Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/1396 Thanks!
Most of the speed of light onto the
Tsoukalis OSCA of
the unit soufflés weapon Bembry close
to Paul Graff wouldn't natürlich
show antifascist and
aluminum is very common for
the technical, political society
and resistance.
Michael,
hello. Better now.
OK, cool.
Yeah.
Welcome. My name is Oscar.
My pronouns are he him his.
If you want to address me after the talk.
Come do so.
I will give you a talk called the
technical is political at
about around three topics.
They are not strictly separated from each
other. It's obviously about technology,
but not about quote.
I will not show a single line of code,
but I will really more talk about
technology, about its use and
its misuse in the society
we live on now.
The society has evolved and changed very
much through technology, and I want to
show some of the ways it did.
And lastly, I will talk about
resistance because I personally think
that some of the
things that technology did with our
society, but not necessarily positive.
OK, so some last
remarks before I start and I want to ask
the person DPS,
a dolphin on screen.
So everything I said
has been said before,
and
I'm not the one who said it and mostly
queers or women or people of color,
sometimes all of the above
who said it.
And I don't trust you to
believe me, but I would ask you to
believe them.
Um, secondly,
this talk is very much an introduction, a
cover, a broad range of topics,
but
I will not go into depth
into some of them, so there will be
questions left unanswered.
Yeah. So just please
keep this in mind.
And lastly, if you want
to see the slides, you can find them
at all about OVL Dot Design Slash
S.W., Dash CCC Dash
one nine, all by scanning this
QR code in the top right corner
or
after my talk, I will tweet them at
underscore 0V or B.
Yeah, these are, I think, the opening
remarks. So let's
go somewhere.
I want to tell you a story
and a story that's up some facts that
has some opinions that does have some
swearing because I'm kind of angry
at some of the things I will talk about.
It's a story about connections and
connectivity.
And as we listen
to 21st century, I would kind of be
remiss to not at least briefly
talk about the internet.
And I would like to start with a
bit of like an overview
of the internet.
There is a spoiler. There is no cloud
just out, other computers for Dos.
And so
like most great things, the internet
started from very humble beginnings in
December 1969, like 50 years ago.
The predecessor of the internet,
the ARPANET, which stands for
advanced research projects agency
network with just four universities
connected to each other.
In October 1969,
the first message was sent
on the ARPANET and it was low.
The connection dropped in the middle of
the of the message, which was sent from
the University of California in Los
Angeles to Stanford.
It probably was supposed to be
locked in or loaded, but
time can't tell us anymore.
For us as technicians, this is kind
of a relief because even though often it
started with a buck and every buck we
wrote has some like historical
predecessors.
Now, from then on,
things evolved pretty much.
This is a scheme of the internet from
1997, around
roughly from the Federal Agency
for Security Information Information
US technology.
But it's a bit oldish and
a bit funny, maybe, but it's still
roughly holds up, even though we have no
ISDN anymore.
But roughly, the structure
is the same. We have, like some
internet service providers and we have
content providers like people who host
websites.
We have the domain name system and the
right side.
And we have clients.
And they had like the the
the virtue, the foresight to
make the internet a cloud thing.
Even do I think in 1997, it wasn't
really, really over it already,
but it's only your word.
It's no infrastructural reality.
The infrastructure of reality very much
looks.
Sorry, Adam,
I switch things up
today. We managed to connect more than 50
percent, almost 60 percent
to the internet, which is kind
of amazing given
the size of the Earth.
But this also means that almost
60 percent are almost
40 percent are not connected to the
internet and how they will be connected
to the internet. Very, very much how
they experience the internet.
For us,
we probably have to promise and mind off
the internet was going to.
Give voice to the voiceless, visibility
to the invisible and power to the
powerless.
This is a quote from an article by Mike
Monteiro, who was an activist
and writer who writes very,
very much about technology
and power dynamics and technologies and
how we have to fight, and I refer to
him
often going on.
Yeah. So this is kind of the promise that
we maybe grew up over that we experienced
when we when we
got connected to the internet.
Now quickly reality
check. This is more
likely the central infrastructure
of the internet is deep sea cables
running around the oceans.
This is a projection how it would
look like by 2021.
You can see basically every continent is
connected by more by many strength.
This is a graphic from the New York
Times.
They ran an article where they
explained
the
the the
technology behind it, and
I forgot one thing to link for the
slides. There's also an exhaustive list
of resources.
Basically, everything I say has a kind
of going deeper.
Article I will also show the link at the
end again.
