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So today we want to talk to you
about the
role of technology and society
in the longer arc
of human history.
We'd like to take you. We'd like you all
to take a couple of things away from this
talk.
The interaction between
a piece of technology and a peace and
and society is rarely settled
in, you know, two or three years
or ten years.
We're still, as a society, just barely
learning how to use email.
If you think even in the past five or 10
years, the way emails used in
professional contexts has changed
radically, we don't really know what it
means yet.
We think we have a reasonable
understanding of how you use an
auditorium.
We figured that one out.
Mostly
the other thing we'd like to talk about
here and we'd like you to take away from
here is that
while geek culture kind of grew
up is an outsider, a culture
that changed.
It's at the heart of politics, in the
heart of social movements now,
because it's the heart of how we
communicate now.
Geek culture and hacker culture
used to be relatively apolitical,
but now every action
that you take and every piece of code
that you write has political effects.
Now you may intend some of these effects.
You may not intend most of these effects,
but they're there and we need to start
thinking about and understanding these
changes. And this is the change that's
happened in our lifetimes.
So
Quinn is mostly
a kind of incoherent blend of
anti-capitalist anarchism in California
libertarianism,
and Ella is a Marxist in
the class, presumably with blood on her
hands. But since she likes me a lot,
she's promised me six minutes notice on
The Purge before it happened so I can get
a head start.
Despite the political parts of this talk,
this talk is not about our politics,
not about what Ella or
I want you to do.
It's about what we've learned from
examining the network effects that
we live with now
because fundamentally,
many of you will recognize this.
But fundamentally,
architecture has a politics and it
has a culture.
And while we were all kind
of sitting around in our culture
and usenet in the 90s or wherever
we got our start kind of being
like el-Said Outsiders,
the world pivoted.
It changed and surrounded us and put
us at the heart of these matters.
And so whatever you want
to do politically,
what we're going to be talking about is
the framework of the politics that
technology is creating around
the world right now.
So one of the
one of the really interesting structures
in the world right now that we spend a
lot of time dealing with our states.
States have a couple of very basic things
that they require to be able to interact
with the world.
They need to be able to see their
territory and the people who
live in that territory if they're going
to be able to interact with them.
And this is this is simply a truth
that applies to anything, to any time
where someone needs to interact with the
thing. If you can't perceive a thing,
you can't interact with it.
This map here is the planned city of
Brasilia, which is the
city that was built to be legible
to be understandable to the state.
The notion that a state should, if
nothing else, even if it can't understand
all of the rest of its territory, all of
its other cities, it should be able to
understand the city from
which it governs.
Of course, I don't know how many
of you are familiar with the actual city
of Brasilia, but it doesn't look
much like what's indicated on that map.
Reality has kind of come back in
and gotten a lot messier again.
So a lot of the time,
the ability of a state to see
its citizens and to see its terrain is
actually a very, very good thing.
This is the snow map which founded modern
epidemiology.
It's a map of cholera deaths in London
around a particular well when
they didn't understand that
water and the cholera was spread through
water.
This map told
us things about human disease
transmission that have saved
at least tens of millions of lives.
And this is a form of surveillance.
Sometimes this is a bad thing.
This is a map that the city of Amsterdam
prepared from their very complete census
records of where all the Jews were
in Amsterdam for the Nazis.
During the process
of kind of the societal adjustments
following the revolution in France,
and this was actually one of the demands
leading up to the revolution from certain
sectors of society,
the revolutionary
government was continued under Napoleon,
standardized on the metric system.
One of the things that this did was
that it eased a lot of the burdens on
farmers who were having to deal with
incompatible local unit systems
being used to basically rip them off from
what they should have earned on their
profits.
But it also laid
the groundwork for tech standardization
and for central control.
To paraphrase Chateaubriand, what
he said at the time, you know,
if someone's using the metric system that
they're narc.
In other words, you know that if someone
is using the metric system, they work for
the government, they work for the order
that is attempting to impose legibility
on society
in the state of Quinn in the fourth
century B.C., no relation
the the emperor
decided that imposing
surnames on the population was a good
idea.
They needed to be able to
conscript people for labor and
for the military. They needed to be able
to tax people, and they needed to be able
to apply laws to families.
Now many of the ruling families and this
is true throughout the world in places
where names have been, have been
put into force and have been imposed on
people. Many of the ruling families
already had surnames that were frequently
attached to where they lived or where
they ruled.
