 primarily, a hacker and reverse engineer. And I run an e-waste reverse engineering laboratory called Unbinary, where we repurpose e-waste. I'll start with a little, this will be, this talk will not have any slides. It'll mainly deal with our thinking about electronic waste and some of the philosophy behind that. I thought it was necessary to talk about this subject because we tend to, at hacker conferences, talk about all the technical minutiae and details that go into hacking devices and reverse engineering devices, but not enough about the context. So I felt it would be nice to just have a talk about the context and our thinking. I'll start with a little personal history, as this will become relevant to the subject we will discuss later. About 22 years ago, I was an undergraduate interdisciplinary art student and a young hacker in the city of The Hague with an extremely slim budget. To make ends meet in the first years of my studies, my neighbor and my student residents and I, both obsessed with hacking hardware for music, would go out late in the evening on Thursday nights with a shopping cart looking for discarded electronics on the sidewalks in The Hague City Center. You see, in the year 2000, e-waste recycling wasn't strongly regulated, and people just threw out their BHPCs out on the street when they were done with them. We would also find lots of old stereo amplifiers and old dusty CRT TVs. To our luck, just a few hundred meters from our student residents, we had an electronics hardware supplier, Stuttenbrand, and along the street, filled with second-hand electronics stores. We would pick up any device we would find on the sidewalk, bring them back to our student residents, open them up, and remove any component we could harvest for our projects and repair the rest. The repair devices we would sell to these second-hand shop owners. Now, I would create DIY electronic music instruments and play them live in squatted buildings all over the city. In a time when trash was readily available to anyone who wanted to do something interesting with it, so were abandoned, decaying buildings to anyone who wanted to make them available for use by the community. The anarchists in the Hague around the year 2000s were prolific in their attempts to bring life and freedom to an otherwise dull and bureaucratic city. They had an old squatted anarchist stronghold in the middle of the Hague called the Blaue Aansloch, or the Blue Fungus in English. Dozens of anarchists lived there, published magazines and organized protests. They had a theater space called the White Space, where I would perform my first pieces of harsh noise music, a Volksgeöke, or a social kitchen called the Vermoerde Slagertje, or the Murdered Butcher, and a large industrial space called the Pirate Bar, or the Pirate Bar in the Harbor of Schäfeningen. These spaces would be entirely run by volunteers, much like this camp, but all year round. And they also lived inside and around these buildings, and honestly, the only ones who would genuinely be welcoming to a young black kid with a natural propensity to hack shit. A lot has changed in the past 20 years, meaning the early 2000s I used to be surrounded and harassed by skinhead Nazis. 20 years later, these types make memes and wear suits and run white-wing populist parties in the government. We used to be able to find and create new, free, and public spaces. Now squatting has been made illegal, and abandoned buildings are bought by the rich for real estate speculation and remain empty and unused. And lastly, where we used to be able to physically see electronic trash in the street to repair it ourselves, now we have recycling parks, where the sheer volume of electronic trash is hidden from the public and shipped to low-income countries in the global south. I kind of covered a lot of ground here, so I need to shortly explain why I mentioned all of these different things, from personal anecdotes to changes in the political climate. It's because they're all not that different. I'm trying to highlight subtle changes in the context in which we live and work and play. Highlighting a sense of freedom and independence from government and corporate control that we took for granted and has slowly disappeared. I feel this disappearance is the cause of a lot of our current social and environmental problems, also with electronic waste. For instance, hiding the electronic waste we produce behind recycling and environmental waste management strategies helps the tech industry greenwash their products and sell more of it. It allows them to continue to project a mythical future scenario where these products will be environmentally ethical, make our lives easier, more comfortable, and more connected. I'm sure we here are all aware that this is obviously a market employee conjured up by tech companies that sell devices and that we don't genuinely believe in the science fiction sold to us by advertising companies. Somehow I do feel that the underlying ideological message is implicitly accepted by most of us. The underlying ideological message being that the technology we use, sanitized by the visual absence of waste, is somehow inherently rational, ethical, and clean. That is created in some kind of sterile vacuum unaffected by the randomness and unpredictability of life. I get the impression that because it portrays itself as the application of the scientific research that preceded it, or the product as a reflection of our highest scientific achievements, that we are prompted to trust it implicitly. This means we automatically gloss over many of the real intentions that underlie the introduction of these products to the general populace and adopt a strong tendency to think about electronics within a reductionist, narrow frame of reference, without