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OK, so the return of the
invisible committee, apparently
it's not as invisible
as you might think, so
please set the stage with a huge
applause.
All right, go to Abernathy's in
English, passion of mine,
so I was speaking English.
All right.
First of all, I'm I'm kind of sorry in
advance because my my speech is kind of
long and somehow complicated.
And the fact that I have to give it in in
English gives me a little room for
improvization. So I will probably have to
read a lot of the
notes that I've taken.
So to start, I would like to
to to apologize for the
title and of speech and
the the speakers.
Actually, we just wanted to have
an invisible committee for Google
to our mine to appear somewhere so that
our potential allies and
friends can spread it out
and figure out what this
all will be about.
So to start, I would clarify
the place from where I speak.
It has probably no, not that much
interest. Besides, for the German
undercover police will probably
be here texting French undercover
police.
So I I'm part of
some people who've been called by the
media to Charnock nine.
Basically, that's a story I will make
really short.
But just so that you understand that the
reason why it makes sense to speak here,
six years ago we got arrested on some
tourist charges in France
and basically the French police accused
us of many, many, many different things
from from organizing riots,
from
being a recruitment center in New York,
and for sabotaging a train
against nuclear transport and
all kinds of things, which most of
us were just not true.
And basically, this
is our main concern, whether we will
belong to some kind of international
revolutionary conspiracies that will just
be willing to destroy Western
civilization.
But they also accused us of
one thing that is actually important,
that the reason why why somehow
we can we can speak here is that they
accused us of having written the book,
which is called In English The Coming
Insurrection.
This book became some kind of bestseller
in France because of the big media
things. It was around the arrest
and also somehow in the US when a
Fox News, Glenn Beck, just managed
to try to read it and
figured out that it was the biggest
threat to American
peace at that moment.
And so
so here's the point.
Of course, I'm not, of course, speaking
on behalf of the committee,
I'm neither a member, representant
or whatever for
the very fact that the invisible
committee is is a plane on which to try
to think strategically and politically
of the current situation,
just like somehow anonymous will will be
some plane for for tactical and strategic
or type of types of
attack.
So for that matter, there is no inside or
outside, no membership nor nor
authorship. It belongs to no one.
And everyone just like Anonymous, for
instance.
So the question is why it is me basically
coming to speak it just because there's
this funny, funny thing where
the police in France have tried really
hard for years to, uh, to
to prove that we would have written this
book.
And somehow they fail so much that we can
somehow assume to travel the world and
just discuss the content of it just
as good readers of it.
And so then to the question of why
coming here to the CCC to speak
up, the reason is,
is actually pretty simple.
The answer is, is Jeremy.
Jeremy Hammond
will rot in jail right now, as
I guess most of you know.
And to my delegates, this speech,
of course, when.
And actually, there's a there's a new
book by the Invisible Committee, which is
called To Our Friends, which is published
in for a few weeks and was going to be
publishing in Germany and in
the US soon.
And there's a whole paragraph
in it about, let's say the
hackers have been radical
movement.
And it was stopped at some kind of
answer to to, uh, to Jeremy
Hammond acts.
Basically, when Stratfor was hacked,
a website was defaced and one could
read the coming insurrection
on the scroll roll instead
of their of their index.
And so we interpret it that
this gesture as some sort of call, as
an invitation to discuss what is
happening politically, politically
in the ROMELIO.
So our presence here
is some kind of answer to that call,
or at least our contribution to the
debate, to the political debate
that is going on within this computer
and hacker group.
All right,
so just to go back to the Stratfor
thing, to many of us, we
were not necessarily
really close to the to the hacker
world, just this hack of
Stratfor by an
anonymous friend. And I think it
meant a lot. It meant a lot politically,
symbolically and practically.
Why that moment? We might have had the
feeling that an anonymous main
targets were the poor Church of
Scientology and that sometimes it was
a little bit politically confused.
This attack on Stratfor really
seemed like changing the deal.
The target was perfect.
Stratfor is just the
tip of the spear, the private twin of the
CIA.
The skills seems to be impressive from
what we could get from them.
And basically stealing Stratfor clients
money to give out on Christmas was
actually really funny.
And of course, we don't have to wonder
why the FBI put so much energy in
trapping Hammond and others
using Subu and
using this type of offer
of infiltration that we all
know of.
Now,
we can bet that if it was a mere Dede's
attack, they wouldn't have cared so much.
Police, I mean, but what
made a AntiSec such a threat in
the eyes of the US police, we can guess,
is that there were obviously brilliant,
angry, determined and
was a huge sense of humor, which is
something that you're really forgiven
for.
But anyway, what's what
this attack.
But is that for the hacker,
whether work for security, for
governments and domination or you fight
against it.
So there's actually very little room
in between and all
those who walk down the path of hacking
now and know a lot
of them know that and they're paying
the price for it, which is most
police harassment and jail.
But despite what we call
seasonal meaning, we can see behind this,
this is a serious
the attack against Stratfor.
It's still seen that there's some kind of
like confusion that rings into the hacker
world, like politically.
And maybe we can we can think that the
reason why there's still some confusion
is because no one, even maybe
the hackers themselves, take seriously
the political and philosophical and
philosophical implication of hacking
and of computers.
So basically, this is what we'll try to
humbly do here.
It might be complex, like I said before,
an abstract for sure.
