How the Hackerspace dies.

I started working with IT more or less 20 years ago, after my university. Before, technology was just my hobby, and passion, which started more or less in 1986. So I can say that I love it.

Also I love hacking. My first modem was self-made , because IBM modems were too expensive. And also synchronous, which meant “not able to connect me with any BBS like Fidonet”. So I did it by myself , together with friends: with iron chlorine, copper board, a drill, and so on. I was 16. Now I am 46. I think I can call myself “sort of hacker”. Still not sure if “hacker”, just “sort of”.

Now, I like new technologies. So I installed GnuSocial. I am enthusiast of the idea of a self-hosted social network, distributed and so on.

And then I see how this good idea dies. Is dead. Right now.

A walking dead, sure.

Still dead.

First, GnuSocial is a self-hosted system. So I expected to share experiences with other peoples, which also self-hosted. Forget it. Almost none of them did it. GnuSocial is actually based on a few huge(?) servers . Thismeans is even more centralized than facebook, which at least has thousand of servers. How 5 servers owned by non-specified people are more distributed than 3000 servers of Facebook, geo-redundant in 5 continents, is very hard to understand.

When I tried to understand why nobody else than me was running an instance, the answer was like: “I’m not that familiar with technologies like you”. So why you are here? Why you are pioneering a new technology you don’t even understand? The result is always the same: “anarchism. marxism. leninism. communism. anarchism. feminism. whatever-ism”.

In short: “moron-ism”.

Long discussions about politics, endless discussions about marxism, Leninism, anarchism, and other -ism which are (at least) 200 year old. Discussions on ideas with no chance to apply anymore in 2016, were ending to nothing, and starting again. “How to realize anarchy?”. “How to make a feminist society?”.” How to bring communism in the US?”.

Then, it was the time of vanity diseases. I cannot understand why having depression, autism, Asperger syndrome, bipolar syndrome is that cool. For me, a disease is “bad news, dude”. Is nothing cool.

I do not hate people with health problems, of course. Still, each and every person I know, actually diagnosed of those problems, told me their life was nothing cool. Each and every person I know, actually diagnosed of depression, autism, Asperger, Bipolar, told me they liked their new condition as much as dinosaurs liked an asteroid.

Only when I go in the “nerd-verse” and the “geek-verse”, “hacke-verse”, being diagnosed of depression &co, seems to be cool.

And after a while , I just realized none of them was actually having problems. Almost none of them actually had the same symptom of any people I know, which is diagnosed for real. All of them were fakes. All of them had a “vanity disease”. Most of them were simply unemployed, because of insufficient education and no skills, trying to say their failure was due to a disease.

And the last crowd we boarded was the vegans. Ok, what you eat (or not) is none of my business. Still, a religion is a religion, a diet is a diet. A diet cannot be a religion.

No, you will not save the planet because you eat salad. No, you are not better people than anyone else just because of tofu and seitan. And no, a new technology is a club supposed to be into technology, and no, diet is not a technology. Neither politics. A political program is made of foreign policy, economy, transportation, welfare, and everything a country needs: a diet is not “politics”. What you eat is just what you eat, not “politics”.

I have nothing with people which wants to avoid politics. But, when people is too stupid or lazy to understand politics or religion, they try to replace it with a diet. Please, please don’t claim your diet can take the place of religion or politics , or ethics or moral. It won’t work.

If you don’t understand religion, just not have one: do not pretend your salad is the new religion. If you don’t understand politics, or never studied history, don’t pretend everything in the planet is about tofu. Saving the planet it is not that simple as cooking your meal: if “how to cook your meal” is likely the most complex policy you can understand, it doesn’t means this is the only possible policy, nor the best one.(and no, just one people each thousand is gluten intolerant. All the people claiming to be , is just people used to eat trash food, too many and too often.)

Did I mention the vanity-outrage people? The people which is continuously outraged about things reported by websites which are not even journalism. Of course they are: since there is a policy which says “do not blame the victim”, everybody wants to be a victim, to avoid getting blamed for their own stupidity.

