 Good evening. Good evening and welcome. Welcome to this evening's Future Tents and New America Fellows program event. I'm Andres Martinez. I'm the editorial director and I'm the former Fellows director here at New America, the editorial director of Future Tents. And more importantly, I'm your moderator for this evening. Future Tents for those of you with us for the first time is a collaboration between New America Slate Magazine and Arizona State University. You can follow us on Twitter at Future Tents now. This is a very exciting night for us as we celebrate Franklin Ford's important book. Frank is an alum of our Fellows program at New America and he's a Slate alum, as he recounts in his book. And he probably has an ASU teaching gig in his future. He doesn't know it yet. So this is truly a family affair. And I'm very appreciative of how generous Frank has been with his time with us. He also did a Future Tents event in New York last night, which I heard was a great success. And Frank reminded me or told me as we were coming in that that might have been the platonic ideal of moderating. So it's going to be all downhill from there. But what's particularly exciting about tonight is that prompted by Frank's impressive book, we all get to consider one of the more consequential questions of our time. One that people in this country and in this town, because of their own agendas, are very reluctant to discuss in an open and candid manner. Yes, I am talking about the question, of course, is how soccer explains the world. The title of Frank's magisterial book, and I chose that word carefully. I'm really glad someone finally had the courage to tell an American audience that the game that makes the world tick really isn't one of theirs. So if you know me well, you know that I'm not entirely joking, that I am a bit obsessed with soccer. And in fact, years ago, Frank and I put on a New America panel on the World Cup. And still I'm in awe of Frank's first book. I have about 20 copies of it at home because so many people kept giving it to me. But we're here tonight, of course, for Frank's new book, World Without Mind, The Existential Threat of Big Tech. I was thinking last night, as I was looking over the book again, how much Frank manages to pack in a fairly compact and vastly entertaining read. This is an authoritative intellectual history of Silicon Valley and a provocative critique of the cultural impact of the technologies we've come to rely on to connect us to each other and to connect us to information. It's also part memoir, which Frank, given the culture clash that Frank experienced at the New Republic, between older publishing values and our brave new click-friendly world. Both Future Tense and the Fellows Program in New America are focused on timely inquiries of great societal impact. And I'd like to think that we have a certain humility in our preference for big questions over the pretense of having all the answers. As those of you who've been to previous Future Tense events are well aware. And there's really no more pressing question these days than the impact of these transformative informational technologies. Their impact for better and for worse on how we lead our daily lives, on our democracy, on our economy and our society. The four corporate horsemen of the apocalypse, or the brave new world, depending on how you see things, sketched out by Frank in his book, are Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. And an important part of that story is the ambition and growing power of these young but massively influential companies, including in our own worlds. And by our own worlds, I'm talking about media, the academy, and yes, even DC think tanks. Just this week, our Cronkite School at ASU announced a partnership with Facebook, a media literacy lab that is to be headed by my colleague Dan Gilmore, who's been a frequent critic of these companies on our channel and at our events. And of course, as many of you might be aware, New America itself has been in the news recently as a result of its long standing relationship with Google, and even longer relationship with Eric Schmidt, a subject that is likely to come up this evening. So again, this is truly a family affair. Frank, more than anything, I want to congratulate you on triggering this important conversation here and elsewhere on the role these companies play in our lives. I thought it would all be downhill after soccer, but you managed to find a topic of equal importance and salience and do it justice. The way we're going to proceed tonight is that Frank will first give a short talk and then join me in conversation. After that, we will have three other folks with different perspectives join the fun to talk about the question of big tech's role in our lives. I'll then try to leave some question for your question, time for your questions after that conversation, but also encourage you to stay afterwards and we can continue talking about this important subject amongst ourselves over a drink and some more nerves. So Frank, podium is yours. I'm not going to lie to you. It was pretty surreal to get mic'd up for this event in the Eric Schmidt idea lab. But I wrote this book and, as Andre said, it grew out of personal experience. It began with my editing of the New Republic magazine where I worked with a co-founder of Facebook, Chris Hughes, who was 28 years old and worth $700 million when he bought the magazine. And I'm sure you hate him already after that, but Chris came in and he had this glorious ideal for what would become of the New Republic and it was incredibly attractive to me because we had been this little magazine that had sputtered along. There was a history of the 1960s that I read once that said the readership of the New Republic couldn't fill the University of Mississippi football stadium. And we'd been this small elite-minded magazine that had this incredibly strange alchemy of writing about political insider dish, high-minded pieces about policy, and long essays about high-brow culture. And we'd sputtered through the digital era. We just couldn't figure out how to make things work. And then in walked Chris, who was this mythical savior who had a vision for how we could combine serious ideas, he professed his commitment to those, his deep pockets, and then also he was a guy who had invented social media. And so it seemed like this perfect alchemy that would work for us and lead us into a solution for journalism that would be a dignified response to all the things that had ailed us in this new era. And at first it worked out pretty wonderfully from my perspective. I was able to spend a lot of money but then at a certain point on good quality journalism. And at a certain point things started to go downhill because Chris wanted to both prove himself to his fellow technologist but he also said we needed revenue. And so there was one way to get revenue which was through growing web traffic and there was one way to grow web traffic which was to produce pieces that would fly on Facebook. And so we engaged in this microcosm, this incredibly compressed period of media history where we had to go through a very, very quick digital revolution and it transformed the way that we did journalism. That suddenly we were beholden to this one massive platform and the values of the platform ended up becoming the values of the magazine. And suddenly we were, this magazine that had been devoted almost to a fault to being original and we were chasing the thing that was popular, the thing that was trending. We were trying to latch on to the thing that everybody else was talking about. And that experiment ended really badly for me. I ended up getting fired and it ended up becoming a small object lesson in the ways in which the values of Silicon Valley were inconsistent with the values of journalism. And so I was of course angry about this experience but I also felt like I was seeing something that was happening to our society writ large that we've just become so dependent on these four companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple and they're just simply different than the monopolies that we've encountered in the past. They're different because one of the sources of their monopoly is that they've amassed more data than anybody else and they leverage that data in order to addict us to their products. Data is everywhere you've traveled on the internet. It's your friends, it's your reading habits, it's your financial history, it's an x-ray of your soul and they leverage this portrait of the inside of your mind and they create these platforms that are designed to just distract us constantly and to always seize our attention. And so everybody who has an iPhone knows exactly what I'm talking about because, sorry I didn't mean to stare at anybody, but everybody who has an iPhone knows that this device is always buzzing, it's always notifying us that when it exists in another room it beckons us. We sleep with our iPhones and they awaken us in the middle of the night and the next thing we know we're caught in an endless scroll and that's not an accident. That's the way that these things were created. And so I'm concerned about the threat to privacy that these companies pose but more than that I'm concerned about the threat that they pose to our ability to be thinking human beings. That contemplation and the very essence of what it means to be an independent human being who arrives at ideas by themselves is under threat. Facebook is also a great example of this in the ways in which they've amassed so much power over democracy and that these companies are dangerous because they shape our reality. And the core concern about monopoly has always been about how private power has the possibility to distort public debate. And with Facebook we saw this in the last election in ways that are now increasingly obvious to us in the ways in which bad actors were able to manipulate this system but it was also apparent to us in other sorts of ways because Facebook has created this feedback loop where we're always getting what they think we want based on the data that they have. And instead of creating individuality, there is individuality that comes with these technologies but there's also this herd mentality. It's what I described with the New Republic where we were constantly chasing the hive mind, constantly trying to attach ourselves to the emotions that would make us popular in the world. And this experience of being trapped in these filter bubbles that they've created where it is intellectually incapacitating. It causes us to be weak and susceptible to fake news, to demagoguery, to propaganda. And if you have good actors or well-intentioned actors like journalists manipulating this system, we can only imagine the harm that can be done from the bad actors who manipulate this system. And so I wrote this book in part, it was a personal story to process the anger that I felt but also to kind of intellectualize this problem that I saw that was happening to the rest of the world. And at the core of this debate, at the core of this argument, is a concern for individuality but also a concern for the future of our democracy. Because if you go back to Jefferson, you go back to the founders, this is what they were worried about. They were worried about the possibility of private power exerting this influence over public debate. And I would be remiss if I didn't in some ways connect that to the