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Introduction
There Are a Number of Places This Book Could Begin

There are a number of places this book could begin.

It might start with me, in my kitchen, stirring a jar of sourdough starter. Sourdough is a thick batter-like home for wild yeasts that, when at room temperature and in its active growth phase, foams happily and releases a rich, hoppy smell. For millennia it's been used to bake bread that has a slightly sour tang - hence, sourdough - and which generally requires longer to rise, but which is delicious and, by some accounts, better for you than breads made with instant yeast. I hadn't heard any of this stuff before a year or so ago, but today I am stirring my own culture, feeding it with flour and water and setting it on the kitchen counter to let the microbes grow and develop. Tomorrow I'll mix some of the starter with more flour and water to begin making bread dough, kneading it for 15 minutes or so before leaving it overnight to rise.

Or it could start in a hackerspace - any hackerspace, it doesn't much matter which one. It might be tiny, like one student-run hackerspace in Boston I visited, which was squeezed into a few square metres in a basement of a university building. The walls are filled to bursting with whiteboards, piles of humming servers, books, notices and posters, and shelves of wires and plugs and tools and spare computer parts. There's also what appears to be a small flying machine, labelled 'McFly'. In the centre of the room, student hackers sit around tables or on a battered sofa, talking in groups, focusing intensely on laptop screens, or plugging, welding and building. The air, in the manner of air in densely populated basement rooms the world over, has a thick, moist fug to it.

Or we might be in a much larger space - a TechShop, or the 40,000 square foot ex-factory makerspace that is just down the road from the students in Boston. These kinds of spaces might feel emptier: they're probably less crowded, and tools and materials are balanced less precariously. But they're still full of stuff, from laser cutters to 3D printers and CNC routers and, importantly, the finished or half-finished projects these tools are being used to build. You can see anything from beer brewing systems to exquisitely fine jewellery and hacked bikes with glitterballs attached to them. There's more space, so there are more comfy chairs, plus a library of sofas, armchairs and bookshelves in the centre.

But we might also begin in the media, with the UK's Guardian newspaper launching its 'Do Something' campaign in early 2014. This was, as the paper wrote in its 'Do Something Manifesto', an invitation to 'try something new'. Through a monthly magazine, journalists present stories and discussion about easily accessible and low-cost opportunities for readers to try something different. Articles give advice on everything from places to learn how to upholster your furniture to unusual ideas for a date or whether it's possible to learn Russian in a day; the tone is chatty and friendly, with reader feedback and sections like 'The Do Something Challenge' and Beginner's Guides. The campaign, the Manifesto explains, is motivated by the belief that the experience of novelty adds value to people's lives. Whether it's trying out new things, meeting new people or learning something different, living life such that you accrue new memories and new experiences means that you will live more intensely. If you 'broaden your horizons, learn new skills, or implement more beneficial habits', they suggest, your life will be more satisfying (though also perhaps harder work: the first magazine contains a list of tips on how to meet your goals and stay motivated).

This book is about the connections between these things. More specifically, it's about hackerspaces, and the hacking and making activities that go on within them, and their connection to broader developments in society. Culturing sourdough; hacking together software or bike-glitterball hybrids; embarking on a lifestyle of active and engaged leisure: these things look quite different on the surface. I want to argue, however, that they share some central commonalities. Something similar is going on when one chooses to join a hackerspace, gets involved in crafting, or dabbles in traditional skills like sourdough baking. Taken together, these kinds of activities can tell us something about the kinds of societies we live in, and the kinds of people we are asked to be.

The rise of hacking and making

Hackerspaces and the maker movement are a growing trend. Though many people haven't heard of them, as of the start of 2016, there were 1,233 active hackerspaces around the world, and more than 500 spaces in development. This is a global movement: these spaces are anywhere from Surprise, Arizona to Yangon, Myanmar.1 They can be anything from tiny rented garages to vast former factories or shopfront locations, situated anywhere from inner cities to residential suburban tracts. They may be private members' clubs or open to anyone, anytime. They may be literally filled to the ceiling with stuff - electronics supplies, wood, books, defunct tools, test tubes and fume hoods - or almost empty apart from a couple of tables and chairs.

What they share is that they are physical spaces, operated collectively, where members can use equipment they might not be able to afford, or have space for, by themselves.2 This equipment can be anything from 3D printers to industrial sewing machines or server systems. It is, essentially, anything that hackers and makers need to help them hack and make. Hacker and makerspaces therefore bring together people who are interested in hacking and making, and offer them support in doing so. The result, the stuff that is hacked and made, is pretty diverse. Hacker and makerspaces can help you learn to code, give you access to the tools you need to make your own furniture, provide lessons in electronics, or give you space to do some table-top genetic engineering. British freedom of information campaigner Heather Brookes has called hackerspaces the 'digital-age equivalent of English Enlightenment coffee houses',3 which suggests something rather intellectual and discursive: a place where ideas might be shared. Hacker and makerspaces house communities of people who, together, learn and share and make anything from apps to oscilloscopes.

For a long time hacking had strictly negative connotations. Even now, the term can make us think of the activities of Anonymous, the loosely organized collective which has taken down the websites of PayPal and Visa and agitated for social justice,4 or of solitary, bearded geeks with poor social skills.5 President Barack Obama at one stage dismissed ex-NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden as a '29 year old hacker'.6 Hacking as a criminal activity - as breaking and entering on computers, networks and servers - remains the top entry in the Urban Dictionary's definition of the term.7 This understanding of hacking is as something that is strictly digital. It's generally illicit, referring to practices known as cracking, or black-hat hacking, rather than white-hat hacking, which is 'ethical' hacking that harmlessly tests the resilience of particular networks.8

But the idea of hacking, and, relatedly, that of making, is currently being rediscovered as something positive, exciting and useful. As far back as 2005, the American Dialect Society announced that 'lifehack' was one of its words of the year (definition: 'to make one's day-to-day behaviors or activities more efficient'9). Today the website Lifehacker continues to offer tips and tricks to help deal with everyday life, from how to effectively de-seed a pomegranate to a guide to making your own keyboard. IKEA hacking involves the re-purposing of IKEA products into anything from vibrators to personalized kitchen cabinets.10 A 2014 book frames urban exploration as 'place hacking'.11 Computing also remains an important context for hacking. Take, for instance, the growth of hackathons, software hacking marathons which focus on contributing to a particular technology, or on a social issue or problem.12 In the UK, a 'National Health Service Hack Day' is held several times a year, to help develop better healthcare technologies.13 The trend to use technology to hack social problems14 has reached such a pitch that there's now an annual 'Stupid Hackathon' satirizing it, at which participants attempt to develop projects with 'no value whatsoever'.15

Hacking has even entered the heart of the establishment. The Royal Institution of Great Britain's Christmas Lectures have been running since 1825 and were started by Michael Faraday. Presented in the Institution's lecture theatre, with its high-banked round of seats, wooden panelling, and stage from which Faraday himself once spoke, the annual lecture series aims to provide engaging science education to young people. Among others, Nobel Prize winners have given past lectures. It's a sign of the reinvention of hacking, then, that in 2014 the lectures took as their focus 'how to hack your home'. Over the course of three lectures, Professor Danielle George (an engineer, and the sixth woman in the history of the Christmas Lectures to...