Hacklabs and Hackerspaces

Shared machine workshops

Maxigas

Definitions

Can you imagine professional and would-be engineers building their own Disneyland? It happens in most European capitals. Hacklabs ¹ and hackerspaces ² are shared machine workshops run by hackers for hackers. They are dedicated rooms or buildings where people interested in technologies can come together to socialise, create and share knowledge, and work on projects individually or in groups. There are also regular hacker gatherings which complement the fixed space with a fixed time to meet. Thus a shared space and time of discourse is constructed, where meanings are negotiated and circulated, establishing what can be called a scene.

Hacklabs and hackerspaces belong to a diverse and troubled family taxonomy of shared machine workshops. Tech shops, co-working spaces, incubators, innovation- and medialabs, various kinds of hubs, and finally fablabs and makerspaces – listed here in order of co-optation – all try to emulate and capitalise on the techocultural force galvanised by hacklabs and hackerspaces. Explicit references on the websites of such organisations to the concept of “community” ³ quickly betray them as lacking the very values they advertise. After all, contemporary capitalism is increasingly dependent on authenticity and coolness, which it mines from the underground. ⁴

Regarding the differences between hackers and makers, lines are not clear. Some hackerspace members state that hackers are not just making, but also breaking things, while a makerspace member complained that “hackers never finish anything”. ⁵ In marketing materials, discoursive strategies vary in ways to maneuver around the four letter word (“HACK”) in order to tame its negative implications but gain the positive associations it brings. While the hacker ethos is often held up as a central system of values which permeates the scene, it may be more useful to understand it not as an a priori moral ground. Instead, as a practice based orientation which stems from the social context and social history in which hacklabs and hackerspaces are embedded: the way they “sit” in the social fabric. As such it varies widely with the context, as we shall presently see.

Therefore, the following section briefly traces the historical trajectories of both hacklabs and hackerspaces, including their intersections. It should be noted that the current configurations presented below are not the only possible way they can or did work. Next, the potentials and social significance of currently established hacklabs and hackerspaces is explored, preparing the ground for the evaluation of these tactics from a strategico-political point of view in the last section.

Historical trajectory

The stories and histories below are confined to Europe, since I am more familiar with the continent.

Figure 1: Les Tanneries squatted social centre, Dijon, 2007. Photo published by nigra. Source: https://linksunten.indymedia.org/de/node/98266 Licence: Creative Commons 2.0 Attribution Non-commercial Share-alike.

Hacklabs

Hacklabs existed basically since the advent of the personal computer, ⁶ but their “golden age” has been the decade around the turn of the millenium (greatly inspired by the conclusions of the Hackmeeting in Milano, 1999) ⁷. Often located in squatted spaces and occupied social centres, they were part and parcel of the autonomous politics toolbox, on par with such practices as food not bombs popular vegan kitchens, anarchist infoshops and libraries, free shops and punk concert halls ⁸. For instance, the Les Tanneries occupied social centre in Dijon (see Fig.1) housed all these activities under one roof at some point, ⁹ as did the RampART in London, ¹⁰ the Rimaia in Barcelona, ¹¹ or Forte Prenestino in Rome ¹². The largest network of hacklabs existed in Italy, ¹³ where influential hacklabs bloomed from the LOA hacklab in the populous North (Milan) ¹⁴, through the aforementioned Forte and bugslab ¹⁵, also in Rome, to Freaknet ¹⁶, known to be the first of its kind, in Catania, Sicily.

