[sudoroom] Thoughts on Hackerspace Culture

[Eddan Katz]

Sudo friends.

I finally got a chance to read through the much anticipated report from 
South Africa about the success and failure of the Telecentres in South 
Africa. It surveys a longitudinal 10-year study done trying to measure 
and evaluate the relative success of libraries, cybercafes, and 
telecentres. It's often been my impression that telecentres have many 
similar characteristics to what we call hackerspaces, but am thrilled 
about the willingness of Sudo Room to make our community deliberately. A 
significant difference I see between the hackerspaces that I know are 
that telecentres are generally in communities with an overall lack of 
resources, rather than an abundance of resources but a lack of public space.

The link to the report is below, the abstract reprinted below, and an 
excerpt about the conclusions regarding the fate of the telecentres 
below that. Pages 5-10 would be most relevant for people who want to 
read past the abstract, but not much further than that.

 >
Public Access Computing in South Africa: Old Lessons and New Challenges
/Ricardo Gomez, Shaun Pather, Bryan Dosono

/
http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/view/915
Abstract:
The public access computing (PAC) ecosystem in South Africa includes 
public libraries, telecenters, and cybercafés. These PAC venues offer 
marginalized and underserved populations opportunities to use computers 
and the Internet to meet their information needs. Based primarily on 
interviews with telecenters and cybercafé staff, and on focus group 
workshops with telecenter and cybercafé users, we assess the relative 
strengths and weaknesses of telecenters and cybercafés and their 
contribution to community development. Government-sponsored telecenters 
continue to exhibit the same problems reported a decade ago, and 
libraries are slow in offering technological services. However, 
cybercafés set up through entrepreneurial initiatives fulfill an 
increasingly important niche and introduce a strategic business model 
for entrepreneurs in disadvantaged communities. Learning from the 
experience of cybercafés can be an effective way to overcome the 
shortcomings of telecenter experiences of the last decade in South 
Africa. New business models in the PAC ecosystem, such as the 
entrepreneur model, need to be rooted within a developmental agenda in 
order to ensure that ICT facilitate meaningful outcomes amongst needy 
communities and that a local context for the social appropriation and 
effective use of ICTs prevails.

Full text available in .pdf at 
http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/viewFile/915/418

excerpt, page 8

    The issue of telecenter sustainability has been discussed at length
    in the ICTD literature (for example, Best & Kumar, 2008; Mayanja,
    2006; Proenza, 2001). But telecenters in South Africa seem to be
    impermeable to the lessons drawn in the field during the last
    decade. As long as telecenters do not function properly, their
    impact will be small. By providing access to functional phones,
    faxes, computers, and Internet, however, telecenters provide users
    with the resources and skills needed to access the knowledge and
    opportunities to compete in today's technology-driven market. The
    key to empowering poor and marginalized South Africans is to provide
    them with the means to lift themselves out of their poverty. The
    many small telecenters are supposed to be providing just these
    opportunities. The contributions that community volunteers bring to
    the telecenters should not be overlooked. The most successful of
    telecenter managers develop a strategic plan for recruiting,
    training, retaining, and rewarding volunteers that will save the
    telecenter operational costs in maintaining ICT equipment in the
    long run (Roman, 2002). The importance of the technical and
    administrative skill of facilitators has also been cited as an
    important factor in the success of telecenters. Per Arellano,
    however, not all ICT interventions are equally successful. A number
    of contingency factors need to be in place for continued success:
    communications infrastructure, community buy-in and support, a
    sustainable revenue model, and last but not least, trained and
    committed staff (Arellano et al., 2009). The Cape Access project in
    South Africa is a good example of a telecenter program with a model
    founded on community buy-in and participation. In a critique of this
    project and other PAC interventions, Pather & Mitrovic  argue that a
    systemic and well governed approach to ICT4D projects cannot be
    achieved without an effective involvement of local governments
    (Pather & Mitrovic, 2008). They suggest stronger local government
    involvement is needed based on their specific role based on
    need-driven policies and strategies operationalized through the
    multi stakeholder platforms.



