 Good evening, everyone. How are you tonight? How are you tonight? Excellent, I'm glad to hear that. My name is Urs Koster. I'm with the Berkman Center, and I'm also in the Law School faculty here. I have the great pleasure to serve as your emcee tonight, and really fortunate to welcome you to this special event, to this special evening. As you will see tonight, we will make the impossible possible, or is it actually the other way around? The possible impossible. In any event, I'm really delighted to host the US launch of impossible.com and thrilled to welcome Lily Cole, the founder of impossible.com and her team here on campus. We'll hear in a minute more about this new social network for giving and receiving for free. So it's promising to be a really interesting, exciting evening to give you a quick overview of the program. We'll start with an introductionary video, relatively short, to give us a basic idea of what impossible is about. Lily will then add context to that and some background. We'll have a little demo by her team. We'll have time for a few quick questions, clarification questions, and we'll then segue into a panel with a number of wonderful panelists. I will introduce the panel later on and talk about not only the platform that we're going to launch tonight here in the US, but also more broadly about some of the core issues that the platform raises and broader societal questions around gift economy and sharing norms of reciprocity and the like. So this would be an interesting conversation with the panel, but of course all of you are invited to participate in the question and answer session as well. We have microphones to circulate. I should also say that this evening will be recorded and the video posted to the Birken website. So be careful what you're saying. No, I'm just kidding. And if you want to tweet about the event, please use the... Do you prefer the hashtag impossible or at impossible? At impossible. So that's the way how to tweet about tonight. I think that's all I have to say in terms of housekeeping, right? Anything else? No? Good. With that, again, a very warm welcome and here is our introduction to video. And I'm sorry that the video doesn't play. I really want to introduce you properly, but please, please stay here. So Lily Cole is, as you know, a world-famous fashion model. She's an actress. She's a social entrepreneur. And if I may add to this already impressive list, she's also Vickett Smart, as you will hear in just a minute. It's a real gift, actually, to have you here tonight with us. And thanks so much for giving the Birken community the opportunity to host you and your team. We're really thrilled to participate in your latest project and we're eager to hear all about it. So thanks for being here. I just want to say thank you first and foremost. I feel very honored to be here. And I feel very honored by the brilliant speakers I've got joining us tonight. And I'm going to try and explain a little about what we're doing. And then I'm going to try and shut up for the rest of the evening and learn from these guys. So I'll start by saying there seems to be, I guess, quite a conflict in some of the words he uses, like model and actress and social entrepreneur, it would seem maybe. But interestingly, my background working in fashion, I started working in fashion 12 years ago now, led me increasingly to the understanding that I saw economics as one of the most powerful languages that we speak internationally and that has social implications and environmental implications. I was working for different charities over a few years and simultaneously working for different companies. And I increasingly felt that unless we look at production chains, unless we look at businesses, the ones that you might advertise for or that you might buy into, we are going to continue to have social environmental issues that then charity will need to mitigate. And so I started challenging my energy into working with companies that talked about transparency and tried to have socially and environmentally responsible production chains founded a company in England on those terms. And still to this day, try and think through that remit. Now that's looking at the monetary prism that we're in for the most part. And then three years ago, I was with a friend, had a conversation that gave birth to an idea which preceded my understanding of the gift economy, but led me to research the gift economy and learn about alternative economic ideas. And I found the gift economy to be really, really fascinating. From my perspective of it, the most fundamental difference between the gift economy and what I think predominates today, which is exchange paradigms, is based around reciprocity and the idea that reciprocity might be generalized as opposed to direct. So rather than A gives to B because B gives something back to A, often money could be something in a different kind. What about A gives to B? Trusting that firstly, B might need it and A can for that reason. And trusting that B might give to C, C might give to D and one day D might give back to A. And if you have a structure or a society or a network or a world where everyone is giving and receiving, inevitably everyone will give and receive and there will inevitably be a return. It just won't necessarily be direct. And it's very interesting when you think about what the social implications are of that different equation and the research that's been done looking at societies, often pre-catalysts, arguably in different measures in our own societies today where the gift economy exists and the social equations that it structures and sets up. The idea that it creates subtle relationships between the individuals. Imagine everybody in this room was there to support you. Like if you needed anything, had your back. Like imagine that was everybody in Boston. Imagine if that was everybody in the States. Imagine if everybody in the world you knew would support you if you needed it, would answer your needs if you needed something answered. And the small price to pay is where you see the opportunity to help another. You can and you do. I think that's the kind of world that I personally would love to feel more of a part of. And so this kind of slightly crazy venture I've been on with, impossible, is saying can we think about that? Like can we think about value and can we think about our relationships with another? Can we propose an idea that we might do things for another without an obvious sense of return? And encourage and facilitate maybe a bit more of that through technology. And so we've built an app and we've built a website, which I'll explain a little bit about right now. I'm not here to pitch an app or a website. The more people who join it, the more great that community will be. But really I'm talking about the ideas that are kind of behind it, above it, outside of it. And it's not about this one structure. But we've done our best job at thinking about how can technology show up the possibilities so that they can maybe trigger A to help B. Because sometimes you don't know B. Sometimes you didn't know B actually needed something that you might have or needed some help with something that you could do. So that's the point of this. What we have done is we have created a social network. So like most social networks you have a profile, which is public and shows your wishes, which are things that can work both ways. So things you can offer up to the community and things that you can ask the community for. So it's written in a very free text way like a tweet. So it's kind of open-ended how people use it. A lot of people have been using it for skills, service-oriented stuff. It could also be advice. It could be products. The only premise is that it's all non-monetary. And then saying thank you the thought process behind that was to create an abundant currency. So reflect what's happening on the system without potentially quantifying and making it go into an exchange with Alati. So you can say thank you as much as you want and that's always there in your profile and public. So here's in a stream. You can see content that's close to you. So based on location. So you're seeing neighbors content. You can see people you follow. So existing social graphs I could follow my people I follow on Twitter, people I follow on Facebook, et cetera. And we used hashtagging content to also there's no example actually there but if I wanted to look up music related content I could click a hashtag music and find anything posted nearby to do with music. We included this one because somebody posted that in Boston yesterday so I thought it was quite nice. And then here's an example of one being fulfilled. So I actually know this man Ron Garan. He's an astronaut. I wish you could see the picture at the end because it's a picture he took of space which is quite cool. But he posted a wish from Texas to get a girl to go to visit Japan through I think it was Make a Wish Foundation. And it ended up being that he needed air miles. A couple of us donated collectively air miles. The girl's wish was fulfilled and he posted a thank you. And then these are examples of people posting thanks on the network which again as I say is a kind of playful subversion of the idea of currency. It doesn't really mean anything. It just means if you go to someone's profile you can kind of see all the things that they've done and said thank you for. And then that's a screen grab this morning of a bunch of things that people had posted mostly in London because we did promotion at the end of last year in London and so most of our community are UK based. We do have people around the world. The final thing I'll say especially before we bring these panelists up is that when you look up the gift economy one of the examples interestingly is the internet and open source technology and how open source software is arguably a gift economy of sorts. And I think it's really interesting that at least I understand that the internet's kind of revived at least in dialogue and any examples the idea of the gift economy and kind of how it can mean what it can mean for us in a contemporary context. And not only demonstrated it like I mean it actively demonstrates it through the web itself then through platforms like Wikipedia through the GitHub community audience community. But also shows I think the accumulative value that we all take from that that actually by not being closed and siloed we all receive more from that that by kind of opening and sharing there is a greater accumulative benefit for everyone. So it actually I would argue doesn't suggest it's a that giving become