English Audio Request

The CCC has its own permanent base on Marienstraße in Berlin. It's not a secret and you'll find "Chaos Computer Club" listed on the bell push of the neo-classical building. You pass through a stone walkway to an inner courtyard and on the far right side is the entrance to the CCC. Inside, there's a collection of desks pushed together, well-worn office chairs and sofas and coils of wires strewn across most surfaces. Crates of Club-Mate, a soft drink beloved by hackers for its high caffeine content, are piled at the back and dispensed from a defaced Coke machine. Someone has drawn a noughts and crosses board in the dusty screen of an old video game, Ideal Twinline, and underneath, the words, "How about a nice game of chess?" There are posters on the walls: "Liberty waits on your fingers" and "Keep on blogging".
Hackerspaces aren't just about hacking with computers. The ideals can be applied to every aspect of life including politics – which is considered just another "system" by which humans live together. Like any other system, it can therefore be hacked and these spaces offer a real-time experiment in political hacking. They often contain power tools, industrial cutting machines, sewing machines and sometimes even kitchens for "culinary hacking". At the tiny hackerspace HACK (the Hungarian Autonomous Center for Knowledge) in Budapest, members have built an electronic plantwatering system, and at Sprout in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I saw an MIT student building a jet propeller. In large spaces such as Noisebridge in San Francisco members have created an active space-exploration programme sending weather-balloon probes up to 70,000ft in the sky to collect images and data using GPS smartphones and digital cameras. Access to and membership of the spaces is usually governed by commonly agreed norms, but notably there is a lack of formal rules. Asking permission is frowned upon as it implies a power imbalance. The chosen way is to observe the culture and then seek agreement.