mf - A new Cypherpunk generation

Good morning everybody. I hope uh you all had a as good as a Friday evening as I had. Um I see a very very packed room. I think everybody is still full on in the conference mode. Um my name is Mil.

Uh online I also go as MF. Uh it does not stand for [ __ ] even though you would like to think so. Um what it exactly stands for that's a whole different conversation. Uh I want to warn everybody that this talk is not going to be technical at all. Um if you were expecting something incredibly technical um not this one.

So before I start, I would like to ask who here has ever heard about the term cipher punk? Can you just raise your hands? Okay. So a few people have not. That's great.

Uh even better that all of you have actually already heard about this. It makes sense that uh you know our PR on cipher punkism seems to be working. Um I'd like to start off going back a little bit in the past. Now, if you think about cipher punks and the culture that we know it as today, it went through a lot of different experiences throughout the age of humanity. It didn't just start with the 1993 manifesto on which we'll talk sooner also about just as much already in the 151600s we had initial conversation through John Lockach about what does privacy mean for today's society and eventually that evolved even further with Fukall creating his prison where you're constantly being surveiled and watched and thus creating a mental prison for a lot of people who might not actually be watched but eventually have a constant state of surveillance.

It ends up being a similar kind of a prison that you could expect by being actually watched and thus was very efficient for people to behave under pressure and stress of being watched. This led further into a whole bigger situation as we went throughout the 19th century to the 20th century. We had the first and second world war happening and suddenly after the second world war we had a lot of people who became more aware of their environment let's say so um who here has not heard about George Oral wow you are all very educated I like that so in 1948 George Orwell wrote with his book called 1984 which was kind of an evolution coming throughout the second world war and the beginning of a very prosperous time within the United States or in generally the West. You could argue that suddenly as we had the invention of the fridge, we had the invention of food and a level of safety that now people had enough on top of their mass of pyramid to actually care about their privacy. The other way around as well, the Cold War was just about in its footprints and suddenly people cared more about what was happening to the east.

What did they know? Who did they know? What did they know about you? A first representation of big brother was mentioned in the book 1984 where there's this a singular party not a singular person as at least in the book big brother was never defined to be a specific person that was watching you rather a specific party or environment or authorative being that would constantly surveil whatever you are doing. This image, especially for my Romanian friends in this room, might come a little bit familiar.

Um, this is taken back in the 1960s, if I'm not mistaken, regarding the back then dictator in Romania, and I will probably butcher his name, but Ciu. Um, I'm sure all my Romanian friends definitely know about him. And for those who don't, I really recommend to watch the movie called videogrammers of a revolution, a documentary that goes deeper into this. Um, why is he so relevant and although seemingly happy here do is due to his moving of control of the security tat security was back here in Romania just as much as we had the KGB STAC CRCA in the different parts of the country. Although the security th had a bit of a different let's say reach in 1973 the reach was going so far that journalist called Emil Gorescu um was almost assassinated in Germany back at the prime days of the security th there were about 460,000 informants keeping track of what you were doing what the people were doing um 46 60,000 people.

That meant that if you would be in a classroom or if you would be in a movie theater, very likely there would be somebody constantly watching you and what do you do? This kept building up and especially in Romania um after 1989 when the revolution kind of started happening we suddenly had the iron curtain falling away in Europe which fell a bunch of upcoming um let's say new mentalities of people who were able to at least escape some sense of their security surveillance origins. From here on, I'd like to bring it to or more of the digital environment as we all work and move in today. You had Eric Hux creating the Cyberpunk Manifesto, which talked about how we should push for our own digital freedom and privacy. A very big switch from just being surveiled by wiretapped phones and being surveiled by the people around you and being pushed around and showcased based on your actual physical appearances.

now suddenly also meant our digital appearances were becoming more and more important. Eric Hux wrote the manifesto back then, although he was more a representation of a generalwide movement and initial mention of cyber punks that was happening then. What it exactly means to be a cyber punk called touch base in a moment. But eventually the main core point is that we suddenly needed to push for our own digital freedom because nobody would otherwise allow us. I'm sure you all heard about PGP um being exported initially as ammunition.

For those who have not, there's some pretty cool t-shirts that will tell you about how it was somehow seen as ammunition. And eventually they put the whole code in a book. A book that would you allowed to take outside of the country because a book could not necessarily be seen as ammunition. It's important to see this kind of an act of rebelliousness as part of how cipher punks have been moving both in the past and assumingly also in the future. There are always rules we need to keep ourel to in a society we would like to live in.

But at the same time, these rules have a limit and an edge that you actually need to follow. As long as you can stay within the thin lines, there's a lot of gray area where you can actually push through for your specific ideologies in that sense too within his manifesto. Um, Eric Harks wrote a very clear message called cipher punks wrote code. Now, who in this room here is technical and writes any sons of code? Okay, like 50% let's say.

