 Welcome back y'all are looking beautiful from up here please finish up your freestyle cohorting conversations and listen we've got a lot to cover first things first I know there's been some confusion and conversation around the bus and shuttle situation I'm here to calm that down so last night you should have received an email from Hannah or Kevin Bitterman check your emails if you haven't and all of your information is in that email if you did not receive an email from Kevin Bitterman or Hannah please see Hannah soon ish and Hannah's in the back with a wonderful black hat next to Devin in the orange Hannah great Hannah also in the last 10 minutes sent eight people an email with the change I'm gonna read those names now so you can make sure you check your email so Tim Jennings Chad Peterson Marcy Krausen Allison Davis Jose Gonzalez Milta Ortiz Kelsey Tyler and Sarah Waugh so for those folks just make sure you check your email so you can see the latest from Hannah cool all right so did everyone have a good time on their field trips I know I did my bus where's bus D y'all are so best bus ever but to honor those experiences we just had together I would love to have a town hall where everybody everybody shares out their experiences but we don't really have time for that so instead I want to try a town hall that is exactly three seconds long I want everyone here to share one thing they're gonna take away from those field trips and we're gonna share it the exact same time this will shake off those lunch cobwebs and get us warmed up for a real town hall later with our consultants that's gonna be in the last banjo song so everyone quick quick quick take a moment to think about one thing you're gonna take away from the field trips it could be serious or it could be silly but it shouldn't be more than three seconds so here we go our three second town hall I'll count down from three and after I say one not on one but after one you share your field trip take away ready well it doesn't matter because here we go three two one three seconds thank you for attending our three second town hall and for sharing your experiences so freely and at the same time it was wonderful we'll just become one big cohort for a moment and it was a beautiful thing and all seriousness one reason we did these field trips is because too often in American beanings we try to pack so much stuff in and we wind up spending so much time in a hotel or a conference center that we really never get a sense of where we are so we thought that was really important to do in Kansas City so with our Kansas City info burst and the field trips we hope that we achieved that goal and to get a deeper sense of things I'd love to introduce Jeff Church from Coterie Theater to the stage hi everybody fellow cohorts I should say right I think you're all Kansas City cohorts now can I think of you that way we loved having you here here's the deal my my I was just going to talk to you about where are you you are across the street from Hallmark's headquarters and Hallmark is the largest employer of artists commercial artists I should say in the United States or perhaps the world and it happens to be right here across the street and the building that you're in besides being in the Western you're in the Crown Center complex and the Hallmark owns this complex and in this complex there are three theaters live theaters there's the theater that I run with Joette Pellster the Coterie Theater which is a multi-generational theater on level one and then there's the music theater heritage on level three and then there's a theater a full 400 seat theater that is dark and is looking for its identity because it Hallmark used to own it and run a commercial theater but then the economic downturn happened and now we have a big empty 400 seat theater there's an opportunity for somebody out there please come and join us now across the link you get over to Union Station and in Union Station you have the city stage and that houses theater for young America and beside that is the Todd Bolander Center that you guys some of you went to on the bus tour and that's what an exciting place that is and then you can even take a bridge over the train tracks and get yourself over into the crossroads and that is the crossroads West which is like has the fish tank and you guys all maybe some of you had David Ford as your host down there who is a crossroads leader but there's also crossroads East which houses the Green Lady Lounge where some of us were until rather late last night and then there but a butting that is the living room theater and further downtown of course is the the rep second stage in the power and light district at the Copacan stage and besides all of that is a area of town called the bottoms and some of you went to the ship last night so that was a wild experience I bet for some of you so that's this lower section then as you go up the street you actually have a city-owned theater used to be a barn that burnt down and then somebody had the idea like let's make a theater that community groups can use and that houses two professional theaters melting pot and spinning tree and then a little bit further down Main Street off Main is Paul Mesner Studio the Metropolitan Ensemble Theater the Unicorn Theater and then if you go way out you get Starlight Theater which is a big outdoor theater that seats 7,000 people so and of course the rep is right there in the UMKC campus also at the end of the Main Street corridor so that's kind of where you are in theater now where you are is in Missouri did some of you think you were going to Kansas some of you did didn't you and that makes us cross now I it we can't I just like I'm not even from here Missouri I've been here 24 years but I get cross about it and I think the reason why we get cross is because we all a lot of the arts have have the hub is in Missouri but in Kansas there's not a lot of arts there's some arts but not a lot and so we get protective I think but there is this street that cuts through a large portion of the city and that street is called State Line and if I drove you in a car I could be on Missouri and you in the same car can be in Kansas if I just drove down the middle of the line which I do to people all the time and it freaks them out so anyway that's that's okay where you are now I just will say one of the challenges that we have you know yes we have a great cost of living and there's a great art scene here but we have never really united Kansas and Missouri in as a sort of getting the the people in Kansas to think about coming to Kansas City Missouri fully as their own arts hub I mean that's really been a challenge and with something we have to solve and we've tried to do it in different ways and wish us luck on that because the city's growing going south and they hardly even you know sometimes there's people who don't even know of the art scene we're not even a blip on their radar so we have our challenges but we sure have loved having you and have a great rest of the afternoon and if you stay tonight see a play go to a great restaurant love to talk more to you thank you thank you Jeff now many of you know Jeff as our beloved producing our artistic director of the Children's Theatre Coterie but he's also directing Adult Place and he's directing Equus at the Living Theatre so if you are staying tonight and not dealing with the bus situation you should go see what you're directing at the Living Theatre so thank you now here we go Ethan it is my pleasure to introduce our next plenary speaker to the stage Ethan Zuckerman he's a director of Civic Media at MIT he is an activist and scholar whose work focuses on the global blogosphere free expression and social translation in the developing world he was a fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society the co-founder of Global Voices and award-winning international citizen media network and co-founder of Geek