<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Johny Radio <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:johnyradio@gmail.com" target="_blank">johnyradio@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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Rachel McConnell rachel at <a href="http://xtreme.com" target="_blank">xtreme.com</a>, Wed Jul 31 15:07:29 UTC 2013
wrote:<br>
>"As one of the founding members, I can say that I am not an
anarchist and anarchy was never one of the goals of Noisebridge....
You can describe it as anarchistic if you feel it fits... but do not
think that means everyone, or the organization in general, will
agree with the label."<br>
<br>
"I" do not label it so. Anarchy simply appears to be integral to the
history, language, and current operations of the place, as described
in my last post-- Anarchy, or something inspired by it, as conceived
by NB members who preceded my arrival here, including the two people
who i understand to be the founders, Jacob Appelbaum and Mitch
Altman. Since NB is politically heterogeneous, I would expect
disagreement on what NB should be. <br>
<br>
The primary Noisebridge decision-making instrument, Consensus, comes
straight outta Anarchist theory and practice. Do you disagree with
that statement? <br>
<br>
Leaderless structure is a core Anarchist principal. Do you disagree
with that statement?<br>
<br>
This is not my idea or label. Personally, I'm not an Anarchist
either (although I agree with some anarchist ideas). I feel the
Consensus concept is flawed. i also feel NB's implementation of
Consensus is flawed. But that has not stopped me from being a
participant in Noisebridge for 3 years. <br>
<br>
"There are lots of fascinating challenges to running a hackerspace
using the purest anarchist collective principles...."<br>
<a href="https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Social_Engineers" target="_blank">https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Social_Engineers</a><span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br></font></span></div></blockquote><div><br>
I wrote that. It's a joke. The idea that we use "purest anarchist collective principles" is obviously a joke, because we don't. <br><br>The other piece you pointed to is titled "Is Noisebridge an Anarchist Hackerspace"[1] and unless the entire article (which Tony asked me, under that title, to write) is just "yes", your assertion that I think that Noisebridge is an anarchist organization is unlikely to be the case. <br>
<br>The piece I wrote debates the point at length, (and isn't even a position that I share any more, clearly, because these days I'm a Stalinist. No, wait, I'm still a Carsonite Mutualist. Or a Macleodian Fourth Internationalist), and one of the points that I stressed is that Noisebridge and hackers in general resist titles, and for very good reasons. One of them being that people who are hung up on terminology aren't really that interesting to spend time with. One of the reasons why I stress that Noisebridge isn't an anarchist space now is because people are explaining, outraged, that it should conform to their idea of an anarchist space, and that is the dumbest argument ever. Noisebridge is just noisebridge.<br>
<br>As I've argued endlessly before, Consensus is as much plundered from the processes of the IETF than it is from Foods not Bombs. Maybe I should have spelled that out more in that article, but I only had four pages.<br>
<br>d.<br>PS please fix your mail client so you don't break threading<br><br>[1] And if you're going to selectively quote it, you can just quote the whole damn thing, so that people don't have to back-derive what I thought I was saying. Here it is, in full:<br>
<br>Is Noisebridge an Anarchist Hackerspace?<br><br>The appropriate answer to this, as with many questions about Noisebridge, will<br>be the one ends up turning into a two hours long conversation, wide-ranging but<br>broadly inconclusive, during which the asker finds themselves cleaning the<br>
bathroom, or soldering a PCB, or drinking some sort of odd and possibly<br>poisonous new apple vinegar drink, and which the askee, learning as much about<br>the answer as much as the questioner, visibly changes their mind six times. <br>
<br>Then, exactly thirty years later, scarcity economics collapses, and we all find<br>ourselves camped inside an abandoned aerogel Bigelow space hotel as it orbits a<br>Legrange point between San Francisco and the Sun. Together we munch on a shared<br>
