Hacker Spaces

The first hacker space I visited was Noisebridge in San Francisco. It was started by a bunch of like-minded people, including my old roommate from before I moved back to New York City. A couple visits ago, he took me to it and showed me around. It was incredible. Thousands of square feet, crammed with all kinds of equipment, books, materials, and a bunch of hardware hackers, hacking around on stuff.

It was also an anarchic do-ocracy, open to the public, and full of neat ideals. A lot of Occupy people connected very strongly with Noisebridge, and even sort of took it over for a time. At least that's how it seemed.

But I was blown away by the whole concept, and was very sad to live in New York and not San Francisco anymore, because only San Francisco had Noisebridge. But as soon as I started raving to my friends about hacker spaces, a lot of them were like, "oh yeah, hacker spaces exist. They're really cool. You don't know about them? They're great! You should go to one of the ones in New York City. There are plenty of them there."

So I was happy again, and I started researching hacker spaces in my town. Unfortunately, they were all kind of far away, and the one I visited that seemed like the best option, was not nearly as big as Noisebridge, and had not nearly the same amount of geeky features. So I abandoned the idea, and thought about maybe setting up a personal hacker space in my apartment. After all, why not?

But that didn't really come to pass. Then last night my ex-girlfriend Lena came over for dinner. Lena always knows lots of things I don't know, in fact she gets paid to know things I don't know. So we were hanging out and I mentioned that I was considering getting a sewing machine, because Kar had used a sewing machine in San Francisco, and it had been really cool, and I'd been able to figure out which sewing machine I wanted for myself, by talking to her about hers (I chose the Brother CS6000i by the way).

At first we started talking about whether a sewing machine required having a large pile of supplementary materials, special scissors, bolts of cloth, and what-have-you, in order to really be useful; but then Lena said, "why don't you just go to the new hacker space over by Union Square! They have sewing machines!"

Boing-ng-ng-ng-ng! went my head. Lo and behold, Hack Manhattan has a place within walking distance of my house. I jumped online, joined their mailing list, created an account on their wiki, introduced myself to all of them, and scheduled time to go visit their space twice in the next two weeks. All within five minutes of learning about them. I was very excited.

Of course, the truth is, I'm not much of a hardware hacker. I don't know electronics, nor am I particularly fluent in designing objects for 3D printing. Yes, I built my own book cases and large impressive work table; but that's just wood and screws and measuring devices. And yes, I'd love to make some weird-ass clothes; but that hasn't happened yet.

So inevitably since last night I've started wondering, do I want to pay the rather high monthly fee for membership in a hacker space, even a really convenient one that has cool hackers in it? It would absolutely be worth it if I were going to spend many hours there and do lots of cool hacks. But if I'm just going to drop in once in awhile and not really do much of anything, then I'd say it wouldn't be worth it.

But I really want to try. Hardware hacking is basically something everyone should be able to do. We should all understand basic electronics, and the fundamentals of engineering. We live in a world literally crawling with invented machines. We should understand this stuff. So, any future course of my life should most certainly include a significant portion of study in this area, regardless of anything else I want to do, or any career I choose to pursue.

So, I'm leaning in that direction. We'll see how I feel after I actually visit the place and see what it's like.

But yeah. Dinner with Lena. We had sushi and swapped stories about romance and body modification. She seemed happier than I'd seen her in a long time. It was a very pleasing hangout.