full awareness of the very real, broad, environmental, and social context in which it operates. Again, taking a pluralistic, contextual perspective is important to understand the mess we are in. We see this narrow frame of reference when thinking about electronics, a demonstrated character that can only be described as a dominant and perverse form of technofetishism, a preoccupation with the benefits of technological novelty, the obsession with technological aesthetics, and the ideal of technology as a catalyst for human prosperity. Some subjects that pass by the average person's newsfeed on a weekly basis are the elaborate transhumanist fantasies exploring the future convergence of humanity and artificial intelligence. I'm sure you've read it. How we can clear the ocean of microplastics using advanced robotics or the promise of sustainable, biomimetic architecture and urbanism, even billionaires selling the miracle of private space flight in the future colonization of Mars and so on. On the other hand, there are obviously also sounds of distrust and alarm. People who, rightfully so, address problematic developments in technology, a beat about the dystopian amount of corporate and government surveillance we are increasingly subjected to, and the rapid disappearance of civil liberties that follow. Not to mention news about arms manufacturers in the West's military industrial complex that incite forever wars in order to maintain a lucrative market for high-tech weaponry. I mean, although it is good that we hear news that, as contrary to the marketing spin, manufacturers use to sell their devices, and it is great that we as hackers question and interrogate every new technology that emerges, the underlying implicit assumption and trust in technology that is supposed to work in a neutral and unbiased way is surprisingly still intact. What I feel remains in both attitudes is that the progression of technological innovation is somehow inevitable. You could almost say it's like a force of nature. And that progress in the human condition is inextricably linked to the rapid forward march of technological innovation. If I mentioned biomedicism in architecture and design is a great example of that. To my estimation, we appear to think that by creating biomorphic buildings that imitate geometric structures we find in nature, we create technologies that are harmonious with it, allowing us to avert the growing problems of global warming and that we can somehow reintegrate ourselves within our ecosystem in ways that doesn't harm the environment. This shows that all we can do is amend technological developments we find problematic, changing the bits we don't like and keep the rest of the ideology intact, duct-taping the problems we face by iteratively designing new products that solve problems the previous one has created while the status quo is unshakably maintained. Now, it feels as if certain fundamental questions regarding technology and our relationship to it are not being asked in earnest. And I wonder why? Is it because we, the public, don't fully understand the intricacies that go into how technological products are made? Is it that we think this way because it fits our economics and the means by which we sustain ourselves and our families financially? Or does the problem go farther? Is the real problem inherently ideological? That the ways in which we think about ourselves and the environment is stuck, permanently intermixed with technology? Perhaps in this sense, Europe, a place where we somewhat arrogantly portray ourselves as a post-ideological society, liberated from the backward and restrictive confines of dogmatic religion, is still deeply ideological. Maybe we have simply replaced religious ideology with an ideology that favors scientism and technofetishism, that the disastrous outcomes in the forward march of technological advancement are not accidental, but the modus operandi of our society. Like I mentioned earlier, electronic waste is an interesting subject because its very existence immediately provides a counterweight to the dominant ideological narrative and defies reductionist viewpoints. The problem is inherently pluralistic. If technology advances, if it is as they say, progress, why does so many of it regress, ending up broken and dead in landfills? Why do the devices, which only a few years ago were heralded as the harbingers of the future, now lay idle in a pile, leaking battery fluid into the soil? In the hope of learning more about this subject, I visited several conferences on electronic waste and the most bizarre aspect of visiting these events is that next to endless ineffective discussions about environmental policy, our technofetishism and capitalistic obsession with the commodification of our problems quickly takes over and yet again produces a whole range of unnecessary products and solutions. The term circular economy, quote unquote, was also thrown around a lot. In short, it is the idea that you can use waste as a resource for other products and so close the loop from production to disposal. I find using this term to again be a misleading biomimetic fantasy as the problems we face aren't just economic in nature. As I mentioned earlier, the context in which the problem situates itself is broad and pluralistic. The objective should not be to extract economic value from objects and materials we consider to be waste but to reimagine what we consider waste to be. There's not a single magical competitive business strategy that is going to work in time and at scale that will outperform solving this crisis in an open, unilateral, uncompetitive way. Our capitalistic economy is the cause of the problem, not the solution. Short analogy, expecting capitalism to solve our environmental problems is like lying