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    Makers
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    Makers
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    Makers
    Ebook661 pages11 hours

    Makers

    By Cory Doctorow

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Perry and Lester invent things: seashell robots that make toast, Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. They also invent entirely new economic systems. When Kodak and Duracell are broken up for parts by sharp venture capitalists, Perry and Lester help to invent the "New Work," a New Deal for the technological era. Barefoot bankers cross the nation, microinvesting in high-tech communal mini-startups. Together, they transform the nation and blogger Andrea Fleeks is there to document it.

    Then it slides into collapse. The New Work bust puts the dot-bomb to shame. Perry and Lester build a network of interactive rides in abandoned Walmarts across the land. As their rides gain in popularity, a rogue Disney executive engineers a savage attack on the rides by convincing the police that their 3D printers are being used to make AK-47s.

    Lawsuits multiply as venture capitalists take on a new investment strategy: backing litigation against companies like Disney. Lester and Perry's friendship falls to pieces when Lester gets the fatkins treatment, which turns him into a sybaritic gigolo.

    Then things get really interesting.


    At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 27, 2009
    ISBN9781429969284
    Unavailable
    Makers
    Author

    Cory Doctorow

    Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction author, activist and journalist. He is the author of many books, most recently The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation, a Big Tech disassembly manual; Red Team Blues, a science fiction crime thriller; Chokepoint Capitalism, non-fiction about monopoly and creative labour markets; the Little Brother series for young adults; In Real Life, a graphic novel; and the picture book Poesy the Monster Slayer. In 2020, he was inducted into the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