On 6/29/12 5:37 PM, Anthony Di Franco wrote:
>
> The characterizations of the institutional spaces that hacker spaces 
> are contrasted to here are reminiscent of Ivan Illich's 
> characterizations of same in his essay Vernacular Values, and besides 
> that, Vernacular Values is good background for this and by taking a 
> longer view on what's substantially the same question it provides some 
> of the history this ends by asking for:
> http://www.oikos.org/ecology/illichvernacular.htm
>
> On Jun 29, 2012 4:20 PM, "jenny ryan" <tunabananas at gmail.com 
> <mailto:tunabananas at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     via Johannes Grenzfurthner/Frank Apunkt Schneider (monochrom
>     <http://www.monochrom.at/english/>):
>
>     HACKING THE SPACES
>     A critical acclaim of what was, is and could be a hackerspace (or
>     hacklab, for that matter)
>
>     // Hackerspaces 1
>     // History
>
>     The history of the so-called hackerspaces expands back to when the
>     counter culture movement was about to make a serious statement. In
>     the decade after the hippies attempted to establish new ways of
>     social, political, economical and ecological relationships, a lot
>     of experiments were carried out concerning the construction of new
>     spaces to live and to work in.
>
>
>     These were considered as niches to relieve and rescue people from
>     the monotonous way bourgeois society directed civic spaces from
>     kindergartens to cemeteries to be exactly the same and to
>     reproduce its patriarchal and economical order.
>
>
>     The politics of establishing open spaces were meant as explicit
>     statements confronting a capitalist (and in the East: an
>     authoritarian communist) society whose very structure, purpose and
>     operating mode were broadly considered to "alienate humans", to
>     take control of and to modify their basic human needs and
>     relationships.
>
>
>     Thus, the failed revolt of the sixties survived and flourished in
>     the shadows of a ubiquitous bourgeois lifestyle. And the idea of
>     change was conjured up from nebulous lysergic dreams and pathetic
>     speeches to get one's dreams and/or feet back on solid ground - to
>     be dis-obamaized, if you like.
>
>
>     This conversion gained its popularity because macro-political
>     hippie dreaming ("I had too much to dream last night" as the title
>     of a classical psych pop tune by 'The Electric Prunes' put it) had
>     completely deteriorated. The hippies learnt that social and
>     political change demanded more than just joining the mantra of
>     posters, pop songs and drug fantasies that were promoting it. The
>     real world was way too tough to be impressed by a bunch of filthy
>     bourgeois drop-outs mantra-ing about change. The capitalist
>     imperative of the real world was way too effective to really be
>     changed.
>
>
>     And yet, when it all was over in 1972, some of the people involved
>     were not ready to give in and give themselves over to the system
>     and to fade into integration - hence the launching of
>     micro-political tactics. Instead of trying to transfer the old
>     world into a new one people started to build up tiny new worlds
>     within the old world. They made up open spaces were people could
>     come together and try out different forms of living, working,
>     maybe loving and whatever people do when they want to do something.
>
>
>     It is necessary to have a look at the historical development of
>     political movements and their relationship to spaces and
>     geography: the students' revolt of 1969 was driven by the idea of
>     taking back places and establishing a different psychogeography
>     within the maze of the city through détournement. Likewise, the
>     autonomia movement of the late 1970s that came to life in Italy
>     and later influenced people in German-speaking countries and the
>     Netherlands was about appropriation of spaces, be it for
>     autonomous youth centres or appropriation of the airwaves for
>     pirate radio.
>
>
>     Thus, the first hackerspaces fit best into a countercultural
>     topography consisting of squat houses, alternative cafes, farming
>     cooperatives, collectively run businesses, communes,
>     non-authoritarian childcare centres, and so on.
>
>
>     All of these established a tight network for an alternative
>     lifestyle within the heart of bourgeois darkness.
>
>     // Hackerspaces 2
>     // Present
>
>     Hackerspaces provided room where people could go and work in
>     laid-back, cool and non-repressive environments (well, as far as
>     any kind of space or environment embedded into a capitalist
>     society can be called laid-back, cool and non-repressive).
>
>
>     Sociological termed "third spaces" are spaces that break through
>     the dualistic scheme of bourgeois spatial structure with places to
>     live and places to work (plus places for spare time activities).
>     They represent an integrative way that refuses to accept a
>     lifestyle which is formed through such a structure. This means
>     they can come to cooperative and non-repressive ways of working on
>     e.g. technical problems that may result in new and innovative
>     solutions. And that's exactly where Adorno's "Wrong Life" could
>     slip in too.
>
>
