 Hi everybody. Welcome to EFF's final fireside chat for our 30th anniversary. I'm so delighted that you could be here and I am just, I have to say I'm kind of giddy with how excited I am about this event because we're going back to the future. We're going to talk to some of the people who are involved in EFF's founding. We're going to hear some stories. I suspect that given the people who are joining us today it'll be a bit of a Rashomon about EFF's history. You know everybody remembers things differently but it's going to be really great fun. So we have three of the people who help spur and nurture EFF. As many of you know probably we were going to have a fourth person. We were going to have Steve Wozniak join us today and I'm very sad to say that he had to bow out of our event. Today he sends his big regrets and we hope to find a way to schedule an event with him in the in the future. We were really excited that Steve was going to join us today because he's one of the people who helped support EFF really early on but isn't as well known for that role and he recently affirmed to us how proud he was of that early support for EFF and how important it was going to be to have EFF strong and in the corner of the tinkers and the modders and the repairs especially as we head into deeper into the digital age and if you haven't seen Steve's video on the right to repair I really recommend it because in it you can see the kind of spirit of the early internet the makers and the modders and the tinkers that really is part of EFF's founding ethos and still a huge part of the community that we support today so take a look at that and stay tuned. We haven't heard the last from Steve in EFF so remember the final part of today's program is for you drop your questions into the chat at twitch at any time that's EFF.org live stream excuse me let me say that again EFF.org live stream on twitch we'll pick them up and we'll respond to as many as we can and if you're using EFF's privacy badger I am sorry you're going to have to give it the permission to by shifting the embed.twitch.tv slider and then reload the page privacy badger is a little too over anxious on twitch we're working on it but in the meantime that'll make sure that your voice is heard and when we're done today the stream is going to be available on youtube and of course as all good things are it'll be available at the internet archive on youtube it'll be at EFF's page and at the archive it'll be easy to find as well so tell your friends if they miss this and they want to catch the live stream that they certainly can also please note that with as with all EFF events we have guidelines and codes of conduct if you go to EFF.org slash event expectations you'll see how we can make sure that we all have a great time today so thank you very much you know this series of live discussions that we've done throughout our 30 year celebration year have looked back at some of the biggest battles in internet history and the effects of the modern web and joining me today are three people who really I think it's fair to say we're prescient about that. The first one is our three guests today are Mitch Kapoor, John Gilmore and Esther Dyson. Let's start with Mitch. Mitch is a pioneer of the personal computing industry as both an entrepreneur and investor and an advocate for social change. Mitch is always just a little head of the curve on things. He was ahead of the curve when he founded EFF and he's been ahead of the curve at recognizing the need for social justice in the way that we move forward as well. Along with his partner and wife Frida Kaeperklein, Mitch invests in startups that close the gap of access opportunity and outcome for low-income communities and communities of color and founders committed to building diverse workforces and inclusive cultures. In 1982, Mitch founded Lotus Development and designed the Lotus 123 spreadsheet which is was the original killer application that made computer personal computers ubiquitous in the business world. In addition to co-founding EFF in 1990, he's the founding chair of the Mozilla Foundation which created the Firefox web browser and the co-chair of the non-profit K-PORC Center in Oakland, California and serves on the board of SMASH which is the Summer Math and Science Honors Academy, a three-year STEM intensive residential college prep course that empowers students to deepen their talents and pursue STEM careers. Mitch is known as saying that genius is not evenly distributed by zip code. Genius is evenly distributed by zip code but opportunity is not and the other thing Mitch says that we use all the time at EFF is architecture is policy and that is one of EFF's founding principles and comes that we still think about today. Next up is EFF co-founder and current board member John Gilmore. John is an entrepreneur and a civil libertarian and he's sporting a vintage EFF t-shirt there. He was an early employee of Sun Microsystems, an early open-source author and co-created Cygnus Solution along with EFF, the cypher punks, the desk cracker that we'll talk a little bit more about later and the internet's alt-net news groups. He spent 30 years doing programming, hardware, software design, management and philosophy, philanthropy and investment. Along with being a board member of EFF, John is on the board of the Unix Association, Code Weavers and Request and he spends a lot of time trying to get people to think more about their society, their building, especially around issues around drug policy and attempts to control people's mental states and John's advocacy on encryption which we'll also talk about a little later, I think literally changed the world and certainly gave me my first opportunity to do something full and fun in tech. So welcome, John. And our third person is former EFF chairwoman Esther Dyson. She's currently the chairman of Adventure Holdings and also deeply involved in Wellville. Am I right about that? Did I say it wrong? Edie? So Adventure is basically a website that I use for my email at this point. It was the