 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the beta zone. Welcome to the Dalian Forum 2019. We are going to talk about surveillance. We're going to talk about a session called No More Obscurity. And of course, we're going to do it while live on the Internet. That, I think, makes a lot of sense. So today we are going to explore what it means for a society to have all these surveillance technologies being deployed. And as you will see, not necessarily by the government itself, but also by private citizens. Why do people do that? What does it change? What are the pluses and the minuses of these technologies being used on a wide scale? We're going to start with a presentation in Chinese. So if you do not speak Chinese, I invite you to raise your hands and get headphones for live translation. Our speaker is going to talk for 15 minutes. And then we will have a panel discussion with two more speakers that are going to join us on stage. And we're going to finish with a Q&A with the audience. So please prepare your questions. Raise your hand when we start the panel. And we will give you a microphone. Please wait for the microphone to ask your question so we can have you on the record. And then we can exchange and discuss about this very contemporary and important topic. To open the day, I would like you guys to help me welcome a very famous Chinese artist who is going to show you the movie he made using exclusively surveillance footage that he found on the Internet. The first unintentional actors, please help me welcome Mr. Xu Bing. Thank you. Thank you so much. First of all, thank you very much for attending this meeting. And also thank you very much for inviting me by Davos so that I can introduce my kind of special feature film. And also thank you for the introduction. You know, I'm sorry. You know, in 2013, because I was bored and watched television program. And this is a program or some legal thing. Sorry. Oh, yeah, here. 2013. And 2013. Out of boredom, I watched television program. And it was a program about some legal affairs, et cetera. And I saw some footage of surveillance cameras. And I was impressed. I feel, I felt that they are charming, because, you know, this is some kind of mindless eyes. And the people were watched are very natural, because they didn't know that others were watching them. I had the idea that if there is a feature film made of this footage, the film would be very interesting, because it will be very different from the traditional feature films, because traditional feature films are acted by actors. I mean, feature films, not documentary. If I can produce such a film, it will be different, because every single frame is actually what has happened. Therefore, I started to think this idea. And I asked this idea to my friends who are filmmakers. And all my filmmaker friends said, it is impossible, because you even don't have a main character. You don't have the photographers. How do you promote the plots? Okay, I said, well, I will show the story of the cosmetic surgery story of that, because anyway, the people will change their faces from time to time. And then I started the making process. And I find some friends who are guards of factory or some people from the television station. But my material were very limited. This is the first material I got. This is the parking lot, the back door of a parking lot of a hospital. And I got this material and put it into my computer. And I started to invent some stories for the people in the video and to design some dialogues for them. And after that, it made me believe, convinced that with enough materials, I definitely can make a feature film. But at that time, surveillance technology was not well developed. It was impossible for me to get enough materials. But in 2014, I found that there were a lot of materials of the footage on internet. And I started, resumed the program. And I said, I bought 20 computers downloading 24 hours in all of these videos. And this process last one year, 11,000 hours of clips of video. And then I started to design the script and the dialogues and the editing work also. I think, maybe you know there is a film, the name is Truman Show. This story is about a kid from his birth. He was growing up in a very small township. Actually, every moment from his birth to his adulthood are broadcast. He doesn't know this, but except him, all other people know this. And I think my work is a social imagination of the film Truman Show. Because for me, the present world is like a studio. You have a lot of surveillance cameras recording every corner of the world about what is happening. And then it sent all of this information to internet. It gives us a special perspective or a special eye for us. Why I say so? Because surveillance cameras or surveillance technology enables our eyes, or means the organs. The organs of our eye are linear because for today, we came here from the hotel to participate in this event. But after this event, I go back to hotel or go to another place. All information will be different because this feeling is linear. However, surveillance technology gives us mesh or kind of net experience like a net or mesh. Because we can know what is happening around the world. It's kind of like a mesh or net. For example, I am my home and I know what is happening the street next to my street. Something special may happen. And today we can know that what is happening beside us, this was impossible in the past. This technology actually has changed our sense of history or historical values. I am thinking, for example, any individual or any organization is capable enough to save all the videos of surveillance and leave it for the people of 100 generations later. It will be meaningful. So the people in the future will be more capable to make a judgment about the past or present. Or it will be totally different. It would be totally different than otherwise. I mean the people without this recordings. Or for example, in the dynasty of Qing dynasty of China, we don't know what was the life of the emperor of Guangxu, the second last emperor of China. And if we had that material, we would have a totally different judgment than the scholars of present day. Surveillance cameras have this feature which is in 100 