“The way we stay free and safe and un-shot and all of that? Politics. Democracy. Holding them to account. It wasn’t so many years ago that Oakland was the first major city to pass a law forcing the city to put every new piece of surveillance, every new database, up for public debate. You saw how hard the surveillance tech companies fought that, how much money they poured into getting it killed. They were scared. Because you know what’s more powerful than all the crypto in the world? An accountable process. Politicians who answer to us, not the billion-dollar companies that hire them when they get out of office.

“Technology has its place. We can organize, securely, to a degree that the Black Panthers, the Free Speech Movement, the Yippies, the Wobblies, the Pink Panthers, the American Indian Movement, all those organizers and activists from this area, they couldn’t have even dreamed of. We’d be idiots not to use those tools. But we’d be bigger idiots to just use those tools. The most important tool we have for curbing official abuses of power is consensual, legitimate, democratic government. That’s what we have to use the tools for.

“I’ve known Masha here for a decade, and I’ve never doubted that she was a brilliant technologist. I mean, she was definitely worth every penny Xoth and Zyz paid her. But Masha”—and she turned to me, a gentle smile on her face—“you’ve never been very smart about politics. You’ve got tunnel vision, you think that if the tech doesn’t solve the problem, it can’t be solved.

“We can solve these problems, Masha. With your help, we can tool up to resist. When we resist we can organize. When we organize, we can win.”

“Technology won’t save their asses. We know that better than anyone. Technology is a tool that gives us the space to make political change. Politics are a tool we use to open the space for making better technology. It’s like parallel parking: you go as far as you can in one direction, then back up and go as far as you can in the other. Use tech to make political achievements, use politics to improve tech. Back and forth.” She swung our hands to match her words, like we were playing ring-around-the-rosy.

The others all knew chants that I didn’t know: “If we don’t get it/Shut it down” “Whose streets? Our streets!” and one I’d heard in half a dozen languages: “The people! United! Will never be defeated!”

Everyone I’d ever heard chanting that had been defeated. They’d had hope. They’d kept chanting. I chanted it. Hope fluttered like a banner.

She looked both younger (her haircut, her clothes) and older (her eyes) than she had in Slovstakia. She was so young. That was something I’d conveniently not thought much about when I’d been in Slovstakia. It wasn’t just the hair that made her look younger, though: in Slovstakia, she’d always had the brooding air of someone embroiled in a life-or-death struggle (duh) whereas now she looked like your basic Kreuzberg hipster, the kind of person you’d find discussing blockchain and Know Your Customer rules in a speakeasy while chain-smoking Turkish cigarettes.