Take back tech 3 was hosted this year in Atlanta, while it’s the 3rd occurrence of the conference, it was the first for me and most other RTM members who were at the conference.

flock out of Atlanta

Ahead of the conference there was a rally outside flock’s building in Atlanta, while I didn’t land early enough for that, the email that promoted the rally was a reminder that much like Seattle, my every move in Atlanta is probably being watched by a private company aligned with fascism.

That realization didn’t change much for the plan though, just a deep sigh of determination as I tell myself “at least they don’t have a socialist mayor”

Keynote

Opening had a depressing interview with Naomi Klein, not sure if it’s because I had just arrived from a long flight during which I vomited many times or because of how heavy the excerpt she read was. No “new” revelations from the talk other than the fact that tech broligarchs are concentrating power and that Gaza was one stop at the genocide train they are determined to ride.

the data-center fight

Another panel featured organizers fighting against data-centers in their community, the panel members had a mix of sarcastic, inspirational, optimistic, and entertaining tones.

Optimism was refreshing but didn’t seem to be supported by much when they would follow-on to explain it. the victories they achieved are of-course a source of pride, it is amazing to see communities come together and force the powers that be to yield to any of their demands at all.

My skepticism comes from the scale, for every win there are dozen loses. Yes people are waking up to the crisis and fighting back, but how much power, money, and influence does these tech broligarchs have still and how much more power do we need to build to stop them for succeeding and enslaving us or failing and taking down the economy with them. We seem to be in a lose-lose situation right now fighting to make sure we have a chance to rise from the ashes!

“AI” debate

One of the events features a debate between an AI abolition team, and an AI reformist team, or in other words, pro “people’s AI” team.

Mid debate my friend made a joke saying “why not also have people’s slavery, people’s police, ….” and you and I get the point. I stole the joke and told it to few people, but in a more playful style where I say “I was convinced by the arguments presented by the debate”, observe the shook or focused listening for a second then follow-up with the joke. I wonder why my friends like to pick on me *sigh*.

I’m not sure if it’s more impressive that vast majority of the attendees were cheering for the AI abolitionist arguments or that some people cheered for the “People’s AI” arguments at all. I’m also not sure if the debate is staged or if the two sides had an actual agreement, as the “People’s AI” side seemed to be cheeky and playful. They distributed free candy on people and jokingly I asked if it was a bribe, prompting them to tell everyone after me “We promise it’s just a gift not a bribe”. Once again, anybody knows why my friends like to pick on me?

While the debate was 4 rounds of alternating 3 minutes speeches without a chance for opposing teams to respond or provide a rebuttal, It was still helpful to hear some of the famous well crafted arguments. Was some of the arguments misleading? yes, like a pro-AI argument claiming LLMs are not all bad giving an example of some tech collective developing a local LLM that helped develop a plugin to block offensive content.

That is genuinely impressive, no doubt, but is that what people mean when we use the word “AI”? or are we talking about Clause’s cutting edge models sucking up all the water and energy so Peter Thiel can masturbate to the idea of machines executing his genocides? Keep doing all the cool math and engineering work you do bestie, we are talking about chat bots that can generate synthetic pornographic movies here, remember those?

Stickers and zines

One table that was purposed for registration got repurposed for free stickers, I did get myself some fun new stickers and RTM had a bunch of our own that we put there and as you can see from the picture quickly gone, perhaps it’s the beautiful design donated by our friend, or maybe the conference was full of anarchists as famously anarchists love cats.

At one point I wrote a thank you message on the back of the stickers and started handing them out as gifts to translators (did I forget to mention the conference was bi-lingual? both Spanish and English translations were available).

We also brought zines, all of which can be found on the RTM website, shared and/or printed and distributed with or without modification!

We wanted to run one of our disco-tech events but Detroit Community Tech, the organization that was the inspiration for these style of events, beat us to it and generously gave us a table to run!

Coop-cloud meetup

Zines and stickers weren’t the only thing that can pleasantly surprise you to see, one thing that even surprised us to see was fliers to the coop-cloud meetup.

At coop-cloud (a federation of tech collectives of which RTM is a member) we submitted a proposal for a workshop, one that was not accepted so while we have a bunch of us traveling to Atlanta where more members of our federation exist, namely the Movement Infrastructure Research, we all co-hosted a meetup in the city that lasted 6-10 PM on the evening of the 2nd day of the conference.

The fliers were there first day at the same table with the books, I asked everyone I know who printed them and everyone said “not me and I have no idea”, person who printed the fliers and put them there, thanks, would you satisfy my burning curiosity and message me? I will be ready to die in peace right after this.

The meetup featured two important highlights:

1. A 1v1 competition between me and 3wc during which we competed to deploy coop-cloud apps using coop-cloud tools and recipes on rented servers we got from capsul.org, we figured since we are in Atlanta we will use an Atlanta provider for the temporary machines. It should not come as a surprise that I’ve lost. An attendee told me the next day they were feeling at the edge of their seat, and I can’t be happier to hear it felt exciting.

2. A never seen before demo of coop-cloud’s new website, and that was super amazing! Coop-cloud’s community prides itself in moving slow and leaving no-one behind, but that is a true صبرت ونلت moment (ask an Egyptian friend or an Arabic speaker to explain this, if you don’t find one maybe ask on the fediverse?)

And remember, if you are in Atlanta, you must visit the Sandbox hackerspace and tell them how cool they are!

Portable network kit

One of the sessions was run by “Community Network NY”, they demonstrated their portable network kit, a go bag companion for the end times.

The kit is basically a wifi router connected to a raspberry-pi with some self hosted applications like a matrix server, a cinny web application, and an own cloud instance.

They also promoted meshtastic nodes but I wasn’t sure if that was a side-note or meant to be part of the kit.

I liked the idea, I suggested they check out merri-bek’s project lores.tech since they already use a rspberry-pi and recommended they maybe also check out coop-cloud (merri-bek tech is another fellow member!)

I noticed they are using Mikrotik’s RouteOS for the router and I wanted to say “why not openwrt” but I’ve already suggested few stuff and at this point I was afraid someone would snap and tell me “Why did you come to the workshop if you think you know it all”. My question on why not openwrt is genuine though (as in, open source > less open source) so maybe I’ll email them about it at some point.

Bud, thorn, and rose

If this is usually presented in a different order pardon me, I learned about the concept at the airport on the way back. but if you don’t know it, a bud is something I’m looking forward to, thorn is something I didn’t like, and rose is something that made me blush (I’m pretty sure my friends were teasing me and it is supposed to be something that I liked, no time to look it up, you and I are stuck not knowing for now)

My bud is the connections I made (pretty cliche, but maybe the question is to blame :p) and the energy we all collected that will power our push for a liberated technology that servers our needs instead of our self-proclaimed lords for sometime to come.

My thorn is that blusky dominated the conference and people either didn’t know about fediverse or just gave in to the popularity of blusky. why is this a thorn for me you ask? I’m maybe just brain-washed by social.coop/@cwebber blog posts (fine, here is the link if you insist I share it with you: https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/; there is a response to her by someone from blusky and a response to the response article and that’s how far I followed that thread before making a strong judgement that you can never change my mind about /s).

My other thorn was the use of zoom, surely we could contract a coop/collective like meet.coop or mayfirst.org to provide a jitsi or big blue button server. Mayfirst even has a jitsi fork that supports bi-lingual calls, so f*ck zoom really.

My rose was the bonding and collective growing experience we had, seeing people I’ve been working with online for a couple of years in person for the first time, and the beautiful picture taken of me by an event photographer (If you are my friend, you can ask me to see it in a DM, if not, better luck next life).