 Hello, everyone. Welcome. It's a real pleasure to see you all here. I'll begin by acknowledging that we're all gathering here today on traditional Wynmore territory. We have, as you know, as many of you know, many excellent lecture series at the law school. And this one, the Reed Lecture Series, is the one of the longest standing. It's quite something that we're gathering today for the 40th Reed Lecture. That's quite something, I think, for a lecture series to have lasted and continued for that period of time. It's in honor of Horace Reed. He was the dean of the law school from 1950 to 1964. He was many other things as well. And this lecture series was set up in cooperation with the Reed family and the law school to honor Horace Reed and his memory and legacy. We're very pleased to have some members of the Reed family here today, Dr. Robert Reed, Ms. Michelle Raymond, Mr. Russell McKinnon, and Dr. Judy Reed, Guernsey. And it's great that they have continued to support this lecture series. So welcome, the Reed families. We're really delighted to have you here. Some of you will know a little bit of Horace Reed's life. So I'll just give you a few details. So we know the person after whom this lecture series and his brothers here today is named. He had a rich academic life and a rich life in public service. He enlisted during the First World War. He served as chair of the Regulations Revision Committee with the Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War, as a longtime member of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board, a longtime member of the Conference of Governing Bodies of the Legal Profession and the Conference of Commissions on the Uniformity of Legislation, honorary president of the Nova Scotia Barrister Society, to 67, and as Canadian delegate to the Conference of Private International Law at the Hague in 1968. He's remembered for his life of public service, but he was also remembered as a great teacher. And this is an excerpt that was written about him in the Halifax Herald in 1975. Horace Emerson Reed, OC, OBE, QC, VA, LLB, LLHEM, SJD, LLD, that's a lot of letters. Former dean of Dalhousie Law School and a legal scholar and law teacher taught law with all the authority of a profound and mature scholar of international renown. But he also brought to his teaching the benevolence and humanity which were among his most admirable qualities. Kindly and affable, readily available to students and colleagues alike. He presided as dean over a lengthy period of unparalleled expansion and development in the faculty of law and marked it firmly with his velocity and objectives. And in recognition of all his achievements, Dr. Reed was appointed officer of the Order of Canada in 1973. He also had honorary degrees from Acadia, Queens, Dalhousie, and the University of Windsor. He began teaching in Minnesota, but gradually saw the light and came back to Dalhousie. Of course, we're delighted that he came. And now I'll introduce our guest today, Professor Annalisa Riles. And here I'm just going to put in a little plug for Kim Brooks when I sent a note around asking for suggestions, I think it might have been you who proposed Professor Riles, so I'm delighted. Thanks for the suggestion. So, Professor Riles is with us to deliver his support here. A remarkable bio. I like reading it. I've read it several times just for the sake of reading it down. So I'm going to say a few things about it. And guess what I like about it is that it's so remarkably interdisciplinary across the law and social sciences, which really is impressive. And which I think really is in the spirit of the reading lecture and what it's supposed to be about. So Annalisa Riles is the Jeff G. Clark Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. She's the founder and director of Meridian 180, a transnational platform for policy solutions. I think that's amazing. And interesting. Her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of law, markets, and culture across the fields of private law, conflict of laws, financial regulation, and comparative legal studies. She has conducted legal and anthropological research in China, Japan, and the Pacific and speaks Chinese, Japanese, French, and Virginia. And English. She has published on a wide variety of topics, including comparative law, conflict of laws, financial regulation, and central banking. Her first book, The Network Inside Out, won the American Society of International Laws Certificate of Merit. She has served as a visiting professor at Yale University, University of Tokyo, London School of Economics, and the University of Melbourne. And she's been a visiting researcher at the Bank of Japan. Her most recent book is The Changing Politics of Central Banking. She's currently working on a book about the possibility for a transnational democratic dialogue in times of geopolitical conflict, always topical. Based on the experience of Meridian 180, her latest research concerns the transnational data governance regime. She writes both these and other issues on her blog. And if you go to her website, you'll see a link to her blog. And so it's my privilege and pleasure to introduce Professor Riles. The title is The Sociology of the Platform, Reimagining the Digital Public Sphere. Over to you, Professor Riles. Also with this very carefully. Well, thank you so much, Dean Cameron, for this lovely invitation, for this lovely introduction. I really appreciate, of course, being here. I don't know how many of you know my co-author on many papers, Karen Knopp, who's a graduate of this law school. But Karen and I have been working together for 15 years. And I've heard many, many things about Halifax and always wanted to come. So it's wonderful to be here with all of you today. This is really, I'm speaking today with a great deal of trepidation, because it's the first time I've spoken about this project publicly in a law school environment. So I thought that you all were really nice people and it would give me a chance to kind of try it out. So this is all very much in the experimental mode. Okay, so 20 years ago, new digital technologies were heralded as engines of a new era of public discourse. So I remember, I think we all remember in the 90s, the sense that life was really going to change and become much more democratic. They would allow social activists to escape, let me stand over here so you can see that, to escape from the iron cage of bureaucracy, weaken our reliance on old institutions in terms of our political activism and our funding for activism and so forth. People used phrases like post bureaucratic organizing or organizing without having to organize because of the internet. And although there have been Arab Springs, clearly there's been another side to this. This is not the whole picture. It's far from bringing rationality to public discourse and enabling connections across public divides. Digitized conversation has become largely something of a free speech, free for all. Radicalizing passions and amplifying charismatic authority and leading to greater vulcanization of the public sphere. So certainly those of you who have the privilege of watching all this from across our border and not having it be your personal problem, I envy you, but I think for many of us it's quite traumatic to see what's happening to our politics now in the United States. And so it seems that this digitization of the public sphere has ushered in a really new, almost post-democratic ethos, far from being the engine of democratization, a post-democratic ethos in which the internet platform becomes a way to actually undermine democracy, rather than support democracy. And this really fits with what a lot of sociologists and science and technology studies scholars and anthropologists who study social media platforms like these have been saying for some time now about these platforms, which is in part focusing quite a bit on the economics of these platforms. And the facts that all of us, and probably every single one of us in here, including myself, is very engaged on a number of these platforms, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or what have you, or Airbnb or Uber or any of these platforms, but they seem, the anthropologists have described them as increasingly becoming what one anthropologist called sociality factories and markets, places where people are engaged as laborers in producing content about themselves and producing themselves really as data to be bought and sold by others and marketed. And so that there's not just a political story here, but an economic story. And so this is very much less optimistic, I guess, than where we started in the 90s. Now in legal studies, the debate has, I'd say pretty much tracked what I've just described in the social sciences. So early on, there was a great deal of euphoria. This is Yochai Benkler, now at Harvard, who was really very excited and many were excited and liked him about what was come of these new technologies. But that was soon followed by a great deal of pessimism from people like Cass Sunstein, who's talked about the fact that it's, he calls it the daily me generation, where it's all about getting content about yourself and your view of things and the way you want things to be and never really having to hear actually anything different from what you want to hear. Or Jack Balkan, also, who's talked a lot about, again, like the anthropologists, the question of the consumer model of conversation, in which we are all consumers or producers of information rather than citizens in a conversation. And of course, not everybody, whoops, this thing is going nuts on me here. Of course, not everyone is negative on this. Yochai Benkler remains quite optimistic that in certain cases, at least, these platforms can become sites of real democratic activity and he gives some concrete examples of that happening with what I guess many of us would call good results. But there is nevertheless a great deal of pessimism. And so now, the conversation in the law world is focusing on the implications of this for the regulation of speech. Do we need to think differently about how we regulate speech given that speech itself seems to be changing in some ways? And so we have here kind of two main positions, very crude. I'm sure many of you who teach constitutional law can fill this in in much more interesting ways. But just to get it out there, a libertarian view that says, you know what? So what if it's consumeristic? It's freedom of speech is a fundamental right, just like freedom of religion. Let the chips fall where they may. And on the other side, a more Republican or