 Welcome, everybody, to our next talk. It's community. Our speaker today is Mitch Altman. I'm pretty sure I don't have to introduce him to you. Just two of his many achievements. He's one of the co-founders of Noisebridge, a hacker space in San Francisco. And he's also the inventor of the TV begun, the advice that can switch off TVs everywhere. So he just said, I turn off TVs for a living, which is awesome. Also, I don't know how many of you have watched or read Game of Thrones, but I always think of Mitch as the three-eyed raven, so a guy who has been sitting in a tree, just being super wise. And he has always been there. And he's teaching people who come along. So that's basically Mitch for me. Yeah, so I hope you will enjoy the talk. He's going to talk about his experiences in the community. And he hopes to inspire people. So please give a warm round of applause to Mitch. Hey, thanks, everyone, for being here so early in the morning. I didn't know I was going to give this talk until a couple of days ago, really. And I put together a bunch of slides that I've been giving talks on for the last couple of years, mainly the last year, as I travel around. I can talk about a whole bunch of different things. I just came back from China a month and a half ago. And there I gave basically the same talk about, I don't know, 25 times to all these government officials in China who keep inviting me to come and talk about hackerspaces of all things. So I could talk about some of that. I could talk more about hackerspaces. I could talk about a whole bunch of things. I don't know what people think. Should I just rant? OK, so anyways, this is my contact information. It's real. Please contact me if you think I can help you in any way. You know, running a small business, I've done that. I've made a lot of stupid mistakes. And I can help you avoid those same stupid mistakes so you can make your stupid mistakes. If you're depressed, I've been there. Whatever, please contact me if you think I can help. I love helping people anyway I can. You can find me on the internet if you don't want to get that. I'm not really into conventional wisdom myself. Conventional wisdom. Certainly, we can learn from the experiences of others. But if we're going to do anything really cool in our lives, we've got to quite often think of things and do things in our own way. So a lot of the stuff I'm going to say is probably going to be, well, anyways, it's just my opinions. I don't want to tell anyone what to do and what not to do. But I hope you can take what I say and just think about it and come up with your own ways of doing things. And since you're a captive audience, I always like showing this slide and talking about the importance of having a way of making, getting the resources you need to live your life the way you want to live it. It's really, really, really important to do all of that in a way that feels personally meaningful for you. So many of us, probably even here in this room, need money in order to get food and shelter. As absurd as that is, we do need some money. That's only one resource, though. If we focus on that one resource, it's to the detriment of so many others. What are we willing to do to get those resources? So you can have some job that you don't even like just to get enough money so you can come home exhausted so that you can fall asleep, groggily, wake up, take a bunch of caffeine so you can wake up to go back to work in the morning for a job you don't even like. You can do that. You can do other things, too. Maybe you can have a job you hate. A lot of people seem to choose that. I happen to turn TVs off for a living and I love my job. So I want to say a bit about that and just use that as encouragement to all of you if you're not doing so already to explore. Take time to explore and find ways that maybe you can create projects that you love that other people might love, that they might pay you to do it. At the best, capitalism has that to offer. There's other problems with capitalism, as we all know, but that is a possibility. You might be able to make a living doing what you love rather than something stupid that puts you out of commission. And I think with the world, the way it is right now, we all have to play our part and that's always been true but with the recent events and the world's political scenes, that just really points that out. So I do live a life that I really love but as many people here know, I didn't start off that way. I grew up being totally depressed. I was brutally bullied in school, targeted for being gay, for being an introverted geek, for being bad at sports, not caring who wins in games, for being weird, for being intellectual and in my country, being smart is kind of a detriment. So life was total hell. Teachers actually watched as the bullies beat me up. And life was really hell. My parents were clueless. So when I got home, I tried to escape all of my pain by watching TV because there it was. We had a TV, we had more than one TV and I watched it a lot and kids on TV, unlike me, who were beautiful and had loving parents, understanding friends, problems that were solved by the end of the show. And it was totally depressing to me because I would compare myself to all of that and that made me just wanna watch the next show to get rid of my pain even more and I would just sit there getting more and more and healthy, not doing anything, not learning how to deal with other kids, not doing anything useful and time would just go away and it would just make me more of a target when I went back to school only to wanna escape my pain even more when I got back home and that's called addiction and I am still a TV addict. There are so many ways that we can use to avoid ourselves and our lives. There are so many distractions, many of them socially sanctioned, considered socially desirable even, like working too much or drinking too many substances or eating too many substances or whatever. We can use anything as a distraction. All these things have things to offer as well. You know, it was a long road for me to actually learn to live a life I love living and I don't really have the time to talk about all that now. If you're interested in some of that story, you can look at 28C3 on the Geeks and Depression Panel that I organized at the end of Lightning Talks with the help of Nick Farr a few years ago. But if you wanna talk about that ever, just grab me or email me or call me. I'm happy to share all that. But I eventually did learn being a