 All right, folks, we're gonna get started because it is time for something completely different. Hi, hello again, I'm Kevin Bankson, the director of the Open Technology Institute here at New America, and I'm totally excited to introduce our next keynote speaker, Malka Older. Malka studies the sociology of organizations at the Institute for Political Studies in Paris. Its actual name is in French, but my French accent is comically bad. With a focus on how governments adapt and improvise in response to major disasters like Hurricane Katrina or the Japanese tsunami of 2011, sadly, this is somewhat of a growth industry these days. That work is informed by her more than a decade of experience in humanitarian aid and development, which earned her the title of Senior Fellow for Technology and Risk at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs in 2015. In her not at all copious spare time, however, Malka has established herself as one of the most unique and exciting new voices in science fiction today. In particular, her sci-fi political thriller Informocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by The Washington Post, amongst others, including myself, please read it, it's really good. That book, as well as its sequels, Null States, and being released next month, State Tectonics, are not only rip-roaring yarns, but they also reflect some super smart, futurist world building, rigorously imagining the new forms of political governance that could arise in this century in response to the spread of internet technology and big data. Her work is, in that way, one of the many examples of how some of the best thinking about technology's impact can be found in science fiction. So we brought her here today to share some of her ideas about our non-fictional future. To get your futurist juices flowing for the visioning exercise we have planned for after her talk. So enough from me, Malka. Thank you so much, Kevin, and thank you everyone for being here. It's a pleasure to, as a science fiction writer, come to a conference full of people who work on the internet and tell them what the future of the internet is going to be. As Kevin said, my novel, the first novel in my trilogy is called Informocracy, which is a, it was meant to be a working title. It's a pretty clear neologism for rule by information. And that's what I'm really talking about in the book. I'm talking about the fact that it's the people who have the information, it's the people who control the information, and it's the people who know how to interpret the information that are the people who are really in control of what's going on in this future distant world. The world that I'm talking about, the future that I posit, takes place about 60 years from now. And in this future, the nation-state is not entirely extinct, unfortunately, maybe, but it's faded a lot. Most of the world is on a new system, not the nation-state system, but a new system that I call micro-democracy. In this system, the basic jurisdictional unit is 100,000 people, give or take. And those people, whether it's a couple of really dense city blocks, or whether it's vast acreage in a rural area, that unit of 100,000 people get to vote for any government that they want, anywhere in the world. In the book, there are about 2,000 governments that exist, and by governments, I mean, collections of laws and procedures and processes and cultural decisions and holidays and everything else that makes up our experience of a country. And some of them are very local, and they only care about local issues, and they really focus on that. Some of them are global, and they campaign in each of the elections, the global elections, to try to win as many of these sentinels as they can. So what that means, of course, is that as you're walking around in a city, you might cross a border when you cross a street and have a whole new set of laws to deal with, and it also means that if you're a government, you may have constituents who are scattered over the entire globe and have very different interests coming from different places. Now, you'll notice that this is not entirely different from the world the way we experience it now, because we can walk across the key bridge and be in a different, well, technically, I don't know if it's a different state since we're not in a state right here, unfortunately, but you can be in the same metropolitan area and cross between different jurisdictions. You can do that in different boroughs in New York. You can do that in Boston. You can do that in Chicago. You can do it in almost any metropolitan area. You're gonna be covering multiple municipalities that have different laws, and you need to check every time to see whether you can actually turn on red or not. And likewise, we also have governments that have constituents spread over enormous areas. This country includes far-flung citizens that have very different interests as they come from different parts of the country with different economic bases and so forth, and even places that are non-contiguous, like Alaska. Similarly, other countries, Gibraltar, Ceuta, Malia, Madagascar, sorry, Réunion, which is one of the French overseas territories. So these are all things that exist already in the world. But in my book, it's taken to a point much further. It's more of an extreme, and to facilitate all this, we have a global bureaucracy, which I very creatively named, Information, which is dedicated to information management and to dealing with all the information that exists in the world. Not only collecting it, certainly not collecting it and keeping it in the 1984 style, but collecting it and distributing it, and not just making it available, but actually being