/documenti
Milan is calling. Hackmeeting is answering. Eleven years ago digital communities from all over Italy and Europe met at the social centre CPA Firenze Sud in Florence. Ten years ago this experience was repeated in Milan.
Since then, hackers, nerds, geeks, curious individuals, activists and the like have been meeting on a yearly basis to talk about what was going on around them, and to show through sheer facts that any device (from personal computers to media) can be hacked into something different, better and, above all, free from hierarchies and power.
This year Hackmeeting is back in Milan.
This time hackers will have to face an unrecognizable city, deaf to the cries of its inhabitants and dumb towards the problems of those who would like to live in a more humane place. Milan is a city where the only possible economy belongs to property speculation, department stores, fear and control. Mass media and glossy magazines keep trying to spice this image with some glamour. But hiding behind this are the usual intriguers hunting easy money, the sheriffs who use truncheons in the best of cases and knives in the worst, and short-sighted arrogants who see citizens as huge wallets to be exploited.
In the last two decades, Milan has been the stronghold of the Italian right-wing, the exhibition space of the world someone would like to force on us. A virtual republic based on fear, under constant control, ceaselessly spied on and patrolled, where people are stunned by a sort of do-it-yourself door-to door surveillance, and by the fiction of reality shows and TV news, two formats which are harder and harder to distinguish. Everyday Milan, Italy's flagship city, is fled by more people who want to avoid isolation and a total lack of perspectives at work, at home and in human relationships. Precariousness, security frenzies, evictions of social centres and factories, deputized citizens, racism, authoritarian violence.
When asked what a hacker is, we'll always give the same answer: a hacker is, more than ever, someone who wants to have her life in hand and change it by fighting to make it better -- through technology and politics, through culture and through an idea of concrete freedom which is the exact opposite of the logic of money boasted by the rulers (who nobody is as deluded as to consider governors anymore). A hacker is anyone who wants to free herself from the patterns of subjugation and conformity that are forced upon us by an economy that has eventually showed its fallibility.
When asked what hackers know, we'll respond by pointing at the processes that, at more than one level, vainly generate insecurity and fear.
When asked what hackers do, we'll show machines and software as well as p2p practices ranging from filesharing to open and distributed production, up to the ability to get involved, to build and to imagine an economics of abundance.
When asked what hackers want, we'll show the Babau (or "Bogey"), the image that responded to the eviction of the social centre Cox18 and of Primo Moroni's Archive, as well as to the logic of social centres deactivation which the Milanese administration is so fond of.
The Babau is a short circuit of security propaganda, an antidote against media lies, an equipment to transform the eagerness for control and repression into tools which become freer and more defying each day that passes by. Its yellow triangular eyes are our answer: an answer that demands more culture and less fear by those who consider technology as an instrument of liberation and creativity. Its grimace is a reaction to the authoritarian and racist decree called "security package" and to the attempts to change free knowledge sharing and free circulation of people into a hell of judgments and retaliations. Its many-toothed red mouth is the hacking of the world that surrounds us, displayed by our practices and by our longing for another, still possible, city.
The Babau is a mask and a suit of armour, for our fight against fear. It is our acts and our wish for a city and a world that do not kill us day after day. The Babau is reality hacking.
Hackers of the world, the time has come to appear together with the Babau in the city of Milan. In the days of the Hackmeeting, we shall metamorphose narrowness and barriers into sharing, buildings into video screens, fear into freedom, vertical into horizontal, centralization into distribution, hardware into clothes, code into enjoyment, music into short circuit. We shall give life to access points, we shall pump up bicycles, and meet people from all over the world. And most of all, we shall exchange code and humour(s). Time has come for HackMeeting 2009.
