 Okay, so the return of the invisible committee. Apparently, it's not as invisible as you might think. So please set the stage with a huge applause. All right, good evening. I will speak in English because my German is very bad. So I will speak in English. All right, first of all, I'm kind of sorry in advance because my speech is kind of long and somehow complicated. And the fact that I have to give it in English gives me a little room for improvisation. So I will probably have to read a lot of the notes that I've taken. So to start, I would like to apologize for the weird title and for speech and the title of the speakers. Actually, we just wanted to have an invisible committee for Google Tornock 9 to appear somewhere so that our potential allies and friends can spot it out and figure out what this all will be about. So to start, I will clarify the place from where I speak. It has probably not that much interest besides for the German undercover police who might probably be here texting French undercover police. So I'm part of some people who've been called by the media to Tornock 9. Basically, the stories I will make really short just so that you understand the reason why it makes sense to speak here. Six years ago, we got arrested on some terrorist charges in France. And basically, the French police accused us of many, many, many different things from organizing riots, from bombing a recruitment center in New York and for sabotaging a train against nuclear transport and all kind of things which most of were just not true. And basically, there remain concern that we will belong to some kind of international revolutionary conspiracies that will just be willing to destroy Western civilization. But they also accused us of one thing that is actually important, the reason why somehow we can speak here, is that they accused us of having written a book which is called In English, The Coming Insurrection. And this book became some kind of bestseller in France because of the big media things around arrest and also somehow in the U.S. when Fox News Glenn Beck just managed to try to read it and figured out that it was the biggest threat to American peace at that moment. And so, here's the point. Of course, I'm not, of course, speaking on behalf of the Invisible Committee. I'm neither a member or a representative or whatever. For the very fact that the Invisible Committee is a plane on which to try to think strategically and politically of the current situation. Just like somehow anonymous will be some plane for tactical and strategical types of attack. So for that matter, there is no inside nor outside, no membership nor authorship. It belongs to no one and everyone, just like anonymous, for instance. So the question is why it is me basically coming to speak. Just because there's this funny thing where the police in France have tried really hard for years to prove that we will have written this book and somehow they failed so much that we can somehow assume to travel to the world and just discuss the content of it just as good readers of it. And so, then there's a question of why coming here to CCC to speak. The reason is actually pretty simple. The answer is Jeremy Hammond who writes in jail right now as I guess most of you know. And to my dedicated speech, of course. And actually there's a new book by the Invisible Committee which is called To Our Friends which is published in France for a few weeks and is going to be published in Germany and in the US soon. And there's a whole paragraph in it about, let's say, the hacker cybernetical movement and it was sought as some kind of answer to Jeremy Hammond's acts. Basically when strut for was hacked, the website was defaced and one could read the coming insurrection on the scroll roll instead of their index. And so we interpreted that as this gesture as some sort of call as an invitation to discuss what is happening politically in the hacker milieu. So our presence here is some kind of answer to that call or at least our contribution to the debate, to the political debate that is going on within this computer and hacker milieu. Sorry. So just to go back to the strut for thing. To many of us who were not necessarily really close to the hacker world. This hack of strut for by anonymous and anti-sec, it meant a lot. It meant a lot politically, symbolically and practically. While at that moment we might have had the feelings that anonymous main targets were the poor church of Scientology and that sometimes was a little bit politically confused. This attack on strut for really seemed like changing the deal. The target was perfect. Strut for is just the private twin of the CIA. The skills seemed to be impressive from what we could get from them and basically stealing strut for clients money to give out on Christmas was actually really funny. And of course we don't have to wonder why the FBI put so much energy in trapping Hammond and others. Using Sabu and using this type of infiltration that we all know of now. We can bet that if it was a mere DDoS attack, they wouldn't have cared so much. It's a police, I mean. But what made an anti-sec such a threat in the eyes of the US police, we can guess, is that they were obviously brilliant, angry, determined and with a huge sense of humor, which is something that you're really forgiven for. But anyway, what this attack embodied is that for the hacker, you weather work for security, for governments and domination, or you fight against it. So there's actually very little room in between. And all those who walked down the path of hacking now know, a lot of them know that, and they're paying the price for it, which is most of the time police harassment and jail. But despite what we could see, the meaning we could see behind this, let's say, surrogacy in the attack against Troutford, it still seems that there's some kind of confusion that ranks into the hacker world politically. And maybe we can think that the reason why there's still some confusion is because no one, even maybe the hackers themselves, takes seriously the political and philosophical implication of hacking and of computers. So basically this is what we'll try to humbly do here. It might be a little bit complex, like I said before, an abstract for sure, but we really have the feeling that there's something decisive to understand in this movement and what it means generally. We think that understanding that helps us to