From Fractals to the Rise of Maker Movements

Ron Eglash and Ellen Foster writing in Think Africa:

Image courtesy of Think Africa

...A profound, way to think of the fractal tradition, is to focus more on its recursive and self-organising aspects. This facet of the tradition can be referred to as 'generative justice': the ways that flows of value, whether from human labour or nature’s own productive capacity, will prosper best when allowed to re-circulate from the bottom-up, rather than be extracted from the top down. Better to fertilise a garden with compost from its own local ecosystem than to extract it all and try to keep the soil going with chemical fertilisers. Better to allow workers to manage themselves in a cooperative they own, than to extract their labour for a corporation or state government.

Globally, one of the best cases for the advantages of generative justice has been the rise of the ‘maker movement’. This movement is often cited as a worldwide trend focusing on grassroots knowledge production, peer-to-peer learning and a hands-on approach to technology. Its mission is to create a society of producers. Citizens whose creative activities − recreational, entrepreneurial, artistic, pragmatic, or otherwise − go against their positioning as passive consumers of increasingly obfuscated technology, which permeates their daily lives.

Image courtesy of Maker Faire Africa

A large part of this hoped-for transformation is the creation of hacker or ‘makerspaces’ accessible to ordinary citizens. These spaces enable like-minded individuals to share tools, skills and facilities to revolutionise their access to technological fabrication, in much the same way that public libraries revolutionised access to books. Within the global imaginary, the maker movement is typically seen as a more Euro- or American-centric activity, but there are makerspaces popping up across the globe − including in Africa.

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