 It's my huge, huge pleasure to introduce Julie Cohen to you. I suspect everybody knows Julie's work here, but just a few brief notes. She is a professor at the Georgetown School of Law but is visiting here at Harvard Law School for the entire year, which is fabulous for us and for our students. She's teaching variants of the classes that she teaches there here, ranging from copyright to property in the first year and advanced theory of intellectual property and so forth, which has been fabulous. The great news also for us is that she's in the middle or the near the end, I suppose, of a book project. I know Julie's work primarily by reading all of the articles that she comes out with in Law Reviews and so forth, which are important elements of our field in cyber law. If you were to read any one of those, my favorite is actually, in some ways, maybe the most recent, the one on privacy and transparency in the Chicago Law Review, which I would commend to all of you if you're in the business of reading Law Review articles. And I know there's some of those themes that are carried through into the book. I would imagine that Julie's gonna talk about here on configuring the network self with that and we'll turn it over to Julie for the next 15 or 20 minutes. Okay, thank you so much, John, and thanks to the Berkman Center for inviting me to do this and to all of you for showing up. And the little blurb on the web made reference to structural conditions of human flourishing, which is something that comes at the very end of this book that I've been writing. And so what I thought I would do is spend actually more time giving you background than talking about chapter nine, but I'll get there. So I'm gonna kind of set the table for that. And if you're wondering why I'm not getting to it, I will get to it eventually. But so the book, configuring the network self, is motivated by, way back when when I started working on it, by two things that really struck me about the discourse around information law and policy. And when I say the discourse, I'm referring to the US law and policy discourse. There are differences between that discourse and for example, the European discourse in certain respects. So I'm not making a claim to be talking about that. But within the US legal and policy space, the two things that struck me as odd were, number one, that we make a lot of grandiose pronouncements about designing laws and infrastructures that facilitate free speech or facilitate market choice. So there's a lot of freedom being floated around, freedom, expressive freedom, market freedom. And yet quite often at the end of the day, there's a set of results that seems in many ways antithetical to the interests of the individuals and communities that have to exist and go about their business within this space to the extent that they're told a whole bunch of things they can't do with content owned by other people. There are relatively few barriers to collection and aggregation of information about people and observation of what they do. The world of artifacts within which we move is increasingly seamless and opaque. It's sort of a homework of good design that everything has to look like an iPhone, but it's really hard to figure out how it works and what it's doing. So there's a disconnect between the discourse about all these freedoms and the way it actually seems to work. And then the second disconnect is, should be easy enough for people listening to recognize. It's the disconnect between the copyright-centered debate about cultural environmentalism and enclosure and free culture on the one hand and the privacy debate about the other. On the other hand, there's a free culture debate is all about openness and often seems to me to be about openness to such a great extent that it's impossible or at least very difficult to contemplate how privacy claims might be reconciled within that discourse about open, open, open and to contemplate how that might work architecturally and thus for advocates, free culture advocates and privacy advocates to make common cause with one another because of the ways in which openness becomes fraught. And so it's puzzling about these disconnects that I experienced. And what I ended up deciding, and so I'll state for you now, the major substantive thesis of the book and also a major methodological thesis of the book there related is that we make these laws and policies and we have these debates about freedom within a frame of reference that at least within the US law and policy discourse derives from liberal political theory to a very large extent. And so there are terms that get tossed around like autonomy and freedom and there are presumptions that get tossed around like rational choice and disembodied individuals who can play in the realm of the virtual and who can exercise autonomous choice in markets that are increasingly virtual. And that's not really a worldview that has much relation to reality in my opinion. And what we ought to be focusing on if we want to understand for example why a free culture agenda might be important or why privacy might be important and how you might reconcile a wish for greater openness and culture and a wish for more effective protection of privacy would be to focus on the experience, what I call the experience geography of the networked information society on the conditions that govern information flows to and from and about people on the fact that those people are real and embodied and localized in cultures and contexts and are experiencing the network indirectly as it's mediated by devices and platforms and interfaces and have to learn how to make it work somehow. What I'm describing as the framework sort of ported in from liberal theory doesn't tend to give us good tools to ask those questions because if you for example start from the presumption that the self is autonomous and separate from culture then it's going to be very difficult to ask how selves are constituted by culture and how the rules that we make about access to culture result in different consequences and that we need to evaluate. If you treat the self as autonomous and separate from culture it's gonna be difficult to say things about how regimes of privacy or more privacy or less privacy result in meaningful significant consequences for the way that we experience our culture and the way that our political discourse works. And so it turned out when I read some more that actually there are lots of folks that do ask these questions they just don't primarily seem to be operating in law. There are people who work in cultural studies, people who work in information studies and science and technology studies and if I haven't mentioned your field but. Insert here. Lots of people in the room are in these other areas. There are a whole literatures about this that often sort of encapsulated by legal scholars