Living together: Reflections on collective living

A version of this post was initially published on 2022-05-30 (Setting Orange, the 4 day of Confusion in the YOLD 3188) in my gemlog at:

gemini://gem.hack.org/log/collectives.gmi

The text has been edited and I added a few photos.

Posted on the blog on 2024-12-15 02:33 +0100. Later updated with how Area 41 ended.

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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/albums/72157635352182900/

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 great documentary about Crass 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 and social experiments, 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 concert venue, Café Svängrum, often with amazing live 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, 18?

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 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 had married Helena and lived in Stolplyckan, a large cohousing project, with 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.

In the early 90's I learned about the NEXUS movement through the Future Culture mailing list. The NEXUS movement was about combining housing collectives and worker cooperatives to share an Internet connection. You have to remember that getting Internet to a residence in those days was hard and expensive!

The basic idea of NEXUS was that the Internet could be used to form a federation of living/working nexi for commerce and coordination. NEXUS-Gaia was the main mailing list of the movement, all the nexi of Gaia, Mother Earth of the Greek mythology, and, well, the Global Association of Internet Anarchists (GAIA)…

You should definitely read Dwayne "ddraig" Jones-Evans' NEXUS Manifesto!

NEXUS awaits: all you can lose is your isolation.

Indeed.

In the spirit of NEXUS, I was part of a movement in Stolplyckan 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 pay 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 a terminal server for every stairwell 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. It was probably something like a Vitalink Ethernet bridge (probably old DEC labelled things) and modems?

It wasn't very speedy, but it worked well for 1997 levels of "well". I'd rather have a reliable and leased-line 14.4(? 19.2?) kbit/s than a lot of packet loss or dial-up.

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 dayjob to work from there, except maybe once or twice, but I spent many evenings there. It was a different age.

When I separated from Helena I moved into this flat for a while. Things went a bit chaotic after that. I wasn't feeling well. At all. I was self-destructive to the point of suicide attempts. It couldn't last.

Eventually, I moved back to Helena. We had some poly on-and-off thing going, almost like before.

A while later, when I came back after a stint at the psych ward, we had the brilliant idea to form a co-living space of our own with a good friend, Roberth. The three musketeers!

We called our new flat Area 41, after Area 51, and our new address, number 41 on the street. Fitting, considering we were all aliens, in a way. First three, but very soon four adults (Dennis was our d'Artagnan), two children, and 18 computers!

I mostly worked from Area 41, even though I also commuted almost weekly to Stockholm during a period. That's a post (series!?) of its own, perhaps.

I was the only one who worked from home full time, but after a few years when we all had laptops we would sometimes sit on the lawn behind our house with our computers, even if we didn't have network access there. At first we didn't even had wifi in the flat!

In the beginning 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(!), then Internet over cable TV coax and, at the end, the wonderful Bonet/Bostream DSL with static IP!

The cable TV thing was pretty unstable. We did some software hacks to make it better, which helped, but wasn't perfect. Perhaps it was an early version of DOCSIS? Bonet was a relief. We had nominally 2 Mbit/768 kbit/s over DSL. Orckit's stuff, not the ATM-based ADSL, thankfully. ISDN was 128 kbit/s at best (2 * 64 kbit/s channels), if dayjob paid, and 64 kbit/s otherwise.

I remember one time during the ISDN era when I suddenly realized we didn't have a phone! I think we were expecting someone to call about fixing something in the flat. I ran out and bought an ISDN phone.

A friend in the networking business gave us some old Symbol 2 Mbit/s wifi PCMCIA cards, later upgraded to the wonderful Lucent Orinocos. We didn't even have an access point at first so someone's laptop would have to work as the router and we connected ad-hoc, but this was clearly the future! It felt revolutionary!

As a comparison, the only wireless built-in to my laptop at the time was infrared! I could connect my Thinkpad x570 to the mobile phone I had, an Ericsson GH688, and use GSM's 9600 b/s over infrared. I couldn't actually afford to do that, of course, but the technology was there.

Sometimes I miss the time in Area 41. A lot of great parties and dinners, of course, but the most important thing was the sense of always having someone around who you could trust and be yourself with. A family, I guess, although perhaps not very traditional. Chosen family is family, too!

Working from the area, at least when the network was working, was also very nice. I could fetch the kids from daycare/school easily and then continue to work for a bit when I came back after the kids had settled down.

My psychiatric problems persisted. Things got a bit chaotic in a few relationships. That's something I don't miss that much. Yes, I realize I'm likely the chaotic culprit here, but that's just another reason not to miss it!

Funny story that perhaps says something about the mood in Area 41: I remember once when I was upstairs working on restoring a Sun Ultra 1 workstation. 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, hugged me (or perhaps even kissed me?), and left.

This repeated a couple of times more until I got the message and went down to the party, by this time starting to become a little inebriated. Mission accomplished!

Area 41 lasted until 2002. I moved in with my girlfriend Petra, later my wife. The area ended with a bang: