WEBVTT

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Hello everybody,
I'm Simone Roboutti,

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I'm part of the organization
of Cables of Resistance,

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I'm also part of the
TechWorkers Coalition.

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The conference is going much
better than we thought.

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We sold out after a few
days, without promotion,

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so the interest
for the conference

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was already
very high.

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But still, the quality
of the people that

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showed up, the quality of the
talks, the quality

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of the party was much
higher than we expected.

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The first time
we did it,

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there was no
previous edition,

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so a lot of people
committed a lot

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of their time and money
to show up here and attend

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also to speak, like
a lot of speakers

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from throughout
the world.

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If people learn that
Big Tech is bad and

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then they go home, for us
it's a defeat,

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but we want to start
building bigger alliances,

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more systematic, structured,
coordinated efforts.

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And so some of the activities
are targeting that.

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It's good that a lot of
organized groups showed up

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rather than isolated individuals
with big ideas on what to do.

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So that was the impulse.

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Especially for me

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as a tech worker,
I want a new way

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to build technology,
I don't just want to resist

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for some time against what
big tech is doing,

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I want a new system that produces
technology and that's why I'm involved.

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But for me, I've
been organizing,

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in the tech sector
for many years,

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we understand that labor
has much more leverage

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over the big tech industry
than people outside,

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and that's my
personal commitment.

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I've been doing this
for seven, eight years.

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A lot of people think that
we are all tech bros,

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tech bros and tech
workers are opposites.

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And we're trying to
push this narrative,

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and for many years there
was a lot of skepticism

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of tech workers actually
coming on board,

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and now it's happening
and it's so a shift,

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and it must be connected to
environmental struggles

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or feminist struggles
and so on

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There's also a lot of people
from the hacking scene,

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which is separate,
they are not really

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labor oriented in general,
but this is an

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existing narrative shift
within the hacker scene

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of "Just building new technology
is not going to save us, right?"

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And so a lot of
people are slowly

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understanding, we need to move
towards labor,

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help labor organizations
or think of the material side

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of technology rather
than just producing

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alternative software,
right?

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And so that portion
of the hacking scene,

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which is people working
in tech, in practice,

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very often they are
people working in tech,

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showed up a lot more
than we expected

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because they weren't necessarily our
target crowd, but a lot of them came.

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We have been collecting
a lot of knowledge

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about what's already
happening and there's

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a need for at
least two things:

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More coordinated efforts,
that is something

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every leftist says,
we need more networking,

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The other part
that we acknowledged

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was missing and is still kind
of missing is the narrative part

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We are weak on the
narrative part of like,

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we are just in opposition
to big tech, but

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big tech is still
setting the narrative.

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We are against it, but they are
setting the narrative.

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And this
doesn't work.

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We need to tell people a believable
story of how technology could be

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that goes beyond
opposition to big tech.