sounds like it would be a great place to buy those helicopters. >> weather technology developed is kind of a variation on the previous question about the aircraft with a technology, the famous question about teflon and the bass program and all that has gotten out into the commercial world at all or what development there is so secret, what steve a look at. 51 states that area 51. >> that's an interesting question and i haven't heard about any commercial the applications that tend to be military and espionage based. >> including the best health paint and all that? the first attempt at which was apparently according to the book something of a disaster. ..

>> was there one particular story that you fan the most shocking or surprising of the things you learn about area 51? >> you know, everything that was told to me was very ornate and very interesting, and i think all circled back to allow me to create the puzzle so to speak,

all these individual pieces that in and of themselves were fascinating to understand the broader bigger picture of area 51 was what i found the most rewarding, certainly at the end to step back and say this makes sense and this is why it's secret and this is what went on there even though i probably only know a small fraction of it. winston churchill once said about, and he was speaking about russia, he said it's an inic ma wrapped inside of a puzzle wrapped inside of a riddle, and he could have been speaking about area 51. >> our thanks to annie and also author of the new book. >> this event was hosted by the commonwealth club in san fransisco. visit commonwealthclub.org for

more information. >> you're watching booktv on c-span2. >> well, coming up next, a discussion between authors michael and douglas ruchecoff and its impact, both positive and negative on the world. it's about an hour and 10 minutes. [applause] >> hi. so, welcome, everybody. i'm doug, and we thought we would start by talking a couple minutes and go back and forth a little and probably have time to open it up to you, and i'm going to start because if you know anything about doug, you know that you shouldn't speak after

him, and he's graciously allowed me to take advantage of that fact and go first, so i wanted to talk a little why i wrote wikileaks in the age of

>> it is much more spontaneous phenomena, one that anybody can start. you don't need permission to create something that has the potential to go global. you just need something compelling that you want to say, and thanks to the network with the small end, not the old networks like abc and nbc and things like that, but it can spread and the effects in which we're living in constantly now. the other thing that's changing is the way that information, itself, data is becoming more pervasive and fluid and easy to combine and make new meaning from, and when you combine these two things together, the ease of entry into the political conversation and all the information we have to work with, new information and new ways of combining it, that is

what i would argue is the age of transparency, and i wanted to distinguish between transparency and privacy because a lot of people i think make the mistake of combining the two of them, and so when you hear about wick leeks and -- wikileaks and the fact there's now a transnational organization that seemingly is beyond the reach of any government because it's situated all over the world, that people can leak information to and expose the secrets of who knows. a lot of people immediately say, well, i couldn't live in such a world because what if my secrets were exposed, my business dealings, what if my personal, you know, skeletons in the closet, and i think it's really important to distinguish between the movement for transparency and the need for personal privacy. okay. transparency is what people with

relatively less power need to do or get from people with more power so that we can scrutinize their actions and hold them accountable. and some of those people are beginning to understand the need to be more open, but in most cases, we have to do it to them until they get it, and what they don't act in transparent ways, we're not going to trust them anymore because of how they view secrecy to hide truths from us. the flipside is privacy for the most part is about what people who lack power need against people who have power. at the moment, your privacy is eroded in all kinds of ways. how many people carry a cell phone? how many of you shut off your gps location on the cell phone? verizon or at&t collects information where you are minute by minute. that's how the phone calls get to you, but it also means that

information is now trackable. same with facebookment how many of you read the terms of service on your facebook account all the way through? not a person raises their hand. [laughter] how many of you are aware they change the term to take things that used to be private and make them public? i bet more people are aware of that. this brave new world with wonderful free services are seemingly close to free services are also stealing away our privacy. that doesn't include what the government can do to listen in on your phone calls, search your e-mail, or to do these things without a warrant. privacy is endangered, but it is not endangered by transparency organizations. julian assange said the more power you have the more

transparent you should be. i have not seen evidence that wikileaks is after, you know, your personal laundry list. last point, and then i'll hand it to doug. the other key thing that's happening, and this is why i'm opt mystic -- optimistic about the times we're in is the gap between what powerful people say they do and what they actually do is now being challenged in a forceful new way. that's always been the job of journalism is to ask questions and expose the doings of the powerful. the problem we've had with journalism -- we have many problems, but one big one is journalism inevitably lives somewhere; right? the newspapers that publish in the united states all sort of stop questioning when they reach the water's edge and turn into sort of state cheer leaders and so there are kinds of questions they don't ask about the way our

country is run simply because they are based here, and they are also easily intimidated. the way that amazon took wikileaks off its servers is a good example of how easy our seemingly open and free internet can be turned into something very controllable simply because of powerful senator staffer called amazon did you know you're hosting wikileaks on your servers? when will you take it down? we have a network of people committed to making sure that that information that one state doesn't want to get out may yet get out and be visible to all of us. we have a new potential to hold the powerful accountable. it's a dreadful world we live in, but when was it any better? actually, i should reframe that.

