So, first of all, I just want to thank the organizers for doing this great job. I've done it once and it's really hard work. And it's been a little bit since I've been at DePCOMP and it's really so, so nice to be back here. For those that don't know who I am, Gabriela, people call me Biela, and I've spent about the last 10 years looking at different hacker communities. And my first project was on free and open source software with a big focus on Debian. And it kind of culminated in a book called Coding Freedom, the Ethics and Aesthetics of hacking, which is available under Creative Commons license if you haven't checked it out. I was a pretty kind of regular at DePCOMP, but for the last number of years I got lost in a wormhole. And it was a bit of a fun wormhole, it was a bit of a scary wormhole, and I feel like I've actually only gotten out of the wormhole literally about 10 days ago. And that's because I finished this book completely in about August 10th. And the wormhole was looking at anonymous and studying anonymous. And it really took a huge amount of my time and effort and emotions and compared to something like Debian was a much, much tougher puzzle to crack. And the talk I'm giving today is primarily about anonymous, and you may be wondering what does anonymous have to do with Debian or free software. And at one level it kind of has nothing to do with these, but at another level it actually does have a lot to do with free software and hacker politics and also the questions of access and openness. And I wasn't really planning on giving a talk in part because I was exhausted while I was traveling through this wormhole for three years, but some folks suggested that since I went to this other galaxy and I've emerged back that I should give a talk about it. And what I'm going to do today is focus quite a bit on anonymous, but I'm going to try to make some connections between them and open source and also contextualize anonymous within the sort of flourishing of hacker politics that we've seen in the last couple of years. My talk has a warning. We're entering a politically incorrect zone. All personnel entering the premises will encounter a thing called freedom of speech. And in fact, anonymous is quite known for their offensive speech. And I will admit that anonymous will be violating the code of conduct. Because of their offensive speech, I think that they would be very happy to hear that they are violating the code of conduct. If you are concerned with adult language or expletives, and this is a problem, you might want to leave. I don't actually think it's going to be too much of a problem, but I think it's important to mention it at the start of the talk. So the talk is divided into three parts. How is it that anonymous turned to activism? It's a very interesting story. A second part, which is about their sociology, their politics, their political significance. And then finally, I'm going to get to weapons of the geek and talk about the broader milieu. But to start, we're going to start with a question of an accident and the accident. Because I really do think that anonymous is a tale about a crazy aberration, perhaps one of the weirdest political accidents ever to have occurred. Now this is not unusual to anonymous only. Even free software at some level has these accidental elements. And so for example, when Richard Stallman dreamed up the idea of free software and eventually architected a legal element to free software, he didn't envision free software to be a kind of global collaborative project, and it was Linus Torvalds who accidentally initiated that, right? So these are pretty common things in the history of politics. But as we'll see in a moment, I think the accident was really on overdrive with anonymous. A good place to start is in 2007. Fox News featured anonymous one evening in a general news segment, and they called anonymous hackers on steroids, a bit hyperbolic. And then they also called them the internet hate machine as well, which was a term that anonymous kind of embraced, somewhat ironically, but not entirely ironically either. The question is, was Fox News being just colorful? Were they exaggerating as Fox News often does, right? Well, yes and no. Fox News was reporting on anonymous because at the time in 2007, anonymous was purely a kind of trolling outfit. They were really well known for causing discordia, for choosing targets to humiliate them, and a lot of the activity came out of 4chan.org, and if you haven't been there, please enter at your own risk. And this trolling activity was done for the lulls, for the laughter, to take pleasure in the suffering of others, and anonymous was only known for this activity. Now as an academic, I strive for some precision in my definitions and actually think that one definition provided by anonymous as to what trolling is really captures the spirit of trolling, and that's ultra-coordinated motherfuckery. So that's what they were doing from about 2004, pretty much until 2008. So one example of one of their trolling raids was done against Habbo Hotel. Habbo Hotel is a social networking site that is popular in Finland among the youth, apparently, and anonymous once engaged in a trolling raid where they created a bunch of avatars where everyone was African American with afros and suits, and they blocked access to the pool because the pool had aids and fail. And this is classically extremely offensive in what anonymous did. This was in 2006. Now what's interesting actually about the Habbo Hotel raids was there was actually a slight political sensibility. There were rumors that the moderators in Habbo Hotel were blocking avatars if they were dark, so they were using very offensive means to protest Habbo Hotel, but it was primarily about trolling. So now let's fast forward to today, literally today, last week, when anonymous is now a name used primarily to instigate revolution, protest around the world. And in order for me, I'd like to actually show you an example related to one of their most recent operations, which relates to Operation Ferguson in Ferguson, Missouri. And this operation concerns a young African American man, Mike Brown, who was shot six times by a police officer. And anonymous swooped in, and they do what they do now, which is engage in distributed denial, service attacks, and hacking. But they're also very well known for helping to organize protests and create videos to kind of raise political awareness and consciousness. So let me now play about one minute of a video that they created for Operation Ferguson. You know, within 24 hours of Robin Williams' death, we knew more about what happened than we've learned in four days since the very public shooting of Mike Brown. There it goes there, now firing on to the crowd. He just said to me on air, media do not pass us, you're getting mace next time you pass us. They're threatening to mace you. Yes. Media do not pass us, you're getting mace next time you pass us. But your guess is pretty, is pretty thick. Greetings, citizens of the United States. We are anonymous in recent light of the situation in Ferguson, Missouri, where the People's Right to Protest has been usurped by an illegal curfew and the deployment of the National Guard. We're committed to stand hand in hand with the people in Ferguson, where peaceful protesters have been arrested, journalists threatened and the Right to Protest criminalized. Using jammers to disrupt communication of live streamers, letting clumb rule the streets like dictators in the Middle East to hurt people, no fly zone, in a word a military force, will not ensure peace and justice in Ferguson. Jane Nixon, this is not democracy. This may be your right, but not your right to fight us, and that's what my the dosage of online and offline protest will continue. So that's pretty remarkable, I think, to go from these, you know, extremely offensive trolls that are all about pranking to this, which is about protest and political awareness. And this is just one example of over 200 operations that Anonymous has been involved in in the last number of years. So for example, they were involved in the Arab Spring, they were one of the first kind of outside groups to report on Tunisia in January 2011, shuttling and gophering videos out of the country to the Western media. They were an informal protest, or I mean public relations wing for the Occupy movement. And Anonymous is quite well known to be triggered into action when it comes to any sort of intranet issue or censorship issue. So for example, they were quite involved in stopping SOPA, which is about piracy and engage quite extensively. So the question is, how do these trolls pivot towards activism, right? And one of the fascinating things is that it really has a lot to do with Tom Cruise. We have Tom Cruise to thank for Anonymous. And what happened, and really because he believes in Zeno, that is really part of it, because really what happened was that there was this video. Who's has brought to this world, there still remains one more word on the man. Call it Tom Cruise on, Tom Cruise Scientologist. I think it's a privilege to call yourself a Scientologist. It's something that you have to earn. And because Scientologist does, or she has the ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions, being Scientologist you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them. Okay, so that video was leaked by Little A. Anonymous. It was members of the Church of Scientology who were critical of the church, who got the video out. This church was meant only for internal consumption for Scientology members. It spread like wildfire. And news establishments like Gawker published the video. And Scientology is known for its very litigious nature. And so they got out there, they got out their lawyers and their lawyers threatened websites like Gawker with lawsuits. And once they did that, Anonymous, the trolling outfits like, hey, what a perfect target.  And to this day, it's probably their mothership trolling raid. I mean, basically they DDoS'd every website related to Scientology. They sent hundreds of pizzas to Scientology churches across the country. They pranked the Dianetics hotline. They scanned their, you know, butts and then sent faxes of their butts to churches. These sorts of things. They had a great time doing it. And as part of this trolling raid, they created a video. And the video was done for the sake of the lulls. And it was a very important video. And now I want to show you leaders of Scientology. We are anonymous over the years. We have been watching you, your campaigns of misinformation, your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature. All of these things have caught right with the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation. The extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed for the good of your followers or the good of mankind and for our own enjoyment. We shall proceed to expel you from the internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. I recognize you as serious opponents. Okay, so this video also took off. It was like wildfire. And the interesting thing is that within Anonymous, it helps spur a debate. And the debate was, shall we stay faithful to our madcap roots and continue to be these gnarly internet trolls or should we actually earnestly protest the Church of Scientology? I mean this is truly a debate that started to happen after this video and after some critics of the Church also said, hey, you guys are kind of powerful. Why don't you jump aboard the ship of kind of protest and activism? Well, they made a decision. And the decision came in the form of a global day of protest on February 10th, 2008, where over 7,000 geeks and nerds showed up across 127 cities in front of Scientology churches and protested. And it was really interesting. I went to the protest in New York City and it was pretty clear that, first of all, a lot of these internet nerds came from 4chan and 4chan truly is kind of anonymous and they just wanted to meet other kind of people from 4chan. But on the other hand, what also happened was that the media validation that they got, as well as just the feeling of empowerment when you kind of hit the street, was enough to constitute a new activist project, a long-term activist project. And it went by the name of Operation Chenology. And this was the kind of name of the anonymous operation that started to earnestly target the Church of Scientology and people from anonymous every month started to protest the Church. Now it's time for a slight detour. How is it that I kind of got involved, right? These things were happening. But why was it that it caught my attention? Well, I'm going to confess, I myself have had a relationship with Zinu. And it happened in 2007 when I ended up at the University of Alberta for a postdoc. And I found out that the largest Scientology archives in the world are housed in this university.  