 Indeed, I'm going to solve all the problems that were raised on the last panel. And I will give us a fix that one fix, the one policy change we need to make to solve all of this. So I'm talking about the title of this section is Visions of an Alternative Internet. And I like that the word vision is plural. I'm going to give you not just one alternate vision of an internet, but many in 15 minutes. And I guess I was going to talk about it in terms of my story, Johnny Appledrone versus the FAA. And I apologize if anyone from the FAA is here. I didn't mean it. And I guess the first question to ask is why would we want an alternative to the internet? What's wrong with the present day internet? Too slow. Yeah, we want it to be a little bit faster. So we need to lay more fiber. And then what would the characteristics of a better internet be? And I guess maybe the way to approach this is in terms of the previous conversation about the value of negative hieroglyphs and the relation between our negative imaginations, our fears for the future, and our positive hopes for the future. So really, even though I was very excited about this anthology and the premise of the anthology, I couldn't help but also include a kind of secret dystopian vision of a bad internet. Where the internet might be going, how it might go wrong, how trends that are happening now might take us in a direction we don't want to go. And so the premise of the story is that the internet has, over time, become in some ways less open, less private, less desirable in all sorts of ways. And part of the reason that it becomes less desirable has to do with everything that the previous panel was talking about. The internet is surveilled by corporations, by government agencies. That, for me, wasn't really the core problem. The problem had more to do with a concept I got from a book by a law professor, Jonathan Zittrain, who wrote a really good book called The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. And his complaint in that book, his worry, is isn't about surveillance. It's more about the generativity, what he calls the generativity of our devices. So it used to, at some point, be taken for granted that you owned and controlled your own devices. You had some say, for instance, over how you used platforms if you ran your own website on your own server, if you, say, owned your own phone. And his worry is that our devices are increasingly moving into the model of the walled garden. So something like America Online is the future for all of us. And we are moving toward that future through devices like the iPhone. So if you want to download an app on the iPhone, you have to go through Apple's App Store. And you can break your phone, you can jailbreak it, you can use it in unsanctioned, unofficial ways. But most people don't. They don't bother to do it. They wouldn't know how to do it, even if they wanted to. And so, in a way, all this discussion about surveillance is a little bit, and it's extremely important, but it's also a bit of a red herring. So the new iPhone 6, the new iOS, automatically encrypts your phone. So the NSA is very upset about this. There was a recent New York Times article, and James B. Comey, the director of the FBI, was very upset that these devices might allow people, in his words, to hold themselves beyond the law. He said he would feel very sad if he had to look into the eyes of the parents of a child who had been kidnapped and tell them that the only way to find their child was on this encrypted iPhone. And this was sort of the scenario that he was spinning, and we might view that as a kind of plausible scenario. We might decide that it's not a plausible scenario, but I wanted to sort of think about what a totally filtered internet might look like. And so in my story, I describe it using the term the media sphere. The internet becomes something where your devices are filtered, the servers are filtered, encryption is in various ways illegal, and this becomes the negative hieroglyph of the story. So if you're living in this world, if you're living in a world of total surveillance, total filtration where government and the state and large corporations have control over what you can do with these devices, how would different activist communities respond to this? And the alternative in the story is a decentralized mesh network of drones that this community develops, and they're called the drone punk community. And Johnny Appledrone, as you can imagine, is a figure in that story for promulgating these ideas and spreading these ideas. And the notion is that you can build your own internet from scratch. You can, in some way, bypass the internet backbone. You can, in some way, bypass ISPs and that last mile, which is such an important question for policymakers today. And this is sort of the second, the positive hieroglyph of the story. And there's a community of drone punks. They form something called the drone punk Congress, which is concerned with governance questions of how this network should be organized, what protocols should govern it. And that's the story. I wanted it ultimately to be a story, right? I cared most of all about telling a story about characters and these ideas kind of get slipped in along the way. But sort of the fight over the different possible futures for the internet becomes the subject matter for the story. And it becomes the central driving conflict that are sort of moving the characters. So the title, Johnny Apple Drone versus the FAA, is a description of that fundamental conflict between two alternate possible