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Welcome, everybody, to our next talk.
It's community, our speaker today is
Mitch Altman. I'm pretty sure I don't
have to introduce him to you and
just two of his many achievements.
He's one of the co-founders of
Noisebridge Hackerspace in San Francisco
and he's also the inventor of the TV
began the advice that can switch
off TVs everywhere.
So you just said I turn off
TVs for a living, which is awesome.
Also, I don't know how many of you have
watched or read Game of Thrones, but I
always think of Mitch as the three eyed
Ravens', a guy who has been sitting in a
tree, you know, just being super
wise. And he has always been there and
he's teaching people who come along.
So that's basically Mitch for me.
Yeah. So I hope you will enjoy the
talk. He's going to talk about his
experiences in the community and
he hopes to inspire people to please
give a warm round of applause to Mitch.
And thanks, everyone, for
being here so early in the morning.
I didn't know I was going to give this
talk until
a couple of days ago, really, and I
put together a bunch of slides that I've
been giving talks on for the last couple
of years, mainly last year.
As I travel around,
I can talk about a whole bunch of
different things.
Um, you know,
one of the I just came back from China
a month and a half ago, and there I gave
basically the same talk
about, I don't know, twenty five times
to all of these government officials
in China who keep inviting
me to come and talk about hacker spaces,
of all things.
So I could talk about some of that.
I could talk more about hacker spaces.
I could talk about a whole bunch
of things. I don't know what people
think.
Should I just rant?
OK. So anyway, this is my
contact information.
It's real.
Please contact me if you think I can help
you in any way.
You know, running a small business.
I've done that. I've made a lot of stupid
mistakes and I can help you avoid those
same stupid mistakes so you can make your
stupid mistakes
if you're depressed.
I've been there.
Whatever.
Please contact me if you think I can
help. I love helping people anyway.
I can.
You can find me on the Internet if you
don't want to get that,
I'm not really into
conventional wisdom myself,
conventional wisdom.
Certainly we can learn from the
experiences of others.
But if we're going to do anything really
cool in our lives, we've got a quite
often think of things and do things in
our own way.
So a lot of the stuff I'm going to say
is probably going to be,
well, anyway, it's just my opinions.
I don't want to tell anyone what to do
and what not to do, but I hope you can
take what I say and just think about
it and come up with your own ways of
doing things.
And since you're a captive audience, I
always like showing this slide and
talking about the importance of
having a way of making getting
the resources you need to live your life
the way you want to live it.
It's really, really, really important to
do all of that in a way that feels
personally meaningful for you.
So many of us, probably even here in
this room, need money
in order to get food and shelter.
As absurd as that is, we
do need some money.
That's only one resource, though.
If we focus on that one resource, it's
to the detriment of so many others.
What are we willing to do to get those
resources so
you can have some job that
you don't even like just to get enough
money so you can come home exhausted,
that you can
fall asleep groggily, wake
up, take a bunch of caffeine so you can
wake up to go back to work in the morning
for a job you don't even like.
You can do that.
You can do other things, too.
Maybe you can have a job you hate.
A lot of people seem to choose that
I happen to turn TV's off for a living
and I love my job.
So I want to
say a bit about that and just use that
as encouragement to
all of you if you're not doing so
already, to explore, take
time to explore and find ways
that maybe you can create projects
that you love, that other people might
love, that they might pay
you to do it at
the best.
Capitalism has that to offer.
There's other problems with capitalism,
as we all know. But, you know, that
is a possibility.
You might be able to make a living doing
what you love rather than
something stupid that puts you out of
commission.
And I think with the world the way it is
right now, we
all have to play our part.
And that's always been true.
But with recent events and
the world's political scenes,
that's just really points that out.
So I do live a life that
I really love.
But as
many people here know, I didn't start
off that way. I grew up being totally
depressed.
I was brutally bullied in school,
targeted for being gay,
for being an introverted geek, for being
bad at sports, not caring who wins
in games,
for being weird, for being intellectual.
And in my country, being smart is kind of
a detriment.
So
life was total. Hell, teachers actually
watched as the bullies beat me up
and life was
really hell.
My parents were clueless.
So when I got home, I tried to escape all
of my pain by watching TV because
there it was.
We had a TV,
we had more than one TV and
I watched it a lot.
And, you know, kids on TV, unlike
me, were beautiful
and had loving parents understanding
friends problems that were solved by the
end of the show.
And it was totally depressing to me
because I would compare myself to all of
that. And that made me
just want to watch the next show to get
rid of my pain even more.
And I would just sit there getting more
and more unhealthy, not doing anything,
not learning how to deal with other kids,
not doing anything useful in time would
just go away and it would just make me
more of a target when I went back to
school, only to want to escape my pain
even more when I got back home.
And that's called addiction.
And I am still a TV addict.
There are so many ways that we can use to
avoid ourselves in our lives.
There's so many distractions, many
of them socially sanctioned,
considered socially desirable, even
like working too much
or drinking too many substances
or eating too many substances.
Whatever we can use anything is a
distraction.
All these things have things to offer as
well.
No, there's a long road for me to
actually learn to live a life.
I love living and I don't really
have the time to talk about
all that now.
If you're interested in some of that
story, you can look at
twenty eight C three on the Geeks and
Depression panel that I organized
at the end of lightning talks
with the help of Nick Fire a few years
ago.
But if you want to talk about that, ever
just grab me or email me or call me.
I'm happy to share all that.
But I eventually did learn being a geek
to become really good at your stuff.