selfless it suggests actually it's a very kind of self rewarding mechanism. And so yeah I think it'd be very interesting to think about the the broader possibilities that the internet can offer in the landscape of which we are exploring a small small part of. Great, thank you so much. We have time for for some questions. I talk very fast. We opened it officially in November end of November and I think we're we're at 10,000 people at Christmas and I think now around 25,000. And it's where we call ourselves and I mean we are actively in beta so we're releasing every month the better version of the app. So I don't think it's potential as a tool maximise. I think we've got a lot of work to do on improving the platform. We plan also to make it open source later in the year and because I know that the ambition is bigger probably than you know a small team of one small team of people can can do and I hope that it can you know set a precedent that many people can contribute to. Can I ask a cynical question about people cheating the system and ask whether there are some we just take and never give and whether that's a problem how you deal with that? I think part of the reason for the thank yous is is being a little bit mindful of that without being cynical. I saw a brilliant economist just before I left I was at Cambridge University when I started thinking this through and just before I left I saw a very good economist there and explained this idea. At first interestingly he spent about half an hour just being like well he just didn't and then finally he clicked and he got it and he was like okay yeah I get it I'm sorry I was thinking in the old way and then he referenced so he referenced the words way birds fly in a v the way that they structure their pattern and become kind of self-regulating as a system and I think the what we're doing with the thank you is trying to allow some element of self-regulation so we don't it's really important to me that impossible doesn't have any kind of omnipotent role that we say this user is bad and this user is good but we just reflect what's happening in the system so that hopefully the community can manage itself accordingly so if for example somebody is doing loads which is happening you know you have people and there's some very very proactive users who accumulate tons of thanks and hopefully there is some return it's not built into the system but of course all the community around them and the people who come to their profile will see that and you could say arguably vice versa and if you still want to dialogue with that and you don't think that's a good enough answer then tell me what type of community standards or restrictions do you pose of your users in what sense in terms of what they're allowed to post what they're allowed to post that's an interesting challenge we have built tools so the community can moderate itself and I think that's optimal so you can flag and report content and I think and I hope over time we the community will manage itself rather than again us having to play that omnipotent role we discourage monetary posts because I think it'd be so easy for it to become another place that people and people post you know sales content I feel like there's enough there's enough of that in the world the point of this is great space so that's not the dominant model obviously abusive anything abusive illegal we we moderate yeah but it's a tricky one yeah it's a tricky philosophical conversation right now there's a question right behind you there you and your team have really thought a lot about the given economy but everybody I've spoken to who wants to make the world a better place also has to talk about the 75 percent of the global population that's not working enough to have access to to apps or rich internet content there's some talk I'm curious to hear your thoughts about globalizing a given economy and how you can transfer goods and services across international boundaries into places where you can't necessarily ship something we we start we're starting off where we're starting off which is um western society for the most part people who have computers or iPhones we are thinking already about people who don't have access well the reason we did the website as opposed to just iPhone was it was really important to me that anybody could not anybody but a lot more people than just iPhone owners could could access it and so that's why we built the web simultaneously we're looking right now we're doing a hackathon at the end of the month in Berkeley to look at how we can disseminate wishes in different in ways other than the website and the app so for example we're building this um roboticist there has been building an ATM that prints wishes and that could right now it's just like a kind of like prototype almost like thought piece art piece but actually if it works we could potentially put in different cities so you get a free point of access where you can find local content um SMS I think is really important and I know our partner Kwame that's really important to him is how we can adopt this to work through SMS for people who don't have smartphones obviously a lot more developing community well communities I'm not suggesting that we can reach the whole world and as I said the I think the idea is bigger than one network will ever probably managed it's more about can we I think it'd be great if this became more of a natural practice off the app you know just in like day-to-day reality um so yeah we're just dealing with what we came here in Berkeley by all means come it's open there is a gentleman who's really eager to jump in yeah sorry I just wanted to add that actually if you're 75% this is less of a problem this is a 1% what lilies address is a 1% problem we're using technology to solve a problem that is about the disconnect between society actually as you go down sort of through through the lower echelons communities exist much more people support it doesn't much more um and actually when you get to 75% you actually find there's an awful lot more of giving economy so it's actually not needed quite so much it's kind of you it's interesting yeah I did think that I thought I wasn't going to go into that space but seen as you mentioned it um yeah I've actually found interestingly on my travels that you like when I think of examples of seeing the gift economy in practice I think often of like developing worlds uh context like I was in a village in Ghana where they don't they don't really don't use money like it's not common currency I mean maybe they use a little bit but not really and um for example they have mud huts and they have to re-thatch their roofs every three years and it's just practice that the whole community will come together or the whole male community at least and re-thatch one mud hut and they'll take turns and by it's just a given that you have to do that because at one point in the next three years your roof's gonna really need to do done and also the conversation that gave birth to the idea was on the way to a refugee camp on the Thai-Burbanese border which I was visiting and once again that's a really extreme example of this but they don't use money they live in incredibly difficult circumstances obviously that that refugee camp when I visited it had been standing for 26 years already there'd been kids who'd been born there and lived you know their whole lives there and they I have to say were one of the most amazing kind of communities I've ever been part of because you just see a different value system emerge there and I'm not trying to romanticize it or say that's ideal like I think it's a very difficult situation but you do see I think different value propositions emerge and that was you know they existed they were interdependent by necessity through something you might call the gift economy so um yeah you might argue this is actually addressing quite first world problems on on some level but so of users in the first world what are you noticing is cultural differences say between people in France and the UK or the US have you detected anything it's really I think too I'd love to be able to answer that question I think it's too early to say we all of our promotions been in the UK the end of last year most of our users are in London we did quite active promotion because it relies on density somewhat like it's more valuable if you've got lots of people nearby using it London's probably been the biggest point of traction because we did quite a focused campaign there and then we've got people across the country who I watch like communicate a lot of more of online stuff because they haven't got a strong enough local community we've got some users in America we've got some users in like Mexico, Jordan, Brazil, Poland like you know because of the way media works nowadays people have peripherally heard about it in different countries joined early and posted wishes like I wish there were more users in Mexico or um yes there's been a few of those are you finding that the current population of users are exchanging more web-based services or more face-to-face services again I think it depends on the location so in London there's been a lot more face-to-face and overall speaking a lot more online because of issues of density I think that if we achieve what we hope to in terms of you know growing growing kind of stronger local communities then that might change that ratio but yet to begin with um online and I imagine also because it's quite an easy point of access you know if you'll kind of want to put your toe in the water with this idea it's much easier to start giving advice or respond to people through phone or Skype than it might be to actually drive to the house and meet them okay I was that sort of gets to what I was going to ask which is how do you balance the desire for you know locality in giving and receiving things versus the fact that some things don't need to be local so like I want I want to offer to shovel snow I'm probably only want to do that within a 20 minute walking radius on the other hand if I was going to offer you know helping somebody learn HTML it doesn't matter if they're in Brazil yeah see that's a new englander right um there's no references the one question we ask actually when you post a wish is is it locations is the location important and so if you say yes then it's shown based on location so people who nearby will be shown it preferentially and if you say no then the location is treated mutually by the system yeah we haven't gotten into the middle territory yet what do you think of anonymous gift exchanges um I think they're quite interesting we're