Hacking with Care!
King, Emily
Zimmermann, Jérémie
Hacking with Care is born from the magical encounter of Emily King, a massage artist, Jérémie Zimmermann, an internet activist, and friends with common good at heart. The collective explores well-being and care as components of hacking and activism, while also seeking to liberate care, and to inspire alliances between "caregivers" of different competences.
 Music Oh hey, can you hear me? So in the meantime, I suggest maybe some of you are familiar with using a laptop computer. Maybe some of you are using a backpack every day. Maybe some of you have ever experienced neck pain, back pain, maybe aches that goes all along the arm, the elbows, because of too much typing, you know. I learned some years ago these very simple exercises that really changed the way I related to my upper back and shoulders and never experienced pain again since I practiced them quite regularly. I want to show them to you. If you agree, you can do them about any time. It's quite quick. I'll do kind of an abridged version here. Whatever happens, be careful. You know, every mileage is different, but the principle is simple. Look, you put your shoulders up, then down, up, then down, like on, off, on, off. And you do that a couple of times, actually 10, 12 times maybe. We don't have time now. Then you roll your shoulders like this, gently, at first, then depending on how much you suffer, you can vary that. Then in the other direction, then in a disjointed way, it goes very well with music, like funk music. Then the other direction, again, you should do this 10, 12 times, whatever works for you. And now the point is to really warm up the upper part of the back, the spine, and well, mostly the shoulder blades. Now that they're warm, you can turn your head all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. You may hear and feel a cracking that may feel really good, actually. And that is the tension going away. Then all is left is to bring your head forward, like a turtle, and back, forward, and back. So to summarize, on, off, on, off, then rolling in one direction, rolling in the other, disjointed in one direction, disjointed in the other, all the way left, all the way right, and again, then forward and back, like a turtle. You can do that several times a day when you feel a bit of pain, or anytime I hope it helps, like it helped for me. Well, it is now time we begin. So I'm Jeremy Zimmerman. I would define myself as a hacker, an enthusiast of technology and systems in general who like to understand how they work and hopefully make them work better. I used to be an activist for seven years, full, full, full, full time. I was the main coordinator and spokesperson and campaigner and analyst and graphic designer and whatnot for La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based citizen organization defending freedom online. I got in many fights in France and in the European Parliament, the telecoms package, the ACTA, net neutrality, and so on. And I went very, very, very close to a very bad burnout, and I learned quite a bit about this. So, hi. Am I on? Yes. Hi, my name is Emily. I'm a well-being massage practitioner. I have been doing that for 10 years now. So I make, I share, and I study massage and recently classical Chinese medicine as well. I like to work in a combination of techniques in a rather open, freestyle way. And I like to collaborate with people outside my field, like musicians, for example. And I like to write massage protocols. And I am not especially a tech enthusiast, and I was not computer literate. But I improved on that second point and had much pleasure learning thanks to Jeremy and the lovely friends he introduced me to. So when we met with Emilia, I figured that even if I knew how, I knew about hacking computers, networks, parliaments, legislations, press releases, graphic design, video games and what not. I had no clue what massage was about. So since then, I learned a lot to her contact. But when we met, I was so badly burnout, I slept three hours and three hours and three hours. I had my phone constantly on my ear burning, was running from place to place, and wasn't really myself anymore. Emilia offered to give me my first massage, and after one hour, I figured I ended up in a state where I was so much re-centered on myself, so much myself again, on a slow, deep breathing mode. I opened my eyes and I remember looking at her and saying, well, hey, you're a hacker. Right, so we've been talking already a bit about hacking, activism and what it is that we do. But that's actually when Jeremy calls me a hacker that I really understood the meaning of the word and that I could really relate to it. So then I really gladly accepted his invitation to join him and La Quadra Childrenets on a summer hacker summer camp in the Netherlands in 2013. Well, La Quadra Childrenets were experimenting with their first tea house, now famous, and where other friends were there as well, we'd been reflecting on the same questions. So that's basically where hacking with care started for the first time. So that was three years ago. So what's hacking, what's care, and what's hacking with care? To me, hacking is an emancipatory practice of humans versus systems or tools. It is a systemic approach where you have to understand the whole box in order to be able to think outside of it. It is sometimes about breaking, it is about remixing, it is always about inventing. It is, before everything, to me, a set of ethical values. It is about the free flow of information, the free sharing of knowledge, and it is about enabling others to participate. Care, there would be much to say about care, but simply put, I would say that care is about goodness and even it's about common goodness, actually, and nurturing that. It's also about creating, sustaining harmonies and finding balance between one and the world, one and the other beings in the world, and one with oneself as well. I would say that care is not defined by a particular set of skills, rather it has to do with a presence and attention and an intention. What it is that you are going to do with what you love to do, what vision of the world are you going to support with what you do. And so, in that view, care, community care, self-care, for us, will be all the same thing. So this is what we mean by hacking with care. It's shared vision, shared ethics with common good at heart. It is our way to create situations, moments, formats in which to exchange and share. It is about producing resources to embed this knowledge we want to share, and it is to give us ability to engage in research. This is how we plan to hack care. This is how we plan to be hacking with care. This is how we do it. This is how we do it. Already. And so basically the very happy encounter between us and other friends with this proposition would like to scale and bring more people together and make alliances, because actually we think even if from a distance it doesn't seem at first that we're doing the same thing, well, in fact, we are. So let's do this together. So care for hackers, activists, activists and whistleblowers. What's common in activists, hackers, and I guess whistleblowers as well, I think is passion. Passion as an engine that makes you do things better, that makes you do things more. Passion as a fuel that takes all of yourself into the battle, into the cause, into the project. All of yourself means all your resources, your mental and your physical resources. This passion is something burning hot. It is something of tremendous power. We used to joke in the European Parliament that one passionate activist equates ten, maybe a hundred robotic lobbyists. So this passion is something very beautiful, very precious that we must preserve. But the flip side of this passion is that as everything that is tremendously hot, it burns. And it burns and the risk is that it ends up burning you. When you're exhausting all your resources and it keeps