Anti-Capitalist Computer Club: How We Spent Our Summer Vacation

Confession time: We wrote an August newsletter… It sat in drafts and never went anywhere tho. So as far as your inbox knows, we spent the whole summer in Pismo.

Want to know how we actually spent August? Here’s our essay:

Rangers showed up and tried to shut down the Really Really Free Market at Jastro on the 16th. If you weren’t aware, park rangers in Kern County are sheriff’s deputies, so they’ve got asshole trained directly into them at the academy. They wanted us gone and couldn’t cite the exact part of the code we were supposedly violating, so they stood around for a while and then left. Everybody kept doing what they came to do: mending, haircuts, tech advice, free clothes, household goods finding a new home.

The DeFlock town hall at Salon Juarez on the 19th blew past any of our expectations. Well over 50 people came out to talk with their fellow neighbors about Flock cameras in Bakersfield. All four local networks covered it. We sent everyone home with resources and a date for the following week.

Some of those folks showed up a week later at City Council on the 26th. Residents who aren’t Ariel or Jason got up to speak about Flock, which we appreciate, because it keeps the two of us from looking like cranks. Ariel’s statement actually drew applause, which prompted Mayor Goh to sternly remind the room that applauding is not permitted. Councilmember Gonzales told us he was unaware the town hall was happening, which is a strange thing to miss when KBAK and KBFX ran it on both their channels multiple times in the days beforehand and all four networks covered it after the fact. Guess nobody watches the news anymore.

Our latest public records request with BPD is also still sitting there. We filed PRR-7507-2026 back on June 23rd asking two simple questions: whose cameras feed BPD’s Real-Time Information Center, and who receives the data. Since then BPD Records has emailed twice, on July 19th and August 14th, to ask nothing more than whether or not we’d like to close it. We said no both times. Seventy days in, zero pages.

September Ahoy!

Meetup at Dagny’s

Wednesday, September 2nd @ 6-8pm

This one’s about what comes next for the AC3. Flock will continue to be part of it, obviously. The rest is everything else we want to build: workshops, mutual aid, making old hardware useful again, and putting together a community that holds up over the long haul.

Bring your ideas. Bring a laptop you’d like to see turned into something useful, if you’ve got one lying around. Bring a friend.

Bakersfield City Council

Wednesday, September 16th @ 5:15pm | Council Chambers, City Hall, 1501 Truxtun Avenue

We’re going back. Same asks as August: pause new surveillance purchases, adopt a public use policy for the RTIC, and answer the records request that’s been open since June.

Public comment is open to anybody who lives here. You get two minutes and you don’t have to be an expert on any of this. Saying you live in Bakersfield and you don’t want your movements logged is a complete statement. Show up early to fill out a speaker card, and find one of us if you want a hand with what to say.

Really Really Free Market

Sunday, September 20th @ 9-11am, park TBA

Third Sunday, like always. We’ll announce the park on Mastodon and Jason’s Insta once it’s locked. Bring what you can spare, take what you need, and stick around if you have a skill worth sharing.

Now for something other than Flock…

California is age-gating the internet. Your Linux box is getting a pass

Age gating is the idea that a website or a device should confirm how old you are before it lets you do anything. Not a checkbox where you swear you’re 18. A real check. Upload a government ID, or let a camera scan your face so an algorithm can take a guess.

Lawmakers love it. Utah, Texas, the UK, Australia, and France have all passed a version. The pitch never changes: kids are getting hurt online, so make the internet check everybody’s papers at the door and the hurt should stop.

The premise falls apart on contact. Confirming that someone is, say, fifteen means identifying everyone who walks up, adults very much included. What actually gets built is an ID checkpoint for the whole web, with a side of security theater.

California’s version is the Digital Age Assurance Act, which Newsom signed last October. It makes operating systems collect your age at setup starting January 1, 2027. As written, that included every Linux distribution on earth. Debian maintainers. Whoever cuts the OpenBSD releases. Some kid shipping a novelty distro out of their spare bedroom. All of them suddenly "operating system providers" responsible for age-gating users in California.

AB 1856 makes them exempt. Buffy Wicks, who wrote the original act, introduced the fix in February after Linux developers and the EFF made a shitload of righteous noise. Senate passed it 39-0 on August 26. Assembly concurred with a 69-0 vote the next day.

The exemption covers anyone distributing software "under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software." GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache all qualify. Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSDs are out. GrapheneOS too, which already said in March it wasn’t complying regardless.

