now please join me in welcoming Jaron
Lanier and James bridle good evening
thank you very much coming welcome to
Conway hall if you’d have been here
before
Conway halls part of one of the oldest
surviving free-thinking organizations in
the world which makes it a pretty
appropriate place I think for tonight’s
conversation should be entertaining
thanks for coming thanks to this school
life for organizing this and
particularly Thank You Jaron for being
with us here this evening and as I’m
sure you’re aware by some Kathy’s
introduction and from whatever else he
might know in the past John is a
computer scientist a musician as you can
see from the objects arrayed on the
stage with us here he’s an artist and
he’s an author his book manifesto you
are not a gadget which was published in
2010 criticized the glorification of of
the collective over individuals ever
individual creativity and individual
agency and particularly criticized the
way that that glorification is of is
often encoded into the digital
technologies digital structures that
we’re building both in kind of very
large corporate settings and in some of
the internet sort of more radical
libertarian projects his new book who
owns the future continues to investigate
many of these themes and that’s what
we’re discussing tonight both both kind
of his view of what’s happening in the
world and and what what might be done
about it but before getting into that
John would like to start with some music
so over to you yeah hey thanks for
it’s so funny having these sort of
lounge chairs onstage I’m just going to
feel like spacing out so um yeah so I’m
in this weird position of talking about
the you know the future of the digital
political economy and all that but also
playing weird instruments when I do it
somehow it all works so I’m going to
start with the how many you’ve heard me
play this you know this is from Laos
it’s called a can I’ll play a little bit
of this and then we’ll talk about the
ah there’s a wonderful story about that
instrument which may be all if you can
ask me about it in the questions if you
remember and they’ll tell you tale about
that there’s a good argument that this
is the the ancient invention of binary
numbers and the digital idea actually
but it’s true it’s true it’s the oldest
known combinatorial binary object
representation that has happened in
humanity but anyway let’s get to the new
book all right Kyle I will what can I
ask you can ask me a question sure
I will know this particularly because of
your interest in the musical instruments
and stuff kind of is one of the themes
that runs through several of your books
and like your background in a whole
range of areas music but also in in
computers is kind of one of the things
that forms it and I was particularly
interested in the as well as in you’re
interested in virtual reality which one
of the kind of earlier formation parts
of your of your areas of interest huh
how do how does music and virtuality and
things of that form the background to
the kind of ideas that we will be
bringing I’ve never had an answer to
that question it’s just the stuff idea
but honestly I mean I wish I had I could
spin all kinds of lies about it that
would be really entertaining but in
truth I just find myself doing these
things but respectfully could I can I
introduce the new book as a start and I
just I’d like to dive into that since we
only have a an hour and I just want to
so um here to start to explain the new
book let me let me take you back about
thirty years it’s more than thirty years
32 or 33 years and I was part of a
circle of young technical people who
were just on fire and enthused about
what we were doing with computers and we
could see already this very strange
property of computation which is
sometimes known as Moore’s law and it’s
known in various ways but the idea is
that computers are going to keep on
getting cheaper so therefore there’ll be
just more and more of them doing more
and more things more and more connected
so you can sort of see this weird
inverse funnel where every little thing
you do will be expanded in
multiplied and so back then we could see
that that was going to happen and there
were these crazy discussions like if
they’re billions of little computers
where will they be in door knobs that
was a joke once and they actually did
turn up already decades ago in doorknobs
and hotels and so forth and they just
would they would pervade everywhere and
so in the context of that realization
there was this sort of sense of wow you
know the world is going to change with
the stuff how should it change and there
were a number of really interesting
ideas in play the very earliest one
started before the year I was born
actually 1960 the very first person to
articulate this was Ted Nelson who
articulated one concept of networks and
to get to the punchline I believe he
turns out to be right but during the
70’s and 80’s a countervailing concept
came up which is the one that’s become
an orthodox dominant concept now it’s
the one expressed by the pirate parties
and it’s the one that’s just beaten into
us every day by almost every digital
pundit it seems and this is the idea
that information should be free that
there’s that culture should be open and
so under this scheme people share the
networks gets all this information
everybody’s supposed to benefit I don’t
want to just talk forever so I want you
but the very very quick version of the
book is that I came to realize from just
observing the results that we totally
blew it and that’s completely wrong and
the reason it’s wrong is incredibly
simple that not all computers are
created equal whoever owns the biggest
computer on an open network gets to out
calculate everybody else and becomes the
spymaster who can organize everyone else
to their advantage and it doesn’t matter
if that’s my master is actually called
this why master if it’s a National
Intelligence Agency or if it’s a finance
scheme that forces austerity on the
world or if it’s Google or Facebook or
Microsoft or any of the other companies
it’s all exactly the same game and it’s
not a sustainable game and we need to
switch to a different one so that’s the
in the in the book you and you come up
with this term for for these various
systems or objects they’re collecting up
all this information and doing something
with them which is siren service and
you’ve mentioned a whole bunch of
examples there could you give us kind of
one example of a siren server in action
why why you chose that name for it and
what it’s doing and how it’s affecting
the world ah sure it was really hard to
come up with the name and I still don’t
think it’s perfect I went through a
bunch of names they were master servers
for a while and they had some other
names but siren sir were illiterates so
it seems okay at least so um I think a
good place to start is what happened in
finance so financier is discovered
computation in the 80s more or less I
mean big Network computation and what
happens when you have the biggest
computer on an open network is you’re
suddenly presented with outrageous
advantages that you couldn’t even have
planned on or anticipated so what
started to happen initially in the 80s
and then in the 90s a little bit more
and then recently even more is that you
have the giant computer you gather data
from everybody and you say hey I’ll just
calculate the perfect investment I’ll
calculate the perfect scheme I can
predict enough and I can understand
enough of what’s going on that I can
radiate all the risk and loss out to
other people so some of the examples
well there were some early ones there’s
a thing called Enron you might remember
and something called long-term capital
remember those guys those were the test
runs and and then the current wave of
austerity was precisely caused by people
sort of getting even better at this and
the problem with it the sort of
confounding thing is a as I described in
the book I know a lot of the folks who
are involved in creatively creating
these and I don’t think they’re bastards
I don’t think they’re creeps I think
what it is is that having the biggest
computer on an open network provides you
with such a huge temptation that it just
it’s almost impossible not to just go
with the flow and so you you calculate
your perfect investment
you know the metaphor I like to use is
Maxwell’s demon the old teaching tool
for thermodynamics so y’all know
Maxwell’s demon remember it so if you go
any take it we get an intro to
thermodynamics class you’ll you’ll meet
the demon and the demon is an imaginary
creature who’s who’s standing by a
little door and if a hot molecule comes
by the door it opens the door and the
hot molecule goes in if it’s a cold
molecule it keeps the door closed and
after a while it’s separated out the hot
and the cold and then it just lets them
run back together and turn a turbine and
then it repeats and creates a perpetual
motion machine sounds great doesn’t it
and the reason it doesn’t work the
reason there’s no free lunch is that the
very act of discrimination requires
power the reactive memory storage to
calculate whether particle is hot or
cold requires power and so the power to
run the door radiates enough waste heat
to undo the scheme right and so by the
same token all the air conditioners in a
hot city make the city hotter even if
they might make a few rooms colder right
this is the no free lunch principle and
so far as we know it’s inviolable and so
what you’re doing when you have the
biggest computer in the network you get
the illusion that you can violate that
principle because you can calculate your
perfect investment but it means
radiating out outward risk and loss to
everybody else and you sort of imagine
there’s this infinite sized planet that
can absorb it all but it can’t and then
you need your bailout and the government
goes into austerity it’s and it’s
exactly the same process and so in the
book what I propose is that the current
austerity that’s the result of
real-estate manipulations is the precise
mirror what we’d call an isomorphism in
mathematics to what happened to the
music business with open sharing and
piratebay and all that that this
principle this principle benefits you
know it gives you quick treats at first
like the people who got bad mortgages at
first thought they were getting the
greatest steal of their lives an easy
cheap mortgage or a free music file but
it’s part of a process in which a big
computer is perfecting its game at the
expense of society at a whole until it
breaks so then this is a principle you
identify not happening just in the kind
of big shadowy worlds of finance but
kind of in the tools that we use every
in terms of social services like Google
and Facebook they’re employing the same
very large systems of data gathering and
this kind of privileged access to data
to to do what what are they what are
they gaining from us in return well so
the way I see it what happened in
finance should serve as a cautionary
tale for computation in general so in
terms of why worried about free research
and free social networking there’s some
short-term reasons to worry but the
it’s funny I helped make up the rhetoric
about how great free music is like you
know when people talk about oh but you
can go play live gigs and it’s better
and you’re freed from labels and
everything I really made up a lot of
that stuff I really know it I’m not like
some old guy who doesn’t get it you know
and the problem I saw with it is that
it’s not so much that you can’t make any
money as a musician in a world of open
copying of music files you know as as
often pointed out you can still sell
tickets to gigs and all that the problem
is that you’re forced into an informal
economy in what I call a real time life
so you have to sing for your supper for
every meal and it’s it’s it’s a way of
life that might you might do well once
in a while if you’re one of the lucky
few but you will never be able to
sustain a serious illness raise children
or a sick child especially like it
doesn’t it doesn’t prepare you for the
contingencies of life because it’s only
income it’s not well it’s not there’s no
there’s no momentum behind it but does
that apply to all of us that I mean when
someone just signs it to Facebook or
uses Google search how are they what’s
the value of the the labor essentially
that they’re welcomed missing that the
problem will become more serious as they
as they get older in like 10 or 20 years
and specifically here’s here’s I think
where it’ll become very serious going
way back to the 19th century there’s
been a trope that has never proven true
which is that automation should kill
employment right that was the Luddite
dilemma that’s what motivated early
early Karl Marx writing and so forth and
the way it motivated the start of the
science-fiction genre with HG Wells Time
Machine and all that and I mean so this
has been this underlying fear and it
just hasn’t ever panned
we’ve tended to end up with better jobs
as technology gets better but the thing
is this this ideal that we mistakenly
committed ourselves to could actually
make that trope true and the reason why
is simple the more automation there is
the more the economy has to become an
information economy because that’s
what’s left and if we say information
has to be free it means that the economy
will shrink I mean it you know and
that’s that sounds overly simplistic and
and it can be stated much more carefully
but I believe that fundamentally that
dilemma is quite real and so you know
the kinds of automation we can expect
our taxis and trucks driving themselves
to a large degree throwing drivers out
of work we can expect manufacturing to
become much less labor intent of
intensive whether it’s 3d printers or
other things and on and on and their
demonstrations every day of white-collar
jobs educated jobs being doable by by
software now the trick is that every
time software can do something that
people used to do it’s due to what we
call big data and big data is just the
massive contributions of everybody on
the net in disguise so like you know
like one example I’ve used is to perform
automatic translation and cloud services
all the real translations but or the
additional translations by real people
are gathered together and then your new
translation is correlated with those
because there’s a lot of little sub
examples that can then be mashed
together to create a plausible
translation so artificial intelligence
on the network or Big Data is just a way
of disenfranchising or anonymizing
people that it’s precisely the same
thing
I mean sometimes the algorithms are good
but fundamentally it’s a rehashing of
day different people and by D monetizing
all of that data the more automation
becomes important the more the economy
will shrink so basically every time you
use Facebook you’re reducing your
employment prospects for the future it’s
a gradual no no I mean that shouldn’t
sound funny I mean that’s actually a
fact it’s just gradual you’re killing
your future drip by drip how is the kind
of accumulation of information and the
wealth that flows from it oh I mean you
said that this kind of the echoes of
Luddism or
the fears of automation stuff have kind
of been present with us for as long as
there’s been any form of automation how
is what the source siren servers and
what Google and Facebook are doing
fundamentally different kind of previous
capitalist accessories like the
Industrial Revolution or the enclosures
or yeah it’s a great it’s an interesting
question because there is this question
of how much is really new and how much
isn’t and I think there’s a case to be
made that some of what I’m talking about
is not all that different from what
happened towards the end of the 19th
century or in the run-up to the Great
Depression and so forth in a sense I’m
not a historian and I can’t tease that
out entirely I do believe there are some
similarities and some differences one of
the differences is the sort of arm’s
length cleanliness of the new way of
doing it I mean like I think the old way
of being a bad banker let’s say was a
little bit more deliberate than the new
way of being a bad banker because you
can accumulate extraordinary
extraordinary wealth to the point of
damaging the economy as a whole without
intending to it’s almost like this
automatic arms like sort of a thing
because you are just given such as such
advantages because you have the best
computation so I think I think the
difference now versus then is really a
lack of bad intent you know it’s it
almost happens automatically and I say
that from direct experience of knowing
some of the people involved and now
maybe it was like that in the past but
my sense from reading history is that it
was not so this is an intentionality
that’s almost being built in by accident
into the software that’s kind of
performing this a respected of human
intention yeah well I mean sometimes it
depends you know but I like I think
maybe Facebook was intending to play the
game but Google wasn’t because I was
there I remember it there was out that
actually no like people people thought