geek to become really good at geeky stuff and I spent a lot of time helping little companies with their project problems and I got paid really well for that, able to make enough money in a few weeks to a few months to live the rest of the year without working and I would use that other time for all sorts of cool things. But after 10, 15 years actually of doing that, I got kinda tired of doing projects for other people. Not so much because it was for other people but because they were projects that weren't ones that excited me. Even though I did a bunch of really cool projects, they weren't really ones that excited me. They had all of these pluses and minuses. Everything has pluses and minuses, right? So the minuses seemed to outweigh the pluses for me. Even though I helped create virtual reality and I think I put a slide, I was doing my slides at 2.30 in the morning so they might be kinda out of order. We'll see. Anyways, I might have a slide about VR later. I helped develop VR in the mid-1980s. Of course, there's a lot of hype about VR right now. It's gonna be the next big thing and I don't like the next big things. I don't know about you but I knew back in the 1980s that it was gonna be used to market at us, to make us wanna buy things we don't even want or need. And of course, that's what's happening right now unless Facebook decides to change the way they do things. I'm not sure why they spent, what was it, $3.1 billion on Oculus Rift? It was probably to make the world a better place. We'll see. Anyways, after doing all this for about 15 years, I decided I really wanted to put all my time and energy into things that I thought were awesome. I didn't wanna spend so much of my time and energy working on other people's projects that I just thought were okay at best only to be exhausted and have about two months of recovery to figure out how to live my life again after the project would end. So I did an experiment on myself. I saved up a year of money. I was lucky enough to be able to do that and I set aside that year as a year that I would only do what I love doing. It was kinda scary though because we're all trained to think that money's really important and in many ways it is. How would I make money again? If I kept turning down work that came my way simply because I didn't love it, would anyone hire me again? I didn't know. But I did have some kind of notion that there must be some way of doing stuff that I find really meaningful, stuff that I love doing and then getting enough of what I need to keep doing what I love. I thought that would somehow be possible but I didn't know what that would be. I knew a bunch of stuff that I loved like volunteer work and I knew that there were a bunch of projects that I really wanted to play with that I didn't really play with for a number of years because when I was working in electronics I rarely felt like coming home and playing with electronics. So all that energy kinda like just was on hold. But now I had time and I started working on projects that I really loved that I was thinking about for years. One of the projects became the Brain Machine which some of you may have seen and you can try it at the hardware hacking area. I got one with me and it's a popular project. But the one that really got on a roll was TV Be Gone. For so many years TV had had control over my life. Part of living, learning to live a life I really love was quitting television. I went cold turkey in 1980 and I had a lot of time to do other things like become really good at geeky stuff which made me a living for the next 15 years. But still back then this was 2003 when I did this experiment. TVs were starting to pop up everywhere in public places. It's way worse now. But in 2003 it was terrible as far as I was concerned. And this thing that had had power over me I could get rid of it from my apartment but now it was popping up everywhere in public and I didn't want to just sit in my apartment just to be away from TVs. I couldn't do anything about those TVs in public places but I could and did figure out a way to turn them all off. So I did. And it took me pretty much all of that year to make that happen. Conceptually it's pretty easy. I mean what could be easier? I mean in off code it's just blinking an infrared LED. It's invisible light. But still it's just blinking an LED. And you do a little bit different for Sony and Panasonic and all that. But whatever it's a microcontroller blinking an LED. What could be easier? Well it turned out they don't publish the codes. So it took me a year to figure out all of the ways that these codes work and to record them all from universal remote controls. Get rid of the duplicates. It required making my own logic analyzer because back in 2003 that cost $10,000 minimum and I didn't have that. And all this software I had to write in order to characterize all of the data that I had and it was a lot of data. And get rid of the duplicate and near duplicate codes because an off code is the same as an on code. And then turn a TV off if another code comes along and turns it on. Well that wouldn't be okay would it? So anyways it took me a year. That's okay. I was obsessed. Once I started turning off any TV I wanted to turn off all of them and after a year I was doing that and I was doing it because I loved it. And I still do love it. And I really didn't think it was gonna make me money. I was just doing it because I loved it and there were a bunch of friends helping me and they were helping me because they thought it was really exciting too. They wanted one as well. So everyone who helped me after I got it working I made one for them. And it did work. After a year I was going around San Francisco where I lived turning TVs off everywhere. I went and it was really fun. And my friends were doing it as well and they had a lot of fun and their friends saw what they were doing and they wanted one and I couldn't make one for everyone so I decided to have some manufactured. But when it turned out that the friends of my friends friends also wanted them that's when I thought maybe this actually is an opportunity as bizarre as it might be. I mean the conventional wisdom would definitely not say to start a business about something as bizarre as this but I'm not conventional. So I took a gamble and I put all the money I had into buying as many as I could afford not just a few hundred but I bought 20,000. And I thought maybe it would take oh I don't know five years whatever but I knew I could at least sell 5,000 