//HACKING IS A MINDSET, NOT A SKILLSET// HACKING IS A MINDSET, NOT A SKILLSET//
Within the margins of an Empire that forces us to find loopholes to survive; we all become hackers. We crack the codes of conduct imposed upon us and shred the social contracts we never signed. We rout out internalized carceral systems of reward and punishment, designed to fool us into thinking we aren’t free. With small experimentations, we build fruitopia seed by seed, re-imagining queer futures, remembering that together we can learn and build anything we desire.
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DAWGIE——WHAT ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT???
This lil’ frooty seedling bloomed into building a mesh media server as form of resistance to , capitalist indoctrination, predatory Internet Service Providers, and every cop city everywhere.
Also so we can Meshflix and chill with hot people who deserve to rest and vibe after a long day of resistance.
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What’s is the mesh?
The mesh network is a community-controlled wireless internet network that is designed, spread, and maintained by a collective of its users and volunteers.
The mesh, in turn, it’s media server, work to cut into the profits of evil tech corporations who HAVE NO FRIENDS and are major funders of Cop City.
RE: Cox Enterprises, of Atlanta, is a global communications conglomerate, and monopolizes as an internet service provider in my city, donated $10 million to the Atlanta Police Foundation in 2022. The CEO of Cox Enterprises, Alex Taylor, reportedly heads the APF Cop City fundraising campaign. Additionally, Cox Enterprises owns the Atlanta-Journal Constitution (AJC), the only major daily newspaper in the metro Atlanta area. The AJC has published editorial pieces supporting Cop City.
Ew.
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Deep History: the sex worker to pirate pipeline.
In April 2018 SESTA/FOSTA passed into law. It criminalized and effectively took down the crucial online platforms sex workers used for advertising and digital security practices, such as client e-verification tools and “bad date lists” of dangerous clients. This created several health and safety concerns as these tools were essential for screening and networking with others providers.
In the wake of this I found myself scrambling to organize workshops teaching other sex workers about digital security and how to survive under the sudden impact of even harsher state surveillance. I formed the Super Secret Cyber Security Club (SSCSC), now evolved into Cyborg Support, where workers with criminalized forms of income met once a week to talk about tech stuff, mainly digital security, teach each other practical skills on how to interface with technology that fostered more agency.
In 2019, I pitched the idea of building a mesh network to some people in SSCSC who were excited about different forms of autonomous comms and building collectivized infrastructure. We began studying the mesh networks that Detroit and NYC were building and I wanted to build one too. I had no idea what this project would entail and I had never done anything like it before, but I was confident I could pull it off.
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This is the crux of "hacking as a mindset and not a skillset"
I am a Gemini who runs on the fuel of infinite curiosity and I want to learn how every thing works.
Forever operating on the optimistic delusion that I can learn and build anything if I at least try. I am the, "Why buy that, I can make that" guy and the, "We have McDonalds at home" guy.
When shopping for pre-made hamburger buns I derail the BBQ by hours by saying "How do I make my own hamburger buns?"
"Damn, This is toaster is broken…how do I fix this?" I am not an electrician but I am an artist and a transexual so I bet I could!
As a tinkerer I notice that I like to dive in, completely uninformed and attempt to problem solve. I forget that Youtube tutorials are a thing because I am just old enough to grow up in a world that it didn't exist, so breaking shit in the name of fixing it armed with sheer will and zero information was how approached this project and I will continue to approach life in general.
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Just as my vision of building a mesh network started to bud, COVID hit and the dream dissolved as we globally pivoted and all tended to other emergent collective needs.
My imagination was sparked again in 2022 at a tomato factory in Paoli, Indiana at Deepmay, an experimental tech camp I help organize. A student at Deepmay made an inspiring presentation about the mesh network they started in their community, that we will call POPNET (for the sake of anonymity) POPNET was born from a group of friends who wanted pool their 2020 stimulus checks and build a project together. They all made Powerpoint presentations and pitched different infrastructure project ideas that the collective fund could go toward. The mesh network was chosen and a bunch of other beautiful shit happened after that. Without any of them having a tech background, together they successfully built an incredible, valuable, sweet, gushy gush gush of a community resource that I’m forever impressed by and if I keep typing about I will get sappy.
Hearing this story re-invigorated me and I ended up moving to this city and becoming apart of the mesh. Since then I have learned so much and have just gotten nerdier and more excited about the beauty of holding infra in common, building resilient tech, and community networks and reader feel free to insert poetic world weaving mesh metaphor here YOU GET IT.
I love the magic of friendship and seizing the means of production as much as the next guy ya know?
Building this media server was a great excuse to connect with my friends who host their own servers and skill up as they graciously guided me through the it.
It also served as a model for small explorations to detach from the sicko systems that drain our bank accounts with secret subscriptions and a tool to resist the psychic death of relying on corporate curated media.
It was time to retire the goofy tactics of signing up for a new library card in every city to expand my access to more audiobooks on Libby. Or the classic, using my former roommates ex-boyfriends cousins Hulu login. Despite how much I love this.
