hydrarchist writes:"Should have released this months ago but Blicero and I never managed to find the time to do the corrections. This interview was conducted in summer 2001 and subsequently published in issue 5 of Multitudes, and is available at Samizdat in french. Much has happened in the meantime and our intention is to do a second interview in the coming months.Please send any queries or connections to hydrarchist at yahoo.com, or append thems as a post to the article.

A Space of Construction and Deconstruction

Interview with blicero about the experience of the LOA
Hacklab in Milan

Q.What is a hacklab? And more specifically, what is the
LOA Hacklab in Milan?

A Hacklab is a place where we try to combine the hacker attitude,
that is to say the act of understanding the functioning of complex
machines in order to deconstruct them and reconstruct
them in a non conventional manner, with the ambition
of analysing the real. A place of relations where
people, brought by a marked interest in the new forms
of electronic communication, by the digital and the
telematic, can meet to construct a different way of
understanding things and intervene in the processes
that determine reality. A Hacklab is in some way a
meeting place for the various entities and
determinations of digital antagonism.

The LOA Hacklab (Mi) specifically is the Hacklab of
Milan, born after the hackmeeting 99 which took place
at the social center . Last year we
were involved in different campaigns run principally,
but not only, by all the "realities" (1) of Italian
telematic antagonism: open and free access to knowledge and immaterial goods, freedom of expression, courses and seminars,
construction of a new server which will be presented
during the next hackmeeting, and very many other
things. Currently, our internal coordination mailing list
numbers 70 subscribers, and we continue
to expand our collaborative projects.

Q. Could you present fairly quickly the route that propelled
the establishment of the hacklabs in several Italian
cities, and particularly the relationship between this
dynamic and the occupied social centers?

A. In the beginning there was the hackmeeting. During
these self organized occasions telematic
activists and hackers from all over Italy (and
elsewhere as well) exchanged ideas, opinions, tips,
and took advantage of the opportunity to meet physically
after having gotten to know one another through the
intermediary of the flux of bytes. The first of these
meetings was organised in 1998 at the CPA FI-SUD, one of
Florence’s social centers, and it was a success. The second was
in Milan in '99, and many people began to ask themselves why not give some
continuity to these
moments of exchange and relationships between each
hackmeeting. Thus were born the
Hacklabs in Florence and Milan, not to forget the
Freaknet Medialab that had already been operational
for some time. In a period of two years, other
hacklabs were created and even today others are being
born. At present there are ten and the desire to
hack and to change the current context seems
not to diminish, but rather the opposite.

The relationship with the social centers has without
doubt a historical component; the hackmeetings were
born and took place in the social centers of Florence,
Milan and Rome, and it was natural that structures
having as fundamental objectives, amongst others, to give
continuity to the activities taken up by the hackers,
started off and found their own space inside
structures such as the social centers.

There exist also deeper reasons, tied specifically to
the hacker attitude and to its origins, fully
convergent with those which inspire the subjects of
self-organisation. Two fundamental characteristics of
the hacker ethic meet in the wish to give knowledge
the widest possible circulation and the desire to
understand the functioning of complex mechanisms so as to be
able, as a result, to detourn them for one's own
pleasure and desires. If we transpose these
characteristics into the 'non technical' milieu, it
is easy to identify the occupied social centers
and the self-managed spaces as clear and obvious
attempts at reality hacking. The convergence of these
two characteristics (historic and 'behavioural')
brought the hacklabs and the realities of
self-organisation to share spaces and trajectories.

Q. A particularly interesting aspect of the experience of
the LOA is in the fact of organising regular 'courses'
where you try to transmit expertise on the subject of
use of UNIX type systems and computer science languages (Perl,
HTML, C etc.) to 'normal users'?

A. Not only to ‘normal users’. The courses, in theory, are
of differentiated standards for those that already have
some knowledge and feel motivated enough to pursue
them.

Q. How does that work?

A. We built a class room with i486 PCs and screens
recovered from the dumpsters of banks and other
offices. We have sixteen work-stations which provide
everything necessary to take the course and get hands
on the machines. We strove and have succeeded in creating a didactic
space which leaves nothing to envy the commercial courses in computer
science
that presently flourish everywhere, thanks to
recovered material, a little reflection and our will
to demonstrate that the headlong rush towards a
technology which is ever more sophisticated, and always the 'last
word', is purely and simply a reflex of the capitalist
process; the latter necessitating the constant
creation of markets to survive. Besides the physical
structure, several of us got together to produce
didactic material, to put together curriculum for the courses and
seminars,
transparencies, hand-outs, CDs and so many other
things. Lastly, it even occurred to us to produce
courses on video, but that seemed a little bit too
much...

