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Made with love, sold with love? Ideologies and realities of work for American crafters in the Digital Age

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Made with love, sold with love? Ideologies and realities of work for American crafters in the Digital Age

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Content MADE WITH LOVE, SOLD WITH LOVE?
IDEOLOGIES AND REALITIES OF WORK FOR AMERICAN CRAFTERS IN THE
DIGITAL AGE

by

Samantha Close

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION

August 2017

Copyright 2017 Samantha Close

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project and myself both owe a deep debt of gratitude to the many who helped me bring it to
fruition. I want to thank my advisor, Henry Jenkins, for leading me to have faith in my work
even when I thought it was hopeless, to believe in the power of agency even when systems are
rigged, and to be courageous and empathetic as a scholar and a person. I am also incredibly
thankful for the support of my dissertation committee members—Sarah Banet-Weiser and Lanita
Jacobs. They critiqued me when I grew too complacent and brought a wealth of expertise and
perspective to the project without which it would be far poorer. I will miss the meetings I had
with each of my committee members, sharing advice and critical insight as well as support,
humor, and good book recommendations.

None of this would have been possible without the generosity and insights of my many research
participants. Thanks from the bottom of my heart go to Barbara, Bethany, Dani and Nicky, Gary,
Jess and Billy, Nancy, Shauna, Alisa, Gary, Carter, Lynn, Sahara, Charlotte, Tami, Sen and
Josue and Cleia, Donna, Darcy, Pat, Drew, Rachel, Heddi, Min, and Alex. Your work inspires
me in so many ways, and I am honored to have been able to bring light to it. To the many
crafters, knitters, crocheters, artists, and small business owners with whom I interacted only
briefly, thank you for allowing me into your world.

Cynthia Wang, Tisha Dejmanee, Raffi Sarkissian, Alisa Beer, and Diana Lee are friends without
whom this project would never have seen the light of day. They were a rock of reassurance,
sanity, and support during the most difficult professional endeavor I have ever completed. The
Civic Paths research group, led by Sangita Shresthova and Henry Jenkins, was essential in
helping me develop my thought and seeing how this small case study could connect to a broader
world of civic imagination and relevance.

My family has supported me along every step of this very long journey. Their unconditional love
and support, even through my mis-steps and re-tracings, means more to me than I can express in
words. In a different way, without the quiet presence of my cat Wooster and that of the later fur
family additions of Charlie, Ivy, and Jeeves—and their occasional incitements to go on walks or
to take a deep breath and snuggle—I would have been lost.

Finally, special thanks go to my partner Vee. She has fed me when I was too tired to eat and
driven literally thousands of miles over the years to give me a simple hug. Her example as an
educator inspires me to continue in my work and share the fruits of this labor with my students.
Her generosity of spirit and unconditional love inspires me to be a better person.

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Table of Contents
Introduction __________________________________________________________________ 4
The Case of Crafting _________________________________________________________ 6
The Four Faces of DIY _______________________________________________________ 7
Methodology ______________________________________________________________ 13
Chapter Overview __________________________________________________________ 16
The Dream of Doing What You Love ____________________________________________ 23
Do It Yourself Bootstrapping _________________________________________________ 26
Defining DIY Affect By Watching You Work ____________________________________ 35
It’s Not Doing It Yourself, It’s Doing What You Love _____________________________ 43
Imagining Individuality and Collectivity Together _________________________________ 48
Conclusion ________________________________________________________________ 51
Doing What You Love in Practice _______________________________________________ 55
The Capital of Authenticity: Are You a ‘Real’ Spinner? ____________________________ 57
The Practical Necessity of Love _______________________________________________ 61
Precarity Is Not the Natural Result of Passion ____________________________________ 64
Folk Marxism _____________________________________________________________ 70
Exchange as Communication Rather Than Accumulation ___________________________ 73
Going cold sheep: Refusing accumulation _______________________________________ 76
“You do what you can do” : Refusing Work _____________________________________ 79
Conclusion ________________________________________________________________ 81
Creative Work in the Platform Economy __________________________________________ 84
What is a Platform? _________________________________________________________ 87
The “Newness” of New Media is Supporting Sociality Rather Than Efficiency __________ 94
The Reproductive Labor of Platform Work ______________________________________ 97
Not Valuing Reproductive Labor Breaks the Platform System ______________________ 101
Conclusion _______________________________________________________________ 109
The Death of the “Real Job” ___________________________________________________ 111
Why Don’t You Just Get a Real Job? __________________________________________ 113
Uniting People in a Culture of Individualism ____________________________________ 120
Folk Marxism ____________________________________________________________ 124
Conclusion _______________________________________________________________ 126
List of References ___________________________________________________________ 128
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Introduction
This book presents an analysis of creative work in America during the first decades of the
new millennium. Perhaps at no other time have so many people been able to create so much and
to send their creations out into the world for others to see, hear, taste, occasionally sniff, and,
particularly if it’s made out of yarn, snuggle. This creativity was not produced by the new
technologies of networked communication. Rather, the Internet acts as catalyst and massive
distribution network for things people were already interested in doing. It turned out that there
was a lot of “them,” and they were interested in doing everything. Networked communications
technology has also been charged with rusting the links between making things and making
money, never that strong to start off with, down to nothing. Those who spend their time making
things, particularly young people, are likely to hear two kinds of advice: first, it’s nice work if
you can get it; second, don’t quit your day job.
I should know: people said both to me enough when I was growing up. My research into
creative work is inspired by both a lifelong passion for creative writing and filmmaking and a
long hard look, while doing an art school master’s degree in Digital Design, at how difficult
trying to financially support myself by working in those fields would be. Instead, I came to
academia to earn a Ph.D. in Communication. My parents were by that point resigned that my
B.A. in English would never lead me to the respectability of law school and recently joked that,
in the post-recession digitally-driven world, there are more lawyers than jobs anyhow. I come to
the study of creative work as someone skeptical about why it is so hard to make a living in a
conglomeration of industries that, particularly in contemporary America, make so much money.
I come to the study of creative work as a feminist who cares about the diversity of the faces,
voices, and hands behind the flowering of subcultural production. I come to the study of creative
5

work as a communications scholar trained in a combination of cultural studies, critical theory,
media analysis, and anthropology. Finally, I come to the study of creative work as someone
politically committed to social justice. The privilege of academia is to have the time and
theoretical tools to understand what it is that’s happening and why. The purpose of academia, I
argue, is to produce that knowledge with an eye to how things can get better.
I’ve come out of this project feeling more optimistic about the possibilities developing in
the world of creative people and creative work than I was going in. At the same time as the old
mold of a fulfilling, happy life has become very difficult to achieve, it is also losing much of its
allure (Gregg, 2010; Halberstam, 2011). Many of the problems of capitalism, injustice, and
collective organization that people are grappling with are long-standing. They are newly urgent
in a world where many of the tried-and-true ways of dealing with the problems have been
stripped of their power. But they are not new. There never was a golden age for everyone to
which we can return. Instead, people are forging new paths for themselves to create lives that
are both joyful and sustainable. From one point of view, as the old ways of doing things become
less and less sustainable, we have less and less to lose by experimenting with different kinds of
choices. This is not to say the process is painless. On the contrary, it is often stressful,
exhausting, and even terrifying. Making different kinds of choices risks incomprehension from
relatives, friends, and others on whom we depend for support as well as intense self-doubt about
whether the route we are struggling to take is the right one. But after spending time in the world
of creative work as an aspirant, as a researcher, and as a participant, this much is clear: change is
possible, and it’s worth it.

6

The Case of Crafting
Out of a wide range of DIY and participatory cultures, I have focused in on the
subculture of crafting, making things by hand. There are a number of reasons behind this
decision. They stem from my commitment to applying theory and critique in the service of
change, searching for sources of power and hope rather than more ways in which we are
doomed.
Crafting is distinct from many other making and hacking cultures in that most
participants are female. You would also be hard-pressed to find an ethnic tradition which does
not contain a wealth of crafting expertise. Crafting is also the rare cultural practice which is
incarnated in forms that are associated with the poor, the middle class, and the wealthy. It can
mean make-do, stretching limited resources as far as they can go; the pottering and puttering of
hobbies, visiting big box stores and making lumpy sweaters your family members pretend to
appreciate as gifts; or artisanal perfection patronized by wealthy clients, painstakingly applying
fine technical skills to the creation of art. This is emphatically not a subcultural case in which
diverse voices and hands are absent. Crafting expertise is not something which everyone has or
which anyone somehow naturally develops, but it is much more accessible than many other types
of expertise, particularly technological expertise.
Crafting has a very long history as a cultural practice and an economic culture. Its
entanglement with technology is measured in centuries, rather than dominated by ideas of a
digital revolution. Having such a rich background with which to compare and contrast
contemporary developments helps to highlight what kinds of changes are significant—genuinely
new or old patterns repeating with a difference. For instance, crafters have long occupied the full
spectrum of niches between amateur and professional, such that produsage and prosumption are
7

more the historical norm than the exception (Bruns, 2008; Bruns & Schmidt, 2011). Crafting has
also been taken up as an important practice by earlier activists, from the Arts and Crafts
Movement in the United Kingdom to Gandhi’s embrace of spinning and weaving as anti-colonial
steps towards economic self-determination to the Whole Earth Catalog’s listings of places from
which to buy crafting tools to the “benefit corporation” and “conscious capitalist” philosophies
to which companies like Etsy subscribe.

The Four Faces of DIY
This book traces the intersection of two perhaps unlikely concepts: participatory cultures
and Marxist theory. I ground this meeting in the concrete case of crafting subculture, exploring
it as creative work and play which has been significantly impacted by the development of the
internet.
Participatory cultures are defined as ones “with relatively low barriers to artistic
expression and civic engagement; with strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations
with others; with some type of informal mentorship whereby what is known by the most
experienced is passed along to novices; where members believe that their contributions matter;
and where members feel some degree of social connection with each other” (Jenkins,
Purushotma, Weigel, Clinton, & Robison, 2009, p. 7). A great deal of the literature on
participatory cultures has drawn from cases within media fandoms, generally female-dominated
communities who pushed the boundaries of practical, legal, and ethical exchange between
professional and amateur creative work and workers (Coppa, 2006; Jenkins, 1992, 2014; Stanfill
& Condis, 2014). Critiques of participatory culture studies question the political meaningfulness
of the participation they allow and the extent to which governments and corporations exploit
8

these cultures’ activities and products (Andrejevic, 2008; Carpentier & Dahlgren, 2011; Hay &
Couldry, 2011). Participatory and sub-cultural studies have also often been critiqued as centering
those who already possess mainstream cultural privilege, for instance through combinations of
ethnicity, social class, ability, and gender (Banet-Weiser, 2014; Hay & Couldry, 2011;
McRobbie, 1980). But it is essential not to assume absence. As Wanzo (2015, para. 1.6) points
out, “despite their invisibility in fan studies, African Americans are often hypervisible examples
of fandom” and black scholars often operate as aca-fans in their analyses of popular culture but
are absent from genealogies of this identity and methodology.
Marxism is increasingly less the particular political-economic theory developed by Marx
and Engels and more a surprisingly diverse field of critical theory and political philosophy. I
work with an understanding of Marxism that draws from Hannah Arendt, who focuses in on the
question of exploitation, and the work of autonomous Marxists, who see historical and political
change as motivated by the agency of the workers where emotion and affect are as important as
capital and the commodity (Arendt, 2006; Berlant, 2010; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Gregg, 2009;
Weeks, 2011). Much critical theory related to technology and political-economics builds on top
of a Marxist foundation. Terranova (2013) famously theorized user activity as “free labor,”
which is both free in the sense that it is not compelled or supervised by those in power and free
in the sense that it is unpaid.
The intersection of participatory cultures and Marxist theories in the analysis of crafting
is surprising in that these theoretical perspectives are often considered antithetical to each other.
In simplified terms, participatory culture theories generally locate progressive potential in DIY
subcultures, while Marxist critiques generally see DIY as a symptom of neoliberalism, much
more in concert with the corporate status quo than in opposition to it. I argue that both of these
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theoretical perspectives are essential in order to understand the significance of creative work in
contemporary America.
To provide a backdrop for the analysis of crafting that follows, I tell the story of my own
introduction(s) to crafting. I explain how and where participatory cultures as well as Marxist
structures appear in crafting. Wandering under the fluorescent lights of the indoor mall
connecting Boston’s convention center to the hotel hosting my academic conference, I happened
to catch sight of a magazine called Jane Austen Knits on a display at the front of a Barnes and
Noble bookshop. In order to maximize on the opportunity of having hundreds of academics
walking by the store, the staff had reversed the usual layout and pushed everything related to
classic and serious academic literature to the front of the store. Next to collections of Austen
novels, literary criticism of her writings, and historical biographies of the woman and her time,
sat Jane Austen Knits. Within the magazine, independent knitting designers had created their
own patterns inspired by particular characters, scenes, and descriptions from Jane Austen’s
works. The magazine also featured articles on women’s lives and the culture of knitting during
Austen’s time, although I was later to find out that Austen herself was an unlikely knitter—based
on her class and national background, she probably “tatted” lace. I more or less decided on the
spot that I needed to knit the shawl inspired by Elizabeth Bennett’s walk to the Netherfield
manor to check on her sister Jane’s health. Having no idea whatsoever how to knit, I also
located and bought a basic DIY instructions and materials kit book.
This brief incident indicates how entangled grassroots DIY and participatory cultures are
with late-stage mass capitalism at its most banal. The independent knitting pattern designers,
writers, and historians of Jane Austen Knits exemplify the vibrancy of amateur media and fan
cultures, as well as their growing professionalization. Each of the designers was listed in the
10

magazine under her (and they were all women) Ravelry internet pseudonym. Many identified
themselves as fans of Jane Austen or Regency England itself. But all were also professional
creative workers, in a sense—they submitted their patterns and swatches to Interweave Knits, the
large arts and crafts media company behind Jane Austen Knits as well as several other outlets,
and were paid for their work as independent contractors who worked for themselves. In Jane
Austen Knits, a key aspect of participatory cultures is the rise of entrepreneurship. This is not a
new development, as fan music was already beginning to be professionalized as creative work in
the pre-Internet years (Jenkins, 1992). This magazine is an intensification of these developments
and a sign that the “copyright wars” which prevented many fans from making money—or even
distributing—work that riffs on popular culture are slowly tipping in favor of the fans (Couldry
& Jenkins, 2014; De Kosnik, 2013).
The I Taught Myself Knitting book-and-kit that I picked up, on the other hand, represents
the corporate and mass commercial uptake of DIY. The Boye Corporation seems much more the
author than any particular person (certainly none are listed on the book’s cover) and the
publication is strategic. Boye was the first American manufacturer of knitting and crochet tools,
and though it is now owned by the larger Simplicity Creative Group, Inc., it they are still the
most common brand of tools carried by big box retailers such as Wal-Mart, Target, Jo-Ann’s,
and Michaels. The book-plus-kit commingles learning their products with learning basic crafting
skills. At the same time, as the title implies, the book frames its purchaser not as a consumer but
as an intrepid DIY-er who can figure things out for herself. A Marxist perspective points to the
diminution of political possibility in such corporate-sanctioned DIY—the knitter’s activities are
defined in an extremely individual manner and the book’s author is alienated from their labors of
11

creation. Consumption remains foremost, as the next logical step would be buying more crafting
tools, books, and yarn produced by the Boye Corporation.
Ironically, it turned out that although the needles, stitch counters, and other tools in the
kit proved useful, the book itself didn’t help me very much. I turned to YouTube instead, where
a number of knitters had created video series demonstrating basic techniques, with production
values ranging from the very low-fi to the quite slick. I might have been DIY, but I definitely
didn’t teach myself to knit. The KnitWitch did. Later on, I learned more advanced techniques
and trouble-shooting practices from talking with friends who had already been knitting for years,
trying out patterns with detailed instructions, and watching even more YouTube videos. This is
a different, far more community-oriented shade of DIY than that of the I Taught Myself Knitting
variety. Here “yourself” implies a plural and commercial transactions are not required,
exemplifying the participatory culture theory’s emphasis on informal mentorship. What was
essential was networked communication technology. I found the KnitWitch’s videos by
searching around on YouTube and navigating the results its algorithms threw back. My best
knitting friend happened to live on the opposite coast, and so our conversations and her
instruction relied on our cell phones and, often, their ability to share pictures and short videos.
My mother later pointed out that this was not, in fact, my first introduction to knitting and
fiber crafting more broadly. She had been a knitter and tried, in vain, to introduce me to the craft
herself. I had entirely forgotten. I do remember her sewing clothing for my elementary school
self—it was really annoying to have to stand still and be measured and fitted for things,
particularly when there were pins involved. The younger me distinctly preferred buying clothes
from “cool stores” that advertised in the magazines I read and which branded themselves as
spaces for fashionable teens. These clothes were, for a middle-class girl from the suburbs,
12

expensive but not prohibitively so. My mother had grown up on food stamps with crafting as an
economic necessity. She sewed her own wedding dress not out of DIY desire, as such, but out of
the knowledge that she could save some money this way and still have a beautiful dress. She did
insist that I learn how to sew. I was resistant to being forced to learn such a girly skill—my
tastes running far more to soccer practice and video games—until I realized its utility for
Halloween costumes. By the time crafting had become cool again, many mothers and
grandmothers had given up the craft themselves or continued it only as a hobby (my mom turned
her sewing machine to beautiful, decorative quilts and wall-hangings rather than clothing for
myself, my brother, and my dad). I did receive a large box of yarn and needles in the mail, once
I told my mom of my newfound hobby, including a half-finished scarf she had once worked on
making for me. It was crafted out of an unusual ribbon-shaped yarn that I had selected as
different from the other, more traditional yarns in the shop. Those had been too lady-like for me.
Such a history of missed family connections in craft is surprisingly common for middle-
class Millennial women, although for many the family member unsuccessfully urging them to
sew and knit was their grandmother. Crafting remains connected to a stereotypical image of
homebound, passive, dependent femininity even as much contemporary DIY has become self-
consciously feminist. One of the most well-known examples of this recently were the pink
“pussy hats” many women knit to wear in the Women’s Marches protesting the Trump
administration. A Marxist feminism, however, questions the efficacy of such actions: does a
pussy-hatted march and the ensuing massive creation of memes and sharing of photographs
disrupt the workings of power or simply provide an escapist valve whereby people believe they
have done “enough” (Dean, 2005)? Academic feminists are often split on their readings of
crafting. Black and Burisch (2010, p. 616) locate great potential in craftivism and other
13

politically engaged crafting practice which “keeps the focus on the interactions and relational
potential of craft making rather than on a passive relationship between viewer and object,”
particularly a consumer relationship. Others emphasize the prevalence of consumption within
crafting and link it to concerns about a broader postfeminist turn, which appropriates feminist
discourses but is “anchored in consumption as a strategy (and leisure as a site) for the production
of the self” (Dawkins, 2011; Luckman, 2013; Matchar, 2013; Robertson, 2011; Tasker & Negra,
2007, p. 2).
These multiple introductions to crafting highlight the four faces of DIY that intersect in
the pages that follow: entrepreneurial subcultures, brand-conscious and transmedia corporate
franchises, community-based sociality conducted through technology, and a continual debate
about whether DIY, at its base, is activist and feminist or merely consumption in a new
wrapping. Sometimes DIY wears only one of these four faces. But more often it is a blend, such
that the interpretation and analysis of it demonstrates as much about the critic as it does about
their object of analysis. This is why I start you off by explaining my own perspective; how I
come to craft as an academic but also as an amateur knitter and active participant in the
subculture under analysis.

Methodology
This book is a communication studies analysis of crafting. That being said,
communication has often been referred to as an undisciplined discipline. As such, my approach
draws liberally from cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, organizational
communication, and the critical theories of feminism and Marxism. My interpretation of crafting
proceeds through an identity hermeneutics that places a feminine gender identity at the center of
14

my reading and generally treats women as the norm rather than the exception (Wanzo, 2015).
This is not to say that male crafters are a rarity but to de-center masculinity, particularly
hegemonic masculinity, as the default from which others deviate. A feminine gender identity
does not imply a feminist political orientation. Many crafters are feminists and see crafting as a
key part of their feminist practice. But many are not and range from ambivalent to hostile to
apathetic about feminists and feminism.
This book builds on the insights of two years of ethnographic fieldwork, one year focused
on the Etsy platform and one more focused on Ravelry, with American crafters. My
methodology conceptualized crafting as a subculture, not as a community. I see crafting as a
subculture because even though it is an old and widely known cultural practice, many of its
values oppose those of mainstream culture, and crafters are highly aware of these mis-matches.
Beyond this, crafters very often say that they feel part of a community, but they do not
conceptualize it as a broad, amorphous social grouping. Rather, they described small, closely
interwoven communities united around more specific connections such as interest in a particular
craft, a shared meeting space (either virtual or physical), family ties, political commitments,and
so forth. These smaller communities tended to be more demographically homogeneous than the
subculture as a whole, although virtual communities organized around interest in a particular
craft were more diverse than communities organized in other ways.
My fieldwork encompassed interviews and participant observation. I approached the
crafting subculture at a meso level, keeping both the individual crafter and broader groups in
view, by using structured snowball sampling. I began by making contacts in different crafts,
geographical locations, and with different entry points into crafting—from retired industry
professionals to young M.F.A.’s to users and moderators of particular online forums to those
15

who had been featured on Etsy’s front pages to those who had quit selling their crafts entirely.
Each of these crafters introduced me to or told me about others and existed in their own
hyperlocal crafting context. I traveled across the United States to meet and talk with crafters
where they were, follow them to craft fairs and group meet-up’s, and conducted numerous long-
distance interviews online. This method allowed me to see what ideas and practices were shared
across the subculture, endorsed by diverse crafters and crafter communities, and which were
contained to particular communities and sub-groups. I spent particular time in Los Angeles,
New York, and Missouri, each of which is layered with different crafting locales and approaches.
But somewhat to my surprise, I found more commonality than contrast, even among people of
very different identities and backgrounds.
My participant observation took different forms through these two years. I opened and
operates my own small Etsy shop and also took a knitting pattern all the way from idea, through
design, to publication on Ravelry. Although crafting is clearly highly social, a great deal also
happens when the crafter is alone struggling with her yarn, photography set-up, and electronic
inboxes. I analyze these experiences in an autoethnographic way which incorporates my
particular perspective and vantage point on crafting. Crafters produce a great deal of media,
from forum threads to op-ed’s, and, particularly as Etsy held its IPO, crafting made a lot of
appearances in the mainstream press. I used Google alerts to track mentions of “Etsy” and
“Ravelry” in online news, blogs, and other outlets. I read magazines, watched YouTube videos,
participated in forum discussions, and eventually made my peace with the fact that no archive
could possibly contain everything that happens in such a large, vibrant sub-culture.
It is relatively unusual to mix media analysis and ethnographic fieldwork to the extent
that I have here, particularly in the second chapter. But this is a necessary methodological
16

intervention for a situation in which DIY is important not only to DIY subcultures like crafting
but to society at a broader scale. The cultural power and economic productivity of creative work
in the post-industrial age has a number of industries looking to the creative DIY worldview as an
explanation for how to get things done in the contemporary United States (Flew, 2005). Reality
television, in particular, acts as a fulcrum point between the so-called old media regime of
broadcast culture and passive audiences and the new media regime of networked communication
and active users. I complement this attention to popular media with analysis of news articles, op-
eds, and corporate presentations, particularly in the fourth chapter. These media give a view into
the workings and cultures of the platform companies which form an integral part of DIY culture,
both economic and more purely social.

