1 00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:12,533 *rc3 preroll music* 2 00:00:12,533 --> 00:00:17,580 Herald: All right, our next talk is Cory Doctorow, who I think needs very little 3 00:00:17,580 --> 00:00:21,820 introduction in this situation. But for those who don't know him: he's an 4 00:00:21,820 --> 00:00:24,741 activist, he's a science fiction author, and I think he can be 5 00:00:24,741 --> 00:00:28,715 described as the King of Bloggers. I remember him appearing on XKCD 6 00:00:28,715 --> 00:00:34,960 with a cape back in the good old days. So, Cory, please take it away. 7 00:00:34,960 --> 00:00:38,766 Cory Doctorow: I don't know how I feel about being a king, given 8 00:00:38,766 --> 00:00:41,846 given that I'm wearing a guillotine badge. 9 00:00:41,846 --> 00:00:44,135 Perhaps, like, party secretary. 10 00:00:44,135 --> 00:00:47,644 You have my permission to take my picture. 11 00:00:47,644 --> 00:00:53,873 So I'm going to I'm going to talk today about technology and optimism 12 00:00:53,873 --> 00:00:57,649 and where it comes from and where it needs to go. 13 00:00:57,649 --> 00:00:59,460 And I want to start by… 14 00:00:59,460 --> 00:01:04,753 well, I want to start by putting on my slides. So let's do that. 15 00:01:04,753 --> 00:01:10,323 I want to start by busting a myth, the myth of the blind techno optimist. 16 00:01:10,323 --> 00:01:16,531 You've probably encountered the story, the story that, you know, once upon a time, 17 00:01:16,531 --> 00:01:20,172 there were a bunch o' nerds who had discovered the Internet, 18 00:01:20,172 --> 00:01:23,593 and thought that if we just gave everyone the Internet, everything would be fine. 19 00:01:23,593 --> 00:01:26,422 And that the only thing that they needed to work on 20 00:01:26,422 --> 00:01:28,865 was making sure everyone got connected and everything else would 21 00:01:28,865 --> 00:01:33,649 take care of itself. And now those idiots have led us into this crazy, terrible, 22 00:01:33,649 --> 00:01:38,445 dystopian world. And why didn't they foresee all this trouble? And the way that 23 00:01:38,445 --> 00:01:42,950 you know that this blind technological optimism is a myth is that people don't go 24 00:01:42,950 --> 00:01:46,700 out and start organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation because 25 00:01:46,700 --> 00:01:50,430 they think that everything is going to be fine in the end. You know, if there's a 26 00:01:50,430 --> 00:01:57,360 motto that characterizes those early technological optimists, it's not that 27 00:01:57,360 --> 00:02:01,520 everything is going to be great. It's that everything will be great if we don't screw 28 00:02:01,520 --> 00:02:06,814 it up. And if we do screw it up, it's going to be really, really terrible. Now, 29 00:02:06,814 --> 00:02:12,409 before computing was the source of regular stock bubbles, it was just a passion. It 30 00:02:12,409 --> 00:02:18,482 was driven not by dreams of riches, but by programmers who are able to make stuff 31 00:02:18,482 --> 00:02:24,709 happen. If you think about what the the journey of a programmer is, it's that 32 00:02:24,709 --> 00:02:31,310 first you figure out how to express your will with sufficient precision that your 33 00:02:31,310 --> 00:02:37,129 computer then enacts your will, and enacts it tirelessly, perfectly… 34 00:02:37,129 --> 00:02:41,939 [stream lost] 35 00:02:41,939 --> 00:02:44,709 …computer is connected to a network, you 36 00:02:44,709 --> 00:02:48,489 can project your will around the world. You can take the thing 37 00:02:48,489 --> 00:02:52,521 that you've built, this self executing recipe, and you can give it to 38 00:02:52,521 --> 00:02:56,602 someone else, and they can execute it as well. It's, and… But it's better than a 39 00:02:56,602 --> 00:03:00,808 recipe, right? You might have a recipe for your grandmother's brownies. And when you 40 00:03:00,808 --> 00:03:05,000 send it to someone else, they still have to follow the recipe. But a program is 41 00:03:05,000 --> 00:03:08,932 like a self executing recipe. It's like a machine that just makes your grandmother's 42 00:03:08,932 --> 00:03:13,554 brownies appear in every household in the world if they just download your code and 43 00:03:13,554 --> 00:03:17,549 run it. And of course, as you get on the network and you find these people to share 44 00:03:17,549 --> 00:03:21,833 your code with, you're finding the people as well. You're finding community… 45 00:03:21,833 --> 00:03:45,421 [stream lost] 46 00:03:45,421 --> 00:04:41,562 *chimes* 47 00:04:41,562 --> 00:04:43,432 Herald 2: But, well… 48 00:04:43,432 --> 00:05:21,011 *chimes* 49 00:05:21,011 --> 00:05:26,246 But not in, yeah, that large scale, to be honest. 50 00:05:26,246 --> 00:05:32,121 Tried around quite a few things, and had a little 51 00:05:32,121 --> 00:05:37,468 little online session for the Towel Day and for all these things. We had the 52 00:05:37,468 --> 00:05:45,661 Easterhegg, the DiVOC, and yeah. We're working on it to get the connection back. 53 00:05:45,661 --> 00:05:52,244 So, yeah. 54 00:05:52,244 --> 00:05:54,639 CD: …giant, fat, phonebook-sized… 55 00:05:54,639 --> 00:05:56,565 H2: OK, I can hear the voice CD: …bill that they would get 56 00:05:56,565 --> 00:06:00,899 every month for all the things that they did, and so they they 57 00:06:00,899 --> 00:06:06,985 they ran this whole system in the shadows. And the last thing they wanted was for 58 00:06:06,985 --> 00:06:09,489 for what they were doing to come to the attention of their bosses. 59 00:06:09,489 --> 00:06:12,610 And so they had a whole bunch of rules about what you could and couldn't create. 60 00:06:12,610 --> 00:06:15,490 They especially didn't want any sex, and they didn't want anyone 61 00:06:15,490 --> 00:06:20,477 explaining how to make bombs on Usenet. And so there would be votes about 62 00:06:20,477 --> 00:06:23,106 what news, new newsgroup could be created. 63 00:06:23,106 --> 00:06:27,043 But every now & again, the backbone cabal, which is what they called themselves… 64 00:06:27,043 --> 00:06:32,688 H2: So we do have a sound of Mr. Doctorow here 65 00:06:32,688 --> 00:06:38,699 So I think it shouldn't, shouldn't be too much of a of time until we get the 66 00:06:38,699 --> 00:06:41,800 stream back. CD: …about cooking should go under the 67 00:06:41,800 --> 00:06:45,068 talk hierarchy, and not under the rec hierarchy. 68 00:06:45,068 --> 00:06:51,421 And John Gilmore and other people who were in his company decided to set up 69 00:06:51,421 --> 00:06:56,289 their own alternative version of Usenet called the alt. hierarchy specifically 70 00:06:56,289 --> 00:07:00,467 to allow for a discussion of cooking wherever the hell they wanted it. 71 00:07:00,467 --> 00:07:04,472 To exercise that little quantum of self-determination. And very quickly, 72 00:07:04,472 --> 00:07:10,938 the alt. hierarchy grew until it was larger than all of Usenet put together. 73 00:07:10,938 --> 00:07:16,493 So the worst nightmares of those early digital activists have come to pass. 74 00:07:16,493 --> 00:07:19,942 We have total penetration of technology. 