 I have a project that I'm working on this year that synthesizes a variety of work that I've been doing for about the past decade or so. So there's lots of different pieces that come together. So there are, I'm not going to contextualize actually what I, well I am, I'll contextualize a little bit about my background. I started off in the humanities as an English professor and did that for several years and now teach in engineering at the University of Washington in a department called technical communication. So what my work does is it brings together both humanities and social science and more technical aspects from engineering and thinking about design. And most recently what I've been doing is work in the developing world or emerging markets. I know the term developing world is problematic, we can talk about that later, but so doing work about what use, the technology usage patterns around the world and what we can learn from looking at what people do with technology when they start using it. Okay. So there are lots of different threads here, but the overall story goes something like this. I'm going to give you the punch line up front. And so essentially we've gotten quite adept at talking about user-generated content as a source of creativity and resistance, okay? And what I'd like to do is call these hacks, all right, just for the purposes of making vocabulary a little bit easier. If you think about mashups, it's kind of hacking, okay? Making things do maybe what they weren't originally designed to do. We know how to analyze the cultural impact of these hacks in a sophisticated and theoretical fashion, and we've known how to have that conversation since before digital content, as it turns out, back in the analog days. And what I want to do is connect this kind of analysis to technical hacks to make the claim that user-generated adaptation of technology artifacts themselves is also a source of creativity and cultural resistance. There's increasing amounts of work being done on this, including by some of the fellows at the center. And what I want to do today is focus on two sites of innovation in order to talk about technical hacks. And the first is, well, with both of these, it's what people do with technology in all sorts of places. And so the first of these is looking at emerging markets or the developing world context. And the second is looking at community spaces, aka hacker groups, okay? And to accomplish this, what we need to do is shift our thinking in two specific ways. The first is rather than looking at emerging markets as, say, from an academic way to address digital divide issues or from a commercial angle to think about how to make new devices that can be sold to the bottom of the pyramid, instead thinking about what goes on in emerging markets as bottom-up innovation that can contribute to more creative design generally. So that's the first shift in thinking about why bother going to the two emerging markets and looking at what people are doing with technology. And the second is I want to recuperate the term hacker, which is both more complicated and more important than one would think. And there are lots of definitions of the word hacker. The Q&A that Amer had sent me some questions that I responded to that were on the website, and one of them was, how do you define hacker? And I have my own very specific definition, and I would love to debate that with people. But what I want to do is I want to change the terms of what we think of in terms of hackers, because there's an increasing movement to protect ourselves against hackers and hacking that I think in the long run can threaten innovation. And so the conversations that we have about making sure that intellectual property and copyright allow people to be creative online and to create meaningful content, essentially I'm arguing that we should extend these discussions to ensure that they include the technical side of innovation as well. So these are some of the things that I'm going to talk about today. These are the only words that you're going to get in the presentation, so savor them. So for several years I've been doing research on differential patterns of technology use. Questions like how does age or gender or race affect one's willingness to use a specific technology, and once a technology is adopted, how does identity and subjectivity affect both usage patterns and then any adaptations that users go through? So the question of adoption and adaptation, particularly as intervention, so that's sort of an important point, that adoption and adaptation of technology is a kind of intervention in it, is tied to work that I started many years ago back before the internet had pictures, for those of you who, like me, might be grizzled enough to remember that. So while the digital age has made creative repurposing of cultural artifacts easier to execute and perhaps more widespread, is by no means a new process. So what it remains though is just really spectacularly consonant with early examples of, say, slash fiction or other kinds of fan fiction. The work of people like Tanya Medlesky, Dick Hebdig, and Henry Jenkins, critics who looked at modes of individual resistance to scripted consumer roles. And so where this goes, essentially, is that for those of you who are interested, well, yeah, I'm not sure how many people here are interested in the theoretical underpinning of the argument, but it's taken from work on subjectivity, combining strands of postmodern feminism with the work of people like Paul Smith, work that details the tension between being a constructed agent and a subject with agency, that push pull of identity formation and how one navigates through institutional and cultural forces. So I don't actually think that this is the format for an extended theoretical discussion of subjectivity. Happy to chat with you later if you want to go in that direction, but there's no easier way to put people to sleep during and after lunch. So let me just say that my own work in this area, back when I started in the early days, concerned women who write romance novels, and I don't know, yeah, it's a tiny, tiny print, but that's their web page, and a national writer's organization called the Romance Writers of America. And that work was an examination of the complicated role negotiation that women would go through as they moved from being readers to becoming writers, so from being consumers to becoming producers, consumers of that cultural artifact to producers of a variant artifacts that reflected more closely their narrative or creative values that reflected their selves back into the text. And I raise this because the arguments about digital creation are not necessarily new, and in fact, you can see some of the same scholars moving from