 Andrew has recently published this. I thought quite excellent book, The Internet is Not the Answer. It's his third book. Several years before, he published a book that created a great deal of stir, called Cult of the Amateur, followed with a book called Digital Vertigo. This is his next salvo in a series that offers, I think, very interesting and constructive critiques of what's going on in the shared world of the internet and the businesses that surround it. Andrew takes some pride and pleasure in being a controversialist, I think, instead of stirring things up. I have every confidence that we'll be able to have an interesting and lively conversation here. I do think it's worth giving a little bit of Andrew's background before he began writing. He is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, actually, of the same generation that I am of, class of 95, of the people who are trying to build internet-based businesses before they even bothered putting a 1.0 after Tim's web. He, prior to that, as a historian and a teacher of history, and that's something that comes into play quite a deal with the internet, it's not the answer, spends a lot of time these days in Silicon Valley, leading conversations and salons around some of the issues involved with the book and other issues around Silicon Valley culture and values and aspirations. I'm really happy that we have them here. Andrew Keen. Thank you. It's a real honor to be here. And I apologize if I break down in the terrible coughing, but don't take it personally. It's an honor to be here for a couple of reasons. Obviously, very distinguished members of the audience. And in the book, I really do focus on the history of the internet. The first version of the book was too polemical. And my publisher, Morgan Entrican at Grove Atlantic, who's a very good publisher in New York, came back to me and he said, you've got to tell the history of the internet. So the first two chapters, or the first real two chapters, really do tell the history of the internet and some people here have very important roles in that. But I think MIT has, perhaps, in institutional terms, the most important role, Vannevar Bush. And I really begin with Norbert Wiener and his idea of cybernetics and the way in which that became the pioneering foundation of thinking about the web. So being at MIT, from my point of view, is a real honor. So yeah, this book is called The Internet is Not the Answer. Some people said, and probably including Ethan, well, the title is a little vulgar. And yeah, books, for those of you who are writers, books need vulgar titles to sell. But I think the problem with the title is not its vulgarity. I'm not saying the internet will never be the answer. One of the things we'll probably talk about today is the way in which the internet needs to become the answer. It has to become the operating system for 21st century life. That is unavoidable. We can't turn the clock back. We can't go back to some idyll, some analog idyll in the 20th century. But my biggest problem, actually, with the title is the word the internet. I think the word the internet itself has become slightly archaic. I was talking to Ethan about this earlier. It's too narrower word. I mean, imagine in 1812 writing a book called The Industrial is Not the Answer or something like that. What I've tried to do in this book is talk about these, in Hegelian terms, these world historic, these structural shifts in the nature of things. I believe that, and I'm sure I'll be interested to see whether you guys agree with this, but I believe we're living through one of the great changes in history, in structural terms, in economic and social terms. And it's being driven, as it was at the beginning of the 19th century, by technology. Bryn Johnson and McAfee, I know they're here as well. I'm sure you all know their book, The Second Machine Age. Talk about it as The Second Machine Age. Other people have different definitions. But I think what is clear is that we're living increasingly, perhaps, in something called the networked age, the distributed age, the nodal age, the age of the digital revolution. And you guys are the architects of this, the ideologists maybe in some way, the engineers. You understand this as well as I do. I tell the history of the internet in the book for the first two chapters. And it was a very good learning experience for me. Obviously, I became quite familiar with the most important architects, but it also reminded me of a couple of things. Firstly, how old the internet is. The first computer-to-computer communication was in 1969. So almost at 50 years of that in a Tim's invention of the World Wide Web. It's more than 25 years old now. And having told the history, some people would say, and this is often the refrain you hear in Syracan Valley, well, it's too early. We can't come to any conclusions. It's too early. And I've been hearing that since 1995. It's always too early. We can't make any judgments. It's rather like, for those of you who are parents, it's rather like making a judgment about a badly behaved adolescent. I say, oh, it's too early. They'll grow out of this. They'll grow up. And of course, sometimes they do. And sometimes they don't. But I believe that we're at a point now where we can come to some general conclusions about whether or not this thing, which we call the internet, the digital revolution, the network world is succeeding. Now, I focus on its claims, and I have a great deal of respect for the architects who wanted this world to be more equal, to be fairer, to undermine many of the traditional hierarchical structures of 20th century industrial and cultural life. As Ethan said, my first book was about the cultural industries and was a kind of defense of a certain kind of cultural elite, which was very controversial. This book is less, and I'm not sure whether I should be happy about this, this book is less controversial, I think, because things have changed dramatically since 2007 when I wrote Cult of the Amateur. I think more and more people are coming around to my position. It's not just me. There are a number of other thinkers. I know Sherry Turkle is at the university, Geron Le Nier, Nick Carr. There's a number of us making quite similar points about what's happened. So what I do is I say, OK, it was promised to create a better world, a world where more people would have more opportunity, a world of more democracy and cultural terms. Above all else, a world of economic opportunity. I quote Kevin Kelly a lot. Kevin, I'm sure he's been at this place as well. Kevin, in his book, The New Laws of the New Economy, was very influential in the 90s. He's still very influential. And what I conclude in the book, and this may be a beginning for a conversation, is that so far, the internet is not the answer. So far, the internet has not the digital revolution network society is not doing what we expected it to do. Now, let me add the caveat that I don't believe that there is some conspiracy. I'm quite critical of many Silicon Valley companies, Google and Facebook. But I don't believe they are conspiring to wreck the internet. There are natural laws, winner-take-all laws, laws of the network, which I get, power laws, which I get into in some detail in the book. I don't think the internet has been subverted. I don't think there are evil people out there who wanted to destroy it. But the consequence, nonetheless, is of a disappointing outcome. So far, excuse me. And let me talk about three areas very briefly, where I think the disappointment is the most salient. And then perhaps we can open it up. Maybe Ethan wants to ask some questions. The first is inequality. Now, we know that people like Thomas Piketty, Reich, Krugman, they've all written very important books and articles about inequality. And had I always used this, but now I've got Tim Hitter, not that I would wish that would have happened, had you been knocked over in Geneva in 1988 and not invented the web, we'd still have inequality. I'm not arguing that without the web there wouldn't be inequality. I'm not arguing that economic inequality today, the hollowing out of the middle, this increasing disparity between a tiny new plutocracy and an underclass and the decimation of the old middle class, thank you very much, is entirely the cause of the internet. But what I do argue in the book is it's contributing. It's contributing, the so-called sharing economy is anything but sharing. It's contributing to a new structure of half-employed people selling their labor on platforms, the undermining of the old secure jobs of the industrial age, and the increasing disappearance of a kind of dignity of labor. It's, of course, in Silicon Valley, contributing through the massive financial success of companies like Google and Facebook, where a tiny group of technologists have become infinitely rich. