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a guy wonderful well it's great to be with everyone we're gonna get right into it today because we have a special guest understood kale as well as mine
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something that will be with us in a little bit I'm gonna do a brief run through of where we are in Colonel before handing it over to Andy who's going to get us well into conversation about
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libraries Archives this internet that we've been exploring on uh for a few weeks thus far and of course much longer as technologists and users we've already
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gotten to show Brewster this slide so I'm gonna keep it brief and just um Brewster what what I what I hope you know is you have a group around you that's really grateful to spend time with you they're all wonderful in their
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own ways and um I expect an Engaged enjoyable hour with you and we're really really grateful to have you we're in a particular part in Colonel
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where things slow down a little bit this module take back the web is is one where we explore our stated goals are exploring the internet and our intentions and how
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those two things interact and luckily for I know many of the kernel fellows I think it's been a little bit quieter this week I think it's been a little bit slower and we expect it to remain that
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way for weeks three which is where we are now week before week five with a bit of an upswing in energy going into week six and seven we'll have a celebration to end the block that will start to
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prepare for as week five turns to six and definitely has six turns to seven um we expect you know there will be at least 45 Adventures that present during that week
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and then we'll do a proper send-off celebration for that week seven so um enjoy the quiet time as I think what I'm I'm getting at because we eventually will uh ask of you to to help us pick up
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the pace for a wonderful ending um but this is the time if you have an adventure that you're focusing on or something that you want to like really go deep on um it will be quieter right the first Fireside on vitalik was here maybe there
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was 180 people on the call right now there's six on the Firestone I expect the number maybe will go up but you'll have a little bit more space to meander and we are grateful for that um once again I think that's really all
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I have there's no like thing to do I'll just pass the mic to Andy to try to set the stage where we are uh in the syllabus and move us towards conversation
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thank you so much so this is the last of the backward facing modules in kernel before we get to week four and Beyond it means it's the end of the Spiral in this
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particular direction and we are deeply inspired by Brewster's work in this particular regard both as librarian but also as Visionary in 2015
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he wrote an incredible piece called lock the web open which was then shamelessly stolen by Juan Bernay who is referenced in this week's module uh in a talk in
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Berlin where we consider what the dream of the web was and where we have landed with it's the things that have been achieved and those which remain to be
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achieved those ideas which still wait for their time to come in particular we make the arguments this week that locking the web open but taking back the web has to do with three
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fundamental pillars it means reclaiming our ability to think for ourselves it means reclaiming our time and it means extending our ability to cooperate
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these three ideas are realized through an intentional approach to technology how we make it and how we use it both of those are really really critical the focus primarily being on what we mean rather
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than what we achieve something much more internal introspective and reflective rather than achievements or artemarians I do and that couples nicely with the notion of
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Freedom that we put forward in this particular module Freedom has many many different interpretations we had some beautiful discussions about it yesterday in the Learned tracking on toes I highly encourage you to watch at least the Nina
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Simone song in the freedom module because it says so much more than I could ever say in words but what I will say here is that freedom is simply the ability to be conscious of the constraints within which you operate
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there are some further words about like that particular idea the freedom of No Escape is hard sometimes spoken of and then it is applied to free software where we look at the gnu Manifesto and the work of Richard stallman who's a
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somewhat controversial figure but nevertheless highlights three very important things in that Manifesto which have to do with how we think freedom is realized in relationship both with each
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other and by virtue of the Technologies we use to relate and those three ideas are that it must be honorable it must be shareable it must be hospitable
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these three ideas are very interesting to see in a technical Manifesto but they are nevertheless critical and when we recognize that these are the manifestation of freedom in
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technological terms that allows us to relate in more wholesome ways that perhaps lead us toward Collective wisdom we can have deeper discussions about the
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history of tools for thoughts how they lead us to an ability to uh reclaim our time to be genuinely present to conspire
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to conspire means to breathe together so to breathe together against some of the oppressive systems we have constructed for ourselves and in so doing
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come to a new humility right this Peace by Vacaville at the very end is one of my favorite in the whole module humility comes from the word humus means that shared layer of soil
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um at the top of the forest that is where all of the decaying matter Falls and from where we all draw our nourishments girls it's that layer of the earth that
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is fertile and thickened and that allows for us to grow upwards toward the light so there'd be a nice spread our branches and process sunlight such that we can produce food for the
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rest of the chain and go on in the cycle of ongoing life so that is a wide framing of uh of taking back the web there are some much more
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specific ideas much less philosophical and Brewster's piece about locking the wave open which we will get into today uh but having set that particular
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scene uh it's with great great great privilege and excitement that I welcome Brewster who began the internet archive who has been a
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uh a Visionary of what the web is and could be for longer than I've been working on it that's for sure and um in particular the piece that I would
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like to begin with we will also be inviting my Ishikawa Sutton to join us she will come in a little bit later she's on another call right now and when she does join I will introduce her because she is unique and wonderful in
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her own way as well uh but in terms of this particular part of the call with Brewster one of the things which has most excited
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me about the work out of the internet archive recently and if you're not familiar with them you may at least have interacted with the way back machine which is one of their many projects that
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provides an incredible service to many people looking for information that has you know gone out of dates or been removed from the web for various
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different reasons and Brewster's work has in some sense to find the decentralized web as an effort to break apart all the
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layers of the current online experience and it's with this notion that I'd like to begin Brewster because breaking apart all the layers it reminds me of this old
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Stanley Kenneth spawn which I'd actually like to read in parts because he writes oh I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections and my
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tribe is scattered how shall the heart be reconciled to its Feast of losses in a rising wind the manic dust of my friends those who fell along the way
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bitterly stings my face yet I turn I turn exalting somewhat with my will intact to go wherever I need to go and every stone on the road precious to me
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in my darkest nights when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage in numbers clouded voice directed me live in the layers not on the letter
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so before we get into all of the work that's the archive has been doing with d-web and where the web is headed uh as a part of kind of looking back at the history of where
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we've come from Bruce I would love to I would love to uh Begin by asking you know what have we lost from those early days and how do you guard yourself against these bitter wins and the cynicism that