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    Reviews for Makers

    3.5/5

    379 ratings46 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A dark, important look forward veiled in techno-sensawunda optimism. I fear Cory is growing up. The plot and prose is not particularly impressive, but if you come for the ideas, you'll agree with me that it deserves an extra star (4 out of 5).
    • 3/5
      Not my favorite book by Corey at all. There is a cool story built around the maker culture in here, but it gets dragged down by bad relationship drama,and one overly long and poorly done sex scene that should have started with, 'Dear Penthouse Letters."
    • 3/5
      Very interesting premise which is let down a little by the length and pace of the novel. The whole thing feels a little too ambitious for the final product to live up to. That said, I thought the characters were well-drawn and I genuinely cared what happened to them. The ending is striking, but not necessarily in a satisfying way. It's worth a read, but is a little disappointing overall.
    • 4/5
      Fun read, SF based on interpolating where the internet and file-sharing are headed. Fun ideas, but the characters were not exactly memorable.
    • 5/5
      Born to invent and create, Perry and Lester go together like peanut butter and jelly. When they invent a whole new world with someone taking notes of every move, life becomes a little hectic. Then, when their baby crumbles, the whole world is watching. These friends are draw to the limit and it's no surprise that the company and the friendship, may be doomed for ever. Will they be able to redeem themselves?This is a witty novel that will appeal to nerds everywhere. I'm including myself in this nerd category. So to all you dorks out there, this is a book written just for you. (And me.)
    • 3/5
      The story was very good, but the sex scene in the middle was ... not something I want to read again, ever.
    • 3/5
      DIdn't like this one as well as some of Doctorow's other books. It felt a little unbalanced, jumpy, and long. If you're really into maker culture, then it's probably a good read.
    • 4/5
      Makers, set sometime in the near future, explores how technology, creativity and business will continue to shape and change our lives. Suzanne Church, a journalist, has seen it all , the fall of the automobile companies in Detroit;the dot com boom and bust; and most recently the merger of Kodak and Duracell whose products have become obsolete, but their processes and infrastructure are still valuable products to people like Landon Kettlewell. Kettlewell has a vision to use Kodacell, Kodak and Duracell's merged name, infrastructure to support small start-ups and make it possible for them to thrive. Enter Perry and Lester who are creative and intelligent with great ideas, but lack the business skills to make a living. Kodacell supports them and their products while Suzanne reports on the new businesses of Kodacell and others know as the New Work Movement. As New Work grows, changes and even fails the cast of characters experience a variety of emotions which the reader can't help but feel if they are able to look beyond the tech jargon.Makers is not only the story of these young entrepreneurs as they explore their dreams, it is a commentary on the future of corporate America, journalism, technology's effect on society and even the American Dream.Cory Doctorow, the author, is a tech blogger and has written a young adult novel, Little Brother. The appeal of Doctorow's two novels is the discussibiltiy and geek factor. Readers might get bogged down in the tech jargon, but if they get beyond that the ideas presented are thought provoking and interesting. Makers might appeal to readers of Carl Hiaasen's Team Rodent and some of his novels dealing with the development of South Florida.
    • 4/5
      A great book centering and the friendship between two guys that just want to make awesome tech stuff. They start a revolution, and the story gets told to the world by a tech journalist.
    • 5/5
      This Cory Doctorow novel takes us to the very near future, a pretty bleak, economically depressed landscape. Into this landscape, Doctorow drops two tech nerds (Lester and Perry), an English venture capitalist (Kettlewell), a blogger (Suzanne Church) and a mid-level Disney exec (Sammy) in a story of how unfettered high tech capitalism and bio-technology might shape the near future, a future in which many of our previous bellwether economic engines, companies such as Kodak, Duracell and Westinghouse have found themselves to be obsolete.This is a vastly entertaining read, one in which very, very many current economic trends are followed to their potential conclusions, some good and some not so good (think airport security). The wealth of potential new inventions which Doctorow has imagined is staggering. Imagine a world in which obesity is eliminated through biochemical altering of metabolism (with the proviso that the altered individual must consume 10,000 calories a day or starve to death!). Imagine what might happen to Disney World when patrons can undergo similar or superior experiences through virtual reality in one’s own home or at a fraction of the cost. Rest assured, Mickey will not go quietly into that good night. As an aside, what is it with Doctorow and Disney?This is a story told in three parts: First, an attempted conversion of the old economy into a vibrant, creative “New Work” economy in which micro cells of technologically proficient, highly creative inventors are identified, organized and capitalized; second, 5-10 years following collapse