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II. The Founding Spark: The Vision Before the Fall
🗎 Filename: 02_founding_spark.md
They called it a makerspace. But for me, it was never just that.
It was a commons. A sacred one. Not in a religious sense—but in the sense of what could be made sacred through intention, reciprocity, and shared authorship.
Dallas Makerspace was not a collection of tools. It was a living organism, pulsing with potential. A place where the lines between teacher and student dissolved, where engineers cross-pollinated with artists, where welders, coders, and dreamers spoke a shared dialect of possibility.
I founded it not as a company, not as a club— …but as a container for creative sovereignty.
We believed that anyone—given time, tools, and trust—could become something more than the world allowed them to be. We believed that knowledge should not be hoarded, but handed forward. That systems should not be gatekeepers, but gateways. That hierarchy was a failure of imagination.
I did not lead with charisma. I led with infrastructure— with bylaws, with bootstraps, with midnight debugging sessions. The dream was never about me. It was about us.
And for a time, it worked. We built, we taught, we collaborated. We became something rare: a self-organizing body of civic creation.
But seeds are vulnerable. And even the healthiest systems, if not protected, can be infiltrated— slowly, silently, until the dream no longer recognizes itself.
That was the world before the fall.
And this… is how the shadow took root.