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, they're all worth $30 billion. So if they put their cash together, they could solve the Greek crisis, the Greek financial crisis overnight. So we're talking about massive aggregation of wealth. And I think that that inequality is one of the three reasons why, so far at least, the internet hasn't been successful. It's also true in cultural terms. The power laws and economics also work in cultural spheres. So we have the appearance of these new kind of cultural barons on networks like Twitter and Facebook, with millions of followers. And then again, a kind of an underclass of people. Now, a woman at Harvard Business School, could Anita Elksberg, written an important book called Blockbuster, in which she makes the point that the entertainment industry itself is even more unequal now, even more of a blockbuster economy than in the analog age. So again, this isn't just me saying this. Secondly, I talk about the crisis of employment. I have two chapters in the book, back to back. I have one chapter on Rochester and Kodak is the quintessential industrial company that employed 150,000 people. And then, of course, I talk about Instagram, which didn't necessarily replace Kodak. But we have this symbolic shift from a Kodak moment in history to an Instagram moment. When Instagram sold to Facebook a couple of years ago, same time when Kodak went bust, Instagram employed 15 people. And that, at the time, seemed unbelievable, but it actually seems less unbelievable now when you think that Facebook then went on to acquire WhatsApp, which employed about 55 people for $20 billion. So we have a crisis of employment. I write quite a lot about the growth of artificial intelligence, the appearance of machine learning, and the way in which this technology is, again, disintermediating skilled laborer. A couple of weeks ago, I did a debate in London with Walter Isaacson about this. And we talked about the way, Walter was on the other side and agreed with me, but I at least talked about the way in which, through the Morovich paradox that actually all this technology was resulting in a challenge to skilled labor to lawyers and doctors and accountants and above all else teachers. So the impact of network, society on employment, I think, is very, very troubling, very problematic, particularly the way in which the most innovative Silicon Valley companies are now essentially becoming artificial intelligence companies. Google is the best case. Thirdly, and in this sense, I have to quote Ethan, because I was thrilled when he was finishing my book and I read a piece by him. Where was it? Atlantic. It was in the Atlantic in which he described the original sin, unambiguous biblical language, the original sin of the internet being its free business model. Now, this is a very well-informed audience. I probably don't need to tell you. But a lot of people wanted themselves, OK, well, Instagram sold to Facebook for $1 billion and it only employed 15 people. How is it possible to generate that kind of wealth, that kind of value when there's only 15 people working for it? And of course, the value of Instagram is in what Mike Moritz, another very distinguished Silicon Valley investor, describes as these new data factories, these ubiquitous, always open data factories where we're all contributing to Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or even Google, in a sense. We are all working for these companies, but of course, we are not being remunerated. We're not being financially rewarded. Now, some people might say, well, we know what we're doing and some of us do. And for many people, it's a fair exchange. But of course, what Ethan, I think, meant when he talked about the original sin is that in this economy, in this free economy, we're all being transformed into product because the dominant business model of the internet is advertising. Google was the company that, I think, pioneered this. It's been developed by many so-called Web 2.0 companies since. These are big data companies whose value is predicated on their knowledge of us. Eric Schmidt's sometimes been very clear about this. He says, we know more about you than you know about yourselves. I'm not sure if Eric was joking there. He has a funny sense of humor. But certainly these companies do. So this data economy has created a surveillance as Bruce Schneier, I'm sure you will know him. I'm sure he's, does he, has he been here? He's got a new book out. Yeah, we'll get him over here. I was just on the phone with him before he came in. Is he here? He's over at Harvard. Well, he talks about the dominant business model of the internet being surveillance. So inequality, unemployment, surveillance. Now, I could sit here, someone's gonna stick up their hands and say, oh, well, the internet's been good in some ways. And I don't deny that. I have a couple of pages in the book where I make it clear. And we appreciated that. You know, I make it clear I couldn't have written the book that I was, you know, I always do this. I got tissues in one thing. You know, I'm as, I'm as wired as anyone. I'm not a lada in any way. But there are a lot, many, many books, including I'm sure people here have written about why the internet is a good thing. So it's not, I guess, a balanced book, but balanced books are boring, I think. But it is a polemic. It's an attempt to wake people up to the current digital reality. And it's, hopefully, and it's having quite a lot of resonance, I appreciate you all coming, but maybe that's the way it is. So here's how we thought we would structure this. Andrew sort of laid out the core argument of the book, which in many ways is that we hoped the internet would help us find answers to some of these great problems like inequality, meaningful work. There's other ways in which the internet has proved not only to be not an answer, but actually a much more aggravated problem around issues like privacy and surveillance. I want to ask a couple of questions, having enjoyed the book a great deal this weekend. And then I want to open it up into a broader conversation. We're going to keep in mind the fact that Andrew is holding it together. No, I'm enjoying myself, don't mind. And so on and so forth. But so I think the first question I want to ask is what is the answer, right? So you've put forward a very thorough critique, which says that a lot of these aspirations, a lot of these sort of mid 90s cyber utopian aspirations are wholly unrealistic. You're not in the camp of the people who suggest that we shut off the internet, walk away to our backs. You do have an answer. You actually title a chapter of the answer. What's the essence of the answer? You told me that was wrong. Yeah, no, you are wrong. Yeah, I don't think anyone talks about switching. I mean, even the Daily Mail in England doesn't talk about switching the thing off. I don't mean maybe in North Korea or something, but I think the way to begin to think about the answer is to imagine we're back in 1812 in England. And we're having this great debate about the impact of the industrial revolution on work, on inequality, on the behavior of the new elites. And the industrial revolution was far from ideal, of course, we know that. I'm not claiming that it was solved in every respect. But many of the problems were solved through political means. Technology didn't solve the problems, the early problems of the industrial revolution. Technology really didn't solve pollution. I've got this phrase. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but it's sort of sexy. Data is the new pollution. Technology didn't solve the problem of child labour in factories. Technology didn't solve the problem of the problem of rubber barons or the cultural problem of rubber barons and their greed and their lack of responsibility to society. And I think we are entering, if you like, the political stage now of the web. The first, you know, Obama talked about the internet when he came out to Silicon Valley a few weeks ago. He talked about it as the Wild West. And I think he was, in a sense, warning the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley that we're on the brink of this new age, the political age. And I think the answer is partly political. I think if there is one core enemy in my book, it's the libertarians, the Peter Teals and the Travis Kalalniks of Silicon Valley, who think that the market is always the solution, that the market will resolve all these problems, that all we need is to keep our hands, governments the problem, regulation is the problem, legislation is the problem. And if only we can keep our hands off technology, off the web, off these companies, then the thing will be resolved. And that certainly wasn't the case in the Industrial Revolution. So I think part of the solution is a political solution and we're seeing it. And we're seeing these companies behave a lot better. We're seeing it, Uber is the classic case, where it really did behave very responsibility until it recognized that it was having to fight, every local authority around the world. We're seeing it now in the increasing attention the EU is looking in antitrust issues with Google. We're certainly seeing it in the right to be forgotten law. Now, I'm sure most of you aren't in favor of that. I'm not sure if I am in favor of that. I recognize I heard a debate with Jonathan Citdrain on this and I recognize it certainly far from being an ideal law. But we do need regulation, we do need legislation on data. We do need to figure out political solutions to the data issue. After all, we're just, I think McAfee talks about, he's got that metaphor of the chess board, where every piece on the board adds another grain of rice and by the end you get to this enormous, you've got more grains of rice than in the history of the world. I think we're on the verge of that when it comes to data, with self-driving cars, with the internet of things, with wearables, with devices being in walls, with smart cities. We're still at the fairly early stages of our debate about data. So I think one solution is government, one solution is more regulation. I think another solution is more corporate