Catching signals that sound in the dark

  The secret life of trustees: Someone has to keep the lasers legal! This is a copy of the post I wrote for nottinghack.org on april 12th, to archive on my personal blog Lasers, lathes and leadership When I first joined Nottingham Hackspace in October 2024, I was mostly looking for a place where my partner and I could build things without tripping over each other in our shared house. I’d heard great things about the space, but I didn’t realise just how much it would come to mean to me. Yes, the tools were impressive—giant laser cutters, an impressively stocked wood workshshop, even a metal lathe—but it was the people who really got me hooked. A community of tinkerers, builders, hackers, and artists who share ideas freely and love nothing more than helping each other learn. Becoming a Trustee (Even When You’re Not Sure You Can) When a mid-term trustee position suddenly became vacant, I didn’t immediately think of putting myself forward. I had surgery coming up, and honestly, it felt...

  Mutual aid as community, which you need to survive the coming apocalypse. Principles and practices for collective care, mutual aid, and survival Why This Matters I don’t know about you, but I genuinely feel like the word has gone to shit. There’s climate crisis, economic precarity, rising fascism, and social fragmentation. The idea of surviving alone seems far fetched, like some sort of maladaptive daydream that I can’t quite escape from. The world we’ve inherited is built on faulty (if not outright fucked) systems of extraction, competition, and exploitation, and it’s failing us. It was always going to. Survival isn’t just about meeting your material needs. It’s about belonging somewhere . Abraham Maslow, in his hierarchy of human needs, identified love and belonging as fundamental to wellbeing—just above physical safety and sustenance. Yet, modern capitalism takes this from us constantly. We become isolated, untethered, and uncohesive. We’re constantly told we only have worth...