*preroll music*
Herald: Our next talk
is going to provide a bit of introspection.
“We lost the war” has been the name
of a talk also by Rop and Frank
at the congress 10 years ago.
And this is basically the updated version of that talk.
Over the next hour, we’ll hear about the past and current events as well
and the bold prediction for the future, I hear.
So please give a warm welcome to Rop and Frank!
*applause*
Frank: Thank you for being here! Let’s start with a very quick question:
Who has seen, either in person, or on video,
our talk from 10 years ago?
And who has read the text that belongs to it?
*chuckles*
Ok, thank you!
So, 10 years ago, at the congress, we felt that we needed to talk about
the state of the world, about what the state of the hacker community is.
Rop and me are coming from quite different backgrounds.
Rop is from Netherlands, I’m from East Germany,
so we have both our perspectives on the hacker culture
and the position of the hacker culture in our world, but we share
a rather common way of analysing stuff and analysing the world.
So, the talk back then depressed the hell out of a lot of people
because it was just four years after 9/11
and people were not really ready to accept that
things are probably not gonna be really good and nice
in the near future.
And so, the press had quite a number of things to say;
most of them circled around the cover of the “Datenschleuder” back then
where the text was published that belonged to the talk.
“Hackers raising the white flag”, “Hackers giving up”, in this way.
Which was not really what we intended, actually.
Because we actually wanted to just say:
“Ok, reality is not looking too bright,
but that doesn’t mean we need to be depressed.”
And this is somewhat what we’re trying this year again.
*chuckles*
So, one of the critics that we had in this talk
was that we used the term “they” a little bit too losely.
“They” meaning “the others, the enemies”.
So, we just want to clarify up-front
that we don’t really believe in large conspiracies.
The world is too complex for large conspiracies.
There is no world government that does all these things;
it’s not like the Illuminati are sitting somewhere with the Gnomes of Zurich
and doing this stuff, but
it’s also not like freedom and liberty don’t have enemies!
As probably, many of you have seen the talk about
the people who got incarcerated in Guantanamo,
there are people out there who really don’t believe
in freedom and democracy and they are plenty, and they are powerful.
And this is what we meant with “they”.
*chuckles*
In that sense.
Rop: The other criticism that we got is that you can’t really speak of a war,
upholding civil liberties, upholding democracy is a perpetual fight.
You have to continuously fight, there is no winning, there is no losing,
there is just this continuous struggle.
Which is of course true! That criticism is completely right.
But we argued and continue to argue
that there are certain things that are so much easier to prevent than to undo
and that the introduction of ubiquitous general surveillance,
recording of everything, is one of these things
that grows power structures which are incredibly hard to get rid of
and it’s so much better to prevent.
And that’s probably part of a class of events
of turnings that are better to prevent
than to have happened.
The drone war is the beginning of the perpetual undeclared war
fought by robots.
There’s something fundamentally that changed
when the West, when America introduced a system
of black sites and torture happening all over the world;
prisons without any accountability where people can be locked up for a decade
without any trial, without anything.
And of course climate change brings possible tipping points,
maybe behind us, maybe still ahead of us.
So these are all events where, yes, you can speak of war
or at least of major battles, and of winnings and losses, in that sense.
Frank: So, essentially, what we said was:
“We lost the war when 9/11 happened.”
And that was the war for taking the direct route to a positive utopia
to a utopia that is not from the dystopian novels and computer games
but is going straight to, yeah, the positive world outcome. We lost that war.
And, if we look back, 10 years later,
very few people will probably dispute this finding.
So when we look quickly back at the predictions that we made
we were mostly right. So the economy tanked 3 years later
because the brittle system of banking nearly collapsed
and was just by hair breadth rescued
by means that really nobody understands anymore.
So the one thing that we were wrong about so far is the price of oil
that, miraculously, currently is very low.
But still nobody really understands why this is truly the case.
It is utterly bizarre.
So, democracy, if you look at what has happened to democracy
in the Western societies
it is hard to argue that democracy has made large progress.
On the contrary, what we see is,
that in many countries democracy is on the way out,
is no longer the preferred system of government for many people.
The security state, we can see it in our everyday lives, it is encroaching.
Meanwhile, you need to pass security check gates
when you want to board a train in several countries.
Ubiquitous surveillance is there. We have data retention.
So the security state is making large progress.
What we said back then, about climate and the refugees,
has largely been vindicated.
If you look at the weather patterns that we have:
Today even in Reykjavik, they have now a storm with over 300 km/h
that is coming in there.
We don’t have winter anymore in Germany,
so it is becoming kind of obvious
that the climate is not right anymore.
And the refugees that are being caused by this climate change
are around the corner.
So, another thing that we were talking about
was surveillance and whistleblowers,
and the need for that, we come a little bit later to that.
