 So we'll get started. Thank you very much for coming. My name is David Weinberger. We usually at these sessions go around and have everybody say a word about who they are, but we're not going to do that today because there are too many of you because Anil Dash is way, way too popular. Completely deservedly so, by the way. But I recognize many faces here and I can assure you this is a really smart, interesting crowd. I am so, so happy to be able to introduce Anil, who I've followed for many, many years and who I admire vastly. He's a technologist, he's a writer, he's an entrepreneur and in many ways, or at least from my point of view, he embodies some of the very best values of the internet culture. He's been blogging since 1999 which I think makes you officially an early blogger, a blogging pioneer. He's one of the founders or original employees, founder, six apart. Early employee. Early employee, early very influential employee, six apart, which brought us movable type, which was a really important and still is a blogging platform. He has gone on to many other deep and interesting things including founding expert labs, more or less at the prompting of the Obama White House and is currently co-founder of ThinkUp. So I want to just read one line, one sentence from his homepage, his site dashes where he blogs. But first I want to remind you of the rules here which are few, the only thing you need to know is that this is being webcast, it will be posted, so feel free to say whatever you want, just understand that this is fully, fully public. There is a hashtag, the name of which I don't remember, what's the hashtag for this? The normal Berkman hashtag. Pound Berkman. Pound Berkman. There we go. So that's the one thing that you should know. So on Anil's page he says, by way of introducing himself, the highest use of new technologies is to empower people who are not born with the privilege of access to the institutions that define our culture. It's not the normal sort of statement you find on an entrepreneur's site, but I think indicative of where Anil's heart is. So, Anil. Thank you very much. Very kind introduction. It's exciting to be here. This is not something I ever imagined getting the chance to do. So first of all, thank you all for your time and attention and the introduction. I also, you know, it's great to get a room full of people that will arrive at a conversation that's called the Web We Lost. There's a lot of assumptions just in the name about us sharing a common context and a perspective on the Web or at least being willing to entertain that perspective on the Web. And so I think there's a really exciting opportunity to have a great conversation about this. I thank you for your time. And I wanted to start first. I came up today last night from New York City with a symbol that we see in New York City. Have any of you ever seen this symbol? How many of you know what it is? Anybody? One hand. Okay. You know, I thought it was two. And it's not. This is the symbol for a privately owned public space in New York City. So if you go to NYC.gov slash POPS, privately owned public space, this is where this logo lives. And, you know, I had seen this everywhere around New York City thinking, oh, that means there's a park here or I'm going to take my time there. And it actually means nothing of the sort. Privately owned public spaces are exactly what they sound like. They exist because companies want to build buildings that are taller than the zoning regulations allow. And so they say we'll give you an easement on that regulation as long as you're willing to build a public space that people can use. So you end up with these aberrations like the Sony building being, you know, 60, 80 stories tall and a nominal park which actually takes a form of their atrium. I call these things captive atria where you can go and do things that are nominally public like drink a coffee but not any of the things we'd associate with a true park. This all becomes important in this whole conversation. But not least because one of the places that has this logo in front of it is Zuccotti Park. Park. So certainly a lot of you are familiar with the name of Zuccotti Park from the Occupy movement which had its flagship encampment at Zuccotti Park. And the reason that flagship encampment is no longer at Zuccotti Park is because that symbols on it it's a privately owned space. It does not exist as a public space as we know them. This idea, the redefinition of a public space in order to meet the preferences or, you know, the goals of a private corporation is a refrain that comes through the entire conversation we're going to have today and has been a recurring motif and this lens of looking at it through how we look at our physical civic institutions has been very, very helpful and instructive to me in reconsidering the ways I think about the web that we live and work and play on today. Especially because all of us can conflate the symbol for a privately owned space with the symbol for a public park. I think we do that a lot and we need to understand what the distinctions are. The most important distinction between these spaces that we think are public and the ones that are privately owned is that the constraint that the privately owned space has introduced to us is they deny us the right to transgress. This can happen in many different ways. Typically people want to talk here about public assembly about demonstrations, about marches, about occupying. I think those are all really important things. I think about folks like improv everywhere. Right? So they're doing art in public spaces sometimes comedy in public spaces and in order to assert what they do that is culturally valuable to be able to perform their art they have to frequently mislead people about their identity misrepresent their identity they need to masquerade someone else they need to be able to operate anonymously or during times and places when people aren't supposed to have access. That's in order to perform things that are entertaining, amusing, kids safe. And so this is a really key underpinning of what we expect a public space to be able to let us do is transgress isn't always just the moments where you're having a march. It is these everyday things that are fun and entertaining and make life a little more livable. And it's important to be to understand how we transform spaces from what looks like park or public space into private spaces. And the lens again for this that was most instructive in seeing how the transformation happened was to imagine a secretive private Ivy League club I am very flattered and excited to be here but as I was speaking to folks earlier today one of the things that is probably not as familiar to all of you that get to sit in this room on a regular basis or in the buildings around here is this is an intimidating place to be. I didn't graduate from college. I'm the son of immigrants. This is not the place that I'm supposed to be speaking certainly not on this side of the room and so it's very easy to forget how even a space as welcoming as this one can seem intimidating and closed off to the vast majority of people in society. And this is particularly true when I look at where I spend my time online. Facebook was constructed explicitly as a secretive private Ivy League club and I'm supposed to feel flattered and rewarded that it now allows me to come in. But I don't always feel that way. Sometimes I feel like it's still yours. I'm glad to be allowed to participate in it but it's never going to be mine and it's never going to be a place of me. And almost all of the tools that we use in the technology world and the social networking world have a very hard time transcending what they were originally created to support. If this is what you were originally created to support how far can you get from the origins of what you were sort of born to be? And it's especially important because of what people do inside the secretive club. And the way that most of our social networks work I think this is actually the outcome. The wholesale destruction of your wedding photos. I picked this one because this is really this visceral image for me of every time you watch a local news story about somebody having a house fire or apartment fire and they'll talk about we grab the kids and the pets and the photos. We had our wedding photos. We got the pictures. Everything else we can replace. Everything else is just stuff. Let's say it all the time. These are our memories. This