company I ran. I owned for 25 years but never mind. Sorry. Sorry. I must have a but anyway. It's pretty old. Yeah. I realized I didn't send you an updated bio. So that's all right. Well, we'll talk a little, you know, currently Esther's really working, focusing on on health and community health through her project called Wellville and it's a really awesome thing. So I would love to hear a little bit about that. I think I think Esther was on one of the first boards of EFF and certainly was chairman of the board through some critical fights. And it's great to have you here today. And of course, just last year we teamed up with Esther a little bit to try to save.org from being sold down the river. So it's fun to get back in touch as well. Because some of these fights, they just keep coming back. So thank you all very much for joining today. I want to start with the founding of EFF because it's so full of rich stories. You know, if folks haven't read John Gilmore's a John Gilmore excuse me John Perry Barlow's a not too brief history of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. That's a really good document to start with. It is of course in Barlow's own particular style and his own particular views of the founding of EFF. But it's a real fun read. So Mitch, I mean, the apocryphal story is that Barlow was sitting on his ranch in Pinedale, Wyoming and you literally flew down from you dropped out of the sky in a plane to talk to him and found the EFF. So where's the truth there? Is that really what happened? Actually it is. Well, let me and I'll explain but first let me say thanks very much for having me. It's important to celebrate these anniversaries to remember where we all came from because that helps us understand where we where we are going and the spirit of John Perry Barlow looms heavily over this entire event. I just have to take a moment here to say how much I miss him and how utterly instrumental he was in EFF. So do you want like the two-minute version of this, not the 10-minute version? I'll give you the medium of the founding. But it all centers on the well, an early pioneering online system, early virtual community, founded by Stuart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame and many other things. Circa 1989, going into 1990, they hosted an online hackers conference with Harper's Magazine and that is where John first ran into some of these teenage hackers who were kids, explorers, getting away with what they can get away with. But it left an impression on him and it started a dialogue. And then, unrelatedly, or perhaps not, the FBI paid him a visit. And why did the FBI pay him a visit? Because somebody had gone dumpster diving and retrieved a small amount of the source code for the Apple Macintosh and they had sent copies of it to a number of people, including John, and as it turned out myself, but that's getting slightly ahead. And the FBI's visit troubled John because, as he said, they were good at things in Wyoming like cattle rustling, but had no idea about cyberspace. And he wrote a piece about it that became widely circulated and I read it. And I said, Oh my God, I had the same frightening experience that these two agents showed up at my door one day, demanding to speak to me. I called my lawyer and said, Yeah, you kind of have to speak to them. But if you don't, they'll just get a subpoena. So why don't you? I didn't know anything. I got this thing and I sent it back to Apple. But that was the link between John and me that we had had this. We saw new things going on online, law enforcement starting to step in, unfortunately, pretty clueless. And then the arrests started happening. And the Secret Service was busting people. And there was disgust on the well at some length. And it troubled me a lot. And I was flying from Boston where I lived to San Francisco to go do something. And I stopped in Pinedale, specifically to pay John a visit. We have to do something about this. And that was the birth of the EFF. It was and it was originally to make sure that injustice was not done to some of these kids who were exploring around, but they're not. The stakes were so small, then there was no money involved. There were no state secrets, people's lives were not being ruined. But they're being imprisoned and convicted of felonies. And it was out of conviction that we needed to do something to and it quickly, and I'll stop, spun into understanding there was a collision going on between the advance of technology and the slow turning of the gears of government. And we realized this was a civil liberties issue of our time to extend the Bill of Rights into cyberspace. That's the founding. And John showed up about 15 minutes later, John Gilmore. Well, so John, let's, let's, so he should tell his, you know, his, his, his, his part. Perfect segue. So John, pick us up 15 minutes later. So on the well, well a little bit, but my doctor was on the well and he saw things happening, happening Mitch and John, John Perry and said, I might be interested in this. And so he, he hooked me up and I got involved and, and offered to send money and recruit, recruit some supporters like that. I was going back through emails from the time of July of 1990 today and I found one that I sent to the leaders at San trying to convince them to, to, to come up and said, what Mitch and Barlow realized as they started to put together the foundation was that it wasn't simply a little bit of constitutional, constitutional lawyers could straighten out its impact of the, of the bumpy inter interaction of society and computers. Future shot or, or on the frontier where me, the lost of nuns have not yet well understood or well, we intend to try to define them in the public, in the public. Hey, John, I think I'm going to stop in for a second because your audio is really messy. So maybe you can work and see if we can clear that up a little bit with, with Mona, our lovely offscreen person. So, because this is fascinating and I want to hear every word. All right. No, it's still, it's still going. Let me switch