 If you haven't been interviewed, it would like to be. You can sign up for that at the registration table. We'll be doing a couple of more interviews through the morning and then those interviews will be, how would you say, premiered, if you will, at the end of the conference. If you have to leave early, because I know there are some people who have to leave at lunch, it will be online, right? If everybody agrees and, you know, there shouldn't be a problem. We can send it to you. We can give you a link. There's a link for that. OK. Other housekeeping is just to quickly say thank you to the folks at UMW for hosting us in this beautiful space, for spending. Yes, I agree. And we intentionally came here. This was, you know, and I know folks might see it and I apologize for the indulgence, but it was a little bit of a reunion for us to meet with folks who I've spent a large part of my career creating with and I love. So I just did kind of do that. But as Antonio said to me earlier, he's like, I feel like I know everybody in the room and there was a sense of that. And I want to thank all of you for taking the time out of your busy schedules, out of your lives and coming here and celebrating. It was a celebration of life, Brian, but I don't think it felt entirely like a funeral. Like you could go, yeah, and not feel bad at this funeral. Right? Great funeral, but I got a motor. Great pate, but I got a motor if I'm going to make this funeral. So with that, it is my distinct pleasure to introduce our third and final. But by no means is it over. Key note, this is Brian Alexander. He is a futurist, and I could say a lot about him. Like he recently published a book that you can buy here, right? And it is called The Academy on Fire, Universities on Fire. And one of the things that I will say is when I first came to Mary Washington in 2006, I'm sorry for the feedback. But when I came to Mary Washington in 2005, actually, not six, one of the things that was happening is people were saying, get a blog. Do this. And one of my first kind of interactions online were with Brian Alexander with his Dracula blog, which he would do regularly. He was also part of a kind of discussion at Middlebury College about should we let Wikipedia be accessed on campus or use. This was early. And it was an outrage. And he was a voice of reason then. And he remains a voice of reason now. In fact, in 2012, him and I found ourselves in the same place at the same time in New Hampshire. And it was at that point, there you go, we got some locals. But we found ourselves in the same time, same place in New Hampshire. And it was 2012. And between talks, Brian and I just had some time in the library there. He let me know, look the nightly gig I've been doing for the last 10 years is coming to an end. And I think I'm going to go out on my own and be a consultant. And I was thinking to myself like, Jesus, you're living the woods. You have no internet. You're basically homesteading. And now you're going to do an online consulting business. And I have to say, Brian Alexander is the hardest working man in EdTech. 2012 to now, he has built basically he's the Jerry Springer of EdTech. If you watch his Thursday specials, he brings people on. He creates community. He is maybe one of the most generous people in this field. I know. And I will give you a story and I heard Brian saying it to Brian, the Brians, so that's Brian Lam, that's Brian Alexander. They spoke here in 2005 and they became known as the Brians on this campus, which is very fun. This is going back. But Brian was mentioning to this Brian that I want to really thank you for sending me a random email with three or four other people to share. Maybe it's a movie he saw. Maybe it's an image he found. Maybe in my case, often it's a shark attack somewhere in the world that he had been following. And he'll not only email me, but he'll include three or four random people I didn't know. And what will ensue is a small conversation via email with people I had never known. And I think for me, that's a perfect metaphor for a lot of what we had talked about over the last two days. These simple acts of generosity and kindness that help us feel connected and part of this sociality that Kathleen said beautifully, we're losing. Or maybe not managing very well. So without further ado, it is my distinct pleasure and honor to introduce Brian Alexander. Thank you for coming and join me in welcoming him. That was biofeedback. The great thing about having a beard is you can't see when I blush. So Jim, thank you so much. That's very humbling and very, very sweet. Jim's also heading to the back towards my wife, who normally tries to hide in such events. And as a card carrying extrovert, I have to, of course, draw attention to her. All this work of consulting for the past decade I couldn't do without her. So thank you for my love. Let me just bring up a couple of tabs to set things up. Where's Rajiv? So last night, and I feel just like an elephant up here. After a dancer last night, he was talking about the etymology of reclaim. And this was sticking in my head. So I went to the great Oxford English dictionary and pulled it up and was going through the etymology of reclaim. And a fun thing that got me was the first answer in the OAD was about reclaiming or saving a person from a state of vice in a moral way of life. And I thought, OK, this is completely appropriate as I went out last night to pinball machines and all that. But when you Google reclaim conference, the first hit for me is God's design for sex in marriage. And so I went to sign up for that anyway. Authentic intimacy, which is not an acronym we normally associate. Now, but speaking of AI, one of the things I use AI for, text AI, is to get a consensus sense of a topic. Because chat, GPT, Bard and Bing are very, very mainstream, very bureaucratic, very central. And so I find them very useful for that. How many of you have used slides.gbt? The couple healed very good, very good. And of course, Molly Cheehak, who gives great talks about AI at Georgetown. So this is a tool that will just on the spot give you a slideshow on a topic. It takes a long time, about 60 seconds, to cough these up. And so I asked him, please generate a slide deck in the future of the World Wide Web. And the results are kind of interesting. So let's see, here's the future of the world. And that's, by the way, all I gave it was that prompt. Nothing else, nothing else. So here's a basic slide, little text. All the web has come a long way since the conception, blah, blah, blah. Next slide, web 3.0. So talk about blockchain, decentralized applications, smart contracts, okay. Next slide, artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, creative analytics, okay. Internet of things, potential smart devices and sensors, okay. Virtual augmented reality, and here's my favorite part, check out the image. I did not suggest that, but I'm happy. Cyber security, and we've got a padlock there as an image. Accessibility, so guidelines. And of course, no image for that. Privacy, and we've got another lock there on the phone, data breaches. User experience, along with Wikipedia there. I'm not sure why they picked that, but there it is. Mobile optimization, mobile first, and a little more text about that. And we continue to emerging technologies, including quantum edge computing and 5G, and then the conclusion, the world wide web is constantly evolving. Its future potential is enormous, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm done, thank you. But I'm actually not going to be speaking to about half of those things. Because I think about half of this is actually dead or wrong. But I did want to show that to you as an interesting example of what you can do with some web technologies and AI, getting a bit meta. If you'd like to look at that presentation, or if you want to look at the presentation I'm about to deliver, just go to my blog, post this this morning. So you can click on that, the whole show is on SlideShare. And in fact, let me just bring that up right now. So I mean, I find if I present PowerPoint, it's interesting. Nobody gets excited, no one says, yay, PowerPoint. If I say I'm not going to use PowerPoint, then people will stand up and cheer, lost away, but this is what people expect. But the other thing is I want to show you a lot of images. And this is right now, I think, a pretty good way. To start with, I think most of you know me by now. So let me just give a little bit of a background about why I'm talking about this particular subject now. To do the future of higher education, I research a lot. And on the left, you can see the trends that I follow, about 100 of them right now. And all of those fed into my previous book, Academia Next, which is kind of notorious because page 23 asks you to imagine what would happen in the future to higher education if hypothetically a pandemic struck the world. It goes on a great detail, trying to imagine what would happen. Needless to say, nobody paid attention to page 23 until about three years ago. And then I get all kinds of freakouts. Alexander, what did you know, right? What dark forces are you in league with? And so I can talk about that if you're interested. And of course, this book is available. I've been blogging since, I think, arguably before the word blog came up. Around 1999, 2000, I was teaching information literacy program at