 Good afternoon, everybody. I am Matthew Battles, Associate Director of MetaLab at Harvard and a fellow at the Berkman Center. Welcome to Wasserstein Hall and the Berkman Tuesday lunch talk, where we're joined today by Astra Taylor, author of the People's Platform. I'll introduce Astra more fully in a moment, but first I wanted to just cover some business. The first thing that I want to say is, as many of you know, the Berkman talks are live-streamed and archived for posterity in video and audio, so if you were moved to speak during the question-and-answer session, you might want to bear that in mind. There also will be a Twitter stream, the hashtag Berkman, which Sarah Watson, who will be moderating the Twitter stream, put up on the board for us. And finally, this is a book talk, really, and there are books for sale from the Harvard Law School Coop back up here at the back of the room. And so you have an opportunity to get the book while Astra is here with us today. So Astra Taylor is a person of parts, an author of the People's Platform, taking back power and culture in a digital age. She's also been writing for a number of forums, The New York Times, N-plus-one. Where else have you been lately? The Nation, of course, the London Review of Books, Book Forum. She's a filmmaker, and that's how I came to know Astra's work in the first instance, particularly with the film The Examined Life, which I would highly recommend all of you taking a look at. It's a wonderful work. It's a work that I keep finding myself teaching from. It's kind of a mash-up of, this is an awful thing to say, mash-up. You already know that I'm saying something awful, but it's a mash-up of like my dinner with Andre and Fast Cheap and Out of Control. It's really a work that highlights the importance of dialogue, of conversation, of exchange, and of ideas, first and foremost. Finally, Astra is an organizer, an activist. She helped to launch the Occupy Wall Street Offshoot Strike Debt and the Rolling Jubilee Campaign. Now, these are all very disparate things, of course, and yet, as I said to Astra before we came in here, they really are like the internet connected by a system of tubes. They're really well-plummed. I think that what we look forward to today is Astra plumbing those depths with us. She's promised us a brain dump that will cross the boundaries of activism, the internet, IRL space, authorship, organizing, and film. After she's done that brain dump, we'll have a chance to dialogue with her. Without further ado, I will turn it over to Astra Taylor. All right. Thank you, Matthew. Am I on? Can everybody hear me? OK. Thanks for the kind introduction. Thanks for having me. OK. Yeah. I'm going to do a sort of book summary at the beginning, because as I was just telling Matthew, I have a really hard time focusing on anything that I've finished. The minute something's finished, it's sort of in the past, and I'm moving on. And I think what I'm trying to do now is figure out what I learned right in the book and how that intersects with some current projects that are percolating, and how it sort of influenced my thinking, my world view, how I see the terrain of my activism and my cultural work. So why did I write this book, The People's Platform, Taking Back Power and Culture in a Networked Age? Part of it was that my film, Exam and Life, which he just described, it was being released in 2009, and it was this sort of moment where it was distribution channels were changing, and there's a lot of excitement. And like so many filmmakers right before my film went into theaters, I found it cut up on the internet in little bits. And so I emailed some folks on YouTube and asked them to take it down, and they told me to fuck off that philosophy is free. And so that got me into the copyright wars, and what does free mean, free speech, free beer, free prize, free, what are we talking about? Freedom. And I also found myself going to a bunch of web 2.0 conferences, because actually around 2009, the internet was, it still is the site of a lot of political utopianism, and there was sort of the Twitter revolution I ran. But what I was struck by mostly was the sort of undercurrent of commercialism, and the fact that there was so much excitement about artists releasing their stuff on the internet, but it was always, the next thing was always like, and you'll get a brand partner. And to me, I just felt like I didn't become a writer or a documentary filmmaker to partner with brands explicitly or implicitly. That's not what I'm going for, I hate advertising. So that was a part of the motivation. I felt like what was missing from the conversation was an accessible political economy of new media. So going back to me, it's fairly evident. I made these two philosophy films. I made one called Zizek, one called Exam and Life. I'm actually now working on the third in the nerd trilogy, The Working Title, What is Democracy? Which my agent said was the worst title she'd ever heard in the history of her career. It sounds like a civics class nobody will want to go to. And I said, okay, that means it's the movie for me. So there was a movie produced by the National Home Board of Canada called Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky in the Media. So I saw that, that influenced my thinking. Noam, of course, is talking about the old broadcast top down model, where the people who own the news outlets distort the news in service of special interests. When I got a little bit older, I got into the Frankfurt School. So that's the Adorno in a bathing suit. Because people write him off as such a curmudgeon. I think it's important to remember his softer side. I'm just gonna be faster, but one of the basic arguments in my book is that we've overemphasized change and continuity is as important as change when we look at the new media landscape. So some of the old problems, the problems of the old media landscape that I was so motivated by that influenced me as a kid to have a zine that I distributed, or as an adult to make independent films, or only a few years ago to produce this Occupy Gazette, this broad sheet with my friends at N plus one. Discussed that commercial media, the mainstream media, and how dumb down things are that a lot of the problems have carried over into the digital age, namely consolidation, centralization, and commercialism. And these problems are still with us, so business models haven't been disrupted. So if Noam Chomsky talked about manufacturing consent, we now live in the age of manufacturing compulsion, because clicks equal cash. So none of this will really be news to people in the room. But what we have is not an overthrow of the old legacy media. The old legacy media is here and doing well. So here's just Walt Disney because it's one of the examples that's always invoked by copy left critics, Walt Disney is a bad guy. But Walt Disney is doing okay. Meanwhile, we have these new big tech giants climbing to the top. Google, who's gonna be the first $1 trillion company? Is it gonna be Google or is it gonna be Apple? So now we have Silicon Valley and Hollywood. We have coexisting and they're increasingly collaborating and making deals and working together. So in the book, I also talk about the idea of the long tail, which was much more sort of present in the cultural discourse at the time I was writing this and instead I look at Matthew Hinman's idea of the missing middle. And think about how that's a concept I think we need to apply both to cultural artifacts but also to economics. Because obviously that's a problem of our economy right now, is the lack of. A middle, sorry, now I don't quite know how to use this in my notes. Okay, sorry, so