happenings here at the New America Foundation. And it's a bit of an uncomfortable subject for me to bring up because I have fondness for both of the players who were the protagonist and antagonist in this debate. That when I was fired from the New Republic, Anne Marie was one of the first people to write me after I got fired and offered me a fellowship. And as I wrote this book that was critical of Google, I was untouched in the process. But just because I have gratitude for that doesn't mean that I'm not outraged at what happened here. And to me, it is essentially reflective of some of these broader problems that I wrote about in this book. It's the problem of dependence and that over the course of the last few years, these companies which started out as plucky upstarts with a lot of moxie who seemed like they were outsider firms have suddenly become the insider firms. That these companies who once were disruptive have become the incumbents and they're behaving as incumbents do, which is that they then begin to try to manipulate the state to protect their incumbency. They've all spent vast sums of money trying to buy power and influence in Washington DC. They've done it through lobbying and they've done it through the ideas industry. And the behavior of these companies that I've described is not so different from the industries that have gone before them, in the ways that are not so obvious like the ways in which they mimic the behavior of say the tobacco companies and producing these products that are reversed engineered to addict us. But also I think that we need to be vigilant about the threats that they pose. And so when I look at what happened in here, I understand I want to just step back a little bit because it's become a highly personalized discussion in ways that I think are probably have been probably unfair to both characters and that there's a lot of there's character aspersion that's happened that I think is unfair. But Barry, so Anne Marie supported me and Barry when I came to New America was the person who kind of did the most to take me under my wing. And I developed an extremely collegial relationship with him where he did a lot to help foster my thinking and foster my work. And so he also did an incredible job of taking an issue that was on the fringes of the public discourse and through his own kind of pluck and moxie and intellectual work and also fostering of young intellectuals was able to help carry this debate from the periphery much, much closer to the center. And so when his work clearly when his work traveled closer to the center, it was once something that could be that could be tolerated or even supported by a company like Google. And then now because these issues because of what's happening in Europe because of the changing politics of the Democratic Party, it's become much more dangerous to them. And what I would what I would love to do in this conversation is to to do what to whatever we can to kind of advance to some of the larger questions that are at stake at this moment that that pertain not just to New America, but pertain to other aspects of of Washington DC and pertain to our democracy more generally. So a company like Google, we know it stands between us and knowledge that if you're trying to if you're trying to encounter the world, Google becomes a primary portal for the way in which we encounter the world. Just as Facebook is a primary portal for people to encounter information and Amazon is a primary portal for people who were shopping on the internet and the way in which our phone is a primary primary portal to everything else. And that's that's incredible power. And Google has the ability and these other companies have the ability to shape winners and losers. What Google decides appears at the top of its search results becomes the thing that we all pay most attention to. And that's simply that's simply a fact. And we've always cared about this in our democracy. We've always been acutely concerned for companies that amass too much power in the shaping of public opinion. And we've responded to them fairly, fairly aggressively. And so so what happened what happened here, I don't want to get a meshed in in the in the details about it. But I do think that it it calls attention to this larger problem that it becomes harder and harder for us to discuss these issues if we allow this private power to continue to amass in the ways that it has with no countervailing response. And really the primary message of my book is that we've been frozen in time a little bit. I mean these companies have advanced us and they've done incredible things to human civilization. But our response to them is stuck as if they are still the plucky outsiders. The type of Google that arrived in the late 90s and the early 2000s that we could look at as a company that could be viewed in an almost entirely admirable sort of way. Our perception of them needs to change. The response of our society needs to change. We need to we need to return to the very powerful tradition of anti-monopoly that we have in this country. We need to we need to create an architecture in our intellectual lives and in our individual lives that allows us to detach from these machines from the companies that run these machines. That we need to ask the sorts of questions about the choices that we make in our in our in our organizations in our public life that that allows us to to maintain our genuine independence. And these these are the big these are the the greatest themes of our age because these companies have a view of human nature. They have a view of what it means to be a human being. What what it means to have a public square and we we might decide that we endorse their vision of the world but right now because of their economic power they're able to carry us along on their vision in a way where we're not exerting countervailing influence where we're not being thoughtful about this transition where we're not making active efforts to preserve the the the the marketplace of ideas the democratic discourse that if we step back and we pause and we contemplated I think we would want to preserve. So why don't we just have a conversation now. Thank you and thanks for your candor about New America. I I should say that Ann Marie Slaughter the president of New America is one of the the folks I mentioned who are going to join the conversation. So at that point I will give Ann Marie an opportunity to address what happened with with open. I should also add just I didn't mention this in the run of things that I'm I joined the board of Open Market when it was created and so full disclosure on that and I'm I'm proud of that association. And so I mean the so we'll hear from Ann Marie. I would just say from future tense's perspective and then I do want to get to the larger ideas. I warned you guys this was a partly a family affair but you know future tense has been looking at the impact of technology on society for seven plus years and we have been you know New America is one of the the three founding pillars of this partnership and we have never encountered any interference or you know pressure on what we should say or shouldn't say if you read us on slate you probably not a week goes by that we don't say something critical of these companies and I think that's also been true of the spirit and certainly in our events as well and it's been true of the spirit in our in our fellows program which I ran for a number of years and I think that has continued under under Peter Bergen. So I am no longer part of the New America leadership team beyond future tense. I was not privy to what happened between open markets and Ann Marie and I'm going to leave that to her in the last year. But I just in terms of the context I think that's what I would say from the future tense perspective and also once again to double down on the family affair theme. You know if you look at the blurbs on Frank's book you know two of the four are also written by people who are close to the story from a New America vantage point. Steve Call who was the president of New America for several years the second president of the foreign and Marie he really developed and deepened the relationship with Google and with Eric Schmidt in part I think over a shared vision of internet freedom both at home and abroad against a different kind of incumbent against a different type of what was considered a monopolist in the domestic scenario on the net neutrality debates and certainly against a different kind of incumbent monopolist overseas in terms of autocratic governments. So part of the strange irony of this whole discussion is that it was it was it was almost it was very unusual and almost entirely predictable that you had that things would blow up given that you had this really remarked I mean it is testament to what new to New America that it was able to foster open market right but then there was this way as open markets became more successful that there was a collision course that was kind of set. Yeah but before we I don't I don't really have much of a view on what happened with open markets this year I'm just trying to provide a little bit more context and the other person I would want to shout out to that wrote who wrote one of your blurbs is Tim Woo and when I was reading your book I was very much reminded of the master switch which also is sort of an early warning as to what might happen to the promise of the internet in the hands of concentration of corporate power it's just the fantastic book that chronicles what happened to previously you know exciting enthusiastic technologies that had this sort of grassroots enthusiasm to them and then became sort of stifled in some ways by corporate concentration of power. Your book feels in many ways like the sequel to the master switch. So in terms of the culture of New America you know I don't think Eric Schmidt of Ideas Lab fame is I mean I think he's a fairly sophisticated guy and I think when he decided to partner with New America and invest in New America and join the board at the invitation early early on before he was at Google I think it was at the invitation of Jim Fallows if memory serves me one of your colleagues at the Atlantic I think he kind of knew what he was getting himself into that this was a sort of Montessori like think tank as I like to put it where there is a sort of eclectic diversity of views I came here as a fellow in 2007 started running the fellows program in 2008 and back then I was struck by how there was no cohesive worldview and we had policy programs warring with each other most famously at one point the health policy program and the committee for responsible federal budget which became another you know thriving spinoff of New America and and and then fellows and there was a certain respect for the independence of thought of where these people wanted to go and it's again not knowing the details of the last few months with open markets I would be it would be hard for me to imagine that Eric Schmidt or somebody at Google woke up one day and was shocked shocked to find that that they couldn't quite control the messaging at New America or that so maybe things changed maybe you know and I think we'll have I suspect that there will be critical voices of these corporations in New America for many years into the future as they're having in the past but but that will be the test of this so you know and we'll hear more from Anne-Marie but