analog critiques to digital critiques, Henry Jenkins sort of primary among them. So you may ask what do romance writers have to do with computer use in Cambodia and Uzbekistan, which is a fair question. And so those romance writers, as well as the fan fiction writers and zine producers and all those folks who were essentially doing user-generated content back before we had computers, worked their way from being passive consumers of cultural products to producers of artifacts with themselves and others as the audience. And it's exactly that dynamic that I want to draw attention to. The dynamic that says I will not passively consume. I will instead make this object, whether it's a book or a song or a game or a device, meaningful to me. I'll add my voice to what it is, and I'll speak back to it. And that blended conversation is an amazing moment of creativity and innovation. So what we're going to talk about is kind of a wide, disparate variety of areas where that conversation takes place. So the ease of production enabled by digital tools makes these conversations seem in some ways almost mundane. We've been having, we were the person of the year last year and user-generated content, fuels and industry, et cetera, et cetera. And I do think it's increasingly valuable to make the assertion that those acts of cultural production and resistance are important, particularly in an environment where one might argue the cult of consumerism has gained an especially strong following. And as I mentioned, we've become quite adept at those theoretical readings of resistance to technology and to cultural narratives and to complex analyses of user-generated content. But in some ways, the user-generated content of the analog age or the digital age can also be seen as a usage model of media. These are analyses of how users adopt a medium in their lives and how they adapt it to their needs. So adoption and adaptation are twin frames for analysis. What do people choose to use and what do they use it for? And then the sort of two other questions, the invisible questions embedded in that, is what do they choose not to use and what possibilities are foreclosed for them because they don't use it? So from a technical angle, what I started doing, or from a more technical angle, I got interested in this larger question of what kind of patterns do we see and who's using what when it comes to technology. And that was, what do they use it for? Are there any kind of narratives of cultural resistance and why do they use it at all? So I started looking at race and gender in the US and then I thought, oh, well, this is really interesting and there were very early internet initiatives going on in Uzbekistan, back in the late 90s, which is when I was doing this work. So for some reason, I chose to go to Uzbekistan back in 2000 and started this project there. So, okay, let's talk about Cambodia for starters. And then the rest of them, I'm just going to lump Central Asia. I'm going to just sort of talk about Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan together. And if you really want to know what's happening in what country, you can ask me about specific pictures, I'll let you know. So talking about, what I want to do now is talk about the patterns of technology adoption and adaptation going on in a variety of countries. So people in diverse contexts, and in my research group at UW, we use the phrase resource constrained environments. I run a group called Design for Digital Inclusion, and we sort of talk about that notion of resource constraint rather than specific locations because a lot of the arguments are relevant domestically as well. So here are some of the ways that people use technology. And what I'm going to do with these uses that I'm going to discuss is link them to that notion of hacks, okay? The notion of technical hacks, changing how stuff is supposed to work so that it works the way one wants or needs it to work. That these are moments of creativity, moments of innovation to pay attention to. So one of the things that people do is they use older technology and they figure out how to make it work. So if you look at that picture up there, what you see are examples of some pretty antiquated technology being used in the past couple years. And what's happening is that people figure out how to make slower processors, less memory, older operating systems work for them, okay? They cobble things together, they figure it out. One of the things that they also do is they share systems that we think of as a one per user system. So if you travel anywhere in the developing world you'll see this model where you have multiple users grouped around one computer. And a user then gets to find in different ways. So I may actually go with some friends and sit next to a computer and never ever touch a keyboard but I may still think of myself as an internet user, okay? Because I'm interacting with the medium. So I may be literate in Uzbek but not so good with Russian and have no English at all. But I might visit an internet cafe regularly with one of my sons who types messages for me to customers or relatives. I may be a regular surfer of news sites but I can't necessarily afford too much internet time. So my friends and I pool money to buy an hour or two and then we sit together and read our favorite sites. I may be fascinated by computers but have no idea why I might spend my money on internet sites at all that primarily have news about other countries and so I may log on to instead to do something like download a ringtone for my phone. And all of those are definitions of being an internet user. So people also use technology not just for entertainment or for education and not just for political mobilizing in advance of the next election but they may use it for other things. So for those of you who don't read Cyrillic the top line says internet cafe and that's the name of the internet cafe. I like this picture a lot. So we have all these various usage scenarios but one of the best hacks that I've seen in the internet cafe system over the years has to do with games. So here we have bread and counter strike for sale together and essentially what we've seen over the years is that games fuel the growth of internet cafes and the internet industry in a variety of places. So what you get is really kind of swanky places that look like this. I should play this game with Ivan of guess that country. It's been to all these places. So you get places where people come in so you get businesses that open in a community they'll open in a neighborhood and the internet is really really expensive to use and most people actually can't necessarily afford to use it and so what they'll do is in addition to having internet access they'll also be games which run