Rop: This talk is not going to be as depressing as the one in 2005,
not because the subject matter is less depressing
or has become better all of a sudden
but because more people are used to the world being the way it is.
There’s no longer... we no longer need to shock an audience into a world we see,
that is completely different from the world that most people perceive.
And the goal for this talk is to get a large group of mostly very smart people
– being you and whoever watches this –
to be as happy and as politically productive as possible
in an environment that is still going to be increasingly dystopian.
And when we talk about a dystopian environment
the most important issue that is pressing, immediate, and involves all of humanity,
is, of course, climate change.
F: So what we see is not so much
a direct global warming but a “global weirding”.
That means, that the weather patterns are shifting. The Hadley Cells, which is
the way the water goes up and where the water goes down, are shifting.
That means that the livelyhoods of many people who are depending on agriculture
are threatened. And we don’t know
where these patterns will be moving.
The one thing that we can see is that future generations
will look back at us as the guilty party.
We are the people, in their eyes, in the eyes of our children,
we and our parents were the people who basically fucked up the planet,
probably beyond repair.
*applause*
And the one thing that we would like to call you on
is taking this responsibility.
So, what we see now with the Syrian war is just the beginning.
It is just the early wars
that have a strong climate component
that we can see in many more conflicts that are rising.
So most of the Arab spring had a large component of food riots,
of food prices going up,
which was certainly to a large extent also speculation,
but also draught, meaning lack of water in large parts of the world.
And there will be many more.
So there is no real way to escape this reality any more.
Rop: This planet is largely a crime scene.
The fossil fuel industry, who have known about this
since the 1970s,
needs to be killed or needs to be... their bottom line
needs to be hurt significantly because a lot of the carbon that
they’re currently getting out of the Earth needs to stay there and not be burned.
The technology to change our energy infrastructure is already there,
solar is already profitable or near profitable in a lot of places,
and we need to fight conflicts that are
going to have components in fighting in courts,
they have components in fighting in demonstrations in the streets,
we need to take charge of these issues.
If you look at what’s currently happening with the fossil fuel industry,
it’s a lot like the tobacco industry.
If you have known for so long that this was going on,
and you have prevented the correct policy response
by hiding the science, by muddling the image,
then you have responsibility, and
if there is damage, you are culpable for that.
Also techno-optimism is a problem in our circles.
Many people think: “Well, we screwed up this planet maybe, but we have spacecraft,
we can go to other planets, there’s other worlds!”
That doesn’t work. There are no habitable planets in our reach
and there won’t be for generations to come.
So no matter how bad things may get on Earth,
it’s still not going to be anywhere near as inhospitable, on a bad day,
as it will be on Mars on the best possible day.
See? That’s a positive message, huh?
*laughter*
*applause*
Frank: Yeah, I mean, the core of the hacker culture is:
breaking stuff, fixing things.
And this planet, if you can say so, is our spaceship,
and it really needs fixing.
And so this is something that we see
that the hacker community or hacking community
can do much more.
And if you look at [from] where the refugees are coming
and for what reasons they are coming,
we see that there is a lot of regions that
will become hard to live in
so either because there is too much water, there’s too little water,
the ground turns into swamps,
and so these countries will be massively struggling
with how to feed their population, how to give them space to live,
and there’s a lot of stuff to do,
for technological minded people with organisational capabilities
like our community is, to help these people.
And to prevent also the dystopian streak that governments
usually take on when they are in emergency situations.
If you look at the larger refugee camps,
that is a massively dystopian set-up.
So people are wearing wristbands to register at every checkpoint,
they are limited in their range of movement,
they are just barely fed and housed and that’s about it.
And that means that a world that is in constant emergency mode
has a really hard time to be a democratic society.
But on top of that, the West, the Western countries,
but increasingly also China, and the other upcoming
larger powers, have their hands in pushing countries
into chaos, so we have seen now a large sequence of things
that end up with Syria and Libya,
where under the disguise of bringing forward democracy
with drones, countries are essentially pushed into chaos.
Because no one took responsibility of
setting up structures, setting up stability,
making sure that the people there
actually end up not in a much worse situation
than they have been in before.
And so the human rights and the managing of
migration is in direct conflict with the economic interest
of the arms industry. If we look at
who is selling these arms it’s mostly Western
countries and Russia. And we are selling these arms to countries
like Saudi Arabia which will be the next
large conflict zone. And which don’t have any democratic control.
And we just do that under the disguise of
providing stability to regions.
And while bombing countries into democracy
fortunately has become very much unpopular
this is also why the arms industry is pushing so much
for drones. Because drones can fly around
and not destabilize countries for oil
and not causing body bags coming home.
But it would be wrong to say that US foreign policy
has been a failure. It has not.
So if you look at the core interest behind this foreign policy
what is happening there, basically countries being un-balanced,
nobody really being able to concentrate their power to challenge their hegemony,
this has been largely a success.
