[00:00.350 --> 00:02.650]  So, I'm Unixjazz.
[00:02.850 --> 00:09.030]  I'm very happy to be with you all and extremely honored to be presenting for the 2600 community.
[00:09.370 --> 00:16.350]  So, the talk I prepared for this session is a bit different from the usual climate crisis talks.
[00:17.010 --> 00:25.950]  Because I will not be emphasizing the existential risks that we're all facing with the ongoing collapse of different ecosystems.
[00:26.710 --> 00:37.270]  There are many places, many talks, there's the scientific literature, there's the environmental action literature that we can have access to this kind of information.
[00:37.270 --> 00:39.170]  But it's certainly not enough, right?
[00:39.270 --> 00:40.470]  We need much more of that.
[00:40.730 --> 00:47.510]  So, what I would like to do instead is to take a different route as we move towards the end of hope.
[00:47.510 --> 00:56.430]  And here, by hope, I mean the conference, not in humanity, to discuss the intersections between hacking and environmental activism.
[00:56.990 --> 00:59.550]  So, there's hope for us to keep going.
[01:00.750 --> 01:04.490]  And this hope is renewed every two years, right?
[01:04.690 --> 01:09.330]  Here in New York City, we get to gather and it's always a great time.
[01:09.330 --> 01:14.310]  And I understand that you all must be a bit tired after, you know, so much action.
[01:14.690 --> 01:17.370]  So, I thank you again for being here.
[01:18.210 --> 01:21.790]  So, I would like to start by sharing an observation with you all.
[01:23.090 --> 01:28.470]  And I'm pretty sure many of you in the room also know the cases that I will be talking about.
[01:28.830 --> 01:38.690]  So, if we consider the history of hacking, it's very easy to see how much it has contributed to and transformed the history of computing.
[01:38.690 --> 01:44.970]  It's very easy to see how much it has contributed to and transformed the history of journalism.
[01:45.250 --> 01:52.710]  It is super easy to see how it has contributed to the contemporary history of political activism.
[01:53.330 --> 02:05.410]  And it's also easy to see how much it has contributed and transformed the practice of statecraft as hackers get co-opted to work for nation states worldwide.
[02:06.690 --> 02:14.250]  But there's one critical area that we have not seen yet as much in terms of hacker activism.
[02:14.550 --> 02:31.810]  So the question I want to explore in this talk and share with you all and think with you is the question of how can we learn from existing examples in the hacker archives regarding what we could call hacking in a common planetary interest.
[02:31.810 --> 02:45.090]  And this is an expression that I'm borrowing from a colleague, a friend, a hacker friend who has studied various expressions of political work in what she has called public interest hack.
[02:45.270 --> 02:53.610]  And this colleague is Gabriela Coleman that many of you know and she's always presenting and always present at the HOPE conferences.
[02:53.610 --> 03:04.430]  So, in a nutshell, my hope is in this talk that we as a community, we can help make sense of our environments.
[03:04.730 --> 03:15.730]  We can advance social, ecological and technical... the understanding of social, technical and ecological systems as a new area for hacker projects.
[03:16.890 --> 03:22.410]  So, before I proceed, I would like to just present a few preliminary definitions.
[03:22.930 --> 03:26.790]  So, the first one concerns this idea of the Earth systems, right?
[03:26.890 --> 03:32.590]  Which is something super well established in environmental sciences in, you know, the study of Earth systems.
[03:32.590 --> 03:47.190]  So, basically, what I mean by that, and this is how I organize the talk and the examples that I will discuss with you all, is that we have basically four components, subsystems, if you will, atmosphere, land, water and ice.
[03:47.430 --> 03:56.660]  And these systems are also... have the presence of humans and non-humans that inhabit what we could call a planetary commons.
[03:56.660 --> 04:01.060]  So, I want you all to think with this idea of the planetary commons.
[04:01.540 --> 04:08.720]  And the sad part of this, as we all know, this is a commons that is made proprietary, you know, more often than not.
[04:09.200 --> 04:12.700]  Which is extremely problematic, especially when it comes to environmental action.
[04:12.920 --> 04:23.280]  So, the basic idea here is to explore hacker projects across these subsystems, and to learn from them to advance the idea of hacking in the common planetary interest.
[04:23.280 --> 04:38.680]  So, the second definition I want to share with you, and this is not a definition that we need to talk much about at HOPE conf, but I would like to discuss because there's something interesting for us to explore in terms of the idea of the commons, is this idea... it's what I mean by hacking in this talk.
[04:39.360 --> 04:55.980]  So, I would like to provide a preliminary definition, which is based on the assumption that, if we look historically across several examples of hacking in different contexts and internationally, we get to see that hackers have fostered an underground commons.
[04:56.920 --> 05:14.720]  And this is a commons that many of us at HOPE, and in the context of different projects in the hackerspace movement, get to participate in creating a community with, for, and through analog and digital technologies, technologies, but not only digital technologies, right?
[05:15.480 --> 05:32.640]  So, and the last one that I would like to explore is a definition of technology, which again, not necessary for this community, but I think it's important to bring this up, because the definition I would like to emphasize comes from the field of anthropology,
[05:32.640 --> 05:40.960]  and it helps us think about the similarities with other popular definitions of hacking that many of us hold.
[05:41.540 --> 05:48.820]  So, I would like to first look at the definition that comes from Alfred Gell, who studied technology and magic.
[05:49.620 --> 06:04.900]  So, Gell, like many other anthropologists, he refuted what we call the standard understanding of technology, with this idea that technology is fundamentally tool making for the purposes of addressing human subsistence needs.