over to ask you for a second. Yeah, let me, let me switch over to ask you for a second. We'll come back. Thanks. So Esther, you got involved pretty quickly thereafter as I, as, as, as I go back through the history and how did, how did you find out about EFF and decide to get involved? Oh, we got you on mute. That one, I think we can take you off. That's easy. Yes. I hope my sound is working. Yep. I knew Mitch mostly through adventure, which did exist for 25 years. And it was the industry's big conference slash newsletter. And Mitch, you'll know this better than I do that. In addition to EFF, there was the commercial internet exchange, because some people at digital equipment had sent a sales message over the internet. And a lot of people thought, oh my God, that's so disgusting. And of course, we all thought, wow, this is great. You know, it's, it's, it's not just something for scientists and universities. It's actually something for real people kind of living their lives kind of in the same way that, you know, 30 years later when you started seeing logos on spaceships that weren't NASA, some of us actually thought it was a good sign. So Mitch started the commercial internet exchange. And I was interested in that. And Barlow was indeed a magnetic figure and was talking about, I mean, to be honest, I love what he said. I sometimes thought he kind of over said it. You mean both my friend. Yeah. But I mean, I don't remember exactly how I got invited to the board and whether it was just because they needed a girl. But anyway, I thought, wow, this is really important stuff. And I want to be involved in, you know, discussing the policy and also helping perhaps to mediate it. And, you know, just it seemed like the center of PC form was the center of where things were. And this was like kind of the center of where things were heading and the policy side. So I joined the board. And then later on when they couldn't find a chairman, I stepped in. You know, there's a long history of EFF getting assigned roles because you came late to meetings. That's how I got to general counsel. But we're going to see if we can get John back on again. But, you know, your point about Barlow is a really important one. And one I share, he once actually said that he had me along at a talk so that I could be his hyperboleectomy. And I think, Mitch, he might have told you the same thing. You know, I told him that that was that was my role. And I retired from that role. So thank you for I took it over. And at the risk of being mildly pedantic for a moment. Esther, what you're what you're talking about was very real, which was the turnover of the internet from the NSF to the commercial sector, which was a bumpy kind of process. And the commercial internet exchange was this trade association of the early ISPs, UUNET and PSI, that were really trying to promote the commercial development of the internet. But that actually came a little bit later. It may have been your locus of intersection. But I remember when we put it together as an organization in 1990, 1991, I turned to people who I thought were adventurous and spirit and smart and wanted to see the right thing done to be on the board. And you and Stewart Brand and Rob Glaser and a few other people were sort of the early, early board members. So perhaps I should come at it from another angle, which which also was part of what was happening with me. 1989 was the first time I went to Russia. And I spoke a little bit of Russian. And, you know, in the United States, the internet was really cool. There were, it was kind of a consumer thing. And people were talking about wine, wine seller records and recipes. But in Russia, it actually was far more important because you could not, I started using email when I was trying to communicate with my friends in Russia, because you could not pick up the phone and call people. You could not send a fax. And yeah, I saw how important it could be in a place that did not have other technology. In Russia, the first users were scientists. And then people who were trading stocks, financial types. Whereas in the U.S., it was, it was much more of a consumer oriented thing that people didn't believe was going to be serious in business. But in Russia, the implications of what this could do for people who were disconnected, and frankly, who did not have access to media from outside of Russia, was, you know, this whole freedom, spread the truth, all that kind of stuff was much more important in Russia than it was in the U.S. And I mean, lots has changed. And it's fascinating to see the misinformation. I mean, that I understood too, because I'd seen so much of it in Russia. And we'll get to that later, I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that the, you know, the early issues that EFF was involved in, I, you know, many of them we still do today, but of course, things have changed over time. And the ones that we still do today are still standing up for free speech, especially from marginalized people all around the world. This issue, you know, that you experienced in Russia is something we hear from people all around the world, that the internet has really made their voice able to be heard. And we still spend a significant, it kind of gets lost sometimes in the West, but we still spend a significant amount of time trying to find voices out, voices out. I hear it. I hear it. I hear it. I hear it. It's like half of John's words you can't hear, and the other half you hear twice. All right, John, let's try again. Okay. Sure. How's that? Good. Okay. Right. Well, yes. Well, yes. Esther was on the first board, which also included Dave and the Stuart Brand, Stuart Brand had mentioned, mentioned as the founder of The Well, and that included me. So, yeah, I had a long career in computers and no career at all in policy. And so EFF was an attempt to say, well, look at this whole world we're building with computers, and let's not have the power of the people, people stop making policies like any put into a computer as fair government to any time. Yep. I