burning, the result is what we call a burnout and a burnout has terrible consequences. It has terrible consequences first of all on your cause, on your project, on whatever this is you're defending. But it also has terrible consequences on yourself. It makes you stressed, anxious, therefore it makes you make mistakes, therefore it makes you lose your confidence, therefore it will make you be more aggressive and therefore it has consequences on the people around you. It makes you make mistakes the way you behave with people around you. And this is what leads to anger, this is what leads to tension, this is what could lead to infighting. And we know how much infighting is the main cause for failure of social movements and projects alike. So it's one of the main. So mitigating burnout, of course, is a major objective. Also, keep in mind that activists in many contexts and increasingly we hope will have to handle security seriously. And this brings extra constraints on the body and on the mind. Handling those keys, keeping those keys on a USB at all time, keeping one or several laptops with you at all time, retaining physical control over those machines. How do you go to a doctor? How do you go to a sauna? How do you lay down on the beach when you feel tired if you have to get those three, four, five laptops with you? It's something also we should keep in mind. Also what is very interesting to me after my own experience is that when you're burning out, you're submitted to fast time. Everything around you is going faster and faster. Those phone calls, those tweets, those emails, you have to take care of them. You have to handle them. You have this feeling that if you stop, everything is going to crumble. So you have to be on top of it, which means that you become a slave to your environment. Your environment defines the time in which you live. When we all know that it is in other moments of time, in those long moments of time, when you decide, when you control, when you sit down, when you breathe deeply, that you can look at the future, that you can think for your well-being. It is in those moments of longer time that we can think strategically. And strategic thinking is what we need today, whatever your cause, whatever your project. This is what we badly need today. So it is about collectively finding ways to mitigate, detect this burnout when it comes, but also about taking back control of our time and of our timelines. So on the subject of careful hackers, why careful hackers and activists? Of course, we're interested in care for everyone, but we do have at heart to focus on hackers and activists and whistleblowers, is because not only do they work themselves out in very specific conditions, but they also face pretty intense repression from the systems of powers that they disturb with their action. People, companies, states who don't have public interest at heart, unlike our friends, and rather favor their profits and privileges. So it is a fact that hackers, activists, whistleblowers are closely monitored, they are intimidated, harassed, and they get all sorts of abuses, whether they be made-up accusations and disproportionate charges and whatnot. So how do we bring care in such a complex and sensitive context on top of all the specificities that Jeremy has described? How do we facilitate that access to care? As a caregiver, that will mean learning and experimenting and adapting with security, because obviously, as we have understood here, access to care will be closely tied to security aspects, which will have to do also with anonymity and privacy and also much more. And actually later, we will argue that much of it would benefit actually everyone and should be default setting for everyone, but right now we're focusing on hackers and activists. And one other very important motivation for us to bring care for hackers and activists is gratitude. So our care as an expression of our gratitude for their action. And with that, the idea is that care is transitive, it communicates itself, and although we are very aware that a massage cannot get someone out of prison, cannot win a case, cannot bring the justice which would actually be really good for their health, a massage can maybe help a lawyer, a journalist, a friend, a family, someone who's out there kicking us for us and for them. And this very notion of care as gratitude, I think demonstrates that care is not only hacking, that it is also actually activism. So hacker ethics and tools for caregivers. So when we speak of hackers, ethics and tools for caregivers, we refer to, for example, very concretely, access and circulation of knowledge and resources for care as opposed to their privatization and restrictions around them with paywalls, copyrights and what not trade agreements. We refer to, as we've evoked already, best practices with regards to anonymity and privacy and even amnesia, that would be a good one as well. And here, let me paraphrase the publishing organization WikiLeaks. And so we want transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak. And who are the weak? Well, the list is very long, unfortunately, very sadly. But if we listen closely here, privacy for the weak is a part of a Hippocratic oath, basically. So that should bring to mind the doctor-patient relationship and the contract between them. And how is this done today in a context where there is massive data exploitation for commercial or social control purposes? And how is this done today with the Internet of Things and Medical Things, which increases potential for misuse and failure? And also, how is this done today when we're in a context where there are abuses of power in the name of anti-terror? And basically caregivers and other state bodies who are being asked to turn into thought police and therefore breach policy, breach privacy with their patients. So that's the context. And when we talk about exploitation of data, it's important to understand that it has very concrete implications on everyone's freedoms and what they can do with their lives. So, for example, are you going to get this job if you're planning to have a baby? Are you going to get fired because you smoke weed? How expensive is your health insurance going to be if you can't show that you made 10,000 steps if you walked 10,000 steps last month? And can you enter this country if you're HIV positive or another one? So that's very, very concrete repercussions on freedoms. As a quick question here, who encrypts their communication with their doctors and other caregivers? You see, there's one hand in the room. So for all the others here, what's happening when you're asking a question about an STD, about an abortion, about mental illness? What's happening is that it's going unencrypted, right? So we know now that all our communications, all our behaviors are being recorded, aggregated in profiles, and are potentially being used against ourselves for commercial or political purposes. But you know what's worse? The worst consequence of mass surveillance, maybe, is self-censorship. It's the things we don't say, but also the things we don't do, the places we don't go, the people we don't associate with. So what are we going to do when we feel low? Will we stop asking for help? When we're asking questions about this thing that is growing somewhere on ourselves, will we stop looking for answers? Will we stop caring for each other because we are too afraid that those things will be known and used against us? So hacker ethics and tools provide a concrete path of action. With free Libre software, we will take back control of our machines. With decentralized services, we will take back control of the infrastructure and know where our data is. With end-to-end encryption, we will get hold of our keys and secure ourselves, our communications. So our hope is that by transmitting those tools and those values to the caregivers, maybe they can help, maybe they can help leading by the example. You know how the