of the “New Work” economy, our heroes (Perry and Lester) create a nostalgic look back through construction of a “ride”, in which participants not only experience the contents, but grade and ultimately reconfigure it through their collective experiences. Such rides sweep the nation, and are connected and remain identical through technical networks; third, is the clash between the “rides” and the ultimate “ride”, Disney World. The Empire Strikes Back, as it were. Suits, countersuits, trademark infringement, industrial espionage all ensue.Doctorow is clearly no fan of multi-national corporations, bureaucracy, “suits” or even mid-level management. One would almost picture his Utopia as a near anarchical society in which the individual creative genius is given complete control, unfettered by law (intellectual property) or administrative control. Of course, both in real life and in Doctorow’s novel, such a society is not sustainable. At each level of the story, a predictable progression of creativity, success and growth is followed by chaos, control, litigation and ultimately collapse. It’s a wild “ride” and one well worth the time.
    • 3/5
      While idea inspiring from a technological perspective I still find Doctorow's writing style disjointed. His transitions from paragraph to paragraph are clumsily executed and never quite reach the level of a Gibson or Stevenson. In addition the characters embody much of what I dislike of the Modernist and Post-Modernist movements which is selfishness and unabashed individualism with no concern to the larger society. In all honesty I didn't even finish the epilogue so this is a generous rating of three stars based solely on the ideas within. If you want to read a book by Doctorow pick up "Little Brother". Many of the same problems exist but it's a better overall story.
    • 3/5
      Part 1 was good, Part 2 seemed to run on.
    • 4/5
      I always feel like Doctorow's long books seem to drag on forever. He is a fantastically fun author to read, but he seems to do a better job with balancing his short stories.Finding out how Doctorow will drag a Big Corporation into his stories (especially his beloved Disney) is always fun. Overall I enjoyed being pulled along through the story, and will doubtlessly read it sometime again in the future. It will have to wait until I've revisited some of his other works that I like much more.
    • 5/5
      Cory Doctorow has given us another foreseeable, and very believable, future in Makers. The premise of the book is an extension of trends we see around us now, at the close of the first decade of the 21st century. Mashups and hardware recycling is taken to the next level by bored, out of work dot com people paired with venture capitalists looking to make a quick turnaround on profit, create new gadgets by combining old gadgets, pump them out until knock-offs reduce the profit margin. The process is then repeated with something new.What saves this book from becoming boring is an almost Frankenstein type of transformation: one of the projects becomes bigger than the sum of its parts and takes on a momentum, a life style rather than a life, of its own that no one saw coming. Along with this, Doctorow creates another group of lifestyle trends based on the rapid globalization of the tech world and fitness trends, some of which, like medical tourism, are already here, just not to the degree presented in Makers.While you don’t have to be a technophile to appreciate what is presented here, it helps. Technophobes, on the other hand, may be totally turned off by some of the ideas presented and may not get some of the more subtle humor offered. Makers is well worth the read and well worth more than 4 stars, but not quite brilliant enough to get that elusive fifth star.
    • 2/5
      Enjoyed the first half. Deathly bored during second half. Epilogue OK. Disappointed.
    • 4/5
      Very interesting to see the conflict of open source in the world we have. There are many problems but some hope as well.
    • 2/5
      I tried very hard to like this book. I loved the pretext and I really wanted to like it, but it’s so hard going, nothing much seems to happen and it’s much, much too long.Focussing on a very near, wholly believable future, the story kicks off brilliantly, the characters start out interesting but then - nothing. The characters quickly merge and become indistinguishable, so that you have to work rather too hard to keep up with who’s doing what, where and why. What story there is is so heavily padded with inconsequential detail and irrelevant sub plots that it quickly becomes very confusing.The technology rules, as you’d expect in a story from Cory Doctorow; I get the feeling that the technology is far more interesting to him than his characters – at times they feel like ‘carriers’ for all the ‘fun stuff’ Cory really wants to write about.Which is not to say it's a bad book, there are some great ideas, some gripping sections; the chapters set in the shanty towns that have sprung up in Florida’s ruined condos and abandoned gated communities were a highlight, but these are small islands of interest in a vast ocean of seemingly endless lawsuits and technological detail and not nearly enough character development or plot to truly engage my interest.In short, the ideas are great but they need a stronger story and better characters to hang them on. It would benefit hugely from a really good edit.
    • 2/5