deliberative democracy view that says, no, speech isn't just an end in itself. It's a means to an end. That end is self-government or collective self-determination. And so we have to think about the ways that some speech can have silencing effect on others. For example, by taking away their dignity, Jack Balkan talks about this quite a bit. The idea that some of this speech coming out of say places like Brightpart in the United States is taking away the dignity of African-Americans or other minorities in the United States. And therefore keeping them from speaking. And that in those cases, perhaps we need to think about how we're going to regulate this. Do we need some way to regulate it? And so people like Balkan and Cassandrasine have said that the goal is really to create citizens, not consumers. And do we need to begin to think about how to change the way speech happens in the digital public sphere so it's focusing more on citizens and not consumers? OK, so that's kind of the framework that we're operating in. I think there's a few limitations to this conversation in the law world as it's played out so far. One is that as you can hear, it's actually very state focused. The question is, what should the state do about speech, first of all? We're talking about state regulation. And secondly, the reason the state would want to do something is to fix the problem of citizens in the state, how to make us have better states because citizens have to play their role in a democracy so that they're not overtaken by demagogues and so forth. So very state focused. That's one thing. Second thing is surprisingly not very transnational in the way they're talking. Little awareness that one of the things that's really new and important about this digital public sphere is that it's no longer a local or domestic public sphere, that it's very transnational in its orientation. And certainly if you just think of what happened in the US election and the way that a lot of the speech was from outside the United States, you'd think that would be becoming quite obvious to us now. So not very transnational. And then critical scholars in the humanities and social theory who've talked about, whoops, I don't know what that is. Sorry about that. Sorry about that. Who've talked about freedom of speech are the critical scholars who've talked about this have been quite critical about how lawyers' conversation, the conversation I described is quite narrow in its focus. So Judith Butler has talked about the fact that this whole conversation that law professors are having presupposes a particular kind of subject who does the speaking and the listening, which is a very, you know, it's just one model of what a subject is. It's not even the only model in the United States, let alone other countries. Or Talal Assad, a very important social theorist, has talked about the European choice to allow defamation of the prophet Muhammad as taking away the humanity of European Muslims and therefore keeping them from speech, speaking. And he talks about how the freedom of expression, free speech talk becomes its own cultural dogma in its way of excluding people. So in other words, what they're saying is that there's a lack of self-consciousness among law professors about the cultural foundations of the entire free speech conversation. And the question that raises for me is, might there be other ways altogether for us to think about digital deliberation that might raise other regulatory challenges to our minds or that might suggest other ways of thinking about how to solve the problems that we are facing now? So that's where I'm coming from. So I come at all this as in camera set as both an international law scholar and as an anthropologist. And so I'm interested in it from both sides. So as an international law scholar, my first project was on international legal institutions and I got interested in networks, the phenomenon of networks, which was everywhere in circa 2000 when I published my book. Everybody had a network, everybody participated in a network. And in international law, these networks were really the new hot form of social organization or for ways of thinking about problems. And I was interested in studying these anthropologically as forms of thought as models or templates for the way people worked. And to understand basically what was the fantasy, what was the appeal of this form that seemed to be dominating international law at that time, circa 2000. What's interesting to me is that networks have kind of ceased to be the hot thing now. Now, a lot of the talk is about platforms. And so what I'm interested in is thinking about the platform in much the way that I talked about, thought about networks. So that's from my law side. And especially international law. I'm thinking about platforms in international spaces. As an anthropologist and a socio-legal scholar, I'm interested in rethinking the normative legal debate about free speech regulations. So there hasn't been that much social science that law professors have done on free speech. Yochai Bencler, who I mentioned, has done just some empirical work aimed at showing that he is right, that there can be positive outcomes to speech. But I mean, I think the more interesting question for social scientists is not whether he's right or wrong, whether there can be good outcomes or bad outcomes. But what are the unstated assumptions in the normative debate? What else, not is regulation good or bad, but how does, what is the appeal of these things? Why are people deliberating online? How are they deliberating online? What are the outcomes? And sort of look at this concretely through ethnography. So that's the second way. And I should say there's a third way that reason I'm interested in this. It's more as a human being and as a political and ethical subject. I like everyone else at the moment and feel that I have to think of how I can engage in what I can do about the situation that we're now facing. And the project I'm gonna describe therefore today is a departure from the kind of standard empirical project that I've done for my entire career in the sense that it involves an experiment with a form of political intervention. It's not just describing something or documenting what other people are doing. I'm not just studying Facebook. I'm trying to work with a bunch of like-minded academics to see whether we can experiment with finding new solutions. And what is there any possible imagination of this digital space that we could call positive that we might wanna try out and see what it looks like? So that's a little bit unusual and controversial I guess in social science to be involved in that way. But that's, we can talk more about that if you like. So now what I'm gonna do is take you into the world of the project that I've been involved in and talk about that for a little while and then we can come back and think about some of the implications for the free speech debate. Okay, so the project is called Meridian 180 and it was born out of a crisis. In 2011, I was doing field work in Japan at the Bank of Japan and of course we had an earthquake followed by a terrible tsunami followed by a nuclear accident. And this created a great deal of, it was really not just, it was obviously a humanitarian crisis, it was also an economic crisis, a political crisis, but for many of us it was also a kind of epistemological or ethical crisis. The question was, how could this happen? How could things get this bad? How, here we are in Japan, right? Someone said to me, this isn't Indonesia, which I mean, we could go with whether that, I wanted to make that comment, but the idea being we thought we could trust the system, right, how could this happen? And that led a lot of the people that I was working with as a scholar who were regulators and policy makers and academics to say, boy, is there anything I could have done or should have done to avoid this terrible disaster? What will be the next disaster? What will it look like? And will I have done all I can do to make sure that we're not in this situation again? And so as we began talking about what the problems were, there was a sense that one of the issues was intellectual silos. A sense that the nuclear regulators were talking to the regulators and the activists were talking to the activists and the social science and the lawyers were talking to the lawyers. And there was very little across conversations which could have revealed what some of the problems were. And also that the conversation transnationally was very thin. The nuclear reactor had been built by an American company, General Electric. The nuclear radiation was going to other countries like Korea and eventually United States and elsewhere. And yet there was no way to deal with that transnational dimension. So the sense was, well, okay, perhaps we need to prepare for the next crisis by thinking about a way in which we could have deep and searching and challenging conversations across all those divides and what would that kind of conversation look like? So here's just a mission statement from the group. Like, whoops, sorry, sorry. The group describing some of the concerns that they had and we formed this group called Meridian 180. Meridian 180 is the name of the 180th Meridian, the international date line. It separates east from west, right? So this idea that there needed to be a conversation between east and west. But it's also, I don't know if there are any sea people involved in seafaring. If you have any of that in your family, you probably know that Meridian 180 is also considered mythologically to be a place where strange things happen. So when seafarers cross the 108th Meridian, they'll do for anything like stand on their head or there's all kinds of myths of that. Strange ideas come into you in this space. And so we thought this could be, it stood for the idea that we were gonna think differently about things as well. And so the idea was to, of course, because we're talking about people who are very busy and in different parts of the world and have different languages that they use and so forth, that we might be able to harness new technologies to do that. At this point we have over 850 members in 35 countries and we hold online forums which is some of the forums that we've had. This is not a complete list, but online forums that go on every month on different topics and then live conferences and so on. Here's just an example of what's going on on the site right now. Here's a conversation started by our Korean team which is about putting yourself in the shoes of the people who are surrounding the leadership in