Its odd that one member was upset that the space was going to be politically neutral – as if that meant she wasn’t welcome to come and do political things – I think that would be crazy and would happily call Russ and Jonty crazy if they went down that road. Paula is right that technology and politics are intertwined and a lot of geeks are very political. I am very political and I have enjoyed immensely talking to people at the hack evenings about political matters.

I do have to insist that my money goes to the creation of an easel, not a canvas. I’ve no problem with the easel being used to support canvases whose content I would not approve of, but a political agenda for the hackspace as a whole is an obstacle for me. I would not be walking away – I’d be running.

Fortunately, my experience hanging out with lefties is that I agree with them 50% of the time and enjoy arguing with them 45% of the time so I foresee having a generally good time with a clear conscience.

As for what is being communicated, I don’t think that there is any doubt as to what monochrom advocated. Take a look at this excerpt:

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

That is what I’d call the hackspace-as-canvas model, where the group as a whole operates politically rather than members of the group being political (hackspace-as-easel).

If you meant to be advocating something different from hackspace-as-canvas, then you need to be a lot clearer about what you mean. Perhaps you could start by describing what it is you think we should be informed and reflective about and who exactly you think needs to do that reflecting?

I’ve been saying this over and over again: if you read the essay, yes, there’s a very obvious leftist style in writing (monochrom are in general quite known for their stance in the political spectrum), but the only thing it tries to convey is the importance of critical and informed reflection, not a political agenda. If it was doing that I wouldn’t be supporting it as I don’t believe in homogeneous groups either.

Your opinion and wishes are all valid and important to the topic, and it would be a pity if you drop out the whole thing without sharing it. By now the controversy over “can we actually talk about this?” has stopped on the hackerspaces.org discuss list, so I’m probably gonna start answering some of the on-topic replies – I don’t think I’ll post about it on the London one again, partially because people need to see how the dynamics of such a space develop in real life. As far as I know, no-one directly involved has been part of a similar undertaking before. And it’s like programming, the imagining of how it’s gonna work is all nice, but the implementation teaches you a lot.

M