 How did you guys like the conference? Yeah Yeah, thanks for clapping and sign language. I appreciate that The robot appreciates it really Thanks for being here This is an event that happens every two years although it hasn't happened in four years So it's kind of like the English language where it doesn't follow any rules But what I wanted to do since we're ending an hour early is I wanted to wrap it up by giving a talk that I gave it the first cyborg camp. So this talk is 10 years old and Hopefully it'll be interesting and then after the talk, I'm gonna shorten it It'll be maybe 20 minutes. We can do an open discussion You can ask me anything you like or anybody else anything you like Really anything you want and I will happily talk about it and then we will wrap up and Show of hands is anyone interested in writing poetry about tech tomorrow from noon to 4 p.m And an undisclosed location okay, great you two see me after class and That'll be nice. We're gonna make a tiny zine because zines are great All right, so here's an old talk Cyborgs and the information society, but I updated the year So we're all cyborgs if you hold up your phones, which may be out of batteries at this point The point is that every time you interact with a piece of technology you're a cyborg a cyborg is an organism to which Exogenous components have been added for the purpose of adapting to new ambient spaces. This came from us 1960 paper on space travel This is not Terminator. This is not Robocop This is the idea that humans are not supposed to go into specific environments or be like animals But yet we evolve externally through mental extensions of ourselves like writing on cave walls and writing in general or by attaching Exogenous components to ourselves so we can go scuba diving one day and climb Mount Everest in the next we are a weird species And this is the the image that goes along with that quote Extension of a fist extension of your of a tooth This is the idea behind physical extensions of ourselves yet we've had more and more mental extensions of ourselves and unlike the physical extensions of ourselves that are fairly standard and stable over the Course of two million years the hammer doesn't really change in its application or its shape our mental extensions have changed from cave paintings to spoken word to poetry to Giant computing machines that are a size of a gymnasium and have less power than a calculator To something that you sit there in your hand and it performs the function like a scrying pool Allowing you to call up anything from anywhere around the world with a press of a button a kind of techno social womb where you can Request anything at any time and you get mad if it doesn't show up immediately Traditional anthropologists are stereotyped as going to other countries thinking of people as the anthropological other and Then coming back to their first world country is insane how interesting these people are how curious their kinships are People like Margaret Mead getting it Incorrect one year and then coming back three years later and then in getting it correct It didn't really matter if you were correct or not as long as you had the interest of this other world Today our world is compressed and collapsed into one thing We are all cyborgs where cyborgs the minute we are using these tools and a cyborg anthropologist says What is the norm today because it wasn't the norm 15 years ago today? We wake up next to our phones they cry and we pick them up and soothe them back to sleep They get hungry and we plug them into the wall and yet 15 years ago We were terrified that when smartphones suddenly started to have cameras that our privacy would be dead That we shouldn't allow these into specific places and other than Japan which forces a An actual camera sound when you take a photo We've learned that when you hold your phone up and you take a photo that social protocol tells somebody that you're going to Take a picture so it's not really a big deal because the main thing is that it's not that technology isn't ready for us It's usually that we're not the ones ready for technology We have a metabolism rate and we have to think how long does it take for us to get used to a new norm We are hoarding pictures of cats and news articles right now on our phones Which is exactly what somebody does with cats and newspapers in a physical house And it's okay These are new norms because everybody does it. It's okay to binge watch Netflix It's okay to be Sitting there and waking up next to your phone before looking at your significant other in the morning because it's the new norm Who's heard of the Macy meetings in? 1941 Yeah, so three people the idea of the Macy meetings was that technologists and anthropologists got together and they said at some point Tech might not be as expensive might not be as large What will that do to the fabric of society in the future? Let's say technology wasn't the size of the gymnasium. What if it was the size of your pocket? What would alter what would change there aren't too many transcripts from these meetings But they were really influential because it was one of the earliest times where social scientists and technologists got together at the same table Later cyberganthropology was launched as a sub-discipline of anthropology at the American Anthropological Association Not the car company that you call when you get stuck on the side of the road in 1992 And it was really important because it said let's look at humans and tools in a new way and let's start to look at these non-human allies that live alongside us and How they're changing our culture and how we work into that culture. So we look at the present day We have a strange kind of Mary Poppins technology where we have an automatic production of space This is my favorite kind of ad art campaign Sometimes you get ad campaigns that work with artists which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't But this one was for Maxter hard drive and what they did is they said let's take eight years of digital photos It's somebody's hard drive and let's print them all out. And this is what it looks like And my question is how many of you are carrying around this giant load that if it were to be deleted You would have this enormous sense of loss But you wouldn't remember