Reactions like these betray a fundamental and all-too-common misunderstanding of who hackers are and what they do. At its most basic, a “hacker” is one who hacks. The word ‘hack’ originated at MIT in the 1960s and 70s, where it meant something like “messing around”. One of the earliest applications of the term was for students who explored locked parts of buildings or steam tunnels under the campus. This was known as “tunnel hacking”.  Later, the word came to refer to elaborate and intricately planned pranks orchestrated by MIT students. The Jargon File (an invaluable repository of hacker culture) lists examples such as putting a police cruiser on the roof of a building, or inflating a huge ‘MIT’ balloon at the 50 yard line during the Harvard-Yale football game.

From this early use, the term spread to the MIT AI lab, which was one of the major hotspots of early computer and software development, and one of the birthplaces of computer hacking. It was there that “hacker” took on its current meaning. The exact definition depends on who you ask, the jargon file lists eight separate meanings, but others would claim fewer, MIT hacker Phil Agre is quoted as claiming that, “The word hack doesn’t really have 69 different meanings. In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation.”

To me, the key thing that makes something a good ‘hack’ (and its perpetrator by extension, a ‘hacker’) is that it involves cleverness and elegance (either in the form of clean efficiency, or intentionally absurdest inefficiency). Brian Harvey of UC Berkley (another important site in the history of software) argues that what makes a hacker, is at its core, an aesthetic judgment, and I’m inclined to agree. One of the best (although not necessarily most succinct) expositions of what it means to be a hacker is given by Eric S. Raymond. He lists the central tenants of hacker philosophy as:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil.
4. Freedom is good.
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence.

There are many people who will claim that, “hacker” refers unambiguously to noble, ethical, hobbyist-tinkerers. They argue for the use of “cracker” to refer to malicious computer criminals. Leaving aside the fact that cracker already has a much better-established slang meaning, in my opinion, the people who argue the loudest in favor of “cracker” tend to be IT nerds who want the cred that comes with the label “hacker”, but don’t want to accept the moral ambiguity and anti-authoritarian connotations that come along with it. Just because you write code for a living, it doesn’t make you a hacker. In fact, it may even be a mark against your hacker-dom. A true hacker doesn’t write code to make a living, s/he codes to solve an interesting problem in an elegant way.

The truth is that “hacker,” encompasses both ethical coders and malicious criminals. Some criminals have been very inventive and creative in their efforts to compromise systems. By the same token, most computer criminals are not all that clever. It is a simple matter to download ready-made tools which can be used to, crack wifi encryption, or orchestrate a DoS attack, for example. These people are not hackers, they are script kiddies.

My preferred nomenclature is the one which uses “Black Hat,” or “White Hat Hacker” for cases where it is necessary to distinguish and separate hackers who engage in criminal behavior from those who do not. I feel that this terminology preserves the full range of meaning for “hacker” and doesn’t resort to silly invented (as opposed to organically developed) terms like “cracker” to draw the distinction.

If this all seems a bit complicated, it’s because it is. To help clarify things, I made a little Venn Diagram:

But after chasing these people all over Amsterdam for an hour and a half, I do have to ask, are they hackers…or ninjas?

UPDATE: I took the train back to Utrecht, but managed to miss the last bus out to my couchsurfing host’s place by 5 minutes (my timing is effing terrible), so I wound up staying in a crappy hostel and paying 21 euro for the privilege. I guess it beats sleeping at the train station. Oh, and all my clothes are at my host’s place. Hooray sleeping in your clothes. Anyway, yesterday sucked.

Anyway, because I’m lazy about writing right now, here’s some photos of the Széchenyi Baths I went to yesterday. It was a pretty neat experience, kind of like a cross between a public pool and a water park. One thing that isn’t very obvious from the photos was the fact that it was actually really cold out, but the water is extremely warm (25-40°C depending on which pool).

This might be the best photo I've taken

The main outdoor pool

Playing chess in the pool

Golden hour

So, first, the Italian Hackmeeting. My biggest impression on first arrival was just how cool the location was. I think I mentioned this earlier, but the story I heard was that the place was built as a party mansion for a guy with mafia ties. It was pretty huge, with at least two main levels, plus the roof and the basement. There was also a good-sized coutyard with gardens and mosaic tiled fountains that I’m sure were quite impressive at one time. The place now is appropriately graffitoed (Italian word!) and grungy, with some pretty cool artwork and berpunk junk lying around. All in all, an excellent venue for a hackmeeting.