it would be big but nobody understood
exactly what the mechanism would be and
I think you know theory can only predict
so much I think we have to learn
empirically by watching this happen a
number of times to see the pattern and
but the put the problem as it stands now
is like there are people inside Google
who are where this is a problem and go
talks a lot about and I don’t want to
single out Google but it’s the example
we used for the moment is they you make
a lot of talk of being open and not
being evil but a lot of what they do
remains kind of totally invisible and
potala by corporate one of the things
that I really want to be very clear
about is that I don’t believe in the
doctrine of the bad people and the good
people so I’m not willing to dump on
Google I mean among other things I sold
them a start-up and yet and to make
things even and their friends you know
and to make things even more complicated
as a research I’m a member of Microsoft
Labs and Microsoft does all the same
stuff so I’m totally part of this and I
I don’t think there’s this class of bad
people you know and I it’s a little
tricky because sometimes to get people
to communicate a problem the human mind
is so clan oriented you want to identify
okay it’s those bad people you know
those are the bad ones and I think in
this case it’s more of a pattern problem
than a bad class of people so yeah I
think a lot of what Google does really
sucks but it’s true for exactly for me
you know that’s I’m talking about myself
I’m not talking about some mysterious
dark other so but if we talk about a a
series of kind of things that being
built into these systems kind of from
the ground up quite possibly by accident
then it requires some kind of
intervention to to change the course of
this ah that’s the book this is this is
well this is where yes why you start to
look that you recognize that there’s
been some kind of fundamental
architectural errors into the the
software we’ve built and you mentioned
already you kind of identified that uh
that there were previous better
potentials the Internet in the work of
someone like Ted Nelson
yeah where at what point did it go wrong
why did we go down this wrong path and
and and what point did you get become
really uncomfortable with it okay well I
think we went wrong in the 70s and it
happened in a strange way part of it was
the internet was born in sort of two
communities one was a sort of a
government military complex and another
was universities which at that time was
hippies very much and so you could say
was sort of a right
left collaboration and so in in the
United States where the the initial
internet start was started to work the
the people on the the right-wing or sort
of military side were deeply upset in
the 70s about something that seems kind
of petty at this point but it was a huge
cause célèbre which was the fixed
speed limit on the highways to conserve
oil because there had been an oil
embargo and so forth and so to counter
that there was this thing called
citizens band radio which was that which
was sort of the the Twitter of its era
or something it was it was more present
in the culture probably than Twitter’s
today there were songs about it on the
radio it was like the this huge thing
it’s hard to imagine now and so it would
happen ISM people would use this radio
while they were driving to tell each
other where the police were hiding so
that they could speed and in order to do
that they had to make up fake handles
so that they wouldn’t be arrested and so
this created this idea that anonymity is
the cool thing and this kind of open
anonymous untraceable network is the
cool thing
meanwhile in the university side I
hardly need to explain why they were
interested in exactly the same idea it
was a drought towards the in the
beginning the draft was still active
although it ended soon but people were
still scared of it so part of it was
trying to separate from society because
people are terrified of Vietnam and that
it might renew and the other thing was
drugs I mean I I just think remember one
of the earliest computers on the
internet also sits waste-heat was a was
serving a pot farm
illicitly in the basement of a major
universities computer science lab and i
know i will not state which one but this
sort of stuff went on so there was this
sort of fantasy that what it means to be
empowered as the untechnical person is
to be able to escape the view of the man
of this central authority which is the
fantasy that drove the idea of the open
this that’s what drove this idea that
anonymity and being able to do think
about a trace is one in the same as
Liberty online and it all made sense at
the time it all seemed to be correct
like I say this was I don’t think
anybody could have predicted how it
would play out
and then you ask when I started to feel
uncomfortable I can I mean there were a
couple of distinct moments when I was in
the 90s I had a little startup company
that Enron wanted to buy and I started
to talk to those guys and I got really
creeped out they were just now they’re
there there were some bad people
actually that was that was bad and they
were using networks in such a horrible
way and it just disturbed me terribly
and then that company ended up going to
Google and then I started to watch
Google grow and I start to realize wait
a second I love the people at Google but
they’re actually doing the same stuff
that Emma was doing there to see with
this email they don’t realize they’re
they’re doing it you know and but the
thing that really got to me that really
got me in the gut was I’d spent so many
years proclaiming how horrible it was to
have to be to be stuck with a label and
a recording contract if you’re a
musician and how wonderful would be to
just directly give your music away and
all that and then what I saw happening
is when my musician friends some of whom
were very famous and beloved would just
get ill or have some issue come up and
suddenly their income went away and they
we would have to organise benefits so
they could get their operation or
something remember in the US we haven’t
had health insurance so everybody lives
on the edge and it just hit me so hard
that we’d made a mistake because we were
actually hurting the people on the
ground we were intending to help now of
course if you were 20 and you just
wanted to run around on the stinky band
doing gigs and promote it online great
that works great but it doesn’t work for
a life cycle um so if we have these kind
of couple of these twin desires which is
this kind of desire for anonymity and
this desire for kind of things being
free whether that’s experienced whether
it’s music or any of those things those
are the things that then are powerful
things powerful servers the siren
servers that you talk about but can come
along and basically secretly make their
own profits off without returning
anything back to people who’ve who’ve
generated that and we kind of given them
that power through demanding well in an
Indian thing which happens more
forgiving back what they give back token
amount so what happens is with every
single one of these schemes there’s some
people who interact with them who do
very well and to me this is the
equivalent of what in the 19th century
was called the Horatio Alger story so
there are always a token few people who
do very well
your YouTube videos who do very well
with their whatever it is their
Kickstarter campaigns or something but
the thing about it is for society to
work and for society to remain
democratic economic outcomes for people
have to be distributed with sort of a
mound like a bell curve or at least some
approximation so that the some large
bulk of people can outspend the elite
otherwise democracy falters and we’ve
seen that again and again and people who
interact with this scheme some of them
do well but the distribution is instead
one of these sharp curves where there’s
the so-called long tail and then this
token peak and and that’s a democracy
destroyer it is is this something that
only applies to creative people people
are supplying musical videos or who are
kind of entertaining in some way or the
other forms of contributing or being
treated about yeah sure I mean for now
it’s the creative people or the people
you know but but when the cars drive
themselves and and and your electronics
are printed out you know when labor
starts to go away potentially culture
should be monetized to make up the
difference so that we can still have an
economy the only alternative would be
some sudden rush into socialism and
socialism in the context of these sirens
servers would be really bad I really
don’t want a socialist committee that’s
also the master spy business you know I
think I think that would that’s exactly
how socialism has failed in the past and
that failure would be amplified so I
think socialism has to be off the table
and the Information Age so you know just
it just won’t work I mean it just gives
it just because computers aren’t created
equal people are born on computers
I’d like to come back and bit to that
kind of ideas of socialism and of under
and it’s the kind of the types of
contributions who can make whether
creative or otherwise but but let’s turn
to in the book what you propose is some
sort of corrective measures for a system
that we’ve built now so that doing our
outline briefly just took a couple of
the measures and let you outline in the
book that would sure well there are a
variety of them and some of them have to
do with the architecture of digital
networks and some of them get just a
little technical
and and some of them are just simple so
the simplest idea is counter to the most
popular idea the idea the pot of the
pirate parties and so many other
idealist enterprises now and that’s to
make information worth something to make
it be paid and what I need to say about
this is that I think it’s absurd to go
around to people who are copying music
files and scold them and say oh you
mustn’t copy that music file because of
copyright or something and the reason
why is it currently there’s no
reciprocity those very same people are
being spied by cameras every time they
walk on the street every device they use
is logging data about them every single
thing they do is going into databases
that will affect their future credit and
all that and so all this information is
being taken from them that really
effects them and they’re not paid for
that information and now we’re going to
complain about them copying a music file
so in the context of that incredible
imbalance I don’t think you I don’t
think it’s easy at least to argue that
they should be forbidden from from
copying the music file however if there
was a case where they were being paid
for information as it’s used that turns
out to be valuable because of their
existence that’s a different story
then I think there could be a social
contract where they don’t mind paying
for the information for the very simple
reason that the system they’re paying
into also provides for their own wealth
and sustenance and the well-being of
their their life you know and they’re in
and let me give you one example of why I
think this idea would bring enough
benefits even to bring around the sort
of radical left that that might
initially resist it the most right now
when you walk in the streets of London
there’s army of little cameras that are
following your every move machine vision
is good enough to track you so we’re all
being tracked all the time and this is
kind of nuts because we have fought very
very hard Wars precisely to avoid
systems in which people are being spied
on all the time and we might imagine
today that the people who run the spy
agencies or the tech companies or our
bankers or lovely sweet young people
whatever you think of them the point is
who knows we’ll be in that position in
the future you know like like a
them like this as a setup for big
trouble and that’s why those wars were
fought and yet we acquiesced to it now
now the current response is to try to
use law to correct it so you have
bureaucrats and brussels and elsewhere
gather to say well what should the rules
be about this data this is this is I
can’t tell you how techies laugh at this
process because the idea that
bureaucrats can foresee what programmers
will do with anything remotely like the
speed of programmers as they do it it’s
just so absurd it’s just laughable
they will never keep up I mean it’s just
ridiculous and I could go into some
examples of why but it’s just it’s it’s
just not the law is not agile and
powerful enough almost by definition to
address this issue however a combination
of law and commerce would so if as
information is gathered about you
because you’re walking about the
government has to spend money on it and
they have a limited budget because
they’ve had to argue for whatever tax
rate they can then they have to make
decisions and all of a sudden the path
of moderation appears I think the idea
see the thing about cloud software and
the big data and all this stuff is that
it can bring incredible benefits if we
could all get feedback about how our
life choices are affecting our carbon
footprint that might be a great thing
that might make a big difference to the
climate but that can only happen in the
context it has to be calculated as a
whole it can’t be just person by person
and yet right now to give up that data
would be to to feed into the scheme but
in a commercial sense it could be
moderated and anyway so part of I’m
sorry I’m Ted going on no no but I mean
I think I think outside life if you
could explain a bit more about how that
that system of exchange would work so
that how people would be compensated
okay so so another another thing is some
avoid going back to the origins of
networking the very first idea for
compute for network media and for
networked expression and for mashups and
all these things that we are familiar
with right now goes back to 1960 the
first so far as I know there’s no
dispute that the first person to
articulate this stuff was Ted Nelson and
at the time he or at least when I first
met him which was in the 70s he was
explicit
talking about trying to avoid some sort
of let it let I’d like future it so that
it find waited for money for information
to be monetized as information
technology would eventually take over
the economy so that there could be an
economy and a number of the principles
I’ll just I’ll just go over a little bit
about what an El Sonia Network would be
like which is different from what we’re
used to one thing is you don’t copy
stuff so this is such a weird concept in
the early days of networking one of the
things that we used to love about it was
that you don’t need to make copies
anymore because the original is still
there because it’s a network and the
whole idea of copying is sort of bogus
on a network and so if this doesn’t
immediately make sense to you think
about the phone in your pocket you
download apps for it and if the app is
updated by the developer yours updates
so it’s more like a mirror than a copy
right so that’s that’s the way it was
always supposed to be and the reason
copies came about is just so bizarre but
the really influential computer science
lab was called Xerox PARC and Zarek’s
Park is where Ethernet was invented
which is the way your phones are talking
to Wi-Fi right now and it’s also where
the modern feeling of computers were
invented the idea of graphical
interfaces and all that stuff came from
Xerox PARC and it was sponsored by Xerox
which was the preeminent copying machine
company and so I remember being there
when I was quite young and and all the
stuff was happening you know and we
would whisper like oh it’s such a shame
we have to include copying in this
software but otherwise will freak out
our sponsors so the very idea of copying
on a network which is technically absurd
was really part of pleasing a sponsor
which ended up not benefiting from the
research because I think we were too
afraid to tell them what was really
going on so so there’s no need for
coffee so you don’t impose this
artificial idea of copying because it’s
it’s stupid
it doesn’t copying how car to import in
history and in culture in terms of in
terms of preservation of culture it does
it wouldn’t the kind of absence of
copies defeat one of the sort of primary
advantages the Internet as we have it
now that that it’s resilient the copies
of things are saved I’m I just know
there’s a lovely line in your book where
you talk about this kind of transition
that we’d have to make the system we say
that you know
we lost Rome but you know the
Renaissance did kind of turn up
eventually and that whole process
happened because we preserve copies of
things in multiple states yeah no no no
no nothing free network is vastly more
durable than a copy network I mean so so
so here so here’s how it works the very
idea of not needing copies was actually
born on the same day as I understand it
as the idea of the mash-up itself so
here’s how it would work let’s say
somebody’s made something I don’t know
video or something and they post it and
now people access it and somebody wants