responsibility. I have a couple of examples in the book of ways in which companies work together for example, to fight online piracy. I think it would be wrong to exclusively depend on government. But I also remind people, and if I make this specific, but I'm certainly doing it in my talks, the regulation and innovation aren't incompatible. I mean, imagine we were back in the late 1990s, and there hadn't been the antitrust case against Microsoft. Microsoft would have crushed Google. Microsoft never would have allowed Google to become such a dominant player in search in 2000, 2001. So I think regulation actually enables innovation sometimes, and I think it's wrong to see those as polar opposites. So I think that's one place to start, and you think that's entirely wrong? No, I don't. I actually think it's an incredibly hard sell, though. And as someone who... To this audience or to Washington DC or where? Well, so if I summarize the argument in some ways, it is that we've reached the political moment, right? So we've had this incredible flourish and innovation. We're in a very different economy than we were 20 or 30 years before. Take the parallel to the industrial revolution. Suddenly there are a lot of negative responses to the side effects of that technology. In the US, you end up with Teddy Roosevelt showing up to bust the trust. You end up with progressive era reforms coming out of this. But asking us to suddenly get enthusiastic about the government being the solution to this. I don't know if you've looked in on congressional approval ratings lately, for instance, or even presidential approval ratings. That's a very, very hard sell. And I think that even antitrust is the sort of thing where the people who, in many ways, sort of aligned themselves with, no, we really are looking for these values of openness. We really are looking for these values of innovation. Found ourselves wondering who we were rooting for when you had less than taking on Microsoft because it does feel like an awfully big hammer to sort of hit it with. So I think your diagnosis is right. I'm trying to imagine who the Teddy Roosevelt is or what the citizen movement is that takes us into regulation. And I'm wondering how we regulate without killing what's interesting and organic and fertile about this space. Because I think we can all agree that there's been a lot in this creative moment that could have been regulated out of existence had we not been very careful about it. I agree with them. I mean, I'm not disagreeing, but I think you can come out with all sorts of other alternatives, crowdsource management or some other kind of network solution. But those don't work, I think, when it comes to this. Do you think there's no, I haven't seen any evidence that they work. So we can put on our rose-tinted glasses and we can hope that there are other alternatives. I think one of the biggest problems today, and this is kind of outside the book, I mean maybe it's almost a subject for another book, is that we have two speeds in the world. We have internet speed and we have government speed. Again, I probably don't need to tell you guys that. We have a fundamental problem with governance, with legitimacy and leadership and the nature of politics. And we have this incredible innovation coming out of Silicon Valley, which is remarkably quick. And the Google model is kind of move forward and don't worry about any of the consequences. And by the time anyone wakes up to it, it's too late. But the problem is that there's no alternative to government. What's the alternative? So one possible alternative within this, and I'm now trying to figure out how to play Peter Teal, which is not a role that I particularly enjoy playing, is the role that basically says, these companies are all potentially extremely fragile. You and I can both remember a moment at which Yahoo was the dominant player within the space and no one wanted to figure out how to cross them. It's possible that Microsoft was laid low by Lessig, but I think in many cases we would look at the antitrust decision and say, it was pretty weak tea in the scheme of sort of what came up for it. Isn't the most powerful thing within this, the ability for consumers to shift very rapidly? If we were as concerned as you want us to be about surveillance, any sane person would get off Facebook, abandon it in an instant, and find a more security-respecting better-behaved platform, given that these companies have no tangible assets other than the loyalty of people who choose to use them. Is antitrust really where you need to go, or do you simply not need more alternatives on the horizon? You have it in for Amazon in this book. You're very concerned. Well, I have it in for Amazon for three reasons. They're labor practices, they're impact on retail stores, particularly bookstores, and increasingly monopolist in publishing their behavior towards small publishers. You know, like every, you know, Amazon's like pornography, we all use it, you just don't talk about it. It's a great service, they never screw up, but it's still, there are many problems with it. If we go after Amazon, are we counting on the market to give us another bookseller, are we counting on the market to give us competing everything stores? Do we somehow take down Amazon and we return to the American Main Street? Because you seem to admit that, you know, companies like Kodak weren't laid low by Instagram, it was a way of accelerating and already ongoing process. Yeah, and I'm not, yeah. If you go after something like Amazon with antitrust, do we end up with another Amazon coming in its wake? Do we end up, what's the situation you're hopeful coming out of this entry? Well, firstly, and you're right on Kodak, and I talk about that, you know, Kodak is, Kodak screwed up, you know, Kodak were the people who invented the digital camera and never developed it. So, you know, in some ways we, I mean, I'm not sympathetic to Kodak, I'm just sympathetic to the people who work to Kodak. So, your question is... So, the practical question is, what are we hoping for? So, you are criticizing... Well, what I'm hoping for when it comes to, what I'm hoping for is, and Brad Stone talks about this at the end of his book on Amazon, that unlike TO, I don't think monopolies are a good thing. They're certainly not good for consumers and they're not good for society. So, historically, antitrust cases have resulted in weakening companies. It hasn't always resulted in more monopolies. So, you're saying that if we shackle Amazon or we shackle Google, that you'll just get bigger monopolies, is that your fear? The answer you're putting forward, the answer that I hear you putting forward is this is the political moment, this is the governance moment. We need to come in, we need meaningful regulation on data, I'm with you on that. We need antitrust. I think I'm probably with you on that. I'm asking you to give me the affirmative future. You get to do what you want to do. We elect you, you are now Silicon Valley's representative, you start a digital caucus within Congress. What is the world that you're hoping for at the end of it? Well, I would certainly want government to be able to catch up. I would want government to learn Silicon Valley's speed and be able to deal with technology, learn about technology. And I would want Silicon Valley entrepreneurs to become more responsible. You know, I have quite a lot of coverage in the book, some of it rather satirical about the behavior of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. They need to grow up. They need to become more responsible. Now, I think of all the companies, the worst is Facebook because they're so untrustworthy. If you look at their internet.org initiative, which is essentially an attempt to get the next two or three billion people of the world online, it's really an excuse to transform the internet into Facebook. It's really turning the front door of the internet into Facebook. And one of the things that I've really worked on in the book is sort of attacking the hypocrisy, attacking the idea, particularly I think of a company like Facebook that presents themselves as improving the lot of mankind and are actually only simply promoting themselves. I mean, the political details are complicated, but I think there has to be a political solution. So you can't imagine how deeply uncomfortable it is for me, Andrew, to both find myself quoted in this book and then find you making arguments that I find myself making to the press about things like internet.org. I'm terribly worried that we found ourselves on the same side. It's very disconcerting to me. I'm wondering... And just to come back on that, it's not disconcerting to me, because I always knew. It's not just me. No, but I think, as I said, there is a group of people who are making these points now, whether it's Turkle, or Lignier, or Carr, myself, as a number of others, and we all started in this community. So it's not as if we began as reactionaries or activists of some sort. Well, so this is, and this will be the last question for me, and I want to open this up because I know that people are waiting to jump into this, but the last question for me and all of us is, I think there's a lot of us who share many of the critiques that you're putting forward, have many of the concerns that you're putting forward, but when we look for answers, they are internet-centric answers. They may be answers that say, yeah, we have to organize, we have to get political, we have to build