 All right, let's get started. Hello everyone. Good afternoon. My name is Urs Gasser. I'm the executive director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society here at Harvard. I have the great pleasure to welcome all of you to this very special, very happy celebratory event, a panel in celebration of my client's most generous gift to what was formerly known, the Berkman Center, and now is the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. It is a great honor to welcome you back on campus, Mike, together with your wife, Joan. We couldn't be more grateful for this fantastic gift, and we'll talk more about it later today. For this first part of the event, however, I'd simply like to introduce another close friend and supporter of the Berkman Klein Center, John Palfrey, who's the head of school at Phillips Academy in Andover, who is a very long friend and collaborator, who also serves as a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center, among many other positions he has. He was previously the professor here at Harvard Law School, and hopefully one day we'll come back. And John kindly agreed to moderate this fantastic panel, which is actually an all-star panel on the topic of power and participation in the networked public sphere. Thank you so much, John, for your willingness to be with us today. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for being here as part of the celebration. Thank you in particular to Mike Klein and to Joan. Thank you for being here on this celebratory day. This is an amazing moment for the Berkman Klein Center, an amazing moment for Harvard University and, of course, for Harvard Law School as well. We're thrilled that you are here, and thank you for making all of this possible. This is a really, really wonderful moment where I think we can reflect on what is not quite 20 years of work that started way back when, and I hope that Jonathan Zittron, one of our founders, and Charlie Nesson, one of our founders will take some time today also to tell us about some founding stories, to talk about what's happened in the interim, and then also to talk about what is to come and what we'll be able to do with this amazing platform. I'm going to turn it over very quickly to the panel, but I did want to reflect just briefly with Mike here to thank you for the ability for all of us to have the power that these centers afford us to do this work. I can think of no environment, no teaching and learning environment, no environment with colleagues greater than the one that the Berkman Klein Center affords, and I think this is a topic that is so central in so many ways to so many different fields, and the gift of being able to do this just personally has been so meaningful, and I know that many of the people who have come back here, I see so many friends and graduates of the school and alumni of the center of various ways. It is amazing what you and the Berkman family have made possible, so thank you for that, and it'll be fun to dig into it. So thank you again. We are going to take maybe five to seven minutes with each of the panelists off the start, and then they will no doubt have comments for one another, and then we will open it up for all of you. They're a microphone, so have your questions and comments ready, and I'm sure this will be very lively. Since the topic is power and participation in the network public sphere, I figured we should start off with something a little bit definitional, and in fact, the man who coined the term, the network public sphere, is on the stage, and Yochai Benkler, Yochai faculty member here, well known for his work in lots of areas related to this topic. Yochai, I wonder if you might start out helping us think about the network public sphere as a concept, and then as you like, head into power and participation as well. Sure. So again, let me join everyone in thanking you, Mike, and thanking everyone for coming here to help celebrate a new degree of freedom for the center to do the work we do with all this amazing network of people coming together to talk and learn and think. The network public sphere is a way of thinking about the cluster of technologies and practices we use to talk to each other about what matters to us, to decide what counts as true or untrue, what counts as persuasive or unpersuasive, what counts as relevant to political debate and not relevant to political debate, and it's very much intended as a contra distinction to what characterized public discourse through much of the 20th century organized around mass media, whether state owned and controlled in many countries, whether market owned and market cleared in the U.S. as we knew it, and the whole structure, if you think of media studies and political communication in the developed in the mid to late 20th century, organized itself around this fact that to speak required a platform and the owner of the platform was a commercial entity that might use its platform power to affect the political agenda or might use it to sell it to someone else for advertising and in very imperfect market, and that was the entire debate. The network public sphere really tries to capture the idea that the net broke open that particular set of bottlenecks and allowed both market and non-market, both state and non-state, actors to participate and be able to actually exert power over each other, debate, argue, change the narrative, primarily around the question of framing a debate, saying what counts, what is happening, what counts as important, and mobilizing for action. So if you just look at the last, at last week, the confrontation between Keith Scott's family and the police over the videos, over the police videos, the fact that Keith Scott's wife already embeds in her practice, she has a phone, she is every much of a videographer and a video journalist as is the journalist. She has the capacity to capture, to tell the story, and she knows that there are multiple ways around which no one can block to be able to actually communicate. That's the source both of decentralization of power to shape the narrative, to shape how we frame the question, and that emerges from the physical devices through to the network architectures. But we also know that if that was the ideal opportunity, it's always been contested. In the first generation, it was contested very much by 20th century incumbents, whether it's telco carriers who wanted to control, whether it's media companies who controlled through copyright, and a lot of the battle was around opening up those affordances vis-a-vis the 20th century incumbents. I think a lot of what we've been seeing now is the emergence of new points of control, new points of power. So if we continue with the same theme, when Corinne Gaines tries to actually do the same thing and harness a live audience to stream her encounter with the police as a way of protecting herself from being shot, her account is shut down. And we learn that Facebook has an interface with the police. She ends up dead. We don't know what happened in those particular seconds. So there's no utopian one-directional decentralization of power. And decentralization of power itself is not necessarily utopian. In a study we're doing now with Media Cloud on looking at the election, it's very clear that all that on the online debate on immigration, Breitbart is one of the major voices larger than most of mainstream media. It's not clear valence right or left. It's just widely distributed power to work around concentrations of power, some 20th century and some that are emerging in you. Yochai, thank you. What a great start. And I feel I find you everywhere. I was reading this past week a book called Free Speech by Timothy Garten Ash, which is looking at the history of free expression and how it fits in this connected world. And he very much builds it on top of you and the network public sphere. So you are everywhere, your theories are pervading our work. And I'm excited to hear some back and forth, especially on some of those power and participation points too. Intasarab, I might turn to you next. Intasarab is a professor of law here at Harvard Law School and a scholar in a number of related fields and also the head of a center that is also here at Harvard Law School. And I think your work on Sharia source and many things that link together Harvard Law School's faculty through the Berkman Klein Center is just a great inspiration. We are delighted that you are part of the Berkman community and I wonder if you might reflect on your work and how it relates to power and participation in the network public sphere. Well, thank you. And I join in starting out with the congratulations and thank you for making this all possible to my client and all of you that are here because the Berkman Klein Center has been, as you said, very instrumental and essential to building up this project which I've been thinking about for a long time called Sharia Source which is housed at the Islamic Legal Studies Program here at the Law School and sort of built in combination or with support from the Berkman Klein Center. And so I want to tell you, before I tell you exactly what the project is, a little bit about how it emerged to give an idea of what it is. So Sharia Source came from, in part, studying Islamic law alongside American law and having a lot of ease in studying and understanding American law through being able to log on to Westlaw, Lexis Nexus, Bloomberg, now Google even, but not having a way of doing the same thing for Islamic law very easily. There was simply no access to sources on Islamic law. And so I thought what if we had such a source? What if we could build something like a Westlaw for Islamic law, a Google for Islamic law? And that's the basic idea of Sharia Source. But then, and related to this theme of power and participation and the network public sphere, it didn't seem enough to just have access to resources for people like me that were interested in it, could read the sources in their original languages, but it seemed that there also was a need in the public sphere for more participation or access to understanding what these Islamic law materials or debates were even about. What is Sharia in the first place? I got calls from newspapers asking this question as it comes up in the news and in policy circles and foreign policy debates. Can you explain what Sharia is and is ISIS Islamic? There was a famous Graham Wood