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comes from kind of losing friends that would be a wonderful place for us to begin gosh well thank you I really appreciate uh spending some time uh together today
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um I I don't want to keep you know at this uh it's such a high level that and that your philosophical level that it's not actually kind of useful um the
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for me the dream of the net the the internet as I sort of set out in 1980 to try to make it happen was can we just build that thing that people have been
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promising for a long time the memex the the uh the hypertext of of uh of Ted Nelson what became the dream of of uh uh of the World Wide Web it just didn't
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seem that hard I mean why why aren't we there already and I'd say some of the Lost friends aspect is kind of coming to grips with the oh we're in 2022 and we
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still don't have the global brain we don't even have everything online uh we don't have so we don't have a lot of the things that technically we're going to be quite easy to do
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um so why not and why did we steer so differently that the internet is many things to many people it's a communication structure but for uh for
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some of us there was this idea of building the library of everything the Library of Alexandria available to all that also fought right we we were able
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to weave computers and not just people into the collective uh knowledge of everybody and then maybe we could establish something more out of that you
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know I'm not you know saying that there's going to be a unitary um global village where everybody's singing the same camp songs I think it's going to it was going to be a globe of
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villages where there's interaction there's building on each other um there's a referencing um and how did we try to build all of that and there's
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I I don't know the web one Web Two web three sort of you know everybody draws their different lines so I'm going to try and try one myself the web one world I think we felt like we were building
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something together um whether it was through blog posts that were useful it was more than Usenet where um the the posts were ephemeral we were
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able to go and bake Pages um which I think is an interesting conceit uh that Tim berners he didn't call them posts you called them pages and that
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evokes paper that invokes books that evokes library and it's was that a vision uh that uh I helped build earlier before the web and then with the web to
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try to make that Vision happen web 2 may be thought of as feeds when did we go from pages to feeds and when I think of feeds I think of what you do to horses
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faces and you push them into troughs and say you know eat this stuff um and what do we really have to show for um a year on Facebook really I mean
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have we built Wikipedia Pages no have we built blog posts that uh can be referred to no have we built um news um uh pieces that are referenceable no we basically have built followers and
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rage we're wasting our time um and I think the web is betraying us um the the web that we wanted is is now
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become something else that we um uh them kind of a way of and I think that people are interested in building a
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legacy of building relationships that matter that uh and I think we have an opportunity to rebuild the web in this um
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approach not by going backwards but by going forwards by taking advantages of the new technologies the new structures um the new people that have joined the
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web uh and the net since all those days um and build something that's worthy of the time that's being invested I mean think of the billions of hours that are being wasted in some of this just
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dribble that is just going on and you say well you know it's kind of you know we were always wasting time just talking to each other but I think we want to build memories build structure build
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um uh culture um and we're fighting against walled culture where there are those that are trying to
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proprietorize it uh they're uh those that are trying to make it just a streaming service of nothing on the web um there's uh Elder poses to this
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um that somewhat are based on business models that I think are lacking of of insight so where but to answer your question India of where how do I try to
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make sense of it when I come around to different turns I kind of go back to well I've only really had one idea which is can we build the library of everything could we build universal access
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to all knowledge could we make it so that anybody wanting to have access to the best knowledge people thoughts ever would have access
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to it and flip that around and say you have a place in that world and you have a way of adding to that in a constructive way so it's not like actually the world that I grew up in
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where the textbooks and the News were handed to you and you felt like you had no way of participating can we go and make that dream happen technologically
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absolutely and uh what what can we do to try to get uh to that vision is the sort of guiding uh light that I have used um
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during my career incredible incredible the library of everything and universal access to knowledge is certainly something that we will touch on for that's a um really
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this phrase of yours not a global village but a globe of villages is a really really interesting one for me because it seems to touch on how we might enact more participative spaces
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where people see themselves reflected and feel at home and feel the ability to contribute to and benefit from the world's knowledge and it's something if we go back to your 2015 post that is
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really really interesting to me because it touches on this really deep relationship between distributed systems and local flourishing or local culture so the quotes that I've pulled from that
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blog post of yours all those years ago now is that internet service providers for example want their users to have a good web experience and would be likely to serve as a close and fast host for their users this would also help save
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those companies on bandwidth bills because more of their traffic would be local in this way there can be cultural institutions as well as commercial organizations that have incentive to replicate parts of the distributed web
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thus increasing reliability and performance so as I say it's really fascinating that these distributed Services lead to local incentives and help to both preserve and
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amplify the relevance of cultural institutions and what we might call like third spaces in in healthy Civic life so I'm ready I'm so fascinated by the Yeah
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like the push for like distributed Global Systems then resulting in a globe of villages rather than a global village and it's such an important difference that I'd love to hear more on
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so okay let me let me try something I I I've been trying this out I don't know if this works uh but so let me use you as a sounding board
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for it an arc so in the um paper era um Publishers would make copies of books or um magazines or or newspapers or
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whatever these would be bought and read by uh by individuals and they would be held by libraries so they would be bought by libraries and you'd have you know even the smallest book maybe with had 500 copies or
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there'd be thousands of copies you know tens of thousands of copies of these things that they would then go and live in a bunch of different places these uh libraries and whether as our
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personal libraries or our uh reflected the community that they were serving yes there were inputs from the outside but they were organized and manipulated and preserved
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um in a distributed way so the Publishers were free to go off and think about the next thing and put out the next great idea um terrific but there's um our brains you can kind of think of ourselves as inside out I think that's why we have
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bookshelves uh in our homes is to sort of think of our brains but inside out right so you can actually see what it is you've been thinking about over time and you remember and you can pull it right it is your brain um
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our libraries did this then what happened and then I'd say there was the Mainframe era the Mainframe era uh was the uh well we don't all have to go and build our own collection of this stuff
