rop, frank: Ten years after ‚We Lost The War‘

preroll music

Herald: Our next talk

is going to provide a
bit of introspection.

“We lost the war” has been the name

of a talk also by Rop 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 Rop and Frank!

applause

Frank: Thank you for being here!
Let’s start with a very quick question:

Who has seen, either
in person, or on video,

our talk from 10 years ago?

And who has read the
text that belongs to it?

chuckles

Ok, 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.

Rop and me are coming from
quite different backgrounds.

Rop 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 analysing
stuff and analysing 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
gonna 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 “Datenschleuder” back then

where the text was published
that belonged to the talk.

“Hackers raising the white flag”,
“Hackers giving up”, in this way.

Which was not really what
we intended, actually.

Because we actually wanted to just say:

“Ok, 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.

chuckles

So, one of the critics
that we had in this talk

was that we used the term “they”
a little bit too losely.

“They” meaning
“the others, the enemies”.

So, we just want to clarify up-front

that we don’t really believe
in large conspiracies.

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, many of you
have 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 are powerful.

And this is what we meant with “they”.

chuckles

In that sense.

Rop: 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 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.

Frank: So, essentially, what we said was:

“We lost the war when 9/11 happened.”

And that was the war for taking
the direct route to a positive utopia

to a utopia that is not from the
dystopian novels and computer games

but is going straight to, yeah, 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 3 years later

because the brittle system
of banking nearly collapsed

and was just by hair breadth 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.

But still nobody really understands
why this is truly the case.

It is 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,

is no longer the preferred
system of government for many people.

The security state, we can see it
in our everyday lives, it is encroaching.

Meanwhile, you need 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.

If you look at the weather
patterns that we have:

Today even in Reykjavik, they have now
a storm with over 300 km/h

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.

So, another thing that
we were talking about

was surveillance and whistleblowers,

and the need for that, we come
a little bit later to that.

Rop: 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’s 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.

F: So what we see is not so much

a direct global warming but a
“global weirding”.

That means, that the weather patterns
are shifting. The Hadley Cells, which is

the way the water goes up and where
the water goes down, are shifting.

That means that the livelyhoods 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,
in the eyes of our children,

we and our parents were the people
who basically fucked up the planet,

probably beyond repair.

applause

And the one thing that we
would like to call you on

is taking this responsibility.

So, what we see now with the
Syrian war is just the beginning.

It is just the early wars

that have a strong climate 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 draught, 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 any more.

Rop: 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,

it’s still not going to be anywhere near
as inhospitable, on a bad day,

as it will be on Mars
on the best possible day.

See? That’s a positive message, huh?

laughter

applause

Frank: Yeah, I mean, the core
of the hacker culture is:

breaking stuff, fixing things.

And this planet, if you can say so,
is our spaceship,

and it really needs fixing.

And so this is something that we see

that the hacker community
or hacking community

can do much more.

And if you look at [from] where
the refugees are coming

and for what reasons they are coming,

we see that there is a lot of regions that

will become hard to live in

so either because there is
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
organisational 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.

If you look at the larger refugee camps,

that is a massively dystopian set-up.

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 a democratic society.

But on top of that, the West,
the Western countries,

but increasingly also China,
and the other upcoming

larger powers, have their
hands 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 structures,
setting up stability,

making sure that the people there

actually end up not in
a much worse situation

than they have been in before.

And so the human rights
and the managing of

migration is in direct conflict
with the economic interest

of the arms industry. If we look at

who is selling these
arms it’s mostly Western

countries and Russia. And we are
selling these arms to countries

like Saudi Arabia which will be the next

large conflict zone. And which
don’t have any democratic control.

And we just do that under the disguise of

providing stability to regions.

And while 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 US foreign policy

has been a failure. It has not.

So if you look at the core interest
behind this foreign policy

what is happening there, basically
countries being un-balanced,

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 these countries,
especially in the US and the UK,

but also other Western countries,
this has been a very successful decade.

