 All right. Our next talk is Corey Doctorow, who I think needs very little introduction in this situation. But for those who don't know him, he's an activist. He's a science fiction author. And I think he can be described as the king of bloggers. I remember him appearing on XKCD with a cape back in the good old days. So Corey, please take it away. I don't know how I feel about being a king, given that I'm wearing a guillotine badge. Perhaps like party secretary, you have my permission to take my picture. So I'm going to talk today about technology and optimism and where it comes from and where it needs to go. And I want to start by, well, I want to start by putting on my slide. So let's do that. I want to start by busting a myth. The myth of the blind techno-optimist. You've probably encountered this story, the story that, you know, once upon a time, there were a bunch of nerds who had discovered the internet and thought that if we just gave everyone the internet, everything would be fine and that the only thing that they needed to work on was making sure everyone got connected and everything else would take care of itself. And now those idiots have led us into this crazy, terrible dystopian world and why didn't they foresee all this trouble? And the way that you know that this blind technological optimism is a myth is that people don't go out and start organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation because they think that everything is going to be fine in the end. You know, if there's a motto that characterizes those early technological optimists, it's not that everything is going to be great. It's that everything will be great if we don't screw it up. And if we do screw it up, it's going to be really, really terrible. Now, before computing was the source of regular stock bubbles. It was just a passion. It was driven not by dreams of riches, but by programmers who were able to make stuff happen. If you think about what the journey of a programmer is, it's that first you figure out how to express your will with sufficient precision that your computer then enacts your will and enacts it tirelessly, perfectly. Computer is connected to a network. You can project your will around the world. You can take the thing that you've built, this self-executing recipe, and you can give it to someone else, and they can execute it as well. But it's better than a recipe, right? You might have a recipe for your grandmother's brownies. And when you send it to someone else, they still have to follow the recipe. But a program is like a self-executing recipe. It's like a machine that just makes your grandmother's brownies appear in every household in the world if they just download your code and run it. And of course, as you get on the network and you find these people to share your code with, you're finding the people as well. You're finding community. But not in that large scale, to be honest. Tried around quite a few things and had a little online session for the towel day and for all these things. We had the Easter hack or the Divock. And yeah, we're working on it to get the connection back. So yeah. Okay, I can hear the voice. The whole system in the shadows. And the last thing they wanted was for what they were doing to come to the attention of their bosses. And so they had a whole bunch of rules about what you could and couldn't create. They especially didn't want any sex. And they didn't want anyone explaining how to make bombs on use that. And so there would be votes about what news group could be created. But every now and again, the backbone Kaval, which is what they called themselves. Okay, so we do have a sound of this doctor over here. So I think it shouldn't shouldn't be too much of a time until we get the stream back about cooking should go under the talk hierarchy and not under the wreck hierarchy. And John Gilmore and other people who were in his company decided to set up their own alternative version of use net called the alt hierarchy specifically to allow for a discussion of cooking wherever the hell they wanted it to exercise that little quantum of self determination. And very quickly the alt hierarchy grew until it was larger than all of us net put together. So the worst nightmares of those early digital rights activists have come to pass. We have total penetration of technology. There is centralization surveillance and manipulation of all of our technology everywhere. And the question that I think is a valid one to ask is how were we dealt such a stinging defeat? How did it come to pass that people who foresaw this danger and work to make things great and not screw them up still arrived at this moment where the internet consists of five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four. That's a phrase from Tom Eastman, a software developer in New Zealand. And this is where I get to my thesis about what's just happened and what needs to happen next because there is a story about technologists that says that the blind spot was dystopia that technologists just failed to understand that all of this stuff could go horribly wrong and they really understood how whoops they really understood how wrong it could go. The thing that technologists failed to understand was the relationship of monopolism to technology and the economy as it was emerging in the early days of the technology revolution. So if you think about the early days of the commercial internet and commercial technology, personal computing and so on, it was