peek side and to see that hacking cannot just be limited to a pure idea of a pure practice, a pure skill, a pure technique, but a peculiar and rich relationship to the world. So a few years ago, telecomics, which is another hacking group as you know, they made, I quote them, they said that the reason why hackers were ahead of that time was because they didn't consider the internet as a separate virtual world but as an extension of physical reality. And it's even more obvious today when we see hackerspace getting off the screens to just get in the streets and just open hackerspace. But if we can all agree on the fact that there might not be any distinction to be made between the virtual and the real, we have to acknowledge that behind the virtual world at its very core, at its very foundation, lies a certain peculiar ideology that is a peculiar way to apprehend, understand and make the world real. This way of thinking, this ideology that has become real, it has a name, a historical name. It's called cybernetics. And it's always pretty funny because when you talk about cybernetics you directly sound like an 80 years old person who just doesn't know anything about computers and would just think that, but actually it's not. I mean, this term cybernetic is probably more actual than ever for the reasons I will try to expose. And we have to firstly understand what the history of cybernetic is and we'll see that it really enlightens the way the world is organized today and our relationship to computers. So, sorry again. I'm not speaking too fast. Yeah, I am. All right, sorry. It's stress. I usually speak too fast, but stress is not helping. So, the history that follows of cybernetics. So in the 1940s, a mathematician, Norbert Weiner, while he was finishing his work for the American Army, undertook to establish a new science that will also be a new definition of man, of his relationship with the world and with himself. So it was also Claude Shannon, an engineer at Bell and MIT who worked on information theory, contributed to the development of telecommunication and he took part in that project too. As did Gregory Bateson, a Harvard anthropologist employed by the American Secret Service in Southeast Asia during the Second World War. And there was also the truculent John von Neumann who wrote the first draft of a report on the EDVAC which is regarded as the funding text of computer science. He was actually the inventor of game theory which is a decisive contribution to neoliberal economics. He was also a supporter of preventive nuclear strike against the USSR. Just for the story. Hence, the very person who made substantial contribution to the new means of communication after the Second World War also laid the basis of that science, that viner called cybernetics. And he actually took that from Ampère who one century before had the good idea of defining the science as the science of government. So we're talking about an art of governing whose formative moments are almost forgotten but whose concepts branched their way underground feeding into information technology as much as biology, artificial intelligence, management or cognitive sciences. At the same time as it strong cables on the whole surface of the globe. So what cyberneticians believed and somehow created is a world where machines will make all forms of political control unnecessary because computer networks could make ordered society without a centralized control. The idea was that if humans being were linked by webs of computers they could create together their own kind of order. The feedback of information between all connected individuals in the network could create a self-stabilizing system. This idea came from a peculiar idea of nature, of nature as an ecosystem that always self-regulates and self-control itself. And this is that idea that there will be some kind of natural balance that should be and could be achieved in human relationship thanks to computers. So cybernetics is the idea, it's the philosophy, the ontology, the idea of being that supposes that everything, that life itself can be flattened as pure communication, as pure messages. And from there we will need no gods nor masters as machines will enable us to control everything and to control ourselves. Calculus and feedback loops will allow real-time control of the world by analyzing and deciphering all human behaviors and conducts. So it means that life could be reduced to communication as I just say and that it will just require to set this communication free to let it flow freely for human beings to achieve the highest level of freedom. That's what the hypothesis and the dream of cybernetics. And so here we basically, we see where this idea comes from. Basically the circulation of information could be superposed to the circulation of commodities. Life is turned into information that needs to circulate as equivalence just like commodities do. Feedback being the key to regulation. So the cybernetic project means firstly separating and flattening life by translating it into zero and one and then reuniting it as a representation that is mimicking life. So now we can start to see how the cybernetic hypothesis is the politics of the end of the political. So why will we be interested in what the conceivers of computers and the internet said and conceptualized 60 years ago? Simply because this paradigm, this way of thinking power, social organization, this way of thinking a self-controlled and surveilled world, this paradigm is today the vanguard of government. It is today and it will be even more tomorrow. It's not the type of power that faces us, it's the type of power in which we dwell. It is a form of domination in which we live, the environment in which our conducts, desires and lives are framed. I've got a quote here. This quote comes from Jared Cohen and it comes from the New Digital Age and it says the following thing. No, no, sorry, I'm wrong. I just need to read the quote before so you get the funny thing. The quote is this. In Tripoli, Tottenham or Wall Street, people have been protesting failed policies and the meager possibilities have afforded by the electoral system. They have lost faith in government and other centralized institution of power. There is no viable justification for a democratic system in which public participation is limited to voting. We live in a world in which ordinary people write Wikipedia, spend their evening