Hakker Land

Nobody had ever told me the whole truth about what technology actually costs.

But I also understood something else: nobody told me, because I had never asked the deeper questions.

So I started exploring them my own and I carried that boy's look with me the whole way through.

Notes from one my explorations can be found here → Echoes of Electronic Waste

Somewhere along the way, I started noticing a pattern.

The plastic waste we can't deal with today is the direct consequence of earlier generations getting seduced by this invention and everything it made possible, using it for things that lasted minutes, then left to decompose for centuries, poisoning the same water and soil our food grows from.

Now we're doing the exact same thing with electronics.

We can either break the pattern here or watch it repeat itself again, but this time escalated.

• Recycling, upcycling and sustainability consulting companies
• Open-source and hacker communities building software
• Academic Sustainable IT research communities
• Local communites directly affected by the problem

• E-waste recycling is energy-intensive and structurally incapable of keeping up with the scale of the problem. Recycling isn't the fix, and it won't be for a very long time
• The most effective way to reduce e-waste is to keep hardware alive longer and that begins with software
• In most cases, hacker communities build software with almost no awareness of its environmental footprint. The community best positioned to fix this often doesn't even see the problem
• Green and Sustainable IT are still young fields, only taken seriously once AI made the environmental cost of computing too big to ignore. The warning signs were there long before anyone listened. That's the pattern: these fields only get taken under consideration once the damage is already done, instead of existing beforehand to prevent it
• Academia has mapped this problem extensively. What it hasn't done is fix it at the source, because academia became trapped inside its own method: quantifying everything, reducing a problem this complex into numbers and statistics that were never built to hold it. What's needed here isn't more data. It's a different way of building knowledge

Einstein once wrote:
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”

That idea became one of the principles guiding how I looked at the proposed solutions. If the problem was created by a particular way of thinking, then solving it requires us to step outside that framework and look at the system differently.

So instead of asking how we can make the existing system work better, I started asking a different question: "What would it look like to build something that operates by entirely different rules?"

• Community as the actual point. Technology without people means nothing, and whatever this became, it had to exist to give people the tools that let them push social change themselves. Because tools are the revolution
• A new way of creating knowledge, outside of academic structures: space for experimentation and formats radical enough to extend the imagination instead of limiting it
• Foresight as part of the process itself, not an afterthought: predicting and scenario-planning a technology's consequences before it ships, the exact opposite of how everyone else seems to operate nowadays
• A fundamentally different way to build software and the financial ecosystem around it, with ecological and social elements at its core, not as an afterthought and financial stability built in for the entire life cycle of the software
• Upcycling instead of recycling and where recycling is unavoidable, doing it through bioprocessing rather than hard chemistry

• 3 years of nomadic life, traveling across Europe and Asia
• One criterion above all: find a country still free enough from capitalism and enough distance from established systems to experiment, prototype and build alternatives

And then I immersed myself in the shortlisted locations, getting to know the land, the people and the reality behind each one.

• Europe knows how to build software. It has deep technical expertise and a strong community of specialists
• Asia knows how to repair, reuse and upcycle. It has existing e-waste networks, practical knowledge and deep roots in the problem itself

The selected location is designed as a bridge between these worlds, a place where technical knowledge meets hands-on experience and where ideas, skills and solutions can move in both directions.

This process required discipline, sacrifice, sustained attention and deep work with the mind. There were no button to press, no prompt to enter and no AI that could do this work for me.

Full story on how the Mountain became the foundation of this project → Entities & beings behind

• Legal framework: what's possible, what's required on the land
• Preliminary agreement made with the landowner
• Beginning the process of changing its status from agricultural to buildable
• Strategy, but not just a plan for where the project is heading, but the full structure behind it, stakeholders mapped, roles defined and the kind of groundwork that only shows once you look closely enough to notice how solid it actually is
• Communication strategy and an entire identity: vibe, voice, language and visuals, all built so Hakker Land's purpose comes through clearly, without getting lost in translation
• From there came the promotional and crowdfunding campaign and the whole system running underneath it

It might be hard to believe in 2026, but the foundation of entire project was built on paper.

No AI prompts and no endless scrolling for inspiration, no feeding a problem into a machine and waiting for an answer. When I began the process of creating the strategy, I went somewhere else: into meditation, deep relaxation and the theta state of mind.