So, sure, there has been a lot of chaos around,
but economically, and for the arms industry
in these countries, especially in the US and the UK,
but also other Western countries, this has been a very successful decade.
So it’s not like their policies have been failures.
Rop: *quietly, to Frank* Do you want to put this ?
Next slide I think.
Frank: Yeah, one of the things that are the tools
of foreign policy *scoffs* in the West
is of course ubiquitous surveillance and we had...
In 2005, we wrote that we need
to know how the intelligence agencies work today,
we need to know how the backdoors work,
and how that is done in large scale. That was 2005.
And we also wrote that we need
the infrastructure to harbour whistleblowers,
to make it possible for people from the dark side to
come forward, and get this information out.
At least on this, it has been a success. *scoffs*
This we can say.
*applause*
So we now know much more about
how the surveillance works, and – but does it really help?
Rop: For most people, looking at the Snowden revelations, it’s like
discovering a new force of nature. It’s like they have discovered
this whole universe that they didn’t previously know about,
there’s this “deep state” level of logic, of thinking, of diplomacy,
of how countries really interact, that now many more people know about.
What was considered paranoid, what was considered:
“Oh my god, this is like a really cynical way of looking at things!”
– now, many more people can see the documents, be they diplomatic cables,
or be they the Snowden revelations, and they can look and they can see:
“Look, this is really how the world works.”
But, leaking alone is not sufficient.
There’s – as we can now see – there’s too much systemic corruption,
too many secrets, too many anti-leaker laws and measures.
We’re going to need true transparency laws and we’re going to need to be able
to trust our governments and our parliaments to do the right thing.
There was this naive belief that if the scandal is big enough,
the system will finally correct itself.
What we see is the opposite. We see a scandal of the magnitude of Watergate
every week or every two weeks and nothing is happening.
We need to cope with that, we need to come up with new strategies.
It’s like the paranoid movies where finally the protagonist
gets to the president, and tells the conspiracy to the president, and then
finds out in, sort of, in shadowy words, he can find out
that the president is already part of the conspiracy.
When the Snowden revelations came out it was quickly clear that our governments
were not shocked, they were not like, “Oh my god, our intelligence agencies
are really out of control! We need to do something!” No, they were like:
“No, there’s nothing going on here, keep moving, pay no attention.”
So we really need to come up with strategies to deal with that.
Frank: So essentially their reaction was,
it was one of the first from when the
NSA was confronted by the German government,
and their answer was: “So, ok, now you know.”
*scoffs*
But that was about it. So what we have is the situation
that it looks like transparency alone doesn’t help anymore.
We had somehow hoped that... It was also one of the naive beliefs
of the early internet times, that transparency alone, “If people just knew”,
if people knew the problems, the things, they would act,
they would get their stuff together and, yeah, basically, change the system.
And it turned out that this was a quite naive belief.
But that doesn’t mean that transparency is not important.
It turns out that transparency is like basic hygiene,
it’s like brushing your teeth, like taking a shower for society.
So if you don’t have a transparency of power and the power structures
and of what interests are being conceived by whom,
what the tools of surveillance are, “who knows what”,
then you cannot have a democracy anymore.
Because the world has become so complex that it’s very easy
to hide relatively sinister interests within society.
We even have the problem now that, if you have a proper conspiracy
– a small one! – if you make it complex enough,
the scandal cannot be told within one print page
or one scroll range on the web site.
Then it’s hard to have it as a scandal anymore.
Which is also part of the reason why the Snowden revelations were kind of
difficult to turn into concrete action for the larger society.
So one thing that we need to keep in mind
is that even the well meaning people in government
and in bureaucratic institutions really need transparency
to keep things in check, so it’s not like transparency is useless or is
something that we should give up as a goal,
but we need to understand it has a different meaning,
a different purpose than what we originally thought.
So the question is will this apathy last?
So, what will happen when people start realizing
that the surveillance that they have been trained to ignore somehow
will be in everything that they own. When the “internet of things”
starts for real – we have basically network sensors
in everything we own – then, suddenly,
the world becomes treacherous.
So everything that you own, every door that you open,
everytime that you go to the fridge – if you have an “internet of things” fridge –
then your fridge will snitch on you. *chuckles*
And tell somebody that you opened it and what you took out of it.
And if... the question is if this maybe will change things.
It’s an open question to me. I don’t know.
So maybe the people will stay in this apathy
and not change their attitudes but maybe there is
a critical mass point where people say
“Now, it’s enough. It’s enough.”
So, maybe we need a seal:
“Certified cloud-less object” or something.
that we need to stick on stuff.
*applause*
And this is also one of the things that the hacker community is being asked for,
as, actually, we are the ones... the hacking people are the ones that
can actually do this, making objects cloud-less again,
*chuckles* if needed.
