 Our next talk is going to provide a bit of introspection. We lost the war, has been the name of a talk also by Rob and Frank at the Congress 10 years ago. And this is basically the updated version of that talk. Over the next hour, we'll hear about the past and current events as well and the bold prediction for the future I hear. So please give a warm welcome to Rob and Frank. Yeah, thank you for being here. Let's start with a very quick question. So who has seen either in person or on video or talk from 10 years ago? And who has read the text that belongs to it? Okay, thank you. So 10 years ago at the Congress, we felt that we needed to talk about the state of the world about what the state of the hacker community is. Rob and me are coming from quite different backgrounds. Rob is from Netherlands. I'm from East Germany. So we have both our perspectives on the hacker culture and the position of the hacker culture in our world. But we share a rather common way of analyzing stuff and analyzing the world. So the talk back then depressed the hell out of a lot of people because it was just four years after 9-11 and people were not really ready to accept that things are probably not going to be really good and nice in the near future. And so the press had quite a number of things to say. Most of them circled around the cover of the data slider back then where the text was published that belonged to the talk, our hackers raising the white flag, hackers giving up in this vein, which was not really what we intended actually because we actually wanted to just say, okay, reality is not looking too bright but that doesn't mean we need to be depressed. And this is somewhat what we're trying this year again. So one of the critics that we had on this talk was that we used the term they a little bit too loosely. They meaning the others, the enemies. So we just want to clarify upfront that we don't really believe in large conspiracies. So the world is too complex for large conspiracies. There is no world government that does all these things. It's not like the Illuminati are sitting somewhere with the gnomes of Zurich and doing this stuff. But it's also not like freedom and liberty don't have enemies. As probably when you've seen the talk about the people who got incarcerated in Guantanamo, there are people out there who really don't believe in freedom and democracy and they are plenty and they're powerful. And this is what we meant with they in that sense. Yeah, the other criticism that we got is that you can't really speak of a war. Upholding civil liberties, upholding democracy is a perpetual fight. You have to continuously fight. There is no winning. There is no losing. There is just this continuous struggle, which is of course true that criticism is completely right. But we argued and continue to argue that there are certain things that are so much easier to prevent than to undo and that the introduction of ubiquitous general surveillance recording of everything is one of these things that grows power structures which are incredibly hard to get rid of and it's so much better to prevent. And that's probably a part of a class of events, of turnings that are better to prevent than to have happened. The drone war is the beginning of the perpetual undeclared war fought by robots. There's something fundamentally that changed when the West, when America introduced a system of black sites and torture happening all over the world, prisons without any accountability where people can be locked up for a decade without any trial, without anything. And of course climate change brings possible tipping points maybe behind us, maybe still ahead of us. So these are all events where yes, you can speak of war or at least of major battles and of winnings and losses in that sense. So essentially what we said was, we lost the war when 9-11 happened and it was the war for taking the direct route to a positive utopia, the utopia that is not from the dystopian novels and computer games but it's going straight to the positive world outcome. We lost that war. And if we look back 10 years later, very few people will probably dispute this finding. So when we look quickly back at the predictions that we made, we were mostly right. So the economy tanked three years later because the brittle system of banking nearly collapsed and was just by hair, breath rescued by means that really nobody understands anymore. So the one thing that we were wrong about so far is the price of oil that miraculously currently is very low and but still nobody really understands why this is truly the case, it's utterly bizarre. So democracy, if you look at what has happened to democracy in the Western societies, it is hard to argue that democracy has made large progress. On the contrary, what we see is that in many countries, democracy is on the way out. It's no longer the preferred system of government for many people. The security state, we can see it in our everyday lives. So it is encroaching meanwhile you need to have to pass security check gates when you want to board a train in several countries. Ubiquitous surveillance is there. We have data retention. So the security state is making large progress. What we said back then about climate and the refugees has largely been vindicated. I mean, if you look at the weather patterns that we're having today even here, I mean, in Reykjavik, they have now a storm with over 300 kilometers per hour that is coming in there. We don't have winter anymore in Germany. So it is becoming kind of obvious that the climate is not right anymore. And the refugees that are being caused by this climate change are around the corner. And so another thing that we were talking about was surveillance and whistleblowers and the need for that becoming a bit later to that. This talk is not going to be as depressing as the one in 2005. Not because the subject matter is less depressing or has become better all of a sudden, but because more people are used to the world