i think the times we live in are very exciting and that the potential to hold the powerful accountable is now in many, many more hands, and it's just up to us what we decide to do with it. with that, i give you my friend, doug rushcoff. [applause] >> i'm going to continue where you left off. there's a guy in my town i was talking about the wikileaks thing that i was going to come do this event. oh, the wikileaks guy, they should catch him and shoot him in the head. this is a guy who i would normally, you know, consider a kind of hillary clinton lefty, basically of a court of how i think politically. i was trying to think how does that happen to someone, get to the point where they think he should be shot in the head. it's not because he's watching fox news or glenn beck got to

him. it's because of the precise moment we're in, transitioning from an electronic media age to a digital media age. you know, the moment of transition is this transparency. the first thing we've seem to have gotten at the hinge between the electronic age, the television, radio age, the age where you turn on the thing, you accept your programming and just watch it, the thing that we got as we transitioned and if you looked at the arts before the transition, we got the cuts and pastes, we got hip hop and remixing and mashup. what we got is people repurposing, deconstructing the media that they were being fed their whole lives; right? we took our tools, took it apart. cut, paste, copy; right? now we can mash up the stuff. we get some transparency, we can

see into the tv, take it apart and understand, oh, that's this man's message. oh, that's thatman's message. oh, they're doing this. we reached that adolescent ad busters no logoish ambition as to what they are doing. i look at wikileaks as the most mature expression of that. this is what they are saying. i remember burrows said when he would cut up the newspaper and put it together in a random way, he would say, oh, let's find out what the paper really says. [laughter] it's that ability that's great. i don't see that where -- because talking about us going to. it's what are we going to do with it? when i think of digital media, don't think of the code on the cd-rom. i think of digits.

it's digital. i think of ten fingers. it's digital commands. it's the human number ten. digital brings things back to our creative capacity, the bias is towards us creating media rather than just consuming media. the electronic media that was global, global television, global radio led to revolutions because people watched the cosby asking why don't we live like that? digital media can do something else. digital media tools are the tools in which we can begin to produce, through which we can start to create the society we want to live in rather than just deconstruct or make transparent the society that we don't want to live in, and in some cases that work is distasteful to us because it's work; right? it's not about necessarily getting a global constituency to

read what you put on the "huffington post" and blog it and link it and tweet it to all their friends. it's great, but it's easy to say what they are doing wrong; right? it's harder to use technology locally and how do we fix the problem? how do we do this? when i look at the successful uses of social media in se, you know, in egypt or the countries with successful revolutions, what are those but highly localized national movements; right? these are people reconnecting with their local national roots. these are not people saying we want to be a part of the global community, but we want our rights right here, and the social media they do is local in nature, yes, they tweet out what's happening and get on cnn and get the support and all, but it's about local means so where i share that optimism is in the

possibility that people use these technologies for local currency, for local networks and towns have found how cheep it is to get space in someone else's satellite. if it's legal in your state, you can have a municipal supported wi-fi for everyone in your town. that's where i get excited is people understanding the value they create through these technologies rather than just surrounderring the value they create to youtube or facebook to get hits and get more friends and be part of that internal economy where really the users are the product. there's so many environments in which we think we're the users, but when someone else is paying, usually they are the customer and not you. we're not the customer of facebook, by the thing being sold on facebookment the environments that seem so free are free because we're not paying with our money, but

someone else is paying for us; right? to be rendered on to that system. privacy issues, i mean, notwithstanding. the last thing i say to almost bring it back to you here is to me, the very notion that oh, we're losing our privacy, it's not that it's silly, but it's that we lost our privacy long ago. i mean, whether it was direct marketers having everything about your family on an index card. they knew your license, your dogs, your family, and they had enough modeling then to know if your kid will be gay or stay straight or you will be jewish or be a revolutionary. i mean, that's been known. the thing that's new is that now we know they know. we know that we have no privacy. our lack of privacy is becoming transparent to us; right? that is actually a healthy thing.