So, I would actually argue that Oh, it's the wrong button. Here we go. I would actually argue that the right code aspect of the cipher pug mentality is today not that relevant anymore as it was back in 1993 or 1990s in general. in back then to be able to have access to a computer very likely you would be a privileged person. You would probably be in living in a big city being part of an educational program that gives you access to a mainframe at least with the capacity to be able to build and compute any encryption models.

You would need to have a general understanding of mathematics. You would need to have the socioeconomical status where you would be able to determine at least a couple of years of your life to university instead of needing to work around the clock already. You would also need to be able to have the environment that is supportive of you to dedicate a large chunk of your time trying to understand the differences in the ones and zero. But today all of us, all of you here, um, all of the people probably in this whole building have one, if not two, if not three, multiple computer devices on their pocket that can already run computations or run encryption algorithms. I would argue we are entering an era where we should be more aware and open towards the metaphor cyber punks built.

For those who have read the Cypher Punk manifesto or read part of the Cippherpunk mailing list, it will become clearly obvious that it is less about the actual physical aspect of needing to write code. It's less about writing another algorithm that can defend us against a surveillance state potentially using our information. It's more about proactively executing the ideas you have to be able to secure your own digital freedom and privacy. In that sense, building means not just writing code. In today's time, if you just write code, probably nobody will end up using it.

You need some nice design. You need some people wanting to use it. You need people actually caring about using it. Especially because often people tend to say, "Oh, I have nothing to hide. Why should I care about my privacy?"

Now, building is one of the main pushes that I'm trying to give true for the next generation in that sense where we need to be open for people from any background wanting to contribute to this. In the end, building towards a cyberpunk future means four main topics one would support. I would almost call those a little bit as the the principles of uh a cypher punk culture, cyberpunk being. Um the private communications is obvious. We all have signal.

We all have end to- end encryption systems. Being able to talk to the other person that you're trying to reach without a third party eavesdropping becomes more and more important in a society where our information and communication becomes incredibly valuable for companies trying to understand what we want, where we want it and when we want it. It also becomes more important for those people like the journalist back in 1970s that almost got uh assassinated to make sure that whatever the people are writing about you don't need to necessarily worry that you will get punished for your freedom of thoughts. Anonymity and pseudonyms is a part of a privacy cyberpunk culture that it might be less less only technical. Having the ability to create your own alter ego, having the availability to explore um yourself as somebody who's growing up and becoming a new person and learning who you are, what you are, what you like, what you do.

It's sometimes important to forget that the world is watching you. And the way you can enforce this is by creating your own pseudonyms. Just as MF is maybe not that anonymous of a pseudonym anymore, um there's plenty of people in the communities I move in that tend to use only a pseudonym. So they can have some kind of a guarantee that whatever they tend to stand for does not follow them back to home which creates a safety net for people to express their free uh free mind no matter if we support their opinion or not. This is also where the anti-ensorship starts coming in.

If you have the ability to communicate things without the worry that what you've communicated will be censored, you have an ability to make a change with your words that you write down or communicate with people. If people tend to censor you, not only might they hide the information you're trying to share, at the same side, they might actually censor specific parts of your information you're sharing and create a different narrative than what you actually stand for. All of us here in blockchain has heard a lot about anti- censorship, specifically when we're talking about financial utilities or tools. But sometimes it's simple to make sure that what you write or what you communicate does not get hidden and taken apart by somebody who has a different meaning. Now the last but not least important part of hiding the hiding allows you to create an environment where you don't need to be afraid to utilize the tools you create.

Sometimes you don't want to tell people what your secrets are or that you have a secret because people are very curious beings. We I like to know things I'm not supposed to know. I think we all like to know things you're not supposed to know in general. And the moment somebody feels that you're hiding something, no matter if it's a good or a bad thing, just general hiding, people tend to become way more curious and privy. This gets even worse when you're dealing with a sense of authority.

I don't know if any of you have ever been stopped by um let's say a police or border check. Um, if you would tell them, "Oh, I'm actually hiding something." Even you might just be hiding a Polaroid picture of your girlfriend and you together in a a fun night in Paris, let's say. So, very very likely they will not leave you alone for a good half hour to make sure that they figure out what are you hiding. Now, the tools we create often you can also argue that what about the bad guys?

What about the terrorists? What about the pedophiles, the drug dealers? What about the let's say the bad people defined by the society we live in? Can't they use the same tools we are trying to build to protect herself to just as much also keep engaging in their activities? I would actually argue in that same sense that we also we've been using hammers as a society to build houses and other constructions for centuries, millennia.

