hi everybody so I’d like to start by
asking you to think about some of
biggest business success stories of the
last 10 to 15 years
okay the kind of brands and the kind of
businesses that are usually used in the
same sentence as innovative and
disruptive okay
everyone has one now those words
innovators and disruptors only tell
stories right let’s think about Facebook
okay Facebook we all use our shop but
Facebook is also all about trolls about
BOTS about fake accounts about fake news
maybe you thought about air B&B okay but
every B is also about gentrification
about rising house prices in cities
everywhere from Amsterdam to subpar lows
or maybe you thought about uber who have
been in the news a lot recently thanks
to sexual harassment charges or maybe
their worker welfare issues or maybe you
thought about Amazon who have also been
in the news you want worker welfare
issues and also issues around them
having them monopoly over a market now
we all still use these products you’ll
still use these services they’re easy
that cheaper you know we can’t feel bad
about choosing to use them but most of
us have a negative perception about many
of these kinds of businesses and
sometimes we feel like these businesses
don’t really care about that they’re not
really doing that much to change our
markets so if you think about some of
the things that happened just this week
in Washington DC
representatives from facebook from
Google and from Twitter were invited to
congressional hearings that were
examining the implications of shall we
say foreign interests in the US
presidential election from one of the
senators at the hearing said
I quote that she was disappointed with
Facebook with Google and Twitter she was
disappointed because they didn’t send
their videos for ten hearings because
they didn’t really seem to care that
much about what they did then and how
they’re gonna fix the problem in the
future so we’re in this moment with
technology and with so many businesses
but seem to control our lives we seem to
have no power ever and today I want to
ask about how we got here and what
lessons we can learn from that story
that we can take into the future that
will allow us to build technology
solutions and brands and businesses are
completely different so I’d like you to
all indulge in a little bit of time
travel with me I’d like to go back to
California to the 1962 the hippie
movement now the parallels between the
hippie movement and early digital and
web culture our world documented hippies
were a group of people who looked at the
world and wanted to make it better you
know they’ve seen things happen to
awards other very destructive events
happen and they thought that they could
make the future better and they were
high quite literally on the ideas of
freedom of personal expression or
liberation of empowerment of creativity
really positive things they were
optimist and what they did but they
thought that they could come together
they could use all about positivity and
all about optimism and change the
narrative and out of that culture came
people like this so this is you probably
know him through his most famous
sentence which is the medium is the
message he was a philosopher and a media
theorist and he predicted that the right
technology would allow people to take
control from institutions from
government
and allow them to do think that they
wanted in their own lives we’d give them
power and now we know that kind of a
smoothly accurate prediction he lived in
a time where there was also things like
this so this is the Whole Earth Catalog
and this is something that was first
released in 1980 and it was all about
helping hippies to understand how to
live a DIYs self-sufficient lifestyle
you can look through some of these back
issues on Google now and in some ways
almost like an early google it’s a
collection of random things that allow
you to have information that can empower
you and of course I can’t talk about but
full of early hippie movement unless I
talk about things unless I talk about
these guys as well ok these people need
no introduction because the truth is
that you can draw a direct line between
the hippie culture between Steve Jobs
and the tech companies that exist today
but here’s the thing something happened
to that early optimism of the hippie
okay
many big tech companies with still say
that they are optimist CEO Mark
Zuckerberg then very regularly and
probably quite lonely I am an optimist
but big tech optimism is kind of
different to hippy optimism big tech to
make them go a little bit something like
this it says everybody is fundamentally
good therefore you don’t need
traditional structures government’s
institutions you have the power in you
to govern yourself but what you need is
you need ways to connect yourselves or
you need platforms to help you do it and
that’s where these tech companies come
in and this is where they make money and
where they have a place in our
they have essentially co-opted optimism
for profit now maybe you might think I’m
cynical and perhaps a grain of truth in
that
but it’s also interesting to see that
people who are deeply engraved in
Silicon Valley culture have some of
these thoughts as well so this quote
comes from Evan Williams he gave an
interview with the New York Times in May
this year and Evan if you don’t know was
the founder of blogger he was a
co-founder of Twitter and he’s the
current CEO of media all platforms are
about bringing people together and he
said I thought that once everybody could
speak freely and exchange information
and ideas the world would automatically
be a better place I was wrong can you
imagine other tech companies or any
other big Silicon Valley figures
admitting that what they did wasn’t
always for the good of humanity it’s a
really extraordinary point of view to
take by saying that what we are doing is
maybe not always doing the right thing
and this point of view that he has is
played out again and again in countless
stats in countless surveys for example
41% of Americans have been personally
subjected to harassment online 66
