Last weekend was Cables of Resistance, a conference I've been organizing together with 20-something other people since last September. The goal was to bring all the Berlin and German movements fighting against Big Tech in the same venue for cross-pollination, strategic coordination, and simply to discover more about each other.

For me, it was a chance to do something again in Berlin, the city where I live, after two years focusing on Tech Workers Coalition Global, which is primarily an online affair. The element of grounding and relationship-building, which underlined the conference, was for me a personal and emotional need before a political one.

I was skeptical at first: not being a Leftist, the organizing groups and the target crowd felt and still feel distant in culture, language, and identity. For a long time, I felt like a guest, suppressing this sentiment, as I often do, to pursue the organization of the conference, a necessity I agreed with.

Now that it is over, I want to look back and offer some insights that speak to the historical moment we are going through.

Let's start with some math.

Originally, we were targeting 300 participants. We booked what at the time felt like an oversized venue. We sold out all the tickets in less than a week, basically doing a single post on social media. This was months before the conference.

Wait, that's just not how it works: it was the first event for us, and possibly the first of this kind in decades in Germany. It wasn't targeting the general public, but people who were already politically active. Why was it so easy?

We had to sell more tickets. We sold more tickets. More participants coming required more volunteers, and in the end, more than 200 people took shifts to help us.

Comes the day of the event, and the venue is packed. Bodies squeezed in every hall. People lining the walls of the seminar rooms. More people show up asking to volunteer to join the event. We struggle to count who's coming in through the door. In the end, probably more than 1000 people joined us across the three days.

How many were left out? Most of my friends couldn't get a ticket, which we stopped selling because, at some point, we were afraid of endangering people. All of this with pretty much no effort to try to sell the tickets. I like to speculate that we could have sold 3000 tickets if we had made different choices.

It may sound self-congratulatory, and it is. As I said, I'm not a Leftist: I like to win, and this result is a win worth of celebration, even if just instrumental to more impactful wins. But I'm sharing these numbers because they suggest a lot more is moving than we can see. The interest in the event surprised every single person involved, including me. I believed I had a sense of the technopolitical scene: I discovered I don't.

Let me talk about the Saturday workshop. Since the program felt a bit too academic for my taste, I tried to bring something else to the table. Yeah, we know big tech is bad. Now what? Knowing things doesn't change things. Let's spice things up, I thought.

Some weeks before the conference, by chance, I met Nala at a party after a long time. We danced. We talked about Rodrigo Nunes. We talked about the conference. “What's your strategy to scale up this effort after the conference is over? What's the expected outcome? Where will you funnel the people involved?”

I didn't know.

As I said before, the conference for me was fulfilling primarily an emotional need rather than a strategic one, and I grew comfortable with the limited clarity on long-term clarity that motivated what in the end was a first event of a heterogeneous group of organizations with very different theories of change.

Fuck. I'm getting sloppier.

In the end, I managed to squeeze in a Strategic Mapping workshop of the anti-big-tech organizations in Germany. Nala would facilitate. The slot is not great: 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM, in parallel with the dinner and a couple of other sessions, and a live performance. It's the end of a long day of conferencing, and it's a Saturday evening in Berlin. Only the more motivated will come, but it's ok. “I guess max 20 people will show up, plan for that, Nala.”

Five minutes before the time of the workshop, and there are already 30 people in the room. “Simone, close the doors and let me think how to adapt the workshop.” Nala shuts down for a couple of minutes, eyes closed. “I got it”, she says.

People keep coming in. Lesson learned: if you place a sign saying “Full” on the door at an event full of Leftists, it won't achieve any effect. More people join. In the end, there will be around 60 participants in the room. Run around, grab post-its from every room in the venue, run back.

Nala replanned the workshop on the fly and gave me a master lecture on the ineffable art of the “It is what it is.” As a 3° Dan political facilitator, I was impressed by what a 6° Dan could do. I still have a long way to go. The workshop involved different exercises that culminated in the production of a collaborative map, documenting all the relevant organizations in Germany fighting against Big Tech.

The most interesting bit is that most people didn't know most of the actors and organizations that other participants were bringing up. Neither did I, despite having done similar mapping exercises before. You can see the results in the photo. Hopefully, soon the exhaustion from the conference will fade, I will regain control of my limbs, and be able to transcribe and systematize the results.

A second important insight, which was the input for the reflection I'm writing, is that when the participants were asked which actors are building the narrative we need, very few, and underwhelming, actors came up. Solarpunk and Lunarpunk were mentioned. Then Cory Doctorow. Big up for Cory, who always promotes Tech Workers Coalition, but I don't think his shoulders are broad enough to carry this burden. Where is the equivalent of Fridays For Future or Extinction Rebellion in the fight for democratic technology? There's nothing like that. Nobody is filling that ecosystemic function.

The dust still has yet to settle after the event. We have to deal with the consequences of German political repression. We haven't had a meeting yet, but we are already thinking about what comes next. It's clear this is not going to end here.

The intensification of the psycho-digital loops makes the whole society more nervous: Cables of Resistance is but an itch that got scratched.

The shakes provoked by the acceleration of Imperial collapse leave bigger and bigger cracks in the concrete, where the tendrils of a new technology probe around, looking for attachment, nourishment, and Sunlight.

We did what we did not because it was easy, but because we thought it was easy. We are going to do it again.