[30C3] Hacking With Care

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Lightning conference that Emily and Baba gave at the 30C3, the 30th Chaos Communication Congress of the German CCC, in Hamburg on 28 December 2013.

Hacking (with) care is a versatile, collaborative initiative which purpose is to bring balance, embodiment, body & soul awareness and care to the hackers’ communities, living by the shared ethics of goodness for all, joyful creativity, freedom and sharing of knowledge.

Hacking (with) care explores questions relative to hackers’ psychological and physical well-being and health, and looks at how a sense of freedom in the technological realms can relate to a sense of freedom in one’s life. We seek to encourage vitality and (data)love potentialities to blossom both on and away from keyboards. We also feel we want to return the favor to those who, often behind their computers, care for all of us by engaging everyday in straining battles for freedom.


https://events.ccc.de/congress/2013/wiki/Static:Lightning_Talks

See also: http://hackingwithcare.in/

Emily:Hello. So, I am Emily and this is Baba and we are Hacking With Care. Hacking with care is a project, a collective project to care for hackers-who-care, and help them care for themselves and others. Before we go any further, we are going to stretch our tongue and face so that speaking will be easier and I suggest that you do the same with us. So, imagine a big lion, and stick the tongue out really far, open your eyes very wide, and lets go, three, two, one… alright so anytime that you have tensions in the jaws you can do that. It’s really nice for teeth-grinders, people who grind their teeth at night. And it’s really good before giving a talk. And so now Baba is ready to talk.

Baba: Hackers by definition have no limits. Their only limitation is, yet, the body. In order to survive, one has to take care of his body and organs. I must say at this point that we do not endorse the post-human clique theory. It’s mostly the opposite: Very ancient techniques can provide solution to very new problems that hackers encounter. Yoga, or traditional Chinese medecine, are solutions to usual problems, to everyday problems. By training, by doing a training routine, ten minutes every day, one can feel one’s own body. Like computers we can start the day by a boot sequence. You don’t need to be a super hero to stretch yourself. Stretching is natural.

Emily:The way that we see massage and techniques like yoga, we see them as very successful examples of peer-to-peer. You know some go back thousands of years and so it’s also an example of arts that are, free, still free, for, in the most part, free knowledge, very open protocols, so in that way we identify also with hackers’ ethics and this is the way that we practice. We want to support regeneration of resistance, that vital forces of people who engage in defense and creation of freedoms, feel good and don’t burn out doing so, so we want to share what we know about that. I wanted to tell you also, that once before giving a massage to someone, I asked him where he was feeling pain in his body, and he answered that the world was a chronic pain. In many aspects it is true, so we want, with this project, to help you, that this pain doesn’t embed in your body and so that you, so we all do what we have to do for the common good without breaking.
More exercises.

Baba:We want to show you rapidly some basic exercises that hackers can do. First of all, yoga of the eyes, because we’re always looking in front of a screen, so the yoga of the eyes is like this and we train our eyes like this. The second one is for the muscles of the arms. We can do two corners like this and it helps to strech the…

Emily: …tendons so you don’t get tendonitis from clicking all day. Another one is for the fingers.

Baba:We are making a survey and we would like to invite you to contribute to the survey. If you know some tricks, to help you every day, we would like to compile this and make a…

Emily: …we want to build a well being hack box, so we have a survey on our blog if you want to contribute with your own tricks.

Baba: …and we would like to invite you to the fourth level to the Tea House and La Quadrature where you can have a massage and some tea.

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