being the way it is. There is no longer, we no longer need to shock an audience into a world we see that is completely different from the world that most people perceive. And the goal for this talk is to get a large group of mostly very smart people, being you and whoever watches this, to be as happy and as politically productive as possible in an environment that is still going to be increasingly dystopian. And when we talk about a dystopian environment, the most important issue that is pressing, immediate and involves all of humanity is of course climate change. Yeah, so what we see is not so much in direct global warming, but in global weeding. It means that the weather patterns are shifting. The headless cells, which is where the water goes up and where the water goes down are shifting. That means that the livelihoods of many people who are depending on agriculture are threatened. And we don't know where these patterns will be moving. The one thing that we can see is that future generations will look back at us as the guilty party. We are the people in their eyes and the eyes of our children. We and our parents were the people who basically fucked up the planet, probably beyond repair. And the one thing that we would like to call you on is taking this responsibility. So what we see now is the Syrian wars just the beginning. It is just that the early wars that have a strong climate component, component that we can see in many more conflicts that are rising. So most of the Arab Spring had a large component of food riots, of food prices going up, which was certainly to a large extent also speculation but also drought, meaning lack of water in large parts of the world. And there will be many more. So there is no real way to escape this reality anymore. So this planet is largely a crime scene. The fossil fuel industry, who have known about this since the 1970s, needs to be killed or needs to be, their bottom line needs to be hurt significantly because a lot of the carbon that they're currently getting out of the earth needs to stay there and not be burned. The technology to change our energy infrastructure is already there. Solar is already profitable or near profitable in a lot of places. And we need to fight conflicts that are going to have components in fighting in courts. They have components in fighting in demonstrations in the streets. We need to take charge of these issues. If you look at what's currently happening with the fossil fuel industry, it's a lot like the tobacco industry. If you have known for so long that this was going on and you have prevented the correct policy response by hiding the science, by muddling the image, then you have responsibility. And if there is damage, you are culpable for that. Also, techno-optimism is a problem in our circles. Many people think, well, we screwed up this planet, maybe, but we have spacecraft. We can go to other planets. There's other worlds. That doesn't work. There are no habitable planets in our reach and there won't be for generations to come. So no matter how bad things may get on earth, they're still not going to be anywhere near as inhospitable on a bad day as they will be on Mars on the best possible day. See, that's a positive message. Yeah, I mean, the core of the HECA culture is breaking stuff, fixing things. And this planet, if we can say, so is our spaceship and it really needs fixing. And so this is something where we see that the HECA community or HECA community can do much more. And if you look at where the refugees are coming and for what reasons they're coming, we see that there's a lot of regions that will become hard to live in. So either because there's too much water, there's too little water, the ground turns into swamps. And so these countries will be massively struggling with how to feed their population, how to give them space to live. And there's a lot of stuff to do for technological-minded people with organizational capabilities like our community is to help these people and to prevent also the dystopian streak that governments usually take on when they are in emergency situations. I mean, if you look at their larger refugee camp, so that is a massively dystopian setup. So people are wearing wristbands to register at every checkpoint. They are limited in their range of movement. They are just barely fed and housed and that's about it. And that means that a world that is in constant emergency mode has a really hard time to be in democratic society. But on top of that, the western countries, but increasingly so also China and the other upcoming larger powers, have their hand in pushing countries into chaos. So we have seen now a large sequence of things that end up with Syria and Libya where under the disguise of bringing forward democracy with drones, countries are essentially pushed into chaos because no one took responsibility of setting up a structure, setting up stability, making sure that the people there actually end up not in a much worse situation than they have been before. And so the human rights and managing of migration is a direct conflict with the economic interest of the arms industry. If we look at who is selling these arms, it's mostly western countries in Russia. And we are selling these arms to countries like Saudi Arabia who will be the next large conflict zone and who don't have any democratic control and we just do that under the disguise of providing stability to regions. But bombing countries into democracy fortunately has become very much unpopular. This is also why the arms industry is pushing so much for drones because drones can fly around and not destabilize countries for oil and not causing body bags coming home. But it would be wrong to say that U.S. foreign policy has been a failure. It has not. So if you look at the core interest behind U.S. foreign policy, what is happening there, basically countries being unbalanced, nobody really being able to concentrate their power to challenge their hegemony, this has been