Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/681 Thanks!
As you all know, it's been three years
of the CCC and the debate on technology
and politics has held a special place.
Our first talk today is called
the on psychiatric blic,
and it will be quite meta as it
will backtrack through the titles and
abstracts from nineteen eighty four
to today.
Analise apparent patterns and turning
points in the subject.
To do so we have Moxey Gus who
has a Ph.D.
for Masters degrees and three bachelor
degrees.
His.
He's currently conducting postdoctoral
research. He's interested in cybernetics,
in the intellectual trajectory and
everyday practices of the human and
natural sciences.
Joining him is Mel, who has a background
in computer science, a Ph.D.
in media studies, works in research in
the intersection of technology, education
and the international development.
A round of applause from Exodus and Mel,
thank you.
So thank you for coming at this
really early hour, and
this is the first
results of a longer research
project that we
started in a couple of weeks
ago and
the.
The idea was to look at
how the relationship of technology
and politics looks like
in the oil talks of
the Congress.
So this is a kind of
talk about all the talks that have been
before.
And it's a kind of talk
that will be about talks.
And why we were interested
in this question is, of course,
because there is an ever growing debate
inside the Congress
between the hard core techies
and between the technical activists.
How much politics and what kind
of politics should be in the Congress?
What is the interesting what a boring
technical content that should be
presented and so on.
At the same time, this is also a
classic social scientific
question. In fact, there is a social
scientific discipline called science
and technology studies that is
mainly constructed around this
question of the relationship between
technology, society and politics.
So what we did was
to go back from the beginning and
read all the titles and the talks
and categorize them and try to
come up with some preliminary
results to show you.
And in this journey
and we found that the first
years were scarcely
documented.
So we had to look at
various archives and we found some
funny artifacts in the meantime.
So we would like to share with you
a video and
some parts of a television
report that was screened in 1986
documenting the second Kiowas Congress.
This will be in German.
Played and clear.
KAOS communications concurs Flintwood
Artie in Hamburg,
the usual hacker party,
that stuff and field operations
for between.
I entered comedically, that's fancy
about the crazy feeling
of our pleasure.
I know that Mark
does shake Denise up,
but
I've seen
oh oh,
oh, come on, bottom shaft.
Feingold, bad taste here.
Demand is depressed.
Oh my
God.
When he the telephone that woman for
Valdete didn't in the beginning.
And that's on banking earth and out
not in the eyes of people
who decided
to
on
the Huckabee.
The goal is not to influence on.
We put it to diminish.
We can feel the doctors I can extend.
Hoby does futilities is an
effort to focus within the
computer technology because
it's she it's an
and was and then
esteemed influence
the accent you of
the Huck Finn gunslinger
DC.
Yeah. I want to
talk about any computer and telephone
ineffably nutrition data and an acoustic
or a modem.
You can as a head start in its beginning
of a feeling that is a 20 year of
deposits of bank and of course computer
scene is not Togami sneaked into thinking
in ecosystem. Andrian, if you
like, double schabir locked up in type
you should.
Since it came from the perspective
of Indonesia, Indonesia is indeed sealed
as hackers
would pass filter.
Isn't this Marcus Pasta Shatz.
Oh,
it's in Thailand. No cost conscious.
And it got to be of
not to elevate to the states,
not to add to an abundance
of other doright
international finance.
I was touch eskin on the antifa
enough times in mentioning to us here,
as all this happens, I was
asked initially
and we couldn't eat food in fact, or six.
Linden is an Pommier
pretty dusty nationality or
no against it.
Then I was into it in front
the title
of the
market.
We think that a
nationality today
it's of no importance
and we change so soon as
it's most amount of time.
I would
you
like to buy your video.
I said I'm not
done. And if you don't mind, a
young
son or.
So we ended.
So we saw a glimpse of Holland
at the end, the one of the
founders of the club.
And so this is the word
cloud of all that I said, just to give
you an impression of the whole.
And as you can see, most of the terms
look like technical terms, but
then in the context
and they are often politicized
in different ways than in
the most typical way in which
these technical terms come into
a political way of talking is
the nightmares that you see on the left.
And we were interested to see
over the years how the
topics and how the relationships
developed and what was the
internal dynamics of the
of the course
universe and maybe
also the European hacking
scene.
But also we were interested how
this internal dynamics was
connected to larger social
transformations, for example, if it
is possible to detect the fall
of the Berlin Wall
in the Congress content.
So we chose just
one very obvious
and prominent example
for our first round of searching
for keywords.
And this was searching for the keyword
NSA.
And I don't know, you can probably not
read the years, but it shows that it
came up in 2004 and in 2005
and then again only in 2013.
And from anecdotal evidence,
I would have thought that it would have
been present also in the years before
there was this kind of told you so
mentality.