pretty aggressive about getting important information into people's faces. For example, by annotating political speeches or commercial advertisements, if they're making any claims that could be misinterpreted, if there's something that's a little unclear, if there's something that borders on falsehood. So this massive bureaucracy, this UN-style organization that deals entirely with information management is there to make everything work and sees itself very much as kind of a neutral administrative force to let this micro-democracy function the way it's supposed to. So rule by information. Rule by those who control the information. It's not actually that different from the present, as you may have noticed. When I was developing this, I had a couple of different ideas, a couple of different sources for these ideas about both the government style and the information organization. Thinking about the information organization, of course came from frustration with our information environment now. It came from frustration, particularly about the difficulty of having arguments with people I disagree with. Now, that maybe sounds like something a little bit obvious that it's difficult to have, should be easy really to have arguments with people you disagree with. But if you wanna have substantive arguments with people that you disagree with on matters of policy, on matters of ideology even, you still need a common basis of agreement at the bottom, you need some facts. And as you may have noticed, we've been running out of facts for a long time, even before the current moment of this serious dearth and lack of facts that we're facing right now. It's been a while, and we've seen how people get sucked into different streams that believe in entirely different worldviews. We think of this now as a social media bubble sort of thing. But if we think back a little bit, we know that it was occurring already with decisions about what cable news channel to watch. It was occurring before that with decisions about which network to watch and which radio station to listen to and which of the two or three hometown newspapers your family chooses to receive. So this is not a new thing, but it's certainly been exacerbated lately. And I was really interested in the idea of having an adult in the room, in terms of deciding what information was worth transmitting and what information needed to be annotated and cautioned and what information needed to have the basic data shown behind it. I also had another inspiration for this, which came from one of my experiences when I was working in Disaster Response. And it came from the UN actually. I don't know, is there anyone from the UN here? I'm just, okay, good. I used to work for NGOs. We typically don't like the UN that much. But there is one branch of the UN that I really love, that I really found very useful all the time, which is the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UN OCHA. And this particular disaster, which was an earthquake in West Sumatra in Indonesia. OCHA had brought in a dedicated, full-time information management staff. So there was one person there whose entire job was to deal with all the information that came in and make sure that everybody else had that information. So he was updating maps all the time, then he was making photocopies of them so people could have them because it was a low bandwidth environment, to say the least. He was dealing with all the different rumors that came in, he was looking at people coming back and saying, okay, this village, they've lost this many houses and this village has no water and people coming back with information that was on totally different axes and he was figuring out how to consolidate it. And he was doing that, it was a sort of public service that the UN was providing for all of the humanitarian responders involved. And that really got me thinking a lot about information as a public good. Information is a public service. Information is something that forms the underpinnings of so much of what we do, very similar to the way that electricity does now, the way that having piped water accessible does for us. And so this is part of the world that I created in my book. It was a world in which there was an idea of information, access to information, as complete as possible, available to everyone. And of course, when we talk about information these days, what we're really talking about is the internet. And that's very much what it looks like in the book. So a lot of this that I created to write the book was wishful thinking. I was thinking, gosh, you know, I wish televisions would just say when people are lying. I wish they would just, you know, the commentators on cable news would just tell us that this particular study, okay, we don't know exactly what it means, but you know, we have a balance that tells us it's probably this. And here's the evidence to the contrary. I wanted that grown up in the room to be able to draw some lines about the information, both what was true, what was unknown, and what was untrue, but also what was worth caring about. Because I think that's also a problem that we're seeing in our information environment right now. We have a glut of information. We have so much information that we don't know what to do with it. And that's why when I talk about rule by information, it's not just access to the information, it's not just control of the information, but it's interpretation of that information and figuring out what is important. So I was, you know, I was wishful thinking I was very hopeful for this idea of having a world where there was someone who could draw some of these lines, but the second that I came up with this and thought, yes, we'll