is who we are. Our physical selves, our photos and everything else is just stuff. And it's especially striking because every single day we hear about a social networking service that succeeds. And what the conventional tech industry startup industry defines the success is one, you sell to one of the big social networks. And two, you delete everybody's wedding photos if they're stored on your service. So Posteris is a blogging service that did very well. Therefore they sold the twitter and I don't know if it was last week or next week but they're about to shut down and delete every wedding photo that's ever been stored on their service. And there are countless precedents for this. There are many, many startups. In fact the conventional thing to do is to say good news community. Number one we're all going to be rich. Two, you're not getting paid. Three, we're going to delete your wedding photos. We've all gotten those emails and we've all gotten them multiple times. So think about the mismatch here. You see people on the worst day of their lives tearfully telling the news reporter on the camera, well we got our photos and we're all okay. And on the other hand we all have our inbox every single day. Somebody saying we're going to delete this stuff. By the way don't call us we're on our private island down there. We're rich. That's fascinating. That's an incredible dichotomy. And that line just never gets connected. They're throwing away the thing that we say we care most about. And of course why do they do this? They're allowed to. Because in terms of service. In terms of service that none of us really read. Well in this room there's a couple of people that read them. But really in a normal room we don't read them. You know there's ambiguity as to whether they're enforceable at all. But the reality is the terms of service essentially give them carte blanche. We all know this. They can do whatever they want, whatever they want. And you know we're our option is that we can sort of you know take a hike if we don't like it. And I wanted to recontextualize this. This is the common state of affairs. We're all familiar with these issues. We're all familiar with the challenges around this. But we tend to look at this as simply the cost of doing business. Or the reality of the web ecosystem is today. And I wanted to reframe this in an important way. This is actually a battle. This is a battle against values that the early social web had. And I'm talking about a time about a decade ago. It may have ended as late as 2005. But between say 1999 and 2005 there was the creation of the social web. And this is the rise of everything from blogging tools to social photo sharing like Flickr. And the host of other things that eventually got branded Web 2.0 and turned into the social web we have today. And I got to be witness to it. I was a blogger as David said early on. And the interesting thing for me about being introduced as a blogger is it's a little bit, these days like being introduced as an e-mailer. It's not really a meaningful introduction. It's like this is something hundreds of millions of people do. What do you mean? And part of the reason I cling to that as an identity is there was a time when it was a statement of identity. It was a meaningful thing to say I do this task. Because the community shared values. Because the action was uncommon enough that it distinguished you in who you were. And that is something that's completely evaporated in our perception of what the Web is. Nobody's a Facebooker. It's not something everybody ever introduces themselves as being. You might say somebody's a Twitter but probably not in a positive sense. And so that idea that there was a commonality, there was a culture, there were a set of values that were shared is really important to understanding how they could have been systematically dismantled. So now, if you're going to make a statement like systematically dismantling the values of community, can we show how that's true? For a starting point we have a lot of software that forbids journalism. How many of you have an iPhone like I do? A bunch of them. So this is an excerpt from the iOS app stores terms of service for developers whenever they submit. I'll read this for the benefit of those who can't see it. Apple says, and again all the grammar errors here are theirs. We view apps different than books or songs which we do not curate. If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, I like the song there, or create a medical app. That's Apple's stated policy. All of us are consuming apps, purchasing apps, and supporting an economy with this as its presumption. The great thing about this is it's so sort of open-ended. Who knows what's even enforceable here? It gives a lot of discretion to Apple. But I like the idea that if you want to criticize a religion, write a book. Because that can presumably be sold to the iBook store so they don't really have an aversion to you distributing it just not in an executable form. I wonder why that is? That's weird, right? Why are people who write software different than people who write books? And why are people who do both, like me expected to follow different rules in these different contexts? Because we all know software actually can do a very good job of engaging and activating people to perform different actions. And this has been proven to be what Apple enforces. If you look at something like the drones app which shows the locations where drone strikes have taken place from American drones, they prohibited it from being distributed through the app store. So there's precedent here where they're saying, look, that kind of journalism, even though it doesn't violate these, the drones aren't actually sex. They don't really say why, but it's like, that kind of journalism isn't what we ought an app to do. So we've drawn this distinction in kind between what formerly lived in the world of publishing and what lives as apps. And so certain types of speech, certain types of expression are constrained when they're in executable code as distributed by these networks. That's a really powerful concession. And the language here, it's not usually this explicit, but we have the explicit language. This is something every iOS developer whose app you've ever downloaded can read to. And then there are things that are a little less visible, which is shaping the law to make the way we like to control our data illegal. The most pressing example about this is the conflation of acts that were formerly speech with things that are published as works. So what we do is we bring public discourse into the realm of IP law through the terms of service and through the ways the services treat our communication. And there's a lot of parts here I want to tease out as an expert in this by any means, but I'll take the parts that are most relevant here. First is obviously all the social networks try to operate as common carriers. They want to see themselves as neutral substrates for the information they transfer between people, except when it comes to monetizing it. At this point it becomes a work. And this is really important because there's no real clear boundary here. So I can clearly sit at home with my son and sing him happy birthday. And that's allowed. I can do that in a slightly mediated way if I had been out of town for his birthday where I could have done it over FaceTime. And I clearly can't put it up on YouTube with me singing happy birthday to him because then it's a work. So those are pretty well defined. Somewhere in between maybe there's a vine, that's only six seconds so that's kind of short, so maybe that's okay. What if the FaceTime was really laggy and it ended up being stored or cashed along the way on the network? What if I accidentally had enabled a feature or they had a software bug where it could be publicly broadcast by people that chose to tune into it but I didn't do it on purpose? There's this really open-ended area where we get into the speed of transmission of the network and where things are cashed starts to decide as to whether this is a work that they're going to monetize or that people can sue me for violating their IP rights around, or whether this is just speech between people. And of course all the things we can think about when people are wearing wearable cameras and monitoring devices, there's a really obvious evolution here. A lot of these tenets of this reckoning are very familiar to us but the most important part here is now we