over a land or single player games and there may also be movies that you can watch on site and other kinds of and sometimes the ring tone stuff goes on in these places. So maybe there's not so many internet customers maybe there's no internet customers to begin with. So how does a business stay open. So what they do is they offer games and then kids come in and play games and what that sign up there shows is a pricing structure three tiered pricing structure. So to play games which is the first line that you see up there is one sum an hour to use the internet is two and a half sum an hour to be online is also one sum an hour and online is things like doing I am and so there's what you're seeing is a reflection of an ISP practice where it's metered by megabyte download. So essentially if you're doing online activities that don't constitute downloading things then it's a lot cheaper. So but this is actually very very recent and so earlier there would just be two pricing structures. So you have this cafe that's open some business that's open in a community kids come in they play games they can't afford internet but what that means is when there's someone in the neighborhood who does actually need access to the internet and has the money to pay for it that that business is extant in the community. Someone can walk through the door and get access to the resources. So offering the gaming becomes a way it becomes a viable business model it becomes a workaround in terms of social expectations about the purpose of technology particularly in emerging regions. So if you look at for example what NGOs do and what they tend to fund when they fund internet projects pretty much across the board games are banned I mean I think you could you could be pretty comfortable making that claim in lots and lots of places but in fact it's gaming that that makes it a viable industry in the commercial sector well and porn but you know we all know porn fueled everything for the internet so so one of the other things that they do is create customer basis by having so that says computer club and what it is it's a sign for a StarCraft competition and so they have local gaming groups and local game competitions and for those of you who follow the world cyber games which is the computer gaming Olympics the countries of central asia have placed very well so I'm startling what Lee well over the years in part because of activities like this one of the other things that I've seen over the years this is actually one of my favorite stories world of war stan so how many people know what world of warcraft is how many people play world of warcraft oh come on on up to it really no one occasionally so world of warcraft you all know what it is lots and lots of people play it lots of people are in the game world requires internet access you interact with people you go on group quests a lot of the gameplay is predicated on transactions all kinds of transactions including through an auction house where things are listed for sale and then you buy them in order to get better armor better goods etc so the internet access in the region it's pretty expensive and so what's happened is in a couple of the regional cities regional capitals the local ISPs have set up their own rogue servers their own world of warcraft servers so if you subscribe to the local DSL within the city you can play world of warcraft as much as you want if you pay hourly but you can only play against people who are located in your city and since you're not a room full of world of warcraft players what I'll tell you is the game is fundamentally very very different if there are only 200 people who belong to the universe rather than the thousands or tens of thousands that you would see on a regular commercial server so things like the basic mechanics of gameplay that blizzard built up for world of warcraft literally don't work the same way a lot of them don't work at all and yet there are these devotees people play the game they make it work within their within their infrastructure environment so this is um they've also actually made up their own their own rules here but i'm not gonna oh my computer's thinking it's thinking there we go okay so here's another um we can talk about telephone hacks and system hacks so this is what the public telephone infrastructure looks like in some places and so this is a a hack that people have developed to get around that so the phone up there uh belongs to the person who lives uh along the sidewalk whether it's a home or business and what they do is they run the phone out from their home line to the phone booth when you want to make a call you go give them some money you make a call and at the end of the day when they go to sleep they unplug the phone and take it into their house with them okay so again so routing around of the system so then there's the whole cell phone issue and the way in which uh cell phones work and what i would like to say about this is less about central asia and more about the studies that have been done generally about the developing world and all of the really fascinating sms-based uh applications that have been developed in order to help people scaffold the their needs of everyday life so you get these uh sms pricing structures you know are folks familiar with the with those are so essentially if i'm a farmer um and actually use the fishing example so uh it's been done in a couple countries so i i'm going out to fish um i can use my cell phone to send an sms to find out what the price of different fish is that day so that i can fish for the fish that will fetch the best price and then when i'm ready to go back to shore i can find out what the price is at different markets so i can bring my boat to the market where i'm getting the best price for the fish that i caught that day okay um their cooperatives that use pricing structures um there's all kinds of information services as well as these kinds of agricultural services that have been developed for cell phones this is a um maybe a less um a less socially redeemable hack but so Tajikistan has oh four million people four or five million people up to six okay six million people and they have about nine mobile phone companies so we've got one two three four five six gsm here and then there's another three cdma companies that exist in a country of six million people and what's happened is the mobile providers have been very adept at figuring out how to adapt their services to the needs of the country and so it's very mountainous it's pretty hard to um put those towers up in parts of the region but then you'll get cell phone companies that operate oh solely say on the border with afghanistan and you can think of what niche market they're accommodating there with that customer base