If we look at the progress of technology we can see that facial recognition,
including mood detection, micro-expression detection,
infrared blood-flow detection will become very cheap,
it will be everywhere. And we need to have countermeasures.
And that means for instance also cooperation
with the artists who make clothing, who make
make-up, who do all the stuff that you can legally
still wear in the public domain, and
think about, with them, what we can do against this ubiquitous surveillance.
So that brings me to the core question:
So what is our mission as a hacking community?
And I used to define this saying:
we are partly responsible for maintaining
society’s capability for change.
To keep the wiggle rooms open,
to keep the capabilities for political actors
who want to change the society for the better,
to make that still possible.
Not being strangled by surveillance, not being frozen in place by lack of options
where people cannot do anything anymore
because every step that they do is registered;
everything that they do leads to potential blackmail.
And Evgeny Morozov has recently written about that,
and he said that’s the “invisible barbed wire”
that is basically around you and that is made up
of the data that you leave so that restricts your options,
it restricts your room of movement and you’re not really
realizing that, unless you run against the invisible barbed wire.
And so this question of “blackmailability” versus transparency
– we want to have as much privacy as we can as individuals,
but we want to have the institutions that have power as transparent as possible –
is in the core of the struggle for a free society.
Basically, giving the individual the right,
or keeping our rights, for change, for movement,
for making things better
versus the institutions’ capabilities to keep stuff secret from us.
This is one of the core struggles that we have.
And the intelligence agencies know stuff about those in power.
They know what is blackmailable. And the interesting thing is that
the number of blackmailable offenses has been shrinking recently.
That has basically shrunk to: very clear corruption,
pedophilia, and tax evasion. With everything else, you can get away.
So, as a politician, drug use is no problem, affair is no problem.
Having strange hobbies: absolutely no problem.
*laughter* *applause*
Homosexuality – no problem anymore, very good!
But, those people in the security apparatus
that evaluate politicians and look at them,
and look what they can find against them
in the black’n’old chambers – we don’t know.
So we don’t know most of what politicians do.
I mean, sometimes, we learn that they have bizarre habits
involving their genitalia and pigs, which is, from my perspective,
their private thing to do, but what’s more interesting is that
what the circle of men there did, was creating a shared “Kompromat”,
a shared knowledge about each other that was so painful back then
to publish, to divulge, that they had, basically, mutually assured destruction
against each other. This is how power circles work.
And the intelligence agencies know this as well, and they want to get in there,
and we have very limited resources to find out if politicians
are in the hands of intelligence agencies. We can just look for the patterns.
So if a politician suddenly changes his course
on matters that the “deep state” intelligence agencies
are concerned about, then we can be pretty certain that they have something
against him that falls into the “still blackmailable” category.
So why did Cameron survive this thing?
Because everybody who could have overthrown him
was part of the same circle. *chuckles*
So they were all part of the same game and they knew about it.
So they created a space of invincibility around them.
And so, the question then is, “Why does it all matter so little?”
Why are all these big scandals that we know about, all this corruption, all these
things, where we know that politicians really misbehaved,
except for these three cases, but even then –
why is nobody rioting on the streets? Why is nobody calling out a revolution
just now, why is it that people are just saying:
“Yeah, this is how it is, this is how it has been
all the time and we cannot do anything about it?”
Rop: For that, we have to look at the psychology of our time.
We live in what circles around the “Adbusters Magazine”,
by the Adbusters collective, described – and I thought that was really useful –
they describe our time as a massively polluted psychological environment.
And it makes sense to think about it that way.
We have mechanisms for discourse in society and those mechanisms are
deliberately sabotaged, by lobbying, advertising, sock-puppeting,
the destruction of debate, and the destruction
of the human ability to think properly,
is very widespread in our societies.
There’s no more proper discourse, there’s no proper facts,
and there’s trends that counter any scientific thinking
or enlightenment – anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-fact...
There is a lot of thinking
that rejects a common truth or rejects a common reality that we live in,
and tries to find niches, tries to do...
tries to retract into something
that we can still believe.
We need some kind of a rationality movement. We need some kind of a movement
to say: “Look, we can disagree on policy, we can disagree on a lot of things,
but let’s not disagree on facts. Let’s not...”
And America is of course the capital of
what has been described as “bullshit mountain”,
as whole universes that are internally consistent
– universes of fake facts, of fake realities,
of fake, and we need to reject those.
Much of science, of the scientific enterprises,
at this point is very captured, economy is
basically run by the large banks.
But still: that doesn’t mean we can reject
the practice of science, just because it’s currently not in the right hands, often.
Facts are important.
And it’s also important to understand
that being angry or unhappy
right now, for prolonged periods,
is a recognized medical condition.
If you look at the world, and for a year or two years at a time,
this world makes you really depressed, or angry, or unhappy,
you can go to the doctor and you can get medication for that.
