Maker's mark: Why so many young techies are turning to tinkering

It’s true: Some 70,000 people attended an arts-and-crafts fair in Manhattan this past weekend. They milled. They performed callous-building feats of manual creation. And they demoed soldering, sandblasting, quilting, farming, injection-molding and all manner of human endeavor that showcases the meeting of opposable thumbs with materials in space and time.

It was the World Maker Faire, the roving “festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness” that invites “tech enthusiasts, crafters, educators, tinkerers, hobbyists, engineers, science clubs, authors, artists, students and commercial exhibitors” to show what they’ve made, and what they’ve been making. Even after seven years of these events, the exuberance of the Maker Faires is still discomfiting. Sure, this time things were a little less off-the-grid than in years past, despite all of the robots, drones and robots that make drones on display; but still, this year’s event was much more kid-friendly, with lots of neato colorful Build-a-Bear-style stuff that led many observers to wonder whether the Portlandia-and-Brooklyn-grown maker culture might be going mainstream.

Maker Faires “over,” as they cyclically do with Burning Man and TechCrunch Disrupt. So why is this strain of culture, the tinkering class, the one that’s gone viral in 2013?

It certainly was underpredicted. In fact, of all the imaginings of the future that proliferated in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the birth of the Web, exactly none foresaw America’s youth returning to colonial folkways — darning, churning, butchering and smelting. In the '90s, if you were ambitious and 25, you were supposed to open a bagel franchise in pleasant downtown Bucharest (glasnost!) or launch an allergy-product dot-com empire called Atchoo or Snot.com, to compete with the failsafe San Francisco blockbuster Gazoontite.com.

But, if you’ll permit a brief review: The markets in former Sovietland never stabilized or became intelligible enough for morally squeamish American small businesses. At the same time, the dot-com bust turned websites — almost every single one of them — into jokes, albeit necessary ones, which millennials were all too ready to abandon, for Facebook, mobile apps and almost anything with a lowercase “i” or capital “G” in front of it.

Alas, children of the 1990s — the ones whose eyes on college commencement day had been trained on Russia and the early Web — failed to clock this shift. So even as we Gen-X types have given up on our Warsaw-condos plan, we still habitually identify digital opportunities with the Web — that commercial dot-com space. At the same time, the younger set sees the Web as itself now Iron Curtained by an all-too-stable oligopoly (Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Facebook, AOL) that offers little chance for smaller players to do profitable work that also satisfies a creative itch.