So if you're interested in something that
I mentioned, the page will
help you out. This article, for example,
is LinkedIn.
But this this
graphic also shows the yellow
strength and the yellow strings are
cables that are owned or will be
owned by Amazon, Facebook, Google or
Microsoft, so they are owned by
by private
companies. And as we see
the breadth and the width of of the
internet and how many people
are connected to it, it feels
like a public good.
But still
more and
more of the infrastructure of the central
infrastructure is privately owned, and
I think there's just something clashing
there
and it
is OK as long as these companies
don't make their
interest count.
I think they will at one point.
And besides the
private owned infrastructure,
there's also another thing more and more
states are trying to centralize the
internet infrastructure into like central
access points.
And the Mozilla Health of the Internet
Report 2019 reported
that there were 188
shutdowns in 2018.
A shutdown is not a router failing or
something. A shutdown is a region or a
complete country disconnected from
the internet, basically not being able to
use it anymore.
For example, largely
unnoticed in the Western media, the
longest shutdown of of a complete
region is currently going on in Kashmir
and India. It's offline since four
months.
This is the longest shutdown under
democracy of the whole internet.
There have been longer shutdowns of
single services, social media, for
example.
But they're like whole.
Kashmir is currently not connected to the
internet anymore, and this is just one of
many cases in 2019 also
currently going on.
But even if people are connected
to the internet, their connection to the
internet might look like this.
They are probably and
sometimes only Experian.
Experian. Facebook There has been
one survey by a researcher called
Telenor Indonesia in 2015,
where she found the staggering number
that more
people are
saying they're using Facebook than that
they're using the internet.
And she thought at first there has to
be something wrong with the numbers
because obviously Facebook is using the
internet, but they they are so
connected to Facebook.
They basically just use the Facebook app
and
they they are so, so
and entrenched in the Facebook ecosystem
that they think Facebook is the thing.
There is no internet, it's just Facebook.
Now, if you are working for Facebook,
you can say this is a success.
I think that's dangerous as
fuck because we know
how
a magnificently Facebook managed to
look good for everything they touch,
basically.
OK, so this was kind
of the basic connection part.
The thing with Facebook centralizing
access to the internet also shows
something something else, and they
want to be a topic.
And in the next section,
it's called the web.
We lost and this is a
quote that I kind of stole
by Anil, that she was an activist
and an entrepreneur, working
and then trying to build meaningful
technology. And she wrote this piece
in 2012, and she gave many examples, like
Technorati, which some of you might
remember which were offline 10 years
ago already. So just what we lost might
not be more like a distant memory
for some of us. Some maybe have never
experienced that.
And she starts this article like this.
The tech industry and its press have
treated the rise of billions.
Scale social networks and ubiquitous
ones from apps as an adult
would win for regular people.
He goes on to say they seldom talk about
what we have lost along the way in this
transition. I want to talk about some of
the some of the things we lost.
And I want to start with maybe an
unlikely candidate.
This is coming from MySpace, who some of
you might remember because he was the
first top front we got
on MySpace and state our top friend
basically till the end until he luckily
lost all of our data.
An unlikely candidate because MySpace
very much feels like a centralized
platform, right?
Had just MySpace and MySpace profile,
but MySpace enabled something.
MySpace enabled something like this,
which is
probably like the top of that design,
ever.
But and just is vitally important.
This is personal. This is something
someone built. Someone sat there
and added two ounces to their MySpace
profile and made it their own.
They didn't necessarily own the
infrastructure, but they owned.
The design was their personal MySpace
page. No other page looked like this.
For better or worse, my pictures
probably looked even worse.
But it enabled us to learn this as to
learn HTML to get the kind of entry point
into into working with technology.
To quote Mike Monteiro again of the
article I mentioned at the
beginning of the internet or the
worldwide web, we kind of put our stories
and songs and messages and artwork
where the world could find them for a
while. It was beautiful.
It was messy and it was punk as fuck
and how
punk it has been.
This is a screenshot of a GeoCities page,
which was another hosting platform
where you could put your important
kind of important things on there and
kind of work with work with the web.
It reached the large comic sense letters.
If you study the material on this
website, you will hopefully understand
what our purpose on Earth has been.
This page is intended to be useful as
written in smaller letters at the top.
I don't know if you are able to reach us
and reach welcome home, and I feel
very much like home, and I believe
someone had the time of their life
building this website.
Really, this must be a ton of fun
to have happening there.
And then some
usefulness. Maybe I don't know because I
can't look it up.