article, which apparently was the most read Atlantic article ever with that title. And there was a debate about, you know, is ISIS Islamic and what is the Sharia or Islamic law that was behind it. And then the third call that I got was actually to go to help, to go to Brunei to help some understanding, help garner some understanding for American politicians and policymakers and members of the public as to what Islamic criminal law was, which is something that I've written about that I'm very interested in, because the, in a bizarre turn of events, the Sultan of Brunei who owned Hotel California had just passed an Islamic criminal law code. And so there were protests in California outside of this famous hotel because there was a fear that any Islamic criminal law code would necessarily discriminate against people. And would that be the case? Were there Islamic criminal procedures that might help guide that legal system? And so I went to look into that and that related to the TPP's ability to pass, because Brunei was one of the 14 countries that was part of the TPP deal and the emergence of Islamic criminal law in the mix that no one understood and thought to be all bad, and perhaps it would be bad if applied in sort of the draconian ways that we see about in the news. But from my research, that's not the only way that it can be applied. And there are certainly constraints that the criminal procedures would impose on draconian applications of the law. So things like that, to me, you know, sort of highlighted the relevance of Islamic law and in understanding what it is in ways that can really affect not only the research areas that I'm interested in and a lot of the academics here are interested in. But beyond that, a broader public conversation where others can participate in the debate, and what I wanted to do with Sharia sources basically make available both the sources on which Islamic law and all of its diversity is based and then also have an opportunity for scholars to engage one another and the public. And so we try to do that through building out a portal, really engaging people and then sort of publicizing or creating programming about it that might help inform public conversations about Islamic law. So all these P's here, participation, network, public age, and the portal and the people that are involved is basically what Sharia source is about. Thank you. That's a wonderful story and just a great, I think, instantiation of what this idea 19 years ago or so could grow into and has grown into. And my little story, remembering when I was five or six years ago, I think I heard from Dean Minow that a wonderful BC law scholar was going to come over here and visit for a bit, and I was in charge of the library at the time. And the librarians were so excited that this amazing library of Islamic law would be used in a particular way. And you came down and were burrowing through all of those works and then clearly had this idea that you could take that work that was buried in the basement of a library and make it alive in these important ways at this crucial moment in our history. So it's amazing what you're doing and I'm glad you're doing it with the Berkman client. So our library is amazing and to make it even, even more accessible through your work is wonderful. Zainab Tuchaki, you are one of the people who can expand this conversation yet further. One of the things I know that we all celebrate so much about the Berkman Center is a combination of people who have been here as fellows and also who are faculty members at other universities and who expand the reach. And I've always felt this has been one of the most special parts of the Berkman Center, certainly under Urs's leadership and others. It's expanded even more in this way, particularly internationally. You've done so much work, of course, thinking about Turkey in particular, but many other environments. And that story of the network public sphere I think is absolutely undergirding the work that you've done that's so important. So maybe if you could react to the prompt of power and participation in the network public sphere and welcome back to Harvard Law School. Thank you. So I want to start by saying the network public sphere has been life changing for me personally because I grew up in Turkey under the military regime, instituted under the last one, but the one and a half before, sorry, my part of the world. And I became a computer programmer because as a teenager I needed to find a job very quickly and I knew some programming and I wanted to pick a job that had no ethical implications. Because I was interested in science and I thought physics, nuclear bombs, medical, there's all this genetics. So I thought let me pick a clean thing that'll get me employed without any ethical issues. That didn't work out too well, did it? So this is to handicap anything I say, I'm not good at this, guessing the future. It turned out to be very important to me because I started working at IBM because of that, which had the intranet before the internet was in Turkey. So I was this teenage programmer that IBM reluctantly hired. They hid me from upper management for a long time because they had to do this multi-country thing and they had an intranet. And there I got the network public sphere within a company and it blew my mind because in Turkey there was only the television station and it was censored and it showed only US media. So we watched Little House on the Prairie, which my part of the world makes no sense because there is no middle of nowhere in Turkey. Anything you are, there's 5,000 years of history and more. But they didn't want to tell us what was happening in the southeast part of Turkey. So we watched Laurangles instead. In IBM I thought this is going to change the world because here I am. IBM's upper management doesn't know I work here because I'm a teenage girl and that's not okay yet. But I'm collaborating with 26 countries to localize something that pays the bills. Never mind that part. So I switched to sociology from computers and I said I'm going to do the social side of it. People thought I was crazy. Probably was. Then I came here to do my master's coincidental personal connections and people thought I was crazy because what is this internet society, computer science, sociology, how do they connect? I got a PhD and I got hired in spite of what I studied because I could do statistics and stuff. People were like, all right, we'll just let her do our statistics. In fact, that's how I paid my way through everything till then. And then Facebook came along and people started changing their minds about whether this was relevant or not. And then I found Berkman. It was the first time in my intellectual life I wasn't homeless. There were all these people who were working and thinking about all of this stuff before we were talking and thinking about it in any form or way. And what I've done since has been kind of just expanding this collaboration that I found for the first time literally in Berkman, the first time in my life that I was welcome for what I was interested in and not tolerated despite the weirdness. It wasn't Berkman. So I want to thank the Berkman community and thank you for making it on a more strong footing because I can't imagine something we need more, an independent mind into the network public sphere. And I will tell you guys one story about what's at stake and this will go from everything you guys have been saying. And that's my research into Facebook's role because we talked about Facebook too a minute ago on the network public sphere. So about two and a half years ago in August of 13th, 14th, on my Twitter feed I started noticing these Ferguson protests that were kind of bubbling and we all kind of know what happened since. But at the time they were really small and this teenager had been killed and there's a grieving community and the police department showed up with military grade armor. Now I have a lot of friends all around the world and I started tweeting these pictures we were seeing from Ferguson protests which was these armored vehicles with snipers on top and my Egyptian friends were like are you guys okay? No I know but my Bahraini friends were this is very familiar. So what happened was on Twitter which is part of the network public sphere but not algorithmically filtered the story dominated the whole conversation. And then two journalists who were charging their Wi-Fi and they were accessing Wi-Fi and charging their computers at McDonald's which is a common scene from protests around the world got disappeared by the Ferguson police department which got a lot more they literally just picked them up and illegally arrested them apparently. Which got my Egyptian friends were like free Wesley can we start a hashtag and trend it? So at this point I switched to Facebook to see what my friends on Facebook were saying about this and the conversation was absolutely absent on Facebook. I switched back to Twitter like everybody's talking about it I thought maybe my Facebook friends are kind of not talking about it. Well it turned out after much research which has since been implicitly confirmed by Facebook Facebook's algorithm was smothering the Ferguson news because it at the moment very much like the ALS ice bucket challenge which was people dumping ice water on their heads which was very algorithm friendly. And had it not been for this unfiltered Twitter because mass media wasn't covering much either. It's plausible to me to imagine a counterfactual world in which the movement that has since brought so many painful but necessary conversations to the public sphere to the state could it have been smothered in the beginning? Maybe. The rate of police killings we don't really have great statistics from 2014 before but NAACP thinks that they're steady. So it just might be our ability to hear and the ability of people to get together and say look at this and to document this is what's changed. But there's nothing as you say you know it's not like good or bad I like to say it's not the you know Thor Sammer the internet's not Thor Sammer only the purest of heart can pick up and only do good things with. It's a very complex moment and there's a lot of power at stake because there's a lot of money at stake and we now have machine intelligence coming into this space and making decisions and there are very few places where I see this kind of conversation happening