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Comment by aleph_minus_one

1 day ago

I get your arguments. In my opinion the core of the problem is that a lot of the "political" taks are about political topics that are outside the core of the kind of politics (?) that are related to hacking. These talks are what people are complaining about as "too much politics".

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aleph_minus_one

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user764743  1 day ago

That's fine but technology doesn't exist in a vacuum, you can't talk about (for example) facial recognition technology without mentioning the social groups it affects the most or is used against. Same for plenty of others topics directly or indirectly related to hacking and computers.

If you look at the history of the CCC, they also don't see a line between technical freedom and social freedom, because you can't have a free internet in an unfree society.

The 'outside' topics you mention are often just the hackers' way of applying their methodology to the world beyond the screen. Society is a larger system with its own bugs and exploits that inevitably affect the computers you use and the code that run them, and hackers like to apply their methodology to analyze that to understand the consequences.

Moreover, if you actually want meritocracy, you have to address the social barriers that keep people out of the room, and you can't do that without addressing the outside world.