Corpse a nonprofit group that provided technology assistance to governments and companies in the developing world he was named a global leader for tomorrow by the World Economic Forum please join me in introducing Ethan Zuckerman to the stage thank you thank you so much Daphina and let me just start by saying you guys are way livelier than the family physicians so so what Daphina did not mention is that my hobby is speaking at conferences where I know absolutely nothing about the subject matter at hand and and sometimes this works out really well but when you go out and hang out with those physicians they're like man like we didn't invite you get off the stage we're calling security it was it hurt people it really it really hurt but it's the advantage behind this is that it forces you to draw connections between something that you actually know a little bit about which for me is this question of how people around the world try to make change in their societies and tie it into what you're talking about with audience engagement and so you look at this and you go this is great I don't actually have to say anything about the theater I don't have to say anything about audience engagement which is good because I don't know anything about it I'm gonna come and talk about something that I know about this one's gonna be a layup and then you realize you've made a terrible terrible mistake and the reason for this and I started thinking about this about two weeks ago is that this question of engagement this question of participation turns out to be pretty much the hardest question in the two fields that I work in I basically work on two things I work on this question of social change and politics and I work on this question of where is the internet and where is the sort of space of participatory media going and the one problem those two areas have in common that they absolutely have not solved is figuring out how to do participation at scale and this problem of participation at scale is so hard that even really smart really powerful people screw it up like the White House so we got a call from the White House about two years ago this doesn't happen even that often over at MIT but we got a call from the White House because they wanted to do a hackathon and hackathons are the new hot thing in the tech world they're basically a way of saying you know we're gonna get some geek cred you know this is the era of Facebook we all need geek cred instead of street cred we're gonna bring in technologists to come take on the problems that we have to deal with we're gonna sit together in a room for a day or two we're gonna get new ideas sort of coming out of this they called us up and said we're gonna do a civic hackathon the first one that ever happens at the White House send us someone good so I send Catherine Catherine's one of my best students she's the grown-up one in that picture she's amazing she's a data visualization expert she now teaches data visualization at Emerson College she's astounding we send her off we have a long conversation do you wear jeans because it's a hackathon do you wear a suit because it's the White House she goes it's great she comes back and I say Catherine what did you work on you're at the White House you're working on cutting-edge technology you're working on ideas that that are gonna really be the future of all of this and she comes back and says well this is what I built I built a map that lets you see where people in the United States signed a petition so this is a petition about forcing people to have storm sellers and you'll note that a lot of people signed it from Oklahoma I go wait a second wait a second petitions that's still a thing like why are we talking about petitions petitions is what the White House had you work on because petitions are old like seriously old like you go back and there is meaningful history behind petitions petitions show up in the Ming dynasty round about the 14th century the emperor because he doesn't like talking with the little people has a special secretary and this special secretary reads the petition you bring to him and figures out whether you are serious enough that you actually get face time with the emperor and because this is an emperor remind you this is the only way that you actually get some of this face time so this is a very deep political system the entire English system of jurisprudence is built up around the petition the Magna Carta in a very very real way is a petition from lords to the king essentially saying look you got to hear us we've got some basic rights here that you have to acknowledge and the petition goes in a lot of different directions this is basically a petition to stop men from drinking so much coffee because it's screwing up their sex lives which is sort of wonderful and it's actually totally worth reading but in seriousness the the 19th century in England there's a whole rights movement built around trying to ensure that average people normal people who can't pay their salaries can serve in parliament the charter movement which is built around petitions the US is built on petitions we end up declaring independence from England because they won't listen to our damn petitions because this is one of the problems with petitions no one listens to the damn petitions and so because our petitions keep getting rebuffed we end up saying you know what thank you very much we're gonna move on we're gonna try to do something else but when the Obama administration decides to announce you know what we're gonna be open we're gonna be geeky we're gonna be technical what do they do they put up a petition site we the people come along come petition us help us figure out what you need as the populist of the United States here's the thing petitions are not a great solution they weren't a great solution in the 14th century they're not a great solution now but the petition demands a certain amount of respect and the reason it demands a certain amount of respect is that it's a bad but tolerable solution to a really really hard problem and the really really hard problem is this we've got 300 million people they've all got opinions they've all got things they want to do they have things that they care about they have things that they want to change out in the world people want to speak they want to be heard and they want what they have to say to matter and that's what the petition tries to do the petition tries to create a way for us to speak it tries to create a way that we can be heard and it tries to give us this hope that whatever we're asking for here might have some impact out in the world that what we have to say might matter and might change the world that we live in in one fashion or another so the White House does this they put this up in 2011 a lot of people have used this site people start showing up in droves to use this site you had 350,000 petition signed up but I'm going to save you the math here the average petition gets 63 signatures and this is the problem with petitions petitions are a really good way to scale speech they are a really bad way to scale listening and you know what if you've got 350,000 petitions you either need that secretary sitting next to the emperor or you need some other solution to the problem and the solution to the problem that the Obama administration came up with was pretty simple they said you know what you want to prove to us that this is worth listening to get 5,000 people who share your opinion line 5,000 people up then we'll listen to you get 5,000 signatures on the petition we then promise you a response then this petition comes by right this is the petition to secure resources and funding and begin construction of the death star by 2016 now I don't know if you've been on the internet but this is the kind of stuff that goes wild on the internet people do okay with a petition like this signing up 5,000 people for this that is not a problem