think that's right. And you hear it in the early things. You know, I went back and saw and watched an early firing line episode with Esther and Jeffrey Barlow did along with Ira Glasser from the ACLU and some other folks. Reed Hoffman and Erica Huffington. Yeah, on the other side, which is interesting. But the, you know, the point that there was a culture develop line that governments in the 90s especially just did not understand and were mucking around in without really even understanding what they were doing or what was going on. It was really the story of the 90s in a lot of the things that we were doing. The same was true with encryption and the encryption debate with the government thinking, well, encryption, that's, you know, a technology that we use to break the German's codes in World War Two and people like John and others saying, you know, this is the way we're going to have to see security online. Like, you know, we're both right, but they were coming from very different viewpoints about the technology. And, you know, honestly, both of those debates are still happening right now. It's really not, oh my gosh, is the echo, are you guys hearing the echo too? Yeah, it's not as bad for you as for John. Keep going. All right. I'll keep talking. But, but, you know, the things have moved over time. And it's not so much that they moved as in we've solved anything. Sometimes it feels that way. Sometimes things have gotten better. We certainly freed up encryption. If the government had its way in the 90s, none of us would be doing any of this work over encrypted channels. And we, we really did shift the dynamic there, even though the FBI still wants us all to leave our front doors open. So in case for criminals, they can come in faster. But, but, and the free speech fights are are more complicated now. But they're still there in the in the primary way that we started talking about them. So let's shift a little bit and talk about kind of, I want to talk this next little bit about kind of today where we are in the world today. And then I want to ask all of you about what the world looks like if we get it right. I have done this throughout the EFF 30th year. I feel like oftentimes in the midst of these policy and legal debates, we've lost a little vision about what the world would like if we get it right. So I want to precede that to you guys. I'm going to ask you that question. But let's talk about today and what things look like today. And this is your note. We're at the half hour folks. So if you have questions that you want proposed to the panel, please go ahead and put them in the chat on Twitch. Our team will go through them and pick them up and we'll answer as many of them as we can before we run out of our hour. So, you know, EFF, as I said, has grown along with the internet, but we've got some new issues as well. And I guess I wanted to ask each of you, you know, what are the issues facing, you know, people who care about civil liberties and digital rights right now, that EFF is either addressing or that you think we ought to address in the current moment, kind of given where we are in the world. I'm going to go to Esther first. I'm going to just kind of mix it up a little bit. Okay. I mean, it was interesting to listen to the firing line debate, which was kind of my prep, and how much the government people, yeah, just didn't understand what the thing was. Yeah, it's not, at the same time, the internet people don't understand that no matter how free you are on the internet, as long as you actually have a front door and someone can come in and attack you, you may be free on the internet, but you're still physically present somewhere, and they can come and get you. It's not really a separate place as much as you might think. What's interesting to watch right now is a bunch of, you know, everybody wants the answer. This is acceptable. This is not. These are the rules. But all the stuff we're talking about is really a spectrum. Transparency, the more power you have, the more transparency should be required of you. The less power, you know, fine, be private. But the moment you start acting in public, you start having your rights impinge on other people's rights and other people's safety. And what we're seeing right now, you know, we have gun control and we have speech and slander and so forth and so on. But we also have this fundamental change of where a person walking down the street may be carrying a concealed weapon, which is a virus. And the the issues around privacy, the issues around vaccine passports, people, people don't seem to get that the issue isn't the passport and the, you know, the disparity, the poor people are more at risk, poor people are more vulnerable, poor people have more trouble getting vaccines, their immunocompromised things. But, you know, the vaccine passport is not, it's not that, the vaccine passport is just a piece of information. It's not responsible for the disparities. So all these different conversations get conflated into a lot of mishmash. And, you know, the one thing the internet has done is it's made it, again, physical borders, sovereign borders, visas, travel, all these things kind of crash into this global internet. But you can't, yeah, it's, it goes back to this firing line thing, you know, you want local entities to be able to set their own rules, but they can't set the rules for everybody else. Yeah, it was a problem from the founding on. It's true. But at the same time we now have this third player, which is the Facebook's and the, you know, and we have the DNA of the internet confronting the metabolism of the always hungry, never enough exponential growth mindset of these companies who simply are focused on creating wealth and selling things, including something like .org, which, you know, is, is not sellable because it's a public asset. And anyway, those are the things that are interesting that are going on right now. Yeah, I would certainly agree that the, you know, the rise of the, you know, that the internet was kind of created and, and, and, you