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

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.