But common people had all sorts of
different ways of being known.
And if you imagine that you've got
a dozen different ways that you can be
named and you might have some
reasons to not want to be
legible to the state.
This is very, very convenient for you.
So assigning patronages was a way
of changing that power structure.
And along the way, it may have also
changed some of the power structures in
the family. It's not clear.
But one of the things that they
attempted to do was to make the
rest of, to make the head of a family
responsible for all the actions of the
rest of the family, which you could
reasonably see might have some,
some cultural shifts.
Now this is really interesting because
it shows that the vision of the state has
consequences when the state looks
at the world.
It makes things fall into the boxes
that it's measuring.
Even if they didn't before.
In other words, networks weird
legibility.
So
this is, I think, kind of a controversial
statement in this room right now, but I
think that surveillance is
actually a form of human concern,
human attention and human concern
and and surveillance
is what we do when we care about
something and sometimes
that care takes positive forms.
Coming back to the color map,
sometimes it allows us to
build infrastructure that works for
a lot of people. Sometimes it allows us
to prevent disease and feed children
and so on and so forth.
And sometimes it's used for political
control, but it's always used in some
way of concern.
And like technology and
many political qualities, it is neither
good nor bad.
Nor is it neutral, excuse me.
And and I think that's
one of the things we have to bear in mind
in this particular age of surveillance
is that in
many ways, surveillance is the
small touches that we do on each other.
Surveillance is when we check up on each
other and stuff like that.
So finding a way to cast that to where we
can reclaim the positive and suppress
the negative is, I think, much more of
the task than to fight all surveillance.
It's a much more subtle question than it
would seem right now.
But when we talk about this kind of
vision of the state, the state is watcher
of the state as as arbiter of money,
for instance, the news
cycle we have right now, if we want to
take it back all the way to
fourth century B.C., China,
this isn't this all makes more sense.
You know, it makes sense that that
nations are trying to get all the
information they can because they're
trying again to make their
world legible.
And when they get all that information,
they're putting it into the categories
that they perceive are meaningful.
And and that means destroying
by ignoring the ones that aren't.
I think one of the things that's really
useful about reading this history is it
gives you a measure of prediction on
what states are going to want to do with
technology.
They want to keep tabs on their people
for good and bad reasons.
And there's always both good and bad
reasons, and
they want to take
the power that they get
by being the state and use it to
mold the country that they're in.
That has been a tremendously
progressive force in history and a
tremendously destructive one, but it
still comes from the same fundamental
impulse.
And this is why it's really easy for me
to stand up and say a state will always
spy on its people as much as it possibly
can, because states always have.
Not just to maintain their power, but
just to maintain the
ability to control consequences,
which is a point that we'll return to
later.
So we're in an odd
time of history and I want to actually
roll back to another
moment in history and introduce you
to William Tyndale from the
16th century and Tindale
had to flee one day from his native
England, and he never set foot in
England again. He died outside of England
because he decided to translate.
He decided what he wanted to do was
translate the Bible into English.
Now, centuries before this, this
was always a contentious issue,
translating the Bible into the local
language.
It was generally in Latin
centuries before this pope innocent.
The third had had essentially
sentenced to death people that would try
to do something like this.
The lady was never even to touch the
Bible. It was to be interpreted and
handed down from on high
by the church because the
church were the people who had the
knowledge to understand it.
It was a top down picture, and
Tindale was part of a movement that
wanted people to be able to take control
of their own Christianity.
He was opposed by Sir Thomas
more. Now St. Thomas more,
who believed that the church
was necessary to keep order if this
is sounding a bit Hobbesian.
That's because it is a Hobbesian debate,
and it is one that we are still kind of
I'd say we're like in the third act of
this. I used to think this was a good
metaphor for where we are now, but
actually, I think this is just the same
thing going on.
So more in Tindale got
into a huge fight and
more was on the run.
Sorry, Tyndall was on the run.
Morris was sitting when King Henry the
eighth, and they got into
a big argument.
And this argument spanned the continent
at various points about whether or not
the Bible should be in English and people
should be able to interpret their own
religion.
And of course, that got started because
of this guy, Martin Luther,
who created a bunch of
theses and stapled them to a door and
then and then sent them all around the
continent.
