 Hi, I'm John Follito, President of Linux Australia. The following presentation was given at Linux ConfU 2011 as the Friday morning keenight. The presentation contained material which was in violation of our policies and which was upsetting to some viewers. This video contains imagery of a violent and sexual nature as well as some profanity. As was done at the closing of Linux ConfU, I would once again on behalf of the LCA 2011 Organising Committee and Linux Australia like to offer my apologies that the speaker did not adhere to the conference's policies and reassert that this material should not have been displayed in the context of the conference. A more detailed statement from the Linux Australia Council can be found at the URL below. While this presentation was in breach of our policies and contained material which was not appropriate for presentation of the conference, we feel it is important that we post it online as a record of what took place. Good morning everybody. The first thing I want to do is I want to thank you all very much to be included in any bill that has been. Jeff and Eric is an honor beyond anything I ever thought that I would ever get in this lifetime. So thank you all very much. And I want to apologize for not being able to be with you the entire week. I do a lot of talks. I get paid fairly well for a lot of them. It's the ones that I don't get paid for at all that I end up working the hardest on. This is one of those. This is my gift for me to you because when I don't get paid for it, I get to tell you what I really think. So let's start off with two announcements. The first is every square inch of this talk is creative commons licensed. You may use it, any of the materials in it in any way you see fit. The second is that this talk is rated PG-13. If there are children in the room, they should leave now. There are disturbing images and there will be profane language. All right, let's get started. Now, in just a few days time, it's going to be 32 years to the day, which is a bit more than a billion seconds since I actually formally learned to code. I was very lucky to go to a high school that had its own PDP 1145. And I was very lucky that in 1979, it decided to offer a computer science course with some of the VT-52s they had and a deck writer. So my first OS was RISDIS and my first programming language was basic. Now, about 100 million seconds, three years before that, what had happened was one of my friends invited me to go spend a Saturday morning over with his dad at his dad's data center. Okay, I went over there. He sat me down at a deck writer and he typed this. It was all over. All right, the damage had been done because from that day, all I ever wanted to do was play with computers and pretty much I have been able to keep to that. The only time I didn't play with computers was when I was at MIT. MIT. I began work as a software engineer, so I got to play and I got paid for playing. And so in the years that have followed, I've written code for basically every major microprocessor family except the 6502, weirdly enough, all of the common microcontrollers in every OS from CPM to Android Linux. I even wrote a batch-executed RPG2 program, which was run on an IBM 370 mainframe. Now, Christmas 1990, I decided that I was going to sit down and read a science fiction novel that had been pinned by an up-and-coming writer. And that novel, Neuromancer, that changed my life because it gave me a vision that I would pursue for the rest of that decade the idea of a three-dimensional, immersive, visualized internet cyberspace. And so I read that book and basically I dropped everything and I moved to San Francisco, which was the epicenter of all the work that was going on in virtual reality. And I founded a startup that I named OnoSendai after the company in Gibson's novel. And that startup was aimed at designing and marketing an inexpensive, immersive video gaming console that was networked. Now, it was very hard work. It was frequently painful. And I poured my life savings into the project before it went belly up. I can't say that any of the other VR companies spared any better. A few of them still exist, but they're really shadows of their former selves. They sell products and into industrial markets. Each of these companies failed because every one of them, my own among them, coveted the whole price. Each of us had eyes of megalomaniacs. Each of us were going to rule the world. And each of us did lots of inventing and took every scrap of that invention and protected it with copyrights and patents and laws. And I invented a technology that's very similar to seen in the Wiimote, but 14 years earlier. And it's all patented. I don't own that patent because after my company collapsed, the patent actually went through a series of owners until eventually, I don't know, five years later, I find myself in a lawyer's office being deposed because my patent, the one that I didn't actually own, was involved in a dispute over priority and theft of intellectual property and all sorts of other violations. Lovely. Now, with the VR industry pretty much in ruins, I actually sat down and said, let me try this again. I'm going to design my own networked VR protocol. So what I did was I used a parser that had been donated by my friend Tony Parisi. And I was building on this work from this coder over in Switzerland. It was a bloke by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who had published rings and rings and rings of this