Chapter Overview
This book interrogates creative work from three distinct, if interrelated, vantage points:
the dream of creative work, the day-to-day reality of doing it, and the techno-social environment
in which it is embedded. Put another way, these chapters analyze the ideology undergirding and
motivating creative work, the choices made by agents who pursue creative work, and the
structures which constrain but also support those choices. By putting my analysis of the
ideology, agency, and structure of the creative work of crafting together, I avoid making a
moralistic judgment or arguing that crafters are right or wrong to act as they do. Rather, my aim
is to understand what and why they do as they do, the cultural frames, material conditions, and
sense of self through which crafters come to an understanding of how the world operates. My
analysis is continually alive to the possibility of change for the better, seeking out places of
strength and possibility rather than closing off potential avenues for change.
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The second chapter provides an analytical description of the ideology that underwrites
contemporary creative work. This ideology is often described by the acronym DIY, do-it-
yourself. Academic and popular intellectual debates about DIY refract and reflect hopes and
fears about contemporary cultural, political, and economic change. “Do it” bespeaks agency and
activity, but it also invokes the possibility of political compulsion. “Yourself” most obviously
refers to individualism, but it also leaves open the possibility of collectivity. In participatory
cultural and autonomous Marxist practice, “yourself” is plural rather than singular and translates
as do-it-together in emergent collectivism rather than kill-or-be-killed entrepreneurial
individualism or passive waiting to be led, organized, and institutionalized (Castells, 2015;
Close, 2016; Papacharissi, 2015).
I interrogate DIY ideology through its popularization in the subgenre of reality television
which focuses on work, considering both the broadcast texts and the reactions of fans and
audiences to those texts. I put reality television’s construction of DIY in conversation with the
DIY articulated by crafters. This is not because (either) one causes the other in a deterministic
way. Rather, DIY has seen such an upsurge in cultural prominence that multiple vantage points
are necessary in order to get a full picture of creative DIY as a cultural frame. I argue that DIY
is more rightly understood as DWYL, do-what-you-love. Crafters understand themselves as a
certain type of person, a creative person, who knows themselves as such through their love for
making things. That love is culturally channeled and expressed in two very different definitions,
one which exalts the American Dream and one which exalts a mischievous joy in doing without
much caring if anything ever gets done. Neither one of these loves is somehow intrinsically
better than the other. But in the context of a neoliberal America, the uncertainty and self-doubt
18

tied into pursuit of the American Dream can ideologically validate sacrifices and pain that would
otherwise be both unacceptable and potentially avoidable.
The third chapter seeks to understand what decisions crafters make given the constraints
they experience and the dreams they have. Like any subculture, crafting contains an internal
status hierarchy that both gives it meaning and lends itself to the creation of what reality TV calls
“drama.” I theorize this status system via Bourdieu’s ideas about capital and crafters’ attempts to
define what “handmade” truly means. This hierarchy sometimes works against the more utopian
impulses in the subculture, unconsciously rewarding those who already have more mainstream
privilege with more subcultural status as well. Despite this, crafters’ decisions about how to put
their values into practice are slowly giving life to what I call “Folk Marxism,” an alternative
economic culture with enormous potential for a more humane, sustainable working world.
It is not necessary to share or agree with crafters’ passion for creativity to understand its
impact as a cultural frame through which crafters make decisions (Neff, 2012). When faced with
the reality of long hours, low pay, and precarious working conditions, crafters prioritize joy and
pleasure over the sacrificial logic of the hegemonic work ethic. Many of their evolving practices
express recognizably Marxist critiques of capitalism, such as the conceptualization of exchange
as communication rather than a means to accumulation, the prioritization of use over exchange
value, and the refusal of both work and accelerating consumption. This philosophy traces back
not to Marxist commitments, however, but to crafters’ cultural values and, above all, their joy in
creating. Perhaps fittingly, some of the strongest statements of the political need to prioritize joy
came from part-time crafters, those whom the values of hegemonic work culture would suggest
merit less consideration and hold less subcultural status.
19

The fourth chapter places the subculture of crafting in the larger technological and
political structures that surround it. Crafters are only one subculture of creative work that draws
inspiration from DIY and doing what you love. Coders, those who build and maintain the digital
platforms of Web 2.0, share many of the values I have identified in crafting subculture even
while crafters and coders are demographically extremely different groups, particularly in terms
of gender. But this shared value on creativity and creative work becomes problematic when it is
fetishized as the only kind of work that is meaningful or culturally valued.
Platforms as a technology have a history of development which emphasizes the
importance of the social and of facilitating rote labors of maintenance. Most of the work people
do on and through platforms, even in a creative subculture like crafting, is in support of creativity
rather than itself creative. But such reproductive labor is degraded by both mainstream
devaluation of the feminine and the subcultural emphasis on creativity, making the alienation of
crafters and coders from their maintenance labor an unfortunately common reality. Attempts to
overcome this alienation often take the form of shaping support work into the template of
creative labor. This has the unintended but deeply problematic impact of creating hierarchies
between groups, such as crafters and coders. Crafting, as a subculture with a relatively unique
value on repetitive labor and non-creative work, is an instructive case with which to theorize how
to avoid the alienation of people from rote maintenance work without at the same time
attempting to turn that work into creative production.
Finally, I conclude by addressing a question which lingers around discussions of creative
work, particularly that by women and people of color: Why don’t you just get a real job?
Crafters do work long, hard hours, whereby even those who pursue it as a hobby first have to
take care to avoid repetitive stress injuries and feeling trapped into doing work they do not want
20

to do. Without sustained ethnographic observation, this might suggest that crafting culture
operates on the affect of cruel optimism, wherein making a living doing what you love is
simultaneously impossible—the fact of working and earning a living precludes joy—and too
possible—digital platforms make this kind of work possible to do, at a basic level of theory and
practicality, in a way it was not before (Berlant, 2010). But by staying with crafters over time
and seeing how they respond to the negative affects that attend their work, as well as the positive
ones, crafters are quietly building a different world in which “real jobs” cease to exist.
The fact that the most obvious and natural way to respectfully exchange creative labor
and its products is through selling on for-profit technological infrastructures points to how
widespread neoliberalism truly is in contemporary America. This makes the emphasis on
meaningful creativity and joy, rather than profit, in the DIY which crafters, coders, and many
other share all the more remarkable and a clear sign of strength on which to draw. In the digital
environment, it is an inescapable fact that the materials with which you creatively work also
belong, in a moral sense, to others, as they are created by their activities . Recognizing that
while still promoting creativity is essential to reducing precarity and fulfilling the promise of
Folk Marxism and the platform economy.
The analyses in these chapters are animated by my vision of a better world. This vision is
inspired by the imaginations that lie implicit in popular DIY media, crafters’ practices, and in
much of the scholarship—both critical and celebratory—of participatory and DIY cultures. The
key aspects of this vision are a world characterized by abundance, rather than scarcity, and in
which connections between people, institutions, things, and environments are recognized and
negotiated, rather than taken for granted. I see crafting subculture as one place in which this
21

better world is being created, slowly and from the ground up, rather than beginning with these
ideals and dictating their institution from the top down.
The flowering of creative making in crafting and other DIY culture exemplifies the
power of diverse creations speaking to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways rather than
reaching for a singular good art or true point. As a practice of make-do, crafting is invoked in
times when people feel short of money. Implicit in this kind of crafting is the vision not of a
world where money is plentiful but where making things, instead of buying them, is culturally
normative. Machine-aided production has come to the point where scarcity is far less a question
of absolutely lacking enough food, electricity, shelter, and so forth and far more one of failing to
ethically distribute what exists. One of the key problems that I identify in the economic culture
of crafting is precarity, in which crafters must worry about their creativity providing for basic
subsistence. The problems of precarity are particularly clear in critiques of “free labor,” which
document the poverty that in a neoliberal world results from not devoting one’s time to
maximizing income. But the utopia implied in these critiques seems to be one entirely consistent
with hegemonic discourses of work, “which subsume people’s social and cultural lives fully into
the economic sphere” (Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013, p. 71). The utopia that animates my vision
here is emphatically not one in which each action is repaid in monetary terms by those it
benefits, it is one in which the intrinsic and social motivations for acting are not constrained by
the practical need to worry about money.
In thinking about connections, I draw heavily on Donna Haraway’s (2016) metaphor of
living together as passing string figures from one hand to another. Receiving something implies
knowing where it comes from and accepting it like a gift, rather than as a right, which one
expects to eventually pass on in turn. Making changes to what you’re given is expected and
22

appreciated at the same time as it is clear that any making done in the present builds on work by
others in the past. This vision does share some characteristics with utopian realities imagined by
critiques of participatory cultures, particularly those involving new media. Andrejevic (2008, p.
38) and Dean (2005) critique interactive media as creating a circulatory flow of messages and
communication “in which the subject gets off on the very failure of the attempt to make an
impression on a debunked symbolic order.” Implied in this critique is a utopia in which subjects
do make impressions on the symbolic order in which they live and regular people do receive
responses from the powers that be. This is clearly important, and I expand on it in the fourth
chapter. But the utopia within crafters’ practices places as much of an emphasis on horizontal
communication between crafters as it does on vertical communication between crafters and, for
example, platform owners. In my vision of the path towards better world, power comes from
these kinds of existing connections and responses, rather than from engagement with those in
pre-existing power.

23

The Dream of Doing What You Love
The rise of the internet has been accompanied by an upswell of cultural belief that doing-it-
yourself is the way to make good things happen, both for yourself and for the world. From one
point of view, this is ironic. The internet has arguably made us more interdependent with each
other and with high-capital infrastructure than ever before. But from another, it is inevitable.
The broad strokes of a cultural media history of the United States resemble a pendulum swinging
back and forth between an emphasis on acting and an emphasis on viewing. During the
broadcast era of media technology, the pendulum had swung decidedly to the side of viewing—
the hegemonic model of a media technology was one that transmitted the creations of experts
and professionals to the broader public. We were due for a swing in the other direction. The
hegemonic model of a media technology today is one that thrives on (at the least) interactivity
between users and the technology and even more so on engagement between different users via
the media and participatory cultures that link sociality and political activism.
These are, of course, very broad strokes. But zooming out to this extent is a necessary
reminder that no matter how fixed ideologies appear in a particular historical moment, we are
continually engaged in “ideological terrains of struggle and the task of ideological
transformation” and that change is not only possible but likely (Hall, 1986, p. 40). One crucial
goal of scholarship and cultural critique more broadly is to identify concrete areas where struggle
is taking place, analyze the context and stakes of that struggle, and assess its importance, both to
the actors of the struggle and more broadly (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Hall, 1986; Haraway, 2016).
As I argued in the introduction, the work and culture of creative production are a key arena for
political struggle in the context of internet-networked late-stage capitalist America. The work
practices of the creative and technology industries are increasingly thus seen as a model for a
growing number of other industries, and their outputs are often the face of America overseas.
24

While this is most obviously true of official productions and blockbuster franchises, smaller and
amateur media also often spread across national boundaries to meaningful effect (Jenkins, 2008;
Jenkins et al., 2013). Shauna put her kids’ clothing and accessories shop online at Etsy after long
stints selling at flea markets. She had always wanted to visit Paris, particularly as a lifelong
veteran of the fashion and costume industry, and proudly told me that the first person to buy
something from her lived in France. The item? A “total ‘I Am America, We Are Awesome!’
jacket” of custom-sewn denim!
In this chapter, I zoom in to struggles over what DIY means as a cultural commonsense and a
structuring ideal for work in the creative industries. To make this analysis concrete, I explore
struggles over the meaning of DIY as cultural commonsense that is articulated in reality
television and in the minds of creative people like crafters. The reality shows on which I focus
all feature real people doing creative work, plotlines created through careful editing after-the-fact
(i.e. through editors performing creative work on representations of others doing the same), and
the readings, actions, and reactions by broad communities of reality TV fans. In a convergent
media era where distinctions between producers and consumers are no longer clearcut and
influence, albeit unevenly, flows in both directions, studies of industries and work as well as the
broader cultural importance of programs are incomplete without the perspectives of fans and
others formerly known as the audience.
I put these broader cultural constructions of DIY in conversation with crafters, as well as the
off-screen reflections of reality show participants, as they articulate DIY for themselves. There
is, of course, overlap between these groups. Crafters very commonly watch television while they
work on the more repetitive aspects of their crafts; as knitting pattern designer Alex put it, “just
plugging away in front of several seasons of a TV show, punctuated by periods of intense
25

thinking and math-doing and planning.” While many of the crafters with whom I spoke
mentioned Netflix binges of drama series, Ravelry groups dedicated to particular reality shows—
including community-organized betting pools and swaps based on the results—attest that many
crafters are also reality television fans. Movement happens in the other direction as well.
Officially remixed and broadcast reality series episodes place reality show participants as
viewers, watching themselves in the original episodes and commenting on the action in the
manner of a DVD track or via pop-up notes on the original broadcast. Many former reality series
contestants blog, tweet, or otherwise comment on new seasons of their series—some even return
to the screen as judges, mentors, and challenge-givers! Similarly, those with MFA’s and other
art and trade school credentials are part of the standard contestant recruitment pools for series
like Work of Art and Project Runway and the Food Network regularly invites skilled “home
cooks” into their casts.
Although I focus on broadcast and cable reality television series because of their popularity
and broad cultural reach, crafters are increasingly mediating and presenting their own work in
podcasts, Instagram pictures, and other forms that borrow from the conventions of reality
television. Some crafters, notably “Irish Mike” of Discovery’s Big Giant Swords, even transition
from creating their own YouTube videos to the screens of network-produced reality television.
Gary is part of a group of Etsy crafters who started a friendly practice called “Crafter Cage
Match” mirroring reality show practices. Crafters sign up and “every couple of weeks two
people are chosen…sent identical boxes of supplies and they get a random theme, they have to
come up with something using these supplies. The rest of the team votes on it, decides who did
the best. There’s no prizes, but it’s a lot of fun.”
26

I begin by situating the DIY of reality television and creative work in the history of DIY
philosophy in the United States and the contemporary convergent mediascape. I argue that “do-
it-yourself” is actually a misnomer. The primary meaning of DIY today is actually DWYL—do-
what-you-love. How love is defined as an affect, however, is both crucial and contentious. Its
two primary incarnations are a love reminiscent of the American Dream, which requires sacrifice
to prove your dedication, and a love evoking the figure of the trickster, which emphasizes fun,
joy, and humor. Creative people deeply identify themselves with and through their work. Rather
than individualistic images of the good life, however, I found those of fellowship through sharing
creativity, either the work itself or its results. Much of the tension internal to DWYL comes not
from conflict and resistance between, for instance, viewers and texts but from artificial
imaginations of creative meritocracies as zero sum games in which only one person can triumph.

Do It Yourself Bootstrapping
Do-it-yourself philosophy has a particularly long history in the United States. In the
imagination of settler-colonialism, the country was a wild territory rich in resources and
possibilities but which required hard work to “settle” (Roediger, 2005; Veracini, 2010; Wolfe,
1999). This sentiment is particularly immortalized in American folklore via colonist John
Smith’s citation of the New Testament aphorism “he who does not work, neither shall he eat” in
a speech to the struggling colonists of Jamestown. It is important to note right from the start that
while work is essential to getting things done—and to having something to eat—its place in our
lives is more than “economic necessity and social duty; it is widely understood as an individual
moral practice and collective ethical obligation” (Weeks, 2011, p. 11).
27

American imaginations of DIY work coalesce particularly around the American Dream,
wherein someone (particularly an immigrant) can start from nothing and, through hard work and
grit, work up to owning their own business. American Dream entrepreneurship imagines a
“’good capitalism,’ a utopian form in symbolic contrast to the rapacious, speculative,
financialized capitalism behind the 2008 economic crash” which linked to industries that don’t
produce any things, as such, instead managing and trading what is produced by others (Streeter,
2015, p. 3108). This understanding of work draws from both the Protestant work ethic and the
Transcendentalist philosophy of romantic individualism. The work ethic demands that people
approach work as if it was their calling, the larger purpose of their lives (Weeks, 2011). This
mindset is well explained by former Silicon Valley CEO of Evernote Phil Libin as, “I don’t
believe in life-work balance…I believe in life’s work” (Carson, 2015). Romantic individualism
imagines the self “as uniquely isolated in a masculine fashion and the source of a dynamic, inner
experience that calls on us to live creatively beyond the bounds of predictable rationality” and
societal convention (Streeter, 2015, pp. 9–10). This philosophy of DIY work is usefully
understood through the figure of Steve Jobs, who was referenced by crafters when explaining
how they understand the world of work, by media stories of DIY entrepreneurship, and in
academic analyses of Silicon Valley and contemporary DIY. Particularly after his death, popular
media often construct Jobs “as a creative entrepreneurial hero…who succeeded not by the use of
rational calculation or hard work but by following his inner passion, by being ‘authentic’ to his
inner self” (Streeter, 2015, p. 9). While Streeter counterposes working hard and following one’s
inner passion, the idea of the calling collapses these practices together. As Shauna told me, “I
just watched a Steve Jobs film, a documentary…yeah, he was smart, and he also had a lot of grit.
And he worked really hard. People say work smarter not harder, but I don’t believe in
28

that…You have to grind.” Even though DIY is intimately connected to work, it is not primarily
motivated by profit. Indeed, for those with wider and more overtly political commitments,
“perhaps no dream in American culture has recurred as often as the one in which a group of
spiritual adepts remake the world they have inherited in the image of their own ideals” (Turner,
2006, pp. 36–37). Social entrepreneurs are particularly visible examples of DIY in the non-profit
sector, which at the same time “offer a compelling vision of meaningful work [and] celebrate a
problematic account of work/life balance” valorizing what Shauna terms “the grind” over all
other aspects of life (Dempsey & Sanders, 2010, p. 439).
The story of a whole country pulled up by its bootstraps has great cultural resonance,
particularly during elections when both conservatives and old-school liberals call “for
abandoning ‘special interests’ and returning the party to policies appealing to the ‘average
worker,’” who is presumed to be both white and male (Roediger, 2007, p. 19; Skocpol &
Williamson, 2012). It is also often and very rightly critiqued for its frighteningly narrow take on
history, consistent with the settler colonial ideology in which settlers see themselves as “founders
of political orders and carry their sovereignty with them,” as opposed to immigrants who “can be
seen as appellants facing a political order that is already constituted” (Veracini, 2010, p. 3). As
such it erases the presence of indigenous Americans (Veracini, 2010; Wolfe, 1999). It also
ignores that much of the work done to settle and build up America was done not by free DIY-ers
but by African and then African-American slaves who, even many decades after the end of
slavery and continuous residence, are still often effectively seen as migrants rather than settlers
(Roediger, 2007; Wolfe, 1999). The enduring legacy of settler colonialism is clear in calls to
“take our country back” and, more recently “make America great again” that imagine the United
States’ founding through the symbolic story of “the original American colonial rebels opposing
29

tyranny by tossing chests of tea into Boston Harbor” rather than, as one example, that of the
Thanksgiving feast (Skocpol & Williamson, 2012, p. 7).
The romantic view of work is also highly gendered via a social Darwinist imagination of
the world, whereby heroic, masculine innovators naturally rise above the masses and
governmental assistance opposes the natural order (Bruni, Gherardi, & Poggio, 2004a, 2004b;
Thompson, 1989). It considers labor as exploit or venture, “an excellence and an efficacy of a
kind that cannot without derogation be compared with the uneventful diligence of the women”
(Veblen, 2009, p. 5). Popular press and even scholarship often cast female entrepreneurs as
anomalies or as a wholly new creature of the modern era who must conform to existing
masculine models of entrepreneurial venturing, notably through delaying having children or
avoiding it altogether (Bruni et al., 2004b; McRobbie, 2016; Neff, 2012). In the contemporary
era, neoliberalism often rhetorically positions bootstrapping DIY entrepreneurship as the ethical
way out of poverty, rather than a morally suspect reliance on public welfare and state support
(Harvey, 2005; Skocpol & Williamson, 2012; Weeks, 2011).
This is not to say that DIY philosophy or investment in the American Dream is
exclusively the province of white people, of men, or even of the middle and upper classes. Quite
the opposite. Even though Shauna, an African-American Brooklyn native, referenced Steve Jobs
as an entrepreneurial model, she felt strongly that “being an entrepreneur is in my DNA.” Both
her father and grand-father had their own stores and, despite staying at home for ten years, her
mom “would sew…she was so crazy with a glue gun, I’d watch her make towels and sell them to
people, she did hair in the house.” She argues that “African-Americans, we’re very
entrepreneurial…this is a part of our heritage because we couldn’t get jobs. There just wasn’t
work for black people…that’s where music, rock and roll music [came from].” Entrepreneurship
30

has been a key feminist and queer practice, particularly in the creation of bookstores and even
sex toy shops (Hogan, 2016). The first African-American female business owner, Madame C. J.
Walker, based her entrepreneurial venture on hair and make-up products for black women
(Clarke, 1999). Methods of social selling often attributed to the development of new
technologies like Facebook also trace their roots back to Bonnie Wise, the first woman featured
on the cover of Business Week, whose idea for a “home party plan” helped make Tupperware
into an American icon (Clarke, 1999). Working-class activists, feminists, and others of
marginalized identity have historically mobilized a “laborist” work ethic to demand better pay
and conditions on the basis of their excellent work and through critique of an idle rich (Weeks,
2011). Precarity activism continues this approach through campaigns such as the “Fight for
Fifteen” that advocate a living wage wherein full-time work is possible and allows workers to
pay their bills without relying on governmental support or multiple jobs (Gill & Pratt, 2008;
Jacobs, 2015; O’Connor, 2014; Weeks, 2011).
It is this discourse of subjects whose DIY work ethics evidence their deserving nature
that dominant readings of reality work television materialize and promote. The subgenre I term
“reality work television” depicts non-fictional people performing non-fictional work in a serial
dramatic format. This dramatic format is most often that of competition, such as on Project
Runway, The Apprentice, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, America’s Next Top Model, Top
Shot, and Chopped. But the subgenre also includes a significant number of slice-of-life series
focusing on small businesses, for instance Ace of Cakes, American Pickers, Pawn Stars,
Treehouse Masters, Tanked, and Property Brothers. Although most of the people featured on
the screens of reality work television are white, there is a clear and conscious effort, particularly
in competition series, to have more than token participation by people of color. The subgenre
31

participates firmly in the logic of niche broadcasting. This means that instead of seeking the
broadest possible audiences, programs like reality work television and cable networks like Home
and Garden Television, the Food Network, Lifetime, the History Channel, Animal Planet, and
Bravo, speak to smaller audiences defined by particular shared interests (Lotz, 2014). Some
programs have nevertheless achieved broad acclaim and wide popularity, particularly those like
American Idol which depict the work of becoming a pop music star or those like Strictly Come
Dancing and Dancing With the Stars which feature celebrity contestants. Some of the regularly
appearing characters in reality work series have reached surprising levels of celebrity. The Pawn
Stars cast of pawn shop owners were invited to talk about some of their interesting historical
pieces in a main network New Year’s Eve special, for instance, and Project Runway fashion
design mentor Tim Gunn has successful spin-off television series and books of his own.
Although workplaces are a common and recurrent television setting, “reality TV is a
genre that is obsessively focused on labor” (Hendershot, 2009, p. 244). Competition and slice-
of-life shows share a number of textual tropes that characterize the subgenre more largely. They
are heavily focused on the I of DIY and spectacularize an incredibly wide range of labors and
skills, particularly hand work—from sewing a cocktail dress to trick marksmanship to “picking”
valuable and historic vintage stuff out of garbage heaps to building aquariums which are also
skateboarding ramps to dancing a classic waltz. Close-up shots emphasize chefs’ skilled hands
swiftly manipulating knives and food; wide shots dramatize the acrobatics of carpenters
constructing a treehouse in midair; point-of-view shots put viewers in the place of elite
marksmen and women taking aim at their targets. These formal devices call back to a “culture of
the hands” understanding of work, creation, and production that draws from historical veneration
of artisanal craftwork and further developed among factory workers represented by “craft”
32

unions (Crawford, 2010; Dudley, 1994; Sennett, 2008). While creativity is today often
associated with brain work such as coding, engineering, or scientific research, in the culture of
the hands manual labor “is also profoundly creative” (Crawford, 2010; Dudley, 1994, p. 133). In
this cultural system, “the value of what you produce—not the number of years you spend in
school—is the ultimate barometer of your social worth” (Dudley, 1994, p. 128). Accordingly,
even the experts of reality work television, such as judges, hosts, and mentors, “are more apt to
characterize themselves as ‘self-made’ authorities” who gained their status through work in the
industry rather than as celebrities and television personalities (Ouellette & Hay, 2008, p. 3).
But where the culture of the hands and contemporary DIY diverge is in the relationship
of the worker to society at large. For both artisanal craftsmen and factory workers, self-worth
and social value comes from making something essential to society that “most people can’t make
for themselves, because either special skills or collective efforts are involved” (Dudley, 1994, pp.
169–170). In DIY, there is a basic belief that everyone is creative, such that anyone and
everyone could make whatever they want and need (Banet-Weiser, 2012; McRobbie, 2016).
This romantic individualist aspect of contemporary DIY explains one of the more puzzling shifts
that reality work television introduced in lifestyle television program structure. Previous series
often included explicitly educational segments, where hosts demonstrated a small project step-
by-step so viewers could create it themselves, even when the focus of the show was not primarily
education and demonstration. The tutorial form is much beloved in digital DIY culture, but as an
overall framing the instructional teacher-to-student form does not make sense in a moral order
where you ought to be actualizing your own inner passion and potential rather than re-creating
exactly what you are shown. Programs still celebrate and display the spectacular results of elite
creative work, of course, but with reality work TV the ability and opportunity to work with and
33

create things, to be a DIY-er oneself, often seems more attractive than owning the things that
participants make. This ideological emphasis on making and creating extends to reality
television’s economic model, which emphasizes product placement—from the Brother sewing
machines Runway contestants use to construct clothing to the Bass Pro Shops gift cards Top Shot
contestants compete for in each episode.
1
Unlike interstitial commercials, these product
placements do not advertise objects for consumption, as such. Instead, they showcase
(purchasable) tools with which viewers can emulate the work of participants on the shows.
Self-worth and social value come from actually doing things rather than owning them,
persisting in making through the inevitable failures, setbacks, and difficulties. One second-
season Top Shot contestant achieved notoriety even before appearing on the show, for example,
by creating an audition tape in which he replicated every trick shot featured in the first season.
In this vein, the subgenre thrives on stories of amateurs and upstarts going head-to-head with
established authorities—this forms much of the dramatic conflict of examples like Throwdown
with Bobby Flay and the Iron Chef franchise (Enli, 2009; Hendershot, 2009). Crafters delight in
artistic challenges even as they are sometime daunting. Yesenia and Josue proudly told me of a
piece they had recently finished for a customer who saw they made piñatas and asked “do you
guys only make piñatas or can you make this Pokémon from a paper lantern?” The lantern’s
construction had to posses both the complex shape of the Chandelure Pokémon character and the
ability to be broken down and shipped, then re-assembled by the customer. Neither of these
tasks are straightforward or, indeed, something the crafters had tackled before, but as Yesenia
told me, “technically, I do say we can make anything.” When the work does not present itself as

1
The Food Network is a notable exception to this general model. It screens a large number of reality work series
but notably avoids product placement in most of its shows, going as far as to cover the labels of the flours, grains,
oils, and other products used to construct dishes onscreen.
34

a creative challenge from the outset, creative people make it one. Aquarium design show Tanked
ritually structures its slice-of-life episodes around conflict between the practical, or business-
focused, partner Wayde and the creative, or vision-focused, partner Brett. Brett proposes and
sells an over-the-top idea to the client during their design pitch, which Wayde is unsure they will
be able to pull off. Wayde and the show’s artisans struggle to bring Brett’s vision of, for
instance, a fully road-ready bus which is also an aquarium, to life.
One of the primary enemies DIY-ers face in actually doing things, both on and off screen,
is time. Crafters often face crunch times around the Christmas holiday season and when
prepping for a festival or other in-person event. Competition entrants race to finish their pieces
to have at least a chance of avoiding elimination; small business owners strive to produce
incredible work under their clients’ seemingly impossible deadlines. “The clock” often becomes
a character of its own, given life through on-screen displays counting down time remaining, non-
diegetic audio of seconds ticking away, and hosts regularly calling out time warnings (and the
last ten seconds) to busy competitors. Trying to beat the clock is one of the few causes which
can unite competing participants into cooperation on a shared goal. Chopped and Project
Runway contestants who have completed their own work, for instance, will sometimes step in to
help a struggling fellow finish their creation before the end of a challenge. Similarly, reality
work shows do certainly punish laziness and wasting time, often depicting break-taking as an
indication of a moral lack such that the contestant doesn’t truly deserve to be on the show. As
Jay McCarroll, the first winner of Project Runway, puts it, despite the torturously long hours
“you were really forced to be motivated on camera or else look like a lazy f**k” (Hochberg,
2009).