largely a success. So sure, there has been a lot of chaos around but economically and for the arms industry in this country, in the country, especially in U.S. and U.K. but also other western countries, this has been a very successful decade. So it's not like their policy has been failures. Do you want to put this aside? Yeah. One of the things that are the tools of foreign policy in the West is of course ubiquitous surveillance. And we had, in 2005, we wrote that we need to know how the intelligence agencies work today. We need to know how the backdoors work and how that is done in large scale. That was 2005. And we also wrote that we need the infrastructure to harbour whistleblowers to make it possible for people from the dark side to come forward and get this information out. At least on this, it has been a success, as we can say. So we know much more about how the surveillance works and what does it really help? For most people, looking at the Snowden revelations is like discovering a new force of nature. It's like they've discovered this whole universe that they didn't previously know about. There's this deep state level of logic, of thinking, of diplomacy, of how countries really interact, that now many, many more people know about. What was considered paranoid? What was considered, oh my God, this is like a really cynical way of looking at things. Now many more people can see the documents, be they diplomatic cables, or be they the Snowden revelations. And they can look and they can see, look, this is really how the world works. But leaking alone is not sufficient. There's, as we can now see, there's too much systemic corruption, too many secrets, too many anti-leaker laws and measures. We're going to need true transparency laws, and we're going to need to be able to trust our governments and our parliaments to do the right thing. There was this naive belief that if the scandal is big enough, the system will finally correct itself. What we see is the opposite. We see a scandal of the magnitude of Watergate every week or every two weeks, and nothing is happening. We need to cope with that. We need to come up with new strategies. It's like the paranoid movies where you finally, the protagonist gets to the president and tells the conspiracy to the president and then finds out in sort of, in shadowy words, you can find out that the president is already part of the conspiracy. When the Snowden revelations came out, it was quickly clear that our governments were not shocked. They were not like, oh my God, our intelligence agencies are really out of control. We need to do something. No, they were like, no, this is nothing going on here. Keep moving. Pay no attention. So it's really, we really need to come up with strategies to deal with that. Yeah, so essentially their reaction was, it was one of the first, I think, from when the NSA was confronted with the, by the German government and their answer was so, okay, now you know. And, but that was about it. So what we have is the situation that it looks like transparency alone doesn't help anymore. So we had somehow hoped that it was also one of the naive beliefs of the early internet times that transparency alone, if people just knew, if people knew the problems, the things, they would act, they would get their stuff together and, yeah, basically change the system. And it turned out that this wasn't quite naive belief. But it doesn't mean that transparency is not important. But it turns out that transparency is like basic hygiene. It's like brushing your teeth, like about taking a shower for society. So if you don't have transparency of power and the power structures and what interests are being conceived by whom, what the tools of surveillance are, who knows what, then you cannot have a democracy anymore because the world has become so complex that it's very easy to hide relatively sinister interests within society. We even have the problem now that if you have a proper conspiracy, a small one, if you make it complex enough if the scandal cannot be told within one print page or one scroll range on the website, then it's hard to have it as a scandal anymore, which is also part of the reason why the Snowden renovations were kind of difficult to turn into concrete action for a larger society. So one thing that we need to keep in mind is that even the well-meaning people in government and the bureaucratic institutions are really need transparency to keep stuff in check. So it's not like transparency is useless or something that we should give up on a goal. It's just that we need to understand that it has a different meaning, a different purpose than what we originally thought. So the question is, will this epitome last? So what will happen when people start realizing that the surveillance that they have been trained to ignore somehow will be into everything that they own? When the Internet of Things starts for real, if we have basically network sensors in everything we own, then suddenly the world becomes treacherous. So everything that you own, every door that you open, every time that you go to the fridge, if you have an Internet of Things fridge, then your fridge will snitch on you and tell somebody that you opened it and what you took out of it. And the question is, if this maybe will change things. So it's an open question to me. I don't know. So it may be that people will stay in this apathy and not change their attitudes. It may be that there is a critical mass point where people say it's no, it's enough, it's enough. So maybe we need to unseal so certified cloudless object or something that we need to stick on stuff. This is also one of the things that the hacker community is being asked for. Essentially, we are the ones that, the hacking people are the ones that can actually do this. So making objects cloudless again, if needed. If you look at the progress of technology, we can see that facial recognition, including mood detection, micro expression detection, infrared