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wouldn't it be more efficient if somebody else were to go and pull these things together and um digitize this stuff and make it available and gosh wouldn't that be terrific and it was the Lexus Nexus the
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West law uh these sorts of uh large-scale databases and what became proquest or elsevier um but it ended up with only one copy one place and one organizational
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structure and we lost agency we had terminals that got to see what these Mainframe providers did um and that uh it felt great it's sort
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of like the first time you're on Spotify or remember when you first got Netflix it's like wow look I can finally get access to this stuff rather than going down a freaking Blockbuster or whatever but then it was always it sort of lost
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its in it the organizational structure yeah was supposed to be AI around you but um so we lost something with this Mainframe era the web basically became
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that again it was a terminal on somebody else's organizational structure there's only one copy who the organization that controlled that one copy had enormous levels of power
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um and it it made it uh a not yes they were distributed in the sense that there were lots of different websites or services around them but uh it really became kind of any
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particular thing the New York Times had only one way to view it and what they said was all there was and then you started getting these aggregators uh to go and make it so that you had to go to
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these Fair places and it was just like oh my God I'm in a cage um so then how do we go and get back again how do we get the agency back
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to organizations that reflect our values and our people but are using the resources of all the rest and I think there was a concept of Tim O'Reilly sort
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of Web 2.0 that was all going to be apis and it was going to be linked data and if you've tried to actually get that stuff to work and work overtime it just doesn't uh depending on other Corp uh
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corporations to go and keep their services going in any kind of consistent way is just farcical they just don't do it um so it's difficult to weave any of these things together we basically have
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terminals on other people's database products I think we can go and build a more decentralized system that will serve us better by going and having more agency
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whether it's in within your browser or within your community going and having copies of things organized in new and different ways that reflect what you want to do but still with the power of
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having all of this information out there and you can share it um non-geographically so that we can um you know we're probably all odd birds in our hometown um that we didn't want to just be locked
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into what the physical environment made for us um so I I'm again I'm not trying to go backwards let's go forwards and add back uh some of the things that we made have
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lost based on some of the sort of Dopey technology of mainframes or these glass Terminals and somebody else's database products or um you know aggregators like a Twitter or Facebook which makes I don't know
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makes me feel like I'm kind of an audience member with uh with I I'm in Disneyland I I'm I'm told exactly what it is I'm allowed to do there's some there's a script done by somebody else
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of what I'm supposed to be playing a role in and that doesn't feel like a very good use of of the human Ingenuity creativity that we've all got around us yeah I love that awk it makes good sense
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it reminds me of all of the references to fun in LPS that you will come to but there's one other kind of scene setting aspects which is important for me here based on what you've been saying uh is
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that you know in in this 2015 piece you draw the distinction between the internet which is a distributed system and the web which is centralized in many of the ways that you've just described here and in addition to distributed
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systems advancing or amplifying the relevance of cultural institutions and third spaces these a globe of villages the other benefit that comes as a result of having multiple people serve a
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website simultaneously and some of the other aspects that you talk about in this post is that it brings with it almost inherently privacy right um because if a website is served from
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multiple different places you can't just go to one server and ask for all of the IPS that pinged it and surveil them you need to do a whole bunch more and becomes significantly more difficult so even just by virtue of the architecture
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Things become more private and privacy does relate to our ability to think for ourselves we have the library in our home and you know Vivek and I have a good friend who's not on this call who
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has a library in his living room where these These are the books I like to show to people you know and then and then another little Bookshop a bookshelf in his bedroom and this is only for the special people if you if you make it into the bedroom bookshelf then you've
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really been let into the inner sanctum you know uh and and I think that there's something some delightful about that and it seems to me that you know privacy is really critical to our ability to augment our thinking
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for ourselves um and and what I want to pick your brain on here Brewster is that's you know you mentioned the mimics and the Neva Bush as we may think is in this week's syllabus along with
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transformative Tools For Thought from Michael Nielsen and Andy matushek and it's fascinating to me because you know like one of the questions I have is how can
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privacy and the social uses of knowledge that bush talks about these user Trails through the mimics the emergent social use of information as opposed to the kind of top-down Library science classification of things uh you know he
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says that those user trails are so critical to our ability not just to record and store the record of human knowledge but to consult it uh and I'm I'm fascinated by the inter
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the interface between like privacy and the little library in our bedroom that we only want to show it's a very very close friend so we really trust and the need to have these social user trails
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that illustrates the the use of information currents in Civilization how do those two things go together um yeah good good good good good point
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um I I think there's uh trustable or uh institutions and trustable organizations and trustable people are are key in this I mean in the in the old days in your book out of your library there were
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these little pieces of paper in the back that's that said who signed something out right and it was fascinating to find is this a book that nobody cared about or was this like thriving and who
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checked it out and and you could look and just go and be able to connect with the people that you shared this uh book experience with um can you imagine doing that now I mean people would just go freak out
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um because of the abuses of these organizations um around privacy um and it is happening so let's just say take something that happened to us I think was yesterday the day before the
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author's Guild put out this press release of being so proud to force Amazon to watch how many pages somebody read of a book um or actually never even read just flip
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the pages so that they would count those so that if they tried to get a return and they tried to return that book um for a refund they couldn't get a refund if they turned too many pages the
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author's guilty author's guilt was proud of forcing a corporation to spy on all readers to go and try to make some uh chits for their uh I don't know lawyers or whatever the heck they are
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um it was just Dreadful I mean really we lost the thread right that we really need to be able to trust uh organizations and we can't even trust these trade organizations that are
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supposed to be on your side because they're going to try to cause wrong behavior um the these computers can do things that are kind of wrong and uh these this
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network structure um and it's happening so it's not like oh there's just you know Doom and Gloom out there gosh Brewster you know you know uh yeah thanks very much the web isn't robust it's okay it basically
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Works Wiley the the scientific publisher sold a database product of ebooks um it was a package of ebooks to uh different libraries and then they just
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took away 1 200 books from that database product of ebooks which was by the way the only way libraries could get access was by subscribing they didn't get to own their ebook at
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all they didn't get to go and for the money they didn't get to buy and Own It Wiley could take it away at any time and they did they took away this was just this last week uh 1 200 e-books just
