Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Adam Savage: The Importance of Sharing”.
Hello, [ Applause ]. All right, i can’t check hands with everyone, yet hello, hello, maker faire, another big hurrah for rabid transit. Please thank you guys for keeping me warm and to the vallejo mercs who got me here and the uh got me there in the in the land. Speeder 501st. I love you guys. Ah, here’s another year um, i uh i’ve been thinking about what i was gon na say this morning for weeks. I wrote it down this morning and i didn’t expect it to go where it went.
But here we go. My life is centered around the stories that we tell each other. It is centered around the products of our making and the stories that those objects bring with them, as well as the stories they tell, but i have ignored sometimes a key aspect of what happens when we make, and that aspect is generosity our making in and of Itself is a radical and deeply generous human act. When we construct code sew or bake something new into existence, we are no longer passive observers or simple receivers of the realities around us.
We declare ourselves participants. We are installing light on a path that others may choose to follow whenever we put something into the world that didn’t exist, we’re trying to solve a problem that we see it might simply be how to paint a portrait of a person in front of us or It might be how to elicit a specific emotion with sound. It might be how to safely pull a shark from the water for tagging. With twenty dollars worth of local hardware, it might be how to turn oneself into an approximation of a favorite superhero or how to bypass a local crumbling infrastructure to ensure the safe distribution of medicine to far-flung and hard-to-serve communities. Every time we make anything, we are identifying a problem, however, trivial, that it may seem, or local or personal and in seeking to solve that problem, and we seek to solve that problem through and with what we make and any look at history at all of human History will center upon the things that we make and the stories we tell about them when we make things anything at all, we’re asserting that we’re part of that history, not simply receivers of it. We become players in the human race making is communion with fellow humans. It’S community it’s sharing and whether that’s sharing ideas, aesthetics or engineering. It’S an act of sharing with our fellow passengers on this delicate sphere, and it turns out that our parents were right.
It is so much better to share your toys, i’m here, to defend sharing as a vital aspect of mature cult maker culture that is intrinsic to the underlying ethos of what it means to be a maker and, by extension, in my opinion, a human being. Some people don’t want to share. I once attended a gallery show where the artist had done some fairly novel executions of portraits using common materials in a way that was really surprising, and i asked them about their process and they told me they didn’t want to share it with me. They wanted to keep the technique a secret. At one point, when i was working in a special effects studio, a friend of mine was making these large round forms using a very specific set of techniques, and he was doing it for a week and a half, and it was fascinating all the levels that he Went through – and i asked him if i could take pictures of the process – and he said yes, but he would withhold key parts of the information from me so that i could not learn how to do this. He considered it part of his job security for years.
The makers of barbie dolls have shut down, and maybe they still try and do this – they shut down any and all barbie themed, art shows and artwork. This is a grossly misguided form of copyright and trademark protection. It seems that they imagine somehow that they can dictate that they can dictate how people think about and discuss barbie through their enforcement. I disagree vehemently with this stance. I view it as antithetical to making as a practice as a discipline and to being a member of any community as a member of a community of humans. Art is one of the key ways in which we converse about the world and what is going on around us.
Human progress is made not simply because of how we make things, but also because we share what we make and how we made it. The first two examples i gave are examples of people mistaking the techniques that they know for a commodity. The third is based on the specious idea that one can control everything about a brand, and i know that unique processes have a value, and the inventor of those processes should benefit from that value. I believe that too that’s what our patent and copyright acts are built to address, but each of the three examples i gave are about treating something as a scarce commodity when it is not scarce at all, because sharing defies the laws of physics, the more you give Away the more you have when star wars came out and changed my life.
I was 11 years old and reading the fan magazines. At the time. I learned that people built that universe and decided that i wanted to do that too and 20 years later in 1998. I got hired up in industrial light and magic, and one day i was making some radar dishes for the movie space cowboys and i’d come up with. I had to make a dozen of them, and this was going to be really laborious.
These are like open frame. Uh radio telescopes, like the one you pass on 280 on the way here and uh. I came up with this new method of doing it, which was i laser, cut out the wire frame and then in under the heat lamp of a vacuformer.
I slumped it into a very specific radar disc shape and my friend lauren peterson who’s. One of the original industrial light and magic model makers from star wars and empire came by my desk and he said what are you doing? That looks really cool and then he went and told some of my co-workers about it and for the rest of the day, everyone filed past my desk to learn this new technique. This new technique, the institution that was the model shop, was imbibing. My new execution and learning it and keeping it in its pocket for future reference, and i i wasn’t special in this regard at all this every time a new process was brought in or someone came up with a new way to do something that procedure was repeated And the subtle institutionalization of the sharing and knowledge and about building was one of the single best things about working in that model shop.