very dynamic. Companies that were giants one day ended up being acquired by upstarts the next day. And that dynamism was not driven solely by technology but also by US antitrust or anti-monopoly enforcers. So I want you to think about what the experience of a kid in the United States in the 1980s would have been like if you were using technology. So you might have gotten your Apple 2 Plus in 1980 or 1981. In 1982, the modem that came with it could suddenly dial all kinds of services all around America at a fraction of the cost that it used to run at because AT&T had been broken up and long distance charges fell through the floor. And then in 1984, you might have replaced that Apple 2 Plus with an IBM PC but it's more likely that you might have replaced it with an IBM PC clone, whichever one you replaced it with. It was probably running an operating system from this guy, the guy who wrote this letter Bill Gates, the guy who started this tiny little company called Microsoft. And the reason that the IBM PC was running code from this little startup and not from IBM itself was not because IBM didn't know how to write code. IBM was really good at writing code. They were arguably too good at writing code. And for 12 years prior to the creation of the PC, IBM had been an antitrust hell with the Department of Justice in which they were sued and sued and sued. And every year of that 12 year lawsuit, IBM spent more on its lawyers than the entire US Department of Justice spent on all the lawyers pursuing all antitrust action. And one of the things that the Department of Justice was really adamant about was that if you made hardware, you shouldn't try to monopolize the software for it. And so even though eventually IBM prevailed, the case was dropped against it, the last thing they wanted was to get in trouble with the DOJ again. And so after this 12 year process, when they made their first PC, they decided not to try and make the operating system for it. Instead, they tapped Bill Gates to make an operating system for it. And then Tom Jennings, the guy who created FidoNet, which was the biggest competitor we had to use that it was a non internet based distributed message board system. Tom Jennings, who is a virtuoso hardware engineer who lives a few kilometers from my home here in Los Angeles. He was tapped by a company called Phoenix that asked him to reverse engineer IBM's ROMs. And he reverse engineered the PC ROM produced a specification that was used as the basis for a new clone ROM. And that clone ROM was sold to PC vendors all over the world. And it's how we got Gateway, Dell, Compact, and all of the other PC vendors that might have sold you that IBM PC clone in 1984, running an operating system that IBM hadn't made on phone lines that had been broken up from AT&T. And then in 1992, you might have noticed that little company Microsoft had grown to be a monopolist itself with 95% of the operating system market. And so in came the Department of Justice and the Department of Justice spent the next seven years dragging Microsoft up and down that same gravel road that they had dragged IBM up and down for 12 years. And even though Microsoft got away the way IBM had, their behavior was tamed too because when a couple of guys in a Stanford lab, Larry and Sergey named their new search engine after the largest number they could think of, a one followed by 100 zeros at Google, Microsoft decided not to do to them what they had done to Netscape because they had seen what the Department of Justice does to you if you do that to your nascent competitors. And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect market, a market where you could make your products with low capital just with the sweat of your own mind by writing code that you could access the global audience of everyone who might want to run that code over a low cost universal network and that that audience could switch to your product at a very low cost because you could always write the code that it would take to port the old data formats and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a market where the best ideas would turn into companies that would find customers and change the world. But what we didn't realize, what we were naive about in those Halcyon days of the early internet was that anti monopoly law, the anti monopoly law that had made things so robust and dynamic that had given everyone who had access to a computer a chance to try and make a dent in the universe that that anti law antitrust law had been shot in the guts in 1982 and was bleeding out. That's all thanks to this guy, Robert Bork. Robert Bork is kind of an obscure figure for most people these days, although I said that on Twitter the other day and a bunch of people in their 50s said, well, I know who Robert Bork is, but I think if you're not an American in your 50s or a certain kind of weirdo conservative activist, you've probably never heard of this guy. Robert Bork was Richard Nixon's solicitor general and he committed crimes for Richard Nixon. And they were so egregious that when Ronald Reagan tried to appoint him to the US Supreme Court, the Senate decided not to confirm him because he was too grimy for the US Supreme Court. And so instead he became a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan and he created a new theory about when monopoly laws should be enforced, a theory he called the consumer harm theory. The consumer harm theory says that we don't hate monopolies because monopolies are bad, we