what you had lost because you hadn't reflected over the photos that you took Because it's so easy to take a photo that the relative usefulness of each photo Diminishes completely. I did an art residency at Banff in Canada for a while the Banff Center in 2009 and I decided because my My artist partner got detained at the Canadian border and couldn't show up with me I had to improvise so I printed out my Facebook wall in 2009. I still have this the size of an actual wall Having all of my personal information and our interactions with people in this entire gallery and I thought of it as an old Faro wall the idea that the minutiae of a Faro could be Put in sandstone forever because there's no acid rain But in a dry climate you can preserve this for a really long time And I thought well now with Facebook everybody has the minutiae of their lives written on a wall But it's not in sandstone Does it really mean anything and could we go into a digital dark age at any moment where all of this is gone? When you wake up from this era when you're 80 if you live that long What will you remember of now? Will you remember the reddit binges that you went on a Netflix series that you watched your favorite episode of friends? Will you remember the music you listen to how you fell in love? What will you remember and? The question is is any of that just stuck in a hyperlinked memory that isn't necessarily to anything real But is something that's just archived inside of a machine How many of you go to your email inboxes and instead of using a plug-in like I use in chrome that says inbox when ready Which just allows me to press the inbox when ready button and it hides all my email Otherwise that how many of you just go into your inbox and your attention is immediately hijacked and you're kind of this persistent paleontologists that searching for a keyword To a memory that you had so that you can get an email back to somebody But you get distracted by the new stuff the new dust that settled on the top of your inbox This top of your digging site how many of you are stuck in simultaneous time? Where you decide to do one thing and something else happens on that and something help it happens on that and 20? Iterations later you remember what you were really supposed to be doing How many of you are trying to have a nice moment in time? The Greeks had two words for time by the way one Kronos the industrial time and Kairos the time of falling in love the time of human time the time of watching rain on the side of a window when the Power is out when you're a kid really being there how many of you have been punctuated out of those moments by a Random haptic buzz of your phone in your pocket that you have to look at because it might be important And then you just see that it's a Facebook notification that you need to download the newest install of Facebook This kind of gives me what I like to call a panic architecture This is was my inbox after I spoke at Ted in 2010 It was horrifying and I and I started to talk to people who had Relative amounts of fame and they said well all the replies come in a few different bundles and here's how to answer all of them I started using automatic replies, which was not nice But I did that for a year and it's fine But the whole idea this panic architecture is that the amount of time and space it takes to respond to all of this stuff Is so much larger than you actually have time to do and every single thing is in the same font size So it seems the same importance even though it's not and You think that every single little thing like a piece of spam is just as important as that note that your mom Wrote you three years ago, and it's a long paragraph And you really want to respond but you only remember that you wanted to respond late at night when you're not at the computer And when you log in the computer again or on your phone you get a push notification from something else That doesn't mean anything at all. I have no idea how that interpreted that Freud yeah, he just skipped it Freight had this amazing book that I found called civilization and its discontents He warned of a possible future in which our prosthetics turned against us because they were ill-fitting And there's something you'd be said about social class here. Can you not afford the latest upgrade? Does it matter if a company has enough money? Are they required to make the interface work well with you instead of against you? How does the technology work when there isn't great Wi-Fi or isn't great cell signal? If you keep a device for too long now, it does turn against you the operating system fails There's some security issue. It just stops working all together Or if you have your secondary eye in the shape of a phone and it breaks. What does it mean? Now instead of being the norm of kind of a superhero things are broken And you have to borrow somebody else's techno social ability to get something back Or the idea that instead of plants that shed leaves that are renewable We shed our devices, but they don't turn into any new devices When the phone first came out like early phones you would go into a phone booth or you would have a room in your home that had a phone and You could talk with somebody that wasn't there It was expensive, but you could have this temper You could have this private space and you could sit there and draw on the post-it note or whatever you were doing And tangle your hand up in the crazy long phone cord or whatever you were doing But then when the mobile phone came out like the the original cordless phone that was the first time a phone could get lost And now we have this kind of idea of a temporary negotiated private space There's this person on a phone other people on the phone and they're kind of temporary negotiating which I think of is Having a peeing section in a swimming pool like you're never gonna get it be able to get rid of it but the idea is that You had this private space in your home Now that gets out into the real world and if you're talking on your phone in a public space It's like you're one and a half people and you're carrying that around So you're like one and a half or two or three people in a seat scrunched next to somebody who's taking up one nice polite seat This is one person solution Since this is ten years old. I found