[06:05.740 --> 06:15.760]  So, what Gell demonstrated is that instead, technology involves much more, and something that extrapolates the idea of tool making and tool using.
[06:16.540 --> 06:24.580]  So, there's production, there's reproduction, there's repurposing, and there's magic involved in all technological work.
[06:24.580 --> 06:28.540]  And this is something that is very familiar to many of us in the hacker community.
[06:28.740 --> 06:42.580]  So, in all of these aspects of technology, they're very close tied with this idea that technology is fundamentally part of a network of social-technical relations, right, that we're all embedded in.
[06:42.800 --> 06:51.500]  And these webs of relations that we're all enmeshed in, they involve transmission of knowledge and cooperation between folks, fundamentally.
[06:51.500 --> 06:57.160]  And this is something that we see all over at HOPE and in the context of the hacker community at large, right?
[06:57.300 --> 07:02.820]  We're all sharing skills, transmitting knowledge, learning from others, and cooperating across projects.
[07:02.980 --> 07:18.660]  So, what I would like for us to think about in the definition is to stress the resonance of this idea of hacking as a common human, with the practice of solidarity with folks for learning and exploring our social-technical surroundings.
[07:18.940 --> 07:39.840]  And here's a quote from a gal that I really like, and I would like to share with you, with this idea that technology is this idea, and here I'm quoting him, the pursuit of intrinsically difficult to obtain results by roundabout and clever means, is the peculiar aptitude of the technological animal,
[07:40.060 --> 07:41.040]  that we all are, right?
[07:41.340 --> 07:55.780]  So, I will present examples from the Hacker Archive across these four quadrants of the social, ecological, and technical, Earth system, air, land, water, and ice.
[07:56.480 --> 08:03.720]  So, what are the examples of hacking in the common planetary interest across these subsystems?
[08:03.820 --> 08:05.140]  So, let's start with atmosphere.
[08:05.540 --> 08:07.500]  So, the year is 1989.
[08:07.680 --> 08:13.580]  We're in the deep end of Reaganism, HIV, pop music, repression.
[08:14.120 --> 08:19.560]  To quote here a trash band, RDP, how they immoralized this in their song.
[08:19.560 --> 08:24.060]  We're completing 10 years of the creation of the computerized Bulletin Border System.
[08:24.400 --> 08:28.440]  The international hackerdom is flourishing at this point.
[08:28.780 --> 08:41.420]  And this is the year of the Galactic Hacker Party, organized by HackTech in Amsterdam, to bring together old-school and new-school hackers to discuss the political implications of information technologies.
[08:41.900 --> 08:48.160]  So, meanwhile, the Galileo Space Probe project is in full swing at NASA as it prepares to launch.
[08:48.160 --> 09:00.260]  A project that was known for its recurring hardware problems, its challenges in securing a budget that kept increasing, you know, for 40 million to like 400 million in budget.
[09:00.540 --> 09:09.120]  And it came after, like, it was about to launch just a few years after the 1986 Challenger explosion.
[09:09.120 --> 09:14.240]  So, the environmental movement is also on this case.
[09:14.720 --> 09:27.520]  Protests are organized locally and internationally to halt the launch of Galileo for carrying 15 pounds of plutonium as a power source to take the space probe to Jupiter.
[09:27.520 --> 09:43.040]  So, as Seulet Dreyfus and Julian Assange reported in their brilliant book of hacker history called Underground, the anti-nuclear protests were not limited to the demonstration at the launch site.
[09:43.240 --> 09:49.480]  They also involved the form... they took the form of a worm to protest the use of nuclear power.
[09:49.480 --> 10:01.880]  So, the worm, and many of you know, this is not a community that we don't need to dwell on this topic, because many of you know this case that is very popular, of the WANK worm, worm against nuclear killers.
[10:01.880 --> 10:17.880]  So, on October... Friday, 13th of October, WANK was unleashed on the DACnet-based NASA Space Physics Analysis Network, infecting machines across several sites of the space agency.
[10:18.000 --> 10:31.880]  And this is a well-known case that was identified by Manuel Goldstein, our big brother on the positive side of the force, as one of the earliest cases of hacker activism before the term started to circulate in the 1990s.
[10:32.020 --> 10:43.620]  So, the authorship of the WANK was never attributed or claimed, but there's evidence that it came from Australia, given the references to the band Minna Oil, with a verse from their song, Blossom and Blood.
[10:44.120 --> 10:49.180]  And here I quote, You talk of times of peace for all, but prepare for war.
[10:49.340 --> 10:53.540]  And this is very close to home to many of us across the planet.
[10:53.540 --> 11:08.060]  So, the WANK one consisted in a script written in DCL, a digital command language that explored vulnerabilities, but also misconfigurations in VMS machines.
[11:08.240 --> 11:11.040]  So, in VAX machines running VMS.
[11:11.260 --> 11:14.400]  I do not have a personal experience with it myself.
[11:14.740 --> 11:17.420]  It was before my time, unfortunately.
[11:17.420 --> 11:23.560]  But I learned that DCL is a very powerful scripting language because it does have access to system services.
[11:24.140 --> 11:32.440]  So, interestingly, one of the things that WANK did was to change the message of the day, to display humorous phrases like, Vote anarchist.
[11:32.600 --> 11:34.460]  The FBI is watching you.
[11:35.220 --> 11:37.140]  And, and here's my personal favorite.
