[00:00.000 --> 00:01.100]  Okie dokie.
[00:01.420 --> 00:01.860]  Woo!
[00:02.300 --> 00:02.940]  Wow!
[00:03.300 --> 00:07.720]  You can... So, first disappointment.
[00:08.300 --> 00:11.180]  I don't have any slides.
[00:12.280 --> 00:16.260]  Because it is about storytelling.
[00:17.300 --> 00:19.560]  So, you can give... This is awful.
[00:19.960 --> 00:23.960]  Can we just have the light of the... Just turn the lights off in here, really.
[00:24.200 --> 00:25.060]  It's really better.
[00:25.240 --> 00:29.180]  I feel so alienated from my audience.
[00:29.180 --> 00:30.320]  I just want to see them.
[00:30.420 --> 00:32.260]  Just like turn the room lights on, really.
[00:32.460 --> 00:32.560]  Ok?
[00:33.580 --> 00:35.440]  Because this is really... This is weird.
[00:35.580 --> 00:36.440]  I feel like an alien.
[00:36.720 --> 00:37.920]  I'm like... Yeah!
[00:38.180 --> 00:39.360]  That's how I like it.
[00:39.600 --> 00:39.820]  Ok.
[00:40.280 --> 00:42.560]  So, thank you so much for coming.
[00:42.860 --> 00:43.820]  Just a quick question.
[00:44.020 --> 00:54.700]  How many of you people of whatever gender you prefer being addressed with have been here two years ago to see my ranting about hackers?
[00:55.340 --> 00:55.880]  Oh!
[00:56.200 --> 00:56.560]  Ok.
[00:56.780 --> 00:57.340]  It worked.
[00:58.120 --> 00:58.800]  Come back.
[00:58.960 --> 00:59.140]  It's mine.
[00:59.300 --> 00:59.300]  Yeah.
[00:59.780 --> 01:04.400]  So, a guy last year called me the angry prophet of hope.
[01:04.780 --> 01:06.920]  And it can only be an Austrian.
[01:07.200 --> 01:07.280]  Yeah?
[01:07.740 --> 01:11.580]  Because what Austria provided the world with is Hitler and myself.
[01:11.760 --> 01:12.160]  Yeah, of course.
[01:12.320 --> 01:12.420]  Yeah.
[01:12.820 --> 01:15.780]  So, my name for all... Ha!
[01:15.940 --> 01:16.060]  Oh!
[01:16.200 --> 01:16.380]  Bernie.
[01:16.620 --> 01:16.880]  Thank you.
[01:17.020 --> 01:17.540]  Thank you, Bernie.
[01:17.540 --> 01:19.140]  How are you on the angry prophet of HOPE?
[01:19.240 --> 01:20.100]  Yeah, absolutely.
[01:20.360 --> 01:20.540]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:22.000 --> 01:28.280]  The main problem is now, and that's also a little bit about storytelling, is now the mad prophet is now running for presidency.
[01:28.600 --> 01:29.300]  So, it's...
[01:29.300 --> 01:32.140]  That's the problem of white angry males.
[01:32.140 --> 01:33.480]  They do weird shit.
[01:33.660 --> 01:34.900]  That doesn't help anyone.
[01:35.140 --> 01:35.180]  Yeah.
[01:35.700 --> 01:35.840]  Ok.
[01:36.120 --> 01:40.600]  So, for all of you here who don't know me, my name is Johannes.
[01:40.940 --> 01:43.640]  And my last name is long and complicated.
[01:43.920 --> 01:44.540]  It's Grenzfurthner.
[01:44.540 --> 01:51.700]  And, which means, roughly translated, Border-Forder.
[01:52.040 --> 01:54.660]  So, my name is Johnny Border-Forder in English.
[01:55.400 --> 01:56.580]  And I'm from Austria.
[01:56.740 --> 02:02.080]  It's a small little country in the middle of Europe, known for music and mass murder.
[02:02.620 --> 02:06.760]  And it is a pleasure being here again at HOPE.
[02:07.120 --> 02:10.780]  And I want to talk about storytelling for hackers.
[02:10.780 --> 02:15.760]  The actual title is, what the f*ck are you talking about?
[02:16.200 --> 02:17.440]  Storytelling for hackers.
[02:18.020 --> 02:21.280]  Just to put an emphasis on that we need to do something here.
[02:22.400 --> 02:33.460]  So, storytelling-wise, I am very, very happy that I decided not to do the PowerPoint thing.
[02:33.460 --> 02:43.960]  Because I think what hackers or people in the hacking community really lack is a way of getting a message across.
[02:44.260 --> 02:45.860]  Of getting a point across.
[02:46.200 --> 02:51.940]  And the cool and interesting thing about storytelling is also a little bit my personal story.
[02:51.940 --> 02:54.460]  My personal story is, I was born in 1975.
[02:54.920 --> 02:58.720]  So, I grew up in the middle of nowhere in the Austrian countryside.
[02:59.320 --> 03:02.460]  And there was no one there that was like me.
[03:02.720 --> 03:06.360]  I was a really strange nerd before the term nerd arrived in Austria.
[03:06.360 --> 03:11.920]  And I tried to find other people that I could talk to about all the stuff that I wanted to talk about.
[03:12.780 --> 03:24.200]  And I was kind of like this weird, strange, kind of privileged white little f*cker who was looking for other privileged white little f*ckers to talk about.
[03:24.200 --> 03:28.440]  And at one point, realizing that that's probably the problem.
[03:28.900 --> 03:32.200]  Because white little f*ckers always try to find other white little f*ckers.
[03:34.220 --> 03:37.700]  Which summarizes the whole hackerspaces community in one point.
[03:38.380 --> 03:49.660]  But the main problem of the hackerspaces community and the hacking community is that hackers are very, very exclusionist.
[03:49.660 --> 03:56.120]  Although everyone says we are so inclusionist and we are so wonderful and we welcome everyone into our midst.
[03:56.520 --> 03:57.440]  And it doesn't really work.
[03:57.860 --> 04:04.060]  And one main problem of that is because the way we tell our stories.
[04:04.260 --> 04:08.220]  The way, in a certain way, I hate PR terms a lot.
[04:08.420 --> 04:13.040]  But the way we are selling our revolution.
[04:13.040 --> 04:25.200]  The way how we sell our counterculture and our subversion is always in a completely weird and skewed way that most of us don't understand ourselves.
[04:25.660 --> 04:31.300]  See, growing up as a nerd, I was kind of like a shy personality.
[04:31.300 --> 04:40.520]  But what I learned is that there's only one way of kind of like finding other people is communicating with other people.
[04:40.940 --> 04:46.720]  And telling them what I was about and what I thought the world should be all about.
[04:47.060 --> 04:52.340]  Of course, in the mid-1980s, I got my first computer and my first modem and I joined the BBS system.
[04:52.340 --> 04:55.680]  And I found other people there that I could communicate with.
[04:56.200 --> 05:04.380]  And the cool thing is like what remains in my fragmented memory from back then is the stories I heard.
[05:04.900 --> 05:09.340]  It was a really tight-knit community, the BBS systems and FidoNet and all that kind of stuff.
[05:09.540 --> 05:14.440]  But what sticks still in my mind is like how I was introduced.
[05:14.440 --> 05:27.480]  How I got personal messages from people running BBSs or other nerds in the community who kind of like told me, Hey, that's us and that's how we work.
[05:27.740 --> 05:32.560]  And do you want to contribute to that in a meaningful way?
[05:33.040 --> 05:34.740]  Or don't you?
[05:34.940 --> 05:43.440]  Or do you have something that could help our community in a way that would change it to a better community?
[05:45.460 --> 05:47.900]  And for me, that was really interesting.
[05:48.460 --> 05:58.180]  So I also remember it was the first time that I got kind of like an online kind of like threat mail, but not the threat mail in a bad way.
[05:58.340 --> 06:01.340]  I got an email from another guy because I was young.
[06:01.420 --> 06:03.460]  I was like 13 or 14 or something like that.