for blood flow detection will become very cheap. It will be everywhere. And we need to have countermeasures. And that means, for instance, also cooperation with the artists who make clothing, who make makeup, who do all the stuff that you can legally steal wear in a public domain and think about with them what we can do against this ubiquitous surveillance. So that brings me to the core question. So what is our mission as a hacking community? And I use to define the saying, we are partly responsible for maintaining society's capability for change. So to keep the regular rooms open, to keep the capabilities for political actors who want to change the society for the better, make that still possible. So not being strangled by surveillance, not being frozen in place by lack of options where people cannot do anything anymore because every step that they do is registered. Everything that they do leads to potential blackmail. And so, Yevgeny Morozov has recently written about it and he said it's the invisible barbed wire that is basically around you and that is made up of the data that you leave so that restricts your options, restricts your room of movement and you're not really realizing that unless you run against the invisible barbed wire. And so this question of blackmailability versus transparency, so we want to have as much privacy as we can as individuals, but we want to have the institutions that have power as transparent as possible in the core of the struggle for free society. Basically giving the individual the right or keeping our rights for change, for movement, for making things better versus the institution's capabilities to keep stuff secret from us. This is one of the core struggles that we have. And the intelligence agencies know stuff about those in power. They know what is blackmailable. So, and the interesting thing is that the number of blackmailable offenses has been shrinking recently. So, that has basically shrunk to very clear corruption, pedophilia, and tax evasion. With everything else, you can get away. So, as a politician, you have drug usage, no problem, affairs, no problem, having strange hobbies, absolutely no problem. Homosexuality, no problem anymore, very good. So, but those people that are in the security apparatus that evaluate politicians and look at them and look what they can find against them in the blackmail chambers, we don't know. So, we don't know most of what politicians do. I mean, sometimes we learn that they have bizarre habits involving their genitalia and pigs, which is, from my perspective, their private thing to do. But what's more interesting is that what the circle of men there did was creating a shared compromise, a shared knowledge about each other that was so painful back then to publish, to divulge that they had basically mutual assured destruction against each other. This is how power circles work. And the intelligence agency know this as well, and they want to get in there, and they, we have very limited resources to find out if politicians are in the hands of intelligence agency. We can just look for the patterns. So, if a politician suddenly changes his course on matters that are the deep state that the intelligence agency concerned about, then we can be pretty certain that they have something against them that falls into the still blackmailable category. So, why did Cameron survive this thing? So, because everybody who could have overthrown him was part of the same circle. So, they were all part of the same game, and they knew about it. So, they had, yeah. So, they created a space of invincibility around them. And so, the question then is, why does it all matter so little? So, why are all these big scandals that we know about all this corruption, all these things where we know that politicians really misbehaved, except for these three cases, but even then, why is nobody writing on the street? So, why is nobody calling out the revolution just now? Why is it that people are just saying, yeah, this is how it is? So, this is how it has been all the time, and we cannot do anything about it. For that, we have to look at the psychology of our time. We live in what circles around the Adbusters magazine, by the Adbusters Collective described, and I thought it was really useful. They describe our time as a massively polluted psychological environment, and it makes sense to think about it that way. We have mechanisms for discourse in society, and those mechanisms are deliberately sabotaged by lobbying, advertising, sock-puppeting, the destruction of debate, and the destruction of the human ability to think properly is very widespread in our societies. There's no more proper discourse, there's no proper facts, and there's trends that counter sort of any scientific thinking or enlightenment, anti-vaccination, anti-science, anti-fact. There's a lot of thinking that rejects a common truth or rejects a common reality that we live in, and tries to find niches, tries to do, tries to retract into something that we can still believe. We need some kind of a rationality movement. We need some kind of a movement to say, look, we can disagree on policy, we can disagree on a lot of things, but let's not disagree on facts. Let's not, and America is of course the capital of what has been described as Bolsheet Mountain as whole universes that are internally consistent, universes of fake facts, of fake realities, of fake, and we need to reject those. Much of science, of the scientific enterprises at this point, is very captured. Economy is basically ran by the large banks, but still that doesn't mean we can reject the practice of science just because it's currently not in the right hands often. Facts are important, and it's important to understand that being angry or unhappy right now for prolonged periods is a recognized medical condition. If you are, if you look at the world and for a year or two years at a time, this world makes you really depressed or angry or unhappy, you can go to the