Iffy Books | 404 S. 20th St., PHL

⏰ Buzz & Beep: Make a Custom Alarm with an ESP32-C3
2025-04-13 10:00 - 11:30, 2025-04-05 10:00 - 11:30, 2025-04-04 14:00 - 15:30, 2025-04-03 12:00 - 13:30 (America/New_York) | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Build and program an alarm that makes sound and vibrates! No soldering required! We’ll be using Micropython.
To complete this project you’ll need to buy a kit for $12.95. Here’s what it includes:
• ESP32-C3 Super Mini microcontroller
• Mini breadboard (170 tie points)
• Vibration motor (3.4mm)
• Active buzzer module
• Momentary push button switch x2
• Port-to-plug jumper wire x2
• Plug-to-plug jumper wire x5
Requires a USB-C cable with data (sold separately)
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💡 Solder & Code: Make a 3-Button Keyboard with a Pi Pico
2025-04-12 10:00 - 11:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
In this workshop you’ll build and program a customizable 3-button USB keyboard using a Pi Pico microcontroller. You can program each button to type a chunk of text (e.g., your email signature), enter a keyboard shortcut, or launch an application. It’s easier than it sounds!
Here’s what we’ll do:
• Solder three push button switches onto your Pi Pico
• Install CircuitPython firmware
• Install Adafruit HID libraries
• Copy example code to your Pi Pico
• Adjust the example code to make your own custom keyboard
We’ll have a limited number of computers to share, so bring a laptop (Windows/macOS/Linux) if you can.
You’ll need to buy a Pi Pico Push Button Interface Kit for $9.75 to complete this project. We’re recommending a $10–$25 donation for the class (notaflof).

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💥 Digital Synth Workshop
2025-04-11 14:00 - 16:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Design your own digital synthesizer in a wooden box using a Pi Pico clone board! We’ll have soldering irons, hot glue, and all the other supplies you’ll need. It’s an open-ended project, so you may have to finish at home or come back for a future session.
This project is recommended for folks who have soldered at least once or twice before. If you’re brand new to soldering, we recommend taking a beginner class first.
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You’ll need to buy a kit for $35.95 to complete this project. Here’s what it includes:
• RP2040 development board (a.k.a. Pi Pico)
• 64 rainbow wires (for buttons & knobs)
• red and black wires (for power & audio)
• mono screw-terminal audio jack
• rotary encoder w/ knob
• potentiometer w/ knob
• dipole on/off switch
• 2×4 push button keypad
• 2-prong push button switch x8
• through-hole push button switch x2
• 2.2 uF non-polarized capacitor (225)
• 4.7 uF non-polarized capacitor (475)
• 10 uF non-polarized capacitor (106)
• LED light x5
• 5 100 Ohm resistor x5
• tiny screwdriver
• push pin
• M2 screws (self-tapping, 10mm) x8
• plastic spacer x16
• 3x AA battery clip
• micro USB cable with data
• wooden box

⚡️ Beginner Soldering: USB Data Blocker
2025-04-11 13:00 - 14:00, 2025-04-07 13:00 - 14:00, 2025-04-07 12:00 - 13:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Charging your phone in a public place can be stressful. What if someone is collecting your metadata for marketing purposes? What if they’re copying your files or installing malware? A USB data blocker can help! It’s a little adapter with the data terminals left disconnected, so you can charge your phone anywhere without fear.
This is a relatively quick soldering project, perfect for total beginners. We’ll have soldering irons and supplies to share.
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📡 Meshtastic 101
2025-04-10 12:00 - 13:30, 2025-03-28 15:00 - 17:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Join us for an introduction to Meshtastic, an application that lets you send private text messages over the air using pocket-sized LoRa radio transceivers. We’ll show you how to flash the latest Meshtastic firmware to the device, customize the settings, and start chatting with your friends.
Here’s a link to our zine on LoRa + Meshtastic.
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⚙️ Neo-Luddite Reading Group: ‘Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest’ by Finn Brunton & Helen Nissenbaum
2025-04-09 18:30 - 20:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Full schedule: victorgom.es/neoluddite
➡️ Virtual Meetup Link
Time and Place: The 2nd Wednesday of each month 6:30-8:30 ET in person at Iffy Books. There is also a virtual option for accessibility purposes, also hosted by Iffy Books.

