 Actually, it's big enough I am going to take the paper, just in case my phone dies. Meryl Stupendt paper. I know, I noticed. Good afternoon. Hello, hello. Hello, hello. Yay, welcome. Thank you, Max. Good afternoon. My name's John Bracken. I'm the Vice President for Technology Innovation at Knight Foundation. And good afternoon. I'm Jennifer Preston, the VP of Journalism at Knight Foundation. And it sounds like we have a raucous crowd here. Before we get too raucous, I want to remind you, we are streaming live on Facebook Live, so you have an audience of, a virtual audience that's not here with us. So hi, we'll try to speak up for you. So thank you so much for joining us, and thank you to Paley Center for having us. We're calling today 10 years forward and back, and we wanted to talk about what we've learned and what we're hoping for about the state of the Internet. Sort of the excuse for this conversation is that it's 10 years since we announced the first winners of the Knight News Challenge, and we use that as an excuse to bring together the 13 amazing set of speakers that you're going to see today. As some of you may recall, 2007 marked the change in how we used the Internet and how the Internet worked for the purposes of social conversations. It's the year that Twitter launched at South by Southwest. It's the year that Facebook really grew out of college dorm rooms. It's the year YouTube hosted the first presidential debates. And of course, it's the year that this thing was launched, the iPhone, which really changed a lot of the way we work. And it was the year that Knight Foundation started the Knight News Challenge. A lot of us had a strong sense of optimism about what the role of technology and the Internet could be for building community, for strengthening the way we communicate with one another. And I think more recently, a lot of us have focused more on the concerns, the downsides, the worries about false information, about propaganda, about bullying and hate, and the shift we've seen from spaces of civic discourse that were open and public to those that are closed and private. So in 2007, one of the wonderful things about the News Challenge is that it also changed philanthropy. Because what it did was that it opened Knight Foundation's doors to ideas from all over. And the question then was how might people and what projects might really serve, how might we use digital media technology to really serve people in communities in very much the way that newspapers did in the 20th century. And as John said, it was a period of tremendous optimism about open data, about the Internet. And so many of the great ideas that have come out of the News Challenge today served the optimism. And what we've seen is now many of the ideas, our most recent challenge, was aimed at helping address some of the troubling aspects of the Internet. So we'll get to talk about both sides of the spectrum today. Before we do that, we're going to do something, you know, you guys who are here physically saw the Wheel of Fortune exhibition upstairs. So today, before we're going to announce some winners, we're really excited to announce eight grants to past News Challenge winners, but we really want to double down on the success that they've been having. So the first one we want to announce is to code for science and society to support decentralized data services for academic and government institutions. Next, we want to announce the Columbia Journalism School to enable journalists to produce data journalism with technical skills. Data and society to support the Disinformation Action Lab to analyze and develop solutions to propaganda and disinformation threats. Janet Hayden. And to Document Cloud to Ted Hunt and Aaron Pilhofer. And Document Cloud, which has helped so many news organizations around the country, around the world, really get out information in a user-centric way. Emblematic group to support the use of photogrammetry to create 3D models for journalism VR projects. And next, M-Relief to make it easier for Americans to check their eligibility and apply for government programs. Shift Design to support the national rollout of HistoryPin's Story Box, which helps local libraries host community engagement events. Lastly, and not least, Code 2040 to support organizational growth and sustainability as part of its efforts to promote equity and inclusion in the tech industry. And I should say that the $3 million gift that Knight is rewarding is part of a $5.6 million investment that they're announcing today from an array of funders. Congratulations to all the work Code 2040 is doing. So next, we're going to begin the conversations. And I'm going to turn it over to John to introduce Jennifer and Paul. Jennifer and Paul, come on down. Jennifer and Paul, come up to the stage. Jennifer Palka is the founder and executive director of Code for America and has wherever you like, madam, and been involved and active with the news challenge for several years. Paul Steiger was among the things that were created in 2007 was ProPublica, one of the most important new initiatives in journalism of the last 10 years. Paul is the founder and also happens to be one of my bosses at Knight Foundation as a trustee. So we're really excited to have the two of you. I guess I'm going to awkwardly shift and come over here. Did you want to be in the middle and I took your chair? I'm just going to come off to the side so you guys can talk. No, no, you're making us feel uncomfortable. Come back. So where should we start? So Paul, what were you thinking in 2007 when you started this crazy idea of a nonprofit national journalism project and how do you think it's grown in the last 10 years and how does it fit in with where we are today? Well, thinking is too soft a word. I was praying it would work. And those of you who know what ProPublica is, it's a nonprofit investigative reporting team. And we came into existence because of what the other Jennifer alluded to a few minutes ago, but the downside of the Internet, which is that it completely destroyed the business model of journalism, particularly newspapers, and created a need for all kinds of remedial efforts to restore some of the balance, one of which was to mobilize technology, which has been, I think, a revolution in journalism. That's happened over the last 10 years and that's been possible because of all these developments, some of them funded by night in the tech world. And the particular focus we had was investigative reporting because it was the one that was most hammered by the destruction of the old business model. The other which somebody else will have to come along to do is international reporting, which was also hammered. But it's been an extremely exciting 10 years for us and I'm thrilled at what's happened so far and my successors have taken over running things, doing it much better than I could have done and I'm eagerly anticipating what they're going to do next. So Jen, I mean sort of Code for America arose at this time as journalism, especially local journalism was shrinking. How much has that driven the work you all have done, especially around open data and pushing out information in a way that's kind of untraditional for a way we would think about it from a journalism background? Yeah, we were just comparing notes about 2007, by the way. You forgot to mention the time that you took off to watch your football games. Well, that's true. January 1st and 2nd, but then January 3rd we started. I was trying to figure out what the roots of open data were in 2007. I was really thinking about, you know, I guess it was, you know, when did Barack Obama announce his candidacy? Because in 2007 I was all wrapped up in the world of Web 2.0. That's what I was doing was running this event that was all about, it was very optimistic times, all about the web coming back as the sort of participatory medium and all about what government data was going to do for us. And it was that moment when we had Sunlight Foundation people come to Web 2.0 and we had this room set aside for Web 2.0 developers to work on state data. I think it was that year. I think that was 2007. I'm trying to get my years right. But yeah, I remember it as the year of the iPhone and sort of the, for me sort of the dawning of the realization that government was going to be a player in this and that world of tech, media, journalism and that government was sort of now a player in it because they were bringing all the state together. And it was, I think one of the first times I think people in the Valley started paying attention to government and that sort of triad and saying, hey, there's really something interesting here. And I think it changed the kind of the relationship. And one of the things we were talking about before was when government comes to the table with data, it's not that actor in the room that we're trying to hold accountable as much. It's actually at the table with something good. And we think about it differently than when we are investigating malfeasance of some sort. It's actually playing with us in that way. And I think that was sort of what started to happen in 2007, 2008. We decided to do Gov 2.0, I think, in 2008, which was the first time we said, how do you apply the principles and values of the participatory web to not just the business of getting a new guy elected, but actually a job of governing. And I think that actually launched in 2009. So it was sort of this gradual, for me, awareness of a world that I didn't know coming more from the tech space. And it's a little daunting to look back at how positive we were then, how much we thought open data would change the world, and how much we thought this was a way that government would always be coming to the table in a more constructive way. I think that you have a marvelous list of some of the great things that governments brought to the table. I've heard you talk about geopositioning satellites, which think of everything that's hooked to that. I'm a New Yorker, but I wanted to check which subway route was better. And the geopositioning satellites helped me to do that. The weather reports, all are based on government data. But there also are fundamental problems with the way that government tries to use that data. And the challenge of getting bureaucracy to deliver it in its best form. I mean, one of the reasons that, one could argue, one of the reasons that the Affordable Care Act got such a bad reputation was that they didn't wheel out, it might have been an impossible task, but they did not wheel out the program that would allow you to sign up in a way that people could deal with it. The website didn't work when it launched. It did later work. It's good to remind us that it did end up working really well and we signed up more people than we originally thought we could before it even failed. But it was yet another just sort of punch in the gut of, yeah, if government can't do digital, then it really can't implement its policies. And I do think of that as particularly a watershed moment in a very practical sense. It was a watershed moment for a whole sort of, I guess, later step in this story, which is the creation of the United States Digital Service and the Technology Transformation Service, which are going to be part of this story as we look at the next 10 years. Those things really wouldn't have happened. I was trying to make them happen and I absolutely would have failed. I was in the process of failing at doing them until HealthCare.gov had such a rocky start because then it was like, oh, right, like you can't spend all of this time, all of your political will getting this thing packed and then have it fail, getting this thing passed and then have it fail because you can't do, you can't use the Internet, right? You can't make a website that works. Truth is, you can. And you said it was an impossible task. No, not an impossible task. Absolutely not an impossible task. But hard in a government context. And in the time frame. Yeah. I want to drill down on some of your lessons from that, especially in terms of the local work. But first, I want to remind you all of the folks watching, any questions you have for this dynamic duo, if you use hashtag news challenge, I will peel some out and ask that. Okay. So before I ask you guys about local and the lessons from HealthCare.gov and local, I'm just going to connect from a, in terms of night foundation history, one, I would say in 2007 that first set of grants we announced, one of them was to EveryBlock, which you remember very well. It was one of those sort of out of these sort of civic data government conversations. And Paul Smith, who was on the technical team at EveryBlock, of course, was on the rescue team that came in and worked with HealthCare.gov. So just linking this, a night foundation historical footnote. But can you guys talk? And Paul Smith now works with Dan O'Neill, who is at EveryBlock at ad hoc, one of the new vendors. And Dan O'Neill is the one who taught, well, Dan O'Neill and Max Ogden taught us how to get data out of governments. This combination of being nice and being mean. Sorry, I just had to throw in more history there. Combination of being nice and being... So how does the combination of nice and mean work differently at the local level? I mean, ProPublica's rolled out in Illinois, its first sort of local initiative. I know that the brigades and everything you guys have learned, that you learned when you were in Washington is now being rolled out locally. I mean, the example of nice and mean... This is way before Illinois project. This was our nursing homes project. And it's a perfect example of what's good and bad with government data. Government collects everything you can imagine about practically every nursing home in America. You know, how many beds do they have? How many stories? What zip codes are around it? And they also include things like how many patients escaped. How many patients escaped and died. How many failed tests there were. But if you try to go in and pull that stuff out, you can't do it because the interface sucks so bad that... Max and Dan O'Neill didn't fix that yet. What's wrong with you guys? It provided a great opportunity for ProPublica because what we did was, we said, we, I mean, my colleagues who can do this stuff said, look, we can write code that will allow you to easily extract which nursing homes are the best and which are the worst and where they're located. And an ordinary human being can do this. And then we said, okay, this is fine. We put up the big database. We updated every quarter, which is when the government updates it. But we said, this would be great for local TV stations because when there's new info that comes down, we can give that to them and it's something other than shootings and fires that they can put up on the evening news that has real relevance to their community. Which nursing homes are doing great and we can interview them or which nursing homes should be in jail and we can do interviews with them and say, oh yes, you might want to go to this website and you can look for yourself. So that's the combination. They have great data, they collect everything, but they're a little nervous about making it easy to offend people. Yeah, because they've been burned so often. Yeah, right. I was just on the phone with John Wonderlick at Sunlight talking about, I asked him first, what's his story he wants to talk about at our summit or Cook America Summit in May. And he said New Orleans and it was just funny because I think we did a project on blight in New Orleans back in 2012. And it's the same example. It's easier, I think, to get data at the local level if you are persistent because it's very, though you're right, they do collect a lot of data. I think when I got in this field I kind of had, my vision of it is like you get a data set and you do something with the data set. And it's not that, it's like a dozen data sets or like three dozen data sets in different formats that don't, where the fields don't match up. I mean it's just, it turned out to be a lot more complicated. But when people care, right, if you have elderly people in your family you may really care about the nursing home care in New Orleans people really cared about the blight set. So it was worth it to sort of persevere through the complexities, both technical and of course really human to make that data available to the people in New Orleans. So this was a project we did called Blight Status. We're previously really the only way you could understand the status of a blighted property in New Orleans was once a month when each individual data owner was sitting at a very long table. It's the only human data integration when they're all at the same table. And it's just interesting to think that that project is still having a deeper and deeper impact in government operations in 2017 where it's not just about getting that data out to the public but it's also about improving government because they have access to that data. I mean one of the things that has impressed me about what you've done in some of your various incarnations is sort of breaking down the walls between the bureaucrats and the public. Using only things like possums and fire hydrants and that kind of thing to get people to see that if they step up, you have a wonderful phrase that I've forgotten but don't complain lend a hand, it's more felicitous than that. I think it's said a lot of different ways. Some people say raise your hand before you point your fingers. Great, but that makes people feel like they can make a difference using these things. You know, in a place like Boston that occasionally has 12-foot snowfalls, you have people adopt a fire hydrant and if it's covered, they get notified by an app and they go out and fix it. Or if somebody thinks there's an animal in the nearby garbage can, they mention it on the website and they go in and let the possum out. Those are actual examples, right? Those are examples from Boston in 2011. And that kind of thing makes people more comfortable with each other but going from there to the big stuff where as you say there are multiple databases and you've got to get lots of people cooperating and interacting, that becomes more of a challenge. I think I would have thought 10 years ago that we would have gotten a little bit farther with this but it is still pretty amazing how much it's grown. I mean, if our civic notion as a country is that it's by the people, that we do this by the people, we're not doing as good a job as we should in 2017 of letting people raise their hand and say I want to work on this and then giving them a good way to do that, whether that's getting data from their local government or federal government and making something of it or figuring out how to help their neighbor. But I think I'm also kind of amazed. So we had this Congress of our brigades, our local communities. We have 76 of them around the country. Miami was there in full, really showing off their great stuff around working with Texas after the hurricanes had sort of swept through the country. Rebecca Monson, shout out. Amazing. Yeah, totally amazing. Julie Kramer, amazing. Sketch City in Houston. Sketch City in Houston is a Coach America brigade responded to Hurricane Harvey, built a bunch of tools, a bunch of stuff, and then just called up Miami. It was like, here you go. We have, I think, seven brigades in Florida. So they took them and now that's sort of turning into stuff. So you actually had really on show amongst these 76 communities, really concrete, visible, beautiful examples of people saying, yeah, it's, you know, I'm going to raise my hand. The other thing we say, where our favorite laptop sticker these days is, no one is coming, it is up to us. Which I think is, which actually came from Matt Weaver who was on the Healthcare.gov rescue. But it is up to us and we got to do a much better job in the next 10 years of making that us really aware of what we can all do together. And I think that bridges that, I mean it's always been, I think, the same community, but even tighter ties between the journalism community and that government community. In journalism, you know, we talked about the downside of the web and how it destroyed the business model. But the upside is that there has been a revolution in journalism over the last, maybe a little more than 10 years. But certainly the last 10 years have been the most dynamic where technology has transformed journalism in a way that's just as profound as the invention of the telegraph, the photograph, the lithograph, radio, television, you name it. You know, I mean, my last year at the Wall Street Journal, we won the public service Pulitzer Prize for a story that involved a significant amount of tech and it also pissed off the tech industry. This was about back-dating of options and I won't, trust me, it was a fraudulent way that companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere used while competing to hire folks and they didn't really have to do it, but it was easy and they did it and it went right up to Steve Jobs, who was the one who called me up in London and chewed me out for 40 minutes, but we were right. But to do that story, one of the things we had to show that was that to do with these companies said they had done with their options would have required more good luck than a $1 bet winning the megabucks and I had a young reporter, a math major, who could write the equations but I had to go and beg the business side to use their servers to crunch the numbers for hours overnight while they weren't using them. In those days it would take me days or weeks if I could do it at all to do something that now a couple of people in the office will not wait for a scribbler to ask them to do it. They will think of the story and in half a day they'll have it done because there are now people that have both the genes and the training to write code and the genes and the training to think about news and that combination has meant that you can get databases crunched, you can get ideas for stories, all kinds of things that simply could not happen. Now happen because a 25-year-old coder is standing near the elevator with two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and the journalists say we just can't scrape this data, it doesn't work. The young man says there's no data that I can't scrape and they go down, they get some sandwiches, they come back upstairs and the data scraper discovers well this is part of the night thought but I can do it and they work together for a few weeks and all of a sudden they have an app that we call Dollars for Docs that still delivers anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000 pages a day. This is a revolution in impact for society. That so reminds me of Max Ogden in Boston City Hall except for the part where he says it's harder than I thought. Everything always seemed easier than I thought. Manushan Twitter just said wow this is more positive than I thought it was going to be and so I'm going to pull in a couple questions that maybe will take us in a less positive way. You guys are just the first of many. But I want to ask you both about the state of the industries from which you come over the last 10 years and where things are. Paul, one question to you was what do you think of the last 10 years of the Wall Street Journal? I would broaden that and say what do you think of the last 10 years of where traditional journalism newspapers have gone? And then Jen, for you, partly thinking about the great work that Code 2040 is doing that we just mentioned. You've been in the tech industry for a decade plus. How do you think we, they are doing? Are we on issues of equity and inclusion? Are we where you thought we would be today 10 years ago? In the tech industry? Can I decline? I'll let Paul go first. I anticipated that. I was why I coupled them together to give you a minute. You know, the Wall Street Journal is still one of the, you know, three or four or five best newspapers in the country. Everybody has changed. The Wall Street Journal was, I was still there. We had a visionary CEO who said content has value and we charged for our content from the first day. It took other people. Remember, information wants to be free. Sorry, if you can't get people to pay for advertising, the only way you're going to be able to pay your reporters is if you can get them to pay for the content. So, there has been, at the national level, I think the combination of what the internet and faster and faster computers and phones and all of the other changes in technology that has counterbalanced the hammering of the financial model. At state and local, the negatives are way out weighing the positives. But I'm hopeful that, and optimistic that over time, we'll find a way to support this kind of journalism at the state and local level. This is why my colleagues at ProPublica have come up with the Illinois project, which is a pilot to see if our model can work doing that kind of journalism. Thank you, Paul. Now you can bring us in on the state of the tech industry. As much as you like. I mean, I feel a little bit like it's unfair because we, you know, certainly the civic tech community is not perfect and not perfectly diverse in the way that it should be, but it is a little different from the tech industry at large. Certainly the numbers show that it's different. It's just a more diverse community that's driven by, I would say, a set of values that are connected to the tech industry. There's sort of borrowing of the sort of ambition and optimism of the tech industry, but are really much more grounded in a sense of, well, we're talking about the name ProPublica and our tagline. You know, we reference for the people by the people a lot in our work. Really, a different sense of the commons as being for everyone, not just sort of the commons that we've created in Facebook, et cetera. There's just a little bit of a different set of values, so it's very hard to... I don't really know that I work in the tech industry. I feel like I work in a slightly different, I'll say, corner of it that I really like and is not perfect either, but one thing I would just say is that when we talk about all of this stuff and Paul was talking about a chance encounter with a set of journalists and someone who knows data really well, I mean, all of this is happening because of human capital and connections and redefining roles. It's these hybrids, these people who didn't exist. Most of what gets done today in my world and I think in your world to know is certainly the job titles and job roles that we had before and the new job titles and new roles that didn't exist before, and they happen because we're bringing different communities together. For me, it's all about the intersections of things. It's all about not one thing and a different thing, but something new, like data journalism, like design in government, whatever it is. We kind of feel like you have to build the human capital community for government that works in a digital age in a way that matches the country we're trying to govern. So we've made a big effort towards diversity, I think in the tech industry. It's still pretty bad, I guess. We're still fighting a lot of fights that we should have thought a really long time ago. One gets in for a really optimistic closing and then you gave us a dose of realism. A dose of realism. I have a piece of optimism here. You know, I mean, here we have someone of the female persuasion who knows from tech like crazy. You know, we both went to Yale. I knew you were going to get that in there. But she got into, Jen got into the Bronx High School of Science, which is, you know, no way could I have gotten into Bronx Science. And I have, I hope you're a new friend, but I have another friend, Jessica Lesson, who was a star reporter right off the Harvard Crimson for the journal, but then she left and started her own expensive $400 a year website called The Information. And one of the things that she did recently was to break the story. It's not, you know, as colorful as Harvey Weinstein's depredations, but about these, a couple of these funders in Silicon Valley who would invite, there are now women with startups looking for funding. They invite the women to meet them at a hotel and they arrive and the desk clerk says, oh, you've got to call up to his room. And he says, I've got a suite. Why don't you meet me at the suite? And you know, some women say, you're not in your life, dude. And but others go up there and he, you know, chases them around the desk. And if they don't do what he wants, they don't get any money. And he denied it. He threatened to sue, you know, all kinds of things like that. Did the story anyway. And this was before they came out in the Times. Jessica really, I think, broke that. Yes. She did a great job. Now, you know, the Times stuff was spectacular. I mean, you know, getting, breaking through the walls that Harvey had set up, that was a tremendous bit of reporting. But so was what Jessica did. It was spectacular. And that set off a cascade of women coming forward in Silicon Valley. So, you know, on the one hand, it exposes a seamy underside of human nature. But the other thing is it shows that women are in two positions of power. They're doing startups and they're in a position to expose the bad stuff that's going on. That was a good way to tie it back all in. Things are changing. Thank you guys so much. We're going to step aside now. Jennifer is going to lead us in the second conversation. So. Thank you. Thank you guys both so much. Jennifer is going to welcome, I think, Yancey and Sally. And I'll let you do the introduction while saying that. Yes. So, Yancey and Sally, why don't you join us up here on the stage. And in 2007, Sally, I know in your background as a foreign correspondent and as a journalist in some of the world's trouble spots, I feared that you may have been in one of those in 2007, which you can tell us a little bit about that. And Yancey, we're really looking forward to you telling us so much about how you got Kickstarter started. So, I guess in 2007, I was based in Cairo. It was before the revolution in Cairo. And it was responsible for coverage of all of the Mideast, including the Iraq War. So, I think from that time to this time, there's a couple of things. I found a lot of resonance in what? So, after I did that, I went to what is probably as far away from that as you could possibly do, which is to be Washington Bureau 2 for the AP. Did that for a couple of years through to presidential cycles and now based in New York. I think that there's just been so much change, so much of it bewildering, but also so much of it deeply optimistic in journalism and so much of it completely tied to digital transformation, technology. I found a lot of resonance in a lot of what Paul said about how journalists actually use technology these days. I think it is so different than it used to be. I kind of think there was a time back in 2007 where you thought of data as like this sort of rabbit hopping around the newsroom or something, right? It was a thing, right? And what I have found the most transformative is that ordinary journalists now use technology and use data just simply as one of the other tools in their reporting toolbox. I mean, we tried a couple of years ago in Washington to just completely try to demystify this as much as possible. You have tools as a person trying to get information. Those tools include your ability to get people to talk to you and they include the ability to look at numbers and other information and get information, usable information of that. I still think there's some work to be done on that. I think that there still is a little bit of a... I'm fascinated by one of the grants. I know Columbia has worked really hard to try to get the connection between what you think of as people who understand news and journalism and people who can use technology. And when I go out and talk to people at schools or whatever, I say that's what needs to be focused on, right? I mean, that is the real critical thing. In some newsrooms, there still are divides between the people in one corner who can code and the people who have the news instincts. But everything that we've been trying to do the last 10 years has been to break down that boundary and create cohesive teams where people are teaching other the stuff because it really makes a huge difference. We have a story on the wire today, on our app today that's about a hospital in a psychiatric hospital in Hawaii that has a really big walk-away problem. And somebody walked away and did a bad crime. And I don't think that my state reporters based in Honolulu, 10 years ago, were using data to break news. And now they are. And that's just such an important breakthrough because that means that... And it's not just us. It's... If anybody went to the committee to protect journalists dinner last night, a lone blogger with a little bit of training in Yemen who can be an important voice of information for her country now in London. So I think there's a lot of negative things happening in the media. Obviously the rise of fake news is an incredibly difficult challenge for all of us. But there's a ton of... I feel very optimistic personally. So what I heard there was not just tools, but culture change. Absolutely. It's like a real shift on a change in the culture. Right. In newsrooms and just the way of thinking. And when you look at fundraising, my goodness, like Kickstarter really just changed the way that so many people are now supporting startups and social good. Yeah. So how did it all begin? What's up, y'all? Nice to see you. Yeah. I was taking you back there. Well, 2007, I was actually working as the editor-in-chief of a music magazine. So that's what you expected to hear, I'm sure. But yeah, a platform called eMusic. It was the first music subscription service. In my life before Kickstarter, I was a music critic for eight years, writing for The Voice and City Pages and Spin Entertainment Weekly, things like that, just reviewing records. And so that was my life at the time. But a couple of years before that in 2005, I had met a person who's my co-founder and Kickstarter, one of my two co-founders, Perry Chen, when he was working as a waiter in a restaurant where I was a regular. And he had had this idea of a new way to fund creative projects. He proposed an idea online. People put up their credit cards, but no one is charged unless it sells out. And so we decided to start working on that. But I came from that as a writer and as a person who cared about those things. And yeah, so I think I'm representing the... I'm standing in the utopian corner for the Internet. I think Kickstarter is a very utopian product. Like anybody with an idea, anybody can put up the money. There's verification systems, et cetera, but it's largely based on trust and an honor system. And it works fabulously. Three and a half billion dollars changing hands based on trust and enthusiasm for new ideas. So I think that the utopian dream is alive and well. It's just overshadowed by monopolistic corporatization and heavy control. And that is going to undo us unless we think of a way out of it. We were talking about this on the phone a little bit the other day about this idea of whether... To me, what has happened in the last 10 years seems to make very much sense. And I don't come from a tech background to be perfectly frank about it. There's one thing up and you have an optimism that this means that people can communicate more with each other. Dark corners of the world can actually... Information can come from there. People can connect in different ways. Those are all very great things. And I think a ton of that has actually happened over the last 10 years. But that same power that's inherent in that, obviously people who want to spread misinformation and people who want to manipulate information, they have the same access to that. And so, to me, it's much more the less 10 years are... Like, the battle is joined, right? Much more than there was going to be a utopia and that was just going to be the absolute sort of outcome of it. I mean, I find that my own organization is incredibly more transparent than it was 10 years ago. It's probably not nearly as transparent as it needs to be, but in terms of whether the folks who interact with our journalism, whether they have more of a say in what we do and if they have more influence on how we think, absolutely 100%. It's like night and day to me. And I think that's what the point of it was was to give a bigger voice to everyone. Yeah, it's funny that... I don't think that you were saying this, but I think that there is a sense that, like, there are wrong voices out there or discourse is broken. Right. Which is amazing, considering, like, these are just all ideas that live in the minds of human beings and the idea of, like, some of those things, it's a hard place to draw a line and we're just simply being exposed to what's actually there. And, you know, I was thinking about this today, like, institutions are very... All of our institutions in America are based on a shared sense of values that is either implicit or explicit. And the Constitution depends on, like, there are six things we all agree we're going to do here. We don't lie, we don't, whatever, we don't murder each other. There's some basic set of things and right now it feels like we're lacking that in culture completely and in American culture in particular, but then, you know, I was thinking, actually, well, when we look at the Constitution as our values, actually, maybe we're killing it according to our values. What are the top two American values according to the U.S. Constitution? Freedom of speech and right to bear arms. This is America at its most Americanist, you know? Like, number three, no soldiers are living in our homes. Like, check on that, too. So maybe this is the plan and maybe it's just that the folly of mankind, the way that we build systems, the way that we try to force order and a simple model upon a world where there is no such thing, is, again, to produce these things that are very uncomfortable for us, which is challenging for us, but they're all true. I mean, I think that's a really good point and I also think that, you know, when you talk about something like, do people believe in facts anymore, right? And I've been in a, I'm sure you all have, too, a lot of seminars last year where it's like facts, no one in the world believes in facts. And I mean, there's a lot of people in the world who believe in facts, okay? And there's clearly a couple of folks right now who, for various reasons, have decided that they don't want to believe in some facts or something like that. But that's just the truth of our, that's just like the truth of our world. That's not, to me, something that means, I'm not expressing myself very well, but there are a lot of people who seek out factual information when it is important to them, okay? And I mean, if you go and buy a car, you want to know what the car's price is, what the loan, you know, capabilities that you can get, you seek out factual information. And so it's, I don't see much evidence that people don't seek out facts. I do see evidence that sometimes they don't believe the messenger and they don't, they want, or for some reason, they decide not to believe specific facts. Often those are for political reasons. But to me, that sort of, I kind of get a kick out of the idea that, you know, we all worry that trust in institutions is falling. I think it's good for institutions to have to, to regain that trust every minute, right? I would rather work for an institution that every day has to go out there and say, this is why you should trust us today because this is what we did today. And I think that's a healthy thing. There's a lot of pain around it and we've all lived through a lot of pain. There's no question about that. And there are a lot of folks who are actively trying to move around dangerous misinformation in our world. And we're very focused on America, but there's a lot of, I think the Rohingya thing that's going on right now is a fascinating and very scary but also illuminating example of the dangers loose in our world in terms of, do you believe in eyewitness information? How do you need to know that it's eyewitness information? What is the level of proof that you need to know that it's eyewitness information? But those are all really interesting and important questions for us to grapple with going forward. You know, what I think when I hear you say these things is about, that I think there's a difference in attention between fact and truth. And that you can read an article that is full, that has all facts and contains no truth. And I think truth is more emotional. Truth is more melodramatic. Truth is not just rationality. Truth is feeling. Truth is history. Truth is acknowledging whatever the broader scope of things. And I think truth is more important than facts, but it's harder. Definitely. It exposes the relativism of all life. Right. And I think a lot of the things that we may be saying, people aren't listening to the right facts, that may be true, it's also possible that they might be listening to the right deeper truth. And it's hard to know where, like, which is which, but I don't, like, I think if we knew everything, right, if we knew every fact in the universe, this is no different. We're in the exact same position because it's about something deeper than fact. Right. Well, which is why journalism plays such an important role in providing context. Right. So if 10 years ago the internet created incredible, like, culture change inside newsrooms and just democratized the way that people could contribute and support artists and then startups, and now your latest feature at Kickstarter. Looking ahead, how might the internet help support