35

Defining DIY Affect By Watching You Work
Many accounts of DIY, digital culture, and new technology rely on a rhetoric of disdain
for “old” and “passive” media. Television has the dubious honor of continually serving as both
explanation and symbol for the ills of broadcast culture in which supposedly “only
when…people are too tired to enjoy the pursuit of their passions are they ready to be reduced to
the passively receptive state suited for television” (Himanen, 2001, p. 108). Many who spend
their leisure time with new media, particularly video games, respond to critiques with a version
of “at least I’m not watching TV” (Castronova, 2007; Himanen, 2001; Hong, 2013). Shauna, a
crafter, expressed very similar sentiments, saying flat out that “to me, wasting time is watching
TV…If I could give anyone a piece of advice, cut out watching television and see how much
time you have. Trust me.”
These sentiments are strange to anyone familiar with media fan cultures, which often
form around television texts. For fans, watching is a tremendously active and often social
phenomenon that often inspires production rather than substituting for it (Coppa, 2008; Jenkins,
1992). Much of the interactivity offered by new media technologies pales in comparison to the
unruly possibilities of participation in activities that involved television and that operate
according to cultural and social protocols rather than to the dictates of software code (Jenkins,
2008, p. 137). Particularly before the internet, however, television fan cultures were
underground and production teams assiduously avoided even the appearance of knowing
anything about them and their creations (Jenkins, 1992; Zubernis & Larsen, 2012).
Without relying on a technologically determinist digital revolution, how did DIY re-enter
the mainstream? Reality television, “the first killer application of media convergence,” provides
a crucial link with which to understand the development of DIY and the media environment
36

which both constructs and reflects it (Jenkins, 2008, p. 59). Competition reality series revived a
television mechanic that takes advantage of the medium’s capacity for live broadcast by asking
viewers to call in and influence how the show unfolds. Reality TV reached out to its audiences
to interact with the show via voting and as a casting pool. Fans more than reached back.
Survivor spoilers, for instance, developed an impressively sophisticated collective intelligence
network that played cat-and-mouse with the series’ production team in attempting to predict (or
conceal) the order in which competitors would be eliminated (Jenkins, 2008). Cooking
competition series Chopped regularly features special Viewers’ Choice episodes in which
viewers curate the “baskets,” strange collections of ingredients that contestants are challenged
into combining together into coherent meals, via social media. Viewer-selected baskets are
notorious for being extremely difficult, once requiring chefs to make dessert out of the
combination of kale, fruit cocktail, cottage cheese, and marrow bones!
Reality TV has been a privileged object for many media theorists who see its textual
logics as foreshadowing the conditions of life enmeshed with digital media. On the critical side,
Andrejevic (2002, p. 231) argues that interactive media and reality TV produce the same political
economic landscape, in which “a few select members of the audience are entering the celebrity
ranks and cashing in on their 15 minutes of fame…non-celebrities—the remaining viewers—are
being recruited to participate in the labor of being watched to an unprecedented degree by
subjecting the details of their daily lives to increasingly pervasive and comprehensive forms of
high-tech monitoring.” This monitoring is sometimes unobtrusive or veiled, as in the collection
and collation of big data, but in the realm of creative work people more often act as producers for
the media by which they are observed. Independent musicians increasingly see narrating their
lives and work to their audiences as part of their work, essential to convincing audiences to pay
37

them for their music rather than downloading it for free (Baym, 2015). In the food blogosphere,
women “strategically, ironically, and creatively play with the representations, limits, and
visibilities of the postfeminist, female body,” developing a girlie aesthetic rather than going
along with hypersexualized commercial aesthetics that equate the female body with food
(Dejmanee, 2015, p. 7).
This is not to say that creating the media by which one becomes visible is necessarily
empowering. Banet-Weiser (2014, p. 97) analyzes the sub-genre of YouTube videos in which
teen and tween girls seek judgement from the internet on whether or not they are “pretty,”
ultimately arguing that “the ‘Am I Pretty?’ videos, and the contexts that authorize them, are part
of the way neoliberal politics work in the current moment to contain girls and women through
the market for self-esteem.” It is to say, however, that watching and doing are intimately
interconnected, rather than ideologically opposed, DIY practices. This construction of DIY
draws much less from the image of a passionate, individualistic, isolated artistic soul and much
more from a participatory culture ideal of DIY as communication and conversation, where doing
is an essential first step but so too is sharing, reacting, and watching the creations of others
(Jenkins et al., 2013, 2009; Turk & Johnson, 2012). Bethany remembers the impact another
crafter had on her in explaining the difference between an older media logic of creating a
complete fall season fashion line for a show that would be received as a complete, finished work
and a digital media logic in which “it’s just about creating something and putting it up and seeing
if people like it.” The friend told her, “it doesn’t matter if you have one item in your shop or
fifteen, the idea is just have your shop and then…you can grow your shop around the people that
are coming.” The next week, Bethany opened her fashion design shop on Etsy and feels thankful
to the friend for encouraging her to, finally, just do it.
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Many fans of reality TV emulate not the contestants but the experts on the judging
panels, evaluating and critiquing the participants’ efforts. Their joy in spectatorship points to
another enduring truth of DIY: the ability to do something in an entertaining way is not the same
as that required to (technically speaking) do it well. And these judgements are participatory
practices, not interactive ones, that frequently defy the officially sanctioned narratives of the
texts. In 2008 the retired political journalist John Sergeant became a contestant on the very
popular British dancing competition show Strictly Come Dancing. The series spectacularizes the
work of dancing by pairing celebrity contestants up with professional dancers as teacher-partners
and filming their practice sessions, thereby emphasizing the technical aspects of learning and
performing the steps of various ballroom and Latin dances. Couples are given scores through a
combination of a judging panel and call-in viewer voting. As a BBC series, Strictly derives from
a strong tradition of “education by television,” and many producers as well as viewers suggested
that the show’s purpose was to educate the populace on the art of dance and the winner should
thus be the celebrity contestant who learned how to dance the most proficiently (Conlan, 2008;
Enli, 2009). The elderly Sergeant, however, continued in the competition long past the point at
which the other contestants were more technically skilled, riding a surprising wave of popular
support for the comic effect of the serious newscaster’s poor dance performances.
Appreciation of “bad” media is certainly not new, but it is particularly prominent within
participatory cultures (Coleman, 2014; Jenkins, 2008). I call this affect “lol,” after the common
Internet abbreviation for “laugh out loud.” It is still populist but in a very different sense than
the American Dream’s populism. Where the American Dream is anticipatory and aims at
ascendance into the elite, this kind of doing what you love is focused on enjoying the present
and, just possibly, pooping in the roses of the elite. Lol is not, however, always kind. It
39

sometimes shades into lulz, which is also primarily about humor but are “acquired most often at
someone’s expense, prone to misfiring and, occasionally, bordering on disturbing or hateful
speech” (Coleman, 2014, p. 31). Reality work series Dirty Jobs suggests how thin the line
between lol and lulz can be. It ostensibly “profiles the unsung American laborers who make
their living in the most unthinkable—yet vital—ways,” such as collecting roadkill, cleaning
sewage treatment plant equipment, and inseminating horses (Discovery Channel, n.d.). The
show is relatively unique among reality work television, however, in making its central character
not the workers themselves but the host Mike Rowe, who briefly attempts each of the various
jobs. The camera often lingers on the faces he makes in reaction to the stench, danger,
messiness, and difficulty of the work, giving the show an air of voyeurism.
In another example of lulz at work, fans also often enjoy watching the anguish of the
expert judges, forced to comment on and critique work that (by accident or design) defies their
standards and pokes fun at the seriousness of competition-based reality shows (Jenkins, 2008, pp.
91–92). Strictly judge Arlene Phillips, for example, complained that Sergeant was not even
trying to improve, saying “I know with John, he sits and reads The Guardian [in the practice
studio]. A lot of time he and his dance partner spend fooling around” (Addley, 2008). Sergeant
controversially decided to quit Strictly Come Dancing before the competition drew to its close,
saying “there is now a real danger that I might win the competition. Even for me that would be a
joke too far” (BBC, 2008; Conlan, 2008). His exit provoked fan outrage, from high traffic
prompting the BBC to shut down the series’ online message board to formal complaints seeking
reimbursement for the cost of viewer calls made to vote for Sergeant (which the BBC did
eventually provide). Despite Sergeant’s public statements, many fans were suspicious that the
show’s producers had forced him to quit in order to select a winner according to elite cultural
40

standards and the hegemonic logic of a hardworking, deserving DIY winner—not according to
popular desire (Enli, 2009).
As reality producers must themselves be more and more creative in designing challenges,
even participants can feel the lulz and lol. Project Runway’s fourth season tasked the aspiring
designers with creating outfits for female WWE wrestlers to wear while in the ring. Instead of
buying their materials at the usual location, the designer fabric store Mood, the designers went to
the House of Spandex. The main episode itself went off without a hitch, seemingly seamlessly
incorporating the taste culture of professional wrestling entertainment into Runway’s serious
world of haute couture. Challenges like this where designers work with particular clients place a
high premium on the designers successfully channeling the desires and needs of those clients.
The wrestling challenge threatened both censure and elimination for designers not able to take
designing for the wrestlers as seriously as they would designing for a more traditional client like
model and host Heidi Klum. But in the season retrospective and behind-the-scenes special,
multiple designers recalled filming this episode as one of their favorite moments of being on the
show. Chris, a designer often critiqued for his flamboyant tastes, wondered, “What are the
judges going to say for this challenge? What is Nina Garcia going to say about a pink spandex
outfit with rhinestones on it?!” In footage not included in the official episode broadcast,
designers watched judge Michael Kors break down into laughter and lose his composure entirely
after one wrestler used a particularly provocative hip movement while modeling her outfit on the
runway. One designer described him as “like a kid in church,” which points towards the
connection between the lolz affect and the feeling which hangs around trickster figures in
literature and folklore, defying the official institutions of culture and their demands for serious
composure (Hyde, 1999).
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John Sergeant’s run on Strictly Come Dancing is a prominent example of a tussle
between organized fans who judge reality television by a divergent aesthetic, but it is very far
from the only one. The talent competition Eurovision is renowned for the melodramatic affect of
many performances and enjoys a very well-publicized grassroots campaign wherein viewers,
particularly in Britain, vote for the most bizarre or (likely) unintentionally hilarious
performances rather than those with the most traditional artistic merit. In the United States the
Vote for the Worst website and campaign gained prominence around American Idol and fans
who, as founder Della Terza puts it, “just love it because it’s so bad…It’s so fun to watch
because it’s so fun to make fun of” (Ryan, 2007). The campaign spread out to most other
prominent reality work series, particularly those geared around popular arts such as singing,
dancing, and talent acts, and had some notable successes in propelling candidates like American
Idol season six contestant Sanjaya Malakar through their series (Strecker, 2013).
Producers have responded to this audience interest in the lolz, trying often trying to create
a distinction between the hardworking American Dream DIY of the main program text and lulz
for more dedicated fans in extras, specials, and online material. One common approach is to
feature “failed audition” footage, edited so as to spectacularize the badness of the performances.
Others go further. Hendershot (2009) notes the contrast between most reality work television
and The Simple Life, which dramatizes socialite Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie’s continual
avoidance of work. Paris and Nicole refuse to take anything seriously and so “one cannot simply
dismiss them as cruel villains…it’s just that they hate work, and they happen to know how to
make poor people work for them” (Hendershot, 2009, p. 255). But while The Simple Life is
unique in the subgenre in that “the gotta-get-things-done (or die trying) work ethic…is utterly
lacking,” Paris and Nicole are far from the only people featured in reality work television who do
42

everything they can to avoid working (Hendershot, 2009, p. 251). Chumlee, the goof-off
employee low on the Pawn Stars totem pole, has become a surprise fan favorite. He is very
rarely shown actually working, but rather than getting others to do his work for him (although
this is likely one of the off-screen results) Chum continually hides from his bosses and naps or
plays around while on the clock. Chum is undoubtedly a layabout. But he is a very committed
and mischievous layabout. It is not simply his laziness but the audacity, resourcefulness, and
creativity with which he is lazy that endears him to viewers.
These viewing practices highlight the tension between the disciplined work ethic of the
hegemonic DIY American Dream and an unruly DIY that glories in messiness, laughter, and
poking fun at authority without really caring if the work gets done or not. While both the
American Dream and lol affects have deep cultural roots, lol in particular builds on the relation
between viewer and viewed. The most visible domain of the lol in crafting is the humor
commentary blog Regretsy. The author explains its aesthetic as “where DIY meets WTF” and
gleefully skewers listings created by unsuspecting Etsy sellers. Although some crafters find the
blog mean or distasteful, examples of lulz rather than lol, more went out of their way to mention
Regretsy to me during our interviews and define themselves as fans of both Etsy and Regretsy.
Tami identifies the public dimension of Etsy as what makes crafts fair game for humorous
critique, saying “if some grandmother somewhere makes a lumpy sweater and gives it to their
grandkid, no, you don’t make fun of that. But if you make it and you put it up online and you
ask for money for it, then you’ve put it out there.”

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It’s Not Doing It Yourself, It’s Doing What You Love
In the landscape of reality work television and its fans, even lazing around doing nothing
is celebrated if you do it in a creative and entertaining manner. The cardinal sin is being
uncreative. This emphasis on creativity is an essential element of contemporary DIY, a taken-
for-granted part of the concept as cultural commonsense. But this feeling of familiarity hides
how different the philosophies of do-it-yourself and do-something-creative actually are from
each other.
The idea of do-it-yourself can easily be interpreted to mean that creativity is necessitated
only by the limited resources of “yourself” trying to accomplish some goal, not an essential part
of the goal or an end in itself. As reality work television’s challenges are without exception
strenuous, often off-the-wall, and occasionally completely humiliating, they do very genuinely
force contestants to exhibit the can-do, make-do resourcefulness that characterizes DIY.
Cutthroat Kitchen is an entire show based around the premise of eclectic and devilish constraints
that chefs must overcome, from baking a cake without any pans to chopping and prepping
vegetables while lying on a hammock to seasoning a dish without using any salt. This
mobilization of creativity, particularly individual creativity, as a way to overcome limited
resources is often a neoliberal formulation which expresses opposition to the current corporate
status quo but also “has the (unintended) effect of depoliticizing the structural socioeconomic
problems…by rendering them as individual responsibility” (Dawkins, 2011, p. 279). Like the
work ethic, this conception of creativity has a complicated history that make simple critique
difficult. Darcy describes DIY not with reference to the indie crafting often envisioned by
critiques of neoliberalism but as a way of life handed down from her parents based on their
experiences growing up during the Great Depression. She approached her crafting hobby and
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her full-time work as a nurse in a small Missouri town with the same DIY outlook. When the
clinic in which she works needed a pipette holder, for example, instead of taking seventy or
eighty dollars out of the clinic’s small budget, Darcy made one out of zip-ties and a recycled
box.
More often today, however, doing-something-creative is the central aspect of
contemporary DIY, rather than simply a means to an end. Refusing to creatively “embrace the
basket” of required ingredients in Chopped or to see the design possibility in (literally) garbage
on Project Runway is to set oneself up for censure within the narrative editing and possibly even
elimination, despite completing a dish or outfit. I differentiate between these emphases here and
going forward by re-naming much of what is commonly called DIY to DWYL—do what you
love. And what DIY-ers love, both as viewers and as makers, is creativity. They often think of
this love of creativity and need to be creative as an intrinsic, essential part of themselves as
individuals. Challenges often ask contestants to explain how they have expressed their point of
view or personal story through their work, be it a song, a gown, or a pasta dish. In this way
reality work television contrasts heavily with makeover and transformation reality shows such as
The Swan and even those based around competition mechanics like The Biggest Loser and
America’s Worst Cooks. Makeover shows center on self-work, where contestants follow the
advice of experts to make themselves “better” in some way (Banet-Weiser & Portwood-Stacer,
2006; Ouellette & Hay, 2008; Ouellette & Wilson, 2011).
Reality work show participants already know who they are. They are people who do
creative work. Pete Nelson calls himself “the treehouse guy,” for instance, a humbler version of
his show’s title Treehouse Masters. Similarly, crafters profoundly think of themselves as a
certain kind of person: a “creative person.” Crafters often identified themselves to me as such
45

while reflecting back on their lives or explaining how they started making things in the first
place. People in an extraordinary range of circumstances and across many lines of difference all
identified themselves to me as a creative person. Consider the words of Sahara, an African-
American fiber artist living in the Bronx district of New York who is a lifetime veteran of the
fashion and textile industries:
“I think I was about 11, and it was the first time I had seen kettle dying…to me, it looked
like this was where the rainbow started [laughs] before it went into the sky. And at that
moment, I decided that I wanted to do this. I didn’t know it was manufacturing. I just
knew, I had no idea that it was sexist, that women weren’t involved, I knew that I wanted
to do that. I wanted to be in charge of making all that color. And then that was it…it
sealed my fate in textiles.”
Nancy, a white quilter living in suburban North Carolina who is a former physical therapist and
stay-at-home mom, similarly remembers herself as a creative person:
“It expands on the creativity and I know I’ve got that in me. You know, when I was a
senior in high school, this is something I’ve always been proud of, I was voted ‘Most
Creative’ out of all the girls in my senior class, because I was doing this kind of stuff
then. And it’s just something I guess that’s in you.”
Cleia, a Latina piñata artist and sculptor living outside of Los Angeles who is a former service
sector employee, explained that even though the work was difficult:
“I like that I get to test out my creative skills…I like to put my all into every piece that I
work on. I like that I get to care about everything so much, for that time. I get to put all
of the care that I have into it.”
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And finally, Drew, a white man with a full beard living in Missouri who grew up in a carpenter’s
family in Kansas, mused ruefully that although he had tried working a variety of jobs in the
technology and service industries, he kept coming back to crafting:
“[I] just kind of fought it for a long time and realized that was what I was best at, and I
was constantly creating anyways, so.”
Sahara, Nancy, Yesenia, and Drew do not know each other and would not think of
themselves as part of the same community.
2
Rather than citizens of an imagined “Handmade
Nation,” crafters see themselves as individuals (Levine & Heimerl, 2008). Crucially, however,
crafters are individuals who see themselves as like others in a fundamental way. I theorize this
through the idea of a subject position. A subject position is different from one’s identity or
subjectivity—while everyone has their own individual identity, a subject position is more like a
type. For crafters, “creative person” is their shared subject position. Subject positions are
“multiply inhabitable” such that “’teenager,’ for instance, can be occupied antagonistically as a
rebel, or normatively as a ‘good student’” (Boellstorff, 2005, p. 11). To be part of the crafting
culture, it is essential to somehow inhabit the subject position of a creative person. The
distinction between those in the subculture and those outside it is very clear, even in the context
of close ties and shared membership to other communities. Rachel told me about having one of
her most popular cross-stitch pieces, of a quotation from a television show, removed from Etsy
based on a copyright claim on from FOX. Her father, despite being a lawyer and thus familiar
with the doctrine of fair use, proved himself not a creative person by telling Rachel that he had
no sympathy and had for some time been expecting her work to be challenged and taken down.