uh voice over ip internet telephone is another way like games that internet cafes are having revenue come in another way that they're sustaining and i'm going to try to accelerate my talk a little bit here oh okay right so before we go on i'll say so these are all creative adaptations to technology making it work technically and socially within a given context that they're innovative applications as well models that can be adapted elsewhere to grow industries and doing research in emerging markets or the developing world can do more than contribute to an understanding of the digital divide it can do more than identify markets such investigations can provide valuable insights into patterns of innovation and they can do far more than user-centered design strategies in terms of generating creative design okay so that's sort of another subtext here and uh in the work that i'm doing sort of what traditional user-centered design or participatory design contributes to the story so in the abstract for this talk i i did promise to discuss theories of subjectivity and axe grinders in the same breath so there's the most unflattering photo in the universe but it is about an axe grinder so there you go so i started the talk by discussing content mashups um as a form of resistance to cultural forces and we do have that sophisticated way of discussing those kinds of content intervention content interventions into dominant forces and how does a content mashup or user generated content citizen journalism for example big topic around here um how does that constitute resistance kind to institutions and to uh kind of narrow channel cultural discourse and what i'm trying to do is bring the same recognition of resistance to technical mashups the examples that i've been showing have all been kinds of technical hacks mashups of systems and sort of going back to the original work that i did with race and gender where that work really started was thinking about interface design and how user interface either accommodates uh or encourages certain users based on different identity elements how does it encourage the participation of certain users and not encourage the participation of other users and so bunch of folks have written about that about how user interface design is sort of culturally situated and makes assumptions about who users are um so uh so what i'm trying to do now is draw attention to how important those moments of technology technical intervention are whether it's designing a new ui or some of the other things we'll see here and also that these kinds of interventions are not necessarily predicated on our cane expertise just as user generated content is not the purview only of domain experts okay so this is the leap to that second community of innovation that i want to focus on and precisely for their contribution to conversations about creativity this is the i'm not going to say anything more about ict for d i'm gonna or the the emerging market stuff i'm gonna go into the second community because the time is a waist in and i want to say that this is kind of an accidental part of the story this is actually a really important point i never intended for this stuff to be part of my scholarship this came out of uh just what i started doing in my life um you know that whole free time thing that sometimes we have free time and we do things that aren't associated with our work and so i started doing this and hanging out with this group of people and came to realize that the sorts of activities that we were engaged in i won't say they i'll say we uh we're really resonant with the work that i was doing in emerging markets and a lot of the conversations that people were having about digital technology and what innovation what constitutes innovation so so uh so here we go so i'm going to talk about hackers and the argument that i've been making for years regarding research um in other communities that those patterns of adoption of technology adoption and adaptation um speaking more plainly how users hack systems and make them usable or relevant um is an argument that can be made to hacker communities and the whole diy community and um so these are some of the things that we do we do use a lot of screwdrivers and a bandsaw this is a pcb printer and uh what it allows you to do is uh print out plans for soldering up a pcb board it's a great way of uh building stuff yourself in a cheap way we launched a high altitude balloon so we uh got up to about a hundred and seven thousand feet and um we did lots of electronics and um putting together a variety of cameras and uh we made sure the payload was pink because it had lots of wires and scary-looking things and when it landed in eastern washington uh we didn't know what people would think um so we there are a whole bunch of us and we spent a couple weeks uh doing this and trying to figure out how you could do new things with photography and how you could do uh get video and do tracking through various mobile technologies we do things like play with ferrofluid i don't know if you know what ferrofluid is but it's pretty cool stuff and uh if you it if you run a magnet underneath it on the like on the other side of this little tupperware you'll get these incredible patterns there uh it's remarkable stuff uh uh we do some things like uh build power tool drag racers okay for power tool um races which is a weird thing uh we one of one of the one of the folks built a tesla coil you know what a tesla coil is okay and actually one of the really interesting things that i learned about tesla coils is is while it's running if you walk out with the fluorescent light bulb and you get close enough it'll light up it just just from ambient electricity and so this is all a kind of experimentation and uh there sometimes it is just like the whole tesla coil experimentation is just sort of learning how electricity works and what can we do with it but then there's stuff that's more purposeful so this is an rfid tag and one of the things that we've been doing is thinking about rfid and some of the social implications and that's that's actually my other berkman project is all about rfid and and other kinds of security issues and writing software and hardware and doing some examination into what some of the vulnerabilities are of rfid technology oops a daisy which constitutes not just playing like you might make the argument with the balloon or the tesla coil but also looking at what some of the policies are that regulate how we move through our everyday life so those credit cards that you have when you get your new credit card maybe it has an rfid chip in it do you have any idea of what those true vulnerabilities are about that rfid chip that's in your credit card and those are some of the things that