Well, if, I'm perhaps to go twenty years earlier than my engagement, so when Dyn was born. Yeah. I used to be an activist back in the ninety nine, two thousand after the BBS time, and I quickly realized that the work as a software developer was boring so I engaged into activism and at that time, the the most the broadest let's say international movement was indie media, for independent media And already I was involved into doing software for free radio stations on the Internet. So the dream that dragged me in was the fact that people could broadcast their own media just like politics. It's my love. Yours. And, yeah. The the downside of the dream is that there is not only your podcast on the Internet. Like, you know, and, yeah. I very much like the socialist attitude and much less other other media. So it was it was let's say, nowadays, we can call it a bit of a naive dream, but still, I think that free speech is a important principle because, I like people to be able to distinguish between, spam and real content. Right. But still the spectrum of, of, news of, of, creation of sense to be very open. So that's that's where I come from more or less, but I always thought that art was one of the best mediums to express, ourselves and not to give answers to people, but to pose questions, to let them, think about questions, situations, dramas, tragedies, comedies, And so I engage art as a as a production in in my work. This was in the early two thousand when I was here in Austria where I lived about four years and worked in the Arts Electronica Center at the FutureLab at that time, which was a very inspiring, environment. Yeah. And then, moved to work in more in the art video art field in Montevideo time based arts in Amsterdam. So I'm, all in all, I'm a hacker, but I've been in contact with artists. I've been in contact with activists, and I think many people in this meeting are, are at the crossroads, at this crossroads. Let's say we are a sort of liminal liminal figure that can bring more sense into society perhaps to be digested, some news, something new, and some thinking out of the box. That's what I try to do all my life. In 2000, I started publishing software software as dine.org as a foundation. The first website was a Moebius Bandwidth quote by Gertrude Stein, a rose is a rose is a rose. And then you have subsections with software insights. There was no marketing really. There was like poetry, and it has been always inspired by, earlier movements like the Freaknet, the Poetry, Hack Club, and, the tribes that we had in Sicily back in, South Of Italy in '94 where I learned how to compute. And, yeah, we still maintain museum of old and ancient computers. So that's also where I come from. I come from a tradition of studying also old computers, which makes, I think, modern code also better, more performant, and, helps us to not reinvent the wheel. I prefer to read a book by Donald Knuth explaining me where an algorithm comes from and how many tries were making it better rather than cut and pasting from Stack Overflow. Still, no less. I I read books about algorithms that are really entertaining. And, yeah, dyne let's talk about dyne. You know? Like, dyne is, is an attempt to make collective this effort and to link various various people, various collectives. So it's not subsuming, identities. There is a community of people that, come out in their own way from the circles, and they it's pretty big now because it's been twenty years around. And, it's basically it's it's around projects and principles. The principles are three for the foundation. This is black and white on institute. We do free and open source software, which nowhere is fortunately is well accepted in blockchain world. Believe it or not, twenty years ago, it was very hard to do it also in institutions, in private sector. No one understood the value of free and open source software. Yeah. So that's one of the pillars. The second one is interdisciplinarity. So valuing different skills into developing software. So what we do is we develop software, but we don't develop it for a profit because the foundation is unknown for profit. We develop it because it has an impact, a value in society because it can move something, can disrupt, can break chains. Why why didn't we call this break chain? Breaking chains. Yeah. Whatever. So empower people. So therefore, you as a software developer, you can't be aware of what we really do the difference, make the difference for people. You need more skills. You need researchers. You need artists. You need economists. You need anthropologists, ethnographers, you need a branch a vast branch of people, and you need to be able to work together on on that. Now you you do media. You produce films and documentaries. You know, it's not done by one just one person. You have to run. Correct. Yeah. So yeah. You know, eventually, a documentary film production is very, very big. And, and coordination and and and the communication may become even the biggest work for some people. So, yeah, that that is the that is the the second pillar of Dyna. And the third one is environmental sustainability. For Dyna's meant, also in the first publication that I made, DynaBolic as a as a synodlinic operating system back in the early two thousand, which was a big worldwide sensation at that time. I made it run on Xbox game consoles. And the claim was that, a game console is the most sold hardware in the world. So why can't we only play with it? Why can't we modify it to actually run software? Which became a big thing because, together with xBMC, so what is called now the CODI project, the early founders, they managed to crack the key for