North Korea and trying to think, instead of thinking about it from our point of view, and thinking how what would be one's options if one were them and therefore what could one do about it? So that's an example of the kind of different thinking that goes on. Now from the beginning, this was really an experiment in not being Facebook. That's what everybody thought of, one that they wanted to do. So we set up a number of structural features that were supposed to prevent this from becoming that kind of free speech free for all. One is the conversations are multilingual, so getting rid of the hegemony of English, something I know you Canadians are way ahead of us on, but understanding that. And also something we didn't anticipate about that was that the fact that people knew that someone was translating their speech meant that they understood that their speech had better be serious because it was gonna take somebody a great deal of time to translate it. And so the quality became very different. People put some thought into it. The other feature was the conversations were completely private and not quotable outside of the conversation. So less grandstanding for that reason and more risk taking was the hope. The third member's carefully chosen through that is I don't know everyone, but someone who's come into the group knows someone, everyone else. So that there would be some sort of social accountability. And of course the idea that it would be not for profit. So this is funded by a consortium of universities who serve as bases and cover the costs into the translation. So the idea being that it would not be, not have profit motive. And finally that the governance would be diffused. That it would be shared across people from different countries and therefore and different disciplines. And so reflect different points of view. Now for the first few years of this project's existence the participants really didn't know how to describe themselves. Somebody said what is Meridian 180? Everyone kind of panicked and didn't know quite what to say. Was it a think tank? Or was it a community? And at an early meeting of the leadership group which is called the Core Idea Group people pondered what metaphors to use. And I remember possibilities proposed included amateur think tank. Or guerrilla consulting group. Or one black box theater performance or my personal favorite intellectual gym. A place that people could go to kind of just get, train up and get some new ideas side by side with strangers and then leave. But at a meeting of the leadership in 2016 the question was resolved. After trying on a whole bunch of different possible ways of describing ourselves, somebody said we're a platform. And then this flash of recognition went across the group. And one leader with links to the tech economy an entrepreneur said a platform, a platform. We're a platform. And he's tried it on all these different voices. Like he thought that just totally fit. And there was just consensus immediately on this term platform. So what did they mean by platform? Why was this so appealing? And I think this is important anthropologically as data about why this term appeals. So people said things like institutions are older. They're less flexible. They're more locally grounded where platforms rely on new information technologies to cross distances and borders of all kinds. Platforms that was also remarked are distinct from communities which seem more old fashioned. So the appeal of the platform as a modality of techno-sociality was that it was supposed to bring together all kinds of differences. People from different language groups, people from different political views, people with different expertise by filtering and somehow organizing conversations technologically in a way that would be impossible in real life. So this seems to be a feature of the appeal of this idea of the platform now. That it brings together many diverse elements, institutions, funding, intellectual property, people, technologies. And now platforms have become even sources of wealth. People buy, I met a guy in Hong Kong recently who was telling me, oh, I buy and sell platforms. And I said, what does that mean? He said, I buy the whole thing. I buy the people, I buy the know-how, I buy the institutions, I buy the whole thing. And I sell it to somebody else. So they've become even commodities. Yeah, exactly. So the other thing is that what platforms are for is often very open-ended. They're thought of as a technology, a means to an end. But what they're really for is kind of open-ended. So point number one that I wanna make here is that this platform idea seems to be emerging as an important model of social organization. Not just in one country, but in many countries. Something that's capturing people's imaginations that maybe we should pay attention to. So, sorry. So one of the ways that I would pay attention to it is by comparing it to something I studied before, which is the network. So here's a diagram from my earlier book of something someone had made, of what a network looks like, the people that I was working with at the United Nations. And when you think about the network as a phenomenon of international law, versus the platform as an emerging phenomenon, there's some similarities. They're both supposed to cross distances. They're both supposed to manage an incredible heterogeneity of viewpoints of people and so forth. But there are also differences. In theory, networks were supposed to be infinitely extendable. So the fantasy about networks, as I wrote about it around 2000, was that activists thought we could just keep growing our networks. Anyone can participate. More and more people can get involved. It's like, it's just, it's gonna, anyone can get involved. Whereas platforms are really quite exclusive. That it's an opposite mentality. It's a platform is not for everyone. And so in my mind, one of the things we can say about this is that this whole fascination with digital deliberation and platforms is represents already a darker worldview than we had around 2000, which was in 2000 we had a faith that we all could connect up. Now we seem to have lost that faith. That we're already seeing ourselves in more limited groups. So the appeal of small groups on Facebook or this idea that you wanna connect with certain people by keeping other people out. The other thing that's different about networks and platforms, this by the way is a diagram that our law school communications team produced of what it is that I'm doing. And I just think ethnogra, as a data point it's fascinating to me because these are people in the business of marketing things and I think the person who made it used to work at a gap or something. So here's her image of what it is. And so you can see already a very different style from 2000 in terms of how people think about it. So the other thing about platforms, you kind of see this in the diagram is they have an infrastructural quality. The network was just supposed to kind of happen on its own. And a lot of the critiques that people like me had of networks as they were talked about is, wait a minute, it doesn't just happen on its own. It takes a lot of resources to have a network. Whereas this thing is all about focusing on the technology, on the infrastructure. It's actually fascinating, almost fetishizing the technology itself. The digital is really the focal point. It's like the secret sauce. The machine is what we wanna know. How does Facebook do it, the technology? So let's talk a little bit about the technology in the Meridian project and see what we can unpack since that seems to fascinates people and see what we can make of that. And this is, by the way, is a classic and a logical move. We're gonna go beyond what Meridian says about itself, which is all the beautiful stuff I talked about already and now think, kind of, look in the back room and see what's going on. So at the base, at the center of this thing is a digital platform for multilingual online conversation that we built. It was originally built by this guy who was an out of work PhD in medieval literature working with these people who are kind of artisanal software people in Ithaca, New York, this kind of hippie town, right? And they built this thing together for no money and it was like really rickety and always breaking down and it was always never working and it was kind of pieced together by these guys and eventually sputtered and stopped and fell apart. And in the last year, most of Meridian 180's activity has been focused on this problem of rebuilding the platform. So we just launched a new digital platform and this is considered by the Meridian community as an incredible accomplishment, a huge feat. And it involved many different dimensions, technological feat, how to harness new digital translation technologies so that we could translate quicker and more efficiently and involve in more languages. And this was built by a bunch of really smart computer scientists in Berkeley, California, who were inside a company. So again, not these people anymore, much more corporate. Second, a financial feat, this was turned out to be incredibly expensive, raising the money, getting the people to do this, getting all the institutions to share the costs. You know, you can't imagine hours and hours. Third, relate to this, here's just, I'm just a picture of our, just to give you some idea of its constant to-dos. The organizational or logistical feat of this project, multiple teams in many countries working together to make it happen. There were legal issues, there were branding issues, there were tons of organizational challenges, there were staffing problems. So it finally happened. Now, what can we, what is the point of this? The point is, this is hardly organizing without organizing or whatever it was that we said in the 90s about what this was gonna be like. On the contrary, it takes a whole bureaucracy behind the scenes to run something like this. And tons of very traditional institutional problems like how do universities cooperate, the kinds of things that you probably work on all day long. How do departments cooperate? How do you get people to buy into working together? You know, how do you get everyone to share resources? Very, very traditional, nothing fancy, nothing new fangled at all, something very, very old fashioned behind all this. Second point is, as the story suggests, hardly a magical technology that just has a secret sauce and makes things happen. On the contrary, a world full of constant glitches, turf battles, misunderstandings, people who have to be hired, people who have to be fired, meetings