>> well, i don't disagree with that at all. i think the thing that -- the first is a worry, and the second is more optimistic. we'll go between pessimism and optimism. i think that the thing that worries me about the time we're living in is the fragmentation of our attention and the danger, the blessing of the ability to get our hands on all this information and to make things with it and express ourselves. we're going through like this unbelievable period of self-expression now. i mean, the old saying was, you know, freedom of the press belongs to him who can own one. well, now we can all own wop. we're all talking, but it's not clear if we're listening.

i think it is clear we're not all listening and we're being overwhelmed by so many voices clammoring to get into the conversation and to be heard that the ultimate result is the kind the hypergridlock or these huge attention swings. you know, we focused on iran for two weeks and then michael jackson died and so much for those people in iran, so at a level and a personal -- at a metalevel and a personal level, we have a problem we have not yet solved. how do you drink from the fire hoses and how do you in your efforts to add to the public conversation do something other than just add to the relate rick? we have not solved this problem yet, and i don't think the facebooks, ect. of the world are interested necessarily in solving them. we have to figure this out and demand better filters to deal

with the deluge, and if we don't, we're in big trouble as a society and a world because we don't have -- we have like an 18th century machinery that is still the only thing that we have for collectively solving problems. i talk a little bit in the book about an idea that we in personal democracy qowr rum called we government. the notion is there may be a path through this which is neither about getting just big government or small government, left or righting but it's more that individuals and communities and government koa credits better services and makes the process transparent, very simple example of this, you may have heard of a site called see, click, fix, which i'm a big fan of growing out of a big guy in

new haven wanting to report the potholes in his neighborhood, and he was about to just send in the information the old-fashioned way, make a phone call, sends in a letter, and it disappeared into a black hole, and he thought that's -- that doesn't seem good enough. what if i could make my report to be relevant person in my town, but for the report to be visible on a website where everybody can see it and we all could tell whether or not people had the same problem and whether the problem was getting resolved; right? he built the plat platform and made it easy. you can take a picture, upload the picture, designate who the picture is sent to. the site also tells you what agency to send it to, and you can tell how long it takes for problems to be resolved. because the information is transparent, everybody pays attention to it in a different way. they can't bury is the way they

used to be able to bury it. this is now in more than 500 cities and in two years got more than 75,000 service reports on it, and it's working, and people are beginning to see maybe there's another way for me to do stuff. last point. i don't agree about egypt. i don't think these revolutions, these uses of social media are local in the way that you were saying or just local. i think that there's something else also coming which is the potential for a genuine global consciousness that comes from using these tools. it's not inherent. you can absolutely see more hypernationalistic tepid sighs amplified -- tendencied amplified by people who want to use the internet for that. what's amazing and exciting is

take the difference in tahir square. it was i'll possible to suppress the news from egypt, but the active sharing whether you were there or you were here or somewhere else, builds networks. it's like think of it the way the brain creates new memories, and, you know, the tendrals reach out, make a connection, and the connection is reenforced the more that action is done or that memory is pulled up, and i think we're seeing the same sort of thing, a global nervous system that emerges around these episodes. there's no question -- it takes local organizing and 99% of what happens in places like egypt is about what the local organizers have figured out how to do, but at the same time, there's this metaeffect developing, and we

are not just relying on the internet itself. we're obviously going to quality media. in this case, al-jazeera gave the best report in the eng lash language. they grabbed to it for rich content and that's the only place they could get it, but i'm optimistic about this wave of change because i think one of its products, one of the things it's doing is like a carrier wave spreading this new culture of global connection, and it's very fragile as we saw in places like egypt, again, where they shut off the internet for several days, and we didn't have much recourse although people tried to find ways to route around the censorship and some information was able to get out, but i think that just further clarifies for us what the challenges are that we have, and