[06:03.540 --> 06:07.480]  And I said something really obnoxious and stupid on a message board on the FidoNet.
[06:07.960 --> 06:11.680]  And that guy was really calling me out and saying like you can't do that shit.
[06:11.680 --> 06:12.920]  Like just like behave.
[06:13.520 --> 06:15.640]  And in a certain way, it was good.
[06:15.800 --> 06:18.020]  It was good that someone told me to behave.
[06:18.400 --> 06:21.080]  In a certain way, it was something like a netiquette.
[06:21.280 --> 06:22.500]  But it didn't really exist.
[06:22.680 --> 06:31.560]  And I'm not a huge fan of netiquette in general because we need a million gazillion netiquettes for all different communities and all different scenes and sub scenes.
[06:31.560 --> 06:39.880]  But it was for me like a way of learning to communicate and listening to other people.
[06:40.580 --> 06:45.700]  And in the same time, I was doing a lot of pen and paper role playing.
[06:45.920 --> 06:50.860]  I'm not sure any pen and paper role players here who still do it.
[06:52.200 --> 06:55.780]  But still, the point was I'm still not really...
[06:55.780 --> 07:02.360]  I mean, I tried doing GURPS again like two or three years ago, but I stopped doing it.
[07:04.040 --> 07:16.020]  But the cool thing about role playing is, and doing it with your friends, is you learn this like really interesting skill of telling a story, listening to a story, reacting to the story.
[07:16.220 --> 07:17.780]  And it's a discourse, it's a dialogue.
[07:18.160 --> 07:22.860]  And of course, most of that discourse is about killing orcs or something like that.
[07:23.040 --> 07:24.660]  So it's kind of like a low level discourse.
[07:24.940 --> 07:29.820]  But in a certain way, I spilled water on this thing here.
[07:30.140 --> 07:31.960]  So, okay, I'll put it up there.
[07:35.480 --> 07:49.120]  So, role playing gave me a tool, so to speak, of kind of like emphasizing and trying and writing down stories, and trying to find what's the essence of a story, and what do you really want to communicate.
[07:50.760 --> 08:02.820]  And at one point, when I was like 15, 16, 17, that's what I'm still known for is I founded like an art technology philosophy group called Monochrome, and I'm still part of it.
[08:03.160 --> 08:11.020]  And the basic idea of Monochrome still nowadays is finding the perfect website of mass distribution of an idea.
[08:11.480 --> 08:13.240]  So, sometimes it could be a musical.
[08:13.420 --> 08:15.940]  Sometimes it could be a computer program or a robot.
[08:16.260 --> 08:23.760]  Sometimes it could be, I don't know, a computer game or a novel or a piece of street theater.
[08:23.920 --> 08:29.940]  It does not matter what medium you use, you always are telling a story.
[08:29.940 --> 08:34.660]  And the story is the key and the essence of what you're doing.
[08:35.600 --> 08:39.620]  Especially, as myself, in a political activist way.
[08:39.920 --> 08:45.780]  Because the main problem nowadays is nobody wants to listen anymore because everyone thinks like they already know everything anyways.
[08:46.860 --> 08:49.080]  So, how can you reach people out there?
[08:49.200 --> 08:51.580]  How can you spread viral information?
[08:51.720 --> 08:56.600]  How can you tell stories to an audience that doesn't want to listen to you anymore?
[08:57.660 --> 09:06.300]  So, political work, and for me, hacking is political work, doesn't work in the same way as in the 70s or in the 80s.
[09:06.380 --> 09:12.900]  You can't go onto the street and distribute leaflets and say, here's a leaflet, read it, and now go form a union.
[09:13.080 --> 09:14.580]  That doesn't work like that anymore.
[09:15.060 --> 09:17.180]  By the way, I mean the whole system changed.
[09:17.320 --> 09:18.600]  We are in neoliberalism now.
[09:18.780 --> 09:22.400]  We are in a society of control and not in a disciplinary society anymore.
[09:22.400 --> 09:26.200]  So, a lot of things changed in the last 30 and 40 years.
[09:26.600 --> 09:29.260]  And of course, also subcultures change over time.
[09:29.480 --> 09:42.620]  Because new technology, new media, whatever is there, also changes our behavior and changes the way that we should react to behavior that we don't like or disagree with on a political level.
[09:42.620 --> 10:03.380]  So, in a certain way, I would say that political activism nowadays and political storytelling should be more like a virus or should be more like an elaborate prank or pranks of subpranks of subpranks than like a five-second message that can end up on CNN.
[10:03.620 --> 10:06.240]  Because if it ends up on CNN, it's wasted anyways.
[10:06.240 --> 10:23.900]  So, it's not... So, most of the pranksters I know and most of the political activists, including them, the anonymous f*ckers, they're always reaching for this, like, strange 1970s goal of the mass audience.
[10:23.900 --> 10:28.700]  So, we need to propagate our idea and we have to change the world and blah, blah, blah.
[10:28.800 --> 10:33.480]  And all that stuff is even propagated by storytelling in the mainstream media.
[10:33.480 --> 10:39.200]  I mean, I have to say, I like this series, but not because of the key story.
[10:39.360 --> 10:44.560]  I like Mr. Robot, but I don't like what Mr. Robot is telling.
[10:44.840 --> 10:52.880]  Mr. Robot is probably, hacking-wise and infosec-wise and counterculture-wise, the worst thing you can watch.
[10:53.080 --> 10:56.760]  Because nothing in this thing works.
[10:56.760 --> 11:03.920]  It has a really strange, let's call it, hacker-martyr vibe.
[11:04.220 --> 11:11.960]  And at the same time, it's also selling the point that, of course, like all hackers are strange freaks with multiple personalities.
[11:12.500 --> 11:16.080]  And all hacker stories are kind of like bad copies of Fight Club.
[11:16.260 --> 11:16.740]  And I don't know.
[11:17.640 --> 11:20.180]  So, I get the point.
[11:20.180 --> 11:23.180]  I get the story that is being told in Mr. Robot.
[11:23.520 --> 11:27.920]  It is the story of a really interesting, clever, troubled individual.
[11:28.300 --> 11:31.320]  And how he interacts with the world.
[11:31.640 --> 11:43.460]  But on a political level, nothing that Mr. Robot is telling is in any way new, adequate, or does anything to make the world better.
[11:43.760 --> 11:45.380]  Of course, it's an entertainment product.
[11:45.380 --> 11:48.900]  And we can discuss a lot about how entertainment should be or should not be.
[11:49.420 --> 11:57.060]  But there are single episodes of Star Trek Next Generation who are almost like a hammer in your face with philosophy.
[11:57.880 --> 12:01.680]  I mean, Star Trek, for me, is a good example for nerd storytelling.
[12:02.060 --> 12:06.820]  Because Star Trek is almost like philosophy for dummies.
[12:06.980 --> 12:08.220]  And it's fun watching it.
[12:08.400 --> 12:20.440]  Because they're taking one ethical problem or one political problem, a really small one, and combine it and encapsulate it into one story in 45 minutes with a couple of really relatable characters.
[12:20.820 --> 12:22.080]  And then they tell it to you.
[12:22.220 --> 12:24.080]  And you actually learn something from that.
[12:25.520 --> 12:29.300]  Don't get me started about JJ Abrams and all that stuff that's going on right now.
[12:29.780 --> 12:45.040]  But Star Trek, for me, is a good example, especially Next Generation, of how you can do something like a subversive thing, namely teaching people something on a mainstream mass media level.
[12:45.380 --> 13:02.520]  Another example, because I've been in discussions like this all the time, because most of the time I take apart films about hacking or I take apart films about subversion, because I always try to find out why it doesn't work or why does it bother me.
[13:02.520 --> 13:09.220]  I mean, of course, I know we live in a capitalist system, and it's all entertainment products and people are trying to make money with it.
[13:09.380 --> 13:10.660]  That's for sure, yeah?
[13:11.080 --> 13:23.080]  But still, there are glimpses out there where something really wonderful happens, that within that system and within the studio system in Hollywood or TV production, whatever it is, something magic happens.