moving a telescope via the internet and making discoveries half a world away. Get online to get to help organize protests in cyberspace and in the physical world, such as the revolutions in Egypt or Tunisia or the demonstration of the indignados throughout Spain or porous cables revealed by WikiLeaks. The same technologies enable us to work together at a distance or creating the expectation to do better at governing ourselves. And so here it's not an indignados who speaks. It's actually someone called Beth Novak who is actually directing the open government initiative for the Obama administration. And then another quote from the New York City Hall. In New York, what the New York City Hall thing is that the hierarchical structure based on the notion that the government knows what's good for you is outdated. The new model for this century depends on co-creation and collaboration. And surprisingly, the concept of open government data was formulated not by politicians but by computer specialists and were fervent defenders of open source software towards development, moreover, and they involved the U.S. funding father convictions that every citizen should take part in government. And here the government is reduced to the role of team leader or facilitator ultimately to that of a platform for coordinating cities in action. The parallel with social networks is fully embraced, I still quote. How can the city think of itself in the same way that Facebook has an API ecosystem or Twitter draws? It is a question in the minds of the New York mayor's office again. So even if these declarations can be seen as fanciful cogitation and product of somehow overheated brains of Silicon Valley, it is still confirmed that the practice of government is less and less identified with state sovereignty. In the area of networks, governing means ensuring the interconnection of people, objects and machines as well as the free, that means transparent and controllable circulation of information that is generated in this manner. This is an activity already conducted largely outside of state apparatuses, even if the letter tried to be by every means to maintain control over it. So it's becoming clear that Facebook is not so much the model of a new form of government as it's reality already in operation. And so, again, I will quote again the new digital age. It says, in the future, people won't just back up their data, they will back up their government. And in case it's just not clear enough who the boss is, it concludes, governments may collapse and wars can destroy physical infrastructure, but virtual institutions will survive. With Google, what is concealed beneath the exterior of an innocent interface and an extremely effective search engine is an explicitly political project. A company that maps the planet to Earth, dispatching its team into every street of every one of its towns cannot have purely commercial aims. One never maps a territory that one doesn't contemplate appropriating. So, of course, we could consider cybernetics as pure ideology, but it's not. It's a materialized one made of millions of apparatuses that transform relationships to ourselves, to others, and to the world. So, we believe that cybernetics is actually the new form that government takes. It is the new form of government, actually. By government, we don't mean the actual governance that are regularly elected by a particular way to... that are regularly elected, but government in terms of this particular way to exercise power. To govern is not to impose a discipline to a body, nor to enforce the law on a precise territory. To govern is something different. It's a different political technique. It's all about conducting, leading the conducts and behaviors of a population. It's taking care of the population like a shepherd of its herd to maximize its potential and orientate guide its freedom. It's all about taking it to account and designing its desires, its habits, its fears, its ways of thinking, and its milieu. It's about deploying a whole set of tactics, of discursive tactics, of material tactics to pay the finest attention to popular emotions and feelings. It's all about acting in the environment to continuously modify its variables to act in a few to influence the actions of others, to maintain the control of the herd. It's basically like waging a war without the least possible violence, a war of influence, subtle, refined, psychological, and indirect. So, I'm sorry, I just need to drink. So, up until recently, this technique of power, that is government, was endorsed by what was called political economy. What we think that today, we witness the downfall of political economy and its replacement by cybernetic. Cybernetic can be seen as a savior of a declining global capitalism. Economics have never been a reality or a science. From its inception in the 17th century, it's never been anything but an art of governing population. The diversity had to be avoided if riots were to be avoided. So, to quote Hamilton, the surest way for all government is to rely on the interests of men. So, once the natural laws of economy were elucidated, governing meant letting its harmonious mechanism operate freely and moving men by manipulating their interests. So, harmony, the predictability of behaviors, a radiant future, an assumed rationality of the actors, all this implied a certain trust, the ability to give credit. That's the whole story of economy. But what we witness today is that the worldwide crisis is just pulverizing this old perception and this dependence on trust. And somehow, there is not really a problem, the end of trust, as a cement to capitalism can be replaced by cybernetic control. Where control and transparency reign, whereas the subject's behavior isn't dissipated in real time through the algorithmic processing of a mass of available data about them, there's no more need to trust them and for them to trust. It's sufficient that they'd be sufficiently monitored. As Lenin said, trust is good, control is better. So, cybernetics developed on that open wound of modernity. It has hurted itself as a remedy for the existential and those governmental crises of the West. Cybernetic government is inherently apocalyptic. It has no project in the future, no positive idea on life. Its purpose is to locally manage and control, create stability and eventually produce a perpetual self-regulation of systems through