AI was used, but only to execute not to create

Once the core was created, AI stepped in to handle the repetitive, technical layer: formatting, structuring content and speeding up tasks that didn't need a human's full attention.

Every phase of this project has its own scope and its own minimum budget: legal work and clearing the land, the infrastructure needed to actually build, scouting and reaching out to co-creators, promoting the project further and eventually building the space.

The minimum for each one is set at exactly what's needed to move and to find out what this adventure actually brings with it.

There are already several ways to support and get involved, all laid out on → Become part of the story page

And this is only the beginning

There's a much longer list of fundraising experiments waiting to happen, and it's also open for your ideas to reveal themselves, so we can find out together what actually works.

For the record, I already got naked in a promo video for this project, which should give you a fairly good idea of both how open and honest I'm willing to be about this journey but also how far I'm prepared to go to get the attention it needs.

And don't forget to send crypto: hakkerland.eth

What you get in exchange is being part of the story. You'll get access to communication, sharing real progress, not just wins.

But this is also just getting started, so figuring out the actual formats, how updates get shared, what involvement looks like, is something will be built together as we go.

There is only one thing that will not be compromised, and that's the quality of transmitting content, as a way of respecting you and your time.

• Complete the land purchase and pay off the final installment
• Finalize the land status change: move the land from agricultural to buildable status so that construction can legally begin

Before anything new can be built, the existing site needs to be cleared.

• Clear old, collapsed and burned structures that are currently occupying the site
• Remove existing waste and debris and make the terrain safe and accessible for further work
• Assess and care for the existing trees, many of them left neglected for years

The architecture needs to respond to this particular mountain, not force the mountain to respond to a generic building plan

• Architectural plan built on natural building principles
• Collaboration with experts in the field to design structures and select regenerative materials

Infrastructure doesn't build itself. This is the minimum one-year budget for three to four people on the ground

• Construction and physical responsibilities: coordinating the practical, technical and construction-related work on site
• Documentation and coordination: leeping records of everything as it happens and creating and maintaining content for the community gathered around the project
• Site management: day-to-day operations, logistics, paperwork and generally keeping everything held together

A buffer for the unexpected, because building on a mountain rarely goes exactly to plan

Build a safe, functional workshop space for construction work, equipped with the tools needed to actually get things done

The project needs to be connected to the outside world even when the physical site is remote

• Establish reliable internet access for documentation, remote collaboration, streaming, communication and keeping you connected to what is happening on the ground

Right now, Hakker Land has no boundary and uninvited wildlife has been making the most of it, tearing up trees and disturbing the terrain.

• Build the fence from plastic parts sourced from electronic waste
• Purchase Precious Plastic machinery to actually start the production process
• First tangible proof-of-concept for turning e-waste into infrastructure

The fence would be first proof that the problem Hakker Land is built around can become part of the solution

Water from the mountain is hard, which means machines and tools don't handle it well without help. The current source is also weak and unpredictable, which leaves one real question: how to actually get water flowing here in a way that can be relied on.

• Stabilize and protect the existing mountain water source, including a filtration system to deal with its hardness
• Build basic sanitation infrastructure with a minimal footprint and in a way that respects the geology and natural flow of the site

Reliable electricity is one of the basic conditions for making the project operational. The current power supply can disappear for days at a time, making consistent work and communication difficult.

• Establish stable power generation suitable for the site's actual conditions
• Explore energy storage using repurposed batteries, turning another waste stream into useful infrastructure where technically and safely viable

• Direct visits to hackerspaces across the region, learning how they work, what they've built and where the overlap with Hakker Land's mission actually lives
• Every visit gets documented in full becasue it's the kind of content that creates history

• Regular presence at hacker and open-source conferences: Chaos Computer Club, FOSDEM, DEF CON, HOPE and others along the way
• Presenting the project's progress and opening up space for public discussion around it

• Every process gets documented in full, not just what was built, but how, why, what failed and what was learned along the way
• Openness has its limits and those limits are part of the design. Boundaries built to protect the project from exploitation and extraction in a world where AI is making both easier than ever

Hakker Land isn't arriving as a finished system waiting for people to fit themselves into it. What gets built will be shaped by the people, ideas and discoveries that become part of the journey, including new ways of making decisions and ownership, tested in real conditions rather than theorised about on paper.

None of this survives on community funding alone.
What will be worked out along the way is a stable model with diversified sources of income, income that doesn't depend on asking people for money every single year, but on offering something tangible and useful.