know, runs off of protocols and a lot of distributed stuff and that this platform mentality now is really something that is quite different from the world we had in the 90s. And it's required at least us at EFF to really begin to thinking about competition and interoperability and things that kind of help in some ways recreate a more level playing field for people who want to go online or to launch a, launch a venture online, whether that's an open source tool or a for-profit business. And it's something that I, I, you know, we've just created in the past few years because we felt like if we couldn't, we couldn't address that problem, we couldn't address the privacy problems and the civil liberties problems and the speech problems that are coming as a result of the hegemony of the big companies. I want to, yeah. Just one, one other thing that is really scary, which is the, these platforms are getting really good at understanding addiction. And, you know, at what point are you kind of fringing on someone's free will if you, you know, you basically understand them so well that you get them to do things they regret all the time. I mean, my personal feeling is that Robinhood is, is one of the great disasters of this decade. Yeah. And, and so thank you. Thank you. Mitch, what do you see FF today in the world and what are the kinds of things that you think, you know, we're doing that you're, you're, you're, you know, you're kind of proud of? Where would you, where would you are just in a little different direction? Well, I, you know, you and I have had some interesting conversation about that. Let me see if I can summarize. I think the digital rights perspective needs to broaden, as far as I'm concerned, in order to take on the kinds of injustices and harms that characterize the current age. And you see this in particular, and it's been referred to here, the abuses of corporate power, the amplification of misinformation and hatred, because it serves the business models of these companies is, and is harmful to the health and safety of large numbers of people in this country who have every right to feel safe. And when conspiracies are being amplified on these platforms, that's a problem. So I would say yes, being thoughtful about competition interoperability and the whole, you know, antitrust momentum, that there's a role for an EFF, you know, in that which, which it is doing, I don't, I think there has to be more. I think there, there has to be, but it gets into politics, and it gets into a zone that rights organizations have always tried to avoid. And I think it's unavoidable, because I don't think you can do the good in the world that you can do if you don't take what are called political stances about what's justice and what's fair. And so if I were on the inside today, I would be trying to have that conversation in the organization about, is our perspective broad enough? Are there things where we really need to take a stand that some people are just not going to like? Can we hold the thing together? I mean, my one last thing I'll say is my, if I could replay the history of EFF and where I feel like I could have done a much better job, is in the early days, the liberals and the libertarians came together on the issue of digital civil liberties, and we were very effective. But there was a kind of resistance in the organization, and I was in the minority, about feeling that government had a constructive role to play, needed to play a constructive role in securing freedom and liberty and safety. The DNA was very heavily set in favor of a minimal role for government. And I was unable to marshal the resources and arguments or maybe just, it wasn't the right time. And EFF has had a long history, and maybe someday somebody will write for the history of it. But the reason I mention that now is I think there's a similar moment. And there are choices to be made, and I think it's important to make the right set of choices. And justice requires a pretty broad perspective in expanding what we mean by rights and how we secure them for people so that we can have a society that is genuinely inclusive of everyone. Yeah, I mean, I certainly agree that as the internet has grown, the people who need it have grown, the people who rely on it in the ways in which it's vital have really grown. One of the things I'm proudest of is the work that my colleague Ernesto Falcón has done getting, trying to get broadband access in the state of California and federally and specifically around municipal broadband and community broadband efforts, because I think that that's one of the places where we have to try to make sure that we are bringing along, you know, the widest range of people and the rightest range of voices. But I completely hear you in respect that, you know, there's, we can definitely always do better. So John, let's go to you. You know, you're on our board right now. And what are the things that EFF is doing right now that they're the proudest stuff? We didn't get to talk about encryption much because of our technical issues. Right. Well, where we stand now is like, it's kind of the more ancient, the more they stay the same. People, people, I mean, I understand Mitch's concern not finding a constructive role for government. But when the government was looking, was looking clueless about our issue, of course, of course, you know, a reason which is to try to try to minimize the influence they have, still, still seeing that same level of cluelessness with politicians claiming, trying to pass the stage that say you're not allowed to spread misinformation on the internet. And then when a politician, a politician lying on the internet, you're not allowed to either them either. You know, this is just a bit clueless. We're, we're, you know, we're seeing the FBI coming, coming around again and saying, well, no, we're not trying to provide a backdoor into every piece of electronic. But we always want to be able to see the plain text of every communication. You know, it's people, it's people have a clear grasp on the