It's been a while again. I was going to write a post for Halloween but it feels like I have less and less time for these kinds of reflective activities. I guess that's to be expected, getting older and having more obligations and whatever else. It also feels I've had enough time self-reflecting anyway, I spent like all of my twenties analyzing my own dreams pretty much all day. I have to say, looking back at that time, I really did learn alot about myself. If only I was at all an interesting person to learn about...

When it comes to the hightlights of the last six weeks, a few things come to mind. On the 6th of November I took part in a CTF held by TraceLabs, a non-profit organization that looks for people online who have gone missing. It's supposed to be a way for people to learn OSINT skills while doing something useful. There were 4 people to look for and this being the first time I've ever done anything like this I decided to focus on only one of them. It was an interesting experience and I have to say I learnt a lot in the process. There's the way you think you'll do something and then the way you actually do it, and in going through the actual motions of looking into a person made me sharpen my thinking about online searches. I wasn't first or last and I got a fair amount of points given that all I wanted was just any points at all. So, I felt it was a success.

The second "interesting" thing I did over the last few weeks was take part in an online "unconference" called the Civil Resilence Forum. I heard about it from my friend and after reading about the speakers they had lined up I decided to sign up. I've never been to a conference like this before, physically or online, so I had no idea what to expect. The conference was generally about preserving democratic institutions and what practical things individuals can do to help uphold civil discussions and fight misinformation. Given my previous encounters with misinformation I wanted to hear what others had to say about it.

The conference was split up into two day. The first day was the day they had speakers and mostly didn't need to interact. Given that the first day was on a Friday, I had to work anyhow so I just listened to the talkers as I answered e-mails. It seemed that most of the people that were part of this conference where from the digital rights/think tank ecosystem and it was kind of like their job to go to conferences like this one. I think I may have been the only random person there just listening because of general interest. The most interesting talks where maybe by Carole Cadwalladr from the Guardian and Paul-Olivier Dehaye who talked about the general political landscape and how it has been influenced by social media. Valdis Krebs had a really cool talk as well about using schematics to find connections between things, be it people, books, websites, whatever. I was introduced to this way of studying problems during the TraceLabs OSINT investigation I took part in a few weeks ago and hearing a professional OSINT investigator talk about gave me the feeling that maybe even someone like me could do something meaningful in the field if I found the right thing to look at.

Day two was about discussion and despite my initial fear of talking out of my ass given that I've never been a part of this kind of thing before, I tried to say things that were useful to the discussion. I mentioned some of the things I've encounter with misinformation and gave some of my general observations regarding digitalization and finding common ground with people. It felt good to do something else than worry about technology and instead talk about it with people who also have a genuine interest in changing things.

That's about it for now. A lot more has happened that's for sure but this is about as much energy and time I have to write anything. Next week I'll be listening to a talk about Memes, Myths and Existential Art: the far right & the end of the world. It reminds me of that art exhibit I visited a few years ago. The conversation I had with the artist dealt a lot with the alt-right, or at least that's what I remember, and this sounded pretty cool. Bellingcat had advertised it on their Twitter page. I've been meaning to reread the Military Memetics presentation that pretty much changed the way the artist saw memes. I remember she even printed the whole thing out and would show it to people. Anyway, till next time.