Today we are more or less stuck like
this, or most people are stuck like this
with the standard Facebook news stream.
Just basically. In nothing we can do
about it. We can post links there and
stuff, but we can't make it beautiful.
We can't, we can't make it ours anymore.
And no, naturally I'm designers have
talked a bit about design and try to
illustrate this design.
But we haven't lost design
to quote any trash again.
We have lost key features that we used to
rely on and worse.
We have abandoned core values that used
to be fundamental to the web world.
He goes on in this article, naming
examples failed big technology companies
cooperating together to solve a goal
which basically does not happen anymore
and platform capitalism and surveillance
capitalism. Twitter Both Twitter and its
proprietary formats of data that you have
and better into, you've appeared for
Twitter and Facebook does the same for
Facebook. And there's there's no
collaboration anymore.
Basically, everything every platform
tries to tries to win.
So we have lost
the access to make stuff our own.
We have lost the sense of openness
and we have lost the sense of
collaboration.
And overall, we have
lost the ownership of our
data and our content by mostly pushing it
into into one of the platforms and not
building our own infrastructures.
So I would go so far
as to say that we kind of lost,
lost our voice.
But still,
the web can be a plethora like
intermingling of all kind of awesome
things that are still very awesome
websites out there.
Some are,
like all human knowledge.
Some are like helping
helping out other people.
So there is still awesomeness on the web,
on the
web
and the web can be a plethora of
creepiness. We don't have to have
experience running dot com or similar
sites to know that there's stuff on the
internet which is not necessarily want to
see really that we maybe
just want to forget.
But some of this is harmful
of rest as harmless summit as harmful,
and we'll talk about this in a second.
So the web really can be can
be everything.
And I think that it's very vital
that we need to be aware of this and
we try to preserve this, that we
fight against the idea of states
centralizing the infrastructure and fight
against these shutdowns, that we fight
for net neutrality and that we fight for
open access to our data and our content.
OK, so it might be easy to
say right the weapons for everyone
because I just thought it is right.
But I want to rephrase this as
as a question for a moment,
and
I would give you an example.
This is a screenshot by
from a tweet of Michael Kosky, who's a
feminist writer in Germany, a very
reclaimed, one of the most popular in a
moment and great at this.
She just published a paperback of the
last book, The Last Days of the
Patriarchy, Patriarchy,
and
it took, I
think, an hour
until some guys showed up and
asked, Why don't you cry babies?
Just do your own thing?
So, you know, without men, start your
own companies and destructive
dement.
Are you afraid of that or what?
And I chose this for two reasons.
One, I have to give this talk and light
document because of the screen.
And when I give the first version of this
talk, I have just another tweet of
enlightenment. I went back to the
example I quoted for Gun, so it looked at
the timeline and she
put just posted to three hours ago and
her comments were full with stuff like
this. And second, because it's really
easy to go full O'Reilly on this and say
this this was basically stupid, right?
But
harassment, be it physical abuse, digital
isn't harmless.
And why just example?
The single example might be easy to
dismiss or kind of the
ongoing torrent of hate and vitriol
that women of queers of
people of color have to experience online
as soon as they are
or as soon as they make their voices
heard
is isn't
isn't harmless at all.
And often we talk about free speech
and how we have to have how we have
to right to say everything.
I want to quote a woman of color on this
Tatiana Mac, who wrote Canary in the coal
mine one of the most.
Or that first, she wrote,
We must protect safety of all speech.
And she wrote so in the wake of the
Christchurch attacks on March,
a
lot in the wake and the aftermath of the
Christchurch attacks.
And in this piece, she goes very
into depth. So technology
is failing endangered
endangered groups, not just on the
on the world wide web, but in the digital
realm in general.
If you read one thing I mention here, I
would please ask you to read this because
this is really, really, really important.
OK, great.
OK, so.
We have to protect the safety of those
who are online about speech,
of those who are already speaking all the
time and are very loud anyway.
And as soon as you hear it, you guessed
it, some red and white guy talk comes up
and says, you really aren't allowed to
say anything a woman.
I mean, well, free speech and all 911 was
an inside job.
And I have
a very simple answer to this, which is
shut the fuck up, but would shut the fuck
up. You basically are not going to
into some kind of health discourse.
So obviously why you correct
this can't be the descent
of the of
our
work against us.
We have to kind of talk about what is
free speech, what enables free speech,
and are you allowed
to say anything no more?
Are you just constantly saying
everything? I think they are.