breakfast designed and dispensed by our bootleg 3D printers, powered by free<br>software, whose code and form have mutated a million times since they were<br>first sketched out until their processes and motives are beyond human<br>
comprehension. That morning, the printers have, for no good reason, output<br>little fortune cookies with the Noisebridge logo on them. Inside the cookies it<br>says "Do you still care about the answer?" They are delicious, and taste of<br>
cider and cinnamon.<br><br>Still, I imagine you're a bit pushed for time, and I only have four pages on<br>this, so let's try something a bit more speedy than that. <br><br>Let us suppose you are struck with that lightning-bolt mood moment that comes<br>
to us all at the space, that premonition of ragequit and outburn, that means<br>that instead of nodding beautifically at your conversation partner, you just<br>want to SORT THIS OUT NOW. What will people say then, when you roll your eyes<br>
and snap at them to answer the fucking question?<br><br>Here then are the snappy answers I'd imagine.<br>"No-one's in charge, so yes."<br>"Well, many of the founders were anarchist, so yeah, I guess so".<br>
"We try to be"<br>"No-one's in charge, so no."<br>"It's not really a place for politics."<br>"They call themselves that, but they don't know anything about anarchism."<br>
"Shut up and hack."<br>"It's a non-hierarchical horizontalist radically inclusive environment."<br>"It is what you make it, so no. Wait, I mean yes."<br><br>Let me just pick one of those, and run it through the static semantic analyzer<br>
suite and see why we should probably talk longer.<br><br>"Because the founders were anarchist, so yeah, I guess so": This is<br>simultaneously the most accurate and naturally the worst anarchist answer ever.<br>
<br>Looking through the old meeting notes, many of Noisebridge's constitutional<br>elements -- most notably, consensus, and the largely non-privileged position of<br>members versus someone who just wandered in off the street -- comes from a<br>
strong belief that Noisebridge should look to recent<br>anarchist-with-a-capital-A-and-a-big-circle traditions in institution-building.<br>People liked the thinking behind groups like Food Not Bombs, had worked with<br>deliberations that came out of the radical feminist, eco protests, WTO protest<br>
traditions, and wanted to imitate what they saw as a more explicitly political<br>dimension to the hackerspaces than they'd seen in Europe.<br><br>That's why we don't have leaders. That's why we actively scan for anybody who<br>
wants to take charge, and escort them to the door. That's why everybody on the<br>board stands on an explicit "the board should have no power" platform. That's<br>why the first ten minutes of Meeting are devoted to people declaiming against<br>
any suggestion that anyone at Noisebridge has privileges beyond anyone else,<br>and then pouring scorn on anyone who seeks to aggrandise it. That's why you're<br>suspicious, already, that the protests of this paragraph hides some hidden<br>
nexus of influence, and have already set upon seeking it out and eliminating it<br>when you're next around.<br><br>There's some pretty obvious reasons why hackers,, makers, and hackerspace<br>makers might be attracted to an anarchistic cluster of institutional ideas. I<br>
think it's uncontroversial to suggest that hacker culture is distinctly<br>anti-authoritarian, and suspicious of centralisation and hierarchies. The<br>culture is not on a mission to unravel or demolish existing structures, but is<br>
certainly determined to route around them if problematic. To be amenable to the<br>hacker notion of progress, reality, including political reality, needs to be<br>flexible and relocatable and repurposable and rational. Monkey power<br>
structures, stolid implacable bosses, creeds, credos and violence are the<br>allergenic nuts in the otherwise chewable nougat of the world.<br><br>(And yes, I know Zuckerberg talked the "Hacker Way" in his SEC IPO documents.<br>
Every generation has its exploits; ever Foundation has its Mule.)<br><br>Hackers have many distractions and obsessions, some of which make them<br>billionaires and some of which make them homeless, but it's fair to say that<br>
most of those behavioural attractors arc their personal histories toward<br>self-empowerment, radical decentralisation, and at least some intent to<br>dissolve away the bonds of power.<br><br>There's a shared vector here, then, with the anarchist project. Hacker utopias<br>
are rarely ones with the perfect admirable execution of state control or ever<br>more svelte technologies of coertion. I don't think that's a coincidence. I can<br>bore you on a separate occasion regarding the deeply-buried tendrils that<br>