and so what happens is the White House gives a really good response to this we get a really great response back it comes back and says this is not the petition response you're looking for first of all as the Obama administration we are not into blowing up entire planets and committing genocide of entire you know star systems and besides that if we were going to build a planet-sized defense force would we really build something so vulnerable that Luke Skywalker in a single ship could fly in shoot down an exhaust vent and blow the whole thing up I don't think so that is not what American taxpayer money is going for and in the course of reacting the way that you guys are reacting most of us miss the other thing that the Obama administration did which is they raised that threshold from 5,000 to 25,000 and then they raised it again to 100,000 and that's where it is right now if you actually want to get a response to your petition you gotta get 100,000 signatures and 100,000 signatures this is no longer something you're doing for fun if you're putting up a petition you are starting a movement you are actually trying to build some sort of an organization to get to the point where you can actually find your way to be heard and people are getting heard this actually is working this is actually a really good story this is a story from the Obama administration about a petition that get 130,000 signatures that ended up supporting the right to unlock your cell phone which in the grand scheme of things this is not world peace this is not curing hunger this is not ending disease this is not toilets for children but it's not a bad thing this is the move in the right direction Obama is able to say look I push for this legislation because I saw 100,000 people getting behind this this does not happen with every petition there's a lot of petitions out there that the White House has simply chosen not to respond to and one of the interesting things is you can sort of break them into two camps you can either say this is not the White House's problem it turns out a lot of other countries petition the White House for change and the White House sort of goes hey man I'm sorry like we're not gonna help you out with that the other thing is stuff where Obama really doesn't want to say no I don't think Israel's an apartheid state I'm not gonna take a stance on that particular one and that petitions been waiting for an answer for quite some time the other thing the government can do is they can give you kind of the backwards answer so this was a really interesting response this was President Obama coming in and saying I'm gonna respond to all these petitions that I got about gun control and I'm gonna tell you that we are fiercely committed to gun control within the Obama administration until you start reading what the petitions were and the petitions were telling Obama not to engage with gun control so this is the moment where 50 people come up to petition you and say please keep your hands off our guns and you say I've heard you my goal is to take your guns and however you feel about gun control this is a weird way to have a petition work out the whole idea was you were trying to figure out how to have your voice you were trying to figure out how to have an influence on a big political process and you end up getting exactly the opposite of what you thought you were looking for so how is this still a thing well it's still a thing because these three questions how do we scale speech how do we scale listening and how do we scale deliberation how do we scale actually having a conversation about we as a community or as a city or as a nation these are three of the hardest problems that anyone ends up facing in a democracy this is not a problem you face as a monarch and as a monarch it's not that you don't have to listen you actually do have to listen you had better be listening to your military if you're a monarch it's a really bad idea to let those guys go off on their own you definitely want to listen to your commercial elites that's a good idea they can you know essentially make your life very miserable but the problem with the democracy the challenge with a democracy is that you've got to listen to everybody and everybody has to at least theoretically have that ability to speak the possibility of being heard and the possibility of what they say mattering and that turns out to be basically the challenge that the founders take on when they try to found the country when you come along and you basically say look we're going to run this a little differently you know rather than having the monarch rather than having this very small group of powerful people I listen to we're going to try to set up a system where we listen to everybody and let's be clear right not everybody not those you know women everybody not people of color everybody but you know we're going to try to get a step further towards everybody in the hopes that we're going to start getting there and this actually inspires some really radical change so the first thing that the United States has to do when trying to figure out how we're going to scale these things up is to figure out this question of how do you scale speech the United States even in 1776 is really big going from Maine to South Carolina when the technology of the day is a horse that's big and that is a really hard area where you can scale a conversation and so the founders do two things the pretty interesting the first one is they said look we're going to make this a value it's one of the explicit things we're going to say we're going to give you the right to speak we're going to give you the right to assemble and any number of different public places whether it's the church whether it's the public square and we're going to throw the geeks at it we're going to throw the leading technologies of the time and this is the alpha geek who's really working on this Franklin is an interesting dude in like 19 different ways but the most interesting thing about this dude is that he is involved with the two most lucrative technologies of the time in the late 1700s which are printing and the post office so the guy starts his own print shop when he's about 16 years old this is a great way to make money and then by age 31 he's the postmaster for Philadelphia which means he's able to control this whole system moving information throughout the entire country for everybody who's laughing about the resemblance I get it people ask me frequently if I'm cosplaying I am not in fact cosplaying if I let the glasses down I put on the vest it gets really I'm just into the dude I'm just into the dude he's a good man the crazy thing about Franklin the crazy thing about Franklin is not only is he trying to figure out how to scale up the post right and the post is this great way to have people all throughout this nation have a conversation with one another one on one he's also trying to scale up something even crazier he's using the post office to try to connect everyone into a single public sphere so here's how this works there are an amazing number of newspapers in early America there are something like four times as many newspapers being published in America in the 1820s than there are in the British Isles 50% of households have a subscription to a newspaper many many people are subscribing to many newspapers they are going back and forth everywhere and they're a little different from how we think about newspapers they are a little bit of news a lot of advertising a lot of collections of letters and opinion pieces and a lot of collections of other newspapers there is no copyright law at this point so you are getting in this copyright law but it's different it's it's not the crazy thing that we deal with now if you are a newspaper editor you are getting in anywhere from 50 to 200 newspapers every week into your newsroom and you are functionally cutting and pasting them together and