For quite a while now my years end with a visit at the CCC’s annual congress, the Chaos Communication Congress which had its 30th instance this time. The 30th Chaos Communication Congress (30C3) was the first one post-Snowden and it was bigger than ever before with between 8000 and 9000 guests. And not only attendance grew but obviously the media was paying close attention to the whole shebang: How would the hacker community react to the changed landscape?

The “lineup”, the list of speakers, was basically a who is who of the cypherpunk and crypto scenes combining well established security researchers with (in)famous hackers and activists. A perfect situation to deal with the impact that the Snowden leaks have had on the Internet and specifically this subculture of people living in the digital sphere. And considering how many talks had the phrase “after Snowden” in its title or subtitle the conference (and scene) did aim at dealing with the big existential turmoil the last year has brought with it.

The conference itself was a blast with a density of brilliant people in one building that I have hardly every seen anywhere, with a level professionalism by the organization that was second to none and a very colorful and open vibe throughout the whole venue. The program managed to cover the many of the different facets of the subculture spanning from makers over security people to artists bringing people of somewhat different backgrounds together. “External” experts (for example from the political sphere) were invited to talk in order to broaden the focus even more. And the party was intense.

Now it is very important to understand the situation that the scene is in: Snowden’s leaks have basically proven every lunatic conspiracy theory about surveillance to be true. Algorithms and technologies believed to be a working protection against secret services and their attention melted away like ice in the summer sun. The fundamental uniting beliefs of the hacker subculture were no longer valid: Hackers are not smarter than the NSA workers, the government does actually employ competent people (and provides them with the resources to get some work done) and technology will not save us. The whole hackers as high priests and superheroes of the digital age died faced with the reality of secret services with limitless resources. How do you react to that?

The 30C3 did by looking back: Looking back at “this year in cryptography”, looking back at Snowden leaks detailing the catalogue of NSA toys from 2008, looking back at the language of politicians and security people. Generally looking back. Which is not a bad thing. The leaks are still neither fully public nor really understood. And it takes a while to get over the shock of the whole ideology being destroyed by an emotionless reality. The scene needed some time to deal with the fall from tech-god in a digital universe to being just another object of total surveillance.

But when the leaks hit, the hackers and security researchers did not get the luxury of going away for a year to find their bearings. The media and the public demanded answers, demanded to have people knowing their shit explain what was going on. There was no time for contemplation but only a race to try to understand and explain the newest leaks before the next one would hit.

The whole scene got caught in the media cycle that Greenwald, Applebaum and the media they worked together with kept spinning. But obviously not out of malice but out of an understanding for how media works: Instead of just dumping the whole mess in the public at once they tried to keep the scandal going, tried to force the public (and as a consequence politicians) to address the issue. And Der Spiegel, the Guardian, Jacob Applebaum and many many others have shoved this scandal into the public perception week after week after week. Trying to generate the amount of outrage that they feel (rightfully) it should generate.

Sadly the road to hell is paved with good intentions and we as a subculture or scene or whatever you want to call it got fully caught in the escalating hype/shock cycle. Last week we were all fucked because our algorithms are broken. This week we are fucked because our hardware is full of back doors. Next week we are even more fucked because whatever. And we nod at each other knowing just how fucked we are. If the public only understood, right?

During the conference there was an interesting discussion between German journalists about whether a journalist can be or should be or is allowed to be an activist. And while the dogma might say that journalists need to be neutral and stay out of being part of the story in an activist kind of way we all know that in reality there is no binary separation between journalists and activists. That in reality it is a continuum between these two extremes where everybody decides for each situation where he or she falls in that specific context.

But while we tend to use these perceptions to talk about journalists and their interactions with us and the world we forget that we ourselves to obviously fall in that same continuum and that people we only perceive as activists or hackers can in this context fall very far into the spectrum of journalist. And the job of a journalist (as well as the commitments, restrictions and obligations) differs from the work that an activist or hacker would do to help a subculture find its bearings.

