Newspeak House — College of Political Technology

At the top of Brick Lane on Bethnel Green Road in east London the streets are lined with four-storey buildings tightly packed shoulder-to-shoulder, alternating brick and plaster. At street level there are pizza parlours, cafés, vinyl record stores, and a shop that sells terrariums. One building, measuring four gabled windows across with two wide storefront windows at the ground level, has nothing in the display for sale. This is the event space of Newspeak House, where I ran my event earlier this month.

After arriving at Heathrow on my 10 hour flight delayed by 3 hours I dropped my luggage at the hotel in Brick Lane and walked up to the space to meet Edward Saperia, the person who runs Newspeak House. I just wanted to get a sense of the place so I could plan the logistics of my event in a few days. I got more than what I came for.

It’s bigger on the inside

For a few years I knew Newspeak House as an event space where lots of tech meetups happen. What I didn’t know is that above the large open meeting hall, with its speaking area near the back and its cool fully adjustable mood-lighting, were three more floors which housed a whole residential college!

Edward Saperia not only runs an event space but is the founder and Dean of Newspeak House, The London College of Political Technology (among holding various other positions, see his profile here)). This is an independent college with a one year program where participants engage in:

the study of institutions founded with a purpose (civic, political, public sector, charitable, activist, etc), the communities that surround them, and in particular the novel digital infrastructures that they produce and deploy.

Fellowship-candidates are expected to work on a political technology project, not just write a thesis. There are lectures, and candidates are to run events and engage with various political technology groups in London (and… ahem… from around the world! 😄) as part of their field work. Of the most recent cohort of 18 fellow-candidates, 6 actually live in Newspeak House. Since 2015 the college has produced more than 80 fellows. Some of the more prominent ones include:

The current cohort has some very excellent people that I felt lucky to hang out with while I was in London. I even got to talk about my experience in the Pirate Party of Canada with former Chairman of the Board of the Icelandic Pirate Party!

The faculty is also full of interesting folks with intriguing experiences. See the whole list under the Faculty tab here. You are likely to recognize some of them, for example Matt Stempeck, who maintains the Civic Tech Field Guide, is the college Librarian!

Floored

After graduating from Cambridge with a maths degree in 2006, the future Dean Saperia went into finance for about a decade. He then started a creative studio and in 2015 “bought a derelict building in an unfashionable part of town.” Since then this area has absolutely sprouted vintage clothing shops where a pair of shoes can cost you $1000. A lot of work went into improving the building, including building a lovely outdoor terrace that is heated, covered against the rain, and has a bar! I sat out there late one night with Kevin Marks and Orion Reed talking about indieweb, Causal Islands, Ink & Switch, and more.

The ground floor is an open space with exposed brick and two storefront windows that can fit about 100 people. You can hire it out for events or pop-up stores and the like (seriously flip through the gallery on that page to get a sense of how people customize the place!).

Up a set of narrow stairs is a common room with big poofy comfortable couches where people can sit and converse late into the night. The walls are covered with large picture frames that don’t contain paintings but blackboards. I sat in this room until late the first two evenings I was in London, talking with fellowship-candidates and other community members about a myriad of topics. Next to the common room is the shared kitchen, and on the other side of the wall is a pantry and drawing room where even more meetups happen, including the weekly Ration Club, a free community dinner for anyone interested in hearing about the college and its work that has continued for ten years.

The next floor up is a fully kitted out classroom, an office, two rooms for residents, and a guest room for visitors. Finally, the top floor has four more rooms for residents.

Experimenting with governance is another feature of the one year program. Each year a new cohort matriculates and the residents have to come up with a system of rules to govern the living space and its resources amongst themselves. Every year the slate is wiped clean and a fresh new experiment in communal living kicks off.

What isn’t happening there!?

After a long flight over the north pole, and suffering some severe jetlag, I only intended to pop into the space for a few minutes that first night. However there happened to be a meeting of the Open Rights Group happening that night so I stuck around. The following night I was back again for a presentation by two members of the Open Culture Foundation_ from Taiwan who had popped by London after their trip to FOSDEM. Then, the following two evenings I was there for Protocols for Publishers ✨. After four nights in a row I had to cut myself off so I could see the rest of London 😅.

Nearly every night there are events at Newspeak House. The entire event archive going back to 2016 is available to browse. Just to give you a sense, here are a few that happened just recently:

• Peter Steinberger presenting on a little thing that would eventually molt into OpenClaw
• Nick Srnicek presenting on his new book Silicon Empires
• a screening of Koyaanisqatsi
• Book Club Night with the Author of There Is No Anti-Memetics Division
• the initial Journalism Technology London Meetup

@atproto.London, Feeling of Computing, and Campaign Lab are some of the groups that have regular meetings at Newspeak. It really is a hub of the tech scene in London.

Inspired

I think visitors who travel to London and see Newspeak probably all have the same reaction as I did that first night: why can’t we have a Newspeak in MY city!?

Here in Vancouver we have cool places like Z-Space and Atelier House. DWeb Vancouver has talked about having a space of its own and is probably the most politically aligned to the work that Newspeak does.

I left Newspeak thinking:

• Could we raise funds to “buy a derelict building in an unfashionable part of town”?
• Could relatively small Vancouver support a program like this?
• Do we have enough of a civic tech scene as a foundation (Toronto’s is much more established)?
• Would we start from scratch, or we have a satellite campus with a relationship with Newspeak?
• What does it take to set up an independent college in BC?
• Could it be a different shape like a co-op?
• Could we run Newspeak’s main Introduction to Political Technology course here at an existing college or even Z-Space?
• What relationships at the established colleges and universities here could we rely on? (I used to teach Digital Ethics at UBC in the Okanagan, but would have to expand my network here in the Lower Mainland)

In all, as you can probably tell, I was very inspired by the existence of Newspeak House. In April I will be in Germany but will stop in London on the way for a few days to visit again.