objective C code that had been pre-processed into NCC. And all of it implementing the hypertext transport protocol. So I took Berners-Lee code, I folded it into my own, Tony's folded it into my own. And in about 10 days, I prototyped a browser for three-dimensional worlds that was attached to Berners-Lee's brand new worldwide web. And that happened 17 years ago this week, half a billion seconds ago. Now, when I'd gotten my 3D browser up and running, I was faced with a choice. I could try to hold it tight and go, mine, mine, mine! And struggle for attention. Or I could promiscuously show my code with the world. Being the attention-seeking whore that I am. That decision was easy. And after Dave Raghett christened what I'd done VRML, I published the source code. And a community began to form around that project. And I got some very, very nice help from this 18-year-old sysit minute wired by the name of Brian Bellendorf who said, you know, let's bring Silicon Graphics in on this. So we brought them in and they actually said, excellent, we'll open up our code. And so by the time of the Second International Conference of the World Wide Web, we had a specification with running code in open source and VRML was off and running. Precisely because it was open to all and free to all and available to all. Now in my own life it took about a billion seconds of living before I grok the value of open source. Before I had the penny drop moment when I realized that a resource shared is a resource squared. And I owe everything that came afterward. That's my career as an educator, as an author, on the new inventors to that one insight. And so ever since then I've tried to give away almost everything that I do, whether they're ideas or articles or blog posts or audio, video recordings or slide decks and of course lots and lots and lots of source code. And it seems that the more that I give away the richer I become and that's really not even necessarily financially because there's more metrics to wealth than the cash in your bank account. There's more ways than one to be rich, just as there's more ways than one to be good and there's more ways than one to be evil. And that brings me to my second penny drop moment which I had after I've been coding for just about a billion seconds. Now, sometimes the evil we do, we do to ourselves. And for about a half a billion seconds between the ages of 19 and 39, I smoked tobacco. Until I realized that anyone who smokes tobacco past the age of 40 is either a fool or actually rather poorly informed. So I quit and took five years to quit and many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many packs of nicotine gum. But I am clean. Now, a few years ago, a few years ago, a Harvard researcher by the name of Dr. Nicholas Christakis published some very interesting insights and research about how the behavior of smoking spreads. It's not advertising because advertising for smoking is mostly banned these days. It's because we take cues from our peers. If our friends start smoking, we ourselves are more likely to start smoking. There's a communicative relationship. It's almost an epidemiological relationship. The behavior is being transmitted by mimesis, by imitation. We're the imitating primates. We're so good at imitating one another that we can master language and math in XKCD. We see our friends smoking. We want to smoke. We want to fit in. We want to be cool. That's what it feels like in our minds. But really, what we want to do is just imitate. We see something and we want to do it. This explains jackass. Now, mimesis is not restricted to smoking. Christakis also studied obesity. He saw that it obeyed the same network effects. If you're surrounded by obese people, the chances are greater that you will be obese yourself. And if your peers start slimming down, chances are that you will join them in dieting. So the boundaries of mimesis are quite broad because we can teach soldiers to kill by immersing them in an environment where everyone is learning to kill. We can teach children to read by immersing them in an environment where everyone's learning to read. And we can stuff our face with maccas and watch approvingly as our friends are doing the same. We have learned how to use mimesis to our advantage, but equally it makes us its bitch. Now, recent research published last year has shown something else that's kind of disturbing. Divorce spreads via mimesis. If you divorce, it is more likely that your friends are going to split up. Conversely, if your friends separate, it's more likely that your marriage is going to dissolve. And that makes sense. You're observing the behavior of your peers and you're imitating it, but here it's touching the heart. It's touching the core of our being. But this is who we are because booting up into homo sapiens sapiens meant the acquisition of a facility for mimesis that's as broadly flexible as our facility for language. They may in fact be two views into the same cognitive process. We can imitate nearly anything, but what we choose to imitate is determined by the network of our peers. And that set of relationships is what we now know as the social graph. And this is why one needs to choose one's friends carefully because they're not just friends. They are epidemiological vectors. They sneeze, you catch a cold. They're the puppet masters. They're pulling your strings. Even if they're blissfully unaware of the power they have over you or the power that you have over them. Now, all of this