the person who made this I was so excited I found if he's an industrial designer. He lives in Los Angeles. I went to his studio He's doing he does art Installation rooms for a living he makes rooms for artists. He's he's amazing and he makes he's an industrial designer Just makes bunch of this stuff This was part of a video series where he made a portable cell phone booth It could pack into a backpack and he would walk around New York in like 2008 And he would go up to a deli counter and this oh, sorry put his phone on and put this thing over in this I got to take a phone call He also made a thing called a porta party Which was just a porta party booth, but it had a party in it And so you could go in and have a party safely really quickly and then like come out You'd like put people in he did all these like fun stuff He did another one that I really like called email garden, which was kind of a calm tech way of understanding how much email you got There's a bunch of strands of green plastic substrate that came out of Like a motor and the motor would push a little bit more of this green thread up With the amount of emails he got so if he went on vacation for two weeks He came back and there's just like this tangled mess of spaghetti wire of the amount of emails that he got So we could kind of see like what email he got, you know one was spam and that grew more just as visualization This concept of ambient intimacy Is the idea that and Sheldon is not here anymore But he calls it loosely but deeply entangled is that you might not be around anybody You might be completely alone. You might be in another country But there's this idea that you could always connect with somebody I don't know about the quality of the connection But if you were to print out all the people in your phone if you're in a region It might look like this depends on who you are But there could be so many people that you could connect to but you're not really there with them So you kind of have these loose connections And this this speaks to Marc Auger's concept of non-places Marc Auger was a postmodern theorist french postmodern theorist and his idea is that A place is something where you have relation history and identity So a home you have relation you have identity you have history in a place But in a non-place you have none of those things in a traffic jam You have no relation to anybody else except for your car You have no identity except commuter and you have no history on the road because the road is not something You can stand on everything that's compressed into two dimensions on the side of your windows of your vehicle And so a lot of industrial revolution gave us these non-places where we were as humans were put on pause And the way to bring some of that back to have a place in a non-place is to Have a phone To talk to somebody so now we're filling our space again with music and other things But it's kind of like a social light like it's not a real deep Connection it's just a band-aid So when we become cyborgs, you know having a second self before You're even born and having this production identity outside of yourself This was my original second self the case organic is an art project that lasted for 10 years And i'm transitioning to another identity by the way I'll I guess i'll write a report on it But the idea was to craft a second self outside of myself that would produce my primary identity in a in a feedback loop um And really it just becomes this kind of interface for social grooming where You could present yourself In analog life and there's there's an art to that But a lot of people are presenting themselves in digital life as their exact self They're getting just as upset as they would in real life But you can carve it you can create it you can see what happens And for somebody who was isolated in the medwest and didn't really have a lot of peers when I grew up I could make a forum and I could try and all these different identities But now we kind of have a template itself Where here's where you put the text here's the facebook profile What it was originally was like you would speak on the well And you would network and you would have whatever identity and you were the text that you were and you were known for Your construction of self through text Now it doesn't mean that this cut across all of the social demographics and social classes because you still had to have Access to a computer But it did provide us a way to Not be constrained As donna harroway would say by like the flesh As a cyborg you could create yourself in any way you wanted to you wouldn't have to be constrained by gender or social class You could create that in real time And I thought as somebody who grew up not necessarily with all the privileges in the world that I might be able to Do that and have a feedback loop that would produce an identity That was more equal than the one that I grew up in And these kind of psychological effects that we get accustomed to it's kind of like a spreadsheet game You want plus one follower plus one like and you forget. What are you actually producing? What will be remembered in five or ten years? Hypersigials from grant Morrison is kind of this idea. I got really excited about Serial experiments lane when I was like 14 Really shy girl with brown mousy hair Uh didn't really understand the world yet went online to the yardo and could suddenly produce an identity So I I definitely followed this as a template for what I was doing But along the way kind of realized you can see how oldest references That the internet was both a playground that you can enjoy but also a factory for Producing things you could produce fame you could produce bullying you could produce torture You could produce fake news as we've now seen It's just this kind of space of a database game And the reason why it's so compelling is that the real world the rewards have slowed down It's not that you can just buy a house suddenly With the current economy, but you can buy one in farmville You can't I mean really old reference But you can buy some that you can do something faster And if you can do something faster in this virtual world, isn't that more compelling? If you go into minecraft in the first night in minecraft you have to prevent the creepers from killing you Your psychology