[Noisebridge-discuss] Thoughts on Hackerspace Culture

[Jenny Ryan]

Hello Noisebridgers,

We at Sudo Room (forming Oakland hackerspace) are currently in the process
of creating our culture, iterating ideas for egalitarian governance models,
and most importantly, coming up with creative membership modalities that
reach beyond the bounds of the current incumbent system.

doing some research i came across this and thought i would share:

via Johannes Grenzfurthner/Frank Apunkt Schneider
(monochrom<http://www.monochrom.at/english/>
):

HACKING THE SPACES
A critical acclaim of what was, is and could be a hackerspace (or hacklab,
for that matter)

// Hackerspaces 1
// History

The history of the so-called hackerspaces expands back to when the counter
culture movement was about to make a serious statement. In the decade after
the hippies attempted to establish new ways of social, political,
economical and ecological relationships, a lot of experiments were carried
out concerning the construction of new spaces to live and to work in.


These were considered as niches to relieve and rescue people from the
monotonous way bourgeois society directed civic spaces from kindergartens
to cemeteries to be exactly the same and to reproduce its patriarchal and
economical order.


The politics of establishing open spaces were meant as explicit statements
confronting a capitalist (and in the East: an authoritarian communist)
society whose very structure, purpose and operating mode were broadly
considered to "alienate humans", to take control of and to modify their
basic human needs and relationships.


Thus, the failed revolt of the sixties survived and flourished in the
shadows of a ubiquitous bourgeois lifestyle. And the idea of change was
conjured up from nebulous lysergic dreams and pathetic speeches to get
one's dreams and/or feet back on solid ground - to be dis-obamaized, if you
like.


This conversion gained its popularity because macro-political hippie
dreaming ("I had too much to dream last night" as the title of a classical
psych pop tune by 'The Electric Prunes' put it) had completely
deteriorated. The hippies learnt that social and political change demanded
more than just joining the mantra of posters, pop songs and drug fantasies
that were promoting it. The real world was way too tough to be impressed by
a bunch of filthy bourgeois drop-outs mantra-ing about change. The
capitalist imperative of the real world was way too effective to really be
changed.


And yet, when it all was over in 1972, some of the people involved were not
ready to give in and give themselves over to the system and to fade into
integration - hence the launching of micro-political tactics. Instead of
trying to transfer the old world into a new one people started to build up
tiny new worlds within the old world. They made up open spaces were people
could come together and try out different forms of living, working, maybe
loving and whatever people do when they want to do something.


It is necessary to have a look at the historical development of political
movements and their relationship to spaces and geography: the students'
revolt of 1969 was driven by the idea of taking back places and
establishing a different psychogeography within the maze of the city
through détournement. Likewise, the autonomia movement of the late 1970s
that came to life in Italy and later influenced people in German-speaking
countries and the Netherlands was about appropriation of spaces, be it for
autonomous youth centres or appropriation of the airwaves for pirate radio.


Thus, the first hackerspaces fit best into a countercultural topography
consisting of squat houses, alternative cafes, farming cooperatives,
collectively run businesses, communes, non-authoritarian childcare centres,
and so on.


All of these established a tight network for an alternative lifestyle
within the heart of bourgeois darkness.
// Hackerspaces 2
// Present

Hackerspaces provided room where people could go and work in laid-back,
cool and non-repressive environments (well, as far as any kind of space or
environment embedded into a capitalist society can be called laid-back,
cool and non-repressive).


Sociological termed "third spaces" are spaces that break through the
dualistic scheme of bourgeois spatial structure with places to live and
places to work (plus places for spare time activities). They represent an
integrative way that refuses to accept a lifestyle which is formed through
such a structure. This means they can come to cooperative and
non-repressive ways of working on e.g. technical problems that may result
in new and innovative solutions. And that's exactly where Adorno's "Wrong
Life" could slip in too.


The Capitalist system is a highly adaptable entity. And so it isn't
surprising that alternative spaces and forms of living provided interesting
ideas that could be milked and marketed. So certain structural features of
these "indie" movement outputs were suddenly highly acclaimed, applied and
copy-pasted into capitalist developing laboratories. These qualities fit
best into the tendency in which -- by the end of the seventies -- bourgeois
society started to update and re-launch using the experiences gained
through countercultural projects. Mainstream harvested the knowledge that
was won in these projects and used it. Normalizing dissent. Uh yeah.


Thus, the sixties revolt and all the micro-revolutions that followed turned
out to be a kind of periodical refreshment. As a system, capitalism is
always interested in getting rid of some of its old-fashioned oppressive
traits that might block its overall evolution and perfection. As an
example: eco-capitalism became trendy, and it was quite effective
generating capitalist "good wealth" and capitalist "good feelings".


Hackerspaces today function differently than they initially did. When the
first hackerspaces were formed there were always clear distinctions (an
"antagonism") between "us" (the people resisting) and "them" (the people
controlling). Certain people did not want to live and toil within the
classical bourgeois working scheme and refused to be part of its
ideological and political project for some pretty good reasons.


The otherness of the spaces back then was determined by the consistency of
a bourgeois mainstream culture on the basis of a dualistic cold war world
order. Here again they proved to be third spaces of a different kind:
neither state nor free trade capitalism. And being structural and
ideological different from that had been an important political statement
and stance.


In a society easily distinguished into mainstream and underground
categories, each activity carried out within the open space of such an
underground was a step from the wrong direction.

The very practice of making personal use of alternative structures came
with assurance of being on the good side. But post-cold war society
established a different order that deeply affected the position of the
hackerspaces.


