Minui majestatem mentis humanae, si in experimentis et rebus particularibus, etc. (“La dignidad de la mente humana es reducida por el frecuente y largo trato entre experimentos y particulares”; Bacon, Novum Organum). Este prejuicio ha tendido a llenar las ciudades con espectadores inútiles y con hombres orgullosos comprometidos a una especulación holgazana, y el campo con tiranos baladíes que son ignorantes, perezosos y desdeñosos.

. En algunos casos en relación con la agencia se invocan el arte, la artesanía (craft) y una imaginación renovada para la creación de objetos que nos convoquen, más que simplemente de objetos sin vida.

Hice hincapié en ‘creación’ porque el trabajo intelectual, como el diseño, tiene que ver con el hacer. En la escritura hay una dimensión encarnada, a menudo ignorada, casi una tactilidad y una fenomenología de la escritura que participa más

subjectsofpowerincyberspacehavecomeintobeingthroughtheaccumulationofrepetitiveactions,throughtheirtakingupandembeddingofconventionsintheireverydaylivesinhomes,workplaces,andpublicspaces.Itisthroughtheactsofparticipating,connecting,andsharingthatthesehavebecomedemandsandlearnedrepertoiresthatarenotseparatefrombutindeliblyshapedbyandshapingofsubjects.

Henry Jenkins similarly noted that "do it yourself' is a diffuse notion that can be conflated to an individualistic perspective on creative and technical work, and thus he advocates for moving towards more "collective enterprises within networked publics" (Knobel & Lankshear, 2010, p. 232). Compared with hacking, making is more involved with creating objects within a lineage of craft or art. Rather than hacking's strategic to bring about differences (an outcome), making is more

Compared with the contentious history of hacker culture, the history of making is comparatively unmapped. It can be most accurately described as a new craft movement (Rosner & Ryokai, 2009) that recalls relationships with materials through craft (Sennett, 2008) and hobbies (Gelber, 1999).

This popularization is well captured by Brian Alleyne's (2011) observation that "we are all hackers now," a far cry from the insularity of the late 1980s (Meyer, 1989). The term hacker is freely applied to contexts as diverse as data-driven journalism (Lewis & Usher, 2013), urban exploration (Garrett, 2012), and creative use of IKEA products (Rosner & Bean, 2009). I frame hacking as "popular" to underscore its accessible, immediate, and participatory aspects (Jenkins, 2006), even if it is not popular in the same way as "fan cultures" (Jenkins, McPherson & Shattuc, 2002). Rather than media, the popular tum in hacking is linked to interactions with objects, platforms, and practices that invite participation and thereby increase the scope of who have typically considered themselves hackers in new and unforeseen ways.

HackerMoms built on the language of hacking, and its emerging discourse of digital production, to define and legitimate women as hackers and, accordingly, relevant actors in high-tech-nology markets. To accomplish this, members accorded feminized emotional and craft-based skills the same respect as accorded to computer engineering competencies within more “traditional” (predominantly male) hacker collectives.

At HackerMoms, many members like Renz used craft techniques to create objects and “hack” physical craft materials. From the perspective of those who saw HackerMoms as “anti-hackerspace,” celebrating craft and art making without computation rendered the concept of hacking ambiguous and insig-nificant. This concern often resonated with engineers and scientists like Renz’s husband, a physicist, who confessed to her he did not consider her work hacking (Interview with Daniela Rosner, 18 April, 2013).

Executing code entailed more than ‘menial’ labor, much like wrote domestic handi-work; to compute, female factory workers wove the core memory by hand — carefully moving long wires around rings — in what some termed the “little old lady method” (Wolfinger, 1994). Histories of craftwork have even shaped the computer itself. As his-torians of computing (Ensmenger 2010, Light 1999, Maly 2013) have suggested, pro-gramming has always been “women’s work.” Evidence includes the punch card mechanism Marie Joseph used in her Jacquard loom and Charles Babbage later fit to his analytic engine, the machine celebrated as the precursor of modern-day computers.

craftwork reappears in the technical imagination of the organization. Lucy Suchman and Randall Trigg (1993), for example, have equated the work of technology development with socially organized craftsmanship: “the craft-ing together of a complex machinery made of heterogeneous materials, mobilized in the service of developing a theory of mind” (p. 144). Here, they build on Latour’s (1986) concept of science as craftwork to describe the work of “crafting machines” that are capable of effectively engaging with humans and participating in social relations (Suchman and Trigg, 1993: 147). In particular, they identify “collaborative craftwork of hands, eyes, and signs” as the unit of analysis built into the organization of production and use.