A division in the sensibilities of participants and the focus of activities can also be discerned, with North European hacklabs leaning towards security and circumvention and South European ones more bent on media production. ¹⁷ For instance, the German Chaos Computer Club is known to break various important state and corporate systems publicly since 1985 (Bildschirmtext bank transactions) ¹⁸ until now (Biometric passports) ¹⁹, while Dutch mag Hack-Tic had to close down in 1993 for publishing exploits – at the same time, Barcelona hacklab Riereta ²⁰ was famous for their ground breaking work in live streaming, while the Dyne “Free Culture Foundry” ²¹ for its work in (real time) multimedia processing and multimedia operating systems (Dynebolic Live CD) ²². Today, notable examples exist in Amsterdam (LAG) ²³ and near Barcelona (Hackafou) ²⁴. Both operate in the context of larger autonomous spaces: the Binnenpret ²⁵ in Amsterdam where LAG is located is a legalised (ex-squat) building complex which houses an anarchist library, the OCCI self-managed musical venue, a vegan restaurant and the Revolutions Per Minute record label, amongst other things like apartments; while Calafou ²⁶ where Hackafou is, calls itself an ecoindustrial, postcapitalist colony based on a cooperativist model, including a furniture manufactory, poultry farming, the TransHackFeminist Hardlab Pechblenda ²⁷ as well as flats.

Figure 2: Old hard drives nailed to the front door of the police station in Dijon, France. Action against the censorship of the local Independent Media Center. 4 November, 2004. Photo published by print. Source: http://print.squat.net/move.html

Around the turn of the millenium, when modem connections were considered modern, it was sometimes only possible to connect to the Internet (or its predecessors, like BBSs and networks like FidoNet) by getting down to a hacklab in your neighborhood. Therefore, these “squatted Internet workspaces” – as they were sometimes called in the North of Europe – did not only facilitate virtual connections between people and machines but also contributed to the formation of embodied counter-computing communities. Personal computers were still scarce, so “[m]embers of the collective scavenged and rebuilt computers from trash”. ²⁸ Obsolete computers and discarded hardware would often find its way to hacklabs, and transformed into useful resources — or failing that, to artworks or political statements (Fig.2). Mobile phones and popular voice-over-IP solutions like Skype did not exist when hackers from WH2001 (Wau Holland 2001), Madrid and bugslab, Rome set up telephone booths on the street where immigrants could call home for free. GNU/Linux development did not yet achieve a critical mass so installing an open source operating system was an art or a craft, not a routine operation. Free software was not yet established as a lucrative segment of the market, but had some characteristics of a movement, and hacklabs housed many developers. Hacklabs seemlessly combined three functions: providing a social and workspace for underground technology enthusiasts to learn and experiment; supporting and participating in social movements; and providing open access to information and communication technologies for the public. In cyberspace, everything was still fluid and there was an overwhelming intuition, paradoxically inspired by cyberpunk literature, that if the losers of history learn fast enough, they can outflank “the system”. Evidently, hacklabs were political projects which appropriated technology as part of the larger scheme of the autonomous movement to transform and self-organise all parts of life. Therefore, technological sovereignity is interpreted here as the sovereignity of the autonomous social movements, as a technology out of the control of state and capital.

Hackerspaces

Hackerspaces were brought in by a transversal current, related to the advent of physical computing ²⁹: the idea that you can program, control, and communicate with things outside the computer, and the ability to do so given the availability of microcontrollers in general on the consumer market, together with the beginnings of open source software/hardware platforms like the Arduino in particular on the hobbyist market. Arduinos leveraged the power of microcontrollers to bring physical computing within the reach of even novice programmers who did not specialise in machine control. The idea of physical computing was inspiring in the post-dotcom-bubble era, when the increasing concentration of Internet based services in the hands of a few major US based multinational corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon made web development, interaction design and network engineering both ubiquitous and utterly boring.10

The subsequent range of technologies, including 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC machines (all digital fabrication tools), and quadrocopters (the hacker version of drones), DNA synthesisers, software-defined radios – were all built on the extended knowledge and availability of microcontrollers. It is not far-fetched to argue that every few years hackerspaces absorb a major technology from the military-industrial complex, and come up with a DIY-punk version to be reintegrated into post-industrial capitalism.

As opposed to hacklabs, hackerspaces interface with the modern institutional grid through legal entities (associations or foundations), and rent spaces ³⁰ financed through a club-like membership model. Their social basis is comprised of independent minded technology professionals who like to explore technologies generally without the confines of the market, and whose level of knowledge and generous paychecks allow them to articulate the relative autonomy of their class in such collective initiatives. Such a constellation allows the assorted freaks, anarchists, unemployed con (“media”) artists and so on to tag along with them.

