Notes: Technology and Politix workshop
A presentation and a discussion.
Brief history of hacklabs. The AnarchoGeek. Is that a sexist term?
hacklab
A presentation and a discussion.
Recent history of hacklabs and other initiatives. How tech n politix get towgether in openly political spaces.
The _first wave_ (North line).
Anarchist and libertarian squats.
Plug n Politix: ASCII -- 1st squat internet free coffee.
LoTech Berlin
EgoCity Zurich
Print Dijon
2 main characteristix: freesoftware, politix, based in a squat. A cybercafee once a week open. Skillharing workshops. Photography as well. To secure their communication and act politix in digital.
This was the North development.
In the South: _second wave_.
Activists and hackers meet: the birth of the HACKLAB. They plan the revolution together. They wanted to go public: the HACKMEETINGs were born. Every year in Italy. Always happen in a squat. Reclaim the diff use of technology and insert itself into a broader political framework.
Spread to Italy.
5 Spanish Hackmeetings
6 Italian Hackmeetings
_Third wave_: transnational HACKMEETING. 1st: this year, Croatia. Two waves coming together. Horizontal decision making, self-managed. Going out of the digital: reality hacking. Reclaiming every aspects of your life through using your creativity to get through obstacles. This is the THK.
Q: ACTIVIX - Indymedia scene Lancaster. Leeds, Sheffield. Let's make the connection.
_Goals_
BB: Reclaiming computing and subvertising technologies.
Pantechnological society. Promoting tech as a solution to every problem. The WiFi trend f.e. A simple comsumption product? We are supposed to use it as it was advertised.
Hacklabs almost exclusively rely on skipped material. There is overproduction on the field.
Hacking a disk drive to make a vegetable cutter machine. Controlling the coffee machine through your parallel port.
BB: To connect radical left and free software activists.
Free soft community and rl anti-autoritarian comm have many thgs common, but they tend to ignore each other.
What is free software? Copiable, understandable (distributed with source code). The source code is the recipee for the cake. You have to compile it (bake it). You normally buy the cake and you know the recipee. You can modify free software on condition that you distribute them amongst your friends.
FS is about cakes for free and cakes for the community.
Richard Stallman invented free software. He was a protohacker. A person who hacks through obstackles with creativity.
Hacker is a sexist term.
He created the resistance movement that is to be called GNU.
Its been meant as a resistance movement against proprietary software. It's a global open society shit.
FS is developed by lotta people round the world. Anyone interested. A collective effort. Anyone can get involved, not just programmers. Propose a program or a feature, translate, write dox, etc. Transparent and open development processes. Democratic self-org process.
Same theories are applied at PGA-like shits.
Anarchists are claiming abandoned property and criticizing private property. FS devs are criticizing intellectual property.
squatnet, etc.
What can geeks do for anarchos? Give them a hacking lesson or at least provide the necessary services like servers, netaccess, etc.
What can anarchos do for geeks? Connect them to a broader (political) perpective.
Q: do you have to be man to be a geek?
A: Geektalk is a boytalk. Masculime culture. Conceal information. Like RTFM. Lame newbie you are. There's a good document.
A: I'm a female geek. At ACTIVIX I met women and they were also confused about the language.
ETC meeting too (E.. Tech Carnival).
A: The Egyptian User group and all the Arabic groups have 50% women.
A: In fact all over the Arabic work techjobs 50% women.
The presentation is on track again.
Radicalise free software.
BB: Public empowerment, digital alphabetisation.
The digitalisation leads to diempowerment. Social control is concerned. The state control tools are getting more and more technobased. It might means that we could reach more into them, but usually it is not so: we don't have the techknowledge. Technpower. Tech is a weapon. The NET is a purely cool militant tool. [The digital divide.]
Free acces bridges the DD. It's not about getting free access, b/c you will find it everywhere in the near future. It's about being a phisycal interface to Indymedia and other things.
_Local experience_
The name.
