We come now to the third presentation. So we had two presentations on, let's say, principles, and now one that is also about principles, but goes into policies. It's by Vesna Manjolivic, and it's called Away from the Internet of Ecosight. Hi everyone. It's great to be here. After 10 years I'm at AMRO again. It's not so great to start with doom and gloom with the Poli crisis and also being here on the third day I have noticed that I'm going to be repeating a lot of things that have already been said because there's a lot of resonance and overlap between the previous speakers and the workshops and what I'm going to talk about, but there's also going to be differences. So to acknowledge and to express the feelings about some of these elements of the Poli crisis, I want to refer to the three most recent and kind of directly touching to my life. And that is the grief that I feel for the victims of the wars and genocides that are going on right now in Gaza and Ukraine. And I'm angry at the police violence that they're using against the protesters, the student protesters in Amsterdam, where my daughter is also involved. And the third is I'm worried about the fact that we had the hottest April in the recorded history just last month. And what does that mean for the upcoming summer? So, yeah, it's hard living at the crossroads. And to go back to the previous speaker's quote about the death cycle, we need to do something at these crossroads to escape the death cycle of our attitudes of domination, the beliefs in the infinite growth on the limited planet, and the belief in anthropocentrism. So this is me. I'm juggling at the crossroads and dealing with all these issues of the polycrisis and the burning planet and the neurodiversity, the privileges, the death cycle, and many other balls that are being kept in the air. My background is in electrical engineering. I'm a hacker and I'm a community builder. I'm not a media artist. So as you can see, this is the limit of my graphic design skills. These are the inspirational women that formed my way of thinking. Ursula Levin with her utopias and the alternative views of gender and also critique of capitalism. Then the indigenous activist who talks about the cooperation rather than charity and talks about collaboration, Lila Watson. and formulated these principles of governing the commons, which are very much embedded into the early days of the Internet governance that I'm going to talk about soon. And finally, Radia Perlman, the grandmother of the Internet, to balance out a little bit the introductory keynote that talked about all the tech bros that created the internet. Well, there were women at the early days of the internet too, and we need to celebrate them also. Although she was involved in the early days of developing the BGP routing protocol, but at a later date in her life, which I also recognize, she also started worrying like, was that a good thing to help create the internet? Is it going to help us maintain the living planet or is it going to kill us all? So when I talk about the internet, I mean internet infrastructure. So, I'm not talking about the web or applications or the content. I'm going to be talking for the middle part of this talk about of layers, which describes like the protocol stack. And all these layers are independent from each other so that you get interoperability, end-to-end connectivity, and so-called permissionless innovation, which is not a good thing anymore, but at the beginning that helped create this network of networks that has been possible to grow and to include many different players from the beginning because you could innovate on each one of those layers, and then there was interoperability between them, all of them based on the open standards. So those were the kind of ideological beginnings of the internet, apart from the military-industrial complex that was also there, but in the kind of academia and engineering these were the these were the underlying principles. And there was this, of course, kind of belief in the emancipatory features of the Internet, and it completely didn't live up to it. So it did promise to bring the education and liberation and empowerment to the masses, to connect everybody to each other so that we can all be better for it. But what did we get instead? We got cat videos, and we got ecocide. We got cat videos, and we got EchoSide. So this is part of the title of my talk, but the idea itself comes from the paper that was presented last year at the conference called Computing Within Limits. It was written by Elina and Rob. I have notes for all of these slides, and there are links to the original paper and everything. And so based on their paper, I have created this visualization to kind of see for myself, because, again, also I'm not an an academic so reading the long academic papers is also quite hard so I wanted to illustrate what the point that they were making so what they did is they they looked into the legal definition of ecocide and compared certain technologies across those aspects of the ecocide so they looked into how severe is the harmful impact of, let's say, 5G. How widespread is the use of each one of those technologies, for example, data centers? What is the long-term impact on the environment? How vantan is that usage or in my translation how unnecessary it is to use that technology at all, for example Bitcoin, and what are the parts of the environment that are impacted by that specific technology. So this kind of graph helped me to realize that they're all horrible in one way or the other. Like they're different from each other, the impacts are kind of smallish, but it's also very subjective. Like I have just given them these numbers. It's very hard to actually quantify using the numbers and to create such a comparison. So how did we get here? And more importantly, who can make a difference? How can we get out of this? Who is in charge and how can you take part? Well, I come from the dark side. I come from the technical governance of the internet and I love this illustration which just shows how complex it is when you try to understand how does the technical governance of the internet looks like. It looks like a crime scene. And you need a lot of investigation to figure out. So there are three parts in this. There are names, numbers, and protocols. And there's a lot of acronyms. Again, I will explain some of them later. So the domain name system is