that's what I calculated I would have to sell in order to break even. And if I broke even that would be great because even if it took five years whatever in five years there'd be 5,000 people turning TVs off all over the world and I thought that'd be really cool. It's kind of bizarre because we live in a world where people just automatically go in a room and they turn a TV on if it's not on already. I just don't get it I want to turn them off but if I could help other people turn them off I thought that'd be cool. But it turned out I was totally wrong I did not sell 5,000 in five years. I sold 20,000 in three weeks. And I had to order more and it was really stressful but all of my friends who were helping it turned out almost all of them were in a place in their life they could quit jobs that they didn't like and helped me and we formed a company and it's been making a living for all 12 of us for the last 12 years. It's kind of awesome doing something we really love. But you know at that moment the first day of sales was because of a Wired.com article because of someone I volunteered with at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition and he was in journalism school and he did a final project and he's like oh well let me interview about this it'll be like 15 minutes. But it turned out we spent all night that we met going around San Francisco turning TVs off and he would go up to people and say he turned off the TV what do you think about that? And so it turned out in a really good article that got into Wired.com and evidently people pay attention to Wired.com because that morning the first day of sales was determined by that Wired.com article which was Tuesday at two in the morning on October 19th and I know that date because it changed my life forever. That article because people were just waiting for my website to go live. Me and my friend Chris were getting it ready so I could accept credit cards for the few strange people that might wanna buy this thing but at five in the morning when we finally finished we started getting orders immediately after making the website go live. I mean what were people doing? Were they just hitting the F5 key waiting for the live soon screen to go away and yeah that's what was happening. So anyways NPR, National Public Radio in the United States called me and I was up all night I don't even know what I said and I guess I did okay because immediately after that the New York Times called me and then People Fucking Magazine calls me and Fox TV they called me and the next day I'm on Fox TV live on their morning show with I don't know how many tens of millions of people who maybe I don't even like watching me live as I'm turning off TVs in their studio. Oh I'm obscured by mics. Okay so I guess people are watching out there. Hi everybody so yeah anyways because of all that I was invited to give public talks and talking into a camera is one thing but talking before a whole bunch of people who can see you drooled. I mean that's I'm an introverted geek I mean what am I doing talking before all of you but it turns out I like it and I guess I did okay and anyways this has been changing my life continually in unexpected ways ever since and I have a few slides for that but I do wanna point out I succeeded in my quest for what I call success and it's an ongoing process as long as I'm alive but this is my definition of success if you can make time to explore and do what you love doing you might find things and I think you will find things you really really love you have to make time for it though which is the hard part and if you find something you really love chances are other people will too and with the right people maybe coming together to make it available for others others might pay you to do that and you can get enough of what you need doing what you love to keep doing what you love. It's possible no guarantees it's guaranteed that it won't happen if you don't try so anyways that's up to you but because the TV be gone I met some totally weird wonderful person named Lamora Freed who calls herself Lady Aida and she's after a few years later she started Aida Fruit which is a huge open hardware company that does lots of amazingly cool stuff for the open hardware community and because of her she's friends with the editor of Make Magazine which I never even heard of they've been around for a year at this point they said hey we're gonna be in San Francisco why don't you come to the Maker Faire and I'm like what the hell's the Maker Faire and I looked it up online and it's like why didn't I know about this so it's a whole bunch of people who come together to show off what they create what they make and share it with other people so I went and I was like amazed I was like there's a whole group of introverted geeks sharing their projects of all sorts and I thought that was wonderful of course no one was making anything there oh actually I thought it was weird it's a Maker Faire so I thought gee I love this maybe the next time I go I'll actually teach people how to solder which is something I love and that grew from a few soldering irons to teaching 3,500 people how to solder in two days and I put a lot of my life into Maker Faire I also started writing for Make Magazine and that's the first time I published The Brain Machine which is a really weird project that helps people meditate and along the way you hallucinate colors and patterns and it turns out people like hallucinating so it became a popular project and yeah I wanted to use that as a way to share the benefits of meditation which is another one of the things that was important for me to learn to live a life I love and not just be a depressed blob so if other people could benefit from that I thought it would be cool and it also I wanted people to try making something that even if they've never made anything because it was intriguing enough it worked on all these things but going to Maker Faire I met someone who connected me with someone named Bernie S who's part of 2600 and he called me up and ordered a bunch of TV beyonds for his friends and he said you should come to this thing called a hacker conference and I'm like what the hell's that? I've heard of 2600 I was into phone freaking when I was in middle school but I didn't really know about hacker conferences and I went and my first one was hope six and that totally changed my life forever in another way and this was thousands of the most coolest geeks I ever imagined all in one huge hotel in the middle