missed due to time zone confusion, emails that end up in people's spam folders that never get to anyone, technologies that break down or that people don't like to use. So in other words, the point is it's not magic at all. It's actually very, very rickety still. So, but the third thing that I would say about this is something that was really unexpected to me, that I never could have imagined sitting in my office theorizing about this had I not been through it. Which is that all of these to-dos, all of these messages, all these documents that have to be produced in files and emails somehow bring people together. So let me give you an example. One team that's been working on this project involves a lawyer in Singapore, a lawyer in Brussels, a graduate student in London, and a computer scientist in Ithaca. And they've been working very, very hard for a year as volunteers in the case of three of them and paid in the case of a computer scientist on this project, donating their time. These are people who had never really met in person. I think they finally met once. Completely different stages in life, completely different status. The most unlikely group. And what's been really totally surprising to me is to see these people speak in really almost pseudo-spiritual terms about the meaning of the relationships that they've developed among this group of unlikely people. So this idea that, and they talk about friendship and they talk about their loneliness and how few friends they actually have. And the fact that what this has meant for them is that they've had the serendipitous opportunity to become friends with somebody they never would have been friends with before. So when I asked this lawyer in Singapore, you're such a busy guy, why are you doing this? And he says I could never have friendships like this otherwise. So that's what his commitment is about. Friendships is what people, you can see this group, that they've just founded this new office in Seoul and how happy they are. So friendships, friendships seems to be what people think they're getting out of it. And this is puzzling to me, not what I expected, but as an anthropologist I wanna take it seriously. Now friendship, so let's talk about friendship for a second. So friendship is something that's really hard to talk about in social science. We as anthropologists can talk about consumers. We can talk about citizens. We can talk about family, what we call kinship. We can talk about members of social movements, but we don't really have much of a way of talking about friends. We don't know what to say about friends. And I think it's even harder for lawyers to talk about friendship. I can't think of any good legal theory of friendship. Certainly the whole debate about citizenship or free speech on the internet never thinks about friendship as a category. And it's certainly not a category in international law either. Although now that I'm thinking about it I think you could trace a whole history of international law in terms of actual friendships and the meaning of friendships and where they are. But the irony is that friendship is the actual word that the whole social networking site is already using to describe itself. So this idea of adding friends and being friends. And of course when something like Facebook or LinkedIn talks about friendship they're talking about instrumentalizing your friends, profiting from your friends or increasing your friends for some instrumental purpose to get a better job or something like that. But that's not the only way that we're talking about friendship today. I read in the newspaper yesterday, I guess it was. Maybe some of you saw that the British government has just appointed a new assistant minister for loneliness. And this idea that people's lack of friendship has become a social problem that people can really recognize. So it seems like there's some currency to this problem of friendship. And of course we should be rightly critical of this kind of empty online consumeristic instrumentalizing exploitation of people's desire for friendship. And in fact, I also saw this week that the guy who invented the like button on Facebook, the computer scientist himself said that he will never use it again, that it's a kind of drug. He talked about it as a drug because people so much want to be liked that when they post something they're constantly checking back to see if anybody liked them. But I think as a social phenomenon, it's very interesting. It suggests how serious this loneliness problem is. But notice that where is friendship appearing in my story? It's not actually in the conversations on the platform, the Korean dialogue. It's actually in the work of making the platform that people come to feel with their friends. It's the backstage stuff that seems to be most important. And notice that the friendship is coming about not by anything new that people are doing but very old fashioned bureaucratic stuff working together to solve practical problems that could be exactly the same kind of problems we would solve in this room together. Nothing special about the online dimensions. But what is new is that the technology has needs. It's not perfect. On contrary, it's a broken technology. And because the platform has needs, it's rickety, it needs to be fixed. People have to fix it. And the people who have to fix it come to have a basis for connecting with one another. Okay, so let's bring all this back to free speech. So as anthropologists know, one of the best ways to think about social practices and their regulation is through cases of conflict. So a lot of the anthropology of law is about particular cases of conflict. So what I'm gonna do is tell you a story of a case of conflict within Meridian 180 about free speech and freestyle, free speech and see what we can make of it. So some time ago, the post-doctoral fellows who were involved in the project came to me, you know, they're very idealistic and still believe in solving problems. So they came to me and said that our group did not reflect the full political spectrum, that we were all basically a bunch of center leftists talking to each other. And that if we really wanted to be the radical group that we said we wanted to be, we needed to bring in some of those right wing nationalist people and the ones who seemed to be threatening us and have a dialogue with them. So I thought about this. Okay, that sounds like a good idea. So we started searching for the right candidates and as it happened through my dean and his donor connections, I was introduced to the ideal candidate, that's how we law professors meet such people. And he was a high ranking member of the political staff of the Republican Coalition in the United States in Congress and somebody who was directly responsible for making US policy towards Asia who held both a law degree and a doctorate in political science focusing on China. And if that's not enough for you, he was also claimed to be a Zen monk and a former Navy commander. We were like, this is too good to be true. So we invited him to join the membership and he accepted. Now, his first few posts were as expected brilliant, creative, on point, fantastic. Then in a conversation on a totally different topic, he launched into an inflammatory attack on the corrupt and oligarchic nature of the Chinese government and of the intellectuals from China in our group. We have a very large group of Chinese participants who he said were all on the government, Chinese government payroll and so should be dismissed out of hand. Now, remarkably, nothing like this had ever happened before and actually has never happened again. And the Chinese member who is in our leadership group or the core idea group really panicked, a law professor. He panicked and he said this was gonna make members in China very uncomfortable. They were gonna withdraw from the project because people would start to suspect that this was a covert US nationalist project of some form. But really what bothered the anthropologists who were in the leadership group was that it seemed like this guy left no room for the other side to intervene or respond, that he wasn't really interested in talking to them. He was talking about them to people who already agreed with him. So the incidents seemed to expose in its violation some deeply held normative commitment of the group that one at least could say what everyone wanted but one said it in a way that allowed other people to respond. So the free speech, free for all. So the group delegated to me the responsibility to call this guy up. So the next morning I phoned him and asked him if he would revise his post. And I explained that I wanted him, here I still was thinking that the digital technology itself was the problem. So I wanted him to visualize the Chinese members as if they were in a room with him and ask him if in a non-digital environment like this one he would have made the point in exactly the same way. And I pointed out that while many of our Chinese members probably actually agreed with his criticisms of the Chinese state, that it would be awkward if not impossible for them to participate in the conversation if he framed it in that way. And he responded swiftly and angrily. In his view he said this was a matter of free speech. He had a right to say what he wanted to say and he did not wanna participate in the habit of US sinologists of what he called self-censorship in order to avoid offending Chinese sensibilities. He accused me of US bias, anti-US bias and as I tried to entice him to think about how he could maybe have a more interesting conversation if he changed his terms, he would have none of it. He said, quote, I participate in six or seven listservs where Chinese members spout nationalist propaganda and I'm expected to behave like a gentleman. At that point I wondered what had happened to his Zen training. But anyway, when we ended the call he made some very minor revisions and resubmitted the piece to finally. Now within its own logic this guy's argument made perfect sense. It's the libertarian view that I started with. This idea of free speech as a fundamental right come what may. And no matter the consequences to some laboriously created community that you might be participating in. And this set off an intensive debate in the leadership from reading 180 about what to do about it. And there were a lot of different points of view but ultimately the group felt that Meridian 180 was an experiment in taking risks with deliberation and that it was important to take the risk, to allow the dangerous situation to happen and to see what could come of this rather than to