not anonymous I mean you could actually be anonymous there's no nothing to stop you from setting up an anonymous profile arguably you'd have less trust in the community because the more kind of I think the more self-evident you are about yourself and you connected to other online social networks probably the more likely people will trust you I don't know that but that's my gut feeling um but I have actually been considering whether people could post wishes anonymously um and how then the logic of that would would work through I'm not against I'm not against the idea you'd obviously run into a problem practically speaking if you're about to meet and issues like that but fundamentally I'm not against it gentlemen right there in five years from now where do you want impossible to be what will look like possible it's always so tough when you talk about the future because then I don't know you just feel like you set yourself up for a failure of some sort um obviously I believe in this I wouldn't have invested like a large part of three years of my life and as much of my kind of resource and self into it if I didn't and I really do believe in the value system it's trying to propagate and I would hope that in five years time we have either built a community internally or if through the open source network we help other people build similar structures that also facilitate that same movement I'd be very happy we're also developing separately things looking at monetary like what kind of as I began like supply chains I think I have lots of ideas of where this can grow and go to but they're all backed up by trying to make essentially deeper connections between people may ask a question too what's the biggest challenge right now or starting an enterprise like this it's quite there's quite a few um fundraising has been very hard it's been self-funded by me and our cto and the British government gave me a grant but we're structured as a unisocial business so essentially it's kind of in another weird gray space where we're not a charity and we're not a business 100 a profit we'll go back into the social mission and so um this you know it's philosophically largely like a charity but gives us more freedom to operate like a business hopefully become self-sustainable and be able to grow and so that's quite challenging to like yeah it's quite had a few quite interesting conversations investors about that growth I mean actually users and solving the density issue I mentioned before is a big issue so how can we how can we grow in a way that it can scale and provide enough value to the users you know if you're on there and you love the idea but you haven't got people nearby on it like it's not going to return that much value you know you're limited to things you can do online it's probably not going to return that much value and I can try my best at flying around the world and talking about it but it's largely out of my control um whether we can deal with that that problem as it as it kind of emerges maybe so for a few uh specific sites like couch surfing there's some there exists there are a few sites like couch surfing uh and maybe ride sharing uh which uh which adjusted up the whole site just to share one particular thing yeah do you do you see impossible ending up with sort of uh sort of ghettos where people do you end up where you end up realizing that actually there's a whole lot of people sharing this one particular thing we ought to probably uh sort of create a little market a special marketplace for particular things uh do you think that you know that it could end up into from being this very generic thing at the moment end up sort of spinning off uh places where people you know the same old customers come repeatedly to to to give away a look for specific very specific thing yeah and I think that actually probably would be a better answer to the five years from now question um we and that is also probably a good answer to the what's one of the biggest problems we have um that we're trying to do so much like that uh and I don't think that's wrong that approach because as I said it's more about creating a community and understanding of value at this point um but you know there is there's a really great app you might have heard of um that deals with finding a car immediately when you need one um it's got four letters in it it's really becoming popular um like that's after tens or hundreds of years you know maybe hundreds but of industries looking at the issue of of travel and car services and how can we make it more and more intelligent and more and more convenient to the customer um and you get to this you know an app that does that very very very well and we're like how can we do everything that you've all been trying to be doing for like hundreds of years at the same time in a different way and and of course the service is not going to be that good so it would be wonderful if we did have a part of impossible it was like can I find a free ride and it brings me a map and I see anybody who's driving in the direction and I see their profile so I trust them and it's more elegant version of hitchhiking you know it'd be brilliant if we can start to refine this tool to solve specific problems um in a more tool-like way but uh that's a little bit beyond our capacity right now and um to your point on the couch surfing and or those couch surfing interesting actually I read a um I read a report on these kind of ideas a few years ago that used couch surfing as the only example of non bilateral return um that they've proven that non bilateral return works and can grow um I really love what they do and their kind of philosophy behind it and I always try to whenever I meet and I've spoken to the one of the founders of couch surfing whenever I try and meet people in that landscape communicate a very like collaborative philosophy of like if we can ever help you and like traffic you know if we have people asking for homes can we traffic them to you like there are ways we can build bridges between collaborative networks um and I hope that uh many of the people working that space in different ways will be as collaborative on the macro scale as they are on the kind of inner micro scale because I think that gives yeah the whole idea a lot more hope great I think that's a perfect segue actually into our panel so I may ask the panelist to join us but first thanks again so we have Sir Tim Berners-Lee he doesn't really need an introduction anymore uh he invented the web what can you say more Tim welcome we have Rosemary Leith who's a co-director of the World Wide Web Foundation and the Berkman Fellow would you like to have you here tonight and last no Jonathan is here great we have Judith Donoth she's also a fellow at the Berkman Center and formerly at MIT and straight from teaching Jonathan just in time our role and wonderful Jonathan Citrain thanks for speaking so Lili set the stage in in wonderful ways and framed I think also some of the broader themes that we hope to talk about tonight and I would actually like to start by taking two steps back you introduced this notion of the gift economy as one of the core concepts that you've been thinking about and you've been inspired by and so in this concept gift economy we have two prongs right one is the gift and then the economy and in that order actually I'd like to start this conversation by asking Judith um what is a gift as a social practice as a social phenomenon okay so to start with I think even gift is such a complicated term and there's a couple of others have been thrown around here tonight that I think will be useful to clarify so when you think of gifts there's actually a bunch of different types of things we can think of there's the you know the traditional western Christmas gift birthday gift and that's a slightly different one but what I would like to say about that one what's interesting there is that's a lot about saying what do I think about you if I'm giving you a gift it's a way of my signaling what I think of you and what do I think about our relationship at the more coercive level it might be what I think you ought to be like and what I think our relationship should be like the guy who gives his wife you know vacuum cleaner for her birthday is giving her some kind of message it may not be welcome but it's certainly a message um that's you know a particular type of gift that's about our relationship there's also the type of gifts I think we've been talking about more tonight which are gifts within a community which is another word that I think we might want to focus on a little bit more because gifts really exist within relationships and they exist within communities and I think that's one of the big challenges here I think the gift part in some ways is less difficult than the community part if you look at a lot of the communities that work in this way in which like I give something and then someone else gives something there's a huge level of trust and now trust is something that's very hard to gain and one of the things when you have a strong community with strong ties among people you have that kind of trust because they've had to do things to prove that they are trustworthy um there's a lot of work that's been done with like with closed communities such as like for instance the orthodox communities of diamond merchants that just you know will have like 80 000 of diamonds and they'll like toss them to someone else and they don't need to have a receipt or anything but you look at the shared rituals that they have gone through in the years of establishing that they will attend all these rituals they share these norms that they will pay a huge price for either freeloading or behaving in an untrustworthy way they can afford to be very very free with giving within that space and so I think one of the challenges here is that once we move outside the individual relationship with a gift and we start moving into a larger community the bigger we grow the harder it is to establish that kind of trust and so even when you look at online sort of examples of gift giving one a little gift I think some of the examples have been very interesting on impossible and then people say you know asking like they just want the answer to a question but if you look at the internet there's most of the internet is someone asked a question there was like use net was people asking questions they wanted an answer or they're all over there's a lot of information that's out there on the web because people have been asking and answering questions there for a long time and those answers are a little bit of a gift and if you look at things