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[return to "Hack Club: A story in three acts (a.k.a., the shit sandwich)"]
1. patcon+BV[view] [source] 2025-11-13 16:57:34
>>alexkr+(OP)
As someone who has co-founded and co-organized a leaderful non-hierarchical community that has lasted 10 years of weekly hacknights (we've literally never missed a week) and many generations of stewards... I've done reflection on the value of messiness/disorder and "aggressively relaxed" constraints. I sometimes tongue-in-cheek describe myself as having some meagre expertise in "operationalising anarchy", which is only half a joke :)

I suspect the things this author is critiquing and the internal resistance to it is DIRECTLY related to the wonderful things this org can do and how it operates.

I'm of the belief that you can't truly love a thing without loving its mother. This applies to orgs as it does all creatures undergoing evolutionary processes. If you do straddle this belief tension, you perhaps love something other than the thing you thought you loved. And this other thing you love will eventually take shape under your care and watch. Which is nice, that "what we put our attention on grows".[1]

So obviously, you are permitted to love a thing and take issue with its incubating process/culture, but I would suggest you're the site of contradiction that has some explaining to do. If you win and change the process of the thing you love, the thing you love is on a new path toward being something else. And maybe that's fine. A new seed will grow in the empty space. People probably need to have a thing to love that looks like the thing you loved. It will be back.

But there's some other healthy dissonance here that the author isn't grasping. I would say this to them: You are the bringer of the end of what you love, not its saviour. It's all good -- these transitions happen, and in a more zen sense, it can come to pass without [my] judgement. But just please understand your role. You're not a hero, you're a death. Maybe a healthy one, but a death all the same. The thing you love perhaps won't survive your care.

To be clear, I have very mixed feelings. The critiques are valid, but I wish I could acknowledge them without compulsion to demand an action. I think orgs that work like this need to stay small, only scale horizontally (inspiring/supporting other sister orgs to grow), and resist any central/vertical scaling that brings you under the rules and norms that they are desperately trying to steer clear of, but are now accountable to (according to our shared societal values).

[1]: http://adriennemareebrown.net/2012/08/09/giftingmyattention/

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2. SigmaE+FH2[view] [source] 2025-11-14 05:10:21
>>patcon+BV
You nailed it.
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