 Shall I open this interesting discussion ? We're looking at each other, who is going to start ? So I guess the decorum is not visible for whoever is listening to us, but it's quite interesting to be in the underground of the museum, and my name is Stéphane Dugin, I'm the chief executive officer for the Cyberpeace Institute in Geneva. J'ai été dit de donner des mots de backgrounds. Je vais commencer comme ça, quickly civil servant for most of my career, with that I would say after so many years we can say an obsession of supporting victims of crime and now the crime is in the cyberspace, so that's what I do for a living, and helping the one most vulnerable against the worst of the attack. And I guess we can start with that. Right. I'm Caterina Riva, and I am maybe the odd one out with the word we're discussing together tonight, which is Hacker. So I'm going to give a little autobiographical introduction. I'm currently the director of a museum in Termoli, Southern Italy, called Macthe, Museo di Arte Contemporania di Termoli. I've been there for a year, so yeah, with the challenges of what the last year has been. And before then, although I'm Italian, I worked and lived abroad. I was in Singapore for two years. I was working for the Institute of Contemporary Art Singapore, whose acronym is ICA. And it's really funny because if you do a quick Google search on ICA Singapore, it sends you to the link of the immigration authority. So, and I think also when I first arrived, I made a mistake on linking, I don't know, my social media to that, and then someone pointed out that I was redirecting maybe to where I didn't want to be. Also, those two years in Singapore, I have to say really change a little bit my outtake on how digital life has been changing everything. And in particular, trying to address how it's changing the production of artworks and how artists and curators work. Also, being in Singapore, I experienced firsthand a kind of, I guess, constrictive government and technological experiments being taken out on population. So, that made me a little bit scared as a citizen of the world. And also, before Singapore, I spent three years in Auckland, New Zealand, as the director of contemporary art space called Art Space, which again was a really interesting opportunity to encounter a very far away and very layered post-colonial community that taught me a lot about being elsewhere and working with the different audiences and maybe challenging a bit our Eurocentric ways of thinking. And going back a little bit more in time, I studied and worked in London where I did an MFA in curating at Goswitz. And I, at the same time, I opened a curatorial project space with two colleagues called Form Content. And we did projects there in real life because I guess we had a website, but maybe things weren't as dematerialised as they seem to be now. So, yeah, I mean maybe before passing on, I just would like to say that maybe, yeah, I'm here also to learn and, yeah, maybe bring my own kind of outsider look and perspective to the conversation. Hi, my name is Patrice Riemanns. If Katerina is an odd person out, I may be the odd person in with Anphésies on Odd because I'm supposed and considered to be a hacker. My background is very simple. I've been academic for the major part of my life. I'm a geographer, but I switched quite early from geography into the electronic networks as it was called in the time, which became for the general public, the internet, which is much older than many people believed because many people would date the internet from the 90s and maybe even later. But anyway, I became internet and especially cultural and especially internet activist. And I've been part of many events generally in a peripheral position because I don't like to be at the top of things, say I much prefer to be a kind of observer. But maybe the most important thing for now since the theme is hacker is that I might surprise people in the sense that I'm, as I often say, I'm a hacker, but I'm not a coder. And the most important point that I want to make because it is, in my opinion, the beginning of a lot of misunderstanding. However, hackers are very much connected to information and communication technology as it is called or say the internet, the electronic networks and the technology which supports it all. It's in my view and in the view of, I am happy to say quite a number of hackers, connection to IT is never necessary and especially not a sufficient condition to be a hacker. To be a hacker is a question of, again in my view, of attitude, of habitus, of way of doing. And I will start the conversation with saying that the main characteristic of somebody who will be considered a hacker is to be curious. That curiosity is the most important thing. And a lot of things go with it with always keeping in mind that as a proverb say, curiosity killed the cat. Great. I wonder if we want to establish also maybe some kind of ground for what a hacker is or if we want to jump in other directions because there's kind of the standard definition but I'm personally quite interested in the characterization or should I say of the mis-characterization of this figure and maybe this kind of disembodied nature being one of the main points. And I wonder maybe if you can help me also understand maybe a basic difference between a hacker and a cracker if there's a different attitude as you say, Patrice. Well, when you are talking about misunderstanding maybe the most important one is in the olden days quite early on there was this make the differentiation between a hacker and a cracker. A hacker is a good person or a white hacker. A cracker is a bad person doing bad things which you are combating and in my view it's as quite often it's absurdly simple a cracker is not a hacker. A hacker works according to the hacker ethics which is quite well defined and which says do no harm. In the beginning time of hacking well, first maybe it's good to know that the word hack and hacking which apparently but I'm not very sure of that but apparently originated in the MIT the Manchester Institute of Technology was just coding was just about making computer works which at that time was really a kind of pioneering activity with very little being you were creating knowledge as you were going that had a very important feature that knowledge was absolutely open it was shared and it was open and the internet came out of that and one of the maybe most crucial problem of the internet as we know it today is this you would almost say original sin that it was open and it's built to be open and when all kind of bad things started to happen of which crackers are part but also the commercialization and financialization of the internet and trying to make things secret again was always a kind of manning yeah you can use all kind of metaphors like how you call it soping the floor with a mop while there is a lot of water flying coming in so hackers in the beginning were simply coding and then it evolved it evolved for a very important reason is that MIT saw that this open knowledge closed in it closed in for various reasons the most important one being commercialization and commerce is of course based I think wrongly but it's the way it works on secrecy on property knowledge IPR you want to no no no just what you're saying on IPR I mean the basis of commerce exactly an IPR is exactly what hackers are coming into second thing what hackers are doing is gaining access if the thing is open gaining access is easy you just take access but if it's closed you have to gain access for some way or another the problem started hackers were gaining access illegally because what they wanted to gain access to networks was closed and then quite early in the beginning kind of war conflict started to happen between hackers young people generally at that time hackers were really very young I was with Dutch hackers since the beginning almost the beginning of my Amsterdam which is quite remarkable in itself because in the Netherlands everything is supposed to happen in Holland everything is supposed to happen in Amsterdam but they came from a bit north and they were 15 something like 15, 16 they came to the open to Amsterdam by the way when they were something like 1920 and that's when I joined them bit by accident and they interacted with their main main goal was to gain access to networks which were closed and at that time there were government networks academic networks commercial came in there that's also I think an important point that commerce came into the internet relatively late one of the things Bill Gates is more to have said it was a fad and it will pass away like so many things you see where we are now so in the beginning it was all and when the Dutch hackers came into the network they were combatted for a part but also admired by and they got quite early access on agreement with the main academic network and from there on at least in the Netherlands the kind of modus vivendi modus vivendi came into being I am speaking of the very late 80s and early 90s by the way in Italy for instance things were completely different hackers from the beginning were seen as as a evil force and in Italy they were much more radical than they were politically speaking than they were in the Netherlands so in Europe generally you can as far as hackers are concerned you can make a difference between the north and the south in the sense that the south was early militant and got into really severe repression from the state whether in the north a kind of compromise evolved in the Netherlands especially because we had in the Netherlands a very early computer criminality laws and the hackers profiled themselves as a social movement by profiling themselves as a social