[13:23.640 --> 13:30.800]  And one example, and I think you'll completely boo me down now, but I like Titanic, you know?
[13:31.820 --> 13:33.340]  Anyone seen Titanic?
[13:34.280 --> 13:36.200]  Who has not seen Titanic?
[13:37.300 --> 13:37.520]  Okay.
[13:38.280 --> 13:46.260]  So Titanic is this big blockbuster movie from the late 1990s, and it's about the Titanic.
[13:46.980 --> 13:53.460]  And it's a big ship and it drowns with lots of people on it.
[13:53.460 --> 14:00.460]  And there's a lot of, like, Schmalz in it, as we say in German, there's lots of, like, love and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
[14:00.680 --> 14:05.100]  And in a certain way, in the end, of course, it's clear who dies in the end.
[14:05.260 --> 14:08.080]  It's the working class guy dies, of course, yeah.
[14:10.580 --> 14:11.660]  Yeah, sure.
[14:13.080 --> 14:33.360]  But the cool thing about Titanic is, and I only realized that way later, is that Jim Cameron is actually not only telling a story like a big love story, but he's telling a really interesting, clever story about class warfare and class struggle in the early 20th century.
[14:33.620 --> 14:38.500]  And there's not another single movie that does it as well as this film.
[14:38.500 --> 14:44.120]  Of course, it's, at points, a little bit too much, but, I mean, it's a Hollywood blockbuster.
[14:44.400 --> 14:53.360]  And at the same time, it's a Hollywood blockbuster where I go out of it and I kind of learn something about how society was structured in the early 20th century.
[14:54.160 --> 14:57.280]  And to a certain degree, how it's structured today.
[14:57.600 --> 15:03.500]  But we kind of forget about that because things look a little bit more nice nowadays.
[15:03.500 --> 15:08.820]  But then again, you get reminded that there are black people on the street who get shot just because they're black.
[15:09.140 --> 15:12.340]  And then you get like, f*ck, nothing actually happens.
[15:13.280 --> 15:14.240]  Nothing gets better.
[15:14.360 --> 15:16.460]  No, it's not true that nothing gets better.
[15:16.640 --> 15:24.080]  But we need to remind people in an emotional and interesting way that we need to change things.
[15:24.240 --> 15:28.660]  And how can you convey the idea of that something needs to be changed?
[15:29.280 --> 15:32.060]  It needs to be conveyed on an emotional level.
[15:32.540 --> 15:36.920]  And the cool thing about storytelling is that a story is an emotional machine.
[15:37.200 --> 15:43.520]  A movie, as a good example of storytelling, is a highly crafted emotional machine if it works.
[15:43.880 --> 15:48.680]  Of course, there are many emotional machines out there who don't work at all.
[15:48.680 --> 15:51.020]  Well, that's what we call a bad movie.
[15:51.340 --> 15:58.800]  But if a movie works, you sit in there, you're immersed into an experience, an emotional experience.
[15:59.120 --> 16:02.740]  And you let yourself go through the stages of the emotion.
[16:03.140 --> 16:07.780]  And in the end, you walk out of the cinema and have a good feeling about something.
[16:08.020 --> 16:10.580]  And you also probably, hopefully, learn something.
[16:10.920 --> 16:16.060]  Of course, you have to encapsulate the message that you want to portray.
[16:16.060 --> 16:19.840]  So, let's say, the political idea that you want to portray.
[16:20.060 --> 16:27.120]  The political idea in Titanic would be, for example, the whole story about class warfare, etc.
[16:27.720 --> 16:36.680]  But you need other little motors in that engine that makes it easier for the audience to get into that.
[16:36.980 --> 16:38.700]  And, of course, there are many, many filmmakers.
[16:38.920 --> 16:40.440]  There are many novelists.
[16:40.540 --> 16:45.640]  There are many writers out there who have completely different views on that.
[16:45.640 --> 16:50.640]  I mean, I'm talking from a perspective of, like, critique, of political messages.
[16:51.200 --> 16:59.000]  How can we still use the media in some interesting, meaningful way to convey a story?
[16:59.320 --> 17:07.280]  Another interesting example is because when people ask me, what do you think is the best movie about hacking?
[17:08.080 --> 17:11.280]  And, of course, I know, I like war games.
[17:11.440 --> 17:12.480]  I grew up with war games.
[17:12.640 --> 17:14.420]  It's a great, wonderful film.
[17:14.580 --> 17:18.160]  Of course, it's a white dude and he has this, like, kind of, like, stupid female.
[17:19.940 --> 17:25.320]  But still, it was 1983 or 4, so it was a different time.
[17:25.940 --> 17:28.960]  And, oh, no, it was not a different time.
[17:29.100 --> 17:29.960]  It's just, like, the same now.
[17:31.740 --> 17:35.320]  But a really good film about hacking, I think, is Inception.
[17:36.180 --> 17:39.140]  And I'm not sure that Inception is a good movie at all.
[17:39.340 --> 17:41.820]  But if it's a good movie, it's a movie about hacking.
[17:42.900 --> 17:51.100]  Because the cool thing about Inception is, like, that it visualizes entering a system in a really interesting way, I think.
[17:51.220 --> 17:57.740]  Of course, it's a crossover of kind of, like, virtual reality slash dreamscape slash whatever slash whatever slash whatever.
[17:57.740 --> 18:03.800]  But the cool thing is that I had discussions with people after seeing Inception.
[18:04.460 --> 18:19.640]  And one person, that's how I actually came up with that idea, is he said, it is really interesting how they portray dreams as, like, something hidden, as something locked away, as something that you have to get a lot of energy to get into.
[18:19.940 --> 18:21.920]  It's almost like breaking into your dream.
[18:22.100 --> 18:23.140]  And they do it with technology.
[18:23.140 --> 18:26.980]  They have this, like, interesting little machines in there.
[18:27.800 --> 18:29.620]  And they never really talk about that.
[18:29.780 --> 18:30.540]  But it is true.
[18:30.880 --> 18:32.700]  And they are breaking into a system.
[18:32.980 --> 18:35.420]  And sometimes within the system into the next system.
[18:35.600 --> 18:37.800]  And the systems have different mechanics.
[18:38.000 --> 18:41.380]  And, of course, they portray that with different physics and things.
[18:41.980 --> 18:44.240]  But still, I like it a lot.
[18:44.460 --> 18:53.700]  Because on a mainstream level, it is something that portrays something like systems within systems.
[18:54.020 --> 18:55.620]  And, I mean, for us, it's all...
[18:56.760 --> 18:58.040]  An easy thing.
[18:58.260 --> 19:00.500]  I mean, many people are really clever.
[19:01.240 --> 19:02.520]  Hopefully, including myself.
[19:04.380 --> 19:08.080]  And we know that on a certain level to deal with metastructures.
[19:08.380 --> 19:21.100]  But, I mean, you cannot, like, forgive it for granted that people out there who go shop at Walmart and then go and see a movie have ever thought about metastructures or systems within systems or something like that.
[19:21.100 --> 19:21.640]  No, no.
[19:21.920 --> 19:22.640]  There is...
[19:22.640 --> 19:26.540]  The wonderful thing about storytelling is, like, that you can make complex ideas.
[19:27.420 --> 19:31.200]  And they might not even be on an intellectual level.
[19:31.200 --> 19:47.080]  But they might capture something that gives people an out view, like, a new idea of having, like, experienced something in a story, in a book, in a film, wherever it is, that they have not experienced before.
[19:47.520 --> 19:51.340]  That's why I think, of course, it is important to tell people, just, like, read a book.
[19:51.500 --> 19:52.320]  Yeah, of course, yeah.
[19:52.680 --> 19:55.320]  But, I mean, how can you convey people reading a book?
[19:55.320 --> 20:03.000]  And so, that's my whole idea of, like, the weapons of mass distribution of an idea is, like, sometimes you have to make it easy for people.
[20:03.240 --> 20:14.440]  You have to get people where they don't think that they might be educated, where they might get something that they're not expecting.
