JEFF: You can get all the pieces separately? JANE: Oh sure. Zillions. Many as I want.

JEFF: And they’re cheap?

JANE: (Scoffing) What’s cheaper than plywood?

And I got a laser cutter right next to my laser printer.

JEFF: (Gazing at ceiling) That’s a new lamp up there, isn’t it?

JANE: (Preening) You like it?

JEFF: It’s a giant fanfold thing made out of your face.

JANE: Yeah, that’s called “profile cutting.” The barriers to entry are so low! I just downloaded the starter kit, put my face against my scanner sideways, then kinda rotated myself. So now the lamplight shines out of my eyes, but in a tasteful rose-colored shade of Perspex.

JEFF: You sell any of those?

JANE: My mom bought one.

JEFF: My mom’s my best customer, too. How is Aunt Susan? I haven’t seen your mom around much lately.

Illustration by Damien Correll

JANE: That’s because Mom’s gotten so deep into the post-consumer alteration of all her IKEA goods. It’s not just about the community sharing of furniture plans — she is much more into the remixing, the mashup scene, you know, surface glossing, alternate parts. I keep telling her, “Mom, that’s close to piracy! You need to really master the tolerances and the material behaviors!” But, you know, my mom’s old-fashioned.

JEFF: She’s still way into Second Life, huh?

JANE: They call it “Second Retirement.”

Ponoko is super-friendly to makers, and one naturally wishes them well. But my greater concern is Ponoko’s cousin: that visibly heaving groundswell of entities that are all trying to make real-world, nonvirtual objects. It’s like there’s a kind of gnawing hunger upon the land because all the heavy industry has fled to China.

So we’re seeing a whole panoply of innovative efforts, arising in a haze of neologisms. They might once have been websites or think tanks, but now they are “think-and-do labs,” “patching zones,” “creative industries,” a “laboratelier” (I really love that one, though it’s almost impossible to pronounce), “unconferences”, “skunkwork foo-camps,” “ practice-based research,” “transdisciplinary collaboratories,” “commons-based peer production,” and (as Ponoko might slot it all together) a “place-tool-market platform.” None of those seem to me to hit the mark yet. But boy, they sure are suggestive.

They are a set of shaded Venn diagrams: overlapping conceptual circles. And at the core of that overlap, there is a lot of white light. In 2008, it’s still a hobbyist thing, a fringe activity, a prototype and/or experiment. That’s where it’s gestating now and sucking up its energies. When it emerges from those verbal mists, it’s going to be strong, fast, world-scale, and deadly serious.

Bruce Sterling is a science fiction writer and was the guest curator of the SHARE Festival 2007 in Torino, Italy.

Make: 21