only hate monopolies because they sometimes raise prices. And so long as a company that has a monopoly isn't immediately raising prices after they acquire that monopoly, it's okay to let the monopoly form and to let the monopoly fester. And this idea was incredibly popular and not just with Ronald Reagan, every one of the neoliberal leaders of the Reagan era from Helmut Kohl to Margaret Thatcher to Brian Mulroney to Augusto Pinochet took up the ideas of Robert Bork and said that from now on we are not going to get rid of our monopolies. From now on we're going to encourage the growth of monopolies on the grounds that they are efficient and only shut them down if we can prove that they've used their monopoly to raise prices. Now this idea is a stupid idea but it's incredibly popular for rich people because rich people like the idea that they could buy shares in companies that could establish monopolies. And those rich people funded Robert Bork. They created among other things a series of junkets called the MAN seminars, M-A-N-N-E. The MAN seminars are continuing educational seminars for U.S. federal judges in Florida where you fly to Florida, stay in a luxury hotel and get lectured on the brilliance of Robert Bork. 40% of U.S. federal judges have been through the MAN seminars. Unsurprisingly those judges are far less likely to punish monopolistic conduct. The people who like Robert Bork funded law schools and economics departments and journals and they turned the idea of consumer harm into a kind of global doctrine that has now taken over every single regulator in the West. China has a slightly different vision of it as does Russia. But the European Union, Canada, the U.S., most essential in South America have all adopted these rules. I don't know to what extent these rules have penetrated the African markets. And consumer harm, this idea that monopolies should only be shut down if you can show that they're using monopolism to raise prices, is incredibly hard to prove. In fact, you could basically call it impossible to prove. And as a result, anti-competitive conduct became so routine that we no longer think of it as unusual. Until the Bork era, here are some of the things that were considered violations of antitrust law and that would have attracted scrutiny from a regulator. Merging with a major competitor, acquiring a small competitor, or creating a vertical monopoly where you own different parts of the supply chain like Google buying an ad tech company. Now, the story of how tech got monopolized leans hard not on Robert Bork, but on all these exotic ideas like network effects, the idea that if you have one fax machine, it's useless and two are very useful and three are twice as useful and four is twice as useful again. And that once a tech company starts to become successful, the network affects snowball and you will never dethrone it. Despite the fact that we no longer have Friendster or Alta Vista or Amiga's or any of these other potential purveyors of network effects. A close look at how tech companies grew does not show that network effects is what led to that growth. Instead, you see predatory conduct, money ball, using access to the capital markets to raise gigantic amounts of money and buy or merge with all of your competitors as the means by which they grew. And as an example of this, I want you to think about Google for a minute. So Google is a company that has made exactly one and a half successful in house products. They made a really good search engine and a pretty good hotmail clone. Everything else that they've made in house died, right? This is just a small sample of the Google product graveyard. And everything that they've done that's successful, Android, ad tech, YouTube and so on. All of these are companies that they acquired from someone else. So this is not a company that has a natural monopoly due to a network effect. This is a company that has an unnatural and monopoly due to predatory conduct. Now network effects are indeed real. They are a thing. And you can see them exemplified pretty well with the Bell system. This was what we called AT&T in the US before it was broken up in the 1980s. But with tech, network effects are very different from other kinds of industries. Think of the railroad industry where once you have rails that run from one place to another, it doesn't make any sense to put in a second set of rails. And so the custom accrues to that rail vendor which can add more rails to more destinations. And before long, you have these natural monopolies emerging in rail. But that's not how it works with technology. And the reason is that technology has interoperability. So built into our general purpose computers and our general purpose network is the ability to run any program provided you can express it in symbolic logic and to interface any new network service with any existing network service. Now oftentimes that interoperability is deliberate and engineered. Someone will go to a standard's body like the W3C and decide on what an HTTP header looks like. But just as often that interoperability is adversarial. That interoperability is a form of competitive compatibility where a new company makes a product that plugs into an existing product or service without permission against the wishes of the people who made the existing product or service like Tom Jennings making his IBM PC ROMs. And what happens then is that the walled garden of the company that came before becomes a feedlot in which all of the