Lots of people, 5% or 10% of the population in some countries,
are on antidepressants.
These are the people that cannot function,
they basically do not want to go to work.
Are we – and this is an open question – are we suppressing a critical mass?
Because at some point, when there is no other people that don’t wanna go to work,
and start a movement, or, I don’t know,
riot in the streets, or do whatever else it is that they would be doing,
if they don’t go to work. If you have enough of these people, not doing that,
then it becomes the right decision for the lonely person that is out there
to also take antidepressants.
Our community – we have to face this – has a large pool
of what I would call non-neuro-normative people.
There are lots of people in our community that are on the autistic sprectrum,
that are bipolar, that are... there is lots of people
that are not the standard norm,
when it comes to their neurology.
What does that mean? What does this mean in practice?
Hasn’t it always been the artists, the slightly crazy people,
the slightly non-normative people, that have seen things coming first,
that have warned about things first?
These are things we need to think about.
Frank: Another thing that we need to take care about in our community is:
“Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you”
holds more true than ever.
Because we have now in our midth...,
in our middle quite a number of people who are actually harassed
by the governments. So if you look at the people from Occupy in the US,
basically the refugee waves that are coming in from the US,
the political refugees that are coming from there.
They’re coming now also from Hungary and Poland.
People who have really been oppressed and really experienced
a lot of harassment from the hands of their governments.
And so we need to be also clear that the more crypto that we use,
the better our technical security systems get,
the more classic the intelligence agencies will get as well,
that means more informants.
And so we need to figure out ways to
sort the needlessly paranoid and slightly crazy people from the people
who really have a problem with oppression and being followed around.
So informants are tools of power.
We need to talk about the power structures that are using them.
So if you look at the larger picture, we have basically 3 major models
of society that we have on this planet today.
It’s more the US Ayn Rand ultra-individualistic
surveillance state system, that says that everything that you can do
for yourself is good for you and the state surveils everybody else
so stuff stays within the prescribed limits.
Then we have the Chinese model of the harmonic society, that essentially says:
When we can keep this 100 000 people happy, it’s okay to kill this 1000 people.
And is... yeah... another way of saying
utilitaristic usage of power is justified.
And then we have the European model, that is more on a traditional
of enlightenment, of individualism,
of balancing out state power and economic power.
But none of these models is really superior against the other
because all of them are deeply corrupt.
So all of them have been corrupted by various interests
and if we can not solve the corruption of the political process,
then all these models kind of converge.
So it doesn’t really matter any more, if you are living under a Chinese
surveillance state or a US surveillance state.
Maybe you can watch better pornography in one than in the other,
but that’s about probably it.
And so... and if we can not get this corruption out of the systems,
regardless under what systems we live,
then the problems will not go away.
Yeah, we should understand that surveillance, ubiquitous surveillance
means that we have less and less small scale corruption.
So basically small briberies to get your passport faster,
or to get the building permit done,
but surveillance means that the corruption needs to be large scale.
That’s the billions, not the hundreds of Dollars or Euros
that you’re talking about. That means... the surveillance state means that
larger and larger interests are at play and that these are the ones
that are dominating the state. And these are harder and harder to fight.
So fighting the small corruption of a corrupt official in your hometown
is doable.
Fighting a large multi billion dollar weapons manufacturer
is becoming slightly more complicated.
So, we have tried to... to visualize
the situation somewhat.
So we have this graph where we have
on the one axis liberty, democracy, civilization,
on the other one we have time.
And we... what we want...
Rop: Don’t kill yourself just yet! There’s more positive messages out there.
Frank: Yes! *is laughing*
So what we don’t know is how long will it be till rock bottom,
we don’t know what will be coming later,
so if it will go down further or will go up at some point
and we also don’t know how deep the valley will be.
So but, what is pretty sure,
is that stuff will not be really rosy for a while.
So if you look at the tendencies in the world that we have briefly discussed now,
it doesn’t really... it’s not really possible to say:
“Okay, revolution next week, things will be good again.”
So this would be just a lie.
So we need to understand, that the next decades
will be more greyish than beautiful, in that sense.
So there will be lots of §$%&.
But, that doesn’t mean, that they can not be good fulfilling decades for us.
That doesn’t mean that we need to be depressed about it.
It’s just the world that we live in and the world we live in we can
change to a certain extent but not by wishful thinking.
Rop: Yeah! *applause*
So let’s look at a few trends.
Terrorism is now the main reason why we need to be discarding basic civil rights.
But I remember being a child in the 1970s
and my parents tuning into the morning broadcast to hear
whether the hostages in the train or the hostages in the school in Holland...
there was a conflict with Moluccans
wanting there own state and they took hostages and they were threatening
to shoot them. Conflicts lasted for weeks.
