In Silicon Valley, this divide is often explicit: As Kate Losse has noted, coders get high salary, prestige, and stock options. The people who do community management—on which the success of many tech companies is based—get none of those. It’s unsurprising that coding has been folded into "making." Consider the instant gratification of seeing "hello, world" on the screen; it’s nearly the easiest possible way to "make" things, and certainly one where failure has a very low cost.

I have read this paragraph a few times and I still cannot put my finger on why i disagree with it, but disagree I do. First off the fact that Coders receive high salaries. prestige and stock options is more to do with market forces than anything else. Making 'hello world' appear on the screen may be gratifying but that's reductive to what the coders are doing. The reason they are highly esteemed (be it money, respect etc) is the fact that they are doing something difficult that also has a limited number of people who can do it, can the same be said of community management? I'm certain its difficult but is there a low number of people who can do it?

Code is "making" because we've figured out how to package it up into discrete units and sell it, and because it is widely perceived to be done by men.

The same could be said of painting, writing in terms of them being 'making' something. They were also once perceived as being done by men exclusively but that changed, the same is true of coding. In some future time when women coders are as common as men coders I guess this entire point becomes moot.

It seems like this is an argument against market forces rather than against 'creators'.

The first part of her essay reminds me of Paul Graham's "Keep Your Identity Small". Tying your identity to any group predisposes you to us-vs-them thinking. Identifying as "a maker" might seem particularly distasteful because maker vs. non-maker is a decent proxy for rich vs poor.

As a teenager, I read Ayn Rand on how any work that needed to be done day after day was meaningless, and that only creating new things was a worthwhile endeavor.

People have happily informed me that I am a maker because I use phrases like "design learning experiences," which is mistaking what I do (teaching) for what I’m actually trying to help elicit (learning).

This is sort of interesting. A man who makes a toaster creates a long-lived artifact used to create an ephemeral product (toast). She creates an ephemeral product used to create a long-lived artifact (education). I intended to argue that she is a maker in that Randian sense, but I guess I understand her point now.

A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”

This seems pretty fundamental. Supply and demand seem to currently favor "sons" over "daughters", and capitalism preferentially fulfills the wants of the economically valuable. So of course we are more likely to raise our daughters like sons than sons like daughters. We want the best for our children.

Humorously, while trying to demonstrate they aren't a creator, they point out many things that they do create/make.

You can create intangible things. You can make people more educated/smarter. You can make a community. You can make an information hub.

The "maker" community is not the opposite of the "community work" community, but rather that of the "consumption" community.

At least, coming from the 'maker' community, this is how I observe it to be. Making things, no matter how small or insignificant, provide a more beneficial boost than consuming something. And thus making something is good.

Walk through a museum. Look around a city. Almost all the artifacts that we value as a society were made by or at the order of men. But behind every one is an invisible infrastructure of labor—primarily caregiving, in its various aspects—that is mostly performed by women.

Well, now I know what this article is going to be about...

The cultural primacy of making, especially in tech culture—that it is intrinsically superior to not-making

Yes. Making things is better than sitting on your ass and twiddling your thumbs.

Making is not a rebel movement,

Making seems to be a broad thing that could be anything from hacking a machine to bypass some sort of arbitrary DRM (which I would consider the above) to being an architect. Making is nothing but making things, or, according to this article, making physical/technological things.

I would say the issue here is that we have turned schooling into a chore, a job, etc. We don't see it is fun, as valuable, as great, because we used schools to teach people to obey orders rather than learn to truly better ourselves and work towards a goal. Fix that, and we will see a large amount of respect for teachers come right back, on an individual basis at least.

(although it’s not all that clear that the world needs more stuff).

Yes, we should stop making more stuff. Stop progress. Stop moving forward. Screw stuff, screw progress, materialism is bad, fuck society, pass me the LSD man.

The problem is the idea that the alternative to making is usually not doing nothing—it’s almost always doing things for and with other people, from the barista to the Facebook community moderator to the social worker to the surgeon.

Baristas make drinks. Facebook community managers create/curate communities. Social workers create and manage documents. Surgeons create surgery.

Services are just as important as goods. They are valued nearly as much as well, outside of the fact that they are rapidly being replaced by robotics.

But you can also think about coding as eliciting a specific, desired set of behaviors from computing devices. It’s the Searle’s "Chinese room" take on the deeper, richer, messier, less reproducible, immeasurably more difficult version of this that we do with people—change their cognition, abilities, and behaviors. We call the latter "education," and it’s mostly done by underpaid, undervalued women.