journalism, help support trust in media, in information, in news? Well... We have a whole... Well, you know, it begins by getting people out of the feeds. Every day, every moment that you spend swimming in a feed of other people's thoughts like you are stuck in mud, you are not going to go anywhere. There's no truth in feeds. There's facts in feeds. I found myself recently wanting an editorial publication that only has a 10-year horizon. It only reports on things that started at least 10 years ago so we can actually know the reality. It's not just a press release of it launched. It's like, what is that? Is that a real thing? Is that not a real thing? But it takes a willful separation from networks and feeds that are just creating a hive mind of mushy nothingness in your brain and finding a way to be separate from it. And I think that's what great... Any great thinking, whether it's philosophy or journalism or a great film does, but I think that to me is still where we are trying to get people. Sounds like the printed version of newspapers. I think there's a lot of that already going on. I felt much less optimistic about the future of how journalism was going to make money and keep its... Well, not make money, but keep itself going. Self-fund itself. Five years ago, then I did now. I feel much more optimistic about that. I don't feel totally optimistic about it. I think there's a lot of completely rocky roads still ahead, but I think there's some little shoots shooting up. One of them is nonprofit journalism or disinterested philanthropies trying to push investigative reporting. I agree that I think geographic diversity and states in the U.S. and pockets of overseas are the neglected places and the places where hopefully a lot of the future interest in this goes. I had this fascinating fight with two of my relatives a couple of years ago at the Thanksgiving dinner table. This was before our families had fights at Thanksgiving dinner table. We always had them, anyway. But they both work for very prominent technology companies in America, and they were both essentially Internet utopians. I love them both very dearly, but they were talking to me about how all information should be free. At that point, I was in Cairo, and I was trying like mad to take my tiny little news budget and cover a war that the United States of America was involved in in Iraq. And I was like, information is not free. Good information is not free. I'm sorry. I've got to keep people safe in Baghdad, and I have to be able to get them to report news for you to know what's going on in Baghdad. And if you think that you don't need me and you just need a blogger, then that blogger needs to have... I'm not speaking that you have to believe in old-fashioned news organizations, but someone's got to be there as an independent observer and an independent voice and tell you what's really going on in that country. Because if you think that either the Iraqi government or the terrorist or the U.S. government are giving you the full truth, that's not the case, okay? And I was really angry at them that they thought that they could get information and they didn't understand that it actually created... it needed resources to create information. So in the last year, both of those relatives have said to me that they understand the difference. I mean, I call it good information and bad information. Let's say something. Let's say fact-based journalism and non-fact-based journalism. And I agree that there's a difference between facts and truth, but I think facts are an incredibly important underpinning to truth. As long as there are billionaires in the world, media will be easy to fund, right? I mean, why not? Why not buy your own newspaper or publication or whatever? They might want their own... they might want to influence it in ways. Yeah, exactly, of course. That's why. That's why they'll do it. But I think about like what is... like how about, you know, how about Gawker and Gothamists in DNA Info? Like how about three of the early pillars of web publishing, you know, murdered? Murdered. Not because that they weren't providing value, because they were providing value or they agitated for something more. But just gone. Like, that just happens. We're all going like, oh, that's no big deal. Gawker was terrible. Whatever Gothamists, it was click-baity sometime. Whatever. I can find Tompkins Square dog parade Halloween pictures somewhere else. But yeah, I mean, that's coming. That's not stopping. That's like, oh, that just happened those couple times in 2016, 2017. No, that's a wave that's going to continue. Yancy, you can just share with us like tremendous insights about what you've learned about crowdfunding at Kickstarter and how might what you've learned since 2007 about the way and what people will support. What lessons might be applied to support quality journals? You know, crowdfunding is a solution of many solutions. I would maybe take a step back and think about what you get out of that and what Kickstarter has, which is just the lesson is you have to be your own bitch. Like, someone's going to control you. Someone is going to write a check for you. Like, as much as you are in control of that and not someone who you're not close with, that makes the biggest difference. And so I think that means that does mean charging for things that does or it just means not paying yourself or guess what, y'all? Like, none of us are making money on this. We're just doing it to do it. But there have to be a trade-off there. If the trade-off you're making is, oh, no, we're going to get a lot of money and we're just going to grow ourselves away to where we can be powerful and do whatever you want. You know, that's never going to work. You're always selling something. And if it's your soul, you should know it from the beginning. So as a... So you came to Kickstarter as a music critic as an artist with a real appreciation what might journalists and journalism learn from artists? Well, you know, I think it's maybe... It's about having a clear vision of difference. You know, as an artist, your practice is about, like, what is unique about you? You know, you're in a market of there's, like, okay, there's a billion painters who cares. But, like, what is that specific angle? And then, like, just owning that so hard, you know, it only becomes about difference. And that's how you build an identity. And that's how you build a brand. And you could try to do that by saying, like, we're everything to everybody, whatever. Like, no one believes you. Weirdly, the more specific you are, charging $400 a year for the information, like, that's attractive. Like, oh, that person seems so confident. They know what's going on. I want to be a part of what they're doing. So it's like taking a harder, bolder stand and being willing to sacrifice. The law of sacrifice is something I believe in. If you want to get something for people, you've got to give something up. And so, if that's trust, then that means there are other things you're going to have to trade on. And maybe that nice office in Flatiron and the nice 20-inch monitors for your designers is something you're not going to be able to afford. And Sally, we just have a minute or so left looking into the future. Let me see. Yancey, looking into the future, you're stepping down as CEO of Kickstarter. Is there a newspaper in your future to own and to guide? The Yancey Gazette publishes daily. It will have a big music section. No, but I'm convinced even our new ideas are too old. And I believe very strongly we need very different ways to think about the future. And that's what I'm about. And so there's more to come from you on that. Great. And Sally, on a note of optimism as the last panel. I would express that. I think that what I think is important going forward is I agree completely that the pace of change almost has to increase more dramatically than less dramatically. But what I've been trying to think and to somehow find ways to express is that the values of organizations, like my organization, stay exactly the same. I don't want to change the values. It's accuracy. It's facts. It's fairness. It's those sorts of things. And I don't want to change the values of my organization, but I want to change the nimbleness and the way we communicate, the accessibility, all the things that you're sort of talking about, the approach to the world. All of that I think is the place where we need to put our best folks and think and change. And I've found that that, you know, I'm curious how to express that the best way so that it really captures that. That's sort of the very optimistic but also difficult challenge that I see ahead of us, though. Thank you very much for joining us today. I have the pleasure of inviting Nancy Lublin, the founder and CEO of Crisis Text Line, to join us and Eric Gunderson, the founder and CEO of Mapbox to join us. And Nancy already did the mic drop. She did the mic drop before even getting on stage. This time I'm going to sit in the middle. Hi guys. Are you on? Yep, you're on. So both of your projects, I mean, you have pretty different projects that I want you to talk about, but they both depend on engaged communities that you probably wouldn't engage without these little mobile things in our pockets. So maybe I'll start with you, Nancy, and maybe you guys can... I'm going to try to stay out of it so you guys can bounce off each other because you guys are such shrinking violets for two of you. But Nancy, how dependent are you and how did you build this community that allows Crisis Text Line to be what it is? The community was the biggest surprise. Here, I'm going to slide this way because I can't see a lot of people. The community was the biggest surprise of this. When we first built this, we really thought about the textures as our audience and we thought... I mean, we always thought that they would glob onto this because it's common usage, it's text, they know how to text, and that's the primary way people communicate. What we didn't expect was this community of crisis counselors to be as vibrant as it is. So when we first launched, we thought we would be the pipes and we put out an RFP to crisis centers to actually do the counseling, you guys should come in and sit down. It's okay. Or shrink, that's fine. Anyway, so... That's Jackie, you're going to meet her tomorrow. Okay, cool. And so we launched with three crisis centers and then our volume went bananas and we quickly had six crisis centers and then 11 and we said, well, they're all really disparate, they're saying different things. So we tested like a magic 12th cohort and scraped best practices and we trained our own crisis counselors and very quickly saw that they outperformed on every KPI. They were faster, they had higher quality ratings, and they were volunteers. We weren't paying them and we were paying these other crisis centers. So we said, well, let's do that. So in 2015, we pushed those crisis centers off and we pivoted completely to our own crisis counselors who we trained. Is anybody here a crisis counselor? Hi! Hi, Sam. In the last... In just the last 28 days, we have almost 3,800 SAMs. And so it's... It's a really vibrant community. People travel around the country to meet each other and it's incredibly diverse. There's about three dozen active duty military personnel. There's about three dozen deaf crisis counselors. There's a lot who are rural. We have a handful in Dubai. It's really, it's pretty awesome. And Eric, you also are an incredibly successful young startup that also works with an engaged community of folks. Can you tell a little bit of that story and like, would you exist without the community that supports you? No, so I started... I started Mapbox with a group of... with a group of developers that grew out of a project called Development Team. We're literally on the ground working with the UN, working with the World Bank, trying to help people tell stories with data. But you're working in these austere environments. There's no... There's no map to tell that story on. And so much of data is geo. Well, the reason there wasn't any map in a lot of these places was because the people in those places couldn't make the map themselves, right? I mean, mapping used to be just a historically bit of very capital intensive process. So going back to 2007, you have this moment when digital maps weren't new. We had these online, but in 2007 when the iPhone came out, the map started being drawn right around a blue dot. And this is a moment where the map starts forming around you. But the problem was there wasn't any data to power that map yet. But there was this growing community. It was about, let's say, five or six years old, called OpenStreetMap. And similar qualities to Wikipedia, where you could start going in and adding your house, adding your road, adding context about a neighborhood that you live in or where you grew up. This is an incredibly profound moment where everybody's looking back on this being like, this has been proven now. But when you and I first met, the idea of crowdsource data from a local community seemed crazy to many folks. And you start having this nexus of... It seemed a little crazy to me too, to be honest, but you talked me into it. I hope a little later in the conversation we talk about how communities work with technology and how do you fund it from a sustainability standpoint. Jen was talking about some of the open data pieces and where the open source component comes in. The reality is to continue to nurture community, it's just like any kind of diet. You need a lot of support from different diverse aspects. So yeah, no. It's been an amazing couple years where a combination of a really rich community and key investments from new satellite imagery to better sensors on the phone all starts creating this amazing feedback loop. And the best thing of all is now in places all around the world there's a map to help us make better decisions about where we live. I think that's incredibly profound. And you guys help fund that. So what's this year been like for you guys? I mean, I think for a lot of us, as I said in the opening, the last year has been a moment of reflecting on what did we get wrong, were we overly optimistic. I mean, Nancy, you work with the most critical context people can be in in the course of their daily lives. How has this year been different or similar from the first five years of CTO? This year has been very busy. So I'm in the pain business and there's a lot of people in pain. I would count this year for us as kicking off an election night. So an election night at one point, were you on that night, Sam? Were you on the platform? No. One point in time that night we were saying eight times normal volume it was ridiculous. And there was three groups of people. LGBTQ Textures and the number one word they used was scared. Immigrants and children of immigrants who were worried about being deported. And the third group was sexual assault survivors. I personally took a conversation with someone who had been raped that day who said, should I bother going to the police? Who's going to believe me when we just elected a pussy grabber? So that was the beginning of a long year. Also things like you had major suicides in the last year, Chris Cornell and Chester Bennington from Lincoln Park who was a real icon for like a music journalist for a particular age group of feelers. And then I don't know if any of you watched 13 Reasons Why or Know About It or have a kid who watched it. That was brutal. So I'm really fun at cocktail parties right now. What one good thing though is sad liberals are great volunteers. So we have seen, we have fortunately, because essentially we're a marketplace, much like Kickstarter, we're hiring if you're looking. So we're a marketplace so I don't control supply but I don't control demand. So demand has clearly been bonkers in the last year but supply, starting with the election has also gone up. We've had tons of sad liberals who in addition to funding resistance things and thinking about running for office are also like I want to volunteer and I want to do something that matters and so our volunteer numbers have also gone up and especially went up in the first part of the year. So it's been a very interesting year. I'll leave it with, it took us four years to the first 50 million messages back and forth. So it's gone through the second 50 million. Before I go to Eric for your 2017 report I'm still looking for questions so hashtag news challenge if you have questions. Sorry, I didn't meant to do that earlier. Look, aside from the personal pain over... Seven for one, seven for one if you need it. I mean there have been some amazing times and one of the things I was not expecting on this is how do you help add context? When I was getting developments you started, the person I was starting with in Ward we meant literally protesting in front of Dick Cheney's house during the war. You grew up and you're just like I've seen shit. And now you have this incredibly idealistic group of people that you get to work with every day that actually grew up under one of the most amazing presidents we've ever had in our history. And I don't know, I just... I never thought I'd... It's been an interesting moment of feeling a little old. I appreciate you calling me young here. But to actually try to add context... I said you have a young startup. To actually add context also. To help focus on what is so exciting. And for me what's been so exciting this year is you've seen mainstream adoption of open data and open source at a level that's just exquisite. And I think what... Some of what we're seeing on the open... on the open data side is going to be the key ingredient for a lot of machine learning and artificial intelligence. And now to look back at a project that I started years ago being even better hands with Ian Shuler. What developments he's doing. You have new open data and new satellites from NASA and how they're starting to process to be able to have better estimates of hurricane strength. There's this amazing moment where what we've been building for the last couple years is starting to hit a curve like this. Now the downside of hitting a curve like this I think was brought up in regards to just some of the inherent consolidation that starts happening. Because whoever has access... Deep learning works is it learns from something. So whoever has access to that learning corpus is going to very quickly start accelerating. And I think we're at this moment now where some of the open data work that's been invested for years and years and years is starting to become a really powerful corpus for all of us to benefit from a level machine learning that can really help us out. Are you optimistic about machine learning? How are you guys incorporating it into your work? I'm optimistic about how we're going to use it. We're going to use it faster and more accurate. That's what we're doing now. I'm creeped out by some of the companies who call us and want to train on our data corpus. Our corpus is really valuable. It's tagged by humans on both sides. It's unstructured data corpus. It's all sentiment. I don't fault them, but there are some creepy-ass companies out there that you're all using every day that call and say things like can we train on your set? Well, if you don't give it to us, we can get it other ways. Which is like putting me on notice. Would you like... I'll bet you're interested in outcome data, Nancy. Like, what happens to your textures afterwards? And I'm like, that would be nice to know. Like, we... And they're like, well, we can give it to you because we can scrape it and tell you the last time they logged in with us and if they're still alive. Just give us all your mobile numbers. Are you getting me? No, this is... It is... It is increasingly terrifying what is possible with random pieces of data. And, you know, we have this notion of, you know, PII. That's like... Most of that's like a social security number or something. The more scary data, it's the stuff that's not PII, right? I mean, being in the location business, if you do not design your systems from an anonymized data collection standpoint from the start, things get freaky, right? So I do... We are really trying to share best practices with other developers because anybody building an app that has anything to do with the location starts becoming that kind of vector. And if you don't talk about best practices of anonymizing data, certain kind of encryption technology, and we're spending a lot of time talking about that in context of AWS because that's accessible. If you don't start sharing these best practices, you can really open up a lot of different vectors of different apps. So it's so layered also because it's true. So we've got the mobile carriers have agreed to dump everything and to pull us from billing statements. But we're on AWS. We use Twilio. And there's so many other ways to get at our