Hacker spaces have definitely changed. In the 90s the one here was a crazy 24hr party, it's entire membership was anarchists with zero regard for laws which they considered only existed to control information. Somehow I managed amazing productivity yet was largely high out of my gourd with Skinny Puppy blasting in the background almost constantly. Everything was surprisingly well organized, we would all decide on something like we need 60 handsets to try to clone and we'd accomplish that by the end of the day. We need to code our own STS-like dialup chat board because we're not paying for a license. 25 of us would work on that until 6:00am the next morning and it'd be done even with the craziest of distractions going on, such as around 11pm a steady stream of local misfits would come in as we'd converted it into an all ages boozecan and defacto nightclub with a stupid amount of lights rigged up that were in hindsight absolutely frightening considering the terribad wiring job we hacked together. It looked like the video from Front242 - Operating Tracks but with more eye searing strobe lights.
Now the hacker space I go to is largely populated with professional developers and students so gone is the raging music, the drugs, the anarchy/activism, the close-knit community, the epic amount of crime and nobody knows each other. There's less women too, in the 90s I would say it was half and half with many girls actively participating. I can count on one hand the amount of female hackers I've seen at the new space. Even though our old space was drug fueled insanity more work seemed to get done. No group projects going on anymore, there's a few but it's usually something like making your bike glow in the dark and not hacking software just for the sake of hacking. Doesn't help that none of us have any spare time either, we are all too busy in careers/school to afford an all nighter hack session like back in the day. Barely any of us can even manage to coordinate a time when everybody can be in the same room for 5 mins for a meeting let alone work on any projects.
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Hacker spaces have definitely changed. In the 90s the one here was a crazy 24hr party, it's entire membership was anarchists with zero regard for laws which they considered only existed to control information. Somehow I managed amazing productivity yet was largely high out of my gourd with Skinny Puppy blasting in the background almost constantly. Everything was surprisingly well organized, we would all decide on something like we need 60 handsets to try to clone and we'd accomplish that by the end of the day. We need to code our own STS-like dialup chat board because we're not paying for a license. 25 of us would work on that until 6:00am the next morning and it'd be done even with the craziest of distractions going on, such as around 11pm a steady stream of local misfits would come in as we'd converted it into an all ages boozecan and defacto nightclub with a stupid amount of lights rigged up that were in hindsight absolutely frightening considering the terribad wiring job we hacked together. It looked like the video from Front242 - Operating Tracks but with more eye searing strobe lights.
Now the hacker space I go to is largely populated with professional developers and students so gone is the raging music, the drugs, the anarchy/activism, the close-knit community, the epic amount of crime and nobody knows each other. There's less women too, in the 90s I would say it was half and half with many girls actively participating. I can count on one hand the amount of female hackers I've seen at the new space. Even though our old space was drug fueled insanity more work seemed to get done. No group projects going on anymore, there's a few but it's usually something like making your bike glow in the dark and not hacking software just for the sake of hacking. Doesn't help that none of us have any spare time either, we are all too busy in careers/school to afford an all nighter hack session like back in the day. Barely any of us can even manage to coordinate a time when everybody can be in the same room for 5 mins for a meeting let alone work on any projects.