in a hospital bed, dying from a terminal illness and expecting the disease to cure you. One of the more recent e-waste conferences I visited had a trade floor on the ground floor of the event. Half of the trade floor was filled with companies that owned smelting facilities or developed state-of-the-art circuit board shredding machines. There was a lot of talk about artificial intelligence and cloud-based inventory solutions for processing waste but very little talk about the causes and nature of electronic waste and the different conceptual ways in which we can address this massive problem to begin with. Again, our current capitalistic economy is not a rational, objective, and neutral exchange of goods goods and services. It is an ideological framework, a value system governed by belief, rituals, and superstition. It is like an impenetrable monolith that determines how we think and act. We think we are dealing with a problem that is material and pragmatic, which requires a solution that should shift how we extract and exchange monetary value in relation to waste but nothing could be farther from the truth. It is time we should come to understand what the nature of electronic waste is. Conceptually talking about the nature of electronic waste is philosophically an ontological question. Ontology deals with the nature of being and perhaps by trying to answer the question of what electronic waste actually is, by initiating that process of investigation, we can find ways to look at the problem in a different way. We can start anywhere, so let's start at the production of devices. If we start at the absolute beginning, and I will not go in too much detail here, industrial metals are refined from mind ore, an aggregation of one or more minerals. The destructive activity of establishing a mining site wants to habit a habitat for local wildlife, part of a balanced ecosystem, and the activity of extracting the components of the ore that have utility in the production process already unleashes tailings that may contain arsenic, which is a potent poison, barite, cadmium, calcite, lead, which causes widespread neurological damage and dramatically impedes on the cognitive development of children, fluorite, and more poisonous than lead, manganese, sulfur, and zinc. And I believe the harm of radioactive materials need no further introduction. Although the progress, the process of creating a device causes much more harm to the environment further down the line than just the tailings that are released in the environment, such as the tremendous amount of water that is used in the semiconductor industry, for instance, we can already notice that irreparable harm is immediately done at the start of production. Before a device is even brought into existence, that something had to cease to exist, often permanently, in order for the device to come into being. With this knowledge, we arrive at an ontological axiom that can help us understand what e-waste is. It is the understanding that everything that exists is in existence by virtue of its existence. The entire reason for being is existence itself. What automatically follows is that when everything in existence by virtue of itself is in existence by virtue of itself, any other thing that is not an intrinsic property of that thing cannot own or lay in claim to it. Therefore, nobody can own anything. No land, no object, especially no person. Private property is not theft. Private property does not exist. Again, things can relate to one another, even demonstrate an interdependence, but they cannot ontologically belong to each other. The things we produce with our hands are no different. Our uncanny ability to invent and bring things into the world has not yet taught us what it ontologically means for something to exist. This ignorance results in the situation that the devices we create, by the very ways in which we produce them, permanently and destructively infringe on the existence of other things by claiming ownership of their existence. This process, which is kind of like an avalanche in a snowstorm, is continued after people have thrown their devices away. Common causes for throwing devices away are blatant overconsumption, a short lifespan of cheap electronic devices to deliberate and planned obsolescence, the inability to repair devices, abandoned software support, end-of-life status of devices, the destruction of unsold products. Now, we know Amazon is guilty of doing this frequently, and the reckless dumping of e-waste. To shortly give an overview of what happens after devices are discarded, the Global e-Waste Statistics Partnership, or the GESP, recently released a document called the Global Transboundary E-Waste Floes Monitor 2022. It's kind of a long title. Which aims to shed some light on the global flow and processing of e-waste. In that document, we find that in 2019, we produced about 7.3 kilograms of electronic waste per capita. This sums up to 53.6 million tons of e-waste. This is expected to rise to a staggering 74.7 million tons of e-waste in 2030, and 110 million tons by 2050. I mean, that's ridiculous. This is expected to go on. Now, as shocking as this projection might be, the most surprising figure I found is that in 2019, only 17 percent, 17 percent, or 9.3 million tons of it, was managed in a way that was environmentally sound. This means that 83 percent or 44.3 million tons of global e-waste literally fell off our radar. How is that possible? The majority is mixed up with other waste streams, and that ends up in poor countries. Where they are traded, burned, dissolved in open acid pools, and dumped in landfills, endangering the health of people that process this waste and ultimately the environment at large. And there are areas in Ghana that is currently called the electronics