is interesting. It doesn't really have the shock of the new because our mother has told us to exercise caution when selecting our friends. We all know people who ran with the wrong crowd and had their lives destroyed as a result. I mean, this is common knowledge. This is common sense. But things are different today. Not because of the rules have changed. Those seem to be sort of human eternals, but because we have extended ourselves so completely and so suddenly. We have new digital social networks. They recapitulate the ones between our ears and at least one respect. They become channels for communication. They become the channels through which the messages of mimesis spread. So viral videos, viral behavior in general is an example of this. Now, digital social networks are instantaneous. They're ubiquitous. They can be vastly larger than the 150 or so that's imposed on our endogenous social networks. The functional limit of the human neocortex because just as computers can execute algorithms hundreds of millions of times faster than we can, our digital social networks can inflate to elephantian proportions. They can connect us to thousands of other people. But most of us keep our social graphs a lot smaller than that. The average number of friends on any given Facebook page is around 35. And that's small enough that it resembles your endogenous social network. So the same qualities of mimesis come into play. When your connections start talking about a movie or a song or a TV series, you're more likely to become interested in it. And if this is all happening on Facebook which it normally is these days, there's another member of your social graph. It's there whether you like it or not. Facebook itself. You choose to build your social graph by connecting to others within Facebook. You store your social graph on Facebook's servers. You communicate within Facebook's environment. And all of this has been neatly captured providing an opening for Facebook to do whatever they will with your social graph. You friended Mark Zuckerberg telling him everything about yourself that you've ever told to any of your friends. And more actually, because an analysis of your social graph reveals much about you that you would never tell to another human being. Your sexual preferences and fetishes. Your social class. Your income level. Everything that you might choose to hide is revealed entirely because you need to reveal it in order to make Facebook work because you do not own it. Because you do not have access to the source code or the databases because it is closed. Your social graph is the most important thing about you that can be represented in bits. With it, I can manipulate you. I can change your tastes, your attitudes, even your politics. We know this is possible. It is probably even easy. But to do this, I need your social graph. I need you to surrender it to me before I can fuck you over. Now, we didn't understand any of this a quarter billion seconds ago when Friendster went live, but it's 2011 now, and we have a pretty good idea of the potency of the social graph. But we find ourselves pathetically addicted to the amplified power of communication provided by Facebook. We want to quit it. We just don't know how. Just as with tobacco, going cold turkey isn't going to be easy. Now, on the 28th of May last year, I killed my Facebook profile. I signed off once and for all. There's a cost because I am missing a lot of the communication that is happening within the closed world of Facebook. But of course, I also breathe a little bit easier knowing that I'm not quite the puppet that I once was. And when someone asks why I quit, an explanation that took around 1,200 words this morning and then they just close the conversation down with, look at my grandmother's on Facebook. I have to be there. That's gonna be our epitaph. Ladies and gentlemen, we are so fucked. We ended up here because we surrendered our most vital personal details to a closed source system. We should have known better. And that's only the half of it. So much has happened in the last eight weeks that we've almost forgotten before all of the disaster and tragedy that has afflicted Queensland. We were obsessed with another sort of disaster that was sort of rolling out in slow motion like a car smash from inside the car. So on the 29th of November, WikiLeaks in conjunction with several very well-respected newspapers began to release the first of a quarter million cables that were written by various State Department officials throughout the world. The US government immediately announced that these cables were inconsequential. But of course, one has already led to a revolution in Tunisia, which is producing a revolution in Egypt, which is now producing a revolution in Yemen. And we also know that Hillary Clinton and just take a look at those eyes. That Hillary Clinton has requested credit card numbers and DNA samples for all the UN representatives in New York City, presumably so she can raise up a clone army of diplomats intent on identity theft, which is not a good look. So in early December, as the first cables came to light and their contents began ricocheting around media sphere, the US government realized that it had to act quickly to staunch the flow of these leaks. And the government of course had some help. It had a willing Patsy, an individual seduced by the United States projection of power who decided to amount a DDS attack on the WikiLeaks website in the name of freedom or liberty