Again, nothing on this list
of church reforms that Luther and Tindale
and that whole crew wanted were new.
Not a thing was new.
What was new was that if you were Martin
Luther and you wanted to say the church
needs to reform and you got on a horse
and to go tell people that that's what
you believed the church would burn you.
But something had changed.
And this is also how Tindale
and I mean this the
statement Tindale ran away and then they
had a fight for years doesn't
make any sense to most people
in that era. And it just sounds assumed
to us because of communication technology
and in this case, that communication
technology is
the printing press.
So
Luther was able to put out his 95 theses,
sit safely with a patron
in Germany and say the church needed to
reform. And the church did occasionally
be like, Could you send them for a
meeting? And he's like, No, I'll stay
here in Germany, it's fine.
And and now,
originally, though, the printing
press had been a huge
tool of the church.
They were the biggest customers
of printing not just
to print Bibles, but to also standardize
the interpretation of the religion
everywhere. They can print things out,
send them out to all of Europe and
gain control and again legibility
on their religion. Make sure that
everybody had the right materials.
There was no corruption in them and
spread them everywhere.
And that went on for a few years, and
then the dissidents got a hold of this
technology, and it turned out they could
do the same thing the church could do.
So the big question hanging over the 16th
century was, was the printing
press going to reform the Catholic
Church?
Well, in fact, the printing
press reformed everything
on the planet and possibly
a few things off the planet.
So they didn't
even have a language to ask the right
question for the undertaking
that they were embarking on.
So
Tindale and Moore were two threads inside
one institutional power, but there are a
lot of kinds of power in society,
not just one.
The church has waned in authority.
Capitalism was in many ways just getting
started. This was the birth of the East
India Company.
This was the birth of mercantilism
in that same era.
But the power of guns and the power of
money and the power of God are just three
different kinds of power, and they all
let you do different kinds of things.
They're not commence verbal with each
other. They don't act on each other, they
don't act on themselves.
If you have a pile of money that doesn't
necessarily let you directly
influence what someone else who has a
pile of money wants to do now,
you can maybe take away their money
or force them to do something
else because you've bought the thing that
they were trying to buy first.
But there's a lot of subtlety here in
terms of how power acts.
And this is one of the things that
seems to be occasionally getting
missed while we talk about, oh,
we need to force states to do such
and such, we need to stop states from
doing such and such.
You know, there's this, you
know, oh, corporate surveillance is the
worst thing. Oh, state surveillance is
the worst thing. No, they're different
things, and they may be problematic
in different ways.
All power needs to be able to see the
world enabled in order to act,
whether you are a state or a corporation
or a church. You need your own kind
of legibility and your own kind
of surveillance.
Whether that means figuring out
if the people in all of the villages are
showing up in church on Sundays and
whether or not they're doing any of these
things that might be indicative of any of
these various heresies that you keep
hearing about.
Well, let's go burn some people and find
out. Or whether it just means
that I need to be able to set cookies in
your browser and figure out what kind of
porn you like.
That's the same operation, but for very
different reasons.
States are panicking right
now. They're acting the way they
are because they're panicked.
There's this thing that Quinn calls the
consequence fairy.
And it used to be that consequence.
Ferry was a very staid creature,
and it would sort of, you know, float
slowly around the room and a light
on the shoulders of heads of state and
popes and bishops and,
you know, capitalists and say your
actions matter in the world, you're an
important person.
And at some point in the past 20 or so
years, the consequence very got drunk.
And now the consequence for is kind of
flitting around the room going, you
matter and you matter and
you matter.
And everybody else is like, What the
fuck?
How do we even deal with this?
Because we don't know how.
Because our legibility.
You know, like the world hasn't changed.
The stuff that we pull in is still the
same thing.
But it doesn't mean what it used to mean.
We can't interpret it anymore.
So one of the things we're seeing right
now is we're seeing states
desperately trying to hang on to not
their ability to surveil, but their
ability to understand.
But those don't look different from the
outside.
Rule of law was never intended to
operate in a state of exception, and this
is one of the things which is very
interesting if we talk about rule
of law as a response to unrestricted
surveillance or to any other of the
problems in the world right now,
a state of exception and a state of rule
of law are defined
opposites.
We now live in a state of permanent,
but neither pervasive nor complete
exception.
And this complicates all
responses within systems.
Sue?