of New York City and I loved it I totally loved it and I've been part of doing hacker stuff ever since and I didn't know it but I'd been hacking all my life and in fact going from a depressed blob of a kid to someone who loves living my life that was a life hack because that's hacking and we can hack ourselves and at that conference there were some people one in particular who was helping organize and well a bunch of people told me about these things here in Germany at the time in Berlin and the Chaos Computer Club and they said if you love this you'll really love those so my first one was 23 C3 and it's now buried in these somewhere there it is what's left of it so yeah and again there was hardly anything being made there so I set up some soldering irons and that grew into the hardware hacking area and I set that up at my next hacker conference which was this one and not only were there thousands of geeks sharing and people all of whom I wanted to actually have a conversation with all even though we're all introverted it was just so wonderful and of course there was lasers and LEDs and a rocket ship and of the hundreds of talks there were people talking about hacker spaces calling it the hacker space design patterns which was a talk and yeah I thought gee you know hacker conferences end these things are wonderful but they always end and they have to like somehow adjust back into life in what most people call the real world but which seems to me to be some kind of ethereal weird thing to decide now but if I could start a hacker space in my hometown it doesn't have to end we could be doing this stuff all year round coming together in community supporting each other exploring what we love trying things doing things encouraging people to be the best we can be and so I started noise bridge with some friends a bunch of us getting together made this amazingly cool space happen we've been through lots of problems but we've overcome all of them and we continue to do that community is definitely hard work but it's so worth it we need community in our lives we need community in our lives we don't need it to survive but we need it to feel that our lives are way worthwhile we absolutely need this and we don't have enough of it in our lives and this resonates with so many of us I mean that's why we're here right right here in this room and you could see me on the video and it's cool that these technologies exist but it's so much cool to be here all together living and breathing together well back at chaos camp 2007 there were people who went off and formed NYC resistor and hack DC and other hacker spaces and these were highly influential along with hacker spaces in Germany that already existed all of us helping each other to create our spaces they became influential in starting lots of hacker spaces within a year there were a hundred more within a year after that there were 500 more and then there were a thousand more and it's been growing pretty much exponentially ever since we started hacker spaces.org the year after that here's a map from there showing many of the hacker spaces on any continents are actually kind of obliterated by pins there this stuff's happening that's actually an old map because China is now obliterated with hacker spaces and I'll talk a bit about that if I have time too so yeah starting off kind of small I mean teaching people to solder I've been teaching people to solder every Monday at Noisbridge every Monday since 2007 and now that I travel so much someone else named Jay at Noisbridge who's totally awesome has been doing that for the last couple of years so the tradition continues and it became one of our most popular things people love doing this stuff and it kind of grows is my favorite picture from teaching 50 people at one side of solder that was at 30 C3 here three years ago and yeah look I mean they're just learning to solder I mean it's no big deal but look they're happy that's the kind of thing that happens when people just come together to try something they think they might like and you know to build confidence even though if someone may never solder ever again they have the confidence to know they can do something they didn't even think they could do so yeah this stuff's fun and I've been going around the world giving talks and workshops big talks, little talks huge LED screens and crazy stuff it's just great going around the world teaching people what they want to learn and sharing hopefully inspiring them to do whatever it is they think is cool in their lives and whatever just a few pictures here's a talk for a whole bunch of government bureaucrats in Hangzhou, China from a couple months ago and here's one in Rio, this was a lot cooler they say have more LEDs in Rio de Janeiro from last month and back in a few years ago when I was still doing Maker Fairs that grew really big and it was just tons of fun putting a lot of time into that helping lots of people of all ages and 2011 they gave me this honor which it still like makes me emotional and if you want to see a video of me crying you can see a video even still on the Make website of me accepting this award, 3D printed parts I got I received the first and it turns out the last Mitch Altman Maker Hero award they named it after me and it's like it's just a recognition for doing what I love and yeah it was great and then at the end of this at the New York Maker Faire there was a thank you dinner for everyone who helped and they talked about all these great things thanking everyone for this and that and then we got this $10 million grant for putting hacker spaces in a thousand high schools in the United States and it's really really cool and then he's going on and saying oh and by the way it was a grant from DARPA which is an arm of the US military and I felt like I was kicked in the stomach because every single place I ever worked in my entire life without exception until TV began the military came and wanted to take what we were doing and every single time the people who ran the company said yes because it would make them a lot of money and I quit every single time and I didn't want to quit Maker Faire I never imagined that the military would come and want to take that but of course they do they want the magic created by what we're doing and after struggling with it for a while I knew I would feel terrible quitting helping making a fare but I would feel way more terrible helping the US military hurt and kill and spy and maim and doing all the things that they do