 As you all know, it's been 33 years of the CCC and the debate on technology and politics has held a special place. Our first talk today is called Der Drei und Dreisig Yarra-Rückblick and it will be quite meta as it will backtrack through the titles and abstracts from 1984 to today, analyze apparent patterns and turning points in the subjects. To do so, we have Maxi Gas, who has a PhD, four master's degrees and three bachelor's degrees. He's currently conducting postdoctoral research, he's interested in cybernetics in the intellectual trajectory and everyday practices of the human and natural sciences. Joining him is Mel, who has a background in computer science, a PhD in media studies, works in research in the intersection of technology, education and the international development. A round of applause for Maxi Gas and Mel. Thank you. So thank you for coming at this really early hour and this is the first results of a longer research project that we started a couple of weeks ago. The idea was to look at how the relationship of technology and politics looks like in the all the talks of the congress. So this is a kind of talk about all the talks that have been before and it's a kind of meta talk that will be about talks. And why we were interested in this question is of course because there is a never green debate inside the congress between the hardcore techies and between the technical activists, how much politics and what kind of politics should be in the congress, what is the interesting or boring technical content that should be presented and so on. At the same time, this is also a classic social scientific question. In fact, there is a social scientific discipline called science and technology studies that is mainly constructed around this question of the relationship between technology, society and politics. So what we did was to go back from the beginning and read all the titles and the talks and categorize them and try to come up with some preliminary results to show you. In this journey, we found that the first years were a bit scarcely documented. So we had to look at various archives and we found some funny artifacts in the meantime. So we would like to share with you a video, some parts of a television report that was screened in 1986 documenting the second chaos congress. This will be in German, played with a player. That didn't scare off. The controls were sharp, the enemy crawled everywhere and here it is called Gilb, the general post. From here, the telephone lines are used to open the way into the budgeted data networks and banks, a kind of data travel office. The hacker movement is naturally information-friendly and produces a lot of pressure accordingly. Hacking is a hobby that requires a lot of theoretical knowledge. The advanced computer technology controls the data networks and various data banks. It has to constantly build up, because everything is in the data flow. The hacking center. Here it was allowed to be hacked, legally understood. The hacker needs a computer, a phone and a connection between the two, an acoustic coupler or a modem. Now it can be given to the data network, but many hindrances are made. The owners of data banks and large computers do not like to see it naturally, when strangers enter into their systems and maybe even drive a Schabanack. They protect themselves with secret numbers and passwords. The overcoming of these hindrances is the actual goal of the hacker. The recognized secret numbers and passwords are the hacker's cost-effective treasure. Thanks to the central name of the Chaos Congress, a fairly organized process. Almost all events took place and almost all of them were announced at a different time. International exchange of experiences. It was about the old question after the turn of the human sense. Here, so the hacking. Vau says, We are not like announced five hackers from six countries. We are a few more. We think that nationality is meaningless. If we exchange ideas, the ideas of importance are. So beautiful sentences, you would like to hear at the UNO or a summit. The hacker movement stays with its ideals. I do not see a reason that I will change it. Yes, it would be a movement that would perhaps strengthen the entire population. What a beautiful utopia. So we ended it. So we saw a glimpse of the one of the founders of the club. So this is the word cloud of all the data set just to give you an impression of the whole. And as you can see, most of the terms look like technical terms, but then in the context, they are often politicized in different ways. In the most typical way in which these technical terms come into a political way of talking is the nightmares that you see on the left. And we were interested to see over the years how the topics and how the relationships developed and what was the internal dynamics of the universe and maybe also the European hacking scene. But also we were interested how this internal dynamics was connected to larger social transformations. For example, if it is possible to detect the fall of the Berlin Wall in the Congress contents. So we chose just one very obvious and prominent example for our first round of searching for keywords. And this was searching for the keyword NSA. And I don't know, you can probably not read the years, but it shows that it came up in 2004 and in 2005 and then again only in 2013. And from anecdotal evidence, I would have thought that it would have been present also in the years before. There was this kind of told you so mentality that I frequently heard people talking about that we knew it all along and nobody listened, at least