[hackerspaces] Hackerspaces origins history

[Mark Janssen]

A rough attempt at a history from my pov:

I would say such places as the Homebrew Computer Club and various
other American and European Computer Clubs were the start of it, back
in the 70s.  1) People gathered in other people`s garages to talk
computers and make/do stuff and 2) there was a community focus.
(Other people were making stuff in their garage but the community
wasn't invited, or community was invited but they were only having
BBQ.)  Steve Wozniak and friends created the first Apple computer in
such an environment, for example -- a personal computer for the
masses.

After that personal computer revolution, such movements went out of
garages into virtual spaces.  Everyone now had their own world on the
computer, and connecting with each other to Bulletin Board Systems.
However, it should be noted that the HAM Radio folks were doing this
since the 50's or so.  It's just that the personal computer
accelerated these interpersonal connections by many-fold.  These
movements culminated in the Internet.

In between the Personal Computer revolution and the Internet
revolution, you have Linux  -- the catalyst between the two that would
create the elite hacker, centered around GNU and the spirit of Free
Software.

Hackers at this point in history were embroiled in various battles,
trying to maintain the gains they got with the Internet.  The Law
attempted to bring it all down with Napster, and that ruptured the
movement considerably.

Where it gets interesting is mid-2000s.  That is were I personally,
anchor the creation of "hackerspaces" -- where it is a named movement.
The purpose, in my mind, was to create a new economic system (really a
new world order), because clearly the old order was no longer good or
trustable and was threatening to take every hope for a better world
away.

For various esoteric and personal reasons, I don't count anything
approaching "hackerspaces" until 2005.   Because until the law was
bringing everything down, there simply was no purpose.  SF_X, for me,
was such a space.  Hardly anyone knew of it, because it wasn't trying
to stick itself above the weeds of anonymity, to be popular or
well-known (yet).  It was a tiny little seed amidst the wilderness of
the antichrist that had become the US economy.  It was going to rely
on the power of a vision and heart.  But in the end, that little
sapling was buffeted to death by the winds of stupidity and desert of
passivity.

I was fighting to fix 100 years of America -- a country that refused
to take responsibility for it`s own history and that had isolated
itself from the rest of the world.  I was fighting to re-establish the
Right to Live (in a land that prides itself for "liberty and justice
for all") after being arrested for sleeping on unoccupied property.
Without some accountability and a transition by and of America, it was
simply unethical to make yet another economic system, which would
surely be co-opted to extend the existing system of insane growth on
the already existing cancer of the G20 economy.

But in end, I fought alone.  The issue that brought down sf_x was the
same issue that I was fighting:  property and the right it gives to
exclude others.  Either people didn't know how to take the Law into
their own hands, or they were simply too sedated by all the comforts
the antichrist economy gives them.  (I say "antichrist economy", not
to invoke religion, but to point to a system that relies on genocide
and torture to feed itself.).  I still don't know why the G8 protests
of Seattle didn't amount to anything, but then I also remember just
how difficult it was to pull the Law back into my own hands where I
could fight on the grounds that it was founded upon.

The real question should be, is the revolution dead?

Marxos