Many more people died of terrorism in Europe
in the 1960s and 70s than they did in the 80s and 90s and onward.
But nobody spoke about discarding basic civil rights.
Why? Because it was simply too expensive. I think we can say that now.
Because in that time it was seen as ridiculous for the East German state
to want to know who sent mail to who or to open all these envelopes.
That was seen as typical things that only
a police state would ever contemplate on doing.
All of these things are being implemented now. Why? Because it’s cheap enough!
This was all cost driven, not danger driven!
*applause*
And we can see long term strategies. We can see strategies that span decades,
the treaties, the internationally harmonised legislation,
ACTA, CESA, cybercrime treaties, TTIP... what not... what not... etc. etc.
They used to cement the economic status quo,
or they used to increase surveillance and repression.
And it’s like they figured out the strategy. There is now a treaty train
leaving every year or two years and it’s to wear down the activists.
Everything that the activists managed to get off the train
is just put on the next train.
See if you can mobilise the same things,
the same level of activism two years later.
How often do we need to mobilise the same fight
to fight the same damn unconstitutional laws?
There is very necessary activism that is... always
has this “Act now to stop this evil law from coming into effect.”
It’s very important! It needs to happen.
But it may not be enough. We don’t have ready-to-go answers; maybe, there is a few
ideas we have, and other people have, but we need clever and funny strategies.
Because I’m often called a pessimist and
“Oh my god it’s all doom and gloom.”
But a lot of what’s going on in the world right now is actually very funny.
It’s funny in a very dark way. It’s a very dark humour.
But you can not look at this world and go “Oh my god, this is...”.
It’s so stereotypical. And we have to make people see this.
We have to be the clowns. We have to make people see this.
If the Interior Minister says:
“Well, parts of my answer would make the population insecure.”
*laughing, applause*
...that deserves roaring laughter from the entire population,
‘cause it’s the only thing that will work.
*applause*
But what we also need is, we need to dare to dream ahead.
There is... A lot of strategies in activism are incremental,
meaning we are here, we want to go there, so let’s chop this up
into 10 little pieces and then start working on the first two.
Whereas in reality we are not here, because there is so much
chaos going on. There are so many events happening,
that we are actually all over the place all the time.
So we need to build strategies that assume that we are not in the place,
where we are in today. But we assume we are somewhere completely different.
And sometimes we win.
We have very few strategies for when people we like
or people who’s ideas we agree with actually get to power.
Do we know what laws we would like to have repealed?
What new laws would we like to have passed?
Have we maybe taken the time to write these laws already?
Even though they are ridiculous today?
Is there an Anti-Patriot-Act? Is there an... ?
We’ve tried to work on a few of these things.
I’ve been personally a part of thinking about IMMI,
the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.
That was an idea: can we create a system of laws to protect publications?
Anywhere from whistleblower protection,
protection of journalists, protection of publications.
So can we make a system of laws and can we figure out how they would all
work together to protect publications in one country and then
through sort of a spreading effect make that go to other countries.
We need to... we need to dare to think ahead!
And to not just always react and always be driven into this little corner,
which we have to fight a way out of.
In many countries discontent with the powers that be, with the way things are,
is growing. In some countries that leads to left wing movements
growing or getting... even getting to power.
There’s things going on in Portugal, in Spain, in the UK,
where Corbyn is now leading the Labour Party.
In other countries and powers those that challenge the status quo
or say they challenge the status quo
with even more fear and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies.
And in the US interestingly we see both trends happening,
but in an increasingly bizarre corporate media landscape.
So there’s all these things happening.
Frank: Yeah so, one of the things that changed in the last 10 years is:
Stuff can change very, very quickly. So stuff, situations,
reality can change very, very fast.
For instance, let’s look at the refugee situation.
Just a year or two ago what has been happening in Europe in the last month,
would be... have been totally unimaginable.
And there is no security
in the rest of the herd still grazing.
So if you see stuff is nice and well over here in Germany,
which is becoming more and more of an exception in the surrounding countries,
then that doesn’t mean that stuff can not change here very quickly.
And this is something that we need to get adjusted to. That the stability is gone.
So the stability, the dampness of the system are all gone and that means that
these sudden turns of events can also make oppressive regimes
like in Poland or in Hungary or commonly seen in France more powerful.
So we can not guarantee that change is positive in every way.
So if you look at the increased pressures
on the population, we see that
the problems that are multiplying from automation on the one hand;
on the other hand more and more people
not having their talents valued by the market, by the job market any more
and the pressures that are now coming in with the refugees
will make right wing powers probably more powerful.
And the question is: In this fight for power
in the Western countries that will becoming more pronounced political fights
how do we position ourselves?
How does the hacking community position itself in these fights?
So will we engage? Will we fight? How?
What is the... yeah... what is the means
and the goals that we are aiming for?