white gong is a symbol of authority for many people. Maybe this authority could be put at good use. So this is a bit dark and I'm sorry, but our hope is that we can do all this in a joyful way, because hacker culture is mostly about a playful enthusiasm, about doing things in an inventive way. And that's precisely the point and the way we want to do it with hacking with care. So what we've done so far and what's next? So for the past three years, what we've done is very concretely offer care to individuals and organizations. And we cannot tell you much about this because privacy, right? And we've also been present at hackers, congresses and camps, conferences with workshops, care sessions, documentation, and often teaming up with others like La Quadrature du Net, very good friends. Center of investigative journalism, tactical tech, courage. And we have created some resources as well. You click. So this hands massage manual for everyone, for example, which you can find and download on our wiki available in English and Portuguese for now and soon Spanish and more. And there's also other massage protocols on the wiki that you can find. And we've compiled other resources that other people have put together in the same spirit on the wiki as well, for hackers and caregivers. So what did you do? That was a screenshot of a video tutorial that we shot for freedoms of movement. And we dedicated it, as you can maybe see, to Julian Assange, who will have been four years arbitrarily detained inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on the 19th of June this year. So that's dedicated to him and it will help you with your freedoms of movement. So what we want to do in the future is basically keep doing this and doing more. We want to experiment, keep on experimenting with new formats, new formats for actions, for events, some of them directed towards organizations going directly on the field with activists and hackers and try to transmit this knowledge by the practice on the field, but also formats and events directed towards caregivers themselves, help them encrypt their communications, for instance. We want also to be able to better response to crisis individual and maybe collective. And we want to engage in more research, maybe starting with the very question of burnout in activist communities. Our capacity to scale and grow all of this will mostly depend on the variety of skills and the material support we collect from the one, hint, hint, material support. It will depend also on the organizational skills, the way we will manage to make all this work together, arrange all this beautiful diversity in a joyful and meaningful way. And maybe more importantly, our capacity to grow and scale will depend on you and the way you will feel like participating and contributing. Yeah, there are basically as many hearts and skills, as many entries as there are hearts and skills to this project. So you can contribute whichever way you feel. We have lots of ideas, many ideas we haven't had yet as well. And we can discuss this after the talk. We have two behind the dome in the relax area where we will meet with another hacker, Sarah, who is talking right now on gender and medicine. So we all meet together in the relax area after this talk. And so we're very grateful for the occasion to speak here. And before we open the floor, we'd like to take some time for a little shout out for everyone who cannot be here in the room today. All the ones who just can't be here because maybe the price of the ticket and all the ones who are watching the streams. But a particular focus on all the ones whose freedom is being restricted right now. All the ones we wish could be exercising all their freedoms with us today the way it should be. You were saying what we really need for everyone is justice and care is just what we can do in the meantime. Right, so we send our love and support to Julian Assange, to Chelsea Manning, to Edward Snowden, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, Lori Love, all the ones we are not. And many, many more. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for everything hacking with care. Join us. And we'll be now opening the floor for questions. Be aware that we have a list of keywords that if they are pronounced during this session, will immediately lead to a song being sung by Emily and I. Please. Who has a question? I don't see anybody here. Don't be shy. Somebody wants to ask a question. It's now. Well, there are no questions. Be aware that if there is no question, you will have the singing. Okay, now we have a question. There is a question. It's good as a threat as well. Hi, thank you for this talk. I would like to suggest nonviolent communication as a way to learn how to talk to each other with more empathy as one of the caring activities that I would like to help you with in the future. Great. Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Is there another comment or another question? No, so, well, thank you very much. We have this song actually. It's a song, okay. Yeah, we have this song that we sing. It's not by us, but we sing it because it gives us a lot of courage. It shakes the stress. And also we like to think that when there is someone listening in on us, maybe, we like to sing this song. Singing as a form of care. Yeah, singing is care. Singing as a form of care. It's in my face. Thank you.
 Music  Oh hey, can you hear me?  So in the meantime, I suggest maybe some of you are familiar with using a laptop computer.  Maybe some of you are using a backpack every day.  Maybe some of you have ever experienced neck pain, back pain, maybe aches that goes all along the arm, the elbows, because of too much typing, you know.  I learned some years ago these very simple exercises that really changed the way I related to my upper back and shoulders  and never experienced pain again since I practiced them quite regularly.  I want to show them to you. If you agree, you can do them about any time. It's quite quick.  I'll do kind of an abridged version here. Whatever happens, be careful.  You know, every mileage is different, but the principle is simple.  Look, you put your shoulders up, then down, up, then down, like on, off, on, off.  And you do that a couple of times, actually 10, 12 times maybe. We don't have time now.  Then you roll your shoulders like this, gently, at first, then depending on how much you suffer, you can vary that.  Then in the other direction, then in a disjointed way, it goes very well with music, like funk music.  Then the other direction, again, you should do this 10, 12 times, whatever works for you.  And now the point is to really warm up the upper part of the back, the spine, and well, mostly the shoulder blades.  Now that they're warm, you can turn your head all the way to the left, then all the way to the right.  You may hear and feel a cracking that may feel really good, actually. And that is the tension going away.  Then all is left is to bring your head forward, like a turtle, and back, forward, and back.  So to summarize, on, off, on, off, then rolling in one direction, rolling in the other, disjointed in one direction, disjointed in the other,  all the way left, all the way right, and again, then forward and back, like a turtle.  You can do that several times a day when you feel a bit of pain, or anytime I hope it helps, like it helped for me.  Well, it is now time we begin. So I'm Jeremy Zimmerman. I would define myself as a hacker,  an enthusiast of technology and systems in general who like to understand how they work and hopefully make them work better.  I used to be an activist for seven years, full, full, full, full time.  I was the main coordinator and spokesperson and campaigner and analyst and graphic designer and whatnot  for La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based citizen organization defending freedom online.  I got in many fights in France and in the European Parliament, the telecoms package, the ACTA, net neutrality, and so on.  