binds to that game as an animalistic response that harkens back to what it is to be human to survive And you're bonded to that game in a way that you haven't been in real life Why is that less compelling than you know, why are these virtual worlds? I mean Farmville is a virtual reality an augmented reality facebook is a two-dimensional virtual reality What we forget when we talk about vr and ar and all these overbuilt systems Is that it doesn't take much for our imagination to attach to something That's why legos are so compelling. They invite our imagination to attach to something and we co-create the thing with our imagination Of course that leads to spreadsheet games social grooming psychological effects And the kind of training wills whoever had who had tamagotchi's when they were growing up. Yeah This is really funny because I think of this as like a training will like please feed the pet so that it survives Please feed your friends with text and emojis so they the friendship survive Like I'll go through I'll set a time and be like I need to text people with emojis Make sure that I continue to have friends because if I forget I won't get access to this pile of norwegian people I grew up in an analog backyard. It was really fun Um, I was growing more physically than I was socially and I brought my tape recorder backyard. It was really fun time Um, but a lot of people don't have backyards anymore. They're they're in apartment buildings And an apartment building doesn't have that random free range kid zone anymore They're constrained and so they go into a kind of digital backyard where you can talk with anybody across any border without a passport maybe your best friend is 10 miles away Maybe they go to a different school And you don't just have the idea of hanging out with like 10 friends After school and then like maybe your mom calls you at night. There's this idea that like it's really dangerous I go to some other countries and people just run around and they're not into door. They explore. They're just hanging out and coming back So I'm worried about this kind of disconnect between social and physical development Especially when you have this kind of augmented reality for bullying where, you know, I got bullied all the time as a kid But when I got home from school, I was safe It was great But now like I can't imagine having to grow up with this where like the bullying will follow me as a virtual Cloud forever and ever until my parents switched me schools. My parents did switch me schools because of the bullying I went to 10 schools but You know, there was at least something that could be done. I was very lucky Um, so how do you kind of merge tech with real life instead of having the tech being constrained to sitting there in front of the tech? Here's a bunch of fun things that I'm just gonna give you because you know, I had I had written a talk 10 years ago I don't really have the structure down yet. You're looking at a history of what I was doing But Mika Satomi did this cool thing where she made this uh vest that you could wear And you could play video games on the person's back And then in doing so you would be giving them a massage while playing a video game So the idea is that you would connect the labor of the fun labor of a game But you wouldn't be wasting that you'd be able to give somebody a massage Kelly dobson said why do we have why do machines have to speak our language? Why can't we speak their language? Why do we have to tell them like on and off and have all this voice activated stuff? So she had a blender where you go And a blender would go This other guy, this is a that's an old picture of me. Um, this this uh, this guy in um In germany decided that he would make a system called the northpaw And the northpaw would just be a haptic buzzer that would buzz in the direction of north It would be like a belt that you would wear with like 12 buzzers And it would always buzz in the direction of north and what this guy and everybody found is that When you wore this you would develop a sixth sense for wherever you were And he found that like a month later he would dream and he would have a buzz to where his home was in the dream um But this you know these three things definitely inspired like my foray into calm tech like trying to take some Information and put it into a different sense with this one trying to use uh labor in one sense and make it fun for somebody else And stop putting voice activation into everything. It's dumb All right, so we have some information junk food. I think right now one of the One of the issues is that we kind of have a fractal production of value There's there's value and then there's an interface with more value and then there's kind of a Kind of a value crisis where everything seems to have value at the same time And that gives us the kind of intermittent Reinforcement that we have as like scionarian rats where we're just clicking the button to find the food I've started to change this I keep my phone in airplane mode. I decide a couple times a day that I want to check something And then maybe once a week I answer a lot of the stuff But I'll keep it. It'll be like do I need to do that right now? No, I need to not worry about it It's been a really hard process because this stuff gets your anxiety up I want more of the kairos time. I want more of the self-reflection time even if it's dangerous Even if I'm bored even if I hate myself even if I'm scared of what I'm thinking about I would rather have that and be alive than just fill my time endlessly with notifications from a machine I call this poorly and neuroscientists hate it Mental defragmentation because when I was a kid I used to watch the mental I used to watch the defragmentation on a computer and you could just see the memory of the computer go and that was really cool Um, and I thought of what if you go on a road trip? Like I've gone on a road trip with some people in this room And it's been really nice to just sit there and have uncompressed time and write note poetry and publish a little zine Or you know just to have that human time Um Because if you don't have that are you being really reflective? Do you know who you are? Are you just repeating the same thing for 10 years and I would ask all of you What is it you want to do