graveyard that is so large, you see electronic waste onto the horizon. The sky is filled with smoke, and there are people in the informal sector covered in dirt trying to get something out of it they can use to feed their families. This is also common in China. We do this. We buy all these iPhones, we buy all these devices. Once we're done with them, we discard them. Yes, great. We put them in some kind of recycling facility. Shipped off to Africa. But at least we can pretend that we're solving the problem. So after the short trajectory from the very beginning to the end of the electronic device, we can argue that in the creation and the supposed death of a device, it is only a thing that exists an isolated object onto itself for a very short time. So it's only a thing, to us at least, for a very, very short time. That's when we use it, right? That's when it's a thing. That's when it has its own ontological identity. But that's the shortest part of its life. And if we want to acknowledge its full life, it becomes something entirely different. A more apt description is that each device is unique and is a unique catastrophic event, irreducible to the sum of its parts, an irreversible displacement of matter, and continued impediment to the environment. Once we have unleashed these events into the world, the environment is irreversibly damaged. In this light, adopting an ontologically nominalist perspective could be beneficial. Ontological nominalism, which is a philosophy about ontology that lost in the Middle Ages, it asserts that you cannot refer to things by their universal properties, but only by their particularities. For example, to not consider a broken iPhone by its universal ontological properties, an iPhone. But as a particular event in time, with a unique history that ultimately got its screen cracked, this brings the broader, non-reductionist, pluralistic context back into the acknowledgement of the problem. The ontological antithesis of this perspective is the one the public, in general, currently holds, which is ontologically realistic. Ontological realists, so not nominalists, would argue that the devices, like the broken iPhone, are within the same category, a pile of computers, a pile of phones, and this is reflected in policy. E-Waste is considered an abstract category that might contain subcategories, but an abstract category onto itself. This means that by virtue of its ontological status, the only way to address it is by its scale. If you address a problem through its universals, you will need a solution that addresses the same universals. If all you see is a pile, you will treat it as such. This is why we need to return to ontological nominalism when discussing E-Waste. If each device is ontologically unique with its own particularities and character, what these devices are and what they could become is all of a sudden opened up again. The former linear and destructive trajectory of these devices, i.e., ending up in Ghana, and set aflame, suddenly branch into a multitude of paths and possibilities. Now, I'm not saying that this solves the E-Waste problem directly, right? Once a device, like I said earlier, comes into existence, that's it, that's it. There's no way we can go back, right? But, as I said earlier, we can go back, right? But what could happen to these devices is still open. What we could do with these devices still has a lot of possibilities. So, what was once considered dead and harmful is resurrected and given a new life, much of what the anarchists did in The Hague 20 years ago. It gives life and freedom to an otherwise harmful and bureaucratic process. Now, I'm sure you're guessing right now, because I don't have any slides where I'm going with this, guess which activities are the most adept at taking an ontologically nominous perspective towards devices. Can anybody name an activity? What are we here to do? Hack, right? And reverse engineering. Now, commonly, reverse engineering is explained as the reverse of engineering, as it were, where instead of starting at requirements and ending up with a design, you start with the product and you end up with information of the design. Now, there's something unique to this process. It's not simply reversible. The inverse or opposite of engineering relies on an entirely different set of thought processes. Right? And we go back to philosophy for this. In my personal experience, reverse engineering is inherently a heuristic thought process, which is learning by doing. What I mean by this is that I experience it as an approach to a problem solving that is often inefficient, imprecise, and creative. If you happen to have a broad frame of reference spanning diverse fields of knowledge, we are all generalists one way or another, this heuristic thought process allows you to string together seemingly unrelated things to help comprehend whatever is your object of scrutiny and uncover the rich potentialities that hide within. This is kind of a convoluted way of saying, it's not a bug, it's a feature. Now, ontological nominalism towards e-waste and discovering potentialities might seem like something that doesn't directly address the magnitude of the problems we face. You know, I did admit that I'm not here with any solutions. I'm just here to address the way of thinking that will help us get towards solutions. And that's a step I'm not sure we've taken yet. But we are many also, right? Unapologetically hacking and reverse engineering devices immediately removes the biggest cause of all of the problems I just described, the concept of private property and the governments and corporations that through it maintain a stranglehold on the environment. So squat their empty buildings, do it again, hack their devices, go dumpster diving and create new possibilities. The