because if you are near Silicon Valley I was there last week every table in the restaurant was talking about valuations of their stock every single table. The critical eye is difficult from the pull of so much money so it's only the and academia moves on its own pace it's these centers that do the work of what kind of a network public sphere do we have. What kind of things could we have what's the you know space of alternatives and to understand this power that's unleashed all over the world for good or bad my part of the world it's parts of it are a nightmare and parts of it are very liberating. I was in Gezi Park protests I documented them I studied them I tear gassed them and I tweeted through them I ended up live tweeting a coup it's a crazy world in some ways and just beginning so I'm super pleased to be in this conversation and to have this opportunity to try to think independently and critically about where are we going and what else could we be doing so. Sainem thank you and thank you for giving voice to the fellows program to your own experience and to everything you've it was amazing for me so thank you and I get my my news about Turkey primarily from your Twitter feed just to be clear so keep it up please it's very helpful and better than CNN. I hope I don't life to eat another coup that was not planned. That sounded like a hard thing. Catherine Bracey over to you as the penultimate panelists you this is going back a little bit in time since you and I started working for the Birken Center in exactly the same day which was I think I started two weeks did you you had me feed all right very well. It's like which twin was born sooner. This is this is actually part and parcel of our relationship so thank you I'm corrected appropriately by my friend Catherine Bracey we were in Pound Hall at that time and moved very quickly over to a new space you within the context of the Birken Center did I think every job along the way before you escaped we were very sad about that but you went to the west coast and have done so many interesting things since then both in terms of politics using the network public sphere in a literal way you've also done it in the context of Code for America you are now doing this interesting work in tech equity in the Bay Area maybe you could give your reaction to the importance of the power and participation in the public sphere. Yes I'm from that alien land on the west coast where all anyone talks about is valuations. Yeah well I must admit that I was a little nervous coming into this because I feel like I've been a little bit too close to the ground both in politics and in technology to have anything profound or sort of bigger picture to say but I've been assured by Yochai that I can just tell horrifying stories about politics and tech and everything will be great so I'm going to tell a horrifying story about. Did we all get out of jail free cards from Yochai? I would like one. I so I took the circuitous route to the west coast from here I left almost exactly six years ago the Berkman Center and had a little stint in Texas that we don't talk about and dropped out of grad school to join long story short join the technology team on President Obama's reelection campaign so I drove up to Chicago I actually brought my copy of Wealth of Networks into campaign office. You're such a good dork that's been. You're such a good dork and I got laughed at almost immediately and learned very quickly that no one in politics actually cares about the year yeah no they actually yeah they read polls that's about it. Eight months into that so I started very very early about 18 months before election day eight months into the campaign I moved to San Francisco to open the campaign's technology office and the idea was that we were going to recruit the best and brightest minds on the west coast to supplement our technology team that's based in in Chicago and I think we there were a lot of we knew that there were a lot of talented people who were really interested in supporting the reelection effort but were not willing to give up their jobs and take a drastic pay cut and move to Chicago for a few months so we decided we would go to them and this was the first time anyone had done this in political history and and we had no idea how it was going to work out and I landed there as it happens just as SOPA and PIPA the SOPA and PIPA victory tour was happening and everyone's very satisfied with themselves and I think I came at this moment where my job was to recruit technologists to sort of use their skills for the public good at least what I thought was the public good and they were also sort of at like coming to this realization that they had real political power at that time and I remember realizing at that moment that this was the first time they were coming having that epiphany that they had any political power and I had spent eight years here and I feel like we all thought that they all knew that there were people in DC who were making all of these decisions that were really life and death decisions for this industry and they really had no idea and I just it just kind of blew my mind how isolated the tech industry was given how pervasive it was and how democratizing it was and how we all thought it was going to change the world I think that was sort of then the seed for what has become the work that I do now which is very much a realization that none of the none of this power dynamic is going to change unless we change who not just uses the tools but who builds the tools and and right now that world is extremely I can't I know this is a loaded term but I can't think of a better term to describe it it's extremely inbred and scientists know what happens when inbreeding goes on for too long and and that's a real danger it's a danger if we if we are thinking about what the future of innovation is and what the future of democracy is if the people who have control of not just the wealth but the the 21st century means of production is held in such a very few mostly rich mostly white and Asian mostly male hands awesome well that is a horror story that we'll have to pick up on I offered to go last that's true that's true so Jonathan Zittrain you are someone here who needs literally no introduction you are one of the co-founders of the Berkman Center of course you are the the faculty chair of the Berkman Center these days you are my teacher here I owe enormous enormous debts to you of many many kinds I don't think I need to tee you up in any way to to bring this particular part together so over to you thank you John and thank you for your invitation to us to think longitudinally about the history of this center and what's been going on and I can't help but think outside in the foyer there there's all sorts of quotes selected from different people about law and justice and as this was being built and designed our dean Martha reached out to say can you think of any quotes that have an internet piece to it and you'll see right outside that door is a quote from John Perry Barlow former lyricist for the Grateful Dead Wyoming cattle rancher and breeder and why did you turn to Catherine when you I want to ask well she was talking about inbreeding she asked me to link it up and she conceded to my going last so it's working out very well and John Perry perhaps after he left out his most important credential well what would that be berkman fellow a berkman fellow our first berkman fellow along with alex mcgovray and others right that's true one of our first berkman fellows the first says charlie again like twins being born who came a little bit ahead and uh he even gave to us on a special occasion a physical hard drive containing all of his email which um we then scrolled away in the library but we're looking forward to that sort of unearthing and nobody is bashed it with a hammer right nobody has bashed it with a hammer and the librarians don't take kindly to that some things don't change but John Perry perhaps after having consumed some prohibited substances uh in davos switzerland in 1998 wrote something called a declaration of the independence of cyberspace and uh he framed it a little bit after the american declaration of independence and it said uh as i recall governments of the industrial world you weary giants of flesh and steel we come from cyberspace the home of mind and on behalf of the future we ask you of the past leave us alone and it was this sort of libertarian creed decor that was in its way the starting gun for a celebration of what yochai later described so wonderfully as the networked public sphere in which you didn't need to have the funneling function of government to provide the public forums the facilities by which to distribute pamphlets that we'd be able to talk to one another and uh let things go and that that was a very important thread in thinking about the public sphere and in fact celebrating it that then as we sort of leveled up and hit the next phase of the development of the mainstreaming of the internet things got more complicated and it took a while to realize it and it's it's very telling zane up story of twitter versus facebook that unfiltered feed can be so liberating and then there's this moment where the second order effects start to come in and everybody realizes this is an unfiltered feed i'm going to start putting my ads for a rolex watch in there or i'm going to start making as if i am an activist when in fact i'm the government and uh then you wonder well who will govern the space or how are we supposed to navigate it and i think alex mcgillibray second fellow at the britain center never a fellow never too late alex talked to us after the program and alex one of our star students and alums went on to among other things job at twitter as its general counsel and i think has been quoted this is your chance to correct the record as having said he comes from the free speech wing of the free speech party dot dot dot let the tweets flow and that has been sorely tested over time because if we want broad based participation in the public sphere a kind of opportunity for everybody to have a seat at that table and we believe that dialogue is improved the more that people who have different views talk to one another it calls to mind terry fischer's uh developing theories of semiotic democracy having a chance to own the concepts that define our world it's a it's another aspect actually i think of joe nye's