 So, I have the great pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker, Susan Crawford from Harvard Law School, and I'm, she needs no introduction. That's very kind of you, I appreciate it. Okay friends, so this is a ridiculous task. I'm being asked here to talk about the internet over the last 25 years, and I'm grateful for the opportunity, and I very much enjoyed listening to what's come before. And I'm going to do something pretty retro. These have been all conversations. I actually thought a lot about exactly what I wanted to say to you today, and it is actually a cosmic joke that I'm up here. My presence here is highly unlikely. I grew up in basically a 17th or 18th century household. Both of my parents were composers. It was a silent house, and in an oddly isolated way, we were in Santa Monica, California, in complete silence, as far as I could tell. And in that house, the only way of expressing affection really came through music. Music was love. I don't want to overplay this, but I've checked with my brother who ran away decades ago, and he has confirmed that there was tremendous fear and isolation surrounding us. I've kept a journal for a long time, ever since then, and I know that what I wanted at that point was a boisterous, cheerful, open-hearted, never lonely future time. A screen door slamming open, slamming shut. What I wanted was actual human music, the kind of resonance and acceptance that I now understand everybody wants. I distinctly remember my own first experience of the Internet, and I've talked about this a lot over the years. By pure chance, I was at a Washington law firm that was the first in the country to have PCs on the lawyers' desks, and we had a dial-up connection to the Internet, and I distinctly remember dialing into a soap opera website called The Spot, and The Spot was a Santa Monica beach house full of 20-somethings, sunned and sand, you know. And they were very hip, they were very trendy, and we were invited to immerse ourselves and by clicking here, and I remember clicking there, and it was like the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, you know, the world parted for me. And the idea of human connection over the Internet is the most important thing that I'd run across until that time, and that has happened to me since. Like so many people, I believe it's a tremendous gift to humanity. I am an optimist. Ethan and LaTanya were confirming that I was going to present the optimistic spin on all of this, and also like so many people, and take a look at yourself, my greatest weakness has become the thing I study in my professional life. I've been really looking forward to giving this talk. It's a UPI, a unique professional experience, because these have been some tumultuous years since then, and it's given me the opportunity to think about time, to think about time itself, because of course, like so many of you, I think of myself as a very young person, a kind of bumbling, serious of heart, yearning, sometimes rambunctious, slightly odd, solitary person. So full of energy that I'm jumping across the richly patterned carpet of my grandparents' apartment in Philadelphia, rather than walking judiciously. And my poor grandmother Crawford, she was a punctilious, somewhat anxious teacher of French. She murmured, why is she doing that? Why is she doing that? And even at six, I knew that she was a little alarmed. So on the evening of June 29th, 2007, I was taking the Express New York City subway south from Times Square. When two complete strangers approached me just to show off their new iPhones. That evening, the car was lurching back and forth, and they just wanted to share the glory of the ability to touch glass that could be made to interact and produce sharp and deep colors and images amazing. They looked down, they touched the screen gently with the thumb of the hand that wasn't holding on to a strap or a pole, and then looked at me, watching for my reaction. Just about shouting with excitement as we were standing in the swaying car. The first time it happened, I thought it was kind of an only in New York moment, which happens all the time in New York. The second time it happened, I thought it was a trend. And it struck me that the iPhone was having a transformative effect on people. And then just last month, I had another subway iPhone experience. This time, the A train south of 34th Street. I saw across from me a man and a woman taking a picture of themselves. It was a selfie. The man's upraised arm, right arm, taking a picture of both of them. His left arm around the woman, squeezing her. And I saw their smiles deepen and glow in that moment. Not because each one of them thought that they looked great in the image on the picture of the camera, but because in that moment, they were seeing themselves being perceived by delight by the other. To be truly seen and adored by the person who was taking the picture, or otherwise in the picture. So there you go, absolute delight, ten years later. Now, a while ago, 1.2 billion years ago, before there were subways or keynotes, two black holes circled each other in a galaxy far, far away from our own. Their intense gravity accelerated their rotation. They were moving at half the speed of light and pulling ever closer. In a fraction of a second, they merged. Meanwhile, that extraordinary acceleration produced a storm of gravitational waves that rippled outward across the universe at the speed of light. It took 1.2 billion years for those light waves to reach Louisiana. But they did about two years