Protocol Berg v2: Ann Brody, Costanza Gallo - Goodbye Cypherpunk values Adapting to the new world

Hello. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here for this talk. Uh so the title was already introduced. Uh so we will just introduce ourselves.

So my name is Anne Brody. I have a PhD in communication studies and my background is in anthropology. Um, I study decentralized governance and Dows. And my name is Costansa. I have a master degree in low anthropology and society.

And I've been working in crypto since forever advising more than 10 projects. So, thank you so much for being here and for working with us with what anthropologist do in cryptos. Okay. So this presentation essentially is about rethinking cyberpunk values because you know the world has changed and so must we. But before we actually delve into what that means, let's first begin by setting some context on who were the cyber punks.

Now I recognize that maybe many of you here are already seasoned cyber punks and uh you've seen Uh so you know this explanation might be redundant but for the newcomers I just want to take a chance and explain. So the cyber punks were activists who believed that privacy was a fundamental right where and in an increasingly digital world uh privacy was central for political freedom and personal autonomy which could be achieved through the means of cryptography as a form of direct action. So activism through technology instead of relying solely on legal or political systems, cyber punks sought to build technological solutions that would secure privacy by design. And one of the earliest cyberpunk people uh from the states was Eric Hughes and he wrote an important document called a cyberpunks manifesto uh which was basically a concise declaration of principles where individuals must use cryptography to secure their privacy because essentially no one else will. So there were these ideas and I directly quote uh it was stated privacy is necessary for any for an open society in an electronic age and that people cannot depend on governments for their protection of privacy and also ideas like cyber punks write code and you know quote we know that someone has to write software to defend privacy and we are going to write it.

Um so in in these sort of ideas code becomes a moral act. It's a mode of resistance and a medium of autonomy. So it becomes both the shield and sword in this digital terrain. That's sort of like how the imaginary uh works. But in today's world this ethic of protection and agency has evolved.

So while code remains crucial, uh what I'm personally seeing with my anthropological eyes is cyberpunk culture and the idea of cyberpunk is now um expanding beyond uh just coders and programmers and devs. Now we have community builders, writers, poets, artists, uh archavists and educators. um all those who craft the cultural, symbolic and infrastructural commons of our digital future are sort of coming together up and rising. So there is an expansion of sorts going on and we must remember that as we forge a new path uh we we work not only through the means of code like before but also narratives, norms and social networks. So this being said, um it is important to note that the cyberpunk manifesto coming from 1993 didn't happen in a vacuum.

Like any cultural movements, it happened in the context of a broader shift of a broader political shift of what was happening in the world. So what was happening in the world on the wider political scene? Many things were changing back then. Um and especially in the years that led to 1993 um with the excuse of cold war for example um the government were tightening their surveillance. Um during cold war it got so insane that to the point that crypto cryptographic technologies were primarily developed and controlled by government agencies like the NSA and cryptography was actually classified as ammunition like a nuclear bomb.

Um then for example even the private sector was developing. So Oracle the big database company was founded and its first customer was the CIA. So on the one hand internet was expanding and more people were going online and were um exchanging information. On the other hand um western governments started building back doors and so of course there was this growing concern over surveillance control of cryptographic technologies. But then on the side of that there was also thirst for for freedom, anger for freedom.

So while the cyber punks were writing code to defend our privacy and to defend our freedom of informations, building digital tools and writing code. There were activists that were reclaiming physical spaces as temporary zones of freedoms like the Berlin technoc collapse in the postwar era. So both forms of resistance emerged when the state was overreaching and the objective was the same. The more governments were tightening their control, the more individuals were seeking to expand their freedom with experimentations and autonomy. Now it is important to note that while the cyber punk movement specifically emerged within the western context um within the US as a direct response to increasing digital surveillance.

The desire for freedom and desire for autonomy is not restricted to cyberpunk only. It's not restricted to western societies only. So while the authors of the cyberpunk manifestos are from the US, the bottom up the grassroots demand for freedom is not restricted to a singular culture or uh technological tradition. So for example, the Arab Spring in 2010, it was um a broader global demand for freedom and resistance against oppressive surveillance and censorship. It is not frame as cyber panks but it share similar ideas challenging centralized control empowering individual voices through digital tools like social media creating spaces of freedom and experimentation and indeed the bell of censorship fell.

Internal service providers shut down. mass surveillance over communication brought so many people in jail. Um yeah, the Arab Spring was fundamentally driven by local histories, contest and grassroot aspirations reflecting the universal yet distinctly local nature of those principles. And history shows that governments everywhere in Egypt, in Syria, in the US, in Germany, in Russia, they all employ the same tool to shut down criticism. So why is it important?

It is important because this the world has changed a lot since 1993. And so we should how? Yes. So we should accept that technology, the technology we're building here is political. It was political in 1993.

