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Comment by user764743 | Hacker News Reader

I'll never get people who say that there is too much politics at a god damn hacker conference like the CCC, considering The Chaos Computer Club was founded in 1981 specifically to be a political watchdog.

more so especially since the very act of "hacking" is a political statement because it involves redistributing power over information.

Code is law, remember?

That would be like complaining about "too much law" at a constitutional convention.

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Especially as congress has, for as long as I remember, been about the superset of infosec, society, art, etc. IMHO it's more along the lines of complaining about any ride that isn't a roller coaster at a theme park--no one is forcing you to go on any rides, other people clearly enjoy them, they're not taking anything away from your roller coaster, and having them increases the diversity of the crowd in an ultimately positive-for-everyone way.

Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today.

Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground. That is the real problem.

> Some people just like to complain that they have to take a shower and can't harass women like they used to like they could when congress was at the BCC and that kind of nonsense didn't immediately get you thrown out like today.

You could never do that. A few years ago, some activists tried to make a fuzz with stuff like creeper cards, intervention teams and codes of conduct. But those were never needed in the first place, almost nothing ever happened at CCC that would have warranted those things. But "those white male hackers are certainly sexist raping pigs" is a firmly entrenched stereotype in certain circles.

The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out. Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't "hooray, more refugees", "hooray, more EU dictatorship" or "hooray, down with everything right of Rosa Luxemburg".

> Your talk won't ever be on the Fahrplan if the topic isn't [...] "hooray, more EU dictatorship"

There is a talk on Chat Control though?..

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground.

I don't know which past Chaos Communication Congresses you have attended, but it always was. If that's not for you, then that's too bad.

> The one thing you cannot ever do is go to CCC and express any idea that isn't very far left. That is a very certain way to get thrown out.

Opinions that people get thrown out for are not "I love my country" or "hey, maybe immigration should be handled differently". They're things like "Hitler was ok, actually". And IMO if a conference doesn't throw you out for _that_, it's not one worth attending.

The problem has been the continuous purposeful rightward shift of the overton window as part of a wider strategy by the far right.

You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left". You see the far-right decrying our democratically elected government as "dictatorship", a classic Putinist propaganda move.

Don't let the right wing extremists set the narrative! Don't listen to their complaints about things being too "political" or "far left". It's all just a tactic in their march towards fascism.

You could use exactly the same rhetoric to make the opposite argument.

Sure, but you would be denying reality. Look at the political reality in Europe and the US.

How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?

Just because you don't see the "far left" doesn't mean it isn't there. Would you consider CDU in Germany to be conservative or even Christian right now? I've been far left all my life until I noticed how fake it all is. Sane goes for the right. now I'm just following truth. It's a lonely path.

All the best & I hope you had a Merry Christmas as well.

CDU is not far left. It's reducing immigration, reducing social services, and removing bike lanes to make more room for cars. Not things the left is known for - but they are things the right is known for.

The best thing the right has done to advance its cause is to convince so many people that the words "right" and "left" don't have actual meanings.

> How many countries are led by the far right? What about the far left?

Since you asked the question, I assume you have an answer, and I'm curious to hear it. I imagine it will reveal more about your personal politics than any observable political reality.

Double-replying to apologize for my previous comment! I saw what I felt was a leading question and answered it with a leading question in kind, but I got turned around reading the thread and realized much later that I actually agree with you and my answer would to your question would probably be more similar to yours than to the person you were replying to.

> You see it in action here, where the politics of the CCC, despite not having changed since their founding are suddenly decried as "very far left".

No, things have changed in CCC as well. Back in the day, free speech (in the US definition) and a firm opposition to any censorship were consensus on CCC. Nowadays, censorship is totally OK if it targets the right. And any kind of remotely right-wing opinion is declared "not free speech, not an opinion, thus not protected". This is also evidenced by quite a few talks on the topic, and cooperation with far-left activist groups like "Zentrum fuer politische Schönheit" sabotaging right-wing speech on several occasions.

Why is what right wingers do speech that should be protected, but not what the "Zentrum fuer politische Schönheit" does?

There's a certain hypocrisy in all right wing demands for free speech. They always mean freedom of their speech, not of people they disagree with.

There is quite a difference between "speech" and what ZfpS does. Their actions are often criminal, and not in the sense of "political crimes" but actually criminal acts that have nothing to do with speech or opinions. They have doxed people and called for violence against them, they have exhumed dead children and paraded around their corpses, stolen things, stuff like that.

The trouble comes when "speech" is arbitrarily defined and/or enforced to suit a narrative. The initial targets are always the lesser-favored extreme cases in order to have the least amount of people disagree with it. Then when the people are comfortable having them define what speech is acceptable, they slowly start eroding rights to include simply anything that they don't like.

That's why people say that taking away the rights of one group is like taking it away for everyone.

Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

When CF continues to host 8chan and other groups that routinely trade monkey torture/zoosadism videos, but for some reason only KF goes too far... yea that doesn't make sense to me. I don't think they should be playing Internet police, and it's possible that (in the US at least) even doing so in the first place could nullify their Section 230 safe harbor protections, by attempting to moderate content that flows through them.