soft power which in its initial definition was basically the power of hollywood and the way in which that is an ambassador for us around the world in a way that may be a tank or arms sales complimentary at least and possibly a good substitution but that it's it's not actually who owns who's allowed to use a word on pain of copyright infringement although that has been a big part of the history in the fights but rather just who feels as if he or she can participate without being driven out whether by vitriol by doxing just daring to stick your head up and say hey here's a view i hold what can come back at you thinking about the free speech implications both for that individual and for the dialogue we so much want to encourage that is the hangover after the initial round of celebration that marked probably the first five to ten years of the development of the internet and i think at this moment if i had to kind of put a bookmark in here so when we come back should we come back in about 15 years and see where where we're at it's have we how have we solved the problem of eliciting contribution from as many corners as possible and encouraging it while being able to figure out when voices should be excluded when behaviors should be ruled out of bounds and whether it's traditional sovereigns that should hold that power as they have or whether it is a form of self-governance is yet to be determined i think about the battles over i can to have several united states senators telling us this week that the future of the internet depends on a department of commerce memorandum of understanding with a california nonprofit it strikes me as unlikely but we digress but the real fight then is governments governing self-governance whatever that might look like algorithmic governance somehow setting up a program and letting it just decide and corporate governance i mean it's weird to see some of these big issues basically being a customer service issue for a twitter or a facebook and believe me i sympathize with them they're like they don't know what to do what are they supposed to do when are they supposed to be deciding who can speak and who can't when in essence at the moment they're one of a handful of gatekeepers so these are problems that as an intellectual matter are fascinating because nobody has it solved no one has figured this out but my hope is that with the kinds of folks in this room and connected virtually through our pads we have a good shot at experimenting with different solutions being able to weigh them with enough distance from it that if they're not working even if we propose them we'd say like let's never speak of this again or even write it up and say we tried it it didn't work and to iterate towards something that people really feel identity with and a part of rather than just these technologies appear on their doorstep and they look to see whether version seven is much different from version six and kind of go on their way that's that's kind of my greatest hope for this sphere that there's a much democracy and participation in the framing of the code and the governance as there is just in the content of a given conversation that it facilitates wonderful jennathan thank you i think that is the perfect segue in a participatory mode to turn to all of you i think david weinberger may once describe this group as the group formerly known as the audience is that right so we have such brilliance in this room if you have thoughts comments questions the mics are coming around and if they're not immediately i will can i actually ask um alex a question you can put you right on the spot first of all i should have a mac please i don't recognize them if people don't call them amac oh sorry alex migillivre would you like to introduce yourself i'm alex but most people call me because that was my email handle but i was one of the first students of the berkman center and probably benefited more than almost anybody here from the wonderfulness of the center a bunch of us are tied for that amac i think so so happy that the clients have chosen to continue that and to make it something that will happen for generations more so thank you um well importantly what you didn't say is that you you were one of like the very um i guess you were the exception to the rule of smart people in silicon valley who actually thought about this stuff and i think we had this warped perception because you and andrew mcglockland used to come back all the time um and like put forward these hard problems and that gave me the sense that everyone in san francisco in tech was thinking about these things as hard as you guys were um and i guess i should have known that because you were flying all the way across the country to have these conversations which should have been a clue that they weren't happening in san francisco so i should make that qualification that there were a few of you who were thinking this stuff through at the time at twitter um and you have made the trip back east so we kind of look like that and i'm wondering if you have a similar experience of sort of crossing the country and being horrified by what you found on the other side if i'm so uh sad that i chose to stand up because my mouth was hurting watch out all of you around the edge i will never do that again in this crowd um uh so um um uh my current gig is with the u.s. government i work in the white house doing tech policy um and uh i have found it to be i i'm a fairly optimistic person i would say so i um i found it to be great like i really found it to be very welcoming of the tech perspective and um completely engaged in the harder uh problems um as katharine was saying um so i i don't see as much of that disjoint um there's definitely places you go where people might not know the way things are done indifferent like in the on the west coast or here at harvard um but that's a total advantage to those of us who have been around uh because you can appear really smart just by saying things that are pretty basic and from the other um from the other side um but yeah i haven't i i have found at least uh within my current role that the the receptiveness to trying to do things differently um even to the word disruption within government um is a is great um and uh and i would i would also say i i i um and i'd love your thoughts on this i've always felt that the that the engineers that i talked to back west had a really well developed sense of uh morality and ethics um it's just they didn't necessarily see that as applying to anything that they were doing at the time um and so you know when napster came out you talked to students and they would be like well you know i only download uh artists that have already made lots of money like they have this whole very complicated uh sense of how why how they're doing it in a in a moral way and i i feel like a lot of engineers are that way um and so my my question is not necessarily like how do we bring how do we bring people to the moral ethical hard questions but how do we awaken them to the fact that the stuff that they're doing right now it has that uh that part um and um i think that's that's something that that is hard um i think is really benefited from the work that you're doing to bring a lot more diverse sets of views into the building and creation of these technologies well am i supposed to answer yeah go i think it was back to you for sure okay um so i will say that when after that uh kind of first realization about how isolated um silicon valley metaphysical silicon valley was from um kind of the rest of the world i had the task of trying to recruit a bunch of these people to help build uh the campaign's digital infrastructure and i was really scared that no one was going to sign up i mean we had no way to know how much energy there was so we actually went very quickly to the opposite problem of not having enough work for the hundreds of people who raised their hands to do and i was i i would say probably by the end of it we got mid six figures worth of engineering time out of the set of developers who just wanted to help get the president re-elected um some of them quit their jobs and moved to florida for the end of the campaign i mean it was uh pretty heartening to see so i would say that there's a lot of um you know i think that the moral compass is there it's just they don't know what they don't know and that's where isolation becomes a real problem so when there aren't people in the room who can ask questions or say you know maybe we shouldn't put that filter on snapchat because it's kind of racist like no one says that because they're not in the room and those you know how do you have a um a moral you know these questions about conversations about these big moral questions when everyone in the room thinks the same thing that you do it's very hard to come to any sort of governance structure that's going to work for everybody um if that's if those are the people around the table anybody else like to jump in the minute well this is a feast and i can't resist asking for some predictions uh there was arab spring and then there was shutdown yeah there was freedom and then there was enclosure there was it's all free and then there's tolls there was the future of the internet and how to stop it and then there was you know can we have global networks that are networking the centers of people that are doing networks i'd like some some predictions uh twitter as i understand it is the front lines of trying to deal with violent extremism at this moment the united states government buys the data sets from all of the internet providers what's the what's your prediction here and what's your prediction particularly about public discourse democracy access i think zaynab yeah so that voice and then so i study network social movements that's something i do i've you know studied the arab uprisings i was at taher square i studied the gezi park protest many others and i think the interesting thing is how the unintended consequences are surprising to give you a sort of the snapshot of what i think right now which is plug forthcoming book is that i think the network public sphere gave these movements this enormous ability to organize quickly and at scale and which was very empowering you know people who had no voice otherwise kind of could get together very quickly and i saw this again and again and they came together in a very participatory ethos i mean john perry