stuff. You're welcome. And then there's not common rule sets like how long should you hold on to things? And how should automated scrubbing work? And I mean, there's just... There aren't set practices. I am also on the board of change.org. Change.org has an enormous data set that's very interesting, especially when you consider the amount of work that change.org does in, like, Russia. And the Russian activists who have really relied on change.org. And, I mean, lives are at stake. If someone were to get a hold of the names of the Russian activists who have uploaded some of these petitions, it's very sketchy. And yet there aren't common rule sets on encryption. I was really hoping that DJ was going to be able to get this done when he was in the White House. Yeah. The DJ Patel was going to be able to get this done during the Obama administration and issue a paper on here are best practices on privacy and security. I know there are a lot of people in the room who are working on this. We need, like, a Hippocratic oath. We need some common set of standards for what it means to carry a blue lightsaber in this space. You're teeing up some of the later conversations. Oh, sorry. My question from Twitter, from Erin, is do you have any sense of how participating as a counselor has changed the counselors? Or can you, like, how does it change you? I have a 12-year-old daughter and so she looks at me all the time and is like, Mom, your crisis text lining me again. So it's definitely so it's definitely changed, like, the way that I talk. Here's a couple of, like, tidbits. You never want to use a why question, so questions that start with the word why are just, they're useless. You won't get good information out of people. It sounds kind of sending, it's negative. Better questions start with how or when. The best words you can use are smart, proud, and brave if you want to make somebody else feel strong. There's sentence structures, all that kind of stuff. And so I was talking to Wendy Kopp about this. Teach for America, when it first started, thought that it was all about student outcomes and what they've realized along the way is that actually the core members, something like 70% of them stay in education after their two years of service. And so they've done all these studies on what's the impact on having these tens of thousands of core members out there in the world caring about public education. So we talked to their evaluators and we're probably going to hire them or other evaluators to look at what's the impact of our crisis counselors. We've now trained 10,000 people in these Jedi skills. Hmm, second Star Wars reference. In these Jedi skills there's empathy and cultural competency and having hard conversations who are now, like, out there on military bases and in churches and cul-de-sacs. And, you know, they're real-life people on two legs. And what's the impact? I don't know yet. So I want to touch on what, and I don't know how much you're thinking about this, Nancy, but Eric, I know you're spending a lot of time outside of the US. As you think about the next 10 years, what are you learning about from China? What are you learning about from India? What are you learning from Southeast Asia? And what is going to, in terms of, you know, Knight Foundation works and thinks locally about communities here in the United States. What should we be anticipating based on what you're learning? What's emerging? Yeah, one of the depressing anecdotes from the panel right before was talking about, you know, as newspapers have come under increasing pressure, international reporting budgets have been cut. I'm in China almost every two months right now. I don't. It is, you know, there's a notion here in America that things are done fast, things are done cheap. You know, I'm going for a run in Shanghai. The sidewalks are perfect. The quality of transportation there, their bike share system in regards to dockless bikes is beyond last mile. Their payment system in regards to mobile pay and banking sector for an unbanked... It's just like, you know, the innovation is going to start getting imported and I don't think America knows that and that freaks me out. And I don't know, like, how do you share what you've seen over there? You know, bit by bit, there's just like, there's a level of quality and honestly, there's a lot of aggressiveness outside the U.S. and people putting their heads down and getting radically more skilled and teched up than we are and I think it's going to be a very, very interesting next couple of years. I mean, we're, you know, in school we're taught, as Americans, we're taught we're special and I think it's going to be a very interesting moment when there are some cultures that are going to be proven to be more creative, more ahead, more advanced, getting more stuff done than we are. That's going to be an interesting point of passing the torch. How do you look for inspiration? I mean, like, you're a serial entrepreneur. You start a new thing every couple of years. Like, how do you how do you decide what's next? I like solving problems and I never know what they're going to be. I mean, Crisis Text Line grew from the rib of dosomething.org. Aria is here and I didn't think I was going to be in this space but it was compelling and somebody had to do it and so I did it and we're not done. I really think we should help a billion people. I think this is a global issue and so we're going to expand to 20 countries in the next four years. We're already training people in Canada and the UK and I'd like to bring this to other parts of the country where no mental health services exist and when there's no data because if we can create a global map of crisistrends.org you can see what we've aggregated and anonymized for the US. It's pretty cool but imagine doing that for the world and this is where the technology getting ahead of policy is exciting because there is no unified or in some places there's no definition of domestic violence if you're married do whatever you want. There is no definition or common definition of what is a minor and so if the technology builds and in systems because we do work in systems like this if we establish that and a universal definition of these things we can then have a global map of mental health and behavioral health and that will be really exciting and can change a lot of things so I'm bullish on the next four years having said that I do have a side hustle already that I'm working on. Go on. Time's up. Well so I've got a side hustle I'm working on the side too. Can we all by the way I don't know how much more you're going to be up here but tomorrow's your last day and this is crazy who's going to return our phone calls nobody because nobody else there returns phone calls you're great and we're hold on am I alone come on has it not been no you know what I'm talking about so what I was going to ask Nancy was as veteran successful startup CEOs what are your you both have built amazing teams in the minute we have last what are your CEO hacks startup CEO hacks we have lots of more junior emerging executive directors here in the room sleep training just start early that's it that's it that's it I remember I literally remember the moment I was like reading this thing I was like Bill Clinton sleeps four hours a night and yeah now it turns out by the way two plus two plus one does not equal five like apparently you can optimize to a point where it just becomes pretty brutal but no because the reality is if you want to do if you want to do something and lead a team in the end of the day it's your job to pick up the pieces and you've got to find the time to do that like it's you've you've got to be the one that takes care of the stuff nobody else wants to do and take care of the people when they when they fall down that's your job and it's just a level of work you put in and there are all the typical things like hire people smarter than you sleep is optional the one touch rule when you open it finish it but I would say the best thing I learned is was taught to me by one of our supervisors I will confess I was afraid to be on the crisis text line platform for like the first 18 months almost two years I just didn't think I would be good at it and I was afraid that I would be too emotional like I cry at the Olympics when any skater falls down like I just there've been McDonald's commercials that have done it to me I mean like I just I thought I was going to be it was going to be hard and we had a big spike and one of the supervisor slacked me and was like you need to be on the platform the community needs to see you here and I went on and I basically haven't left and I'm now in the top 10 crisis counselors just as a volunteer for taking conversations and I'm in there all the time and it's made me a better CEO made me a better mom it's made me I hope a better friend I don't know Arya can tell you but and I will never not eat the dog food like as a CEO you have to be one of your top users and you have to be in there you have to eat your own dog food all right well dog food we're going to take a 10 minute break and then we're going to have the amazing Susan Crawford talking about the subway experience and the future we'll be back in in 10 minutes so people on the internet come back and find us in about 10 minutes thank you you too hey Dan Schultz Dan Schultz quiet down all right hi everyone hi hi it's a hug fest so I have the great pleasure of introducing our keynote speaker Susan Crawford from Harvard Law School and I'm that she needs no introduction that's very kind of you appreciate it okay friends so this is a ridiculous task I'm being asked here to talk about the internet over the last 25 years and I'm grateful for the opportunity and I very much enjoyed listening to what's come before and I'm going to do something pretty retro these have been all conversations I actually fought a lot about exactly what I wanted to say to you today and it is actually a cosmic joke that I'm up here my presence here is highly unlikely I grew up in a basically a 17th or 18th century household both of my parents were composers it was a silent house in an oddly isolated way we were in Santa Monica California in complete silence as far as I could tell and in that house the only way of expressing affection really came through music music was love I don't want to overplay this but I've checked with my brother who ran away decades ago and he has confirmed that there was tremendous fear and isolation surrounding us I've kept a journal for a long time ever since then and I know it was a boisterous cheerful open hearted never lonely future time a screen door slamming open slamming shut what I wanted was actual human music the kind of resonance and acceptance that I now understand everybody wants I distinctly remember my own first experience of the internet and I've talked about this a lot over the years I by pure chance I was at a Washington law firm that was the first in the country to have PCs on the lawyers desks and we had a dial up connection to the internet and I distinctly remember dialing into a soap opera website called The Spot and The Spot was a Santa Monica beach house full of 20 somethings sun and sand you know and they were very hip they were very trendy and we were invited to immerse ourselves and by clicking here and I remember clicking there and it was like the lion the witch and the wardrobe you know the world parted for me and the idea of human connection over the internet is the most important thing that I'd run across until that time and that has happened to me since like so many people I believe it's a tremendous gift to humanity I am an optimist Ethan and LaTanya were confirming that I was going to present the optimistic spin on all of this and also like so many people and take a look at yourself my greatest weakness has become the thing I study in my professional life I've been really looking forward to giving this talk it's a UPI a unique professional experience because these have been some tumultuous years since then and it's given me the opportunity to think about time to think about time itself because of course like so many of you I think of myself as a very young person a kind of bumbling serious of heart yearning sometimes rambunctious slightly odd solitary person so full of energy that I'm jumping across the richly patterned carpet of my grandparents' apartment in Philadelphia rather than walking judiciously and my poor grandmother Crawford she was a punctilious somewhat anxious teacher of French she murmured why is she doing that why is she doing that and even at six I knew that she was a little alarmed so on the evening of June 29th 2007 I was taking the express New York City subway south from Times Square and two complete strangers approached me just to show off their new iPhones that evening the car was lurching back and forth and they just wanted to share the glory of the ability to touch glass that could be made to interact and produce sharp and deep colors and images amazing they looked down they touched the screen gently with the thumb of the hand that wasn't holding on to a strap or a pole and looked at me watching for my reaction just about shouting with excitement as we were standing in the swaying car the first time I thought it happened I thought it was kind of an only in New York moment which happens all the time in New York the second time it happened I thought it was a trend and it struck me that the iPhone was having a transformative effect on people and then just last month I had another subway iPhone experience this time the A train south of 34th street I saw across from me a man and a woman taking a picture of themselves it was a selfie the man's upraised arm right arm taking a picture of both of them his left arm around the woman squeezing her and I saw their smiles deepen and glow in that moment not because each one of them fought that they looked great in the image on the picture of the camera because in that moment they were seeing themselves being perceived by delight by the other to be truly seen and adored by the person who was taking the picture or otherwise in the picture so there you go absolute absolute delight 10 years later now a while ago 1.2 billion years ago before there were subways or keynotes two black stars two black holes circled each other in a galaxy far far away from our own their intense gravity accelerated their rotation they were moving at half the speed of light and pulling ever closer in a fraction of a second they merged meanwhile that extraordinary acceleration produced a storm of gravitational waves that rippled outward across the universe at the speed of light it took 1.2 billion years for those light waves to reach Louisiana but they did about two years ago and thanks to a pair of mirrors laser beams at each other in a vacuum tube 2.5 miles long in Louisiana we heard those two black holes rotating the distance between the mirrors changed by one part in a billion trillion as those mirrors vibrated very slightly that vibration in turn could be heard as sound now there's a scientist who bet 50 years of his professional career that one day humans would hear the sound of gravitational waves and he's named Ray Weiss and he teaches at MIT and he said a couple weeks ago that he as a young man had been in love with a pianist and followed her from town to town listening to her concerts and he says that the sound of that long ago and far away rumbling of space-time is just like the sound of a hand sweeping across the piano keyboard from the bottom to middle C and he said to us they were waving hello the black holes were waving hello to us Ray Weiss is one joyful youthful guy I'm retelling this improbable scientific thriller of a story because I'm a little dubious that 25 years is a meaningful period it's a nothing Fooey we really are just at the beginning of the internet of what it will mean to understand what will change and what will abide as a result of global unconstrained capacity to communicate. Okay we know a few things I am troubled by the model for bundled online journalism I'm not sure it seems like it's very tough I want to suggest that a levy on everybody connecting to the internet would be a good idea for stable funding but I want to also applaud the Knight Foundation for single-handedly it seems lighting the way and experiments that might support the future of journalism I'm a big fan of the Tau Center at Columbia advisory board I sit yeah Tau Facebook and Google today seen from our narrow perspective to be forces that are so powerful that they could rumple space time several times before breakfast you know they can do it they have so much power and yes we can be are worried I know we'll hear more about this this afternoon that you can do anything with data and there are no rules and Nancy is right we don't have any approximation of self-restraint right now but I want to say that I bet that like me many of you have been dreaming of the internet before it even came into existence we have not yet reached anything like those dreams I have a feeling we are still plotting around in mud this is the modem squawk of AOL and human beings at their best are never cynical so at the risk of sounding hopelessly anachronistic and I know I am I'm here to remind us of where we started in those days 25 years ago people talked about multimedia experiences that was the term for the web and I distinctly remember one of my colleagues 20 years ago laughing loudly with alarm at the idea that everything we read watch and listen to would be called content content he said he was really alarmed oh yeah well today there is a lot of on trend panic about the internet out there and some of this panic is distinctly American which poses a risk to this country I have to say I was grateful for Eric Gunderson's remarks in the last panel about China I've distilled the panic here in America down into three categories for ease of cognition let's just get them all out there so we can deal with them the first panic has to do with the isolating controlled and synthetic experience of digital communications over handheld devices people stare down at handsets as they are standing in beautiful public places or crossing the street you're itching to pick yours up if you haven't already you're bored by my pace you wish there were images drenching the screen behind me sorry about that our devices are very close to our hearts a young fashionable girl will carry her wrist up lifted with a very beautiful bag on the other hand a man will close the cover of his iPhone heavy leather cover as a marker that the conversation is over we look up you know we are we love we fear these devices we're not sure we're working through it I know these devices are felt by some to be somehow in charge unless deliberately turned face down or buried in a bag somewhere it's like it's like shielding your eyes in a movie when the manic clown is just about to reveal his real self so that's a panic okay panic one as panic two is about the role of the giant platforms or in their beautiful coinage the global behavior modification empire again pundits are out there proclaiming that intimate and social is a risk and these platforms are seen as essentially limiting American life and having a sordid role in human life our American open society and protection of speech is under severe attack becomes some speeches getting amplified and entrenched and we don't like it and even the word social has taken on a dark foreboding meaning which as content has been forever changed but forever forever that seems wrong that hints at the third panic we're freaked out worried that the internet has gotten awful and is going to always be awful people look at digital communications and see something like Penn Station at its worst moments chaotic ugly crowded plastered with ads full of human misery unlikely to be helpful in our human journey and featuring sudden bursts of sound at uncomfortable moments even though when we take somewhat wiser breaths we know that it's best to be consistently doubtful about any fixed assumptions on the nature of things I think all of these panics every single one of them risk some day sounding a little silly we've done this before over and over again usually because people like me over 35 are bloviating about the new thing that's just arrived on the scene anything that was in existence when the horizon seems exciting anything that comes after we're 35 seems terrifying we just keep doing it over and over again so let's take the suspicion and fear these panics one by one I think we can stop worrying about handheld devices I'm just going to say that the effect of phones on our psyches I don't think humans will be staring at handheld devices for many more decades it just makes no sense to look down all the time and poke at a screen we love looking at other people looking at things around us our eyes if you notice face forward not down and our wide fingers keep making spelling