>     The Capitalist system is a highly adaptable entity. And so it
>     isn't surprising that alternative spaces and forms of living
>     provided interesting ideas that could be milked and marketed. So
>     certain structural features of these "indie" movement outputs were
>     suddenly highly acclaimed, applied and copy-pasted into capitalist
>     developing laboratories. These qualities fit best into the
>     tendency in which -- by the end of the seventies -- bourgeois
>     society started to update and re-launch using the experiences
>     gained through countercultural projects. Mainstream harvested the
>     knowledge that was won in these projects and used it. Normalizing
>     dissent. Uh yeah.
>
>
>     Thus, the sixties revolt and all the micro-revolutions that
>     followed turned out to be a kind of periodical refreshment. As a
>     system, capitalism is always interested in getting rid of some of
>     its old-fashioned oppressive traits that might block its overall
>     evolution and perfection. As an example: eco-capitalism became
>     trendy, and it was quite effective generating capitalist "good
>     wealth" and capitalist "good feelings".
>
>
>     Hackerspaces today function differently than they initially did.
>     When the first hackerspaces were formed there were always clear
>     distinctions (an "antagonism") between "us" (the people resisting)
>     and "them" (the people controlling). Certain people did not want
>     to live and toil within the classical bourgeois working scheme and
>     refused to be part of its ideological and political project for
>     some pretty good reasons.
>
>
>     The otherness of the spaces back then was determined by the
>     consistency of a bourgeois mainstream culture on the basis of a
>     dualistic cold war world order. Here again they proved to be third
>     spaces of a different kind: neither state nor free trade
>     capitalism. And being structural and ideological different from
>     that had been an important political statement and stance.
>
>
>     In a society easily distinguished into mainstream and underground
>     categories, each activity carried out within the open space of
>     such an underground was a step from the wrong direction.
>
>     The very practice of making personal use of alternative structures
>     came with assurance of being on the good side. But post-cold war
>     society established a different order that deeply affected the
>     position of the hackerspaces.
>
>
>     While on the one hand it got harder and more repressive, the
>     system (a clever one!) learned to tolerate things that are
>     different (in the pipeline of integrating or assimilating them)
>     and to understand that it always has been the edges of normality
>     where the new substance grows. Milking covert culture.
>
>
>     Before that, the open intolerance and often brutal oppression
>     carried out against countercultural spaces only made them stronger
>     and their necessity more evident (at least where society didn't
>     succeed in crushing them).
>
>
>     Thus, alternative life forms were applied ideally as a
>     rejuvenation of what was old, boring, conservative and impotent to
>     progress and adapt in an ever changing bourgeois present. New ways
>     to solve technical (and aesthetical) problems were cooked up in
>     the underground and bourgeois talent scouts watched closely to
>     occasionally pick this or that, just as it happened in the field
>     of pop music with the so-called alternative rock of the nineties.
>     Alternative mainstream, ahoi!
>
>
>     On the other hand, the nineties marked the triumph of liberal
>     democracy, as Slavoj Z(iz(ek writes: "The fall of the Berlin Wall
>     on 9 November 1989 marked the beginning of the 'happy 1990s'.
>     According to Francis Fukuyama, liberal democracy had, in
>     principle, won. The era is generally seen as having come to an end
>     on 9/11. However, it seems that the utopia had to die twice: the
>     collapse of the liberal-democratic political utopia on 9/11 did
>     not affect the economic utopia of global market capitalism, which
>     has now come to an end." It's thus highly ironic that geeks and
>     nerds, while watching the death of liberal democracy in its
>     political form (civil liberties granted to keep the social peace)
>     as well as its economic form (crisis) turn to become
>     liberal-democratic defenders of an ideology that has already failed.
>
>
>     Without the political demarcation lines of a cold war society,
>     hackerspaces changed sometimes without even noticing it. The
>     political agenda was mushroomed by individual problems that techno
>     nerds tried to solve in nice fearless atmospheres, non-aggressive
>     states where the aggressiveness of the market was suspended; where
>     one could discuss technical and creative problems and challenges
>     politely with likeminded people.
>
>
>     As such, the political approach faded away on /en route/ into tiny
>     geeky workshop paradises. The micro-politics failed on the same
>     scale and to the same extent as older macro-political projects got
>     pulverized through the irreversibility of capitalism. The idea of
>     having a revolution (of whatever kind) was domesticated into good