But we really have the feeling that
there's something decisive to understand
in this movement and what it
means. Generally, we think
that understanding that helps us to pick
side and and and
to see that hacking
cannot just be limited to a pure idea
of pure practice, a pure skill for
pure technique, but a clear
and rich relationship to the world.
So.
A few years ago, Telecomix, which is
another hacking group, as you know,
is the I quote them to said
that the reason why why hackers
were ahead of the time was because they
didn't consider the Internet as
a separate as a separate virtual
world, but as an extension of physical
reality.
And it's even more obvious today
when we see hackerspace
getting off the screens to just get in
in a just up and hacker space.
But if we can all
agree on the fact that there might not be
any distinction to be made between the
virtual and the real, we
have to acknowledge that behind
the virtual world, at its very core,
at its very foundation, lies
a certain peculiar ideology
that is a peculiar way to apprehend,
understand and make the world real.
This way of thinking, this ideology
that has become real.
It has a name, a historical name.
It's called cybernetics.
And it's pretty funny because when you
talk about cybernetics, you directly
sound like an 80 year
old person who just doesn't know anything
about computers and just things.
But actually, it's not.
I mean, the
the.
This term cybernetic is probably more
actually than ever for the reasons I will
try to expose.
And we have to firstly understand
what what the history of of
cybernetic is.
And we will see that it really
enlightened the
way the world is organized today and
our relationship to computers.
So
it's not spinning too fast.
I am sorry to
stress, I usually speak too fast, but
stress is not helping.
So as
a history that's full of cybernetics.
So in the 1940s, a
mathematician, not Bhavana,
while he was finishing his work for the
American Army, undertook to
establish a new science that
will also be a new definition of
man of his relationship with the world
and with himself.
So was also Claude Shannon, an engineer
at Bell and MIT who worked
on information theory, contributed to the
development of telecommunication.
And he took part in that project, too, as
did Gregory Batan, a Harvard
anthropologist employed by the American
Secret Service in Southeast
Asia during the Second World War.
And there was also a trickle into John
von Neumann, what the first
draft of a report on the AIDS vaccine,
which is regarded as the funding text of
computer science.
He was actually the inventor of game
theory, which is a decisive contribution
to neoliberal economics.
He was also a supporter of preventive
nuclear strike against the USSR.
Hence the very person who made
substantial contribution to the new means
of communication and to data processing
after the Second World War also
laid the basis of that science
that Vyner called cybernetics.
And he actually took that from OPOWER
one century before I had the good idea
of defining the science as the science
of governments.
So we're talking about an art of
governing was formative.
Moments are almost forgotten, but
with concepts branched their way
underground, feeding into information
technology as much as biology, artificial
intelligence management or cognitive
sciences at the same time.
And it's as strong cables
on the whole surface of the globe.
So what Seweryn editions believed and
somehow created is a world
where machines will make all forms
of political control are necessary
because computer networks could make
order society without
a centralized control.
The idea was that if humans being were
linked by webs of computers,
they could create together their own kind
of foder.
The feedback of information between
all connected individuals in the
network could create self
stabilizing system.
This idea came from a peculiar idea of
nature, of nature as an ecosystem
that always self-regulating
and self-control itself.
And this is that idea
that there will be some kind of natural
balance that should be and could be
achieved in human relationships thanks to
computers.
So cybernetics is
the ideal.
It's a philosophy, the ontology, the idea
of of being that suppose
is that everything that life itself
can be flattened as pure communication,
as pure messages.
And from there we will need no
gods, no masters, as machines
will enable us to control everything
and to control ourself.
Calculus and feedback loops will allow
real time control of the world by
analyzing and decipher and deciphering
all human behaviors and conducts.
So it means that life
could be reduced communication, as I say,
and that it will just require
to set this communication free, to
let it flow freely for human beings
to achieve the highest level of freedom.
That's why the protests and the dream of
cybernetics.
And so here we are, basically,
we see where this idea of this idea comes
comes from, basically the circulation
of information could be super
to the circulation of commodities.
Life is turned into information that
needs to circulate to to circulate
as equivalence, just like commodities do
fit by being the key to regulation.
So the cybernetic project means, firstly,
separating and flattening life, but
by translating it into zero
and one and then reuniting it
as a representation that is mimicking
life.
So now we can start to see how
the cybernetic hypothesis is the politics
of the end of the political.
So we will be why will we be interested
in what the consumers of computers and
the Internet said and conceptualize 60
years ago? Simply because this
is this way of thinking,
power, social organization,
this way of thinking of self-control
and surveilled world.
This program is today's the vanguard of
government.
It is today. And it will be it
will be even more tomorrow.
It's not the type of power that faces
us is the type of power in which
we dwell.
It is a form of domination in which we
leave the environment in which our
conduct's desires and lives are framed.
I've got a quote here
just just to this quote
comes from
Jared Cohen, and
it comes from the new digital
age and it says following saying, Oh, no,
no, sorry, sorry, I'm wrong.
I just need to read the before.
So you get the funny thing is this
in Tripoli doesn't harm or Wall Street,
people have been protesting failed
polices and the meager possibilities
afforded by the electoral system.
They have lost faith in government and
other centralized institutions of power.
There is no viable justification for a
democratic system in which public
participation is limited to voting.
We live in a world in which ordinary
people write. Wikipedia spends
the evening moving a telescope via the
Internet and making discoveries half a
world away.
