 Thank you very much. Five years is not a very long time in computing terms, but in publishing terms, particularly journals, it's a lifetime. So I just want to say thank you very much and happy birthday to the internet velocity review. Well done. And it's a privilege and an honour and a pleasure to be able to give the first few words today. So having ended your introduction, Frédéric, with honouring important Turkish activists, I think that resonates, I hope, with some of the things I want to say today. If you're going to write issues around who you're going to write, what they are, what they're not, that's what keeps me busy. But I'm not going to talk so much specifically about those many, many issues. They kind of fail, I want to say. I'm going to riff off the interview that Frédéric and I did, which is a little old media booklet. I also use old media. I use ink on Dead World. So I'm also using the silicon touch today. So I'm going to refer to, I'm going to talk about the structure agency tension that we're all working in as researchers. Also as activists, if you wish to call ourselves that, or as advocates, as technical experts, as designers, as teachers, as students. And there's always this tension with the structural facets of what we're working with. And we're only writers agency today. How does one really make a difference? Does anyone want to? Okay, so three big statements, just to sort of make three big statements and get them out of the way. Number one, I work with the assumption that policy is political by definition and certainly by preference. So policy making processes and outcomes are inherently about finding out or being engaged in exercising, if not resisting, or repurposing, incumbent and emerging powers. In this case, of course, the internet however defined as our focus. But of course in case of what I tend to use internet now as an adjective rather than a proper noun. So internet media communications, computer networks, digital processes, life, love, call it what you like. What if we want to think about policy and as power is not located of what I like to call mothers as well, the online often nexus of internet design, internet terms of access and use and content, what we now call that data, but content still doesn't matter. And I think those are ways to actually try keep some sort of structure, good structure to what we're trying to do. Now actors include, of course, us, and they include institutions, all these power brokers that we'd like to define and isolate and talk about. But also I think as we know we're all non-human actors. I'm going to talk about two more uses of the word actors. And non-human actors are now including artificial intelligences, bots, you know, infrastructures themselves, arguably non-human actors, internet of things. The transmission highways and byways and cells that affect how we live, what we find out, who we work with, how we get to what we want to know. And everything is now becoming automated. So let me just try and operate this. Right. I'm going to use a bit of artwork here. This is an education gathering. So this is a fair use situation. And I'm going to acknowledge all artists as I can by name. Very exciting artists going on using these technologies in extraordinarily raised things of beauty. I remember that some of these technologies also create things of beauty. This is a wonderful artist we're meeting now. I could talk for 20 minutes just about this piece, but this is a still from one of his exhibits called Reborn Light, Reborn TV. So what I'm trying to say is within my three big statements, how we might define power, whichever discipline you belong to and how you prefer to talk about it, we're also talking about ideas and the subtle emotional dimensions to everyday life that are now mediated by, mediated by, structured through these internet dependent forms of media communications. And I'm going to quote me now about this piece, which actually moves in and out. The dove moves, I will tell you. It's an old television with the projection of the dove that is mowed in and out of this huge, huge container of water, slowly ensuring that as it comes up, the water pours out the bottom. It's quite an extraordinary piece because of course the effect of the light and concrete material objects. And he says, TVs are mostly like computers and humans are similar in their structure. Humans are made up of body and spirit, as is TV and computers, or body, frame and light digital content. In other words, the artist says, if a human body is a vessel for holding spirit, then a TV computer is a vessel for holding light, spirit and mind. So this is my way of giving us a little bit about those kind of possible techno-determinist frameworks. Possible. I'm not going to accuse you of being techno-determinist, I know some of you are too old. Okay. So I'll just let you take that engine in it. If you want to think about who these actors or agents or actants are, some people like to order stakeholders. Some of us are forced to use the word stakeholders. Good idea. Most people would that corporations, private actors are being extraordinarily important and they are still extremely dominant form of actors in the internet political world. They also work with, but also as we know, against and in spite of how state actors, governments wish to set the rule books themselves. But this is hardly a new thing to