like the history of use net while it wasn't a bounded community it was a community people got to know each other they were in small groups once the web came around and there started to be search and the community boundaries started to break up that sort of lightweight gift community lightweight as it was fell apart because then you would have what were effectively freeloaders coming in because they came in through search as opposed to become coming in as community members and they were like ask a question get their answer and off they went so there wasn't the sense that you're answering something to someone who would then contribute so well this doesn't quite answer your question of what is a gift a lot of it is that it's things that we exchange to maintain and establish these relationships and it's done within the boundaries of some kind of relationship and community so it's very helpful I'm afraid yeah one quick question as a follow-up are there gifts with negative value you alluded to it it's not it's not clear that it's always positive well there's tons I bet is there anyone in this room who has ever received a gift that they did not like who that's never happened to right it's re-gifting yes there's re-gifting is great that's in a community what you often get it where it's just you always have to bring that bottle of wine to dinner and there's that bottle of wine nobody ever wants to drink it can move around the community but there you get a lot of that that's the thought that counts but a lot of them can be there are coercive gifts the gift that says this is the sort of person I think you are and you think I'm not that or the sort of the inappropriate gift from someone you're not that fond of who suddenly gives you like you know a great necklace it's like you know I really don't think we had that kind of relationship but thank you very much perhaps you would like to reconsider that so yeah there's certainly a lot of it is because they are costly statements about what someone thinks you're like what they want you to think of themselves and what they want to think about your relationship so you certainly those are all a lot of the cost especially in personal gifts is that you're very likely to make a mistake and that I think is also just one quick thing here where again there's a lot of different types of gifts and so that type of gift is something where what the recipient wants is a big mystery and how good you are at guessing it or how oblivious you are is a lot of the message in it but we're looking at something like impossible is very different where people are very clear I want this I want this here are the things I would like if you want to give me a gift here's the gift you can give me so part of it is the it doesn't have that kind of costly giving of some kind of information showing what you know of that person you don't reveal anything about your acumen about who the other person is because they've already told you what you want so that's also a different type so the part of the question is when do you want to be able to say I'm going to give you a gift because I'm going to show you my insight if I know what you want I can't communicate any personal insight so so one of the key takeaways from what you're describing so happily is that gifts are a deeply social practice and have a long history obviously so when we segue from the gifts part to the gift economy part I'm wondering how the merchants of markets have actually changed our culture of giving and receiving and I was hoping Rosemarie that you could share some of your observations of course you already heard right that nowadays we have business models that are built around sharing practices and around things that previously were actually all about giving and receiving for free and now it's commercialized so what does the economy the market economy in particular due to our culture of sharing and giving well I think if you look at capitalism a little bit in the market economy with profit motives perhaps accumulation of wealth in the digital world what does that mean and is it fed by social capital really you know what is social capital it's getting access it's increasing networks excuse me increasing your quality of life as a result is it self-interest which is slightly contrary to what impossible seeks to do but can people use use the site for self-interest to build their social capital and is building social capital selfish if you're fulfilling a wish what do you think Lily um I interestingly actually have drawn an analogy previously in my mind between uh the social reputation that was recognized often in gift economies that uh yeah a lot of anthropological texts again have written about um that there is social reputation as a big part of the practice and um how social media depends largely on social reputation I would say and as um that's a big kind of um a big force behind it and I don't necessarily think that that's about I don't judge it as good or bad you know I think that people have different motivations for for giving for cooperating and sometimes I think obviously it's beautiful and it's an anonymously and there isn't self-interest but I think that if you cooperate and you give because there's an element of social reputation in that if it ends up with a more cooperative world like I'm not going to hate on it or judge it or stop it so but I do think there is a very interesting um yeah analogy there so I would say one sorry one last thought there and if you actually think about I think if you think that through um like what uh what does social reputation mean it means that I walk into a room you know like a real room or a theoretical room like my facebook page and it changes how people relate to me you know it's how I'm perceived and um you might say that social reputation could be built on power or could be built on showing off and that's what I'd say a lot of social media does right now of like making your life look amazing um you don't see that many posts you know pictures on instagram of like here's how a crappy day um uh if your social reputation is built on um is built on your acts of kindness and like how you interact with the world around you and your community like that's quite an interesting inversion of um social reputation and I don't think it's necessarily a bad one I know that I have um wonderful like I feel like like many places I go in the world I have wonderful people around me and wonderful friendships and that's probably largely built through my relationships to them you know and how hopefully I've treated them and they've treated me and that grows in time um so I think somehow you can remove the cynicism from it and see that actually it's just a value maybe to everyone to to interact in that way yourself included so I would like to drill down a bit on on this question what's the role of technology and obviously with Sir Tim Berners-Lee here you gave the world a wonderful gift with the worldwide web protocol and basically created that something that now itself is a platform for for giving and receiving so the question is um is the internet in its DNA at the world level in particular bolstering social norms of sharing and and and this kind of mechanism that we now also see um uh underlying impossible.com or is it about the humans using the technology so what's what's the role of technology I think it well it's true that yes for the people who are playing in the engineering task force designing protocols back back in the day so the people that that I sort of looked to and copied they when they designed the previous protocols like TCP and FTP and SMTP the things that came before HTTP uh they now those were all common things so that the the commons was how it worked that was it's and it's a bit like the commons of scientific knowledge uh you know that you establish the it's a very well worn way of working that you establish you everybody right raises the commons and you do that when you're developing internet protocols and when you're developing knowledge and then you can spin things off on top of it you can use use the platform uh so yes initially you could the the development of the platform itself was very much done with the commons model but once the platform is there then it can be it's supposed to be a neutral platform it's supposed to be just it's supposed to be like a white sheet of paper it's supposed to be used for whatever humanity uses it for and so uh when you look at the web you see humanity and you don't necessarily see uh a commons model yes I notice that John Perry Barlow quote on the wall basically uh I forget which exactly are his words but obviously because he does from that quote that that he he was saying you know we're building this place where it's all gonna be different and ever and uh and uh he he was expecting something very utopian he stands out I think as the peak of you know maybe selected for the quote on the wall as being the person who really represents that nobody else really went for such a utopian idea some people still feel no on the web because you can contact copy copy stuff there should be no copyright for example but most people mostly what you see on the web is now you see humanity with its commercial and with its altruistic and whether with all the things that you see so in so I don't think the web itself um uh sort of is naturally premed because it's a net neutral platform it doesn't naturally work better for altruistic things that said it gives us a choice of what we build on top and so if we are thoughtful and when we build the next platforms if we do things like think about what sort of world we want to have instead of just uh implementing the previous world and bits if we actually think and hey you know and say hey we nice to have a world in which things are different then I think we can so good so it gives us a chance to start again the things we build on top of the web can be whatever we want so I think solve more power to impossible for for deciding to go deliberately in a way not because the web takes you that way because they decided it would be good to go that way it was actually on that point it was really interesting I'd been working on impossible very much by myself at this point a few years ago and um I just done uh I just done the first version of wireframes finally after hiring two people to make them and they were not right I was like how am I going to do this by myself I don't know how to use uh powerpoint properly and so I'm going to make them by collage and so I just made collage wireframe scan them in and mocked together how this thing was going to work through 10 pages and my um