 Bonjour tout le monde, le titre de ma présentation aujourd'hui c'est l'utilisateur c'est moi ou en anglais, me, I am the user. And of course if you're speaking in front of such a reputable audience you can't do a presentation without proper reference and I have chosen this guy called Louis Catois as somebody that to some extent inspired me for to the title of this presentation and what I want to speak about today is a bit of the historical background that at least the German hacker scene which I feel home at has built up within the past three and a half decades. So since I've learned that many of you are not from Germany some of you might actually hear something new those of you who are from Germany should be ashamed if there's anything new in my presentation for you. So this is merely a repetition. I want to speak a little bit about sovereignty. According to Wikipedia sovereignty is the full right and power of a governing body over itself without any interference from outside sources or bodies. Basically this guy was a sovereign because he was the king of France. In political theory sovereignty is a substantive term designating supreme authority over some polity and the polity is basically a political entity defined by common criteria such as identity resources and some kind of organization. This is a very complicated definition and probably there hasn't had of not much use. I am when I went to university not today but I actually did go to university. I didn't study information science because you shouldn't do that if you're a German hacker. We are obliged to at least not finish studying information science. So I had to study psychology and sociology, polytology, forensic psychiatry, all that stuff. And during my studies I learned a different definition for sovereignty and that is sovereign is she who decides on the exception by a somewhat controversial political philosopher at least in Germany and of course we all know who decides on the exception on our computers. Back when I started working with computers I basically my interface to this computer was this little command prompt but obviously I would be lying if I told you that this was basically what I was looking at all day more looked like this because I was a big Gianna sisters fan. The background to this computer was I actually wanted a Nintendo very badly and my father only gave me this Commodore 64 and he said you need to have something that is not a consumer TV but something that you can do something with. So I did something with it and played Gianna sisters. Eventually I got a personal computer many of you have had one of those I suppose big box you put it under your desk and then you have a user interface like this or maybe later like this and I know some of you for some of you look more like this here like you already had a bash or SH command prompt and maybe the KDOS desktop environment or something you were already you had already converted to higher spheres which I only reached later. And then eventually moving on with computer evolution my interface looked like this and or like this you know depending on whichever side of the barricade you were fighting on and then something very strange happened and that is I basically looked at it with quite some discomfort and then and that is this is computers eventually looked like like this and and obviously the first thing that comes to your mind is they took my keyboard away but not only that they also took your compiler away. So that these are the first computers that are commonplace that you cannot program yourselves anymore before that you're whether you had a Windows computer or a Linux system or you know a BSD system the computer came ready to be programmed by you. Now obviously few people cared about it so it was perfectly fine to remove a keyboard remove a compiler charge people to program for it build app stores and all that so apparently we were all fine with this because most people didn't need it. And I want to acknowledge the upside during this evolution of the personal computer the personal computing device every year there was more and more that people could do with these machines and achieve using these machines and they were being empowered more and more every day and it's those machines certainly enabled me to do more and more in my life you know communicate with friends and all that yet if you look at this from the perspective of sovereignty it was all downhill we cannot but you basically cannot buy an iPad and write iPad software on an iPad you have to buy yet another computer download this this whole software development environment and if you want to actually you know make the software available to others you have to pay a yearly fee to some app store provider and give them a third of your of your gross income with this software and I'm not sure that this was a particularly good development now I want to go back to the back to the 80s when the chaos computer club and the german hacker organization and probably the largest hacker organization in Europe was founded and it was founded by people at the beginning of the 80s who were already working with computers back then and obviously back then a computer was not in your home it was not something you had on your on your desk in a in a that you would find on a desk in a in a regular person's home just as you would find a smartphone in everybody's pocket today and these guys coming from a quite leftist perspective and on society decided that they should meet and discuss how computers would shape our society how our societies would evolve using computers and um they decided to place a little text in a in a german left-wing newspaper and ask for for a meeting of computer enthusiasts and this is what they wrote in 1981 those in power today believe that national security can only be achieved by the use of computers does that sound familiar is that something you could write today I think so we're now facing biometric surveillance systems we are killing people using semi-autonomous drones we have data retention laws on all the data that we basically transmit over whatever network we choose to use and in 1981 these guys already