“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.”