Video Interviewer Diary- day 0
From What The Wiki?!
My name is Gweeds, I am from the USA (Austin, Chicago, NYC, San Francisco, most recently Guadalajara, Mexico). I self-identify as an anarchist hacker chef.
We arrived TUESDAY from San Francisco via London, joining up with some British, German, Polish, and Ukranian friends along the way to this great gathering of the hacker tribes in Der Mittle of No-vhere, Holland. Getting in two days before the official opening helped us see the camps expand and grow from their initial setups and allowed us to squat in the totally uninhabited Cypherpunks tent for a while (our tent plans were destroyed by a US airport's local representatives of the greater US police state). I had planned on filming some interviews for a film project with Biella- but our camera people (and equipment) ended up not turning up. By the end of Tuesday, Hanno had lent us a proper two-person tent and Daniel at the Apple Camp had graciously lent us a very nice camera along with DV downloading facilities and later access to the raw footage we shot! Such generosity with objects, and now on to the even more abundant generosity with access to each others' brains:
Our first misty twilight in Holland we spent getting into some great conversations and recording them in poor light with the camera. We stopped by the OpenBSD tent and were plied with drinks while we recorded for posterity the OpenBSD'ers doing what they do best: talking shit about Linux! Very entertaining. Also some great interview segments on reverse engineering and the Icelandic hacking scene. I'm pretty sure that sober they will recollect the drunken permission they gave us to record their images and ideas and document them on the web!
After the sun fell, we stumbled around in the dark with our camera, touring the grounds and taking in more almost-set-up camps than party tents. The ASCII cafe tent was very hospitable- an honor system pay-beer fridge, and what might possible have been the only working net connection at that point in the evening. Some very interesting conversations there about activism and surfing. The beautiful light sculptures along the main streets really stimulated the evening and hinted at the orgy of illumination to follow over the next few nights- yellow banners flapping in wind, lit up in floodlights- the bizarre blue and yellow circus tents that housed most of the main compounds (bar, cafe, etc) turning the forest land into a circus event, and a gorgeous but inexplicable spotlight array cycling through on and off underneath a majestic tree- and did I mention the blinkencamp? I guess that amazing 2001/2002? exhibition in Alexanderplatz?, Berlin has spawned its own art genre- so many arrays of on/off subjecting us to the advertising sloganeering of a electro-anarchist mindcriminals. And of course really adorable iconography of hearts, little doll figures, and yes, an AI-driven game of Snake. Tons of great eyecandy but I'm sure it's just gearing up, I haven't even found any full-fledged demo scene campsites yet! Before turning in for the evening we saw the CCC rocket ship "Heart of Gold" pulling in on its trailer to the CCC compound and I really appreciated seeing the connection between hacker camp festivals past and present.
Of course it rained the next morning but on the whole the weather had been very pleasant- some unbearable humidity (warm and wet) for most of the day with some alleviating sprinkling throughout the day and some proper mud-producing rainfall by late evening. We walked around a lot of the day watching the hammock-scaffolding set up- pipe scaffolding with hammocks and ethernet hookups, a net treehouse for a dozen laptop monkeys, with a strange triangular lit-up overhang for shelter.
With video camera in hand, we enjoyed some lunch and set out to interview several groups of people, preferrably starting with people I knew something about who would allow me to steer the conversation towards what I felt would be very interesting topics of dicussion. Reflex from London explained the camp's wireless DECT phone system in depth, setting us free from the chains of phone companies and their roaming fees with the added bonus of free international calling through an Asterisk/VOIP set up. Fuck yes! Doogie, a doctor from Scotland volunteering the the CERT first aid crew, narrated his bicycle trip to What The Hack from London with his mate TenYen- 270km?! or something, with packs, tents on their backs. We bopped around checking out the Swedish camp, the CCC camps, our home sector Wootstock and even got to consensually film a little medical emergency when Doogie responded to a call for a sprained ankle at the CERT first aid tent. Some great footage of the doctor biking quickly off with his recumbant to fetch some calming tea for the patient.