Q. Who comes to the seminar courses of the LOA?

A. The crowd is rather varied running from students to
professionals, passing by the hackers as far as some immigrants who through these
courses manage to find a job. The courses and seminars
are not only instances of apprenticeship and sharing
of knowledge, they are above all and especially moments of
relationship. During the classes, our everyday
activities find themselves confronted by the presence and ideas of
those who come to take the courses and seminars. From
a certain point of view, the courses and seminars
represent for us what sociality represented for the
self-managed experiences of preceding decades.

Q. Do you think that the transmission of knowledge, of
expertise in the use of software tools is a matter of high stakes?

A. In this phase, it is for sure a key element in the
construction of other perspectives of digital rights
and beyond. The digital universe is one of the rare
universes where it is really possible to put in
everyone’s hands the means of (immaterial) production
and the sharing of this know-how is one of the
fundamental elements for allowing everyone to
participate in the struggle. Changing reality takes
place also through the sharing of the tools to
change it, and in the computer science-telematic universe,
that is exactly what we are trying to do. It's no
accident if the concepts of 'private property' and the
'limitation on the freedom of circulation' of
knowledge, but also of goods and people, are the elements
upon which late capitalism is based. The sharing of
knowledge and the availability of immaterial knowledge
for the most vulnerable levels of society constitute
an important threshold so that the latter can
participate in the transformation of the present.

As can be seen in the area of biotechnology, closed
Knowledge - with high costs of production but also of
accessibility - is the game of those who want
globalization to increase their own profits
and power even more. Horizontal sharing has been a 'rebel'
practice since its very origins, which are
diametrically opposed to the origins of capital.

Q. The LOA also do software projects. Interesting
and surprising things such as “OBOE” which aim to give
the blind access to computer technologies and digital
cultures. Where does this type of initiative come
from?

A. Acts of 'intervention' in software are an innate
aspect of the hacker culture, in which the hacklabs
trace their roots. In the course of this year and a
half of experience, we have touched on different
questions - each one of which necessitated a detailed
treatment - and each time we tried to
confront them with the same seriousness: on the one
hand, to construct a critical and analytical
discourse of the situation (such as the accessibility
of electronic texts and the interests of the large
publishers in the “Cavazza-Galiano” case last autumn)
and on the other hand, to provide solutions and hacks
to offer alternatives. It is one of the fundamental
characteristics of the hacklab, in my view: to try to
combine practice and theoretical political
analysis. The work of software production (as well as
the courses) are the ideal reflection of this will.

Q. What are your projects in progress and those now completed?

A. Numerous things are in progress, few are fully
completed. On the one hand, because it is difficult
to put the word 'end' to a project and on the other
because we lack a fundamental resource: time. In
progress, we have OBOE, a search engine for eboobs, a
project for an encrypted IRC client and especially the
completion of an independent server which will allow
free rein to our madness... Amongst the things
that we have completed (or contributed to their
completion) there are the courses and seminars - henceforth active for
more than a year - , the previous
editions of the hackmeeting, and initiatives on the GNU
economy at the level of software and editorial. The
“copyDown” (a system for the electronic exchange of
texts which has the future possibility of becoming a
sort of Napster for text and which is based upon Gnutella)
and many other little things.

Q. You organised a meeting at Bulk on the theme 'Free
Software and No Copyright' in November 1999, which
stressed the right of reproduction and opposition to the
European project on software patents. It seems to us
that No Copyright - by insisting on the right to copy
- is on the side of copyleft put forward by the GNU project
and which insists on the right to copy and to modify,
based, exactly, on a reversal of 'copyright'. Don't
you think that it is necessary today to go further than No
Copyright?

A. Yes, in fact! Besides, the series of initiatives that we led
on the GNU economy was driven by a very complex
reasoning and practice on the question of copyright.
It is obvious that the model to which we refer is that
of copyleft, which has already shown its success in
the fields of software and documentation. Likewise, it
is clear that a final perspective where everything would
be copyleft would be more than desirable, but it is
true also that the battle to force the times and the
powerful interests relative to the achievement of a
free sharing of knowledge passes through the abolition
of the laws of copyright and the voluntary withdrawal
from laws that one does not share and wishes to
eliminate.

A. Thus the phrase 'No Copyright'. It is certain
that to think of a future world in which the spirit of
the community renders useless the very concept of
copyright is a beautiful reference to dream of, but it
remains no less true that our pragmatic tendency makes
us choose to first try the most
feasible routes, to as a result pile on the pressure to go further. With different times and means: in the
first phase, we fight for something that changes the
mechanisms, not depending on relationships and people,
but effectively compatible with the
currently predominant market mechanisms; the second
phase, is a much bigger wager but and si that for which we fight
every day, as much with words as with concrete
actions: seeking to transform the logic of domination
into a logic of community, the free market into free
sharing, alienation into participation, the fact of
delegating into the fact of acting. We are really only
at the very beginning, but we live turned towards the
future....

1. In Italy, the term ‘realities’ is often used to indicate
the heterogeneity of the occupied social centers and other spaces
linked to the social movement. Each space has its own character and
often a local specificity."