Noisebridge’s members have filled this small space with an enviable collection of shared tools, parts and works in progress.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com
SAN FRANCISCO — R. Miloh Alexander and Seth Schoen are hunched over an old pay phone whose innards are being grafted onto the guts of a Walmart telephone and a voice-over-IP modem.
Right now, the Frankensteinish hybrid looks like a pile of tangled wires. Somewhere in the mess, an alligator clip has popped loose. Schoen frowns.
"We really need to solder these down," he says.
The two are working on a recent Monday evening at Noisebridge, a collectively operated hacker space in San Francisco. Across the table, Noisebridge member Molly Boynoff is typing on a sticker-covered MacBook, learning to program in Python. Next to her, Noisebridge co-founder Mitch Altman is showing two newcomers how to solder resistors and LEDs onto a circuit board.
"There are zillions of people around the world doing this," says Altman, referring to the swell of interest in do-it-yourself projects and hacking. "It’s a worldwide community."
At the center of this community are hacker spaces like Noisebridge, where like-minded geeks gather to work on personal projects, learn from each other and hang out in a nerd-friendly atmosphere. Like artist collectives in the ’60s and ’70s, hacker spaces are springing up all over.
There are now 96 known active hacker spaces worldwide, with 29 in the United States, according to Hackerspaces.org. Another 27 U.S. spaces are in the planning or building stage.
Located in rented studios, lofts or semi-commercial spaces, hacker spaces tend to be loosely organized, governed by consensus, and infused with an almost utopian spirit of cooperation and sharing.
"It’s almost a Fight Club for nerds," says Nick Bilton of his hacker space, NYC Resistor in Brooklyn, New York. Bilton is an editor in The New York Times R&D lab and a board member of NYC Resistor. Bilton says NYC Resistor has attracted "a pretty wide variety of people, but definitely all geeks. Not Dungeons & Dragons–type geeks, but more professional, working-type geeks."
For many members, the spaces have become a major focus of their evening and weekend social lives.
Since it was formed last November, Noisebridge has attracted 56
members, who each pay $80 per month (or $40 per month on the "starving
hacker rate") to cover the space’s rent and insurance. In
return, they have a place to work on whatever they’re interested in,
from vests with embedded sonar proximity sensors to web-optimized
database software.
Altman wears a black Dorkbot T-shirt, a black zip-up hoody and olive khakis with large side pockets. His long gray hair features vibrant blue and red stripes, and he’s nearly always smiling. His enthusiasm for hacker spaces is infectious.
"In our society there’s a real dearth of community," Altman says. "The internet is a way for people to key in to that need, but it’s so inadequate. [At hacker spaces], people get a little taste of that community and they just want more."
Noisebridge founder Mitch Altman shows first-time visitor Jay Thomas how to solder.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.comNoisebridge is located behind a nondescript black door on a filthy alley in San Francisco’s Mission District. It is a small space, only about 1,000 square feet, consisting primarily of one big room and a loft. But members have crammed it with an impressive variety of tools, furniture and sub-spaces, including kitchen, darkroom, bike rack, bathroom (with shower), circuit-building and testing area, a small "chill space" with couches and whiteboard, and machine shop.
The main part of the room is dominated by a battered work table. A pair of ethernet cables snakes down into the middle of the table, suspended overhead by a plastic track. Cheap metal shelves stand against the walls, crowded with spare parts and projects in progress.
The drawers of a parts cabinet carry labels reflecting the eclecticism of the space: Altoids Tins, Crapulence, Actuators, DVDs, Straps/Buckles, Anchors/Hoisting, and Fasteners.
Almost everything in the room has been donated or built by members — including a drill press, oscilloscopes, logic testers and a sack of stick-on googly eyes.
While many movements begin in obscurity, hackers are unanimous about the birth of U.S. hacker spaces: August, 2007 when U.S. hackers Bre Pettis, Nicholas Farr, Mitch Altman and others visited Germany on a geeky field trip called Hackers on a Plane.