regulate this guy. So we just held our breath and we let his post go forward. And what happened next was completely surprising to me. Other members stepped in. So a Korean member who is himself chief economic advisor to the presidential candidate of Korea so he was kind of a politician, immediately understood what was going on and definitely changed the subject. And then our Chinese members who we thought were going to either drop out of the project or respond in similar tone actually just ignored him and kept on talking about other things. They ignored him. And this was absolutely fascinating to me and I asked our Chinese post doc on the project, what's going on? And he said, oh, young Chinese people have heard all that kind of conversation before. There's nothing new about it. And they're participating in this because they care about it and they're not gonna let this guy derail it. He said, and the metaphor he used I think is so interesting for the topic of our discussion today. He said, it's like when you're surfing the web and you see like some inappropriate advertisement. I think he talked about pornography. Pornography and you just ignore it to focus on the content that you care about. Everybody in the digital space knows how to ignore things and I thought that was so fascinating. So ignoring as a political move. So what we had here was a bunch of people who were committed to this project and saw this guy's comment not as a threat to them or something, but a threat to the platform. And they responded in a way that defended the platform and its future. So how do we interpret this episode and everything I've been telling you in light of the legal debate that we started with? First, this guy's libertarian view did not prevail. His intervention I think, whatever it was meant to do, failed and he eventually kind of became silent. I guess he's still a member, but I haven't heard much from him in a long time. But at the same time, the group did not take the Republican deliberative position of regulating his speech either. Rather, this guy's speech ended up being beside the point because it was ignored by the group. And the more I think about this, I think that this idea of social ignoring is another response that we need to think much more seriously about when we think about how people, how real people in the world are dealing with the explosion of bad speech, right? That it's not, again, because here, this is something that's not the state does it. It's not about banning or not banning, allowing or banning. It's about people socially just ignoring what they don't want to hear, not denouncing but ignoring. And that makes the speech beside the point, but also what it raises, I think, for us to think about is the social skills involved in emerging social skills involved in being on platforms, which many of us are learning. And one of those skills is the ability to ignore, to refuse the clickbait, so to speak. And this might be something we want to think what more about as a tool of social engineering. Second, we thought Meridian 180 was special because we had set up all these rules or put in place these technologies that would make sure that we weren't a free speech, free for all. And what we learned from this episode was that Meridian 180 was special because the members were committed to the platform. And that it was the commitment of the members to the platform that saved the platform in that situation. And this I think is interesting because as I said at the beginning, all of our thinking about free speech, debates, and its regulation online in the US is still very much focused on the state and the role of the state and the state as a solution. But here what we're seeing is a group of people who come from very different states and very different kinds of political states who have a commitment to a new kind of social organization, the platform. And I don't think that any of us as law professors have thought very much about these institutions as sites of commitment, as sites in themselves that generate our commitment. And as such, this could get us to, if we were to think more about platforms as places where people feel that they, where their identities are defined, that define them, where they feel committed. We might begin to think more critically about different kinds of platforms. What's the difference between a Facebook and a Meridian 180? What kinds of subjects, what kinds of committed subjects are they producing? One might actually be producing consumers or laborers, whereas another would be producing a different kind of identity. So to think about the platform as an important social institution, not just a way to get speech out there on the way to changing the state where we think the state is the most important institution. And the third thing that I wanna leave you with is this idea that what people in Meridian 180 are telling us that they're doing is not just about citizenship, nor is it about consumerism, but it's about friendship. And so perhaps this very really odd thing that people think they're producing, friendship, is something that deserves a lot more critical attention, both in law and in the social sciences. Maybe we do need a legal theory of friendship on par with our legal theory of citizenship, for example. That as a phenomenon or kind of connection, weak social ties outside existing economic or institutional or political groupings that we already know about. And to think about what are the conditions of friendship? What is its significance for human dignity and human flourishing? And yes, for international and national politics. And so the bottom line here that I wanna leave you with is that I think there is a lot that we can be hopeful about in these spaces. But in order to be hopeful about them, we're gonna have to think in different ways about what's going on in these spaces. What kinds of subjects are being produced? What kinds of collectivities are being produced? And what kinds of social skills are already at work in these spaces that provide a kind of local regulation apart from the regulation of law? So I'll stop there. Thank you. Great. Yeah, please. Let's take this lecture and I felt like there are a lot of parallels. In internet, out of your home, many of you are like the idea of like fans of your job. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're the idea, they're gonna like fan fiction. Uh-huh, uh-huh, interesting. Yeah. The idea that you have a sense of community that is posed in a similar way in terms of the fact that like a shared interest in some cases, they might be gated, they're required to like provide reasons as to why you want to end the community. So I found that like this idea of where you want to be was very similar to those in the idea that there was like a shared product that they're working towards, the sense that it was exclusive because there were certain membership departments that have you met. And the sense that everyone ended up knowing each other in some sense because of the fact that they're all working together because of that, they're gonna be more careful about what they actually say. So I found that pretty interesting. One point that you had made about the idea of each and how one option could be to just ignore things that are being said. In the case of writing 1-8, it's a very small cluster of people. But what about when the scale becomes much larger? For example, one big issue is the idea of harassment where even if it's a very particular group of people who are making comments in response to tweets are being said, it's still such a significant portion that people find themselves unwilling to submit on Twitter because there hasn't been a way or rather Twitter shows in to take this approach where they're just gonna let people say whatever they want and not moderate. So how do you find a community like Marine 1-8 or any other community in the future will be able to deal with issues like scale? Very interesting question, that's great. So thank you very much. Yeah, so you're right. So I'm not sure that the scale issue was the reason why people were able to ignore it in this case and not feel excluded and they wanted to quit. I think perhaps if this particular individual had been, if there had been more of these people, he wasn't the only one to speak. If there was a sense that this is not just one person but a sizable group, then perhaps that would have a different kind of social force behind it. And I think you're describing a situation in which it's not just one random person who's making a comment. It's someone who has a lot of authority behind them or a big group behind them or who stands for a collectivity that we have to be concerned about. So when the president of the United States is making racist comments on Twitter, that's different from someone else, right? I'm not thinking about the president of the United States, I'm thinking about the Twitter and the idea that there is some anonymous person who created accounts simply because they didn't like what some person said. And now they're going to repeatedly harass that person. So, I mean, well, one of the other things I think that we should think about is, as you said, Twitter is a corporation that set up the ground rules in a way that made it very difficult for people to manage that on their own, right? So I think that the economics of these platforms relates to the governance structures that they have, right? And so this, I've described a platform which is really quite self-governed and which the members feel that they have confidence, I think, that they can intervene and change the governance structure and get involved at every level they want, whereas we don't feel that way about Twitter, right? So perhaps part of the problem that you're describing is that we have the wrong kind of platforms. And perhaps what this gets us thinking about is what would some different platforms that have different governance structures look like would that make any difference? So, for example, in the anime situation, I think you might find something quite different than you find on Twitter, no? What do you think? It's a small community, yes, but there's also an echo chamber where people might not even be willing to put out a comment in the first place because it's community-oriented. I mean, I think, I really wanna emphasize that what made people feel invested in this platform was the work they did in creating it behind the scenes, right? Whereas I don't think that you and I feel that way about Twitter. Twitter belongs to Twitter and all our investment is in our comments on Twitter, right? So I don't really