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went off of every library's shelf um this is this doesn't make any sense it's not it's not robust um the Privacy uh aspect that we've got in the net is is being abused uh um the
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lack of privacy so how do we get it back I because I'm I'm a big believer in Van of our bushes we can't understand the web by just seeing it statically you have to know where people all went I
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started a company called Alexa internet um which was sold to Amazon in 1999 and um yeah people say oh you did Alexa and I said yeah but not that Alexa
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um so it was but it was a organization that cataloged the web by looking at what other people want to it's people who like this webpage like this webpage it was the first of the massive collaborative filtering things that
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Amazon you know did as part of their buying experience so we applied we sort of really pushed on the collaborative filtering thing to try to help people navigate uh what's going on out there
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based on the anonymized usage Trails but how anonymized and um well we thought we did a good job of that both both culturally and technologically to try to make sure that things did stay Anonymous
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but could you decipher it if you were wanting to yeah you could probably do that um so what prevents it um well good behavior
00:31:53
trustable things um the idea we're trying to go towards a trustless society um I think is is uh uh not a great way to go
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um we we need trust we need to build um trustable organizations um and I think that's somewhat the business model problem I think in terms of the ontology of of you started out
00:32:18
this conversation a very high level so let me try telling you know um one of the you don't get to go and say what are the basic branches of um plants or or knowledge very often
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right Aristotle you know got to to do this um when the beginning of the internet John Postell um broke up the internet um namespace into.com
00:32:42
dot edu dot mil.gov dot org and it's freaking brilliant right I just think about those sorts of of why why do you need to break
00:32:55
things up like that why didn't you just have a homogeneous namespace like telephone numbers or something like that um it's these different things and one of the interesting things about the breakdown of those particular types is
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they think differently the what's succeeding as a dot gov person is very different from succeeding as a.com person when I wake up as a DOT org person a person with a DOT org at the
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end of my email address I what life is for what succeeding means is different um and I think that that uh structure is very uh indicative what we've seen is
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the well.com boom and you say well that created but it's like no the.com boom is taking over freaking everything that that at class C corporation in the United States is a
00:33:47
um is spreading way too far I'd say money is a great tool but it's just been over uh expressed whether it's the advertising model the subscription model the lock-in you in all sorts of
00:34:00
different ways um the these uh business models that we've evolved in the.com world are just not serving us very well I like the 501c3 structure it works very well you
00:34:13
can make them operational they're not just advocacy organizations I think the work of Wikipedia um the internet archive are actually quite interesting uh uh structures so I
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think there are alternative ways to motivate ourselves um to go and build a private uh robust but still a fun environment inviting so it's not rule of contract it's rule of
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law anybody that pays by the by the protocol you can join so protocol is not platform of messnick um um excuse me
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um I think our very important um pads that we can uh draw on to build a better web I love this I love that there's there's so many threads to draw on in that
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particular response so we happen to agree about trust and trustlessness and it forms a big part of module zero in kernel where I want to like take that given the ontological piece although I
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see Vivek pausing me for a moment so I will come back to it one one important pause would be that my has just entered the project wonderful am I it's lovely
00:35:28
to have you welcome hello welcome sorry for being late it's no problem you're never late so we're always on time around here so everybody please meet my
00:35:39
in Chicago sudden they are a a very important part of the B web uh and have played a really critical role in organizing many of the aspects of it
00:35:52
both the in real life and the uh online if you would like to read some of the work with which they have been Associated you can go to compost there is a link in the colonel slack it's
00:36:06
really incredible this particular Edition inoculates is wonderful and there are vicious rumors on the streets of Third Edition to come soon uh it is
00:36:19
served both over ipfs and hypercore it is a living example of what collaborative decentralized websites might look like and uh we're so honored
00:36:31
to have you with us my I will come see you in just a moment because I have some questions about uh fun and joyfulness and subversion which we can touch on but just to finish this
00:36:45
particular thread with you Brewster uh on privacy trust business models and naming these four things are really really fascinating to me because
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you say in this 2015 piece that we've been looking at this new web could be an inviting system that welcomes people to share their stories and ideas as well as a
00:37:10
technology platform that one can add to and change without having to ask permission allowing technological change just for the fun of it the distributed web could also incorporate new naming systems that
00:37:23
would exist alongside the DNS to support new approaches to naming and the Technologies to support them this is such a fascinating idea the notion of both an inviting system that
00:37:34
welcomes us into new approaches for naming is as you have already indicated an incredibly powerful almost mythological concept right given that the ability to name stuff
00:37:46
across mythologies is a very important part of the human story and you know as it relates to our privacy in the last sort of
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technical piece of this is a big part of the the blog is is about bits torrents and you know one of the really interesting features of torrent systems is that readers of files become the
00:38:11
servers of those files and and so you have this this Tyrant system where if I read a file I serve it which helps us create user trails in potentially private manners especially when we
00:38:23
control the way that things are named and use things like content addressability right so like if if the content that I produce is how things are addressed and that addressability is
00:38:35
then fed into a system that I can participate in creating the naming of in ways that invites the local villagers in my community to contribute that seems to
00:38:48
me like it's just such a compelling vision and and I would love to hear just any any other responses on that it's just being able to reuse replay
00:39:00
recontextualize is absolutely critical um it's the only way to make things run I um if I think of um uh what's what's missing towards being able to do this well addressing content
00:39:15
addressability is great uh Ted Nelson tried to to put forward a mechanism of going doing making it possible for people to make money by publishing on the net um I I there there should be lots of
00:39:28
different ways but um just let's go and just spend just a moment on on how limited that is say you wanted to actually make something you had an article you wanted to put it out you're a rock band you want to put it
00:39:39
out how can you make some of it available for free and then someone charge for it on the internet no not really not without going and putting your stuff on iTunes or uh Amazon or just you know or put in some
00:39:53
PayPal blah blah blah um it it doesn't work um so we could where in the old days you know you could make your Zine and people would send you five bucks
00:40:05
um and that would be kind of awesome and you'd get some validation through that we it's all become very centralized we don't have um decentralized money um I think that that's one of the great
00:40:17
things I think about the whole uh crypto world is we money has an API um is it gonna uh bring charlatans absolutely is it going to cause bad
00:40:28
behavior absolutely but how do we go and share reuse feel good about going and uh and doing this adding to other people's things without you know I I think of the iPhone is the definition of closed I
00:40:42
mean if you want to go and make some addition that's not Sanctified by um by Apple it's called jailbreaking immediately really I mean is this where we've gotten to um it's so we've got a problem out there
00:40:55
but we need a system that is ruled by law not by contract by you play by the rules um that are easy to understand and your thing works and that's how the internet itself um the idea of plugging
00:41:08
into TCB IP worked that's actually the protocol of the World Wide Web you can just make it available and then uh if people can find you say through a search engine then you're playing the game but uh we now have content moderation
00:41:22
structures that are trying to be built into things like the twitters and Facebooks because of all the problems that we've seen um it's putting those guys in a very uh awkward position
00:41:34
um and it's so I don't say just don't do content moderation let just Twitter flow uh we know how that turned out and it wasn't very good so um we need um more uh participation in shaping our
00:41:47
world let's have a hundred flowers bloom for different ways of forming uh our communities around these materials um even though they may be the same
