Abstract
Since the 2000s, turn-of-the century inventor Nikola Tesla has gradually become a mainstay in several DIY cultures, notably indie and DIY media, Web 2.0 digital platforms, and the “maker” movement. The presence of this historical figure demonstrates the important symbolic and discursive role the history of technology plays within cultures of technology. The paper argues that these different accounts of Tesla’s role in history are representative of several key conflicts and contradictions running through DIY cultures of the past 20 years, as they have oscillated between individualism and collectivism, neoliberalism and anti-capitalism, and technological determinism and social constructivism. Using representations of Tesla to unpack these conflicts and contradictions, this article highlights the political stakes of cultural representations of the history of technology, with particular consideration given to the labour DIYers invest into making new things and their recognition of the power and politics built into technologies.
Essay
Introduction
Since the 2000s, turn-of-the century inventor Nikola Tesla has gradually become a mainstay in several DIY cultures, notably indie and DIY media, Web 2.0 digital platforms, and the “maker” movement. The presence of this historical figure demonstrates the important symbolic and discursive role the history of technology plays within cultures of technology. The different accounts of Tesla’s role in history are representative of several key conflicts and contradictions running through DIY cultures of the past 20 years, as they have oscillated between individualism and collectivism, neoliberalism and anti-capitalism, and technological determinism and social constructivism. These DIY cultures, and the myths that animate them, are themselves a part of socio-technical systems that are shaping the nature of contemporary labour, economics, and politics.
Since the 1980s, historians of technology like Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Parke Hughes, and Trevor Pinch have built a strong case for the fundamental role society plays in forming technologies. This field has grown to include the influence culture has on technological change (Nowotny 16-18). Several scholars have endeavoured to define particular cultural contexts that have had a significant influence on the history of technology. For example, Thomas Parke Hughes observes a certain “technological enthusiasm” in turn-of-the-century the America (American Genesis), while David Nye theorizes an American “technological sublime.” Fred Turner investigates the roots of the utopian culture of Silicon Valley in San Francisco Bay Area counterculture and technological determinism. While these scholars all study the important formative role culture and society play in the history of technology, what is less commonly discussed is how the history of technology is itself constructed culturally and how this in turn factors into the cultural construction of current and emerging technologies. How are social relations to technology shaped by a definition of technology (what it is, where it comes from, and what it can do) that is rooted in a specific vision of the technological past? How do the stories we tell about the history of electric light or radio communications shape our understanding and use of current emerging technologies?
The example of Nikola Tesla offers a case to investigate this question. Tesla was a Serbia-American electrical engineer, most famous for his invention of alternating current (AC), the format of electricity that every grid in the world uses today. He also did work on a range of other technologies that would later become widely adopted like radio transmission and x-ray. But his actual historical importance is not relevant here. Instead, what is relevant is the way his role in history has been represented. Tesla’s image, name, and story have played a part in articulating different visions of the transformative, democratising, and empowering potential of DIY technology since the early 2000s including, indie media, Web 2.0 media platforms, and the “maker” movement. This article finds two key versions of Tesla’s role in the history of technology across these three DIY movements. For some, Tesla’s story of tragic failure reveals how social, political, and economic factors affect the development and adoption of new technologies, while for others, his story of unmarked triumph demonstrates the power of disruptive ideas and of making for the sake of making, ameliorating key conflicts within the culture of tech industries and the platforms they operate.
The way we construct the history of technology has important consequences for our ability to recognize the power and politics imbricated within technologies. Indeed, we can use representations of the history of technology to help elucidate some of the conflicts and contradictions within these DIY movements relating to whether technologies can be intrinsically liberating forces, or whether they are themselves the product of coordinated socio-political change. This question has been haunting DIY media for decades, but it has manifested itself particularly acutely in recent years. Media platforms are increasingly being held to account by people across the political spectrum for the immense power they wield to shape public communications, challenging their self-representation as neutral, unregulated spaces. As maker labs have proliferated in universities, community centres, and libraries across the globe, tensions have arisen between those who see them as “incubators” for entrepreneurial disruptive innovation in the tradition of Joseph Schumpeter and those who see them as an opportunity to make critical interventions into the complex interaction between society and technology. Within these contexts we can find Tesla at work, sometimes managing and obfuscating these conflicts but also, if we look closely, revealing fundamental assumptions about what technology is and the effects it has.