[20:14.440 --> 20:18.000]  And that could be, of course, a prank on the street or a street theater or something.
[20:18.240 --> 20:21.460]  So, there's this, like, great quote by Chairman Mao.
[20:21.640 --> 20:23.520]  I'm not a fan of Chairman Mao.
[20:24.040 --> 20:31.460]  But Chairman Mao at one point said that, Mickey Mouse, like Disney, is a sugar-coated bullet.
[20:32.800 --> 20:42.860]  It's, like, you know, of course, he's referring to, like, cultural imperialism and how Disney makes it easier for you to swallow reactionary agenda and digest it.
[20:42.860 --> 20:52.880]  Because most of the Disney films out there are portraying enormously reactionary storylines about, you know, princesses and da-da-da-da-da.
[20:53.640 --> 20:55.960]  But people feel entertained about it.
[20:56.060 --> 20:56.920]  They like it.
[20:57.060 --> 21:06.600]  And the cool thing about being influenced by something that emotionally touches you is you don't even realize what's going on.
[21:06.700 --> 21:10.580]  You don't even realize that you have been infiltrated by an idea.
[21:10.580 --> 21:29.820]  And I think we should use that core ideal, this, like, core essence of, like, trying to be in the way that we convey our stories in a more emotional and interesting way.
[21:29.820 --> 21:47.880]  So, what I wrote in this little pamphlet I wrote about the talk today is, for f*ck's sakes, hackers are bad storytellers, misunderstood by the media, I'm not even talking about the mainstream press, ripped apart by their own peers, often incomprehensive and boring.
[21:47.880 --> 21:48.600]  Why?
[21:50.340 --> 21:55.480]  The story is that I think that we have to step back.
[21:56.100 --> 22:01.620]  I know it's really important to have insider fights about what f*cking Linux distribution you're using.
[22:01.840 --> 22:02.980]  But that's not the point.
[22:03.180 --> 22:04.240]  It is not the point.
[22:04.440 --> 22:05.660]  Of course it's the point.
[22:05.800 --> 22:07.140]  I know that we all like that.
[22:07.140 --> 22:13.460]  We all have our insider debates about this Linux or whatever, or like being a Star Trek or Star Wars fan.
[22:13.600 --> 22:14.600]  I know, we all like that.
[22:14.700 --> 22:15.480]  We're all nerds.
[22:15.640 --> 22:16.600]  I get it, okay?
[22:16.980 --> 22:20.740]  But at one point, you have to step out of this.
[22:21.080 --> 22:23.240]  You have to embrace people.
[22:23.240 --> 22:33.720]  You can't scare them away by saying like, oh, I don't like the joke on your shirt, because that is not a joke about the right Linux distribution.
[22:34.920 --> 22:36.000]  I don't like you.
[22:36.140 --> 22:36.400]  No!
[22:36.780 --> 22:49.680]  I mean, if you can't even like have a conversation like adult people at a hacker conversation, at a hacker conference, where should we get with our ideas of a political movement?
[22:49.680 --> 22:55.760]  And I'm not getting into the debate of a political movement in the sense of like, I know we have many, many people down there.
[22:55.940 --> 23:02.140]  We have people who would consider themselves like anarchists, who are most of them are actually libertarians.
[23:04.100 --> 23:06.160]  But, or leftists, whatever it is, yeah?
[23:06.360 --> 23:08.800]  But I mean, that is not the point I'm making here.
[23:08.880 --> 23:14.620]  I'm not doing a political speech in a way of like that I want to indoctrinate you with new Marxism or something like that.
[23:15.320 --> 23:17.600]  But consider that you have an agenda.
[23:17.640 --> 23:19.060]  And I think you all have an agenda.
[23:19.060 --> 23:21.660]  There is something that you want to change about the world.
[23:22.120 --> 23:24.540]  Because that's why people do hacking.
[23:24.720 --> 23:26.160]  And that's why people come to hacker conferences.
[23:26.320 --> 23:30.240]  To meet their peers, to meet community, to exchange, to learn something, yeah?
[23:30.600 --> 23:33.960]  Even if it's watching another two hours of Rambam, yeah?
[23:35.980 --> 23:37.740]  So... Rambam!
[23:39.680 --> 23:42.680]  You are coming here because you want to do something.
[23:43.680 --> 23:54.300]  And you can only do something, really, if you think about how you communicate what you are doing to other people.
[23:55.260 --> 24:00.880]  And I'm even talking about stuff like, does your mother understand what you are doing?
[24:01.360 --> 24:04.500]  And it's, I know, it's like, it's the worst question I can ask, yeah?
[24:05.500 --> 24:06.740]  But that's the point.
[24:07.000 --> 24:14.500]  I mean, we have the problem of that, or I say like, annoyance that Trump and that stuff is happening, I know, yeah?
[24:14.800 --> 24:22.100]  But the problem is that politics nowadays works only on an emotional level.
[24:22.100 --> 24:23.840]  It only works for you based.
[24:24.120 --> 24:28.780]  You can, you can, you can get into like, with a Republican, into a debate.
[24:28.960 --> 24:29.740]  And I'm trying that.
[24:29.880 --> 24:33.680]  I'm, I like trolling Republicans, especially as an Austrian leftist.
[24:33.860 --> 24:34.880]  I like to do that, yeah?
[24:35.720 --> 24:38.640]  Because most of the time, I'm just having a conversation with them.
[24:38.940 --> 24:43.180]  And at one point, their conversation completely, or their reactions disintegrate.
[24:44.080 --> 24:55.280]  And they switch into this mode of like, And it's not that they're doing this, but they get paralyzed at one point.
[24:55.460 --> 25:01.600]  They get paralyzed because they don't want to talk anymore.
[25:01.820 --> 25:03.280]  It's almost like they're shutting off.
[25:03.680 --> 25:09.340]  And you can only get beyond that point if, to a certain degree, you embrace them.
[25:09.620 --> 25:15.700]  And if you think how they are thinking, talk to them on their level.
[25:17.000 --> 25:19.400]  Think how their internal story works.
[25:19.640 --> 25:25.220]  And only if you understand their internal story, you can then introduce them to your internal story.
[25:26.060 --> 25:31.140]  It's, of course, like this whole bullshit about the clash of civilizations and blah, blah, blah, all that stuff, yeah?
[25:31.420 --> 25:35.700]  Yeah, I mean, we have that clash of civilizations between people all the time.
[25:35.940 --> 25:37.360]  I have an idea of the world.
[25:37.660 --> 25:38.980]  Let's see, it's a neo-Marxist.
[25:39.100 --> 25:42.060]  And you have an idea of the world, and that's anarchist or whatever it is, yeah?
[25:43.380 --> 25:47.340]  This stuff is not that far apart, to certain degrees.
[25:47.820 --> 25:50.760]  But you can only really understand the other person.
[25:51.300 --> 25:55.160]  And that's almost like a therapeutical remark I'm doing, yeah?
[25:57.360 --> 26:00.200]  Attacking someone never changes anyone.
[26:00.600 --> 26:07.000]  Attacking just causes the root problem of, like, a system is shutting down.
[26:07.000 --> 26:09.560]  And that's not what you want to do.
[26:09.780 --> 26:13.600]  I mean, the basic idea of social engineering is, like, being friendly.
[26:14.880 --> 26:18.700]  So, and to a certain degree, storytelling is also social engineering.
[26:22.300 --> 26:28.940]  And if you want to be a master of that craft, of course you have to practice this a lot.
[26:28.940 --> 26:30.120]  And I like to do that.
[26:30.280 --> 26:34.260]  I like to go into bars and just, like, chat with people and tell them stories.
[26:34.360 --> 26:36.100]  Sometimes I make up completely weird stories.
[26:36.900 --> 26:38.860]  I have 13 Facebook accounts.
[26:39.740 --> 26:45.940]  One of my Facebook accounts is, like, a 16-year-old white Aryan supremacist daughter from Montana.
[26:48.020 --> 26:56.040]  And, of course, not even my dear wife, Anna, who is in the audience, who really took my weird last name.
