💟 Cassette Mixtape Workshop
2024-02-10 13:00 - 17:00 (America/New_York) | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
On February 7th and February 10th we’re hosting a free cassette mixtape recording session. Bring a playlist on your phone/computer and we’ll help you record it to an audio cassette tape.
We’ll host three sessions each day, at 1 p.m., 3 p.m., and 5 p.m.
Register for 1 p.m. on 2/10:

Register for 3 p.m. on 2/10:

Register for 5 p.m. on 2/10:

💌 Origami and Love Letters
2024-02-11 15:30 - 17:00
Share the love with origami and love letters! Learn different paper folding how-tos and make various Valentine’s-themed origami pieces to share with your loved ones! Decorate thank you and love letters to accompany the final pieces. Join us on 02/11 from 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm.
Led by Nabithoughts.
Register

✏️ The Writing Room
2024-02-15 17:00 - 19:30, 2024-03-07 17:00 - 19:30, 2024-03-21 17:00 - 19:30
Come co-work with other writers in three 40-minute units of silent writing. Writers and projects of any type welcome. 10-minute breaks and accountability check-ins between units. BYO coffee, water, computer chargers, notepads, etc.

🔓 TOOOL Lock Picking Meetup
2024-02-16 18:00 - 21:00
On Friday, February 16th from 6–9 p.m. we’re hosting a meetup run by the Philadelphia Chapter of the Open Organization of Lockpickers.
> Come join us for our monthly open pick night at Iffy Books! Whether you’re a novice who just stumbled upon LockpickingLawyer, a seasoned safecracker, or somewhere in between, come join us for a evening of fun as we pop some locks.

⭐️ PHL Fediverse Meetup
2024-02-17 15:30 - 17:30
On Saturday, February 17th at 3:30 p.m. we’re hosting a meetup for fans of federated services such as Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, BookWyrm, and PeerTube. Hope to see you there!
Masks are required. We’ll have extras for anyone who needs one.

📚 Philly Socialists Reading Group: ‘Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict’ by Phil A. Neel
2024-02-18 16:00 - 17:30
We’ll continue discussing the book Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict by Phil A. Neel. Email us at admin@phillysocialists.org for more details.
This group is open to anyone committed to collective learning and liberation whether they are a member of Philly Socialists or not. We aim to tackle challenging theoretical texts together. Rather than finding ‘the correct reading’ of a text, the goal of group is to collectively find tools from texts for creating a better world.
Philly Socialists is a political organization committed to creating a just and sustainable future for ourselves and our planet. As socialists, we believe in freedom, democracy, and the right to basic human dignity. Capitalism denies us all these. Only revolutionary change that ends capitalism will win us the future we deserve. And only a massive, organized force can get us there. If you are interested in finding out more, please find us at our website https://phillysocialists.org

⚙️ Neo-Luddite Reading Group: ‘Race After Technology' by Ruha Benjamin (Chs. 3–5)
2024-02-20 18:30 - 20:30
Our current book for the Neo-Luddite Reading Group is Race After Technology (2019) by Ruha Benjamin. We’ll meet Tuesday, February 20th at 6:30 p.m. to discuss the introduction through chapter 2.
Meetup link
➡️ Official schedule
“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” -R. Benjamin

Contact:
neoluddite@victorgom.es
Twitter
Bluesky
Substack
3rd Tuesday each month 6:30-8:30 @ Iffy Books
Discord: Email neoluddite@victorgom.es for an invite!
The issues and harms surrounding emerging technologies are especially concerning given the lack of regulation in the tech industry generally, and the tendency of productivity-increasing technology to further concentrate power in the hands of the few. This reading group will explore these risks and engage with how they work in the hopes of better organizing to protect the rights of workers and individuals. The goal is to have a better understanding of the costs (data, carbon, human labor) and risks (misinformation, unpredictability, bias) of making these machines, as well as limitations in what they can learn about the world primarily through text.We’re currently reading Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin and will decide what to read next at our first session of the year.So far, we’ve read “Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence” by Dan McQuillian and The Human Use of Human Beings by Norbert Wiener. The following archived pages include more Information on those sessions: Resist AI and The Human Use of Human Beings. If you’d like to learn more about me, you can visit victorgom.es for a bio.
Schedule
If you’re joining for the first time, I’d suggest you read this before anything else for some historical context: What the Luddites Really Fought Against by Richard Conniff.
The only expectation is that you read the chapter(s) of the book that’s listed for that meeting. You’re still welcome to participate if you haven’t done the readings as long as you are mindful.
The author kindly provides a free reading guide on her website, so I’d reccomend checking it out for the relevant chapters prior to each meeting to get you thinking. For each chapter, I’ve also noted some optional readings for context, so I’d suggest checking those out rather than reading ahead in the book. And remember, if you ever find yourself struggling with any of the readings or concepts, reach out! Either directly to me over email or to the entire group over discord.