from the Congress talks and topics. This is not visible. But as Maxigas already said, we're also interested in talking to people that have attended previous talks and getting more data and more evidence. So maybe this was visible in other areas, just not in the Congress presentations. So where did we get the data before 92? It was the most difficult part. We tried first the Congress archive on the CCC website, but that was not available anymore. So we were lucky enough, however, to find the file still in the web archive. Another source was the data archive, which is unfortunately also incomplete. And there we found a few scanned PDFs that we had to copy by hand. So just to give you an example, this is the data from 84. There was a more or less complete schedule from the first Congress. So that one was still easy enough to copy. There were other ones. Yeah, it also says bring your picture. There were other ones like this one from 91. It's already a bit harder to read, but it was still possible. Of course, there's also no abstract. So it wasn't always easy to figure out what the talks actually were about. We'll also talk about this aspect later. And then there were files like this one, which is a review of the Congress 1990. We could not find any file plan or any schedule. So what we did is actually read the file and try to figure out, okay, is this what people are talking about? Is this a talk? Was it a workshop? Was it just a topic that came up? And try to compile a more or less accurate file plan from this information. So after 1992, there was already something called the World Wide Web. And the schedules of the Congress were usually published in a human readable form there. So we could write a scraper to gather the talks. And of course, we used the proper library and no regular expressions were harmed in the process. The first ones are actually just ASCII charts, and they are with the PRE tag inside the HTML. After 2002, there are machine-readable dumps of the program in the ICA format. And at some point, there is also XML, which is the most structured dump that we could get. These ones have different problems than the previous ones. So they are in various encodings. And usually the full abstract or in some years, at least the full abstract was also missing. So this is, for example, some of the problems that we still have to clean up in the code base. Everything that we used, including the code that generated the original dataset and also the categorized datasets are available in this repository. And we have this plan to migrate it into maybe an open science framework or a similar website, which is for open science projects specifically, which is not just a repository. So as we said, of course, we tried to discern which talk should be considered a technological talk and which talk should be considered a political talk. And we had to introduce some other categories to deal with the more controversial abstracts. So all in all, we looked at 2,307 talks. They are in a comma-separated values file. And we asked three humans to categorize. Here, we would like to thank Fumiko, who helped us to go through all these talks. And of course, Mel and me were also reading them. We didn't use the categories that are used in the conference tracks, also because the different categories of the conference tracks were changing over the years, but also because these categories don't necessarily reflect the research questions that we wanted to ask. So of course, the most highly debated part of this will be how we discern technology from politics. In short, we can say that we just assumed that everything that comes into the Congress has something to do with technology. So what we were looking for is a social impact where it is not just about, for example, the technicalities of certain legislation, but it's also discussed how this legislation is shaping society or which social groups is this good for or bad for. So what difficulties did we have? Of course, as mentioned before, there were a couple of talks where we had no abstracts. We tagged them as undefined. For example, there was one talk called THC++. We don't know what this was about. We have our speculations, but we cannot definitely say whether it was technical or political. There were a few non-talks, like the hacker jeopardy, radio broadcast, theater, DJ sets, music, films that we also excluded from the text versus politics tagging and tagged them as non-talks. And then there were controversial talks or just to show that the differentiation between technical and political here at the Congress is not always so easy. So one talk, for example, called Object to Software, the coming revolution, sounds quite or rather technical, but in the abstract it shows that it's actually dealing with changing the world or changing the way things are made, influencing how everyone can access technology. So this is certainly a social or political stance that this has. So we have a couple of preliminary results, preliminary, because they're only based on the tagging of one data set. And as we said, we hope to find more people for the tagging, but also to join the data sets together. So there are consistencies, which we found out is they're almost or it's about 50-50 that the Congress is about tech and politics. It's slightly more technical talks, as I said, from this first data set of tagging. It looks a bit more technical, but it's almost 50-50. Then there were certain inconsistencies. For example, in 2007, you can see that the number of talks goes down in 2002. And this was not a change of venue. And it's also not obvious from the number of attendance. So we don't really know where this came from. If any of you has an idea, please let us know. Also, you can see on this one, this is all talks over the years. 