On a personal level, things have gotten
weird to
positional ethics is
basically what happens when you join
an institution, when you join an
organization, when you join a network,
that network or that institution
has a set of ethics that are attached
to it.
And when you operate within that
institution, you take on some
of those ethics, you become
the person that does the thing
that the institution needs to
do in the world.
Now this is not complete.
This is this is definitely not total
infrastructure does this too.
And this is a really interesting thing
for all of us to build communications
infrastructure in the world.
Infrastructure has an ethics now
in a lot of cases right now that
ethics is actively suicidal.
We are dealing with suicidal
infrastructure that we're embedded inside
and we cannot become
non suicidal ourselves entirely
because we're still tied into that
infrastructure.
We can only become
in some ways, sensible or human
or humane again.
If we get outside of that infrastructure,
but we can't, because that's what runs
society.
Things in our lives can sometimes
override positional ethics.
And this is where our friend Walter
really comes in, right?
You know, if you have kids,
all of a sudden you realize, Oh,
I will do anything to feed these
kids.
It doesn't matter what I thought my world
used to be.
My world is now different.
And one of the things that's really
interesting about life in a network
society is that we don't just have
a single set of ethics.
We don't just have a single context
anymore.
We may find that we wake up in the
morning and we go to work and we
work on systems of state or corporate
control all day.
And then we go home and we do
other work to undermine the exact
same systems of control
that we were working to build all day and
we are literally fighting ourselves.
That is one of the conditions of the next
century.
So one of the reasons that
institutions are freaking out right now
is because this network that we're on
makes people weird, and actually, I like
this particular network's weird people
in almost like the high medieval sense
they almost make people have a fake
magic to them.
And all of a sudden, one person can
become many people on the network, and
that legibility that several
thousand years of getting a last name
on you people is suddenly gone because
you've just invented 15 new people
today and
10000 if you wrote a script to do it.
And all of a sudden, you know,
the thing that that
power has a grip on has weirded
in that classic.
It's totally full of a fake and
uncontrollable magic, and that's what you
are right now.
That's what you are becoming.
That's what people on the network have
become and
and the network has its own logic.
Or possibly this.
I'm not sure I want to apply that word
here, but but
it's really true that the network rejects
your reality and substitutes their own
those categories, those safe and
understandable and predictable
categories. Those get weirded out too,
and we're all kind of living through this
process. This is all still within our
lifetime.
And and we don't have
a social structure or even a language
to describe the networks that we're
living in right now.
And it's
doing really, really strange
things to institutions.
The internet, in particular,
turns conduits into barriers.
And I do mean that the IRA used
to be the good guys.
Their job from the 1950s was to
standardize all the record players
to make sure that all the record players
would play all the records so
that anyone could get music and to set up
distribution system so that anyone
around the country could get anyone
else's music.
And this was actually a really
interesting and magical thing they did,
because if you were living, you know, in
a Louisiana bayou in 1950,
you didn't hear music from New York
until they fixed this system
and they allowed this this.
They were one of the entities that
allowed this common culture to grow up
in these other options to enter people's
lives all over America.
And they didn't actually really change
what they did for the next 50 years.
But the world did that pivot.
The same one that put you at the heart of
the matter took this conduit
of information and turned it into a
barrier.
And the people who were working these
jobs, the people who lived through this
whole cycle with the RIAA.
I got to say, like, as a journalist, you
have to call them for interviews.
It's like calling crazy people.
And I have a lot of sympathy for them
these days because they didn't do
anything wrong.
The whole world just went cuckoo
from their perspective.
And they're grabbing at reality as
best they can.
In fact, so many of the things
that would have been the awesome, geeky
things to do in the 50s and 60s
have turned from conduits
and generous ways of sharing information
into the barriers, trying to stop the
networks from doing their job better
because they've got those kids to feed.
And they've got a mortgage and what they
were doing the right thing all their
lives. Why did they have to change now?
So
what does it look like on a grand scale
when these these
weird things go on with institutions and
people? Well, some of you be familiar
with this kind of graph.
This is from 1979 to the present
level of global protests.
And you're part of this, I think we all
know is fed by the fact that coordinating
protests is now piss easy compared
to what it was prior to this,
that it's, you know, it's like signing
up for a mass tweeting
and then going somewhere.