Because during my research with free and open source software hackers, a number of people had told me that they were involved in protesting the Church in the 1990s and that they had released secret Church documents. And that, in fact, the very issues I was interested in, copyright and trademark, were actually explored because of the battles that occurred in what is humorously referred to as Internet versus Scientology. And there was a very popular Usenet group in the 1990s that circulated secret Church documents and Scientology went after its critics in a very kind of hardcore fashion. And here I was at the University of Alberta and I was studying these early battles. But I was actually quite secretive about the project because, you know, Scientology is and was a little bit creepy and they went after academics and journalists. And at the time what I found so interesting when I was doing the project wasn't simply the fact that Scientology went after its critics, but as an anthropologist I was interested in the fact that Scientology seemed to be the perfect nemesis for the geek and hacker world. It was like Scientology was the evil doppelganger of the hacker world. Now I'm going to now offer you one tiny morsel from Scientology that I think will prove very immediately what I mean by this. Hackers have a very particular relationship to science and technology and Scientology is a religion about science and technology and a relationship to technology could not be more different than the way that hackers treat technology. So I'm going to show you a document called Keeping Scientology Working which one might say condenses again the view that Scientology takes on technology. So Keeping Scientology Working consists of getting the correct technology applied, consists of having the correct technology, knowing the technology, knowing it is correct, teaching correctly the correct technology, applying the technology, seeing that the technology is correctly applied, hammering out the existence of incorrect technology, knocking out incorrect applications, closing the door on any possibility of incorrect technology, and closing the door on incorrect application. And this is done with no irony whatsoever, right? This is the truth. And so what was really fascinating to me was the way that geeks and hackers in the 90s had found their perfect nemesis and so when Anonymous came into being, I was like, oh, this is like proves my thesis that once Scientology goes after this population, there is this true enjoyment in protesting your nemesis. So I decided to start following Anonymous. I was also really just intrigued by that transformation from these trolls that were living in the kind of underbelly, the underworld of the internet, and that they decided to sail on the ship of activism. So let's now fast forward to 2010. This is April 2010 where the kind of very famous hacker institution that was involved in politics was not Anonymous. It was WikiLeaks at this time. And WikiLeaks released Collateral Murder. It was provided by Chelsea Manning. And for those that don't know what Collateral Murder is, it was a U.S. military video that, in fact, the Reuters news organization was trying to get access to. They had requested it through a Freedom of Information Act and they could not get it. And the reason why they wanted it was this video shows U.S. soldiers gunning down a couple of journalists and children. And it shows the cold-blooded pathological reality of war that tends not to be shown anymore in our news organization. And it really caused quite a bit of controversy and it was something that really put hackers on the political map. At this time, Anonymous was geopolitically insignificant. Now let's now go to the fall of 2010, September. There was something by the name of Anon Ops, which eventually became an IRC server. And what happened was, Chenology was still protesting the church of Scientology. There was still some trolling under the name of Anonymous. But a new wing, a new node, came into being. And what was interesting about this new node was, first of all, it wanted to defend file sharing and piracy. That became its issue of choice. But the more significant innovation was that they started to use digital direct action in the form of hacking and distributed denial service attacks to make their political points. These were tactics that were dropped by Chenology. Chenology really stayed within the legal domain. Now, how they came into being was also very much like that accident I just told you about. And I don't have time to go into the details, but I do go into it in my book. But very soon after the Constitution of Anon Ops, they come to intersect with WikiLeaks. And it has to do with Cablegate. So Cablegate is when WikiLeaks releases diplomatic cables, again, provided by Chelsea Manning, it really causes this huge firestorm. The U.S. government pressures financial organizations like MasterCard and PayPal to block WikiLeaks. It was known as the banking blockade. Amazon also pulled the plug on services. An anonymous Anon Ops, this new wing, comes in support of WikiLeaks and basically initiates the largest distributed denial service protest in the history of the web. So freedom of expression is priceless for everything else, there's MasterCard, right? And what is really amazing about this moment, there's a couple of things. First of all, it was also a bit of an accident. I'll tell you what it was very briefly. Anon Ops was only going to mirror WikiLeaks like many other geeks and organizations were doing. But someone went ahead and didost PayPal. They probably had access to a botnet, they did it. And then someone in the secret cabal, because there's many, but many cabals in Anonymous, decides to claim that DDoS as Anon Ops. And so he went to a blogger and said, that was us, let the world know that that was us. And then this guy goes back to the little cabal who actually makes decisions through consensus and everyone is livid, they're going to shred him to pieces. They're like, that wasn't us, we did not make this decision, we're just mirroring WikiLeaks. And then this savvy, clever person said, hey, that ship was sailing, I wanted to jump on that ship, come on, the media's all over this, let's just say it was us. And then finally they're like, yeah, let's say it was us. And then they decide to claim it their own and also do a lot more DDoSing, right? Again, imagine if that had never happened. And this was quite significant because this detached Anonymous from questions of file sharing. Also what was quite interesting was that the DDoS was really only made possible by very cheap botnets that these hackers were renting or had control of. But thousands of people were angered at this blockade. And so thousands of people also joined this IRC channel, there was 7,000 people on one channel, that's a lot of people. There was over 100,000 people who downloaded low-orban ion cannon, which was a tool that you can use to contribute to the DDoS. It wasn't necessary and a lot of people got in a lot of trouble for using it, but it showed or made palpable the kind of widespread discontent that people had with what the government and corporations had done. It was after this that things got really interesting with Anonymous. First of all, this was the architecture that Anonymous took. It began to look like a Hydra. They were competing political nodes with different political cultures. There were regional nodes in Italy, in India popping up. It really became a complex geography. And then the other interesting element was that Anonymous became Anonymous everywhere. This was the time where along with WikiLeaks they got involved in Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Venezuela. It was unbelievable the fountain of activity that was coming out of Anonymous. And following them basically became my life 24, well not 24 hours a day, but when I was awake and thankfully I was on sabbatical that year, otherwise my teaching would have suffered quite a bit. So then just very briefly, you know, Anonymous mutates a lot. It changes. And two of the big changes were in May of 2011 a number of the hackers who did a lot of the political technical work decided to break away and form a group called LULSEC. And the reason why they broke away was Anonymous had become so associated with activism that if they did hacking that didn't have a political purpose people in Anonymous would get upset. So they decided to break away with their own little group where they would hack for the LULSEC, for the fun of it.  And it was interesting because even though many of the hacks had no overt political purpose, they were enacting a politics of transgression. They were also demonstrating to the world the crappy state of internet security. And they were a little bit like a performance troop as well. They disbanded at the end of June. And then soon after through some leftover members created the group Antisec, which unlike LULSEC became a political, a militant hacker group. Militant in the sense that on Fridays they would try to target the governments, for example.  On Mondays it was, you know, Monday military meltdowns, right? Like they were really just trying to target governments and security firms. And they really went on an unbelievable hacking spree. Now I can't go into detail about all the operations under the banner of anonymous or LULSEC or Antisec, but to give you a flavor of what anonymous does and how it does it, I would like to just go in depth for a second in one operation that I think is representative of the different tactics that anonymous uses in its operation BART from August 2011.  And so they were protesting Bay Area Rapid Transit, sorry. And they were protesting the killing of Charles Hill, the local activists, and the Bay Area Transit was going to shut off cell phone access for the second protest in the hopes of quelling protests. Anonymous is like, oh, censorship, we're going to get involved. A small team called the cabin crew initiates it. AnonOps gets quite involved. Like they often do, what they do is engage in an organized street protest. This actually is not from the first protest. This is the year anniversary, but I just like the picture. And it's also paying homage to another man who had been killed before Charles Hill. But they also, some people took the initiative, oh, this was also during the protests and I guess the point I was going to make with this is that though many of their tactics are legal, they like to retain their abrasive screw you edge. And I think that this is a perfect example of that. So along with protests, some individuals decide to hack into the Bay Area Rapid Transit websites and they release customer data, customers that had nothing to do with the police brutality. And this of course causes enormous controversy inside and outside of Anonymous because generally let's just say information is procured through hacking that reveals corruption. Most people Anonymous are like down for that. If hacking has collateral damage, there's a few people who decide to move forward with it for the purposes of media attention. This lands them literally on CNN, but this act initiated a press release from Anonymous that Anonymous is not unanimous. And finally, if someone can do something in the classical style of trolling, they often will if they can. And in the case of Operation Bart, they were able to.  