Get online to get to help organize a
protest in cyberspace and in the physical
world, such as the revolutions in it in
Egypt or Tunisia, or the demonstration
of the indignados throughout Spain,
or pore over the cables revealed by
WikiLeaks.
The same technologies enable us to work
together at a distance are creating
the expectation to do better at
governing ourselves.
And so here it's not an indignados
who speaks. It's actually someone called
Beth Noveck was actually directing
the Open the Open Government Initiative
for the Obama administration.
That's right.
And then another quote from from the New
York City Hall in New York.
What the New York City Hall thing is that
the hierarchical structure based
based on the notion that the government
knows what's good for you is outdated.
The new model for this century depends
on creation and collaboration.
So, unsurprisingly, the
concept of open government data
was formulated not by politicians, but by
computer specialists
and were fervent defenders of open source
software development. Moreover, and
to involve the US founding father a
conviction that every citizen should take
part in government.
And here the government is reduced to the
role of team leader or facilitator,
ultimately to that of a platform
for coordinating citizen action.
And the parallel with social networks is
fully embraced, I still quote, How can
the cities think of itself in the same
way Facebook has an API ecosystem
or Twitter draws?
It is a question in the minds of the New
York mayor's office again.
So even if his declarations are
can be seen as fanciful, cogitation,
product of somehow overheated
brains of Silicon Valley, this still
confirms that the practice of government
is less and less identified
with state sovereignty.
In the area of networks, governing means
ensuring the interconnection of
people, objects and machines as
well as the free. That means transparent
and controllable circulation of
information that is generated in this
manner.
This is an activity already conducted
largely outside the state apparatus,
even if the latter try try to be
by every means to maintain control over
it.
So it's becoming clear that Facebook is
not so much the model of a new form of
government as it's reality already
in operation.
And so, again, I will
call again the new digital age.
It says in the future, people want just
backups are data backups or governments,
and it's just not clear
enough with the bosses it controls.
Governments may collapse and worse
can destroy physical infrastructure, but
virtual institutions will survive.
With Google, what is concealed beneath
the exterior of an innocent interface
and an extremely effective search engine
is an explicitly political project.
A company that maps the planet to
dispatching its team into every streets
of every one of its towns cannot have
purely commercial aims.
One never maps a territory
one doesn't contemplate appropriating.
So of course, we call consider cybernetic
ideology. But it's not.
It's a material.
It's a materialized one
made up of millions of apparatuses
that transform relationships or sells to
others and to the world.
So we believe that cybernetics is
actually the new form that government
takes.
It is a new form of government, actually.
By government, we don't mean the actual
governance that our regular elected
by a particular way to our
regularly elected.
But governments in terms of
this particular way to exercise
power to govern, is not to
impose a discipline to a body, nor to
enforce the law in a precise territory.
To govern is something different.
It's a it's it's a different political
technique. It's all about conducting
leading the context and behaviors of
a population.
It's taking care of the population like a
shefford of its herd to maximize
its potential and orientate
its freedom.
It's all about taking it to account and
designing its desires,
its habits, its fears, its ways
of thinking and its Melio.
It's about deploying a whole set of
tactics, of discursive tactics, of
material tactics to pay the
finest attention to popular emotions
and feelings.
It's all about acting on the environment
to continuously modify its variables,
to act a few, to influence the actions of
others, to maintain the control of
of the herd
is basically like waging a war without
war, without the least possible violence,
a war of influence.
Subtable, refined, psychological
and indirect.
So detering,
so up until up
until recently, this technique of power
and his government was endorsed by what
was called political economy.
What we're saying is that today we
witnessed the downfall of political
economy and its replacement by cybernetic
cybernetic can be seen as a savior
of a declining global capitalism.
Economics have never been a reality or a
science from its inception in
the 17th century.
It's never been anything but an art of
governing. Population scarcity
had to be avoided if riots were
to be avoided.
So, to quote Hamilton, the surest
way for all government is to rely on the
interests of man.
So once the natural
laws of economy were elucidated,
governing meant letting its harmonious
mechanism operate freely and moving men
by manipulating, by manipulating their
interests.
So harmony, the predictability
of behaviors, a ready and future,
an assumed rationality of the actors.
All this implied assertion trusts
the ability to give credit that
the whole story of economy.
But what we witnessed today is that the
worldwide crisis is just pulverizing
this all perception and this dependance
on trust.
And somehow that is not really a problem.
At the end of trust, at the end of
capitalism can be replaced by cybernetic
control where control and transparency
reign, whereas a subject's behavior is
anticipated in real time through the
algorithmic processing of processing of
a mass of available data about them.
So there's no need to trust them.
And for them to trust, it's sufficient
that they'll be sufficiently monitored.
As Lenin said, trust is good,
control is better.
So cybernetics developed on that open
wound of modernity.
It asserted itself as a remedy for the
existential and those confirmed
government or crisis of the West.
Cybernetic government is inherently
apocalyptic. It has no project in the
future, no positive I.D.
on life. Its purpose is to locally
manage and control, create stability
and eventually produce a perpetual
self-regulation of systems through
the unrestrained, transparent and
controllable circulation of information.
So, to quote Vyner, again,
communication is a segment of society
and social work whose work
consists in keeping the channels of
communication open.
Are the ones on the continuance
or downfall of our civilization largely
depends.