75 00:07:19,942 --> 00:07:25,636 There is centralization, surveillance, and manipulation of all of our technology, 76 00:07:25,636 --> 00:07:33,189 everywhere. And the question that I think is a valid one to ask is how were we dealt 77 00:07:33,189 --> 00:07:39,137 such a stinging defeat? How did it come to pass that people who foresaw this danger, 78 00:07:39,137 --> 00:07:45,389 and worked to make things great and not screw them up, still arrived at this 79 00:07:45,389 --> 00:07:49,740 moment where the Internet consists of five giant websites filled with screenshots of 80 00:07:49,740 --> 00:07:54,253 text from the other four. That's a phrase from Tom Eastman, a software developer 81 00:07:54,253 --> 00:07:59,650 in in New Zealand. And this is where I get to my thesis about about what's just 82 00:07:59,650 --> 00:08:02,680 happened and what needs to happen next, because there is a story about 83 00:08:02,680 --> 00:08:08,129 technologists that says that the blind spot was dystopia, that technologists just 84 00:08:08,129 --> 00:08:11,730 failed to understand that all of this stuff could go horribly wrong. 85 00:08:11,730 --> 00:08:14,350 And they really understood how –whoops– 86 00:08:14,350 --> 00:08:17,975 They really understood how wrong it could go. The 87 00:08:17,975 --> 00:08:21,960 The thing that technologists failed to understand was the relationship of 88 00:08:21,960 --> 00:08:28,060 monopolism to technology and the economy as it was emerging in the early days of 89 00:08:28,060 --> 00:08:33,340 the technology revolution. So if you think about the early days of the commercial 90 00:08:33,340 --> 00:08:37,669 Internet and commercial technology, personal computing and so on, it was very 91 00:08:37,669 --> 00:08:42,760 dynamic. Companies that were giants one day ended up being acquired by upstarts 92 00:08:42,760 --> 00:08:49,210 the next day. And that dynamism was not driven solely by technology, but also by 93 00:08:49,210 --> 00:08:54,630 US antitrust or anti-monopoly enforcers. So I want you to think about what the 94 00:08:54,630 --> 00:08:59,208 experience of a kid in the United States in the 1980s would have been like if 95 00:08:59,208 --> 00:09:04,611 you were using technology. So you might have gotten your Apple II+ in say, 1980 or 96 00:09:04,611 --> 00:09:11,910 1981. In 1982 the modem that came with it could suddenly dial all kinds of services 97 00:09:11,910 --> 00:09:18,079 all around America at a fraction of the cost that it used to run that because AT&T 98 00:09:18,079 --> 00:09:22,630 had been broken up, and long distance charges fell through the floor. And then 99 00:09:22,630 --> 00:09:27,610 in 1984, you might have replaced that Apple II+ with an IBM PC, but it's more 100 00:09:27,610 --> 00:09:33,700 likely that you might have replaced it with an IBM PC clone. Whichever one you 101 00:09:33,700 --> 00:09:39,660 replaced it with, it was probably running an operating system from this guy, the guy 102 00:09:39,660 --> 00:09:43,350 who wrote this letter. Bill Gates. The guy who started this tiny little company 103 00:09:43,350 --> 00:09:48,440 called Microsoft. And the reason that the IBM PC was running code from this little 104 00:09:48,440 --> 00:09:52,944 startup and not from IBM itself was not because IBM didn't know how to write code. 105 00:09:52,944 --> 00:09:57,634 IBM was really good at writing code. They were arguably too good at writing code. 106 00:09:57,634 --> 00:10:04,320 And for 12 years prior to the creation of the PC, IBM had been in antitrust hell 107 00:10:04,320 --> 00:10:09,131 with the Department of Justice in which they were sued and sued and sued. And 108 00:10:09,131 --> 00:10:14,821 every year of that 12 year lawsuit, IBM spent more on its lawyers than the entire 109 00:10:14,821 --> 00:10:19,861 US Department of Justice spent on all the lawyers pursuing all antitrust action. And 110 00:10:19,861 --> 00:10:24,620 one of the things that the Department of Justice was really adamant about was that 111 00:10:24,620 --> 00:10:28,847 if you made hardware, you shouldn't try to monopolize the software for it. And so 112 00:10:28,847 --> 00:10:33,564 even though eventually IBM prevailed–the case was dropped against it–the last thing 113 00:10:33,564 --> 00:10:38,315 they wanted was to get in trouble with the DOJ again. And so after this 12 year 114 00:10:38,315 --> 00:10:42,209 process, when they made their first PC, they decided not to try and make the 115 00:10:42,209 --> 00:10:45,870 operating system for it. Instead, they tapped Bill Gates to make an operating 116 00:10:45,870 --> 00:10:50,916 system for it. And then Tom Jennings, the guy who created FidoNet, which was the 117 00:10:50,916 --> 00:10:55,210 biggest competitor we had to Usenet. It was a non-Internet-based distributed 118 00:10:55,210 --> 00:10:59,850 message board system. Tom Jennings, who is a virtuoso hardware engineer who lives a 119 00:10:59,850 --> 00:11:05,550 few kilometers from my home here in Los Angeles, he was tapped by a company called 120 00:11:05,550 --> 00:11:11,180 Phoenix that asked him to reverse engineer IBM's ROMs, and he reverse engineered the 121 00:11:11,180 --> 00:11:17,330 PC ROM, produced a specification that was used as the basis for a new clone ROM, and 122 00:11:17,330 --> 00:11:22,600 that clone ROM was sold to PC vendors all over the world. And it's how we got 123 00:11:22,600 --> 00:11:27,370 Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other PC vendors that might have sold you that 124 00:11:27,370 --> 00:11:33,540 IBM PC clone in 1984 running an operating system that IBM hadn't made, on phone 125 00:11:33,540 --> 00:11:39,709 lines that had been broken up from AT&T. And then in 1992, you might have noticed 126 00:11:39,709 --> 00:11:45,579 that that little company, Microsoft, had grown to be a monopolist itself with 95% 127 00:11:45,579 --> 00:11:49,540 of the operating system market. And so in came the Department of Justice, and the 128 00:11:49,540 --> 00:11:53,480 Department of Justice spent the next 7 years dragging Microsoft up and down that 129 00:11:53,480 --> 00:11:59,310 same gravel road that they had dragged IBM up and down for 12 years. And even though 130 00:11:59,310 --> 00:12:04,300 Microsoft got away, the way IBM had, their behavior was tamed, too, because when a 131 00:12:04,300 --> 00:12:10,009 couple of guys in a Stanford lab, Larry and Sergei, named their new search engine 132 00:12:10,009 --> 00:12:15,480 after the largest number they could think of, a one followed by 100 zeros, a google, 133 00:12:15,480 --> 00:12:20,310 Microsoft decided not to do to them what they had done to Netscape because they had 134 00:12:20,310 --> 00:12:24,360 seen what the Department of Justice does to you if you do that to your nascent 135 00:12:24,360 --> 00:12:32,060 competitors. And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect 136 00:12:32,060 --> 00:12:37,050 market, a market where you could make your products with low capital, just with the 137 00:12:37,050 --> 00:12:42,360 sweat of your own mind, by writing code. That you could access the global audience 138 00:12:42,360 --> 00:12:48,513 of everyone who might want to run that code over a low cost universal network. 