Matthew, in fact, right. I just wanna say Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google, has said the long tail doesn't exist. The internet leads to bigger blockbusters, bigger concentrations of brand, bigger superstars, etc. Meanwhile, from the creative side, just because products are free, doesn't mean it's not possible to make huge cups of money. So again, the missing middle is about economics and spiraling inequality as much as it is about superstars versus amateurs online. And how do these platforms make huge cups of money? Often it's through advertising, which I've already said I have a huge problem with, advertising is on the up. So I've been joking that this is kind of the retro future. That's the age we've come to that even though we have this amazing new communications infrastructure and all these new tools and gizmos. We're still being fed branded content just like the old days of camel news caravan, which was produced by camel cigarettes for NBC. So I saw recently, the New York Times is firing 100 people, but their branded content division was made a big announcement that it's hiring. If you're a touring musician, you can stay at the Sour Patch Kid's house in Brooklyn as long as you make some Sour Patch Kid inspired content. Next morning on your way out. So in the book, this leads to a sort of call for public investment. I feel like we need competition from non-commercial alternatives and public subsidy. And technology alone won't create the sort of democratic, independent, robust culture that I, for one, desire. My beef with advertising goes beyond just finding it annoying and finding the idea that journalists are writing native advertising, native advertorials or whatever they're called. To these lists that I'm sure you're well aware of, basically the way that data brokers target us, sort us, rank us. So this is just one example of these less struggling elders singles. Rough retirement, small town and rural seniors, rural and barely making it. And so these categories, of course, open up new avenues of discrimination. So one point that I feel it has to be made when you're talking about advertising, it's about so much more than the annoying things you see in your news feed. It's about opening up of these new ways to discriminate. The fact that you can now, creditors can now infer things about you that they cannot legally ask on a credit report. And you'll see that example really matters to me based on the current political work I'm doing. So I think it's not just a sort of cultural pollution issue, which I find advertising to be, it's, I don't know, on the one hand, it's pollution, I find it to be noisy. It's also kind of artificial, it's kind of a kind of artificial fertilizer that encourages the growth of kind of cloying, non-confrontational cultural things. But then there's also a social justice component in that these data brokers and these advertisers target people in ways that are very troubling. Okay, so that's my book. Some people have said my book could have been called Occupy the Internet. And indeed my book was turned in a year and a half late, because I got really distracted when Occupy started. And so I think that was, you know, the bigger economic conditions we're in was certainly a factor in my thinking. But this picture, you know, this picture could be a picture of the Internet on Google images, but actually I just did a Google image search for financial networks. You know, so the way that these things are kind of one and the same is what's kind of interesting me now. And I think the question the book takes for granted, but I didn't make it explicit because I kind of didn't want to use academic language. I wanted to write something, again, very accessible, very accessible political economy. I never even used the word political economy. The question is, you know, how do you take back power and culture in a networked age, or I could have said under neoliberalism or post-fortism, right? In networked capitalism. Where are the levers for change? Where can you push back? So the book kind of ends with the call for, you know, more subsidy, public media and non-commercial alternatives, you know, baseline privacy laws or something. But how would you actually get those things? Like what are the levers? It's easy to write a book at the end to be prescriptive and to say, okay, I've got some solutions, but how do you actually get traction on those issues? And for me, I'm just committed to merging theory and practice. That's sort of, so for me, part of the experiment, part of the fun then is to kind of be like, okay, I want these things. Like where can I see getting some traction, making some of those gains? So go back, this is from Josh. This is a joke for him, but yeah, I was a teenage delusion before my Frankfurt school phase, actually, which is backwards. You should not go to Deluz first. But I was kind of hardened to read his post-script on control societies. Has anybody read this? Post-scripts on the societies of control by Deluz. So it's written in 92, and it's really prescient. And it's basically about the sort of, he argues that we're shifting away from Foucault's Disciplinary Society, which I'm sure everyone's heard about the Panopticon, this idea that someone's watching you, to something that's kind of more pervasive, that's more all-immersive, that we're living in the society of control. And he says, for example, that we've moved from the monetary mole to the serpent, the financial serpent that we've gone from the factory to the corporation. The corporation is kind of everywhere, right? It outsources the actual labor to distant places, but yet it profits. And the fact that we're kind of in this very complicated new financial space. And what's interesting is he basically anticipates the dominance of the internet and this other thing I'm interested in, which is debt. So he says, everywhere surfing has replaced sports. Before surfing was like in the nomenclature. Yeah, and that the new man is a indebted man or something to that effect. So this idea of the control society, and he says basically unions are in decline. What new weapons are we going to make to fight back given this? And when I read this, I was like, okay, this is kind of exactly where I'm at. So I'm going to give two examples of sort of ongoing struggles that I'm interested in. This one I'm not so involved in, but my friends are leading it. And the next one that I'm very intimately involved in. So one, one struggle on the cultural front and one on the explicitly economic, economic front. But this is where I would really like to really get all my nice notes that I made. So anybody a PowerPoint expert, because I don't teach and I never have to do this. Yeah, I put it in percent of you. There's my beautiful little deer. Oh, which isn't, but doesn't it need to mirror to be up there? Right now. How does this work? Techies help. Oh, and now it's working. Okay. I don't know. Okay, cool. Anyway, I like this photo because I kind of feel like it says it all about what a confused moment we're in. It says free, which is utterly meaningless in this context and usually is meaningless because nothing's really free. And then there's this giant tech multinational corporation. And then there's this rock band that kind of on the one hand you're like, are they artists or are they actually like the record label? And they're just there. You know, but so how does how does an artist fit into this landscape? And your music is interesting. It's an interesting thing to return to you because in a way, you know, musicians were patient zero. Right. Or you always talk about the naturalization of this naturalization of higher