Tesla and Edison in the Age of Industry
This article’s focus is on the past two decades, but it is necessary to understand older popular representations of Tesla first in order to contextualize more recent examples. The key feature shared by all recent representations of Tesla is the idea of rediscovery, that Tesla needs to rescued from scorn or neglect and reintroduced into the popular imaginary of the history of technology. While Tesla was famous in his own time, earning recognition from publications like Time Magazine, and he has always been celebrated in his native Serbia,[i] his posthumous legacy in North America was unenviable until his resurrection by DIY cultures.
It seems likely that Tesla was one of the key archetypes of the classic “mad scientist” trope. In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Rotwang, the scientist driven mad by grief and loss, brings his maschinenmensch to life with the use of a Tesla coil. This metal orb and column that issues arching high-voltage electricity into the air is Tesla’s most iconic invention, in no small part because of the spectacular way it renders electricity visible. Rotwang has a distinctly medieval appearance and has connections to the arcane, resembling wizardly representations of Eastern Jewish “Ostjuden” in contemporaneous films such as Der Golem (Kaes 32). According to David Skal, images of Tesla’s labs inspired the design of Dr. Frankenstein’s lab in James Whales’ iconic film Frankenstein (Figure 1)(129). One can also find traces of Tesla in the “mad scientist” nemesis of Superman in a 1941 episode of the Fleisher brother’s animated series. In this example, the mad scientist uses an “electrothanasia-ray,” a superweapon modeled on Tesla’s own rumoured invention of the same name, which The New York Times described as a “death-beam” that could “annihilate” an army of a million “in an instant” (Figure 2). Frankenstein’s castle on a hill, Rotwang’s ancient cottage in a modern city, and the mad scientist’s mountaintop laboratory all clearly demarcate these figures as threatening outsiders, as what Georg Simmel would term “strangers.” While none are a 1:1 representation of Tesla, they build on his image as a peculiar foreigner who makes spectacular technologies.
Representation of Tesla during this period stands in stark contrast to his contemporary Thomas Edison, a figure who is frequently put in a dichotomy with Tesla. In his analysis of James Whale’s Frankenstein adaptation, Christopher Frayling contrasts the representations of Dr. Frankenstein with the more “down-to-earth” working class American Thomas Edison (117). Edison represented ascendant American industry and the prosperity it brought with it. Edison founded G.E., the only company that has been on the Dow Jones Industrial Average since its beginning. Furthermore, Edison was a promotional media innovator (Musser 83-92). That he left his mark on the history of the moving image is beyond question. Even in the years following his death, Edison continued to appear as the people’s industrialist. For example, MGM produced a pair of highly fictionalized biopics in 1940, the first, Young Tom Edison, features Mickey Rooney playing Edison as a boy, and the second, Edison, The Man, features Spencer Tracy as adult Edison. The latter depicts Edison as a headstrong working-class Midwesterner who builds a company that not only transforms the world, but also provides solid jobs for thousands of Americans. In one scene Edison says, “It’s not the money wrapped up in the laboratory, it’s the lives wrapped up in the laboratory… It means a weekly paycheck for all my men. It means home, shelter, clothing, and food for lots of families.” Clearly not a speech a mad scientist would make.
Figure 1: Still from Frankenstein (Whale, 1931).
Figure 2: “Tesla, at 78, Bares New ‘Death-Beam” (The New York Times, 1934).
Representations of Tesla in the past few decades have responded to both this veneration of Edison and to the highly contrasting and even demonising representations of Tesla. More than simply questioning these historical representations themselves, these more recent examples question the ideology and values that supported them in the first place. Tesla has become a figurehead for those who want to question the legacy of industrial modernity. He is the anti-Edison. As such, his non-conformist ethos is exaggerated to fit the mould of the ultimate DIY hero, someone to promote the ability of individuals or groups to produce technology and media themselves, rather than being mere receivers or cogs in proverbial industrial machines. This can take the form of anti-capitalist sentiments, or it can merely suggest the rise of new forms of self-managed and entrepreneurial capitalist production. Tesla has appeared in service of both. But by parsing the difference between representations we can see very different versions of his role in history.