have the industry that creates the social networks explicitly wanting to get involved in the way that IP law evolves. So when people are the most telling example of this but when for example Google puts on their homepage a request that people call their senators or write their senators about SOPA and PIPA or when Wikipedia shuts down its homepage in order to encourage action there, what you have is the scenario that we those of us that thought Citizens United was a bad decision were fighting against. Corporations explicitly saying influence this policy in the direction of our interests. And yet most of us in the tech world cheered when they did so. So we said please Google, one of the biggest companies in the world please Facebook, one of the biggest companies in the world encourage people to influence IP policy in the way that you prefer encourage them to call your senators and when you do so we will congratulate you and thank you and reward you for doing so. And we do this even at the same time as they take ordinary speech where we're talking to each other on our Facebook walls or sending each other messages through Gmail and turning them into works that live under the IP regime that we already think is unfair. So that's a pretty radical shifting of the goalpost that's happening that we're complicit in. We actually cheer them on when they do this thing that in any other context if they put a bumper in front of our DVDs or our films in the theaters saying call your senator and tell them to adjust the IP laws in favor of the MPAA or the IAAA we would have been probably protesting out front of their offices and this is a pretty dramatic shift that's happened without us really objecting very much at all. Then there's the technological changes. If you go back a decade ago 2005 or so metadata was all the rage. It was in fashion amongst the geeks. So what you could do with a flicker photo when you took a photo you could geotag it with a free text word you could do machine tags all these incredible things bubble up so you start to get even today when somebody makes a mashup here's all the photos in a certain location they always do it on flicker because you can't do it on Instagram because the metadata are thrown away or locked into Instagram's APIs when you do it. Part of this was flicker was from the old web they were from that small community and they said you want to share these ideas we want to share the ability to do these things. It's the reason you still can do that creative common search every single one of these images on this slide show is that flicker creative common search I'm sure all of you have done too for presentations and you can't do it on Instagram because they don't care about metadata and they succeeded whatever it was a dozen kids make an app and they sold it to Facebook for a billion dollars and that's defined as success. But this is true on many many levels to be invited by Berkman to speak for me always can't go without remarking about RSS and the spec that lives at the Berkman center and say you know you can debate the sort of RSS's dead thing on the technological front but the reality and this is something we'll revisit later is that from an end user standpoint clearly this isn't something any end user has chosen. Some of this is our abdication on the technological front of making open formats as appealing or making metadata rich experiences as appealing as those. But the reality is these companies are not going to invest in metadata that makes information discoverable or easily shareable. There's even more fundamental corruptions of these systems through economics. So at the birth of the social web links were editorial they were artistic, they were voice. Any of you remember suck.com from the olden days, the old timers? Great site right? So you remember hyperlinks and suck and they were always these sort of snarky you had to hover on it and see where the link went oh that's actually a punch line, that's not just a link right? It's really clever and now when you hover on a link it's to the internal tag page for the New York Times aggregation page around this story. I wanted to read the text of this law, well now it's not that this is their tag page about that story. And the reason why is searching and optimization in Google but the fundamental thing that happened here is with the introduction of AdSense and AdWords, Google converted the meaning of links from purely editorial purely expressive, purely artistic into something that is economic and immediately transformed what links were. Back at that time I was making blogging software and we used to, you could just put whatever link you wanted to in a comment because you wanted to send people to your site and check it out and link spam happened overnight it went from, there was no reason anybody would ever paste a link into a comment form on the web into something happening on every single site that we worked with in less than six months. So link spam it happens and all the other things that happened around the SEO happened almost immediately when links are converted into an economic statement. Now that was what the sort of combination of links with page rank and with an economy did with Google ten years ago. Today Facebook has what they call edge rank I think and it's based on the idea that likes are an expression of your intent. Likes are what you like likes are how you feel about that page or that site or that company or that brand or that cause that you have clicked on. Purely editorial, purely artistic except being used as the fuel for their economic engine as to how they rank things in your news stream and what they charge advertisers on their platform. So we're in a direct parallel to what happened with links ten years ago. We're going to see likes spammers. We're going to see the like engine optimizers. We're going to see the rise of fake likes and like fraud and all the other things that we saw with links going back ten years ago. And this could be you know, Twitter favorites. This could be whatever you know, I'm sure it'll happen on YouTube when you favor it or star a story there or Tumblr hearts but the reality is these gestural things that used to be editorial and an actual indication of people's intent get corrupted very very quickly in these economies and they take away ways we have of expressing with one another in a social context. Again the exceptions where you look at Flickr through this sort of benevolent stagnation under its time with Yahoo favorites on Flickr still mean favorites and they probably will because they're not going to find a way to monetize this probably very soon. But aside from those little islands that's sort of the you know, the Galapagos of the social web for the most part as they're evolving and trying to monetize things we're going to see these gestures that used to be about me telling you I liked your work turn into economic actions that then get divorced entirely from the original context. And it's especially important to think about how links get transformed and likes get transformed by this economy when we think about these interactions and I'm going to read part of this. This is them by context when you I wrote a post to my blog about 18 months ago that got shared a lot on Facebook and when people clicked on the link from Facebook to get to my site they got this message that I'll read in part. Please be careful for the safety and privacy of your Facebook account remember to never enter your password unless you're on the real Facebook website. Also be sure to only download software from sites you trust to learn more about saying save here's some links and then it says you can go through to my site if you go ahead and click continue so you've probably seen this if you ever clicked on a Facebook link and seen something like this a warning and be careful. So there's a couple interesting parts here the underpinning here or the assumption that Facebook is making is that my site is less trustworthy than theirs that alone I take some issue with right but let's grant that let's say it's true let's say I'm trying to steal all your privacy and they're not the interesting part here is on my site as today as then I have Facebook comments and to have Facebook comments you actually have to add in little bits of metadata to your site the open graph tags that they have you have to essentially register with them and tell them I'd like to work within the Facebook ecosystem and only then after they've validated