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Hackers was very inspirational to me when I read it as a ~17 year old. I'd been programming off and on for a while, but just really getting into it at that poin

Hackers was very inspirational to me when I read it as a ~17 year old. I'd been programming off and on for a while, but just really getting into it at that point—and the attitudes of many of the folks in the book resonated strongly with me (especially the early MIT hackers). I naively thought I'd find a group of people like this in college, and of course failed to. I moved around the country some looking for people, too (mostly in Berkeley, CA and Cambridge, MA)—but never had much luck. Definitely not saying they aren't out there, or that my searches in those places were exhaustive, but I did look and failed to turn anything up. My current view is that it's difficult for at least a couple of reason: 1) It requires the group to have some some kind of unifying aim (even if it's very loose/general) and (ideally) a physical location members can return to regularly which fosters both serious work and the ability to relax/socialize/goof around. Seems like some makerspaces are pretty good with this, but from what I can tell typically don't have sufficient focus on software/CS to be of interest to me. 2) It's hard to search for these things because the results will overwhelmingly be filled with folks who don't actually feel much compelled by pure hacking but describe themselves as such for professional reasons. In my experience this is mostly what programming Meetups are about: making contacts to find jobs, or people trying to get themselves to learn some new tech, not because they are particularly curious but because it would improve their resume. I think part of the problem may also be related to viewing the discovery/creation of such a group as something easier than it really is. I'd bet both the difficulty of finding it and the potential rewards of doing so are higher than people typically expect. Doing a few google searches and occasionally asking around town will not be sufficient. That said—anyone else here in Tucson presently? :)

archagon 9y ago
Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey! One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so inspiring (apart from the Berkeley connection) was because it described a piece of technology that brought local people together by design. Today, we can go online and find out what people are saying in any part of the world on any conceivable topic. But barring a few notable exceptions like Nextdoor, there seems to be relatively little focus on technology that connects us with our neighbors and colleagues (except in a roundabout way). When I was a student at Cal, our Livejournal group hosted a biannual event called AnonCon, where hundreds of people would gather in a single thread and anonymously moan about finals, gossip about campus life, and discuss who they were crushing on. At the co-op where I was living at the time, this was a Big Event: people would huddle in the living room under blankets and have a merry old time reading threads and adding their own thoughts to the pile. You'd run into AnonCon participants in the real world who you'd have never thought were clued in to this sort of thing. It felt like the campus was suddenly electrified through the comments section of this simple blog post! We weren't really online, but part a quirky campus community brought together by way of technology. It makes me wonder if maybe these kinds of communities could be kickstarted with a modern take on Community Memory: a distributed database or forum combined with some sort of physical beacon that would facilitate peer-to-peer connections between local devices. There would be no pathway to the internet: if you wanted to know what was going on in your community, you'd have to go to a particular location (or find a friend) and grab the latest snapshot of the database directly. Perhaps someone might hide a beacon in their favorite café, seed it with some comp-sci talk, and then see who shows up to trade thoughts! Idealistic communities with unified aims and physical haunts could almost emerge out of the ether — in cafés, libraries, community centers and parks. If globally-hosted communities incentivize people to spread out, perhaps peer-to-peer communities could incentivize people to grow closer together. And maybe, the kind of unity and camaraderie evident in those oddball Hackers communities would subsequently follow.
- westoncb 9y ago
  Hey archagon—that sounds like a great idea. I can just imagine how it must have felt to get on AnonCon :) I wonder about the two principles involved there (or the ones I've happened to pick out anyway): locality + anonymity. Seems like the anonymity supports a kind of radical latitude of expression, which is great for the initial phases of starting something new; meanwhile, locality constrains who participates in the discussion and influences the topic (to things more local) without constraining it. Thinking about this more concretely, while I had trouble finding a group of like-minded thinkers/builders in Berkeley/Cambridge—I have no difficulty imagining that if I posted a number of random ideas I've had about programming languages or philosophy or whatever, that I would have received some interesting replies, and that some of those replies could turn into discussions, and some discussions would evolve into something no longer anonymous. As for implementation, I most readily see it as an AR application: message boards tied to physical locations. Of course there are any number of factors in how this would be carried out that would attract (or repel) different subsets of people, or different types of discussions etc. For instance, I could see it devolving into a world-wide cover of bathroom stall graffiti if too loose, or generating little of interest if too constrained, etc. Cool projects btw! I think we spoke briefly on here some years ago :) Also, did you ever go 'the Med' in Berkeley? Do you know if anything similar has taken its place since it shut down? Edit: actually, I guess the 'AR' aspect of it is pretty superficial—it's just the idea of associating virtual objects with geolocations that I had in mind with it. But, at least with the current state of AR frameworks/hardware, it would probably be better to just use a more traditional 2D UI for this. But the key thing would be that depending on where you were standing in the physical world, you'd get a different set of 'terminals' (or something), which you could jump into and start discussing things.
  - westoncb 9y ago
    I drew up a wireframe of what I'm thinking: http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg Would be cool to keep it something super simple like that—though you'd need a way to create new 'terminals' which get pinned to particular geolocations, too. (Also 'terminal' isn't quite the right concept/term... but yeah.) Maybe each user gets one terminal that they can place somewhere... Maybe if it gets enough upvotes the user who placed it is allowed to place another. Thoughts anyone?