we're trying to figure out because frankly no one else is really trying to figure it out for us so it's this kind of alternate community of research and discovery but what's happening for the folks who do this kind of work is that increasingly what they do and the questions that they ask are being constructed as illegal okay so and that's sort of that's the intervention that I really want to try to try to fight back against so there is this little story on boing boing about the car calendar I mean I'm sure some of you read it that some folks who Wendy's laughing so folks who they'd kitted out their cars and there was a car group and they wanted to make a calendar with pictures of their cars and then they got a cease and desist from Ford saying no you cannot have pictures or I guess actually Kathy Press refused to print the calendar saying they would be in trouble you can't take pictures of your car even though you bought it and you own it and as many modifications as you've done to it any picture of your car actually doesn't belong to you so what you own you don't actually own speaking of cars if you were the kind of person who wanted to work on your car and you had a somewhat recent car you can't actually legally work on your car not because the mechanics are too difficult but because it's wrapped up in really proprietary software that you can't get access to not that you necessarily want to copy the software you don't necessarily want to access to the source code but maybe you just want to work on your car because you own your car you should be able to work on your car or maybe you own an iPhone and you really wish it had an app that helped you oh I don't know name some sort of task of everyday life that you would like to accomplish more usefully and that application is not available in the world so okay I'm going to go ahead and build that app I actually can't build that app and load it onto my cell phone or load it onto my iPhone without it becoming a liability in the future for when Apple updates the firmware and it's not because Apple necessarily is marketing an application that does the same thing and they want to make money off of it they may say well we're not developing this app and we may never develop this app but you still can't develop the app even if you really want it and we're not making money off of it but someday we might want to make money off of it so therefore you can't do it okay so these all of the kinds of mashups or innovation that people would want to engage in increasingly there's a lockdown on that and that's problematic I would say again all the effort that we put into thinking about IP and copyright and ways to protect user generated content and the conversation the textual and digital conversation that happens among users that doing that at the side of technical innovation is just as important so those hacks in the developing world that we looked at are often in response to obviously visible institutional failures so if you think about that empty phone booth that was in Tajikistan and the private sector solution to that problem running the phone line out from the home the work done by hackers is in response to similar failures but failures that are less obvious and less visible there are failures associated with narrowing channels of power increasing passivity on the parts of users increased specialization that tries to make the argument that innovation can only come with expertise and with consumer capitalism taken to its illogical extreme when to purchase something no longer means you own it outright so hackers I would argue whether it's that private phone provider on the street corner or the person writing that new application for the iPhone counter that push to centralize who gets to do what with technology and to push back against the increasing movement to say that the things you purchase that you own aren't actually yours to experiment with to improve or to creatively repurpose and I suppose you can call them these if you want and many people will but that move from user to hacker that point when one becomes an actual builder and builds value and creativity and possibility is worth rethinking and rethinking what actually does get thefted in that process and whether we want to in fact recuperate that movement from one role to another and identify what's positive in it I'm done and there's things Yes Keith So I'm curious about the motivations of the hackers that you're hanging out with versus the developing world hackers that you and I both do a lot of work with and generally speaking the reason the developing world hackers hack stuff is because something's badly broken just won't work in that context there's not necessarily a lot of this sort of creative explorative I don't know anyone who races you know belt sanders in Ghana for instance although I know some very very creative hackers do and I wonder if it's sort of a bridge too far in sort of looking for parallels between the two it seems to me like there's something else complicated and political going on with the folks that you're hanging out with that I'm not sure it's entirely fair to ascribe to folks doing this in the developing world is it fair to use the same terminology to talk about these guys or are the motivations so different that it's a mistake to sort of bash them up together so that's a great question I think what I would do is I would go back to the RFID issue and the RFID research that we're doing as the way to build that bridge more effectively so the notion of play like I don't I think that the notion of play is applicable in the developing world when you look at what people do with technology and the kind of personalization that people do with their cell phones it's not all instrumental so they do have that sense of play as well so I don't I don't want to completely erase that but I think that the stronger connection is at the point of the hackers that I hang out with here the research that they're doing they really do see it in response to the fact that institutional structures are not working to either protect them or make sure that technology does the things that they feel it needs to do and that's the same connection to why people are doing the routing arounds in the developing world so a lot of it is perception on their part they see themselves I think engage in a similar kind of now I'm also completely totalizing the community which is inappropriate I mean I you know completely but get back to the economics so I get it I understand that you know people are worried that technology has become increasingly a black box and the only way to do is to fight back against it but you know those screwdrivers cost money so do the bandsaws you know and so do the belt senders that you know you're