[sudo-discuss] Ladders, tables, and other horizontal surfaces

[rachel lyra hospodar]

Greetings, sudo!

It has been a long time since i have visited! I hope you have all been 
doing well. I am taking the time right now as the year draws to a close 
to reflect on the current state of things in my world.  Perhaps you will 
indulge me in reading everything below.  perhaps you are seeking a tl;dr 
in which case i will ask you,
have you seen my folding plastic table?
have you seen my aluminum ladder?
have you seen my dreams for a shared space and a common future?

I believe I left them laying around here someplace, possibly with my 
name scrawled across in marker.

The table is about 3'x6', blown plastic, folds in half.  The ladder is 
aluminum, 12' high or so, and quite nice.  The dreams are like hair or 
cuticles, forever growing back even as i try to ignore them and focus on 
something tangible or 'important'.

At the beginning of this year I closed Coyote, a shared art studio and 
retail space I had been managing in North Oakland. We closed in part 
because of the loss of one of our founding members, who moved back east 
to live closer to his family.  We closed also because of a mismatch with 
the neighborhood, admitting reluctantly that where we wanted to have our 
art studio was not compatible with where we needed to do our retail work 
- to seek customers, and build paying business.  We struggled to 
integrate into our neighborhood, making friends while seeking to 
understand the impact of gentrification.  We struggled with an 
unscrupulous landlord, mounting costs and flatlining incomes, and we had 
to admit that the project wasn't working in its current guise.

The upscale restaurant down the block sought our support, as we were 
closing, for a 'neighborhood meeting' about crime.  When I pressed the 
owner (who had never before visited, in our year and a half in business) 
about what their concerns were, he told me that some of their patrons 
were being mugged on their way from the tony restaurant to the train 
station.

I can't say that I was surprised.

I wasn't surprised that the patrons of this restaurant had been mugged. 
  The food is not cheap and the place is an oasis of genteel laughter in 
a neighborhood more attuned to sirens, car stereos, and the stacatto 
passage of these same folks in their cars on their way home to the hills.

I also wasn't surprised that the restaurant owners, after completely 
ignoring the existence of their scrappy neighbors, after failing to 
welcome their new peers to the block, after ignoring that small business 
baksheesh of customer-trading, were still willing to hit us up to come 
to their 'community' meeting and talk about how to 'stop crime'.

I ache for folks who suffer through being robbed with the threat of 
violence, or with actual violence. It sucks to have something like that 
happen to you.

But.

In the time that I bottomlined our business in North Oakland, we lost 
about 5% of our sales income in shoplifting.  This is in comparison to 
basically nil in shoplifting losses in a similar store that I previously 
ran in San Francisco, near haight/fillmore.  What's different? Income 
inequality.  Sure, in a diverse place, folks of all different sorts 
encounter each other, and there is a lot that is healthy about that.

In this region there do seem to be some entrenched group identities in 
the culture war, and I sometimes wonder which side I am on.

I have watched friends and neighbors struggle as their food stamps are 
cut. I have listened to the pained conflict that grows up in their 
loving homes around money, when there is none. I wondered most 
especially which side I was on after George Zimmerman was let free, and 
marches passed my West Oakland house every day. I saw the notoriously 
violent OPD standing between me and these marches, as if to protect me. 
This more than anything else drove me to walk out my front gate and join 
those marches, to show with my body where my loyalties lay.

I have watched the region that has nurtured me for the last decade sink 
into an inequality that I am led to believe is as deep and deeply 
entrenched (meaning the unlikelihood of people to transcend the 
circumstances into which they were born) as the period that preceded the 
French Revolution.

Only whose head will roll?

In the midst of these questions I was forced to confront the inadequacy 
of Sudo's best and most shining efforts.  It is a place where I have 
made friends, many of whom stay in my orbit & community now as I 
re-orient. Sudo is also the only place where my hair was ever grabbed 
without my consent.  It is a place where I have been accosted in a dark 
hallway by someone who repeatedly demanded my attention despite my 
demurrals, despite walking away. It is a place I have been yelled at in 
anger, as have many others. It is a place I have feared to bring 
friends.  I watched a community struggle to set boundaries to protect 
its members, only to founder as it seeks to define what a 'member' is 
that deserves protection.

I say these things not as a condemnation of sudo, and i hope they are 
not read as such.  I say them as an honest person sharing some difficult 
thoughts, and i remind you dear reader that we reside within a culture 
that is structurally predisposed against this. It trains us to see 
critique as attack, to see critical thought as a threat, instead of what 
we hackers know as the fundamental strength we bring to any situation. 
We can think.  we can assess. we can learn and grow and change, and we 
can evolve.

We are meta. We are legion, and we cannot be contained.

I read recently about this space starting in SF, and while i was 
gladdened to hear about Double Union, I am extra excited to imagine 
another space with such a strong commitment to inclusion.
https://github.com/wallacemax/sfhackerspace

I hope the east bay hackerspace scene continues to grow, evolve, and 
flourish.

I understand sudo is changing right now as well.  It is well for all 
things to change, and I hope that in this case the changes lead towards 
the causes of transparency in governance and inclusion for all, which i 
always understood to be some of the most fundamental tenets of sudo.

be well, good luck to all, and always,
R.