139 00:12:48,513 --> 00:12:53,239 And that that audience could switch to your product at a very low cost, because 140 00:12:53,239 --> 00:12:59,067 you could always write the code that it would take to to port the old data formats 141 00:12:59,067 --> 00:13:04,790 and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a market where the 142 00:13:04,790 --> 00:13:10,297 best ideas would turn into companies that would find customers and change the world. 143 00:13:10,297 --> 00:13:14,817 But what we didn't realize, what we were naive about in those halcyon days of the 144 00:13:14,817 --> 00:13:19,640 early Internet, was that antimonopoly law, the antimonopoly law that had made things 145 00:13:19,640 --> 00:13:24,930 so robust and dynamic that had given everyone who who had access to a computer 146 00:13:24,930 --> 00:13:30,279 a chance to try and make a dent in the universe, that that antitrust law had been 147 00:13:30,279 --> 00:13:35,676 shot in the guts in 1982, and was bleeding out. And it's all thanks to this guy, 148 00:13:35,676 --> 00:13:41,670 Robert Bork. Robert Bork is kind of an obscure figure for for most people these 149 00:13:41,670 --> 00:13:44,490 days. Although I said that on Twitter the other day and a bunch of people in their 150 00:13:44,490 --> 00:13:48,310 50s said, "Oh, I know who Robert Bork is." But I think if you're not an American 151 00:13:48,310 --> 00:13:51,990 in your 50s or a certain kind of weirdo conservative activist, you've probably 152 00:13:51,990 --> 00:13:56,970 never heard of this guy. Robert Bork was Richard Nixon's solicitor general and he 153 00:13:56,970 --> 00:14:02,319 committed crimes for Richard Nixon. And they were so egregious that when Ronald 154 00:14:02,319 --> 00:14:07,230 Reagan tried to appoint him to the US Supreme Court, the Senate decided not to 155 00:14:07,230 --> 00:14:12,529 confirm him because he was too grimy for the US Supreme Court. And so instead, he 156 00:14:12,529 --> 00:14:18,660 became a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan and he created a new theory about 157 00:14:18,660 --> 00:14:24,399 when monopoly laws should be enforced, a theory he called the consumer harm theory. 158 00:14:24,399 --> 00:14:29,770 The consumer harm theory says that we don't hate monopolies because monopolies 159 00:14:29,770 --> 00:14:35,140 are bad. We only hate monopolies because they sometimes raise prices, and so long 160 00:14:35,140 --> 00:14:39,930 as a company that has a monopoly isn't immediately raising prices after they 161 00:14:39,930 --> 00:14:44,940 acquire that monopoly, it's OK to let the monopoly form and to let the monopoly 162 00:14:44,940 --> 00:14:49,980 fester. And this idea was incredibly popular, and not just with Ronald Reagan. 163 00:14:49,980 --> 00:14:54,970 Every one of the neoliberal leaders of the Reagan era, from Helmut Kohl to Margaret 164 00:14:54,970 --> 00:15:01,713 Thatcher to Brian Mulroney to Augusto Pinochet, took up the ideas of Robert Bork 165 00:15:01,713 --> 00:15:05,748 and said that, from now on, we are not going to get rid of our monopolies. From 166 00:15:05,748 --> 00:15:09,400 now on, we're going to encourage the growth of monopolies on the grounds that 167 00:15:09,400 --> 00:15:14,470 they are efficient and only shut them down if we can prove that they've used their 168 00:15:14,470 --> 00:15:20,020 monopoly to raise prices. Now, this idea is a stupid idea, but it's incredibly 169 00:15:20,020 --> 00:15:23,579 popular for rich people, because rich people like the idea that they could buy 170 00:15:23,579 --> 00:15:28,000 shares in companies that could establish monopolies. And those rich people funded 171 00:15:28,000 --> 00:15:33,379 Robert Bork. They created, among other things, a series of junkets called 172 00:15:33,379 --> 00:15:36,064 The Manne Seminars. M-A-N-N-E 173 00:15:36,064 --> 00:15:39,924 The Manne seminars are continuing educational seminars for US 174 00:15:39,924 --> 00:15:44,620 federal judges in Florida, where you fly to Florida, stay in a luxury hotel, and 175 00:15:44,620 --> 00:15:49,650 get lectured on the brilliance of Robert Bork. 40% of US federal judges have been 176 00:15:49,650 --> 00:15:53,500 through the Manne seminars. Unsurprisingly, those judges are far less 177 00:15:53,500 --> 00:15:59,750 likely to punish monopolistic conduct. The people who like Robert Bork funded law 178 00:15:59,750 --> 00:16:05,980 schools and economics departments and journals. And they they turned the idea of 179 00:16:05,980 --> 00:16:11,430 consumer harm into a kind of global doctrine that has now taken over every 180 00:16:11,430 --> 00:16:16,509 single regulator in the West. China has a slightly different vision of it, as does 181 00:16:16,509 --> 00:16:21,139 Russia. But the European Union, Canada, the US, most of Central and South America 182 00:16:21,139 --> 00:16:26,750 have all adopted these rules. I don't know to what extent these rules have penetrated 183 00:16:26,750 --> 00:16:33,180 the African markets. And so, and and and consumer harm, this idea that monopolies 184 00:16:33,180 --> 00:16:37,180 should only be shut down if you can show that they're using monopolism to raise 185 00:16:37,180 --> 00:16:41,209 prices, is incredibly hard to prove. In fact, you could basically call it 186 00:16:41,209 --> 00:16:45,880 impossible to prove. And as a result, anti-competitive conduct became so 187 00:16:45,880 --> 00:16:51,261 routine, that we no longer think of it as unusual. Until the Bork era, here are some 188 00:16:51,261 --> 00:16:55,040 of the things that were considered violations of antitrust law and that would 189 00:16:55,040 --> 00:17:00,860 have attracted scrutiny from a regulator: merging with a major competitor, acquiring 190 00:17:00,860 --> 00:17:05,439 a small competitor, or creating a vertical monopoly where you own different parts of 191 00:17:05,439 --> 00:17:11,700 the supply chain, like Google buying an ad tech company. Now, the story of how tech 192 00:17:11,700 --> 00:17:17,820 got monopolized leans hard not on Robert Bork, but on all these exotic ideas like 193 00:17:17,820 --> 00:17:22,330 network effects. The idea that if you if you have one fax machine, it's useless and 194 00:17:22,330 --> 00:17:26,870 two are very useful and three are twice as useful and four is twice as useful again, 195 00:17:26,870 --> 00:17:30,410 and that once a tech company starts to become successful, the network effects 196 00:17:30,410 --> 00:17:35,090 snowball and you will never dethrone it. Despite the fact that we no longer have 197 00:17:35,090 --> 00:17:41,810 Friendster or AltaVista or Amigas or any of these other potential purveyors of 198 00:17:41,810 --> 00:17:48,440 network effects. A close look at how tech companies grew does not show that network 199 00:17:48,440 --> 00:17:53,254 effects is what led to that growth. Instead, you see predatory conduct. 200 00:17:53,254 --> 00:17:58,470 Moneyball. Using access to the capital markets to raise gigantic amounts of money 201 00:17:58,470 --> 00:18:02,591 and buy or merge with all of your competitors as the means by which they 202 00:18:02,591 --> 00:18:06,618 grew. And as an example of this, I want you to think about Google for a minute. So 203 00:18:06,618 --> 00:18:10,198 Google is a company that has made exactly one and a half successful in-house 204 00:18:10,198 --> 00:18:14,494 products. They made a really good search engine and a pretty good Hotmail clone. 