Hello everybody, I'm Simone Roboutti,
I'm part of the organization of Cables of Resistance,
I'm also part of the TechWorkers Coalition.
The conference is going much better than we thought.
We sold out after a few days, without promotion,
so the interest for the conference
was already very high.
But still, the quality of the people that
showed up, the quality of the talks, the quality
of the party was much higher than we expected.
The first time we did it,
there was no previous edition,
so a lot of people committed a lot
of their time and money to show up here and attend
also to speak, like a lot of speakers
from throughout the world.
If people learn that Big Tech is bad and
then they go home, for us it's a defeat,
but we want to start building bigger alliances,
more systematic, structured, coordinated efforts.
And so some of the activities are targeting that.
It's good that a lot of organized groups showed up
rather than isolated individuals with big ideas on what to do.
So that was the impulse.
Especially for me
as a tech worker, I want a new way
to build technology, I don't just want to resist
for some time against what big tech is doing,
I want a new system that produces technology and that's why I'm involved.
But for me, I've been organizing,
in the tech sector for many years,
we understand that labor has much more leverage
over the big tech industry than people outside,
and that's my personal commitment.
I've been doing this for seven, eight years.
A lot of people think that we are all tech bros,
tech bros and tech workers are opposites.
And we're trying to push this narrative,
and for many years there was a lot of skepticism
of tech workers actually coming on board,
and now it's happening and it's so a shift,
and it must be connected to environmental struggles
or feminist struggles and so on
There's also a lot of people from the hacking scene,
which is separate, they are not really
labor oriented in general, but this is an
existing narrative shift within the hacker scene
of "Just building new technology is not going to save us, right?"
And so a lot of people are slowly
understanding, we need to move towards labor,
help labor organizations or think of the material side
of technology rather than just producing
alternative software, right?
And so that portion of the hacking scene,
which is people working in tech, in practice,
very often they are people working in tech,
showed up a lot more than we expected
because they weren't necessarily our target crowd, but a lot of them came.
We have been collecting a lot of knowledge
about what's already happening and there's
a need for at least two things:
More coordinated efforts, that is something
every leftist says, we need more networking,
The other part that we acknowledged
was missing and is still kind of missing is the narrative part
We are weak on the narrative part of like,
we are just in opposition to big tech, but
big tech is still setting the narrative.
We are against it, but they are setting the narrative.
And this doesn't work.
We need to tell people a believable story of how technology could be
that goes beyond opposition to big tech.