[hackerspaces] Hacking the Spaces: A critical acclaim of what was, is and could be a hackerspace (or hacklab, for that matter)

[Jens Ohlig]

Am 11.05.2009 um 00:59 schrieb Paul Böhm:

> Hey Jens,
>
> Not every organization can take care of everything. It's so cheap to
> create organizations these days, that i believe it to make much more
> sense to have focused organizations with whose goals the members
> really identify, rather than big catch-all organizations.
>
> I don't see why being a part of a hackerspace should give anyone the
> right to guilt me into supporting political causes or proposed
> solutions that i might not believe in.

Sure, it's probably better to have a separate organization for  
questions like agricultural subsidy politics or car pooling or which  
party or candidate you should vote for in the next general election of  
your country. I couldn't care less about all this questions. However,  
for the politics of hackerspaces and the very political act of running  
an open space there is probably currently no better organization than  
this mailinglist. Also, the discussion on how the politics of  
hackerspaces should work should take place in the spaces, not  
elsewhere. Just claiming that it's apolitical what we do is not an  
option for me.

Please look beyond the tone the monochrom piece is written in -- sure,  
it sounds a lot like leftist academia theory speak. I admit that this  
language, like Club-Mate, is an acquired taste: One gets used to it  
(or doesn't). Parts of the essay could be rewritten with less inside  
jokes mentioning Marx and Adorno and more Lolcats and Matrix quotes.  
But this is not really the point. The point is that we are doing  
something highly political here and I'd like us to think about the  
direction we are taking this before we wake up and realize that yet  
again things didn't work out like in the utopias that came before us.

Cheers,
Jens
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