 I think we are going to kick things off just to be mindful of time. Yes, this is how good attention is. I'm sure we're still going to have people drifting in, but wanted to kick things off. I'm Sue Hendrickson. I'm the executive director here at the Berkman Plime Center. We are so thrilled that all of you are here that you're interested in the center. We're looking forward to finding ways for you to engage with it. A whole variety of different opportunities for that both in our programming with our programs with the people who are here and these the internet and society I joined here just by way of background I joined here from having been in private practice before that as an IP and commercial emerging tech lawyer for the last few decades. And I did so in part because the internet and its challenges with society are the issues that I think are going to define our days and the next few chapters and I'm hoping that with the intellectual thought leadership and the convening power that we have here and the community that we build with you and others, that we can tackle these really fundamental societal channels, challenges that we're facing so really looking forward to that wanted to introduce Jay Z who many of you know the co founder of the Institute faculty here I couldn't possibly list all Jay Z title so I'm not going to try but really has been behind the leadership here and we're going to start with a presentation that Jay Z is going to do but please come around and I look forward to meeting you talking with you having you meet our staff and teams that are working here to try to drive change in the space. Thank you. Well, hello, everybody. As Susan I'm not that Jay Z, and sometimes was also disappointed expectations. But I do have Jay Z.org the domain name, due to an unhealthy interest in domain names 20 years ago. And my shift will come in with that as a possible investment. And speaking of possible investments, apart from simply welcoming you all thank you for coming out to learn more about our Center for Internet Society and kind of walking with us on this journey together, whether you're taking your first steps or have been with us for a while or in staggered ways. And whether you're here in person or potentially virtually since we're using the wonderful proprietary zoom protocol, which includes since I think we paid extra for zoom premium, this weird gray line at the top to indicate that we are special. Now it's time on investments and I thought I would just open with a kind of ripped from the headlines thing for last year that I've been puzzling my way through. This is people, aka Michael Winkleman Michael if you're tuned in. Hello, and he's a graphic designer slash digital artist who did this really cool project where he created something digitally every day. And he started quite a while ago, 2007, and has been at it for more than 5000 consecutive days. All right, that's pretty cool. He then decided to make a mosaic of those 5000 works pictured here, and he then decided to auction off an NFT of the work through Christie's. I've heard of NFTs, I don't know if you've ever heard of Christie's but it's an auction house. And this is a kind of normal thing Christie's like auction. It's an untitled painting you can see the details over in the corner at sign. And it tells you a little bit of details it's acrylic on campus these are its dimensions. And if you win the bidding you will get the physical object represented by the picture. Here. Okay, so what did Beeple's thing say? Beeple's thing was every day the first 5000 days, there it is. And the artwork that I made is very much influenced by the tools and influenced by the work of a bunch of people in the crypto community as well. Hey Mike, this is Jason. I was going to say congratulations. You're at $25,250,000. That's crazy now. Jesus Christ, what the f**k? Oh my God, $15,000,000. $69 million. I think it probably means digital art is here to stay. I'm going to Disney World. $69 million for that NFT. That starts to feel like real money, even if it was originally in cryptocurrency, that's how much it was paid for in dollars by Christie. So like they really made sure the check of the traditional form cleared for it. And like, how did we get here? In fact, what just happened? I find myself asking that a lot on internet stuff like what just happened. And we should just look at it a little more closely for a moment. So here's back to the details page. It has a smart contract address. Here again is the work. The smart contract address points to this work in a way I'll show you in a second. That's a little bit weird because this is a $69 million work, one of the top 10 most valued works of art in the world right now. And I'm just showing it to you. Have I taken it? No, no, no, of course not. I'm just showing you the work. And my Zoom is going slowly. There should be something appearing on the screen because it's on my screen. This is what Zoom doesn't want you to know. I like to hold my thing up and say, oh, there it is. Okay. So this work can be found at this link. Anybody can type in this link and when they do, they will get a 300 megabyte JPEG that chrome will start sagging under the weight. And then it has like that little zoom in. Don't click that or that's it. Your Chrome is toast. But 500 megapixels 300 megabytes. And again, it's yours to enjoy. Like go to that and you too can download it and find me the screen that could show that in all its glory. And you've got a hybrid thing. So then what did the person who bought the NFT actually get. And again, I find that puzzling too. So here's the smart contract address on the Ethereum blockchain. I wouldn't know it anywhere. And if you go look at that. You see that it points to another link which is the smart contract which has just basics about how stuff gets transacted on this blockchain for this kind of object it's the 40,000 or so use of that contract. And the owner, the owner is people, because