My other major early observation was that Italians eat like crazy. The first night, not everyone had arrived yet (I got in on Wednesday and the hackmeeting didn’t officially start until Friday), so there were only about 20 people to go out to dinner. A sizable number, but enough that we could all sit at one big table at a restaurant. First, we went to a sandwich place called Mr. Pannini. I’m not a big fan of the Italian almost-raw prosciutto, so I ordered the quattri formage…which also came with prosciutto, whoops. This was sort of a stand up/take it and go sandwich place and it took a long time for everyone to get their sandwich. So as we’re leaving the sandwich place, somebody goes, “Hey, you wanna go for pizza?” and most people were enthusiastic about a second dinner. We went to “Times Square Pizzaria” across the street from Mr. Pannini. They served individual 7-inch (18 cm?) pizzas. I got the “Empire State” which was basically a vegetable supreme. The pizza was very good, but it was in no way New York style pizza.

So then, as we’re leaving the pizzaria, another person is like, “Let’s get gellato and coffee!” So we had to go get that, too. In summary, I have no idea why Italians don’t all weigh 300 pounds.

The meetings were pretty cool. I frequently found myself wishing I spoke Italian. Among the presentations I watched, there was one on asymmetric encryption that was pretty interesting and seemed to do a good job of covering some of the history of crypto. I also saw one about some new P2P technology based on bittorrent, but apparently better in ways that were unclear to people who didn’t speak Italian. There was some stuff with ham radio that was pretty cool too, but again difficult to follow.

I had expected the meeting to be a little bit more international in character. There were a couple of Brazilians (from Indymedia, they had also been at the Budapest meeting), one German, and one other American there. The American guy spoke Italian, though. He was a pretty cool guy, but he was also prone to saying things like, “All currency is false currency,” which sounds sort of profound and radical, until you realize that it doesn’t mean anything unless you have rigorous definitions of “currency” and “false”. Now, I’m sure this guy did have those. But they’re so open to arguement that it pretty much defeats the point of having a pithy opening statement.

On Saturday night, they had a band play at the squat, and later I went into town with a guy named Gioseppi, who wore a denim jacket and was really into early-90s grunge and Kerouac. He told me he wanted to visit Seattle because, “That’s where grunge is from,” and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the grunge scene in Seattle has been dead since almost before Kurt Cobain’s body was cold.

Almost everyone was quite friendly and welcoming, and willing to try to talk to me in English, but not everyone spoke English well. It was quite isolating, and in some ways stressful to be surrounded 24 hours a day by people speaking a language you can barely understand. My stress was compounded by my laptop’s complete and utter failure on Friday. Some of the hackers were actually really cool about helping me look at my dead machine. I had initially felt bad about asking them about it. End user support is generally considered irritating and not worth the time by most people who actually know something. Plus, it makes me look like a “why can’t you fix your own computer?” moron.

I managed to get several people interested in it as a fun, curious challenge. Especially cracking the mysteriously-created BIOS password. One guy eventually guessed the password: all 0’s. Whether that comes about as the result of failing memory zeroing out values, or is some sort of default built into the BIOS, I don’t know.

Nobody could actually fix it, but they at least confirmed for me that it’s a pretty serious hardware failure that demands OEM servicing.

Also in the lame and irritating category, I slept on a couch of uncertain providence and awoke the next morning to find my hands and forearms covered with small itchy insect bites. I’m assuming bedbugs (couchbugs?). They’ve stopped itching now and have mostly healed, but it’s a week later and they’re still slightly visible. Lame.

There were a lot of cool things at the conference, however.

As part of a tradition at these hackmeetings, the DHCP was disabled, and anyone who wanted to use the network had to go up to a table where the “DHCP Umano” sat, provide him with your hostname, and he would tell you your IP address. I found this charmingly archaic.

They also had delicious pasta meals made twice a day by a group of volunteers. Anyone who wanted to eat kicked in €3 and was served. In the spirit of the free software movement, every day the pasta recipes were posted outside the kitchen, so that anyone who cared to could inspect the source code and make the food themselves if they liked a particular one.

All in all it was a really good time. It would’ve been better if I spoke Italian, but I met some cool people, including one guy who invited me to stay with him in Rome when I pass through that city.