mistakes you know we're not good at this so we'll either be facing multiple interactive services all around us or carrying around our own little digital interfaces in the form of glasses or contact lenses we will have put interactivity in its place as a layer of life not a distractor as an invisible stream of seamless activity inextricably intertwined with the other than an aliening force we will grow up we will grow up and new institutions I do believe will arise I'm not out of faith for that either we'll adopt these glasses and this ubiquitous interactivity incredibly quickly we're adopting everything quickly it took us about 50 years to adopt electricity 35 for the phone 31 for the radio you get my idea here 16 for the PC just 5 for social media things are happening faster I do think Google Glass was in artful ahead of its time and I imagine that our clumsy primitive constrained incredibly expensive limited and slow digital interactivity and our current customs of using it will look to our successors as finding kindling right lighting it boiling a huge that of water putting clothes in it and stirring them with a pole and then hanging them up in the wind to dry look to people who have a washing machine that seems silly to us we will look silly to others in short handhelds and waiting just to give into that panic the second panic Facebook Google and Apple I believe that the rising clanging alarm bells of panic will inevitably be still if we take some good path dependent initial steps right now as I stand here today there seems no choice when all of your friends on our Facebook along with a billion other people and everything you do searching everything out seems to involve Google we feel trapped will individuals ever break out of the headlock and won't all forms of media just be terrifying law well I have an answer to this we keep learning that cheap and great is better than free and lousy both so far Facebook is relying on its stories about free and ensuring that people join its world and stay there on its terms and variously integrated ways but in fact and here comes the China part of this where network use is more advanced consuming a single noisy wash of everything isn't actually all that appealing China where live streaming cheap and great has been an enormous market everybody under 20 is streaming either themselves or watching somebody they're looking to connect with individual lives not a vertically integrated killer platform of everything China looks to get 300 million people connected to fiber to the home they're doing different things than we are and as Eric said they're way ahead of us they want the under bundled version they want the personal connection not the newsfeed and until the Chinese government shut down a bunch of the apps this summer they got it in exchange for a few digital tokens in countries and regions where connectivity is good enough to allow for actual human connection people find ways to connect and they use that trust and enthusiasm we saw for Kickstarter to find each other now in the meantime the online platform fear is on Google and Facebook are looking for new ways to suck us in with live streaming of their own augmented reality but if we're not paying attention whole cities can become Google test beds watch Toronto, Facebook can become the internet for millions of people every form of transport will come connected to a favored world of integrated apps and that's why my third panic are fear that the online experience is always going to be the same that's the one that really matters that's the one we should really care about that's the only one that is real it's also the only one that we stand a chance of nudging in a different direction but only if we're quite intentional about it now yesterday I was part of a major announcement in San Francisco where Mayor Ed Lee and Supervisor Mark Farrell and a big team are calling for bids for a private party under the city's direction to build a dark fiber network connecting every single home and business in San Francisco the city won't itself sell internet access but it will lease that capacity to private competing companies and the city is going to subsidize low income subscriptions so nobody is left behind if San Francisco pulls that off they'll have universal world-class connectivity, low prices at a cost anyone can afford this is the first major American city to take this step it's hugely exciting this is the magic my younger self wanted to conjure this is the idea of unconstrained capacity as different from our current internet access as having internet access is different from not having it some day it will reach every corner of the land this is electricity eventually did it will take enormous political will and resiliency to get there but we will and it will be so cheap and zero latency will be so common and unlimited data will be so expected that the internet will vanish just the way that electricity did when electric lights were first deployed in a courthouse square in a small midwestern town grown men fell to their knees because night had been turned to day they were gasped and people gasped and it was news we no longer do that when we see an electric light and so we will stop being amazed by data similarly as we get used to it as when it's everywhere you know and as for local news I do hope that is funded by us the little tiny slivered money paid by people who are subscribing to fiber that really is a sustainable funding model that I would love to addict more of you to now overwhelmed by the primary need to connect rather than to consume content Facebook could become get ready this era's AOL quaint heavily controlled circumscribed a marker of cludelessness the same irritation about lock in could do many apps as soon as genuine data capacity being online truly online works for all of us we are so at the beginning of this story and here's where the last 25 years help us conjure up the next 25 because I was of a certain age in a certain place I've listened for many hours of my life to early internet engineers talking to each other and you should see they really relax before the rest of us yahoo clambered on to the internet they were having a good time and what they were enjoying was staying right where they are and experiencing life in a distant place through the eyes of another and just journeying to foreign lands it's a warm pond familiarity for them they loved it and that was a great joy and we also love staying where we are and where we are got to say most things are going just fine they really are every day people are nice to each other I was just talking to Jen during the break I have been traveling to scrappy cities across America for the last year and a half and nonpartisan places cheerful places optimistic places you get out on the road if you're feeling depressed and so there are two parts to my vision I want to present what can happen to the next 25 years if we make unlimited competitive cheap capacity available to everybody makes the joy of human connection these faces made available to everyone everywhere those crisis counselors that we just heard about they don't have to be limited to text this is a great empathic human gift to be able to help someone else in a time of need and for the first time over fiber we'll be able to see micro expressions you know 125th of a second a real expression of human anger fear sorrow and eye contact over our current internet connections people from a distance will be able to be seen whole to be understood not to be fractured and that's all the humans want it makes a huge difference social presence that's the killer use of this thing is social presence even now people meditating together across a digital connection feel a greater sense of connection and also feel more open to others because they've done it in the presence of someone else even if at a distance more mundanely people working together will get all the nonverbal communication of both body language and I movement and they'll feel they really are together our brains can't distinguish your virtual from real connections of this kind people seeking economic and social mobility intellectual and spiritual mobility will be separated from opportunity by no more than a pane of glass that's the dream anyway that's the optimism at the same time will lead intensely local physical lives again with a dip a richer tapestry of information being made available to us through our glasses or contact lenses we'll need to find people new occupations not just new jobs because the roar of automation fueled by all this capacity is going to change a lot and our human value add though as we shelter in place will be the flexibility the Jedi skills we just heard about flexibility compassion empathy counseling it's going to be a big adjustment so we're in a period of noise and confusion and here's where my odd upbringing has had strangely useful outcomes there's a recent novel about Shostakovich by Julian Barnes that's helped my understanding quite a bit and it says what I want to say better than I can so I'll paraphrase music good music great music has an irreducible purity to it it might be bitter despairing and pessimistic but it is never cynical what can be put up against the noise of time only that music which is inside ourselves the music of our being which is transformed by some into real music which over the decades so longer time scale is if it is strong and pure and true enough to drown out the noise of time is transformed into the whisper of history on the time scale of human history human behavior has certainly changed but human nature human nature has not and it won't and soon we'll get this right the internet will disappear from active view will be left with what abides what abides I've only gradually learned is that human music connection the magic I wanted to conjure decades ago like those black holes more than a billion years ago we will be waving hello thank you very much all right well with that as a setup we got the chance to hear from Latanya and Ethan Latanya Sweeney it runs the data privacy lab at Harvard Ethan Zuckerman runs the center for civic media at the MIT media lab I don't think we need it and they're going to do a duet so come on down Ethan and Latanya hey so just before anything else man I love Susan Crawford can we just get another round of applause Susan is one of the most optimistic people I know but what I love about Susan's optimism is that it has a vision of possible futures we could choose with technology and I think for Latanya and me we're always looking at these critical questions of what decisions are we making about these systems what are we choosing to embrace what are we choosing to reject that's very much what we wanted to think about but it's just amazing to have someone that's such a Ethan's trying to nicely say we're the downers no and so in some ways I wanted to start with that with you because Latanya you scare me and like not as a person but as a researcher like a lot of the things that I've been most scared about over the last 10-20 years of the internet have sort of come out of your research I learned about your work for the first time when you found my governor's anonymized medical files and basically said yeah medical anonymity yeah forget about that doesn't really happen so given the chance to share a stage with you I wanted to ask what were you scared about 10 years ago what are you scared about now so the governor medical record was 20 years ago okay alright alright 30 years ago maybe 1997 yeah but 10 years ago in 2007 the thing that I was working on then was a simple idea that you could type SSN VTAY into a google search bar and you would see people's social security numbers let me give you an example and that's because people would put their resumes online and there was a habit of putting their data birth and their social security number part of that resume so I built a little it's not that I'm a downer for the sake of just depressing people or making them feel creepy this is real stuff well it's also because I'm a computer scientist by training and the goal is how do you get to Susan's real world if you don't look at what the unforeseen consequences are and address them so this clearly was an unforeseen consequence and with the rising amount of identity theft and credit card fraud I wrote an AI program that would go around finding these online figuring out if they could get an email address for the same person sending them an email and encouraging them to take them down what happens when you send someone that email well when it first started people would people accused us of stealing their identity and people threatened to sue me and you know why was I stealing things like that but after about a year it had run and then about two years media from around the country started picking up about the program by 2007 you would be you really couldn't find them online at all so this doesn't happen anymore this is all set you fixed it you wrote a program this never happens anymore and we've solved this particular bug with identity theft in 2007 but in 2017 as my students pointed out to me in the spring they're back so that one didn't work so well so is that what we're worried about now in 2017 are we worried about we didn't learn these lessons ten years ago we're still releasing data we're putting it all over the place personally identifiable information keeps showing up is that is that our contemporary well I certainly I certainly is an ungrowing problem you know also in 2007 Facebook was moving beyond campuses and coming into the real world and one of the things that it did is it required date of birth and date of birth and birthplace hometown and we had learned that you could actually predict social security numbers digits of a person's social security number from those two fields and all of our attempts to get Facebook to stop making that public had all failed and so in 2007 one of the things we were really interested in is why is it that for anyone born from 1987 to 2011 your social security numbers are given out at date of birth and they're sequential in your state and so in fact you can figure out when a person was born from date of birth in hometown so you would think that that would be the thing that would would seem like a vulnerability so we did get the Social Security Administration to stop doing that issuance so newborns don't have it but anyone here who is in that time period yours are predictable and we can predict it if you like so but the Knight Foundation gave us a grant to figure out a little bit more at another deeper level what are the flows of personal information where is the information really and where might it all come from in 2016 it was an election year we were interested in the kind of information that you find on election website there were 36 states had websites where if you were a voter you could go and you could change your information but how do those websites know you're you they know you're you by you're the one who has to provide the name address and date of birth or name date of birth in zip code or your social security number or something like that and so we were interested in where might all the places be that we could get it and we found no shortage of them 500 places making it very easy to impersonate voters online not to mention the fact that Facebook reminds me every day who's had a birthday usually how old they are giving me the birth date the year and going forward and if I know something about the hometown I'm in pretty good place to guess that at that point and you know it's very expensive to automate to change the voter information on those 36 websites so for less than for around $10,000 you could change 1% of all the voter registrations in nationwide so you're saying that Donald Trump is right and that in fact millions and millions of people may be voting illegally using the scheme to go in and change the information and that you're capable of doing this for just a few thousand dollars we're saying for 10,000 people you can do the opposite that is instead of accounting for people additional votes this is a way to disenfranchise millions of people from not being able to get their vote to count no one would ever want to prevent anyone from voting well so and it's kind of an interesting system too because if you change a person's address on their voter registration they go to the polling place that they've been going to for years only now they've been going to the polling register so they're said that you can't vote here they start yelling and screaming so they give them a provisional ballot except provisional ballots don't count in most states so it's kind of a pacifier effect that at the same time can really have a dramatic impact on a sort of undercount so it's the opposite of the voter fraud conversation that we typically hear about new people voting it's more like a new kind of suppression of vote so simply by having personally identifiable information available through various different data brokers who tend to be lightly registered here's an attack that for almost no money makes it possible to function large numbers of people from voting and it can be geographically targeted which suggests that you could also make it demographically or psychographically targeted exactly that was our finding cool I'm worried about that if we look over that arc from 2007 and the work with Identity Angel that program coming forward what we see is sort of this notion that these problems haven't really been addressed and that they're just getting worse and instead of there being just financial harm now you're talking about other kinds of institutions failing and so forth and so but we just tend to sort of ignore it and just keep on happening it would be nice if there was some way to get control of this so Michelle Shaglowski is someone who's been writing really passionately about what he thinks is wrong with the advertising supported web and one of the analogies that he started putting out is that every company says we're going to collect your data it's going to be an amazing asset we're going to make a ton of money off of it he suggests that you think about your data as toxic waste here's something that you have a sort of a necessary byproduct of what you're doing but it's your job to dispose of it as safely and carefully as possible before it essentially melts down and destroys your business who's right are these businesses that are making enormous amounts of money trying to figure out how to broker data are they handling this the right way or should we be looking at this as something that frankly is pretty terrifying for a lot of people to touch well I'm definitely saying on the terrifying side and the reason for that and the reason for that is really quite simple you know data the social contract made by companies like Google and then on to Facebook this idea of data for service is a model that says your data is worth worth nothing until they figured a way to monetize it and you get it in exchange this service except for one problem and that is you ever try to get data out of Google or Facebook they don't give it to anyone it was free when it came in the door but good luck trying to get it out of there well suddenly they made it valuable now all of a sudden it's incredibly valuable and this social contract is also changed with the internet of things now I don't get free service I buy the device the device still has all the data and so now that social contract is even changing where I'm now paying and they still get to keep my data and I don't get a copy of it and so this underscores to us the value of the data it also the work that I just talked about that we've been doing also underscores the vulnerability that it leaves us all in and right now the keepers of the data and the ones who are making the most money on it have an incentive to keep data free which is why things like in the sorry Ethan I think backwards well it doesn't go backwards well anyway one of the things that you saw was you could get a database for $500 that had the social security numbers of all Americans that's pretty amazing so that's right exactly but a company will take it and when they take it and they monetize it this becomes additional resources for businesses and there are many data analytics companies where their products well let me say it differently we are the product our data really is the product and so forth so is there good news at the end of this do you have the solution the way you had 10 years ago a script that was able to go out and sort of help people realize how dangerous this VT behavior was are you going to let everyone who uses the internet right now know how dangerous it is to use any number of services that are grabbing PII where do we go with this yes I don't have an answer I don't have that answer and the program worked for a while but then when we stopped using the program it seemed like the resumes came back