Centenary College in Louisiana. And I started putting up news about the information literacy on the website for it. I started putting in a reverse chronological order, little chunks, and said, this is pretty cool. I can keep doing this. So right now, for example, in my current blog, I've been blogging about climate change and higher education. This fed my most recent book, which just came out. Of course, I brought some copies here if you'd like to grab some. I also do part of this work through my teaching at Georgetown, where I teach in the wonderful learning design technology program, master's program. You can see one of your, one of the people here, in fact, right now, in motion pointing at you, Lee is a delight to photograph, because she's always on great shape. But you can only see my students there on the left. So let's get to talk, let's get talking about this. The future of the web, I'm going to kind of work through a funnel to get there. I'm going to talk about some extrapolations from present points and shift to talking about external threats to the web, some of them are existential. Talk about cultural changes that may shape the future of the web. And then some technology developments and then talk about the biggest threat facing human civilization and what that means for the web. As I go, please think of questions you have. Please think of topics and everybody online. Of course, I want to hear from you as well. And if you want to tweet out or mastodon out or share in anything, please do. I want to hear, I want to see that and I'd love to hear your thoughts. This image is one of my favorite. This is how I think about the future. I think about present day stuff and then forces working on it, like hands on clay for a potter's wheel. So I'm going to be showing you or some of those hands, some of those fingers, some of those grips. I'm going to be working in a funnel. The very, very bottom is technical details of the web. The very top is changes in civilization. Because the web is that plugged in and the forces are that large. So you can go back to 1991, think about the web and I don't want to take us back there right now because Kathleen and Rajiv did a fantastic job of that. I just love sharing this image because it makes me so happy. But I want you to think about the future. So 2028 is the next Earth-Mars conjunction. So it's possible that we will have definitely robots, possibly humans headed to Mars. And what I'd like you to imagine is the first web server being served up from the Martian surface. And naturally I didn't draw this because I'm a terrible artist. This is from Mid Journey, which does a pretty good job of it. Unfortunately, when I asked Mid Journey to imagine this, it kept giving me images of an astronaut without a helmet or with bare hands. And I thought maybe it's an expanse fan, right? It's thinking about terraforming, I don't know. I said, maybe it is, maybe it is or maybe it really doesn't like Elon Musk. Yeah, come on, Elon, go to Mars, you don't need a helmet. So one of the tools in the Futurist Toolkit is trend analysis and extrapolation. So you take a look at current developments and recent history and then organize them into a line and see where they might take you. And our first approximation, this is just a very good kind of kindergarten way to think about where things might be headed. So let's take a look at some of these right now. And we can start with the size of the web. It's quantity, which is actually kind of difficult to measure. And I was researching this and finding a bunch of different measurements for it. And what's interesting is we have a huge boom starting from Tim Burr's Lee releasing that through the 1990s up to the 2000s. And then we kind of max out, depending on how you measure it. So if you take a look at web domains, we may have hit a plateau. If you look at websites, we may have hit a plateau or gone down a little bit. And in fact, depending on how you organize this data, it may be that we're at an even keel that we're no longer growing. So if that's the case, and this is a big yes, because all of this data I find a little squishy, we have to think about this. If the web has reached a peak and we're stable right now, what does that mean for web design? What does that mean for all of you trying to encourage people to use the web? And there's, of course, this is just a very simple extrapolation. We can think about the possibility that it may grow again or it may decline in size. But we're no longer in the glory days of the web just booming all over the place and people generating lots and lots of web content. A few more trends I want to just touch on really quickly. One of them is just the fact of giant platforms. I mean, for a lot of you in the room, these are the enemies, the Facebooks, the Pinterest, the Instagrams. These are the giant forces that really own a lot of the web. And it seems likely to me that that pattern is going to continue at some scale. People love to pronounce the death of Facebook. I would love to have that many users and be dead, okay? I mean, they're talking about still a billion users or a few hundred million users, that's not dead, right? That's very much alive. Even if you hate it, you can't set it aside and say, well, it doesn't exist or it doesn't matter. And meanwhile, we get interesting motion. We get people saying, well, I'm tired of Facebook. I hate Zuckerberg. I'm going to go to Instagram instead. And this happens a lot. I mean, the big migration from Twitter to MasterDot was actually very, very small, a small number of people. A lot of them bailed out in part because the MasterDot onboarding process is not good. But we have lots of these web giants. We may see more, Blue Sky, Maygrow, I'm not sure. There are a lot of these out there. But the fact is that unlike the indie web, we still have a lot of these giants. And we should expect them in the future. Second point to think about it is simply accessibility. And we are still lousy at this. We still produce a web aimed at multimedia, aimed at looking really cool, and ignoring a chunk of people who can't see this very well. A publisher friend of mine who works on a great project called Ben and Tech trying to make as much e-book content accessible as possible, he sends this to publishers of all kinds. He says, would you decide not to sell books to people with red hair? No, I mean, that would be stupid. Why would we do that? So, OK, why are you deliberately deciding not to sell books to blind people? Publish a book. Oh, I see. I see how this works. That's a problem for us and the web. We don't make this stuff very accessible. We know how to. It's just not very sexy. It's hard to get funding for it, but we have to keep doing that. And it's possible. Demographically, some of you know me, I'm obsessed with demographics. As our population ages up, our eyesight is not getting a lot better. So we have to think about that and want to be careful about this. The third is responsive design, which the whole world knows about. I'm sorry, the whole world except for education. Because we still design as though the typical computer is a desktop computer. I mean, the fact that most people prefer to use smartphones in various ways has not really impacted a lot of web design. So that's something which we will still keep working on. And the last is Web 3.0. Yeah, it's hard to talk about that without getting sarcastic. It's hard to talk about it without invoking organized crime. And in fact, we'll go back to Rajiv's reclaim, right? Trying to talk about immoral natures, right? I remember people adoring Bankman Fried. I still remember people telling me how wonderful Bitcoin is. Academics still talking about this. And we are going to need a truth and reconciliation commission about this. No one's done significant crime or significant jail time about this. There is a heinous amount. I don't think bullshit is the right word. This is tulip mania at scale. And it has failed immensely. That Bitcoin still exists. People use blockchain for a few things. But Web 3 has been a disaster. It has flopped massively. And if you want even better evidence of that, if massive amounts of crime and financial devastation isn't enough evidence for you, please take a look at the artist formerly known as Facebook. Because meta now has forgotten the metaverse. They're not talking about it. They laid off people working for it. What are they focusing on instead? AI. That's their focus. So if you think of Web 3.0 as a combination of really Bitcoin, blockchain, and the metaverse, it seems to have just flopped massively. I mean, I remember the massive flop of Second Life. This feels like that to me. It doesn't die. It doesn't go away. It still exists. I'll come back to that in a little bit. But that seems to have completely flopped. Web 3.0, I'm going to come back to Web 4.0 in a bit. Another great trend that hasn't flopped is the dark web. And this is just fantastic. Everybody loves this. It's in every crime show. It's in every horror show. You can't find some data. What happens? Find a young hacker, have them get in the dark web, and find it. Oh, and there it is. It's a cliche. It's a cliche because it works. The dark web has all kinds of fantastic data in it. People love using it to get all kinds of stuff. The biggest blow to the dark web is, for me, one of the great positive developments of our time, the decriminalization of