]]> http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/2008/10/where-was-i/feed/ 2 http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/2008/10/social-center-and-critical-mass-in-pisa/ http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/2008/10/social-center-and-critical-mass-in-pisa/#comments Sat, 25 Oct 2008 17:27:11 +0000 http://www.withoutatraceroute.com/?p=1298 I should say a few words about Stefania’s car. It’s a totally hilarious 22-year old beater. The roof leaks when it rains, so she has to always leave the windows open a crack so the interior can dry out. There’s a joint from a previous owner wedged deep in one of the air vents, so if you turn on the heater, the entire car smells like weed. There’s a broken radio from an even older car in the dash—when Stefania got the car, the radio didn’t work, so she replaced it with the radio from the car her father had owned when he met her mom, which he had kept as a memento (aww). Then that radio was destroyed by moisture after a few months. The back of the car is covered with tons of random bumper stickers, including a “01-20-09: Bush’s Last Day” sticker that an American friend of hers had insisted she put on the car. “It always confuses the Europeans, because they write the dates the other way,” she told me.

There was some question as to whether the car would make the 100km journey to Pisa without incident, but it performed like a champ.

Upon arriving in Pisa, we visited was a large social center near the city center. It’s not quite a squat, because the groups using it had a two-year lease from the city that recently expired. They haven’t moved out, and are currently embroiled in a fight to renew the lease. The city wants to bulldoze the building and construct a bus depot. It’s a big structure, and twenty-three groups involved in all sorts of different activities are based there. There’s a group that provides free bike repairs, a group that offers Italian language classes to the local immigrant population, and the hacklab offers tutorials on the internet and computers. Stefania conducted an interview with one of the hackers for her Ph.D. research, and he also gave us a tour around the premises.

Cool broken-computer art piece in the courtyard

The bike repair room

Wall of the library in the social center

After the tour, we were invited to borrow some bikes and participate in the Critical Mass demonstration that evening. Apparently Pisa holds Critical Mass events every month, but they are usually not that large, with only a few dozen people in attendance. This event was different, because instead of the normal organizers, it was put together by protesting university students.

A little bit of background, the Italian government recently passed a new law (“legge 133″) which drastically slashes funding for education in Italy, including universities. There isn’t a whole lot of English-language media on the issue, but Nature has published a couple pieces on the impact it will have on research scientists in Italy. It’s not just the scientists and staff who are upset, though. University students are also righteously pissed off. In protest, students have occupied many of the public universities in Italy in 1960s-style sit-in takeovers, and there have been many large street demonstrations. The University of Pisa (founded 1343!) is one of the more prestigious Italian universities, and, along with some of the universities in Rome, has been playing a leading role in these protests.

So anyway, that’s what this Critical Mass was about, a protest against law 133. Somewhere between two and three hundred people showed up, and even the organizers were suprised by the number of bike-riding supporters. The group assembled in front of the University buildings, and then rode from there to the Piazza dei Miracoli (“Square of Miracles”) in front of the Leaning Tower, making a lot of noise, chanting slogans (“Hands off the University!”—it rhymes much nicer in Italian) and attracting attention along the way. Arriving at the square, somebody broke out a megaphone and people were taking turns addressing the crowd from the pediment of a statue in front of the Tower. One of the teachers whose job is now in jeopardy spoke and was well-received; several students shouted fiery rhetoric into the megaphone.

The guy with the megaphone in the above photo, in particular, seemed to me to be the very embodiment of the dashing, romantic young student-cum-revolutionary. He spent a lot of time with the megaphone.

I was just thinking about how awesome it would be to stand on statues and yell things into megaphones for good causes when Stefania poked me, “Hey, they want people who speak foreign languages to come up and address the tourists.” Somebody spoke in French, and then Spanish; I figured they would easily have somebody to do English, but I’ve found that the Italians are surprisingly self-conscious about their English, even when they speak it relatively well.

It was then that I was really glad I hadn’t shaved in a few days. You gotta look the part, right? I stepped up onto the pediment, megaphone in hand, and discovered to my surprise that it’s not as easy as one might think to ad lib appropriate, inspiring, and eloquent rhetoric when facing a crowd of several hundred students and perhaps a thousand more tourists and onlookers.

I think I must’ve been reading too much American political coverage lately, because on my first attempt I could summon nothing but bland banalities about the importance of education. I said, among other things, “A great nation like Italy deserves a great university system.” and “Education should be a government priority!” Not exactly the stuff of which revolutions are made.

People were supportive though, and after a minute or two, I stepped down. A small, shy Asian kid stepped up after me and addressed the crowds in timid Japanese. He was awesome and everyone loved him. About 10 minutes later, some of the Italian students motioned me over again. Apparently they really wanted English addresses because so many tourists speak English.