spawn reality. And or or quickly, it's the old saying about hard for hard for someone to understand your point of view when his job depends on him not him not understanding you. I'm, I'm very glad that EFF has existed to issues, issues. And I think we have a long role coming in the coming in the futures. There's not a clear answer to any of these. There's not an obvious, oh, we'll just do this and then we'll solve it. So it's, it's a model and we have to keep working it through. Yeah. But the values have stayed largely the same. I agree with Mitch that there's always been a bit of attention about the role of government. And I agree with John, that when your first 10 years are spent trying to convince government agents that you don't have to seize everything that's plugged into the wall. When you have a search engine, you might come at this from a perspective of, of, of worry about it. On the other hand, you know, EFF is, you know, long advocated for privacy rules that are much, much stronger than we have now that requires the government to set the floor for our privacy instead of, you know, that being left to, you know, individuals clicking through whatever they had around, you know, again, around broadband access, network neutrality, EFF has taken a pretty strong stance for a role of government in creating the spaces for people to be able to innovate if not making the decisions. So it's a, it's, it's always complicated, but I, I agree that especially in the first 10 years, we were highly skeptical. And, and, and I think that skepticism was well-earned and maybe we didn't move past it as fast as, as some people would have liked us to. I think that's a fair, fair comment as well. So we have a few questions. So I want to get to them, but I am going to save the last couple of minutes to ask you, like, what does the world look like if we get it right? But let's ask a couple. We've got one from David Mackie who asks, you know, what words of advice would you have to the next generation of people who are, you know, looking, looking ahead to the future of the internet? Let's start with Mitch. I heard, I saw you go off mute. So I would encourage looking more broadly than just at the technology. I mean, I know we do that, but I would encourage being less technology centric because the more I see what has actually happened with the internet, the more I think it is a function of the dysfunction of capitalism. And without fully addressing how capitalism can work better and what's wrong with it, because it's really what is driving. It's where the investment and the dollars go and what gets funded and what gets developed and why and which things. So that my encouragement would be to bring that much more fully into the picture to be able to ask questions like, just because you can start a business that's going to make a lot of money, should you really be an American or global hero? Or do we want to rethink that? That's great. Esther? I would take what Mitch said and kind of extend it even further. I mean, I think Mitch will probably agree. But, you know, I mean, first of all, I don't know anybody of the future who's going to be a leader that is not in some way an internet leader. I mean, they might not be building the internet, but they will be using the internet to communicate. They will be using the internet, whether they're for profit or not for profit. I mean, it's just, it is part of the infrastructure. And I mean, the biggest problems in the world right now have to do with the resources being distributed unevenly. And those resources start with, you know, we train our AIs. We want to make sure they have no biases. We forget to train our children. You know, and it's not that I want to send all the parents to the training school, though that might be a great idea. But just, I work in some of the poor communities of this country. And half the children are growing up underfed, underloved, undereducated. And they're, you know, they're damaged by the time they become 10 years old. And we can't build a society with that amount of inequity, that amount of damage that it costs, you know, it's just, it's human lives, but it's also the cost to the rest of the world. And we need to focus on, you know, God bless it, infrastructure, human infrastructure, human capital, as well as I'm up here in Lake County where it was 104 just two hours ago. And where the, I'm in one of the nicer hotels in the bandwidth works, but all over this county, it's hard to get online. And so, you know, again, people suffered during COVID. So that the leaders of the future need to figure out some way to remedy that. And, you know, there may be this world of abundance for a few people, but there's, there's a lot of people missing out. And even if, and the costs are being borne by society, they're not being, they're being borne by those individuals, but they're also being borne by everybody else. And we need to start thinking both longer term, and more broadly about the communities around us, because they are all interconnected. Yeah, we're all interconnected down. That's for sure. Hey, John, what's your advice to the future internet leaders? Well, I'm with Esther there and, and, and in that, in that a lot of, a lot of issues to them, as well as the issues on the internet myself, I've spent, I spent 20 years on funding or and, and trying to, trying to reduce the arrest rate of black and brown on many, on many other, you know, ill effects of the drug war. That's, that's, that's not RFF thing thing. I think to, to be effective, we need to focus on what we're good at. And I would say, I would say it, the internet environment, was, was a bit of a success saster. It had to grow up, grow up very soon in the 90s and it kind of got ossified. Opportunity opportunities are still there to continue evolving, evolving it, to continue evolving, not just, not just what's available on a website, what, what protocols there are besides the web, invent new, new things and invent new technologies and think a lot, think a lot, the opportunity opportunities in the