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Posts
Re-accounting Oral Histories as a Method of Processing

2016-06-21 • 15:46:51

Preface

The contents of this post were originally meant as a response by members of the Noisebridge community to recent shocking revelations documented in the news, and which I began drafting during a flight on June 2nd centered around many of my conflicting emotions (most of which I was still processing). The draft went through many iterations and edits were provided by a number of amazing folks both inside and outside of the Noisebridge group. It eventually evolved into a (very long) message that all of us agreed had lost relevance as a post for Noisebridge. Appropriately the draft was scratched and a new (shorter) one formed by those involved later posted on June 10th.

I’ve decided for my personal health and sanity to continue writing out the original draft (in addition to all the helpful edits provided) and post it here. The people coming forward (semi) publicly with their stories of mistreatment, misconduct, abuse and harassment are more courageous and powerful than many of us who’ve mostly sat around in silence turning a blind eye when these activities occurred. That has been my motivation to write this out and release it. It’s a combination of an oral history of Noisebridge, and my personal feelings orbiting around certain events both recent and in the past. I’ll keep comments on this post open and unmoderated until I have reason to delete and close them out. Thank you.

Original Post

Hi there. My name is Rubin and I’m a founding member of the San Francisco hackerspace Noisebridge. I’m also a Middle Eastern cis-male queer who supports feminism and many grounding aspects of anarchism. I’m haphazardly drafting up this while traveling to a wedding in a sculpture park, participating in Toorcamp, and going through a bit of recovery after some voluntary surgery.

I’m writing this post partially because I want to get a bunch of really complicated feelings out of my heart and head (many of which I’m still processing, feeling negatively about, and will need time to stew), but mostly I felt the need for the community to make a little bit of a statement about who we (Noisebridge) are today and less of what we were in the past. This post contains the combined contributions of a number of different hackers currently active within our community, I deeply thank them for their help.

Noisebridge got started around 2006 because a bunch of really dedicated folks decided that San Francisco needed a space similar to some of the older hackerspaces found in Germany, Austria, and the rest of Europe. Our desires were to construct a space built upon anarchist roots, not clouded by rules or process. A space to feel safe while being excellent to one another and hacking the planet, a space in which all would be welcomed. I remember the night I was invited to dinner by some friends who had returned from a winter trip to Germany, shooting this extremely preposterous idea at me. I told them it was silly and would give it a year before it burned to the ground.

A lot has happened over the past decade. We’ve sent objects into space and back again (and had a competing internal space race). Our community fostered local activism and helped support the Occupy Movement. Through some dedicated volunteers we launched a successful program to transform money into internet freedom while footing the NSA/FBI/CIA occasional visits’ bill.

We’ve given away access to our space to thousands and thousands of people around the world, some of whom visit every day, and some of whom still have a key but haven’t visited yet. We’ve welcomed people of all shapes, sizes, colors, socioeconomic backgrounds, and education levels to share, create, and participate, with a truly unprecedented level of unconditional acceptance. Our high-minded ethic of “inclusiveness” stood in stark contrast to that of many other hackerspaces and collectives, and we defended it zealously.

We also unwittingly created an environment for some really horrible things to occur.

In this dark era, visitors abused the space as a homeless shelter and drug den. Harassment was rampant and thefts of personal items happened routinely. The space became unwelcoming and unsafe for many.

Many of the people most heavily involved in the space during these times allowed for some truly wrong things to happen – largely in defense of our stated ideals, such as what we believed “inclusiveness” and anarchy to mean. Some individuals worked hard to improve the space any way they could, but their efforts were run ragged by the much more powerful inertia of the community norms we ourselves had put in place.

Most importantly, our interpretation of what we believed inclusiveness meant at the time, and how consensus and do-ocracy work, led us to feel that our hands were tied. It was early at this point that I reached burn-out and needed a break from the space. In addition to me the space lost many good people to this dark time, causing us to call sharply in question the meaning of “inclusiveness”. Trolls just ate it up.

And in the midst of this darkness, about 2 or 3 years ago, a new group of enthusiastic hackers stepped in. Having seen the space at its greatest and its lowest points, the new wave started a concerted effort to redefine and re-envision our core ideals. We cut away all our previous attempts at policy and punishment-based behavioral control, and found greater self-regulation and positivity in a highly Anarchist, do-ocratic cultural practice of continually reaffirming What We Want, and identifying and refusing to accept What We Don’t Want.