And I was spent a lot of time
helping little companies
with their project
problems.
And I got paid really well for that,
able to make enough money in a few weeks
to a few months to live the rest of the
year without working.
And I would use that other time
for all sorts of cool things.
But after 10,
15 years actually of doing that,
I got kind of tired of
doing projects for other
people, not so
much because it was for other people, but
because they were projects that
weren't ones that excited me.
Even though I did a bunch of really cool
projects, they weren't really ones
that excited me.
They had all of these pluses and minuses.
Everything has pluses and minuses, right?
So the minuses seem to outweigh
the pluses for me, even though I helped
create virtual reality.
And I think have I put a slide?
I was doing my slides at two thirty in
the morning so they might be kind of out
of order. We'll see.
Anyways, I might have a slide about VR
later. I helped develop VR in the mid
1980s.
Of course, there's a lot of hype about VR
right now. It's going to be the next big
thing and I don't like
the next big things.
I don't know about you, but I knew back
in the nineteen eighties
that it was going to be used to market at
us to make us want to buy
things we don't even want or need.
And of course that's what's happening
right now.
Unless Facebook decides to change
the way they do things, I'm
not sure why they spent what it was at
three point one billion dollars on
Oculus Rift.
It was probably to make the world a
better place.
We'll see. Anyways, after doing all this
for about 15 years, I decided
I really wanted to put
all of my time and energy into things
that I thought were awesome.
I didn't want to spend so much of my time
and energy working on other people's
projects that I just thought were OK at
best, only
to be exhausted and have about two months
of recovery to figure out how to live my
life again after the project
would end.
So I did an experiment on myself.
I saved up a year of
money.
I was lucky enough to be able to do that.
And I set aside that year
as a year that I would only do what I
love doing.
It was kind of scary, though, because
we're all trained to think that money is
really important and in many ways it is.
How would I make money again if I kept
turning down work that came my way simply
because I didn't love it?
Would anyone hire me again?
I didn't know.
But I did have some kind of notion
that there must be some way of
doing stuff that I find really meaningful
stuff that I love doing and then getting
enough of what I need to keep doing,
what I love.
I thought that would somehow be possible,
but I didn't know what that would be, I
knew a bunch of stuff that I love, like
volunteer work, and I knew that
there were a bunch of projects that I
really wanted to play with that I didn't
really play with for a number of years,
because when I was working in
electronics, I rarely
felt like coming home and playing with
electronics.
So all that energy kind of like jazz was
on hold.
But now I had time and I started
working on projects that I really
love that I was thinking about for years.
One of the projects became the brain
machine, which some of you may have seen,
and you can try it at the hardware
hacking area. I got one with me and
it's a popular project, but the one that
really got on a roll was
to be gone.
For so many years, TV,
it had control over my life,
part of living, learning to live a life I
really love. I was quitting television.
I went cold turkey in 1980
and I had a lot of time to do other
things, like become really good at geeky
stuff, which made me a living for the
next 15 years.
But still, back then
this was twenty three.
When I did this experiment,
TVs were starting to pop up.
Everywhere in public places is way worse
now. But in 2003
it was terrible as far as I
was concerned.
And this thing that
had had power over me, I could get rid of
it from my apartment. But now it was
popping up everywhere in public.
And I didn't want to just sit in my
apartment, just be away from TVs.
I couldn't do anything about those TVs in
public places, but I could and
did figure out a way to turn them all
off.
So I did.
And it took me pretty much
all of that year to
make that happen, conceptually, it's
pretty easy.
I mean, what could be easier?
I mean, in off code, it's just blinking
an infrared led.
It's invisible light, but still it's just
blinking an led and you do a
little bit different for Sony and
Panasonic and all that.
But whatever it is, it's a
microcontroller blinking an led.
What could be easier?
Well, it turned out they don't they don't
publish the codes.
So it took me a year to figure
out all of the ways these
codes work and to record them all from
universal remote controls, get rid of the
duplicates it required and making my
own logic analyzer, because back in two
thousand three, that cost ten thousand
dollars minimum. And I didn't have that.
And all this software I had to write in
order to characterize
all of the data that I had was
a lot of data and get rid of the
duplicate and near duplicate codes
because of code is the same as an honor
code and turn the TV off.
If another code comes along and turns it
on, well, that wouldn't be OK with it.
So anyways, it took me a year.
That's OK.
I was obsessed once
I started turning off any TV, I wanted to
turn off all of them.
And after a year I was doing that and I
was doing it because I
loved it
and I still do love it.
And I really didn't think it was going
to make me money. I was just doing it
because I loved it. And there were a
bunch of friends helping me and they were
helping me because they thought it was
really exciting, too.
They wanted one as well.
So everyone who helped me after I got it
working, I made one for them
and it did work.
After a year, I was going around San
Francisco where I live, turning TVs off
everywhere I went.
And it was really fun and my
friends were doing it as well.
And they had a lot of fun and their
friends saw what they were doing and they
wanted one. And I couldn't make one for
everyone. So I decided
to make to have some manufactured.
But when it turned out that
the friends of my friends friends
also wanted them, that's
when I thought maybe this actually is an
opportunity.
As bizarre as it might be.
I mean, the conventional wisdom would
definitely not say to start a business
about something as bizarre as this, but
I'm not conventional. So I took
a gamble and I put all the money I had
into buying as many as I could afford,
not just a few hundred, but I bought
twenty thousand.
And I thought maybe
it would take, I don't know, five
years or whatever, but I knew I could at
least five thousand, that's what I
calculated I would have to sell in order
to break
even.