So just as a political
economy producer, Homo Economicus,
people were just manageable
by the framework of the industrial
states, cybernetics is producing
its own humanity,
a transparent humanity emptied out
by the very flows that traverse it,
electrified by information and
attached to the world by an ever growing
quantity of apparatuses,
humanity that's inseparable from its
technological environments because it
is constituted and thus driven by that,
such as is the object
of government now no longer a man or
his interests, but his social
environments, political economy, rangpur
beings, by living them free to pursue
their interests, cybernetics control them
by leaving them free to communicate.
And behind the futuristic promise
of a world of freewheeling people and
objects when cars, fridges, watches,
vacuums and dildos are directly connected
to each other and to the Internet,
there is what is already here, the fact
that the most polyvalent of sensor
is already in operation, that is myself.
I share my geolocation,
my mood, my opinions, my performance
numbers and their self evaluation.
I always post photos of my vacations, my
evenings, my riots, my colleagues of
what I'm going to eat.
If I'm going to fuck.
I appear not to do much, and yet I
produce a steady stream
of data whether I work or
not. My everyday life is a stock
of information, a stock of data
that is valuable on the market of
cybernetic capitalism.
Regrets, regret, refrigerated
storehouses of data or the pantry of
current government in its remaining
databases, produced and continuously
updated by the everyday life of connected
humans. It looks for the correlations
it can use to establish not
universal laws, nor even wise,
but rather wens.
And what's so state ambitions,
as the stated ambition of cybernetics is
to manage to to manage
the unforeseeable and to govern
the inconvertible instead of trying
to destroy it.
And of course, the object of the great
harvest of personal information is not
an individualized tracking of the whole
population.
If the civilians insinuate themselves
into the intimate life of each and
every person, it's not so much to
construct individual files as to assemble
massive databases.
That makes numerical sense is more
efficient. To correlate the shared
characteristics of individuals in a
multitude of profiles with a
development suggests one
is not interested in the individual
present. An entire, but only in
what what makes it possible to determine
their potential line of flight.
And this where we understand why Google
is a war machine,
that the
advantage of applying to civilians, to
profiles Evans and Virtuality, is
that statistical entities don't take
offense and individuals can steal.
Claims are not being monitored, or at
least not personally.
While cybernetic government
already operates in terms of a completely
new logic, its subject continues
to think of themselves according to the
old paradigm.
We believe that our personal data
belong to us like our car and
our shoes, and that we are only
exercising our individual freedom by
deciding to let Google, Facebook, Apple,
Amazon or whatever or the police have
access to them without realizing that
this has immediate effects on
those refused to and will be treated
for from from then on as suspects,
as potential divines.
So just like against a new digital
age puts it.
So I quote again, so there will be people
will resist adopting and using
technology.
People want nothing to do with virtual
profiles, online data systems or
smartphones.
Yet a government may suspect
that people opt out completely,
have something to hide, and thus
are more likely to break laws.
And as counter-terrorism measures
that governments will build a kind of
hidden people registry we described
earlier, if you don't have any registered
social networking profiles or
mobiles or a mobile subscriptions
and online references to your to
your unusually hard to find,
you might be considered a candidate for
such a registry.
You might also be subjected to a strict
set of new regulations that includes
rigorous airport screening or even travel
restrictions.
So this is where we see
a divide going through the
hacker movement.
There are those who hack against
governments, against gotan mentality,
against cybernetics, and there are those
who want a better transparency.
We want a democratic control over
control. So we pursue the dream of
cybernetic world where life can be
reduced and self managed by good
algorithms.
So of course, we owns the Internet.
To what extent do illegal Trevelyan's
go are real and important issues?
But there are not sufficient.
There are there are some way off the tip
of the iceberg. What could make us miss
that? A new form of power is holding
us. And most of all, this way of
revealing what will be hidden by
companies and governments should not make
us believe that a solution should
be a general transparency,
which was, for instance, the political
horizon of the Pirate Party is a Pirate
Party program was just about pushing the
political ideology further or
problem with Sabaneta cannot be
that that the people were actually.
The problem is not the people who
actually own the key to the networks and
to Awdry. That's what makes cybernetics
the enemy of freedom is rather it's
flattened and fully controlled idea
of what life should be.
So let's set an example.
For instance, you remember probably
the riots in Tottenham and
in London in 2011 and in.
At least maybe it was the same thing
in some other places in France,
some old newspaper said, oh,
yeah, you know, it's it's a real it's a
Twitter revolt.
And actually, the rioters use the
Blackberries, not Twitter.
So but but what actually
Twitter helped organized around
was those those popular riots.
What was what was called
as a citizen sweepers who
volunteered to sweep up and repair the
damage caused by the confrontation and
looting.
And that initiative was relayed and
coordinated by something called crisis.
Commons was drubbings, I quote,
a global network of volunteers working
together to build and use technology
tools to help respond to disasters
and improve resiliency and response
before a crisis.
So what we see here is that a cybernetic
tools can as much be used to support
a revolt and to suppress it.
That's the point I wanted to make.
In the same way
we can look at some of the ETOPS
that have been produced by last year's
social movements and, for instance,
some Spanish indignados
for them.
What they say, and I quote again, that
for them, the social computer networks
have not only accelerated the spread of
the 2011 movements, but also
and more importantly, had set the terms
of a new type of political organization
for the struggle for society, a
connected, participatory and
transparent democracy.