I think you're right that the interest in this story speaks to a very legitimate concern about the role these companies are playing in Washington in our society and I think whether the business model of an ideas enterprise like New America or like a university in relying on these companies that that is a very legitimate question going forward for Anne Marie models in the New America model correct me if I'm wrong because you you know more about it than I do but when it when it began it was it was not relying it didn't take corporate money am I wrong about that I think I'm right about that there was corporate money started in 2001 and so there is they're two different funding models and and the corporate money I think is I don't know what percent what percentage of of New America is is corporate money it's 12 percent so it's not it's not a massive percent but the most the balance of it is foundation money right and so an individual so foundations and in individuals when they they give money they they have so they have interests right they have agendas that they they aim to everyone has government's have interest governments yes they do and but I think it's foundations operate under a set of they kind of understand they have an inherent understanding of the ideas industry and its rules and a certain ideal of disinterestedness because they've been conditioned to do that and they don't exist to make a profit but whereas corporations exist to make a profit and so there's there is an inherent problem it's not it's not it's not it's not always a problem but there is there are those moments when you step on a company's toes in a way that makes them scream and that yeah let me ask you related to that you you you mentioned our changed perception and again new america was it was a sort of story in august that brings a lot of these issues to light but but the bigger picture is you you mentioned how our perception of these companies particularly in our sort of you know relatively progressive dc bubble our perception of these companies this changed dramatically in recent years you and you alluded to changes in the democratic party but maybe talk a little bit about that because i do remember you know in the obama years people were so eager to work with these companies in a way that they might have been allergic to doing things with exxon mobile or coca-cola or and now i feel like we've done this u-turn is it because the behavior of the company's changed or is it because we woke up to something about them that we were in denial about earlier well there's two things that i want to say one is that these companies are interesting because in addition to being profit making they're also they proclaim themselves to be idealists they don't which they almost have to be in order to operate in some of these these realms that if you if you were google and you i mean if you would distinguish google from the other search engines was that it you couldn't buy placement in google and so it had it had an idea about its place in democracy and it's true that the democratic party these companies kind of align themselves with the center left as reflected in the way that eric schmidt and others crowded around barack obama and barack obama hugged them right back and also in the way in which they tried to focus on kind of cultivating well google google spread its money around a bit ecumen ecumenically they spread it on the right and i think one of the adam works with mercatus which has received google money and has uh to support its work and so it spread his money ecumenically but politically there was really no mistaking where silken valley especially was which was the center the center left and so i think that's starting to change now because the democratic party understands that there's this free-floating anger that there's this populist spirit and i think the smartest people in the democratic party have tried to find ways to harness that energy in order to attack fairly core economic problems that maybe haven't been addressed and so some of these problems weren't evident because uh only you know their monopolies are the companies are not that old and the monopolies uh it's even it's even controversial to say that they possess monopolies in the uh the the the market that they preside over and so you're right it's uh it's only recently that i think that um people have started to awaken to some of the core risks that these companies pose to say these companies are not that old is uh is almost an understatement i mean i when you were um frank was twice the editor at the new republic i mean i should have mentioned these now also at the atlantic and um when you were first at the new republic as editor and you know you were one of the traditional gatekeepers to this world your numbers were small but your influence was huge i was an editor you know at another old line traditional outlet in those in some of those years at the new york times on the editor page and when if i look back at that moment in time which wasn't that long ago um google and facebook for all intents and purposes didn't exist yet right you know and and we were everybody was worried about the financial viability of apple and amazon amazon after the dot com bust and and i mean amazon after the bust and then apple had been struggling in the late nineties got a bail out from microsoft of all places because microsoft was worried about being the bad monopolist and before that you were it's you know you were at slate as you mentioned in your book in seattle slate founded by bill gates and everybody was worried about you know this this this fierce monopoly of microsoft thanks to its control of the browser so but that all of that raises a question about the permanence of these of the gatekeeping informational monopolies how we wanted to find them is there something now irreversible about the portrait you are painting and the power of these companies or are we going to be having events like this in 10 15 years talking about companies that have not yet been born today or just percolating in someone's garage first full credit to the government for its lawsuit against microsoft which played a fairly important role in creating space for the invention of google that with if microsoft hadn't been worried about government looking over its shoulder i think it would have probably used its advantage in the browser to try everything that it could do to strangle google and its crib and so the government gave the government actually created space for google to flourish which is part of a long story with antitrust laws getting applied to atn t or ibm or you know that in creating space for innovation which is not necessarily the way that we think about government the second thing is that the advantages that these companies have sure they can be they could be disrupted at some point and we can't really predict the future of technology but there are a couple things that i think make their advantage especially especially worrisome the first is is is the ways in which companies now aspire to get bought by these companies they no longer aspire to dethrone them secondly you look at the way in which talent in the sectors where there could be potential competitors to them in ai or virtual reality they manage to use their monopolistic rents their their massive piles of cash to pay exorbitantly in order to to capture the talents that might be capable of challenging them and then finally there's just this sense of the network effect that once these companies have captured whatever network that they've captured it it there's at least the perception that they they will become very almost impossible to to topple and that's built into the whole vernacular of silken valley the first mover advantage the network effects etc etc and so i think that um you know theoretically we could sit around and we could hope that they're going to get dislodged but i it's i can't see that happening and in the meantime we're we're going through all these profound transformations we can see their effects on democracy and it seems like what's called for is not twiddling our thumbs but actually imposing some sort of countervailing power you have this line in i think it's in i believe it's in your introduction where you where you say and it's a line that again not that long ago might have felt inspiring but now there's something a little bit haunting about it you talk about there can only be one global village and that's the line and i and that goes to the sort of power of the network and and which leads to sort of monopoly in some ways in some ways that are convenient and maybe we can become complacent about that i mean the fact that i can go on facebook and get updates from my colleague editors and my first newspaper job in pittsburgh and you know my friends from junior high in mexico um you know what's not to like about that and of course your book is the other side of that but what is not to like um but yeah can i be clear about one thing which is that i consider the search engine to be one of the marbles of human ingenuity and i think that the iphone is an incredible invention but it just because these things are amazing doesn't mean that we need we should suspend skepticism and or or give up on our kind of basic practices of thinking about markets that have governed the united states for for generations and so my fear is that um is that there's something almost uh intellectually disabling about the about these things and that we do have this sense that we're just these this is this inevitability that we just need to accept the permanence of the network effect or accept the permanence of the these these companies or um or or or that we can't really change our relationship to technology but are you are you overstating the extent to which people suspend their own thinking when they go on these networks or perhaps get them let them off the hook for not if they choose to do so for not exercising their own judgment i mean is it is it mark suckerberg's fault that if i go on facebook and i read things that are not credible that i don't think to go and also get information from elsewhere that i'm surrendering that i mean how much fault how much personal responsibility no no it's it's his fault i mean it's on you too but it's it's ultimately i feel like you're letting me off the hook no no you're on the hook but he's on the hook even more because he's um he's created a system that has presided over the the decay of of of media institutions that provide he tried to connect me with my buddies back in yeah well look if i could have if i could have a facebook that could allow me to just look at my friends pictures maybe i would take that if i could turn off the news like if it wasn't a news feed if i if it was just a feed maybe that i think i would i would be much more happy with that but the way that um you know facebook is this stew facebook is um it's not what your friends share i mean it is what your friends share but facebook takes all of that and it organizes it and it provides hierarchy and it says this is more important than that and that's based on um on on the behavioral sciences is that it it's exploiting and so it knows your pleasure points it knows your anxieties and it tries to give you all those things in order to keep you as engaged as possible and um human beings should probably be stronger in response to that in response to that we should be more willful but