with your life? How do you want to live? Are you actually happy? Is any part of your day something that you enjoy Living with and if it's not try putting your phone under a cast iron pan for an hour and seeing how you deal with your life Or a digital downtime Yeah, that's a good quote everything in moderation especially moderation. There's an old talk from 10 years ago. Thanks so much for listening in the end So do people have questions was that reasonable? That was a really weird giving that talk We can talk about anything for um 15 minutes 20 minutes and then maybe we can wrap up Does that sound good or we could continue longer? We're supposed to go to like six but Arthur Do we want a microphone for the livestream? Okay, hold on Wait, wait In the last 10 years, uh Have you encountered examples that you had add to that presentation? Like there's some neat things that you that have come about in the meantime Yeah, I wrote a book on the calm tech part in the self reflection part. Um I wrote a book on the sound part which will come out like next month um I did a startup on one of the parts Yeah, I did like all this is like broken out into like a talk on vr A talk on here like yeah, there's there's been a lot that I would add that that's all kind of Matured more or less. Yeah But there's there's a lot here. I mean the problem with this talk is that there's no real point and um That was always like, how do I piece it out and then figure out Which thing is appropriate for which era right like when I first came to talk on alerts and how annoying they were in 2014 in norway nobody cared. It was rated a two out of five on the presentation level Like people didn't like this talk and they were really mad. They're like, why aren't you talking to us about cyborgs? We hired you to give a talk on cyborgs and you're talking to us about alerts And I said well, I have to practice this talk and in a couple years Everybody will be annoyed with alerts and they'll wonder about how to have our attention back And I have to start giving it now because it's not going to be very good for like a year or two And I'm sorry And so, you know eventually people were like, yeah, we really carry about alerts But if I had tried to give a talk on alerts in 2010 like not even that not even enough people had alerts and phones Yeah But they were kind of like there was a recession going on like people were worried about more stuff than alerts So then what was that like? Well Maybe that was a good time to do a startup on reconnecting people to like civic geo things which Went from an open source project to something bought by a large corporation Yeah, so that one was strange. Um, and then yeah, the other one was Yeah, I guess it's it's been broken up and then like vr came back Like part of this talk, which I didn't give was about steve man and all his vr and ar projects Which I just studied for historical purposes And then like vr and ar came out and I could like break out this deck and suddenly people wanted me to speak at These virtual reality conferences. So I think my timeline is always like I'm usually three years ahead. And so as long as I just Care about it instead of just knock myself in the head and be like, well Nobody cares about it. Therefore. I shouldn't care about it And I say, okay, nobody cares about it. Maybe I should really care about it and work on it so I've just Learned to trust my gut. Like if I really care about a thing, I'll quietly do it not tell anybody about it Because people will say, oh, you have too much free time on your hands or that's dumb or don't talk about that So I just Quietly do something in the background wait for it to be reasonable to release it and then quietly release it Have people hate it for a couple months or a year Deliverately give it in front of people that hate it Until it holds up on its own, which is not fun to do It's like a musician like releasing some really bad music And they have to deal with it and they have to go on tour with it for like a year But thankfully people have liked this stuff over time. So Oh, yeah Recent report that the exec there's the digital divide has flipped And the executives in silicon valley are keeping screens away from their kids And people with the least resources are using screens as babysitters Is this fundamentally changing our humanity growing up with Screens instead of human interaction and any comment you want to make on that? Yes, and then I'll get your question um Yeah, so all the executives I know in silicon valley send their kids to a walder steiner schools. They do not You know, they have a lot of them have nannies and if they don't They try to spend their free time with kids It's hard for people like one person to stay home with a kid anymore like My mom's job got automated. So she had to stay home with me So I got I got lucky, but it definitely impoverished my family. It was not great So I got like a lot of cool attention and training from my parents, which was nice um And I didn't really have a lot of screen time um I guess the screen time issue is that if the tv is that close to your face And the led screen has specific frequencies of high energy blue light It leads to corneal degeneration before the age of 14 So corneal acres can detach and it leads to uh needing surgery later in life Also, like the depth of understanding reality like you're not getting the depth perception and training that you would have like climbing outside in a tree like there's massive things also like delayed gratification if you're used to Pressing on a button and getting everything and you think your kid is really smart because they learned how to turn a page On the ipad and that's really smart instead of Considering it's 40 years of industrial development and design that has gone into it Then you end up in a situation where like It's not really parents fault like the parents who can't stay with their kids and occupy them in some other way Or give them a notebook to write in like they have to do something with their kids You know, so I don't fault anybody for that But for the people who have resources. Yeah, they make sure that I think like before the age of seven kids should have Physical and social and mental development learn to work in teams learn to do a long-term project over the course of six