And somehow here, the point I want to
make is that we all feel a little bit ill
at ease to see that
there's so much in common between the
type of utopia that presents itself
as revolutionary and the one upheld
by Jared Cohen and Eric Schmidt
when on the first page of their books and
used to learn again, you can read the
Internet is the largest experiment
involving anarchy in history.
So what we need is not transparency.
It is actually opacity.
If you want to build and use tools that
allow us to secure
our secure and then anonymous access
to the Internet.
It's not to defend the network.
It's to defend ourselves on the network
and from those who own and control it.
An Internet that provides anonymity and
confidentiality of communication is
not the Internet. It's a political
operation against the Internet.
As a control device,
we should remember as this cruel
sentence from Edward Snowden, he said,
I quote, The greatest fear that I have is
that nothing will change.
People will see in the media all of
these disclosures.
They will know the lengths that the
government is going to grant themselves
powers unilaterally to create greater
control over American society and global
society. But they won't be willing to
take the risks necessary to stand up and
fight.
And actually, this is what happened.
I mean, nothing happened.
This is not to say that somehow a
journalistic task of revealing
corruption, massively, etc., is not
useful. It's it surely is,
but only because it enables us to protect
ourselves from it.
What I mean is that knowing the NSA
spying on everyone doesn't produce any
freedom. It doesn't produce autonomy or
bring down governments to quote an old
friend.
It's not true. That will destroy all the
flies, but a world of truth.
It doesn't make life qualitatively
better. It just helps us to know
what we have to do to create a zone of
capacity to keep our activities hidden
from governments, from government.
Panopticon The only
reason why anyone will oppose a
surveillance state is not for the sake
of it or for some abstract
idea of privacy or freedom.
Nobody does that.
And what will be the point of hiding or
preference is for Coke or Pepsi from the
dictator of action that the cybernetic
power always wants what's best for us
and it actually knows it better than us.
So that's the only reason why one will
actually fight against civilians is
because of the potential of the
potentially criminal character of its
activities. And this is something that is
fully achievable when you want to subvert
the existing order, the existing
social relationship, which seems to be
the main objective of Anonymous and
the hacking world, you
just end up with the police trying
to stop you.
So what I mean is that we never fight for
an abstract idea of freedom.
Nobody does that. We fight to disrupt
the status quo.
And it is in this very process that lies
freedom. Freedom is never the objective.
It is a fight itself.
So I will go to
the last part of my speech.
Yes, I will end up
so I can clarify what what I
what I think is really rich in the hacker
movement and how
it helps clarify your question for the
global revolutionary movement.
For at least 150 years,
the revolutionary movement has been
divided around the question of technique
and technology.
To summarize the debate, you had to, on
one hand, a
technophiles which were basically
on Marxism. We saw that the machines will
help us being free and it will be the
condition to the global emancipation.
And on the other side, you
had the like, say,
technophobic people will believe that
alienation was rooted in
technique and technology itself.
But somehow technophobia and technophobia
are the two sides of the same coin.
And this is what what what the movements
helps us.
It helps us understand
what they do have in common technophobia
and technophobia
is that they share a same false
belief that such a thing
as technik exists, that a
pure technik will exist.
It will be possible in human existence
to divide between what is technical
and what is not.
Well, in fact, it's not possible.
No such thing as a pure technique exists.
You only have to look at the state of
incompletion in which a human offspring
is born and the time it takes for it to
move in the world and to talk
to realize that its relation to
the world is not given in the least.
It's rather as a result of a whole
elaboration in relation
to the world, is not the result of a
natural compatibility.
It is essentially artificial that
is technical. To speak Greek
for its human world is a certain
configuration of techniques, of culinary
techniques, architectural techniques,
musical techniques, spiritual techniques
and from national agricultural, erotic
martial, whatever, or
the human world is always technique.
There's no generic human nature
or essence because there are only
particular techniques and because
every technique configures a world,
a relationship to this world.
And that is also why our fellow, your
world really appears to us as technical,
because a set of activities, that
structure is already part of us.
It's one those who are not familiar with
that seems to have a strange
artificiality.
The only moment where we where we feel
the world is, is is
is artificial is when we make
an innovation and where or when something
breaks down
so the techniques can be reduced to
a collection of equivalent instruments.
The generic man will just take up and
use without his essence being affected.
Every tool configures and embodies
a particular relation with the world.
And the worlds formed in this way are not
equivalents anymore than the humans we
inhabit them are.
And that's why we cannot hierarchy's
those worlds. There is nothing to
establish some as more advanced than
others.
There are really distinct, each having
its own potential and some history.
Of course, the Western ideology of
progress implicitly introduce a criterion
to hierarchy's world, and it's actually
a pretty simple one.
It's the productivity of the techniques
considered apart from what each technique
might involve ethically without regard
to the sensible world.
It engenders this
why there's no progress but Catalyst's
progress and why capitalism is
the uninterrupted, uninterrupted
destruction of worlds.
So this is why technophiles and
technophobic fail to grab the ethical
nature of every technique
in order to hierarchy's was a criterion
has to be introduced and implicit in
making it possible to classify the
different techniques in case of progress.
This is simply the quantifiable.
It's a productivity of the techniques
considered apart from what each technique
involves ethically without.
And so.
So in that sense, capitalism
is essentially technological, it is a
profitable organization of the most
productive techniques into a system.
It's cordial figure is not the economist,
but the engineer.
The engineer is a specialist in
techniques and those thus the chief
expropriates of them.
One doesn't let himself be affected by
any of them and spread his own absence
from the world heavyweight he can.