under the umbrella term post-modernist which is then kind of used in a very pejorative way which I think is unfortunate. So one sort of overall purpose of the book project is to unpack that set of literatures and ask okay well if we pay attention to actually how the information society works on the level of what I call situated embodied users of networks and network and information and how those situated embodied users experience information technologies we may be able to learn some things that then could inform our thinking about information law and policy. And so the book seeks to do that and seeks to do it within an overall normative framework informed substantially but not completely by the Amartya Sen, Martha Nessbaum theory of capabilities for human flourishing. So I state just as this is my normative prior that we ought to be seeking to pursue a regime of information law and policy that will promote human flourishing, that will furnish people with the capabilities to flourish meaningfully and there's great work that's been done by a whole bunch of folks on access to knowledge and network neutrality. For example, that talks about for example that one needs meaningful access to culture in order to be able to participate in politics in culture as culture in life and therefore a set of intellectual property rules should take those considerations into account. Where I part company though with that framework is the extent to which that framework also tries to situate itself within the liberal tradition and I have a theory about why they do that which I won't bore you with now but it tends to result in a fair amount of indeterminacy and so a critique that's often leveled at the capabilities theory is that you could just make anything into a required capability for flourishing because to the extent that you could argue that it becomes affirmatively necessary for people to have it in order to flourish. How do we make that framework more concrete? How do we lend it content? I argue you lend it content by actually looking at these postmodern literatures that tell us important things about the mutually constituting relationships between self and culture, between self and community, between technology and culture and community and then you lend the theory of capabilities for human flourishing content by being able to say things about how those processes work and in consequence what kinds of guarantees or spaces the laws should attempt to provide. There are some concepts that we might come back to in the Q and A but I don't wanna just talk and talk and talk. What emerged as three critical reference points for that inquiry are first of all what I've already referred to the notion that selves are constituted by culture but more narrowly the first critical reference point for this inquiry is what I refer to as the mutually constituting relationship between information technologies and embodied perception. You all experience whether or not you stop to think about it the tools that you have as reconfiguring your access to the world and it's not just virtual. It's a relationship between you, your situated self and the geography of the world that is changing and changing again and being remediated in part by the characteristics of this device or interface or platform that is between you and everything else. And there's a whole bunch of good thinking about how to theorize that, how to understand it, how to describe it and how to interrogate it. The second critical reference point is the concept of everyday practice which is sort of an anti-paradigm that's useful for describing what people do. So if you read the legal literature you often find a dominant paradigm that says for example we should evaluate the consequences of a particular legal or architectural regime by reference to its effect on political discourse and speech or by reference to its effect on freedom of speech or by reference to its effect on whether people can make free and informed choices in markets. And those frames tend to yield pretty reductive models of human behavior so at the end of the day you're kind of sitting there scratching your head going well is all people do just run around making rational choices in markets or are we instead to think of people as constantly animated by romantic notions of political dissent and critical commentary. You see this in the fair use jurisprudence a lot. Everyday practice is a concept that's used to describe sort of all of the everything else. Having a beer and watching the football game today and engaging in political commentary tomorrow and going to buy an eye touch the next day and everything else that comes in between and how people engage in behaviors and how they make sense of them to themselves and in their communities. Everyday practice is not linear. It is not always animated by overarching strategies. It's often very reactive. It's often very tactical. So there's a great website that people set up to go walk around New York City and not go in front of any surveillance camera. That's a tactical response to the increasing deployment of surveillance cameras and it's very ad hoc. It's not like somebody sat down to devise a political theory before they set that up. They just did it. I think there's something valuable to be learned from focusing on everyday practice as the dominant conception of how people do what they do. And then the third critical reference point is the notion of play, okay. Play. Okay, the third point is the notion of play. Play is a concept that appears particularly in the intellectual property literature. When people critique the breadth of the copyright rules they often say something like, and then we see therefore that people should have freedom to play with cultural resources. And play is important. It's linked in a lot of literatures to creativity, to invention. Yet I think all of that discussion about deliberate intentional play that people engage in needs to be broadened to encompass another conception or definition of play as just the play of circumstances, right. The idea that creativity, for example, will blossom not just because you decided today that you wanna play, but because life puts random stuff in your way. And if you go and read, for example, the work of people who have done historical studies of great moments in art or who interview contemporary artists, quite often that's what you get back. I don't know why I thought of that, but life threw this and this and this in my path and I mixed them together and that's what came out. So there's a sense of play, not as play by individuals, but play of circumstances, play of random stuff that life puts in your way. And that play is a critical part of what we should, I argue, be seeking to foster in our information policy and it's a critical condition of human flourishing. So structural conditions of human