sending them out to your own subscribers and what Franklin does is he does two things one he makes newspapers cheaper than letters so the little fold of paper letter hey mom I'm doing fine glad I went to Philadelphia Boston was a dump that's you know a buck whereas sending her the Philadelphia newspaper is twenty five cents and in fact this goes this is such a heavy subsidy that people start writing letters by buying a newspaper making pinpricks under the words so that you can read the newspaper by holding it up to the light and saying oh that's what he's trying to say to me but he's doing this because this is a way to subsidize a public conversation he wants everyone to be informed because if we're gonna govern ourselves as citizens we need to somehow be involved with these conversations on a nationwide scale and he goes a step further for the newspapers the reason the newspapers are subscribing to 200 of these is that they're free the post office will simply carry newspapers from one newspaper to another because it is in the public good and this is a way of trying to create a public sphere it's trying to create a space where we throughout this vast and completely brand-new nation can say what we have to say have it picked up by a newspaper so it can theoretically be heard have it picked up by a network of other newspapers so that we get to the point where it's possible maybe just possible to have a nationwide conversation now look this works a lot better for some people than others we have a lot more wealthy and well educated founders who have influence in these debates but it's a system that's trying to solve the problem how do we have that conversation on national scale we also have the question of saying how are we now going to get together and argue and deliberate and discuss about this and here we have the problem of representation we all know we're represented by senators are very many of them to per state and we're represented by representatives and those representatives scale with population and this is a big deal when the founders sit down to write the Constitution George Washington after chasing off the British basically says nothing about governing the country he sort of knows he's going to get elected he's going to be the first president he doesn't really want to express an opinion the one thing he gets involved with the one place where we know he stands up and says this is an issue is when the framers of the Constitution say I want to represent it for every 40,000 people and Washington says no no no no 30,000 we got to think small this person is your voice in deliberations the whole genius of American democracy is that you're going to have a personal relationship with someone who's going to represent you they're not always going to do what you asked them to do they're going to go in they're going to have an argument they're going to have a conversation it's going to get riled up at a certain point and they may change their minds this whole notion of like voting out politicians because they flip flop that's like 180 from how we founded the nation the whole idea was you wanted to elect someone who could be in that conversation and who you would be able to have a real relationship with in your community someone you knew someone you felt you could petition to so they could represent you in those sorts of deliberations so here's where we are 200 years ago 1815 15 states Ohio's just come on board we've just kicked out the British the second time in the war of 1812 we've got a really nice functional public sphere it's a sphere of letters it's a sphere of the press we have basic representative democracy we're represented a ratio of about 40 35,000 to one by 65 representatives what happens in 200 years a lot right we get a lot bigger we get a lot more populace we get way way more diverse and we end up with some really interesting and really complicated technology changes we move into what people now call broadcast democracy and broadcast democracy is a world in which we're no longer working nearly as well to scale speech we're mostly working to scale listening because here's what happens as big newspapers come online and start making money as radio comes online as television comes online that ability to share your opinion to share your perspective that gets way the heck more concentrated you suddenly have a much much smaller group of people political elites the wealthy increasingly corporations who have access to those means of communication and those means of communication scale listening really well it's really hard to avoid listening when you've got three television stations but they don't scale speech well at all and at the same time we deal with another scaling problem we realize that if we keep up with this 30,000 thing there's no conceivable way we can have representation in Congress we would be up to 10,000 people in the House of Representatives which would be really interesting because it would probably force us to actually figure out how 10,000 people have a conversation which is not a problem anyone has really figured out how to solve but we throw our hands up we basically say you know what let's stick with the ratio 700,000 to one and what this means is that you no longer have any believable chance that that person representing you in the deliberations is someone who you know someone who understands you someone who comes from the same background that you come from and this starts leading to mistrust it starts leading to a professional political class a real break between people and a real sense that people can't have their voice make an impact so what do people do they hack they try to come up with new technologies to solve it the 1920s the progressives they come in and they said guys this is not the way it's supposed to be we got to give you that ability to make impact we want to hear your voice we want you to be able to make change we're to change everything we're going to put up ballot referenda you can vote directly on things if you live in California you suddenly have to read through 40 of these this is the 1920s solution to this this is the 1920s coming in and essentially saying we know we've got a problem we know that we're not listening we know that we're not deliberating how do we bring it back to the people and this changes a lot of things once you're asking people to vote on issues at the statewide level you've got to expect them to be informed you've got to expect them to be reading newspapers the news changes in the 1920s you get investing of journalism you get muck raking you get the secret ballot prohibition comes at the same period because right now everyone's getting people out to the polls by offering them rum and prohibition comes in and essentially says whoa whoa whoa whoa wait citizenship is a serious thing we should not be getting drunk while we're doing it let's shut down the bars what happens with all of this we'd like you to stop drinking read newspapers and vote on ballot questions voter participation drops from 75% to 30% and we've never gotten it back we've never come back from this we ask people to step up and sort of scale participation and most people say to go man that is really hard and it is really hard it's really hard to get across and so you have other people trying to figure out how to hack this right political polling probably the most low of the technology in the world this is actually a technology trying to solve this problem george gallup when he starts going around and saying what do you think what do you think he's trying to figure out how do we do better representation than electing people every two years if we could ask a set of people every week or so what do you think on this issue where do we think we're going we would have better participation we would be in better shape to deal with this scaling problem we've been hacking on this problem for 200 years and 20 years ago this