or something. And WikiLeaks went down and it quickly relocated its servers into the Amazon EC2 cloud. And that lasted until US Senator Joseph Lieberman started making some noises and then WikiLeaks was quickly turfed out by EC2 with Amazon claiming violations of terms of service. And then that was followed immediately by another discovery of another violation in fairly short order with WikiLeaks provider, every DNS. And then for the coup de grace, PayPal had a look at their own terms of service and Calhalla, they found that WikiLeaks was in violation and they froze WikiLeaks account which at the time were fairly overflowing with all sorts of contributions. So you deprive them of servers, you deprive them of name service, you deprive them of funds, check me. And of course the powers that be thought that this would dent the forward progress of WikiLeaks. And in fact what it did was cause the number of copies of the website and associated databases to multiply, today there's nearly 2,000 copies of the WikiLeaks web servers. And so like striking at a dandy lion, attacking it only causes the sea to spread to the winds. And although WikiLeaks has resumed the work of releasing its cables, the entire incident has proved one mean, ugly nasty point. The internet is fundamentally not free. Where we thought we breathed the pure air of free speech and free thought, we are finding ourselves severely caged. If we do something that upsets our masters too much, they're bringing the bars down on us, they're leaving us no room at all. That's not liberty. That's slavery. This isn't some hypothetical, this isn't a paranoid fantasy. This is what is happening. And it will happen again and again and again whenever the forces of the state or forces in collusion of the state feel themselves threatened. None of it is secure. None of it belongs to us. None of it is free. And this is why we are so truly and holy fucked. This is why we must stop and rethink everything we are doing. This is why we must consider ourselves the victims of another kind of disaster, another tragedy and must equally and bravely confront another kind of rebuilding. Because if we do not create something new, if we do not restore what is broken, we surrender to the forces of control. I will not surrender. I will not serve. Now, like it or not, we find ourselves at war. It's not a war we asked for. It's not a war we wanted. But the war is upon us. It's the last great gasp of the forces of control as they realize that when they digitized in pursuit of greater efficiency or a profit or extensions of their own power, whatever they once held on to so tightly became so fluid that it is now slipping away from them completely. And that's one enemy. That's the old enemy. That's the ones whom history has already ruled irrelevant. There's another enemy. An enemy who seeks to exteriorize the interior to make privacy difficult and therefore irrelevant. Without privacy, there is no liberty. Without privacy, there is no individuality. Without privacy, there's only the mindless, endless buzzing of a hive mind. That's the new enemy. And although this announces itself with all of the hyperbole of historical inevitability, that is just PR in extending the monopoly power of those forces. We need weapons. Now I'm not talking about the low orbit ion cannon or anything else that a bunch of script kitties are gonna cook up. Rather, I'm recommending a layered defensive strategy, one which allows us to carry on with our own business, blithely unwelisted by the forces that might seek to constrain us. And so to further that task, I present to you my design guide for anarchists. Design principle one, distribute everything. The recording industry used the courts to shut down Napster because they could because Napster had a single throat that they could get their legal arms around. They could choke the life out of it. But in a display of natural selection that would have brought a tear to Alfred Russell Wallace's eye, the selection pressure that was applied by the recording industry led directly to the creation of Nutella, which through its inherently distributed architecture became essentially impossible to eradicate and the day of the darkness had begun. Break everything up. Break it all down. When you have the components, make them all independent. Allow them to talk to one another, allow them to search one another, share with one another so that together they will create a whole greater than a simple sum of parts. And then you will never be rid of them because if one piece should be cut down, there will be two others to take their place. Now, this is simply an extension of the essential UNIX idea of simple programs that can be piped together to do useful things, small pieces loosely joined. But these pieces shouldn't live within a single processor, a single processor, or a single computer, or a single subnet. They must live everywhere they can in every possible environment so that they can survive any of the catastrophes of war. Design principle two, transport independence. Now the inundation of Brisbane and its surrounding suburbs brought a sudden death to all of its networks, whether they were wired or mobile or optic. All of these networks are centralized, and for that reason they can be turned off, whether by a natural disaster or at the whim of the powers that be. For those of you who are unaware, the mobile phone networks in Egypt have been going up and down over the last two days. And just as significantly, these