He's a sad and servile figure.
The figure of the hacker can trust point
by point with a figure of the engineer,
whatever the artistic director or
entrepreneurial efforts to try
to neutralize him may be, whereas
the engineer will capture everything that
functions in such a manner that
everything functions better in place.
It's in the service of the system the
hacker has to himself.
How does that work in order to find its
flaws, but also to invent
other uses to experiments.
Experimenting, Xen means exploring
what such and such a technique implies
ethically, what relation to the world it
enables or disables.
The hacker polytechnique out
of a technological system in order to
free them.
If we're are slaves to technology.
This is precisely because there is a hole
in symbol of artifacts of all of
our everyday existence that we take to be
specific, that we take to be specifically
technical, and that we will always regard
simply as black boxes, of which were
the innocent users understanding how
any of the devices that surround us works
allow us to see them not as mere
environments, but as a world arranged
in a certain way and one that we can
shape. This is the hackers perspective
on the world and these past
few years, the hackers military as gained
some sophistication politically, managing
to identify friends and enemies more
clearly.
But as we said earlier there, there's
still some confusion to clarify.
In 1986, Dr. Prush wrote,
whether you know it or not, if you're a
hacker, you're a revolutionary.
Don't worry, you're on the right side.
It's not certain that this sort of
innocent is still possible.
We have to remember that it's actually a
hacker. It just gave out
Jeremy Hammond to the cops
in the hacker Milia.
There's a originary illusion according
to which freedom of information, freedom
of the Internet or freedom of the
individual can be set against those who
are bent on controlling them.
And this is a serious misunderstanding.
Freedom and surveillance, freedom and the
panoptic all belong to the same
arm of government historically as the
endless expansion of control procedures
is a corollary of a form of power
that is realized through the freedom of
individuals as we exposed earlier.
Liberal government is not one that is
exercised directly on the bodies of its
subjects or that expect obedience.
It's a background power which prefers
to manage space and rule of our interests
rather than bodies are powers that
overseas monitors and acts minimally
intervening only want to frame when the
framework is threatened.
Government is up order which one obeys
like one eats when hungry and covers
oneself when called.
Though for the individual,
freedom is the only kind there is.
Is that, is this what
the Libertarians will never understand
are genuinely free being is not even set
to be free. It simply is.
It exists, its power, according to its
being safe and animals, that it is
roaming free only when it lives in an
environment that's already completely
control fenced and civilized
in English friend and free and
friend and fly in German come from
the same Indo-European root which
convicted of a shared powers that grows.
Being free and having ties was one
and the same thing.
I am free because I have ties, because I
am linked to a reality greater than me,
not because I'm alone on my own.
Freedom is not the act of sharing or
attachment, but a practical capacity to
work on them, to move around in space,
to form or to solve them.
The freedom to uproot oneself has always
been a fantasy and
empty freedom.
So to conclude this thought, because
there's been many hacking attacks that so
many of us have uploaded those last
years, and the stake is, of course, to
always bring them further, to not
let us get arrested alone.
Facing repression, it's
pretty clear where the strength of
hacking lies.
We need to multiply all of capacity
from where we can experiment without
being cocked.
And we need clouds of attacks against
infrastructures of control and civilians.
And of course, attacking infrastructure
doesn't mean truly destroying it,
but also means learning how to inhabit
it differently, how to snatch it
from its actual use and how to
appropriate it for the construction of
all worlds.
Just to sum it up, a world doesn't have
an infrastructure.
It has a way and a form
letter.
Sorry, it is long just for those who
might be interested. I just want, I think
to think are basically most
of what a big part of what I said came
from.
So a chapter of this book that I was
thinking about, which is called Out to
our Friends. And I actually have copies
in English and German for.
All of this very chapter, which probably
more clear and less boring to read and to
hear, so I will have
some if you want. And also at 10:00,
there are some people here were
organizing a workshop and the whole
14 to discuss to discuss
those issues that have been discussed
here. So I invite everybody who's been
interested to go at 10:00 tonight, that
whole fortune.
All right. Thanks for the talk so far.
We actually have 15
minutes for Q&A.
So if you have questions or comments,
please get in line at these microphones.
Please note that, please, only one
comment or one question at a time.
So I guess we can start
with microphone number four.
OK, guys, thanks.
Very, very complex talk you gave
there with a lot of philosophy in it.
But I'm just
back on the idea of engineer versus
hacker. You say like the engineers
using technology or making technology
a slave of the system.
How you express that and the hacker
is different in a way that the
trust understands the technique and
tries to use it in different ways.
I don't know which kind of engineer you
meant there, but I don't think that you
can differentiate in this way
as like a mechanical engineer
doesn't just use technique
technique for like
a living off the system or whatever.
It's more like an understanding
as well. And using it in a different way.
Maybe not like an Hekker, but still
not just, you know, enslaving it.
I think I get your question,
but I don't really hear it very
well there. But I guess you could say
that my my my critical
engineer was to omni lateral
is what he said.
Yeah, I guess that's
the point here is that I was trying to
make is not to say that all engineers
in the world individually are evil
person, but that the figure of the
engineers, the job of the engineer
is to make a system work.
Why?
The difference was a figure of the hacker
is not to how to make it work better, but
to understand how it works, to be able to
actually change its use.
That's what the point of the of the
comparison is that the answer was.
