Transcriber: Santiago Chambó Reviewer: Denise RQ
Thank you.
I'm an Annenberger, 2007 PhD.
(Cheers)
Annenberg!
I'd like to talk about free speech, civil liberties, cultural innovation,
what they're going to look like
and what it's going to take to keep them thriving in the Digital Age.
About two months ago, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
made a very interesting and unprecedented speech.
She said that we have a new priority in American foreign policy
and that priority is called Internet freedom.
In essence, she said that if we truly want
to export what we identified as core American values
- free speech, civil liberties,
the ability of everybody to contribute
to the public sphere and to the political process -
we have to make sure that everybody, everywhere,
has the ability to participate in the Internet.
It's become that fundamentally important.
If you look at recent developments around the world and the political sphere,
that's clearly manifestly true.
Beginning with the so-called first Twitter revolution,
the Green Movement in Iran two years ago,
and moving to the kinds of events we were seeing gripping:
in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya,
basically the entire North Africa and Middle East at the moment.
They're not entirely a product of online and social media,
but they're largely fueled
by communications that take place in those media.
The Secretary Clinton identified both of those as key examples
of why it is so important for us to push Internet freedom as a key priority.
But there are a number of other forms of political speech online
that she didn't really talk about.
This is one of my all-time favourite examples.
I'm sure some of you in the audience know what it is.
It's called the Grass Mud Horse.
For the last two years, this has been one of the big memes in the Chinese Internet.
It's basically a pun.
I can't say what it sounds like in Chinese because it's so dirty
that I would probably get canned off the stage.
It basically rhymes with something very, very nasty.
People have used this meme, creating plush dolls, photoshopped images, videos,
to complain about the censorship
that the Chinese government is imposing on the Internet.
Nobody has ever mentioned censorship or the Chinese government by name,
but everyone knows exactly what it means,
so much so that the Chinese government actually changed their policies
regarding the distribution of online video after this meme broke out.
In fact, there's this whole range of wonderful, amazing, beautiful
(Laughter)
new cultural forms, what I call configurable culture.
I just wrote a book about it called "Mashed Up".
These are funny and silly, but they are also serious.
Every single one of these mash-ups, remixes, machinima, and modifications
means something political, about inverting the kinds of power
that have defined communications throughout the 20th century.
We are seeing that pyramid with the powerful people on top
filtering the information down to the powerless on the bottom inverted,
and a real ground-up global cyberculture emerging.
But it's not all good news.
There is significant censorship going on right now.
As Secretary Clinton pointed out, the Internet was shut down in Iran
and the Green Movement ended for the moment.
The Internet was shut down in Egypt;
that wasn't enough to stop the momentum,
and Mubarak was sent out.
China is surrounded by what's known as the Great Firewall of China.
They have mandated
that censorship technology be installed in every single laptop
that is distributed in the country.
There are serious threats to free speech and civil liberties
in these places,
but this is actually true at home as well, here in the US.
The threats here are very different.
For one thing, we have a broadband duopoly at best.
For 97% of Americans, you have two choices at most,
the local phone company and the local cable company,
in terms of how you're going to get broadband into your home.
All Americans have four wireless communication companies to choose from,
all of them equally crappy and expensive.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Thank you.
And one of them is about to buy another one,
so they'll be down to three.
This matters because it creates an information bottleneck.
No matter how many millions of people are creating cool mash-ups and remixes
and are sharing information, planning demonstrations,
and publishing manifestos,
all of that information has to go through the eye of the needle.
It has to pass through servers and infrastructure
owned by this tiny handful of companies
who are completely beholden to the government and to big industry
and are willing to do whatever it takes to stay on those good sides.
This produces a situation where it's very easy for the government
to call up AT&T or Verizon and say,
"There's a law called FISA, but we are going to ignore it;
and we'd like you to spy on Americans' personal communications for us."
It's very easy for Congress to push laws like COICA,
which the Senate introduced in its last session,
that granted the US Department of Justice the same unilateral, unchecked power
to censor entire Internet domains from the US public,
which the Chinese government enjoys.
The range of commercial exploitations go from AT&T and Verizon
preventing NARAL, a pro-abortion group, from texting its own supporters;
to censoring out webcasts by Eddie Vedder that weren't supportive of President Bush;
to the kind of stuff that we've seen with Google and Facebook,
taking our personal information too far and allowing advertisers and others
to develop very highly detailed personal profiles of us.
In the words of Lawrence Lessig,
- I wish I'd coined this phrase -
"Code is law."
Ultimately, it's the platform and technology that overdetermines
the laws and the norms of the society
and says what we can and can't do, what we can and can't say.
That means that, no matter how much amazing cultural resistance we have,
no matter how many cool mash-ups, remixes, and arguments we have
through these cultural media,
it won't be enough to ensure free speech, civil liberties,
and cultural innovation.
No matter how much we argue in Washington about Net neutrality
and whether AT&T should be able to buy T-Mobile,
whichever way those debates go, they won't be enough to secure
free speech, civil liberties, and cultural innovation.
No, the Internet is fundamentally flawed.
It's great for delivering HD video on demand,
it's great for allowing us to buy cool shoes on Amazon,
but it isn't good for ensuring the future of political discourse.
What we really need is a new network.
