Presented at
30C3 (2013),
Dec. 27, 2013, 11 p.m.
(60 minutes)
The news of the past few years is one small ripple in what is a great wave of culture and history, a generational clash of civilizations. If you want to understand why governments are acting and reacting the way they are, and as importantly, how to shift their course, you need to understand what they're reacting to, how they see and fail to see the world, and how power, money, and idea of rule of law actually interact.
Our relationships with work and property and with the notion of national identity are changing rapidly. We're becoming more polarized in our political opinions, and even in what we consider to be existential threats. This terrain determines our world, even as we
deal with our more individual relationships with authority, the ethics
imposed by our positions in the world, and the psychological impact of learning that our paranoia was real.
The idea of the Internet and the politics it brings with it have changed the world, but that change is neither unopposed nor detatched from larger currents. From the battles over global surveillance and the culture of government secrecy to the Arab Spring and the winter of its discontent, these things are part of this moment's tapestry and they tell us about the futures we can choose. The world is on fire, and there is nowhere to hide and no way to stay neutral.
Presenters:
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Quinn Norton
Quinn Norton is a journalist who covers technology and culture. She's written about Anonymous, the Occupy movement, intellectual property, copyright issues, and the Internet.
Quinn Norton is a writer who likes to hang out in the dead end alleys and rough neighborhood of the Internet, where bad things can happen to defenseless little packets.
They are also places were new freedoms and poetries are born, and run riot over the network. She started studying hackers in 1995, after a wasted youth of Usenet and BBSing.
These days, Quinn is a journalist, published in Wired, The Atlantic, Maximum PC, and more. She covers science, technology, copyright law, robotics, body modification, and medicine, but no matter how many times she tries to leave, she always comes back to hackers.
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Eleanor Saitta
Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better.
Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality.
Eleanor is Principle Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project, a co-founder of the Trike threat modeling project, a contributor to the Briar decentralized delay-tolerant communications project, Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute in Reykjavik, and is on the advisory boards of Geeks Without Bounds and the Calyx Institute.
Eleanor is a regular speaker at conferences including the CCC Congress, SigInt, Uncivilization, ToorCon, and Arse Elektronika. She is nomadic, living mostly in airports and occasionally in New York, London, Stockholm, and Berlin.
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