It was political in 2009 when Fatashi launched Bitcoin. Technology is political as Surveillance technology gives power to centralized governments. Cyberpunk like technology empowers people. Giving tools to people to organize a protest to coordinate and rise against centralized powers is political. Web three is political.

We've been seeing with the talks before and we need to admit that because whether we admit that or not, if we don't own that, political parties will own it. And we've been seeing it in the past 12 months where political parties all over the world have been running on a crypto platform and they have been appropriating this because we didn't. So in 1993 very few people were online. Um in 1990 only 1% of the world population was online. Today more than 70% of the world population is online.

Um for most people like for me there is no distinction between online and offline and also while the manifesto was deeply rooted in US culture internet is borderless and information should be free to flow. So when we talk about cyberpunk in the new world order, it has to be grounded online and offline and statements like cryptography will inelooably spread all over the globe have a deeper and broader meaning today. So we must start from the assumption that freedom and privacy cannot be selectively applied to some and denied to others. is cyberpunk tech must be available for everyone or otherwise it is not cyberpunk and the first step is to ground cyberpunk in goodness is to make it available to everyone. So it should be a technology that it is available to everyone and to do so we need to put the humanity back at the center.

So in practical terms because this is very philosophical it means that when we say that it is borderless it should actually be borderless it should not be transferring people based on the IP addresses so no matter whether you're in Toronto you're in Berlin you're in Milan in Ramala in Arabia Bangkok a chance of resistant network must ignore firewalls it must ignore IP bounds and borders either all have freedom or all of us do and this is of course extremely scary to centralized governments. Um they act on fear. Fear is universal for every governments all all around the globe. So they regulate based on fear, imposing restrictions on who can use the code, making artificial borders, saying that some IP addresses cannot use it or if you interacted with some IP address, then you're prevented from using it. And this is what they do.

They prevent people from using software based on IP addresses. the the platform, the infrastructure that we use to build our code if we give it to everyone indiscriminately. Think about GitHub. Um, they can cut access to internet service providers if they want to silence us when everything else fails. They can refuse to give us access to the hardware that we need to build the technology.

And when everything else fails, they just go around and harass people. So resistance now means infrastructure defense, internet service providers, decentralized G hosting, decentralized supply chain because the pressure is no longer abstract. It is very operational and it is very grounded in offline. Then there is another point because the most dangerous enemy is the one that pretends to be your friend. And cyberpunk in the new world order means most of all looking in the mirror and seeing ourself.

And asking if the technology that we're building is truly a technology for everyone. And I don't mean like, oh, is a D5 protocol so complex that it requires a PhD? No, it's fine. Um it means asking can the technology we are building today be used by an evil corporation like Palanteer to actually implement surveillance? Can it be used by governments to restrict our freedoms?

That happens because sometimes the road to hell is paved by good intentions. Um sometimes it happens because there is a trade-off that we don't see. And sometimes because people are playing into the wannabe cyberpunk tech uh that seems to be cyber punk at first but is actually a tool for control. So here I would like to call for the colonizing cyberpunk and grounding it into goodness. So by asking the question is what we're building actually humane?

Is what we're building inviting to people? Is it is it good? Because being good is about care and care it is political. Okay. So now I'm going to take a more uh philosophical sort of uh psy psychoanalytical approach here.

Uh so what is the way forward? So we believe that we must go from fear to care. The older cyberpunk generation was characterized by fear, shame, and vulnerability. In this respect, we must rethink the relationship of cyberpunk values from this stance. The emotional substrate of cyberpunk, despite its technical rationalism, is affectively shaped shaped by shame, paranoia, and fear.

Shame in particular plays a central yet disavowed role. The shame of being seen, the shame of being known, the shame of exposure. Shame is fundamentally an individualizing and narcissistic emotion. It centers the self as a failed or contaminated object and in doing so isolates rather than connects. The cyber punk reacts to shame by retreating into technical mastery, encrypting everything, trusting no one.

It is a fantasy of purity and control. A dream of self-s sovereign subject who never has to depend, reveal or negotiate. But this dream leaves little space for cooperation, solidarity or repair. When privacy is grounded in shame, the ideal uh becomes to disappear, not to relate. Trust is seen as a bug, not a feature.

Dependency becomes weakness. Vulnerability becomes a flaw. What emerges is a social ethic of isolation masked as liberation. So what can we do? So it starts with you.

We must move from shamed driven privacy to affect aware infrastructures where protection is not merely about defense but about sustaining the messy collective and ongoing work of being together. One way we can approach this shift is through uh framing cryptographic instruments not as a means of control but as mediums of care. Means through which we cultivate, protect and co-create more just and durable forms of collective life. I emphasize the word care here quite deliberately because it signals a return to the deeper currents of the hacker ethic. Not merely its libertarian defiance, but more of its artisal devotion to the craft of making its joy in tinkering, in refining, in building with care for the future.