and the vulnerabilities came back and the number of new sources are much larger it seems like there has to be a more larger answer and maybe part of it is finding ways for people to get control of their own data maybe it's a way for people to have more control offering platforms that offer more control so that's a direction that we've been looking in and would that be like decentralized social networks is that sort of going in the direction of something like a diaspora is that a brokerage model like folks like Doc Searles have been trying I have my data I can put it out and you might get access to it if you give me certain privileges coming out of it how do we do that well I don't have any answers check back with me not in ten years but maybe we keep meaning to have good reasons to get together what are you doing well look so maybe I'm more hopeful than you are today so I was thinking about ten years ago as well and what I was working on ten years ago was this question of who gets to speak online I had done a bunch of research with Hal Roberts, John Paul, Jill York couple of other folks over at the Berkman Center now the Berkman Klein Center around censorship and I was really interested in this idea that the internet which this global open space was getting shut down and around in China we did a whole bunch of work on could we get around this censorship could we use virtual private networks could we use these different censorship tools to me it really seemed like the problem ten years ago was are we all going to get this opportunity to speak and the other project I was working on was the first project that the Knight Foundation supported with me which was Global Voices and so that's a network that's now twelve years out into the world I'm going to be off to Colombo Sri Lanka to meet 400 volunteers so Global Voices is basically a community of people who monitor citizen media all over the world and then share their perspectives on what conversations are taking place so rather than me looking at Pakistan as an American Christian and going Pakistan isn't that where terror comes from I can have Pakistani authors saying actually there's this really cool conversation in Lahore right now about this new art gallery opening and here's how we're talking about women in education and these are the conversations happening so I was hugely enthusiastic about this idea that these tools were going to keep getting better once everybody had smart phones once everybody has connectivity everyone was going to become a content creator we were all going to become publishers Susan I know I'm not allowed to say content creator but we were all going to be putting information out in the world and I have to say but don't we all do that through Facebook? so we do and here's the interesting thing once we get to the point where billions of us are producing information sometimes it's a Facebook post sometimes it's Instagram sometimes it's you know even a like or a share is information of a sort so we're all publishers right now and there's one big problem which is that no one has changed the supply of attention and so instead of just having professional publishers newspapers people with business models competing for my attention my friends are competing for my attention students are competing for my attention someone who came up with the latest greatest cute cat video is also competing for my attention and at this point I think the problem that I am most terrified about is really simple it's filtering how do we decide what information is worth paying attention to but Facebook will do that for you you've noticed that so look so they solved that problem so here's the really interesting thing about this so first of all if you're a regular Facebook user and you haven't done this try this experiment there is a button on Facebook's news feed you can switch between the most recent news feed ordering and it's pretty incredible I have less than 15% overlap between what Facebook shows me and what the people I follow are actually telling me and the reason for this is that Facebook is very concerned about me Facebook really wants to only give me information that I'm going to care about and so they look for certain things they look for friends who posted something that's getting a lot of comments I'm pretty sure I've seen that even if that's four or five days old they really want to make sure that I get it if I haven't liked someone or particularly looked at their pictures for a while they may just sort of fall out of my feed Eli Pariser started calling this the filter bubble and sort of making the case that Facebook takes this tendency we have to pay attention to people who are a lot like us homophily and just sort of strengthens it but the truth is there's a whole lot of problems that come down to being filtering problems fake news is a filtering problem if we decide we want Facebook to identify and pick our news out and give us only the true stuff we've asked Facebook to do more filtering for us fake news also by the way only really ends up being a problem because Facebook filters for stuff that's highly viral and so it sort of makes it up the chain a lot of what we deal with toxic abuse and harassment online is a failure of platforms like Twitter and also Facebook to give us filters that we have access to and that we can control don't you want to know all the viral stuff I don't get it the viral stuff that has a whole bunch of people telling me to kill myself because I work for George Searos an open society foundation I can probably do without that most days although I have to say the nice thing a man online is that my worst days online are generally what outspoken women call Monday so you know there is that certain gender privilege there around that but yeah it'd be really nice if people had the ability to sort of come in and say I am being abused in this help me block people who are making it impossible for me to use this service so I mean for me what I'm really interested in so what do we do so here's the thing Facebook as well as all these other networks could make it possible for us to filter and we know that they can and the reason we know that they can is that the advertising industry is the most amazing filtering mechanism anyone has ever seen so I'm guessing a lot of people in the audience here read JD Vance so we are all concerned now that we are not paying attention to Appalachia so I can go on Facebook and say I want to target 20 to 35 year old white men from Appalachia who voted for Trump and I can start sending ads to them what I can't do is say you know I'd like to read these people's feeds and find out what they are talking about I'd like the chance to become friends with them I'd like to follow them I'd like to listen to them I'd like to pay for it but we don't have good tools for filtering what we hear from and what we do so we built something recently yeah yeah yeah can I pull up the video on this so we launched this thing earlier today it's called GOBO we just very quickly went past the fact that this is a research project and that you have to sign an IRB form to play with it I mean well it is it's Facebook's click through agreement so to use this you link your Facebook you link your Twitter to it and we pull in your feeds and we suddenly give you this ability to start filtering them and you'll see at the very top you'll see that a few posts are already filtered out you can see associated with each post it says it's out to be because right now the gender is set very very far towards having a lot of women's voices so you can actually essentially say I hear too much from men online let's move that slider over we actually added a mute all men button I think that may actually be my favorite button on the internet right now there's also a brands button if you'd like you can shut off the brands but there's also sliders like and what we're doing here is we're using really bad machine learning these are really crappy off the shelf algorithms we could work much harder and make them much better but this isn't a product this is a provocation and the provocation is to basically say why is it that we don't get to do this Latonia like why is it that we have entered into this contract with these companies that basically say we have your best interests at heart we're gonna do things for you and then they close the box we don't get to see how Facebook is adjusting those levers why don't I have the opportunity why don't I have the right to come in and start playing with those levers myself and decide whether one day maybe I want my feed to be really silly or another day I want it to be really angry why can't I do that wait is this a filter of the filter unfiltered so this is a great question so with Twitter we're able to get a pretty unfiltered view of it and then we do what we would call subtractive filtering so one of the best filters that I find for twitter is rudeness you can basically crank it up so you only get people to a certain level of politeness that turns out to be very helpful we also filter in one of the things that gobo asks you is it ask you what news you normally read and then based on a set of publications if you decide to expand your political point of view we'll start ending up handing you articles from different sources and sort of filtering it into it one of the real problems is that we can't filter Facebook at this point because Facebook doesn't like to let you play with their tools unless you're within their environment so from Facebook we get pages we get the public pages that you like and we can filter those but we don't at this point get your friends posts and to do that we may have to break a couple of rules so we're thinking about that between you and me I don't want anyone else to know that we're I don't want to am I too sued the worst thing in the world would be having Facebook come after an academic institution asking the question of why we can't get access to our own social graph and the posts from our own friends that would be a terrible case to have to argue so yeah yeah no but I so but let me turn this back to you LaTana I mean how do we get from the things that scare us and piss us off to the solutions this isn't a solution but at least it's a provocation it's a way of sort of opening the question about do we have the right to shape our own information how do we do this around privacy how do we do this about personally identify the information you know a lot of the work that I've done in this kind of showing unforeseen consequences giving it air sometimes it is disruptive and we have had a long a lot of practice of businesses getting better at what they do because they've sort of been shamed into it yeah and maybe that might yeah but also sometimes doing things like this and sort of putting it out there in their face also we've got lots of evidence and examples of where you then ignite a lot of really brilliant people to work on that problem so data privacy has been one of those areas and you know we first started out with those with re-identifying your governor's medical record and then you end up with differential privacy which is a stronger privacy today it ignites a lot of smart thinkers spend just a moment on differential privacy differential privacy for a lot of people in this room is like one of the most interesting ideas that you haven't heard and you've been working on that for a while like give us a quick well I don't want you know there are many ways so back in 1997 showing how vulnerable data was started the idea of well then how do you fix this how do you share data well you can make some guarantees of anonymity and so computer scientist over that time I started with the first model and people have come up with other models today the operant model is differential privacy which is simply the idea of making sure that any of the outlier information is not present in the data I have less than a minute so that's my nutshell part of the way that I sort of tell people about it is that if I have full access to a data set if I can keep querying it over and over and over again I'm always going to be able to de-anonymize it if I have a limited number of bytes at the Apple and particularly if I'm looking mostly at data that's sort of right in the main corpus and that maybe is hidden by noise that's been generated forth there's ways around it but my point in this and the reason I wanted to end on this was we are not just grumpy miserable grouches we are super paranoid people who enjoy looking at where these technologies are taking us and looking at the unintended consequences so that we can find ways to push back against them and what I found so inspiring about your work starting 20 years ago was the idea that you were out there identifying these problems and saying these are solvable we can do something about this because that next step that's the one that I think is so important and our students that have come over the last 20 years have really demonstrated that from everything from algorithmic fairness and how do you detect discrimination and prices and so forth we have a long history of students actually doing that so that in the end everyone can have sort of the vision that Susan Crawford talks about with technology without the harms but this work of finding these unforeseen consequences erring them out dealing with them has to be done by the Nite Foundation for making bets on grumpy academics so that things better thank you so much Catherine and Tony joined me I wanted to say three things one if you've got an empty seat next to you you can raise your hand and people that are back there you can come and claim one of those empty seats come on down thank you two we have a reception after this not after this one immediately but soon thereafter third there's a report there's a bunch of material associated with the grants we announced today some of the things we've learned from the news challenge in the last few years at nightfoundation.org slash KNC so I'm going to sit this one out because I want to hear from you two guys a lot especially how you react to the discussion so far so on my right is Catherine Mayer who's the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation which is probably the largest non-profit thing on the web probably the largest web collaborative project that exists and the largest reference source in the world possibly so we're really lucky to have Catherine Tony Marks in addition to running the largest public library in the world is also the co-chair of the night commission on media trust and democracy so thank you so much for being part of that with us and been an inspiring leader in the public library space I've got lots of questions for both of you but I'm going to stop and just see if you guys have any reactions to the special particularly the last two conversations from Susan and from Ethan and Matanya about the role of data and what excites you and what scares you please well first thank you to John to the night foundation it's great to be with you all I have to start with a story so before I came to the library I used to work and live in the woods in Massachusetts not quite as far as Ethan lives up there and when I got the job and came to New York I found myself on the subway so going back to Susan's subway stories reading the New York Times the way my daddy taught me right cumbersome and a woman next to me is reading the New York Times on this and a lot of New York I sort of you know I say God that's got to hurt your eyes and she looks down at her screen and she looks over at my text looks down at her screen and she says my font is bigger we're in a new world right I mean I'm happy to defend this I'm both a pessimist and an optimist meaning I think we all see the dangers we're living in and certainly the challenges to trust and democracy and media are amongst those dangers the questions of privacy and how we give people their rights to what they should have the right to God knows it's a library we take that very seriously but I also agree with Susan that you know we're just at the infancy of this thing and it is an amazing amazing tool so let me just if I can just at the library we focus on a number of things one, because we serve the poorest neighborhoods in New York which includes some of the poorest neighborhoods in America we have to start at the base so going back to earlier discussions two and a half million New Yorkers New York City don't have broadband at home so we started lending 10,000 households at a clip to take hotspots home so they would have broadband it's amazing that San Francisco is thinking of now doing this this should be this what did I do wrong this should be a utility it should be a public utility at least at a basic level and so we're working at that we used to have a partner at the FCC to help us that's no longer the case secondly people with or without connectivity especially in the poor neighborhoods don't know how to use this thing don't know how to turn it on we teach 125,000 people a year at this point basic computer skills all the way up to coding where we have 5,000 people on a wait list in the poorest neighborhoods these are mostly women mostly people of color what once was, minority in America and we have to address that as well but thirdly, lastly and this is where the connection is between us we are in the content business we are in the quality content business we actually believe in facts we think they're important for a democracy and we do not think even though this device was invented with a vision of universal access to quality information if you just think back to where it all began everybody's gotten distracted by shiny objects huge profits, competition whatever it is and certainly my children are distracted endlessly distracted by mostly invidious comparisons as far as I can tell and we have to get back to the place of competing with that distraction that because as Ethan said there's only so much attention and we're losing the war for the attention of most people and we're losing it because we're not actually competing for it certainly the library thought it never had to compete for a thing that we never had to promote a thing those days are over so we have to find a way to get back on the path to the holy grail together with the DPLA the internet archive all the other great libraries of the world and say how do we get the world all the quality content that is out there the corpus of accumulated knowledge and make it so easy and so attractive that we can compete for attention and I'll close by saying my fantasy Catherine you can tell me if this sounds reasonable is when my kids do research on Wikipedia which they do yes they all do sorry I didn't mean to diminish there I want you when you get to the fact that you're most interested in and you see a footnote and it has a I want you to be able to click there and possibly through your local library actually get the whole text so you can say okay that was interesting but I want to go deeper and we want to make it easy for you to go deeper I mean there are all kinds of possibilities let's do it I think that yes it is possible in a world and where more of those texts are accessible and available we've been working with libraries we've been working with the OCLC to bring their world cat system using their API to pull all of their resources into Wikipedia's citation graph these are the things that we believe in fundamentally we don't want people to read Wikipedia and stop before they hit the citations we want people to be critical readers we're like you we believe in quality we believe that when you break that almost evidentiary chain between the information that exists on Wikipedia and where it actually comes from you're doing a disservice to your audience it's not intellectually honest but I think that you know I want to go back to sort of this question of optimism and pessimism and where is the internet today I had my burn it all down moment recently I'm sure many of you in the audience burn it all down it's over the internet is done 25 years it was reading this piece about the auto generation of content for children on YouTube I'm sure many of you yeah so it was one thing when it was our democracies and our democratic institutions and our sort of civic ideals but when it got to the next generation that was sort of where I drew the line and yet I keep going back to this sort of this quote this James Baldwin line around I cannot be a pessimist for I am alive and I also believe that optimism is a duty and it is a duty within each of us to think about what is the role that we can play so that we don't have to burn the internet down because we are only 25 years in it's a relatively young technology and there is so much opportunity that we've already seen it create Wikipedia is a stunning example of this it is not just the students who are doing their research on Wikipedia or talking to Alexa and they don't realize they're talking to