is there a boardroom somewhere where a marketing and product design group is trying to figure out how to make your next Happy Meal toy, laptop, or Ikea table look like it was handmade by a MAKE reader, recycled from scrap, and sold on Etsy? Will we soon have Potemkin crafters whose fake, procedurally generated pictures, mottoes, and logos grace each item arriving from an anonymous overseas factory? Will the 21st-century equivalent of an offshore call-center worker who insists he is “Bob from Des Moines” be the Guangzhou assembly-line worker who carefully “hand-wraps” a phone sleeve and inserts a homespun anti-corporate manifesto (produced by Markov chains fed on angry blog posts from online maker forums) into the envelope? I wouldn’t be surprised. Our species’ capacity to commodify everything — even the anti-commodification movement — has yet to meet its match.

creating fake artisanal goods on the assembly line

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