movement they became a bit inattacable you don't touch social movement social movements are ok so as long as they were not engaging in criminality that was quite alright to come back to this to what are hackers doing there are several stages you have hackers doing for instance active like criminal hackers in the help of making system secure this is a very positive quite often not very much knowledge very difficult to acknowledge because unless they have been hide in by the institution company or government or whatever indeed to probe their network for failures for vulnerabilities vulnerabilities if they do it by themselves and then signal to the instances that they have this and that vulnerability nowadays there is some kind of protocol for that but in the early days it was really kind of bad weather is coming let's smash the barometer or this messenger is telling me my armies have been smashed up let's kill the messenger and so a lot of difficulties arose of that and then yes you have the whole and that was one quite a few words Lara Lara the artist suggested phishing spam ransomware et donc je ne suis pas vraiment très intéressé ce n'est pas une activité de hacker c'est une activité crimine en utilisant des computers avec une connaissance qui est pourtant la même chose que ce que les hackers ont la connaissance du système je suis beaucoup plus intéressé dans cette position de la connaissance parce que pour moi c'est un aspect majeur d'être un hacker et ce n'est pas seulement pour IT c'est pour la technologie en général et pour la connaissance en général hacker c'est quelqu'un dans la possession de un illegal ou on me dit une connaissance unautorisée dans un certain sens nous sommes en temps d'égypte les hauts prises ont la connaissance ils sont autorisés à avoir ça la connaissance est par définition criminel et je l'aime c'est très intéressant je vais commencer avec la fin c'est pour moi hacker c'est comme j'ai compris et je pense que la grande majorité de personnes qui regardent ce topic il n'y a pas de négative connotation pour le monde c'est trop mauvais c'est un peu plus vert sur l'article sur la description de l'événement des hackers quand en fait on parle des criminels mais pour moi il n'y a rien à faire avec hacker pour moi hacker c'est vraiment quelque chose de la connaissance c'est l'empowerment d'un citoyen pour comprendre le système qu'ils interactent avec c'est comme si on interactait avec un système on interactait avec un écosystème pour savoir comment ça fonctionne et si ça ne fonctionne pas pour l'intérêt pour le faire mieux et c'était vraiment pour la source de la philosophie c'est vraiment pour aller vers la philosophie c'est un moyen de vivre un moyen de voir votre environnement vous avez été critiques pour votre environnement pour moi le lien avec hacker il y a beaucoup de haut sens de self-critique défense contre manipulation défense contre l'intérêt de l'information qui vous fait actuer pour ne pas savoir pourquoi vous actez comme ça hacker c'est pour ne pas aller contre ça pour garder votre cerveau et tenter de regarder les craques entre les codes quelque chose que vous avez dit et que je vous abonne d'autre chose d'autre chose d'autre chose c'est crime mais il n'y a rien à faire avec hacker c'est la même chose un racer est un bon et quand quelqu'un est en train de faire le coup il faut définir parce que le car est la même car non, ça n'a pas d'accord il y a quelque chose que vous vous mentionnez aussi du coup il m'a dit il m'a dit de la puissance et de la connaissance je ne me souviens pas je pense que c'était Zimmerman mais il m'a aidé je ne veux pas dire non sens mais si les gens nous écoutent je pense que c'était Zimmerman qui la première fois a mis en place le PGP et au moment où ceci était connu de son ami, de son réseau ils m'ont dit, regarde-le parce que le FBI va vous accueillir parce que ce que vous faites maintenant ce n'est pas illégal ce n'est pas quelque chose qui est venu de l'Etat qui dit qui, l'Etat alors quelque chose qui va s'occuper de vous et non surprise, le FBI est venu quand aujourd'hui des décennies après ça l'encryption est à la base de tous les services que nous avons sur Internet sans l'encryption, nous ne pouvons pas s'occuper de l'échange en finance je ne dois pas expliquer pourquoi c'est important c'est aussi une question de momentum et si à ce moment cette personne avec la philosophie state de mind et l'approche ne va pas dans les boundaries je veux que l'encryption soit bien puis peut-être que ce n'est pas ce qui se passe pour la grande majorité de nous donc à un moment vous devez jouer avec la boundaries, avec les règles mais si vous faites ça pour la connaissance si c'est transparent, si c'est ouvert si c'est réellement pour les bons communs si vous ne faites pas ça pour l'égo et pour prouver que vous êtes mieux dans le système parce que parfois ça peut aussi aller et si on ne mélange pas ça avec le crime et c'est assez facile de définir le crime donc peut-être que c'est plus compliqué de définir le hiking mais c'est très facile de définir le crime donc peut-être que c'est plus facile de aller c'est là que je vois ça c'est là que je vois ça dans mon constructe de l'égo le point intéressant c'est de l'encryption c'est-à-dire qu'on a commencé dans un stage où vous étiez battu pour le droit d'encryption et aujourd'hui on a le stage c'est-à-dire que mon cerveau vient après le 9-11 vous devez combattre pour le droit d'encryption oui on peut parler de ça mais c'est... c'est-à-dire qu'il y a des scanniques et des banques quand dans certains pays si vous faites ça vous êtes encore criminalisés et vous devez avoir la permission d'assurer que vous détectez la vulnérabilité dans un système que si c'est exploré il va traiter la surveillance de millions de gens et parce que vous êtes regardant ça vous devez nous dire que je suis désolé et que j'ai la permission s'il vous plait ne m'occupez pas donc c'est une situation grave je pense qu'il y a beaucoup d'intéressants sur la table je suis vraiment intéressée aussi dans cette question d'éthique que je pense que vous aussi vous êtes vraiment intéressés et peut-être qu'une seule façon que nous pouvons parler de ça c'est aussi d'ouvrir un landscape géopolitique parce que j'ai réalisé qu'on fait souvent les erreurs de la pensée d'une langue, d'une internet mais les choses changent très drastiquement selon quel point vous regardez à eux et je pense aussi d'un très simple des exemples artistiques comme Aaron Schwartz je suis sûr que vous êtes d'accord avec son nom il était commission quand il était still alive pour proposer un art work avec un autre artiste de New York qui s'est créé avec un index d'index d'un même mot comment il est visualisé sur les browsers dans différents places c'est tout le monde je n'ai pas la référence visuale sur moi maintenant mais pour exemple c'est un dove avec une branche d'olive dans un pays et c'est une femme avec une flèche d'une autre depending sur les règles religieuses etc l'autre aspect je suis super intéressée et pour moi c'est un croc dans cette discussion et pourquoi je suis des surveillants digitales ce qui se passe c'est cette idée d'obfuscation et pour moi c'est de pouvoir avec les gens qui savent comment utiliser certaines choses et tout le reste de nous est resté en cliquant sur les cookies parce qu'on est trop fiers de lire les prints et c'est comme ça que les choses sont gradually taken away from our understanding you can think something and name it but also you can make stuff happening without most of the people understanding how it works and maybe last but not least another thing I'm really interested in is this idea of the body and how when we try to imagine what a hacker is or does we never think about the social movement or a person trying to do something it's always looked at through the lens of data and money or something quantifiable or at least that's the way I think about this and maybe also the ways wrongly portrayed in media and going back to what you were mentioning about Lara Favaretto the artist that invited us and whose project this clandestine talks are she sent as a series of images to kind of inspire us or for us to consider and they were very loose and maybe not necessarily linkable to this idea of a hacker but there was one that to me was kind of interesting and it was this man whose face you couldn't see and had like a jacket over his head as if he didn't have a head yeah headless for some reason and yeah just gonna put it out there sounds like the idea of a hacker in the mainstream media I know that guy with the hoodie yeah Mr Robert that is the one doing the bad thing all over the world interesting figure for sure I mean while we think this is the hacker it gives a lot of space for the entities that are really doing a big arm on the internet to be unchecked I mean it's easier you know to give a scapegoat easily identified more or less wrong more or less and that's the person that is the threat of the internet that's on say almost maybe a meta level that's the whole problem of un authorised knowledge the holder of an un authorised knowledge is going to be the scapegoat because the holder of the un authorised knowledge is not doing what the ones with the un authorised knowledge are doing and that is where the harm is and you are completely right to say that the ones doing the most harm to the internet or to society in general to the population to society in general it's very necessary to take a lot of our conversation out of IT out of the technology to project it to society to society in general and one of the main move of that is of course but naming it is immediately killing the conversation almost to speak out the C word for capitalism ah, that's true D, because the yeah, no no it's very