But also in KF's case I think it was not so much their content that got them "in trouble", but the people behind that crusade being so loud about it, like Liz Fong-Jones and Keffals, who relentlessly harassed every possible service provider even remotely related to any aspect of KF-related services at all, which included domain registrars, DDoS protection services, hosting/colo/DNS providers, IP space owners, upstream ISPs (and even Tier 1s), etc.

It was basically a master class in mentally-questionable retribution crusades for bringing their very ugly skeletons out of the closet and exposing all of their wrongdoings. LFJ was mad that their rape allegation was made public by KF, and Keffals was mad that their illegal bathtub-HRT scheme was made public.

> Do you think KiwiFarms deserved to be banned from Cloudflare and all its other former service providers?

I do believe that providers of such services such as cloud, internet, ... have to stay neutral on such purposes under nearly all circumstances. If the team behind KiwiFarms did something illegal, this is a problem for the judicial system.

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

- Wilhoit's Law

Well Joscha Bach's talk got removed this year because of that mail exchange with Epstein. But disregarding the content discussed, I found it indeed a bit off-putting how he basically licked the butthole of his sponsor between those lines.

do you think the old-school CCC would be happy with a guy walking onto the stage and yelling the N word over and over, or would they kick him out? Because that's the quality of "speech" they now support "censoring".

Being (un)happy about something is totally different from creating and promoting an oppressive censorship apparatus, criminal laws and police actions against that something.

Imho: You don't have to like that person yelling that stuff. You don't have to like what they are yelling. But you have to accept that it has to be their legal right to yell that stuff. Because otherwise, any opinion will one day be a criminal thing to say, just takes one election...

You actually don't have the legal right to walk on stage at C3 and yell the N word repeatedly. The fact you think you have or should have that right means I am not the extremist in this conversation.

If San Francisco is what you get when you embrace the left, and opposition to that is fascism, I think a lot of us have just decided we must be fascists.

Never been here, huh?

San Francisco is a right-wing, pro-capitalist place.

The left would be public ownership of the means of production.

Nah, this is just the No True Scotsman fallacy. San Francisco is FAR more left in their politics than most of the nation. For example, the new mayor described himself as:

> As a lifelong Democrat and San Franciscan, I am running for mayor to turn around the city I love

London Breed, the mayor before, was endorsed by explicitly Democrat or nonpartisan individuals (including Kamala Harris)

We could go on. What's ironic here is that this comment just reveals how disconnected this form of left wing politics is from the larger nation. They call even examples of the politics of their own "right wing" because they're so radically left

There is no left wing politician in power anywhere in the US.

Democrats are a center-right party, they do not argue for any left wing position - like nationalizing industry, abolishing markets etc etc. In Europe, their equivalents in terms of economic policy would be conservative parties like the CDU.

The fact you consider them left wing is only evidence of above overton window shift happening.

What in the quote screams left-wing to you? Is it just because he's San Franciscan? But that would be circular reasoning: SF is left because of its mayor, and its mayor is left because he's from SF.

You mean the epitome, the nerve center, the capital and apex of 21st century entrepreneurial capitalism? That left-wing bastion? Ridiculous.

> Congress has become a radical leftist politics playground

Which is fucking based. Being a radical leftist should be normalized even more and people like you need to be driven out of _every_ fucking public space.

There is no radical left or radical right; there is only right and wrong! If you don’t understand human rights and realize that you are not the only person or creature on this planet, you need to change your point of view.

It seems that no modern comment section is complete without the complaint "too much politics", then followed by "but everything is political". Some talks do not even try to draw a line from politics to computers, and I think that is what people feel unhappy about.

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

The first two talks are in the "Ethics, Society & Politics" category, and the third in the "Art & Beauty" category. Why would they need to be about computing?

It's a big organisation, and politics is wrapped up in what they do, along with the post-WWII Antifaschism culture in Germany.

Even if it weren't the case, I don't get why attack them for helping stand up for democracy, something in dire need of advocacy these days

Unrelated to this conference I've often heard the "everything is political" argument, and mostly with a passive-aggressive "or else.." (you're up for a political fight) undertone. I once enquired on very mundane things in life, and yes "those too are political act". Well, if everything is bleakly political in that sense, we may make it universal, just call it Newspeak.

Definition of politics: whenever two agents have conflicting goals and a resolution is reached (peacefully or otherwise). Or more succinctly, multi-agent dynamics. Yes, almost everything is politics, and this is not diluting the word, any more than saying that almost everything is made of atoms is diluting the meaning of the word "atoms".

(Parent comment was edited to remove the part about diluting meaning)

Having any hacker conference in the USA is a political choice, because it deters any non-US citizen from entry. The bars to enter the USA are high, including the coercion to hand over your accounts from social media.

I’m not sure you think otherwise, and are just calling on the US as an example since the HN crowd is heavily US skewed, but just for the avoidance of doubt, this is a German event.

The US is a large, well connected country with a lot of hackers, for all definitions of "hacker", it is even the country that created the term.

