Woody Poulard, a Meshtastic advocate in New York City who participates at the hacker space NYC Resistor and has distributed a zine about how to use mesh routers, says he has worked with ICE watch volunteers to establish a broader network of mesh communications in New York. In January, he participated in a workshop for people building small router nodes into their phone cases, so they would have an immediately available connector wherever they went.
“If there’s a natural disaster, it’s good for that too,” Poulard says. “But it’s perfect for the situation that we’re in right now, where you have people you might not want to join a conversation.”
Beyond the makers meeting the moment are those preparing for what is likely to come.
Artist and crafter Claire Danielle Cassidy has been at the resistance art game for a while in Portland, Oregon, a city that is currently suing ICE over its use of tear gas. She builds tech like light graffiti projectors and solar-panel power banks to charge people’s devices at demonstrations and protests and advocates for joy and “weaponized cuteness,” because “girly culture is going to save us, like it always does.”
She spoke to me from her neon-soaked home in Portland, wearing a pair of her own laser-cut earrings that spell out “FUCK ICE.” (You can download the file to make your own.)
“Being effective in activism, you don’t need to be upset, stressed out, and have an adrenaline response for you to be caring,” Cassidy says. “This is the whole pipeline of fascism: sucking people into shame and fear cycles and trying to take power over the situation. Things can be gentle even in the middle of all of this. And you can still be effective.”
The trick to doing that, Cassidy says, is to make it a habit. She runs a pop-up camp called There U Glow, a queer- and femme-led workshop that aims to teach people how to modify LED lights as a fun way to get participants into technical tinkering.
“If you learn about how to set up an LED coat, you actually know 75-ish percent of how to set up an off-grid solar array,” Cassidy says. “I can tie that together for people.”
Despite the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive push into cities and communities around the country, Cassidy says crafters and makers are preparing for the worst without sacrificing what makes them human.
“We’re not fucking around in the dream space anymore,” Cassidy says “This is a particularly fucking fraught time. But we are still going to live our lives.”