So I think that this is a really good kind of example of the way in which Anonymous integrates legal tactics, illegal tactics, morally gray tactics in one operation. This is not being necessarily coordinated by the same people, although they may be on the same IRC server. Okay, now I just want to move away from their history and talk a little bit about their kind of sociology and their political significance. I don't have time to go into this, I'm going to skip that. So initially it was quite fun to study Anonymous. It was quite pleasurable. It really is an unusual subversive subcultural world. But eventually this was definitely not a mother-cracking game. With over a hundred arrests around the world there were about two dozen people in the United States who were arrested with numerous, numerous convictions and it's so significant the number of arrests, again in North America and Europe and much of the world, that a number of the lawyers who are representing people from Anonymous have called this moment the nerd scare. That is something like the red scare where the U.S. government went after and demonized communists during the McCarthy era. And I would like to mention it's not simply just Anonymous that is targeted as part of this nerd scare. I think a great example of this is Peter Sunde who is part of the Pirate Bay, who is currently in jail in Sweden serving a year sentence simply for running the Pirate Bay. You know, with Anonymous, if you're going to have arrests it also means that there's a lot of snitches that are obviously going to be within Anonymous. And one of the most famous was this fellow here, Ekter Montseguir, who is better known as Sabu, who is part of Lulsec, who had been arrested in June in the day of his arrest. He flipped and became an informant. And he was really pivotal in catching a lot of the hackers who were arrested in the United States and the UK. Probably the most significant of all of them was Jeremy Hammond, who is currently serving a 10-year sentence for hacking many kind of American corporations. So that's obviously something that's part of the sociological landscape. But what has been interesting is that even though there's been major arrests, even though there's snitches everywhere, Anonymous has not been entirely stopped. They're quite strong and going strong. And I decided to kind of make a list of ingredients that kind of can help explain the secret sauce of Anonymous's success, and here it is. So I think part of the reason they're successful is because they have bold and recognizable Hollywood aesthetics. There is a really kind of strong participatory open thrust in Anonymous, which I'll get to. They function like an anti-brand brand. There's a lot of mystique and misinformation that helps create a drama, so people want to follow them. They land a tremendous amount of media attention. But I think the most important has to do with their unpredictability. And in fact, if there was one word, if I had to pick one word to describe Anonymous, it would definitely be Mercurio. They're changeable, volatile, fickle, flighty, erratic, animated, lively, sprightly, quick-witted. These kind of characteristics really capture what Anonymous is about. And what's interesting is that I don't think that they're random. There's many logics to Anonymous, but they're very malleable and fickle and flighty. And this kind of set of characteristics is not unique to Anonymous either. In fact, if you know about trickster lore, the trickster being figures like Coyote or Anansi the spider or Loki if you've seen Thor the Hollywood film, tricksters kind of embody these characteristics. And in my book I do a lot of kind of conceptual work of relating the trickster to Anonymous. But these characteristics are really animated by their amazing artwork, which on the one hand is functions like memes and so far as they're stock images that are just tweaked and redone so a lot of people can contribute. On the other hand, there is a kind of a lot of artistry that goes into it and their videos in particular, as we've seen, whether it's that first Scientology video or the videos that they create for their operations, are incredibly important. Just like with any kind of domain of political organizing, you have to have teamwork and that is no different in Anonymous and it comes at many different levels. So for example, Anonymous is often described as being hackers, hackers, hackers and hackers, hackers, hackers. And in fact, compared to something like Debian, actually what makes Anonymous distinctive is that many people are not hackers. Many people who show up are students and janitors, video makers, designers, like people with really different backgrounds.  It's got over one million followers and this is based and predicated on teamwork. They've had up to 25 people behind the team. There's a style guide. There's rules and consensus. They have to follow. There's big dramas. They explode. They get reconstituted, right? So that's really important. And then of course, LullSec, AntiSec, you know, there's a lot of teamwork that goes into Anonymous. Another kind of factor behind their success is their openness. They really combine and open source logic in the context of organizational obscurity or downright secrecy. And I know that this may not seem like a pair that can go together, like how can something be really open and also really secret at the same time, right? And it's because it's two different elements that are in play. So really Anonymous is this idea that cannot be controlled. It's free for anyone to take. And I think it was really embodied well when Jake Davis, who was known also as topiary, a member of LullSec, before he was arrested, he tweeted, you cannot arrest an idea. And this is the only tweet that now stands on that old account. And what this has meant is that you have Anonymous in Indonesia, in Singapore, in Canada, right? It really is this commons for anyone to take. And there are limits to who can take it. I once heard a good story from some intelligence officers who told me that jihadists actually admired Anonymous for all the media attention they got, but really they probably couldn't embrace the idea of Anonymous or Lulls, right? The cultural differences between kind of jihadist terrorists and Anonymous are too big. So it doesn't mean Anonymous can travel anywhere and everywhere, but nevertheless it has real wide appeal and can circulate. And I think the most crystallized example of this was when Polish parliamentarians who were protesting the anti-counterfeiting trade agreement, which was being considered in Europe, well they protested it and one of the ways that they protested it was by taking the Anonymous mask. Now they weren't claiming to be Anonymous, but by this time the mask had become equated with popular dissents and again was a symbol that could travel in many different parts of the world and it was because no one claims ownership over it. However, the architecture of the actual networks like Anonymous is like a maze. It's unbelievably complex. There's cabals within cabals. It makes the cabals in Debian look like child's play in comparison. I mean to give you one example, there was once a channel that I believe was called Kitten Core, which at first I thought was about cat porn, but it wasn't and there was another one called Upper Deck and they had the same exact people minus one person because at the time they were splitting bitcoins and this was a new person and they didn't trust them and so for a while you have like these two channels that are exactly the same minus one person, right? And really the only reason why I've come to know about many of the cabals is because people were arrested and they were able to talk freely in a way that they weren't able to do so before and even though I've written a really big book I feel like I've only captured like a fraction of this maze and that's what it really felt like. So now I just want to move to the ethics and politics of anonymity. You know, whenever Anonymous intervenes in a certain area of the world or operation there's an effect to their operation but at a more meta level I think Anonymous is really interesting because they came into being just at the moment where anonymity and privacy are truly going extinct and dying and possibly are going away and sometimes I really do think Anonymous is simply the kind of party at the funeral of privacy. You might as well go out having a good time if you're going to do it. But what is really fascinating is not simply that they incarnate visually this importance of privacy and anonymity but that there is an extremely robust anti-celebrity ethic that's at the heart of Anonymous and I think that there is real strong virtue in embracing opacity, illegibility, anti-celebrity in the age of celebrity and surveillance and there were many, many kind of examples in which people who were seen to kind of be acting for fame, recognition or who were self-promoting were literally kicked out, banished, chastised, thrown to the corner as a result of doing so. This was really a living ethic and I have many instances in my book and I'll just give you right now a short conversation happening between one person accusing another person who demassed of trying to seek fame and recognition and again there's going to be some strong language. So this person says, hey, E, can I say you really love attention or just some wannabe?  The other person tries to defend himself, say whatever you want, but you'd be wrong and then this person says you're like this other person on Twitter who seeks attention. And so really this was something that was really incredibly important. Now, another logic of anonymity that is alive and anonymous actually has a very long heritage and it has to do with the fact that speaking anonymously is important for the vibrancy of democratic societies and this has been enshrined in the Supreme Court. Probably my favorite example is captured in an aphorism by Oscar Wilde who says, man is least himself when he talks in his own person, give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth. But I think that there is a pretty strong sentiment as well that acting anonymously is cowardly. This is something I hear quite a bit sometimes when people are critical but I actually disagree. I think that there's good political reasons to try to protect yourself and I think at its best anonymity puts the attention on the message rather than the messenger. And in many cases when it comes to political movements whether it's in the past or it's in the present so here we have Hoffman who was one of the founders of the Yipis which is a kind of counter-cultural 1960s pranking sort of movement who was made into a celebrity leader Abby Hoffman and then there's Julian Assange who was very much kind of embraced by the media and Julian put himself in the spotlight and in both instances when the leader is tarnished his or her reputation the whole movement can be tarnished so there's real kind of powerful reasons why one might want to embrace anonymity in political acts but a final kind of element about anonymous interactions when you're doing it politically in small groups is that there's a great psychological burden when you're interacting with others very closely but you can't share much about your life with each other and in fact some of the hackers who were caught simply shared too much about their lives because they couldn't sort of hold back when you are under such intense conditions you want to talk about your past and your desires and what you've done and this is exactly what people did because it's truly hard to remain truly anonymous and the next quote I'm showing you is from a hacker who did manage to remain anonymous and he's