we should know we also have to go read the atlantic yeah right but we're we're um we we live in a society where we have this sense of that we're all perpetually crunched for time and that we want somebody to more efficiently organize things for us constantly even if it's not in our own interest as individuals and citizens to have one company uh organizing that information for us based on this this powerful urge to addict us so you you talk about one thing i had i had trouble with in your book was when you describe the the episode the one thing factually i mean when you went when you talked about the entend cordial between the companies yeah the end this notion that i mean i i love any illusion the world one but also the the suggestion that there's a collusion between these four to sort of conquer the world in concert um and you mentioned as an example again eric schmidt of ideas left fame being on apple's board as an example of the sort of cozy collusion but then of course that didn't end well um schmidt sort of famously left had to leave the apple board when google launched android and steve jobs felt betrayed that google had gone into telephony when he was on the board and and sort of running against the notion that hey we'd sort of carve things up and we were you know we weren't going to get into search but you got into telephony and i'm just wondering if you're almost like underselling uh or underestimating that the hubris of each and one of these individual companies that they might actually feel like they can pull this all off on their own the race to singularity the race to i wrote a book called world without mind the existential threat of big tech i've never been accused of underselling before well but but it's a serious question i mean do you feel like yeah i just when i when i to the extent that i follow what amazon is up to or facebook or google i i feel like they each feel that they don't need to work in concert with anybody else at the end of the day right there's certainly areas where they do i mean so this question of how you define a market is kind of a um it's a tricky question and if you put four antitrust lawyers in a room they would never come to the same conclusion in their areas where these companies are competing against one of their advertising being um the most important one but when it comes to their core businesses they really you know there's google google has this is at its core the search company amazon is at its core the retail company uh facebook is at its core a social network and uh and apple is at its core a hardware company and so and they do they do nibble at each other in some in some instances it's more than nibble but i think the point is is that um we live in this world where it's just it's it's considered to be very hard to be the second mover and that and so uh when google gets into social media it kind of it goes there and then kind of retreat when microsoft gets into the search engine business it tests the waters in a fairly substantial way but then quickly retreats and these become object lessons that guide the way that they but you're right in that ultimately they're all kind of everything companies in the way that i describe and that's part of the threat that they pose which is that um google started off saying that it wanted to organize knowledge but that became too modest in a vision for them and so they branched into self-driving cars and they became a life sciences company etc etc amazon started off as the everything store but then owned the washington came to the washington post the movie studio power the cloud etc etc and there's no end to the etc i do want to ask you quickly a media question and then i want to invite um our other panelists to join and that's you know quickly so so when i worked at newspapers we were going through this wrenching transition because print media and newspapers across the country had lost their business model was predicated on revenue from advertising that you know was was printed out and most classifieds all that migrated online yeah and we were waiting for this this transition for the advertising dollars on the newspapers websites to sort of replace and catch up dollar for dollar what had been lost in the print side and lo and behold that day never came because along came google and facebook and took all that money i mean through their success and whatnot but but it basically you know if you're a newspaper it's been like waiting for godot in terms of when is the state going to come when our online ad revenue is going to catch up to what we lost and it all went to facebook and google so in that context and with the real crisis that we're facing in media across the country particularly when it comes to sort of local and state coverage what is the responsibility in your mind of these companies and the people behind them to fill that gap not just in terms of what they're doing internally but in terms of finding new ways perhaps of underwriting this journalism you mentioned jeff bezels acquiring the washington post yeah you were at the atlantic you at some point there's some transition going on where yeah uh lorraine pal jobs is coming to acquire the atlantic um is this something that we are going to see should should see a lot more of nationally or should there be i don't know some mega facebook foundation that funds investigative reporting in minneapolis what's the frankfort solution to this i would suggest that's the wrong question to be to ask which is that we shouldn't we shouldn't want um the people who already have tremendous amounts of power to walk in and be our beneficent saviors where they end up accumulating even greater hold over uh over public discourse um and so my inclination is to want to contain them rather than and and when it comes to saving journalism i would rather have a solution that came from within journalism where journalism can find a different way to de-addict itself from these companies and um journalists are terrible narcissists um which won't probably come as a much of a surprise to anybody who's ever watched tv um tv news but uh journalist uh you know we have this myoptic view that just because jeff bezos comes in and saves the washington post you know we should suddenly treat him as a deity um and all right so the washington post in some ways has gotten better under jeff bezos in some ways it's engaged in some of the sorts of um uh journalism that i i kind of decry in the book the data obsessed chase of of popularity um but just because he's sponsored a paper that has had that that has a great editor and marty barron and has published important pieces about donald trump in my mind doesn't fundamentally change the way that i think about amazon and the dangers that it poses to the world and so i think i think journalism needs to play you know journalism has had this collective action problem where it's grown ever more dependent on these companies and so when the companies say uh do video journalism says okay we're gonna rush in the direction of video and even even if they know in their core that's probably what they shouldn't have they shouldn't be spending their money there it's not really what they want to do they do it because they're dependent and they have no choice which is yeah yeah okay who's gonna win the world cup oh god back today you're away you can you have uh it just as i can't predict the company that's going to disrupt google this is only a few months away from them yeah um all right are you gonna think about that no i'll say i'm gonna say i'm gonna france okay that's contrarian uh so i'd like to invite our second panel to join us and i'm going to be introducing them while we add some chairs um anamary slaughter as all of you know is the president and ceo of new america oh frank i think you're supposed to move here these are like a game of musical chairs to find out how much whoa i'm listening to gary boward that that moment where gary boward was flipping pancakes and then flipped himself in the back of the podium off the podium i live in i live in fear of that and it almost just happened to me so i'm going to start at the end adam tear is a senior research fellow with the technology policy program at the mercata center at george mason university he's the author of permissionless innovation the continuing case for comprehensive technological freedom he's a previous president of the progressive of the progress and freedom foundation and a director of telecommunication studies at the kato institute and a senior fellow at the heritage foundation welcome adam and to his right is anamary slaughter the president ceo of new america uh dr slaughter this is very formal has written or edited eight books including the chess board and the web strategies of connection in a dangerous world and unfinished business women men work family uh as many of you know from 2009 to 2011 she served as a director of policy planning for the u.s. state department the first woman to hold opposition and she uh was the dean at the woodrow wilson school of public policy and international affairs and then we have emily parker who is a future tense fellow and she's the author of now i know who my comrades are voices from the internet underground she's also a former served in secretary clinton's posse planning staff at the u.s. department of state she's the co-founder of code for country the first open government codathon between the united states and russia and she's also a narcissistic journalist or a recovering one having edited op-eds at the wall street journal where she also wrote a column about the internet and she also edited column at the New York Times so welcome all so amary i think i i need to give you the prerogative to just respond a little bit to what has been said and we really all want to know if you think france is going to win the world cup too so first of all uh i'm glad to have this discussion uh and i want to start by saying new america is deeply proud of the open markets work both barry's work and the work of the younger scholars that he mentored uh and we're equally proud of frank's book it is very much a book in the new america tradition uh andres already mentioned tim woo who was one of our fellows who wrote uh who actually coined net neutrality and we've done a lot of work on net neutrality which takes on a number of big corporations uh similar work on wireless spectrum and work against big food companies uh we sponsored the meat racket uh which was chris lennard's book uh against tyson's food so and you can go and look at all the books uh that are out there uh they are the kind of work uh that we love to sponsor and no one has ever said uh that their work was interfered with so i decided that barry lin and i had to part ways because he could not work respectfully honestly and cooperatively with his colleagues but i did not fire him i could have i did not fire him because of the value of the work which we believe in deeply and because he'd been here a long time i tried i negotiated for two months with him to spin out open markets with full funding we called his funders to transfer the funding with full staff to make sure he had money to support those staff because they were our employees and we cared about that if he didn't have money we were gonna have to try to see if we could find them uh positions and i'm not sure we could have because we didn't have uh other funding so full funding full staff and complete