205 00:18:14,494 --> 00:18:20,100 Everything else that they've made in-house died. This is just a small sample of the 206 00:18:20,100 --> 00:18:23,135 Google product graveyard. And everything that they've done that's 207 00:18:23,135 --> 00:18:31,161 successful–Android, ad tech, YouTube, and so on–all of these are companies that they 208 00:18:31,161 --> 00:18:37,440 acquired from someone else. So this is not a company that has a natural monopoly due 209 00:18:37,440 --> 00:18:43,290 to a network effect. This is a company that has an unnatural monopoly due to 210 00:18:43,290 --> 00:18:48,913 predatory conduct. Now, network effects are indeed real. They are a thing. And you 211 00:18:48,913 --> 00:18:52,552 can see them exemplified pretty well with the Bell System. This was what we called 212 00:18:52,552 --> 00:18:58,609 AT&T in the US before it was broken up in the 1980's. But with with net with tech, 213 00:18:58,609 --> 00:19:02,259 network effects are very different from other kinds of industries. You think of 214 00:19:02,259 --> 00:19:07,631 the railroad industry where once you have rails that run from one place to another, 215 00:19:07,631 --> 00:19:13,690 it doesn't make any sense to to put in a second set of rails. And so the custom 216 00:19:13,690 --> 00:19:17,799 accrues to the rail vendor, which can add more rails to more destinations. And 217 00:19:17,799 --> 00:19:21,246 before long, you have these natural monopolies emerging in rail. But that's 218 00:19:21,246 --> 00:19:25,550 not how it works with technology. And the reason is that technology has 219 00:19:25,550 --> 00:19:31,410 interoperability. So built into our general purpose computers and our general 220 00:19:31,410 --> 00:19:36,350 purpose network is the ability to run any program provided you can express it in 221 00:19:36,350 --> 00:19:41,610 symbolic logic and to interface any new network service with any existing network 222 00:19:41,610 --> 00:19:45,299 service. Now, oftentimes that interoperability is deliberate and 223 00:19:45,299 --> 00:19:50,240 engineered. Someone will go to a standards body like the W3C and decide on what an 224 00:19:50,240 --> 00:19:55,972 HTTP header looks like. But just as often, that interoperability is adversarial. That 225 00:19:55,972 --> 00:20:01,360 interoperability is a form of competitive compatibility, where a new company makes a 226 00:20:01,360 --> 00:20:05,602 product that plugs into an existing product or service without permission, 227 00:20:05,602 --> 00:20:09,604 against the wishes of the people who made the existing product or service. Like Tom 228 00:20:09,604 --> 00:20:15,350 Jennings making his IBM PC ROMs. And what happens then is that the walled garden of 229 00:20:15,350 --> 00:20:19,690 the company that came before becomes a feedlot in which all of the customers have 230 00:20:19,690 --> 00:20:24,917 been handily penned in, so that the new market entrant can go over and choose 231 00:20:24,917 --> 00:20:30,190 whichever ones they want and devour them in a smorgasbord. So to think about how 232 00:20:30,190 --> 00:20:36,440 this worked with the Bell System, the Bell System originally had not just a monopoly 233 00:20:36,440 --> 00:20:41,156 over the wires, but a monopoly over the things that connected to the wires. It was 234 00:20:41,156 --> 00:20:47,720 against the law to connect a phone, or a phone-like device, or even a thing that 235 00:20:47,720 --> 00:20:52,940 clicked on to a phone, to a phone that came from the Bell System or to a jack 236 00:20:52,940 --> 00:20:57,636 that the Bell System had installed. And they argued that because they were a 237 00:20:57,636 --> 00:21:01,758 monopolist, they were part of America's national security and safety apparatus, 238 00:21:01,758 --> 00:21:06,150 and that allowing third parties to connect things to their network would result in 239 00:21:06,150 --> 00:21:10,217 the network being made unreliable and therefore America being made insecure and 240 00:21:10,217 --> 00:21:15,915 unsafe. But they didn't use this power just to keep the network operational. They 241 00:21:15,915 --> 00:21:20,420 used this power to extract monopoly rents, to make money by screwing over their 242 00:21:20,420 --> 00:21:25,460 customers, by preventing new market entrants. So, for example, to see where 243 00:21:25,460 --> 00:21:30,030 how bad this got, you can look at where it broke down. The first time that this 244 00:21:30,030 --> 00:21:34,971 system broke down was when AT&T sued a competitor called Hush-A-Phone. 245 00:21:34,971 --> 00:21:39,937 And Hush-A-Phone was a plastic cup that snapped over the mouthpiece of your Bell 246 00:21:39,937 --> 00:21:44,969 phone so that, when you were speaking, your voice would be muffled, and people 247 00:21:44,969 --> 00:21:49,249 who are in the same room as you would find it hard to listen in on your conversation. 248 00:21:49,249 --> 00:21:54,699 And AT&T argued that the Hush-A-Phone, because it was mechanically coupled to the 249 00:21:54,699 --> 00:21:59,170 Bell System, endangered the integrity of the Bell System. And their regulator told 250 00:21:59,170 --> 00:22:03,833 them to go pound sand. They said, no, this doesn't endanger the system, get used to 251 00:22:03,833 --> 00:22:06,860 it, people can connect things to their phones. And that's when they lost 252 00:22:06,860 --> 00:22:10,961 mechanical coupling prohibitions. And then they went after another company called 253 00:22:10,961 --> 00:22:16,980 Carterfone. And Carterfone made a walkie talkie that plugged into a regular RJ11 254 00:22:16,980 --> 00:22:21,790 jack that you could connect your phone to. And it was for people who worked on 255 00:22:21,790 --> 00:22:26,235 ranches and farms so that they could they could clip a walkie talkie onto their belt 256 00:22:26,235 --> 00:22:29,852 and go out and work in the barn or ride out on the range, and still take their 257 00:22:29,852 --> 00:22:35,930 phone calls. And AT&T argued that by electrically coupling devices to the Bell 258 00:22:35,930 --> 00:22:41,350 System that they were violating AT&T's monopoly and endangering America. And 259 00:22:41,350 --> 00:22:46,320 again, their regulator told them that that was not a valid reason, and they lost the 260 00:22:46,320 --> 00:22:49,820 ability to block electrical electrical coupling. And this is where we see the 261 00:22:49,820 --> 00:22:53,570 growth of everything from modems to answering machines and all of the other 262 00:22:53,570 --> 00:22:58,750 devices that eventually plugged into the Bell System. So interoperability can turn 263 00:22:58,750 --> 00:23:03,580 network effects on their head. And interoperability was really key to the 264 00:23:03,580 --> 00:23:05,667 growth of the tech monopolists today. 