Radicalizing hackers and hackerizing radicals

(mostly redacted) intros

• hunch it's exausting to try to radicalize libertariants
• eff/fopf can't hire everyone, how can we create and
• important to not fetishize issue, cause
• how to talk to young people
• briding worlds
• do we hire people from industry or hackerized radicals?

1. discussion#

• assumption: easier to bring technical skills to radical people, but we

should leave open door to everyone

• hiring from mainstream (to work on securedrop). have they become

politicized

• common story: people followed corporate path and felt aimless and

wanted something more

• one hire brought a lot of best practices from "professional" world

into hacker community, which was very useful

• [redacted] works at corporate startup w/ good values. lots of

employees from places like palantir, google

• digression: what is palantir? they aggregate law enforcement and

intelligence data across agencies and make them easily queryable

• there are lots of people with solid values
• what does one get from working at a corporation to use it to bring

stuff back to activist spaces?

• do we give people the tools they need to translate that knowledge?
• do we give people a forum for sharing what they learned?
• big detractor: people don't want the paycut
• how do we deal with that?
• why do people work? not just $$$
• a lot of it is relationships
• working in non-heirarchical spaces is also rewarding
• family and solidarity are rewarding
• if well-intentioned programmers want to become radicalized, what do we

point them to?

• what organization can sustain them?
• if they can only volunteer, what can they do?
• supporting people with benefits (like health care!) reallly makes a

difference

• if we do have a non-profit that can support people, benefits are

really important

• obamacare, universal basic income
• there's a level of trauma in terms of actually acquiring the skills
• often information is taught in really intimidating ways
• even non-profit w/ good benefits couldn't sustain [x] living in bay area
• not possible to make changes of scale needed to confront problems
• got tired of pushing for what was needed and what could actually be done
• how to weaponinze spare time of well-intentioned programmers?
• onboarding infra needs to be incredibly solid
• could we standardize on how to plug people in?
• how can we efficiently funnel people into existing projects?
• at day job, we reorganized incredibly frequently
• non-profits don't tend be able to move this way. not "agile" etc...
• can we use timeboxes and sprints to effectively use corporate

coders' time?

• can we leverage time of people with partial time off?
• in sum: can we come up with smaller chunks of work to do?
• what makes this work attractive?
• can't compete on material benefits
• can compete on social, emotional support
• social-justice driven spaces can heal and meet needs that companies

can't meet

• there is *huge* demand for this
• case study: NYC-based learning collective for activist programmers
• grew out of research needs of housing campaigns, etc.
• lasted over 2 years (a lot in activist time)
• people who are still programmers are ones who learned corporate stuff
• in corporate places we learned corporate tools, not activist ones
• activist things are smaller, but to make internet we need (eg:

replace google docs), it's big

• can we scale our activist networks to make such big tools? can we

use our corporate skills to make smaller tools?

• how can we find meaningful (non-corporate) coding work for activists

before they fall out of the lloop?

• how can we divide up really big infra projects into smaller chunks

of work suitable for activist coders (or corporate recruits) to tackle in their spare time?

• centralizing the on-boarding
• effective harnessing of volunteer work
• getting peeps interested is easy, keeping them engaged is hard
• civic tech meetups are a great place that keep people's energy, but

they aren't politicized

• can we make the rad equivalent of civic tech meetups?
• is there a bait and switch move you could do?
• pose as civic tech meetup but secretly be an anarchist tech meetup?
• we don't make time to strategize deeply, work extendedly on retreats
• on being reactionary
• opinion: anarchism == reactionary to material captialism that stole

everyone's culture

• we can't beat google. we can parasitize their space, make plugins

that work on top of them and counter what they do

• we shouldn't try to replace FB, etc. with our own social network,

b/c reinforces consumerist/passive position of users

• hot take: civ take is just neoliberalism: privatize the public good
• coopts well-intentioned programmer's time and puts it toward

counterproductive means

• corporate tech does some things more efficiently, can we structure

software dev in ways that learn from this?

• non-profit industrial complex problems
• do they have a generally liberalizing effect on radicals?
• doe they effectively mine the more hard skills of hackers?
• do they steer energy toward more pedestrian concerns?
• could we intervene?
• established non-profits gonna creep on a self-driven project
• way to think about non-profits and funding: you are just taking

excess left-over wealth

• great example: robin hood foundation -- have good rep, but for every

dollar they spend, they get tax break, and focus/language is on "monetization" (not our structure)

• instead: seek support from/for each other. raise $ to pay for small

leaves of abscence

• seek to avod beiung permanently beholded to anything/anyone
• on bait & switch: assumes an "us v. them" frame
• have lots of "non-political" friends. scary to be asked to "come

over to our side & fight the man."

• how can we work together toward particular goals?
• how can we meet people where they are at?
• if we put people in box of "them" it will be harder to work with them.
• "build or buy?"
• bait & switch / bite-size chunks
• we should do more meetups.
• palantir was a bad name:

1. main takeaways#

• professional bite-sized onboarding infrastructure
• does bait & switch work?
• DIY or buy?