We try to combine everyday problems and computers. Libertine politics. Free shops. Organic garden. Concert venue. Computer space. 8 persons there on a permament bases. At Dijon.
Usually there is 1 techie who print mail and has the techopower. Whereas, we use a mailing list as an email address. Then we have an internal Wiki for internal organisation. A Wiki is a page which anyone can change.
the most successful and complicated task is called: collective admin. 30 computers in the squat. All Debian powered. Some servers. One internal server for file exchange. We have all music there in Ogg Vorbis. There is an encripted channell there. This needs administration. Usually there is an administrator. We wanted to refused this. Not to depend on the experts that do the slavery thing. Everyone learnt to administer a different server. They sometimes switch. So that even the not-so-geek learn about all the network.
That's how to merge politics and technology.
THE END OF THE PRESENTATION
C: Having root access. Typically the root person has the right, who both knows and is trusted.
Q: How can you prevent the computer disabled users to screw the system.
A: That's how you learn to deal with anything. You have to accept the fact that if you want people to learn you have to let them play.
C: Freedom Lab London. Not working very well. Three computers left there with the old geek anarchists when the Social Centre moved. It's a very social concept. In London everyone has the Internet. You don't go there to check emails. You have to push the process forward.
I am not very knowledgable. Just a power user. People coming like "Oh I am so glad that you are going to fix it." How to involve them? How to make themselves want to learn.
A: In PRINT there are people coming for the Internet, but more like checking for the free software. Bit of an ID crisis. We were discussing it. It's pointless about free Internet.
In the North they are laptoping and not talking, in the South it is the other way around.
C: PnP debates are beyond most people's horizons. I'm working with a group and it is very difficult to communicate, I have to do it e way, but some members are refugees without access.
C: Political people are to be involved by showing them that something that enhances their political power. Or skills that they enable them to get jobs and money, so that they won't die starving for the revolution.
C: Recycling computers which HLs do is very important. That's the answer for the refugee and other access problems. People always say that techies won't give their knowledge. But I think they have a lot to give. Just they need time b/c this tech stuff takes time, and they don't always look very interesting while they are doing it.
BB: Sexism n Geeks
BB: Hacklab beyond(2) ESF
Q: Any xp with repression.
A: We had that but not in HACKLABS. It was in Genova.
A: Frankfurt: hard disk removed, 2 computers smashed.
A: ASCII once evicted, they took 2 40GB HDD with downloaded Linux images.
A: Post-Genova trials: thanks to Indymedia videos 28 persons are on trial.
A: Sweden, Goteburg. Two persons jailed for operating an SMS tree with riot location messages.
C: Our Dijon hard drives are encripted, authorities could only decript it with special money in a few months.
C: Most people are unaware how much infotraces they leave behind. Tell'em what are the issues and the solutions.
A: Southern Germany. Radical rightists mails captured.
Q: Genderchangers.
A: I've just been to 2 workshops. Women on the hardware side. Most sexy side of the computer they think. They connect tech and sexism.
Q: The Women Indymedia group. A Q to the establishing questionnaire: How many women do you have? How do you like to involve women? -- What happened? -- They asked how to do it. It is difficult. For example give positive replies to email if you agree.
A: Women really want to know but are afraid to ask stupid questions. Especially amongst men. Man are taught to ask stupid questions.
C: Maybe it is not a problem of structure, but a problem of women.
A: I think it is a structural problem. I agree that they fear to enter the digital world, even older men etc. It's priviliged young white males. People who feel insecure prefer to have clear structure. Not like a bunch of geeks talking to each other. There was an Indymedia meeting. Clash between tech and nontech people. Eventually a tech workshop. A group of laptopers working. Finally one stood up, said "Does anyone has a question?" When they had he said three times successively "That's the wrong question." and went back to work.
And there is the problem of writing manuals, a slavework.
But there are many women in the video and picture side of Indymedia, esp in Italy.