And if I broke even, that would be great,
because even if it took five years or
whatever in five years, thirty five
thousand people turning TVs off all over
the world. And I thought that would be
really cool.
And it's kind of bizarre because we live
in a world where people just
automatically go in a room and they turn
a TV on if it's not on already.
I just don't get it.
I want to turn them off.
But if I could help other people turn
them off, I thought that be cool.
But it turned out I was totally wrong.
I did not sell five thousand in five
years.
I sold twenty thousand in three weeks
and.
And I had to order more
and it was really stressful, but all of
my friends who are helping it
turned out almost all of them were in a
place in their life. They could quit jobs
that they didn't like and help me.
And we formed a company and it's been
making a living for all 12 of us
for the last 12 years.
It's kind of awesome doing
something we really love.
But, you know, at that moment, the first
day of sales was because of a Wired.com
article, because of someone I volunteered
with at the San Francisco Bicycle
Coalition.
And he was in journalism school, needed a
final project.
And he's like, oh, let me interview about
this. It'll be like 15 minutes.
But it turns out we've spent all day, all
night that we met going around San
Francisco, turning TVs off.
And he would go up to people and
say he turned off the TV.
What do you think about that?
And so
it turned out in a good article, really
good article that got into Wired.com.
And evidently
people pay attention to Wired.com because
that morning,
the first day of sales was determined by
that Wired.com article, which was
Tuesday at 2:00 in the morning on
October 19th.
And I know that because it changed my
life forever,
that article, because
people were just waiting for my website
to go live. Me and my friend Chris were
getting it ready so it could accept
credit cards for the few strange
people that might want to buy this thing.
But at 5:00 in the morning, when we
finally finished, we started getting
orders immediately after making
the website go live.
I mean, what were people doing?
Were they just sitting, hitting the five
key, waiting for the live
soon screen to go away?
And, yeah, that's what was happening.
So anyway, is NPR,
National Public Radio in the United
States called me and
I was up all night.
I don't even know what I said.
And I guess I did OK, because immediately
after that, The New York Times called me
and then people fucking magazine calls me
and Fox TV, they called me.
And the next day I'm on Fox TV Live
and their morning show with I don't know
how many tens of millions of people
who maybe don't even like watching
me live as I'm turning off TVs
in their studio.
So and.
I can't oh, I'm obscured
by Mike's.
OK, so I
guess people are watching out there,
everybody, so
yeah, anyways, because of all that,
I was invited to give public
public talks and
talking into a camera is
one thing, but talking before a whole
bunch of people who can see you drool.
I mean, that's I'm an introvert, a geek.
I mean, when we're doing talking before
all of you. But it turns out I like it
and I guess I did OK.
And anyways, this has been
changing my life continually in
unexpected ways ever since.
And I have a few slides for that.
But I do want to point out.
I succeeded in my
quest for what I call success,
and it's an ongoing process as
long as I'm alive, but this is my
definition of success.
If you can make time to explore and do
what you love doing.
You might find things.
And I think you will find things you
really, really love.
You have to make time for it, though,
which is the hard part.
And if you find something you really
love, chances are other people will, too.
And with the right people maybe
coming together to make it available for
others, others might pay you to
do that.
And you can get enough of what you need
doing what you love to keep doing what
you love.
It's possible no guarantees,
it's guaranteed that it won't happen if
you don't try.
So anyway, that's up to you.
But because the TV bigon I met
some totally weird, wonderful
person named Lamore Free who calls
herself Lady ADA, and
she's after
a few years later, she started a fruit,
which is a huge open hardware company
that does lots of amazingly cool stuff
for the open hardware
community.
And because of her, she's
friends with the editor of Make magazine,
which I never even heard of.
They'd been around for a year at this
point then.
So they were going to be in San
Francisco. Why don't you come to the
Maker Faire and what the hell is the
Maker Faire? And I looked it up online is
like, why didn't I know about this?
So it's a whole bunch of people who come
together to show off what they create,
what they make and share it with
other people.
So I went and I was like amazed
that I was like as a whole group of
introverted geeks sharing their projects
of all sorts.
And I thought that was wonderful.
And of course, no one was making anything
there, which I thought was weird, the
Maker Faire.
So I thought, gee, I love this.
Maybe the next time I go, I'll actually
teach people how to solar, which is
something I love.
And that grew from a few smoldering irons
to teaching thirty
five hundred people how to solar in two
days.
And I put a lot of my life into
Maker Faire.
I also started writing for Make magazine
and that's the first time I published The
Brain Machine, which is a really weird
project that helps people meditate.
And along the way you
hallucinate colors and patterns and it
turns out people like hallucinating.
So it became a popular project.
And yeah,
I wanted to use that as
a way to share the
benefits of meditation, which is another
one of the things that was important for
me to learn to live a life
I love and not just be a depressed blob.
So if other people could benefit from
that, I thought would be cool.
And it also I wanted people to try making
something that even if they've never made
anything because it was intriguing
enough, it worked on all these things.
But going to Maker Faire,
I met someone who
connected me with someone
named Bernie S, who's part of twenty six
hundred, and he called me up and ordered
a bunch of T v guns for his friends
and he said, you should come to this
thing called a hacker conference and
like, what the hell that
I've heard of.
Twenty six hundred. I was into phone
phreaking when I was in middle school but
I didn't really know about hacker
conferences.
And I went and my first one was
Hope six.
And that totally changed
my life forever in another way, and
this was thousands of
the most coolest gigs I ever
imagined, all in one huge
hotel in the middle of New York City.