265 00:23:05,667 --> 00:23:08,847 So think about the iWork suite and its history 266 00:23:08,847 --> 00:23:13,590 Before the iWork suite came about, Apple was in really serious trouble 267 00:23:13,590 --> 00:23:18,272 in enterprise networks. If you ran a business, chances are most of the 268 00:23:18,272 --> 00:23:23,336 computers in your network were PCs, but maybe the designer or an executive who had 269 00:23:23,336 --> 00:23:27,646 the right to decide what kind of computer they would use was would be running a Mac. 270 00:23:27,646 --> 00:23:33,650 And the way that that Microsoft punished you for running that Macintosh in the 271 00:23:33,650 --> 00:23:38,870 Microsoft environment was by dragging their heels on updating the Microsoft 272 00:23:38,870 --> 00:23:44,140 Office suite for the Mac. And so Macs became this kind of cursed zone, where if 273 00:23:44,140 --> 00:23:49,100 someone were to send a Word file or an Excel file to a Mac, and that file was 274 00:23:49,100 --> 00:23:53,240 then opened and saved again, it would never be openable again on any computer 275 00:23:53,240 --> 00:23:57,701 anywhere in the world. It would be irretrievably corrupted. And Bill Gates 276 00:23:57,701 --> 00:24:03,050 did not fix this because Steve Jobs went to him and asked him pretty please to make 277 00:24:03,050 --> 00:24:07,480 a better Microsoft Office suite for the Mac. Instead, Steve Jobs got a bunch of 278 00:24:07,480 --> 00:24:12,740 engineers to reverse engineer the the file formats. And then they produced iWork, 279 00:24:12,740 --> 00:24:18,571 whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are used to read and write Office files perfectly. 280 00:24:18,571 --> 00:24:23,496 And very quickly, they were able to colonize the Microsoft Office environment, 281 00:24:23,496 --> 00:24:28,785 running ads like the Switch ads, where they said, well, you may have hesitated to 282 00:24:28,785 --> 00:24:33,589 give up your Windows PC because all of your files are stuck in there. 283 00:24:33,589 --> 00:24:37,255 But what if I told you that you could read and write all the files ever 284 00:24:37,255 --> 00:24:40,757 created with a Windows system, and you could do it from a Mac 285 00:24:40,757 --> 00:24:44,676 by running one piece of competitive compatibility software, of software 286 00:24:44,676 --> 00:24:48,463 that was adversarially interoperable with the Microsoft ecosystem? 287 00:24:48,463 --> 00:24:52,329 And that is what rescued the Mac from the scrap heap of history. 288 00:24:52,329 --> 00:24:57,160 And it wasn't just software, it was also hardware. In the early 1990's 289 00:24:57,160 --> 00:25:03,120 Lexmark was the–or rather the late 1990s–Lexmark was the printer 290 00:25:03,120 --> 00:25:09,310 division of IBM, the not very well reformed monopolist, and Lexmark used 291 00:25:09,310 --> 00:25:13,970 little microchips to stop people from refilling their laser toner cartridges. 292 00:25:13,970 --> 00:25:17,483 And a company called Static Controls, a little Taiwanese company, reverse 293 00:25:17,483 --> 00:25:21,834 engineered that microchip. It only held a 12 byte program, so it wasn't hard. 294 00:25:21,834 --> 00:25:26,442 And they made new chips that would allow you to refill your cartridge. Lexmark lost 295 00:25:26,442 --> 00:25:30,710 their lawsuit against Static Controls. And so now Static Controls had this huge 296 00:25:30,710 --> 00:25:35,526 installed user base of people who are desperate for cheap toner cartridges. And 297 00:25:35,526 --> 00:25:39,790 instead of having a network advantage, Lexmark now had a network disadvantage. 298 00:25:39,790 --> 00:25:46,073 Today, Lexmark is a division of the company that owns Static Controls. 299 00:25:46,073 --> 00:25:51,990 And it's not, of course, hardware also. It's also network services. When Facebook first 300 00:25:51,990 --> 00:25:55,850 got off the ground, Mark Zuckerberg had a really serious problem, which is that 301 00:25:55,850 --> 00:26:00,304 everyone who wanted to use social media already was on the dominant social media 302 00:26:00,304 --> 00:26:04,469 platform, a company called MySpace that was owned by the world's most rapacious, 303 00:26:04,469 --> 00:26:09,652 vicious billionaire, Rupert Murdoch. And again, Zuck did not go to Rupert and say, 304 00:26:09,652 --> 00:26:14,042 please allow your users to talk to my users because people want to use Facebook, 305 00:26:14,042 --> 00:26:17,520 but they don't want to leave their friends behind. Instead, what they did was they 306 00:26:17,520 --> 00:26:22,285 made a bot and you give that bought your login credentials, and it would go to 307 00:26:22,285 --> 00:26:26,690 MySpace and scrape the waiting messages that were there for you and put them in 308 00:26:26,690 --> 00:26:28,884 your Facebook inbox, and you could reply to them, and 309 00:26:28,884 --> 00:26:32,124 it would pilot them back out to MySpace. 310 00:26:32,124 --> 00:26:38,272 Now, all of this led to a very dynamic system that completely changed the 311 00:26:38,272 --> 00:26:42,540 way that we interacted with technology. But all of this has gone the way of the 312 00:26:42,540 --> 00:26:47,738 dodo. And the reason for that is that as these companies acquired new monopolies, 313 00:26:47,738 --> 00:26:54,505 they diverted their monopoly rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility. 314 00:26:54,505 --> 00:27:01,322 So you may remember the urgent fight over software patents. The growth of software 315 00:27:01,322 --> 00:27:06,420 copyrights. The ongoing problem of anti- circumvention rules that make it illegal 316 00:27:06,420 --> 00:27:11,378 to break DRM, most recently seen in the shutdown of youtube-dl. 317 00:27:11,378 --> 00:27:13,794 Enforceable terms of service. 318 00:27:13,794 --> 00:27:17,029 Facebook has just used its terms of service to try and shut down 319 00:27:17,029 --> 00:27:21,970 Ad Observatory, an academic project that tracks Facebook's compliance with its own 320 00:27:21,970 --> 00:27:27,230 policies on political paid disinformation. And they've said that because this service 321 00:27:27,230 --> 00:27:31,210 violates their terms of service, it's illegal. Never mind that Facebook had to 322 00:27:31,210 --> 00:27:34,550 violate MySpace's terms of service to gain its ascendancy. 323 00:27:34,550 --> 00:27:39,496 And then new rights that are purchased with very expensive lawsuits. 324 00:27:39,496 --> 00:27:42,782 So today we have the Google-Oracle lawsuit 325 00:27:42,782 --> 00:27:46,050 going through the Supreme Court in the United States. That might 326 00:27:46,050 --> 00:27:52,394 create a new copyright over APIs. Now, all of these things–patents, copyrights, 327 00:27:52,394 --> 00:27:56,463 anti-circumvention, terms of service, novel copyrights–they trade under the 328 00:27:56,463 --> 00:28:02,311 name intellectual property. And if you're familiar with the phrase intellectual 329 00:28:02,311 --> 00:28:07,179 property, you'll know that free culture activists hate this term. In fact, when 330 00:28:07,179 --> 00:28:09,160 you ask them what we should call these things… 331 00:28:09,160 --> 00:28:12,327 Sorry, there's my software patents slide, I knew I had one in there somewhere. 