would have been proud of their ethos and that ethos goes back to the sixties movements say the port here on statement from the sixties would have been very much home in taher square we want to do this but the culture of this wanting voice and getting that voice very quickly and also using that voice to organize logistically they took the organizational the communication networks became organization networks and i watch these young people perform amazing feasts of organization the problem was and i couldn't have foreseen this and i don't think anybody could have maybe somebody could have but i didn't was that when you scale up so quickly it's very hard to go into your very first curve organizationally at 100 miles an hour and especially if you're coming from a very participatory moment what happens is all the participation without infrastructure for decision making paralyzes the movement so they have tactical freeze they can go to taher and they can never figure out because they first came together that day so doing things the harder older way ironically meant that they had all this how to work together built up that in the very first curve the first challenge they faced wasn't when everything was at stake they had built that up together now what does this mean for the future of these moments it doesn't mean that they're destined to do this it also doesn't mean that they should go back to doing you know leafletting instead of twitter because that's nonsense right it's not the thing what i'm seeing is this incredible awareness in many social movements that this was their problem that the participation and the scale on up very quickly it's almost like a startup that skills up very quickly but it's done of a vc to come rescue you got a government coming after you that is not a good place to be at 100 miles an hour and gaze apart protest zero to 100 miles in two days that power turned out to be a weakness the reflection and this kind of analysis of i sometimes liken it to climbing up Mount Everest but a sherpa's carrying your oxygen tank sounds great unless you run into trouble and then you're not a mountaineer somebody helped you up internet was our sherpa and then we ran into problems that you run into above 8000 meters and we weren't mountaineers because that was our very first mountain their understanding of this makes me hopeful because i hear this reflected back it's not just my analysis i hear this perspective reflected back through social movement people around the world who've been through two waves now with the the Seattle wto movements and all of that and now this two way so i think there's maturity in saying let's figure out how to also make decisions together and do the sort of long term work together but also use these tools because going back to the old tools isn't the thing the unfortunate thing here is what people have alluded to which is for my part of the world is that when you have authoritarianism kind of dispersed quickly but without intermediary institutions that we've built in you know europe it took hundreds of years i lived in belgium in a town where the germans had massacred the town inhabitants twice within living memory so it wasn't like europe was very easy but they built from that destruction the middle east i think never had the chance to go from you know knocking over authoritarianism to building institutions and in that vacuum we saw extremism like isis jump up and use the same tools and it was surreal to me i found myself discussing with my friends at google because of youtube where i had spent many years discussing how not to censor activist videos we found ourselves discussing what to do about beheading videos that were produced to go viral and i was like this is so real how are we discussing this but that's where we are am i hopeful or not i'm hopeful that there's a lot more understanding i'm not as hopeful because it's moving very fast and very wrapped up so so thank you we look forward to your forthcoming book for more on a little plug but yeah i'd be very interested in additional predictions one thing i might pull out of dean minnow's comment which was in part about you know going from openness and all the excitement that i certainly think all of us who were near the bergman center at the beginning felt as the predominant kind of hope right with with the internet to a period of various forms of enclosure the other thing that's happened of course is that authoritarians and others who are acting against the will of the people are using the tools themselves both to put out propaganda you know but also to practice surveillance at a very very large scale and seems to me that one of the predominant changes has been the extent to which these are actually very dangerous tools in that way particularly for activists and particularly when we look at a wide range of people using the tools the least sophisticated users are in real peril by virtue of using them and not really understanding them as well so in some of these predictions i'd be interested if that surveillance question might actually might factor in as well it was certainly going to be big part of what i wanted to talk about so predictions are hard particularly about the future right predictions also assume a certain fairly deterministic and at least predictable set of interactions and i would resist that i think it's more a question of threat models and competing threat models so jonathan put on the table the threat model of the mob the the censorship of the gamer game of the of the mob responding we have the concern with cyberterrorism we have all sorts of a threat model that's about the distribution of power and i worry about that threat model because to me the threat model is much remains much more concentrated power than decentralized power and concentrated power both in the state and in the market and the problem we've seen is that repeatedly a generation that imagined that government could function fully well in the kansas era gets replaced by a generation that believes in self-regulating markets and ends up crashing and burning and we're in a moment where uh and for a very brief period maybe jon perry barlow's ideal of of uh anarchism being able to be a functional political program as ebb and mogul and put it in 99 seems to have crashed and burned on precisely the the shows of what zaynab described for the arab spring it's the the impossibility of pure structuralism we have people working the primavera working on blockchain and the ways in which the failure of full structuralistness actually to function under these conditions so we have this persistent sense of imperfect systems and we have to understand the threat model but you talked about surveillance in authority in authoritarian countries and uh we're in a post-snowden era unless you're describing us as an author could be us too yeah surveillance and control pervade our lives whether it's controlled by private companies and the idea of the market or whether it's public company or whether it's the public uh and the space zaynab has a great paper on combining these capabilities together for how essentially the political system gets uh uh framed and controlled so when you say how do i project the future i can imagine a class of threats that combine high degrees of surveillance and control by states that find their legitimation from fears of cyber terrorism and cyber crime uh that end up converting a network into one that has relatively few affordances to actually act and mobilize and speak by comparison to what's possible in order to be able to control them but at the same time reports on its users to a central actor either to control their actions and mobilizations or to control their purchasing behavior and all of this legitimated within the constraints of you're getting what you want in the market and you're getting the security you want from the state under conditions that are tightly controlled i think that's an entirely plausible pathway i also see a plausible pathway where we do actually solve some of these problems where we uh commit politically morally to that being the solution and we try to build models of governance that actually try to leverage the advantages and overcome the limitations of each of these so if you look at susan's beautiful talk susan croff it's beautiful talk this afternoon about cities and responsive communities a lot of it sounds like just back to a government providing everything but then you look inside and you see uh how much of the work is about actually moving some things over to social provisioning something over to market provisioning resisting what she's calling the the urban intelligence industrial complex that's purely based in market but also uh not completely relying on one so building those kinds of models building the kinds of models that connect with technology to actual self-governance those are the models of governance that i could imagine work out but i do i do think that the core question of whether the threat model is the power of distributed networks that are unruly or the power of concentrated concentrations of power that use network surveillance and platform designed to control people around the network is the core question and the more we're willing to buy the story of the other the cyber terrorist the immigrant and the criminal the more we'll be willing to concentrate power in nation states controlling these systems the more we'll be willing to rely on single companies that will control our data and keep us secure and satisfied and in fact the more brittle and susceptible to control will end up with the system wow other predictions jonathan looks like you're stepping up to the make well uh i confess that lately yochai's threat model of centralized control has been on my mind i'm not sure why as november nears and it is a reminder that technologies that are so powerful and so beneficial with just a small tweak in the surrounding environment can be amazingly intrusive and uh negative for us and thinking about how to tyrant proof in the centralized models threat model the tools we've built to create a safe society to solve crimes and other problems uh that's one of the things i think we are working on and uh you know you do wonder how richard nixon might have fared if he were uh at his most paranoid and worried today and in office with the tools uh at his disposal um i guess if i had to write a sequel to the future of the internet