It is worth to remember Bifo’s testimony comparing his experience in organising the industrial working class in the 1970s and his contemporary activism organising precarious artists. ³¹ The main difference he refers in practical terms is the difficulty of finding a shared time and space where and when collective experiences and subject formation can take place. Hackerspaces address both issues rather effectively, combining 24 hour access and the membership model with their own brand of social technologies for coordination.

From the point of view of the engagement of civil society with hacklabs and hackerspaces, it is crucial to understand how the productive processes are carried out in these social contexts. Participants are driven by a curiosity about technology and the desire for creation. They are passionate about understanding technology and building their own creations from the available components, let it be communication protocols, functional or disfunctional technological artifacts, techno-garbage or raw materials like wood and steel. This often necessitates a degree of reverse engineering: opening up, taking apart, and documenting how something works; and then putting it together in a different way, or combining it with other systems – altering its functionality in the process. Such reinvention is often understood as hacking.

Tinkering and rapid prototyping are two other concepts which are used to theorise hacker activity. The former emphasises the incremental and exploratory aspect of how hackers work, as well as the contrast with planned industrial design projects, and ideals of the scientific method as a top-down process departing from general principles and moving towards problems of the concrete technological implementation. The latter foregrounds the dynamics of such work, where the accent often falls on producing interesting results rather than understanding clearly all what is involved, or maintaining full control over the development environment. Those who seek to exploit hackers under the guise of collaboration often forget that, resulting in mutual frustrations. Indeed, calling something a hack can refer to the fact that it is really crudely put together to be handy in a particular situation, without much consideration or knowledge – or the opposite: that it is a work of genius, solving a complex and often general problem with striking simplicity and robustness.

The politics of hackerspaces is similarly ambiguous: opposite to hacklabs, where technology is more or less subordinated to political perspectives, in the hackerspaces politics is most often framed by technology ³². Participants of the latter often feel deeply about issues like freedom of information, privacy and security, or measures (be they legal or technological) which restrict technological experimentation, such as patents and copyright, because these issues touch upon their own conditions of self-expression ³³. For the same reason, traditional social struggles like the redistribution of power and wealth, or structural opression based on the perception of bodies like gender and race leave many of them untouched. While they tend to frame their claims and demands in universalistic terms, or in the language of pure efficiency, ³⁴ they fail to exercise solidarity with other social groups.

In particular, while standing up firmly for the idea of user controlled technology, their universalistic ideal often boils down to “engineer controlled technologies” in practice. Hackerspaces may be lacking the motivations or the tools to build a sociologically concrete political subject wider than their own ranks. Fortunately, their most important interests overlap with those of more exploited and oppressed social groups, so that the deficiencies of their political perspectives can only be detected at its blind spots. An even more hopeful sign is that last years saw an increasing diversification of the hackerspace audience. Inspired by the makerspaces, many hackerspaces started to organise outreach activities for children ³⁵, while new spaces with a gender focus has been founded, as a result of the dissatisfaction with inclusivity in mainstream hackerspaces. ³⁶

Potentials and limitations

Hackerspaces arguably fall outside the grid of modern institutions, since they are not affiliated with the state, do not have ambitions to participate in the market with aim of capital accumulation, and – with some exceptions – lack the ambitions associated with civil society, like speaking in the name of other actors, mobilising the population, or pressuring the state institutions. Of course, in each country they position themselves somewhat differently: while in Germany the Chaos Computer Club which is associated with many local hackerspaces ³⁷ is a consultative body of the Constitutional Court of Germany, a position of professionalism, hackerspaces in the Netherlands ³⁸ blend into the alternative landscape between artist workshops and small startups.

At the same time, relative autonomy does not simply imply an outsider position, it does also point to a degree of internal organisation. Hackerspaces are propelled by the hacker culture which is as old as personal computers: at least according to some, it was the struggles of hackers, often verging on illegality, which spawned the personal computer ³⁹. Hackerspaces are littered with old computers and networking hardware, to the extend that at Hack42 ⁴⁰, (in Arnhem, The Netherlands), sports a full scale computing history museum ranging from typewriters through the legendary PDP-11 from the 1970s to contemporary models.