doctor and you can get medication for that. Lots of people, five or 10% of the population in some countries are on antidepressants. These are the people that cannot function. They basically do not want to go to work. Are we not, and this is an open question, are we suppressing a critical mass? Because at some point when there is no other people that don't want to go to work and start a movement or, I don't know, riot in the streets or do whatever it is, whatever else it is that they would be doing if they don't go to work, if you have enough of these people not doing that, then it becomes the right decision for the lonely person that is out there to also take antidepressants. Our community, we have to face this, has a large pool of what I would call non-neuronormative people. There are lots of people in our community that are on the artistic spectrum, that are bipolar, there's lots of people that are not the standard norm when it comes to their neurology. What does that mean? What does this mean in practice? Hasn't it always been the artists, the slightly crazy people, the slightly non-normative people that have seen things coming first, that have warned about things first? These are things we need to think about. Another thing that we need to take care about in our community is just because your paranoid doesn't mean that they are not out to get you, holds more truth than ever. Because we have now in our myth, in our middle, quite a number of people who are actually harassed by the government. So if you look at the people from Occupy and the U.S., basically the refugee waves that are coming in from the U.S., the political refugees that are coming from there, they're coming also from Hungary and Poland. People who have really been oppressed and really experienced a lot of harassment from the hands of their governments. And so we need to be also clear that the more crypto that we use, the better our technical security systems get, the more classic the intelligence agencies will get as well. That means more informants. And so we need to figure out ways to sort the needlessly paranoid and slightly crazy people from the people who really have a problem with suppression and being followed around. So informants are tools of power. We need to talk about the power structures that are using them. So if you look at the larger picture, we have basically three major models of society that we have on this planet today. It's more the U.S. Ayn Rand ultra-individualistic surveillance state system that says that everything that you can do for yourself is good for you and the state. So where's everybody else? So stuff stays within the prescribed limits. Then we have the Chinese model of the harmonic society that essentially says, you know, when we can keep this 100,000 people happy, it's okay if we need to kill these 1,000 people. And it's, yeah, another way of saying ultra-terroristic usage of power is justified. And then we have the European model that is more on the traditional of enlightenment, of individualism, of balancing out state power and economic power. But none of these models is really superior against the other because all of them are deeply corrupt. So all of them have been corrupted by various interests. And if we cannot solve the corruption of the political process, then all these models kind of converge. So it doesn't really matter anymore if you're living under a Chinese surveillance state or a US surveillance state. Maybe you can watch better pornography in one than in the other, but that's about probably it. And so, and if we cannot get this corruption out of the systems regardless on what systems we live, then the problems will not go away. And we should understand that surveillance, ubiquitous surveillance means that we have less and less small-scale corruption. So basically small briberies to get your passport faster or to get the building permit done. But surveillance means that the corruption needs to be large-scale. That's the billions, not the hundreds of dollars or euros that we're talking about. It means the surveillance state means that larger and larger interests are at play and that these are the ones that are dominating the state and these are harder and harder to fight. So fighting a small corruption of a corrupt official in your hometown is doable. Fighting a large, multi-billion-dollar weapons manufacturer is becoming slightly more complicated. So we have tried to visualize the situation somewhat. So we have this graph where we have on one axis liberty, democracy, civilization. On the other, we have time. And we... Don't kill yourself just yet. There's more positive messages up there. So what we don't know is how long will it be till rock bottom. We don't know what will be coming later. So if it will go down further, it will go up at some point. And we also don't know how deep the valley will be. So what I'm pretty sure is that stuff will not be really rosy for a while. So if you look at the tendencies in the world that we have briefly discussed now, it's not really possible to say, okay, revolution next week, things will be good again. So this will be just a lie. So we need to understand that the next decades will be more grayish than beautiful in the sense. So there will be lots of work. But that doesn't mean that they cannot be good fulfilling decades for us. So it doesn't mean that we need to be depressed about it. It's just the world that we live in. And the world we live in, we can change to a certain extent, but not by wishful thinking. Yeah. So let's look at a few trends. Terrorism is now the main reason why we need to be discarding basic civil rights. But I remember being a child in the 1970s and my parents tuning into the morning broadcast to hear whether the hostages in the train or the hostages in the school in Holland, there was a conflict with Molokans wanting their own state and they took hostages and they were threatening to shoot them. Conflicts lasted for weeks. Many more people died of