C: You needn't ask a lotta stupid questions if you RTFM or at least google it first. I am a women and I can write my question in the search engine and get the answer from the computer without bothering people.
C: Men tend to play around the NET. Try out software they don't need. The women are interested in software they need. I'm gona start a project with some Germans to find out where to start, and what to trust.
A: They are the HOWTO pages.
C: Getting back to the original issue. That's not a women's problem. The first is cultural. They are not encouraged. Literature studies more. The movies present a male role model of the hacker. Demo parties. Male dominated, but everyone wanted girls to come. If they did, they were flooded. These local antenna people were very friendly. They said they want euros, beer and girlfriends. That gave my the shit.
C: Men usu get the keyboard out of the girl's hands, but not the other boys.
C: Shootem'up games introduced comps to a certain generation in Finland, and girls couldn't relate to that.
C: A stupid question is not what is considered stupid. My experiences show that girl's questions are more the time considered stupid.
C: The interaction is problematic, but the knowledge is there and it is open.
C: The geeks like to fuck around with techs, but they also are the people to set up the environment for the users.
Q: In London, some Indymedia people are going to do an Indymedia Center as parts of the Communication Rights Forum. Working together with a lota NGOs. Connects the community media and the lobbyists to bring out their secret knowledge. In the PolyMedia Lab in Geneva there was no collaboration.
C: PML was a total failure. Politically create a countersummit of techies. But there was NO localised feature, not even the local activists knew about it. It was a closed circle of media activists.
C: I followed it from the outside. What is it good for? They didn't want to discuss that. Only how to do it.
C: Activix of NW England: no one came up from London, the arrogant city bitches. It's always like that.
I work in ESF with NOMAD project. A strange combination of people. Developing a translator program for BABELS. Some French people wrote the software to substitute for commercial hardware. We could hardly make the ESF use it. The compromise was to archive the whole ESF. They couldn't get rid of us. At the ESF London we will show what one can do with the archive and also do practical workshops.
/C: Comment; Q: Question; A: Answer/
maxigas scripsit 2004.07.27
A presentation and a discussion.
Recent history of hacklabs and other initiatives. How tech n politix get towgether in openly political spaces.
The _first wave_ (North line).
Anarchist and libertarian squats.
Plug n Politix: ASCII -- 1st squat internet free coffee.
LoTech Berlin
EgoCity Zurich
Print Dijon
2 main characteristix: freesoftware, politix, based in a squat. A cybercafee once a week open. Skillharing workshops. Photography as well. To secure their communication and act politix in digital.
This was the North development.
In the South: _second wave_.
Activists and hackers meet: the birth of the HACKLAB. They plan the revolution together. They wanted to go public: the HACKMEETINGs were born. Every year in Italy. Always happen in a squat. Reclaim the diff use of technology and insert itself into a broader political framework.
Spread to Italy.
5 Spanish Hackmeetings
6 Italian Hackmeetings
_Third wave_: transnational HACKMEETING. 1st: this year, Croatia. Two waves coming together. Horizontal decision making, self-managed. Going out of the digital: reality hacking. Reclaiming every aspects of your life through using your creativity to get through obstacles. This is the THK.
Q: ACTIVIX - Indymedia scene Lancaster. Leeds, Sheffield. Let's make the connection.
_Goals_
BB: Reclaiming computing and subvertising technologies.
Pantechnological society. Promoting tech as a solution to every problem. The WiFi trend f.e. A simple comsumption product? We are supposed to use it as it was advertised.
Hacklabs almost exclusively rely on skipped material. There is overproduction on the field.
Hacking a disk drive to make a vegetable cutter machine. Controlling the coffee machine through your parallel port.
BB: To connect radical left and free software activists.
Free soft community and rl anti-autoritarian comm have many thgs common, but they tend to ignore each other.
What is free software? Copiable, understandable (distributed with source code). The source code is the recipee for the cake. You have to compile it (bake it). You normally buy the cake and you know the recipee. You can modify free software on condition that you distribute them amongst your friends.