and how to stop it today it might be well we tried um and so luckily i don't i still want to think of the wheel is spinning i told you so is that another alternative please shut the door on your way out yeah um but it also is a reminder that complimenting all of the focus on the technologies themselves and even on governance structures is just thinking about the people that on which they operate and from whom we are expecting contribution and there you have to play a really long game and it's it's why when i look at the work that sandra is doing on youth media or lea plunkett is doing about kids and their relationship to this thinking about even how in the public school system where and elsewhere in schooling that nobody feels as if he or she has figured that piece out how to have engaging in civil and civic discourse how to meet somebody that you disagree with and not immediately think it has to become as it would be between sports teams a battle just between fans that's not like you're ever gonna reconcile the oakland raiders and the pittsburgh stealers you can't have them have a summit and finally bury their uh their dispute i mean that's like the that's a feature not a bug but we shouldn't think of that in the marketplace of ideas and i worry about the neoliberal project of actually welcoming disagreement and having a way to process it that requires tending and a number of us i know here have been charmed and astounded by wikipedia that it even exists it you know works in practice but not in theory and uh it is a time for your bumblebee metaphor that's right i know incorporate by reference but um that is exceptional and even it may not persist and trying to take that apart and put it back together so we understand some of the secret sauce seems to be part of the long game we need to play to have a populace that will make the most of of what there is to offer and i don't even think it's just a mob although that has its own threats when one individual can create sock puppets and with a little skill be in effect a mob you can't have that as the uh the ship that the convoy will have to go at and i i think it's actually why i look at um intasar's project too taking uh a body of material that is in part an oral tradition not a written one and being able to reduce it to a format that people can engage with and talk to one another about seems to me such a great example of how to move a project like this along um and i would think that they're correspondingly in its way be a chance i'd love to persuade jk rowling to um put into the public domain book one of harry potter there's still six like you know first one is free and then you get hooked and make it so that that first book is something that students in fourth fifth sixth grade could do incredible exegesis upon with no intellectual property barriers and get into the kinds of debates that we get into over other materials uh as a way of of finding the joy in public participation in a network spear i hear that yale university pressed it pretty well on both of your books despite they're both being available online right so that's true they might also get your level of sales yes we don't have the counterfactual but yes they did okay just just just them's fighting words when you say will wikipedia work jury's thought we've got such a massively successful set of people here around the cooperation group that have come now for a decade and studied the details of wikipedia and free software and sasha sitting here with online cooperatives and um um i've been there with open video i mean there's just so many people here have worked on the details of making these things work that if there's a hope for actually learning what it means to construct governance on top of an open platform in conversation with market players when you're talking about um company-based peer production summer here is is uh part of the european uh cdp project so supreme of era um documenting hundreds or thousands of successful models of provisioning i was just reading a paper uh by vasilius crystallics and others about people doing uh open design on a commons-based production model of prosthetics for 3d printing that are a fraction of the price of the ones that are this is not a question it's a massively important research project but it's not a who knows whether it works we if anybody knows we do if i may in the uh final words specific uh meaning in law but uh i i guess it's less does it work and more i think of the immortal words of jim kirk for how long mr scott for how long and it's exactly the research you're averting to that that says that points the way towards how to do it i just i wouldn't want and i don't think you would want to presume that this is a force of nature so powerful that it doesn't need any help to realize itself no no question but you've got our former fellow myofooster morel now sitting in barcelona with the city government building what it means to put barcelona in the commons combining both commons-based production with a municipality um we're building it trying to at least some of us um uh and very much in this community the same government that took barcelona.com away from its registrant through the uniform dispute resolution process and uh claimed it as its own i think there's there's truth she might be i'm gonna move to the we'd like to say something brief and then we'll go go to i'll say something brief about predictions because my i mean my inclination my first inclination was is never to predict and it's instead to go to the past as a historian but i think that they work equally as well and it's for something that jz said about the people always being at the center they always have been and so i think there's no reason to do anything but predict that they always will be when it comes to trying to grapple with some of these big questions about how well how do we grapple with the big questions in a collective collaborative way and and do what i think berkman has done very well and and what makes it such a nice uh home or partner for this project on sharia as well is to to do it in a way that targets certain communities of people to engage while being open access or open um opening the conversation to everyone else but it's going to be the people i think at the core uh of figuring out the problems of democratizing the information and the conversations and ultimately of figuring out how to govern and and use the information hopefully to to toward a better world it's a great insight it also i think helps bridge and think about how the body of work the okay i was just referencing in cooperation might be something on which we can build as you build this this new project so what a what a neat what a neat thought uh joe and i've had the mic for a while i wonder how much as we think about predictions we are being extraordinary ethnocentric and if you go back 20 years to the 90s to john perry barlow and also to bill clinton's statement that nailing that the maintaining control of the internet in china will be like nailing jello to a wall and we look at the fact that we talk about a global internet but in fact china is the largest part of a global internet and it has in effect nailed jello to the wall and that barlow's utopianism seems quaint at best particularly for that part of the world you predict 20 years ahead do you think you were good 20 years ago uh in other words what the view was that sovereign governments couldn't do it in fact the biggest sovereign government biggest in internet terms has done it pretty effectively and it's not the argument that the great firewall uh it can't be breached by vpns or something of course it can the point is use social control over corporations plus police control to lock up people who don't who deviate from that and you have in china an extremely well controlled internet and so as we look to the future shouldn't we go back to the 90s and ask how good were our predictions not for the internet globally because we're making a mistake to say global but for the largest piece of the internet weren't we badly wrong i suspect any number of you have a lot to say zeneb do you want to start and then uh and kathrin bracey you've gotten the mic the least so if you want to jump in on this one you can be ready but you don't have to of course to to make even worse uh i think it's very important to understand that the governments especially authoritarian governments are going to evolve in the space and what i'm seeing is not just that china has this enormous infrastructure which not just sensors because censorship isn't their main problem it's used as a stabilization mechanism so there's participation from the public so that it can stabilize itself and not be blindsided meanwhile effectively curtailing collective action there's great papers by gary king on how exactly this works but that's china let's say because it's got a domestic internet that's billion people and all of that so what does russia have what does turkey have well it turns out that a very good way of censorship is too much information and this is sort of to add to your threat models is the central powers using decentralization to confuse and overwhelm the public so that you give up trying to think it's knowable so the current censorship model i see in these countries like russia turkey where the cat's out of the bag you really can't shut the internet down because the e-government of turkey runs on it but what they can do is the network public sphere as soon as there is a claim to something happening there is this flood of counterclaims that it's a hawks every picture from is from gaza there's no other place on the planet every picture of government misconduct is not from turkey and it is too much information as a method of censorship and targeted drowning and distraction targeted distraction so very ironic to me that at this point that we haven't really a clay shirky had said it there's a filter problem not a too much information problem but we hadn't really figured out 20 years ago that this would become a more effective censorship than actual blocking of the internet because people want to circumvent they can circumvent but if you're flooded with 30 pieces of contradictory information with no way to make sense of it that is very very effective and that is a way in which the centralized powers could help us re decentralize if they were to step up as effective filters or we could have collective