to mash it up they want to take a clip
and mash it into something else so they
have a reference link to the thing and
it’s a bi-directional link so that the
original knows it’s been linked to and
the person who made the original knows
that the things being used and now their
new video has a link back to the
original and then there can be a
derivative video of that one that now
has a link back to the original mashup
and it can get as mashed as mashed as it
likes and there’s bi-directional links
explaining the history of how the whole
thing came together if you like a little
bit like the history on a Wikipedia page
but a little bit more detailed and
structural and now the beauty of this
there are many many wonderful things
about this one thing is that meaning is
only meaning in context there’s no such
thing as absolute meaning oh I don’t
think we can argue that if you want but
but if there philosophers nettings but
anyway just just as a rough cut if we
can agree that knowing the context of
something helps helps understand what it
is so in this case the context is
preserved so we have better preservation
there’s a balance of Rights of the
master and the mash so if somebody wants
to represent something in a way that
misrepresents it like maybe it’s a clip
of a politician that’s selecting just a
little bit that creates a misimpression
the link to the original is right there
so it becomes much harder to do and
because of these bi-directional links we
can set up an economic scheme so that
micro cam payments can can continue to
benefit everybody in the long chain of
mash up in this and so everybody gains
an incentive to keep the thing going so
they’re an enormous number of advantages
and bi-directional links are sort of
like double-booked accounting they
actually create a much more robust
network so it actually is better at
preserving it preserves context
well as just content which becomes more
more meaningless with time and it and it
identifies content with people who are
the actual people are the entities that
matter not the bits so on many levels
it’s more it’s both more durable and
more functional it’s also more efficient
in the in the large scale I mean what
we’re doing now is a massive I mean the
carbon footprint of the internet I’ve
tried to estimate it but it’s its
magnitudes worse than it needs to be
because of all the copies in all the
lost context it has to be recovered I
mean consider what Google does for
living mostly is recover the backward
links that were thrown away to figure
out where things came from what Facebook
does is figure out who’s looking at
other people and that would also like
all of this effort all this scraping of
the net all the time is actually
unneeded so it’s this giant act of waste
and stupidity it’s it’s it’s a
profoundly dumb thing that we’re doing
um if it’s a profoundly dumping the way
doing yeah and that there are
technological solutions to it and who
can who can achieve those technical
article solutions like on it on whom
does the burden lie to to change this is
this something that kind of that anyone
can achieve that governments can achieve
was it something that remains entirely
the preserves of technologists yeah so
um so here there’s two different
questions well there’s so there’s three
questions raised in the book one is is
my diagnosis of a problem here the
correct diagnosis that can be argued the
second is a proposal of a solution and I
go into quite a bit of detail but I also
make it clear that I can’t pretend to
know everything in advance it has to be
approached empirically but there’s a
question what the solution is right then
the very hardest one is what’s a
transition like what how does it work
so in the book I outline a variety of
different scenarios I could get us there
I will say of among people who are aware
of these ideas are many who are thinking
about the solution and I are a solution
and I get emails every day multiple
emails from people who have a scheme and
a lot of people want a scheme that can
create a transition magically fast like
in the way that something like a
Facebook Rises quickly or Bitcoin or
Kickstarter or something so they want
some kind of thing that feels like a
Ponzi scheme at first and everybody
wants to jump in
into and then at the end of it is this
more sensible expanding information
economy I’ve never seen one of those
that I think would work but maybe
somebody can do it I tend to prefer more
deliberative sort of slow approaches so
that we can learn as we’re going and we
don’t make another huge mistake and so I
propose a sort of a spiraling back and
forth over a couple of decades maybe
more about politics and technical people
working together to gradually steer it
even though I realize that might be an
overly adult way to approach the problem
but I think it’s the more sensible one I
mean I think we have some time this is
not like this imminent catastrophe it
becomes a catastrophe when automation
becomes very good it’s maybe like the 20
years or something like that Dave meant
you’ve mentioned automation being this
kind of coming fad and you’ve said how
it how it affects people now
particularly who are performing kind of
creative work and so on but also I can
see how your your kind of iterative
system of rewarding people backwards
over time for earlier contributions to
an information economy works for people
who who contribute creatively to that
network and what happens to people who
aren’t creating content if the whole
thing is transferred to an entirely
information based economy okay the rest
of the economy all right so there’s a
couple things to say about this we’re
used to a sort of a very constricted
idea of what information economy can be
because the information economies we’ve
experienced are all sort of these tree
shaped things that feed up to one of the
giant siren servers like an Amazon store
or something like that or an Apple store
and in those cases you get as I was
saying you get this distribution of
people who benefit with a very thin tall
peak and then a long tail and not much
in between now there’s another kind of
network we’re all familiar with where
people’s contact with each other’s
information is much richer and generates
more of a bell curve distribution if you
were to monetize it and that’s a social
network so the unmonitored part of say
of Facebook say where you connect with
each other or Twitter if you look at the
distribution of what people do with each
other in the information space and if
you were if people were getting paid for
that it would create a bell curve and
that
in middle class and so that’s where we
find hope is turning information economy
into more of this graph webby kind of
thing instead of instead of a tree that
feeds to a master node now in the
context of doing that what will happen
is they’ll be they’ll still be stars but
it’s just that the the in-between mask
the bump in the middle will be able to
expend them so that an elite won’t take
over the society I mean that’s that’s
what you get for that now it doesn’t
mean that you don’t have the downside of
the curve to of people who make less
than average and much less than average
and so what you want is to have as few
people who do really badly in the
information economy as you can or they
should be about the same as the number
of elites you know sort of you want a
symmetrical bell curve and then for
people on the bad side of the bell curve
the information economy there are two
things that can happen one is they can
do well in the physical economy which I
don’t think will go away completely so I
think it’s very unlikely that the
information economy becomes everything I
mean presumably there will be things
that software and robots don’t do we
don’t know exactly what they are I mean
there’s I have many friends who believe
that your massage will come from the
ideal robot massager in the future and I
described in the book house well it gets
really nutty there’s some people who
think that that that you know nobody
would be foolish to have anything but a
robotic sex partner in the future when
they’re better than people or whatever
you know you know I make fun and
something’s up but anyway it’s not
important for us to know exactly what
can’t be automated yet the point is that
it’s very unlike that everything will be
automated so there should be a physical
economy and many of the people who might
be on the down side of the curve of the
information economy might find might
find success in physicality and here we
hear we hit a dilemma that I don’t know
how to solve we hit a tragedy that no
one’s been able to solve which is that
if you want to have a society in which
there isn’t an elite that gains power
you have to have some sort of bell curve
where the middle has the power and out
spends the elite but if you have that
then there’s some kind of it down at the
low end of that curve which is the poor
or something like that the people who
don’t do as well and I don’t know how to
disempower and
without also creating that because
that’s how statistics work that’s how
math works and so so there has to be
social services I think in a future in
which most people have Liberty and and
and that’s those are fighting words in
the US where people are sort of super
libertarian and an refine Rand oriented
these days but I just think the math
supports that idea so I think you need
to have some form of liberalism to make
an information economy work in the
future and some but this the main
solution you’re proposing or the UFOs in
the book for this there’s very much
based on this idea of two-way linking
and always attributing context and
therefore being able to funnel kind of
financial transactions through that to
kind of support all kinds of work
everyday work as well as creative work
um it feels like an expansion of the
very technological kind of dominance
that your critique in the book that you
say that we’ve ended up with the system
that we have now so very unforeseen
unforeseen outcomes from technologies
that we didn’t see coming yeah and your
solution is to essentially expand the
technological right view of the world
yeah that’s the human condition the
human condition is we make our way and
we try to get better at it but every
time we do something to try to influence
our own fate because we’re these
mysteriously free creatures we they’re
side effects because we’re not perfect
and then we have to undo those side
effects and that’s what technology as
technology is always undoing the last
thing you did because you screw it up
you know I mean that’s what it is and
it’s a it’s a game it’s a game we
entered into leaving the Garden of Eden
if you like it’s a game that’s mandatory
for us we can’t escape it at this point
I get frustrated with it sometimes even
though I love technology I sort of wish
I could get off the ride once in a while
but it’s it’s our fate now it’s what we
got and it’s it’s scary you know because
you know every disease cured is a new
poison or biological weapon and the
making every new source of nutrition is
a famine in the making potentially it’s
what Malthus pointed out every you know
we have to learn to get better and
better at not screwing ourselves over
as we get more capable in general and it
sucks but that’s what we got to do we
have to grow up it’s hard um we’re going
to go to the cute animal I think he
wants to play a ball but it close one
more oh yeah I’m also from Salinas so
we’ve identified that there’s a huge
problem there’s an issue here which is
based on the kind of technological
foundations the way we build things and
there are potential ways to change that
as well and that we could we architected
still feels like something that’s very
much the the domain of technologists of
people who who can read and act in those
systems for themselves but before we go
– I love know some kind of things that
that people every everyone can do – to
slightly change the course of this to
address this themselves in kind of these
are long-term problems but there must be
short-term approach yeah I did have some
recommendations about that so one thing
I want to recommend is to become as
aware as possible of how you fit into
other people’s computation schemes so
all of us are being tracked by dozens of
gigantic hidden computers now all of us
are being characterized by dozens of
dossiers that will really influence us
that will determine whether we get
credit who will meet to date where we’ll
be employed you know and so and and
these like I said these these big
computers that have these dossiers are
sometimes held by private companies
sometimes by national intelligence
agencies sometimes they’re in banks or
financial schemes of one sort or another
I I think the one thing to do is instead
of freaking out and going anti and
saying all those techies are terrible I
think experimenting with your own life
by severing ties with different servers
from time to time and seeing what
happens is one gate is one way to regain
some autonomy and also just to screw
with the technologists a little bit and
and so so and it doesn’t have to involve
deep judgments or something so like
let’s say you’re in a situation where a
particular service of Facebook or
Twitter seems essential to you
well you know it depends where you are
in life I mean if it really is and it’ll
it’ll do harm then it to not use it then
keep using it but if you’re young enough
to be experimental just like you might
want to go hitchhiking in some part of
the world that’s less developed to just
know yourself and know the world
directly a very simple thing to do is go
off it for six months just try it
just just ever go off it not judging not
saying that anybody else should do it
not saying that you’ll never go back on
it not not being a moralist about it but
simply as an experimentalist stop using
it for a while if you want to play the
technical game of trying to hide from
the server’s and trying to get better
you can read about that there are all
kinds of little extra like you can get
plugins for your browser that’ll block
ads and trackers of that but you have to
be vigilant I mean that requires a lot
of work I mean even just setting privacy
settings in facebook is is something
most people can’t do really and and no
seriously I mean and and so you know
it’ll that takes some work there’s
nothing you can do that’s easy you know
I mean if there’s somebody if there’s
something where somebody says oh you
know to get out from under this regime
tweet this or you know forward this
movie to people I mean if it’s really
easy it’s not doing anything I mean just
get used to that all right on those
approaches though kind of exactly what
would be impossible in a more pervasive
technological system like the one that
you proposes the kind of next step for
for kind of freedom in this if
everything that we do if every action if
every contribution is kind of tracked
monitored surveilled and and and put it
within a kind of capitalist framework of
reward doesn’t the the salute that that
approach of cutting yourself off become
completely impossible well until we
change the system now I mean this is the
problems are right now we face these
all-or-nothing choices for instance you
know this idea of wearing a little
display over your eye and seeing extra
stuff in the world well i embedded that
you know and i built the first one of
those and blah blah blah you know years
ago and now google wants to bring out
their thing Google glass and I’m and a
lot of the people on it were from my own
startup and I like them you know and I I
want them to be successful but the
problem is that he used it at all you’ll
have to or support as I know you’ll have
to
line up for Google stuff you know and
all the information will be logged from
right on your face what you’re seeing
you know and the choice of having to
either get something like that and
submit to acquiesce to being tracked all
the time on this very intimate level or
not I mean it’s a crazy choice and what
you should really have the choice of
doing is yeah you can track me but it’s
going to cost you and then you set your
price and then you decide how much you
want to be tracked by that price and if
they really you know and you can if you
set it high enough you won’t be tracked
and most people probably end up
somewhere in-between because there’s
some value in it but it’ll create
moderation that that’s the way up idle
not thank you um put you on that note
yes okay so I have three more
instruments and I’ll play one before
questions and then one or two after
questions there’s an electric mood
middle-eastern instrument there’s a
weird double flute thing that has no
name that I got from some Hungarian
gypsy kids so it’s really cool that’s
not not documented anywhere I don’t know
what it is and I have a Japanese
shakuhachi flute which do you want dude
let me hear double Hungarian fluid from
the gypsies shakuhachi all right double
flip all right so then we’ll do so then
I’ll do one of the other ones later so
this was um I saw some kids doing this
in a train station and they won was when
was playing these to distract people