On my second go around I felt I did a much better job. I explained to the tourists that, “this demonstration is against a new government law that cuts funding to education, they are strangling the university,” and went on to say that “universities are important to the health of a nation; especially a nation with a culture and history like Italy’s. Some of the oldest universities in the world are here in Italy, and now they are threatening to destroy that. We cannot allow this!”

The ‘we’ was a bit of a stretch, I concede. I also found myself being far more nationalistic with my rhetoric than the Italians who were speaking. Had I shouted, “Death to Berlusconi!” I suspect the protestors would’ve eaten it up (I also suspect I might’ve gotten an angry phone call from the US State Department). But I felt that as a foreigner, it wasn’t my place to issue sweeping denunciations of the Italian government. Please note that this kind of courtesy doesn’t stop Europeans from talking shit on my government continuously.

Approaching the tower

These guys were awesome, their signs say Adopt A Mathematician

After the Critical Mass, we headed back to the social center for a party, but the rest of the stuff in Pisa is probably worthy of a separate post.

The big thing that I came to Berlin for is C-base. C-base is amazing. It’s basically the hacker mecca. It’s been in its current location since the late 1980s, which in the computer world is practically an eternity. Unlike many of the other hacklabs I’ve visited which are precariously located in squats, or part of some larger social center, C-base is its own entity. Registered as a non-profit corporation, it collects money monthly from some 400-500 dues-paying members.

C-base is tricky to photograph. If I use a flash, it washes out and does a very poor job of conveying the dark, cyberpunk aesthetic of the place, and it’s too dark to really photograph properly without the flash. At least, for my crappy camera. It looks kind of like the inside of a laser-tag arena, only without the smoke machine; and most of the neon blinking things actually do something. There’s strange aliens, and circuit boards all over the walls. Apparently some of the original founders’ mother/mainboards now adorn the “nerd room” in the basement. This room is off-limits to non-members unless escorted by a member. When I emailed, the C-base guys generously found an American ex-pat member to show me around.

C-base has its own founding myth and mythology. The story goes that there’s a crashed space station buried underneath Berlin. The iconic TV tower in the center of Alexanderplatz is the antenna of this station. C-base is part of the station buried underground. The C-base members are the extraterrestrial inhabitants of the station, and every improvement or expansion of C-base is an attempt to reconstruct the station. Accordingly, non-members are “aliens” to the C-base members, hence the “No Alien” signs noting members-only locations. When entering these restricted areas, my guide yells out, “Alien entering” in German.

On Monday when I was there, they were playing with a homebuilt multitouch computer. Microsoft is developing this concept under the “Microsoft Surface” label. If you’ve never seen one of these, this video gives you some idea. The C-base one is homebuilt with about $6,000 worth of hardware. It uses a webcam mounted in the console to spot where your hands are, a high-res projector reflected off a mirror for display, and a Linux-based interface.

There’s also a robotics team at C-base. When I was there, they were working on trying to build a small robot that would balance itself on only one wheel. They had the basic hardware built, but were having trouble getting the software to interface correctly. Another group at c-base, Friefunk.net is working on constructing a free wireless network for all of Berlin. They’ve been coordinating with churches to install hardware in their steeples to provide maximum coverage from high networks. They also have special router firmware that can be installed on normal consumer hardware to allow your home router to become a part of their mesh network and contribute some of your extra bandwidth to the project.

Tuesday night, they had an open stage night, with several different bands jamming and generally rocking out. It was notable for being the only musical event I’ve been at where having a laptop open in front of you was not only socially acceptable but actually made you cooler. Also, during one performance, the singer concluded a song featuring the lyric “yes we can” with a random shout of “Obama!”

On Saturday, I went to an Ubuntu 8.10 release party at c-base. It was surprisngly well-advertised (I saw advertisements announcing it on the U-bahn throughout the week) and consequently well-attended. There were presentations by members of the Ubuntu Berlin development team about some of the new features in this release of Ubuntu. I’ve actually been running the 8.10 beta on an SD card since Florence, so a lot of it wasn’t new to me, but it was still a really cool environment and neat to be able to see some of the actual developers.

Other notable occurances in Berlin: I went to a couchsurfing Halloween party, hung out with a cool Polish econ student, and later to a “secret” Halloween party in the boiler room of an abandoned building on the outskirts of Berlin.

