Wired News: Making a Revolution: "Maker's Faire and its estimated 20,000 visitors are part of the DIY movement, and this movement has a political side. Presenters and attendees alike say they are tired of being infantilized by technology. They want five cent parts for their fuel pumps. They want the DMCA to be repealed. They want to make their own soap and baby food. They want be able to open the box, peer inside and muck around in the innards. Socializing at an event that brings hackers, grease monkeys, knitters and robot builders together can feel like the melding of niche communities that never should have been separated. Craftiness is activism based on a value system that seamstresses and Linux hackers share.
Still, the philosophy is not so much counter-consumerism as counter-corporate control. At the fair, some adherents to old-school hacker ethics passed out flyers asking whether makers were really doing anything very radical at all. If a hacker is just a weekend hobbyist, hacking does not challenge the commercialism that gave us black box technologies, restrictive licensing agreements and the DMCA in the first place. 'Asking for the right to modify a commodity that has been sold to us does not challenge anything. These projects only help to create bigger cages or longer leashes,' read an anonymous handbill circulating at the fairgrounds."