care whether Twitter survives or fails in some sense. It's not me, it's not me. Whereas, so I think one of the insights of this ethnographic material is that we need to not focus just on the speech and what is said and what the rules of the speech are, but on the infrastructure behind it and the economics of that infrastructure and the organizational structure and how much work people have to do to make the platform because it's that very ordinary work as much as the speech that determines the nature of the speech itself. Right, yeah, yeah. I'm gonna have to build off of what Grace is saying and this might also be a factor of RH. Yeah. This is what we need to see along. But when we are discussing these platforms, I cannot but think that they're not isolated in spheres. So if someone sees something they're unhappy with, they'll pursue it through Twitter, through Facebook, through doxing potentially. Other means of spamming the person, examples of say, a Nintendo translator who angrily abandoned the community, gets so involved and starts sending letters, tweets, Facebook messages and so on and she ends up getting fired. Yeah, right. Because of the allegations that have been raised and the company doesn't want to hold on to this person. I think that we can't necessarily talk about ignorance when some people have their work is so intimately connected to it. When you're looking at YouTubers, the line is no longer a thing. No. But people on Instagram, people who are personalities, it's up on the internet and need that social connection. But is that different, do you think, than a situation of workplace harassment in the non-digital sphere? Is there something new here? I think that part of the difference potentially is that this allows a lot of people who aren't even a part of the community necessarily to also come in and start making these statements to start putting that influence through where folks find out that this has been going on recently and I think this is a great example of your friendship point. Last week was AGQ, which I'm not gonna give total details of it, but essentially it's a community of people who play video games as quickly as possible. They raised over $2 million for the current Cancer Foundation and it's folks from around the globe, many different languages who are named together and they just go over and they play games and raise money. Or it ends fantastic, but it caused a lot of controversy because it was done through Twitch and they changed the Twitch stream, the chat, because it was full of racist and mischievous and transphobic content. And they made it subscriber only, you had to pay $5 to be a part of it so you can communicate. People got angry, we're hosting their own Twitch streams of it and immediately those chats started devolving into racist, misogynistic, transphobic content and other people started getting very angry and started spamming and harassing streamers, the people involved behind AGQ and all these other aspects of it, even though they were not themselves actually a part of that chat community. There were folks outside of it and angry about what was going on and still managed to make that known. So I just, although I absolutely agree that the platform itself and how structured will affect how people communicate within it, these platforms themselves are not isolated bubbles and still have other aspects in there, those platforms interconnect and you can tweet something you saw on Facebook you can go and those platforms link amongst themselves. Yeah, that's very interesting. So, no, I think that's a really interesting and great point and so one of the things that maybe we need to study is the interface between those and who is working that interface and it may be different people working different pieces of that interface, right, and when we think about this so that what I'm describing is too simplistic in a sense that it doesn't give us an ecosystem of platforms as a picture of what's going on, right? Yeah, I think that's really, I mean thank you, that's a really great point and also in fact, I think that one of the ways this is gonna be interesting in international law and international relations is the way those platforms start talking to each other and what people are doing in those spaces. So already, for example, around the North Korea issue, you see different platforms in Asia and elsewhere where people are beginning to have conversations across those platforms as you say and then that's, in that particular example, serving functions that you're not seeing in the regular international relations space. So that is, there's a lot more attention and you should do it, it would be great. And I'll... The BC is next, yeah. Thank you very much for recording the lightning presentation. Two things that come to me as you presented. First is the idea of the network and shifts of life and I thought whether you would entertain the idea that this thing of a lab, we will serve today. Because conception, the idea that in networks, I use this in the context of resent and corruption work, the notion of quotation control works in those platforms in that context, right? And so that even though we look at platform today, in the context of your own project, for example, you have people who are there in postage of particular ideas, goals, and working towards a set objective. So, conceptually, I'm just asking whether you would extend that idea that ultimately, some of the lab, although ultimately which would appear the point is that technology, by far, has driven back from two different scales. So that's the first big point I'd like to make. The second, I think, don't tell us what you've made. In the context of Twitter, I think there's a myth, right? They put facilities in there that you can assess and you'd be a friend, but I'm not saying post from her for the next couple of months if I don't want to, right? So I really like the idea of ignoring as a political school for social engineering. I've done it sometimes. It's racist things and you just mute, right? I don't have to respond. So I think I like that idea and it's a piece to revive that platform, such as Twitter. Still have the use and people maybe have not also been as open and educated, these issues are emotionally tough, but in some ways we have decisions to make on that level. And lastly, is the idea that yes, friendship, I think, have, by far, made people only, well, I've met them virtually for five years. And then you actually have to five years and meet at some conference and you talk as though you've met many, many times, right? So there's that community in there. And it relates, for example, how you engage those platforms for myself, so I find it very interesting. Interesting, and you're talking specifically in terms of anti-corruption networks? Oh, I'd like to hear more about that. I hope we can talk some more, because I am fascinating that people are still talking about networks in that space, but they're also talking about platforms that they both exist, is what you're suggesting. Very interesting. I have to think more about that, that's great. I mean, my sense is that at least when, the way people are talking about networks back in 2000, there was just this assumption that it just kind of happens. You know, like I'll start networking with you and you network with me and pretty much, I mean, I was focusing on the women's movement, as well as my research was. And then pretty soon we'll be at the UN and we'll change things, and there wasn't that much attention to the nuts and bolts about how it was this assumption that you can just network, right? And not that, oh, there are actually all these impediments to everybody networking, whereas this technology seems to be more, it's also very hopeful and kind of, you have a lot of too much faith in it, maybe, but there's still a focus on that problem of how do you actually do it, which is kind of interesting. I, yeah, I think that, maybe you're right that, in a sense, it's easier to just mute somebody on a digital platform to ignore someone on a digital platform than it is in real life, right? So if I see something offensive to somebody right here, they may feel compelled in person that they either have to respond or that if they don't respond, they're somehow coalescing, you know, agreeing with what I said. Whereas if I mute you, if I just ignore you on social platforms, I'm just getting you out of my life. So I think you guys have a really good point that it's not that easy. I really wanna work with what you guys said and I think you're absolutely right, but still it's a counterintuitive move to say sometimes we can shut people out with these technologies. And if we simply, for example, I mean, I, as thinking about this, in terms of the political situation in the United States, which is my obsession at the moment, if we simply stopped paying attention to every tweet coming out of the White House, then the power of the White House would be very different than it is. And probably the most important political thing we could do would be to ignore, right? And yet that is so difficult to do, right? And it requires actually a lot of ethical commitments. And what I described in terms of what our Chinese members did, I'm sure was quite hard for many of them to just say, I'm not gonna take the bait on this. I'm not gonna participate, right? So, yeah, we don't wanna overstate the power of that, but it can be a counterintuitive move, maybe, yeah. Yes? What will be the effect on our ability to watch what we want and ignore what we want by what come to last week in the universe? You're talking about net neutrality. Neutrality. Great point, great point, right? There's over what we can see. Great point. And you address that. Yeah, so that really brings us to the economics and the infrastructural quality of this, right? That it does make us realize that it's not just speech out there, that there are platforms that are built on particular technologies that are owned by particular people and that how those nuts and bolts are put together matters to the conversation. And I still think that that could only happen because most people are still not conscious enough about that. They still are thinking, oh, I'm just talking, right? They're not thinking about everything that happens in the back room. So, I think this is really important, your point, that it is gonna be harder to hear certain things potentially and harder to get certain points of view and easier, too easy to get other points of view because of this change to net neutrality. I mean, the history of what the big internet providers have done in the past