because it is kind of mysterious that it
works at all and then the other was
picking their pockets
and the the if you see only one of these
at a time that’s a pretty well-known
instrument but the pair together has a
special trick and I’m not aware of it
all right so question so again take some
questions if you overhear I think we’ll
start and wait for the mic so we can all
hear I’ll be going
hello there I’d like to talk about human
consciousness so you talked about the
music industry for example everything
was you know in about 1995 we saw the
internet coming things like getting free
Napster and so on turned up in nineteen
nine we thought it was going to be good
you’re saying it was probably bad Apple
came along in 2003 with iTunes and the
rest is history
it’s the largest distributor of music by
a long way so what happens with
education we’re now looking at digital
learning MOOCs Khan Academy or this kind
of stuff coming along Harvard MIT and so
on or trying to get in that bit like the
old record labels yeah you know if the
if education isn’t free it’s not
available what happens when another
Death Star comes in and owns education
owns the content owns the assessment
isn’t that human consciousness yeah okay
so um this idea of leveraging the
internet to make education more
accessible to large numbers of people
was one of the core ideals of the
internet from its very birth and I
worked very hard myself on schemes like
this and obviously it’s essential and
and one would have to be cruel to not
want to see something happen and yet
under the current scheme of information
being free it you know it’ll bring in
initial benefits to a lucky token for
you just like the other digital
transitions do but then remove
opportunity from large numbers of others
I mean this hit me really strong when I
you know I remember looking at this
really bright young folks entire square
who had in part used mobile phones and
and the Internet to to help organize a
revolution that at that time at least
was relatively painless and and peaceful
relatively you know compared to many
historically we’ll see where it goes now
but anyway I remember looking at them
and thinking wow this is so great and
maybe the technology helped a little bit
but you know what are there jobs going
to be what
they going to do what are the what are
their life prospects you know we’re you
know and you try to imagine how this
technology is really going to play into
helping them build lives build families
build some build a base build some
momentum build something that’s solid to
get out of the informal economy and into
a formal economy and it’s just not going
to happen so you know the problem I have
is that we could rapidly create a lot of
educated underutilized underemployed
people around the world which who would
be very frustrated and that would be and
that’s what I’m that’s what I feel we’re
doing so I’m all for making technology
more accessible of course what a lovely
thing and yet if we don’t also make
wealth insistent and sustenance and an
ability to enter a formal economy that’s
a fair economy with the middle class
that can sustain a democracy if we don’t
do those things at the same time we’re
just offering the cruelties and we’re
screwing over those people so we have to
we have to do the whole thing we can’t
just do a little part of it so thank you
very much I thought that was really
interesting I guess I was interested to
hear what are your thoughts on kind of
seeing the digital and the physical is
different I guess namely I’m thinking
about digital dualism and you know
earlier kind of when you started your
talk you said something along the lines
of I came to realize we blew it not all
computers are created equal and then you
I think talked about you know whether or
not it was new so maybe you could
elaborate on that and how the two
interrelate okay all right so a computer
is a little pocket of the world a little
a little draw a box around a piece of
the world and then you manipulate it so
that it’s deterministic and predictable
you you create a little local local area
where thermodynamics doesn’t apply where
that’s not entropic where information
isn’t lost and all the bits work
perfectly and in order to do that you
radiate waste heat and randomness into
the the rest of the world so overall
there’s no free lunch just like I was
talking about Maxwell’s demon so every
every computer is exact every bits of
Maxwell’s demon you know they can only
run for a while and at the expense of
increasing entropy and the rest of the
world so so you know the this this idea
of a computer cannot be reality because
reality can
absorb the waste heat from all the
computers they are they’re fundamentally
different or else there would be a free
lunch and so you have to look at
computation fundamentally and you can
see that it’s a local illusion that’s
created now then another layer to ask
about is why did the bits have any
meaning at all you know like you could
have two computers that do the same
thing that were specified by different
programs for instance so there’s no
there’s no single implied meaning to any
set of bits and if you want to get you
know to really get into this in detail I
go into it a little bit in this book but
more in the previous book and you are
not a gadget with there’s a thought
experiment about an infinite computer
store where you take an arbitrary string
of bits then you search through this big
computer store to find one that makes it
operate as any arbitrary program you
know and you start to see that there’s a
kind of a there’s a there’s a weird
thing about computers where there has to
be some external force that imposes
meaning on the bits and and and so so
intrinsic to the idea of computation is
a kind of a dualism
now whether dualism is right or not
ultimately it’s a different question but
the very idea of competition has
embedded in it the idea that people are
different from ordinary mechanism
because we impose the the meaning and
create this this that we’re able to
perceive this local violation of
thermodynamics and all that so there’s
there’s actually a enormous mystical
dualism implied in the very idea of
computation to begin with this isn’t
this was actually this is embedded in
the idea of the Turing test even because
it’s a person who’s the judge of whether
the Turing test has been passed and and
you know and that’s the problem is that
it’s a circular thing it always comes
down to people judging so so just to
answer your question yeah I think people
are mystical and different from matter
but in particular different from
computers and I and I think that not
because I know it absolutely but because
pragmatically it’s the only way to think
that allows me to be an effective
computer scientist how does that that
separation of humanity and computers is
linked that it’s necessary for human
involvement to kind of give meaning to
the toaster how does that relate to the
the idea that we can kind of impose a
better humanistic relationships between
people through better uses of technology
itself no technology can’t make people
better and it can’t make really relation
like the way I think of it is maybe
there’s a fine line distinguishing these
things but what I want to do is not have
technology make things worse between
people I feel like only people can make
things better but I think technology can
make things worse
and I can go into a bit more detail
about that I think in the human psyche
there’s sort of a what I call a clan
switch I think we evolved to be able to
be either singleton roamers or members
of a clan and when you have a computer
network that’s designed to invoke Klan
membership then people kind of can align
themselves like like photons on a laser
and become sort of unified and that’s
what happens when things go viral and
stuff and it can happen very rapidly and
if it’s about a cat video no harm done
if it’s about a political idea or
dumping on some group or something it’s
it’s fascism you know and I really am
afraid we’re playing with fire and I
think we we see little outbreaks that
means stuff online all the time and the
problem is could there be a big one yeah
there could be and and I concerns me and
the you know the point so getting back
to you know the monetize Network that’s
a graph instead of a tree that I was
describing I believe for many reasons
would create more diversity of points of
view and be less likely to turn that
clan switch I would love to try and
understand a bit more about do you make
you distinguish between a mirrored
Network and a copy network right so me
remember
which which information is shared I
guess in a way that preserves it
original and a copy network English
original is effectively destroyed
everything becomes copies and and if I
understand the question I’d like to ask
is about has to do with abundance you
know copy shares the same group term as
copious right abundance and part of the
argument about I guess a copy based
network is that it enables abundance now
my question is this are you arguing that
the your idea of a mirror network or
Nelson’s idea of a mirror network could
end up creating more and are you kind of
arguing that the copy based network that
we become used to we think that there’s
a great deal of abundance but it’s at
the expense of people like creators
getting screws because they can’t get
paid for the work it yeah not really is
abundantly just to repeat what the
gentleman said the benefit of the
machines the gentleman asked if the if
this description of the mirror network
where you can reach out and reach the
single copy versus a network where you
copy everything if that produces that
produces the illusion of abundance the
continuous copying but it’s actually
kind of shrinking the network as a whole
well it shrinks the economy so you know
the the more information the more the
information economy becomes dominant as
automation gets better the economy will
expand if information is monetized
little contract if information is not
monetized I mean this is this is just a
very simple thing for instance in in
Silicon Valley it’s a common thing for
venture capital firms to advertise that
they will only invest in a net startup
that will shrink markets because it’s
when you shrink markets that you’re
gathering the power you’re getting rid
of what had been monetized which is
other people having wealth and you’re
concentrating it in your server so the
idea is that you’re shrinking the market
we’re doing that to the overall economy
so the copy oriented network is
precisely the opposite of abundance and
the longer goes to the future the less
abundance they’ll be and the mirror
network is
is the primary difference is the
backward link the idea is that every
information has a context it remembers
where it came from and that small change
makes a huge difference because it does
allow for monetization it does put
information in context and it ties
information to the people who made it so
it’s about the people instead of the
bits and so that’s the true path to
abundance yes so yes you’ve been lied to
you’ve been sold a bill of goods I’m
sorry I helped do it you described in
the book frequently as essentially of
what you’re proposing is a more honest
accounting whatever he takes everything
in well I mean to put it into most
brutal terms the very idea of artificial
intelligence being able to do something
a person can do online like Translate is
exactly and precisely an act of bad
accounting it’s an act of forgetting to
account for where the value came from
I’m a lot of what you’ve talked about
and I appreciate I’m a cyberneticist I I
appreciate your entropic value
perception and your your Maxwell’s
demons alignment but a lot of what you
talk about seems to promote the fact
that there is no positive some economy
there it’s always zero-sum economy or
negative some economy in the machine
world when you when you contribute you
have to trade one thing against another
and am i understanding correctly that
you really don’t think there is a
positive some economy there in the
machine no what I’m saying is that the
Machine network is a negative some
economy where the success for the few
shrinks the market overall so I’m
arguing that it’s a shrinking that the
Machine economy is a shrinking economy
if you like and what I’d rather see is a
growing economy I’m not I’m not saying
it’s your sum I’m saying it’s worse than
and explicitly so I mean that’s what we
say when we create startups that’s our
logic for deciding which startups to
fund so this is not like some I’m not
applying some avant-garde you know
radical interpretation I’m actually
describing the language we use ourselves
in how we act it’s actually conventional
will in emergent will intelligence
emerge from from all of this data and
will the internet become intelligent as
as the Turing test teaches us the only
sense in which intelligence can emerge
is if we believe it has emerged and the
problem is we can’t tell the degree to
which we’ve made ourselves into idiots
in order to make that have that
perception so therefore we don’t have
the empirical basis we don’t have a
privileged enough position to answer
that question we can only rely on
pragmatic considerations to decide and
those who think that the Internet can
come alive are planning a disruption in
our collective memory and in our way of
doing things that they call the
singularity which would be highly
destructive and really stupid but there
will never be any resolution about
whether our machines become intelligent
it’s always a matter of faith just as it
is between people so I think we’ve got
one more question yes okay I’m
interested in the enforcement of the
kind of monetized network as you talked
about how when in order to transfer
something on a network you have to copy
it how do you enforce these money flows
and given you know everything all the
history we’ve seen of how
copy-protection schemes work in order to
give people the means to view something
you have to give the keys to unlock it
and those are almost always broken if
they haven’t broken already it will be
in the future yeah sure
okay first of all um I’m trying not to
be too technical on this talk so one has
to make a distinction between logical
copies and so what I’m saying is you
don’t need to be any logical copies
obviously as a matter of implementation
there have to be copies there have to be
local caches and bla bla bla just for
performance and backup and all that so
that that has to be made clear so
there’s not there’s not a there’s not
like sort of an injunction on moving
we’re because it is a network you know
but there is an injunction on logical
copies and then in terms of the security
issue I think ultimately there’s no such
thing as an airtight system I mean and
if you want to see some people trying to
build something like that you could look
at Bitcoin for instance where there have
been some scandals and some and some
problems and I think you can make a
pretty good system I think we could do
better than Bitcoin maybe we can do
twice as good or something you know and
reduce the occurrences of people of
security holes in it but that can’t be
the central point I mean what has to
happen is a social network where most
people see a value in it and want to
follow it and then the exceptions can be
a matter for hackers and law enforcement
to deal with but they have the
exceptions have to be small the only way
for society to work is all as if it were
to work at all is if the majority of
people feel that the system is worth
working within right so it’s not that
hard to go and break into apartments and
cars and steal them I mean I’m sure many
people in this audience have the skills
to do it if I know my audiences and the
reason we don’t go out and do that is we
like living in a world where cars and
homes aren’t broken into very much right
and so that’s a social contract that has
to take hold digitally we can’t try to
rely on some perfect security system we
can have we can have a good one so that
because they’ll always be some of the
I’ve known some criminals who estimate
that five percent of the population is
criminal you know that’s that’s a number
that one runs across and in in
criminology circles as well so let’s say
it has to be good enough that for the
one out of 20 people who are just not
going to like anything it’s at least a
little hard and some number of them are
catchable and overall the thing works
but but but trying to chase the perfect
security system of course is impossible
like the perfect password can’t be
remembered you know that’s just that’s
the way it is you can never quite get
there and on the note of the social
contract we’ve agreed to give time for
book signings and so on after this so I
think that’s the last question but you
would ask to play one more piece first
before we give ok I’ll play a couple
more minutes
bucho Karachi
both I don’t know if I can I don’t know
if I can do them at the same time is
this on you all know what it is right do
I need to introduce e it this is my
electric good which is I can travel with
getting this stuff and it’s it’s at least ha