some drugs. Which, I mean, when people talk about our time being the darkest timeline and being dystopian, you're not seeing the whole picture. I mean, the decriminalization of marijuana? Do you remember when this was a fantasy not too long ago? Do you remember when there was always that one crank who would talk about hemp shirts all the time? Amiduro was illegal to research this. And now you can drive through Detroit. And there are big signs saying, Detroit is better with cannabis. Which is true, by the way. So that's taken the dark web down a bit. Because you can use the dark web to buy assassins. And drugs. And some of these drugs are now more freely available. I'm still trying to imagine what happens if we actually can research psychedelics. If someone who isn't Gwyneth Paltrow can push it forward. By the way, for Gwyneth Paltrow, the key thing, think about the movie Contagion. The movie Contagion is amazing to watch. It was wrong about one thing. In that movie, which depicts a Contagion, the CDC is extremely competent and heroic. No one anticipated the reality. But there's a great bit. Gwyneth Paltrow gets sick immediately and dies. That's not a spoiler. And there's a scene where CDC guys are autopsying her. And they go over her body. And they get her head. And they carve open her skull. They look inside it. And they freak. And they say, quick, get people on the phone. Look what's in there. I mean, that's goop, right? But if we, in every sense. But if we go past that, I mean, thinking about what psychedelics can mean, it may be a bit of a renaissance. That said, we still like to buy illegal stuff. The dark web will continue. And that'll always be there. And some of you may contribute to it in your world in different ways. The other thing to think about is what some call the splinter net. And I find nobody in higher education really talks about this. And this amazes me. Promise of the internet. I don't mean the utopian promise. I think that's overblown. What I mean is the idea that the internet interpret censorship is damaged around it. That great idea from the 1970s. Well, the reason it's not working is in part because we're splitting up the internet to different chunks. And that means we're splitting up the web into different bits. I mean, you're familiar with some of the examples. I want to show you a couple of the future ones. This is One Belt One Road. China's enormous initiative that is just sprawling across multiple continents. It's a combination of business, economics, trade, and, of course, security. I mean, it's a huge, huge, huge project. And this, of course, comes with China's different approaches to the internet, which includes the great firewall of China, includes enormous numbers of state security officials who try to survey Chinese people, the laws of the rest of the world. And there's an interesting thing to think about. As we kind of wade into Cold War 2.0 between Beijing and Washington, we have to think about to what extent this starts to carve apart bits of the web. Because after all, the flip side of this is the AUKUS agreement, is the alignments between India and Australia and parts of Europe and Japan, along with the US. Do we start to carve up the web into different chunks more and more deeply? That's something you want to watch. And, of course, this does apply to higher education. And this is something which nobody in higher... I'm fascinated by how little Americans talk about China at all. Almost nobody in the US studies the Chinese language. There are very few Chinese studies majors out there who are just not taking this seriously. The Department of Defense, the foreign policy establishment really are, but most of the population doesn't care. There's a university alliance set up across the Silk Road, across the One Belt, One Road option. So you can now link together different universities who can collaborate and combine. I mean, this is a whole division happening across the world right now. And we have to keep that in mind. But that's not scary. Let me give you some of the scary things. What are the existential threats to the web? See, whenever you look at the future of something, you've got to look at the possibility of a thing not existing anymore. So how might the web go away? And one of the ways that carrying the... You want to look at this? Here is an image from under George S. Gorgias. The character of this curtain in the 1970s was a son who basically got out of a huge ball with lots of energy at the Earth. And one of the things he did was, he bounced around the atmosphere and found a telephone and telegram poles at the top of the atmosphere. I mean, the sun is terrifyingly huge and powerful and is completely beyond our control, absolutely thoroughly beyond our control. So these geomanic storms happen from time to time. You can track them, no matter how wonderful the geomanic storm is, like solar weather. So what happens when you get another massive bowl of plasma and energy that strikes the Earth? And say across a bunch of GIS satellites, what happens when you get part of the atmosphere start ionizing again? What happens to all of our networks? This is one of the ways that the web will be hit pretty badly. And we can do it ourselves. That's the bottom slide here. I'm a child of the 1970s, so I remember nuclear war as a specter. And I thought that would have gone away. If you're in Washington, D.C., you can walk into the Air and Space Museum and in the front of it, they have a bunch of U.S. and Soviet missiles that had been decommissioned. It's an amazing, amazing thing to see. I almost cry whenever I see that. But now we're talking about nuclear war again, so that's always a possibility. These are some of the existential threats to the web we have to keep in mind. Far worse than Elon Musk. Now, we also have cultural shifts, and I want to pause and talk about these, because some of these can be very, very important to very, very small details about how we use the web. So one of them is the possibility of expanding ever more state control censorship and data valence and surveillance. State governments, states across the world of all kinds have been doing this in different ways, including the U.S. I don't think I have to go into background about all that. These could expand further and further. For example, the Turkish government, Erdogan has been re-elected. He may become more enthusiastic about controlling the Internet. You may see this in India, where the Indian government has been relaying more and more ways of tracking people online and trying to use data valence to control that population. So we may expect more of that. And when it comes to the web, I mean, this group has been thinking about surveillance and data valence. We have to expect more of that to happen. On top of this, or the opposite of this in some ways, is the fact that the indie web might become more like, say, NPR. I mean, if the web is a precious, historical cultural artifact, which I think it is, how do you preserve it? One traditional way of doing that is to nationalize things or make them public. So what happens if the Library of Congress expands its archiving? What happens when Brewster Cale finally dies and the wonderful Internet Archive is, you know, headless? Does Congress try to pick this up and support it? Yesterday morning, Kathleen Fitzpatrick was talking about the idea of a web that is not commercial, where there's no money involved. The question is, how do you keep it going? Is it possible that different governments will step up to try and take care of that? And we saw an early example of this with your Piana in Europe, which was trying to have all kinds of web content for Europe. I'd see some of that in the U.S. And in fact, some of you might call for that if you want to preserve the web. So, further. In the futures field, we have a perpetual argument about generations. People love generation models. And everybody I know is consumers love talking about this. Boomer this, Generation Z this. I'm Generation X, so we're used to no one ever mentioning us. You know, if someone says I'm Generation X, I just go, really? It's me. It's a bizarre thing. People love these models. And one of the things they talk about is using generations to talk about oscillations and attitudes. And one argument goes that the Boomer generation pushed a huge attitude of hyper-individualization. So when you think about massive amounts of fine-grained personalization and anything, they'll see it coming out of that generation from the 60s, 70s, 80s on out. But now all the pendulum is beginning to swing in the other direction. And we're more and more interested in community values. And if you could just set aside your own political predilections for a second, just think about some of the weird ways this is showing up. When you hear people ask for content moderation, content control, or censorship, or licensing of some kind, they're often using that voice to the community. So if you hear right-wing dingbats, sorry, try to be analytical. Right-wing people talk about, oh, I don't like drag shows or I don't like this. They'll often say, well, you don't want our children ruined. We won't preserve the community. And if you hear the opposite, they'll say the same thing. We're trying to preserve trans kids. We're trying to preserve our community. It may be that increasingly we have more and more of a cultural consensus over applying