futures for the internet. And I guess, so that's the description of what it is. And I can talk about that more if you're interested. But I guess an important point for me was to resist the idea that our hieroglyphs are technologies for scientific developments. I'm a great fan of science fiction. I love stories about gadgets, systems, moonshot ideas. But for me, the really important thing and the thing that maybe can transition into the next panel is the idea that the hieroglyph of this story is not technological, but political. So the thing that we really need to think about and the thing that a conference like this can do is to help us think more about the relationship between technology and policy and think about what kinds of futures we wanna build and what architectures of governance we wanna build. And this is where I think Carl Schroeder's story is one of the sort of most prescient in the anthology. He makes the point that what we're dealing with when we think of the big ticket problems that are facing the world right now are not problems of scarcity or imagination. They're problems of governance. So if you don't like global warming, if you don't like global climate change and you want to do something about it, first of all, you have to think politically. You have to think what kind of organization can do the job of coordinating the actions of different states, different corporations, what kinds of regulations are needed in order to produce this hypothetical better future that we want. And it'd be great if Elon Musk could come and save us and do this for us, but there are sort of fundamental issues of governance. What is an equitable form of climate justice? How do we solve that problem? And I don't think it's a problem of coming up with a really nifty geoengineering solution, although we may need to engineer the climate in some way and this might be something that we choose to do collectively, but this is sort of fundamentally what I think we need to be talking about. And what I think science fiction writers are uniquely positioned to think about. So that's, I guess, that's the sort of core of what I wanted to say. And I can take questions or we can move on to the next panel. One or two questions, yeah. In your story, Johnny Appledrone is assassinated. Right. And I don't want to give a thought away, but I'm really curious. It happens in the first line. Yeah, yeah. So my question to you is you left, you were ambivalent in your story about who really did the assassination, but it seemed pretty clear it was politically motivated and the FDA was the obvious candidate. This was a positive hieroglyph? Yeah, that's a good question. I guess my wife who's in the audience didn't feel like it was a positive hieroglyph when she read it. I didn't want to write a story that ignored the substantive problems that we face. I mean, this isn't a utopia by any means. What was positive about the hieroglyph for me was the notion that there might be a community, a political community that might, despite substantive political differences, work together, overcome internal obstacles. And the story ends, I won't say how it ends, but it ends in a way that is meant to suggest that something like a drone commons in the story is ultimately a tactic. It's a way of overcoming specific local problems, but it isn't adequate. The state is very powerful and you can't dispense with the role of governance. You can't get rid of the state. You're not a political anarchist. So the question isn't, will we have a state? It's what kind of state are we gonna have? And this is why I apologize to the FAA because I think there is a role for an organization like the FAA in the hypothetical world of the story. It gets militarized and it becomes a very dark version of it. But so I do try to end on a kind of positive note, but it isn't about an individual. People are, I don't wanna say people are expendable because I don't mean that in that sense, but any one individual isn't gonna make the difference. Loved the story. Loved the story. Focuses on two major technologies, drones and mesh networking. Mesh networking has now actually been in the news quite a bit this week with the adoption by Hong Kong protesters of FireChat, which is a peer-to-peer chat app that works via Bluetooth and just direct connection via Wi-Fi. Has that made you reassess, rethink, reinforce your thinking about what you wrote in the story? What have you been thinking about FireChat, if anything? I mean, I think it's very similar to what's in the story. I'll say that. It's a tactic that protesters are using in a specific situation to bypass government control of the internet, the Chinese control of the internet. And of course there's sort of the other side of it, which is these probably Chinese-sponsored fishing scams where certain apps are also being disseminated among protesters and collecting their data. So both things are happening at the same time. And often you think you're doing one thing, you think you're downloading the app that'll allow you to form your mesh net network, but really you're downloading the app that the government wants you to have in order for them to collect your data. So I guess it highlights, it's not the same app in that case, but it highlights the way that these devices and these networks can be corrupted, they can be taken over or they can, I mean the FBI has a long history of sending undercover agents to monitor protest groups and not interfering with their activities in fact, but just collecting data and often acting in unsavory ways. Okay, thank you.