road we are on leads to nowhere, and let's imagine new ones instead. Thanks. Very much. Is it already working? Maybe. We will see. Thank you. I don't know. You? Oh, we hear something. Maybe. Maybe not. Okay, yeah, perfect. Okay, so we have some time left for questions. So if anyone has any, please line up at the microphones. Please be close to the microphone so that we can hear you properly, properly. And please be quite concise in your question. So microphone in the middle front, please start. Yes, I think that the best way to reduce electronic waste is to buy less devices. What do you think? I think we should not buy any device that we can't use for at least 15 years. So definitely overproduction and overconsumption is indeed a problem. If we are less enticed to buy new products because we find a myriad of ways to find new uses for existing products, the incentive is reduced. Now, obviously that's not something that happens automatically. But indeed, I agree with you. Reverse engineering devices, hacking devices, repurposing devices, finding new uses for devices, de-incentive devices, buying new devices. And hopefully can reduce some of the overconsumption we face. Yeah. So next question again from microphone. Yeah. Do you believe there's any possibility we can return as a study to a culture of tool use where we can actually sustain the way we use and make tools for centuries? Like blacksmithing in the old days was actually sustained for several thousand years at a time and it was fairly in line with our natural development. We're a lot less spread out, but nowadays do you think it's possible with technology at all? Or are we on the irreversible path? I have to be a bit pessimistic here. I think we are partly on the irreversible path simply because there's so many tons of ways to already deal with. But I do think that the resurgence of anarchism as a social philosophy should enable us to think of new ways to deal with this problem. Definitely the state and corporations should have not only less power, but should be dissolved. So I think we actively should try and find new ways to live together and new way to produce the tools we need to live. Are there any questions from the internet? Do we know that? Does anyone have any? No. Yes. No. Good. Then next question from a front microphone please. And maybe the other person and Justin are behind you. I'm a huge fan of civil disobedience. You already mentioned one, namely squatting. But maybe like and I think like in modern anarchism there's a problem of like a very narrow scope of tactics to use. But why not for example go to an Apple store and occupy it so that they cannot sell their fucking devices? Yes. Yeah. What do you think of those kind of things? Any form of direct action is very welcome. So I'll be there to join you. Okay. Next question please. Well, you say anarchism can solve problems, but in essence anarchism means no laws. No laws at all. That's not true. The only law is that there is no law. But I think it's necessary to have regulations to not export this electronic waste to countries which are poor and can't defend themselves. So I think we should make this electronic waste visible here. Anarchism does not mean that there are no laws. Anarchism means there is no overarching hierarchical dominating force that determines how you think or act. Anarchism means mutual aid. Anarchism means solving problems together. I think the event we are currently in is actually a great example of an anarchistic practice. Everybody's volunteering and look at how wonderful this event is. Next question. And if you also want to help feel free to sign up. But next question please. Yes, do you believe that the way all tools, all equipment, all devices are manufactured nowadays, they're never designed to be taken apart again. They're never designed to be repaired. But culturally in the past there has been more of a tendency. Like if you look at the 40s, 50s, suddenly, I love test gear, but every part of society you could to some large extent actually repair things and most materials were actually available to remake afterwards. You feel there was like a hegemonial change where suddenly some large corporations got together, took over and made the whole... Do you feel there was a shift at some point where it became worse philosophically or has it always been bad? Capitalism has always been bad. I think I can only go by personal experience. I mean I'm 41 years old and for me what the biggest difference was was the Reagan Thatcher era of privatization and globalization that made things dramatically worse. So I would kind of pinpoint that time as being the start of an increase of problems we face. Okay, then next question please. Very much of the hardware that we throw away is thrown away because we can't change software and reverse engineering can help with that but it's incredibly laborious. I am really surprised that governments both know this problem of dumping waste everywhere and make no laws to say if you stop supporting a device you have to disclose everything needed to build your own software on this device. Everything that you had available, all the designs, all the schematics, all the whatever, all that and if I were to provoke an action that's the direction I would move it towards. Sorry what did you just say I couldn't hear you? If I were to set up an action I wouldn't focus on an individual Apple store even though that does catch the news definitely but I would also go for this to have laws in stated that say you are the owner of the device also after the brand stopped supporting it that you have the right to have the code you have the right for all the design scheme matter. Yeah, yes, I find any means by which you obtain information of devices absolutely legitimate so