widerassemblages. This allows us to expand our scope torepair and repurposing, and to observe how objectsare brought together to produce new kinds ofcollective accomplishments in which individual actsof making accomplish only a part of a never-completed whole.

Third, and consequently, ‘making do’ lets us see thewider frame within which hacking and making exist.We might see hacking/making here not as analternative to traditional forms of market exchangeand cycles of production and consumption, but asexisting in parallel – and indeed in intimateconnection – to regular markets. In the U.S. andabroad, making is viewed as a significant consumermarket, where makers buy kits and other materials,while maker events (e.g., hackathons and makerfaires) are scouted by industry for employable talentand/or investment. By ‘making do’ we do not meana world set apart, but an alternative configuration





that accompanies other forms of production andexchange.

What spans all our sites is a glimpse at how peopledraw upon technology production, making, andhacking to situate themselves within their ownshifting terrains as well as within a neoliberal worldorder. Making in particular takes place whether ornot we celebrate or mythologize it, as we saw inDhaka. Indeed, it may be transformed by those whoare able to articulate its meaning for global markets,commodities and innovation culture as evidentamong the ‘makers’ we observed in Taipei andShenzhen. At the same time, those involved inhacking and making may also be responding to ormaking sense of the global discourses around theiractions and may take up the banner of hopethemselves, in whatever local and contingent waymakes sense to them, as we saw in Hanoi andAsunción. Across our research sites, innovation andcreativity were promoted by politicians andcorporations alike as a key strategy towardseconomic development. And yet the instances ofmaking and hacking that we discussed do not fitneatly into this unifying rhetoric of a globalizedfuture of makers.

Finally, we strongly resist any reading of the makingand hacking cultures we study as more authentic ormore legitimate sites of production. All exist within,and with (at least some) awareness of, globaldiscourses around hacking and making.Craftsmanship and ‘making do’ may be idealized bymakers and hackers themselves (as visible in ourTaiwan, Vietnam, Paraguay, and China casestudies), and these makers may even appropriate“native” making practices into their branding andmarketing campaigns. By focusing on diverse formsof ‘making do,’ we likewise break with the artificialbinary between the hands-on production that, forinstance, a hardware start-up performs and theproduction a craftsman or repair worker performs.Certainly, we acknowledge that tech entrepreneursand repair workers are positioned differently inrelation to global networks of funding and access tosocial and cultural resources. Nevertheless, making

practices – although also positioned differently –necessarily unfold in relation to and through localand global contingencies in all cases.

Throughout, we have attempted to destabilize themyth that making and hacking is best understoodprimarily in relation to Western political and socialconcerns. By showcasing the wide variety ofactivities that can fit under the rubric of ‘making’and ‘hacking,’ we posit that these activities are notpurely mechanisms of empowerment (as commonlyenvisioned), but also mechanisms for positioningoneself in relationship to serious (and seriouslydisempowering) constraints, including thoseassociated with neoliberal modes of governance aspracticed across a growing range of global contexts.We neither wish to romanticize modes and culturesof technology production driven by necessity nor dowe argue that our sites are simply yet another formof innovation. Rather, our goal has been todemonstrate how making across our sitesfunctioned as a mode of intervening in andpositioning oneself in relation to existing social,economic and political structures.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Morgan G. Ames, PhD, is a lecturer in the Schoolof Information and the interim Associate Director ofResearch of the Center for Science, Technology,Medicine & Society at the University of California,Berkeley. Morgan’s research explores the culturalpolitics of technology, the ideologies behind high-tech innovation, and the role of utopianism in thetechnology world. Her current projects focus on theimaginary of the “technical child” as fertile groundfor this utopianism. Her first book, The CharismaMachine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptopper Child, is due out from MIT Press in 2019. Email:[email protected] Lindtner is an assistant professor at theUniversity of Michigan in the School of Information,with a courtesy appointment in the Penny W.Stamps School of Art and Design. Lindtner’sresearch and teaching interests include innovationand technology entrepreneurship, making andhacking cultures, shifts in digital work, labor,industry, policy, and governance. Lindtner drawsfrom more than eight years of multi-sitedethnographic research, with a particular focus onChina’s shifting role in transnational and global tech

mailto:[email protected]





