This is interesting but I don't particularly agree with the analysis of why things happened the way they did.
For one thing, my critique of the makerspace cultural vibe would NOT be that people were too into funko-pop-ism but rather that people were constantly trying to sell this idealism of 'you could make anything!!!' without really either having or teaching the skillset of figuring out *how* to take a project from concept to completion. Or how to identify the technical skills you'd need and aquire them.
Which is notable because I also have been to a lot of community art spaces that are WAY better at this! I mean those are hit and miss also. But there's at least one I can think of where if you turn up being like 'hi I want to make a giant wearable sculpture of a bug and I haven't made anything like that ever' they will Make That Happen. Like: heres how you sketch an idea, here's practical questions to address, here's materials we have on hand as construction options, heres people who will show you how to work with those materials.
And like. Hypothetically there could be / could have been maker spaces like that. But in my experience they were all like 'Wow look at our cool printers!!! You can make anything!!1!' And they'd have like. A basic checkout process for How To Use the printer or the laser cutter or whatever. But beyond 'you feed a file into it and it does the thing' you were on your own?
And that is pretty much why most people never made it past 'print some cool thing I found on thingiverse' hence fidget spinners and little articulated animals and whatnot.
AND THEN ALSO I spent some time in engineering college circles where there are a bunch of people around who know how to 3D model (actually kind of an annoying skillset to aquire tbh. But that's another can of worms.) And also had a very 'we can fix things, we can interface with reality' mindset so there would be like, the broken button on the drinking fountain in the mech e building had a 3D printed part repairing it and so on.
But even then it never became a huge part of the landscape. Because the OTHER thing you realize when you get this far into it is that 3D printed objects kind of suck. ESPECIALLY the makerspace lowest common denominator 'PLA extrusion printer' output. It's not only a piece of plastic shit, it's actually *worse* quality than the previous quality benchmark for cheap plastic (injection molding). It's made of thin layers of a plastic that is both soft and brittle. The layer adhesion is iffy and even when good it's not strong. The surface is ridged and trying to smooth it is futile because it just scratches and gets rough and nasty. And that's once you get *past* having to redo the first layer three times and watch it like a hawk because if the base layer doesn't stick evenly to the platform the whole print is screwed and you get a nasty lump of plastic that isn't even the right shape.
And yeah there are other 3D print technologies! There's other plastics and other deposition tactics and even metal printing and etc etc. But all of those are ALSO more fiddly in the details than you might think, in ways that limit their application or make them impractical for casual use. And fundamentally they all still have layer boundary issues because that is the Whole Gimmick of 3D printing. That you are making it in layers.
If you want to get around that you can do CNC milling or make molds or any number of other things. (Lost wax casting is an ancient technique! You can do it in your kitchen probably!) But everything has its process specifications and limitations.
If I had to put my finger on one thing that I think went wrong with makerspace culture, it would be the mass misimpression that 3D printing was somehow a way AROUND the issue of process. That it was a way to transmit concepts directly into reality without having to know how to do anything to make that happen. And the way people kept trying to sell each other on this idea, actively impeded the development of a collective knowledgebase for how to use the actual process of 3D printing effectively.
To which the 3D printed gun thing is an interesting exception! People worked on that for years. And for a long time, I assumed they would fail, because of the whole thing where 3D printed plastic parts are shit. But they succeeded! It is a solved problem, there is now a whole technique for printing guns! I don't know much about it, other than it took a lot of troubleshooting on the basic end of getting the material quality of the parts to hold up to what was needed. So again: becoming expert in this specific fabrication process and its foibles.
As far as I know, this happened with guns for a specific combination of reasons: regulation of the production of guns and gun parts, and the discreteness of 3D printing. You can make your own 3D printer, no one even necessarily knows that you have it. Nothing about the printer itself is incriminating of the fact that you made gun parts on it (except the print files). There's almost certainly other fabrication processes that would be much more suited to making guns, but they don't offer the degree of secrecy and obfuscation 3D printing does. Because people were very invested in the project of coming up with an untraceable way to make guns, they solved the not-insignificant material quality problems 3D printing presents, for their use case.
The only other use in which 3D printing has really persisted, to my knowledge, is rapid prototyping - in the sense of being able to quickly make mockups of objects you've 3D modeled and see how they are as physical shapes (made of shitty plastic). You have to be Pretty Damn Good at 3D modeling for this to be more worth your time than like, making a papier-mache mockup over a tape-and-newspaper core. Or making it out of cut paper, or wire, or something.
My point is, I think there absolutely is a hunger to learn how to make things and maintain things, and design and modify things. And makerspaces as a cultural shtick came out of that hunger, but I think many of them got drawn off into Gadgets Of The Future! excitement and lost track of the basic necessary skillbuilding, which is first around learning how to analyze a problem or break down an idea into workable parts, and second of all about the techniques associated with any fabrication process.
The sort-of-sucessor to the makerspace phenomenon seems to be an upswing of the concept of mending? I see lots of like, repair nights at the hardware store, clothes-mending nights at the secondhand store, etc. Which I think has the potential to be really cool! Certainly other foibles are potentially in play, more along the cottagecore-ism faultlines than the gadget-ism ones. But I do think, learning a specific material process (like darning or whittling) is a more tractable way in to the skillset of being able to modify your physical environment, for anyone who isn't already coming from a background of proficiency in computer modeling. And I think many people will find these sorts of skills more applicable to the objects in their life they want to modify or mend, than the ability to make hypothetically anything out of shitty layered plastic.
