“In this time the maker is the revolutionary. As we slide deeper into what’s being now called the ‘greater depression’ I suggest we consider this collapse is also the renaissance in disguise. If you’re tempted to savor what was: money, consumerism and greed, consider how little life it contained.”
“Our inheritance is a complicated one. Today corporations hold in place a hearty structure that contorts the nature of reality into a peculiar form created by one motive, capital. The human experience is meticulously determined by geniuses of psychology and marketing. They work for geniuses of capital. Disguised as choices, we are being asked to do primarily one thing, consume. As inheritors of the mega-mall the spirit of our generation looks for its voice through advertisements, and isles of products.”
“These students, through their own choices, have worked for four decades to document and preserve the stories, crafts, trades, and the personalities of their families, neighbors, and friends. By doing so, they have preserved this unique American culture for generations to come.”
“So it is this ‘last man’ who has to make this revolution. He is not only the man who will benefit by the revolution, but also the maker of the revolution. Therefore the revolution haste be brought about in the context of democracy and by democratic methods, whether constitutional, extra-constitutional or un-constitutional. Democratic means peaceful. It is calculated to bring man nearer to each other: a revolution that will not prove divisive. We have to explore a technique of revolution which will be cohesive.”
“Dissemination of Post-Industrial technology brings with it ad hoc technological education leading to the potential for innovation in the context of adapting open source designs for greater local appropriateness. This will feed-back through the communications networks for Maker knowledge distribution to the west, expanding the base of novelty but also providing very practical answers that would tend to elude western Makers because of their different environment and less practical thinking. Technology tends to both disseminate and assimilate culture where its development has an opportunity to ‘flow’ in more than one direction. […] This feedback would have the potential of pushing Post-Industrial technology to critical mass because for people in the developing world this isn’t fun and games or a counter-cultural movement. This IS their first real-world practical industrial infrastructure and they’re going to use it to catch up with the western standard of living despite their lack of Industrial Age style resource infrastructures.”
“He was not the maker of the new world, but he took what was perhaps a passing fad and made it a religion …” – Ulam, A. B. (1988). Prophets and Conspirators in Prerevolutionary Russia. Transaction Publishers. p 56. [see]
“Their intellectual challenge is to the entirety of Western thought, including thought about thought.”
“Suddenly cells of strange obsessive anarchist film scratchers and painters are omnipresent. It’s a ding-dang DIY thumpin revolution in your town and across the globe.”
“We are now at the stage where all universal questions are matters of concrete specific urgency for society in general as well as for every individual.”
“The poet is a revolutionary, an agent of social change, a visionary. The ‘maker’ as we were known in ancient times must not only spin evocative webs of beauty, wonder and tragedy but take time to put context around world changes.”