customers have been handily penned in so that the new market entry can go over and choose whichever ones they want and devour them in a smorgasbord. So to think about how this worked with the bell system, the bell system originally had not just a monopoly over the wires, but a monopoly over the things that connected to the wires. It was against the law to connect a phone or a phone-like device or even a thing that clicked onto a phone to a phone that came from the bell system or to a jack that the bell system had installed. And they argued that because they were a monopolist, they were part of America's national security and safety apparatus, and that allowing third parties to connect things to their network would result in the network being made unreliable and therefore America being made insecure and unsafe. But they didn't use this power just to keep the network operational. They used this power to extract monopoly rents, to make money by screwing over their customers by preventing new market entrants. So for example, to see how bad this got, you can look at where it broke down. The first time that this system broke down was when AT&T sued a competitor called Hushaphone. And Hushaphone was a plastic cup that snapped over the mouthpiece of your bell phone so that when you were speaking, your voice would be muffled and people who were in the same room as you would find it hard to listen in on your conversation. And AT&T argued that the Hushaphone, because it was mechanically coupled to the bell system, endangered the integrity of the bell system. And their regulator told them to go pound sand. They said, no, this doesn't endanger the system. Get used to it. People can connect things to their phones. And that's when they lost mechanical coupling prohibitions. And then they went after another company called Carterphone. And Carterphone made a walkie-talkie that plugged into a regular RJ11 jack or that you could connect your phone to. And it was for people who worked on ranches and farms so that they could clip a walkie-talkie onto their belt and go out and work in the barn or ride out on the range and still take their phone calls. And AT&T argued that by electrically coupling devices to the bell system that they were violating AT&T's monopoly and Endangering America. And again, their regulator told them that that was not a valid reason. And they lost the ability to block electrical coupling. And this is where we see the growth of everything from modems to answering machines and all of the other devices that eventually plugged into the bell system. So interoperability can turn network effects on their head. And interoperability was really key to the growth of the tech monopolist today. So think about the iWorks suite and its history. Before the iWorks suite came about, Apple was in really serious trouble in enterprise networks. If you ran a business, chances are most of the computers in your network were PCs. But maybe the designer or an executive who had the right to decide what kind of computer they would use would be running a Mac. And the way that Microsoft punished you for running that Macintosh in the Microsoft environment was by dragging their heels on updating the Microsoft Office suite for the Mac. And so Macs became this kind of cursed zone where if someone were to send a Word file or an Excel file to a Mac and that file was then opened and saved again, it would never be openable again on any computer anywhere in the world. It would be irretrievably corrupted. And Bill Gates did not fix this because Steve Jobs went to him and asked him pretty please to make a better Microsoft Office suite for the Mac. Instead, Steve Jobs got a bunch of engineers to reverse engineer the file formats. And then they produced iWork whose pages, numbers, and keynote are used to read and write Office files perfectly. And very quickly, they were able to colonize the Microsoft Office environment running ads like the switch ads where they said, well, you may have hesitated to give up your Windows PC because all of your files are stuck in there. But what if I told you that you could read and write all the files ever created with a Windows system, and you could do it from a Mac by running one piece of competitive compatibility software of software that was adversarily interoperable with the Microsoft ecosystem. And that is what rescued the Mac from the scrap heap of history. And it wasn't just software, it was also hardware. In the early 1990s, Lexmark was the, or rather the late 1990s, Lexmark was the printer division of IBM, the not very well reformed monopolist. And Lexmark used little microchips to stop people from refilling their laser toner cartridges. And a company called Static Controls, a little Taiwanese company, reverse engineered that microchip, it only held a 12 byte program. So it wasn't hard. And they made new chips that would allow you to refill your cartridge. Lexmark lost their lawsuit against Static Controls. And so now Static Controls had this huge installed user base of people who were desperate for cheap toner cartridges. And instead of having a network advantage, Lexmark now had a network disadvantage. Today, Lexmark is a division of the company that owns Static Controls. And it's not, of course, hardware. Also, it's also network services. When Facebook first got off the ground, Mark Zuckerberg had a really serious problem, which is that everyone who wanted to use social media already was on the dominant social media platform, a company