new technology comes around we move from broadcast democracy into the Internet and everything changes and everything changes because as soon as you move into this new paradigm of the Internet people want to participate they can and if you do not take them seriously they will bankrupt you and I say this from personal experience in 1996 I'm the CTO of this company tripod.com I'm hiding in the back I had more hair but not that much more hair we are a tiny little startup even before tiny little startups become cool this is like 96 people don't actually sort of understand this whole net thing we're hanging out in the house and we are publishing a magazine but it's an internet magazine so it's super exciting we're all just out of college our our magazine is called tools for life it's going to help you figure out how do you go out in the world and get a job and invest and meet somebody and have the best life you can possibly have and in the background like late one night at 2 a.m. one of my programmers writes a little tool and this is called a home page builder that lets you put up your own home page on the web and these things are awful they're hideous they're ugly as hell people don't know what they're doing they make these ugly miserable things and and so we just let people start putting up their own home pages and then I get the bill I get my monthly internet hosting bill and it is 20 times what it was the month before it is more than it is in our bank accounts it is more than it is in our investors bank accounts I have just lost the company because our users love this stuff so much more than the content that we are working very very hard to give them that they are going to very quickly put them out of business unless we can figure out how to make this our business so we have to look at all of those nice smart you know smiling people who all see this as a step to the New Yorker and we're gonna write this online magazine we're gonna get real jobs out in the world and basically tell me you know what no one cares what you're writing they want to write and even if it looks like Dragon Slayer's extended page this is where our business is going and so we finally come up with a term for it we call it user-generated content which is a very polite way to sort of say you don't want to listen to me you want to speak and that's what the internet is all about it's all about trying to figure out how people can speak how you can scale speech and the internet has scaled speech more than any technology we have ever seen in history suddenly it's become possible even whether you think of it or not anyone who's tweeting this that's speech at scale anyone who is putting this up on Facebook anyone who's Instagram all of these things are speech acts going and putting things out into the world and this has become the new way that economics in this space happens what happens when you do it you suddenly have a surplus of one thing and when you have a surplus of one thing you end up with a scarcity of another thing Herbert Simon comes up with this formulation in 1971 he basically says look when we suddenly have a whole lot of information something is going to be scarce and the thing that's going to be scarce is attention suddenly that everyone can ask for our attention and we're suddenly going to find that this is our most precious commodity now Simon by the way is not reacting to the internet he's reacting to the Xerox machine he is freaked out about the fact that as an academic now everybody is going to be able to send him drafts of what they're writing and handed to him and he's gonna have to read it and he's losing his shit because he realizes there's no way that I can do all of this but now we look at the internet and we realize this is exactly where we live we are all perpetually battling each other for attention we're trying to get attention from everything else that's on the stream we're battling with the advertisers who are also looking for the attention we're battling for any activist out there who wants to say look this is now what you have to pay attention to we're battling the White House Obama is going out and trying to use these things as well because he also needs attention and then when people actually find a way to come grab a lot of our attention like folks like only 2012 we end up feeling sort of cheated we end up feeling like someone hacked this like it shouldn't be that easy there's no way that these guys who are running a somewhat shady operation should suddenly be what everyone is talking about this just feels wrong and so people start reacting to this condition and saying we've got information overload we've got no way to handle all the people asking us for information other people look at this and say no no no no it's filter failure if you just had better tools if you could just get exactly what you wanted then you wouldn't feel overloaded the problem with that is that we do have those tools and you can hear exactly what you want to hear because the internet has gotten very very good at building filters and if you only want to hear from New England academics there are websites you can go to and hear from nothing but New England academics and that's bad for us for a nation as well in the same way that we tried to build a nation that made it possible to have that argument between Massachusetts and South Carolina we need to find a way to have an argument that's global in scale so that we're actually thinking about all of these things I wrote a book on this you can read it if you want I'm not actually going to talk about it because I'm talking about something else I'm talking about this question of how we deliberate how we not only figure out how to speak and how to hear but how we decide and this is a place where we've also fallen down the best examples within this are outside the United States this is Brazil this is a movement called Marcos to build the internet this is a bunch of Brazilians getting together and saying you know what we don't trust any of you guys we're gonna pass our own internet legislation we're gonna write it ourselves online more than 1200 people come together they write this bill they get it passed Brazil now has some of the best legislation to protect the internet that exists anywhere else in the world you've got cities like reggae Vic essentially saying look we need every citizen to tell us what we should be doing make a better reggae Vic tell us how to participate within this we have comparatively little of this in the United States we have comparatively little of this because we have never solved this representation problem we've still got this very small group of people and it's really not very easy to get that job anymore and when you get that job and you are now a new elected representative this is what the Democratic National Committee tells you you should do this is how you should manage your time four hours a day should be spent raising money that's what call time means that means working for your reelection from the day you got into office half of your office hours you might spend two hours doing what we think of as congressional work actually being out there and on the floor and you might have a chance to talk to some of your constituents for an hour or two a day we have hit a system that does not scale and people try to fix it by trying to figure out can we influence these big guys the big presidential candidates Dean is up there not just because I love the screen but Dean actually tried to do something very different he said look I'm going to ask people who support me to help write my platform go online write a blog tell me about it we're gonna read this we're gonna contemplate we're gonna deliberate from this we're gonna figure out what it means to be a progressive candidate in the United States right now he gets knocked out four years later and suddenly we have Obama doing something very very different Obama