Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Adam Savage’s Maker Faire “Sunday Sermon””.
[ Applause, ], hello, makerfaire, you like to start just go: okay! Well, let me say we’re thrilled that you’re here and I’m even more thrilled. That Adam is here. I think it’s like the 11th year or something we love you and we are inspired by you, and here you go without further ado, Adam Savage. Let me get my stuff out.
How are you guys doing today so last year I got I got here and I was getting ready to get on another giant animal to ride over to the stage and Sheree said you know everyone’s eager to hear your Sunday sermon, and I said Sunday sermon. What’S that and she said, that’s what we call your sunday talk and no one had told me, so I decided this year to write something more akin to a sermon, a secular one, to be sure, but all my brothers and sisters, my sisters and brothers – welcome to Maker Faire, it is lovely to see you’re, shining and beautiful faces to see the inspiration that is here and well hey, sherry. Is there a mic stand possible or not? Do you want to move the umbrella new? You guys can see me I’m visible right. What’S that strap the mic on the umbrella? No, where are we and where are we going? Where we are, is amazing? Driverless cars might mean the end of a million vehicle related deaths per year with technology and science. We have improved the overall health and wellness of humans to the point that it is better now than it has ever been in history. We can produce calories cheaper than imaginable fifty years ago, and luxuries like washing machines, cars and televisions are part of nearly every single household, where the Internet makes so much connectivity possible that the Barbie collecting banker in Japan can become best friends with the LARPing poet in Spokane things are pretty cool. This is a terrible time where our open Internet is under threat, where automation will eliminate millions of jobs in the next decade, where the disparity between the richest and the poorest of us increases every single day, where the color of one’s skin can radically alter the outcome Of trivial interactions, things as simple and quotidian as driving down the street or flying on an airplane are fraught with uncertainty at best. Thank you. Well, hello, Oh much better things as simple and coat ideon as driving down the street or flying on an airplane are fraught.
Are fraud, where are they with uncertainty at best and lethal danger, at worst or in connect? Interconnectivity still yields cleats and exclusive groups leading teens on social media to feel more alone and more marginalized, where partisan politics? Sorry, where science, the crucible of human progress, has become attached to partisan politics, the engine of exclusion and marginalization, where our planet is being irrevocably changed for the worse by our bad habits as William Gibson famously said, the future is already here: it’s not very evenly distributed. Both of these things are true at the same exact time, things are have they abs, as they have always been they’re, both great and terrible, but where are we now now temporarily? We are at the Maker Faire mothership in San Mateo, where we are celebrating that it has never been a better time to be a maker. What unbelievable tools we have at our disposal. We have 3d printers final cutter scanners, laser engravers and every hand tool imaginable, and we are here because of you.
Mad scientists makers, tinkerers modders, plotters planners organizing teachers, parents and inventors find that being around each other is inspiring and seeing what other mad geniuses makers, tinkerers modders plotters, planners organizers, teachers, parents and inventors are doing, invests our work with more purpose and gives us ideas to Go back home, it’s invigorating and it’s heartwarming. We are here to be part of a solution. We may not be able to see the pathway to the solution that can lead to an overall fulfilled healthy, safe and well educated populace, but we can take each step. That seems like the right one, that’s in front of us and we can get together and share an enthusiasm that is a great first step to take.
We come from so many different backgrounds and circumstances and families, and yet we are all here together. The Industrial Revolution turned us into a cargo cult and gave us consumerism for better or worse, but we are here as a vanguard of a new way of thinking about consumerism. The devices that we are currently calling rapid, prototyping machines will soon become so good. They will be rapid manufacturing machines.
The current product release model that requires expensive, advanced, tooling and fulfillment chains to be developed at massive human and financial cost is about to give way to countless versions of the on demand model where iterative invention can take weeks instead of months hours instead of days, the Economy of scale, where an apple has to make millions of iPhones to enjoy the cost savings that make unaffordable to a person that economy of scale is about to collapse, and I think that’s a good thing. It means that I can buy my next computer case from a kid down the street and enjoy their hard-working innovation, as well as having a personal connection to them. I am all for that.