terrorism in Europe in the 1960s and 70s than they did in the 80s, 90s and onward. But nobody spoke about discarding basic civil rights. Why? Because it was simply too expensive. I think we can say that now. Because in that time it was seen as ridiculous for the East German state to want to know who sent mail to who or to open all these envelopes. That was seen as typical things that only a police state would ever contemplate on doing. All of these things are being implemented now. And why? Because it's cheap enough. This was all cost-driven, not danger-driven. And we can see long-term strategies. We can see strategies that span decades. The treaties, the internationally harmonized legislation, ACTA, CISA, cybercrime treaties, TTIP, whatnot, whatnot, et cetera, et cetera. They used to cement the economic status quo or they used to increase surveillance and repression. And it's like they figured out the strategy. There's now a treaty train leaving every year or two years and it's to wear down the activists. Everything that the activists managed to get off the train is just put on the next train. See if you can mobilize the same things, the same level of activism two years later. How often do we need to mobilize the same fight to fight the same damn unconstitutional laws? There's very necessary activism that is always has this act now to stop this evil law from coming into effect. It's very important. It needs to happen. But it may not be enough. We don't have ready-to-go answers maybe. There's a few ideas we have and other people have. But we need clever and funny strategies because I'm often called a pessimist and oh my God, it's all doom and gloom. But a lot of what's going on in the world right now is actually very funny. It's funny in a very dark way. It's a very dark humor. But you cannot look at this world and go, oh my God, it's so stereotypical. And we have to make people see this. We have to be the clowns. We have to make people see this. If the Interior Minister says, well, parts of my answer would make the population insecure, that deserves roaring laughter from the entire population because it's the only thing that will work. But what we also need is we need to dare to dream ahead. There's a lot of strategies and activism are incremental, meaning we are here. We want to go there. So let's chop this up into 10 little pieces and then start working on the first two. Whereas in reality we are not here because there's so much chaos going on. There's so many events happening that we are actually all over the place all the time. So we need to build strategies that assume that we are not in the place where we are today, but we assume we are somewhere completely different. And sometimes we win. We have very few strategies for when people we like or people whose ideas we agree with actually get to power. Do we know what laws we would like to be? Have repealed what new laws we like to have passed? Have we maybe taken the time to write these laws already, even though they're ridiculous today? Is there an anti-patriot act? Is there... We've tried to work on a few of these things. I've been personally a part of thinking about IME, the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative. That was an idea. Can we create a system of laws to protect publications anywhere from whistleblower protection, protection of journalists, protection of publications? So can we make a system of laws and can we figure out how they would all work together to protect publications in one country and then through a sort of spreading effect make that go to other countries? We need to dare to think ahead and to not just always react and always be driven into this little corner which we have to fight our way out of. In many countries, discontent with the powers that be with the way things are is growing. In some countries that leads to left-wing movements growing or even getting to power. There's things going on in Portugal, in Spain, in the UK where Corbyn is now leading the Labour Party. In other countries and powers, those that challenge the status quo or say they challenge the status quo with even more fear and anti-immigrant sentiments and policies. In the US, interestingly, we see both trends happening but in an increasingly bizarre corporate media landscape. So there's all these things happening. Yes, one of the things that changed in the last ten years suddenly is stuff can change very, very quickly. So stuff, situations, reality can change very, very fast. For instance, let's look at the refugee situation. Just a year or two ago, what has been happening in Europe in the last months have been totally unimaginable. And there is no security in the rest of the herds still grazing. So if you see stuff is nice and well over here in Germany which is becoming more and more of an exception in the surrounding countries, then that doesn't mean that stuff cannot change here very quickly. And this is something that we need to get adjusted to that the stability is gone. So the stability, the dampness of the system are all gone. And that means that these sudden turns of events can also make oppressive regimes like in Poland or in Hungary or commonly seen in France more powerful. So we cannot guarantee that change is positive in every way. So if you look at the increased pressures on the population, we see that the problems that are multiplying from automation on one hand, on the other hand, more and more people not having their talents valued by the market, by the job market anymore. And the pressures that are now coming in with the refugees will make right-wing powers probably more powerful. And the question is in this fight for power in the Western countries that will be becoming more pronounced political fights. How do we position ourselves? How does the hacking community position itself in these fights? So will we engage, will we fight? What is the means and the goals that we are aiming for? And the world today is uniquely connected and complicated. So