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May 4, 2011

Cory Doctorow Predicts the Future in Makers

Jonathan Liu:

Perry and Lester are two guys living in an abandoned mall outside of Miami. They're the sort of guys who, to borrow a phrase from the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, can think up six impossible things before breakfast -- and then build them in their workshop out of stuff they've found in the junkyard.

In short, they're makers.

Cory Doctorow's Makers: A Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come is jam-packed with cool ideas. In the book, a lot of these come from Perry and Lester, like a toast-making robot made of seashells or the Distributed Boogie Woogie Elmo Motor Vehicle Operation Cluster, which uses a gaggle of discarded toys to drive a Smart car via voice commands. Now these two examples are pretty silly -- something you do just to prove you can, but there's also some stuff that shows up later in the book that made me think, "Hey, I'd buy one of those!" Parts of the book read like a "Best of Kickstarter" highlights reel.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 4, 2011 1:08 AM
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