Shout out to Alex, the complete stranger that have been using their Hulu login for 5 years that they made me my own profile. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH THANK YOU
WORLD WEAVING YADDA YADDA… ONTO THE TECHNICAL STUFF!
- what tools I used:
- 1tb external hard drive
- resurrected 2013 macbook
- sticky goodwill keyboard
- ancient monitor found in trash
- 3 thumbdrives (only broke two!)
- 4 TB storage in old dell tower
- found mouse
- Raspberry pi 4 (as a distraction)
- Micro SD card repurposed from old 2003 phone
- 1 extremely short Ethernet cord
PT. I - NECROMANCY: Combating planned obsolescence
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I had never built a server and had no idea what it would entail. I started experimenting by learning to build a local media server on my home network. For my first prototype I was using a 1 terabyte external hard drive and an old 2013 Macbook. This machine someone threw away because they thought it was broken (to be fair, it was) I painstakingly resurrected it using necromancy, adding a two week side-quest to the prototype.
Originally I put Ubuntu on the machine but found myself CHMODing till I was blue in the face and could not figure out Linux permissions for Plex to be able to see my content. I phoned a friend and read too much and feel asleep. I ended up attempting to put Mac OS back on the macbook. This process took many days of deep diving on forums to figure out how to slowly upgrade the operating system that Apple no longer supports. Apple makes their hardware impossible to use/upgrade the software, after a certain time due to planned obsolesces. Perfectly good hardware being discarded because we HATE THE ENVIRONMENT RIGHT? YA WITH ME?
I had to do a series of jumps from on apple operating system upgrade to the next to next in a way that only a few people had taken on in various forums I read. This was a wild way to spend my time. Eventually I was able to get the machine running on MacOS Mojave, loaded a VPN, Transmission; a torrenting client, and a Plex server on it. When I finally succeed in getting it to work on my local network I immediately wanted to build a better second prototype.
PT. II - MESH IT UP
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I pitched the idea to the mesh heads at POPNET and met for a brainstorming session with my friend J. We dreamed up possibilities and what next steps we would need to execute to make the project happen.
J sourced an old Dell tower with 4 TB of storage on it and set up a Jellyfin using NixOS. Jellyfin is an open source fully self-contained media server, there is no subscription-based consumption model. As opposed to Plex, Jellyfin has no tracking, phone-home, or central servers collecting your data.
I attempted to learn Nix language enough to fuss with the config files on NixOS and then promptly gave up because I have dodged learning any languages other then the very bare minimum needed to complete a task, despite being a technologist for decades.
I ended up wiping the drive and starting fresh with Yunohost using their install guides. I installed Wireguard, Audiobookshelf, and Jellyseerr on the server. Jellyseerr is an open source software application for managing requests for your media library. It is a fork of Overseerr built to bring support for Jellyfin & Emby media servers. This would allow the user base to request content to be automatically added to the media library.
At first I was struggling to even login to Jellyseerr. It wasn’t clear that it needs the server ip and the 8069 port instead of the plain text URL. This also was the point where I ran into hairpinning becoming a problem. Hairpinning is essentially the rest of the net being able to see your server but it not being able to be seen on your local network.
This became fussier and fussier as the project became more complex.
The Yunohost server is hosted on a Dell tower that was located at my house and attached to my local network.
This machine doesn’t have much processing power to encode the media so the new plan was to make this a two server project. The Dell tower being used to field user requests to download new media and store media. The mesh server being new and having more processing power would be used for playback encoding and host the Jellyfin itself.
This called for a marriage
On Monday, March 18th, 2024, J and I officiated the great wedding ceremony of the servers! They both shook hands and it was official. Since the wedding they both have been mostly good at communicating, but like most relational bonds, are forever learning to dance with one another.
PT II 1/2: Things are going smoothly: How can I make shit harder and more complicated??
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After the lesbian server wedding reception I was very proud of myself that everything was running so smoothly, I tucked myself in to bed and started to drift off. BUT! Before I fell asleep I was like “this project is nowhere near done, I should start another!” and purchased a Raspberry Pi 4 online with one eye open at 3am.
The Pi arrived the next day and I went to work building another server with the intention of hosting an email client with from my personal domain (cause Shanhuan, my classmate and collaborator on another project, had to send ONE email and we didn’t want to pay an email service provider) Also I became distracted putting Pi-hole for my LAN with the intention of routing all devices on my network through a VPN. I took my VERY SHORT ethernet cord and moved my roomies GIANT TV and hooked it into my SMALLEST COMPUTER as a monitor to install Pi-hole. I had cords all over the room blocking the entrance/exit to the room so my house guests had to get in the house using the doggie door. I spent 12 hours staring at a screen troubleshooting, it was super beautiful outside and I regrettably declined an invitation to ride a motorcycle to a waterfall and go camping with a group of my HOT friends. I again fell asleep having done nothing but break my network by fussing too much with the DNS config files.