he has announced that that's his wallet. And again, I guess people who are real because oh yeah of course that's people like I know that address like the back of my hand. And this thing in turn points to this address on the IPFS, which is the interplanetary file system. Normally you would think that's just a weird joke, right. But no it's actually the interplanetary filing system, because the internet has weird ways of making weird jokes into real things that still feel like the joke is on somebody and we're not quite sure. And if you then go to that place on the interplanetary file system, which I invite you to do it's open for anybody. You go to that place and then this is what you see. This is this is it. This is it is the metadata data about data which is a text file with some structure to it. And you can see, he wrote I made a picture from start to finish every single day. This is my every one of those pictures, and then it has another link to this, and this link goes to a website, which then redirects into the IPFS again, where you end up going from here over to there, which is the thing. If you're thinking this is kind of like a matryoshka doll sort of set where it's like wait so what am I getting a point to a link the points of metadata file that points to yes, I think it is kind of like that in fact it's really more kind of like this. What did the person that bought the NFT get that we didn't. What they got was the right to have the Ethereum blockchain represent a single transaction showing the movement of the token you just saw from people to the buyer. That's what they got. $69 million. I don't know. There's a quote from the buyer who is synonymous saying that he is confident that that token will be worth a billion dollars someday. And I wish them luck. Blockchain like invented by Satoshi Nakamoto, our friend wiki tells us that we don't actually know who that is. In fact it's probably more than one person, and their speculation and somebody has claimed that we're not sure. So we have a thing we're not exactly sure what it is invented by we're not exactly sure whom producing tokens that are only worth hexadecimal strings of numbers. Otherwise, all of us can get whatever they get. And there's somehow $69 million involved. This kind of confusion multiplied across multiple blockchains I mean, how many crypto coins are there I know there's an ongoing list at the coin oxy site and they contribute to coin oxy. They have a coin of their featured on coin oxy. It means your coin is dead. And as you can see there are 2200 entries in counting, but anybody can make their own point isn't that wonderful. This is the kind of thing that gets produced by a generative system a generative system meaning one that invites contribution from anybody, and there's no gatekeeper to say that is a profoundly dumb idea. No, it's just like you know what you do you want to make a blockchain, make a blockchain, you want to say why it's valuable great see if it works in the marketplace if somebody else will pay $69 million to affect the transaction on the chain. Maybe not a work maybe it won't. And it turns out that that is a current sort of synecdoche key of the way the internet itself has worked and technologies didn't have to be generative this is maybe generated a textual level because you can type any text you want on this old typewriter, but the way this typewriter works is set from the moment it left the factory. You can't reconfigure the typewriter to do something different than what it does. And for a while the future of the typewriter was that this is the brother smart word processor which was like yesterday's technology of tomorrow. It doesn't use its main menu, the way it acts, it doesn't get firmware upgrades, this is the appliance you bought, and how it will work is defined by the brother company college big brother, and you will use it however you use it. It's been a while seen as a future of technology until circa 1977 Steve Jobs comes along with this thing called the Apple computer. And for the first time in a single form fitting case. You have a thing you can look up to a television set, how about repurposing get a blinking cursor, and you're like that's so cool is watch the cursor blink. It's up to you to type in a program like 10 print hello 20 go to 10 and be like I love computers and watch to see it go and also means that third parties can write stuff. People that aren't Apple can write code for the Apple and others can run it and Apple isn't in the middle of that transaction no gatekeeping. So in this case, you have something like this account, the first spreadsheet ever digitally, and the business world is like OMG, and suddenly Apple computers are flying off the shelves, and Apple has to do market research to figure out why their hobbyist computer got so popular. I see it's because every fortune 500 company now means 10,000 of them, because two folks in Boston invented this account on Cape Cod. It's a little bit weird. And then you have all sorts of other computers like this wonderful old PC. And that just runs any software, you hand it. If it's executable, it executes totally different from the royal typewriter from the brother smart word processor, and that leads to an entire industry of off the shop software that you buy, or that people share with you. And that is the kind of ground zero of our digital revolution over the past 30 years, and it was a similar move in the network space. The telephone company in America, AT&T, that's the whole thing. And then along comes the internet, a totally weird, not expected IP does not mean intellectual property here. These internet protocol, built by a bunch of engineers who are kind of doing it in their spare time, and claiming no intellectual property ownership of it, and slicing the whole digital world into these modules. So that you can be an expert on ethernet, and you don't need to know about anything else if you have fast ethernet that you