Keynote: The Power of Play

Rob Conery dives into how unstructured, goal-free tinkering—weekend experiments and playful curiosity—has sparked some of tech’s biggest revolutions. From Claude Shannon’s mechanical mice at Bell Labs to Homebrew Computer Club schematics over beer and the open-source pioneers who rewrote collaboration rules “just for fun,” Conery argues that play isn’t a distraction from serious work—it is the serious work. By tracing this playful thread through computing history, he shows how goofing off with wild ideas (AI, open networks, public code sharing) often lights the fuse of innovation.

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