2
They are all part of very meaningful smaller communities based around, for example, residing in a city, a particular
crafting niche, visiting an online forum, and an interest in women’s entrepreneurship.
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This was one of the only times Rachel went to Etsy’s forums, seeking advice from other
crafters—creative people—who understood the creativity that goes into fan crafting. This is not,
however, to say that all crafters necessarily agree about the merits of mixing traditional craft
techniques with popular culture influences. Gary, for instance, said “You don’t want to be the
guy at the craft booth next to the person who just slaps NFL trademarks on something.” This is a
strong, community-specific disavowal at the same time as he recognizes that people who do
“craft” in this way are in the broader culture. Unlike those outside the crafting subculture,
however, he has clearly negotiated a position on what kind of appropriation is allowable, for
instance arguing that using wrapping paper with a copyrighted character image in order to make
Christmas ornaments is firmly in the gray area of both law and “real” craft. Such negotiations
are necessary as, after all, in Gary’s chosen craft of origami patterns are “copyrighted almost like
sculpture, almost like blueprints for a building” and largely derive from a shared set of
historically developed techniques at the same time as origami crafters are continually adapting,
changing, and building on those existing patterns.
The creative person subject position can be occupied via an affect that emphasizes the
work ethic and American dream or an affect that emphasizes the lol. Tanked’s “idea man” Brett
exemplifies a lolzy approach to creative work. Brett is creative in brief flashes of vision while
the team are pitching ideas to clients. He feels no need to see these through—after coming up
with the initial idea, the narrative depicts Brett spending most of his time goofing off, pranking
the other employees, and even sleeping in his office. By contrast, Wayde is a grinder. He
approaches creativity via a strict work ethic and is the one who solves all of the minute technical
and artistic challenges necessary to create an aquarium that is safe for the fish, possible to install
in the client’s space, and an incredible work of art.
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Imagining Individuality and Collectivity Together
As these examples suggest, DWYL rarely involves working by “yourself” or alone.
Nelson is not the only “treehouse guy” featured on Treehouse Masters. He is part of a small,
close knit crew of treehouse masters, including his wife, daughter, and two sons. He also seems
to be one of a friendly, vibrant network of treehouse masters, as other builders often appear on
the show as special guest artisans. Artistic cooperation is frictionless, with no mention of the
sometimes sensitive questions of divvying up payment and credit. Slice-of-life series most often
depict small businesses run not by individual entrepreneurs but by a tightly connected group of
like-minded and loving people, many times based around family. This picture accords closely
with the dreams of a perfect working life that many crafters express to me. Shauna, for instance,
told me “I have a clear vision of things.” She outlined her dream of owning a brick and mortar
small business which sold wedding gowns, prom dresses, and special occasional clothing for
children. Rather than requiring employees (and herself) to arrange day-care for their own kids,
“in the back would be a little room, a playroom…it would be a store where my son could come
and hang out. Maybe hire someone to help watch the kids: you can see your kids. You have to
work, but you can spend time with your kids.” Despite growing up in New York and loving the
city, she could only imagine this happening somewhere in the South like Georgia, North
Carolina, or South Carolina. Shauna was far from the only crafter to emphasize working with
family and friends as a key part of doing what they love. Billy visualized his and his wife’s ideal
company in a particularly evocative way, saying “I never want us to get too big for me to take
everyone out for beer!”
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The importance of collectivity within these DWYL dreams would surprise many critics.
Reality TV is often critiqued for promoting a neoliberal outlook, such that viewers learn “how to
conduct and ‘empower’ ourselves as enterprising citizens” who are always individuals, rather
than members of a collective (Ouellette & Hay, 2008, p. 2). Interpersonal relations are
frequently competitive, rather than collaborative, evidencing the “drama” for which reality TV is
culturally well known. Working with others in group challenges is an oft dreaded source of
frustration that brings fears of unjustified elimination. Similarly, a common reward for a
contestant who has won a small challenge is to be accorded the right to choose the groups in
which participants will work, offering plentiful opportunity for sabotage via engineering
personality conflict. The structure of competition shows encourage this outlook by pitting
contestants against each other—there can only be one winner.
This difference in vision of success as individual or collective could be explained via the
format distinction between competition and slice-of-life reality work series. But much of the
emotional pathos of competition shows like Project Runway, Top Shot, and The Next Food
Network Star comes from the certain knowledge that all but one of the talented and driven people
depicted will not receive the resources to pursue the career of their dreams. The emotion of the
losing contestants’ elimination is often constructed through double farewell sequences, one in
which the eliminated contestant takes their leave of those remaining, usually in a wide shot of the
group in a waiting lounge, and one in which the contestant takes their leave of the audience,
speaking directly to the camera in medium close-up. While pathos is most obvious in the
viewer-viewed relationship, contestants also often evidence close attachments to each other and
genuine unhappiness at the necessity of reducing their number. In one notable example during
Top Shot’s fourth season, police officer and air force veteran Greg Littlejohn could not bear to
50

vote for one of his team members to go to elimination and shed tears over his internal conflict
while on camera. With the notable exceptions of The Apprentice and Cutthroat Kitchen, which
require it, contestants who actively attempt to sabotage their competitors are often cast by editors
as the villains of that episode or series’ narrative.
Series like Project Runway, Top Chef, and The Voice present themselves as meritocratic
American Dream machines that give already talented and skilled people the material resources to
make a living through their work. Reality work show contestants are usually not yet where they
want to be professionally, but this is not presented as their fault—indeed, their creative talent and
skills are continually celebrated—so much as it is their lack of opportunity. Judge and mentor
Blake Shelton often commented that the difference between him and The Voice contestant Craig
Wayne Boyd did not lie in talent, experience, or work but in the luck of someone deciding to
give Shelton a chance that Boyd never got. The Voice became that someone for Boyd, who won
the series’ seventh season after almost quitting music because of his debt and the day-to-day
precarity into which it had sunken him. Competition series provide a clear structure by which
aspirants who win their challenges gain access to ever desirable and ever elusive resources, both
social and economic, necessary to be set up in a creative business. Slice-of-life series visualize
what winning, having a successful career doing the creative work you love, would be like. Some
networks even explicitly tie these series together, such as HGTV’s Design Star whose winner
receives their own show.
But these are strange meritocracies. A strong work ethic, talent, and desire are assumed
but not necessarily rewarded. In this they more or less accurately mirror the affective structure
of contemporary creative industries; workers often have a keen sense that they are lucky to have
their job and a horde of equally skilled people are always available to take over their positions—
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or do them for less compensation (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; McRobbie, 2016). Tami
echoes this feeling, saying “I’m so lucky that I get to do this all of the time…a lot of people
would give their right arm to be as busy as I have been.” A self-sacrificial work ethic seems
almost a moral necessity, expressing thanks for the opportunity to do creative work. Even in the
world of stability, wealthy patronage, and creative vision depicted in slice-of-life series, people
take on multiple jobs at once and the work seems to be its own reward. Nelson ritually slacks off
in each episode not by resting or hanging out (as opposed to working) with his family, but by
taking on another, smaller job repairing an existing treehouse in need of TLC.
The theme of sustaining physical harm in order to get or keep a dream job has disturbing
carryover from screen to sofa. Yesenia made an aggravated noise when I asked her about on the
job injuries, saying “crafting is dangerous! I’ve melted my skin with the glue gun lots of time…I
have a cut right now I got yesterday. It’s dangerous, but it’s cool.” Rachel developed wrist and
elbow tendonitis from her cross-stitching, despite not sewing full-time and being someone for
whom three orders at once is a considerable amount. For creative workers who do have to leave
their houses, exhaustion from working long hours on set could make even driving home
dangerous (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010). This is a particularly acute problem for creative
workers without health insurance. The lack of universal, state-sponsored healthcare in the
United States is often tied to its neoliberalism, which emphasizes an individualistic, rather than
collectivist, approach to life (Harvey, 2005).

Conclusion
While older genres of competition television, such as game shows, reward winners with
lottery-scale winnings that theoretically ensure they will no longer need to work, in reality work
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television the prize for winning is more work—just in a less precarious situation. This is almost
exactly the dream that most crafters express to me, but they do so in a way which recognizes that
meritocracies need not be a zero sum game in which only one elite can continue their work. This
feeling comes through also in eliminated contestants’ speeches to camera, which often vow that
this is “not the last you’ll see of me” and, in the more gracious speeches, thanking the show for
the opportunity, exposure, and introduction to the other competitors. The continuing importance
of—and desire to do—work is not surprising in the context of DIY as DWYL. Creative work is
not primarily a chore for creative people, something they only want to do for its extrinsic
benefits.
This does not mean that they want it to dominate their lives or to hurt themselves in its
pursuit. But “giving up opportunity” is a near unbelievable action within the ideology of
DWYL. Doing so relies on a strong exercise of agency and often draws on the lolz definition of
love. Runway season seven contestant Maya Luz shocked audiences, host and mentor Tim
Gunn, and the rest of the fashion design competition participants by voluntarily quitting the show
just as she seemed to be a shoo-in to make it to the series’ coveted final three (“Sew Much
Pressure,” 2010). By quitting the series, she gave up the chance to win valuable capital, both
economic and cultural, towards the coveted position of a fashion designer who is her own boss
creating her “own line,” the fulfilment of the American Dream definition of DWYL (McRobbie,
1998). The extent to which her decision was unexpected and contradicts the framing logic of
reality work television echoed in the episode’s editing—a retrospective montage intercut by
interviews with other designers interrupted Runway’s formula for depicting challenges (brief,
sketch, shop, work, show, judgment) and attempted to contextualize her decision
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Two of Luz’s fellow Runway competitors’ responses set out the conflicting directives of
the love in DWYL. Emilio Sosa chided Luz to the camera in his on-screen interview, arguing
that “if you’re going to leave, say, ‘Okay, I’m going to design my ultimate outfit and let them
kick me out on that outfit’” (“Sew Much Pressure,” 2010). This way of thinking positions
fashion design as a true labor of love, in which the only acceptable exit is pursuing one’s artistic
vision with such ferocity and fervor that the strictures of the outside world smack you down. For
Sosa, doing what you love is the American Dream where “quitters never win” (“Sew Much
Pressure,” 2010). Seth Aaron Henderson, by contrast, took the opportunity of his interview to
passionately and angrily defend Luz to Runway’s viewers. He said, “You know we work
eighteen, twenty hours a day, seven days a week, you’re pretty much drained all the time, so you
know anybody sitting at home saying ‘I can’t believe Maya quit, you know what f*** off, you
have no clue, don’t judge, you come here and try it’” (“Sew Much Pressure,” 2010). This
response exemplifies the love-defined-through-lol. When the joy is gone, there is no moral
obligation to suffer through and continue.
Throughout this chapter, I have placed the ideological construction of DIY by popular culture
in conversation with its construction by fans and crafters. Luz’s decision was surprising, but it is
not as singular as the official text necessarily made it out to be. Bethany had all but shut down
her Etsy shop the second time we spoke, almost a year after I first met her. While she was still
selling clothes, doing make-up, and cutting hair to pay her bills, she was switching tack to get a
certification in meditative yoga. “I feel like I’ve been focused on outer beauty for so long,” she
said, “now I want to kind of go to inner beauty.” Shauna and Alex both realized that they needed
breaks from designing to preserve their love for the creative work by taking the pressure off of it.
54

Love is not a simple emotion or an easily understood affect. The do-what-you-love
incarnation of DIY contains within itself a tension between the love of the American Dream,
which requires dedication to the dream above all else, and the love of the lolz, which emphasizes
joy, pleasure, and happiness—albeit sometimes at the expense of others. Of the two, the
American Dream love is more officially sanctioned and hegemonic. But the rise in both
visibility and importance of participatory cultures, particularly those conducted via the Internet,
means that the lol is far from unknown. As creative people define themselves through DWYL,
they often do so through visions of collectivity in which family and friends work and play
together. This desire for collectivity is in ideological tension and contrast with the “you’re lucky
to get to do this” sense that pervades the creative industries as well as provides the dominant
framing of competition-based reality work television. Navigating these tensions to construct
your own life relies on agency, by both creative people and their communities, and forms the
subject of the next chapter.

55

Doing What You Love in Practice
It is the sure sign of a subculture when a store is burgled and the owners are relieved that the
only thing emptied is the cash box. Alex, a knitting pattern designer, told me the thieves
probably got away with a few hundred dollars—but they left untouched the thousands of dollars
of luxury yarn sitting right next to the register. Crafting, the practice of making things by hand,
is enjoying a post-industrial renaissance of cultural and economic prominence in the United
States. This resurgence parallels the Arts and Craft Movement’s re-discovery of traditional craft
in industrial-era Britain, but it is repetition with a difference. American crafters live in a society
structured by both networked computing and neoliberalism, which means that quilt groups are as
likely to meet up in an internet forum as in someone’s living room and that the handmade quilt
which might once have been gifted to a dubious grandson can now be sold to a busy professional
woman half the country away.
Although crafting is most commonly practiced and conceptualized in the United States as a
hobby, many contemporary ‘hobbyists’ also operate their own small craft businesses online. The
subcultural ubiquity of crafting e-commerce platform Etsy, which hosts digital storefronts for
people looking to sell handmade goods, vintage goods, or craft supplies, is perhaps best
demonstrated by Alisa’s statement that she does not want to sell her handspun yarn but
nevertheless does have an Etsy store. A year later, she uses the shop to sell off some of her yarn
to facilitate moving into a smaller apartment, and a year after that her shop makes steady sales of
knitting and sewing accessories. She donates the proceeds to charity, so far over $1500 to the
Flint, Michigan Child Health Development Fund. Many of her customers click over from her
ads or are among her friends on fiber arts platform Ravelry.com. Ravelry began as an online
database for knitting patterns and is now most commonly described as Facebook for Fiber
56

Crafters. It also facilitates the sale of patterns by site users, allowing (mostly) women like Alex
to design knitting patterns full-time.
Crafting is just one of the many creative industries now open to amateur workers as well as
experienced and credentialed professionals. The lower barriers to entry are often associated with
both a flourishing of ideas and with a lowering of worker protections and compensation. As
such, many scholars argue that creative work is a double-edged sword, precarious because it is
pleasurable (Andrejevic, 2008; Bulut, 2015; Bunderson, J. Stuart & Thompson, Jeffery A., 2009;
Dempsey & Sanders, 2010; Gill & Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Kücklich, 2005;
Ross, 2009). It is no longer enough to identify creative activity as precarious or free labor and
conclude the analysis. I push beyond this by identifying crafter practices that evidence logics
alternative to neoliberal entrepreneurship and form the inchoate ‘features of an elementary
spontaneous communism’ (Gill & Pratt, 2008). This emerging philosophy is folk Marxism, a
theory grounded in ethnographic observation of practices that build on recognizably Marxist
principles but grow out of the values of contemporary crafting culture.
In the sections that follow, I will analyze the logic of crafting culture as it operates in
practice based on data collected in two years of ethnographic fieldwork with crafters of a diverse
range of ages and ethnicities across the United States. I identify the interplay of capital and
affect as crafters seek to enjoy their creative work but also struggle with its precarity. The
precarity of creative work does not derive from crafters’ love for it but rather from the neoliberal
political conditions in which crafters are trying to do what they love. I argue that theorizing
crafters’ work as self-exploitation is politically deadening as well as inadequate to the nuanced
meanings crafters bring to their lives and work. Their practices of material exchange and of
57

social support for refusing both work and consumption lay the groundwork for a folk Marxist,
post-capitalist society.

The Capital of Authenticity: Are You a ‘Real’ Spinner?
Perhaps no topic elicited so many physical responses of head-shaking, eye rolls, sighs,
and ironic laughter from crafters as that of debate over the meaning of the term ‘handmade.’
Making things oneself is the central practice of crafting, but what ‘oneself’ means is complex.
As craft scholars and many crafters themselves point out, craft’s history is intimately connected
with that of technology (Adamson, 2010; Barber, 1995, 2013; Kelly, 2009; Macdonald, 1988).
Drawing the line between what has been made by hand and what has been made by a machine
depends heavily on historical period, crafting subculture, and personal philosophy. Jewelry
maker Jessie asked me in exasperation, ‘if you use a sewing machine, does that mean it’s not
“handmade” anymore?’ In quilting, possibly not. Quilt shows and competitions generally have
different categories for hand-sewn and machine-sewn quilts, and some bar machine-sewn entries
altogether—without even getting into further debates about what aspect of quilt-making is
appropriate for the machine to aid, piecing the top or binding the layers together.
Defining the handmade matters because it is the marker of authenticity in the crafting
world. Authentic handmade artisanal products can demand a premium in the marketplace and
confer high status upon their makers. Bourdieu (1984) explains status, or symbolic capital, as
the accumulation of different types of capital. He identifies three major forms of capital:
economic, related to financial resources; cultural, related to cultural skills and goods; and social,
related to connections with others (Bourdieu, 1984). In the contemporary American era of
digital technological revolution, handmade objects agglomerate both cultural capital,
58

representative of a newly re-valued traditional skill, and (at least in theory) economic capital, as
“middle-class women who have the available income to make discretionary purchases from sites
such as Etsy” fuel a vibrant market for craft goods and supplies (Luckman, 2013, p. 264).
3

Handmade objects are also literally made out of time. As textile archaeologist Elizabeth
Wayland Barber (2013) puts it, “making things by hand is slow. Really slow.” Understanding
status in crafting requires consideration of a fourth type of capital, temporal capital (Sharma,
2013; Wang, 2013). The idea of temporal capital may at first seem counterintuitive since, unlike
money or prestigious degrees, the experience of time is not unequally distributed across lines of
power throughout society. But while temporal capital is bounded by time, it is not itself time—it
is control over time (Wang, 2013).
Mainstream American cultural logic generally holds that the less time one has to spend to
achieve a certain result, the better. Temporal capital is increased by optimizing time such that
more activities can be performed in a shorter time and that any time spent returns the maximum
possible benefit. In a speeded-up digital world, displaying temporal capital by being busy
replaces or at the least augments the familiar status symbols of economic capital, such as a large
house or fancy car (Himanen, 2001, p. 27). In crafting subcultures, temporal capital works
differently. Crafters often distinguished between themselves and the rhetorical figure of
‘people,’ mainstream society, saying that ‘people’ don’t understand why crafters invest time in
making an item, delaying its acquisition and requiring more temporal capital, when they could
simply go buy one at a store. For crafters, the more time spent making an object, the more
authentically handmade that object becomes and the higher their status. Those whom Sahara
termed ‘zealot’ crafters, then, seize on any use of time-saving tools as the sign of an imposter.

3
This parallels developments in the Arts and Crafts Movement in the later stages of the Industrial Revolution. For
more, see Luckman (2013), Morris (2010), and Starr (2010).
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Although crafters generally positioned themselves as not playing what Alisa called ‘the
authenticity game,’ each must nevertheless negotiate and re-negotiate their position in it. Nancy
says that the first time she saw a product called the Accuquilt GO! Fabric cutter, which removes
the need to individually cut each side of a fabric piece, she thought ‘that is just cheating.’ Now,
she has one. While she admires entirely hand-sewn quilts, she associates them with the
decidedly non-digital Amish and says with a laugh that for herself, ‘you reach a point where if
you want to get something done in your lifetime, you’re probably going to use the machine, and
they were invented for a reason.’
This subcultural status game becomes problematic when players ignore the relations
between temporal capital and the other forms of capital, particularly economic capital
(Portwood-Stacer, 2013). Alisa tells me that she has been sometimes critiqued by other crafters
as ‘not a real spinner’ for her decision to buy and spin from pre-dyed, already prepared fleeces.
Part of the reason for her decision, however, is that ‘I have roommates, or apartment-mates, and
none of them want me to wash fleece in the bathtub.’ Living space costs money, particularly in
her home city of New York, and her economic capital does not provide additional crafting space
on top of a place to live—nor does her social capital allow antagonizing those she lives with.
Alisa’s keen awareness of living companions’ displeasure at craft creeping into common spaces
comes from an experience two moves ago, while living in a New Haven ‘apartment with two
bathrooms and two roommates.’ She bought an unprepared fleece and set it up for dyeing in one
of the bathroom tubs, where ‘it sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat and sat
and I did nothing with it because I really didn’t, like I was in love with the idea of doing it but
not with the actuality of doing it.’ There is a tension between the way that crafting materials and
tools are essential materializations of a crafter’s identity as a crafter and the way that ‘things also
60

make demands on their owners. Their presence in the home is a problem that has to be
continually solved’ (Brienza, 2016; Woo, 2013, para. 5.20).
This is especially true of full-time crafters and others who make a significant proportion
of their income from crafting. Tami tells me of one day in the busy Christmas season when her
husband had come home from work early. He found himself unable to open the door to enter, as
her boxes of ceramic mugs being packed, stacked, addressed, and readied to go to the post office
took up all of the available space in their 400 square foot Hollywood apartment. Tami seems to
love her mailing label printer as much as her ceramic tools, telling me ‘I’m not sure how I got
through that first year without it.’ Billy and Jessie started out with a strong desire for their
crafting business to be truly personal and handmade, treating tools of business like mailing labels
with a similar logic to those of crafting. When the couple launched their jewelry business Son of
a Sailor they were determined to address every package by hand themselves, a huge dedication
of temporal capital to cultural and social ends. As Jessie says, ‘we try to make everything feel
like a gift...rather than just “oh, here’s an order.”’ But, Jessie points out somewhat defensively,
this is unfeasible now that their business has grown to the size where they employ several other
people as well.
Critiques of subcultural studies often point out the field’s emphasis on the activities of
people who fit the hegemonic identity norms of white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class, and
male, or its lack of attention to the ways in which those who differ from this norm in only one
respect can nevertheless be privileged in others (Daniels, 2013; Hall, 2005; Jenkins, 2014;
McRobbie, 1981; Portwood-Stacer, 2013). I embrace this critique but urge caution against its
totalizing application. Although white crafters are often the most visible representatives of indie
crafting culture, assumptions by both scholars and the mainstream public that they are the only
61

participants become themselves a debilitating perspective.
4
Sahara, who is African-American,
tells the story of scavenging for dye plants like purple loosestrife growing on the side of the road.
These plants and their dye components are sold, of course, but pricey. It is difficult to imagine a
more artisanal and handmade process than this: she picks dye plants, creates dyes, prepares and
dyes her own fibers, spins the fibers into yarn, and then knits or weaves finished garments with
that yarn. Sahara was startled and then deeply amused when a woman stopped her car and
leaned out the window to tell her, ‘it’s great they have programs for low income people to clean
up these weeds!’

The Practical Necessity of Love
Theories of capital, with their extrinsic focus, might seem an odd fit for an analysis of
crafting, work that so many engage in out of intrinsic love for the process itself. Crafters often
seem surprised when I ask them why they make things. Dani insists that she crochets because
it’s fun. When I ask what is fun about it, she tells me ‘crocheting is just plain fun because it is
“expressing yourself through yarn,”’ but exaggerates her speech and grimaces at the artistic high
culture connotations of such an explanation. Dani finishes the thought by shrugging and saying,
‘I don’t know. Creating things is awesome.’ Most crafters practice or have at least tried a
variety of arts and trades, and they often evangelize others into trying them as well. At a fiber
arts group meet-up in New York, Alisa and her friends did their shameless best to coax me away
from my knitting into attempting to spin yarn. They gave me beautiful, soft fiber to pet and
laughed knowingly at my protestations that I could barely keep up with knitting, much less pick
up a new hobby. Alisa, who spins, knits, weaves, sews, and quilts, told me later that ‘Fiber arts

4
As will be analyzed further in the analysis of online platforms in the following chapter
62

are kind of an inclusive thing. You pick one up at your peril, and you pick a second one up at
increased peril.’
Perhaps surprisingly given this promiscuity of knowledge and more generalized love for
creating, as such, it seems very rare for a crafter to learn a new craft with the motivation of
turning it into a business.
5
My own experience in participant observation showed why this kind
of market-focused process is remarkably unsuited to creative work. With an eye to a unique
product, saleable brand, and a very fun afternoon with a paper-making kit bought at a garage
sale, I set out to make paper out of old books and sell it on Etsy.com. Mostly, I used pages from
old dictionaries and thesauri scavenged from a clean-out of our graduate offices. I dedicated a
blender to the paper-making process, originally a home-warming gift from my mother, and
proceeded to take up an obscene amount of space in the kitchen and living room with stations for
paper pulping and making. I read extensively in paper-making blogs and tutorials online, all of
which declared it relatively easy and cheap to make your own mould and deckle, certainly a
much better option than buying the expensive professional-grade equipment also for sale to
consumers online. I set out to make full-size versions of the plastic toys from my garage sale kit
out of embroidery hoops, picture frames, polypropylene sheeting, and window screening.
I have rarely failed so completely at an endeavor in my life. It turned out that making
one’s own mould and deckle was not, in fact, simple. If I had just ordered one of the lower-end
professional kits online, I would have spent around the same amount of money, far less time, and
ended up with tools that actually worked. Frustrated recourse to the plastic toys showed my
critical error in understanding the paper-making process: pulling the mould and deckle straight
up out of the pulp and holding it level while extraneous liquid drained out, key to creating

5
This is increasingly a motivation, even if distant, for complete newcomers to learn a new craft or, particularly, for
enrolling in a class. But no one with whom I spoke, i.e. established crafters and craft entrepreneurs, started this way.
63

relatively flat but still solid and durable paper, was exponentially more difficult at letter size than
it had been in the cute little heart frame that fit in my palm. Tutorials had also failed to account
for what one did with the pulpy liquid leftover after making paper or, indeed, after an
overenthusiastic green DIY experiment in which dryer lint turned out to pollute one’s pulp with
animal hair rather than strengthen it with tiny fabric fibers otherwise destined for the dump.
Also not mentioned was the heart-stopping risk of pets mistaking the toxic liquid for their water
dish. But even more than these practical problems, I realized I didn’t actually enjoy making
paper. It was different than I had thought it would be, and all the marketable glimmer of the end
product couldn’t induce me to put in the unpaid hours on work that, in frustration, I had begun to
loathe.
Indeed, despite the ascent of do what you love ideology, the idea that people should
endeavor to make a financial living by doing work that they deeply enjoy, love and work are still
concepts that fit uneasily with each other. The cultural sense that love belongs in private and
work belongs in public is hard to shake even as digital technologies and networked
communications continually erode the industrial era separation of public and private spheres.
Economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer (2011, p. 174) theorizes this reasoning as the ‘hostile
worlds’ philosophy, the argument that ‘when separate spheres come into contact, they
contaminate each other…corrupt[ing] both; invasion of the sentimental world by instrumental
rationality desiccates that world, while introduction of sentiment into rational transactions
produces inefficiency, favoritism, and cronyism.’ Missouri-based candle and jewelry-maker
Donna told me flat out, ‘When you make stuff to sell, it doesn’t work. For me, like as an artist,
it’s important that I only craft when I’m in the mood to craft, when I want to craft, and if
someone else thinks it’s great, then that’s great.’ Half the country away in New York, Alisa
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agrees, saying ‘I’m not really interested in making my meditative hobby into a commercial
business.’
Studies of creativity attest that many are skeptical that joy in making could even be
rationally theorized, much as it is common wisdom that explaining a joke kills its humor.
Despite this, studies suggest that much of creativity’s pleasure comes from entering a ‘flow’ state
that bypasses self-consciousness (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). Handwork, in particular, has a
difficult-to-describe transcendent quality often connected with spiritual and ethical values as well
as recommended as therapy for anxiety and other disorders (Crawford, 2010; Dudley, 2014;
Macdonald, 1988; Sennett, 2008). Gary, who now makes and sells silver origami jewelry,
recalls that he first learned to cross-stitch during his thirteen years in the army.
6
Despite this
difficulty of definition, the love involved in creative work is not just an abstract idea. Its
presence is essential. Even craft entrepreneurs are crafters first, just as Postigo (2014, p. 10)
discovered that ‘game commentators are gamers first’ in the seemingly worlds away but
similarly DIY practice of creating video game commentary YouTube videos.