And I loved it.
I totally loved it.
And I've been part of doing Hekker stuff
ever since. And I didn't know it, but I'd
been hacking all my life and in fact,
going from a depressed blob of a kid to
someone who loves living my life.
That was a life hack because that's
hacking and we
can hack ourselves.
And at that conference, there were some
people, one in particular,
who was helping organize.
And, well, a bunch of people told me
about these things here
in Germany at the time in Berlin
and the Chaos Computer Club.
And they said, if you love this, you'll
really love those.
So my first one
was twenty three, C three
and it's now buried in these somewhere.
There it is.
What's left of it.
So, yeah,
and again, there was hardly
anything being made there, so I set up
some smoldering irons and that grew into
the hardware hacking area and
I set that up at my
next hacker conference,
which was this one.
And not only were there thousands of
geeks sharing and people all
all of whom I wanted to actually have a
conversation with all even though
we're all introverted, it was just so
wonderful.
And of course, there was the lasers and
LEDs and and a rocket
ship.
And of the hundreds of talks,
there were people talking about
hacker spaces, calling it the hackerspace
design patterns, which was
talk.
And now
I thought, gee, you know, hackers
conferences end.
These things are wonderful, but they
always end and they have to, like,
somehow adjust back into life in
what most people call the real world, but
which seems to me to be some kind of
ethereal, weird thing to decide now.
But if if I could start a hackerspace
in my hometown, it doesn't
have to end.
We could be doing this stuff all year
round, come together in community,
supporting each other, exploring what we
love, trying things, doing things,
encouraging people to be the best we can
be.
And
so I started
Noisebridge with some friends.
A bunch of us getting together made
this amazingly cool space happen.
We've been through lots of problems, but
we've overcome all of them and we
continue to do that.
Community is definitely hard work, but
it's so worth it.
We need community in our lives.
We don't need it to survive, but we need
it to feel that our lives
are way worthwhile.
We absolutely need this
and we don't have enough of it in our
lives.
And this resonates with so many of us.
I mean, that's why we're here, right,
right here in this room.
And you could see me on the video.
And it's cool that these technologies
exist, but it's so much cool to be here
all together, living and breathing
together.
Well, back at Camp twenty seven,
there were people who went off and formed
NYC Resistor and Hack DC and other
hacker spaces.
And these were highly influential, along
with hacker spaces in Germany that
already existed, all of us helping each
other to create our spaces.
They became influential in starting lots
of hacker spaces within a year.
There were one hundred more within
a year after that there were five hundred
more and then there were a thousand more.
And it's been growing pretty much
exponentially ever since.
We started Hackerspace Big the year
after that.
Here's a map from there showing
many of the hacker spaces,
many continents are actually kind of
obliterated by pins there.
This stuff's happening.
That's actually an old map
because China is now obliterated
with hackers phases.
And I'll talk a bit about that if I have
time to.
So, yes, starting off kind of small, I
mean, teaching people to soldier, I have
been teaching people to soldier every
Monday at Noisebridge
every every Monday since two thousand
seven. And now that I travel so much,
someone else named Jay
at Noisebridge, who's totally awesome,
has been doing that for the last couple
of years.
So the tradition continues and
became one of our most popular things.
People love doing this stuff and
it kind of grows is my favorite picture
from teaching 50 people
at one side, a soldier that was at thirty
three here three years
ago.
And yeah, look,
I mean, they're just learning to
shoulder. I mean, it's no big deal, but
look, they're happy.
That's the kind of thing that happens
when people just come together to try
something they think they might like, and
in order to build confidence, even though
someone may never soldier ever again,
they have the confidence to know they can
do something they didn't even think they
could do.
So and this
stuff is fun.
And I've been going around the world
giving talks and workshops, big
talks, a little talks, you know,
huge led screens and
crazy stuff.
You know, it's just great going around
the world teaching people what they want
to learn and sharing,
hopefully inspiring them to do whatever
it is they think is cool in
their lives
and
whatever.
Just a few pictures.
Here's a talk for
a whole bunch of government
bureaucrats in
Honjo,
China, from a couple of months ago.
And here's one in Rio.
This is a lot cooler
because they have more LED's
in Rio de Janeiro from
last month and
back in
a few years ago when I was
still doing maker fairs that grew really
big.
And there's just tons
of fun putting a lot of time into that,
helping lots of people of all ages.
And in
2011, they gave
me this honor, which
it still makes me emotional.
And if you want to see a video of me
crying, you can see the video
even still on the make web website
of me accepting this award, 3D printed
parts.
I received the first and it turns out
the last Mitch Altman Maker
Hero Award. They named it after me.
And it's like
it's just recognition for doing
what I love. And
it was great.
And then at the end of this,
at the New York Maker Faire,
there was a thank you dinner for everyone
who helped.
And they talked about all these great
things, thanking everyone for this and
that. And then then
we got this 10 million dollar grant
for putting hacker spaces in a thousand
high schools in the United States.
And it's really, really cool.
And then he's going on and
saying, oh, and by the way, it was a
grant from DARPA, which is an arm of
the US military.
And I felt
like I was kicked in the stomach because
every single place I ever
worked in my entire life, without
exception until to
be gone, the military came and wanted to
take what we were doing.
And every single time the people who ran
the company said yes, because
it would make them a lot of money.
And I quit every single time
and I didn't want to quit Maker Faire, I
never imagined that the military would
come and want to take that.
But of course they do.
They want the magic created by what we're
doing.