true just to react on something that you were just saying the why, I mean a personal level I've been interested to the cyber peace institute it was because of cyber peace it was not cyber security institute it's not about securing the computers and the networks etc, that's okay it's important but that's not what I would strive for what's interesting here is to say this internet, this cyber space what I want to call it this kind of mental construct because it doesn't really exist in fact it's just a mean to an end and the end is the safety, the security the dignity, the equity of human beings you know, in whatever they do and what they do can be very critical I mean without a secure cyber space today you don't have access to water you don't have access to food, you don't have access to healthcare you can't discuss, you can't get knowledge and and you're saying it depends on the region of the world where you are in the countries this has a specific meaning if you're in the western world because everything is digitized and you click and something happens like the magic you know of three centuries ago but if you're all a part of the world because this, it's not via the internet that you're going to access it you're going to access it via capitalist services that are going to pretend to be the internet and that's problematic it is very one of the most shocking things and I admit that I did not realize that because it's and then I was in development studies can you imagine but you're absolutely right in saying that we have to but you said that we have to look at at other parts of the world when I read that the failure of Facebook which was a few days ago if I'm not mistaken put us users of Facebook I'm not into inconvenience but it was a lifeline via WhatsApp it was a lifeline for people you mean when it stopped or it was absolutely shocking for me on two planes it's it's a scandal that a failure of Facebook put people into real life difficulties but it's also a scandal that it has come to that why is it that people have become so dependent on proprietary technologies for their interest in mind but only to make money out of it by the way I never understood how you can make money by giving free services to people who have no cash anyway but that's another that's completely another point that's my own navity and knowledge but it's proper we have used the term it's bad in itself at that level that's one of the things we should combat but what's one of my problems you are in a Stefan is in a better position than I am because at least he has a focus he has a focus an institution where focusing on something quite precise even if it's very wide but if you are like me an observer of what's going on in general you are looking at fights all over the place and then I'm not even talking about the general cluster fact of society is a climate goes back to the big C also this one would you like Stefan to tell us a bit more about the cyber peace project I really like this title and I was also thinking so much of how usually these conversations are framed are about binaries and maybe a good way of trying to move past this is enlarging the terminology and from a very negative space bring it to something potentially positive I was imagining war and peace the novel you're the cyber peace question maybe yet to tell us more about how you got there a pleasure something as you said before in fact was interesting when I joined it was before that was in my year before in Europe I was program manager to create and be chief of staff for the European cyber crime center and then I created and led the unit that was anti-dash propaganda online in between Charlie Hebdo when it was really like something it was quite tragic and despite the fact that all of this is happening and it's impacting human beings it's a fact I guess everyone knows everyone has the hint of it I was thinking of your search that you do in different part of the world if today you make a search and you take the big names of the big cyber attacks so you take one a cry first you need to know what they are so it's already in a cluster of knowledge so you need to be a bit informed to understand that this could you could be a victim of something you don't even know the name of so start with that but imagine that you know you put that in Google, in Bing, wherever what you're going to see images are images of computer you will see figures you will see numbers of cash that has been stored etc what you will not see ever is the face of someone as if this is computer it's the network hitting the network and this is so non humanized as a problem so how can we hope to design human centric solutions and that's really what decided me to join the institute because it was a practical vehicle to implement human centric solution towards vulnerable communities what we do we provide assistance to the one with the least capacity to defend themselves this is the one that have money time, incentive network to attack so when the asymmetry is at the worst that's where we enter into play and for example we specialize ourselves in helping NGOs so NGOs in humanitarian sector where their mission is sensitive their field of action is sensitive their data is super sensitive their beneficiaries is super sensitive and their cybersecurity level is very very low criminals knows that state actors knows that but there was really no one ready to defend them so that's where we want to spend all resources and try to make a difference but not only to have transactional help because it's nice to help people but the whole idea is the knowledge that you generate from that help what are the cracks who are the real actors who are the real threats it's not that guy that everyone is looking for basement, that's not this one so it's state actors it's the hybridation criminal groups and state actors these are the real threats and how do we make sure that states when they discuss about norms and law and regulation when they pave the way of the future of you me or cyberspace, the one for the future generation how do they understand where the real threat is but not starting to put text treaty on the basis of no no no but we know who is the cyber criminal he's the hacker he doesn't like the black box he's the one that is not happy and ok and smiling when he's clicking you know and scrolling down with algorithm he or she has no clue how they work I guess we can be a bit more ambitious for all of us yeah and maybe it's about also turning the lens and showing the effects or the people affected by this rather than the supposed kind of culprit maybe also maybe this might help less abstract and maybe I don't know lead by examples so I don't know if you want to share also I don't know real events or and sorry I just wanted to add something cause you were mentioning when there was a big freeze of the social media and I think again it's very layered conversation and I think you know as people in the west with the certain level of education and access to things we can decide to log off Facebook but for most people they use WhatsApp it's a survival it's talking to their family back in Africa when they live and work in Europe or elsewhere so they don't even question what's behind it so yeah by the way I find that very problematic that we have landed in a situation like that I would just like to to come back to what you said about when government enacting rules one of the biggest problem I think is that the very limited sometimes non existent knowledge of of rule makers of decision takers of how the technology work the technology has come to be out of control and one of my main contention and it has at least lateral connection to the people using WhatsApp in quote-un-quote developing countries that is that technology has escaped even I think in some instances the control of the people developing it using it I see a bit of a parallel with the financial crisis when the financial crisis happened in 2008 diagnostics were about how could it come and then one discovered that a lot of things a lot of financial instruments were not even understood and vehicles were not even understood by the people who were acting on them it was a kind of rush forward and IT information technology in my view has gone the same way so there is also a big problem there so empowering people is probably not enough empowering for the situation we have now we might also be thinking about reversing the situation in the sense that the technology as it exists now has become a bit too has become really a bit too complicated you cannot simplify technology to the at most limit one of the example I have is that my friend and now disappeared Arjen Camphouse was an expert in internet in security and was really propagating the use of encryption by vulnerable people in his case more in the west which were journalists advocates human rights advocates and people like that but propagating this encryption for everyone there was one big problem is that you cannot simplify encryption endlessly but the average user will not understand it up to the even the minimum level that you have to understand so you have a gap between the absolute minimum you can reach in complexity understandable complexity of encryption and the maximum average knowledge of the majority of the user and that gap for the time being is unbridgeable and that is something that you will see in many in many instances but the gap is getting larger that I cannot say I found the image I found the image good enough to without without the need to quantify it it's of course very important to know whether the gap is widening or diminuant especially if it's diminuant then you can hope that you reach a point that security for everybody the end of vulnerability the end