Meeting 1 (Jan. 16th):📖 Race After Technology

Preface & Introduction

🎥 Are We Automating Racism? by Vox
🎙️ Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000: Let’s Do the Time Warp! by Emily Bender & Alex Hanna

1. Engineered Inequity

🗞️ In Retrospect: The unseen Black faces of AI algorithms by Abeba Birhane
📜 The Whiteness of AI by Stephen Cave & Kanta Dihal

2. Default Discrimination

📜 The Surveillance AI Pipeline by Pratyusha Ria Kalluri
🎙️ Timnit Gebru Looks at Corporate AI and Sees a Lot of Bad Science by Reimagining the Internet

Meeting 2 (February. 20th):📖 Race After Technology

3. Coded Exposure

📜 Large language models propagate race-based medicine by Jesutofunmi A. Omiye, Jenna C. Lester, Simon Spichak, Veronica Rotemberg & Roxana Daneshjou
🎥 Signing Black in America by The TALKING BLACK in AMERICA Project

4. Technological Benevolence

📜 Power to the People? Opportunities and Challenges for Participatory AI by Birhane, A., Isaac, W., Prabhakaran, V., DC-az, M., Elish, M., Gabriel, I., Mohamed, S.
🗞️ How Inclusive New AI Model Latimer Can Fight Bias by Kalina Bryant

5. Retooling Solidarity, Reimagining Justice

📜 Reclaiming AI as a theoretical tool for cognitive science by Iris van Rooij, Olivia Guest, Federico G Adolfi, Ronald de Haan, Antonina Kolokolova, and Patricia Rich
🎙️ Confronting Our Reality: Racial Representation and Systemic Transformation with Dr. Timnit Gebru by The Radical AI Podcast

Additional resources

Outreach Resources & Guides

📜 Digital Defense Playbook: Community Power Tools for Reclaiming Data by Our Data Bodies
📜 A People’s Guide to AI by Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg (Diana Nucera)
📜 Algorithmic Accountability: A Primer by Data & Society

Potential Future Reads

📖 Blood in the Machine: The Origins of Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant
📖 Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks
📖 Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant by John Zerzan & Alice Carnes
📖 Technofix: Why Technology Won’t Save Us or the Environment by Michael Huesemann & Joyce Huesemann
📖 Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor by Kim Kelly
📖 The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation by Cory Doctorw

Links to more links

Critical Lenses on AI by Iris van Rooij
A Luddite Library by LibrarianShipwreck
Resources by Ruha Benjamin

More on Luddites

I’m a Luddite. You should be one too by Jathan Sadowski
Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite? by Thomas Pynchon
Byron Was One of the Few Prominent Defenders of the Luddites by Kat Eschner
Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: machine-breaking, romanticism, and the several commons of 1811-12 by Peter Linebaugh

Poems

Song for The Luddites by Lord Byron
A Luddite Lullaby by Don Bogen
All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace by Richard Brautigan
I Am the People, the Mob by Carl Sandburg
They Say This Isn’t a Poem by Kenneth Rexroth
Under Which Lyre by W.H. Auden
When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer by Walt Whitman

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🩹 Bleeding Control Basics
2024-02-21 18:00 - 19:30
Wednesday, February 21, 2024 at 6 p.m.
Face masks required!
Presented by Untitled Medical Collective in association with Philly SRA, Bleeding Control Basics will go over first aid as it applies to severe bleeding. We will cover scene safety, injury assessment, basic bleeding control, and tourniquet application. This class doesn’t provide any kind of certification, and is just meant to provide essential information to as many people as possible.
If you have any questions about class content, reach out to untitledmedical@proton.me.
Register

⚡️ Intermediate Soldering Session
2024-02-22 18:00 - 19:30
On Thursday, February 22nd at 6 p.m. we’re hosting an intermediate soldering class. We’ll have soldering irons and solder to share for free, as well as DIY electronics kits for sale. Or bring your own project!
Register:

☀️ Direct Solar Power Working Group
2024-02-24 13:00 - 15:00
Join us from 1–3 p.m. on Saturday, February 24th for the second meeting of the Direct Solar Power Working Group. Our plan is to discuss & experiment with methods for using solar energy without batteries.
Stay tuned for more details!