And after struggling with a while, I
knew I would feel terrible quitting,
helping make it fair, but I would feel
way more terrible helping.
The US military hurt and kill and
spy and maim and doing all the things
that they do, and I already help them
enough by paying my fucking
taxes.
And it still makes me really sad
to think about this and of course, angry,
but that gave
me a lot more time to do a lot of other
things by not doing that, which
took a lot of time, which I love.
But it turned out because of that, I was
invited to give a talk at Ted
Brussels, which is a really huge
TED event.
Twenty two hundred people and
gave a talk about hacker spaces, which
I'm just so gratified, actually
helped start hacker spaces around the
world, more hacker spaces.
And also every year I've been
manufacturing TV bigon in China,
choosing a place that
treats their people way well, pays them
well, treats the environment
well and has
safety standards that are adhered to.
There aren't there are a lot of places
like that in China. Of course, there are
a lot more places that aren't like that.
But I've been going every year because
it's really important to be with people
and keep the physical
communication happening and not just
over the Internet.
So after Bunnie
Huang organized a trip showing people
manufacturing and Shenzhen in the
electronics markets there, I thought it'd
be really cool to bring people from
China, from Noisebridge over there and
show what it's like.
And that's started what I call hacker
trips to China.
So I've been organizing a group of people
going to China and showing all the pluses
and minuses there and having a lot of fun
and going visiting.
I mean, it's fun going in a bunny suit
might not be fun doing it every day, but
doing it once a year is really fun.
And and it grew really big.
And this is actually in the Beijing
airport.
I thought that was wonderful.
And and I've been working
with this guy is a professor at Tsinghua
University.
It's considered one of the best
universities in China.
And if I have time,
I can talk a bit about that.
And
as long as we're going around, we get
invited to give talks.
And the more I give talks about hacker
spaces in China, the more I'm invited to
give more talks.
And I,
I talk about it in ways it's
it's helpful for, you know, talking to
bureaucrats, you talk bureaucrat speak.
So the benefits of a hackerspace
are its educational
benefits and as well as its local
economic benefits to kickstart
depressed areas.
And they give talks that grew from
little teeny like in a university to
huge talk to universities, to this
at the Panasonic's Center.
And it's huge.
I mean, that poster behind me that they
had a huge one.
It's like, hey, we invited a white
guy.
He's going to talk about a hacker spaces
and all these people show up
and all these other people
start doing it as well.
And hacker spaces are starting all over
China. Have a few photos next, but it
filters up all the way to the very top
of government pushing this stuff.
And here is
Premier Li, that's supposedly
the head of state of China
last year, going to visit
Taiwan hacker space
and saying this is the future of China
hacker spaces.
Can you imagine the future
of China? He said so.
And then all the bureaucrats everywhere
in China think they have to start a
hackerspace.
So the US not wanting to be left too far
behind.
So and oddly enough, this
guy, Joey, he's he's
amazingly brilliant and wonderful.
He he now lives in Shenzhen,
China, and works at this
hackerspace.
So anyways, hacker
spaces, they're they're awesome,
but hackerspace is the main thing about
them is community.
It really is about community.
So many cool things come from it.
But the main thing is community
people, self organizing to create the
community that really works for them.
And it's really fun.
I mean, whether it's soldiering or doing
mechanical things, it doesn't matter.
People coming together to do what they
think they might like, encouraging each
other, exploring, feeling like
they're part of each person is part of
something bigger and wonderful.
And it's all
about hacking.
And there's many definitions of hacking,
but mine is seeing the world
full of resources, the world
is full of resources.
Money is one of them.
But there's so many resources and we can
use them all in any way we want
anyway. We don't have to use them in the
way that they were intended by the people
who created those resources.
We can use them any way we want.
We can see what works, what doesn't
improve our projects with them.
Those projects can be pretty much
anything and then we share
it. And overall we do it because
it's really wonderful.
It's really a way of looking at things, a
way of being.
And here's a slide from my
bureaucratic talks or talk for
bureaucrats.
There are totally intrapreneurship they
want to create the next Silicon Valley.
It's not going to happen.
But anyways,
to be a hacker, you don't have to be an
entrepreneur to be an entrepreneur.
You don't have to be a hacker.
But if you're going to be an entrepreneur
who's any good, you do have to be a
hacker.
You definitely need to start with a
creative mindset and grow
something that's personally meaningful,
that will be meaningful to other people
so that they'll pay you to do it.
Otherwise, what's the point?
So and of
course, anything can be hacked.
This is what most people think of
electronics, computers, whatever.
But technology is just tools.
You know, there's all sorts of tools for
art and craft and art and craft is
totally the hackers doing that.
That's the hacker mindset.
Same with science.
You don't do science expecting a certain
result. You do science with a hypothesis
to see what will happen and then learn
from it and then make more hypotheses
and grow from it. This is hacking.
We hack ourselves all the time, otherwise
we don't become better people.
We hack our communities, we hack the
planet. We need the hack the planet.
The planet certainly needs our
love and support and growth
and improvement.
We need to hack everything and we
can do that so much better
with the support of others, with others
sharing our resources together
and making ourselves and our communities
and our societies and the planet a better
place for all of us.
And we can do that with all these
different kinds of tools, electronics
and fabrication and the small hand tools
and art and cooking
all ages.
It's not about age,
little people, big people.
We all have things we can share with
other people. We all have things we can
learn from other people.
And this is why hacker spaces
are such fantastic educational
environments
and why schools are having
hacker spaces as part of their
curriculum. Now, I've been giving more
and more talks about that as I go around
as well.