Precarity Is Not the Natural Result of Passion
That creative people derive pleasure from their work is one of the most consistent
findings about creative work in a wide variety of environments, from the analog to the digital
and the paid to the unpaid (Brienza, 2016; Csikszentmihalyi, 2009; Dudley, 2014; Gill & Pratt,
2008; Himanen, 2001; Jenkins, 2008; Kücklich, 2005; Neff, 2012; Ross, 2009). But pleasure
also often comes up in the negative; as Charlotte says of her very successful fashion design
work, “this is supposed to be fun. And it’s… stressful.” This emotional flipside of stress,

6
Albeit as a distraction while on the army band bus rather than as therapy for PTSD, also a relatively common route
into fiber crafting.
65

frustration, and anxiety, along with the common phenomena of burnout and exhaustion, are
infrequently discussed in the literature but well-known in practice (Gill & Pratt, 2008; Gregg,
2010). When work and play melt into each other it can be extremely satisfying, but it can also
result in the transformation of all play into the obligation of work (Close, 2014).
What is discussed extensively is the other most consistent finding about contemporary
creative work, its precarity. Precarious work describes the increasingly more common condition
wherein workers face long hours, low to no pay, minimal job security, social isolation, frequent
moves, and minimal health care (Close, 2014; Curtin & Sanson, 2016; Dudley, 2014; Gill &
Pratt, 2008; Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; Kücklich, 2005; McRobbie, 2016; Ross, 2009).
Some theorists argue that the contemporary correlation between loving your work and precarious
work has an element of causation, such that ‘pleasure itself may become a disciplinary
technology’ (Andrejevic, 2008; Dean, 2005; Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 17). Given crafting, and
creative work more largely, is a self-directed and entrepreneurial enterprise, critical discussions
of precarity often turn to false consciousness, the manufacture of consent, and self-exploitation.
Caldwell (2016, p. 46), for instance, writes that he undertook research on precarious labor in the
contemporary film and TV world ‘partly because so many frustrated individuals that I talk to
misperceive the labor regimes they operate within.’
Ironically, however, the self-exploitation argument leaves the crafters with no viable hope.
Exploitation’s power as a theoretical concept comes from the way it conjoins material economic
conditions with political expectations of justice and agency. Through this move, Marx
transformed the social question of poverty into a political force by arguing ‘that poverty is the
result of exploitation through a “ruling class” which is in possession of the means of violence,’
rather than the inevitable result of resource scarcity (Arendt, 2006, p. 52). Combating
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exploitation necessitates identifying both that ruling class and its means of violence. This can be
as obvious as the blunt-force weapons of feudalism and totalitarianism, but it can also be subtle
and ideological.
The concept of self-exploitation places the worker as both the ‘ruling class’ who perpetrates
violence and the victim of that violence. The moral spark of fighting against exploitation comes
from indignation and outrage, the sense that justice has been violated and all parties are not
behaving in a morally appropriate way (Arendt, 2006; Castells, 2015; Zelizer, 2011). Outrage
against oneself for not being and doing in the right way? This is a deeply powerful and
potentially destructive feeling, but it is one that threatens the workers themselves rather than the
structures of power. As Sen, one third of the Piñata Design Studio, tells me, ‘this business is just
difficult, a lot of people will shoot you down, “why don’t you get a real job” and then they’ll be
like “you need to work harder, you need to do this, you need to stop doing that.”’ Charlotte
laughs a little bitterly when I ask how many hours a week she spends on her knitwear business
Isobel & Cleo, saying ‘Honestly, I can’t—I don’t, I am always working on Isobel and Cleo.
Constantly.’ A friend employed in finance helping her apply for a line of credit at the bank had
chastised her, arguing that ‘You can’t write this in your business plan…you can’t say that, “yeah,
well, I’ll pull an all-nighter if I need to, I won’t sleep for three days if I need to,” because they’re
not going to give you a line of credit. It has to be realistic. But that’s what I do.’ Theories of
self-exploitation and false consciousness replicate rather than combat the very feelings of self-
blame already generated by precarious work (Hesmondhalgh & Baker, 2010; McRobbie, 2002).
This is particularly true for marginalized workers, such as women and people of color.
While the almost exclusively white and male luthiers adopted the price of a factory-made guitar
as the (still quite harsh) standard by which they judged their labor, the overwhelmingly female
67

crafters often judge their work as not even worthy of a factory price (Dudley, 2014). A member
of the Budding Designers group on Ravelry.com asked others’ opinions about ‘selling’ her first
patterns for free, writing that she felt she had not yet ‘earned the right to charge full price’
because of her inexperience, regardless of the quality of her work. Tami’s first sale came from a
co-worker who asked if he could pay her to make him a copy of the mug she had made for
herself. She agreed but found she could barely look at her own creation in use, even though her
co-worker was delighted with the mug. Such self-doubt and castigation feeds on the mainstream
capitalist structure of feeling wherein ‘time is money’ and there is no point to expend cultural
capital ‘under conditions where little or no money is earned doing it’ (Dudley, 2014, p. 75;
Himanen, 2001; Illouz, 2007). This logic over-valorizes the work of experts without providing
any pathway for people to imagine becoming experts themselves, particularly as many crafters
see that their own college and even graduate degrees do not translate to jobs.
By pursuing the self-exploitation argument or theorizing pleasure solely as a mechanism of
control, academics become yet another group of experts telling crafters they are doing it wrong.
There is a sad irony in this. Academia is a clear example of creative, passion-fueled work, which
itself is becoming ever more precarious with the decline of tenure and the rise of adjunct labor
(Gregg, 2009). To pick one precarious practice, peer review depends both on free labor by
reviewers and on ‘spec work’ by authors, who write without any guarantee of compensation
(Caldwell, 2016; Gregg, 2009). Invocations of neoliberalism, in particular, often invoke a
sweeping rhetoric such that ‘whatever is placed near the object of critique becomes the object of
critique’ (Ahmed, 2015). But given how prevalent neoliberal politics are in contemporary
America, it would be more surprising if central cultural fields such as academia and creative
work were not affected. To avoid devolving into simple criticism, critique must be grounded not
68

only in theoretical and empirical understanding of the realities of others but in awareness of
one’s own position. It must also be open to possibilities, seeking cracks in systems of power
rather than simply pointing out dead ends (Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2008).
Precarity is not a natural consequence of passion-drive creative work. It results from the
combination of the creative work model with a neoliberal political environment. In post-
industrial capitalism, creative work has risen dramatically in prominence and scale. This is
particularly true given the impact of open-source coding and the free software movement to the
development of the Internet and everything that would become Silicon Valley (Lessig, 2008;
Rheingold, 1993; Turner, 2006). As Hartley (2005, p. 19) puts it, ‘the “creative industries” idea
brought creativity from the back door of government, where it had sat for decades holding out
the tin cup for arts subsidy—miserable, self-loathing and critical (especially of the hand that fed
it)’ around to the front door of industry and wealth creation. Neoliberal policies, however, seize
on and amplify only some of the aspects of the DIY culture boom: flexible working conditions,
passion, entrepreneurship, and connecting people through the exchange of goods. Neoliberalism
ignores that stable, basic, non-market driven material support for creators underwrote all of the
historically successful DIY and entrepreneurial movements. Governmental support, be it in the
form of guaranteed salaries for wartime R&D scientists and later think tanks or in the form of
entrepreneurial and small business grants to young British fashion designers, provided essential
support for their creative work (McRobbie, 1998; Turner, 2006). Female media fans, in
particular, created in a ‘weekend-only world’ supported by full-time jobs with no intentions of or
desire to profit financially from their work (De Kosnik, 2009; Jenkins, 1992, 2008).
Neoliberal politics advocate the decrease of this kind of support and an increase in
dependence on free markets through privatization and the creation of new markets (Harvey,
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2005). In this model, creative workers are reliant on successive market valuation of each of their
works for their basic income. Creative workers become ‘only as good as their last project’
(Caldwell, 2016; McRobbie, 2016; Neff, 2012). This is a terrifically poor model for the desired
result, a flourishing of creativity and artistic production, as ‘making support contingent on
artistic performance crowds-out artistic innovation’ and actively works against the ideal creative
state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996; Frey, 1999, p. 82). Studies of artists more generally
suggest that a balance of basic support—lights, food, housing, and so forth—and incentives that
respond to individual work stimulate creative production most effectively (Csikszentmihalyi,
1996; Frey, 1999; Hartley, 2005).
7
Lynn articulates the feelings behind these results when
discussing how she understands purchases from friends. She says “there’s that tendency to
think” her friends are only buying something because “they think ‘wow, she really needs a
handout.’” The term “handout” recalls the vocabulary of government support that neoliberal
policies decry as discouraging DIY entrepreneurialism, but for Lynn so-called “private” support
from friends that doesn’t recognize the value of her craft falls into the same undesirable category.
Winning an NEA grant or stipend that provided a basic income would encourage, rather than
discourage, her creative work.
The difference between crafters with basic material support and those dependent on the
whims of the market is particularly marked in the contrast between Gary, who works full-time in
IT, and the full-time crafters Tami and Charlotte. One of Tami and Charlotte’s central
complaints is that they are stuck making and re-making one or two items that brought past
success, the mug Tami ‘knows I’m going to sell fifty of.’ The temporal capital required simply

7
It should be noted that Frey (1999) ultimately suggests against direct state support to the arts. His models for
possible state support, however, are limited and in any case emphasize the importance of non-profit institutions and
patrons, rather than the market.
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to make those objects means, as Charlotte points out, ‘there’s no time to design or try new
things.’ As successful crafters’ queues and orders back up, this problem intensifies. In the case
of luthiers crafting guitars, which even at the simple cost of materials are priced in the thousands,
they became vulnerable to speculative buying: some customers put in orders and lock in prices
for a custom guitar months or even years in advance, assuming its value will have greatly
increased by the time the luthier completes the piece so the speculator can ‘flip’ it (Dudley,
2014). Gary put it quite simply, saying that ‘If I needed to finish this piece so my family could
eat next week, it would be a lot less fun.’ With the support of a stable and well-paying full-time
job, he was one of the crafters I spoke with who experimented the most artistically, creating
unique collections exhibiting different metal finishes, origami techniques, and innovative
concepts.

Folk Marxism
The importance Gary places on the fun of crafting might seem trivial in comparison to
the need to feed a family or keep the lights on. But politically useful analysis must build on ‘the
meanings cultural workers themselves give to their life and work,’ and for crafters fun is a
central goal in their lives and their work (Gill & Pratt, 2008, p. 19). The way crafters translate
the different forms of capital into pleasure, and how they respond to alienation from that
pleasure, evinces a growing post-capitalist worldview. I call this worldview Folk Marxism, a
grassroots philosophy-in-practice that pairs entrepreneurial agency and recognizably Marxist
critiques of the hegemonic work ethic, wage relation, and prioritization of exchange value over
use value. As Lynn argues, ‘it doesn’t make sense, if you really think about it, to work for
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somebody else…if I’m working hard [as an entrepreneur], it’s so I can have a vacation, not so
somebody else can have a vacation.’
It is clear from talking with crafters who practice at different levels of intensity, from the
full-time 12-15 hour days to the hobbyist spinner still at risk of developing a repetitive stress
injury to the jewelry makers who confine crafting strictly to weekends or the summer, that there
is no ‘typical day’ in the subculture.
8
But there is a typical narrative that describes the life cycle
of a craft business, which I heard again and again in interviews and experienced myself as a
participant-observer. Crafters begin with the dream of doing what they love, believing that their
talents as creative people and the vibrancy of the crafting subculture will carry them. They
create items, open shops online, apply for and attend festivals, and are surprised to find sales
slow to non-existent. They then seek out advice by talking to friends, posting on Ravelry
forums, reading Etsy guides, taking business classes, and so forth. Fortified by knowledge,
crafters dedicate themselves to their business and ramp up to an intense schedule, devoting more
and more temporal and economic capital to it. This is, all ultimately recognize, unsustainable.
At some point, crafters hit a wall (Close, 2014). Health breaks down. Social and familial
relationships fray. Crafters find themselves actively avoiding their work—but it still dominates
their thoughts.
The conditions of their crafting work have alienated them from their pleasure in crafting,
similar to what Bulut (2015) calls ‘the degradation of fun.’ It is important to note that crafters
who are extremely successful hit the wall just as hard, if not harder, than those with few or
moderate sales. The online shop’s accessibility is a virtue for those living in more rural areas—

8
This becomes even murkier when crafters hold multiple jobs within the craft subculture, for instance a knitting
designer who also works at a yarn shop and teaches knitting classes. This is quite common, particularly for full-time
crafters.
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Lynn defended her choice to open Etsy and Zibbet shops to her skeptical mother by pointing out,
‘who’s going to walk into my store in Maryville, Tennessee?’ But the online environment brings
also the possibility of, as Jessie and Billy remember, suddenly selling $2500 worth of jewelry,
‘and we didn’t necessarily have twenty-five hundred dollars of jewelry made, you know what I
mean.’
To make it over the wall, crafters must decide if they will continue with their business or
not and, if so, in what form. Their tactics for doing so prioritize pleasure and re-arrange their
other capital to preserve it. Some hire employees or find manufacturing schemes they can live
with, sacrificing some of the cultural capital of the handmade to reclaim their time for fiddling
with materials and designing. Others take on side jobs, both within and without the crafting
world, sacrificing some of their temporal capital in order to take the pressure off their shop sales.
Conversely, Jessie and Billy decided to quit their other part-time jobs, reclaiming that temporal
capital, so they could ‘jump in headfirst’ with their Etsy store. Many create, as Gary, Heddi, and
Donna put it, ‘hobby first, business second’ shops, whose growth they consciously restrict even
if it means a reduction or cap on economic returns. Few who want their crafting income to pay
significant bills could follow Gary’s example of shutting down his shop in the first week of
December and foregoing the profitable holiday season in favor of spending that time with his
family. But even most full-time crafters insist on taking a Fordist-style two-day weekend no
matter how their sales are doing, even if that ‘weekend’ might technically occur on Tuesday and
Friday.
Many of these tactics focus on protecting joy in the form of creative flow, the zen state of
making that lies beyond self-consciousness. Crafters enjoy relaxing into repetitive motion—
though not for so long that they incur repetitive stress injuries—and fiddling around with
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materials, designing with hands and mind in concert and ignoring the outside world. As such, I
wondered why so many continued their shops at all. The business labor involved in running an
online shop is significant, even for a small one, and so if the crafters are not solely dependent on
that income, why go through the trouble at all? The crocheter Nikki, Dani’s older sister and first
employee, came up with the answer when Dani was stymied at explaining what she enjoyed so
much about crafting. Crafters take great pleasure in exchange, in what Nikki phrased as
‘creating an effect on people’ through not only making something but then giving it or showing it
to others. The relationship between the cultural capital of making and the social capital of
connecting is key to two of crafting’s most promising folk Marxist practices: exchange and
refusal.

Exchange as Communication Rather Than Accumulation
It is a sign of how deeply American society is structured by neoliberalism that crafters
point to buying and selling as the best way to facilitate social exchange. But stripped to its bare
essentials, ‘the market’ is just a place for exchange. Neoliberal free markets and government-
controlled fixed-price markets are the most common contemporary incarnations of markets, but
they are far from the only ones. There is rich documentation of gift economies both ancient and
contemporary, as well as on underground and criminal markets (Hyde, 1983; Jenkins et al., 2013;
Mauss, 1990; Rheingold, 1993; Turk, 2013; Zelizer, 2011). Exchange in the crafting world takes
place in an array of differently configured markets, but the meanings of exchange are remarkably
resilient from for-profit to non-profit and gift to barter settings.
When I ask Dani about the differences between giving crafted objects as gifts and selling
them in her Etsy store, she shrugs:
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‘It’s really fun to make the things either way and then just…well, I get paid for one and
then there’s, I get a nice smile. Well, I get a nice smile for both, but I can’t see the one
on the internet [laughs]’
Selling one of her crochet pony patterns is a capitalist exchange, in the sense that Dani’s business
Crafted Cuteness as well as the Etsy Corporation profits from the transaction. But her
explanation makes clear that the motivations behind and affects around her craft sales far exceed
those of sales in the typical capitalist framework. Crafters conceive of exchange as a form of
communication, a way to engage others more authentically and receive feedback on their work.
As Lynn puts it, ‘Fundamentally there’s nothing wrong with shopping at a big box store. But
with handmade shops, there’s a person there.’
Crafters frequently feel as though purchases are not just simple transactions but represent
moral and political support for their entrepreneurial endeavor, signs that recipients understand
and value the results of their labor as more than simply a commodity (Dudley, 2014; Jenkins et
al., 2013). Danni and Nikki have an automated message sent to anyone who purchases an item
from their Etsy shop thanking them for the purchase and explaining that ‘Your support is what
allows crafters like me to keep crafting. Give yourself a big ol’ pat on the back, you earned it!
Also, please be sure to leave me a 5 star review so others can know what they’re getting into
when they’re contemplating making a purchase from me. I would appreciate it greatly and it
would make me very happy if you did. =D’ This message positions her customers as recipients
of a gift and entreats them to give back to her, and the larger population of ‘crafters like me,’ via
the social work of posting a review. Crafters enjoy giving to family and friends, and for many a
friend or relative made the suggestion to start their business. But they also take great joy in
purchases from what Tami terms ‘a stranger from the Internet!’ Exchange with someone not
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personally known to them, someone who unlike a relative or friend would lose no social capital
by rejecting an object, validates crafters’ cultural capital and brings joy as well as economic
returns (Close, 2014).
Communicative exchanges need not involve money. Unlike mainstream narratives,
crafters see entrepreneurship as less do-it-yourself and more do-it-together (Close, 2014). The
‘Free Pattern Testers’ (FPT) group on Ravelry offers a forum for independent pattern designers
and people interested in test knitting others’ patterns to meet. FPT explicitly prohibits designers
compensating their test knitters in any way: no money, yarn, contests, or other free patterns. The
forum rules also insist that any finished objects belong exclusively to the test knitters; designers
cannot ask for the finished products back. As explained on the FPT philosophy page, ‘designers
who can afford to provide compensation/incentive would have an unfair advantage over
designers who don’t have the resources to do so. Designers should be able to attract testers
based on the merits of their pattern and how they interact with their testers.’
Despite, or perhaps because, FPT exchanges are de-capitalized, they definitively do not
occur in an idealized space wherein participation is completely free of obligation. On the
contrary, long-time moderator Min says that FPT’s moderation team doesn’t consider a new mod
‘really’ a member until they’ve been cursed at by a Ravelry user upset with one of their decisions
or community rules. FPT explicitly privileges designers and test knitters who contribute actively
and positively to the group’s community, building its social capital, as well as those whose
cultural skills lead to the creation of ‘quality’ designs and finished objects for the community at
large. FPT has detailed guidelines by which members contribute to the community and each
other. For example, test knitters must post feedback at least once per week and designers must
commit to publicly moderate the test. This insistence on public communication, rather than
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private messages or emails, mirrors the structure of labor in media fandom wherein
‘community…is not just an abstract byproduct of the fannish gift economy but a recipient within
that economy’ (Turk, 2013, para. 3.2). Everyone contributes a certain amount of work, as a
membership due, but they also have easy access to all of the community’s production.
Even outside the highly organized boundaries of FPT, crafters commonly gift temporal
and cultural capital to their fellow crafters and enjoy their success. Lynn was not alone in feeling
that ‘people in our community want you to succeed mostly…I can tell you how to make a
lightbox for zero dollars,’ even though she depended on her Etsy and Zibbet shops for a
significant portion of her income. Online forums or local meet-up groups often exemplify the
collective intelligence paradigm as crafters pool their knowledge and resources to help each
other work through issues ranging from dealing with customer complaints to understanding
changes to Etsy and Ravelry’s coding to securing legal representation in copyright suits.
Crafters greatly value the friendships made through these communicative exchanges, which can
cross boundaries of geography, ethnicity, gender, ability, and social class.

Going cold sheep: Refusing accumulation
‘Cold sheep’ is a term loosely derived from ‘cold turkey,’ i.e. quitting smoking cold
turkey. It means a moratorium on buying crafting materials and supplies, principally yarn and
fiber. Crafters often struggle with consumption. Like luthiers who explained their passion for
making guitars through analogies of alcoholism and addiction, fiber crafters often refer to their
supplies as a ‘stash,’ with its connotation of illicit drugs. The idea of the stash has spawned a
host of other terms: projects which allow crafters to use small amounts of many yarns are ‘stash-
busters,’ selling supplies is ‘de-stashing,’ encouraging someone else to spend money on supplies
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is ‘enabling.’ Where the luthiers analogized themselves as sick or addicted for making guitars
when it was not profitable to do so, fiber crafters going cold sheep treat over-spending, rather
than crafting, as the problematic practice (Dudley, 2014).
Although terms like cold sheep and stash are most commonly heard on Ravelry, the
phenomenon is not constrained to fiber arts. Donna, a jewelry and candle-maker, told me ‘I
can’t even go into a bead store anymore’ because of her well-founded fear that she will walk out
having made a purchase. She readily notes that exuberant consumerism is one key problem with
approaching her jewelry-making as ‘business second, hobby first, or craft first…like I cannot, I
can’t spend any more money on my crafts until I sell something. That's where things are at this
point. Like I cannot justify spending another dime. I have enough beads at home now, like to
make, to make a whole bunch of great jewelry, but I want new beads!’ Like media fans, crafters
are often pathologized for this love of objects (Jenkins, 1992; Woo, 2013). These critiques
suggest that the solution is to quit objects just like smokers quit cigarettes—as the graffiti
commonly stenciled on sidewalks in my neighborhood proclaim, ‘Stop Buying Shit.’ But the
way the idea of the stash and cold sheeping develops through practice builds on crafters’ love for
their objects even in their refusal to purchase more of them.
Cold sheeping’s refusal of purchase recognizes the importance of material objects to
crafters as creative people, how ‘surrounded by particular things, people produce themselves as
particular kinds of agents’ (Woo, 2013). Strategies for going cold sheep often revolve around a
focus on the use value of yarn and fiber already owned. As one Ravelry group founder exclaims,
‘No more stash-padding for us! Stash-DIVING is going to become the norm!’ In this, going
cold sheep is different from the superficially similar political tactic of a boycott. It builds on
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community value for the cultural capital embedded in objects rather than disparaging it or using
the group’s combined economic capital to force change.
What cold sheeping refuses is the capitalist logic of ever-accelerating accumulation itself.
Dani and Nikki tell that their crafting business is self-sustaining, while hobby crafting certainly
is not. There is a mis-match between the yarn needed for different patterns, particularly more
complicated ones, and the way yarn is sold. They explain:
‘You go, I want to make a bob-omb [video game character]. I have to buy black, white,
silver, yellow, and orange yarn. Yarn is not cheap. Even if you buy the cheapest stuff,
that’s five skeins.’
‘About three dollars each.’
‘That’s fifteen dollars. And then you can make one of those. And then you keep it,
you’re out fifteen or more depending on how much you spent on the pattern. And for us,
you can make like six or whatever out of that much yarn. And then you sell them. And
with that money you re-stock the yarn, and it’s definitely self-sustaining.’
‘When it was a hobby you have big piles of yarn everywhere…you just stick it in your
closet.’
Dani and Nikki are part of a large family supported by a small family-owned musical
instruments store. By engaging in craft entrepreneurship, they are actually better able to focus
on and enjoy making while managing the tension between limited economic capital (particularly
as manifested by their access to physical space) and their cultural and practical need for yarn as
active crocheters.