filtering mechanisms to counter this and that could happen but it is it's a threat that I don't think any of us had seen that too much information itself would be a more effective censorship than unplugging the tv and shutting off the news was that's 20th century and that's there so I'm just adding that as a threat model other views I have nothing to say about China but you know back to the sort of prediction space I don't know if this is really a prediction but it's interesting for my sort of naive outsider point of view why no one in tech or in Silicon Valley or people who are talking about these issues questions the distorting effect of venture capital as sort of the primary economic infrastructural piece for this entire industry and I feel like you could someone could who had a lot of time and in a beautiful library and research money could tie back a lot of the problems we see in the industry now to venture capital as sort of the source of the problem so maybe if we could answer some of those questions we could do a better job of predicting the future I think it's crazy maybe unprecedented and in human history that Uber a venture backed company who's on paper worth many billions of dollars is planning to move 3000 employees create 3000 jobs in Oakland where I live literally across the street from my apartment and the overriding sentiment is no don't come meanwhile Oakland is one of the most economically depressed cities in the country it is insane I mean I someone correct me if I'm wrong but I've never heard of a city saying don't come to a company that was planning to bring 3000 jobs and untold other sort of indirect economic development to a place and I think that those kinds of reactions to the economy that is being created by the internet industry is something that should give us that should be a real red flag for us as we think about who's left in and who's left out and who has access to this growth and what it and what kinds of sort of nihilistic reactions it might cause for people who don't see it as benefiting them at all well an interesting way to bridge in a way your response on the and the question around ethnocentrism might be also to say as we think about particular communities we may think everybody wants job creation everybody wants new you know innovative companies that use technology and that may not be true in every every circle everyone wants a job they just don't see this as a as an industry that's going to create anything for them it's just going to displace them my rent went up 20 last month um you know if you look at someone who's trying to raise a family on uh $80,000 a year even I mean you can't afford to um really build a city and so there's questions about well you know how does venture capital incentivize building sustainable growing companies like it's no who who would ever pass an internet company down to their kids like that will never happen it's just bizarre to even think about um and so what does that mean for the kind of economy that we're creating and how how sustainable it can be okay I want to come back more directly perhaps to uh there are two aspects to your question Joe one is uh why believe us now we were so wrong then and two um uh what about China um and so let me take them so the first is I think the uh cyberspace is a new space and it will change everything was a view in the 90s certainly Charlie and John Perry were sort of central but it was contested um and it was contested precisely along the question of were there points of control that could be reasserted I think so one of the things is research projects right Jonathan's work with Ben Edelman God knows how long ago the work that John then continued on just mapping the facts how effective is the censorship that's the first thing we start to do and again this is work here in the center to actually try to test the proposition can you or can't you does the internet uh interpret censorship as as as damage and route around it or not and the answer it turns out is sort of kind of but not really and it's if you build a system like China does or Saudi Arabia then you can actually manage it that was a fact that came out of the research and I think that's a central commitment we have um but the second point which is about the the uh American centrism of our policy debate uh I think has massive implications and again I'll go back 19 years 1998 ebb and mogul and NYU at a conference that I organized arguing about encryption export controls talking about the fact that we were doing our policy on clipper chip and encryption export controls ignoring the fact that these communications were going to protect people who otherwise would have their fingernails torn down as he used that metaphor I still remember 19 years later the fact that our debate over encryption and surveillance and policing ignores the fact that if we force by design our companies to design visible technologies breakable technologies the millions of people who will be put under a boot for longer than necessary doesn't come into our conversation is a travesty we have real choices we have choices between focusing on information security on resilience and robustness of systems and on policing through visibility there are plausible arguments to be made but we don't make the argument that if we focus on making it possible for the FBI to read everything and that's the thing we lean on we're also making it possible for China to keep its framework and for other countries in the world particularly at the time when we're seeing the democracy in such a crisis 20 years ago maybe you could have still been optimistic you look at Latin America you look at Central and Eastern Europe you look at India you it looks like things are going in the right way today between Brexit and the Trump campaign between the breakdown of the Shenzhen project and the rise of the Swedish Democrats that alone Le Pen or alternative for Deutschland we don't know that that's where we're going it's irresponsible for us not to think of those terms when we are regulating so the FBI can tweak here and there under what is potentially at least a reasonably law and order system can I um fighting words maybe for you but um so one thing I maybe it's from what part of world I am watching sort of the Middle East in this integration and I have been saying and I'm a very much a first amendment person as the planet goes I'm probably in the 1% of people who believe in it but I think the first amendment looks really nicer when you've got Canada up north and Mexico down south and two oceans then uh in the middle of a civil war with ethnic cleansing being organized online and we've seen this happen again and again in a lot of times so we're seeing this in Burma now which we had this authoritarian regime fall apart no intermediary institutions and if you ever thought that no religion was totally immune to this kind of stuff it's extremist Buddhist monks organizing mostly on Facebook because that is a network public sphere here it's just kind of I can't believe I'm saying these sentences to be honest um and there's been 4 to 800 deaths in the past year uh it's the biggest source of refugee outflow in Southeast Asia right now I can't run the counterfactual but Facebook's a major part of what's going on because we have people without the digital literacy or literacy and things go viral and it's like the anti-Semitism of the 30s the crazy stories go viral the Rohingya are eating your children's stories it's on Facebook people are like it must be true and they are now all networked and these phones are you know Chinese 30 dollar phones in everybody's hands and I'm not sure like this is the first amendment framework doesn't work because you do have and I think even if it was in the United States it wouldn't work right because this is an incitement to violence very clear but it starts before that right it starts it starts with the hate speech which we would be okay with because you know we're the United States and we've got Canada and we've got Mexico but there without the intermediary institutions the the transition from authoritarianism to the free willing network uh sphere has come with this enormous problem I was just speaking to Facebook people I was saying look this is you know forget everything else the quarterly earnings or whatever this is going to go down in history as a potential like the way radio Rwanda is in Rwanda's history and I you know who knows maybe there's two people on Facebook who are in the India office who's looking after five countries and one of them is Burma and who's looking at this and I'm just trying to raise this for the complication on the other hand I've spent my whole life opposing government censorship and corporate censorship of speech and here I am giving this very complicated story of right to life and right to assembly is perhaps is gonna trump but who's going to decide this right there's no Burmese government you can count on on this as I said I don't know if this is that this is what I was trying to talk about with Facebook people saying you've got to prioritize this maybe they will so it's why we need research centers to think about these things engage maybe the only positive thing I can say here is that the more we know the more we can actually say look this is happening and even if we don't have an answer because there's no answer I can propose for my back pocket that I'd be very happy with but then again there is you know the big 800 people that and the biggest refugee outflow in that part of the world is Facebook driven so I have one last question I'd like to ask but any reactions to this question before before we do so the last question I'd love to have everybody take a crack at is we have this amazing opportunity thanks to the Klein family and the Berkman family to continue this work for the next whatever it might be and this is I just think such a such a great luxury that here we're able to bring together this community and to study it and I think one of the things that animates each of our work is thinking about hard problems what are the hard problems that persist and you've each surfaced one or more during your time but I thought we might go down the row and maybe we'll you've just spoken so maybe we'll end with using it and and start with Jonathan but what is the hard problem that you most are excited to study in the Berkman Klein Center in the years to come that's funny I was gonna