connect, at a distance, the separated tribes of these late 20th century free<br>software/free speech/free thinking hackers, and the WTO-fighting, direct<br>action, zapatistas of the same period. <br><br>But if it's all so intertwined, if we're all sisters and brothers, why not wear<br>
the label proudly? Why do we dodge the term? Because hackerdom has also been<br>frequently suspicious of political labels, which means that they will often<br>veer away from self-defining as being a follower of any doctrine, even when<br>
they are exchanging ideas from those political traditions wholesale. <br><br>And possibly the worse reason why you should adopt a label is because some<br>bunch of people in ancient history tried to label the place you try to work in<br>
that way. Who failed to die horribly enough, and left them in charge? Founders<br>should never be trusted.<br><br>You see a Godel sentence or two in here, I hope. Noisebridge's own inbuilt<br>cultural reticence to let itself be defined is part of that very congeniality<br>
to anarchist process.<br><br>In my experience, this is a point of commonality rather than contrast with the<br>anarchist project. For all the depiction of anarchists as unrealistic idealists<br>(or anti-social and violent nihilist), most of the engagingly weird and<br>
righteous and hard work in the movement gets done by people who have<br>insufficent time for doctrine, and a itch, not to watch the world burn, but to<br>build a better society in the shell of the old. "The priority of life and<br>
action to theory and system", as anarchist David Wieck described his view of<br>the philosophy in the Seventies. And as David Graeber described it, the<br>supposed founders of anarchy, like the untrustworthy founders of Noisebridge,<br>
believed the project to be more a sort of "insurgent common sense" than a<br>theoretical framework.<br><br>Of course, the Official History of the Anarchist Project has not exactly been<br>quoted widely for its prgamatic successes: but that is partly because<br>
anarchists (like hackers) are not the ones who usually end up writing the<br>documentation (or the marketing brochures). The last thing those in power --<br>whoever they might be -- might want is a coherent tale of possibility that<br>
describes groups cohering and succeeded without coertion, and without a<br>dictated plan.<br><br>Such possibilities are forever hinted at, though, at the edges of the<br>convenient and conventional story. Some families, happy families, do not live<br>
under threat of punishment or a grand and external plan. The nations of the<br>world, proud of their own order, have no one who looks over them when<br>negotiating with each other. And most importantly for hackers, the tools and<br>
the processes that they use to create and disseminate their own works rely on<br>co-operation and communication more than coertion and fixed roles.<br><br>Hackerspaces take the strongest hint of a potential way to model real world<br>
communities and physical spaces from the lessons learnt dealing with the<br>non-geographical affinity groups of their own backgrounds, and the tools they<br>collectively built to facilitate that growth. Noisebridge in particular, is an<br>
ongoing experiment in how far you can take those principles and ways of living.<br>What happens when you open a place as widely as a wiki, where anyone can edit,<br>and everyone can revert. What happens when you declare that the only rule is<br>
mutual co-operation, and that everyone is responsible for each other? If we all<br>have a lingering distaste for the powerlessness of enforced surveillance,<br>gleaned from a million dead-end jobs and a shared technological knack for<br>
extrapolating subtle instruments of control into their terrifying conclusions,<br>what happens when we deny ourselves those instruments, even when we seek to<br>control our own lives and spaces?<br><br>These are answers that can't be snappily given. You can write all the code you<br>
want, but the only way to see if they work is to execute the program, watch it<br>crash, edit, rinse and repeat. The only real response consists in living out<br>the ideas and seeing what they spell. Is Noisebridge an Anarchist Hackerspace?<br>
Not until everywhere else is an Anarchist Hackerspace too! Or at least, that's<br>the plan...<br><br><br><br><br><br><br><br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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