What if I told you that the vast majority of teachers are absolute shit at their jobs? What if I told you that we would probably not lose all too much if we replaced teachers with video tutorials looked over and better-explained by people with a high school graduation?

I have had so many classes that involved nothing but "come in, look at info you could have read in the book, do problems, leave". Yes, there are amazing teachers that do more than this, that actually teach, and I agree that they are undervalued, however, the vast majority are not. I have had about 5 teachers that I could really say were "good" in my entire "student career" up to this point. The rest could be replaced by a machine fairly easily.

And there it is again. We undervalue these jobs, not because they are done by women, but because society viewed women as incapable of doing better jobs and forced them into places considered less valuable. We have made considerable amounts of progress towards undoing this recently, lets not fuck it up.

When new products are made, we hear about exciting technological innovation, which are widely seen as worth paying (more) for. In contrast, policy and public discourse around caregiving—besides education, healthcare comes immediately to mind—are rarely about paying more to do better, and are instead mostly about figuring out ways to lower the cost.

This is flat out wrong. Most all technology is about making things cheaper, easier, and more simple. Even if the device is more expensive, it's value must be more than the cost of the device. If it were not, nobody would buy it.

Secondly, healthcare should be about helping as many people as possible in an age where so many go without. Also, importantly, technology tends to be what makes healthcare cheaper, more accessible, and more available. Not new social methods. I will go to a doctor that charges 10 dollars for an impersonal visit vs one that costs 50 or 100 to see some overpaid doctor that will tell me the same thing anyways. Doctors are/will be for when the machine fails.

People have happily informed me that I am a maker because I use phrases like "design learning experiences," which is mistaking what I do (teaching) for what I’m actually trying to help elicit (learning). To characterize what I do as "making" is to mistake the methods—courses, workshops, editorials—for the effects.

People are saying that when you teach, you create. You forge and help the development of minds. You create ideas, concepts, systems, and use them to do something. Do you think "makers" make machines in order to simply have more machines? No. (Well, some do, but that's a hobby, not a job) People make machines in order to accomplish something. Some of them will even create systems in technology that will help us teach thousands more children at a rate that is far more comfortable to them, and will help forge more solid foundations and free teachers up to jobs that they are far better at doing, inspiring thought, rather than ramming it down our throats.

Machines are a means to an end, just like those workshops are. Machines make people happy, machines create value, they feed people, clothe people, help people. Technology has the same core drive as social factors do, to help others. To build society, to create.

The only alternative to not creating is to sit and consume. If you have a job, you are providing value to society. Yeah, it may not be valued well, you may not get paid well, but that's because your job is common and easy to do.

If we hired teachers based on the abstract idea that you are trying to inspire and teach children (rather than regurgitating information) , and got the damned teachers unions out of the picture, we would see a lot of teachers get fired, but the remaining ones would find themselves with a skill. A skill that is rare, needed by society, and will probably get paid much better than currently (at the expense of all those fired teachers, but the well-paid coders are firing just as many office workers).

Or, worse, if you say that I "make" other people, you are diminishing their agency and role in sense-making, as if their learning is something I do to them.

People are the product of our environment. We have no magical ability to ignore the effects on us. A great teacher can make a student. Just like a shitty one can break them. It's not like all the people living in ghettos chose to have shitty lives where they work paycheck-to-paycheck, or not at all. We don't have agency, honestly. We are, and are made, who we are.

A quote often attributed to Gloria Steinem says: “We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.”

Yeah, because "raising daughters" used to be about raising people content with being nothing, with doing jobs that were dead-end, and didn't involve bettering yourself. Now, we have the chance to forge a society where the burden of childbearing can be shared between genders, and we can all be those who make things. We can all succeed, and we can all do what is great for each other. I'd much, much, rather we continue raising everyone like sons.

Maker culture, with its goal to get everyone access to the traditionally male domain of making, has focused on the first. But its success means that it further devalues the traditionally female domain of caregiving

Again, women, remember. Making isn't for you.

And don't give me bullshit about "that isn't what is being said" because it is well what is being said. If it weren't we would be seeing an article saying "We need to get more women into tech by telling them they can succeed in it, that tech is not just for men". "We need to remove women from roles that are soon to be eroded away by ever-more intelligent machines, and into jobs where they will be able to prosper to the benefit of us all"

Rather, I want to see us recognize the work of the educators,

So says the fucking teacher.