With this historically-informed approach and a lot of hard work, our community and our space have again flourished. Good people we thought we’d lost to chronic harassment and frustration have come back to hack, like unicorn sea otters coming back to live in a healthy forest of rainbow kelp. I’m proud to say that I find Noisebridge a safe space to hack in again and don’t feel ashamed talking with friends about it. There’s always room for improvement, but the general “lowercase-c” consensus is that we’re going in the right direction.

Because of the dynamic range of shit we’ve had to endure as a community over the years and our will to be as transparent as we can be through documentation, Noisebridge has become an amazing “canary in the coal mine” resource to the rest of the global hackerspaces community. About to try something new with your space? See if Noisebridge has done it before and how it went wrong (or right). More importantly, read up about what we tried to fix it. As much as we’re made fun of within other spaces, people sure do look to us often to avoid the mistakes we’ve thrown ourselves into. We’re actually proud of all of this.

Thinking over all what I’ve just written, it’s still amazing the space is standing and not a smoldering pile of cooling embers (yes I know this joke is a little ill timed considering a local and favorite hardware store sadly burned down yesterday, but I wrote this bit weeks ago). Out of all those people I remember seeing at our initial meeting in the first location we moved into, I think there’s maybe only 3 or 4 of us still around today. The space now belongs to the new blood, and they’re doing a damn good job of keeping it together.

Bringing it back to the present (and the more emotional bit), there’s been much coverage over allegations of sexual acts of misconduct (rape) within the Tor community. Twitter has turned into a gross religious war ground of anarchists demanding proof through a police investigation before they’re willing to admit that someone could be telling the truth about being assaulted in the most intimate way. Media outlets are now sinking their teeth into this thing, and Hacker News bloggers and commenters have been arguing like it’s the Christmas of CIA conspiracy theories, which all probably have some grain of of truth. Sadly, many people with a sharper business tuned agenda in the hacker/security community have been shoving true victims aside in order to sell “their stories” of past conflict for professional gain while the ink is hot.

And in the spirit of owning our shit, it’s important that we own the fact that Jacob Appelbaum (Jake) helped found Noisebridge, alongside countless other founders and volunteers. He imprinted our community with all of the positive and negative ramifications of his gregarious, manipulative, complex, and problematic personality. He was one of the founding members of Noisebridge and was highly influential in us formalizing from a group of hackers meeting once a week to manifesting into a physical space. I don’t believe Noisebridge would exist today if it hadn’t been for his contributions, but I can say the same for a number of other founding members. With all that being said, none of it excuses any of his past or present abusive actions.

Shortly after moving into our current location in 2009, Jacob dropped off being a part of the community by not participating in the physical space and avoiding Noisebridge related things online all together. He currently isn’t a member. His vague involvement with the community as of recent consists of a complicated whois record, and the once in a blue moon reply to the mailing list whenever something about him or his ego crops up.

What we (the Noisebridge community) can say for sure is that Jacob’s behavior, along with many incidents we regrettably overlooked in the past, now would absolutely trigger our Anti-Harassment Policy, and result in conversations and confrontations that would not have occurred when Jacob was still involved in Noisebridge. As the weeks have gone by since I started writing this, Noisebridge has made a public statement about Jacob no longer being welcomed to participate in the community (do-ocratically), and folks have started the process to formally ban him (through consensus).

As a friend of his I am saddened for not speaking up sooner, not calling him out on his past shit, not telling him to lay off the creepy pants act. As a citizen of my wider communities I’m angered that instead of addressing the problem of a predator using their social influence and charisma for sexual gain, we (myself included) defaulted to greeting newcomers in the past with the passive solution statement of, “whatever you do, don’t sleep with him.” Above all else as a member of Noisebridge, I regret not fighting more against harassment in the hacker community, especially involved within our San Francisco space.

As a community we are all in some way responsible for creating the environment in which certain behaviors can occur. What Noisebridge has learned, through the Drama Llama School of Hard Hack Knocks, is that avoidance of difficult conversations merely makes bad behaviors worse. I know I’m not alone over regretting not speaking up sooner about what we observed about Jacob in the past, especially now.

Noisebridge today exemplifies Actually Learning From Our Mistakes. We don’t sweep the shit under the rug, pretending everything’s OK; we point at it, we laugh and cry and rage at it, and then we make things better. The current shit going down has the potential to make the hacker scene better. If anything, this letter should be that rallying cry.

