Editor’s note: This post is the fourth in a four-part series about making privacy-preserving cryptocurrency accessible and useful for underserved populations. Its original author, Violet Rollergirl, is a transgender sex worker who has modified the post from its original in order to speak to a broader audience. We are republishing her work here with her express permission.

Off-ramping: where and how to spend your cryptocurrency

At the end of the day, cryptocurrency is just currency. You can’t breathe it, you can’t eat it, you can’t drink it. It won’t provide companionship, fulfillment, inspiration, or joy. A number in a bank account, or a cryptocurrency wallet, won’t keep you alive. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to spend it on something.

The cryptocurrency world calls this “off-ramping,” the complement to “on-ramping.” In this case, it means turning your cryptocurrency assets into something else, whether digital or physical.

In the traditional financial system, spending money comes with a privacy trade-off: your bank, credit card company, or payment processor knows what you’re up to. Transparent (non-private) cryptocurrency systems suffer from the same problem, but worse, because everyone in the entire world can watch what you buy. This is one of the main safety benefits to using privacy coins: no one but you and the vendor you’re buying from knows what you’re up to.

Paying directly in cryptocurrency

The easiest way to off-ramp or spend your cryptocurrency is to just pay for the thing in the same privacy coin you already have. Of course, this requires the vendor to accept payments in that privacy coin, and that’s still rare.

It’s worth pointing out that, as gig workers, we are actually quite a skilled bunch. As I’m sure you know (and as I’ve said before), independent labor requires myriad skills, and most gig workers are wearing multiple hats at once, which means you can support many of the gig workers you know without necessarily going to your friends for that one skill you already know they have. I personally know colleagues who are editors, tailors, graphic designers, leather workers, bartenders, computer programmers, cooks, tutors, and nannies who also do various forms of gig work as a supplemental income.

Community’s always been important but it’ll become more so very rapidly. If the quality is there, I’d rather get my blouse sewn by a fellow gig worker I know or one who is recommended to me by a friend. And, guess what, if they’re willing to accept payment for that service in Zcash, I’ve got my perfect off-ramp right there!

So if you’re a gig worker with such skills, share that fact with friends you trust. Or maybe you’ve got a car, time, and need cash? Consider offering a Homobiles-style car service for your fellow workers and accept payments in ZEC or another privacy coin! Build a local economy, and stay surveillance-free by using Zcash to sustain it! The true revolutionary potential of this truly cannot be overstated.

One way to think about this is: Zcash in Zodl is to money what Signal Private Messenger is to speech. Vive la révolution!

Paying in Bitcoin when you only have Zcash

Although Zcash is a superior private currency, most of the crypto world still relies on other surveillable systems, like Bitcoin. Thankfully, cryptocurrencies can be easily converted from one to another so it’s easy to pay in a vendor’s cryptocurrency of choice even if you only keep a balance in Zcash. There are lots of ways to do this, but many are clunky and require you to be quite careful about exchange rates, conversion fees, and payment processing times.

By far the easiest method is Zodl’s “Crosspay” feature, so named because it can make “cross-chain payments” simple and safe. Let’s work through a common use case I have one step at a time and show Crosspay at work.

As a person who travels frequently, one very common need I have is to pay for my travel bookings. Some newer travel sites will accept payment in Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other cryptocurrencies, but I’m aware of none who accept Zcash. (Obviously, if you know of one, please contact me to tell me about it!) This is where Zodl’s Crosspay feature shines and where Travala (referral link) comes in clutch.

It works like you’d expect any other flight and hotel booking platform to work, but you can pay directly in cryptocurrency. They also have a loyalty program, so you can earn extra rewards, and help me do the same if you sign up via my referral link.

Join Travala (via referral)

Travala’s payment options includes direct cryptocurrency transfer with dozens upon dozens of different supported cryptocurrencies, including the popular ones. (Yes, you can also pay with a fiat credit card, but the point of this demonstration is to show you how to pay in crypto.) While Travala doesn’t support Zcash directly, Zodl lets you swap your ZEC out for a number of cryptocurrencies that Travala does support at the same time as you send a payment.

Do this to pay for a hotel booking or flight ticket with cryptocurrency:

1. Start at Travala and find the hotel or flight you want to book just like any other travel website.
2. Once on its checkout screen, choose a cryptocurrency to pay in and begin the checkout process. Travala will present a checkout screen to you that looks something like this:
   
3. When you’re ready to pay, proceed to the payment screen itself, which will look like this:
   
4. Copy and/or send the address presented to you in the screen above, perhaps by sending it to yourself as a “Note To Self” message in Signal Private Messenger.
5. Open your Zodl wallet app.
6. Click on Zodl’s “Pay” button to open the Crosspay screen.
7. Next, in the “Send to” section, enter the payee’s (Travala’s) information:
8. You’ll see a cryptocurrency selection drop-down menu for choosing the currency the payee wants to receive from us. Find Bitcoin (BTC) from the list of options; it will have a small Bitcoin logo on top of a larger, second, identical Bitcoin logo. This means we’re using our shielded ZEC, but paying in Bitcoin.
9. In the Address field, paste the Bitcoin payment address you copied from Travala earlier.
10. Now choose how much to pay by entering an amount in either Bitcoin units.
11. Click “Review” at the bottom of the Zodl Crosspay screen. Zodl’s “Pay Now” drawer will open.
12. Review your payment and ensure that the fiat amount, if shown, will cover your Tryst TLC order.
13. Click “Confirm” when you are ready to make your payment and send the transaction.

In my experience, it takes about 5 to 10 minutes for the transaction to complete, so make sure you also have at least that much time on the checkout payment timer before you confirm your transaction, or you may not be able to get your account credited before your purchase order expires. If that does happen, you’ll have to speak with a support representative about crediting your account.

There’s a lot of sparkle-emoji technology sparkle-emoji happening here, but what’s extra cool about this is that at no point do you ever need a Bitcoin wallet! Moreover, no remnant of digital cruft exists anywhere in the various blockchains that can be meaningfully linked back to you. While the vendor you’re purchasing from may know who you are, they don’t know where your funds came from, and they don’t care.

Practically, this enables you to safely keep your cryptocurrency assets in the Zcash shielded pool, where they stay completely private, and still be able to pay any vendor who accepts any denomination of a supported cryptocurrency equally privately. If you do this, no one can know how rich (or poor) you really are. In contrast, if you keep your holdings in a transparent ledger system like Bitcoin, the whole world can tally your real net worth without ever asking you questions.

This is not a hypothetical example. This is in fact how I pay for my membership subscriptions for business expenses that accept cryptocurrency, as well as for the VoIP phone number I use for SMS inquiries. Consider trying it out for your next cryptocurrency payment, too.

Piggyback on the gift card economy

Among the most common ways to spend your hard-earned cryptocurrency today is by piggybacking on the massive gift card economy for making various kinds of retail purchases. One thing that’s nice about this for us as gig workers in particular is that many of us are already very familiar with gift cards and similar store credit services. We may even have regular business expenses such as a prepaid mobile phone (eSIM) line or hotel bookings we need to make to run our business.

Since gift cards and store credit systems are already a certain kind of alternative digital local currency, cryptocurrency is a natural fit. As a result, an entire crypto gift card marketplace industry has emerged to support this particular kind of off-ramp. While different crypto-to-gift-card vendors support different currencies, Zodl’s built-in decentralized exchange solves that problem, so the main considerations for those of us who want to use this method to spend our cryptocurrency funds are:

• finding a crypto to gift card exchange provider that partners with a brand we want to buy from, and
• ensuring that the exchange provider’s terms of use and their “Know Your Customer” rules doesn’t risk our privacy more than we are comfortable with.

I strongly suggest talking to your friends and colleagues about what services they like and feel safe using, and why. But if you’re just starting from scratch, read on to learn about my favorite vendors. Two of them conveniently, are built into the same self-custody wallets I’ve already recommended.

Pay for stuff via Flexa in Zodl

The gift card vendor directly integrated with the Zcash wallet app I use is called Flexa, which is basically a multi-store gift card manager mini-app inside the Zodl wallet app itself. If you’ve installed the mainstream version of Zodl (i.e., from the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, but not from the F-Droid strictly free software app repository), you’ll have the option to spend your shielded ZEC at partnered Flexa brands from within your Zodl wallet.

As of this writing, some Flexa partners include Ulta Beauty and Kiehl’s (cosmetic and skincare product brands, useful for the obvious reasons), Sheetz (a convenience store and gas station chain, useful if you often drive yourself to outcalls), and Chipotle, which I guess is mostly noteworthy for personal reasons because one of my partners loves Mexican food, so I get to treat them here often. :)

First, set up Zodl to work with Flexa as privately as possible by enabling Zodl’s built-in Tor network privacy features. Once that’s set up do this to use Flexa from within Zodl:

1. Open your Zodl wallet app. Make sure you have some ZEC in it, enough to cover the cost of the thing you’re about to buy in the local fiat currency where you’re buying it (such as in US Dollars if you’re in the United States).
2. Tap the “More…” button in the Zodl main screen.
3. Tap the “Pay with Flexa” item in the resulting list.
4. If this is the first time you’ve used Flexa, you’ll be asked to complete a brief registration process where you are asked for your name and email address. At this point, there are a few things you should know:
   1. While Flexa will have this information, none of it will end up on the Zcash blockchain network nor with the ultimate merchant from which you are buying something.
   2. At the moment, Flexa limits your spending to $750 USD per week. As a result, Flexa is not required to share any of your off-ramping activity with the US government’s Internal Revenue Service (IRS, the tax man).
   3. I signed up with Flexa using a name that is not my legal name and an email address that is not one I use for my legal identity, and I was still able to buy stuff by funding it with my Zcash balance. You can do the same. (Try using Firefox Relay for your masked email address.)
5. Once you have a Flexa account, you’ll be given a “Flexa QR code” that is basically just a barcode that participating brands can scan as a native payment. It’s that easy. But you’ll also see a “More instant payments” box at the bottom of your screen. These are “legacy Flexa brands,” which are the stores at which you need to tell the cashier that you want to pay using a “gift card” or “store credit.” To use these:
   1. Tap the logo icon for the brand you want to pay for. This will let you create a one-time use virtual gift card and load it up using your Zcash funds.
   2. Enter the amount you owe at the register. If the cashier tells you that your total is $20 USD, enter that amount under the brand’s logo.
   3. Press or tap the Confirm button. A new brand-specific virtual gift card QR code will appear.
   4. Tell the cashier you have your gift card ready. They will ask you to scan it. Do so, and you’ll have paid!

I have successfully used Flexa this way and, while it’s currently limited to supported business partners, it is by far the easiest way to spend my ZEC on real, physical stuff.

If you need something from a store that doesn’t have a Flexa partnership, you can still maybe find it from another cryptocurrency to gift card vendor.

Other cryptocurrency to gift card off-ramps

When you’re using the gift card economy to spend your cryptocurrency, the first challenge is figuring out which service can get you a gift card from a brand you want to purchase from.

The cryptocurrency to gift card vendor I know most about is Bitrefill (referral link), because they’re one of the largest. Another popular one I use is Piggy.Cards (referral link).

Both Bitrefill and Piggy.Cards sells gift cards to a plethora of well-known brands by accepting cryptocurrency as payment for them. You can buy these even more privately by browsing the sites via Tor Browser. If or when you hit purchase limits, you can create a “basic account” with Bitrefill to get decently large spending limits ($10,000 USD per month). Signing up with any name and any working email you like will work fine. (I didn’t use a legal identity to sign up and have no trouble using the site.) If you want to give Bitrefill or Piggy.Cards a try, signing up with my referral links will also earn you (and me) additional discounts and initial spending money.

Join Bitrefill (via referral) Join Piggy.Cards (via referral)

Since there are so many purchases available at these sites, I’ve also compiled the below list to help you get a sense of what’s available and may be particularly useful for us as gig workers via this particular gift card off-ramping site.

• Digital pre-paid Visa credit card (via Bitrefill) - Perhaps the most generically useful crypto off-ramp via the gift card economy is simply a pre-paid credit card. You pay in crypto and get a legitimate digital pre-paid credit card number that has a fiat balance you paid for using your cryptocurrency balance. You can also get physical pre-paid credit cards mailed to you.
• Amazon Gift Card (via Bitrefill) - This gift card is good for anything sold at Amazon.com, not that I’m trying to encourage you to give Daddy Bezos more money, but, y’know….
• Ulta Beauty Gift Card (via Bitrefill) - Ever since I started using cryptocurrency more in my everyday life, this cosmetics retailer has become my go-to for makeup and simple skincare needs. Flexa from within the Zodl wallet app also supports filling Ulta Beauty gift cards.
• Amtrak Gift Card (via Bitrefill) - Since I service clients in numerous cities clustered along Amtrak lines on the United States’ East Coast, this is a particularly convenient off-ramp for me and I imagine other frequent train-riders would want to know about it, too.
• Lyft Gift Card or Uber Gift Card (via Bitrefill) - For the obvious reasons.

You can also find gift cards for needs of all other sorts, including airline and hotel bookings, at gift card off-ramping sites like these. However, remember that the gift card economy is still actually part of the fiat economy. When possible, it’s best to avoid converting your cryptocurrency back to fiat currency, whether to avoid privacy incursions or simply due to the inconvenience. That’s where crypto-native services come in.

Use crypto-native service providers

Instead of gift cards, which is really just a roundabout way to help fiat economy vendors accept cryptocurrency without actually accepting cryptocurrency payments, there are also a class of business-to-consumer (B2C) middlemen that will accept payments in cryptocurrency and either interface with vendors on your behalf or provide services paid for in crypto themselves.

Booking hotel stays and air travel with cryptocurrency

We’ve already looked at one such off-ramp: Travala! But it deserves a mention in this section as a reminder, as well.

Buying VoIP phone services with cryptocurrency

Earlier, I showed you how to off-ramp using the gift card economy, which is one way you can buy prepaid phone and data plans. However, there are also some VoIP providers that will accept payment directly in crypto. Here’s a short list:

• JMP.chat - This VoIP provider is really a hosted Jabber/XMPP (instant messaging) service with a paid VoIP gateway. You give them Bitcoin, they give you a phone number. You can even sign up and use the service over Tor for more privacy. JMP.chat deserves its own exposition, but for now, just know it’s an option if you are comfortable getting through an unusual sign-up process.

(Please contact me to let me know if you found any more quality VoIP providers that accept crypto payments!)

Buying VPN services with cryptocurrency

Another common service many of us have need for is a reliable VPN. I have a lot of thoughts on the topic of private network technologies, which can mostly be summed up by preference for using Tor over a VPN but with that said, if you’re going to use a VPN, you should probably stick to a reputable one that you can pay for in cryptocurrency. Here are my favorite options for that:

• MullvadVPN - Based on a traditional VPN technology called Wireguard, Mullvad also accepts payments in Bitcoin.
• NymVPN - Nym is a novel VPN technology that requires a subscription to use, but not only is it reputable, you can pay for Nym with shielded Zcash.
• ProtonVPN - Many providers know this company for their ProtonMail service, but Proton also accepts Bitcoin for their VPN product, which can implement either a Wireguard or SSL/TLS-based VPN.

Fund a traditional payment card using cryptocurrency

If you don’t need the more complete privacy guarantees of off-ramps available via KYC-lite options such as gift cards, you can also apply for (and hopefully receive) a refillable, cryptocurrency-backed, payment card with a major traditional card issuer.

Since these are the equivalent of physical credit cards, you will have to upload your legal identity documents during the application process, meaning this off-ramp only provides partial privacy. Still, its convenience may be useful for workers who only need privacy from individual clients, rather than also from corporate or government institutions, or who simply need an off-ramp to spend their more private cryptocurrency earnings.

The biggest advantage of these cards is:

• they can be used for anything a normal credit card can be used for, like rent and utilities payments, which are situations in which even prepaid Visa gift cards may not always work.
• they don’t require a bank account to pay off, making this option especially attractive for gig workers who have already suffered banking discrimination and are having trouble using or opening a traditional checking or savings account.

By on-ramping directly in crypto and then funding a payment card like this, you simply don’t need to deposit your earnings into a bank account before you can fund the balance of your crypto-backed payment card.

Apply for a Payy Card, a crypto-backed Visa payment card

Payy (referral link) is a self-custodial, privacy-centered cryptocurrency wallet and payment gateway able to interface with Visa’s payment processing network. This makes Payy two things at the same time:

• a digital payment app, much like a cryptocurrency version of CashApp, Venmo, or PayPal, which makes it easy to do the kinds of things you might currently be using those apps for in your civilian life (pay back friends for dinner, for example).
• a Visa payment card paid for with cryptocurrency, but usable anywhere traditional Visa credit cards are accepted.

What’s appealing about Payy is that you can fund your Payy Card’s balance using either fiat currencies, such as from traditional bank accounts, or cryptocurrency sources, such as other crypto wallets or exchanges, by converting whatever cryptocurrency you have into USDC on Polygon, for example. This makes it feasible for de-banked individuals to buy things the way most of the banked population does, without needing to get a bank account, which is no small feat.

It’s important to remember that payments you make using a Payy Card are associated with your legal identity. From that perspective, it’s not more private than a regular credit card. However, it is a lot more private than just using Bitcoin, Ethereum, or other transparent-ledger cryptocurrency systems directly, because your payments aren’t published publicly for the entire Internet to see.

Payy itself communicates what data is public and what data stays private when you sign up for a Payy Card. Here’s the infographic I was shown when I applied for my Payy Card:

I would not recommend using your Payy Card or the Payy network for your any need you have that requires more privacy, if you can avoid it; do your best to stick with Zcash and Monero for that. However, if your friends are unwilling to adopt the stronger privacy protections offered by Zcash in Zodl, are scared of the volatility of actual privacy coins, or have otherwise succumbed to the propaganda that stablecoins are somehow superior (even though we know they’re not), Payy can be a convincing half-step to at least get them using cryptocurrency with you.

Your Payy Card can make you look more like a “normal” civilian in your personal life. And you can still keep your wealth private by having it in and moving it through the Zcash shielded pool (i.e., Zodl) at every opportunity.

If you’d like to try Payy, using my invitation link will net me “Payy Points,” which act a bit like a credit card loyalty program:

Apply for Payy (via referral)

Join a digital employment cooperative that accepts cryptocurrency

So far, the cryptocurrency off-ramping options I’ve described largely avoid unnecessary interaction with the fiat economy. Turning away from traditional financial and governmental systems is becoming increasingly important. However, it can also brand us illegitimate to individuals or institutions who do interact with that world and who, for whatever reason, we are also forced to interact with.

Unfortunately, lacking traditional legitimacy often means lacking important safety nets that come with traditional employment, like medical/health insurance and retirement plan benefits. It also means struggling to show proof of income in many situations where we still need it, such as taking out a fiat loan or renting from a landlord. Crucially, many classes of gig, freelance, or independent workers share in this frustration!

Let me be absolutely clear: I firmly believe the current system is unredeemable. As the fiat world continues failing to provide many of us our most basic needs, alternatives will be urgent sooner rather than later. On a personal level, I don’t even care why this empire is crumbling; whether my government failed me out of malice or whether it failed me because it’s incompetent is not something I have the luxury of thoroughly investigating. I just need a solution, and I need it yesterday.

One novel angle from which to attack this problem comes in the form of digital employment cooperatives, sometimes also called a freelancer’s union (not to be confused with The Freelancer’s Union). If you can join these institutions, they offer a way to legitimize your income, whether fiat or cryptocurrency. This means you get some of the benefits of traditional employment while retaining the freedom of being an independent worker.

Despite not being suitable for or available to everyone, this kind of thing is still worth knowing about. So, let’s look at one such off-ramp next.

Opolis: a crypto-native independent employment platform

Opolis (referral link) is a novel digital employment cooperative you may be able to join (if you meet minimum income or eligibility requirements based on your needs, see below) that can offer a way to legitimize your income, including any earnings from cryptocurrency transactions. With Opolis, rather than work “under the table,” you set things up like a traditional business, funnel your earnings through that business, and then pay yourself back as a salaried employee.

After reading this, if you want to join Opolis, you can help me by joining via my referral link:

Join Opolis (via referral)

In plain language, the whole setup works like this.

1. Register a legal business entity, such as an S-Corp that offers whatever services you provide. I’m being perfectly honest when I say I’ve discussed nuances of the JavaScript programming language with some of my clients!
2. You then hire yourself as an employee of that business, so you can pay yourself a salary out of the business’s future revenue.
3. Your business entity then partners (joins) with the Opolis business cooperative, which collectively negotiates employee benefits like health insurance plans.
4. Finally, your business in turn offers those employment benefits to you, the “human resource” (employee).

Yes, this tactic introduces complexity to your work. It means you have to go through the process of registering a business, like picking a name and choosing which State is best for you to register your business in. But the rubber meets the road when on-ramping the same as it did before, if not even better.

• Getting paid directly in crypto is no different, just show a client your QR code from a cryptocurrency wallet.
• You can use your registered business as a further shield to protect your individual privacy for accepting fiat payments like deposits when using your corporate bank account linked to fiat payment apps, notably Zelle. Just make sure you’ve registered your business in a privacy-friendly state like Delaware, Nevada, or Wyoming, and via a third-party registered agent so that you don’t have to list your legal identity as a publicly disclosed member of the corporation.

Now that you’re earning revenue on behalf of your business, you’ll need to record those funds in some accounting software. (I prefer to use GnuCash for this, but I’ve also heard good things about Rotki.) This way, you can treat it as your business’s taxable income for reporting when your business pays member dues in the cryptocurrencies Opolis supports. Yes, it also means you’re now going to pay taxes; that’s the cost of fiat legitimacy.

As a trans gig worker, my main motivation for looking into this option is my need for safe and reliable HRT medicine (it’s expensive to be trans in America). Unfortunately, Opolis has minimum income requirements that puts it out of my reach, at least for now. But when (not if 🙏🏻) I eventually make enough to meaningfully benefit from further professionalizing my independent business this way, this business cooperative approach seems like a good one.

A few other points to know about this off-ramp:

• I will personally vouch for Opolis being as worker-friendly as they need to be for someone like me to join.
  • They’re not tracking your hours or looking into the specifics of your business or clientele.
  • When meeting with their agents, I was not subtle about what industry I’m in. The agent I spoke with did not bat an eye, and didn’t pry.
• Also, you don’t need to be earning all of your income from one aspect of your work to join. What matters is how much you’re making in total so that you (as a business) can afford to run payroll while covering operating expenses, employee compensation (salary and benefits), and paying taxes or other applicable fees.
• No, this is not likely to be feasible for survival gig workers. For some mid-range or higher-end independent workers, part-timers, or contractors workers who also freelance in multiple industries, however, joining a digital employment cooperative like this one could both level up their business and further integrate them with the cryptocurrency economy.

I’d love to hear about your experience if you try something like this so please don’t hesitate to reach out to me if you do!

Editor’s note: This post is the third in a four-part series about making privacy-preserving cryptocurrency accessible and useful for underserved populations. Its original author, Violet Rollergirl, is a transgender sex worker who has modified the post from its original in order to speak to a broader audience. We are republishing her work here with her express permission.

On-Ramping: Acquiring Cryptocurrency Funds (as a Gig Worker)

Now that you have a privacy-preserving cryptocurrency wallet app and can receive funds in a privacy coin like Zcash or Monero, it’s time to start acquiring some funds. The cryptocurrency world calls this “on-ramping,” using the analogy of a highway on-ramp from one place (the fiat economy) to another (the so-called “crypto-native” economy, or whatever).

Getting paid directly in crypto

I’ll be blunt: the easiest way for many of us to start getting crypto is to just get a client or customer to pay or tip us in cryptocurrency. This simply avoids any interaction with the fiat economy entirely. This is of course even better if we get paid directly in a privacy coin like Zcash or Monero and don’t have to convert, exchange, or swap the money we make into one of these privacy-preserving cryptocurrencies, but my favorite Zcash wallet app, Zodl, even makes it easy to receive deposits in Zcash from a range of cryptocurrencies.

Receiving the same cryptocurrency being sent

The simplest way to get paid in crypto is to simply receive the same cryptocurrency your client or customer has to send you. More often than not, this is likely to be Bitcoin, because all of the major cryptocurrency exchanges support that.

My more privacy-conscious clients actually prefer paying directly in Zcash, though, which is why I have both Zodl (the most private Zcash wallet app) and Cake Wallet (a privacy-focused wallet app that supports most other major currencies, but not yet Zcash); together, these two wallets let me accept dozens upon dozens of cryptocurrencies without needing to swap or exchange one currency for another.

To get paid in this situation when you don’t need to perform a currency swap, find the “Receive” button in your wallet app. Every wallet app makes this button very big and clear, because everyone likes getting paid and that’s what wallet apps are for. Tap or click the Receive button and you’ll be presented with options to reveal the full address, a QR code of the address, and sometimes also other ways to share the address of your wallet such as by sharing a link. (This is exactly how my own cryptocurrency tips and donation links work, by the way.)

Send the address or the generated QR code to your client or customer however you’re already talking with them. Ideally, you’re messaging discreetly, such as over Signal Private Messenger, but any method of sending them some text or an image (email, text message, whatever), will work. Have them press the complementary “Send” button in their wallet app, enter the address you gave them, whether via copy-and-paste or by scanning the QR code you showed them, and you’ll have your money a few moments after they confirm the transaction on their side.

Zodl even has a “Request” button in its “Receive” screen that lets you enter an amount you’d like to receive and embeds this amount into a QR code that you can display, or save as an image to send. If your client or customer also has Zodl (or any other wallet app that supports Zcash QR codes), they can just scan the QR code to send you exactly that amount of money in Zcash’s cryptocurrency, called ZEC, the Zcash Electric Coin.

You can think of Zodl’s “request via QR code” feature like a simplistic point-of-sale system. I love it because it’s perfect for us as providers since we’re so often interactively requesting payment from customers and clients who need things to be as easy as “scan-and-send.”

Getting paid in Zcash when your client or customer only has Bitcoin

Zodl also has a neat feature worth knowing about that makes it possible for you to receive cryptocurrency deposits (or even payments!) regardless of whether your client or customer will send you shielded Zcash directly. It’s called a “swap deposit,” and it’s one way I make paying me in cryptocurrency easy for clients who won’t deal with anything except Bitcoin, Ethereum, or whatever their cryptocurrency of choice is.

As swap deposits require entering a “refund” address for cases where the currency swap fails, there are two ways to perform one with Zodl.

• The simpler option, if your only means of accessing cryptocurrency is the Zodl wallet app itself, causes failed swaps to get refunded to the client’s address. I’d only recommend this in situations where you trust your client to try again, and where your client is not likely to become fatigued by trouble ensuring you have been paid.
• The second option requires you to have another cryptocurrency wallet app that supports holding the same cryptocurrency that your client is sending you, such as using Zodl and Cake Wallet together. This way you can ensure all the funds from failed swaps are still sent to you, not back to your client, just not have your money immediately show up in Zodl as shielded ZEC.

This second method is one of the main reasons why I use a combination of Zodl with Cake Wallet.

In the example below, let’s assume your client wants to pay in Bitcoin, but you want to receive the most private currency you can as quickly as you can, which is shielded Zcash in Zodl.

The way we do this is by initiating a currency swap trade, but we’ll have the client play the role of the seller while we act as the buyer. Put another way, even though our client is sending the funds, we will receive his failed trade’s refund, and we’ll also be where his successfully traded funds are sent. This means the “trade” actually serves as a full cross-currency, cross-chain payment in one fell swoop.

Note: In the following step-by-step walkthrough of how Zodl lets us perform a swap deposit, Cake Wallet and Bitcoin are just examples. You can replace Cake Wallet with whatever other self-custodial cryptocurrency wallet you are comfortable using, and Bitcoin with whatever cryptocurrency your client or customer wants to send you that your chosen self-custodial wallet app supports holding.

Do this to get paid from a client or customer by performing a swap deposit in Zodl using your Cake Wallet as the “refund” address for the Bitcoin your client is paying in:

1. Open Cake Wallet to the wallet of the cryptocurrency your client is sending you, such as Bitcoin.
2. Tap the Receive button. This reveals your own Bitcoin wallet’s address.
3. Copy your own Bitcoin wallet’s address and make a note of it somewhere. We’ll use this as the “refund” address in Zodl’s Swap feature.
   • I like to send this to myself using Signal Private Messenger’s “Note to self” feature.
4. Open your Zodl wallet.
5. Tap Swap to open Zodl’s decentralized exchange (DEX) integration.
6. In the From cryptocurrency selection drop-down menu, choose the currency (and network) your client or customer wants to send. In this example, we’ll choose BTC (Bitcoin on the main Bitcoin network, also known as “Bitcoin mainnet”).
7. In the Refund Address field, paste the Bitcoin address of your own self-custodial wallet, like Cake Wallet, that you noted earlier.
8. In the Amount field, enter how much you’re asking your client or customer to pay.
   • This is the exact amount you expect to receive in ZEC. Any additional funds will be sent to the Refund Address you entered earlier.
   • You don’t need to calculate transaction fees yourself; you’ll get an automated estimate for this shortly.
9. In the To section, choose a slippage tolerance, that is, how much more than the target price your client or customer is likely comfortable paying.
   • I tell clients that this covers “all transaction and payment processing fees, inclusive.”
   • I usually leave this at its default of 1%. This is low enough that it’s usually a much cheaper option than many fiat services such as wishlists or tipping sites.
   • You can set a custom slippage tolerance if you want to be extra sure the swap succeeds and you think your client or customer will not care much about the increase in total price.
10. Tap the Get a quote button to generate a swap trade quote with a total estimate, including fees and any extra price slippage.

11. Review the quote. It’ll look something like what’s shown in the screenshot below:

    Screenshot showing a swap quote in the Zashi wallet app.

12. Tap Confirm to generate the swap trade’s address, amount, and QR code.
13. Show, share, or send this payment information to your client or customer.
    • Tell your client or customer that they have about 1 hour to confirm the send. This is a very common grace period to hold a quoted price in cryptocurrency ecommerce systems such as BTCPay Server.
    • The swap deposit’s “payment” address shown here is ephemeral (temporary), much like other cryptocurrency shopping cart checkout pages. You cannot reuse it ever again.
    • (If you’re using this technique to swap (i.e., “convert” or “exchange”) your own non-private Bitcoin into private shielded Zcash, rather than using this technique to get a client or customer to pay you, this is when you go to your other Bitcoin wallet app or log in to your exchange service account and send your own cryptocurrency funds to the address Zodl showed you.)
14. Tap the I’ve sent the funds button.

At this point, the swap trade is “pending deposit.” Remember, when using this technique to collect a crypto deposit or payment, it’s actually your client or customer who’s sending funds, not you. Moreover, they’re not sending funds directly to you, but rather to the decentralized exchange to which you’ve requested a currency swap from their currency into yours.

The address shown in the quote confirmation isn’t your address, but rather a deposit address for the underlying DEX associated with the currency swap trade you were quoted. This is why the address will eventually expire and why your client or customer needs to send the funds sooner rather than later.

When your client or customer actually sends those funds to the exchange’s deposit address, the exchange will attempt to make the trade between currencies. When it does, one of two things will happen:

• If the swap trade succeeds:
  • your Zodl wallet app will see the receipt of exactly the amount you’ve requested and will immediately auto-shield it, making your funds completely private.
  • your Cake Wallet app will see any overage paid, i.e., the difference between the slippage tolerance you set and the actual realized slippage of the trade as it was made, “refunded” to you from the exchange. This amount is also now yours, completely immune from chargebacks.
• If the swap trade fails:
  • your Zodl wallet app will report the trade as unsuccessful for whatever reason, but…
  • …your Cake Wallet app will see all of the original currency (Bitcoin, in this example), received as a “refund” and is completely immune from chargebacks. You can now try the swap again or use another exchange to swap into Monero. (I like Cake Wallet because Trocador, a centralized exchange aggregator and proxy site is built into Cake Wallet!)

What’s clever about this is that no matter what happens, you receive the money the client or customer sends. Moreover, you are never interacting directly with the client’s wallet; there’s no next-neighbor connection between you and them. You only ever interact with the currency exchanges, keeping any digital association between you and your client or customer to an absolute minimum, providing ultimate payment discretion.

For some of us, however, getting paid directly in crypto seems like a stretch. Our clients or customers are wary of cryptocurrency, they don’t have the technical skill to do it, they have no existing cryptocurrency funds themselves, or they don’t have the same cryptocurrencies that we want to accept payments in. So, next, let’s talk about on-ramping in other ways.