networks require the intervention of governments and telcos to boot back up. They had to work hand in hand to bring service back to the worst effect in suburbs. Now, so long as you're in the good graces of a government, this can be remarkably efficient. But if you find yourself allied against a government or if your government is afflicted with corruption, such a simple thing as a dial tone can be nearly impossible to manifest. We have created a centralized communications infrastructure. We have lines that feed into trunks, which go into central offices, which then feed into backbones. And this seems to us as the natural order of things, but it is entirely an echo of the commercial requirements of these networks. In order to bill you, your communications must pass through a point where they can be measured and metered and tariffed. There's another way. Years before the internet came along, we had UUCP and FidoNet to spread news and posts and mail through the far flung and only occasionally connected global network of users. It was slower than we're used to today, but it was no less reliable. Messages would end up forwarding from host to host to host until they reached their intended destination. It all worked pretty well if you had a phone line. It worked great if you had an internet connection or pretty much anything else. And I really think that there were probably some crazy Unix geeks who took their UUCP, printed it out on paper tape, carried it to another host and fed it back in. You know, it's true. A hierarchy is efficient, but the price of that efficiency is incredible vulnerability, whereas a rhizomatic arrangement of nodes within a mesh is slower, but it's nearly invulnerable. It will survive a flood and an earthquake and a fire and revolution. So to abolish these vulnerable and dangerous hierarchies, we must reconsider everything that we think we know about the right way to move bits from point A to point B. Every transport has to be considered from point to point laser beams to wide area mesh networks using unlicensed spectrum to semaphores and smoke signals. Nothing is too slow, it's only too unreliable. If we rely on TCP and HTTP exclusively, we risk everything for the sake of some speed and convenience. But ladies and gentlemen, this is life during wartime. We have to bear this extra burden. Design principle free, secure everything. Now why would any message traverse a public network in plain text? And yet the bulk of our communication occurs in the wide open. That's web servers and web browsers. It's email servers and their clients. It's sensors and the recorders. This is insanity. This is not our job. It is not our job to make things easy to read for ASIO or the NSA or Google or Facebook or anyone else who has some need to know what we're saying and what we're thinking. And so as a baseline, everything we do everywhere must be transmitted with strong encryption until someone perfects a quantum computer that's a pretty good line of defense. But we need a security approach that's much more comprehensive than this. The migration to cloud computing which is driven by ubiquity and convenience and baked into Google's Chrome OS. It deprives us of any ability to secure our own information. When we use Gmail or Flickr or Windows Live or MobileMe, we surrender our security for a little bit of simplicity and this is a false trade-off. These systems are insecure precisely because it benefits those who offer those systems to the public. There is value in all of that data. So everything is exposed, leaving us exposed. If you do not know where it lives, if you do not hold the keys to lock it and release it, if it affects to be more pretty than useful because locks are ugly, turn your back on it and tell the ones you love who do not know what you know that they must do the same. And then go and build systems which are secure, which present nothing but a lock to prying eyes. Design principle four, open everything. Now I don't need to offer any detailed explanation for this last point. It is the reason that we're all here. If you can't examine the source code, how can you trust it? This is an issue beyond maintainability. This is an issue beyond the right to fork. This is an essential element that will prevent paranoia. Transparency is the new objectivity and unless any particular program is completely transparent, it is inherently suspect. Open source has the additional benefit that it can be reused and repurposed. The parts for one defensive weapon can rapidly be adapted into another one. So open source accelerates the responses to new threats, allowing us to stay one step ahead of any of the forces that attempt to close all of this down. And there's a certain irony here because in order to compete effectively with us, those who oppose us will be forced to open their own source to accelerate their own responses to our own responses because on this point we win. Open source improves selection fitness. Now when all four of these design principles are embodied in a work, another design principle emerges, resilience. Something that is distributed and transport-independent and secure and open is very, very difficult to subvert or shut down or block. It will survive all sorts of disasters, including warfare. It will adapt at lightning speed. It makes the most of every possible selection advantage, but of course nothing is perfect. Systems engineered to these principles will be slower than those built purely for efficiency. The more