independence we even negotiated with him to share millennium fellows their new program that we have we were planning to have our fellows work at the new open markets institute we worked for two months to do that i thought we were negotiating in good faith two days before the new york times article i wrote barry an email saying you really we got to get this done because it's the end of the summer and he said we're almost there it became clear he had a very different agenda at no point did google or any funder tell me to fireberry lin and at no point did google or any funder try to influence the work of anybody here and if any funder ever did tell me that i'd tell them to take a hike i mean i i can't even imagine i've spent my life in the academy as a professor and i cannot imagine a funder telling me who i've got to fire or what work to be done and indeed there are 24 new america fellows who wrote a letter about concern for the integrity of new america's work and all of them said no one has ever interfered with our work but i want to go further and say this is about frank's book but if you want further proof you should look at my book i published a book in march on it on networks in the world on how we design networks in the globe and i argued against gatekeeping i argued very strongly that against exactly what frank argues against in his book the idea that different countries would actually lock up different parts of the internet and at the end of it i argued for open society open government and open international system and in internet in the arguments on open society i argued for a return to the brandycean view of antitrust exactly what frank argues because i was at the university of chicago law school when the law and economics people took it over and i don't believe in that view i don't believe that only economic efficiency is what should turn antitrust i wrote that i referred to google's tangles with the eu back in 2001 i cited an article written by barry lin and phil longman and at the end of it because frank talks about this too i said the real problem is the aggregation of data and sooner or later the people will catch up with the data masters and will demand a slice of the value that is created that now goes to all these countries companies i wrote all that in march google never said a word eric schmidt blurbed the book so the idea that suddenly i'm going to turn around and say gosh open markets you're criticizing google you should go we have 12 corporate funding of that 3.6 percent was from google and eric funded us over many years but he had stopped funding us by june so i want to say two more things lots of reference to the eric schmidt ideas lab which is right there so frank you write and i deeply agree with you about the need to preserve human values in a time when our lives are being taken over by technology indeed at the end you talk about turning back to books and and kind of engaging each other instead of all sitting at a table looking at our phones i deeply believe in that but my definition of human values includes honesty integrity and loyalty eric schmidt was on our board for 15 years he was on our board before he went to google when he stepped down from our board we honored him as any institution would for that kind of service and chair he was chair of our board for eight years so just because now people have suddenly see google in a different light we are not going to take that down we are not going to suddenly say oh sorry eric you know even though we were thrilled to have you for all those years suddenly we're going to turn against that and we're going to have relationships with a former board member as any organization would but he was not funding us he's stopped funding so the last thing i just want to say is to broaden this debate because where i really do agree with frank is that the rise of big tech companies and technology generally poses huge issues for all of us i've already explained where i come out on antitrust issues but there are enormous privacy issues and new america works on those privacy issues there are enormous issues precisely about how are we going to preserve our humanity at a time of artificial intelligence which all these companies are competing on and finally and i inadvertently contributed to a growing distrust in all of our institutions not just think tanks but universities and certainly media and that is something we all have to tackle and it is something that i i do think given where we are new america is going to work very hard on so i want to leave it with as i said i did not part ways with berry lind for anything to do with google and i think there are larger issues here that i'm very proud to have this kind of debate at new america and new america will continue to host exactly these kinds of debates adam i and i should tell the audience that we planned this event and invited you all before the open markets news and i hope you don't feel you're coming to another family's thanksgiving dinner and be like whoa i don't know about uncle charlie yeah i should have had a drink before i got out here so uh but what do you know so so i do want to bring you into the conversation in terms of this the larger issue um that frank alluded to earlier and that amary is is is grappling with um because you're in this industry too if we define the industry as sort of the ideas policy space um where we're trying to inform uh people about how to think about challenges facing society and how we should resolve them and whether it's think tanks like ours or academic institutions and i understand mercatus probably straddles both you're also because of our business model seeking funds from some of these very companies and i understand google has also funded mercatus so you're coming into this this this family conversation you know step back and help us figure out you know what how people should think about this and whether going forward if there is going to be such concern over the tremendous power of these gatekeepers to information uh is this kind of funding just going to be by definition too compromising in your mind how do you wrestle with that so i've spent 25 years working with five different public policy organizations and i've been at organizations that have been 100 corporate funded and almost zero corporately funded uh currently the mercatus center i believe our corporate funding is something like three or four percent you'd have to ask our funding department fund raising department but i i know it's definitely never been over 10 anytime since i've been there in the last seven years it's a trivial amount but uh foundations individuals there's always a different balance wherever you go um and yet no matter where i go uh often accused even if you get even 0.001 percent any corporate money of being a corporate shill of some sort uh it just goes along with the territory and yet educational institutions and nonprofits have been funded by corporations and trade associations and other types of private bodies and philanthropists for a long long time this has been a struggle for the ideas business to know how to balance this and how to come up with a set of principles to make sure that your scholars are isolated and i'm not going to name names but i know there are other organizations both in the conservative libertarian and liberal movements that all have this problem and some deal a little lot better than others i can tell you with an old organization that i briefly ran as president progress and freedom foundation this had become a chronic enough problem for me trying to find a way to diversify funding that by the end of the day i finally euthanized the place i put it under because we were so unsuccessful in being able to find enough balance support from individuals and foundations like other organizations i'd work for and it had become toxic to the work culture and it had been impossible for me to defend my own academic reputation and so i'd have to walk into brooms and say like look i understand we get all this corporate money but really you should be scared of me not for that because because i actually believe in the ideas that i'm articulating here today you know but they didn't believe that they only thought i was there to take somebody else's view which no matter how hard i try i couldn't defend against it i'm not sure if there's a clear silver bullet solution or goldilocks principle that gets things just right zeroing out corporate money altogether in the ideas world is next to impossible but i think putting together a good set of principles at the board level and at the presidential level about how you do your research and how you keep a long arms reach from these corporations and being very hyper transparent about these relationships ultimately is the best way to probably head off some of these problems before they develop some of this is reminiscent of debates and concern around campaign finance in other words there's a there's a candidate for public office or an incumbent politician receive donations because of the views that he or she holds or does she does he or she hold the views because of the donation it's sort of a sequencing chicken and egg thing you know i think google following in erich metz footsteps partnered with the open technology institute here over a shared vision of internet policy but over time the perception might be that and we've been accused of this in past debates you know i remember back when working closely with steve where often sometimes when people would try to discredit new america on net neutrality battles it was accused we were we would be accused of being a shill for google by you know the 18 t's and comcasts of the world were on the other side and so instead of you know in addition or instead of addressing the merits you would get into those debates so i think that's an interesting analogy to the way of thinking about it but i'm curious adam on the merits of frank's argument that there is something perhaps unprecedented about the the gatekeeping power to information of these companies and what they've achieved is that something just a different order of magnitude that makes money and influence from these companies in washington something that's just qualitatively more worrisome than you know board motor company or one of the benefits of spending as long as i have been a crusty old dinosaur in the tech policy world now for as long as i've been involved in these fights is that you realize the more things change the more things change the same because the narrative that i see in franklin's book is very similar to not only some recent textbooks policy books that are out there but i can go back to the time when i remember seeing neil postman talk about these issues with regards to television and radio back in the 80s and i could trace it on down through what lorence lessik had to say in the in the late 1990s and then on down to the debates i had here at new america foundation with johnson zitrain and with tim wu and others about other tech titans um and i wrote a whole paper about this one where i went through and i just like listed out all the all the laments about all the various information intermediaries throughout the decades and just was remarkable it was remarkable how much the similar themes that you see there again and again and again and you could say well now it's different these these companies have more reach they have more information than ever before