To care in this context is to resist the extractive logics that have come to dominate much of web 3 discourse. It is to affirm that the value of a system lies not solely in its scalability or market fit, but in its capacity to support lived situated forms of freedom. The aesthetic and effective dimensions of making pleasure, beauty, even play must be reinstated as political acts. And in this respect we can draw from the hacker tradition not solely as a practice of subversion but as a philosophy of worldmaking one in which craft is a form of ethical inquiry. Hacking in the sense is not merely the disruption of systems but their imaginative reconfiguration.

A mode of engaging with complexity through both precision and playfulness. I think we should. We're not done yet. There's more. There is more.

The last slide, but thank you. But thank you. And so this is where I see the role of science fiction really coming into play. Um, so I'm a huge book nerd and there is a really great book by a media uh scholar named Finn Bruntton who talks about the earliest subcultural visions around digital cash and the earliest experiments that preceded bitcoins. uh basically the experiments and projects that aimed to recreate features of fiat in digital form and which helped make Bitcoin successful essentially.

And so Breton reveals how technological utopians and political radicals created experimental money to bring about their visions of the future and how these experiments were deeply rooted in science fiction literature essentially which is a genre as you know that speculates about the future in ways that are both visionary and cautionaries. And so these stories didn't just entertain, they shaped a political and technological imagination. They envisioned worlds where cryptography, anonymity, and decentralized technologies could resist authoritarian uh control and safeguard individual freedom. But again, today we stand at a very different crossroads. The world that birthed the early cyberpunk ideals has shifted dramatically.

Our political and technological landscape has transformed. Surveillance capitalism has become more pervasive. AIdriven predictive control grows and our digital environments are increasingly dominated by a few massive players. The old fights over privacy and cryptography are now tangled with also climate crisis, digital authoritarianism, new forms of economic inequality and struggles over identity and so on. So why do I bring up science fiction?

Because the future demands new stories to shape it. Privacy and freedom must be understood as relational, not something one simply possesses, but something that emerges within a web of social, technological, and institutional relationships. It is about creating the conditions in which entire communities um can thrive. So when privacy is violated, it's not just an individual harm. It is a disruption to the networks of trust, care, mutuality that allow for resistance, kinship, and collective survival in the first place.

At a fun level, at a fundamental level, one might say, as Castanza said earlier, either we all have privacy or no one truly does. Without a shared commitment to collective liberation, any notion of freedom remains partial and precarious. In this sense, liberation is not merely a personal condition but a relational and mutual one. One where um so in this case there is no liberation for me unless there is liberation for us. And what I'm really trying to say is we need to make space for new grammarss of freedom which is rooted in care, kinship and interconnection.

So instead of envisioning a single definitive manifesto such as the Eric Hughes foundational text from 1993, we might embrace a more pluralistic approach. Let the original manifesto serve as a point of inspiration, not prescription. Go forth and craft your own punk ethos. Remix it, reimagine it, rewrite it. This is not a time for orthodoxy, but for many visions, which is to say, let's not just be consumers, let's be creators.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. If you'd like to continue this conversation, we'll be around. Otherwise, you can find us on X on X.

Thank you so much. That was really great. I wasn't prepared for that. Real truth bombs in there. We have time for some questions.

Not much, but some. Uh first one is uh how to make the tech available to everyone when we do not even own the infrastructure to run the internet. Can I take this one? Yeah, go. That's the question.

That's the I mean that's the most important question because um owning the internet infrastructure is actually um it gets everything from the connection to the hardware to the means of production for the hardware. Um and when a government wants to transfer you and everything else is failing what they do is just they cut off the ISP. So on one hand I would like to say that actually there is a very cool example I want to say I want to use um and it's an example where the community um came up and rose to activating um and give made internet available um and it happened in Gaza um as you know with the current war um what happens is that um the Israel shut off the internet service providers to prevent people from communicating Um, so I've seen um a lot of movements um buying the EIM cards from well from Egypt um that had enough coverage to also cover Gaza and so donating them to people that were on the ground. So when we don't own the technology and we don't own the internet infrastructure is a very big problem and it's something that I really would like to change. In the meantime the community and the character community of helping one another um is something that in that instance help it a little bit.

Thank you. Uh next question. Can you elaborate on the cyber bank? Yeah. Uh this is what I say.

So I'll take this one as well. Um what I've been seeing very often is that many technologies that are claiming to be cyberpunk um are actually enforcing IP addresses to get access are actually enforcing borders that should not be there on the claim that we know better. um when actually the whole idea is that um I don't remember the quote exactly but the code is going to be available and you cannot stop it. That's very simple. is not claiming or this is cyberpunk and then just claiming it just because it's cool to say today it's good marketing is good branding is actually making code and making it available without um yeah without using it as a branding.

Thanks. Uh that's all we have time for today. Thanks for dropping all these truth bombs and live by what these young ladies were saying. uh to the Vigron.