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“You do what you can do” : Refusing Work
Theories of participation often give the impression that the more one participates, the better.
This logic primes participatory work for exploitation insofar as it takes place within a system
where neoliberal capitalism is already entrenched (De Kosnik, 2009, 2013; Hartley, 2005). I
argue this is the case even when the imagined participation is political protest. Autonomous
Marxist celebration of the refusal of work, for instance, tends to focus in on the action of
refusing by emphasizing practices like strikes and demonstrations. Despite the action’s content,
its underlying logic replicates the values embedded in the hegemonic work ethic and its ‘grim
scenarios of success that depend upon trying and trying again’ (Halberstam, 2011, p. 3; Weeks,
2011). Privileging ever intensifying, ‘maximal’ participation also accentuates a well-known
academic bias towards results and activity rather than what quantitative research terms null
findings (Carpentier & Dahlgren, 2011). We need something to write about, after all!
But something’s absence can be just as important as its presence. Crafters often
referenced the ideological and cultural expectation that they be active on social media. This
imperative frequently comes through references to other crafter friends who sell more than they
do, although some also mention advice articles, podcasts, and guides. For instance, Donna told
me, “my friend Leslie has had great success, but she’s on every day like favoriting things and
liking things and buying beads from vendors on Etsy and totally working the system.” Donna
tried to emulate her by “Etsy-ing” on her phone at least once a day. As many crafters told me,
however, their experiences being on social media as a crafter had made them skeptical about how
worthwhile this effort was. Donna pointed out that she had had “like three sales, I think, since I
really tried to get on every day.” She commiserated with my efforts to take better photographs
but being overwhelmed at the extent of the set-ups that were recommended—not only lightboxes
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but staging, filtering, possibly hiring a professional photographer or model, and beyond—but
stopped me, advising “you do what you can do.” In the context of expectations that people are
always on, always available, and always active, stepping back when the meaning of engagement
has been lost is an important exercise of agency. Crafters refusing guilt for not striving to go
beyond what they have the time, energy, and funds—or even simply the desire—to do evidences
a quiet confidence and belief in the self that combats some of the problems at the heart of
DWYL.
Social media is one thing. More surprising is that the refusal of crafting work is also a
practice crafters advocate and support in certain circumstances. My experience during the
Thanksgiving holiday with my partner’s family mirrors stories several crafters have told me.
Watching me knit a dish towel that would eventually resemble a piece of loose-leaf paper, my
first original design, my partner’s cousin told me he would be interested in commissioning me to
make the towels for him to give as Christmas gifts. He offered me fifty-dollars to make five of
them, and we had the following exchange:
‘It’s going to be more like fifty-dollars for one.’
‘I could buy them at Target for less than that…’
‘If that’s what you want to spend, you should get them at Target.’
‘But I’d rather put the money into the hand of someone I knew.’
‘So you’re saying you’d rather pay someone you know less than Target pays its workers
overseas to knit dishtowels on machines?’
At this point our conversation became the center of attention in the small living room, as my
partner jumped to tell her cousin of the long hours I spent sourcing yarn, working on the design,
and knitting the pieces. In such a way did the living wage, the global textile industry, and the art
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and artisan craft market become topics of conversation at a Thanksgiving dinner table where
discussions of politics were usually forbidden. Online, crafters often offer each other emotional
support in these situations and encourage turning down or confidently negotiating such requests
rather than accepting from fear of violating social expectations or fear of not making a sale.
Many crafters explicitly identify such negotiations as political. One knitting pattern
designer explained in the Budding Designers Ravelry forum that she has stopped visiting the
‘Big Six,’ forums to which every Ravelry site user is automatically subscribed, in large part
because ‘the strict “no politics” rule makes it very difficult to discuss anything touching topics
like the environment, sustainable products, a fair consumer attitude, etc.’ Such rules are
relatively common on internet forums, often in an effort to prevent disagreements, flame wars,
and the breakdown of community, even as they then unfortunately cement the status quo (Swartz
& Driscoll, 2014). Such rules can contribute to the incorrect impression that the online ‘DIY
movement exists ostensibly as a highly depoliticized space’ (Solomon, 2013, p. 14). What I find
more common is crafters founding, moderating, and frequenting smaller groups within the
overall sites, such as the Budding Designers or FPT Ravelry forums, where they set their own
policies and rules.

Conclusion
Sen is a third-generation piñata maker who broke away from her highly successful family
business to start her own, brother and cousin in tow. ‘I don’t want to do this business just to
make money,’ she says firmly, ‘it’s about showing what’s possible. That you can do what you
love.’ Crafters often poke fun at my interest in work and sales, telling me they did not begin
crafting because they thought there was money in it—is that why I started knitting? To crafters,
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it is obvious that they will continue crafting even if they ultimately decide to withdraw from
entrepreneurship. As Lynn says, “even if I wasn’t selling anything I’d be making something.
You know. For me.” They are still creative people, after all, even if they refused crafting work.
Sahara found that many of the recently immigrated former textile workers in her neighborhood
stopped being offended and started to be curious about her crafting after they felt more secure in
America, telling me ‘they didn’t hate the spinning itself, it was the environment they did it in.’
This might well seem obvious, but it was a necessary reminder for me. I had
unconsciously begun to privilege full-time crafting in my research, wanting to find a way it could
become as stable as good factory or white-collar office jobs used to be (in theory, anyway). But
truly analyzing alternative practices on their own terms entails assessing the possible value in
and reasons behind what looks, by normative standards, like failure (Halberstam, 2011). Many
crafters who consciously stepped back from social media did so with a shrug rather than a
speech. As folk Marxism evolves, it necessarily contradicts existing normative moral dictates—
crafters decline to optimize their time, many do not seek to do what they love full-time, and they
tend to see income as utilitarian rather than as a status symbol. They struggle with over-buying
supplies just as many scholars struggle with over-buying books. Folk Marxism is a philosophy
built from the ground up through experience and practice, not from ideological commitments
down.
The day-to-day practice of crafting does puncture some of the promise of do what you
love ideology. It brings that ideal to the messy reality of contemporary America, where even
handmade items are often created from things bought in stores and a for-profit Internet platform
seems the most obvious place for authentic exchanges of material and social support. Crafters
approach the world as people who have the knowledge and agency to make changes where they
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are, such that ‘seeking to make the most of the opportunities offered by the creative industries,
even in the form of private enterprise, is not an abandonment of critique but its implementation’
(Hartley, 2005, p. 13). Folk Marxism is a powerful critique because it is growing from the
struggle of crafters trying to make things work in the real world. It forms an empirically-based
vision of a post-capitalist society where pleasure, rather than profit, is the highest moral calling.
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Creative Work in the Platform Economy
Up until now, I have focused in on crafters, their hopes, dreams, and practices. In this
chapter I pull back to analyze the way crafters’ work sits in the broader digital infrastructure and
culture that surrounds them. The precarity of work in the platform economy cannot be
understood by looking only at the workers—this replicates damaging narratives of self-blame.
Nor can it be understood by creating a false dichotomy between crafters and an abstract socio-
economic system. Platform companies such as Etsy and Ravelry are not only corporate entities
but are themselves constructed and maintained by the labor of workers, such as coders and
community managers, who are employed by the companies. These connections and
interdependencies have always existed, but in the world of Web 2.0 and late stage globalized
capitalism, “becoming-with” each other, rather than “becoming” strong on one’s own, is no
longer optional even in theory (Haraway, 2016).
In the previous chapter, I argued that crafters are re-shaping DIY ideology into the
philosophy-in-practice of Folk Marxism, an entrepreneurial and practical critique of the
hegemonic work ethic, the capitalist wage relation, and the prioritization of exchange over use
value. Folk Marxism is related to senses of community among different local groups of crafters
and a cultural value on joy in creation that is widely shared. These particular values and cultural
ideas are not limited to crafters. Open source coders and hackers, for instance, also place a high
value on creative work performed outside of traditional capitalist economic structures. But the
sense of communality that Folk Marxism brings to many crafters’ interactions with other crafters
does not stretch across the divides between crafters and those who do other types of work in the
platform economy, particularly coders. The internet platform, ironically a technology built for
communication, restricts the ways in which different kinds of users can engage with each other,
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making each side’s motivations and reasoning seem at best obscure and at worse actively
malicious to the other.
This divide is caused by neither the technology itself nor even the socioeconomic system
of neoliberal capitalism. It has much more to do with the way the culture of do-what-you-love
creative work understands work that is necessary but not necessarily creative. Up until now, I
have emphasized crafters’ dreams and practices of creative work. But as Lynn ruefully puts it,
“that’s like five percent of your time, the rest is social media and website stuff, taking picture
after picture after picture after picture, trying to write descriptions, all the other stuff that I think
a lot of people don’t think about.” “All the other stuff” is a fundamentally different kind of
work than creative making. It encompasses labors of connection and coordination, such as
determining where and when to place advertisements or how it is most efficient to take a large
number of packages to the post office in the busy Christmas season—Tami swears by her old
IKEA bags. This kind of work sometimes ironically requires significant creativity, as the Piñata
Design Studio team’s innovations in creating modes of shipping for their complicated, custom-
sculpted piñata pieces and the elaborate filming, editing, and even music-making that goes into
creating “behind-the-scenes” social media videos evidence. But if the difference is slippery, it is
also deeply felt. At the same time as Yesenia details the creative labor that goes into their
marketing, she says “we don’t just do this stuff [gestures at the table at which they create their
items], we do online stuff. The photography…use those filters, use those effects. It’s a lot of
work.” Groeneveld (2010, p. 270) points out that in all the contemporary celebration of
traditional women’s work, “nary an article celebrating the joys of quotidian vacuuming, dish
washing, or toilet-cleaning appears.” Even though one could imagine creative ways of
vacuuming or toilet-cleaning, it is difficult to see them as fulfilling in the ways that knitting or
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drawing can be. These kinds of maintenance-focused labors serve a different purpose than
creative work.
The distinctions between creative and more formulaic, support-oriented, and even
secretarial labors are particularly charged for women. Female-dominated crafts have long
struggled to be taken seriously as artistic media with creative potential (Gubar, 1981; McRobbie,
1998; Robertson, 2011). And even when crafts have been taken seriously in political and
philosophical terms, as in the Arts and Crafts Movement that emerged at the turn of the twentieth
century, the crafting women are often seen as carrying out the ideas of visionary creative men
(Luckman, 2013). In the context of this history, it is unsurprising that the feminist question
about contemporary crafting is whether reviving and celebrating the artistic, creative potential in
traditional women’s crafts or continuing to seek creative, productive power in traditionally male-
dominated spheres of business and government serve women’s interests better. But to accept
this question at face value is to also accept “the dominant legitimating discourse of work” which
crafters’ practices and imaginaries are quietly subverting (Weeks, 2011, p. 13).
What feminist efforts to re-value housework and caring work do evidence is how
essential routine labors of maintenance and support are to a functioning society. Creation and
production are not sustainable on their own—the creativity that goes into designing a knitting
pattern, for example, loses much of its social value and meaning if the repetitive labor of actually
knitting up the pattern’s directions does not take place. Despite the cultural emphasis on
creativity that is woven into both craft and platform culture, the digital platform as a technology
is remarkably focused on facilitating and automating repetitive activities, particularly those
related to communication and sociality. Interfaces, databases, and algorithms keep track, for
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example, of messages sent by other users while you are offline—work that was the job of a
secretary in a pre-digital time.
Unfortunately, platforms’ role as support technologies, and the importance of that role,
has been forgotten. Much of this comes from crafters and coders’ attempts to re-shape their
interactions with platforms into the familiar and fetishized shape of productive, creative work.
Being creative requires a certain degree of freedom, freedom to tinker, experiment, and try things
out in a state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, 2009). But “the internet, as it were, is all
somebody else’s toes,” and what is creative play from one perspective is frustrating instability,
messiness, and evidence of power imbalances from another (Sauter, 2014, p. 4). As platforms
have been developed, they increasingly act as a filter which materializes the actions of those on
one side of the fence into data objects which those on the other side can easily manipulate.
There are clear practical benefits of such modular logic in facilitating the automation of
processes and extraction of data, but it conceives of communication between users and coders as
instrumental, rather than empathetic (Mcpherson, 2012). As such, the platform environment and
culture of work in which it is situated inhibits effective communication between crafters and
coders. This contributes heavily to the precarity and instability of the platform economy and
enhances existing problematic tendencies towards elitism within cultures of creative work.

What is a Platform?
In the earlier years of the internet, much more communication took place in the broadcast
mode of individual webpages and blogs, where a relatively few number of content creators spoke
to a wider range of readers. Sociality and peer-to-peer conversation tended to happen in private
spaces, such as e-mail listservs, rather than in the open spaces of Twitter or Tumblr that evolved
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later. After the dot-com bust in 2000, Tim O’Reilly coined the term “Web 2.0” to describe how
the internet companies which survived the crash were developing. He identifies several “core
competencies of Web 2.0 companies,” which include envisioning products as services rather than
discrete software packages, controlling rich data sources which draw strength from numbers
rather than scarcity, and working with users rather than for them (O’Reilly, 2005). The signature
technology of Web 2.0 are platforms, intermediary organizations “that provide storage,
navigation and delivery of the digital content of others” (Gillespie, 2010). The most famous
platform is likely Google, which indexes and makes find-able the broad swathes of content
created by more broadcast-mode Web 1.0 pages and blogs. It can be tempting to suggest that
platforms are parasitical forms, as suggested by the widely-shared joke of Web 2.0: You make
all the content, they keep all the profit. There is some truth to this, and the joke is useful in the
context of political activism seeking recognition for users’ unpaid labors. But it also ignores the
“great deal of resources [that] are expended to keep digital systems that rely on software in
working order…hidden labor” of coders and other platform employees (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011,
p. 10).
Platforms have become continually more influential, to the point where observers
describe a “platform economy” made up of intermediary organizations such as eBay, Uber,
AirBnB, and Craigslist as well as the vast number of people who perform work through these
platforms. Lynn expressed irritation at the common expression “I bought it on Etsy,” telling me
“there are some people out there who don’t get that it’s not Wal-Mart, you didn’t buy it from
Etsy, you bought it from a person.” This way of speaking indicates the importance of platforms
as brands, aside from their technological functions. There is a continuity between this way of
thinking about websites and the way in which we talk about television shows—although you
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might have watched a segment depicting the individual designer Christian Siriano work, you will
probably say “I watched Project Runway.” In a world where formal qualifications are
increasingly both less necessary and less respected, branded platforms—both those of Web 2.0
and of reality television—act as sources of legitimacy. People are more likely to make a credit
card purchase via a platform they know, for example, than via the unknown website of an
individual crafter. Both reality television series and web platforms also perform important
relational labor, helping those they feature connect to viewers, customers, collaborators, and
funders (Baym, 2015).
As this comparison with reality television series suggests, platforms do not only exert an
organizing force online. They are also associated with a particular geographical and
organizational structure. Platform companies are relatively centralized, both in terms of their
geographical location and organizational layouts. They have set offices, like Etsy’s headquarters
in the DUMBO district of New York City, and even those employees who physically work in
satellite offices are related to the company’s headquarters via organizational charts, hierarchical
reporting, and “backchannels” of communication like Slack. Ravelry is less centralized; its
small team of staffers are dispersed across multiple states. They work together in an “internet
office,” however, constructed by web-based group chat services, screenshot and image-
uploading platforms, file-sharing platforms, group editing platforms, online video-chat services,
and customer support-specific email apps (Forbes, 2009).
Platform users, by contrast, are geographically and socially dispersed. In physical terms
they can be anywhere which has some access to Internet and mail service. For example, Carter
sources the beads, laces, trims, and ribbons in her craft supply shop from her and her husband’s
travels across the globe. She explains the idea behind her shop WomanShopsWorld in a way
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reminiscent of knitters and their yarn stashes, saying “being a jewelry designer myself, I am so
enchanted with so many types of beads and supplies that I can’t possibly use them all myself. So
WomanShopsWorld gives me a chance to play with these goods, handle them, photograph them,
and share them with you” (Seibels, 2017). As more and more people conduct more and more of
their lives via internet platforms, the industrial era divide between home and work is dispersing.
Carter is as much “at work” while on the road talking to artisans and browsing markets as her
husband is “at home” napping on the couch in their warehouse’s office. Before platforms, Carter
would have needed the boutique space a large city can provide to make this curatorial business
sustaining—but she lost access to such a big city when the recession hit. The cost of warehouse
space in California forced Carter and her husband to downsize and move their wholesale bead
and craft supply business across the country to South Carolina. Rather than acting as a harbinger
of creative cities, internet platforms are helping crafters deal with the economic need to leave the
city behind (Florida, 2005; Tay, 2005).
Users’ locations draw more from trends in home-working than the visions of creative
cities theorized by people like Richard Florida (2005). The thousands of living rooms where
many crafters both work and watch TV are “a complex space that is not either a work or a home
space but a dialectically engaged, symbolically rich combination” (Wapshott & Mallett, 2012, p.
67). Crafters who live in more rural locations or lack access to personal transportation often
point to the spatial organization of the platform economy when they explain what made them
want to try selling their crafts online and why, when they become disappointed with one
platform, they seek another platform rather than a different mode of doing business. Lynn
pointed out “Who’s going to walk into my shop in Maryville, Tennessee?” to her digital skeptic
mother, arguing it wasn’t worthwhile to attempt to lease space in a brick-and-mortar building
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near her home. The typical modernist narrative that tracks workers’ moves from rural to urban
areas in search of work are reversing: Lynn was born in Atlanta but “’cuz of a boy [laughs]”
moved from urban Georgia to country Tennessee. The decision was made much more clearcut
by her work drying up in Atlanta as the film and television industry (pre-True Blood) went
through a period of decline. After experiencing a physical creative city “losing all its jobs,” she
sees the geographical agnosticism of platforms as a key way in which they are less precarious
than offline work.
Etsy and Ravelry are both central platforms in contemporary crafting culture. Etsy is by
far the largest e-commerce platform to focus on handcrafted items, by any metric. It was
founded by Rob Kalin and a very small group of employees in 2005 and by the end of 2016 had
grown to employ almost one-thousand people in offices spread across eight different countries
(Etsy, 2016). With gross merchandise sales over $2.39 billion, Etsy is the fifth-largest e-
commerce site in the United States (Dobush, 2015). This scale often comes as a surprise to
people not acquainted with crafting. The platform is much more well-known for its signature
brand of artisanal, feminine creativity, such that when Etsy filed for an IPO in 2015 financial
news often described the company as “growing up,” “moving beyond kitsch,” or “not just for
brides anymore.” Along with this brand aesthetic is an idea of social entrepreneurship “using the
power of business to create a better world through our platform, our members, our employees
and the communities we serve” (Etsy, 2017). Etsy institutionalizes this through various
company policies, the Etsy.org non-profit, and being a certified B, or “benefit” corporation. The
B-Corp designation has legal standing in a growing number of states and is overseen by the non-
profit B-Lab, who certify that businesses “meet rigorous standards of social and environmental
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performance, accountability, and transparency” (B Lab, 2017). Etsy often acts as a high-
visibility test of the idea that capitalism can be reformed from within and at scale.
Ravelry, by contrast, is as utterly unknown outside of fiber crafting as it is ubiquitous
within it. Ravelry began its life in 2007 as an online database created by the husband-and-wife
duo of Casey and Jess, who sought to organize and catalog all of the patterns, yarn, and other
crafting information that were spread across the fiber blogosphere (Manjoo, 2011, p.; Ravelry,
2017). The site requires users to create accounts, which are free, and to be logged-in while
browsing the site. Ravelry grew so explosively that for the first few years, prospective users had
to ask to be put on a waiting list for accounts that stretched from weeks into months and at one
time numbered more than thirty-thousand people. Over a few years, the site has grown to
accommodate a current population of almost seven million registered users and more than two-
hundred million page views each month—all supported by a very minimal staff of five
employees. Ravelry is now a major sales venue for independent knitting, crochet, and weaving
pattern designers and pattern book authors. The designers can sell their patterns online and
inside brick-and-mortar local yarn stores who signed up for Ravelry’s “In-Store Pattern Sales”
service (Browne, 2011). As Min pointed out to me, however, Ravelry’s wide-ranging forums
have become the site’s main use for many. Ravelry automatically subscribes all new users to the
“Main Six” forums: Patterns, Yarn & Fiber, Techniques, For the Love of Ravelry, Needlework
News & Events, Tools & Equipment, and Loose Ends, each moderated by a team of volunteers.
Beyond this, any user can start their own forum or group and many, many have.
The contrast between Etsy and Ravelry speaks to the breadth of shapes that platforms,
even for-profit ones, can take. The sites operate at vastly different scales and conceptualize their
user communities in very different ways. Etsy looks like most e-commerce sites, with a
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customer-facing front page that invites consumption rather than discussion. Ravelry’s front page
requires all prospective users—be they pattern designers, beginning weavers, yarn advertisers,
hobby knitters, or professional technical pattern editors and graphic designers—to create an
account with the site before they can view most of its content or interact with the site in any way.
As Casey explains in a tech-focused discussion space, this was a very deliberate design choice
(Forbes & Bootstrapped Users, 2013). Even though Ravelry accounts are free and fairly quick to
set up, needing to have one “affects the way people feel and interact…Another small bonus is
that it’s hard to provide good community and customer support with such a small staff, but at
least we know that most of the people who are emailing have taken the time to create an account
and look around” (Forbes & Bootstrapped Users, 2013). While Etsy often promotes “the Etsy
economy” as part of its vision of social change, the Ravelry team has explicitly turned down
offers of corporate consulting work or to export their model to other subcultural spaces.
Ravelry’s team argues that “each pastime should have a social site that’s built carefully to meet
the needs of that group, and it should be built by people who are active participants in that
group” (Manjoo, 2011). These differences in architecture and vision do correspond with very
different relationships with their user bases. Crafters who use Etsy are more likely to see
themselves as part of a movement, but they are also more likely to have an ambivalent or
negative impression of the Etsy company. The name of the Ravelry technical advice and help
forum, “For the Love of Ravelry,” well expresses the dominant user affect towards the company.
Ravelry changed its fee structures for pattern sales from a graduated tree of flat fees to a model
of commissions on each sale. For a full-time pattern designer like Alex, this cut significantly
into her income. But rather than protesting, she told me, “they so deserve it, everything they’ve
done for knitting.”
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The “Newness” of New Media is Supporting Sociality Rather Than Efficiency
The kind of mutual sociality and co-creative atmosphere that Alex identifies in Ravelry
reflects the platform’s intellectual history in cybernetics. The cybernetic ideal of a platform
works on the metaphor of a party among friends—while party hosts (coders) create and maintain
the party, they are as much attendees as their guests (users). And guests are expected to
contribute their energy, as well as their special skills, in support of a mutually entertaining,
transformative, and empowering experience (Close, 2016). Coders do not hold themselves
above and apart from their systems but rather became some of their most enthusiastic users.
Kelty (2005, p. 193) points to Napster as a particularly influential model of the Internet for geeks
across the world, a technological wonder that “demonstrated something on a scope and scale
never seen before” but which also “connected people according to what they most cared about.”
Music-lovers-come-coders were able to help tweak and improve the platform, forming a
“recursive public” wherein the traditional political models of speech, debate, and argument are
superseded, or at the least augmented, by an emphasis on politics through co-making the very
system within which people engage each other. The open source and hacker movements are
some of the most visible and vibrant examples of this fusion of social engagement, technical
development and political negotiation today (Dunbar-Hester, 2014; C. Kelty, 2005; C. M. Kelty,
2008; Lessig, 2004).
With this history, platforms represent a very different relationship between technology,
crafting, and reproductive labor than has existed previously in the long history of craft. The
production of cloth and other essential goods has been intertwined with technology, understood
as tools created by people to do things, from archaeological times (Barber, 1995). The making
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of thread, for example, began with people twisting fibers together with their hands on their laps
(Barber, 1995). It is easy in post-Industrial America to lose sight of the importance of cloth, and
through it thread, to human economy and society. It’s illustrative, for example, that although the
Industrial Revolution’s steam engines are largely remembered for powering advances in
transportation, “the first major applications of the new engines were mechanizations of the
making of cloth: the power loom, the spinning jenny, the cotton gin” (Barber, 1995, p. 33). Such
technological development in relation to crafting has generally proceeded with the goal of
eliminating the need to craft at all. Each of these technologies sped up and de-skilled the process
of crafting thread, looking forward to a day when no one would need to spend time and effort on
such rote work.
This fantasy of elimination is the relation that governed the introduction of computing
technology to offices as well. Early computers were designed to speed up and make more
efficient what was seen as menial, clerical support tasks of filing, sorting, and retrieving
information. They were machines of bureaucracy, taking over the labor of mostly female
secretarial staff rather than aiding that of the designers, inventors, and artists most identified with
them today (Turner, 2006). The first film with a computer as a central character, for example,
was not War Games (1983), with its climactic intellectual battle between a hacker and an AI in
control of America’s nuclear weapons, but the Tracy-Hepburn romantic comedy Desk Set
(1957). In that film, Spencer Tracy portrays an engineer and efficiency expert who invented the
computer that promised to automate and improve the work of reference librarians, portrayed by
Katharine Hepburn, Joan Blondell, Dina Merrill, and Sue Randall. These computers were the
engines of bureaucracy, cultural hegemony, and war that the countercultural movements of the
1960’s defined themselves against (Turner, 2006).
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Technology that envisions replacing humans with machines often treats sociality between
the workers who remain as a bug, rather than a feature. Just as the massive Desk Set computer
symbolically replaced the friendly camaraderie of the librarians, each improvement in spinning
technology pulled crafters further away from each other. Even in the Arts and Crafts
Movement’s exaltation of the spiritual and political properties of handcraft, for example, women
were encouraged to spin on wheels rather than knit as “the mobility of the latter allowed women
to gather together and talk while producing, an affordance of knitting explicitly valued by indie
craft women today but in previous times associated with feminine distraction” (Luckman, 2013,
p. 252). Etsy and Ravelry, while very different from each other, both begin with sociality and
communication as an essential feature, not a bug. Etsy envisions itself as in partnership with
crafters who operate shops on the platform, such that “when our seller community does well, we
do well,” and institutionalizes this vision through their economic model of supporting the
platform company through commissions and listing fees, rather than advertising. Ravelry is
guided by more of a traditional company-customer philosophy, where “with everything we do,
we start with the question ‘how does this benefit Ravelers?’” (Forbes & Bootstrapped Users,
2013). The materialize this vision economically by supporting the site through advertising—but
only allowing ads that are specific to fiber crafting culture, such as for yarn or spinning tools, to
keep the environment coherent and focused on craft. These two platforms also demonstrate the
interconnectedness of online crafting culture: roughly a quarter of the advertisers on Ravelry are
Etsy shops (Forbes, 2012).