00:41:59
materials so that if we don't have to have I don't know 10 different messaging apps um on our phone I mean I remember when the uh before the email before the at sign so when going and bridging
00:42:13
between these email systems was a pain in the ass um it just didn't it didn't work very well then we had the AD Sign but now we have uh and that was a decentralized system protocol not platform
00:42:25
um yet you know we wanted to move on you know slack is better but but now it's all kind of centralized into something else or Twitter actually seemed better than using Skype and you know with
00:42:37
multi-group you know messages it just didn't work very well but then it became too controlled and and had a drive and a Class C corporation towards growth growth growth advertising more spying
00:42:50
more celebrities more politicians um can we uh have some communities that don't have that in them and um like this kind of group um this is where new ideas happen these
00:43:03
are the bonds that matter how do we go and make Technologies where we leave living on something you say okay well this this thing is being recorded maybe somebody's going to watch it later yeah kinda have you not very much so how do
00:43:16
you um make it so that we're ending up building things together um uh Within These some it's going to be for free some of it's going to be um uh for pay
00:43:28
um the the old I think of of Cambridge or Oxford as being built out of the monastery model where they had a wall around themselves and they were a copyright free zone if you're an
00:43:41
academic the crime is not reading as the current Publishers will insist um it's actually not reading if you were going in and doing some and you're going to write a paper on something you had to go and read everybody else's work on
00:43:55
that it was a copyright free zone within itself it worked extremely well until well large corporations started breaking up the the publishing model of the uh of the universities which is a serious
00:44:07
problem but we're seeing this over application of uh Universal uh uh control by very few players destroying communities let's open it back up again
00:44:19
let's have some fun um let's get some people paid let's get materials reused re-contextualized um so that they can be um built on
00:44:31
um let's let 100 flowers bloom we let's let's get some good ideas coming this next time and let's not Knock Lock Out the next new guy that may look different
00:44:43
um maybe from a different place um they can come up with the new Revolution that overturns um whatever it is we think we're gonna do for the next 10 years incredible incredible
00:44:56
ah my my dear friend uh it's so wonderful to have you with us and I have led Brewster into some just incredible and also
00:45:08
greedy kind of places with content moderation trust and trustlessness the application of business models somewhere between privacy and open collaboration with been wondering through some of these
00:45:22
really dense topics and I would love to really elect on the last thing that Bristol was saying there let's open it up let's have some fun let's reuse materials let's make sure that we can
00:45:35
have small communities of common interests doing stuff together these tiny little subversions you know in in kernel
00:45:46
we have this Link in module one to a presentation given by an incredible designer called melee Co and she talks about joyfully subverting the status quo
00:45:59
and yeah I know that's subverting the status quo is certainly a stated aim of the B web um and the way in which you go about
00:46:10
that is incredibly principled these principles that you were a part of making which include technology for human agency distributed benefits mutual respect humanity and ecological
00:46:24
awareness they link very very deeply into what maybe Co is talking about in her presentation on joyful subversion which she says joyful subversion happens
00:46:36
through small things through experimenting with formats through creating spaces through minding symbolism building on history and Shifting the nature of work
00:46:47
so I would love to hear about the small and joyful subversions of your life especially as it relates to compost but also if you have some personal stories
00:47:00
to share of of just little things that subvert the status quo in these beautiful ways maybe close example for instance is like she knew that they were putting in facial recognition software into MacBooks and so when they were
00:47:14
doing this she made pink hearts come out of Steve Jobs's head as he was kind of okaying the technology in the meeting and she couldn't reverse the direction of this particular Endeavor within Apple
00:47:26
single-handedly but she could make pink hearts come out of Steve Jobs's face uh so I I'd love I'd love to hear some stories of building Compass or little joyfuls of versions that you've been involved with over the past few
00:47:39
years which are on your hearts in this moment yeah thank you Andy and thank you for this conversation um I think um a major thread for us with compost and
00:47:54
and also with the d-web work with the internet archive is um as Brewster said I think it's really to um celebrate each other and celebrate our shared values I think
00:48:06
um there's it's so important for there to be a culture of talking about what's important and what we are trying to build towards and I think um within our overarching economy in our
00:48:19
society it's so easy to sort of everyone get into their own lane right into sort of stress out about your health care and your job and your career and you know like sort of like uh kind of like
00:48:33
raising your own or climbing the ladder right in your project or in your um in what you're doing but I think when we make communities where you can see other possibilities and we can have friends
00:48:45
and relationships with people who are thinking about the same things and worrying about the same things you're building you know solidarity between people who want to build something better and um you know dweb and the
00:48:58
events that we we do is really about that it's um you know we ground it in the projects and the technologies that people are building and it's really to kind of like show that there are
00:49:11
multiple means for us to build the web that we want but then also that we need to support each other in doing this that it's not this competition um that there should be many ideas to
00:49:23
address all kinds of different you know Solutions or problems that people are having and so um yeah to answer a question um I think one uh
00:49:35
well a couple things stick out uh so um from we had due webcam in 2019 and we had um yoreis who is from a Community
00:49:47
Network in Brazil who um was speaking to um another person I can't remember the name of organization right now but they made um like a locally hosted educational materials that can be offlined and then during the pandemic
00:50:02
um because uh uradi was connected with Micah who was a person who worked there um had found out about this that uraday was able to offline all these educational materials for his
00:50:14
um you know rural community outside Sao Paulo in Brazil um during the pandemic when um you know educational materials were really hard to come by schools were shut down and things like that and
00:50:25
um and it just like that just seeing how that one human connection was able to create a whole bunch of opportunities for this for his community was just I I think it just made me realize the potential of of
00:50:40
connecting people and um building trust within um people who are building the tools that address you know user and I hate end user as a term but you know that that help address Community need
00:50:53
um uh what are a couple other things I think um all the work that Community networks are doing I think um so our our fellows program
00:51:04
um had 25 fellows this year um about half of them were representing uh Community networks where they are building and stewarding that last mile infrastructure of connectivity and
00:51:17
there's so much really interesting sort of innovation experimentation happening there because that question of like um if you are a community that is um you know maybe doesn't have access to
00:51:30
tap water you know or um doesn't have access to the normal things we sent like in urban areas we take for granted you know what does it mean to have access to the capital I internet um there's a lot of questions around
00:51:44
um having more local information that is contextual for the people who are living there and um I think every time that we sort of like play around with um uh
00:51:58
that sort of like cut that Assumption of like ubiquitous connectivity um just playing around with that I think um makes for really interesting conversations around like who is
00:52:10
stewarding our data and and secondly how do we make them uh how do we make those systems sustainable um and uh just a moment from DUI Camp was when all the fellows were building a
00:52:23
community Network or a mesh Network across the camp and there were yelling you know across the the uh space to say like oh no you gotta like you know move the antenna here like a little bit to
00:52:35
make sure that the line of sight is is correct and like that type of like awareness of like how our networks are built I think is a really important way to be aware of our infrastructure and um
00:52:47
I think the more that we think about that um the ways that our infrastructure is something that people are having to build and having to Steward um I think all the conversations that
00:52:58
the internet archive is doing to talk about you know like how it's building a fiber Network across the bay how you know how it's um how it deals with like scanning particular
00:53:10
um you know like LPS and maps and things like that it's like it's like that grittiness of like the networks that I think like really really helps um sort of like make our our networks more
00:53:22
tangible and more like appreciated in terms of the care that we need to to Steward them incredible incredible uh one of the ladies who uh who who helped
00:53:36
in fact Let the mesh Network build the the Web Camp this year also happens to be the most incredible singer I have heard in a long time Esther is just something
00:53:47
else and uh these kind of surprising moments that occur from one to one human connection and the Ripple effects that they have through the networks and the technologies that we create with
00:54:00
astounding to witness firsthand and to see her singular Beyond roles that are impromptu wedding in the Redwoods somewhat presided over by Brewster with a roomy poem it's just
00:54:13