And that I frequently heard people
talking about that.
We knew it all along and nobody listened,
at least from the Congress
talks and topics.
This is not visible.
But as Maxygen already said,
we're all also interested in
talking to people that have attended
previous talks and
getting more data and more evidence.
So maybe this was visible
in other areas, just not in the Congress
presentations.
So where did we get the data before?
Ninety two, it was the most difficult
part.
We tried first the Congress archive
on the CCC website, but
that was not available anymore.
So we were lucky enough, however,
to find the files still in the Web
archive.
Another source was the Datin Slider
archive, which is unfortunately also
incomplete.
And there we found a few scanned PDF
that we had to copy by hand.
So just to give you an example,
this is the data in Florida
from one that showed up from 84.
There was a more or less complete
schedule from the first Congress.
So that was that one was still easy
enough to copy.
There were other ones.
Um, yeah. It also says bring your
picture.
And there were other ones like this
one from to one.
It's already a bit harder to read,
but it was still possible.
Of course, there's also no abstract, so
it wasn't always easy to figure out what
the talks actually were about
with us to talk about this aspect later.
And then there were files like this one,
which is the review of the Congress.
Nineteen ninety.
We could not find any plan or any
schedule. So what we did is
actually read the file
and try to figure out, OK, is this
what people are talking about?
Is this a torg?
Was it a workshop or was it just a topic
that came up and
tried to compile
a more or less accurate fire plan
from this information?
So after 1992, there
was already something
called the World Wide Web and
the schedules of the Congress
were usually published in a human
readable form there so
we could write a scraper
to get the talks.
And of course, we used the proper
library and no regular expressions
were harmed in the process.
And the first ones are actually
just ASCII charts and they are with the
tag inside the HTML.
After 2000, too, there
are machine readable dumps of the program
in the format and
at some point there is also SML,
which is the most structured
dump that we could get, and
these ones have different problems than
the previous ones.
So they are
in various encodings
and usually the full abstract
or in some years at least a full abstract
was also missing.
So this is, for example,
some of the problems
that we still have to clean up in the
code base.
Everything
that we used, including
the code that generated the original
dataset and also the categorized
datasets are available in this
repository.
And we have this
plan to migrate it into
maybe open science framework
or a similar website, which is
for open science projects
specifically, which is not just
a repository.
So as we said,
of course, we try to
discern which
talk should be considered
a technological talk and which
each talk should be considered political
talk, and we had to
introduce some other categories to deal
with the more controversial
abstract.
So all in all, we looked at two thousand
three hundred and seven talks there
in a coma, separated values fail
and we asked three humans
to categorize.
And here we would like to
thank Fumiko, who helped
us to go through all
these talks.
And of course, Mel and me
were also reading them.
And we didn't use the categories that
are used in the conference.
Trex also because the different
categories of the conference tracks
were changing over the years,
but also because these categories
don't necessarily reflect the
research questions that we wanted to ask.
So, of course, the
most hotly debated part of this
will be how we discern technology from
politics.
In short, we can say that, um,
we just, um,
we just assumed that everything that
comes into the Congress has something to
do with technology.
So what we were looking for is a,
um, a social impact where
it is not just about, for example, the
technicalities of a certain legislation,
but it's also discussed how this
legislation is shaping society
or whichever social group is is good
for or bad for.
So what difficulties did we have,
of course, as mentioned before, there
were a couple of talks where we had no
abstracts and we take them
as undefined. For example, there was one
talk called Edge C++.
We don't know what this was about.
We have our speculations, but
we cannot definitely say whether it was
technical or political.
There were a few non talks
like the Hecate Jeopardy radio broadcast
theater deejay's.
That's music films that
we also excluded from the, uh,
from from the text versus politics
tagging and attack them as
non talks.
And then there were controversial talks
or just to show that and the
differentiation between technical and
political here at the Congress is
not always so easy.
So one talk, for example, called
object to software.
The coming revolution
sounds quite or rather technical,
but in the abstract it shows that it's
actually dealing with changing,
changing the world or changing
the way things are made,
influencing how everyone
can access technology.
So this is certainly a social or
political stance that
this has.
So we have a couple of preliminary
results. Preliminary because they're only
based on the tagging of one data
set.
And as we said, we hope to find
to find more people for the tagging, but
also to join the data sets together.
So there are consistencies
which mean which we found out
is and there almost
are it's about 50/50
that the Congress is about tech and
politics, a slightly
more technical talks.
As I said, from this first dataset of
tagging, it looks a bit more technical,
but it's almost 50/50.
Then there were certain inconsistencies,
for example, in 2007,
you can see that the number of talks
goes down in two thousand
here and this was not a change of venue.
And it's also not obvious
from the number of attendance.