the unrestrained, transparent and controllable circulation of information. So to quote Weiner again, communication is a cement of society and whose work consists in keeping the channels of communication open are the ones on whom the continuance or downfall of our civilization largely depends. So just as a political economy produced a homo economicus, people were just manageable by the framework of the industrial states. Cybernetics is producing its own humanity. A transparent humanity emptied out by the very flows that traverse it, electrified by information and attached to the world by a never-growing quantity of apparatuses. A humanity that's inseparable from its technological environment because it is constituted and so driven by that. Such is the object of government now. No longer man or his interests, but his social environment. Political economy rang over beings by leaving them free to pursue their interests. Cybernetics control them by leaving them free to communicate. And behind the futuristic promise of a world of fully linked people and objects when cars, fridges, watches, vacuums and dildos are directly connected to each other and to the internet, there is what is already here. The fact that the most prevalent of sensor is already in operation, that is myself. I share my geolocation, my mood, my opinions, my performance numbers and their self-evaluation. I always post photos of my vacations, my evenings, my riots, my colleagues of what I'm going to eat, of what I'm going to fuck. I appear not to do much and yet I produce a steady stream of data. Whether I work or not, my everyday life is a stock of information, a stock of data that is valuable on the market of cybernetic capitalism. The great refrigerated storehouses of data are the pantry of current government. In its remaging, through the database it is produced and continuously updated by the everyday life of connected humans, it looks for the correlations it can use to establish not universal laws, nor even wise, but rather whens and whats. The stated ambition of cybernetics is to manage the unforeseeable and to govern the ungovernable instead of trying to destroy it. And of course the object of the great harvest of personal information is not an individualized tracking of the whole population. If the surveillance incinerates themselves into the intimate life of each and every person it's not so much to construct individual files as to assemble massive databases that makes numerical sense. It is more efficient to correlate the shared characteristics of individuals in a multitude of profiles with the probable development they suggest. One is not interested in the individual present and entire, but only in what makes it possible to determine their potential line of flight. And this way we understand why Google is a war machine. The advantage of applying the surveillance to profiles, events and virtualities is that statistical entities don't take offense and individuals can still claim they're not being monitored or at least not personally. While cybernetic governmentality already operates in terms of a completely new logic its subject continues to think of themselves according to the old paradigm. We believe that our personal data belong to us like our car and our shoes and that we're only exercising our individual freedom by deciding to let Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon or whatever or the police have access to them without realizing that this has immediate effects on those who refuse to and will be treated from then on as suspects as potential deviance. So just like again the new digital age puts it so I quote again there will be people who resist adopting and using technology. People who want nothing to do with virtual profiles online data systems or smartphones. Yet a government might suspect that people who opt out completely have something to hide and thus are more likely to break laws. And as counter-terrorism measures that government will build a kind of hidden people registry as we described earlier. If you don't have any registered social networking profiles or mobile subscriptions and online references to your unusually hard to find you might be considered a candidate for such a registry. You might also be subjected to a strict set of new regulations that includes rigorous airport screening or even travel restrictions. So this is where we see a divide going through the hacker movement. There are those who hack against government against governmentality, against cybernetics and there are those who want a better transparency. We want a democratic control over control. Those who pursue the dream of cybernetic world where life can be reduced and self-managed by good algorithms. So of course who owns the internet to what extent do illegal surveillance go are real and important issues but they're not sufficient. There are some way at the tip of the iceberg what could make us miss that a new form of power is holding us and most of all this way of revealing what will be hidden by companies and governments should not make us believe that the solution should be a general transparency. Which was for instance the political horizon of the pirate party. The pirate party program was just about pushing the cybernetical ideology further or problem with cybernetic cannot be that the problem is not the people who actually own the key to the networks and to our data what makes cybernetics the enemy of freedom is rather it's flattened and fully controlled idea of what life should be. So let's take an example for instance. You remember probably the riots in Tottenham in London in 2011 and in France at least maybe it was the same thing in some other places. In France some old newspapers said oh yeah you know it's a revolt it's a Twitter revolt and actually the rioters used blackberries not Twitter but what actually Twitter helped organize around those popular riots what was called as a citizen sweepers who volunteered to sweep up and repair the damage caused by the confrontation and looting. And that initiative was related and coordinated by something called crisis commons whose job is I quote a network of volunteers working together to build and use technology tools to help respond to disasters and improve resiliency and response before a crisis. So what we see here is that cybernetic tools can as much be used to support a revolt and to suppress it that's the point I wanted to