Doing-It-Yourself Has Never Been Easier: Examining the Influence of the Internet on the DIY Movement.
Since the recent scandal involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the general crowd is becoming more and more aware of the implications involved in sharing personal information online. However, the general public seems not to understand entirely the gravity of the situation, as even sharing the articles about the aforementioned scandal on Facebook is still helping the company make money and the ad agencies find out more about your personal interests. In addition to that, while Facebook is the only tech company that was requested to respond for the issue, many other online services have been operating in a similar way since the invention of Web 2.0¹. And that is reflected by the copious amounts of emails I have received in the past weeks about the changing of terms of service. Therefore it is up to the users to reclaim the online space anyway they can. With this in mind, communities began to form online (often around personal blogs or free, globally accessible websites) with the intention of creating fruitful online environments that allow users to share their knowledge and their work freely. Contributors provide in-depth instructions on how to gain the same knowledge they have, in order to reproduce a similar result. Today, DIY² (Do-It-Yourself) culture encompasses a large movement of people engaged in making and creating things on their own. Ever since the term “DIY” became a part of the English lexicon in the 1950s, one of its essential goals has remained the same — the desire to share information freely to educate the public. However other aspects changed. First of all, DIY is no longer solely a set of home improvement instructions, photos of knitting diagrams uploaded online under the crafts category or collections of failed inventions found on subreddits titled DiWHY or Shitty do it yourself. The strategies and tools of disseminating knowledge within the community also changed with the invention of the internet, as did the ways in which one would learn information. The community exists primarily online on platforms like YouTube or Kickstarter. It values sharing, learning and staying creative over earning profit and social capital³. Though these motivations might not seem like enough incentive to some, entering a DIY community means that you have the opportunity to obtain aid from people of different backgrounds and different levels of proficiency.
The increasing number of users on the internet has changed various aspects of DIY culture such as the mediums used to collaborate, invent and share knowledge, which in turn has impacted the type of objects that are made by the community. Using evidence from interviews with amateurs and professionals working with DIY methods, academic literature, as well as collective case studies, I argue that by contributing to a DIY community, the creator is given access to collaborative knowledge as well as an alternative way of finding financial support for their personal projects. This allows creators to produce projects without worrying about their marketability and the need to rely solely upon economic resources derived from sales. Though there are risks to participating in such a community, this paper offers practical advice to avoid the risks that could arise from contributing to the DIY community.
First appearing in the early 2000s, Web 2.0 allowed for a new type of environment — one that was online (and therefore able to connect people from all over the world) and interactive (which over time became a platform for contemporary discourse, which often takes the form of cyberbullying). These two aspects of Web 2.0 became essential to the DIY community because they allowed people to express themselves in an easily accessible manner that allowed for a discussion. Those who participate in the DIY culture find solace in sharing their work with a community of like minded people and find connections through it. British sociologist and writer, David Gauntlett, argues exactly that in his book Making is Connecting. Gauntlett describes the phenomenon of people connecting through an activity, and argues that DIY culture shows how the services or products one would normally pay for can be reproduced at home. He says that, “the central idea at the heart of [DIY approaches] is a rejection of the idea that you overcome problems by paying someone else to provide a solution.”⁴ This leads to an understanding that DIY culture is not just about learning crafts or knitting, it can, within certain activities, act as a tool for creators to become more engaged in an activity and gain a sense of empowerment.
Of course, DIY is not solely focused on self-empowerment and home improvement. Because a lot of professionals in their fields use DIY methods in order to educate or empower others by sharing the information they once learned. Take Niklas Roy, a German artist and coder, for example — he often creates complex electronic devices that he considers to be DIY. When he creates his devices, he documents the steps necessary to recreate them in order to serve “as an inspiration in case someone wants to solve a practical problem, similar to one for which [he] found already a solution.”⁵ Aside from photographs he also posts online any code related to the device as well as schematics that could help other creators connect the pieces together. The code he shares is covered under the “beerware license” and however improbable it might seem this license is real and is used by quite a few programmers. Here is how Roy explains it: “I publish my codes often under a beerware license, which means that I give away all rights, but I encourage the users of my code to invite me for a beer in case they meet me. I got one beer from a random stranger in Prague, so far.”⁶ Though it becomes clear that Roy might not necessarily be making a living from openly sharing his code, this act allows him to create connections all around the world. In addition, by sharing information on how to recreate some of the devices he’s made, he creates a space on his own website that is no longer a traditional artist portfolio, but rather an environment for sharing resources that can be very useful not only to artists working in similar mediums, but also to engineers, coders, designers etc.