nation are going to come from people who can see beyond paradigm, paradigm of the internet is an access for five, five and, and, oh, forget 50, 50 million websites that are, that are, oh, and forget those other protocols like voice over IP or email, don't matter, matter. I think we can, I think there's a lot of opportunity there. And, and part of VFF's role is to make sure that part of your stays, your stays open so that some invent the thing, the thing that replaces the world, or that makes a, makes a way of communicating with email, mail. Yeah, we got to think beyond the web. I think that is right. And, and certainly making sure that whatever happens is open for innovation and for people who, you know, who come up with something that none of us thought of before. I mean, I think there's a, there's a way in which we try to future proof our policies and laws so that they can, they can move that, that's going to need to move beyond, you know, certainly the five big companies that control everything today, but even beyond the things that we're thinking about and talking about today. The next question is, is more focused on EFF. What are the ways in which EFF, this is from, I'm going to say it wrong, PMOSEC, in what ways is EFF important today that you did not expect in the organization's early years? John, we're still having trouble with your audio, but, but maybe I'll go to go to Mitch first. Well, look, I certainly didn't anticipate nor do I think most of the folks early on anticipated that the scale and centrality of the internet and the way things would be depended on it. The fact that the stakes are so much higher today because it affects everybody in every way is just, I think not, you know, it's just hard to imagine. I think the human imagination in general doesn't work if you're trying to think six or seven orders of magnitude larger, or maybe there are a small number of geniuses for whom that, you know, is the case. And so, yeah, sort of had we known, I think would have paid a lot more attention to security in the early days, which is just so, you know, most people were pretty nice and it was friendly and open. It came out of academia and the research world and sort of very casual decisions, you know, have had enormously consequential and not great effects that and, you know, and can't really be undone, can only be sort of incrementally fixed, patched, kind of, you know, and so, yeah. I think that is right. Esther? The punchline is that the stakes with which EFF, you know, is involved in a difference that can make is global. That's not exactly, we thought it was important, but more in some sense, unprincipled and wanting to do the right thing. And today, again, EFF is important because everything that it touches just is so consequential. Yep. Yeah. I guess the, I mean, the one thing we didn't really understand perhaps is that the problem with the internet is the people on it. It's not the internet. And, you know, eventually all the people are on it. And one problem is the people who can't get on it by virtue of income or, you know, depending on where they live, even a government that doesn't want people to communicate or they don't, they're not educated, money, whatever. But fundamentally, if you got rid of the people, the internet works fine. So the people on it that need to be, if not, you know, again, this issue about local regulation versus universal, how the different parts fit together, what you do about misinformation, you know, forget porn. Misinformation is kind of causes active harm. And again, it's much more like a virus. I mean, in a sense, you know, I like the notion of you look for the metabolism, which is the business models that end up being cancerous, rather than looking for the, you know, the particular strings of text or images or something. It's those business models that really cause most of the trouble. Yeah. I think it's really true that the, I think there was a dream that Barlow had that we could start this new place that would be better than the place we left behind, right? That's his famous quote. And I think that the reality is we brought all of society's ills with us. And so if we want to make the internet a better place, we have to make society a better place at some basic level. And, you know, we can, the protocols can help us, but, but they're not going to solve it. John. And we just, we need to make sure that you one must understand the same problem is going to happen with Mars. I'm not sure if we can leave the planet either and leave the problems behind. As long as humans are going, that may be fair. John. Right. Well, one thing you didn't understand in the early years is the copyright was going to be initiated to care about. And John Perry was figured that out on the first and the first to write about it and wired, had to drag us along a bit to work on to work on it at all. But now it's a major for what we do, what we do is because, you know, copying nation and nationally how networks works work. So the, I don't know that we've really identified, identified new, new, as big as copyright. Maybe anti antitrust is another one that we didn't think we'd have to get involved in and maybe now we do. Yeah, I think those are two of them. I think patents as well is something that, of course, Mitch and our current board chair Pam Samuelson identified a long time ago as an issue that we then launched, have launched projects and continue to work on as well. So that's another one that comes to mind. So we only have a few minutes left. So I want to do a kind of a lightning round and ask each of you, you know, so what does the world look like if we get this right? What are, how does our, I take your point that the digital world, the offline and the online world are increasingly difficult to separate. But you know, we're here at EFF. So what is our, what does the digital world look like if we get it right? Let me start with you Esther. I mean, I sort of question the premise that there's an end state. And I mean, what we need to do in a sense is develop a grammar for