📙 Book Talk: 'Rude Citizenship: Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power' by Larisa Kingston Mann
2024-02-24 19:00 - 20:30
Join us on Saturday, February 24th at 7 p.m. for a talk by Larisa Kingston Mann on her book Rude Citizenship Jamaican Popular Music, Copyright, and the Reverberations of Colonial Power (University of North Carolina Press).
➡️ Live stream link
In this deep dive into the Jamaican music world filled with the voices of creators, producers, and consumers, Larisa Kingston Mann—DJ, media law expert, and ethnographer—identifies how a culture of collaboration lies at the heart of Jamaican creative practices and legal personhood. In street dances, recording sessions, and global genres such as the riddim, notions of originality include reliance on shared knowledge and authorship as an interactive practice. In this context, musicians, music producers, and audiences are often resistant to conventional copyright practices. And this resistance, Mann shows, goes beyond cultural concerns.
Because many working-class and poor people are cut off from the full benefits of citizenship on the basis of race, class, and geography, Jamaican music spaces are an important site of social commentary and political action in the face of the state’s limited reach and neglect of social services and infrastructure. Music makers organize performance and commerce in ways that defy, though not without danger, state ordinances and intellectual property law and provide poor Jamaicans avenues for self-expression and self-definition that are closed off to them in the wider society. In a world shaped by coloniality, how creators relate to copyright reveals how people will play outside, within, and through the limits of their marginalization.

💾🌾 Iffy Books Permacomputing Meetup
2024-02-25 13:00 - 15:00
Our next permacomputing meetup is on Sunday, February 25th at 1:00 PM EST. You can join us in person at Iffy Books (404 S. 20th St., PHL) or via Jitsi Meet.
➡️ Meetup Link
From Permacomputing.net: Permacomputing is a more sustainable approach to computer and network technology inspired by permaculture. Permacomputing is both a concept and a community of practice oriented around issues of resilience and regenerativity in digital technology. In a time where computing epitomizes industrial waste, permacomputing encourages a more sustainable approach, maximizing hardware lifespans, minimizing energy use and focussing on the use of already available computational resources. We do this because humans are part of nature and technology is an extension of humans, and we acknowledge that technology has been used to harm nature. We want to find out how we can practice good relations with the Earth by learning from ecological systems to leverage and re-center existing technologies and practices. We are also interested in investigating what a permacomputing way of life could be, and what sort of transformative computational culture and aesthetics it could bring forward. If you want to know more, please start reading about what is permacomputing in essence, and then dive into its principles.
Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Design Constraints in Computational Culture by Mansoux, Howell, Barok, and Heikkilä (2023)

🪐 Speculative Futures Reading Group: 'The Einstein Intersection' by Samuel R. Delany
2024-02-28 19:00 - 20:30
On Wednesday, February 28th at 7:00 p.m. we’ll meet to discuss the novel The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany. Hope to see you there!
A member of an alien race, Lo Lobey has assimilated the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled. The tale follows Lobey’s mythic quest for his lost love Friza. The deeper story, however, concerns the way those who are “different” must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967.

⚡️ Beginner Soldering Workshop
2024-02-29 18:00 - 20:00
On Thursday, February 29th at 6:00 p.m. we’re running a soldering workshop for beginners! Anyone can attend for free, but you’ll need to buy a circuit board with components for $6 to complete the project. Here’s what’s included in the kit:

1 x Weevil-shaped PCB
2 x LEDs
1 x 47k Ohm resistor
1 x miniature photocell
1 x 2N3904 transistor
2 x 220 Ohm resistors
1 x CR2032 coin cell battery
1 x 20mm coin cell battery holder

Register

💾 Philly 2600 Meetup
2024-03-01 18:00 - 20:30
> The Philly 2600 meeting is a monthly gathering of local hackers, phreaks, nerds, geeks, activists, tinkerers, developers, infosec professionals, and other interesting people.

