 Thank you. So, all growing up, all through school, I hated history. I really did, which is strange because I actually loved school. I was one of those kids, yes, I'm sorry, but I was really focused on the future, always, from a very young age. I had plans, goals, that was where my life was going to exist. I had things that I wanted to accomplish and do, and my teachers were able to help me understand how most of the subjects in school could help me achieve those goals, math, science, language, all this directly helped me affect the future that I wanted. But history, they would always fall back on this saying that those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Exactly, I hated that saying. I hated that saying because it was the same one that I heard every year with every new teacher that I talked to, and it didn't get me excited about history at all because I didn't see how that had any bearing on the future, and it focused all on avoiding the bad when I wanted to help create the good, and I think that it ignored this other little bit, that if you do learn from history, you can still repeat it. I think we see that over and over, but my teachers didn't care about any of that. They had to teach me history anyway, so I went through school not liking history, but enjoying the rest of subjects, but as soon as I was out, as I was becoming a young adult, that changed dramatically. I began to develop a love for history because I realized that just because they couldn't explain it to me in a way that I grasped, history really can help you affect the future. It can help you create the future that you want to create. It is a data nerd. It gives me all the data points that I need to make better decisions now to create the future that I want to create. As I'm going to talk about the future of the web and why it's so important to us, I have to start with a little bit of a history lesson. We have to jump back a little bit first. A short little jump to 1991 first. 1991 was a real important year to everyone here, whether you realize it or not, because if you use the internet to make your living or pursue your passions or have your voice be heard, this was when the internet sort of as we know it came to be. Tim Berners-Lee in association with CERN was developing some of the tools that we see as sort of the basis of the internet, the hypertext transfer protocol or HTTP, hypertext markup language or HTML, and the first web browser. All that came out right there in 1991. But that's kind of the top layer of the internet. At the same time, though, the commercial internet exchange was working to take all these individual networks that existed all over the place, mostly at universities and in government facilities, each one having sort of a wealth of information in it, a wealth of data, and they wanted to interconnect all these networks and create the internet, and they succeeded. Right there in 1991, the internet started and it looked something like this. It's not as fancy or as flashy as we expect today, but we can see our roots here. We can kind of see where the internet started. We see the core, the bones of the internet. But really the most important part about this that you have to understand is that at its earliest stages, at its inception, at the birth of the internet, if you will, the internet was extremely open. See, all these networks were not just connected, but the commercial internet exchange pushed really hard for what they called a no settlement policy. They wanted to make sure that these silos of information shared that information all around freely rather than staying silos with some sort of digital gatekeeper. Even all these tools that CERN developed, they were actually open standards that anyone could implement. At the very beginning, the internet was extremely open and focused on sharing information. That was its goal and its purpose. That's where it started. As we look at where it's gone, this will help us have a starting point to be able to track its direction. Before we leave 1991, while it was an important year for all of us that used the internet, it was particularly important for me personally. It really affects my story and why I care so much about some of this. Looking back on my life, 1991 was a year that set the direction for where I would go, for what I would do. It may sound a little crazy considering that I was nine years old and going into fourth grade, but it's true. It's okay that it seems a little nuts, because nine-year-old me didn't really get the importance or what things in my life were important at that time, either. As a matter of fact, if you could travel back in time and ask young Aaron what is so awesome about 1991, I'd completely miss the point and talk to you forever about this, right? Super Nintendo, it was amazing. It was the first one that I had sort of saved up my money and bought my own console. It was this huge jump forward in video gaming and I was addicted to video games back then. I mean, I got to play stuff like this on it, right? Who recognizes this game? Yeah, there's quite a few of you. That's fantastic. Super Mario World, right? So much better. The graphics were stunning. They were amazing to me. I mean, look at those Super Nintendo graphics. The gameplay was smooth and complex. It was cool. It was so exciting, but it wasn't the Super Nintendo games that set me on the course that I went on, but it was a video game. It was this one. Who recognizes this one? Yeah, like a couple of you. This is Gorillas. Gorillas was distributed in 1991 with MS-DOS 5, so like pre-Windows-ish era, right around the start of Windows. And as you can see, the graphics were terrible, and the gameplay was equally terrible. It was turn-based, and when it was your turn, you would type in a number for an angle and type in another number for a velocity and hit enter, and your gorilla would throw an exploding banana at that angle and velocity, and you would try to hit the other gorilla. It was really bad. But I spent a lot