[11:37.380 --> 11:41.640]  Remember, even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat.
[11:41.640 --> 12:01.480]  So, WANK tried to get access to regular accounts, but also privileged accounts using like a preliminary attack that was pretty popular in the early days of the hackerdom, which is to guess passwords by matching username with passwords, right?
[12:01.480 --> 12:12.620]  So, while it did that, it generated a list of accounts and passwords that would copy to other machines, and then launch the guessing, you know, brute force attack again.
[12:14.200 --> 12:24.840]  So, as it advanced to other machines, it ended up like infecting, you know, 500 nodes at a time that like 500 nodes, it's a substantial network, right?
[12:24.980 --> 12:30.420]  Given the difficulty, the price of access to have like computer networks at that time.
[12:30.420 --> 12:38.660]  So, the WARM was also, it also terrified users with the display message and the system that the files were being deleted.
[12:38.940 --> 12:42.920]  But interesting thing, the thing is that the files were not being deleted at all.
[12:43.180 --> 12:45.840]  So, the intention here was very clear.
[12:46.140 --> 13:02.280]  The idea was to shock the users, shock the system administrators, and most importantly, to invert a relation of power with the design and deployment of the WARM, while potentially trying to slow down the launch of the Galileo Space Pro.
[13:02.940 --> 13:13.740]  So, here's another case that is connected to nuclear action, anti-nuclear action, but it's stemming from a different genealogy.
[13:14.480 --> 13:20.240]  So, over two decades later, another important environmental hacker intervention took place.
[13:20.240 --> 13:29.640]  Another atmospheric, but also social, technical breakdown, happened with the so-called triple disaster of Fukushima in Japan, March 11, 2011.
[13:30.340 --> 13:39.240]  The world watched through yet another televised horror show, with the explosion of three out of four nuclear reactors in Fukushima Daiichi in Japan.
[13:39.240 --> 13:57.380]  As we know from documentary evidence, everything started with an earthquake off the coast of Fukushima prefecture, leading to a massive tsunami wave that passed the containment barrier in front of the nuclear reactors, heating and impairing the power supply of the cooling system of the nuclear reactor.
[13:58.820 --> 14:17.080]  So, without the cooling system, the reactors started to heat up, and internal pressure started to build up in the containment vessels, which led to explosions releasing a very thick radioactive plume that got dispersed throughout the country.
[14:17.420 --> 14:24.620]  So, in Japan, people took the streets to call for the deactivated power plants to not be restarted.
[14:24.620 --> 14:30.000]  Meanwhile, at Tokyo Hackerspace, members got together to discuss a very different agenda.
[14:30.480 --> 14:38.580]  And in the agenda, on the top of the agenda, the question was, how could we hack together for disaster mitigation and relief?
[14:39.280 --> 14:43.640]  And a message was circulated into other hackerspaces to call for action.
[14:44.000 --> 14:50.660]  And here I quote a message from Anne-Marie from Tokyo Hackerspace that was displayed on a website.
[14:50.660 --> 14:57.300]  Many of our members have been cooped up at home waiting out the storm, but not laying idle.
[14:57.560 --> 15:11.620]  We have on the way several Geiger counters, Geiger tubes, from which we will be making community sensors in order to help to keep the public informed on a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour basis.
[15:11.620 --> 15:32.180]  While the initial exposure has been low, our concern in the long-term effects, food and water supply, and ground soil conditions over the next several months, we are calling upon hackerspaces all over the world and friends of hackerspaces and friends of friends of hackerspaces to help out.
[15:33.220 --> 15:34.340]  And people did.
[15:34.660 --> 15:35.800]  They heard the call.
[15:36.140 --> 15:41.980]  And messages with offer of help started to trickle in from various corners of the hackerdom.
[15:42.460 --> 15:46.900]  An old surplus Geiger counter was shipped to Tokyo Hackerspace.
[15:47.100 --> 15:53.220]  And as soon as it arrived, it was modified and interfaced with the microcontroller to facilitate the process of data collection.
[15:53.220 --> 16:09.880]  And what is very interesting is that from this early experiment came the idea of building an open Geiger counter using common tools, a common prototyping platform, at least for people with the idea that more people in a hackerspace community could actually contribute.
[16:10.280 --> 16:13.180]  So the choice of Arduino was very clear, right?
[16:13.260 --> 16:15.220]  It's something that a lot of people have experience with.
[16:15.220 --> 16:18.240]  So they have the ability to collaborate and get involved.
[16:18.240 --> 16:25.480]  So the result was a very quick iteration of a couple of weeks of hardware design prototyping and testing.
[16:25.740 --> 16:39.800]  It was super impressive the short period of time that this came about, which led to the first Geiger counter kit produced by Chris Akiba from Tokyo Hackerspace in collaboration with other members of the community.
[16:39.800 --> 16:50.260]  And it's important for us to also be reminded of the fact that this was a very pressing time of anxiety and uncertainty for us.
[16:50.480 --> 16:54.260]  We didn't know at the time that what food was safe to eat.
[16:55.580 --> 16:58.300]  We didn't know what places were hotspots.
[16:58.660 --> 17:04.960]  We couldn't have access to Geiger counters to actually measure and know what was going on.
[17:06.300 --> 17:10.500]  So it was a very, very difficult time for us.
[17:10.620 --> 17:18.520]  But it was also a time of creative experimentation and hacker bricolage in very important ways.
[17:18.800 --> 17:24.280]  One of the experiments of data collection at the time consisted in radiation war driving.