So it’s not like their policies
have been failures.

Rop: quietly, to Frank
Do you want to put this ?

Next slide I think.

Frank: Yeah, one of the
things that are the tools

of foreign policy
scoffs 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.
scoffs

This we can say.

applause

So we now know much more about

how the surveillance works, and
– but does it really help?

Rop: For most people, looking at the
Snowden revelations, it’s like

discovering a new force of nature.
It’s like they have 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 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 finally the protagonist

gets to the president, and tells
the conspiracy to the president, and then

finds out in, sort of, in shadowy
words, he 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, there’s nothing going on here,
keep moving, pay no attention.”

So we really need to come up
with strategies to deal with that.

Frank: So essentially their reaction was,

it was one of the first from when the

NSA was confronted by
the German government,

and their answer was:
“So, ok, now you know.”

scoffs

But that was about it.
So what we have is the situation

that it looks like transparency alone
doesn’t help anymore.

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
was a quite naive belief.

But that doesn’t mean that
transparency is not important.

It turns out that transparency
is like basic hygiene,

it’s like brushing your teeth,
like taking a shower for society.

So if you don’t have a transparency
of power and the power structures

and of 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,

the scandal cannot be told
within one print page

or one scroll range on the web site.

Then it’s hard to have it
as a scandal anymore.

Which is also part of the reason why
the Snowden revelations were kind of

difficult to turn into concrete
action for the larger society.

So one thing that we need to keep in mind

is that even the well meaning
people in government

and in bureaucratic institutions
really need transparency

to keep things in check, so it’s not
like transparency is useless or is

something that we
should give up as a goal,

but we need to understand
it has a different meaning,

a different purpose than
what we originally thought.

So the question is will this apathy last?

So, what will happen
when people start realizing

that the surveillance that they have
been trained to ignore somehow

will be in everything that they own.
When the “internet of things”

starts for real – 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,

everytime that you go to the fridge – if
you have an “internet of things” fridge –

then your fridge will snitch on you.
chuckles

And tell somebody that you opened
it and what you took out of it.

And if... the question is if this
maybe will change things.

It’s an open question to me. I don’t know.

So maybe the people
will stay in this apathy

and not change their attitudes
but maybe there is

a critical mass point where people say

“Now, it’s enough. It’s enough.”

So, maybe we need a seal:

“Certified cloud-less object”
or something.

that we need to stick on stuff.

applause

And this is also one of the things that
the hacker community is being asked for,

as, actually, we are the ones... the
hacking people are the ones that

can actually do this, making
objects cloud-less again,

chuckles
if needed.

If we look at the progress of technology
we can see that facial recognition,

including mood detection,
micro-expression detection,

infrared 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

make-up, who do all the
stuff that you can legally

still wear in the 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 used to define this saying:

we are partly responsible for maintaining

society’s capability for change.

To keep the wiggle rooms open,

to keep the capabilities
for political actors

who want to change the
society for the better,

to make that still possible.

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 Evgeny Morozov has
recently written about that,

and he said that’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,

it 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

– 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 –

is in the core of the
struggle for a free society.

Basically, giving the
individual the right,

or keeping our rights,
for change, for movement,

for making things better

versus the institutions’ 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.
And the interesting thing is that

the number of blackmailable offenses
has been shrinking recently.

That has basically shrunk to:
very clear corruption,

pedophilia, and tax evasion.
With everything else, you can get away.

So, as a politician, drug use
is no problem, affair is no problem.

Having strange hobbies:
absolutely no problem.

laughter
applause

Homosexuality
– no problem anymore, very good!

But, those people in
the security apparatus

that evaluate politicians
and look at them,

and look what they can find against them

in the black’n’old 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 “Kompromat”,

a shared knowledge about each other
that was so painful back then

to publish, to divulge, that they had,
basically, mutually assured destruction

against each other.
This is how power circles work.