archagon 9y ago

Hey, I'm currently in the bumming-around-Berkeley part of your journey! One of the reasons I found the Community Memory chapter of Hackers so inspiring (apart from the Berkeley connection) was because it described a piece of technology that brought local people together by design. Today, we can go online and find out what people are saying in any part of the world on any conceivable topic. But barring a few notable exceptions like Nextdoor, there seems to be relatively little focus on technology that connects us with our neighbors and colleagues (except in a roundabout way). When I was a student at Cal, our Livejournal group hosted a biannual event called AnonCon, where hundreds of people would gather in a single thread and anonymously moan about finals, gossip about campus life, and discuss who they were crushing on. At the co-op where I was living at the time, this was a Big Event: people would huddle in the living room under blankets and have a merry old time reading threads and adding their own thoughts to the pile. You'd run into AnonCon participants in the real world who you'd have never thought were clued in to this sort of thing. It felt like the campus was suddenly electrified through the comments section of this simple blog post! We weren't really online, but part a quirky campus community brought together by way of technology. It makes me wonder if maybe these kinds of communities could be kickstarted with a modern take on Community Memory: a distributed database or forum combined with some sort of physical beacon that would facilitate peer-to-peer connections between local devices. There would be no pathway to the internet: if you wanted to know what was going on in your community, you'd have to go to a particular location (or find a friend) and grab the latest snapshot of the database directly. Perhaps someone might hide a beacon in their favorite café, seed it with some comp-sci talk, and then see who shows up to trade thoughts! Idealistic communities with unified aims and physical haunts could almost emerge out of the ether — in cafés, libraries, community centers and parks. If globally-hosted communities incentivize people to spread out, perhaps peer-to-peer communities could incentivize people to grow closer together. And maybe, the kind of unity and camaraderie evident in those oddball Hackers communities would subsequently follow.

westoncb 9y ago
Hey archagon—that sounds like a great idea. I can just imagine how it must have felt to get on AnonCon :) I wonder about the two principles involved there (or the ones I've happened to pick out anyway): locality + anonymity. Seems like the anonymity supports a kind of radical latitude of expression, which is great for the initial phases of starting something new; meanwhile, locality constrains who participates in the discussion and influences the topic (to things more local) without constraining it. Thinking about this more concretely, while I had trouble finding a group of like-minded thinkers/builders in Berkeley/Cambridge—I have no difficulty imagining that if I posted a number of random ideas I've had about programming languages or philosophy or whatever, that I would have received some interesting replies, and that some of those replies could turn into discussions, and some discussions would evolve into something no longer anonymous. As for implementation, I most readily see it as an AR application: message boards tied to physical locations. Of course there are any number of factors in how this would be carried out that would attract (or repel) different subsets of people, or different types of discussions etc. For instance, I could see it devolving into a world-wide cover of bathroom stall graffiti if too loose, or generating little of interest if too constrained, etc. Cool projects btw! I think we spoke briefly on here some years ago :) Also, did you ever go 'the Med' in Berkeley? Do you know if anything similar has taken its place since it shut down? Edit: actually, I guess the 'AR' aspect of it is pretty superficial—it's just the idea of associating virtual objects with geolocations that I had in mind with it. But, at least with the current state of AR frameworks/hardware, it would probably be better to just use a more traditional 2D UI for this. But the key thing would be that depending on where you were standing in the physical world, you'd get a different set of 'terminals' (or something), which you could jump into and start discussing things.
- westoncb 9y ago
  I drew up a wireframe of what I'm thinking: http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg http://symbolflux.com/images/wireframe123.jpg Would be cool to keep it something super simple like that—though you'd need a way to create new 'terminals' which get pinned to particular geolocations, too. (Also 'terminal' isn't quite the right concept/term... but yeah.) Maybe each user gets one terminal that they can place somewhere... Maybe if it gets enough upvotes the user who placed it is allowed to place another. Thoughts anyone?