Five, four, okay. Okay, so we can start the morning session of the last day of AMRO 24. That was quick. I had the feeling we just barely started, and, well, that's it. I don't know. It feels weird. Anyways, I'm sure there is still a lot of time today to get to know each other and continue working and exchanging ideas. So, but yes, that's the last day. It's kind of sad. But let's leave all the tears and the desperation at the end of the day. This morning we start with more like a mellow slot. We are a bit late because yesterday there was a nightline. And yeah, but still we have presentations. I see nice and lovely people in the crowd. Great. So the program for this morning is we will hear two presentations, one from Javane, an association from Vienna that is participating also with the workshop this afternoon. Just a big heads up. There are workshops in the afternoon that still can be participated at. The list is not full, so please check the workshop and join. And then there is a second presentation from Adio Dinica, who is sitting there. And that's about click workers in the sub-saharan countries so it deals with AI and database labeling and all these topics that we have been already started discussing in the in the previous days and in the opening day and I'm but I'm really happy that there is a deal who is contributing with a specific focus from the research. Yeah, what to say? Nothing else. I'm glad to introduce one representative from Javane, who are still here in the front. Please come up on stage. Yeah, so while we're getting ready, cables everywhere. Javane means bud, so like a blossom. It's a group of artists and activists based in Vienna. And you're contributing with the work that is downstairs, the Na carpet, right? And with a video, and then you're doing the workshop in the afternoon. And I'm very, very curious to hear the presentation that you're presented, which is about the use of digital technologies in Iran, somehow like analyzing what we all know, the digital technologies they do offer people ways to connect and to do things but they become also instruments of power and control and so we swing between the two the two states I'm very happy to hear your thoughts of this thank you. Does this work? Okay. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for coming, although it's a bit early. But I hope everybody had their coffee and is ready for our session. My name is Sara Mohammadi. I'm a student myself. I study international development at the University of Vienna and I work as a journalist but most importantly I'm part of a collecting and I'm representing my collective today called Javone. Javone as David said means bad. It symbolizes a new beginning and hope after a dark chapter. And we consist of six people, and our main work is community work, art and cultural projects, and our main goal is to bring people together and to inform about people living under authoritarian rule. We found each other last year in the midst of popular uprisings in Iran, Afghanistan, and Kurdistan, and us having family and close personal connections to these lands, feeling the suffering of our people, reading social media posts after social media posts, watching horrible videos of police brutality and state brutality against protesters. We joined our forces and decided to create something with the deep pain we felt. And this is how Javaner or Little Bud was created. This is us. Today I want to share with you a narrative that intertwines technology, activism and the suppression of both as we explore the profound impact on protests worldwide. Let's start by painting a vivid picture. Imagine waking up to a text message on your phone, sent en masse by the authorities, reminding you of a mandatory hijab law. This isn't a hypothetical scenario in some dystopian fantasy. It's a reality for many women in Iran. In this picture you see a message that says, Dear citizen, respecting the hijab law and its abidance by it is necessary as any other law. And it is a text message that was sent en masse to cell phone holders by the police and to women who were caught on surveillance cameras with facial recognition tools provided by China without the mandatory hijab. So Iran's command in chief, Ahmad Reza Jordan, stressed in a June 2023 statement that the use of CCTV cameras to enforce mandatory hijab laws for women, and this is all part of a bill called the Hijab and Chastity Bill. And the enforcement of this bill is monitored through the way it's cameras with facial recognition technology. This isn't just about a piece of cloth. It's about the state's determination to silence dissident imposed control, even through the most personal of technological devices to us, namely our smartphones. devices to us, namely our smartphones. But amidst this climate of repression, there's also a flick of hope. This picture here is part of a manifesto posed by the so-called United Youth of Iran in December 2022 on an ex-formal called Twitter. This United Youth is an alliance of 30 youth groups organizing protests and strikes in various Iranian cities since mid-October of 2022 through social media platforms. And the group said its manifesto is meant to pave the grounds for dialogue and cooperation among various trade organizations, unions, political groups, and activists inside in Iran and outside. that these words, these informations that were shared, serve as a testament to this dual nature of technology, which can be an instrument both for mobilization, which we see in this picture, and the target of suppression, which we saw in the picture before. And when we look at how both protesters and authoritarian governments use technology, we see it's not just one homogeneous thing. It's a mixture of good and bad. And in this lecture, we want to explore the dual nature of technology's impact on protests and also examine its role as a tool for mobilization and suppression. as a tool for mobilization and suppression. Since the protests surrounding the presidential elections in Iran in 2009, the Internet has become a crucial tool for Iranian population to document the atrocities of the regime and share them with the outside world. Iran is one of the lowest-ranking countries in the World Press Freedom Index, concerning the freedom of press and journalists. So only state media is officially permitted there. So in this context, the Internet and social media platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, TikTok, platforms, such as Instagram, Twitter, Telegram, TikTok, serve as crucial platforms for reporting on protests and human rights violations, as well as for organizing demonstrations. Since 2014, there have been feminist online campaigns, like where women remove their head scars, protest against the regime, and film themselves doing so. However, on the other side, this newfound digital empowerment comes with a heavy price tag. Government crackdowns and severe internet restrictions aimed at silencing dissident voices. dissident voices. A young Kurdish girl was killed by the Iranian police in September 2022 for not wearing a proper hijab in Tehran. Her Kurdish hometown started an uprising which was joined by the entire Kurdish province and in the end the so-called movement reached the entire country of Iran. It was therefore not surprising that very quickly the internet access for Iranians had been severely restricted by the state in order for them not to mobilize. With platforms such as then called Twitter, WhatsApp and Instagram partially or completely being blocked. So while VPNs typically provide a workaround for this, many feared a repeat of similar situations like it happened in 2019. During that time there was an internet shutdown where there was a weeks-long complete shutdown of internet access to suppress protesters protesting against rising oil prices. So with only the national information network, a state-controlled internet being provided, human rights abuses by the regime against its own population couldn't be shared. So as a result, the protests were brutally suppressed in silence, leading to the deaths of 1,500 people. So many Iranians and Kurds, both inside and outside Iran, feared a repeat of this regime action. And they urged people living outside of Iran to continue publishing and sharing videos, photos, articles on social media about the protests. And they also encouraged the use of hashtags to help sustain the ongoing movement in Iran. use of hashtags to help sustain the ongoing movement in Iran. So what happened in 2022 was that especially the Kurdish and Iranian diaspora, which haven't had full control of the internet access, stepped up and became activists for Iran themselves. This was via sharing pictures and video of protests that people filmed and sent and uploaded under the threat of their very own lives. But this also happened via tools like Snowflake, a tool that helps circumvent internet censorship with people outside from Iran giving their internet access to Iranians to use the open internet and the snowflake tool would eventually become a symbol of resistance. And being able not only to sit at home and watch videos but really do something for people felt like you would get a little hope and a little power back, especially for diaspora people. in authoritarian contexts, which can lead to more oppression and suppression of protests, but at the same time to empowerment and can be a tool of resistance and accusation. However, what we also saw last year is with Twitter being bought by Elon Musk and eventually become an X, that one man can single-handedly and slowly destroy something that has been such an important platform for sharing news not only for Iran but also during the Shanghai protests, during the Arab Spring, also now still for Palestinian people. We saw that technology and software that is not tangible and graspable can also vanish at some point and what we want to do today and what we want to invite you to is to see how we turn this fear of vanishment into an art project on June 19, 2023, the hashtag Na, meaning no in English, went viral among Iranians on Twitter as an expression of solidarity with students. This was following a peaceful sit-in protest of students at an art university in Tehran being attacked by the state security forces and a group of university students released a statement which I'm going to quickly read to you. We who have become us for almost a year now have nothing to say to you except the word no. After your renewed emphasis of gender apartheid and the obligation to attend the university in a job, after shutting off the water and using violence against our friends who were only staging a sit-in for equality in the campus, we reiterate that we will not turn back. This sky is still full of stars, even after pulling some of them to the ground on a daily basis. The wound that opened wide with the death of Gina Amini is still bleeding, and we are standing hand in hand for freedom. So we, Javanet, took this know and this fluctuary hashtag to create an art project that you can visit at the exhibition including film documenting the making of process of the project and also including people saying no to topics they find important. And this art project aims to demonstrate the solidarity among individuals affected by authoritarianism. And we dedicate this art project to all those who say no to all forms of oppression, division, colonialism, racism, and anti-Semitism. And yes, to change, revolution, international solidarity, and above all, freedom and collective liberation. Our art project also aims to materialize the wave of resistance we witness through our phones on a daily basis as daily practices of disobedience. So we invite you to see our art project, to watch a short film, and also very importantly to join us in the afternoon at 4 o'clock at Willifred for a workshop session where we take our art project as an example and want to discuss how digital trends and hashtags can be taken up and materialized and thereby gained permanence and importance and most importantly to create something together. Thank you. Thank you very, very, very, very much for the presentation. I'm quite sure there are questions. So if you... Is there somebody with a burning question in the crowd? So maybe I have a question to break the ice. I wanted to ask you, to the whole group, how you work together and how you keep connected with people in Iran or in the other countries where the group is from and how that works and how do you support people who are there in their activities? We have personal connections to Iran, namely our family and friends. The communication has been very, very difficult since the last year, I would say. So connecting to people inside the country, especially in a protest context and in a regime critical context is something that we cannot