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I dreamt about Dial House last night. I've never been there, but it was like I belonged, like I was meant to be there.
Last I heard anything about Dial House they were trying to gather enough money to buy the house, but that was perhaps 10 years ago? I had to look it up today to see if it was still there and still functioning as an anarchist open house.
Here are some photos from someone who was there in 2013:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/violentgrind/9657115444/
Click on the left for more photos.
Penny was still there. Still baking bread. I'm glad.
I found a recent interview where he says he still lives in the house:
https://www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2022/03/penny-rimbaud-interview.html
I'm relieved.
Here's a
if you don't know what I'm talking about.
I used to think that I would create such an anarchist haven with friends some day. An intentional community or an anarchist collective, living and perhaps working together.
My parents had a friend who had been a volunteer in a kibbutz in Israel. I met them as a child and was really impressed. Kibbutzim, and especially the more Libertarian Socialist ones, seemed like a dream come true. Interestingly, when I was a child we viewed Israel as a more or less a pragmatic socialist country, a beacon of Social Democracy, very much unlike how people view Israel today.
For a while in my late teens my friends and I had our eyes on an old civil defence bunker we had visited, but that turned out to be mostly daydreaming. Living together in a bunker! Sounds great, doesn't it!? There was even a small movie theatre in there which would have been awesome.
No one seems to know what happened to the bunker. Perhaps it's secret again?
I used to spend many weekends in my teens at Stömne verkstäder, a worker-owned cooperative which had a cafe, Café Svängrum, which often had amazing concerts. They seemed to know a lot of people in the alternative music scene in Sweden.
I remember an amazing alternative midsummer party which was probably the first time I ate burritos. They were made with tortillas I baked myself in the open air. I discussed intentional communities, anarchism and worker-owned business with some of the residents late into the night. I was, perhaps, seventeen.
I moved away to study at a university a long way from home. I suppose I could have put up an ad somewhere to find someone my age to live with, but instead I rented a room from an elderly couple. The couple thought I was pretty weird and pretty soon wanted me to leave, so I moved to a student dorm for a while. I didn't really fit in there, either, and at least one person in the dorm really disliked me and did strange, hateful acts against me.
A few years later I lived in Stolplyckan, a large cohousing project, with H and our two kids. There were four large buildings, more than 130 flats, and plenty of common areas: a large gym hall, pottery, wood shop, a school with years 1 to 3, no less than three daycares, et cetera, et cetera.
Through the Future Culture mailing list I learned about the NEXUS movement in the early 90s. The NEXUS movement was about combining housing collectives and worker cooperatives to share an Internet connection. Remember that getting Internet in those days was kind of hard! Internet could then be used as a means for forming a federation of nexi for commerce and coordination. NEXUS-Gaia was the main mailing list of the movement, all the nexi of Gaia.
You should definitely read Dwayne "ddraig" Jones-Evans' "NEXUS Manifesto":
"NEXUS awaits: all you can lose is your isolation." Indeed.
I was part of a movement in Stolplyckan in trying to get an Internet access for the houses or at least some shared computer with an UUCP feed for mail. I ran a BBS at the time (The Hack Machine, later IBKOM) and after a while managed to get a UUCP feed for it (lysator.liu.se!closet). One of my neighbours helped with paying the extra phone line for the BBS. That was the closest to Internet connection we got.
We had this idea we could use a box of old short-haul modems we got from a strange dude in Stockholm with Ericsson connections to make people connect to our common computer, but it didn't work out to wire up the place. If we had had some terminals servers and a lot of coax we might have had something.
Some friends shared a nearby flat and managed to get an Internet connection in a sneaky way: they got a leased line and just showed up on either end when the technician came to install it. One of the ends happened to be a computer club at the university where they could easily hook up to the real network. The leased line was just dumb wires. They hooked up their own, used equipment at both ends. Not very speedy, but it worked well for 1997 levels of "well". I'd rather have a reliable 19.2 kbit/s than a lot of packet loss.
They offered me to put a terminal in their shared computer room. I put my NCD 16 there and got an account on one of the local computers. Now I didn't have to dial in or bike all the way to uni or work to get Internet! Still had to leave home, though, but it was just a ten minute walk. I didn't get permission from work to work from there, except maybe once or twice, but I spent many evenings there. It was a different age.
(Photo of a white/beige X terminal with a square screen and a DEC-like keyboard.)
M and me in front of our terminals
(Photo of two men, the one to the left in white t-shirt and blue jeans, the one to the right (me) in black t-shirt and black jeans, both sitting in front of X terminals.)
When I separated from H I moved into this flat for a while. Things went a bit chaotic after that. I wasn't well. At all. I was self destructive to the point of suicide attempts. It couldn't last.
I moved back to H for a while. We had some polyamorous on-and-off thing going. Then we had the brilliant idea to form a co-living space of our own in another, larger flat. We called it Area 41, after Area 51, and our address, number 41 on the street. We were all aliens, in a way, not quite fitting in. Four adults, two children, and 18 computers!
The four adult members of Area 41 during a party. I'm on the right.
(CW: Eye contact! Photo of three men and a woman standing next to each other, most holding some form of alcoholic beverage, all smiling in a way. All are dressed mostly in black. Two of the men have shaved heads, including me, one has black hair. The woman has long red hair and is dressed in a black PVC dress. Yes, my hand is on her breast.)
I worked from Area 41 for a couple of jobs, even though I also spent a lot of time on weekly commutes to Stockholm. That's a gemlog post of its own, perhaps. I was the only one who worked from home almost all the time, but after a few years when we all had laptops we would sit on the backside lawn and type, even if we didn't have network access from there. At first we didn't even had wifi in the flat.
At first we had just dial up modem access which was as awful as it sounds. Then we got ISDN, even with automatic dial-in when traffic hit one of my static IP addresses. Yes, really nice!
The ISDN was 128 kbit/s at most, at least when someone else (my job) was paying the metered access. After that we got Internet over cable TV. That was pretty bad at first, with lots of packet drops and sometimes the connection was dropped completely, but it got better over time. Then we switched to an early form of DSL with, I think, 2.5 Mbit/s downstreams and 768 kbit/s upstream. Again with static IP!
A friend in the networking business brought some old Symbol 2 Mbit/s wifi cards for us. We didn't have an access point so someone's laptop would have to work as the router, but this was clearly the future! As a comparison, the only wireless built-in to my laptop at the time was infrared! You could connect it to the mobile phone I had, an Ericsson GH688, and use GSM's 9600 b/s over it. I couldn't afford to do that, of course, but in theory you could.
Sometimes I miss that time. A lot of great parties and the sense of always having some friends at home. Working from there, at least when the network was working, was also very nice. I could fetch the kids from daycare/school easily and then continuing working a bit when I came back.
My continuing downward spiral into a severe depression and some rather chaotic relationships are the only clouds... But rather big clouds.
I remember once when I was upstairs working on restoring an old Sun workstation that I had just bought. A party was just getting interesting downstairs. Suddenly an unknown, very cute young woman was standing next to me, looking over my shoulder. She said "I was told to bring this beer to the weirdo upstairs" and handed me a beer, hugged me and left. "That was strange", I thought, but continued working on the Sun. And drank the beer.
After a while a cute young man did the same thing: came up with a beer, said something funny and hugged me, and left.
This repeated a couple of times more until I got the message and went down to the party, by this time rather inebriated. Mission accomplished!
mc,
Setting Orange, the 4 day of Confusion in the YOLD 3188 (2022-05-30)