And the world today is uniquely connected and complicated.
So any solutions are going to be complex.
That means we need a generation of activists
that is post-depression about the situation
and that doesn’t have any fear of complexity.
So complexity is the new norm.
It’s not like things or simple solutions will be around the corner any more.
This time is gone forever.
Rop: So, we did this talk in 2005 and it was, in many ways it was taboo.
All of congress was depressed for a while or at least
people were walking around with gloomy faces.
And there was then and there still is today a myth in the progressive community,
that a story must have a happy end.
If you want to get large groups of people
to come together and fight to make change,
you have to present a happy end.
And this is bullshit!
*applause, cheering*
The problem with that message is that you create a disconnect
between the reality that people can see, a reality where outcomes are gradually
getting worse in some fields and the world
that they are told to believe in.
Everybody is hiring PR professionals
and PR professionals are... their job is to keep everybody consuming.
So their job is to present happy outcomes.
Their job is to keep people to spend their money.
And so we tend to believe these people, when they say:
“Well you must have a happy outcome.
Let’s all... Let’s tell people that if they don’t
buy the right light bulbs and don’t get their electricity
from the right provider and buy a Prius
then they’re themselves responsible for any bad outcomes that happen.”
So shame everybody into believing that the bad outcome is actually them.
That’s a frame that we should reject.
We’ve been warning progressive people, that have seen things coming, about
what’s going on right now since the 1970s. The coming of the police state, the fact
that planetary resources are limited, there’s limits to growth. That’s 1972.
I was 4 years old. So let’s not fall for this kind of messaging.
Frank: The question is then: What is our mission?
What is the stuff that we should aim for?
And one thing that should be very clear about is
this planet is a crime scene.
And this also means that...
*applause*
the thing to say to the people responsible is: so for decades we have made it
very clear that we don’t want to live in an 1984
environmental degraded police state.
We saw it coming but we went there anyway, because it was short-term profitable
and your corporate friends were very well off with that.
So please, now, step aside, place your hands where we can see them
and we will read you your rights, while we try to mitigate the shit that you caused
as best as we can.
*applause*
So the forces that made the world as it is today are not natural laws.
It’s not like this greed and this corruption
is the native state of humanity.
It is just what people made it to be.
And so, the people who did it are nameable.
So we know that the fossil fuel industry knew since the 70s and 80s
that they were basically causing planetary collapse,
that they were causing the climate
to go down for their corporate profits.
And that also means that we need to preserve the evidence.
So we may not be yet in the position that we can cause prosecution
of these people, but this time will certainly come,
hopefully before our children are too old for that.
And so, we don’t need to really fight
their silly PR efforts to still preserve their profits.
So what we need to do is collect the evidence and let them know
that we collect the evidence and that we will use it some time.
*applause*
So in the 80s we thought that all change is good.
So because the world was kind of frozen in place so that
especially in our fields, in technology and telecommunications,
we thought that all change is good,
but now we need to remind ourselves that not all change is bad.
So because when we are in a world that we
think that may not be getting much better soonish,
the sudden impulse would be to revert to
conservatism saying are we try to cliiing to
the status quo and not try to have too much change,
but this would be wrong, because change can also be for the better.
So this absence of stability is the new norm.
We need to live with that. And we need to work for making positive change,
because change itself can no longer be averted.
Rop: Yeah, we need to define missions for ourselves and argue for them
to be worthwhile, personally as well as in the bigger picture.
Picture a world were... yes, some outcomes may be negative
or things may be getting worse, but you can do meaningful stuff in the
life-saving, democracy-rescuing, world-changing sense of the word.
No fake utopian outcomes, no lies to tell people,
but still very positive at the personal level for each and everyone of us.
The sense of belonging to a community like the one we have,
but other communities as well, is going to become more important.
In difficult times people will come together.
There’s great happiness in the sense of purpose to be found in caring
for your friends, sharing knowledge and experience.
Especially if things get a little bit hairy.
And even if we end up in a bad possible future,
if things degrade, if infrastructure starts to fail,
even if that happens, the hacker mindset is – I’ve said this before –
is a post-apocalyptically appropriate way of thinking.
Wouldn’t you run to your hackerspace,
if things really went wrong?
Wouldn’t it... if the world went down in chaos,
I would really want it to happen somewhere at the end of December, because
you all would be the people I would want to be around.
*applause*
I would like to think of this community as having a role,
when things go wrong.
And many of us have taken on these roles.
I was travelling to some of the Eastern European countries
to Serbia, to Croatia to see some of the refugee situations
with my own eyes.
And I think many more of us need to be there.
There can’t be just one guy from Zagreb running around with wireless modems
to try to connect all the people that are trying
to help there and try to disseminate information.
Many more of us need to be in these situations.
*applause*
Frank: And so, we have been following
the strategy of enlarging our cultural,
or culture, the hacking culture over the last many years.
