Program Notes
Guest speaker: Eben Moglen
[NOTE: All quotations are by Eben Moglen.]
“For the policy makers, in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand: How do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity? They do not know the answer to this question, and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control.”
“Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.”
“Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the Net is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy. It proves itself all the time. Somebody’s going to win a Nobel Prize in Economics for describing, in formal terms, the nature of disintermediation.”
“The greatest technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call the World Wide Web, an invention less than 8,000 days old. That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.”
“The next Facebook should never happen. It’s intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people. Which is not to say that social networking shouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t happen with a man in the middle with tax build into it.”
“The way innovation really happens is that you provide young people with opportunities to create on an infrastructure which allows them to hack the real world and share the results.”
“We care about protecting people’s right to hack what they own. And the reason that we care about it is if you prevent people from hacking on what they own themselves you will destroy the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.”
“We said from the beginning that free software is the world’s most advanced technical education system. It allows anybody, anywhere in Earth, to get to the state of the art in anything computers can be made to do by reading what is fully available, and by experimenting with it and by sharing the consequences freely.”
“We should move to a world in which ALL knowledge previously available before this lifetime is universally available. If we don’t, we will stunt innovation which permits further growth. That’s a social requirement. The copyright bargain is not immutable. It is merely convenient.”
“The universalization of access to knowledge is the single more important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet. Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout ‘copyright’.”
“Nobody should be fooled about the prospects for social growth in societies where fifty percent of the people under thirty are unemployed. This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car-building jobs. Everybody sees that.”
“And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the world who insist that Internet freedom, and an end to snooping and control, is necessary to their welfare and ability to create and live.”
“Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy with whom we are directly in touch. That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.”
“And there is a third aspect of privacy, which in my classroom I call autonomy. It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions you make are unaffected by others’ access to secret or anonymous communication.”
“The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumner is that young people move to them to make new ways of being taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village and the social control of the farm.”
Previous Episode
311 - The Spirit of the Internet
Next Episode
313 - In a German Salon 1983″ Part 1
Similar Episodes
- 522 - Surveillance Capitalism and the IoT - score: 0.72477
- 548 - The Politics of Electronics - score: 0.71720
- 565 - John Perry Barlow Tribute - score: 0.71328
- 534 - Drugs, Cultures, and the World Corporate State - score: 0.69264
- 019 - The World Wide Web and the Millennium - score: 0.68738
- 529 - Privacy & Free Speech in 2017 - score: 0.68648
- 371 - Civil Rights In Cyberspace - score: 0.68391
- 311 - The Spirit of the Internet - score: 0.68025
- 425 - Drug Policy, Technology and Everything Else - score: 0.67357
- 229 - Trialogue_ The Evolutionary Mind Part 2 - score: 0.66603
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo. I’m the host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:30 ►
This is Lorenzo, I’m the host here in the Psychedelic Salon, and today’s podcast, in my opinion, features the most important lecture that I’ve ever posted.
00:00:37 ►
Now, I know that there are a lot of young people who listen to these podcasts, and to my mind, that makes you quite exceptional,
00:00:42 ►
because, well, these talks are really not the kind of thing that the average young person listens to. And I’m mentioning this because it is my fervent hope that there are quite a few young people
00:00:48 ►
out here in the salon who will truly grok the talk that we’re about to listen to, and
00:00:53 ►
that you people will be among those whose ideas may ultimately save the ability for
00:00:59 ►
us humans to have any private thoughts whatsoever.
00:01:04 ►
So have I got your attention? My point is that
00:01:07 ►
had I heard this talk when I was still in high school, my life would have been significantly
00:01:11 ►
different. Of course, there was no internet then, so I couldn’t have done it, right? But even now
00:01:18 ►
that I’m in my 70th year, this talk has already caused me to start out on yet another new path.
00:01:26 ►
year, this talk has already caused me to start out on yet another new path. For as William James once said, one can change their life simply by changing their attitude. So what is it, can you
00:01:34 ►
imagine, that has so captivated my attention? Well, it’s a talk that was just given two weeks ago by a
00:01:40 ►
man whose career I’ve been following ever since the uproar in the mid-90s over the strong encryption program called PGP, or Pretty Good Privacy.
00:01:49 ►
At that time, the U.S. government tried to prohibit a brilliant young computer programmer
00:01:54 ►
from releasing an encryption program that was as good or better than anything
00:01:59 ►
that the government itself had access to.
00:02:02 ►
And it was Eben Moglen, the man we are about to hear,
00:02:06 ►
who was one of the lawyers who came to the defense of this programmer
00:02:09 ►
and ultimately succeeded in seeing that his encryption software
00:02:13 ►
made it into the public domain.
00:02:16 ►
But Eben Moglen isn’t your average civil rights lawyer.
00:02:19 ►
In fact, he began his professional life
00:02:21 ►
as a designer of computer programming languages.
00:02:32 ►
He then acquired several degrees, including a master’s and a Ph.D. in history, along with his Juris Doctorate, or law degree.
00:02:38 ►
And at the present time, in addition to his extensive work in keeping the Internet free of government control, he is a professor of law at Columbia University.
00:02:47 ►
Law at Columbia University. It was on May 22nd of this year that Dr. Moglen gave the keynote speech at the Freedom to Connect conference, which was held in Washington, D.C. And while that was a
00:02:54 ►
somewhat expensive conference both to produce and to attend, in the interest of keeping information
00:02:59 ►
freely available, the conference producers published his talk on YouTube immediately after it was given,
00:03:05 ►
and they also posted a link to an audio-only version, which was the source for this podcast.
00:03:11 ►
And besides the conference producers, I want to thank John S., my wife, and about a half a dozen
00:03:17 ►
other fellow Saloners for bringing this to my attention. Now, just so that you know, the Freedom
00:03:23 ►
to Connect conferences are devoted to preserving
00:03:26 ►
and celebrating the essential properties of the internet. Freedom to Connect, or F2C, is designed
00:03:34 ►
to advocate for innovation, for creativity, for expression, and for little d democracy.
00:03:41 ►
The essence of this organization is that it is about building an Internet
00:03:46 ►
that supports human freedoms and personal security.
00:03:50 ►
And it is also about having access to the Internet as infrastructure.
00:03:55 ►
As they say on their website, infrastructures belong to and enrich
00:04:00 ►
the whole society in which they exist.
00:04:02 ►
They gain value in a wide variety of ways,
00:04:07 ►
some of which are difficult to anticipate,
00:04:09 ►
but they gain value when more members of society have access to them.
00:04:14 ►
And F2C especially honors those who build communications infrastructure
00:04:18 ►
for the Internet in their own communities,
00:04:21 ►
often overcoming resistance from incumbent cable and telephone companies
00:04:25 ►
in order to do so.
00:04:27 ►
The way I see it, basically, this is an assembly of some very powerful and influential geeks,
00:04:33 ►
lawyers, and activists.
00:04:36 ►
Now, at the beginning of this talk, you may wonder what got into me to play this lecture
00:04:41 ►
here in the salon.
00:04:42 ►
But trust me, this talk not only picks up on the topic
00:04:45 ►
of the ongoing development of the Internet
00:04:48 ►
that I touched in my March 2001 talk at the Inside Edge,
00:04:51 ►
which I played for you last week,
00:04:54 ►
it also encompasses an extremely well-reasoned example
00:04:57 ►
of psychedelic thinking,
00:04:59 ►
and it is a call to arms for the worldwide Occupy movement.
00:05:03 ►
In short, I think that this is perhaps the most important talk that I’ve ever played here in this salon.
00:05:09 ►
And the way I see it, it doesn’t really matter if you’re a geek, a lawyer, an artist, or someone with little technical fluency.
00:05:17 ►
There’s more than one important message in this talk for you, no matter who you are.
00:05:21 ►
In short, it deals with the very immediate future
00:05:25 ►
of the evolution of human consciousness
00:05:27 ►
and the dire straits that lie ahead
00:05:29 ►
if each of us doesn’t do whatever we can right now
00:05:33 ►
to encourage others to listen to this message as well
00:05:36 ►
and then act on it.
00:05:38 ►
Granted, this is an uber-geek turned lawyer
00:05:41 ►
speaking before some of the top Internet developers
00:05:43 ►
and policy makers in the
00:05:45 ►
country but he’s also speaking directly to you and i just don’t know how else to encourage you to
00:05:52 ►
listen to this extremely important lecture so hang in there in the beginning in the foundational
00:05:58 ►
elements that dr moglen lays out in the beginning of his talk and if you have to just gloss over any Thank you. But I did try to include most of his replies. So now let’s listen to this interesting and important talk by Dr. Eben Moglen.
