Thomas Lord [05.18.07 11:43 AM]

This is one of those things that O'Reilly has a hand in (both directly and in influence over the larger "movement") that I think is pretty darn good (not that anyone asked).

It reminds me of the 1970s when, in a (relatively speaking) entertainment-media desert there were fasion trends in macrame, carpentry, electronics hacking, etc. A lot of that came off as a kind of "retro," back-to-basics drive -- a marketing spin that I think, in retrospect, points to a kind of growing generational awareness (at the time) that, compared even to their parents, they were alienated from their labor and environment to an unprecedented degree.

It didn't work. We didn't see a nationwide explosion of small communes and thriving craft markets. We did see the next generations not only entering into the same extreme degree of alientation but -- much more alarmingly -- having no memory of exposure to the grand and great-grand grandparents generations during which the alienation wasn't quite that bad ---- that is, the younger ones have no clue of what an alternative might look like.

One large factor in the Alienation is the role of the media: the increasing precision of advertising, the competing but few and elite hegemonies which dominate content, and the increasingly 2-way nature (advertising in one direction, surveillance data in the other).

It is refreshing and hopeful, therefore, when part of that media is redirected towards (one hopes) part of a cure. If a return to or growth into basic skills, capabilities, liberties, and community is the opposite of an alienation that is substantially caused by media, it is an interesting inversion (and a nice hack) to see media weilded as an instrument of promoting basic skills, capabilities, liberties, and community. Reminds me a little bit of the way the GPL weilds copyright towards the end of restraining the (specifically anti-libertarian) effect of copyright.

One should be concerned, scanning exhibitors, of the hint of cynicism, absurdism, withdrawl and resignation at such a purportedly skills-based event. On the other hand, perhaps that is a cautious irony, and nothing more (modulo the occaisional "vacate or remedy" notice).

At the end of the day:

Any effort that results in a net increase of the number of kids who weild blow torches with some measurable degree of skill and awareness -- or equivalently, causes some dad somewhere to contemplate improving the quality of his family's material life by taking up knitting --- any effort like that can't be entirely bad.

-t