really almost too much to to bear in one go but before I hugged too much so to speak I would really love to hand over to some q a now that we've introduced you well by and it's so good to have you
00:54:27
and to hear your perspective truly it's uh it's just such a privilege so thank you for at least entertaining me with that one question and the I think if we can uh we can get some other voices from
00:54:40
the other participants that would be really really beautiful beautiful thank you Brewster thank you my uh anyone who has questions please feel free to raise hands Avia also has the slider I wanted
00:54:54
to check with Thomas if you're willing to unmute and ask your question about libraries as a potential place to start and I'm sure we'll have others chime in soon Thomas are you available for that
00:55:07
sort of thing uh hello sorry I'm doing my laundry right now but uh I just had a question and that is should libraries be running ipfs nodes
00:55:20
um now that the conversation is on um storing information and making it accessible I think that libraries should uh should have their own collections they should build right a book is maybe a megabyte
00:55:35
right you know so the Library of Congress is 26 million books 26 million megabytes is 28 terabytes you can buy that for Less Than A month's rent
00:55:47
um so uh the idea that we but we don't have tools and we don't have the business models for libraries to have their own collections um so should they be running ipfs notes yeah they should
00:56:00
be writing uh that and their own web server and and and and um the you know even okay all you guys you're probably you have your homes you have your businesses why isn't there an
00:56:12
antenna on the top of it that's just free and open wi-fi I mean why not um you know you you guys have you know good enough studs around you to go and you know firewall things if you wanted
00:56:24
to or you just open it up um and so if we had every Library being able to go and store what's happening within their Community that's been a traditional thing that libraries do um but are they doing it now do they
00:56:37
don't have the tools no they really don't know how to so it's ipfs the Breakthrough moment maybe um uh because that is a very nice peer-to-peer Network idea that you read it you then serve it you make it more
00:56:49
permanent love it yes let's do that but let's also you know storage with a J um let's let a bunch of different flowers bloom but let's bring it in let's re-empower libraries are an
00:57:01
interesting model not just because you know it's an interesting industry but it's a 12 billion dollar a year industry three to four billion dollars of it goes to Publishers products it is a socialized support of the publishing
00:57:13
infrastructure in the trade publishing it's about 20 of the books sold are sold to libraries but in e-books they're not sold anymore they're just licensed it's becoming a big problem there's lawsuits about it including of the internet
00:57:26
archive about trying to make it so the libraries will never own anything ever again it's a problem okay but let's go back to the more positive uh comment of what could libraries um be so their public infrastructure for
00:57:39
knowledge and memory and they have been they they didn't really adapt very well to the internet opportunity let's go and do that but let's not uh just to say well that's great they should do that
00:57:51
it's we should do that I think of the library is what the internet is um the web is is what all of us are building we have Unshackled the library think of it as a
00:58:05
concept and we're all participating in building that we're building other things whether it's gaming infrastructure you know how to there's other things we're using TCP IP to do but one of them is to build a global
00:58:18
library of all of us so how do we go and take what used to because of the paper problem was locked into either our bedrooms our living rooms um or these um community libraries uh thank you for
00:58:32
Andrew Carnegie um oh I Andrew Carnegie one of the you know most fierce cop uh capitalists ever um he carved into his uh the Pittsburgh
00:58:44
uh Carnegie Library read to the people doesn't that sound kind of commy to you um above the door of the Boston Public Libraries free to all information's different information is
00:58:59
different from Commodities such as wheat or steel or like it's not interchangeable in the same way so capitalism doesn't really apply as well to information as it does otherwise
00:59:12
anyway long long long way of saying yes they should they should participate much more but take the inner Library yourself and run it yourself and I think then we can bring um the next Andrew Carnegie
00:59:24
who may be on this call um to be uh uh to build the next generation of whatever public libraries become beautiful thank you so much brister we have now some questions
00:59:35
trickling in so maybe uh we'll go to my first for this but um we can see the just to continue on the threat of libraries just to hear there's there's one question that came in anyone wants to unmute the question
00:59:48
around libraries and the web and how much of the problem is about Legacy IP law for digital media does anyone want to unmute or should I maybe pass that to
01:00:00
my Andrew stick okay feel free to take it away may you want that one or should I shall I go um yeah so the question is um you know is the problem
01:00:17
uh Legacy IP law or the problem for libraries in the web is that we're using Legacy institution intellectual property law for digital media oh yeah I mean
01:00:30
um like certainly with um libraries right you know having to create a lot of artificial scarcity particularly around digital material um is very much tied to Legacy IP laws
01:00:43
where um there's just an entire industry built on um limiting knowledge and and also not
01:00:54
compensating even the creators that are creating that uh the culture and information that the Publishers are even selling right to the libraries um there's a great new book by Rebecca
01:01:08
Giblin and Corey doctorow that just came out called choke point capitalism and um it just it touches upon this exact issue of the ways in which Publishers and um you know the platforms like Spotify
01:01:21
Amazon or uh Gatekeepers of culture and all of that really affects libraries that affects the web in the ways that we um are able to um You Know Remix content even access
01:01:35
content I come from a copyright access to knowledge background at the eff and just you know all the ways that we aren't able to uh you know modify our hard Hardware or jailbreak our photos
01:01:48
booster was saying quote unquote jailbreak our phone to be able to do anything to being able to comment and remix you know culture that exists like on YouTube like there's more and more of these
01:02:01
restrictions that exist because of copyright laws and you know I don't I we need to have that updated at the same time that we're building these new systems
01:02:12
um compost for instance we ensure that all of our works are Creative Commons share um sharealike uh buy licensed just
01:02:26
because we know that since all of that content from compost will be copied over potentially through ipfs nodes and through hypercore and just it might just you know spread all over the place that we can we cannot have anything
01:02:38
copyrighted because it'll be copied and that's kind of the goal right and so I think the technology of the decentralized web where things just spread where it wants to go is just very
01:02:52
much inconsistent with the with copyright as we have it today and I think that also make brings up the question like how do we compensate authors well how do we appreciate them and make sure that they are being paid
01:03:04
for their work and I think that's really connected to the work that libraries are doing and yeah um and the ways that we think about knowledge creation and and labor beautiful thank you so much Mike I I
01:03:18
want to go to Charles last if you're willing because you have some really related questions in the chat and then we'll move back to Victor and then anyone else Charles please no thank you um Brewster and my thank you so much for
01:03:31
your work and being who you are um yeah so Brewster you mentioned Ted Nelson a couple times and um I wanted to bring in one other uh key name for me and for many of us here at Doug
01:03:42
engelbart so in light of um sort of their work and um and your own obviously and experience it I'm curious about the relationship your View Broad Strokes a relationship between repository and
01:03:55
Community we're thinking about Doug's term the dynamic knowledge repository networked Improvement community and and further how could this inform collaboration thanks oh things should all be built into one
01:04:08
and I think it was one of the mistakes uh one of the shortcomings of the web um is it didn't build in a library system at all right it had an address structure that was very very simple that
01:04:20
got you to one server one place that got uh you could withdraw uh something back and um so it didn't have to be that way but the win of the web it was just simple enough that in you know with in
01:04:32
Pearl um in an afternoon you could write a web server um and that so it was an easy enough thing to try to get people involved in but it's time to move forward um so to make it so that our
01:04:45
repositories are living Dynamic systems they're not feeling like stale websites we had to build the Wayback machine as a cluge on top of the existing web um and it's still not even woven into
01:04:57
the web I mean only the brave browser that if you hit a 404 does it go and try the Wayback machine why didn't Firefox or Chrome do this I don't know um it's good would try to um but they didn't
01:05:08
um and they haven't and it's it's uh we we've locked ourselves into a very limited um um view of how are we building knowledge um together and um it's time
01:05:21
to break out of it and we've got the tools the JavaScript uh structures the uh um the peer-to-peer um uh protocols within the web web uh artist webrtc um make it so that we can do
01:05:34
peer-to-peer we can do whole virtual machines inside wasm on on your browser you can run a Macintosh from to 15 years ago at speed in your browser
01:05:46
um by clicking on something safely and sandboxing so we can distribute software and code that can communicate with each other we can build an operating system um that evolves more quickly than using the standards
01:05:57
um uh uh committees structures for going and trying to get everything to move in lockstep so I think we've got tools to go and build um new uh things that we didn't have available to US during the time that Tim