Through this seemingly easy act of sharing their intellectual property, participants in the DIY community fight what they consider to be the negative effects of the so-called informational capitalism.⁷ The aforementioned Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal can now be seen as a sort of mascot for informational capitalism, seeing as it’s made everyone shake their fingers at the reappropriation of information for a capitalist aim. Aside from letting Cambridge Analytica “harvest millions of people’s profiles” in order to “target their inner demons”, for those that did not concern themselves with how Facebook became a multi-billion company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says it best in his congressional testimony: “Senator, we run ads.” Then it must not come as a surprise that contemporary capitalism, due to the advancements in technology, is said to value information and knowledge the most. As such, fighting informational capitalism is important for those who want to make sure that the information available online stays free and accessible to everyone. Though, being a part of the DIY community is not the only way to fight against informational capitalism, it has proven to be a good method for different media, from printed punk zines (which are said to have originated the DIY community in the UK in the 1970’s), to online blogs. In addition, by sharing free knowledge and information this system allows others to build on what someone had previously done to get inspired. Julia Walter-Herrmann and Corinne Büching, in their book FabLab: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors, wrote, “through these new ways of sharing and through ideas such as Open Source licensing, people do not only get inspired by others but they can also take up the solutions of others and build on them, so that new ways of making on more sophisticated levels become possible.”⁸ Of course the philosophy behind DIY and Open Source is quite similar, so we can clearly see how this quote applies to the DIY community.⁸ Walter-Herrmann and Büching also noted that the “motivations for contributing to DIY communities highlight information exchange as a core value…”¹⁰
Aside from the community-driven sharing of information, DIY communities also provide creators with alternative ways of finding financial support for their projects rather than relying solely upon economic resources derived from mass produced sales. Such alternative ways of financing your practice can be crowdfunding, selling your products directly to supporters, or simply being paid for hosting workshops or classes. Mark Hatch writes about his own experiences with such alternative funding methods in his book, The Maker Revolution: Building a Future on Creativity and Innovation in an Exponential World. In addition to mentioning the various methods for sponsoring a project, Hatch argues that alternative financing methods, such as crowdfunding, provide a better way of communicating with your client, in other words this is Cambridge Analytica’s methods but voluntary and scandal-free. This has additional benefits, because it attracts a clientele that is engaged in the entire process of production, and provides feedback along the way. He says that, “crowdfunding platforms and startup accelerators don’t just provide funding, they provide critical insight and a direct communication pathway to one’s most avid and engaged consumers; they can provide the startup capital needed to get investors.”¹¹ This can be illustrated using Kickstarter, a popular crowdsourcing platform founded in 2009. The platform became well known because it was the first major crowdfunding site, which changed the way people fund personal projects. For the first time a stranger from across the world could see your project and not only help you fund it but also get in contact and voice their opinions about what could be improved. Alon Hillel-Tuch talks about the importance of crowdfunding in his 2013 TED Talk, where he describes crowdfunding as:
[…] disrupting society in a very big way. We’re taking that pyramid scheme, that sense of hierarchy and we’re just fundamentally changing it. It’s no longer the top down approach, where the people on the top or capital heavy are making the decisions on what is right, what can we do, what can we not do. Instead anybody along those lines can create a project, raise the funds […] and drive the impact. […] Anybody anywhere with any kind of idea whatsoever now finally has the ability to reach out to people and make it happen.
And he’s absolutely right — with the invention of crowdsourcing there exists now a more democratic approach to creation, funding and distribution of projects. That being said, it is not a perfect platform for users because it takes 5% of money raised, and if a project doesn’t meet its fundraising goal then it doesn’t get any of the funding.