And but it's really
all about community.
So but this is
where real innovation happens, is when
you have that creative environment for
people who are exploring, they actually
find unique things like
drones.
I mean, the main thrust of that
was in twenty three, thirty three.
The first time that
publicly was shown
German hackers created for
computer fans
on a thing that they made with lots of
microcontrollers to control it all.
And it actually flew
fucking awesome.
Of course, it had lots of LSD on it too,
which made it cooler looking.
But now it's open source
and you can buy a little what you call
drones instead of micro copters now
for fifteen dollars.
And of course, all the people involved
with that don't know anything about the
technology that went into that.
It's all open source.
They just copy it and use it.
But this is how things go.
And of course, there's downsides to
that guy I showed you in the White House
a little bit ago, used it to kill people
in Yemen and other places around the
world.
That's because some people think it's OK
to do something for the military.
I don't
think people can make their own choices,
but I know what I think and I'm happy to
talk about that if you ever want to as
well.
So, um, yeah.
So anyways, hacker spaces, they're
cool. They've grown from 40
about in twenty seven to zillions
in the world now because they're so cool
and governments are pushing them because
they love them. The feather in their cap
if they're bureaucrats and
they're good for education, good for the
economy.
But so many bureaucrats are creating
spaces like this.
It's beautiful, it's nice coworking
space, maybe if there were people there
doing stuff, but
it's not hackerspace.
But here's the one in China, Shanghai
University Tadeu
that I helped form.
Here's Shinkai again in Shanghai,
Beijing, Taiwan.
This one is mostly for education
for little kids.
This one, they have one in a school.
This one is just way cool.
Community space in Shenzhen.
I've been helping Tsinghua University
with their hacker in residence program.
They want to have like 10
or so hackers all the time.
And I want this to spread everywhere.
And I've been helping people do that.
This is a silly poster we created for the
kick off of it a couple of years ago.
But yeah, there's opportunities out
there. We have a temporary page
on hacker
hacker spaces, dog
full of all these places where you can
just go and
share what you know and learn from other
people and take it somewhere else.
I want to be able to do this all year
round.
So I'm working on a
website called Hacker in Residence dot
org, and it's
hard to get volunteers to follow through
on things. I've been trying to make it
happen for a couple of years, but in any
case, soon, hopefully
in the next few months, that'll be up so
you can browse through residency
opportunities if you want to.
But Hacker Spaces Dog also is
a place where you can get resources to
start your own hacker space.
And we all help each other even though
we're totally different.
So I
could go on, but I think I'd rather
open it up for Q&A
rather than rant more.
So let me just go to
the.
Last slide, opportunities for all
actresses are awesome, so,
you know, that's really why I do all I do
is to help encourage people to
explore and do what they might
find meaningful to do in their lives.
We live on a planet where
I think a vast majority don't feel
their lives are way worthwhile.
And I don't think that's OK.
I think that's the cause of pretty much
all the problems we face when we have
a lot of people in a
society where people feel
their lives aren't worthwhile.
Collectively, we're all very much
easily manipulated and we
get people like this to lead our
countries.
But if we come together and share our
resources, we can do
so much, we don't have to wait for the
government to do cool things for us.
And in fact, if we wait for the
governments to do cool things for us,
we're just all going to be dead.
Nothing wrong with being dead, but while
we're alive, we can do cool shit.
So let's do a cool shit.
Well, thank you very much, Mitch, for
your inspirational talk, we have like 15
minutes left for Q&A.
So if there is anything you always
wanted to ask Mitch,
do you have now the possibility we have
microphones here throughout the room
while we wait for people to get the
courage to move the microphones?
We have one question from the Internet
that we've got to start with.
There's a question from Iasi and the
question is, can hackerspace be viewed
as a force for democracy and increased
transparency in China?
I hope so.
Um, there's no way to know.
I mean, the government of China, it's
been really exciting being going to China
every year. I go there every
year for a month or two since
two thousand three.
And I have my own unique
perspectives on China.
Um, they're not necessarily correct,
but it's been exciting being there
and seeing it open up in amazing ways.
If you get your information about China
from mainstream media, it's wrong.
It's absolutely wrong impression of what
you get.
Some things are certainly correct.
I mean, it's a huge centralized
government and I'm not a fan of those
in any form.
Uh, they do some terrible things.
I really see it very similar to
my own government, which I'm not a huge
fan of either.
But, you know, it's home.
Uh, China is a place I go to a lot.
In some ways, it's sort of a home to as
is here in Germany,
mostly in Berlin.
Um, but, uh, for
the last ten years
there, society from the top down
has been encouraged to open up where
bureaucrats for the first time ever in
two and a half millennia of history,
they're bureaucrats have been encouraged
to experiment, to try things,
to help people live lives that they find
more worthwhile.
And there are bureaucrats in high levels
talking in that kind of language.
It's kind of amazing.
Um, and so from twenty
three, when I really didn't like going to
China at all, which is very close
to 2011, 2012,
it's been opening up like crazy and
uh, 2013, 2014.
But then the last two years
they've been going in the wrong direction
again. So hopefully
with hacker spaces opening up where
people are encouraged to explore and do
things that are really interesting,
some of them, some people in some of them
will be, uh, doing
things to make their lives and the lives
of those around them much better.
And, um, we'll see
at any moment things could change really
quickly in China at any moment.
Things can change really quickly in my
country.
And it seems that when that happens, the
rest of the world follows.
And I hope that pattern changes.
Thank you so much. Next question from
this microphone.
