2026 We're Back!

The Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence is a yearly gathering on the intersection of anarchism and technology.

MATC 2026 Flyer

You zoom towards the edges of the sprawling machine that farms our attention, past the conveyor belts of neatly packaged preferences in glittering boxes. From this distance the network of twisting cables takes on a sinister shape. The outward uniqueness of content belies the conditioned experiences they contain. Upon reaching the fringe of augmented reality, you find that behind every blinking cursor and LCD glow sits an individual with dreams and desires.

So here's a plate of copy pasta before you go. Here's what we've attempted and what we want to try next. Here are the blueprints for the world we want to dismantle. The glimpses of a world we could want reflected in shards of glass. And the connections we've made through the refuse of capitalism.

October 17 and 18 2026

A 2-day event: October 17 and 18 2026 At Batiment 7 in Tiohtia:ke Montreal

Welcome to anarcho-curious techies, tech-curious anarchists, and everyone in between.

Contact

🗯️ https://kolektiva.social/@MTL_ATC <-- Check here for updates!

📧 mtl-atc@riseup.net

Location

The 2026 Montreal Anarchist Tech Convergence is taking place at Batiment 7 in the Pointe St-Charles neighborhood.

The main address is:
1900 Rue Le Ber
Montreal, QC
H3K 2A4

Accessibilty Information

Masks!

Wearing of K95/N95 respirator-style masks indoors is encouraged! We will have a limited supply available at the welcome table.

Physical Accessibility

All the rooms we are using this year are accessible by wheelchair, but please consult Batiment Sept's own Physical Accessibility page for more information.

Food

Vegan lunch will be provided on both days on a by-donation basis. Baitment Sept also houses a bar (Sans Taverne) and a grocery store (Épicerie le Détour) for coffee, drinks, and food.

Unconference

There will be a room available for an "unconference" schedule. Bring any last-minute proposal you like, and sign up for a slot on the white board!

Schedule

Saturday activities will run from 11h-18h

Sunday activities will run from 11h30-18h

And swing by foulab both nights to continue hanging out!

See complete activity descriptions below.

Saturday, October 17th List of Activities

Sunday, October 18th List of Activities

Activity Descriptions and Details (Saturday)

Rising Against Big Tech: From Common Blockers to Collective Solutions

Tapage, Saturday 11:30 - 11:55

This discussion will introduce the work of the Rise Against Big Tech (RABT) coalition. We'll explore experiences of migration, technological autonomy, and community controlled infrastructures. Making the case for moving away from Big Tech is one thing, but actually doing it is another.

3D Printing Definitely Useful Things

Upstairs, Saturday 11:30 - 12:55

A sort of drop-in discussion thing on 3d printing, but only useful objects. I have nothing to share on the subject of decorations, only the challenge of making useful objects, from electronics enclosures to air purifiers, cat feeders, drone and bicycle parts, mounting brackets, molds for stronger/better/cheaper parts, stuff like that. I figure I would write, print and bring a bunch of zines that have most of the wisdom in there, and a bunch of example legit useful things/parts, and parts we can break to show the strength etc. I am hesitant to actually bring my printer as I rather need it and can't risk damage, and the process is very slow anyway so showing it is of marginal use, but I hear there is one at B7, they might not want us poking at it. For a few hours people can drop by and discuss things with everyone, and I'll give out zines and try to share what I have learned. Printing has surfaced as important for open source stuff.

Making our data ungovernable: Autonomous infrastructure in an age of mass surveillance

Tapage, Saturday 12:00 - 12:55

Having to choose between convenient, heavily-surveilled, cloud-based platforms and limited, sometimes vulnerable softwares that are geared toward movement organizers feels like an impossible decision. But what if there was another way?

Autonomous infrastructure is infrastructure that is managed and maintained by the community that uses it. In this talk, we’ll cover a brief history of tech-fueled state repression & its mechanisms, and some of the realized digital dreams for liberatory technologies that have emerged as a counter to this techno-dyistopian hellscape. We’ll discuss the possibilities, strategies, and considerations for creating these infrastructures within our communities, and make a case for why the medium-level-technical-bravery required to build servers is well worth the reward.

This presentation will be followed by a workshop on sunday, where we’ll teach attendees to apply these lessons and put these tools into action for their own networks.

What happened to Autistici/Inventati and how to make sure it doesn't happen again

Tapage, Saturday 14:00 - 14:55

Last August, Autistici/Inventati (A/I) was added to the specially designated global terrorist list by the American government for providing services to anti-fascists and Palestinian activists, forcing them to shut down.

This facilitated discussion aims to examine what happened, debate on the root causes of this issue and share ideas on how to organise so this situation doesn't happen again.