01:06:12
berners-lee was was trying to do the uh the web we have encryption that's now legal to distribute it's hard to remember it wasn't legal to distribute back then um so this is that was dumb but it was
01:06:24
true so let's go and build in privacy from the start but also we can go and sign things and have this content addressability content addressability which handy you mentioned It's Magic it
01:06:36
is Magic it is you you can come from the world just by knowing a string of numbers you can just ask for it from the world and it comes together and you know you have it for real that means that you don't have to depend on the provenance
01:06:50
of the where you got it from you can get it from anywhere your neighbor whatever and you still know that it's the home page of of uh of compost magazine um that is
01:07:02
um new things that have come about in the last 20 30 years that we can build a new architecture on and build it um to be better stronger and I'm so glad my you're bringing up the how do we get
01:07:15
people to participate and get paid if that's what they're after uh how do we go and do that or at least acknowledge uh what they are um uh what they've done um so that we're building on and a crediting people
01:07:28
[Music] my would you like to add on to that uh no I'll leave it I think that was an excellent answer thank you thank you Brewster yes
01:07:42
um beautiful okay so we have Victor and then Lisa okay um so I have a question regarding like um regarding distribution of knowledge which sometimes others will consider not
01:07:54
to be published I mean like if we see like from history when you know that when the first time that the Bible which was only Latin was translated into German was having such a big backlit
01:08:07
regarding that it should not be uh translated and also like in a different part of History where we have like you know when um in in 1930 where
01:08:18
like books was uh burned down because like these people were publishing information which is like because they're curious they were like Maxes or the Chinese Evolution when they decided
01:08:30
to destroy like the his history of the country because this is not supposed to learn because like you know because like there's a government which doesn't uh see that or maybe because I'm from this
01:08:43
um religion and this should not be published again how can we make sure that we incentivize like knowledge which is supposed to be published and informed but also to make sure that you know
01:08:55
um making sure that it should not be destroyed because like even though like it's not you know the opinion that we want to hear it's also important that you know it has to be shared that you know that this exists so you can also have like a different opinion but
01:09:08
sometimes we are always afraid to you know publish something that we don't know so how can we make sure that all this knowledge can also be published but not destroyed as you know different parties
01:09:20
yeah so it's a bit controversial what I'm saying but yeah that was also what I was thinking about about distribution of knowledge in some way um so yeah the the history of libraries is
01:09:35
one of Destruction and it tends to be destroyed by the uh the the governments or the I I think of whether it was king or church back in the day and now it is government and and Corporation
01:09:48
um so that's what happens to libraries is they're destroyed um and so you say well that's universally bad well it's like well yeah some people say you should you know be able to move on
01:09:59
it's uh that you know going and destroying uh a culture whether it was the the Germans trying to destroy the Jewish culture by going and wiping out all of their libraries in the mid 20th century
01:10:12
um yeah that's all very horrible let's look at it from the flip opposite point of view when you have a new medium come about um it uh causes disruptions that are huge I'm very interested in reading
01:10:26
about the Reformation the first few Decades of the um uh the 16th country there was Erasmus there was Luther and they were publishing
01:10:38
um much more freely because they had the printing press now and they uh harassment said 285 books 280 how do you have 285 books um it's because they were basically pamphlets that were kind of
01:10:50
blog posts let's call them blog posts and then there were these images um that were coming out these broadsides and um it used to be that you had to go to the church to see a picture of uh uh
01:11:02
the mother of Christ and that was very controlled but now you could go and get in these heretical uh images very that's the Instagram of the day it caused things to burn um we basically wiped out a lot of
01:11:15
monasteries lots of people died it was and there was Counter Reformation there was the Spanish Inquisition it was tumultuous time and some of it was because there was a new medium with this
01:11:27
birthing of the print of of digital uh medium I think that's some of what we're seeing going through the United States or whether it's Brazil or Myanmar uh that we're seeing a new medium going and
01:11:39
upending power structures you know I think we I have uh relatives that watch Fox News and they think it's like news they think it was like the news they grew up with it is not at all
01:11:52
like the news they grew up with but it kind of looks like it um so it that's why I think we're uh uh don't the idea that all information should be always available to everybody
01:12:05
without any seamless barrier I think can lead to uh manipulation by extremely powerful players uh to cause radical upheaval and change and it's not necessarily what you all want so
01:12:19
um I I worry when people use the word censorship in a sentence usually all conversation is stopped right they've got you know I now sort of know we're talking in so black and white land and
01:12:32
there's no nuanced conversation to be had anymore so am I pleading that uh libraries and on the internet archive not get burned down yes um but do I understand that there's uh
01:12:45
an interplay especially when we have a radical new technology coming around that we have to be careful and understanding and nuanced about it um and try to have some more gray
01:12:57
conversations let's live in the gray Zone not just in the black and white zone it's uh it's it's where truth lives nice to welcome live and maybe ask that
01:13:10
who have been really jiving with this therapist in this place yeah so I like I'm really into the Protestant Reformation just for the soul fact that I feel like it was the first time memes
01:13:22
I mean me medic culture has been a thing long before but uh Martin Luther and the people in the Reformation intentionally created visuals that were
01:13:33
printed in Mass to communicate with people who couldn't read because people were kept illiterate as a form of control um and the visuals were like poor Farmers pooping in the Pope's hat and
01:13:47
farting at the pope and uh demons pooping out all the religious people um so it's like really like so close to where we it's like what has
01:14:02
changed really but that was the first time really like that because people were illiterate and the only information they received was from religious leaders they thought religious leaders were
01:14:15
like directly from God and they couldn't be challenged so seeing this crazy like uh what's the word crass representation was like oh you know what I have been
01:14:27
treated like crap I hate these people someone else is validating this like let's let's go and they nailed it to the door I think of the church you think that's what happened um so it was like really the first time
01:14:40
the printing press came into play in terms of like causing a revolution um and there's a um really like one of the best podcast episodes I've ever heard is a a bankless episode called the
01:14:54
crypto Renaissance which talks about web3 as like sort of um they have a historian who talks about it and as a reflection of the Protestant Reformation and the Renaissance and all that stuff
01:15:06
so I'll put the link to that because that's what that's where I learned about the proteins but those funny you know history is written by The Victors so we we look back on the Reformation is breaking out of the jail but we don't really focus on just the
01:15:20
level of destruction of all the libraries and of the time uh that that book that I quoted here the fragile history is a big Tome there's a shorter little you know uh paper kind of like my
01:15:33
um locking the web open which is what can we learn from Hernando's Columbus's library that might be kind of fun um and it's boy two-edged sword and let's you know
01:15:44
let's let's do this revolution well folks um we we can we can learn from the past let's go and do this one without you know just burning the hell out of everything in the past saying we're
01:15:57
right [Music] I guess a question that comes to mind sorry to chime in is is it is it even possible I guess I still want to spend a lot of time looking at history and and I
01:16:09
completely agree I think if we look at histography uh we know that basically uh history's version by those who have won and if we look at the history of the Reformation or any kinds of reformers
01:16:21
movements at the time we know in countries where they haven't been successful uh how the story has been told right um but I guess we have this tendency or
01:16:32
as human beings as always like I mean destruction and then you know it also brings uh reconstruction I guess or uh delaying off the ground for a new era is it entirely possible that this
01:16:45
revolution I mean if you think about just the transition if we can call it transition from what one to web two and now potentially web three we're seeing a lot of Destruction anyway so is it even entirely possible to think about a world
01:16:58
where destruction doesn't happen for I guess the Phoenix to grow and and then to Come From the Ashes amen right you know that's that's the but let
01:17:15
this technology is is ours to make right the people on this call are empowered you guys are uh able to be uh game Masters right you can go and help Define
01:17:27
how the game works for the next participants and you know whoever made the the dial on the phone round and put the numbers in that order had an enormative amount of control as to how the world worked for a long time
01:17:40
afterwards so making the decisions well that you guys are making right now is incredibly important um and I I don't know if it is just you know destruction not happening what if there's an evolution there's a revolution that's
01:17:52
