 We're here at the Internet and Politics Conference at the Berkman Center for Internet Society at Harvard University and I'm here with Andrew Rache from the Personal Democracy Forum. I hope I got that right. And I wanted to talk to you a little bit about there's a lot of discussion about what the role of the Internet will be in the administration since it seemed to play such a major role in the election. And what do you think? What do you think really exists beyond all the hype and the press releases? Well you know political opinion in our society gets formed by people talking to each other and they do it in the most traditional places around a dining table around a water cooler over the back fence in the market and people share their aspirations their hopes their dreams and a lot of those conversations happen you know that way in 2008 the same way they have for decades but now because of the Internet those conversations are in effect on steroids. My 82 year old dad who doesn't know how to do more than one email address at a time was emailing his 50 friends Barack Obama YouTube videos during the election and so you know in a normal you know without the Internet my dad would have spent a year and a half or two years waiting for a social situation where he might have met those same 50 friends and he would have had something to say about the political situation or his belief that Barack Obama would be the best candidate and now he's able to do it instantly in one afternoon even if it's just one address email address at a time now you know if you think about all the people who know how to do more than one email address at a time or making those video YouTube videos you know my dad's become a 21st century political pamphleteer but there are hundreds of thousands of other 21st century political pamphleteers that are using these tools not only to help elect someone but also to let their opinions be known about all kinds of things so it there's no doubt that it's going to have an effect on governance not just how we elect someone but how we actually solve problems and then ultimately some of these people are going to use these tools to solve problems themselves that the government hasn't solved for us and therefore actually competing with government you can imagine for example you know people taking pictures of potholes and posting them on a Google map or people developing ways in which to find out when the subway or bus is going to arrive these are things that traditionally government would be doing for the public people are figuring how to do this themselves with these tools so we're seeing a new network public sphere where it's not really just about electing people it's about actually a new kind of governance where people solve problems because they need to be solved and they're using these tools to empower themselves to connect with like-minded other citizens around the same issues and that's the thing that's so exciting so this is almost a vision of a new type of government in a way is that is that accurate is it yeah a new type of governance you know I mean if you think about it you know you don't need a law passed to make sure you know put people already turn off their cell phones when they walk into a movie theater and there's already sort of a collective social governance around the fact that you turn off your cell phone you walk into a theater you didn't need a law to be passed because people figured it out and people are going to start figuring out other ways in which to just sort of decide on things without actually having to pass a law because there's a certain social norm about it that gets established through people talking to each other it's just cooler to you know decide let's all do this because it's good betterment of society there's a tendency to think that government can solve all our problems and government is still stuck in the 20th century even though we've elected Barack Obama in the 21st century he's not going to be able to drag the entire federal bureaucracy into the 21st century in just four years and but these tools keep evolving and evolving very quickly Twitter wasn't here two years ago YouTube wasn't here three years ago Facebook and Myspace weren't here three years ago who knows what kind of tools will be here four years five years eight years from now so we're talking about even more powerful tools more powerful people who know how to use the tools and if government doesn't catch up people are going to try to solve the problems themselves that's a it's a it's a idealistic scenario and I'm wondering what the flip side of that might be I mean how could how could we get it wrong well the you know we always worry that government could turn itself into big brother because it's watching us it's keeping track of all our cell phone calls our easy pass through the toll toll booths all our emails are traceable or text messages are traceable but if you really think about it we all have these cameras we all have these ability all these tools to also watch the government so I actually think that there is a big brother it's maybe called little brother and it's us and that it's the that there'll be a balance created between the bad stuff and the good stuff because the tools of collaboration the tools of organizing allow people to hold their government accountable when the government starts to behave in ways that don't benefit the whole and that has to do with transparency it has to do with campaign finance reform it has to do with you know all kinds of cronyism and sort of top-down political deals that used to occur in the 20th century but now we're going to be challenged by new ways of actually connecting so not just the people who have access get to make the decisions but maybe the people who know the most about a particular subject get to make make the decision so I actually don't see a downside you know people talk about you know rumors about Barack Obama being a Muslim distributed on on the internet and that's bad well it's the same as you know when we used to when I was going to school people would say don't believe everything you read it's the same applies today I mean if you asked Americans whether the earth revolves around a son or the son revolves around the earth 18% of Americans think that the son revolves around the earth I mean we have an education problem in our country because education has been choked financially for decades and education is a pillar of democracy so we only think about these tools in relation to the kind of educated citizenry we have today but we may have a more educated citizenry in 10 or 20 years because there's so many more resources and so many more opportunities for learning moments that don't just happen in classrooms but just happen because of a network world and so maybe we'll have a society that can actually identify the truth faster than it could before and so that's why I'm optimistic and I don't really see a downside so instead of instead of maybe the technology catching up with the people we've got to get the people to catch up with the technology now in a way well and then there are some people who will never catch up with the technology because some baby boomers who got successful and happy you know with their jobs and their position in life in the 20th century aren't going to adapt to this new technology and there are new entrepreneurial energies social entrepreneurs who are thinking about using their their skills and these tools to create new kinds of value systems that aren't necessarily related to money or position but are in term but are valued in terms of the how how many more people can be positively affected by a set of decisions or an ability to connect with other people and you're gonna actually the big opportunity here is where you start seeing citizens from different countries connecting with each other doing diplomacy without their government's intervention because you could find people in two different countries that you would otherwise the governments are opposed to each other but the people in the both countries actually agree on the same thing and they could both be lobbying individually to try to get their governments to agree to what they see taking the role of the government out of the out of the equation anarchy in a way empowered by the internet empowered by the internet so we tend to think about technology in relation to our own governance in our own democracy but this technology is is going to change the entire world I mean 5.5 billion people are going to have cell phones by the year 2010 that's 75 percent of all the people in the world so they're going to be many millions of people if not a billion people who are going to have cell phones before they have clean water or access to enough food if you extrapolate that to let's say 2015 maybe 80 90 percent of all the people in the planet will have cell phones that's unprecedented every single human being on the planet would be connected to every other human being on the planet and the phones that they're going to have in 2015 are going to make the iPod of today look like a motor roller brick from 15 years ago so we're seeing this advance further and further and we're just at the very beginning you know we said that the good news about the Barack Obama campaign is not just that he won but that now the entire political establishment realizes that the internet is here to stay it's not just a little you know flare up that it got Howard Dean some money or that unseated George Allen with the macaca moment on YouTube in 2006 or got the nomination for Connecticut to Ned Lamont and every single example showed that you know it didn't really elect anybody well it's now understood that the internet is essential to electing someone but that's just the beginning it's you know I was used this analogy Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone because he wanted to distribute music he didn't know that he was actually creating an entirely new communication tool called the telephone as we know it today but when he was when he first used it the first thing he said to Watson was Watson are you there can you hear me we're at the exact same point in the use of the internet in understanding what its implications are we're just at the very beginning look forward to interviewing again in another 10 20 years when we can first see another 10 and 20 years down the road thank you so much for for taking the time and but I want to plug your website real quick it's personaldemocracy.com and the site is called techpresident.com techpresident.com okay well thank you so much for spending time with us