00:06:30 ►
I’m going to talk mostly about a subject almost as geeky as the stuff we all talk about all the time, namely political economy.
00:06:43 ►
we all talk about all the time, namely political economy.
00:06:50 ►
I’m going to try and make it less snooze-worthy than it sometimes seems to be,
00:06:59 ►
but you’ll forgive me, I’m sure, for starting fairly far from OpenSSL. We’ll get closer as time goes by.
00:07:03 ►
The developed economies around the world, all of them now,
00:07:08 ►
are beginning to experience a fundamentally similar and very depressing condition.
00:07:16 ►
They are required to impose austerity because levels of private debt have gummed up the works and the determination
00:07:30 ►
of the owners of capital to take vast risks with other people’s money have worked out
00:07:37 ►
extremely badly for the last half decade.
00:07:41 ►
And so austerity is the inevitable and politically damaging position for all the
00:07:48 ►
governments of the developed world. And some of those governments have begun to slip into
00:07:54 ►
a death spiral in which the need to impose austerity and reduce public investment and welfare support for the young is harming economic growth,
00:08:06 ►
which prevents the austerity from having its desirable consequences.
00:08:13 ►
Instead of bad asset values being worked off and growth resuming,
00:08:18 ►
we are watching as the third largest economy in the world, the European Union,
00:08:32 ►
the third largest economy in the world, the European Union, finds itself at the very verge of a currency collapse and a lost generation,
00:08:39 ►
which would have profoundly depressing effects on the entire global economy.
00:08:44 ►
For the policymakers, I recognize that few of them are here.
00:08:47 ►
They have, of course, better things to do than listen to us.
00:08:54 ►
For the policymakers, in other words, an overwhelming problem is now at hand. How do we have innovation and economic growth under austerity?
00:09:01 ►
They do not know the answer to this question,
00:09:08 ►
austerity. They do not know the answer to this question and it is becoming so urgent that it is beginning to deteriorate their political control. Marginal parties in several
00:09:14 ►
very highly developed and thoughtful societies are beginning to attract substantial numbers
00:09:21 ►
of votes and threatening the very stability of the economic planners capacity
00:09:27 ►
to solve or to attempt to solve the problem of innovation under austerity. This is not good news
00:09:35 ►
for anybody. This is not good news for anybody. We have no opportunity to cheer for this outcome,
00:09:42 ►
which is largely the result of incompetence in those people
00:09:46 ►
who claim to be worth all that money because they’re so smart. It is partly the result of
00:09:52 ►
the political cowardice which gave them too much room to swing their cats. It is not that we are
00:09:59 ►
glad to see this happen. But there is a silver lining to the cloud. There are very few people in the world who know how to have innovation under austerity. We are they. We have produced innovation under austerity for the last generation. And not only did we produce pretty good innovation, we produced innovation that all the other smart, rich people took most of the credit for.
00:10:28 ►
Most of the growth that occurred during this wild and wacky period in which they took other people’s money and went to the racetrack with it was innovation we produced for them.
00:11:06 ►
So now, despite the really bad circumstances, which we too can deplore because the unemployment is my graduating law students, your children, and all those other young people whose lives are being harmed for good by current bad economic circumstances. The people beginning their careers now will suffer substantial wage losses throughout their lifetimes. Their children will get a less good start in life because of what is
00:11:12 ►
happening now. We cannot be pleased about this, but we have a very substantial political opportunity
00:11:20 ►
because we do have the answer to the most important question pushing all
00:11:27 ►
the policymakers in the developed world right now.
00:11:33 ►
That means we have something very important to say, and I came here this morning primarily
00:11:38 ►
to begin the discussion about precisely how we should say it. And I want to present a working first draft
00:11:48 ►
of our argument.
00:11:51 ►
I say our because I look around the room
00:11:53 ►
and I see it’s us here this morning.
00:11:55 ►
Our argument about what to do
00:11:59 ►
with the quandary the world is in.
00:12:04 ►
Innovation under austerity is not produced
00:12:08 ►
by collecting lots of money and paying it to innovation intermediaries.
00:12:15 ►
One of the most important aspects of 21st century political economy
00:12:21 ►
is that the process we call disintermediation, when we’re being jargony about it, is ruthless, consistent, and relentless.
00:12:37 ►
Television is melting. I don’t need to tell you that, you know already. Nobody will ever try to create a commercial encyclopedia again.
00:12:51 ►
Amazon’s lousy little, I will let you read some books unless I decide to take them back, machine,
00:12:59 ►
is transforming publishing by eliminating the selective power of the book publishers,
00:13:07 ►
much as Mr. Jobs almost destroyed the entire global music industry under the pretense of saving it,
00:13:16 ►
a task his ghost is already performing for the magazine publishers, as you can see.
00:13:23 ►
for the magazine publishers, as you can see.
00:13:30 ►
Disintermediation, the movement of power out of the middle of the net,
00:13:35 ►
is a crucial fact about 21st century political economy.
00:13:38 ►
It proves itself all the time.
00:13:41 ►
Somebody’s going to win a Nobel Prize in economics for describing in formal terms the nature of disintermediation.
00:13:48 ►
The intermediaries who did well during the past ten years are limited to two sets, health
00:13:56 ►
insurers in the United States owing to political pathology and the financial industry. Health
00:14:03 ►
and the financial industry.
00:14:08 ►
Health insurers in the United States may be able to capitalize on continuing political pathology to remain failing
00:14:12 ►
and expensive intermediaries for a while longer,
00:14:16 ►
but the financial industry crapped in its own nest
00:14:19 ►
and is shrinking now and will continue for some time to do so.
00:14:24 ►
and is shrinking now and will continue for some time to do so.
00:14:31 ►
The consequence of which is that throughout the economic system,
00:14:33 ►
as the policymaker observes it, the reality that disintermediation happens and you can’t stop it
00:14:40 ►
becomes a guiding light in the formation of national industrial policy.
00:14:46 ►
So we need to say it’s true about innovation also. The greatest
00:14:53 ►
technological innovation of the late 20th century is the thing we now call
00:14:58 ►
the World Wide Web. An invention less than 8,000 days old.
00:15:15 ►
That invention is already transforming human society more rapidly than anything since the adoption of writing.
00:15:19 ►
We will see more of it.
00:15:45 ►
The nature of that process, that innovation, both fuels disintermediation by allowing all sorts of human contacts to occur without intermediaries, buyers, sellers, agents, and controllers, and poses a platform in which a war over the depth and power of social control goes on, a subject I’ll come back to in a few minutes.
00:15:48 ►
For now, what I want to call attention to
00:15:50 ►
is the crucial fact that the World Wide Web is itself
00:15:54 ►
a result of disintermediated innovation.
00:15:59 ►
What Tim first did at CERN was not the web as we know it now.
00:16:07 ►
Tim first did at CERN was not the web as we know it now. The web as we know it now was
00:16:14 ►
made by the disintermediated innovation of an enormous number of individual people. I
00:16:21 ►
look back on what I wrote about the future of personal home pages in 1995 and I see pretty much what I thought then would happen happening. I said then those few
00:16:28 ►
personal homepages are grass seed and a prairie is going to grow, and so it did. Of course, like all
00:16:37 ►
other innovation, there were unintended consequences. The browser made the web very easy to read.
00:16:46 ►
Though we built Apache, though we built the browser,
00:16:51 ►
though we built enormous numbers of things on top of Apache and the browsers,
00:16:56 ►
we did not make the web easy to write.
00:17:00 ►
So a little thug in a hooded sweatshirt made the web easy to write and created a man-in-the-middle
00:17:10 ►
attack on human civilization, which is unrolling now to an enormous music of social harm. But that’s the intermediary innovation that we should be concerned about. We made
00:17:30 ►
everything possible, including, regrettably, PHP, and then intermediaries for innovation
00:17:39 ►
turned it into the horror that is Facebook. This will not turn out, as we can already see from the stock market
00:17:47 ►
results, to be a particularly favorable form of social innovation. It’s going to enrich a few
00:17:53 ►
people. The government of Abu Dhabi, a Russian thug with a billion dollars already, a guy who
00:18:01 ►
can’t wait to change his citizenship so he doesn’t have to pay taxes to support the public schools
00:18:06 ►
and a few other relics of 20th century misbehavior.
00:18:11 ►
But the reality of the story underneath is
00:18:15 ►
if we had a little bit more disintermediated innovation,
00:18:21 ►
if we had make running your own web server very easy,
00:18:26 ►
if we had explained to people from the very beginning
00:18:28 ►
how important the logs are
00:18:31 ►
and why you shouldn’t let other people keep them for you,
00:18:36 ►
we would be in a rather different state right now.