[17:24.500 --> 17:27.840]  And war driving is a very common practice in hacking, right?
[17:27.940 --> 17:30.940]  Like in Wi-Fi hacking has been with us for a very long time.
[17:30.940 --> 17:36.860]  So the idea was you would connect Geiger counters to GPS modules and to data loggers.
[17:37.040 --> 17:43.960]  And then once you have that system, you would attach to a car where you put in your backpack and you would bike around a town.
[17:43.980 --> 17:52.800]  Or you would walk with this system with you and you would collect geolocated data as you move about across the country.
[17:53.540 --> 17:55.200]  So this is a story again.
[17:55.380 --> 17:56.660]  This is a story that is very common.
[17:56.780 --> 17:58.040]  Many of you know about this.
[17:58.920 --> 18:00.740]  But we know what happened next.
[18:01.080 --> 18:10.580]  So what was initially an experiment of a small hackerspace, it started to find echo across the Japanese society and also internationally.
[18:10.580 --> 18:17.540]  So a non-profit organization called SafeCast spun off hackerspaces hardware experiments.
[18:17.740 --> 18:24.640]  And they started to create, improve and offer public workshops and distribute open hardware based Geiger counters.
[18:25.300 --> 18:36.840]  And in the span of one year, SafeCast managed to collect, amass a substantial database of geolocated data of radiation levels across the Japanese territory.
[18:36.840 --> 18:55.720]  And this is the point I would like to make about this case is that we could include this case as an example of ecological hacktivism in a sense that hackers got together to build their own tools through a common set of technologies that were also circulated in the context of the hacker community to
[18:55.720 --> 19:00.160]  address the problem of radiation, radioactive contamination.
[19:01.660 --> 19:12.300]  So let's now turn to another subsystem land and look into old school and contemporary examples of hacking in the common planetary interest.
[19:13.240 --> 19:17.800]  So here's another gem from the archives of ecological hacker history.
[19:18.060 --> 19:24.420]  And again, this is an example that is very well known and I'm sure many of you know about this case.
[19:24.420 --> 19:35.260]  This is one coming from the early engagement with the Zapatistas movement from Chiapas, Mexico, in their struggle to protect their ancestral lands against corporate enclosures.
[19:36.260 --> 19:48.680]  Enclosures that are pushed by the U.S. government via NAFTA and in collaboration with the Mexican president at the time, Ernesto Zedillo, in 1994 to end or to erode the system of communal land management.
[19:48.680 --> 20:01.180]  So the erosion of this communal land management called Ejido was encoded in the, the system was encoded in article number 27 of the Mexican constitution that describes that.
[20:01.360 --> 20:06.600]  And here I quote, our land, water and mineral rights are the property of the people.
[20:06.600 --> 20:22.080]  I quote, fundamentally allowing for common lands, if you destroy the system, for these common lands to be, to cater to foreign corporate interests as part of a big push for corporate, for corporate globalization in the 1990s.
[20:22.080 --> 20:36.520]  So in this context, a group of artists and hackers under the name of Electronic Disturbance Theater orchestrated a series of attacks to the Mexican government to support the Zapatistas in their political and ecological struggle to keep their lands in livelihood.
[20:36.880 --> 20:38.900]  So this is particularly important.
[20:39.080 --> 20:41.360]  And here's a point I would like to make with this case.
[20:41.360 --> 20:52.480]  This is important because to the land earth system, because areas of ecological preservation are strongly correlated with the presence of indigenous communities in Latin America.
[20:52.720 --> 20:57.540]  So fighting for community indigenous lands is fundamentally an ecological act.
[20:57.720 --> 21:03.640]  So there are two important political hacks involved in this case, and they're fairly simple.
[21:05.440 --> 21:07.380]  They're really old school with this point.
[21:07.920 --> 21:27.200]  One is the case of electronic graffiti, which consisted in the elementary, but important practice of flooding the Mexican government websites, who HTTP GET requests for a resource that didn't exist at the time called Justice, with the intent of flooding the HTTP logs with the message of support for the Zapatistas.
[21:27.880 --> 21:49.140]  And in this case, this particular case of, you know, claiming, sending GET requests for justice, is to protest against the massacre in a small village of Actel, which is a village of Zapatista supporters that was massacred by a parallel military group in order to weaken their support for the Zapatistas.
[21:49.780 --> 21:57.800]  And this is an extremely tragic and sad event that involved killing of children and babies, and it was just like extremely, extremely traumatic.
[21:58.700 --> 22:14.840]  Another important action that was happening in the context of this ecological hacktivist action is the usage of the same application, Floodnet, to flood the HTTP server of the Mexican government with SIM packets, right?
[22:14.840 --> 22:18.440]  With the classic DOS attack.
[22:18.720 --> 22:33.260]  So here we see another trivial but symbolically powerful instance of hacker activism in the common planetary interest, since destroying land in Mexico has implications for the wider planetary subsystems as we know.
[22:33.900 --> 22:48.500]  Okay, so fast-forwarding to the contemporary moments, here now we're in 2010, another important instance of hacking in the common planetary interest took place in Europe around the activity of DecoCyde Collective.
[22:48.880 --> 22:59.060]  Through its connections, and this is important to emphasize because of the genealogy that this hack is stemming from, and its connections with Earth First and the hack block.
[22:59.600 --> 23:11.220]  So DecoCyde became known for defacing the website of the European Climate Exchange, right at the cusp of a global push for the so-called carbon emission trading market.