Conversion de véhicule à l'huile végétale - Waste vegetable oil conversion

Upstairs, Saturday 15:00 - 15:55

Une présentation sur comment convertir un véhicule diesel pour fonctionner à l'huile végétale avec des études de cas locales. La présentation sera suivie d'une démonstration concrète d'un véhicule converti.

Get on the Fediverse now!

Upstairs, Saturday 14:00 - 14:55

Have you ever dreamed of a social platform run by real people, free of corporate domination? The Fediverse is a federation of independent social networks connected with open standards across the Internet. In this workshop, we'll go through the process of picking a server, setting up an account, connecting to friends and family, and setting up a profile. We'll especially focus on how anarchists can connect and congregate on a network we make for ourselves.

No more NoBlogs - Let's build something different

Tapage, Saturday 15:00 - 15:55

The sanctioning of A/I and subsequent shuttering of NoBlogs crippled the ability for anarchist collectives around the world to safely publish material about their work. It is likely that many are already working on potential replacements to fill the gap NoBlogs left behind.

We believe that the attack on A/I demonstrates a novel threat model that any future replacement to NoBlogs must account for, and a failure to do so could pose a massive risk to anarchist formations globally. Join us for a group discussion on alternative approaches to building more resilient forms of anarchist infrastructure. We will share our progress on our own proposal for “non-custodial infrastructure” as a potential way forward, and we invite you to bring your own ideas, perspectives, and proposals for how we can restore publication capacity to NoBlogs’ former users in a way that can architecturally guarantee higher degrees of security and resilience.

Building grassroot communication infrastructures between autonomous spaces in the Netherlands

Tapage, Saturday 16:00 - 16:55

Presentation and discussion of community organising efforts in the Netherlands for grassroots communication infrastructures linking autonomous spaces and providing public services. Our aim is to collectively reformulate our communication needs and relationship to everyday technologies that we rely on. We need to be able to use existing hardware and legacy protocols as well as adopt to novel developments in the information environment. Meanwhile, we need to cater for both usability and security concerns. Deployment and development needs to happen through the involvement of a wide range of different people including but not limited to techies. The technology has to align with our political values, in terms of intentional outcomes being reflected in design choices and documentation efforts. For these reasons we focus on the Reticulum Network Stack that is so much more than a LoRa messaging protocol.

OSINT CTF

Upstairs, Saturday 16:00 - 17:55

Calling all google dorks and OSINT nerds, the second annual MATC OSINT CTF is here. Come test your chops on a friendly Capture The Flag game, as we hunt down tasty morsels of intel about [REDACTED] on the open internet. Come as a team or an individual. Bring a computer and your sharpest search queries or your slickest CLI tools. We'll have prizes for teams and individuals at all levels. Everyone welcome. Sign up at the door.

Gaps in Signal's security model

Tapage, Saturday 17:00 - 17:55

The Signal Protocol is touted as the most secure cryptographic messaging protocol available, but Signal is no silver bullet. In this talk we explore what Signal's threat model is, what it doesn't address, and explore ways an adversary can pop you without compromising Signal's cryptography or otherwise "backdoor Signal".

This talk will start with a "tl;dw" or key takeaways right up front that will be understandable for anybody; but we'll then start getting into pretty technical details for those of us who like that kind of thing.

Activity Descriptions and Details (Sunday)

Infrastructure against occupation - The role of tech infrastructure in the Twin Cities anti-ICE resistance

Tapage, Sunday 12:00 - 12:55

When Trump’s DHS unleashed their full-scale occupation of Minneapolis and St Paul, networks of organizers, hackers, and technologists built out extensive technical capacity for occupation resistance. This included systems for secure communications, locating abductees, and tracking ICE personnel, drones, and vehicles using sophisticated data aggregation and analysis. This technical capacity has remained critical to the resistance against ICE in the United States, especially as organizers in other cities are attempting to reimplement similar infrastructure.

As part of our work with Movement Infrastructure Research, we visited the Twin Cities during the height of "Metro Surge" to study and support this infrastructure directly. This talk will provide a comprehensive outline of these systems as they operated during peak ICE activity, how they were effective, how they fell short, and how they could be reapplied to combat fascism in interregional and international contexts.

Leaving the GAFAM: How to use tools like Nextcloud and Cryptpad

Upstairs, Sunday 12:00 - 12:55

A lot of people still have their files in places like Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive despite recent evidence that these organizations (the GAFAMs) collaborate openly with the american fascist regime. They either don't know that alternatives exist, or are afraid that it will too difficult to make the change. This workshop aims to show that it's possible to kick the fascists GAFAMs to the curb and that easy-to-use alternatives exist. Two alternatives will be presented: Nextcloud and Cryptpad.