should give us no confidence that they're gonna protect, just do what's in the public interest here. Why would they, right? So, this is really important, but I don't think most people are focused on it. So, it's a... How many of those internet providers likely to be political and do things politically and they're not in use of that access? You know, I'm not an expert on that, but my sense is that they're much more likely to be focused on the bottom line, that it's not so much about what's politically right or left, it's more about what's gonna make them money. And the fact is that what's gonna make them money is not my blog or your blog. It's what, you know, Amazon has to say or something like that, right? And that itself is a problem for us. So, I see it more in terms of the economics than in the simple right-left politics. I don't know what you think, but... So. So much is just, you know, there was a lot of what you said, I haven't been able to kind of put the pieces together, so I don't think that fast, but there is something interesting about, I'm just gonna go back to the kind of closing down the conversation by ignorance, and I don't have, I have only an instant on this, but like there's nothing new about that strategy for other persons. Yeah, yeah. You know, what's interesting is, and again, I just, I can't throw a connection to the last enough here, but you're trying to make a claim, I think, about how we're using speech and how much we should accept people just saying whatever it is that they have to say right under the kind of label of free speech. And the consequence of a kind of closed platform here is that you've shifted the balance of voices so that if there's a voice you don't like, you're able to basically ignore it because there's a shared political view of the cluster of people who are there, right? And I'm just not sure what that is exactly, like it's not, I don't particularly care about free speech myself, so, but it's not a free speech victory, particularly. Yeah, yeah. And maybe what you're trying to say is, maybe there's something about that kind of adage about, you know, the reason why we've got free speech is because the good idea will rise to the top or something, but, and never don't be thinks that's true anymore, I don't think, right? And so, you know, you're controlling, there's something complicated for me about the strategy of ignoring something as a way of creating a kind of political space presumably where you hope there'll be solutions to problems, right? I couldn't quite, I haven't linked through in my own mind the kind of points you're making against the goal of this, which is something that hasn't shown up yet in terms of the conversation, right? So what's happening here? Are you actually solving, you know, Sudanese as a result of these conversations? How is that connected to the friendship point? What does it mean about ignoring certain voices? Like I can't kind of work myself through that at this point, but there's nothing, you know, ignoring voices in the main will work against you, right? It might be, like if you're a kind of liberal person, if you're a racialized person, if you're a woman, in the main, those strategies have been used against you. And so, we can ignore voices, we get to ignore voices until the cacophony of voices becomes relatively even and then we have to fight with each other for a while and then the power shifts and then we start ignoring a different set of voices, right? That's my sort of lived experience of how these things kind of work. And so, you created a room where the weight of the voices is able to silence. I'm just not sure what to make of that. Yeah, yeah, very interesting. So, I think this links up with your point because what you're suggesting I think is really important is that it's not ignoring in the abstract. There's a structure to the nature of the platform that makes that a viable strategy, right? And so then, what I take from what you're saying is what we really need to be focusing on is not the strategy of any one individual, ignore or don't ignore or speak back, whatever, but what is the nature of the platform in which you're engaging? And finding and creating, building and finding platforms which have a structure to them, economic and otherwise, which makes it possible for us to take risks and also ignore seems to be a really important political project, therefore. But then, the point that you raised is that then, but then the problem is that they can become echo chambers and so forth and so then your point is then what's really important is the linkage between these platforms there and the interface between them and how we start thinking about them as hooking up. So putting the three of you together, what I'm thinking about now is what if we start thinking about the public sphere as a networked space of platforms which have different structures to them and we start thinking about what would be the conditions for the networking between them but also the nature, the structure of different platforms that we would need so that people could have dignified conversations that would give them dignity and allow them to take risks whoever they might be in those different spaces. But that's a totally different problem than the way free speech people talk about the problem. It's much more institutional, it's much more focused on the sociology of what really goes on in these spaces and like you, I've never cared about the free speech debate. It just bores me at some level. So then, I think we need to think about why are we bored to it? Because there's probably a reason. What else, what are we missing? What is missing from that debate to make this a viable space in which we can think about a condition for a future that we want to live in, right? And so, this has been really helpful. And you guys want to see more so I want to hear more of what you want to say. Good. Okay, can we give Brian a chance to say something? And then he wants to say something. Okay, so Brian has had a chance yet. I just want to make sure everybody gets a big one chance. Yeah, so I'm probably going to say some things that I think are probably in line. But first of all, to try and run a little more around the real uses of platform because we started off thinking about Facebook as your own Twitter as platforms. It was a kind of technical revolution, I think, around that. And they are meant to be in some manner, and they fail at this as being, as you put it up again, inclusive and open. Right, right. And this one now is closed. The way that you're, the Radiant 180 model is closed. So the relation, it seems to me that what goes on in Facebook or in my own experience, like with Twitter, sometimes I'll end up in a conversation and suddenly there'll be a long-rating of people around the conversation and we'll be able to be including more and more people and then suddenly it transforms from being something just an open source conversation into a new platform. So it becomes a conversational platform to develop. But it's not exclusive, right? And so what the Radiant 180 strikes me as being intentionally regulating its membership. But I'm not sure that I would think of those people as friends in those little long-rating moments. That you have, right, right. But then I start thinking, well, a couple of those people I didn't know. All right, I've been, I would call them friends. And now I'm watching how our conversation develops and I can see like somebody like, this is about separate indigenous relations. And I can see how some people are like responding to my remarks and suddenly we're starting, I felt a hostility coming at me. But then I had to, I felt I needed to adjust my speech so that I could continue the conversation. And then I've not opened something else up. So eventually it was becoming a little platform. And so I just wanted to say, so the contrast between that two is kind of open and sort of acipient emergent platform that happens versus one that is born of a moment like the tsunami and the shamanic event. And then the other thing is that quite often just as a point, sometimes friends on Facebook will say, hello, hi, and I've got a problem. Can you contribute to this? The last those, I don't know how to teach this course or I don't know how to. How to find a way to do organic farming or something. And then people respond. So it's an assumption of hive mind being a community of people who occupy the hive together and somehow are amenable. And you're reaching out to this and imagine what that is being updated and friendly. Or willing to have a conversation that is not too dissonant enough that you could actually organize it with. So I don't understand that, how do you put hope? Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's, there's another part of this book project that focuses on the whole fantasy of the collaborative economy now, right? Which fits in with that, right? Which is the idea that we've all lost faith in both the market and the state that regulates the market. And so now the thing that gives us confidence is hive mind, right? We've lost faith in science. So this idea of, if collaboration emerging as the new thing we can actually believe in. And I'm not for or against that. I just think it's a really important social phenomenon that deserves probably more, and there is some critical work. I mean, Beth Copponelli's been working on that. Different people are beginning to think critically about why collaboration now, what does it make? What are the, should we buy in? Should we be in favor of it or against it? What should be the, what are the dimensions of that? Right? So I think you're talking about that sort of crowdsourcing idea as a place of not just friendship, but producing something of value, right? Producing an answer. And it is, I think it is very connected to that. And it's also connected to your point about what are we actually doing in this space? And just one thing on the friendship thing. I'm agnostic about whether you guys are friends in that space. That would be up for you for to decide. All I'm trying to say is the friendships that I've seen emerge are not between the people talking online, since I'm reading 180. I think they're actually quite, quite weakly connected to one another. And they're just speech notes. The friendship is the people who are actually volunteering their time and building something. And that's a very ordinary, very, very practical thing. And it's something anthropologists can study, have been studying for years in the anthropology bureaucracy, right? So, and I think that that's a dimension of this that gets overlooked in