The term DIY has been applied to a variety of different movements with different political meaning over time. The arts and crafts movement championed by figures like William Morris in Victorian England advocated for a return to pre-industrial modes of artistic production, to “unalienated labour” (Krugh). Morris’ version of arts and crafts included a socialist politic, though the products of the movement were largely luxury items beyond the reach of workers (Krugh; Morozov). Conversely, during the same period techno-enthusiast publications that extoled the virtues of modernity such as Scientific American and Popular Mechanics popularized both practical and hobbyist projects, using the term “do-it-your-self”.[ii] Form this we get the conventional definition of the term as repair and home-improvement. Similar in its technological enthusiasm, MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club (est. 1948) and the Homebrew Computer Club (est.1975) of Paolo Alto were breeding grounds for hacker culture, which would merge with the counter-cultural communard movement and an ascendant Silicon Valley entrepreneurialism via the figure of Stewart Brand (Turner 7-8). On the other end of the political spectrum, 1970s and 80s punk and hardcore movements promoted a DIY ethic that sought self-determined autonomy separate from capitalist cultural industries. This lead to a proliferation of community run venues, zines, and independent labels, making space for political punk movements like Outpunk and Riot grrrl (O’Conner 1-18). A range of “micro-political,” “direct action,” autonomist, and anarchist political DIY movements followed in the 1990s and 2000s that focused on “resistance” rather than “protest” including environmental movements like Reclaim The Streets, squatting movements for public housing, and the formation of autonomous zones like Occupy Wall Street (McKay 2-12). Around this same time the “textual poaching” of fan cultures and “participatory culture” first observed by Henry Jenkins became the content for new digital platforms that gobbled up media market share. Finally, and most recently, the maker movement has pulled on several of these DIY threads, fostering communal spaces for DIY hobbyists who make material technologies via its Maker Faires. A corollary of this has been an explosive proliferation of technology incubator “maker spaces” in institutional contexts (Nagel). At the same time, the philosophical turn towards the “new materialism” has fostered a movement that uses making as a means for critical intervention.
This is not an exhaustive list. But even from amongst these examples one can clearly see that DIY can meant very different things to different people, and these examples cannot neatly be divided into two camps. Connections can be made between some, while others are diametrically opposed on some points. Some are opposed to any form of capitalism, while others are only opposed to a certain Fordist version of it. There are even significant contradictions within individual movements. The following pages will delve into the specificity of some of these differences and contradictions in greater detail. Yet there is a common through-line that joins them: an interest in turning everyday people from being the receivers or consumers of industrial mass production into being producers themselves through craft, organization, or technology. To quote Jacques Servin, of culture-jamming duo The Yes Men, DIY means “there is no application process,” you just do it (qtd. in Reilly 127).
It is exactly Tesla’s role as an underdog, as an outsider, that drives his appeal for those who seek to resurrect his image in this context. This is particularly true when compared with Edison. Elevating Tesla and reintroducing him to the cultural history of the electrification of America represents a symbolic shift in power, a victory for the outsiders and the misfits, and a desire to promote their values. In 2014 I discovered a sticker-bomb street art campaign featuring Tesla (Figure 3). Illicitly posted on trashcans and street signs, the stickers suggest as revolutionary cell of DIYers. Edison represents old, ossified industrial powers that jealously guard their power, while Tesla is a tinkerer and an unconventional thinker, a hero for those who seek to make technology their own instead of accepting the technology given to them by industry. In a recent web series titled Great Minds, comedian Dan Harmon explains to a re-incarnated Thomas Edison “you’re known as the successful guy… and (Tesla) is the cool guy, the punk rock guy” (Figure 4).
Figure 3: Photo of Sticker-bomb (Author, 2014).
Figure 4: Still from Great Minds with Dan Harmon (2016)
There is a subtle but important distinction between these revisionist histories though, one that will give shape to the following sections of this essay and help uncover key points of tension running through DIY movements. While one school of Tesla history styles his story as that of a radical and creative DIY inventor who was thwarted, frustrated, and exploited by industrial powers (Edison prime amongst them), another school sees Tesla as the true architect of the electrical age, an individual who created the modern world but was then forgotten. Although it can sometimes be difficult to tease out this difference in certain examples, these two different narratives imply significantly different ways of understand the history of technology and society.