You probably noticed that from... I don’t know, if you look back at
the Eidelstedter Bürgerhaus, the congress was still looking a bit drab,
whereas now we have an... artists and people from the various cultural domains
as an integrated part of our community, of our culture.
And this is essentially what we need to do.
So if you look at the last, back at the last 10 years
the stuff that was made working
is the alliance between the hackers,
the journalists, investigative journalists, and the artists.
So this is something that is working now. This is a big achievement.
So that we can say: This is something where we managed to grow our culture,
so growing from a couple 100 people in some old community building in Hamburg,
now we’re having 12 000 people and could be 15 000 if this house would house us.
This is a big change.
And this is also something we can be proud of.
*applause*
So if we want to form further alliances,
so we need to... in order to succeed
we need to actively stop the trend that people are
choosing minor bickering fights.
That they are more interested in fighting the heretics in their own ranks,
in the people who are not using the words that they like
or that are finding different stuff important.
So we’re all having more or less the same goals
this is basically what makes us a culture,
is that we’re having the same ideas about
the general structure of society how it should be,
the same ideas how people should interact
and the rights of the individuum.
And we should actively try to stop fighting each other.
So we are not each other’s enemy.
*applause*
The enemy is something different.
So we have seen quite a number of people
who tried to
find the heretics
as their main goal in life, as their enemy in life
and ended up in finding no real purpose any more.
Because when they solved this one “problem”,
they still ended up with having not solved the bigger problem.
And we have seen the same thing happening
for more and more smaller issues like
animal rights, people finding out okay...
or human environment people not finding solutions,
that they can really bring forward, because the problems are bigger than
their individual... and smaller problems that they’re trying to fight.
So we need to look at the bigger picture. And this is essentially the problem
that we need to solve as a community, as a culture
to keep focused on the bigger picture and not trying to fight
our little wars among each other.
What editor is the best? What Linux distribution is the best?
What programming language is the best? What way of gendering is the best?
So these are meaningless fights. This is nothing worth spending your energy on.
*applause*
So, ...
Rop: We need to be aware that there are money aspects
and social economic tensions within our culture.
Things are different than they were 20, 30 years ago
because the economy of our subculture has changed,
because our community is much wider and broader.
Many younger people do not have the kind of stability,
that many of the now older people in this crowd have.
Hardcore hardware and software hackers that have established themselves usually
do not have a problem making a living in today’s project oriented job economy.
But many who came to our cultural space in the last years are designers,
they’re artists. They’re from other adjacent fields.
They’re living more and more precariously, because
their competition in their fields is much more fierce. We need to take care of this
at least where we can to keep our community economically accessible.
*applause*
That means... *applause*
...we encourage various forms of economic cooperation to make sources of income
more widely accessible.
Hackerspaces are not just the new universities, they’re also the new co-ops.
That means solidarity between people of different skill sets and talents.
And we need to grow the economic footprint of this community,
applying more of our thinking and our skills to problems outside of
the core field of IT: agriculture,
energy, transportation. In essence, let there not be an interesting field
out there that does not have a hackerspace dedicated to it.
*applause*
Frank: So, in closing:
we are headed for some very rough times.
That’s undeniable but it doesn’t mean that we can not have a lot of fun on that.
So we know, the surf is good when the waves are getting bigger.
And... *applause*
and sometimes in many places just keeping
the ideas of political freedom alive is a political act.
So basically our mission is to keep the torch burning,
so to keep the ideas of freedom, of individual rights,
of a society that’s transparent and just alive.
Our community is uniquely positioned to do that.
We can build the tools to make the activists
and political activists capable of still effecting change.
We are the ones who can develop new forms of communications.
If you look at this whole podcast universe for instance,
that was essentially created in our community
and that is reaching many more people now
with political education than common forms have been before.
Or if you look at just the open-source movements
that are more as running our planet now.
So we are the people who are responsible
to a large extent for effecting a better outcome.
And this is something that we need to take responsibility for.
Rop: So in closing really: No!
There will probably not be a revolution magically manifesting itself next Friday.
Probably also no Zombie Apocalypse. But still we need to be ready
for rapid and sizeable changes of all sorts of kinds.
And the only way to be effective in this and probably that’s our mission
as a community is to play for the long term, develop a culture that is more fun
and more attractive to more people, develop infrastructure and turn around
and offer that infrastructure to people that need it.
This is not a thing we do as a hobby so much any more.
It’s also something we do for people that need this infrastructure.
Create a culture that’s capable of putting up a fight, that gives its inhabitants
a sense of purpose, so forth, usefulness and enlarge that culture
over time, until it becomes a viable alternative to the status quo.
I guess that was it.
Frank: Thank you! Rop: Thank you!
*applause*
*postroll music*
subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in 2016