Research Note

This Research Note explores the cluttered interiors of the hackerspaces Noisebridge and Double Union in San Francisco, California, and i3Detroit and OmniCorpDetroit in the Detroit, Michigan, metropolitan area. Drawing on spatial ethnography conducted between 2018 and 2023, I explore how hackerspaces demarcate community and relate to the public. Emerging in the United States in 2008 and spreading during the financial crisis, hackerspaces are educational nonprofits and flexible coworking spaces where anarchist and libertarian hacker cultures converge in brick and mortar. Inspired by twentieth-century European hackerspaces, US hackerspaces utilize the nonprofit model to create open technology spaces where theoretically anyone can work, re-skill, and create in a collectively governed environment. Converging with the contemporaneous DIY (do-it-yourself)-focused maker movement, which popularized the term "making" as a more inclusive version of "hacking," hacker-spaces expanded their user bases from coders and engineers to anyone looking to craft, learn, and retrain. Catering to users with broad skillsets and needs, hackerspaces accumulate tools, materials, and craft projects in progress. Their spectacular clutter invokes the landscapes of the garage, workshop, laboratory, artist studio, and messy classroom. Meanwhile, the inscrutability and countercultural coding of their interiors paint hackerspaces as exceptional zones where the rules of the surrounding city are suspended. However, this Research Note argues that hackerspace clutter is structured by countless negotiations over how to balance individual and collective freedom and safety. What I call "collective clutter" records the ways the ideals of openness, organizational horizontality, and freedom in digital hacker culture collapse in the physical collective settings of hackerspaces as their members shape and steward their rented buildings and spaces

Collective action · Craft · Dialogical self · Ethnography · Freedom of information · Hacker · Metropolitan area · Negotiation · Cybercrime and Law Enforcement Studies