where the governance of the names is happening, so the URLs that we as humans can deal with. Then underneath that there are IP numbers that are needed for the equipment of the internet. They need to be unique and initially they were also supposed to be distributed fairly and with the view of the future so that they are limited resource and it was supposed to last for far far in the future so the fairness and the uniqueness were the principles for designing this system it is hierarchical. There are five continental regional organizations that are responsible for distributing these numbers, which is different from, for example, names that are very commercial. You can buy a domain name. There is a whole chain of organizations that are going to try to sell it to you. And there are also commercial ones like.com, but then there are also national ones and not-for-profit, and there is like a whole mix. All of the number distribution organizations are not-for-profit. And underlying all of that are the protocols. So the open standards that are helping to describe how to build that interoperability. And that is developed by IETF. And then there's more. So those technical organizations are the ones described in top blue and green circles. This diagram is supposed to describe multi-stakeholder approach to Internet governance. So that's like a mouthful. So that's like a mouthful, and it's a concept that has been developed to counter the previous way of how telecommunication networks have been controlled in every country and then between the countries internationally there were there was the international telecommunications union which is part of united nations and they have been deciding the rules on how can you connect to the telephone network who can operate how much does it cost, and so on. As opposed to that, in the internet, there is no such thing. So there is not a central body, there is not a national body, there is not a international body. There is this group of organizations, and they talk to each other in this multi-stakeholder model, which means there are many stakeholders in the future of the Internet or the practice of the interconnectivity and they have to talk to each other and they cannot be like bossing each other because they all depend it's like really like interdependency relationship so the the national in international regulators and the laws and so on are described in this purple circle. Then there is the commercial vendors and the commercial operators, the ones that we think about when we, like as consumers, want to buy those services. And those are like also the tech billionaires and so on. And then the organizations whose job it is to deal with the coordination and the internet governance in a more kind of narrow sense. And at the end, there are users. So all of us, 5 billion people that are actually using the internet, they're kind of an afterthought to all of us, 5 billion people that are actually using the internet, they're kind of an afterthought to all of this, although it all exists so that the users can actually connect and talk to each other. Okay, so it is complex. So how can you take part? The other way of how this multi-stakeholder model is trying to differentiate itself from the previous ways of governance is to say that this is completely open. It's open, it is accessible, it is all transparent, and you can take part. Of course, practically it is true. You don't have to be accredited, you don't have to belong to government delegation, you only have to have an email address and you can take part in development of all these standards. At the same time, there is a huge unawareness and ignorance of the power structures that do not enable everybody to equally take part in the internet governance. Because each one of these axles of marginalization prevents people from taking part, either because of their gender or because of their citizenship status or because of the language barriers or because of the economic inequality. So all these inequalities play part in the fact that the internet governance is not as open and accessible as we would like it to be. Now, why would we like it to be open? Because we are getting older and we do need younger people to take part. We also realize that internet is not only for the techies anymore and we would like to receive the input and the contribution from the non-techies, but it's really hard because we can't talk to non-techies. It's just really a cultural barrier. And there are many other reasons, so I hope some of them will become clear. For example, abundance of acronyms. We just use a lot of acronyms. acronyms. We just use a lot of acronyms. So for example, Internet Engineering Task Force is an organization, again, not for profit, international, in a way practically quite accessible. They work, or shall I say we work, because I'm also part of it. We work within certain working groups. So for every topic, there is a working group. There are mailing lists, wikis, document repositories. Everything is accessible. You don't have to pay for it. It's all for free. And then there are physical meetings. So you can join those meetings too. Everything is recorded. You can just take part. In a similar way, so who is taking part in all of that? Well, it's engineers, people from the network operators, how can I say, scientists, and so on. Then there is RIPE, RISE IP European Européen, European IP Networks, Community of Network Operators that are implementing those open standards to actually run the network. So ISPs, telcos, banks, content providers. Again, there are working groups, mailing lists, physical meetings, virtual meetings. Everything is completely open. The same for the names. Internet Corporation for Signed Names and Numbers, ICANN. Again, working groups, maybe they call it slightly different, like special interest groups. It's a bit of a different crowd because they are trying to sell these domain names. There's a lot of marketing people and sales people and intellectual property lawyers because the names can be trademarked and so on. But again, each one of these organizations really wants to attract new people, different people. Then there is more like a dialogue on Internet governance, which is more kind of policy-based, and social scientists go there, governmental types, lawyers again. And so you can join them too. And finally, there are some of the foundations that can help you have a project that works