[26:56.080 --> 26:57.160]  I still can't believe that.
[26:59.280 --> 27:02.060]  Also, she does know who that character is.
[27:02.180 --> 27:10.280]  Because I kind of want to keep them apart in a way that I don't want anyone interfering with that character.
[27:10.280 --> 27:22.060]  Because if I have one like from someone who should not be in her posse, then it completely destroys that little narration that I was creating.
[27:22.280 --> 27:28.020]  So, storytelling is not only about writing a novella or something like that.
[27:28.180 --> 27:30.660]  It's also creating a character, for example, on Facebook.
[27:30.940 --> 27:31.800]  And playing it.
[27:31.880 --> 27:40.140]  And trying to think, like, what problem does a 16- or 15-year-old white Aryan supremacist in the middle of nowhere in Montana have?
[27:40.920 --> 27:42.560]  And what music is she?
[27:42.680 --> 27:47.200]  And is she upset about that Prussian blue are now hippies and that kind of stuff?
[27:47.380 --> 27:49.620]  You know, like, and I'm trying to play with that.
[27:49.760 --> 27:58.920]  And I think that playing, playing with characters, storytelling is always about characters, is trying to be another person.
[27:59.120 --> 28:06.020]  And trying to be another person, at least in your mind, is also a step in understanding other people better, I think.
[28:07.560 --> 28:13.860]  Of course, it's also important about how... what words you use.
[28:14.080 --> 28:24.460]  And there's, like, one old joke I'm always making is the main problem about global warming is that global warming sounds too nice.
[28:25.520 --> 28:27.520]  That's a storytelling problem.
[28:27.520 --> 28:31.560]  If you call that global warming, people think, yeah, it's nice.
[28:31.740 --> 28:31.980]  It's warm.
[28:32.240 --> 28:33.740]  Who likes it cold, you know?
[28:33.960 --> 28:34.560]  It's global.
[28:34.680 --> 28:35.520]  Global is a nice term.
[28:36.240 --> 28:37.300]  Warm is a nice term.
[28:37.480 --> 28:37.840]  It's nice.
[28:38.120 --> 28:38.300]  Yeah.
[28:39.000 --> 28:45.120]  And, of course, I mean, we're talking about, like, 90% of the population who are not scientists or not interested in anything.
[28:45.180 --> 28:46.400]  They just hear a term.
[28:47.140 --> 28:52.320]  And the person who came up with the idea of calling it global warming should be shot.
[28:54.220 --> 28:58.980]  Because it really, I think, caused massive problems for decades to come, yeah?
[28:59.760 --> 29:06.460]  Another... they should have called it something like atmosphere cancer, and we wouldn't have a problem in the global debate anymore, yeah?
[29:06.760 --> 29:08.720]  But that's another example of storytelling.
[29:09.080 --> 29:10.760]  Like, even a word is a story.
[29:11.540 --> 29:16.500]  And you send it on the way, and then it gets its own wings and destroys things.
[29:17.460 --> 29:23.580]  Or, for example, the whole privacy debate about other people reading your emails and stuff like that.
[29:23.660 --> 29:30.500]  I think people, by hearing email, have this strange conception of that email is like mail.
[29:30.860 --> 29:32.640]  And mail is protected, you know?
[29:32.720 --> 29:33.840]  You cannot open your mail.
[29:34.160 --> 29:36.680]  It's illegal that you open your mail, you know?
[29:37.280 --> 29:39.240]  For another person, you open the mail.
[29:40.200 --> 29:51.200]  If you would have called it an e-postcard from the beginning, people would use email probably in a different way, because they know, oh, it's a postcard, it's open.
[29:51.460 --> 29:55.320]  I should probably not write all this stuff in my email.
[29:55.460 --> 30:00.260]  But, I mean, there are probably many, many, many examples about that kind of stuff.
[30:00.440 --> 30:08.260]  So, if you're doing a startup or something like that, and if you want to call it in a certain way, think twice how you call it startup.
[30:08.260 --> 30:17.440]  Because a name is something that is enormously fast getting viral and getting its own life.
[30:17.900 --> 30:25.800]  And even like putting a name in the world should be debated at least with your friends or something like that before doing that.
[30:25.800 --> 30:34.480]  So, Neil deGrasse Tyson had this fun tweet that Anna found two days ago.
[30:34.960 --> 30:37.340]  And he... it's almost like...
[30:37.340 --> 30:40.880]  Neil deGrasse Tyson has this like really interesting gospel vibe sometimes.
[30:41.080 --> 30:42.240]  You know, he's like this like...
[30:42.760 --> 30:43.720]  I tell you.
[30:44.420 --> 30:51.140]  And he said something like, may your signal be high and your noise be low.
[30:51.940 --> 30:54.060]  And that's... that's it to the point.
[30:54.580 --> 30:57.440]  Your signal in storytelling should be high.
[30:57.660 --> 30:59.660]  It should be... it shouldn't be blatant.
[30:59.940 --> 31:01.060]  It shouldn't be...
[31:01.060 --> 31:06.020]  You shouldn't write like in page two that the person dies on page seven.
[31:06.220 --> 31:06.860]  You know, of course not.
[31:07.080 --> 31:07.100]  Yeah.
[31:07.620 --> 31:15.820]  But emphasizing on the key elements of your story and what you want to convey is not actually a bad thing.
[31:17.220 --> 31:21.760]  For years and years, I refused to read Stephen King because I thought like, Ah, Stephen King.
[31:21.940 --> 31:22.500]  That's like...
[31:22.500 --> 31:23.500]  People read that in...
[31:23.500 --> 31:25.820]  You know, in the bathroom or something like that.
[31:26.340 --> 31:29.480]  And at one point, I read a Stephen King novel.
[31:29.840 --> 31:30.840]  And I got it.
[31:30.960 --> 31:35.220]  I understand why people like reading Stephen King.
[31:35.540 --> 31:37.400]  Because he's a masterful storyteller.
[31:37.620 --> 31:41.360]  And he is really emphasizing on...
[31:41.360 --> 31:50.560]  Although it could be like a 1500 page novel, you never lose sight over what's really, really important in the story.
[31:50.560 --> 31:58.200]  And only you lose sight if he deliberately wants you to lose sight of that.
[31:58.460 --> 31:59.940]  And that's a strategy, of course.
[32:00.040 --> 32:06.680]  Of course, you can create something that is working with illusion, that is working with deception.
[32:07.200 --> 32:12.660]  But that deception only works if it's embedded into a bigger framework of the story.
[32:15.120 --> 32:18.400]  We have a lot of problems in the hackerspace.
[32:18.400 --> 32:21.320]  It's hackerspaces and hacker community.
[32:21.840 --> 32:29.820]  And many of them, it's one of my favorite topics, is this whole strange idea of like, Why are we all creating hacker martyrs?
[32:29.920 --> 32:32.320]  Why is Assange so important?
[32:32.420 --> 32:33.740]  Why is Snowden so important?
[32:34.120 --> 32:36.880]  Why is f*cking Jake Applebaum so important?
[32:38.520 --> 32:41.400]  And I don't take that f*cking literally, sorry.
[32:46.280 --> 32:51.760]  The problem is, is that, that's the wrong idea of storytelling.
[32:52.780 --> 32:57.500]  Storytelling is, should be, not about heroes and heroines.
[32:57.500 --> 33:00.700]  The hero narrative is destructive.
[33:00.980 --> 33:03.060]  The hero narrative is the wrong way to go.
[33:03.200 --> 33:10.640]  The hero narrative is telling people and perpetuating the idea that exceptional people will save us.
[33:11.180 --> 33:11.500]  No!
[33:12.060 --> 33:14.520]  Exceptional people will never save us.
[33:14.760 --> 33:16.080]  Not Elon Musk.
[33:16.380 --> 33:17.340]  No one, no.
[33:17.860 --> 33:22.140]  They have their own agendas, but it's certainly not saving people.
[33:25.500 --> 33:30.180]  And, if you create a storyline, and the media likes that.