Also, at the hostel I was staying at, a guy gave me a free ukulele because he was tired of carrying it. So now I just need to learn to play the ukulele. I also met a very friendly Iranian guy who drank tea compulsively (~6 cups a day) and kept trying to get me to match him cup-for-cup. He was in Berlin to work and was staying in the hostel while looking for an apartment. He complained bitterly about the awful bureaucracy of the German government, which is probably true, but I was surprised to hear it compared unfavorably to the ponderous religious/governmental hybrid authority that runs Iran.

No Alien (This means you, Homo sapiens sapiens)

Hardware workshop

Ubuntu Release Party

There were several art exhibits set up at Kiberpipa as well. HT Gold was a glitched-up version of an old C64 video game called Hat Trick. Anyone who wanted to could mess with the joystick, which would produce different interesting colors and sounds. Another piece called System Cassio:Pia reminded me of a Dalek; it had all sorts of blinking lights and TV screens displaying short clips from movies and music videos. A project I thought had the potential to be really awesome was a thing called “Culture Robot”. This involved a projected map of Ljubljana (with “free” or “open” cultural spaces highlighted), and these little insect-like robots built from a CD base with wire antennas attached to collision sensors. The whole thing was surrounded by a rectangular wood base with other movable obstacles, and the robots would roam around, bouncing off the walls and the obstacles. It was cool-looking, and I liked the robots, but it would have been about 200% cooler if the robots had actually interacted with the map in some way. As it was, the map was just a superfluous background.

Perhaps as a result of over-exposure to all the glitch art, my camera started going on the fritz, producing some rather interesting glitches(-art?) of its own. I’ve included a few of the (totally unedited!) cooler examples below, but it was actually really irritating to never be sure if a picture I took was going to come out or not. I guess in the days before digital photography, that’s how every shot was. Regardless, the photos of System Cassio:Pia and Hat Trick below were not taken by me but rather by the festival photographer, Tea. More actually-good photos can be found on the Kiberpipa photo archive.

The other big thing on the first night was the arrival of the Pirate Bay bus. For reasons of pure awesomeness, some of the people associated with the world’s largest bittorrent site (and its mother project Piratbyrån, the Bureau of Piracy) have decided to cruise around Europe in a modified Stockholm city bus as an “experience laboratory”. I really enjoyed the Pirate Bay/Piratbyrån people. For one thing, they took themselves about a third as seriously as anyone else at the festival (with the possible exception of Monochrom…I’ll get to them). It’s not that the other participants weren’t fun, it’s just that they mostly saw themselves as real artists with serious or semi-serious artistic endeavors. The Pirate Bay people seemed to be in it almost entirely for the lulz.

They were several hours late arriving at the festival, having just driven in from Bolzano, Italy. A slogan painted on the back of the bus cautioned “Slow on the road; fast on the net”. After arriving, one of the guys from the bus performed a “traditional folk dance of the Kopimi [read: copy-me] people,” which involved wearing a colorful knitted outfit and dancing randomly waving a “ceremonial sampling wand” to a repetitive, sample-looped piece of music. One person I talked to complained that this performance was just thrown together from some crap they already had on this bus, which I thought was sort of the point.

The Piratbyrån performance brought to a close the first day of the festival.

The first talk was by a woman named Eleonora Oreggia. She has an idea for something she calls “Virtual Entity” which would be a universal, shared, collaborative metadata system for files. She wanted the system to be decentralized, automatically updating to take into account new revisions of the file, and allowing for people to comment on it. She gave an example of the problems with current, static metadata systems: if she uploads an early version of an artwork, without filling in all the metadata, and somebody downloads that file, then later when she finished the file and fills out the rest of the metadata, then anyone who downloaded the file earlier would have bad, incomplete/out of date metadata.

I’m not sure I fully understood everything that she was proposing. Much of her vocabulary seemed strange to my ears, she talked about metadata being the “soul” of a file, mapping the relations between files as the “DNA of the files”, and proposed calling the segment of the metadata containing the initial creation information “the kernel” (after the presentation, I suggested she choose another word, since “kernel” already has a pretty well-established meaning in the computer world).

It’s kind of a cool idea, and there are a lot of problems with current metadata systems. But it seemed more like a thought-experiment than a real project to me; I don’t think she understood just how freaking impossible her system would be to implement. For it to really work the way she imagined, you’d either have to add network-aware code to every content-authoring and editing program in the world, or somehow convince people to go to your website and manually update data all the time. Not to mention the requirement for it to be decentralized would require a whole bunch of different servers, or some sort of peer-to-peer component on people’s computers. Even currently popular metadata systems are a mess of different, incompatible formats, so I don’t see how you’d get people to standardize on yours.

