WORKSHOP: Riot in the Matrix - What's next?

Corporations and their applications control our identities and networks. They extract data of our sharing activities and communication to monetize it within the prism of surveillance capitalism (credit: Shoshana Zuboff). A few giant corporations and their database silos are harvesting our digital life. For the profit of a few.

In our search for privacy more and more people switch to “secure messaging apps” and various privacy-enhancing technologies. Surprisingly enough, encryption has become a new marketing argument for tech companies to keep users tied up to their products. We are living in what we could call the “mess of messengers”, having to use a handful of incompatible messaging apps every day to talk to our different networks. However, we don’t always even think that our favourite encrypted apps are actually... centralized. A single server, a single point of failure, a single team that takes decisions – centralization is not only a threat to security, it is yet another tool of alienation that takes away control over our own data and contacts. What if we risked a radical shift to bring communication infrastructures back to the users?

This workshop & conversation session brings together technical experts and Internet freedom activists to present and discuss current developments in the field of decentralized communication. Free and Open Source Software (and Hardware!) projects are at the center of attention.

"Riot in the Matrix" has its origins at Elevate 2017 when a group of decentralization- and Internet-activists came together to present fascinating developments in the field. It continued as a "tour" concept at four different Festivals as part of the We Are Europe collaboration.

The messenger "Riot" as well as the decentralized communication platform "Matrix" obviously played "some" role in terms of inspiration :) Even more interesting to be able to talk to the founders of "Matrix" and "Riot" directly. In this session.