00:18:40 ►
The next Facebook should never happen.
00:18:50 ►
It’s intermediated innovation serving the needs of financiers, not serving the needs of people.
00:18:52 ►
Which is not to say that social networking shouldn’t happen.
00:18:56 ►
It shouldn’t happen with a man-in-the-middle attack built into it.
00:19:00 ►
Everybody in this room knows that.
00:19:02 ►
The question is how do we teach everybody else? But as important as I consider everybody else to be right now, I want to talk about the policymakers. How do we explain to them?
00:19:27 ►
important parts. One, what do we know about how to achieve innovation under austerity?
00:19:34 ►
Two, what prevents governments from agreeing with us about that? So let me present first
00:19:42 ►
my first draft of the positive case for innovation under austerity. It’s called We we made the cloud. Everybody understands this in this room too.
00:19:47 ►
The very point about what’s happening to information technology in the world right now
00:19:54 ►
has to do with scaling up our late 20th century work.
00:19:59 ►
We created the idea that we could share operating systems and all the rest of the commoditizable stack on top of them.
00:20:10 ►
We did this using the curiosity of young people.
00:20:15 ►
That was the fuel, not venture capital.
00:20:36 ►
We had been at it for 15 years and our stuff was already running everywhere before venture capital or even industrial capital raised by IT giants came towards us.
00:20:46 ►
It came towards us not because innovation needed to happen but because innovation had already happened and they needed to monetize it.
00:20:51 ►
That was an extremely positive outcome. I have nothing bad to say about that.
00:20:59 ►
But the nature of that outcome, indeed the history as we lived it and as others can now study it, will show how innovation under austerity occurred.
00:21:07 ►
It’s all very well to say that it happened because we harnessed the curiosity of young people.
00:21:11 ►
That’s historically correct,
00:21:13 ►
but there’s more than that to say.
00:21:16 ►
What we need to say is that that curiosity of young people
00:21:20 ►
could be harnessed
00:21:21 ►
because all of the computing devices
00:21:24 ►
in ordinary day-to-day use were hackable.
00:21:29 ►
And so young people could actually hack on what everybody used.
00:21:36 ►
That made it possible for innovation to occur where it can occur without friction,
00:21:43 ►
which is at the bottom of the pyramid of capital.
00:21:49 ►
This is happening now elsewhere in the world
00:21:52 ►
as it happened in the United States in the 1980s.
00:21:56 ►
Hundreds of thousands of young people around the world
00:21:59 ►
hacking on laptops,
00:22:04 ►
hacking on servers. Hacking on general purpose hardware available to allow them to scratch their individual itches, technical, social, career, and just plain ludic itches. I want to do this, it would be neat.
00:22:49 ►
I want to do this, it would be neat and nail was the United States government’s policy,
00:22:52 ►
will remember how hard they fought to prohibit $3.8 trillion worth of electronic commerce
00:23:00 ►
from coming into existence in the world.
00:23:07 ►
commerce from coming into existence in the world. We were proponents of nuclear terrorism and pedophilia in the early 1990s, and all the money that they earned in campaign donations
00:23:16 ►
and private equity profits and all the rest of it is owing to the globalization of commerce we made possible with the technology they
00:23:26 ►
wanted to send our clients to jail for making.
00:23:31 ►
That demonstrates neatly, I think, to the next generation of policymakers how thoroughly
00:23:39 ►
their adherence to the received wisdom is likely to contribute to the death spiral they now fear they’re going to get into.
00:23:48 ►
And it should embolden us to point out once again that the way innovation really happens
00:23:54 ►
is that you provide young people with opportunities to create on an infrastructure
00:24:01 ►
which allows them to hack the real world and share the results.
00:24:07 ►
When Richard Stallman wrote the call for the Universal Encyclopedia,
00:24:13 ►
when he and Jimmy Wales and I were all much younger than we are now,
00:24:18 ►
it was a frivolous idea.
00:24:21 ►
It has now transformed the life of every literate person in the world.
00:24:28 ►
And it will continue to do so.
00:24:31 ►
The nature of the innovation established by Creative Commons,
00:24:37 ►
by the free software movement, by free culture,
00:24:41 ►
which is reflected in the web, in the Wikipedia,
00:24:44 ►
in all the free software
00:24:46 ►
operating systems now running everything, even the insides of all those locked down
00:24:53 ►
vampiric Apple things I see around the room.
00:24:58 ►
All of that innovation comes from the simple process of letting the kids play and getting out of the way.
00:25:05 ►
Which, as you are aware, we are working as hard as we can to prevent now completely.
00:25:13 ►
Increasingly, all around the world, the actual computing artifacts of daily life
00:25:20 ►
for human individual beings are being made so you can’t hack them.
00:25:32 ►
The computer science laboratory in every 12-year-old’s pocket is being locked down.
00:25:40 ►
When we went through the anti-lockdown phase of the GPL-3 negotiations in the middle of last decade, it was somehow believed that the primary purpose for which Mr. Stallman
00:25:47 ►
and I were engaged in pressing everybody against lockdown had something to do
00:25:54 ►
with bootlegging movies. And we kept saying this is not the free movie
00:26:00 ►
foundation. We don’t care about that. We care about protecting people’s right
00:26:08 ►
to hack what they own. And the reason we care about it is that if you prevent people from
00:26:15 ►
hacking on what they own themselves, you will destroy the engine of innovation from which
00:26:24 ►
the engine of innovation from which everybody is profiting.
00:26:28 ►
That’s still true.
00:26:33 ►
And it is more important now precisely because very few people thought we were right then
00:26:36 ►
and didn’t exert themselves to support that point of view.
00:26:42 ►
And now you have Microsoft saying we won’t allow third-party
00:26:47 ►
browsers on ARM-based Windows RT devices. And you have the ghost of Mr. Jobs trying to figure out
00:26:55 ►
how to prevent even a free tool chain from existing in relation to iOS.
00:27:01 ►
And you have a world in which increasingly the goal of the network operators is to attach
00:27:07 ►
every young human being to a proprietary network platform with closed terminal equipment that
00:27:14 ►
she can’t learn from, can’t study, can’t understand, can’t wet her teeth on, can’t do anything
00:27:22 ►
with except send text messages that cost a million times more than
00:27:28 ►
they ought to. And most of the so-called innovation in the world in our sector now goes into helping
00:27:37 ►
IT for network operators that improves no technology for users. Telecom’s innovation in the world has basically ceased.
00:27:48 ►
And it will not revive so long as it is impossible
00:27:53 ►
to harness the forms of innovation that really work under austerity.
00:28:00 ►
This has a second-order consequence of enormous importance. Innovation under austerity occurs in the first order because the curiosity of young people is harnessed to the improvement of the actual circumstances of daily life. The second-order consequence is populations become more educated.
00:28:24 ►
Second-order consequences, populations become more educated.
00:28:30 ►
This intermediation is beginning to come to higher education in the United States,
00:28:34 ►
which means it is beginning to come to higher education around the world. We currently have two models.
00:28:38 ►
Coursera is essentially the Googleization of higher education
00:28:43 ►
spun off from Stanford as a for-profit entity,
00:28:46 ►
using closed software and proprietary educational resources.
00:28:52 ►
MITX, which has now become edX through the formation of a coalition with Harvard University,
00:28:59 ►
is essentially the free world answer.
00:29:03 ►
is essentially the free world answer. Similar online scalable curriculum for higher education delivered over free software using
00:29:09 ►
free educational resources.
00:29:12 ►
We have an enormous stake in the outcome of that competition.
00:29:17 ►
And it behooves all of us to put as much of our energy as we can behind the solutions which depend upon free courseware
00:29:28 ►
everybody can use, modify and redistribute, and educational materials based on the same
00:29:35 ►
political economy.
00:29:38 ►
Every society currently trying to reclaim innovation for the purpose of restarting economic growth
00:29:46 ►
under conditions of austerity needs more education deliverable more widely at
00:29:53 ►
lower cost, which shapes young minds more effectively to create new value in
00:30:00 ►
their societies. This will not be accomplished without precisely the forms of social learning we pioneered.
00:30:11 ►
We said from the beginning that free software is the world’s most advanced technical education system.
00:30:19 ►
It allows anybody, anywhere on earth, to get to the state of the art in anything computers
00:30:25 ►
can be made to do by reading what is fully available and by experimenting
00:30:31 ►
with it and sharing the consequences freely. True computer science.
00:30:39 ►
Experimentation, hypothesis formation, more experimentation, more knowledge for the human race.