And I went very, very, very close to a very bad burnout, and I learned quite a bit about this.  So, hi. Am I on?  Yes.  Hi, my name is Emily. I'm a well-being massage practitioner. I have been doing that for 10 years now.  So I make, I share, and I study massage and recently classical Chinese medicine as well.  I like to work in a combination of techniques in a rather open, freestyle way.  And I like to collaborate with people outside my field, like musicians, for example.  And I like to write massage protocols.  And I am not especially a tech enthusiast, and I was not computer literate.  But I improved on that second point and had much pleasure learning thanks to Jeremy and the lovely friends he introduced me to.  So when we met with Emilia, I figured that even if I knew how, I knew about hacking computers, networks, parliaments,  legislations, press releases, graphic design, video games and what not.  I had no clue what massage was about.  So since then, I learned a lot to her contact.  But when we met, I was so badly burnout, I slept three hours and three hours and three hours.  I had my phone constantly on my ear burning, was running from place to place, and wasn't really myself anymore.  Emilia offered to give me my first massage, and after one hour, I figured I ended up in a state where I was so much  re-centered on myself, so much myself again, on a slow, deep breathing mode.  I opened my eyes and I remember looking at her and saying, well, hey, you're a hacker.  Right, so we've been talking already a bit about hacking, activism and what it is that we do.  But that's actually when Jeremy calls me a hacker that I really understood the meaning of the word and that I could really relate to it.  So then I really gladly accepted his invitation to join him and La Quadra Childrenets on a summer hacker summer camp in the Netherlands in 2013.  Well, La Quadra Childrenets were experimenting with their first tea house, now famous,  and where other friends were there as well, we'd been reflecting on the same questions.  So that's basically where hacking with care started for the first time.  So that was three years ago.  So what's hacking, what's care, and what's hacking with care?  To me, hacking is an emancipatory practice of humans versus systems or tools.  It is a systemic approach where you have to understand the whole box in order to be able to think outside of it.  It is sometimes about breaking, it is about remixing, it is always about inventing.  It is, before everything, to me, a set of ethical values.  It is about the free flow of information, the free sharing of knowledge,  and it is about enabling others to participate.  Care, there would be much to say about care, but simply put, I would say that care is about goodness  and even it's about common goodness, actually, and nurturing that.  It's also about creating, sustaining harmonies and finding balance between one and the world,  one and the other beings in the world, and one with oneself as well.  I would say that care is not defined by a particular set of skills,  rather it has to do with a presence and attention and an intention.  What it is that you are going to do with what you love to do,  what vision of the world are you going to support with what you do.  And so, in that view, care, community care, self-care, for us, will be all the same thing.  So this is what we mean by hacking with care.  It's shared vision, shared ethics with common good at heart.  It is our way to create situations, moments, formats in which to exchange and share.  It is about producing resources to embed this knowledge we want to share,  and it is to give us ability to engage in research.  This is how we plan to hack care. This is how we plan to be hacking with care.  This is how we do it.  This is how we do it.  Already.  And so basically the very happy encounter between us and other friends with this proposition  would like to scale and bring more people together and make alliances,  because actually we think even if from a distance it doesn't seem at first that we're doing the same thing,  well, in fact, we are.  So let's do this together.  So care for hackers, activists,  activists and whistleblowers.  What's common in activists, hackers, and I guess whistleblowers as well,  I think is passion.  Passion as an engine that makes you do things better, that makes you do things more.  Passion as a fuel that takes all of yourself into the battle, into the cause, into the project.  All of yourself means all your resources, your mental and your physical resources.  This passion is something burning hot.  It is something of tremendous power.  We used to joke in the European Parliament that one passionate activist equates ten,  maybe a hundred robotic lobbyists.  So this passion is something very beautiful, very precious that we must preserve.  But the flip side of this passion is that as everything that is tremendously hot, it burns.  And it burns and the risk is that it ends up burning you.  When you're exhausting all your resources and it keeps burning,  the result is what we call a burnout and a burnout has terrible consequences.  It has terrible consequences first of all on your cause, on your project,  on whatever this is you're defending.  But it also has terrible consequences on yourself.  It makes you stressed, anxious, therefore it makes you make mistakes,  therefore it makes you lose your confidence, therefore it will make you be more aggressive  and therefore it has consequences on the people around you.  It makes you make mistakes the way you behave with people around you.  And this is what leads to anger, this is what leads to tension,  this is what could lead to infighting.  And we know how much infighting is the main cause for failure of social movements and projects alike.  So it's one of the main.  So mitigating burnout, of course, is a major objective.  Also, keep in mind that activists in many contexts and increasingly we hope  will have to handle security seriously.  And this brings extra constraints on the body and on the mind.  Handling those keys, keeping those keys on a USB at all time,  keeping one or several laptops with you at all time, retaining physical control over those machines.  How do you go to a doctor?  How do you go to a sauna?  How do you lay down on the beach when you feel tired if you have to get those three, four, five laptops with you?  It's something also we should keep in mind.  Also what is very interesting to me after my own experience is that when you're burning out,  you're submitted to fast time.  Everything around you is going faster and faster.  Those phone calls, those tweets, those emails, you have to take care of them.  You have to handle them.  You have this feeling that if you stop, everything is going to crumble.  So you have to be on top of it, which means that you become a slave to your environment.  Your environment defines the time in which you live.  When we all know that it is in other moments of time, in those long moments of time,  when you decide, when you control, when you sit down, when you breathe deeply,  that you can look at the future, that you can think for your well-being.  It is in those moments of longer time that we can think strategically.  And strategic thinking is what we need today, whatever your cause, whatever your project.  This is what we badly need today.  So it is about collectively finding ways to mitigate, detect this burnout when it comes,  but also about taking back control of our time and of our timelines.  So on the subject of careful hackers, why careful hackers and activists?  Of course, we're interested in care for everyone, but we do have at heart to focus on hackers and activists  and whistleblowers, is because not only do they work themselves out in very specific conditions,  but they also face pretty intense repression from the systems of powers that they disturb with their action.  