movements, but when we look at this networked world, turning away from the internet seems like a non-option, if not just an unwise option. How do we build the bridge between people like Tim, who are deeply engaged with thinking about how we get a web we want, but I, and tell me if I'm wrong, Tim, I can't really imagine Tim coming in with sort of an internet is not the answer as his lead argument within that. How do we, how do I bridge you guys, basically? How do I bridge between people who are deeply, deeply, deeply invested in the future of the internet but willing to accept some, if not most of your critiques, but are gonna look for those solutions very much within these same technologies? Are we deluding ourselves, or do we need some of that value sphere to come in and sort of influence the current Silicon Valley values? Yeah, I mean that's a great question. So I do spend quite a few pages in the book on Tim himself, on his role, and to me he sort of epitomizes the public spirited nature of the first part of the history of the internet, up until, you know, 92, 93, the appearance of a Netscape and then the radical commercialization of the web. So I do, in the history, juxtapose this public spirited internet of Tim, of Vannevar Bush, of Norbert Weiner, of J.C.R. Lickleiter, of these remarkably gifted and publicly spirited people who weren't particularly, didn't seem to be, I mean, I'm sure they needed to eat, but they weren't particularly interested in the aggregation of massive wealth. And then this new wave of, you know, Zuckerbergs and Bezos. I do actually make the argument that had Larry Page and Sergey Brin been around in the 50s, they would have been very much part of the MIT community. So I don't believe there's a new, and it's probably even Zuckerberg. I don't believe that there's a new type, it's a new world. It sounds like it's Stanford's fault, that's what you're saying. Yeah, I'm Berkeley, so everything's Stanford's fault. I think, I didn't have a response to your, I think we have to be really careful to create this, you know, again, coming back to your biblical metaphors. We have to be very careful in our history of the internet. If we say, okay, the first part of the internet was this wonderfully altruistic, publicly spirited period, financed by government, and often, of course, defense industries, it certainly wasn't perfect in any way, in every way. And now this new world is one of radical commercialization and the enormous greed, you know, the Travis Kalaniks of the world. I think we have to be very careful to avoid becoming nostalgists ourself and believe that we can go back to that earlier period because we can't. And I think the idea of reinventing the internet as a public internet, of going back, well whilst it's certainly very attractive in many ways, it can't be done. I don't see how it could be practical. So I think we have to avoid that. I mean, I would guess my only, you know, Tim has talked about often, I think I quote him in the book, of having a bill of rights for the internet. I wouldn't necessarily disagree with that, but my focus is on a bill of responsibilities. So it's this issue of rights versus responsibilities that in my mind, but the fact that I'm here, the fact that, you know, that you invited me and that you recognize that some of my arguments are coherent, means also that we have entered a new period where many of the original evangelists, optimists are now troubled that they recognize that this thing isn't working as it was supposed to. And rather than just stepping back and assuming that the market will solve it, you recognize that there need to be external solutions. Now, whether it's government or some other external, I wish there was something an alternative to government. I just don't see it. I don't know where it exists. I don't know where it will come from. So, you know, for those of us who do continue to teach history, you've done a great job of setting us up with a Hegelian dialectic here, right? We have the government-sponsored happy, Edenic internet before the fall. We have this commercial internet dragging us into the realm of surveillance and such, both of which are radical oversimplifications. It demands some sort of synthesis to move us forward. Does anyone either have the synthesis, the solution to where we're going, or at least a good question to make sure that we can allow Andrew to live up to his provocative reputation and make sure we have a good argument as well as a good conversation here. You, start us up. I'm you from Central Sea Media as already. I'm kind of interested to hear you compare internet with capitalism. You internet follow the history path of capitalism. It was, you know, much of many problems at the first moment and it fixed itself and came into being at the present stage. And are you satisfied with capitalism today? Well, that's a big question. Well, I think there is a, you know, I think some of the one or two of the criticisms of the book say that I'm not writing about the internet. I'm writing about capitalism. But the reality is that they're inseparable and that's why this idea of the internet as the operating system for 21st century life is really important. Think about the way in which Uber or Airbnb or TaskRabbit are reinventing work, labor, transportation. Think about the way in which these supposed sharing companies are rewriting the laws of capitalism. So I think it's increasingly hard to separate 21st century capitalism from the network. And we know that every industry now is about to be reinvented by the network whether it's education, whether it's healthcare, whether it's energy. We're already seeing it with transportation and hospitality. So the idea, it began in media. When we're 95, you know, it was music, it was movies, it was, well it wasn't even movies, it was newspapers, it was books. But today every industry is about to be changed. So I don't think it's possible to actually separate the internet from capitalism. I think they've become so intertwined. They've been so tangled up together that increasingly when we're talking about capitalism, we're talking about, if you like, a digital kind of capitalism. And that's the polemic in the book. I'm saying that this capitalism doesn't work, that it's a return to the rubber barren capitalism with the radical inequalities of the early 19th century. Doesn't mean I'm against capitalism. You know, I often make speeches in America. I did one with Jeff Jarvis, who's a friend, but he's always critical of me. Anytime I even criticize capitalism, he said I'm a European socialist. You know, and I think we have to be realistic and not always fall back on, well you can be critical of capitalism without being a socialist. You can be critical of capitalism without being against the market. I still believe in the market. I believe in the profit principle. I believe that the market is the best system for arranging society, but it can't be completely unregulated as the current digital revolution is making it. So by the way, we're gonna actually throw a market-based incentive on this. The best question for Andrew wins this copy of the book, which I've just bought from the back of the room, because I already have two copies. And I'll sign it. At home, and he'll sign it. So we'll throw that out there, and I see that's already got Ali with his hand up. Yes. And I've got Susan in the queue next. My name is Billy Hashmi, Center for Civic Media, and my question to you is that we've seen in the, if you see neoliberalism as a paradigm, the idea that market is, should be free, requires constant intervention by state itself. So state intervenes to ensure that the market is actually free. So the state has been doing that. So how will you reconcile that approach with how things are at the moment? Because it has done a lot of stuff, a lot of intervention to ensure that market remains as it is. Well, can you give me an example of that? I'm not clear. To ensure that the market operates the way it is, state ensures that, for example, that it intervenes so that market operates the way it operates, basically. So Ali, you've got someone sitting here and saying that he wants more market intervention. So you're saying that government is already intervening. Yes, government is intervening to ensure that the market is actually free. So you're acting against the workplace, for example, at the moment? Yes, I mean, generally the way, generally the system versus that any time where you see that things are being regulated, it avoids that actually. So classical example would be 16th century physiocrats, for example, where there was great trade taking place. And there are lives that, when they will fix the grain prices, instead of actually bringing down the prices, it will result in scarcity because people will not invest in sowing the seeds. So that's the approach, basically. So whenever they intervene, they realize that, OK, that's fine. Right, so rephrase this says, given that when the government intervenes in this, it's going to have unwanted secondary effects. How do we think about that question? Well, there are always unwanted secondary effects of anything. You can always come out with excuses against the government intervening. But when you have a serious problem, when you have, say, the problem of monopolies, when you have increasing inequality in society, when you have, I think, this looming problem of labor, of what we're going to do in a world of increasingly intelligent machines, we can't worry about that. We can't worry