of the problems that have vulnerable people and communities which you are addressing can be closed if it is augmenting which might very well be the case well yes it depends from which perspective you are looking at this from the big C corporations or the people or certain group what you were saying before in terms of the lack of digital literacy in the policy make sphere it's very true it's very very true I mean in my years in Europe or not in work with the sub-uppice institutes I spent and we spend a lot of time providing knowledge to policy makers it's not about position it's about the basic knowledge the keys that you need to have to understand the technology the topic that you have been presented and that's quite tough also because this especially in policy making it's existing in vacuum it's existing in the context of an organization the way government are organized is putting a frame on what they are supposed to understand what they are not supposed to understand the topic they are supposed to look into and they are not supposed to look into the silos that are existing there for decades and you will know very recent example, you wanted example so you have discussion at United Nations on cyber security 2 of them already it's interesting let's go beyond the acronyms United Nations discussion to discuss about norms and regulation in the cyber space for responsible behavior you park that then you have another initiative with the UN cyber crime treaty where there this is about the future of how to understand cyber crime and how to fight cyber crime it's not the same group when you discuss with Ministry of Foreign Affairs and I'm doing this a lot telling to them at the end of the day you know behind, this is the same internet this is the same cable what you need to learn is more important is the difference between the lower level of the internet when you're really close to the cable almost at electrical level and when you're in the content that is passing by the pipeline because then suddenly it's a different topic that you organize yourself alongside this would make sense this is me we never work together and that's the way it is and because you organize like this you frame the topic and you absolutely blind to the reality of the technology then there's an issue the second gap you are asking another example is this reflex specific by government that someone needs to be responsible point me to the responsible community is that the industry who should I investigate and let's take the example of deepfakes so I was still in Europe all the time end of 2017 when deepfakes become a bit mainstream how it became mainstream it's not that there was a company behind there was no state behind what happened is that suddenly there was the free thing that you need to create deepfakes TensorFlow so artificial in the machine learning algorithm was for free open source on the internet the availability of personal data places on the internet was enormous you could download half of Facebook Instagram whatever you wanted to do and the processing power that you need to train your algorithm was super cheap for the first time and all of this was put together by a community of people that did not even know each other and in three weeks they create deepfakes technology and this is one of the biggest threat that you have to democracy these days if you cannot trust and something that you said before people with internet is on the basis of trust if people cannot understand everyday the encryption at least they need to trust that someone understands and they can trust that someone to safeguard their interest and if suddenly you cannot trust what is presented to you via a screen via whatever that's problematic and there was no responsible behind it's because you were mentioning it before the technology is moving so fast and more importantly the convergence the technology is hitting and booming in a way that no one can predict what is going to happen next and for policy makers this is ciderating they are like frozen what I'm going to do you tell me that what I learned is useless to what is going to happen because it's exponential rise of technology no one can plan exponentially I know what happened the last five years I can plan five years of it normally now the world doesn't work like this so it's complicated you said they were freeze they froze they have how do you say in english démissionné they have quit long time ago one of the interesting thing about the internet especially if you come from the French from French culture French history it's a first technology it's a first technology which has been completely left to the private parties it was developed at some stage of course it was developed by the state but by the moment it was developed in the United States it was developed in France although in many other countries but when it became really large scale and I could observe that in the Netherlands the government declined quit that happened in the early 90s when we were doing in Amsterdam the digital city we said well this is going to grow we would need more government intervention and financing of course and the answer of the government was no we are going to give it all to the private parties let the market which is a short hand for corporations let the market lead the way and from there on the rest is history in a certain sense and that's why I say this quitting of the government and you can't spend a lot of time to explain to politicians to make us how it works and so I'm afraid it's deliberate probably at an unconscious level but as you say it's too complicated we quit and there's something again we step out of technology and go into general politics that's a characteristic of the modern state the modern state does not care anymore it does not want to handle these things I'm one of my many aside that I'm a public transport interest it's far too complicated we don't want to let the market do it and I mean nobody force you to go into the tram of course you have in Luxembourg you have a fantastic system but in general it's a kind of yeah when in the olden days we were responsible for it when it went well we never got any compliment questions in parliaments now it's easy trains are not working company is responsible let's look where are the let's search for the responsible let's make sure it's not us and it's not impossible just to compliment on this sometimes policy makers they can be ambitious sometimes they don't know that they are ambitious to be honest look at GDPR this is the fact that GDPR the EU did not realize what it was going to do globally and GDPR is the global data protection the general data protection regulation which is created from the EU but in fact now pushes anyone processing personal data on the internet to set up some basic rules in order to protect the owner of this personal data it's kind of a short cut but that's something like this from the EU, all the companies in the world had to change their processes their business model, their notification ok, there's another debate to say is this in the ineffective or not this we can discuss but it really changed the way companies had to do business and on the basis of something that was purely ethical, it was about ethics people needs to be in capacity to control their personal data and now the EU is doing the digital service act which I think is going to have a similar effect because it's on the content level so it's something about no content moderation what can be on the platform what cannot be right of recourse takedown of content it's and again, I mean this content is not living somewhere it's just passing by all over the cables of the internet yeah, I mean I don't want to justify anyone but I just also think there are different speeds to these things and technologies moving at a much faster pace than you know, political protocols or democracy can keep up with and also this idea of trust I think that has been really exploited by you know big corporations that made a lot of money like harvesting all of our data until someone told them hey wait a minute you know, really telling us trust we know what we are doing and no one maybe not even understanding really what was going on, I mean the great majority of people then and by the way, that's someone saying hey, what's going on that you're mentioning, he's a hacker that's exactly what hacking is about to me, computeritica, it's investigative journalism but hacker is in some sort an investigative journalist of the internet you know, he's asking the question putting the fingers and saying ok, what's happening here with various consequences and a various degree of success and unfortunately the balancer is there are some good developments but myself, I am a bit pessimistic because there have been in recent years there have been major disclosures which where of the calibre that you would say well, now things are going to change but it's there is a parallel with the Covid situation which put a complete break on the economy and suddenly people realized well, we now have clean air and now the pace of life has slowed down maybe we should really change well, at the moment we are a few percent still lower than the emissions we did in 2019 so we are back to normal and with these disclosures the last big one it was not even the last one that had just come now but I can't recall it exactly but say the last for me was a really major break the major disclosure was Snowden and when Snowden happened I really kind of idea ok we have always thought it was like that but no we know there is a really a difference between thinking where you are pretty sure what's called in Dutch probability which is very, very, very close to surety to be absolutely sure of it but now you