Converting fiat currency to cryptocurrency

If you have existing fiat currency, like US Dollars (USD), Euros (EUR), or whatever, the simplest way to acquire cryptocurrency of any kind is to buy it. This works like any other foreign currency conversion. By way of analogy, when you’re converting fiat currencies from one to another, you go to a currency exchange counter such as those that are at airports. There, you ask the person at the currency exchange service counter for an equivalent amount of the local currency given your available foreign currency.

Fiat-to-cryptocurrency conversions work just like that, except instead of going up to a physical counter, you visit the currency conversion service’s website. Many such fiat-to-cryptocurrency exchanges exist. Today, the biggest and most famous of these are Coinbase, Kraken, and Binance, although both CashApp and PayPal also function as cryptocurrency exchanges, albeit for a smaller array of cryptocurrencies.

While this method is very easy, the downside is that you will likely be asked to show your government ID to the exchange, especially if you’re trying to convert currencies in large amounts. This can be a big privacy risk if you’ve previously used that exchange’s services to make other kinds of transactions that you don’t want linked to you legal identity. In this case, consider creating a brand-new account from scratch.

The good news here is that it’s in no way shady to be buying cryptocurrency. These are just currencies and securities like any other. However, doing so at a cryptocurrency exchange means the exchange is still holding your funds for you, so I’d suggest that sooner rather than later you move your funds out of the exchange account and into a self-custodial wallet, like Zodl or Cake Wallet.

Buy ZEC via cryptocurrency exchanges

If you already have some fiat currency like US Dollars and want to enter the cryptocurrency ecosystem, you can treat cryptocurrency like money from another country. Just as you might convert your dollars into Euros at a foreign currency exchange service desk when you visit France, so too can you convert your dollars into ZEC (or another cryptocurrency).

This means you need to open an account at a cryptocurrency exchange service, and this will almost certainly require you to upload your legal identity documents when opening the account or making your first exchange. Once you do this, though, you can move fiat funds into crypto and then from there move your newly-acquired crypto to a self-custody wallet (like Zodl) outside of the exchange’s control.

Since some people’s clients face way less banking discrimination than de-banked populations do, it’s far more likely that they will be able to create and keep accounts with such exchanges open. However, if you are lucky enough to have avoided banking discrimination and can also do this, you can pretend to be your own client and walk through the steps I’ve written for how to do this in my client-facing guide just as they would:

Crypto Quick(est) Start

Withdrawing funds privately

One very important thing to remember is that buying Zcash at a cryptocurrency exchange is not private. You’re buying transparent ZEC from a custodial account, not shielded ZEC held in a self-custodial wallet app. Moreover, if a cryptocurrency exchange doesn’t support shielded ZEC withdrawals, you cannot privately move ZEC to your self-custodial wallet.

As I write this guide, the only major cryptocurrency exchange that supports shielded ZEC withdrawals is Gemini, a feature they should be praised for. This makes it possible to move ZEC from your Gemini account directly to a Zcash shielded address.

This lack of support for shielded ZEC withdrawals from the cryptocurrency exchanges that support Zcash in the first place is why I often advise buying Bitcoin or Ethereum from those exchanges and then using the swap deposit method I described above to withdraw those funds from your cryptocurrency exchange account.

Another important thing to understand is that buying ZEC from one of these custodial exchanges and sending it directly to your self-custodial wallet app is not the same as buying ZEC and then keeping it in the account you created at the exchange. By moving your funds out of the exchange and into your self-custodial wallet app immediately, you’re doing the equivalent of withdrawing your money from the bank so you can hold onto and protect it yourself.

The ultimate takeaway is that by choosing to hold a privacy coin, once you receive your ZEC or XMR in your self-custodial wallet app, you can move it about freely and privately. That’s the only way to effectively free your money from others’ control.

Summary and Next Steps

The easiest way to get crypto is for someone to just give you some that they already have. This also demonstrates the easiest and most natural way to transact with cryptocurrency, since it just requires scanning a QR code of the receiving wallet from the sending wallet, and confirming the transaction. You can receive cryptocurrency like this as a gift or a payment.

Other ways are more complex, and require a fiat-to-cryptocurrency “on-ramp,” which requires opening (yet another) service account at a cryptocurrency exchange.

Once you have cryptocurrency, though, what can you do with it, besides just hold onto like a stock portfolio? Well, you can buy stuff with it, of course. That’s called off-ramping, and we’ll look at that next.

Editor’s note: This post is the second in a four-part series about making privacy-preserving cryptocurrency accessible and useful for underserved populations. Its original author, Violet Rollergirl, is a transgender sex worker who has modified the post from its original in order to speak to a broader audience. We are republishing her work here with her express permission.

Everything (and Only) What You Need to Know about Cryptocurrency Wallets

A lot of people think getting started with cryptocurrency is hard. That might have been true years ago, but it’s not anymore. There are really good, easy to use apps, often called “wallets” or, more precisely, wallet apps, that make setting up your cryptocurrency “accounts” shockingly fast and private.

Understand the “wallet” metaphor

Cryptocurrency is realized in software, not paper or metal. You cannot hold a Bit-“coin” in your hand, nor can you put one inside a literal wallet. Therefore, of course, cryptocurrency “wallets” are not literally wallets, but rather programs you install on your phone (your computer) that let you interact with cryptocurrency networks for the purposes of conducting transactions with others who are also using them.

The use of the term wallet is, of course, just a metaphor.

Case in point, this Web page isn’t really a literal page (unless you’ve printed it out and are reading it on paper). Nevertheless, the metaphor of printed words on paper is useful for communicating something very important. If you’ve previously encountered a book, pamphlet, brochure, or magazine, then describing this section of my guide as a “page” instantly communicates what you can do here: read, learn, browse forward and backwards, even highlight the text, copy it, and more.

Metaphors are useful for talking about familiar characteristics in unfamiliar environments. But they are still just metaphors. That’s why you’ll often hear me describe crypto wallets more precisely as wallet apps.

Cryptocurrency apps are often called wallets because we use those apps to hold (or otherwise access) the money stored in them. When we need to pay for something with paper money, we dig around for our wallet in our purse or pocket, reach into one of its pouches and pull out a bill or some coins. When we pay for something with cryptocurrency, we similarly need to find the wallet app on our phone and tap a button labelled Send, Transfer, or Withdraw.

More elaborate physical wallets sometimes have multiple pouches in them, perhaps one for your US Dollars and another for your Euros or for that loose change you got from a recent corner store purchase, slots for credit or ID cards, and more. Similarly, more elaborate cryptocurrency wallet apps can hold multiple currencies, offer separate metaphorical pouches (confusingly also often called “wallets”) for keeping certain funds discretely organized away from other funds, or even let you log in to various other electronic services with the use of identity credentials.

Wallet app selection criteria

Different wallet apps have different features, so your choice of wallet app matters. In some ways, this is like choosing a Web browser. Different people have different needs, preferences, and even aesthetic choices.

Wallet app dealbreakers

For me as a gig worker, as a trans woman, and as a privacy advocate, the most important considerations in choosing which wallet app or apps to use are that whatever I pick must:

• support the private cryptocurrencies (Zcash and/or Monero) I need to use, and
• operate in a self-custodial way so I’m not re-introducing the risks of being de-banked by using a third-party service.

These are my two deal-breakers.

If the wallet app doesn’t support Zcash or Monero, then it’s not very useful to me because it won’t work with the privacy-preserving technologies I rely on to keep my financial data private.

Similarly, if the wallet app doesn’t work in a self-custody manner, then it’s not really a wallet, it’s a teller window at a bank. That means I don’t actually have any of my money on my person, because the bank is holding on to it for me. I’ve personally experienced having my funds inaccessible because the financial institution unilaterally denied me access to my own money and one of the whole points of using cryptocurrency for me is to ensure this can never happen again.

Wallet app nice-to-haves

The best privacy-focused wallet apps also offer other protections from privacy violations or even from making costly mistakes as I’m learning to use them. Here’s my additional list of wallet app nice-to-haves:

• Auto-shielding: since Zcash has a public (transparent) and private (shielded) mode, good Zcash wallet apps will automatically shield (make private) any publicly visible funds deposited into them.
• Address auto-rotation: to receive crypto-money, wallet apps generate cryptocurrency network addresses, sometimes called wallet addresses, which you need to then share with a client or customer so they know how to pay you. Address auto-rotation means your wallet app automatically gives you a new wallet address to share with each new client, for each new payment, or whenever you demand it.
  • This means I can give different clients different addresses, frustrating any attempts they may make to collude with one another to compare notes about who they’re paying. This feature is sometimes called “ephemeral addresses,” but this is a misnomer, as all past addresses can still receive funds without interruption, so they aren’t really temporary or ephemeral in any way.
• Permissionless swap deposits: this feature makes it possible for me to unilaterally protect a client or customer’s payment privacy even if they refuse to use a privacy-preserving technology themselves, enabling me to receive Zcash even if my client or customer pays me in another currency like Bitcoin.
• Built-in Tor protection: keeping financial transactions private in the blockchain ledger system is great, but the best privacy-focused wallet apps also protect you from classic network surveillance via “set and forget” integration with Tor Project’s anonymizing network proxy from within the app itself.
  • Using Tor makes it harder for anyone to know that you’re even using a cryptocurrency network in the first place.
  • I highly recommend enabling this feature if your wallet app supports it. For example, the Electric Coin Company’s blog shows you how to enable Tor within Zodl.

Both of the wallet apps I’ll recommend next support all of these features!

The cryptocurrency ecosystem evolves quickly, but as of this writing there are two very clear winners. I’ll show you both.

Zodl (formerly Zashi): Privacy-focused Zcash wallet app

Zodl Wallet (formerly Zashi) is the best beginner’s privacy coin wallet app, period, full stop.

Its simple user interface may frustrate more experienced cryptocurrency users and there are some edge cases it can’t account for on its own. However, this same simplicity is what novices will be blessedly relieved by. If you’ve never used a cryptocurrency wallet before, Zodl will delight you from the very first moment you open it.

I like to say that Zodl is to money what Signal Private Messenger is to speech: an app so uncompromising about financial privacy and yet so easy to use that it’s almost impossible to fuck up. If you’re just starting out in gig work today and you want only one simple app to communicate bookings with clients or sales to customers, make it Signal Private Messenger. Likewise, if you’ve never tried cryptocurrency before and you only want to use one app to get clients or customers to pay you in crypto, make it Zodl.

Zodl runs on Apple iOS or Android devices, including GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused, de-Google-ified Android alternative:

Go install Zodl now

Some other unique features that make Zodl particularly attractive to privacy coin novices are:

• Crosspay: this feature is the easiest and most private way to make payments in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies directly out of your (shielded) Zcash balance without having to do any conversion or transaction fee math yourself! More on this later.

I think Zodl is fast becoming the killer app for anyone who’s at risk of being de-banked from the traditional financial system. By holding shielded ZEC, your money stays entirely private. Since Zodl’s Crosspay and swap features are built on a permissionless, decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol called NEAR Intents, you still have access to the broader crypto ecosystem in a way no one can ban you from.

Cake Wallet: Privacy-focused Monero wallet app

If you’re already more experienced with cryptocurrency, or if you simply want a more elaborate wallet app, I suggest you look at Cake Wallet.

Unlike Zodl, Cake Wallet supports holding a whole slew of different cryptocurrencies, including Monero, (shielded) Zcash, and many other non-private cryptocurrencies like old school Bitcoin proper. This means that as long as you’re comfortable with its slightly more complex user interface, you can consolidate all of your crypto needs into this one single wallet app.

Go install Cake Wallet now

Some other unique features that make Cake Wallet particularly attractive to privacy coin veterans are:

• Swap provider switcher: this feature lets you choose the currency conversion/swap service you want to use when you want to exchange one kind of cryptocurrency into another. Most notably, in addition to the NEAR Intents decentralized exchange, they also support Trocador, a centralized exchange currency conversion service proxy site, which provides an additional layer of identity protection when making currency swaps. You can further use Trocador over Tor from within the app.
  • For example, if you need to turn your Monero into Bitcoin, or your Bitcoin into Monero (a swap NEAR doesn’t support), you can use Trocador’s service directly within the Cake Wallet app to do this easily.

Using multiple wallet apps

Although I find that the majority of my needs are met with just Zodl wallet, once you start learning about cryptocurrency you’ll find it both easy and useful to at least dabble in other cryptocurrencies and wallet apps. There are multiple reasons for this:

• Sometimes, it’s easier to get paid if you can “meet clients where they are” by using a wallet app that more natively supports whatever currency theirs does, without going through a decentralized exchange that may delay receiving your funds from less cooperative clients.
• Once you start amassing some wealth, you may want to mitigate some of your risk by spreading your holdings out across multiple wallet apps, cryptocurrencies, or both.
• Occasionally, you may run into a technical limitation that requires you to use another wallet app to get something done. This is becoming much rarer, but does still happen.

As I write this, the cryptocurrency ecosystem is also still very fragmented. Different wallet apps work with different cryptocurrencies, and different “coins” are available on different “chains” (sometimes called “networks”) as “tokens.” It’s all very confusing and can get annoying and rather jargon-filled quickly.

This fragmentation itself may also push you to need more than one wallet. However, if you stick with Zodl for your Zcash and Cake Wallet for your Monero and your Bitcoin (or Ethereum or whatever other non-private cryptocurrency you’re ultimately pushed to use), you’ll cover what I estimate is 90-95% of your use cases.

I personally use Zodl most often. After that, I use Cake Wallet. For what it’s worth, if you really want to explore wallets and feel comfortable getting a bit adventurous with your choices, I also like Edge Wallet and Ywallet.

Open your wallet app and you’re good to go

This is the surprising part for a lot of people: once you open your self-custodial wallet app, you’re immediately able to receive payments. That’s literally all there is to it. No need to enter a name, make an account, verify your age, or prove your government identity. Get the right kind of wallet app (always self-custodial or non-custodial), and you’re instantly set up to make sales and accept deposits or payments interactively.

In every wallet app, you’ll see a button labelled “Receive.” This is the button you press to, you guessed it, reveal your address, which is the way other people send you whatever cryptocurrency the wallet app supports. That’s what we’ll need to start getting crypto.

Quick safety note

Self-custody wallet apps are truly like physical wallets, not bank accounts: if you uninstall the wallet app, or your phone is lost or gets stolen, and you don’t have a backup somewhere then all the money in your cryptocurrency wallet is lost, too.

Another useful analogy, at least for those of us who have physical safe vaults at our homes or places of business, is that you should think of your self-custody wallet app like a physical vault in which you keep your cold, hard cash. Lose the key to the safe, and you lose access to the money inside. There is no bank teller you can go to beg for help from, even though the money is still right there, sitting just out of reach.

Thankfully, it’s very easy to protect yourself from this kind of financial loss. To understand how it works, you should know a tiny little bit more about what happens when you open a self-custody wallet app on your phone for the first time.

Backups and recovery phrases

When you install your wallet app of choice, it automatically generates what’s called a wallet seed phrase, or recovery phrase, or BIP32/BIP39/BIP44 mnemonic code, or something to that effect. This is a fancy way of saying “the wallet app made up a secret passphrase that gives you control over your money.” All of those terms mean the same thing.

Your wallet’s seed phrase is usually a sequence of 12 to 24 words that, as soon as you start caring about your funds, you should probably write down somewhere safe. (I suggest using a password manager like Bitwarden.) Eventually, you may even want to memorize it. This secret recovery seed phrase or whatever you want to call it is your magic money spell, the incantation you can invoke to “magically” conjure your money using any wallet app that supports both your cryptocurrency and your recovery phrase algorithm. Almost all of the good, modern wallets support this cool feature.

If you memorize the words of your wallet’s seed phrase in the right order, you can do some amazingly sci-fi-esque shit, like cross international borders carrying nothing at all, and still emerge on the other side able to access your funds again as soon as you get your hands on a smartphone with an Internet connection. It’s like you’re a mashup of Trinity from The Matrix and Natasha Romanov from the Marvel Cinemantic Universe or something. It’s crazy that this works, but it does!

This seed phrase is actually the input to a cryptographic algorithm that’s used to deterministically generate a multitude of cryptocurrency addresses that you fully control. Only you can see the value they store, and only you have the power to spend from those addresses. (That’s why you don’t want to share this secret phrase with anyone else; anyone who knows the secret phrase will have the same power you do.) Despite generating a ton of addresses that may, over time, contain different amounts, your wallet app sums them all to show you a single, total balance.

Summary and Next Steps

Now that you have one of the cryptocurrency wallet apps described above, you have the equivalent of an “account,” “vault,” “place to put cash under your mattress,” or just “wallet” where you can put your digital private money. Just like physical cash, it’s up to you to keep it safe. The next step, of course, is to go get paid.

Editor’s note: This post is the first in a four-part series about making privacy-preserving cryptocurrency accessible and useful for underserved populations. Its original author, Violet Rollergirl, is a transgender sex worker who has modified the post from its original in order to speak to a broader audience. We are republishing her work here with her express permission.

Most people use money. For a lot of people, that money has become electronic: credit or debit cards, online payment services like PayPal, or online banking. Especially for gig workers, freelancers, independent contractors, or others who still live paycheck-to-paycheck, their economic activity—who pays them and who they pay—is where their privacy is the most vulnerable.

Meanwhile, cryptocurrency gets a bad rap and, in many situations, it’s deserved. Most of the “crypto” sector is just not relevant, not helpful, and not intended for us as normal people, rather than as bankers. However, there is a sliver of really powerful stuff in there, and I want to normalize that slice of it because I truly believe that doing so is vital to protecting ourselves, our clients, and our financial futures.

Using Electronic Private Money is a series of articles that I hope will help you better understand why there are real benefits to using the good parts of what cryptocurrency makes possible, what those benefits are, and how to capitalize on them in your day-to-day dealings as someone who is not a banker or a Bitcoin bro.

Start using cryptocurrency today

The following is a series of articles I’ve written in the hopes of helping you gradually move more and more of your financial life towards safe and private cryptocurrencies and away from (often discriminatory) traditional banking institutions and the implicit surveillance they subject you and all the people you transact with to.

Gig workers of all stripes are increasingly using cryptocurrency, but there are many who still don’t. Maybe that’s because it’s unfamiliar, it confuses their clients, or they’re unaware of how to convert crypto assets into material necessities. If any of that describes you, then you’re in the right place.

Moreover, I understand that cryptocurrency has a reputation problem. It’s often maligned for social reasons (“cryptobros”), ecological reasons (“blockchains are killing the planet”), and political reasons (“money is made up bullshit and a tool of the oppressor”). I’m not going to refute these points, except maybe the second one; both of the cryptocurrencies I recommend are moving away from solely compute-intensive Proof-of-Work (PoW) schemes to ecologically-friendly Proof-of-Stake (PoS) schemes.

Ultimately, crypto is an undeniable win for me in my life and my work, so this series is for my colleagues who are willing to give cryptocurrency a chance.

A Simple Cryptocurrency Primer

Cryptocurrency is just digitized money. Don’t think about it like a technology. Think about it like a foreign currency.

Why I use cryptocurrency

Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons anyone uses money, regardless of who you are. Money, including cryptocurrency, can be used for:

• a medium of exchange, i.e., you can use it like cash, to pay for things and accept payments from clients and customers.
• a store of value, i.e., you can use it like a bank account or an investment portfolio, to keep financial assets in a safe place, to trade it like stocks or mutual funds, or to hold onto it like a retirement plan.

Both are valid uses, but let’s be frank: most of us are poor. We don’t have large investment portfolios. We don’t care about the crypto stock market. We aren’t tracking the volatility metrics of a given coin or how strong the Dollar is against the Euro today or next week. We are mostly just trying to survive, and so we aren’t here to learn day trading strategies.

I just want an easy way to pay for things (like my ads) and a private way for my clients and customers to pay me. Unfortunately, if we rely on traditional payment methods, which is often called the “fiat” economy, we are taking on a bunch of additional risks. These risks include:

• having our legal identity revealed (“doxxed”) to our client or customer
• getting banned from the payment app we’re using, or losing access to our bank account (getting “de-banked”) and having our funds in it frozen or confiscated
• having sales reversed (suffering “chargebacks”) by disgruntled, malicious, or scammy clients
• accidentally accepting counterfeit bills. It’s even possible for a client not to know a bill they gave us is counterfeit!

Using cryptocurrency correctly solves every single one of these problems. That’s why I use it.

Since cryptocurrency can function like digital cash, I don’t need to sign up to a big tech service or open an account at the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank to use it. Since it’s not actually physical, but rather “mathematical” money, there’s no chance of a client giving me counterfeit bills or coins. For the same reason, once a client or customer sends me money in a cryptocurrency transaction, there’s no way for that sender to initiate a reversal or punish me with a chargeback.

There are also some additional benefits that using cryptocurrency has over fiat currency. I think the most awe-inspiring of these is how I can cross an international border with absolutely no physical device on my person, and yet still travel with all my money. In other words, cryptocurrency changes money from something you have (paper money) into something you know (a secret pass phrase). If you memorize your cryptocurrency wallet’s secret phrase, you’ll always have access to your money in a way that no one can take away from you, even if you’re traveling with nothing but your birthday suit.

Two kinds of cryptocurrencies: Private and Not-Private

Some of the above, like the way cryptocurrency makes counterfeits impossible (cryptographers would say, “mathematically infeasible”) is made possible regardless of which cryptocurrency you use. Bitcoin is the famous cryptocurrency, and it’s had this counterfeit-proof characteristic since its inception. But some of the other things I talk about above are only possible if you strictly limit yourself to certain cryptocurrency technologies that are broadly classified as privacy coins.

A privacy coin is a cryptocurrency that keeps transaction data secret. In such a transaction, the payment’s sender, recipient, and amount are known only to the parties conducting business together. No third party observer, payment processor, or other intermediary learns who’s paying you, that you’re the one being paid, how much you’re being paid, or what you’re being paid for.

Only privacy coins do this. In contrast, anyone with a Web browser can know everything about every Bitcoin transaction ever made, because Bitcoin works by broadcasting transactions publicly for the world to see. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to be doing that, nor do my clients. It’s the same reason we use encrypted messaging apps like Signal to communicate privately.

Put another way: privacy coins are to money what encrypted messaging apps are to speech.

Privacy coins are also called opaque ledger systems because they hide the contents of their accounting ledger. Non-private coins are therefore known as transparent ledger systems. While a transparent ledger system relies on everyone in the world having full visibility into all transaction data to solve some technical problems, privacy-preserving opaque ledger systems use math known as zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) to encrypt the details of each transaction so that only the sender and intended recipient know what’s up.

Once more: only privacy coins do this. The biggest misconception about Bitcoin is that it’s pseudonymous money, but nothing could be further from the truth. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other transparent ledger cryptocurrency is more like a public Venmo feed with no way to make it private.

There are a lot of privacy coins out there, but the only two that I’m going to talk about in detail are the two most reputable and proven ones, the ones I trust to keep my transactions private: Zcash and Monero.

Zcash in a nutshell

Zcash is the gold standard in cryptocurrency privacy technology.

It was also the first privacy coin to popularize the idea of using zero-knowledge proofs to encrypt cryptocurrency transactions. It was super slow when it was first introduced in 2016, but has since become faster and better in so many ways. Today, Zcash is in its sixth major iteration (called a network upgrade), and now uses a technology called zk-SNARKs, which is a funny name that stands for Zero-Knowledge Succinct Non-interactive ARguments of Knowledge, to massively speed up the computation required for the strong privacy guarantees it gives us.

A lot of people who have been in the cryptocurrency space for a while have a lot of bad information about Zcash, which stem from an outdated understanding of its technology and app ecosystem.

Most people who rag on Zcash will tell you that it’s “not private by default.” This is just not true anymore. They are saying this because Zcash actually supports both a private and a non-private mode. In Zcash parlance, we call this “shielded” (private) and “transparent” (non-private/public) addresses and transactions. Back in the day, most apps that supported Zcash’s currency token, called ZEC (the Zcash Electric Coin), didn’t support the shielded functionality, but that’s since changed.

Good apps like Zodl (formerly Zashi) wallet exist that not only fully support and default to Zcash’s shielded mode, they also automatically convert non-private/public/transparent Zcash funds into their shielded/private equivalents. These apps also prevent you from spending unshielded funds, and some even go so far as to help protect your privacy from other deanonymization techniques by making it dead-simple to use the famous privacy-enhancing anonymizing proxy called Tor from right within the app.

Zodl in particular is made by the same team that built Zcash itself. It’s my favorite wallet app for Zcash.

Monero in a nutshell

The other privacy coin a lot of people like, and that I’ll use, is Monero. This is the bad boy of the privacy coin world, because it’s been the cryptocurrency most used by darknet markets and ransomware gangs. A lot of people think Monero is only useful for evil things, but that’s also like saying pencils are bad because sometimes people write hateful things with them.

In reality, Monero is just a privacy coin like Zcash, except it uses a different technology than Zcash to offer its privacy. Unlike Zcash, Monero uses a technique called Ring Confidential Transactions or RingCT, in which your transaction data is mixed with and hidden among a bunch of decoy transactions. This makes it harder (but not impossible) to determine which transaction is your real one and which is not.

There’s a famous saying in the cybersecurity world that goes, “security through obscurity is no security at all.” That’s why I personally like Zcash’s technology better than Monero’s. That said, Monero is “good enough” for me (for now) and getting better all the time.

Another famous saying in cybersecurity is that all good security measures have “defense in depth.” This pattern is sometimes called “layered security,” and in this case it means there’s an upside to using both Monero and Zcash together, if you want to, specifically because Monero’s technology is fundamentally different than Zcash’s. I think this is overkill for everyone except the most dedicated or at-risk individuals, but using two technologies that are different from one another means that if disaster strikes and one of the two is later broken, you’re still protected because you used the other, too.

My favorite app for Monero is Cake Wallet.

Self-custody or Bust

Just like there are two broad kinds of cryptocurrencies you could use (private or opaque ledger, and not-private or transparent ledger), there are two broad categories of cryptocurrency apps you can use: self-custody (or non-custodial), and third-party (or custodial) crypto apps.

The concept of “custody” in cryptocurrency refers to who keeps your money for you. Either you do, self-custody, or someone else does, third-party custody.

Unfortunately, both types of crypto apps will call themselves “wallets.” Calling an app a wallet makes it sound like your crypto-money is in your own pocket, just like putting paper money inside of a physical wallet means you have it immediately available to you because it’s on your person.

In reality, only self-custody/non-custodial wallets do this. Third-party custodial wallets, such as those offered by CashApp, PayPal, Venmo, Coinbase, and many others are actually nothing like wallets.

To understand a third-party custody so-called “wallet” app, the appropriate metaphor to use is that the app is a teller window or an ATM machine. Your money is not really on your phone at all, but actually in some bank vault to which you have no keys. To access your money, you must prove your identity to the bank teller or the ATM machine, which makes a determination about whatever evidence you presented about your claim to the portion of money in their vault you’re requesting. That determination may be favorable to you today, but not tomorrow.

That’s why third-party custodial crypto apps are just as risky to use as a traditional bank or fiat payment service. There’s simply no technical gaurantee you can cash out when you ask them to please let you spend the money you previously gave them custody of. Because it’s not a wallet; it’s a bank account.

I don’t trust third-party custodial “wallet” apps. I don’t have them. I won’t use them. I’ll never recommend them for gig workers, although clients can still safely use them to pay us. (See my cryptocurrency guides for clients to learn more about that side.)

Self-custodial wallet apps are the way to go. Using a third-party custodial wallet re-introduces most of the risks of the traditional financial system. Put another way, self-custodial wallets are the only sure-fire way to protect yourself from suffering chargebacks or getting doxed.

Both of my favorite wallet apps mentioned above, Zodl (for Zcash) and Cake Wallet for (Monero and Bitcoin), are examples of self-custodial wallets.

Self-custody comes with responsibility

Self-custodial wallet apps are one of the most empowering advances in digital money. But with great power comes great responsibility, and self-custody wallet apps do come with a tradeoff, the same way physical wallets do.

If you lose your self-custodial wallet app, you lose your money. The way to protect yourself from this is a backup. You can safely back up your wallet app to your Google Account or Apple iCloud Account, because good wallet apps will encrypt your wallet data to your phone’s unlock PIN or passcode. But the best way to protect yourself from losing your money is to store your wallet app’s “secret phrase,” perhaps even storing it in your mind (memorizing it), so that you can regenerate it later.

I’ll talk more about that later when I discuss wallet app backups and recovery phrases, but for now the important thing to know is that unless you’re using a self-custody wallet app, you’re actually giving the third-party service direct access to your money, just like a regular bank account. This defeats the point of crypto, for me, so I don’t really listen to much anyone has to say about them.

Summary and Next Steps

Hopefully, this gives you enough of a foundation to understand why I use cryptocurrency and why you might want to, too. By sticking to privacy coins like Zcash and Monero, none of my financial transactions can be linked to my real-world information. By avoiding third-party custodial wallets and services, I never need to show my government ID to a banking institution, and I’m protected from chargebacks because I am effectively my own bank. And using cryptocurrency in the first place protects me from counterfeits.

The biggest downside to cryptocurrency is that it’s still not used by the majority of clients or customers, and it’s still not accepted by most civilian businesses to pay for ordinary things. Slowly, both of these things are beginning to shift and in the meantime there are an increasing number of ways to spend your hard-earned crypto on “real world” stuff.

As more providers learn to accept and use cryptocurrency, we can accelerate a crypto-native economy while getting more clients on board, too.

Our thanks as always to Carey Parker for the work he puts in to producing these interviews with us and his amazing lineup of top-notch guests. Like our prior interview with him, Carey asks great questions and gives us an opportunity to get philosophical about what the Internet is, how to understand the fragility (and resilience!) of “agreements about communication,” and how all this relates to a fundamental understanding of digital safety and threats.

An incomplete, rush transcript of the audio is provided below:

Carey Parker: Hello, everybody, welcome back to firewalls don’t stop dragons. I’m your host, Carrie Parker. Today, we have episode 267 For April 11 2022. And we’ve got a really fun interview for you today. I love these guys. I forget how I ran across the tech learning collective. But they have some great classes, I’ve taken several of them at this point. And it turns out all from the same instructor who is the same person we are interviewing here today is a really great person. And I’ve very much enjoyed his classes. And we’ve got a great discussion going here. And you’ll notice that today’s episode is a little bit long. And I actually thought really hard about trying to edit it down. And I just I went through it, and I just couldn’t find a place that I wanted to cut out. So we’re gonna run a little bit long today. So I’m going to try to keep the intro and outro a little bit short. So a couple quick notes. The all the winners from the contest last month have been notified via email, if you have not gotten your email, please check your spam folder, this is the kind of thing that would usually get flagged as spam. Hey, you want to contest click here, right? So but this one’s real, at least hopefully for you anyway. And by the way, the grand prize winner, the grand prize winner, your mailbox is full. So I recorded this kind of early. So it may be fixed by the time this episode comes out. But if you are the grand prize winner, please check your inbox it is full. Now quickly set up the interview. Again, trigger warning, there is one quick F bomb in here. But I didn’t have the heart to remove it. I thought it was kind of funny. Also, we’re going to talk about the original motivations for this group. And it’s obviously the original motivations for creating the tech learning collective were very specific. But I just want you to keep in mind as you’re listening to this, these classes are for everybody, literally anybody. I mean, let’s face it today, our world is computers and the internet. And this group goes to great lengths and does a very good job of explaining how it all works in ways that anybody could understand. During the interview, he mentioned that we talked about he and I talked about downloading Wikipedia, which we did, but it was it was not on air. So he’s referring to something that you haven’t heard yet. So that might sound weird, but that’s why but I did talk to him about that. And I recently did it myself actually to prove that I could kind of do it. So I’ll circle back to that in the outro. But we’ve got a long interview, and it’s a lot of fun. So let’s not waste any more time. Let’s get to the interview with tech learning collective. Today I’m talking with the lead cybersecurity instructor for the tech learning collective. Welcome back to the podcast.

Tech Learning Collective: Hi, thanks so much for having us back. It’s really good to be here.

Carey Parker: And with all the stuff going on in Europe right now the the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, it’s brought up a lot of more dire more interesting more, I don’t know how to put it, cybersecurity situations, and things that, you know, a lot of us have thought about on the abstract that are now becoming very real, for a lot of people. And so I thought it would be interesting for us to talk because you guys do obviously a lot of wonderful classes are around these sorts of things. And again, now that it’s become really, like real I you know, with that context, I thought it’d be good to kind of talk about some basics in cybersecurity and, and privacy and anonymity and things like that. So why don’t we start off though, tell us a little bit. It’s been a while for a lot of us and tell us a little bit about what you guys do?

