Makers
By Cory Doctorow 2009
416 pages
Cory Doctorow chronicles the near future cycle of tech booms and busts. Doctorow creates a compelling and complex world where characters ride the “New Work” movement from infancy to old age. Centered around hardware hackers called makers the story opens at the dawn of a physical dot-com style boom where large corporations turn venture capitalists leveraging small teams of creative makers with all the tools to make whatever products they can imagine. With the ability to physically replicate almost anything ideas spread like digital files and soon everyone is making for themselves leading to the inevitable financial bust. Documenting everything is a journalist turned blogger who struggles with how to cover events she is personally a part of. Doctorow imagines a world where people are empowered to make things themselves and explores how this freedom conflicts with corporate, legal and governmental structures. Touching on everything from genetic therapy diet fads to future Disney turned goth Makers never ceases to entertain and inspire readers to image a world where the only limit to what we can build is our creativity, and our legacy institutions. While it is tempting to sum up the book “Techology giveth and Technology taketh” a more apt summary might be “Technology changeth and we must deal”.