-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512 Surprise visitor Eleanor Saitta gave an important closing keynote speech at OHM2013. [0]
She reframed the whole mass-surveillance scandal, and recent months hacker scene bunfighting over the meaning of "apolitical" into a simple dilemma: how do we understand humanity? "Do we understand people as fundamentally good or do we understand people as fundamentally evil?" That is a question Thomas Hobbes, a founder of modern political philosophy, described as the bellum omnium contra omnes, and engraved into the fabric of Capitalism as one of its pillars. He resolved the dilemma from a mechanistic vision of the nature of human beings, saying that humans are fundamentally evil, and left alone in their "state of nature" would end up at war with one another. In his book Leviathan, he describes "the state of nature" of human beings: "In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." It is interesting to note that to him, a proponent of the absolute power of the monarch, uncertainty was reason enough to support an artificial political power. Four Centuries later, we fortunately understood that uncertainty is our daily bread, and there's no reason to believe it would lead us to tear each other apart. Instead, as demonstrated consistently over the last few years around the world, large catastrophes trigger impressive amounts of altruist, cooperative behaviors; the end of the Apartheid in South Africa, as the abolition of slavery in the USA before, didn't trigger the vengeance of the formerly oppressed people; millions around the world keep protesting peacefully despite inhumane police repression and crimes of the banksters and their fellow power-concentrators beyond forgiveness; etc. * Ella goes on to describe how that fundamental question of how one looks at good and evil in human beings leads to the noxious behaviors of CIA and NSA types, and all the nation-states apparatus, interwoven with corporate structures, and other states, into a mesh of centralizing structures: "So, decentralization, when you do not have the rule of law as a protective structure, which we don’t, is an incredibly, incredibly critical tool. This means that we need to stop using an Internet that is build out of services: APIs are kind counter-revolutionary. It’s over, we need to stop relying on central services, we just can’t do it anymore, it’s impossible to build a free Internet that is centralized." * Her rant goes on to reflect a recurrent pattern in the recent months in the hacker scene. I'll leave you here with her conclusions, a calls for arms that I whole-heartedly support, since the same inspiration led me to start the GNU/consensus in the first place. == hk * "Yes, we have culture wars going on. This isn’t about hacker in-group politics. The culture war is the big culture war: It is the fight for the narrative of what humans are. Do you believe that people are fundamentally altruistic, or do you believe that we will stab each other in the back for a loaf of bread at a moment’s notice, and that if you are not kin and kind then, fuck you I’ll stick your head on a pike? If that’s the world you want to live in, you get to choose which of those is true. This isn’t just about what is true, but about what we want to be true. You get to build the world you want to live in. That’s what the culture war we’re having right now in the hacker scene is actually about." * "So if we want to have something that resembles democracy, given that the tactics of power and the tactics of the rich and the technology and the typological structures that we exist within, have made that impossible, then we have to deal with this centralizing function. As with the Internet, so the world. We have to take it all apart. We have to replace these structures. And this isn’t going to happen overnight, this is decades long project. We need to go build something else. We need to go build collective structures for discussion and decision making and governance, which don’t rely on centralized power anymore. If we want to have democracy, and I am not even talking about digital democracy, if we want to have democratic states that are actually meaningfully democratic, that is simply a requirement now. But we cannot build a free world, on an unfree Internet. You cannot build functionally decentralized Internet-centric democratic structures on an unfree Internet. It is like the CIA trying to build a free democracy on a legacy of treachery and murder. It just doesn’t work. So yeah, let’s fight." [0] https://noisysquare.com/ethics-and-power-in-the-long-war-eleanor-saitta-dymaxion/ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.12 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Icedove - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQIcBAEBCgAGBQJR/zSuAAoJEEgGw2P8GJg9dEkP/i84naP9RE+1hnNeLFIfIQNr gt04CodRa/LGtawjiFjJ4WxtpoiK2bzhw4Yhvx+INW13faJ+VckF2EwZ5gAinAvT xlOyR9X7LhQPCJbwur05Ql06GeHgpjzTDWXgtms5vEOnR519iO66OdBmWVlzhNHu +8CHlKklODXx1VHMKq0HdR8hcVX14AcQOjWxCULavxRFX1MgkNUegme4HgGOUy/M V2S0ojqa5jOjKk+JJBwllVGBy6xLgrBv4bvnMwbC5ijseygTzeEQ7oBUinkFa2W2 eD26aX0WoeiRk/jjDXZEI0xAFXKIcbPIlS1auwmP+ANCKcHJxLoT3Im9AFX5+qlg n/FnDspaaSES6aMsdSfbEQgZvNdFr0TjbxlSxD+ReQFa3D4yMm49+yMXp9w7FVx4 hZEO+F7hPEYxUwzd8ujkTAeM4CZQaC7llrvfMcuEutFnhV980OnYdJuKYpPeJNvd EBPRm7NhJ5q57cDtDkMweH9FUx8wibeDZPEDoMQi03s2UsAs8ik4X+58xrWINKy+ GscvqVsuXXMNp4/jClLNDse88OEpcp4UqzV3OVYVOMjUb3I16DZueEpGWvv912HX BgCjQy1hovkHgPG9O5n/9J9YBSHNOoVWiUUvp0UegLUiLUt4+LBaaV7XdLx37EeI 3HuivT0Jim0oUIziwIvv =K+tA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
