l have to start with a trigger warning maybe. This site is about counterinsugency, and in the developed world, that is mostly psychological warfare. Any oppression people experience from other people, or social circumstances, or in relations to resources, should be recognized as systematic social control. Everybody is oppressed.
Y'all came to find out how anti is often fa, to confirm or disconfirm your own assessment. l'm throwing a curveball and talking about me first.
In case y'all didn't know, l'm racialized. l am differently racialized though, not only do l change colors depending on sun exposure, there are also a lot of places in the world where l am not racialized. l am also neither female nor male presenting, and could be a range of ages. Notice that l'm not talking about my identity, l'm talking about what l look like to other people, like the reader.
l am so ambiguous to the state of California that it never bothered to indictrinate me, it simply excludes me from support. Some people would categorize that l have intersecting oppressions. Only if l f with the developed world. That actually goes for everybody.
So when l go into a space where people have received strong indoctrination into the racial, gender, ageist, normy order, which is the entire developed world, l often receive no eye contact, or even acknowledgement that l am there. It took me a long time to understand that if an indoctrinated person does not have a lexical category for somebody, they do not f with that person. From the perspective of the indoctrinated people, they are just acting like everybody else... except me of course, who does not really exist, and l will leave shortly anyway if they just kept ignoring me. However, sometimes shortly turns into decades or never. They find it inscrutable: why would anyone stay if they aren't socially included? l'm there for the infrastructure, fool! bahaha! This is my relationship with "hackerspaces".
l'm not in these places to get in with people, l'm there to use the infrastructure. l don't use money so l am there because this is one of the founding tenets of these places, that it is infrastructure for anybody. My relationship is with the space. l do meet people, and there's all types, but it's not my main objective of being there, contrasting with the vast majority of people who go. They are there for community and all that it implies.
There are all kinds of communities. In a controlled society, like this 1, only certain types are allowed to exist, and then only some of those are visible. Should this be a surprise to people who can't even look a not typical person in the eye?