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I'd tend to agree, sort of sidewise, with the article author that "hack", like "make" in the "maker culture" sense, is freighted with all kinds of connotations that I think somewhat blur its applicability here. Where and when I grew up, the term was "jury rigging", which I think much more narrowly captures the same meaning as "gambiarra", and likewise escapes the commercial colonization of "hack" and "make". Jury rigs by their very nature are one-offs - necessarily individuated applications of ingenuity, with whatever resources happen to be available, to solve problems often unique to the contexts in which they arise. You can't reasonably call such a thing a "prototype"; it's not an exploration, but rather a (semi-)permanent solution, and should it need to be replaced later on, likely it will be another jury-rig, itself unique although perhaps similar to the first, that does so. Such efforts are the very antithesis of off-the-shelf solutions. To that point, I think the article author is both right and wrong to decry commercialization, and the commodification of industrial manufacturing techniques, as antithetical to pure ingenuity. I'd agree that when one can 3D print, laser cut, and CNC mill custom parts to a fare-thee-well, the jury-rigging or gambiarra style of ingenuity tends to fade into disuse, because why bother jigsawing together expedients when you can just design the exact thing you need and then manufacture it at a lot size of one? If it doesn't work as expected, throw it out and make another. If it does, the nature of the process lends itself well to the idea of productization (ugh, what a word), because the result is already necessarily designed for manufacture at industrial scale, with only some optimization required. And the large-scale commercialization of "maker culture" in general, with publicity and marketing firms opportunistically adopting the term in a transparent bid for the same sort of exploiting-the-naïve business as those "We Can Get You Published!" ads in the back pages of an old Writer's Market, certainly merits being looked upon with distrust and distaste. On the other hand, human ingenuity isn't a limited resource requiring conservation; be it ever so disdained, it will nevertheless rise anew in each generation, in each person, faced with a challenge for which no easy off-the-shelf solution or CADed, CNCed custom manufacture is available. We live at a moment of historical coincidence where such solutions are far more easily available than at any time in the past - but that may not always be so, and either way, "the future is unevenly distributed". In those places where it's thin on the ground, people still jury-rig and gambiarra their way past problems, just as we have always done - it's just that we don't hear about it much, because it's not terribly fashionable, and in any case people who do it can't be relied upon to noise it all over Facebook. And should we find ourselves exiting the current historical coincidence into a world where "the future" is less available to everyone, we'll see human ingenuity rise to meet the problems that new world poses, just as we always have. |