To quote Nasrin Malik from his speech,
The Myth of the Free Speech Crisis.
She said that the purpose
of this free speech crisis myth or the
myth that you aren't allowed to say
anything normal is to guilt people
into giving up the right of response to
attacks and to destigmatize
racism and prejudice.
She goes on to say it aims
to blackmail good people into ceding
space to bad ideas, even though
to have a legitimate right to refuse.
And I want to stress this.
We have a legitimate right to refuse.
There's nothing in the world that should
that should have to
us stepping back and not saying
something against the hate online or
in the real world.
We have the right to refuse and we have
to use this.
So yes, the web is
for everyone,
but
we can't let this hate that is online
go unchecked.
And of course, this is not only a tech
problem. This is not only a tech problem
because technology companies are relying
on much analyst workers
in data centers trying to filter
out the hold stuff and making just a
very, very real world problem
with all kind of physical, psychological
implementation cases
at it.
And it's not only a tech problem,
still, because you can't kick and hate
like society is no easy chatroom,
but you can kick them people out of it
and they are gone.
This is not how our
opinions work freely.
OK, so if it's not a tech
problem, but it's a societal problem, it
kind of makes sense, maybe to
talk about society.
But I call it the next
section of the talk, the walls we broke
and what we mean.
I want to start with one
of the problems.
Problem number one is basically that
white people gave money to white people
to solve the problems of white people.
So in a very white
society at the first place,
they are constantly
putting money into wenches
of white people.
We still have
a
more centered, centered whiteness at the
core of our solutions and at the
course of the
discourse and technology,
and basically everything else was
discarded along the way.
And just recently, I think a
reckoning and trying to get this back
problem to
male people gave money to many people to
solve the problems of male people.
It's to the state.
It's companies founded by women have a
very much harder than companies founded
by men to quite some sort of capital.
And if they do, they
are
faced or faced, confronted with a
larger scale of scrutiny and
easy, easy a failing, basically.
Now, if one of these
things gets problem, a toast,
often
one or the other of the
employers of the employees
of such companies shows up and said,
but we didn't mean to.
They didn't want to build companies
that exclude not male people or
that include exclude, not married people.
And to some extent, I won't believe them.
I want to believe them because
if they would mean to Dave would have
just been full blown shit hats.
They would be like escorts,
basically. So I kind of want to believe
them because maybe humans
are not worth of thought.
Maybe hopefully.
Oh, OK.
And that's that's OK that they didn't
mean to, but that they didn't mean to
does not solve the problem because
the
problem here is to quote Tatiana Mac.
Again, that intent does not erase
impact. It does not really matter how
you intended your technology to be used
or what your intentions between behind
building something was.
What really matters in the end, is the
impact of those people that have to
feel it.
And if they if they feel,
if they feel discrimination, if they are
discriminated by you, by your products,
it really does not matter that you didn't
want to build
a product that is discriminatory
in the first place.
So tech is not neutral
and it has never been neutral.
The technology we built and the
technology we will
build will
always be
or
can always be used for bad things.
This makes it necessary
for us as technicians that we can't
be neutral.
We can't say if you put this out there
and then we see what happens, because
then it
will
happen. It will happen basically.
So we have to take a stand.
So in 1985,
the scholar Joseph Eichenbaum, was
interviewed and he said
it is not reasonable for a scientist or
technologist to insist that he
or she doesn't know or cannot know how
technology is going to be used.
And this was like 1985,
24 years ago, basically.
But the problem hasn't really changed,
and technical tech wasn't really good in
resolving resolving just so far.
Maybe we can change this.
This brings me to my next post.
I want to stress that Facebook is
bullshit and Facebook PR
representatives who go on
in news and
in publications after their
ads found to be discriminatory.
And they say, Yeah, but inclusion is at
the heart of our company.
They are blatantly lying because the
thing that is on the heart of Facebook's
company, it's nineteen ninety eight point
five percent of the revenue, its
advertisement.
And if they'd say, Yeah, but TV is a
core, they they know
that they have or they should know
that they have problems. I don't know if
they know and I say
they're lying because the intent
that they have does not erase the impact
that their product had.
And it's kind of an
afterthought. Still think, yeah, we put
something out there and it will be used
for good. It will only be used for good
if we care about using it for good.
But the problem with technology and
discriminatory technology goes
deeper than that,
as if that's bad enough in the first
place.
But we have
to
be aware of the use
of algorithms, for example, to
make decisions about the future of
people saying who will commit a crime,
predictive policing
and
the reality that the algorithm is
algorithms are over and over again
discriminating against people of color.