Wikipedia it is the doctors who use the offline version of medical Wikipedia in places where access to textbooks are either too expensive or they're 10 years out of date or they don't exist in a local language it is transformational what access to information actually offers and we know this in the local library setting where we have students who use Wikipedia as an extension of those library hours at the end of the day we know this to be true all over the world and so how do we create more opportunity like that I don't know I worry tremendously about the themes I don't think I don't think we've addressed that the themes of consolidation are real and that consolidation is something that we haven't had to contend with I've been thinking about this in the context and John you were in a conversation recently around this and what is a public space on an architecture and an infrastructure that is inherently not public every aspect of the stack from the cabling to the layers like the application layer that runs at the very top it's all privatized and the traditional response to consolidation in these spaces is to is one of creating a public carve out but that's usually because there's some sort of aspect of scarcity you think of public land you think of art you think of spectrum there's some sort of scarcity and so there's a pressure to create some sort of public layer or public place and we don't have that on the internet because the internet is infinite there is no scarcity and so I've just been really grappling with this idea of how do we deal with these inherent tensions of consolidation where we have just a very few arbiters of what is valuable and how we interface and this idea that there is no public space through which we engage and that has implications for good as well as really thorny questions like what do we do when something like Stormfront gets kicked off Cloudflare what is the public space for reprehensible ideas so I absolutely and how do we judge and how do we filter going back to the earlier conversation and who decides who gets to filter I do think we are clearly at a moment where the public perception of the major platforms has shifted we hear stories about major these major companies and sponsors of meetings like this they are announced as the sponsor and they get booed instead of applauded at this point heard that one this morning I heard that too I will say look the information supply is incredible which is why as Ethan said the need to filter is going to be all the more important I'll just give one sort of other side to that which is to say that the information is sort of overwhelming but at the same time to note that the majority of the books written in the history of the world that are in our physical libraries are not available to most people beyond two sentences right and the two sentences that was a decision of the Supreme Court couldn't be a more direct statement about the superficiality of what is being offered right I mean you can't do better than that I understand the legal reasons for it but we have to get past that yeah someone said I heard the statistic and citation needed I have no idea where it comes from on brand on brand someone will know it before you finish saying it I'll tell you it was at a wikipedia conference and they said that 7% of the world's knowledge is in books again I have no idea sitting next to me from Ghana goes that's some of some of the world's knowledge and I love that because our vision statement is imagine a world in which every single human can freely share in the sum of all knowledge and we have been thinking a tremendous amount about not just accessibility but representation and who gets to participate and what are those barriers at wikipedia have just recently gone through this process of thinking we're 16 years old we should get an impossible idea we should be this free encyclopedia anyone can edit and then maybe people will trust it and here we are in this place in time where we have greater trust than the BBC in the UK I don't know that that's a good thing to be clear I actually think that the institutions of journalism we want them to be trusted we rely on them we rely on them as secondary sources we wouldn't exist without them but the idea going back to sort of look at 16 years into our existence in 2030 we just sort of chose a date 29 years in what will we have created at that point and we came to this this conception of knowledge equity and what does knowledge equity look like in the future when we really think about the breadth of information that's available the representation that exists we sort of estimate that only 5% of the knowable of things that are notable in the world are actually represented on English Wikipedia let alone all of the other Wikipedia's and so there's certainly these massive inequities only 17% of biographies of people on English Wikipedia are about women, only 2.5% of geotag content is about the continent of Africa you have these really great sort of asymmetries and differentials that we want to be able to address and when we think about how do we address those questions who are the partners that we have in this certainly the library space when you look around and ask yourself these questions who are you talking to because I think that the only way that we're going to be able to address this meaningfully is through coalitions of like-minded partners and where we reinforce your mission because we become the jumping off point to everything that's in your collection and we get the chance to work with your collection to improve the quality of our content but who else do we need to bring in I mean we spend a lot of time as some of you know talking to foundations to thought leaders we talk to the tech industry we certainly never did that before and we talk to our communities because I think according to Pew studies the libraries are the most trusted institution in America that may be because there are things we aren't able to do and therefore haven't been able to screw up yet but and one of the things we have to be careful about in our conversations is there are people who would like to grab that trust from us and run with it use our brand to bolster theirs to the disadvantage of not just our brand but of what we represent your public problems do you think that I was recently listening to people speak about the changing role of libraries in society how much of that trust comes from your function as a civic space rather than just the institution of access to information I think it's civic space we're the most used, most visited civic institution and space in New York City 215 public libraries in the city as a whole got 40 million visits a year in the poor neighborhoods people have no place else to go and in the wealthier neighborhoods it's actually amazing going back to earlier conversations the Rosemaine Reading Room which is one of the most beautiful rooms in the city, I think the most beautiful but it's full every day and most of those people are not using our books which is the only reason you need to be there and most of them are on computer and you just think well why are these people here and it goes back to earlier conversations they're here because we're not cavemen even though we could sit at home alone all day doing what we want we actually want to be with other people we even more want to be inspired by beautiful spaces and other people doing work of the mind so there's that I think librarians are pretty unthreatening and for centuries have sort of literally said let me help you find a better book because librarians are fierce there's maybe some librarians I'm going to have to think about that no I just mean as defenders of your privacy as defenders of the right to freedom of inquiry no I meant as for the customer coming in sense of nobody thinks oh that librarian is giving me a book because Coca-Cola paid that person to give it to me there's none of that but the role of libraries is changing I mean this is a little off subject but one of the things that if I could imagine the future of libraries which is part of my job to figure it out so I can get there before it hits me civic space I think will be ever more important and that includes computers and books and librarians and all those things we're filling that space with education programs so we're being much more proactive not just passive and I don't mean to diminish passive in the sense of civic space but much more proactive we've created about a million education spots at the NYPL annual over the last few years and special collections you're always going to want to come in but there will be a day in the future where the basic circulating reading collection will not be on the shelves in the library and when you come in for that you'll be able to get it in your packet or on your glasses or whatever or a chip in your head and that'll be fine but if we don't as libraries ensure that that is available to everyone no one else will because there isn't any profit in it you mentioned this issue of Coca-Cola's not sponsoring it you mentioned this issue of Coca-Cola but for us has also been such an fundamental part of the integrity of our model is the fact that we don't run ads and what I mean by that is we've heard a lot about the optimization of algorithms for stickiness and virality and what is interesting and I love the idea that when I walk into a library or when I walk into Wikipedia that a article or a book about the history of I'm going to say Pokémon because that's a classic Wikipedia trope an article or a book about the history of Pokémon is as valuable as the collected works of Shakespeare and is given an afforded the same pride of place and treated the same way as it's retrieved from the stacks or retrieved from our database I think that that lack of incentive structure and I think fundamentally what we're talking about when we're talking about fake news or anything else we're talking about the incentive structure in the business model of serving information that it continues to attract eyeballs to serve ads against what is so corrosive about the information ecosystem today totally agree and we've all become addicted to that and we sort of raised our children to think it's okay to not have an attention span to just keep going don't bother me during this drive go watch this video whatever it is we've all done it Pokémon the truth is you know I'm an educator I don't think it all should be painless I don't think it all should be sort of addictive viral stuff some of it sometimes you gotta spend some time and some effort we've sort of forgotten to teach the next generation and the gizmos are not helping that that's important it gets back to from my perspective you shouldn't trust what you read on the internet you shouldn't take it at face value it actually requires labor to do the work and those are the skills that we need to be training for in libraries have a fundamental role to play in that media literacy, critical thinking I mean Wikipedia demonstrated before anybody else that there is also a crowd source here and a wisdom in crowds that can be sort of leveraged and that's been amazing I mean I actually think the way that Wikipedia works is less about the crowd source and more about how we make decisions in very small instances so the model only works at scale because we're having conversations about very small decisions we're talking about what word to use for neutrality we're talking about what citation is best and it's at the end of every sentence rather than how we build the encyclopedia as a whole and that's why when you read it it's a very organic thing because it has no consistency it's a giant edge case but the reason it works is because small decisions and small conversations scale and I think that that's one of those fundamental differences it's not that the wisdom of the crowd is so great the wisdom of the crowd can be great but the wisdom of the crowd can also lead us to algorithms that show us big news bad things but when we're able to engage in that sort of those small dialogues we want to build our knowledge base how we want to run our societies how we want to build our communities that's where the opportunity lies that just feels like a really awesome spiking the ball moment thank you both so much thanks for both of what you're doing and what you've been doing and that was fabulous Tristan and Laura you want to come down and close us out so I'm excited thanks to the co-founders who's the co-founder and executive director of Code 2040 which raised a lot of money to continue doing their awesome work today congratulations and Tristan Harris who has a new start up that I'm not going to I'll let you talk about and I won't unveil names and things like that but I think just to maybe prime the pump a little bit I think about you as both sort of reflecting for us on what have we done wrong in building this digital age in the recent past and how do we build in different ways to ensure that we're building better for everyone so I don't know so with that very narrow mandate yeah what have we done wrong over the last ten years you know I think one of the things that we talk about a lot at Code 2040 is this idea that a lot of the systems and processes that companies use that decisions are made by have been sort of built as a reflection of some of the systems and processes that have built America and spoiler alert we work on racial equity so we think a lot about the ways in which sort of systemic racism and exclusion leech into systems when they aren't designed to intentionally avoid that so if you sort of go with the default and you don't think about these issues you end up with systems that perpetuate the types of issues that we see in our country and increasingly as there's been sort of a consolidation of power across companies that mediate and moderate our participation in society these sort of major internet companies we're seeing some of those same systems perpetuated in who gets to make choices about the way these products are built and how we access them and what is equitable and so if I had to sum up I guess what we've done wrong over the last ten years it's not having been intentional about creating the type of space that we want digitally in a way that frankly in many ways we haven't been intentional about creating offline so we're sort of replicating these patterns and the challenge or the problem is that in many cases we're building fundamentals right now and we're building systems and processes that are going to sort of self-replicate over the course of the next ten years or you know code 2040 is named for the year 2040 the start of the decade when people of color will be the majority in the US so that's sort of the time horizon we spend a lot of time thinking about and we're seeing these systems and processes that will replicate and sort of entrench over the next 25 years if we don't make a choice to actually break and disrupt them now yeah I would say the thing that I think unifies both of our perspectives I'm always interested in the blind spots of systems and there's a blind spot this is what you're coming down to is essentially a blind spot of who's in the room determines who wins and I'm interested in also in the blind spot of moral operating systems I come from Silicon Valley I used to be a design ethicist at Google where I was studying how do you ethically shape and steer two billion people's thoughts and the you know when I think about people that I knew who worked at Facebook in the early days it ran on a kind of moral operating system which was what people click on is what they want if you tell me you want to go to the gym but I hand you a box of donuts and you pick the donut then your true preference was the donut there actually was it was total you know you were just making it up when you said you wanted to go to the gym and that moral operating system had the blind spot that literally all of us are now living inside of which is that what people click can be manipulated to have nothing to do with what people want and I'm really interested in how you restructure thinking so that naive moral operating systems like that can't thrive so can you guys say a little bit what that means what you're doing what 2018 is going to look like for both of you so maybe and can you you want to announce your new thing yeah we're going to be announcing more stuff soon so so yeah so it's not a start so I've been working I left Google about a year and a half ago to launch a public conversation about essentially how what Ethan was talking about that what matters is not capabilities in rooms like this we tend to focus on the capabilities of what we need to add and we miss the kind of actual raw sources of power that direct where our attention goes because where our attention goes controls everything else nothing else matters you can add as many capabilities or information sources you want but where people's attention goes the only thing that matters I have a bias because I was working on that for two years at Google for four years at Google and I got really concerned when I was at Google about essentially this problem that 50 mostly white engineer you know men at three or four companies were controlling what two billion people were thinking and there was no moral operating system that says how do you decide these little trolley problems of do I flip the switch and then two billion people's thoughts go that way or that way and I left Google about a year and a half ago to raise a public conversation about how important that is and also why these tools are not neutral because we have this narrative that this is just a tool and it's up to us to choose how we use it and human nature is just playing out however it plays out and it's just sitting there waiting for people to express inherent human nature as opposed to the real truth is that which is that these are each basically supercomputers YouTube is a AI supercomputer that's been given this goal to basically maximally extract human attention out of people's minds and has to do this race to the bottom of the brainstem to grab it out of you and that is very dangerous for society and so these forces like attention spans winnowing down to small rates and computer generated video that's hurting kids on YouTube are in fact not just these accidents that we're bumping our elbow into but are actually part of this big invisible source of power which is this race for attention that because of the advertising model all these technology companies are sucked into so I left Google year and a half ago to start a non-profit that's basically dedicated to solving and tackling the misalignment of incentives with the attention economy and we haven't named it yet but that's what I'm working on so Code 2040 is really looking at how do we leverage the tech sector as a path to create economic equity and racial equity in the US and sort of standing in opposition to this idea that as power is concentrating and sort of there's these 50 mostly white mostly male folks who are sort of making this set of decisions that actually we need to intentionally create pathways into the industry to ensure that the products and platforms that are being built are reflective of society and frankly that we're not creating a permanent economic underclass that cuts along race lines because a lot of the wealth and opportunity that's being driven in the economy today is being driven by technology tech companies, tech skill sets and we're seeing institutional barriers to entry for particularly communities of color so we do this in a few different ways we're best known for our direct service work our fellows program that we've run for five years where we connect talented black and Latin acts developers to their first job or internship in the tech industry we have partner companies who are actually willing to invest in changing their own systems and processes to recognize talent that was not picked up by their own sourcing and bedding processes and we also are translating the insights of running that program vetting thousands of black and Latin acts students working with dozens of valley companies on how they recognize and assess talent understanding what the conditions are when an individual shows up for that summer internship that lead to success and retention or that bounce that person out and we're taking all of that and we're turning that into the ability to consult with and train companies that are willing to actually do the change management required to upgrade their systems and processes we're investing in building a community of equity change agents people who are passionate about inclusion in tech and with the tools and insights could actually mobilize not just themselves but their communities and actually the funding that we announced today is the first step in pulling together a group of supporters who will invest in Code 2040's growth over the next three years so moving from 200 students to a