old history politics teacher came by now retired like one of the most brilliant wise men I've been fortunate to be taught by and came by for a cup of tea and I showed him I just want to show you this thing I'm working on and it was quite extraordinary to see he was um like genuinely blown away and not by uh the singular idea of um yeah well there was what's called impossible at that point of impossible but rather by suddenly seeing what the internet can potentially allow us to do and he studied history like he studied hundreds of years of different social movements and different political movements and I think he just suddenly saw oh things that people have been trying to do a society to try trying to do for hundreds of years now actually may be possible in and what does that mean not impossible by itself but what does that mean broadly um and I I personally have been very very inspired the last few years through working on this and just thinking about the breadth of possibility there is um for uh for new things to emerge I mean if you think about social media and how I don't I don't think there's another example historically where the whole like such a huge proportion of the world has so quickly changed its social dynamic in a very you know in a very immediate way um it's it's pretty powerful yeah I think it's very interesting and it's really in its infancy so I'm very interested to see what other ideas people have and yeah what else we can do I think we were going to see he was and he looked over your shoulder and said Lily give us to me our code of happy JavaScript for you then he knows what JavaScript is um and I also think you're I don't know if you want to talk about that at all but the web you want campaign which I know you two are working on um really speaks to that too it's like the internet is so amazing and it's like we have so much potential with it and I think so important we honor that perhaps we can get back to that in just a minute because that seems to be a terrific segue actually for something that Jonathan has been thinking a lot about and that is this question the generative quality of the internet but also very much going forward the pressures that exist and the threat that exists to an open internet that allows for things to be built on top um in the way as we've seen it in the past so looking at the status quo and and and perhaps more interestingly some of the trends you see happening right now in in the commercial world but also how platforms are actually operating um in what direction are we headed and what are some of the possible implications not only for platforms such as impossible.com but for the ecosystem how we as as users participate in in interactions and sharing and in social practices well I think you're right to ask about the pressures on the platform and on the platforms and also maybe to draw within that the pressures on individuals these days um we live in a time where we have more affordances to use a nice social science term surely than ever before the idea that we can get a message or a photo or something out to the world and if it's interested in it it will ricochet instantly it's been easier to do in 2014 than 2013 than 2005 than going all the way back and at the same time I think it fair to say that our perception of the environment is one where dangers lurk at every corner somebody's like oh you opened your computer that was your mistake it's totally compromised now you'll have to microwave it and you're like what yep yep it's gone um or uh the idea that if you cross the wrong person online like your life can become a living hell as subscriptions are ordered up for you and column knees are set about you and you're left having to fill out repeated bubble sheets on Facebook that this does violate the terms of service and no I don't want to send them a message that says they're a bad person can you take care of it um and the normal response to those kinds of fear and pressure is to an individual to to withdraw to pull in I think to a parent to tell their kid like you're not going online except for me watching you and maybe an angry bird or two until you're 27 um and I think also to try to look in the first instance for protection and rules and in specially designated security entities that will help you and there's reason for that I mean we aren't a law school so most of the writings on the wall outside are about how great law is far low so I'm standing out you Tim you went right to the one that was most relevant where Barlow was like screw this um the declaration from the Declaration of Independence for cyberspace which opens with you weary giants of flesh and steel I come to you from the home of cyberspace the place of mind your old states have no purchase here but I digress um that was very 1996 that sentiment and as we find more rules channeling us either through those who would review what we do for acceptability automated rules that may categorize or limit what we can do I think as with rules and security in the offline world there's a longer term cost even if they're working well for the shorter term problems in that more and more when we behave in certain ways we can't tell ourselves we can't answer the question am I doing this because I'm a decent person or am I doing this because Dr. Skinner will deliver a shock if I should stray and when the rules are enforced that well we no longer internalize them and own them we simply do it because that's what we'd better do and I get pretty nervous about that so um anytime we've seen online an act the gift that was referred to by Tim of not looking to patent what he did just in case if it should hit big then maybe I should you know get one percent is one percent too much to ask for the web I'm glad I'm not giving you this advice then but only now in retrospect when it's too late to do anything about it um when we see those acts those are moments of inspiration that do inspire stuff and I can see it collectively too with something like Wikipedia and we can ask how much social capital matters on Wikipedia there are barn stars you can be aborted in statistics of how many changes you've made it's just funny that the barn stars have no security to them it's not like only if five distinct people vote that you have earned a barn star may you get the barn star and hear the rules for evoking it it's anybody can edit your user page on Wikipedia to paste a gif of a barn star in it be like good job and which makes you realize that you could go to your own user page on Wikipedia and award yourself every known barn star and invent a few more the way that a uh dictator might uh give himself a stooning of medals for imaginary accomplishments and people tend not to do it precisely because there's not a rule against doing it it's just no fun to vote yourself rich that way and I think that's a pretty genius piece of the design of Wikipedia so uh what I like about something like Wikipedia and about impossible is there's a weird silver lining in a world full of trolls in which we can choose to break the trolls rules and damn the consequences and like be nice to one another in measurable ways that we own and the less of it there is the more we're obviously owning it when we're choosing to deviate from either the transactional or the transgressive first order against rules norm um and there's one other thing I wanted to say about social capital which is it is a platform but it's one infused with a very special priming of the pump and I think that when people uh encounter a measure of fame and celebrity what that means is there are other people who are like I'm really excited about what you do I'd like to somehow be a part of it just like kind of get a piece of the magic it's called fandom and I think when people are subject to fandom they often choose to become ambassador for unicef or they pick a cause it's like if you have some extra energy to burn off that's called liking me why not give money to this good cause it seems like a really nice idea to channel just the 56th like of you into something useful for someone else and I think the genius lily of what you're doing is instead of just picking your cause you've built a platform and told people like don't even follow me in my particular thing of like abandoned pets although everybody should help an abandoned pet this message sponsored by the mspca um but instead saying pick a way in which you'd like to be nice to a stranger and connect with them and own that and by doing that you will honor whatever good feelings you have about me that's what i'm asking you to do and I think that infuses this otherwise neutral platform with a certain starting spirit that it can then exist independently and go off in the directions it goes and I think the web is that as well there's so much connection in the sense of building a platform and giving it that boost and finally the threat comes in either from somebody wanting to troll it and I think we could probably learn a lot from wikipedia on the way in which it deals with trolls which is genuinely amazing it's with a form of fake love that just totally frustrates them where like they vandalize a page and a good wikipedia will then deal with the vandalism by reverting it and leaving a note on their thing that says we're so excited that you like wikipedia that you're playing around with it here's a place where you might also try that won't hurt the page as much and like damn it I was trying to hurt it and like thank you again for your interest in wikipedia and they like really have to try to get a rise out of the wikipedia administration such as it is and how do you know how do you know what that that's what happens to trolls it's all research dammit it's all research it's for the greater good um I've seen it happen I I've read about it um that's the answer um and the other thing is you can become a victim of your own success that if something becomes too popular too quickly and exactly what makes it successful and therefore popular is the culture and practice built around it rather than a particular magic technology that just you push a button then you get a magic bean if too many people flow in looking for the magic we get what I think is what anybody who has been to burning man says the next year that person is at burning man which is it's gone to hell that last year was the key year and everybody who joined after me is just a hanger on and and you know that from you that's right that's right so figuring out how to deal with the influx of attention that comes from success and retaining your spirit I think that's a problem wikipedia faces every day it's a problem the web faced