However, even with the possibility of crowdfunding your artistic projects, the decision to work in a creative field often evokes for thoughts of being a “starving artist.”¹² Nonetheless, there are ways to earn money as an artist while still working in fields that interest you. I can speak from my own personal experience of funding the artistic project Center for Technological Pain. In the Center, I create DIY solutions to health problems that come from technology, that take the form of gadgets (meant to eliminate the problems), self-defense against technology moves and workshops. When I first started working on the project, I already had ambitious ideas for the end goal (such as filming in various settings and hosting workshops), though I hadn’t considered how I would be able to fulfill my personal goals for the project. After giving talks about the project at festivals and checking websites, blogs and twitter pages online, I found that several grants seemed to be geared towards what I was working on. One grant in particular, organized by a company named Simplon¹³, was geared towards supporting women working on artistic projects that engage with technology. Despite its scientific-sounding name, Center for Technological Pain offers commentary on our addiction to the devices we use everyday, and provides a set of tips on how to remedy them. However, oddly enough, this critical perspective originates from a millennial who never lets her phone leave her sight. This apparent contradiction is what attracted the jury to my project and was the primary reason behind giving me the grant. Now, I am not a professional in grant receiving or proposal writing, but I do have one piece of advice — which is to spend a lot of time and energy on grant applications that seem the most relevant to your project. While you might want to apply to every grant in your field out there, make sure that you pay special attention to those looking for projects whose criterias you fit. In addition, I recommend actively participating in festivals, discussing your work at panels, and attempting to get media attention for your projects, because success online helps bring (financial) success in the real world.
Now that I’ve talked about Kickstarter and the importance of online presence for financing your own projects, I would like to consider the negative sides of third-party platforms. Although these platforms can be very helpful tools to share one’s work, the decision to make personal inventions public can also be dangerous for one’s intellectual property since that information is available to everyone with an internet connection and your personal ideas will most likely be stolen, if they are good enough. Paul Spinrad, in a rather practical article he wrote titled, “Your Guide to DIY Crowdfunding Tools (to Avoid Kickstarter Fees)” discusses different alternatives to Kickstarter. As I briefly mentioned earlier, Kickstarter is not the best or the fairest of platforms, but it is the most well known. However, that doesn’t mean we need to keep using it. In his article, Spinrad mentions the downsides of Kickstarter as a crowdfunding platform, notably that users must give up 5% of their commision to the company and don’t have control over the user-experience of the page dedicated to the website. He also suggests cheap or free alternatives to Kickstarter that artists and designers could include on their own websites, in order to avoid any platform-related problems. Spinrad writes:
Other new tools and services empower people to “be their own Kickstarter” and create a multi-user portal of their own, where they can host other people’s crowdfunding campaigns and collect the commissions themselves, or choose not to. They can launch these crowdfunding portals from their own dedicated domain, or as funding pages integrated within an already-existing web presence. The trend-story takeaway here is that a new wave of infrastructure is decentralizing crowdfunding — which, given crowdfunding’s democratic nature, seems only fitting.
Another platform that is used widely among DIY contributors is YouTube. Although it appears to be a democratic platform for uploading videos, YouTube also exploits its users similarly to Kickstarter. Besides the risk of having your intellectual property stolen, Mark Andrejevic, author of “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor”¹⁴, talks about other ways in which corporations are monetizing our online presence. This includes using the users’ data for commercial purposes, such as targeted ads, or using keywords to sponsor promoted videos. He calls this “user-generated labor”¹⁵. Though the issues he addresses are valid, it is up to the individual user to determine just how much this bothers them and whether or not the disadvantages of being part of that system are sufficient for them to forsake a large community of spectators. Besides, there are many advantages to using platforms such as YouTube. For example, the platform offers contributors higher visibility rates due to the large community of users, and this could potentially lead to collaborations with different people and invitations to events that could fund your practice. Andrejevic says that, “critiquing the economic logic of a site like YouTube means considering how power relations structure the “free” choice, whereby user-generated data is exchanged for access.” This brings me back to the idea of informational capitalism. Andrejevic (and he’s not the only one to notice this) claims that YouTube, while allowing a free service, makes money by selling the data from their users to ad companies, so that these ad companies can target their content in a more effective way, and therefore attract customers to their websites. As we saw earlier, for some companies this practice doesn’t end up so well, however Alessandro Delfanti in his book writes that, “the ‘original sin’ of informational capitalism is characterised by enclosures that do not block access to the informational pasture but rather increasingly manage, adjust and control the flux of data and knowledge.”¹⁶ According to Delfanti, having control over over data and being able to use it in ways that affects how we browse the internet is worse than blocking one’s access to the internet all together. Whether you agree with that or not, what is clear to me is that services collecting and using user data are unethical, and this practice still happens though it is increasingly attracting negative attention from the mainstream media. While just talking about it does not seem to be influencing the actions of the companies that analyze our data for their own business, one thing that we can do to democratize the internet is to decide to use our own independent websites and blogs in order to share information, whatever it might be.