cultural norms to the Internet as a whole and to the web in particular. So Rajiv last night was quoting Martin Wellin ed tech metaphors. And I asked him about the rewilding idea. I actually don't think we're going to rewild. I think that's too chaotic. I think at this point we'd rather control more. And we might not call it control, but I think that will be how it works out. Now this plays out in different ways. We have all kinds of platforms that do this. I mean, I love tracking Facebook's laughably bad attempts at content moderation. I mean, they're just hilariously bad. They're like the Mystery Science Theater of censorship. They're just absolutely terrible at this. I friend, and you've all probably experienced this in different ways. But that's out there. That's how the world is working to work. In the U.S., we have one particular legal aspect. Do you all know Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act? The Communications Decency Act by those proof that Congress loves stupid names for laws. The Section 230 gives Safe Harbor to anyone who owns a platform and that includes all of you as you maintain blogs so that you cannot be held liable for content that goes across that platform. So if Brian Lam and I argue about 1970s rock and I tell him he's completely wrong and he says, yeah, well you're a hoser, then he can't sue me for provoking him because he can sue me, but he can't sue Facebook for letting that happen. Section 230 was just up before the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court preserved it again. It's an open question if you'll keep going. I think it's actually very unpopular. So think about this as you think about web design. Last person, I think who it was, I want to say it was pilot, was talking about preserving the eccentricity of the web. Brian, I know that was in your recording, preserving unusual voices. I don't know if we think that anymore. Or unusual voices might be a very small subset of unusual voices. There's other cultural shifts that keep moving. By the way, am I going too fast, too slow? Perfect. Okay. Is anyone remember this? There was a Zoom-like conference tool in the late 1990s for webinars. It had this cool feature. Every user had a little pixel that they could flag. And it was red-green, red-green-yellow. So if you were happy with where things were in the webinar, set it to green. If you were really stuck and terrified, flag it to red. If you weren't sure, you're feeling a little bit lost, but you can keep going and put it to yellow. Does anyone remember this? I can't think of it. And it was fantastic as a presenter, because you could see these pixels. If it was all green, rock and roll. If it was all red, stop. I always wanted to have that again. So one of the great triumphs of our time, one of the other positive non-dystopian things, is the fact that television is actually good. I think people under 30 have no idea how weird this is. If I went back in time and told my 1982 self that a problem in the future is going to be, there is too much excellent television to watch. They would have said, they did legalize pot, didn't they? And the psychedelics have gotten in, right? But one of the problems with this is that all of our decades of criticizing television have fallen away. And the thing that happens in American culture is whenever we invent a new medium or new technology, we immediately romanticize the previous ones. So now people love talking about H-Track and AudioCassette, right? They're just wonderful. We are happier about those than whenever we actually use them. And so the same is true of TV, right? TV is wonderful. We love it. It's so great. I can watch the wire. The wire is magnificent, right? Problem with this is this sidesteps all the great criticisms of how TV often encourages passivity for a lot of the audience. Not all, but a lot of it. And this appeals to a lot of people. The idea of the Internet TV, people love this idea. The idea is a little content serving thing that you can just pay for and be happy with. And this is a popular motif. And this may grow. You want to watch for that. I think it's a terrible idea. It's definitely not the rewrite web, but it's there. Second thing to think about is we are now back in the great days of radio. That is in terms of streaming. I mean, when you listen to a radio station, you would have no control over what came over it. It would just be whatever you could play. So if I'm going to listen to, say, a great DJ, like Joe Murphy, who is playing something wonderful, I can't tell, I could write him and say, please play some more Blue History call. He may or may not. But if it's coming over the radio, if I set up a recording device, I could record it. Otherwise, I own nothing of it. I can experience it and love it or hate it, but I don't control it and I don't own it. And that's where we've moved with streaming services. We're listening to Spotify. Myself, I used to love the idea of Pandora just because I love the idea of telling music that it was wrong and thumbing it down. And we love you too. In person, that's my major go-to from music, because I'm weird and obsessive. But I don't own any of that unless I set up a download mechanism and 99% of people don't do that. Think about the digital archive world of scholarship. We don't have print volumes anymore. We have digital ones, which are great in so many wonderful ways. But libraries don't own them and they can go away. So we are in that world. Notoriously, one major economist leader said, you will own nothing and you will enjoy it. That seems to be where we are. And what does this mean for the web is interesting. That helps push us, I think, towards the idea of creating content on YouTube or on Pinterest or on Facebook and not to actually go into reclaim and getting servers. By the way, I keep saying this. I tell this to my students, I tell them to place fingers on the street. Reclaim this awesome. I have a stack of sites there that do everything great. You don't know this. You all know this. You all know this. But I have to say it. But that doesn't seem to be the major drive. People buy DVDs now. They use this furniture. Now, the other thing to think about, and you guys are all part of this as well, is the idea of what the British press calls the tech lash. The growing criticism, the sense that Silicon Valley is horrible all the criticisms you've heard. Some of them are very well informed. Some of them are not. They're all over the place. But that tech lash keeps building. And what's weird in the U.S. is that it gets bipartisan in some interesting ways. Kind of everybody gangs up on Silicon Valley, but for different angles. You can see this in pop culture. Inclusionally we have tech bros as villains who are not dramatically very convincing. But still we'd like to see them. So the Glass Onion movie, for example, had a very pompous tech bro, and he suffered. So we may see the tech lash continue, which doesn't necessarily make it easier to work on the web. It may be that the web itself starts to swim to view as a problem. And we've heard that as long as the web has been there. Another cultural change. How many of you went to school during the Cold War? How many of you did not? Okay, you guys are doing a hands up. Hello. Hello. Yes. These are called gray hairs. You will see them sometime. Those of this second group did not marinate in the lesson that communism is evil. The first group did. We were told 24-7 socialism is evil. Communism is bad. We know that we know that we know got it. After that, no. We're starting to see cultural shift that results. In part because this generation here grew up with the 2008 financial crash, maybe the 2001 crash. Capitalism doesn't look too hot for a lot of these guys right now. And you'll hear this from a lot of people, a lot of progressives, that the real problem with X and Y is capitalism. I'm not here to talk about that to assess the validity I claim. I just want to point that out as a cultural movement. And that has some interesting side effects. I mean, it may be that it goes global and that we have a lot of interest in anti-capitalism. And this may help, you know, bob up interest in the indie web, especially in capitalism's formulation of it being not economic, at least not based on venture capital. This is an interesting Cory doctorate novel that I recommend where people end up just seceding from a zillionaire society and trying to form a whole new world. It's a Cory doctorate books. There's lots of 3D printing, lots of open source software, lots of tokens and all that. But it actually is actually very, very interesting. We may see more and more of that idea. And again, shaped by generations. This is my favorite photograph in the past 10 years. God, is that great, you know. You just look at her face and look at Trump's face. This is the generation gap I think about a lot. And that generation gap may continue. So you may see a new generation that rises that actually likes the indie web, the open web. All right. This is, I'm talking about the web by itself, but I want to talk about some other technologies and how they impact it and bring these up. The first is to think about extended reality. So by that, I mean the merger of the DEVAN diagram overlap between augmented reality and virtual reality. And so one thing about is if XR actually takes off. If people actually start using this at scale, what does