# "Embedding Digital Rights into Technology" by S El Damaty // ECC#2 - Buenos Aires 2025 - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 13:10 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn, congress, ethereum cypherpunk, buenos aires, argentina, vitalik buterin, privacidad, filecoin, foundation, EL Damaty, Human Tech - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-L5-fTcV1qD8 - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5-fTcV1qD8 ## Description Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress by Web3Privacy Now is the world's largest cypherpunk and human rights event. 4500 people gathering in Buenos Aires to celebrate privacy with internet freedom leaders like Richard Stallman, Vitalik Buterin, Roger Dingledine, and Eva Galperin. Join us in building a free internet for all. Website: https://web3privacy.info/ Congress site: https://congress.web3privacy.info/ ## Transcript [applause] Hey, good evening everybody. Uh, hey guys. Uh, in the back feel free to to join us. Uh, otherwise uh I think we'll get started in a sec. It's it's incredible to be here. I think uh yeah, all good. Can I can I use the stick? Yeah. Does the stick work? Oops. No, not yet. >> Technology is accelerating. >> AI, biotech, digital systems, reshaping everything. But if technology moves without responsibility, we risk systems that harm instead of help, divide instead of connect, exploit instead of empower. That's where the covenant of humanistic technologies comes [music] in. It's a framework for building technology that serves people and technologies that must serve public good and planetary health. It started as a printed document, something tangible you could hold and read. Manifest.hum.te is where the covenant becomes an active community, a place to explore the principles and contribute ideas and artifacts. Artifacts are proof of human contribution. >> [music] >> essays, art, research, open-source systems, evidence that humans are still creating, still building, still at the center. This isn't just a website. It's a movement of people. We're connecting with others who believe technology should be human aligned. [music] On manifest.te, explore the covenant of humanistic technologies. Sign the declaration, prove your humanity, submit your artifact, and join the conversation. Innovation is powerful when it's human aligned. Be part of the community. Be part of the movement. Um, wasn't supposed to play the video immediately, but uh, hey guys. [laughter] Uh, so uh, today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about community is action. And you saw a little preview of that in a web app we've been building out uh for how we can actually bring people together to produce artifacts that act uh with community on, you know, specific things that we care about. See if I have my slides here. All right. While they're pulling up the slides, uh a little snafu Oh, here we go. I can show something today in under a minute. So, we already spoke a little bit about this, but we do have this really narrow window to embed digital rights into tech. That's the main thing, if you're listening or not, that I want you guys to take away from you from here today. Um, and that's really because we have this kind of reality we're dealing with where tech is constantly accelerating. Hard to keep ahead of, especially if you're working in this space. you can see it firsthand. Uh there's kind of like stuff happening behind the scenes that we, you know, we can kind of like don't really think about. For example, the consolidation of infrastructure for a lot of the services that we rely on daily. And we're seeing more and more that these interfaces that we're used to like iPhones or uh say like the browser or uh the chat GBT interface are becoming stronger and stronger gravity wells for our agency. We're delegating more and more of our agency and decision-m to these interfaces that are characterizing our experience with technology now. And these interfaces are really good at gating information. So, do we stand a chance? How do we really fill this gap? Uh we really have a chance I think with community and specifically how we take community to action. So you know you can capture infrastructure but it's a lot harder I think to capture the human layer especially on in small scales in localist context. uh you know I think like not to go uh too deep into some stuff but I think you know uh keeping humans in the loop for example one really uh kind of like thought experiment I love to to to bring up is uh with Maxwell's demon right so physicists thought that they'd invented this perpetual motion machine called Maxwell's uh demon was which was a thought experiment by Maxwell clerk who invented uh the laws of electro electromagnetis electromagnetism and his whole idea was like if you have two demons inside uh just outside of a system that was at equilibrium. These demons can say for example uh collaborate to generate a perpetual loop of energy. So the one at the top would only let high energy particles through, the one at the bottom would only let low energy particles through and you create this gradient and voila, you have a perpetual energy machine. But these physicists never really thought about the value of information. For those demons to actually be able to make these observations and flip these switches with the knowledge that which particle is which, they need information. Um, and if we start thinking about our planet Earth as humans, as the demons in the loop that are trying to create these sustainable loops, whether for regenerative purposes or industrial purposes or other purposes to be determined, it's the human in the loop that's really going to determine where we go on this planet. So, community as action can't stand on its own, right? So, we can bring people together. We can be the humans in the loop. We can use our community as co-design [clears throat] agents, right? Rely on each other more than say for example interfaces that we depend upon like uh like say chat GPT prompt or a Google search bar. But really what uh I think can action is what how we take offense but really we need to also be thinking about how we can take defense. So protocols are ways that we can really uh delegate that defense into the infrastructure around us so that we can continue doing what we do best whether that's creating new arts, designing new technology or furthering say some some goal, right? Some activist goal. And there's two pieces I think I really want to call out. One is the importance of self-custody. So being able to actually own your own keys uh that