William Gibson has in one of his books that looks just a little bit into the future. A community in the southwest called the sandbenders, and he posits this future will be no longer buy new laptops. We just buy bigger, hard drives and slightly better screens, and we put them into a pre-existing case, and so this group in the southwest is taking recycled materials and silver and turquoise and making laptop cases that are highly personalized to each buyer and they’re called the sandbenders.
I love the sandbender future, we’re opening up maker spaces every single day in libraries, schools, hospitals, rec centers Boys and Girls, Clubs, community centers, all over the country and all over the world, and we are here working hard to equalize and democratize. The access to those spaces working hard to share best practices, curricula, fundraising tips and even tools and techniques with each other, and with these maker spaces we are training, a generation of makers, inventors and digital digital natives to manipulate their world, hopefully, for the better. There may be a James Bond villain in here somewhere right now that positions taken by Elon Musk and if he’s our generations Bond villain, we’re not doing so bad uh Elon spoke at Ted this year and he said a quote.
I love. He said he just. Why is he doing all the crazy stuff that he’s doing, because he just wants to be able to think about the future and not be sad? I can’t think of a better sentiment, no matter what side you fall on in any of these debates.
So why make? Why do we make there as many reasons as there are hearts and minds, but some of the more significant ones we make, because in a world of suffering such as we live, having the illusion of control over an empty bench or a blank page or a silent Room is how we build energy to help those around us we make, because humans have always worked out their problems in microcosm and while we share child rearing traits with orcas and social hierarchies with gray wolves, we are the only ones making marks on paper about it. We make because we’re storytellers using the narrative form to understand our universe, our surroundings and each other’s stories, or how we truly communicate and make sense of our experience we make because iterative failure is as important a technique as iterative success and, let’s talk about failure. I know that I did this last year, but it’s worth repeating by the age of 13. A young girl has already been inculcated with the cultural idea of perfection that she’d rather say she didn’t complete her coding assignment than show five pages of bad code.
People who don’t admit to failure and resist confronting their own shortcomings will eventually be the inhibitors of progress. They are the opposite of agents of change, they’re anti reagents. We need to talk about helping kids to understand failure, but we need to talk first about what we mean by failure and what benefits it might yield. When we say failure, we truly mean failure with a small F.
Failure with a capital. F is like I got drunk and missed my own surprise party or my son’s Bar Mitzvah. No, I tried to make that a joke, but it’s so horrifying, no one ever laughs. When we’re talking about failure. Again, we mean with a small F and what we mean is things not going according to plan? Nothing ever goes according to plan. Nothing ever goes according to plan and that’s the plan that whenever you set out to make something from nothing, a song, a poem, a table, you start with a plan and then things go awry.
If Buddha had to choose a fifth truth underneath his tree, I’m convinced it would be. Nothing ever goes according to plan, and that’s why we do it because confronting ourselves and our own biases in the microcosm of the blank sheet of paper, the empty room or the pristine bench, is how we practice and succeed at better taking knowing ourselves and our loved Ones: it’s how we come to know and love ourselves. We can’t just as the flight attendant says, you’ve got to put on your own oxygen before putting the oxygen on your child. This is we practice, and so my fellow makers, mad geniuses, tinker’s modders plotters, planners organizers, teachers, parents and inventors.
Let us help the moral arc of the universe bend towards justice. Let us go forward and spread the word that we can use our skills for good for the betterment of our lives, our communities and our planet. This isn’t partisan. Let’S move forward with these things in mind: acceptance, inclusion, sustainability, democratized access, creativity, support, forgiveness, safety and love. As the late amazing statistician, Hans Rosling said, I have a suggestion for a new term for the developing world. Let’S just call it the world, let’s hear together at Maker Faire work together on making a better one.
That’S my Sunday sermon, [ Applause, ] .