If we have Amazon providing the
footage of the ring home security cameras
to police departments basically
without any control over
what the police does with it.
And if you don't control police, I think
most of the people in this room know that
this might not end so well.
And then we have companies
just focusing on enabling
and modernizing I.T.
departments like volunteer who worked
with the police and has to
build, hasn't they? To
a large scale data
harvesting project with the local
police. And they do this all over the
world. It's not just the police and
person.
And they also use
algorithms to predict
to predict the future.
The thing the problem with this algorithm
is the underlying models are
wrong because the algorithms
they were given data off to.
Past and out of the past, they
should predict the future.
Now the problem
is if you give
an algorithm data from a recent past
and it should build a future, the future
is likely to be racist.
If you don't control your algorithms and
does offline, does doesn't happen.
For example, this kind of famous example
with Google's photo
filters algorithms which
discriminated against black people,
black people and for labeling
them as gorillas.
Google has pulled this off and still
isn't able to teach the algorithm
that it does not.
It's like this.
The algorithm still just does nothing
with it. It's so ingrained into the data
or more recently at all credit card
discriminating against
against women by giving women
with a higher income a lower credit
score than males with a lower income.
Again, Goldman Sachs, the
the bank behind this credit card,
said. But we didn't mean to.
But you did.
You did, you didn't mean to.
But you built technology that did it.
So it really does not matter
if you didn't mean to.
And it also doesn't matter if you put
race or gender as an explicit input
into the algorithm.
To quote the researcher Rachel Thomas.
Even if race and gender are not inputs
through your algorithm, it can still be
biased on these factors.
Machine learning excels at finding latent
variables, and
if you don't control your algorithms,
these latent variables
will result in runaway
feedback loops. So the algorithm over
and over reinforcing itself
and setting the next set of data
on which it learns. And then suddenly
it is so ingrained into the data
that you can't do anything about it
anymore.
To quote Nisshin, your study
was very, I think,
concisely and rightly said.
Data from the past should not put the
future if we can use data
from the past to learn about the past.
But what we're currently doing is trying
to predict the future and this has
to fail.
This is something that the data can't
do.
And Tatiana Mac said
that the technology that we use
excel accelerating at a frightening rate,
a rate faster than our reflective
understanding of its impact.
But we still let the technology.
We still evolve this technology ever
faster and faster and faster, and we
still don't try to really understand
what happened here or if we do, we do it
and kind of niche groups, but not as
society as a whole.
This also is, I think, a problem
because of the humans that
have access to two computers.
So I want to talk about
the means of production for a moment or
a very short history of computing.
I want to start with a kind of
imaginative thing.
So for a moment, please imagine
a programmer.
OK, I guess it's very
likely that you came up with someone
who more or less plus minus the mustache
maybe looked like this kind of white,
able
bodied male person.
And rightfully so, because
programmers today mostly look like this
high.
But
next question for a moment,
please imagine a computer.
And chances are, again, that you
kind of came up with something standing
on a desk like a modern day laptop or
something, if you know
about the history of computing, you maybe
went a step back and thought about
something, something like this, this room
filling tech giant computing machines
that were doing less than the phone
that is in our pocket. But we're still
like to the history.
I want to go even further back into the
1892 and in 1892,
the New York Times post a job at
at which the Civil Service Examination
will be held May 18th in Washington
and, if necessary, in other cities
to secure eligible for the position of
computer and do not take any
office. But two vacancies exist one
at $1000 to address of 1400.
The nation will include the subjects of
algebra, geometry, trigonometry
and astronomy. Application blanks may be
obtained after United States Civil
Service Commission note This really
does not sound like they were searching
for some kind of machine, right?
And they didn't because they weren't.
They were searching for humans.
And more specifically, they were
searching for women
historically into the
myth of the 20th century.
A computer was a human, was
a woman. They were doing really
complex and amazing mathematical
computations.
They at Harvard for Harvard, for example,
they were calculating the how stars
traveled across the across the
sky. And it did so so right.
Some of the data to calculate it back
back then is still in use today.
And the
how women were so
synonymous with computers that by the
mid-20th century, computing was
so much considered a woman's job that
mathematicians would guesstimate their
horsepower by invoking Google
years
and went
to their refers to mechanical computing
machines.
And when they were describing
the units of machine labor that one of
these machines, Hester, were describing
it as a killer girl
where we today would talk about
kilobytes, maybe they were referring to
kill girls.