00:30:47 ►
We needed to expand that into other areas of culture.
00:30:52 ►
And great heroes like Jimmy Wells and Larry Lessig laid out infrastructure for that to occur.
00:30:59 ►
We now need to get governments to understand how to push it further.
00:31:05 ►
The Information Society Directorate of the European Commission issued a report 18 months
00:31:10 ►
ago in which they said that they could scan one sixth of all the books in European libraries
00:31:18 ►
for the cost of 100 kilometers of roadway.
00:31:23 ►
That meant, and it is still true, that for the cost of 600 kilometers of road
00:31:28 ►
in an economy which builds thousands of kilometers of roadway every year, every book in all European
00:31:35 ►
libraries could be available to the entire human race. It should be done. Remember that most of those books are in the public domain
00:31:46 ►
before you shout copyright at me.
00:31:52 ►
Remember that the bulk of what constitutes human learning
00:31:57 ►
was not made recently before you shout copyright at me.
00:32:04 ►
We should move to a world in which all knowledge previously
00:32:10 ►
available before this lifetime is universally available. If we don’t, we will stunt the
00:32:18 ►
innovation which permits further growth. That’s a social requirement. The copyright bargain is not
00:32:29 ►
immutable. It is merely convenient. We do not have to commit suicide culturally or intellectually
00:32:39 ►
in order to maintain a bargain which does not even relevantly apply to almost all of important
00:32:48 ►
human knowledge in most fields. Plato is not owned by anybody. So here we are asking ourselves
00:33:00 ►
what the educational systems of the 21st century will be like, and how
00:33:07 ►
they will socially distribute knowledge across the human race. I have a question for you.
00:33:14 ►
How many of the Einsteins who ever lived were allowed to learn physics? A couple. How many
00:33:23 ►
of the Shakespeare’s who ever lived, lived and died without learning to read and write?
00:33:28 ►
Almost all of them.
00:33:30 ►
We have 7 billion people in the world right now, 3 billion of them are children.
00:33:34 ►
How many Einsteins do you want to throw away today?
00:33:39 ►
The universalization of access to knowledge is the single most important force available for increasing innovation and human welfare on the planet.
00:33:49 ►
Nobody should be afraid to advocate for it because somebody might shout copyright.
00:33:58 ►
So we are now looking at the second order consequence of an understanding of how to conduct innovation under austerity.
00:34:06 ►
Expand access to the materials that create the ability to learn. Adapt technology to
00:34:14 ►
permit the scientists below age 20 to conduct their experiments and share their results.
00:34:22 ►
Permit the continuing growth of the information technology universe
00:34:27 ►
we created by sharing over the last quarter century, and we begin to experience something
00:34:38 ►
like the higher rates of innovation available despite massive decreases in social investment occurring
00:34:48 ►
because of austerity.
00:34:51 ►
We also afford young people an opportunity to take their economic and professional destinies
00:34:58 ►
more into their own hands, an absolute requirement if we are to have social and political stability in the next generation.
00:35:08 ►
Nobody should be fooled about the prospects for social growth in societies where 50% of the people under 30 are unemployed.
00:35:20 ►
This is not going to be resolved by giving them assembly line car building jobs. Everybody sees that. Governments are collectively throwing up their hands about what to do about the situation. Hence, the rapidity with which in systems of proportional representation, young people are giving up on established political
00:35:45 ►
parties. When the pirates can take 8.3% of the vote in Schleswig-Holstein, it is already
00:35:56 ►
clear that young people realize that established political policymaking is not going to be directed at their future economic welfare.
00:36:07 ►
And we need to listen, democratically, to the large number of young people around the
00:36:14 ►
world who insist that internet freedom and an end to snooping and control is necessary
00:36:21 ►
to their welfare and ability to create and live.
00:36:28 ►
Disintermediation means there will be more service providers throughout the economy
00:36:33 ►
with whom we are directly in touch.
00:36:36 ►
That means more jobs outside hierarchies and fewer jobs inside hierarchies.
00:36:44 ►
Young people around the world, whether they are
00:36:47 ►
my law students about to get a law license or computer engineers about to begin their practices
00:36:53 ►
or artists or musicians or photographers, need more freedom in the net and more tools with which
00:37:01 ►
to create innovative service delivery platforms for themselves.
00:37:07 ►
A challenge to which their elders would not have risen successfully in 1955.
00:37:13 ►
But we are a new generation of human beings working under new circumstances,
00:37:18 ►
and those rules have changed.
00:37:23 ►
They know the rules have changed.
00:37:27 ►
The indignados in every square in Spain know the rules have changed. They know the rules have changed. The indignados in every square in Spain know the rules have changed. It’s their governments that don’t know. Which brings
00:37:33 ►
us, I will admit, back to this question of anonymity, or rather personal autonomy. One
00:37:41 ►
of the really problematic elements in teaching young people, at least the young people I teach, about privacy is that we use the word privacy to mean several quite distinct things.
00:37:55 ►
Privacy means secrecy sometimes. That is to say, the content of a message is obscure to all but its maker and intended recipient.
00:38:07 ►
Privacy means anonymity sometimes.
00:38:10 ►
That means messages are not obscure,
00:38:13 ►
but the points generating and receiving those messages are obscure.
00:38:19 ►
And there is a third aspect of privacy, which in my classroom I call autonomy.
00:38:26 ►
It is the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions that you make
00:38:31 ►
are unaffected by others’ access to secret or anonymous communications.
00:38:40 ►
There is a reason that cities have always been engines of economic growth.
00:38:48 ►
It isn’t because bankers live there.
00:38:52 ►
Bankers live there because cities are engines of economic growth.
00:38:58 ►
The reason cities have been engines of economic growth since Sumer
00:39:03 ►
is that young people move to them to make new ways of
00:39:08 ►
being, taking advantage of the fact that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village
00:39:17 ►
and the social control of the farm. How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Paris was a
00:39:26 ►
fair question in 1919 and it had a lot to do with the way the 20th century worked in
00:39:32 ►
the United States. The city is the historical system for the production of anonymity and
00:39:41 ►
the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living.
00:39:47 ►
We are closing it.
00:39:50 ►
Some years ago, to it, at the beginning of 1995, we were having a debate at the Harvard
00:39:56 ►
Law School about public key encryption.
00:40:00 ►
Two on two.
00:40:02 ►
On one side, Jamie Gorelick, then the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, and Stuart Baker, then as now at Steptoe and Johnson when he isn’t in the United States government making horrendous social policy.
00:40:34 ►
And we spent the afternoon talking back and forth about whether we should have to escrow our keys with the United States government, whether the clipper chip was going to me, Eben, on the basis of nothing more than your public statements this afternoon,
00:40:47 ►
I have enough to order the interception of your telephone conversations.
00:40:51 ►
In 1995, that was a joke.
00:40:54 ►
It was a joke in bad taste when told to a citizen by an official of the United States Justice Department,
00:41:00 ►
but it was a joke, and we all laughed because everybody knew you couldn’t do that.
00:41:04 ►
department, but it was a joke, and we all laughed because everybody knew you couldn’t do that.
00:41:12 ►
So we ate our dinner, and the table got cleared, and all the plates went away, and the port and walnuts got scattered around, and Stuart Baker looked up, and he said, all right, well, we’ll
00:41:17 ►
let our hair down. He had none then, he has none now, but we’ll let our hair down, Stuart said.
00:41:22 ►
We’re not going to prosecute your client, Mr. Zimmerman.
00:41:26 ►
We’ve spent decades in a holding action against public key encryption.
00:41:31 ►
It’s worked pretty well, but it’s almost over now.
00:41:34 ►
We’re going to let it happen.
00:41:36 ►
And then he looked around the table and he said,
00:41:39 ►
but nobody here cares about anonymity, do they?
00:41:42 ►
And a cold chill went up my spine. And I thought, okay, Stuart,
00:41:47 ►
I understand how it is. You’re going to let there be public key encryption because the bankers are
00:41:52 ►
going to need it. And you’re going to spend the next 20 years trying to stop people from being
00:41:57 ►
anonymous ever again. And I’m going to spend those 20 years trying to stop you. So far, I must say
00:42:03 ►
from my friend, Mr. Baker,
00:42:07 ►
he has been doing better than I had hoped,
00:42:10 ►
and I have been doing even worse than I had feared,
00:42:13 ►
partly because of the thug in a hoodie,
00:42:14 ►
and partly for other reasons.
00:42:18 ►
We are on the verge of the elimination of the human right to be alone.