percent have seen it happen to somebody
that they know people who spend more
than two hours a day on social media
platforms have twice the perceived
socialized isolation of people who spend
less than half an hour
forty-five percent of UK adults say they
feel lonely at least some of the time
and this is a particularly significant
study because it was held and asked
people who were under the age of 60
so the 60 plus demographic often for
different reasons feels isolated our low
now this feeling is translating to
younger don’t those are all really
worrying stats not just for innovators
or people that live in Silicon Valley or
people that are creating tech products
but for all of us because it’s really
about asking us if the technology that
we’re using
helping us to create a vision of
humanity that we want to do is it
helping us to really come together and
to really make life meaningful for
everybody and the short answer has to be
no but it’s really easy to ask that
question and it’s actually a lot more
difficult to think about how you can
solve that how can you create tech
products that take something from those
early hippies from that optimism that
they have and use it to create something
that can enrich and meaningfully enhance
us as you another thing we’re gonna
solve that here tonight that is a big
question to us and a big thing to think
about
all i’d like to do now is to show you
some examples of some technologies that
are using the power that they have and
the things that they can do in really
interesting ways in ways that are
bridging gaps between people and between
events and situations that might
actually make us all better so the first
piece of technologies or the first
innovation I won’t
is something called huddle and huddle is
an app that allows you to upload videos
of yourself talking about mental health
issues and it’s primarily aimed at
people who have mental health issues
something that still remains a taboo in
this society even today so the idea is
that you upload videos that love talking
about anxiety body image about whatever
your mental health issue is you upload
it into the app and it creates this
repository of videos people can watch
them and if they think that they can
share something that’s helpful to you or
if they think you’ve given something to
them that’s helpful they can contact you
you can also because the issue of mental
health and still will probably leave
quite some time so sensitive uploading
anonymously
the problem with anonymous content is
that it hasn’t gone so well in the past
right believes trolls all these kinds of
issues
claim lots of anonymous platforms that
have tried this kind of thing in the
past what this does look different is
that it uses algorithms to weed out poor
behavior before that behavior happens so
it’s about making this space safe for
the people that need it and using new
technologies to do that so that’s
thinking about how technology can
empower a group of people that is often
overlooked by traditional tech products
and traditional text services we already
touched very briefly on the issue of the
u.s. presidential election and one of
the big things that fell out of that and
of course closer to home out of brick
stick to with the idea of the filter
bubble and how hard it is to discover
opinions that are conflicting to our own
these kind of platforms like Facebook
reflect the things back to us that we
like
we live in this bubble of coziness
effectively what this app does hide from
the other side is it matches you with
people who have different political
opinions to you so we’re all used to
using apps like tinder or bumble to you
know hook up with people to find dates
this is taking that kind of platform
that kind of behavior and applying it to
something that’s slightly different and
it doesn’t just help you find somebody
who has a different opinion to you it
also suggests ways you can start
conversations with them that are
meaningful that are useful and let the
probably go beyond five minutes of just
shouting about why each other is wrong
now I know that we can’t talk about new
technologies and how these are changing
the world in which we live in without
talking about one of the biggest new
tech is virtual reality virtual reality
is obviously still in its infancy for
quite a lot of people and it’s still a
technology that is being developed
even as we speak now there are new ways
of addicts sent to virtuality so you can
make virtual experiences more real
there’s also new virtuality experiences
that are linked to brain wave readers so
you can control how we move around them
in the VR space simply by using your
mind but perhaps the biggest thing that
VR can offer is the idea of empathy lots
of people are worried about virtual
reality because they think it will
actually make us more isolated we have
these headsets on we live in these
wealth that are for our eyes only but
what about if virtuosity really can help
us be more I’ll have more empathy for
other people situation we’ve talked a
lot in the past about how film and book
are a great empathy driver perhaps this
could be even more powerful than that
and this is
a training program that was developed by
the NFL in partnership with Sanford
University and it allowed you to immerse
yourself in a situation that was totally
foreign to you so if you were a white
man because I’m poor you could
experience what life was like as a black
woman the kind of things that you would
never fully understand until you made it
good in those shoes now I’m not saying
that a virtual reality experience is
gonna completely change everybody’s
attitude to racism or to other issues
that are ingrained in human society but
then not but this is all about using
technology to think about how it can
push up forward about how it can make a
better human and one of the things that
always comes up when we think about some
of the big issues with tech companies in
Silicon Valley if you think about the
slide bar it just showed you just now
they were mostly populated by white men
and that is the problem as well because