any solutions are going to be complex. That means we need a generation of activists that is post-depression about the situation and that doesn't have any fear of complexity. So complexity is the new norm. It's not like things or simple solutions will be around the corner anymore. This time has gone forever. So we did this talk in 2005 and it was, in many ways, it was taboo. All of Congress was depressed for a while where at least people were walking around with gloomy faces. And there was then, and there still is today, a myth in the progressive community that a story must have a happy end if you want to get large groups of people to come together and fight to make change. You have to present a happy end. And this is bullshit. The problem with that message is that you create a disconnect between the reality that people can see, a reality where outcomes are gradually getting worse in some fields, and the world that they are told to believe in. Everybody is hiring PR professionals and PR professionals. Their job is to keep everybody consuming. So their job is to present happy outcomes. Their job is to keep people to spend their money. And so we tend to believe these people when they say, well, you must have a happy outcome. Let's tell people that if they don't buy the right light bulbs and don't get their electricity from the right provider and buy a Prius, then they are themselves responsible for any bad outcomes that happen. So shame everybody into believing that the bad outcome is actually them. That's a frame that we should reject. We've been warning progressive people that have seen things coming about what's going on right now since the 1970s. The coming of the police state, the fact that planetary resources are limited. That's limited to growth. That's 1972. I was four years old. So let's not fall for this kind of messaging. Yeah, the question is then what is our mission? So what is the stuff that we should aim for? And one thing that we should be very clear about is this planet is a crime scene. And this also means that the thing to say to the people responsible is so for decades we have made it very clear that we don't want to live in a 1984 environmentally degraded police state. We saw it common, but you went there anyway because it was short and profitable and your corporate friends were very well-off with that. So please now step aside, place your hands where we can see them and we will read you your rights while we try to mitigate the shit that you caused as best as we can. So the forces that made the world as it is today are not natural laws. It's not like this greed and this corruption is the native state of humanity. It is just what people made it to be. And so the people who did it are nameable. So we know that the fossil fuel industry knew since the 70s and 80s that they were basically causing planetary collapse, that they were causing the climate to go down for their corporate profits. And that also means that we need to preserve the evidence. So we may not be yet in the position that we can cause prosecution of these people, but this time will certainly come, hopefully before our children are too old for that. And so we don't need to really fight their silly PR efforts to still preserve their profits. So what we need to do is collect the evidence and let them know that we collect the evidence and that we use it sometime. So in the 80s, we thought that all change is good. So because the world was kind of frozen in place, so that especially in our fields in technology and telecommunications, we thought that all change is good. But now we need to remind ourselves that not all change is bad. So because when we are in a world that we think that may not be getting much better soonish, the sudden impulse would be to really revert to conservatism saying we try to cling to the status quo and not try to have too much change, but this would be wrong because change can also be for the better. So the absence of stability is the new norm. We need to live with that and we need to work for making positive change because change itself can no longer be averted. We need to define missions for ourselves and argue for them to be worthwhile personally as well as in the bigger picture. Picture a world where some outcomes may be negative or things may be getting worse, but you can do meaningful stuff in the life-saving, democracy-rescuing, world-changing sense of the world. Of the word, no fake utopian outcomes, no lies to tell people, but still very positive at the personal level for each and every one of us. A sense of belonging to a community like the one we have but other communities as well is going to become more important. In difficult times, people will come together. There's great happiness and a sense of purpose to be found in caring for your friends, sharing knowledge and experience, especially if things get a little bit hairy. And even if we end up in a bad possible future, if things degrade, if infrastructure starts to fail, even if that happens, the hacker mindset is, I've said this before, there's a post-apocalyptically appropriate way of thinking. Wouldn't you run to your hackerspace if things really went wrong? If the world went down in chaos, I would really want it to happen somewhere at the end of December because you all would be the people I would want to be around. I would like to think of this community as having a role when things go wrong. And many of us have taken on these roles. I was traveling to some of the Eastern European countries, to Serbia, to Croatia, to see some of the refugee situations with my own eyes. And I think many more of us need to be there. There can't be just one guy from Zagreb running around with wireless modems to try to connect all the people that are trying to help there and try to disseminate information. Many more of us need to be in these situations. And so we have been following the strategy of enlarging our culture, our culture, the hacking culture over the last many