And it all started with her, this is
Ada Lovelace.
Now finally, we have a name named after a
room named after her next to it's the
biggest room of the conference, and
rightfully so. I think she was
working in the mid-19th century and
together with Charles Papa, she
worked on the thing called the difference
engine what's really an engine, steam
powered and such, which was doing
calculations. And she's widely regarded
as the first programmer because she wrote
the programs for for this engine.
Now, going
into the middle of the 20th century, its
very short history of computing,
we, for example, have women working
as telephone operators.
And when the first computers came
up, they were like, these huge things I
just showed and these kind
of these women had the the skill
necessary to to work
on these machines.
So some of the women who were
programing the real, the first
real computers that we not
kind of know or understand today is a
computer, for example, Grace Hopper
copper sorry, working for the Navy
during the Second World War,
or we have to ENIAC six,
namely Kathleen McNulty, Betty Jean
Jennings, Elizabeth Snider, Marlene
Vesco, Francis Pill+ and
Rootless Little Men working at the
University of Pennsylvania at
a machine called the ENIAC, which is
generally considered to be the first all
purpose computer. So they were
calculating missile ranges for the
for the army.
But it's generally like this computers
should be able to calculate basically
anything all we have in
Great Britain at Bletchley Park.
We had to colossus mark to code breaking
computer, which broke code
the Enigma code of the Nazis basically
in real time.
And here we have two women operating
this, namely
Dorothy Basil and as Booker,
and just continued well into the
1960s. I think
where people working with computers were
mostly women.
They weren't doing punch cards anymore.
Now they had like keyboards and stuff,
but they were mostly women
and
women, also among the people
creating the first compilers and high
level programing languages.
So the things we probably interact with
today.
And then a question was
raised, which is what is a or
who is a programmer, really?
It was raised, among other things,
because there was a shortage of
programmers.
And some
newspapers at the time talked about
a software crisis was more
like a labor crisis, actually.
And I think it still really isn't
resolved today.
And this crisis or crisis, however,
went as far that the WHO held a
conference in Germany in Garmisch.
They weren't including any
women on the cast list.
So basically just male people
deciding the future again.
And Peter made a change.
Dumb and clear
evidence and the history of women in
computing wrote the most
significant change they made arguably
was semantic programing they decided,
which heretofore be known as engineering.
The talk.
The title we probably used today
to
shift on vocabulary was shift
and
in focus. It was more focusing on
technical skills than maybe on the
skills that humans have to possess as
the so-called soft targets working with
each other, collaborating.
But fundamentally, you have to be kind of
an engineer, very serious
thing in
this crisis to have also more concrete
factors at play, for example, a lack of
child care, a lack of mentoring and
of course, because we live in patriarchy
of age, discrimination against against
women.
And so there were also other factors
driving women out of the workforce
factors I think that are still very
relevant today
and
does change us or problems.
They worked on iconic
Apple apps, from introducing
the Apple to its from 1977.
So roughly 10 years later,
and here we see so.
Do you ever see the woman
back into the back in the kitchen, doing
the household and very admiringly
looking down at her men who was in the
front, very earnestly working at a
computer with some kind of economical
data? So it's probably destroying
the economy, you know such?
I don't know.
But this at shows that
in the public view,
programing and working with computers
was more getting more mentally ill by the
day and it still is today.
Now what we still
have today is again white
men who hire white men to solve the
problems of white men, and they
hire that appears basically
to end their companies and buy debt,
reinforcing this cycle.
This focus on a male
workforce that we have today, and I think
we have to have to broaden the
access and we have to break the cycle.
Now there are organizations
like he and the club, the Hexham or
globally women who code
who
are actively working on
getting more women and more non-binary
people. Basically, everybody who's not
male in the entire computing
workforce, there are feminist tech
spaces, and we saw a talk yesterday on
the stage about feminist sex spaces,
for example, at the heart of Coat and
Berlin,
who
try to make programing more accessible
and trying to teach this to to
more people.
Yeah.
And what they do is it's fighting and
just brings me to my last, last time,
last section,
which is named You've got a fight.
We have to fight because the breath
of things and these are not the only
thing they had to leave out such things
because otherwise I think the talk would
have been 45
hours instead of 45 minutes minutes,
probably.
Um, and I want
to talk a bit about ways we could
fight. The first one is maybe a bit
unlikely.
I want us to be playful.
I want us to work with technology
in a way that it's that it's playful.
That's that's fun,
because being playful is one of the ways
in which we can use to reclaim
the web we lost. But I talk, but
it can also like very creating
different entry points into technology.