signing, Xbox games on the Xbox one. Okay. And we had the only two signed CDs, that were, you know, not requiring a mod. You could just put them in, but we had no authorization from Microsoft to run stuff on the Xbox. It was enormously useful because, the Diabolical built in also support for the joystick, a browser. You could go on the Internet. It was quite amazing. It was distributed in Africa, in India. Like, people could recycle the the the game consoles. That hardware was present everywhere. And, I even got contacted by DARPA. They ran a whole investigation about my software because, soldiers in Afghanistan were using it in the barracks to connect to their family and write emails because they had only Xbox game consoles there. No one thought giving them computers to write emails to their family. Wow. So it became like a a big thing. I got compliments from that when they said, wow, there's no Is there a malware? With it? Yeah. There there was no malware. They they checked it. It was free and open source. They they probably there was more than one person that read all my code there. And I'm glad Was Microsoft happy about that? Microsoft never talked to me. So I guess we don't need to talk to each other. But, you know, I think that one big satisfaction for a for a software developer is, like, empowering people through stories that, you know, they can do things. Of Of course, my objective was not empowering American soldiers necessarily, but once it's free, it's free for everyone, and I'm not there to judge your situation and what brought you there and what what is your need to really talk to your family, which I think should be a universal need granted to everyone. The big satisfaction for a developer is that your code is read by people. It's not only run, but can be read, modified. People can learn from that and can distribute their own modifications. So this is also like the ethos of free software that really drags me in, is the fact that what I do is not useful only to me. Primarily, nowadays I build stuff that is useful because I use it myself, which I think is healthy. You know what? Well, developers that use their own that eat their own dog food. But, yeah, it's the biggest satisfaction comes from people that really read your code, comment on it, learn, improve it, and interact on that level on that. So, yeah, coming back to Dine, we have done a bunch of projects in the last twenty years of existence, to to since 2005 is officially a a foundation incorporated in Amsterdam where we have an office. And, since 2012, we work also as a resource organization for the European Commission besides the the voluntary project that they have that we have. And, the first one was Decent, about decentralized citizen engagement technologies. So we researched in the new layer of, political parties in Europe, like the Pirate Party, the Five Star Movement, the Poremos, that, claimed and developed, developed systems and claimed to have a democ a participatory democracy into their process. So we went investigating what were the software, how transparent were these processes, how reliable they are from a scientific point of view. And and we got dragged in. It's it's a fantastic success, especially, what has been in Barcelona and Madrid with the fearless cities, with the the election of Manuela Carmena in in Madrid of, Ada Colau in Barcelona, what became a movement of a new way to think, you know, urbanization and government. And, yeah, after we applied for, the first, the first grant about blockchain research and development, which is decode, the decode project became a flagship project for the European Commission now on on blockchain technology. So we developed, but we also demystified the the concept of blockchain. And there we we try to concentrate on ownership of data and sovereignty. Sovereignty of algorithms, which is the subject of also my my academic research, means that people are able to understand algorithms and also also have decisions collective decisions about them. Meaning that not only a technical elite, a technocracy is in place. A technical elite drives the decisional process. So you need to make participants everyone. So when I develop a software and when someone uses the software we are participants together, you're not a user, I'm not a developer. I like to to see in the political process that we are on the same level. And you see this reflects in the in the in the political in the coherence, you know, you cannot put always on another level of of decision, of democratic decision those who are in charge of of executive power. So, yeah, I think we did pretty well, I mean, also according to those who sponsored our research and nowadays, you know, we have a non Linux distribution, that one, that abides to principles of minimalism which we also very much use that is the second ranked on bistro watch by user reviews after Arch Linux so it's a big achievement. We are about to release the fourth version and that's a basic new Linux distribution. We have a project about circular economy in which we are working on digital product passports and material passports for the circular economy to understand the life cycle of materials through also crypto, having a cryptographic authentication of graph databases. Mhmm. But perhaps the most interesting for the audience may be the, Xyrem project that I that I presented here. Yeah. So Xamarin starts from a very small assumption that, I started thinking about in the past years. I mean, I started coding it in four years ago, then more people joined. That we had to stop developing software for machines to understand us and start developing software for us to understand machines.

