Mastodawn

@alxd 1 The importance of Hacker Narratives
Is best. The others go negative.

What are the main 3 points?

@alxd constructing and teaching the tools and infrastructure needed to build better lives, better communities, better governance and a better world
And having the power to say no to those corporations and bad actors who would stand in the way

That's what it's about for me

@alxd our narrative work needs a shot in the arm (boy did that phrase age)
Installing Linux has never been easier, explaining the value of Freedom has never been more confused ( thanks to Microsoft and 'the open source movement')

@ryancoordinator asking for spoilers 3 months in advance? ;)

It will require a lot more work, but in short:

1. Cyberpunk (in popculture) is about a rebellion, not creating a consistent and comprehensive alternative

2. A lot of hackers internalize the aesthetics and values of cyberpunk, willingly portraying themselves as rebels, not builders

3. In order to be seen as more than just destroyers (in popculture), they need to paint a world they would like to create, which could be Solarpunk

@ryancoordinator my talk at HOPE2020 ( https://alxd.org/technological-narratives-at-hope2020.html ) set some foundations for that, this time I'd like to talk more about the proposal and how we can describe our work and what's most important, our network and communities as a viable alternative, not just an angry "in your face, corporations". Something non-technical people could get behind and understand.

Technological Narratives at HOPE2020

Last month gave my "Technological Narratives: Solarpunk, Cyberpunk, Popculture" talk at HOPE2020 conference. It's finally available in video form! You can watch it at this link! HOPE stands for Hackers On Planet Earth, a US hacker conference organized by 2600 magazine, The Hacker Quarterly. Normally it happens in the New York, but due to the pandemic situation this year it was moved online. The conference featured dozens of great talks and workshops across 9 days, including speakers such as Cory Doctorow or Idalin Bobé from TechActivist.Org. Feel free to browse all the talks here or watch them on The Internet Archive!

alxd - solarpunk hacker

@alxd I'm with you spiritually, solarpunk is important and spreading the narrative of building does matter (see my work on Greenpilling)

But the megacorps that are the hacker adversary in cyberpunk have never been more powerful and omnipresent, and the aesthetic continues to be cool

@ryancoordinator they sure are. Soon I'll finish translating my latest essay on that (already premiered in Polish). Let me give you a single quote:

"In our fight against corporations and capitalism, cyberpunk made us very save - because predictable - rebels." The corporations know the playbooks and know how to "play" every hacker story, because we agree for them to dictate the narrative.

To truly fight capitalism, you need to imagine an alternative.

@ryancoordinator going back to my HOPE2020 talk -

I don't believe hackers will succeed in re-taking the narrative until we can tell stories about Wikipedia. A global, civilization-level project, understandable by near everyone, and yet we don't talk about it in our culture! Wikipedians are not heroes, archivists and librarians are not spoken about, because we are supposed to be blind to the value of cooperation.

@ryancoordinator
> and the aesthetic continues to be cool

And this is one of the biggest problems. The aesthetics are cool because they were _marketed_ and _engineered_ to be cool, to appear cool, to be internalizable even by the very people whose values they speak against. Cyberpunk wants lone wolves and individuals. Hackers are communal and work in groups, share projects.

How does no one see the obvious contradiction? Why do we still continue to promote ourselves this way?

@alxd yeah, please dig into that. I'm not sure this is clear enough for me to see your point.

Is it like... 'Cool is bad, even the SS had cool costumes, that is not enough'?

@ryancoordinator I would take a jab at the SS' aesthetics, but I wouldn't go as far as "cool is bad".

I would say "let's make our own cool". Our own dirty, communal, flawed but awesome projects, let them be cool. Let the cluttered workshop of Miyazakis movies, a whole community squabbling and working together be cool. Let us laugh at the sleek and corporate, single-use things. Let's make old, modified, repairable, rusted but trusty things cool.

@ryancoordinator has any hacker read the original https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/550165 and not think "hey those devices made specifically to be modifiable and repairable, with the blueprints / documentation available to everybody are cool"? "I can totally get why the newspaper prints a whole page of <CONTRIBUTORS.md>", "Those standarization groups advising against some broken products should be a normal thing."

Ecotopia

A novel both timely and prophetic, Ernest Callenbach’s …

Goodreads

@alxd this is the Public Goods narrative, which still needs help to be more sexy

@ryancoordinator which Public Goods are you talking about? There are several things / movements using this name ;)

Ryan Makes, Dreamscaper Oct 10, 2022

@alxd I took the Public Goods narratives to be about the same thing.

The one about libraries, parades, free software and good governance.

My entry point narrative wise was at Gitcoin.
What alternatives are you talking about?

till Oct 9, 2022

@alxd I like 3 and 4 most. Though 3 sounds a bit like you're going to talk about one individual hacker. If it's more about archetypes or narratives, perhaps something like "The death of _the_ Cyberpunk – the birth of _the_ Solarpunk hacker" might be better?
1 and 2 seem less catchy to me, but might be good to use those phrases in the longer description.

Urusan Oct 9, 2022

@alxd In a Solarpunk world, a hacker would be a lot more of an establishment figure. The day to day work of the role would realistically be much closer to that of a lawyer or legislator. This is because the technical decisions made impact and shape society and require (democratic) community participation.

@urusan Im currently reading the Half Built Garden book and while the focus is somewhere else, this is a part of the world there. I think its a worthwhile vision.

@urusan between the https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41637112-a-half-built-garden , https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/43263243-gamechanger and the first half of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/40604388-walkaway I can totally see a new narrative / aesthetics about hackers building a new world together.

A Half-Built Garden

On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wak…

Goodreads

Chris [list of emoji]Oct 9, 2022

@alxd

It may be worth mentioning that Gibson himself was not trying to paint the "hard and shiny" hacker culture as a cool thing. He talked about this in an interview around the time The Peripheral came out. I *think* it's this one, but it's paywalled so I'm not sure.

https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-william-gibson

The Art of Fiction No. 211

Vancouver, British Columbia, sits just on the far side of the American border, a green-glass model city set in the dish of the North Shore Mountains, which enclose the city and support, most days, a thick canopy of fog. There are periods in the year when it’ll rain for forty days, William Gibs...

The Paris Review

@suetanvil I event mention that in my last talk from HOPE :)

I think it just became aestheticized. The problem here is that a lot of hackers and hacker communities embraced this aestheticization without understanding the consequences.

Chris [list of emoji]Oct 9, 2022

@alxd

Well, he made us nerds cool, so it's kind of understandable.

@suetanvil well, let's nerd the next generation into a community-focused, supportive and productive hacking for a better world then ;) We just need to be conscious how we tell our stories.

grob (teeth era) 🇺🇦🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️Oct 9, 2022

@alxd
As a non-hacker, 2 and 4 sound best to me, depending on how matter-of-factly vs tongue-in-cheek you wanna be.