production alongside research in the United States,Taiwan, and Africa, She is currently writing a bookon the culture and politics of making andtransnational tech entrepreneurship in urban China.Email: [email protected] Bardzell is Professor of Informatics in theSchool of Informatics, Computing, and Engineeringat Indiana University and the Affiliated Faculty of theKinsey Institute. Bardzell pursues a humanisticresearch agenda within the research and practice ofHuman Computer Interaction (HCI). A commonthread throughout her work is the exploration of thecontributions of feminism, design, and social scienceto support technology’s role in social change. She isthe co-editor of Critical Theory and InteractionDesign (MIT Press, forthcoming) and co-author ofHumanistic HCI (Morgan & Claypool, 2015).Email: [email protected] Bardzell is an Professor of Informatics andDirector of the HCI/Design program in the School ofInformatics, Computing, and Engineering at IndianaUniversity–Bloomington. His research on emergingsocial computing practices includes critical-empiricalstudies on maker communities in the United Statesand Asia, intimate and sexual interaction, and onlinecreative communities. A common thread throughoutthis work is the use of aesthetics—including thehistory of criticism, critical theory, and analyticaesthetics—to understand how concepts, materials,forms, ideologies, experiential qualities, andcreative processes achieve coherence in designobjects. He is co-editor of Critical Theory andInteraction Design (MIT Press, in press) and co-author of Humanistic HCI (Morgan and ClaypoolSynthesis Lectures in Human-Centered Informatics).Email: [email protected] Nguyen is an assistant professor in theDepartment of Women’s and Gender Studies atUNC-Chapel Hill and adjunct assistant professor atthe School of Information and Library Science. Herresearch explores the cultural politics of ethnicity,expertise, and information technologies intransnational circulation. With a focus on Vietnamand the Vietnamese diaspora, her work asks howtenable is difference as a value to uphold whenmarginalized people seek to establish themselves as

modern subjects, as equivalents, as legitimateequals through the work of informationtechnologies. She explores these questions throughanthropological fieldwork of software production andarchival memorializing. Email: [email protected] Ishtiaque Ahmed is an Assistant Professor inthe Department of Computer Science at Universityof Toronto. He builds novel connections betweencomputation and ethnography to strengthen thevoice of marginalized populations around the world.With expertise in Computer Science, DevelopmentSociology, and Design Theory, he has been workingwith different marginalized communities inBangladesh and India for the last eight years. Email:[email protected] Jahan Mim (Bengali: নুসরাত জাহান) is anarchitect and lecturer in the Department ofArchitecture at the Bangladesh University ofEngineering and Technology (BUET) in Dhaka,Bangladesh. She has won awards for her work onlow-cost housing model design. Email:[email protected] J. Jackson is an Associate Professor in theDepartment of Information Science and Departmentof Science and Technology Studies at CornellUniversity, with additional graduate fieldappointments in Communication and Public Affairs.His research connects contemporary questions ininformation science to theoretical andmethodological traditions in the critical, interpretive,and historical social sciences. He is especiallyinterested in the messy and uncertain moments inwhich new technologies meet unsettled ethical andlegal terrains, and the processes and controversiesby which these uncertainties get reduced, codified,and normalized as practice and culture. Email:[email protected] Dourish is Chancellor’s Professor ofInformatics and Associate Dean for Research in theDonald Bren School of Information and ComputerSciences at UC Irvine, with courtesy appointments inComputer Science and Anthropology. He also holdsthe position of Honorary Senior Fellow in Computingand Information Systems at the University ofMelbourne. His research focuses primarily onunderstanding information technology as a site of












social and cultural production; his work combinestopics in human-computer interaction, socialinformatics, and science and technology studies. Heis the author of several books, most recently “TheStuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities ofInformation” (MIT Press, 2017). He is a Fellow of theACM, a Fellow of the BCS, a member of the SIGCHIAcademy, and a recipient of the AMIA DianaForsythe Award and the CSCW Lasting ImpactAward. Email: [email protected]

[1] The dynamics of this situation and what it meansfor understandings of technology, mobility andinfrastructure are explored at greater length in(Ahmed, Mim, and Jackson 2015).



Making or making do? Challenging the mythologies of making and …morganya.org/research/Ames_JoPP_making.pdf · 2018. 7. 2. · that hacker culture is in fact deeply indebted to the

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