332 00:28:12,327 --> 00:28:13,771 When you when you call it… 333 00:28:13,771 --> 00:28:16,410 When you ask them what we should call intellectual property, they say, oh, you 334 00:28:16,410 --> 00:28:19,730 should call it the author's monopoly, because that's what they called it in the 335 00:28:19,730 --> 00:28:24,213 days of the Statute of Anne. That's what they called it in the founding in the 336 00:28:24,213 --> 00:28:29,960 United States, authors' monopolies. And authors get really pissy when you say that 337 00:28:29,960 --> 00:28:34,020 they have a monopoly. And they do for good reason, because although formally the fact 338 00:28:34,020 --> 00:28:37,950 that I wrote this speech and therefore I have the monopoly over reading it to you 339 00:28:37,950 --> 00:28:42,510 on my microphone means that I am a monopolist, I don't have a market power 340 00:28:42,510 --> 00:28:47,486 monopoly. Right? I can't use this monopoly to extract monopoly rents from the 341 00:28:47,486 --> 00:28:52,808 marketplace. Writers who go to the five remaining publishers–soon to be four 342 00:28:52,808 --> 00:28:56,395 if Bertelsmann buys out Simon and Schuster–don't get to use the fact that 343 00:28:56,395 --> 00:29:02,250 they have a monopoly to negotiate crazy supermarket prices that go beyond what 344 00:29:02,250 --> 00:29:07,400 what would happen in a competitive market. Unlike, say, the the monopolists 345 00:29:07,400 --> 00:29:11,030 themselves, the actual monopolists we have who get to charge very high prices for 346 00:29:11,030 --> 00:29:19,153 their services. And so it's it's not a bad point that an author's monopoly is not a 347 00:29:19,153 --> 00:29:22,502 monopoly in the way that we talk about it when we talk about monopolism in the tech 348 00:29:22,502 --> 00:29:29,435 sector. But IP does have a very precise meaning, a meaning that is not… 349 00:29:29,435 --> 00:29:35,280 has nothing to do with intellectualism or property. IP in the sense of software 350 00:29:35,280 --> 00:29:39,890 patents, copyrights, anti-circumvention, terms of service, API copyrights, and so on 351 00:29:39,890 --> 00:29:45,360 it has the precise meaning of any law or rule that lets me decide who can 352 00:29:45,360 --> 00:29:50,105 criticize me, who can compete with me, and who and how my customers must behave 353 00:29:50,105 --> 00:29:54,911 themselves. And when you fuse a market power monopoly with an author's monopoly, 354 00:29:54,911 --> 00:29:59,908 when you have a market power monopoly that has IP behind it, you get something far 355 00:29:59,908 --> 00:30:05,063 more durable than either a regular monopoly or an author's monopoly, 356 00:30:05,063 --> 00:30:09,389 a copyright monopoly. You get a monopoly that the government will defend rather 357 00:30:09,389 --> 00:30:15,452 than dismantling. So, for example, if you have a monopoly that you can defend with a 358 00:30:15,452 --> 00:30:20,787 patent, right, like today, you have HP monopolizing it's ink cartridge market and 359 00:30:20,787 --> 00:30:24,778 they have patents over the security chips and their ink cartridges. The government 360 00:30:24,778 --> 00:30:30,741 will seize compatible ink cartridges at the border on your behalf for because they 361 00:30:30,741 --> 00:30:35,740 violate your patents. And so instead of punishing you for creating a monopoly, the 362 00:30:35,740 --> 00:30:41,288 government will reward you by doing your enforcement work for you. And not only 363 00:30:41,288 --> 00:30:45,071 that, but once you have a monopoly that's backed by some kinds of IP like 364 00:30:45,071 --> 00:30:49,846 anti-circumvention, the government will punish people who report defects in your 365 00:30:49,846 --> 00:30:55,702 products. So if you have a monopoly over printers or if you have a monopoly over 366 00:30:55,702 --> 00:31:03,070 phones, and someone finds a defect that allows third parties to install their own 367 00:31:03,070 --> 00:31:08,690 ink or their own app stores, the circumvention of your DRM becomes a crime 368 00:31:08,690 --> 00:31:12,810 under Article 6 of the European Copyright Directive, and under Section 1201 of the 369 00:31:12,810 --> 00:31:16,711 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and under similar laws all around the world. 370 00:31:16,711 --> 00:31:20,766 And the government will both fine and potentially imprison the security 371 00:31:20,766 --> 00:31:24,770 researchers who point out that your products have a defect in them. 372 00:31:24,770 --> 00:31:26,950 Now, I started this talk by saying that 373 00:31:26,950 --> 00:31:30,625 early Internet boosters were not blind to the perils of technology. 374 00:31:30,625 --> 00:31:33,451 But some of them them were, a little. 375 00:31:33,451 --> 00:31:36,203 After all, once all that money started sloshing around, 376 00:31:36,203 --> 00:31:38,560 then if you could convince yourself that tech was an unforced 377 00:31:38,560 --> 00:31:42,345 an unchecked force for good, then you could also convince yourself 378 00:31:42,345 --> 00:31:45,629 that getting all of that money that the tech industry was generating 379 00:31:45,629 --> 00:31:48,444 would make you on the side of good. 380 00:31:48,444 --> 00:31:51,928 The myth of two guys in a garage who could top a billion dollar giants 381 00:31:51,928 --> 00:31:56,169 and become billionaires themselves, fired a lot of techies' imaginations 382 00:31:56,169 --> 00:31:59,092 and sidelined a lot of their conscience. 383 00:31:59,092 --> 00:32:03,356 But those days are behind us, thanks to monopolies. 384 00:32:03,356 --> 00:32:08,220 Thanks to monopolies, founders who want to start businesses that compete 385 00:32:08,220 --> 00:32:14,230 with the monopolists, monopolists who have double-digit growth every year, and who 386 00:32:14,230 --> 00:32:19,333 realize tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in profit collectively. 387 00:32:19,333 --> 00:32:23,600 Those founders, when they go to a venture capitalist or another funder, are told 388 00:32:23,600 --> 00:32:28,340 that the funders aren't interested in funding these direct competitors. 389 00:32:28,340 --> 00:32:33,186 Funders call the lines of business that big tech is in the kill zone, and they 390 00:32:33,186 --> 00:32:37,240 understand that any attempt to fund a business that operates in the kill zone 391 00:32:37,240 --> 00:32:39,699 will result in your company being crushed 392 00:32:39,699 --> 00:32:42,737 by the monopolistic power of the entrenched company. 393 00:32:42,737 --> 00:32:47,448 And so instead, if you are a technologist headed to Silicon Valley, 394 00:32:47,448 --> 00:32:52,300 you don't dream of changing the world. You dream of like having a mini kitchen with 395 00:32:52,300 --> 00:32:57,930 free kombucha and maybe getting massages on Wednesday on the on behalf of the 396 00:32:57,930 --> 00:33:03,430 company. And liberated from the fear of losing customers to competitors, tech has 397 00:33:03,430 --> 00:33:08,960 pivoted from liberating customers to manipulating, locking in, and abusing 398 00:33:08,960 --> 00:33:14,932 their users. And the code that does that manipulation, that abuse and that lock-in? 399 00:33:14,932 --> 00:33:18,713 It's all written by technologists. Technologists who discovered their passion 400 00:33:18,713 --> 00:33:23,190 for the field when they felt the thrill of self-determination through writing code 401 00:33:23,190 --> 00:33:27,624 and projecting it over networks. And this is a really important fracture line. 402 00:33:27,624 --> 00:33:31,670 I think this is a way to understand things