never been caught but he was telling me one day how hard it was to bear that burden and he said the hardest is the silence when we have trouble and stress unlike family or work tensions there's no one to talk to no friends who understand the advantage is that anonymous can resurrect you can go away, come back with a new name if you don't share anything for you, he was talking to me I'll keep following Biela there's no nick changes for you and so it is definitely not necessarily easy to work under the veil so just to finish now I'm just going to talk very briefly about weapons of the geek contextualized, anonymous within this larger field very briefly this title is inspired by an anthropology book called weapons of the weak everyday forms of peasant resistance in which an anthropologist by the name of James Scott looked at interventions like minor acts of sabotage or foot dragging that on the surface do not look political, it's someone being difficult at work for example but his argument is that in the aggregate they do have political effects and that in many different peasant societies there's many different types of weapons of the weak but they all share some similar characteristics and in part inspired by the fact that in the last stage and especially the last five years there's been this unbelievable kind of flowering of hacker political activity I am really interested in what are the points of similarity and differences between let's just say the world of free and open source software radical tech collectives, the pirate party, the whistleblowers what unites hacker and geek politics and in what ways are the different modalities quite different and I was really struck by Zach's earlier talk because on the one hand I think that there are these two opposing trends on the one hand there are these very very strong forces of depoliticization in the hacker world I think also bolstered by startup culture as well but on the other hand there's also been this unbelievable flowering of kind of very direct action politics in the hacker world and so first of all just very briefly in terms of some of the similarities or not so much similarities but one way to account for the fact that we have a kind of explosion of hacker politics today has to do with the fact that courage is contagious you have these very dramatic acts such as what Chelsea Manning did giving all this information to WikiLeaks and what Julian Assange did and that literally inspired Jeremy Hammond in anonymous to return to political hacking we know probably that Edward Snowden was at least partly inspired by what came before him right so these very visible acts and this is very different from weapons of the week which are very invisible hacker politics weapons of the geek are very visible on the other hand and this visibility has allowed for this kind of courageousness to be infectious now I think there's about a half a dozen characteristics that help explain some of the different connections between something like the pirate party, the pirate bay Debian and anonymous and don't worry I'm not going to go into all six of them but I'm going to mention one of them and one element that I do see marking hacker and geek politics is different from other domains is that hackers often work on projects together and their different motivations don't get in the way of achieving a goal so people go to projects for very different reasons and additionally their offline political affiliation like are they social democrats or they're libertarian or they anarchists that tends not to matter so much for many different domains for politics whether that's Debian or anonymous and generally I think that's a really powerful thing and to give you a great example of this in action I'm going to show a very short clip from a movie on the pirate bay where each of the three kind of main people behind the pirate bay are explaining why they contribute to this project and each one of them has wildly different reasons in Swedish so there's subtitles at the bottom I actually have to escape it because it's too large okay for the media for communication I really don't care if ideology behind pirate copying is right or something or politics I do this because it's really fun to drive a big site what is the important pirate bay it democratizes a lot and creates a good way to express freedom what does it have to do with the material that the pirate bay can do for an individual to share the material even if it's based on the law it's a boring problem I think you have to discuss okay so they're under oath I just like that slide for weapons of the geek they're under oath I have no reason but to believe them the first person is interested because he wants to run a neutral political communication infrastructure and by the way Anacada is another person who's been caught up in the nerd scare he was in solitary confinement for quite a while I'm not even completely sure why he's in jail but he's someone else who's in jail the middle person is into it because it's fun and then Peter Sunday is like this is political for me and I see that in many different domains of hacker action you have that kind of extreme flexibility and malleability and I actually think that this is generally a really positive thing but there are some limits to it as well at times and this is what I'm going to I promise finish with I think it's really interesting with weapons of the weak I mean geek you have these very different domains like free software like anonymous real blowing and there's these amazing moments where they cross pollinate and I'm going to show to finish a video by Edward Snowden who basically videoed into hackers on planet earth and he basically pays massive homage to free software installment and he talks about the importance of creating technological tools for the fight against surveillance and basically he's issuing a call to arms and the question now is what free software developers what Debian is going to do in response and there seems to be a strong need to bake in security defaults that provide enhanced privacy to protect and enable things like crypto so that governments cannot so easily snoop on the population and I think that this is a really important call but one of the things is that this can't necessarily arise magically but needs to be a kind of concerted effort if not for a whole project at least a team in a project in order to make it happen where basically different motivations need to align in order to make it happen but again what I really like about this final video that I'm going to show is that different areas of hacker politics do cross pollinate do come together do speak to each other and again Snowden is a perfect example but the limits or the problem is that he's just an individual who did a tremendous amount by exposing this kind of blanket surveillance and the kind of close relationship between corporations and governments but he's very well aware that there are armies of geeks and hackers and it is they who could find who can finish the kind of job that is necessary to restore privacy if not we're definitely just going to be at the party at the funeral of anonymity and privacy so to finish I'm just going to play the video and then I realize I've gone over time so we can just wrap up but if people have any questions or comments I'll definitely be around afterwards topic and I think when we talk about whether or not the government begins going after journalists this is the real sticking point for me because in terms of my political philosophy as it relates to technology here is I would say almost Stalman-esque when we think about free software we need to think about software as a means of expressing our freedom but also defending our freedom governments rely on the same technologies we do they adopt the same standards they use the same products and this happens worldwide so the solution to that when you ask me is whether or not the United States government can manage to behave itself to restrain itself against violating the constitution against bringing suits against journalists limiting the freedom of press other governments will make different decisions and if we want to live in a better more enlightened world what we need to do is we need to remove those capabilities from the governments by enshrining our rights into our means of communications by denying them those capabilities at least at a targeted level because you can't pitch a zero day at every mobile phone or it's going to get caught it's going to get caught by a researcher it's going to end up on the Verge or Technica or any one of these other sites and there's going to be a post mortem there's going to be reused and re-purposed they're going to find it out they're going to trace it back to you but governments can still pursue their legitimate needs on a targeted basis by using those zero days only when they are the least intrusive and essential means of getting okay so he goes off a little bit but I just wanted to end there and just thank everyone for the work they do and again I'm going to be here all week so if you have any questions or comments I'm happy to engage and take them thank you very much


I am having a hair meltdown. Hi, beautiful. It's true, I'm having a hair meltdown. I am just like the rest of you. I sometimes struggle with my hair.   You know, people say hate's a strong word. I can confidently say that is the right word for this situation we're in. I don't like the length, I don't like the color. It's like pink in some spots. I don't know why. It's freaking me out. I need to fix it. And today I was supposed to film another video and then I was like, you know what? Why don't we just film me fixing my hair?  My hair might be a little crispy, but I'm gonna show you a good way of doing a bleach bath with a little damage because anything with bleach is damaging, okay?  It's the reality of life. Okay, so to fix this hair disaster, I wanna show you right now what's going on. I am actually embarrassed. I don't know how it got this bad. When I went red, it destroyed my life. This was my hair red or copper. Yeah, don't do that to yourself if you plan on being blonde again. It causes so much damage. I don't know what I was thinking. I actually wasn't thinking when I did that. So now we're in this situation where I have pink going on from that copper. I have red, I have yellow. My hair did not get too light the last time we lightened it.  We're gonna start off by lightening my roots. I don't have much roots, but I've been waiting for this moment. To do a bleach bath, I needed to wait till I have adequate amount of roots to make sure that everything processes correctly and I don't end up with like yellow roots and all this. But the first thing I recommend doing is using a Malibu clarifying treatment. This is what I'm using today to clarify my hair. This will rip out all of your toner. It's amazing. You'll see how effective these crystal gel packets are. This is by Malibu. It's called Head Lab Crystal Gel XL. Prepare a scalp and hair for future treatments. It removes buildup and eliminates oxidized minerals. So it's gonna really help clarify my hair and get whatever is going on here out. So then I'm left with a more yellow canvas, hopefully, to then do the bleach bath later and get even better results. Okay, we got water, we got the crystal gel. All we do is pop that baby in there. I actually like never measure how much water goes in here. I know. I'm sorry, Malibu, if you're watching. You guys are great. I'm sorry that I don't follow the directions. It's just a lot of reading sometimes for me. You do this and it creates this gel formula. Someone's a little happy to see me today. And then usually you're supposed to wash your hair. My hair is clean. I actually just washed it today, but I have BDSM slick and defined balm in my hair. It's fine. It'll eat through it. You want best results, clarify your hair and don't put product in it. But I am just putting it all over my head. I don't know what just got in my throat. Do that, boom, bam, boom. And then the magic happens. Make sure it's warm water too. I don't know, read the directions if you get this. I got it on. I'm gonna comb it through, hold on. Boom, I'm gonna pop a bag on here, let it sit for like five to literally 15 minutes. We'll see. And I'm gonna watch the color come out and then I'm gonna shampoo and condition and be ready for my lightening services. We have finished the Malibu treatment. As you can see, my hair is so much lighter. I didn't think it was gonna be this light. I'm so impressed. Before you do a bleach bath, try this Malibu treatment. It works very well on me. My hair is so much lighter. I feel already so much better. But we are now going to go in on the roots, get these babies nice and refreshed and then I will do the bleach bath on my ends and show you exactly how I formulate the bleach bath, how it works, why we use it, all that good stuff. So I'm gonna get Christine to do my touch-up and I'm gonna get some work done while she does it. Okay, we have finally made it to bleach bath time. Woo, that's what you all came here for and we're about to do it, baby.  