that mean for the web? Right now it's an interesting question if you would actually use a web page in XR augmented reality. I mean if you're walking through this campus right now and you've got your glasses on or you have your phone and you have an augmented reality layer of Fredericksburg over time. Would you use apps or would you use the web? More likely apps in different ways. That's an interesting problem. And the other is that the mobile app world was among other things, a deliberate move away from the web. We may see that continue. But we're watching the Apple announcement of Vision Pro. That's very, very interesting. There's a lot of interesting research on this. But I wanted to pause on this screenshot here because there's so many interesting things going on in this presentation. Like we're talking about gaming, there wasn't that much. And most of the gaming was watching gaming in a 2D scene. Not 3D. Not actually using augmented reality. But here we have somebody who's looking at an Apple thing but they're also looking at the web. And I wonder how often we'd do that. If you're on your plane i.e. in hell and you put on your Vision Pro and hopefully it'll cost less than $4,000 at some point. I think it will. But you put that on. You open windows and everything else. How many of those windows are going to be the web? I don't have an answer for this. But this is an open question. And this is a question to decide right now. Will you actually use the web in XR? And in fact, will you create for the web in XR? In this whole announcement I saw one scene and if anyone saw more let me know. Somebody with a keyboard. And I couldn't tell if it was a virtual keyboard or Bluetooth keyboard. But are we actually going to make web content in XR? Now Lee's going to laugh when I say this. My most hated thing in WordPress, you all know what it is. Gutenberg, of course. You might be able to do that without a keyboard. Because it's not really a text friendly setup. But other than that, do we keep using the web in XR? This is an interesting AR project that came out, or this trial last month. Add timing for these guys. But the idea here is to have a complete desktop setup. And they've been working on this for a while. So if you take a look here, you can see we've got Outlook, we've got Twitter, we've got a few different things going on. And again, would you use web pages? Or would you use something else? One more technology to think about. Because there's lots of technologies we can plug into the web. And I haven't mentioned containers or anything. But to think about haptics. Are we actually, I mean, haptics has been trucking along slowly, but surely it's been working its way into everyday life a bit. Molly last night was driving us around town. Thank you, Molly. Where'd you go? I just like, there you are. And she pointed out there in her new electric car there were interesting haptic feedback points in the screen. We see this of course with mobile controllers. We see this with some cell phone responses. But we see more of this on the web. When I was just setting up my poor laptop here, if we could do this presentation I showed, you know, one person was pressing at the screen at different points. How much haptic stuff can we put in the web? That's a whole open research question right now. And we can go further and talk about something that doesn't get a lot of talk about. How many of you listen to more than one podcast a month? See, you're a cool people. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to have a baseline here. This is great. People's eyes go back in their head. I listened to 12 today just coming here. I'm listening to three right now. It's wonderful to have the second wave of podcasts. I mean a lot of people go, serial kicked it off. Podcasts go back further than that. They go back to 2004. There's some great stuff out there. But there's podcasts and there's also audio books. And no one talks about audio books, which is bizarre because they're huge and they're growing like mad. That is a whole industry. And people love using it for all kinds of reasons because unlike video, unlike text, you can multitask with audio books. I mean, you can multitask with video. It's just kind of self-defeating at third point. You can't type while watching video or you can, but not very far. Or you live in Boston. But a key thing to think about is, will any of that occur in the web? Think about how many podcasts you listen to that don't have a web page. You get them through, you know, Apple podcasts, you go through Google podcasts, you can stitch or whatever else. They don't have to have a web page. Why use a web browser to view a podcast? That's an interesting question. Will audio migrate us away from the web? All right. Two big topics to talk about. AI. There's so much to talk about last night. And the SPLOT AI, Alan Levine, that sentence makes no sense. That whole show yesterday of AI was fantastic. There's so much to talk about. Hopefully in about a week I'll have a little announcement about this, but let me just say I'm doing a lot of work on AI and one of the things to think about is right now it's hard to predict. It's hard to forecast because we have so many open questions. So for example, if you look at the top left of this giant cheesy flow chart, we have the question of training data sets. The training data sets right now are enormous. They are so huge. But there's an open question if they have to still keep being that huge. Some of the AI protocols let you use smaller and smaller data sets. So this is an interesting decision point. Are we going to have, will we keep having AI be the province of giant companies that can wrangle huge data sets or we'll be able to use smaller and smaller ones? Here's another question. Are we going to hate this or not? This is an interesting question. And people keep saying there's all this AI hype. There's lots of AI hate at the same time. These two are in love with each other. They've been coterminist, haven't stopped yet. So what if we decide that we can't stand it anymore? Humans invent technologies and we usually use them. We sometimes stop. We did this, for example, with nuclear weapons for a while. And we did this with a crossbow, which is a fantastic killing technology. And we stopped it. Think about plagues. We know how to make plagues of all kinds. And we really pause that from happening. So will we put AI on pause? In the great science fiction novel, Dune, which now people know about because you're cheap ones in that movie of it, right? You have the idea of yes, yes, you have the idea of a religious crusade of sorts against AI. And that changes civilization. And I used to talk about this 10 years ago. That's old science fiction. Who cares? Think about it today. People are terrified of this. Or maybe we split. Maybe we split our culture in half or into two parts. Those who are AI users and those who refuse. So do you get a sticker on your website made entirely by humans? No AI involved. The other thing to think about, the bottom left there is to think about nonprofits. Because right now we have Microsoft, we've got Google, we have Facebook. We just learned today Instagram is developing its own AI that just got leaked. We don't have a lot of nonprofits. Technically open AI is a nonprofit, but it's a puppet from Microsoft that doesn't count. What if nonprofits, educators build AI tools using educator nonprofit sources? Let's say we went to Hottie Trust and JStore and then ran software created by librarians overall of that. What kind of program could we create as a result? This sounds like the far future of maybe July 1st. But that's another option. So we have interesting choice. Do we start cracking out new AI pathways? Or do we keep going with the giant setup we have right now? So that said, what does this mean for the web? Obviously we have easy content production. We make tons and tons of it. So it's possible we will just overflow the internet and especially the web by making just too much stuff. There are already AI generated spam, already AI generated content farms. We keep making more and more of it. And of course we have I put mistakes and deep fix together. You've all heard some of the stories, right? Like the idiot lawyer who used chat GPT to come up with legal arguments in front of the court and also use chat GPT to come up with new citations that didn't exist. Some of you may know Vanderbilt University, sent an email to a student's a very emotional supported email and had the made by chat GPT at the end of it. There's lots of stupid things we can do. And there's also deep fix, which just get better and better and better. Now we also have assisted creativity. So this image here I'm a terrible artist. I cannot draw anything. My daughter loves to mock me as I draw a line. But this is great for me. I can use mid-journey, I can use dolly and this powers me to be more creative. I use my photography. I'm just a kid at photography. But all the different editing suggestions are great, really helpful. And then of course, writing and coding. I mean, this is the whole specter of the possibility of computer programming beginning to shrink as we can automate chunks of it. Because isn't that So here's one sequence to think about. One possible way this plays out for the web. First, we keep making more stuff. We produce more and more web content. It becomes a problem. There's too much