ed naturalization. But I feel often I feel like the people are talking about this don't really know, know much about music. On top of the other things I have been, you know, on the road with a band for the last almost two years now and I have a pretty good sense of what the landscape is like for, you know, an independent musician, independent musicians that, you know, can survive but are not are not you too. Anyway, so in the world we're in the networked networked age or in the society of control or whatever, the figure of the artist is actually really important. So, you know, why was it that musicians and musicians livelihoods and how they distribute their music or don't or whether people pay like, why was that so fraud? Why was it so interesting to people who weren't musicians? And part of it I think is because the figure of the artist is actually really key in this day and age. So first, you know, how do artists think of themselves? How is the concept of the artist changing? And I always come back to this quote from John Lennon which is, you think you're so clever and classless and free. So today artists are encouraged to think of themselves as kind of standing alone but also as entrepreneurs or brands, not as laborers. And so this kind of obscures the issue of exploitation, whether it's by a record label or a platform. You think of yourself as like a sole proprietor, right? It's just this free agent. And this perspective is affirmed in the way musicians are paid if they're likely enough to be paid. So they receive percentages or fees or royalties. They don't get wages because there's no boss. They play gigs or they do projects rather than steady jobs. Already the standard breakdown of like boss and employee is not there. So exploitation isn't as visible. So that's how artists are encouraged to think of themselves. Meanwhile, everyone is encouraged to think of themselves as an artist, especially if you're being taken advantage of. So the ethos of the autonomous creator is really in demand in our precarious economy. Right? Because creativity is in vogue time and again to justify low wages and job insecurity across all sectors of the economy. Journalism, teaching, right? It's being off lighted into individuals. Institutions are retreating from having to support them and it's like, well you do what you do because you love it. Right? So you take all the risk on yourself. And I have some examples of this from the book. The Chronicle of Higher Education urged graduates to imagine themselves as artists to better prepare for the possibility of impoverishment when tenure-track jobs failed to materialize. Quote, we must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood and become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship. So, you know, even academics, you're really just artists. So if you don't get paid, that's fine. NPR reported on the temp worker lifestyle and it said it was a kind of performance art, kind of like walking a tightrope. You know? You're an acrobat. Without insurance. And then I also have an example from the Apple store. The Apple store in 2011 told some employees who were trying to demand better wages that money shouldn't be an issue when you're working at Apple because it's an experience. So it's kind of the same logic, you know? So artists, the figure of the artist is being employed. And for me, one of the problems is that the negative things about being an artist, the precarity, the insecurity, are being spread instead of the wonderful things about being a creative person, which is sort of the non-alienation, the autonomy, the dignity. So the bad aspects of work. Meanwhile, what do, again, to go back to the fact that music is constantly being invoked. I just thought this was so funny. So this is Mark Anderson, who I'm sure all of you know. And, you know, people speaking about what happens to musicians. And even the bands that fall completely on hard times, they now go and play at people's birthday parties or they play launch events for tech companies. People don't want to listen to Hoody and the Bluefish anymore, but it turns out it's pretty cool to have them at a birthday party and they get paid 25,000. And I just read that. I was like, what are you talking about? You know, and so this is the kind of punditry in a way that my book was arguing with, which was like people who don't really know things that are making these pronouncements about the future of music. So what is happening with music? So, you know, everybody's read all of the hype about Spotify and low royalty rates. And this is one example, just one quick example of people fighting back. So this was a picket line outside organized by the Content Creators Coalition, which again, my friends founded. And they were picketing the fact that Google's Music Key had thrown a block channels of independent bands and independent musicians. And so did everybody read about this? Yeah. So it's kind of like the Amazon and Hashat thing where they removed the buy button. So it was Amazon really throwing its weight around. It had already made deals with the three major labels. The Independent Music Consortium had not yet made a deal. True independence. And there were people who are their own labels, sorry, had not made a deal. So it was going to rival, it wanted to rival Spotify, but it was offering even lower royalty rates. The terms were totally non-negotiable. If labels didn't sign, they would be blocked, as I said. Meanwhile, the big three record labels had negotiated other streams that weren't available. So they had agreed to this low royalty rate because they had access to other revenue. So it was a worse deal than Spotify. And I just want to read one quote from a sort of major independent label, who I talked to about this off the record, but I'm going to just say he's anonymous. So he said, the majors accept rock bottom per stream rate so they don't have to pay their artists. They get listener hour guarantees, essentially guaranteed per rat of shares, even if users don't listen to their artists as much. And then they keep 100% of the breakage, not attributable to the artist. And then majors are getting hundreds of millions of dollars in annual advances and keep 100% of the breakage if they don't have to hit that amount. So the businessmen get richer and the artists get nothing out of it. And of course, the media doesn't understand how licensing works. So when YouTube says they've offered everyone the same rock bottom per stream rate, it gets reported that YouTube has offered everyone the same deal, which is not true at all. So what this is, this is an example of the RIAA, the big record labels colluding with Google to actually design a payment system that doesn't trickle anything down to artists, that keeps it all in the back end for the executives of both camps. And there were more insidious annoying things about this deal I could go into in great detail. So one of the founders of Content Creators Coalition said, what Spotify has done in my reckoning is take the worst parts of the labels system and the worst part of the streaming ecosystem and merge them. So again, continuity and change, I think, are really important. And the CCC basically has three principles. One is artist control of their work. We believe it is a right of any creator of cultural content to choose when and how and whether their work is distributed for commercial gain, monetized with advertising, or otherwise exploited. As a documentary filmmaker, I have a more nuanced view because I feel like sometimes I'm very much a proponent of fair use and I feel like that needs to be made a little more complicated. Two, fair pay. We believe in the right