Postface

Before and after the Noisebridge statement got posted I’ve gotten poked by a number of friends, both in and outside the hacker scene. Some of those outside had known Jacob approximately 10 years ago when he lived in San Francisco, well before Noisebridge was a thing and online rights and privacy had turned into such a fought over subject. With a lot of these friends there really wasn’t a question of, “do you feel he did it?” Most of us had seen him in his borderline sexual predator bully mode. It’s odd being asked passive questions like if I know how he’s doing and if he’s going to be able to take care of himself, while again turning a blind eye to the apparent issues as if they’ll fade away into the past. I sincerely believe they won’t now.

Jacob did some awful things to me in the past. One of the very first interactions I had with him I can now clearly label as non-consensual or even assault, but in the past just brushed over it with the notion that attractive boys will be attractive boys. He also did things to loved ones of mine, things I wish I had stood up to and protested instead of being glazed over by his charisma when I didn’t understand my own emotions. Looking back at it now I feel like I didn’t have the right tools emotionally and socially, or didn’t understand what tools I did have to make a change in these situations. Maybe it was just the fear that if I questioned his “lifestyle choices” he would no longer see me as a friend.

It was educational to see him turn negative towards me. At the first Toorcamp he shamed me in front of a dozen other friends, telling me I should just leave for ruining the whole event (a very long story involving an inverted boy who cried wolf narrative I’m happy to recount in person). Another time, he blew up when I greeted him with a pat on the back that was harder than intended. I apologized immediately, yet he held a grudge against me for almost a year, stating that I had assaulted him and it wasn’t something he tolerated inside of the Noisebridge community.

I was relieved when he began the process of moving to another part of the country (and eventually another part of the world). My involvement with Noisebridge and the greater hackerspaces community meant that I would still run into him, more often than I originally thought. Dear friends of mine in Berlin got involved in being a part of his “entourage” and communication lines started to dissolve. In early 2012, standing in a metro station under Berlin, facing someone I love very much as the train doors were closing, I blurted out “If you sleep with him we can no longer be friends, I can’t pick up the pieces anymore.” Recently I found out that interaction at the station later caused Jacob to vehemently argue with said friend about how they should drop contact with me all together.

Writing this now brings some closure. I am still going to beat myself up about it for awhile. I’m still going to feel like utter shit for not saying something sooner, every time I read a new story of assault. I don’t find any of my stories to be more relevant or important than those involving women in the hacker community who have been more directly sexually abused or humiliated (though many have told me that isn’t true and my accounts of abuse and misconduct are just as valid, which I acknowledge hearing). Regardless, the two things I’m still hopeful are for Jacob to accept accountability and a willingness to seek help. I don’t think either will do much for me, but I feel they will provide a lot of closure for many of his other victims. It would also give breathing room to many of my friends who still have a justifiable desire to help defend him and set a healthy precedent for a community sorely lacking in positive examples and a terrible track record.

Jake, if you’re reading this, do the right thing: fess up, apologize, learn from your mistakes. Listen to the people, your friends, that you’ve hurt.

And to my friends with whom I’ve had very little contact either due fear and coercion, or for following a false hero: I’m sorry this is happening, I’m sorry we’re so far away. I understand you are doing what feels right to you and I support you for that. I still do, and will always consider you a friend.

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Posts
Hype

2014-08-23 • 23:54:51

Synthetic Seduction

I seem to only come here when things aren’t looking so great, which is unfortunate as I honestly need to write more, and about less muggy topics.

Issues with my leg have gotten to a point where they’re good, but not great, and don’t seem to be improving anymore. I’ve recently been deliberating with myself on the notion of having the titanium removed from my leg all together. What I’ve heard through my doctor and friends is that this might help with the remaining pain and possibly give me more freedom to move with that leg. If asked a few months ago if I would be willing to go through a similar amount of recovery from the accident, I’d say no. However now I feel like it’s the only option.

And so I’ve been hyping myself up on how easy this surgery would be and not to worry about it.

About two months ago, while visiting friends in Minneapolis for the Northern Spark art festivals, I woke up one morning with some uncomfortable pain in my testicle. A day later the pain hadn’t disappeared and so I started poking around and found a lump. Long story short the lumps weren’t cancer and in most cases aren’t harmful, except mine were painful and needed to go.

Whatever hyping I had been doing about potentially getting my leg all fixed up, was depleted earlier this week when I went in to a surgery center so a doctor (a funny one at that) diddle around inside my scrotum scraped out things with a grapefruit spoon. I’ve been at home since on my back rubbing ice packs into my crotch, which at one point was actually about the size of a grapefruit. The silver lining (not my stitches) is that I got a vasectomy in with the procedure, something I’ve been planning to get for a long time.

Due to all this my life has more or less been on pause since June, and I think this’ll also affect my plans for long term traveling over the end of the year. Poot.