In the morning I woke up and no one could use the internet and I had to undo everything I did the night before. Unplug my Raspberry Pi, hide it in a closet and swore off playing with it until I finished my media server project.
PT III: How I learned to stop worrying and love the ROM
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Now that the servers were married I set up a Wireguard Client on my Yunohost server and config the mesh server so I cold tunnel into the mesh from my local network. I am in a neighbourhood that the mesh doesn’t reach yet unfortunately. We also had to do some wild stuff like have the mesh server SSH to itself so it could communicate outside of the network and I probably made a bunch of weird security choices on my local network cause I kept having to block remote connections from all over the world.
Troubleshooting the server was kind of like tending to a baby. “Why are you crying?” I just changed your config file. Maybe you need your cookies cleared? Mostly when things broke, it became a dance of throwing on a VPN to avoid hairpinning, or switching back onto my local network, or tunnel into the mesh, or switch browsers, or clearing cookies. Again and again til it turned 18.
Jellyseerr came to a standstill when I spent days just trying to login. So I figured I would continue working on the user request idea later and just get content on the server. A lovely friend (with great taste) who self-hosts a media server offered me their SSH keys and I used them every night at 3am to slowly mirror their content from their server to mine. To start, it currently hosts 77 Audiobooks and 317 Movies.
It’s now LIVE! Access to the media server is available locally to all POPNET users. Which includes ~25 nodes, visitors of the community center where our super node is installed, the food bank, the bike shop, a couple of other projects around town, and whoever is walking by around one of the nodes that casts free internet.
The mesh is currently negotiating to get onto the taller, more centralized buildings in our city to expand LOS (Line of Sight) to potentially 10,000 more residence. In the meantime, I am going to continue to build out the media server a bit more so all of the mesh users can automatically add whatever Movies, TV Shows, Books, Music, and Audiobooks they want. I am excited to see how the collection grows as it is curated by tastes of our community.
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BACK TO THE POETRY
How can we continue to braid more experiments and play into our lives while living in an Empire that profits from stripping us of our agency, imagination, and each other? Most things that shape our daily lives like time/money/land delineations are made up and stop having power if we all decide to stop believing in them. Ideally in unison, maybe today?
How can we stop copy/pasting the limited possibilities of the past onto future, and feel safe enough to lean toward our collective fear and curiosity, stop asking for permission and act as though we are already free. (we are)
Can we step our of our own way, become full time LARPers, and act as though the world we want already exists?
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Acknowledgements
Gili: Where once was sewing tables and living rooms, sprouted server project after server project. Ethernet cables and power-cords crept like ivy through our home at one point blocking the exit so our guest had to use the doggie door. Thank you for your grace as I woke up in a start at 3am to save the server from being flooded as the rain leaked in from the windows.
J: My tech therapist and fellow mesh-head. I appreciate the endless troubleshooting and witness as I built & burned down & built again. Thank you for officiating the wedding of the servers and helping deliver our media server baby into the world.
Sean: Grateful for your inspiration and encouragement. You were the first person I talked to about this idea and our talks really gave me fuel to start diving in and learning this! Infinite gratitude!
Sam: Thank you for trusting me with your SSH keys. Thank you for your guidance, solid recs, and bandwidth in all senses of the word.
Shanhuan: Thank you for the spaciousness to neglect our other commitments, projects, and meetings while I worked on this. You are my forever student/teacher/collaborator/jester/friend/and I cannot wait to see what blooms as we continue to build together.
Friends: The past few weeks you only saw the top of my head and my face lit up by a computer screen. Thank you for listening while I talked at you in cryptic riddles of letters and numbers, your eyes only glazed over a little bit. I am ready to touch grass now.
Megnha, Oren, and Alice: This class deeply nourished me, as both a student and a teacher. I found myself gushing about the guest speakers, readings, and concepts to anyone who would listen. I don’t think I have ever found myself so invested and challenged in a classroom setting. I love being armed with new skills that feel so potent and useful, like I’m navigating the Linux command line using BASH like a pro right now. As I marinate on this material, it will continue to nourish me, my students, and fractal out into infinite possibilities.
Thank you, thank you, thank you <3
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Written by: io hushpuppie
websites: puppyworld.io & cyborgsupport.net
Email: io@puppyworld.io
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About the author
Io is a hacker, tech angel, volcano enthusiast, power-lifter, world builder, and a friend of every dog.
Io is a multi-media artist, they love to make interactive art like bingo boards, divination tools, goofy websites, stop-motion animations, sew weird stuffed animals, airbrush shirts, and draw little doodles on love notes for their friends and neighbours.
They started building computers from spare parts as a child and now host cybersecurity workshops for tailored to frontline activists and people with criminalized identities. They co-created Cyborg Support Club, a virtual community teaching practical education on info-sec, digital boundaries, and somatic integration.
io continues to help expand the mesh network, and is working to build abolition tech lab, stay tuned for infinite possibilities :)
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