of Content Creators to a fair share of the wealth our work generates. I'm definitely for that. And three, collective representation. We believe in the right of all creators of cultural content to aggregate our power to protect their livelihoods in our art forms. And with streaming, they have multiple demands, but one of them is simply transparency. And I think this is a really fantastic demand for a group of artists to make for these companies that have kind of built their reputations on transparency and openness and all this because every single streaming service, especially Google, though, is... Well, at least Apple, actually, you just know it's sort of a 70-30 split. I personally don't think that's fair, but it's out there in the open. But Google is just the India, they're mad with nondisclosure agreements. And so this is one of the problems. And the other thing is that an irony in terms of organizing is that Google right now is facing some very gentle, not heat, some hot breath about antitrust with the FTC. But artists are concerned about sharing their data, their reports from Google. They're concerned that actually they could be busted for antitrust because actually they are sole proprietors, they are LLCs, they're small corporations. And so if they then say, if they get together and try to share information and then fight Google, they might have some legal pushback or something. So their lawyers are saying, actually, that could be risky. So it's very interesting to me how the legal landscape inhibits organizing. But nonetheless, actually, just by manifesting and organizing and making a lot of noise and actually going to Google and making it concrete in Manhattan and having that picket line, they generated enough bad publicity that the company caved at least temporarily and got rid of some of the more egregious aspects. So that's one example of people figuring out, okay, we're no longer fighting the record label. We have to actually take on one of these platforms. Okay, so here's another example of taking back power in a digital age. And this is about the work I've been doing that came out of Occupy. So I've been working with a group called the Rolling Jubilee Campaign, which buys and abolishes debts on the secondary market, and a new initiative called the Debt Collective, which is an organizing platform. So this is a picture from our telephone. It was drawn by Molly Crabb-Apple for the writer Sarah Jaffe. But it's just a sort of example of what we're trying to get people to think about. So the way that financial entities are involved in every aspect of our life, right? Debt collection, loans, healthcare, student aid, all of this. This picture is of course a riff on Matt Taibe's article about Goldman Sachs as the vampire squid. So these tentacles of finance, it's just like when we're using a commercial web platform and people are profiting off us, how do we push back? When you're just a human being participating in the economy, where are the points of leverage to push back on these actors? And our sort of larger analysis is that, again, to go back to the idea of neoliberalism, neoliberalism sort of gained steam in the 1970s when wages started to stagnate, trade unionism started to decline, and the illusion of prosperity was created because there was easy access to credit. So everybody started going into debt for basic necessities. Tuition at schools started rising as subsidies declined, so we started debt financing our education. And that's something that we think is a major social problem. So these are some out-of-date stats from our Rolling Jubilee homepage. So people are deeply indebted. Actually student debt is now over 1.3 trillion. It's estimated to be 2 trillion by 2020. But we see the problem of debt as an opportunity. In the words, indebtedness could be turned into an asset, a form of economic power for the indebted. So if the 1% have wealth, then 99% have debt. So 1.3 trillion dollars of student debt could conceivably be 1.3 trillion dollars of leverage. So this is one of our slogans, you are not alone. So we want to go, puns, puns are good. We want to go from the personal, the personal condition of indebtedness to the political structure. You are in debt because social services have been cut. That's why you break your leg and you are $40,000 in debt from your emergency room visit because there's not universal healthcare. We think debt is also promising because again with the decline of trade unionism, debt doesn't matter, debt isn't contingent on your job. It's an economic point for people who are unemployed, for people who are precariously employed, for students. So it's something that links people who are not in the workplace, who are dispersed. And so what we're trying to do is sort of unravel those chains of debt to kind of reverse engineer that vampire squid or that octopus through debt and change the rules of the game. So this is just one example of how difficult this is. This is just an information sheet from a student loan asset backed security. So our loans are bundled into these portfolios. So it's a very opaque system and debtors don't have access to their own data. People often don't know who they even owe money to. And this is, I think, a really interesting problem because this is our data. Sorry, this is our data and yet we don't have access to it. So what would it be like if individuals could see the financial landscape the way creditors do? Creditors have an amazing sort of bird's-eye view and that's how they can assess risk and stuff like that. Meanwhile, we are out there one by one. So we want to see if we can ban people together and collectivize and build power but also do that by accessing people's information. Okay, so here's the rolling. Do you believe this was our first campaign that started in 2012 where we figured out how to kind of break into these shady secondary debt markets and buy medical debts, intuition debts for pennies on the dollar. So it's kind of a hack, in other words, it doesn't change the existing system but it uses the system against itself. These are my friends who are working on it. There are a few others too. This is a New York Times piece when we launched. So we've abolished over $33 million of healthcare and medical debt to date with where to come. So this project is wrapping up. But we don't talk about debt forgiveness because we feel like that implies that you need to be forgiven and that there's like some, you know, blameworthy debtor and some generous creditor. And we think you are entitled to healthcare, you're entitled to education and so these debts are odious to begin with. But we cannot buy and abolish all of the odious debts in the world so that's why we are transitioning into something called the debt collective which is essentially a kind of 21st century debtor's union. And it's a new membership organization that leverages collective power so people can renegotiate, refuse their debts even, demand fair terms into predatory lending. And so, you know, again, like people aren't in a workplace. Our members are scattered across the entire country. And so the web has been sort of essential in terms of allowing us to connect with people and find them because we don't share a shop room floor. So we just launched our initial campaign in February around this predatory for profit college. It's massive. It served 100,000 people at its height. It's called Corinthian Colleges. It was a chain and we launched the first ever student debt strike. We won't pay our debt. Everest was one of the main subsidiaries of this. We're working with former students who are leading the charge and we're kind of assisting them. So there are, there were 15 