Saving Hacking From the Zaibatsus: A Memoir

The_Gibson, The Doctor, Kirk Strauser, R¥, Alice Rhodes (c0debabe) Wednesday, July 29, 2020: 1300. Your data is not theirs to own. With the advent of centralized social networks in the mid-2000s, all culture became consumed by the giants. Those gi...

The_Gibson, The Doctor, Kirk Strauser, R¥, Alice Rhodes (c0debabe)

Wednesday, July 29, 2020: 1300. Your data is not theirs to own.

With the advent of centralized social networks in the mid-2000s, all culture became consumed by the giants. Those giants then proceeded to sell your information, your privacy, and even our nations. Yet they still trudge on, much like John Perry Barlow's weary giants of flesh and steel, and we do little to stop them.

Your data is not theirs to own.

Three years ago, The_Gibson began an experiment that would become a community that would engage in projects to save our privacy and change the worlds of at least the members of that community. Now this panel hopes to help you spread that change further. In order to save hacking culture and the Internet, we must build new social networks and services that are federated and decentralized, and self-maintain our data rights.

Your data is not theirs to own.

Decentralized and federated networks are the past from which the public Internet sprung forth. These models have started to become viable again as the social media silos have begun to be seen as dangerous to the daily operation of society, and cloud hosting has become inexpensive. These new communities live somewhere between the BBS age and Web 2.0 - modern, nimble, creative, and largely free of undue outside influence due to advanced moderation capabilities and a hard to exploit distributed data model.

The presentation will tell the story of how this team did it - and how you can do it too.