that there will be unforeseen consequences. And I'm not sure if I'm answering your question. But let's go over to Susan for now. And we'll see whether Ali wants to reform a little further down. So Susan Kish, I've never quite been able to reconcile the fact that, theoretically, the internet is this global, boundary-less network and that you work within this global framework. And yet most of these discussions talk about a US perspective. And how can we reconcile trying to fix this seamless system in a US framework without, number one, seeming like the ultimate imperialist, and number two, being able to actually enforce it in a way that achieves the objectives you stated? Well, that's a really good question. And I think one of the things that's happened is that the two things have happened. One is that, as you say, the internet is increasingly, and this reflects a broader issue in America, the global nature of the internet has really been an excuse for these massively wealthy, powerful, multinational American companies to become even wealthier and more powerful. And I think Americans are uncomfortable with that idea. But I also think there's this idea that the internet would be global. It was one of the great dreams that it would do away with traditional boundaries. You go back to John Perry Barlow's idea of the internet representing a global system that would do away with the nation state, do away with traditional boundaries. And the reality of the internet is it's fragmenting into many different internets, for better or worse. You know, I'm no great fan of the Russian government or the Chinese government or the Iranian government. But the reality of the 21st century internet is it's fragmenting. There's an Iranian internet. There's a Russian internet. There's a Chinese internet. And there's not an awful lot we can do about that. At the base of the table, please. Yeah, so I was kind of curious about your starting this by saying, let's go back to 1812. And imagine that when we had the Industrial Revolution, we had political solutions to child labor, robber barons and everything else. I mean, also at the time of 1812, we had kind of all new government institutions. That's the French Revolution, the American Revolution. We had democracy. We had three tri-partite governments. I'm wondering, if we imagine this moment to be similar, can you envision a more distributed governance system? I mean, has the internet maybe not gone far enough in terms of creating political institutions? That's a great question. That's a really good question. And I never really thought about it like that. But I think it's an interesting comparison to go back to the governmental institutions and the sort of the development of democracy and perhaps to understand that the achievements of government in the 19th century in terms of regulating some of the excesses of the Industrial Revolution were bound up in the revolution of government itself. I'm not sure what distributed government means. I mean, do you want to say more about that? Well, then why do you use it? Well, I think we're thinking. I mean, I think people who are talking about distributed governance are thinking. Well, when they use it, what did you think of it as? I think it's sort of nodal government. I think more loosely networked organizations. Well, can you think of some examples of how that could work? I mean, these are great questions. I don't mean to be critical. I mean, as a, for instance, on this, right? You're seeing movements coming out of Brazil, for instance, with the Marco Civil, which is a jointly authored piece of legislation, which has become one of the main sort of the centerpiece of Brazil's regulations of the internet. And it was written both by a small group of professionals, but with contributions from about 2,000 citizens participating within it. A lot of people are sort of wondering whether we might end up seeing this political shift at the same moment as you're talking about a regulatory shift. But what's interesting is, of course, a lot of that experimentation is happening precisely in these digital spaces because they allow for a much broader set of participation. Well, let me also say something about my critique of the, I think, because I have a little bit of this in the book. The problem with the politics of the, you know, it was hoped, for example, that Occupy would mature into a concrete political organization, but it didn't. We all know the catastrophe, the tragedy of the Arab Spring and the way it's become this awful killing ground. My argument, I think, is that the politics of the internet are problematic. And this is bound up in my critique of the way in which the internet lends itself to more and more individualization. It's both a cause and a consequence of more and more fragmentation, isolation, alienation. So in Occupy, for example, when its website or its marketing was a quilt of individual voices. It was the 99%, which was, I think, extremely problematic because it's a meaningless term. But as the 99%, it contained everyone's voices and everyone was telling their own story. So there's a broader political problem here. In the old industrial age, when social class meant something or when ideology meant something, when we were tied together by material interests, you could see the emergence of political parties, liberals, labor parties in particular, conservative pro-capitalist parties. But today on the internet, because of its radical individualization, because of the echo chamber nature of its culture, because of the way it isn't really very social, what it really is is just a platform for our individual voices. Now I play around a lot with the idea of the selfie in the book and use that as a sort of battering ram. But I think there is a more serious element in the sense that we're only going to get political movements out of the internet when we're tied together by more than just emotion. And the challenge is to come up with political organizations and movements that reflect the reality. Now the problem is, is the internet movements tend to, and this comes back to my core argument, they lend themselves to charismatic leadership. So Grillo in Italy, for example, is an example of when these parties that are supposedly very democratic and supposedly very open have a tendency towards opaqueness and a tendency towards sort of a narrower lead who don't really work very much. So I think that that's the fundamental challenge. I don't know what the solution is, but I think when you talk about distributed politics, it's a very vague concept. And I don't know how it works. I don't know what it means. And distributed economics has created new monopolists like Google. So I'm not sure if I even want distributed politics, because it would lend itself to political parties. It's on form of capture. That was a great question. It's a weird deal. I think the obvious monopolies are something to strive for, but he says shoot big. Think of big ideas and the fact that you're thinking in the spaces that other people aren't full of resultant monopolies. He would say, if you disagree with Facebook, or if I'm putting my shoes in, if you disagree with Facebook, don't look to build diaspora or LO, which tried to compete in a distributed fashion and failed, but maybe try and look for other monopolies and in the way that Google also might just stop without competing in the same space, you might be able to do the same thing. So Peter Steele's message is think big, try and build monopolies. Do you have an alternative way of thinking? Do you think you should be building distributed systems or should be more egalitarian in the way we look? Yeah, I mean, look, there's two ways. I mean, obviously, anyone who starts a company wants to be a monopolist. There's nothing wrong with that. You want a successful company, and that's one of Teal's points, that anyone who starts a company wants to be a monopolist, because that's what you want. You want to control the market. That's when you're most successful. I don't have a problem with that, because it's just stating the obvious. What I do have a problem with is his idea that monopolies are good for society. I think he touches on this. He doesn't have a problem. He's very much against antitrust. And I think that's rooted in his idea that we live in an age where the only people capable of changing the world are entrepreneurs. So there needs to be almost different laws for those entrepreneurs. In the 19th century, John Stuart Mill wrote a very important book called On Liberty. And we talked about the intellectual driving civilization forward, that these were the people who existed outside traditional laws. For Teal, it's the entrepreneur. And he seems to think that the entrepreneurs shouldn't necessarily conform to the same moral imperatives or standards as anyone else. And I think he's wrong in both respects. I think monopolies are bad for society. And I don't think that entrepreneurs are the driving force of our civilization. Saul, I hope you're going to spring to the defense of the entrepreneur. No. Yes. Are you an entrepreneur? No. Whatever the polar opposite in the sort of civic sense is on one of those, I guess, whatever. But I'm sort of interested in the question of distributed government and sort of the multinational aspect of the internet. And I want to turn it around to one of the examples we use, which is the Uber, which, I agree, is a despicable company for all bunches of reasons. But the regulatory things that should have been in place