Putting a face on the crisis: Challenges and opportunities in repurposing registry data for militant purposes

Tapage, Sunday 14:00 - 14:55

Housing is not in crisis, rather it’s under attack, and those attacking it have names and addresses. This presentation will discuss the use of data and digital technologies to promote new modes of "watching the watchers" in the context of housing. While earlier, more traditional forms of sousveillance have typically relied on audio-visual technologies — cop-watching being a paradigmatic example — more recent initiatives, by contrast, have started exploring the use of digital networks and databases. Using the case of Fuck my Landlord — a tool designed to help tenant activists in Montréal, Québec and Sherbrooke research property portfolios, landlords and the complex corporate ownership networks behind them — this talk aims to contextualize the rise of such initiatives and to discuss the sociotechnical challenges specific to such data-based initiatives.

Tor AMA for anarchists

Upstairs, Sunday 14:00 - 14:55

Ask me anything about Tor, hosted by Tor developers. Learn about the Tor anonymity network, what software you can use to access it, basic guidelines for using it, and why it's an important tool for anarchists. Bring your questions about online opsec, anonymity, contributing relays, and circumventing censorship. All skill levels welcome, no questions are too basic or too niche!

A tangled web: Network science and networks of liberation

Tapage, Sunday 15:00 - 15:25

A generation ago, radicals inspired by new developments in scientific knowledge and technology imagined self-organized, decentralized networks as the basis for a new antiauthoritarian politics. Today, talking about networks can often feel banal. But meanwhile, the serious academic study trying to find shared properties in many different kind of networks (social, biological, technological, etc.) had only just begun, enabled by access to data and improved computational tools. This talk will provide an short overview of some of the interesting findings from the field of network science, including some troubling ones, and in light of that, discuss how we can think of liberatory possibilities of networks.

Making our data ungovernable: Launch self-hosted apps using co-op cloud

Upstairs, Sunday 15:00 - 15:55

Want to host a website, file-sharing and syncing platform, community wiki, and more all on the same server for your household or an entire community? In this workshop, participants will learn the basics of hosting software using Co-op Cloud, an open source platform for public interest infrastructure.

This workshop is a hands-on follow-up to Saturday’s making our data ungovernable talk. By the end, participants will be able to protect and secure their data through self-hosting. Those who have preexisting servers and domains will be able to leave the workshop with permanent tools for their communities to use; otherwise students will practice on temporary servers. Students will learn to configure services like NextCloud, Jitsi, or Wordpress and be able to access them on the web. Day one participation encouraged but not required. Bring a laptop, a friend, and a pre-existing server linked to a domain if you have one.

Lightning talk: Send in the hounds

Tapage, Sunday 15:30 - 16:55

Boston Dynamics Spot use in industrial applications

Lightning talk: GrapheneOS distros - A template for getting secure devices in the hands of activists

Tapage, Sunday 15:30 - 16:55

There is clear and growing evidence in charging documents and firsthand reports that cellphone data is playing a key role in political prosecutions such as the Prairieland defendants, the Cop City RICO case, and student protesters at Stanford, University of Michigan and elsewhere. Dissidents need protection against all of these threats.

Movement Infrastructure Research (mirnet.org) presents provisioning tools and a prototype model for securing and distributing GrapheneOS devices at community-scale.

Tapage, Sunday 15:30 - 16:55

Quit social media! A guilt-free talk on malicious and addictive social technologies: how to talk about them, how they affect us, and simple ways to break their behavioural patterning. You already want to. Then, a call to affirm life through boredom, yearning, and the unknown.

Lightning talk: OFFDEM reportback

Tapage, Sunday 15:30 - 16:55

Le mois passé nous avons mené un atelier OFFDEM sur la question démilitaire et le logiciel libre en OFF de BalCCon en Serbie, dans les Balkans une zone frontalière aux tensions européenens et mondiales. Nous aimerions vous faire un petit compte rendu de nos impressions par la voix d'une personne basée à MTL. https://oxygen.offdem.net/pub/call-for-presence

A month ago, OFFDEM workshop about demilitary free software issues took place in Serbia during the BalCCon, in the Balkans a Borderland to European and international tensions. We wish to bring you a short update from our work and our feelings after the event, brought by the voice of a MTl person.

Reticulum networks for anarchists

Upstairs, Sunday 16:00 - 16:55

We are anarchists interested in building resilient and autonomous mesh networks using Reticulum, over LoRa (inexpensive accessible long-range radio), over the Internet, over whatever we can imagine. This will be a drop-in workshop/demo/hacking hangout. Come if you are curious, or if you are already doing stuff with Reticulum bring your hardware and join our network!

Bringing a laptop or android phone is helpful, but not necessary!

OSINT CTF prize ceremony

Tapage, Sunday 17:00 - 17:25

A prize ceremony for the winners of yesterday's CTF!