🌸 What’s the Deal with Native Plants?
2024-03-02 15:30 - 17:30
In North America, we call plants that lived here prior to European colonization Native Plants. They evolved over tens of thousands of years to coexist with the soils, animals, insects, and humans of their specific bioregions. Although much of their habitat, and the cultures of stewardship that tended them over this long time period, have either been destroyed or seriously suppressed, a recent uptick in the popularity of gardening with native species is good news for our ability to rebuild meaningful relationships with the ecosystems around us.
In this workshop we’ll talk about why growing native plants is fun, easy and important; how to the best ones to plant in your particular space; how to care for them; and where to find them. We’ll also introduce some of the wild bees you are likely to meet while cultivating native plants, and discuss ways to work mutually with beneficial insects.
The class will be most useful for people that have some space for in-ground plantings, but everyone curious is welcome! There is no fee for the class, but we encourage attendees to make a $5 (or more!) donation to the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape tribal nation in southern New Jersey: https://nllhonorarium.carrd.co.
About the presenters:
Goda Trakumaite has been working with native plants in various ways since 2017: she has propagated them, sold them retail, installed and tended native landscapes, and is currently working in native plant seed production.
Alexis Smith is co-operator of Squirrel Dance Farm. She once did research on wild bees, but currently relates to them more as friends.
Register

📚 Philly Socialists Reading Group: ‘Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict’ by Phil A. Neel (through chapter 2)
2024-03-03 16:00 - 17:30

👾 DC215 Meetup (Postponed to April 3rd!)
2024-03-06 18:00 - 20:00
Join us Wednesday, March 6th for an event hosted by DC 215/Hackers’ Assembly. Stay tuned for details!

🚂 Model Internet Club
2024-03-09 13:00 - 17:00
The Model Internet Club meets again on Saturday, March 9th, 1–5 p.m. Newcomers are welcome.
The network is up and running! We now have a DHCP server, a DNS server with custom domain names, and handful of websites running as virtual hosts in Apache. And we now have a wi-fi access point!
We’re looking for websites to run on our local network. If you have an idea, email iffybooks@iffybooks.net or join us for our next meeting. If you’ve never created a website with HTML before, here’s a guide to get you started.

🪴 Herbs for Everyone: How to grow herbs from seed and preserve your harvest
2024-03-10 15:30 - 17:30
Herb farmer Alexis Smith will cover starting seeds and growing seedlings under lights, caring for your plants in the garden, harvest, and how to safely dry and de-stem what the plants yield. She will also introduce you to a few of her favorites, with a focus on herbs that can lift our spirits and ground us in our bodies. Alexis co-operates Squirrel Dance Farm, an herb, flower and berry farm in Swedesboro, NJ.
Register:

🎵 Open Cassette Mixtape Sessions
2024-03-13 15:00 - 19:00
Bring a playlist on your phone/computer and we’ll help you record it to an audio cassette tape. We have plenty of tapes!
We’ll host two sessions, at 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. This event is free/by donation.
Register for 3 p.m.

Register for 5 p.m.

⚡️ Beginner Soldering Workshop
2024-03-14 18:00 - 19:30
On Thursday, March 14th at 6:00 p.m. we’re running a soldering workshop for beginners! Anyone can attend for free, but you’ll need to buy a circuit board with components for $6 to complete the project. Here’s what’s included in the kit:

1 x Weevil-shaped PCB
2 x LEDs
1 x 47k Ohm resistor
1 x miniature photocell
1 x 2N3904 transistor
2 x 220 Ohm resistors
1 x CR2032 coin cell battery
1 x 20mm coin cell battery holder

Register

🔓 Lock Picking Meetup
2024-03-15 18:00 - 20:00
On Friday, March 15th from 6–8 p.m. we’re hosting a lock picking meetup at Iffy Books. All are welcome! We’ll provide plenty of tools and locks.

Photo by Dhscommtech

🌺 Let’s Make Wildflower Seed Balls!
2024-03-16 13:00 - 17:00
Stop by Iffy Books on Saturday, March 16th from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. and make your own seed balls with native wildflower seeds. We’ll have plenty of supplies to share!

🪡 Hands-On Darning Workshop
2024-03-17 13:00 - 15:00
On Sunday, March 17th from 1 to 3 p.m. we’re hosting a darning workshop and mending session. Total beginners welcome!
Here’s our darning how-to zine.
Register:

📚 Philly Socialists Reading Group: ‘Hinterland: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict’ by Phil A. Neel (through chapter 3)
2024-03-17 16:00 - 17:30

⚙️ Neo-Luddite Reading Group: ‘Race After Technology’ by Ruha Benjamin
2024-03-19 18:30 - 20:30

🩹 Bleeding Control Basics
2024-03-20 18:00 - 19:30
Wednesday, March 20th, 2024 at 6 p.m.
Face masks required!
Presented by Untitled Medical Collective in association with Philly SRA, Bleeding Control Basics will go over first aid as it applies to severe bleeding. We will cover scene safety, injury assessment, basic bleeding control, and tourniquet application. This class doesn’t provide any kind of certification, and is just meant to provide essential information to as many people as possible.
If you have any questions about class content, reach out to untitledmedical@proton.me.
Register:
