[Noisebridge-discuss] Anarchist? Libertarian?

[Danny O'Brien]

On Wed, Jul 31, 2013 at 9:24 AM, Johny Radio <johnyradio at gmail.com> wrote:

>  Rachel McConnell rachel at xtreme.com, Wed Jul 31 15:07:29 UTC 2013
> wrote:
> >"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."
>
> "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.
>
> The primary Noisebridge decision-making instrument, Consensus, comes
> straight outta Anarchist theory and practice. Do you disagree with that
> statement?
>
> Leaderless structure is a core Anarchist principal. Do you disagree with
> that statement?
>
> 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.
>
> "There are lots of fascinating challenges to running a hackerspace using
> the purest anarchist collective principles...."
> https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/Social_Engineers
>

I wrote that. It's a joke. The idea that we use "purest anarchist
collective principles" is obviously a joke, because we don't.

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.

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.

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.

d.
PS please fix your mail client so you don't break threading

[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:

Is Noisebridge an Anarchist Hackerspace?

The appropriate answer to this, as with many questions about Noisebridge,
will
be the one ends up turning into a two hours long conversation, wide-ranging
but
broadly inconclusive, during which the asker finds themselves cleaning the
bathroom, or soldering a PCB, or drinking some sort of odd and possibly
poisonous new apple vinegar drink, and which the askee, learning as much
about
the answer as much as the questioner, visibly changes their mind six times.

Then, exactly thirty years later, scarcity economics collapses, and we all
find
ourselves camped inside an abandoned aerogel Bigelow space hotel as it
orbits a
Legrange point between San Francisco and the Sun. Together we munch on a
shared
breakfast designed and dispensed by our bootleg 3D printers, powered by free
software, whose code and form have mutated a million times since they were
first sketched out until their processes and motives are beyond human
comprehension. That morning, the printers have, for no good reason, output
little fortune cookies with the Noisebridge logo on them. Inside the
cookies it
says "Do you still care about the answer?" They are delicious, and taste of
cider and cinnamon.

Still, I imagine you're a bit pushed for time, and I only have four pages on
this, so let's try something a bit more speedy than that.

Let us suppose you are struck with that lightning-bolt mood moment that
comes
to us all at the space, that premonition of ragequit and outburn, that means
that instead of nodding beautifically at your conversation partner, you just
want to SORT THIS OUT NOW. What will people say then, when you roll your
eyes
and snap at them to answer the fucking question?

Here then are the snappy answers I'd imagine.
"No-one's in charge, so yes."
"Well, many of the founders were anarchist, so yeah, I guess so".
"We try to be"
"No-one's in charge, so no."
"It's not really a place for politics."
"They call themselves that, but they don't know anything about anarchism."
"Shut up and hack."
"It's a non-hierarchical horizontalist radically inclusive environment."
"It is what you make it, so no. Wait, I mean yes."

Let me just pick one of those, and run it through the static semantic
analyzer
suite and see why we should probably talk longer.

"Because the founders were anarchist, so yeah, I guess so": This is
simultaneously the most accurate and naturally the worst anarchist answer
ever.

Looking through the old meeting notes, many of Noisebridge's constitutional
elements -- most notably, consensus, and the largely non-privileged
position of
members versus someone who just wandered in off the street -- comes from a
strong belief that Noisebridge should look to recent
anarchist-with-a-capital-A-and-a-big-circle traditions in
institution-building.
People liked the thinking behind groups like Food Not Bombs, had worked with
deliberations that came out of the radical feminist, eco protests, WTO
protest
traditions, and wanted to imitate what they saw as a more explicitly
political
dimension to the hackerspaces than they'd seen in Europe.

That's why we don't have leaders. That's why we actively scan for anybody
who
wants to take charge, and escort them to the door. That's why everybody on
the
board stands on an explicit "the board should have no power" platform.
That's
why the first ten minutes of Meeting are devoted to people declaiming
against
any suggestion that anyone at Noisebridge has privileges beyond anyone else,
and then pouring scorn on anyone who seeks to aggrandise it. That's why
you're
suspicious, already, that the protests of this paragraph hides some hidden
nexus of influence, and have already set upon seeking it out and
eliminating it
when you're next around.