to control Uber had nothing to do with the global governance or even national governance. It was local governments regulating cars on the road and who should be driving and what insurance you should have and what sort of safety checks there were. But also, when that actually brought itself out, the people who were best at grassroots politics turned out to be Uber. We had a fight in Cambridge over Uber for their reason. But they hired David Plouffe, right? Well, this was before that. They got more people to a Cambridge licensing commission meeting than had ever shown up before. They, you know, the license commission didn't know what to do with it. So there seem to be all sorts of forces here which you really haven't pulled together. And I think your title, almost more literally than you do, I mean, the answer to Uber is not the internet. It's local politics and regulation in the real world. When you critique Amazon, you critique labor practices. And that's real world stuff. That's not internet stuff. That's labor laws, et cetera. But yet, most of your discussion seems to push into the internet realm and internet governance as things like that. I don't know about this. No, I see your point. But I don't agree, actually, because I think the answer is what you're talking about. I would strongly agree. I think local government is much more important than, you know, I don't have the answer for me isn't global digital government. I don't come up with the idea of distributed government. I agree with you. I don't think we're necessarily disagreeing. I do think that it's harder and harder to distinguish the internet from the world. And I think one of the things that we have to sort of get beyond is always making a distinction between the real and the virtual, because they're increasingly so bound up with one another. But I agree with you. And that comes back to the solution is politics. If someone can come out with a better solution, I'm open to it. But I just don't know of one. So I mean, one interesting thing at all of this, right, is that Saul's tax return, I believe, says activist as profession. And it sounds like, to summarize his argument, you could have written a very different book, which was a book trying to inspire a new labor movement, looking for the dignity of work, and looking at the ways in which underpaid, undervalued, and underprotected workers underpin a great deal of what's going on here, either in the literal sense of the Amazon workers, that wouldn't have sold as well as a book that sort of takes on the internet within its sights. Are you in the wrong place? No, I don't. There are lots of books I could have written. I'm interested in the internet is the dominant story of today. It's what everyone's obsessed with one way or the other. And I'm interested in telling that story and in understanding that story. So you're saying I should have written a book in defense of labor unions? I think you could have written a very important and probably dusty, unread and unloved book on the importance of labor unions in the beginning of the 21st century. I think I could have, but I also have done. I've reminded people in this book of the importance of unions. I've reminded people that Uber is against unions. I've reminded people that the sharing economy isn't about sharing. And you've got people like Jeremy Rifkin in Europe saying that the sharing economy will be post-capitalist. It'll be all about sharing. It's just complete garbage. So I'm bringing back, I mean, I don't know if you've read the book, but I'm bringing back concepts that, for me, are important, the dignity of labor, unions, political and economic system, which is relatively equitable, and saying that this digital world isn't creating that. I could have written a 500-page book about the history of labor unions, but I'm not an academic. And I'm not a labor union historian. I'm interested in technology and its impact on the world. Do you want to put it on the hand, or are you stretching? Yes, no, I'm putting it on the other hand. Great. Let's go with the young lady first, and then we'll go to you next. So I guess the question is, you have these examples, for instance, the consumer example, where essentially corporations, which involve the internet, become very effective at organizing political movement. And so the question is, how do you bootstrap the process of the people who are running the internet? And some senses are the people who have the influence to use the internet to create these political movements. And how do you bootstrap an alternative process, such as more citizen led or something, so that we drive towards these more equitable movements as opposed to movements led by corporations? Yeah, that's a good question. Bootstrap meaning, I'm not clear on that word. You mean finance, organize? How do you start this organizing, this movement towards people, like organizing themselves as opposed to, what is the alternative model? You have this model of corporations driving people to participate in local politics. If we say that this sort of corporate model is just fundamentally flawed because there's so much money involved or something, then how are you engaging people with in order to convince them to form small movements around these things or those things? Well, I think when it comes to Uber, we're already getting those kinds of movements. And in Europe, you've got quite a lot of movements. You have a lot of Union challenges to Amazon's labor practices. You have more and more people and companies in Europe that are challenging Google and data and Google's role in the surveillance economy. So do you see as a drive sort of more equitable? Small companies or movements? I do think that entrepreneurs have a big opportunity here. And I went to speak at Google a few weeks ago and someone asked me, what's our biggest challenge? And I said, your business model doesn't work. And it seems obvious to me. It doesn't seem obvious to anybody else. But I'm wondering whether in 30 or 40 years we'll look back and think that business model was a failure. And at work for 10, 15, 20 years, I think coming back to this issue of the market is that the real opportunity is with entrepreneurs. Because I think, say when it comes to data, we haven't had Chernobyl, we haven't had Exxon Valdez, we really haven't had the data catastrophe yet. I mean, maybe we had the NSA, but that got kind of mudded because it became an attack on government rather than on the issue of the data economy. But I think that whether it's DuckDuckGo or a number of other companies that are emerging here which are focused on new business models is that we need to, if you like, educate consumers into recognizing the value of paying for things. We need them to understand that when something's for free, it's not really for free. So I'm more sympathetic to market-led solutions here. I know it seems sort of hard to imagine, but I think that people are beginning to wake up, especially in Europe, I think, to the implications of the free economy, to the implications of data, especially since we're on the verge of this massive explosion of a data economy, connected car, internet, things, all the rest of it, and people are gonna become more and more aware of its impact on us. Privacy is a massive issue. And only becoming larger, right? No, I'm with you on that. It is interesting to think about when asked the question of whether you wanna head towards a movement or head towards entrepreneurship that at the end of the day, that entrepreneurship is where you would put your back. But I wanna bring time to the... Well, yeah, but let me just say, I'm not against. You know, we're in Cambridge. I used to live here. I know about Cambridge in terms of political movements, but it seems as if the most effective way for solving a lot of these problems are market-led ones. And that we can fight and shout about Uber in Cambridge and that can have some impact. But the real impact will probably still come from market-led solutions. The better or worse, I'm not necessarily celebrating that. It's just a reality. So, let me go back to pick up again on you. So, put down pretty quickly the idea of a decentralized governance. I didn't put it down. I just don't understand what it means. So, to me, sort of, is that a fault, I suppose. So, the people who have discussed over the last 20 years about how to build, you know, how to build the way, how to build new technology, how to make new standards, have discussed it on many lists and things like the internet engineering task force and the web consortium and so on. And they've done that without country borders being a part of the people. So, you know, the web sort of built on the internet. The internet was built without where you don't, you know, where to communicate. They're not aware of country borders being cost, but it's built. And nothing you've built is country free. It doesn't use the country system. And so, it's only when we start to talk about it. So, you know, when you can talk about design, you can get together a whole bunch of people, design a whole new protocol, a whole new application on the internet, and without really knowing where the people, you're combined, you're where your colleagues are. And sometimes, you know, they don't even like to travel. So, you're not sure you could ever find out. So, when you used to sort of forward progress and developing a new thing, including, for example, systems, you know, social systems, which involves, like some of the other social networking