HACKERS in MADRID

From Miami’s South Beach to the shores of the Manzanares there’s more of a thread than you’d think. To pull on it I’m joined by Daniel, cofounder of Hack Madrid, a community that held its first event on 24 August 2017 with seventeen people and today gathers thousands.

Daniel comes from Miami, where he took part in Planet Linux, that Linux Café in Coral Gables, and got to know Hack Miami up close, the community that served as his inspiration: open to everyone, free and unbound to any company. That’s where Hack Madrid draws from. We talk at length about what he understands as hacker culture, which he links to the schools of the Greek philosophers and to the Library of Alexandria, and about his crusade against big-button hackers, the ones who press buttons without knowing what happens underneath. He told me about his radio show, about the La Nave space at Cifuentes 5 and the plans for the World Party. He also calls for a Hacker Federation that would unite groups like Hack Miami, Hack Barcelona or Hack Madrid without any of them losing their independence.

A conversation to understand that being a hacker is a way of thinking and a way of life, not a forty-hour course or a photo at the summit. What matters, he says, is in the climb.