And it's something people can do in a
few minutes. It's something, you know,
I the people who set up the
act of protests in Poland
that brought down that legislation
eventually. Weren't people who had been
working on it for years and building
networks and and doing trainings
and so on and so forth.
They're just like, I'm going to start a
Facebook group.
And pretty soon there was 200000 people
in 300 cities crashing a piece of
legislation that was a treaty
that was never even supposed to face
any serious opposition that came
out of nowhere.
And that's one of the one with a Polish
parliament massed up talk about weirding
identity and institutions right there.
This one's a little bit more subtle, but
actually, I think ultimately more
important something has happened since
the 90s certainly took off by the year
2000.
And actually, interestingly, maps pretty
well with that global protest graph
in a by pretty well I mean, in a rough
sense that it has risen on a similar
plane, which is that this
bottom line is is foreign
aid from 1970
to the present.
And that top line is international
remittance and international remittances,
the fancy pants term for sending money
home to your family.
So what's happened here is that
the is that nearly three times
as much money is sent by
immigrants back to their families,
as is is sent to
countries via foreign aid from
governments and possibly other
fundraising institutions.
Why is that important?
Because that's a system of mutual care.
It is again largely
illegible or stepping out of the state.
Some of this actually the number is
probably higher than this because it is
very, very hard to count remittances
that go through informal economies.
A limitation that the people who studied
this recognize, but by their very nature,
they are eligible and they're often
used for remittance by people who are
trying to avoid taxes or avoid
governments that are trying to skim off
the top of the remittance economy.
So again, the network is
making things pretty weird.
So
I first got online in August of 1994,
just before the internet suddenly
became a very different place
for the first of probably the dozen or
two dozen times that that's happened
since then.
And
that culture that I first came in
on was a culture
where we were kind of off in a corner
doing our own thing and.
That September, when all the college
kids came online and then everyone
else started coming online,
all of a sudden we don't live somewhere
off in a corner. Now, all of a sudden
we live right in the middle of
everything,
and everything that we're doing is going
to keep echoing through
history, no matter what we want to do.
One of the things that means is that it
means that we need to learn history.
It means we need to learn our own
history.
If we continue
to ignore
the shaping effect that we have on the
world, we miss
a lot of things.
It means we're going to keep repeating
the same mistakes.
It means we're not going to understand
the victories that we won in the
past.
It means we're not going to understand
the victories that other people won
and see the similarities between the
situations that we're in now
and that some French peasant was in 700
years ago or some Chinese peasant was
in 2000 years ago.
That social change is really,
really critical.
You know, we keep hearing, Oh,
codas, polished code is law laws
code. There's this, there's this, you
know, equivalent.
See, now I think there's something deeper
there as well. I think that
code becomes given
a hundred years culture.
And that's a lot harder to predict.
In some ways, we can look
at a piece of law and
make some guesses about
what effect it's going to have on the
world. It's a lot harder to make the same
set of guesses about what a
cultural object or a thing that will
influence a cultural object is going to
have on the world.
But if we don't start thinking about it,
we're definitely not going to get there.
So one of the things
that we're talking about is trying
to stretch our minds,
stretch out like our conceptions of
history while living, while those
institutions and those institutional
ethics that we're talking about push you
towards thinking in quarters.
Most of culture is currently conducted
on like quarters or maybe
an annual cycle.
But somebody like pointed out to me
recently that they can't right now find
any articles that are making
predictions for 2014.
Our time horizons have gotten so short
that we are too scared to predict next
month.
But we can look back.
We can look back at different points and
and take lessons from them.
Some of the things that we face right now
are unprecedented, as all history
has been, and some of
it is patterns that we can learn from.
And when we step back and look at not
just not just things like
Tindale and more
and the path they traced up to the
Enlightenment.
And again, interestingly, it is almost
we can also look at things like the fall
of the Roman Empire, the rise of paper
money in China.
All these things are things that can help
inform us and make us understand the
technologies that we face today.
But of course, there are limits because
every moment is unprecedented.
And right now, there are so many frickin
people out there.
That's what's so strange about this
moment every second.
Two hundred and seventeen years of
human experience pass on this planet.
Since we've been talking.
It's something close to 500000
years in this in
the course of this talk.
That's the that's the human attention
that is passed from seven billion people.
While we've been standing here, we've
been standing. You've been sitting.