make. That's great people can buy it and run internet protocol on it and that's their business. And that means that any kind of innovation can happen at any layer without having to coordinate with another layer. And it's the hourglass is because it's really wide on the top, you can run any app it's like an executable for the network it's whatever anybody wants to invent works over internet protocol. And similarly it works over whatever medium gets invented sometime will have Wi-Fi figured out. We don't yet but when we do the internet's going to work great over it. And it's such a strange way of organizing thing. This modularity. We haven't talked about it but it's worth making a bookmark for packet switching of packetizing information, so that you can shove a ton of information from different people over one pipe, and not have to keep passing the pipe back and forth. But just have it fail gracefully is too many people use it just slows down for everybody, rather than just being allocated to one person perfectly and everybody else has to wait in line. It is such a radical proposition that it really did lead to the question of whether the internet could even work. As late as 1992 IBM was saying you couldn't possibly build a corporate network using internet protocol. It's too weird. It's too unreliable. You can say the same thing about blockchain. You can say the same thing about the interplanetary file system. You can say the same thing surely about Wikipedia. Like just imagine great idea everybody. It's an encyclopedia that starts with one article, and then anybody can just come along and type more others can edit it at any time. They don't have to put in their names. And before you know it will get a good encyclopedia. Oh yeah it'll be in 200 and some languages. That's a profoundly bad idea. But that's why the mascot of the internet engineers in their spare time the internet engineering task force is said to be the bumblebee, because the wing to fur ratio of the bumblebee is said to be too large for it to fly. And yet miraculously to be flies. Like I was saying 2006 they finally figured out how the bees fly. Obviously there's a doctor talk that's almost over. So I will just say they flap their wings. Very quickly. But it means that something like Tim Berners-Lee can come along. And just in his spare time like he's not busy enough as a particle physicist at CERN. It's time for World Wide Web. Here's the protocol. All we have to do is have everybody use this protocol to build web pages of links, the pages, and to have other people build browsers that understand when you see those utterances of web pages, how to paint them to pre pages. All right, world. The rest is up to you. I'm out of here. So we have a pretty abridged version of how the World Wide Web comes about. There were other competitors too but this one worked with Tim having no privilege in the middle to decide what websites come and what websites go. So you end up getting a wheel of cheese cam in Somerset, England, if you were to tune in and watch the cheese ripen. And it was registered in domain names originally for free. It cost nothing to register a domain name that nobody else had registered. So here in 1994 is the journalist Josh Quitner being like, nobody has McDonald's.com, including McDonald's. He calls up McDonald's. He's like, did you know you don't have your own domain name. And they're like, I don't know what you're talking about. So he got the domain name. And then later called up McDonald's and was like, hey, do you want to make a donation to a good cause. And I'll give you McDonald's.com. And they're like, we're going to sue you. And he was like, you can have it. And that was that. I mean, I just can't resist between the other story that at some point Princeton review ends up registering Kaplan.com test prep and putting up some funny site about Kaplan at Kaplan.com even though it's Princeton review just to goof around. Kaplan was not amused. John Katzman who ran Princeton review at the time said if you give me a case of beer, you can have Princeton review.com. They threatened to sue him, leading to this wonderful quote, one of my favorite of that era, which is Kaplan has no sense of humor, no vision and no beer. So it's kind of weird McDonald's finally gets McDonald's.com this is the very first website McDonald's.com. And it looks a little basic, I think, I don't think you can actually order something there's no infrastructure for that. But everything looks kind of like this in 1996. Here's eBay in 1996. This is a homepage of auction web that would become eBay.com welcoming you to join the community of buyers and sellers and here's a personal note from Pierre Omidyar talking about how this is a grand experiment in internet commerce. And it's about honest dealings and most people are honest but there are some bad ones, but you know what will drive them away that we need your active this is like internet governance version 0.4, but it worked well enough for eBay to become eBay and to do much better than $69 million when it went back in time to go public. There have been these weird gold rushes whether over websites over domain names which are kind of the NFTs of 1998, right down to NFTs right now of strange things that people get excited about, and that nobody has vetted beforehand, and that represent various people for varying motives including greed or wealth maximization I think we call it law school, or, you know, governance experience or doing good in the world of some kind, anybody can set up shop and try to do that. And that's how like our center over the years has been inspired to just build stuff generally in the public interest whatever the many folks at the center who won't agree with one another about exactly what that is that's suitable for debate. So what the public interest is, let's see if we can build that this is the original Creative Commons website built at the Berkman Klein Center that then became creative