People, companies, states who don't have public interest at heart, unlike our friends,  and rather favor their profits and privileges.  So it is a fact that hackers, activists, whistleblowers are closely monitored,  they are intimidated, harassed, and they get all sorts of abuses,  whether they be made-up accusations and disproportionate charges and whatnot.  So how do we bring care in such a complex and sensitive context on top of all the specificities that Jeremy has described?  How do we facilitate that access to care?  As a caregiver, that will mean learning and experimenting and adapting with security,  because obviously, as we have understood here, access to care will be closely tied to security aspects,  which will have to do also with anonymity and privacy and also much more.  And actually later, we will argue that much of it would benefit actually everyone  and should be default setting for everyone, but right now we're focusing on hackers and activists.  And one other very important motivation for us to bring care for hackers and activists is gratitude.  So our care as an expression of our gratitude for their action.  And with that, the idea is that care is transitive, it communicates itself,  and although we are very aware that a massage cannot get someone out of prison,  cannot win a case, cannot bring the justice which would actually be really good for their health,  a massage can maybe help a lawyer, a journalist, a friend, a family, someone who's out there kicking us for us and for them.  And this very notion of care as gratitude, I think demonstrates that care is not only hacking,  that it is also actually activism.  So hacker ethics and tools for caregivers.  So when we speak of hackers, ethics and tools for caregivers, we refer to, for example, very concretely,  access and circulation of knowledge and resources for care as opposed to their privatization and restrictions around them  with paywalls, copyrights and what not trade agreements. We refer to, as we've evoked already, best practices  with regards to anonymity and privacy and even amnesia, that would be a good one as well.  And here, let me paraphrase the publishing organization WikiLeaks.  And so we want transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak.  And who are the weak? Well, the list is very long, unfortunately, very sadly.  But if we listen closely here, privacy for the weak is a part of a Hippocratic oath, basically.  So that should bring to mind the doctor-patient relationship and the contract between them.  And how is this done today in a context where there is massive data exploitation for commercial or social control purposes?  And how is this done today with the Internet of Things and Medical Things, which increases potential for misuse and failure?  And also, how is this done today when we're in a context where there are abuses of power in the name of anti-terror?  And basically caregivers and other state bodies who are being asked to turn into thought police and therefore breach policy,  breach privacy with their patients. So that's the context.  And when we talk about exploitation of data, it's important to understand that it has very concrete implications on everyone's freedoms  and what they can do with their lives. So, for example, are you going to get this job if you're planning to have a baby?  Are you going to get fired because you smoke weed?  How expensive is your health insurance going to be if you can't show that you made 10,000 steps if you walked 10,000 steps last month?  And can you enter this country if you're HIV positive or another one?  So that's very, very concrete repercussions on freedoms.  As a quick question here, who encrypts their communication with their doctors and other caregivers?  You see, there's one hand in the room.  So for all the others here, what's happening when you're asking a question about an STD, about an abortion, about mental illness?  What's happening is that it's going unencrypted, right?  So we know now that all our communications, all our behaviors are being recorded, aggregated in profiles, and are potentially being used against ourselves  for commercial or political purposes.  But you know what's worse? The worst consequence of mass surveillance, maybe, is self-censorship.  It's the things we don't say, but also the things we don't do, the places we don't go, the people we don't associate with.  So what are we going to do when we feel low? Will we stop asking for help?  When we're asking questions about this thing that is growing somewhere on ourselves, will we stop looking for answers?  Will we stop caring for each other because we are too afraid that those things will be known and used against us?  So hacker ethics and tools provide a concrete path of action.  With free Libre software, we will take back control of our machines.  With decentralized services, we will take back control of the infrastructure and know where our data is.  With end-to-end encryption, we will get hold of our keys and secure ourselves, our communications.  So our hope is that by transmitting those tools and those values to the caregivers, maybe they can help, maybe they can help leading by the example.  You know how the white gong is a symbol of authority for many people.  Maybe this authority could be put at good use.  So this is a bit dark and I'm sorry, but our hope is that we can do all this in a joyful way,  because hacker culture is mostly about a playful enthusiasm, about doing things in an inventive way.  And that's precisely the point and the way we want to do it with hacking with care.  So what we've done so far and what's next?  So for the past three years, what we've done is very concretely offer care to individuals and organizations.  And we cannot tell you much about this because privacy, right?  And we've also been present at hackers, congresses and camps, conferences with workshops, care sessions, documentation,  and often teaming up with others like La Quadrature du Net, very good friends.  Center of investigative journalism, tactical tech, courage.  And we have created some resources as well.  You click.  So this hands massage manual for everyone, for example,  which you can find and download on our wiki available in English and Portuguese for now and soon Spanish and more.  And there's also other massage protocols on the wiki that you can find.  And we've compiled other resources that other people have put together in the same spirit on the wiki as well,  for hackers and caregivers.  So what did you do?  That was a screenshot of a video tutorial that we shot for freedoms of movement.  And we dedicated it, as you can maybe see, to Julian Assange,  who will have been four years arbitrarily detained inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on the 19th of June this year.  So that's dedicated to him and it will help you with your freedoms of movement.  So what we want to do in the future is basically keep doing this and doing more.  We want to experiment, keep on experimenting with new formats, new formats for actions, for events,  some of them directed towards organizations going directly on the field with activists and hackers  and try to transmit this knowledge by the practice on the field,  but also formats and events directed towards caregivers themselves,  help them encrypt their communications, for instance.  We want also to be able to better response to crisis individual and maybe collective.  And we want to engage in more research, maybe starting with the very question of burnout in activist communities.  Our capacity to scale and grow all of this will mostly depend on the variety of skills  and the material support we collect from the one, hint, hint, material support.  It will depend also on the organizational skills, the way we will manage to make all this work together,  arrange all this beautiful diversity in a joyful and meaningful way.  And maybe more importantly, our capacity to grow and scale will depend on you  and the way you will feel like participating and contributing.  