and verified your page do they even allow the comments to display so I'd explicitly opted into the Facebook ecosystem part of this was to prove that I'm not an extremist like I'm a moderate on these things I'm not a radical part of this is because it's a service to my readers a lot of them use Facebook and this is a way they could talk about it and share it with their friends so there's a convenience factor I was to do and am by the same things that we all are while we use the networks and so I was part of that narrow slice of the web that had explicitly gone to them and said here I am here's who I am here's me vouching for the fact I'd like to participate in your ecosystem and this happened around the same time as they'd introduced the social reader apps that I'm sure some of you remember the Washington Post and The Guardian would let you read the stories within the context of Facebook and it would sort of promote at the top of your timeline and be a little bit spammy but you'd see those stories right and those sites when you read the Washington Post story entirely within the wrapper of the Facebook experience never got this warning message it never said anything about this site might not be trustworthy it certainly never said anything about whether the information on that site might be trustworthy but even though I'd opted in they gave this warning to people scaring them off saying you shouldn't click outside our walls you probably shouldn't leave Facebook because it's not safe this is the safe place they do that to the sites that register with them what do they do to the sites that don't even register with them the majority of the web this is something that I was stunned by and the response actually from them was interesting I wrote about it because again I had the privilege of doing so and I have a little bit of an audience enough to amplify it and I got a sort of friend of a friend email this is just a software bug wasn't supposed to do that it's supposed to have something added to your link that says this one's okay he's alright he's with us and I believe them I don't think it was malicious they were saying let's screw this one guy's tiny blog I think they just didn't care but the striking thing about this was that means in the best case all of us are fixing bugs in Facebook software with our time and energy and they're not there's no way to report a bug like this there's no way to even troubleshoot and test enough to know that it's a bug if they hadn't had somebody that wanted to say face their do the work into the software I wouldn't have even known this was an issue that's the best case scenario is we're fixing their bugs the worst case is they are deliberately trying to shunt traffic away from those who don't participate fully in their ecosystem don't give their content over to be consumed within the network and that's again that's one of those clear okay this is how the social networks work but this is true across the board for all the things that compete with the web social networks compete with the open web apps that we talked about in the top compete with the web so we know ideas locked into apps won't survive the acquisition the first thing you do when you succeed in Silicon Valley and your company is acquired is you destroy everybody's wedding photos but this is true at the device level too we've increasingly coupled our content and our expression to devices that get obsolete more and more quickly right so we have ways of expressing ourselves it's like it's a simple level while this app requires a retina screen now and so everybody has to upgrade and do these things and when you get to this sense of these new devices formats get harder and harder to preserve and this is especially true when there are these proprietary or under documented formats right because we've given up on formats I know there's a lot of work here around everything from like I said RSS to ebooks to open formats but the reality is those of us that cared about this stuff and I spent many years working on open formats around all the different ways of social sharing have lost overall we've lost very very few of the consumer experiences that people use or the default apps that come with their devices work around open formats there's some slight exceptions around photos obviously JPEG is doing pretty well HTML is doing okay but the core interactions of a small short status update or the ability to tell somebody you like something those things aren't formats or protocols at all they're completely undocumented they can be changed at any time and there isn't even the expectation that they would be interoperable that is perhaps the most dramatic shift from the early days of the social web there the table stakes even for the big players was the expectation that you would come to a meeting with a bunch of other geeks and hash out some way for things to interrupt that was how the web was built in its first decade maybe it's first 15 years and it went away really really quickly with almost no public discourse about the implications of it geeks talked about it as an unfortunate technological development but not at the cultural or social level so this is the underpinning there's an enormous amount of changes that are happening there's this really intentional pulling away from and you know things like formats or performance because they are destabilizing to the power of these networks right they make the lower switching costs all the kind of classic calculations we have here but the most important implication of these things is when we think about what these networks are trying to function as as public spaces and I've worked on this too where you know the president will do a twitter town hall or a google hangout or go to facebook's office next to Mark Zuckerberg and we treat these things as public spaces town hall right indicates this is public space but if we think about privately on public spaces we know that dissent and transgression are not permitted and so what we end up with is the combination of the terms of service plus the evolution of IP laws are actually trumping the constitution in our public discourse there are things that these networks can preclude us from saying and have the ability to preclude us from saying that formerly were speech but are no longer speech right through these apps through these social networks there's an incredible shift and one really useful way to think about this is every single message you said about the election on facebook when you got into that debate with your in-laws could have been transformed by facebook on the server into saying the opposite and that would be within their rights right now people would maybe object to that but they would certainly be allowed to do that similarly apple would reserve the rights to say we're not going to let you say these things through these apps or we're not going to permit apps in the store that let you say these things and that would be something that they could shift through their current terms of service you can argue about there being the open web the rest of the web the rest of the things that don't go through the app store is a place to care on the discourse but when public officials themselves are using these networks this is a really really important constraint so I live in New York City after Sandy we had local officials talking about relief efforts that were only being broadcast as messages through facebook a lot of infrastructure was down and facebook was very valuable there I don't want to diminish the important value these networks give to society but you had to be locked into facebook to see where public relief was happening in the wake of an emergency that's striking change and then there's the disposability factor the wedding photos factor I kind of don't care about the elected officials that much we talk about the occupy stuff in the elected officials but I'm talking about everyday things this is the improv everywhere the prank you want to play on your friend or the birthday notice or singing happy birthday to your kid those are the things that I'm much more concerned about the everyday persons interactions are what's most at risk here in the ways of expressing ourselves that are just not possible like creating links that are not about shooting for the SEO economy or creating likes that aren't about optimizing our like strategy and the classic response to all this is just opt out are there any ex facebook users here people that have quit never