In his history of the electrification New York, London, and Berlin, Thomas Parke Hughes makes the case for why industrialists like Thomas Edison played such an important role. Edison was not, strictly speaking, a scientist or an electrical engineer. Instead, his skills laid in raising funds, employing bright engineers and inventors, wrangling with policy-makers, and monetizing ideas. Building a network requires “generating, controlling, distributing, measuring, and utilizing electricity” (Networks of Power 43). The inventions of the lightbulb is all well and good, but without a plan for how to produce electricity, lay lines to deliver it, and install it in houses, all the while gaining regulatory permission, raising funds and staying solvent, one cannot light a single house. Hughes’ point is not to further mythologize Edison, but to argue that technologies are in fact socio-technical systems. Economics, politics, and even culture shape the emergence of technologies. Hughes’ theory helps to identify the difference between different accounts of Tesla’s role in the history of technology within DIY cultures. While a story about the oppositional forces that frustrated and eventually defeated Tesla attunes our attention to the political, economic, and even cultural factors that shape the emergence of technologies and their effects in turn on society, a story of how Tesla’s ideas actually changed the world in spite of the forces that opposed him assumes and promotes a more technologically deterministic view. There are immense political stakes to these two different visions of how technologies take shape and influence society, particularly when we consider the labour DIYers invest into making new things, their engagement in public policy, and their ability to recognize power and inequality.
Tesla and DIY Media
Over the period of the early 2000s Tesla became a symbol for putting the power to create media into the hands of everyday people. Though he had little to do with media himself, especially in contrast to film pioneer and prodigious self-promoter Edison, the unconventional creativity that sprung from Tesla’s independence and his conflict with industrialists provided powerful analogies for people who saw transformative potential in creating media independently outside of existing industrial structures.
Tesla appears as an analogy for independent media creation in an episode of the web series Drunk History. The premise of Drunk History is that a comedian drunkenly tells a historical story from memory while a cast of comedic actors performs it. The performances have a clear intentional DIY aesthetic. They look as though they were shot in someone’s living room, with half-assembled sets, ill-fitting costumes, and glued-on facial hair that seems to shift from scene to scene. In their 2010 episode on Tesla, comedian Duncan Trussell drunkenly recounts the inventor’s life with an accompanying performance by John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover as Tesla and Edison respectively. The episode tells the story of how Tesla was exploited by Edison, and it models Tesla’s technical innovation as a form of creativity. In it Tesla is depicted literally digging ditches for Edison, as Edison sits in a lawn chair barking orders (Figure 5). Edison tells Tesla if he can invent an AC motor he will pay him a large sum of money, and when Tesla receives divine inspiration on how to build such a motor, Edison says he was only joking and refuses to pay. Later, when Tesla’s AC technology is used by George Westinghouse to compete with Edison’s direct current, Edison launches a cynical media campaign to win the public’s favour using his kinetoscope, electrocuting animals to show the danger of alternating current.[iii] Finally, Tesla descends into madness, exploited and unappreciated, dying alone in a tenement apartment, giving him a tragic romantic death not unlike that of William Blake or Vincent Van Gough. The video draws two clear groups in opposition to each other: the creative thinkers who come up with the ideas, and the industrialists who profit from those ideas and strategically thwart any threats to their power. It stands as a ringing endorsement for an independent mode of production like the one that produced the video itself.
(Picture here)
Figure 5: Still from Drunk history Tesla & Edison (2010)
The idea of turning people from the receivers of media or technology and empowering them as creators has been theorized as a transformative and even revolutionary move for decades. In 1966 Julio García Espinosa argued for an “imperfect cinema” as part of the Third Cinema movement, where everyday people would make media as a sort of part-time hobby, rather than having dedicate professionals and institutions or businesses make it. This mode of production would be an alternative to a top-down media broadcast system that worked in service of existing power structures. He theorized that imperfect cinema would both bring “social justice” to media, democratizing the media landscape and giving everyday people a voice, while at the same time providing “the possibility of recovering… the true meaning of artistic activity.” In other words, to Espinosa independent media production makes possible a form of media without influence, a pure mode of expression. Many have seen emerging media technologies as playing a key role in facilitating these liberated and democratized media forms. Four years after Espinosa, Hans Magnus Enzensberger theorized that videotape recorders offer the ability to empower and “mobilize” the people (14). “For the first time in history,” he writes, “the media are making possible mass participation in a social and socialized productive process, the practical means of which are in the hands of the masses themselves” (15).
