So my name is Y.Senton and I want to talk to you today about why kids need to know how to hack. Why hacking is a political act and why I think hacking should be the cornerstone of a new civic education. So a lot of people don't really like the word hacking. It kind of brings up connotations of breaking into banks and stealing credit card numbers. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a certain kind of technological industriousness, a maker disposition that's tied to innovation and creativity. I define hacking and specifically being hacker literate as engaging in empowered practices that aim to reconfigure and revise existing technology via technical, social, or legal means. How is that political though? To me it's political because all technology is political. All technology is made by people. All people have politics and those politics get baked right into the technology when they design it whether they like it or not. We can see this in the tech that we use every day. Something like Wikipedia for example has values around collaboration baked right in. Something like Facebook has values around sharing personal information that are baked right in. These are political values and they are right implicit in the designs. So what a hacker understands is that technology is malleable, those designs, they're malleable. And if they don't really line up with our values, we can change them. We can move them around. The problem is that right now a lot of the wrong people get this. Hosnoumu Bark for example last year turned off the internet and Egypt and prevented people from organizing because he knew that he could do that and have power in that way. Mark Zuckerberg understands the design of Facebook might eventually get us to share every last thought we're having by default. He gets this insight implicitly in his bones. They know both of these people know and lots of other people know that you can marshal power economic or political power by hacking technology and designing it in specific ways. But I'm really hopeful too. I'm hopeful because the malleability of technology means you can hack it back when it's going in the wrong direction. Like the FTC, they recently hacked Facebook by slapping 20 years of privacy audits on Facebook in addition to other regulations for the next 20 years. It's a great thing. We need more of this kind of stuff. Hopefully because of SOPA and PIPA, the recent problematic legislation that had real potential to stifle free speech online because people started to get that the design of the internet is inextricably tied to our political and civic values and our political freedoms. I'm hopeful because SOPA and PIPA also showed people that the internet is vulnerable. Because people changing the architecture in the wrong way. So sometimes being hacker literate means hacking an existing platform like the FTC did to Facebook. But sometimes being hacker literate means actually saying don't touch my platform. Like we saw with SOPA and PIPA. This is about a literacy. It's not about doing one thing or another. Because really the internet was not an accident. All the things that we like about it, the openness, the transparency, the participatory culture. These things are by design. The early designers of the internet had political commitments that they baked in to the early structures. And the future of those structures is up for grabs. SOPA and PIPA also showed us this. And this is one of the core reasons that we need to teach our kids how to hack and how to be hacker literate. So a good friend of mine once said if you have a large group of people in front of you that you cannot let them leave the room without giving them marching orders. So here are mine. Four things. Number one, position kids as designers and makers of technology. We do a lot of this here at DML. It's a great thing. We've got to keep on doing it. The more kids design, the more they will get that politics are inextricably tied to those designs. Number two, talk with kids about the relationship between technology and values. We do this just like we do with media literacy. Have kids ask questions about what the intentions, biases, assumptions of the people that design those technologies are that they use every day. This is really important. Number three, integrate hacker literacies into digital literacies. Digital literacies are largely about empowerment through technology. Bringing hacker literacies into that fold means getting kids prepared to be empowered in relation to technology. It's an important difference and we have to focus on it. Number four, embrace the subversive nature of hacking everywhere. Have kids hack your classroom, have them hack your library space, have them hack your community center, have them get the disposition early that everything should be hacked. It's not just about technology. Because ultimately the end of the day, Simmer Papper was right. He said over 30 years ago that most of the time we have technology leading kids by the nose, the computer programming the child. He said we need to switch that, have the child programming the computer. It's 2012. I think it's time we got started. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.