been abstainers I respect that very much but that's like you're 70% of all the abstainers in the country you're in this room and I I thought I want to be one but I'm also like I don't want to martyr myself to not being able to interact with my in-laws either they got a grandson they got to see him alright I'm on Facebook and that is the most obvious cost the social cost but there are opportunity costs there's incredible career costs for me as a technologist but even if I weren't could I do my job without being on LinkedIn without being on Twitter could I meaningfully expand the sphere of opportunities that I have open to me in a very real way the beginnings of being on the social networks if I hadn't participated in the blogosphere I wouldn't be in this room today there wasn't some other path for me to get here I wasn't in academia and I wasn't qualified in those regards the way that my ideas could be discovered was because I was early on a network that ended up being successful and valuable and you know this pattern repeats over and over people talk about me having a larger number of Twitter followers than most folks the main reasons why is I was early on that network and the people who created that network put me on their suggested user list and privileged me to have more followers so those are now I was fortunate to be in place to be able to take advantage of those opportunities and I had my own privileges to get there but those things are not level playing fields today so there's a lot of social costs not being on these networks there's also a really important point that always gets overshadowed this is sort of a fairly like-minded group people are very literate in these topics the main reason that this shift happened in the social web I think was the arrogance of the people that cared about the open web in the early days and you know having been in the room from many of these conversations I remember when OpenID was created and OpenSocial and all these sort of open whatever like you could put open in front of anything and people would have gotten behind it you know and we did sincerely care about enabling all these positive things for users we wanted to protect and preserve these things for users but the way that we went about it effectively ended up being so arrogant that Mark Zuckerberg's vision seemed more appealing which is extraordinary right like again for me to think a guy that made a private club for Ivy League kids to raid each other's attractiveness was more appealing than what I was working on and more inclusive really rocked a lot of my assumptions about how we went about building technology some of this was usability and user experience and just simplicity and design those are all important but some of this was how we told the story what we thought mattered the way we went about talking about these things and you know I look back a lot at the despite all the positive things that have happened from the social web some of the missed opportunities around encouraging positive contributions and making a true public space and I have to think that if we had been listening more and if we had been a little more open in self-criticism it would have been really valuable and this refrain keeps coming back even with the sopa and pipa conversation a year ago there was a lot of triumphalism about the geeks won right they impacted policy in the way they preferred but to get there required an extraordinary amount of hyperbole right we have to say this is a threat to the first amendment free speech is being destroyed and you know maybe it's true but it's a little bit exaggerated a little bit amplified and it worked that once but does anybody think we could do that again every time we needed to doesn't scale right so that that willingness to pat ourselves on the back uncritically say look we won we beat the evil movie industry these are our allies these were early free speech advocates the creative industries and music and movies that we should identify with them as artists and that we're vilifying them seems like somebody's getting over a pretty good trick on us our biggest enemies are people who support creative industries that can't be the case and again that comes from this arrogance of while they're dinosaurs they're a legacy industry I know people in this room tend to be a little more involved in their thinking but the people that we count on to rally behind our efforts they don't see us being publicly critical of one another or critical of ourselves and I think that that's one of the reasons it didn't work that's one of the reasons that the open web sort of faded away is it wasn't as compelling a vision as what can be told by those who would rather control it and for something to seem less inclusive than an effort like I said with Facebook or Apple who are incredibly insular cultures incredibly arrogant cultures they're not you know egalitarian in the ways they look at creating technology at all and they still were more appealing I think that's something that we should look at very very seriously with some reflection and try to understand why why it was that their vision was more appealing the other defensive thing a lot of us want to say it's only some of the web it's just Facebook it's just Twitter you can get by fine without it people in this room do and it's funny because this assumption comes from the idea again from those early days that we built the social web for pages the web was made for pages it's been to publish academic papers that's what it was designed to do and you think of pages and I always think of like something like this right this sort of classic web page layout a bunch of boxes like the New York Times home page and an interesting happening thing that happened in the past decade is this model of what a web page looks like has shifted to this to a stream this is increasingly how we consume our information if we think about whether it's on our mobile phones or where we spend the day cruising up and down in the browser there are all these narrow single column streams of the information we want to consume that we're constantly refreshing and this starts about a decade ago if we look at the last 15 years we can look at the things that pop up you have blogger in 1999 and that's sort of the first like this is a reverse hierarchical classic stream of information and then Gmail actually becomes streamed in 2004 it's one of the most radical things why people didn't like the original Gmail inbox Twitter of course pops up in 2006 and we go on and on through Facebook through Tumblr through Pinterest, through LinkedIn through YouTube and the interesting thing that happens here around this time point 2010, 11, 12 is you go from sites that already existed like LinkedIn and YouTube but were pages and they shift to being streams so the home page of YouTube YouTube is embedded on more sites than any other widget anywhere on the web so they have tons and tons of data Google has all the data in the world and they take something that used to be a regular set of pages and if you go right now, you go to your YouTube home page take a look, it's a stream of stuff that's the most recently updated at the top most dramatic one to me was a couple weeks ago Yahoo! changes their home page to a stream so this behavior across the board is shifted meanwhile the media industry is still making pages and those who was to talk about this stuff from the theory standpoint are still making pages and they're experienced by users, these streams as apps they feel like apps, they don't feel like pages so the fundamental model of what we think the web is is wrong and this is again that example of us saying we know how the web works we're the geeks, we're the technologists and users choosing something different because if you look at this time frame of time spent for users what percentage of their time online is spent in a stream experience it just goes up and up and up so across is about half the time people spend online in 2010 is in a stream based experience and it's going to probably be about three quarters it's a little bit of an estimation here on the right end of this chart but the percentage of time spent online and the way people spend that time is by looking for the next item in a stream and yet most of our conversations ignore that reality and in fact this number is probably even higher if we consider phones, every single thing you read on your phone is just you going up and down through some stream of information