Yeah, there are basically as many hearts and skills, as many entries as there are hearts and skills to this project.  So you can contribute whichever way you feel.  We have lots of ideas, many ideas we haven't had yet as well.  And we can discuss this after the talk.  We have two behind the dome in the relax area where we will meet with another hacker, Sarah,  who is talking right now on gender and medicine.  So we all meet together in the relax area after this talk.  And so we're very grateful for the occasion to speak here.  And before we open the floor, we'd like to take some time for a little shout out  for everyone who cannot be here in the room today.  All the ones who just can't be here because maybe the price of the ticket  and all the ones who are watching the streams.  But a particular focus on all the ones whose freedom is being restricted right now.  All the ones we wish could be exercising all their freedoms with us today the way it should be.  You were saying what we really need for everyone is justice and care is just what we can do in the meantime.  Right, so we send our love and support to Julian Assange, to Chelsea Manning, to Edward Snowden,  Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, Lori Love, all the ones we are not.  And many, many more.  Thank you very much for being here.  Thank you for everything hacking with care.  Join us.  And we'll be now opening the floor for questions.  Be aware that we have a list of keywords that if they are pronounced during this session,  will immediately lead to a song being sung by Emily and I.  Please. Who has a question?  I don't see anybody here. Don't be shy.  Somebody wants to ask a question. It's now.  Well, there are no questions.  Be aware that if there is no question, you will have the singing.  Okay, now we have a question.  There is a question.  It's good as a threat as well.  Hi, thank you for this talk.  I would like to suggest nonviolent communication as a way to learn how to talk to each other with more empathy  as one of the caring activities that I would like to help you with in the future.  Great. Very interesting. Thank you.  Thank you.  Is there another comment or another question?  No, so, well, thank you very much.  We have this song actually.  It's a song, okay.  Yeah, we have this song that we sing. It's not by us, but we sing it because it gives us a lot of courage.  It shakes the stress.  And also we like to think that when there is someone listening in on us, maybe, we like to sing this song.  Singing as a form of care.  Yeah, singing is care.  Singing as a form of care.  It's in my face.  Thank you.
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Music Oh hey, can you hear me? So in the meantime, I suggest maybe some of you are familiar with using a laptop computer. Maybe some of you are using a backpack every day. Maybe some of you have ever experienced neck pain, back pain, maybe aches that goes all along the arm, the elbows, because of too much typing, you know. I learned some years ago these very simple exercises that really changed the way I related to my upper back and shoulders and never experienced pain again since I practiced them quite regularly. I want to show them to you. If you agree, you can do them about any time. It's quite quick. I'll do kind of an abridged version here. Whatever happens, be careful. You know, every mileage is different, but the principle is simple. Look, you put your shoulders up, then down, up, then down, like on, off, on, off. And you do that a couple of times, actually 10, 12 times maybe. We don't have time now. Then you roll your shoulders like this, gently, at first, then depending on how much you suffer, you can vary that. Then in the other direction, then in a disjointed way, it goes very well with music, like funk music. Then the other direction, again, you should do this 10, 12 times, whatever works for you. And now the point is to really warm up the upper part of the back, the spine, and well, mostly the shoulder blades. Now that they're warm, you can turn your head all the way to the left, then all the way to the right. You may hear and feel a cracking that may feel really good, actually. And that is the tension going away. Then all is left is to bring your head forward, like a turtle, and back, forward, and back. So to summarize, on, off, on, off, then rolling in one direction, rolling in the other, disjointed in one direction, disjointed in the other, all the way left, all the way right, and again, then forward and back, like a turtle. You can do that several times a day when you feel a bit of pain, or anytime I hope it helps, like it helped for me. Well, it is now time we begin. So I'm Jeremy Zimmerman. I would define myself as a hacker, an enthusiast of technology and systems in general who like to understand how they work and hopefully make them work better. I used to be an activist for seven years, full, full, full, full time. I was the main coordinator and spokesperson and campaigner and analyst and graphic designer and whatnot for La Quadrature du Net, a Paris-based citizen organization defending freedom online. I got in many fights in France and in the European Parliament, the telecoms package, the ACTA, net neutrality, and so on. And I went very, very, very close to a very bad burnout, and I learned quite a bit about this. So, hi. Am I on? Yes. Hi, my name is Emily. I'm a well-being massage practitioner. I have been doing that for 10 years now. So I make, I share, and I study massage and recently classical Chinese medicine as well. I like to work in a combination of techniques in a rather open, freestyle way. And I like to collaborate with people outside my field, like musicians, for example. And I like to write massage protocols. And I am not especially a tech enthusiast, and I was not computer literate. But I improved on that second point and had much pleasure learning thanks to Jeremy and the lovely friends he introduced me to. So when we met with Emilia, I figured that even if I knew how, I knew about hacking computers, networks, parliaments, legislations, press releases, graphic design, video games and what not. I had no clue what massage was about. So since then, I learned a lot to her contact. But when we met, I was so badly burnout, I slept three hours and three hours and three hours. I had my phone constantly on my ear burning, was running from place to place, and wasn't really myself anymore. Emilia offered to give me my first massage, and after one hour, I figured I ended up in a state where I was so much re-centered on myself, so much myself again, on a slow, deep breathing mode. I opened my eyes and I remember looking at her and saying, well, hey, you're a hacker. Right, so we've been talking already a bit about hacking, activism and what it is that we do. But that's actually when Jeremy calls me a hacker that I really understood the meaning of the word and that I could really relate to it. So then I really gladly accepted his invitation to join him and La Quadra Childrenets on a summer hacker summer camp in the Netherlands in 2013. Well, La Quadra Childrenets were experimenting with their first tea house, now famous, and where other friends were there as well, we'd been reflecting on the same questions. So that's basically where hacking with care started for the first time. So that was three years ago. So what's hacking, what's care, and what's hacking with care? To me, hacking is an emancipatory practice of humans versus systems or tools. It is a systemic approach where you have to understand the whole box in order to be able to think outside of it. It is sometimes about breaking, it is about remixing, it is always about inventing. It is, before everything, to me, a set of ethical values. It is about the free flow of information, the free sharing of knowledge, and it is about enabling others to participate. Care, there would be much to say about care, but simply put, I would say that