The ‘Makers contradiction’. The shift from a counterculture-driven DIY production to a new form of DIY consumption.

The Makers, born in 2005 with the founding of the MAKE magazine, are recognised as the pioneers of the so-called ‘Third Industrial Revolution’ (Anderson, 2012, 2012; Rifkin, 2012; Marsh, 2013; Lipson, Kurman, 2013) as well as the proponents of a ‘Movement’ stemming from Do-It-Yourself (DIY) practices. Such a movement, whilst proposing a socio-technical revolution based on personal use of production technologies, tends to be taking a non- conflictual position towards those global economic players against whom it claims to offer an alternative model. This tendency, observed among some Makers communities, contributed to the shifting of DIY practices from production to consumption activities. In order to highlight this phenomenon, we devised three stages of analysis: i)The understanding of the Makers phenomenon within a social sciences theoretical view, to frame the emergence of Makers as consumer figures; ii) investigation of the role played by Maker Media in disseminating the concept of Makers and influencing the Maker Movement; iii) the analysis of the Makers’ activities within the Makerbot-Thingiverse communities, undertaken with theoretical and conceptual tools derived from ‘Practice Theory’.