of it. There's too much and you can't trust it. An old problem resurrecting again. Then second, let's just assume that information literacy doesn't take off. This is too bad. Information literacy is wonderful. We're all librarians. Hello, hello. Information literacy is fantastic. We need to have more and more of it, obviously. But I keep hearing major political and popular figures not saying it and not using it. Journalists, for example, do not understand that information literacy exists which drives me nuts. Let's just say that librarians don't manage to conquer the world. I want them to, but let's say they don't. I know. You guys are good. And we start using AI agents in order to make our way through this huge ocean of stuff. Do we end up then with a kind of AI layer stretched out throughout the web? I'm going to make stuff. AI is going to help me. Maybe I'm a good actor. Maybe a bad actor. I'm also going to be reading it. I'm going to be using AI to help me find stuff that didn't help me assess it. Maybe the ACRL helps complete suggestions for a good agent in this way. This is one possibility to think about. The AI is woven into your web experience, both as creator and as consumer. Now, there's still more to think about from AI and how this can impact the web. I mean, there's the possibility of more jobs that involve fusing the AI and web design. There's an interesting question of authenticity. Have you all thought about this or talked about this? One person nods and you're 22? That's a pretty good guess. The idea that you could somehow either watermark a production that you make with AI, so this image here, for example, which I think is really cool, but have some digital note in it saying made by mid-journey and some other metadata attached to it, or you watermark your non-AI generated stuff. That's one possibility. Or you could put it on the blockchain. I was telling you about how Bitcoin is a disaster. Web 3.0 doesn't really work. But still, one of the uses of the blockchain, not a really good one, but it can still work, is to try to authenticate things. Authorship may become weirder and harder to find out as a result. And on top of this is the interesting question for all the people. And you may have seen this if you pay attention to the arts that I know pilot does, is do you want to make your content available to be scraped? The Wall Street Journal, I'm sorry, Washington Post had a great column, I don't know if you all saw this, where they found one of the big corpuses and basically put a search engine into it, into an article, so you could search this corpus to see if any of your stuff was in it, which is pretty exciting. Some of my stuff was in it, I'm pretty excited now, right? But do you want to say no? At least one art site had a revolt of the artists who didn't want their stuff to be included. Do you do that with your web? Do you have a robots.txt file saying no, I'm not going to be spidered in this? Or do you want to be? Because you want AI to work. That's a whole division to think about. Now, I want to skip ahead because there's a few more things I want to touch on, but there's the big thing, the big thing that is next. Yeah, this is a fascinating chart, I'm going to skip it for right now. I haven't heard anybody talking about this now. And I want to put this on the table. Rajiv, if I can say this please forgive me for the pun, I think you danced around this last night a bit. This is a weather station in Cape Cod and this is maintained by the U.S. Weather Service. And the U.S. Weather Service decided to abandon it. They're not going to provision it any longer because right there is the Atlantic Ocean and it's rising. So the Weather Service had the decision. Do you move this to another location? Do you build a wall to protect it from the water? Do you elevate this on say concrete stilts? No, it's not worth it. We're going to give it up to the sea. It's not going to happen tomorrow, but they already made this decision. Florida, the state of Florida, which you know, insert as much satire comedy and horror as you want, has already made the decision to give up some of the Florida keys. The Little Islands and the South bit of Florida, they went through key by key and decided which ones are worth preserving and which ones are just going to be underwater. That's already been made. This is the greatest, greatest challenge facing the human race right now. By far. It is a terrifying, terrifying challenge intellectually, morally, practically. This covers about every single ground and I guess one of the reasons why people have a hard time talking about it. Climate change is a hyper object. It's an object that we're not used to dealing with this kind of scale. So just to give you a little bit of setup for it, you will find many maps like this just looking at sea level rise, which is just one part of climate change. You could take your eyes and just work around the coastline of North America here. I mentioned Florida. Florida is simply gone. No climate scientists think Florida survives climate change, period. Florida, man, is underwater. But look up and down, but think, just think of how many people are there and how much culture and how much richness is there. And look up and down the east coast, Boston. See that big, you know, niche of underwater now? New York, Philadelphia, DC? Norfolk is simply gone. Look at the Gulf of Mexico, where you can see the Mississippi is now kind of inland sea and big swaths of Mississippi and Louisiana are underwater. Look at the west coast. San Francisco is now the gateway to an inland sea. The Sea of Cortez nibbles up toward LA. This is not a science fiction model. This is not extreme fantasy. This is just basically projection looking at the science we have. And it might not go this high. It might only go half this high. Here's Miami, by the way, which I can't get enough of. Miami has a lot of problems. It's at sea level, and it's built on a lot of limestone. So they already have the thing called daylight flooding. Have any of you experienced this? The city will flood when the weather is perfect. It just floods. Not during a hurricane, it floods then too, but just because it's at sea level and because there's so much water just sloshing back and forth. So if you take a look at Miami, and you want to pay attention to it, just how many universities and colleges are there. This is how close they are to the Atlantic Ocean. Blocks away. Here are a few that are actually on the beach. If you're one of those educators, you have to think, am I going to have a job in five or 10 years? Do we move our campus? Do we build a wall? We have a lot of choices here. The flip side of rising sea level is not enough water. That's when we're talking about climate change. Too much water for those who don't need it, so this is not an aridification. Taking a look at the arid parts of the world. That includes deserts, but also places that are just really dry. And you can see at a glance that we have a lot of aridity and that's all expanding. Washington Post had a piece about some libraries in Mauritania, which are the edge of the Sahara Desert. The desert is simply expanding and all the fine particles of sand are working their ways into those libraries. Take a look at the western half of North America. And think about what it means to be in, say, Las Vegas. Or to be in Phoenix. You know, Phoenix, where at times the summer heat is so hot that the tarmac on the airports melts and planes get stuck. That's already happened and it's getting hotter still. Look across North Africa and look across Central Asia. I could go on. And I did. That's why I have a book. But the whole idea is that this is enormous and complex in hitting us in multiple directions. I mean, this is recent data from a couple of days ago, taking a look at defining the niche where humans can live comfortably and work and raise food and how that niche is shrinking and some countries are just losing miles and miles and miles of that. One side effect, if you live in a wonderful place that's safe from climate change, if you think it is, think about all these people who are not going to want to live there anymore. How many millions of people is your institution ready to host some of the more support from this question? Now, campuses can interact with this. I work in higher education, so we talk about this in different ways. We can interact in terms of changing our campus physical campus grounds. We can talk about this in terms of research, in terms of teaching, community relations. I want to talk about the web and what this means for this. So, climate change produces a potential existential threat to the web. How much of it is now underwater where that water temperature and composition is changing? And how much of it is actually on the edge of water currently? Think about the challenges to human staff as well. One of the side effects, one of the many side effects of climate change is increasing disease, more pandemics. How do you maintain the web service if people keep getting sick? And of course, problems about budgets. If you have to move your campus, that's going to be a lot of money for your campus. And here, for example, there's just some infrastructure in the U.S. that cyber infrastructure. And again, Monroe showing you all the sea level rise. Look at where all those cables are. Look at where all those data centers are. Here's a bigger