 Hi, everyone, and thank you for inviting me to speak. Thanks especially to Cliff and Joan. I can't remember the last time I was at CNI, but it may have been 2006, 15 years ago, with colleagues from Columbia in a presentation addressing video as the new vernacular. I think we were onto something back then. My name is Peter Kaufman. I work at MIT Open Learning. And this talk is about my new book, The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge. We set something up at the start. The health pandemic that we are in today, the economic and jobs crisis we have plunged into, the unhinged political violence we are witnessing are all a function, a direct function and result of the severe information disorder that we find ourselves in today. This book I've written is about that. We can do something about it. It's also about that fact. All of us can do something about it, about this growing epistemic disorder. And it's about the fact that we have to do something about it. We being especially, those of us who work for knowledge institutions, like universities, libraries, museums, archives, labs, and public non-commercial institutions as well, we have a moral responsibility to act in any way in all the ways in which we can. Let me make three points. First, the battle of truth versus lies, knowledge against ignorance is not new. My book opens in the 16th century with a guy who got burned at the stake for trying to share knowledge, a guy who got strangled to death. It's the same guy actually roped onto a piece of wood and lit on fire. And as he's on fire, they come around to strangle him. Or actually, I think they strangled him first, but they didn't kill him, so they lit him on fire, as one does in the heart of the 16th century. William Tyndall was his name. And his thing was to translate the Bible so that people could read it and hear it in ways that the apparatus of the church and the apparatus of the crown did not want it read and did not want it heard. Worship was like television back then. But television and newspapers and magazines and the web all together once a week. It was like listening to my talk today and maybe one or two others. And that's all you had for media, representing the outside world for the week. I'd be here up at a pulpit reading stuff to you, not from this book, but from something that looked like this, one book, the same book, and no other every week. Imagine doing this every week and nothing else. If it were my book, that'd be great for sales. But actually, you could not have your own copy of this book. No, you could not buy it. You could not own it. Not in the original languages and especially not in a language like English that you could understand. No, another guy in Tyndall's time gets burnt at the stake also for having the Lord's Prayer in English written on a scrap of paper in his pocket. Anyway, I would be here reading this. Every outside bit of media information to you and for you every week. This basically was your coalition for networked information back then. But I would be lying. It'd be like watching Fox News and nothing other than Fox News. I would be saying to you, you have to give money to me. Otherwise, you won't get to heaven. It was like being at Mar-a-Log of a trap there and unaware that there was anywhere else to go, unable to go anywhere else. You have to do this. You have to do penance. I would tell you when the word in the Bible was actually to repent, you would have to do that. You'd have to engage in charity, I would say, where the Greek word actually meant to love. For confess, which is what the church wanted, this Tyndall fellow gave us the simpler and more personal word, acknowledge, which is truer to the original text. Tyndall was a genius. Ultimately, his work with the Bible would give us the English language, that is, as many idioms as Shakespeare gave us. He knew seven languages. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Aramaic. He's completely devout. By all accounts, in fact, when he's in jail, he converts his jailer and his jailer's family. Anyway, this system of lies and toxic information that was going on back then, he would have none of it. And he waded through the Bible from Genesis 1 through Revelation 22, not only owning the thing upon pain of death, translating the thing upon pain of death, but printing and distributing that translation in sections over time, his entire life, upon pain of death. And he worked with all the publishing technologies of his day, connecting personally with book designers, paper suppliers, printers, boat captains, and horsemen across 16th century Europe, essentially the YouTube's websites and Twitter's back then, another coalition for networked information, if you will, and he brought the knowledge and the book that contained in it, where he sought to, into the hands of the people. They chased him down and they killed him for it. The battle of knowledge against ignorance, truth versus lies is not new. And if you're a professor, an author, a librarian, a bookseller, a publisher, a curator, an archivist today, you're involved in it. But if you start professing the wrong kinds of things from your pulpit about the Nachbar, the Palestinian state, for example, or publishing the wrong things about the fact that our military sometimes shoots and burns civilians in our name, or the fact that the Democratic National Committee is shot through corrupt, or the fact that our governments and communications companies can and do sometimes, track and share every move we make. Or if you try to make all the academic and scholarly journals free to the world, or overseas if you're Alexei Navalny and start publishing truths about Russian government, malfeasance, and church corruption, the forces that exist will come for you. Like they came for Fred Hampton in a recent movie some of us may have