Tech Learning Collective: Sure. So yeah, first of all, I mean, it’s very timely topics for a lot of people. We are a cybersecurity and infrastructure engineering, not quite bootcamp, you can almost think of as like an anti bootcamp, we basically do open to the public, twice weekly, give or take these days workshops on all these topics, cybersecurity, infrastructure, engineering, System, Administration, some coding, not a lot, just a little bit, just enough to sort of like, have the perspective for it. And the reason that we do this is in this way is because we are we thought we were founded as a political affinity group here in New York City, in about the 2016 2017 ish era, shortly after a certain presidential election. Yeah, and, and again, that was also another event, right, that made real for a lot of people the understanding of why cyber and digital safety mattered, right, and how it affects the physical world. I think there’s no more I guess, pregnant is perhaps the wrong word. But there’s no more like a pronounced expression of this as of course, cyber war. And then of course, physical like hot war, right, like that we’re seeing now so. So that is very timely for people. And when these things come up people, often, you know, humans, as guests, as a species are not that great at preparing ahead of time, right, necessarily, but when things come up, it’s good to have resources to turn to. And so we were very focused on making sure that there was a place to go for people who saw the impact and the importance of this in their lives to both learn about things from like a defense perspective, right, kind of like digital self defense style stuff, but also just an awareness of how to build these kinds of infrastructures that don’t necessarily rely on on existing massive global systems on like necessary, not necessarily capital I internet, even in some cases, and I’m sure we’ll talk about that as we’re seeing, in this case, Russia right begin to try to, to try to unplug and close down. So there’s a lot of like relevance to there too. And we do it again, with a very political mindset. And with a very clear forward trans centric, right, like, demographics. Everyone who runs tech learning Collective is genderqueer of some variety. And we wanted to make a space where this topic wasn’t just available to those with a lot of money who could go to like sans classes, and like, you know, pay $100 for, you know, like a six hour workshop, but really only needed to, you know, sort of like commit a small, small amount of money, our workshops are anywhere between 25 to $35, generally, for about two hours. And often, as I think you might have recalled, we run a little bit long when I have fun with fun with student questions and things. And yeah, and so and to provide just like a sort of like a one on one to to a one bridge for all these topics that affect people’s lives in ways that are perhaps not as a not not as not something that people would normally think about unless they’re, you know, under either some threat or concern, or they have some other sort of project or affinity group or, like, you know, workplaces need right to to have an understanding of how our digital systems work and keep this current society at least running, but also what it can do to change it and how we can how we can influence that on our own. So that’s kind of like a sort of a philosophical overview of it. But in general, the like the day to day, our workshops, classes, we do a lot of mentoring, we get to social events in the city as well. So if you are in New York City, and you are subscribing to our calendar, you’ll you’ll see occasional socials and Hangouts and parties and things like that. So that’s, that’s us.

Carey Parker: It’s wonderful. And I have I have to get some of your your classes, not just like the collectors, but yours specifically. And, yeah, and they’re a lot of fun. And they’re so informative, and they’re so laid back, I really, really enjoy those. So absolutely, if you’re looking to learn some stuff, these are great classes. And they’re very different than any than most of the classes I’ve taken in a very good way. So

Tech Learning Collective: I think one of the things that I’ll point out just on that on that note is like when people hear classes, they often think of school, right? They think of, and one of the things that we like to talk about, especially when we talk about security topics, which is mostly what I teach is that when you are thinking about security, you are often trying to think about failure modes and how things break. And so when you are constantly taught to follow a checklist and play by the rules and be in the boxes, right, then you’re not going to necessarily be a great security engineer, by definition, because you’re being trained how to think inside a very specific set of boxes, and all of the best engineers, right, like don’t have necessarily, in our in my opinion, anyway, don’t necessarily have CS degrees. They’re not necessarily computer experts, right? They’re philosophers. They’re artists, they’re body hackers, right? Queer people, they are musicians, there are people who have some way of understanding the world from a creative and and even I would say mythic perspective. And that’s how, that’s how you start thinking outside the box and start to see where things will fail how things could be different, right? And so our workshops reflect that pedagogy and are very, very conversational in nature. There’s not like homework to take home. In fact, we encourage people to come not necessarily even prepared but to, but to come being willing and being ready to be exposed to new things so that they leave prepared to to take advantage of resources that are already out there.

Carey Parker: Absolutely. Yeah. Again, I highly recommend it. These classes are not that expensive, and they’re really a lot of fun. So for anybody, so Absolutely. Thanks for the plug. Yeah, oh, sure. That’s guarantee. So, again, this is what I think when things like this happen, it gives us you know, a lot of people don’t prepare for the storm until have actually gone through wind, like they think because it’s like somehow in the future it might happen may not happen to me. And then all of a sudden, oh my god, it just went for a week without power because of an ice storm that came through or I live in a country that was a democratic for 30 years, and all of a sudden isn’t, you know, where the it really brings things home. So you know, hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. And so we’re going to talk about that today. And hopefully, you know, this will give a little more context, little more urgency, maybe to some of these things and bring them home. So for one thing, we you know, here’s certainly in the United States, and probably a lot of the first world you know, take the internet totally for granted and not not just as its existence, we know but ubiquitous access to it. Right. And, you know, many of the courses you guys offer, you know, dive into the details, that some level the various protocols, you know, the things that make up today’s Internet, and, you know, obviously, we can’t cover that today. That’s why you guys have classes but but, but to lay some foundation, you know, for our discussion that we’re about to have, you know, can you maybe give us a very high level talk about the key things we need to understand about how the internet works. And then maybe you know, you know, while the internet was designed to be extremely resilient. It still does have shortcomings. So you know, maybe what are some of the main weak points of today’s internet?

Tech Learning Collective: Yeah, that’s a really important place to start. Right. And I think also, it’s important to point out that like, well, a lot of us have what we would consider ubiquitous access to the internet, even in the States. And I think especially in the States, it’s comparison to some other countries, right? Like Internet access is not as ubiquitous as we would like. And even in places where you have it, it might not be very or fast enough to be useful for the things that you’re doing with it, right. And so like, there’s a lot of importance in our classes, especially, but also just in general to like, understand what the internet is to talk about access before you talk about the actual failure modes, and you know, like, packets, and all this sort of like, you know, technical stuff, right, just getting online is a huge hurdle for a lot of people. And of course, in situations where you know, you’ve got infrastructure that’s degraded for any number of reasons, that’s going to be even harder. The thing that I think makes the internet well, so the thing, the thing that makes the internet resilient that I think people overlook, right, and this is the thing that is perhaps maybe even the most, the most important taaway, right from for understanding the internet, is that it’s not really as I should say, it’s as much about agreements about how to communicate with one another, as it is about the technology itself. And the infrastructure that powers it. So what I mean by that is, like, you know, we are speaking the same language right now, human language, English, we both know it. And so we have some agreements about what words mean, generally, we have some agreements about like, you know, grammar. And this means this disagreement called English, right is the way that we canake meaning out of the sounds that we’re talking, speaking with, right? So that is font like philosophically what the internet is, too. It’s a, it’s an agreement of a communications protocol. So if you understand the language, right, and if you like, which is a if you have the capabilities of making the sounds or the internet’s case, right, and making the electrical signals in a certain way, then you can be part of the internet. And the thing that I think is mind boggling for some folks, because you don’t experience the internet in this way, is that anyone can this. It is not about being a massive corporation, or a government or genius inventor or anything like that, right? If you have a computer with what we call a TCP IP stack, right pieces of software, basically that know how to emit the electrical signals in the order that the internet agrees to communicate with, right in the English language of the internet, if you will, then you can connect a node up to the internet. That’s what made it so exponentially. That’s what made it grow so exponentially fast, and what made it and what makes it so potentially, right, potentially accessible. So you need those computers, you also ne to know a little bit about how to configure that software, right. But it’s actually not particularly difficult to do. And so the important takeaway is that every single part of the internet, by definition, is an agreement of some variety. So we can look at like the super, super foundational levels of like the Ethernet protocol, and like connecting a wire from one computer to another, right? That is, those, if you connect two computers with a wire, they can speak to each other, they can send data acss that cable, they can write share files, or whatever you want to do with them, because they understand the same language, you build that up from one layer on top of another, they all speak those, those different protocols, and because they all know what to do with that information, they can talk to each other. Right. And so when we talk about what the the internet, and understanding both how it is resilient, and also how it is fragile, this is the core concept to get, which is to say, when you arerying to speak to people you don’t know, right? In other words, computers that you don’t necessarily have any pre existing relationship with or knowledge of, then you’re going to need to do this through either intermediaries, right, like other computers, or you’re going to need to have some measure of trust in the environment in which you find yourself. So in the physical wor, this is like if you get bad directions, right? While you’re driving on, you know, a country road that you’ve never been on before, then you’re not going to end up in the place that you intend, right. And computers have the same problem. If I send you right via like a spoof DNS query to the wrong place. Right, you’re going to end up at a place that you don’t necessarily inte to be. And that can be a dangerous situation. So that’s both the resiliency and the weakness of the internet, right? Everybody has the capacity to sort of like insert themselves at many of these levels, right, have these layers of this complex system and kind of do what they will, I think, like, actually a really great example of that recently, where all the the BGP hijacks that were happening to the crypto sites lately, right? When youaw a BGP the Border Gateway Protocol is this is this part of the internet that that informs routers? Who owns what slices of cyberspace of cyber territory cyber areas, right? And of course, you can add, write your own you can claim your own little little space of the cyber world, if you will, of cyberspace, right terally a metaphor of land, because it is far more vast. And then physical space, at least on the earth, maybe not the whole universe, but the earth. But it also right is simply a claim. And someone else can make a similar claim or change the belief of others about who belongs in that space. And so that makes it very resilient because a lot of people can have sort of like their fingers in the pie, right? Yeah. But it also makes it dangers, because you have to trust those actors. So a lot of cybersecurity is around understanding Roots of Trust, which is not that different from the physical world. And this fundamentally makes the internet really flexible. And that flexibility also can be one of its one of its security shortcomings. So I think I would say that is the most important thing, especially in the context that we’re talking today of digital security and cyber warfare, that’s probably the most important thing to take away, if you’ve never thought of the internet in that in that way before. Right? It’s, it’s that it is really just an agreement that a t of people have knowledge about how to interact with, and the more knowledge you have about it, the more you can do with it, because it is just a agreement of how we’re talking to each other, and then making claims to one another.

Carey Parker: I love that analogy. I love analogies in general. And that’s all the things I love about the class that you guys use. My teachers usually bring these things back to some sort of metaphor or whatever to help us understand it. And as you’re thinking that my brain is just going crazy, like, oh, yeah, so so like, talking is like Wi Fi. And like writing is like Ethernet. And, and then ere’s these layered protocols like, you know, so on top of English, there’s maybe like poetry that has to rhyme. And then on top of that, there’s haiku. You know, and so, you know, anyway, you can really go a long way with that one.

Tech Learning Collective: Yeah, no, I mean, it’s very relevant to right, like, I mean, one in one of our classes, for example, our DNS workshop, we build a alternate dns route, right, which is a fancy way of saying that we make our own root DNS server, so that we can determine what the top level domains should be right forget.com.m.edu.org.net or whatever, like, Oh, those are the canonical, the conventional, like the well known, like, dot coms are like the you know, the top level, the TLD is the top level domains. But those are all just choices that somebody made, right? And then we all agreed to it, right? So like, we could also like anyone at anytime can say, Oh, I don’t agree to that. Now, you’re not going to change anyone else’s experience with the internet, iyou don’t agree to it and go live, you know, and go go do your own thing over there. But if you go do your own thing over there, you can build the identical infrastructure, right from from, from, like, from a spec level, from a specification perspective, right, and just have different TLDs different top level domains. So you can make you know, we we make a dot workshop domain, for example, which doesn’t exist, as far as I know, anyway, ithe canonical DNS route. But again, you have the same power to do that. And as long as other people and this is the key, as long as other people point their DNS resolvers, write their software to your DNS route server, then you have created a new DNS route. And you can now you know, operate using those other names simply by declaring it. So because the internet is an agreement about communication, that’s it.

Carey Parker: Right. Okay, sthe Biden administration just issued another warning about potential cyber attacks by Russia and retaliation for the global financial sanctions, you know, for that kind of thing. What sorts of precautions should we be taking right now, given that, you know, as maybe as consumers, maybe US citizens, you know, potentially potentially as employees of companies, that might be a target of a cyber attack? What do you think? What, what attacks,n your opinion, maybe most likely, in which attacks, you know, might have the most significant consequences?

Tech Learning Collective: Yeah, oh, there’s a lot of questions in there. So yeah, I mean, the anticlimactic answer to this is that like, you know, everything that we’ve been saying about digital securities is applies right? So like, what this is really the like, you know, hey, oh, that was all that stuff that we were talking abou about like you know, making sure that like all the bases are covered like the basic stuff like you got to update your software you got to make sure your passwords are not being reused, et cetera, like use a password manager this kind of stuff all those basic like fundamental one on one level things that are maybe a little annoying Yeah, but but are really are kind of like a ep one sort of thing that that first of all, I think is like let’s just just worth reiterating. And fact I don’t know if it’s what you mean about the Biden administration’s issued another warning but I do know that Cisar at the cybersecurity infrastructure and Security Agency has a new program recent program that they launched actually when when the tensions with Russia started becoming more pronounced called shields up and this is shiel up program yeah is basically a portal of like a bulletin from the government to anyone who you know operates any kind of service and of course they’re targeting primarily enterprises and business services and of course federal federal agencies and critical infrastructure providers so like you know, the the electrical grid and you know, water treatment plants and this sort oftuff but also enterprises businesses and this could apply to everybody right they’re not they’re not limiting this right their shields up bulletins have for now weeks basically just been reiterations of all this same stuff. It’s like hey, remember like you told me that you told you to patch your you know, your youCitrix servers remember, like, you know, we said please make sure that you have your your firmware up to date on your routers, like, please do that. Like for real? We mean it this time, right, right, right. So so you know, again, so it’s the anticlimactic way to describe this as like, you know, you’re if you’re paying attention to this, which maybe your listeners are, which ilovely. And you’re actually doing the thing where you know, you’ve got your Tom home Wi Fi router or something your you know, that that that your ISP gives you right, some bacter. SP gets, you just make sure that it is actually up to date. Right, right. That’s probably the most important thing that you can do fromike a network, right defense level. And the reason for this actually, the reason that’s actually important, not just for enterprises, of course, absolutely. For Enterprise Business Continuity is, you know, this is going to be the thing that you’re worried about, but also just for home users, right. And I think a l of people forget this from the context of like, because the context of cyber was a little bit different than the context of a hot, you know, you know, some dropping bombs inside, right, is that it’s not geographically limited, right? So like you, if you have like, what was the recent one, the micro tick, there waa, there was some micro tick router, like, yeah, like, back from like, 2018, or 2017, or something like was like four years old or something. But there was some botnet that was continuously exploiting these old Mikrotik routers. And like, that’s only possible, right? Because those routers haven’t been updated for ars. And the point that I’m trying to bring here is that like, if you have one of those devices, right, you might be part of a cyber attack and not even know it. Right, right. And so if you care, and again, hope people do about protecting, honestly, alcountries, right, this is not this is not related to one another, you don’t know who’s going to be commandeering your device. But like just keeping your firmware up to date on your router, or just keeping your software up to date on your computer. Right. Like that kind of stuff is actually that’s what system meanshen they say shields up. Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily have to be more complicated than that. And the reason it’s important is because you could be used as a proxy as a as a as you know, as a reflection, right point for an attack that you don’t even knothat you’re part of, if you don’t maintain the devices that that you have. And, you know, I understand this isn’t necessarily the easiest thing for some people have people have like, for example, old Android phones, and vendors aren’t keeping up to date and this kind of stuff. So that’s that can be that can be difcult. But, you know, if you have the ability to do these sort of basic steps that we’ve been saying, for ever now, the best time would have been a year ago, the next best time is now do this.

Carey Parker: Well. And I think one of the points I wanted bring home is that is that corporations are made of people. And so a lot of people think especially if you work for a medium to large size company, we’ve got departments that do that, we’ve got a security department, we’ve got an IT department that th do security, so I’m not worried about it. At the end of the day, a lot of social engineering attacks, and other attacks are against the weakest link. And that could be anybody in the company, which means that every It’s everybody’s kind of responsibily to understand this to some degree and to not, and did not have bad passwords and not give out information over the phone to somebody that don’t absolutely know who they’re talking to.

Tech Learning Collective: I mean, this is very, like World War Twera, like loose lips sink ships is right. Like Absolutely, yes. Information is not like a It’s not constrained by the physical world. Right. And that’s, that’s the main difference that makes this hard from a cyber theater perspective. Now, again, if yoare like, you know, in a situation where you’re being actively physically bombed, right, yeah. Like, there’s very different things you got to concern yourself with. And I think also, it’s important to remember, so that we’re not just freaking people ou I guess, that like, once you start dropping bombs, like once bombs start dropping, right, the notion of going to a cyber front is a little bit moot. Because you’ve got a very different radius of you can almost think of it as like you’re you’re attacki at a lower level of the stack like Maslow’s

Carey Parker: Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, right there where there’s, you’re at a different level at this point.

Tech Learning Collective: Rig? Yeah, good advice to like, you know, Ukraine is is very different than an advice in the US to like an American citizen. For we right have in America, the best thing that we can do to be helpful in this context is, as I was mentioning, all the things at were already all the anticlimactic things, right to make sure that you’re not part you’re not commandeered in some way. However, right, like the threat on us is not nearly the threat as is on them. And this also relates to like, you know, what, what you should do, how you should think about the attacks on physical infrastructure and stuff and communication networks and this sort of thing. Because, like, we’re not getting geo located to find our location to get bumped. Right, that’s actively happening there. Right. So there’s a lot of different things that you need to concern yourself, but this is the this is the distinction that that that’s worth drawing, right? Is that notice in hot war scenario, the physical terrain, right, the physicality of it is part and parcel of the calculation, whereas the absence of that limitation is that front and center consideration for us Right. That’s the distinction to be clear in one’s mind.

Carey Parker: Well, let’s, let’s talk about that a little bit. And, and I want to talk about the the war from both sides. And let’s start with the Ukrainian side for them. Obviously, there’s a lot of physical danger. But there’s also infrastructure dang. So, you know, Internet access is essential in times of crisis. And for the rest of us that, you know, maybe that’s where severe weather events or natural disasters of other sorts. Yeah, totally. But you know, obviously, war. Yeah. So, you know, kinetic war. So for the, for the citizens of Ukraine, access to the internet has been impacted by these things, you know, damage to physical facilities, or power outages, or, you know, or maybe even the denial of service attacks, which is the cyber realm, b what sort of tools and techniques, you know, can we use in these sorts of emergency situations, or access to the internet, and let’s say, if you’re prepping, if you’re thinking ahead, and you’re thinking, Oh, this is real, it actually could go sideways. If I had time and money, you know, what sort of things might I do ahead of time? To prepare for some extreme circumstances? Yeah, what’s in what’s in my go bag? Right? That’s what you wa to know. Yeah, go back. First, have a go bag. What’s

Tech Learning Collective: ready? Yeah. So for those who aren’t aware, like the go bag is is the idea of prepared write a satchel or some sort of like, you know, package of things that you use in an emergency. And again, this depends on an emergency. So like, you know, when I, when I lived in San Francisco, I remember, there were a lot of PSAs around like, here’s how to prepare for an earthquake, right. And again, like, when I was out in the Midwt, and tornado, the tornado cones, it was all about, it’s all about tornadoes. And then of course, down in the Gulf, you’ve got, you’ve got flood warnings and things like this. Right. So it sort of depends on your, on your area. That being said, your your threat model may be exactly what’s what I was going to use that, right, depending on where you are, right, you have a different, different different needs of this kind. And then again, at’s that’s true here, as well, there’s a couple of facets that I think are particularly worth pointing out, which, which I’ll get to in a second, that may make things different when you have like different than a natural disaster, right? When you have an actual adversary who’s reacting to your actions, you need a very different sort of set of things. And for instance, let’s say right, you want comms right? In a natural disaster scenarioWell, ham radio has been like a really, really popular and really enduring right now it’s doing that I remember back in the 20, with 2011, I think it was with the Arab Spring situation, right? There was a lot of people that were routing around Internet censorship, using just regular old fax lines. And again, there were long range hams, right, that were that were communicatingto get around internet blocks and this sort of thing. But again, that’s a very different situation than what we see now in Ukraine, where ham radio is very easily triangulated. And so you don’t necessarily want to do that, right? Because you’ll make yourself you make your position known. And if you’re in a hot war situation like they are, then your physical location is very, ry important to protect, for literally life and death reasons. Right. And so you don’t necessarily have access to the same mechanisms of maintaining internet, right? Even Starlink stuff like this, right. And I think you mentioned something about Starlink, before we started talking about, like, you know, even Starlink things can be geo located, right, because it’s all it’s all just radio emissions, you know, at the end of the day, startli for what it’s worth is, I don’t know if this is like commercially available yet, but they have a roaming mode. So one of the pieces of advice that I’ve been hearing around this is turn that on, it’s like buried deeply in some in some form, or configures or another. But it allows you to like basically put a Starli device right on your truck or on your car or whatever, and actually be driving around and it will, it will hop almost a little bit like a like a cell, like a cell signal, right cell tower so that you maintain connectivity, because I think for the commercial ones right now, the way they’re selling in the US as there stationary, they don’t have this roaming mode turned on, they connect to a right point then they stay and you have to keep it there

Carey Parker: Real quick for those Starlink is Elon Musk’s satellite based communication system that has been launching many many satellites to the much to the consternation of stargazers. Yeah. But yeah, situations like this, it could be crual.

Tech Learning Collective: Well, right. So we call that SATCOM, right. Satellite communications, system department Homeland Security have also been putting out warnings about SATCOM attacks for exactly this reason, right? Like satellite communications are harder, a little bit too, to geolocate right than just band radio kind of stuff. And they potentially right have a much better, they have much better bandwidth, like they’re, they’re better devices right there. And so they’re really, really important for having a backup method of accessing the internet asong as of course you can connect out to right like you’re not getting jammed in some in some way. So anyway, so my point is, is that these are like if you have access to these sorts of devices, right? Like, then definitely you’re gonna want to consider that as like a first mode of of access, but the situation matts again, if you are trying to anticipate an adversaries reactions to your actions, such as for example, if I use this am I going to be geo located and fucking bombed? Can I use that word? Sounds like you know, it’s, it’s a risk then then you You have very different, you have very different things in your go back. there’s that is what I will say. Now, in general, though, this is all about just thinking ahead. And that’s true for both the both the adversary scenario and the natural disaster scenario. So things like making sure that you’ve got power is the thing at I think people don’t necessarily think about too much when they think about these columns, because like these devices will eventually run out of electricity. Right. And so, when I talk about thinking ahead, one thing that comes to mind, from that I do often is just think about how, like, what you need for the tngs that you need, and then ask yourself that same question five times, right, so okay, I need internet, what do I need for internet? Well, I need power, okay, what do I need for power, rig, and then just keep keep on that rabbit hole. And so this could be like, you know, a, an extra battery pack. If it’s not, if you’re not expecting a long, long outage, it can be a solar panel, right, and one of those travel solar panel things, those catake a while to charge. But again, depending on your scenario, you can leave it out, right, or, I know hikers use this a lot right to charge their phones. That’s also useful, right in the context of a go bag, even if you’re not hiking, right. In other words, you might buy it for the context of well, I’m going out camping, but you might not be going out camping, you might just put in your go bag, make sure it’s charged every three months or so. Right? And then have a source of power. And that’s a steahead, right? Thinking ahead a little bit beyond just well, I’m going to need this electronic device with me, right? And want to have access to in that sense. So I mean, I guess my point is like, it really is about thinking one step ahead. Or rather, taking care of the thing that is immediate, right? And then taking the next step before you get there. So this example of right, I’m gonna need my phone. Okay, what do I need around me to ha my phone? I need power, what do I need, right to have power, I might need a generator I might need like solar, I make these solar panels, etc. This process is what disaster planning is about.

Thanks again to everyone at the Center for a Stateless Society for publishing our initial piece and for following up with us with an invitation to join Joel for an interview on The Enragés!

Joel Williamson: This is The Enragés. A show where we take a deeper dive into written works published at the Center for a Stateless Society. Join us as we give voice to the ideas challenging the vain phantoms that haunts our social reality and stand in the way of total liberation. For more information visit, C4SS.org. And to support this show, or any of the other projects happening at the Center, please visit patreon.com/c4ssdotorg. Thank you for listening.

Hello, and thank you for tuning in to The Enragés. I’m your host, Joel Williamson. You’re listening to the second half of our conversation with the Tech Learning Collective. In the first half of our discussion with TLC, we explored what the Tech Learning Collective is. And we also began dissecting an article they wrote for the center called “Imagining an Optimistic Cyber Future.” This installment is the second half of our conversation. Thanks, again, for tuning in. And thank you for your support.

So at one point, in the article, you describe how we’re making the machines who are buying our thoughts. If this is true, it seems criminally under emphasized in popular discourse. Can you break down what that means? And how we can know that it’s actually happening?

TLC: Yeah, there’s, um, there’s a number of sort of things in there. That was a line that would that I think, you know, we’re trying to cram a lot of ideas into a relatively short essay. And it might require a little bit of understanding about like, how this economy, you know, this surveillance economy, this capitalist Silicon Valley market, right, like actually works.

So in brief, right, anytime that you’re interacting with a computer that isn’t yours, right, you’re giving someone else information about you. And the way that the way to think about this is like, if you pick up the phone, right and call somebody, it doesn’t matter if they pick up the phone or not, they know that you called, right? Yyou are making a connection, you’re trying to reach out right to somebody else. And so when you load for example, facebook.com, right? You are calling Facebook, right, you’re picking up the headset, this time, it’s your browser, you’re making a phone call over a dial tone, called the Internet, right to Facebook, and they know that you called right, so they know that you tried to connect to them at that moment in time. Then if you actually do connect, and you can post something right on Facebook, you’re giving them more and more information.

So simply interacting is feeding this sort of like data collection machine, which is obviously a hard thing to get out of right, the cliche way to say this is if you’re not paying for it, right, you’re not the consumer to the product. And while that’s true, again, it doesn’t really reflect the full extent of what’s going on. Because even if you were paying it paying for it, for example, you’re still making right that same connection, you’re still actually picking up the phone and calling, you’re still feeding data, right? To those machines. Right? And by letting them possess all of your important data, right, again, by important data, what we mean is everything about you, right, like your thoughts, your habits, your subconscious mannerisms, right. Like when you post, you know, what you had for lunch today, right? There’s a lot of information there. Everything.

And the goal very explicitly for these businesses, right, is that they want to own you like to literally make you into and treat you as property, I mean, intellectual property, right data, but still property, right, the whole movement towards intellectual property, which is its own nightmare, is showcasing that. So for example, like a really illustrative example of this in the business world is this tool called Chorus.ai. That’s a subscription service that businesses pay for to help their salespeople perform better. It’s, you know, report stats, like the longest monologue in a given meeting, the percent of time a salesperson spoke, you know, they suggest that you should aim for 40 to 60%. Other details like that. And so ask yourself, right, like, how does it actually do that? Well, in order to report these details, right, it’s first got to collect this data, and otherwise, it would have nothing to report on. So it works by automatically recording zoom calls. Simple, right? When you think about it, it just makes recordings of everything and then analyze them.

Another perhaps even simpler example, is Facebook Messenger. Right? Like, have you ever, for example, lost a phone had to replace it, like with a new one, right? Like when you log into Facebook Messenger for the first time in your brand new phone, right? What happens? But you open up your messenger app, and you see all the past messages with all of your contacts, right? And so again, ask yourself, how does it do that? And again, it’s simply records it all, right? If Facebook wasn’t keeping all of your old messages, it wouldn’t be able to show them to you when you get a new phone. And so at a pretty concrete level, right? Like these things are not magic. They are actually in a way, they’re kind of stupidly simple when you peel away this veneer of the slick user interface and the intentionally dense tech jargon. And so every time you’re interacting with these systems, right when you’re literally any interaction, actually, it is helping them to build the model of you or to build the data representation of you.

Sometimes people would call this sort of your data shadow is a term that’s often used in the privacy circles. And that means that it’s also, of course, obviously really hard to extricate yourself from because any interaction, right helps them the only actual way to not participate in that kind of building of those machines. Right? That then you are then asked to pay for right to get your own your own thoughts back your own data, right, your own important thing that are possessing all of the things about you is to not participate. And that’s a that’s a tall, that’s a tall order for a lot of people still today.

It’s important, I think, to recognize as part of that, that this sort of like veneer, right of the slick user interface that the the intentional convenience with which they are they’re trying to make everything sort of magic away from you, right? Like, don’t worry about any of this happening, don’t worry, just open up your phone, you’ll get all your Facebook message history, he’ll be fine. Right? Even though the bottom rung of that ladder, it really is just they’re recording it, and they’re keeping it. That’s it. That’s all they have to do. It’s not complex, it’s not technologically sophisticated. It’s not some magic innovation that they’ve come up with in the last five years. I mean, you know, I could have also recorded everything that you’ve said on post-it notes and then handed them back to you. And I would still have every record everything you said, you know what I mean? Like it’s different, just because it’s the Internet. It’s just a record. And by using those flashy terms, by using those slick interfaces, by coming up with dense tech jargon, that doesn’t make sense to anybody except you in the tech industry, I think what’s what’s important to recognize is that those are also intentional choices that are designed right to weed out the people who aren’t already brainwashed by this, this capitalist cult of Silicon Valley so that those who are working in that industry can continue to hoard that kind of power that those capabilities bestow as though they’re like some sort of priests of this early religion, right? Like and our goal at Tech Learning Collective is to basically peel back the layers of that onion, or, you know, pull back the curtain to reveal Oz or like, you know, steal their holy books and share them with anyone who wants to learn how to translate the texts, right? Like that’s, that’s the goal. This isn’t actually a complex machine being created. It is simply a, you know, an avatar of you that they don’t want you to recognize as such.

Joel: That’s spooky, I’m not gonna lie.

TLC: Yeah, it is. I mean, the spookiest thing for me about that, right? Is that like, it’s actually not complex, but it’s, but it’s hidden intentionally. So. And because it’s hidden, it makes people it’s one of those things where, like, it’s more scary, because you don’t understand it. But then also at the same time, the more you do understand it, the more evil it becomes. You know what I mean?

JoeL: Yes, yes, I do. It’s I mean, it’s honestly, it’s something that it’s anxiety producing, when you focus on it too much. And yeah, like how we’re all perpetuating it by participating in these systems. So you know, there’s something to be said about how that happens, how that takes place, and what humans value, I think, because if you make something convenient, and people find it useful people, you know, it doesn’t matter, their background or their political ideology, they’re likely going to adapt it. So I mean, I wonder if that’s true. And we take that seriously. That means that we can not sort of technocraticly manage people toward freedom, but we can at least present them with an option that meets those needs of convenience and usefulness, for example, to move toward a freer world.

TLC: Oh, totally. And I think the thing that I want to I want to interject there, right? Is that, like, remember that everything is convenient relative to something else, right? So convenience is not this absolute. What is convenient, about, for example, Google Docs, right? or whatever, you know, system you’re using, is simply that you don’t have to think about it. And that’s not an inherent quality of Google Docs, right? That’s what infrastructure is, right? You don’t think about, for example, the water treatment plant every time you turn on the faucet in your in your kitchen, but it’s there. Right?

Joel: Right.

TLC: And you don’t think about it not because the water treatment plant is somehow extra convenient at the service that you pay for, explicitly. Anyway, you know, one can argue that perhaps taxes is that but that’s a whole other conversation.

The point is, right, is that it’s infrastructure, and it’s there, and you don’t have to think about it. And that’s what the point of infrastructure is. So Google Docs, right, wants to become infrastructure. So that you don’t think about it. And our argument is that the problem with Google Docs being infrastructure, right, is that it’s not actually the most convenient thing ever. It’s just the most convenient thing if you don’t have Google Docs, right? If you don’t have a certain kind of infrastructure, then you can’t do the thing, right that the infrastructure is providing to you. So the example of this is, again, the Netflix example from earlier, right? Like, what happens to your Google Docs, right? When your Internet service goes down? Well, again, you have trouble accessing it, right? You can no longer sync your changes to it, and so on and so forth. So it’s not actually the best that it could be. It service isn’t actually as convenient as we want it to be. But we think of it as convenient because the history that we remember is a history without Google Docs being present.

Joel: That’s a good point.

TLC: And, exactly, and so so it’s not that people are acting irrationally or that we feel like there needs to be some sort of like shame and you know, shame a name, you know, emotion, like it’s okay to use things right like that today, because the alternative maybe is not using them. But as we move forward with increasingly usable and capable, free software that is decentralized, as opposed to centralized and all these other sort of movements, you know, towards the qualities of the infrastructure that we want, that we described, not only in the article, but also earlier in this conversation, then you can begin to see the failures and the limitations of all the things that people seem to believe are the best that it could possibly be today, right, like Google Docs.