87 and 88, for example, we could not find any information at all. No reviews, no file plan. I think only the announcement of the Congress. And then there's some potential findings or things that we could read from the data. One is that more participants does not mean more talks. Another one is for where we could see that the data actually shows what's also written in reviews is in 89 in the Datenschleuder. It says that for the first time, there was less technical talks than political or social ones. And this is also shown in the data here. You can see this is the first time that politics is taking over technology. Yeah, this is the overall graph. As we said, there might be adaptations to this one when we merge the tagged files. But it looks like for a while, politics was much stronger. Technical talks were much stronger. And at the moment, politics seems to catch up. So which one is which data? Oh, the blue one is the technical talks and the green one is the politics. So how we want to go on with this idea is asking you to help us. Also, maybe to improve the code or to volunteer to categorize the talks. You can send pull requests of just a few talks or you can debate what is already there, or you can sit down and spend, I guess, around 12 hours to go through every talk and add your opinion to the pool. You can also work and repurpose the code and the database. So for example, it would be quite nice to do something like this with the Hope Conference in the United States, which is supposed to be one of the more political hacker conferences in North America. And I wonder how these things are playing out over there. We also want to talk to people to try to find out some of the archives that are mentioned in different documents that we were looking at. So apparently, at some point, there was an official congress paper published during the conference. And in 1989, there is also mentions of an electronic newspaper that was circulated. And in various places, for example, in the 34th Datenschleuder, we also saw references to a legendary chaos archive. And the question is if the chaos archive is lost, or it's possible to find. And to discuss these questions and to continue the talk in a more relaxed setting, we registered a discussion in the A2 room tomorrow at four o'clock. So if you want to share with us some stories from the early congresses or your opinions about technology and politics at the congress, please come and talk to us there. As I said, we have to see how the three datasets that we have relate to each other. And then if we can have three different opinions about each talk, then we can have a less subjective dataset to work with. We also have to get information from the years that are missing and of course clean up the code a bit. But this stupid idea of dividing the talks into technology and politics is just a first step, one of the initial approaches to this problem. We actually want to spend most of the time of the research project with qualitative data. So talking to people, making interviews, focus groups and so on. And how we want to use this statistical evidence is basically just to have a consistent starting point for discussions. If we do this, then we can also start to ask more interesting questions. For example, how does the ideas about politics depend on the ideas about technology that are circulated inside the congress? Or how these two categories are actually defining each other? And thank you very much. You can see our contacts here and the slides are also online, so you can download them if you want. And as we are well on time, maybe we can just ask one question to the audience, who has attended the congress in the 80s? So there are a couple of people. So we really hope some of you are joining our workshop because we're really very interested in hearing about those days. We found, as we said, very little written evidence from those years. Thank you. How about a round of applause? We have a few minutes for questions. So please step up to the microphones. If anybody has anything to ask or add. Yes, microphone one please. Yeah, thank you for your talk. Very interesting. So my question is you said you don't want to use those grassroots categories that the congress itself uses for categorizing talks. That's fine, but I still would be interested in knowing how have these grassroots categories changed over the years? Have you any observations on that? Well, no, we didn't look at this specific question. What I can say about this is maybe that there was a lot of technical talks, which actually ended up, for example, criticizing society or proposing a campaign or pointing out conflict between social groups. And of course, for example, if a talk is about firmware security, then it will automatically go into the technical section. But at the same time, we found talks that were in the political track that were just explaining, for example, what are the current laws that regulate independent security research. And as long as they were just an overview of the actual legislation in place without any normative opinions or without any reflection on what does it mean in terms of freedom or, let's say, privacy for the larger population, we just categorized them as technical talks. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. What about microphone three? I switch to German. Are there any other questions? Anybody else? Thank you very much. Thank you very much.