knew it the realization that computers cannot go on strike is beginning to dawn even on mid-sized companies does that sound familiar I think it does some very sarcastic individuals say the main reason amazon is even still employing people in their warehouses is that they have hands and like robota arms are just not good as versatile as human hands yet by the time you have this breakthrough these people are going to be out of the job just as truck drivers and all that I I don't need to tell you all this I just want to share with you my my uh my uh all at the you know people are understanding this 30 over 35 years ago the postal service now believes they need to prove through field trials that the telephone will be even nicer with their computer based screen text systems now I mean our relationship with the postal services has changed in the past while back back then the ccc's discussion with the postal services was mainly that they wanted to use the modems and weren't allowed to build their own ones I guess by now our main discussion with them is we want to use the internet and they're not building one at least in Germany the latest ad campaigns make it clear that the personal computer is now being foisted on video saturate is bmw drivers in Germany now nothing against bmw drivers although they are a pain in the ass if you're a bicyclist but I guess what what I read in this what I read in this sentence is that these people were introduced to computers as consumers they were given computers as a consumption device consume videos consume prong consume whatever video game but they were not introduced to computers as a means for empowerment and a means for independence or creativity and this is what to some extent hurts me every day when I wake up and take my ipad and read twitter consuming other people's excrements we believe and this is the important part we believe that despite all this useful things can be done with home computers without a need for large centralized organizations at that point in time there wasn't even a large centralized organization that you would you know call google apple facebook amazon or even the internet it just didn't exist back then and they already knew where we would be you know what would be our main headache in 2018 and so they said to keep us computer freaks from puttering around aimlessly any longer we're doing something and we'll meet in Berlin on 12th september 1981 and I find it very interesting because to some extent I see those who work with computers today and work on the good stuff they're also oftentimes you know at least I have that feeling that I'm puttering around aimlessly and not striving for a higher goal you know I'm trying to finish my coding project trying to satisfy a customer trying to fix that damn buck so I can fix the next one and sometimes we lose the vision for for what we're even doing here so when they met on this random day in 1981 they decided to talk about international networks communications law data processing law they asked the question who owns my data at a point in time when nobody even had data yet there was no such thing as people having data I mean they had a date of birth and a name copyright information and learning system databases encryption computer games programming languages process control hardware and whatever else an idea to say we had basically haven't stopped talking about these issues ever since while everybody else now updates their Instagram and Facebook accounts without even thinking about these questions and me they I mean I never really let go of these questions and they somehow annoy me throughout my life because I certainly dreamt of a different future with this whole internet thing when I was introduced to it being 11 years old and I had my first 56k modem and I dialed up through a school network and I saw the internet and realized that now the world had to some extent changed and there was now a way to get a direct connection between basically any computer that is connected to this network and any other computer that is connected to this network and it seems like like this is long for long forgotten days the telecommunications networks now basically fight against the role of being mere providers of tubes tubes used by google amazon facebook to make billions and the telecommunications networks basically being their their infrastructure provider but nothing more than that and I was hoping for a for a more decentralized network at least this is what I was promised by the hacker ethics which I'm sure many of you have heard before they were first published in a book by Stephen Levy hackers heroes of the computer revolution and over the time ccc added two little sentences to these epic principles that we all try to follow and that I would like to advertise to you now access to computers and anything which might teach you something about the way the world really works should be unlimited and total always yield to the hands-on imperative now I'm not sure if that is still the case anymore today if you look at the United States where basically education costs you a fortune before you can ever make one and yet in this whole internet sphere and this is the one and only community where I've ever really seen this endless spirit to create knowledge and to share knowledge with each other specifically when I went to university I already learned that this was not really in the genome of people to share knowledge you know be sick one day and ask your fellow students for their for their notes that they took during the lecture that you were that you were missing interestingly since I was studying in in Berlin here and I'm from the former western part of Germany and our our class was basically 50 percent former eastern part 50 percent former western part the people that had a eastern background eastern german background they were they were basically ready to share everything they were ready to you know help each other they would support each other and the people that came from the west wouldn't now we know how history decided which which culture would be predominant from then on and I think we still see it today all