[23:11.480 --> 23:22.300]  Also known as cap-and-trade, which creates financial instruments and incentives that allow for companies to basically trade and purchase permits to pollute.
[23:22.300 --> 23:25.220]  And we would say, like, how convenient, right?
[23:25.380 --> 23:28.880]  Like, you can just leave the solution to the market, right?
[23:28.980 --> 23:33.180]  Like the invisible, you know, grubby hands of the market to actually find a solution.
[23:33.500 --> 23:44.220]  So DecoCyde denounced the cap-and-trade scheme as a scam for converting pollutant emissions from factories as a commodity to be bought and sold.
[23:44.220 --> 23:51.900]  So while continuing their business as usual without any meaningful or structural change.
[23:52.720 --> 23:59.880]  So in the language of Balmer, markets, markets, markets, markets, markets, markets, and markets.
[24:00.160 --> 24:06.900]  And two slides of Balmer is already too much, so I'm not gonna, you know, make you see this for too long.
[24:06.900 --> 24:16.960]  So, another decade has passed since DecoCyde's defacement of the European climate exchange.
[24:17.060 --> 24:33.200]  And we witnessed the rise of an important hacktivist actor named Guacamaya, whose international fame came from their conscious leaking of email archives from mining companies and corrupt military forces in Latin American countries.
[24:33.200 --> 24:41.460]  And if we look at the Guacamaya release files, we can see the family resemblance with a wide range of hacktivist actors, right?
[24:41.560 --> 24:53.980]  We can see the resemblance with the wank, warm hack, to the electronic disturbance theater, and more recently with important hacks by Sub-Calmandanchi Marcus, also known as Phineas Fisher, right?
[24:54.260 --> 24:57.300]  That we, it's a case that we also, it's very familiar to us.
[24:57.500 --> 25:02.800]  So, the anatomy of the leaks are particularly telling in the case of Guacamaya, right?
[25:02.800 --> 25:14.520]  We have terabytes of email archives as exfiltrated from Microsoft Exchange servers that look like Swiss cheese from the point of view of anyone who's willing to pay attention.
[25:14.840 --> 25:22.340]  And here we find, for example, the evidence of environmental crimes with no disclosed oil leaks.
[25:22.460 --> 25:24.080]  They're very recurrent, sadly.
[25:24.080 --> 25:30.920]  The evidence of illegal monitoring of journalists, which again, in our community we know that is very recurrent, sadly.
[25:31.700 --> 25:35.080]  And evidence of sexual abuse that goes unpunished.
[25:36.260 --> 25:41.220]  And plenty and plenty of evidence of corruption involving mining companies and governments.
[25:41.220 --> 25:49.340]  So, like Phineas Fisher, this kind of hack in the common planetary interest was not meant to display a so-called elite hacker practice.
[25:49.560 --> 26:00.980]  It's not done in for reputational gains, ego boost, but rather as part of a genuine environmental concern for the well-being of people as part of the well-being of the planet.
[26:00.980 --> 26:17.800]  As Gwai Kamiya hacktivists wrote in their poetry, as they published release files and also poetry, released poetry with a leak, our victory is life itself, meaning fighting for the preservation of life that is human and more than human, right?
[26:17.940 --> 26:25.040]  As these subsystems are all implicated in the maintenance of life that is ours and also of the planet.
[26:25.040 --> 26:30.200]  So, let's move to a third subsystem, which is water.
[26:30.800 --> 26:48.420]  So, many of us know, especially some of us who have been in computing for quite some time, or for those of us who are more historically inclined and read on the history of computing, the historical record of the computing industry is very, very far from clean,
[26:48.560 --> 26:49.960]  to say the least.
[26:49.960 --> 27:01.280]  A chip and component manufacturing sites fabricated in the U.S. before the wave of outsourcing in the 1980s left a really, really, really serious toxic legacy.
[27:01.720 --> 27:13.280]  So, for example, out of 1,100 sites connected with the computing industry just in the United States alone, 15% are still active with hazardous waste and has not been cleaned up.
[27:13.280 --> 27:21.600]  And this is not to say anything about the ground water pollution that is something that is extremely difficult to mitigate at this point.
[27:22.140 --> 27:38.220]  So, anthropologists David Palo and Lisa Park in their book, Silicon Valley of Dreams, describe that computer manufacturing workers are exposed to over 700 harmful chemicals while fabricating chips, circuit boards, components, connectors, and cables.
[27:38.220 --> 27:53.700]  And that's why it's so important for us, in the context of the HOPE conference, for us to insist on the practices of repurposing technologies, recycling, upcycling, doing everything that we do in the context of hardware hacking to actually address this problem.
[27:54.240 --> 28:00.700]  So, the examples of environmental degradation are connected to the industry, connected to the computing industry.
[28:00.860 --> 28:04.560]  They're too extensive for us to cover here, for us to do justice to the topic.
[28:04.560 --> 28:14.040]  So, I would just like to leave us with a very telling quote from Gordon Moore, Intel's co-founder, about their factory in Santa Clara.
[28:14.240 --> 28:27.120]  And here I quote Moore saying, the bottom of the pipes, the bottom of the pipes was completely eaten out of the whole way along.
[28:27.360 --> 28:35.280]  And that was just about the time we really started recognizing how much we had to take care of this.
[28:35.480 --> 28:38.780]  And then we ask, well, maybe a little too late, isn't it?
[28:38.780 --> 28:50.040]  Maybe a little too fast to outsource the industry to places with much worse infrastructure than the United States to handle toxic waste products.