there's no bounds in that and I do not think we need to ask for permission. We don't need permission in essence everything is public property not public common property and if these corporations claim ownership of intellectual property you can simply ignore it. Okay are there any more questions someone wanting to ask something by a salon stage? Yes you okay back microphone please. Hi I think the previous person was trying to say that you don't need permission but do we need to go much further those companies need to help us with all possible documentations SDKs in order to bring the hardware that they've sold us into whichever future life that it could have so what you say is ignore their counter pressure and what he's saying is take it 10 steps further obligate them to help you to build your own stuff. Well companies are not inanimate objects they are occupied by people people that work there and these people are perfectly capable of sharing information with the public they should simply be incentivized to do so. Right corporations are not entities they are not impenetrable they're occupied by people people like you and me and what is required is that people understand the importance of this issue so they take matters in their own hands that's it that's all we need to do. Yes you may answer. I think then you're too passive. That's passive? Yes that is passive you know why. How is that if I ask somebody at Apple say hey could you give me the schematics please let's be friends how is that passive if I go if I go to the protectors of private ownership the government and ask them would you could you please ask them to give me your to give me their schematics what do you think they're going to say they're there to protect the corporations. Okay true if you that's that's asking for your point you say that if we if we don't get the government to do the plan that I presented or that's actually the other we don't need the government but it would be so much better if we turn the government in such a way that they actually start helping us now that's gonna take ages I agree this is gonna be a horrible fight but that should be the long-term aim how to get there that's the difficulty I think that's I think personally I find your perspective to be too complacent you are expecting people that represent themselves as protectors of the public which they are not to help you they will not there are decades of environmental movements and and activities that that environmental movements have done in the hope to change policy what has that brought us right we just had a weak heatwave Australia is on fire how much lobbying do you want to do like okay so um and you have a question yes next question please and from microphone well I guess it's more of like a discussion by now but on tactics and strategies like and the tactic is occupying or well I'm not saying you should petition anything you should occupy them and demand whatever we want to demand I think I think a good start is as others said open source hardware open source software etc maybe in the over-larging ideological framework I think there are for example anarchists in Argentina who say you have need to expand the floor of the cage the government is a cage but you need to expand the floor of it before you're able to fight the big monsters the corporations so we do need some in in between steps I would say and I think I agree on for example making like everything like a common commonly licensed uh yeah and then you can think of tactics around it but yeah I would say it's it's not enough to only hack you have to also force force the government and the corporations force them by by yeah by well out tactics well thought out tactics that that you get what you want yeah I think that is inherently an unanarchistic way of dealing with the issue um the the the um the the way to you know there are no barriers all of these barriers are simply cognitive right there the the the government and corporations have no legitimacy their legitimacy is upheld by our belief that they should exist right that is the problem um simply acting as if you're free which is what direct action is um you achieve a lot more goals um than by acknowledging their existence and trying to move along the paths they've laid out for you you are already free all you need to do is act as this is probably more of a discussion than a answer question but thanks for your question maybe you could take it outside after the talk if that's all right for you perfect I don't think our points of view collect but yeah thanks yeah thanks for asking the question and are there any more questions yes feel free to use the microphone in the front so would you call right to repair an anarchist movement or did it start off as one and became more of a we get the government to change the rules sort of movement because in a lot of ways right to repair did start off that way because it was just people forcibly getting the schematics through their friends and things and now it's more of a political movements that is on the public stage for everyone to see so what what do you think about right to repair um about so about 12 years ago or so I was part of a hacker group in Amsterdam and we used to have um we used to receive stockpiles of hardware from people that used to work at at companies uh and hardware companies and telecommunications companies and we would um reflash all of those devices repair them and just give them away to everybody who needed them so indeed like right to repair sounds like it started in that environment right um I do currently feel that the excessive lobbying and asking for permission is antithetical to its to its origins so I agree there yeah okay I think that's it so please give one last round of applause for him thank you very much