like the Googler Walkout and Tech Won't 403 00:33:31,670 --> 00:33:35,970 Build It. No Tech for ICE. The solidarity movements against facial recognition and 404 00:33:35,970 --> 00:33:43,520 other surveillance technologies. That technologists are no longer able to delude 405 00:33:43,520 --> 00:33:49,130 themselves with the thrill of billions into thinking that it's OK to do what 406 00:33:49,130 --> 00:33:52,930 they've been doing. And one by one and in increasing numbers, they're starting to 407 00:33:52,930 --> 00:33:57,540 wake up to the fact that it's time to do better. It's time to realize the 408 00:33:57,540 --> 00:34:01,880 liberatory power of technology and step back from the power of technology to 409 00:34:01,880 --> 00:34:06,240 control us. That this will all be so great if we don't screw it up and if we do screw 410 00:34:06,240 --> 00:34:10,314 it up, it's going to be really, really terrible. And there are precedents for 411 00:34:10,314 --> 00:34:13,658 this. And unfortunately, the precedents are pretty incomplete. So, 412 00:34:13,658 --> 00:34:18,409 Robert Oppenheimer very famously was one of the few people in the world who is both 413 00:34:18,409 --> 00:34:22,000 brilliant enough at being a manager and brilliant enough at being a nuclear 414 00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:25,859 physicist that he could lead the creation of the first nuclear bomb and the 415 00:34:25,859 --> 00:34:31,179 Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the United States. And legendarily, as that 416 00:34:31,179 --> 00:34:35,950 first nuclear bomb test went off, he turned away from the mushroom cloud and 417 00:34:35,950 --> 00:34:40,290 said, "I am become death destroyer of worlds," and embarked on a lifelong 418 00:34:40,290 --> 00:34:46,470 project to demilitarize the atom to to put back in the bottle the genie that he had 419 00:34:46,470 --> 00:34:53,940 made. And my hope is that we can arrive at a world in which our Oppenheimers decide 420 00:34:53,940 --> 00:34:59,289 to put down their tools before they make their atom bombs instead of after. That, 421 00:34:59,289 --> 00:35:04,100 that we are at this crossroads now where not only are the harms so visible that 422 00:35:04,100 --> 00:35:10,069 they're undeniable, but also that rewards for building the digital 423 00:35:10,069 --> 00:35:17,829 equivalent of these A-bombs have dwindled from a star in technology's hall of fame 424 00:35:17,829 --> 00:35:24,330 to a really well funded pension plan. And surely that is not enough to sell out for. 425 00:35:24,330 --> 00:35:29,332 So many of you listening today probably read my novel Little Brother and its 426 00:35:29,332 --> 00:35:34,410 sequel Homeland. I know that because I often hear from you, especially at events 427 00:35:34,410 --> 00:35:41,700 like CCC and DEFCON and at SchmooCon and at THOTCON and so on. People come up to me 428 00:35:41,700 --> 00:35:47,559 and they say, you know, I read your book and I, I understood both how powerful 429 00:35:47,559 --> 00:35:52,420 technology could be and how terrifying it would be if that power was not harnessed 430 00:35:52,420 --> 00:35:57,500 for the people and instead was harnessed to oppress people. And it made me embark 431 00:35:57,500 --> 00:36:01,670 on my career as a technologist, as a security researcher, a human rights 432 00:36:01,670 --> 00:36:06,490 activist, a cyber lawyer. And, you know, that's the best thing in my life, really. 433 00:36:06,490 --> 00:36:11,660 I mean, apart from my kid and my family. The fact that there are people out there 434 00:36:11,660 --> 00:36:15,000 who have devoted their lives to doing something better because of something 435 00:36:15,000 --> 00:36:18,099 I wrote, that's that's really important to me. And frankly, you know, if my kid has 436 00:36:18,099 --> 00:36:23,087 got a chance of growing up in a world that doesn't make Orwell look like an optimist, 437 00:36:23,087 --> 00:36:26,027 it's going to be in part because of that stuff. 438 00:36:26,027 --> 00:36:28,769 But I've written a new Little Brother book. 439 00:36:28,769 --> 00:36:32,115 I wrote this book that came out this year called Attack Surface. 440 00:36:32,115 --> 00:36:36,052 And this is genuinely not an ad. You don't have to read it. And in fact, if you're 441 00:36:36,052 --> 00:36:39,906 watching this, you probably don't need to, although you might enjoy it. Because this 442 00:36:39,906 --> 00:36:45,559 is aimed at a different kind of technologist. This is a story about the 443 00:36:45,559 --> 00:36:51,410 kind of technologist who spends their whole life kidding themselves that working 444 00:36:51,410 --> 00:36:55,550 on systems of control and oppression are not that big a deal, because if they 445 00:36:55,550 --> 00:36:58,930 didn't do it, someone else would do it. There's an endless supply of 446 00:36:58,930 --> 00:37:03,390 Oppenheimers, and if I turn my back, someone else will be there to to finish my 447 00:37:03,390 --> 00:37:10,259 work. Who come to a realization, maybe belated, that they've spent their whole 448 00:37:10,259 --> 00:37:14,711 life building a dystopia that they don't want to live in. And who redeem 449 00:37:14,711 --> 00:37:20,539 themselves, who come back from the brink. And the reason I wrote this story now is 450 00:37:20,539 --> 00:37:26,950 because I really wanted to reach the technologists who are waking up every day 451 00:37:26,950 --> 00:37:31,530 and saying I fell in love with this stuff because it liberated me. And I spend my 452 00:37:31,530 --> 00:37:35,920 days figuring out how to take away the future of people who might be liberated by 453 00:37:35,920 --> 00:37:41,390 it themselves. And that's an urgent message, because author's 454 00:37:41,390 --> 00:37:47,493 monopolies–IP–are available to everyone thanks to the Internet of Things, 455 00:37:47,493 --> 00:37:49,808 thanks to our embedded systems. 456 00:37:49,808 --> 00:37:53,186 I'm going to break here and editorialize very briefly. 457 00:37:53,186 --> 00:37:58,599 This is the slide I'm most proud of, not not for any kind of intellectual heft, but 458 00:37:58,599 --> 00:38:02,670 I'm really bad at the GIMP, and I think I did a really good job. So I just want to, 459 00:38:02,670 --> 00:38:05,670 if you're if you're looking away from your screen, if you're like peeling vegetables 460 00:38:05,670 --> 00:38:10,059 or something, spare a glance at this slide. I'm very happy with this slide. 461 00:38:10,059 --> 00:38:18,229 So the IoT means that every device in our world has access to an author's monopoly, 462 00:38:18,229 --> 00:38:25,956 has IP in it. And that governments will enforce the strictures that the designers 463 00:38:25,956 --> 00:38:31,055 and manufacturers of these devices put into them by punishing people who try to 464 00:38:31,055 --> 00:38:37,461 use competitive compatibility to undo those strictures. And not only that, but 465 00:38:37,461 --> 00:38:44,670 IoT devices are not merely smart as a convenience to invoke the law. 466 00:38:44,670 --> 00:38:49,654 They're also smart as a way to enforce the manufacturer's desires, as a way to 467 00:38:49,654 --> 00:38:57,790 control the the actions of users, of competitors, and of critics. That 468 00:38:57,790 --> 00:39:03,645 these devices have a kind of unblinking eye that watches you whenever you use them. 469 00:39:03,645 --> 00:39:05,614 And if it catches you trying to do something 470 00:39:05,614 --> 00:39:08,140 that might displease the manufacturer's shareholders, 471 00:39:08,140 --> 00:39:11,458 it can stop you, and it can rat you out to the authorities. 