She had some interesting ideas about authorship, “What you create does not belong to you,” which is not an unheard-of position. I think you can make strong case that artistic creations somehow belong to all of humanity. Should da Vinci have been allowed to destroy the Mona Lisa if he’d wanted to?

At the end of the presentation, she had sort of a collaborative exercise where she wanted us to think of examples of various types of data. She proposed that all data be “divisible in four substances” she tentatively identified as TEXT, AUDIO, IMAGE, VIDEO. This grouping seemed kind of problematic to me. “Where does a compiled binary file fit?”, I asked. Somebody else wanted to know whether MIDI instructions were text or audio. Is a PDF file text, or image? What about archives that contain many different types of data? What about steganography?

One guy noted that ultimately, data is just data, and maybe you should just group everything into Ones or Zeros. In any case, I wasn’t really sure what the point of the taxonomy exercise was. If you can play it with a video player, it’s a video file; if you can edit it with a text editor, it’s text; if you can execute it, it’s an application.

The next talk was by a Dutch woman named Rosa Menkman who creates glitch-art, mostly video. I thought her presentation was pretty cool. She showed a Mario 1 speedrun video, which is a pretty vivid example of people who make extensive use of glitches: jumping backwards because it shows one less frame, double-jumping off walls, abusing flaws in the game’s collision-detection to move through walls. I’m not sure if speed-running counts as hacking, but it certainly involves taking a known system and pushing it to its absolute limits.

The slides for her presentation were pretty cool looking. They looked like what happens if you open a MS Word document in a normal text editor (you can try this yourself with notepad), where you get some readable text, but also a lot of gibberish and symbols from misinterpreted formatting information. She opened with the quote, “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it the right way” (I doubt you could do much damage with a chalkline, but the idea of using things in unintended ways is sound) She talked about the “In-Between manifesto” which includes tenets such as “We react to the spirit of our time”, “We celebrate the percieved accident”, “We make meaning through imagination”.

I thought the idea of appreciating and re-interpreting what would normally be seen as negative failures of a system was an interesting one. She did admit, though, that not all glitches are wonderful, some are boring and you just want your computer to work. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a BSOD is just a BSOD.

The final lecture of the night was from Michael Schweiger from the Austrian Community Radio group Radio FRO 105.0. I’ll be honest, I don’t really think that terrestrial community/free/pirate radio is very important, especially in the developed world. Schweiger talked about the use of Community radio as a place for open expression, to give a “voice for the unheard” and “room for experimentation and discursive reflections,” which is all well and good, except that all those purposes can be much better served by the internet. You’re much more likely to reach somebody who’s actually interested in what you have to say by setting up a globally-accessible website than you are by running a low-power FM station.

During the Q&A section after the presentation, I raised this question. People responded with the example of islanders in Tonga who are using community radio to communicate and share information between islands—which is great, I think radio is better than nothing in situations where internet infrastructure is sparse—and reaching people in their cars—which, unless you have a high-power transmitter, means reaching them for ten or fifteen minutes while they’re in your broadcast radius.

Almost all of these stations also do webcasting, and maintain websites with archives of past broadcasts. To me, that’s basically an admission that the terrestrial broadcasting is unnecessary. Actually, to me, the most interesting part of the radio presentation was a demonstration of a cool graphical timeline browsing system on the radio fro website.

I think non-commercial radio has a place for bringing greater exposure to independent musical artists, and stations like NPR usually do very good journalism, but in both cases, the fact that they broadcast on the airwaves is kind of incidental. There’s some cool things happening with TCP/IP-over-HAM radio, but traditional AM/FM radio seems like such a throwback medium to me.

At the end of the night, the Pirate Bay guys showed up with their bus, and took anyone who was interested on a rambling tour around Ljubljana. The driver stopped at any local city bus stops we passed, and we tried to entice any local Ljubljanians waiting there into boarding the bus. A few of the bolder Slovenian teens actually did take us up on the offer and rode along for a while. “I feel like I’m living in a cartoon,” one of them commented. My camera was still misbehaving, so many of my best shots were destroyed, or at least that’s the excuse I’m going to use for the generally low quality of the photographs from our bus tour. I also took a grainy, low-bitrate video that lets you hear the strange, repetitive circus music and sort of get a feel for the atmosphere on the bus:

Download Link

The bus also featured a lot of post-it notes and painted phrases like:
“Home Killing Is Taping Industry Music”
“Eye Ball the Media”
“401: Solutionartemporary.com”
“S23M Homepage: Under Construction”

After the ride on the Pirate Bay Bus, I headed over to an American ex-pat’s house to watch the US election results.

