Based on an article in Futuribles no.410 by Michel Lallement
Drawing on a field study carried out in the ‘hackerspaces’ of California, Michel Lallement shows how different communities gather in spaces dedicated to ‘making things’ and even to ‘making things together’-new spaces of formal or informal work where individuals develop various personal or occupational projects.
The ‘hackerspaces’ of the San Francisco Bay Area, which the present article examines, belong to that new family of organizations whose main common feature is to promote the ‘do-it-yourself’ and ‘do-it-with-others’ spirit. Open to anyone, they bring together individuals who wish to carry out fabrication projects of multiple kinds (coding, electronics, sewing…). As places located in physical space, ‘Hackerspaces’ make available to their regular members-and to those who visit on a one-off basis-a set of resources that are both material (machines, tools, raw materials etc.), intellectual (workshops and courses), digital (wi-fi, virtual discussion platforms and forums) and social (contacts, opportunities for collaboration, social gatherings etc.).
Hackers and Hackerspaces-how are they defined?
Almost all the members are proud to declare themselves ‘hackers’-not in the debased sense of those who ‘hack into computer systems’ (properly known as ‘crackers’) whose-at times disastrous-exploits feature regularly in the media, but as makers, tinkerers capable of repairing, inventing and crafting anything at all. And not just objects, but also political campaigns.
For the hackers, the aim is to achieve an objective without transforming the entire framework of the system they’re working on. Though the outcome may seem strange in terms of the overall system, a ‘hack’ is generally an intelligent creation that works well.
Steven Levy formalized the terms of all this for the first time in 1984. In Chapter 2 of his Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, five propositions provide an axiological basis for a morality which has long informed ‘hacker’ practice: ‘1) all information must be free; 2) Mistrust authority-Promote decentralization; 3) Hackers should be judged by their hacking, not by bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race. and/or position; 4) You can create art and beauty on a computer; 5) Computers can change your life for the better.’
The Operation of Hackerspaces
The hacker ethic is embodied today in practices for which hackerspaces have been the main arena since the mid-2000s.
In the San Francisco Bay Area, these open organizations generally have several dozen or even several hundred members. Since many other people frequent the premises regularly, it is sometimes difficult to gauge precisely the real numbers of hackers who tinker around there every day of the week. Installed in premises measuring on average around a hundred square metres, they are all equipped with various tools and machines.
The hackerspaces regard themselves as independent of any form of economic or political power. With two exceptions, these spaces actually operate with relatively modest budgets-generally just a few tens of thousands of US dollars. Most of the expenditure goes on infrastructure (renting the premises, electricity). The resources come from membership subscriptions, donations from individuals (and, here and there, from companies), and the sale of products such as stickers and tee shirts, and from bar takings when there are social gatherings. Classed as non-profit-making organizations, the Bay Area’s hackerspaces are in no sense comparable with companies. When one of their members exploits one of his inventions commercially, the financial benefit from the innovation goes exclusively to him, provided, of course, that he has filled out a patent application correctly and lodged it with the appropriate authorities.
The Hackers’ Three Ethical Principles
Despite the variety in profiles and occupations, a single conviction unites the San Francisco Bay Area hacker community, as it does that of many other comparable places across the world: the crucial thing is to be doing and making. ‘We do things, we make stuff’, the Bay’s hackers like to declare when asked about their activities. This tells us that the goal is less important than the means.
To put it more accurately, as work that has its own goal within itself, doing/making enables two forms of autonomy to be combined: autonomy in work (the ability to decide freely the rules governing their activity) and autonomy of work (the disconnection of their activities from any interest or control deriving from the market or from any sort of bureaucracy).
Consequently, for the hackers, the strict compartmentalization of social time and the repetition of tasks are to be avoided. To work is, first and foremost, to refuse to do anything associated in any way with drudgery or tedium.
Free exchange of information and co-production, working with peers and having one’s work reviewed by them, represent a second structuring principle. For hackers, heavy bureaucratic machineries put a block on cooperation in work and also on the free circulation of information. That isn’t the case with networks, flexible and decentralized structures through which it is possible to reconcile freedom and efficiency, though on condition that some primordial demands are met, such as freedom of expression, respect for private life, concern for others and a desire to incorporate the largest possible number into networked spaces.
A third and last principle: doing/making, from the standpoint of hacker ethics, means making work into an art.
***
In conclusion, this spirit of making isn’t exclusive to hackerspaces. It also suffuses many other places, whose histories, though partly similar, are nonetheless distinct. The fablabs (fabrication laboratories), for example, owe their existence to the initiative in the early 2000s on the part of Neil Gershenfeld, director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT. As Gershenfeld sees it, we are about to enter a new technological era.
The use of machine-tools is no longer a problem, Gershenfeld argues. While, some years ago, you still needed two years’ training before you could hope to use a machine-tool correctly, now it takes only two hours. The current success of the fablabs would seem to be confirmation of the arrival of a new paradigm whose consequences we are barely yet aware of: with the price of design software and machines falling drastically thanks to personal fabricators, everyone can now act on the physical world in the same way as they already act on the world of information with their personal computers.
Such a transition in no way marks the end for ‘classical’ companies, any more than it ushers in a radical individualization of labour relations. Conversely, as the experience of the Californian hackerspaces suggests, it gives rise to three areas of promise: the possibility of bringing about forms of work organization that are sometimes described as utopian; the possibility of outflanking the colonizing powers that are the market and bureaucracy, not to destroy these definitively but to bring them into the service of an emancipatory project (autonomy in and of work); and lastly the possibility of rolling out the hacker ethic into as many configurations as there are institutional and cultural (national and local) settings, so as to have this new work-morality bear fruit. For all that, the risks of being deflected from the goal or seeing it undermined are not to be ignored. The Maker Movement has already been targeted by initiatives aimed at transforming our contemporaries’ inclination towards do-it-yourself and do-it-with-others into so many selfish, self-seeking projects. However, nothing is set in stone as yet. In the future, making will be what we are able, collectively, to make of it.