care is about goodness and even it's about common goodness, actually, and nurturing that. It's also about creating, sustaining harmonies and finding balance between one and the world, one and the other beings in the world, and one with oneself as well. I would say that care is not defined by a particular set of skills, rather it has to do with a presence and attention and an intention. What it is that you are going to do with what you love to do, what vision of the world are you going to support with what you do. And so, in that view, care, community care, self-care, for us, will be all the same thing. So this is what we mean by hacking with care. It's shared vision, shared ethics with common good at heart. It is our way to create situations, moments, formats in which to exchange and share. It is about producing resources to embed this knowledge we want to share, and it is to give us ability to engage in research. This is how we plan to hack care. This is how we plan to be hacking with care. This is how we do it. This is how we do it. Already. And so basically the very happy encounter between us and other friends with this proposition would like to scale and bring more people together and make alliances, because actually we think even if from a distance it doesn't seem at first that we're doing the same thing, well, in fact, we are. So let's do this together. So care for hackers, activists, activists and whistleblowers. What's common in activists, hackers, and I guess whistleblowers as well, I think is passion. Passion as an engine that makes you do things better, that makes you do things more. Passion as a fuel that takes all of yourself into the battle, into the cause, into the project. All of yourself means all your resources, your mental and your physical resources. This passion is something burning hot. It is something of tremendous power. We used to joke in the European Parliament that one passionate activist equates ten, maybe a hundred robotic lobbyists. So this passion is something very beautiful, very precious that we must preserve. But the flip side of this passion is that as everything that is tremendously hot, it burns. And it burns and the risk is that it ends up burning you. When you're exhausting all your resources and it keeps burning, the result is what we call a burnout and a burnout has terrible consequences. It has terrible consequences first of all on your cause, on your project, on whatever this is you're defending. But it also has terrible consequences on yourself. It makes you stressed, anxious, therefore it makes you make mistakes, therefore it makes you lose your confidence, therefore it will make you be more aggressive and therefore it has consequences on the people around you. It makes you make mistakes the way you behave with people around you. And this is what leads to anger, this is what leads to tension, this is what could lead to infighting. And we know how much infighting is the main cause for failure of social movements and projects alike. So it's one of the main. So mitigating burnout, of course, is a major objective. Also, keep in mind that activists in many contexts and increasingly we hope will have to handle security seriously. And this brings extra constraints on the body and on the mind. Handling those keys, keeping those keys on a USB at all time, keeping one or several laptops with you at all time, retaining physical control over those machines. How do you go to a doctor? How do you go to a sauna? How do you lay down on the beach when you feel tired if you have to get those three, four, five laptops with you? It's something also we should keep in mind. Also what is very interesting to me after my own experience is that when you're burning out, you're submitted to fast time. Everything around you is going faster and faster. Those phone calls, those tweets, those emails, you have to take care of them. You have to handle them. You have this feeling that if you stop, everything is going to crumble. So you have to be on top of it, which means that you become a slave to your environment. Your environment defines the time in which you live. When we all know that it is in other moments of time, in those long moments of time, when you decide, when you control, when you sit down, when you breathe deeply, that you can look at the future, that you can think for your well-being. It is in those moments of longer time that we can think strategically. And strategic thinking is what we need today, whatever your cause, whatever your project. This is what we badly need today. So it is about collectively finding ways to mitigate, detect this burnout when it comes, but also about taking back control of our time and of our timelines. So on the subject of careful hackers, why careful hackers and activists? Of course, we're interested in care for everyone, but we do have at heart to focus on hackers and activists and whistleblowers, is because not only do they work themselves out in very specific conditions, but they also face pretty intense repression from the systems of powers that they disturb with their action. People, companies, states who don't have public interest at heart, unlike our friends, and rather favor their profits and privileges. So it is a fact that hackers, activists, whistleblowers are closely monitored, they are intimidated, harassed, and they get all sorts of abuses, whether they be made-up accusations and disproportionate charges and whatnot. So how do we bring care in such a complex and sensitive context on top of all the specificities that Jeremy has described? How do we facilitate that access to care? As a caregiver, that will mean learning and experimenting and adapting with security, because obviously, as we have understood here, access to care will be closely tied to security aspects, which will have to do also with anonymity and privacy and also much more. And actually later, we will argue that much of it would benefit actually everyone and should be default setting for everyone, but right now we're focusing on hackers and activists. And one other very important motivation for us to bring care for hackers and activists is gratitude. So our care as an expression of our gratitude for their action. And with that, the idea is that care is transitive, it communicates itself, and although we are very aware that a massage cannot get someone out of prison, cannot win a case, cannot bring the justice which would actually be really good for their health, a massage can maybe help a lawyer, a journalist, a friend, a family, someone who's out there kicking us for us and for them. And this very notion of care as gratitude, I think demonstrates that care is not only hacking, that it is also actually activism. So hacker ethics and tools for caregivers. So when we speak of hackers, ethics and tools for caregivers, we refer to, for example, very concretely, access and circulation of knowledge and resources for care as opposed to their privatization and restrictions around them with paywalls, copyrights and what not trade agreements. We refer to, as we've evoked already, best practices with regards to anonymity and privacy and even amnesia, that would be a good one as well. And here, let me paraphrase the publishing organization WikiLeaks. And so we want transparency for the powerful and privacy for the weak. And who are the weak? Well, the list is very long, unfortunately, very sadly. But if we listen closely here, privacy for the weak is a part of a Hippocratic oath, basically. So that should bring to mind the doctor-patient relationship and the contract between them. And how is this done today in a context where there is massive data exploitation for commercial or social control purposes? And how is this done today with the Internet of Things and Medical Things, which increases potential for misuse and failure? And also, how is this done today when we're in a context where there are abuses of power in the name of anti-terror? And basically caregivers