An account of trying to run Willoughby and Baltic, a local maker space.After the first year of W&B, some of the old members were still angry about the fall out of W&B, and had started DDOS attacks on the website. In fact, attacking W&B seemed like their pastime. The angry group started ugly rumors, hacked my accounts, hacked some of the members accounts, and made lots of excuses for acting out. My email was spoofed repeatedly, and the petty cash bank account number was posted online. The police thought it was likely that my social security number had ended up online.
I’m kind of not surprised. This part I was surprised by, but maybe I shouldn’t have been:
So I started interviewing professional tradesmen. But when I described the typical demographic of the members and most likely the future students, the reaction was always negative. The tradesmen were universally telling me that they didn't want to work with students or people from the "Ivy League" or academia. The fabricators had a strong resentment toward "the elites". As one candidate told me "Yeah, I know those people. I fix their mistakes all day long." This didn't happen with just one candidate, it happened with 8 of them.