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Paper short abstract:

This paper examines particular discursive threads in Western maker cultures that frame places like present day Guatemala and rural China as aspirational geographies of pastoral and preindustrial making and are, subsequently, suggested to already be interchangeably post-apocalyptic.

Paper long abstract:

This paper investigates how a major strain in contemporary Western making culture rooted in Silicon Valley politics overlaps with a longer history of doomsday preppers and survivalist practices. While not representative of the entirety of maker culture, claims for the value of making, DIY, handicraft, and other manual forms of expertise as necessary for the future are not uncommon. Reading justifications for making practices in conversation with popular interests in survivalism, such as reality television and ads for emergency preparedness kits, I show how discourses of various making communities in the West negotiate both utopian fantasies of limitless innovation and self-reliant individualism and apocalyptic anxieties over survival capacities amid societal collapse. I will focus on the implicit models of both history (time) and geography (space) that such discourses deploy, which I argue largely reifies the West as synonymous with industrial modernity through the narrative uses of non-Western geographies in shows like Survivor, magazines like MAKE, and doomsday prepper guides. I show how "peripheral" places like present day Guatemala and rural China are constructed as aspirational geographies of pastoral and preindustrial making and are, subsequently, suggested to already be interchangeably post-apocalyptic with reference to the "center" of Western making. With attention to how such discourses around making imagine non-Western geographies as simultaneously both premodern and post-apocalyptic, I suggest strategies for proliferating alternate histories and geographies to account for a greater diversity of spaces and times of making.