ago, and thanks to a pair of mirrors shooting laser beams at each other in a vacuum tube, 2.5 miles long in Louisiana. We heard those two black holes rotating. The distance between the mirrors changed by one part in a billion trillion, as those mirrors vibrated very slightly. That vibration in turn could be heard as sound. Now there's a scientist who bet 50 years of his professional career that one day humans would hear the sound of gravitational waves. And he's named Ray Weiss, and he teaches at MIT. And he said a couple of weeks ago that he, as a young man, had been in love with a pianist and followed her from town to town, listening to her concerts. And he says that the sound of that long ago and far away rumbling of space time is just like the sound of a hand sweeping across the piano keyboard from the bottom to middle C. And he said to us, they were waving hello. The black holes were waving hello to us. Ray Weiss is one joyful, youthful guy. I'm retelling this improbable scientific thriller of a story, because I'm a little dubious that 25 years is a meaningful period. It's a nothing. Fooey, we really are just at the beginning of the internet, of what it will mean to understand what will change and what will abide as a result of global unconstrained capacity to communicate. Okay, we know a few things. I am troubled by the model for bundled online journalism. I'm not sure. It seems like it's very tough. I want to suggest that a levy on everybody connecting to the internet would be a good idea for stable funding. But I want to also applaud the Knight Foundation for single-handedly, it seems, lighting the way and experiments that might support the future of journalism. I'm a big fan of the Tau Center at Columbia, whose advisory board I sit. Yay, Tau. Facebook and Google today, seen from our narrow perspective, to be forces that are so powerful that they could rumple space time several times before breakfast, they can do it, they have so much power. And yes, we are worried, and I know we'll hear more about this this afternoon, that you can do anything with data and there are no rules. And Nancy is right, we don't have any approximation of self-restraint right now. But I want to say that I bet that like me, many of you have been dreaming of the internet before it even came into existence. We have not yet reached anything like those dreams. I have a feeling we are still plotting around in mud. This is the modem squawk of AOL. And human beings at their best are never cynical. So at the risk of sounding hopelessly anachronistic, and I know I am, I'm here to remind us of where we started. In those days, 25 years ago, people talked about multimedia experiences and that was the term for the web. And I distinctly remember one of my colleagues 20 years ago laughing loudly with alarm at the idea that everything we read, watch and listen to would be called content. Content, he said, he was really alarmed. Okay, well today, there's a lot of on-trend panic about the internet out there and some of this panic is distinctly American, which poses a risk to this country. I have to say I was grateful for Eric Gunderson's remarks in the last panel about China. I've distilled the panic here in America down into three categories for ease of cognition. Let's just get them all out there so that we can deal with them. The first panic, the first panic has to do with the isolating, controlled, and synthetic experience of digital communications over handheld devices. People stare down at handsets as they are standing in beautiful public places or crossing the street. You're itching to pick yours up if you haven't already. You're bored by my pace. You wish there were images drenching the screen behind me. Sorry about that. Our devices are very close to our hearts. A young fashionable girl will carry hers in her wrists up, lifted with a very beautiful bag on the other hand. A man will close the cover of his iPhone heavy leather cover as a marker that the conversation is over and he'll look up. We love, we fear these devices. We're not sure, we're working through it. I know these devices are felt by some to be somehow in charge unless deliberately turned face down or buried in a bag somewhere. It's like shielding your eyes in a movie when the manic clown is just about to reveal his real self. So that's a panic, panic one. Now, panic two is about the role of the giant platforms or in Jaron Lanier's beautiful coinage, the global behavior modification empire. Again, pundits are out there proclaiming that intimate and social is a risk. And these platforms are seen as essentially limiting American life and having a sordid role in human life. Our American open society in protection of speech is under severe attack, some speech is getting amplified and entrenched and we don't like it. And even the word social has taken on a dark foreboding meaning much as content has been forever changed. But forever, forever, that seems wrong. That hints at the third panic. We're freaked out. We're worried that the internet has gotten awful and is going to always be awful. People look at digital communications and see something like Penn Station at its worst moments. Chaotic, ugly, crowded, plastered with ads, full of human misery, unlikely to be helpful in our human journey, and featuring sudden aggressive blasts of sound at uncomfortable moments. Even though when we take somewhat wiser breaths, we know that it's best to be consistently doubtful about any fixed assumptions on the nature of things. I think all of these panics, every single one of