with one of these organizations. These are just the two of them, but there are many more. So what do we need? Well, as I said, we need young blood, like vampires. We need more participation. We need different points of view. We need alternatives. And what do we offer? We offer fellowships. We offer grants, we offer support for the travel, we offer you mentoring if you join some of those events. So part of my job is to advise on increasing diversity within these technical communities. And one way that I used to like doing that was by organizing hackathons, thinking that that will be multidisciplinary and I'm going to put like designers in contact with network operators and students with software engineers and so on with with limited success. But we still do that, so if you're interested, we can talk about it later. Then the next approach is local hubs, because we have these events, but they are large-ish, expensive, you have to travel, you have to take extra time. So if you don't want to do all of that or you cannot, it's possible to have a smaller event where you can talk in your local language, don't have to travel too far, you don't need a visa, and so having these federated events, decentralized events, is in my opinion a future for the internet governance and other kind of community engagement. And yeah, there are like organizations of women that are trying to counter those old boys networks, so helping each other IETF, it is called Sisters, and you can also join that and there will be a lot of support. So these are kind of ways in which you can take part in shaping the policy that is governing the internet. But why would you do that? Because my problem with that is like bringing more canaries into the coal mine. Like, why would you want to come there if it's going to just increase the probability of the growth of the internet towards more ecocide? Maybe not, because my hope is that we can bring the concepts of climate justice into the internet governance. And so why should we do that? Because if we kill the planet there won't be any internet, there won't be any point of the internet. I just want to highlight that this has been created using an online generator for the safety signs that you can use yourself. Well, the original purpose was to create actual safety signs, but you can also hack it or make an art out of it. hack it or make an art out of it. So, crossroads again. There are many, many different ways in which we can bring more awareness to the internet governance. One of them is permacomputing. The other could be bringing the digital rights activists who are already working on the climate justice to come up with new principles for the internet governance and this was an outcome of one such workshop that we had two years ago in Berlin where we came up with the rules that it would be possible to implement in the protocols that would focus on limitations, reparations and solidarity. And so the limitations are about limiting our use of material resources, energy and data in the global north. Now, previously we heard that there are, it's kind of problematic to divide people into global north and global south, but in this context of the reparations, I think there should be kind of the technical reparations in a similar way as the climate movement is calling for the reparations being paid to those parts of the world that have been suffering and have been exploited for the benefit of us, whose internet and connectivity has been growing, while now we have to limit our use so that they can have at least basic connectivity that we are all enjoying. And finally, we should all work together in solidarity with each other, but also with the view of solidarity with the more than human inhabitants of this planet so that our internet is not going to kill all the squirrels. our internet is not going to kill all the squirrels. The second movement that is very important to cross connect with the internet governance is the degrowth movement. I have been part of it already for two years and there is a big gap between the internet governance communities and the degrowth communities because this has been seen mostly as like a political approach while within the internet governance at least the technical parts we are very allergic to to bringing the politics into it, while by now that's my goal in life, to bring the politics back to the internet governance. And so the degrowth movement has been existing for many years, there's a lot of theory and practice of it, so this is just yet another example. And the third one is rebellion. Rightly so, the young generations are pissed off that we have ruined the planet for them and I think we need to harness that energy and make it constructive so that the future of the internet is going to be less horrible than how we used it until now. So the third part of my talk is about the hippies, again referring to the beginning, the keynote where some of the hippies were very optimistic about the future of the internet and now are still working against the big tech. And on the other hand, the anarchist principles or the anarchist awareness of the power dynamics can be translated from the power dynamics within the human society to the larger power dynamics between humans and the rest of the planet. Because one of the root causes of our polar crisis, in my opinion, is this attitude or belief of the anthropocentrism, that we are superior to the more-than-human inhabitants that we share the planet with. So the solution would be that we find ourselves in a bit more modest and humble position of belonging to the cycle of life. Because we are not the only ones who can communicate over these networks that we have built. Other species can also communicate over the distance, as we have heard in previous presentations too. So a bit challenging for my Slavic pronunciation, but the wood wide web is also a thing and there are also networks within the soil of mycelia connecting trees, connecting bacteria, connecting other species. So there is multi-species communication going on and we might tap into that in a more spiritual way and in that case we will not need the Internet and we will still have a living planet. Thank you. Applause A shameless plug, there's a workshop tomorrow. So come and see how the nature is fighting back and how can we make the Internet of squirrels together. Thank you. Applause and we make the internet of squirrels together. Thank you.