when people for a while when they looked at trolling of various kinds online said we need new computer ethics how do we keep training people and we are past computer ethics at this point as the main way to solve it but despite that I do think there are ways to try to help onboard this new energy that comes in so they're really apprenticing to the very spirit that made it successful and made them want to join to begin to begin with jay z do you think that there is a movement to crowd source kindness so if you have a young generation of people who grew up on the internet that instead of going to soup kitchens you can actually go online and you can be kind online you can find an outlet as you're saying for for a number of things you want to do I mean look at reddit yes gift yes sample and so actually it could be the start of something really magical of a new trend of a new vehicle for people instead of physically going out I do and I think the less formulaic it is the better which means one might have to continually evolve modalities of finding people in need of being kind and and reddit in that particular subreddit is an incredible example of just transforming people's worlds now when they make the reality show based on it that then follows people around as they are awarded it all starts to get transactional and such but I think the hope is that that spirit then finds another pathway to express and I think it's a habit that then becomes learned it's really it's so amazing when you go to your first meet up or you successfully have a couch surfing and you define success the first time as like no one died no one was killed and then you're like did I have a good time it's actually the new success these are things that really can change people's I think general outlook on life and that's to me why it's so powerful so maybe we should ask how the wikipedians would deal with a with a child anti-troll methods with a with somebody who puts dark dark uniformed anonymous forces in a neighboring country just to see what see without very much comment uh-huh maybe that maybe it's a form of it's a form of trolling and it would be susceptible to the same sort of treatment I think that certainly the it's the ethos of nonviolent resistance to almost anything which is I'm not going to play in your frame and that may mean that I will pay a great cost and it's not clear that every threat can be met successfully with nonviolent resistance but my guess is we are underestimating that number rather than overestimating it great this may be an excellent moment to open it up since we have some wikipedians in the audience wink wink in case SJ wants to weigh in with reflections but any questions to the panelists and wait for the microphone please it's right here it's funny I hear a birthday next to it wouldn't be funny if we all sang happy birthday right now I'm curious what the gift economy and sort of these social bonds and and sort of these social networks building up around sort of reciprocity and and sort of spontaneous so to speak giving is are there concerns that we end up giving to people that we relate to more often and that this can stratify us and sort of make us say hey this person looks like me or thinks like me or listens to the same music and and then we have got even more sort of segregated or stratified society because of we say oh this is all good and gifting but actually we're just sort of kind of creating a smaller pool of tighter connections so it's the gift bubble issue um I I don't think I could ever answer that on like a on a base like human level of like the instincts we might have to give to one another but on a systems level of like how we've been designed impossible um and tried to design in a way that would allow serendipity in the content you see so that's why you don't just see follow you don't just follow your friends you know you you know you kind of your stream has local content it's taking the best features of chat roulette and putting them into impossible I think there's another way of looking at it is that you don't want to try and build interfaces that go contrary to what we understand about human nature and it's true that people are more trusting of those who look similar to them there was um there's a very interesting experiment on a couple of years ago by someone who was looking at um who you will vote for and it turns out if you combine that they could say okay these people wanted to vote for you know Bush and these people wanted to vote for Gore but if they took the person's own face and very subtly combined it with the candidates face it actually quite changed the level to which you vote for so there's all kinds of things that basically if you could find someone out there who's you you'll just give them everything I love social science which probably makes a lot of um a lot of sense we are you know we have a lot of reasons want to give to family etc so what you want to do when you design an interface then is you say let's work with this because it also turns out that we can redefine the different coalitions that um we see as people like us so if you want to work on that design you say okay well what we don't want is to say you know all the white people only give things to white people and you know etc like that you say what are different ways of setting up how groups are formed in this piece you know there's been other experiments done um where people have taken groups and said you know basically you know that's it worked how sports works you put a green t-shirt on a one set of people yellow t-shirt on another set and they're like deathly enemies and so you could do things like that in interfaces that say okay we're gonna make this particular set and say you are like these people you can do a lot of things to work with that kind of tendency as opposed to saying we want to go against the tendency to give to people like us you can just start to think about redefining how we want to do that and I think that that also there's a I think there's a very complicated thing in English this doesn't seem to be doing a good job with words around gift because there's so many things packed into it but the kind of gift that's about a relationship like with an immediate person is very different than the gift that's a charity and you know I think one of the things I'm still struggling to understand about impossible is where does it fall in that domain of the gift that's about the personal relationship and the gift that's a charitable donation to somebody and charity is a lot about giving to others and you know if you read something like my monities work a lot of it is about saying that the giver should be as anonymous and disappear and that the highest level is where people don't even know they've received something and so that's very very different than the kind of gift exchange that's about it can't be anonymous it's all about building a relationship so I think as we develop these interfaces we need to kind of understand which piece of you know the traditions and understandings of gifts and relationships we're pulling so yes the local church for example it would have a two phenomena might be one might be a potluck supper where everybody comes and brings you know gives random food to each other on a very much of a peer level and then they also twinned with a church somewhere in the school somewhere in sub Saharan Africa where they're building the school and it's sort of completely different relationship but it does seem that when you're if you're trying to get somebody to go and do the the the second giving where you're crossing community boundaries you're crossing I think one of the early questions was about yes but isn't this just about the one percent learning to give when the other 60 70 percent already give that's the only way they survive but it's true isn't it true also that even that even though there might be this theory of the gift it being remote if you want somebody to give you make them very conscious of exactly what the little girl they're giving to looks like even though they're we know way the other side of the world in fact what you do instead of saying you're going to give to people of this in this country who have been in famine you say for the cost of a coffee you could inject this child with their with their vaccines right so just just for clarity like my monities notion about gifting as charity the highest level wasn't that you don't know who you're giving it to but they do not know who gave to them and they do not and that the highest level they don't even know that something was given to them like you know something just appeared in their life was better but they're not even aware that someone has come to help them out because the idea was that there's something that that can be deeply distressing about being given to also so I think part of it is there's such a complicated there's very complicated psychology is around giving and receiving and and the issues around reciprocity are a lot of a lot of it isn't a bad thing it's about maintaining the dignity of the recipient to be a giver um yeah I actually think that one of the interesting insights I've come to through this process is that and I could be wrong on this because it's just speculative but but that people actually have a harder time receiving often than giving and that actually at some point I wanted to call this the receiving economy almost um and said I just call it the giving receiving economy and it's interesting actually it's very I've never I don't really ever see those two words put together it's always kind of the gift economy or the gift and culture and of course they're both necessary and important um but is the receiving the asking or just being willing to receive or like being vulnerable enough to to let yourself and to potentially question the idea that that disempowers you you know and I think then you get into an interesting dialogue around the power politics of exchange and does there have to be you know Marcell Miles that we were talking about previously wrote about the power dynamics that come into gift giving and that it can create subjugated power relationships but that does that have to be the way the way it is or is that because we're used to an exchange paradigm where if someone gives to me I therefore expect I need to return to them um it's in I don't know it's it's it's interesting psychology but to your question on what types of gifts uh one I would love to do in future and like build more anonymity um option uh aspects as we touched on earlier and we're trying to think through that now um partially for those reasons and secondarily