And it is not that inaccessible to non-US citizens. Sure, the current administration is not very welcoming, but it is easier than, say, Russia (where a lot of hackers also live) if you want to attract an international audience.

Anyways, it is the CCC, and they are doing it in Germany, of course, because they are German.

> And it is not that inaccessible to non-US citizens. Sure, the current administration is not very welcoming, but it is easier than, say, Russia (where a lot of hackers also live) if you want to attract an international audience.

I would say that with the current US administration, it is similar hard to get to the USA as to Russia.

The difference rather is that in Europe's hacker scene there exist quite some people who, if they stated their opinions openly, would get in much worse trouble if they stated their opinion in Russia than in the USA (because in the USA these opinions are currently "more acceptable"). On the other hand, for Russian hackers likely the reverse holds: I can easily imagine that quite a lot of Russian hackers, if they stated their opinions in the USA, would attract quite a lot of trouble.

Just to be clear: I consider it to be quite plausible that in 5 years, the situation might be similarly bad in the USA as it is today in Russia.

Now, I could say a lot of things Russia is known for, but not for their rich hacker culture, lest it to be mentioned in the same context as USA. Russia simply isn't known for their large hacker culture; Europe is (since I want to include a member of FVEY, specifically a country which Brexited, and am also referring to a time when EU did not yet exist). A somewhat dark past of CCC is related to Russia via Eastern Germany by CCC member Hagbard (my nickname here related to it). Back in those days, the hacker culture very much was counterculture. KMFDM has a couple of good tracks about it.

CCC is German, and started in West-Germany. It is the oldest hacker conference. The second was USA (DEF CON), and the third was The Netherlands (theirs is approx every four years, and has a different name every year). The first one in NL was HeU 1993 (Hacking at the End of the Universe). This list excludes demoscene (IMO part of hacker culture due to reversing / cracking software, plus programmming and art in limited constraints, but at the very least it is related to); the first demoscene party was called Copy Party in Finland, 1980. Nordic countries are well represented in demoscene.

I am only aware of one person who fled USA to RU, and said person wasn't known in hacker culture before he did, plus he ended up there by mistake. By contrast, various people in infosec left USA for Europe. Jacob Applebaum went to Germany, Drew DeVault went to The Netherlands.

Since 2022, brain drain started in Russia due to the full scale invasion and war with Ukraine.

There's a very free country near the USA which does not have the ridiculous entry requirements the USA has. It even has a couple of large cities near the US border, including near cities with a rich hacker culture. Entry to said country is about as easy as entry to Germany. The country is called Canada. Yes, your neighbor.

May HOPE, DEF CON, and Black Hat end up in a tolerant, hacker-friendly country. I am not aware of brain drain due to Trump II. I mean, it is happening, but it also happened during Bush era, and the proportions I don't know about.

As for CCC being held in Germany. They have been very open to foreigners (as have us Dutch been), famous USA hackers were always welcome (and came) to hacker conferences in NL and DE. Talks in NL were almost all in English, at CCC partly (German is a relatively popular language in Europe). Nowadays, almost all German talks get dubbed and subbed. So CCC is very American-friendly, cause we Europeans get that Americans speak almost exclusively English only.

Maybe it's that people disagree with the politics, but also don't see a room for discussion.

In my experience, you are right - that is what most complaints of "too political" really mean.

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".

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.

Take this as example: https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2025/fahrplan/event/...

For many hackers, it is just a game, a technical puzzle. The interesting part is overcoming the obstacles, the information or bounty money they get in the end is just the reward, its nature doesn't matter much. Even when there is no reward, people do it because it is fun.

Like with lockpicking, many pickers work with the cylinder in a vise, and the lock is just a mechanical puzzle. That the lock can be attached to something one would want to secure is just a distant thought.

Politics is a game too. With far less fun rules, unfortunately.

The vagueness and sheer breadth of the word "politics" is doing the heavy lifting in your argument there.

The shape of the politics changed, though. From civil rights, questioning authority and cypherpunk, which inherently has a libertarian bent, there's now much more identity politics and social justice / grievance culture with only tenuous connections to tech.

For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI. It's a very conservative degrowth movement nowadays, all in all.

> For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI.

Hacking was always against centralization and central control (and towards decentralization) - which is why any lecture celebrating the bigtech AI companies would strongly be against the whole culture.

While for various reasons AI is a controversial topic, I would say that if someone gave a great talk about how to decentrally train some AI model efficiently as some volunteer computing project, this would be perfectly fitting for the C3.

Addendum: There is an AI talk (as pointed out by wunderwuzzi23 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46390959): https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/agentic...

> For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI.

No, just this one, because it steals from almost everyone and gives to the few. Even if it seems to be somewhat failing at monetization for now, control is in the hands of a very few.

I am happy they are careful with new technologies, especially one like AI, and also set the right impulses. Enough non-political reasons to have that stance, especially taking in societal implications and how technology affects everyone and not just stakeholders and techbros. In a time when tech in the US is just accelerating by the top-down agenda of figures like Andreesen, Thiel & Co., that is very much needed imo.

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