make. In the same way we can look at some of the utopias that have been produced by last year's social movements and for instance some Spanish and Ignatos for them what they say and I quote again for them the social computer networks had not only accelerated the spread of the 2011 movements but also and more importantly had set the terms of a new type of political organization for the struggle and for society a connected participatory and transparent democracy. And somehow here the point I want to make is that we could feel a little bit ill at ease because there's so much in common between the type of utopias that present itself as revolutionary and the one upheld by Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt when on the first page of their book you can read that the internet is the largest experiment involving anarchy in history. So what we need is not transparency it is actually opacity if you want to build and use tools that allow us to secure anonymous access to the internet it's not to defend the network it's to defend ourselves on the network and from those who own and control it an internet that provides anonymity and confidentiality of communication is not the internet it's a political operation against the internet as a control device we should remember this cruel sentence from Edward Snowden he said I quote the greatest fear that I have is that nothing will change people will see in the media all of these disclosures they will know the lengths that the government is going to grant themselves powers unilaterally to create greater control over American society and global society but they won't be willing to take the risks necessary to stand up and fight and actually this is what happened I mean nothing happened it's not to say that there's somehow a journalistic task of revealing corruption mass surveillance etc is not useful it surely is what I mean is that knowing the NSA spying on everyone doesn't produce any freedom it doesn't produce autonomy or bring down governments to quote an old friend it's not truth that will destroy your world of lies but a world of truth it doesn't make life qualitatively better it just helps us to know what we have to do to create zone of opacity to keep our activities hidden from government from government panoplican the only reason why anyone will oppose a surveillance state is not for the sake of it or for some abstract idea of privacy or freedom nobody does that and what will be the point of hiding our preferences for Coke or Pepsi from the big data vacuum that the cybernetic power always wants what's best for us and it actually knows it better than us so no the only reason why one would actually fight against surveillance is because of the potential of the potential criminal character of its activities and this is something that is fully assumable when you want to subvert the existing order the existing social relationship which seems to be the main objective of an anonymous and the hacking world you ultimately end up with the police trying to stop you so what I mean is that we never fight for an abstract idea of freedom nobody does that we fight to disrupt the strategy school and it is in this very process that lies freedom freedom is never the objective it is the fight itself so I will go to the last part of my speech I will end up so I can clarify what I think is really rich in the hacker movement and how it helps clarify huge questions for the global revolutionary movement for at least 150 years the revolutionary movement has been divided around the question of technique and technology to summarize the debate you had on one hand technophiles which were basically on moraxism we thought that the machines would help us being free and it would be the condition to the global emancipation and on the other side you had the technophobic people who believed that alienation was rooted in technique and technology itself but somehow technophobia are the two sides of the same coin this is what the hacker movement helps us understand what they do have in common technophilia and technophobia is that they share a same false belief that such a thing as technique exists that a pure technique would exist so it is really possible in human existence to divide between what is technical and what is not well in fact it's not possible no such thing as a pure technique exists you only have to look at the state of incompletion in which a human offspring is born and the time it takes for it to move in the world and to talk to realize that its relation to the world is not given in the least it's rather the result of a whole elaboration man relation to the world is not the result of a natural compatibility it is essentially artificial to speak Greek so each human world is a certain configuration of techniques of culinary techniques architectural techniques, musical techniques spiritual techniques, informational, agricultural erotic, martial, whatever the human world is always technique there is no generic human nature or essence because there are only particular techniques and because every technique configures a world a relationship to this world and that is also why our familiar world really appears to us as technical because a set of artifices that structures it are already part of us it's one of those we're not familiar with that seems to have a strange artificiality the only moment where we feel the word is artificial is when we make an innovation or when something breaks down so techniques can be reduced to a collection of equivalent instruments that a generic man could just take up and use without his essence being affected every tool configures and embodies a particular relation with the world and the world's form in this way are not equivalent any more than the humans we inhabit them are and that's why we cannot hierarchize those worlds there is nothing that will establish some as more advanced than others there are merely distinct each having its own potential and its own history of course the western ideology of progress implicitly introduce a criterion of a hierarchized world and it's actually a pretty simple one it's the productivity of the techniques considered apart from what each technique might involve ethically without regard to the sensible world it engenders this is why there's no progress but catalyst progress and why capitalism is the uninterrupted destruction of worlds so this is why technophobics fail