have a great monolithic bureaucracy like the UN and it'll make sure that all the information is provided and annotated and the studies and the data and everything is there. The minute I thought that, I thought this is gonna be a disaster. Because we know that as tempting as it is to have someone with authority, that's also extremely dangerous. That's the easiest way for our information streams to be corrupted is for that, that whoever is believed as truth to be corrupted. And so that's the conflict that my books struggle with over the entire trilogy. But I wanna talk a little bit about that and about where it comes from in the real world. Because as I said, while all of this is about a future, an imaginary future that I came up with, the truth about science fiction writers is that we're writing about the present, almost always, almost every science fiction writer you read, it's the present disguised as the future. So when I write about a world in which people are ruling by information, I'm writing about today. And I'm thinking about my experiences, not just in this situation where there was a dedicated information management person in a crisis and it was the best thing ever for that crisis response. But I'm also thinking about the times when I didn't have access to information. When I was working, for example, in Darfur in Sudan and all of our internet capability and phone capability came from satellite. For a while we had it pretty good because we were able to Skype with each other. There was some sense that Skyping was not too expensive somehow over the satellite, the Arbagan. And then all of a sudden one day I was on Skype and the financial administrator for the NGO wrote me and said, what are you doing on Skype? Get off right now, didn't you see my email? And it turns out they got the bill and it actually was super expensive to Skype and so that was the end of that. Which is, I will just put a side note, an occasion when measurement of internet use didn't work out well for me. And from there I actually went to a more remote place in Darfur where I didn't bring an Arbagan. I didn't have the satellite internet. I had smuggled one of them into Cartoon the first time I went, but NGO asked me to bring it in my luggage and they said, just don't tell anyone about it till you get here and it was my first job. I was like, sure. But I guess I hadn't smuggled enough. So I went to another and I didn't have it and so my entire communication besides the satellite phone was sending a thumb drive on the helicopter that came in once a week and then getting a different thumb drive in response from my boss in the other town. So that was an interesting experience in being sort of separated from internet and from information in general. We heard a lot of rumors but I didn't have any access to the news sites. One thing when I did get access in Sudan to news sites one thing that I appreciated hugely which I don't think exists anymore was the low res BBC page. I don't know how many of you remember this but there used to be an option to say low res if you were in a low bandwidth environment which as far as I can tell is gone. I don't know, has anyone used it recently? I look for it and I can't find any button for this. So another thing to keep in mind. In other places that I lived there was not a lot of internet access and very few people's had computers. I'm thinking particularly about Indonesia and Eastern Indonesia where I lived for a while but that just meant that people were accessing the internet on their phones. There was a kind of jump. There's another very famous science fiction writer who has said the future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed and which is kind of another way of saying we're writing about the present but and it's true when we hear that quote from Gibson we think a lot that the future is Japan, right? And certainly Japan is the future in a lot of ways but the last time I spent some time in Japan which was a couple of years ago but not that long most of the hotels I went to in Tokyo and especially outside of Tokyo didn't have wifi. They would hand you a LAN cable when you checked in if you said you wanted internet and so there was an entirely different development of the way people use the internet there because again people were mostly using it on their phones and so there wasn't so much a need for wifi to connect to computers. People were already connected on their very large and impressive cell phones. So I'm talking about the present when I write about the future. I'm talking about the things that we have now and the way they might look if we fast forward a little bit and one of the things one of the other things that I write about in my book and that I want to use to lead into our discussion our working groups after this is a concept called narrative disorder. So in my book one of the main characters has this syndrome called narrative disorder. It's something that we all suffer from in varying degrees in this future of mine it's a diagnosable mental condition and it has to do with the stories that we hear all the time and I bring this up it's the idea that we're able to synthesize stories from very few clues because we are so used to ingesting narratives constantly. We ingest narratives not just in books and movies and television but also if you pay attention in advertisements in news stories, feature stories and even the shorter stories. If you notice these days even headlines kind of have suspense built in like did he perjure himself? When the traditional the classic idea of a headline is something that tells you what you need to know out of the story and certainly the first paragraph should tell you what you need to