25 According to Stephen Weber, ‘by experimenting with fundamental notions of what constituted property, this community has reframed and recast some of the most basic problems of governance’. Large corporations currently make money from open source, while inventing new business, organizational models, notions of property, ownership and innovation along the way. 24 The significance of hackerspaces goes well beyond the leisure-time activities of a bunch of geeks (however interesting they might be). 23 The proliferation of hackerspaces around the world has helped promulgate a DIY maker culture that revolves around both technological and social practices of peer production, creative tinker- ing, a commitment to open source principles, and a curiosity about the inner workings of technology. With an estimated 700 to 1,100 active spaces in existence worldwide, hackerspaces are a significant global phenomenon. Today, there are hackerspaces across several cities in China such as Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Ningbo, Huangzhou, and Guangzhou. Only six months later, Xinchejian had grown to such an extent that it moved into its own building. They equipped a room with a 3D printer, sensor toolkits, soldering irons – and China’s first hackerspace was born.
About three months into my ethnographic research with Xindanwei, a small sub-community formed, led by David Li, Min- Lin Hsieh and Ricky Ng-Adam, who were interested in DIY and open hardware. I was able to witness this moment while I was conducting research with a collective of entrepreneurs, designers, bloggers, and artists active in and around the co-working space Xindanwei 22 ( 新单位 ). China’s first hackerspace opened in Shanghai in the fall of 2010 under the name Xinchejian 21 ( 新车间 ). Hackerspaces also often host educational workshops, where these tools are used to teach others about manipulating the physical environment through software, or vice versa. A typical space is equipped with computing tools that allow for experimenting with the physical/digital boundary – computer-controlled laser cutters, 3D printers, and microcontroller kits.
Hackerspaces are community spaces created by people committed to new approaches towards technology use and design, based on the open sharing of software code and hardware designs. China’s maker culture emerged from a growing network of hackerspaces, that is, physical spaces that expand ideas and practices of the web generation into hardware and manufacturing. They bring together and align often contradictory ideas such as copycat and open source, manufacturing and DIY, individual empowerment and collective change and in doing so they craft a particular kind of subject position for themselves and others in China. DIY makers align with start-up culture and hackerspaces in the United States, do not hesitate to take advantage of foreign venture capital, 20 and exploit political promotions of China’s remake into a creative economy. leveraged dissident artists for claims over national cultural production and how artists in turn exploited state support, Barmé argues: China’s DIY maker culture is neither entirely countercultural nor pro-system.