to grab the ethical nature of every technique in order to hierarchize walls a criterion has to be introduced an implicit criterion making it possible to classify the different techniques in the case of progress this criterion is simply the quantifiable it's the productivity of the techniques considered apart from what each technique involved ethically without and so so in that sense capitalism is essentially technological a profitable organization of the most productive techniques into a system its cardinal figure is not the economist but the engineer the engineer is a specialist in techniques and those the chief expropriator of them one who doesn't let himself be affected by any of them and spread his own absence from the world everywhere he can he's a sad and servile figure the figure of the hacker contrast point by point with the figure of the engineer whatever the artistic police directed or entrepreneurial force to neutralize him may be whereas the engineer will capture everything that functions in such a manner that everything functions better in order to place it in the service of the system the hacker has to himself how does that work in order to find its flows but also to invent other uses to experiment experimenting then means exploring what such and such technique implies ethically what relation to the world it enables or disables the hacker pulls technique out of the technological system in order to free them if we are slaves to technology this is precisely because there is a whole ensemble of artifacts of our everyday existence that we take to be specifically technical and that we will always regard simply as black boxes of which were the innocent users understanding how any of the devices that surround us works allow us to see them not as mere environments but as a world arranged in a certain way and one that we can shape this is the hacker's perspective on the world and this past few years the hacker's milieu has gained some sophistication politically managing to identify friends and enemies more clearly but as we said earlier there's still some confusion to clarify in 1986 Dr. Crush wrote whether you know it or not if you're a hacker you're a revolutionary don't worry you're on the right side it's not certain that this sort of innocent we have to remember that it's actually a hacker who just gave out Jeremy Hammond to the cops in the hacker's milieu there's an original illusion according to which freedom of information freedom of the internet or freedom of the individual can be set against those who are bent on controlling them and this is a serious misunderstanding freedom and surveillance freedom and the panoptical belong to the same paradigm of government historically the endless expansion of control procedures is a corollary of a form of power that is realized through the freedom of individuals as we exposed earlier liberal government is not one that is exercised directly on the bodies of its subjects or that expects their obedience it's a background power which prefers to manage space and rule over interest rather than bodies a power that oversees, monitors and acts minimally intervening only when the framework is threatened government is at order which one obeys like one eats when hungry and covers oneself when cold so for the individual monitored freedom is the only kind there is that is what libertarians will never understand a genuinely free being is not even said to be free it simply is it exists, deploys its power according to its being we say often animals that it is roaming free only when it lives in an environment that's already completely controlled, fenced and civilized in English friend and free and friend and fry in German come from the same Indo-European route which conveys the idea of a shared power that grows being free and having ties was one and the same thing I am free because I have ties because I am linked to a reality greater than me not because I'm alone on my own freedom is not the act of shedding or attachment but the practical capacity to work on them to move around in the space to form or dissolve them and to approve oneself has always been a fantastic and empty freedom so to conclude this talk there's been many hacking attacks that so many of us have uploaded those last years and the stake is of course always brings them further and to not let those who get arrested alone facing repression it's pretty clear where the strength of hacking lies we need to multiply zone of opacity from where we can experiment without being cocked and we need clouds of attacks against infrastructures of control and surveillance and of course attacking infrastructure doesn't mean purely destroying it but also means learning how to inhabit it differently how to snatch it from its actual use and how to reappropriate it for the construction of our worlds just to sum it up a world doesn't have an infrastructure it has a way and a form that's it sorry it was long sorry just one last thing basically most of what I big part of what I said came from so a chapter of this book that I was speaking about which is called To Our Friends and I actually have copies in English in German for one of this very chapter which is probably more clear and less boring to read than to hear so I will have some there if you want and also at 10 there are some people here who are organizing a workshop and the whole 14 to discuss those issues that have been discussed here so I invite everybody who has been interested to go at 10 tonight at whole 14 alright thanks for the talk so far we actually have 15 minutes for Q&A so if you have questions or comments please get in line at these microphones please note that please only one comment or one question at a time so I guess we can start with microphone number okay hi thanks very very complex talk you gave there with a lot of philosophy in it but just back on the idea of engineer versus hacker you say like the engineer is using technology or making technology a slave of the system how you expressed it and the hacker is different in a way that he tries to understand the technique and tries to use it in different ways I don't know which kind of engineer you meant there but I don't think that you can differentiate in this way as like a mechanical engineer doesn't just use technique for like a slaving of the system or whatever it's more like an understanding as well and using it in a different way maybe not like a