are absolutely sure it's out and things will change no, nothing changed and it's even even getting worse so my question would be maybe it's kind of turn allow it or not allow it turn of the discussion but is it maybe not time to put a break on technology or do we have to accept that yeah things are like they are I mean we have to live with it we have to live with Facebook till it dies itself or it gets in the metaverse yeah transform or is it or can we not can we not put a break to it and that is within the circles I am in it's a major discussion and bone of contention and it's called de gross la décroissance in French and as I was in its time a fervent advocate of free and open source software and or I am now an advocate for de croissance but for de gross and de gross means also technological de gross in the sense that you can empower people in using technology to a far larger extent that you can now and making it possible for them to use technology to use IT but at a lower level than the technology that we have as it is being deployed and exploited by big corporation and can be only by big corporation so in at some stage I was very much into the discussion about free wifi free wifi that means community owned and community run wifi there have been a lot of well started as experiments and it's still ongoing one is in Denmark, one is in Catalonia and they work very well people are connected wifi is functioning they have communication but there is a little problem YouTube is not going to pass it not enough bandwidth for it what do you want what do you want both as community as people or what do you want as say at government level and at government level I'm very afraid that in some instance they will and it happens in the united states they will actually forbid it they will actually forbid non commercial meaning non corporate application of technology I wonder if there's like in between in this binary of degrowth and like the protocols that implement barriers or frontiers that try to regulate something that keeps molding and changing I don't pretend that I have the answer there because the very fair question the very complicated one what I do know what I do know is there's no way that that regulation can technically regulate technology this I don't believe we saw that because technology is evolving in a way that no one even is in capacity to predict now because of convergence and exponential growth so this I don't believe in technical limitation like a boundary in which technology is going to thrive and it cannot go beyond this that I don't believe but I do believe that regulation regulators have a responsibility of at least promoting values at minimum it works it doesn't work history will tell but their roles there is to protect the population on the values that are the cement of this democracy of this state here I'm talking you know democracy is EU because this is where you have this beacon of a bit of knowledge and hope to be ambitious you know on rules and regulations in the cyber space so this should be pushed way more being way more ambitious and then from there you can assess if this is working or not but at least to reach that point because otherwise we are going to continue to say oh you know what it's impossible at the same time no one is really going to try to stop it so it's just going to boom exponentially and you are going to have companies becoming the internet Facebook several times internet is Facebook tomorrow when the metaverse is going to be out there the internet is going to be the metaverse you see what I mean the same kind of logic the same way when they wanted to send their own currency and then suddenly let's take the example of Libra when Facebook wanted to put Libra out there it's interesting one because they could secure partnership with quite big financial companies so they had like this backup of the industry they hit a backup that they haven't seen coming because you know Facebook anything can go is that states woke up and say wait wait wait isn't that the sole role of states to create money and that's really interesting because at the same time crypto currency were out except that with crypto there's no state behind there's no entity behind so you cannot really say who is behind making Bitcoin and Ethereum it's the community so it's very difficult to regulate there was a face, there was a name that was going to create money outside of state and then suddenly state woke up so it's not absolutely impossible yeah I would say ambitious regulation and reading the world today it's EU should lead sadly enough it looks like EU is not in the strength to lead and that's not great because otherwise something that we discussed about since the beginning hacking to exist and to work it's deeply linked to the existing infrastructure of the internet how the internet works there's now as we speak initiative from states to change the deeper nature of the internet to transform this into a centralized system controlled by states and it's not a hypothesis that it could be like 10 years ago, 15 years ago people say nah it's impossible they will never change they want to do this technique it's impossible and if that happens then this is the root of everything else then you change how people connect with each other well it's funny because that stage that where the states the states according to you and I agree with you was the stage in the very beginning of the internet and ITU the international telegraph telecommunications wanted to keep control failed to keep control I think because of passive or active US government intervention wanted to keep the internet American but the funny thing is that in those days we people who were for free internet were supporting objectively supporting the US government and I can in this and now we are back to it I think what you just described made me think ok that is plan A plan A as you say the European Union kicking into action doing something do we have a plan B we are leaving a plan B we are in plan B we are in plan B because no one has the ambition to do a plan A plan A B plan whatever let's call plan C what is plan C plan C would be that people take power that the users would be also the producers I call them the producer but what I want to say that the things are owned and run and if possible developed by the way no not if possible necessary have to be developed by the community by the people is there any chance to that? which means that you need states to invest into digital literacy for the population you need states to trust their people and to give them a lot of knowledge so that they can become really this digital citizen enlighten understanding the technology and with the capacity to critically decide I'm using this app, I'm not using that one in fact I'm using no apps because I don't need apps and I can go back to the structure of the internet but this is an effort of states providing a lot of knowledge for citizens to become something else than consumers that will kill the business model of corporate yeah because I think these values maybe you're talking about they're not shared and I think when you talk about you know the free internet and an open system I think that was an idea that has been completely lost and if internet was ever a public space now is a completely private one and I think also people engage as individuals like community spaces are no longer there so I think it really requires a whole new system and it's also nuance I guess you cannot hope that state is going to be responsible you know for the whole stack up to the application down to the technologies, I mean the private sector will always have a role there just a question of you know ok I'm not talking about the degrowth option I'm talking about the there's a regulation there's a clear empowerment of people to understand what they do and understand the ecosystem becoming empowered but there's still I guess an industry behind some sort of tools or others because not everyone will be in capacity or having the time or the appetite to develop their own tools to be you know within the open source I mean we saw that but these companies can really well and they show that they could be the tools with GDPR, go back to GDPR could really well you know operate in a framework that will be properly regulated now the problem is that this is not there it's self-regulation I mean we saw what self-regulation was doing in the financial crisis that has a lot to do because the kind of companies I completely agree with you the kind of companies who could do that will by definition not be big monopolistic companies there will be small community local company federating so sharing the knowledge not that everyone develop the wheel or reinvent the wheel in but what you were using the word private maybe it's private has a good connotation and refers to individuals it's maybe I think it's a kind of discussion it's better to always use the word corporate it's not public versus private it's public versus corporate and yeah that the kind of regulation you are proposing is so much against the interest of corporates that also given the osmosis often between government at the personal level between government and corporate I'm not very hopeful about that so no no I'm not saying it's going to happen tomorrow for sure how can we make it happen I'm not demanding it no no no no I get that we go back to trust first we go back to staying ambitious and there was a report yesterday in Switzerland from the national center for cyber crime about the fact that crime is on the rise everything is bad factually speaking it's worse than it was but it's exactly the time not to be ok nothing works what are we going to do in the contrary all the tools are there that's the