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The Reproductive Labor of Platform Work
Although these technologies do ease burdens of repetitive and secretarial labor, and in so
doing make the platform economy possible, the greater bulk of the work required to operate in
the platform economy is still related to maintenance, in support of creativity rather than creative
in and of itself. Crafters continually emphasized to me that one of their biggest surprises was
how much time and work it took to put up listings for items. Creating a listing includes taking
photographs, considering categorization, crafting titles and keywords for search engine
optimization, calculating shipping for domestic and international customers, and so forth. Once
that had been done, crafters still needed to carefully package, address, and ship items as well as
respond to customer issues. Knitting patterns are not only written but edited for technical issues,
tested by other knitters, laid out graphically on the page, and knit into finished objects which are
then photographed so the pattern shows knitters what the final result must look like. Independent
pattern designers also often pitch their work to fiber crafting magazines and book collections.
This involves extra steps of finding calls for patterns, writing pitches, corresponding with
editorial staff, and often negotiating “yarn support” wherein yarn companies provide designers
with free yarn in exchange for recommending that yarn as a good match for their pattern and
featuring it in their photographs. Designers or yarn sellers who operate Ravelry groups
dedicated to their work must also moderate those forums, troubleshoot or offer advice, and come
up with activities and topics of discussion that will encourage crafters to continue returning to
those forums.
While coders’ technical expertise is foregrounded in descriptions of their work, much of
their day-to-day labor is reproductive. For instance, coders de-bug existing programs, analyze
outputs, and write customized versions of standard processes, such as a log-in page or an
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inventory database. One of the greatest challenges that Etsy’s engineering and coding
department faced was helping the site to rapidly scale up from its initial single web server and
database (Gallagher, 2011). The initial solution they chose, creating a middleware program
called Sprouter to mediate between the site’s public face and its database, ended up causing as
many problems and as much site downtime as it solved (Surge 2011 ~ Scaling Etsy, 2011). The
coders eventually transitioned to implement off-the-shelf middleware and solutions that had been
tested by other companies, concluding “if you’re doing something ‘clever,’ you’re probably
doing it wrong” (Gallagher, 2011; Surge 2011 ~ Scaling Etsy, 2011). This is a far cry from the
image of coding labor as creative experimentation. Indeed, the Senior Software Engineer Ross
Snyder pointed to the desire to create their code in-house, from scratch, as a cause of Etsy’s
technical woes.
I will refer to this kind of work as “reproductive” or “support” labor. Feminists were the
first to theorize this vital but also invisible work, developing concepts like immaterial labor and
emotion work in addition to reproductive labor (Fortunati, 1996; A. R. Hochschild, 2012).
Online, it encompasses what de Kosnik (2016, p. 7) calls a “repertoire” in her analysis of
archives:
a series of actions that [archivists] must perform over and over, which consists of moves
such as paying for server space, processing submissions (even if an archive has an
automated intake process, in which contributors can upload their own content without an
archivist’s assistance, the archivist must still constantly oversee, debug, and improve the
automated system), responding to users’ questions, migrating the data when necessary,
and representing the archive to interested members of the public or press.
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As this description suggests, reproductive labor is heavily site-specific and context-
dependent. Even when the general outlines of the work are the same, each system has its own
quirks that must be understood and worked around and each organization has its own culture that
must be understood and worked within. Crafted objects are often bought, and given, as gifts.
Tami allows customers to gift items anonymously, shipping directly to the recipient, but has had
to develop a special procedure for one of her most popular mugs. This particular mug has the
text “World’s Best Analrapist,” referencing a particular scene from the television show Arrested
Development in which a character proudly proclaims himself an “analyst” as well as a
“therapist”—an “analrapist”—as well as the well-known convention of “World’s Best” mugs.
She credits its inclusion in buzz surrounding the show’s return to the air as allowing her the
publicity needed to craft full-time. Given the joke’s off-color nature, however, she has actually
received outraged messages from the recipients of anonymously gifted mugs who did not get the
joke. She had to create a form email, including a link to a YouTube video of the Arrested
Development scene to which the joke refers, that she sends as a reply. She also treats this
accusation of being a “person who gets her jollies by sending you rude joke mugs” as the one
acceptable time to unilaterally disclose who anonymously gifted a mug. Etsy crafters do a great
deal of custom work. This is one clear benefit of hand-making an object each time—
accommodating custom requests is far easier than when machinery must be modified. Tami tells
me of a surprising number of people, however, who indicate their desire for custom work but
neglect to pass along the details of what they want. She sent one buyer a message with different
options for typography, for instance, asking “which of these J’s do you like?” and was frustrated
to receive back a response of “I love it!” that did not indicate which “J” the buyer loved. Sahara
similarly shakes her head at the number of people who want custom clothing but balk at needing
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to make the time to come in to the studio for fittings. These experiences recall Lynn’s intense
frustration with her time as a customer support specialist and saleswoman for a jewelry
company. She hated dealing with people who “would call the line and have no idea what they
wanted, like ‘I kind of want a ring’…” such that she was stuck on the line with them for long,
painful phone calls. Many crafters who had experience in more traditional customer service jobs
noted that the platform interface gave them much-appreciated distance. Physically manifesting
patience, supportiveness, and enthusiasm for a difficult customer in person or on the phone
requires a great deal of bodily “emotional labor…the display of emotion that is in some way
defined and controlled by management and, as a result, is often perceived as inauthentic” (K.
Miller, Considine, & Garner, 2007, p. 232). Platforms allow crafters to accomplish much the
same result of being polite, professional, and helpful even while rolling their eyes and feeling
irritation.
Unlike the cultural capital of a creative idea or the economic capital of the financial
industry, such investments in support labor are not liquid or easily transferrable—when a
particular workplace closes, be it an auto plant, a tech start-up, or an online platform, workers are
not able to take this accumulated value with them (Dudley, 1994; Neff, 2012). As Alex pointed
out to me, “it’s very time-consuming to set up a new platform, especially when you have 90
patterns. It’s a lot of listings to make and you don’t know if it’s going to do well or not.” This
puts the oft remarked-upon brand loyalty of creative workers for their workplaces in a different
light. Moments like a Project Runway contestant or featured Etsy shop owner gushing about the
positive opportunity that the platform has brought them are often put forward as proof that
creative workers are drinking the Kool-Aid, only a step or two away from false consciousness. I
argue they point instead to workers’ investment in their accumulated expertise in reproductive
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labor, how to maintain and support their work in that particular platform environment. To hold
on to the value of their reproductive work expertise, crafters know it is essential that the system
they already know how to work—and on which they are set up to work—remains the system that
is viable for work.

Not Valuing Reproductive Labor Breaks the Platform System
Obviously, this is not to say that users will never decide to jump ship. These decisions
often indicate the importance of support work: crafters are likely to move between platforms
when the new platform can significantly reduce the burden of maintenance labor they must
perform. Alex had started out as a knitting pattern designer on Etsy. At that time, however, the
site required her to send out a separate email with the .pdf of the pattern each time she made a
sale. This doesn’t sound like much, but those few minutes add up quickly when making several
sales a day. Ravelry launched with automatic .pdf delivery coded in, such that when another
user buys a pattern Alex already has set up in their system, it doesn’t require any work from her
to complete the purchase. She switched from Etsy to Ravelry and didn’t look back, even when
she heard that Etsy “finally” (as she put it) added a similar feature.
But these movements can also be spurred by ideological disagreements and violations of
the implied social contract of the platform. On October 1, 2013, Etsy made a controversial
policy change to the site’s definition of “handmade.” The company began allowing crafters to
partner with outside manufacturers, working more as designers than as handcrafters, per se.
Lynn describes the decision as a “pretty emotional betrayal” which went against the history of
the platform as working with crafters as part of a shared community rather than dictating to it,
particularly on such a central subcultural value as the definition of “handmade.” Unable to sleep,
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she went to her computer and wrote a poem called “I Am Handmade,” not directly expressing
her feelings about the policy change but defining what the handmade meant to her. Lynn posted
it on the Etsy platform forums and went to sleep. She was stunned to wake up and find her post
had more than one-hundred replies from those who shared her feelings and that the poem had
been shared by other crafters across the platform and other social media.
I spoke with many crafters who moved their shops off of Etsy for ideological reasons
after this change. Many were cynical about Etsy’s motivations in allowing sellers to work with
outside manufacturers, arguing that since Etsy’s business model is based on commission and
listing charges, it was inevitable they would eventually privilege high-volume businesses over all
others. That this move came right as the busy Christmas retail season began speaks to the
dedication of the crafters who moved. One popular destination for crafters looking for a new
home for their shops was Zibbet, an Australia-based online crafts marketplace whose servers
crashed when roughly six-thousand new accounts were created overnight (Close, 2014). The
Zibbet platform company was still quite small, with the executive team answering questions
themselves on the forums as the Ravelry employees do. Rather than Etsy’s commission and
listing-based model, Zibbet paid its expenses through a monthly account fee. This seemed like a
better platform structure to many of the disillusioned crafters. But they also found the transition
much more difficult than they had expected. Etsy’s name recognition and platform search
engine optimization set-up meant that crafters whose shops were now on Zibbet had to re-orient
their maintenance work to emphasize outreach and advertising outside of the platform. Tactics
of promoting listings that had worked on Etsy did not carry over to Zibbet. As I spoke with
crafters months after their move, many also noted that the monthly account charges meant they
needed to adjust their pricing calculations—it was a larger share of their budget than they had
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anticipated, especially with slow early sales, and Zibbet did not have the same commission-based
incentive to pull customers to the site that Etsy did. In the end, many found themselves back on
Etsy, but with a profound change in affect. As Lynn put it when she began selling her crafts on
Etsy “it was a lot easier to think of it not quite as just your shopping mall venue” whereas now
“the venue, that’s just your venue.”
For many crafters, Etsy’s policy decision was a tipping point for their growing
dissatisfaction rather than a sudden shock. The emphasis on communication, co-dependence,
and co-creation—communication and creativity as intertwined—has been obscured in the way
that platform spaces have developed. Across the user-coder divide, technological design has
shifted back to automation and the elimination of the need for discussion and communication
rather than the facilitation of it. Etsy, like many other platforms, uses A/B testing in order to
learn about and improve their site. A/B testing, familiar from experimental social science
research, involves splitting a broad pool of test subjects into different conditions so as to gauge
the impact of the different conditions on subsequent behavior and attitudes. For accurate results,
it is essential that the subjects not have broad knowledge of the conditions, including which
condition they find themselves in, as this might cause them to behave artificially. Platforms that
run on big data are, from an experimenter’s point of view, ideal environments for A/B testing. It
is relatively easy to adjust the way a platform website deploys for users randomly sorted into
different conditions, and the massive user base of popular platforms such as Etsy or Amazon
offers great statistical power to demonstrate effects.
For crafters, however, A/B testing can be extremely frustrating. Most crafters, like most
everyday Internet users, are not code literate. Much of their mastery of support labor in the
platform environment comes from collective intelligence, where those users who do understand
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code share their knowledge and others spend a considerable amount of time doing trial-and-error
testing of how sites perform under different conditions (Jenkins, 2008; Lévy, 1997; Nardi, 2010;
Rosenblat & Stark, 2016). When an Etsy A/B test changes the workings of the site without
warning and for only some users, for instance as in May 2014 removing shipping costs from
some item listing pages, it undermines collective intelligence and makes crafters’ expertise in
maintenance work obsolete (Steiner, 2014a). This is particularly difficult for those who depend
on online sales for a significant portion of their income. Barbara, for example, an elderly vintage
seller and clothing crafter told me that in August 2015, “my views and my sales suddenly
dropped out from under me to about a quarter of what they had been…kept getting the same
responses from Etsy administration, which is work on your tags and titles, work on your SEO
[search engine optimization], um, work on your photos. And I did that until I was blue in the
face, and it wasn’t making any difference.” Other users have reported changes to the site, such
as the missing shipping prices, as bugs, and are furious to discover the “bugs” were purposeful
changes that they were not notified about (Steiner, 2014b).
This problem is particularly deeply felt given the extent to which platforms continue to
depend on maintenance work performed by their active, unpaid user communities to continue
functioning. Barbara was one of many crafters who moved their shops to Zibbet, a smaller Etsy
competitor, out of her frustration with Etsy. I asked her if she felt there was a community at
Zibbet, and she explained “this morning someone reported a number of shops selling t-shirts for
under 20 cents and free shipping…it was clearly factory-made junk. And I reported it, and by
this afternoon, that stuff was gone. And I love that. At Etsy, if you reported something, nothing
ever happened.” On the company’s side of the platform, something does happen: a report is
generated and sent to Etsy’s Marketplace Trust and Integrity Team (K. Morris, 2013). Once
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enough reports have been received about a particular shop, or Etsy’s own internal algorithm flags
it enough times, the employee team asks the shop owner in question to document their process.
This exchange is private, however, and so as CEO Chad Dickerson writes, “there are times when
available public evidence suggests that a violation of our policy is clear, and our investigations
find that it’s actually not the case” (Dickerson, 2012). He argues with considerable truth that
doing otherwise would be “operating based on a mob mentality” (Dickerson, 2012). But to a
crafter like Barbara, the platform environment as it is treats her small gift of thought and action
to the platform environment as if it required no response and carried no meaning. The felt denial
of individual efficacy and standing as someone who matters in a community, enough to merit a
response, violates the core principles of participatory culture and the features of digital design
that initially drew people into online worlds (Castronova, 2007; Jenkins et al., 2009)
Many put conflicts like this down to fundamentally opposing interests, with crafters more
interested in the purity of the handmade and Etsy more interested in the economic returns of
high-traffic resellers. Or, as a commentator for Wired philosophically posed it, “Can a
marketplace that made its name as a righteous alternative to business as usual go pro without
losing its soul?” (Walker, 2012). But this framing of the problem confuses the issue rather than
clarifying it.
Coders and crafters both envision themselves according to the dream of doing what you
love: empowered individuals performing productive, creative, inspiring work. This does not
have to mean ignoring the extent of non-creative, reproductive labor that is necessary in order to
also do creative work. Craft has a long history of valuing just this kind of work, associating it
with the sociality of knitting circles rather than drudgery. But as sociality has increasingly been
connected to creativity, those who do non-creative work are increasingly considered as Others,
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not people who are part of the same social group. Talking with Min, a longtime Ravelry group
moderator, about the considerable maintenance work required to keep a large group running
smoothly, she mused that if her group “wasn’t part of Ravelry, then maybe we could hire our
own Casey to do our coding and blah blah blah.” The “Casey” she was referring to is the
husband half of the husband-wife team who co-founded Ravelry. Casey originally coded the
website himself and now does so with the help of one other employee, Christina, in the small
Ravelry team. Min’s phrasing struck me with its instrumentality: “Casey” is a person, “a Casey”
or “our Casey” is a tool to create code. Thinking of coders as tools to create websites and
programs, people who would necessarily need to be hired, rather than as people who also often
take joy in creative making and might volunteer for a project they were interested in, shows just
how abruptly Folk Marxist philosophy-in-practice can stop.
Casey’s site username and staff moniker of “Code Monkey,” a phrase derived from geek
and coder subculture, wryly suggests the feeling that one’s personhood was degraded and
devalued down to the unskilled labor which could be extracted from it. Geek singer-songwriter
Jonathan Coulton expresses both the dream of work as a coder and the often unfortunate reality
with the lyrics “This job ‘fulfilling in creative way’/Such a load of crap” from his popular and
semi-autobiographical song “Code Monkey.” The expression has complicated politics, however,
as it appropriates the racist insult “monkey” to express the alienation of mostly white, First
World, educated men from their labor in a way that people of marginalized identities are already
familiar with.
Etsy CTO (now CEO) Chad Dickerson spoke to the problem of the code monkey at the
tech industry Rails Conference in 2011 (O’Reilly, 2011). His deeply felt talk “Optimizing for
Developer Happiness” reflected on the problem of labor alienation by referencing the dystopic
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worlds of newspaper comic Dilbert’s software development office and the film Modern Times’s
(1936) ultra-Fordist factory. Dickerson particularly references the “Billings Feeding Machine”
from Chaplin’s film, a proposed improvement to the factory that eliminates workers’ need to
take a lunch hour by mechanically feeding them while they continue working on the line, as an
example of “really de-humanizing” work. But then he immediately transitioned to a
contemporary photograph of a software coder slurping takeaway at his desk in front of his
monitors, bringing laughter from the industry crowd as they recognized the similarity and the
growing transformation of supposedly “no collar” technology work into “blue collar”-style
factory labor. At Etsy, Dickerson instituted “Eatsy,” twice-weekly communal lunches wherein
all employees from all departments eat together and chat. Eatsy is regularly referenced in
articles about the company and has come to stand rhetorically as a symbol for its emphasis on
cooperation and co-creation. Dickerson says that with Eatsy “we’ve optimized the lunch hour
for happiness, not just developer happiness but company happiness” (O’Reilly, 2011). Building
on this theme of community and to prevent employees from feeling like code monkeys whose
work was meaningless and out of their hands, Dickerson implemented a quintessentially Web 2.0
system wherein coders continuously deploy code to production and see the impact of their
changes on the live website.
Through these changes, Dickerson attempts to de-alienate coders’ work by transforming
the reproductive and maintenance-focused aspects of their labor into creative work rather than
raising the cultural status of reproductive work itself or improving the conditions under which it
is performed. More than anything else, the existence of a term like “code monkey” in the male-
dominated coding culture but not that of “craft monkey” in the female-dominated crafting culture
indicates who is more surprised to be spending their time doing rote reproductive, rather than
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excitingly creative and productive, work. As feminist scholars of labor have documented under
theories of the “second shift,” even when women enter the paid-labor workforce outside of the
home they continue to be responsible for the traditional support work of an at-home mother—
cleaning, cooking, helping the kids with their homework. Predictions that men would take on
more of this reproductive work as women increasingly became breadwinners themselves have
largely not come to pass (A. Hochschild & Machung, 2012).
Indeed, if the figure of the code monkey envisions programmers instrumentally, as tools
to create code, the more common critique of the platform economy is that corporations view
users instrumentally, as tools to create data (Morozov, 2011). This was reflected above in the
discussion of A/B testing. The problem of the platform economy’s digital surveillance of its
users is not quite that of privacy, which could be addressed by technological fixes like blocking
cookies or even the legal fix of a “right to be forgotten.” It is the extent to which activity
conducted and data created on platforms are enclosed as objects which are the private property of
platforms (Andrejevic, 2002). Much of the visual content of both Etsy and Ravelry, for example,
consists of photographs taken by users and uploaded into the platforms’ systems along with
corresponding meta-data. How the photographs act online is determined by the platforms’
algorithms. Etsy crafter Heather Wells was distressed to discover that while a Google image
search brought up photographs of her handmade chocolate cupcake charms, clicking on one of
her photographs brought the searcher not to her Etsy listing page but to a generic Etsy search
page for “cupcake charm.” Despite her photograph providing the impetus for the internet
searcher to click onto the Etsy platform, “my item was in the top row in the third slot [of many].
There have been reports by other sellers that their item did not appear on the page at all, or it was
towards the bottom of the page” (Wells, 2013). As Gary explained it, “We’re working hard to
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bring in these buyers. We want to keep them looking at our stuff” rather than, as Wells argues,
using her photographs “to lure people to directly competing items” (Wells, 2013). This kind of
algorithmic behavior alienates crafters from the products of their labors just as short-term
contracts and corporate policies do code monkeys.
Gary suggests a fix that runs along a similar logic to Dickerson’s. He told me a lot of
crafters feel that Etsy imagines crafters who run shops on the site as if they were employees, who
would expect the results of their work (like a photograph) to be used in ways that they have no
control over. While some activists in platform culture argue that users should receive a wage for
platforms’ use of their labors, Gary argues it’s the other way around, “I’m paying you to be here.
I’m a customer,” whose listing fees and commissions produce Etsy’s income. Etsy employees,
then, should be the ones doing maintenance work in support of the crafters. Both Gary and
Dickerson’s solutions re-envision their own reproductive labor as creative work which should be
supported by the reproductive labor of others. Dickerson’s ability to implement his change
speaks to the greater power that high-level platform executives have in the platform economy,
but Gary’s solution flips, rather than fundamentally dismantles, the hierarchies of power existing
in the platform ecosystem.

Conclusion
Within the boundaries of Folk Marxism, crafters help each other with support and
maintenance tasks, gifting labor and expertise in impressively selfless ways. But at its heart,
historical Marxism’s collectivism has been largely based on an Us-Them dynamic, wherein labor
and management were mutually defined by opposing interests and power to change things was
distributed entirely between them. What is needed now is to understand how this kind of
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philosophy can grow to deal with a world defined by its interconnectedness and
interdependencies, without resorting to simplistic hierarchies.
For example, many of crafters’ frustrations related to the ways in which Google and Etsy
work together. But it is unclear whose changes caused particular problems. Google’s changes
are highly unlikely to be based in a conspiratorial or profit-driven desire to re-shape the
handmade. Rather, they are likely oblivious to the ripples in the craft platform economy that
follow changes to their image search. As such, these sudden shocks and requirements of re-
learning and re-working are at some level inevitable. Lynn explains decidedly, “If you decide
‘this is my shop, I’m done,’ it’s not going to work. It’s constant, constant, constant work,
constant tweaking, constant learning, your shop is never done…And things change, like ‘my
shop’s doing great, google’s picking it up, and then—this is notorious—google changes things
and you fall off the map. You have to re-learn everything you thought you had learned.” But
this requirement of reproductive labor can never fall just on users—or just on coders.
Essential to reducing precarity and making positive change in the platform economy is
the realization that routine support, reproductive, and maintenance work is essential. When it is
“optimized” such that it looks more like creative work, it creates hierarchies that run counter to
the sociality and communication that form the heart of platform technology.

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The Death of the “Real Job”
This book weaves together insights gleaned from an eclectic mix of both data and
methodologies. I analyze the subculture of crafting as a kind of creative work through three
lenses: ideology, agency, and structure. All three of these perspectives are essential to
understanding why people do what they do, what they actually do, and the impact of those
actions and decisions. I hope that this three-part picture of ideology, agency, and structure
suggests a model for other studies of subcultural labor.
I began with the dream of doing what you love, using a media studies approach to
analyze how dreams of creative work are constructed at a textual level as well as in the
conversations between fans and popular culture. I put these media studies insights in
conversation with my ethnographic interviews with crafters and how they explained their
motivations and what they saw as an ideal working life. From ideology I moved to agency,
using an ethnographic and communication studies approach to analyze what crafters were doing
in practical, everyday terms. There is an internal subcultural hierarchy to crafting through which
crafters articulate and negotiate central cultural values. Their exercises of agency in making
decisions against this framework form Folk Marxism, a philosophy-in-practice that holds great
political possibility for the future. Finally, I zoomed out to place crafters in the broader
technological, social, and economic structure of the platform economy. Here I found that the
very emphasis and value on creativity that structures crafting is shared with many other groups,
particularly computer coders. But it elides the continuing reality that most work is not creative—
it focuses on maintenance and support. Efforts to re-structure one group’s work such that their
maintenance-focused labors act like creative work leads to the creation of hierarchical power
imbalances and much of the precarity against which both companies and crafters struggle.
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It would have been easy to write about crafters through a narrative of the utopian dreams
of DIY careers enabled by digital technology devolving into a dystopian reality of long hours,
low pay, debt, and material insecurity—or a differently dystopian separation between those
wealthy enough to play at their work versus those who needed it to pay their bills. The very ease
of this critique should make us suspicious. Following in the path of queer theory, I argue that we
need to embrace the frivolous in crafting culture rather than “following the tried and truth paths
of knowledge production” that lead to such a critique (Halberstam, 2011, p. 6). Gibson-Graham
(2008, pp. 616–617) argue that “while people have little trouble accepting that [post-capitalist
activities and organizations] exist, it is harder to believe they have any real or potential
consequence” and, if they do, any future other than incorporation into the existing structures of
power. To support movement towards a more just future requires taking seriously existing
sources of cultural strength.
Crafting is a feminine subculture that thrives on joy in making things and being creative.
Recognizing and building on this strength must come hand-in-hand with understanding the
relationship between crafter and non-crafters. The very love and joy in creation that motivates
both crafters and the coders who create and maintain digital platforms becomes a stumbling
block, rather than a bridge over which to unite, when it suggests that the only kind of work worth
doing is creative making. In an interconnected ecology, it is not possible for everyone to be
creative all the time—someone is always working with someone else’s things. The bounded
natures of both me-first and we-first approaches to life are poorly suited to a technological and
ecological environment of intimate interconnections (Haraway, 2016).
The system has been changing so that those with more social power are able to be
creative more of the time, which forces those with less social power to spend less time being
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creative themselves and more time reacting to and supporting the creativity of others. This is
not the result of a conspiracy or bad intentions but of a horror of routine, maintenance-level
work. If not yet to a way forward through what has been one of the more intransigent sticking
points of digital platform and DIY cultures, crafting subculture’s value on making and remaking
even when nothing necessarily gets made gives a place from which to start and an idea of what
an alternative value system might feel like. Handcrafting culture carries within it an almost
singular discourse of valuing routine labor, both for its affective properties and for the
opportunities it provides to socialize or consider other things. Friendship, communication, and
exploratory thought are just as essential as shared values and interests to sustaining participatory
cultures.
I chose to study the subculture of crafting in part because I see it as a best-case case study
for progressive change in contemporary America. Those traditionally marginalized, such as
women and people of color, are both abundant and acknowledged experts in much of the
technical making skills that crafting requires. Major companies in this subcultural space, such as
Etsy and Ravelry, have explicit commitments to creating social change along with producing
profit. No matter how skeptical we may—and should—be about how these commitments are
implemented, cynically dismissing them from the start dramatically reduces potential allies and
ironically evinces much of the toxic individualism that is the object of progressive political
critique.