and I already helped them enough by paying my fucking taxes and it still makes me really sad to think about this and of course angry but that gave me a lot more time to do a lot of other things by not doing that which took a lot of time which I love but it turned out because of that I was invited to give a talk at TEDx Brussels which is a really huge TEDx events 2200 people and I gave a talk about Hacker Spaces which I'm just so gratified actually helped start Hacker Spaces around the world more Hacker Spaces and also every year I've been manufacturing TVB gone in China choosing a place that treats their people well pays them well, treats the environment well and has safety standards that are adhered to there are a lot of places like that in China of course there are a lot more places that aren't like that but I've been going every year because it's really important to be with people and keep the physical communication happening and not just over the internet so after Bunny Huang organized a trip showing people manufacturing and Shenzhen and the electronics markets there I thought it'd be really cool to bring people from noise bridge over there and show what it's like and that started what I call Hacker Trips to China so I've been organizing a group of people going to China and showing all the pluses and minuses there and having a lot of fun and going visiting I mean it's fun going in a bunny suit might not be fun doing it every day but doing it once a year is really fun and it grew really big and this is actually in the Beijing airport thought that was wonderful and I've been working with this guy as a professor at Tsinghua University it's considered one of the best universities in China and if I have time I can talk a bit about that and as we're going around we get invited to give talks and the more I give talks about Hacker Spaces in China the more I'm invited to give more talks and I talk about it in ways it's helpful for, you know, talking to bureaucrats you talk bureaucrats speak so the benefits of a Hacker Space are its educational benefits and as well as its local economic benefits to kickstart depressed areas and I give talks I grew from little teeny like in a university to huge talks at universities to this at the Panasonic Center and it's like huge I mean that poster behind me there that they had a huge one it's like hey we invited a white guy he's gonna talk about Hacker Spaces and all these people show up and all these other people start doing it as well and Hacker Spaces are starting all over China I have a few photos next but it filters up all the way to the very top of government pushing this stuff and here is Premier Li that's supposedly the head of state of China last year going to visit Chihua Hacker Space and saying this is the future of China Hacker Spaces can you imagine? The future of China he said so and then all the bureaucrats everywhere in China think they have to start a Hacker Space so the US not wanting to be left too far behind so and oddly enough this guy Joey he's amazingly brilliant and wonderful he now lives in Shenzhen China and works at this Hacker Space so anyways Hacker Spaces they're awesome but Hacker Spaces the main thing about them is community it really is about community so many cool things come from it but the main thing is community people self-organizing to create the community that really works for them and it's really fun I mean whether it's soldering or doing mechanical things it doesn't matter people coming together to do what they think they might like encouraging each other exploring feeling like they're part of each person is part of something bigger and wonderful and it's all about hacking and there's many definitions of hacking but mine is seeing the world full of resources the world is full of resources money's one of them but there's so many resources and we can use them all any way we want anyway we don't have to use them in the way that they were intended by the people who created those resources we can use them any way we want we can see what works what doesn't improve our projects with them those projects can be pretty much anything and then we share it and overall we do it because it's really wonderful it's really a way of looking at things a way of being and here's a slide from my bureaucratic talks our talk for bureaucrats they are totally into entrepreneurship they want to create the next Silicon Valley it's not going to happen but anyways to be a hacker you don't have to be an entrepreneur to be an entrepreneur you don't have to be a hacker but if you're going to be an entrepreneur who's any good you do have to be a hacker you definitely need to start with a creative mindset and grow something that's personally meaningful that'll be meaningful to other people so that they'll pay you to do it otherwise what's the point so and of course anything can be hacked this is what most people think of electronics, computers, whatever but technology is just tools you know there's all sorts of tools for art and craft and art and craft is totally the hackers doing that that's the hacker mindset same with science you don't do science expecting a certain result you do science with a hypothesis to see what'll happen and then learn from it and then make more hypothesis and grow from it this is hacking we hack ourselves all the time otherwise we don't become better people we hack our communities we hack the planet we need to hack the planet the planet certainly needs our love and support and growth and improvement we need to hack everything and we can do that so much better with the support of others with others sharing our resources together making ourselves and our communities and our societies and the planet a better place for all of us and we can do that with all these different kinds of tools electronics and fabrication and small hand tools and art and cooking all ages it's not about age little people big people we all have things we can share with other people we all have things we can learn from other people and this is why hacker spaces are such fantastic educational environments and why schools are having hacker spaces as part of their curriculum now I've been giving more and more talks about that as I go around as well and but it's really all about community so but this is where real innovation happens is when you have that creative environment for people are exploring they actually find unique things like drones I mean main thrust of that was in 23c3 the first time that publicly was