German and Austrian hackers have been organizing into hacker collectives for years, including Metalab in Vienna, c-base in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club in Hannover, Germany. Hackers on a Plane was a delegation of American hackers who visited the Chaos Communications Camp — "Burning Man for hackers," says Metalab founder Paul "Enki" Boehm — and their trip included a tour of these hacker spaces. They were immediately inspired, Altman says.
On returning to the United States, Pettis quickly recruited others to the idea and set up NYC Resistor in New York, while Farr instigated a hacker space called HacDC in Washington, D.C. Both were open by late 2007. Noisebridge followed some months later, opening its doors in fall 2008.
It couldn’t have happened at a better time. Make magazine, which started in January, 2005, had found an eager audience of do-it-yourself enthusiasts. (The magazine’s circulation now numbers 125,000.) Projects involving complex circuitry and microcontrollers were easier than ever for nonexperts to undertake, thanks to open source platforms like Arduino and the easy availability of how-to guides on the internet.
The idea spread quickly to other cities as visitors came to existing hacker spaces and saw how cool they were.
"People just have this wide-eyed look of, ‘I want this in my city.’ It’s almost primal," says Rose White, a sociology graduate student and NYC Resistor member.
Soldering irons and LED-light projects crowd the main workbench at Noisebridge.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.comIn Noisebridge’s case, the community had a boost thanks to Altman’s geek cred (he’s the inventor of the TV-B-Gone) and his connections to existing geek societies, such as Dorkbot,
a monthly gathering of San Francisco techies. Other cooperative
arts-and-technology spaces in the San Francisco area — such as NIMBY, The Crucible and CELLspace
— also helped prepare the ground. And of course it helps that San
Francisco is already receptive to geeks, anarchists and other square
pegs.
The recent crop of hacker spaces has followed a rough blueprint prepared by Jens Ohlig called "Building a Hacker Space"
(.pdf). Ohlig’s presentation is a collection of design patterns, or
solutions to common problems, and outlines some of the best practices
used by German and Austrian hacker spaces.
Many are governed by consensus. Noisebridge and Vienna’s Metalab
have boards, but they are structured to keep board members accountable
to the desires of the members. NYC Resistor is similarly democratic.
Most of the space — and the tools — are shared by all members, with
small spaces set aside for each member to store items and projects for
their own use.
"The way hacker spaces are organized seems to be a reaction against
American individualism — the idea that we all need to be in our
separate single-family homes with a garage," says White. "Choosing to
organize collectives where you’re sharing a space and sharing tools
with people who are not your family and not your co-workers — that
feels different to me."
Noisebridge even welcomes non-members to come use the space, and
Altman says non-members can do everything that members can (except
block the consensus process). The community governs itself according to
the guiding principle expressed on a large poster of Keanu Reeves
hanging from the loft: "Be excellent to each other, dudes."
"It sounds hokey, but it works," says Altman.
Hacker spaces aren’t just growing up in isolation: They’re forming
networks and linking up with one another in a decentralized, worldwide
network. The hackerspaces.org
website collects information about current and emerging hacker spaces,
and provides information about creating and managing new spaces.
There’s also lots of information exchanged via IRC and a weekly
telephone conference. They even enable extramural exchanges.
"It’s like an embassy for hackers," says Metalab’s Boehm, who has
been spending a lot of time at Noisebridge lately while here on a
tourist visa. "If you are a member of a hacker space, you can go
anywhere in the world. It’s like instant family."
That welcoming attitude is proving powerfully attractive to many geeks.
"I can go to any hacker space anywhere in the world and be welcome there," says Altman. "You could too."
Noisebridge board member Rachel McConnell holds a
sonar sensor, an infrared sensor and a sack of tiny pager vibration
motors that will be incorporated into a wearable proximity-sensing vest.
Photo: Dylan Tweney / Wired.com