Can Casey?
Casey Evans said.
Keep making fun stuff and talk about
animation, but animations with
Asperger's, but you animate graphics.
Casey Evans does stuff like this,
which maybe isn't.
It's no real
algorithmic magic, but it's super
cute and super amazing.
And it's cute.
It's cute that does. That does that makes
this jellyfish go up and down, smiling,
like blinking their eyes, and I think
it's super cool.
And she also does stuff
like this. This is a blob.
It's a bit shy and stopped dancing when
when you look at this and to
do this, she uses the Shape Detection
API that's built into Google
Google's Chrome browser.
It's available hydrophilic and the
Protection API has the ability to detect
faces.
Now, this kind of sounds dystopian
if you weren't animating blobs fitted,
but you can also use this technology
that maybe at first sight.
But for sound sounds a bit
odd stuff. Oh,
sounds a bit dystopian to use to build
good things.
Tech maybe can be plain useless.
This is a Twitter bot called Every Day,
it just combines two emojis and builds a
double helix DNA alter.
This is the gay rocket DNA, and I think
it was about damn time that we have this
and it's
let's use more or less
useless. It's fun.
It's Burt spelled with a Twitter board
called Cheap Bots Thumb quick.
So there probably wasn't even a lot of
time involved to build it.
But it's still it's still great.
I love this every time of what
a wonderful combination of these popped
up in my Twitter feed, and
I'm I'm lucky.
I'm I'm happy.
So to quote Casey Evans again,
in a world that becomes more dystopian by
the day. We can also use technology
for good, and it's important that we use
technology for good because there's
something in this playfulness
that's more than fun
and something about this playfulness that
we can use to teach technologies
and that we can use to build communities
and over the course of computing history.
We're mostly not
male people doing this kind of thing.
So also to the male men in the room,
please be more fun and more communities.
And we can also use this technology
to educate ourselves
and to educate others.
We can use this to learn stuff,
but we can also and this is also
important to use this to unlearn stuff
not just forgetting but actively
unlearning
ways of thinking, for example, that
we learned in a racist society and where
we have to make a conscious effort to
unlearn this. We can't just
forget this.
We can build book clubs or
communities in which we exchange
ideas about technology, for example.
And it was Grace Hopper
actually in 1968 who already said
that you needed people with more
vocabularies, and she means that we,
we use technology and technologists need
vocabularies that unjust not just
strictly technology to
not just strictly about technology,
to be able to interact with the world as
a whole and to more technology both
developed as a whole.
The more vocabulary we need and the more
important it is that we welcome people
who know these full vocabularies into
into our circles.
One project that's very near to my heart
currently is self-defined.
It's built by Tatiana Mac and maintained
by a community,
a modern dictionary about us.
We define zero words, but they don't
define us. So it's available
at self-defined app,
and it's basically a way to kind of
reclaim reclaim languages
and make languages,
not
ours. Because I'm a white men and
language is probably already mine, but
to make language again
formed
and defined by the people who
are impacted by this.
And this also brings me to the next
thing, which is that we have to hear and
amplify the voices of endangered
groups.
We have white people, have our I have to
use our safety to stand
up for people who are targeted
by racism because we
have safety and we have privilege and the
society and we have to use
this privilege.
Of course, also we as men
have to use the safety we have in a
patriarchal society to
to fight against.
Fight against this and use the safety.
And of course, also straight people
have to use the safety.
They have a straight people to fight
against homophobia, to stand up.
If a dude in your workplace make a
homophobic slur and stand up and say
something, not just sit there, make
your voice heard because your voice is
actually more hurt, you can have to
change this, but as long
as it is, we have to make our voices
heard.
This isn't strictly
about empathy, right?
Because empathy kind of requires
you to feel the way the
other other person is feeling.
And I think this can be a death trap
because I, as a white person,
cannot possibly know how it
really feels to
go around to street day by day and be
targeted by racial microaggressions or
something. I, as the men, cannot know how
it feels to have a Twitter account
and be bombarded with all this kind
of bullshit comments
because I just don't get them mostly.
So to quote from Creighton.
Empathy relies on someone else being
able to understand the suffering of
others in order to do anything
about it. And she goes on to say,
We don't need to understand the suffering
of others to take action, to minimize
the pain. We only need to be aware
that the potential for suffering exists.
We need to be aware that there's.
Picking up, we need to be aware
of of the dynamics.
And is this awareness that
makes it possible to consistently act?