There's also a lot of people who has been smashed in their skull with a hammer too. Just as much as you can use a hammer to build a house, you can use the same tool to inflict a lot of bad. And it's an very important mindset because in the end, it's just a tool you're creating to for people to protect their own digital freedom and enforce this instead of being it taken away. Just as much it's important for the journalists in between us, for the people who might want to contribute to Wikileaks, for the people who might not want to share their hidden conversations with their mom and just want to make sure they have a sense of privacy while they're communicating with their girlfriend or with whoever they want to communicate. for the people who might be gay and at the same time they live in an or authorative regime that does not allow this.

It's way more than just the bad people trying to abuse a system that is just as well a neutral system for everybody to use. Now, how do we keep this kind of an environment going? Because in the end, it's a rat race. You play with encryption models against organizations that potentially have more resources. might even be better organized because let's be honest, decentralization is sometimes chaos and having a lot of people work in between all of the scales also requires them to somehow create a coordination effect to upkeep this effort.

You see three images here which represents kind of the core of our let's say professional environment where we deal with institutes we deal with um you know ourself builders and just as much also the resources we need in general to keep going. Each one of these has specific people that are incredibly important to keep the things happening as we want them to happen. From politicians lobbying for digital privacy to investment funds willing to put a risk and a bet behind a private communication application or just as much any application that can enforce privacy or one of the other principles we talked about to you and me people in this room who are trying to learn more about privacy and cyber punks and actually contribute to that. Remember my message. It's not just coding, not just writing code.

It's very much contributing to actually proactively built this feature. Because one thing that we do that the people who are trying to abolish these encryption systems don't is that we don't need to deal with a huge amount of administrational let's say um policies to say it nicely. We need privacy just as much that privacy needs you too. And this is not just a blanket statement that would say okay we always need privacy but every day there are attempts where people are trying to change the laws change the impact deal with obtaining information and just already by using tools or applications like signal instead of telegram you are contributing to making sure that people know that not even you know normal people can also use It's not just the black and white hats. Once encryption models and privacy tooling turns into the norm for our day-to-day activities, it gets very hard for a government to just take it away.

Um, before I close off my talk, uh, I want to obviously thank you all for being here and, uh, wish you a very nice upcoming conference. I would like to urge you to scan this QR code so I can take all of your money. Now um it's part of a EU feedback and consultation. Um cypher punks are active and proactive and this is something we all can do right now. you can fill in a questionnaire that the EU is pushing towards um privacy, cyber security expert, um politicians or anybody that's involved with sensitive data.

Fill in the questionnaire as in they're currently trying to implement allow or in the early stages of implementing allow that would make metadata required to be kept by a lot of the digital companies we deal with. Metadata is one of the current bigger risks within privacy, particularly as we have encryption models that can hide the message. But the context of this message can still sometimes rat you out and who you are and where you are. And as such, thank you very much for being here and I hope you all enjoy some good Romanian food. Awesome.

Awesome. Awesome. Thank you so much, MF. That was absolutely fascinating. Guys, are there any cipher punks in the room who'd like to ask a question of MF here because so rare that we've got an expert on this topic uh right here to to be inquired with.

I've got a question. Um back in the 90s it felt like governments were the main enemies uh like they were the purveyors of censorship that they were the the main target for this movement. But nowadays it feels like it's a bit more corporations that are in the the target line. Do you do you agree with that statement? And do you feel like the battle's changed in any way?

There's definitely a sense of truth in that. Um, I like to avoid the ideology of main enemies. Uh, especially as a government is rarely a centralized person. And within a government, there's always people pro and against privacy. Um, but companies definitely have shown up way more caring about the abolishment of your privacy, let's say.

So suddenly in the '9s and 2000s we went towards a surveillance capitalistic system where your data is worth a lot of money for people not just one person's data but all of our data combined allows people to utilize this for let's say capitalistic purposes now I'm not necessarily against u somehow a variation of a capitalistic system but at the same time if your data is valuable and worthwhile you should be able to sell it yourself if you want it to be sold or have a say in that or not. The big difference as in with an enemy compared to the enemy of a state or a corporation in here is that uh likely I'm saying likely at least in the west company is not going to try to abduct you for an opinion that might be controversial towards the current political system while a government might still engage in that. So you're having an economical risk and um a privacy about your personal information that you share and that's up to you if you should share it or not. And comparing that to back in the the cold war times or even nowadays in some regimes the risk of being abducted from your family is very different risks but at the same time there not everybody is going to be abducted by their family but probably everybody has some of their data token by meta and used it for their own purposes. So even though they have a different level, they're still both quite relevant to today.

And I'm only expecting that it becomes, you know, corporations become more relevant as time goes onwards as well.

That makes a lot of sense. So even though the context changed a bit, the movement stays the same. I love that. Do we have any questions from the audience here, guys? Um, feel free to either go through the QR code or put your hand up.

One of our lovely volunteers will ah right over there. Um so when you talked about anti-ensorship and um like anonymity and pseudonyms I once said that the self censorship is the worst kind of censorship. Um and I want your thoughts on that.