Finally, autonomy is relative because it does not achieve or aim at complete independence and self-sufficiency, or one could say sovereignity, from the state. This is in stark contrast with hacklabs, which usually operate without a legal body and inhabit autonomous zones of some kind. So while hacklab members can hide effectively behind pseudonymous monikers without further questioning, hackerspace members can call each others names, but in most countries they have to give their real name and address to become members.

So while hacklabs oppose the state ideologically and heads-on in an anarchist way, hackerspaces question state legitimacy in playful ways. ⁴¹ can work on the level of immanence, either by simply applying the right repertoire of existing technologies to the right situation (creating a website for a good cause, or rendering it disfunctional) or developing existing or new tools, like porting a 3D printer driver from Windows to GNU/Linux operating system, or inventing a universal remote with a single button to turn off any TV. ⁴²

Strategic outlook

While hacklabs operated with a clear political mission based on a more or less well articulated political ideology, hackerspaces explicitly deny their political engagement. These strategies have their own potentials and pitfalls. On the one hand, the hacklabs of old would directly engage in social conflicts, bringing their technological expertise to the struggle – and yet they remained enclosed in what is colloquially called the activist ghetto. While helping to gain an edge and access the once widespead infrastructure of the autonomous movement, their alignment severely limited their social reach as well as their proliferation. On the other hand, hackerspaces can and do mobilise their own resources based on the relative affluence of their members and the close connections with industry which comes with the same, while being able to reach a wider audience and collaborate with social formations across the full spectrum of society. Their increasing numbers (over 2000+ registered on hackerspaces.org), far outgrowing that of hacklabs even in their heyday, are in no doubt at least partly thanks to these factors of apolitical affluence. Hackerspaces stepped beyond the historical limits of hacklabs, yet they lost on political consistency in the process.

Declaration of political neutrality should always be regarded questioningly, however. Most hackerspace members agree that “technology is not neutral”, or that it is the “continuation of politics by other means”: the questioning of technological rationality, as well as the oppressive essence of technology, is common parlance in in conversations, even if hackerspaces would not embroider the slogan on their flags. In the final analysis, however, the main contribution of both hacklabs and hackerspaces to radical political transformation is their tireless work on establishing user control over technologies, and expanding the range of these technologies year by year, from software to hardware to biology. What is needed for hackerspaces, is to systematically raise consciousness on the significance of these practices and the solidities they imply.

Maxigas: Étudiant en littérature, cinématographie et philosophie avant de devenir spécialiste en sciences sociales dans le domaine des études scientifiques et technologiques. Il vit sa vie comme un fauteur de troubles, journaliste militant, défenseur radical du sysadmin et grand amateur de la culture cybernétique. Actuellement, il mène des recherches sur les artefacts et architectures non abouties des hackerspaces en tant que doctorant à UOC/IN3. Maxigas travaille également sur une recherche visant à construire un ordinateur biologique au sein du Biolab de Calafou. Web: http://research.metatron.ai/

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Insight from groente. ↩︎
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In the Netherlands some hackerspaces rent “antisquat” real estate which comes with a low price and a disfavourable contract, a scheme initially established by rentier companies to fend off squatters from the property. ↩︎
Franco Berardi a.k.a. Bifo. 2009. Franco Berardi and Marco Jacquemet and Gianfranco Vitali. New York: Autonomedia. ↩︎
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Some examples follow. The hackerspace passport is document where visitors to hackerspaces can collect stamps called “visas”. The Hackerspaces Global Space Program launched in 2011 with the mockup goal to “send a hacker to the moon in 23 years”. SpaceFED is a federated authentication system for (wireless) network access across hackerspaces analogous to eduroam which is used in higher education institutions worldwide. ↩︎
http://learn.adafruit.com/tv-b-gone-kit ↩︎

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