do. And if we do it, we have to do it anonymously. What we are doing is we are, for example, connected to a protest camp in front of the United Nations in Vienna, where there are also people from Iran, for example, who came last year after the protests, and this is like a safe place for them to connect and to find people among themselves, but contacting people inside of Iran to create a protest, it's nothing that we can we would feel like, we would have a very bad conscience for it because since we stated the surveillance of the internet is still very active there. Yeah, so it's very difficult to not to put somebody else at risk, right? Yeah. I have a question maybe for the crowd. Did I remember correctly? Wasn't there, like, some sort of... I recall something like a signal. That signal was also banned, and then there was some sort of wake. I'm not sure if in this context of Iran protests or somewhere else, does somebody else recall that many people started installing bridges or something for signal? Or is it only in my head? Yes, Fi? A microphone, please. Yeah, okay, so signal relays were set up for that. Yeah, I think that would I think that's very important also to open up this conversation so that we see very well that the technical does affect the social and that it's very important to exchange and see the needs also for the people there. Yeah, I don't know. Somebody from the... and see the needs also for the people there. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Somebody from the... Yeah. From Yavon. Because you asked how we work together, like a very important thing is for us in our group that we don't keep like sort of a Persian supremacy up, so we really, really try to deconstruct that kind of nationalism that is, I think, existing everywhere, but I think also in the context of Iran it's a bit more complicated. So our group consists of Kurdish, Iranian, and Afghan people. And what we really want to do is to bring this national, transnational solidarity in front and in the, like, in the center of everything we do. And in the context of social media and protest pictures, we also see that certain identities and certain people are not pictured. So that's also something that comes on the top of every problem that we have to tackle. Certain faces, certain identities, certain bodies don't get to be presented, even though they are protesting. And these are very important aspects for us that we try to overcome in our work and try to connect with different groups and different people to humanize also ourselves and remember that this, for example, Iran, is a country where so, so, so many different minorities, ethnicities, religions live in, and we really want to hold each other's hands and go through this together. Thank you, I totally agree. I think it's very important. And I mean, that's basically the game that we should not forget in any country where we see a strong nationalist movements that are rising up everywhere, that they do exactly the same move, that wiping off the differences and the actual identities that are in the country. I mean, I'm from Italy. I see that also there. But that's a completely different thing. But we see it everywhere that this is happening. And I really appreciate that you bring it into your work and also bring it also here in Austria and make it visible in the art context, that's very important because otherwise we end up like, I don't know, seeing mostly the flags or mostly like very superficial identities and like it's very easy to overlook all the depth that goes into in a society, all the differences and the identities. Another question there. Thank you so much for telling it. I think it's very important, especially in European context. So I had a question that I have from my experience of the Belarusian revolution. So I kind of had these controversial feelings during the revolution that kind of, yes, we're using these platforms that every time could kind of crash us in a way and use these ways that were already kind of invented by someone. And what I was interested in during that time was some parallel infrastructures or kind of, I don't know, like some ways how to hack a little bit this monopoly of platforms were invented, like, for example, some micro-community tools or ways how neighbors could be connected or something like without using specific platforms that were already there, specific platforms that were already there, but trying to make some instruments that could be here and now helpful for the communities, I was wondering whether anything like that in terms of kind of, I don't know, thinking about these instruments, how we can hack them or how we can I don't know, make some different ways how to stay connected. For example, when the internet is blocked, like, for example, from my context, there were some attempts to share, like, to find the tools that are still functioning, maybe not like the popular ones, but there were some hacks with exchanging emails were still possible, so things like that. Maybe if you have any experience in that, that would be interesting. I mean, like one example that comes immediately to my mind is it was not like a technical solution, but like when the internet was really shut down in 2022 these youth groups that are presented earlier they would like like distribute flyers but like in a very secretive way like in front of doors of neighborhoods of neighborhood, make it really small and put it in there, or on cars, on the car boards. The wipers? Yeah. You could see in the pictures that were also shared in social media after that there would be a lot of solutions. One thing that was also really funny for me is that at the metro there are also surveillance cameras everywhere that depict people that are protesting or not wearing the hijab and people would put sanitary pads on the cameras. So yeah, it's really funny, but really creative. So the cameras could not film them anymore. So you could see that people have become very creative in the ways of circumventing this technological suppression that they're facing. Any other comment on this? I think, yeah. And like for the diaspora, it was like, for example, we still, so earlier on when there was no internet communicating, like it wasn't popular, it would be like that you just basically call the people on their phone, but you always had to have like a card where you put money on it and it was like super