Lanier and James bridle good evening
thank you very much coming welcome to
Conway hall if you’d have been here
before
Conway halls part of one of the oldest
surviving free-thinking organizations in
the world which makes it a pretty
appropriate place I think for tonight’s
conversation should be entertaining
thanks for coming thanks to this school
life for organizing this and
particularly Thank You Jaron for being
with us here this evening and as I’m
sure you’re aware by some Kathy’s
introduction and from whatever else he
might know in the past John is a
computer scientist a musician as you can
see from the objects arrayed on the
stage with us here he’s an artist and
he’s an author his book manifesto you
are not a gadget which was published in
2010 criticized the glorification of of
the collective over individuals ever
individual creativity and individual
agency and particularly criticized the
way that that glorification is of is
often encoded into the digital
technologies digital structures that
we’re building both in kind of very
large corporate settings and in some of
the internet sort of more radical
libertarian projects his new book who
owns the future continues to investigate
many of these themes and that’s what
we’re discussing tonight both both kind
of his view of what’s happening in the
world and and what what might be done
about it but before getting into that
John would like to start with some music
so over to you yeah hey thanks for
it’s so funny having these sort of
lounge chairs onstage I’m just going to
feel like spacing out so um yeah so I’m
in this weird position of talking about
the you know the future of the digital
political economy and all that but also
playing weird instruments when I do it
somehow it all works so I’m going to
start with the how many you’ve heard me
play this you know this is from Laos
it’s called a can I’ll play a little bit
of this and then we’ll talk about the
ah there’s a wonderful story about that
instrument which may be all if you can
ask me about it in the questions if you
remember and they’ll tell you tale about
that there’s a good argument that this
is the the ancient invention of binary
numbers and the digital idea actually
but it’s true it’s true it’s the oldest
known combinatorial binary object
representation that has happened in
humanity but anyway let’s get to the new
book all right Kyle I will what can I
ask you can ask me a question sure
I will know this particularly because of
your interest in the musical instruments
and stuff kind of is one of the themes
that runs through several of your books
and like your background in a whole
range of areas music but also in in
computers is kind of one of the things
that forms it and I was particularly
interested in the as well as in you’re
interested in virtual reality which one
of the kind of earlier formation parts
of your of your areas of interest huh
how do how does music and virtuality and
things of that form the background to
the kind of ideas that we will be
bringing I’ve never had an answer to
that question it’s just the stuff idea
but honestly I mean I wish I had I could
spin all kinds of lies about it that
would be really entertaining but in
truth I just find myself doing these
things but respectfully could I can I
introduce the new book as a start and I
just I’d like to dive into that since we
only have a an hour and I just want to
so um here to start to explain the new
book let me let me take you back about
thirty years it’s more than thirty years
32 or 33 years and I was part of a
circle of young technical people who
were just on fire and enthused about
what we were doing with computers and we
could see already this very strange
property of computation which is
sometimes known as Moore’s law and it’s
known in various ways but the idea is
that computers are going to keep on
getting cheaper so therefore there’ll be
just more and more of them doing more
and more things more and more connected
so you can sort of see this weird
inverse funnel where every little thing
you do will be expanded in
multiplied and so back then we could see
that that was going to happen and there
were these crazy discussions like if
they’re billions of little computers
where will they be in door knobs that
was a joke once and they actually did
turn up already decades ago in doorknobs
and hotels and so forth and they just
would they would pervade everywhere and
so in the context of that realization
there was this sort of sense of wow you
know the world is going to change with
the stuff how should it change and there
were a number of really interesting
ideas in play the very earliest one
started before the year I was born
actually 1960 the very first person to
articulate this was Ted Nelson who
articulated one concept of networks and
to get to the punchline I believe he
turns out to be right but during the
70’s and 80’s a countervailing concept
came up which is the one that’s become
an orthodox dominant concept now it’s
the one expressed by the pirate parties
and it’s the one that’s just beaten into
us every day by almost every digital
pundit it seems and this is the idea
that information should be free that
there’s that culture should be open and
so under this scheme people share the
networks gets all this information
everybody’s supposed to benefit I don’t
want to just talk forever so I want you
but the very very quick version of the
book is that I came to realize from just
observing the results that we totally
blew it and that’s completely wrong and
the reason it’s wrong is incredibly
simple that not all computers are
created equal whoever owns the biggest
computer on an open network gets to out
calculate everybody else and becomes the
spymaster who can organize everyone else
to their advantage and it doesn’t matter
if that’s my master is actually called
this why master if it’s a National
Intelligence Agency or if it’s a finance
scheme that forces austerity on the
world or if it’s Google or Facebook or
Microsoft or any of the other companies
it’s all exactly the same game and it’s
not a sustainable game and we need to
switch to a different one so that’s the
in the in the book you and you come up
with this term for for these various
systems or objects they’re collecting up
all this information and doing something
with them which is siren service and
you’ve mentioned a whole bunch of
examples there could you give us kind of
one example of a siren server in action
why why you chose that name for it and
what it’s doing and how it’s affecting
the world ah sure it was really hard to
come up with the name and I still don’t
think it’s perfect I went through a
bunch of names they were master servers
for a while and they had some other
names but siren sir were illiterates so
it seems okay at least so um I think a
good place to start is what happened in
finance so financier is discovered
computation in the 80s more or less I
mean big Network computation and what
happens when you have the biggest
computer on an open network is you’re
suddenly presented with outrageous
advantages that you couldn’t even have
planned on or anticipated so what
started to happen initially in the 80s
and then in the 90s a little bit more
and then recently even more is that you
have the giant computer you gather data
from everybody and you say hey I’ll just
calculate the perfect investment I’ll
calculate the perfect scheme I can
predict enough and I can understand
enough of what’s going on that I can
radiate all the risk and loss out to
other people so some of the examples
well there were some early ones there’s
a thing called Enron you might remember
and something called long-term capital
remember those guys those were the test
runs and and then the current wave of
austerity was precisely caused by people
sort of getting even better at this and
the problem with it the sort of
confounding thing is a as I described in
the book I know a lot of the folks who
are involved in creatively creating
these and I don’t think they’re bastards
I don’t think they’re creeps I think
what it is is that having the biggest
computer on an open network provides you
with such a huge temptation that it just
it’s almost impossible not to just go
with the flow and so you you calculate
your perfect investment
you know the metaphor I like to use is
Maxwell’s demon the old teaching tool
for thermodynamics so y’all know
Maxwell’s demon remember it so if you go
any take it we get an intro to
thermodynamics class you’ll you’ll meet
the demon and the demon is an imaginary
creature who’s who’s standing by a
little door and if a hot molecule comes
by the door it opens the door and the
hot molecule goes in if it’s a cold
molecule it keeps the door closed and
after a while it’s separated out the hot
and the cold and then it just lets them
run back together and turn a turbine and
then it repeats and creates a perpetual
motion machine sounds great doesn’t it
and the reason it doesn’t work the
reason there’s no free lunch is that the
very act of discrimination requires
power the reactive memory storage to
calculate whether particle is hot or
cold requires power and so the power to
run the door radiates enough waste heat
to undo the scheme right and so by the
same token all the air conditioners in a
hot city make the city hotter even if
they might make a few rooms colder right
this is the no free lunch principle and
so far as we know it’s inviolable and so
what you’re doing when you have the
biggest computer in the network you get
the illusion that you can violate that
principle because you can calculate your
perfect investment but it means
radiating out outward risk and loss to
everybody else and you sort of imagine
there’s this infinite sized planet that
can absorb it all but it can’t and then
you need your bailout and the government
goes into austerity it’s and it’s
exactly the same process and so in the
book what I propose is that the current
austerity that’s the result of
real-estate manipulations is the precise
mirror what we’d call an isomorphism in
mathematics to what happened to the
music business with open sharing and
piratebay and all that that this
principle this principle benefits you
know it gives you quick treats at first
like the people who got bad mortgages at
first thought they were getting the
greatest steal of their lives an easy
cheap mortgage or a free music file but
it’s part of a process in which a big
computer is perfecting its game at the
expense of society at a whole until it
breaks so then this is a principle you
identify not happening just in the kind
of big shadowy worlds of finance but
kind of in the tools that we use every
in terms of social services like Google
and Facebook they’re employing the same
very large systems of data gathering and
this kind of privileged access to data
to to do what what are they what are
they gaining from us in return well so
the way I see it what happened in
finance should serve as a cautionary
tale for computation in general so in
terms of why worried about free research
and free social networking there’s some
short-term reasons to worry but the
it’s funny I helped make up the rhetoric
about how great free music is like you
know when people talk about oh but you
can go play live gigs and it’s better
and you’re freed from labels and
everything I really made up a lot of
that stuff I really know it I’m not like
some old guy who doesn’t get it you know
and the problem I saw with it is that
it’s not so much that you can’t make any
money as a musician in a world of open
copying of music files you know as as
often pointed out you can still sell
tickets to gigs and all that the problem
is that you’re forced into an informal
economy in what I call a real time life
so you have to sing for your supper for
every meal and it’s it’s it’s a way of
life that might you might do well once
in a while if you’re one of the lucky
few but you will never be able to
sustain a serious illness raise children
or a sick child especially like it
doesn’t it doesn’t prepare you for the
contingencies of life because it’s only
income it’s not well it’s not there’s no
there’s no momentum behind it but does
that apply to all of us that I mean when
someone just signs it to Facebook or
uses Google search how are they what’s
the value of the the labor essentially
that they’re welcomed missing that the
problem will become more serious as they
as they get older in like 10 or 20 years
and specifically here’s here’s I think
where it’ll become very serious going
way back to the 19th century there’s
been a trope that has never proven true
which is that automation should kill
employment right that was the Luddite
dilemma that’s what motivated early
early Karl Marx writing and so forth and
the way it motivated the start of the
science-fiction genre with HG Wells Time
Machine and all that and I mean so this
has been this underlying fear and it
just hasn’t ever panned
we’ve tended to end up with better jobs
as technology gets better but the thing
is this this ideal that we mistakenly
committed ourselves to could actually
make that trope true and the reason why
is simple the more automation there is
the more the economy has to become an
information economy because that’s
what’s left and if we say information
has to be free it means that the economy
will shrink I mean it you know and
that’s that sounds overly simplistic and
and it can be stated much more carefully
but I believe that fundamentally that
dilemma is quite real and so you know
the kinds of automation we can expect
our taxis and trucks driving themselves
to a large degree throwing drivers out
of work we can expect manufacturing to
become much less labor intent of
intensive whether it’s 3d printers or
other things and on and on and their
demonstrations every day of white-collar
jobs educated jobs being doable by by
software now the trick is that every
time software can do something that
people used to do it’s due to what we
call big data and big data is just the
massive contributions of everybody on
the net in disguise so like you know
like one example I’ve used is to perform
automatic translation and cloud services
all the real translations but or the
additional translations by real people
are gathered together and then your new
translation is correlated with those
because there’s a lot of little sub
examples that can then be mashed
together to create a plausible
translation so artificial intelligence
on the network or Big Data is just a way
of disenfranchising or anonymizing
people that it’s precisely the same
thing
I mean sometimes the algorithms are good
but fundamentally it’s a rehashing of
day different people and by D monetizing
all of that data the more automation
becomes important the more the economy
will shrink so basically every time you
use Facebook you’re reducing your
employment prospects for the future it’s
a gradual no no I mean that shouldn’t
sound funny I mean that’s actually a
fact it’s just gradual you’re killing
your future drip by drip how is the kind
of accumulation of information and the
wealth that flows from it oh I mean you
said that this kind of the echoes of
Luddism or
the fears of automation stuff have kind
of been present with us for as long as
there’s been any form of automation how
is what the source siren servers and
what Google and Facebook are doing
fundamentally different kind of previous
capitalist accessories like the
Industrial Revolution or the enclosures
or yeah it’s a great it’s an interesting
question because there is this question
of how much is really new and how much
isn’t and I think there’s a case to be
made that some of what I’m talking about
is not all that different from what
happened towards the end of the 19th
century or in the run-up to the Great
Depression and so forth in a sense I’m
not a historian and I can’t tease that
out entirely I do believe there are some
similarities and some differences one of
the differences is the sort of arm’s
length cleanliness of the new way of
doing it I mean like I think the old way
of being a bad banker let’s say was a
little bit more deliberate than the new
way of being a bad banker because you
can accumulate extraordinary
extraordinary wealth to the point of
damaging the economy as a whole without
intending to it’s almost like this
automatic arms like sort of a thing
because you are just given such as such
advantages because you have the best
computation so I think I think the
difference now versus then is really a
lack of bad intent you know it’s it
almost happens automatically and I say
that from direct experience of knowing
some of the people involved and now
maybe it was like that in the past but
my sense from reading history is that it
was not so this is an intentionality
that’s almost being built in by accident
into the software that’s kind of
performing this a respected of human
intention yeah well I mean sometimes it
depends you know but I like I think
maybe Facebook was intending to play the
game but Google wasn’t because I was
there I remember it there was out that
actually no like people people thought
it would be big but nobody understood
exactly what the mechanism would be and