of time playing this game, even though I had the glory that was the Super Nintendo out in my living room. Why would I do that? Well, it was because of this. See, that game wasn't distributed to show what graphics PCs were capable of or even what kind of gameplay they were capable of. It was actually distributed to showcase QBasic, which is Microsoft's integrated development environment for the basic programming language. And so it was distributed open source. It came with the source code. As a matter of fact, it only came as source code. The way you played it is you opened up this development environment, you loaded the source code, and you pressed Shift F5, which is compile and run, and you would play the game. And it was super intriguing that I could scroll down through all this text and see that somehow that turned into the game that I played. And it was this openness. It was my first experience with openness around computers. I was always interested in computers and technology, but suddenly I was interested in what actually made those possible. What was under the hood, so to speak. And of course, that intrigue turned into curiosity. And pretty soon I was making changes and breaking stuff most of the time. But eventually I was able to do all kinds of modifications and changes to this game. And that is where my desire to learn more about the things that power all this technology that I enjoyed. And it's important to understand in this part of the story that nine-year-old me couldn't have made this game. I didn't know this programming language to start with. It wasn't easy to learn a programming language, especially back then. You couldn't just Google and get a tutorial and work your way through it, right? But I was able to take this thing that these extremely smart developers at Microsoft wrote. And then I was able to learn from that and build on top of it. I could kind of pick up where they took off and move forward. And at first it was tiny little changes. And then eventually it was more and more until I did know how to program in the basic programming language. And this concept of learning from what other people have already done and then building on top of it, starting from where they left off, is extremely important throughout all of history. So if you thought that we were only going back to 1991, I'm sorry, because this dates back at least to the early 1100s. Bernard of Chartres, who was a philosopher and teacher, he would tell his students that the reason that they that they were able to accomplish more than the philosophers that came before them wasn't because they were better or smarter or more capable. It was because they were able to learn from those people and pick up where they left off. He said they were able to sit on the shoulders of giants. Lots of you have heard a statement kind of similar to that, right? But you probably have no idea who Bernard of Chartres is because we all learned it as Isaac Newton, right? This scientist who some 500 years later penned in a letter. If I have seen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants. I get why teachers teach it with Isaac Newton. We look back and we see him as a bit of a giant, right? He sort of changed the world, trying to imagine what the world would be like now without the things that he gave us. It's tough. He gave us Newtonian mechanics to help us understand how things move. He gave us calculus. Before him, no calculus. After him, we all had calculus in school, right? Whether you liked that subject or not, the fact is almost everything that we consider modern requires calculus. Everything from skyscrapers to jet engines, you have to have calculus to make them and to make them safely. Even though we see that history sort of turned and made a drastic change at this point, Isaac Newton said, it's not that. It's not that I was a giant. It's not that I was the turning point. It's that I was the culmination of all these things that came before me. I was able to sort of compile that altogether and build on top of that and add my little piece. We all recognize his little piece is very important, but the truth is it could never have happened without the people that came before him. To start working our way back up through history to where we're at today, this concept dates all the way back to the very beginning. This ability to take the information that people before you have worked to create and build on top of it, we've gotten iteratively better at that process all through history. Every time it happens, historians can see sort of a jump in productivity, a jump in new things being developed, dating all the way back to when we first got language and then written language and then writing on paper instead of tablets. Then we were able to compile things in whole libraries that you could go to and learn. Then the printing press for being able to distribute all that, and that's around when Isaac Newton came in and had access to all this information, but we've still gotten better. We developed computers which could take those whole libraries and put them on your desk. Who remembers installing an encyclopedia program on your computer? Who did it from disk? Floppy disks and who did it from CD? It still blows my mind. I remember that feeling of looking at the bookcase of encyclopedias at my grandparents' house that had all the yearly updates to it and filled this whole set of shelves and then just installing it on my computer and it sat on my desk and had more up-to-date information than theirs did. It's amazing how easy it was for me to access information at that time, but it's gotten even better since because the internet improved still. Now that information can move around like it was never able to before. The internet is the single most efficient information sharing tool ever. It has ever existed and every time we've gotten better at sharing information as humans, we've made more progress than ever before. We can see that now. Things are progressing extremely fast in