Language, information and the virtual space were distinctive features of the previous generation. Craft, matter and the fusion of the digital and the material are defining generation M, the first generation of the 21st century.El lenguaje, la información y el espacio virtual fueron las características distintivas de la generación anterior. La creación, la materia y la fusión de lo digital y lo material son los elementos que definen a la generación M, la primera generación del siglo XXI. Este ensayo explora las implicaciones materiales, sociales y ecológicas de estas transformaciones, y argumentan por un posthumanismo autónomo y alter-ontológico: compostar las vidas y ecologías de lo cotidiano para nutrir mundos justos en los que se pueda vivir

Papadopoulos, Dimitris

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#PAPADOPOULOS, D. (2014). Generación M. Materia, creadores y microbioma: compost para Gaia. Revista Teknokultura,
Vol. 11(3), 637-645.
Recibido: 03-04-2014
Aceptado con correcciones: 07-07-2014
Aceptado: 25-07-2014
Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes:
Compost for Gaia
Generación M.
Materia, creadores y microbioma: compost para Gaia
Dimitris Papadopoulos
University of Leicester, School of Management. UK
d.papadopoulos@leicester.ac.uk
ABSTRACT
Language,  information  and  the  virtual  space  were  distinctive  features  of  the  previous
generation.  Making,  matter  and  the  fusion  of  the  digital  and  the  material  are  defining
generation M, the first generation of the 21st century. This essay explores the material, social
and  ecological  implications  of  these  transformations  and  argues  for  an  autonomous,  alter-
ontological  posthumanism:  composting  everyday lives  and ecologies  to nurture  liveable  and
just worlds.
Revista Teknokultura, (2014), Vol. 11 Núm. 3: 637-645 http://teknokultura.net
ISSN: 1549 2230 637
Dimitris Papadopoulos
Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia
KEYWORDS
Ecology, hackers, justice, maker movement, technoscience.
RESUMEN
El lenguaje, la información y el espacio virtual fueron las características distintivas de la
generación  anterior.  La creación,  la  materia  y  la  fusión  de  lo  digital  y  lo  material  son los
elementos que definen a la generación M, la primera generación del siglo XXI. Este ensayo
explora  las  implicaciones  materiales,  sociales  y  ecológicas  de  estas  transformaciones,  y
argumentan  por  un  posthumanismo  autónomo  y  alter-ontológico:  compostar  las  vidas  y
ecologías de lo cotidiano para nutrir mundos justos en los que se pueda vivir.
PALABRAS CLAVE
Ecología, hackers, justicia, movimiento de creadores, tecnociencia.
http://teknokultura.net Revista Teknokultura, (2014), Vol. 11 Núm. 3: 637-645
638 ISSN: 1549 2230
Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia Dimitris Papadopoulos
1.  Language,  information  and  the  virtual  space  were  distinctive  features  of  the  previous
generation. Craft, matter and the fusion of the digital and the material are defining generation
M, the first generation of the 21st century. 
2. Generation M makes stuff. Not through mass production but by tweaking and expanding
the  capabilities  of  existing  things  and  processes.  The  maker's  craft:  hacking,  tinkering,
stretching, knitting, inventing, weaving, forking, recombining.
3. Making starts from what is there. Intensive recycling. Immediate caring. Generation M lives
in  a  terraformed  earth:  climate  change,  toxic  environments,  the  6th  extinction,  soil
degradation, energy crises, increasing enclosures of the naturecultural commons. It encounters
these harmful life thresholds with response-ability for the limits of productionism. Production
does  not  characterise  generation  M's  mode  of  life—co-existence  does.  Responsible
terraformation. We make as we co-exist in ecological spaces. 
4. Generation M is all about collaborations that create the very material conditions we live in.
But  these  are  neither  collaborations  between  individuals  or  minds,  nor  social  cooperation.
These are collaborations between diverse material and symbolic forces of living matter and
abiotic  matter.  Beyond  the  masculine  and  able-bodied  logic  of  expansive  productionism
making is, literally, about creating and maintaining relations and exchanges in proximity (not
necessarily spatial or temporal promixity). 
5.  It  is  about  making  life  with  other  beings  and  material  formations.  The  organisational
principle of this mode of existence is neither the singular subject nor the network nor the pack
but  the  communities  of  species  and  things.  The  microbiome  is  a  manifestation  of  this
principle: to be invaded and to let oneself be invaded by bacterial communities, to be a host
and  to  be  under  attack  simultaneously—co-exist,  exchange,  change—in  order  to  form  a
sustainable  life.  From the sterile environments of network society,  cognitive capitalism and
Revista Teknokultura, (2014), Vol. 11 Núm. 3: 637-645 http://teknokultura.net
ISSN: 1549 2230 639
Dimitris Papadopoulos
Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia
the  knowledge  economy  that  characterised  the  previous  generation  to  the  wet,  contagious
involutions of interspecies and multi-material communities. 
6.  Making is uncomfortable with both the mass production of the Fordist  era and the lean
production of the post-Fordist period. We move from industrialism through immaterial labour
to  embodied  manufacturing;  from  the  factory  through  the  social  factory  to  communal
production.
7.  Generation  M's  work  is  self-organised  and  community  managed.  Post-Fordism  is
characterised by the flexibilisation and precarisation of work. Precarity is institutionalized in
the  public  and  private  sectors  and  presented  as  unavoidable  for  society  and  economy.
Responses that oppose precarity (as trade unions occasionally do) or fantasize zero work (70s-
80s social movements and their revivals)  become irrelevant as work in the M age becomes
inextricable from our very ontological make-up.
8. The digital and the material fuse. The digital alone is no longer the drive of social life and
innovation. There is no opposition between matter and code. Everyday objects are digitalized
