[tor-talk] [Fwd: Multiple Internets]

[Zenaan Harkness]

On 2/20/16, Zenaan Harkness <zen at freedbms.net> wrote:
> On 2/20/16, Cari Machet <carimachet at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ooooo interesting WW - thanks much
>>
>> F2C2012: Eben Moglen keynote - "Innovation under Austerity"
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2VHf5vpBy8

Awesome insights from Eben. Here's a very rough summary:

Summary:
- disintermediation

- make it all open, universal access to hack, read, learn, experiment, and share
- libre software, the commons and the licenses that facilitate this
commons, underlies all modern commerce, every major 'recent'
corporation
- there will never be another commercial encyclopaedia
- for the cost of 600km of roads (1000s built every year), every book
in every European library can be scanned and made available to all,
and they should be
- free software is most advanced tech education - anybody anywhere,
can get to the state of the art, by downloading, reading, experimental
and sharing freely - true computer science, more knowledge for the
human race
- bulk of human learning was not recent
- all knowledge should be universally available, not doing so will
stunt further growth and innovation which permits further growth - a
social requirement for growth
- "copyright bargain" is not an immutable bargain, just a convenience
for monetizers, not even relevantly apply to almost all of important
human knowledge in most fields - Plato not owned by anybody

- what will 21st Centure education systems be like?
- 3billion of the 7billion people in the world are children - how many
Einsteins or Shakespears do we want to throw away today?

- the universalization of the access to knowledge, is today the single
most important force available for increasing innovation and human
wealth on the planet - nobody should be afraid to advocate for it
because someone might shout "copyright!"
- this also allows young people to take their economic and
professional destinies into their own hands - an absolute requirement
for social and political stability in next generation

- more jobs outside hierarchies, less jobs inside hierarchies
- young people know the rules have changed, its governments that don't

- "privacy" means:
   1) secrecy - content of a message is obscure to all but its maker
and intended recipient
   2) anonymity - messages are not obscure, but the points generating
and receiving those messages are obscure
   3) autonomy - the opportunity to live a life in which the decisions
that you make are unaffected by others access to secret or anonymous
communications

- there's a reason that cities have always been engines of economic
growth - not because bankers live there - they live there -because-
cities are engines of economic growth (since Sumer), because young
people move there to make new ways of being, taking advantage of fact
that the city is where you escape the surveillance of the village and
the social control of the farm

- the city is the historical system for the production of anonymity
and the ability to experiment autonomously in ways of living - govts/
"we" are closing this

Some great personal historical anecdotes.

- We are on the verge of eliminating the human right to be alone, to
do your own thinking, in own place, in own way, without anybody
knowing

- prices, offers, commodities, opportunities, are now being based on
the data mining of everything
- senior govt official of current administration/govt, said to me
after US rules changes of length of time for keeping all info about
citizens for whom nothing is suspected, that the "minor" changes in
the Ascroft rules, all minor details of those for whom nothing is
suspected, will now be kept not for 180 days but for 5 years (an
approximation for infinity)
- Eben: should we have a law, based on the constitution, for this?
Govt official just laughed. Complete despotism.

- One of the problems of innovation under conditions of complete
despotism - one of the problems of 20th century totalitarianism, is
that it eliminates the possibility of free markets and innovation.
- the network is an extraordinary platform for social control
- USA and China have adopted almost identical points of view/ actions
- robust full society network people graph, connecting people to
everybody they know, and exhaustive data mining of society, is
fundamental govt policy for both governments for "stability
maintenance"

- we, who understand what's happening, need to be very vocal about this
- not just our civil liberties at stake - I shouldn't need to say
this, that should be enough, but of course it's not - we need to make
clear that the cost, the other part, is the very vitality, vibrancy,
of invention, culture and discourse, that wide open, robust,
uninhibited public debate that the US Supreme Court so loved in NYT v
Sullivan, and that freedom to tinker, invent, be different,
non-conformist, for which people have always moved to the cities that
gave them anonymity, that gave people a change to experiment with
anonymity and to experiment with who they are and what they can do
(the loss of this is the cost close to being paid by us all)
- this opportunity to experiment anonymously in being, thinking and
doing, more than anything else, is what will sustain social vitality
and economic growth in 21stCentury
- of course there are other reasons, protection for the integrity of
the human soul, but that's not govt's concern
- precisely for the glory of how we understand civil society that that
is NOT govt's concern
- precisely our commitment to the idea of individual's development at
own pace, and in own way, that has been centerpiece of OUR society's
fundamental commitment, that means that protection of the integrity of
the human soul is OUR business and NOT govt's business

- we must be clear to govt that there is no tension between
maintenance of civil liberty in the form of the right to be left
alone, and economic policy of securing innovation under austerity -
they require the same thing:
 - free software
 - free hardware we can hack on
 - free access to information
 - right to share freely
 - free spectrum to communication without "let"? or hindrance
- to everyone on earth without regard to the ability to pay, to
provide a pathway to an independent ,economic  and intellectual life
for every young person

- we have the tech we need
 - cheap micro servers
 - the right software
- need to retrofit the first law of robotics into current society, in
the next few minutes, or we're cooked
 - this is CIVIL innovation
- must continue the long lifetime of personal computers that everybody
can hack on, by using them, needing them, spreading them around
- use our own force as consumers and technologists to deprecate closed
networks and locked down objects
- without clear guidance in public policy, we will remain a tiny minority - 8.3%

- innovation under austerity is our battle cry, not for things we care
about, but for the things the other people care about, our entree to
social policy, and our LAST chance, to do in govt what we've NOT been
able to do by attempting to preserve our mere liberties, which have
been shamefully abused by our friends in govt as well as by our
adversaries
- we've been taken to the cleaners with respect to our rights, and
with respect to everybody's money
- nobody will run in this year's US election on the basis of the
restoration of our civil liberties
- but they will all talk about austerity and growth, and we must bring
our message
- this is my first draft, inadequate in many ways, but it's a place to start
- if we lose, the night will be very long, and very dark
--------------------------------

May be someone can fix up the transcription, and transcribe the question time...

Be strong folks, and may you find that which your soul seeks for you.