English Audio Request

"What we've done at Noisebridge is not to say how bad everything is but to create a viable alternative," says Jacob Appelbaum, one of its founders. "I wanted a space where we could make things come true. Almost like a magical environment where we could decide one day we wanted to have a space programme and then ... we did. That's not going to happen in a cafe. There currently isn't a public place where you can have a lathe or a table saw or computer access or couches where you can sit, where no one feels entitled to throw you out. The closest thing is the university lab where I work now but there we're beholden to university administrators. In this place we are beholden to no one but ourselves."
I caught up with Appelbaum in Seattle, where he's now a staff research scientist at the University of Washington. He explained that the political ideology of the hackerspace is probably nearest to libertarian, "in the liberty sense". Anyone who wants to contribute something, whether time, money or ideas, is welcome. The ability to do things is dependent on being accepted by the group, and that comes when one's actions have merit. Appelbaum says that Noisebridge is run along anarchist principles of mutual aid, solidarity and respect. He is keen to stress that this is not anarchy in the sense of chaos but as author Emma Goldman describes it: the liberation of the human mind from religion, property and government, "a social order based on the free grouping of individuals for the purpose of producing real social wealth".
The group makes decisions based on consensus. "It can take a while," he admits, but the advantages outweigh the costs. "In our society people don't have a lot of agency to change things. And when I say 'our society' I mean 'the world'. Sometimes in our discussions it will be the first time that someone has ever felt listened to in their entire lives. That's actually incredibly sad but I'm happy we can give them that opportunity. I think there are a lot of us who don't think the world is as we would like to see it. And anyone who is not a utopianist is a schmuck."