[Sol-]

The shape of the politics changed, though. From civil rights, questioning authority and cypherpunk, which inherently has a libertarian bent, there's now much more identity politics and social justice / grievance culture with only tenuous connections to tech.

For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI. It's a very conservative degrowth movement nowadays, all in all.

[aleph_minus_one]

> For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI.

Hacking was always against centralization and central control (and towards decentralization) - which is why any lecture celebrating the bigtech AI companies would strongly be against the whole culture.

While for various reasons AI is a controversial topic, I would say that if someone gave a great talk about how to decentrally train some AI model efficiently as some volunteer computing project, this would be perfectly fitting for the C3.

Addendum: There is an AI talk (as pointed out by wunderwuzzi23 at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46390959): https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/hub/event/detail/agentic...

[eqvinox]

> For a hacker conference, they also are pretty Luddite against new technologies like AI.

No, just this one, because it steals from almost everyone and gives to the few. Even if it seems to be somewhat failing at monetization for now, control is in the hands of a very few.

[flawn]

I am happy they are careful with new technologies, especially one like AI, and also set the right impulses. Enough non-political reasons to have that stance, especially taking in societal implications and how technology affects everyone and not just stakeholders and techbros. In a time when tech in the US is just accelerating by the top-down agenda of figures like Andreesen, Thiel & Co., that is very much needed imo.