For us, as people who, for example, have our own internal infrastructure that we sell post for managing TLC, one of the beautiful things about that is that A) we don’t pay anything beyond hardware costs work, which is not much because again, hardware costs and you know, are plummeting, we don’t give up any of this sort of data in sort of a privacy concern, concerning context, right, because again, it’s not someone else’s computers, it’s our computers. But also, it means that we can continue to work when, for example, Google has an outage, right? Like, that doesn’t happen very often. But when it does, it doesn’t matter to us, because we’re not using their infrastructure anyway. And so that is a more convenient scenario for us, now, again, we have some technical expertise to be able to set this kind of stuff up. But that’s why we started the school because we want more people to get more of those abilities, right. So that it’s more feasible for more people, you know, to be in control of their computing devices, and be able to understand at least that they have other options for infrastructure that they can make themselves or that they can come to some local affiliation to do that for them.

We talk a little bit in the article also a bit later on maybe less about this, about like, for example, Internet access, just generally. And there’s like a lot of community technology projects that enable Internet access without having to go through a commercial provider. And what that means is you just don’t have to pay a commercial provider for Internet access, you might not even have to pay the community provider for Internet access. Right? And again, that doesn’t mean you have to be an internet network engineering expert, it means that you have to be aware of or know people or have an affiliation with right or have a voluntary exchange, right? with someone who does know that in the same way that like, it’s really useful to have, for example, a doctor in the family, right, or a lawyer in the family, it’s really useful, right to have a network engineer in “the family,” even if the family is just, you know, a neighborhood group as opposed to like a blood relation.

And rather than centralizing the knowledge of how to do these things, in blood, only a handful of a couple 100,000, mostly white men in Silicon Valley. Like that seems like a recipe for disaster in the same way as for example, totally forgetting how to plant tomatoes seems like a recipe for disaster, right? Like, we should know how to do that. And it’s not like we shouldn’t have to ask one person, right, who’s like the tomato expert, to give us all of our fruit and vegetables, that is putting way too much power in that person’s hands. And so it’s really not a matter of technology.

In our perspective, it’s a matter of just education, in the same way that we want a society right? where most of the buildings have electricity. Right, what that means is we have to have enough people power so that there are enough physical electricians to physically wire all the buildings in the society, right? We can’t rely on one or two people to do that. Now, this is an analogy in the physical world. So it makes sense why most people, but like, we need to have like 1,000,002 million, you know, residential electricians. But the Internet has a different level of scale. So I as an individual, and as a capable system administrator, right, could manage the email services or the chat services or the you know, equivalent of a Google Docs, like a Nextcloud instance, right, for probably anywhere between 500 to maybe 10,000 individuals, you know, no sweat off my back, right, for a neighborhood.

If I was an electrician, I couldn’t wire 10,000 people’s houses, because that’s a physical world task. But with digital technologies, right? What you gain is this level of scale that’s orders of magnitude beyond what you can imagine in the physical world. And so my point is that it makes sense that right now, there’s only a few, you know, the knowledge of how to do that is concentrated in a small handful of human individuals. And if we want a free society, in all the ways that we mean that, then it has to be true that other people than just those, you know, handful have to learn about how the infrastructure works. There is no shortcut beyond that we have to actually disperse that knowledge because otherwise in the sort of knowledge is power way of thinking about it, right? Otherwise, we just give it all up to whoever chooses to learn it first.

Joel: Mhm. What are some actionable things that we should be doing right now in order to reverse this trend to beyond what you just explained?

TLC: I’ll point to another article that we actually published on C4SS, called “We have only four years to prevent a fascist USA, here’s what we need to do now.” We published that shortly after the 2020 general election. And, you know, we’re not trying to sort of highlight electoral politics, we actually don’t really give a shit about electoral politics too much. But in it, we outlined the sort of four broad steps, right that we can take immediately to set ourselves up for a better scenario, where we are more resilient against reactionary forces and fascist politics in the future. And generally, those four things follow this paradigm that we’ve already outlined above. So I won’t go into too much detail, right.

But it starts by this sort of, like, by necessity, right with this, with this individual action, of learning to make use of the resources that we actually already have that are newly available to us, right to create things like our own in house movie libraries, which can obviate things like Netflix, right, or other service providers, right, the so called self-hosting movement is sort of the beginning of that. And we’re seeing a lot of that now, more than more than we were in sort of the mid 2000s, it was there. But it was, again, that practice is simply becoming more widespread, because it’s getting both easier. And of course, it’s becoming more just sort of recognized as a possibility. TLC’s role in this is to make it even more of a possibility for more people. And to show you that you can actually, in fact, do this without spending 20 years toiling in the industry, like there is another way.

But once that is sort of done on an individual level, right, what you find is that, because of the scale that I just described of computing, if you start up your own server, even on like a tiny $35, Raspberry Pi, you will probably have more compute power than you know what to do with. There is so much density in the capabilities of these things today, that one person would be challenged to make use of it all, right? And so what that means is that you have an inherent opportunity then to find and gather others who are either doing the same thing or wants to do the same thing, or are sort of aligned in the ways that we talked about earlier in terms of material impact in their lives. Maybe you can find them by coming to tickler and collective workshops, who knows, right? But the idea is that you then have a pathway towards this collective action that can do more collectively the things that you’re already doing individually, like creating physical scale, neighborhood internetworks, which then feeds into the localism talked about earlier. Right.

But in general, there is no shortcut, as I mentioned, to building an infrastructure that we own ourselves. interaction and cooperation and interaction with the current paradigm is cooperation with the current paradigm. And so anything that you can do to reduce that, again, I’m not saying anyone should go cold turkey, I’m not saying it’s impossible or rational in the current scenario, but making the move away from that very quickly yields dividends, in not just notions of freedom, but also in terms of actual capabilities that you actually have right in your day to day work. And we just have like that, that’s the way forward, we have to do that.

Thankfully, a lot of that work has already done, as I mentioned, like the Netflix example, again, like Jellyfin is a sort of free software media server, it’s beautiful, it looks like Netflix, it automatically gets metadata, it’s easy to manage, right? Like it’s, if you set that up for your household, I mean, it’s never been easier to do that. And so a lot of this work has already been done. It’s just a matter of actually making use of it, and learning, you know, to do so, which is again, what TLC hopes to make more possible for more people.

Joel: When discussing the transition away from our present conditions, you wrote, quote, the autonomous pockets will quickly seek to interconnect covering more ground as their practices and networks mature. It reminds me of Konkin’s, a glorious vision of revolution, and how concentrated centers of counter economic neighborhoods would act as an essential part of a transition away from corporate and state power. Was Konkin and an influence on your thought here? If not, who are you taking inspiration from or what are you taking inspiration from?

TLC: So there’s definitely overlap, right in this notion of sort of like community technology that we talked about with what I guess is Konklin’s vertical. What do you call it vertical?

Joel: Vertical agorism? Maybe.

TLC: Thank you. Yeah, vertical agorism. And it’s certainly related to that. But this sort of harkens back also to our initial impetus of like caring more about the impact of the tactic and strategy than the source of the idea, right. And so there are certainly people in our collective who were inspired, I guess, I should say, by this idea of local first organizing, right, and also that the black market or gray market economic activity is one in which is now more possible online than it perhaps was, and that that’s a good thing.

The other sort of, like influence here, insofar as it’s an influence again, right is actually the notions of, for instance, local libertarian municipalism, or communalism ala Murray Bookchin, later became of course, Abdullah Öcalan notion of democratic confederalism. Both Konkin’s and Bookchin’s and Öcalan’s, they all have this idea of sort of starting from underneath the state system, building an infrastructure as not exactly an alternative but like as sort of almost like a for lack of a better way to say it maybe a parasite, right, within the current system. And then creating a point at which you can then disconnect and stop participating. Right. And so that that pattern generally is, is very much an inspiration, except that it’s not either or. And it’s not that we’re trying to say that one of these methods is superior than the other.

It’s again, like that tracing paper analogy, what we’re trying to do is sort of, and-both these different ideas. So yes, horizontal and vertical algorithm, ala Konkin’s sort of black market approach is absolutely part of it, right? I mean, the more that you have an infrastructure of your own, the less interaction you have to have with an infrastructure that you have to, by virtue of interaction, with undermine your own ideals. And at the same time, right, there’s a stepping stone that we should recognize as important to go from where we are now to perhaps a more idealistic or utopian vision of for lack of a better way to say it, like full-on anarchism, where we have organizations that are locally scoped, but that are more democratic, by which I mean, more lowercase D right? People Powered in nature. Ala the Öcalan idea of democratic confederalism. And again, it’s not that we’re trying to prescribe one way over another, it’s that we don’t know what’s going to necessarily work in the case of a given student, right. Like they might find themselves in some scenario, where one tactic might be better suited for what they’re trying to do than another. And our goal is to try to empower them to both understand the strategy, but also then enact the strategy through the literal empowerment, which is to say, to enable them to have power in places that they did not before. That necessarily starts on an individual basis, and then grows to become something that they can then include others in right as their skills increase. And whether they choose one vision over another in terms of these Anarchist strains of thought is kind of up to them.

And, you know, if they’re not already familiar with Konkin’s agorist visions of how this would happen, or if they’re not already familiar with, you know, with Bookchin’s or Öcalan’s, more modern ideas, obviously, you know, one thing that’s nice about Bookchin and Öcalan is that they were almost turncoats, right, to a prior ideology. That’s generally a place where I mean, like, you know, Bookchin was famously a Stalinist. So like, generally, we tend to encourage people to take into more consideration thoughts that have come from not only just sort of like, avoid, but have come from a rejection of a prior deeply held belief, because that shows a growth and an analysis, that is not only useful to understand where they’re coming from, where a thinker is coming from, but also because it’s the practice we want our students to go through, right?

Most people don’t come to tech learning collective being like I’m an anarchist. And I want to do this, right. Like most people come to it being like, I heard something cool about this free software project, or I heard something, you know, neat about the way that you all teach, and I kind of need a job, but I don’t really want to care about my job, but I really need a job and like, what do I do, right? And so like, we are teaching, we are as which I mean, we are as much a political school, right, as we are a technology school. And so what that means is that our students are by definition, if we succeed, they are going to be turncoats against capitalism. They currently believe in some portion of it more often than not. And our goal in showing them how much of a lie so much of technology is, the technology industry, right, is to politically engender a desire to overthrow the received wisdom that they’ve got and the story of someone like Bookchin or Öcalan, right, who have famously rejected prior portions of their beliefs, right? It’s very much relevant there.

And so both the tactic is very much a part of the like, inspiration. Yes, we think it’s also more possible now than it was before because coordination costs, and the barriers to the kind of confederalism, right, that they’re talking about is lower today than it was in, say, the 70s. But also, right, the history is important, because it’s a similar pattern, that any competent and successful effort is going to go through. Like, you have to fail a lot to succeed. So rather than be afraid of failure, learn to fail in ways that don’t hurt others as you do it.

Joel: In your section on the rise and fall of techno feudalism, you do a great job at fulfilling the goal of imagining an optimistic cyber future. However, it seems completely reasonable to look at our current situation and feel that there’s really no way out. Why are the fatalists wrong?

TLC: We don’t know. I mean, are the fatalists wrong? Like, you know, I hope they are, of course, and I guess if we don’t know, it doesn’t really, we don’t know if they are not they maybe they you know, maybe they’re wrong. Maybe they’re right.

I think the bigger question right is like, if we accept fatalism now, right. Then what’s the point any of this? Right like that? It’s like fatalism is inherently a pre-emptive resignation. And that precludes any sort of future genuine attempt to succeed. And beyond being fatalistic, right, that’s kind of boring. Like, why do anything then? And I think the key takeaway there is that like, even if they’re right, right, even if we’re doomed, we’re actually having a pretty good time, right, learning new things, and helping others learn new things and collaborating with alumni groups that have been through TLC and building local infrastructures and doing all these projects, right, and, and a whole lot more. So like, we kind of don’t care, you know, if they’re right or not, like you might as well enjoy what time we do have right now, right, instead of like wallowing in some sort of pit of despair and doom and gloom.

But that being said, like, there is actually a lot to be hopeful about right now. You know, I mentioned all these new opportunities, not just in terms of pure technicality, but there is a wave of new interest, both politically and just in terms of shifting recognition about what’s possible, and I don’t think that we’re actually doomed, like many of the fatalists would assume that we are and again, like, if we are okay, but I’m still gonna do this, because this is like, definitely more fun than sitting around and watching Netflix.

Joel: Yeah, so, so relatedly, at another point, in the same section, you describe a bleak picture of the future where quote, Silicon Valley, replaces everything with robots and politicians turned to even more draconian measures to quell rebellions against the technocracy of which their governments depend. Does it have to get worse before it gets better?

TLC: Yeah. Um, yeah, we genuinely do think that it will get worse in some places before it gets better. But we also think that it’s going to get better in some places, right? And that this is going to happen simultaneously, like, like, it might stall, right? Like, like progress, as we imagine it right is not this sort of like linear, you know, progression from the then to the now and then to the future. I think it’s not how any of this ever works, right? It will improve in some areas, it’ll get worse in some places.

The point is that we shouldn’t expect it to be a straight line, right? If we expect it to be this sort of simple, you know, step by step by step progression, then bluntly, we will have no preparation for dealing with any kind of regressions, we won’t be able to be prepared well, for reactionary political forces, we won’t be able to deal with unexpected new material crises like natural disasters, right? Like, we should be planning for the reality we’re actually in, not the scenario that we think that we’re in, right. And so yes, like, in some places, it will, it will probably have to get worse before it gets better. There is other places where it’s going to get better, and then get worse and get better again, and then sort of zigzag like, you know, it’s, it’s it’s not a straight line.

But the takeaway is, regardless of you know, whether things are getting better for you, or in your locale, or you know, some region is that even if things are not going well, right, like there is opportunity there, if things are going really well, there is opportunity there. The tactics might be different, and they should maybe be different, but there’s always opportunity in any situation. And so the goal should be making the best of whatever situation you find yourself in. And again, that’s part of why Tech Learning Collective tries very hard to not direct students project or the outcome or the ideology that they that they come with, but rather to enable them to take as much advantage, whatever situation they find themselves in, because that’s going to be much more important and much more useful for them as a student, both for technical reasons, but also just for like, you know, political and emotional reasons.

Joel: For sure. So some futurists are hopeful at the prospect of uploading their minds to the Internet and fully merging themselves with the digital world. There’s a quick mention in the article of resisting the temptation to abandon the physical realm. Why is this a temptation that we should resist?

TLC: Right! I hope this is not gonna sound again condescending, but like bluntly, that specific strain, right, like this sort of future utopianism is just bluntly, not something that we take seriously at all. The idea of holy merging with the digital world is, it’s unappealing. But it’s also just kind of absurd, right?

Like, for one thing, again, we talked about this earlier, like, the digital world is itself grounded in the physical world, right? Like every one or zero in a computer system is ultimately a physical thing, whether that be an electrical charge and a capacitor, or a magnetic charge on a hard disk platter, right, or like a divot in a vinyl record even right, like, you cannot have a digital world without physical devices, it is impossible. So you can’t ever divorce yourself right? from physical reality, no matter how much you want to.

And also right for the thing like the physical analog world, we think it’s actually quite beautiful. And the vastness of experience that you can have there is wonderful and awe inspiring and could be all kinds of pleasurable in ways that the digital world can’t or is unlikely to be or even if it was, so what it’s different than the analog world. But it’s like why abandon all the physicality in the first place, even if you could. Right?

The physical world, that is actually where we live. And any sort of like fantasies of disembodied avatars in some sort of virtual reality are like, okay, fun, sometimes sure, but they’re like fantasies, they’re not anything else. They are fantasies. And so partly, we have to resist the temptation to hyper focus on this kind of fantasy, precisely because it tears us away from the corporeal existence of an embodied human experience of the world, right, and that embodied humaneness is what underlies all things, not just digital things.

For example, on the Internet, we use the language of a website, right? Like the language of place, we say a website as though it’s a physical location, a site, even though it doesn’t necessarily feel like a real place, right? Because we can travel to any other site instantly. Which is to say that the address bar of your browser, right, like makes all websites feel equally far or equally near. But again, in reality, they are not. Right? In reality, one website is physically farther from you than another because both websites are in fact hosted on a physical device somewhere in the physical world. And we have to remember that because again, if we don’t, right, then Facebook and Amazon and Google will be the ones who remember that for us, and they’ll be the only ones that know the truth. And, you know, meanwhile, everyone else would be, well, you know, living in a dream world, Neo.

Joel: [Laughs]. Maybe we already are in a digital world!

TLC: Yeah, well, I mean, then, then, then we’re doing that we may as well just have fun with it. Right? That’s the key is that, you know, even in that fictional world, right, like, that was an entire story about how physicality underlies perception. And so it’s certainly an interesting train of thought. I mean, like, I know for example transhumanists often have a lot to say about, you know, human experience. And that’s, that’s fine and interesting and wonderfully contributory right to, to a dialogue about what it means to be a person.

But if you go so far as to completely divorce yourself from a desire to be in a body in the physical world, then you are not really taking seriously right, the material conditions in which you live and all politics that we care about, right are about the material conditions in which we live.

Joel: Is it realistic to think that we can make the internet free? You said it was already free? In some ways, but, can we make it to where people can access it without having to pay for it?

TLC: Yeah, and so this is another one of those things where I think like there’s be this massive con perpetrated on the public, right? Like, the Internet, right is the term that we named a specific network of interconnected computers, right? Machines that are that are connected to each other. In one of our workshops, actually, at TLC, back before the pandemic times, when we met in person, one of the classes involved building our own internet. And we did this literally inside of a single room. It was completely disconnected from the internet. But it was in fact, an internet, it had DNS servers. So you could go to websites that had domain names. It had BGP routing, which connected one network on one side of the room to the other network on the other side of the room had physical cables, it had Wi Fi, right. It was a real internet, it was a network of networks that were interconnected, i.e., an internet. But it had no route to the internet, capital T capital I.

And the reason why we do that class is not only to learn about how the internet works, but also to recognize right that what the internet actually is, is just a method for communication. That’s it. And so in that sense, it’s already free, right? Like, you don’t have to pay anyone to create an internet, all the software, all the protocols, all the standards is out there and available for your use, you just didn’t know how to use it, which is again what TLC teaches. So the internet is free.

The reason that people think that the internet is not free, and that sounds right is because the way that they can connect to anybody else, typically, is that they have a device called the modem or router, right? Probably in their closet or by their TV or something, right. And they pay an internet service provider and ISP, right for the privilege of transiting through that device.

So the way to think about this is that your ISP basically erected a toll booth, except the toll booth isn’t on some highway, right? It’s literally right outside your front door, right, your home’s digital door, right, the thing that you have to exit to get to anyone else is itself or has become because of the ISP, a toll booth and you have to pay every time you leave that specific doorway. So if you find a route around the ISP that’s charging you, right, to get there, then sure you don’t need to connect with other people. Right. So for example, I mentioned this a little earlier that in New York City, there’s a network called NYC Mesh, and that is a community owned basically wireless ISP, except that you don’t have to pay to connect to it because it’s a community owned network. Right. And it’s a I think that’s the point. It’s also now a 501(c)3. But the point is that their networks like this all over the world.

In Cuba, as recently as a couple years ago, right, there was a community created network called S-NET are known as the street network. And again, it was disconnected from the internet, but had all the things you would expect on, quote, the internet, like game sites, and social networking, and news and so on and so forth. But because of the US embargo, it was disconnected, right? It was not allowed to connect to quote, the internet. And so it was his own little sort of its own pocket of internet bricked computers. And that didn’t cost money to connect to the internet, it couldn’t because it wasn’t connected to the internet. Right.

And so the point is that the technology enables us to communicate, regardless of how we are billed for our communication. And the thing to recognize that there is that right, the reason why you have for example, an ISP account, right, and a bank account associated with it, and that they are tracking how much for example, bandwidth you use, right is because one has to measure what one wants to control. So because they are invested in controlling what it is that we do and say, right, they are incentivized to measure what we do and say, because that’s the only way to actually control it. But that’s a choice that’s completely orthogonal, has no relationship whatsoever to the actual capability of connecting to another device, that is an overlay on top of a much more foundational infrastructure.

And so if you can separate those two pieces apart, then you have a much better understanding of like, what’s required to have the communication you want. And also what’s not required to have the communication that you want. So in that sense, again, the internet’s already free, right?

Like back in the day, again, in the 70s, and 80s. Right before the web was invented in the 70s and 80s. The Internet existed, it was smaller, but anyone could connect basically for free. as though it were a public beachfront at the ocean, you could just hop in, right on a public beach to the ocean, I don’t know charges you to get to the waves, at least on a public beachfront, right? You don’t need a credit card number to connect to the Internet in the 70s. Because the internet was not something that was being charged for. It was just there. You had to be at a university campus, right? Because was the mainframe days. But again, connectivity just meant plugging in. Well, that’s still possible today. It’s just that the capitalist infrastructure around that treats it in a different way, and therefore measures what you do in order to bill you.

Joel: Alright, so you conclude the article by highlighting the potential of a liberated telecommunication network to facilitate the rejoining of social function and material function. Can you unpack what that means? And maybe also explain why this is an important goal?

TLC: Yeah, so this is the attempt that we made try to connect back to that beginning of that article, where we talked about the social media conversation, right, like, a social media, in its maybe deepest or fullest form, right is again, a medium of social connectivity, a social connection. And that’s what society is made of, right? Like society, the word even right? Like, it’s, it has the same root as social. So we have to as human beings, right, have some kind of medium over which we can connect pre internet, right? That was only an exclusively the physical world, because there wasn’t a digital world. But now we have more mediums to connect, we can go out and meet each other physically, or at least we could before the pandemic. And we can also do that right in various ways in various spaces in so called digital space.

So the benefit of doing in digital space, right is that we are not bounded by the rules of geography we’re not talking about it was a physical embodiment, we can do so over long distances we can do so over long distances, very quickly, that’s a new ability that should be explored. And in order to explore that in a free way, we need to have a network that allows us to do that freely, which means it cannot be done in places like Facebook, it cannot be done by requiring payment for Internet access, like an ISP does, right, because that is fundamentally a non free or constrained by others, right, social medium.

And so when we talk about the possibility of rejoining sort of social material functions in that way, what we mean is that there are opportunities to enhance and improve that social binding between people, right, that sort of like that notion of neighborhood camaraderie in ways that we haven’t really had before that telecommunication can facilitate. If we are able to do that, then the most fundamental part of what society is which is the choices that we make around how we are organizing ourselves for various different kinds of purposes, whether it be economic exchange, or emotional attachments, and so on, right, that fundamentally changes our ability to do that in ways that don’t abide by the same rules as we had to in the past, like for example physical presence. And so the appropriate combination, the appropriate choices, of what should be bound to physicality and what should not, or what could be bound to physicality but what doesn’t have to be, right, that’s the thing that I think is probably the most important work of our generation, and we can’t do it without telecommunication.

Joel: All right, so we have two listener questions. One came in just as we started recording.

TLC: Cool!

Joel: So the first one is, what are your thoughts on a voluntary credential system that can be used to mitigate the spread of communicable diseases?

TLC: Hmm. Voluntary credential system. Do—is, um…I might need some help understanding what is asked there.

Joel: Well, another follow-up question to that that the same person wrote was, what might a stateless vaccine passport system look like?

TLC: I see, wow, that’s a very timely question. [Laughs.]

So, one way to think about this, and I’m kind of spitballing here so please don’t take this too seriously, but like, one way to think about this is in the same way where we think about how you might trust someone that you don’t know personally to do a given task. Like, to solve that problem the State uses licenses. To use the electrician example from earlier, like, a licensed electrician is different in some way than an unlicensed electrician. And the presumption is that a licensed electrician is going to be better, or more capable, or more competent, because they have been licensed to do the thing that electricians are supposed to do.

That’s not actually true, right, it’s a sort of transitive assumption being made based on how much one trusts the issuing authority, in this case the State, to do a good job of vetting that particular individual and their capabilities. And even so, that doesn’t necessarily guarantee that because they are licensed they will do a good job for you. There are other problems that might arise, right? Maybe they have a bias against you, the customer, or whatever. So those are sort of flawed at their core but they are in many ways the most widespread solution for trusting you don’t already have trust in.

The reason I bring up this analogy of licensing is because that’s kind of what a vaccine passport is. Right? Like, if I don’t know you personally and I have no social connection to you, I have no other way of knowing anything about you, then I’m not going to necessarily feel safe being in a crowded theater with you unless maybe you have this so-called vaccine passport. So then the question becomes, okay, what is the issuing authority for such a passport?

That is the same problem, sort of, or at least it’s the same problem space as the licensing question and partly the reason that that’s such a problem is because we have no other mechanism of a social point of reference. Right, like, we’re interacting very often—I mean, you and I have never talked before, and so I don’t really know you from Adam, right Joel, except what I know about you is mostly through your association with C4SS. And so I have some pre-existing association with C4SS and so I can make some assumptions about you based on our mutual third party friend here known as the C4SS.

And also, if you look at the licensing examples, you are probably more likely to ask a friend who is an electrician to come to your house and fix a fuse or whatever it is that’s going on with your wiring, right, than you are to pick some random person off of some electrician’s directory because you know them. I mean, this is literally Konkin’s horizontal agorism, right, that’s exactly what that is. And I think there’s a lot of sense there.

When you take that to the vaccine passport analogy, the thing that I think is maybe the underlying problem there is, where are you going? Right, like, if I’m constantly traveling physically to places where I have no social relation to, why is that? Well, that’s because there is no alternative economy. There is no alternative reason to—I’m going to a restaurant where I don’t know the owners of because I don’t know the owners of any restaurants, as an example. And if I did know the owners of a restaurant, then a stateless vaccine passport is simply my trust in them, right? As opposed to my trust in the State. Does that make sense?

Joel: Yeah, yeah, for sure. All right, so we actually have one more listener question and then we’ll go to the actual end of our conversation.

TLC: Okay.

Joel: Does TLC see a future where three bars covers every nook and cranny or is your talk of bar-free zones where we can escape or get away and feel unplugged and disconnected because there’s no signal, a signal free wilderness space? Does that make sense?

TLC: I think so. I mean, the three bars, you’re talking about cell phone signal, right? Like, connectivity?

Joel: I would think so.

TLC: Yeah, I mean, so, like the irony of this is that we can get no connectivity whenever we want. We literally just have to turn off our phones. Just because there’s connectivity around us doesn’t mean we have to connect to it. That is actually an individual choice that we have. And so, while there is value in wilderness, and y’know, from an ecological standpoint the Earth absolutely has to be re-wilded to a certain degree—the amount of wilderness that we have lost is a death sentence for the planet and we have to do something about that in a meaningful way. And that very well might mean “Do not build here!” Like, don’t put a fucking cell tower in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest. Like maybe don’t do that? So that might be an example of a signal-less space and there’s some value in that both ecologically and, y’know, spiritually.

I don’t actually think that means also that we are also doomed to connectivity or lack of connectivity. Like, I definitely turn off the data connection and the Wi-Fi connection on my phone sometimes and just do local stuff on my phone, even as well. And then also sometimes I just put down my phone.

But I think maybe what’s underlying that question is how do we get back to a healthier relationship with these devices? And I think again that comes back to recognizing what they are for us, recognizing them as a capability that we can have, in the same way that for example human bodies have different capabilities. Like, y’know, I have a different level of clarity of eyesight and a different sense of smell than somebody else. And these are things that we can do and when I want to use that capability, I have it. But because I have an understanding at a deep technical level about what my phone really is, it doesn’t feel to me like it’s calling me or like I’m stuck in in this sort of doom scrolling loop because I’m the one controlling my interaction with this device. That really makes it an extension of me, rather than me being an extension of Twitter, for example.

I think flipping that paradigm is important in one’s mind, but also just in practice. That comes from an ability to be dextrous, an ability to have a kind of sensitivity to what it is that these devices are doing for us that bluntly not a lot of people have right now and again is part of what Tech Learning Collective is trying to do. It makes sense that a lot of people feel at the behest of the social networks because that’s what they’re designed to do you. But if you understand a lot more about what’s going on then it’s a lot easier to take control over your experience with those devices.

There’s a lot of like, y’know, wellbeing advice. Like, oh, turn off notifications after 8PM and stuff. And that’s fine and well, right, but that’s really a shallow and superficial suggestion. You know what I mean? And TLC tries to take that to the next level by giving you the kinds of knowledge and practical experiences that you need to have in order to have the relationship with technology that you want in the same that it behooves you to learn a little bit about cooking so that you can make the meals that you want. And then you’re not beholden to someone else to cook for you or to go out to a restaurant all the time to get the meal that you want. You can do that yourself. And that will not only change your relationship with your meals, right, but it will change your relationship with your body because it’s what you’re putting in your body. That is the food you’re having.

And so that same mindset, like, you should know a little bit about this [digital] stuff because it is your mind, it is your brain basically. It is the non-tangible parts of your thoughts that is what the computing device is for. The laptops, the phones that we have, what they actually are are our thoughts made objective, which is to say they are objects, material objects, into which we have inscribed our thoughts, in this case in silicon and electricity as opposed to maybe graphite and pencil. But it is that thing. And so just as you might journal in a diary and you need to be able to read and write to be able to do this well, you need to have some level of dexterity around the devices that you have in order to be able to think with them healthily.

And potentially also the repulsion of three bars in a certain area, that then becomes a lot less scary or damaging to you because you get the control over it, and you feel that control over it. And it’s not anymore just something that’s happening around you in your environment, but you actually get to be the one to say, yeah I want to connect right now. Or no, I don’t want to connect right now.

Joel: Are there any related groups or projects that you think folks should get involved with if they want to help move towards an optimistic cyber future?

TLC: Detroit Community Technology Project out in Detroit is sort of like the NYC Mesh equivalent, right, they offer free Wi-Fi, free Internet access to their local community network. They always need volunteers of various kinds. There’s a similar project out in Santa Fe, New Mexico, there’s one in Portland, Oregon. There’s obviously NYC Mesh here in New York City. There’s all sorts of different projects that you can get involved with, and these are just the networking related ones, so I would look into those.

But y’know, much like Öcalan describes the sort of, like, urgency for the Kurdistan people to make local and democratic confederalist institutions for their region in order to subsume, ultimately, the Turkish state, right, that is what we need to do at a global level. That is the kind of self-organization that needs to happen if we are to free ourselves from capitalism anyway. And that starts by necessity with individual action, but grows, or could grow, right, into collective actions and affinity groups and neighborhood networks and that kind of thing.

Joel: Where should folks go to learn more about TLC?

TLC: Yeah, the best place is TechLearningCollective.com just the website. You’ll find calendars of events there. We have probably two or three workshops every week that happen online that you’re welcome to join. Those are public events. There’s also a set of courses that are offered with much less regularity. So if you’re super excited about this I highly recommend the workshops over the courses; they’re both cheaper and are happening more frequently. There’s also a blog there. You can subscribe to a mailing list if you’re so inclined. And, what else is there? Yeah, there’s a contact page where if you really wanted to ask a specific question that maybe wasn’t answered on our FAQ or About pages, the TechLearningCollective.com/contact page lists both our general email address and a PGP key and even a Signal number that you can reach out to us with.

Joel: Cool, is there anything I forgot to ask you about that you’d like to touch on before we end the interview?

TLC: No, I really appreciated the questions. I really appreciated the opportunity also to sort of elaborate on some of our thoughts, it’s always hard to get so much of this into a, y’know, a two-thousand some odd word article. So this went, I’m sure, maybe longer than we expected but I had fun, I hope you did too. Thank you so much for inviting us on.

Joel: I did, I had a lot of fun. But yeah, thank you for joining us. I know everyone else is going to really enjoy everything you had to say today. That was the Tech Learning Collective. Thanks again, I hope you have a good rest of your day.

TLC: Thanks, you as well!

For a number of years, Non Serviam Media has been exploring the world of anarchist and anti-authoritarian ideas through conversations with political thinkers and activists. They’ve covered topics ranging from prison abolition, to immigrant labor and migrant rights, and, more recently, queer biohacking. The same crew’s new collaboration with the C4SS is sure to be equally edifying. In part 1 of our conversation on the show, we discuss Tech Learning Collective itself for those who aren’t familiar with what we do, and then tackle the key technology topics of the day, like unpacking how the Internet became what it is now, and what’s wrong with social media.