modifying the drag race right is there an economic motivation associated with this sort of new American rise and hackerdom the sort of big magazine culture it I realize it's now sort of being celebrated to an extent that I haven't been before it's always been present there but I guess I understand that a lot of the people involved with this are very political about it see the political motivations but it's the economics that are of interest is there a common ground on that so some of them are the economic element so Etsy is a good example of the DIY so Etsy is a it's an online store for the DIY community where people sell the things that they make and that's the place where DIY becomes about efficacy for these people and people make a living doing it so it's not just play so the other thing about and this is associated with the security project that I'm doing where I mean I think you can you can break hackers into different categories you can break security researchers into different categories and some of the security researchers including some in this larger community that I'm talking about this research that they do this is part of how they support themselves as well so it's not completely devoid from their professional lives so there is an economic angle to it but I think Etsy is probably the better example this is John from Uptarsta one of the things that I think is is so interesting about this is the moment at which Linux has become ascendant as they kind of embedded software and everything if you go buy a plasma tv today the odds are it comes with a print out of the gpl because it's got Linux on it is exactly the same moment at which you're increasingly not able to hack those things because they're closed in all kinds of other ways and this kind of celebration of the make zine culture comes exactly at the same time as in some way software gets less and less hackable dcma and all that kind of stuff and I guess I wonder what's the kind of relationship of that to these emerging markets in the sense that much of the research that's done on emerging markets as you started out saying is about how do we sell stuff into this new market right how do we how do we feed the bottom of the pyramid with good electronics cheap right and yet kind of you want that research to also have some sense of of this openness so I get I don't have no time formulating it as a question but what do you make of that kind of paradox of sort of hyperattention to this at the same time as nobody's reading is as resistance so I'm not a statistician but I think they have a fondness for the phrase correlation is not causation so I'm not uh I'm hesitant to draw causation but I do think it's interesting that when you have this ascendancy of kind of DIY as people are feeling like they can't see inside any longer and there's that great if you've read was it rainbow's end uh for nirvinge I mean it's this great book where it's wonderful dystopian future where you can't see inside anything and there's this dramatic moment where one of the characters finally you know in a fit of violence gets the hood of a car open and and on the hood of the car it had said no user no user serviceable parts within and then within the car like a it's like a stack of russian dolls you know everyone you open and it says no user service serviceable parts within so this infinite regress of you have no right to to have any kind of intervention but uh I I would agree with you it is extremely interesting I don't know whether one has to do with the other I could speculate about it but it would be pure speculation in terms of the the emerging markets research so one of the things that I found interesting as I've been doing this work for eight years is that people who actually look at emerging markets essentially they care about four countries they care about Brazil Russia India China brick and they don't really care about pretty much any other region the the folks who do the commercial work and because those are where the substantial markets are where they see the return on their investment so I think it's also a little bit disingenuous of me to make this claim about emerging markets research for what I'm doing in central Asia because it is uh it's a convenient connection uh so I'm interested in your uh discussion of the the internet cafes that you know are economically viable because they offer games but also provide useful services alongside and wondering if that offers design suggestions for building modifiability into mass market uh objects so that uh even if they are sold as game boxes they can also serve as internet machines um and how we can do that to reach market scale um on objects that then also have these beneficial side effects I think that's a great point so the assuming that users are not they're not unified they're not coherent or they move through various stages in their usage career with a certain device so Intel has been for example building new kinds of PCs to accommodate usage models in the developing world including multiple users etc um so the the uh the game cafe example for me though also revisits the notion of instrumental uses of technology so a lot of the uh a lot of the emphasis often uh in developing world technology is how can this be useful not how to accommodate play and the fact is like one of the takeaways for me in that in that story is that people do play you know everyone plays and I can go to the you know the smallest dusty town the reason that mobile phones are cheap enough for the fishermen to get them is because lots of people buy them for other reasons to play and uh engage in the banal conversations here uh and the where are you get them to scale that the fishermen can have the same time though that phenomenon of the gaming cafe um is quite specific to Asia don't see the same pattern of Africa um and it's interesting it's it's I remember you know walking in for the first time to a cyber cafe in mongolia and seeing a two-tiered pricing structure going holy cow how the hell did we not think about this in africa but the answer is gaming there is an entirely different business based around old nintendo and old playstation games for you know a quarter of 15 minutes so um but entirely separate markets that have broken off so and then what happens in in at least in these countries is eventually as the market matures the game cafe in the internet cafe is put off and then you'll have separate places where people go for their different uh for their different activities but so in Uzbekistan in ninety nineteen thousand they had the those nintendo cafes as well and what happened is they got replaced by the internet cafes which is interesting so when I was in kenya doing some work I was working with someone who owned a company there and I