*Yeah, well, maybe. Kinda the WIRED scene drinking its own kool-aid here.
*There's a lot of institutional barriers and boundaries intended to restrain and undercut this means of production. It's like fanzine printing, the indy record biz and open-source; it's got an arts-and-crafts atelier dynamic. Makers have no friends in the corridors of power and no safe haven from which to seriously disrupt the status quo. You can't even give it away: Microsoft makes more money off Android patent predation than Google makes from Android itself.
*However, the status quo is getting so top-heavy and dysfunctional now, so obviously unjust and so riddled with mass unemployment that it's possible to imagine some stricken region cracking up, abandoning IP, patents, safety regulations and economies of scale, and going into a full-scale Maker frenzy. Almost a wartime, victory-garden, scrap-metal economy. Could even be in the USA. Probably needs to be reframed from hobby activity to resilient civil-defense. Less of a stretch than that looks.