are in your possession that can't be taken away that are difficult to lose. It's really important, I think, for any sort of community to be able to coordinate like this in these like cybernetic digital systems. And of course, verifiability security. How do you actually know the person you're talking to is the one that owns the key that uh that corresponds to them? So, we already watched the video. I'm not going to let you guys watch it again. So we prototyped this community as action with an underlying protocol as defense and community as kind of offense to push forward into the future we want to see at uh Patagonia in Edge City just like literally like a couple days ago. So we were out there for 10 days. Uh we had about uh 25 people from all over the spectrum uh from uh folks working in neuroch engineers. We had somebody who was working you know who used to work at kernel on portable meg. We had folks trying to build like you know using reveal commit schemes to detect time travel all sorts of interdisiplinary work including artists and one thing that really characterized this was this uh kind of positive feedback loop where we were constantly learning from each other. So daily study circles, workshops where we really dived into uh design philosophies surrounding the technology that we cared about and we had fun too, right? So we had social events, we went out on adventures and that's all part of the human layer, right? It's not just tech. A big part of this were artifacts that came out of this 10-day residency where we developed this shared vocabulary of what we care about and how to talk about it, how to communicate it, and really started uh I think like finalizing a core branch of the design philosophy that would later be forked by different projects I'll show you guys in a sec. Uh these sorts of residencies I think are also really important if you're you know you're going to train the human layer to be something resilient. uh being able to uh develop this culture of accountability and and and incorporating interdisciplinary contributions to your work where critiques are a source of strength less so a source of weakness and of course output in the form of artifacts. So here's a couple artifacts that came out. Maybe you might recognize this person if it's I don't know if you guys can see that with this resolution. Um but yeah, we've had people really taking uh these concepts of how do we really embed digital rights into tech and taking that story, right? This story of uh let's say like collective liberation by design in technology, right? As opposed to technology being a a tool to serve some sort of purpose or end goal. Um, one of the contributions was about 180 hours of footage of a documentary that was collected in Patagonia with interviews from folks building all across the spectrum uh, called Nura Codeex. Uh, so if this this this is like a really special piece. I'll show you guys how you can get more information on it in a sec. We had folks also producing novel ideas of how to think about the internet, right? So these are things that are kind of possible when you establish uh a strong coordination layer right at the human level. Uh folks working on for example converting research objects or PDFs into agents themselves and rewriting how the internet actually might work. We had people working on how you could even do proof of personhood using neural data. So can you take for example some EEG trace and use that to prove that that person is aware uh is in a state of consent and that they are a unique human. Absolutely challenging stuff to do but these are the kind of areas that folks were working on. Uh we even had individuals bringing in new ideas to how we think about design philosophies in uh yeah in user experience by bridging it to say out of neurotypical individuals to neurode divergent individuals. So when you design tech, you're not really just designing tech for one person. You should really be thinking about all the different types of people that can impact or that you know your UX will impact their daily lives. And in that process, you come you stumble upon new truths of of how these design even in you know regular typical people actually work and you can make uh produce some like incredible unlocks uh for UX all sorts of crazy stuff. So yeah, I mean if I could just close on a couple notes, I think um I think it's really important when you bring people together, we do have the tools to bring people together with tools for liberation, uh tools for empowering agency. And again, I can't underscore enough how important self-custody is. So, in in our 10-day residency, residents would work on these projects and at the end of it, they'd be able to submit these artifacts for curation using their keys. So, they would actually sign an attestation on the design philosophy that they uh attested to when keeping into consideration what they were building. So, they would create these keys with like a simple social sign on because some of these folks weren't programmers, they weren't web three folks, some were coming outside of the space. Uh and so they were doing they were tapping into this without even knowing about it. And uh just a shout out to wop.xyz. These keys were built on a wallet as a protocol which lets us actually um provide self-custody while solving many of the challenges with it. So for those of you guys here today that feel that they would like to connect their node to a human layer and perhaps tap into some of the protocol as defense through self-custody and and cultural expression. invite you guys to check out uh the design philosophy that emerged from from this residency, the newest version of it. Uh to check it out, see if it does something for you and how you think about product design or how you think about activism or whatever it is that you're working into. Uh to check out because I think it's a really powerful tool for those that are thinking about onboarding users, but also uh self- custody is really important and submit artifacts. So, if you'd like to see any of the o these artifacts in more detail, if you want to check out uh the summary of the documentary or some of these other projects, you can just uh go to this website and uh you'll be able to sign the covenants which will give you access and then you can start exploring. Uh you can also upvote some of these if you think that they're pretty cool and deserve deserve greater attention. That's all I have for you guys today. My name is Shotti Alamati. I'm one of the co-founders at Human Tech and uh it's an honor to be here today. Thanks, [applause]