one, looking at the web of the world and how much of this is coastal. I mean, about a third of the human race lives on coastlines. So, a practical sense. You sit down with WordPress and you start to make a website. What do you mean for that? Well, maybe you make fewer web pages. I mean, think about this. The digital computing world has a massive carbon footprint. We can calculate in different ways, but it's simply true. I mean, the lifespan, that laptop appearing, it needs carbon to be made, it needs carbon to be shipped, it contains carbon in it, all the cloud servers that we access, all infrastructure, fires of carbon like that. So, do you start making fewer web pages? To reduce this footprint? And do we make lighter pages? Do we have web pages that don't have so many calls to ads? They have less media? I asked poor Kathleen yesterday about rich media and the development of the web. Maybe you have fewer embeds. Maybe you have more text than simple images. And maybe the whole idea of having a single web page, a really long web page, rather than multiple web pages, maybe that takes off and goes further. We have less interactivity, perhaps. We have fewer cute Java applets running around. Less rich media, no blockchain, no metaverse, and maybe down times. Are you all familiar with this project, low-tech magazine? That's a fun. Do you know the guy? I'm starting to stalk him because I find it fascinating. Low-tech magazine measures every web page on its site by its carbon footprint and by its electrical demand. It's really simple and loads really fast. It's great stuff. But he maintains the server for it on his balcony. The server is powered entirely by solar. And so it's carbon neutral. It goes down sometimes. Are we ready for that? Are we ready for a web that isn't always on? Do we go back to more tangible media? This was a huge digital project. We shipped tons of information. Do we do more of that? My good friend Chris Lott in Washington State mails me stuff. He's a digital genius, but he ships me things because that's fun and has less of a carbon footprint. Or do we do the opposite? Do we instead decide to fly less? By the way, if you work in higher education, that is the third rail. That is the most dangerous topic you can mention. You can talk about copyright violation. You can talk about economics. Nothing is quite as scary as telling faculty and staff they might have to fly less. I've raised that before in topics with faculty. I've been called the Trump supporter. I've been called the anti-intellectual just for raising the idea. So I just want to warn you, this is the third rail. This is a difficult topic, but let's just say we decided to fly less. The French government came up with this interesting policy where they banned short-term flying but the idea was if you're in Paris and you want to go to Lyon, you shouldn't fly. There's good trains that will do the trick. What happens if we keep following this up? We know how to do conferences online. Hello everyone on StreamYard and Discord. We know how to do this. If we do that, what does that mean for the web? We make more web content. Maybe we have more web-hosted services of all kinds. Maybe we start using the web as a resilience hub as a resilience. So for example, what if we harden our web experience? Make sure that's more likely to survive storms and that kind of thing. We have more backup power sources, more cloud sources. Maybe we make the web a key part of our resilience going forward. And maybe, maybe whatever anyone on my edge says doesn't matter. This poster haunts me and I see this again in that young woman's eyes. You'll die of old age. We'll die of climate change. And I find this difference everywhere I go. I gave a talk in Peru and I had a bunch of college administrators and business people talking about climate change and afterward they did not want to talk about it. Everyone under 30 did. The AV team wasn't anything to do with this. They came after me to ask me questions because they're that concerned about this. Think about that's the source. Someone who is Alex, right? Someone who is Alex's age. Maybe you're likely to push the web for this. And there are other impacts for this that we have to think about that we're just starting to touch on. For example, I mentioned the tech lash. Does that make us think poorly of tech cloud centers? Because they are big CO2 hubs as a personal choice. What happens when you have to choose between your internet access and air conditioning? And what happens to geoengineering? Geoengineering is the whole so far conceptual framework of trying to do gigantic engineering projects to slow down the amount of sun coming to the earth. There are all kinds of ways of doing this. Air lifting, huge mirrors in orbit putting different chemicals in the ocean or on top of the North Pole. Lots of ways of doing it. Lots of huge arguments around the gigantic field. So do we, you know, what if we turn against geoengineering? What if we tax data centers more? I'm reading a novel right now which comes up the idea of taxing coal and oil companies and giving that money directly to consumers. Anyone live in Alaska here? Alaska has this dividend. It's an interesting thing where every year every inhabitant of of Alaska gets money from the oil strikes there. It's a great thing. All the booze runs out the next day. But what if we were to take all that money and distribute to people? What if we have more people who call themselves Luddites or Neo-Luddites who decide that this hardware is terrible and we need to stop it? Something like that wonderful pair of monitors there looks obscene to them and dangerous. And what if we just restrict use to the internet? We have rolling blackouts in some parts of the world, including the U.S. Do we do rolling internet access and web access? Do we change the web design in a few other ways? Do we change the size of pages? Do we restrict scripts? Do we block ads? And do we block the use of AI in the web? Because it has an enormous carbon footprint. This is a phrase I see. It may come down to choosing between your internet connection and your city's power supply. And how much is social media worth if you can't even turn on lights to take selfies? This isn't a choice that happens every day. This may happen in the summer when it's really hot. Which is next week, right? Let's think about a solar punk web instead. You all familiar with the solar punk idea? Very good. If you're not, Google it and look at images. Solar punk is a design movement and the idea is to have a positive human centric, excellent climate change period. It sounds obscene in some ways, but it's not. The idea is not to make this period terrible, but to imagine being positive, to imagine being humane and good as possible. So the solar punk design movement, there are computer games, there are books, there are stories, but the art is the best place. It often looks like this. Trying to imagine new architecture, human interaction, clothing, designs. What would a solar punk web look like? Another cultural change to think about. And again, if I could pick on Alex and Pilot for a second, the generation that comes up after the Cold War that thinks capitalism is a problem. I'm just pinning this on you right now. You have no hands, so you can't fight back. Oh, there they came, right? So what happens if we decide that economic growth was the problem that led us to climate change? It's true, right? Straight up. I mean, our whole industrial setup produced all this. We know this. Well, there's an argument that says we should stop that. The great American writer Ed Abbey once said, growth for growth's sake is the ideology of the cancer cell. Well, what if we decide that's true and we stop growing? We could cut back a little bit. What does that look like? Do we recycle our hardware more and more often? Do we use lower and lower impact media? By the way, this is what Dal E said or showed when I asked him to imagine a degrowth of the future. Dal E clearly has an opinion on this. So let me close out. I talked about Web 3 and I mocked it. So what does Web 4 look like? What does Web 5 look like? One possibility is what I call the paleo web. And that's basically the web that you all love. And that keeps going. Maybe it grows a little bit. Maybe it's more controlled or surveyed in some ways. And the dark web is definitely with it. Along with some social media giants. So we just keep doing that. Keep re-enacting it. So like the wonderful arcade we went to last night, we keep reproducing those and keeping them going. Or we could follow what I call the paleo web 2.0 idea and we make sure that this is not economically involved. There's no money sloshing through it. I think of modern poetry where no one gets rich unless they're on Instagram. I think of interactive fiction which has no economic benefit whatsoever. But people love modern poetry. They love interactive fiction and they labor at it and it works. So this is one model for the web. Or we have the green web which I've just been talking about. A lighter one, one that uses less computation. Or what I was calling the everything everywhere all at once web. Where we have more media crammed into pages and browsers. And we have all kinds of things integrated. So it's built into extended reality. You can ask extended reality through web pages. You can use the web and more interactive things, devices including Kathina