months So that they understand how long it takes and then in schools Make sure that there's art and and culture and all of the other stuff that takes a long time to train So that there's something other than tech because if you only get tech It can lead to depression and anxiety and feelings of worthlessness because you're just comparing yourself to the highlight reel of everything That's been produced online and you don't see as I was talking on the future prairie podcast any of the middle stuff You don't see any of the development. You don't see what it takes to make something Um, so if you don't see any of that then, you know, you're you're kind of getting cheated out of What it takes to do something and it kind of enriched childhood, which we can't blame anybody for but that is a danger And in terms of like dividing people. Yeah Like you're you're looking at a generation who either is really depressed and commit suicide or gets opiate addiction Uh, or a whole other group of people that learns to create and creates the next generation for people So hopefully they'll create a really good generation for us in the future or they might not but there's Hopefully there's more people around to do that. That's really bleak. Uh, please ask the next question Yeah, I was just gonna say uh, this is kind of uh, similar to what the his question. Um, I loved all of that. Um, I um, working with uh, kids with disabilities Is what I've I've been doing with um, and specifically with kids with behavior disabilities People, uh, just kids that just don't know how to treat each other They, you know, a lot of them are very violent and explosive Almost every single one of them that I've worked with in four years Has a technology addiction actually and it's a very common very very common thing And I actually just had a conversation with a co-worker about how, um Our jobs with our we're teaching these kids how to regulate emotion How to teach how to teach people teaching people how to treat one another It it could potentially be the the oldest job, you know, that's around So I was just gonna see what what you might have to say about that. Yeah, um I think I'm on the hook to write another book after this one and the only thing I can think of to start with is You know that you have that the the The rat and the cocaine lever thing or the rat presses the cocaine button until they die Yeah, the sconeering rat right like those different versions of this test There was a study done later For these rats and what they noticed is that they had another control test rats with enriched environments and rats with unenriched environments You just throw a rat in a cage with nothing else to do and they're then press the lever forever But the rats with families and activities and free time and cool stuff ignored the lever So I think instead of saying like it's a technology addiction We could say what is unenriched in somebody's life and how do you bring back that meaning and kairos time and culture And if you can bring that back, you're gonna see a level off in that addiction That's what i'm hoping the hypothesis from the rats applied broadly to humans non scientifically might do All right caveat caveat caveat But I think it's important to look at that and say, you know, how do you enrich Somebody's life and how can we do that without a lot of money? Well, actually the cool thing about culture is that it grows between spaces It grows in periods of political weirdness, you know, and if we can embrace that Then we're going to have a chance I think Hopefully it's a more hopeful Thing than the last answer to the question. I'm trying to be more positive I would agree with that. It just it takes it's hard to teach self-care to somebody who hasn't grown up with it And who has parents who haven't taught them that Yeah Thanks for your talk In thinking through your metaphor of the sarcophagus room And and where information lies. Yeah I When I think of the stanford group the captology group that bj fog is put together Over the years and the sort of the birth of instagram I wonder if you could address A way in which What I think you're pointing at which is How do we Encourage kids or students etc to emerge out of their sarcophagus rooms Into the light of day Into the outside world What keptology is there for the living world? Thanks, jair. Uh, jair also runs a conference. What is media? What is life with university of oregon? I would suggest checking that out every year That's how I met the X church group vr spawn a lot of things. Thank you for being here um Well, I don't know if I have any of the answers But I would say like yeah this the next generation of children They're getting their driver's licenses later. They're not socializing in the same way Um, they're socializing through not with like through a device through a mediator not with Each other and that's just a you know, it's a it's a change Um, I'm right on the cusp of the two generations So, you know, I got my driver's license at 18. Like, you know, I got everything late Um, and I would say I was highly depressed because I didn't know that there was anything else in the world Like I was stuck in just tech and until a strange individual introduced me to the idea of other stuff like I couldn't really get out of that So, you know, if you eradicate arts and music and other cultural programs in schools And you just give people tech and you think adding more tech and iPads are the answer You're robbing people of a potential future that they could have had because they didn't even know it existed So how do you do that without any more arts funding because that's hard to find? Right, how do you do that when it's very it's good for the economy to have people that are depressed because they'll Pay more for stuff and they'll sell their stuff for less and they'll be online like a run-on sentence Right at some point that will invert and it won't be good for the economy anymore And hopefully that day will come soon because it's really getting annoying um but in terms of like introducing people that like All I could do in school is join clubs And joining clubs because they can be run on a very small budget You know, you can get secondhand instruments. You can get weird clay supplies You can do a saturday science class if One of those