Uh, you mentioned thirty
three three and I actually really
remember quite well.
Thirty 3C.
I mean, it was the one
where all the Snowden stuff
went down on us.
And I really
remember quite well
what kind of effect it had on me.
And I think that I'm also kind
of more of the introverted guy.
I got also all
these feelings of all the people around
me and recognized how,
yeah, kind of depressing the
situation was.
So all these talks and
the only thing you could do
was the only thing you
could think about was, well, I'm
this one person and there
are these huge organizations
with a lot of resources and
I can't do anything.
So what
I experience with hacker spaces
is at least that there
is some kind of protected
space where you can get around
that feeling and can
experience that you can do something.
But for me, I
would like to pose the question to you.
How do you think can we
break this cycle of
actually seeing ourselves only
as individualized people
with this perspective?
Hey, there are huge organizations
doing crazy things all around us,
and I'm only this one person
alone. I can't do anything.
So how do we break the cycle?
Maybe with stuff
youth you've seen all over the world.
I mean, you traveled so many interesting
places. I'm really envious
about that.
Kind of it's it's great
and it's great that you share your
experiences, but maybe
you have an idea how we can get
out of this situation,
out of this passiveness which I really
experienced and recognized in
a massive amount and on
very pressie.
It was the reason I didn't visit.
Next, Congress after that,
so right.
Well, I think reframing that
might be more beneficial,
reframing the question.
I don't know if we can change
all of that.
Not all that many decades ago, there were
a few people who kind of took
over the German government.
And once they got it to
a certain point, there was really nothing
that could be done except
have it play out.
I think what could anyone have done
at that point if people could have
seen where this was heading?
Maybe there are things they could have
done earlier.
And I think we're in a similar situation
right now or at the beginning of
a lot of people actually openly
promoting fascism.
And all the surveillance we're seeing
right now being paid for by our
tax money is just one
symptom of that.
Those leaders that I showed you
briefly are also symptoms
of that.
So, again, if we wait for our governments
to do something cool, it's not we're
going to be dead before it happens.
But we can have a
lot of control over
what we choose to do with our time and
who we do it with.
So if we collect together with people who
have a common vision for making
our lives and the lives of those around
us better.
We can do that.
Doesn't have to be against
any other people, even
if they're doing deplorable things.
I mean, you can it's totally up to you
what you want to do with your time.
And I'm actually glad there are people
who are taking their time to work
against these things, to slow that stuff
down as best they can, and
especially since it shows everyone
that they're not alone in being
against that stuff.
But if we create something positive
over here and have
that be so cool that other people tend
to join us,
then it doesn't matter as much what's
going on over there unless they get in
the way of us doing, for doing, and then
we can go over there and try it again.
But no matter how fascist anything
gets, there are always going to be niches
within which we can do things that we
believe are way cool.
And as things continue
to decay and our great leaders are
finding fantastic creative ways
of helping it decay faster,
people are going to need to key into
what we create.
It's up to us to create the groundwork
for what's to come.
And I think that's what we've been doing.
By just having this every year,
it inspires us to go out into the world
and do cool stuff.
And so much school stuff has come from
that and other people can join us.
I mean, this whole thing, it's sold out
in minutes because so many people want to
be part of all of this.
I see. That is incredibly positive.
And we need more.
I mean, right now there's like thirty
five hundred hacker spaces.
We need millions.
And that's just hackers phases.
We need a whole bunch of other people
forming other communities and we can all
help each other wherever it makes sense.
And that just grows.
So and regardless of what the
outcome is, each of us
doing what we feel is best
daily in our lives, usually
in our lives,
gives each of us meaning in our own
lives, which
can, by example, help other people.
Thank you. Next question will be from the
Internet again.
Um, so I was very interested
in the hacker spaces around the world,
and they wanted to know about where they
can name several cultural
differences that are in different
countries and different spaces
and also, uh, kind of elaborate on
the, um, grade of government involvement
in countries other than the United
States.
And they would like to know some cool
projects from hacker spaces in Africa,
Eastern Europe or the Middle East.
Right.
Um.
Hackerspace is a much more similarities
than differences in my experience, but
the one thing that is culturally
different is regardless of where it is,
whether it's the US or Europe
or China or Africa
is in places which have
economically depressed,
where they're economically depressed,
people are being encouraged
to be entrepreneurial, especially right
now where we're in a pretty amazing
tech bubble.
And so the government
is pushing this.
And then there are venture capitalists,
which people where I come from, call them
vulture capitalist, are putting a whole
bunch of money into this, wanting the
next Apple and the next Google to grow
from this. And they're creating those
empty spaces like I showed you.
And people are obsessed with making
money. And it's just not going to happen
if you don't create that creative
environment with community to start
from where cool ideas grow
from, nothing's going to happen.
So that's when that's.
But people actually want that
to happen. So that's why they're inviting
me and other people to give talks about
this to help them do that.
So there are a lot of cool projects
that are growing from this.
And when you have people
in a local area doing things they
think are cool, there are things that are
cool for the people there,
whether it's, you know,
a whole bunch of people making more 3D
printers or drones, which are super
popular, or VR, which is being
pushed now, or Internet of Things,
which is being pushed now, you know, like
people are doing it because they think
it's cool. So for me, I don't really
care what the project
is. For me, the main thing is it's
people working on things that they think
are way cool and meaningful for them.
And I see that happening everywhere.
Thank you. Next question from this
microphone.
I think you already touched on this right
now, but you said that
in China they want to create
a new Silicon Valley and
that you thought it wouldn't happen.