The presenter is Johannes Grenzfurthener (who wears a literal black hat) from the Austrian group Monochrom. He describes the nine members of Monochrom as, “electrotechnicians and designers and linguists and philosophers”. Monochrom started in the late 1980s on the FidoNet BBS, then later published a sort of print fanzine/yearbook about “technology, politics, art crap, whatever we thought would be interesting,” and later expanded into a variety of other formats: robots, short films, t-shirts (“I was a copyright violation in a former life”), musicals (“We really did a musical  about computer programs who check the credit rate of an Austrian criminal”).

They also function as collectors and archivists of “late capitalist” culture. They collect typos: “timeslut,” “what the duck?” “charmobyl,” “censorshop,” “Isreal,” “landlard,” “congratulatinos,” “border feces,” “Untied States,” “pythong,” “the merciful goofness of the Lord,” “In god condition,”. They collect “bad restaurant art”, strange phrases overhead while walking down the street, and “applied office arts” otherwise known as “office doodles”. My favorite was the flowchart/sketch “Files–>Data–>”

Additionally they do real life pranks and games, setting up a “great firewall of China” littered with the “heads” of Chinese dissidents in front of the Googleplex in San Francisco. They held a “Nazi petting zoo” (a petting zoo where people could pet Nazis, not a petting zoo run by Nazis) so that Austrians “can finally embrace history and hug the Nazis.” They organized a session of “massively multiplayer Thumbwrestling,” experimenting with different network topologies for the game.

In San Francisco, they organized an “Arse Electronica” festival (a play on Ars Electronica) devoted to technology in the adult industry and published an anthology “pr0novation: pornography and technological innovation”. This is not as goofy as it sounds: porn has been at the leading edge of innovation in home video recorders, digital photography, and of course, porn was the first “killer app” for the internet (only within the last couple years have social networking sites overtaken porn sites in leading overall web traffic—when someone creates a porn/social networking site [besides myspace], it will probably kill the internet).

The title and main topic of the presentation was “The Innermost Unifier: The Corporate Anthem” and he transitioned to this subject via a pretty amazing sock-puppet show summarizing their view of the way corporate culture has evolved over the years. Then, Grenzfurthener presented a variety of internal corporate loyalty anthems (part of a large archive he is amassing). He sang along enthusiastically, enjoining the audience to accompany him.

The funniest part to me was his presentation of the 1940s IBM anthem, “Ever Onward IBM” complete with lyrics thanking Thomas J Watson for his creation of such a wonderful company to work for. 1940s IBM was presented as the prototype of the old-style, hierarchical corporation. This was pretty hilarious to me, because, of course, it’s Thomas J Watson’s money that’s paying for me to travel around the world hanging out with Austrian art-philosophy-hackers. I was perhaps the only person in the room able to un-ironically join in a hymn praising old man Watson for his glorious vision. But hey, what the hell, “IBM supports Linux 100%” right?

Another of the corporate anthems with personal resonance belonged to the Dutch firm Phillips. Earlier this year, I visited Eindhoven, birthplace of Phillips and visited their first lightbulb factory there. Demonstrating the evolution of corporate songs over the years, the Phillips anthem from the 1980s has no lyrics about serving, or about thanking the wise bosses, but only about feeling good working for the company.

Although Herr Grenzfurthener barely touched on coding, and only obliquely on technology, I think his was in many ways the most hackerish of any of the presentations. He displayed an astonishing breadth of interests and ideas, and Monochrom clearly has an exceptionally firm grasp on the hacker concept of “ha ha only serious”.

The next day, Saturday. Grenzfurthener and his Monochrom compatriot, Günter, led the festival participants in the creation and deployment of a “sculpture mob,” hastily constructed DIY public art. First, we had a training session where groups of three were given five minutes to construct a sculpture from a pile of junk wood using hammers and nails. Then one of the observers was appointed “art critic” and proceeded to critique the creation. My group produced a flimsy rocket ship-like piece that half-collapsed when we attempted to move it. One of the observers, a Frenchman, tapped into a deep well of snooty French art critic stereotypes (think this guy on the LA NPR station) and pronounced our piece a phallic (phallic in the art world being anything that is longer than it is wide) tribute to the fledgling Indian space program.