00:42:21 ►
We are on the verge of the elimination
00:42:23 ►
of the human right to do your own thinking
00:42:25 ►
in your own place in your own way without anybody knowing. Somebody in this room just
00:42:32 ►
proved a couple of minutes ago that if he shops at a particular web store using one
00:42:37 ►
browser he gets a different price than on the other because one of the browsers is linked to his browsing history. Prices, offers, commodities, opportunities
00:42:50 ►
are now being based upon the data mining of everything.
00:42:58 ►
Senior government official in this government said to me
00:43:02 ►
after the United States changed its rules about how long they
00:43:05 ►
keep information on everybody about whom nothing is suspected.
00:43:09 ►
You all do know about that, right?
00:43:11 ►
Rainy Wednesday on the 21st of March, long after close of business, Department of Justice
00:43:17 ►
and the DNI, that’s the Director of National Intelligence, put out a joint press release
00:43:23 ►
announcing minor changes in the Ashcroft rules, including a minor change that says that all personally identifiable information in government databases at the National Center for Counterterrorism that are based around people of whom nothing, nothing is suspected, will no longer be retained as under the Ashcroft rules for a maximum of 180 days.
00:43:47 ►
The maximum has now been changed to five years, which is infinity. In fact, I told my students
00:43:55 ►
in my classroom the only reason they said five years was they couldn’t get the sideways
00:43:58 ►
eight into the font for the press release, so they used an approximation. Right?
00:44:08 ►
So I was talking to a senior official of this government about that outcome, and he said,
00:44:10 ►
well, you know, we’ve come to realize
00:44:12 ►
that we need a robust social graph of the United States.
00:44:17 ►
That’s how we’re going to connect new information
00:44:20 ►
to old information.
00:44:22 ►
I said, let’s just talk about the constitutional implications of this
00:44:26 ►
for a moment.
00:44:28 ►
You’re talking about taking us
00:44:29 ►
from the society we have always known,
00:44:32 ►
which we quaintly referred to
00:44:33 ►
as a free society,
00:44:35 ►
to a society in which the United States
00:44:38 ►
government keeps a list of everybody
00:44:39 ►
every American knows.
00:44:42 ►
So if you’re going to take us
00:44:43 ►
from being what we used to call a free society
00:44:46 ►
to a society in which
00:44:48 ►
the U.S. government keeps a list
00:44:50 ►
of everybody every American knows,
00:44:53 ►
what should be the constitutional procedure
00:44:55 ►
for doing this?
00:44:57 ►
Should we have, for example, a law?
00:45:01 ►
He just laughed.
00:45:03 ►
Because, of course, they didn’t need a law. They did it with a press release on a rainy Wednesday night after everybody went home. And you live there now.
00:45:14 ►
Whether it is possible to have innovation under conditions of complete despotism is an interesting question.
00:45:23 ►
Despotism is an interesting question.
00:45:29 ►
Right-wing Americans, or maybe even center-right Americans,
00:45:34 ►
have long insisted that one of the problems with 20th century totalitarianism,
00:45:38 ►
from which they legitimately distinguished themselves,
00:45:44 ►
was that it eliminated the possibility of what they called free markets and innovation.
00:45:55 ►
We’re about to test whether they were right. The network, as it stands now, is an extraordinary platform for enhanced social control. apparent remorse, the two largest governments on earth, that of the United States of America
00:46:07 ►
and the People’s Republic of China, have adopted essentially identical points of view.
00:46:15 ►
A robust social graph connecting government to everybody and the exhaustive data mining of society is both governments’ fundamental policy with respect to their different forms of what they both refer to or think of as stability maintenance.
00:46:44 ►
that they have different theories of how to maintain stability, for whom and why. But the technology of stability maintenance is becoming essentially identical.
00:46:51 ►
We need, we who understand what is happening, need to be very vocal about that.
00:47:00 ►
But it isn’t just our civil liberties that are at stake.
00:47:04 ►
I shouldn’t need to say that, that should be enough, but of course it isn’t just our civil liberties that are at stake. I shouldn’t need to say that. That should be enough, but of course it isn’t.
00:47:09 ►
We need to make clear that the other part of what that costs us is the very vitality and vibrancy of invention, culture, and discourse.
00:47:27 ►
culture and discourse, that wide open, robust and uninhibited public debate that the Supreme Court so loved in New York Times against Sullivan, and that freedom to tinker, to invent, to
00:47:35 ►
be different, to be nonconformist for which people have always moved to the cities that gave them anonymity and a chance to experiment
00:47:47 ►
with who they are and what they can do. This, more than anything else, is what sustains
00:47:55 ►
social vitality and economic growth in the 21st century.
00:48:02 ►
Of course we need anonymity for other reasons.
00:48:06 ►
Of course we are pursuing something that might be appropriately described
00:48:11 ►
as protection for the integrity of the human soul.
00:48:16 ►
But that’s not government’s concern.
00:48:20 ►
It is precisely the glory of the way we understand civil society
00:48:24 ►
that that is not government’s concern.
00:48:44 ►
what we understood to be our society’s fundamental commitment that means that the protection for the integrity of the human soul
00:48:47 ►
is our business, not the government’s business.
00:48:52 ►
But government must attend to the material welfare of its citizens
00:48:56 ►
and it must attend to the long-run good of the society they manage.
00:49:02 ►
And we must be clear to government that there is no tension between
00:49:07 ►
the maintenance of civil liberty in the form of the right to be let alone. There is no
00:49:13 ►
distinction between the civil liberty policy of assuring the right to be let alone and
00:49:19 ►
the economic policy of securing innovation under austerity. They require the same thing. We need free
00:49:27 ►
software, we need free hardware we can hack on, we need free spectrum we can use to communicate
00:49:35 ►
with one another without let or hindrance. We need to be able to educate and provide
00:49:42 ►
access to educational material to everyone on earth without regard
00:49:48 ►
to the ability to pay. We need to provide a pathway to an independent economic and intellectual
00:49:57 ►
life for every young person. The technology we need, we have. I have spent some time,
00:50:03 ►
The technology we need, we have.
00:50:11 ►
I have spent some time, and many people in this room, including Isaac, have spent more time now,
00:50:18 ►
trying to make use of cheap, power-efficient, compact server computers,
00:50:22 ►
the size of AC chargers for mobile phones,
00:50:27 ►
which, with the right software, we can use to populate the net with robots that respect privacy
00:50:29 ►
instead of the robots that disrespect privacy,
00:50:34 ►
which we now carry in almost every pocket.
00:50:37 ►
We need to retrofit the first law of robotics
00:50:41 ►
into this society within the next few minutes or we’re cooked.
00:50:47 ►
We can do that.
00:50:49 ►
That’s civil innovation.
00:50:52 ►
We can help to continue the long lifetime
00:50:56 ►
of general purpose computers everybody can hack on
00:50:59 ►
by using them, by needing them,
00:51:03 ►
by spreading them around.
00:51:06 ►
We can use our own force as consumers and technologists
00:51:11 ►
to deprecate closed networks and locked down objects.
00:51:18 ►
But without clear guidance in public policy,
00:51:22 ►
we will remain a tiny minority, 8.3% let’s say, which will
00:51:31 ►
not be sufficient to lift us out of the slough into which the bankers have driven us.
00:51:41 ►
Innovation under austerity is our battle cry.
00:51:45 ►
Not a battle cry for the things we most care about,
00:51:49 ►
but for the ones the other people most care about.
00:51:51 ►
Our entrée to social policy for the next five years,
00:51:56 ►
and our last chance to do in government
00:52:01 ►
what we have not been able to do
00:52:03 ►
by attempting to preserve our mere liberties,
00:52:07 ►
which have been shamefully abused by our friends in government as well as by our adversaries.
00:52:15 ►
We have been taken to the cleaners with respect to our rights, and we have been taken to the
00:52:21 ►
cleaners with respect to everybody’s money. I wish that I could say that the easiest thing to do was going to be to get our freedoms back.
00:52:29 ►
It isn’t.
00:52:31 ►
Nobody will run in the election this year on the basis of the restoration of our civil liberties.
00:52:37 ►
But they will all talk about austerity and growth.
00:52:41 ►
And we must bring our message where they are. That’s my first draft.
00:52:49 ►
Inadequate in every way, but at least a place to start. And if we have no place to start,
00:52:58 ►
we will lose. And our loss will be long. and the night will be very dark.
00:53:19 ►
I’d like to begin this because I hope I speak for a lot of the people here.
00:53:24 ►
That was not just one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard.
00:53:26 ►
It’s one of the most important.
00:53:33 ►
And it won’t be unless we follow up on it, we act on it.
00:53:37 ►
I felt, and actually Elliot’s sitting next to me,
00:53:39 ►
says he felt like this is an I have a dream speech,
00:53:41 ►
and I think that’s what it is. But I think it ended with the nightmare.