called MySpace, that was owned by the world's most rapacious vicious billionaire, Rupert Murdoch. And again, Zuck did not go to Rupert and say, please allow your users to talk to my users because people want to use Facebook, but they don't want to leave their friends behind. Instead, what they did was they made a bot. And you give that bot your login credentials, and it would go to MySpace and scrape the waiting messages that were there for you and put them in your Facebook inbox. And you could reply to them and it would pilot them back out to MySpace. Now, all of this led to a very dynamic system that completely changed the way that we interacted with technology. But all of this has gone the way of the Dodo. And the reason for that is that as these companies acquired new monopolies, they diverted their monopoly rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility. So you may remember the urgent fight over software patents, the growth of software copyrights, the ongoing problem of anti-circumvention rules that make it illegal to break DRM, most recently seen in the shutdown of YouTube DL, enforceable terms of service. Facebook has just used its terms of service to try and shut down ad observatory, an academic project that Facebook's compliance with its own policies on political paid disinformation. And they've said that because this service violates their terms of service, it's illegal. Never mind that Facebook had to violate MySpace's terms of service to gain its ascendancy. And then new rights that were purchased with very expensive lawsuits. So today we have the Google Oracle lawsuit going through the Supreme Court in the United States that might create a new copyright over APIs. Now, all of these things, patents, copyrights, anti-circumvention terms of service, novel copyrights, they trade under the name intellectual property. And if you're familiar with that phrase intellectual property, you'll know that free culture activists hate this term. In fact, when you ask them what we should call these things, sorry, there's my software patent slide. I knew I had one in there somewhere. When you ask them what we should call intellectual property, they say, oh, you should call it the author's monopoly because that's what they call it in the days of the statute of Anne. That's what they call it in the founding in the United States, author's monopolies. And authors get really pissy when you say that they have a monopoly. And they do for good reason, because although formally the fact that I wrote this speech and therefore I have the monopoly over reading it to you on my microphone means that I am a monopolist. I don't have a market power monopoly. I can't use this monopoly to extract monopoly rents from the marketplace. Writers who go to the five remaining publishers soon to be four, if Bertelsman buys out Simon and Schuster, don't get to use the fact that they have a monopoly to negotiate crazy supermarket prices that go beyond what would happen in a competitive market. Unlike, say, the monopolist themselves, the actual monopolist we have who get to charge very high prices for their services. And so it's not a bad point that an author's monopoly is not a monopoly in the way that we talk about it when we talk about monopolism in the tech sector. But IP does have a very precise meaning. A meaning that is not, has nothing to do with intellectualism or property. IP, in this sense of software patents, copyrights, anti-circumvention, terms of service, API copyrights and so on. It has the precise meaning of any law or rule that lets me decide who can criticize me, who can compete with me, and how my customers must behave themselves. And when you fuse a market power monopoly with an author's monopoly, when you have a market power monopoly that has IP behind it, you get something far more durable than either a regular monopoly or an author's monopoly, a copyright monopoly. You get a monopoly that the government will defend rather than dismantling. So for example, if you have a monopoly that you can defend with a patent, right, like today you have HP monopolizing its ink cartridge market, and they have patents over the security chips and their ink cartridges, the government will seize compatible ink cartridges at the border on your behalf because they violate your patents. And so instead of punishing you for creating a monopoly, the government will reward you by doing your enforcement work for you. And not only that, but once you have a monopoly that's backed by some kinds of IP, like anti-circumvention, the government will punish people who report defects in your products. So if you have a monopoly over printers or if you have a monopoly over phones and someone finds a defect that allows third parties to install their own ink or their own app stores, the circumvention of your DRM becomes a crime under Article 6 of the European Copyright Directive and under Section 12.1 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and under similar laws all around the world. And the government will both fine and potentially imprison the security researchers who point out that your products have a defect in them. Now, I started this talk by saying that early internet boosters were not blind to the perils of technology, but some of them were a little. After all, once all that money started sloshing around, then if you could convince yourself that tech was an un-checked force for good, then you could also convince yourself that getting all of that money