information should be free now what does free mean it doesn't necessarily I mean it does as you know there's free as in free beer and free as in free software some of us are debating nowadays whether all information should be made available to everybody but I think somebody still needs to stand even needs to stand the ground of of saying okay if we keep information away from people that basically means stealing their sovereignty stealing the means of empowerment stealing their ways to decide for themselves and that in the end probably means we're giving somebody else more power than we're giving others and you see the leftist background mistrust authority and promote decentralization this is I mean this is the internet hasn't really listened to that one in the past 20 years right we're trying to tell everybody you know run your own software run your own servers run your own mail server and you know decentralize the web because back then that was the miracle of the internet that it was a decentralized network where there were no central nodes where you could destroy single nodes and the internet would would root around damage and still function couple of bgp worlds changed and somehow the internet is is still able to connect everybody with everybody now all this had a military background to be achieved yet um there were certain societal benefits and um it was obviously a cultural revolution for for most of the world yet looking at it a couple of decades later we basically have a few centralized authorities that define not only what we're using on the internet but also what we can do on the internet facebook decides you can now no longer send a message to your friend or more than five friends or whatever they may decide um this is the new reality and and facebook is written in php if i'm not mistaken so there's a lot of reason for decentralization there and mistrusting authorities one thing i mean it's i mean this is an obvious one you should judge hackers and people by their acting and not bogus criteria such as degrees age race or position i mean this is this usually goes without saying unfortunately if i look at the internet today and the way people use it as a communications medium it seems like they also haven't listened to this advice too much which also saddens me i was hoping that the internet revolution would lead to you know more communication empathy and understanding between cultures i'm not saying it has a lot to more hate between cultures but it certainly has not led to much more discourse and understanding between people and the way we're using it in social networks nowadays it probably won't you can create art and beauty on a computer now that is an obvious one to to all of us yet i'm sure many people have been using computers for decades without ever creating anything beautiful and that is a sad thing oh computers can change your life for the better i mean that has certainly that has certainly happened to to most of us right um that's what i'm you know on on on my saturdays i'm telling myself that you know probably computers made my life better even though i have to admit that every once in a while the thought crosses my mind to to just be done with this and uh you know find a new thing something with you know i don't know working with wood or something don't mess around in other people's data don't mess with other people's data so when at a okay at this point in time few people already had data and it's um when i come to this uh when we when we mentioned this part of our ethic it's always uh there are always some surprised eyebrows because after all we are a hacker organization so we hack computers and usually you hack computers because there's data on there that you would like to look into and that data is probably not yours now you may decide that it should be yours or everybody's but we pride ourselves to work with a moral standard that respects the privacy of other people and um our goal is to make public data available and to protect private data now why do we think this is necessary we think it's necessary because this is the only way to get a level playing ground between whatever a governmental body is in power and those who are subject to this power so you see nowadays that basically uh state agencies want to make more and more data secret more and more knowledge secret they want to tell less and less about what they're doing or at the same time they want to know more and more about you and everybody else and this is a very very dangerous um imbalance of of checks and balances and imbalance of power and i think an imbalance of power is always bad for the development of a society so by making data available of the public making public data available to the public um we have a means to understand and influence politics and that is the basic role of information while when we have lost all our private data to one specific entity um we're basically at their um uh we're basically subjected to their uh to their will and we can't really defend ourselves anymore so what does this all mean with regards to sovereignty which my my argument is we are losing at the moment of course you all know and love xkcd and i would argue that the sovereign is she who is in etc pseudo us why would i use a computer that i do not have root access to why would i even use such a machine the wonder the beauty of computers was that these computers could be shaped into anything they came with an ugly command prompt and i could uh make it say hello world and if i decided to say hello other world i had suddenly created two worlds and i was able to do that on my computer even though my skills were limited and i certainly at this point in time was not a very good programmer and i was not a very skilled programmer it's i certainly didn't take the world forward but the fact that computers were built this way is the reason that all this evolved this is the reason the computer was a wonderful um invention this was this is the reason we're living better lives today that computers were universally programmable by whoever decided to program them and now we're losing this we're losing this to an extent that universally