And the intelligence agencies know this
as well, and they want to get in there,

and we have very limited
resources to find out if politicians

are in the hands of intelligence agencies.
We can just look for the patterns.

So if a politician suddenly
changes his course

on matters that the “deep state”
intelligence agencies

are concerned about, then we can be pretty
certain that they have something

against him that falls into the
“still blackmailable” category.

So why did Cameron survive this thing?

Because everybody who
could have overthrown him

was part of the same circle.
chuckles

So they were all part of the same
game and they knew about it.

So they created a space of
invincibility around them.

And so, the question then is,
“Why does it all matter so little?”

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 rioting on the streets?
Why is nobody calling out a revolution

just now, why is it that
people are just saying:

“Yeah, this is how it is,
this is how it has been

all the time and we cannot
do anything about it?”

Rop: 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 that 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
any scientific thinking

or enlightenment – anti-vaccination,
anti-science, anti-fact...

There is 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 “bullshit 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 run 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 also important to understand

that being angry or unhappy

right now, for prolonged periods,

is a recognized medical condition.

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, 5% 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 – 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 wanna go to work,

and start a movement, or, I don’t know,

riot in the streets, or do 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-neuro-normative people.

There are lots of people in our community
that are on the autistic sprectrum,

that are bipolar, that are...
there is 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.

Frank: Another thing that we need to
take care about in our community is:

“Just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t
mean that they’re not out to get you”

holds more true than ever.

Because we have now in our midth...,

in our middle quite a number of
people who are actually harassed

by the governments. So if you look at
the people from Occupy in the US,

basically the refugee waves that
are coming in from the US,

the political refugees that
are coming from there.

They’re coming now 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
oppression 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 3 major models

of society that we have
on this planet today.

It’s more the US
Ayn Rand ultra-individualistic

surveillance state system, that says
that everything that you can do

for yourself is good for you and
the state surveils everybody else

so stuff stays within
the prescribed limits.

Then we have the Chinese model of the
harmonic society, that essentially says:

When we can keep this 100 000 people
happy, it’s okay to kill this 1000 people.

And is... yeah... another way of saying

utilitaristic usage of power is justified.

And then we have the European
model, that is more on a 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 can not solve the corruption
of the political process,

then all these models kind of converge.

So it doesn’t really matter any more,
if you are 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 can not get
this corruption out of the systems,

regardless under what systems we live,

then the problems will not go away.

Yeah, 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 you’re talking about. That 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 the 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... to visualize

the situation somewhat.

So we have this graph where we have

on the one axis liberty,
democracy, civilization,

on the other one we have time.

And we... what we want...

Rop: Don’t kill yourself just yet!
There’s more positive messages out there.

Frank: Yes!
is laughing

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
or will go up at some point

and we also don’t know
how deep the valley will be.

So but, what is 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 doesn’t really...
it’s not really possible to say:

“Okay, revolution next week,
things will be good again.”

So this would be just a lie.

So we need to understand,
that the next decades

will be more greyish than
beautiful, in that sense.

So there will be lots of §$%&.

But, that doesn’t mean, that they can
not be good fulfilling decades for us.

That 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.

Rop: Yeah!
applause

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 Moluccans

wanting there 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 and 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. Why? Because it’s cheap enough!

This was all cost driven,
not danger driven!

applause

And we can see long term strategies.
We can see strategies that span decades,

the treaties, the internationally
harmonised legislation,

ACTA, CESA, cybercrime treaties,
TTIP... what not... what not... etc. etc.

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 is 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 mobilise the same things,

the same level of
activism two years later.

How often do we need to
mobilise the same fight

to fight the same damn
unconstitutional laws?

There is 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 is 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 humour.

But you can not look at this world
and go “Oh my god, this is...”.

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.”

laughing, applause

...that deserves roaring laughter
from the entire population,

‘cause it’s the only thing that will work.

applause

But what we also need is, we
need to dare to dream ahead.

There is... A lot of strategies
in 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 is so much

chaos going on. There are
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 in 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 who’s ideas we agree with
actually get to power.