Rajiv, which is the one on the microwave? Yeah, using the microwave. Look at this. And multiple layers of AI. Secret thing about scenarios. There's no one comes true. It's always a mess. It's always a whole swarm of scenarios. So think of it as a kaleidoscope if you like. All of these things could come true. Paleoleb 2.0 Alongside the green web. Alongside the everything all at once. So for you what does this tell you? You should be fighting for this. For the web. Against all the threats that I mentioned. You should support creative and crucial uses. Including for resilience. You should think of this as a future oriented way. We've been thinking about the past and the present brilliantly. Keep looking ahead where this might go. And then conspire with each other. And co-create this web. Do it with total strangers and friends. Keep making stuff. Friends like these. Now I need to stop. The sheer number of links I have to put up here is a sign of where the web is right now. Thank you so much. That was fantastic. Two questions. I would love to hear your questions. They mean more to me than what I can say. I want to ask an interesting question about degrowth and stuff because I came here with all that in my head. But I'm not going to. I'm going to ask my boring question first. Somebody else can ask that one. One thing you didn't. You touched on it a little bit. Is regulation. There's one piece of regulation there. But what we're seeing. Well, I don't think we are seeing it in higher education. That's the first thing. There's two crucial areas of regulation happening right now. One is cyber resiliency and digital security. And the other is AI regulation. The first has the potential to fragment along national lines. Differences in European and American legislation. There's an existential threat in there to open source in Europe with the European legislation. And AI regulation. We're already seeing what open AI are. Regulate us but don't regulate us in any way we don't like. Which is essentially let's kill open source. We don't have a mode to that conversation that's been happening for a while. So what's the role of regulation in this space? It's a boring subject I think. To the open web. It's a huge, huge threat. And it cuts in numerous ways. And you've identified a whole bunch of them. The national differences are stark. And one I didn't mention COVID. One of the lessons of COVID is that we suck at international collaboration. Which is terrible. Some of you might remember or I read about back in the 1980s. We had this terrible, terrible threat of the ozone layer going away. And we actually created a wonderful protocol called the Montreal Protocol. It's terrific. It's a great achievement. Wonderful thing. We're not doing that now. The pandemic, you know, Russia had its own vaccine. China had its vaccine. The U.S. had its stack of vaccines. Britain had its vaccines and so on. So definitely national biases. So we should expect to see the U.S. government regulate in a way which probably favors Silicon Valley in some way but also tries to please Democrats and Republicans who are terrified of them. And that's going to be very different from what Europe does. Which is going to be very different from what Britain does. And Britain's important because they have a strong AI industry. And meanwhile, China has the opposite because they're trying to regulate AI in order to make it as large and powerful as possible. Because the two countries in the world, far away above anywhere else in AI is the U.S. and China. No one is coming close. Canada punches above its weight, some good stuff but it's mostly the U.S. and China. So China will have its own regulations. So that splinter net will just keep splintering and splintering more and more deeply. There are not a lot of fans of it. Not a lot of lobbying work on its behalf. It's a real problem. And of course, the proprietary guys want to shut that down whenever possible. One of the interesting things about AI is the leaked meta text Lama which has been so powerful and you can do so much for that. So we should expect to see more of that but I think that's the classic open source versus proprietary fight that we keep seeing more of. I do wonder if we will see some sudden lunges at regulation when disasters happen. Plain crashes. We blame AI worse than that. A celebrity feels bad. We blame AI. And then we get some dumb regulation that comes. I have to say dumb regulation because everyone knows that the legislators themselves are not really versed in this. Their staff aren't that great at this and they tend to lag pretty badly while being captured by a lot of lobbyists. So yes, I don't know if it's an existential threat. I do think it's a powerful squeezing threat that could really, really injure the web. More questions. You brought us down by talking about regulation now. Brian. Last night, by the way, this was really funny. So I was sitting behind Brian Lamb and Rajiv was looking at Brian and saying Brian and it was eerie for me to hear that because it wasn't me. I could hear the I instead of the why. People were looking at me like, why is he talking about you? No, no, it's Brian. And then behind us was a third Brian. So we're just stacked up Brian's. So please continue. My favorite thing about Fredericksburg is people keep confusing me with you or lumping me in with you. They did it 18 years ago and got to grow the beard. I got to work on that. There was a dimension that you cover a lot and maybe this is all implied in the climate stuff, but I think there was one dimension that's really shaping that I don't think I heard a lot of which is just the effect of just the giant blobs of regulated capital that are shaping affordability and it underlies the politics and definitely underlies the climate stuff. Is it just implied in your climate analysis or where do you see economics and all this? I talk about economics all the time and by the way, I've never given this talk before, so this is all you know, so it's all on you and I'm quite serious about your feedback. So, I mean, I talk about macroeconomic changes all the time, including escalating income inequality, escalating wealth inequality, which is not being slowed down and how we have this enormous powerful force, which is the one that we're fighting in many ways to change climate change. And this impacts us in many ways. Own a mission giant corporations, owning giant platforms, that's part of it, but also that's what the whole degrowth movement is fighting against and if you go to a company obviously something like Exxon, but also Apple and say, stop making profits. Well, that's alien to every shareholder on earth, right? They can't possibly do that. Their CEOs are sociopathically trained and their profits generate every quarter. That's their main function in life. So, to fight them and say, well, actually we're going to stop growth. Right? And in fact, maybe we're going to cut back a little bit. We're going to degrow in order to reduce our whole civilizational footprint. That's enough and that's very, very difficult. On another topic Larry Lessig once said, it's hard when you're fighting against all the money in the world. That's kind of what this is involved. So, on the other hand, a lot of the big capital sloshing around that you described also wants to make money off of green tech. So, for example, thinking about green jobs of all ways, thinking about who's going to be covering different parts of land with wind turbines with solar panels, with low-head hydro. Who's going to be managing all that? Lots of capital wants to invest and jump in that. So, many ways capital exists not so much ideologically, but to make money and so it's going to jump on that. So, we may just see that transition. The great science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson has a couple of novels where he describes that kind of process of capital transitioning away from all carbon all the time towards being more green. Now, people also disagree with this. There's a wonderful Swede named Andreas Malm who is a terrifying man because he seems to write a book every 30 hours. English is his second language and because he's Swedish speaks it better than most Americans and he's now kind of notorious for a short book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline. And mom says no, that the capital and fossil fuels are bound of intimately, along with ideologies of colonialism and ideologies of race. And that all has to be demolished. So, the anti-capitalist attitudes I mentioned before that's one place you may see that play out. And there's still more. I'm always weirdly happy to talk about macroeconomics. Absolutely. We have time for one more question. So, I wanted to bring in someone from the stream. Hello, ladies and gentlemen. Mark Corbett Wilson wanted to ask can you speak on, speak to total information warfare and higher education? Total information. Warfare and higher education. What does he mean by total information warfare? I don't have the context unfortunately. Mark, if you want to tweet that out that would be great. I'm fascinated by the idea and I'd like to say more. Mark's a good friend. Are you all just stunned right now? Yeah, awesome. Unfortunately, we don't have enough time for more questions, but definitely continue the conversation in Discord, Macedon, Twitter, all of that good stuff. So, thank you so much, Brian. My pleasure.