And what I really want to start pushing
on you, pushing you towards
is trying to look at that long time,
try to look at what the world was like
a few hundred years ago and try to
imagine what you want the world to look
like in 100 years,
because that's a question very few of us
can answer at this point.
Not. What do you think it will look like?
What do you want it to look like?
What do you think is right for people
in a hundred years?
How do you hope people that you will
never meet will live?
People are different because of this
network that we've built over the last
30 years,
but they're having to do it on brains
that haven't had a chance to change.
Normally we have, we have decades and
even generations to adjust to these kinds
of change. Currently, we're living
through an age where we have to adjust to
these changes in
a biologically challenging period of
time.
Billions of people, a number
that none of us can conceive.
Not just the ones on the network, but
those touched by the network, touched by
the presence of the network
are affected by what we
as a community have built.
Yes, we built a technology
that lets governments monitor and control
their people. We also built the
technology that lets people escape the
fates of their rulers and cultures hard
for them. And sometimes we build
those things in the same applications.
You have left millions
and perhaps hundreds of millions of
children know the mothers and fathers who
had to leave them in order to feed them
and care for them.
A tradition that goes back many
generations, many generations
into social isolation and loss.
You've taken away the power of economics
and distance to make strangers of
families.
This is what's buried in those dry
remittance figures.
People, families,
families of origin, families
that we create
distance no longer has the same power
over its lives, over our lives
because of the things that we all built
in the last 30 years.
This is what mutual care looks like.
It looks like the faces of people.
It looks like their blood and their
flesh.
And this is what our technology affects,
controls and enables.
You made millions of people care about
people they didn't know existed.
Millions of people they didn't know
existed.
You made not
just distance, but
the time, but the depth of time.
The human record, all of recorded
history.
You made it so present that we can
pluck it out of the air at any moment.
That's what you did in the last 30 years.
That's what you gave.
Close to two billion people on this
planet in the last
30 years.
That's what you're responsible for.
I know that you didn't ask for this job
and you didn't ask for this role in
society.
None of you. Not one of you wants
to think about the many people
that can be affected by one
fucking perfectly normal bug or mistake
in the technology that you built.
And this is one of the reasons we keep
our heads down.
No one became a geek because they wanted
to be the center of political attention
that just happened.
You don't get to choose.
You don't get to choose what era of
history you live in and what that era
wants to do with you.
And this is a moment when it's all up for
grabs. That's what it means to say we're
on a burning planet.
And what it means to say that we don't
have neutral ground is that you're at the
center of that fire.
You said it.
You're one of the people that said it.
You're one of the people that tended and
everything you do.
The changes you make over the next months
and years are going to chime down decades
and centuries and shape the lives of
people you will never know, but
they will know you.
For one thing, your lives are very well
recorded.
At this point, this is where
we are in history, but we're standing
at a conference where we still have to
remind people in the community to eat and
bathe themselves.
It is time for us to up our
game.
Thank you.
So I believe we will be taking questions
at the mics.
And possibly from the internet, I'm not
sure.
By the way, many of the citations that we
use, not all, but many of the citations
that we used in the talk are contained
within these books and essays and so on
and so forth. And together they make a
pretty interesting follow on curriculum
as it were for the concepts we've been
talking about.
Hi, good evening.
Thank you for the presentation.
After the printing
technology came, we saw emancipate
emancipation of the human being,
human rights, end of slavery.
Do you think that could be something
similar happening with a new
man, which is in the Hansman and
also going through women's emancipation
and of digital slavery and
new human rights?
Can I take them?
So interestingly, we saw we saw
slavery as a explicit
condition abolished, but we saw it as an
implicit condition expanded.
So we have various people who end up
essentially living in slave like
conditions. They can't be they can't
be bought or sold well.
In some cases, they almost can be.
But it is.
It's interesting to watch how that
institution changed. And I think
actually, that's a really, really
important point because
this kind of modified human being
this we're all basically cyborgs
of some sort or another at this point,
living on a cyborg planet.
Like if you look at if you look at this
planet, this is not what the planet
naturally looks like.
This is what we have now.
And and I
think that the job of
our generation, especially in the next
generation, is going to be to try
and end the slavery without instantiating
a new, subtler form of slavery
like we did last time.
So this is coming this
these enhancements are coming.
There's nothing we can do about it except
make it positive.
I see ways in which emergent structures
can make this world a much better place.