crowdsource that to this audience because already everybody in audiences like gosh what would my hard problem be so it's there should be like cards under the chair or something that you old tech you could write on but we should create a email address Twitter hashtags yeah something like that to get it going but certainly lately and it does just tee right into what we've been talking about this field awkwardly named algorithmic accountability and I actually saw Zana talking with one of our more colorful and famed cryptographers about how to rename the field like algorithm is not the right word and accountability isn't the right world but other than that it's great but this field in which we are going to in the name of efficiency in the name of what great features it can give us in the name of defeating we're solving the filter problem we're going to be turning over to code and learning code no less a lot of control to advise us to shape our day to shape our lives what jobs we get where we might go and there is currently no easy model that even exists on which to pattern how that should work or what boundaries if any to set and none of us I don't think is terribly excited about you know cranking out some regulation that gets agreed to when we think we're done but doesn't make the problem go away not to do anything either and I will be the last person not to appreciate just how quickly the technology moves into celebrate that but this is one of those instances where being able at least to gather data to know what's happening and to iterate quickly as we see problems come up has got to be vital and that is a big big project in this as Charlie calls it rhetorical space for the next interval awesome Catherine Bracey all of the problems I can think of are actually human problems and not technology problems which is maybe the point but I really think if we're going to figure out this you know really crack this question around whether the internet can realize its democratic potential you know I've spent the last five years or so working on technology to make politics more equal I think what I have come to understand is that we can't address the questions of political inequality without addressing the questions of economic inequality and that those are really where the roots of all of this these conversations lie so people are thinking about sort of new funding models for the tools that we need or anything like that I think would be really great value add to the field so I think about the mission that we have is in what seems to be a very narrow area of looking at Islamic law but that ends up being an area of a lot of data we're talking about 1400 years and the whole globe and so part of the mission is to gather that data in a way and make it available in a way that's really accessible and really useful so one of the big picture problems that I look forward to working with Burke Klein folk on is how do you use technology to in this era of big data to to collect that not only to collect the information but to channel it in a way that people who after all are at the heart of all this can use it so that it can be useful and used in ways that are positive and not not scary not authoritarian not life-threatening so it's a problem of it's the big data problem and how do we make it useful and wonderful okay two kinds of answers the first is I think we should commit to not knowing which is what we've been superb at for 20 years because the richness of insight the sheer joy of ignoring disciplinary boundaries has been has made this community what it is and if undisciplined as a founder idea is embodied in Charlie then it is I think well embodied in this community and you see it with every year of fellows and as the network continues this very lightweight network of people coming up with ideas and questions and problems that I had no idea were interesting and the next year they're completely indispensable and I think that's what's so beautiful about this place and the way in which it's been independent from the university but at the same time of it and outside it and as a place for conversation for myself I am and will continue to focus on the question of how we spent 40 years creating a deeply unequal economic framework the extent to which the set of technologies we're beginning to see from automation and robotics to platforms to big data and surveillance to 3d printing will or won't be nudged in a direction of a highly extractive form of capitalism or one that is potentially economically participatory that's my set of questions and there are people here I know and love who are working heavily on it but that's just me and a bunch of others and there are many others and and we're going to learn next year and the year after what we are interested in keep at it say no I just want to say yes to everything the one challenge that I'm seeing right now emerge very fast is machine intelligence especially machine learning it's like software is Moore's law every month I see papers that blow my mind that are building on last month's papers it's like those early days of microchip miniaturization and we're like oh this is going to change the world and we didn't know I think we are at such an inflection point with machine intelligence think in three years that's we're going to be just shocked by the things that become very quickly mainstream and they hold such power that the question that you just raised is what kind of an economy are we going to have once we have machine intelligence that is just going like this it's I'm not prone to hype on this I think so I I feel safe to say this is happening and that brings the question that Catherine's been sort of coming back and forth a lot is who is designing this thing that is so powerful and by diversity we don't just mean same kind of people with you know just female Stanford CS grads right that's not the point is that the very the different life experiences across the socioeconomic spectrum because like driverless cars we're looking at it part of means thinking great safer the other part of means this is the employment of last resort to maybe half a billion men on the planet do you really want to unemployed half a billion men in 10 years nothing has ever good come I'm sorry but nothing has ever come out of mass unemployment of men for whom this is this is not a joke this is driving is what all immigrants do this is why our taxi drivers are most immigrants this is what rural to urban immigrants first job this is a job of last resort to hundreds of millions of people and yes we'll have it safer but what the heck and this is kind of like goes back to the uber argument that you're making how do we envision the power of something like this so that it doesn't take us back to 1935 you know or 1938 or something like that with this grace mass of people rather we look at it as how does it become distributive in a very different way because there are all these alternative possibilities I can go John Perry Barlow on but where's the politics of it and who's at the table discussing the technology part of it while designing it so much to do so so much to do and a great platform to do it on I've kept class over for about eight minutes I'm very sorry about that but I would love to just end with one reflection and then one further big round of thank yous the reflection is really just thinking about these two great questions that have animated a lot of this discussion about how did we get it wrong on China as it were and predicting the future and the kinds of tools really that we would bring to that that conversation and seems to me actually though we may have gotten it wrong in the front end or at least contested in a certain way in the front end I actually think we know a fair amount now about how China or Russia for that matter or Turkey on its worst days or Iran controls the space which is a lot of things right they use technology that we of course have now figured out empirically how that happens we know that it happens with lots of humans to Catherine Bracey's point that it's sometimes the grandmother on the corner or it's the person who's quietly and the employee who's working in the in the internet cafe particularly in Turkey one of the things that they set up an enormous amount of surveillance added to that and so forth and I think that the way in which we've come to that understanding and I think the way we've come to the richness of many of these questions is by bringing a whole bunch of different lenses to this question and those lenses I think are in part from people's backgrounds and where we've come from but also in the context of a university and in the context of scholarship it's because we have people who have come at this from different disciplinary backgrounds and different traditions of how to ask the question and you'll often think about have we interpreted this in such a way that it means that we've come up with a new microscope have we found new ways to ask and answer questions and when I think of the gift that the Berkman family and the Klein family have given us it really is the chance to work with so many people layered in this rich and complex and interesting way some of whom are based here in the zip code some of whom are all over some in the White House some in you know all over the world and so many different roles and in the network of centers that Ors has created that really I think is the genius and the wonder of what we're able to do and that gift that that which this gift makes possible it's great to be interdisciplinary in this university but it's really great I think to be in this complicated networked public form of research and inquiry that is just such a fun thing to be able part of so I'm so grateful that we have a chance to explore this and celebrate it I'd like to end with one big round of applause and there are three things I want to have as part of our thank you one of course is once again to the Klein family secondly is the amazing Berkman staff a raid around the edge you all know if you work in this environment what a treat it is to have the those who work under the roof of 23 Everett Street and around I was just going to say too in 20 years I don't think I've ever seen them in business attire this is I know it I didn't recognize particularly Adam Holland whoa it's impressive to see a little bit and of course to our panel a big thank you thank you all for being here thank you John