They also deleted a definition of "user" that read "a child that is the primary user of a device," which technically made every device owner in California a child. [facepalm]

The law is still bullshit

Fewer people standing in the blast radius doesn’t mean the bomb’s defused.

Whatever the method, age verification merges your real identity with your online activity and parks that record in a database where it waits to leak. And it leaks. One age verification vendor got popped back in 2024. The Discord breach handed a pile of government IDs to whoever might’ve wanted them. The EFF has been keeping score.

It’s censorship infrastructure too. Once the state can put a checkpoint in front of "harmful" content, harmful means whatever the legislature says it means next session. Think about everything you’ve ever looked up that you’d rather your boss or a cop (or anyone in your life for that matter) not know about.

Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android are all still required to do this come January 2027. That’s basically every device that everyone you know owns.

But the exemption isn’t law yet

The bill went to Engrossing and Enrolling on August 27 and nobody has signed anything. As Ageless Linux has pointed out, Newsom has until September 30, 2026 to either sign or veto.

So what we need from y’all is five minutes, asking him to sign it.

• gov.ca.gov/contact
• (916) 445-2841, weekdays

Say you’re a Californian, you support AB 1856, you want it signed. Volunteers giving software away for free can’t build age verification infrastructure, and a law pretending otherwise just runs free software out of the state.

Then keep going. Newsom signing AB 1856 saves *NIX developers. Killing age verification saves everybody. Start reading up over at eff.org/age.

Run the OS the law can’t touch

Don’t have a computer running Linux yet? We can help with that! It’s totally free and we’ll do our best to help you install it.

Bring an old laptop to any meetup at Dagny’s! That ThinkPad in your closet. The Chromebook your kid outgrew. The machine Microsoft says can’t run Windows 11. Your daily driver, if you’re feeling really spicy. Back up anything you love and we’ll take it from there.

Come empty-handed if that’s where you’re at. Half of what happens at these is conversation anyway. The next one (as we said above) is this Wednesday, September 2nd, from 6 to 8pm. We’ll have zines, and stickers, and thumb drives.

P.S. Tom’s Hardware has a great writeup on AB 1856 if you’d like to read more.

Things we’re working towards

A surveillance technology ordinance with teeth: Right now BPD can buy and deploy an entire networked camera system without asking anyone first. We want council approval, a public hearing, and a written use policy required before any new surveillance tech gets purchased or accepted as a donation. Other California cities already do this, so we should too.

An answer on PRR-7507-2026: Seventy days and counting. If Records asks us a third time whether we’d like to close it, the answer will be the same as the first two.

Things we’re reading

Flock’s new AI tool asks questions you can’t ask a license plate

Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron at WIRED got hold of the code for OS Investigate, the next thing Flock is building on top of the camera network cities like ours already bought. It ships with 69 prewritten prompts for officers. Not nice. Fourteen of them need no license plate and no name. One of them asks the software to surface potential witnesses by finding whichever cars pass through a neighborhood most often.

Flock has told the public for years, in its own words, that its technology cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals. Turns out the "yet" was silent.

Here’s why we raise questions about Flock technology

Soon to be former Sheriff Youngblood was interviewed on 23ABC about Flock, and his snarky and uninformed question in that video elicited a smartass littany of questions in response from us.

Things we’re watching

Cory Doctorow on The Weekly Show

A long, unhurried conversation between Jon Stewart and Cory about enshittification and where AI fits into it. Cory is in peak form here. You’ll want to write down at least six of his one-liners, guaranteed.

John Oliver on Police Surveillance Technology

Oliver spends the segment building what he calls "a field guide" to the surveillance tools already deployed in American cities, walking through cameras, microphones, license plate readers, cell site simulators, and the predictive policing that stitches them together. If you’ve been trying to explain to a friend or relative why we need to keep showing up to council meetings, send them this. It’ll do most of the heavy lifting for you.

Final Thoughts

Here’s the takeaway from our summer: A ranger who can’t cite the rule you’re breaking eventually walks away. A room fills up the moment somebody bothers to book it. Neighbors who had never spoken at a council meeting took the microphone in August, and the head of our local hydra got uncomfortable enough to lecture everybody about clapping.

None of that happened because we had a clever argument. It happened because people were in the room.

September asks for that four more times. Five minutes on the phone to Newsom’s office. Wednesday night at Dagny’s. The 16th at City Council. The third Sunday at whatever park RRFM lands on.

Take the ones you can get to. Bring along somebody who’s never been.

Talk again soon, friends.