flourishing that emerge after I take these three critical reference points and work through them in chapters about copyright, privacy, architecture, code or as follows, one access to knowledge. I think it's important. I think great work has been done on access to knowledge, but I don't think access to knowledge is enough to just apply a base for human flourishing in the Networked Information Society because it doesn't get you all the things that turn out to be important. It doesn't, for example, get you rights to reuse cultural products unless you're willing to define access as encompassing rights of reuse, I guess you could, but it seems to be that we're talking about two different things. We're talking about the ability to access stuff in the first place and second, the flexibility in the legal structure that allows you to take things and reuse them. A2K doesn't guarantee you, for example, rights of privacy. In fact, to the extent the access frame has anything to say about privacy, it usually tends to say things about how more openness is good. So there are two other conditions that I think we need to add to begin developing a taxonomy of structural conditions for human flourishing in the Networked Information Society. The first of those is operational transparency. We need to know how these digital architectures work. It is not enough, for example, to require data aggregators to disclose to you what information they have collected about you. You need to know how it's gonna be used. It is not enough to say you have a choice between Google and whatever, right? It is not enough to say you have a choice between iPhone and BlackBerry or between take your pick. You have to be given enough information to know what options are being presented to you and what options are being foreclosed in order to know something about the work that these devices that are mediating your perception of the information environment are doing. And third, semantic discontinuity. This is my favorite one. So this chapter at the end of the book argues that there's a thing called semantic discontinuity that is a vital structural condition of human flourishing in the Networked Information Society and what it is is formal incompleteness in legal and technical infrastructures. For example, copyright. Formal incompleteness in copyright rights such that to reuse culture, you don't need to invoke a catch all defense like fair use and pray you can convince somebody. But there is actually space leftover. For play. For example, in privacy. Rigid arbitrary unreasonable rules against transacting in and aggregating personal data such that there is space left over for people to play with identity, to engage in unpredictable conduct and to have their senses of self evolve within the space leftover. For example, in the realms of architecture and this one's gonna push people's buttons if the privacy one didn't already. If you read the computer science literature, there is an ingrained completely unquestioned norm that life will be better and better and better for everybody if we have seamless interoperability between everything everywhere all the time data platforms, interfaces, you name it. And I guess that's really good for some purposes but a consequence of that just automatic unquestioned regress to seamless interoperability is for example, that data about you moves around and around and around without your ability to know where it's going or to stop it. It's that for example, people will say, oh, great, you know, social networks are great. One network is great, another networks is great. Wouldn't it be even better if we combine them to make one big social network? And it turns out that to the extent you scale up, certain desirable features of that network are magnified and certain undesirable features of that network are magnified, you lose to a very meaningful extent, whatever ability to control the visibility of your data and your behavior compared to what you have before. And if all we think is important is open exchange of data, I guess that would make sense but if what we think is important is play and everyday practice and play in the two senses that I've talked about, deliberate play and interstitial play, right? The play of circumstances running into unexpected stuff within gaps in the network. I think we ought to think that through again. There's a real extent to which I think human beings benefit from discontinuity of the sort that I'm identifying and trying to focus on. And so that's a conversation that I want to start even if it takes us to some really strange places. And with that, I will stop in open floor. Awesome, this is gonna be a great book and a great conversation. I have a sense there are some reactions from the crew. Who wants first? Mr. Charles. I have played in this area for a while dealing with identity issues and so forth. One of the things we realized early on was that people need to have the freedom to have multiple personas. So Church Lady 43 may be porn star 562, right? And those worlds should be separate at some level but as things become more integrated, these things tend to get blurred. And then we have the issue of maybe that person is also terrorist 65. And then there is one of those and then we have the security theater reaction to that which kind of gets to the point of your whole, I think the reason this is such an important issue to discuss because we could wind up where we've got this seamless integrated world where all I'm careful on saying is anything I would say in a work environment. So I can't talk politics, I can't talk religion. I can't really have opinions that are unpopular in that world and that quaffs so many positive things about how we can evolve as a society. What I worry about is Joe McCarthy coming back and asking you are you or have you ever been a member of this group which is now in disfavor because in 50 or 60 years we've seen social norms change completely. Yeah, that's, I mean, yes, that's a great comment. So we need to have that discussion and the legal aspects of that, I think, are there's open territory here that needs, there needs to be more definition than there is now. Right. That seems totally consistent with what Julie said. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. There's a pushback that often is a response to that which is, you know, but if you restrict the flow of information in X way we will slide down a slippery slope to Chinese internet censorship or what I'm looking at Donnie or whatever. And that's, I think we have to move out of the security of that in order to have the conversation because it's actually not true, right? There's always a sense in which information flows are limited and structured in particular ways. You can't have protocols, for example, that just let everything go everywhere. But we have to be, I think, more willing to kind of open the door to saying, okay, there are these competing considerations we're trying to balance here, some of which involve having accurate knowledge and others of which don't. How can we make this work? Charlie. I perked up when you talked about copyright and the need for play at the joints without the playful person having to fend off claims with defences of fair use. My understanding is that, well, the way it is right now that that is exactly the situation. And have you got some approach that would create this space of playfulness that one doesn't need to defend? So I do in a funny way, right? And it's a funny way because it would involve going back and looking at the 1909 US Copyright Act and asking what were some good things about this law? That was a law that is just reviled by copyright scholars and policymakers today because, for example, instead of saying as the current law does, you get exclusive rights and original works of authorship regardless of the manner or medium in which they're expressed, it had categories, right? And you couldn't even get the rights unless you fell within categories like lecture or essay or dramatic work or whatever. And then the rights were much more narrowly limited. So not all categories of works got all rights and that's still true to a limited extent today but it's true to a much lesser degree and it's reviled because the pressure on the copyright industry side to expand that framework was overwhelming. How can it be, the argument would go that you erect an arbitrary legal framework that makes unsustainable distinctions between different modes of expression with the result that actions that have a bottom line consequence can't be appropriated, right, can't be. And I think we need to just flip that around. We need to be willing not to go back to exactly what the 1909 Act said but to define rights to reproduction and to adaptation in a way that gives certain very significant rights still to copyright owners and I can talk about why I still think that but quite clearly and unambiguously reserves lots of other things to users and does so without regard to this really annoying criterion of actual or potential market effect which in the hands of a court can always get blown into a reason for extending the right to cover whatever it is the users have done. I think, well let me stop and ask if that. But you're inevitably running up against the pocketbook of the copyright holders who say you're giving away our testimony. Yeah, of course. And there's a limit to what one can do in any one piece of scholarship and there needs to be something which this is not that takes what I'm doing here sort of as a theoretical matter and says okay, how do we get there? Yeah, and I absolutely agree with you, getting there is no mean feat. But I do think part of getting there involves beginning a discourse about the various meanings of play and the various values of play and seeking to make it understood that everybody benefits from that. That it's not just a bunch of crazy YouTube posters for example that benefit from that but it's even the mass culture industries themselves benefit from that because there's a circulation and a ferment that then redounds to their benefit as well. What about you, Professor Nessen? Do you see a narrative here from Julie's story that leads to the reform that you have an interest in? Well, I approach it at the most fundamental level whether there's some presumption of fair use rather than a presumption against it. And right now the burden that she describes is really overwhelming even for non-commercial people who are copying without any profit motive. They still have to fend off this extraordinary assault that can be made on them. So I'm just starting from the law perspective of shifting the presumption in a way that clearly represents the playfulness of the consumer. The end using consumer on the end would be a huge step forward I think. I saw you trying to do this in the Tenenbaum case a bunch of times to focus on the user and that whole experience. It seems it's actually not at all out of step with the overall methodological project that Julie's trying to advance here. I'm fascinated by this project. I'm really looking forward to the book. I am interested particularly in the sort of literature you refer to about, you tell it that lawyers denigrate this promo, this embodied understanding of the everyday because when you said it it made me think of a book that was published about 10 years ago, 1999 that was boldly titled The Internet by an anthropologist and a sociologist and I don't know if you know it but the idea, it was considered by some to be a groundbreaking sort of work in embodied local cultural understanding of the internet and they thought we are just around the corner in 1999 from an understanding in social science that the internet is really local and embodied and cultural and what we need to do is to write the first book of the flourishing of books that will follow that will explain how this works and their book was about Trinidad because they happen to be one of them as anthropologists of Trinidad and so he wrote this book about the internet and Trinidad and the argument is basically that if you're in Trinidad the internet is one thing and if you're not it's a different thing and it has to do with being Trini and what we need are many of these different understandings of local internet and what it means to have an embodied everyday experience of the local internet and the subtitle of the book is an ethnographic approach so the argument was that the internet colon and ethnographic approach is the big turn that's gonna come and in other writing they said that they rushed it in the print because they saw that this big turn in social science was like right around the corner and there's gonna be like the internet colon ethnographic approach in and then country X or group X but it didn't really happen did it? I mean there's still a, I mean the idea is that you refer to if I take your literature right it doesn't seem to have exactly carried the day I mean definitely find people working in this vein but neither is it this, neither when we hear the internet do we leap to the idea that it is of course embodied in particular and extremely different if you're one kind of person versus another kind of person or in one country versus another I mean there's some of it of course and you referred to Chinese censorship maybe as an example but I wonder could you say more about this literature that you're, that you're referring to? Right so you know I haven't seen within for example mainstream US legal scholarship and mainstream policy studies and think tank documents about digital policy a recognition of this what seems to me to happen although I would love to discover exceptions is that there's a thing called a digital divide and you have to overcome