      I liked the idea of this book and I would have enjoyed the main story and the geekery of it, but there is an odd obsession with weight and obesity starting on the first page that I found very off-putting. I suppose the idea is not inappropriate in a "near-future fable", given current political and social views, but the way it's handled made me cringe. Frequently. Fat people are (ironically) 2-dimensional characters, called "the obese" or, later "the fatkins", no matter who's talking. Doctorow assumes that all fat people want the same thing (to be thin) and will do any idiotic, untested thing to get it. And to assume that being thin will make people happy is just plain stupid. But of course they get what they deserve in the end, right?I think I would have liked this book without that (unnecessary and cringe-inducing) subplot but it was so annoying and distracting that it overwhelmed many of the good aspects. I won't be reading it again and I don't recommend it.
    • 4/5
      The last couple of years has seen the charge by a few in literary circles that too many authors today are taking refuge in historical fiction. Their point seems to be there is nothing wrong with historical fiction but it can lead to a dearth of writers writing about the world we live in at present. Understanding and describing our times can be like trying to mold water into a sculpture. Nothing stays as it was for more than a microsecond. Change is constant and accelerating.Cory is a writer at ease in contemporary time. His fiction and essays have worked this territory for decades now. The early age SF writer A.E. VanVogt wrote with the rule that a reader should be hit with a new idea every 800 words. I'm not sure if CD is aware of this rule but his style suggests it. Makers is a novel of ideas. But it's not just a novel of ideas. He's digging deeper into capitalistic corporate economics, social networking, sociology, culture, abundance, waste, and poverty among other subjects. It is a wild ride from the start until the finish.The main characters are two techno-geek friends and a reporter/blogger that chronicles their efforts. They like to make things, thus the title. In the process they help create a new economy based on New Work. Things do good and they are riding high. It crashes. Now they are not riding so high. The story follows them into old age with all kinds of ups and downs. When is the last time you read of old techno-geeks literally playing Calvinball? The game from Calvin and Hobbes where the same rule can never be used twice.Cory is a successful (Boing Boing) blogger. He can string some snarky irreverent passages together like some politician's do spin. He's writing near-future that takes place in about the next five hours and seven minutes. He also lives what he writes. When the Canadian SF writer Peter Watts was recently beaten, pepper sprayed by and turned out into a snowstorm with no coat by the US Border Patrol, CD blogged about it, set up a legal defense fund, and PayPal-ed him $1,000 Canadian. Not a bad guy to have in your corner during these times. He writes a pretty good book too.
    • 4/5
      cool book interesting ideas in it, the story of 2 geeks building very cool stuff and the world it affects. interesting side trails but all in all a good read.
    • 2/5
      I wish I liked science fiction! I like science and fiction but the combination of the two rarely works out for me. I do keep trying though. I tried this book because I have, in the past, been an avid reader of Cory Doctorow's Boing Boing blog, and I like his Guardian columns on digital rights, and I basically agree with most of what he says. This book has tons of interesting future technology ideas in it. The main story is about creating objects with 3d printers and the story contains lots of other assays into the future of economics, biotechnology, mass media, fitness, all kinds of stuff. However it just didn't work for me. I just got fed up with it all. There was nothing much wrong with the plot, and I thought the central characters were well written - especially in the later parts of the book after more time had passed and the relationships between them changed. Just overall the book wasn't my cup of tea. LibraryThing tells me "LibraryThing thinks you probably won't like Makers (prediction confidence: high)" and it was about right I'm afraid.
    • 4/5
      Doctorow steers away from the singularity science-fiction & urban fantasy and returns to base roots -- boys with toys. The story chronicles two Makers -- people who build random DIY stuff just to see if they can, like a hive of Tickle-Me-Elmos that collectively drive a golf cart. Eventually they create some sort of "ride" that garners worldwide attention. Including Disney Parks, who wants to tear them apart, steal their ideas, and sue them to the short-and-curlies. Along the way, Doctorow interjects some singularity elements like drastic weight-loss medical procedures, 3-D printers, and advancements in shantytowns.I don't think it's as good as "Little Brother". There's not as much tension, and the plot meanders. Lord does it meander. The first part, with the boom and bust of the Makers, acts more like a prologue. There's no real unifying goal for the protagonists to achieve (except maybe to be left alone so they can build their things). It's treated more like obstacle, overcoming, obstacle, overcoming. And the final resolution seems deus ex--the bad guy spontaneously learns the error of his ways and converts. Plus I don't get the "ride". Is it a museum? A fictional exhibit? A sort of play? And some things suffer from "24" disease (things happening faster than is plausible). It would be nice to see communication and events happen so fast, but I don't think that's realistic.Don't get me wrong, it's a good book. But the story is more like a serial than a novel, and I'm no big fan of serials.