random great teachers stays after school and doesn't grade papers that night and doesn't spend time with their family That night because they're running your wednesday science after school class That you know, that's one way And another way is like how do you do that as a kid when you can't run down the street and go see a show Like how can you do that when all the culture you see is compressed into mp4 on youtube? And you're in a tiny thing. So hopefully there'll be something more Maybe lego's non-branded lego's maybe a piece of paper in a pad Maybe like uninterrupted quiet time You know an hour a day where you have to be self-reflective Maybe allowing people to be on a computer one or two hours a day Like I did a survey of like a thousand people. How did you learn to program? And a lot of people said well, I didn't have access to the family computer except for once a week So I got these computer programming books and I like wrote it out And then I and then I typed into the computer when I got it and then I screwed up and then there was a bug And then I thought about the bug for a whole week and then when I went back to the computer I fixed it But then it did something weirder and then I had an idea of what happened and I became a really good programmer It was because they weren't allowed to be on it as much And that's kind of the same as like if you can take a picture of anything does a picture mean anything But if you have like three pictures you can take What are they going to be of right? So I think it's just kind of the idea of like if there's an escalator in front of a gym people take it Like if we artificially like limit some of these things suddenly they become more valuable And we get more of the delayed gratification back And we make use of the weird stuff in our environment instead of just clicking a button and getting it reward I'm hoping that might be steps toward an answer Matt you had a question Thanks amber another great talk and a really nice dialogue going So I just wanted to pick up the thread from what we were talking about a few minutes back I was wondering if you've connected with people like Tristan Harris or Any of these silicone valley heretics who started time well spent or humane tech dot org and and whether or not you see That initiative like really taking hold within the culture in silicon valley and Whoever else just in the tech circles that you run in Was this all headed? Yeah, I Hung out with Tristan for a whole day in new york had dinner with him on another occasion talk to him bunch So for those of you don't know Tristan Harris Is an ex-googler and the great thing about being an ex-googler is you can say i'm an ex-googler It's like saying i'm an ex-christian or i'm an ex whatever x anything a complete swap Right and because google is so much in the news and he's a fairly attractive person It's easy to take a big photo and put them on the front page of the atlantic The real big thing that got him was his friend or somebody who didn't even know him made some poetry about it Walk down the streets of new york and put that as a video that became viral about time well spent So it was really interesting to look at that and and when I met Tristan a couple times He was overwhelmed because everybody wanted him to speak at a conference They wanted him to write a book and he was raising funding and getting a whole group of people around him just to take In the intensity So it wasn't that he was trying to do this or he's smug about it. He's just a human that's overwhelmed By the thing that he was trying to not be overwhelmed by so What I like about his effort is that on the time well spent website There is a series of chrome plugins and other tools to get your time back from tech and I would encourage everybody to Look at that. That's really good But in terms of like a long-term solution, you know There are plenty of ex-googlers and ex-facebook people that say let's get our time back But I don't like to think in terms of a year like I like to think in terms of 10 years Like what will exist in 10 years? How we're all will our time be spent? You know like oil painting and watercolor and music will be Around right but like maybe not the current social media interface that we have so I prefer to spend my time On those things that are unmasterable right Which take a really enormous time to do something with and that you can quietly do by yourself that like give you More meaning and I think there's right now. It's just an exciting trend to say tech is bad And let's have some time back and yeah, you know I think with the calm tech effort that I've been trying to do is I've dredged up some stuff in the 80s and 90s In sarahx park that I believe to be more human Universals about attention and what I'm trying to do is take those to the top of companies and say Hey, you don't need to be afraid of people hating tech and you don't need to be afraid of tech But you need to be more deliberate about how you integrate it into your company because it costs you more if you integrate it badly And that's it. So it's a simple message that I think should be able to Not Not be too exotic and not be too exciting or spicy, but just like Slowly feel the cracks between These spaces as a very slow glacier type movement I prefer to do that Then think about a thing at a year at a time because initially I was like, ah, you know, this is intense But then I was like, wow, you're overwhelmed. Oh my gosh. Like well, I'll just focus on this You can focus on that and great. I'll just amplify your chrome plugins and Send me messages every once in a while, you know, so it's peaceable. Yeah So good question. I hope it's an adequate answer Arthur Just building on that Tristan was interviewed in a wired podcast with uh no, you've all hara right and um The author of sapiens and homo des Recently came out with his 21 lessons for the 21st century. Yeah, and I'm wondering how you might address that um concern he has of technological disruption and um, what you see You know as the challenges going forward. Yeah, what is it 21 rules for the 21st century? Is that actually a really good piece? I would suggest like He's writing some pretty good stuff. What what is his name again the author of sapiens? right you've all known a horari so a fantastic writer, but um What