FS is about cakes for free and cakes for the community.
Richard Stallman invented free software. He was a protohacker. A person who hacks through obstackles with creativity.
Hacker is a sexist term.
He created the resistance movement that is to be called GNU.
Its been meant as a resistance movement against proprietary software. It's a global open society shit.
FS is developed by lotta people round the world. Anyone interested. A collective effort. Anyone can get involved, not just programmers. Propose a program or a feature, translate, write dox, etc. Transparent and open development processes. Democratic self-org process.
Same theories are applied at PGA-like shits.
Anarchists are claiming abandoned property and criticizing private property. FS devs are criticizing intellectual property.
squatnet, etc.
What can geeks do for anarchos? Give them a hacking lesson or at least provide the necessary services like servers, netaccess, etc.
What can anarchos do for geeks? Connect them to a broader (political) perpective.
Q: do you have to be man to be a geek?
A: Geektalk is a boytalk. Masculime culture. Conceal information. Like RTFM. Lame newbie you are. There's a good document.
A: I'm a female geek. At ACTIVIX I met women and they were also confused about the language.
ETC meeting too (E.. Tech Carnival).
A: The Egyptian User group and all the Arabic groups have 50% women.
A: In fact all over the Arabic work techjobs 50% women.
The presentation is on track again.
Radicalise free software.
BB: Public empowerment, digital alphabetisation.
The digitalisation leads to diempowerment. Social control is concerned. The state control tools are getting more and more technobased. It might means that we could reach more into them, but usually it is not so: we don't have the techknowledge. Technpower. Tech is a weapon. The NET is a purely cool militant tool. [The digital divide.]
Free acces bridges the DD. It's not about getting free access, b/c you will find it everywhere in the near future. It's about being a phisycal interface to Indymedia and other things.
_Local experience_
The name.
We try to combine everyday problems and computers. Libertine politics. Free shops. Organic garden. Concert venue. Computer space. 8 persons there on a permament bases. At Dijon.
Usually there is 1 techie who print mail and has the techopower. Whereas, we use a mailing list as an email address. Then we have an internal Wiki for internal organisation. A Wiki is a page which anyone can change.
the most successful and complicated task is called: collective admin. 30 computers in the squat. All Debian powered. Some servers. One internal server for file exchange. We have all music there in Ogg Vorbis. There is an encripted channell there. This needs administration. Usually there is an administrator. We wanted to refused this. Not to depend on the experts that do the slavery thing. Everyone learnt to administer a different server. They sometimes switch. So that even the not-so-geek learn about all the network.
That's how to merge politics and technology.
THE END OF THE PRESENTATION
C: Having root access. Typically the root person has the right, who both knows and is trusted.
Q: How can you prevent the computer disabled users to screw the system.
A: That's how you learn to deal with anything. You have to accept the fact that if you want people to learn you have to let them play.
C: Freedom Lab London. Not working very well. Three computers left there with the old geek anarchists when the Social Centre moved. It's a very social concept. In London everyone has the Internet. You don't go there to check emails. You have to push the process forward.
I am not very knowledgable. Just a power user. People coming like "Oh I am so glad that you are going to fix it." How to involve them? How to make themselves want to learn.
A: In PRINT there are people coming for the Internet, but more like checking for the free software. Bit of an ID crisis. We were discussing it. It's pointless about free Internet.
In the North they are laptoping and not talking, in the South it is the other way around.
C: PnP debates are beyond most people's horizons. I'm working with a group and it is very difficult to communicate, I have to do it e way, but some members are refugees without access.
C: Political people are to be involved by showing them that something that enhances their political power. Or skills that they enable them to get jobs and money, so that they won't die starving for the revolution.
C: Recycling computers which HLs do is very important. That's the answer for the refugee and other access problems. People always say that techies won't give their knowledge. But I think they have a lot to give. Just they need time b/c this tech stuff takes time, and they don't always look very interesting while they are doing it.