technology and in medicine and all these areas because we're able to learn more faster about what other people had already figured out and then just pick up where they left off and continue forward. Imagine what potential this has for the future, like not just my future, but the future of all of humankind. It boggles my mind how much potential the internet has. It's huge, but there are dangers, right? It's this mind bogglingly amazing tool, but there are some things that put it at risk and I think it's important for us to look at those and understand those and understand the importance of protecting this amazing tool. The first one that I really want to focus on is closed systems. I think that these put the internet at risk in a way that almost nothing else does. Close systems, when I'm talking about close systems, I'm talking about any platform that we build on or rely on that is owned and controlled by someone else, some other company. This includes Facebook and Wix and Weebly and Squarespace and Shopify and Twitter and tons of these tools that we see and use constantly. First, let me say they're not necessarily bad, right? Technologically, they're probably quite good. That's why people use them. Even ideologically, they're just tools. They're sort of only as good or bad as the people that run them and use them, right? But I still think that they are a risk to the internet, but I think that it can be very challenging to see this risk until it's already hit us, until we've already gone so far in that we're stuck because we're so tightly involved with the internet. Everyone here interacts with the internet daily, right? Yes? Every single one of you. We're really close to that. It's hard to see it sometimes. So I want to talk about something that seems so far removed from the internet for us to see what can happen and then show the parallels. I want to talk about farming. Yeah. Farming has changed a lot over the last, well, over a long period of time, right? Dating way back, everyone sort of farmed. Everyone grew their own food or every village grew their own food, but we've gotten better at it over time, right? Much, much better at farming and the better we got at it, the fewer and fewer people actually had to farm to still produce enough food for everyone. And as that's happened, farms have gotten better and better tools and better and better systems for growing food. And it's what has allowed them to accomplish all that they've accomplished. Modern-day farms are a marvel. They are amazing. They're huge swaths of land tended by a pretty small number of people using some pretty amazing tools. Tractors aren't like what they were when I was a kid or certainly not what they were when I pictured them as a kid, right? I thought it was just an engine in a chassis for pulling things through the field, which is kind of where they used to be, but not anymore. They're amazing, huge machines that can do all kinds of things that they were never able to do before. Leveling a field. Modern-day tractors use laser leveling to level fields extremely, perfectly level. That makes a huge difference in the amount of food that can be produced because it controls how water flows through that field. Evenly, every plant gets some, extremely effective and you can never do that by hand. But these computerized tractors, they can and it's amazing. But the farmers have realized now, more recently, there's a bit of a problem here because they have purchased these tractors, which are feats of engineering, computerized feats of engineering that can do these things that they were never able to do before, but as much as they've spent a million or two million dollars on these machines, they're not cheap. They own the machine and they've licensed the software that runs it because that's all closed source and owned by, in this case, John Deere. It was okay because the software was good. It was extremely good at what it did, but now they're so bought into that that they've realized that when it comes time to say fix the tractor, they've got some problems. They used to be able to take their tractor into their barn and fix it, which was important because a lot of farming is time sensitive. Things have to be planted and harvest often in very short periods of time, at least to be as efficient as they are nowadays, and it's not that they're not capable of fixing computerized equipment. It's that they aren't allowed because it's not their software and you can't fix a tractor without first plugging in and diagnosing it using the computers, but the plugs are all proprietary to these systems. So they started making their own and plugging into a computer anyway. Like homemade cords by these farmers to hook up to their tractors to find out that everything's encrypted and they can't actually use it. And so now there's this sort of resistance of farmers that have started working together with hackers to break the encryption on these tractors. And then they had to write key generators because if something was broke on the tractor like the GPS dish on the top, if they were to get another GPS dish and replace it, the tractor still wouldn't use it because it has to have the key that matches. So now they have these key generators to generate it so that they can repair their own tractors because the alternative, the thing that the company wants them to do is to load that tractor up and ship it to one of the manufacturer's facilities and have it fixed, which puts them completely at the whim of what that company wants to charge and how long that company is going to take. And farmers were starting to go bankrupt and actually lose their farms because maybe they could afford to get the tractor fixed, but maybe they missed their window for harvest and suddenly their farm isn't making any money. And they did not see this coming. They were too busy being excited about how much better these tools made their lives. They were too busy seeing how much more they could do with these tools, how much faster they could