00:53:47 ►
And if you weren’t moved by this speech
00:53:50 ►
Your frog is boiled And I think our frogs have been boiling for a long time. I I
00:53:55 ►
Along with everybody else we acquiesce
00:53:57 ►
to prevailing conditions whatever those happen to be and they have gradually worsened over time and in ways that we don’t fully understand
00:54:06 ►
and our lives are busy and so we go about what we have to do.
00:54:11 ►
So what I want to do is task this audience with participating with the Free Everything
00:54:18 ►
movement that Evan has laid out for us now. So I see this just as a Q&A session,
00:54:26 ►
but as all of us freely contributing
00:54:29 ►
to the framework that Evan has laid out
00:54:32 ►
and that we’ve been part of for a long time.
00:54:34 ►
I love the way he included us in this.
00:54:37 ►
This is, there’s natural selection here.
00:54:40 ►
This is a select group.
00:54:42 ►
David has done an amazing job
00:54:44 ►
of pulling the right people together.
00:54:46 ►
The name of this event begins with freedom,
00:54:49 ►
and I think that needs to be our end as well.
00:54:52 ►
And I have nothing more to add.
00:54:54 ►
It’s just a fabulous talk.
00:54:57 ►
Evan, I’d like to ask you a question.
00:55:00 ►
I see a tension between freedom and convenience.
00:55:07 ►
And I wonder how you see that tension playing out.
00:55:15 ►
I think you urged us to focus on innovation,
00:55:23 ►
innovation, but I wonder if, and I think that that does
00:55:28 ►
that’s compelling to
00:55:31 ►
this audience, perhaps the policy makers,
00:55:37 ►
but to the average user
00:55:40 ►
convenience is an issue. Yeah, it’s true.
00:55:44 ►
Which is not only about the relationship between technology and society.
00:55:50 ►
It’s true about lots of other things as well.
00:55:55 ►
The constitutional theorist Bruce Ackerman wrote a lengthy, multi-volume history of the
00:56:02 ►
Constitution in the United States on the basic premise that most of the time,
00:56:08 ►
most people don’t want to engage in deep thinking about politics and society.
00:56:15 ►
It only happens very occasionally,
00:56:17 ►
and the founders of the American Republic, Bruce said,
00:56:21 ►
tried in the Federalist structure to take advantage of those occasional
00:56:26 ►
moments when people want to pay attention. But here again, and I focus on this because
00:56:33 ►
the demographics are so important, that sense of convenience being more important than other
00:56:40 ►
values moment by moment is more true of grown-ups than it is of children.
00:56:46 ►
I go around the world, I talk to governments about all sorts of things connected with technology
00:56:51 ►
in 21st century society, and I hear from people, from presidents to ministers to local planning
00:56:58 ►
committees, all sorts of stories about the terrible social problems their cultures and
00:57:02 ►
communities face. And I find myself saying often, yes, you’re right,
00:57:06 ►
this is a really, really horrible problem.
00:57:08 ►
It’s extraordinarily difficult
00:57:10 ►
and it requires immense amounts of energy to deal with.
00:57:13 ►
You need the strongest social force possible to deal with this.
00:57:17 ►
And the strongest social force ever available anywhere
00:57:20 ►
is the curiosity of children.
00:57:23 ►
You need to harness it.
00:57:24 ►
We have actually both lessons. The thing you call attention, right? available anywhere is the curiosity of children. You need to harness it.
00:57:25 ►
We have actually both lessons. The thing you call attention, right? It’s attention indeed.
00:57:32 ►
Because it is true that grown-ups in their busy lives find themselves willing to do anything
00:57:38 ►
that works and if you hand them a box with an F button on it, they’ll push it. Whether
00:57:42 ►
it costs them or not, and whether it connects them
00:57:45 ►
to a great big man-in-the-middle attack on their social lives or not, or whether their friends are
00:57:51 ►
ratting them out on the weekends to their employers, I think they pay very little attention.
00:57:55 ►
It’s now. But you give a thing to an eight-year-old, and it’s not like that anymore.
00:58:00 ►
He’s got plenty of time. You give a 12-year- thing like that and she’s ready to take it apart. She’s not thinking about convenience, she’s thinking about learning. She’s doing science. She’s playing around. And I have seen in more places in the world than I can think to name, that force of those children fooling around with computers and doing amazing things. You see it everywhere you go.
00:58:26 ►
So I believe the tension is there.
00:58:28 ►
I believe usability is a crucial problem
00:58:31 ►
in building tools for privacy and freedom.
00:58:34 ►
Freedom Box, the stack of software we need to make
00:58:37 ►
for all those little objects in the world,
00:58:38 ►
you know this even better than I do,
00:58:40 ►
it’s partly about function,
00:58:42 ►
but it’s mostly about integration and usability.
00:58:44 ►
We’ve done all the hard work, my laptop, your function, but it’s mostly about integration and usability. We’ve
00:58:45 ►
done all the hard work, my laptop, your laptop, we’re pretty safe. The problem is how do we
00:58:50 ►
make this work for real people with real busy daily lives? So the tension’s there, but the
00:58:55 ►
answer’s there too. We need to empower children. And part of what is wrong with the technology
00:59:00 ►
is the extent to which they are becoming not inventors but consumers. If that process is completed, we really are sunk.
00:59:09 ►
And this is the part of the thing that I was really trying to talk about
00:59:14 ►
in the big, broad, general way.
00:59:16 ►
We need mesh.
00:59:18 ►
We need a way of doing communication
00:59:21 ►
which is not based around operator-centric architecture.
00:59:25 ►
Is the FCC going to do that for us? No.
00:59:28 ►
You want me to engage my critics? They were bought decades ago, right?
00:59:33 ►
So now we’re in a situation in which if there is one man in this room,
00:59:38 ►
Dwayne Hendricks, there is one man in this room
00:59:41 ►
who might help us to figure out what we’re going to do about this.
00:59:43 ►
We must have build-it-yourself networking that really works.
00:59:49 ►
Nick was a visionary and he tried.
00:59:52 ►
And if it had been ready then, we would be living in a different world now.
00:59:57 ►
But it wasn’t.
00:59:58 ►
I think that’s technical failure of an honorable and important kind.
01:00:07 ►
failure of an honorable and important kind. I think he conducted a vast innovative experiment and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, but the other guys ran away with the profits as usual.
01:00:13 ►
And the one piece we really, really needed, which was communications technology that deprives the
01:00:19 ►
centralized network operator of power, we weren’t ready for. Now we have more closed network than open network,
01:00:27 ►
more people using proprietary closed forms of somewhat like the internet than the internet
01:00:34 ►
itself, and we’ve lost big in that process. Now it’s a harder thing to deal with.
01:00:41 ►
thing to deal with.
01:00:44 ►
I often wonder if the amount of energy
01:00:46 ►
being put into
01:00:48 ►
prevention of file sharing
01:00:50 ►
out of all proportion to the
01:00:52 ►
economic value of any copyright
01:00:54 ►
infringement that’s going on
01:00:55 ►
is a sign that those in power
01:00:58 ►
understand that
01:01:00 ►
they must stop our ability
01:01:02 ►
to be our own nose. Is that
01:01:04 ►
resonant with you? Thank you.
01:01:05 ►
Why don’t you talk about this?
01:01:08 ►
So there are two things in play here.
01:01:12 ►
There’s logical peer-to-peer, overlay networks,
01:01:15 ►
and there’s what we call material peer-to-peer,
01:01:19 ►
physical material networks.
01:01:21 ►
And there’s a complex interplay between those forces. So the Freedom Box stands
01:01:28 ►
to be a tool that participates in that logical network, no matter what its connection to
01:01:35 ►
internet is, and can serve as a seed of a material physical network. Now, your question was,
01:01:41 ►
a material physical network.
01:01:44 ►
Now, your question was, how close are we?
01:01:45 ►
What needs to be done? As Evan said, the basic tools are there.
01:01:51 ►
We know how to build overlay networks.
01:01:53 ►
There’s been incredible advances over the last decade
01:01:56 ►
in distributed computational systems.
01:02:02 ►
So that’s there.
01:02:03 ►
It really, at this point, is a matter of
01:02:05 ►
integrating those tools
01:02:07 ►
in a way that makes them usable.
01:02:10 ►
And
01:02:10 ►
as developers,
01:02:13 ►
that’s something that we’re not
01:02:15 ►
always great at, but it’s
01:02:17 ►
certainly tractable, and
01:02:19 ►
we’re at the point
01:02:21 ►
where
01:02:22 ►
these pieces just need to be fit together.