systems, which involves a certain amount of sort of internal governance, like, like, we have TCA systems and so on. So, we build all these systems and we build it without actually having to connect to the nation idea at all. And then, when something goes badly wrong, like, you find somebody in these systems is lying, who's being fraudulent, somebody is abusing them, somebody is breaking the protocols, somebody is, you know, intersecting messages, changing what's inside them and sending them on, as though there'd never been a, or something like that. And you think, oh, that's not how it's supposed to work, but, and then in the, actually, then you have to find out what countries are in, because all of the, all of the recalls you have is based on open legislation and all the legislation is built on laws and that, because the legal systems were genocated from the time when people were, it was very relevant to be geographically, because it was all about whether you could, where in Cambridge you, it was actually safe to live when you wouldn't have your head chopped off by somebody else and so on. So now, and in some cases places are still like that, still about that, but now, in a way, if you're truly trying to get people, if you're trying to develop, if you're trying to develop some new ways of working, for example, you're trying to, for example, develop, but imagine yourself developing some sort of new social system in which people communicate and, you know, can do fun things and you're gonna try to, like there's sort of, like people of kind of ours, there's a little hint, if you're a student here and you're building something, can we buy them, can we buy the technical things we build actually affect whether what is better or more horrible in the future because of the properties of the new things we build. And so to me, as we're building these things, there are lots of things we've got already which are not really nation-based and so where that is the default seems to me that, so some people are wondering whether we should, the technical community who already worked like this without worrying about nations should start to put down the basis of, for example, they should start defining some bits of constitution so that there's a generally internationally accepted set of constitution levels, like the Bill of Rights, you can have your bill of responsibilities will be welcomed there too. And suppose we have that as a backdrop which actually has happened in this large international. Yeah. Will that, can we then use that locally in each country to sort of to nail home the actual boring bits of regulations which has to, because it is boring to do regulation in one country because you have to just work in one country and all you do will affect that country but you have to, but everybody has to do that locally. Don't you think that there's a chance, but that's the sort of thing some people talk about when they talk about it. Well, let me, but given, let me reverse the question and I'll ask you a question. Given the reality of government policy in, I don't know, say China and Russia and Iran and a number of other countries where the web or the internet can be kind of walled off for better or worse, that's what can happen. And given, Turkey is another example, given the way in which authoritarianism seems to be on the rise and the internet has become increasingly an enemy of authoritarian government. What can you do? And these governments are gonna sign these agreements, right? I think that you're going to get it. It's what's interesting is if you get some countries which are interested in signing agreements. Like, like Europe and the US for example. Because Europe and the US come to a cause on account some privacy and accountability. They come together to produce some common promises about how they will hold their own police forces accountable when they spy on people and things like that. So if you had Europe and the US and some friends, now that's quite a large chunk. If they put together an area in which we have some, we have some basic principles which are in which the normal things which you think are mean and nasty and horrible can, will be, will be actually. Yeah, I'm not even convinced that Europe and America, I mean they're on separate pages on so many of these issues. I'm not sure whether that's doable. So we have two, two political models. We have the local, what was that gentleman's name? Sol, Sol's for the local model. Sol's model is the local model. Tim's model is the global model. And I have to say that I'm much more sympathetic to Sol's model because I just think it's viable. I just think that the international model is so hard to realize. I don't know how it can work. I mean you go to a lot of these world, internet, forum style things. What have they achieved? What do they do? Or without becoming, you know, bureaucrats, massive bureaucracies where people are sort of pursuing their own bureaucratic interests. So the things I go to mainly, the standards. Yeah. And they've achieved. But that's technology. That's not politics. Okay, they've defined. But that's technology. That's not politics. So, you know, they don't have gone on, got business done, and they do stuff. Now the question, now when it comes in, the people who get together and talk about internet governance, they have talked about talking about internet governance. And they have not come out with the master plan. And so, and it's certainly not clear how that's gonna work. And to a certain extent, the jurors definitely stand out. And I think there's a push between people who would like to, who hanker off to the international system where you get nations coming together in the UN. And there's people who want to say, let's make a system which is not really based on nations at all. And there's people who are in between and so on. So it's not clear what people can achieve out there. But certainly, so normally the areas I work with, no, there is progress. And people compromising each other and working with each other, and they produce consensus across widely, people from widely different cultures and things like that. So the question I think is whether you can take that sort of spirit and take it on to making, getting global agreements. Because if you don't, to a certain extent, these are multinationals, these are nonnational companies. Right. So setting it up as a US-based battle between the American government and Google is kind of silly because they'll just moved, they're kind of already paying the taxes now and they'll move everything else to Ireland as well. And it won't be an American company anymore because, you know, overnight. So ownership will be moved to Google Ireland or something. So automatically. So that lady asked the question about distributed politics. Do you know what that means? Do you have any idea? I imagine she might be talking about copolitics which just isn't bound to the nation. By the way, we need to know your name because you're currently in the lead for the book, so. A pre-deboned soul with a lot of social machines. So look, just to offer a quick summary and perhaps queue up two more questions after which we're gonna let Andrew sign books and have another cup of tea. We've ended up with this provocation in which Andrew is basically saying many of these big problems we'd hope to solve society, the internet doesn't automatically solve and in fact, in some cases, may actually go on to exacerbate. We've gone on to this question to say, okay, if we really are dealing with a radical shift in society, should we not only have a technological shift but a governance shift? And I take that to be previous point about 1812. Do we need to think about not only a shift in how technologies are made or put out there, but a way in which spaces are governed? And I don't think anyone quite has a sense for what a distributed politics is yet. Saul put up a highly localized version. Tim put up one which in many ways is sort of a technocratic version. It's very distributed within the space of technocrats but then there's this long history of where that meets the politicians and that's the world summit on the information society and neither you nor I are huge fans of where that interface happens. And by the way, my solution is somewhere combined with the two of them. It's both that. It's hyper-local community networks and then kind of a very big, kind of like the federalist hand where you have the nation and the state takes both of those borders farther out. The state becomes hyper-local and the federal becomes transnational. So the invitation here is for two more questions, A, see if you can do better than previous question and B, either forward this debate or lead us in another direction entirely because there's a lot within Andrew's critique, a lot of different directions to do it. I think we can take one or two more questions. But I think it's really good though we're talking so politically. I mean, I think it only makes my point but the fact that we're really beginning to address these, I mean, there is no self-evident political solution. If there was, I wouldn't have written the book. So I'm gonna give the last two to Rahul and to Deb in that order. So. Sure. So an incredibly redemptious version of your own, what it's like to say that, what the internet is like everything else that's been usurped by existing powers to try to reinforce their existing power dynamics. Now, the counterpoint to that is that, yeah, it's also been usurped by the people that find those