I joined Double Union in June of 2019. I was super excited because I’d heard about it vaguely from my other hackerspace friends. This is not my first hackerspace; I was on the Board of Directions of Pumping Station: One, Chicago’s largest and oldest hackerspace, in 2015, and had been a PS1 member for a few years by then. In this blog post, I cover PS1’s strengths, Double Union’s strengths, and then discuss the hacker vs. maker ethos.

Strengths of Pumping Station: One

Pumping Station: One (PS1) holds a nostalgic spot in my memory, but it suffered from many of the problems male-dominated spaces suffer from. If you want to know the details, I can tell you personally, but that’s not the point of this blog post.

While I was on the Board, PS1 did an admirable job of being involved in the greater Maker community. Being in Chicago, PS1 always had the space and the funds to buy expensive equipment its members could use, such as a Shopbot. There were forging classes in addition to the typical 3D printers you would expect at any hackerspace. There was also a dedicated Arts and Crafts area. We also represented PS1 at Maker Faires around the country. I helped to organize and get funding via votes for several of them — we went to Milwaukee, Detroit, and New York City, and at each one we taught children electronics with a device one of our members, Derek, had designed called a noisemaker.

PS1 had active programming office hours and I hosted monthly movie nights. The social scene was as important as the Maker scene. Monthly at the member meeting we had 300 Seconds of Fame, where you could get in front of the audience and talk about anything for 5 minutes. I remember doing one about the hard problem of consciousness.

Strengths of Double Union

Insert picture here of my herb planter

Double Union holds many events, and continues to hold them despite the pandemic, which is impressive. I’ve gone to game nights and herb-container making and book clubs. Anyone can organize an event very easily, which is cool! You email the mailing list with your idea and add it to Google Calendar, and then people show up over Google Hangouts or Zoom or whatever.

Double Union explicitly states its values of inclusion, and it takes action in addition to saying words. It holds its potential membership to account for its values. It holds current membership to account for its values as well, which is, as I’ve seen at PS1, an incredibly difficult task. Double Union has the best process and structure out of any organization I have seen of creating a space with boundaries and enforcement. Hackerspaces like Noisebridge, PS1, and all over have had trouble with the two professed values that PS1 exemplifies: do-ocracy and being excellent to each other. “Be excellent to each other” is not enough to produce an excellent community space. Double Union is the only space that recognizes this, in my experience, and recognizes the underlying structural problems affecting the rest of us.

Double Union is inclusive of trans women, nonbinary people, feminists, and antiracists. Meritocracy is a joke, which I go into later in this blog post. Intersectionality is something you should always keep in mind, and I know I personally struggle with prioritizing the people that history has overlooked. It’s easier to think of white cis-male role models than it is to think of black women role models, but it shouldn’t be. I have watched Hidden Figures three times but I only remember the name of one of the computers. I have also watched The Internet’s Own Boy thrice and while I do not think we should discount the work of activists of any status, prioritizing the work of black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and LGBTQIA people should be paramount.

Integrity means standing up for your values. Integrity is knowing who you are, and not changing with the wind. Double Union enforces a code of conduct and does not tolerate harassment of its members. Double Union is proudly pro-LGBTQIA and committed to social justice.

Areas where I want DU to grow

What would I like to see in Double Union’s future? Double Union recognizes systematic problems affecting our community but could take an even more active role. How could this come about? Holding more anti-white supremacy events is a start. The first meeting of the Anti-Racist History Book Club is coming up Saturday February 27th. Double Union could be more involved in efforts to provide support for women and nonbinary folk who struggle to break through the anti-meritocracy of the tech industry. Oakland is nearby and a center of social justice movements, especially those centered in black people, such as the Black Panthers. We could find more ways to partner with nonprofits in local communities like Oakland. A member could start a Direct Action arm of Double Union for those who want to do more.

Hackerspace vs. Makerspace

Education is so pivotal towards speeding up the arc of justice. There are many universities in the Bay Area educating tomorrow’s leaders and makers. Right now, who do universities like Stanford invite to their campuses? Techbros like Zuckerberg whose products have little concern for the mental health of their users or even for democracy itself (1) (2). When a woman is invited to speak on campus, it is someone acceptable like Elizabeth Holmes, who tried to emulate Jobs. Women are not allowed to role model alternative career paths or even ways of living that do not involve buying into the current corporate mercantilist style of capitalism. Universities need to realize students care about more than how many billions their unicorn startup can make. Double Union has among its membership female role models who provide an alternative to Silicon Valley’s narrative of Steve Jobs-level assholes whose “merit” justifies their behavior.

Silicon Valley used to have another legacy. Hackerspaces may have originated in Germany, but hacker culture is American. Hacker culture used to have close ties with the counterculture of the 60s. A hacker thinks outside of the box that venture capitalists try to put people in. PS1 is proudly a hackerspace, not a Makerspace. They are still trying to figure out which identity wins. It is my opinion that Double Union should embrace the hacker ethos, and remember the legacy of open source pioneers and activists like Aaron Swartz (3). We remember that computers used to be women, especially black women like Katherine Johnson, who helped send us to the moon. We cheer on fighters like Karen Sandler who demand the source code for their own digital health care devices (4), or Eva Galparin, a hacker who fights spyware used for domestic abuse. My hope is that Double Union can help the next generation have better role models than the ones offered by current leadership of universities and businesses.