They are outraged by everything, because vanity outrage is just a status symbol and being a victim is the new black, so that even the label “radical-chic” seemed to me insufficient to describe that people. Because they are not even “chic”. They are like radical-lousy, or simply radical-phony. I decided to name them the “anti-against-boycott-sayno-complain-outraged” people.

After this anti-against-boycott-sayno-complain-outraged people jumped in, the discussion and the whole environment had become stupid, superficial, childish, obsolete, moronic, pseudo-intellectual, in a way anybody not mental went away.

We have to be honest: this kind of anti-against-boycott-sayno-complain-outraged people is here since 1969, at least. And they were obsolete since 1850, already. They talk of the first industrial revolution, like marx, lenin, communism, anarchism, when we are facing the FOURTH industrial revolution.

They predict the fall of “capitalism” almost every 6 months, since 200 years, and it never happened. But they keep saying that “Marx predicted it all”, regardless the fact a couple of their predictions a year (“this is the end of capitalism”) are failing. They don’t even notice how ridiculous they sound.

The first (and only) victim of a never-happened, always-next-to-happen “crash of capitalism ” is the sense of ridiculous, maybe?

They have never won. Any kind of initiative they take is set to failure. During a financial disaster in 2008, it was a perfect situation for any initiative to change economy. They flooded into the movement “occupy”. It was a blatant failure, regardless of 99% of population getting poor. They had 99% of population as a potential audience, AND THEY MANAGED TO FAIL! Unbelievable talent, isn’t it?

If they can fail in this situation, they can fail forever. And they will, as always they failed in the past.

They are completely unable to get any consensus. They dream of revolution because they aren’t able to gain more than 1% of voters. They fail. They bring to fail everything they touch. They just get hate and contempt from the masses, whatever they do.

Whatever you do , this pile of idiots is flowing in. You create a party which is sensitive to information technology, like the Pirate Party? Just wait a couple of months, and the pile of idiots will flood your party, take all the space, make everyone else to leave, and in the next two weeks, your party will sink in the vast abyss of ridiculous bullshit they scream around.

You create an hacker-space? Just sit and wait. In a few weeks, your club will stop talking about technology, and you will start talking about diet, international issues, politics, 1800-born philosophers, 1900-like history. And of course, depression, protesting, boycotting, vanity outrage, and how bad cops are, lalala.

There is no way , in Europe, to invent something new. No way to create a space, to start an initiative, without the space you create being flooded by this pile of idiots. And set to get no consensus.

A new technology (like GnuSocial) will simply starve and die, for the simply reason they boarded such a pile of idiots. Any person which hadn’t divorced from reality will simply keep away from it!

It doesn’t matters if Twitter is spying me. It doesn't’ matters if Facebook will sell my data to Satan. If the price of being on GnuSocial is to listen at an endless discussion about Marx, Engels, Stirner, and whatever philosopher born in the 1800 s , every day, I do prefer Twitter. I do not want to waste my time to read predictions about how capitalism will end the next year. I have no time to read of people vanity-outraged by events which are not even happening, then i still prefer Twitter and Facebook.

I prefer surveillance over idiocy, yes. I prefer capitalism over douchebag-communism. I prefer monopoly over stupid-o-poly. Sure. I prefer to read of stupid games in Facebook, than read every day the prediction of “how capitalism will crash tomorrow”. The apocalypse-of-the-day makes me sick.

The sad thing is, that the real hackers, the people which are very interested to technology, are just gone alone.

I just know, whatever space you try to create, whatever new technology for communicating will born, it will be flooded by this pile of senseless idiots.

Which will set our initiatives to fail. Any of them. Regardless how good they are. Regardless how much they make sense.

I am still very interested in hacking and technology. I am not sure I want to surrender against this pile of idiots. A couple of friends of me joined some groups of nationalists. They are interested to new technologies as well, and they are open minded , even more than the clubs I’ve known since today. And they are not that phony.

Maybe to escape the pile of idiots, the way to create real hackerspaces, to create good clubs and working initiatives about technology , in Europe, is to move to the right-winged space.

I will give a try to that, too. Who knows?