Enzensberger’s enthusiasm for the liberating potential of technology gained an ironic twist over time, as it reappeared with a neoliberal politic in internet culture. This irony has only intensified as technology companies with similar technological utopic optimism are now being debated as monopolies of social media. This is a point of friction I will revisit in the following section. But there are still many who have not lost their optimism for the transformative effects of people being empowered to create and modify their own media and technologies. Matt Ratto and Megan Boler collect a range of scholars like Henry Jenkins and “maktivism” proponent Steve Mann who look to examples like the role social media played in the Arab spring movement and see promise, not through the empowerment of the neoliberal individual consumer or entrepreneur, but through the organization of groups and collectives (5-8).
American indie director Jim Jarmusch, who started out in the radically unprofessional New York no-wave scene, portrays Tesla in a remarkably similar way to the Drunk History video. For many years now Jarmusch has been planning an opera about Tesla with composer and fellow no-wave artist Phil Kline. While the fortunes of the opera have at times seemed in peril, a blurb in Make Magazine (2015) confirms it is still in production. In a press release about their forthcoming work, Kline and Jarmusch recount Tesla’s struggle with capitalists and imagine him as a sort of artist. They describe the “tragedy” of his “spirit” being “stifled,” for example (Bernstein Artists). As he sees it, Tesla sought total creative freedom, yet he was constantly being frustrated by industrialists like Edison.
A short titled “Jack Shows Meg His Tesla Coil” in Jarmush’s 2003 Omnibus film Coffee and Cigarettes focuses on Tesla’s story as well. In the short, indie rock icon Jack White shows off his own home-made Tesla coil to his band mate Meg while he geeks out about Tesla. White bemoans how underappreciated Tesla is and how he was never able to complete many of his most important projects. He surmises that Tesla’s life was hard because he was so opposed to the structure of capitalism. White cites Tesla’s Wardencliff Tower project as proof. Wardenclyffe was Tesla’s most iconic failure: a giant antenna structure that, according to White, was designed to collect energy from the ether and provide free electricity for all. White concludes, “that’s why they discredited him in the end: free energy.” Again, one can see a parallel being drawn here between the narrative of Tesla as a courageous creative struggling against corporate power and the DIY “indie” form of the film itself.
Both Drunk History and Coffee and Cigarettes see Tesla’s story as one of failure rather than of unmarked triumph, and thus they point to socio-political and economic factors that influence both artists and inventor’s ability to have an effect on the world. Power, economics, political control, and culture all intervene in these stories, preventing the revolutionary potential of individuals creating their own technologies (or, by extension, media) independently.
Subjects like the Wardencliff Tower project suggest that transformative technologies exist, but that they are being kept from us by a conspiracy of power. This in turn prompts us to imagine the alternative scenario: what if Tesla had been allowed to develop his ideas? What would our world be like? Indeed, there is a genre of fan culture that imagines exactly this called Teslapunk. Like Steampunk, Teslapunk imagines a different technological timeline that undermines the conventional division between the technological past, present, and future. Teslapunk artists, game makers, and cosplayers imagine worlds of technological advance, where we can accomplish things using electricity that are not currently possible in the real world, yet they collide this apparent technological advance with the aesthetics of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
This act of imagining otherwise or questioning received technologies draws our attention to the historical factors that shaped them. Though examples like Coffee and Cigarettes, Drunk History, and Teslapunk are utopic at times, these fictions espouse a view of the history of technology that is generally consistent with that of Thomas Parke Hughes: they attend to the historical contingencies, the controlling powers, the regulations, and the economics that produced the technological present. This requires us to acknowledge that a revolutionary idea or invention is not enough to change the world on its own. There are political stakes to this point of view, as thinking this way tacitly points to the fact that technologies cannot effect socio-political change on their own, but that the two go hand-in-hand. Putting technology or media into the hands of the people is not enough on its own.