say. I do think that this generation of what we call tech giants has reached a skirm and a level of depth, not unlike our artists work. A depth-ness and a scale that we have yet to actually really understand and we're trying to. If Facebook can boast that two out of seven people are on the planet, on the planet, two out of seven people on this planet are subscribed to Facebook apps and platforms, that's a hell of a lot of people. Okay, that's bigger than any nation's state. I don't think one needs to take notice of that. Even if some of those accounts are dormant, even if some of those accounts are fake news, still two out of seven. So, we've got a really up a level of analysis now right up to the globe. When we talk about internet technologies, we often assume that they just began yesterday. No, they are actually dependent on very old infrastructures, telecommunications, telephone and telegraph. And this may sound old and dusty, but it's extremely powerful when you think about the history of the age of empire. You think about how the British empire, the Dutch empire, the French empire, how they maintain the imperial rule is through communications. So, government states have always had vested interest in being in charge in somewhere or other of these transmission pathways. And it's an engineer who told me, I've been working in engineering school for quite a few years, he said to me, it's all about transmission. And he said, Robert, if you can draw access to the transmission infrastructure, there's a revolution. And where the most revisions go, the TV, the radio are now internet connections. Here's the next one. Oh, this one's back in 99. Telegeography just does great stuff, highly recommended. Seljuk, who's the late Turkish cartoonist, was a joke back then in the early 90s, but I'm too true now, perhaps. And this is from 2011. Facebook writing up the rule to civil elements. That has changed a little bit, become more dense perhaps, but normally I think it's a very, very powerful representation of what has come before, except who owns and controls this particular map. So I have no idea how long I've been talking, Frederic. All right, so you think you're up to date? You're not. We're not even now up to date. This is the tricky part about the era all of us are working in, is the fact it's a fast-moving target, we read about this all the time. But as a computer hacker Barbie reminds us, things are out of date very, very quickly. Highly recommended computer hacker Barbie, fantastic girl. Really you should follow her. But I mean lots of inside jokes there, but you could actually update this for like this week and have us be the butt of the joke. So as I said in the interview, the thing is that complexity is a thing and the system and the context in which we need to begin with our work. And we all know when we do internet research or internet governance research, it's extremely complex. There are many, many topics vying for attention. It's very hard sometimes to talk about, to not try and talk about everything all the time. We have these conversations in the gigamate committee meetings and we know at conferences you can get very, very specific or you can get very, very general. I think the challenge is to keep the two together, to be focused on whether they assume technology or application or practice or platform, you can call it what you like. But also you should remember the historical context and the cultural context in which you're working. Because without context, what you do is meaningless. Because context is everything. Now, when I started way back in the early 90s, there weren't these kinds of aggregator statistics available. I think the ITU had a few kind of sort of tied looking statistics about something called the internet. It was all about telecom. But now you can actually go online to things like the world internet statistics and get a pretty good picture of how things are shifting. As from there, they need to extrapolate your narrative and figure out what's really going on underneath the numbers. But there's just a sort of an indicator of where we can now go to find quite straightforward facts and figures, which not something we're going very difficult to get a hold of in this particular aggregation. At least what I'm concerned, it's always concerned who's in charge or what is in charge. This is from Scharpatt, who's a Swiss cartoonist. He's done a lot of work on this. I think it's a very, very clever, astute understanding of how things are actually healing extraterrestrial. That isn't just about the underground and the undersea cables. There's also a connection. There's a three-dimensional thing going on. The surface of the planet we've got beyond the planet we've got in the middle of the planet we've got undersea is quite extraordinary physical infrastructure that we're all connected into and some of us are incredibly dependent on. And this is where the tensions are between structural agency. The same kind of satellite connections can help a coast guard, the Italian coast guard, or front-ex locate, track and follow boats of desperate people on the Mediterranean. Locate, track and follow boatloads of desperate people on the Mediterranean. Locate, track and follow and watch as desperate boats of people on the Mediterranean die. Whatever your politics might be about refugees and migration, the same technologies that help