Any act of creation can be seen as the action of a Maker. A hacker specifically fights the system on behalf of those who are oppressed by the system, but to paraphrase the philosopher Rousseau, no one is free if anyone is in chains (5). One critique of hacker culture seems to be that it easily morphs into neoliberalism or neoconservatism. Zuckerberg prided himself on hacking into Harvard, but that kind of hacking for fun and profit is not what I mean by “hacker culture.” Jobs was also considered part of the counterculture at first, and his legacy is problematic. As Plato demonstrates in the Republic, power and money corrupt men (6). Not too many people climb the tech ladder with its 6-figure salaries and its million or billion dollar windfalls and then climb back down again. When people do quit their well-paying tech jobs, what do they “retire” into, owning wineries?

Silicon Valley solutionism can lead one to fall into the neoliberal trap. I think hacker culture is inherently revolutionary, and as long as we hold fast to our values and stay vigilant on behalf of equality, liberty, and justice for all, then we do not have to fear a critical solutionist theory. Hacker culture is very centered on taking subversive actions. Corporate culture is the enemy. Conservative libertarian, Milton Friedman-esque Chicago School of Economics capitalism is the enemy. The Chicago School and Marxists do have one thing in common — their affinity for authoritarianism (7). It is no accident that Marxist-inspired nation-states always seem to fall into Communist dictatorship. When there is no privatized property, a central authority seems to be the default that human organizations succumb to.

Hacker culture, with its love of open source and open access and JFDI (Just Fucking Do It), does not embrace the top-down approach. It embraces what tech companies like Github have utterly failed to replicate: holocracy. Not meritocracy. The tension between PS1’s values of JFDI and Be Excellent To Each Other seems irresolvable. That’s probably because it mirrors the same tension the American democratic republic experiences; how to resolve the difference between Jefferson’s promise in the Declaration and the Constitution explicitly endorsing slavery?

There are those who argue the maker movement can be transformed into a critical making movement (8). This seems, as the proponents rightly pre-defend themselves against, an exercise in hermeneutics. Intervention is the end they envision, and their vision seems somewhat limited to material objects. Intervention that has no political aim, in my opinion, is armchair academia at its best.

Hackerspaces must embrace the political in addition to the personal. Double Union claims to be a feminist hacker/makerspace. What is the aim of feminism? If it is liberty and justice, then we must acknowledge at least three things.

1. There are political goals worth working towards in order to subvert the current white supremacist order. The ERA failed back in the 70s. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was gutted by the SCOTUS Shelby county decision. I can’t even point to legislation centering LGBTQIA rights.
2. Neoconservatism/neoliberalism is an easy trap to fall into, especially if you consider yourself a progressive or even a socialist. A bourgeois salary brings comforts. It brings a nuclear-family centered set of values. This tension between revolutionary action and feminist conceptions of motherhood is highlighted in films like Judas and the Black Messiah re: the relationship between Fred Hampton and his girlfriend, Deborah Johnson (now known as Akua Njeri).
3. White women brought down the ERA, led by Phyllis Schlafly. Not all women are feminists, and she was an anti-feminist. The ERA was ratified by 35 states. Women were so close.

I hope if you’ve read this that you will consider joining Double Union if you are not yet a member. If you are a member, please consider attending a virtual event or organizing one yourself. A hackerspace is as strong as its members, and we are a strong community.

Citations:

1. https://www.theringer.com/tech/2019/2/6/18212421/stanford-students-tech-backlash-silicon-valley-next-generation?fbclid=IwAR27ARQHIHvpvFnbvQNnJPnZ340px38Y-4ugMHgZhorhXZCCgnlQDnScTsI
2. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/12/facebook-doomsday-machine/617384/
3. Including Swartz is apparently extremely controversial, but I feel like despite my reservations in name-dropping a cis-white male, his example is so important towards the kind of direct revolutionary action I would like hackerspaces to be involved in. I have personally met founders like Freddy Martinez, one of the creators of Lucy Parsons Labs, who do activist FOIA work against the police state at hackerspaces like SSHC (South Side Hackerspace: Chicago, and yes I am aware SSHC and PS1 are both impossible-to-Google terms).
4. https://theoutline.com/post/1398/why-can-t-karen-sandler-get-the-source-code-for-her-pacemaker
5. Rousseau’s phrase is: “Man is born free and everywhere is in chains.”
6. In Plato’s Republic, this is the ring of Gyges story.
7. Chicago-trained economists who studied under Milton Friedman intervened in South American economies, which in cases like the Chicago Boys and Chile led to dictatorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys I bring up Milton Friedman because I believe him and Alan Greenspan’s neoconservative and neoliberalist economics have done the most damage ever since Reagan. We have not managed to escape the legacy of Reaganomics or of the New Democrats.
8. https://networkcultures.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/CriticalMakersReader.pdf