Well, it's an inversion of paradigm. It's focusing on the fact that, humans should, understand the complexity that goes beyond their screen and not hide it. So nowadays, I mean, we come out from an era in which, usability was paramount of paramount importance. Apple made a whole, a whole career out of that Hawat empire out of that. And, you know, seamless design, like not seeing what goes on behind but having immediately the the your your your thoughts read and executed by the machine, which is fine. It's comfortable, but it drove us to adopt more complexity and to understand it less and less and also to be in processes that we don't understand. So what I like is to develop simple but beautiful technology that, simple and beautiful to quote Schumacher, that that actually allows us to understand the processes that we are in and still it's powerful but it should be designed and engineered in a way that we can understand it. So for the blockchain specifically, I developed a virtual machine that processes smart contracts in a human like language. Very simple, very understandable by humans. So you can read the contract and understand what it does. Yeah. Which I think is very important because we if we are up to sign a contract, we should read it. Well, it's yeah. I mean, extremely important. I think one of the things that,

It's democratic.

And, you know, we can also see it in socialist perspec in a socialist perspective, let's say. Detail. The exclusion that, a complex system that has, you know, like the technical elite only able to understand it and and change it is creating a class, a class of the cognitariat.

It's, it's just like the proletariat, you know. Well, the the exception, I I mean, from a linguistic perspective is is different, but let's let's stand on this on this graph. Like, we are people that have a cognitive, cognitively, it's not reachable, not because they they are less, capable, but because they come from different disciplines. So inter they have an you have an interdisciplinary approach and what is happening I believe is that what we have adopted in in the blockchain discourse as a structure, a sovereign structure, which in Marxian terms is economy, is now code. Mhmm. And and you know code and the tokens that that will basically bring it up as as the most winning point. And, yeah, I'd like to be in very terms, asserting that, the culture that we are skipping as a sub structure, as we are leaving it as a role, as a sub subordinate role, is actually more important to drive where economy goes. It's more important than we think. It's at the very least at the same level. So it is not, it will bite us all if we don't include people that are cognitively excluded by the processes nowadays. If we exclude them it will bite us all, it will not be a race for the capitalists of of knowledge that go and and right now they are doing an out of process because if you see I mean, the the speaking about blockchain the first blockchain is really like functioned all across the world was bitcoin. Yeah. Had a big pressure to to actually be hacked. I argue it was born together with Wikileaks with the Wikileaks financial blockade and I demonstrated that in some papers. And you mean it was like? Twenty eleven February Wikileaks had the financial blockade after the shooting of the helicopter in Baghdad. Right. So donations started flowing, Visa and Mastercard cut off their pipes without a rule by any any judge. Yeah. And at that time, WikiLeaks decided to accept donations in Bitcoin. Right. At that time, Bitcoin was about 0.60¢, and it was like, inner joke between hackers. Yeah. May same year, there was Forbes first page on bitcoin. Between February and May what happened was an enormous amount of donations in bitcoin to Wikileaks. Mhmm. And mining went also like up. Yeah. So it was the worldwide sensation what what some philosophers would call a kairos, a moment of rapture, rapture with the the pact, you know, of receiving donations for someone that or or a journalist organization that is doing a favor to society to a certain degree debatable but still debatable in a court not, you know, this was like not really fair fair treatment for for the whole organization. So at that point, Bitcoin started being a project growing, and this is the origin. It's important to understand it because it's political origin. Yeah. Nowadays we are ten years later into, prolification of projects which back then I also predicted many people didn't, didn't really agreed with me but I I I thought that altcoins would be exploding at certain point, they did not in the best way they explode a lot of scams in our face and nowadays we have also systems that produce their own complexity. So I'm going back to my point now, There is an autopoiesis of complexity and of new names, new jargons, new, taxonomies, new ontologies around new projects that is, almost they are rabbit holes. They are someone I heard, like, yeah. There are so many projects and everyone is a wormhole. I'm I'm not sure I wanna go in. It's true. We are producing so much complexity and hardly they are referencing each other because marketing, oh my god. No. You need to do your own thing. And so it is this is this is not even, a point we can reach cognitively. It's it's it's it's spam. We are spamming ourselves with with constantly new per so we have to come to a point in which we don't leave behind people that understand much more than us about human processes I speak as a developer and listen to them about what is happening because that is going to be like a useful also debate and with objective, with a very socialist objective that I believe in of not leaving people behind, of also including cognitively including people that are left behind by this this whole this whole sensation worldwide sensation. I'm not saying to stop it and you know I also like bitcoin as a project I think it it brought some wealth to some people. It's it's important to to keep in mind this perspective because otherwise, I give you and I finish this digression. I give you what would be happening, I believe, is what is already happening to the free and open source software to the granuliness environment which you become we become a guinea pig for the pig industry. And this is clear in the Gulenics world. Right now, the big companies are offloading the risk in research and development, not only on free users, gratis users, but in even on small companies. They are trying technologies and then throwing them away after two years and and this way they can destroy all in a world small industry that is built around that technology. Nothing lasts for more than ten years. I I think I'm lucky that I use Emacs as a as a editor because it's there since twenty years. It's version 27 now. But it's very hard to find things that last. You know? Why in academia we use LaTex? It's because it's there since twenty years and and you can be sure. It's so I think that is the drawback. If we keep on producing this sort of noise and and not link not produce, like, a consistent corpus of of understanding between between things, then we are we are, doomed because, some big fish will come just like IBM bought Red Hat two years ago. It was one of the biggest, if not the biggest acquisition in the ICT sector. I think 36 billions. Oh, yeah. And, and it's a milestone. You know? It it it means that now the old school, old world, you know, is is driving the agenda of the biggest, GNULinux company, ever built, Revit. And, and this means something for for all of us that use the GNULinux. So this is history repeating somehow in the moment in which we will have also the the the the blockchain space, which claims to be a very serious tool for assessing contracts and truth That that becomes a sandbox until it's in enterprise level.

