[hackerspaces] Respect the Past, Examine the Present, Build the Future

[dosman]

Interesting food for thought all around, I've enjoyed reading this  
thread. I mostly agree with everything expressed except some of the  
content in the last paragraph of your response.

No one is keeping us down or keeping us from organizing ourselves. The  
industrial age has only allowed us to get lazy, not kept us from  
reaching out further. If "The Man" is the only one creating or  
profiting it is because we allow "him" to (you can take this in many  
ways). And in a way, "The Man" dared to reach out and create the  
factory so is he not the capitalistic hacker? Organizing ourselves  
again to have spaces to freely create and reuse does give us our own  
power back, but only because we want that power back again, not  
because it was taken away from us. In order for someone to insult you,  
you must agree to feel insulted by their words. In the same way, in  
order for someone to take power away from you (in the sense of  
knowledge and the ability to create technology) you must agree to give  
it up as well, or at least complacent about accepting it's beyond your  
capability.

Thanks,
-dosman


On Aug 25, 2009, at 6:16 PM, Hellekin O. Wolf (/tmp/lab) wrote:

> Although I like the “waves” description of hackerspaces, I still  
> think the
> hacker history encompasses the whole history of computing, from early
> prototypes of hackerspaces we can imagine as Leonardo’s Workshop in  
> Firenze
> to Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and the later effort by John  
> Von
> Neumann, Alan Turing, George Boole, JCR Licklider, Douglas  
> Engelbart, Robert
> Taylor and Alan Kay, Ted Nelson… The whole history of the emergence of
> graphical computing and the Internet is paved with the hacker spirit,
> although the term only appears in the 1970s with MIT hobbyists and
> soon-to-be free software advocates.
>
> Hackerdom has roots in the Renaissance University, where knowledge  
> was to be
> transmitted for the benefit of all mankind. The main difference  
> between
> hackerdom and academics, IMO, is on the one hand the reliance on  
> praxis, or
> experimental science rather than theory, and on the other hand the  
> deep
> scientific connection of research for all: information wants to be  
> free
> kinda cyberpunk theme.
>
> Thus hackerspaces share a long history of men and women (the first
> programmer was a Lady*) seeking science and willing to share their  
> knowledge
> with the broadest possible audience. What Nick calls the Third Wave of
> hackerspaces certainly share this public endeavor to make IT  
> available to
> all and spread the virus of learning and teaching and sharing  
> knowledge and
> know-how.
>
> To build upon the same train of thought, Industrialization brought  
> and broke
> communal workshops and mills, and otherwise shared production  
> resources,
> spaces and tools that existed since Renaissance. XIXth Century  
> workshops
> where one could come with bare metal and go back home with a lock  
> and key,
> were replaced by tightly controlled and organized factories where  
> only the
> boss could profit from the effort of all workers. Indeed,  
> hackerspaces bring
> back to front the idea of sharing resources to learn and make things
> otherwise thought impossible to achieve for an individual.
>
> ==
> hk
>
> * http://rheingold.com/texts/tft/2.html
>
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