Tesla on Web 2.0 Platforms
The discourse of DIY media creation has of course transformed since the mid-2000s in the context of Web 2.0 and media platforms. Crystalized by the promotion of Tim O’Reilly and Dale Doherty at events like the 2004 Web 2.0 Summit, Web 2.0 espoused the same values that Enzensberger had: to transform society by turning people from consumers into creators (O’Reilly). Embedded in this movement was also a vision for post bubble-burst commerce on the internet though. While the first Web 2.0 Summit featured attendees like creative commons founder Lawrence Lessig, it also included Jeff Bezos, Marc Cuban, and a raft of venture capitalists. As internet platforms where content is created by users like Youtube and Facebook rapidly spread, the power that they wielded slowly became clear. As Tarleton Gillespie observed in 2010, platforms appear as “neutral,” “egalitarian” media spaces, downplaying the control they exercise and encouraging users to freely post their own content (352). Other observers like Tiziana Terranova had also been observing how exploiting free labour from users was becoming an integral part of many web companies business models (33).
It can be difficult to sort through the differences between various forms of DIY, indie, or user-generated media. Where some examples can be radically anti-capitalist, envisioning people using their creative and communicative capacities to organize and form new political subjectivities, other have drawn scrutiny for the way they subsume these activities into post-Fordist capital production, eroding the division between public life and work, and also creating new forms of self-managed worker precarity (Gill and Pratt 19).
Representations of Tesla offer a point of differentiation within this field because of the way they construct the history of technology and thus shape dispositions toward contemporary technology and labour. This becomes clear when looking at some contrasting examples to Drunk History and Coffee and Cigarettes that offer a different version of Tesla’s story. While those examples see entrenched industrial powers winning out in the end, to society’s loss, others instead see his story as one of unheralded triumph, where Tesla is the true but unrecognized founding inventor of the modern age. From this perspective power, money, and infrastructure are no match for the purity of an original idea.
The most prominent example of the discourse of Tesla as the truth father of modern industry is the campaign to preserve his Wardenclyffe laboratory in New Jersey through crowdfunding. The campaign was the product of web comic artist Mathew Inman, who launched it with a comic titled “The Greatest Geek Who Ever Lived.” In the comic Inman’s lists a litany of technologies we have Tesla to thank for: everything from neon lights to remote controls to the transistor.[iv] Inman concludes that Tesla “ushered humanity into a second industrial revolution,” tacitly taking this credit away from Edison. This version of the Tesla story does not provide for the way economics, policy, power, or culture might affect the way technologies are adopted and in turn influence society. And as a result it produces an uncritical vision of platforms.
In his comic Inman labels Tesla as a “geek” as opposed to a “CEO.” Inman writes, geeks “obsess” and “suffer” and they “abandon the world around them because they’re busy soldering together a new one.” CEOs merely profit from the work of geeks. This echoes Drunk History version of events. While one might expect him to use these categories in order to bemoan the exploitation of geeks and call for change, as Drunk History tacitly does, this is not the direction he takes. Instead, he promotes the identity of the geek as virtuous because they simply do not care. Geeks do not dwell on their exploitation, according to Inman, they continue to make things as though it were their moral duty. This is significant, because while the utopic virtue of free labour was once celebrated as a radical feature of internet culture (Barbrook) it has since become the lifeblood of an emerging industry, as Terranova observes. While some have measured this critique by noting that exploitation is, strictly speaking, not an accurate description if free work is freely given, especially in exchange for symbolic capital (Hesmondhalgh 274), Terranova’s formulation of free labour clearly identifies an ascendant way of doing business, and in many ways this business model relies on the myths of virtuous DIY labour. Furthermore, privileging the transformative potential of the idea neglects the way platforms subtly enforce their own form of regulation and the power.
Inman’s campaign to build a monument to Tesla as the true “father of the electrical age” was wildly successful, gaining support from the State of New Jersey and from companies like Google and Tesla Inc. This version of Tesla is, of course, music to the ears of corporations who style themselves as unconventional underdogs while at the same time possessing unprecedented amounts of unregulated power. Inman’s technologically deterministic view of history that sees only unmarked success in Tesla’s story lends itself to neglecting the power wielded by extensive web platforms or contentions regarding free labour.