do it, and how exciting and amazing the tools were. They were even worried about losing the competitive advantage. What if another farmer has all these shiny new toys, but you don't? There's no way that you can produce as much as them. You are not going to be able to compete. And so they were excited to run down this path. And yes, we know that John Deere owns all this software, but it's good software. We like it, right? Yeah, we know that Facebook owns that whole playground that we use all the time, but we like it. It helps us keep in touch with people that we wouldn't otherwise be able to keep in touch with. It helps us reach an audience that we wouldn't otherwise be able to reach. What if our competitors use it and we don't? Then what? All the same things that these farmers thought as they were excitedly going down this path. But now they're stuck. And instead of being able, instead of being good for them, they've realized this is a problem. And now there's about eight or 10 states that are currently currently have legislation that these farmers are arguing for called the right to repair. They say if we spent millions of dollars on the machines and we own them, we should be able to fix them, which sounds a little bit logical to me at least. But legally, right now, they can't. These farmers, if they repair their own tractor, they've broken the law, not to mention broken the terms of service and are no longer technically allowed to use the software. And you know how useful these tractors are without it? Not at all. Can't even start the tractor. You can do nothing without the computer. And this worries me because I see this path that we're walking down with the internet. Is the internet a decade from now? Is the internet of 2028 going to be the American farms of 2018? Are we going to get to that point where we've been so excited about the new tools, about the new things, about how cool all of it is that we've missed the risks until it's too late? Right now, you see a lot of people using these closed tools on the internet, but you also start to slowly see a trend towards people and businesses being completely reliant on them. Instead of having a Facebook page, they maybe have a Facebook page instead of having a site, a website. So they don't own anything. They push everybody using Twitter and all these other tools. They push everybody to this one thing that is in someone else's playground. It's something that someone else controls. Or maybe they wanted to build an online store and the easiest and simplest way to do that was with Shopify, but again, that their business is revolving around this thing that they don't own or control. And that worries me that we're walking down this same path and just not seeing it, just like the farmers didn't see it. The importance of this, I feel like we often miss because when you think about the internet, you don't think how important it is that information be shared in order for humankind to continue to make forward progress. When you think about the internet, you probably think about some favorite website or favorite tool or even game. Who knows what? But there's all this shiny, exciting that distracts us from recognizing how important it can be. But the truth is the internet is extremely powerful and useful. And it's not even the future. People say the internet's the future. It's not the internet's right now. We have this tool. We have this extremely powerful information sharing tool. Are we using it to its fullest? I don't know. But we have it. We have no excuse. I mean, we have access to more information than Isaac Newton did by a long. But while the internet's not the future, because it's right now, what it does do is it sets us up for a better future. It has the potential to positively impact the future. But only if we can keep it open, only if we can keep this information being able to be shared around. And as the control of the tractor companies grew, at first, it wasn't a big deal at all. So they controlled the software. It wasn't a big deal. There were alternatives. You could always fall back on your old tractors or whatever. But eventually, eventually, they had gone far enough in that these tractor companies had enough control that they could essentially put them in a stranglehold and demand whatever they wanted from them. And we're not there yet with the internet, thankfully. But I don't want to see us ever get there. So what are a few things that we can do to make sure that it stays this useful tool that it is? I want to make sure that I leave us with a few things that we can do. First, use open platforms, open alternatives. As long as there are always alternatives to these closed platforms that exist on the web, as long as there are open alternatives like WordPress, which is a fantastic open alternative to a lot of closed options, as long as there are these things that people can move to, then the closed platforms don't pose the same risk. Because they don't have the stranglehold. They don't have enough control to force the internet into what they see it as, into what they want. Additionally, we can spread the word. I'm an information addict, admittedly. I love information. But I don't love it just for the sake of information. I love it because I think that it's one of the keys to progress. And no one is going to care that much about keeping these closed platforms in check or keeping the internet open if they don't understand the importance of it. And I think that a lot of us here probably understand the importance of it, but are we helping everyone else understand the importance of it? Are we helping them see through the shiny, fun entertainment part of the internet and see just how useful and powerful it is and how important it is to keep it safe? And lastly, the thing that is probably easiest for all of us to do and also likely the most effective is to vote with our money. Support the people and platforms and companies that support the open web. And don't help fund the ones that want to control