comments which was a way as everybody was contributing generatively to the internet there was not a way to signal how another one circumstances, including possibly all of them, you wanted to share your work and creative comments came up with a way to indicate easily how you want to share your work so that then people could reuse it and feel comfortable doing so. This is an example that of an organization with some public minded goal that was able to just start building something, not only writing a paper saying it should happen in the world. And the rest then becomes history. Wikipedia itself is a great example I've already indicated like it might seem like a bad idea that the thing has grown, and I remain amazed at how many good opinions are among us right now. I've seen one. We are all with a meeting that's kind of a Spartacus kind of line, but I don't read any article right now, but you could be. And I mean just like whether it's really reliable pretty well vetted sources written in plain language and multiple languages about something like COVID, you've got it, or you've got I don't know depths of Wikipedia is a great account list of sexually active hopes, or here is a list of inventors killed by their own inventions. Like, yeah, I would, I would, I don't need that. Or this was another day of uprising is led by women like there's all sorts of stuff on wiki that is inviting contribution from anywhere, kind of the way to PR open your was inviting contribution or to make eBay safer and help its IPO value, or Sean fanny in the year 2000 22 years ago, over a spring break was like you know what, what if we took file sharing which already exists and anybody can do it anytime on the internet, and made it that you could only use it to share MP3s. So if you get rid of everything else but MP3s, I'm going to call it Napster. And over the weekend was a huge challenge to the music industry, which have been releasing compact discs that have zero encryption on them that anybody could rip. And then go ahead I think the statute of limitations has passed anybody ever ripped a CD is that. Yeah, all right. Good times. I don't know. But these are the kinds of things that like when it really became understood. Just how powerful the kind of technology was, it was discomforting to any kind of legacy operator that depended on consumer technology being a certain way. Moving forward now to the 2020s. I think it's safe to say that maybe many of all of us feel a vague sense of unease about what this free for all system has produced in different ways it challenges. All of us, whether it's about security. Take a password don't reuse your bank password we didn't spend a lot on security for this app. Okay. So general standard for security. I, alright, I will not ask how many people reuse their passwords is, I think this is being videoed and I was not going to go there. But on that unease has gotten kind of deeper and deeper as we've contemplated exactly what the internet has rocked. Privacy, which this is an ancient issue of time worrying about privacy but like, this is even more ancient this is from 1966, people worrying about privacy on line and it's like, I don't know, go back to 66 you're like, so things in some ways have gotten better. So this particular concern I can't say we've really fixed anything. That's a pretty sad thing to be saying, whatever the dimension might be and that's why I think things are sort of getting more intense around our discomfort, just opposed alongside any feelings we might have about joy that there could exist such a spontaneous and unmonitored and on gate kept instrumentality. And we see it online with regaining and ways in which people particularly marginalized and minoritized people are driven out of a discursive sphere, because of the lack of gatekeeping of somebody having responsibility to own up to that responsibility for the space. And those sorts of things. Again, our problems that remain not only unsolved in practice. I think they remain unsolved in theory. I've been thinking that like the two big problems of internet governance in this era, our first we don't agree on what we want. And second we don't trust anybody to give it to us. We don't trust Facebook. We don't trust governments. Librarians are now somehow if he I thought they were great. I didn't buy the librarian, and now like they are under attack for their role in playing their jobs. This open house comes at a time and wherever you are in your journey, you're joining us we're coming together at a time when this is not just like only how cool so many opportunities skies the limit. There's a lot of stuff going down that might be striking deep disquiet or worry. Last example just in AI. I mean those people remember Tay Microsoft's initial for a into an AI bot that engaged in online learning, meaning that it changed how it behaved on the basis of how people interacted with it on Twitter. What could possibly go wrong. And sure enough, here is Tay at T equals zero. The Tay's billing was it's acts like a nice teenager. So there it is acting like a nice teenager by midday it is, I think confused about what it's about. By the end of the day, it is just like, you've got to be kidding me a Microsoft is like okay Microsoft has a corporate blogs like we have pulled the plug on Tay, we regret it, etc, etc. The biggest entities, many but not all of which started right this particular one in a Harvard dorm room about a 10 minute walk away. And up themselves the legacy entities that somehow are falling short on the degree of power they can wield and lives they can affect. And there remains questions, some of which their hazarding answers to like an independent independently funded oversight board, which some of our affiliates are members of that board. And their affiliates are intense critics of that board, but it represents some effort to figure out a way out of what feels like a maze of dead ends around the problems that this