Luckily I have fine hair. For some reason, fine hair just tends to like stay in the head. You would expect the opposite, but my hair doesn't snap off. Like I can do so much to it and it's fine. But today's a little risky because it's like the seventh time I've lightened my hair. Yeah, okay. Let's first get into a few things about a bleach bath before we actually get into how to mix the bleach bath because these are all important things we're about to go over. Who should do a bleach bath? Nobody, actually no, people should. This is a great process to do when you're only trying to get a small amount of artificial color out of your hair. This is great for those people with semi-permanent color in their hair or di-permanent color who are just trying to scratch the surface. Semi-permanent color only lives on the top of the hair. Whereas di-permanent color lives on top of the hair as well as a little bit inside of it. Permanent color lives inside of the hair. So it is much tougher to get out and you need that very strong lightener. Those color removers, all sorts of things in order to get that to lighten. So if you have permanent color and you're trying to lift it, maybe this might not be the thing for you. This is really for surface lightening, I feel like. Because the lightener is only on the hair for a very short amount of time, we're not getting a lot of internal lightening. It's a lot of that surface. It's going to be really harsh on the surface and strip it clean. That's always the goal of a bleach bath. So if you're somebody who has pastel pink, any pastel color really, and are just trying to remove that, this is a great process for you.  But do this all at your own risk. It's going to be much easier for a trained professional to do this rather than somebody at home, of course. I would say in general, this process usually only lifts your hair a half a shade to maximum, maximum, at full shade lighter than what you are currently. Another question you might ask is how damaging is this process? Doing a bleach bath is definitely less damaging than doing straight up bleach powder with developer. It is not far less damaging. It is by no means not damaging because I think people think this is like a way of lightening your hair without damaging it, which is not true. It's definitely still lightener and it's still going to cause dryness, ridleness, good f***ed up nests to your hair. This can be applied to the hair within a minute, which really helps make sure that everything lightens evenly and at the same time, and the process is very quick. That is where the advantage is. Because you have that shampoo in the formula, which we'll get into formulation later, that shampoo helps get that lightener on the hair very quickly and has that sudsing effect to it that helps distribute evenly to the hair very quickly. So the goal is to expose the hair to lightener for a lesser amount of time than we would have had to with a regular powder lightener and developer mixture.  I'm doing powder lightener with my 20 volume developer. You can do like a one to two part ratio, one part powder to two part developer. I tend to go for a 20 when I'm trying to do a bleach bath. You can use a 10 if you want a very, very, very gentle lift.  So if you want that extreme bleach bath, you have some extreme circumstance, you really need to get that out immediately. Maybe go there, but I would personally stick with 20. It all depends on the situation, okay? I can't examine everybody's hair to the screen or give you recommendations for every single person.  Okay, this is the vibe. See what I'm doing right now? Great, looks gorgeous. Now after you mix that formula, you're gonna add equal amounts of shampoo. So however much lightener you have, that's kinda like the rule of thumb. I mean, sometimes I add less. Basically what happens when you add the shampoo is it's diluting the formula.  So it's not gonna be as powerful. If you add less of that shampoo, you're gonna not dilute the developer as much and the developer's gonna stay strong. I sometimes do equal parts. Often I choose to just put in a big circle of shampoo in there to get that sudsing moment going on in the hair just to get that surfactant in there to help me distribute the product onto the hair quickly, effectively and evenly. Oh, I also put Olaplex in mine. I did a little, just because my hair is falling off. I mean, Olaplex is great. If you wanna use it, do it. But back to what I was saying. This part is very important. Apply this to damp hair. Because you have the surfactant in there, surfactants often react better to wet hair. I usually like towel-dried hair, very heavily towel-dried. Or if your hair's already dry, maybe just spritz it with a bit of water, but nothing dripping, sopping wet. We want to make sure that lightener has an opportunity to get inside those hair strands. And the hair strand is already filled with water. It's now time to apply to my head. As you'll see right now, in this clip, my hair is already processing. My roots are already getting lighter. And right now my roots are the same color as my ends. So now I have the opportunity to lift out the residual toner I have in my hair from the last time I colored it. And it looks terrible and I need to get rid of it.  It's gonna be gone after this. And as you can see, I already applied the bleach baths at the back of my hair, so let's do the front together. I am just going in there.  You don't need a brush. It's really pointless to me. So I'm applying it to the bottom, working my way up. I'm doing this kind of motion with my fingers and this, okay, to really get it on every single hair fiber. We want to spread the hair out. We want to move it around. We want to get so much lightener on there that the hair is completely saturated in this lightener. I want it to be nearly dripping. Okay, that is when you know you applied enough. It is all about applying a lot of lightener. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, get it in there. I'm gonna then go on the other side and do the same exact thing. And I am going to make sure I get every single hair strand, like I said before. Apply, apply, apply. This is looking great.  I'm gonna let this sit for about five to 10 minutes. I'm gonna check it in five minutes and see what's going on. Because my hair is so fragile and it's been lightened so many times, I'm gonna really try and be careful with how long I let this sit on my hair for. All right, my hair has lightened to a great pale yellow. Not really. It's like yellow bordering pale yellow. I'm getting there. I don't think my hair is ever gonna be pale yellow at this point because I had red in my hair and it's been through too much. It's important to check the integrity of the hair, which we did many times. You can just take a strand and gently pull on it. Do, do, do, do, do, tug, tug, tug, tug. If nothing is snapping, you're safe. But be careful and check the elasticity of your hair often. After this process is done, I am now shampooing my hair twice to get all that lightener out. I'm gonna condition it. I'm gonna dry it and we'll see the final results. Okay, are you ready to see the look going on right now? After the bleach bath and after everything. Thank you. Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Wait a damn second. What red? Is your hair two totally different colors on both sides? Yes. And that's because I only toned half my head. So this is how it looks raw, gorgeous. It looks so stunning, honestly. I wish it was a little lighter.  But we're not gonna push my hair to the max. We're not gonna make it fall off because I've done that before and I don't want that for me today. I actually just wanted to show you guys how I toned my hair because I didn't just use a regular toner. I literally just use one simple product to make it go from this to this, which I'm gonna show you right now. It takes me five seconds to do and it's so f***ing crazy. So to tone my hair, all I used was Super Neve Blonde Toning Leave in Foam. That's literally it. If you guys don't already know what this is, it is my brand new product. It will instantly tone your hair in a matter of seconds. And what's great about it is that it rinses right out. There's no permanent anything. If we make a mistake, we like to reverse the mistakes. And it's just easy on the go. It's an easy on the go product for when you just want your hair to look brighter, sexier, more of that silver ashy tone. This is great for people with level nine, 10. Some level eights can see benefits but mostly at nine and 10 area, which is, you can look up what that means. I'll put swatches here, nine and 10, all right? And if you're maybe like a little bit of a nine and a half like this, it'll be good for you too. I usually put this on right after the shower right before I style my hair. Doop, doop, doop, doop, doop, doop. Now we're just gonna take our foam and you'll see it is a very purple color. And I'm just gonna go like this to apply it. Now this does feel sudsy like shampoo. Do not worry, it will dry completely as if there's nothing in your hair. Hold on, I'm distracted. Look at how much has already changed my hair color. Sorry, every time I do this, I am like, what the fuck?  Like I didn't have to pop off this hard when I made this product. So I'm just gonna put enough all around to it's covering every single hair strand. Great, I'm just gonna comb it through just like this. Oh, look at that icy, icy, icy blonde. And what's great about this product is that it has bond builder built into it. So it is going to make my hair healthier, feel healthier, look healthier, be healthier inside and out. And just look all around so much more glossy and shiny. And you'll see that your style lasts so much longer against the humidity with this product in your hair.  All right, now the last step is just to blow dry it. I'm sorry, but that's wild, that's wild. I needed to stop in the middle of that blow dry to just admire the fact that they're both the same color now. It's just crazy. Okay, I'm gonna finish this off. And there we go, both sides of my hair are the same color now. This is the end result. Do I wish it was a little lighter? Yeah, you guys are gonna think I'm sick for saying that, but I'm serious, I really wish it was lighter. Now that I can't see anything, I hope you enjoyed that process. That is how you do a bleach bath among many other things I explained in today's video, but you can get really serious, great results just doing a bleach bath by itself. I'm actually happy with my hair I decided, so that's good. It's blonde enough for now. Anyways, if you like shop anything in today's video, like supernova blonde toning foam, leave it in foam. You can do so with the link right down below or go to xmodohair.com. That is all for today, guys. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to live your extra life and I'll see you next time. Bye.