hours there may be nothing happening, but it's scaring, it's totally silent. And this is what these artists would pay attention to. And all of these footage, cameras, you know, the next moment there might happen something totally out of expectations or something or some image. This is our team. We worked several months. Every day, we just watched what was happening around the world and our team and had a common feeling that when we went out, we were quite careful because we noticed that the world is uncontrollable. The world is out of expectation. Anything could happen. And because I have a rule for myself in this film, every single frame of this feature film must come from public surveillance frame. It shouldn't be shot by us. And this is a rule for my making of this movie. And there is something special brought by this rule, you know, in Buddhism of China, Buddhism doesn't think or body matters at all. Buddhism think spirit or mind or your next life or your reincarnation reincarnation is the truly is a thing that truly matters. For example, I'm here, you are sitting there. Whether are we the real selves? Well, from the perspective of Buddhism is questionable. So it's actually very questionable from the perspective of technology. So there are multiple main characters in this film and it consists of different civilians, video clips of different people. So that will involve the boundary of truth or the boundary of reality. What is real? For example, every day we are using our cell phones. And when we are looking on our cell phones, it seems that we are playing our show together with our cell phone. For example, we are sending the messages to the world, but are those messages real messages or not? As civilians, technology is improving. In the past several years, we can see that the citizens technology has been improved a lot. So before, UK took the lead, but now Asia takes the lead. And in particular, China right now is very advanced in surveillance technology. But what is surveillance? And how do we clearly identify the boundary? And then the US police had the civilians equipment with them when they are on patrolling. We were a little concerned and nervous at the end of the film shooting because we looked at multiple video clips and we knew that how often they change their clothes and how clothes are them like between the restaurant servants or restaurant people. So when we look at the video clips, you can find the location at the right up corner. And you know that where the people are located. So that's why we located 90% of the people and got the right of displaying their faces on in our film. And as we searched for these people, we learned more about civilians and we learned more about the relationship between people. For example, the first one that we approached Xiao Wang or Mr. Wang, he said, so this surveillance camera might change his life because maybe he will be an influencer online. For example, he said something great where he did something funny. So he believed that surveillance camera has already changed his life because that's why we approached where we found him. Right now we have already entered into the post-civilian era and most of the surveillance cameras in China are actually owned by individuals. And we got all the video clips from the individual surveillance cameras instead of the government surveillance cameras. So it seems that people would like to be connected with the world through their cameras. Of course, for the governments, they manage or control the society by using surveillance cameras. That is another function or another use of the surveillance cameras. So apart from the government cameras, I think that the surveillance cameras have more or much wider use because more and more individuals are using them. Now as the technology is developing very fast and the legal system, the virtual system, the morality and the boundaries between people are changing constantly. And in the end, we can have a look at a clip from our film. So the voice is not on. The song is not on. So when I was 17 years old, I was sent to a temple and I heard that there was some noise. I was lying in bed and someone was beating me. And I couldn't be, I couldn't get awake. So these are all the people that we recognize now because we used a lot of individuals surveillance cameras. So we would like to thank them. Thank you all. The stage a little bit because they're going to add some chairs. Thank you very much. Thank you. I must say that I was told by the team to prepare a select. Please watch a bit of the movie and I started to watch it in the airplane and I was totally glued to it. I think people behind me thought I was a very strange person to watch CCTV footage on my computer. But I must say that you showed at the end. Actually, the images are quite riveting because I think it's a visual language that now has created the expectation that when you see CCTV footage, it's going to be very boring like normal life. And from one second is going to switch to the opposite. And something is going to crumble. Somebody is going to die. And there's a lot of people dying in your movie. I don't know if you've counted, but it's, it's, there's a lot of accidents. I mean, you showed the train accident from Spain and one airplane. Maybe 1000 exactly. Yeah. But I thought it was in that sense very representative of life that we seem to have at the same time, very, very safe and very straightforward lives and that they can switch to the extreme in one second. And two other things that really struck me is this idea that you give us, you allow us to peak in the life of others. And in that way, you get us out of our bubbles. You know, it's being told that social media, for example, puts us into bubbles. I think your work really shows us the, confronts us to the diversity of life and the way other people live. And it's true that if you watch the whole thing, you will see that all footage that comes from the different places that are in the credits is the coolest movie credits in the world, I think. But at the end, there's this sense, very strange sense that it's actually the same story is the same images is the same source. So you somehow reconnect us to our humanity. We are going now to debate and I'm going to call two