[28:51.040 --> 28:55.440]  So, and this is connected to the present of the Internet.
[28:56.320 --> 29:00.380]  We are not living happy times for the Internet, right?
[29:00.520 --> 29:06.040]  This is something that we have been discussing here at HOPE and in the context of different conferences as well.
[29:06.040 --> 29:14.860]  And I remember when we used to make fun of Bill Gates and his associates from wanting really hard to transform the Internet into a shopping mall.
[29:15.780 --> 29:27.460]  Little did we know that, you know, 20 years, 25 years past that point, we will reach a level of centralization of infrastructure services in the hands of just a handful of companies.
[29:27.460 --> 29:48.220]  And as we know, this very model of centralized, monopolistic, monocultural style of computing with hyperscale data centers comes with a huge environmental footprint as well, which concerns not only soil contamination, but serious water usage, not to mention the amount of e-waste that is generated.
[29:48.220 --> 29:50.720]  So here are some important data points.
[29:51.200 --> 29:58.060]  It is known in the literature that most data centers are situated just in the United States in water-scarce locations, right?
[29:58.200 --> 30:00.040]  It doesn't make any sense, right?
[30:00.180 --> 30:01.820]  But that's what it is.
[30:01.980 --> 30:09.760]  In the United States and abroad, protests have been organized against the government approval of new data centers in water-scarce regions.
[30:10.700 --> 30:29.680]  On the slide, I have the case of Uruguay, and that is disputing a case with Google regarding the collaboration that Google has with the local federal government to stall a new data center, which is proceeding, without providing the appropriate and full transparent information about the plans that
[30:29.680 --> 30:31.700]  the company has in terms of water use.
[30:31.700 --> 30:42.740]  And this, again, this is happening in a context where Uruguay just had last year the worst water-scarcity problem in its history, right?
[30:43.200 --> 31:06.540]  So out of particular interest here, and this is an articulation that is really important for us to emphasize, is that the hacktivist denunciation of the perverse articulation with data theft, data fording, data mining, and concentration of data for the purposes of training models to use at scale in
[31:06.540 --> 31:07.900]  marketing networks.
[31:09.380 --> 31:15.760]  It is this articulation between data theft and ecological risk of having a new data center, right?
[31:16.220 --> 31:18.280]  But there's hope, right?
[31:18.360 --> 31:19.000]  There's always hope.
[31:19.280 --> 31:20.600]  So we're here at HOPE.
[31:20.600 --> 31:27.940]  We have been discussing several projects of decentralization and distribution of Internet services and resources.
[31:28.140 --> 31:30.760]  And this is really hopeful, and this is really important, right?
[31:31.120 --> 31:42.700]  This is something that has always been very much part of the collaborative and independent spirit of hacker projects, which have huge ecological implications that are more urgent than ever.
[31:42.700 --> 32:00.540]  I would like to leave us with an important example, the case of a community data center in Brazil, in the southeast of Brazil, which provides Internet services based on decommissioned and upcycled servers running in a community center called Casa Tainã in Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil.
[32:02.600 --> 32:06.680]  And they run this from a community center with subsidized electricity.
[32:06.680 --> 32:20.300]  And this center is part of a network of ancestral Afro indigenous territories created by people who ran away from enslavement in the context of plantations in the colonial period.
[32:20.300 --> 32:23.860]  And they started their own communities called Quilombos.
[32:23.860 --> 32:37.780]  This community center, which identifies as an urban Quilombo, provides websites, virtual machines, Jitsi and GitLab instances, and other services for the local community.
[32:38.060 --> 32:46.140]  We also run skill sharing workshops constantly at the community center.
[32:46.140 --> 32:57.040]  And I have on the slide some images of an open hardware workshop that we ran, where we're building the synthesizers that Mitch Altman created.
[32:57.380 --> 33:04.320]  But we're also studying and skill sharing on open hardware for environmental monitoring.
[33:04.320 --> 33:17.620]  And then we also have a picture of Chico Kaminachi from the free radio community in Brazil, laughing really hard to the right of the slide because he's plugging a bad USB device into the rack, you know, of the community center.
[33:17.820 --> 33:22.500]  And we were telling him as he is doing this, like, this is not something you do to your friends, right?
[33:22.720 --> 33:25.840]  So he's like, he's laughing really hard and you can see on the slide.
[33:25.840 --> 33:33.980]  So we now turn to our very last but fast disappearing Earth subsystem, ICE.
[33:34.300 --> 33:38.560]  So I would like to turn our attention to a few examples.
[33:38.780 --> 33:46.950]  They're not necessarily organic to the hackerdom, but they represent something that we could call hacker inspired projects.
[33:49.370 --> 33:57.570]  So on the slide, I would like to turn our attention to a few examples.
[33:57.930 --> 34:05.110]  So first, of course, I need to get out of the way the picture of the polar bear walking on sea ice, because I understand this is mandatory.
[34:05.430 --> 34:08.090]  But this is not what I would like for us to pay attention to.
[34:08.090 --> 34:23.370]  So I would like to turn our attention to some cases of like environmental science where a hacker spirit or a hacker attitude might help actually advance projects in environmental science.
[34:23.870 --> 34:31.490]  So the North Slope of Alaska is the place where these examples are actually taking place that I would like to present to you.
[34:31.490 --> 34:37.450]  So this is we're talking about the ancestral land of the Nupia ethnic group.
[34:38.570 --> 34:44.810]  Historically, this is a region of Christian military and scientific colonization.