Could you elaborate for one second on your definition of self censorship?

Right. Um, so if I don't have privacy uh and anonymity for stating my thoughts, I might self censor and not say things openly. Um, and why it's from me worse than being censored by someone else. I can fight against someone else censoring me. I can try to work around that.

It's very hard to work around your own self censorship and your own thoughts if you are worried about being um looked looked at differently if you say something that that may not be the mainstream opinion or something like that.

Yeah, that's a great question. Thank you. Um I like to refer back to Fuko with the the prisoner of constant surveillance. uh a human that feels that is it's constantly being watched and there might be uh repercussions for their thoughts and actions will definitely censor themsel because in the end they are still a prisoner of the society instead of actually being able to uh talk freely. Um is it necessarily worse or better than somebody trying to generally censor you?

I'm not sure. I the only thing I am sure it's also pretty bad. It's also about people should have the capability to self express themsel. Now that does not mean necessarily that we always should agree with everybody their expressions like there's a lot of people um their expressions I I will not agree with personally but that does not mean they should not have the ability to express that. And I think a really good way for people to actually avoid that uh mental feeling of feeling that you cannot self-express and this self-centering one is the ability to operate under a pseudonym because suddenly what your own thoughts are that you're trying to communicate with a larger society.

it's now said by a pseudonymous person and people might disagree or agree with a synonymous person at least uh it will not necessarily lead back to you personally and allows people to be a little bit more open-minded and self-expressive. Thank you. Humankind had had many technologies that are now irrelevant or were replaced by something else. Do you think ever humankind will not need the cipher punk and everybody will be free to say anything and the big brother watching would be would not be a problem. Although I would like to see this kind of a let's say expressive utopia in that sense.

Um I would also dare to argue that in our digital world there are spaces available to do this. If we're talking in a physical world, um, it definitely gets harder, especially depending on where and how you are. You know, self-expressing yourself in Belgium is going to be very different than self-expressing you in in Myamar. Um, it's a constant change of social, economical, and political environments that is also very much defined by where you are and when you are there, which will significantly adjust your capability to self-express. Does that mean that there will always be people who will respect your ability to self-express?

I don't think so. Even not from an authorative state mentality. Just in your environment, there are people who like to bully. There's people who like to make other people feel bad for their personal thoughts or their personal opinions. That's not even to the level of being abducted by the Stasi, for example.

Um, we live in a society where people have their own perspectives no matter if they're good or bad. And sometimes people care very much against a certain perspective you might be for. Now you cannot stop other people from sharing their own thoughts on top of your own personal perspective you've given. But at the same time, I think we are very lucky to live in a society where we have the ability to communicate with people all across the world. hidden behind a screen from the safety and comfort of a safe room.

And nowadays with the tools we have available, we are the closest ever I would say so to reaching an environment where you can con constant continuously express yourself maybe not always in physical practical sense but at least we have a digital alternative that can help towards that.

Awesome. Thank you. Um, we've got time for one more question. I'd like to go here to consensus builder 804. How do you feel about recent government actions against tornado in the EU pushing against financial privacy tours like Monero?

I think uh a lot of it comes out of the general KYC fraudulent transactions that they're trying to punish. Um, the government does not like you having money without them taking a cut off this money or taxation. The government does not like um money to be distributed to people that they are not able to follow a trace especially because um yeah it does hurt their capability to control and create in their sense a stable society stable society is specifically in their sense that don't necessarily mean I'm agreeing to that. I think the beautiful thing about these tools is that although we definitely want to lobby for the benefit of privacy at the same site the government cannot just turn them off. This is why we have censorship resistant decentralized systems like Monero or other tooling similar to similar to that.

It's not like there's an on andoff button that the government can control. Even during the tornado cast sanctions the smart contract code was still there. You could still use it. You could still use privacy pools nowadays as well or different kind of shielded transactions to obtain a similar goal. The government will always try to stay in control on their financial transaction level specifically because it gives them uh a lot of information and details on what is happening and who is happening it with.

Once you take that away, both the black hats and the white hats will benefit from this. And my personal opinion mainly goes towards the ideology of they can keep trying to turn it off, but as long as we keep building systems that can't be turned off, I wish them the best of luck. I'm not aware yet they have a a very big quantum computer that can break through our encryption models. And until they have that, um, good luck for them to try. And much likely by the time they do have that we will have even a bigger or different algorithm that can again um uh can again defend against that kind of an attack from a bigger system.

So in one way uh it's definitely annoying that they keep trying this because it makes uh all work way harder to do it properly and digitally and keep trying to build these systems in the daylight let's say. So on the other way, they can only try to restrict it. It's not something they can enforce with the technology we have today, which is the very nice thing about blockchains in general.