them, risk someday sounding a little silly. We've done this before over and over again, usually because people like me over 35 are bloviating about the new thing that's just arrived on the scene. Anything that was in existence when we were born seems ordinary. Anything that arises seems exciting. Anything that comes after we're 35 seems terrifying. We just keep doing it over and over and over again. So let's take the suspicion and fear these panics one by one. I think we can stop worrying about handheld devices. I'm just gonna say that. The effect of phones on our psyches. I don't think humans will be staring at handheld devices for many more decades. It just makes no sense to look down all the time and poke at a screen. We love looking at other people. We love noticing things around us. Our eyes, if you've noticed, face forward, not down. And our wide fingers keep making spelling mistakes. We're not good at this. So we'll either be facing multiple interactive services all around us or carrying around our own little digital interfaces in the form of glasses or contact lenses. We will have put interactivity in its place as a layer of life, not a distractor, as an invisible stream of seamless activity inextricably intertwined with the physical world rather than an aliening force. We will grow up. We will grow up. And new institutions, I do believe, will arise. I'm not out of faith for that either. We'll adopt these glasses in this ubiquitous interactivity incredibly quickly. We're adopting everything quickly. It took us about 50 years to adopt electricity, 35 for the phone, 31 for the radio. You get my idea here, 16 for the PC, just five for social media. Things are happening faster. I do think Google Glass was in artful ahead of its time. And I imagine that our clumsy, primitive, constrained, incredibly expensive, limited, and slow digital interactivity. And our current customs of using it will look to our successors as finding, kindling, lighting it, boiling a huge vat of water, putting clothes in it and stirring them with a pole, and then hanging them up in the wind to dry, look to people who have a washing machine. That seems silly to us. We will look silly to others. In short, handhelds and waiting fooie. I refuse to give into that panic. The second panic, Facebook, Google, and Apple, I believe that the rising, clanging, alarm bells of panic will inevitably be stilled. If we take some good path-dependent initial steps right now, as I stand here today, there seems no choice when all of your friends on our Facebook, along with a billion other people, and everything you do, searching everything else, seems to involve Google. We feel trapped. Will individuals ever break out of the headlock? And won't all forms of media just be sucked into the terrifying law? Well, I have an answer to this. We keep learning that cheap and great is better than free and lousy. But so far, Facebook is relying on its stories about free and ensuring that people join its world and stay there on its terms in variously integrated ways. But in fact, and here comes the China part of this, where network use is more advanced, consuming a single, noisy wash of everything isn't actually all that appealing. And in China, where live streaming, cheap and great, has been an enormous market, everybody under 20 is streaming either themselves or watching somebody. They're looking to connect with individual lives, not a vertically integrated killer platform of everything. China looks to get 300 million people connected to fiber for the home. They're doing different things than we are. And as Eric said, they are way ahead of us. They want the underbundled version. They want the personal connection, not the news feed. And until the Chinese government's shut down a bunch of the apps this summer, they got it in exchange for a few digital tokens. In countries and regions where connectivity is good enough to allow for actual human connection, people find ways to connect. And they use that trust and enthusiasm we saw for Kickstarter to find each other. Now, in the meantime, the online platform Fear is on, Google and Facebook are looking for new ways to suck us in with live streaming of their own, augmented reality. But if we're not paying attention, whole cities can become Google testbeds, watch Toronto. Facebook can become the internet for millions of people. Every form of transport will come connected to a favored world of integrated apps. And that's why my third panic, our fear that the online experience is always gonna be the same. That's the one that really matters. That's the one we should really care about. That's the only one that is real. It's also the only one that we stand a chance of nudging in a different direction, but only if we're quite intentional about it. Now, yesterday, I was part of a major announcement in San Francisco, where Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Mark Ferrell and a big team are calling for bids for a private party under the city's direction to build a dark fiber network connecting every single home and business in San Francisco. The city won't itself sell internet access, but it will lease that capacity to private competing companies. And the city's gonna subsidize low income subscriptions so nobody is left behind. If San Francisco pulls that off, they'll have universal, world-class connectivity, low prices at a cost anyone can afford. This is the first major American city to take this step. It's hugely exciting. This is the magic my younger self wanted to conjure. This is the idea of