said let's go to some can we go to some game cafes and he ended up taking me to an old-style arcade that had like a pool table and pinball and uh space invaders and yeah any other questions um I'm interested in in this do-it-yourself group that you're talking about um wherever you run into the law that is where where has somebody said well you can't do this so um I won't say that this is with the group that I've worked with okay I'll just these are some these are some stories that I've been told um if you wanted to find out whether your uh credit card could be read from software that was whether your RFID credit card could be read from just a reader that you can buy off ebay and and software that one could write oneself trying to reverse engineer the so-called um security of that card that um that would be illegal okay that someone might be told that they they uh can't do that reverse engineering legally and I'm actually interested in the I mean I like specifics so who is who is the agent here who who says this is illegal and why is it illegal so I would love to have that conversation with you but I'm not going to do it on the webcast I I will have that conversation with you later um but the reverse mark this is a speech moment reverse engineering is is really dicey in terms of what's legal and what's not I was talking to Phil Malone earlier and he gave some examples of actually of good stories um like the lexmark printer case where um folks did some reverse engineering to route around the lexmark's attempt to mean you could so that you could only use their printer cartridges and lost so because and lexmark had claimed the dmca as saying you know this this is a violation and and the courts actually said no not so much so there's there's some there's some good stuff but I would say certainly the software reverse engineering um and uh the iPhone is another good example actually um but to come back then the law in general would be the dmca that's that's that's yeah that's what I mean about mostly as their concern and if one wanted to mount a defense against this use of the dmca would one try to do it under first amendment or so I'm not a lawyer I don't know how to answer that Wendy would you like to answer that I don't I mean I don't I mean I'm partly I'm thinking you know uh we think of first amendment it's about speech this is about action is there some crossover between speech and action here that so far the successful challenges to the dmca uh in the lexmark case uh or in the chamberlain case where a garage door opener manufacturer was trying to stop people from using their own beepers uh with it uh have been one on the grounds that this is somebody trying to push a copyright protection too far and either they the so-called copyright claimant didn't take all of the steps needed to invoke dmca protection they hadn't locked off all access so you weren't breaking an access control um in order to interoperate with it but the first amendment uh the fences haven't worked so well and and we still need to to keep pushing on the the argument that investigation and learning is part of what's protected by the first amendment and that interoperability shouldn't be prevented but if you can point to a core of copyrightable expression that you're doing the right things to set up technical walls around so far at least the law gives you a fairly strong barrier there well it kind of leads into my question i was going to ask uh whether your project envisions any coming up with any specific legal strategies or arguments for pushing back and uh i would need a collaborator for that since i am not a lawyer okay but this is a very fertile environment for that sort of kind of collaboration so um i i think a series of case studies at least that could be a provide guidance for people would be super useful and that so one of the things that i am doing is so the so the the main project that i set out to do this year was think about privacy and security and do a bunch of kind of ways to educate the public about security risks that are non-academic right not write another white paper but have some kind of public demonstration stuff and and so that's proceeding apace but one of the elements of that has been just talking with folks who do security research and finding out what are the elements of uh what are the kinds of legislation that gets invoked to shut them down and and sort of just doing interviews with folks and and getting their stories about where their professional practice has hit stags and i think that's been really interesting and uh i i think valuable i think collecting that information will be valuable jean i already go back to kind of a theoretical level of questions but in terms of that even the title of your talk today um in terms of producers and consumers and the idea resistance it strikes into the language um kind of implies a certain industrial view of economic activity and that you know the idea of resistance like growing that kind of during the early industrial revolution and sabotaging all the different machines and you know one thing that we talked about a lot here is kind of whether we can move over to more of a common kind of kind of almost a pre-industrial or post-industrial way of looking at an intellectual property i'm wondering if part of what would help us think think about that more would be to try to find a language that's more like i don't know raising or something that that that you kind of taking from the comments rather than using and consuming and resisting which which seems to imply already assumed that there's an intellectual property that that is somehow sacred and and that's really interesting is can you say a little more about that like do you think that would be at all relevant to some of the ways that people talk about like how would you extend that argument to some of the production examples of production here i mean i think here's a little bit harder because you are talking about physical artifacts right in a lot of cases software yeah software yeah software less though so if you're thinking about like kind of a pool of stuff i mean this necessitates legally something else to be able to be in place but like if you're already talking about there's a pool of junk lying in the corner and you're kind of just taking things out of that pile and kind of reconstructing it rather than consuming it or turning from a consumer input rather this is just like a pastor something that we all have have a claim to i'd have the right to go and borrow from and put back into that that would be that would be a different language and saying that you're a producer or a consumer it's just a yeah it's really it's interesting does that is that reflected in in law i mean is it the kind of thing that one can use