it's the emphasis is on peer-to-peer giving um not so much charity giving but we don't um like the man who wished for example for a little girl to go to Japan was obviously it was his choice to make a wish for somebody not himself through a charity I'm not going to you know we're not going to stop that or trust us that but generally it's peer-to-peer right yeah I didn't necessarily mean that it has to be that a charity was like to an organization but just the paradigm of a gift seeming charity right there's a difference between the gift that I you give to someone because it's about expressing something about your relationship and the gift you give to them because you think you're in need and I'm giving this to you because you need help to be honest I would love if we just got away at some point from even the language of giving and receiving all together because it I I I kind of feel like you're inevitably receiving when you give and vice versa like I actually don't see them as that compartmentalized and um and so I wouldn't see it as charitable necessarily but just as like a normal natural human thing to do and then these are the normal natural human beings around you are also going to do that back and and that just feels a bit more normative and for some kinds of uh ways in which the sun falls I'm as you said out of words to use it without saying gift um that in some ways like we have to give my monities a break he was writing a long time ago and it was before the internet I think um and for the reddit example that rosemary brought up uh do people remember the bus monitor her name was Karen I forget her last name who was bullied terribly that video went online the trolls had a decent time with it and then reddit saw to it not only that she was given like a pat on the back and some support and a little bit of money but I think it was ultimately around $800,000 that she was given by the crowd and I think the only way to understand that is collectively people wanted to make a statement that said $800,000 says that's not the way you should behave it's not a statement about punishment it's a statement about just how much of an outpouring there was five or ten dollars at a time about their view on it and the fact that it wasn't maybe the givers were largely anonymous but that the whole thing happened was meant to create a statement about who lots of people wanted to be and what society they wanted to see and that's a neat function I like the idea that it's more about I hear Lily using wish more than need because a wish is something beyond need but also less necessary it's like you don't I'm not telling you you have to give this to me you'll be a bad person if you don't that's a need I think a wish is look you don't have to do this but it would really be cool if this happened don't you agree too and when it does happen I agree great fortune like chance has smiled on me rather than just I got what I was due because people should have what they need it's a very different like a non-expectation feel to it some wishes are offers yeah if I'm right and some wishes are asks yeah so it's it's actually which was interesting actually because we started off with the wish being devised into I wish and I can and had people kind of in a more polarized way posting things and we actually discovered to my delight that people using I wish to post offers too so saying like I wish I could help do da da da I wish I could um which I just think it's wonderful because it's I could really use a dollar or two would be the other one too yeah submerging the two you know which is what we're talking about submerging this idea of giving and receiving which is a bit crazy but I think you know we do actually I think receive when we give and when we break that thought paradigm I think there's something very powerful that could happen we have a few more people you have a mic already right so uh the concept of impossible is really fascinating to me I think it's something that's very closely tied to language especially because we access the ability to understanding comprehend the world through language and so it language defines what's possible and it's also the means in which we could kind of chart new cartography so what can be possible if it's currently not possible and Amelia already talks a lot about this in terms of uh relationship between power and and um and imagination and so she talks about how poets are often the most powerful people in the world because they have the ability to imagine new relationships um especially in the context of like social movements for example and it seems that we're kind of moving away from where we're not moving away but we're moving towards the power of technology and the language of technology as a new way to imagine and solve impossible problems at this huge scale because not only is it uh the internet and the web as it as a uh as a system is very large it's you know you're not alone in thinking within your local sphere but you're thinking at a global level but the language itself allows you to manifest into this plane something that language can always can't always express so when you create something with code you're building something and it's a way to kind of reimagine relationships and re um and build new things to kind of solve a lot of problems and so I'm kind of curious you know uh Tim and Jonathan what your thoughts are on how the language of technology and the language of the internet you know whether it's html or any sort of programming language can kind of help us conceive and tackle large problems and then Lily what your thoughts are maybe on how your platform um is a way for us to articulate impossible problems in new ways so that they can be solved Tim you want to start language I'm not sure so leaving yes language is whatever thoughts and concepts we have and ideas we have there they until we've communicated them with words then they're not actually sort of they don't have any effect so we get this interesting when you imagine that when you look at some of the language somebody's using that that you're sort of the the only model we've got of what's going on in their brain even though their brain may be thinking I have lots of wonderful and much clearer ideas uh what you get is the result of language what so what's interesting um so in Twitter for example it's what's fascinating the way people have developed their own language people develop their own language all the time you know kids develop their language quickly uh and until uh they don't learn for teen language until it's written up in a book that the parents can buy and then they immediately switch it with uh to another teen language uh so that so people will change their language to define groups and things that you know to stop other people sort of yeah being impinging on the group but otherwise it's uh often yeah throughout history that new words have have been created whether when there've been new concepts it's rather neat the way things happen uh where on twitter and what doing a retweet modified tweet and all kinds of little acronyms get uh people get put together very quickly because people come up with a um because in fact there's new things going on and people just invent things that way of talking about it it would be of course neat if in uh i don't know how you could make that happen in impossible if it's worthy you know so that's if the so the imps for example new words yesterday they made that word up somebody well somebody wished i wish i wish that i wish the impossible users were called imps yeah and then now they are so i suppose that happens a lot maybe the word gift so maybe what you you can do is end up sort of retracting some of the words from the website which is take some of the words out of the code and leave people you know leave just leave uh a lot of art work a lot of art and some buttons and let people start inventing new language so that they don't have to have to say i wish but maybe they'll maybe they'll end up you know we're finding ways of saying i they won't say i wish or i want or i need they'll end up producing new words which actually go to somewhere addressing your you know your issues you have with these ones we've got it alone i love um i'm i'm a bit of a geek for um language and um playing with words and we've actually got in the app we spell wishful and thankful wrong with double l's and had a couple of people comment hey you've spelled wishful and thankful wrong has been like no actually that's on purpose thank you thank you yeah it's just a it's full sense of fullness um yeah to your point on impossible uh my uh thesis in university was called impossible utopias and i was look it wasn't related to the gift economy but i was kind of trying to reclaim a concept of utopia in the post post modern landscape and um looked a lot of the idea of how we frame possibility and uh impossibility and that i would argue that are largely the idea of the impossible to largely a human construct and um so challenging essentially what we consider impossible and i guess that is a bigger vision of what impossible is about so actually i said one of the things i've noticed with that we've done lots of interviews for the web we want campaign asking people to think about the web they want and staggering how they assume that whatever we have we have in 15th time is going to have the dmca just as it is and computers are going to be just like they are and all the you know all the software is going to be pretty much they're going to say yes you know they're they're sitting operating in a very small space they're not think that and so we got the these assumptions that that the existing vocabulary we've got and existing words we've got to describe space are will be the ones we have to use in the future is really dangerous we should make sure keeps us inside the box yeah please lily to your to your thought what you said about getting more about about helping somebody um i'm reminded of this sort of buddhist statement where um when you beg you're actually giving people the opportunity to make merit by helping you and so um and sort of that have you thought about in user interface giving people a chance to describe how they've been fulfilled by helping others instead of just saying thanks for the people who've been helped um that how they feel about helping yeah in other words their experience of being fulfilled yeah we have actually and um uh storytelling like encouraging storytelling something we're working on now so we get that to come more to the surface yeah um yeah there's like a long list of things that we're trying to build in but that is high