[33:30.340 --> 33:36.060]  And I don't know why the hacker communities, although, jump on that bandwagon all the time.
[33:36.400 --> 33:38.700]  So yes, of course, there is a person like Snowden.
[33:38.840 --> 33:39.580]  I like Snowden.
[33:40.040 --> 33:41.160]  He did good things.
[33:41.340 --> 33:44.320]  But we should talk about what Snowden revealed.
[33:44.660 --> 33:47.760]  And not about emphasizing on Snowden all the time.
[33:47.960 --> 33:50.380]  Snowden, at this point, is actually unimportant.
[33:50.380 --> 33:56.300]  And the more you focus on him, the more you focus on Assange, the more you focus on Applebaum, whoever it is.
[33:56.500 --> 34:03.040]  You create this strange, toxic, martyr characters, who end up doing what the f*ck.
[34:03.120 --> 34:03.700]  I don't know, yeah?
[34:04.000 --> 34:18.960]  And I think parts of that, parts of the dilemma that Assange is now facing, is part of the importance that Assange got, and that trajectory that it created.
[34:18.960 --> 34:25.000]  This trajectory of people who suddenly cannot cope with their own idledom.
[34:25.110 --> 34:30.480]  They cannot cope with that kind of attention they get.
[34:30.670 --> 34:31.790]  And actually, they shouldn't.
[34:31.920 --> 34:40.610]  I think it's totally important to talk about the basic ideas, but not all the time about one person, another person, another person.
[34:40.610 --> 34:41.670]  And understand?
[34:42.020 --> 34:49.920]  I mean, I'm standing up here because I applied for the slot, and I got the slot, and of course you're sitting down there and you're listening to me.
[34:50.190 --> 34:56.050]  And of course you could spit that argument right back at me and say, like, hey, you're standing on stage.
[34:56.770 --> 35:05.420]  You're talking, you're your own little idol now, and you're all talking to us, and you all use your authority of having a microphone, and you don't have the microphone.
[35:05.520 --> 35:06.420]  Yes, of course I understand.
[35:06.690 --> 35:14.860]  I mean, speaking or using your specific privileges in a certain way is one point.
[35:14.860 --> 35:30.210]  Another point is if suddenly a whole agenda, a whole idea or a political movement is hijacked by certain people, and sometimes those people even want that, but they get too much attention.
[35:31.090 --> 35:43.500]  And if you want to really be drawn into a story, think about what you really want to hear.
[35:43.500 --> 35:51.980]  So do you really want to hear another story about someone who is amazingly clever and did this and that and blah, blah, blah?
[35:52.130 --> 35:56.570]  Or do you want to hear something about, let's say, another idea?
[35:56.750 --> 36:00.920]  So I'm just playing with the hero narrative versus, for example, the underdog narrative.
[36:01.090 --> 36:08.270]  Of course, the underdog narrative is the basic core narrative of, I guess, the hacker spaces and hacker community because we're all people.
[36:08.540 --> 36:11.000]  Nobody really understands what we're doing.
[36:11.110 --> 36:11.810]  We're all nerds.
[36:11.810 --> 36:20.380]  What is it that we have to do to finally reach our audience?
[36:20.550 --> 36:27.940]  That we finally are being recognized, that we finally can break through and not being the underdogs anymore.
[36:28.520 --> 36:34.880]  So the underdog narrative, like the hero narrative, is also the wrong approach.
[36:34.880 --> 36:42.040]  Because it is kind of like devaluing what you are, if you're really an underdog.
[36:42.710 --> 36:48.200]  And most of the time, people who use that narrative for themselves are not even underdogs.
[36:49.020 --> 36:54.460]  The main problem of nerd culture nowadays is that nerd culture is not an underground culture anymore.
[36:54.460 --> 36:58.810]  It was maybe an underground culture in the 70s and 80s, but not even then.
[36:59.550 --> 37:05.690]  Because nerd culture was always based on technology and technology is a privilege because not everyone can afford technology.
[37:05.840 --> 37:13.610]  I was a very privileged kid because my dad could afford to buy me a computer and then I could get a modem and experience certain things that I was experiencing.
[37:13.610 --> 37:18.860]  But, of course, that was a very privileged position I was in.
[37:19.650 --> 37:22.860]  And if you...
[37:22.860 --> 37:24.360]  Are you foaming at the mouth?
[37:24.810 --> 37:26.250]  Yes, I do.
[37:26.810 --> 37:28.340]  Actually, there's a German term for that.
[37:32.290 --> 37:33.860]  No, it's eating...
[37:33.860 --> 37:34.020]  Hydrophobia.
[37:34.150 --> 37:35.110]  We call it hydrophobia here.
[37:35.840 --> 37:36.630]  It's what?
[37:37.440 --> 37:39.050]  We call it hydrophobia here.
[37:39.460 --> 37:39.980]  Hydrophobia?
[37:40.170 --> 37:40.170]  No.
[37:40.480 --> 37:41.190]  A phobia?
[37:42.040 --> 37:43.520]  It's foaming at the mouth.
[37:43.920 --> 37:44.710]  Oh, my God.
[37:45.350 --> 37:49.070]  So, Trump is suffering from what?
[37:49.520 --> 37:50.290]  No, I said...
[37:50.290 --> 37:52.380]  I asked if you're foaming at the mouth.
[37:53.210 --> 37:56.170]  I asked if you're foaming at the mouth and I said it's like hydrophobia.
[37:56.340 --> 37:56.420]  Okay.
[37:56.420 --> 37:58.020]  No, but the story is like...
[37:58.020 --> 38:01.000]  Because I spill all my water and I usually drink a lot by talking.
[38:01.540 --> 38:05.630]  The main problem is like if you talk a lot, then you get that stuff.
[38:05.810 --> 38:07.250]  And in German there's a term for that.
[38:07.690 --> 38:08.500]  It's called...
[38:08.500 --> 38:09.510]  It's called...
[38:13.760 --> 38:17.860]  Laberschmalz, which is literally translated something like talking lard.
[38:19.500 --> 38:25.210]  So, I think you should use that term more often in the U.S.
[38:25.500 --> 38:28.190]  The Laberschmalz, the talking lard.
[38:28.710 --> 38:28.840]  Okay.
[38:29.790 --> 38:30.210]  So...
[38:32.130 --> 38:32.550]  Nerotology.
[38:33.360 --> 38:37.150]  I mentioned that in my introduction online.
[38:37.420 --> 38:40.540]  Nerotology is a really interesting scientific...
[38:40.540 --> 38:42.020]  Thank you so much.
[38:45.520 --> 38:47.770]  Subgenre of structuralist thinking.
[38:48.020 --> 38:51.230]  I'm not a big person who is into structuralist thinking.
[38:51.420 --> 38:55.180]  Like I consider myself more like a destructuralist approach.
[38:55.670 --> 38:58.070]  Because I like my French philosophers and stuff like that.
[38:58.570 --> 39:11.270]  But the idea of Nerotology is that there are certain ways of telling stories that are kind of interesting to observe in different cultures and different zones on the planet.
[39:11.270 --> 39:17.710]  And, for example, the whole idea of the hero narrative or the hero's journey...
[39:17.710 --> 39:23.540]  That Campbell kind of like analyzed in the 20th century is one of these things.
[39:23.790 --> 39:26.630]  I think that most of that stuff is actually bullshit.
[39:26.960 --> 39:29.630]  And I think we need a new approach to Nerotology.
[39:29.880 --> 39:40.380]  Because Nerotology tells us stuff like there is a right way of telling a film.
[39:40.380 --> 39:41.840]  Or telling a book.
[39:42.050 --> 39:47.270]  And you know all this stuff about like a three-act movie and stuff like that.
[39:47.610 --> 39:54.520]  I think that nowadays with new media, with new ways of storytelling, this is not necessarily true anymore.
[39:55.270 --> 40:01.690]  And I think if you, for example, are learning to screenwrite, there are certain structures you use.
[40:01.690 --> 40:02.810]  There is this one book.
[40:03.230 --> 40:04.540]  It's called Save the Cat.