All right, I'll speak.  I don't have any cool good things to show Disport myself tonight I'm Dave Weinstein. I'm a founder of a new company called aquifer and we're making some interesting new tech In the water space literally building machines that generate a couple hundred gallons of water a day So you could use this thing as a water supply for a house And it's targeted. I'm doing this in conjunction with NTU. So I kind of deal with that development deal with them lab space over at NTU and You know, I'm here because part of my design I need to find clever guys to actually work on my team folks that can actually build microcontrollers deal with You know turning compressors on and off dealing with relays dealing with sensors and basically making this stuff work So I thought what better place to come than the Hack space and try to find the hackers that are actually working on co-projects And I think I kind of replace that's what I've seen so far from you guys is actually really impressive You'll find more people in January as well, and it's actually near and us Fusion of police will be having our meet-ups to come there It's Sanctuary. Yeah, one more. So come for the meet-up. There'll be even bigger group Well, actually, you know, it's funny because I you know I was searching for you guys and I found that this was the plan here was to have five people show up And I said, okay, I'll come down So Now the stuff I'm and my background basically Silicon Valley executive that's here lives here in Singapore now It used to live in Hong Kong for four years. I love Hong Kong still I'm working on getting my PR so because I'm willing to settle here and You know, I've worked on a lot of different projects software and hardware I'm an old hardware hack from like 20 years ago And I'm hopefully at a date now So I kind of understand the stuff that you guys are working on but you know enough to say hey That wire is loose but not enough to actually do what you do, you know So if you guys have questions or want to talk to me sure talk to me That's it


Prime Minister, Ministers, Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen, every good thing has to come to an end and this is the closing plenary with our very distinguished co-chairs that have supported the summit so much and I think you have seen them working during the three days very hard, all of them. I don't think I have to present each of them. I think you already know them. These three days in South Africa here at our 28th Africa Summit has been tremendous. I think it's been a very impactful summit. Having a backdrop that is quite complicated, we have had a political situation in South Africa as you know with also demonstrations. The President addressed this in a very proactive way yesterday but we also have Africa that is filled with hope and aspirations. This is the youngest continent in the world but it is so young that if you look at the 20 youngest countries in the world, 19 of them are in South Africa. We also have a situation where Africa still sees a lot of foreign direct investments coming in. In every other part of the world we know have seen a stagnation when it comes to foreign direct investments. In Africa it's still growing and we also have growth in many economies in Africa. If you look at the 40 fastest growing emerging economies of the world, 20 of them are in Africa. But that growth is also needed and we need more growth but it has to be more sustainable except the boundaries of nature. It has to create more jobs but it also has to be more inclusive. This inclusiveness aspect has been a very important one during these days here. Let me start with one of the global CEOs that we have had here as co-chair, Alex Liu. He is the chairman and managing partner of E.T. Carney, one of those big global companies. Alex, you've been very active and we know that Africa is also faced with new technologies related to the 14th Industrial Revolution trying to cope with this. There are huge opportunities in this continent. Your company is also very active. We would love to hear what is your console because that's what you are giving. What is your console to Africa and on the new technologies and on economic growth moving forward? Well, thanks and I've appreciated being a co-chair and enjoying the passion of all of you and all of my fellow co-chairs. From a business perspective, I view Africa as a large-scale start-up. Just like East Asia was in the early 90s, including China, and just like any Silicon Valley start-up, which is matching the opportunity which we've been talking about for many years, actually, and making it come to reality. And that means, and I think, execution and urgency. It's pretty clear to me that there's a need for jobs, economic development, leveraging innovation, entrepreneurship. What I took away from many of the sessions and the side bilaterals, etc., is that we can scale up even faster. I like the Africa Growth Platform idea, which is getting funding and ideas from around the world including Alibaba and Zenith and linking them to entrepreneurs here. I like the idea and the skills discussion about how do we take these great ideas about public-private partnership and mapping them to the jobs of the future. I heard a great story about drone technology being used for agro tech here, pioneered here, and then now being exported to the United States. So if you get all those types of ideas and get them to fruition, there could be a good potential. So the theme is for business investors, foreign and here is how can we use the 4IR technologies to leapfrog, whether it's in fintech, food tech, safe and smart cities, for example, and eliminate some of the bottlenecks. There's the digital trade bottlenecks if you want to be an intraragional power. You need to go from the 19th century to the 21st century in terms of how we handle cross-border trade and customs. We talked in the session about data. If you want to create, collect and protect your data from outsiders, from people that have bad purposes and use them for your own purposes, you need a better regulatory framework. That will help investment make it easier for people to invest in the businesses of the future. So overall, my main question is one of hope but also a call to action because the real issue with 4IR technologies is will you use it in Africa to control your own destiny? Because if you don't, it's a global business, everyone's looking at Africa as an opportunity to exploit. Africa for Africans should be the opportunity to exploit inside out versus outside in. Thank you. I think it was very good. An optimistic one. That was an international CO's outlook for Africa. Sipo Petyana, Chairman of Anglo Gold. To share this outlook of Africa being like a large start-up, what is your take on the opportunities and the challenges you see for business in Africa in the coming decade? Well, thank you very much. I think that we've had very interesting conversations. Clearly, where the threats and concerns about the impact, possibly negative impact of 4IR on the African continent, I think that we talk about more often than not. The good opportunities are there and I think the conversations reflected a great deal on those. There is a digital divide. Africa is lagging behind in many respects and so we need to move with speed. The sense one gets is that the Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement is a catalyst. After all, the African continent, I know that we believe individually that our countries are big and can do these things in their own right. The moment is one where we need to have an African leadership that is Pan-Africanist that speaks and thinks in a Pan-Africanist way and more importantly acts Pan-Africanist, in that these opportunities require collective platforms so we need to soften our borders to enable easy movement of high-end skills given the fact that we don't have skills in abundance and to be able to adapt to technologies that emerge and take advantage of those, we need easy access to skills across the continent and indeed skills of Africans in the diaspora. So our borders and firm borders actually draw back on us. If you look at what happens in Europe and in other places, clearly there is a great advantage there. A Pan-Africanist approach would be one that would not have a nationalistic view in terms of industrialization and now industrial strategies. Each of us wanting to develop major beneficiation plans even though the minerals that we produce are not of a scale and quantum that would justify that so we need to possibly think about hubs where these facilities may be shared and it would have an impact in different areas. We need to think about easy movement of capital within our various regions. So if the Africa continental free trade area enables those kinds of things, it would assist. We need to enable movement and growth of small and medium enterprises because as we heard here in various exchanges, this is one of the most effective platforms for inclusive growth and small and medium enterprises that are capable of also moving across the different countries. So if this Africa continental free trade area is to be a true catalyst, we need to build around it an enabling regime that the African leadership in different countries has to do. By the way, I'm talking about an African leadership adopting this approach and I'm not just addressing myself to governments, but I'm addressing myself to business, to civil society, to trade unions, et cetera, et cetera. The era of protectionists and narrow nationalistic approach is a major drawback for the African continent. So we need to take a different view. Thank you. I want to pick up on this African free trade agreement as a catalyst and enabler. Arancha Gonzalez, LIA Executive Director International Trade Centre. We also heard this question about softening borders, the potential of this free trade agreement. I think trade in Africa amounts only to 17% of all experts in Africa in Asia. Asian export adds up to 50% of all the export from Asian countries. So there is a huge scope. Is it a trade agreement that will make a difference, do you think, or is there a lot of work to be done still? No, I think you're absolutely right that this trade agreement is a necessary but insufficient agreement, but it's a necessary ingredient.  The ingredients have been assembled. The cooks are at the kitchen. The guests are impatiently awaiting for this dish to be served. So the cooking should not take too long. What I heard is that the chefs, and this time the chefs are not the trade ministers. The chefs are the heads of state and government who signed the steel in Kigali, and those that were missing went to Nia May to sign it. They know that they are under pressure because the guests are getting very hungry and very impatient. Businesses are dying, especially small businesses, are dying to capitalise on the benefits of this huge market. At the moment is, as you say, the lowest in the world, but the potential is the highest in the world. Investors are desperately awaiting this continental free trade agreement because they know there are huge investment opportunities. So I think what I've seen in Cape Town in these three days is a very clear sense on governments that they need to deliver this as soon as they can. Now, as they do, I think they've also realised that they should not forget, not just to focus on the ins and outs of how you cook the dish, but also how you bring people along. And this is what we've seen in the streets out there. We have to continue with the education that trade is not a zero-sum game. It's not an I win, you lose. That this can be made win-win. And we have to insist in this education to the citizens so that we don't see a bit of the reaction that some would fear from opening markets. Second good message that I heard, Borga, is around electronic commerce, where there is, as a result of this, an action plan that has been put together. An action plan that, in my view, can synergise efforts at the continental level in Africa to unlock the potential of electronic commerce, but synergise this with what is happening in the World Trade Organisation, where a big negotiation is also ongoing on electronic commerce. And let me tell you, 76 countries are participating in that negotiation, and only four African countries are there. US is there, EU is there, China is there, Japan is there, only four African countries. So please, I think there is a better understanding on the need to synergise the two, continental and global. Wow. You, by the way, reminded me that I haven't had lunch, but... Get ready. Yeah. But there is no such thing as a free lunch. So we have to work a bit more. Andrea Hoffman is Vice Chairman of ROCH, and also a member of the Board of Trustees of the World Economic Forum. I know that you have a big heart also for nature, Andrea, and after this I know that you're heading to Rwanda, that also has a lot of biodiversity. So did nature have the space at this summit that you expected? Well, thank you very much for the question, Morgan. Heart, it's not a question of heart, it's a question of... Closer to the mic. Yes. Heart, it's not a question of heart, it's a question of head. You know, if I look at Africa, and if I look at the particularism of Africa, of course we need, we are the world economic forum, we need to talk about job creation, we need to talk about industrialization, we need to talk about growth. But the particularity of Africa, the particularism of the African culture is this overwhelming nature that surrounds you. So the idea, and I've had the opportunity to discuss that with a number of you over the last three days, the idea that the development model of the less developed part of the African continent all has to do with replicating what has been done somewhere else so culturally there is something much more powerful here and that nature has an opportunity to give you something that we have not anymore, that we have lost. And I think it is extraordinarily important to understand that nature is not something that stops you to develop but that it is an opportunity for development. In fact, I've been hearing in different meetings it's a trillion dollar opportunity for investment. If you look at infrastructure, as long as the infrastructure is green and treats nature with respect, you will be able to achieve better results than what we achieve in other places by treating it as an aid to development and not as an impediment to development.  