hacker but still not just you know enslaving it I think I get your question but I don't really hear it very well there but I guess you say that my critics of engineer was to omnilateral I guess the point here is that I was trying to make is not to say that all engineers in the world individually are evil person but that the figure of the engineers the job of the engineer is to make a system work while the difference with the figure of the hacker is not to how to make it work better but to understand how it works to be able to actually change its use that's what the point of the comparison is that the answer yeah well but then there's this what I say I think it's not that way because an engineer much more uses the stuff he learns to create something new or something use a technique in a different way so there's a lot of similarity between what a hacker does or what an engineer does just that you do it on different suspects if you want I mean I don't think it's the same thing when you work for an engineer in Google and when you just set up an attack against Trot4 you know I don't think you actually really do the same thing you know I mean there's like a big difference in terms of what you're fighting for or against or whatever alright so let's make sure we get other questions too we have one question from the internet at least yes got two actually I'll start with the funniest one are you French? no I'm not but otherwise the guy say that your English is perfect thanks a lot microphone number 2 please hi thank you for your talk what I found in your presentation was that the granularity was individual and government but due to my work I also see a lot of attacks about criminal organizations which have budgets ranging into the millions which also use the same techniques for blackmailing holding people ransom how does this fit into your story I think I guess most I mean I think government is just the mafia that's one over all the other mafias so we're just the smartest one but thank you microphone number 1 yes I'm wondering actually it ties into the question that just came you kind of like picture many things in terms of some individual and the government but then we also and especially when you talk about hackers there is also something like like like many many communities right I mean there's the hacking we are all meeting here but if you walk around the hall here you will find like tons of sub realities where people are doing all kinds of weird stuff you know and interesting stuff and there are on many different levels actually they're hacking at things like kind of like economy related or political related or some security system and so on but still it's you kind of like identify this kind of hacker view or perspective or something as a distinct way of being in the world right and still what I'm not getting is how are you transforming all of these thoughts and all of these multitudes that are around how do you connect it to some kind of action actually my job was not to connect all those but I would really much like to do it but I guess I don't have that power unfortunately or maybe fortunately but I guess I think one of the interest of such a meeting here with so many people doing as you said so many different things on so many different levels is actually to be able to have debates like political debates about what makes sense what doesn't and basically what is the I talk about ethics in my speech and ethics is not a big word just what is our idea of freedom and joy or whatever this is the ethic of it and so being able to to to figure out which are the different positions that exist in this milieu how can things are being done I mean in Tottenham in London the example I was given at some point the police didn't have the encryption code for Black Berries and of course Black Berries were like okay we're going to give it to you but what happened is that some hackers just threatened Black Berries to hack them to reveal their encryption code which will make their phones useless and so they didn't give the encryption codes to the police to help people who actually might have been arrested so I guess that the connection with what is happening outside of the hacker milieu is always going and I think for the last years what we've seen is that it has been improving and intensifying a lot so I guess we just have to need to still go in that way so would you see the communication that you are proposing the way the language you're proposing to talk about things and the views would you see this as some kind of this kind of debate and discourse and what not this is kind of like the ground on which several actions in like all kinds of ways can happen but basically it's important to find some kind of language to an ethics to actually relate it's just a way to try to open a discussion with whoever is willing to to have it Number two Okay so if I understood you correctly then you said that in a cybernetic society things work too mechanical and that also the pirate party for example failed because it lacked vision somehow now my question would be in your opinion what would be a good vision and what would be good goals for political party I don't believe in political party I guess thank you Number four actually it was not a way not to answer but I believe that today what we need to do is to get organized by ourselves with our own means and locally and linked with everyone else so it's not a I think that there are ways and there's always been historically ways to get organized outside of political parties and outside of all the political hypocrisy and I think that's a way to go and I think that is what a lot of people do spontaneously in the world today You mentioned that those who opt out to share the data and to be on Facebook and Google may become suspect or suspicious and they face tougher restrictions maybe do you have a suggestion how to deal with that how to opt out and still not be It's not me who said it, it's actually Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt they're books called the new digital age so you know who they are, they're a Google CEO and someone important in the American defense and it is them who just explains that and of course we can really easily believe that it will happen in the coming years Honestly besides propagating ways for more and more people to be anonymous just like tales or tour just seems to be the only way actually I guess to