panelists. One is the CEO of the Radical Exchange Foundation. She comes from Germany. And the other is the founder and chairman of Octave Consulting Group, is both an attorney and engineer. Please help me. Welcome to the stage. Jennifer Lynn Moron and Neil Hopper. Sir, you please have a seat. And I will go behind the stars. Never walk in front of the stars. I will start with you, Jennifer. Can you, I mean, obviously now we know a little bit more about you. Can you tell the audience a little bit about your work at the Radical Exchange Foundation? So we are a nonprofit organization, non-governmental organization. And can you hear me okay? It's going to come up. The volume is going to be. And we're looking to use market mechanisms and principles, new ideas, reinstall values to reduce inequality, build cooperative social lives through markets and technology. And one of the ideas is around data. What do we do with data? And around governance as well. And so with the idea of data, there's different ways of looking at the origin or like the intersectionality of the data. A lot of the images that we saw, you might have one person in there, but then there's lots of other points. So it's not just one person that it belongs to. And then also we were trying to push the idea of mids or mediators as individual data, as new institutions to protect information, give more control to people, and disrupt the power and concentration of wealth. So big questions that you tackle from an NGO perspective. Our next, the panelist sitting next to you is both an attorney as an engineer. And you also deal with the ownership of data, intellectual property privacy. Can you tell us a little bit about your work? Yes. So Octave Consulting is a professional services firm. And we work with both public and private sector institutions. Just helping them to develop their strategic approach to managing data and managing information risk. So kind of end risk. We help them with regulatory compliance as well as we help them build cyber risk response to protect themselves from online attackers. There are so many, many things I'd like us to discuss today. We only have 20 minutes left. I'd like if there are people in the audience who would like to ask questions like please raise your hand and wait for the microphone to be brought to you. But some questions that were triggered by looking at your movie. What did we gain as a society from the deployment, the ubiquity of all these technologies? What did we lose? How do you find balance between the individual interest and the social interest? Is this really surveillance? At the end, sometimes you wonder because people put the footage themselves. What are we going to do when deep fakes happen? When you start to be able to manipulate video, can a video still be a proof? For example, in the trial, obfuscation is the new privacy, the art of putting so much content out there that the relevant content cannot be found. But maybe I'd like to ask the panel this question like if you look in the past 10 years and this massive deployment of cameras in our streets, in our homes, what have we gained and what have we lost, if anything, according to you? Shubing. And actually everything is a double-edged sword. Everything, you know, the development of any technology has two sides as a coin. It's up to the people, up to our judgment, good thing and bad thing, and is relying on our judgment and to avoid any possible risks of making damage of our life. Today, even we have found 90% of the human being in the world, but when we visit, when we try to reach out to people to get their rights of their image, this is a very traditional way to guide their consensus, their consensus, because everybody here, you know, from your home to here, the old information has been collected by big data companies, but big data companies never ask your consensus whether you agree or not, anyway, your information and they don't pay you for this data. And we want to reach out to the people in our movie, and actually this is some logic there. Maybe the payment method today is totally different than it was in the past, and actually the interest you got is much more than the loss of your privacy rights. For example, your GPS location on your cell phone is more accurate than otherwise, and I think everything is changing, it's different. It's an incredible moment in the movie where you actually show up to this guy, you show the image, and you've been using him in the movie but he's unaware of, and he looks at you like, what are you talking about? And then immediately, as you said, he's like, oh, maybe I'm going to be famous, okay, I'm going to sign. It was pretty exciting for him. But tell us a positive, you know, this is probably happening for a reason. What do you think we've gained as a society from the pervasiveness of images? Peace. For example, for our studio, the benefit for us is I like this way of working with contemporary civilization. We don't have photographers, but every frame, every surveillance camera are cameraman for us, and they work 24 hours for us. This sounds like a Uber, and this company doesn't have any car, but all the taxes around the city works for them. This is today's working method, but surveillance technology enabled my feature film, and in other verticals, I think they also got or have gotten benefits which were impossible in the past. To go to the world, it's the world coming to you, and you get free content that you can work with. Jennifer, I see you're really want to react on this question of the pluses and minuses of these technologies being deployed all around us. Well, I do have a question. So if you make a lot of income from this film, or this work, would you then also share that with the actors? Actually, by making this work, we spend a lot of money. Without making a lot of money, and we make much less money than we spent, because we don't have cameraman, we don't have stars, but we need to spend a lot of money on equipment and human resources, and to download so much material. But of course, we want to show this movie in cinema, but actually we didn't get the license to show our movie. I also wanted to say something about the end scenes as well. You mentioned that they were very impactful, and I think that