doesn't announce that he wants to hear how we should govern he wants you to help figure out how we promote and this is what we get in 2008 and 2012 and this is not just a Democrat thing the Republicans do this as well but we move from this moment of sort of thinking maybe we're actually gonna have a highly participatory highly deliberative presidential contest to one which is basically distributed marketing what we have been facing in the United States since the late 1950s is a long-scale decline in trust this is a graph of what happens when George Gallup goes out and asks people do you have a lot or some faith in government and under Eisenhower you'll see it's round about 70% goes down under that Nixon guy goes down again under Carter comes back a little bit under Reagan we get it back up again after we invade Iraq that's always a good thing invade a country that brings the confidence up it's been down in the teens for a very very long time and it's not just the government it's any big institution people feel like in a world where there's so many different tools that we can use to speak if they don't get heard they stop trusting those systems if they can speak but they cannot influence and affect those systems what goes away is trust and what you start ending up with is revolution and revolution is a lot of fun to talk about when we've got clash on the sound system we're thinking about revolution but revolution is really really messy revolution is something that makes sense when you're in Tunisia and you've had the same guy in power for 32 years but revolution is not necessarily the way you want to govern most countries and you know what revolution isn't even what it was cracked up to be this is my buddy Zaynep Tufeshi she is the smartest person about trying to figure out how political change in closed societies happens and she's by the way in full sociologist gear if you study protests and you are a smart sociologist you wear a helmet because the way that the tear gas gets you is not breathing it it's when the canister hits you in the head so this is the preferred way to go out so she's finishing up a book on what happened in Gezi Park and what's amazing with Gezi Park is Turks of every different stripe come out to protest you have people all in black they are hardcore Islamists you have the communists you've got the left you've got some ultra-nationalists out there you've got the gay and lesbian movement these guys come out because the motto of Gezi Park is send a gal you come to whatever you're pissed off about you come out will have a movement jointly we're going to figure out how to change Turkey and this is a great message to get people out into the streets Twitter is a great tool to get people out in the streets social media is a great tool to mobilize but it is crap at governing these people can't deliberate they can't talk to one another they don't do what protesters did 20 or 30 years ago which is work out their differences before they all come into the square instead we use media to draw everybody out and then everyone decides what to do and they can't get along and this revolution falls apart almost overnight and we're seeing this again and again we're seeing people do a better job of leading people to protest but not figure out how to figure out how an effect on society so what do you do what do you do when people feel disempowered and they feel ineffective people are starting to find other ways to make change my friends who are pissed off about the NSA reading their email they're not trying to pass laws about surveillance because they don't think it's going to happen and they're probably right but what they're doing is trying to write code to make it really really hard for anybody to read their email and over time they may be able to pull it off people who are really frustrated about climate change are trying to figure out how do you fix this in the market and whether it's the Tesla or the Prius these are people trying to go out and essentially say can I find a way to deal with the fact that we cannot get this government to do something meaningful about climate change can I make change out there in the market but you may be looking at this and saying okay I am not a computer hacker nor am I rogue billionaire like Peter Thiel what do I do and the answer for most people is that you make media this is where we're seeing a lot of people trying to make political change so let me try to explain this this is an internet meme that gets a lot of traction shortly after Michael Brown is killed in Ferguson and you start seeing a lot of these pairs of images and the idea behind these images is to ask the question of how black people who are victims of violence end up being portrayed by the media because when a young black man gets gunned down the first thing the media does is finds him on Facebook and finds the image that is going to be his portrayal in death and what people end up saying is that how Michael Brown was portrayed shortly after the shooting was not a particularly fair portrayal most newspapers ran that image on the left and Michael Brown is flashing a peace sign which is usually reported as flashing a gang sign he's shot from the bottom we've got photographers here you know that that's a way to make someone look taller and more menacing you have a photo in the same Facebook stream from the same period of time with this pudgy-looking kid with the phones on that no one is running they are running the one on the left as a way consciously or unconsciously of enforcing the idea that this is a young black man who is a threat and so you have folks like this gentleman who is a 19-year-old active duty Marine come in and say look I looked in my photo stream and you got both of these photos and if I got gunned down which one do you think they would use and you see a whole movement of people trying to find a way to participate within this and by the way not an easy not a contested movement you end up with a lot of white kids coming in and saying yeah I look pretty bad too on Facebook and people going whoa whoa whoa whoa this is not what this conversation is about now is this activism is this slack divism is my friend of getting more as I'll like to talk about yeah it's easy for people to do this is what people do we make media and we put it out in the world but this can matter this ends up in the New York Times they end up talking about it there is not an editor in the country who doesn't have a conversation about this in their news room to try to figure out this question of are we inadvertently reinforcing some of the norms that lie behind what happened to Michael Brown there are ways to make change through making media and through making digital media the human rights campaign did this when human rights campaign decided that they wanted to rally energy for the equal marriage campaign they invited people not only to change the Facebook icon to the pink equals sign but to remix it and to have fun with it and to play with it and in aggregate this starts having an interesting effect you go on Facebook shortly before the marriage equality decision you may not have a sense for which of your family and friends support marriage equality and you may be surprised you may find that there's a seismic shift going on in the United States which a lot of people were surprised by we're over the course of about 20 years we've built a majority in support of equal marriage which most people didn't know you can even use petitions and this is a petition that has a lot to do with why George Zimmerman ultimately gets arrested because this becomes the rallying point where people can participate and say I am pissed off about this I want something that I can do that is more constructive than being angry I want to raise my voice and I want to find a way to make it happen we have to give people these channels we have to give people ways to do this because when