    • 4/5
      Fiction that takes strings of truth from our daily lives and weaves a complex story into the future. Excellent!
    • 3/5
      Cory Doctorow tells the story in the near future of a two hardware hackers who fall in with microfinancing venture capitalists and invent the “New Work” economy, and then find themselves swimming with corporate sharks, fighting with each other, and leading a band of global techno-revolutionaries.The New Work economy is small groups of entrepreneurs producing their wares. The origination comes from the private equity leader who combines Kodak and Duracell together. But he is not looking to rebuild these manufacturing giants. He is looking to use their platform to enable those small groups of entrepreneurs.Those entrepreneurs are the Makers in the title. Backyard hobbyists cobbling stuff together, using the internet to make their products more widely available. The two lead makers, Perry and Lester, work in an abandoned mall that has been turned into a junkyard. They cobble together their initial ideas from the stuff in the junkyard.Doctorow digs into capitalistic corporate economics, social networking, sociology, culture, abundance, waste, and poverty, in addition to the maker culture.I first ran into Mr. Doctorow in a Harvard Business Review interview. One of his quotes on piracy or obscurity stood out: “Of all the people who didn’t buy one of my books today, the majority of them didn’t buy it because they never heard of me, not because someone gave them a free copy.”I like what he has to say. Unfortunately, his fictional storytelling is not as good. Most of the characters in this book are only minimally developed. I mostly liked Perry and Lester as loveable underdogs. The rest of the characters were very flat.The story has some interesting vignettes, but seems disorganized. There are lots of ideas and subplots threaded throughout the book. The book is generally entertaining to read, although a bit clunky. I liked it enough to finish all 400+ pages in a few days.
    • 3/5
      Doctorow loves to write about the near-future with the little guy going up against evil mega-corps and 'Makers' is no exception to that basic premise. Perry and Lester are hacking a post-modern living out of the wasteland of near-future America while living in the shadow of the evil Disney corporation. Suzanne is an ex-reporter turned blogger hired to cover their story. Together, along with a few other people, they create a cult of personality that changes the world - for a little while.This book was up & down for me. Mostly up; the writing style is direct and easy to read. The characters are pretty well-conceived and have interesting relationships with each other. The back-drop of the post-modern, post-consumer world is rendered in great, but not over-bearing, detail. I'm not entirely sure what the denouement was supposed to be though? The last few chapters left me feeling flat as the story just sort of petered out.I have to add that I did not really intend to read this book when I began it. Doctorow, putting his money where his mouth is when it comes to his stance on intellectual property rights, released the e-book version of 'Makers' under a Creative Commons license. That means it's free to download from online sources, (his website, gutenberg.org, etc). However... the cover artwork is not included in the licensing. So... here I had this blank bookcover on my e-reader and, having forgotten what it was that I downloaded several months ago, I only openend the file to see which book it was. I parsed a few paragraphs and was quickly hooked in & ended up reading this almost 600-page tome in just about four days. In short, it's an easy read that you can snag for free. Give it a shot. Even though the book is not perfect, it does contain a lot of cool ideas.
    • 4/5
      Cory Doctorow’s book Markers is a roller coaster ride (reference intended) of the ups and downs of the “New Work” era and beyond.The main characters Lester Banks and Perry Gibbons have an infectious energy for the future and the creative process that is energizing and Suzanne Church’s chronicles of Lester’s and Perry’s adventures gives this story an uncanny raised hair on the back of the neck vision of what our own future could hold.Although the book is a SF novel, I often found myself thinking, this isn’t science fiction, this is just around the corner technology.I personally loved the laser translator. Imagine getting the job on the merits of your skills and talent rather than language requirements. And the earbuds, snitch-tags and the self-modifying robots were pretty mind-blowing too.The story moves at a fast clip and when the characters crash, you crash right along with them, and when they pick themselves up, you dust yourself off too and move forward.The only disturbing aspect of the story is the biotechnology angle. Oh, I hope that as a society we don’t go down that path, but the temptation for some to become fatkins may just be too strong.I enjoyed Markers thoroughly and recommend the book highly.
    • 3/5
      In an economically struggling America, two good friends, Perry and Lester, invent and sell novelty items made of junk. This places them in the vanguard of the New Work movement, and they ride that wave until it busts in obvious parallel to the bursting of the dot-com bubble. They shake themselves off, and build an ever-changing amusement ride in south Florida. It seems to be catching on, which in turn, catches the attention of a nervous Disney executive concerned about declining attendance at the Disney World attraction he oversees in Orlando.