There's some pretty obvious reasons why hackers,, makers, and hackerspace
makers might be attracted to an anarchistic cluster of institutional ideas.
I
think it's uncontroversial to suggest that hacker culture is distinctly
anti-authoritarian, and suspicious of centralisation and hierarchies. The
culture is not on a mission to unravel or demolish existing structures, but
is
certainly determined to route around them if problematic. To be amenable to
the
hacker notion of progress, reality, including political reality, needs to be
flexible and relocatable and repurposable and rational. Monkey power
structures, stolid implacable bosses, creeds, credos and violence are the
allergenic nuts in the otherwise chewable nougat of the world.

(And yes, I know Zuckerberg talked the "Hacker Way" in his SEC IPO
documents.
Every generation has its exploits; ever Foundation has its Mule.)

Hackers have many distractions and obsessions, some of which make them
billionaires and some of which make them homeless, but it's fair to say that
most of those behavioural attractors arc their personal histories toward
self-empowerment, radical decentralisation, and at least some intent to
dissolve away the bonds of power.

There's a shared vector here, then, with the anarchist project. Hacker
utopias
are rarely ones with the perfect admirable execution of state control or
ever
more svelte technologies of coertion. I don't think that's a coincidence. I
can
bore you on a separate occasion regarding the deeply-buried tendrils that
connect, at a distance, the separated tribes of these late 20th century free
software/free speech/free thinking hackers, and the WTO-fighting, direct
action, zapatistas of the same period.

But if it's all so intertwined, if we're all sisters and brothers, why not
wear
the label proudly? Why do we dodge the term? Because hackerdom has also been
frequently suspicious of political labels, which means that they will often
veer away from self-defining as being a follower of any doctrine, even when
they are exchanging ideas from those political traditions wholesale.

And possibly the worse reason why you should adopt a label is because some
bunch of people in ancient history tried to label the place you try to work
in
that way. Who failed to die horribly enough, and left them in charge?
Founders
should never be trusted.

You see a Godel sentence or two in here, I hope. Noisebridge's own inbuilt
cultural reticence to let itself be defined is part of that very
congeniality
to anarchist process.

In my experience, this is a point of commonality rather than contrast with
the
anarchist project. For all the depiction of anarchists as unrealistic
idealists
(or anti-social and violent nihilist), most of the engagingly weird and
righteous and hard work in the movement gets done by people who have
insufficent time for doctrine, and a itch, not to watch the world burn, but
to
build a better society in the shell of the old. "The priority of life and
action to theory and system", as anarchist David Wieck described his view of
the philosophy in the Seventies. And as David Graeber described it, the
supposed founders of anarchy, like the untrustworthy founders of
Noisebridge,
believed the project to be more a sort of "insurgent common sense" than a
theoretical framework.

Of course, the Official History of the Anarchist Project has not exactly
been
quoted widely for its prgamatic successes: but that is partly because
anarchists (like hackers) are not the ones who usually end up writing the
documentation (or the marketing brochures). The last thing those in power --
whoever they might be -- might want is a coherent tale of possibility that
describes groups cohering and succeeded without coertion, and without a
dictated plan.

Such possibilities are forever hinted at, though, at the edges of the
convenient and conventional story. Some families, happy families, do not
live
under threat of punishment or a grand and external plan. The nations of the
world, proud of their own order, have no one who looks over them when
negotiating with each other. And most importantly for hackers, the tools and
the processes that they use to create and disseminate their own works rely
on
co-operation and communication more than coertion and fixed roles.

Hackerspaces take the strongest hint of a potential way to model real world
communities and physical spaces from the lessons learnt dealing with the
non-geographical affinity groups of their own backgrounds, and the tools
they
collectively built to facilitate that growth. Noisebridge in particular, is
an
ongoing experiment in how far you can take those principles and ways of
living.
What happens when you open a place as widely as a wiki, where anyone can
edit,
and everyone can revert. What happens when you declare that the only rule is
mutual co-operation, and that everyone is responsible for each other? If we
all
have a lingering distaste for the powerlessness of enforced surveillance,
gleaned from a million dead-end jobs and a shared technological knack for
extrapolating subtle instruments of control into their terrifying
conclusions,
what happens when we deny ourselves those instruments, even when we seek to
control our own lives and spaces?

These are answers that can't be snappily given.  You can write all the code
you
want, but the only way to see if they work is to execute the program, watch
it
crash, edit, rinse and repeat. The only real response consists in living out
the ideas and seeing what they spell. Is Noisebridge an Anarchist
Hackerspace?
Not until everywhere else is an Anarchist Hackerspace too! Or at least,
that's
the plan...









> --
>
> Johny Radio
>
> Stick It In Your Ear!
>
>
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