we don't really bad things happen in Boston after the marathon bombings city of Boston comes together and comes together fast within six hours the Red Cross of Boston makes the following announcement thank you very much we have more blood than we can handle for the next two months please stop donating second we have more money than we can handle for the next year please stop donating now I know that almost all of us are fundraisers here I cannot imagine a situation in which an NGO says please stop donating Red Cross says please stop donating people want to participate they want to do something and so a lot of these people hanging out on the website Reddit say look maybe we can help the cops let's look at some of the images let's see if we can figure out what comes out there and they come up with a theory who's really done the Boston bombing they identify this kid Sunil Tripani Sunil has disappeared from Brown University a couple of months before the theory emerges that he has disappeared to become the bomber people start calling his family and showing up on their doorstep they have a Facebook page asking where their missing child is they have to say this is not Sunil I can't believe you're coming to this conclusion and it's not Sunil turns out they just flat out got it wrong turns out five days later Tripani shows up dead suicide in Providence killed himself in part because he's been hounded by what ends up being a gang online these are not necessarily bad people these are people who want a moment to participate they can't find it they can't find the right way to do it and what the internet is remarkably good at letting us do right now is bringing people together and trying to have an impact on the world and we have to get a lot better at it because it is a real power so here's why I'm hopeful I get to do a lot of work in the developing world I do a lot of work in sub-saharan Africa do a lot of work in Kenya and Kenya had a really bad election in 2007 the guy in power decided to stay in power despite the will of the majority you ended up with rioting in the streets one of the nicest most stabilized countries on the continent suddenly is a big mess friends of mine good friends of mine are media makers their bloggers their political commentators and they look at this and they say look this is not okay we've got to figure out how to document what's actually going on in our country we have to figure out the bad and the good we have to find a way to come together and talk about it and they build this new product called usher he witnessed and it's really simple what it lets you do it's either from a mobile phone or from a web browser you can make a report you can say here's what's going on in my community right now someone burned down my shop or right now someone from a different ethnic group brought a family that was under threat into their house someone was trying to make conflicts someone was trying to make peace and we end up with accounts thousands of accounts from all over the nation painting a really rich story of what's going on giving a real sense of what's happening to Kenya in early 2008 this turns out to be a really helpful thing to do it's so helpful that we put the software out we put it out on the market and people start using it for other reasons they start using it in Haiti after the earthquakes so the people can come together and say here's what happened here's who needs help this becomes Hades 911 system for people using their mobile phones to say here's where I am here's why I need help here's a map of the destruction in Port-au-Prince and here's the blueprint that we use to solve it so I had the good fortune to work with these amazing Kenyans since 2008 and I found myself looking at this and saying I want to do something I want to do something around this power to participate online and here are my assumptions I'm gonna assume that people are gonna make media I'm gonna assume that they're not gonna trust the government I'm gonna assume that they want to see the influence they can have in the world and I'm gonna assume that if we can put a lot of people together we can make some real change and so I went to Sao Paulo and I went to Sao Paulo because of these two guys on the left the mayor of Sao Paulo does something crazy when he gets elected he says here is a 300 page book of 120 promises I am making to the people of this city and if I don't live up to them get rid of me you know don't elect me in four years and he does it because this guy in the middle Oded Greishu says you know what we're gonna hold you to it I have the largest group of community organizations neighborhood organizations and we're gonna watch you like a hawk and we're gonna see whether you live up to this or not and Oded calls me up and says we haven't figured out how we're gonna watch him can you help and I said yeah we do that so we've been going out and building this piece of software called promise tracker and promise tracker lets you sit down with a group of people and say this is what I care about in my community I'm a father I've got a five-year-old I spend a lot of time thinking about playgrounds I really want my kid to have a place to play and I can now make an app that lets me go out into the community and make a map of the playgrounds are they any good are they dangerous are they safe are they working do they need maintenance and I can recruit my friends to come help me map that and we can put that map online we can make a visualization of it we can invite other people to come and find a solution to those problems and it doesn't have to be playgrounds it can be bike lanes it can be any different way of doing things it's a platform to let people find what they're passionate about what they care about and try to find the solutions and Brazil is the most amazing place in the world to do this because you have almost no trust in government and incredible creativity and you'll see people coming out and essentially saying here's what I want to solve these folks the garbage pickers they're the people who actually keep the streets of Brazil clean we have this tendency to run them over with our cars we should really do something about that I'm gonna raise thirty thousand dollars online to pimp my carosa to help people go out and try to figure out how to paint these carts so that these guys are visible and they're respected and they're a clear part of the community and you'll see slogans that say things like my works honest is yours or if it were up to me I would recycle the politicians if you want people to engage you got to figure these three things out you got to figure out how you help people speak you got to figure out how they can be heard and you have to figure out how they have impact because if you don't get that last one right people figure out very quickly that the controls aren't connected to anybody when you have speech it gets harder to listen it gets even harder to deliberate and when we have more speech and no way to have impact we may actually end up with more mistrust and so what we got to do is we've got to expect that people are going to make media we got to figure out how that mistrust that mistrust of institutions turns into an asset for making change it is our most renewable asset we got to help people figure out how they can come together and move the needle and I thank you guys for listening to me hello so we want to make some space if there are a couple of urgent questions that you want to ask Ethan while he's here so if there are some questions there's a couple of mics in the house questions you've got mics you can speak we will hear you it is scalable but if we're gonna do it you have to stand up and do it because otherwise we're gonna go on because there's other wonderful things on the program all right here we go participation hands up for participation I'm gonna be really specific and I totally think you can help me Jason Rizyan