“We’re going to create a new class of artisans…” (45) says Tjan in Makers. And indeed, the book is about frontiers in many forms. This is represented by a literal move away from Silicone valley, and the ebbs of the dot-com-boom, by our Carraway-esque heroine, Suzanne Church. “Suzanne had heard a lot of people talk about giving up on the Valley since she’d moved here.” (58). She discovers, like the reader and like the tech industry, that the future is elsewhere. In her case, elsewhere is the seemingly egalitarian workshop of Perry and Lester in a charmingly decaying Miami suburb: “The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.” (71). This perhaps begs the question: are frontiers harder to establish in metropolises with endless competing startups, thirty dollar hamburgers, and two thousand dollar single-bedroom apartments?

A revision:

“The great cities of commerce like New York and San Francisco seemed too real for her, while the suburbs of Florida were a kind of endless summer camp, a dreamtime where anything was possible.” (71). This perhaps begs the question: are frontiers harder to establish in metropolises with endless competing startups, thirty dollar hamburgers, and two thousand dollar single-bedroom apartments?