know out of that news story. But now even the hard news stories are kind of formatted in a way that allows for that denouement at the end for a little bit of surprise for getting people to not just click but read all the way through. And we are so used to these stories that we can watch the five second ad before our YouTube video and it can tell us an entire story about the kid who gets dirty and then the mom puts the clothes in the wash and they come out clean or the person who goes into the meeting and they're not quite prepared but they have a great coffee and then everything works out fine. We know these stories, we know the beats that they follow, we know the arcs and so we're able to put them together in our heads based on five seconds worth of clues. And that also means that we see stories in places where they might not already exist and it means that we create stories all the time. But what I'm kind of interested when I think about forecasting into the future, when I think about imagining what a plausible future will look like. The test that I use for figuring out if it makes sense is if you read it and it feels like a story, if it makes sense to you, then that means that the people are acting in plausible ways. It means that the setup and the conditions make sense to us all in terms of the stories that we're familiar with and the way people work. So I wanna talk a little bit about the way that we can use that in the breakout sessions to maybe come up with some interesting ideas about the future, some things that are a little more different than what we're used to thinking about that and use that sort of speculation, that sort of science fiction about the future to work backwards and see what we're telling ourselves about the present. So what I've found writing these books is that writing something that is wishful thinking, that is fearful thinking, writing something that takes place 60 years in the future but is really about today is a great way to figure out what's going on today that we're not seeing. What are the assumptions that underlie what we do? What are the path dependencies that we don't think about that keep us from breaking out into something more interesting, that keep us from doing something different? The political system that I came up with in my book Micro Democracy is something that could function perfectly well given the technology we have. As I said, it's something that we do on a sort of more mild level. But the things that are stopping us from getting there are both the ingrained power interests, of course, but also these sort of underlying assumptions about what a country is. We think about countries as being geographically contiguous even though we have all these examples in the present that are not. And so sometimes it takes getting out of that mindset and trying to think of something that is deliberately fiction, something that is deliberately in the future to really understand what we're missing in the present. And so that's what I'd like to do with the breakout sessions. We're gonna come up with a couple of different topics and then I think we have one or two open groups to come up with your own topic if you prefer. And we want to brainstorm a little bit about what that issue or question will look like in 2050. What you want it to look like, what you're afraid it might look like. But with no constraints, not thinking this is what I'm predicting, not thinking this is what might work out under the resources that we have now. Imagine with unlimited resources, imagine with everyone turning their attention to this project. What do you want to create out of this issue? What do you want the in-state to be in 2050? And then to work back a little bit from there and think about in your group what that says about the state of that issue today. So we're gonna talk a little bit more about those working groups in a moment, but first I wanted to see if there were any questions that I can answer. Although I should warn you, I am a novelist, I'm a sociologist, but I'm not an engineer. And if you ask me something technical, the answer is going to be, I made it up. But you can ask. Any questions? The answer, but so it leads to another one. That's the best kind, really. Because I was trying to figure out, and I have not finished the entire trilogy, but I've read in Femocracy, is this intended as a utopia or a dystopia or neither? And I think it's your imagined utopia then with a lot of dramatic complication and difficulty thrown in. But that leads to the question, if you were trying to reconceive it as a straight utopia, recognizing that that wouldn't be dramatic, but what would the utopia version, the working version, look like? Okay, that's a great question. I wanna say, first of all, that when it came out and actually still sometimes in the reviews, a lot of people refer to my book as a dystopia. And I find that really confusing. And I started out kind of thinking, well, you know, if people interpret it that way, if that's what it feels like to them, that's cool. And now I'm kind of, I'm a little less happy with that because I think we often use the label dystopia as a way of distancing ourselves from the things that are really going on. If there's something in my book that's triggering this dystopia label, I think it has to do with the surveillance. It has to do with the ubiquity of these small cameras and everybody's search history is completely available. But the surveillance in my book is just really a little bit of a notch ahead of where we are today. And the differences in the book, all of the information is available to everybody to see. Now, there's some privacy in the book. The cameras are not inside of people's houses