EFF's 2019 Pioneer Awards Winner Remarks and Speeches

EFF’s annual Pioneer Awards ceremony celebrates individuals and groups who have made outstanding contributions to freedom and innovation on the electronic frontier. On Sept. 12, EFF welcomed keynote speaker Adam Savage, who spoke on the importance of storytelling, scientific exploration, and personal discovery. And each of our honorees had important messages to share with us: legendary science fiction author William Gibson reminded us how early science fiction shaped the world we live in now; the inspiring anti-surveillance group Oakland Privacy showed how we can stand together to make lasting differences in how technology is used in our communities today; and trailblazing tech scholar danah boyd challenged everyone in the tech world to shape a better future. 

Opening the ceremony was EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn, who framed the evening by reminding us that we must articulate what that better future looks like and work to make it happen—because "honestly, we don’t have any other choice." Additionally, she underscored how important it is to recognize our past and move toward a better future. "Even now, especially now, we need hope," she said. "In the end, we cannot build a better world unless we envision it and talk about it."

Below are transcripts or prepared remarks of the keynote and award winners' speeches. Audio of the entire ceremony is available here, and individual audio recordings of each speech are below.

Opening Remarks by Cindy Cohn

Audio

Thank you so much, Aaron.  I am just delighted to see everyone here tonight and to honor these amazing people.  Tonight we take a moment to celebrate our community. 

But as we begin I want to send a moment out for our friend Chelsea Manning, who is again incarcerated by a vindictive government. Our hearts go out to her and we wish she could be with us here tonight.

On to our awardees.  Each of them will have an individual introduction, but I think tonight’s awardees represent a great cross-section of the work that is being done to make our digital world better. 

Executive Director Cindy Cohn delivers the opening remarks

First, there’s Dr. danah boyd, who has spent her professional life trying to figure out and reflect back to us the ways in which people, especially young people, are interacting with technologies.  That would be enough, but danah has now gone far beyond that to both support and inspire other researchers and build a community thinking about how Data and Society do and should interact.

Second, there’s Oakland Privacy, who represent what a supporting, inspiring, grassroots community can accomplish – putting the city of Oakland far ahead of the national conversation on these issues.

And finally William Gibson, whose imagination and storytelling have framed our digital world, with both its benefits and its perils. William pioneered the vision that we needed, and he did so before EFF and these awards even existed

We gather tonight in a time of reckoning and change for our community. It’s one where we desperately need to articulate and push for a better technical world because so many people have lost hope: unable to think of the future as anything but a dystopian hellscape, even as they feel trapped behind their phones or their keyboards.

Outside our world, the blush of tech-excitement has given way to a tech-lash that is needed. If not conducted thoughtfully, however, this moment threatens those who most need digital tools to keep themselves safe. It threatens those who have used and are using the Net to find community, support, and solidarity, and join together to find and implement solutions to many, many problems we see pressing against us all.  Politicians of all stripes are angry at those big, brand name tech companies, powerful and unaccountable, but for very different and often sharply contradictory reasons.  But as they shoot at Big Tech, we know that the public interest Internet, the marginal voices it has empowered and the innovators that could challenge and reform the current status quo, all sit nearby and stand a great risk of becoming collateral damage. We must not let that happen.

So far, we’ve seen that many of the efforts to combat the problems of big tech actually threaten to empower and ossify it.  I shed no tears for the big companies, who join John Perry’s weary giants of Flesh and Steel as the unwelcome would-be governors of cyberspace.