'Steal from the Capitalists'

"People at this camp don't want fame, they don't even want to be photographed. The majority of us prefer to be ANONYMOUS"

As the Twitter co-creator returns to activism, his fellow hackers question the techniques he brings from Silicon Valley.

11 Nov 2015 14:05 GM

Evan Henshaw-Plath is a coder, activist, anarchist, and a hacker. He is also one of the original developers of Twitter.

Programmers are like digital superheroes. Everybody else gets to use the technology, the reality in which we play, but the programmers get to reshape the rules, the physics of our digital universe. Evan Henshaw-Plath

Henshaw-Plath believes that as a tech activist his role is to promote social justice and he is keen to empower civil society to affect politics through the use of software. He explains how TxTMob, a platform that enabled protesters to send text messages to large groups anonymously, formed the basis of Twitter.

But when he came to the realisation that Twitter was not the world-changing idea he had hoped it would be, he sold his share.

Now bridging the worlds of hackers, activists and Silicon Valley start-ups, he's on a mission: to use the techniques he has learned in the world of lean start-ups to support the technology being developed by activist groups.

The technologies he's trying to promote are all about allowing people to have truly have secure communications, and his attempts to use Silicon Valley techniques provoke resistance from his radical colleagues.

Can Evan convince the activists to steal from the capitalists in the name of efficacy or is that a political compromise too far?

'Steal from the Capitalists' can be seen on Al Jazeera English from November 23 at 2230 GMT

• stories: INTEL and The Birth of Silicon Valley