it, right? If you are still in some you know benighted urban you know inner city place somewhere or in some shack on the edge of the grid and your connectivity is limited or you don't really know enough to use the internet for all the things that you need to use it for we wanna help you get over that and you know that's good and bad, right? I don't wanna say it's all bad it would be nice for example to have a national broadband policy like the one in the Brickman report but it would be really nice not to do that in a way that denies all of what you just talked about and it doesn't seem to be in there. So like internet option as assimilation? I mean that sounds kind of Borg like but it's more you know there's a there seems to be an assumption that there's a sort of uniform digital ethos and level of competency that we just have to get every BT2 and depending on what report you read it would be market oriented or expression oriented but that kind of seems to be what it is. John Markerson there. No. Saleel, David, Fernanda. So I'd like to see if you could elaborate a bit on the implication that interoperability and the desire for interoperability implies that information should flow everywhere that seems to me that a response could be that these are two separate things and we don't want information to not flow because things are incompatible but rather if we want information not to flow it should be because of an explicit decision in the architecture that there is some policy decision and the architecture could be designed to allow certain information flows and not allow other information flows to be a separate thing from the question of compatibility and interoperability. I don't know that I necessarily would want to exclude either one of those options. So we could imagine that everybody thinks this is the greatest thing since sliced bread and everybody's on board with semantic discontinuity and digital architectures and we're just gonna design and decree by fiat a system of randomized incompatibilities. There's a value to having those incompatibilities emerge in other ways than by design and there's a value to not fixing some of the ones that exist in the world even though at this point we don't by and large tend to think about it that way. So I think that the challenge is how to design gaps or how to design a framework that encourages gaps to appear and rewards gaps that appear and if you think about it it's almost like everything is driving against that. I got to the end of the book and I was like, geez, I have to write something about capital markets. There was a piece in the New York Times a couple of weeks ago about how open source companies that do well tend to get bought by proprietary companies and become subsidiaries and nobody really knows what they're doing with them or how they could be managed differently if that hadn't happened. Capital markets reward interconnection and at a very, very basic level that matters. I'm sorry? Assimilation. Yeah, yeah, Borg, yeah, yeah. I'm fighting that but yeah and so either it's a completely quixotic and ridiculous idea or it's really important but there are just a lot of moving parts. I don't know if that's the answer you envisioned but I guess what you're saying is that the kind of gaps that you have in mind are not necessarily ones that can really be designed in the way that computer science is. There are ones that I think would emerge if some of the rules were different because people want to do them. I had an RA once go and look for discussions on open source groups about forking and it was so interesting what she found. There are these discussions, right? Some of you have been involved in some of them or have seen them and this is a core tentative of open source, right? If you don't like the way the standard's going you can fork it but people get so anxious because it's at war with this other deeply held belief that everything should talk to everything else but constantly people are seeking to fork and to create their own communities and it seems that it would be good to respect that and find ways to enable it. David. After a number of years here having the techno determinism more or less kicked out of me, I find it hasn't entirely, so. Awesome, okay. Well, excuse me, are you, you find awesome the fact that I've had the techno determinism mainly kicked out of me or that there's a residue that I'm about to ask you about? And as a good postmodernist I have to say both, right? So I love you talking where you're going with us so thank you, let me be clear about that. So given that the internet is different if you are, is a different thing because of your embodied experience of it if you are an internet dad as opposed to if you're in Cambridge, et cetera, et cetera which seems to me incontestably true and really important to keep in mind especially for aging techno determinists. Nevertheless, I find myself thinking that yes, but there are things that anybody who goes on the internet as long as the internet is in any recognizable form. So there are conceivable sort of pared down things that violate all sorts of rules and norms and canons of the internet that I'm gonna put aside. But whether you're an internet ad or you're in Beijing or you are in Cambridge if you're on the internet, you don't see necessarily all the same you won't see all the same things but you will have the sense that ideas can be linked which is a really powerful new capability that there's a huge amount of information more than you could ever consume that you could ever touch that a lot of that information was put up by people like you, not simply by people who have access to publishing systems that there is an amazing amount of disagreement on the internet, even in fairly controlled internet versions of the internet, there's a tremendous amount of disagreement at every level that those things are constant for any culture, any cultural encounter with the internet. You come away, so I'm proposing this but I don't know it's right, you come away with things like that. And so that makes me think, well dammit, I'm a techno determinist again because I'm saying that any encounter no matter how embodied, what embodiment, what culture is still gonna come away believing and knowing those sorts of things. So is that, am I wrong about that residue? Is that itself so inculturated that yeah, it's true but it's that very level of residue is taken up differently by different cultures and by different embodied individuals within those cultures or is there something that actually can be said across cultures about our experience of the internet? Well, I think there certainly are things that can be said across cultures about it. It all depends on your level of abstraction, right? It's good to have access to all this information. That's pretty abstract. People will see the information and make different