thousand building our community from 6,000 individuals today to 40,000 in the next three years and actually building out not just the consulting but also the ability to share broadly the insights from our work so that folks can pick up those tools and do that work themselves so it's really an ecosystem level approach to thinking about how you dismantle the barriers and systems that have historically excluded people from being able to participate in this industry and that you actually shift that all to create new pathways in and pathways to leadership and power so my internet's not working so I'm gonna go old school and ask people to raise their hand actually like I'm gonna go from Wikipedia to the library and if you guys have questions raise your hands and we don't have mics but I'll repeat it wow hi there are people there look at that we can see you now so before I just want to prime you guys is there if you guys win how is the internet and the way we engage with it gonna be different five ten years and if you lose what's our what are we in for yeah okay well answer that backwards to try to be a little bit positive at the end I think you know one of the important things to recognize is sort of what's at stake here and there's a piece of it that's around sort of the economic equity and economic access and this idea that do we want to create this rift that we already see I mean the wealth gap in the US is shocking you know the median net worth of a black or a Latinx family is 9 to 13 thousand dollars the median net worth of a white family is 130 thousand dollars like the gap is there it's not closing without us taking action and so there's a whole host of sort of economic issues that will permeate society as a whole if we don't figure out how to make the tech industry a more inclusive place but there's also the product implication so there's decisions being made every day that are reinforcing the types of barriers to success and the stakes get higher I mean there was a video that was circulating recently of a dark skin person trying to operate I forgot if it was a soap dispenser or like a soap yeah so a soap dispenser and it was like the soap dispenser like the optical sensor like couldn't recognize the dark skinned individual but then they used a white paper towel and it was like here's all the soap you want and like that is like okay that's inconvenient but what happens when we're like putting optical sensors on self-driving cars we're then making decisions about like do you hit this thing that it can't see or do you spare the driver or like not to pick on Google but when they launched the latest photos it categorized black people as gorillas which if you know anything about the way products are tested at Google they do something called dog fooding where the folks who get the first iteration of the product are their own staff and so and behold it had an easy time categorizing the folks from ethnic backgrounds that were well represented at Google and it confused black people and gorillas which tells you something about the representation of black people at Google and so they launched with that and again like what happens when that's the data set upon which we're categorizing information and it's like black people are monkeys which is really one of the oldest racist tropes in our country. There's issues where we use AI to create restaurant recommendations and the script crawls the internet and is like oh Mexican that tends to turn up with illegal in a lot of news stories so Mexican restaurants must deserve a lower rating and so you get this sort of self reinforcing mechanism so there's all these product issues that have huge offline implications as well in addition to just the ability for folks to sort of earn their livelihood in the 21st century so that's what's at stake that's the negative but I think the question of like if we solve for this what does the internet look like what's exciting to me is like we don't know like what does it look like when a broader swath of society has access to these tools and the ability to build for their own communities like what types of problems might we solve I mean one of the sort of thought experiments that we talk about is if you know black and Latinx communities had access to all these tools if we were able to use the tech sector to close the racial wealth gap like what other social problems would we solve would we see the same issues in the public education system would we see the same school to prison pipeline would we see like what else will flow from this like we don't even know because we haven't lived in that world yet and that's the world that we're envisioning yeah in terms of what was the second part of the last question is what are you worried about basically so I think what do you want to scare us with so I think I'm really really scared because I think people are not paying nearly enough attention to there's so many issues that need fixing but why is there a community of people worried about like run away AI so why is that creepy why is it so creepy about that because the idea is that this thing gets so smart it starts thinking so many steps ahead pursuing its own goals that it just sort of terraforms the rest of society in pursuit of that goal so we already know that we're worried about run away AI the reason that I'm so worried about the present moment is that we've actually already created a run away AI and no one noticed because we called it something else we called it the Facebook news feed and no one's paying attention to it and instead of pointing the AI on the same side of the table we're looking out at a problem like drug discovery or solving cancer or solving inequality or solving criminal justice and saying let's solve the problem we created this massive run away AI powered by corporations that are more profitable than God with huge data sets on everybody and we pointed it at a target that's very easy to defeat we pointed it at the human mind two billion of them and we said basically test a million variations of something and figure out whatever will capture this person's attention so when the AI plays chess and it thinks you know when you first sort of watch an AI play chess it makes some kind of dumb looking moves and then gets a little better and makes some kind of fun to play against the AI and then it beats Gary Kasparov when it beats Gary Kasparov when it beats all of humanity at chess it's now just better than all of humanity at chess well we've created an AI that's in that wiggling around beating all of humanity at what will predict 50 steps ahead of where our own mind will work what's going to capture our attention so Tinder's going to get better and better predicting what's the perfect reason not to be with the person that you're with YouTube's going to get better and better at saying what's the perfect thing Facebook's going to say what's the perfect thing to keep you individually on the screen and to polarize societies because it has to show individuals personally what's good for their attention and people miss this that part of the business model of Facebook is to polarize societies by nature because it's optimizing for an individual's attention so the current stock price if they were to take polarization out of it and untread society their stock price would go down so we have this problem where it's not artificial or theoretical it's like literally right now two billion people's thoughts are steered by an AI that's out of control and to me this should be one of the most important things that we're all talking about every day it should be like front page headlines of every newspaper and so I'm very worried that if we don't solve it the costs for society are that things stop making sense our minds lose all their capacities our children are basically reduced to replacing their self-worth with likes and things like that I mean I'm not trying to be a doomsday I'm just saying this is literally what all the forces are driving towards what I'm optimistic about if you were to fix all this is to remember what we actually want and have a conversation about values and to watch every system in our society and make sure that the incentives are aligned with what we want and that whatever that AI is it's on the same side of the table as us asking what is the society that we want to be creating and living in so there's a question there and then there's a question here hi I feel like I've been on an optimism pessimism roller coaster for the last 10 minutes so one underlying sort of conversation that's been had today is about maximizing profit and how a lot of what technology and media companies is doing is to maximize profit and I'm wondering how we can begin to shift our culture towards sort of minimal profit maximum social good and how we can start that conversation here today I have some thoughts on that that's exactly the issue at stick here I don't know if you saw in the there's a New York Times article about nine things sorry nine experts weighing in on what Facebook should do and Tim Wu author of the book the attention merchants recommendation was that Facebook should be turned into a public benefit corporation which sounds ridiculous and impossible but when you realize just how bad things are headed towards it actually seems like a really good idea to be lobbying for in terms of how you get to futures like that one of the things that we were talking about right before coming on stage was the need to activate like if you say okay these runaway corporations that are pursuing something and everyone at the corporation sees what it does to YouTube for kids and then YouTube says hey we don't want that to happen for YouTube for kids but somehow the metrics aren't changing because YouTube is still maximizing time on site and so we're thinking what we really need is like a union of concerned technologists where the employees have a huge amount of power here so if you're looking at levers you say oh you might instinctually say we have to go to governments to get corporations to stop maximizing profit you technically do have to do that but one of the things that these corporations really don't want to happen is for their top a talent to leave the company and I think when we all wake up and realize that we're driving our civilization off of a cliff by pursuing this extraction economy of attention and that no one wants that you know I think that the employees if we had like an ability to aggregate their opinions and goals and put them in the top of product decision meetings saying we actually don't want to maximize time spending here's the compromise we're willing to make I think that's one lever of change in the economy who are currently not represented at the very top yeah we have already been brainstorming about essentially it's how you redistribute power there's like capitalism has a lot of issues y'all and I think part of that's part of what we're talking about you know is how do we introduce models for accountability that sort of step outside the traditional bounds of the incentives that are handed to us by capitalism so next time we'll have an economist on stage with us too we've got time for one last question if someone's got a mic for the gentleman right here Grace thank you Ethan you brought up this issue that all characterizes kind of like the noisy world signal the noise and the way we might be addressing it is louder or algorithmically or repetition which presents its own dangers but I want to go back to what Susan said and kind of her last part of her speech which really resonated with me because I'm studying this problem is how do you how do you counter noise and maybe it's coming up with an ethical framework for the algorithm but she said music in a way and thinking about that to get attention that we go not to our base desires but our highest aspirations to things that elevate us including this conversation so I just wanted to put that out there and hear your thoughts whether it's in terms of having diversity in creating that platform or in terms of this like thinking of an ethical framework thank you I think the version of that that's the conversation we're having is the distinction between framing a conversation about diversity inclusion in a way that is about harassment and avoiding lawsuits that sort of makes it this like legal liability versus what is possible when we actually make use of all the talent available to us and bring all voices to the table and the way that we can actually achieve things that the people in these rooms can't actually even think of at the moment that there's tremendous opportunity this isn't about something that's remedial this isn't about punishment this isn't about avoiding liability I mean we do have to do all those things as well but what's really about is sort of the power and potential impossibility and what it would look like to actually unlock the creative potential of a much broader portion of the population in this country and around the world and that is that sort of higher ability to create and design and to build a world that we haven't seen so I don't need to be pessimistic I it's only the last comment of the day so so I mean if it's a question what I heard your question to be about is sort of like appealing to our highest selves versus appealing to our lower base instincts as someone who my whole perspective is informed by this lab I studied at Stanford called the persuasive technology lab and a lifetime of understanding how people get manipulated and understanding the evolutionary instincts and the strings on the human animal that you can pull to make people do and think and believe and steer them to do anything and what that teaches me is that in a game-theoretic world where if one actor plays the I'm going to pull on these evolutionary strings and they're lower on the brainstem than the actor who's pulling the high evolutionary strings that one's just going to out-compete automatically unless you change the game and some high level actor says I know what moves people are making and we don't allow those moves so in the race to the bottom of the brainstem to get attention we say this is the bottom we're going to bring up the bottom and the race to the bottom and then also how do you flip the game so you create a race to the top for what you're talking about so there's a couple actors that can actually do that and the ones that can do that are the ones that are not beholden to getting the most attention so Apple for example is a company that's not actually in their business model about maximizing how much attention that they get and they're kind of a government already of the attention economy that people live by they can change the rules and say hey we don't want to allow us to go that low but to do that we have to have a conversation about what are those evolutionary strings how low do they map on the brainstem and what are the moves that we want to be able to make in other words is outrage and sensationalism and fear what are the kind of classes we can make for those moves and say we don't want those to happen we want to stay above that range thank you both so much thank you to all of our speakers Jennifer thank you Jennifer is now going to come up and tell us so we've got the reception coming up Jennifer is now going to tell us what the expected night foundation over the next several years um what is it you know we're talking ten year things do we have several years and we should do something so thank you to the Paley Center for having us here so much thank you to the winner congratulations to the eight winners do you want to mention News Match and the commission yes hi so two things that we have happening right now that I'd like to tell everyone about one right now we have News Match in the field hashtag News Match News Match is a matching gift program that night foundation joining with the MacArthur Foundation and Democracy Fund put together this year it's a three million dollar fund for non for not-for-profit news organizations more than a hundred not-for-profit news organizations around the country so the idea behind News Match is to help these not-for-profit news organizations with their end of the year campaigns so this not-for-profit news fund provides a matching gift up to a thousand dollars for every contribution to non-profit news around the country and this campaign is running through the end of the year you just need to go to newsmatch.org we've made it very simple and you can pick which one or all of the more than one hundred not-for-profit news organizations you would like to support this holiday season season of giving in 2017 and so please give and please share please use the hashtag newsmatch so we can bring more awareness around the country about the value and importance of journalism and of the great work that non-profit news outlets around the country are making the other thing I wanted to share with all of you and my goodness the conversations today will so inform the work and that is work that is being led by Tony Marks president and CEO of the New York Public Library and Jamie Woodson who is a former Tennessee lawmaker who now runs an education advocacy organization in Tennessee so both Tony and Jamie Woodson are leading the night commission on trust media and democracy in the aftermath of quite a divisive presidential election at night foundation we said okay there are a lot of questions that have been raised in the last year and how might we go about helping address them helping answer them so one of the things that we did as many of you know is we went into the field right away with John's incredible team and launched a prototype challenge we got more than 300 entries and more than two dozen projects that were funded to help address the questions and concerns about misinformation and disinformation and how to make sure that there is more accurate information and more importantly it's not about supply it's about demand what can we do to make sure that people want to access quality news and information so another thing that we did was we went into the field with a very ambitious research agenda you're going to be hearing more about that later and working with the Aspen Institute we launched the night commission on trust media and democracy which I just mentioned that Tony and Jamie Woodson are leading with I hope you're not leaving with more than two dozen experts around the country and the Aspen Institute has commissioned some really terrific white papers one of them by Ethan Zuckerman which I'm going to tweet out the link using the hashtag news challenge on trust and I have to tell you it's a must read it's a compelling read Ethan's work really provided for me and so many other commission members context around the issue about trust and the decline of trust in the news media because guess what folks other than libraries all other democratic institutions are down in the basement when it comes to trust as well so Ethan's paper really just provides very important context about where we are with trust and democratic institutions overall but what I also loved about Ethan's paper is that it also outlines some very hopeful trends about the internet and where can we find those hopeful trends by looking at the way that young people are really using the internet and web and social for civic engagement along with all of those other not so nice things so those are just two major initiatives that we have going right now that I wanted all of you to know about there's one other thing that I just wanted to do so John Bracken and I are both baseball fans in the 7th inning and we're in the 7th inning right now we would stand up and stretch so I'm inviting everyone to stand up and stretch and I want a loud round of applause for my colleague John Bracken who's last day tomorrow so thank you well you still thank you the news challenge has been around for 10 years and 7 of those 10 years has been with Mr. Bracken awesome job thanks to the night staff for pulling out together this event I want to give a particular shout out to Hallie Atkins who's back there Hallie not just coordinated but when we originally conceived of this idea we said we'll talk about the news challenge that's a terrible idea the program you drafted John is stupid no one's going to come to it re-think it so we went back we rethought it and so if Hallie hadn't pushed us we wouldn't have had this great agenda of people talking today so thank you all so much and thank you Hallie and thanks for everyone at Paley and Knight for pulling us together so John tell everyone where you're going you're going to a trusted institution I'm going to go actually be working with a previous general public library of America yeah and some of my new colleagues are here so we're going to meet Michelle and Marcia at the reception so that means we'll be working very closely thank you all you're so sweet but didn't I have to bring the baseball thing into it? that was good that was sneaky