4 AUGUST: THE FUTURE BEHIND THE COMPUTER

The morning was supposed to be taken up with an in depth talk by Professor Hamelink, Professor Boafo and their students about the relationship between the northern and the southern hemisphere as regards computer technology. They had prepared the discussion but as I reported earlier, the Kenyan telephone system in Nairobi went down the moment we wanted to start the conversation. Nevertheless, they sent us the results of their thinking via fax later, so their thoughts were embedded in the final ICATA declaration at the end of the GHP. Via Peacenet we went online anyway to discuss the relationship between the rich northern and the poor southern hemispheres, finding out how computer technology could contribute to the emancipation of people all over the world. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was a reference point in all these debates, mostly because all of the people who participated 'wanted to do good', but many of us did not know what 'doing good' implied in those days. The fact that e-mail and Internet facilitates cheap information that is hard to censor appeared to be of crucial value for people in the southern hemisphere during these debates.

Rop Gonggrijp, reporting about this session, cites a contribution from Mexico to this debate, in which a comparison was made to the introduction of the railways in Mexico early in 1914. Freedom fighters, farmers who were with Pancho Villa, had to pass the city of Empalme where the army was based, on their way to Mexico City. Travelling by train they decided to go around the city. They took 500 meters of train track, laid this in front of the train, moved the train, dismantled the track and laid it in front of the train again. Within two weeks Pancho Villa's farmers had passed the city without blood having been shed (Gonggrijp 1989, 32).

In the afternoon, while Paradiso was filled with hackers having a great time, the edit group and some other people gathered to draw up the final declaration that we wanted to launch on the networks as a result of the GHP. At that moment Gordon Pasc, a famous cybernetician, entered Paradiso. He was in town as a guest of the CICT of the University of Amsterdam, with which we collaborated, and offered to give a speech. With a huge black cape, a pipe and a plastic cup he climbed the stage of Paradiso and explained the principle of entropy to the gathered audience by blowing smoke into the plastic cup and showing how it finds a shape. Chaos is full of tensions and patterns and shapes will always evolve in the end; entropy is one of the dynamics that is responsible for this.

At four o'clock that afternoon we received a telegram announcing that all telephone lines in Paradiso would be shut down, because we had regularly used stolen NUI's. There was great excitement in the building as a result, until someone carefully looked at the telegram and saw that it was signed by P.H.Rieking. When we realized that 'phreaking' was the author of the telegram, the joke became clear. The rumour was that P.H. Rieking had hacked the telex system of the phone company. All telephone lines in Paradiso kept on working till we closed. That evening a party closed the amazing gathering, and the ICATA declaration, one of the first hacker manifestos, was sent into the world.