that the tech industry was generating would make you on the side of good. The myth of two guys in a garage who could topple billion-dollar giants and become billionaires themselves fired a lot of techies' imaginations and sidelined a lot of their conscience. But those days are behind us thanks to monopolies. Thanks to monopolies, founders who want to start businesses that compete with the monopolists, monopolists who have double-digit growth every year and who realize tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in profit collectively, those founders, when they go to a venture capitalist or another funder, are told that the funders aren't interested in funding these direct competitors. Funders call the lines of business that big tech is in the kill zone, and they understand that any attempt to fund a business that operates in the kill zone will result in your company being crushed by the monopolistic power of the entrenched company. Instead, if you are a technologist headed to Silicon Valley, you don't dream of changing the world. You dream of having a mini kitchen with free kombucha and maybe getting massages on Wednesday on the behalf of the company. Liberated from the fear of losing customers to competitors, tech has pivoted from liberating customers to manipulating, locking in, and abusing their users. The code that does that manipulation, that abuse, and that lock-in, it's all written by technologists, technologists who discovered their passion for the field when they felt the thrill of self-determination through writing code and projecting it over networks. And this is a really important fracture line. I think this is a way to understand things like the Googler walkout and tech won't build it, no tech for ICE, the solidarity movements against facial recognition and other surveillance technologies, that technologists are no longer able to delude themselves with the thrill of billions into thinking that it's okay to do what they've been doing. And one by one in increasing numbers, they're starting to wake up to the fact that it's time to do better. It's time to realize the liberatory power of technology and step back from the power of technology to control us. That this will all be so great if we don't screw it up. And if we do screw it up, it's going to be really, really terrible. And there are precedents for this. And unfortunately, the precedents are pretty incomplete. So Robert Oppenheimer, very famously, was one of the few people in the world who was both brilliant enough at being a manager and brilliant enough at being a nuclear physicist, that he could lead the creation of the first nuclear bomb in the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the United States. And legendarily, as that first nuclear bomb test went off, he turned away from the mushroom cloud and said, I am become death destroyer of worlds and embarked on a lifelong project to demilitarize the atom to put back in the bottle the genie that he had made. And my hope is that we can arrive at a world in which our Oppenheimers decide to put down their tools before they make their atom bombs instead of after that we are at this crossroads now where not only are the harms so visible that they're undeniable, but also the rewards for building the digital equivalent of these A-bombs have dwindled from a star in technology's hall of fame to a really well-funded pension plan. And surely that is not enough to sell out for. So many of you listening today have probably read my novel, Little Brother, and its sequel, Homeland. I know that because I often hear from you, especially at events like CCC and Def Con and Schmu Con and Thought Con and so on. People come up to me and they say, you know, I read your book and I understood both how powerful technology could be and how terrifying it would be if that power was not harnessed for the people and instead was harnessed to oppress people. And it made me embark on my career as a technologist, a security researcher, a human rights activist, a cyber lawyer. And, you know, that's the best thing in my life really. I mean, you know, apart from my kid and my family, the fact that there are people out there who have devoted their lives to doing something better because of something I wrote, that's really important to me. And frankly, you know, if my kid has got a chance of growing up in a world that doesn't make Orwell look like an optimist, it's going to be in part because of that stuff. But I've written a new Little Brother book. I wrote this book that came out this year called Attack Surface. And this is genuinely not an ad. You don't have to read it. And in fact, if you're watching this, you probably don't need to, although you might enjoy it because this is aimed at a different kind of technologist. This is a story about the kind of technologist who spends their whole life kidding themselves that working on systems of control and oppression are not that big a deal. Because if they didn't do it, someone else would do it. There's an endless supply of Oppenheimers. And if I turn my back, someone else will be there to finish my work. Who come to a realization, maybe belated, that they've spent their whole life building a dystopia that they don't want to live in, and who redeem themselves, who come back from the brink. And the reason I wrote this story now is because I really wanted to reach the technologists who are waking up every day and saying, I fell in love with this stuff because it liberated me. And I spend my days