I think you know theory can only predict
so much I think we have to learn
empirically by watching this happen a
number of times to see the pattern and
but the put the problem as it stands now
is like there are people inside Google
who are where this is a problem and go
talks a lot about and I don’t want to
single out Google but it’s the example
we used for the moment is they you make
a lot of talk of being open and not
being evil but a lot of what they do
remains kind of totally invisible and
potala by corporate one of the things
that I really want to be very clear
about is that I don’t believe in the
doctrine of the bad people and the good
people so I’m not willing to dump on
Google I mean among other things I sold
them a start-up and yet and to make
things even and their friends you know
and to make things even more complicated
as a research I’m a member of Microsoft
Labs and Microsoft does all the same
stuff so I’m totally part of this and I
I don’t think there’s this class of bad
people you know and I it’s a little
tricky because sometimes to get people
to communicate a problem the human mind
is so clan oriented you want to identify
okay it’s those bad people you know
those are the bad ones and I think in
this case it’s more of a pattern problem
than a bad class of people so yeah I
think a lot of what Google does really
sucks but it’s true for exactly for me
you know that’s I’m talking about myself
I’m not talking about some mysterious
dark other so but if we talk about a a
series of kind of things that being
built into these systems kind of from
the ground up quite possibly by accident
then it requires some kind of
intervention to to change the course of
this ah that’s the book this is this is
well this is where yes why you start to
look that you recognize that there’s
been some kind of fundamental
architectural errors into the the
software we’ve built and you mentioned
already you kind of identified that uh
that there were previous better
potentials the Internet in the work of
someone like Ted Nelson
yeah where at what point did it go wrong
why did we go down this wrong path and
and and what point did you get become
really uncomfortable with it okay well I
think we went wrong in the 70s and it
happened in a strange way part of it was
the internet was born in sort of two
communities one was a sort of a
government military complex and another
was universities which at that time was
hippies very much and so you could say
was sort of a right
left collaboration and so in in the
United States where the the initial
internet start was started to work the
the people on the the right-wing or sort
of military side were deeply upset in
the 70s about something that seems kind
of petty at this point but it was a huge
cause célèbre which was the fixed
speed limit on the highways to conserve
oil because there had been an oil
embargo and so forth and so to counter
that there was this thing called
citizens band radio which was that which
was sort of the the Twitter of its era
or something it was it was more present
in the culture probably than Twitter’s
today there were songs about it on the
radio it was like the this huge thing
it’s hard to imagine now and so it would
happen ISM people would use this radio
while they were driving to tell each
other where the police were hiding so
that they could speed and in order to do
that they had to make up fake handles
so that they wouldn’t be arrested and so
this created this idea that anonymity is
the cool thing and this kind of open
anonymous untraceable network is the
cool thing
meanwhile in the university side I
hardly need to explain why they were
interested in exactly the same idea it
was a drought towards the in the
beginning the draft was still active
although it ended soon but people were
still scared of it so part of it was
trying to separate from society because
people are terrified of Vietnam and that
it might renew and the other thing was
drugs I mean I I just think remember one
of the earliest computers on the
internet also sits waste-heat was a was
serving a pot farm
illicitly in the basement of a major
universities computer science lab and i
know i will not state which one but this
sort of stuff went on so there was this
sort of fantasy that what it means to be
empowered as the untechnical person is
to be able to escape the view of the man
of this central authority which is the
fantasy that drove the idea of the open
this that’s what drove this idea that
anonymity and being able to do think
about a trace is one in the same as
Liberty online and it all made sense at
the time it all seemed to be correct
like I say this was I don’t think
anybody could have predicted how it
would play out
and then you ask when I started to feel
uncomfortable I can I mean there were a
couple of distinct moments when I was in
the 90s I had a little startup company
that Enron wanted to buy and I started
to talk to those guys and I got really
creeped out they were just now they’re
there there were some bad people
actually that was that was bad and they
were using networks in such a horrible
way and it just disturbed me terribly
and then that company ended up going to
Google and then I started to watch
Google grow and I start to realize wait
a second I love the people at Google but
they’re actually doing the same stuff
that Emma was doing there to see with
this email they don’t realize they’re
they’re doing it you know and but the
thing that really got to me that really
got me in the gut was I’d spent so many
years proclaiming how horrible it was to
have to be to be stuck with a label and
a recording contract if you’re a
musician and how wonderful would be to
just directly give your music away and
all that and then what I saw happening
is when my musician friends some of whom
were very famous and beloved would just
get ill or have some issue come up and
suddenly their income went away and they
we would have to organise benefits so
they could get their operation or
something remember in the US we haven’t
had health insurance so everybody lives
on the edge and it just hit me so hard
that we’d made a mistake because we were
actually hurting the people on the
ground we were intending to help now of
course if you were 20 and you just
wanted to run around on the stinky band
doing gigs and promote it online great
that works great but it doesn’t work for
a life cycle um so if we have these kind
of couple of these twin desires which is
this kind of desire for anonymity and
this desire for kind of things being
free whether that’s experienced whether
it’s music or any of those things those
are the things that then are powerful
things powerful servers the siren
servers that you talk about but can come
along and basically secretly make their
own profits off without returning
anything back to people who’ve who’ve
generated that and we kind of given them
that power through demanding well in an
Indian thing which happens more
forgiving back what they give back token
amount so what happens is with every
single one of these schemes there’s some
people who interact with them who do
very well and to me this is the
equivalent of what in the 19th century
was called the Horatio Alger story so
there are always a token few people who
do very well
your YouTube videos who do very well
with their whatever it is their
Kickstarter campaigns or something but
the thing about it is for society to
work and for society to remain
democratic economic outcomes for people
have to be distributed with sort of a
mound like a bell curve or at least some
approximation so that the some large
bulk of people can outspend the elite
otherwise democracy falters and we’ve
seen that again and again and people who
interact with this scheme some of them
do well but the distribution is instead
one of these sharp curves where there’s
the so-called long tail and then this
token peak and and that’s a democracy
destroyer it is is this something that
only applies to creative people people
are supplying musical videos or who are
kind of entertaining in some way or the
other forms of contributing or being
treated about yeah sure I mean for now
it’s the creative people or the people
you know but but when the cars drive
themselves and and and your electronics
are printed out you know when labor
starts to go away potentially culture
should be monetized to make up the
difference so that we can still have an
economy the only alternative would be
some sudden rush into socialism and
socialism in the context of these sirens
servers would be really bad I really
don’t want a socialist committee that’s
also the master spy business you know I
think I think that would that’s exactly
how socialism has failed in the past and
that failure would be amplified so I
think socialism has to be off the table
and the Information Age so you know just
it just won’t work I mean it just gives
it just because computers aren’t created
equal people are born on computers
I’d like to come back and bit to that
kind of ideas of socialism and of under
and it’s the kind of the types of
contributions who can make whether
creative or otherwise but but let’s turn
to in the book what you propose is some
sort of corrective measures for a system
that we’ve built now so that doing our
outline briefly just took a couple of
the measures and let you outline in the
book that would sure well there are a
variety of them and some of them have to
do with the architecture of digital
networks and some of them get just a
little technical
and and some of them are just simple so
the simplest idea is counter to the most
popular idea the idea the pot of the
pirate parties and so many other
idealist enterprises now and that’s to
make information worth something to make
it be paid and what I need to say about
this is that I think it’s absurd to go
around to people who are copying music
files and scold them and say oh you
mustn’t copy that music file because of
copyright or something and the reason
why is it currently there’s no
reciprocity those very same people are
being spied by cameras every time they
walk on the street every device they use
is logging data about them every single
thing they do is going into databases
that will affect their future credit and
all that and so all this information is
being taken from them that really
effects them and they’re not paid for
that information and now we’re going to
complain about them copying a music file
so in the context of that incredible
imbalance I don’t think you I don’t
think it’s easy at least to argue that
they should be forbidden from from
copying the music file however if there
was a case where they were being paid
for information as it’s used that turns
out to be valuable because of their
existence that’s a different story
then I think there could be a social
contract where they don’t mind paying
for the information for the very simple
reason that the system they’re paying
into also provides for their own wealth
and sustenance and the well-being of
their their life you know and they’re in
and let me give you one example of why I
think this idea would bring enough
benefits even to bring around the sort
of radical left that that might
initially resist it the most right now
when you walk in the streets of London
there’s army of little cameras that are
following your every move machine vision
is good enough to track you so we’re all
being tracked all the time and this is
kind of nuts because we have fought very
very hard Wars precisely to avoid
systems in which people are being spied
on all the time and we might imagine
today that the people who run the spy
agencies or the tech companies or our
bankers or lovely sweet young people
whatever you think of them the point is
who knows we’ll be in that position in
the future you know like like a
them like this as a setup for big
trouble and that’s why those wars were
fought and yet we acquiesced to it now
now the current response is to try to
use law to correct it so you have
bureaucrats and brussels and elsewhere
gather to say well what should the rules
be about this data this is this is I
can’t tell you how techies laugh at this
process because the idea that
bureaucrats can foresee what programmers
will do with anything remotely like the
speed of programmers as they do it it’s
just so absurd it’s just laughable
they will never keep up I mean it’s just
ridiculous and I could go into some
examples of why but it’s just it’s it’s
just not the law is not agile and
powerful enough almost by definition to
address this issue however a combination
of law and commerce would so if as
information is gathered about you
because you’re walking about the
government has to spend money on it and
they have a limited budget because
they’ve had to argue for whatever tax
rate they can then they have to make
decisions and all of a sudden the path
of moderation appears I think the idea
see the thing about cloud software and
the big data and all this stuff is that
it can bring incredible benefits if we
could all get feedback about how our
life choices are affecting our carbon
footprint that might be a great thing
that might make a big difference to the
climate but that can only happen in the
context it has to be calculated as a
whole it can’t be just person by person
and yet right now to give up that data
would be to to feed into the scheme but
in a commercial sense it could be
moderated and anyway so part of I’m
sorry I’m Ted going on no no but I mean
I think I think outside life if you
could explain a bit more about how that
that system of exchange would work so
that how people would be compensated
okay so so another another thing is some
avoid going back to the origins of
networking the very first idea for
compute for network media and for
networked expression and for mashups and
all these things that we are familiar
with right now goes back to 1960 the
first so far as I know there’s no
dispute that the first person to
articulate this stuff was Ted Nelson and
at the time he or at least when I first
met him which was in the 70s he was
explicit
talking about trying to avoid some sort
of let it let I’d like future it so that
it find waited for money for information
to be monetized as information
technology would eventually take over
the economy so that there could be an
economy and a number of the principles
I’ll just I’ll just go over a little bit
about what an El Sonia Network would be
like which is different from what we’re
used to one thing is you don’t copy
stuff so this is such a weird concept in
the early days of networking one of the
things that we used to love about it was
that you don’t need to make copies
anymore because the original is still
there because it’s a network and the
whole idea of copying is sort of bogus
on a network and so if this doesn’t
immediately make sense to you think
about the phone in your pocket you
download apps for it and if the app is
updated by the developer yours updates
so it’s more like a mirror than a copy
right so that’s that’s the way it was
always supposed to be and the reason
copies came about is just so bizarre but
the really influential computer science
lab was called Xerox PARC and Zarek’s
Park is where Ethernet was invented
which is the way your phones are talking
to Wi-Fi right now and it’s also where
the modern feeling of computers were
invented the idea of graphical
interfaces and all that stuff came from
Xerox PARC and it was sponsored by Xerox
which was the preeminent copying machine
company and so I remember being there
when I was quite young and and all the
stuff was happening you know and we
would whisper like oh it’s such a shame
we have to include copying in this
software but otherwise will freak out
our sponsors so the very idea of copying
on a network which is technically absurd
was really part of pleasing a sponsor
which ended up not benefiting from the
research because I think we were too
afraid to tell them what was really
going on so so there’s no need for
coffee so you don’t impose this
artificial idea of copying because it’s
it’s stupid
it doesn’t copying how car to import in
history and in culture in terms of in
terms of preservation of culture it does
it wouldn’t the kind of absence of
copies defeat one of the sort of primary
advantages the Internet as we have it
now that that it’s resilient the copies
of things are saved I’m I just know
there’s a lovely line in your book where
you talk about this kind of transition
that we’d have to make the system we say
that you know
we lost Rome but you know the
Renaissance did kind of turn up
eventually and that whole process
happened because we preserve copies of
things in multiple states yeah no no no
no nothing free network is vastly more
durable than a copy network I mean so so
so here so here’s how it works the very
idea of not needing copies was actually
born on the same day as I understand it
as the idea of the mash-up itself so
here’s how it would work let’s say
somebody’s made something I don’t know
video or something and they post it and
now people access it and somebody wants
to mash it up they want to take a clip