student debt strikers in February and now there are 107. So they're on strike. They're refusing to pay their federal loans back and demanding a full discharge. And we've been making incredible progress. Because the student Everville is growing. This is Bloomberg business news. So that's not a bad headline in our opinion. Two weeks after we announced the strike, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau invited us to meet them in D.C. and we met also with the Department of Education and Treasury and various attorneys generals. And so yes, it looks like relief for tens of thousands of students might be on the horizon. So I just want to sum up really quickly. Basically, this is Space Vs. Place at Sun Ra, which is one of my favorite bands. But I think the sort of challenge right now, this whole idea of taking back power in the network ages, is making space into place. Debtors are distributed. Or the example of musicians, Mark Rebo, who's one of the people behind the Content Graders Coalition, he was like, the problem is musicians are in space. You're on the road. You're on this thing. You're on the road. You're not there together in the factory. And so I think there are so many examples where the initial problem of organizing is turning something into place. And so that's what they did when they went to Google headquarters in Chelsea and they protested there. They named something and they made it concrete. Even if we know that actually isn't the power center for Google. I mean Google is data centers. Google is a million things. But just that making it real. Yeah. And so I think these are just little examples for me of like how we are actually going to tackle this issue of spiraling inequality and the fact that we are more and more dispersed. And the internet is a sort of factor in that dispersal. But also can be an avenue for us to come together. So anyway, that's my talk. Sorry. Those are my thoughts randomly. Randomly. Thanks. Thanks, Astra, very much. And there's a lot to contend with. And I hope a lot of questions and thoughts to bring to bear on all of this. I have a microphone. And so I get to start with some questions. But I will share the microphone presently. And we have another microphone on the other side of the room as well, which Carrie will steer around. And so I'll sort of wrangle some questions after I ask a couple of myself. And we've got about a half an hour for questions and discussion. So I love this image too, Astra. And it's particularly sort of fortunate to my mind because as I was thinking about your talk, I was thinking about this one of my favorite Google image searches currently, which is, I mean, like a Google image search is kind of an intellectually lazy place to begin. I admit that. And yet nonetheless, I like looking at the Google image search of, if you search, and you can do this right now, it's kind of cool. I don't know if it's cool, but I'll tell you what it is. If you search for you are here Milky Way, you get a whole panoply of versions of that t-shirt, that kind of beloved t-shirt image of the Milky Way galaxy with a little arrow saying you are here. I mean, that's always seemed like a kind of salutary image, a kind of salutary reminder of where we are and the enormity of the universe and our place. And the interesting thing about the image search is all of the galaxies are different and all of the locations are different. We don't really know where we are fundamentally, you know. And to me, there's a nice kind of objective correlative with that, the sort of wallpaper of all of these different images of different galaxies and different addresses in them. And some of the mystifying effects of the internet. I loved the visualization, the network visualization on the globe, which looks like it might be the internet, but turns out to be financial networks. And so, I mean, I think, you know, a question that I have for you is really, how do we begin to find ourselves in that space, you know? How do we make the leap from the internet network and where we are located in that to the financial networks and to the communities in which we live. And I think that some of your organizing work points towards that. But how do we remember that, in fact, the internet hasn't abolished time and space? How do we begin to turn it from space into place, cyber place? What would a cyber place look like? Yeah. Oh, I don't know. I mean, these are the two examples that I have that are concrete. I mean, I think the old organizing axiom that you begin by asking people what they need, you know? In other words, that comes first and then you figure out, well, what place connects to that, you know? So these musicians are very motivated because they're truly independent musicians. They're truly, they're not the tailors of the world. They have a sense that they're being steamrolled, that they don't have a seat at the table. So then that need was the source of a discussion like, okay, well, where can we find Google? Where can we find music key? Because, you know, there's not even a customer service hotline to call, right? That's how abstract it is. So this headquarters became symbolic. And movements are always that mix of, you know, real organizing, real community building, and also with kind of theatrics, the kind of ethical spectacle and so would. And that's the other thing about the space. It's not just a space for you to inhabit and be in, but it's a space for you to perform in and to demonstrate your solidarity or to demonstrate your cause in some creative way. I wish that there were more of those spaces that were purely virtual. But it's interesting. So the book is, in my book, I have the sort of more common critiques of Facebook, all the things that we've all heard a million times. But now as I try to actually organize with people as my group, as we organize with people in there, we're seeing much more just how unfriendly it is to sustain conversations, you know, how it really isn't a space because it's not stable. It's always refreshing and new and serving you those bits of content so you can't have a real long searchable conversation. There's no history there. It doesn't really archive yourself well. And so just what unsolid ground it is or something. So I think we're really lacking in spaces online to build those communities. But yeah, I don't know, starting with groups and then trying to figure out where does this go. That was a question that kept coming up in Occupy and the first thing which was how do we occupy... We can occupy Wall Street, but actually the financial center wasn't even there anymore. I mean, the banks are in midtown now. So they're like, how do you occupy Goldman Sachs? Where is it? And these are the things I think we need to figure out. I don't have a lot of more examples. That's why I'm kind of hanging on to these two. But there must be others out there. Great point at which to throw it to folks in the audience who might have questions. Anybody want to grab it? Here we go. Thanks so much. It was a really interesting collection of thoughts and I liked the way that you hooked them together. I've been thinking about space online and you talked about centralization and how Facebook and essentially one giant corporate centralized entity isn't really a good place for us to organize or do anything except for get ads and depressing news, I guess. So I was wondering if you had thought much about how people build those tools. I'm helping to work on a decentralized media platform but it's a lot of work because I didn't know if you were familiar with other folks who are doing things like attempting to make their own space, like not just hacking into the spaces that