Oh, gloom. Yeah. And, yeah. No. I think he's playing clown. I think he's just, like, trying to get some clicks. Yeah. It's Mhmm. That that's a clickbait academia. Yeah.

I believe it's a very primitivist approach, and it's also not informed because these people, are themselves lacking the interdisciplinary approach to it. Yeah. And, and, yeah. It's it's you see, when you're a professor of a university with a set path in your life down to the, you know, retirement and death, it's very easy for you to criticize everything because you don't have to do anything with what you say, but, you know Use papers, I guess. Yeah. Eventually, kids smashing the windows of banks will be just, your, KPI for your success because, yeah, you can turn the masses to think something else. I'm a doer. I'm a pragmatist, and I like to, to do stuff, rather than criticize. So I think that, honestly, if also as an academic, we are to be involved, into into this blockchain space, we have to travel through it. We have to complete our journey through an ethnographic, anthropological research, not only economical, not only macroeconomical. And I don't trust macroeconomists, really so you know yeah that's what I think about that and they were very quick in publishing their books and filling their mouths with judgments And, yeah. That's that's something that socialist should keep in mind at the anarchist lesson. Don't judge too fast. Don't don't be so fast in judging. Yeah. But I mean, what I mean, just

conclusion about how we should be It's it's a real pity because it's also occupying the field. There is, now we are in The US, so we moved into I'm a I'm a continental philosopher, so for me it's foreign territory. But, I I very much like what people like David Hakkin, for instance, have wrote about financialization. And when we go and talk about financialization, that is a pretty important discourse. If you tell me, like, the digital trend of blockchain of Bitcoin has accelerated the financialization to a stage in which it's obvious that it's not anymore connected to the dynamic of production? I rest my hands, I rest my arguments, you're right. Actually you can see bitcoin or even better more recently gamestop as trolling completely the financial market telling, hey, guys. Do you realize that what is written there is has no relationship with what is happening there? Right. And do for a long time. Is it For a long time. David Duncan wrote about this, I think, in the eighties. Yeah. Christian Marazzi wrote about this also in the in the eighties in a in a very profound sense. We have, actually, these are real socialists, I think. Also, proper academics that research and describe these processes. If you come out and say, like, oh, this thing is outright. Like, what the fuck? You you wanna know one one thing? Fortune was not outright. Now everyone thinks Fortune was outright, but the founder of Fortune fought against the invasion of alt right means in Fortran at the very beginning. This story is told by some collectives that like Clasterdock and some some collectives from Italy that that drove the story. So how can you say that a project is like you know has to be banned because oh these are Nazis like before you really go through the the the thing and and and its history. Right. So yeah. It's kind of