and mash it into something else so they
have a reference link to the thing and
it’s a bi-directional link so that the
original knows it’s been linked to and
the person who made the original knows
that the things being used and now their
new video has a link back to the
original and then there can be a
derivative video of that one that now
has a link back to the original mashup
and it can get as mashed as mashed as it
likes and there’s bi-directional links
explaining the history of how the whole
thing came together if you like a little
bit like the history on a Wikipedia page
but a little bit more detailed and
structural and now the beauty of this
there are many many wonderful things
about this one thing is that meaning is
only meaning in context there’s no such
thing as absolute meaning oh I don’t
think we can argue that if you want but
but if there philosophers nettings but
anyway just just as a rough cut if we
can agree that knowing the context of
something helps helps understand what it
is so in this case the context is
preserved so we have better preservation
there’s a balance of Rights of the
master and the mash so if somebody wants
to represent something in a way that
misrepresents it like maybe it’s a clip
of a politician that’s selecting just a
little bit that creates a misimpression
the link to the original is right there
so it becomes much harder to do and
because of these bi-directional links we
can set up an economic scheme so that
micro cam payments can can continue to
benefit everybody in the long chain of
mash up in this and so everybody gains
an incentive to keep the thing going so
they’re an enormous number of advantages
and bi-directional links are sort of
like double-booked accounting they
actually create a much more robust
network so it actually is better at
preserving it preserves context
well as just content which becomes more
more meaningless with time and it and it
identifies content with people who are
the actual people are the entities that
matter not the bits so on many levels
it’s more it’s both more durable and
more functional it’s also more efficient
in the in the large scale I mean what
we’re doing now is a massive I mean the
carbon footprint of the internet I’ve
tried to estimate it but it’s its
magnitudes worse than it needs to be
because of all the copies in all the
lost context it has to be recovered I
mean consider what Google does for
living mostly is recover the backward
links that were thrown away to figure
out where things came from what Facebook
does is figure out who’s looking at
other people and that would also like
all of this effort all this scraping of
the net all the time is actually
unneeded so it’s this giant act of waste
and stupidity it’s it’s it’s a
profoundly dumb thing that we’re doing
um if it’s a profoundly dumping the way
doing yeah and that there are
technological solutions to it and who
can who can achieve those technical
article solutions like on it on whom
does the burden lie to to change this is
this something that kind of that anyone
can achieve that governments can achieve
was it something that remains entirely
the preserves of technologists yeah so
um so here there’s two different
questions well there’s so there’s three
questions raised in the book one is is
my diagnosis of a problem here the
correct diagnosis that can be argued the
second is a proposal of a solution and I
go into quite a bit of detail but I also
make it clear that I can’t pretend to
know everything in advance it has to be
approached empirically but there’s a
question what the solution is right then
the very hardest one is what’s a
transition like what how does it work
so in the book I outline a variety of
different scenarios I could get us there
I will say of among people who are aware
of these ideas are many who are thinking
about the solution and I are a solution
and I get emails every day multiple
emails from people who have a scheme and
a lot of people want a scheme that can
create a transition magically fast like
in the way that something like a
Facebook Rises quickly or Bitcoin or
Kickstarter or something so they want
some kind of thing that feels like a
Ponzi scheme at first and everybody
wants to jump in
into and then at the end of it is this
more sensible expanding information
economy I’ve never seen one of those
that I think would work but maybe
somebody can do it I tend to prefer more
deliberative sort of slow approaches so
that we can learn as we’re going and we
don’t make another huge mistake and so I
propose a sort of a spiraling back and
forth over a couple of decades maybe
more about politics and technical people
working together to gradually steer it
even though I realize that might be an
overly adult way to approach the problem
but I think it’s the more sensible one I
mean I think we have some time this is
not like this imminent catastrophe it
becomes a catastrophe when automation
becomes very good it’s maybe like the 20
years or something like that Dave meant
you’ve mentioned automation being this
kind of coming fad and you’ve said how
it how it affects people now
particularly who are performing kind of
creative work and so on but also I can
see how your your kind of iterative
system of rewarding people backwards
over time for earlier contributions to
an information economy works for people
who who contribute creatively to that
network and what happens to people who
aren’t creating content if the whole
thing is transferred to an entirely
information based economy okay the rest
of the economy all right so there’s a
couple things to say about this we’re
used to a sort of a very constricted
idea of what information economy can be
because the information economies we’ve
experienced are all sort of these tree
shaped things that feed up to one of the
giant siren servers like an Amazon store
or something like that or an Apple store
and in those cases you get as I was
saying you get this distribution of
people who benefit with a very thin tall
peak and then a long tail and not much
in between now there’s another kind of
network we’re all familiar with where
people’s contact with each other’s
information is much richer and generates
more of a bell curve distribution if you
were to monetize it and that’s a social
network so the unmonitored part of say
of Facebook say where you connect with
each other or Twitter if you look at the
distribution of what people do with each
other in the information space and if
you were if people were getting paid for
that it would create a bell curve and
that
in middle class and so that’s where we
find hope is turning information economy
into more of this graph webby kind of
thing instead of instead of a tree that
feeds to a master node now in the
context of doing that what will happen
is they’ll be they’ll still be stars but
it’s just that the the in-between mask
the bump in the middle will be able to
expend them so that an elite won’t take
over the society I mean that’s that’s
what you get for that now it doesn’t
mean that you don’t have the downside of
the curve to of people who make less
than average and much less than average
and so what you want is to have as few
people who do really badly in the
information economy as you can or they
should be about the same as the number
of elites you know sort of you want a
symmetrical bell curve and then for
people on the bad side of the bell curve
the information economy there are two
things that can happen one is they can
do well in the physical economy which I
don’t think will go away completely so I
think it’s very unlikely that the
information economy becomes everything I
mean presumably there will be things
that software and robots don’t do we
don’t know exactly what they are I mean
there’s I have many friends who believe
that your massage will come from the
ideal robot massager in the future and I
described in the book house well it gets
really nutty there’s some people who
think that that that you know nobody
would be foolish to have anything but a
robotic sex partner in the future when
they’re better than people or whatever
you know you know I make fun and
something’s up but anyway it’s not
important for us to know exactly what
can’t be automated yet the point is that
it’s very unlike that everything will be
automated so there should be a physical
economy and many of the people who might
be on the down side of the curve of the
information economy might find might
find success in physicality and here we
hear we hit a dilemma that I don’t know
how to solve we hit a tragedy that no
one’s been able to solve which is that
if you want to have a society in which
there isn’t an elite that gains power
you have to have some sort of bell curve
where the middle has the power and out
spends the elite but if you have that
then there’s some kind of it down at the
low end of that curve which is the poor
or something like that the people who
don’t do as well and I don’t know how to
disempower and
without also creating that because
that’s how statistics work that’s how
math works and so so there has to be
social services I think in a future in
which most people have Liberty and and
and that’s those are fighting words in
the US where people are sort of super
libertarian and an refine Rand oriented
these days but I just think the math
supports that idea so I think you need
to have some form of liberalism to make
an information economy work in the
future and some but this the main
solution you’re proposing or the UFOs in
the book for this there’s very much
based on this idea of two-way linking
and always attributing context and
therefore being able to funnel kind of
financial transactions through that to
kind of support all kinds of work
everyday work as well as creative work
um it feels like an expansion of the
very technological kind of dominance
that your critique in the book that you
say that we’ve ended up with the system
that we have now so very unforeseen
unforeseen outcomes from technologies
that we didn’t see coming yeah and your
solution is to essentially expand the
technological right view of the world
yeah that’s the human condition the
human condition is we make our way and
we try to get better at it but every
time we do something to try to influence
our own fate because we’re these
mysteriously free creatures we they’re
side effects because we’re not perfect
and then we have to undo those side
effects and that’s what technology as
technology is always undoing the last
thing you did because you screw it up
you know I mean that’s what it is and
it’s a it’s a game it’s a game we
entered into leaving the Garden of Eden
if you like it’s a game that’s mandatory
for us we can’t escape it at this point
I get frustrated with it sometimes even
though I love technology I sort of wish
I could get off the ride once in a while
but it’s it’s our fate now it’s what we
got and it’s it’s scary you know because
you know every disease cured is a new
poison or biological weapon and the
making every new source of nutrition is
a famine in the making potentially it’s
what Malthus pointed out every you know
we have to learn to get better and
better at not screwing ourselves over
as we get more capable in general and it
sucks but that’s what we got to do we
have to grow up it’s hard um we’re going
to go to the cute animal I think he
wants to play a ball but it close one
more oh yeah I’m also from Salinas so
we’ve identified that there’s a huge
problem there’s an issue here which is
based on the kind of technological
foundations the way we build things and
there are potential ways to change that
as well and that we could we architected
still feels like something that’s very
much the the domain of technologists of
people who who can read and act in those
systems for themselves but before we go
– I love know some kind of things that
that people every everyone can do – to
slightly change the course of this to
address this themselves in kind of these
are long-term problems but there must be
short-term approach yeah I did have some
recommendations about that so one thing
I want to recommend is to become as
aware as possible of how you fit into
other people’s computation schemes so
all of us are being tracked by dozens of
gigantic hidden computers now all of us
are being characterized by dozens of
dossiers that will really influence us
that will determine whether we get
credit who will meet to date where we’ll
be employed you know and so and and
these like I said these these big
computers that have these dossiers are
sometimes held by private companies
sometimes by national intelligence
agencies sometimes they’re in banks or
financial schemes of one sort or another
I I think the one thing to do is instead
of freaking out and going anti and
saying all those techies are terrible I
think experimenting with your own life
by severing ties with different servers
from time to time and seeing what
happens is one gate is one way to regain
some autonomy and also just to screw
with the technologists a little bit and
and so so and it doesn’t have to involve
deep judgments or something so like
let’s say you’re in a situation where a
particular service of Facebook or
Twitter seems essential to you
well you know it depends where you are
in life I mean if it really is and it’ll
it’ll do harm then it to not use it then
keep using it but if you’re young enough
to be experimental just like you might
want to go hitchhiking in some part of
the world that’s less developed to just
know yourself and know the world
directly a very simple thing to do is go
off it for six months just try it
just just ever go off it not judging not
saying that anybody else should do it
not saying that you’ll never go back on
it not not being a moralist about it but
simply as an experimentalist stop using
it for a while if you want to play the
technical game of trying to hide from
the server’s and trying to get better
you can read about that there are all
kinds of little extra like you can get
plugins for your browser that’ll block
ads and trackers of that but you have to
be vigilant I mean that requires a lot
of work I mean even just setting privacy
settings in facebook is is something
most people can’t do really and and no
seriously I mean and and so you know
it’ll that takes some work there’s
nothing you can do that’s easy you know
I mean if there’s somebody if there’s
something where somebody says oh you
know to get out from under this regime
tweet this or you know forward this
movie to people I mean if it’s really
easy it’s not doing anything I mean just
get used to that all right on those
approaches though kind of exactly what
would be impossible in a more pervasive
technological system like the one that
you proposes the kind of next step for
for kind of freedom in this if
everything that we do if every action if
every contribution is kind of tracked
monitored surveilled and and and put it
within a kind of capitalist framework of
reward doesn’t the the salute that that
approach of cutting yourself off become
completely impossible well until we
change the system now I mean this is the
problems are right now we face these
all-or-nothing choices for instance you
know this idea of wearing a little
display over your eye and seeing extra
stuff in the world well i embedded that
you know and i built the first one of
those and blah blah blah you know years
ago and now google wants to bring out
their thing Google glass and I’m and a
lot of the people on it were from my own
startup and I like them you know and I I
want them to be successful but the
problem is that he used it at all you’ll
have to or support as I know you’ll have
to
line up for Google stuff you know and
all the information will be logged from
right on your face what you’re seeing
you know and the choice of having to
either get something like that and
submit to acquiesce to being tracked all
the time on this very intimate level or
not I mean it’s a crazy choice and what
you should really have the choice of
doing is yeah you can track me but it’s
going to cost you and then you set your
price and then you decide how much you
want to be tracked by that price and if
they really you know and you can if you
set it high enough you won’t be tracked
and most people probably end up
somewhere in-between because there’s
some value in it but it’ll create
moderation that that’s the way up idle
not thank you um put you on that note
yes okay so I have three more
instruments and I’ll play one before
questions and then one or two after
questions there’s an electric mood
middle-eastern instrument there’s a
weird double flute thing that has no
name that I got from some Hungarian
gypsy kids so it’s really cool that’s
not not documented anywhere I don’t know
what it is and I have a Japanese
shakuhachi flute which do you want dude
let me hear double Hungarian fluid from
the gypsies shakuhachi all right double
flip all right so then we’ll do so then
I’ll do one of the other ones later so
this was um I saw some kids doing this
in a train station and they won was when
was playing these to distract people
because it is kind of mysterious that it