these technologies are becoming being
created by one person perhaps for a
person who looks a lot like them and
we’re never truly going to have
technologies that are much more
expansive and that are much more
generous than what they give back to us
and let them start changing that
narrative as well the final point I
would like to leave you with when it
comes to tech innovation is about how
it’s all about disrupting the right
things
now this innovation has a really nice
narrative to it it was first developed
by somebody at university in the US and
he called it do not pay and it was
eventually a chat book that helped you
to contest parking tickets so if you’ve
got a parking ticket the tap what would
help you understand whether you had any
grounds in which to contest it who you
sent those things to why you might be
able to kiss
and it managed to overturn over 160,000
parking tickets in London and New York
okay but quite impressive but then he
decided to do something quite
interesting with this technology he
decided to use it for something
completely different for people who were
in vulnerable housing situations there
were maybe at risk of being evicted by
landlords they could use a totally
different version of the chatbot but one
that works in exactly the same way to
access legal advice about how long they
could stay in their property what their
legal rights were where they could get
free legal counsel who could tell them
what letters what the rules were and
then in its most recent iteration they
do not pay tapper is helping people in
the u.s. challenge a big insurance
company that had a data breach when lots
of people’s data that’s stolen and
people had some financial issues as a
result of it it’s helping them
understand what their rights are in
relation to that kind of issue so that
is the chat book that has taken a really
interesting journey from something that
is ok annoying parking tickets to
something that can really fundamentally
impact how someone lives their housing
situation so maybe it’s also all about
thinking about how technology can
disrupt is the right thing you know of
course there will always be
jusuru juicers that help us pulverizer
fruit more quickly we have to expect
that there is always going to be
innovations and tech products that are
perhaps not really for the good of
humanity but at the same time we should
always be striving to think about how we
can at the same time think about ones
that do so maybe you work for start-up
maybe you work for a big company maybe
one day you want to be a startup creator
yourself the challenge for all of us is
thinking about how we can learn from
that earlier
to nism that really was intrinsic to the
very earliest web and digital culture
and how we can bring them to bear on the
products on the services technology that
we are creating today because we are all
living together and it’s up to all of us
to think about how we can create
connections and create new things that
can help drive all of us forward into a
better
[Applause]
asking you to think about some of
biggest business success stories of the
last 10 to 15 years
okay the kind of brands and the kind of
businesses that are usually used in the
same sentence as innovative and
disruptive okay
everyone has one now those words
innovators and disruptors only tell
stories right let’s think about Facebook
okay Facebook we all use our shop but
Facebook is also all about trolls about
BOTS about fake accounts about fake news
maybe you thought about air B&B okay but
every B is also about gentrification
about rising house prices in cities
everywhere from Amsterdam to subpar lows
or maybe you thought about uber who have
been in the news a lot recently thanks
to sexual harassment charges or maybe
their worker welfare issues or maybe you
thought about Amazon who have also been
in the news you want worker welfare
issues and also issues around them
having them monopoly over a market now
we all still use these products you’ll
still use these services they’re easy
that cheaper you know we can’t feel bad
about choosing to use them but most of
us have a negative perception about many
of these kinds of businesses and
sometimes we feel like these businesses
don’t really care about that they’re not
really doing that much to change our
markets so if you think about some of
the things that happened just this week
in Washington DC
representatives from facebook from
Google and from Twitter were invited to
congressional hearings that were
examining the implications of shall we
say foreign interests in the US
presidential election from one of the
senators at the hearing said
I quote that she was disappointed with
Facebook with Google and Twitter she was
disappointed because they didn’t send
their videos for ten hearings because
they didn’t really seem to care that
much about what they did then and how
they’re gonna fix the problem in the
future so we’re in this moment with
technology and with so many businesses
but seem to control our lives we seem to
have no power ever and today I want to
ask about how we got here and what
lessons we can learn from that story
that we can take into the future that
will allow us to build technology
solutions and brands and businesses are
completely different so I’d like you to
all indulge in a little bit of time
travel with me I’d like to go back to
California to the 1962 the hippie
movement now the parallels between the
hippie movement and early digital and
web culture our world documented hippies
were a group of people who looked at the
world and wanted to make it better you
know they’ve seen things happen to
awards other very destructive events
happen and they thought that they could
make the future better and they were
high quite literally on the ideas of
freedom of personal expression or
liberation of empowerment of creativity
really positive things they were
optimist and what they did but they
thought that they could come together
they could use all about positivity and
all about optimism and change the
narrative and out of that culture came
