We Are Entering a Maker Renaissance

We are living in an era ripe for makers. While large, established players dominated technological progress in recent decades, the next big thing is much more likely to come from a tinkerer’s garage—thanks to generative AI’s accessibility, speed of prototyping, and massive market opportunities. My intuition is that it’s a historic moment on par with the birth of the Internet—or perhaps even more significant than that.

So it seemed like a good time to ponder what makes for a maker. Who is suited to the task of novel invention? What technological and societal circumstances do makers thrive in? And why is generative AI such fertile ground for maker magic?

📻 Who are makers?

As the word says, makers make stuff. They’re the inventors and prototypers who engage with a new technology not because they have to as part of their job, but because they find it irresistibly interesting and fun. They don’t do it for entertainment, fame, or promise of other future boons (even if they sometimes reap those benefits). 

I like to say that developers are “9-to-5-ers” and makers are “9 p.m.-to-early-morning-ers.”  This might not be an entirely accurate description, but it captures the spirit. It hints at the key property of a maker: it’s not a kind of person. It’s a mindset. The same person who puts in their work hours at their day job becomes a maker extraordinaire in the evening or weekends.

They get their hands dirty. They are the kind of early adopter who doesn’t just adopt the tech. They build new things with it.

Makers play with technology, rather than apply it to achieve business goals. They delight in finding weird quirks and twists, the same way gamers love finding glitches that lead to a speedrun. They find all the design flaws and unintended side effects and turn them into a feature. The whole process is messy and often follows the “life, uh… finds a way” path—what makers build may differ a lot from the technologists’ intended range of use.

Makers write crappy code and wire things on breadboards. They rarely care about the future enterprise strength of their project. They explore ideas non-linearly, probing all—however unlikely—possibilities. They scrap half-finished projects and repurpose them into new ones. All of this contributes to the seeming disarray of the maker scene. A good sign of a maker project are fix-forward collaboration practices, where any failed attempts at making progress are addressed by patching new attempts over them, rather than reverting everything back to the pre-failure state.