01:02:26 ►
The hardware is in production,
01:02:30 ►
and the software is in not quite alpha stage, I guess you would say,
01:02:37 ►
but there are building blocks there.
01:02:39 ►
The world’s going to fill up over the next six or seven years
01:02:42 ►
with small, very inexpensive, very powerful
01:02:46 ►
servers which are based around ARM chips and fit in a thing that fits in your hand and
01:02:52 ►
uses small amounts of power that you can really run off a battery array. The Freedom Box
01:02:59 ►
project, which we started talking about in early 2010 and got serious about in early 2011,
01:03:07 ►
is basically a pro-privacy router stack
01:03:11 ►
based on Debian that fits in servers like that.
01:03:16 ►
James Vazil of the Open Internet Tools Project,
01:03:19 ►
who used to work for me at the Software Freedom Law Center
01:03:21 ►
and who just left the room,
01:03:22 ►
has one with him this morning, he told me. Isaac and hundreds of other really good people around
01:03:29 ►
the world, including Jacob Appelbaum of Tor, are working on Freedom Box. The Tor project
01:03:35 ►
will be developing on Freedom Box stack in future. Our goal is to put a small, cheap
01:03:43 ►
object that replaces your wireless router in as many places,
01:03:48 ►
homes and businesses and safe deposit boxes in the world as we can get, running software
01:03:54 ►
which makes secure peer-to-peer connections between people whose identities have been
01:04:00 ►
assured in a civil society web of trust-like way, and which can provide a soft migration
01:04:07 ►
away from centralized social networking tools like Facebook and Flickr and so on, towards
01:04:16 ►
systems which actually share only with the people you really mean to share with, and
01:04:22 ►
which resist the effort of other people to see what’s
01:04:25 ►
going on. Some of that work is work we all use all the time based around tunneling VPNs
01:04:32 ►
and other simple stuff. Some of it is the onion routing infrastructure we are building.
01:04:38 ►
Some of it is efforts to increase our meshability by spreading a lot of stuff which is both base station and client around the world.
01:04:48 ►
Some of it is efforts to take advantage of Skunk Works projects now inside the large IT vendors
01:04:55 ►
who also know that small arm-based servers are going to replace the heavy iron they’ve been selling.
01:05:02 ►
But the real net of it, the bottom seed of it is
01:05:06 ►
control your own server, keep your own logs,
01:05:09 ►
do it in a way which resists tampering from external parties
01:05:14 ►
who aren’t working in your interest,
01:05:16 ►
create some robots who really do have the first law of robotics inside them,
01:05:21 ►
and put them at the portals between private networks and the open public net.
01:05:27 ►
If we do that, we begin, as Isaac says, to interleave the virtual peer-to-peerage of the net
01:05:34 ►
with some actual hundreds of thousands, then millions, then tens of millions,
01:05:40 ►
ultimately billions of peers that run in the interests of the people who own them.
01:05:46 ►
Hi, Evan. My name is Preston Ray. I’m with the Open Technology Institute.
01:05:50 ►
You mentioned towards the end of your speech about how the community of people in this room
01:05:55 ►
and the people, the community that we are a part of, has the knowledge, understands the technology,
01:06:01 ►
grasps, appreciates, and evangelizes the philosophy that you’re talking about to make
01:06:05 ►
free collaborative education available to all to solve our world’s problems of economic stagnation,
01:06:12 ►
innovation stagnation, and austerity. You know, we should recognize that we’re also very much a
01:06:18 ►
community of privilege in many ways, not only of our grasp of knowledge and not only of our grasp
01:06:24 ►
of, you grasp of the tools
01:06:26 ►
and everything that make these things work,
01:06:28 ►
but also the backgrounds we come from.
01:06:30 ►
We’re able to afford this conference, many other privileges that I won’t go into.
01:06:35 ►
What do you feel our responsibility, our role is,
01:06:40 ►
in bringing about the world you’re talking about,
01:06:44 ►
in that if we are indeed only 8.3% of the world,
01:06:48 ►
we can’t assume to represent the entire world,
01:06:50 ►
but what is our role in that entire…
01:06:53 ►
I doubt we’re 8.3% of the world.
01:06:56 ►
It surprises me we’re 8.3% of Schleswig-Holstein.
01:06:59 ►
But let me say a little bit about that.
01:07:03 ►
I’ve been engaged for several years now with a community computing center located in a slum in Bangalore.
01:07:11 ►
The original center was located in a cluster of people who have been living in that spot,
01:07:17 ►
first as untouchable people and now as merely poor people for a very long time,
01:07:25 ►
merely poor people for a very long time, 2,200 people with one toilet,
01:07:31 ►
where some young communists working for the big IT firms in Bangalore fished computers out of the garbage and put free software open
01:07:34 ►
and opened a computing center in that slum.
01:07:38 ►
And what came out was not so much people who wanted to learn how to use an office suite
01:07:44 ►
and get an office job. It turned
01:07:46 ►
out they were painters using the GIMP to paint pictures one pixel at a time, and they were
01:07:52 ►
singers, and they were writers. They were people whose communities had never had so much as the
01:08:00 ►
possibility of dreaming of any of those things. But that didn’t matter to the kids, because they were kids.
01:08:06 ►
They just did whatever it was, and it has changed many people’s lives.
01:08:13 ►
My financial support for that activity has been rather minor,
01:08:16 ►
because they won’t take more money than they can use in order to avoid corruption.
01:08:22 ►
And my moral support has been,
01:08:25 ►
I would say, grossly inadequate.
01:08:28 ►
But nonetheless, working together,
01:08:31 ►
we’ve achieved some quite interesting things
01:08:34 ►
which have changed dozens of lives
01:08:36 ►
and which have produced some teachers
01:08:38 ►
who mean to go out and change a bunch of lives more.
01:08:42 ►
I try to work really quite heavily in my classroom
01:08:47 ►
to remind American law students
01:08:49 ►
who are genuinely sagging at the knees a little bit
01:08:53 ►
with all their debt
01:08:54 ►
to think of themselves as privileged in the way you say,
01:08:57 ►
and it’s important to do.
01:08:59 ►
But even more important maybe
01:09:01 ►
than recognizing our difference
01:09:03 ►
from the other people in the world who have so much less
01:09:06 ►
is recognizing our similarity.
01:09:09 ►
When given the opportunity,
01:09:11 ►
those Einsteins in the street are just like our Einsteins.
01:09:15 ►
They’re better than us, smarter, stronger,
01:09:18 ►
more capable of ferreting out the mysteries of the universe.
01:09:22 ►
We really need to begin at the stage of life where we’re pretty
01:09:25 ►
equal, that is when we are children, and we really need to make it possible for those children to
01:09:30 ►
experiment and learn and grow regardless of their state of economic deprivation. The beauty of the
01:09:37 ►
zero marginal cost revolution in human affairs is we can put all knowledge, all culture, all music,
01:09:44 ►
all art, all everything that matters
01:09:46 ►
to the development of the human mind everywhere, all the time.
01:09:50 ►
In the Siddharshan layout in Bangalore, 2200 people, one toilet, 1700 children and 914
01:09:58 ►
mobile phones. Every one of those mobile phones which is carried by the poorest of the poor
01:10:03 ►
in many societies and which will be carried by everybody in the human race by 2050. Every one of those devices can have
01:10:10 ►
every book and every play and every piece of music, every equation, every experiment
01:10:15 ►
on it, and every brain will grow. Try that, and we can worry less about deprivation and
01:10:22 ►
more about progress.
01:10:23 ►
can worry less about deprivation and more about progress.
01:10:36 ►
The will of humanity towards total connectedness is manifest at this point.
01:10:40 ►
And I said it before and I’ll say it again.
01:10:43 ►
The fundamental dialectic of our struggle is this.
01:10:46 ►
Will we be enslaved by our technology or liberated by it? As technologists, as those privileged enough to understand what exists
01:10:55 ►
now and what is coming, I view our responsibility as making sure that it’s liberation technology
01:11:02 ►
instead of enslavement technology. And I think everybody in this room understands that,
01:11:08 ►
but the privilege does come with responsibility,
01:11:12 ►
and it’s to sound that alarm.
01:11:17 ►
The important thing about innovation,
01:11:19 ►
and we say it when we’re in places which have the grandeur of MIT to say it in,
01:11:24 ►
is it’s a long-run business,
01:11:26 ►
not a short-run business. Proprietary software development, whether for the Windows ecosystem
01:11:31 ►
or the iOS ecosystem, is a game of base hits, not home runs. You can put a neat app on a thing,
01:11:38 ►
and it’s neat, and we really love it, and why don’t you share it with us so we can do better?