things of it. For some reason I'm thinking of the Wikipedia page about the village that kept getting relabeled as Israeli or Palestinian as a really good example of that but it doesn't have to be an example that's so fraught. I think you're only a technological determinist if you believe that there's only one way to get there. You know, there's only one set of rules under which we could continue to live under conditions that in which there is lots of information available on the web. And that anything that we might do to fork some of the flows or protect privacy will jeopardize all the rest of it. And I just don't think that it's at all obvious that that's right, but I didn't necessarily understand you to be saying that. So I guess I have to ask you whether that's what you're saying. No, well it's not exactly, that may be a consequence of what I'm saying. I guess I'm asking it, I guess more, not at the level of how we get there but how deeply the postmodern critique cuts. So the, is there, your postmodernism generally doesn't like residues because it's always about finding the residue and saying, ah, you've got a residue and then showing that you're actually able to pull that rug and sort of residues all the way down. So I'm suggesting that there's, as a hypothesis that there is in fact a residue that's cross-cultural, that is it, I'll say it, close to inevitable, and it's not just that these are generalities, these are really deep and important things. That ideas can be linked. Yeah, that's broad generality, but it also implies a restructuring of many cultures' view of how knowledge and discourse works. That people disagree endlessly. That's pretty general, but it's also really concrete because you see these people are arguing and all different, so is there a residue? Is there a set of stuff that after we acknowledge, deep and important acknowledgement, the cultural differences are profound and shape our experience of everything, including the net, are we then able to say, yeah, but there is something that is true for everybody who encounters the net. And these are not just things that are important, deep and possibly transformational for many cultures. Yeah, yeah, so I didn't mean to be suggesting that there wasn't, and so here probably is a good place to admit that liberalism makes its way back in to what I do, but what I say is that it's not necessarily the case that you wanna throw out all the aspirations of liberalism, just because it's a really crappy, descriptive tool, right? It tells you nothing about the way the world works, but some of its aspirations are pretty cool, and critical subjectivity, for example, is an aspiration of liberalism, just hasn't done a very good job at recognizing how you get that. The free spread of a corpus of existing knowledge, so one thing I would say would be a residue if it were being done differently. Imagine the digital library, the perfect digital library. In which you could have access to all published books, not exactly the way it's working out, but it could be really cool, and you could still take and make of it what you wanted to, but I would argue that that's a universal good or it ought to be, and so I'm not trying to say I have a neutral universal prescription for a structure upon which any vision of human flourishing could fit. I'm trying to articulate a vision that includes both critical subjectivity and access to the tools necessary to develop it. Does that answer your question? Okay. Very good. Thank you. Yeah, I've always, Christian's line of questioning, it has been, linguistics as a discipline has been accused of at least mainstream linguistics, accused by some people of creating this kind of artificial object of study called the language at the expense of eliminating speakers and people. So creating this thing that can be actually dissected and manipulated and scientifically. And so I wonder whether something, some similar accusation can be raised against cyber law or internet studies or disciplines for using the idea of a cyberspace as this kind of like spatial metaphor that is very cool for conceptualizing what's going on, but at the same time it kind of erases people from the idea of what's being studied. So I wonder whether you can draw that kind of parallel there because it seems to me the idea of cyberspace, it creates this sense of something real and concrete that is there, but it actually does it at the expense of thinking about that without the experience of everyday users that you were talking about. Right, and I wrote a whole paper about this actually, which I'm drawing on a lot for the book. But I agree with that. There's a tendency to reify cyberspace, make it separate, and then just project our fantasies of social ordering onto it, whatever those fantasies happen to be and there's a lot of divergence on that. The term I like to use instead is network space, which is a space that is real and is connected by networks and that changes and is kind of rearranged as a result of what networks can do. So 200 years ago you would not have said Paris was closer to New York than Williamsburg, Virginia, but today you might because there are lots of people who do the Paris to New York thing and don't go south of D.C. And we need to, and so networked space is a term that's sort of more amenable to reminding us constantly that we're actually talking about the real world and real people who live in the real world. Yeah, I think so. Let's go Doc Allen and then... I think it seems to me you're saying that in some ways that the linguistics of the subject really do matter. That we can admit that cyberspace is immaterial and different than real space, but your draft and what you've been saying is full of really concrete metaphors, space, environment. I really like the geography of experience that phrased earlier because we not only perceive things that way, they're real. I mean, other people on the net, I don't even know where they are, but there's zero distance for me. A friend of mine describes the net as a giant zero when I was a subject of a talk I gave a couple of years ago. And it seems to me that part of the problem and maybe part of the problem with the way that Professor Lessig and others are approaching things has to do with starting with the, not just with the assumption of the person as this solitary dot that you're talking about here, but two completely different conceptual systems that we're up against. The copyright absolutists who say the internet is a plumbing system through it which is made to pump content to consumers. And if you're talking about access, for example, a term that is often used, it still sounds like you're at the end of a spigot rather than a participant in the middle of this thing, an inhabitant of this geography of experience. And on the one hand, you've got the plumbing system. You have a content pump. And