There is a growth model which can be participative and there is leadership that Africa can show to the rest of the world. I urge the participants to this forum to think about how they can make their business more nature friendly and not just because nature is beautiful but because nature is the thing that supports our life on Earth. David Attenborough at the last meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos talked about maintaining the life system support on Earth and that is very, very real feeling. So we will bring the theme again to Davos in six months' time but in the meantime I have this vision of a strong culturally driven Africa who could help us to give nature the position truly deserves. Thank you and I think this is a nice bridge over to Alan Aglar, Chief Executive Officer of the END Fund. This collaboration between philanthropic organizations and civil society and possibly also business can make a huge difference also to meet the sustainable development goals and all this. Reflections from your side after three days here. Well first of all this has been an amazing three days and it has been a personal honor to serve for the first time as a co-chair and I'm thinking about cooks coming together in a kitchen, as Aron just said we all came together a few days ago and most of us didn't know each other and I find that over the course of three days I have done and feel like observed what WEF does best which is weave together a community in a deeper way and I find myself passionate about disease elimination and I've seen amazing discussions about how philanthropy and civil society can work together in a different way but I've also been telling people about Anglo-Gold social impact and I've also been pitching the South African government about what welcome is doing on mental health. I feel like I've never knew so much about e-commerce and how to advocate for that as an issue and the opportunity to the Africa growth platform. I mean all of us have gone deeper with issues that we're challenging with and I see that across this whole community and to me it's a reminder of we can all do more we can all actually have an influence outside of our own sector we need platforms like this to integrate and communicate and to get really tangible about what does that look like and what are the next steps and what's actionable. I can't help but see Elsie here in the front row and thank her so much for her vision with this I remember four years ago we were here in Cape Town and Elsie stood on this stage and talked about what I feel as well there are so many challenges to getting this work done it's hard for all of us personally the sacrifices that we make but also the opportunities that we have and she laid out all of these challenges and she said to everyone but I'm going to do it anyway I'm going to do it anyway and I think that was something that I took home and I continue to remember from four years ago like what are those things that feel hard right now but we know are needed that they're shouting about in the streets that we feel in our own heart and I just feel that same call after this meeting like we can all do more and we can do more not only for pushing new models of how we work together but across all these sectors so it's just a huge honour Thank you so much the honour was ours Jeremy Farer, director of Welcome Trust your contribution to this continent is vast and I know the work you've done in the area of vaccines but you are also involved in so many projects so it was great to have you here as a co-chair and I guess you have reflected on what other co-chairs have said and also your vision for moving forward in Africa Yeah, thanks very much and just one piece of advice to future co-chairs always try and not end up as the last commentary on the table because otherwise you're left with very little to say and only an agreement with what others have said One of the joys of being here for the last three days though has been to be able to try and forget for a little bit the horrors of Brexit and Brexit has hardly come up as a conversation but I think there are potentially important things to learn from Brexit and I'm not going to comment on countries across the Atlantic I'll stick to the country I come from and that is, as we've heard from my other co-chairs we are at a time of remarkable progress in so many ways but there is no doubt that we also face some huge challenges climate change, the coming of drug resistance epidemics in the health arena the non-communicable diseases but perhaps the biggest one of all even in my view bigger than climate change is inequality and if we go through the fourth industrial revolution which WEF has been so brilliant at pushing forward and we don't learn some of the lessons from the first three and how we did leave parts of society behind or outside the progress that can be made it doesn't matter what the elites that everybody in this room is part of design or think about but if we don't bring society and the community with us as part of the development of that future then I'm afraid it will end up in similar tensions that the first, the second and the third industrial revolutions had and from my background as a doctor, as a scientist the ability to address some of our great challenges through science and innovation in the public and the private sector is almost unprecedented in human history but we have to act, we have to see the urgency and we have to ensure that we don't leave society outside the room but is part of it because without them we won't be able to achieve the progress that's possible Thank you, I think your intervention showed that there were still a lot to cover I don't have a chance to come back I would like to go back to Sipo Pitjana the chairman of Anglo two things I would like you to comment on one is on the question that Jeremy know just mentioned about inequalities how to create necessary economic growth that is a prerequisite when you have all these young people but also making sure that that growth is more inclusive how is that, how to combine those two things that's one question the other one is this pan-Africanist vision and action and approach that you're asking for you see leaders in Africa today that are committed to this because it's really about leadership so those two questions and you have one and a half minutes well thank you very much I think that the very Africa approach but the rhetoric tends to be nationalistic as well I want the following things for my country I want the following things for my country and the problem of course is that more often than not there isn't sufficient scale and that's keeping us backwards so all I'm saying is that let's build on the underlying sentiment of strong pan-Africanism shouldn't we be talking about buying African shouldn't we be talking about protection of investments promotion and protection of investments of Africans in different African economies so that the scourge of what we saw in xenophobic attacks of small businesses in Johannesburg and in Quasulunatal should be frowned upon not only by people in this room but by the African continent in its entirety because to the extent that we don't have that embraced by the entirety of societies where we are it's a drawback so that's the point that I'm making in respect of that so it's very very important the idea that business comes into I'm talking about big business now particularly multinational companies that you go into various jurisdictions on the African continent to make a quick buck and dash off is an outdated model of business engagement business has to define itself as a partner with the African countries in the pursuit of the agenda 2063 which is an agenda of the African continent in ensuring that sustainable development goals are realized in raising issues that could make it more possible for the African countries to achieve potential that all of us talk to and that the nature and the relation and the structuring of the relationships between business, particularly business and governments is a sustainable one we've had and participated in conversations around the role of business in post-conflict sustaining of peace and business must have a role there where do demobilized combatants lend up they must be afforded job opportunities they must be trained they must be enabled to be entrepreneurs businesses must not be corrupt and fund illicit activities that end up propping up wars so all of these things suggest that to the extent that business is outside of this conversation it will be a force for the destruction of the continent when we can turn it into a positive force for the development of the continent thank you Andra Hoffman you were noting very actively when it was mentioned that business as a partner business has to be a partner also with African development we have two schools here we have the school that business has also a broader responsibility as also the World Economic Forum was founded on and another school saying that business of business is business so for Roshan and your company Vice Chairman I guess you have also a clear vision for taking broad responsibilities So the statement that made me not vigorously is the one who said you don't make a quick buck and you're in a way you really need to build this partnership and to come back to this notion of long-term thinking is absolutely essential for corporations the aim of corporations is not just to make money the aim of corporations is to serve the community and I can see that in Africa this would be a particularly relevant thing if you want to create the prosperity which is going to solve some of the issues we've been discussing here i.e. health and hunger you will need to make sure that there is a long-term thinking into the way business is conducted and that's I'm afraid to say it hasn't been the case in the past and that's one of the reasons why I would like to sort of propose this model of nature based economy because nature is something that is going to be staying as long as we need it nature enhancing economy is what I would really see as a model in agriculture in particular we can with the help of new technologies increase the amount of efficacy of farming and the better use of water and better use of resources allocation in the whole farming construction we spend a lot of time saying nature should be able to pay its keep if we keep it it's because it actually pays for itself and the way to do this normally is to talk about tourism tourism and of any definitions but tourism although it's an important contributor will never be sufficient we need to find other ways of the fourth industrial revolution has a way to deal with that and I hope that there will be a number of investments of that nature being done around us the simple message is this one business can also be a long-term partner business is not only there for exploiting taking what is here and run away business is here for the long term and in particular SMEs so I very much welcome your remarks and again I had this discussion with a number of you