uh is that better or worse than an age when i grew up in before humans set foot on the moon and i was growing up in rural indiana and elinoy and had very very few information inputs at all i was dying to get anything from outside of my little my little rural community we had a small little library which wasn't bad we had a couple of u h f and v h f stations that we got from iowa we got a couple of uh of little uh tiny local newspapers that reported on you know what was happening in the farming community we lived in a world of information poverty and now we live in a world of information abundance because we can access anything we want anytime we want anywhere we want on this planet and we sit around and complain about the world of that information overload i think this is a pretty good problem to have and all things considered we need to be very careful before we do what i think franklin is uh suggested in his book when he says that we need to we're nearing the moment when we have to damage one of our revolutions to save the other this sounds to me like burn the village in order to save it kind of thinking that we have to destroy the benefits of the information revolution and all that it entails in order to somehow get to some better goalie locks principle of how we're going to have a perfect informational diet and i think that's really dangerous and destructive when you talk about bringing the government in to say like okay we're going to reorganize information markets according to some better plan whether it's not just antitrust but in the book also things like uh there's a little bit of waxing nostalgic about broadcast licensing and quasi like fiduciary or fairness doctrine like responsibilities or public utility regulation we have a centuries worth of history and economic and legal experience with these remedies they have failed consumers miserably it's been prone to regulatory capture and a denial of information inputs that's the last thing we want to do is to go back and revisit that pass and think that we have to destroy every the all the wonders of the information revolution to have it to go back to that well thanks i'm eager to get Emily in the conversation but i know frank's squirming a little bit here and i'd like to give an opportunity to uh and i i i feel like i grew up in adam's town so i want you to to answer to us both like is this informational overload that we shouldn't uh that we should appreciate more or is there something about the algorithm i mean i i i think um so i think it's too binary to say that we need i'm not saying oh let's let's abolish the search engine let's abolish social media let's throw our phones into the ocean i'm saying let's i think that we can do better and that it's and i'm not and i'm not saying that i want um facebook to be regulated as a utility i'm just saying that we we've had in our country starting at the very beginning a tradition of saying that when power is amassed in one of these communication mediums that we uh we then we try to contain its monopoly or break it up and that began with the postal service which we didn't allow to get into the telegraph business they continued when western union was able to get its monopoly in the telegraph business and we wouldn't let it extend into the telephone business and etc etc and so all right you know maybe we could have let microsoft go ahead and capture the browser and continue its monopoly into the era then we wouldn't have had the search engine i think i'm making an argument that's actually on the side of innovation and that's on the side of of capitalism really at the end of the day so what would you do specifically to uh i mean you mentioned facebook so so if you're not going to regulate it like a public utility where do you draw the the lines and i know it's kind of hard to define compared before why shouldn't we regulate it as a utility if it's the public square why shouldn't we regulate it because i don't accept the fact that we need to have one public square and that we need to we need to assume that facebook is the one choice that we should have i would rather have a world in which we had we had more choice and also today that it should not be allowed to do well i that i think that it is able to continue i think we need to do two things one is we need to need to have some sort of data protection policy in this country it's gobsmacking that there is no law in this country that protects data and that it's able to be traded willy nilly on an open market in the way that it does and that data becomes the basis for its comparative advantage and all the incentives aligned for it to just continuing to push the boundaries of surveillance secondly i i would like to have a merger policy that looks at the size of these companies and looks that as they try to extend their advantages into other areas that at least asks tough questions of them and the fact is that mark zuckerberg has been allowed to persist in a bubble where nobody's ever challenged him or the system that he's created and one good first step is i'd like mark zuckerberg to be called to testify before the u.s. senate to answer questions about fake news and about russian hacking and um you know i think that pressure on these companies as the microsoft case shows can actually be salutary i like what you know when when when london confronted uber um i don't know if uber is going to get booted from london i don't know uber should get booted from london but i do know that uber has behaved in a lawless way and they've treated his workers terribly and having a jurisdiction that actually stands up to them and forces them to answer for their behavior at least has some effect of pushing back and i i i bet you it produces salutary results you were you were early by the way to the russia story i should i should commend you for i think it was before you had formally joined the atlantic at slate some of the most serious reporting on russian without yeah well i don't want to i don't want to well i yeah so i'm not i don't need to apologize family for the thanksgiving dinner dynamic since you are kind of part of the family but i know you've thought a lot about the ways in which our views of these technologies and these companies has has changed over time and i and i think and you've written about how we might have gone from one extreme to another but feel free to talk about that in terms of the context of what's happening or to react to any and all things that have been said here tonight okay or react to everything so yeah i just on your your first question about i do sometimes you know and and ria i think you know this as well when we are both at state there was this kind of almost it was kind of at the turning point but there was still such an idealism about the power of technology to connect the world and this is something that we saw in the u.s. government something we saw in the obama administration something we saw in the media you know and it's something that the tech companies were actively promoting that they were these kind of powerful i don't know they were the forces for good right and now in kind of a dizzyingly short amount of time we've seen the pendulum swing i would say too far to the other direction now i feel like we kind of have like tech is evil narrative happening and i'm not referring to your book but you know the existential threat i mean you know but in general i mean think about it if you look how like look at the coverage right now of all of these companies it's pretty uniformly negative across the board and you can say that this is its own media bubble because i don't think the average i don't know if the average american necessarily feels this way but the average headline definitely feels this way and some of it's legitimate like i'm not defending the right of you know russians to spread fake news on facebook but some of it is a little bit hyperbolic and i think part of the problem is that you know it's like if we went too far in one direction there's like an overcorrection right and so part of the problem is that these tech companies they you know they came on with this like really strong rhetoric right you know don't be evil um you know mark zuckerberg connecting humanity and i think what this did was obscure two very fundamental facts one these are companies they are companies they are these are profit making entities and i think like we have this weird conception like the sense of betrayal when it when when we notice that these companies kind of want to make money right and i think you see that you know what what do you mean you want to make money what do you mean you're selling our data what do you mean it's about ads you know i think there's this weird disconnect like i don't think people get that upset about like other types of companies making money of course that's what they want to do but when you look at tech companies yeah i think people feel betrayed it's like well i put my baby photos on your platform how dare you you know sell advertisements so i think like there's this almost weird like relationship that we have to these companies um i also think that you know while i agree with um you know the problems that frank points out in this book i mean they're they're they're serious problems monopolies and and you know the clickbait culture as a journalist obviously i'm very dismayed by that but i guess the one thing that i would say is that i think sometimes it downplays the role of the user you know and and this is another thing where and you do talk about that in the end of your book for sure but i guess i don't really buy the like facebook it's evil puppet master narrative you know i think we collectively play a much bigger role in this and like for example like if you don't like facebook stop using facebook it's really not that complicated like seriously how many like i can't tell you how many conversations i listen to about everyone hates facebook and facebook's destroying the world how many of those people actually shut down their account look at facebook stock you know what i mean like these these these facts speak for themselves right if we all hate facebook so much facebook is its users facebook does not exist without its users like that's a fundamental fact right so i guess that's where like and i think you know just quickly you know i um i actually spent some time in silicon valley and what we were trying to do and emory was part of this a little bit we are trying to um create kind of an alternative to the facebook twitter culture was a social media platform that tried to emphasize thoughtfulness and civility and we weren't trying to displace these companies we were like a very small scrappy startup but we are we know all these people would come to me with these kind of complaints like i'm so sick of you know everyone only cares about clicks and they only care about virality like we want to have thoughtful social media conversations and so we said like all right let's try that and then yeah and then what would happen is we'd bring people on and they would have we had amazing users you know and we did a q and a we had like really great people on it people would have these great thoughtful conversations but what we couldn't offer was virality because we were small and also because thoughtful conversations don't go viral that's just not what they do and so and what would happen so all these people that spent all their time complaining about facebook