In this post, you’ll find a copy of the audio recording of our interview along with a (somewhat rushed) written transcript of the interview. In the next post, we’ll publish part 2 of our interview along with its transcript. Our thanks to Joel, along with everyone else at both Non Serviam Media and the C4SS for their interest in our work and for engaging with and amplifying our ideas.

Joel Williamson: This is The Enragés. A show where we take a deeper dive into written works published at the Center for Stateless Society. Join us as we give voice to the ideas challenging the vain phantoms that haunts our social reality and stand in the way of total liberation. For more information visit, c4ss.org. And to support this show or any of the other projects happening at the center, please visit patreon.com/c4ssdotorg. Thank you for listening.

Hello, and thank you for tuning in to the Enragés. I’m your host Joel Williamson. Today we’ll be joined by the Tech Learning Collective to discuss an article they wrote titled “Imagining an Optimistic Cyber Future.” Tech Learning Collective is an apprenticeship-based technology school for radical organizers founded in New York City that provides a security first IT infrastructure curriculum to otherwise underserved communities and organizations advancing social justice causes. TLC trains politically self-motivated individuals in the arts of hyper media, information technology, and radical political practice. The piece we’ll be discussing today is an imaginative exploration of radical strategies for a liberatory techno-future. Tech Learning Collective, welcome to the show.

Tech Learning Collective: Thank you so much for inviting us on the show, Joel, and thanks for having us here.

Joel: Of course, before we start breaking down your article, I wanted to ask you a few questions about the tech learning collective if you don’t mind.

TLC: Yeah.

Joel: How did you get involved in TLC? And what are your ultimate goals with the project?

TLC: And that’s, that’s a good question. It’s also sort of a different, you’ll get a different answer, depending on who you ask. Right? So I’ll give you an answer for me. And then I think I would also point people to the Tech Learning Collective website, right. So techlearningcollective.com/about, but personally, I got involved relatively early on in about 2015-2016-ish or so. At the time, there was a mutual self education group, sort of a semi private technical training group in New York City, mostly folks who were trying to just sort of like make some material headway in the situations that they found themselves in in their lives. We got a sort of a somewhat of a boost in the November 2016 elections, for reasons I think you can imagine.

So for me, personally, it was sort of like seeing a self motivated group of people who were like, these are the things that we find a priority as infrastructure for the other things that we want to accomplish, right. And some of us have more experienced than others in a technical sort of like computer IT background. But the goal was really basically just self education, it was basically a private study group, if you will, that sort of happened in a bunch of these anarchist occupied spaces in New York City around that time. So that’s kind of when I, when I got started, and how I got involved, I started, I’ve been a digital security, sort of like, I don’t want to say afficionado, because that sort of like, you know, makes it sound a little bit hobbyistic, but it’s been an important part of my activism personally. So that’s sort of where I started offering my own personal contributions. And so everyone sort of has their own their own sort of like intake story like that.

But the goal sort of was very much like, you know, we all recognize that these skills are skills that are a site of more possibility in certain respects, which is to say, you know, if you were trying to do a kind of organizing in, let’s say, 1970s New York City, right, like, the Lower East Side has a very rich history of radical activism. There were tactics that were more available to you than in other places in America, right, because of the way New York City was sort of, like, structured, I mean, it’s an urban center, it has different needs, and it has different opportunities than other places. So that’s also true in the digital realm. And today, you know, if you were to try to, for example, you know, distribute food from a grocery store, you know, you would, you would very quickly be approached by very militarized police resistance. That is, that’s not a tactic that’s then as accessible and feasible, right, as a direct action tactic for a lot of scenarios today. But those same constraints are lifted in cyberspace, at least for now, at least in some ways.

And so it became very obvious to a lot of people that a prerequisite of getting meaningful material, revolutionary possibility has begun to transition towards spaces that are not as heavily policed because bluntly the police are not as good at policing there. And that is the Internet right now. At least for the time being. So that was our sort of like initial motivation. Like, how can we use this sort of new space as almost, you know, not to overuse an analogy, but there’s almost a wild west space to actually push forward material impacts in community scale, affinity groups and efforts. And we have to get really good at that as quickly as possible. So that was a start. That was sort of the that was the that was the founding vision.

And that’s then of course evolved into a number of different community groups that had sort of spun out of tech learning collective projects in 2015, 2016, 2017, and so on that we now call alumni groups, we now have this sort of more formalized school, which is the tech learning collective at this point, right. And although, you know, people come now with a multitude of different motivations, we focus very, very intentionally on those with political ambitions.

Joel: Cool. So how often do you All right, cool articles like the one we’re going to be discussing today?

TLC: Well, so we try to write as much as we can, there’s a lot of work that goes into the day to day of what we’re doing. So we don’t always spend all of our effort on writing. We have recently tried to get more articles out more quickly, just because we’re in a position where we can, you know, we have an infrastructure now of our own, that we can, that we can sort of build on top of and grow and sort of our writing efforts with C4SS has been, first of all, very well received, which is nice to see. And mostly an effort to try to just like, make more people aware that there is an opportunity for those with political ambitions, right to to learn about sort of the the infrastructural digital technologies that are mediating so much of our lives now, in a way that doesn’t also overlap with for example, recruitment industry, you know, Silicon Valley bullshit. Sorry, like, I don’t know if I can I can use that word on the on the show?

Joel: Yes, absolutely. You get a golden coin every time you curse.

TLC: Oh, nice, well, then I might curse a lot more. But yeah, so. So that’s, that’s where the writing came from. We’re trying to have a cadence of about once a month, you’ll probably not see that many articles only because we’re not that huge a group. And we don’t always have quite as much to say. So if you do want to see additional writing, definitely, that’s the C4SS site is where we’re hoping to publish more things in the upcoming future, we actually have a piece in the works right now for next month. But other than that, of course, there’s also the tech learning collective comm blog itself.

Joel: Is TLC, an explicitly anarchist organization? Or is it just made up of people who identify or have some affinity toward anarchism?

TLC: Yeah, that’s also a really good question. Right. And so this is a conversation that that we had internally, and we sometimes continue to have internally. The short answer is, it’s kind of de facto an anarchist and autonomist organization. Just because, you know, everyone who’s involved has some far left leaning along those lines. But for reasons of mostly just public palatability, and also simply, it doesn’t really matter, right? If you are self identifying as an anarchist, or an autonomist or whatever, if you are excited by this team possibility that doing the same things that we’re excited about, you know, creating alternative networks to you know, the surveilled Internet, finding ways to increase your digital privacy or capabilities for the purpose of community and communal, you know, action, then it doesn’t matter to us, how you identify your politics. And so we’ve taken extremely intentionally sort of non politically neutral political identity neutral tack, without also trying to hide the fact that we have some obvious anarchist ideals. And that has served us well so far. So we’re probably going to keep doing that for a little while longer.

Joel: Right. And there’s all sorts of different types of anarchist organizing, and anarchism is right. Yeah. What drew you towards C4SS?

TLC: I mean, I hope this was okay to say on a C forces podcast, but like nothing in particular, right, like, so.

Joel: Tech positive stuff, maybe?

TLC: Pretty much yeah, I mean, like, you know, we don’t, again, we don’t really care, right, from a project perspective, about the strains of anarchy, per se, like it’s an interesting academic, you know, conversation. And that’s an important conversation, surely, because academics are actually rather important, right, we should be aware of the theory of the stuff that we are doing 100%. And at the same time, at the end of the day, like, you know, an academic textbook is not where the rubber meets the road in most people’s lives. So it doesn’t particularly matter.

So when we started the further outreach efforts to like, say, you know, hey, we’re a school, but we’re not like, because people were very quick to assume that we were very much like a code boot camp, like a flat iron school or a general assembly, returning school, you know, one of these sort of, like, what we call a school to Corporation pipeline, right? Who have a rush to employment style of teaching, and you have to sort of learn to the test and then get like a license and so on. We just aren’t anything like that. But a lot of people were assuming that we were so we said we got to up the politics a little bit, you know, what I mean? Like get people to understand that like, we don’t really care about cooperation with the job market, per se. We care about it in the sense of like, you know, individuals today still need to have some income in a fiat currency that is regulated by a state to survive, which is an abomination. Obviously. But it is the reality that we live in. So we care about it in that sense. But we’re not as a project trying to get people jobs. Like that’s not the goal, right. And it very much is the goal for other sorts of like boot camps and tech education initiatives and so on. And so that’s why we’re like, well, we gotta, we gotta do something to like, differentiate this a little bit more clearly.

And so we basically just started writing these pieces that were, you know, political in intent, not with an identity label associate, but just with, like, what is the action out of it? Like, what is the outcome of the thing that we’re trying to do? And we send some of these pieces to a number of publications, C4SS as being one of them. And, you know, two things appeal to us about C4SS, that’s number one is, as you mentioned, there was a text sort of positive or an appreciation of the capabilities, right, the technology offered. And that was also not just spoken about, but it was also evident to us in how you responded, right? Maybe not you, but like, you know, how people at C4SS, right, were able to communicate back with us. So it was, it was simply quicker, right? I mean, like, you know, C4SS answers faster, with more detail, and with more clear thought, and I mean, not a little bit faster, but like by weeks, write faster than most other publications that we’ve ever communicated with. And that speaks to the existence of internal processes that make use of the kinds of capabilities we’re talking about. Right? So it’s a little bit of a relationship of convenience, not to which I don’t mean to be insulting, I hope it’s not. But it’s also a well aligned organization in that respect.

Joel: Cool. Well, let’s go ahead and move in to your actual article now, I guess.

TLC: Sure.

Joel: What is society, if not the aggregate of communication between individuals? That’s a quote in your article that somewhat captures the trajectory of where you’re going in the piece. Why did you choose cybernetics, among other things, as a major focus?

TLC: Yeah, so we really like this question. And we talked just a little bit before the show about that being a question that we sort of get also somewhat often, which is to say that a lot of people ask us about cybernetics generally, or an interest in cybernetics. And it kind of makes sense, right? Like, there’s the word cyber right isn’t there? And so it aligns with a lot of what people think of what we do.

And this is probably a good opportunity to sort of like mention that, yes. You know, cybernetics, right is basically right, that the formal study of inanimate feedback loops, that’s not the academic definition, but that’s how I would like to think of it basically means like, given the ability to send something about the world via like a thermometer or like a motion detector, or whatever, right? And then you have another ability to change something about the world, right? We have like a microcontroller or mechanical actuator, or again, some other tool whatever, your hand, right anything. Then cybernetics describes how to build systems that have some desired outcome from those two fundamental components.

That’s often what’s called like a closed loop system. And it’s probably what people have here have heard about, like, when they talk about feedback loops or closed loop systems to for example, like an air conditioner, right is a cybernetics system, because it has a thermometer and then it sort of self regulates the temperature in an area, right? And then as the change in the in the air temperature gets sensed by the sensor, then the air conditioner turns back on again, right. So that’s a cool idea, right?

But we’re not totally like it’s not it’s not that we’re interested in cybernetics per se, it’s not actually our focus. And or maybe they have a better way to say that right is that cybernetics is as much our focus as meditation or poetry or linguistics or history, right? Or philosophy. Cybernetics is best thought of as like just one way of thinking about certain elements of human experience, but no better than, for example, music is right, or anarchism, right?

So any hyper focus on a single topic, right will always sort of be somewhat myopic, and only a little bit boring. And worse than that, right? It makes these implementations that breed design flaws in ideals that are then easy to overlook, because you’ve hyper focused right on like, one particular way of thinking about something, and those tend to inevitably fail. So I’ve heard this described right by anarchists as blueprint-ism, a favorite book of mine is James C. Scott’s book “Seeing Like a State,” which is a wonderful exposition of exactly this kind of myopic hyper focus, right? And how it fails in the context of government.

So this is like super relevant to learning about technology, because in our opinion, right, the best software engineers are not actually computer science majors, right? We found that they are generally subpar systems thinkers more often than not, but philosophers are actually really great, like philosophers excel at the practice of reasoning about computer systems precisely because right, they study reasoning itself.

And this is perhaps no more famously expressed than in the Tor project, which is this sort of like privacy enhancing and identity concealing overlay network used by journalists and whistleblowers. It was made famous by Edward Snowden. We teach Tor at great length. In our curriculum. We have actually a number of workshops about it, specifically, and like, when, so talking about these sort of like hyper, you know, sort of computer security things a lot of people would assume that the creators of those things right would be these sort of like computer greybeards, right. Paul Syverson though the invention The Onion routing scheme in which Tor is based, actually holds three academic degrees in philosophy and only one in mathematics and none in computer science at all.

His story, getting to the Tor project and creating that at the NRL, the Naval Research Laboratory, back in the 90s is one that begins with picking up a jobs for philosophers magazine, literally a magazine called jobs for philosophers. And that’s all that within that magazine, just job postings for philosophy majors.

Joel: Wow.

TLC: Yeah. And so, you know it was—

Joel: That must have been very popular among philosophers, but not popular among anyone else.

TLC: Pretty much, right. And I tell the story, like to sort of showcase just how important it is to think about computer systems without the hyper focus on what we think today of what computer systems are, or could be. Right. So in the same vein, right, like cybernetics is interesting, but it’s not more interesting than anything else. And because it’s just sort of like more familiar in terms of what people think that we do, we get asked about it a lot.

But our focus both in class times, for the project, generally and for, you know, personally for ourselves, right? Is the interweaving of all these these different concepts, we talk as much about philosophy and history and sort of like, you know, Gnosticism, for example, even comes up in our networking classes, right, as we do about computer technology, or cybernetics, or, you know, some sort of like what we would consider to be a hard tech concept, because those are just sort of detailed expressions of something that’s a far more foundational concept. And those are the things that politically self motivated people, I think both are, you know, more interested in, but also, because they’re more interested in them, right, have a much better opportunity to use that interest as a foundation or springboard to learn about the details that are expressed in some specific area of expertise, like computers, or permaculture or anything else. Right?

Joel: Awesome. Why is imagining an optimistic cyber future the first step towards improving our relationship with digital technology?

TLC: I don’t mean to be glib with a short answer. But the sort of start and end of it right is that if we can’t imagine something better than what currently exists today, then the best we can hope for is just stumbling through sheer luck into a better future, right? Like we will have no direction and no sort of like ability to define for ourselves what better means.

And so given the forces that are arrayed against, you know, those who would bend the arc of the moral universe towards justice, right, like sheer dumb luck, just, it’s just not good enough. If we want to be intentional about this, we have to first be imaginative about this, and you cannot have the intentionality without the imagination. So starting with a vision and actual like imaginary of what it is that you want to move towards, really does have to be like step zero, you know, it has to be the first step.

And that is also a step that takes time and effort and should take some focus. You know, TLC obviously has an idea of what we’d like to see a future look like. It’s not the only vision, it’s not necessarily the best one. But it is a guiding Northstar, if you will, right to get us towards that future. And we couldn’t do anything that we did without imagining what we want. So that’s why we started that way.

Joel: So how does cyberspace’s infancy explain its volatility?

TLC: The article that we’re talking about the “imagining an optimistic cyber future” is really kind of three articles in one, right? Like, it’s kind of three essays that were weaved together into a quilt that is this article, if you will. And we open it before we even start with one of the three sort of main topics of the essay with trying to set a baseline of understanding around how young which is to say how recent right how new cyberspace and the modern technical era, if you will, right, really is. And the reason for that is because a lot of people, especially younger people, for no fault of their own, really don’t seem to recognize just how new the internet and telecommunication generally really is.

And so we open our piece, right? by reminding readers that, for example, the web was invented, not commercialized, right, not popularized, but invented a mere 33 years ago. So it’s like younger than many of us, right? Like, and that’s important to keep in mind, because a lot of people, especially like, you know, so called tech people or people in the industry, right, are like professionals, right? They think they know what they’re doing. But they don’t. I mean, how could they right? Like, we have a capability that has never existed in all of human history before 33 years ago. So how could anyone reasonably claim to know what the fuck they’re going to do with that? Like they don’t, they can’t possibly know that that is obscenely absurdly. The hubris of that is, it should be shocking, right? Because it’s so new. And so, for what it’s worth, like, if things feel chaotic, right online right now, well, yeah, that’s exactly why nobody knows what the fuck is going on.

So nobody knows what’s gonna happen, which means there are more opportunities also right to determine the trajectory of the future than one might think precisely because, right things are so new.

And so one way to think about this is like, like a laser pointer, like if you point it at a wall, but if you point a laser pointer at a wall, 100 feet away, you only need to move your wrist a tiny fraction of an inch right to cause that dot on the wall to move many, many, many orders of magnitude more than the small distance your hand traveled, right. And so the the point is that the effect is wildly outsized relative to the cause of that. And so that’s basically what’s going on with the internet, right, and the socio cultural effects it’s having on the world right now. And that perspective, we think is super important to keep in mind, because it explains A) right, why we feel things are so volatile. But B) also it gives us sort of a window of historical perspective, right to remember that, like, hold the phone, you know, like, we just learned how to write online, you know what I mean? Like, people are still figuring out how links work, like, give it some time, nothing is settled, the dust is still very much in the air. And that should be both, you know, an opportunity for those who are willing to invest in taking the time to learn about how that works, and comfort for people who feel like everything is going haywire right now.

Joel: you described three great migrations of computing power. Can you briefly explain what those migrations are for the audience, please?

TLC: Sure, yeah. So this is also sort of like the intro to our article, as part of this sort of like, expectation setting. Because again, this is not a history, everyone knows. And so we don’t expect you to come to the article, knowing it. But the important thing to sort of recognize about the moment in cyberspace history, if you will, that we are right now is that is that there has sort of been what we see as these three, as you mentioned, these great migrations, right?

So the first one is simply this creation of mechanical computing in the first place. This was like, you know, the 1800s era, right? By this we mean like the ability to perform computations by a machine. So like a machine could actually be the one computing, right, rather than a human being. Because before such a machine existed, I think the earliest common example of this is the Babbage engine. Humans were the ones that were adding numbers or whatever in their heads or on paper, right to do calculations. And so the first great migration is really just this Genesis moment, or our metaphorical Big Bang, when modern computing or cyberspace was kind of like firstborn. Right?

That’s, that’s the era of the room size computer, these mainframes, these old like, you know, big, literal rooms, whose entire like job was to house right the computer. In fact, it was called a mainframe. Not because of the mainframe, one word is actually contraction of two words, main and frame. And the reason it was called the mainframe is simply because the main frame of the computer was in that room, which of course means that other parts of the computer, we’re not in that room, and like almost this gigantic octopus, if you imagine a mainframe, the room where the computer is, as being the head of the octopus, you can imagine its peripherals which were in this case, dumb terminals, like, you know, keyboards and printers and other sort of disk devices that we now understand as being part of a computer. They were not actually part of the so called mainframe, they were in other frames, literally boxes right outside the mainframe. So the mainframe was its own sort of special thing that was like the first, you know, era of this. The computing happened in the mainframe, in other words.

The second migration didn’t happen till the 1980s. So skip forward, like pretty much 40, 50 years, right past like World War One, World War Two, all of it until you get to the so called personal computer or PC revolution, in the 1980s. So before the 1980s, computing power only existed in these large mainframes. And if you wanted to perform some computation, right, you had to physically travel to the building or campus where that computer was located. Because that’s, again, that’s where the compute power actually existed: in the mainframe.

But in the 1980s, these PCs, these so called personal computers brought the ability to compete into residences, right into Homes and Gardens, by literally bringing the miniaturizing that whole sort of mainframe, and its peripherals, its hard disk drive, right? Its keyboard, so into a size that would fit on a single desk, or, you know, in the back of a garage or something. And that was the big change, for sure. But the compute power itself was still mostly isolated right to those single machines one at a time, because there wasn’t any good way of connecting those PCs together. So we went from this sort of like, Big Bang Genesis moment of like, we have these gigantic mainframes and these campuses that are dedicated just to that to a sort of like an explosion, right of compute power that dispersed the ability to compute into multiple locations. And so that’s the second major migration.

But that explosion, right, didn’t connect all those pieces. And so that’s where we’re living. That’s where we’re going toward today.

Most people you know, today, you and I were talking on two personal computers, but we’re connecting the two, right? So we’re living today in this in the so called third Great Migration, where now most compute power has actually sort of gone back to these gigantic data centers, whether they be government or corporate controlled, right, like Amazon AWS, or Facebook or Google, right.

So you and I still have the ability to perform compute operations on our own devices, right? Again, that’s why they’re called computers or laptops. But notice that the vast majority of the computing that we actually care about happens elsewhere. It’s no longer on our local computer, right? It’s in Google Docs, or Amazon AWS, or, you know, Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever. And those are so called these these, these so called Cloud services, right? They run these so called servers that claim to server whims and those servers and this is The important thing to understand today are not fundamentally different than your laptop, right, but the computer that runs Google Docs, or Twitter, right, that creates the web page that you look at. At its core, it’s just a personal computer moved into a data center. It’s just like your laptop, it’s, it’s running the same essential technology, as you have in front of you right now that we’re using to speak to each other, like on our own laptops, right.

But what’s different about it is that they hold or possess right the things that we care about. So rather than having your documents on your laptop, right, you keep them so called in the cloud. So we kind of really shouldn’t call them servers anymore, we should maybe call them possessors.

But that’s the, that’s the third Great Migration, if like, now we’ve got our own compute power locally. But we’re using that compute power with an over an interconnected network to then speak to other computers that possess the things we care about. Whereas in the second phase of that the PC revolution of 1980s, right, we were able to move the things we care about physically into our homes, because the compute power was there, and there was no network.

Joel: So the third migration is described as sort of a return in some ways to centralization.

TLC: Yeah, very much. It’s centralization. But it’s also this sort of a weird hybrid where, right like the first migration of truly centralized computing was the mainframe, right? You couldn’t do anything without being physically located near a mainframe. And part of that’s because as an individual, like you couldn’t have an electronic computer in your house, such a thing just didn’t exist. So you didn’t have any of your own local compute, right? You couldn’t have a machine calculate anything locally, you had to physically get on a bike and go to the campus and go to the machine room, right computer lab and ask the attendant, right for permission to use the computer. And then, and then you will be able to do some calculations. Cool.

And then when the PC revolution happened in the 1980s, right, you never, you didn’t have to do that anymore, you could just go to your garage or your you know, I mean, mostly assuming that you had the money to do this, which mostly meant that you were, you know, relatively well off white man. But the point is, it’s the same, right? Like, the point is that you have the ability to do the local compute in your house. And that was a big shift, and so that decentralized compute power in a meaningful way, because it meant now that everyone individually was doing their own compute, right? They were they were doing the calculations at home, they were running their own PCs.

The first stage of getting to the network, then, which is to say, when we had a medium to connect all those individual computers together, ie the internet. What happened? What and what is happening, right slowly, is over the course of say, from the 90s, to the mid 2000s, right to the 2010s was this move back this sort of pull this gravitational force that sort of pulls where the important compute happens back to these large companies, these data centers?

And what’s different about it this time, right, is that in this third migration is that we don’t lose local compute, you and I are actually still getting more and more local compute all the time. I mean, look at a smartphone, for example, right? One of these babies is like, way more powerful than any PC in the 1980s ever could hope to be.

And so what’s interesting is, what are we using local compute for? Well, we could use it for anything we could use compute for. But what we’re actually using it for in the model of say, Google Drive, right, is connecting to another computer somewhere else that actually has what we care about right over a network. And so the important compute is now happening in the data centers. Not that it has to, but that currently it is and so that’s sort of that like grab that that pendulum swing, if you can imagine from centralized to decentralized to centralized again, we’re sort of in that third shift backwards.

And, you know, we don’t know how long necessary that will last but you can definitely picture that as like another third Great Migration because now so much is like SaaS based right, “Software as a Service,” or really service as a software substitute kind of computing.

Joel: So the swing back to centralization was sort of recaptured by industry and by the state. Whether or not you agree with left wing market anarchists, conclusions, one huge strength in my opinion of left wing market anarchists insight is its analysis of how capitalism happens, how it maintains itself, how it perpetuates itself, historically, and currently through direct and indirect subsidization, for example, or land theft, the enclosure of the commons, you know, blah, blah, blah. That might be another similarity that you sort of at least hinted at in your article with the merger of the state and corporations. But either way, what makes you confident that the pendulum will swing once again? And how do we bring about the next catalyzing event in order to move towards a free cyber future?

TLC: Well, yeah, further further along in the article, we talked about this sort of like convergence between state and Corporation, right. And I think that this is, I don’t think this is a particularly unique insight or anything, but it’s definitely the case that it is difficult to imagine the existence of the State without, without the corporations that are making it materially and technically possible to have such a thing.

And vice versa as well, it’s a little bit difficult to imagine the kinds of cooperation we have now, not to say that all corporations are all sort of methods of organizing economic activity, or relying on that. But the ones we have now in the in a capitalist model, absolutely rely on the State for the kinds of very obviously unbalanced advantages that some companies have over others, right, depending on their, on their position, and their history and their inheritances.

So the shift to the cloud, right is absolutely a shift that happened, in part, right, because of the inability for the general public at large to recognize the dangers of the conflation between State and Corporation. In our opinion.

However, right? If you look at the way that that migration happened, what you see is a pattern with the other previous sort of emergencies right at the so called great migrations. And so we’re confident that this is going to swing back right to another, another sort of different form of organizing our computing infrastructures, in part, because that pattern holds.

And so what I mean by that is that all these shifts, like the first one, the second migration, and the third one to the cloud, right? All what all these shifts have in common is that they each occurred when two factors, right converged at the same time. And first, we had a given capability like disperse compute power, for example, the PC revolution in the 1980s, right, or the network access sort of became more ubiquitous and available, ie internet access, right, which sort of precipitated the cloud, those things became tangible, meaning that people were actually able to experience it themselves, like have it right and use it make use of it themselves.

And second, that in each case, the emergence of that capability was the solution to a prior problem. So for example, a lack of individual compute, right, during the PC revolution in the 80s, the lack of inter computer connectivity for the cloud, right.

And so if we stopped to think about it for a moment, there are some pretty obvious disadvantages to the current cloud model, right? Some are very clearly political problems. Like for example, we can point out the Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal, right data collection, that kind of stuff. But many are also just purely technical problems, like take the politics takes economics out of it. And you can even just on a purely technical level, see that the current sort of client server architecture where everything is, is sort of on someone else’s computer, and you have to connect to it right? Does actually result in a less than optimal scenario for a lot of applications, right?

And the trite example of this, right, it’s like, how do you watch Netflix if your internet connectivity goes down for a second? Right?

So we can like we can just do the math. So like, in the mid 2000s, it was way more feasible in terms of physical space and dollar cost, right to store your own personal movie collection, say on physical disks, right? Like on DVDs, or VHS cassettes before that. And that’s why Netflix, when they started as a business, right, they started out by physically mailing DVDs to subscribers, because that was the fastest way to get the amount of data they needed to send to you, to you. Right. And so today, of course, it’s actually faster and cheaper to send that same amount of data, not on a DVD that’s printed, and then shipped by courier, right, but like, over the network itself, right, it’s easier to do that than it is to mail somebody, something. And it’s not just easier, it’s also actually faster for the same amount of data that at least they’re dealing with. So, Netflix became a streaming service, because of that makes sense, totally economically rational thing to do.

But now, if you look at it, 20 years later, so right, it’s become both possible and economical for a single person to soar something like say 1000 hi-res movies and TV shows on like a single tear several terabyte hard dk drive that they have in their home, their physical, like a physical device in their house. And that’s like a digital analog to the physical movie collections in most households a few decades ago. But of course, it’s larger and cheaper, and you know, easier to manage for all the reasons that digital things are easier to manage in the physical world. And so in other words, it became very possible to have the sizable personal movie collection in your own home that rivals anything that you might truly care about Netflix offering. And on top of that, right, with free software tools like Jellyfin and other sort of media center interfaces, it’s getting a lot easier and easier, even for folks who don’t have a ton of technical background to manage that library and add new shows to it and sort of download things on the fly and you know, rip things from streaming services, and so on and so forth. Right?

And so if the internet goes down, and you want to watch a TV show to buy the time, well, you know, in that scenario where you have everything local, no problem, right, because you’re using local compute and local network access, you can watch it on your iPad, you can watch it on your laptop, right? Because you’ve got this local network in your house that we also didn’t have in the 1980s, right, called Wi Fi routers.

So this all was made possible right by the plummeting storage costs and improved software interfaces and you know, more ubiquitous networking technologies, all of which is becoming easier and easier to use and more accessible to more people. And so instead of using the cloud, which is really just someone else’s computer, you once again are able to see people actually beginning to personalize the experience by which I mean, not personalized in the way that like marketing companies talk about it. But personalized by which I mean using your own personal resources because all the devices you need to accomplish the task that we’re talking About are in your own home, they are your personal resources. They’re your personal things in your house, for example.

So the thing to highlight about this sort of like pattern, right, it’s not that there’s like some sort of clairvoyance, premonition about what the future is going to hold here. It’s that the writing was always on the wall already. This is just the 2020s version of what happened in the 1980s, personal computer revolution. Some people, in fact, call this the Personal Cloud revolution, right? Again, PC, but instead of personal computer, it’s the Personal Cloud, the term doesn’t particularly matter, right? What’s important here is that it’s following the same pattern, which is this new ubiquitous capability, right? massive personal storage, more ubiquitous, local networking, it’s converging at a time when that capability is solving an acknowledged pre-existing problem, right, which in this case, is relying on other people’s or company’s computers, that is somewhere far away from you. And that’s just one example. Right? But it illustrates the point, we think.

And so as far as bringing about, like the next catalyzing event, you know, we almost, you know, kind of don’t have to do anything to bring it about, it’s already coming, right? We’re already getting more local compute more powerful local networking, more powerful neighborhood scale networking, those devices, right are becoming more available, and in fact, have been available for quite some time. And so we just have to take advantage of it when it’s here, which is what TLC is preparing for by being a school that trains people on how to work with these new capabilities that have already existed for at least five or 10 years now.

Joel: Got it. later on. In the article, you expound a little bit on social media. Why is social media as we know it so awful? And what would social media look like if it were truly social?

TLC: Right? Yeah, this is, this was the first of the three interwoven essays that we turned into the article. It was about all about social media. It’s obviously a hot topic for folks today for many reasons. And what we’re trying to do with that sort of essay is sort of get people to think about social media, the words right, as distinct from social media, the thing that we associate with companies like Twitter and Facebook, right, I think we think about it.

And so what most people think of right, as social media today is awful. Because it isn’t actually a social media, like at all, it’s like not designed to be that it isn’t designed to be a pro-social technology, it never was. And there’s a lot of way, you know, we would think George Orwell would call doublespeak in a world today, this is a great example of that, right?

So social media, we have to understand it’s not designed to nurture social relations. It’s explicitly designed to trigger someone’s social needs. But then leave them mostly unfulfilled while offering the social platform, whatever it is that you’re using Twitter or Facebook, whatever, right as though it’s the solution to the problem that they’ve themselves triggered. So that’s what drives retention. That’s how these companies are explicitly built, not just in terms of business model, but in terms of technical implementation, right? recent documentaries, like The Social Dilemma, I think, do a really good job of showcasing just how explicit that effort is. But it is an explicit choice.

And so we really shouldn’t call it social media, right? We should call it lonely media, because the explicit design goal of sites like Facebook and Twitter is to make you feel lonely, and then offer themselves up as that short term solution to this feeling of loneliness that they’ve just inspired in you.

And that’s no different, for example, than how the US healthcare industry is set up to make more profit, right, when the population is generally sick, as opposed to healthy, right? It should be called sick care, but we call it for some reason, healthcare. And so that analogy is is the same, right? for social media, or holds, I should say, for social media as well, right?

When we say we want health care, what we’re obviously asking for, right as a as a general population, is that we want a generally healthy population, and then also have services to care for us right in the short periods of time, when we’re sick, not the inverse of that. And so when we say we want to use social media, for example, right, what it means is that we want to have a medium that generally serves pro-social ends, right to have a medium over which we can engage in social behaviors. And that also facilitates the kind of positive social connections that we all, you know, seem to want, right. But that also offers facilities to connect to others, right for when they are feeling, you know, lonely, or disconnected or isolated, if for some reason, right, like, you know, had a bad day, I really want to reach out to my friend right now, right? Like, that’s a good thing that social media can can do if it was actually social media. Instead, what it tends to do is induce FOMO by doing scrolling. Right.

And so importantly, the thing to notice by this definition, is that all communication technologies could be social media. It’s not just Twitter and Facebook, right? Back in the 90s, for example, some of the most radical and forceful mental health advocacy was happening on the sort of mental illness support group a web rings, right where someone would put up a website, and then connect it via a web ring, which is to say simply just a link to another site that then links to another site that led them link to another site. But in an intentional, sort of like, actually was an intentional community online, though, right? That was truly a social media, and Twitter wouldn’t be invented right for another 15 years.