After the training session, we retrieved from Kiberpipa some pre-assembled wooden roadblock pieces (“The New Kids on the Roadblock,” as the piece was titled) and set out to find an appropriate location to deposit them in Ljubljana. First, we tried to leave them in front of the rather-unimpressive (but surprisingly nudity-friendly) Slovenian Parliament building, but a security guard came out and yelled at us, “Hey, this is the Parliament!” so we feigned ignorance and moved on.

Somebody suggested leaving them in front of the US embassy, but the consensus was that a) nobody goes to the US embassy in Slovenia so no one would see them, and b) we were liable to find ourselves accused of terrorism.

Finally, for maximum attention, it was decided to leave them in the middle of the central square in Ljubljana, Prešerc. We dropped off the payload and then dispersed in true flash mob fashion. People did seem to notice the new wooden objects, and little children especially enjoyed climbing and playing on them. They remained in place for all of Saturday, at least. We dropped them off in the early afternoon, and they were still there when I passed by Prešerc late in the evening. By Sunday around noon, however, they had been removed. Such is the transitory nature of sculpture mobs.

Rather notably, Presen Square (“Prešerc”) is dedicated to France Persen, Slovenia’s greatest poet. There’s a giant statue of him on one side of the square. Any country that erects heroic statues of poets instead of generals is ok in my book.

A guy named Paule Ečimović gave a talk about “Hacked Varieties of the Pong Computer Video Game Experience,” which was really cool. He showed the original version of pong, some of the later ports, and then some modern “hacked” versions, including my personal favorite, Plasma Pong. It used to be hosted here, before the author was sued by the withered husk of Atari (who somehow still have a legal department?), but you can still download it here and I highly recommend it. You’ll need a medium-decent computer though, Plasma Pong re-imagines the game of pong if it were played on a colorful, fluid field of plasma. It incorporates a pretty heavy-duty fluid dynamics model and fancy graphical effects.

I really liked this talk because it was one of the techiest/most hackerish of the presentations. Paule is a true old-school computer nerd. He’s Slovenian originally, but has lived and worked in the Bay Area in the US for many years. Later at the conference, we talked for a while. I told him about the electromechanical pong rig, which he hadn’t heard about, and is, as far as I’m concerned, the definitive pong hack (at least until somebody makes a pong game using actual plasma). We also talked about the Clock of the Long Now, which I think is one of the coolest projects ever. I kind of want to work for the Long Now Foundation.

Andraž Sraka talked about Kiberpipa.net, an attempt to build a free, self-contained wireless network in Ljubljana using ad-hoc mesh networking and packet radio technologies. This is very similar to what the freifunk.net group is doing in Berlin, the Kiberpipa people are actually using some software developed by freifunk. The tone of the presentation was actually sort of melancholy. According to Sraka, the group had all the hardware, bandwidth and technical expertise they could need, but what they really lacked was interested participants. He said their network had stopped growing, and it was tough to find people interested in helping out or even willing to let people install an access point for them. Apparently high-speed internet service in Slovenia is very cheap and widely available, so many people don’t see the need for a free wifi network.

My own talk was mostly just an explanation of who I am, what the Watson Fellowship is, a recap of my travels to date, and a few of my armchair sociology observations about the different groups of people I’ve met. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve already been exposed to a much more detailed version of everything I covered in my talk. If you’re a true Brendan McCollam Completist (please seek help now) the slides from my talk are available here, and the video of my presentation is supposed to be up on the Kiberpipia site at some point. I would appreciate critiques/suggestions on presenting style. I have to give a much more involved, formal version of this talk next year when I return from the Watson.

Tuesday evening was a round table discussion of “The Hacker Ethic” as a concluding event of the festival. I had planned on simply observing, but found myself sucked into participating. I also found myself reluctantly playing the role of the voice of geekdom defending the concept of the “hack” from co-option by the artists. There’s video of the discussion here. I thought I did a medium-alright job of laying out my views, but I probably could’ve done better. There was a point where somebody raised the question of “does a hack need to be hard in order to count as a real hack?” and I was pretty emphatic that it does, but most other people seemed to disagree with me. On further reflection, I think what I really meant is that a true hack needs to be non-trivial. The difference between “non-trivial” and “hard” is perhaps a subtle one, and I did a rather poor job of communicating this distinction during the round table.

Another random fun fact about Slovenia. Despite how much I like this city/country, I could never, ever live here. The “normal” working hours for Slovenian people are from 7 am to 3 pm. Absolutely brutal for a nightowl like myself. Since joining the EU, some companies are now working “European hours” of 9 to 5, but it’s still an exception to the rule.