Yeah, well, but then there was this
what I would I say, you know, I think
it's not that good because an
engineer much more uses
the stuff he learns to create something
new or something
that but, you know, use a technique in a
different way. So there's a lot of
similarity between what a hacker does or
what an engineer does.
Just they do it on different aspects,
if you want.
I mean, I don't think it's the same thing
when you work for when you're an engineer
in Google and when you just set
up an attack against Stratfor.
I you know, I don't think you actually
really do the same thing.
You know, I mean, this is like a big
difference, you know, in terms of
what you're fighting for or against or
whatever.
All right. So let's make sure we get
other questions, too.
We have one question from the Internet.
At least
it's good to actually,
I'll start with the funniest one.
Are your French.
No, I'm not.
OK, but and of
a guy say that your English is perfect.
Oh, thanks a lot.
All right. Microphone number two, please.
I think if we talk about
what I found in your presentation
was that the granularity was individual
and government.
But due to my work, I also see
a lot of attacks
about criminal organizations which
have budgets ranging into the millions,
which also use the same techniques for
blackmailing, holding people ransom.
How does this fit into your story?
And
I think
I guess the most I mean, I think
government is just the mafia.
That's one of our all the other mafias,
you know. And so, you know, we're just
the smartest one. But.
Microphone number one.
Yes, I'm wondering, actually,
it ties into the question that just came,
you kind of like picture many things
in terms of some individual and
the government. But then we also and
especially when you talk about hackers,
there is also something like
like like many, many communities.
Right? I mean, that's the hacking we are
meeting here. But if you walk around the
hall here, you will find like tons of
sub realities that people are doing
all kinds of weird stuff, you know,
and interesting stuff on there.
And many different levels, actually.
They are hacking at things, you know,
kind of like economy related or political
related or some security system
and so on. But still, it's
you kind of like identify
this kind of hacker view
or perspective or something as a distinct
way of being in the world.
Right. And and still,
what I'm getting is how are
you transforming
all of these thoughts and all of these
attitudes that are around into
how do you connect it to some kind of
action?
And I actually it's
my job was to talk and not to connect
all those, but I would really, really
much like to do it. But I guess I don't
have that power, unfortunately, or maybe
fortunately.
But I guess
I think one of the interests of
such a meeting here was so many
people doing, as you said, so many
different things on so many different
levels, actually, to be able to have
debates like political debates about
about what makes sense, what doesn't.
And and basically what you know,
I talk about ethics in my in my speech.
And ethics is not a big word.
Just what is our idea
of freedom and joy or whatever it is,
the ethics. And so being
able to to to
to to figure out watch
which are the different
positions that exist in this Melea
Hawkins. And since things
are being done, I mean, in Tottenham,
in London, the example I was giving given
at some point are the police and the
police didn't have the encryption code
for Blackberries.
And of course, we're like, okay, we're
going to give it to you. But what
happened is that some hackers just
threaten BlackBerry to to,
uh, to hack them and to reveal their
encryption code, which will make their
their phones useless.
And so that you don't give the encryption
codes to the police to help people
who actually might have been arrested.
But so I guess that the the
connection with with what is happening
outside of the hacker media is is is
always going. And I think for the last
years what we've seen is that it has been
improving and intensifying
a lot. So I guess we
just have to continue to still go
that way.
So what you see, the communication that
you are proposing, the way the language
you're proposing to talk about things and
the views, but you see this as some kind
of this kind of debate and discourse and
whatnot.
This is kind of like the ground on which
several actions and like all kinds of
ways can happen.
But basically it's important to find some
kind of language to an effect
to actually it's
just a way to try to to open
a discussion with whoever is willing to
to to to have it.
Number two, OK, so if I
understood you correctly, then you
said that in a cybernetic society,
things work to mechanical and
also the Pirate Party, for example,
failed because it lacked a vision
somehow.
Now, my question would be, in your
opinion, what the what would be a good
vision and what would be good goals
for a political party?
I don't believe in political party, so
I kept.
I guess. Thank you.
And number four, just to
answer, actually was not a way not to
answer, but I believe that today what
we need to do is to get organized
by ourselves with our
own means and locally
and linked with everyone else.
So it's not a I think that there is
there are ways and there's always been
historically ways to get organized
outside of political parties and outside
of all the political hypocrisy.
And I think that's the way to go.
And I think that is what a lot of people
do spontaneously in the world today.
You mentioned that those who
opt out to share the data
and to be on Facebook and Google may
become suspect or suspicious
and they face tougher restrictions
maybe.
Do you have a suggestion how to deal
with that opt out and still
not be?
It's not me who said it.
It's actually Jared Cohen and
Eric Schmidt and their books called The
New Digital Age. So, you know, there are
you know, there are Google CEO and
and someone important
in the in the American defense.
And it is them.
Just just explain that.
And, of course, we can really
easily believe that it will happen in the
coming years of the
honestly, beside propagating
ways for more and more people to be
anonymous, just like Tale's or
Attah are doing, just seems to
me to to be the only way, actually,
I guess to escape.
I mean, I don't think that we can we can
be like, oh, we're not going to use the
Internet at all in the coming year or
a phone or whatever. I mean, we will
there's the question is, how do we make
sure I mean, how do we do the best
we can so that we maintain Zauner
capacity on the
networks?
Thank you.
All right. We have another question from
the Internet.
Um, you mentioned that
some people might use technology
as an example on cell phones or social
media and, um,
to to fight the blacklist
and censorship and but
some people are not wanting
to use this technology.