the ideology of online connections. Is that there's a lot of pretty ordinary labor that has to go into it. And that has interesting political effects that we might want to think more about. Is it distinct between what's friendly and what's friendship? Yes, yes, yes, very helpful. Thank you. John, and then we'll get... Yeah, I'll try to be quick. First of all, I want to say a really interesting presentation. Like Kim's lot of layers, I'm trying to wrap my head around, but... Me too. So, maybe I fear that I might repeat some of what's said already, but let me try to spin into a more important question. So I took you, so first of all, I think this is interesting and interesting offer that you built. I know you come from the international space. It reminds me a little bit of ICANN's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a multi-stakeholder model. Internet governance is a multi-stakeholder model for solving problems. Yeah. So I think that's interesting because a lot of the problems we see with these platforms are private platforms. And we have the most important public spheres that they are kind of like quasi-public spheres. They're not public, really. They're private platforms governed by companies. And so you have this platform, but I took you to say here's an ethnographic case study on this platform, in which I'm using as a case study extrapolating from this community. So maybe more generalizable problem-solving ideas for what we're seeing as problems on other kinds of platforms. So where you see online harassment is a big problem on Twitter as a platform. On Facebook we have fake news and disinformation spreading. And I think this brings us back to some of the concerns that were being raised already. So if you think of ignoring as maybe a more generalizable solution to other platforms, inevitably it takes us back to the particular platforms themselves and their design and how they're governed. And the private, the companies- Yeah, exactly. And I think your response was, well, you're not concerned with Twitter. If Twitter does tomorrow, that's fine. But then I wonder then is, if in fact your solutions are gonna be generalizable to other platforms, how can we ensure platform accountability as companies implement them? That's what I'm wondering. And if the, or is it that you're saying that in order for your solutions to succeed, you need to abandon those platforms, which is something like Meridian Money, which is a different design and a different community. And then my concern there is, is how realistic is that given network effects, given that there's most been built around all these existing platforms. And who's gonna, will everyone even have a space in that world, right? Exactly. Yeah, great point. Yeah, so I don't know is what I would say to you. I think those are all really good points. I mean, to me, what all this suggests is that with the lawyers are focusing on the conditions for speech we regulated or not, maybe we should spend more of our attention focusing on how do we regulate Facebook, right? And the conditions of those platforms. So it's really about should there be rules as to what Twitter can or can't do if this space is so important to us now, right? And that's the conversation that's just beginning to happen in the US and Congress like just beginning, but mostly around more whether they're a news organization or a, you know, or just a content provider, you know, something like that. Whereas opposed to, no, no, no, no, you are the public sphere now. And if you are the public sphere, we've always regulated, you know, television companies, we've always regulated, why, why would there not be, why couldn't we start to think about rules around governance structure, for example, for these kinds of organizations when they get large enough that they have a huge stake. So that's something I'd like to think more about. But I think your other question is a really good one. Is it really realistic to imagine we're gonna have a bunch of artisanal platforms emerging everywhere, mom and pop platforms that we all can participate in and link them up? Is that just a total fantasy, you know? Or is it something that a bunch of elite people who have access to a lot more resources than everyone else can do? I can do this, even though it's really hard for us too. But, you know, as compared to somebody, you know, else that's perhaps, you know, I think those are really good questions. And, you know, I don't know what the answer is, but I think you're raising the right questions that we need those, but the point is, that's a different set of questions than what we're talking about right now, at least. It seems to me. Just one time, just a question. Have you spoken with evens up to men in MIT Media Lab about his global voice? Everyone says I need to meet him. Everyone. If you need to talk to Ethan about the voices, it's very similar. Do you know him? I also talked to Nathan Matias. He's a collaborative mind. He's just started a non-profit based also at MIT. So it would be a called Citizen Behaviorist Civil Servant. It focuses on using researchers like myself. I'm involved in some of these projects, helping these online communities, building research so they can use it for platform. Wow, interesting. Very exciting. And talk to you. Thank you very much. We'll give them a show. Oh, that's great. No, thank you very much. I was especially taken to your comments on ignoring this initiative. Much important, you talked to a really interesting platform. Of course, it does look outside of itself for validation. And it's interesting that when there was trouble with the platform. Yes. Yes. You showed a photograph of everybody believing the first time they had done the work together. There's the issue of the purchase and sale of the verification of the platforms. So there's obviously a surrounding context. And what I worry about, frankly, you talked about through speech as not being exceedingly of interest in yet the whole concept of pipeline. There's really putting back, it is going right back to the value of through speech as in, yes, this has a value in itself for the through speech. There is a communal list of which comes out of through speech in parts of the indigestible, but it's not interested in what is simply moved into a platform or another. But the thing I've found really interesting is the discourse moving away from people believing that they need to go make a physical and permanent decision in the sense in the political sphere to feeling that they can actually express their views and questions. They don't have to anymore, it's interesting. There's most recent relation to my traditional media and social media and social media one, fragmentation of this world, fragmented world versus a, which was really at stake in the sense of seeing framework, working with the outside world and everything to see. Yeah, right, right, right, right. So if a word is going to be in the relationship, I would say, you know, you talked about the fact that there are fine relationships and there are fine responses, but if ignoring is going to become an accepted response, it needs to be a fine response. That's what people can't tell us the difference between were they unheard, were they unnoticed? Very interesting. Very interesting set of comments. You said about 12 or 15 really interesting important things. So one, I just want to be clear, I wasn't saying I'm not interested in free speech in general, I think the comment was that I was agreeing with was about the way the free speech debate is framed in legal studies, which becomes very almost dweeby in the sense of, you know, I'm not interested in free speech, I'm not interested in free speech, I'm not interested in free speech, it becomes very almost dweeby into my mind and doesn't get to what's interesting about free speech. So that was... And I think the wider point that you're making is one that I was trying to raise but I think I need to do a better job of raising it, which is that, yes, we cannot think of this stuff as separate from what goes on not on the platform, right? And in fact, the stuff not on the platform is more important in this world, right? Like you said, that's why I was showing pictures of the people actually interacting so we don't want to fetishize the online stuff and not realize the other stuff is very important. The third point that I take with I think is really important is ignoring in a context of hierarchy we need to think about the hierarchies that exist when people ignore. So it's one thing for us to ignore some sort of hate speech. It's another thing to be ignored by our elected officials, right? When there's a hierarchy there, we're talking about something very different in quality and that we need to have some sort of sociological understanding of those hierarchies that not all ignoring is the same, right? And I think someone else made that point I think you made that point that it was, you know, there's a social structure here that makes this work as a democratic move that might not exist that certainly wouldn't exist but the other thing I got from your comment that was really helpful to me is to understand why is ignoring so powerful because the person who was ignored doesn't know why they were ignored they don't even know if they were ignored they just don't know whether there was a glitch whether the message never got there it's different from being refuted being told that you're wrong, right? It's just vague and so that's very, very interesting and that I think is harder to do in a face-to-face situation, you know if I'm ignoring you, right, you know what I mean? Whereas if it's online, there's the time difference it's much harder, but not just online it's also true with letters it's true with all the old technologies so then that makes us think, what's really new here? How much of this is new and how much of it is an old problem, right? in that respect, but there's really I'll think a lot more about that, so thank you very much for this critique, so we could, it's clear we could carry on and so what I'm going to say to Professor Rose is she wants to save our few romance so that after we adjourn people who might have some questions or I have questions so I knew before this happened I was already thinking of ways we could get Professor Rose back in the next 12 months and contribute and having heard this I can see now that there's just so much potential so we'd love to have you back and so we have this oh, how pretty, thank you beautiful, thank you very much for being on such a topic thank you so much, thank you for your help it's really a pleasure, thank you