When we over commodify around the things that we make, we mistakenly assert that we are solely responsible for this thing again, i’m not against getting paid for your good work and benefiting from your inventions. But our congress is right at this second contemplating extending copyright to almost 140 years past. The creation – and this is all because disney – doesn’t want mickey mouse to drift into the public domain. Walt disney deserved all of the fruits of his labors, but being able to commodify a creation indefinitely, and even infinitely is bad for culture and it’s bad for the world.
[ Applause ]. It’S instructive to go back and read i’m a little bit of a legal geek. So i advise this it’s instructive to go read the original copyright and patent acts from 1801 and 1802. um they’re, googleable, they’re actually quite readable, but our founding fathers state really clearly in them that a creator should totally benefit from a limited monopoly over the fruits of Their labors, but that, after a reasonable period that monopoly over those efforts should expire. This is so that society can benefit from taking that idea, learning from it tearing it apart, breaking it down and putting it back together in new and different ways.
This is literally how human progress is made and the point of human progress isn’t to make money forever from every useful invention it’s to make the world a better place than we left it, and it’s not just to make the world better for our relatives and the People we know, and the people that look like us, but for everyone working together to solve our common and uncommon problems and share resources, is how to do that, share what you’ve got and what you’ve done. And now my sunglasses don’t have close-ups. So i have to look at this. Let’S see ah yeah one of my favorite things to do when i’m building something complicated is to make more than one of them, and sometimes that’s just because i’m going to screw one up, but usually at the end. I end up with at least two of the thing, and that means i can trade the other one away, and this is this whole new bonus, because not only do i get a new thing, but in the barter exchange the person i’ve traded with, and i each Get a story associated with the things that we’ve traded and those stories become part of the lifeblood of my collection and my shop.
I believe deeply in open source uh. Last year, i released my first uh product, a tool bag that addressed my issues around the idea of a tool bag and in a few weeks, i’m going to release a bunch more products and a second iteration of this bag um, including a a brand new design. At the same time, i’m going to release for uh literally my cost a set of inexpensive patterns for both bags, so that anyone who wants to make one can pay like 15 bucks and make their own yeah. I i cannot wait to see what people do with this, and i don’t think of this as eating into my profit margin.
I see it as investing in building and learning from a community interested in solving and benefiting from the same common problems that i have. I get to see executions of my original idea that drift untold distances from anything i could have imagined the thing about sharing is paul. Mccartney is right at the end of abbey road. The love you take is equal to the love that you make.
I i turned 50 last year my sons are out of the house making their way in the world and now i’m one-fifth as old as america, and it feels old when i put it that way and i’m not superstitious – and i know that it is just a Number, but it has altered the way that i see my life moving forward. I now see myself in this new phase in which i’m no longer arriving. I’M now in the process, however long and i’m hoping for at least 40 more years, i’m in the process of leaving and preparing myself and my things for my departure. I had dinner with one of my oldest friends uh a few weeks ago, and i told him these thoughts and he’s just.
Nobody knows me better than him and the three or four people that i was bouncing around new york with in the 80s, and he said. Oh buddy, it’s totally true we’re all dying and we have to pass everything on i’m working to archive my collection so that each and every important story about what i’ve collected is saved. I’Ve brought in full-time help this year into my shop to assist in that process.
I’Ve started getting the rid of the things that i don’t need to hold on to anymore, giving them away ebay, craigslist, family and friends. I’M looking at the things i have with a more critical eye. I seek to keep only the objects that i consciously want to be a steward of, and everything else should go to someone who should you who can use it, but mostly, i see it as incumbent on me to share what i have learned constantly and through every Medium i get to play in this.
Is the story i’m telling so again i say: let’s share what we’ve got and what we’ve learned. Let’S pay respect to our teachers by being teachers by passing on what we know and admitting what we don’t. By being honest about the wrong roads, we went down to get to our destination the shameful mistakes, as well as the impossible luck. There’S another super important way that we can share.
We can share our ears, we can listen um, we live in a time of real and dangerous social polarization and those who seek further polarization are the enemies of a healthy culture and a healthy planet. Shutting out the voices of other humans has never been a path to achieve greatness. It is the way we have achieved harm and death and despair. We can start to eliminate that polarization by listening. All anyone seeks from an interpersonal connection is to be seen and to be heard, and we are living in a time when it is more important than ever to listen to those whose experiences outside yours it’s also more possible, and it has never been more important to Hear what their world is like and what kind of problems they’re trying to solve, because those problems might be different than yours, but by really engaging in the experience of others and by others. I’Ve specifically, and especially mean those at the margins of society and of your experience. You’Ll see that at the core we are all still similar. That’S the lesson from sharing your ear and letting others share their stories.
We all love our kids and our families and our partners and our friends. We all seek to find spots of real grace in the middle of and around the edges of the noisy business of making our way in the world. And we are all here for too brief a time and yet together we can get so much more done. So, let’s get started. Thank you. [ Applause, ] .