that model well that is the idea of the comments right so but i'm saying like we if we're kind of pushing the idea of a common thing can we find a way to be consistent about that language um to the level of producer and consumer i don't really know what the alternative i mean i guess it did use to be shepherds or or or cow or cow or whatever um and that the resistance is probably more similar to the era of fencing off the the west i don't know so did you just listen to that yeah so do you so i find that very interesting it's like how would you take that to the developing world it's not on the work you do you're going to duck this one on her out to me i'm a genius so this is a great question a great question you're gonna you're gonna toss it over i think you are well pleased to respond it you know it locks into some questions that i was about to ask you sort of for for my next round of questions which were basically to say whether there's any possibility of sort of solidarity between the two groups that you're talking about and is there a sense in which you ask the american hackers to sort of leverage open this not necessarily because we need a ton of it here because you can make arguments back and forth about just how pressing or just how paranoid these things are but make the counter argument that unless you have this stuff remaining as open as possible it isn't hackable and developable and here i think probably the most useful example in all of this stuff is wireless where if you had really successfully locked down a wireless router technology either through uh through dmca or through technological protection or something along those lines there's an enormous amount of innovative stuff that's been in an african and an asian context as far as ripping this equipment apart and making it possible to do it over extremely long distances and what's interesting is that whether or not you sort of take these community networking projects like you know see you win seriously where you've got you know young american hackers essentially saying you know because corporate capitalism is evil i don't want to use an isp i simply want to use my neighbors and you can simply look at that and say that's very nice and you know get back to me after you've made it through your marxist phase they've managed to advocate in some ways for a level of openness around these products that allows for some really interesting development world style to occur and so i'm wondering if there's a sense in which there are commons arguments based on the importance of the commons not necessarily for those who are directly defending it but for who else the comments are taxed but also it would be a nice time to the notion that the airwaves are a public good right so you think about the way that spectrum is optioned off when you have to privatize that in a certain way but there is still this sort of ruminant notion that the the airwaves are a public publicly owned thing and maybe in the developing or the emerging markets something you can try to preserve at a greater level well yeah you're 20 years too late for that sorry there's this little thing called the itu that took care of that ages ago but it is one of those cases where that's absolutely part of the ideology behind the sort of hackers around the stuff in the US those arguments don't have a ton of traction in the developing world and and so far has been pretty much so good when you have you know Tajikistan with nine mobile phone networks there's problems with having nine mobile phone networks but it beats the crap out of having none which is is what happened before properitization of the spectrum there so because this very difficult argument to make on ideological grounds what's interesting is that the ideological argument would be easier to make in this country but then it has technological openness implications so how does solidarity play out when you're talking about communities that aren't subject to the same legal regime I don't I don't know that it's the legal regime that's the issue I mean you know my work I turn this all into interest and you know focus on the different problems like my my fear about sort of solidarity movements around this is that for the most part American geeks have no freaking clue what the technological challenges are of Uzbekistan or Ghana and therefore tend to get things wrong in those rare cases where you see something that's been designed really well by American geeks in the developing world like the one laptop device it is a rare triumph rather than the norm so for me it's more the environmental questions and the questions of problem identification that would sort of make me resistant to sort of celebrate that movement but I you probably make the same argument for legal regimes if you know we are really obsessed with protection of copyright here it's become an enormous issue and there's an enormous amount of enforcement effort that goes into it just isn't nearly as big an issue in a lot of developing nations at this point you know there's a major entertainment publisher in India that has figured out how to undercut the pirates at the DVD market and are now releasing DVDs licensed IP licensed on them for 20 rupees because they figured out that the pirates were selling them for 35 there's no way to shut down the piracy figured out the only way to continue making a profit as a DVD distributor was to license the content of distributed legal DVDs that are lower than the pirate price but that's a that's a very different so I would explore this notion of solidarity more I mean in the comments I do find that very interesting I will say I completely agree with you that by and large American geeks have no clue about what the technical infrastructure is elsewhere and that's been I mean that's been one of my frustrations so that's why I started this work in so many years ago is watching so much money associated with ICT projects overseas get poured down the drain so there are a couple kind of interesting little initiatives of hackers getting together and trying to put together sort of groups of folks who will help NGOs in the developing world design technology solutions based on what they need I also I don't really know what to make of this but from your comment I mean you and I both know that one of the one of the people that's in the group that I'm talking about here is involved in wireless efforts in the developing world so there are some moments of really effective crossover there and I think that's part of what I'm part of what I'm why I'm trying to connect those two communities every now and then it does happen effectively so there are other questions I know there's a meeting in here in a few minutes but anything else okay thanks very much for your attention