worst the tools are there it's just that they are not used because again I'm pushing a lot of responsibility but in this case states are there to lead the way and to say that all the tools we have at least use them to the bone and then if they don't work you were mentioning this speed of technology we're saying that criminality and abuse are evolving at the speed of light and we're not even replying at the speed of law we have laws we're not even there but then if you say that but I hope I'm not sliding down into the conspiracy but when you say that the impression against ground that it's somewhere it's deliberate that deliberate is not I will always say it's not at the conscious level but it's at the unconscious level it's somewhere in the DNA of political power we were discussing power coming in and out that's interesting maybe we have to come back to that before coming back to that I would talk about trust because trust is indeed so essential but in what kind of at the moment in what kind of system are we living we are living in fact in a trust less system why because the impression has again ground trust which is a basically human thing it's maybe an essential no it's maybe not it is an essential human characteristic trust cannot be trusted and we have walked into a situation of trustlessness which is a world of machines and that has a very long history and that history has been one of the author who has explained that is Manuel de l'Onda in a book which is called War in the Age of Intelligent Machines that book Manuel de l'Onda explains that very early on in the United States in the say structuration of the United States in the years after the War of Independence so we are talking first half of the 19th century the idea again ground that when you had a chain of decisions of processes the weakest element in the chain was a human and that had to be taken out of the chain and replaced by protocols by rules and nowadays these protocols and rules are enforced by machines and then you get a whole situation that the trust is taken out and it's a basic philosophy de l'occurrence is to take the human out and replace it by algorithmic what I know but many people will call algorithmic trust called you don't need to trust humans because the protocols and forced by the machines will do the work once you are in that you are out of political decision making so if you have a system like ours now where a lot of things look around you it's not only technological a lot of things is based on pre-established rules and post happening certification yeah to me to me you are lost and I've seen this in so many times I was academic but I was a kind of maverick academic because I never went into all kind of things which one of the things of an academic establishing the credential of an academic is a cv I never had a proper cv I don't have a bio I don't have what I wrote I don't know what I wrote but this is completely so it doesn't any longer work like that it did work in the time that you had to trust because people knew you and that was sufficient I remember I'm sorry if I'm talking I see you frowning I'm with you I'm there too in the olden days to obtain a passport in the United Kingdom in Great Britain the only thing you had to do is to provide a photograph of your local Member of Parliament you went to your local Member of Parliament speak what you call the surgery appointment time what's called a sprake anyway and oh yeah oh yeah your Mr Smith yeah fine oh yeah okay okay sign you when sent to the passport office you got your passport why? because it was trust and it worked that's a fantastic thing at another example which is really I think this is this is a very good example of how human trust and honesty works ethics is that in the High Court of Scotland all judges had to have a pigeon hole where the lawyers of the conflicting parties put their brief what they are going to say to the judge so you have in the same pigeon hole reachable from outside you have the argument of party A and party B now you immediately understand that party B would really much like to know what party A is going to say well lawyers of both parties they would not even think of taking it out and leaving it and that is a form of trust that has disappeared nowadays but I guess also because you take the human out of it so I don't think you can apply the word trust to algorithms I think people it's a cop out people don't trust algorithms they just let them do their thing and never question so I think philosophically we have to go back to this idea of ethics and responsibility that you can only apply to people or people that take on that in my mind yeah I do just reflecting on what you are saying if you put trust and algorithm in the same conversation and how it relates to hacking and understanding the system I go back to hacking for understanding the system how it works for the sake of improvement of the common good if we consider that algorithm replace law code some rules that gives you an environment you can only operate in these rules and these rules are managed by an algorithm de facto this algorithm is the law code is law that famous book by Lawrence Lawrence Lawrence not lying but the other I don't remember from copyright comments CC ok I don't remember but that's the idea suddenly it becomes the law if if you don't have hacking activities to scrutinize this algorithm to understand how it works to look into the code the algorithm has no bias because algorithm at the end of that is not coded by machines even if that one was coded by machine before that one it had been coded by human at some point and on the basis of decision making that was human related it's not because you put human out of the loop that human was really out of the loop there was something somewhere and we saw this scandal with face recognition not so long ago in terms of the facial recognition algorithm was not in capacity to recognize it was more in capacity to recognize a white male rather than a white female and it was between white female and black female and it was absolutely no down why because the bias so hacking again looking in the code understanding how it works why it works and anecdotes students I don't remember where they were so learning machine learning so training machine learning algorithm and what they were doing they were trying to have a algorithm which would automatically detect a banana so when they would put a banana in the frame it would detect the banana not very what can I tell you it was very funny they were putting the banana and it was as fast as possible it would detect it and giving them a light and then it became super fast and then they tried to look into the black box of the machine learning to see what works and they saw a neuron in the middle of the black box that was super active and looked like it was very effective and why because it became a face detection algorithm because the machine learning program really understood that when the face was coming in the banana was coming just afterwards so it became very good in that face but if you don't know how it's coded you really think it's working on the banana it's working on the face so yeah hacking so the noises you might be hearing is us having some chocolates and we are here in a bunker and I'm sitting across from patrice that is wearing an amazing purple t-shirt that says Vatican hacked embassy maybe you want to tell us something about that the people cannot see the t-shirt the t-shirt is very there are not many of them but very quickly it's a story about big hacker events where I used to go even earlier I used to co-organize them and have become so big that people organized in villages of mind-alike people all coming from certain countries and then it's called an embassy a friend of mine was a long time part of the Italian embassy but he got kicked out of the Italian embassy so he started his own which was a Vatican embassy but Vatican embassy that's a bit bizarre so he put it hacked embassy and he still went to this big chaos computer club German hacker organization event with this t-shirt and bringing along better grappa than his Italian ex-franc who had kicked him out it's the story of the t-shirt to just to give you maybe a funny interlude I remembered a book by an art critic from the US called David Hickey that is titled Pirates and Farmers and I remember one of Lara's word mention was pirate again I guess in relationship to this weird idea of hacker so David Hickey writes I'm going to explain this to you very simply all human creatures are divided into two groups there are pirates and there are farmers farmers build fences and control territory pirate tear down fences and cross borders there are good pirates and bad pirates good farmers and bad farmers but there are only pirates and farmers there are very different kinds of creatures and some pirates even recognize the importance of farmers my late friend Roger Miller a famous pirate wrote this in a song after a visit with his tax attorney squares make the world go round he wrote sounds profane, sounds profound but government things can't be made to by hipster wearing rope sold shoes it's a good one that's a nice one pirates are interesting that he makes the distinction between pirates and farmers because the classical anthropological distinction is between nomads and farmers and the problem is exactly the same in the sense that pirates are nomads of the sea and now we really move out of IT but back into capitalism in a certain sense David Graeber who has an anarchist anthropologist is very famous for his book Heirs of Depth which is really a fundamental book wrote it's not very well known also about pirates pirates are seen in a certain sense like hackers as representative