one of them is building a truly resilient network that is not sewly in the -- soully in the hands of private companies who may say when the state says shut off service on vote phone, they shut it off. we need to build something more resilient. >> yes and no. absolutely we need a genuinely functioning internet. that's what i've been writing for the last year or two. we think it's free. it's not. it's controlled top-down. it's centralized because we share processers. it's a centralized thing, and we can create another one. it's not hard, it's just a matter of do we understand why that's important or not? as far as the development of a global consciousness, a guy in mind, a great collective thing, i'm there with you except i look at the internet as practice for

that. i look at the internet as a kind of a rudimentary simple way for us to experience what it might be like if we did this thing for real. when i look at egypt to me, the turning point in that whole revolution is when they turned off the net because what happened when they turned off the net? the people who had been practicing network revolution with each other online had to go out into the street to find one another. when they turn off the net, we go out, and then the real thing happens. >> oh, no, no. i'm going to tweak that a little bit. forgive me for interrupting. i think what happened in egypt is a network publicked. they shut off the public interpret, but they couldn't shut off the internet public.

people got a taste what-like to be connected, not just from the interpret, but cell phones and messaging. i think you would agree with me, doug, many of them already were -- >> this was the tipping point though. really. i think -- >> we'll see what the future historians say. >> i think it was a huge error on their part to turn off the net at that point. it's interesting. i thought the advantage to having our net is that even though they can turn it off, they can turn off anything they want. if they have guns, they can blows us up and turn off word of mouth by shooting people who are speaking. they can always turn it off, but if we had a network that was decentralized and ours, they would have to take a positive action to turn it off. they would have to attack our network to shut it down opposed to now just turn it off at the master switch which they have. one is a much more active attack to make and the other is

passive, just turn it off. that said, turning off the net in egypt was such a provocative act in itself that it turned -- it really did change the way the world looked at that event. all of the sudden it was like oh, my god. you can kill them, slave them, shoot them, but turn off their net? all the sudden we could relate to these folks. a sarcastic way of seeing it, but it seemed like unfair at that point, and it did tip opinion in a lot of ways. >> i want to ask you a question about your book because program or be programmed, i remember talking to you about the question of what our kids are lerping or not learn -- learning or not learning. now, i have teenagers -- well, i'm almost done with teenagers. he has a younger daughter who is not on the net as far as i

know. >> a 6-year-old. >> a question i have because, you know, as you can hear, we are both obviously optimistic about the future in our hands, and yet i have to ask do you think the younger generation is going to be lulled into a kind of complacency? after all, they are growing up networked on platforms that, you know, in some ways are invisible to them. they don't know how they were built, they just work. they don't have to know how they work. schools don't teach it, right? technology seems to be now about learning how to make a pourpoint. when we went to high school, i think we were both around the same age actually, technology in high school was actually learning basic or some other

programming language, and now that's not the case. it's how to make a nice presentation. i'm wondering if you noticed since your book came out, is there a change underway in how kids are being taught or what they are demanding to learn? because after all, they are the ones who are going to live in the future that we're talking about. >> not that they're demanding to learn, but there's a shift in readiness for schools to engage with computer programming more as a liberal art than as an office skill, you know, which is where it's really gotten to. if you take a computer class now, it's like typing. you're learning how to do spreadsheets and microsoft office to get a job in the workplace of today. i have noticed some, not all, but some schools, particularly private schools with lots of money, looking at programming as not only a skill because this is

the language we're using, the operating system on which our society is functioning that it would be great for people to know how it works and what its biases are, but people understanding that when you teach someone programming, they look at the rest of the world differently, that once you've uncovered the bias of a program, once you understood that this environment is programmed to make us behave in certain ways, you look at the city and you say, oh, this is a grid pattern. why did they pick a grid pattern here? i didn't know this was a grid pattern until i took programming in 7th grade. then i looked at it and sow it was a program. they have canals and other things. why did they pick this? it's not like evil robert moses wanted to program my mind, but this was programmed for maximum motion and movement and there's time for stillness, but it's about moving money and stuff quickly, transactions. when you understand that and start looking at your world that way, it becomes much more open

to our reengineering. i may sound like fuller here, but these are problems not of human nature, but problems of design, that all of things we're using. i did a about about money. it was programmed in 1200-1300 and those guys are dead and the money is functioning like they wanted it to, but not serving us. you program new moneys to do other things and so that kind of insight is literacy in the 21st century. to have what used to be call read and write to understand the narrative of human history is composed by people and there's marxists and capitalism and we understand that because we're literal, but to understand the programs by which we live, we have to understand what programming is even if we can't

