For all the talk of the “de-institutionalization of society” enabled by the personal computer, Brand was brutally honest about the kinds of emancipation that he had to offer. The way to join the holy disorder of hackerdom was by, say, playing Tetris—and, on weekends, going home and hacking rubber stamps, postcards, and whatever else one had ordered from the “Whole Earth Catalog.”

Is Brand’s hacking revolutionary, or counter-revolutionary? The plentiful recent books that preach hacking as a way of life—“Reality Hacking,” “Hacking Your Education,” “Hacking Happiness”—express devotion at least to the rhetoric of revolt. “Hacking Work,” a business book published in 2010, announces that “you were born to hack” and suggests ways in which one could “hack” work to achieve “morebetterfaster results.” As in most of these books, our hackers aren’t smashing the system; they’re fiddling with it so that they can get more work done. In this vision, it’s up to individuals to accommodate themselves to the system rather than to try to reform it. The shrinking of political imagination that accompanies such attempts at doing more with less usually goes unremarked.

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That hacking has come to mean two very different aspirations became evident when Barack Obama belittled Edward Snowden as “a twenty-nine-year-old hacker” only a few weeks after the White House endorsed the first National Day of Civic Hacking. In Britain, the Metropolitan Police might be busy finding hackers like Snowden, but in April it helped organize “Hack the Police!”—a so-called “hackathon,” where software developers and designers were encouraged to bring their “unique talents to the fight against crime.” In contrast to jabbering, feckless politicians, hackers offer hope for the most hopeless endeavors. “I’d like to see the spirit of hackerdom improve peace in the Middle East,” the influential technology publisher and investor Tim O’Reilly proclaimed a couple of years ago.

Inevitably, hacking itself had to get hacked. When, in November, Brand was asked about who carries the flag of counterculture today, he pointed to the maker movement. The makers, Brand said, “take whatever we’re not supposed to take the back off of, rip the back off and get our fingers in there and mess around. That’s the old impulse of basically defying authority and of doing it your way.” Makers, in other words, are the new hackers.

There are already plenty of intellectual entrepreneurs eager to capitalize on the new counterculture. Kevin Kelly—who used to work with Brand on his many magazines—has revived the “Whole Earth Catalog” tradition with his new catalogue-like publication, “Cool Tools.” It features product tips for the true reality hacker—from “quick-refreshing underwear for travel” to the “luxurious, squirting WC seat” (thermostatically warmed, and yours for just eight hundred dollars). “A third industrial revolution is stirring—the Maker era,” Kelly writes in the introduction to “Cool Tools.” “The skills for this accelerated era lean toward the agile and decentralized. Therefore tools recommended here are aimed at small groups, decentralized communities, the do-it-yourselfer, and the self-educated. . . . These possibilities cataloged here will help makers become better makers.” In his world, the main thing it takes to be a maker is a credit card.

The maker era might not be upon us yet, but the maker movement has arrived. Just who are these people? Like the Arts and Crafts movement—a mélange of back-to-the-land simplifiers, socialists, anarchists, and tweedy art connoisseurs—the makers are a diverse bunch. They include 3-D-printing enthusiasts who like making their own toys, instruments, and weapons; tinkerers and mechanics who like to customize household objects by outfitting them with sensors and Internet connectivity; and appreciators of craft who prefer to design their own objects and then have them manufactured on demand.

Each of these subgroups has its own history. What turns them into a movement is the intellectual infrastructure that allows makers to reflect on what it means to be a maker. Makers interested in honing their skills can take classes in well-equipped “makerspaces,” where they can also design and manufacture their wares. Makers have their own widely read publication—the magazine Make—a cheerleader for “technology on your time.” Then there are Maker Faires—exhibitions dedicated to the celebration of the D.I.Y. mind-set which were pioneered by Make and have quickly spread across the country and far beyond, including a Maker Faire Africa. And, as befits a contemporary movement, the makers want respect: a Maker’s Bill of Rights has been drafted. Kelly isn’t jesting when he identifies the rise of makers with a third industrial revolution: many promoters of the maker movement believe that personal manufacturing will undermine the clout of large corporations. It might even liberate labor in a way that the Arts and Crafts radicals hadn’t anticipated, with office workers abandoning their jobs in pursuit of meaningful self-employment amid sensors and 3-D printers. Meanwhile, the prospect of being able to print guns, drug paraphernalia, and other regulated objects appeals to libertarians.

A proper movement requires more than newsletters and magazines; it also needs manifestos. Chris Anderson, the Wired editor-in-chief who quit his job to become the C.E.O. of 3D Robotics, a company that develops personal drones, published one such manifesto, “Makers,” in 2012. More recently, Mark Hatch, the C.E.O. of TechShop, a chain of makerspaces across the country, published “The Maker Movement Manifesto.” Both books promise a revolution.

Anderson defines “making” so expansively that all of us seem to qualify, at least once a day. “If you love to plant, you’re a garden Maker. Knitting and sewing, scrap-booking, beading, and cross-stitching—all Making.” There’s nothing in this book about mythmaking, but that surely qualifies as well. For someone who spent more than a decade at the helm of Wired, Anderson sounds surprisingly unhappy with the virtual turn that our lives have taken. He repeatedly blames screens and personal computers for our lack of contact with physical objects. “The digital natives are starting to hunger for life beyond the screen,” he writes. “Making something that starts virtual but quickly becomes tactile and usable in the everyday world is satisfying in a way that pure pixels are not.” Many aesthetes in the early Arts and Crafts debates complained about machines, rather than about the economic conditions under which they were used. Anderson, likewise, sees “pure pixels” as the source of discontent, as opposed to the uses to which those pixels are put (the boring spreadsheet, the senseless PowerPoint deck).

For Anderson, it’s the democratization of invention—anyone can become an app mogul these days—that defines the past two decades of Internet history. Owing to the maker movement, he thinks, the same thing might happen to manufacturing: “ ‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup. Now it describes a hardware company, too.” Every inventor can become an entrepreneur. Indeed, he anticipates a Web-like future for the maker movement: “ever-accelerating entrepreneurship and innovation with ever-dropping barriers to entry.”

The kind of Internet metaphysics that informs Anderson’s account sees ingrained traits of technology where others might see a cascade of decisions made by businessmen and policymakers. (Would “the history of the Web” be the same if the National Science Foundation hadn’t relinquished control of the Internet to the private sector in 1995?) This is why Anderson starts by confusing the history of the Web with the history of capitalism and ends by speculating about the future of the maker movement, which, on closer examination, is actually speculation on the future of capitalism. What Anderson envisages—more of the same but with greater diversity and competition—may come to pass. But to set the threshold for the third industrial revolution so low just because someone somewhere forgot to regulate A.T. & T. (or Google) seems rather unambitious.