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

[Paul Böhm]

Jens,

I'm not disagreeing with you on that: The act of running hackerspaces,
and the core values of helping each other to run spaces that can be
used for projects, definitely are political.

I have never seen a place with more diverse opinions on any political
issues than hackerspaces, and i think that's great. There's no need
for us to all share the same opinions on everything, if we can still
work together on things we all believe to be important.

Paul

On Sun, May 10, 2009 at 5:52 PM, Jens Ohlig <jens at ccc.de> wrote:
>
> 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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