watched. They will track you down. It will drive you in exile or madness or prison or try to push you into an early grave. My second point is that it didn't have to be this way. In 1966, MIT's former president, James Killing, then chairman of the MIT Corporation, like the board, assembled the first Carnegie Commission named after the foundation that funded it. It's the commission that would give birth to American public television. It included 15 members, current and former university presidents, a novelist, a pianist, media titans, labor activists, government officials, business people, inventors, on a roster that privileged white men, but not only women, people of color, born-born individuals, various religious denominations were represented. It was pretty strong for 1966, 67. In the space of a year, the commission and its members held eight formal meetings over some 28 meeting days and sought input for more than 225 people. Its members visited 92 sites in 35 states, foreign countries, and as a group, they issued 12 recommendations, all of them geared as their landmark 1967 report stated, toward more firmly establishing what they called, and I'm quoting, an instrument for the free communication of ideas in a free society. The work of the commission resulted almost immediately in a bill that quickly, in turn, became public law, the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. The funding of the commission, the political connections of the commissioners, the timing all resulted in a perfect flight that allowed for a bill, and then a law, and then a presidential signature. And at the signing ceremony, President Lyndon Johnson spoke to say, think of the lives that this will change. And I quote from his speech there. The student in a small college could tap the resources of a great university. Yes, the student in a small college tapping the resources of the greatest university in the hemisphere. The country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital. A scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York. A famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspirations into some far off classroom, so that no trial need be neglected. Eventually he said, I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank. And such a system could involve other nations too, he went on. It could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to this enrich all mankind. A wild and visionary idea, not at all. Yesterday's strangest dreams are today's headlines and change is getting swifter every moment. I've already asked my advisors to begin to explore the possibility of a network for knowledge and then to draw up a suggested blueprint for it. We must consider, he said again, new ways to build a great network for knowledge, not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use. Today, we rededicate a part of the airways which belong to all the people and we dedicate them for the enlightenment of all the people. It will be free, it will be independent and it will belong to all of our people. A new knowledge network is what he went on about it. You think this would be of interest to the coalition or networked information. The whole idea was that these screens that you were watching me on and that if you would be watching this live, the screen that I would be watching you on, we're going to be the equivalent of revolutions that had happened in the print world for the previous 600 years. But today, scan the dial, the grid, the web. Where has this vision gone? Fast forward 50 years. And another MIT president, Charles Vest, goes on to speak of a quote transcendent, I'm quoting Vest, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced. A meta university that will enable, not replace residential campuses, especially in wealthier regions. It will bring cost efficiencies to institutions and the shared development of educational materials. It will be adaptive, not prescriptive. It will serve teachers and learners in both structured and informal contexts. It will speed the propagation of high quality education and scholarship. It will build bridges across cultures and political boundaries. It will be particularly important to the developing world. The truth is that we are actually building all of us, these visions slowly, but perhaps too slowly to be realizing it and getting it done right. Third point I have, which is my last point, is that we have to do something more. This book catalogs many of the greatest visions to share knowledge. And at its heart, sort of the second chapter, is the encyclopedia that the French Enlightenment philosopher started writing, compiling, and offering to the public in 1750. 22 million words, 72,000 articles. 22 million words, 72,000 articles, 18,000 pages. 28 volumes, 20 years of work. It was an effort to compile all the world's knowledge and pack it into one place that could be published, distributed, and shared. The act of doing this was self-mind blown, but also was what was inside. The encyclopedia smote all these 18th century orthodoxies. No proposition can be accepted as divine revelation, they wrote. The main author of a lot of this stuff was Dennis Diderot in the article on reason. If it contradicts what is known to us, either by immediate intuition or by obvious deductions of reason, it would be ridiculous to give preference to such revelations, the article says. The entry for fortune spotlighted the gross inequalities of wealth already evident in 18th century Europe. In the article on the slave trade, they wrote, and this is the 1750s. The purchase of Negroes to reduce them into slavery violates all religion, morals, natural law, and human rights. And the encyclopedies announced from day one that their giant project would be, as we would say today, fact-based. There would be an underlying and overarching commitment to the verification