By the end of World War I, however, technophilia took hold of the (male) modernist imagination, framing women as instruments and men as makers. The skilled artist/craftman had mastery of machines and women (Oldenziel, 1999: 146).

This rubric represents the legacy of two distinct gendered meanings built into the single word ‘craft’ by artisan communities (Adamson, 2010; Lippard, 2010 [1978]) and progressive era domestic DIY activity in the United States (Gelber, 1997). The first con-cerns feminized connotations positioning the quotidian as the place where power rela-tions can be voiced and contested. Feminist writing of the 1960s and 1970s exposed the historically gendered nature of craft and its ties to domesticity. According to art historian Glenn Adamson (2010), this scholarship reframed amateurism not as an acceptance of circumstance they needed to transcend but as a mechanism by which to judge the degree of gender prejudice. Feminist art historian Lucy Lippard (2010 [1978]) has argued that the category of craft even made possible the recognition of more female artists, expand-ing the realm of fine art to include quilts, textiles, and forms of material rehabilitation. Rehabilitation, Lippard claims, as a type of “inventive” patching (e.g. remaking clothes and recovering old furniture) becomes a mending of objects and public dignity.

But we soon saw that they applied the label ‘craft’ differently. Their definitions came out of a fervent interest in independent craft, or “indicraft,” signaling an effort to “preserve feminine heritage”

Craft figures strongly in these histories, which stress the role of homemaker as laborer (Adamson, 2010; Cowan, 1983; Strasser, 2000). By claiming this labor as part of hacking cultures, the hackerspace mem-bers we discuss locate women’s work at the center of new media industries.

we show how the work of failure began to destabilize an established ontology of hacking, making room for feminist legacies of craft.

The icebreaker for meetings became what they called craft aperitifs, small projects that kept their hands moving. These events invoked a particular idea of “craft” that we elaborate later, one that drew connec-tions between women’s contemporary milestones and feminist histories of handwork.

Craft, according to Adamson, became “a strain of activity that responds to and conditions the putatively normative experience of modernity, in many and unpredictable ways” (Adamson, 2010: 5). It was not outside modernity “but a modern way of thinking otherwise.” In the writing that follows, we show how a logic of failure became a means for “thinking otherwise” about the hacking ethos.

Since the rise of early sites of computer hacking like the Chaos Computer Club, a German technology collective founded in the 1980s promoting open information infrastructure, the term hacking has fit aspirational ideals of technical cleverness and creativity perpetuated by engineer-ing cultures. Women-operated hackerspaces have opened an alternate view: enliven-ing connections between hacking and histories of women’s craftwork rooted in a feminist politics of fracture (Barad 2007; Haraway 1988).

By integrating feminist legacies of craftwork with the centrality of failure — exposing personal failures and failures to transform hacker cultures — members not only energize new modes of hacking activity but also hack the very ontology of hacking.

Appropriation considers both learn-ing-by-using and learning-by-doing as central to the development of new processes (Rosenberg, 1982). Learning-by-doing in particular assumes that knowledge emerges through bricolage—tinkering with and recombining technology elements, thus enhancing one’s understanding (Lévi-Strauss, 1966). For Tuomi (2002), learning through appropria-tion is a user-centered process whereby users meld culture with material resources to innovate.

Hacker and maker spaces are community workshops that promote notions of open-access and equal participation. Yet, they tend to embrace a contradiction. Their egalitar-ian goals paradoxically reflect a masculine geek identity anchored by an exclusionary “meritocracy.” Addressing democratization requires questioning how power and identity in hacker and maker spaces can be reconnected and re-programmed. Daniela K. Rosner and Sarah Fox illuminate just such a rich counter-narrative in the feminist hackerspace Mothership Hackermoms. Rosner and Fox argue feminist hackerspaces emerged from legacies of craft, engineering culture, and emotional style through failure. They argue that histories of craft and domesticity don’t just undergird engineering cultures—they provide concepts for women to re-imagine maker spaces in a feminist mold.

Interactions through things, and perceptions about their potential, were ways to negotiate between seemingly conflicting imperatives of the individualism and communalism (A. L. Toombs, Bardzell, & Bardzell). Members would deliberately design activities that were incomplete to encourage a playful material improvisation. In these ways, the “material sensibilities” of members were particularly important. Similarly, reading a history of craft into software hacking, Lingel and Regan (2014) found that software hackers identified their work with craft as process, embodiment, and community. These sensitive readings of interactions with stuff seemed to more accurately capture the genre of hackerspaces, more so than action was guided by culture.