program ourselves. we have to know the stuff called programming exists. these sequences of lines of code that determine the quality of interactions that we have in programmed environments. >> that's interesting. you know, i'm not completely familiar with julian's analysis, but it's to make it harder for them to share information internally. you do this attack with transparency to snarl up their own decision making ability. in other words, he's trying to hack their program -- >> or crack it. >> or crack it, yeah. it's not at all clear if that makes sense, but the reason -- >> transparency is sabotage. >> the reason i ask the question is because what's so fascinating to a lot of us about assange is that he hacked a superpower, you

know, and it wasn't just sort of in the science fiction novel sense of it. he actually did it, and he applied a hacker mentality to a political problem. now, every day in the newspapers, we read about these, you know, brilliant young wiz wizards making a new world for us, and i -- so you made a radical point about what programming, about what learning programming does enable you to see, but when you talk to these young programmers, right, the ones building foursquare and twitter and so on, you think they really want to remake the world, or is this just a massive opportunity? >> oh, it depends which one you talk to. if you talk to twitter, no, he's

to the talking about that. dennis is the foursquare does want to recreate the world. it's to get people to use the thing. what we want is people be able to say what they think of the realities they live in. he gets it, you know, so it depends. most are not, and most by the time they get to venture capital are not. you know, it's hard to maintain that. >> they certainly are not living up to their responsibilities, the ones who became true platforms. facebook has a responsibility in places like egypt to let people use that service anonymously because if you don't, it's just like giving the secret police a map of who to arrest. >> we the people have a responsibility of keeping facebook alive to use services that promote that logic. i mean, they don't owe anything to anybody; right? >> well, yeah. >> they are just corporations.

i mean, the interesting thing is you talk about assange and the idea of, you know, hacking the political system, you know, hackers are using what their tools are to break the political system. what i'm trying to get us to is the next place you're talking about now. rather than hacking the political system, how do we program the social system; right? the political system is -- it's like, and then what politics do we need in order to do that? >> right. >> most people running these companies don't think that way, but they -- i think they are thinking that way some of them at least enough we can get traction. you know, the sweet guy, the google guy, you know -- >> larry or sergi? >> no, the google guy in egypt who was in the on facebook of all things. i'm sure google loves that, an employee using facebook. it's -- i mean,ives over there, it's a -- i mean, i was over

there, it's a corporate culture that is encouraging people to think about what are the applications of the technologies that would mean something to you rather than just what are the applications of these technologies that will mean something to our shareholders? >> i think we've -- we should let folks in on this, although we could keep going. is there a clock? run around with a mic, and we'll take some questions. >> two quick things. you thought julian assange attacked a political system. he didn't actually breakthrough the superpowers fire walls which is what we think when talking about, you know, hacking. >> they talk about social hacking. in the old days, you get a code in the desk drawers. >> this was a high-tech whistle-blower kind of thing?

the more important thing is i want to talk about your neighbor, the progressive neighbor you're concerned about. he looks at wikileaks and wants to kill the guy. you look at it all white. i think the world is more gray, and what assange did with that irresponsible dump of info was he did dump useful info we needed to know about, but he dumped a lot of up foe that was not necessary to dump that caused problems not necessary to cause. he put people's lives at risk and caused the diplomatic service. they talked about people's personal info. what was the point of that? it made our functions more difficult to do. my point is the guy who wants to shoot him, he sees him black, not right. your point, everything is beautiful, full transparency, that's not good either. the world is gray. >> is there a question or just want me respond?

>> yeah, i want to hear your response to that. >> okay. well, first of all, it is not true that assange dumped raw information on to the web. they redacted a lot of information in terms of the war logs, the iraq and afghanistan war logs, and so far of the state department cables, only a few thousand have been actually posted of the 250,000-plus that are in his and the "new york times" and "the guardian's" possession. dump is the wrong word, and of the ones released have been redacted. now, you are, i think, entitled to your opinion. we disagree. i think the embarrassment of diplomatic gossip being published, that was the choice of the newspapers who were given the opportunity to sift the