coast guards locate, track, follow and watch people die can also be used to go over it and to get around the gate keeping piles of these same forces in order to survive these extraordinary journeys. So I'm referring here to other work I can't do. I'm very much confronted with the liberating possibilities but also the oppressive and murderous possibilities of the same, the same networks in fact. Back to Earth. The internet governance forum, oh we love to hate the internet's governance forum. What a useless place, what a useless meeting, nothing ever happens. We'll just talk, no decisions are made. So where are the decisions made? Will they not know the internet governance forum? Because everyone's probably looking at their Facebook page, okay? But that's not the point. If you're interested in the research and trying to figure out processes and trying to understand dynamics, because if policy is politics then the outcome of the policy is not where the politics line. The outcome of the policy is the end of a long, long process. So as a research you might want to think about we're reaching into the process of trying to get a grip on and how much can I extrapolate for the final product? Who knows what he's up to? This is actually in Baku. Anyone who's there? It's when the human rights agenda started to take shape and there was a lot of activity going on around the conference. We were discovered of a user of human rights who was settling off the line. So who knows what he was up to? This is a really key thing for at least the work I do. For the structures, the infrastructures, the applications, the tools, the fascinating technologies that I know are a really important object of research and interest for the review and of course a lot of us in research. It's not actually the internet governance domain however that might be defined or how it might be currently being redefined where social resistance is actually discussed enough. We don't theorise agency enough. I think we should try and think about that a little bit more. Because if those actors and those agents are more human then we've got some very interesting conceptual arguments to be made and we've got some very interesting philosophers and historians of technology to perhaps think such as Andrew Fingberg. Back to Assange. We can't not talk about Assange and I just love this kind of multi-level kind of approach. I actually got that photo and he was speaking here in Istanbul in 2014 but of course we've moved from Assange to fake news. Or is he fake news? Or I mean where do we even start? Somehow we sort of come from a circle to the 90s where everyone was concerned particularly governments about content, about filtering content filters, making sure our children didn't see terrible things, making sure that online pornography was regulated or created enough tax revenue or was stopped being a new relief system or worrying about whether the truth was out there or not. So if people like Assange are keep reminding us just how fragile our understanding of truth and messages and journalism and any kind of story in the academic work is a story, how actual actually fragile it is and how much it's stories is so perhaps the story of changing attitudes and changing spin and changing narratives. There's just a little throw in there. Okay. After all keeping the other civil society, you see I'm doing my three stakeholder groups. Revolutions can be good for business and every revolution has been good for one particular kind of technology and this is the ones that we know I think about from the 2011 uprisings. I think this is both a reflection of despair at the time but this is perhaps a critical moment we need to think about. Revolutions are not caused, revolution will not be digitized, will not be digitized, will not be digitized. Mainly because as Gilsberg here told us, any revolution with CMTV is the result of what has already happened, is not the beginning. So another indication of how physical these networks are, access can be simply cut and of course we need to go in the governments. We're now in a situation where the very extrajudicial forms of online surveillance that Edward Snowden called the world's attention to that put human rights on the agenda in a way no one expected it to be and now become legitimated and made into law. And I think you find this a very disturbing development historically and I think the historical regular show just pollinated that has been to make legal the very okay there are some checks and balances we can discuss that later but in principle making these forms of online surveillance the rule and not the exception. Okay so back to finger because he of course is a theorist of agency in the light of technology but of course again this is not new okay so to argue that online surveillance on a sort of techno level is new is to forget your history as we know from this lovely phone so to speak and people who watch people do fall in love with it objects of surveillance and this is why I find this particular film very very moving because he falls in love with the thing he's watching and he doesn't fall in love too much with the thing we're studying okay because actually you get zero privacy so cynical but so true and the late Casper Bowden would agree however three different three different political reasons okay it's called now the unlawful no because code is as much an