Hacking the Spaces

/hacking-the-spaces

  • Good piece on monochrom about past, present and future of #hackerspaces

    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.

    http://www.monochrom.at/hacking-the-spaces