[34:45.710 --> 34:50.250]  And in my particular case, my relationship to this region is very recent.
[34:50.530 --> 34:59.970]  I started visiting Utiavik in 2021 after receiving an invitation to help draft a project and join an environmental science project in the region.
[34:59.970 --> 35:10.990]  And I was invited because I had experience with open technologies and community based environmental monitoring after the work that I did studying what happened in the context of Fukushima in 2011.
[35:11.470 --> 35:26.410]  So the very first document I read when I joined the project was this letter from that I have on the slide from indigenous community organizations calling the scientists to include the indigenous communities in the discussion of research priorities.
[35:27.050 --> 35:35.090]  And they are accusing research projects in the region of excluding the community from making critical decisions about the research agenda.
[35:35.310 --> 35:49.590]  What gets to be studied, where the studies are conducted, and what are the priorities, and also using the output of scientific research to actually address problems, concrete problems that the community has.
[35:49.590 --> 36:00.570]  So after reading and thinking about the letter from this protest letter, I realized that we needed to attend, in the context of this project, to two important things at once.
[36:00.570 --> 36:11.770]  So A, we needed to help create interfaces and conditions for community participation and engagement in the technical scientific work, which is very difficult and hard work needs to happen.
[36:11.950 --> 36:26.810]  And then number two, to help move the needle a bit when it comes to the openness of the earth sciences through the development of free and open-source technologies, such as open data sets, open scientific software, and open hardware instrumentation.
[36:26.810 --> 36:29.650]  We can help a whole lot in this area.
[36:30.110 --> 36:35.030]  So, in the process, I was told many times that this is not possible.
[36:35.650 --> 36:39.470]  And that is when the hacker inspiration actually kicked in.
[36:39.770 --> 36:50.130]  And at HOPE, we have, like, HOPE is composed of people who, they just need to be told that something is not possible to make it possible, right?
[36:52.250 --> 36:56.970]  So, and the fact is, like, we need to be reasonable, right?
[36:57.070 --> 36:59.790]  We need to demand the impossible as the saying goes.
[37:00.010 --> 37:02.030]  And so, that's how we proceeded.
[37:02.270 --> 37:06.850]  So, the project is called Understanding the Changing Natural Built Environment.
[37:07.690 --> 37:10.770]  And it's a project dedicated to study the permafrost.
[37:11.810 --> 37:23.610]  And with the increase of global temperatures, the Arctic has been suffering much more from accelerated ecosystemic change, as we know, from the press and also from the literature, the academic literature.
[37:23.610 --> 37:39.690]  And with the permafrost instability for the villages and small towns of the Inupiaq community, houses, schools, and other buildings of the community are getting their infrastructures, their structures compromised.
[37:39.690 --> 37:55.130]  So, we set up an array of sensors to collect environmental metrics and try to make sense of the problem in order to help the local housing authority, the local government, and the community to address these problems of permafrost instability, right?
[37:55.390 --> 37:57.070]  With the hope of mitigation.
[37:57.070 --> 38:10.350]  So, one of the things we did was to come up with a way of integrating emergent indigenous data governance guidelines into the technical work that we needed to do.
[38:10.770 --> 38:33.510]  So, for this purpose, my colleagues and I, we designed a data pipeline that is meant to liberate raw data from S3 containers, from proprietary sensor vendor, like fully packaged, you know, products that are sold to environmental scientists, and organized them in HDF files for distribution.
[38:34.490 --> 38:46.310]  So, we used the care provisions, which is a set of guidelines created by indigenous colleagues to address problems of data governance in this space.
[38:46.310 --> 39:08.150]  We included the provisions and used them as a guide, as a guide, as a horizon for us to do the work that we needed that involved this idea that the work that was being done at a scientific level and technical level needed to benefit the community and the community also,
[39:08.210 --> 39:11.250]  and this is extremely important, and this resonates with the hacker community.
[39:11.250 --> 39:16.670]  The community, the community needed authority to control these technical infrastructures, right?
[39:17.250 --> 39:29.790]  So, another thing we did, and here I counted with the help of Kate Kirwan, Mirella Shaban, Howie Epstein, not that Epstein, never.
[39:29.790 --> 39:32.870]  John Reedy, John Reedy and Alexander Heleneck.
[39:33.110 --> 39:37.970]  We created a rich metadata catalog for every sensor and every logger that we have.
[39:38.230 --> 39:41.630]  And we have four loggers and we have hundreds of sensors on each logger.
[39:42.570 --> 39:46.610]  And the idea was to deposit this metadata catalog publicly, right?
[39:46.890 --> 39:59.050]  So, another thing we did was that we worked on a piece of software, free software for organizing the data with the rich metadata that we generated, the catalog, and stored in HDF files.
[39:59.050 --> 40:13.850]  And this work was conducted by me and John Reedy from the HDF group, which has a really fascinating history connected with the development of the Mosaic browser in that group of scientific software, where they had, in the very early versions of the Mosaic browser,
[40:14.030 --> 40:20.790]  the ability to load and read HDF files, which is pretty fascinating, for the purpose of visualizing scientific data.
[40:20.790 --> 40:24.370]  And, of course, that got dropped from all the browsers moving forward.
[40:24.650 --> 40:28.010]  But the early versions of Mosaic had the ability to do that.
[40:28.290 --> 40:31.190]  In any case, so we conducted this work.
[40:31.190 --> 40:50.910]  And we also, like, one thing that was driving us, and again, back to the idea of the hacker inspiration, is that we wanted to create something that could get the data service that we need to run outside university infrastructures and corporate infrastructure.