During the painy months, I decided in my infinite wisdom that I should go out to Camp Tipsy and help some good friends construct a moon. While there I regretting making it over, as the meds my doctor gave me to potentially fix the testicle problem (it didn’t) was causing me pain on its own, and I the re-dawning realization I just don’t like being in large bodies of water. If I was to go again I think I would like to focus my efforts onto some sort of land based installation, maybe more of a night time space sort of thing.

My choice to go to Tipsy meant that I was also skipping out on Toorcamp up in Washington state. More recently I feel like I’ve been losing touch with the hacker bit of me, which I’m finding odd and I don’t know why. For the month of July, some very awesome and ambitious people decided that Noisebridge needed to get cleaned up and in action shut the space down for 30 days. I’m now again finding myself be drawn into the space, maybe it’s worth working on again, maybe people are interested like they were before.

I’ve been trying to come up with some new photo projects to work on during this time, and am thinking of possibly restarting the photo postcards thing again. I liked it, other people liked it, we were all mostly satisfied.

I’ll try to be a little bit more updatey here again, and not only when the vicodin happens to run out.

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Posts
Catch Up

2013-10-27 • 15:19:46

MetaMetaMeta

I’ve been a bit of a hermit regarding my site over the past few months. The last post coming from my first day in Tokyo, then abruptly stopping. I’m going to try to make a post here once a week from now on, let’s see if I can stick with that.

A silver lining to breaking my leg/hip has been that the couple of months of recovery involved me not really taking any photographs. As much as that sounds sad, it’s been great for catching up on my backlog. I’m only 5 months behind, as opposed to 1.5 years.

So I did go to Japan. That was all interesting and I should have some (many) photos from that trip on the net soon. I was traveling in parallel with some good company and may link to some of their photos too.

Before the trip I was partially gifted with a new toy, a Canon EOS 6D, which is the little brother to the 5DMIII. I haven’t been shooting more often with it, but when I do shoot I’m taking more photos than with any of my film cameras. Additionally the built in GPS has been a life saver. The wifi integration leaves a lot to be desired, but you can do some neat things when it does decide to work, such as this photo. All in all I’m happy to finally have a full frame camera, and thankful to the gift giver.

I’m currently looking for new work. If you know of anyone seeking an engineer of many traits, QA, pythony stuff, please poke me.

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Posts
DevaDeva Cafe

2013-04-29 • 20:28:09

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5UqEY5be-8

DevaDeva Cafe

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Posts
Good Morning Tokyo

2013-04-29 • 15:16:29

Good Morning Tokyo

Flight was surprisingly not a problem, leg mostly lasted through it. Let's see how bad the jet lag gets.

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Posts
Clown Nose

2013-04-19 • 15:41:33

Clown Popular

Clown Bl00

Clown Starset

Clown Foote

Just another normal night at The House of Shields.

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Posts
Socal July 2011

2013-04-19 • 15:31:33

Documenting The Sky

An Odd Umbrella

And then we Hit the Intense Side of the Hill

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Posts
Daedelus

2013-04-01 • 05:28:23

20130331_233755_1_1-1283168532


Audio: OGG

Playing with this notion of making posts happen through my pocketputer.

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Posts
Sleep Does Not Welcome Me

2013-02-05 • 01:36:16

Wrote this a few mornings ago but my pocket computer barfed, and so here it is a little late.

It's been easily over six months since the last time I achieved some sort of satisfying, sound sleep.

The night prior to breaking my leg, for one reason or another, I didn't actually get sleep, and had a very very short nap before hopping onto my steed and riding off to confront that ill fated event. I suppose I slept like a baby the following night in the hospital, strung out from all that had happened and pumped up on morphine. They finally left Al and I alone enough to attempt to sleep around 02:00, only to be woken up at 06:00 to begin prep for surgery. I started to shake uncontrollably in my bed, at which point I looked up at the nurses, very puzzled and informed them that I had no idea why I was shaking. They seemed more alarmed than I, providing a solution of additional morphine, which worked rather well. I suppose that sleeping through the surgery counts too, to some extent. That was the last time I had woken up to seeing a very comforting male bodied face, my general doctor who had heard what happened and come by to check on me post operation. He told me they did a good job sealing me back up, everything would be fine and to go back to sleep, and so I did after mumbling a thank you to him.

All in all the next morning I was able to get up and walk to the bathroom (mostly) on my own. Thank my lucky stars, thanks to those wonderful human beings who dedicate their lives into medicine and the craft of reassembling others whom attempt to live life outside of everyday fear.