Email neoluddite@victorgom.es, or sign up at iffy to be added to the mailing list! Necessary for receiving the jitsi link (video-conferencing software we will use) and if you’d like to join the discord.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 data scraped from the internet.We’re currently reading two books on privacy and related practices: Cybersecurity by Duane C. Wilson and Obfuscation by Finn Burton and Helen Nissembaum.Archived pages of our previous books include: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Resisting AI, The Human Use of Human Beings, Race After Technology, Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech, and The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli. 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 brief 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. 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 (March 12th):📖 Cybersecurity

1. Cybersecurity Origins

A History of Cryptography From the Spartans to the FBI by Panos Louridas

2. Foundations

The Surveillance AI Pipeline by Kalluri et al.

3. Cryptography Demystified

A Primer on Cryptography by Aïda Diop

4. Cybersecurity in Layers

TBD by

5. Who Attacked Me?

TBD by

6. Malware in Action

TBD by

7. Modern-Day Applications

Homeland Security Uses AI Tool to Analyze Social Media of U.S. Citizens and Refugees by Joseph Cox

8. Cybersecurity for the Future

Artificial intelligence is going to supercharge surveillance by James Vincent

Meeting 2 (April 9th):📖 Obfuscation

1. An Obfuscation Vocabulary

TBD by

2. Understanding Obfuscation

TBD by

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
🗞️ Prior to (or instead of) using ChatGPT with your students by Autumn Caines

Potential Future Reads

📖 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 Doctorow

Links to more links

📋 Critical Lenses on AI by Iris van Rooij
📋 Resources by Ruha Benjamin

More on Luddites

🗞️ I’m a Luddite. You should be one too by Jathan Sadowski
🗞️ Byron Was One of the Few Prominent Defenders of the Luddites by Kat Eschner

Poems

🎵 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

✏️ The Writing Room
2025-04-08 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-04-01 17:00 - 19:30, 2025-03-25 17:00 - 19:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
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.

🐧 Linux Lab: Search your system with find & grep
2025-04-06 10:30 - 12:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
The first Sunday of every month we’ll host an event for Linux beginners. Stay tuned for more details!
Photo CC-BY-SA Mark Dickson

⚙️ Book Launch for 'Why we fear AI' by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer
2025-04-05 17:00 - 19:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
On Saturday, April 5th at 5:00 p.m. we’ll host a book launch event for ‘Why we fear AI’ by Hagen Blix & Ingeborg Glimmer, published by Common Notions Press. Victor Gomes will lead a discussion and Q&A, which will be live streamed at the following link:
➡️ Live stream link
“Blix and Glimmer take the reader on a deeply engaging, funny, and provocative tour through our deepest anxieties and darkest fantasies of an AI-dominated future. Why We Fear AI offers profound insight into how AI and capitalism today work in mutually reinforcing lockstep to deskill and devalue humans, and what it will take to wake up from our worst AI nightmares and build a better world.”
—Shannon Vallor, author of The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking
Fears about AI tell us more about capitalism today than the technology of the future.
Will AI come and take all our jobs? Will it dominate humanity, hack the foundations of our civilization, or even wipe humans off the face of the planet? All kinds of people seem to think so. From professors to billionaires, from artists to fraudsters, from journalists to the pope, AI nightmares have gripped the popular imagination.
Why We Fear AI boldly asserts these fears are actually about capitalism, reimagined as a kind of autonomous intelligent agent.
Industry insiders Hagen Blix and Ingeborg Glimmer dive into the dark, twisted world of AI to demystify the many nightmares we have about it. They combine expertise in cognitive science and machine learning with political and economic analyses to cut through the hype and technobabble to show how fears about AI reflect different economic realities—from venture capitalists, to engineers, to artists, to warehouse workers. Truly understanding the potential impacts of AI means confronting capitalism and class, power and exploitation, in concrete terms. Only then can we fight the real threats to our lives, livelihoods, and the planet, instead of tilting at nightmare windmills.
Blix and Glimmer argue that AI nightmares reveal the terrifying underbelly of our current society, of capitalism and its violent ways of organizing our world in its image. If we simply let capitalism and tech billionaires run wild, we can expect the worst: automated bureaucracies that protect the powerful and punish the poor; an ever-expanding surveillance apparatus; the cheapening of skills, downward pressures on wages, the expansion of insecure gig-work, and crushing inequality. But that outcome is not inevitable, however much capitalists may dream of it. Why We Fear AI points the way to a different and brighter future, one in which our labor, knowledge, and technologies serve the people rather than capital.
About THE AUTHORS
Hagen Blix is a New York City-based cognitive scientist whose research spans language, artificial intelligence, and political economy.
Ingeborg Glimmer is a tech worker and industry researcher in Germany working on machine learning.