escape I mean I don't think that we can be like we're not going to use the internet at all in the coming year or a phone or whatever we will, this question is how do we make sure, I mean how do we do the best we can so that we maintain zone of opacity on the networks Okay, thank you Alright, we have another question from the internet you mentioned that some people might use technology as for example cell phones or social media to fight kind of blacklist and censorship and but some people are not willing to use these technologies so what could they do I don't know I don't have any clear I mean I honestly personally I don't think that the upheavals in the world that have happened for the last five years were because of social media but I think that social media is always sometimes to make this happen there's a story about Algeria I think it was in the late 90s there was a huge riot in Kabilia and the way the riot will actually spread is that it's made of small hills and people in one place after some kids were shot by the police will set on fire the police station and the people on the other side of the hill will just see the smoke and see that the people there will be attacking the police and then they will attack the police again and on and on and on up until the whole of Algeria was just set on fire so I guess before and they didn't have the internet so basically they managed to find ways to communicate and to know what was going on so we do not purely, obviously and happily depend on social media on the internet I think number four was next I don't know how to say this in less than five minutes but it would be nice if you did yeah I try so collaboration is really hard and a lot of technology like political parties is used for collaboration between humans to get some sort of society going that allows us to specialize with our jobs and have this life and whatever and that takes five minutes I mean one important part is hacking and political activism and revolution or whatever when things go wrong but on the other hand you also do need collaboration and stability to have some sort of foundation to base that on and I feel like what you're saying is that we only need anarchy and revolution to function but that doesn't feel right to me can you comment on that? it's a really strange anthropological point which is that human beings could only live and would have only lived under power structures which I don't think is true so I don't know what to say you start from the point that we will need to be governed whatever would happen and I think it's not true historically and I don't think it's not desirable either so I don't really know what to answer I think that your presuppose is not true alright there's three more persons in line so that's probably the maximum we will be able to take so number two please hi first off thanks very much for not televising or recording this talk I think that definitely helps the environment for this topic you're talking about in a very positive way it makes it easier to engage with you and ask questions but very simply I'm curious you said you were you don't believe in political parties I'm just curious do you think voting despite that do you also think voting can sometimes be useful and ethical or do you think voting is across the board futile and unethical unethical it's a really abstract question you ask if you ask me if you ask me if it makes sense do I vote for elections honestly I have never voted in my life but if you ask me I think that in some context it's important to have everyone's advice to agree on a decision yes I do it's really important basically the problem with vote is that it makes us believe that this will be the only way for us to agree or disagree on things while I think there are thousands different ways that happen at every moment in life but I do not really believe in representative democracy if that's a question number four I kind of have the same question as the guy who was in front of me but I'll say it in a little bit stronger way so your revolution is successful the government is gone now you have Blackwater, G4S bunch of mafias are growing up and now they want to start another government how you have 48 hours before the people start to starve and how are you going to set up a system, un-system what is it going to look like after the revolution is successful so that's a real interesting question but also it's put in a pretty strange way because I think that this question has never been posed in history this way because most of the time when a government is defeated, it's not defeated from a second to the next it's defeated after people get organized together, people manage to if you take Paris 68 at some point the pigeons give money to the people in strike the bet is that the very process of overthrowing government is also what gives us the hints of how to get organized differently and because what we know that what happens there's a really famous quote from the Courbet during the Paris Commune where he just rides to his mother and he's like Paris Commune and he rushes to his mother and he's like Paris has never been so beautiful life has never been so easy people are good to each other and the belief is that when the normal situation of power is just when you enter a state of exception actually you have to behave in a different manner during the normal way and you know the reason why your question is tricky is that there's a long revolutionary tradition of Marxist socks which was like the revolution is going to be this and that and of course every time it goes a little bit astray it's just like they just kill people it was for the sake of revolution we do not come from this we come from a political tradition that takes its roots in more in the Paris Commune and in Spain 36 and maybe in May 68 and in the fact that we believe in the autonomous capacity of people to get organized by themselves and not to starve people as ever starved because they were left alone by the government government starves people to death a lot of time but people by themselves when there's no government they handle themselves and it's not a crazy belief people can handle the shit by themselves it's true okay I'm sorry but we're running out of time so thanks again for your talk thanks a lot do you want to discuss further just come over here? yeah definitely and I've got the papers for the ones I mean if people are still willing