that's going on um but let's build on uh with with this full knowledge and comp conversation such as this that check and balance ourselves check check and balance what you're doing um go go to somebody that's willing to
01:18:05
go and say call your I I I find that there are some people in call college or high school that are just willing to just you know call my and there's some people you know I'm now running an organization they're not going to be necessarily got
01:18:18
you know up for shouting me down inside the organization so where do you get that input um find it um and and lead your lives uh and your Technologies and your organizations well
01:18:31
um we really do have the power probably way more power than we should right now to go invent a new medium and new structures let's do a good job of it um some of us has blown it in the past so let's go and you know do a better job
01:18:45
going forward I think right now yeah I think um in the D web space there's so much uh of an effort to ensure that there won't
01:18:57
be that destruction or at least on the scale that has been um done in the past um and I and that's you know with ipfs or even projects like Starling that is ensuring the Providence of of
01:19:11
um uh photos and media that is capturing the source of War zones and and protest zones um and I think I think a constant awareness of like you know what are we
01:19:22
not only are we archiving but how are we curating that information I think is really important um I think for most of us like we just we're just bombarded with information and a lot of it is I would say probably
01:19:34
not great for us either you know like there's so much advertisement there's so much you know um like uh media that is just sort of designed to make us feel bad and to buy more things and I think
01:19:47
um thinking about how do we curate things more intentionally so that we are exposing our minds and in dialogue with each other about like what actually matters how do we solve the problems of
01:19:58
our world I think um I think that issue of creation is going to be a really big one um for the decentralized web in the in the next decade um it's like once we build like what Brewster calls like the the our pipes
01:20:12
right like how do we then create the sinks and the toilets like how do we then create the interfaces you know with the the infrastructure that we're building and um and user design and human centered design is really going to
01:20:25
be really key for that so that more people can participate and um and contribute to the ways that we are uh curating and and talking about uh what we are are building
01:20:37
beautiful it goes very well with Lisa's question um which we'll return to it seems like we may not get through them all but Lisa please can yes of course thank you so
01:20:51
much and thank you for this incredibly energizing discussion and chat and I don't know about you but I'm like super amped right now so thank you um so I my question is around this idea
01:21:04
of the structures that our minds are operating within and we talk a lot about re-architecting the internet for everyone or decentralizing it again and I'm curious how do you get from this focus on almost
01:21:19
rearranging the furniture to to seeing the room and then even more so stepping outside of that room to kind of almost realize you're in a house and build something new whether it's elsewhere or
01:21:33
re-architecting the house and so curious to hear both of your thoughts on that as we explore shifting our minds outside of just rearranging furniture
01:21:48
yeah I mean I fundamentally feel like um the way that we have that um broader perspective is to really think about our organizations like how
01:22:00
are we building the tools and how are we building the Technologies and who is involved in that conversation um I think that's like fundamentally what's like what decentralization about
01:22:12
is about decentralizing power and decentralizing the uh the stakeholders who are involved in those considerations and I think if you know if we just continue with
01:22:25
um the same old way of innovation where it's like you know some person has an idea they seek Capital funding from an investment firm they then give that ownership to that to those investors or
01:22:37
you know um exit to public offering of their stock you know stock options like that that part of technological innovation has like I think that is what needs to
01:22:50
be you know disrupted right like there needs to be a lot more ideas around how do we pay people for the labor to build these alternative systems who are looking at the house or looking at the city block more holistically and
01:23:03
thinking about the ways we interact and archive our information and it's and often I I think that work is not appreciated because obviously I think within the status quo right now it's
01:23:15
actually a lot more profitable to to Just Right rearrange the furniture into just like um yeah to look at things from a much more uncreative skill and I think
01:23:27
um what's really exciting to me are projects like open Collective um which is just like breaking down how people um fund projects um and how they uh make uh budgets
01:23:40
transparent within organizations it's helping like hundreds if not thousands of mutual Aid organizations around the world um fund you know like very local Mutual Aid projects and I think that is the
01:23:53
type of project that is actually in some ways to me more important to do centralization than you know some of I'm not going to name any but like you know some of the the work around like certain Technologies because like you know we
01:24:05
have to fundamentally think about the people who are uh working on this and and how they're relating to each other versus just focusing on the tooling so um so yeah I don't know if that answers your question but I think I think it
01:24:19
really is thinking of like very practically and holistically like how do we build things how do we sustain people building things and maintaining things and I think that's really really key thank you Mike let me let me try it a a
01:24:32
a a a complimentary part of that which is what should we build I I have a piece of homework for you um so um please the next time you're driving around or a a shower or sometimes you're
01:24:44
sort of like dead time whatever try this this puzzle out blank but decentralized take something awesome that exists and then try to try to fill in the sentence blank
01:24:57
but decentralized and try it with all sorts of things um such that it's a piece of technology that ended up being centralized but what what does it even mean to make it decentralized um like
01:25:09
um Fast Track Fast Track is you know those things that you you know when you're going through and you don't have to pay tolls it's kind of awesome right but it's centralized what would be fast track but decentralized my wife bought a Tesla that is a it's basically an iPad
01:25:23
with wheels it is awesome but it's a connected device they know every time I pump on the brakes I mean it's weird um so how do we have Tesla but decentralized Google Docs
01:25:35
but decentralized Slack but decentralized I I guarantee you if you spend 10 or 15 minutes without any one of these you will not only start to understand what decentralized means to
01:25:48
you you'll uh start to come up with ideas of like well why did they make it so that that piece of technology ended up so freaking centralized and it's because it's easier or like Maya's
01:26:00
pointing out it's easy it fits our corporate structure it fits our VC whatever and that's the wrong answer for building these Technologies so blank but
01:26:13
decentralized I I find is a good Mental Floss for going and understanding and pulling things apart um uh just as a way to go I also posted
01:26:26
in in the the chat a um I tried to understand what did Richard stallman do with this free and open source software I worked with him back in in the early 80s when he was based we were giving up
01:26:38
on the list machine because it went down it got forked uh and it so he he came back and said okay well we lost that better operating system let's go make a trashy operating system called Unix you
01:26:50
know which of course is a joke for being a eunuch um you know it's a crappy operating system um but he he said the key thing was the license what was what was that idea and how do we apply that idea to more things
01:27:02
um so that uh that little blog um in these little papers that I do kind of every year locking the web open was one that the Hernando Columbus is another this free and open source uh science societies is another
01:27:16
um but I think goes back to um to my is like how you know how do we go and organize ourselves um to make systems where we have game with games
01:27:28
with many winners we're taught in the VC NBA World crap that the United States has got addicted to that you want to be the winner it's like let's we're let's link more like game Masters let's let's
01:27:42
make games with many winners and if you do that you can be a winner too um but it doesn't have to be uh won against all um it's let's let's build systems and
01:27:54
and they're more fun they're more interesting to play in um it makes a more graceful thing to put on your Tombstone than this guy made a lot of money it's like whoopee
01:28:06
um so how do we go in and make a technologies that serve all of us on a techno uh going forward foreign thank you so very much I know that we
01:28:19
have reached half past the hour and I really would love to respect your time you've been with us and so generous uh with your time and we are just deeply deeply grateful for both of your presence the Insight the experience the
01:28:33
perspective that you share is truly valuable I wish you uh continued Joy continued fun continued ways of finding graceful things to put
01:28:46
on your Tombstone all of these are wonderful Reflections and uh it's just been an incredible conversation so thank you so very very much for everything
01:28:59
you've shared with us we look forward to continuing to collaborate across the distributed web and finding new and interesting ways
01:29:10
of acknowledging people making sure they get due recompense making sure that we can build systems which do preserve privacy but are nevertheless fun which adhere to some of the higher visions of
01:29:23
what universal access can mean and what's an open Library might do for our own memory for our Collective memory for the ways in which we share what it means
01:29:38
to live and what it means to live well together thank you very very very much enjoy the rest of your day and thank you for your work thank you so much thank you
01:29:56
[Music] thank you foreign
01:30:11
[Music] foreign [Music]
01:30:41
foreign
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