immediacy you need, the less resilience you get. Now sometimes immediacy will overrule other design principles, but those trade-offs need to be very carefully thought out. Is all of this more work? Yes, yes it is. But then building an automobile that won't kill its occupants at speed is a lot more work than slapping four wheels and a gear train on a paper mache box. But we do that work because we don't want our loved ones hurtling toward their deaths every time they climb behind the wheel. Free to make free. Extremism in the defense of liberty is not a vice. Now, let me take a few minutes and talk you through the design of my own open source project that I'm working on so I can sort of show you how I've tried to embody these design principles in my own work. When I announced that I was going to put Facebook, my contacts on Facebook held what could only be termed an electronic wake. In the middle of my Facebook comment stream, as if I were about to pass away and they would never see me again. Now I kept on pointing them at my posturist blog and they kept on ignoring the links, just telling me how much I'd be missed once I departed. Why don't you just come visit me on posturist, I asked. And one contact answered for a lot and he said, look at Mark, that's too hard because with Facebook I can check on everyone at once. I don't need to go over there for you and over there for someone else and there and there and there. Facebook makes it easy. That's another epitaph. But it precipitated a penny drop moment. The reason that Facebook has such lock-in with its users is because of a network effect. As more people join Facebook, its utility value as a human switch board grows exponentially, Metcalf's Law. It is this access to the social graph that's Facebook's flypaper. It's the reason that it's so sticky and starting to surpass Google as the most visited site on the internet. And the social graph is the key thing. It's what the address book and the roll of decks and the contacts database are morphing into. It forms the foundation for the project that I'm calling Plexus. Plexus is a protocol for the social web. It's plumbing that allows all social web components to communicate from each according to their ability and to each according to their need. Some components of the social web, for instance, Facebook, are very, very poor communicators. They'll talk with them themselves, but they don't talk to the rest of the universe. Other social services, for instance, Twitter, provide every conceivable service to make them really easy to talk to. What Plexus does is it provides a meta API. It's all based around RFC 2822 messaging so that each service can be fed into or fed by an individual social graph. That social graph is personal, portable, and private. You control it. And this social graph, which is the heart of Plexus, is what we might call the Web 2.0 address book. It's not simply a static set of names and addresses and phone numbers and emails. Rather, it's an active set of connections which you can choose to listen to or share with. It's the switchboard. It's the switchboard where the real magic takes place, allowing you to listen or be listened to, allowing you to share or be shared with. And Plexus is agnostic and can talk to any service and any service can talk to it. It's designed to be the wiring that wires everything together so that we never have to worry about going here and there to manage our social graph. And neither are we chained in one place. Plexus gives us as much flexibility as we're required. That's the vision. I have about 1% of that implemented. But just after the new year, I had an insight. I had originally envisioned Plexus as a monolithic set of Python modules. But it became clear that if I did message passing between the components using RFC 2822, I could separate the components. I could create a distributed Plexus, parts of which could run anywhere on a separate process on a separate subnet or anywhere in the world. And furthermore, these messages could be encrypted inside using RSA encryption, creating a strong layer of security. And finally, these messages could be transmitted by any means necessary, whether that was TCPIP or UUCP or smoke signals. And of course, all of it's entirely open. And because it's a protocol, the pieces of Plexus can be coded in any language you like, whether that's Python or Node.js or PHP or Perl or Haskell or Ruby or Java. Shell. Plexus is an agreement to speak the same language about the things we share, what it is. Now, I could go into mind-numbing details on the internals of Plexus, but I trust that those of you in the audience who find Plexus intriguing will find me today and talk to me about it. I am most interested to ask this room and the minds in this room what they know that could help me move the project forward. What pieces already exist that I can repurpose for Plexus? I need your vast knowledge. I need your insights. I need your critiques because Plexus is still coming to life. But a hundred things have to go right for it to be a success with your aid and that can happen. When it does, well, what I want to do is share with you one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite novels called Illuminatis by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. The Chinese Taoist laughs at civilization and goes elsewhere. The Babylonian Taoist sets termites to the foundations. And Plexus is a white ant set to the imposing foundations of Facebook. Facebook and every other service