and I know that it is a feeling that is growing and I need to really believe in it and I'm so glad to hear that Thank you, Andra it's tempting then to turn to you Alex some people talk about like hard-nosed American CEOs but we saw also that the US business round table came out on this topic Andra was just saying no business needs to be a long-term partner and not run away but then you also have those that say that it's too complicated business of business is business you have to make money and then you will tax them where reflections from you well certainly I mean I can't speak for all types of businesses and the like and it's great to be a private company versus a public company I personally believe and my firm believes that the definition of success has to be more than financial we have an obligation as trustees and stewards of this world and the communities we serve to have a lasting positive impact on the people that we employ the people that we could employ and influence and inspire as well as the communities that we mutually should benefit from so fully behind that approach I mean to CFO's point and I think the small and medium businesses in particular for the future and the heartbeat of any economy but particularly African economies because you have less of a reliance on sort of global export MNCs etc as for example Asia did or even Latin America so you got to make that work and I agree also with the analogy it is a meal that needs multiple chefs but they can get in the way of each other you need to find a way to be inclusive and less adversarial take away some of the stereotypes not all businesses act the same way not all communities and governments act in the same in the same way and I think there is a win-win here if we actually can share perspective so if I was a business person talking to the governments and the regulators of Africa what I would say is listen you got to start with reality we've got a lot of different countries at different starting points because Africa is 54 countries but you also have 54 different legislative frameworks on data okay the only 23 of those 54 countries actually have a legislation framework and I'm sure it's not harmonized 7 are in draft mode the others have either no data or no legislation I'm not saying that everyone needs to have it but if you want to have a free trade environment and the future and the vision in 2063 or even 2023 there needs to be a little bit more movement and more cooperation and acknowledgement that everyone needs to contribute to the success of this great continent I think Jeremy you wanted to comment okay then on Arancha on this more standards that are shared 54 different standards it's not really internal market yeah and this is exactly very clearly illustrated in the discussions on electronic commerce which at the end of the day has a lot to do with for example data protection if every country treats the issue of data protection on a purely national basis it's going to fragment not create a level playing field so what we need is solutions that will help us build a level playing field below the national understanding that maybe the systems would be slightly different but they will be interoperable there will be ways to move with pastor rails from one system to another to benefit from this larger market there is one issue though that I wanted to come back to having listened to SIPO which is at the end of the day all these trade agreements need to be made to work for the 99% of businesses in this continent which are small and medium companies and in this small and medium companies there is a big category called women on businesses that today are not exactly in a very good position to benefit from this agreement we've heard all the issues around gender based violence and I suffice it to say that on this one I think we have to put an end to that but there are many other areas where the position of women is also not equal to that of men and this is also in the economy so supporting women entrepreneurs also take advantage from the continent of free trade agreement will be important for the solidity not just for the justice but for the solidity of the efforts of integrating trade in the continent Thank you Jeremy you were mentioning how science could also contribute to development and your partnership for example in also developing vaccines to fight pandemics has been so important and we've seen that lately also with the Ebola outbreak in DRC I think you have a strong message there could you share some of what you have done but also your aspirations in the coming year and to pay tribute to the role that you played in a previous life from Norway and pay tribute to what Norway has done for global health I wasn't fishing for that thank you and a particular individual called Tori Godal who deserves enormous credit from all of us I heard the Prime Minister of Norway describe him as the most expensive Norwegian ever but he has changed the world in terms of the vaccines that came along what we together set up along with others the Gates Foundation, Japan, Germany and other governments around the world was to try and ensure that money capital and pricing did not stop the development of innovative science when there was not going to be a market epidemics come and go you cannot rely on the sales of those vaccines there's no market incentives we're facing the same problem with the rise of drug resistance and what we created together called CEPI was an attempt to try and bring public private partnerships to bear to make vaccines for epidemic diseases and has been extraordinarily successful with the vaccines in DRC at the moment but I met this morning with what we were hearing from Alex and others a medium sized vaccine manufacturing company here in Cape Town University of Cape Town is an incredibly strong academic institution one of the best universities in the world certainly also in the continent and a spin out from there to 300 people now they're going to be too small to move through the regulatory pathway of every country on the continent and yet Africa desperately needs vaccine manufacturing capacity on the continent for Africa run by Africans providing vaccines for Africans to have it in order to do so and here was a company that struggled with short term grants and small amounts of money in order to move forward and won't be able to actually to compete with larger organizations when it comes to getting regulatory approval in every country so regulatory and trade is not just about the movement of e-commerce it's about some of the things that we need today and a regulatory environment across the continent that brought together the drug regulatory agencies would have a dramatic impact on the ability to transform some truly great science through organizations like the African Academy of Sciences into things that people need to make health better Arancha can you just fix this I mean it's what I would tell you is exactly exactly the same answer that we have on data protection on food standards, on medicine standards, on standards for mobile phones on standards for cars is if you take a purely national approach it's not going to work you need a collaborative effort and this is why multilateralism matters and this is why it matters that we nurture the multilateral organizations that give us this global level playing field wow of course the World Economic Forum is impartial and neutral but that was a very timely comment I'm thinking of you Alan this is also something that is very close to your heart health, vaccination mobilizing also the public well I'm really struck by the first comment on is it business for the sake of shareholders or is it business for social good and I just would say that's a false dichotomy and we've seen over and over working with the pharmaceutical sector it's amazing how many times I engage with the pharma sector and they say we keep the best people because of our programs on engaging in neglected diseases that's one of the things that actually helps with retention, helps with talent acquisition I think that from the mining sector it was very clear that when they saw the impact on labor productivity if they didn't deal with malaria amongst their workers they weren't going to be able to have as much profits and I think Jeremy gave such excellent example the efforts around trying to manufacture drugs, manufacture vaccines, having more proximity of production of supplies a huge amount of the health economy is goods and supplies and if more can be created on this continent I think it's an opportunity not for better health outcomes but also for growth I think we've looked at in general the health economy is about 10% or more of GDP globally and in Africa it's only 6% and that that gap represents a huge opportunity for growth and for jobs and for jobs that are more gender friendly in the sense that usually two thirds of women are employed in the health sector whereas it's more like 40% in other sectors so I just think and I ran to see if there's an amazing way of putting words but we were at dinner the other night and she was talking about how one way to look at pan-Africanism also is through the disease elimination mosquitoes don't have passports we have to work cross-border we have to work in collaboration on a regional perspective especially when vectors are traveling and changing and the impact of climate disease climate change on disease is also shifting dynamic so much huge opportunities I think looking at pan-Africanism through that lens of public health I know that the African CDC was featured here this week and I think that having more are looking at things from a systems lens and a continental lens is quite exciting and I know that from my perspective there are so many philanthropists and so many actors in civil society who want to plug into that from a real systems change level you're really good at those sound bites I have to say Aronsha mosquitoes don't have passports I think also CO2 emissions don't have passports maybe we should share that information more broadly I think it doesn't have passports either since we're in Africa and South Africa maybe let's have CEPO have the last word here on this what I think has been an excellent panel we have brilliant co-chairs this year thank you LC for making such a great selection but there's so much at stake here in Africa so we need really pan African leadership and action and CEPO you're not only an experienced businessman but you also spend a lot of your career in government so last minute are you optimistic on behalf of Africa do you think you will overcome all the challenges moving forward is this Africa the new Asia and is this Africa's century well I think that the prospects for the African continent are bright and we know what needs to be done we need leadership that is capable and has the determination to act and act collaboratively it is estimated by the way that in 2020 39% of core skills for various occupations on the African continent will have changed what does that mean in terms of how we share infrastructure across the continent to enable the digital generation that young people with the youth bulge have here which is an advantage for the African continent to connect and enable and access those skills and be pioneers innovators and a new generation that is capable of driving the change that we're talking about it means that we should improve access to educational infrastructure across the continent the idea that you must have a learning department of a particular ministry in your government and all of that and plan building schools and training centers and universities that layout of that infrastructure is going to take a long time so we need to think differently about how we use technology for e-learning online learning access world-class institutions on the continent in the world top-class facilities and institutions if we're going to indeed move with speed to access and enable young people who are yearning for these opportunities that they can see in front of them take advantage of those that's the kind of approach that we need to adopt that's the kind of approach that we need to pursue thank you again I would like to thank our distinguished co-chairs we finish with this panel we're not done because we also have a couple of other very nice things that are going to happen we're going to have some more contributions and we're also going to end with some music so please be seated we're going to rearrange a little bit but we are fast in doing that but again on behalf of the World Economic Forum and myself thank you so much for being our co-chairs and also contributing so much on the substance and I think we even had a little bit fun at the end even if we're dealing with very serious issues so thank you