Objects in Flux - RMIT Research Repository - RMIT University

dynamic. When consumer practices are reduced to a reflection of
capital processes, when they are taken as a mirror of professional
practice (Leadbeater & Miller, 2004) or regarded as a research and
development department driven by an equation of function and need
(Von Hippel, 2005), important qualities of these practices are lost.
These methods of framing, that conflate work and leisure, make work
the defining form, the structure by which production is ultimately
tested and judged. Such an approach does not give adequate account
of productive acts that take place outside the capitalist economy. We
must remember that commercial production is but a subset of human
production and should not be used as the blueprint by which all productive
acts are judged.
Contrary to much of the rhetoric surrounding emergent consumer
production, distinctions between producers and consumers, as given
through relations of power and modalities of action, continue to define
the space of consumption. The emancipatory technology that has
given visibility to divergent consumer practices has also allowed these
practices to be targeted, manipulated, and captured by commercial
interests. If the consumer is to be productive and make this production
known, then their actions are generally subject to commercial control.
It is worth noting that while farmers in the early 20th C. were free to
tinker with the automobile, the owners of the Aibo robotic dog did not
have the same rights.
7.3 Freedom
Despite complex control mechanisms, the research finds that practices
of consumer production have consistently challenged commercial
institutions. From the 1960s onwards acts of consumer production
were seen as a means for activating social change, where practitioners
enacted change in their own lives through direct action. Central to
this approach is a belief that information should be free and open to
everyone, an attitude that is visible within the Whole Earth Catalogue
(Brand, 1968), Jencks’ ‘resource-full computer’ (1972), punk and
post-punk zine production (Triggs, 2006) and hacker attitudes from
MIT in the 1960s to the open source software developers of today
(Levy, 1984). While this belief in freedom of information has become
an inherited ideology within practices of hacking, modding and DIY,
Conclusion
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