that chooses to take the easy path, walling its users in the better to control them. There's another way. When the network outside the walls has a greater utility value than the network within, the forces of natural selection come into play and those walls quickly tumble. We saw it with AOL. We saw it with MSN. We will see it again with Facebook. We will build the small and loosely coupled components that individually do very little but together add up to something far more useful than anything on offer from any monopolist. We need to see this happen. This is not just a game. A billion seconds ago, Linux didn't exist. The personal computer was an expensive toy and the internet, well, let me tell you a little story. This is my friend, Doan. He is the sysadmin who got HP onto UUCP. This is back in 1984. And he remembers updating his Etsy hosts file weekly by hand and when he printed it, it came to two sheets of green bar and that was all the hosts on the internet. And it's a billion seconds later and we're within a day or two of the apocalypse. Total allocation of the IPV4 number space. Something's going on. Now, I'm not as teleological as Kevin Kelly. I don't believe that there's evidence to support a seventh class of life, a technium, which is striving to come into its own. I don't consider technology as something that is in any way separate from us. Other animals use tools, but we've gone further. We have become synonymous with them. Our social instinct for imitation, our language instinct for communication, our technological instinct for tool using, they all seem to be reaching new heights and each instinct reinforces the others. It's creating a rising series of feedbacks that has only one possible end. The whole system overloads, it overflows all of its buffers and as you might expect, knocks the supervisor out of the box. Now call this a singularity, if you like. I simply refer to it as the next billion seconds. The epicenter of this transition where all three of these streams are colliding sits in the palms of our hand nearly all of the time. The mobile is the most pervasive technology in all of human history. People who do not have electricity or indoor plumbing or literacy or agriculture have mobiles. Something around five and a half billion of the planet, 6.9 billion people have one. It's more than, that's everyone who earns more than $1.50 a day. And here's the thing, countless studies are showing that individuals with mobiles improve their economic fitness, they earn more money. And anything that improves selection fitness and economic fitness is a big part of that if you're a human being. Anything that improves selection fitness spreads rapidly as humans imitate one another, as humans communicate with one another, as humans take the tool and further it, amplifying its utility and its ability to amplify economic fitness. And so the mobile becomes ever more useful, ever more essential, ever more indispensable. A billion seconds ago, no one owned a mobile and today everyone does. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested to make the mobile more useful and more pervasive and more effective. The engines of capital are reorganizing themselves around it just as they did three billion seconds ago for the automobile and one billion seconds ago for the integrated circuit. But unlike the automobile and the IC, the mobile is quintessentially a social technology. It's a connective fabric for humanity. And the next billion seconds we'll see this fabric become more tangible and more tightly woven as it becomes increasingly inconceivable to separate ourselves even for a millisecond from those that we're choosing to share our lives with. Now you can call this a hive mind if you want. I simply refer to it as the next billion seconds. And it's starting to push beneath our skins in a way that it's already colonized our attention. I don't know that we're literally going to borg ourselves, but the strict boundaries between ourselves and our machines and other people, that's becoming blurry to the point of meaninglessness. Organisms are defined by their boundaries, by what they admit and what they refuse. And in this billion seconds, we're rewriting the definition of homo sapiens sapiens and revocably becoming something else. Do we own that code? Are parts of that new definition closed off from us, fenced in by the ramparts of privilege or power or capital or law? Will we end up with something foreign inside every one of us, a potency unnamed, unobserved and unavoidable? Will we be invaded and infected and controlled? This is the choice that confronts us in the next billion seconds, a choice made even in its abrogation. Freedom is not just an ideal and liberty is not some utopian dream. These must form the baseline for human experience and the next billion seconds or all is lost. We, ourselves, will be lost. We've reached a decision point and our actions today here in this room, they define the future that we will inhabit, the transhumanity that we're emerging into. We've had our play time, it's been good. We've learned a lot and mostly, we've learned how to discern right from wrong. We know what to do, we know what to build up, we know what to tear down. But this transition is painful and it's bloody and it carries with it the danger of complete loss. We have no choice. We are too far down in it to change our ways now. The way down is the way up. Call it a birth if you like. It awaits us in the next billion seconds. Thank you.