and other state bodies who are being asked to turn into thought police and therefore breach policy, breach privacy with their patients. So that's the context. And when we talk about exploitation of data, it's important to understand that it has very concrete implications on everyone's freedoms and what they can do with their lives. So, for example, are you going to get this job if you're planning to have a baby? Are you going to get fired because you smoke weed? How expensive is your health insurance going to be if you can't show that you made 10,000 steps if you walked 10,000 steps last month? And can you enter this country if you're HIV positive or another one? So that's very, very concrete repercussions on freedoms. As a quick question here, who encrypts their communication with their doctors and other caregivers? You see, there's one hand in the room. So for all the others here, what's happening when you're asking a question about an STD, about an abortion, about mental illness? What's happening is that it's going unencrypted, right? So we know now that all our communications, all our behaviors are being recorded, aggregated in profiles, and are potentially being used against ourselves for commercial or political purposes. But you know what's worse? The worst consequence of mass surveillance, maybe, is self-censorship. It's the things we don't say, but also the things we don't do, the places we don't go, the people we don't associate with. So what are we going to do when we feel low? Will we stop asking for help? When we're asking questions about this thing that is growing somewhere on ourselves, will we stop looking for answers? Will we stop caring for each other because we are too afraid that those things will be known and used against us? So hacker ethics and tools provide a concrete path of action. With free Libre software, we will take back control of our machines. With decentralized services, we will take back control of the infrastructure and know where our data is. With end-to-end encryption, we will get hold of our keys and secure ourselves, our communications. So our hope is that by transmitting those tools and those values to the caregivers, maybe they can help, maybe they can help leading by the example. You know how the white gong is a symbol of authority for many people. Maybe this authority could be put at good use. So this is a bit dark and I'm sorry, but our hope is that we can do all this in a joyful way, because hacker culture is mostly about a playful enthusiasm, about doing things in an inventive way. And that's precisely the point and the way we want to do it with hacking with care. So what we've done so far and what's next? So for the past three years, what we've done is very concretely offer care to individuals and organizations. And we cannot tell you much about this because privacy, right? And we've also been present at hackers, congresses and camps, conferences with workshops, care sessions, documentation, and often teaming up with others like La Quadrature du Net, very good friends. Center of investigative journalism, tactical tech, courage. And we have created some resources as well. You click. So this hands massage manual for everyone, for example, which you can find and download on our wiki available in English and Portuguese for now and soon Spanish and more. And there's also other massage protocols on the wiki that you can find. And we've compiled other resources that other people have put together in the same spirit on the wiki as well, for hackers and caregivers. So what did you do? That was a screenshot of a video tutorial that we shot for freedoms of movement. And we dedicated it, as you can maybe see, to Julian Assange, who will have been four years arbitrarily detained inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London on the 19th of June this year. So that's dedicated to him and it will help you with your freedoms of movement. So what we want to do in the future is basically keep doing this and doing more. We want to experiment, keep on experimenting with new formats, new formats for actions, for events, some of them directed towards organizations going directly on the field with activists and hackers and try to transmit this knowledge by the practice on the field, but also formats and events directed towards caregivers themselves, help them encrypt their communications, for instance. We want also to be able to better response to crisis individual and maybe collective. And we want to engage in more research, maybe starting with the very question of burnout in activist communities. Our capacity to scale and grow all of this will mostly depend on the variety of skills and the material support we collect from the one, hint, hint, material support. It will depend also on the organizational skills, the way we will manage to make all this work together, arrange all this beautiful diversity in a joyful and meaningful way. And maybe more importantly, our capacity to grow and scale will depend on you and the way you will feel like participating and contributing. Yeah, there are basically as many hearts and skills, as many entries as there are hearts and skills to this project. So you can contribute whichever way you feel. We have lots of ideas, many ideas we haven't had yet as well. And we can discuss this after the talk. We have two behind the dome in the relax area where we will meet with another hacker, Sarah, who is talking right now on gender and medicine. So we all meet together in the relax area after this talk. And so we're very grateful for the occasion to speak here. And before we open the floor, we'd like to take some time for a little shout out for everyone who cannot be here in the room today. All the ones who just can't be here because maybe the price of the ticket and all the ones who are watching the streams. But a particular focus on all the ones whose freedom is being restricted right now. All the ones we wish could be exercising all their freedoms with us today the way it should be. You were saying what we really need for everyone is justice and care is just what we can do in the meantime. Right, so we send our love and support to Julian Assange, to Chelsea Manning, to Edward Snowden, Jeremy Hammond, Barrett Brown, Lori Love, all the ones we are not. And many, many more. Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for everything hacking with care. Join us. And we'll be now opening the floor for questions. Be aware that we have a list of keywords that if they are pronounced during this session, will immediately lead to a song being sung by Emily and I. Please. Who has a question? I don't see anybody here. Don't be shy. Somebody wants to ask a question. It's now. Well, there are no questions. Be aware that if there is no question, you will have the singing. Okay, now we have a question. There is a question. It's good as a threat as well. Hi, thank you for this talk. I would like to suggest nonviolent communication as a way to learn how to talk to each other with more empathy as one of the caring activities that I would like to help you with in the future. Great. Very interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Is there another comment or another question? No, so, well, thank you very much. We have this song actually. It's a song, okay. Yeah, we have this song that we sing. It's not by us, but we sing it because it gives us a lot of courage. It shakes the stress. And also we like to think that when there is someone listening in on us, maybe, we like to sing this song. Singing as a form of care. Yeah, singing is care. Singing as a form of care. It's in my face. Thank you.
years ago. So what's hacking, what's care, and shared ethics with common good at heart. It is encounter between us and other friends with this they also face pretty intense repression from the our care as an expression of our gratitude for really good for their health, a massage can maybe those values to the caregivers, maybe they can