And so when we think of social media as like a stand in for a company like Twitter or Facebook or whatever the new one is Instagram or Tiktok, or whatever, right? That’s a very different meaning of the term social media. And so first and foremost, I think we need to start saying what we mean and meaning what we say. It’s one thing to say the word social media, right? But it’s like quite another thing to do the thing that the words mean.

Joel: Yeah. For sure, yeah. Lonely media seems more than accurate to describe whatever the hell Twitter and Facebook is. You also explain, in detail, how a truly social media would likely emphasize a type of localism that would give rise to other benefits such as the blurring of lines between public and private property and a decreased need to depend on invasive security systems which rely on the police. What separates this type of localism from nativist micro-nationalism or patchwork?

TLC: Yeah, this is also a good question and one that we get a lot so thank you for asking it. I think probably the most succinct way of describing the difference is that it’s enabled by this ease of connectivity across geographic boundaries. Which is to say that it is important to remember and recognize that there are reasons to care about local geography, right? Not least of which is because humans exist in a physical world, with physical bodies, in a physical environment, so it makes sense why an awareness of and connection to a local geography and ecology and a regional culture, right, and other aspects of our lives that are necessarily grounded in the physical world would be super important to prioritize.

There’s a common tendency then, though, to mistake this kind of respect for the physicality of things as also and inherently, right, like a rejection of long-distance communication or economic exchange across distant bounds. And that’s kind of missing the point, right? Like, these should be thought of as additive factors, not mutually exclusive ones.

So, it is possible now—and, again, I don’t fault anyone for not necessarily thinking too closely about this or thinking through this because it is, as we’ve said earlier, a new capability that humans haven’t had before in the entire history of human experience, right? But we do actually have now this ability to have a strong, cohesive, relatively small-scale, neighborhood-scale region, right, that is also at the same time well-connected to other groups of people operating at various scales in various places without any care for geographical borders or boundaries. And that’s sort of a new mix of things that telecommunication, global telecommunication, global instant telecommunication, right, has made possible that we haven’t had before.

That level of speed and scale meaningfully changes what we can do, not just on a global level, but also on a local level. And so, right, that’s the whole point of telecommunication, it’s something newly possible, something most people still don’t know how to make sense of and that as a society writ large we kind of don’t know how to add to the way we’re thinking about what a just and humane social organization, a society, would be like. We don’t know what to do with it.

And so rather than thinking about these things in a, not to overuse the pun, but like in a binary way, right, like it has to be either globalist or micro-nationalist, maybe a better way to think about is like a series of overlays. Like, for example, you’re trying to draw a picture but you’re doing it with tracing paper. Right? So each layer of tracing paper that you put over the image adds more and more richness to the final picture, and that’s the thing that telecommunication makes possible that we didn’t really have before.

Some of these layers should absolutely be geographically bounded, right? Physical energy, food production, right, I mean again, human-to-human physical contact. Those are physical things. They are necessarily bounded in the physical world. But other elements of such a society does not need to be bound by the same laws of geographic regionality because telecommunication is now possible in a way it wasn’t before.

Joel: Is it necessary to convince others of the value of freedom in order for your vision to succeed?

TLC: Um, no. I don’t think it is. Obviously we think freedom is a good thing to value, and I think a lot of people already value it, which of course is good. But the, y’know, to use a somewhat capitalistic framing, the pitch here, like, our goals here are not abstract things like freedom or, in the American lingo “the pursuit of happiness.”

I mean, those are good. We want freedom. We want the pursuit of happiness. We would obviously support these things. But they are very, like, sort of highfalutin, y’know, vague notions. They mean different things to different people, there’s a lot of ways to interpret that, that kind of stuff.

Our goals are instead very material things, like which people have enough food? How coordinated is a given network of some neighborhood-scale affinity group? These are concretely measurable things. And, so one way to say this is that values like freedom are, again, like this North Star that we can sail towards, right, but we are in fact way more immediately concerned with the wind in our sail and the waves hitting the hull of our metaphorical ship. That’s what actually matters. And so those are measurable, concrete, material, immediate, personal, small scale things that, y’know, regardless of whether or not you have a political alignment in theory, you can immediately see the value in practicality of the sort of effort here in your personal life.

And that’s why, while it’s of course nice to work with people who think freedom is good as opposed to people like, y’know, fucking fascists who think freedom is obviously bad, right, like it’s better to work with the people who you can actually work with towards the same goal, it’s not actually a requirement to participate. And that’s really important because, again, it means that someone doesn’t have to self-identify or even recognize themselves as being part of so-called—I’m using air quotes here—part of “your group” to then participate in, provide value to, and gain value from the efforts that you’re putting forth.

Joel: So at one point in the article you describe how we’re making the machines who are buying our thoughts. If this is true it seems criminally underemphasized in popular discourse. Can you break down what that means and how we can know that it’s actually happening?

You’re probably wondering why you’re hearing the outro music when we clearly have not finished our chat with Tech Learning Collective. Well, time flies when you’re having fun. And talking to TLC was so great, that our conversation ended up being a bit longer than we originally anticipated. Long story short, we decided to break this conversation up into two parts. And if you would like to immediately gain access to the second half of this episode, as well as other exclusive C4SS content, head on over to Patreon.com/c4ssdotorg to support our efforts of spreading the message of vibrant social cooperation without aggression, oppression, or centralized authority. Otherwise, you can expect to hear the remainder of this conversation for free in one week.

Thank you for your support, and thank you for tuning in.

In this post, you’ll find a copy of the audio recording of our interview along with a (somewhat rushed) written transcript of the interview. In the next post, we’ll publish Part 2 of our interview along with its transcript. Our thanks to Carey for his interest in our work, enthusiasm for our methods, and even, yes, participation in one of our workshops!

Carey Parker: Hello, everybody, welcome back to Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons. I’m your host, Carey Parker.

And this is Episode 208, for February 22, 2021. And we’ve got the first of a two part interview for you today. And today I’m going to be talking with the head instructor from the Tech Learning Collective. And these guys are up in New York City, though they offer their courses anywhere on the Internet. And I took one of the workshops recently, and it was really quite good. And this is not your regular tech education group, these guys are, have really taken a very different and important perspective on learning about computers in cybersecurity. And honestly, they really just have a very interesting and different perspective on technology as a whole, you’ll get a sense of that, from this interview. But you know, really taking a kind of a deep, a deep look at, you know, what technology really is and what its impact is on our daily lives. And you know, how knowledge of technology can really create significant power imbalances with really serious repercussions.

And one of the other things I really enjoyed about the class, and we’ll talk a little bit about in the interview today is some very interesting historical perspectives, and why understanding how we got to where we are today with technology, what the origins of some of these things are really kind of colors, your understanding of what technology does and what it was, what it was really meant to do. And if you were, if you’re interested at all in learning about computers, and I’m guessing you must have at least some interest in that, or you probably wouldn’t be listening to this podcast. But I’ve looked at you know, well college courses, I don’t have time for that, or the money for that. Or maybe you’ve looked at some of these cybersecurity certification programs that even thought those were too expensive are involved. These guys have some really interesting classes that you might want to look at for a lot less money, and are a lot more practically focused.

So anyway, I don’t want to make this an infomercial. But there was a reason I reached out to these guys and wanted to feature them here because they’re doing some great stuff. So we will get into that day in the interview.

Now, I haven’t seen any new podcast reviews or book reviews. But I did want to mention something I don’t think I mentioned before, this actually happened a few months back. But the Privacy Issue, which is really cool website added me to their list of their top 10 privacy podcasts. And I’m in some really rarified company there. So anyway, if that’s if you want to check that out, I’ll put a link in the show notes. So you can look at me on that list and see what else on that list you might be interested in. But I was very proud to make that list.

So that’s all I really have by way of prologue. Let’s let’s get right to our interview with the Tech Learning Collective.

All right, and today, as promised, we’re talking with the lead cybersecurity instructor at the (Tech) Learning Collective. And I came across your group, I believe is at a privacy conference last fall, the name escapes me I went to a few different online, online ones this fall we’ve got I think we talked in the chat room and check out your website and was instantly intrigued by what I saw there and reached out and you guys were so generous to set up this interview. So I wanted to learn a little bit about what you guys are doing. So I took one of your courses I recently took the one taught by you actually called “Clearing Away the Clouds,” which was really excellent primer on how the internet works. So that’s gonna lead to lots of questions. So let’s start off with just the basics.

So your website starts off with a phrase, “Are you looking to get certified? Look elsewhere. Are you looking to spark a revolution? We’ll show you how to become more powerful than the most well funded adversary adversaries, including corporate and government backed opponents.” So with that as a preface, why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about what the Tech Learning Collective is? And you know how it came to be?

Tech Learning Collective: Yeah, sure. Well, first, I think the conference that it must have been Hope 2020.

CP: That was it.

TLC: Yeah. Because we did a series of three I think cybersecurity workshops in their workshops track. This relates to the question, I promise, I’m not just sort of riffing here. But what we taught there was in an introduction to website phishing attacks class, we taught an introduction to website exploitation class. And I want to say the other one that we taught was, if I remember correctly, it was a password cracking, like hash cracking workshop. And so the first thing that you’re gonna notice from all this is that it’s all very security related. That is typically not the way that a lot of schools, especially not politically oriented schools will necessarily start off, it’s not the topic matter, for a lot of courses or classes, right? Like if you’re going to look at a code boot camp or a, if you’re trying to get website certification or a license or you’re trying to do, you know, career switch or something like that, you’re probably going to going to see things that are unless they’re specifically cybersecurity related, and even then, right, there’s a lot of prerequisites for this. You’re going to see very different subject matter. And so the first sort of highlight for this is that Tech Learning Collective started not as a school, that’s why there’s a focus on things that you might not see in like a traditional, if you’re going through the industry’s normal way of learning about this topic matter, you probably go to like a CompTIA A+ certification, get your hardware certs, you know, then maybe you get super interested in networking and you get your CCNA or something like that.

But we started as a political project, not not a school. And so back in 2016, 2015, or so, what we were doing was basically just doing privacy and cybersecurity workshops, you know, for, for lack of a way, say for the average Joe right, for like people who were concerned about internet surveillance, who had heard news about the NSA domestic spying activity, you know, who wanted to sort of understand what was going on in the world around them, not for people who were interested in necessarily in, you know, becoming experts in this field. What we learned pretty quickly, though, was that we weren’t making a lot of headway unless we actually talked about the technology. That’s not to say that everyone has to know the details of how packets, you know, are transferred across routers, or exactly what you know, the cryptography, you know, what the math looks like inside of a SHA-256 hash function or something like this, like that, you know, those are details that, you know, in the same way, you don’t necessarily have to know exactly how, like a water filtration system works to just want running water out of your tap, like that, you know, who you want water to come out of your tap when you turn on the faucet. And that’s kind of it and that’s okay. However, there was a sort of a wall we hit where we couldn’t get past a certain level of explanation and sort of a level of clarity without actually talking about the technology itself.

And so that’s when things started to shift a little bit to like, we really need to focus on not only becoming really good at this ourselves, but also finding a way to make this accessible to people for whom getting a job was not their goal, right? For people who didn’t want to necessarily spend a lot of money or spend a lot of time or change their life in such a such an incredible degree to do a career switch. But they still wanted to know what the hell was happening, and why, you know, the—why a certain app worked versus why one didn’t, or what, you know, a particular news story really meant underneath the headlines. It was just it was not possible to do this in a in an honest way without really explaining what it was that the technology that we were all using—web browsers and TLS certificates and as maybe the class that you went to, right, like we talked a little bit about probably ARP and the MAC addresses and sort of the the ways that that the networking that we have today is built up from these primitive pieces that were around since the 70s. And haven’t really changed that much and why that’s a problem in some scenarios, and why that’s a, you know, what, why that has proliferated to attacks that we see today. So that so that was really the core of it was like, we need to get started with an actual technical foundation. And that’s where the school part came in.

So that’s why that’s sort of the divergence right from from us and a lot of other groups that that typically talk about, sort of the social impact and the other the community education angle, those are great and useful to have. But they always hit a barrier when people start asking questions for which you have to have a foundational understanding of the technology to make solid policy or to understand certain aspects of the law or to understand exactly what the impact is on an individual in this certain scenario.

CP: Gotcha. So. So you touched on a couple things there that are interesting, so who is your audience? Like? Who are you trying to reach who, generally speaking, I’m sure you get—like me, I’m sure I’m maybe not your typical student, but I’m sure you get people from all over you got a website that people find the website, they take classes, but is there a certain audience? You talked about legal and policy and things like that? So are you are you specifically trying to educate, you know, staffers for legislators? Are you I know that you target, you know, certain communities that are actually often in physical danger? What so what would you say if you had just kind of someone who is your target audience?

TLC: Yeah, that’s a great question. So, you know, the short answer is anyone who wants to learn more, but the more you know, the answer I think you’re probably looking for and think the answer that makes the most sense really, for for something like this is people who want to use technology to make the material aspects of their lives like today, better without necessarily cooperating with the bureaucratic and financial system that is often an obstacle for them.

So that could mean right, that could mean people who are in the legal field, right, and who want to know more about the functioning of the technology that they’re using, whether it be for their own personal protection with you know, client attorney privilege, we know that that’s not something that’s necessarily respected by certain law enforcement agencies all the time. We also but but also it could also be you know, it could be people who are in the legal profession who want to not use the law to make the lives of their family and friends and community in the real world better. And the law is just one example. Right? So like, what we are trying to do as a school is to try to train system administrators, which is to say, we, we want it to be more feasible for more people to be operators of their computer systems in a way where they are the ones in power over those computer systems as opposed to the other way around. Right? When you’re using a website, when you’re using a service, Google Drive, Facebook, whatever, right? There’s a relationship that’s being developed between you and the people who are operating that service. The power differential between in that relationship currently is extraordinarily skewed to one side, our goal as a political project, and the school sort of founds this right or to school to school sort of fuels this is to balance as much as possible, through at first by necessity, individual action, but eventually, through collective action, what that power differential looks like. So taking down that’s like reducing the spread there of that power differential is the goal, at the end of the day, how that exactly happens, is going to be you know, that’s that’s sort of like history, shall write that story, you know what I mean. But at the moment, our tactic for that has has shifted from the early 2015 days, where we were primarily doing workshops, in person and at community groups, and so on, of course, then COVID changed a lot of things.

But also, we started focusing a lot more on the technology, specifically, because we realized that what really needed to happen was not necessarily everyone on Earth, needed to understand the intricacies or the effect, not even everyone on earth needed to use a specific, you know, secure messaging tool. And in fact that that was probably not the best way to go about impacting that power differential that we’re talking about. What probably needed to happen, we think we hope is that simply in the same way, as you have maybe a society that has, you know, some number of you know, million electricians, you don’t need everyone in that society to be an electrician, right? You don’t need everyone to be a plumber, you don’t need everyone to be to be to be an expert at certain trade. But you do need enough of them so that you can actually wire all the buildings so that you can actually get running water to everyone in your society. Right, it is a People Power problem, in some means at the end of the day.

And I think perhaps what’s happened is that people in the technology sector are so used to scale and are so used to thinking of these services that they make is like, you know, the success, the marker for success is going to be the situation where they have 200 million users or something. And that unfortunately, feeds into this power differential where what happens when you have 200 million users who don’t necessarily understand how your service is working, is you have a certain kind of power over them. In fact, the more important that service is to their day to day activities in their lives. Look at Facebook, for example, the more power that gives you over them. And so for us, the goal is to basically train, to be the vocational school that’s missing. But to do so from a perspective, where the people who are coming are not only motivated to improve their own lives, but to do so from a political standpoint, and the words who recognize that, for example, the mutual aid groups and the food distribution that happens on the local level in our city in New York City, but also across across the world, right has been in many ways, far more effective than a lot of government responses to the COVID crisis. And if we can supercharge that with technology, as opposed to keeping the the knowledge of the religious priesthood, that is the you know, the tech sector in the Citadel, right, if we can free that, then what we’ll have is a far more dispersed and relatively smaller scale. Right, but but in terms of scaling up, but we’ll have a more scaled out society with a smaller digital divide

Because more people, especially today, right, have access to the kinds of hardware and, and bandwidth that makes it possible for them to be effectively mini service providers for themselves. There’s a whole self hosting movement, I’m sure you’re aware of it, this fits very well into that. And so we often advocate for that kind of thing. But that’s also a dangerous thing without knowledge, right? Like, you don’t want a bunch of people who know nothing about electricity to suddenly be wiring their house. That’s a bad idea. Right. And so it’s important that they know how to do this well. And it’s also important, especially from a political angle, that if they are using this for political purposes, that they’re prepared for the kind of risks that a cyber threat landscape presents them.

And so that’s why the combination of cybersecurity and sort of system administration is is the ultimate sort of guiding light for for the curriculum. It’s why the workshop that you went to probably focus a ton right on like exactly how this works from a computer to computer conversation level. We didn’t probably get too much into the security on that on that specific workshop, right. But most of the workshops we offer have a heavy heavy security focus for that reason. And it’s it’s what makes the courses in the workshops are very different than the ones that you’ll see at, you know, Flatiron, or General Assembly, or Turing or this kind of other kind of stuff. Those are useful to learn about the skills that a job needs. They’re employees to have. But those are not necessarily that useful if the skills you’re trying to learn are, how do I make a computer system offer support to the, for example, mutual aid to distribution networks, right? That are in my neighborhood, those are two, not not divergent. But they’re not entirely overlapping skill sets, there is overlap, no doubt, but they’re not. But the approach that we take is very much geared towards that, that latter goal. And that means that you’re gonna be learning very different things in the classes.

So on one angle, right, we want everyone who’s interested to come so that they get exposed to the stuff that we’re teaching, because what we find, especially if you’re trying to make policy or trying to understand this sort of stuff, in a field that isn’t a technology field directly, right, is that it’s hard, it’s hard to understand what’s happening. And some of that’s just because it’s complex stuff. I mean, computers are one of the most complex machine humans have ever devised. But on the other side, and you know, this is made more clear recently with documentaries, like The Social Dilemma, and, and and all the Cambridge Analytica stuff, right? Like, there are incentives to keep this stuff hidden. And it’s important to recognize that that’s, that’s happening so that when you feel overwhelmed, right, you know, that it’s not just because you’re stupid, you’re probably not stupid, this stuff A) is hard. And on top of that, people are trying to make sure that the new big hype, you know, that the fancy new shiny object, you know, the the next thing that’s going to take over Twitter, right, like, it seems like, that’s, it’s so different. It’s not at the end of the day. And that is, in fact, a form of intentional obfuscation to try to sell a product, which turns out is something you could do, if you knew enough about it.

In the same way as like, you know, cars used to be stuff that we fixed on our own right now, computers, and there’s intentional vendor lock and look at the DIY repair movement, right, the right to repair stuff, all that stuff right there. There’s both there’s both just organic, yes, it is a complicated and it’s hard. And it’s important to recognize that and and acknowledge that. But it’s also important to recognize that when you going to cooperate with a system that is trying to get you to be a cog in the wheel of selling other people’s stuff, they’re not interested necessarily in making sure that you understand the foundational pieces, they’re not teaching you stuff that is relevant today but that was devised in the 70s. They’re teaching you the new Rails framework, or the latest JavaScript, you know, React programming model, or something like that. useful and certainly has overlap. But that’s not the skill you need. If what you want to do is distribute food in your neighborhood. That’s the skill you need, if you want to get a high paying tech job. Does that make sense?

CP: Yeah, and so I think if I could maybe paraphrase that back in, and you’ve, you’ve used the word political many times, so we’re gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna dig in what do you mean by that? And then, but so what I’m hearing from you is that this is really, you know, there are people that get into computers, because they want a career in computers. And so they may, you know, they may want to go to college or get a full till college degree, then, of course, computers, this was really interesting fields where you can actually do a lot of it, either self taught, or with online courses, or by just kind of doing things around and kind of tinkering around it, honestly, it’s a lot of the hacker mindset, in terms of and, and I make a point of the show that, to say that being a hacker is not a pejorative term, it’s, it’s somebody who’s really curious and somebody likes to take things apart and putting it together, who also understand how things work, and is really gets off on the idea of taking something that does one thing and making it do something else as part of a learning process.

TLC: Right.

CP: And so I’m definitely, you know, definitely getting that vibe from you guys. But I think what I think what I’m hearing is that, if it’s not your career, but it’s something you need to understand, because either you’re a community organizer, and you’re putting together, you know, a simple system for 20 people or for your neighborhood or for your politically active group of some sort of other or you’re working with people who for political reasons, need to have a better than average understanding of, of how we are surveilled, and how the Internet works and where the dangers lie. That sounds like it’s more of a grassroots kind of a lower level, very, very practically oriented approach that you’re taking.

TLC: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, what we like to say is that we don’t really care what your project is, we just want to help you succeed in it. Right. So like, if your project is going to need a computer at some point, and most projects do at this point, then there should be someone on that team. Again, this could be as like, you know, radical political project, or it could be just relatively mundane, and you know, just be like, you know, community garden in a neighborhood, right. At some point, you’re going to need a computer probably. And that’s the point at which it might make sense to spend a little bit of time investing in education, about what it is that that computer is and can do for you.

Because what’s important, I think what’s important to understand also is that like it’s more powerful than we think it is, right? Like, there’s this cliche that goes around, we have all this power in the palm of our hands in the form of smartphones, right? We have more more more compute power in our in our hands today than we had in, you know, possibly across the entire continent, if not the world in the early 60s. And that is easy to say and hard to grasp. Right? It means that the things that was happening, the things that were happening in the 60s across a global scale could be accomplished. If in the realm of sheer compute power by one phone today, that’s what it means.

That is not how—that seems ridiculous, if you look at what we’ve actually done with computers, right? Because it seems like, yeah, the world’s changed a lot. But like, it doesn’t feel like one person has that much power. Yeah, and our contention is that one person does have that much power, we just don’t know how to use it yet. And so if you can internalize that, and you’re, you know, willing to spend admittedly, it’s, you know, it’s not like a, you’re not going to suddenly be able to do that overnight, you know, anytime you use a relatively nerdy example, right, like, you know, it takes a while to become a Jedi Master or whatever. But, you know, if you practice at it, there is a kind of power in that, that is unmatched in all of human history. Yeah. And that’s, that’s an unbundled debatable fact, you know, given the, the technology that is as accessible as it is today.

So imagine, for instance, you know, a group of 20 people with one person who knows how to how to how to harness that kind of power. And then imagine that, you know, a group of 20 people with another person that can harness that, right somewhere else. And if you imagine those things, those those pockets of people as seeds across the country, you suddenly have a scenario in which the knowledge of how to do this right, is dispersed enough that the organizing principle of society is one where you actually have the power to affect the kind of bottom up organizational change that a lot of organizers and organizations that are advocating for this kind of like pro democratic, lowercase D democratic, right People Power movement, can accomplish without a lot of money, and without a lot of existing capital, and without a lot of cooperation with bureaucratic bureaucracies that are, in many cases arrayed against them.

CP: Yeah.

TLC: And so that’s the ultimate goal. That is, you know, we’re not utopianists, or, or, you know, sort of, you know, it’s it’s a, it’s an idealistic vision, but we’re not unrealistic about what that means. That’s, that’s a lot of education a lot of time. And, you know, there’s real reasons why people don’t spend their time, the limited amount of time with a limited amount energy that they have learning about technology. And our argument is that that’s okay, too, right? You don’t you can go as far as you want into this as an individual. And not every individual has to do this, and we can still reap these benefits. That’s the point of computers. Right? That’s what that’s what automation allows us to do. That’s what the networked reality that we live in, makes possible. I mean, you and I are talking, you know, different states and, like nothing, right? Like, what is a long distance call anymore?

CP: Right.

TLC: So that is sort of the vision, right? That’s, that’s the idea. Now, whether you come to us as a, you know, policy analyst with a background in, you know, in political science, or you come to us as, as you know, as an aspiring movement lawyer, or you come to us as a, you know, as a gardener, all of those are fine. And in fact, probably better than if you come to us better in the sense of like, you will probably find us more to your liking, as a school as a technology school than if you come to us from the background of like, I want to learn about, you know, I want to be a CS major, and learn about, you know, electrical engineering, not because that’s not valuable and good, right. But because that’s not our goal.

And so, the hope is that the way in which we present the material, and the purpose for which we present the material, is, I’ll go so far as to say unique enough, but also accessible enough, that what you’re learning is actually going to be valuable to you, regardless of which background you have. And if you find it interesting and enjoyable, before long, you will end up with skills that not only are incredibly employable today, but that are immediately valuable to every single project you have today, whether that be web scraping, data analysis, you know, what we call data science these days, right? Or simply being sort of the the tech person of your group. Because those are all things that we teach in various workshops and courses.

CP: So I’ll even take a little step further. Right. And I think that I’ll be curious to get your take on this. But the other value I see in your approach to teaching and the kind of like to some point, actually kind of have you walked through your kind of curriculum at a high level, because I know that you’ve already thrown a lot of technical terms of where people might answer like, like ARP? They have, you know, most people have no idea what you’re talking about. But the point I want to make is, first of all, not all of your classes are at that level.

Second, I think another value to your approach to this teaching is demystifying these technologies, because I think people today throw their hands up in both in terms of security and privacy, thinking, I don’t get it, I don’t know, I don’t understand this stuff well enough, I’m just gonna have to hope for the best or maybe I’ll buy Apple stuff because they seem to be more secure, they seem to more private, but other than that, I don’t I, I can’t hope to understand that they give up without trying. And I think that, and that’s part of what I tried to with the podcast, as well as demystify some of these things. So they’re not, you don’t just out of hand think I can’t grok this, because, like cars, like, you know, repairing lawnmowers. Like, you know, I’ve, I’ve repaired my own washing machine. I’ve repaired my refrigerator, because I’m kind of a hack guy, and I got in there. And once you actually like, get under the covers, look at these things. Oh, that’s not that difficult. This is doing this that’s doing that. It things. Yeah, things make sense. And once you’re armed, at least, even if you don’t have to be or a refrigerator repairman, or you’re gonna have to be a car mechanic, understanding and enough to demystify it is valuable. And if not it also, when it comes to evaluating maybe hiring someone to do work for you, or someone presents you with work that they’ve done, you’ve got some basis for saying, “Hey, that looks fishy,” or “No, that looks good.”

TLC: Yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s certainly an aptitude that that that people, you know, have towards, for example, repairing a refrigerator that look, for example, I don’t have I mean, I’m actually awful, and it sounds like the klutziest person I have so I actually was very proud of myself for fixing one of those, like pull ups think things, you know, like, one of those stoppers that you push down on, and it opens, I was like, Oh, I got that got it, you know, like, there are different intelligences in the world. And I’m not gonna sit here and lie to you, right to tell you that, like, you know, anyone at all, you know, can can without any trouble at all learn about this, but I will tell you that these things are at their core, no more complex than those physical world things, right? Because everything in this world both in it, whether it be mathematics, or whether it be computers in logic, or whether it be in the physical sense, right, they’re made up of smaller pieces.

By breaking the things that are huge into smaller pieces, we can actually examine what the constituent components of a thing is, and therefore how something works. That is the same whether or not you’re dealing with, you know, learning how to make a cabinet, you know, as a carpenter, or whether you’re learning how to make software as an engineer, you’re always going to have to have some understanding of the material you’re working with the tools you have, and how those two things relate to the world at large.

So like I use this analogy a lot in in classes when I teach is, you know, there’s a sense if you if you’ve spent a lot of time in the world, right? There’s a sense you get about for example, when you touch a certain object, you know, oh, that’s metal. Oh, that’s what oh, this is soft wood. Or this is a hard word, right? Like there’s a, there’s a tactileness to your experience in the world of dexterity you gain as you gain experience. You weren’t born with that, that took time and experiences. And most people are learning how to crawl right now on the internet. Yes, that’s okay. It takes time both as a culture and as an individual. But it’s not the case that that will always be true, right? Most people can learn this stuff, even if it’s not their, like, their their innate preternatural ability. And that’s our point, right?

So if you’re trying to learn how to be an master carpenter, you might spend 10,000 hours right, figuring out exactly how oak versus ash operate with a you know, with a with a hammer. And you will get better at that over time. And once you do it, it’ll start to feel more like, you know, when you do touch oak or ash, you’ll feel how it relates to the other tools in your toolbox, you’ll have a sense of what it’s going to do when you put certain stressors on it. And you can gain that same almost tactile sense on a computer, right? I mean, if you’ve been a system integrator for long enough, you can begin to sense you know, oh, my computer’s acting a little funny, right. And if someone who doesn’t know anything about computers me like, I don’t know, it’s just a little slower today. Right? Right. But like that’s a sense that you can actually develop and it’s not magic. It’s a skill. And all of these things, right? Are are things that were not only devised, designed by humans, but were meant to be understood at their base level. So they can be and that’s what we try to put forward in our classes. That’s what we hope to do by as you said that the demystification.

And at the same time though, right, like there’s a lot of history that is relevant to what exists now, as the computer systems we have. The example I think that was brought up in the workshop that you attended, right was the notion of Ethernet. We say Ethernet like it’s just another word. No one really questions what Ethernet is—the ethernet cable, right? Maybe even now it’s a little bit older because most people Don’t even plug it computers in with a cable they use Wi Fi right, which is really just radio. I mean, like if you use the walkie talkie, you know how the radio works in Wi Fi, because the Wi Fi of your computer is just radio, right, which is also how a walkie talkie works. So if you know the walkie talkie, you can understand at a basic level what Wi Fi is doing. And you don’t really need to understand more about it unless you want to.

But this notion that Ethernet right, which is what Wi Fi is intended to make possible wirelessly, is a reference to a specific in this case gnostic idea that gn o s ti c, right, this gnostic idea of a force that permitted and connected everything in the world, the ether. And when Bob Metcalf was inventing Ethernet, right, it wasn’t just some random word he used. He wanted to devise his intention for the technology was a technology that connected and permitted all electronic things. And that exists now it’s literally called Ethernet, it is what Wi Fi uses it is what the Ethernet cables was RJ-45 jacks that you plug in right to the back of your router. That’s what those are, those are Ethernet cables. Most electronic digital devices, when they’re communicating with other electronic digital devices, right are going to be using some Ethernet network. And so by imbuing the pedagogy and the the approach to learning this, with the knowledge of where this came from, we hope to do for technology, what people intuitively understand is important when they’re learning about, for example, their own genealogy, or how to, for example, take care of the earth, right to learn from indigenous peoples, and to learn about how this was done.

Not that we have to do everything the same all the time, you know, there’s, we don’t—culture and technology is not an append-only chain, like we can throw out the stuff that doesn’t work, you know, like, we don’t have to import all the bad stuff, all the you know that the sexism from the 1980s, about how girls can play video games, for example, right? Like, we can just throw that out. But there was stuff that happened at that period that is important to know about and is valuable, like, why is it called Ethernet? And what does that mean? What is the what is the metaphor that the designers of that network we’re trying to go for? Right, because that also helps us understand where we are, if we know more about the notion of Ethernet as the intent of a all permeating connected network, we can understand its function today. And bringing those perspectives back into it as opposed to simply treating the latest technology as the beginning of history, like a lot of classes we find do helps in the educational component, it helps people understand what it is that they’re learning, because now they have not just facts, but they have a narrative across time about how we came to be where we are. And that gives them not only a better understanding of where we are, but also the power to then write the next chapter themselves.

CP: Agree. And I actually thought that part of your course was was super interesting. And now it’s something and I wasn’t aware of though I you know, if I thought long enough that I might have come up with that idea. But it was really interesting to hear you cover that in the class. And so speaking of that, for the audience’s sake, walk through like a high level your curriculum and and talk about the different levels that it addresses because I know that you’ve got different levels of courses, and there are definitely courses in there for the people that might be curious about things that are more high level and not the nitty gritty parts.

I hope you enjoyed part one of that that’d be part two is even if possible, it’s even deeper than the part one we really get into some kind of deep thoughts about around technology. And again, a very unique perspective on even just what it means to use a computer. It’s it’s, it’s hard to describe, you don’t have to tune into Part Two to understand what I mean. But I’ll I’ll bet you money that this instructor, by the way teaches courses I took one of them really manages to look at computers in a way that even I had not really considered before. And then we’ll also talk about it well, in terms of getting deeper, we’ll talk about you know, learning about computers in cybersecurity, really almost from a self defense perspective, by taking a course in personal self defense. So definitely don’t wanna miss part two, that’ll be next week.