entire evidence. they picked those things as the ones they wanted to highlight, and not julian assange. they redacted material that the state department and the defense department asked them to pull out. so far the pentagon says nobody was harmed by the releases so far. yes, there's the potential somebody could be harmed. i argue lying about what we do and hiding what we do is also creating potential for harm and in many cases ongoing abuse so there needs to be a balance. i never said, and i never do say in my book that what we should have a 100% full transparaphernalia sigh and the in-- transparency and the inabout of the government. the job of the government has secrets to keep. when you give # million people -- 3 million people access to "classified information ," you cannot say with a straight face

it's still secret. something is broken here. we have a ma tasty siced secret system. keep the important secrets, and the rest stop with this classification. last point. i think we also need to recognize that in the united states in particular it's like we have two governments. the one we elect and the other one that is permanent since world war ii that operates on its own momentum and according to its own rules. every president we legislate seems to be absorbed if he is not part of it into that same system whenever it comes to national security or foreign policy so people may vote and they still don't get a change. why is that? why do we even know the size of that national security system? we have no idea how big the budget is, how many people it employees. this is supposed to be a democratic country, so the problem we have, and this is

where wikileaks is really important. when i say it hacked a superpower, what i mean is that in the united states every other media entity operating under thet of what the government might do to them. the "new york times" cooperates with the pentagon and state department and the president with holding information from the public all the time. wikileaks is not bound by that same rule. in some ways, it's the opposite. folks may not know this, but after world war ii, there were laws in the books that prevented all the national spying agencies in the united states, britain, and australia, each had laws in the books preventing them from spying on their own citizens, but these spy agencies got used to sharing information with each other about the germans and about the, you know, our enemies in world war ii, so they created a pact to share information -- share information on spying on each other's citizens. they cannot spy directly, they

just share. know we have something -- now we have something similar coming from civilians, and it's a civilian intelligence system wikileaks is forcing on us. i may not like it. i think sometimes the choices that other people may make about what should be transparent will be uncomfortable to me as an american, but think of what we've been doing to everybody else all this time, okay? and the point is that the genie is out of the bottle, the ability to do this is inherent. we have a distributed and relatively uncontrolled, with all of doug's caveats, which are true, we have a distributed system with some resilience to it and you can kick them off amazon and they go to a server in switzerland and so far they have not shut them down, and we have live with that. >> i'm not in the white or black of it. i'm a-political. i'm just blech.

i don't see it as real. the thing that interested me about my local neighbor's reaction was not the politics of it, but -- i wasn't going to get into this oosh i'm leaking into my next book rather than this book now, but i believe what's happening is the narratives that people have been using to organize their experience of reality are collapsing, and so without a new narrative to jump on to, they get angry, lost, confused, so the new narrative if they have one is the story that they write rather than a story that they hear, but we don't know how to do that. now, the program you talked about before, the potholes -- >> see, click, fibbing. >> the potholes lets you be a part of something with the narrative feeling and style to it so you can get aceps of continuity rather than just the shock. i mean, when you have no narrative at all, when you live

moment to moment in a distracted way with facebook and tweets coming at you, the only thing that gets your attention and organizes you is terror. that's the only thing to get you to take action is something, oh, something so frightening that you're going to respond to it, otherwise you have to figure out a way to create some kind of a journey, some kind of cohesive intention so that you can have agency in this world, and without that, you want to shoot the messager. >> other questions? somebody back there, yeah. >> i have a question. how you view what happened to us in this media and the full transparency. what happened to average people? what's happened to people when raging press was introduced? how you view what happened to us? what's going to be next? >> i'll tell you what happened to us is i believe we gained the competency of the last great

media renaissance. it feels we get a new medium, and then the elite seem to actually capture the real capacity of the medium while the people gain the capability of the medium before. so, we get text and the rabbis learn to read and the people learn how to hear. they listen to the scroll be read to them. we get the printing press, and the elite print books while we learn to read. now we get the internet and commuterses, and we learn to write; right? so blog and write and tweet, while the elite learn to program. we finally got the capability of the 13th century, but we're in the #21st century. we're one step behind. we've got a world where instead of paying money a watch money made by studios, we pay money to buy the equipment to make our own movies and then upload them

for more money into servers we don't own. i feel what we've done is turn our productive capability into a new form of consumption, but not actually see or learn to seize the value that we create through this what amounts to labor, but i think that can change. i think the window is not yet closed. there's still a window of opportunity for us to seize the capability of this medium. if not this time, maybe next time, but all i can do is while that window is open say there's more on our here than filling up that blogger window, than filling up that tweet. you can actually see behind the curtain again and create the world rather than just passively produce the content for it. >> you know, doug has the longer view. i always answer this question in a much shorter time frame, and i think is this better than