idea and law is more than the natural of the law and the rule of the law rule of law is not always good law so when I hear people say rule of law rule of law also get nervous because some rules absolute rubbish I want to get these institutions you know IGF, UN, rubbish we don't care we don't need the UN okay let's move to these other governance institutions like ICANN, IETF all in name they're up here one big happy family we're going to tell the world rule of law the same thing we're going to roll the internet out to the next billion I think that whole thing needs to be pointed out far more acutely even from a very technical point of view it doesn't have to be a philosophical point you can look at it technically and some of you already are and the review has been covering some of these topics this is a very good descriptive model of how the stuff works but have no power analysis in it at all and I'm always interested in analysis and definitions and redefinitions of power as they shift speaking of which, lack of content, lack of censorship, lack of power of silence according to Pope Francis himself I'm under Scottless today even he's been on the internet okay nearly there nearly there that's what I've got to do not everybody's a researcher is engaged in in changing policy agendas not everybody has an internet governance research and needs to be academics and scholars can do their work without having to be set in Baku and Aja Lujan listen to internet governance forums on powers but some of us and many of us many of us in this room are actually engaged as policy activists and advocates we have to balance that kind of scholarly academic standards that we need with our desire to make changes and of course we don't all agree what the changes should be but I do think it is possible to critically engage with internet policy politics as a researcher and to be do political internet policy as an activist it's not easy and you can't do it for everything so I kind of stick to my little corner more by accident in design so to speak it does matter it doesn't matter what knowledge we are producing it doesn't matter how we take that knowledge of scholars to even viewing even our king even the German Dutch from the Parliament it does matter not just us me because we are actually as one she reminds us and we're not sort of deciding we're moving from the state or the corporate sectors we are all deeply engaged with each other we are deeply entangled so it's not suicide versus the state versus corporate it's not like state society but I'm teaching this branch right now or even the corporate society convex it's a completely disingenuous argument that these three categories are completely separate they're just a community of four or five access where you actually give yourself our corrects of access to some sort of basis and we see that our excitement a simple bullet that's why I love to do corporate theory a simple bullet articulating our human rights principles for internet that's what this is about just particularly whenever for internet to approach young people are enjoying the soil in Brazil and just the joy of it is to see anywhere away which can be saying something about the things that they're concerned about and they're just reminding me actually it's kind of one of great meetings but the most important is the whole objective of research engagement here are these sorts of initiatives themselves even if they stay quite high they're actually technically not detailed but some of the experts are not really enough detailed for some of the streams that are already out of date to me that's not the point the point is that finally the narrative of society get connected and the identity of itself is narrative and human rights is also a narrative the history of human rights is one of the biggest narratives and that's not a problematic one and that's where my activism sticks into place I think now there's an academic particular for all sorts of human rights political institution you know the human rights so yesterday and an activist all along it's not just a joking that time things are being censored up in the Kimmings this week Dresden we've got local dentistry started to actually suppress basic news articles about their associates and with the right groups so censorship is happening everywhere pressure is happening everywhere I don't know if it's going to come from but it's not only that the internet should be available to all this goes right back to the old Tilly for me I was that Tilly for me should be available at all but who pays so I can mix it up with my classic Walter Benjamin as our corp because I can never leave home without him and um and this is something we've done about history uh if the internet and these screens and the spirits and these pocket boxes are framing how we see and feel about the world and those who are designing such power to actually structure for those experiences in very specific ways with very specific expertise only when it has then um they actually hardly restore the circumstances it's changing the sense of perception while we're not that's not technological journalism that's agency and I think actually there are a lot of blobs I've seen that do I think that's my final but I don't know something to show you it is a piece and I'm I hope you have something to say but we're going to just switch the video and just see it run