Do we know what laws we
would like to have repealed?

What new laws would
we like to have passed?

Have we maybe taken the time
to write these laws already?

Even though they are ridiculous today?

Is there an Anti-Patriot-Act?
Is there an... ?

We’ve tried to work on
a few of these things.

I’ve been personally a part
of thinking about IMMI,

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 sort of a spreading effect
make that go to other countries.

We need to... 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 a 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 getting...
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.

And in the US interestingly we
see both trends happening,

but in an increasingly bizarre
corporate media landscape.

So there’s all these things happening.

Frank: Yeah so, one of the things
that changed in the last 10 years 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 month,

would be... have been
totally unimaginable.

And there is no security

in the rest of the herd 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
can not 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 can not 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 the one hand;

on the other hand more and more people

not having their talents valued by
the market, by the job market any more

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
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? How?

What is the... yeah... 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 any more.

This time is gone forever.

Rop: So, we did this talk in 2005
and it was, in many ways it was taboo.

All of congress was depressed
for a while or 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!

applause, cheering

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 are... 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 all... 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’re 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,
there’s limits to growth. That’s 1972.

I was 4 years old. So let’s not
fall for this kind of messaging.

Frank: The question is then:
What is our mission?

What is the stuff that we should aim for?

And one thing that should
be very clear about is

this planet is a crime scene.

And this also means that...

applause

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 an 1984

environmental degraded police state.

We saw it coming but we went there anyway,
because it was short-term 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.

applause

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 will use it some time.

applause

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 revert to

conservatism saying
are we try to cliiing 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 this 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.

Rop: Yeah, 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 were... yes, 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 word.

No fake utopian outcomes,
no lies to tell people,

but still very positive at the personal
level for each and everyone of us.

The 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 in the 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 –

is a post-apocalyptically
appropriate way of thinking.

Wouldn’t you run to your hackerspace,

if things really went wrong?

Wouldn’t it... 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.

applause

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 travelling 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.

applause

Frank: And so, we have been following

the strategy of enlarging our cultural,

or culture, the hacking culture
over the last many years.

You probably noticed that from...
I don’t know, if you look back at

the Eidelstedter Bürgerhaus, the
congress was still looking a bit drab,

whereas now we have an... 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 at the last,
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 that we can say: This is something
where we managed to grow our culture,

so growing from a couple 100 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 a big change.

And this is also something
we can be proud of.

applause

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 bickering fights.

That they are more interested in
fighting the heretics in their own ranks,

in the people who are not
using the words that they like

or that are finding
different stuff important.

So we’re all 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 how it should be,

the same ideas how people should interact

and the rights of the individuum.

And we should actively try
to stop fighting each other.

So we are not each other’s enemy.

applause

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 any more.

Because when they
solved this one “problem”,

they still ended up with 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...

or human 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.

applause

So, ...

Rop: We need to be aware
that there are money aspects

and social economic
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.

Hardcore 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.

applause

That means...
applause

...we encourage various forms of economic
cooperation to make sources of income

more widely accessible.

Hackerspaces 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,

applying 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
hackerspace dedicated to it.

applause

Frank: So, in closing:

we are headed for some very rough times.

That’s undeniable but it doesn’t mean
that we can not have a lot of fun on that.

So we know, the surf is good
when the waves are getting bigger.

And...
applause

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.

Our community is uniquely
positioned to do that.

We can build the tools
to make the activists

and political activists capable
of still effecting change.

We are the ones who can develop
new forms of communications.

If you look at this whole
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
effecting a better outcome.

And this is something that we
need to take responsibility for.

Rop: 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 sizeable
changes of all sorts of kinds.

And the only way to be effective in this
and probably that’s 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 any more.

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, so forth,
usefulness and enlarge that culture

over time, until it becomes a viable
alternative to the status quo.

I guess that was it.

Frank: Thank you!
Rop: Thank you!

applause

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