people like this so this is you probably
know him through his most famous
sentence which is the medium is the
message he was a philosopher and a media
theorist and he predicted that the right
technology would allow people to take
control from institutions from
government
and allow them to do think that they
wanted in their own lives we’d give them
power and now we know that kind of a
smoothly accurate prediction he lived in
a time where there was also things like
this so this is the Whole Earth Catalog
and this is something that was first
released in 1980 and it was all about
helping hippies to understand how to
live a DIYs self-sufficient lifestyle
you can look through some of these back
issues on Google now and in some ways
almost like an early google it’s a
collection of random things that allow
you to have information that can empower
you and of course I can’t talk about but
full of early hippie movement unless I
talk about things unless I talk about
these guys as well ok these people need
no introduction because the truth is
that you can draw a direct line between
the hippie culture between Steve Jobs
and the tech companies that exist today
but here’s the thing something happened
to that early optimism of the hippie
okay
many big tech companies with still say
that they are optimist CEO Mark
Zuckerberg then very regularly and
probably quite lonely I am an optimist
but big tech optimism is kind of
different to hippy optimism big tech to
make them go a little bit something like
this it says everybody is fundamentally
good therefore you don’t need
traditional structures government’s
institutions you have the power in you
to govern yourself but what you need is
you need ways to connect yourselves or
you need platforms to help you do it and
that’s where these tech companies come
in and this is where they make money and
where they have a place in our
they have essentially co-opted optimism
for profit now maybe you might think I’m
cynical and perhaps a grain of truth in
that
but it’s also interesting to see that
people who are deeply engraved in
Silicon Valley culture have some of
these thoughts as well so this quote
comes from Evan Williams he gave an
interview with the New York Times in May
this year and Evan if you don’t know was
the founder of blogger he was a
co-founder of Twitter and he’s the
current CEO of media all platforms are
about bringing people together and he
said I thought that once everybody could
speak freely and exchange information
and ideas the world would automatically
be a better place I was wrong can you
imagine other tech companies or any
other big Silicon Valley figures
admitting that what they did wasn’t
always for the good of humanity it’s a
really extraordinary point of view to
take by saying that what we are doing is
maybe not always doing the right thing
and this point of view that he has is
played out again and again in countless
stats in countless surveys for example
41% of Americans have been personally
subjected to harassment online 66
percent have seen it happen to somebody
that they know people who spend more
than two hours a day on social media
platforms have twice the perceived
socialized isolation of people who spend
less than half an hour
forty-five percent of UK adults say they
feel lonely at least some of the time
and this is a particularly significant
study because it was held and asked
people who were under the age of 60
so the 60 plus demographic often for
different reasons feels isolated our low
now this feeling is translating to
younger don’t those are all really
worrying stats not just for innovators
or people that live in Silicon Valley or
people that are creating tech products
but for all of us because it’s really
about asking us if the technology that
we’re using
helping us to create a vision of
humanity that we want to do is it
helping us to really come together and
to really make life meaningful for
everybody and the short answer has to be
no but it’s really easy to ask that
question and it’s actually a lot more
difficult to think about how you can
solve that how can you create tech
products that take something from those
early hippies from that optimism that
they have and use it to create something
that can enrich and meaningfully enhance
us as you another thing we’re gonna
solve that here tonight that is a big
question to us and a big thing to think
about
all i’d like to do now is to show you
some examples of some technologies that
are using the power that they have and
the things that they can do in really
interesting ways in ways that are
bridging gaps between people and between
events and situations that might
actually make us all better so the first
piece of technologies or the first
innovation I won’t
is something called huddle and huddle is
an app that allows you to upload videos
of yourself talking about mental health
issues and it’s primarily aimed at
people who have mental health issues
something that still remains a taboo in
this society even today so the idea is
that you upload videos that love talking
about anxiety body image about whatever
your mental health issue is you upload
it into the app and it creates this
repository of videos people can watch
them and if they think that they can
share something that’s helpful to you or
if they think you’ve given something to
them that’s helpful they can contact you
you can also because the issue of mental
health and still will probably leave
quite some time so sensitive uploading
anonymously
the problem with anonymous content is
that it hasn’t gone so well in the past
right believes trolls all these kinds of
issues
claim lots of anonymous platforms that
have tried this kind of thing in the
past what this does look different is
that it uses algorithms to weed out poor
behavior before that behavior happens so
it’s about making this space safe for
the people that need it and using new
technologies to do that so that’s
thinking about how technology can
empower a group of people that is often
overlooked by traditional tech products
and traditional text services we already
