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i threw some good parties in the 90s at warehouse spaces I lived in, and this is distinct from a community space, but closely related. with hindsight, there is a specific talent for doing that. Alex Danco's writing on "Scenes" [1] codifies a lot of the details, but nobody so far has been able to scale it. The main factor when I did a hacker/artist space, it was the effect of relationships with musicians and scene people, not the affect of a vision to make something cool. The defining factor of the spaces I've seen succeed vs. fail was something physical, and explicitly not software, and to a lesser extent, politics. You can have software and politics flavored things, but unless you are doing something physical like robotics, motorcycles, puppeteering, bookselling, pyrotechnics, music production, mma, it's not going to survive. Sure, there are spaces that don't do anything physical, but if you scratch the surface there is always a mysterious source of funding by the usual suspects who want to direct the scene to some other end. The physical activity creates the competence hierarchy that is a stable and self regulating social dynamic. [1] https://danco.substack.com/p/how-scenes-work-with-jim-oshaug... |
I'd say the point is that community spaces should "scale" in the sense they inspire imitators to create their own spaces. We know this kind of scale works because this was how art and culture endured through human history for thousands of years. If anything, the urge to scale up, centralize, and delegate everything to for-profit corporations is what destroyed these sorts of community spaces.