Why Don’t You Just Get a Real Job?
When I talk about crafters and their lives, I often hear variations on the question “okay,
but why not just get a job-job in fast food or at Wal-Mart or something? Sure, it’s awful and
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degrading, but at least you don’t have to worry about where the money’s coming from, right?” I
hope that the previous chapters have gone some way towards explaining why this is the wrong
question to ask. But in this conclusion, I want to address the question, and the motivations
behind it, more directly.
Understanding the broad strokes of crafting’s historical relationship to work is essential
to analyzing the importance and scope of its contemporary resurgence. In historical terms,
crafting actually has most often been a job-job: work that is menial, steady, and essential to
keeping society functioning at a basic level. Spinning thread and making cloth—as just one
example—were the often boring but ever present work of (mostly) women’s lives for centuries
before the Industrial Revolution (Barber, 1995). This work was never particularly remunerative
when measured by the standards of an hourly wage, but it provided vital economic support
through a combination of the sheer production of household necessities, selling excess crafted
items, and putting crafting skills to work for those who could pay not to have to make things
themselves. That crafting requires a large amount of repetitive labor, interspersed with shorter
periods of concentration and creativity, meant it was also work which could be done while
simultaneously doing other things, particularly taking care of children (Barber, 1995). Thus,
even though crafting rarely ever historically provided a living wage, it effectively allowed
women to pull some surplus value out of time that would otherwise have been “lost”—an
argument made again and again as different parts of the textile manufacturing process were
“outsourced” to women’s homes before being brought back into factories, depending on the
particular technological state of crafting at the time (Macdonald, 1988; M. R. Miller, 2006).
In the contemporary post-Industrial United States where manufacturing has largely been
outsourced, it is easy to forget just how much time and effort producing basic necessities,
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particularly clothing, takes (Barber, 1995; Cline, 2013). The first knitting machine was famously
invented by William Lee, who found himself “annoyed by his fiancée’s preoccupation with
knitting during the courtship but grateful for her financial support (from knitting) during
marriage” (Macdonald, 1988, p. 5). His machine still required a human operator but vastly sped
up the process of knitting stockings in the round, theoretically freeing up his wife’s time and
attention from the labor of textile production. Queen Victoria was less convinced that
automating textile crafting was a desirable goal. She denied William Lee’s patent for the
knitting machines on the grounds that “I have too much love for my poor people who gain their
bread by the employment of knitting to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to
their ruin by depriving them of employment” (Macdonald, 1988, p. 5; Wills, 2007). The feelings
of women like Lee’s wife or the Tudor-era poor about knitting were simply not part of the
equation.
This early skirmish of the Industrial Revolution shows an ideological dynamic that would
repeat again and again in the history of craft production. When a new technology is introduced,
crafters are split into different groups. Those who continue in the “traditional” methods, from
the rural poor to the artisans later exalted by the Arts and Crafts Movement, come to be seen in a
romantic light. Like artists, these traditional crafters require patronage for their work since it is
no longer the essential productive labor it was before the introduction of the technology—they
no longer “make” money (Hyde, 1983). As textile production increasingly moved into factories
during the Industrial Revolution, women, particularly middle and upper-class women, “shifted
into the ‘feminine’ role of purchaser rather than provider of their family’s needs and acquired a
new social importance through their ‘consumerism’” (Macdonald, 1988, p. 175). Crafting went
with them. It became something to be pursued non-commercially—for pleasure as a hobby,
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creatively as an artist, and in keeping with gendered expectations for women and classed
expectations for households, motivations which often blend together (Macdonald, 1988; Veblen,
2009). This last motivation has decreased in importance as more and more of the women who
would have been expected to stay at home have left the house to become breadwinners
themselves. By the late 1980s surveys indicated that the more educated a woman was the more
likely she was to sew, leading some to argue that “now that the American homemaker has gone
to work, the only people who sew are those who like to” (Ambry, 1988, p. 37).
But this is not quite correct. Sewing, like other kinds of crafting, also stayed in factories
and corporate workshops. So far, all new technological methods for mass-scale crafting continue
to require the work of human operators. This kind of crafting require different skills and less
time than does that of the traditional artisans. This difference is often read as an indication that
they require no skills at all—a reading that factory workers convincingly dispute (Dudley, 1994).
Rather, the skills now required are those of working with a particular technology, a knitting
machine rather than knitting needles. Those who enjoy the older, less technologized ways of
working, particularly hobbyists, often argue that technology like knitting machines suck all the
fun out of the craft. But as Charlotte pointed out, there are techniques that can only be
performed and things that can only be made on a knitting machine. Once it has been assumed
that craftwork with the new machines is low skill and no fun, however, then those jobs become
morally lamentable—something to be avoided if possible and over which no tears will be shed if
increasing automation can do them for us. Working to improve the laborers’ conditions, notably
unionizing in the case of textile factories, comes to seem like a stopgap, making the most out of a
bad lot, or at worst actively anti-progress, advocating for a status quo that only those lazy and
unable to dream could appreciate.
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When crafters are told “get a real job,” this is the implicit history of crafting that they
have in mind. The meaning of the “real job” colloquialism has been studied over the last two
decades as a way to understand what people, particularly young people, expect work to be
(Borman, 1991; Clair, 1996; O’Connor & Raile, 2015). Gen X college students largely agreed
that real jobs existed, were desirable, and had the characteristics of paying well, requiring a
college degree, and occurring over a standard full-time 40-hour work week (Clair, 1996). They
were split on whether or not real jobs were rewarding but clear that “a real job means working
for an organization and being paid well for one’s work…Nonorganization affiliated jobs ranged
from artist/musician to solo-entrepreneur. These occupational choices were generally frowned
on” (Clair, 1996, pp. 263–264). Traditional manufacturing labor falls into a classed
contradiction—the college student participants in “real job” studies were adamant that such jobs
were not real jobs for them but aware that they might be such for working class people (Clair,
1996; Dudley, 1994; M. R. Miller, 2006). Such working class real jobs, however, have largely
been outsourced away from the United States (Borman, 1991; Cline, 2013; M. R. Miller, 2006).
Over the course of the 1980s, this work has largely been replaced by the pink-collar and service
industries (Wilson, 1996, p. 27). The service industry jobs were minimum wage and largely
non-unionized, thus lacking many of the characteristics that made manufacturing, transportation,
and other unskilled labor work into working-class real jobs (Dudley, 1994; Wilson, 1996). This
switch was also highly gendered. As the phrase “pink collar” suggests, these new working and
lower middle-class jobs were disproportionately coded feminine and largely filled by women
(Dudley, 1994; Wilson, 1996). People are also often dubious whether this kind of work, as well
as other jobs stereotypically associated with women, such as hospitality, non-profit, and clerical
work, qualifies as a real job (Brien, 2004; Clair, 1996; Tsetsura, 2010).
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Contemporary crafting in the digital platform economy is both outside the structure of a
typical corporate organization or a factory, not particularly remunerative, and highly associated
with femininity. It is no surprise that even crafters don’t generally think of their work as a real
job. But they often do not want it to be one. Many crafters in fact discuss “real jobs” by hand-
signing quotation marks around the words. To crafters, a real job means not only working for an
established business but also doing something that is not particularly meaningful, interesting, or
fulfilling. People who have established work outside of crafting that they enjoy, for instance
working in IT, in a government office, and as educators, don’t call them “real jobs.” Rather,
these are “full-time jobs” and play an important role in helping crafters hang onto their joy and
define for themselves the role crafting will play in their lives.
Real jobs are particularly fraught for women. Many crafter-mothers with whom I spoke
saw raising children in the terms of the “full-time job” and used the same logic of rationing the
amount of time and energy they would give to crafting as did those happily employed outside
their homes. Several Millennial students specifically pointed out “stay at home mom” as a
possible real job (O’Connor & Raile, 2015). But this reflects a classed contradiction that is
highly relevant for crafters who want to have children: stay-at-home mothering is often
positioned as essential to proper childrearing by middle- to upper-middle-class women (i.e.,
these women should not be materialistic and should choose to stay at home for the benefit of
their child)…Low-income mothers are told they do their children the most good by participating
in the paid labor force (Medved & Kirby, 2005, p. 466). Some crafters who wanted to have
children had imagined crafting as ideal work to complement that of raising children, reflecting
the long history of crafting as women’s work. They largely found, however, that the amount of
time they spent working as a crafter seemed to preclude having a child. In this, crafters resemble
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those with real jobs, or at least organization-based jobs, in the creative industries who are
“disproportionately female and child-free” (McRobbie, 2016, p. 2).
In their skepticism about real jobs, crafters of widely varying ages reflect the feelings of
Millennial-generation college students. In a study replicating Clair’s (1996) work with Gen-X
students, O’Connor and Raile (2015) found a great deal of hostility towards the term, with half
their participants rejecting the idea that real jobs existed despite all having heard the phrase
before. When they described what people meant by a real job, Millennials imagined them as
having utilitarian, stable salaries with benefits rather than being well-paying and were split
between seeing a college degree as essential for a real job and arguing that each person should be
able to define what a real job was for themselves (O’Connor & Raile, 2015). This may sound
wishy-washy or entitled. It is neither. It is an optimistic response to a period of extraordinary
joblessness and under-employment.
The assumption underlying the question “why not get a real job?” is that an outside
employing organization makes real jobs stable in a way that work like crafting—or stay-at-home
mothering—is not. As many crafters without full-time jobs pointed out to me, however, it is less
and less the case that working for someone else is more secure than working for yourself. After
the turn of the millennium, both service sector and high skill, high education jobs have also
begun to decline in the United States. Workers in the dot-com bubble found that it was indeed
possible to “lose all the jobs” when an industry collapsed, and the resources such as vocational
social networks and specialized experience upon which they depended to protect from the
admittedly increased possibility of losing one job or having one company fail provided little
support in a large-scale collapse (Neff, 2012). There are surprising similarities in workers’
feelings of self-blame and personal responsibility in the wake of both manufacturing and high-
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tech industrial recession—and public opinion likewise blamed both the factory and the office
workers’s greed, incompetence, and selfish idealism for their industries’ collapses (Dudley,
1994; Neff, 2012). Much pink-collar service and support labor is now being overtaken by
automation and the “self-service” of interactive technology. Both are increasingly also being
sent overseas, as the internet infrastructure makes long-distance service and knowledge work
possible in a way that it was not before. People seeking work today, particularly young people,
have followed time-tested paths to real jobs only to find that the paths which used to guarantee
an aspirant work no longer do, just as factory workers found before them (Dudley, 1994;
McRobbie, 2016; Neff, 2012; O’Connor & Raile, 2015). Many who do hold real jobs, even low-
skill ones, are not getting by based solely on their support. Rather, they cobble wages from
multiple jobs together with government support and other means of income creation—the hustle
(Jacobs, 2015; O’Connor, 2014; Wilson, 1996). Real jobs have become less and less stable,
taking part of more and more of the risks associated with creative and meaningful work but
without bringing their benefits. It’s no wonder crafters are skeptical.

Uniting People in a Culture of Individualism
Real jobs act more as a symbolic resource with which to critique crafters’ decisions than
a real option for material stability. Crafters were sensitive to the critique implied in the “why
don’t they just get a real job” question. When I asked crafters what they would like me to tell
people at large about them, “that we work hard even though we work at home” was a very
common refrain. Rather than seeking to argue that crafting could be a real job, in other words,
crafters responded to the implied critique by emphasizing their work ethic. The work ethic, “the
command to approach one’s work as if it were a calling,” is the most distinctive feature of
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American work culture (Weeks, 2011, p. 42). The idea that working hard is the way to get ahead
is commonsense in America. It reaches beyond the mainstream political divide between liberal
and conservative, i.e. between those who advocate for mandating a living wage and those who
argue it is possible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Both accept the premise of the work
ethic but differ on whether it lives up to its promises or not in the current socio-economic
structure. By pointing out how hard they work, crafters adopt the tactic of many marginalized
groups before them who mobilized the hegemonic value of the work ethic to bolster their
political position (Weeks, 2011). Even though they are not taking real jobs, in other words,
crafters and their work should be valued because of their strong work ethic—stronger work
ethics, many crafters argued, than those of people with real jobs who (in theory) do not have to
figure out where their next paycheck is coming from.
Crafters dream of doing what they love, creating things for themselves and others. This
is a dream shared by many. The flowering of internet-accessible subcultural production makes
this dream seem easy on its surface—as journalist and public intellectual Emily Matchar (2013,
p. 73) puts it, “Like many other professional women I know, I’ve also occasionally fostered
fantasies about quitting my job and opening my own Etsy shop.” These dreams are not created
by media. But they do relate to a broader convergent media environment that celebrates
individual initiative and pursuing your passion to draft a life course that blends work and play.
From reality work television and other DWYL media comes an all-consuming love of work and
craft, one that draws from the idea of the American Dream and demands sacrifice and adherence
to a stringent work ethic. This is what crafters mean when they ask me to tell people they work
hard.
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Despite the importance crafters and the broader culture place on working hard, it is
perhaps the least surprising thing about them. As one Etsy executive told me, “It’s always been
a hustle to make it as an artist, and it’s a hustle to make it on Etsy.” Similarly, the critical insight
that creative work entails long hours and low pay is more a continuation than a divergence. In
developed creative industries such as film, this has been mediated by trade unions that strictly
restricted access to creative work (Caldwell, 2016). Now that it is easier to create and distribute
things without going through such a gatekeeper, it is also easier to avoid the protections those
gatekeepers offered. Concern for the lack of a traditional wage structure comes from a place of
concern for social justice. But it suggests that the existing structure of the wage relation and
work ethic are themselves just and “that all of our work-related goals would be met and the
dominant work values justified if only such work were to resemble more closely the employment
conditions at the middle and upper reaches of the labor hierarchy” (Weeks, 2011, p. 14). Many
crafters actively align themselves against this vision of white-collar work and real jobs, rather
than yearn for it. Crafters are often ambivalent about entering into a traditional employer-
employee arrangement for their crafting work, even when it means more stability and fewer
hours.
Critical takes on DWYL media and creative participatory cultures more generally argue
that they promote individualistic neoliberal subjectivities, pushing the work of self-
empowerment onto people already tired and vulnerable (Andrejevic, 2002; Illouz, 2007;
Ouellette & Hay, 2008). Everything in life becomes a possible area of work but not, as discussed
previously, of salary and other material support. But without a plausible alternative vision, the
critique seems to have a regressive function, urging crafters to ignore their dreams and focus
only on maximizing the economic return for their time in a perversely capitalistic way. Some
123

activist movements take a different approach and seek to unite workers in creative employment,
exploitative real jobs, and the broader digital gig economy around a shared experience of
oppression – the precariat.
But what the history of crafting makes clear is that even crafters do not experience
precarity in a uniform way. Someone who a secure full-time job they enjoy, be that in an office,
as a home-maker, or in the academy, relates to economic culture differently than does someone
struggling to continue working in a creative industry after being laid off, stringing freelance and
adjunct gigs together, or striving to avoid returning to work they find unacceptable. For some,
the instability of income is paramount. As Sahara, Carter, Charlotte, and Billy and Jess pointed
out to me, their actual experience with technology-aided manufacturing makes them skeptical
about highly romanticized images of crafters making everything they sell themselves, by hand.
The volume they produce to make themselves sustainable precludes them working creatively as
designers as well as makers. For others, the hierarchical power dynamics of craft, art, and the
platform economy are central. Crafters like Gary, Lynn, and Barbara fervently oppose the
incorporation of machines into production of handmade goods in their subculture. But their
outrage stems more from the imposition of a different cultural definition of “handmade” upon
them by the hierarchical nature of a platform like Etsy than it does at the idea of machine-aided
production itself, particularly like that envisioned by crafters like Sahara, Carter, and Billy and
Jess. For the knitting pattern designers of Ravelry, precarity comes significantly from the value
on the handmade and material, rather than the intellectual and design-oriented, embedded within
the crafting subculture itself.
Dealing with these diverse problems of precarity requires adjusting initial dreams of what
doing what you love would be like. I do not see these compromises and negotiations as a bad
124

thing, even though they can be quite painful to live through. Rather, they represent the unfolding
practice of “weak,” “poor,” and queer theories that refuse to know the answers to all of their
questions ahead of time (Abbas & Goldberg, 2009; Gibson-Graham, J.K., 2008; Halberstam,
2011). The cultural frame by which crafters largely decide how to negotiate the place of craft in
their lives is not that of the American Dream work ethic. It is that of a different kind of love.
This is a love that prioritizes laughter and retains a sense of humor and wonder. Doing what you
love for the lolz is deeply suspect in the American Dream’s moral order. Indeed, it provides a
hopeful vision of what transgressing the work ethic might look like. Crafters’ joy is more
important and, in the context of American creative work, more surprising than their work ethic.
Platforms like Etsy and Ravelry are not corporate employers in disguise. And given the history
of capitalist corporations, do we really want them to be? The vitality of what crafters are doing
suggest better visions of the future than that. They point to visions of work in a world after
scarcity and in which trends and diversity in creative production are driven by joy, rather than
market calculation. To focus on absence and oppression is to miss what does unite crafters as a
subcultural public.

Folk Marxism
What unites crafters is their Folk Marxism, their shared values of joy in work, of using
things rather than accumulating them, and of exchange as a means of communication. Rather
than acting as an escape, the pleasure crafters feel in creating offers something to value besides
profit and a way to de-couple productive activities from production, creation from the creation of
value. Folk Marxism gives us a conceptual framework with which to understand the ways in
which crafters are doing this and the way these practical changes in how they approach work,
125

including refusing to be paid for it, reverberate out from the lives of particular individual crafters
to impact on the broader culture.
Folk Marxism is not generally something that crafters consciously articulate, but I see its
three central tenets reflected in how crafters talk about their work and make decisions regarding
it. Crafters conceptualize exchange as communicative, rather than accumulative. They prioritize
using objects over buying them, even when this can be a struggle. And, as DWYL lolz suggests,
they prioritize love and joy in work over adhering to a work ethic that demands sacrifice as
ideological proof of their dedication. These are recognizably Marxist principles, but they do not
trace back to political convictions. Rather, they stem from crafters pursuing the shared cultural
values of crafting subculture right where they are in contemporary America. Unlike many of the
counter-cultural movements which previously incorporated craft into their practices,
contemporary crafting culture is surprisingly cross-class. While division obviously exists,
crafters from many backgrounds come together on the central digital platforms of Etsy and
Ravelry. Too often, particularly in popular depictions of Etsy’s growth from a small company
towards a major IPO, these motivations have been cast as necessarily dividing crafters, rather
than allowing each to help the other. It is because crafters within the overall culture have
different positions and priorities that crafters as a kind of public can simultaneously push for
both structural changes—for instance, by foregoing potential profits to protest the power balance
encoded into platform technologies—and develop crafting as a sustainable alternative market
culture.
Scholars and activists have despaired of the precarity entailed in neoliberal individualism
and argue that the individualistic frame linking self-worth and work makes it very difficult for
collective feeling and governance structures to emerge (McRobbie, 2002; Neff, 2012, p. 157).
126

Similarly, despite largely shared critiques of real jobs, “less trust in institutions such as the
government and corporations means people are placing relatively more trust in themselves,
whether or not by necessity,” rather than creating a collectivist mindset (Neff, 2012, p. 15). This
kind of collectivity is emerging among crafters. As a theory of subcultural solidarity, Folk
Marxism points towards the kinds of collective political organization—even if it rarely sees itself
as such—which is emerging as crafters work through the uncertainties of their lives. Crafting
work doesn’t necessarily make good jobs or real jobs in the traditional and hegemonic senses of
the phrases. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. There is a desperate need to re-evaluate
longstanding social templates for success and happiness, particularly in regards to careers. There
is a bigger shift underway, one that reaches to the hegemonic templates of a successful life and
the ideas of labor and why people labor that undergird it. This is not a shift that is happening
naturally, or necessarily in a just manner. Often, the people who are most strongly committed to
the ideologically new ways of life made possible are those with the least to lose, based on their
position in the old system, rather than those with the material resources to painlessly support
themselves through precarious change.

Conclusion
Opportunities for building lives around subcultural dreams now exist that did not exist
before networked communication became widespread across the United States. At the same
time, some pathways for building lives that were previously open have been closed by
technological, political, and social changes. I argue that shared subcultural values are laying the
ground for a new collectivist economic culture. But this leaves an obvious question: what about
those who are not crafters?
127

The cultural frames by which crafters decide whether their crafting is part of life, work, a
work-life balance, or their life’s work are particular to crafting culture. But by providing a rich,
detailed case study of people developing both individually sustainable lives and a collectively
sustainable cultural industry, crafting can tell us a great deal about other presents and possible
futures. In particular, it speaks to the negotiation of meaning in work at a time when
technological automation is taking over more and more jobs which previously required human
time and to how culture is produced in a thoroughly convergent age. There is a utopian
dimension to this way of analyzing recent crafting history. Once we accept that neutral,
objective research is not possible, then our choices of where to situate our analyses and how to
construct our concepts very clearly become political and ethical decisions. I put forward my
analysis as a generative model which imagines possible futures based on rich existing
ethnographic and textual data.

128

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Abstract (if available)

Abstract This book interrogates creative work from three distinct, if interrelated, vantage points: the dream of creative work, the day-to-day reality of doing it, and the techno-social environment in which it is embedded. Put another way, these chapters analyze the ideology undergirding and motivating creative work, the choices made by agents who pursue creative work, and the structures which constrain but also support those choices. By putting my analysis of the ideology, agency, and structure of the creative work of crafting together, I avoid making a moralistic judgment or arguing that crafters are right or wrong to act as they do. Rather, my aim is to understand what and why they do as they do, the cultural frames, material conditions, and sense of self through which crafters come to an understanding of how the world operates. My analysis is continually alive to the possibility of change for the better, seeking out places of strength and possibility rather than closing off potential avenues for change. ❧ The second chapter provides an analytical description of the ideology that underwrites contemporary creative work. This ideology is often described by the acronym DIY, do-it-yourself. Academic and popular intellectual debates about DIY refract and reflect hopes and fears about contemporary cultural, political, and economic change. “Do it” bespeaks agency and activity, but it also invokes the possibility of political compulsion. “Yourself” most obviously refers to individualism, but it also leaves open the possibility of collectivity. In participatory cultural and autonomous Marxist practice, “yourself” is plural rather than singular and translates as do-it-together in emergent collectivism rather than kill-or-be-killed entrepreneurial individualism or passive waiting to be led, organized, and institutionalized (Castells, 2015

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Asset Metadata

Creator Close, Samantha (author)

Core Title Made with love, sold with love? Ideologies and realities of work for American crafters in the Digital Age

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 07/20/2017

Defense Date 05/02/2017

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag craft,crafter,DIY,do-it-yourself,Etsy,feminism,knitting,OAI-PMH Harvest,online platform,platform,Ravelry,sharing economy,small business

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee member), Jacobs, Lanita (committee member)

Creator Email but.no.cigar@gmail.com,sclose@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-405635

Unique identifier UC11264027

Identifier etd-CloseSaman-5563.pdf (filename),usctheses-c40-405635 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CloseSaman-5563.pdf

Dmrecord 405635

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Close, Samantha

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA