Hacklabs workshop and the pleasure of political action

During the workshop, which is still continuing, two things have come up. First a less political hacker brought up the issue of why Blicero (who was more or less leading the workshop) was talking about all this indymedia, politics, and related issues. He said that hacklab was and should be more about the technology. The argument went back and forth, and being italians, it became heated.

It has been one of those situations where nobody was moderating a discussion and the people didn´t have enough shared history or unspoken agreements to move the conversation forward productively.

The one interesting aspect which has come out of the discussion is the way the hacklabisti see their work as combining the pleasure of hacking on technology with politics. I´ve never heard american (north or latino) talk about their work in terms of pleasure. Sure hacking is fun, sure running around in the forrest and stopping logging is fun and exciting, but we don’t to talk about it. We’ve got something serious to do, we’re motivated by guilt in someways.

Now they are talking about how they are against having long debates and meetings because that can destroy the pleasure of the action. By action they aren’t referring to direct action type protests, but more setting up a network, installing linux, writing a program.

After the workshop we went outside and were talking about how in someways the discussions here are all technical because the environment in which all the techies work here is political, because they do their techwork through the social center / squatter community. It is this community which gives the techies their politics, and it is this community which sustains and grows the tech activist movement. Nothing like that exists within the north American context.

It goes back to that terrible catch-22. The europeans use social centers as their backbone of the radical social movements, and therefore the explication about how most things come to be and are organized lies in the social centers. In the US we, for what ever reason, can’t have these kinds of occupied social centers. Therefore we can’t just replicate the socio-political movement structures which are built upon them.

The trick is to figure out what models can be taken from the European model and uses in other places.