After that sleeping in the hospital was obnoxious. Different nurses checking in on me through all hours of the night, the IV needle poking the pit of my elbow, kinking the IV tube, too cold, too hot, needing help peeing, some machine I can't see is beeping, trying desperately hard not to think anything at all about how much of a financial cluster fuck this will all eventually be. They gave me drugs, pain killers, liquids, and a slew of substances I will never be able to recall again. It helped, but with only one specific thing, to make me ignore the pain generated from the trauma that hit my right femur, hip, and ass. It wasn't until the 2nd or 3rd night that I realized sleeping will never be the same for me again. What I didn't understand at the time was how much more the lack of sleeping will effect the rest of my waking life, than the minor fact that it'll be a good year or two before my right leg will feel remotely like it used to.

To help with coming off of one of the drugs (either of the Oxies), my doctor prescribed Ambien (in addition to an anti-anxiety pill, because withdrawals suck). I tested it out for a night, thought it to be amazing, and shared that revelation to a friend. He in turn told me an Ambien story of his own, where he woke up (sleep walking) in the middle of the night at his girlfriend's, walked to the corner of the room, decided to relieve himself, did so right there, then crawled back into bed with no memory of doing so (his girlfriend however was more than willing to remind him). Even after hearing that I decided to try Ambien again a few nights later, and when I found my cane the next morning sitting somewhere other than where I left it before going to sleep (no pee puddles though!), I put the drug away and haven't touched it since then.

I'm (mostly) off the meds now, taking supplements to help my bones and joints. Doing stretches and PT at home to rebuild the leg. Walking more than a few blocks is a little bit of a stretch, but on a good day I'm pretty much up to my old cycling self again (can't wait for Spring time actually). The range in that join (femur to hip) is still a little bit limited, trying to sit cross legged is not possible, and generally I need to fidget after a few minutes of sitting in the same position.

Sleeping is another story, I didn't really realize how much I tend to do so on my sides. Laying on my right puts pressure on the hardware in my leg and the muscles that are still healing. Laying on my left brings the weight in my right leg into an odd spot that induces cramping. Every night has turned into this dance of switching positions, attempting to sleep on my back or belly, pretzel configurations with my limbs trying to find some sweet spot that will take something longer than half an hour to become agitated, prompting me to toss and turn again. This has caused me to avoid having other close ones over for the night as I simply don't want to them to get woken up constantly by my rotational marathon, and also avoiding staying with others elsewhere since I'm very much used to the firmness of my mattress and all others I need time to adjust.

Recently about two months ago it's gotten a little better. I can deal with sleeping on a sleeping pad while camping just fine. Fighting less in an office chair. Not waking those sleeping next to me as much. I am more ignorant of my leg cramping up. However even though my physical agony is turning into something tolerable, sleep still doesn't welcome me. I find myself being up till past midnight working on projects and other things, reading the far reaches of the internet. Going to sleep exhausted, waking up somewhere between 03:00 to 06:00 most nights and not really being able to get myself back to sleep till around 08:00. Even now, as I write this, I've been awake for three hours starting at 05:00. Went to pee but was fine, was hydrated, not hungry, mostly warm, no real leg pain. My body just decides that about 4 hours of sleep is all I need and that it's time to wake up.

I turn into a zombie for the rest of the day, waking up late, having an extremely hard time getting myself out of bed. I feel more short tempered with friends, my eating habits turn more cut back, going through my day with less energy than I want to. Surprisingly though most of the time I don't feel anymore sleepy or wanting a nap, which is strange, my body simply tells me sleep isn't a now thing.

I've (re)instated a no laptop in bedroom rule, which has sort of worked but mostly failed since the rest of the house has been so horribly cold. I've been trying to cut back on acidic foods after 18:00, but that's been rather hard as I haven't been cooking for myself much lately. Dropping back on my alcohol intake. Showering before bed. Herbal teas. Simply avoiding the internet and only reading fiction. Getting into bed earlier than midnight and doing nothing till I fall asleep. None of it seems to help in any sort of significant way.

So after laying in bed for thirty minutes right now, staring at the ceiling for another forty minutes and wasting some other amount of time flicking through my RSS feeds, I thought it best to write all this down. Maybe doing so will give me some new insight as to what's going on. Because without sleep, my waking days feel more like dreams.

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Posts
Lost Photos from October 2010

2012-12-18 • 02:03:57

Personal Space Invader

Drunk Cone of Shame

Corpus Callosum at Bottom of the Hill

That\'s what happens when you feed her New Mexican

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