So what could we do
to ensure that?
I don't I don't know. I don't have any
clearer I mean, I honestly
personally, I don't think that
all the upheavals in the world would have
happened for the last five years where
because of social media.
But I think that social media are a
way sometimes to make to
make this happen.
But there's a story about Algeria.
I think it was in late 90s.
There was a huge riot in Incaviglia.
And the way the the the riots
will actually spread is that, you know,
it's made of small hills
and people in one place
after some kids were as police
will set on fire of
a police station and the people on the
other side of the of the of the hill
will just see the smoke and see the
people there. It will be attacking the
police and they will attack the police
again and on and on and on up until
the whole area was just set on fire.
So I guess before and they didn't have
the Internet, so basically managed to
find ways to communicate and to know what
was going on. So we do not purely
obviously and happily
dependent on the social media
and on the Internet.
I think No. Four was next.
I don't know how to say this in like less
than five minutes, but, um,
it would be nice if you did.
Yeah, I try.
So collaboration is really hard.
And I mean, a lot of technology like
political parties is useful for
collaboration between humans to to
get some sort of society going that
allows us to
specialize with our jobs and make up
this life and whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And that takes five minutes.
And I mean, one important part is
hacking and political activism
and revolution or whatever when things
go wrong. But on the other hand, you also
do need collaboration and stability
to have some sort of foundation to to
base that on. And I feel like what
you're saying is that we only need
anarchy and and revolution
to to function, but that that that
doesn't feel right to me.
Can you comment on that?
I think you make a really strange
anthropology anthropological point,
which is that human beings could only
leave and will have only lived
under power structures, which I don't
think is true.
So I don't know what to say.
I mean, you start from the point that we
will need to be Goran's, whatever will
happen. And I think it's not true
historically and I don't think it's not
desirable either.
But so I, I don't really
know what to answer.
I think that your your your your
what your principles are principles
is not.
All right. This there's three more
persons in line, so that's
probably the maximum we we will be able
to take. So no.
To please.
Hey, first off, thanks
very much for not televising
or recording this talk.
I think it definitely helps the
environment for this talk.
For this topic you're talking about a
very positive way, makes it easier
to to engage with you and ask questions.
But very simply, I'm curious.
You said you were
that you you don't believe in political
parties. I'm just curious.
Do you think voting
I mean, despite that, do you do you
also think voting is do you
think voting can sometimes be useful and
ethical or do you think voting
is across the board
futile?
And
it's a really abstract question you ask.
I mean, if you ask me, great.
Yeah, I know. But I mean, what I mean is
that if you ask me if it makes sense, if
I if I do, I vote for elections.
So honestly, I have never voted in my
life. So no, but if you ask me
if I think that in some
context it's important
to have everyone's advice to to,
to, to, to agree on a decision.
Yes, I do. It's really important.
And so, I mean, basically,
the problem with vote is that it
makes us believe
that this will be the only way
for us to agree or disagree on
things. Why these things are
different ways that happen
every at every moment in life.
So but I do not really believe in
representative democracy, if that's a
question that's beyond.
No, for, um,
I kind of have the same question as the
guy who was in front of me, but
I'll I'll say it in a little bit stronger
way. So your revolution
is successful. The government is gone
now. You have Blackwater,
G4S, bunch of mafias
are growing up and now they want to start
another governor.
How you have 48 hours
before the people start to starve and how
are you going to set up a system,
UN system, what is it going to
look like after the
revolution is successful?
Thank you.
So that's a real interesting question.
But also it's a pretty strange way
because I think that this question has
never been proposed in history this way,
because most of the time, you know, when
when when a government is
defeated, it's not defeated from
a second to the next is defeated after
people get organized together.
People managed to I mean, if you take
60, you know, at some point the peasants
give give money to the people on strike,
etc.. And so the bet is that
the very process of restoring government
is also what gives us
the hints of how to get organized
differently. And because what we know
that, you know, what happens in
is a really famous quote from
the court during the Paris Commune where
he just writes to his mother and he's
like, you know, Paris Commune and
his mother. And he's like, oh, you know,
Paris has never been so beautiful.
Life has never been so, so easy.
People are like good to each other.
And the belief is that
when it's a normal situations, normal
situation of power is just
when you enter a state of exception.
Actually, you end up you have
to to behave
in a different manner than during
the normal way.
So when and, you know, there's
a reason why your question is tricky,
that there's a long revolutionary
tradition of Marxist
Suk's, which was like, oh, the revolution
is going to be this and that and this and
that. And of course, every time it goes,
it goes well, we just just like it just
gives people and the layers.
It was for the sake of revolution.
We do not come from this political
I mean, we come from a political
tradition that takes its roots in
more in the Paris Commune and in Spain,
sort of six and maybe in
May 68.
And in the fact that
we believe in the autonomous
capacity of people to get organized by
themselves and not to starve.
I mean, no people as ever starved
because they were left alone by the
government.
Government are starving people to death
a lot of time, but people by themselves,
when there's no governments, they handle
themselves.
And it's not it's not a crazy belief.
I mean, people can handle their shit
by themselves. I mean, it's true.
OK, I'm sorry, but we're running out of
time, so thanks again
for your talk. Thanks a lot.
I guess if you want to discuss further,
just come over here.
Yeah, definitely.
And I've got the papers for that one.
I mean, people are still willing.