💻 Philly 2600 Meetup
2025-04-04 18:00 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
> The Philly 2600 meeting is a monthly gathering of local hackers, phreaks, nerds, geeks, activists, tinkerers, developers, infosec professionals, and other interesting people.

📚 Capital Reading Group
2025-04-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Join us on the first and third Thursday of every month at 7 p.m. for a reading group on Capital by Karl Marx.
Reading for April 3rd:
• The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power
• The Labour-Process and the Process of Producing Surplus-Value
We’re reading Paul Reitter’s recent translation (Princeton University Press, 2024).

💻 DC215 Meetup
2025-04-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Welcome to the DC215 Meetup at Iffy Books! This month, we’re having a redo of our Meshtastic talk! Join us while we dive into Meshtastic and LoRa nodes, a powerful off-grid communication system that lets you send messages without Wi-Fi or cell service. Whether you’re a seasoned radio geek or just curious about mesh networks, come learn how these devices work, how to set them up, and how they can be used for emergency communication, hiking, and more. We’ll have a limited number of Heltec LoRa nodes for sale so bring your gear if you have it, or just come to listen and connect with the Philly tech community! Don’t miss this chance to explore LoRa networks in action and build real-world resilience through technology! Please bring a laptop if you’re looking to flash your nodes or play around with any Meshtastic web apps.
Meetup link

⚡ Beginner Soldering: Make a DIY Guitar Cable
2025-04-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Join us for a relatively quick and easy soldering workshop, suitable for total beginners! You’ll strip some wires and solder 1/4-inch plugs to the ends, creating your own guitar cable.
You can get a kit with 6 inches of cable for $4.25, or 4 feet for $13.50. We’re suggesting a $10–$20 donation for the class, notaflof.
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🪡 Beginner Darning Workshop
2025-03-30 14:00 - 16:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Join us for a class on how to darn your clothes! Bring a garment with a small hole (dime-sized is ideal) or we’ll provide a scrap you can use. We’re recommending a $5–$25 donation for this workshop, notaflof.
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📺 Solder & Code: Li'l Info Box
2025-03-30 10:00 - 12:00, 2025-03-29 10:00 - 12:00, 2025-03-27 17:30 - 19:30, 2025-03-24 12:00 - 14:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Build a minimal e-reader with a 0.96″ OLED screen, two buttons, and a knob to turn pages. Runs for several days on 3 AA batteries!
This is an intermediate-level soldering project. If you’re a complete beginner, you may want to take one of our other soldering classes first.
You can bring a laptop or use one of our lab computers. Instructions & example code at iffybooks.net/lil-info-box
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🎵 Cassette Mixtape Session
2025-03-28 11:00 - 12:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Bring a playlist on your phone/computer and we’ll help you record it to an audio cassette tape. We have plenty of tapes to share!
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coming soon!

❤️ Soldering Practice: LED Heart Board
2025-03-27 12:00 - 14:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
Come out and get some soldering practice! This time we’re making a heart-shaped board with 22 LEDs, using an oscillator circuit to dim and brighten them at the speed you choose.
This project is ideal for folks who have soldered at least once before. Beginners are welcome to join us, but it may take you more than one session to finish. Working with a friend is encouraged!
The kit you’ll need to complete this project costs $5.50. We’re suggesting a $10–$30 donation for the class, no one turned away for lack of funds.
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🪐 Speculative Futures Reading Group: 'Orbital' by Samantha Harvey
2025-03-26 19:00 - 20:30
Join us Wednesday, March 26th at 7 p.m. to discuss the novel Orbital by Samantha Harvey (2023).
> Six astronauts rotate in their spacecraft above the earth. They are there to collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.
> Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction. The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
🎧 Get the audiobook on Libro.fm

🔓 TOOOL Lock Picking Meetup
2025-03-21 18:00 - 20:00 | Iffy Books, 404 S. 20th St., Philadelphia, 19146, United States
The third Friday of every month from 6–8 p.m. we host 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.