works at all and then the other was
picking their pockets
and the the if you see only one of these
at a time that’s a pretty well-known
instrument but the pair together has a
special trick and I’m not aware of it
all right so question so again take some
questions if you overhear I think we’ll
start and wait for the mic so we can all
hear I’ll be going
hello there I’d like to talk about human
consciousness so you talked about the
music industry for example everything
was you know in about 1995 we saw the
internet coming things like getting free
Napster and so on turned up in nineteen
nine we thought it was going to be good
you’re saying it was probably bad Apple
came along in 2003 with iTunes and the
rest is history
it’s the largest distributor of music by
a long way so what happens with
education we’re now looking at digital
learning MOOCs Khan Academy or this kind
of stuff coming along Harvard MIT and so
on or trying to get in that bit like the
old record labels yeah you know if the
if education isn’t free it’s not
available what happens when another
Death Star comes in and owns education
owns the content owns the assessment
isn’t that human consciousness yeah okay
so um this idea of leveraging the
internet to make education more
accessible to large numbers of people
was one of the core ideals of the
internet from its very birth and I
worked very hard myself on schemes like
this and obviously it’s essential and
and one would have to be cruel to not
want to see something happen and yet
under the current scheme of information
being free it you know it’ll bring in
initial benefits to a lucky token for
you just like the other digital
transitions do but then remove
opportunity from large numbers of others
I mean this hit me really strong when I
you know I remember looking at this
really bright young folks entire square
who had in part used mobile phones and
and the Internet to to help organize a
revolution that at that time at least
was relatively painless and and peaceful
relatively you know compared to many
historically we’ll see where it goes now
but anyway I remember looking at them
and thinking wow this is so great and
maybe the technology helped a little bit
but you know what are there jobs going
to be what
they going to do what are the what are
their life prospects you know we’re you
know and you try to imagine how this
technology is really going to play into
helping them build lives build families
build some build a base build some
momentum build something that’s solid to
get out of the informal economy and into
a formal economy and it’s just not going
to happen so you know the problem I have
is that we could rapidly create a lot of
educated underutilized underemployed
people around the world which who would
be very frustrated and that would be and
that’s what I’m that’s what I feel we’re
doing so I’m all for making technology
more accessible of course what a lovely
thing and yet if we don’t also make
wealth insistent and sustenance and an
ability to enter a formal economy that’s
a fair economy with the middle class
that can sustain a democracy if we don’t
do those things at the same time we’re
just offering the cruelties and we’re
screwing over those people so we have to
we have to do the whole thing we can’t
just do a little part of it so thank you
very much I thought that was really
interesting I guess I was interested to
hear what are your thoughts on kind of
seeing the digital and the physical is
different I guess namely I’m thinking
about digital dualism and you know
earlier kind of when you started your
talk you said something along the lines
of I came to realize we blew it not all
computers are created equal and then you
I think talked about you know whether or
not it was new so maybe you could
elaborate on that and how the two
interrelate okay all right so a computer
is a little pocket of the world a little
a little draw a box around a piece of
the world and then you manipulate it so
that it’s deterministic and predictable
you you create a little local local area
where thermodynamics doesn’t apply where
that’s not entropic where information
isn’t lost and all the bits work
perfectly and in order to do that you
radiate waste heat and randomness into
the the rest of the world so overall
there’s no free lunch just like I was
talking about Maxwell’s demon so every
every computer is exact every bits of
Maxwell’s demon you know they can only
run for a while and at the expense of
increasing entropy and the rest of the
world so so you know the this this idea
of a computer cannot be reality because
reality can
absorb the waste heat from all the
computers they are they’re fundamentally
different or else there would be a free
lunch and so you have to look at
computation fundamentally and you can
see that it’s a local illusion that’s
created now then another layer to ask
about is why did the bits have any
meaning at all you know like you could
have two computers that do the same
thing that were specified by different
programs for instance so there’s no
there’s no single implied meaning to any
set of bits and if you want to get you
know to really get into this in detail I
go into it a little bit in this book but
more in the previous book and you are
not a gadget with there’s a thought
experiment about an infinite computer
store where you take an arbitrary string
of bits then you search through this big
computer store to find one that makes it
operate as any arbitrary program you
know and you start to see that there’s a
kind of a there’s a there’s a weird
thing about computers where there has to
be some external force that imposes
meaning on the bits and and and so so
intrinsic to the idea of computation is
a kind of a dualism
now whether dualism is right or not
ultimately it’s a different question but
the very idea of competition has
embedded in it the idea that people are
different from ordinary mechanism
because we impose the the meaning and
create this this that we’re able to
perceive this local violation of
thermodynamics and all that so there’s
there’s actually a enormous mystical
dualism implied in the very idea of
computation to begin with this isn’t
this was actually this is embedded in
the idea of the Turing test even because
it’s a person who’s the judge of whether
the Turing test has been passed and and
you know and that’s the problem is that
it’s a circular thing it always comes
down to people judging so so just to
answer your question yeah I think people
are mystical and different from matter
but in particular different from
computers and I and I think that not
because I know it absolutely but because
pragmatically it’s the only way to think
that allows me to be an effective
computer scientist how does that that
separation of humanity and computers is
linked that it’s necessary for human
involvement to kind of give meaning to
the toaster how does that relate to the
the idea that we can kind of impose a
better humanistic relationships between
people through better uses of technology
itself no technology can’t make people
better and it can’t make really relation
like the way I think of it is maybe
there’s a fine line distinguishing these
things but what I want to do is not have
technology make things worse between
people I feel like only people can make
things better but I think technology can
make things worse
and I can go into a bit more detail
about that I think in the human psyche
there’s sort of a what I call a clan
switch I think we evolved to be able to
be either singleton roamers or members
of a clan and when you have a computer
network that’s designed to invoke Klan
membership then people kind of can align
themselves like like photons on a laser
and become sort of unified and that’s
what happens when things go viral and
stuff and it can happen very rapidly and
if it’s about a cat video no harm done
if it’s about a political idea or
dumping on some group or something it’s
it’s fascism you know and I really am
afraid we’re playing with fire and I
think we we see little outbreaks that
means stuff online all the time and the
problem is could there be a big one yeah
there could be and and I concerns me and
the you know the point so getting back
to you know the monetize Network that’s
a graph instead of a tree that I was
describing I believe for many reasons
would create more diversity of points of
view and be less likely to turn that
clan switch I would love to try and
understand a bit more about do you make
you distinguish between a mirrored
Network and a copy network right so me
remember
which which information is shared I
guess in a way that preserves it
original and a copy network English
original is effectively destroyed
everything becomes copies and and if I
understand the question I’d like to ask
is about has to do with abundance you
know copy shares the same group term as
copious right abundance and part of the
argument about I guess a copy based
network is that it enables abundance now
my question is this are you arguing that
the your idea of a mirror network or
Nelson’s idea of a mirror network could
end up creating more and are you kind of
arguing that the copy based network that
we become used to we think that there’s
a great deal of abundance but it’s at
the expense of people like creators
getting screws because they can’t get
paid for the work it yeah not really is
abundantly just to repeat what the
gentleman said the benefit of the
machines the gentleman asked if the if
this description of the mirror network
where you can reach out and reach the
single copy versus a network where you
copy everything if that produces that
produces the illusion of abundance the
continuous copying but it’s actually
kind of shrinking the network as a whole
well it shrinks the economy so you know
the the more information the more the
information economy becomes dominant as
automation gets better the economy will
expand if information is monetized
little contract if information is not
monetized I mean this is this is just a
very simple thing for instance in in
Silicon Valley it’s a common thing for
venture capital firms to advertise that
they will only invest in a net startup
that will shrink markets because it’s
when you shrink markets that you’re
gathering the power you’re getting rid
of what had been monetized which is
other people having wealth and you’re
concentrating it in your server so the
idea is that you’re shrinking the market
we’re doing that to the overall economy
so the copy oriented network is
precisely the opposite of abundance and
the longer goes to the future the less
abundance they’ll be and the mirror
network is
is the primary difference is the
backward link the idea is that every
information has a context it remembers
where it came from and that small change
makes a huge difference because it does
allow for monetization it does put
information in context and it ties
information to the people who made it so
it’s about the people instead of the
bits and so that’s the true path to
abundance yes so yes you’ve been lied to
you’ve been sold a bill of goods I’m
sorry I helped do it you described in
the book frequently as essentially of
what you’re proposing is a more honest
accounting whatever he takes everything
in well I mean to put it into most
brutal terms the very idea of artificial
intelligence being able to do something
a person can do online like Translate is
exactly and precisely an act of bad
accounting it’s an act of forgetting to
account for where the value came from
I’m a lot of what you’ve talked about
and I appreciate I’m a cyberneticist I I
appreciate your entropic value
perception and your your Maxwell’s
demons alignment but a lot of what you
talk about seems to promote the fact
that there is no positive some economy
there it’s always zero-sum economy or
negative some economy in the machine
world when you when you contribute you
have to trade one thing against another
and am i understanding correctly that
you really don’t think there is a
positive some economy there in the
machine no what I’m saying is that the
Machine network is a negative some
economy where the success for the few
shrinks the market overall so I’m
arguing that it’s a shrinking that the
Machine economy is a shrinking economy
if you like and what I’d rather see is a
growing economy I’m not I’m not saying
it’s your sum I’m saying it’s worse than
and explicitly so I mean that’s what we
say when we create startups that’s our
logic for deciding which startups to
fund so this is not like some I’m not
applying some avant-garde you know
radical interpretation I’m actually
describing the language we use ourselves
in how we act it’s actually conventional
will in emergent will intelligence
emerge from from all of this data and
will the internet become intelligent as
as the Turing test teaches us the only
sense in which intelligence can emerge
is if we believe it has emerged and the
problem is we can’t tell the degree to
which we’ve made ourselves into idiots
in order to make that have that
perception so therefore we don’t have
the empirical basis we don’t have a
privileged enough position to answer
that question we can only rely on
pragmatic considerations to decide and
those who think that the Internet can
come alive are planning a disruption in
our collective memory and in our way of
doing things that they call the
singularity which would be highly
destructive and really stupid but there
will never be any resolution about
whether our machines become intelligent
it’s always a matter of faith just as it
is between people so I think we’ve got
one more question yes okay I’m
interested in the enforcement of the
kind of monetized network as you talked
about how when in order to transfer
something on a network you have to copy
it how do you enforce these money flows
and given you know everything all the
history we’ve seen of how
copy-protection schemes work in order to
give people the means to view something
you have to give the keys to unlock it
and those are almost always broken if
they haven’t broken already it will be
in the future yeah sure
okay first of all um I’m trying not to
be too technical on this talk so one has
to make a distinction between logical
copies and so what I’m saying is you
don’t need to be any logical copies
obviously as a matter of implementation
there have to be copies there have to be
local caches and bla bla bla just for
performance and backup and all that so
that that has to be made clear so
there’s not there’s not a there’s not
like sort of an injunction on moving
we’re because it is a network you know
but there is an injunction on logical
copies and then in terms of the security
issue I think ultimately there’s no such
thing as an airtight system I mean and
if you want to see some people trying to
build something like that you could look
at Bitcoin for instance where there have
been some scandals and some and some
problems and I think you can make a
pretty good system I think we could do
better than Bitcoin maybe we can do
twice as good or something you know and
reduce the occurrences of people of
security holes in it but that can’t be
the central point I mean what has to
happen is a social network where most
people see a value in it and want to
follow it and then the exceptions can be
a matter for hackers and law enforcement
to deal with but they have the
exceptions have to be small the only way
for society to work is all as if it were
to work at all is if the majority of
people feel that the system is worth
working within right so it’s not that
hard to go and break into apartments and
cars and steal them I mean I’m sure many
people in this audience have the skills
to do it if I know my audiences and the
reason we don’t go out and do that is we
like living in a world where cars and
homes aren’t broken into very much right
and so that’s a social contract that has
to take hold digitally we can’t try to
rely on some perfect security system we
can have we can have a good one so that
because they’ll always be some of the
I’ve known some criminals who estimate
that five percent of the population is
criminal you know that’s that’s a number
that one runs across and in in
criminology circles as well so let’s say
it has to be good enough that for the
one out of 20 people who are just not
going to like anything it’s at least a
little hard and some number of them are
catchable and overall the thing works
but but but trying to chase the perfect
security system of course is impossible
like the perfect password can’t be
remembered you know that’s just that’s
the way it is you can never quite get
there and on the note of the social
contract we’ve agreed to give time for
book signings and so on after this so I
think that’s the last question but you
would ask to play one more piece first
before we give ok I’ll play a couple
more minutes
bucho Karachi
both I don’t know if I can I don’t know
if I can do them at the same time is
this on you all know what it is right do
I need to introduce e it this is my
electric good which is I can travel with
getting this stuff and it’s it’s at least ha
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