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The last years saw an incredible proliferation of shared machine shops in a confusing number of genres: hackerspaces, makerspaces, Fab Labs and their more commercial counterparts like TechShops, co-working spaces, accelerators and incubators. Without being comprehensive, the articles collected here address Fab Labs, hackerspaces and hacklabs, but the questions raised reach beyond the walls of each. Shared machine shops figure as the occupied factories of peer production theory – worker owned production units which often look like the perfect illustration of the revolutionary theory on first sight, yet on closer look exhibit all its contradictions. Of the phenomena customarily examined under the rubric of peer production, they are probably as close as we got to an image of a peer produced social fabric – a society of peers.