All right, everybody, thanks again for listening. Tune in next week for part two of fascinating chat with Techearning Collective. Make sure you’re out there getting ready to get your vaccine as soon as it’s available. And you know what, some of these in some states, it’s really kind of an arcane process. So you can also really help by making sure that other people you know, other friends and family, particularly maybe older folks, that they know what they need to do and how to sign up and get in line for their, for their vaccines and help, you know, help reassure people that it’s this is safe, and it’s something we we really all need to do it for this, you know world to get back to normal. We’ve got to get most of us vaccinated.

So anyway, wear those masks when you’re going out, maybe wear to a pair. Apparently that’s a thing. Stay in as much as you can until we can all get these all get these shots and hopefully hopefully by summer, we can get back to some sense of normalcy. So that’ll wrap it up this week. Thanks again for tuning in. Next week will be part two of the interview. And until then, as always, stay safe and don’t get caught with your drawbridge down.

Once again, we’d like to take the opportunity to thank Carey Parker for inviting us onto his podcast. He’s curated an incredible collection of privacy tips, tricks, and best practices over his four years producing the show, and many hours of fascinating interviews with industry leaders and cybersecurity subject matter experts. If you enjoyed our episodes, we encourage you to check out more at FirewallsDontStopDragons.com.

Carey Parker: Hello, everybody, welcome back to Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons. I am your host, as always, Carey Parker, and this is episode 209, which is March 1, 2021. Man, I cannot believe it’s March already. Today, we’re gonna have part two of our interview with the Tech Learning Collective.

And yes, if you’ve been paying attention, I have not mentioned the guests name. And yes, that’s on purpose, I have meant to call that out actually, last week, and I will make a big deal out of it. But basically, that’s just kind of the way these guys roll. I don’t know the name of the person that I interviewed. They, you know, identity them is important and prior, maybe best to say privacy of them is important and names are not. So anyway, I wanted to call that out specifically, because I, I’m guessing that you noticed that I didn’t use the name.

Now today we’re gonna keep talking about, we kind of set up last week, the little cliffhanger. The tease that I left you on last week was to talk about their curriculum, and we’re going to go through and they’re going to give us kind of a high level view of the kind of classes they teach. And, but not just you know what they are, but you know, why they teach and how they teach it’s, it’s really, it’s very different, it’s different than anything you’ve probably ever seen run across before looking at technical training, even when you’re looking at things like Coursera, or LinkedIn Learning, or Udemy, or some of those online courses. This is this is a different take.

And, you know, today we’re going to talk about, we’re going to bring up some, you know, thorny issues like the notion of ethical hacking, and when that when ethical hacking can even become immoral. Things done in the name of ethical hacking are, are not always good. And, again, just an interesting perspective on on this sort of stuff. We’ll talk about why this really is about self defense. And like any good self defense course, you need to know how to attack in order to learn how to defend. And that’s one of the things that they make sure that you know, you know, by the time you come out of these courses, you’re going to know how to perform some of these, you know, basic hacking attacks, and computer attacks, so that you know how to defend against them, and why you have to defend against them. And we’re going to talk about how computer knowledge and lack of computer knowledge can create a huge power imbalance between, you know, regular people, and maybe authorities or people who wish to do harm, and how these classes can help to balance those scales.

I know that sounds maybe a little dramatic, but it’s true. And And so anyway, we’re gonna get into all that stuff today. So if you haven’t listened to part one, definitely go back and check that out first. And just a minute, we’ll get to part two.

Now I want to talk really quickly about one particular news story, we’re gonna have a huge, huge podcast next week, because there’s so many things to catch up on. None of them are are super urgent, except maybe this one might seem urgent, so I wanted to talk about it. And that is this new Mac malware that has been going around in the news. It’s called Silver Sparrow, I don’t know where they get these names. Actually, I think red Canary was the name of the company that found it. So I guess they get the name. And of course, if you’re if the name of your company is Red Canary, you’re probably going to pick some sort of a bird name for these things. So anyway, it’s very interesting. I can’t remember if we talked about it last week, but I’ll just go over it quickly. Now.

It’s, it’s a Mac malware. And they found that on roughly 30,000 Macs, and the funny thing is on all these stories that you know what I’ve seen on video, these stories, I Oh, my gosh, 30,000 Macs, and like, Okay, well, there’s 100 million or more, I don’t know how many, there’s a lot of Macs out there. So it’s actually quite a small percentage. It was interesting in the fact that it I think they found in 153 different countries. So it is widespread, though I think it is focused on the US, or the preponderance of, of infected Mac’s are in the US.

But nevertheless, here’s the weird part, it doesn’t do anything. Basically, it’s kind of a shim or kind of getting your foot in the door or a beachhead. It’s it’s there. It’s a framework that, you know, could have done something bad, but hasn’t hasn’t done anything. It’s obvious that it’s meant to be there to eventually download what we put what we would call a payload, you know, some sort of other malware that would eventually do something. So it’s kind of a framework for getting up to bad things, but it hasn’t done anything yet. So luckily, we caught it before it did. And Apple has already taken steps to mitigate if not prevent this from certainly prevent it from being installed again. And it has taken other mitigations point a point of the matter is we’ll talk about a little bit more next week. But the point of matter is don’t worry about it. It’s fine. It hasn’t been shown to do anything yet and and it’s already basically been hobbled. They got a lot of attention in the press and again, oftentimes the press overhyped these things. I think this is one of those cases so far, at least this hasn’t, hasn’t actually done anything and was stopped actually relatively quickly. So that’s, that’s good.

Okay, I’ve got a lot of other stuff to talk to you about. I’m finally ready to make some very specific Patreon announcements. You’re gonna really want to hear about that. I got some really cool stuff there. So I’ll do that though after the interview. So one quick thing before we get in, I do have another swear word warning, I suppose I could bleed these things out. I’ve never done that. But it’s it doesn’t happen that often. And honestly, I think in context, it makes sense. So anyway, there’s a minor swear word in this in this portion of the podcast. And with that warning label, let’s get to part two of our interview with the Tech Learning Collective.

For the audience’s sake, walk through like a high level your curriculum and and talk about the different levels that that it addresses because I know that you’ve got different levels of courses, and there are definitely courses in there for the people that might be curious about things that are more high level and not the nitty gritty parts.

Tech Learning Collective: Yeah, so I’m gonna try and do this from memory. Because there’s a lot of workshops, like 38 separate workshops now that we offer, for what it’s worth, we do also, we also offer courses and workshops. And these are these are not the same. So we have sort of two tracks where you could be a student with us

The easier one, the sort of the, the more ad hoc are a-la-cart one is just to take workshops, these are public events that you can come to, they are sometimes free, sometimes, often low cost, by which I mean like $25 ish, at that sliding scale, price range. And they cover the entire curriculum that the courses do. So the material is the same, but it’s presented in two different formats.

The courses are intended to be intensives. And they really are intensive. So like, we hope that, you know, the people who come to them are going to commit for the entire period, it’s usually a month or two, usually about one class per week. And it’s a long class, it’s like four to six hours per class. So that’s a lot that’s like, that’s a real, that’s a real commitment, we don’t run those super often, because we want to have enough people to make it A) worthwhile, but B) so that you have other peers in your class, right? Like, it’s a little bit awkward to just be with a single other person, you know, who knows a lot more than you.

The whole point is to create a mutual self education environment, which is how Tech Learning Collective started, actually, back in back in 2015, it was it was basically just a bunch of us who were trying to figure all this stuff out together, some of us had more experience than others. But the point was, was to do so as a community. And that’s really, really important for the goal, right, which is not just to know this, but then to make use of this in a community setting to make it meaningful in your life in the day to day. And that’s also not, you know, just out of some principle. That’s because if it’s not useful in your day to day, you won’t remember it.

It’s like going to another country, right? And not having spoken the language, if you’re there in the country, and it’s suddenly very important that you know, how to say things like, Where’s the bathroom? And how much is this apple, right cost, you will learn very quickly and very well, and it will stick with you because you’ll have those memories. So that’s what we’re trying to do in in the courses.

Now, again, that’s a lot of commitment. And we don’t expect everyone to be able to do that in order to be able to afford that necessarily. And it’s also, of course, a lot more of a strain on our team. So we also offer workshops, which are a-la-a cart, you bet they’re built as an hour and a half, but they almost always run longer.

CP: I can attest to that.

TLC: Yeah. Because you know, it’s fun for us to do and a lot of people have good questions. I personally love teaching, I was a teacher for a long time. So you know, I am often doing those out of enjoyment. You know, it’s just it’s a, it’s a good time to talk about the stuff that I think is super interesting, and also to do so people who want to be there. So, you know, I often I often run long, especially as you could attest to Sorry about that. But the idea is that right?

So like it’s it’s basically a public event where you come at whatever time the class is on, there’s a calendar on the Tech Learning Collective website is TechLearningCollective.com/events/calendar, I think. But there’s a link on the homepage, and you sign up sort of one at a time. And the workshops cover the entire curriculum. So so a single workshop might not be, you know, it’s not going to cover the 16 plus hours in the course. But it’s going to be a part of a course. So for example, the clearing where the clouds workshop is a piece of the net 101 course that we offer.

And so you asked about what the ranges are there, right. So there’s not so much tracks as it are our subject matters, which is to say, the four courses we offer our system administration, networking, security, and web development. And the way we sort of break this down is we’re trying to give you as approachable a syllabus as we can. So that you know people who are used to seeing a school feel like they have a class calendar to look at. But we’re also trying intentionally to be slightly different than a quote unquote, you know, regular school, in that what you’re going to be learning these things are often overlapping. So if you come to for example, the SYS101 courses, system administration course you’re going to get a lot of security and networking content, you’re going to get a lot of system administration stuff, if you go to the networking course, you’re gonna get mostly networking, but you’re gonna see a lot of other stuff too. And the reason for that is because again, it’s all driven through these practical examples. There’s no slides, there’s no videos that we show, it’s all like, whatever we talk about, we’re going to do, right live at the course, or at the at the workshop. And it’s, you know, over in COVID times, it’s all webinars and video stuff.

So it starts really, at the beginning, I mean, in the very, very, if you wanted to take things linearly through the material, and again, we actually advise against that, because A, there’s too much, and B, most people are not interested in the beginning stuff, right? Most people are interested for a given reason. And whatever that reason is, we probably have a workshop related to it. And we want you to start there, even if it’s like, you know, advanced hacking or whatever, like, start there, because that’s going to get you excited. And it’s important that you’re excited if you want to continue, if you are bored in the first five minutes, right, because you decided to start as at the beginning, because you know, you’re a completionist, in that in that respect, you’re probably not going to get very far. And that’s going to be a shame, because you could have gone so much farther, if you just did the thing that’s exciting for you. So we hope that people find their own pathways through the workshops that we offer.

But for what it’s worth, if you really really, really did want to start like I don’t know where I want to go, I don’t have a pre existing interest, I’m just kind of curious and want to check it out, then the place to start is the system administration 101 course. And if you’re starting in a workshop, it would be the Taming Daemons: Basics of System Administration workshop. And the reason that’s the place to start is because at that workshop, we actually begin the conversation by talking about what a computer does, not from a bits and bytes. angle, like a lot of electrical engineering classes, but about what a computer actually what the purpose of it is, like, why do we have them? What are they supposed to do for us? Right? Why Why are we using them today? Why has Why has so much of the world gone in this direction?

And there’s an answer to that there’s a very clear reason for it not in and, you know, many, there are many answers, I should say not one answer, like, it’s certainly true, like from a capitalistic perspective, right? That it increases efficiency and makes profits easier to to, to accrue and all that stuff. That’s all true. But there’s also a lot of other reasons. And in that class, specifically, we focus on a lot of those other reasons. Like for example, the fact that it is basically just an electronic writing device. And we mean that literally.

When you are opening up Notepad or TextEdit, right, you’re writing on screen, and you’re seeing, you know, text appear. And so in that sense, it’s a writing instrument, but it’s also a writing instrument, in that when you press a certain key, you know, q A, whatever on your keyboard, then what you’re doing is you’re actually with electricity, right, inserting a charge, an electrical charge at a specific physical transistors somewhere deep inside your machine. And in that sense, you’re literally writing, not with ink, in this case with electricity on a medium, which is usually these days flash memory, although it wasn’t always right, it used to be spinning disk, it used to be tape, etc, etc. But at some point you’re writing, you’re changing the physical world in some respect to make a mark to make your mark. That is what it’s for. That’s what the computer is for.

So if you treat a computer like a writing instrument, literally like an electronic typewriter, which is where they came from, again, notice the historical tie up there, then you can understand why you should care about continuing to learn how to use them well. And then if you understand enough about what it’s able to do for you, you begin to see or maybe I should say, like the fog of war kind of clears a little bit, right, and you begin to understand all the other powers that writing gives you.

And I mean that again, quite literally, the ability to write down to write your thoughts down is arguably the most magical ability that humans have, it’s arguably the thing, that humans can do that makes it possible for us to do everything else. To share knowledge across generation across individuals, right? Create language. That’s what a computer is for. That’s what a computer lets you supercharge in a very literal way. And so at that point, right, that’s that’s the start of why Why? What we talked about, and the way that we talk about the power of this right comes down to extremely concrete and extremely basic principles. Like literally space and time.

How much can you write? How fast? How much space? Do you need to write it in? Right? These are the questions that system administrators at their core are always dealing with, how much RAM do I have? Do I have enough disk space, right? Do I have enough compute power to handle this workload? Right? And so when you start at that point, and you don’t skip that point and go straight to like, let’s make a web service with rails or whatever, right? Now you’re able to really set the groundwork, or set the stage for all the other things that you could do with a computer that don’t necessarily fit into what you are told a computer should be right?

Most people experience the computer, especially today, either as a social media manipulation tool, or as a work appliance, right? I mean, look at the folders and the icons of paper and stuff on your computer, right? These are not folders, there’s no desktop on a machine. And yet we call them desktops. And there’s a reason for that there’s a history for that, right? So understanding that is both important and good. But also only through understanding that that’s where we kind of came from, can we make a conscious choice about what other metaphor other than desks and paper files and manila folders and stuff that relate to Office jobs that often feel like relatively coercive employment scenarios for a lot of our students? Right, what else can the computer be and do. And that’s what’s so beautiful about starting from such basic foundations, because you really get to create your own world. And, you know, in your own world, you can be quite powerful. And then translating that power into something that you want to see in the real world is the practice of politics. So that’s the connection.

So that’s where we start. And then of course, we end up doing all as you saw at, for example, HOPE, where we, you know, at the end of the day, if you have a deep understanding what that is at that level, then talking about how to hack websites, turns from some magical, you know, superpower ability into just like, Oh, yeah, right, this other line here, and you’re done. Right, like, it becomes much less magical, much less missed, mystifying. And yet, somehow, simultaneously, ever more empowering.

CP: So I really like the analogy you made, in fact, I was gonna bring it up myself that because I had the exact same thought, and that’s, again, one of the qualitative differences between your approach to then, you know, maybe other certainly regular college courses and things is, it’s, you need to know this stuff for a purpose, like, this is not gonna be your career, you’re not going to be doing this for someone else for making a paycheck, you could, you could, and a lot of people do, including myself. But in, you’re much more focused on, this is something you need, these are skills or understanding you need for something very practical for something you need yourself. And it’s like, it’s a difference between taking a crash course and conversational Spanish, because you’re traveling, they’re going to spend, you know, you’re going to do a summer abroad or whatever, versus taking Spanish as a language more from you know, grammar and history. And, you know, while that has its place, it’s not what it’s not what you need, that’s doesn’t fit your, your particular use case.

The other thing, and I must say, from reading your, you know, look at the website and get this vibe, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it also feels to me like taking a personal self defense course, as opposed to just learning karate, I mean, you know, you could have for years, and you’re getting out, and you want to get like belts and whatever, that’s, you know, that’s fine. But if you are in a bad neighborhood, if you are feeling, particularly if you if you’re being stalked if you’re if you’re you know, in a marginalized group, and you feel the need for physical protection, you, you need to know how to protect yourself in any way, you know, without getting into the history of the martial art, or, you know, or I don’t need a belt, I don’t need, you know, I don’t need a color. You know, if I’m in a situation, I need to protect myself, so I definitely get that vibe.

And if I’m not too far off, I’m curious to know, do you must have stories to tell, obviously, without naming names, but there must have been situations where you’ve actually made significant, you know, true real life security impacts on people’s lives.

TLC: Yeah, I don’t want to talk too much about the details of that. But But you’re right, the, the analogy to self defense classes is actually really apt. Because like, you know, look, if you have to fight dirty to survive, we want you to fight dirty to survive, right? Like the cold, the goal is not to follow the rules, the goal is to get shit done and be okay. And if you, you know, need the kinds of things that need to know, the kinds of things that we’re we’re teaching, for reasons of security, you know, you probably have some some shit going down. So I don’t know if I can say that on this podcast, but you know, there’s stuff that you need to, you know, you need to be mindful of that beauty to be careful about right.

And so this also speaks to the history of the group. I mean, again, it started as a political project, the core of us who started this back in 2015, and 2016, as I was saying, this grew out of a number of far Left activists who were involved in Occupy Wall Street and in some, you know, in political projects that were that were that were of the time, I should say. And so, you know, you can imagine that that means that, you know, we have some personal experience with the need for this kind of self defense online.

It’s become much more commonplace that someone might need such defense than it was in for example, you know, the early 2000s, or the 2010s, when when some of us began being political actors in our lives and in our communities, right? So so that’s part of it is that there’s a recognition there that this is this, what matters here is not that, you know, facts are can pass tests or can get licenses or can prove to an employee or you on a resume that you know, your shit, right, right matters, that you’re okay. And at the end of the day that you have what you need to get done, whatever it is you need to get done, and to do so safely. So that that is absolutely the focus.

I also like the analogy to self defense class, because unlike a lot of what I mean, I don’t get to Well, what I’m debating saying is like, like, there is a, you know, there’s a phrase in the infosec sort of hacker world, right, you’ve probably heard it’s called ethical hacking, without getting too ranty about the politics of that, right. It’s, it’s one, it’s a good example of something that has a name, that when you are in a situation that is truly impacting your life in the way that we’ve just described, like potentially your literal livelihood, the notion of, you know, ethical hacking, the way it’s defined in the hacker community becomes a little, how shall I say? Super? superficial, right? what people mean, when they say ethical hacking, as an industry term is legal hacking, is hacking legally. Right is, is is breaking down security boundaries, intentionally breaking security boundaries, usually, of other people’s or other companies devices, in such a way where the breaking of that boundary is within the scope of a contract that they’ve already pre agreed to.

That’s, you know, I mean, it’s a business, it’s a it’s what happens in the world, like, you know, I don’t I don’t have any problems with that, per se. But ethical hacking within the, under that terminology, right, also includes a ton of really unethical stuff, like some really shady not great stuff, that happens totally legally. But I would very much challenge anyone to think that it’s ethical. Cellebrite being a great example, just recently, right? a company that’s that’s sweeping up selling, the ability to vacuum up users phone data, during, you know, relatively specious border checks. Is that ethical, very hard to make that case. Right.

So and yet, right, that is that is absolutely something like Cellebrite employees are ethical hackers in a number of different ways. They’re doing pen tests on Apple devices, they’re, you know, they’re, they have your pen test divisions, this kind of stuff, penetration, test, divisions, and so on.

So the point that I’m trying to get to you is, it’s one thing to use a term like that, right? But it’s another thing to do the thing that the words mean. And for us, what’s important is that when you’re able to do something on a computer, like for example, going to a class of introduction to exploiting web applications, right? The reason that we had that class was not to help you do unethical things, under the protection of a legal contract, i.e., “ethical hacking,” right? The reason that we teach that class, and the focus of that class is, here is how your website could be attacked. And here’s what you need to know to protect it. Because if you can’t see a punch coming, there’s no way you’re gonna know having taken a self defense class or not, what to do to defend against it, you can’t Block a Punch, and you don’t if you don’t know what a punch is.

So the other sort of political angle of this, of this approach to teaching is, when we talk about security stuff, we don’t just do so from the reactive standpoint, right? We don’t just do so to say, Well, here’s how you raise a shield, we say, right, here’s what an attack looks like. And here’s how to do it. Because if you can do it, then you have a much better understanding of what to do to defend against it. And this is actually more important in the digital realm than it is in the physical realm. I know your prior guests. I talked about this a lot. I know Bruce Schneier talks about this a lot, right? Where he mentions how much more advantaged an attacker and an offensive security posture is in the digital world. Right. And that’s because for all the reasons that he described, I won’t get into all that as well. But But the idea is that it is very, very, very, very difficult to create a defensive security posture without having constant awareness of what attacks you are vulnerable to, and the only way to have that awareness is to actually know how to do those attacks.

CP: Right.

TLC: So and it turns out again, as we said earlier, right, those are not as hard as you think they are, which is what freaks the hell out of government agencies right. The fact that any individual can do that. is scary and should be scary. If you all already have a lot of power, right that you want to maintain. Right? So it makes total sense that there that that, you know, companies and and and governments are worried about it, it also makes total sense why the function of a security industry is to retain that knowledge within the minds of a set number of people who may have pre vetted, right?

Now, I don’t have a problem with trying to do what you can to prevent dangerous people from doing dangerous things. But my point is that in the doing of that a lot of people who could benefit from that knowledge, like who could have used a SANS security course who could have used right, like, an OCSP certification, not to get a job, but to be okay in their daily livelihood, because they are actually under attacks, don’t end up able to get that knowledge because of barriers and jargon barriers and culture barriers in the amount of money it takes to learn these things, right. I mean, like, those courses are 1000s and 1000s. of dollars. And it’s just incredibly difficult to sort of break into that, and they already assume a ton of knowledge. And so we’re trying to do is we’re trying to move that sort of security training, right, from the last thing that you do, too, the first thing that you do, without necessarily dumbing it down without without making it seem like we’re making the entire concept or the entire subject matter. childlike, right?

We’re not going to, we’re going to do the same things that those SANS courses and those, you know, offensive security professionals do. But we’re just going to do it, whilst explaining every step of the way. And admittedly, that’s a lot of stuff to explain. But for those of you, you know, listeners who for whom that is the kind of approach that seems exciting or interesting, right? That means that you get access to a piece of knowledge that is otherwise incredibly guarded, both legally and socially, and culturally and financially in all these other avenues. And that, that I think, part of what makes this so unique and so important to do, specifically in the context of having a political student.

CP: Well, I’m glad we got to that point, because I really wanted to drive home, how important the work is that you guys are doing, and, and so obviously, you know, we kind of started off talking about, you know, just interested in knowledge and learning how computers work. And while that’s all interesting, and obviously, anybody in the audience who has that, you know, that level of interest should definitely check out your courses. I also wanted to establish how important the work is that you guys are doing. And so, obviously, taking courses cost money, not a lot, but some and that that is one way to support you. I know you take direct cash donations as well. But before we wrap up here, I’m just curious, are there other ways of if we’ve gotten across the audience that what you’re doing is important work? Whether or not they are interested in your course or not? How else might they help you out or contribute to your cause?

TLC: Well, I mean, I think the the, you know, the most direct thing is even if you’re not, even if you don’t fancy yourself, someone who is somehow capable enough with computers, I think you should give a workshop or two, which I try write workshops, as I said, you know, sometimes we offer free, just through weekend events, more often than not, it’s it’s usually about $25, to pay for instructors time to come to a workshop, the calendar is posted on the website. And they’re about, you know, two hours or so on, on usually in the week, on a weekend or later in the afternoon, US time. So that’s like a very direct way to do it.

But also, you know, the other thing to do is just tell your friends, like, you know, give it a shot, we also have a blog that you can follow there, you know, we talk a lot more about the politics and the approach and the, you know, the things that are happening in the world, we think we just posted about the whole deplatforming conversation and how that affects and how that should be how we think people should be thinking about it in terms of, you know, a movement strategy. And so you could also just, you know, follow that and sort of, you know, we don’t have any social media ourselves. But if you post links on social media about us, that’s also helpful, basically, just letting people know that there is an alternative, right to how to learn about this stuff that isn’t just, you know, oh, my God, I have to now search through the black hole of YouTube on my own. Right. But also isn’t I have to deal with like, recruiters or, you know, code, boot camps, our, you know, sort of like a job centric approach. Again, not that there’s necessarily a problem with that, if you wanted to go the job route, you could also come to workshops, like, you know, we don’t don’t discriminate in that, in that sense, right. But the goal really is right to to make it possible for people who, who already, you know, have the thing they want to do in their life, and who just want to know what to do with the computers in their life to help them do that thing. Right. And so, from that perspective, it’s everyone else, not the people who are looking to get technology jobs that we’re hoping to attract. And and, you know, the biggest challenge for us in that capacity is just letting them know that there is an option that we are option for that, that we think were a good one that we hope will give us a shot.

And oh, and I should also mention, right, like, there’s a, there’s a free sort of do it yourself 24/7/365 available command line basics workshop that is always on the website. If you go to a website, and you click on foundations, I think on the left hand side, our so called foundation courses are a, you know, they’re not really as good as a live instruction scenario, because you can’t ask questions. And you know, there’s not a human on either side of it. But it is a way to, you know, see what we’re about. Try the very first, the very first module of that, of that have that self paced foundations course it’s called, I think, in Enchantment in the Command Line, and it talks literally about a magic ritual that you can that you can try.

CP: Yes. I took that myself.

TLC: Yeah.

CP: Very interesting, yeah.

TLC: So that gives you the flavor, right, that gets it gets you this is like, what is the difference here? Like? I don’t I want people to understand that there’s like two primary sort of exist currently existing branches of the “How do I learn about technology” tree, right, there’s the like, the job stuff, and the code boot camps, and the recruiters and the, and the college courses and so on. And there’s also like this, this sort of branch of community education that’s happening amongst primarily policy and political discussions, right, where, where you’re going to like a library, you’re, you’re you’re having a discussion with people, we’re trying to be a third option, which is that far more kinetic far more experience based, live at the keyboard, right, workshop. But that isn’t then simultaneously encouraging you to make a LinkedIn resume. Right?

CP: So what about things like, what about donating time? Or what about donating books or old computers and things like that? And I know you’re located in New York City? Do you have branches in other cities? And I know, we’re talking about the After Times when, whatever, you know, whatever this you know, pandemic goes down, but I mean, when it comes to things like that, could you are there other ways that we could we could help out?

TLC: You know, we talked about that a lot internally. And so it’s in it’s, uh, you know, we don’t, we don’t want to say no, because anyone who wants to help is appreciated, right? Like, that’s, it’s, it’s nice, it’s nice to get that kind of support. However, being computer people, there isn’t a lot of stuff to do. Right, like, we’ve already automated the entire process. So when you sign up for a workshop, it’s not like a human is answering your email and sending you a ticket. Like, that’s all done. I mean, when we schedule a new course, it’s not like we have a lot of administrative work to then, you know, do data entry. Like, a teacher simply says, I’m available at this time. And from their calendar, there is an event created on one of several platforms that we use to host webinars. And that’s just the press of a button.

And, you know, I don’t say that to discourage people from offering help. I mean, you can certainly, you know, email us at techlearningcollective@riseup.net. And, and ask and see if there’s anything that we need. We’re for what it’s worth, we’re currently sort of trying to make more regular sort of writing crew within the core groups, and we have more outreach. So like, you know, send us tips and that kind of stuff. Like that’s, that’s, that’s certainly welcome. But the reason I do bring it up is because it’s an example of what can be possible, right? Like, we’re not a lot of people. But we, you know, and we don’t have a ton of, you know, everyone has, most people, I should say, not everyone, but everyone who was involved in like, you know, has something else going on, if it’s not a day job, it’s another, you know, another project or a political goal or something. And yet, the school is mostly relatively easy to operate, because the processes are already sort of worked out. And they’re written out in code.

So that, I hope serves as an example, right, of what could be the case for other people as well, and what we’re trying to help people do, because that’s the point of having the computers, right, I don’t want to sit here making calendar events, you know, for an hour. So I don’t need to because I just have my program, do it for me. Yeah. And, and that that could be possible, with many, many, many other small organizations or community projects, right? If only people had more dexterity, like I talked about earlier, with manipulating digital things. And so that’s the goal, get them to that. And so in that sense, we don’t really have need for volunteers or, you know, there is no physical infrastructure that we are lacking. A lot of our internal infrastructure runs on Raspberry Pi’s, which are super cheap, $35 computers.

CP: Yeah, I love those things.

TLC: Yeah, primarily, they are behind Onion services. So that’s just for the internal group. Public stuff is all on, you know, cloud hosted services that are low cost or free. And so, you know, I guess the most direct thing on that front is like, if you see a typo, fix it on GitHub. If you can, or send us an email, let us know there’s something like a broken link or something. But we don’t really have a lot of need for, for volunteers in that logistical capacity because again, so much is digitized.

Oh, and we have a newsletter that you can join. It’s just an email newsletter that sometimes gives you occasional discounts, mostly highlights from our blog, and an event list for what’s happening in the upcoming week. And you can subscribe by clicking the click here to subscribe button on our homepage.

CP: Well, thank you so much for doing what you’re doing. Thanks for coming on the show and talk to us all about this is really very interesting stuff. And I’m glad you guys are out there doing it. Because there’s I’ve run into all the other educational things you mentioned in this and yours was unique.

TLC: Well, thank you so much for having us, I really appreciate getting the chance to be featured on your podcast.

CP: Thanks again to these guys for coming on. I really enjoyed the class I took with them. And I’m sure you would, too, they do such a good job. And again, they they are it’s not for technical people it’s for it’s for regular everyday people, if you’ve got some sort of a community project that you’re involved in, it doesn’t have to be political. But it can be and if if there’s something that you’re doing as a group, and you kind of need to be the IT person for the group or somebody does, it can be you. And these classes are actually quite interesting to you. And even just beyond the technical level, just getting some of the history behind how things work and why things do what they do today really gives you a different perspective on these things.

So great classes, I highly recommend you check them out if you want to support these guys because they are doing some important work take some classes that puts money directly in their pockets in it and it helps them you know keep going tell other people about it as well. Maybe you share this on social media sign up for their newsletter I signed up but doesn’t come out that often. So it’s not gonna really fill up your your mailbox. And of course they do take money so you want to throw some money, I’m sure they would much appreciate that.

All right, there you go. There you have it. The vaccines keep coming, folks get out there, make sure you get in line get your vaccine, we will get through this. We’re almost there. Just a few more months. Don’t give up. Don’t trip at the one yard line. We’ve got to get this ball over the goal. Sorry to use these sports analogies. But really, we’ve—this is not the time to let down your guard. Just keep it up a little while longer. Wear those masks, do the social distancing. Get your shot as soon as it’s available to you help other people to get their shots.

This stuff is really very effective. And if we’re going to get back to any sense of normalcy, we’ve got to get almost everybody vaccinated. So there you have it. Stay safe, everybody and until next week. As always, don’t get caught with your drawbridge down.

Below is a video capture of our LibrePlanet 2021 presentation, along with a (somewhat rushed) transcript of the speakers, and a link to download our presentation slides in PDF format.

Download PDF slides for “LibrePlanet 2021: Beyond ‘Learning to Code’.”

LibrePlanet facilitator: Okay. This talk is titled “Beyond ‘Learning to Code’: How Tech Learning Collective Merges IT Training with Emancipatory Political Action,” and will be presented by members of the Tech Learning Collective, an apprenticeship-based technology school for radical organizers. Founded and operated exclusively by radical queer and femme technologists, they offer unparalleled free, by-donation, and low-cost computer classes on topics ranging from fundamental computer literacy to computer hacking techniques.

In this talk, they’ll describe their holistic approach to IT education, which is creating communities of activist sysadmins out of people who wouldn’t otherwise have called themselves “techies,” opening the world of free computing to people who will apply its advantages their other liberatory goals. With that, I’ll turn it over to TLC.

Tech Learning Collective: Thanks so much for that intro. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for coming to our talk, do you have any trouble just, um, you know, hearing obviously, just throw that into the IRC chat room, and our wonderful tech team from FSF is going to help us out.

I am representing Tech Learning Collective today. I want to talk a little bit about why we’re doing what we’re doing and why we’re doing what we’re doing in the way that we’re doing it. And why it may be different than what you might expect.

This talk is called Beyond learning to code, in large part because one of the things that’s unique about Tech Learning Collective is that we don’t really teach coding per se, we teach a lot of IT infrastructure. And this, of course, overlaps with learning to code. But it’s not, it’s not the same thing. And so, likewise, if you have any questions, please throw those into the chat as you have them. And I hope that by the end of this, what I want to leave you with is a different way of thinking about what would be useful to do today, in your personal life as an individual or as someone who is maybe part of an affinity group, part of a small community group, small neighborhood group, small PTA group, small education group, small club, y’know, something on a scale that is sort of more immediate to your personal life, that will materially impact and improve the situations that you find yourself in, and the situation that you find your loved ones in. That’s sort of really where our focus lies.