However, there are people that see third-party platforms as a safer solution to sharing information. Kris Madden, an American artist, has been working on a DIY project that grew out of her curiosity for mobile phones. Regarding the sharing of information about her project online, she said that it is essential to her because, “someone should be able to learn from [her] struggles.”¹⁷ Regarding the risks that come from publicly posting personal projects, Madden said:
The idea of the [project] being taken I honestly don’t mind. I think there are just risks in general of putting yourself out there online and drawing attention to yourself. […] If you have a personal website, to do that you need to put your own phone number out there, your address… and that makes any person who sees this tutorial or has access to the website easily accessible, you can easily access their information.
Due to the negative experience she has had after sharing personal information online, Madden is skeptical. Yet, she believes that using a third-party website would make it easier to protect one’s identity, because you could include false information about yourself on each platform, to hide one’s private identity from those that would want to find out more about you. With website hosting, your information has to be correct, unlike with social media. Nonetheless, Madden uses lots of online resources, such as tutorials, personal blogs and online communities to find ways of producing her projects. She emphasizes, “without existing tutorials I don’t think I would’ve ever been able to start. They made my project possible.”¹⁸
Though sharing one’s intellectual property on the internet can come with risks, being a part of the DIY community offers artists and designers access to getting helpful feedback, and can lead to new collaborations and future sources of funding. These two reasons (among many others) are enough of an incentive for those in the community to continue contributing to a large network of projects meant to educate and empower others through making. In addition, those who do not agree with the laws imposed on us by big corporations, find alternative means of sharing personal projects without being a part of third-party platforms. Whether it is intentional or not, these contributions to the free sharing of knowledge on independent websites serve as a means of fighting against informational capitalism.
Notes:
[1] The state in which the internet is in right now, that is one where users are no longer simply viewing online pages, but have the ability to interact with the content displayed whether by commenting, posting or liking, to name a few.
[2] A culture based on individual or communal creation of objects, as an alternative to a consumerist society in which one would simply buy the object or pay a professional to do it, rather than making it themselves.
[3] Stacey Kuznetsov, and Eric Paulos. “Rise of the Expert Amateur: DIY Projects, Communities, and Cultures.” NordiCHI ’10 Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries, October 2010, 295.
[4] David Gauntlett, Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of Creativity, from DIY and Knitting to Youtube and Web 2.0 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 56.
[5] Niklas Roy, e-mail message to author, 5 April 2018.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Alessandro Delfanti, Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 25–26.
[8] Julia Walter-Herrmann, and Corinne Büching, FabLab: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 140.
[9] The DIY ethos and Open Source licensing are very similar in their approach in the way that both value the sharing of information. Though Open Source programs don’t necessarily mean that they will be free of charge, the code to how the program is built will be available to everyone.
[10] Julia Walter-Herrmann, and Corinne Büching, FabLab: Of Machines, Makers and Inventors (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2013), 141.
[11] Mark Hatch. The Maker Revolution: Building a Future on Creativity and Innovation in an Exponential World. (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017), 38.
[12] Jackie Battenfield. The Artist’s Guide : How to Make a Living Doing What You Love. (Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 2009), 160.
[13] Simplon is a company that focuses on teaching people of all backgrounds about technology and coding. You can learn more about their mission at simplon.co (This is not a paid advertisement, though technically they did pay me).
[14] Mark Andrejevic, “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor,” YouTube Reader, January 2010.
[15] Mark Andrejevic, “Exploiting YouTube: Contradictions of User-Generated Labor,” YouTube Reader, January 2010, 412.
[16] Alessandro Delfanti. Biohackers: The Politics of Open Science. (London: Pluto Press, 2013), 26.
[17] Kris Madden, interview by author, 04 April 2018, La Gaîté Lyrique, transcribed audio recording.
[18] Ibid.