472 00:39:11,458 --> 00:39:14,757 And so, you know, speaking in my professional capacity 473 00:39:14,757 --> 00:39:18,701 as a dystopian science fiction writer, this scares the shit out of me. 474 00:39:18,701 --> 00:39:22,349 Now, that is all a kind of grim way to end. 475 00:39:22,349 --> 00:39:27,684 And so I'm going to finish this off with a couple of words on what gives me hope. And 476 00:39:27,684 --> 00:39:33,189 this comes from my colleague James Boyle at the Duke Center for the Public Domain. 477 00:39:33,189 --> 00:39:37,683 And Jamie, when he talks about the computer liberation movement, 478 00:39:37,683 --> 00:39:40,497 he compares it to the ecology movement. 479 00:39:40,497 --> 00:39:44,958 And before the term ecology was coined, we didn't have a movement. 480 00:39:44,958 --> 00:39:48,812 We just had a bunch of issues. Some people cared about whales, 481 00:39:48,812 --> 00:39:52,372 some people cared about owls, some people cared about the ozone layer. 482 00:39:52,372 --> 00:39:55,021 And maybe they thought that the people who cared about another issue 483 00:39:55,021 --> 00:39:57,900 were doing important work, but it wasn't their work. 484 00:39:57,900 --> 00:40:01,734 And they weren't really on the same side. They weren't part of the same cause. 485 00:40:01,734 --> 00:40:06,440 But the term ecology changed all of that. The term ecology took a thousand issues 486 00:40:06,440 --> 00:40:12,339 and turned it into one movement; one movement that everyone had 487 00:40:12,339 --> 00:40:16,601 each other's back on. Even if the reason you were in the movement was owls, 488 00:40:16,601 --> 00:40:20,060 you were there to fight the corner of the people who cared about the ozone layer. 489 00:40:20,060 --> 00:40:24,373 And you began to understand that these were all facets of the same problem. 490 00:40:24,373 --> 00:40:26,559 Well, today, monopolies have taken over 491 00:40:26,559 --> 00:40:30,195 and destroyed the lives of people in a million ways. 492 00:40:30,195 --> 00:40:30,746 Right? 493 00:40:30,746 --> 00:40:34,570 Whether you're a professional wrestling fan, a beer drinker, a whiskey drinker, 494 00:40:34,570 --> 00:40:40,470 an eyeglass-wearer, a plane-flyer-in, someone who relies on energy or 495 00:40:40,470 --> 00:40:45,420 financial services or whose money was stolen by a company whose auditors were 496 00:40:45,420 --> 00:40:49,809 one of the big four accounting firms. Whether you are someone who is upset 497 00:40:49,809 --> 00:40:56,009 because there's four movie studios left or three record labels or because there's 498 00:40:56,009 --> 00:40:59,680 only one movie theater left in the United States… one movie theater chain of any 499 00:40:59,680 --> 00:41:02,961 size left in the United States. Or whether you're pissed off that you're not going to 500 00:41:02,961 --> 00:41:07,706 get the vaccine, because in the US there's only one company that makes glass bottles 501 00:41:07,706 --> 00:41:14,009 of any size. All of these people don't know it, but they're in the same side. 502 00:41:14,009 --> 00:41:18,261 They're on the same fight. And that fight is the fight against monopolies. 503 00:41:18,261 --> 00:41:23,454 Now, people talk about big tech as though they're super geniuses. 504 00:41:23,454 --> 00:41:27,213 But when we rip off the mask, we discover that 505 00:41:27,213 --> 00:41:31,322 these are not titans who built monopolies through their special genius. 506 00:41:31,322 --> 00:41:33,931 They're just three sociopaths in a trench coat. 507 00:41:33,931 --> 00:41:37,318 They're just the latest version of the kind of monopolist 508 00:41:37,318 --> 00:41:40,757 that we have been fighting since time immemorial, 509 00:41:40,757 --> 00:41:43,572 since the Rockefellers, since the Mellons, 510 00:41:43,572 --> 00:41:47,797 since every monopolistic family that tried to establish a dynasty 511 00:41:47,797 --> 00:41:50,503 that would allow them to rule as though they were kings 512 00:41:50,503 --> 00:41:55,088 was broken up and relegated to just having their names on a couple of buildings. 513 00:41:55,088 --> 00:41:58,391 We know how to deal with these people, and it's time that we dealt with them 514 00:41:58,391 --> 00:42:03,391 for what they are, which is just plain, old fashioned sociopaths 515 00:42:03,391 --> 00:42:07,397 and not as super geniuses who stand astride the world like colossi. 516 00:42:07,397 --> 00:42:11,809 Thank you. 517 00:42:11,809 --> 00:42:19,430 H: Thank, thank you. I think I'm back now. All right, well, thanks for this talk. We 518 00:42:19,430 --> 00:42:23,540 are basically out of time, so we're moving the Q&A to the fireside chat, which will 519 00:42:23,540 --> 00:42:28,520 happen in, I think, 20 minutes or so. And then all the questions that have already 520 00:42:28,520 --> 00:42:31,000 been asked for this talk will also be answered then. 521 00:42:31,000 --> 00:42:36,411 But Cory, I think we had a short stream outage around minute 5. 522 00:42:36,411 --> 00:42:37,282 CD: OK. 523 00:42:37,282 --> 00:42:41,047 H: So if you know what you said at minute 5 CD: Oh that was the full frontal nudity! 524 00:42:41,047 --> 00:42:43,027 CD: *laughter* H: You can maybe try to, 525 00:42:43,027 --> 00:42:45,959 H: try to recapitulate it. CD: I don't know what I said… 526 00:42:45,959 --> 00:42:48,380 CD: minute 5… H: History of networks apparently. 527 00:42:48,380 --> 00:42:51,579 Unfortunately, it was not visible for us. So I don't know myself, but I think 528 00:42:51,579 --> 00:42:53,886 H: it was the history of networks. CD: Probably it was my story about, it 529 00:42:53,886 --> 00:42:57,809 it might have been my story about the alt. hierarchy. That's probably it. 530 00:42:57,809 --> 00:43:01,740 And and if you if you go to your favorite search engine, 531 00:43:01,740 --> 00:43:04,467 whether it's like, AltaVista or Ask Jeeves or Yahoo, 532 00:43:04,467 --> 00:43:08,327 and type in: alt.interoperability.adversarial 533 00:43:08,327 --> 00:43:11,335 you'll find an article I wrote for the Electronic Frontier Foundation 534 00:43:11,335 --> 00:43:13,761 about the history of the alt. hierarchy. 535 00:43:13,761 --> 00:43:16,549 So I think that's probably what got cut out. 536 00:43:16,549 --> 00:43:18,852 H: OK, wonderful. Thank you. 537 00:43:18,852 --> 00:43:22,061 H: I think people know how to use Google. CD: I think Lycos has also indexed it. 538 00:43:22,061 --> 00:43:25,809 H: Yes. They'll try to they'll try to figure it out. 539 00:43:25,809 --> 00:43:28,999 H: All right. Well, thank you very much. CD: Thank you! 540 00:43:28,999 --> 00:43:30,999 H: Good luck & see you soon CD: I'll see you guys in the fireside chat. 541 00:43:30,999 --> 00:43:31,999 *rc3 postroll music* 542 00:43:31,999 --> 00:44:12,000 Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2020. Join, and help us!