It's not to empathy because we just
might not be able to feel this, but we
can always be able to be
aware.
Nothing organized.
Of course,
we have to go on the streets that we have
to go and we have to take collective
action, not only if you're feeling
the feeling the impact, but by being
aware that others are feeling the impacts
or might be in danger of feeling the
impact.
We have to prioritize communities over
competition because in the capital market
space, we're all competing against each
other and this is how this works.
By focusing on communities and building
health the communities over this
competition, we can go a step
into into
resolving this competition and
making this a thing of the past.
We have to prioritize communities
over companies.
Tech companies are very good in building
and
building like a company community, and
basically all you have to do is live and
breathe for the company.
And I think that's not necessarily
correct.
There are fights of communities inside
companies, probably, and it's cool that
they are there. But the company is not
your community. The company is someone
who has hired you
to make money out of your labor.
That's not a nice basis
for community, and
we have to prioritize communities
of nations.
We have to be
aware that other people in other states
are basically fighting the same fights we
do.
For example, GetUp currently
has a contract running with the
immigration enforcement agency in the
in the US, and this is an agency that
puts children into cages to
deport them and separated from their
families, which is a very, very evil
thing to do.
And still, GetUp refuses to drop
the contract and just a reminder to
anyone to get up and say, Listening,
please drop the contract.
So we are in this together.
We underst together against nations
boundaries and boundaries,
and we can make this count.
I know I'm running out of time, so I
quickly come
to the end.
Just in time, arrive a perfect
and quickly come to the end.
Yeah, so a warm welcome at the first
beginning before we start with the Q&A
session. If there's
a time to do one last
one, I think, OK, collective action
will be a challenge.
We have to take back the streets and we
have to make racists afraid again.
We have to, for example, build big data
against technology, disappears from
white. The ruthlessness which I will show
in a
second and
we have to be like grumpy cat
and we need to act because
if we don't act, we will look like a
bunch of overpaid ballocks.
And I think this is a very bad look.
And I want to give the last book of talk
to you because I book who in and a
hundred years ago said Act Act
courageously, resolutely and
consistently.
OK, so dolphins again
talk. This is the slides in front or
Russell.
Thank you, blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah.
You have been tipped off.
We are not finding what we feel Sergeant
Vincent Rice and Michael Fauna
of Elliston Canines Shaun
of the Arrest Disaster.
Hey, thanks for the talk and thanks
for the positive points you
made in the end.
Very fast.
But I think it's hard to keep
the fun and the feeling
of freedom in an internet that we lose
more and more to private companies.
And I, yeah, you
made the point at the beginning that a
lot of people look at Facebook
and think this is the internet, and
I think this step has
gone further.
A lot of people look at the smartphone
and think this is a computer
and this is the internet, but
it's just a bunch of applications.
And as long as the young people
get used to the internet through this, I
think it is hard to break
this feeling.
That's hard to break this off.
I think it's vitally important that we
that we kind of have another feeling it
that we have maybe have another approach
to technology.
Go out there and teach, teach
people, young people, old people, middle
age people and make
make the point for an alternative and
try to try to build something something
positive. And this is also a I think fun
can be very vital to do this.
Thanks.
Yes. On the left, there's the question.
Yeah.
Thank you a lot for your talk.
I just want like if you don't mind, I
would like to compliment on two aspects
you mentioned.
And the first is the notion of free
speech, because I actually think
rather than talking about which
speeches should we allow, we should
just be conscious that there's a
difference between the freedom to
speech and the freedom to discriminate.
Yeah. And there's actually plenty
of really problematic opinions which
can be voiced without
being upfront hateful.
So I
think this is what this is actually
about, that people go back to actually
voiced a really problematic opinions
in ways that don't directly threaten
individuals. And so I think, yeah,
rather than just always mention
this free speech and oh, it's threatened,
let's just make this differentiation
really clear.
And then the other point is about the
disappearance of women
from technology.
There's actually something really
interesting, and it's that
as soon as any kind of profession
becomes valued and that
this value is reflected by actual
pay, your higher pay, it starts becoming
a male-dominated profession.
And I just wanted to mention that
because, yeah, you showed how as soon as
he was becoming engineering, it became
a male profession.
And like statistically, and this is true
for at least, I know that is true for
almost all European countries, if you can
really observe this phenomenon.
I actually had to send my speaking notes
and didn't say so. Thank you for
pointing.
Any question from the Internet?
No. So at the end, thanks
a lot of big applause for Oscar
and for this value input.