before? i think yes. it is, again, up to you to decide what you will do with these capacities, but i am seeing literally millions of people having this moment of epiphany of i can be a creator. i don't have to just be a consumer, and i can connect with the people that matter to me or who can help me or who i want to go help, and in terms of breaking down isolation and enabling incredibly in many cases life-saving connections, i just happened to be on the phone today with a guy who was helping run the it gets better project that started six months ago after a gay college student committed suicide, a series of gay teens who committed suicide, and i was thinking not only has this project gone viral of, you know, people who are adults telling the younger generation it will get better, and it's

saving living every day, but that what a change it must be for people in all kinds of forms of social isolation to now have access to the internet because you are no longer alone; right? you can find the others. this is a powerful phase shift, and i think doug is -- while doug is right that the elite programs while the rest of us may be just using the tools they made for us to use, that the beneficial effects of these tools can be tremendous. they're also all very disruptive and destabilizing, and we are learning every day how do we adapt, how do we -- you know, what are the new social norms that we need to live with each other? it's not all good. it's not all good. the kid who jumped off the bridge did it because somebody posted a video of him, you know,

invading his privacy with wop one of his roommates. the good and the bad together are now possible, but i guess that's why i'm the more optimistic one in the room. i really do think well, but compared to before when we had to trust walter cronkite and tom brokaw and other white guys to tell us what the news is, but now we can see what the news is. if we choose to let people do that for us, it's our fault, but we have more options now and the tools are in our hands. >> we have to build the tools or trust twitter, facebook, and google to transmit what's actually happening. >> right. another question. >> hi. i was thinking when the both of you were talking about learning programming in school, and for

what it's worth, i'm in my 20s and learned basic in 7th grade. i thought about this one level of extraction and thinking about school and just the way you go from year to year at a very industrial age sort of mechanism, and i was wondering if you were aware of different things like, i think you called it see, click, fix, things like that in the marketplace that are thinking about how to address education in a more digital way, the thinking being that hopefully if education evolves a level, maybe our political discourse will evolve a level as well. >> well, there's experiments. in new york, charter schools has a quest for learning where they use gaming as a model for many other academic disciplines. they teach kids not just games, but games as models so you can

look at politics through gaming, and through programming and how would you reprogram it. there are efforts. most of them are still seen as computer school rather than as something as a different model. >> yeah, i want to say two things about education. the first is on the exciting side, there's an academy in effect, you know, learn at your own pace through an amazing array of online videos and, you know, for some kids that works great, but i don't think we can trust the tools or teaching programming or any of those things to address the real crisis at the heart of education which is how unequal the system is and what a joke we've allowed public education to become, and the idea that we're going to demonize public schoolteachers now and make them pay, you know, i mean, i don't understand this

honestly. it's way beyond my, you know, what i write about a focus op these days. i'm a child of two public schoolteachers, and i'm kind of amazed to see, you know, just when you think it cowbility get worse, and then it gets worse, but we seem not to value it as a society, at least in the united states. we give it lip service, but we have an incredibly stratified education system, and technology alone is not going to be the solution for lots and lots of kids. what you need is a good teacher and a safe setting, and, yes, we have to recognize that learning moments can happen in many places, not just in that box called a classroom, but i would hate to see, you know, people waving technology around as yet one more reason to cut funding for the basics. >> more face-to-face contact for

a human being. >> yeah, that's what i mean. >> there's so much screen time and you don't activate your neurons at all or see the 94% of human communication which is body language, pupils getting bigger, and pacing and leading with your breath. online, you're in a forced asperger situation where there's no social pews and that's why people get up culted and iferg is strange -- insulted and everything is so strange. how do kids learn to interface with humans? a few hours a days to disconnected is too valuable to give up. >> this woman up front here. >> thank you. i wrote my first computer program in 1977. it's not 2011, and i am not yet on facebook or twitter. i have, as you can imagine been chided for it by many people, and i have my reasons i'm not