and twitter they'd come on they say oh we had such a great experience with you we'd say okay come back and they'd be like oh i'm sorry i don't have time and then they'd be tweeting all day okay now this is not twitter's fault this is not twitter's fault and this is not facebook's fault and maybe it's our fault maybe it was our product's fault possibly but i think there was something else happening here and like quickly the analogy that i used to describe this is um this is a story that i heard about a passenger on amtrak and an amtrak conductor came up to him and they were trying to like improve the cafe car they were so they were doing like a survey and uh but maybe it wasn't a conductor it was like that so anyway it was a survey about the amtrak cafe car and they asked him um okay what kind of food would you like to see in the cafe car and he was like you know i travel all the time i'd really prefer to see more healthy options you know like fruit so i'm not like eating junk food all the time and apparently the person who conducted the survey kind of laughed at that and was like yeah everyone says that and then when they get to the cafe car they order the cheeseburger and that to me is like so our problem with social media and a nutshell like everyone loves to complain about facebook and it's like you know how addictive it is and how viral it is and how stupid the content is but like that's facebook is reply facebook is responding to demand that's what algorithm is the reason why facebook is so popular is because it's giving people what they want you know so again i don't really like disagree with you but it's like i just feel like there's a i mean until that problem is accounted for like i don't think we're gonna make much headway in this yeah i mean how helpless are we well i mean on one level i profoundly agree with you it's um you know take it off your phone that you can disengage but on the other hand i think all right let's let's explore this metaphor with food a little bit which is it's actually in my book which is that food processed food was reversed engineered to make people addictive and so can you we just sit around in tobacco let's say that is was reversed engineered to addict people and do we sit around and say you know these you know your people should just quit cigarettes people should stop munching on deritos no we both teach moderation and we teach people that that that you it's not healthy to sit and eat a bag of deritos to the very bottom as tasty as that is as much as you crave doing that but because it's bad for you and at the same time we try to we we try to impose regulation and also wouldn't it be horrible if this is the path that we continued on where we said all right you can work you can get mentally fat just as you've gotten physically obese and to me the stakes are pretty darn high when it comes to the quality of information that gets to our citizenry and and when it comes to some of these questions about privacy and contemplation and i i i just think that the course that we took when it came to food where people got what they wanted is both in part the way that the market works but in part we need to understand that there are these invisible forces driven by corporate profit that are trying to produce products that are addicting and we can accept that to a certain extent but when it comes to to to information when it comes to the future of humanity i'm going to set a higher bar and i'm going to say i i want to ask tougher questions than we've been asking so far elon and mary and adam twain on the great deritos debate i think what you're describing which happened in food and i i definitely followed it in food is happening i mean your own magazine the atlantic the leading article in september was this article about the impact of the iphone on the mental health of teenagers and it's incredibly dramatic it shows you it really you know there's a clip the the numbers fall off the cliff uh when the introduction of the iphone in 2007 what she calls the i gen and the you know depression suicide every terrible thing you can think of your teenager suddenly skyrockets and you know so i that's just like the impact of food i sent that to my teenagers as as most people did and shared it i think and i was telling you before my son gave up his iphone for a flip phone he's 21 because he decided he was spending way too much time on it and he wasn't doing other things and he and there's a sort of anti-tech uh i think anti-tech you almost hip anti-tech things starting among people probably late millennials or people who are now in their 20s so i think your your your point is i think right but i think we're starting to see it but the other point is it's one thing to talk about social networks but i can't imagine living without google search for one thing the number of fights it has saved me right every dinner we used to just scream at each other now somebody googles it and you know you resolve it uh but or an amazon and i recognize you know first the biggest box stores help destroy this main street and then amazon's destroying the big box stores but the amount of convenience i mean i write a lot about families and children and childcare and the number of people who say you know i couldn't live without amazon because it i can do things i couldn't before and with apple you've got all these artists who can now sell individual songs where once they would have had to get a whole album so i i i think we shouldn't conflate all big tech with the addiction of social media and i'm not saying that all big tech sucks i'm just saying that it needs to be we need to be we need to be thoughtful we need to regulate where regulation is is applied and that we need to we need when it comes to protecting democracy and comes to protecting privacy comes to protecting contemplation we need to be especially vigilant and it's like people can't imagine living without amazon well that's kind of empirically not the case we actually i grew up and you know i i think i was 20 something when amazon was invented and simply because these companies are efficient we should be able to capture as much of that efficiency as we can but we shouldn't elevate as you said earlier efficiency into some sort of modern deity adam i speaking of where we grew up i grew up in a country that didn't really respect free speech and the government was very much in control this is mexico's changed lots since then but i grew up in the mexico the old pri so i i think i share your aversion and sort of allergic reaction to the idea that we want the state to intervene in any you know anywhere close to regulating how we access information however and i and i think we're on the same page there however to frank's point is is is there not a legitimate concern frank mentioned the the fake news and and perhaps the desirability of having mark zuckerberg testify about you know sort of russian attempts to influence our election by basically kind of you know getting on this platform that deceptively you know would would send up stories to people who again go on this network because they want to hear from their old friends and stuff and there's something about the algorithm that tees up these you know legitimate looking news stories often under the deceptive notion that they they're being shared perhaps by somebody they know and there's a lot too i mean you talked about information overload and that is part of the story but the other part of the story is this sort of mysterious algorithm that is serving this up where how far do you want to go in recognizing that that's a legitimate concern for our democracy and and what if we're allergic to having the state get involved in this nation of the first amendment i mean what what is some of the what is the answer sure so um let me say a few things in in by way of agreement with what franklin says in the book and then push back a little bit as well because i should have started by saying i started out my life way back in the mid eighties in journalism school and had not only have a great respect for the profession but agree with a lot of what franklin has to say in the book about the importance of a sort of curation role that that journalists and editors play in tailoring stories and narratives for the public and i think franklin falls into a long tradition of media theorists and critics who are adopting or advocating a sort of eat your greens approach to having a healthy balanced media diet and there's something to be said for this i i'm in generally a general agreement with it i think the tension comes in about a how you go about doing this given the fact that commercial present pressures are omnipresent in the journalism world and a lot of what franklin worries about in the book is what a lot of previous media scholars worry about the fact that journalism is a business and then it can't all be easily financed and in a philanthropic way and made completely independent of other marketplace pressures but the reality is is that when he gets to the stuff about the artisan food movement which again i appreciate i'm a big foodie and i like that movement the reality is is that i think we can have the best of both worlds that like the artisan food movement continues to exist in a world of mega supermarkets we can continue to have artisan media movements and small grassroots bottom up type of mom and pop things as we do today and still have large information platforms and intermediaries i think these worlds can coexist i think in fact that the very fact that we have those larger scale information intermediaries whether they be social networking sites search engines smartphones or whatever else makes it easier than ever for us to find these things things that as a child i would have died to have but all i had was my best friend called the 24 set volume of world bank and psychopedias that was my like information input as a child i read them cover to cover a back and forth all day long because i didn't have anything else i would have died to have the reach of a search engine or a social networking site or anything else so i i would say we can have a balanced approach to this getting a good media diet but the problem is is that i think what franklin doesn't want to say because it comes off as being a little bit elitist is that well god damn it look at what these people are reading which is what we get back to about doritos people do have access to doritos and big gulps at 7 11 and they'll go down and get them and you know what some governments do try to just say stop it no we're going to tax it or we're going to just ban it outright that's where i'm going to have a bigger problem because we get into matters of personal autonomy and it's not just personal autonomy with regards to the news business and informational inputs we also get into questions about free speech and the first amendment in this country and about how far we want the government to go bringing in sort of a regulatory wrecking ball not just antitrust but licensing restrictions permitting processes all these sorts of things fairness doctrine that's when i get a little bit spooked about where franklin's going to look very quickly no no very what do you want me to do no no very very quickly are you advocating that we just take the big gulps away and i mean what's the you follow through with that analogy well at least in the world of food we have i mean we've created a world where it's probably