And so to start that off, to start the conversation off, I kind of want to just begin this notion by talking about, like, why care about technology in the first place, right?

There’s a lot of people who have technology interests for many, many different reasons. There’s fun and hobbies and curiosity, right? Just kind of like casual interest. There’s a lot of people who need to care about technology for their livelihood, right, it’s part of their job, part of their work. It’s something that they feel is going to help them become more capable than they currently are. So there’s individual capability, right? And then of course, there’s that Silicon Valley slogan, right “make the world a better place.” It has this sort of utopian vision of all the things that can be improved with better technology. And if we just have the right tools, you know, everything will be fine and wonderful. And, so we like to say that this is sort of the techno capitalist view of what how things are happening, right? Most people, right, in Silicon Valley, like to say that they’re making the world a better place. It’s literally a TV show, right? That you can watch it like a Mike Judge production, “Silicon Valley,” that jokes about this throughout five very, very incredibly ridiculous seasons.

What Silicon Valley and tech companies tend to actually be doing, though, in our view, right is making it possible for individuals to get a job. And that’s fine. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that. It’s just that it’s not really what they claim to be doing. Largely.

Of course, what most people and I don’t mean to suggest that most people here [at LibrePlanet] but I mean, most people writ large in the world want to do with technology, in large part, is that it’s a curiosity. We’re not necessarily sure what to do with technology, it’s just that there’s some cool things and it’s of interest. So it can be a fun weekend project. And how many times have you had someone you know, or know someone, perhaps, who bought a Raspberry Pi for a weekend project, but they never really got around to the weekend project, you know what I mean?

So all these things are really happening to some degree or another. But it’s important to sort of identify what people think that they’re doing, not just what they say that they are doing.

In contrast, right, our sort of view of the same thing is, this is sort of what we actually aim to do is make the world an actually better place. And again, this is why I started by talking about like, what does that mean with respect to your personal life, right, that’s a that’s a place to start that is a little bit more understandable than the larger scale of the whole world. It is also true that if you come through to TLC, Tech Learning Collective, right, you will gain capabilities that you might not have had before because you will be exposed to technologies that you might not have seen. You will have an opportunity to learn from mentors and people with some more experience than perhaps you have about technologies that you don’t necessarily know as much about, and that can, of course result in, for example, getting a job, or other things. But, you know, for us, that’s also part and parcel of the community aspect to it. So we at TLC, right, find technology fun in and of itself, but we find it primarily useful as a medium to do something else.

In other words, we’re less interested in optimizing our database queries to the nanosecond level, right, than we are in having a database. Because what that means is a materially different reality for someone, regarding you know, what they would like to do, then if they didn’t have that same capability that technology provides. So that’s what we care about.

So we have these two primary missions at TLC, TLC being the technology school, right? One is to simply provide meaningful technology education to underserved communities. And in brief, what we mean by that is that in a grandiose vision, we do not believe that a humane society should require you to do any kind of labor for the privilege of having a livelihood, in all the ways that I mean that word. You should not have to work to be able to have food, if that work is for somebody else. Right? You should have an autonomous life, free to make your own choices and all the ways that freedom means and that means at a grand scale, it means that we are working towards hopefully, you know, seeing a world where we can abolish the idea of employment as a prerequisite for survival in the first place.

It also means, of course, that that’s a pretty far off vision. And we’re not, you know, unrealistic about how far away that necessarily is. And so right now, by necessity, perhaps, at an individual level, it means that we want to try to enable this immediate material improvement in people’s lives, students lives in our case. And of course, the lives of you know, the people who are involved in their communities. Importantly, that means that we have to do this in a way that doesn’t rely or require the cooperation of existing capital, like large companies like state and local regulators. Because those are institutions primarily born from a status quo. And obviously, abolishing employment is a radical departure from the status quo. And so what that means that we have to, you know, survive in a world where the status quo is not aligned with our goals. So we have to not require or rely on that work.

The other primary goal for TLC, the secondary objective, right, is to fund existing community-owned technology projects that are built and maintained and implemented, right, for radical social good. And what we mean by that is that we want to materially support so that means either with money or with hardware or with you know, people’s skill and time, the projects that are doing the political work that we find valuable. So this is, for example, hardware, right, as I said, right, physical infrastructure installations, I can talk a little bit about some examples of that later on. The operating costs, right, from proceeds of workshops and courses that we teach. And then of course, we tried to do this in a way where we’re also able to survive in the existing system, which means that we’re trying to avoid the construction through our process of any kind of exploitative volunteering arrangements. And which means that everyone who is involved in a, you know, in a serious time committed way is being paid for their time, when they when they are involved in TLC. That means teachers, and marketing staff, and so on, and so forth. So those are sort of the two primary, two primary goals there.

And this can kind of all be summed up right by this idea that there is a lot of work that needs to be done to write parentheses, “make the world a better place.” But most of that work cannot be done quote “at work,” right? You cannot change the world in the 30 minutes that you have for lunch. So that’s sort of, uh, that’s the challenge.

In a super zoomed out view, this is kind of where we see this happening. This is kind of how we see the potential for change starting. This is called what we call the Tech Learning Collective flywheel. Ironically enough, this is actually a business concept invented or at least popularized by Jeff Bezos of Amazon. And the idea is simply that there is a value, right, that we offer, that we can feed into other values that already exist elsewhere, that once we take advantage of, we can continue to feed into this circular process that starts this so called “flywheel effect” that, while it takes a lot of energy to sort of begin to make this happen, once the flywheel is moving, its own momentum continues the process of getting things further and further, further along.

So in our case, right in the case of TLC, you know, we are a school. We use free software, right? And in using free software, right, it means that we can offer the same things as a lot of other schools with lower financial costs, but it also means that we enable our students to do things with a lot lower financial cost. It also means that we potentially have more accessible tools, right? In both cases that combination drives student enrollment, which drives engagement with our courses, which means that of course we can create more courses and workshops from that, and feed that back into TLC, which, again, is then supportive of both as users and in some cases as contributors to some free software projects, which then drives lower financial cost and onwards and onwards, right. But it also means that we have this opportunity after creating an alumni network, and a set of folks who have a shared baseline understanding of the technology that we’re using right to construct and to offer, right, hyper-local infrastructure projects and other community work. That this benefits how, for example, right, they can do the things that they want to see done that they can advocate for their own goals. What that means is that we can create political impact, right? From a grassroots level, which of course, we’ll also be using and supporting the free software movement, which means that we’ve got lower financial costs to drive student engagements to drive workshops to get more hyperlocal infrastructure projects, and onwards and onwards. And so this in a nutshell, right, is basically the 10,000 foot vision of why we think that starting from an infrastructure school, which I’m going to talk about a little bit more in just a minute, rather than a coding school, we can actually enable this in a way that if you start on the other side, like a coding school, right, you end up actually supporting a status quo instead of resisting it.

So let’s dig into this a little bit more, right? Like, what are the flywheel components that we’re talking about here?

First of all, you have to see a bunch of these things called practice labs. I mean, this is not a super big surprise, anytime that you’re learning something, you’re going to want to play around with it hands on, perhaps, right? And so for us, what that means is that we build it on GNU/Linux, we build it on repeatable infrastructure that we can create as infrastructure as code. Two examples of that are, you know, locally installed VirtualBox, use Vagrant to automate it. These are DevOps tools primarily used in the industry for development operations, right, style work, but we use it for education.

We also, of course, have our own infrastructure, primarily built as IaC, which in some cases, we share with other groups who want to do something similar, primarily this means Ansible, Terraform. We also host internal services primarily over Onion services, to collaborate internally. So we have our own sort of internal calendars, running free software, implementations, CalDAV servers, basically, we have some file servers again, all behind Onion services. Actually, authenticated Onion services in most cases, because we can use IaC, infrastructure as code, to automate a lot of the processes around adding or removing members and giving them appropriate access permissions, and so on and so forth.

The hyperlocal infrastructure projects I mentioned, just very briefly, right, there’s a, we were started in about 2015 or so in New York City, sort of got a boost after the November 2016 election, for reasons. And the core group of us sort of dispersed into a number of other projects around New York City primarily at the time. And what that means, right is that we now have connections to these hyper local infrastructure projects or other sort of groups that are doing things in and around New York City. And again, this is where it comes back to that alumni community, that flywheel effect, right. So what they’re doing can then feed into other groups, and so on and so forth.

From there, right, as alumni share visions with one another, and they experience this sort of alternate approach to empowering technologies, then we create more possibility for mentors, which creates more possibility for apprentices and then onwards and onwards to that effect. I hope that makes sense.

So, when considering a school, right, there are a lot of ways one can go about learning, because the whole point of a school is a place to learn, right. And so, the model that we take here is that we are not trying to the be all and end all of everything, we are trying to be one of several options. Here’s a different couple ways of thinking about what those options are: we have this sort of infographic here where “goal oriented” is on one axis, and the opposite of that is “exploratory.” “Unstructured” versus “guided” is the other axis. And the idea here is that we are sort of both goal oriented and guided. Right?

So what we are kind of competing against, but more just trying to be an alternative to I should say, is a bootcamp or a university model of education, which is the other sort of goal oriented and guided approach to learning a lot of technology things that you probably have seen; computer science courses, you know, Turing School, Flatiron School, or General Assembly, you know, any code bootcamp, that kind of stuff, right? We’re not really trying to be alternative to things like hack fests and social clubs and really Wikipedia articles and stuff. We think those are great and wonderful ways to learn if you have this sort of, you know, personality for it. But for a lot of people goal oriented and guided learning is both familiar and also to a big extent, right, is sort of a more, the thing that they would like to spend their time on, especially synchronous time, right when you’re with a human as well. So if we can zoom in on that a little bit like what is what is it makes it what makes us different than, for example, the bootcamp on the university model?

And to talk about that, I’d like to sort of introduce this idea, right, where we have here, this sort of trapezoidal shape, where we think that’s how we think about learning, here are all the possible things that you can learn, right. And at the very base of this trapezoid, we have these concepts, these foundational pieces of understanding that sort of are relevant regardless of which specific technology you use, right. Above that, we have competencies, which are skills with specific tools, or familiarity with a shared culture in those tools. And you have of course capabilities, which are these higher level abilities to do things with those skills. And this sort of runs the gamut between things that can be fun for, for hobbies, right all the way through the mutual aid and political activism. And in the middle there, there’s this sort of like individualistic idea of like, well, “I need to get a job.” And this is not again, this is not an all encompassing view, this is in essence an example.

So let’s fill this area, right, with things that we learn at TLC.

And so if we start with just filling in some of the concepts that we talk about, right? You’ll notice that there’s some things that are probably very familiar to a lot of, you know, highly technical people, right? There are things like the physical networking of the OSI layer, of the OSI model of internetworking, right? There are things like for example, censorship and anti-censorship, right? Circumvention tools, anonymity, privacy, right? There’s also stuff like, for example, hypermedia and nonlinear writing, right, which is, we think, a concept foundational to, for example, the Internet and the web, in particular, the hyperlink, right? That isn’t exactly teaching about the Web. There were things that predated HTML, for example, that discussed hypermedia and nonlinear writing, that are useful to know about that are not necessarily taught if you go to, for example, a code boot camp that immediately introduces you to the newest version of the Rails framework as an example. And all of this stuff is what we consider, right, the foundational pieces of the things that we’re learning. And we really take a lot of time and focus on making sure that these things are discussed as first class citizens, if you will, of a curriculum.

So from there, once you understand that, you know, these things are things that you can learn, right, you can start utilizing specific tools and technologies to implement your understanding of these things. So for example, cloud APIs, right? Or HTML, CSS, and JavaScript or you know, GPG, and password managers and how to use virtualization and the command line and GNU/Linux and infrastructure as code, and all this sort of stuff, right? We don’t really necessarily have too much of a, you know, puritanical view, per se of like, what you should do here (competences, tools), we care more about here (concepts, foundations). And the reason for this right is because if you understand hypermedia and nonlinear writing, then you have a much better approach, or you have a much better way of approaching any single one of these things. Git, for example, right, it’s sort of a nonlinear way of writing a history about a project. But HTML has links, which is sort of, you know, the introduction to like wikis, which is, both of these are sort of ways to do nonlinear things. If that makes sense.

And then, of course, once you have some skill in one or more several technologies, right, then you can actually do meaningful things in your life, like, share, or explore or publish or collaborate or advocate, right? Or be a leader, create some self direction. And finally, of course, you know, act collectively with others who also have similar skills, and visions, and, like, appropriate views about, you know, where they’re where they’re, how they are viewing the acts that they take with the values that they have.

So if you look at this sort of way that we approach this curriculum building idea, right, and you compare this with, for example, right, like, for example, a code boot camp, or like, for example, a university course, most of which are trying to get you to, you know, be employable, what you see is that there’s a much larger vision about what it is a student needs and what supports a student needs in a guided and goal directed way to actually accomplish those larger things than a code boot camp actually provides, right? That smaller trapezoid is where the book code boot camp focuses its energy. And you can see that we as Tech Learning Collective, right, have started from a much more foundational place, and ended up with a much broader view of what’s possible for students because we started out at that much more foundational place.

So just as another comparison, right, the other part of it is price. I know someone right now who’s trying to engage with a code bootcamp and unfortunately they want you but can’t, because it’s just too expensive. In their case, it’s even more expensive than this. And this, what’s shown on the slide is about $14,000. This is based on data from a sampling of CourseReport.com’s “Best bootcamps for 2020.” In contrast, Tech Learning Collective courses, you’re taking the course right, is literally an order of magnitude less expensive. It’s like and if you take standalone workshops for just particular things, right like that’s even less expensive. So part of the point here is that that this comes back to that flywheel where the things that we’re doing, and the way that we’re doing it allows us to do stuff in a much, much, much less expensive way, that will provide a lot more accessibility to a lot more, a lot more people. This is, of course, particularly important for women who are bearing the brunt of, for example, child caring, you know, requirements, or, you know, things during the pandemic, and you know, all that shit that rolls downhill, excuse me.

Um, the other thing that’s unique about us is that, you know, we started this as a political project, not a school. And so we were very, very mindful from the get go about, like, “Who are we teaching?” And, “What do they want to do with what we’re teaching?” And what that sort of has resulted in is an approach that has, as you can see from this slightly now dated, internal survey, is that we end up getting a lot more repeat students. In other words, people who come to one workshop and then a second, and then third and the fourth and so on, right, who are on the sort of like femme-of-center spectrum, in their gender identity, then the masculine-of-center, sort of side of that spectrum. And this is, you know, as for the industry, writ large is kind of unheard of. For a school in particular, also kind of unheard of, which we’re very proud about.

Um, the other thing that’s different, right, is that we provide this through an apprenticeship based learning experience rather than a sort of rote, rote memorization or like task based learning experience. And what that means is that the people who are teaching are actually expert teachers, not just experts on the subject matter that they are teaching. For us what that means is that every TLC instructor was a TLC student in the past, right. And on top of that, that every TLC instructor is actively involved, right, in the other projects that TLC is sort of like a sister organization about. It also means that the teachers themselves, right, are doing this in a particular style, it is not a lecture approach, it is not a, y’know, sit and watch the presentation, unlike actually what we’re doing right now, where you have slides, right? In classes, it’s really live. So that there are no pre-recorded materials, everything is live in that in that screen share that, you know, sharing of the terminal together. And what that means is that you’re actually doing a lot more kinetic things than you would otherwise.

The other thing that’s different is that we try to learn together, right? So you learn from experts, but you learn together after the fact and with that expert. And so what that means is that we have this sort of series of ways of getting more and more involved in the school that starts with maybe just a public workshop. But that can continue through, for instance, a set of, a curated sequence of classes, that we call “cohorts,” that are that is what make up a particular run of a course. And then once you have sort of gone through that run, of course, right, the next step, if you want to continue being engaged with is, for example, the alumni learning community, where there are a bunch of clubs and other groups that have dispersed out of Tech Learning Collective sort of baseline course material. And so that, that both gives people an on that that’s sort of like lets them dive as deeply as they want, but not deeper. And that means that they can much more quickly move from learning about something technical, to doing the thing that they want in the physical world, in the real world, in the political impact, political sphere, even, based on what it is that they want to do.

So this is sort of like, I want to leave a lot of time for discussion, but it really is maybe a larger issue. But I wanted to just sort of highlight some things that some students have said about TLC so far. And I just want to sort of point at those sort of differences, right?

Like, so one student, Chantelle, who was a computer science undergrad, right says that “the amount I’m learning in Tech Learning Collective workshops is way more than what I was learning in my college classroom.” And the reason I want to highlight this is because this is in combination with the fact that Tech Learning Collective workshops and courses are shorter. In other words, you spend less time in TLC classes but you still end up learning way more than you might in, for example, a university course or, for example, a code bootcamp.

The other thing I want to highlight is someone named Snow who said, “this class was immensely valuable,” right, And this is the big point: “changed my core beliefs about my technological proficiency and potential.” And what I want to highlight in this is this idea that a lot of people who would otherwise be very involved with these sorts of technologies, just for personal projects, just for, you know, things that they want to see done in the world aren’t not because we need for example, necessarily better tools and better documentation. Although of course, we do need all these things. Everything can be made better all the time, but rather because they have through whether it be systemic impacts caused by inequalities out in the world or just sort of preconceived notions about maybe earlier technologies that they’ve encountered, right, this belief about themselves, that an environment that is more social, that is more supportive that is more apprenticeship-based, as we say, right actually changes how they view themselves in that world. And that makes it more possible for them to do all those things that we talked about, that we want to see people, you know, change, lead, and collaborate and share, and explore, and all that sort of stuff.

So that is, you know, getting this kind of this getting this feedback is really, really meaningful to us.

And so again, back to this, right, back to this flywheel: for us right now, right, through primarily, necessarily individual impact, because of where we are in this process. You know, we are trying to do this by offering the sort of alternative to the rush-to-employment way of learning about technology, where, for example, right now, if you go to a lot of code, boot camps, you are almost introduced to the technology as though the current technology is the beginning of history for that technology. There’s not really a lot of discussion, right, about where terms came from, what the history was of a given technology, right? Why that’s important. And for us, right, starting that way gives you a narrative that you can then see yourself not necessarily as simply memorizing a bunch of facts or learning a bunch of sort of standard operating procedures for how to take, you know, a command line and then end up with a website. But it lets you create, in your mind almost, a story, right of what happened before you arrived, what’s going on now. And importantly, because it’s a story, and you have now the tools to write the next chapter, you can actually understand where you’ve come from, understand how you fit into what’s happening now, understand the forces that are that are at play in, for example, the job market or in for example, just the free software movement, generally, and then have the capability, right, of taking that metaphorical pen, and defining what you want to see as the next chapter about it.

And so that, that’s it for my presentation part. I would love, love, love to see questions. I have a lot of things I could say about this. But I wanted to distill this down to just those main ideas, because I’m really hoping that this is at least intriguing to some people. And I’m sure that I probably didn’t cover everything, almost intentionally. And so if you have questions, now would be a great time to sort of let me know about what you’re more curious about, what you want hear more about, and then the rest of this can really just be, right, talk and, um, talk and discussion.

LibrePlanet facilitator: Yeah, so we have about a little over 15 minutes left.

TLC: Great!

Facilitator: We have some really great quick, noisy to ask, talking about the femme of center and masc of center. What do you mean by of center? Why is it a good thing? That they’re not equal? Like, why do you see that as a positive?

TLC: Yeah. Good point. So of center basically just means, right, like, the—this is a bit of Gender Theory 101. And so I don’t wanna spend too much time on it.

But to answer the question, right, the notion of having simply, men and women in the world right now a binary gender dynamic, where you have a male and a female, and that’s all you can ever be right? creates this literally binary right view, you have either your 1 or a 0, right? Like, literally, I think the, there was some—I wasn’t sure if it’s an IETF standard, or there’s some standard that literally describes like, you know, gender representation in databases. And it’s, and it’s, you know, one for a male, a zero for female. And they explicitly say, like, we don’t mean to, to this to be any sort of, like, you know, ranking system, it’s just, that’s how, like, you know, this binary field has decided to be stored. But the point is, is that that’s not how people experience the world.

And so the way to sort of add granularity to some of this, right is to take that sort of binary notion of having two points, or I just don’t know, one, one bit that you can flip, and then having it be instead a range, a scale, right? from let’s say, instead of, like, you know, zero to one, zero, right, you know, zero to 100, as an example. And so if in that, you know, schema, right, binary female is zero, and binary male is 100. Right? Then you have a center point, 50, right, which is what you might have described before as “androgynous,” or as sort of “bigender,” right, or some other sort of mix of the two. And so the idea is that there is a, that that’s the point from which we, from which we measure the sort of like relationships back to binary gender. And as you saw in the slide, I can go back to even right, we basically were like, this is a guess we didn’t actually ask people, right, this is sort of a, you know, a sort of a relatively admittedly like, imperfect and somewhat problematic, right, like, representation of what we assumed based on people’s, you know, self, you know, their own sort of like presented behaviors and such. The reason why it’s good that it’s not sorry, go ahead.

Facilitator: No, that’s I was just gonna ask about you know, why what do you see as positive?

TLC: Right, yeah. And so the reason we see this as positive is because the specific goal of TLC, right is to affect change in the status quo. So if you imagine, so it’s, so the status quo right now is effectively flipped, right? Most companies in most technology positions, right for most companies have primarily men or people who are masculine-of-center, right, in those roles. That is then replicated in all the schools that we’re aware of, right. I mean, look at the whole STEM, you know, thing, and so on. And so by seeing this breakdown, be the opposite of the status quo to us that signals that we are actually making inroads to the progress we want to see. And so we want this as skewed as possible with that respect, without necessarily like, you know, like, it’s not like, you know, there’s a course for femme-of-center people in a course for masc-of-center people, because the material is the same. But seeing the skew this way tells us that we’re reaching the right people, and that the which is to say the people who are not reached elsewhere, right? And that we’re providing that avenue for people who don’t have as perhaps a safe or comfortable or just useful way of going about learning these things in existing paradigms through another alternative. If that makes sense?

Facilitator: Okay, Jack, [unintelligble] thank you so much for your question. Jack Hill, I’m also interested, how would one bootstrap a new TLC organization, especially with the heavy emphasis on relationships with organizations and alumni?

TLC: Yeah, that’s also a good question. So it’s, it’s not so much that we are hoping to create a bunch of TLCs. Although if you wanted to, you know, that would be more than welcome, right? Like the more people who are teaching this, the better. It’s more that what we see our role as is providing a sort of anchor point, right, if you imagine this as a literal flywheel, then that center stick, right that holds the flywheel together that provides that anchor, is also a piece of the puzzle that you need. And so we are hoping—what we are hoping to do is to inspire people to do projects around their abilities that they find important for their local communities. And to have, and we want, particularly the people who are doing those are people who would not have otherwise approached those projects with, for example, the notion of “Oh, I can self host this particular service,” or “Oh, for example, I can create a service that is, you know, relevant to the 10,000 people in my neighborhood, as opposed to the 10 million people in my country,” right? There’s a lot of focus on scale as a marker of success. And what we’re hoping to do is get people to think of success, not in the form of, you know, I’ve started a company that now serves 10 billion people, I guess 10 million people since there aren’t 10 billion people yet, but rather, a marker of success being my life is now better, and my spouse’s life is better, and my family’s life is better in some material way. I have more time; I have more money; I have more ability to effect change in my local city council; that kind of thing. Because I have more data to do it with or if presented, you know, information that I got, you know, from open data sources and this kind of stuff, using tools that perhaps we learned at TLC like Web scraping, and so on, right? That’s the goal. That being said, if you like what we’re doing, and you want to try it out too, do it. Like, we’re not, you know, we’re not in any way precious about that. But it does take a lot of existing relationships. And, you know, it was specifically the affinity group that started around the 2015-2016, sort of digital security stuff that began this particular iteration of TLC.

I hope that answers the question.

Facilitator: I think so, seems to me at least, D-lib asks, Where do your first cohorts come from? I assume that’s asking about first time attenders?

TLC: Yeah, I guess that could be there might be two questions in there. I’ll answer both because I think both they’re interesting, right?

So back to the sort of like the slides around like, what are some people saying, what we actually find is that a lot of people coming to TLC are people who, for example, have some touchpoint with technology education, but have found it wanting. And that actually means that we have a lot of people signing up for workshops, who are either sort of working in nonprofits, or have taken sort of, for example, they’ve gone to a CryptoParty, for instance, right? But they didn’t really do much after the crypto party. Right? So they kind of learned about PGP and GPG. But then they didn’t actually implement it. And so they come to one of our GPG workshops, right to see it from another perspective. Or, for example, they’ve gone to a code boot camp. Actually, a lot of our workshop attendees were people who have gone through a code boot camp and found themselves still unsure about the fundamentals of like what a computer is and why we would be interested in it and, where did all this thing come from? And like why is Ethernet called Ethernet, right?

Like in our description, we talked about like, why is Ethernet like what is what is the Gnostic influence of Ethernet, right? And if you think about it, if you go back in time, to the notion of the “ether,” right? The notion of ether was this gnostic superstition about a permeating force that connected all things very much like The Force in like Star Wars or something. And so when Bob Metcalfe was creating Ethernet, right, like that naming choice was important because he wanted to create a link layer, networking protocol that would connect all digital things. And so he called it the ether-net, right. And so now we have Ethernet. And that’s what that is, right. And so again, having that sort of, like foundational understanding is not something that you get quite as, as I think a lot of people would hope for, from, for instance, a CCNA course, right? Because you’re getting basically getting pelted with a lot of facts. And if you can memorize them, that’s great. But that’s a much harder thing to do for humans because we are story based, and we, you know, like to connect things to metaphor, and ideology, and emotion, right and sense. And so that’s how we approach the pedagogy itself, which is different.

So a lot of people are are people who have come from places where they would otherwise have been, they know that this stuff exists but they also know that they don’t actually know it as well as they’d like. So that’s what the first question that could have been answered by that.

The second question, I think, was maybe in there was, how did we start out? Right, like, what was the first cohort for us? You know, what I mean? And the short, there’s an about page on our website, which I’ll point you to TechLearningCollective.com/about, which talks about this a little bit. But the short answer to that question is basically, we were a mutual self education group that started in a bunch of anarchist occupied spaces in New York City, shortly before the 2016 presidential election, somewhat involved with a number of different groups. And so a lot of us have sort of deep history with the activist Left, and decided that we just needed to be particularly good at this stuff. Some of us had more experience than others. And so what that meant was that we started basically a, you know, semi-private education group. And over the course of several years, having done several projects, what we’ve discovered is that there is actually a repeatable way of sort of presenting this material and learning this material, that is much more likely to result in the kind of skill that we’d hope our comrades to have than, for example, learning through the black hole of you know, videos, you know, or reading Wikipedia articles, or going through existing courses that are primarily geared towards employability as opposed to bluntly competency.

Facilitator: Okay, [unintelligible] minutes left.

TLC: Oh, time flies!

Facilitator: Yeah, decentraleyes asked, “With the proliferation of, quote, free services, like Signal chats, Google Docs, etc. Do you spend time on explaining why those things are not ideal? Before you can get into the ‘Okay, let’s fire up our own community server to do this?’”

TLC: That’s a great question. Yeah, the short answer is we do but the longer answer is that it’s not a distinct topic, right? We don’t present free software as an alternative to anything, what we present it as is simply the best option that we currently have. And the reason for that is because it is the best option that we currently have, I don’t think I need to tell this audience [at LibrePlanet] that thing, but the reason for that is because by starting there, right, what we start with is a baseline that is always available, regardless of what you are, like, I can walk up to any computer in the world, and as long as it’s running a free software operating system, right, where I have access to a command line and the Internet, I know what to do, and I can also then make use of that computer, that machine, right? That is not possible if I have to ask for permission anywhere else. Right? And so like, again, that metaphor that we put in the description, which is, you know, “What good is your pen if the paper that you’re writing on, like, can refuse to show its ink,” right? If you are beholden to anybody else at any point, right, then you don’t actually have the level of autonomy that you need to do the things that we want to see done. And so we start with free software, because if you don’t have anywhere to start at all, then why not start with the software? Someone who’s—Maria was speaking just before us, right? Was saying about like, you know, why not, you know, learn, you know, the GNU Image Manipulation Program instead of Photoshop. And our point is, yeah, if you don’t know how to use Photoshop, then what’s the difference? Right, you might as well start with the Free Software thing, and you’ll be better off for it for many, many, many reasons. Does that make sense?

Facilitator: Mhm! Angie has a question: “If someone has followed the bootcamp flow, focusing on employment, how does TLC help re-establish the foundations?”

TLC: That’s also a great question. So mostly what happens is that a lot of people who have come from boot camps tend to sort of ignore our sort of 101-level or introductory things. And then what they do is they end up coming to a course that’s somewhat more intermediate and they realize how over their head a lot of stuff has gone, right? And so that’s when they tend to be like, Oh, wait a second, what? What came before this right? What am I missing here? And, and, and then they sort of jump back to some of the earlier earlier topics, in part because like when we start talking about computers, we don’t start our conversations with bits and bytes per se, we start out with like, for example, we have a workshop called “Taming Demons,” which is our introduction to System Administration workshop, and we don’t start talking about, you know, computers as machines, we talked about computers as like what is their purpose? Like, why are they here? Right. And for us, that means that they start, we start talking about it as a writing instrument, right? When you write when you press a key on your keyboard, k, l, whatever, right? H, g, whatever, or another language, or a different keyboard, when you are actually doing is inscribing, right into silicon using a medium, in this case, electricity, right, some physical artifact, that’s a change in the physical world exactly like you know, leaving a lead mark on paper is a physical change. So you’re actually physically leaving your mark somewhere, you’re just writing with a different medium. And so the question as system administrators that we should be thinking about right, is how much do we want to write? How much space will that take? How quickly can we write it? Right? And even before we even talk about computers, you can immediately see the parallel to things like RAM and hard disk size, right? And so that’s where we start. And so those are the kinds of things we talked about when we talk about fundamentals. Because when you start talking about it in that way, what you end up with is the possibility of effecting sort of this transfer of skill across things that are not even computer related. And so it’s much more about teaching as much of a philosophy, which is why we call it apprenticeship-based, in part, as it is a specific technical skill, if that makes any sense.

Facilitator: We just have three minutes left, so this might be our last question. “How might the support of ecology and environment fit into that flywheel model for TLC?”

TLC: So, the support of ecology. Um, I think I need a little more clarification of what that means. Do you mean like sustainable infrastructure, like solar-power ARM chips and this kind of stuff? Or…?

Facilitator: That was my assumption from the structure of the question.

TLC: Yeah, I mean, for us that’s sort of, in this simplistic diagram that would sort of partly be free software, right? Like, we need open hardware, open software, we need to be able to have freely accessible designs for all of these things and of course all of this is underpinned by the need to power it. So we actually have to have some energy to power the devices that we’re using for this. And that’s also of course another problem.

Not to be glib, but that’s a little bit outside of the scope of what we’re trying to do in part because we see ourselves as trying to start this process. But that doesn’t mean that people who are part of our alumni community don’t find that interesting. In fact, we were just talking before the livestream started that there’s another collection of alumni I’ll say, in a group called the Solarpunk Magic Computer Club, that has um—you can look it up, I think just do any Internet search will find the Solarpunk Magic Computer Club—and they talk a lot about that kind of more literally interweaving of sustainable, ecologically sound principles with modern technology, so that for example, we’re not using Python primarily or only to attack Microsoft Exchange servers, but we’re using it to for example be partly responsible for helping us grow basil that we’re going to then use in our pasta, because that’s how the flowerpot works. It has Python code that we can hack on, that we can modify, because it’s all free software. That kind of thing.

So that’s very, very fun, very cool, and again it has come out of a number of people who have taken classes and courses with TLC to get a baseline understanding of a technology that is not inherently then immediately funneling them into a metaphor of, for example, this skeuomorphic desktop that we have on a computer.

Right, like, we’re all using “desktop environments,” but if you look at a laptop there’s no desk in it. This is not a desktop. It’s on a desk, but there’s no desk in the laptop. So what is that desktop actually? It’s a metaphor. And if you start understanding that it’s a metaphor then you can start imagining what else you can do with computers because you begin to use different metaphors to interact and think about what the computer actually is for you.

Facilitator: Thank you so much, that is our time.

TLC: Okay, thank you so much for having us at LibrePlanet, and thank you to the FSF, and to you for helping us with the slides earlier. We hope everyone will check out TechLearningCollective.com. Check out the contact page. There’s an email address there, and we have a PGP key as well that you can use if you want more private communication. There’s even an Onion site that we mirror our Web site to, so, thanks for coming and, y’know, change the world with us!