and the reason this is important is these streams are controlled access these are limited access highways these are things where they control the on ramp and they control the formatting and they control the way that you can design it and your Facebook page can be whatever color you want as long as it's blue and this is part of the mechanism through which they are constraining the conversation and we sort of don't really talk about it this is again another one of those mismatches what the open web advocacy community says and what users actually do nobody with open web values has made anywhere near as popular or useful or compelling a stream as any of these providers and in fact we all rely on them for our distribution so I can have my independent blog but if it's not being promoted through one of these networks nobody sees it it's not being in one of these streams it's a format that's consumable in one of these streams that's compatible with what they call native advertising which is the stream items that are ads then it doesn't get seen it's a really big issue and so the pattern that the geeks tend to have here is they say let's fight the last war let's fix the last battle let's go and make an open source version of that old thing right and this is what when people make a diaspora when people make an app.net whatever their reflexive reaction is they say let's make one of the old ones and what they need to do is say what's a new kind of stream that would be compelling enough for normal people to use because normal people never switch apps they might adopt new ones and those might slowly displace their old ones but they never switch apps and they certainly never switch to something that is an open source replacement that's better than the old one and the exception everybody wants to point to is Mozilla and it happened once with Firefox browser in the history of the internet and Microsoft had to be one of the most evil companies in the history of the technology industry if you can create that circumstance again great but you probably won't so that's all of the bad news if you should be sufficiently depressed at this point to say you know we're doomed and the question is so is it just over do we just give up is Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter the new ABCNBC CBS and I don't think so necessarily and part of the reason why is I do believe social technologies follow patterns and the technology industry as a whole is cyclical these things come around and once you understand that you understand the pendulum from in the same way that we go from mainframes being rebranded as the cloud we start to think about like personal computing and we think there is going to be an analogy where people pull things from the cloud into some area that they have more control and programmability about will it be called personal, maybe will it be called computing, almost certainly not but we can absolutely imagine that cyclicality taking place again and gosh Google couldn't be doing a better impersonation of micro circa late 90s if they tried right they have two operating systems they're throwing everything with the kitchen sink out there Microsoft used to make car software back then too they're explicitly trying to become the evil empire but they kind of don't realize it so that's great, so we have to recognize there's going to be a similar correction there's going to be a similar general public feeling of overreach on the part of Google they're making me feel itchy in the way that Microsoft did back in 1997 and something's going to be done about it so the striking thing here is in that case, policy really worked the consent decree, look at 2001-2002 the changes and the impact it had on Microsoft is that now Chrome is the number one browser in the world I use an afterthought for developers they get to it, but they get to it last after Chrome, after Firefox after mobile Safari the geeks always want to blame us on the shift to mobile the reality is public policy can be a really really effective part of addressing the problems in the technology industry I think the browser wars demonstrates that really effectively and we're going to see that similarly with policy around social networking and it's coming, there's no question about it not least because everybody's so libertarian in Silicon Valley that they're doing no job of preparing for it it's also this idea that apps want to do the right thing I mean this is my sort of shameless plug I'm working on one called ThinkUp that I'm hoping demonstrates this but there's a lot of software that is trying to embody the values of the social web and this is again that cyclicality people respond to this now the problem is it's been expressed as the once a year Kickstarter for some app that says screw Facebook give us 50 bucks and it tends to work and a bunch of geeks get on hacker news and they give to it and they do where they don't ship an app usually they never ship anything and nobody ever uses it and then they try again the next year that pattern's got to end and part of the reason that people haven't made apps that people want from the open web community they make science projects they make toolkits and I think we need to again be much more critical of people creating in the open web veins are you making something people want to use every day that a normal person would want to use every day are you speaking with respect are you being more sensitive and attentive to what users want than Mark Zuckerberg is the Jack Dorsey is the Mark Zuckerberg questions but there are apps out there that want to do the right thing we need to shepherd them and coach them and to doing things in a way that's appealing to people not least because we count on very very young people to do this we talked to 23 year olds and asked them to do this and one of the hard things to keep in mind is they were in fifth grade when the stuff was working as the open web did in its beginning they don't remember, they weren't allowed to they weren't open old enough to get into the sign up process to be able to see how Flicker worked at the beginning And so it's very, very easy to overlook the fact that there isn't a cultural learning here. There are very, very few places, even if they have a great education, you go to the best schools in this country, and this is one of them. It's very hard to learn the history of the personal software industry. You can learn about the business side. You can learn about the rise of Microsoft and the consent decree and the DOJ case, and you can learn about how they build HP and all those kind of, you know, they were in a garage and what they did. How software impacted culture, what did happen with the desktop office suite wars in the 80s and the 90s? There's very, very little literature, and the striking thing about this is that's true despite the fact that the principal actors in these battles are still alive, still active in the software industry, right? The inventors of the spreadsheet and the PowerPoint and Microsoft work, they're all still alive and active, and you can email them. And even despite that being true, we can't learn from them about what does it look like when you go through a battle with other competitors where, you know, users are at stake and how does it impact once you actually get to the point where somebody wins and the network gets, you know, the monopoly power gets all the power. These are things that we need to think about as important a part of technology education as the bits and bytes and how you make the apps. And one of the other principles that I think people are starting to understand at a sort of cultural level is that we can learn things from observing ourselves, right? People call it quantified self, which is like, I can't imagine a less attractive way to describe the behavior of keeping track of what you do. But there is an instinctive feeling of like, well, if I keep track of what I eat every day, I might lose some weight and if I see how far I'm managing to run when I get off the couch, it might encourage me to get off the couch a little more often. And interestingly, we don't look at any of our online social behaviors as quantifiable parts of ourselves. It's the strangest thing. The thing that's already digital, that already exists in a computer, we don't have any way of saying it. Am I spending more time on these networks than I did yesterday? Am I spending more time consuming streams than pages? And we rely on some marketing company to