Tesla the Maker and the Silicon Valley Reformation
The DIY “maker” or “making” movement can be just as difficult to sort through as the differing and sometimes contradictory politics of DIY media and platforms. Representations of Tesla once again provide a useful access point, but in a slightly different manner. The version of Tesla found in Inman’s comic has gradually become the dominant one. Indeed, Tesla has become virtually synonymous with this uncritical view of technology. Thus, there is a clear division between those that embrace the image of Tesla and those that studiously avoid him. This division is evidence of a division between makers that take a critical view of the political and social factors that shape historical technological change and those that do not.
The maker movement was founded by Dale Dougherty, a pioneer of early online media and one of the originators of the concept of Web 2.0 (Aced 5-6). In effect, Dougherty’s vision for the maker movement can be understood as a material version of Web 2.0. His enthusiasm for everyday people becoming producers of digital content rather than just consumers has morphed into an enthusiasm for people making things, particularly technical or functional things. The self-labeled movement consists of Make Magazine, first published in 2005, and Maker Faires, locally organized conferences where hobbyists of different types gather to share their inventions. As of 2017, 225 authorized Maker Faires are held globally each year, with the largest taking place in San Mateo, just north of Silicon Valley.
Tesla appears frequently in Make magazine and at Maker Faires. An article in the magazine, for example, offers instructions on how to build a “Spooky Tesla Radio” that mimics a Tesla design from 1901 (Ragan). The 2018 Bay Area Maker Faire featured a one-third scale replica of Tesla’s Colorado Springs coil project, “for lightning research” (Make). One of the most popular reoccurring acts at Maker Faires is ArcAttack, a group that builds giant audio-modulated Tesla coils that allow them to make sound using arcs of electricity, recalling Tesla’s own public performances at the Columbia Exposition of 1893. Cameron Prince, a self-described Tesla historian and maker who has made programming for the Discovery Channel on Tesla, frequently makes appearances as Maker Faires.
By Dougherty’s own account, the maker movement is directed toward re-invigorating technology industries, especially Silicon Valley. He writes, “Makers at their core are enthusiasts, such as those engaged in the early days of the computer industry in Silicon Valley. We’ve lost sight of that aspect of the computer” (12). Dougherty thus re-enforces the mythologized origins of Silicon Valley in early hacking and hobbyist clubs, suggesting that the tech world has lost touch with these precious roots, yet at the same time he tweaks the myth slightly, reducing the culture and politics of this context to the idea of DIY making. Indeed, Evgeni Morozov describes making as hacking stripped of any politics. This new DIY discourse disavows politics much the way the discourse of Web 2.0 platforms does, instead focusing on the idea of making for the sake of making. It is sanitized of the unpleasantness of money, labour, policy, and as recent events have revealed, matters of justice and equality.[v]
Silicon Valley has always emphasized its roots in hacker clubs and garage-based projects, as opposed to its earlier roots (the source of its name) in the silicon transistor factories that emerged from the military-industrial complex and the Cold War (Barbrook and Cameron). Much has happened since those highly mythologized days of hacker clubs and garage prototypes though. The tech sector bubble burst in late 2000, dragging much of the world economy down with it, for one. Since then, many Silicon Valley companies have found stability and been enshrined as the leaders of the American economy, as evidenced in their listing on the Dow Jones Industrial Average. They also own the bulk of the communication platforms and data infrastructure that the world relies on. The myth of Silicon Valley as driven by anarchistic utopian dreamers, radical libertarians, tactician hackers, and garage tinkerers has become increasingly strained in this context. Some aspects of this discourse clearly need to be renegotiated, lest these businesses begin to appear like the industrial powers they once constructed themselves against. The maker movement and its employment of Tesla reinvigorate the discourse that any tinkerer can change the world in spite of the glaring reality that these very same companies guard their monopoly power so jealously, buying up any competition with seemingly endless amounts of capital.
Much like Inman’s Wardencliff Museum project, large tech sector companies benefit from their involvement with the maker movement. Intel, Microsoft, and Google are key sponsors of Maker Faires. By offering these companies the opportunity to be sponsors or partners, Dougherty is giving them the chance to affiliate their brand with this DIY reformation. They move from the being labeled as Edison types to being Tesla types. For the price of a sponsorship, they are symbolically exempted from being seen as the type of company that has lost touch with its DIY roots: a papal indulgence of sorts. Through sponsorship they demonstrate that they “get it.” Even as they wield the type of anti-competitive power Edison did.