power dynamics to try to fight those power dynamics in more effective or new ways. Now, I'm curious what your thoughts are on about sort of the ways that the internet has fostered people to get engaged in new ways to try to actually fight those dynamics which is a narrative we talk a lot about in the city media. So do you wanna give me a couple of examples? Sure. For instance, if I'm interested in immigration reform, I can interview my mother about her immigration experience and post it to a collaborative website where people are posting videos that maybe get watched or not, but it doesn't matter because I had a way to actually interface with a campaign that otherwise I wouldn't have had a good way to interface with a campaign. And now suddenly I'm more interested in battling immigration. But has that had much of an impact on anything? Sure. The dream activists. Had a movement built largely on the web around people coming out as undocumented and unafraid, posting their videos on YouTube. They've ended up becoming the dominant narrative that Obama has picked up, which is what got him to make rather a bold statement about immigration reform, which has won him lasting enmity of the right, but has actually moved further forward on immigration, which in a while, and that's very much a web-based movement pushing that forward. Okay, well, I would accept that. I think you're right on that. But what I would, so I'd accept that, but what I would say is that we need to, we've got to figure out the next step of allowing these single issue movements and initiatives online to mature, to flower into more coherent political organization. So that's an ideal platform where people telling their stories, but the internet can't degenerate just into a platform for people to tell their stories because that's not viable in political terms. That results in anarchy. In anarchy and chaos, like Occupy. So you're right on that example, but I think the Occupy movement is more interesting in figuring out why did it disappear? Why did it fail? The counterpoint is there are actually lots of organizations that use the tools provided by the internet, sometimes by large companies, to organize and aggregate for their rights in local and larger scale venues. I can give you a long list of those examples, and I think you could respond with a set of long list of failed examples. Some of those get usurped by existing people that are trying to build campaigns that work within the existing political sphere. Some don't and fizzle out. I think there's actually a richness there that you're overlooking in your response. Okay, well, that's a fair. I appreciate that. I think your responses are rich in thoughts, and I think there's a richness in the examples. I'm gonna let Deb have the last question, and then we're gonna move on to thanking and signing. It's kind of a bit of a tangential point, but since Uber was the universal bad guy, I thought I'd end with the partial defense of Uber. One of your three main points was around dignity of work, which I think is really a critical dimension to all of this, and in sort of some other context, Crete and I have talked a fair amount about hyperlocal, so community networks and how, if you redistribute who's doing what in a community and think about mutual assistance and self-governance, that's sort of the dignity, and something that doesn't get measured on the commercial access where Uber's making all the money, but there's a sort of other dimension that may not always go together. So a monopoly, does that make, how does that connect with the labor that's involved, that is kind of leading to those profits? So in the case of Uber, I've actually made habit, I use, it's like Amazon, I guess, and I have a fee, right? Well, you'll use it, none of it's- I'm supposed to not admit you use Uber, I use it a lot, and I talk always to my driver. Ask what did you do before, and it's always, typically they drove for some other company before, and how things changed. And usually in terms of pay, it's roughly equal to what they made before, and I say, and do you like it better or worse? And almost all of the drivers say I prefer it. Why? I control my schedule. I work for myself now, I've got this level of freedom and picking work when I want, I've got flexibility, I've got this other job, I've got kids, et cetera. So it's kind of, like I said, it's a minor point, but it's just something to hold on to, which is something about then living in this networking configuration that's actually touching the lives of people who work, most people who work for Uber, my personal poll is pretty favorable. Although it's sort of, those are the people who work for us. You're not talking, if you went into a regular cab, you could talk to a lot of those guys who would give you an entirely different, it's my critique is a broader one of the gig economy. But if the Uber or the cab? Yeah, you know, you're right. You're right, no one's forcing anyone to drive Uber, you're absolutely right. Just as no one's forcing anyone to rent their homes out on Airbnb, just as no one's forcing anyone to sell their labor on tar-strap it. But my point is to say, is this the world we want? Is this the world we want of sort of fragmented labor where everyone's buying and selling their labor on these increasingly monopolistic platforms that are taking 30, 40% of the revenue and creating enormous wealth for a tiny group of people? And my point was in thinking about sort of to Ethan's point, because I haven't read the book, but it sounds like there's a lot of valid criticism of things that are not working well. But to recognize the more complex nature of what the internet has given us and that even in the most evil character in today's narrative, interestingly, compared to the cab drivers, the Uber driver, there's something positive there. So as we think about how to curtail the monopoly when we measure what's happening on the commercial. And if you look at the personal freedom dimension of drivers, it's just, I just want to point out in a scientific poll, but in my ad hoc poll, there's this little group of drivers who are saying personal freedom, yay. Monopoly of the company I work for, I don't like that, go ahead and pull it in, but I like this personal freedom thing. This is kind of working for me. So if there's like a general point, which is how do we get, how do we hold on to some of those things that look like positives while we rein in some of the negatives? Actually there's another dimension in Deb's argument too. Just with Uber is in a market like London, the better drivers have moved where they have more independence because they're happier. So in fact, when you choose someone who's not Uber, you're actually having a lower standard of quality for the same price. We're not for the black cabs though. For Addison Lee. Right, right, for a mini cab driver. They're all leaving to go where they have more flexibility, so there's a shift in my room. But you also have to look at the impact on say, black cab drivers. And on the years they invest in learning the town and the impact on that traditional industry. But Rosemary has just given you the perfect thing. You can deal with amateurs. You can deal with disruptive markets. You can sum it all up in one final response to Deb, don't you? I think I come back to my point that I'm trying to take a, I'm trying to step back and say, is this a world we want? So you're right, on the micro level, yeah, people want to drive an Uber car. People want to sell their labor. But is this a world we want? Is this a world we want of these increasingly sort of global monopolistic platforms taking massive pieces of our work for profit? Travis Kalalnik came to DLD, I was speaking here, in Munich in January, and to get into European markets, he said, we'll give you 50,000 new jobs. I don't know, Travis, that notion of a job is debatable. But the same time he came out with that, Larry Summers and Ed Balls, the British Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, came out with an important report explaining why you have the hollowing out of the middle class. And one of the most important things they came up with is this idea of a gig economy, where we're all working part-time perpetually. And that's not a world I want. That's not a world where people are selling their labor perpetually. I don't think that benefits working people. And I think, coming back to my book, it compounds the winner-take-all economy. It compounds this increasingly monopolistic nature of the digital economy. So I think we have to separate the fact that sure, there are people, there are people on Facebook that like it. There are people, no one's forcing anyone to use these services. No one's forcing anyone to use Google. I use Google, but what I'm trying to do in this book is get people to step back and say, what are the macro, what is the macro impact of this on culture, on society, on freedom? So I try to ask the big questions rather than simply say, well, if people didn't want to do it, they wouldn't do it. Which, of course, is true. So Andrew, thank you for some big questions today. Thank you. Everybody here, thank you for a big discussion coming out of this. The book is for sale at the end of the table. It is, in fact, selling for such a discount that you couldn't afford to give it away to people. I hope people will do it because buying books on paper is a wonderful thing, if only for nostalgic reasons. Let's have a round of applause to thank Andrew for doing this. Thank you.