Because yes, the old modus operandi no longer works. Not even a little. Our whole shtick of taking a usually technical system, analyzing it, poking holes in it and building a proof of concept does not help us anymore. And that is hard to get used to because it has worked to well in the past. It’s what we are familiar with, it’s what we know and what has given us our biggest success stories. And now it’s broken.

And that is probably the most dramatic thing about the post-Snowden area: The people we turn to for solutions have not yet found a new way to think and speak. They go through the NSA toy catalogue and “Blow our fucking minds” (quote Applebaum). And they do. And they’ll do next week. Because that’s how we’ve always done it.

This keeps us hooked on shock. As I wrote on Dec. 30th:

We're like addicts of horror. Trying to get bigger and bigger kicks from nastier and nastier NSA stories. We are drunk from it. #30c3 — Jürgen Geuter (@tante) December 30, 2013

Digesting these Shocks takes time but we don’t take it: We are shocked, we despair and before we start thinking, the next, even bigger, leak comes. Rinse and repeat.

Interestingly the common shock experience helps unite people, brings them together. So they can feel fucked together. And explain to each other actually how fucked we are. But that’s all it does. It keeps us all together in a pit of self-pity and horror.

In 1996 the US military released a new doctrine called “rapid dominance” that is better known as “Shock and Awe“. Shock and Awe is summarized as

the use of overwhelming power, dominant battlefield awareness, dominant maneuvers, and spectacular displays of force to paralyze an adversary’s perception of the battlefield and destroy its will to fight

Sounds familiar? That is exactly the narrative we are building by describing just how omnipotent the NSA is on a technical level. We as the supposed NSA opponents are basically doing the NSA PR work without being paid for it. We tell anyone listening how broken everything is. How far the NSA reaches. How little we can do. And by sticking to the technical level we do not offer ourselves any way out. Because technically there really is none when faced with an organization with almost limitless resources.

But not everything at the 30C3 was backwards oriented. I’ve seen more than one rallying call to “build a new internet”. And here we are doing something very dangerous that we have already seen spread in Germany: We are creating the arguments for a balkanized Internet, for national or regional “Internets”. That is not what we want and that is not what we mean but our words can be used in that way.

When we say that for example Europe needs their own IT stack because everything is either bugged by the US or China (or both) what does that mean? For politics its simple: They take a bunch of money and throw it at big European companies and research institutes. Siemens and Infineon and Fraunhofer are going to love it. But will they really build open infrastructure? Will the European governments really decide not to want backdoors for themselves? And if it’s all open and transparent why shouldn’t the NSA or whoever just attack that new standard? Having one global standard for communication is what made the Internet the wonderful thing it is and I don’t see how the Euro-Computer using the Euro-Software-Stack to communicate is really in any way a better solution.

“It’s all broken so let’s build a new one” is the first approach of an engineer faced with a broken clusterfuck of tech. But it’s not the solution here. Because our problem isn’t technical. It’s political and social. But we keep using the wrong tools. Because if cryptography doesn’t work your are just not using enough of it, right?

The 30C3 was a wonderful event full of brilliant people. I really enjoyed being one of the stupidest people in any room because basically every discussion and dialogue was inspiring. And I don’t know of any other event that has this quality. But it has also shown how much we as a scene need to exit the shock cycle and start developing new utopias. How we have to rethink terms and phrases whose interpretation we hold with religious zeal. How we have to understand that surveillance is not the enemy but the symptom of a global society being so afraid of the world that it sacrifices anything to anyone promising a certain level of control.

And that is where we stumble: Because where politicians promise control by surveillance and the force of law we try to promise the same thing by technology indistinguishable from magic. We follow the same narrative that others can sell a lot better than we can. Which is why we don’t manage to convince the public that we’ve got a point. And that’s the todo list for the next year. A todo list that we need new tools for and a new MO. Let’s get to work.

Since this is somewhat 30C3 reviewy I have to recommend a talk so if you only watch one recording (and there are more talks worth your time) please watch “No Neutral Ground in a Burning World” by Quinn Norton and Eleanor Saitta which should have been the keynote:

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