on the other hand, you have an environment. You have spaces with domains and locations that you visit and have architecture and designers and builders. And we can't avoid using either of these metaphors, actually, because we do packetize things. We do send things, we do upload and download. And these two conceptual systems are utterly and completely at odds and yield different policy and yield different law. And the first is defaulted. The plumbing system is the one that's sort of defaulted. It's the one Charlie's up against with Ten and Bomb. And I don't know how to get out of that. I've been thinking about this for years, but it seems to me these two conceptual systems are utterly at odds and we're right in the middle of it. I think you've got a very creative approach to it. I actually, thank you. I think privacy may help to get us out of it because it's so clear that it's not a plumbing system when it comes to privacy. People have tended to be quite comfortable sort of accepting that you have no privacy, get over it. You're all hoes. Yeah. But when you put privacy front and center, it's quite clear that it's a geography, right? And for example, some of the stuff the FCC is doing right now, I would love to be a fly on the wall in there. It's almost like someone told them to just stay out of copyright, but everything else they're doing seems more amenable to the environmental slash geographic approach. So I wouldn't say it's completely, you know, out of the realm of possibility, but it's difficult. Go, Julie. Yeah, so yeah. So Julie, this is really interesting. I think it's captured a lot of the values that people have talked about this room for the past few years. And I was wondering if you could take us ahead a few steps. I think you've convinced most people of this room. And now we want to start putting it into policy either in, you know, rule-based laws or rule-based technical systems. And I'm curious, you just touched on the FCC. Is this approach amenable to thinking about rule-based systems? And so how, and if not, what are some of the other tools we can begin to think in terms of pushing this towards making this the way the world operates? Right. And so when you ask that, you're talking about technical systems, right? Not a lawyer, but I'm also curious what this would look like in a legal framework. Okay. So, and I know something about what it might look like in a legal framework and next to nothing about what it would look like in a technical framework, but I want to start there anyway and speculate and come back to the legal framework. So it's a conundrum, right? Because when you tend to think about design, you tend to think about designing rules to produce particular results. And I'm kind of talking about the opposite, designing rules that leave space. And yet people are starting to think that way in different contexts, not entirely successfully. So there's this whole discussion about can you anonymize data? And it turns out that we thought you could, and it turns out to be harder than we thought, right? But it hasn't turned out that you can't. It just turns out that you need to relinquish even more control. You need to just trash the data and not be able to get it back, which we have culturally a really hard time doing. But there are, you know, there are, I think there's a lot of room to experiment there. The, in law, right, what that looks like is just making arbitrary rules, right? You can have the right to make your book into a movie, telling a sequel to the characters in the book. You don't have the right to stop someone else from setting another story in that world. Why? Because we just don't wanna give it to you, right? Or, you know, you have the right to ask people for these 10 items of information before you decide to give them a mortgage, but you don't have the right to ask them these other ones. Why? Because we think that's good policy. You know, seems simple enough, except that there's a whole armature of argument that's deployed to kind of whittle that away. But it's not written anywhere that it needs to be that way. There are, you know, so it's a little harder than that, because there are various legal doctrines that exist to kind of root out arbitrary decision-making. And some of those probably need to be rethought in this context, but in principle, I don't see that it's impossible. So one more in-room question that I wanna pull in a couple from the online chat, and I wanna serve one for myself. Cool. Okay, so all this discussion about network spaces and the origin of the internet and its purpose always makes me think of academia, you know, the birthplace of, you know, the network and the virtue of closed spaces and cultures and schools as well as the opportunity to share things beyond the boundaries. And I'm interested in this. I have a non-profit open education website myself. And one of the things I've noticed is that there's great communication and fluid idea sharing within the university space, but very rarely does that knowledge and discussion escape the walled garden. It's kind of unique. I mean, we're in a strange place here, kind of on the cutting edge. We're broadcasting ourselves on the internet, but most schools and classrooms don't do such things. And I wonder if you think there's a unique place for the arguments you're making within the space of education and academics in terms of sharing knowledge openly, as well as the need in many cases to remain private and maintain that space of intimacy in the classroom where you can explore and experiment without outside eyes, I suppose. I think, it's a great question. I think those dynamics are actually really well recognized, but often subconsciously by folks who move in these communities. So any good educator will be able to have opinions and there will be a lot of convergence in those opinions about how certain things are best reserved for closed, there's some slippage between do you want it to be just in the classroom or chat, but limited to members of the class and other things are okay for a larger forum and a larger forum. Any academic who's been an academic for a while will have pretty well-formed opinions about what kind of draft you should be sharing with how many people and what kinds of discussions are better had one-on-one or in a workshop or at a symposium or just on a blog. And I think that what we don't do enough, nearly enough is draw attention to the way all of these systems work and what's valuable about them. And we take everything and try to figure out how we can port it onto the internet and make it bigger. And I'm talking to people, I have no idea who they all they are, that's fine for this. Right, but there's a value to examining that and identifying, hey, wait a second, you're questioning this, I'm not you personally, but if you question the semantic discontinuity idea, look at all the