TechShop charges a monthly membership fee, which provides access to facilities equipped with everything from oxyacetylene welders to the latest design software. TechShop’s support staffers are called Dream Consultants, and the book is peppered with yarns about desperate souls—laid off, poor, depressed, sleeping in their cars right next to the makerspace—who have been transformed by the experience of making. (Describing a woman who became a vender on Etsy after visiting TechShop, Hatch writes, “An accidental entrepreneur was born. And what was Tina’s background? She was a labor organizer.”) Like Anderson, Hatch emphasizes how we are all born makers but are everywhere in ready-made chains. We must abandon the virtual and embrace the physical—preferably at Hatch’s TechShop.
Hatch and Anderson alike invoke Marx and argue that the success of the maker movement shows that…