Maybe. Can you elaborate why you think
that?
Yeah. So it's
not going to be another Silicon Valley.
I'm in Silicon Valley didn't
Silicon Valley wasn't created.
It happened.
There are a whole bunch of I mean, what
why did Silicon Valley happen there?
Why didn't it happen here in Hamburg?
Why didn't it happen in Omaha, Nebraska?
It happened there because there are a
whole bunch of fucking weirdos from all
over the United States in the world who
collected in San Francisco, because
it's been a place where that has been
happening for a long time since its
inception and the gold rush.
And there are a whole bunch of
introverted geeks who thought computers
were cool. And back in the 70s, computers
were huge things that were expensive.
But that technology was becoming
inexpensive and small enough that these
few geeks thought they could make ones
they could use at home.
And they couldn't do it alone.
But collectively, they could.
They formed a community called the
Homebrew Computer Club.
And and together
they created this. And one of them is now
the largest capitalized company
in the world. And they're totally
horrible. But still, stuff grew
from that. Some good, some bad.
You can't copy that.
But what you can do is create
and this is what's happening.
A lot of places create
a creative environment.
Hacker spaces are a big part of that.
Education is part of that.
Of course, hacker space is going to be
part of that.
And from there, people can create things
that are cool for them, which means
that it's cool for their local
community, which means that there
are people in that area who might
want to pay those people to do those
interesting, actually truly innovative
things and not innovation as a buzzword.
So but to do that, they actually have to
create a space.
You know, there's resources coming from
the top down, from government,
local government, state government,
municipal, federal government,
whatever, national government, if that
if those resources get into the hands of
people who can form community from the
bottom up, then it can be totally
successful. And it has been.
And lots of examples.
Thank you. Yet another question from the
Internet.
OK, the question is, in the same way
the Internet was taken from a military
idea to our own use, could you envision
taking the TARP money and ensure
hackerspace is built more positive things
that cannot be manipulated to turn
negative?
Sure, but in the same time, you're
helping the US military, if
that's what you want to do, cool, go for
it. That's not what I want to do.
Short answer, next question from this
microphone and which
you look really happy.
How do you manage it?
And the second question, Duplin,
to come to Russia.
I was in Russia in 1973 when
Brezhnev was still there
with my parents. They came you had to
have an excuse then.
And my father was an architect.
So we got a bunch of architects to get
together and say, we're going to look at
architecture in in Russia.
And we did. And it was way cool.
Russia's probably a little different now.
I would love to go there, invite me
so. And happy.
I'm happy because
I do what I love.
I made time to explore and
do what I love. And it took years and
years and years. But I eventually learned
to live a life I love living.
And if I can do that, you know,
pretty much anyone can, I think takes
a lot of luck. And it takes definitely
support from people at the right times.
There's no guarantees there either.
Definitely guarantee it won't happen if
you don't try, though.
Thank you. Next question from that
microphone.
I just wanted to respond to something you
just said in your answer about
fascism happened over there.
And we do our cool stuff over here.
And I have a moral objection to this.
And I think that's a position that comes
from a place of privilege.
As a white man, I could just say I'm
going to let the fascism happen to other
people and I'm not going to do anything
about it. And actually, you know, you
said that we can carry on doing that
until the fascists try to stop us.
But I think the moral imperative is on us
to stop the fascists from doing their
thing.
And if we don't do that, eventually
they'll come for us as well.
So I guess my question to you is, what
will you do when the fascists come to
the hacker spaces?
Oh, yeah, I didn't mean to imply to let
them do what they do, but
I think it's really, really important
that we do stuff in the niches
to create something positive so that more
and more people can come.
Because if it's just an individual here,
an individual here, an individual here,
there's no way that we have any kind
of energy to stop the fascism
that we see happening.
I didn't mean to give the impression that
we should let it happen.
You know, when
Trump was elected, I was out of my
country and I knew
it was going to happen because I was in
UK in March and April and saw
them turn on a hate machine in order to
get an election to go their way.
And the same thing, exact thing was
happening in my country.
They turned down a hate machine decades
ago against Clinton and there was no way
they were going to turn that off.
And this guy played that really well
and he actually studied the speeches of
Adolf Hitler.
Who's this guy that some of you may have
heard of? And
he's really, really good at it.
He plays an idiot, but he's he's he's
he's a moron, maybe, but he's not
unintelligent. He knows what he's doing.
And, um, yeah.
Once he was elected the day
after hate crimes
went skyrocketing upwards in the United
States.
And not just crimes, criminal
activity, but public bullying
of people for being not their
conception of white and straight
was going up even in San Francisco, which
has a reputation of being the weirdo
place.
I personally experienced being on
a city bus when some guy
who wasn't like some guy who looked
deranged, it just looks
he's just some white guy, middle
class white guy.
And he just stood up proudly
proclaiming that this is a heterosexual
white city.
And this was on a bus full of everyone
but heterosexual white people
and myself included,
and so
instantly people started telling him to
shut the fuck up, which I was
really happy for and angry
about as well.
We have to stop this every
chance we get.
If we don't do this at these stages,
it's over and it doesn't
matter what we do. But regardless,
whatever happens in our governments, we
need to come together and do cool
stuff for ourselves and those around us.
And that can grow
or not.
But we still have to do that because it's
the right thing to do and it's the only
thing that feels worthwhile.
Thank you so much, Mitch.
We have come to the end of our time slot
and we have also come to the end of our
discussion. Please give another one round
of applause for Mitch.
Thank you so much.