shown German hackers created four computer fans on a thing that they made with lots of microcontrollers to control it all and it actually flew fucking awesome of course it had lots of LEDs on it too which made it cooler looking but now it's open source and you can buy a little what they call drones instead of microcopters now for fifteen dollars and of course all the people involved with that don't know anything about the technology that went into that it's all open source they just copy it and use it this is how things go and of course there's downsides too that guy I showed you in the White House a little bit ago used it to kill people in Yemen and other places around the world that's because some people think it's okay to do something for the military I don't their people can make their own choices but I know what I think and I'm happy to talk about that if you ever want to as well so yeah so anyways hacker spaces they're cool they've grown from 40 about in 2007 to zillions in the world now because they're so cool and governments are pushing them because they love them they feather in their cap if they're a bureaucrat and they're good for education good for the economy but so many bureaucrats are creating spaces like this it's beautiful it's a nice co-working space maybe if there were people there doing stuff but it's not a hacker space but here's one in China Tsinghua University TGU that I help form here's Xincha Jian in Shanghai Beijing Chaihua this one is mostly for education for little kids this one they have one in a school this one is just way cool community space in Shenzhen I've been helping Tsinghua University with their hacker and residence program they want to have like 10 or so hackers all the time and I want this to spread everywhere and I've been helping people do that this is a silly poster we created for the kickoff of it a couple years ago but yeah there's opportunities out there we have a temporary page on hacker hackerspaces.org full of all these places where you can just go and share what you know and learn from other people and take it somewhere else I want to be able to do this all year round so I'm working on a website called hackerinresidence.org and it's hard to get volunteers to follow through on things I've been trying to make it happen for a couple years but in any case soon hopefully in the next few months that'll be up so you can browse through residency opportunities if you want to but hackerspaces.org also is a place where you can get resources to start your own hacker space and we all help each other even though we're totally different so I could go on but I think I'd rather open it up for Q&A rather than rant more so let me just go to the last slide opportunities for all hacker spaces are awesome so you know that that's really why I do all I do is to help encourage people to explore and do what they might find meaningful to do in their lives we live on a planet where I think a vast majority don't feel their lives are way worthwhile and I don't think that's okay I think that's the cause of pretty much all the problems we face when we have a lot of people in a a society where people feel their lives aren't worthwhile collectively we're all very much easily manipulated and we get people like this to lead our countries but if we come together and share our resources we can do so much we don't have to wait for the government to do cool things for us and in fact if we wait for the government to do cool things for us we're just all going to be dead nothing wrong with being dead but while we're alive we can do cool shit so let's do cool shit well thank you very much Mitch for your inspirational talk we have like 15 minutes left for Q&A so if there's anything you always wanted to ask Mitch do you have now the possibility we have microphones here throughout the room and while we wait for people to gather courage to move the microphones we have one question from the internet that we're going to start with hello there's a question from IRC and the question is can hacker spaces be viewed as a force for democracy and increased transparency in China I hope so there's no way to know I mean the government of China it's been really exciting being going to China every year I go there every year for a month or two since 2003 and I have my own unique perspectives on China they're not necessarily correct but it's been exciting being there and seeing it open up in amazing ways if you get your information about China from mainstream media it's wrong it's absolutely wrong impression of what you get some things are certainly correct I mean it's a huge centralized government and I'm not a fan of those in any form and they do some terrible things I really see it very similar to my own government which I'm not huge fan of either but you know it's home China is a place I go to a lot in some ways it's sort of a home too as is here in Germany mostly in Berlin but for the last 10 years their society from the top down has been encouraged to open up where bureaucrats for the first time ever in two and a half millennia of history there bureaucrats have been encouraged to experiment to try things to help people live lives that they find more worthwhile and there are bureaucrats in high levels talking in that kind of language it's kind of amazing and so from 2003 when I really didn't like going to China at all which was very close to 2011-2012 it's been opening up like crazy and 2013-2014 but then the last two years they've been going in the wrong direction again so hopefully with hacker spaces opening up where people are encouraged to explore and do things that are really interesting some of them some people in some of them will be doing things to make their lives and the lives of those around them much better and we'll see at any moment things could change really quickly in China at any moment things can change really quickly in my country and it seems that when that happens the rest of the world follows and I hope that pattern changes thank you so much next question from this microphone yeah you mentioned 30s 3c and I actually really remember quite well 33c I mean it was the one where all this known stuff went down on us and I really remember quite well what kind of effect it had on me and I think that I'm also kind of more the introverted guy I got also all these feelings of all the people around me and recognize them how yeah kind of depressing the situation was so all these talks and the only thing you could do was or the only thing you