of democracy horizontalism sharing knowledge seeking and he's not the only one writing in that sense about pirates because like many things in history there are some accepted opinions about other period of times nice one is the dark ages as group nice one is pirates there are also templates quite a lot which the mainstream has attributed generally a bad opinion to the Italian opinion often backed by if not facts at least good evidence that you can be seen differently and then you get a conflict between people holding for the specialists holding for the older opinion and others holding for the new opinion and Graeber whose last book not his last published book his last unpublished book that means not published in English language but translated and published in Italian and in French is about Libertalia the story of of pirates on the coast of Madagascar the west coast the east coast no the east the east coast of Madagascar at the very end of the 17th very beginning of the 18th century having escaped the Caribbean because the Caribbean had become really pacified by mainstream powers restarting their allegedly very democratic very horizontal very sharing communities in on the coast of Madagascar being attacked by other specialists on parwits as projecting ideas of the 21st century into the history whether everyone knows at least they knew that parwits are really bad and their societies were extremely cruel and extremely unequal and extremely aggressive also among themselves and this utopianism was absolutely out of bounds and the same kind of stories you have about nomads and farmers or in the United States about Indians cowboy and Indians what's the mainstream idea of Indians well it's not very good they're very cruel very cruel culture what is the revisionary story about Indians they are very good and very close to nature and actually are pointing to our future and so you have so many examples and and well you have about the hacker story you have exactly the same do you have any pirate stories for us? it reminded me the fact that I mean at least I remember this for my courses of history about French history when you know the king when there was still a king in France who was using corsaires or pirates specific format of pirates which were allowed by the king to go out and ransom rampage steal you name it but it was covered because you know ordered but at the same time on their free days they could also do some pirating for their own intent I mean you have criminal groups that are working very close to state interest or if they don't work close to state interest at least state let them consciously operate so it doesn't mean that they are complice but at least they are clearly a I close my eyes into what you're doing as long as you don't attack me or my interest and it's a situation that reminds me you know what we could see in this in this old age and the word pirate c'est I think it's a very good comparison and then we get into states deliberately engaging into activities which endanger the well it's endanger the internet it's endanger the people become very vulnerable and indeed these people having sidelines I would say I would think mostly in the ransomware yeah there's ransomware there's all the department but something you just said and just to be clear I mean it's not the only place where I would voice it but I think it's critical point is that the insecurity on the internet is the responsibility of states and not only of states because of regulation etc I'm talking about attacks I'm talking about being behind attacks or letting attacks go the responsibility of states is still not that guy in the hoodie in his garage or in her garage no that's not the culprit it states when you see attacks on the scale of solar winds or you see attacks on the scale of you see this market of surveillance that is not only allowed by states but it's purchased by states you have companies like NSO putting this malware like Pegasus zero click into a portable spy this exists because these companies are not hiding in the dark net somewhere no no no no they have a building in the city everyone knows them they spend millions in research and development and each and every dollar, euro, penny that is sent there is against the internet because it's to find holes in the internet and to exploit them against our common interest and these companies exist because states let them exist first they can't buy them product and third do not regulate how this product are exported in between states so this is the highest level responsibility then we can talk about this script kitty that is you know playing with the network of the library next door ok we can talk about this but let's have a bit of you know yeah well in Italy you had hacking team we have a few more but I was thinking about something which as usual or as happens I got lost into I mean to reply to the hacking team that's because we started with that word so we talk back to it every time hacking team was an abuse of the world I don't think to do with hacking so I mean it's not because you claim the word that it means that this is the activity that you are doing they were just taking money to exploit everything on the internet and to empower mass surveillance that in a lot of cases was going against human rights so yeah with the with the states where they are principal clients and the states should have in this case the Italian states should have regulated them in selling and that's what they pretend and all these companies are pretending no we sell only to legitimate to legitimate parties democratic states for the purposes of combating criminality and yeah and then in the end it turns out that they sell to they sell to dictatorial regimes going after human rights activists yeah and who knows what the state is going to become tomorrow I mean you sell to a state today and you think that this state is democratic and then suddenly something happens but it's not exactly the same state it happens in our own I'm very glad that you are saying this something that again pre-technology or pre-IT as we know it it was a time of Tony Blair who was prime minister of Great Britain of the United Kingdom who first Tony Blair and then his successor Brown Gordon Brown implemented extremely liberty threatening laws they were attacked on that there was opposition was saying but these are liberty threatening laws but we will only make good use of them it will be only in the defense of democracy and the legitimate rule of law order but when someone said that yes but you never know what can happen even Great Britain can become a dictatorship really there is a very good television program of the BBC which ran 20 years ago or more and then was shelved because too dangerous too bad to think about it where you saw extremely credible scenario of government being elected into power which was really not in the interest of what was this program you are mentioning I am trying I can better describe it it was the idea was a label like popular politician became elected prime minister well he got election giving sufficient majority parliament to govern and he was implementing this new prime minister implementing policy which were clearly not in the interest of the power that be these were economic but also political and I would almost say cultural interest and he was toppled by an intervention which portrayed his government as causing a situation which was endangering the existence of the state and there was a kind of silent coup and then things came back to normal I don't even I can't remember if he was assassinated or not or whatever it was in any case the whole idea was that the government could be overturned in a fairly efficient non too bloody manner and then you can get a government you can get an extremely repressive government having all the tools and that's what we have seen in the United States far more recently with Donald Trump Donald Trump I mean it's a complete nightmare if this guy comes back I tend to think he will not but okay Donald Trump was well on his way of implementing a completely different order in the United States backed up by instruments of surveillance and control and repression which were incredibly effective and no longer resistible I mean that's also a thing of technology quite often you hear the thing that oh is a Stasi he only had the surveillance capacity that we have nowadays it would never the whole system would still be there optimist will say no there is this sound which says empire raise and fall everything that raises will come down but meanwhile it's quite frightening it's a quite frightening prospect sure what about art this exhibition that it's on now here Moodham tries to tackle with these complexities and I think it's really hard for people working with materials and ideas to be able to compress so much into a sculpture or a video or an installation whatever it may be I think what I'm asking myself is in this kind of political ecology I think we talk a lot about interests, commerce and financialization that it's led by capitalism and by corporations but I'm also personally very worried by the role culture doesn't play into this and it's quite interesting if you analyze a bit also how like Silicon Valley has been like moving along I think culture has really been one of the places they colonized quite early on say with the project of Google archiving owning the rights of all these artworks with the idea that you could pixel by pixel you know experience them on your computer but at the same time acquiring the possibility the same with Bill Gates owning the Getty images and I think also the paywalls around universities or academic papers this idea of inaccessibility and kind of closing off rather than making