ways it exists in your world and that you value to such a large extent that you take them for granted often. I'm gonna let Doc do the channeling for a second here. Wendy Seltzer, whom you do know, but who is listening. Yeah, she says, why is it so clear that the internet isn't a plumbing system with regard to privacy? Should we give the next comment for her to see who? Yeah, and she says, we in italics create bulges in the plumbing, not the net. We create bulges in the plumbing. So you're like a clog in the sewer. Yeah, I don't know. You're fronting the dungeon. I'm gonna stick with fresh water. Okay, I suppose it all depends on your point of view. So if you run a data aggregation business, you would be inclined to see it that way, but I think that you take any executive of a data aggregation business and ask him or her about how he or she feels about this gender neutral stuff is gonna kill me, how he feels about his privacy in his own life. And whether he wants to have in his company's database how often a week he takes an extra drink or the fact that his favorite television show is Fear Factor or whatever, that person is gonna have opinions about that that are completely inconsistent with his professional existence. I think it's a very rare person that it's not that they don't exist. So the Steve Mann surveillance stuff we all know about. So there are these people who believe that they should document and share everything about their existence with people, but it's not where most of us are. And there's a lot of good that comes from the fact that that's not where most of us are and that should matter in the policy space to a lot greater extent than it has done. So I resist the idea that the internet is a plumbing system where privacy is concerned, not because you can't see it that way, but because you shouldn't and we don't. So. That's good. Do you mind if I take one myself? Absolutely not. So I wanna just return to the notion initially from your privacy visibility article. One of the things that was so exciting to me was this idea that you took aim at the US privacy scholars resistance to theoretical approaches from other fields and so forth, particularly the surveillance studies people. And I think you start to open up a lot of things that then you open up further here that just seems really interesting and exciting and a challenge to most of us doing legal work as a research matter, right? You really basically say to all of us you're not looking at this with the proper frame and you're not using all the tools you could. And that's I think just incredibly helpful and you do it very broadly in both of these works but you also then apply it to our field which I think is great. One of the things that Wendy was raising in the chat which is where I think some of this can be also so fruitful is at these kind of sticking points where things like free expression come up against privacy. So we have intuitions that free expression is good on the net and openness is good on the net and free culture is good on the net. We also have intuitions that privacy is important and so forth. And I feel like one thing that you are pointing toward is ways of handling these sort of sticking points between things that we in our first instance just think are good motherhood and apple pie free expression and privacy, you're actually saying, no actually a lot of the stuff is an interesting conflict and maybe if you brought the right tools to bear we would have a more thoughtful holistic policy approach. That may be over-reading into what you're trying to do but I'd love to hear how you think this tool set will help us at these difficult kind of points of tension. So that's actually really useful. Thank you so much because that's exactly the claim that you need the discontinuity to manage the conflict, right? There isn't a single unifying framework that can make it all make sense and that people have really strongly held beliefs, feelings, intuitions, what have you about how different kinds of information should be treated differently. Everybody should get access to Wikipedia. Everybody shouldn't get access to my diary. Now if I become a famous person and someone wants to write about my diary in Wikipedia then it can get hard. But a function of these semantic discontinuities as I'm calling them and actually the way they have functioned in the real world is exactly to manage that. So it's not that you don't have problems, it's not that disputes don't arise, it's not that you don't have this or that public outrage. It's that you have a way to kind of muddle along and have it make sense and in a way that most people can live with. There's a really good book, this is kind of a segue a little bit but one of my favorite books, it's a really rough read but I like it anyway, it's by a woman called Catherine Hales and it's called How We Became Post-Human and she's a literary scholar but she looks at the, she goes back to the early reports of a series of meetings on how to understand information and they had just a wild motley crew of people including Margaret Mead and people you wouldn't necessarily expect to be in these meetings and out of it ultimately came the sort of modern understanding of cybernetics but there were moments when it could have gone differently and as I understand it, one sort of received truth within the cybernetic world view is that information is information regardless of its physical state. It's the same, it passes through minds and artifacts but it's all unified and I actually think that's wrong, right? We are analog in some really important ways and you see it, the whole history of efforts to design artificial intelligence is trying to make a computer be analog in certain ways that it just has a hard time doing. An artist can look at a bunch of other paintings and a carrot growing in the garden and see that it's cloudy and go, oh, I should do this and it's really hard to teach a computer to do that and it's really important. So it's worth thinking about why it's important and trying to make sure we don't get rid of it. Hugely fruitful. I wrote a book with words discussors, you know, called Born Digital and one of the things someone did right after the book came out was gave a T-shirt to my seven year old son which says, I am analog which he wears every single day to bed, to remind me. I have to put in a plug for my colleague and friend Chris Sprigman at Virginia who's selling a T-shirt that says God hates Twitter. You could get one of those to get in touch with him. So we'll all write to Chris and before we do so though, Julie has not only taught one class today, not only shared this lunchtime with us but she's going to teach another class later today so we should thank her profusely and let her go. So Julie, thank you so much. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Not to say the question.