it and limit it and close it for their own profits. I'm Aaron Campbell. I lead the WordPress security team, but I'm absolutely passionate about the open web and its importance. I would love to take some questions and chat with you all about it. Come on, someone's got questions. No? Oh, back here. Perfect. So I read quite a bit, researched quite a bit about this as I was putting together the talk, but I can't recall those numbers. I more recall some of the stories of a couple farmers or a few farmers that have lost their farms because of this, but I don't know what kind of numbers or percentages those are, unfortunately. Which by the way, this link to my slides up here, if you go to that and you go to the slide with the tractor on it, there's a link to an article with all kinds of additional information about that, kind of a good starting point, if anybody's just super curious about that, because I know I was. Yeah. My biggest nightmare around kind of the closed system specifically, I feel like Facebook is right up there, not because of the social network aspect of it, but as businesses begin to rely on it for their livelihood, that worries me. Google is always a scary one. They're not actively doing anything terrible, but so much of how we interface with the internet is through them. It's these companies that have the potential to control information and who can and can't see it, who can and can't find it. That's scary to me. That includes any company that, the big ISPs as well that can control whether traffic even flows from certain sites. The net neutrality is terrifying stuff to talk about from the stage because it's such a divisive topic and there's people that are absolutely passionate about both sides of the argument, but I think the ideal behind it, more than the specific bits of legislation, the idea that traffic needs to be kind of treated equally rather than having any small group of people, whether it's a company or a government or a, you know, some combination thereof, if they have the control over what people can and can't see, that's scary. That's one of the biggest downsides of the way everything's currently set up. Net neutrality, legislating it, wouldn't necessarily be as important if there were a lot of choice and if one ISP wouldn't give you access to something that you wanted to know, you could just move to another one easily, but that's not the case in most places. There are actually, there are a lot of places where you only think you have more than one ISP that you can go through because the truth is, you know, the three or four others that you think you have are just leasing the lines from the one and it really all comes back to one company and that choice is a problem. Right now, even if you have two options, if one behaves badly and you and everyone were to move to the other, that kind of message would get through quickly, but we have to kind of all do that. We all have to be willing to put up with some frustrations and stuff in order to send that message to them and tell them, hey, we want this to stay open and if you look like you're closing it down, then we're not going to pay you anymore. Yeah, I don't know the answer to that. I don't know, you know, I do know that it, oh, like 90% is owned by AT&T. The vast majority of those lines are AT&T. Yeah, yeah, so the specific question, since at least I'm having a hard time hearing them, so I don't know if everyone else is too, but it's about the state level blocking of governments blocking certain chunks of the internet or certain types of traffic. And I think it's extremely dangerous to do that. Yes, there are things on the internet that I personally don't like. Not even talking about things that are illegal for other reasons, like there are things that are perfectly legal that are on the internet that if I were solely in control of the internet, I'd probably get rid of them. I said that I'm an information addict. I love information, but I love accurate information. It drives me crazy to get all these things that my family shares around no matter how many times you tell them to go to Snopes, right? They're not gonna, but like if I were in control, I would probably weep that stuff from the internet, but at the same time, I don't think that that's actually good. Like any person or group of people that can decide what other people can and can't learn is a risk to our forward progress, right? Because historically, there have been all these times where the commonly accepted belief, the truth of the time, turned out to be wrong. And how do you overcome that if some subset of people, be it a government or a company or whatever, is saying, no, this is definitely true, and so we're not even gonna show anybody this other stuff, right? How do you get over those humps as people if the small group hasn't figured it out? It makes the assumption that they are smarter and more right than like everyone else put together, and so I think that's risky. I think one last question, and then we'll end because I think I'm out of time. In what ways does WordPress promote the open web? That's a fantastic one and probably not the fastest one to answer, but I will try to answer it quickly. WordPress is open source. We all know that. That's important because you don't have the data lock-in that you risk having at these closed platforms, right? Because if the goals and needs of WordPress were to diverge from your own, you would still have the capability to continue to maintain or some small group of people to maintain WordPress or develop it in another direction. But on top of that, the licensing is boring as software licensing can be, helps ensure that that will always and forever be the case. There's no way for it to ever be closed back down. The GPL is extremely boring to read, but it's also extremely useful in that it focuses on giving all the rights to the user, which is fantastic. That's how it should be. To me, those are the biggest ways that WordPress promotes the open web. Thank you all.