does something compared to watching an action movie, where you might feel impressed by the graphics or think that, oh, I would hate, you know, it's dystopia, but it's actually happening in front of you, and I think that that has a positive, although it's a negative feeling, it has a positive implication, maybe, in our compassion towards each other, our empathy, but that brings the surveillance and that turning it into a story also. But Jennifer, we know now, I mean, it's been 25 years into this digital technologies revolution, the so-called new technologies which are starting to get old a little bit, but we know that it's always about balance. It's always, every technology brings us pluses and minuses, right? The internet brought us Wikipedia and it brought us fake news and online harassment. Let's talk about the pluses and minuses of this technology, and you know, according to both of your perspectives, so nearly you have a more like technical, more legal perspective, and Jennifer, you have a more holistic, more grounded into like social issues. Can you share with us your view on what has changed in the past 10 years? One step, Neil. Yeah, sure. So across different, like, across different contexts, like we've seen online technology being used for public safety or for public good. For example, in the in the developmental context, we're seeing where large international financing companies, they provide funding to build infrastructure in certain countries, and many times this funding is misused or misappropriated, and we've seen where online surveillance is being used to do time-lapse videos to see how the infrastructure is being built, and then to see how building that infrastructure actually impacts people's life. So seeing how fundamental shifts in terms of social and human development is achieved by using online tech, and then there are other public safety, like in terms of in the United States for truck drivers who drive very long distances. They're incentive device to drive long distances, but many of them they fall asleep and have massive accidents. So we're seeing where online surveillance is being used to ensure that they're getting enough rest, they're employing the defensive driving techniques, and that they're safety while they're upon the job is being preserved. So that's one good way for one good use case. Jennifer, according to you, I mean, this balance I was talking about, where would you put the cursor? Like when is too much too much? It's a question of is it doing anything or is it just recording, is it just capturing and is it just teaching machines or something for the future that we're not really, there might be some kind of understanding where you see when something happens, like you said, it's a lot of nothing until there's something. But what is the fundamental reason for the capturing? And I mean, there's there's the example of the drivers of the cars, their data's being captured, how they drive, what they see for to train their replacements. And so there's there's two sides of it. There's the surveillance for surveillance sake, I guess, or for understanding what's happening all the time. And then there's the the method of teaching and understanding what we do in those situations that's feeding a bigger model of the world or artificial intelligence. And I think that who controls that artificial intelligence or that future is what makes it more dystopic or utopic. Yeah, what happens on that? We're gonna go to your question. Sir, just wait for the microphone, please. Please stand up. So my name is Joanna Bryson, University of Bath. I'm asking a question from the perspective of the United Kingdom, a very surveilled country. In fact, there has been a big shift in how you get welfare payments in the UK that has disadvantaged a lot of people. If they make a very small mistake, they could lose their welfare for a month, two months. And the question is why has this been accepted? In fact, the UN has just done a big release. There's incredible poverty in the UK right now. And one of the suggestions by Guy Standing is it's because the last time we had riots in 2014, there were people who were arrested on the basis of just stealing like one package of diapers or tampons or something like this. And so now the poor are aware that they're surveilled. So the rich know we're surveilled, but it doesn't affect us very much. But the poor are aware that they're surveilled and they're afraid to say anything because they would lose their state welfare payments. So I haven't heard a sufficiently dystopian answer from the panel. So I wanted to bring up this as just one example that there may be different impacts on different people. Neil, maybe you want to say something as an attorney? I want to also add to that. We're seeing where the emerging of like online surveillance and artificial intelligence is actually having negative results in terms of, for example, they've now put speakers in schools in the United States to the speakers are supposed to use artificial intelligence to detect aggression. And if they detect aggression, it's supposed to prevent like shooters. But we're seeing where the technology is not mature. So you're seeing a lot of positive and you're seeing a lot of wasted time of the security services. But to her point as well, you're seeing a lot of negative consequences in poor areas, not just from the welfare, but also seeing where the surveillance in the neighborhoods that are meant to, if you're here in Dunshaf, you're supposed to make a phone call to the security services. But you're seeing where you're only putting these technologies in certain kind of privileged neighborhoods and it's negatively impacting those people because they're being pulled over by police and it's breaking down that relationship between the communities and the security. But there's a very large trend here that in a twist of history, like having access to technology used to be a sign of wealth for a very long time. Ten years ago, you had a smartphone and you were a wealthy person. And now it's shifting to being a sign of the opposite of wealth and expensive schools now have human teachers while poor schools have iPads. When you're very high ranked in a company, you can afford not to answer your