We are set up in a place that was squatted downtown by Kommando Carl Bildt
since late August, called AK4. The house was empty since June, and there was
no plans to use it until one year and a half.

Unfortunately, squats are very unusual in Sweden, and the discussions with the landlord and the city of Stockholm are extremely difficult, even though many newspapers speak positively about AK4. The place currently sets a record for the country, with a life time of one month (and counting) while most squats usually get raided by the police in a few days.

We are however facing an imminent eviction threat and police pressure has been significantly increasing lately – with civil cops coming very often to take
pictures of the house and sirens waking us up early in the morning.

This call is asking you to contact the landlord to show support to the hacklab
and the squat. So far, he has been very closed minded. He only proposed that we leave the place and talked about an expensive and abusive rental contract. It was about a much smaller office, and according to which we would not be allowed to sleep in the premises, we would not be allowed to host concerts, cafes or parties, etc.

The landlord is Fredrik Winberg; he is the CEO of Cementa AB [3], part of
HeidelbergCement Global with a revenue of 15 billion euros per year. He also
runs the Biteam AB company [4].

We do not believe that he or any of his fellows will turn poor should we
definitely get the house in Stockholm, and we think that his behavior is
basically motivated by the capitalist idea that the right to stay somewhere
must always be paid for.

We hereby ask you to contact him to expose your views on squatting and
hackerspaces in order to give him a more comprehensive view on the subject
than what he could have had as a capitalist entrepreneur. His contact email is
fredrik.winberg at cementa.se and he can be reached by phone at
+46 (0)708 25 68 04
(NB: this contact information is available from the WWW).

We do not give a “copy and paste” email to send him, since mail bombing would probably not be effective and only increase tensions. Also, please do not be aggressive nor engage in any other activity (defacing etc.) which would not lead anywhere.

You are also most welcome to join the AK4 Squat Support Group on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=146697601021

Thank you,
The Abbenay Hacklab

PS. We are very grateful for any distribution of this call. Print it, forward
it, post it on your blog, upload it to your favorite social network, etc.

[1] http://www.abbenay.org/
[2] http://lekernel.net/blog/?p=544
[3] http://www.masterclub.se/konsulter.html (Swedish)
[4] http://www.biteam.com/

The question is how long we get to keep it as squats tend not to survive very long in Sweden. Don’t bring anything you can’t afford to lose to the police.

Next meeting: this Wednesday or Thurday is my suggestion.

– Sebastian

Those who have google accounts can view the posts through the web interface. Those who don’t I’ll make an effort to put the posts here.

We are invited to Nordic Hackerspace teleconf tomorrow Sunday at 18:00 UTC+1. Fun!

We have our next afk-meeting next thursday at 17.00 at Proxxi. We wanna start doing stuff, not talk about doing stuff. I wanna get datakörkort, get my gpg-key signed and and… What do you wanna do?

/Sebastian

P.S. Member should submit their membership info here. If you don’t like Google, you can send the info to me at sebastian at liem dot se with this gpg-key

It was a blast.

We now exist on hackerspaces.org and we are on irc; #abbenay @
irc.tinfoilnet.nu:6697 (ssl).

Next meeting: This Thursday, for more info check out our google group.