give us these broad stats or we hope to find the right peer report that somebody's already created for us. And it's striking because it's much easier for me to track my heart rate than it is to track how often I'm checking, reading Twitter. And I'm very mindful of this. I have a two-year-old son and I really, I think I've spent more time reading my Twitter timeline than I've spent reading to him since he was born. And I'm not proud of that. I don't like to think of myself as history's worst monster. But you're like, gosh, is that who I want to be? And if that is who I am, how do I justify it? How am I taking my investment at that time and saying it's meaningful or worthwhile? These are the vectors through which we can displace the networks that don't have the values that the open web cares about by focusing on meaning, by focusing on emotion, by focusing on expression, by focusing on the artists. These are all things that those networks are terrible on, terrible for. We have to be able to do better than them on these regards. If you allow one more color than blue, you're ahead of Facebook. And importantly, there are institutions that care about a healthy open web. This is obviously one of them. This is informed by the work that I got to do with part of my nonprofit with the White House. We were archiving the interactions people had with the White House Twitter and Facebook accounts because the Presidential Records Act requires it. A lot of good reasons. We want the historical record of what the President says to the public. Now this manifests itself in many different ways. The White House has a podcast, so you had White House interns, all of whom were probably Ivy League grads, copying and pasting iTunes comments out of iTunes and pasting them into Word so that they would have a record of what people said about the podcast. It's like there has to be a better way, right? And we can make technology to do this. And so we did this with Facebook. People will archive what people say on the President's Facebook wall, which is horrible, you don't want to read it, but has to be done. And interestingly, at the time we started doing this, this is three, maybe four years ago, Facebook's Terms of Service prohibited archiving your social graph for more than 24 hours, right? Because that had to be kept up to date for reasons, for their reasons. But you had a direct tension between federal law and the Terms of Service, right? In that case, I think Facebook actually sincerely wanted to change the policy, so they ended up changing the policy to where you could archive it longer. But gosh, I wish they hadn't. It would have been amazing to see them shut down the White House Facebook account for violating Terms of Service, right? And so we have to look for these things where we can be civically active in useful ways through technology. It's fascinating to me the reverence people have for Terms of Service. It's not law. It's just Terms of Service. Like break it sometimes, see what happens. Because it's this weird thing where they see code is constantly changeable. Always has bugs, something you can fix. But Terms of Service, this is immutable, right? This is carved in stone. And it's why the reverence? It's because we haven't done a good enough job educating people. Like those will change. If you're effective enough, those will change. PR, Trump's Terms of Service, 10 times out of 10. Every single time. So if Instagram changes Terms of Service and you don't like it and you raise it big enough stink, guess what? They change it back. In that case, they probably change it back to something worse. But hey, we don't always get it right. And that part of actually just being able to beat on your drum and tell a story and that trumping every other power they have has been underutilized. And it's not the same thing as SOPA and PIPOs coming and let's get active on this policy. It's actually looking at ourselves and our culture as being negatively impacted by the Terms of Service, by the policies of these companies and assuming our agency over them. We can correct things, right? And the traditional vector it's been done is through policy, through the Department of Justice issuing a consent decree, through these other mechanisms. And that's great. That's fine. But it's slow as hell. It doesn't work anywhere near as fast as the technology industry should work. So we need to think about ways to galvanize and organize around effectively targeting, and it could be specific clauses in Terms of Service. Like what if we actually focused on Facebook's Terms of Service one clause at a time in the same detailed way we do with public policy and looked for some accountability? Because they're not gonna offer it up on their side. In fact, Facebook explicitly ended the ability of the community to vote on the Terms of Service when there were changes. Now, that was farce anyway because it required one third of all Facebook users to agree to a change. And I don't have 300 million Facebook friends. I don't know if you do. It's a pretty hard thing to pull together. So it was always this sort of token effort, but they even eliminated the token effort at accountability. So then we have to go with what we have. The good news is even though the Terms of Service and the IP policies are working together being shaped by these companies to quiet down or eliminate any of the objections and the protests against it, people have already chosen a path of civil disobedience. The most compelling example of this I always come back to and I'm so inspired by is YouTube. If you go to YouTube and you look at content that people are illegally uploading or uploading in violation of copyright law, do a search for no infringement intended. It's the best for it. It's poetry to me. No infringement intended or I don't own this. Like 12 year olds have a lot of different ways of saying, I guess they're 15 in terms of their signups. But the ways that they say, you know, I'm not trying to step on your toes and I know there's some reason I shouldn't do this, but the world needs to see this video and I'm gonna put it up here. I'm so inspired by that because if we had any other context where hundreds of thousands of teenagers were assembling in public to violate federal law that didn't match the way culture worked or the way they thought culture should work, we would recognize it for what it is, which is a massive act of civil disobedience. This is a million mixer march. Takes place every single day. It's people going up and saying, I know what your laws are, but I know what's right. I know what's right for me as an artist, as an individual, somebody wants to express themselves with culture and I'm gonna do what I need to do. And I'm gonna make a nod to, I don't intend to infringe, but I have to transgress because it's the thing the world needs. It's the way I need to express myself. This is speech between me and my friends, not a work for you to monetize, right? And they're doing it every single day. Ordinary people are doing this every single day and they are violating the terms of service and they are violating the restrictive IP laws because they don't match. That's the opportunity, that's the exciting part. People are doing this every single day. That's why I'm really, really optimistic we can find a new way. Thank you all. Should we do some questions? Absolutely. Cool. I'm gonna start with a narrow point, but it was the first one you brought up so I'm gonna go with it. Please. If I start my wedding photos at the local U-Haul and they suddenly threw them away without telling me that would violate various laws and I would have a civil recourse and it just wouldn't have U-Haul nose better than to do that. Why wouldn't the exact same provisions apply to these online places? I don't know. I wish I did. I'm certainly no legal expert. I think there was an assumption of disposability baked into the culture of the web early on that this didn't count, this wasn't real. And I think almost all of digital culture. You see the sort of sheer amount of effort going into preserving old video games. It feels like that's what like 20% of Kickstarter does. It's like old video games being revived. And I think that's great, but part of it is because the community of people that care about this thing has got a face-to-face glimpse with the threat of it being forever destroyed. And I think that issue of disposability is only sort of corrected by a generation of people coming up that are in legal power and financial