exist. Like the Dead Striker thing is amazing but I don't see lots of other places like that. Maybe I just don't know. So I'd be interested to hear if you have examples of where people are creating their own spaces online. I wish I had a good example of that. It seems like it's Facebook and Google groups. This is one thing we're wrestling with is just the irresistibility, the pull of Facebook because it's where people are and yet once you get to a certain level it's so not conducive to real communication. To me, I just think it's an urgent question and I don't have a good example and say that's the kind of community that I would replicate because that would be... I don't want to be in another Google group either. It's less bad. They're less annoying than Facebook. But if you have any examples I'd be eager to hear them. Yeah, I know. It's Super Bay where we've been working on creating a space where people can serve their media on their own servers but have it seamlessly talk to each other the way email used to be before everyone used like three giant corporate ones. Yeah, I think that's the ease of use thing that is really driven home as well is just getting people to pick up a new... It's a huge disconnect. People who have the power to create new spaces have a sort of technical savvy and they're like, oh, it's cool if you just go hop out to the command line for your email and I'm like, no, it's not. I mean, it's for you but not for everyone and that's not going to create with Facebook or Google groups. Question back here. I'm going to piggyback off one of your slides where you said nothing is free if you allow me to and ask you a philosophical question. How do you philosophically reconcile when you're talking about getting more subsidies? Where do you think the subsidy money come from? And don't you agree that it's much better when people voluntarily buy something commercially available and spend their money by choice versus the government put in a barrel to the temple to create subsidies for somebody to create something? Wouldn't art be better and wanted by more people? That way? Well, I mean, in the United States we're definitely not in danger of a government takeover. It would just be like a little fraction of a percent over here in the corner. Yeah. Oh, there are lots of... I mean, in the book, for example, I just say there are so many subsidies right now that are just being misappropriated. So the telecom industry gets lots of subsidies. There are all sorts of subsidies happening that aren't in the public interest. So there's tons of funds we could just redirect. There are examples of, you know, right now in Canada. So I'm Canadian raised in Georgia. So there's a big debate about a Netflix tax. You know, and basically saying that a broadcaster should have to pay some tiny little percentage into a pool that will go to Canadian media production. And it makes sense when you look at the cultural economics in Canada because their entire media fund is the equivalent of Pirates of the... whatever that movie is. I can't. Funny looking Pirates or whatever that movie was. I don't know, like a big blockbuster. It's like $300 million Canadian a year. So to me I think why can't Netflix kick some money into that. I think we should rather redirect the subsidies. I mean, it's the same thing with education. We could have free... tuition free education in all two and four year public schools in this country for an additional $15 billion a year if we just took out all of the misdirected subsidies that are going to servicers and going, you know, being sort of siphoned off. So, and as far as how to spend the subsidies in a way that's democratic, there are lots of interesting ways of doing that using peer review and ways of... there are voucher systems for people. I mean, there are a million creative ideas I think that could be implemented. And I think it would have a lot of positive social consequences because I feel like the commercial alternative right now is again, it's not just the layer we can see of the sort of branded content. It's the fact that it's connected to this entire system of data tracking and targeted marketing that we have not got a hold on at all. And even the best case regulation, there are still lots of very questionable things that would be legal. I mean, I'm just quickly, here's... I now have a sort of alter ego on Facebook that Facebook thinks attends a predatory for profit college. And so I get nothing but predatory lending phantom debt schemes in my news feed. And so you know, this is really, really troubling because now I have you know, I don't know what, I haven't been on Facebook in so long but it's probably like Whole Foods, you know. And then here are these people you know, it looks like a news clip because the school is legitimately being investigated by federal authorities but you call this number and they basically, it's phantom debt, suddenly they can trick you into giving your bank account info, they steal money from you and stuff, so even if there were strong regulations of data brokers, I actually interviewed some people at the FTC about this because I'm writing a story for the nation. It's not clear to me there's any way to make this kind of targeting a legal you know, except to make, I could make a stink to Facebook maybe if I wrote a story that was prominent and not for something so. Anyway. Two things, one as far as places to organize online that are not Google or Facebook, it's probably good to go back and look at platforms that have been sort of semi-abandoned but people still use and go back to some of them. I like live journal myself for that purpose. I keep a local community organized in my area with it and people like it and it feels a lot more pleasant than Facebook but my real question was about debt. A few years ago there was a big deal about the fact that some home mortgages had not been properly transferred through the registries of deeds and therefore it was not properly recorded who really owned the debt and therefore it was possible to extinguish some of those debts just by the fact that they were not properly recorded and that this phantom company owned them instead of the banks that were supposed to be owning them. I haven't heard much about that lately but it seems somehow related to what you're talking about and maybe you can give us an update. Yeah, I don't know about that case but I think, I mean I don't know about that specific case or what transpired but certainly a lot of the you know I say debtors don't have access to information, a lot of the information they don't have access to is information that would show the lack of a chain of title the lack of accurate paperwork, the lack of you know we know for a fact many of the students that we're working with never signed for loans that they are now being forced to pay back tens and tens of thousands of dollars so which is if we had access to the absence of data and just you know robo-signing is in debt not only in the mortgage crisis but but also even in credit card contracts a New York judge said recently that 90% of the credit card cases he sees the the creditor cannot prove the debt is owed so yeah yeah they're not legitimate yeah Hi, thanks for that so I'm a geographer so I really enjoy the kind of space, place, discussions and so on and just as a pointer there's also within geography currently a discussion around the placidness of neoliberalism and so on so it's interesting to see that discussions around geographies of power and I don't know any of that and there's a new book called Kilburn Manifesto which is all about also the relationship of London in these as a financial hub of these