unconstrained capacity as different from our current internet access as having internet access is different from not having it. Someday, it'll reach every corner of the land, just as electricity eventually did. It'll take enormous political will and resiliency to get there, but we will. And it will be so cheap and zero latency will be so common and unlimited data will be so expected that the internet will vanish just the way that electricity did. When electric lights were first deployed in a courthouse square in a small Midwestern town, grown men fell to their knees because night had been turned to day. They were shocked and people gasped and it was news. We no longer do that when we see an electric light. And so we will stop being amazed by data similarly as we get used to it, when it's everywhere. And as for local news, I do hope that is funded by the little tiny sliver of money paid by people who are subscribing to Fiber. That really is a sustainable funding model that I would love to addict more of you to. Now, overwhelmed by the primary human need to connect rather than to consume content, Facebook could become, get ready, this era's AOL. Quaint, heavily controlled, circumscribed a marker of cludelessness. The same irritation about lock-in could do many apps as soon as genuine data capacity being online, truly online, works for all of us. We are so at the beginning of this story. And here's where the last 25 years help us conjure up the next 25. Because I was of a certain age and a certain place, I've listened for many hours of my life to early internet engineers talking to each other. And you should see, they really relaxed. Before the rest of us, Yahoo's clambered on to the internet, they were having a good time. And what they were enjoying was staying right where they are and experiencing life in a distant place through the eyes of another. And just journeying to foreign lands. It's a warm pond of familiarity for them. They loved it. And that was a great joy. And we also love staying where we are. And where we are, gotta say, most things are going just fine. They really are. Every day, people are nice to each other. I was just talking to Jen during the break. I've been traveling to scrappy cities across America for the last year and a half. And nonpartisan places, cheerful places, optimistic places. You get out on the road if you're feeling depressed. And so there are two parts to my vision I want to present. What can happen to the next 25 years if we have a way to make unlimited, competitive, cheap capacity available to everybody, makes the joy of human connection in these faces made available to everyone everywhere, those crisis counselors that we just heard about, they don't have to be limited to text. This is a great empathic human gift to be able to help someone else in a time of need. And for the first time over fiber, we'll be able to see micro expressions. 1, 25th of a second, a real expression of human anger, fear, sorrow, and eye contact. We've never had that over our current internet connections. People from a distance will be able to be seen whole, to be understood, not to be fractured. And that's all that humans want. It makes a huge difference, social presence. That's the killer use of this thing is social presence. Even now, people meditating together across a digital connection feel a greater sense of connection and also feel more open to others because they've done it in the presence of someone else even if at a distance. And more mundanely, people working together will get all the nonverbal communication of both body language and eye movement and they'll feel they really are together. Our brains can't distinguish virtual from real connections of this kind. People seeking economic and social mobility, intellectual and spiritual mobility will be separated from opportunity by no more than a pane of glass. That's the dream. Anyway, that's the optimism. At the same time, we'll lead intensely local physical lives. Again, with a richer tapestry of information being made available to us through our glasses or contact lenses. We'll need to find people new occupations, not just new jobs, because the roar of automation fueled by all this capacity is going to change a lot. And our human value add, though, as we shelter in place will be the flexibility of the Jedi skills we just heard about. Flexibility, compassion, empathy, counseling, it's going to be a big adjustment. So we're in a period of noise and confusion. And here's where my odd upbringing has had strangely useful outcomes. There's a recent novel about Shostakovich by Julian Barnes that's helped my understanding quite a bit. And it says what I want to say better than I cancel, I'll paraphrase. Music, good music, great music, has an irreducible purity to it. It might be bitter, despairing, and pessimistic, but it is never cynical. What can be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves, the music of our being, which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, so longer time scale, is if it is strong and pure and true enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. On the time scale of human history, human behavior has certainly changed, but human nature has not, and it won't. And soon, if we get this right, the internet will disappear from active view, we'll be left with what abides. What abides I've only gradually learned is that human music, connection, the magic I wanted to conjure decades ago. Like those black holes more than a billion years ago, we will be waving hello. Thank you very much.