could think about was well I'm this one person and there are these huge organizations with a lot of resources and I can't do anything so what I experience with hacker spaces is at least that there you have some kind of yeah protected space where you can get around that feeling and can experience that you can do something but for me I would like to pose a question to you how do you think can we break this cycle of actually seeing ourselves only as this individualist people with this perspective hey there are huge organizations doing crazy things all around us and I'm only this one person alone I can't do anything so how do we break this cycle maybe with stuff you've you've seen all over the world I mean you traveled so many interesting places I'm really envious about that kind of it's it's great and it's great that you share your experiences but maybe you have an idea how we can get out of this situation out of this passiveness which I really experienced and recognized in a massive amount and on 33 C it was the reason I didn't visit the next congress after that so right well I think reframing that might be more beneficial uh reframing the question I don't know if we can change all of that you know not all that many decades ago there were a few people who kind of took over the German government and um once they got it to a certain point there was really nothing that could be done except have it play out I think what could anyone have done at that point if people could have seen where this was heading maybe there were things they could have done earlier and I think we're in a similar situation right now or at the beginning of a lot of people actually openly promoting fascism and all the surveillance we're seeing right now paid being paid for by our tax money is just one symptom of that those leaders that I showed you briefly uh are also symptoms of that um so again if we wait for our governments to do something cool it's not we're gonna we're gonna be dead before it happens uh but we can have a lot of control over what we choose to do with our time and who we do it with so if we collect together with people who have a common vision for making our lives and the lives of those around us better we can do that it doesn't have to be against any other people even if they're doing deplorable things I mean it can it's totally up to you what you want to do with your time and I'm actually glad there are people who are taking their time to work against these things to slow that stuff down as best they can and especially since it shows everyone that they're not alone in being against that stuff but if we create something positive over here and have that be so cool that other people tend to join us then it doesn't matter as much what's going on over there unless they get in the way of us doing what we're doing and then we can go over there and try it again but no matter how fascist anything gets they're always going to be niches within which we can do things that we believe are way cool and as things continue to decay and our great leaders are finding fantastic creative ways of helping it decay faster people are going to need to key into what we create it's up to us to create the groundwork for what's to come and I think that's what we've been doing by just having this every year it inspires us to go out into the world and do cool stuff and so much cool stuff has come from that and other people can join us I mean this whole thing it's sold out in minutes because so many people want to be part of all this I see that as incredibly positive and we need more I mean right now there's what like 3,500 hacker spaces we need millions and that's just hacker spaces we need a whole bunch of other people forming other communities and we can all help each other wherever it makes sense and that just grows so and regardless of what the outcome is each of us doing what we feel is best daily in our lives yearly in our lives gives each of us meaning in our own lives which can by example help other people thank you next question will be from the internet again so I see was very interested in the hacker spaces around the world and they want to know about whether can like name several cultural differences that are in different countries in different hacker spaces and also can elaborate on the grade of government involvement in countries other than the United States and they would like to know some cool projects from hacker spaces in Africa the Eastern Europe or the Middle East right um hacker spaces have much more similarities than differences in my experience but the one thing that is culturally different is regardless of where it is whether it's the U.S. or Europe or China or Africa is in places which are have economically depressed uh uh where they're economically depressed people are being encouraged to be entrepreneurial especially right now where we're in a pretty amazing tech bubble and so the government is pushing this and then there are venture capitalists which people where I come from called them vulture capitalists are putting a whole bunch of money into this wanting the next apple and the next google to grow from this and they're creating those empty spaces like I showed you and people are obsessed with making money and it's just not going to happen if you don't create that uh creative environment with community to start from where cool ideas grow from nothing's going to happen so that's when that's but people actually want that to happen so that's why they're inviting me and other people to give talks about this to help them do that so there are a lot of cool projects that are growing from this and uh when you have people in a local area doing things they think are cool they're things that are cool for the people there um whether it's um you know a whole bunch of people making more 3d printers or drones which are super popular or vr which is being pushed now or internet of things which is being pushed now you know like people are doing it because they think it's cool so for me I don't really care what the project is for me the main thing is it's people working on things that they think are way cool and meaningful for them and I see that happening everywhere thank you next question from this microphone um yeah I think you already touched on this right now but you said that in China they want to create a new Silicon Valley and that you thought it wouldn't happen maybe can you elaborate why you think that yeah so um it's not going to be another Silicon Valley I mean