emails. You cannot do if you're in a lower rank. So now it seems that luxury is actually being away from technology and being wealthy means increasingly being able to push a site which is, I find, very ironic when you look at history. But speaking of the value of these images, there's something very disturbing happening and actually there is a demo where you can get your face scanned. You can choose a famous actor and that person is going to be saying whatever you said and it's called the Deep Fakes. I don't know if you've seen, there's a famous video from Barack Obama. Question to the panel, how long can images from surveillance cameras actually still be evidenced in court when the software to manipulate these images is probably going to be free in one or two years? So, interesting enough, artificial intelligence is being used to create Deep Fakes but artificial intelligence is also being used to detect Deep Fakes. So the technology actually has beneficial use as well as a negative use. I want to circle back to the point that I'm a audience member made as well. In terms of using online surveillance to profile or negatively impact people, there needs to be a legal framework put in place. And we're seeing some of that in GDPR. We're seeing some of that in GDPR where you're not supposed to use modeling data to negatively profile or negatively impact some person. Within the boundaries of the European Union, that's always the problem with the Internet. Which law applies? Those laws need to be harmonized around the world, kind of ensure that there's protection, legal protection so that data is not used to profile and disadvantage. I saw that when GDPR came online, there was 1,000 websites from the USA that basically denied access to European citizens. So this is the way they dealt with it. Sorry, you cannot access our website. We have time for one last question. I'll get to ask something that is, I find very important. There is this idea that is currently being floated in California for data tax. And the model is the tax that was installed by Alaska when there was a pipeline crossing the country and the state was getting money from the pipeline and would give all that money back to the citizen. And so the governor of California is floating the idea of doing the same with data. What do you think about that, Jennifer? You mentioned, you asked a question about the ownership, whether Sue would be giving the money back. What do you think about the idea of a data tax? Would that solve that issue of data ownership and who makes money from what is being created by the consumers? I don't think it's a solitary solution. I don't think it's just a tax, but also creating, like I said, these institutions, these cooperatives that we would put our data to, and then we could say which data we say is allowed to be used. And then there's some data, maybe like energy consumption or something, or that goes through a nest. There might be an intermediate variation of solutions, and one of them might be a tax. But then the question is not all of the data of these companies are Californians. So also how do you then, when the rest of the world starts knocking on, I want my dividend as well, how do you sort that out? So I think there's really a big need for transparency and value of data, as well as what's actually useful, what's beneficial to pushing our society forward and what do we want to use instead of just being used for marketing and things like that. Neil, how would you solve that issue of data ownership and rewarding people? So right now, the privacy ecosystem is largely in favor of the governments and businesses and big business. But we need to move to a solution, and it can be a combination of legal and regulatory framework, technology, controls, as well as public awareness, where we move to a situation where data subjects, they have control of how their data is contextually used or is contextually shared. If it's monetized, they can participate in that monetization, but it needs to move away from being in favor of the big business and government. But that assumes you can find who owns the data. It's like, is the problem musicians have when somebody does a remix? And like, how do you know that it's your sample being used? Last question for you. Has this movie, you worked on this project for several years, has this movie changed the way you work in public space? I started the making of this movie in 2013. And of course, it stopped for several years due to the lack of enough material. I resumed the, I finished the movie in 2017. It's a future movie of 81 minutes in the process. Yes, I think I learned a lot about the relationship between surveillance and the people nowadays. And where does the energy of creation of fine arts come from? Where do our inspirations come from? It's come from our knowledge of fine arts or it come from the social reality. This is, share some light on my thoughts on this. My work, other works, I don't know if you are familiar or not, fine art, well, this is the film, the format is a film, but there is something in common between this work and my previous works. In my work, I want to in a very careful way to produce a reality, but this reality is something fake. Sorry, in Chinese, it doesn't have this work. And this is actually, this feature film is a mimic of a true feature film. It doesn't about love story about two young people. Actually, I want to use this movie to show something different. In Chinese, we have saying that if you want to attack the east, you need to lead your troop to the west. And if you are smart enough, if you can understand my language, you know I'm talking about something else, not this story. As Jennifer says, while put some, or other people put some dramatic videos, but I want to make it like a blockbuster. And the traditional love story, you know, nowadays, in nowadays perspective, which is weird and the fight, the fidgety, the details of traditional love story, you know, is very small compared to nowadays, the complexity. One more round of applause to our panelists, Shubing, Jennifer Lin-Moron and Neil Harper. Thank you very much. Thank you to all those who are watching us on the Internet. Have a good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, man. Thank you.