[GNU/consensus] Eleanor Saitta's Keynote Speech at OHM2013

[hellekin]

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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/
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