>     clean reformism, and the only revolutions that lay ahead were the
>     technological semi-revolutions of the internet and its social web
>     sprouts.
>
>
>     Without former political agendas hackerspaces turned into small
>     places that did not really make fundamental differences.
>     Comparable to the fall of squat houses becoming legal in status
>     and turning into new bourgeois housing projects where the cool
>     urban bohemians live their lives commuting steadily between art
>     world, underground, IT-business and advertisement agencies.
>
>
>     This may not be the case for all the hackerspaces out there today,
>     but it should be noted that most have travelled along the same paths.
>     And while for a long time the macro-political scheme had worked
>     quite well to provide the inherent difference that had been
>     attached to all of the activities carried out in hackerspaces
>     (even to things as trivial as soldering, pottery lessons or
>     juggling trainings), it is missing now. And due to this deficiency
>     hackerspaces can no longer be shaped and politicized on a broader
>     scale. And that clearly means that whatever we might do: our
>     hackerspace communities remain constricted; nothing more than
>     nutrient fluid for breeding human resources. (Soylent Google is
>     made of people!)
>
>     // Hackerspaces 3
>     // Future
>
>     So what can be done about this? Actually, it is not very hard to
>     find something to protest against. Surveillance, whatever. It's no
>     problem to use the prefix "anti". Use rule 76 - as long as you can
>     think about it, you can be against it. But that's just too simple.
>     Never before in the history of bourgeois society has everything
>     been as fucked up as it is right now. But what is lacking amongst
>     all the practising going on in hackerspaces is a concise theory of
>     what bourgeois society is like and what should be attacked by us
>     building and running open spaces within that society.
>
>
>     The lovely alternative approach we share should be grounded in
>     such a theory, which is to be read: a political agenda that lends
>     some revolutionary glam to what we are doing on a daily basis
>     making technical gadgets, networking through the world, or
>     utilizing our technological and programming skills.
>     To get there we really need a more explicit sense and
>     understanding of the history of what we are doing, of the
>     political approaches and demands that went into it long ago and
>     that still are there, hidden in what we do right now.
>     So to start off we would like to organize some workshops in the
>     hackerspaces where we can learn about the philosophical,
>     historical and other items that we need to get back in our lives.
>     Theory is a toolkit to analyze and deconstruct the world.
>
>
>     Plus, we need to reflect and understand that the hackerspaces of
>     today are under the "benevolent" control of a certain group of
>     mostly white and male techno handicraft working nerds. And that
>     they shape a practise of their own which destines most of the
>     hackerspaces of today. (It is hard to understand that there are
>     hackerspaces in certain parts of the US that don't have a single
>     African-American or Latino member.
>     But we'd like to keep our European smugness to ourselves. We have
>     to look at our oh-so-multicultural hacker scene in Europe and ask
>     ourselves if hackers with a migrant background from Turkey or
>     North-African states are represented in numbers one would expect
>     from their percentage of the population. Or simply count your
>     women representation and see if they make 50% of your members.)
>
>
>     As such, we find today's hackerspaces excluding a lot of ethnical
>     and social groups that don't seem to fit in or maybe feel so and
>     are scared by the white male nerd dominance, their (maybe) sexist
>     or exclusionist jokes or whatever might be contributed to them. Or
>     perhaps they don't have the proper skills to communicate and/or
>     cooperate with the packs of geeky guys (or at least they might
>     think so).
>
>
>     What is needed is the non-repressive inclusion of all the groups
>     marginalized by a bourgeois society just as it had been the
>     intention of the first hackerspaces in countercultural history. If
>     we accept the Marxian idea that the very nature of politics is
>     always in the interest of those acting, hackerspace politics are
>     for now in the interest of white middle-class males. This needs to
>     change.
>
>
>     Well, that's all for the moment. Let's start to work on this and
>     see what would happen if we change the somehow boring hackerspaces
>     of the present into some glamorous factories of an unpredictable
>     freedom for all of us even those who do not fit in the classical
>     nerd scheme.
>
>
>     Change the nerds. Make them a better space. For you and for me and
>     the entire human race.
>
>     ------
>     /jnny
>
>     _______________________________________________
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>     sudoroom at lists.hackerspaces.org
>     <mailto:sudoroom at lists.hackerspaces.org>
>     http://lists.hackerspaces.org/mailman/listinfo/sudoroom
>
>
>
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