Arguably, Free Software has never been more successful than these days. Free Software is common place in many contexts, from embedded devices to supercomputers, ... including the space (with the ISS) and beyond! Free Software is also more and more common in education, it is subject of ad-hoc legislation around the world , and thanks to our friends at NSA it is also being looked with increasing interest by privacy-conscious citizens.
Taking issue with such an optimistic view of the (Free) world, a pessimistic speaker is gonna argue that we are, on the contrary, about to enter the so called "Dark Ages of Free Software", where the user freedoms we have accrued over the past 30 years are at risk of being taken away by reckless technological trends.
Unsatisfied with his own pessimism, the speaker will try to induce some of it into the audience, but only shortly before bringing the good news that distributions—and Debian in particular—have a fundamental role to play in Free Software's path toward a new enlightenment.