So we don't really know where this came
from. If any of you has an idea.
Please let us know.
Also, you can see on this one, this is
all talks over the years,
87 and 88, for example.
We could not find any information
at all. No reviews, no plan.
I think only the announcement
of the Congress.
And then there's some potential findings
or things that we could read from the
data.
One is that more participants, that does
not mean more talks.
Another one is for
where we could see that the data actually
shows. What's also written in reviews
is in 89 and the data in Florida,
it says that for the first time
there was less technical talks than
political or social ones.
And this is also shown
in the data
here. You can see this is the first time
that politics is taking over technology.
Yeah, this is the overall graph.
And then, as we said, there might
be adaptations to this one when we
match the tagged files.
But it looks like for a while
politics was much stronger.
Technically, technical talks were much
stronger. And at the moment, politics
seems to catch up.
So which one is which side?
The blue one is the technical
technical talks and the green one is
the politics.
So how we want to
go and
with this idea is a.
And is asking you
to help us
also maybe to improve the
code or to
volunteer to categorize the dogs,
you can send food
requests of just a few dogs
or you can debate what is already
there, or you can sit down and
spend, I guess, around 12 hours
to go through
every talk and
add your opinion to the
pool.
You can also for can repurpose
the code and the database.
So, for example, it would be quite nice
to do something like this with the Hope
conference and
in the United States, which is supposed
to be one of the more political
Hekker conferences in North America.
And I wonder how these things are
playing out over there.
And we
also want to
talk to people to try to find
out some of the archives that I mentioned
in different documents that we were
looking at.
So apparently at some point there was
an official Congress paper published
during the conference.
And in 1989,
there is also mentions of an electronic
newspaper that was circulated
and in various places, for example, in
the certifiers detention order,
we also saw references
to a legendary Calusa archive.
And the question is, if the council
archive is lost, it's possible to
find and
to discuss these questions
and to continue
and and,
uh, talk in
a more relaxed setting.
The registered discussion
in the data room tomorrow
at four o'clock.
So if you want to share with us
some stories from the early Congresses
or, uh, your opinions about
technology and politics at the Congress,
please come and talk to us there.
And as I said,
we have to see how does
that assess that we have to relate to
each other and
then if we can have her three different
opinions about each talk, then we can
have a less subjective
dataset to work with.
And we also have to
get information from the years that are
missing. And, of course,
clean up quite a bit.
But this
stupid idea of
dividing the talks into technology and
politics is just a first
step. One of the initial
approaches to this problem,
we actually want to spend
most of the time of the research project
with qualitative data.
So talking to people, making
interviews, focus groups and so on,
and how we want to use
this statistical evidence
is basically just to have a
consistent starting point
for discussions.
And if we do this,
then we can also start to ask more
interesting questions.
For example, how does the
ideas about politics
depend on the ideas about
technology that are circulated inside the
Congress or
how these two categories are actually
defining each other?
And thank you very much.
You can see our contacts here and
the slides are also online, so
you can download them if you want.
And as we are well on time, maybe
we can just ask
one question to the audience
who has attended the Congress and
the 80s.
So there are a couple of people, so we
really hope some of you
are joining our workshop because
we are really very interested in hearing
about those days.
We found, as we said, very
little written evidence from those
years.
Thank you. Oh, by round of applause.
We have a few minutes for questions,
so please step up to the microphones
if anybody has anything to ask
or add. Yes, microphone, please.
Yeah. Thank you for you.
Thank you. Very dark and very
interesting. So my question is, you
said you don't want to use those
grassroot categories
that the Congress itself uses
for categorizing talks.
That's that's fine.
But but I still would be interested in
knowing how have these grassroot
categories changed over the years?
Have you any observations on that?
Well, no,
we didn't look at this specific question.
What I can say about this
is maybe that there was a
lot of technical talks which
actually ended up, for example,
criticizing society or proposing
a campaign or
pointing out conflict between social
groups.
And, of course, for example,
if a talk is about, uh, firmware
security, then it will automatically go
into the technical section.
Um, but at the same
time, we found the talks that were
in the political track
that were just explaining, for example,
what are the current laws that regulate,
um, independent security
research. And, uh, as long
as they were just, uh, an overview
of the actual legislation in place
without any normative opinions
or without any reflection
on what does it mean, um,
for, uh, um, in terms
of freedom or, uh, let's say privacy,
uh, for the larger population, we
just categorize them as technical
talks.
Yeah. Thank you.
Thank you. What about microphone three, I
switched Richard German sort of
statistic, it's certain Spitalfields
vitalism from being inside
our workshops as far predictable
to the outside. Mark P, please,
of your home.
You can run your workshops on Arcega.
Thank you. This ticket info.
Are there any other questions, anybody
else?
Thank you very much.