changing the rules. You know, a constitution rather than a static set of regulations because you know, there's things continue to evolve and both the problems and the solutions keep moving dynamically. I do think, as I said earlier, if we have a well educated population that is both literate and knows how to think and also is mentally healthy and happy, you know, I mean, not life, life requires struggle, it would be really boring if it didn't have it, but the, we need to figure out how to evolve and change rather than, we need to keep going West rather than going to the North Pole. You know, we keep moving forward, adjusting, changing, having proper ways of doing that. And that, that's very big, but that's the reality of it. I think that's really right. You know, and frankly, I hope, you know, that global warming or, you know, evolving viruses don't just kind of stop the whole experiment in the middle. But, you know, I always used to say if there was a nuclear explosion, after the explosion was over, it sort of, some things would become easier because it would just be clear what you needed to fix and sort of go around and pick up the pieces. And, you know, my hope is that as this COVID thing gets to some point where we can start picking up pieces, we'll start putting them together in a better way, you know, focusing on education, focusing on racial disparities and economics and people's need for meaning and dignified work and stuff like that. And if we do that, you know, it'll be on the internet, it'll be in real life, and it will be much better. Great. Thanks. John? Let's see. I grew up as kind of a low-class kid in a small town, and my way of getting out, getting out of life was the library, right? That was tuition, tuition that previous generation had to create to help people overcome their initial and become like a full world. I think we have, in many ways, supplanted that with the internet. We've created our own infrastructure for helping people and strangers where they don't have very many friends and people who understand them, to find their own need, finding their own in their working work and to make their way in making the world a better place. I think the challenge this generation is tolerance is the ability to let live with, as we disagree, disagree with with the generation that we think is wrong or full, who we think are level or level or countries who we we have been, you know, prized to think are bad people. I think the challenge is not, you know, now that now that we have first to all into all information in the world, now we have to develop some judgment about what to do. And not just down the P down the P, agree with, but trying to find mutual understanding. So our good future, we have mutual understanding and access to information for everyone, regardless of where they are. I'm here here, Mitch. Well, I have a, I mean, more modest goal. I'm going to answer a slightly different question. You know, how can we be less wrong? What would things be like if we were less wrong? And I would say, if we could stop thinking of technology as some sort of autonomous force for good, that would be a start. And, you know, by analogy, in America, and I know not everybody on the stream is American, and I'm aware of that, but it's where we are. There's a big rethink going on with certain quarters, because we understand that the values that we hold dear are should be taking more as aspirational than a reality, you know, liberty and justice for all. But until, and unless we hold up a mirror to ourselves to say, well, how is it that we are not living those ideals and that many people are not included and do not have the opportunity and do not have justice, that's where it starts to change things. If you hold up a mirror and ask, what are we doing and what can we do differently? How do we take responsibility for the world that we have created, especially those of us who have any degree of power and privilege? And I would say the same thing in the technology world, that a process of sometimes uncomfortable self-examination, I think, is actually going to be the thing that can make a difference in making things less wrong and less bad. And there are, there's no shortage of places to start on the issues that EFF is grappling with. Great. Thank you. Thank you. I love how two of the three of you reframed my question. I think that's a good indicator of the talent we have here. Just like every EFF board meeting I was ever involved. Well, we've run out of our hour. This has been fascinating. I could do this for another two or three. But I really want to thank Mitch and Esther and John for joining us today and John for graving all the technical problems. I want to thank all of you for watching and EFF supporters and members all around the world. You help make things like this possible. But more importantly, all the work we do every day and the, you know, the 85 people here who someday again may be here on Eddie Street in San Francisco and all around the world working on this. I want to give a special shout out to Hannah Diaz, Erin Jew and Christian Romero for their support for their, for this event on the back end. EFF has led the charge for privacy free expression and innovation for the past 30 years. We're just getting started. As you can tell, we have a very long history already, but I feel like we really are just getting started in some ways. If you think that it's important to have EFF out there standing strong for your rights and the rights of people who have no voice online, please join us. We work for tips and we stand on the shoulders of giants. So please join with us. So we also have really cool swag if you join. So there's benefits as well. But I hope that you'll continue these conversations about freedom and technology and the better world offline with your friends. And thanks again for joining us and happy birthday, EFF. Happy birthday. Thank you. Great to see all of you. Yeah. Great to see you. And now out to John Perry Barlow, Somo, Sonny, Cyber space. Yep. Yeah. And IRL sometime soon. Thank you.