While on the one hand it got harder and more repressive, the system (a
clever one!) learned to tolerate things that are different (in the pipeline
of integrating or assimilating them) and to understand that it always has
been the edges of normality where the new substance grows. Milking covert
culture.


Before that, the open intolerance and often brutal oppression carried out
against countercultural spaces only made them stronger and their necessity
more evident (at least where society didn't succeed in crushing them).


Thus, alternative life forms were applied ideally as a rejuvenation of what
was old, boring, conservative and impotent to progress and adapt in an ever
changing bourgeois present. New ways to solve technical (and aesthetical)
problems were cooked up in the underground and bourgeois talent scouts
watched closely to occasionally pick this or that, just as it happened in
the field of pop music with the so-called alternative rock of the nineties.
Alternative mainstream, ahoi!


On the other hand, the nineties marked the triumph of liberal democracy, as
Slavoj Žižek writes: "The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 marked
the beginning of the 'happy 1990s'. According to Francis Fukuyama, liberal
democracy had, in principle, won. The era is generally seen as having come
to an end on 9/11. However, it seems that the utopia had to die twice: the
collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did not affect
the economic utopia of global market capitalism, which has now come to an
end." It's thus highly ironic that geeks and nerds, while watching the
death of liberal democracy in its political form (civil liberties granted
to keep the social peace) as well as its economic form (crisis) turn to
become liberal-democratic defenders of an ideology that has already failed.


Without the political demarcation lines of a cold war society,
hackerspaceschanged sometimes without even noticing it. The political
agenda was
mushroomed by individual problems that techno nerds tried to solve in nice
fearless atmospheres, non-aggressive states where the aggressiveness of the
market was suspended; where one could discuss technical and creative
problems and challenges politely with likeminded people.


As such, the political approach faded away on *en route* into tiny geeky
workshop paradises. The micro-politics failed on the same scale and to the
same extent as older macro-political projects got pulverized through the
irreversibility of capitalism. The idea of having a revolution (of whatever
kind) was domesticated into good clean reformism, and the only revolutions
that lay ahead were the technological semi-revolutions of the internet and
its social web sprouts.


Without former political agendas hackerspaces turned into small places that
did not really make fundamental differences. Comparable to the fall of
squat houses becoming legal in status and turning into new bourgeois
housing projects where the cool urban bohemians live their lives commuting
steadily between art world, underground, IT-business and advertisement
agencies.


This may not be the case for all the hackerspaces out there today, but it
should be noted that most have travelled along the same paths.
And while for a long time the macro-political scheme had worked quite well
to provide the inherent difference that had been attached to all of the
activities carried out in hackerspaces (even to things as trivial as
soldering, pottery lessons or juggling trainings), it is missing now. And
due to this deficiency hackerspaces can no longer be shaped and politicized
on a broader scale. And that clearly means that whatever we might do: our
hackerspace communities remain constricted; nothing more than nutrient
fluid for breeding human resources. (Soylent Google is made of people!)
// Hackerspaces 3
// Future

So what can be done about this? Actually, it is not very hard to find
something to protest against. Surveillance, whatever. It's no problem to
use the prefix "anti". Use rule 76 - as long as you can think about it, you
can be against it. But that's just too simple. Never before in the history
of bourgeois society has everything been as fucked up as it is right now.
But what is lacking amongst all the practising going on in hackerspaces is
a concise theory of what bourgeois society is like and what should be
attacked by us building and running open spaces within that society.


The lovely alternative approach we share should be grounded in such a
theory, which is to be read: a political agenda that lends some
revolutionary glam to what we are doing on a daily basis making technical
gadgets, networking through the world, or utilizing our technological and
programming skills.
To get there we really need a more explicit sense and understanding of the
history of what we are doing, of the political approaches and demands that
went into it long ago and that still are there, hidden in what we do right
now.
So to start off we would like to organize some workshops in the
hackerspaceswhere we can learn about the philosophical, historical and
other items that
we need to get back in our lives. Theory is a toolkit to analyze and
deconstruct the world.


Plus, we need to reflect and understand that the hackerspaces of today are
under the "benevolent" control of a certain group of mostly white and male
techno handicraft working nerds. And that they shape a practise of their
own which destines most of the hackerspaces of today. (It is hard to
understand that there are hackerspaces in certain parts of the US that
don't have a single African-American or Latino member.
But we'd like to keep our European smugness to ourselves. We have to look
at our oh-so-multicultural hacker scene in Europe and ask ourselves if
hackers with a migrant background from Turkey or North-African states are
represented in numbers one would expect from their percentage of the
population. Or simply count your women representation and see if they make
50% of your members.)


As such, we find today's hackerspaces excluding a lot of ethnical and
social groups that don't seem to fit in or maybe feel so and are scared by
the white male nerd dominance, their (maybe) sexist or exclusionist jokes
or whatever might be contributed to them. Or perhaps they don't have the
proper skills to communicate and/or cooperate with the packs of geeky guys
(or at least they might think so).


What is needed is the non-repressive inclusion of all the groups
marginalized by a bourgeois society just as it had been the intention of
the first hackerspaces in countercultural history. If we accept the Marxian
idea that the very nature of politics is always in the interest of those
acting, hackerspace politics are for now in the interest of white
middle-class males. This needs to change.


Well, that's all for the moment. Let's start to work on this and see what
would happen if we change the somehow boring hackerspaces of the present
into some glamorous factories of an unpredictable freedom for all of us
even those who do not fit in the classical nerd scheme.


Change the nerds. Make them a better space. For you and for me and the
entire human race.
------
/jnny
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