shared because everything needs to be a profit so I don't know if you have any take on this because I think culture is a bit always what is missing in this conversation because it's easy to go to the technology or the effects and also it's what is missing in political discussions I mean taking the example of Italy with the lockdown they invested a lot of money to restart the economy and of course you know there were huge problems in a lot of areas health being what was perceived and it was the most pressing issue but culture was always was not there or was the very last same in France and I think you know this is a big problem and I think empowerment to me is also this you know having more access to information and I think culture or the right to culture is a big part of that. I mean there's something unique about arts when it comes to these topics is that you can there's the capacity for artists to give a story about the cyber space with all these nuances doesn't have to be you know technology art it can transcend that it can project to you into one single piece of art the complexity, the paradox your position and you can really so I'm always very interested in when artists are embracing this complex topic of cyber ethics what this means for knowledge what this means for the future of the generation and trying to vehicle a message yeah and I think maybe what's interesting in how artists approach this is that they they don't represent anyone but themselves so they can really see through very different lenses and with their research going in very different directions so maybe that's that's what this is it's like infiltrating you know spaces that are last year we had an event it was November last year for the first year of the institutes and we invited artists to produce some artwork you know what is cyber peace for them what does it mean you work on this every day but you work on this under the lens of ok this is about attacks, about victims about laws, about norms it's kind of super framed in my mind and then someone comes yeah and maybe I'm generalizing and maybe romanticizing this a bit but I think art has always had this capacity of imagining futures and maybe the answer is somewhere there or at least they can prospect things that are not on the horizon yet just with there and I think a lot of also the cracks the problems as you were saying like the bias attached to algorithm because they come from human from intentions I think there's really interesting artists who work about that now like in the exhibition Martin Simms and Sandra Perry you know how algorithm disregard black female bodies and how to take back that space and like turn I don't know Siri or Alexa into a different kind of space and yeah I would even top up on that which are really have are going quite far in understanding the whole issue the whole and are able to are able to portray it it's there's a book which is called The Great Offshore we talked earlier about it which is done by The Brain Collective which is entirely has been it's entirely written by artists and they really explain far better than any academics I know the economics working of the situation we are now at the moment The Great Offshore is about capitalism outsourcing itself in various locations like what we've known as tax paradises and so and it's quite fantastic and there are many many instance of that and the reason why you were saying is that they are independent they are not involved they are not how you call it they don't have a specific agenda but this is you should watch out because this is changing also the whole artistic cultural field is now falling prey under this what I call the authorization mechanism and the authorization thing that also arts are going to be framed are going to be enclosed in the system I see it in for instance in the Netherlands in two fields that artists are encouraged and encouraged is you should read for encouraged more less forced or nudged now to go for a PhD which is the absolute example of a certification paper on one hand and on the other hand to behave like entrepreneurs so to become cultural entrepreneurs as it is as it is called which is a way to include them in the monetary capitalist system but for the moment as far as they are resisting and when I was in academia I was noticing that theory was going out of academia in favor of basically money bringing in practical projects in development in the field of development again between brackets in which I was it's very obvious because the department was basically functioning as a resource knowledge source base for the ministry of affaires and of development things and theories was going out theory critical theory of development in my case was going out but theory was moving to art schools because they were still they were still independent they were still outside the system I don't know if it's still possible to go to an art school these days they will say no no but this kind of field is no longer is no longer financed is no longer supported I mean it's been a while also for me but I sympathize with what you're saying because when I was studying in London I went to Ghostmits which prides itself as being a hotbed for theory and thinkers and it was quite interesting cause you know they they kind of really cherish their independence and what happened as a student you have this you know kind of badge of honor that you guard waiting from there but then you're on your own and then you know the colleagues from the other school that it's much more connected to institutions they were the one getting the job internship you know so there's also the reality and I think you know artists have always been infiltrating spaces that are more yeah kind of borderless but you know even in the 60's that was in the UK the artist placement group and they were going into factories and you know like learning or making the other like forget about Taylor is the way of production and nowadays like Silicon Valley does residencies for artists and artists go there cause they probably get five times the money they would get from a residency in a museum or you know an institution you know and the tools in a different way so it's it's a very complex word to navigate as pirates or farmers well I don't know what you think but I think we covered quite some ground and there's still so much ground to be covered there are so many things to be discussed but a nice conversation it's very nice yeah so if everyone agrees maybe I can plug something because you were quite at the beginning talking in terms of empowering people and that's what your institution is doing there are many more institutions doing that fortunately I hope you also federate and know each other I was for instance with a tactical technology collective which started as that was when I was advocate of free and open source software as I called it and there is a group in Italy which is doing exactly that they are giving classes to people you know them? but you know the group as well no no I know the group and it's all about going to the people going to classes in school and explaining how technology works and telling kids 14 years old kids ok you have a smart phone well it does this and this and that and if you do this this and that happens and you don't use apps well yeah maybe some apps you can maybe use but maybe others less so because this and this and that that is happening so there are and it's yeah and for the listeners out there chronicles before yesterday's collapse and there is a heart on the cover a heart that it's technological scope I guess yeah yeah that's empowering making people attaining technological sovereignty that's a bit that's our hope it takes time but it takes also like willingness and again ambition from education program and everyone you know also around school in another life I wrote a play for that that was played a lot in schools in fact to give you know like a really hands on story about what is happening when you just let go when you let technology drive everything and you just let go and it works with kids you always think that you know there's no interest they don't believe anymore it's not true it's even the contrary it's quite I guess there's this kind of misunderstanding about the millennials and the Z generation whatever it's called now that they are like because they're digital natives they understand digital it's absolutely untrue it's very wrong they have been raised to be in fact manipulated by digital means and without in the time understanding how it works but it doesn't mean that they don't have the capacity or the curiosity to understand how it works they have been raised as consumers but you can make them producers and you can make them producers not by imposing programs by imposing curricula you can make them producers by explaining and by being an example and by facilitating by facilitating them the so I'm especially because you see there's the sometimes the meme you know the meme generation makes me think about this it's kind of hiking of the content you know the content that is passing by and you have this glimpse of joke and smartness to transform this content into something super fast super fun for the whole community then what was originally the content is transformed into something else and then it gets a distance so I understand that suddenly people get a distance in what is presenting to them so it shows a bit of self-criticism also it's there it's really there we should not mistake this generation to be blind consumer but as long as not an ambition to make them inform consumer and to help them what can you hope great is there a password for us to escape or how does it work get us out of the 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