01:11:42 ►
Oh, well, the SDK terms this, and the App Store terms that,
01:11:46 ►
and no sharing allowed because Steve Jobs slept here once,
01:11:51 ►
and nobody else can sleep in any bed he ever slept in
01:11:53 ►
unless they have his permission and all that stuff.
01:11:56 ►
It’s okay. It’s B-plus innovation.
01:11:59 ►
But we can do better.
01:12:01 ►
And the point of being experts or inspirers of innovation
01:12:05 ►
is to help those bright young people
01:12:07 ►
do stuff that lasts for the long term.
01:12:10 ►
And you can explain
01:12:12 ►
in that frame why
01:12:13 ►
the political economy of closed-end
01:12:15 ►
innovation isn’t really where you
01:12:17 ►
want to put your good idea when you’re 17.
01:12:20 ►
If Jimmy Wales had gone to work
01:12:22 ►
for Encyclopedia Britannica
01:12:23 ►
or Compton,
01:12:27 ►
I’m sure they’d still be paying him a decent salary.
01:12:31 ►
And that’s become what innovation is supposed to be.
01:12:32 ►
It gets you a job.
01:12:35 ►
That’s when we’re really in trouble.
01:12:37 ►
Thomas Edison didn’t want a job.
01:12:40 ►
Fair enough.
01:12:44 ►
I’m not going to speak in favor of Mr. Edison as an individual. I’m only going to speak in favor of the idea that innovation is for the long run, and that’s what counts.
01:12:52 ►
And if you go to a guy who sells you your life back in return for your idea, that’s not long run.
01:13:01 ►
Actually, I’d like to, toward Joe’s point and a prior point,
01:13:05 ►
I was remembering when Evan was talking about kids.
01:13:10 ►
What I did when I was a kid was I loved radio,
01:13:13 ►
and I loved to stamp radios with screwdrivers,
01:13:16 ►
and I was a ham radio operator.
01:13:18 ►
There was no computing in 1961 that a kid could do,
01:13:22 ►
but I hacked on radios.
01:13:24 ►
And I just want to call Dwayne Hendricks to the mic for a second to talk about what we were talking about in the hall,
01:13:31 ►
about opportunities with amateur radio that still exist.
01:13:38 ►
Thanks.
01:13:40 ►
Amateur radio has been around for 100 years now.
01:13:42 ►
And by treaty, it’s in most countries on the planet.
01:13:49 ►
I can take my amateur radio privileges from the United States
01:13:52 ►
and go to all those countries and operate just like I was here.
01:13:57 ►
Eben talked about we need to have free access to spectrum with no middleman.
01:14:02 ►
Okay.
01:14:03 ►
The amateur radio service is just that.
01:14:06 ►
There’s no FCC in the middle.
01:14:09 ►
You can create wireless devices.
01:14:13 ►
You self-certify them.
01:14:16 ►
And as I said, you can take them to other places on the planet
01:14:19 ►
and operate them without asking anybody.
01:14:22 ►
In fact, with the license class I have,
01:14:24 ►
I can put a communications platform in orbit without asking anybody. In fact, with the license class I have,
01:14:29 ►
I can put a communications platform in orbit without asking permission of the FCC.
01:14:32 ►
That is powerful.
01:14:34 ►
So there’s a lot of misapprehensions
01:14:37 ►
or misunderstanding about what amateur radio is about
01:14:40 ►
perpetrated by organizations like the American Radio Relay League.
01:14:45 ►
It’s all about innovation under your own control.
01:14:50 ►
It gives you complete access to spectrum as long as you don’t use it for commercial purposes.
01:14:55 ►
So let me just leave you with one thought.
01:14:57 ►
Ten years ago, I was working for a company called Com21, the founder of which was Paul Barron,
01:15:04 ►
who’s sort of known as the
01:15:05 ►
grandfather of the Internet, all right?
01:15:07 ►
Paul basically said, look, what I’ve learned is that I look at all these people around
01:15:13 ►
building proprietary radios, okay, and they come and go.
01:15:17 ►
If you’re going to create a business, look at mass-produced radios and use those and
01:15:24 ►
morph them to your own needs.
01:15:26 ►
There’s two mass-produced radios today, Wi-Fi and cable motors.
01:15:30 ►
With a little construct called a transverter, a transverter also known as a linear translator,
01:15:36 ►
you can take the inputs and outputs of a cable motor or any Wi-Fi device
01:15:40 ►
and put it anywhere in the radio spectrum.
01:15:44 ►
And couple that with an amateur radio license
01:15:47 ►
and now you have cheap hardware that can go anywhere and not ask permission of anybody.
01:15:54 ►
Okay? So look into this. I mean, amateur radio, basically I put out devices that you don’t
01:16:03 ►
have to have an amateur radio license to use it.
01:16:05 ►
I mean, under my amateur radio authority, I can have as many transmitters operating in U.S. territory without,
01:16:13 ►
and I have people just like you use them.
01:16:15 ►
All I have to be able to do is to turn on or off the device, okay?
01:16:19 ►
When I was working at Com21, we littered the Bay Area with cable modems that had transverters
01:16:25 ►
and had a wireless Internet network that we had a lot of people using.
01:16:33 ►
So we didn’t get any money for it.
01:16:35 ►
We didn’t charge anybody for Internet access, but we provided innovation of a different nature.
01:16:41 ►
That’s it.
01:16:43 ►
Awesome.
01:16:43 ►
Thanks.
01:16:43 ►
Thanks, Dwayne.
01:16:41 ►
of a different nature.
01:16:42 ►
That’s it.
01:16:43 ►
Go do it. Awesome.
01:16:43 ►
Thanks.
01:16:44 ►
Thanks, Dwayne.
01:16:47 ►
My part of this work, oddly enough,
01:16:49 ►
is just making lawyers, right?
01:16:52 ►
I mean, that’s what I actually do for a living.
01:16:55 ►
And before we get all grand about it,
01:16:59 ►
what that really means is
01:17:01 ►
teaching young people
01:17:03 ►
who have enormous opportunities to change society that
01:17:07 ►
they shouldn’t go and take jobs pushing corporate finance paper instead. I’m not actually trying
01:17:16 ►
Mike’s earnest suggestions to the contrary, notwithstanding, I’m not trying to wield any
01:17:22 ►
power. I do want to talk to people, and I admit to the bad habit of wanting to talk to people in large groups for long periods of time,
01:17:30 ►
which is actually not terribly productive.
01:17:33 ►
But what I think we’re trying to do, and here your question about Mahatma Gandhi seems relevant to me,
01:17:42 ►
I’m trying to get people to believe that they’re the solution to the problem.
01:17:46 ►
I’m trying to get people to believe
01:17:47 ►
that it’s in their hands,
01:17:49 ►
not in the hands of some mysterious power far away.
01:17:53 ►
We’re going to win this close up,
01:17:55 ►
and you must have an Agincourt motif,
01:17:57 ►
then that’s the one to have.
01:17:59 ►
This is not going to be dealt with at a distance.
01:18:02 ►
This is done in those actual muddy,
01:18:04 ►
slipping and falling places where all this goes on.
01:18:07 ►
If Harold thinks we can do it at the FCC, that’s great.
01:18:11 ►
I’m not sure I believe him, but he can, if I can.
01:18:15 ►
What I’m really asking is for all of us to recognize
01:18:19 ►
we’re going to have to talk the language of political economy and government policy for a while.
01:18:26 ►
We’ve talked the language of licensing and how to make free software, and that’s run out.
01:18:32 ►
So now the time has come to talk about how we save society’s itches by scratching them with freedom.
01:18:39 ►
And if we can do that, then we win.
01:18:42 ►
Thanks, everybody.
01:18:58 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:19:01 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:19:25 ►
Just like a lecture by Terence McKenna, as I listened to Evan Moglen with you just now, One thought at more time.
01:19:29 ►
Two, encourage at least one of your friends to listen to it also.
01:19:35 ►
And three, then get together with that friend and discuss the topic of Internet freedom and see if you can discover a way for you to add your mind to the mix
01:19:38 ►
and help us all keep from becoming a race of Borg.
01:19:42 ►
And if you get into some good discussions about this important topic,
01:19:46 ►
I’d be happy to Skype in and join your conversation.
01:19:49 ►
Also, in the program notes for today’s podcast,
01:19:52 ►
I’ll include links to the Freedom Box project
01:19:55 ►
and other relevant information about this important topic.
01:19:58 ►
And as you know, you can get to those notes via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:20:02 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:20:07 ►
Be well, my friends.