But I also see ways in which emergent
structures fighting state power
turning violent could make a completely
gray, featureless, terrible
planet where anyone who was different was
instantly destroyed.
I think that's what our network could do
in the worst case.
I'd rather it didn't do that.
OK, thank you.
Laurie Mark of order.
Basically, if you're standing in the
area, either go to ask a question, sit
down or leave no standing around
blocking entrances. Roger Ailes.
Thank you.
And the next question over there,
I not so much a question
as a comment I would like to
encourage, in addition to reading those
books that we need to learn
and remember more about our own history,
including our very recent history.
It disturbs me that there
have been there are books about
cryptographic algorithms, there are books
about early
days of hacking, but I talk to people
younger than myself or, you know, in
their teens and 20s, and
they're from the people I've
talked to. There is an astounding lack
of awareness of, say, like the first
crypto war.
Nobody that I know
of who is significantly
younger than me knows about the Clipper
chip of Cortez or how we
got.
I want I want to open crypto with,
you know, the combination of the
expiration of patents
and some of the other free software
that developed the period of,
say, like 1988 to 1992
as a collected history seems
to be blank.
So let me actually build on.
I find that finally disturbing.
Everybody in the room who has some sort
of computer science degree or related
degree put up your hand.
Now everyone who
keep your hands up now, everyone
who read Claude Shannon
in school, put your hands down.
OK, so all of you are people with six
degrees who didn't read Claude Shannon,
one of the most fundamental voices
in everything you do.
And that's kind of goes to this
interesting point about
about understanding your history.
I think one of the great things you can
do is talk to old people, ask them what
life used to be like, and
I will talk your ear about this off
about this because let's make sure other
people can actually talk
so.
So you talked about the
view of the states, while the state
itself is just some sort of
technology to keep society
of humankind working.
So while
I really enjoyed your talk, I was
thinking whether you have thought about
the possibility
that some
sort of new technologies we are
inventing building may
even supersede state structure
and
do even more fundamental change
how humans interact on the global level.
So while we could
and may replace the state,
I really like roads.
One of the things that we often end
up doing, and especially in the gay
community, we will end up building
technologies, which will they sort of
mostly work
that doesn't cut it for water systems,
that doesn't cut it for a lot of the
stuff that keeps us alive.
I don't think it is unreasonable to start
the project of trying to replace the
state. I definitely don't.
But we need to make sure that we get it
right. Because if you fuck that one up
too badly, things get really, really
horrific.
I completely agree.
But I was just
I thought this talk was a bit focused
on the state. While the state for me is
just another technology and
the state is the technology that has kept
most humans alive for most
recorded history.
So it's reasonable to spend a certain
amount of time on it.
Jeff, thank you.
Thank you for a brilliant talk,
basically, for me, it boils down
to this. So instead of a question, people
don't be scared.
Be prepared. Be prepared.
Don't be predictable.
Okay, questions are short sentences
with a question mark, and could you
please write down some of
the people who are watching this team are
complaining about the older quality
because of the noise of people answering
and leaving?
So either come and take a seat, be quiet
or just leave. Thank you.
Oh, and the next question we have one
last question.
Oh, that.
Yes. Yeah. Actually, I am
afraid. I'm very, very afraid
because I feel like we're walking on
a very, very thin line because the
actions that we take could
easily tip whatever
will happen in what we do in the
favor of what we want or what we don't
want. And I feel like even when I look
backwards in history,
it's never been like this that that I
basically when I try to create something
I might later wake up in, like a
scene of a dystopian movie where all
I have created ends up destroying all
that I love.
So how can I not be afraid?
So I think that was always true.
Yes, but you were going to be dead before
it happened.
That's awesome.
I want to tell you
quickly about Fritz Haber.
Fritz, however, is a guy who
dedicated his life to inventing as
many horrific chemical weapons as he
could.
And along the way, he worked out nitrogen
fixing, which is
why we have all these people.
And and what's really interesting about
that to me?
Things like Fritz hovers many people.
I keep in mind when I think to some
degree, we have to let go of the fear
because we will never actually control
the good or ill we do in the world.
We can nudge, we can push, we can hope.
But at the end, if the most
amazing boon
to human life came from a guy
who was trying to invent chemical
weapons, we really
no one's driving this crazy train.
OK, thank you very much.
That was it.