Sally Applin's AnthroPunk presentation at Maker Faire

Sally Applin is a Ph.D. student in social anthropology and computing at the University of Kent. She studies how we make technology and how it makes us. She works with Dr. Michael Fischer on AnthroPunk, the idea that "individual people collectively make the world around them, not only from the materials and ideas available to them, but from new materials and ideas that they construct."  One of their messages is that while we may DIY, we work with materials and ideas that come from collaborative sources. In short, making is social and people can make more than things, we make ideas and we are continually making and remaking the culture that we reside within.

She gave a terrific talk at Maker Faire about the making of things, knowledge, culture, and ideas.

AnthroPunk: Meta Making, Culture Making, and the "Making" of Making

• [turn_self_off]

  Reminds me why copyright and patents are such a wonky idea…

• [Anonymous]

  I read anthropunk and thought of some sort of new furry genre. Not everything needs to be a compound word with punk or hack.

• [MacBookHeir]

  “because everything you do is “built on systems that have evolved”
  —

  This assertion reminds me of the intriguing theories of Rupert Sheldrake regarding Morphic Resonance, wherein things and events from the past resonate into the future (and vice versa) -
  therefore things and events are not singular and isolated

• [mf42]

  @anon … “the claim that every system has evolved is sort of unfalsifiable, and therefore not so meaningful.”

  Since we were talking about human systems, we perhaps should have put the qualifier “every human system” in there. This is pretty easy to set out in a falsifiable manner, unless you don’t allow us to build on biological evolutionary theory, in which case we’re kind of out of options. The problem I tend to wrest with is the opposite, that it can be read as sort of banal and self-evident. What is not banal is the notion that is perhaps not explicit enough in the talk, that it is through ideas about the world that we tend to change the world rather than changing (or adapting) to suit the world. Human adaptation is largely active rather than passive, human knowledge is far more the basis of change in recent times (the last million years or so) than human biology, and the interplay between human knowledge and material change arising from that knowledge supports the scope for further adaptation.

  To differentiate from a rather passive sense about adaptation to a more active one I use the term hyperadaptation; the major form of adaptation for people is to change the world instead of themselves. In particular hyperadaptation has to do with the creation of tools (with both a material an ideational component — powerful knowledge) to change the environment rather than changing it in some optimal way in an one-off manner. Tools are much more powerful than behaviours, which is the major problem I have with the use of memes and copying to explain culture by people like Dawkins and Blackmore. A meme in the sense of being powerful enough to do what is claimed for them would have to be tools and associated knowledge and skills, not just behaviours.

  Powerful Knowledge: http://bit.ly/lf9G4V
  Hyperadaptation: http://bit.ly/kXYbRw and more recently the former combined in Cultural Dyanmics: http://bit.ly/kTVBQU

  Michael Fischer

• [buddy66]

  Even Leonardo was a DITer. And the future does have a pull on the present – he knew the goddamn thing would someday fly.

• [Zachary Bos]

  “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” Carl Sagan

• [luisella]

  “because everything you do is “built on systems that have evolved”

  That’s why there’s no such thing as a self-made man and corporations and the richest one percent should pay more than 80% like under FDR.

• [AnthroPunk]

  It looks like the “watch full video” link is missing a letter.

  Here is the link for the full video:

  http://fora.tv/2011/05/22/Sally_Applin_AnthroPunk

• [Ratio]

  AnthroPunk. OK. Like the word “hack” before it, “punk” has lost all meaning.

• [Anonymous]

  I feel like the claim that every system has evolved is sort of unfalsifiable, and therefore not so meaningful.

• [sockdoll]

  no such thing as DIY

  In that case please tell me how to contact these people so they can come build the shelving in my garage for me. Or will it just evolve into place?

  • [AnthroPunk]

    Just to clarify, we never say concretely that there is no such thing as DIY.

    What Mark’s interpretation means is that if you take the long view — the tools and materials that people use in “DIY” actually take an entire system of people working together to create (DIT).

    For example, sockdoll, to get those shelves in your garage, assuming they are wooden, people had to farm trees, cut them, mill them into lumber, which was shipped distributed and sold to you for shelves. The hammer, other tools and nails they would use come from similar supply chain hierarchies. Someone might build it alone–but they are doing so using the cooperation of many others in many other systems. That’s why it can be considered to be a more collaborative effort.

    • [sockdoll]

      Yes, I’m well acquainted with the concept of “nanos gigantium humeris insidentes,” but the DOING is still done by the individual. “DIY” is often about inventiveness and resourcefulness, and a chain of people have obviously contributed to providing tools and materials, but the actual doing still needs to be DONE.

      • [AnthroPunk]

        I agree!