and so on. But it is a very surveillance heavy atmosphere, but it's not that much further than where we are now. The thing is now, all that data is hidden. It's monetized, really. It's kept by certain corporations and governments, mostly corporations. And we don't have access to it, so it's easier for us to not think about it, perhaps. And so, a lot of times when I hear people talk about dystopias, if you talk about a Hand's Maid's Tales dystopia, Margaret Atwood has been very clear, if it wasn't clear enough, that everything in that book that happens to women has been done somewhere and is probably happening right now somewhere in the world. Certainly, the Hunger Games, while it has these fantastical elements, is about the way that children are used in a lot of places. So I take a little bit of exception to this idea of a dystopia, particularly when I'm in a book that's about people trying really hard to make democracy work. But I also did not think of it as a dystopia, both because dystopias are, in fact, as you suggest, narratively boring. But also because I don't think a perfect system exists. I can't look at it and say, I'm going to invent the perfect system. I mean, if I could, I would, and I'd probably write it as a nonfiction, although then not as many people would read it and it wouldn't work. But somebody asked me recently, most of the government seemed more or less on kind of the spectrum of capitalism and socialism that we have now. Where's the super innovative, and I was like, well, if I came up with that, the whole book would be about that one government because obviously we need that, and maybe someday I'll think of it. But for me, the idea that we're going to come up with something perfect and be done is it's just not possible. We're constantly changing. Our societies are constantly changing. The technology we use, but also the ways we interact with each other, the balance of old people and younger people and people who are working and people who are not. So to think that we're going to have one system that's going to be flexible enough to adapt to all of this, it's going to be something that's always going to change. So I don't really see a way to find a stopping point for human history. Sorry, Fukuyama. And I think for me also, if I'm thinking about what I mentioned, this narrative disorder, if I'm thinking about a story that feels plausible to me, even if it's in this leap from where we are now, that also means that looking at something that has nuance that's neither perfect nor completely absolutely horrible, but that connects with the way we know people act and interact as individuals and in organizations. I was just last week out in San Francisco at the Decentralized Web Summit, thinking a lot about the centralization of our internet right now and how power seems to be accumulating more and more in a few hands. And obviously information is sort of like Google taken to the nth most possible extreme. And I can completely understand why that was a feasible model for the novel. I'm wondering if you gave any thought at all to the sort of extreme opposite of that, of an information source so distributed that it almost doesn't exist as an entity. Yeah, I mean, you can read the third book when it comes out in September. Cool. But yeah, in the book, I was kind of reversing the situation we have now in the sense of I have very decentralized government and a lot of choice in government and a very monolithic source of information. Whereas we're now in a given place, you pretty much, if you're here, you pretty much have two choices and once the election's over, you're kind of stuck. You have that one government that you have to put up with until the next election and yet we have all of these different sources of information. We have the different cable sources. We have all the different sources on the internet. We have radio stations and talk radio and podcasts. So I was really interested in flipping that. It's actually not something that I thought of consciously beforehand, but after I'd written it, I thought, ooh, it flips it. That's really interesting and thought about what that meant. So I think that we're in a place where we are, we're seeing a kind of decentralization of voices of information. But we're also seeing a centralization of the monetary, the financial structures behind them, right? So even though we have a lot of different cable news and we have local and we have newspapers and we have these things, a lot of them, it turns out, centralize into three or four mega corporations. And on the internet, it has provided a space for voices that in the past didn't have a place where they could speak, but we see also, I was thinking about the structure on Twitter. I mean, theoretically, Twitter gives us this amazing democratization. Anyone can go on there and get on their soapbox and talk. But if you look at the distribution of followers, which in theory is also not a negative sum game, everybody could follow everybody. And yet, because we have limited attention, you see the people who are already famous, they go on Twitter and they're instantly famous. And we see the way that you see a couple of people with millions of followers and then you see lots of eggs with 30 or 40 or 100. And it starts to also mean something in terms of valuation. So the idea of this decentralization, we have still this problem of triage. We have this problem of sorting and finding what's relevant to you and finding what you trust. So I think there's more on it in the third novel. And I think it's a problem that we have to grapple with. Not with me, but it's only a month left. I think you can handle it. I didn't hear you used the word value. So is there a