journalist in Iran in jail longest American journalist held I decided to make a campaign a poster campaign where people would make a burrito that he loved that I made and have dinners all through the country we have around 200 people that have already done it but it's the Muhammad Ali the national press all talked about him but it's been silent he's been there for 200 almost 60 days and no one in America knows that he's there and I don't know I I'm like doing that thing of what did I do wrong how did I fuck up on Twitter instead of like I'm not Kim Kardashian and breaking Twitter I'm breaking it the wrong way and so it's like I don't know if everyone feels this way but there's sometimes there's campaigns or things you feel that good about that fail yeah and what do you so first of all I I don't think you fail like I think you've got a lot of people behind it the question on any of these campaigns is is what's the theory of change behind right so who has the power to help get your friend release and what's really really hard when you got friends in prison we're dealing with three of our colleagues in Ethiopia in prison right now is that you don't have a lot of influence on the people who are actually making those decisions so you're going really indirectly but you're probably affecting 20 or 30 people and there are people within the State Department and so you need an inside and outside strategy you need a way to be talking to them on the inside and then you need a way to show the pressure on the outside when you've got someone who's in prison you start using anniversaries you start looking for different creative ways to do it you try to keep the pressure up but that visibility that isn't the real theory of change the theory of change is who are you talking about inside where can they make the pressure how do they sort of push on it and how do you use that sort of externality to put the pressure internally within it but you're right in the broader sense which is we fail a lot and trying to figure out how to mobilize is a great unsolved problem and one of the things to do on this is we got to keep iterating we got to keep trying one of the things that we know that works is novelty you know so organizing dinners is a very different way of doing this you might want to take a look at at conflict kitchen in Pittsburgh which has been running around this wonderful model essentially saying can we start understanding places better by trying to figure out how to understand their food you might be wanting to reach out to journalists in Iran or in the Iranian diaspora people who are out talking about the situation in the country why is this so threatening why is this happening what's that person going through you know keep keep turning the crank and keep looking for the inside the outside cool yeah so look I please I'm just running the mic for anybody else's questions you're running the mic I'm around I would love to talk more I'm hanging out the rest of the afternoon thank you you guys are wonderful really love me okay me hi I loved your speech I loved the images that you shows I just wanted to ask you if you could tell me what is a good request for speech so you're giving people a way to be heard like if you can help me think of I'm actually thinking I have a member of a group called the Kilroy's that is advocating for production of plays by women and we're gearing up towards the second year of a big project that we did called the list which is a list of fantastic new plays by women that we're trying to get theaters to produce and so we want people to share that list broad and wide and add to it what is can you give me an example of a great of a good targeted request for speech that people will do and use an act on in order to get that out there so well I mean first of all I you're part of the way there right so so one of the biggest things again is we're looking for participation we're looking for how to sort of value participation so the bad campaign is the one that that starts with shame right and sort of says hey you you haven't put on a play by a woman play right in the last ten years the hell with you guys because you know those work they go fast but they don't feel good you end up feeling bad about it at the end of it you know the one that's better is to sort of say who do we want to see on stage what are great women playwrights what are great works that we want to see help build the list help us figure out where it goes and then one of the things to do is to try the affirmative piece of it name and fame works really well on that so reach out to other theaters who are within that who are doing a great job of putting amazing women's works up there and call them out for that you know hats off to these folks here are some amazing works that have come out of that friend of mine in Kenya was just telling me that she ended up doing this campaign where she tried to evaluate the best parliamentarian in the country and gave that person a bottle of wine and it was a total of a $20 investment but it was the single most successful campaign they did people love to win they love to be awarded and so if you can find some way to do the affirmative as well as the negative let people identify who are the people in their communities who are doing really well on this have that built into the list name and fame as well as name and shame on that that's fantastic thank you anybody else i'm really not trying to sneak off stage i'm just cognizant of the fact that i've taken way more time than you expected okay i'm curious you know it's been i think since i guess the iphone came out in 2007 and there's like a million apps that exist or more and i've heard that in the last two years more content has been generated in our entire history um what you must all of these things have a developmental phase that certain people know about you know there's something happening in the workshops there's research taking place what do you know about what's coming next i mean how long are we going to be in this period in the history of humankind so and when are we moving to something else and what is it well i mean i i can tell you what's coming next and i can tell you that it scares the pants off of me which is the thing about the social media world that we're in right now is that it's public right you know you guys have reactions maybe they're positive maybe they're negative they're on twitter i'm going to search for my handle and i'm going to find out how i did that's going away what's happening on the cutting edge of all of this is ephemeral media highly private media media within very tight very closed groups we see some of this and we look at things like yik yak and we sort of go yeah yeah it's just the kids that isn't the scary stuff not the anonymous stuff the scary stuff is the stuff you never see and some of it's happening for really good reasons my activist friends they are on secret lists you're not going to see them but that's where a lot of political discourse is going and so this space which was working as a public it was giving us a chance whether we were hanging out with a lot of black friends to see black lives matter come across as a wave through it that's going away because that's going into those little micro communities in those micro public and this is a moment where those of us who work on shaping technology we actually have a civic responsibility to sort of come out and say i know this is what people want i know this is what sells and it's really bad for us and i don't want to see it happen but that's where i fear we're going and that's what a lot of us are trying to figure out how to make sure that with all these problems all these problems of participation we don't lose the possibility of this being one of the most interesting public spheres we've ever had and on that note thank you thank you thank you i think we all picked up so much that we can imply in our own