on the priority list and I think hopefully actually we'll go in this month yeah because I had just in the last few months the magic for me is hearing people's stories you know and caring about people have made this collection or had this experience and I just hear trickles of it you know people who reach out to me or I meet um and I think it'd be really lovely to hear more of that and collectively hear more of that thank you hi I've never tweeted I've never been on Facebook um and I'm not a Buddhist but I am begging for a sip of water I'm looking at your water thank you oh thank you very much we can arrange for you to tweet as well tonight it could be the exacta be careful what you wish for thank you there was a question I just want to add something very quickly too about um I can't remember who asked it um about homogen- homogenity is that the right word of making sure that people don't only give to to people who who are like I just want to say very quickly last time I was in this room was for um Ethan Zuckerberg's book launch Rewire and Rewired and he was talking about exactly that concept and how um there's a real danger to the internet being designed in a way that potentially you just see you know you should go to these bars because your friends like these bars you should read these books because you already like that book and um and I genuinely actually do think there's a real danger in that in a lot of algorithms architecting how we experience the web in a way that reflects our own experience the previous experiences or biases or friendships um and with impossible I've avoided if anyone else wants water I'm not drinking it so yeah I through impossible it's something I've been mindful of of um make of trying to make it serendipitous so we're crowdsourcing serendipity um among us we've actually helped come up with that idea of how we could create matches that that we crowdsource rather than algorithmically do for that reason entirely um and I think there's a bigger issue there about how if I go to my computer and I'm seeing mirrors of sorts in my experience of it that I think there's a very big philosophical danger to that the filter bubble yeah yeah yeah yeah the advertising filters the whatever they are so time for one last question thank you so much of the conversation tonight has centered around social capital and Sir Tim had mentioned uh couch surfing and and you you lend out your couch with the hope that you can use somebody else's and Jonathan had mentioned Wikipedia and the way that you can clearly see a user's contribution so Lily when you were just kind of designing this impossible uh to what extent did it play in that we could kind of keep tabs on and how many wishes somebody's you know fulfilled or or just kind of keeping score or as it seems the way that you would rather use wish than gift uh resisting that temptation we do that's what the thanks does so that's an acknowledgement to that point somewhat um and so that reflects what people are doing on the system is always public so you do get a sense of what people are doing um does there's nothing impossible that says that's good or bad or therefore you know you're the more likely to get your wish fulfilled it's just transparent but I would say that with um I don't think it's as simple as I mean there might be people who do who game in that way in trying and thanks to receive but I don't think that that's very likely um and even with uh couch surfing uh the way I first came across couch surfing as I was doing a film in Montreal and one of the actresses told me about this site couch surfing she was using that her and her boyfriend used and they had they had really high ratings on couch surfing and so therefore they had about 20 people a week would request to stay in their house and they'd go through their profiles and when they found somebody they thought it was interesting and they'd get along with they'd invite them into their home and the only reason they would do it is not because they were banking on getting a couch the next time they were traveling but because they genuinely enjoyed the experience that offered of meeting somebody they would never normally meet having a conversation taking them around the city and it was like a real social exercise um and so I think that once again the kind of the value actually in uh that you receive and giving giving you know of like experiencing that human being and spending some time with them and having that moment in time is actually really valuable and I think that impossible will only work and be successful if it has that if it if it delivers on that because it's the only real reason that people will continue to be part of it not to uh the photograph that says thank you you know but the threads of the two lives for a moment with a gift yeah I was just twisted yeah the moment and then you're just away and that's a very rich and that moment in time like in that yeah which is all we really have you know it's like time and it's like let's enjoy it which also helps the surfer understand that it's not a free hotel it's like there's actually part of the culture of it where maybe it's doing the dishes or pulling out your lyre and playing a nice tune I guess it's more of my monities thing the duty of the of the guest is to entertain the traveler thing that you were suspected to participate so I think you know I think again I think we tend to subsume a lot of these things as being you know all of this is sharing economy or something they're all very interesting but I think they're interesting in really different ways so I think this issue with with couch surfing really is about saying here's a way and I think this is very much what you're getting at a lot with impossible of saying that we're sort of a brokerage where one particular set of needs and one set of abilities can come together and then people can have this experience where they share some time and they get to meet and that the matching of the the wish and the granting of it is sort of the catalyst for having a shared experience and that's I think what couch surfing work says is that kind of catalyst like Wikipedia is also really interesting it's a very different model and I think there we might want to look at more like craft traditions that there's something that people have about the pride of building something that you know that you make these pages and even if you're somewhat of an anonymous crafts person within it you know there's buildings have gone up like this so there's something about being part of a group that creates something and seeing that here's this creation that I've been part of and I've contributed to it it's also it's also a selfless act compared to going to the store and buying something for as a monetary exchange but the psychology of it is is not better or worse it's just very different than the social couch surfing piece great thank you unfortunately we have to wrap up here and I'd like to end by asking each of you what's your wish for impossible Jonathan and I feel like even one of those movies where you get one wish and then you try to put a technicality in it and then it comes back to haunt you or I guess it's the monkey's paw isn't it so not that my wish is for it to surprise us all with just how powerful it can be like I do think the ingredients are lined up very nicely and it is one of these generative ideas that is ambitious but not wholly planned that's ready to turn on a dime or a pence and try something else and that it surprises us several orders of magnitude on where it can go and becomes the thing that poor wikipedia has had to be for how many years now where every time you want to light a flame of hope that things can be different than just transactional or security you're like but wikipedia people like yeah yeah yeah wikipedia but so there'll be that moment where somebody will be like but it's impossible and what they don't mean is of course it's not possible but like what about impossible they do it you're like well now there's only two examples you know that's double the number of examples and calcium great to do this a hard one to follow sort of like I wish all the good things possible would happen to it right and now I have to see something different so I will I will take a subset of that and just say you know I wish that it emerges out of it something really fresh and new that is unexpected and I think that it's hard to say what that is but you know something that makes us think there's a a way that people can work together through this medium that we just hadn't foreseen now that we see it it makes sense but we just hadn't known that and that it works as that the catalyst to make that happen I wish for you to all go home and wish on impossible and make it a viral make a viral impact in the US and America and start a global movement so it could start here so that's what I wish for I've been down from the road of course I have to ask to wish that the possible should have a meta wish which allowed them to use as many wishes as they all want in danger of impossible then blowing up in smoke due to lack of contradiction and level breaking I'll settle for I will settle for a wish that impossible will manage to blend somehow the sort of peer-to-peer giving between people of similar status similar place and know each other pretty well with a continual stream of giving from those who feel that they have to those that feel that they don't have in a way that in a way that maybe people don't really notice that that that flow is happening but in the way that also that can be the sort of giving which can adjust inequality can come out of it as well as the one which is celebrate you know which is which happens between peers really concluding thoughts I also wish for surprise like some of you said I mean I've got like you know like my dream scenario of growing a community and different value systems and what are the implications of that and if we do turn into business and make money like all the awesome things socially environmentally we could do with that money you know like I've got the normal like the normal stuff but I think actually truthfully like if it surprises me and it just kind of goes beyond my this is premised on like my faith and optimism in people and if it surprises me how wonderful people can be that would yeah that'd be great so it's become clear you've given a lot tonight and one thing I learned it's not about only about giving it's also about receiving and therefore I have a few small gifts to say thank you to all of you for this great panel and everybody gets applause please thank you very much thank you have a good night