[Noisebridge-discuss] Sleeping in the Space AND Death and Taxes

[Al Jigen Billings]

On Dec 23, 2010, at 9:38 AM, Rigel Christian wrote:

> On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 12:02 PM, Al Jigen Billings
> <albill at openbuddha.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Jake, some people don't want to talk to every person sleeping in order to find out *why* they are doing so. They simply want them not to do it, class distinctions or not. I find it amazingly stupid that y'all spent a month of arguing at great length about this recently and yet here it is again. Is it a hackerspace or a hippie crashpad, people?
>> 
> 
> In all seriousness, this is so much horseshit. Seriously, if you could
> get this kind of compression ratio on actual data you'd be a
> gazillionaire.

 Sweet, I'll file a patent.

> You are in essence saying here "although I'm not too busy hacking to
> be irritated by people who will not comport with my idea of the rules,
> I am too busy to show empathy or concern for a fellow human being, and
> so will instead hide behind those rules in order to criticize these
> People Doing Things I Dislike. Furthermore, I will dismiss out of hand
> a concern that some have brought up as relevant without first showing
> that it is irrelevant or at least ignorable in the broader scheme of
> things."
> 
> Theres a few more embedded assumptions and values there, but I dont
> have time to type them all up, frankly. I'm hacking my food at the
> moment.

You're a bit confused here in your effort to get a diatribe against me out.

I'm not a member of Noisebridge. I dropped out more than a year ago (more like a year and a half ago), voting with my feet and my wallet. I'm not hiding behind any rules nor being too busy to care because I'm not part of a community that allows random homeless people to occupy my space and sleep there. I've worked with homeless before, as well as done volunteer work in prisons, but social justice is not my primary concern when I want to work with my makerbot or build something. If the goal of Noisebridge is to provide a free crashpad to anyone in the Mission, have at it.

My point, which you blithely ignored, is that the "sleeping in the space" problem is symptomatic of a set of issues (and ways of resolving or not resolving issues) which strikes me as part of the reason that people have quit paying dues at NB or otherwise financially supporting the space. You could say that I'm completely wrong but you didn't do so, instead deciding it would be more interesting to talk about me and my motivation. This probably supports the point that I was making since it is just making something *more* personal and drama filled, rather than less. People don't want to be a member of a hackerspace, for the most part, as a grand social experiment. They want to hack. They want to make things. They don't want to have long political meetings to arrive at consensus on a problem only to have people start the whole thing over again (and complain about how they are oppressed when people don't like it) a month or so later. Noisebridge has a governance problem, from what I see, and people are deciding it isn't worth the effort. 

Obviously I'm biases because I decided it wasn't worth the effort a long time ago but given that I've personally seen NB people quit and go elsewhere more recently, I don't think it is just my bias, Rigel.

If you feel inclined to flame me, please reply directly as I won't see list only replies since I'm on digest.

 Al