Like a spoiled child, "Makers" careens unconstrained through a disjointed future with raw enthusiasm, passion, and naivety. Cory Doctorow's story of Lester and Perry, a couple of New Age hacker-inventors in southern Florida, alternates between brilliance and annoyance while my reactions bounced from delight to frustration. If nothing else, "Makers" is provocative, an important read with gems of wisdom buried in an overly long diatribe of clever technology, keen cultural insight and dubious economics.
While we're never told exactly when this all starts, it is sometime in the near distant future - probably the late 20-teens. Things aren't a whole lot different than today - pretty much a linear projection of where cheap microprocessors will lead - from a "Boogie Woogie Elmo" that mimics dance moves and responds to voice commands to virtually ubiquitous robots performing a wide range of specialized tasks. Venture capitalist Landon Kattlewell has engineered the merger of Kodak and Duracell, reshaping the resulting "Kodacell" into a loose network of inventors and hackers, spawning the "New Work" micro-economy that looks a lot more like Bangalore than Boston. The Internet merges with the physical world through 3D "printers" - fantasy devices that can create in mass virtually any device who's component plans and parts can be digitized. On one hand, virtually every shopping mall and Walmart are boarded up, and shanty towns sprawl through suburbia, yet Disney World flourishes, still drawing massive crowds with streams of disposable income. San Jose Mercury News reporter Suzanne Church is assigned as an embedded reporter with the loveable tinkerers Perry and Lester, chronicling this upside-down brave new world. But after losing new job as the old media collapses along with the old economy, she remains on the story, gathering a huge following on her blog which ends up generating more than enough advertising income to keep her afloat and independent. Lester and Perry's genius leads to a bizarre "ride" built in an abandoned WalMart, drawing not only huge crowds but also Disney's unwanted attention. But like all bubbles, "New Work" collapses, Disney takes the gloves off, and the relationship between Perry, Lester, and Suzanne frays.
Doctorow is no fan of big business and big bureaucracy, and "Makers" is at its core a story of the triumph of the little guy. But, fiction not withstanding, his thesis is flawed, cutting huge corners in economic theory to arrive at the micro-economy utopia he has created. Doctorow falls back on tired themes of exploitation of the masses by evil corporations, while suggesting that life would be hunky dory for all if wealth (and technology) was simply redistributed to all. Not surprisingly, the author leans on misinformed parallels to FDR's "New Deal" - like it was "Roosevelt's public-investment plan that spent America free of the Depression" (it was World War II - not government spending - that set the economy back on an even keel.) But flaws not withstanding, "Makers" is a powerful novel, a poignant, passionate and rambling epic of the future, the future of technology, and of love and relationships. It's worth taking the ride.
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The Mark Jones
Defo' my flavour (tinkerer, thinker, maker and dreamer)
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 18, 2012
Djgos
Makes one think - Scary thought that!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 20, 2020Amazon Customer
Absolutely superb!!!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 11, 2016