monolithic value system or fragmented or health fragmented or how monolithic? Okay, so that's a really great question and actually something that I was interested in talking about and then ran out of time. But one of the things that I think is very interesting about our moment right now in terms of information. And one of the things that I grapple with a little bit in the book is that I think we are shifting, we're in a moment of shifting values. We're seeing that neutrality and balance and fairness are much harder to find absolute values for those than we thought. They're not working as absolutes. They're being diluted in part by being used misused in cable news slogans, fair and balanced, but it's not just that. It's also the problem of really figuring out what neutrality means and how that can be used. It's like pure science. We're seeing now that this basis of rationality is not always functioning for everybody in the same way. So in the book, one of the things that the employees, the very well-meaning employees, not all of them are, but the ones that we spend some time with who really want to make information work as a public good, as something that underpins democracy. One of the things they grapple with a lot is like, we know we cannot be neutral. We know we are never gonna be completely impartial. So what do we do as we're making these minute, constant decisions about what information to put forward and what to annotate and which word to use and what do we do with this? And what they come up with, which I think is only a partial answer, but it's a start, is transparency. That instead of thinking about neutrality and us making a decision about what is fair and what is balanced, what we're thinking about is making sure that, so we put this information out there, but somewhere, if you feel like following it, all the data that underpins it is there and our decision making is there and who decided it is there. And so that's, I think, a very partial answer. That doesn't finish it. But I think we need to start looking at what comes next in terms of how we make decisions and of what we believe of what we censor, of what we allow, of what we prioritize, and that's a start. In a broader sense, because that's kind of what I wanted to talk about, but in a broader answer to your question, each of the governments in my system has quite a lot of autonomy. And so there's a lot of range of values in terms of what they do, where they put money. There is a certain baseline of human rights that they must follow to be in the system. At some point in the trilogy, they also institute environmental, a baseline environmental code. But other than that, there's quite a lot of variation. So do you wanna talk about the breakout groups? So our thought for what to do next was to, well actually, I'll stay in the room and we can work in groups at our tables. We'll have a couple of people be facilitators in groups, but like Mako was mentioning, we will have topics to focus on and try and envision what we think the topic will look like in 2050. So some of our ideas for starter topics were access and measurement, neutrality, what else was I supposed to say? Feedback loop. Oh, feedback loop. This is something from the start. Yeah, one of the ideas actually that I think, Michael, that you posed yesterday to Vent around if we have a really tight feedback loop, like how does that impact how things work? So thinking about the feedback of measurement as a topic or other ones that I'm forgetting. I think those were the ones we came up with. For starter ones. And then leaving some stuff open if people had other ideas. But please take this as an opportunity to really think, be a science fiction writer. Don't be a futurist or a prognosticator. Just come up with something wild that you would like to see. Gosh, it's only 30 years from now. You can invent whatever technology you need to make it happen. You can bring in the aliens if you need to. But think about what this would look like if you could make it look like what you want. Or if you really want to go the dark, black mirror way, make it look like what you fear. What is the worst thing that could happen with this issue? And that also gives you something to work away from. I think dystopia is a problematic label in the way we're applying it. But I think that dystopias are a really valid form of science fiction as a warning. Just like kind of hopeful science fiction is really important as well. So be a science fiction writer for the next hour and a half. Yeah. Enjoy. So questions on the activity, anything? Otherwise we'll work in groups. We have some, yeah. Yes. So we will spend, it's about 135-ish right now. We have until three for this block. So let's say that you'll work in your groups until 2.35-ish, 2.40. And then we can share back out whatever what you came up with. No, yeah, I think what we were thinking is we'll pick one of those topics we can have. Since we have a number of tables, we could have two groups on the same topic. I think that would be fine. Or if there's another topic that you're like, oh, let's run with this. I encourage that, that would be good. Is there another question I think? Did you have a question? Okay. Yeah, so I think we have, we seem to have one, two, three, four, five, six, cluster, seven clusters of tables. So the folks that are on the edges want to join one of the tables. So we're working at the tables. We've got paper and things for writing things down. And yeah, we will run with that. And, yeah. The ultimate technology, we will use paper. Cool. And then those of us who, the people I know who we talked to about being facilitators, make sure each of you is at a group. So, can't be good there. Okay. Okay.