touched very briefly on the issue of the
u.s. presidential election and one of
the big things that fell out of that and
of course closer to home out of brick
stick to with the idea of the filter
bubble and how hard it is to discover
opinions that are conflicting to our own
these kind of platforms like Facebook
reflect the things back to us that we
like
we live in this bubble of coziness
effectively what this app does hide from
the other side is it matches you with
people who have different political
opinions to you so we’re all used to
using apps like tinder or bumble to you
know hook up with people to find dates
this is taking that kind of platform
that kind of behavior and applying it to
something that’s slightly different and
it doesn’t just help you find somebody
who has a different opinion to you it
also suggests ways you can start
conversations with them that are
meaningful that are useful and let the
probably go beyond five minutes of just
shouting about why each other is wrong
now I know that we can’t talk about new
technologies and how these are changing
the world in which we live in without
talking about one of the biggest new
tech is virtual reality virtual reality
is obviously still in its infancy for
quite a lot of people and it’s still a
technology that is being developed
even as we speak now there are new ways
of addicts sent to virtuality so you can
make virtual experiences more real
there’s also new virtuality experiences
that are linked to brain wave readers so
you can control how we move around them
in the VR space simply by using your
mind but perhaps the biggest thing that
VR can offer is the idea of empathy lots
of people are worried about virtual
reality because they think it will
actually make us more isolated we have
these headsets on we live in these
wealth that are for our eyes only but
what about if virtuosity really can help
us be more I’ll have more empathy for
other people situation we’ve talked a
lot in the past about how film and book
are a great empathy driver perhaps this
could be even more powerful than that
and this is
a training program that was developed by
the NFL in partnership with Sanford
University and it allowed you to immerse
yourself in a situation that was totally
foreign to you so if you were a white
man because I’m poor you could
experience what life was like as a black
woman the kind of things that you would
never fully understand until you made it
good in those shoes now I’m not saying
that a virtual reality experience is
gonna completely change everybody’s
attitude to racism or to other issues
that are ingrained in human society but
then not but this is all about using
technology to think about how it can
push up forward about how it can make a
better human and one of the things that
always comes up when we think about some
of the big issues with tech companies in
Silicon Valley if you think about the
slide bar it just showed you just now
they were mostly populated by white men
and that is the problem as well because
these technologies are becoming being
created by one person perhaps for a
person who looks a lot like them and
we’re never truly going to have
technologies that are much more
expansive and that are much more
generous than what they give back to us
and let them start changing that
narrative as well the final point I
would like to leave you with when it
comes to tech innovation is about how
it’s all about disrupting the right
things
now this innovation has a really nice
narrative to it it was first developed
by somebody at university in the US and
he called it do not pay and it was
eventually a chat book that helped you
to contest parking tickets so if you’ve
got a parking ticket the tap what would
help you understand whether you had any
grounds in which to contest it who you
sent those things to why you might be
able to kiss
and it managed to overturn over 160,000
parking tickets in London and New York
okay but quite impressive but then he
decided to do something quite
interesting with this technology he
decided to use it for something
completely different for people who were
in vulnerable housing situations there
were maybe at risk of being evicted by
landlords they could use a totally
different version of the chatbot but one
that works in exactly the same way to
access legal advice about how long they
could stay in their property what their
legal rights were where they could get
free legal counsel who could tell them
what letters what the rules were and
then in its most recent iteration they
do not pay tapper is helping people in
the u.s. challenge a big insurance
company that had a data breach when lots
of people’s data that’s stolen and
people had some financial issues as a
result of it it’s helping them
understand what their rights are in
relation to that kind of issue so that
is the chat book that has taken a really
interesting journey from something that
is ok annoying parking tickets to
something that can really fundamentally
impact how someone lives their housing
situation so maybe it’s also all about
thinking about how technology can
disrupt is the right thing you know of
course there will always be
jusuru juicers that help us pulverizer
fruit more quickly we have to expect
that there is always going to be
innovations and tech products that are
perhaps not really for the good of
humanity but at the same time we should
always be striving to think about how we
can at the same time think about ones
that do so maybe you work for start-up
maybe you work for a big company maybe
one day you want to be a startup creator
yourself the challenge for all of us is
thinking about how we can learn from
that earlier
to nism that really was intrinsic to the
very earliest web and digital culture
and how we can bring them to bear on the
products on the services technology that
we are creating today because we are all
living together and it’s up to all of us
to think about how we can create
connections and create new things that
can help drive all of us forward into a
better
[Applause]
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