BB: Sexism n Geeks
BB: Hacklab beyond(2) ESF
Q: Any xp with repression.
A: We had that but not in HACKLABS. It was in Genova.
A: Frankfurt: hard disk removed, 2 computers smashed.
A: ASCII once evicted, they took 2 40GB HDD with downloaded Linux images.
A: Post-Genova trials: thanks to Indymedia videos 28 persons are on trial.
A: Sweden, Goteburg. Two persons jailed for operating an SMS tree with riot location messages.
C: Our Dijon hard drives are encripted, authorities could only decript it with special money in a few months.
C: Most people are unaware how much infotraces they leave behind. Tell'em what are the issues and the solutions.
A: Southern Germany. Radical rightists mails captured.
Q: Genderchangers.
A: I've just been to 2 workshops. Women on the hardware side. Most sexy side of the computer they think. They connect tech and sexism.
Q: The Women Indymedia group. A Q to the establishing questionnaire: How many women do you have? How do you like to involve women? -- What happened? -- They asked how to do it. It is difficult. For example give positive replies to email if you agree.
A: Women really want to know but are afraid to ask stupid questions. Especially amongst men. Man are taught to ask stupid questions.
C: Maybe it is not a problem of structure, but a problem of women.
A: I think it is a structural problem. I agree that they fear to enter the digital world, even older men etc. It's priviliged young white males. People who feel insecure prefer to have clear structure. Not like a bunch of geeks talking to each other. There was an Indymedia meeting. Clash between tech and nontech people. Eventually a tech workshop. A group of laptopers working. Finally one stood up, said "Does anyone has a question?" When they had he said three times successively "That's the wrong question." and went back to work.
And there is the problem of writing manuals, a slavework.
But there are many women in the video and picture side of Indymedia, esp in Italy.
C: You needn't ask a lotta stupid questions if you RTFM or at least google it first. I am a women and I can write my question in the search engine and get the answer from the computer without bothering people.
C: Men tend to play around the NET. Try out software they don't need. The women are interested in software they need. I'm gona start a project with some Germans to find out where to start, and what to trust.
A: They are the HOWTO pages.
C: Getting back to the original issue. That's not a women's problem. The first is cultural. They are not encouraged. Literature studies more. The movies present a male role model of the hacker. Demo parties. Male dominated, but everyone wanted girls to come. If they did, they were flooded. These local antenna people were very friendly. They said they want euros, beer and girlfriends. That gave my the shit.
C: Men usu get the keyboard out of the girl's hands, but not the other boys.
C: Shootem'up games introduced comps to a certain generation in Finland, and girls couldn't relate to that.
C: A stupid question is not what is considered stupid. My experiences show that girl's questions are more the time considered stupid.
C: The interaction is problematic, but the knowledge is there and it is open.
C: The geeks like to fuck around with techs, but they also are the people to set up the environment for the users.
Q: In London, some Indymedia people are going to do an Indymedia Center as parts of the Communication Rights Forum. Working together with a lota NGOs. Connects the community media and the lobbyists to bring out their secret knowledge. In the PolyMedia Lab in Geneva there was no collaboration.
C: PML was a total failure. Politically create a countersummit of techies. But there was NO localised feature, not even the local activists knew about it. It was a closed circle of media activists.
C: I followed it from the outside. What is it good for? They didn't want to discuss that. Only how to do it.
C: Activix of NW England: no one came up from London, the arrogant city bitches. It's always like that.
I work in ESF with NOMAD project. A strange combination of people. Developing a translator program for BABELS. Some French people wrote the software to substitute for commercial hardware. We could hardly make the ESF use it. The compromise was to archive the whole ESF. They couldn't get rid of us. At the ESF London we will show what one can do with the archive and also do practical workshops.
/C: Comment; Q: Question; A: Answer/
maxigas scripsit 2004.07.27
maxigas@zpok.hu |
http://indymedia.hu |