Silicon Valley didn't Silicon Valley wasn't created it happened there were a whole bunch of I mean what why did Silicon Valley happen there why didn't it happen here in Hamburg why didn't it happen in Omaha Nebraska it happened there because there are a whole bunch of fucking weirdos from all over the United States and the world who collected in San Francisco because it's been a place where that has been happening for a long time since its inception in the gold rush and um there are a whole bunch of introverted geeks who thought computers were cool and back in the 70s computers were huge things that were expensive but that technology was becoming uh inexpensive and small enough that these few geeks thought they could make ones they could use at home and they couldn't do it alone but collectively they could they formed a community called the Homebrew Computer Club and um and together they created this and one of them is now the largest capitalized company in the world and they're totally horrible but still stuff grew from that some good some bad um you can't copy that um but what you can do is create and this is what's happening a lot of places create a creative environment hacker spaces are a big part of that education is part of that of course hacker space is going to be part of that and from there people can create things that are cool for them which means that it's cool for their local community which means that there are people in that area who might want to pay those people to do those interesting actually truly innovative things and not innovation as a buzzword so but to do that they actually have to create a space you know there's resources coming from the top down from government local government state government municipal federal government whatever national government if that of those resources get into the hands of people who can form community from the bottom up then it can be totally successful and it has been in lots of examples thank you yet another question from the internet okay the question is in the same way the internet was taken from a military idea to our own use couldn't you envision taking the DARPA money and ensure hacker spaces build more positive things that cannot be manipulated to turn negative sure but in the same time you're helping the US military if that's what you want to do cool go for it that's not what i want to do short answer next question from this microphone thank you mich you look really happy how do you manage it and the second question do you plan to come to russia i was in russia in 1973 when Brezhnev was still there with my parents they came you had to have an excuse then and they my father was an architect so he got a bunch of architects to get together and say we're gonna look at architecture in in russia and we did and it was way cool russia's probably a little different now i would love to go there invite me so and happy i i'm happy because i do what i love i made time to explore and do what i love and it took years and years and years but i eventually learned to live a life i love living and if i can do that you know pretty much anyone can i think takes a lot of luck and it takes definitely support from people at the right times there's no guarantees there either uh definitely is guaranteed it won't happen if you don't try them thank you next question from that microphone i just wanted to respond to something you just said in your answer about letting fascism happen over there and we do our cool stuff over here and i have a moral objection to this and i think that's a position that comes from a place of privilege as a white man i could just say i'm going to let the fascism happen to other people and i'm not going to do anything about it and actually you know you said that we can carry on doing that until the fascists try to stop us but i think the moral imperative is on us to stop the fascists from doing their thing um and if we don't do that eventually they'll come for us as well so i guess my question to you is uh what will you do when the fascists come for the hackerspaces oh yeah i didn't mean to imply to let them do what they do um but i think it's really really important that we do stuff in the niches to create something positive so that more and more people can come because if it's just an individual here an individual here an individual here there's no way that we have any kind of energy to stop the fascism that we see happening i didn't mean to give the impression that we should let it happen uh you know in when trump was elected i was out of my country and i knew it was going to happen because i was uh in u k in march and april and saw them turn on a hate machine in order to get an election to go their way and the same thing exact thing was happening in my country they turned on a hate machine decades ago against clinton and there was no way they were going to turn that off and this guy played that really well and he actually studied the speeches of adolf hitler who's this guy that some of you may have heard of and um he's really really good at it he plays an idiot but he's he's he's a moron maybe but he's not uh unintelligent he knows what he's doing and um yeah uh once he was elected the day after hate crimes went skyrocketing upwards in the united states and not just crimes criminal activity but public bullying of people for being not their conception of white and straight uh was going up even in san francisco which has a reputation of being the weirdo place uh i personally experienced being on a city bus when some guy who wasn't like some guy who looked deranged he just looks he's just some white guy uh middle-class white guy and he just stood up proudly proclaiming that this is a heterosexual white city and this was on a bus full of everyone but heterosexual white people and um myself included and um uh so instantly people started telling him to shut the fuck up which i was really happy for and angry about as well um we have to stop this every chance we get if we don't do this at these stages it's over and it doesn't matter what we do but regardless whatever happens in our governments we need to come together and do cool stuff for ourselves and those around us and that can grow or not but we still have to do that because it's the right thing to do and it's the only thing that feels worthwhile thank you so much mitch we have come to the end of our time slot and we have also come to the end of our discussion please give another one round of applause for mitch thank you so much