How Makers and Preppers Converge in Premodern and Post-Apocalyptic Ruin

This article investigates how US maker culture af rms values of self-reliance and personal responsibility through its increasing convergence with future-oriented preparation in order to construct a US maker identity differentiated from other making cultures worldwide as an ideological project of white American exceptionalism. I argue that the convergence of contemporary making with apocalyptic preparation in the US articulates making practices as vital for individual survival for apocalyptic futures as well as constructs nonwhite and non-Western geographies as simultaneously premodern and post-apocalyptic sites of ruin. US maker culture, while drawing inspiration from these geographies, suggests that such locales will be unaffected by apocalypse and, thus, cannot prepare for it. Consequently, US maker culture excludes the nonwhite inhabitants of these non-Western geographies from the idealized subjecthood rooted in the do-ityourself (DIY) ideology and preparatory logic that maker culture endorses. Maker culture and the maker movement broadly characterize early twentyrst-century interests in the skills and values associated with do-it-yourself (DIY) activities, mechanical tinkering, and artisanal craftwork. The popularity of making, hacking, and crafting practices in the US, for instance, manifests in the proliferation of makerspaces and Maker Faires as well as the success of online handicraft marketplaces such as Etsy.com. The practices of making, hacking, and crafting are practiced globally, of course. Although making describes varied present-day efforts worldwide, many international sites of making often construct and differentiate themselves directly in relation to the US. Claudia Costa Pederson, for example, argues that Latin American women artists working with refuse technologies reimagine dominant conceptions of making practices. Similarly, Silvia Lindtner examines how contemporary Chinese making activities enable and contest shifts in China’s national identity and economy. She highlights, in particular, how Chinese makers negotiate persistent discourses that position China behind the US in terms of modern technological, economic, and cultural development. While prior scholarship has examined the ways non-US sites of making and craft practices construct and differentiate themselves in relation to the US, this article instead investigates how contemporary US maker culture mobilizes non-Western geographies to distinguish itself within a global context of making. I show how contemporary maker culture constructs a US maker identity as distinct from other making cultures worldwide through the con uence of making practices and future-oriented preparation. I examine the centrality of DIY as an American ideology of craft that negotiates between communal and anti-capitalist values on the one hand and individualist and capitalist values on the other. To do so, I analyze discourses within and overlapping with American maker culture and situate them within histories of the racial politics of craft and DIY movements as anxious responses to modern industrialization in the US. I then explore how the discursive justi cations in contemporary US culture for the importance of individual autonomy and responsibility through DIY practices have shifted to incorporate anxieties around disaster, apocalypse, and preparation for future survival. This growing convergence between US maker culture and widespread apocalyptic thinking, a legacy of Cold War 1