Abstract
Hackerspaces marks a brave attempt by Sarah Davies to get to grips with the dizzyingly heterogeneous set of phenomena subsumed these days under terms such as hacking and making. With particular relevance for cultural geographers, it explores this area through the diverse and rapidly proliferating spaces and workshops in which these practices find themselves enacted, giving an account of 30 interviews, spread across visits to 12 hackerspaces, in four regions of the United States (Phoenix, the Bay Area, Boston and New York). By engaging with makers face-to-face, Davies sidesteps some of the pitfalls which I have found to characterise much popular writing about the maker movement – unwarranted hyperbole around technologies such as three-dimensional (3D) printing, the predominance of Great Man narratives and quasi-evangelical talk of a ‘new industrial revolution’ – to focus instead on the all-too-often lacking voices of ordinary users of the spaces themselves.
Most importantly, Davies holds in productive tension the fact that such spaces often fail to live up to the radicalism often supposed to inhere within them while remaining attuned to the fact that these can be remarkable sites of creativity and grassroots social experimentation nonetheless. The spaces may appear to reproduce radically unsustainable networks of production and consumption, for example, with many materials and technologies used by makers obtained cheaply from Chinese factories. As Davies notes,
few people had specific examples of how local, societal or international change was being triggered by hacking and making activities [. . . ] It was much easier to locate the power of hacking and making at the level of personal change and empowerment. (pp. 126–127)
Furthermore, the book is rightly attuned to the skewed social dynamics (gendered and otherwise) which find themselves reproduced in these spaces, with varying degrees of acknowledgement from participants themselves. On the contrary, however, Hackerspaces foregrounds the fact that the spaces visited in the book present a generous, open and valuable commitment to the maintenance of public space for creative endeavour, often through practical grassroots ‘do-ocratic’ organising (Chapter 4), contributing to collective projects for ‘the promotion of a social good’ (p. 171).
The resulting monograph – a breezy and accessible read – shows many of the strengths and (as Davies herself admits) weaknesses of ‘classic’ qualitative research based on semi-structured interviews confined to one cultural context. As such, while Davies has made an admirable attempt to capture the past and present of hackerspaces, cultural geographers might appreciate more lively insight into the stories of actual projects undertaken or a more immersive sense of the lived experience of the spaces themselves to supplement the summation of verbal accounts extracted from interviews. Those looking for theoretical discussion may also be left somewhat disappointed. The book largely steers clear of this area, aside from brief forays into Stebbins’ notion of ‘serious leisure’ and Putnam’s ‘social capital’, choosing instead to focus on establishing a sense of the meanings and social ethos that infuse hackerspaces and probe the apparent compulsion to tinker with material artefacts which seem to underpin their success over the past decade. With making increasingly being appropriated and re-appropriated – whether assimilated into more ‘mainstream’ institutions or through the creation of valuable markets – the book admirably sets the scene for what is likely to be a contested future.