power enough to say actually digital culture is important is everything else. But there are countless disconnects between physical property law and digital property law. And right now they only ever work in favor of the companies that want to throw our stuff away as opposed to treating it as our possessions. It's extraordinary to me. And I think it's just the reframing. I think if legislators and lawmakers saw your digital shoeboxes as important as the photos in your U-Haul or saw them as equivalent, but very few of us are telling them that. Okay, I see three hands. We'll stop it, I'm sorry. We'll stop it, quarter of, quarter of a minute. First to comment then a question. About a week ago I was at the Kennedy School for a seminar on digital politics and the people from Facebook and Google. And both of them have two different teams, one Republican, one Democrat working with politicians and supposedly a Chinese wall. And it was interesting to me that nobody brought up. What about the interests of Facebook and Google and reference to politics? But that's my comment. My question is the latest iteration of digital rights and SOPAs and PIPA and all of that stuff supposedly is the terms of service become law. That's what I read on the web. And if you say, as the emails that I get, tell me if I say that I'm 150 pounds rather than 172 on my dating profile, I have committed a felony. And I'm wondering about that in relation to what you're talking about. We've already seen terms of service become de facto law or diger law. I think with DVD decryption and other aspects, we have policy being delegated to terms of service but being enforced with the full context as if it were public policy. And I think it's one of the great dangers of the sort of dynamic policy systems a lot of people are talking about is that, oh, we'll have things be much more responsive to what the public wants. And with, those are assuming that there are healthy ecosystems for exchange that are not controlled by these companies, which seems like an increasingly bad assumption right now. I think it's, I think the solution again is in that sort of PR Trump's TOS realm. We have to find really good artists that understand these issues to demonstrate them in a cogent way. I think about the artists that made good use of BitTorrent to show sort of legal uses of it were very, very effective in keeping from criminalizing all of non-standard or peer-to-peer distribution. I think we need to look at something similar around really realizing the implications of these terms of service. I love the example of your dating profile being a felony if you misrepresent yourself because certainly everybody can understand that. But we have precedent going back decades of your video rental history being private, right? These are things that, it's not a new issue. It's the scale of people that it impacts and the everyday reality of it are what's changed. The difference now is theoretically we should have more of a voice. The problem is I think we've abdicated a lot of our lobbying to the internet association. It's pretty much controlled by these big companies. There's the assumption that small startups and open web advocates have the same interests as the big companies. So we're all on the same side of, I don't know, H-1Bs and net neutrality and a couple other things that we all are in a bucket together. And I think we need to draw much broader distinctions like the small and the big actually have very little in common on the policy issues that matter. Hey, so I ask you to see three separate trends that are conforming here. We're losing control of our data as it's moving on these third party sites with different rules and different laws and different access. We're losing control of the endpoints because I no longer have the right to put whatever software I want on this. I can even write a file or ASHA program because I don't have access to the memory map. The third is we're losing control of our applications. Instead of owning a copy of Word, we tend to be either using a web app or licensing for use an app which then changes. And the model I like, I think it's really powerful, is we're moving into a feudal model of computing. Yeah, yeah. So even if I pledge allegiance to Google, they will protect me. At least that's the deal, right? But of course in any feudal model, they can also sell me down the river. And if you go back to feudalism, the way we got out of that is we had the rise of the nation state that sets the feudal lords not only have these rights, but you have these responsibilities. So I think that's sort of a good overarching metaphor to describe where we are and then how to get out of it. I love that analogy. One of the things I think about a lot is who has incentives in the market to overthrow that model. And there's a lot of different ways. This is like my day job as I'm CEO of a company making a software app and it talks to Facebook's API and the Twitter's API, right? So there's this reckoning of like I can say after police all I want, but there's like I have to ship software and somebody has to use it and what am I gonna do about this? And one of the premises I have is I think you can build apps that work within their constraints, but don't necessarily have to follow the same path towards success being destroying their photos. If you have these sort of economic underpinnings of building your company in a different way, if you have a closer alignment with what users want. And I think the feudal model, that's really powerful. I mean, I think it is a really effective analogy for the situation we find ourselves in. But I think about something like imagine a cloud app store. So instead of running on this closed device, I'd run on one of these open cloud systems or on any Linux system or something. And again, this goes back to 10 years ago. There used to be mom and pop web hosts, right? People would sign up for a web hosting space, you get an email address and 20 megs of storage and you would shoehorn your WordPress install up there and you were good to go. And that market's gone now, right? So we only have cloud computing or whatever. But there is some degree of interoperability between Amazon, a rack space and IBM or whatever. And I picture, what about an app that runs there, accessible through my browser, instead of on my phone? Because there's actually much more leverage with those providers. There's much more portability with those providers and there aren't just two players. Amazon obviously is dominant, but they're not even looking at control at that level. And that's interesting. And I think that to me feels most cyclically similar to the move from if people were like, how are you ever gonna unseat Windows? And Microsoft Bundling Internet Explorer probably did more to unseat Windows than anything else, right? And so the web browser has just that ability to disrupt. I think that's probably part of it. But there's, who's gonna tell a 23 year old kid doing a startup, like look, somebody's dangling a quarter million hour check in front of you, but you wanna take it from this other person for 200,000 because they'll let you build your app this way without an architecture that's dependent on these things. I mean, that's such a rare error, narrow, like there isn't a pithy. I think of what Lessig was doing a dozen years ago articulating IP law to people was so powerful, but it took years and years and years of him doing the best PowerPoints anybody had ever seen before anybody even understood the stakes. And here we have something even geekier, even walkier, right? Even more obscure and their time urgency is actually much faster because this isn't Disney's gonna change IP law in 10 years. This is like, well, the window's gonna close. So despite that, I'm still optimistic, but I do think we are pledging the camps that we're in. And worse, it's also tied to fashion and to social status now. So if you don't agree to live within the feudal walls of Apple's kingdom, you are out of fashion, right? Or maybe Google or Apple are sort of your choices for a phone. And you look at the sort of, well, you look at the number of Apple laptops here, but you go to a tech conference and say, oh, we use Exchange and Outlook. And sort of, oh, gosh, I'm so sorry, right? So that intersection with fashion and culture is something really important and not something we talk about very much. I'm afraid that's all the time that we have. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay.