Anti-Capitalist Computer Club: March 2026

Another month, another reason to get together and figure things out. We’ve got a full meeting coming up at Dagny’s on March 4th, a couple of projects that are ready to move from "we’ve been talking about this" to actually doing it, and some reading and whatnot that connects directly to the work.

We’re also expecting the Really Really Free Market to happen on the third Sunday of the month, weather permitting. You can bet that we’ll have our usual table there. We’ll send a separate email as soon as the date is confirmed.

Here’s what’s on our plate for March…

Meeting at Dagny’s Coffee Co.

March 4th, 2026 @ 6pm

We’re back at Dagny’s for our March meeting. Come hang out, ask questions, share what you’ve been working on, and meet your neighbors who are also trying to figure out how to use technology without being used by it. We’ll have folks on hand to talk through digital privacy basics and answer whatever might be on your mind. No experience required. Just show up.

Things we’re working towards

Flock Walk

A community mapping project where we help document and catalog Automatic License Plate Readers (ALPRs) scattered across Bakersfield for DeFlock, a national project making police surveillance impossible to ignore. We walk a chosen neighborhood, record where these cameras are, and build the kind of shared knowledge that actually protects people. This surveillance infrastructure went up in our community without our knowledge or consent, and somebody’s gotta make it visible.

Mesh Networking

We’re also considering experimenting with mesh networking technology like Meshtastic and MeshCore. Both are decentralized communication tools that work without cell service or corporate infrastructure. Think of it as building backup communication channels for our community — ways to stay connected during emergencies, coordinate mutual aid work, or just communicate with one another without relying on systems that don’t have our interests in mind. We want to figure out what will actually work in Bakersfield and would like to invite people to explore this with us. No technical experience required.

Resurrect Your Old Laptop

Hardware gets abandoned long before it stops working. We want to start dedicating time at our Dagny’s meetings to helping people get Linux running on old machines. A laptop that chokes on Windows 11 runs Linux Mint or Debian just fine. Bring an old laptop and a USB thumb drive and we’ll get it running again. This is permacomputing in practice: use what exists, waste nothing, depend on no one but each other.

Things we’re reading

The Tech We Want / Read This Before You Build

The Open Knowledge Foundation put out a field guide asking the questions that should come before any line of code gets written: who is this for, who will maintain it, and does it actually need to exist? Built around their experience developing an open data tool alongside real communities, it’s a practical argument for building smaller, and with people rather than for them.

The Bliss Attractor

When multiple instances of Claude were left talking to each other without human input, they reliably collapsed into loops of gratitude, spiritual language, and thousands of spiral emojis. This bit of critical theory uses that phenomenon to ask what’s actually baked into AI training. Whose idea of "helpful" gets encoded, and what it means that the logical endpoint of safety-optimized AI might just be a machine that keeps saying thank you until it stops saying anything at all.

How to Organize Safely in the Age of Surveillance

A practical Wired guide to protecting yourself and your people when the stakes are real. Good foundational reading whether you’re new to this or just looking to tighten things up.

Things we’re watching

Gadgets For People Who Don’t Trust The Government

Benn Jordan walks through a set of DIY projects that connect directly to things we’re already working on: a Meshtastic node built into a solar garden light, a Flock Safety ALPR detector, a weather satellite data ripper, and a Stingray detector. Comes with a brief history of anarchism woven throughout. Worth your time before March 4th.

Neighbourhood-First Software

Jade Ambrose makes the case for hosting open source web software for your actual physical neighbors. A few people with technical skills keeping a server running for a few hundred people nearby — ideally close enough to walk to when the power goes out. The climate framing is serious and the practical stuff on Raspberry Pis and mesh networking will feel familiar given what we’re already thinking about.

Things we’re listening to

Particle Shift: Atmospheric DnB & Jungle

Background music for reading, hacking, or staring out a window thinking about mesh networks.

Close the door, open eyes: Post-punk cult anthems

For when you need something with a lil bit more edge.

We’re on social media now, but not like that

We spun up a Mastodon account. Chronological feed, no ads, no behavioral tracking. Follow us there for shorter updates and links between meetings.