Fortunately, there are tons of much smarter people than I out there,
working on amazing new technologies:
the One Laptop per Child initiative, the Open-Mesh initiative,
and the recently announced FreedomBox initiative.
These are all really cool.
I'm glad to have a lot of fellow travelers out there,
but what we don't have at this point in time is a unifying discipline.
We don't have a sense
of "Here is what is going to take to get from creating a cool technology
to spurring a revolution that's going to ensure that everybody in the world
is allowed to participate in the political and cultural process."
Two of my grad students at Rutgers, Nathan Graham and Aaron Trammell,
and I have come up a set of what we call social specifications.
It's basically a list of qualities
that a network would have to have to ensure that everyone will have a voice.
The first quality is decentralization.
That eye of the needle is the choke point,
that's the political weakness of the Internet.
We need to build a network
that does not have a center, that is only edges.
Secondly, we need to have a network that is universally accessible.
It needs to be build on standards that everybody has permission to use,
that aren't own by anybody.
It has to reach every single human being in every political regime, every climate
and every society around the world.
Third, it has to be censor-proof.
If I want to add my voice to the global freight
and whatever it is that I want to say, I need to know my voice will be heard.
Fourth, I has to be unsurveillable.
If I want to communicate directly with you and I don't want him listening,
I should have that right.
I should have that political and technological ability.
Furthermore, if I want to say something publicly,
but I want to be anonymous like WikiLeaks, let's say;
I should have that ability as well.
Nobody should be able to figure out my true identity.
Fifth, I has to be secure.
Denials of service or attacks can't take it down.
Bad engineering can't take it down.
It has to be robust enough to deliver on this promise.
Sixth, it has to be scalable.
Whether 10 people or 10 million people are using it,
the network has to work, and it has to work reliably.
Seventh, it has to be permanent.
When people log off, if the secret police are coming,
and they stow their device behind the brick in their wall,
they need to know that, when they log back on,
that network is still going to be there.
Eighth, it has to be fast enough.
Enough is a moving target.
Ten years ago, fast enough probably meant 56k dial-up.
Today, fast enough means Internet video and voice over IP.
Ten years from now, fast enough will mean something completely different.
and we need to keep our eyes on that target.
Ninth, it has to be independent.
While it may exploitatively use the Internet, cellphone networks,
or any other networks out there,
were the Internet to close down tomorrow all around the world,
this network should remain standing.
Tenth, it has to be evolvable.
We've reached the point in human development
where technology and society co-evolve.
You can't imagine one moving forward without the other.
We need to build a platform that's going to withstand
the completely unexpected developments of the years to come,
both technologically and socially.
I do think of this as a set of Ten Commandments,
basic foundational principles without which no network can truly ensure
that civil liberties, free speech and cultural innovation will continue.
That's a pretty tall order.
What would such a network look like?
Obviously, there are infinite possible technological solutions out there,
but we've looked at the technology that exists today,
that's not a fantasy but a reality, that people have been developing
and come up with what we think is the best possible plan
to suit this social specifications, given those technological capacities.
We call it MondoNet.
This is the official launch announcement.
In July, we'll publish an article on this in The Information Society Journal,
but you guys are the first ones to hear about it.
It's mobile network,
but it is unlike a traditional mobile network.
If I want to call that guy over there, I take out my iPhone, and I call him.
the signal will go up to the tower and across their entire infrastructure
before it comes back down to his phone.
That's ridiculous.
There's actually another way to network
that doesn't require that central mediator of communication.
That's an ad hoc wireless mesh network.
In a mesh network, my phone connects to your phone,
her phone connects to her phone,
her phone connects to his phone
and so on and so forth.
According to Metcalfe's law, when we add one more node to the network,
that incremental growth drives geometric grown in the network's power.
This is very doable.
This is real technology in development right now in a number of different places.
My favourite part is the way we anticipate its distribution.
There are hundreds of millions, if not billions, of network-ready devices,
sitting in the backs of people's closets and under their car seats.
I gave my iPhone 3G to my son when I bought my iPhone 4 last year
and he said, "I don't want this, I want an iPhone 4."
He's 6 years old.
(Laughter)
I've got these two iPhone 3G, sitting around my house.
How wonderful would it be to publish a little firmware upgrade,
which would be completely free and built on open standards.
I'd download it to my phone, I'd turn it on and boom;
instantly, it's a node in the network.
It's a client, a server, a router, and a peer.
I am connecting directly with you
and, between us, we are passing on his information or her information.
There's native security so that I can't peek into those packets if I wanted to.
Because of the geographical proximity that I need to connect directly with you,
this would be a community-based initiative
and we anticipate seeking funding in the near future to develop a prototype
probably based in New Brunswick, where I teach at Rutgers.
At first, those local communities would probably need a third network,
like the Internet, to connect to one another.
Over time, we'll allow this to go viral,
getting it into the hands of the global open-source and free software community
and developing a global mesh in which every single human being
can freely, easily, and confidently communicate and share their voice
as openly or as privately as they want to
without the intermediaries of the telcos, the ISPs, the governments or anybody else.
I've skipped over many difficult questions to answer, which is a good thing,
but we have addressed a lot of them on our website mondonet.org
and there's a prepublication version of our article up there.
If you guys are in policy, if you are tech-heads,
or if you are just interested, email us, get in touch,
take a look at what we've got and tell us what we've got wrong,
what we've got right, and what else we need to answer.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)