Tesla’s name and image are notably absent from other organized forms of DIY making, notably “critical making.” While critical making was first conceived by Matt Ratto as a way of using the material construction process to discover new cognitive inroads to work through conceptual problems, an idea that is not incompatible with Doherty’s maker movement, it has developed over time in a way that puts the two schools much more at odds. Garnet Hertz, for example, flips Ratto’s definition on its head, instead suggesting that critical making be about integrating the critical tradition into the process of making. He is inspired here in part by Helen Nissenbaum’s concept of “values in design” which studies the power and politics built into technology, like how designs might be ableist, or how algorithms can reinforce racial bias (Hertz 2-3). He additionally integrates concepts from critical design, a practice of designing objects as interventions that, as he describes it, “question the way products reinforce a banal and comfortable status quo by being efficient, optimized, or comfortable, and instead pushes users into more complex emotional and psychological territory…” (1-2). This version of critical making is far less compatible with Doherty’s maker movement, and indeed it seems designed in some cases as a response to it. In a collection on critical making, maker lab organizer Jentery Sayers describes Dohery’s movement as having a “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” attitude that neglects power and politics and suggests a more individualistic demeanour (59). In the same volume Alexander Galloway (not a maker but a theorist) characterizes Doherty’s version of making as a direct extension of Web 2.0 because of the way it embodies a “new form of production that originates from individuals, from their own expression, from their own presentation, from their own performance and self-promotion” (71-73). It is fuelled by the same myths that an individual can enact transformative change, neglecting the politics embedded in technologies like platforms.
The fact that representations or invocations of Tesla appear so frequently around Dougherty’s maker movement and not at all around critical making tells us something about the sedimented layers of meaning Tesla has developed over the past few decades. While his image was once compatible with a critical view of technology that attends to socio-historical factors, it has become too closely association with Web 2.0 platforms that discourage consideration of underlying technical power structures in favour of utopian narratives of egalitarian user empowerment. It is a shame that this is where Tesla’s role in popular culture has ended up, because there is real potential in his story for critical interventions into the history of technology that challenge technologically deterministic or neoliberal narratives of change that ignore the role of power. Tesla could be used to ask why we have the laws, technologies, and power structures we have today. Indeed, he could be used to tease out the conflicts latent in movements like making and Web 2.0 before it. Concepts like Teslapunk could inspire radical reimaginings of our present and future that make us question why we have the world we have, not unlike critical design or Hertz’s version of critical making.
Above all, these varied uses of Tesla in DIY cultures demonstrate the immense significance of how we culturally construct our technological past. Movements like indie and DIY media, Web 2.0, platforms, and maker labs have shaped the very bedrock of communication and labour. The ever-spreading logic of platform capitalism that “empowers” workers into doing precarious labour is a product of these ideas. Further, maker labs are quickly becoming the norm in educational and community institutions. While proponents of these movements may not always take an explicit stance on the history and ontology of technology and its relationship to society, parts of DIY culture like these representations of Tesla implicitly do that work and spread these ideas, for better and for worse.
[i] There has been a Tesla Museum in Belgrade since the 1950s. Belgrade International Airport was also named after Tesla in 2006, suggesting he has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in Serbia as well.
[ii] For example, a 1908 issue of Popular Mechanics features “shop notes” guides on how to make your own well auger (50), or icehouse (54).
[iii] There is a popular myth that Edison electrocuted an elephant to demonstrate the dangers of AC. In fact, this occurred after the war over currents was resolved (Daly 282). Electrical engineer Harold P. Brown was the architect of the idea of electrocuting animals to show the dangers of AC.
[iv] These attributions obscure the contributions of many other researchers and engineers. Inman would later qualify some of these claims in an addendum.
[v] Dougherty resigned amidst accusations of sexism after questioning the technical skills of Naomi Wu, a maker with a popular Youtube channel.
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Biography
Jordan Gowanlock is a postdoctoral visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley’s Film and Media Department. He is a graduate of Concordia University’s PhD in Film and Moving Image program and a recipient of Fonds de Recherche du Québec (FRQSC) doctoral and postdoctoral funding.
© 2022 Jordan Gowanlock, used by permission
Technoculture Volume 12 (2022)