      And that’s pretty much the plot. It’s the story of Perry and Lester, two guys with lots of imagination but not much business sense. They are joined by Suzanne Church, a journalist turned blogger who reports on what they are doing, and by a few other supporting cast members.

      Mainly this is a book of social commentary. It highlights contrasts between protecting vested interests and investment in new ideas, open and proprietary technology, and big corporations and small entrepreneurs. It did all of this fairly well, I thought, and the future it paints is somewhat depressing but believable.

      The characters are also believable, for the most part. I have only read one other Doctorow novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, and the characters in this one are a definite improvement. They aren’t admirable or even especially likeable, but they have understandable motivations and personalities. Even the two characters serving in the role of villains are more pitiable than evil.

      The prose is serviceable and the story flows logically. My biggest gripe about the storytelling was the inclusion of a far too descriptive sex scene, which felt like it was cut and pasted out of some steamy erotic romance novel. It wasn’t required, and it didn’t fit. Oh, and it talks about people smoking clove cigarettes, which are no longer legal in the U.S. and I doubt they will be again in the near future. You can still buy small, clove cigars, but they’re not as good. (Yeah, I used to smoke the things.)

      Anyway, as a near future tale about two average geeky guys, this isn’t bad. It’s not silly. It doesn’t rant. The characters aren’t cardboard stereotypes, and it brings up some interesting ideas. I can recommend it for readers interested in seeing one possible future that believable extensions of current technology and economic trends make possible.
    • 3/5
      Loved the futuristic technonerd main characters and the funny, edgy yet beautifully constructed story. Doctorow is a master of the writer's craft; he imports machine functions as verbs and nouns-- quite casually--to mirror the minds of his protagonists and yet when you're reading, you can't think of a better way to express it. It's a new literary style (to me anyway) both in content and form that stops just short of seeming glib and goes far beyond techno-drivel.It's funny, inventive but in the end, tooooo long, thus it received only 3 stars. 100 pages shorter would have merited 4 stars!
    • 3/5
      I enjoyed this book for a while. I found the "3D printer spawns a new era of creativity" to be a very believable and fantastic basis for a near-future sci-fi novel. But I never really got into the character development or plot development. The concept was great, the storytelling only mediocre.I think this would have been better done as a work of short fiction, highlighting the vision but omitting much of the back story.
    • 1/5
      I have a good contender for worst read of 2015!The first half of this book is simply a message with a story slathered thinly on top. The practically all-male cast is cardboard and hollow, and their characters seem to be half developed based on what clothes they wear and food they eat. The female main character is a Mary Sue who can do little wrong (every single male character professes himself in love with her at some point). The other female characters are weird wish fulfillment girl (a college student who offers sage advice and then throws herself at a main character 10+ years her senior, in a very awkward sex scene) or the frustrated wife of another male character who mainly exists to watch the children and occasionally gets angry at her husband.There's all sorts of over-the-top telling. Like, a character will say "You really smell, man!" and then everyone in the scene will find this so funny they are described as doubled over laughing (or rolling around on the ground) with tears running down their face. Was this book meant for 10 year olds?Also, the fat shaming. Doctorow is obsessed with describing everyone's body types. I counted three instances of really repulsive descriptions of people who are overweight in the first forty pages. I'm assuming this was added to set up the pointless fatkins storyline (what was the point of that anyway?), but it doesn't make these sections any less repulsive to me. Here's a sample: The other commonality this stretch of road shared with Detroit was the obesity of the people she passed. She'd felt a little self-conscious that morning, dressing in a light short-sleeved blouse and a pair of shorts -- nothing else would do, the weather was so hot and drippy that even closed-toe shoes would have been intolerable. At 45, her legs had slight cellulite saddlebags and her tummy wasn't the washboard it had been when she was 25. But here, on this stretch of road populated by people so fat they could barely walk, so fat that they were de-sexed marshmallows with faces like inflatable toys, she felt like a toothpick.And "Right," Perry said. "That's next week, and this aft we've got some work to do, but now I'm ready for lunch. You guys ready for lunch?" Something about food and really fat guys, it seemed like an awkward question to Suzanne, like asking someone who'd been horribly disfigured by burns if he wanted to toast a marshmallow. But Lester didn't react to the question -- of course not, he had to eat, everyone had to eat. Anyway, this book was horrible. The story just kept going and going on pointlessly for 400 pages. I was excited to read something by Doctorow, because I really like his ideas, so this was definitely disappointing. And, okay, the ideas underneath this mess were actually very interesting (I DID like the idea of the crowd-sourced ride slowly turning into a subconsciously created story). But, I rather read about these ideas in blog posts and non-fiction. My advice? Don't read Makers and stick to Doctorow's non-fiction.