salient project for maybe people to know about Yeah. Done and, like, in the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It can be found online. There's a lot of materials, the interviews. So it was led by my colleague Francesca Briar. She's quite a star in Europe, I would say, for having said that the big mega corporations that are accumulating data about us have to be stopped and are also stealing the opportunity to build local economies around the sharing economy. So let's say, move to the veil of Maya in front of everyone in the in this in this era about, really, like, worshiping the digital innovation while it was stealing our identities, profiling us. And, and, yeah, we developed a discourse about the value of data and how people should be in charge because, it's touching everyone's pocket literally as soon as algorithms are used for assessing your possibility to become a criminal or your possibility to get a loan or your the price of your insurance or, your possibility of of getting over the price of housing in one neighborhood or another. As soon as algorithms govern this stuff, they our lives are are very much affected. And the the datasets that are used for this and the very algorithms, if they are not known, we have lost touch of our territory, basically. And before we realize, we are separated and dominated by something that we cannot interact with. So to make it, very simple, we wanted to break this this, this chain of events and, and have tools that give people sovereignty control over their data. But not only in an individual, scale, but also in a collective scale. Because my own data, your own data doesn't count as much taken alone. But in the context of all the people we interact with, in the places in which we live, in our professional space, all the data aggregated, and the graph that we create around ourself, that is valuable. That's valuable for many reasons. And it will be more and more as advertisement will become a way to make, assess prices of things you you want. Basically, it's the is the control over desires and needs. And we all have desires, we all have needs, we all have something to offer. Yeah.

Yeah. It's using blockchains more specifically to build systems that can handle data in a more g d p r compliant way, in a more, compliant way also for privacy. So very very simple example in Amsterdam we made a pilot, we used zero knowledge proof certificates for kids, well 18 years olds to buy beer at the bar without showing their id because that's a breach of your privacy. Most of the cases the bartender will not be interested in your name, but really what you want to prove is only that you are 18 years old or in other countries 21, but not your name and and, you know, your address or your age or your your, social number. So, yeah, you show up your code, and that's certified in zero knowledge proof by the Hemingway Amsterdam by the municipality to be, provable. We approve of your age. It's very simple, but you can improve also. And this is, like, all managed locally. We built, you know, to the the the city to release the zero knowledge proof credential needed to scan your your ID and passport. So we built a passport scanner with a Raspberry PI, a webcam, and an NFC. People at the city of Amsterdam were really crafty with that. And, yeah, we had, you know, I I have no idea how much the meter industrial complex pays for those scanners all the way. We built one with a raspel API with, you know, it was less than a €100. And, it scanned the the the passport and produced something, so proved that you are above 18 years old. So that's a different moment that you are producing that credential. After that is produced to you, you can go around with it and demonstrate

did that into put that into action. Yeah. Yeah. We did also a more complex pilot. We did a petition in Barcelona. So it was a petition about digital rights, but, basically, we worked together with the CDIM, which is a platform in Barcelona for collective decision. And, Francesca Bria, my colleague, she was, elder man of Barcelona for innovation in the period in which we we also drove this project. So we really tested heavily with the people from the CDIM and in Barcelona, some some daring daring, visions. And one of them was that of, driving technologically sound petitions driven with proper crypto. In that case, also, onomorphic encryption to not see the result of the the signatures before the tail the tally. And, and we did, we did petitions on a platform that used to process 75% of the procurements, interacting with the infrastructure of Barcelona. So not a toy just, you know, like a big money flow. So this was a little step and a little demonstration of steps we can do in public sector also to make things more transparent, sustainable, open source, managed by the municipality rather than by some foreign company. And, and especially transparent because, procurement. Oh my god. How much is going on there? Yeah.

First and foremost, to me means meeting people that care about the commons and are not afraid to look into the crypto box. And I found, everyone is ready to do that here. I'm also happy that is not a marketing event, that people are not necessarily selling, something to each other. And, it's more of an exchange. It takes time for become that. For sure, it's not, you know, a roadshow, a corporate roadshow. Yeah. And, yeah, caring about the commons has a tradition, you know, from Alstrom, fortunately known as Nobel Prize, and, many more, many more, economists, like Andre Gordes, for instance, and philosophers that have worked around the principle of commons. So not not depletion of of a resource, but fostering and facilitating the the flourishing of society around that resource with with a sharing attitude and with a responsible attitude about using the resource. And, yeah, we are in the middle of mountains and forests, which were the first places where the commons principles were applied, you know, like in in handling the the wood that would be cut and the planting of new trees. So I think it's, it has a perfect setup and,

Thanks. Have a big fan. Thank you.