[40:04.690 --> 40:06.040]  Has anyone heard about Save the Cat?
[40:06.570 --> 40:06.690]  Yeah.
[40:07.150 --> 40:14.000]  Save the Cat is almost like a formulaic approach to how to write a movie.
[40:14.000 --> 40:28.270]  And if you watch a movie nowadays, like a mainstream blockbuster movie, you can immediately, if you have read that book, or if you have read like a two-page summary of Save the Cat, you can immediately pinpoint.
[40:29.130 --> 40:29.570]  Okay.
[40:29.940 --> 40:32.050]  Ah, it's 45 minutes in.
[40:32.920 --> 40:33.880]  The second break.
[40:34.130 --> 40:36.770]  Oh, that is the dark night of the soul.
[40:36.940 --> 40:37.310]  I get it.
[40:37.400 --> 40:38.710]  You have the dark night of the soul now.
[40:38.880 --> 40:46.490]  And they are really using that almost frame, on the frame, in mainstream movies.
[40:46.500 --> 40:55.400]  That's why you go and see a movie and you strangely always have the feeling that you're watching the same movie again and again and again.
[40:55.880 --> 41:02.000]  And that's because they use, of course, I mean, there is a difference between a horror movie and a rom-com or something like that.
[41:02.130 --> 41:08.550]  But from the emotional arc that you're using in those films, that's pretty much like Save the Cat, right there.
[41:08.550 --> 41:19.710]  The book is, by the way, called Save the Cat, because one of the tricks of this, like, screenwriting tutor is that you have to make a character, in the beginning of the film, you have to make that character sympathetic.
[41:20.520 --> 41:22.770]  So, like, the audience has to like a character.
[41:23.000 --> 41:34.630]  And one trick, for example, could be that, although that is not really important for the storyline, the person, the main character, could, at one point in the first ten minutes, pet a cat.
[41:35.070 --> 41:39.270]  And suddenly the audience knows, oh, that person is nice, that person is petting a cat.
[41:40.000 --> 41:46.360]  And they're using, like, ideas like that to trick you into that.
[41:46.480 --> 41:49.770]  That's why I was referring to the whole thing of, like, the emotional machine.
[41:49.980 --> 41:53.810]  But, I mean, I'm still completely true about that.
[41:53.920 --> 41:56.020]  I think that movies are emotional machines.
[41:56.020 --> 42:00.840]  I think that movies are constructed and also books are very much constructed.
[42:00.840 --> 42:03.730]  But I think there is way more leeway.
[42:03.880 --> 42:10.230]  There is way more things they can actually do and try out with it.
[42:11.290 --> 42:26.960]  And, of course, and that's why I'm talking to you and not other people at other conventions, is I think that we have together, as a community, talk about what's important that we want to convey in the hackerspaces or hacker community.
[42:27.290 --> 42:34.840]  So, first of all, we have to find interesting narrations and we have to find interesting things about our community centers.
[42:35.500 --> 42:37.770]  Hackerspaces, makerspaces, whatever you want to call them.
[42:38.480 --> 42:46.320]  Because, most of the time, the problem of a hackerspace is the problem that it's sold with the completely different...
[42:47.460 --> 42:53.200]  with a completely wrong and not correct way.
[42:53.600 --> 42:57.680]  So, how can you bring people into hackerspaces?
[42:59.300 --> 43:04.180]  The main problem is people get into hackerspaces and they don't feel at home.
[43:04.400 --> 43:08.920]  And they don't feel at home because they are not part of the community anymore.
[43:09.300 --> 43:14.440]  And the community is, I have to remind you, is also a way of telling a story together.
[43:15.040 --> 43:19.340]  We are telling a story about what we think that we are and what we think that we should be.
[43:19.820 --> 43:42.180]  And if that story is 35-year-old white dads want to hang out with their 6-year-old boy kids and tinker around, that's a completely different story about a space than telling a story about a space that is, from its core idea, completely different.
[43:42.180 --> 43:50.520]  That is, from its core idea, more subversive or it is not as defined or not as family-friendly, whatever it is.
[43:50.920 --> 43:54.020]  I mean, the term family-friendly by itself is so weird.
[43:54.160 --> 43:55.120]  What does that mean?
[43:56.000 --> 43:57.220]  What is a family?
[43:57.380 --> 44:01.620]  A family itself is a narration that we are being presented with.
[44:01.620 --> 44:10.180]  And that narration, of course, and I even agree with some of that, but it's part of a cultural grammar that we are just accepting.
[44:10.960 --> 44:25.680]  The cultural grammar is like the normative way of things, is that stuff that is happening all the time are getting denser and denser and denser and harder and harder to change because people are used to certain ways of doing things.
[44:25.900 --> 44:29.840]  And the more people do that, the more people think that's normal.
[44:30.220 --> 44:35.460]  And suddenly we have the cultural grammar of a space or the cultural grammar of a society.
[44:35.520 --> 44:37.420]  And we have to change that grammar.
[44:37.880 --> 44:41.120]  And calling that cultural grammar is not my idea.
[44:41.120 --> 44:46.020]  But that's a post-structuralist idea from the 1970s.
[44:46.140 --> 44:51.200]  And the idea is that pretty much society in itself is a text.
[44:51.780 --> 44:57.020]  And I know that sounds really weird for people who don't read a lot of philosophy and really you don't have to.
[44:58.360 --> 45:07.780]  The idea that we can rewrite society almost like a code, but also like a poem or like a story, is something that people forget.
[45:07.780 --> 45:11.960]  Because society is not as rigid and not as strict as we think.
[45:12.520 --> 45:14.500]  Society is more like a jellyfish.
[45:16.420 --> 45:23.180]  Because so many people believe that it's a jellyfish, it suddenly is a jellyfish and suddenly it's this concrete jellyfish.
[45:23.480 --> 45:24.500]  But no, it's not.
[45:25.380 --> 45:29.480]  We have to accept that power is not ultimate.
[45:30.120 --> 45:31.920]  There is always an end to power.
[45:31.920 --> 45:34.160]  There is an end to the power of Trump.
[45:34.360 --> 45:36.620]  There is an end to the power of myself.
[45:36.920 --> 45:39.440]  There is an end to the power of whatever it is.
[45:40.180 --> 46:00.360]  And the way to talk about that kind of stuff, and the way to use, in a certain way, code, be it legal code, be it something like Creative Commons, I would say, is an interesting example of trying to change society with playing with legal code.
[46:00.360 --> 46:08.100]  Trying to change society with other codes, technological codes, I would call them, is another story.
[46:08.500 --> 46:16.040]  Trying to change society with narrative codes or selling stories in a different way is another way.
[46:16.160 --> 46:17.900]  But I think they are all interrelated.
[46:19.380 --> 46:28.600]  And it's a way to, let's say, find the perfect thing that you want to work on.
[46:28.600 --> 46:33.660]  And I'm pretty sure everyone in here has a different agenda because you just have different interests.
[46:35.060 --> 46:40.240]  But that interest that you really want to get forward...
[46:40.800 --> 46:47.160]  I don't really believe in a soul or something like that, but something that you really want to pour your heart in, your soul in.
[46:47.560 --> 46:49.160]  Try to find out what that is.
[46:49.440 --> 46:52.020]  Then try to find out why that is.
[46:53.480 --> 46:55.200]  Because it's your own story.
[46:55.500 --> 46:57.120]  It's the stuff that you make up.
[46:57.660 --> 46:59.060]  Humans are three things.
[46:59.360 --> 47:00.600]  We are a sexual species.
[47:00.980 --> 47:02.360]  We are a tool-using species.
[47:02.620 --> 47:04.540]  And we are a storytelling species.
[47:05.240 --> 47:06.380]  And that's pretty much it.
[47:07.700 --> 47:15.740]  The way how we present ourselves, the way that I present myself to other people, is through verbal communication and text communication.
[47:16.120 --> 47:20.340]  That's how I present what I think my story is to other people.
[47:20.680 --> 47:22.480]  And connect it to their story.
