Johannes Grenzfurthner/Frank Apunkt Schneider (monochrom) 

// 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 .i.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 Afro-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. 

// 

(Thanks to Jens Ohlig for comments and advice. Thanks to Melinda Richka 
for grammar-slashing.) 

// 

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