Beyond Crypto: Only together are we strong

Transcript

Good morning everyone. Um my name is PG co-ounder of web prep now. But here the point is not who I am but is who we are why we are here and what we can and should do together. because our freedoms are at stake and the way technology is being developed, applied and used is really raising concerns about digital governance, democracy and human dignity. The good news about this old dystopian way of how indeed tech is being used nowadays is that privacy is finally understood by a wider audience as something very important. So it's not just tech nerds or cipher punks

upholding this cause but more and more people are joining the conversation and why this because privacy is very clearly the foundation for self-determination for democracy and for freedom and if there is one concept that I would love to stick with you going away from this talk is that privacy equals freedom where freedom is the ability to do something and privacy is what make it possible to do this something without fear, pressure or uh interference. And privacy is the foundation of many different freedoms from having the freedom of upholding your own political belief and freedom of speech and freedom

of movement, but also freedom of association. Uh freedom to care and connect. If you think for example about the recent, not that recent but the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, a lot of people from Russia were sending crypto to people in Ukraine whether it was their family or friends or just because they were standing for that cause. And if we don't have anonymity, if we don't have privacy, we cannot do that. The same for like a lot of movements. Uh here in India, there are a lot of problems indeed with human rights. No matter we have a beautiful constitution that actually protects human rights. Um still a lot of NOS's and lawyers are just censored and shut down and jailed and

tortured just because indeed there there is no privacy. Um and there are really a lot of freedoms that privacy enables. Um and all those freedoms actually allows us to rebalance power to take power into account. Um so here we are talking about the freedom to build open-source software and different alternatives from proprietarian and extractive platforms. Uh the freedom to resist the freedom to resist to technofascism, authoritarianism and all the form of censorship that you can imagine.

This is why privacy gives freedom the space to exist. And many people worldwide want this freedom. No matter your culture, your background, your color, your political belief. And there is really a lot of different groups and communities that over the years have upholded this freedom, defended this freedom and need this freedom. For example, the freedom of speech is something that for sure interests lawyers journalists NOS's whistleblowers, and without privacy, they could not tell the truth. And as Julian Assange was saying, if war can be started by lies, peace can be started by the truth, by saying the truth.

Freedom to build cryptographers, free and open source software communities, activists, but also, for example, the freedom to learn and access information, which is something that indeed has been defended and upholded by academics, researchers, internet archivists, students, and so forth. And I could go on and on and on with all these freedoms showcasing that at the end it's the people who actually need privacy and privacy and freedom.

Privacy is this common infrastructure that protects freedom of the many and we are the many guys. We are the people. This clearly shows that privacy is plural, is diverse and is composable because there is no one technology or tool or behavior that will actually solve this. It's a collection of different indeed applications, behaviors and solutions. And this is why collaboration is key.

this fundamental need of being able to live, communicate, tell the truth, organize, create and act without being constantly observed, manipulated and dictated to and of course censored. The second reason why collaboration is so important and sorry the first one was it that indeed we are natural allies. It means that indeed no matter uh from what kind of group or political belief or backgrounds you come from we are all sharing the fact that we are the many versus the few. We are the people and we need these freedoms. The second is that we live in very complex system

nowadays and we need complex solutions and we can come to complex solutions just if indeed we put our resources together and we work together towards these complex solutions and this is why Cypher Punk didn't make it because technology alone is not enough. Uh one second. Indeed, you see technical problems always happens. But uh uh uh uh yes, synergy. Um the sum of the parts is always greater than the single components of this sum.

And indeed only together we can create this value and and this complexity that is able to confront these very um complex systems that actually are oppressing freedoms. Then also as I was saying technology alone is not enough because a lot of people are just not uh technologically aware or competent enough to understand what is the problem from a technical standpoint or maybe they don't they don't have the time they don't have the interest uh because everyone has to pay the bills has families and has thing to do. So we should go through culture to make people understand, aware and able to take action towards these freedoms.

And last but not least, why collaboration is our winning strategy because it's thousands of years that the winning paradigm for authoritarianism is dividing people and conquering them. So as long as we are divided between and among all these different small communities, niches and causes, we are not going to make it and we should come together. And this is why collaboration is so important because it's the opposite paradigm of what power is upholding and fostering for thousands of years.

This is what we are doing with web privacy now. We are trying to create an ecosystem around privacy and I would really invite you to join this conversation whether you are an artist, an archivist, uh social scientist, anthropologist, developer. Uh you can scar this QR code on the right to actually access everything we do which is free and accessible um and help us in many different ways. Here is the QR code for my telegram if you want to connect and have a conversation. I would like to thank you all. I think we don't have time for questions, right?

Thank you very much.