incredibly generative technology is generating. That's from 1997 until 2018. That's wires covers representing very different views of how the internet has gone. And that brings us just to today, within this building, and within our virtual existence which is far more capacious than this even lovely building. The efforts that are going on here with our partner centers. Others around the world network of centers that DKC started that how has how many people how many entities in the BKC network of centers now 109. And that's not fewer than before right that's still going up. Okay, the scope of the curve is also positive around the world, trying to use the very tools about which we might feel ambivalent to figure out how to use them in ways to produce generatively something that feels and is positive. Here is the particle accelerator which Tim Berners-Lee inventor of the web worked for really big moonshot kinds of things like smashing elementary particles together. It used to be that universities with government subsidy was how it happened like the certain particle accelerate these days, ambitious digging of holes in the ground. What I'm going to say is like kind of this, and I feels different to me this is not feel like that's where believe these kinds of projects. I even think back to this paper from 1998 talking about search engines, and the ways in which if there is only the commercial and no nonprofit or academic counterparts. With some way in which the entire environment is planted. So, so that the public interest is not represented who wrote this paper. I don't know anybody who's read it recently but this paper was the paper that introduced Google, and it was Sergey and Larry, who first raised the issue of advertising is causing mixed incentives, meaning that you need a search engine in the academic realm. So, I am others are aware that there are all sorts of incentives and ways in which the action AI the data and the PhDs have moved typically from the public realm, the dot edu. The dot GOV, and it's counterparts around the world. This is our colleague Matt Walsh who 10 years ago got full professor within three months was like, I'm out of here. I'm going to Google, because at Google, that's where the real stuff is happening. And it's worth more than a big, it's like big office. I don't know where he was station. Google is the dream. Well, maybe in 2010, it was, but I think for some there's even realizing the limits of that. And it has me and others thinking about what is it to have a responsibility wherever you are part. com. edu behind the counter McDonald's wherever it might be. What would it mean to have to be thinking of the public interest and the implications of what one does. There were three learning professions that were meant to have duties beyond profit maximization for oneself they were divinity one medicine. In the 19th century, what did we add to it, we added surveying surveying became the fourth learning profession, because it's really important to know where your land ends and someone else's begins. Well, maybe it indeed is time, such as with this zoom sensor, modern data scientists to think about other professions whose degree of subtlety of work power that they can exercise in the world. And obscurity of it to others means that maybe they should join the regular learning professions in thinking about and flagging the implications of what they're doing. So the rest of us can talk about it. I'm mindful of Arthur C. Clark's third law and he sufficiently technology is indistinguishable from magic itself or restate it or something the brackets said more bluntly, which craft to the ignorant simple science to the learning. This is the kind of thing that has me obsessed with wanting to figure out exactly what is happening when somebody says $69 million was paid for NFT. I hope it's what makes your curious to, regardless of how much technical expertise you believe you possess or bringing to the table. It is our hope for this multidisciplinary center and center that transcends academia to draw in people from those other domains. To see where are our spots where we're missing stuff that others can see, and through dialogue, largely facilitated by these tools. They come to better understandings develop interventions that might make the world better, according to some mode of better and pilot them and see if they should grow the way something like creator Commons grew. In one corner, I think are the nerds. They think that the technological realm doesn't really apply to them with limits because they can put their way around it. Over here are the folks that are like I don't use technology so I'm not found by it doesn't help still if there's like a terrible Wikipedia entry about you. The fact that you're not online and don't see it doesn't mean it's not hurting you in the middle is kind of everybody else. And I really worry about the state in which so many of us don't really know what's happening in the world or have a framework through which to understand it much less to judge it into better. It is the project of our center we hope that you'll be able to join and partake of and contribute to. And for the science fair style thing that's going to happen next year you'll see so many projects and in the generative spirit are trying to make a difference with different methodologies and different angles that you can join us. And be part of a generative system for which it's inviting our contributions. Others are already making them. What might you like to do in your own sense of the public interest to make things better. This is just a snapshot of some of the folks in the extended Brooklyn kind center network, some of whom are here today some of them are online, some of them are staffing tables. I just really hope you'll join us and I thank you for coming out and I thank our staff our fellows our affiliates our faculty. So thank you for pulling all this together and making this possible. Thank you.