international networks so potentially as a counterweight also to the Occupy Wall Street this would be kind of the London perspective on this so it might be interesting but my question to you was really from an activist's perspective how do you move some of the arguments that you make from a sort of an activist core understanding where you just kind of say well you know I mean I just say neoliberal this neoliberal that into a sort of a mainstream discourse where people like the broad middle if you want the 99% but not the 99% who speak that language feel that they identify with the basic arguments which are you know quite common sense arguments and that they can identify with that in an environment where the public discourse is dominated precisely by commercial media platforms etc so how do you get the message out to that broader population yeah I've never used the word neoliberalism in my organizing or in in my book so because I think it's a really common sense like you said it's a common sense analysis and it's something people feel for us how we typically frame things is I think it's not an intellectual epiphany people need to have it's actually about shame and stigma the shame and stigma of being indebted, of being financially of financially struggling and so we a lot of it is emphasis on you know this is not your fault right this is a again from the personal and political this is a a problem of the way our society pays for things and so you know it's not that you just you know we're an idiot and you went to this for-profit school or that you somehow didn't choose the right program it's that this should be a public good and it's not and people are profiting off of it and as a consequence you know you're indebted but that it's the shame actually more than once people are over the shame then the analysis really just follows and we've been amazed with this initial campaign how how deeply people have picked up the argument because we weren't you know even students who went to this for-profit are now saying we should have tuition free education education is a human right in fact I shouldn't have just had the I shouldn't have had to think I need to go get an associate's degree or bachelor's degree to get a job like I should be able to go to school to learn there should be a much less instrumental opportunity for me but yeah you do not use ugly words big ugly words when you're trying to connect with people but I think we need maybe we need some words that makes sense because there has been something in the economy that has changed and so it would be nice if academics helped devise language that was more useful the truth is I also feel like you know part of the reason I avoid neoliberalism isn't just that it's confusing but that I feel like the problem for me is capitalism so and that's something we don't shy away from talking about I mean we might be in a sort of iteration of capitalism but for me capitalism is the problem so we talk about neoliberalism it's like I don't really want to go back to 1969 you know so that's part of my allergy to that term as well hi thank you for the great presentation it was really lovely you actually started answering my question was more how do we market and brand through social activism because with a lot of the programs that were cut we're branded as a black issue even though more white people are benefiting from welfare for example there are more white people in welfare than there are black people but every time you look at the news it's always a black person with the kids hanging off their breasts the poor mother walking around and the same thing with meth crack and cocaine more white people with drugs but people in jail so you kind of answered that a little bit how do we rebrand it so that it becomes a greater conversation because I feel like there's an opportunity for poor working class white working class have been beaten off really badly in the past few years and the only thing they've had to hang on to were their whiteness and so this is going to shift and it needs to shift and my second question is I don't know if you did any research on it but there were a lot of I've seen lately a lot of companies when they have their online forms they ask for social security they ask for background checks and all that in Massachusetts we just pass the quarry reform where you can't ask any of these questions until you've interviewed the person so after you interview them if they're actually a candidate you want to consider then you can do a background check but you can't do it prior to their resume or application so I don't know if you've done any research on that on the first point yeah we part of what excites us about organizing around indebtedness is that it crosses these boundaries I mean what I loved about Occupy for all of its problems and no matter how much I hated the drum circle was that it was an economic tent the different causes were uniting under and I really think that we need something like that so so that has the power to the strikers are a great example there are older white people there are young black people there are queer people but they all have this common economic condition so there's a kind of economic solidarity at the same time we're really aware of the fact that these issues of predatory lending and redlining disproportionately affect black people and with this school in particular which is accused by the consumer financial protection bureau of running a predatory lending scheme they specifically targeted low income mothers who tended to be people of color right so that's like you know the community that was hit hardest so I think there's potential here to get groups together around around their financial troubles that might cause other just might cause solidarity and also it opens up avenues like we're calling the debt strike economic disobedience and these are also so it opens up new tactics new ways of resisting we are interested though in these issues that you're bringing up like the credit checks like the way that there's been a creep with credit checks and now they're used as proxies for you know employability like I don't think credit checks should be a factor in your employment but I think given that we're here and this is a space where we're talking about digital technologies you know the fair credit reporting act which was already too limited you know basically there all of these alternative credit scoring mechanisms where they're collecting all of your data online and inferring all this stuff about you and doing risk assessment of individuals and you know we don't have a sort of regulatory framework to bring that in and so that's something we're really looking at and right now I'm editing an issue of the nation on technology and politics and the frame of the issue is the way digital technologies are eroding sort of protections we've taken for granted so labor protections privacy protections equal opportunity protections and consumer protections and the consumer protections obviously dovetail with this this network because we have to start looking ahead and looking at the way there are yeah new resources for predatory lenders to exploit you know all these like new online payday loan shops opening up and stuff Silicon Valley investors hi so you've talked really about like use of the internet in terms of like against I guess private corporations and I was wondering if you thought that the power could also be used against the more political issues that are like the U.S. is facing today I'm talking a lot about like criminal justice reform mass incarceration Ferguson and I guess like you could say that like Egypt and Iran had similar issues I