Our first stop of the day's wandering had been to the welcome gate to receive our wristbands and have a chat with the welcomers. They indicated that as of 4pm Wednesday, 366 people have been given wristbands, about 1500 have pre-registered, and 2000-3000 are expected in total. Enno gave us a demo of the laughably optional hard core security set up, airport police-state style, including a full body metal scanner and user-hackable luggage-xray machine. Three people thus far have been physically prevented from foolishly attempting to xray their body parts regardless of the "bad bad bad for your body" signs everywhere on the machine! Just a little reminder of the limits of hacking, of our own mortality, and of community responsibility- not really any sort of physical attempt to curb anyone free will! Oh, heaven's no.
When I speak to other coders at What The Hack, we end up comparing projects that we are working on currently, and areas of interest. I have been working on a project for a year and a half called indyvoter.org, an open-source anarchist social networking platform- like Orkut for actvists. Mako introduced me to a guy working on EFF's TOR, an anonymity cloud onion routing platform. We discussed implementation a little bit since I am looking to write my own anonymity cloud layer and find onion routing unnecessary when there is the entire BitTorrent infrastructure out there and available for my data via a distributed hash table interface. Hopefully I will get to see one of the three TOR talks this week and geek out on some tech discussion.
Ali and I took a 7 oclock dinner with Biella and TenYen- some reasonably priced food- mango mousse, chicken thighs and legs, some noodles with satay sauce, and a nice tomato soup which I proceded to scald myself with. Post-dinner we headed over to the toilets and showers for our volunteer cleaning shift. It had just started raining so we unfortunately were not able to film our locating of supplies, reading the helpful check list chart, scrubbing our fellow hackers' piss and shit off of the German/Dutch schiesse-inspection toilets (US toilets have the hole in the back so your poop goes directly into the pipes), mopping the floors, and leaving little chocolate mints for the next lucky defecator who would be the first and only to admire our handiwork. If you must shit at What The Hack in the next 6 hours, might I recommend stall bank #3B+#4A? Ali did a great job on the shower sinks! People were definitely doing their laundry and dishes in the showers, aka the only source of hot water.
We have spent most of today's wandering accompanied by a Mexican acoustic guitar- serenading everyone we met with music and song, and passing the guitar off to other musicians whenever we recognized that blinkenglow in someone's eyes that indicated their instant glee that someone had brought some musical instruments! After helping some condom-labeling project in the cafe late at night, some Dutch asked us for some John Denver to which Ali and I sang a harmony of Leaving on a Jet Plane, bringing a tear to their eyes. Wandering around from partytent to partytent, people are asking us more and more to go and play for them while they drink, a musicianal responsibility I am avoiding now by writing this wiki article.
We are now in one of the hacktents- those tents filled with benches, bars, music, laptops, and hackers.. extension cords and network leads everywhere. We keep missing the frijtz boothes (they will not be 24 hours until the festival "actually" starts) but were able to find an excuse to devour massive amounts of that secret ingredient of Dutch cuisine: curry flavored ketchup! at the Megablit bar with a 1-token (.5 euro) toasty (grilled cheese+ham sandwich) and 1-token barbecued pork bun. Drinks at the same price! People are passing around drinks, food, and smokes. We have just recorded a dialog with Wim about Dutch politics, American politics, and the popular conceptions about the two. As our realities collided against each others', we informed and disabused each others' cosmopolitan, receptive worldviews. A very satisfying talk where I learned and exchanged much History, Politics, and Hopes with a fellow location-dilletante-wanderluster who moves from country to country, city to city, seeding our perspectives with "the other"'s culture, location, history, and cuisine.
Tomorrow the festival "begins", but already my hopefulness about what is possible here- in terms of realworld dialogue, exposure, learning, and exchange- far exceed the aggregated potentials of all other hacker cons I have attended.
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Dougie adds: "I'd like to agree it is best that people don't try to Xray themselves."