of all source materials. Verification is a long and painful process, as Diderot wrote in his introduction to the whole enterprise known as the preliminary discourse. We have tried as much as possible to avoid this inconvenience by citing directly in the body of the articles the authors on whose evidence we have relied and by quoting their own texts when it is necessary. What this meant in practice was revolutionary. There would be no accepted truths but for those that could be proven incited. And 23,000 articles had links to other articles in the encyclopedia. What librarians like to call cross references. The articles, the article on cannibals ended with the mischievous cross references. Another historian would later describe it, see under Eucharist, communion, altar, et cetera. And the book, this book of mine, also logs, I guess, the forces against truth, against knowledge historically and in the present day. The church, the state, private commercial interests, all very broadly but also very carefully defined. Now, we have responsibility. All these knowledge institutions that exist today. Responsibility that we can reflect upon in the light of what's gone before. We know about Snowden's revelations. We know about Assange and Chelsea Manning and over in Russia, Navalny. We know about surveillance capitalism. We know that we are fed lies by the boatload on some networks more than others, surveilled by the state and corporate means all the time. But there are opportunities we have for publishing and networking today that are unprecedented in human history. The technology that we're gathered on, video, the phones that we have in our pockets. We have a lot more publishing and networking power than even DeRoe could have dreamt of. Everyone has a role they can play. Privately, of course, we can support the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the ACLU Free Software Foundation, libraries, museums, universities. But professionally, we can play a role by committing to publishing all the knowledge that we have, that you have within reach, all that knowledge to the commons as aggressively and as rapidly as possible to make the truth or to make verifiable information, if that's safer, as viral as the lies in circulation today. DeRoe's commitment to reference, to citation, to verification continues in the Enlightenment's most important successor project, which is Wikipedia, founded 20 years ago this year. It's the foundation of what Wikipedia terms verifiability. And in many key ways, it's the foundation for truth and knowledge and society today. Verifiability means, according to Wikipedia, and this is from their principles, that material added to Wikipedia must have been published previously by a reliable source. Editors may not add their own views to articles simply because they believe them to be correct and may not remove sources views from articles simply because they disagree with them. Verifiability is a necessary condition, a minimum requirement for the inclusion of material, though it is not a sufficient condition. It may not be enough. Wikipedia, of course, is one of the world's most popular websites, the world's most popular non-commercial one and an irreplaceable source of verifiable information, open to any and all. Another is the Internet Archive, which is actually working with Wikipedia now, digitizing books, as many of you know, so that links to sources in Wikipedia link all the way through to the books themselves and render images and texts on the cited pages. So in a Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King Jr., for example, another guy who spoke truth to power, the reference link to a biography by Taylor Branch, now hot links to the readable book online at archive.org. That work is essential, only the use of footnotes and the research techniques associated with them as Princeton University's Anthony Grafton writes, makes it possible to resist the efforts of modern governments, tyrannic and democratic alike to conceal the compromises they have made, the deaths they have caused, the tortures they or their allies have inflicted. Can we take verifiability now, especially as our crisis deepens? And this is what I'll leave us with in terms of some questions. Can we take verifiability further as falsehoods abound about vaccines, Trump's families, tax reform? Can we improve citation for the medium that's beginning to overtake us all, which is video? Can we make resources on the web, also kind of a new thing and 700 year framework, verifiable? What does citation look like or sound like in a podcast? We have to think about and devote ourselves to these things. And while we do, we have to publish as much material as we can online, everything. Again, we have to make real knowledge as viral as lies. We have to fund our archives. We know all of us that Google and YouTube, which seem like public resources, are part of a privately owned publicly traded company that keeps information on your searches forever and tracks you where you go on other sites after you've left its own. We have to fund our libraries. And most important, we have to explore and reconstitute the rights we have or think we have online into a new kind of social contract. We have to take a look at our national security agencies, Google and these other sprawling commercial companies like Facebook. We have to create new commissions like the Carnegie Commission to study and propose new rules now, new terms of service for these companies and for society. That's what a social contract is after all, terms of service for society. And we have to find a way, a way to get them made into law like we did before. Look at what happened in Washington on January 6th and you'll realize in this framework, in this light that the stakes are very high. So thank you. For listening and have a great conference.