think the political landscape of the U.S. makes it a different I guess a different place for internet and harnessing the power of networks to operate in yeah but tell me the question like I guess like do you see the power of networks do you think it can be harnessed in the U.S. for things like criminal justice reform mass incarceration reform just systemic racism like we've seen with like Walter and all the like recent shootings yeah I mean I think we we have to and organizers are using social media really well on that but a lot of those it's interesting about those campaigns they're also really rooted it's rooted in Ferguson Ferguson is a place where I just yesterday was in Atlanta with a friend who was one of the founders of Defenders which is in Florida right so that's in Miami and she's now in Atlanta organizing around problems in Georgia so I feel like that's you know as opposed to debtors where we're like debtors who went to this for-profit school they're scattered you know there there's there is more sort of community organizing just from my conversation yesterday which she thought she was facing was just a lack of a lack of local infrastructure and that's one thing that you know local progressive political infrastructure has been so eroded and sometimes all we have is this thin layer of social media and there's not a lot grounding that and if people are gonna keep up these fights and we're in this amazing moment of awareness about criminal justice and we're seeing you know it's almost like we've all we can see the violence that's been perpetrated it's not that there are more shootings but suddenly we're in this moment where we can see them but manifesting some sort of change is gonna require the hard work of organizing and you need infrastructure and support for activists to do that so I feel like I almost feel like this is where the internet's taking off and then you need that grounded bit and that's how occupied it was I mean it cast this enormous shadow through social media that was but it was a shadow because it was ultimately a rather small enterprise and in a way couldn't handle the attention it kind of imploded under all of the attention I don't know that doesn't really answer your question One of the things you talked about was continuity which I thought was interesting as you know there's been a lot of criticism that Silicon Valley and these tech companies are doing stuff that exacerbate inequality and cause problems for you know the poor segments of society and I'm just wondering like to what extent you think it's possible to sort of tease that out or where do you stand on the problem being Silicon Valley and the more increased in technology networks versus this is just sort of inherent state of capitalism and things are corporations are powerful corporations have always been powerful Yeah I mean I agree with both of those things I mean I think you know the thing is now you have yeah it's like I don't know the Uber taxi driver thing it's like taxi drivers have been exploited for a long time but now you have Uber which can serve markets around the world and reap profits from around the world and those profits go to one place right so and then there are all these issues around you know is it an employer is it a platform and jurisdiction is it in and blah blah blah so continuity but also change I mean I think certain things have been intensified and the challenges of organizing labor unions are already having a hard time and the challenges have just so I guess my point is yes and and yes yes I mean a lot of the tactics are the same like to me it's interesting watching the Spotify's of the world just continue over the bad accounting practices of the record labels you know and the record labels have these terrible accounting practices because the record labels were built on you know stealing music from black musicians and then just being like letting the producers you know yeah white label owners and you know that but you know it's very ironic in this age of data tracking and metrics and nothing's easier than a spreadsheet that's right and yet it's not forthcoming so that's where we're at so I have a deep deep appreciation of the of the initiatives that you've talked about today and I find them to be incredibly precise fulcrums which I struggle in finding sometimes and so I one appreciation for that and two and do you think disclosing the process by which you find those fulcrums is more powerful in welcoming other people to do the same or will it make those processes visible to people who will then counteract them oh I don't know yeah I mean I kind of feel like they're going to go on which example are you thinking of specifically both any of it is it better to make it transparent but what will you do it or does that undermine the acrobatics yeah well I think for me I'm always looking for examples because sometimes it just seems like there's such a shortage of them so right now I'm airing on the side of sorry I think you're getting excited so I caught like last year four years ago I started working on this program where where I was I'm still putting it together to help teach high school students on how to start running their own business but part of it is you know I want them to learn technology and part of it is I want them to learn to run their own business because you know jobs are nonexistent now so people need to learn how to create it and so you know the whole thing has been bypassed right so first I had some guy who came up to me from Lord knows where you know saying okay you should download it down to a mentorship program and I was like no that's part of the program they need to get a mentor you know I can start working with this but not that and then just a couple months ago I hear well the new mayor is now starting his own mentorship program where he got the former vice vice CEO I don't know vice president or something really one of the sub-managers of Bank of America to start a mentoring program in the you know heart of duchess of manapin and you know people thought well I was going to be upset about it I'm like oh no great I mean you know Bank of America got what billions and billions of dollars of handout that they're calling handout you know bail out you know if anybody should you know is more qualified to help ghetto children you know who children in quotes on how to get money from the government it should be him you know step aside I'll still build my platform if you guys want to use it more you know more power to you but for a while you know people thought you know that sidetracked my project it's like no you know so it you know I battled with that for a while like you know I spent nights not sleeping you know I became kind of anemia because before I came to that conclusion like why am I stressing myself this is an opportunity here so I was great yeah I mean I'm assuming it's in both cases yeah any case where you're challenging power you get pushed back and we're not it's not an even play fight so you know transparency attention media are like one of the few tools in our toolkit so I that's why we err on the side of openness and and also because this is the first there have been debtor's movements before and revolts back in the progressive era and stuff but you know part of it is okay we're getting this idea out here here's a new avenue to attack inequality and maybe someone else will do it better than us we're totally open to that too I mean because we're a tiny group so yeah so we have we have time for one more question maybe if there's somebody who hasn't asked a question who's got one I think maybe we answered all the questions that's right we're done okay thank you