years. You probably noticed that from, I don't know, if you look back at the Ejlstadter Burger Haus, the Congress was still looking a bit drab, whereas now we have artists and people from the various cultural domains as an integrated part of our community, of our culture. And this is essentially what we need to do. So if you look back at the last 10 years, the stuff that was made working is the alliance between the hackers, the journalists, investigative journalists, and the artists. So this is something that is working now. This is a big achievement. So where we can say, okay, this is something where we managed to grow our culture. So growing from a couple hundred people in some old community building in Hamburg, now we're having 12,000 people and could be 15,000 if this house would house us. This is in big change. And this is also something that we can be proud of. So if we want to form further alliances, so we need to, in order to succeed, we need to actively stop the trend that people are choosing minor, big-ring fights, that they are more interested in fighting the heretics in their own ranks and the people who are not using the words that they like or that are finding different stuff important. So we are also having more or less the same goals. This is basically what makes us a culture, is that we're having the same ideas about the general structure of society or what should be the same ideas how people should interact and the rights of the individual. And we should actively try to stop fighting each other. So we are not each other's enemy. So the enemy is something different. So we have seen quite a number of people who tried to find the heretics as their main goal in life, as their enemy in life and ended up in finding no real purpose anymore because when they solved this one problem, they still ended up having not solved the bigger problem. And we have seen the same thing happening for more and more smaller issues, like animal rights, people finding out, okay, so environment people not finding solutions that they can really bring forward because the problems are bigger than their individual and smaller problems that they're trying to fight. So we need to look at the bigger picture. And this is essentially the problem that we need to solve as a community, as a culture to keep focused on the bigger picture and not trying to fight our little wars among each other. What editor is the best? What Linux distribution is the best? What programming language is the best? What way of gendering is the best? So these are meaningless fights. This is nothing worth spending your energy on. So we need to be aware that there are money aspects and socioeconomic tensions within our culture. Things are different than they were 20, 30 years ago because the economy of our subculture has changed because our community is much wider and broader. Many younger people do not have the kind of stability that many of the now older people in this crowd have. Hardware and software hackers that have established themselves usually do not have a problem making a living in today's project-oriented job economy. But many who came to our cultural space in the last years are designers, they're artists, they're from other adjacent fields. They're living more and more precariously because their competition in their fields is much more fierce. We need to take care of this at least where we can to keep our community economically accessible. That means we encourage various forms of economic cooperation to make sources of income more widely accessible. Hacker spaces are not just the new universities, they're also the new co-ops. That means solidarity between people of different skill sets and talents and we need to grow the economic footprint of this community, apply more of our thinking and our skills to problems outside of the core field of IT, agriculture, energy, transportation. In essence, let there not be an interesting field out there that does not have a hacker space dedicated to it. Yes, so in closing, we are headed for some very rough times. That's uneniable, but it doesn't mean that we cannot have a lot of fun in that. So we know the surf is good when the waves are getting bigger. And sometimes in many places just keeping the ideas of political freedom alive is a political act. So basically our mission is to keep the torch burning. So to keep the ideas of freedom of individual rights of a society that's transparent and just alive. And our community is uniquely positioned to do that. We can build the tools to make the activists and political activists capable of still affecting change. We are the ones who can develop new forms of communications. If you look at this podcast universe, for instance, that was essentially created in our community and that is reaching many more people now with political education than common forms have been before. Or if you look at just the open source movements that are more as running our planet now. So we are the people who are responsible to a large extent for affecting a better outcome. And this is something that we need to take responsibility for. So in closing, really, no, there will probably not be a revolution magically manifesting itself next Friday. Probably also no zombie apocalypse. But still, we need to be ready for rapid and sizable changes of all sorts of kinds. And the only way to be effective in this and probably thus our mission as a community is to play for the long term, develop a culture that is more fun and more attractive to more people, develop infrastructure and turn around and offer that infrastructure to people that need it. This is not a thing we do as a hobby so much anymore. It's also something we do for people that need this infrastructure. Create a culture that's capable of putting up a fight that gives its inhabitants a sense of purpose, self-worth, usefulness, and enlarge that culture over time until it becomes a viable alternative to the status quo. I guess that was it. Thank you. Thank you.