[40:50.910 --> 41:10.550]  So we wanted it to run outside AWS, we wanted it to be liberated from S3, we wanted to be running outside Kubernetes, and running, like, more sensible, like, you know, suck-less, not necessarily suck-less, but more, like, limited, like, concise, like,
[41:11.470 --> 41:16.930]  alternatives, like Minikube, or, like, for example, like Minikube.
[41:16.930 --> 41:23.250]  And to stick with this idea of the responsibility and the ability to control the technology.
[41:23.550 --> 41:43.270]  So the thing that was driving us was this very strong need to move away from the monoculture of gigantic Internet providers, which is something that we would be immediately entangled as long as, as soon as we start talking about scientific infrastructures,
[41:43.570 --> 41:46.730]  like, there's a full package that you can spend with just a few clicks.
[41:46.730 --> 41:46.950]  Right.
[41:47.130 --> 41:50.870]  And we were like, you know, trying really hard to move away from that.
[41:51.370 --> 42:11.850]  So another thing we did, and again, we did this because we were told that it does not make sense for scientists to share data to share code, we decided to go and went the extra mile, and started to prototype and test our own open scientific hardware, which we built and distributed online with open
[42:11.850 --> 42:13.990]  hardware, with an open hardware license.
[42:15.690 --> 42:36.610]  So, and this is another thing we have been working on, and we just did this past, this summer, we put together a team of instructors that included an indigenous software development company called Animiki, environmental justice activists, environmental science researchers and students,
[42:36.710 --> 42:42.910]  and we created the summer camp at a tribal college in the city of Ayutjavik in the North Slope of Alaska.
[42:42.910 --> 42:53.330]  And we ran workshops on the technologies that are based on all the common technologies that our communities are building.
[42:53.670 --> 43:00.430]  And of course, we only get to develop something because we have a community that supports us building common technologies.
[43:00.670 --> 43:12.670]  And we ran workshops where we built environmental monitoring kits with students from the indigenous villages in the North Slope.
[43:12.670 --> 43:15.550]  And in the community members of UPyavik.
[43:15.670 --> 43:26.650]  And we also visited all the research sites, scientific research sites to discuss, to open up the boxes and show what the scientists were doing in different research sites in the region.
[43:26.650 --> 43:37.050]  So, you know, another thing that was something that just opened up this summer was the possibility to collaborate with NOAA.
[43:37.790 --> 43:48.130]  So we had the opportunity to test one of the open hardware research instruments we have been working on at this atmospheric baseline observatory in Barrow.
[43:48.290 --> 43:50.490]  And Barrow is the colonial name of UPyavik.
[43:50.490 --> 43:51.630]  that changed its name.
[43:52.110 --> 43:56.670]  So, but the laboratory, the national laboratory still has the colonial name.
[43:56.670 --> 44:09.290]  So on the slide, you get to see Mirela Chabon and Xavier Ruiz assembling the environmental monitoring instruments that we built for particular matter sensing.
[44:10.270 --> 44:16.970]  Which is, again, based on all the common technologies that we have been working on in the context of the free and open-source community at large.
[44:18.190 --> 44:32.390]  So, to wrap up, after going through all of these examples of hacker and hacker inspired projects across four earth subsystems, I would like to offer a few closing thoughts.
[44:32.710 --> 44:41.790]  So the first one concerns our ability to respond to ecological, technical and political challenges that we have, that we all have.
[44:41.790 --> 44:47.410]  It is well known that the level of integration of these spheres is extremely high and complex.
[44:47.430 --> 45:05.690]  And it's very hard to discuss mitigation strategies without addressing the core problem, which lies in the system of production, reproduction and circulation that is predicated on environmental pillage, infinite, the idea of infinite accumulation and supposedly infinite growth.
[45:05.690 --> 45:14.170]  The second point I would like to also discuss with you all is this idea that we cannot really wait.
[45:14.370 --> 45:17.370]  There's no, absolutely, there's no time for us to wait.
[45:17.370 --> 45:31.450]  And we need to continue to work on hacker projects to repurpose technologies, to recycle them, to upcycle them, you know, work on retro technologies and do everything that we can to use the technologies that we have at our disposal.
[45:31.450 --> 45:36.910]  And most importantly, change the design logics of the digital technology that we engage with, right?
[45:37.110 --> 45:43.770]  And this means moving from a monoculture of computing to a hacker under commons and underground commons.
[45:43.890 --> 45:52.930]  And lastly, the third point is that of exercising our right to be electronically private and forgotten, but not only, right?
[45:52.930 --> 46:06.930]  It's also to always remind ourselves of our common histories, remembering our history, rethinking and reworking the present helps us to get more engaged and also to involve more people in the projects that we're trying to conduct.
[46:06.930 --> 46:17.750]  And as Midnight Oil used to say, and I have to cite Midnight Oil because of, you know, the wank and as a homage to the wank one, no short memory, right?
[46:17.870 --> 46:21.490]  It's like we cannot follow the trap of short memory, which is very common.
[46:22.170 --> 46:34.110]  We can always count on the hacker archives for inspiration and hope, as I have illustrated through all of these cases across the four Earth subsystems, right?
[46:34.110 --> 46:34.530]  Right?
[46:34.870 --> 46:42.790]  So my hope is for us to continue to hack to heal the planet, like we have demonstrated here at HALP across several presentations and workshops.
[46:43.290 --> 46:46.550]  So thank you for being here and I hope to see you at the next HALP.