too consolidated for my taste in a lot of ways but there's still consumer choice and so right now my problem is that google i mean there's really no place you can turn i mean one with the last time you did a ding search or duck duck go and the problem is that if i wanted a if i wanted a site that general the search engine the benefit of the search engine i wanted to be able to have somebody who was competing to protect my privacy better there's no place else i can really turn to you at this at this moment and there's no incentive to go out and create that site because of the lock in that google has managed to achieve and so i'm not saying again just to reiterate i'm not saying let's let's let's destroy search engines and go back to a time when we just depended on the world book for information i'm saying that let's let's manage to kind of reap these benefits and create an actually genuine competitive marketplace so emily i and i i'm i'm i share your frustration that we can't really do justice that any one of these threads and then i i appreciate your your patience with us and we haven't even gotten to some of the rich themes in the book on questions of authorship and intellectual property so everybody's going to have to go home and read frank's book and and continue these debates which are which are so rich and emily i wanted to ask you to sort of take this conversation and put it in a more global context as one of the frank's themes is there can only be one global village these these questions are of global impact these companies are everywhere these technologies are everywhere this conversation is it's been a very washington-centric conversation but the themes of frank's book are universal and obviously they're you know we're seeing different jurisdictions approach questions of antitrust in different ways but even in terms of like the cultural impact do you think this conversation would be salient and and resonate in in east asia or latin america or elsewhere in the world that are people kind of struggling with this in the same way or our other parts of the world still might maybe where we were a little bit in the past in terms of more euphoric about these technologies or sort of what do you see as the global trend on these questions i mean i think china is like laughing and they're like ha ha we told you so like this is why we control the it means that chinese government yeah yeah the chinese government like i mean this is i mean you know it's kind of i'm sort of joking and i'm sort of not but like you know if you were to ask someone who supports chinese internet censorship why like a reasonable person you know why they support chinese internet censorship they will say you know they'll kind of say the like well we can't trust people you know to like to their own devices and like you know fake news and rumors i mean the chinese have been on to the fake news thing i mean what they consider fake news might be different from what we consider fake news but you know in some cases though it's not again it's not all totally authoritarian rhetoric i mean one of the arguments that china will make the chinese government will make is that you know if there were a rumor online you know like a real fake rumor that was you know said that there was some active violence somewhere or that there was like all the the grocery storage ran out of milk like it could cause mass cat and thus we have to reign it in like that's what they've always said and you know i think years ago americans were like really condescending about this and they were like whatever you know or you know i was condescending about it i was like well they're just like that because they don't have a trusted official media but we have all these trusted sources like fake news could never take hold in our country like i feel so sorry for you guys you know but now it's like i mean it's we're kind of in that situation where it's like i don't know what you do when when like you can't you can't leave people to their own devices right and and i think one thing you know i know that there's a lot of like inflated kind of authoritarian we're becoming an authoritarian country hysteria but i do think we have to be a little bit careful because when i say that the pendulum has swung too far in the anti-tech rhetoric it's a slippery slope you know and once you start talking about like you know facebook being the arbiter of truth the u.s. government being the arbiter of truth you get into a you get into a really gray area so i think you know that's how i would answer that question and marie uh if you want to i we're we're running up against our time constraints i want to ask you for a friend i will just tell everybody i'm i've got to catch an 830 train back to france and so i'm going to vanish the minute this is over i'm not running away i'm catching a drink uh so a a point that last night i i asked frank about algorithms and i said you know you were an editor of the new republic and all the sort of elite media editors practice algorithms they decide what to publish and what not there is a process of selection it is not transparent it is in their heads but it is nevertheless an algorithm and i use the example of you know u.s. news and world report which now dominates a lot of uh of colleges and universities there's an algorithm so i said well so what's the difference and he responded well but there are many different uh editors at many different places and they're all competing so it's really the marketplace of ideas the best answer for speech is more speech but that google and facebook have disproportionate power i mean wildly disproportionate power and i think i if that really does resonate with me that and you write about the washington post in its heyday and catherine graham you know going to parties with henry kissinger while her reporters are ripping him apart on vietnam and this kind of cult of separation of editorial from advertising church and state exactly the kinds of of rules new america has those kinds of rules and we're going to make them more explicit and and stronger but i i think what's right is that if google and facebook are in fact maybe not the only public square but they certainly are the public square they certainly are media companies whether they want to be media companies or not then they need to have a different culture the way traditional media has this idea that this is a public trust and i don't think i don't know but their companies as assembly says they've got shareholders they've got to make money i i'm not sure they see their companies as a public trust in the way that i think our best media does and i think that's right because power is power whether it's public or private and you have to be able to hold it accountable uh and that that can be social norms that can be law that can be government but we we need more of that it kind of actually terrifies me the idea of having google and facebook sitting in that kind of gate caper position where they were enforcing rules and regulations and norms on their systems i mean to me that's dangerous like that facebook is kind of in a trap right now where it either has to it either has to admit its power and responsibility and and and and claim credit or it needs to be curbed in some sort of way and my strong preference is for the is for the curb and that um we just don't mean the solution to their power is not to invest them with more power um and in general i think you know what i i've been i i i have to break them up i mean what what government regulation would that well like i said create create create the data privacy against some sort of data data laws data laws that hand them in and then let's curb them when it comes to their merger policy um or or maybe there's even a way to break them up that i that we should we should be considering and i i just i'm not i'm not a wonk in that way and i don't know exactly what the answer is but i think that that's a path that we should we should go down and um i one of the things i so i think one of the criticisms that i've i've gotten on this panel um which is a fair criticism is that i have a somewhat elitist view of the way that that the world works and i i i actually own that i mean i feel like i feel like the people who are in charge of our institutions should actually care about about values they should care about what people read what they watch the quality of the information that they get it doesn't mean that we need to have them sit and watch masterpiece theater all the time it doesn't mean that we should we shouldn't we shouldn't we shouldn't revel in entertainment but my point is is that once you start to just let standard go all together or say that there are no standards and that it is just a pure market and we're not really trying to do anything more than to give you what you want we end up exploiting people's worst instincts we end up getting stuck in this situation where um where where uh where where where people people are just worse consumers of news and information than they once were and we're on a pretty bad track right now when it comes to our public square and it what comes to the state of our democracy and there are many reasons why we're on that that track these companies are not the sole reason but they're a primary reason they're one of the primary reasons and and to kind of give up in the face of it or to just hope that it corrects itself is gambling a huge amount it has been very interesting to see the evolution of this debate around Mark Zuckerberg's responsibilities and the power of facebook in that not that long ago he could sort of get away with saying I didn't sign up to be the grand family or Arthur Salzberger I'm not in the media business in the news business I created this neutral platform to connect you to your friends back in Mexico and it's up to you people what what happens there and I and it's been interesting to see how that argument on his part is becoming less and less you know sustainable and he's kind of inched towards the position of okay I do have to assume some of these responsibilities not quite they're embracing the notion that he has the sort of public trust responsibilities not and not on not because of some regulation but the sort of ingrained public trust responsibilities of the people who used to be the guardians of these news outlets he hasn't embraced that yet it'll be interesting to see whether the Russia story is going to force the issue and I suspect that it might but to your point it's which is the worst I mean if we all see that power to him and to these corporations you know that that we might end up in a place where we don't want but whether or not you curb the future growth of facebook and of these other companies that the gatekeeping power they already have to exercise that access to our access to information in news is already so formidable that I think this is a debate then that will continue to happen and needs to happen and so with that I I've tiny has been flashing the stop card for a while so even though I feel like we're only getting started and I want to have this conversation three more hours we're way over we're standing between you and drinks outside so apologies that we're not going to have time for Q&A right here but hopefully we can continue the conversation outside please stick around till late 30 or so we can continue talking thank you to all of you and congratulations Frank for such an important book