Listen, I get it. I get that there is a "newness" to this technology enabled sub culture of do-it-yourselfedness that is leading people to do some very creative and remarkable things. And so now we have this club called the "maker movement" and they are making cool things in their "maker spaces."
But, despite the hipster pretensions, making things is nothing new. And it's also not a return to anything. It's not a recapturing of some lost era. There was no mythical time when we stopped making stuff and then discovered that technology could let us do it again. What we make and how we make it vary over time. But we have always been making. That's what humans do. As much as our relentless desire for discovery and our ceaseless search for love, creating things is baked into what it means to be us. Art, ideas, weapons, cathedrals, clothes, tools, robots, whatever - we make stuff.
By all means, let's celebrate creativity and our ability to make things. But celebrate it for what it is - not a brand, or a clique or a start-up sector, but simply part of the essence of the continued arc of human experience. So it has ever been and so it shall ever be. Wherever you stand, the space around you in that moment is a maker space. We have made new tools that let us make new and different things, but the whole notion of making things is not a new movement. We just used to call it being human.
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