programmed computers are being sold to us as things but the point that um we're buying i don't know light bulbs with computers in them and and uh scales with computers in them and um heating thermostats with computers in them and we're actually made to believe that these are things we don't understand anymore that there isn't mips or arm um cpu in there and this thing could still be a dog on the internet so you've all heard this one but this i mean in the end this is what it comes down to if you do not own your data there is no way in hell you're going to be sovereign it it's just not going to happen and sometimes i feel like being in the internet like the the little prince um yelling into this this world that i don't understand that i am the user after all and i want to decide how things are supposed to be going now there are little there's little we we basically can do about it and you guys and girls are doing it so this is what i want to thank you for um and i want to encourage you to keep doing your work and fighting to maintain these possibilities for for all of us and i don't think that you know in 20 years there's only going to be um you know a decentralized pile of next cloud instances in this world but it's very important that even though the mainstream moves into a different direction we maintain these spaces of of autonomy and sovereignty of our own data because if there is if something beautiful is going to be invented and developed it's going to be invented in those spaces so with regards to today where you're basically unable to buy a computer anymore that that gives you absolute sovereignty and if you do there's limited things to do with it you're not going to be able to communicate with your friends on facebook but it's so important to understand all this and to maintain the options that we have and give give people who want to escape all this to people people who want to liberate themselves an opportunity and the means to do so once we stop doing that we've lost the bell and now i'm speaking about this as a a white european male but what we tend to forget being this quite privileged group of of internet developers whatever you may call it there are large numbers of people in this world that have not yet gained connectivity to the internet now i've worked in some of these countries where you know way more than half of the population has never been online and what i find very interesting is they are not going to um go through the stages of development that that i just explained at the beginning that i witnessed going from a personal computer on my desk to a an interconnected computer that was suddenly able to talk to other computers to basically a consumption device they are not going to go through this development anymore they're going they're not going to have copper cables that they connect their computers to to get internet connectivity they're going to get the consumption devices that are being handed out to people now probably a smartphone will be the first and probably one and only computer that they're getting and they're going to be introduced to a world where they're basically little lit up boards that you can touch and they are maybe never going to reach the the means to understand how they work they're probably not going to get into positions where they would even you know understand writing or reading code let alone getting a job that would empower them to to work with to change anything about the anything relevant about the systems they're working with and this is what it's all about empowerment and we're really really missing out on this decentralization talked about it long time and of course one thing that i'm a very fierce advocate for net neutrality another thing i witness in in countries that where where you know mobile networks are mobile data networks are now being built is that the the idea of net neutrality does not cross anybody's mind these networks are built for consumers there's no such thing as you know create treating data packets equally there's competition and you want to limit the competition so i said i would have some historic references and i want to come back to this historic reference this is not really a talk but this was not a talk about the good old days this is this was a talk about how we somehow messed up in the bad old days and how we need to shape a better future and if i look at my little reference louis cartos here who said leta so the state that's me in 1701 i would much rather see a user a utilizer of computers that looks a bit like this and in france this happened only 77 87 years later was a bit messy and a bit bloody maybe we've learned and we can get this over with a bit more peacefully but i hope that um we'll somehow achieve greater levels of liberty equal equality and fraternity um in the years to come with this wonderful network of machines and ideas and people that we have created for ourselves and i hope that we maintain the sovereignty over this wonderful network and with this i would like to leave you and say thanks that was really good i really enjoyed that i have to admit none of these thoughts were mine right it's all like 30 years ago that people came up with all this i i just realized it was very well it was one that yours that you should take responsibility for which is the one that you've said that after 20 years not everybody will be using next slide i was rather sad to hear do you think that i would i mean i'm certainly hoping that would that that's going to be the that that's gonna gonna happen to some extent and i i mean i was i was talking to marie earlier and i see this is a community with a growing user base and that's very good oh very much but let's see at least hopefully i mean frank has once an interview uh uh journalist asked him you know aren't you afraid that like google and and apple and microsoft steal your ideas you know it's like please you know that would solve the problem i can retire so you know let's let's hope that that happens someday and they decentralize the whole web um but until then you know we need speeches like these so again thank you very very much it was really good thank you