The rhetoric surrounding the maker movement is shot through with claims that hold up personal fabrication as an ideal, decentralized, noninstitutional technological system. As Chris Anderson, former editor in chief of Wired, puts it in his cover story cum manifesto on the subject, people “can become a virtual micro-factory, able to design and sell goods without any infrastructure or even inventory; products can be assembled and drop-shipped by contractors who serve hundreds of such customers simultaneously.” And, in his novel “Makers,” Cory Doctorow asserts, “The days of companies with names like ‘General Electric’ and ‘General Mills’ and ‘General Motors’ are over.” A revolution courtesy of 3-D printers and hackerspaces.

These claims are fundamentally flawed, a shallow application of political economy mixed with market-based hype and tech utopianism. It’s foolish to think that turning people into entrepreneurial micro-factories is an indication of some death knell for the corporate monster. Who do you think makes the 3-D printers? Who do you think runs the factories in China where bulk quantities of things are actually made and just shipped to you? Who do you think owns the resources needed to provide the materials you’re feeding into the 3-D printer’s maws? As a recent investigative report by journalist Matt Taibbi shows, much of this industrial capital –– resources, manufacturing, storage, distribution –– is owned by corporate conglomerates we know well but associate with Wall Street, not people’s garages: Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, to name a few.

No, the maker movement is not ushering in a decentralized, noncorporate, democratized world. Rather, what it will be adept at doing is serving as a convenient veneer, which hides the gears of corporate capitalism that have been turning all along. Instead of manufacturing jobs, we get manufacturing as a hobby. There’s no financial security and no time for rest when everybody is constantly working the maker hustle — all part of the extreme capitalistic tenet of turning every part of life into an economic activity.

Maker technologies obscure the real labor and costs that are globally embedded in them. Today a small contingent experiences new opportunities to express itself creatively. But what emerges if this becomes the basis for a new economic development program? A society of makers would be one in which each worker internalizes the failings of the economic system by believing he or she is not sufficiently creative and ingenious. Others who fail can be assigned to this new class of noncreatives — again, “takers” instead of “makers.” And this is just for those with the privilege to try and claim a seat at the manufacturing table. What of the service workers today? Can maker ideology help, say, the hotel workers who struggle to keep their jobs? More likely, it becomes further cause for brushing aside labor issues, both domestic and abroad.