[47:24.680 --> 47:35.560]  And understanding and hacking what you think you are yourself is a first step, I think, in the right direction of understanding how other stories work.
[47:36.020 --> 47:39.260]  And why other stories are so strange for you.
[47:40.860 --> 47:43.500]  And why you don't get other people.
[47:44.320 --> 47:45.360]  Try it.
[47:45.580 --> 47:47.660]  I think it's interesting, fun mind games.
[47:48.380 --> 47:50.800]  I think I have another five minutes.
[47:51.080 --> 47:52.520]  I did a lot of talking.
[47:52.780 --> 47:53.320]  Any questions?
[47:55.220 --> 47:55.740]  Yep.
[47:56.240 --> 47:56.820]  Thank you.
[48:08.060 --> 48:10.060]  You talked about the hero narrative.
[48:10.880 --> 48:25.080]  I think one of the reasons it's so successful, and I didn't read Campbell's book, but I've heard him talk about it, is that the viewer or the reader, you know, and it comes up in Star Wars, Matrix, Tolkien, you know, on and on and on.
[48:25.220 --> 48:25.300]  Yeah.
[48:26.360 --> 48:27.600]  And other cultures too.
[48:27.940 --> 48:28.060]  Yeah.
[48:28.780 --> 48:30.700]  Is that we identify with the hero.
[48:30.920 --> 48:31.040]  Yeah.
[48:31.340 --> 48:40.020]  So the question is how do you have, and it's a very powerful way, you know, you kind of insert yourself as the hero as you're reading the story or as you're watching the story.
[48:40.020 --> 48:40.040]  Okay.
[48:40.260 --> 48:54.120]  But I think there's a difference between the hero narrative of that that person is the one person who generates the change and saves the planet, let's speak, in such a way, just put it in such a way.
[48:54.480 --> 48:58.980]  There's a difference between being the hero of a story and being the protagonist of a story.
[48:58.980 --> 48:59.480]  Mm-hmm.
[48:59.620 --> 49:07.920]  You can be the protagonist of a story, and the people, the readers are identifying with you, but you can be a complete f*ck-up that never goes anywhere.
[49:08.480 --> 49:12.800]  That doesn't change anything, but that could be an interesting, that could be the thing that you want to convey.
[49:13.260 --> 49:19.580]  There's, like, one of my favorite science fiction authors is Ian Banks, who sadly died, like, two or three years ago, yeah?
[49:19.580 --> 49:30.580]  And, like, one interesting trick he does in his first science fiction novel, Consider Fleabas, is that he is creating an anarchist utopian society called the culture.
[49:30.880 --> 49:39.020]  And he is selling the culture to the reader by picking a protagonist that hates that culture.
[49:39.160 --> 49:46.140]  The protagonist of that story is attacking that culture, wants to destroy it, and is completely against it.
[49:46.140 --> 49:54.780]  And he uses that trick of having the protagonist being against the thing that the author, as a political view, is actually trying to convey.
[49:55.040 --> 50:00.440]  So the author wants the culture to be the thing that you like at the end of the story, of the book.
[50:00.580 --> 50:01.500]  And you like it.
[50:02.300 --> 50:04.620]  But the protagonist hates it.
[50:05.020 --> 50:07.340]  But you can still play with that stuff.
[50:07.680 --> 50:07.680]  Yeah.
[50:08.140 --> 50:08.340]  Thank you.
[50:10.420 --> 50:10.900]  Right.
[50:11.100 --> 50:11.340]  Hi.
[50:12.020 --> 50:17.760]  So, first of all, HOPE has already added a lot of words to my vocabulary, but Laberschmalz is my absolute favorite.
[50:17.900 --> 50:18.020]  Oh!
[50:18.420 --> 50:19.000]  So, thank you.
[50:19.820 --> 50:21.340]  The interesting thing is that you are German?
[50:21.560 --> 50:21.700]  Yes.
[50:22.000 --> 50:23.440]  And I introduced you to Laberschmalz?
[50:24.020 --> 50:24.180]  Yes.
[50:25.520 --> 50:26.400]  Oh, Jesus.
[50:26.680 --> 50:27.040]  Thank you.
[50:29.180 --> 50:40.600]  Well, my real question is, I think our main communication problem is that we try to explain abstract things to a world that cares about human beings and their relationships.
[50:40.600 --> 50:45.140]  And I think that's where the hero narrative and the underdog narrative come in.
[50:45.280 --> 50:51.840]  So, you've got something abstract, you sort of graph the hero narrative on it as a kludge and you hope that it'll work somehow.
[50:52.240 --> 50:52.360]  Yeah.
[50:52.620 --> 50:53.780]  Do you have better ideas?
[50:54.020 --> 50:54.460]  Okay.
[50:54.880 --> 51:00.360]  So, one point is there is, as a German, you probably know Berthold Brecht.
[51:00.720 --> 51:05.520]  Anyone who does not know Brecht, but Brecht is a pretty cool guy, dead in the meantime.
[51:05.520 --> 51:13.900]  So, Berthold Brecht said a wonderful thing in the 1930s, an image of a Krupp plant.
[51:14.100 --> 51:21.020]  So, Krupp was one of the f*ckers behind the Second World War because they were like defense contractors, as we would say nowadays.
[51:21.340 --> 51:27.140]  And they were supporting Hitler because they were thinking a war would be beneficial for them.
[51:27.140 --> 51:30.540]  So, but Krupp was one of these defense contractors.
[51:30.960 --> 51:41.080]  So, and Berthold Brecht said an image of a Krupp plant does not explain how the company of Krupp is actually working.
[51:41.080 --> 51:50.460]  So, of course, you have always have to take something as abstract as worker degradation or something like that.
[51:50.720 --> 51:54.120]  Or the problems of the working class, whatever it is.
[51:54.220 --> 51:56.920]  It's all incredibly abstract problems.
[51:56.920 --> 52:02.680]  And you have to find something in there to...
[52:02.680 --> 52:05.980]  So, you have to...
[52:05.980 --> 52:13.700]  The cool thing about stories is you can take an enormously abstract situation and make an interesting narrative out of that.
[52:14.040 --> 52:16.020]  I mean, a good example is like Tron.
[52:16.320 --> 52:18.800]  I mean, Tron is kind of abstract, you know.
[52:18.800 --> 52:21.840]  Of course, it's a hero narrative and all the stuff I'm just saying, yeah.
[52:22.220 --> 52:23.380]  We can change that.
[52:23.520 --> 52:34.940]  But I think that especially if you're talking about science, if you're talking about technological problems, about hacking problems.
[52:35.360 --> 52:39.680]  There are so clever ways to deal with that.
[52:40.800 --> 52:47.740]  It's just like it takes more thinking because it's really something that is very specific about what you want to talk.
[52:47.740 --> 52:48.760]  I mean, I don't know.
[52:50.500 --> 52:56.540]  If you want to portray Ruby on Rails as something that is actually worth learning, I don't know how to do that.
[52:57.840 --> 53:00.180]  But I think it's very...
[53:00.780 --> 53:03.200]  Every problem has a solution.
[53:03.200 --> 53:04.580]  I'm almost sure about it.
[53:04.700 --> 53:06.760]  It has a story that is somewhere.
[53:07.000 --> 53:07.980]  You have to find it.
[53:08.060 --> 53:10.260]  It also depends on what you want to convey, really.
[53:14.040 --> 53:19.540]  The abstraction problem is, I think, the least problem of storytelling.
[53:20.240 --> 53:20.840]  I think.
[53:20.980 --> 53:21.740]  I think it is.
[53:22.120 --> 53:22.120]  Yeah.
[53:22.760 --> 53:22.920]  All right.
[53:23.020 --> 53:23.320]  Thank you.
[53:24.160 --> 53:25.260]  Sorry if I couldn't help anymore.
[53:27.300 --> 53:28.200]  I'm very sorry.
[53:28.320 --> 53:30.560]  But if you want, we can chat outside a little bit.
[53:32.060 --> 53:32.880]  Thank you.
[53:33.140 --> 53:34.000]  Thank you.