was I going to say? How was I I want to address what wait? What was the last question? Oh, oh, thank you. Thank you So if you go back in time to agriculture revolution industrial revolution, there was always this Terror that like, you know, you had kids chained to machines in manchester in the uk Like that was terrible Like now you have kids chained to machines, but they're iPods and it's the internet It's playground of factory and they're paying you know Titting to the to the sheep god and you know playing ads Yeah, how's that different? Well, it's different because the kids last longer, right? They are not dying of like cotton lung Right, but they're still indentured servants, right? So like this is like we're in another generation of that And it's really that whole spectrum Like it's not everything is horrible and everything is great for some people things are okay For some people things aren't really good And we have just to have to say we're at a teenage point in this where we're basically at you know 13 year old forum thread disaster But all of us are taking it seriously instead of just shoving it off And I think that's one of like the great disappointments of the last five years is that like Trolls we've emotionally reacted to instead of saying, okay, this is a forum thread gone wrong Okay, next form. Oh no, the whole world is in the same forum thread and it's gone really horribly wrong You know, but we used to have and I think that's the issue of scale right now. I'm less afraid of I'm more afraid of this this scale issue You just have forums and you had small communities on forums and if somebody was going to commit suicide or they were crazy or whatever You would have a hundred people in that forum or it would be a motorcycle enthusiast forum is about specific interests And you could say, oh, well, I think I know that person's phone number call or go over their house or figure out something But how can you do that with a centralized system of content moderators who are paid nine to five and chain smoke on their breaks? Because I went and interviewed a bunch of them Because they have to moderate horrible content. They're not completely attached to anything does empathy scale You know You have to ask these questions of like what works the scale and what doesn't work at scale And I think if we go back to the greek city states model The greek city states worked pretty well because you had small states and people could switch leadership around And you didn't have too many more people now This is you know, this is just my 10 year old self saying I read play to and i'm cool, you know And I like the idea of city states. It could be completely wrong But that model was Small enough and distributed enough That people had ownership when things went wrong Like if we could fix our own potholes in the city or we could plan our own trees Or we could decide our own city design that could be interesting if we could decide to live in a walkable community And not have these giant cars everywhere if we could have barcelona city blocks, right? But instead things are defined for us by like some larger structure The temple itself online or myspace or whatever user experience decides to change and I think that Is one of the fears that I have about technology is that I want to go down the street and have the television repair person repair my tv I want to know them I don't want to have live in that community maybe for a while and grow roots there and develop something slowly over time I want older people to have respect and look good and stay smart I want people to be well dressed and quality close that are not able to be made at scale Like I kind of want something that's a little bit more real than this kind of like Point-and-shoot trash it quickly society and that's really hard to have and so that's kind of like my reflection on the 21 rules for Something something that he wrote which was good, you know Is that we're going through growing pains right now Hopefully we'll settle in but this era right now is temporary just like every other era is Think longer term you deserve it Don't get so caught up right now Because in 10 years things can change in 15 years. We were just getting phones with cameras Things can really really change the next five years and we actually have The ability to help change that so you know I feel like I'm like preaching or something like don't go home and think on the couch and watch the next Rewound of netflix. There's no reruns on netflix. It's all rerun You know, but like do something you know write like Remember how you used to maybe write in a journal or like paint something for yourself and you didn't have to send it to the web Like if you actually sit down and wrote for 30 minutes tonight and didn't publish it What would that mean? What would that look like? Like we don't have to make stuff for other people We can make it for ourselves and I think if we get a little bit of that back the hard time And have each day have something slightly unique in it Cool things could happen. You will surprise yourself like the single biggest thing that this is so silly inspirational quote But it was like bill gates was like people underestimate what you do what you can do In five years, but overestimate what you can do in one. So as long as you just sufficiently set the timeline You can do whatever you want Because things change a lot so Glacier time Not river time rivers are like super exciting. I don't want to be super exciting. I want to be boring But I want to be doing something that makes Somebody remember something The end Okay, that's cyborg camp. Thanks for coming Dave moser on the second floor says please send people up to be scanned better lighting today He's on the second floor you have about a half an hour before he is going to tear down or maybe even longer But we need to make sure not any how much time do we really have To be polite to you and other organizers Okay Okay, sounds good. Uh, yeah, so second floor up. Dave moser can do a 3d scan and send it to you Thanks for coming see you in two years Oh wait, I would like to thank the live streaming crew. I would like to thank all the volunteers I I'm really bad at this part. Thank you everyone for making it possible Uh drink all the beer and whatever else is out there