and interlinked within the web of things.
9.  Technoscience  is  more  than  knowledge  and  innovation.  It  is  the  immediate  and  vital
environment which the first generation of the 21st century inhabits. The participation in and
the  appropriation  of  technoscience  is  essential  for  Generation  M's  self-organised  and
community managed work.
10.  Financialisation,  algorithmic  valuation  and  the  virtualisation  of  money  served  as  the
engines  for  strengthening  the  trembling  economies  of  the  Global  North  in  the  previous
decades.  But  together  with  the  creative,  digital  and  service  industries  they  now  become
conservative  and  conventional  socio-economic  sectors.  Micro-manufacturing  and  hacking
percolates into these sectors and transforms their social and material composition.
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Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia Dimitris Papadopoulos
11. Various social movements prepared the ascendance of generation M by defending social
rights,  expanding  the  commons,  creating  open  software/open  science/open  hardware,  by
fighting for a real democratic, equal and just access to material and symbolic resources against
racist, sexual, gender and geo-political exclusions.
12. Social movements in the M age make a step further. They will not only act politically and
institutionally to defend the commons but immerse in immediate, real, material practices for
commoning life and the environment. A new cycle of social antagonism is emerging, one that
unfolds  through  molecules,  tissues,  composite  materials,  energy  flows,  cross-species  love,
mundane caring for others we live with.
13. This is ecological transversality—the transfer of substances, processes and practices across
disparate material registers and communities of life. Today, we are stuck in the process of
translation.  As  much  as  translation  is  necessary  it  captures  only  a  small  part  of  the
communication  between  disparate  communities.  Rather  than  through  translation,
communication happens through involuntary infections and contingent permutations between
organisms or substances that attract each other.
14.  Making  is  always  located  in  mundane  interactions  and  encounters  across  divergent
ecologies.  This  is  the  unintentional  gift  economy  of  matter  and  cross-species  action.  The
maker's worlds always contaminate each other laterally. Drifting matter. Stuck in translation,
we believe in the one universal world of communication and value. 
15. This is the underlying trope of the anthropocene narrative: We terraformed EarthTM! We
have created this mess! Against the anthropocene story as the ultimate popular and intellectual
fantasy  of  ecological  guilt  and  techno-redemption  a  new  practical  imaginary  captures
Generation M: Another world is possible! Another world is here! A world that challenges the
oppressive  universalism  of  the  maker-of-one-world.  Generation  M  inverts  terraformation:
neither the making of one single ontology nor the making of multiple ontologies, but grounded
making: the non-anthropocentric making of alter-ontologies. From alter-globalisation to alter-
ontologies.
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Dimitris Papadopoulos
Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia
16.  Making::composting.  Everyday life  as  something  that  can be composted,  as  something
that has the capacity in the right conditions to change its ontological constitution in ways that
avoid  erosion,  toxicity,  and  acidity.  To  compost  is  to  sustain  an  environment  that  allows
mixtures of organic residues to  decompose and transform into new organic compounds for
nurturing the soil  and growing plants;  to compost  everyday life  means to contribute to the
emergence  of  new  mixtures  of  social,  biotic  and  inorganic  materials  that  nurture  liveable
worlds. 
17. Surveillance and control of the virtual space (think NSA) is destructive and oppressing,
but a similar type of surveillance on the material level would be truly terrifying. The direct
surveillance  of  bodies  and ecologies  on  a  chemical-molecular  level  will  cause unbelievable
pain and install  totalitarian control.  Generation  M feels  this  danger.  The hope is  in  acting
autonomously  to protect our  own bodies  and the eco-bodies from the malignant  growth of
material policing.
18. Some of the infrastructures of generation M's autonomy are already under construction.
Justice engrained into the material constitution of our lives. Striving for institutional justice is
not enough. Justice needs to be fought for on the level of matter and through close alliances
between engaged groups of animals and plants, committed groups of humans and accessible
material objects.
19.  The  hype  of  human-nonhuman  mixtures  cannot  sustain  the  commitment  to  material
justice.  Posthumanism  and  actor  networks  are  not  good  enough  for  this.  An  autonomous
political  posthumanism emerges  in  the  infrastructures  of  the  M era:  political  autonomy as
material  interconnectedness;  being  in  the  quantum  vortex  of  constant  interdependences;
knowing and naming one's allies;  building communities of justice,  that  is  action groups of
committed humans and engaged non-human others.
20.  Generation  M  is  not  a  'post'  generation.  Generation  M  is  in  the  making.  Compost.
Generation M does not announce something definite and new; it  is  the first  generation that
makes  itself—literally.  Many  things  are  possible  and  many  worlds  can  emerge  within  the
situated constraints of our material interdependences.
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Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia Dimitris Papadopoulos
21. M for matter, M for manufacture, M for material, M for making, M for makers, M for
microbiomes. 
22. M for Gaia.
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Generation M.
Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia
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Generation M. Matter, Makers, Microbiomes: Compost for Gaia

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