figuring out how to take away the future of people who might be liberated by it themselves. And that's an urgent message because authors monopolies IP are available to everyone thanks to the Internet of Things, thanks to our embedded systems. I'm going to break here and editorialize very briefly. This is the slide I'm most proud of, not for any kind of intellectual heft, but I'm really bad at the GIMP. And I think I did a really good job. So I just want to, if you're looking away from your screen, if you're peeling vegetables or something, spare a glance at this slide. I'm very happy with this slide. So the IoT means that every device in our world has access to an author's monopoly, has IP in it, and that governments will enforce the strictures that the designers and manufacturers of these devices put into them by punishing people who try to use competitive compatibility to undo those strictures. And not only that, but IoT devices are not merely smart as a convenience to invoke the law. They're also smart as a way to enforce the manufacturer's desires, as a way to control the actions of users, of competitors, and of critics, that these devices have a kind of unblinking eye that watches you whenever you use them. And if it catches you trying to do something that might displease the manufacturer's shareholders, it can stop you and it can rat you out to the authorities. And so, speaking in my professional capacity as a dystopian science fiction writer, this scares the shit out of me. Now, that is all a kind of grim way to end. And so I'm going to finish this off with a couple of words on what gives me hope. And this comes from my colleague, James Boyle, at the Duke Center for the Public Domain. And Jamie, when he talks about the computer liberation movement, he compares it to the ecology movement. And before the term ecology was coined, we didn't have a movement, we just had a bunch of issues. Some people cared about whales, some people cared about owls, some people cared about the ozone layer. And maybe they thought that the people who cared about another issue were doing important work, but it wasn't their work. And they weren't really on the same side. They weren't part of the same cause. But the term ecology changed all of that. The term ecology took a thousand issues and turned it into one movement. One movement that everyone had each other's back on. Even if the reason you were in the movement was owls, you were there to fight the corner of the people who cared about the ozone layer. And you began to understand that these were all facets of the same problem. Well, today, monopolies have taken over and destroyed the lives of people in a million ways, right? Whether you're a professional wrestling fan, a beer drinker, a whiskey drinker, an eyeglass wearer, a plane flyer in someone who relies on energy or financial services or whose money was stolen by a company whose auditors were one of the big four accounting firms. Whether you are someone who is upset because there's four movie studios left or three record labels or because there's only one movie theater left in the United States, one movie theater chain of any size left in the United States. But whether you're pissed off that you're not going to get the vaccine because in the US, there's only one company that makes glass bottles of any size. All of these people don't know it, but they're in the same side. They're on the same fight and that fight is the fight against monopolies. Now, people talk about big tech as though they're super geniuses. But when we rip off the mask, we discover that these are not Titans who built monopolies through their special genius. They're just three sociopaths in a trench coat. They're just the latest version of the kind of monopolist that we have been fighting since time immemorial, since the Rockefellers, since the Melons, since every monopolistic family that tried to establish a dynasty that would allow them to rule as though they were kings was broken up and relegated to just having their names on a couple of buildings. We know how to deal with these people and it's time that we dealt with them for what they are, which is just plain old-fashioned sociopaths and not as super geniuses who stand astride the world like Colossae. Thank you. Thank you. I think I'm back now. All right. Well, thanks for this talk. We are basically out of time. So we're moving the Q&A to the fireside chat, which will happen in, I think, 20 minutes or so. And then all the questions that have already been asked for this talk will also be answered then. But Cori, I think we had this short stream outage around minute five. Okay. So if you know what you said at minute five, you can maybe try to recapitulate it. I don't know what I said. So history of networks, apparently. Unfortunately, it was not visible for us, so I don't know myself. But I think it was history of networks. It might have been my story about the alt hierarchy. That's probably it. And if you go to your favorite search engine, whether it's like Altavista or Ask Jeeves or Yahoo, and type in alt.interoperability.adversarial, you'll find an article I wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation about the history of the alt hierarchy. So I think that's probably what got cut out. Okay, wonderful. Thank you. I think people know how to use Google. Lycos is also indexed. Yes, they'll try to figure it out. All right. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. I'll see you guys on the fireside chat.