expensive. But this kind of communication started again. So they would like get these SIM cards where they put like money on it, but it became like super expensive again. But another thing is that people also used like Skype, but like calling thing, like not not video one and so they could also like put money on there and have contact but there was a time you would like use every like every two days you would use another platform so what's up is like closed since two years three years now And then you use Telegram, and then you use, like, emo and so on. And you always have, like, one person who is able to communicate to the outside. That's mostly a person that is kind of, like, in the families that is kind of, like, good with technologies. So they kind of keep us updated like, okay, there won't be internet or something like that probably four days long. So just like, don't be like, yeah, so be chill. But yeah, like the time where it was almost a month where you couldn't hear from your family members, it was almost a month where you couldn't hear from your family members, it was really problematic and Also, there is a thing that you can't download VPNs in Iran so you need something like Snowflake or People that are like outside there are like at the borders just go somewhere else download them like for example in Turkey Because we have like the borders just go somewhere else, download them, like for example in Turkey, because we have the borders with Turkey, to download the VPNs and then to share them in Iran, kind of, with secure networks. And there's also a lot of hacktivism, so that also exists. But yeah, communication is really a problematic thing. So also like the mail, like the post, they kind of open your like letters to see if there is content that is like against the regime or they don't even send it. That's also a thing. And yeah, so it's kind of like really hard to be in the diaspora and be able to keep the connection because you never know which app is being used right now but I would say so I think like Europe is more individualistic place continent and I would say like is, or even Kurdistan and Afghanistan are places where the people are still very connected on a personal level. And in Kurdistan it is crucial to have ways to connect because they are always criminalized. So maybe you know that Kurdistan is not officially a country, but it's part of Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Yes, sorry, because I didn't remember what I already told. Concentration. So they kind of have an inner connection themselves. And the uprisings, actually, of Gina Masa Amani after the death of her or the murder of her started in Kurdistan. So it kind of came to the other parts. And there was a big uprising also in Balochistan. So it kind of like came to the other parts and there was a big uprising also in Balochistan. Balochistan is also like there live a lot of minorities, the Balochis, and it was because of the oil prices. So like Kurdistan is here and Balochistan is here and there was still like like, a connection possible because there are minorities who kind of work together. So, yeah, as Sarah said, it was kind of, like, very interesting to see that they have very creative ways of still connecting because they live in communities. They still have this sense of being in a community, working as a community, and thinking as a community. Thank you. I really appreciate that we are talking about areas that very often, at least in my bubble, is not very present. And I'm not sure how many of us in the room get on a constant base or a regular base news from that area. And I think that's very important also, not to forget that there are many other places to look at. I'm not sure, like you mentioned, that there are some hacktivists, or you mentioned the accidental techies, or the accidental admin from the different groups, which is very important for allowing communication between groups that are maybe not structurally communicated. And I think it's really almost poetic to see how the still in in countries where the the authorities are so tight and try to block people to communicate to see that there are always ways and it's really cool I was wondering if there are like if I don't know if these accidental techies they get together, or are they under some sort of groups, or is it something that exists, like maybe an informal entity or something like this that provides information, or how does that work? Or is it something that is still happening much more on a day-to-day basis or day-to-day informal networks? I think it's both. I remember I forgot the name of the group but last year during the protests like a hacktivist group emerged that were also like fighting the internet shutdown of the government and trying to block it out and also like releasing documents of videos and documents of videos but also like documents that were about government officials and the dictator of Iran, like Khamenei, stating that they lost the media war last year because it was so present on social media and they couldn't contain and control the narrative anymore for themselves because everybody would see that they're lying. And I unfortunately forgot the name of the group but I followed them. They were on, not Telegram but like the other thing, Signal. Yeah, they had a Signal group where they would post almost every day documents they would leak and stuff. But I guess it's's one organization or several people that came together, but I think also on a day-to-day basis, I think that a lot of young people would become, because there was no other solution, they had to become activists themselves in order to have these little freedoms that they created for themselves maybe if you find the name of the group later just maybe post it in the etherpad because I think it's really nice and valuable information to share yeah are there any comments or questions? No, so far not. Okay. Well, in case, I mean, join the workshop. I think that there is a lot of material to discuss, and you're also welcome to bring other issues from other countries or from other groups or collectives that want to be represented in this in what you're gonna build like a sort of a map of the the solidarities and the needs and yeah the workshop is in the Cosmic Sladen in Vilfred that at 4 right 4 to 6 yeah so I will say thank you for joining and presenting and have a nice workshop and thank you