ready to do it, and i'm concerned about privacy. i tell people i studied computers and math in college and ect., and that technology was meant to augment our lives, to help us, not take over our lives which seems to have happened a lot today, and people just look at me oddly most of the time as i've been called many things. i just wondered aside from what you said if you have any thoughts on that, the whole idea of this pressure, this peer pressure that everyone has to be on facebook and just losing sight of the benefits of technology opposed to that dependency of just, you know, living every moment on twitter and facebook. >> right. well, there's many ways to answer that question, and first of all, i -- what you're doing is totally cool. i mean, i barely use facebook. it's like it's there because the

same reason that maybe you need a, you know, a mailing address, but i can see why it's seductive for people and addictive for others, but i think the pressure to use it is, you know, you don't have to absolutely, but i think part of what is going on in our fascination with these toys and tools is a search for something that's missing. i was really struck when the ipad, the first ipad came out, and there was this incredible burst of attention to the launch. i mean, and i happened to look on twitter which i think is an interesting tool because it's more like a public bulletin board. you can see for of a pulse of what people who are using it are thinking and doing. it happenedded to be within days of obama's state of the union

speech a year ago, and the percentage of people interested in the ipad compared to obama's state of the union speech was like, you know, three or four times as high. it was like a huge peak, and what i thought about that was there's a need for magic. people are hungry for tran transcendents. they are not getting it. we went looking for it in politics the last cycle. we didn't get it, and now we're looking for it from our toys, and there are cool things about these toys, but they are not transcendent. that's, you know, looking for the shiny object to give you that sort of sense of magic and possibility is a mistake, but the hunger is there. see, the thing that's interesting to me is we haven't stopped looking for things that will change our lives.

we just temporarily distracted by the toys, and the marketing is amazing and all the rest and there's definitely follow-up thinged toot with them including creative things you can do with them, but you can't pram an ipad, you know? the other thing i worry about other than the fragmentation of attention is we will be seduced by the perfection of some of these things into not knowing how to hack them, not knowing how to program them because they are not programmable. they are not made to be. you know, your computer that you programmed on; right? you can program on it; you can't do that with many devices now. that's a seductive danger if we continue to go in that direction. >> yeah, i mean, macintosh worked better than the pc because you had to use mac things with it. oddly enough, we call windows evil, but windows bent over backwards to work with everybody and everything.

you have drivers and throw it in there, try to make it work, and it crashes. windows sucks. by an macintosh and all of this and an apple and it works together. i wonder why. it's in our own world. when systems are open to us, they are messier; right? you don't get that complete wonderful catholic feeling, but -- [laughter] which is a nice feeling to have, that -- you don't get that kind of transcendents, but you end up with a different possibility. i suppose it's a more agnostic tradition to get together and build this thing and out of our activity comes a stranger tractor to transcend our efforts. this sort of infinite game possibility, and that's, you know, that's the best we're going to do i have a feeling. that's the best we're going to do is just settle for the messiness of the human reality in order to build something together, you know, rather than

purchasing that holy grail because it really won't. we all know it never satisfies, never really does. the other thing about facebook, the reason why friends are compelled, remember esther, the landmark forum and somebody got that and if they get it, you have to get it. it's like that mofia wars, farmville quality. facebook is that. the value of their experience goes up when you're all there; right? on the one hand, is seems like a circle, but on the other hand, all there for what? all they're doing is what? just basically giving who we are, surrounderring ourselves into the masks so they -- markets so they can better predict with amazing accuracy, better than we know ourselves, what we're going to do next. it's fascinating. >> what are we going to do in the next five minutes? i think we have time for one more question probably.

two maybe. .. to maintain net neutrality then you've lost net neutrality. you only have met neutrality but for the grace of government and if someone else comes in when

mashaal bachmann is elected president and net neutrality goes away we wish we have that mesh network. >> by the way, one mistake -- i have a lot of respect for the people fighting this fight, but they've never do find it completely because the neutrality of moving information through the network is only one piece of the sorts of system that we need. for example, what about searching neutrality. does anybody here realize when you use google to search you're not going to get the same result as the next person. on the same month term, google is shipping results on what it thinks of you and know about you, when you are searching from and it tweets results to abide by the local law. you may not know this but although complete on google

search, if you start searching for the phrase but tar and will not complete because google doesn't want, and this is their way of playing of nice of copyright holders they do all sorts of things to change the search it's not a pure natural practice. and last, net neutrality sounds nice, but if a company wants to kick you off its services for other reasons it can do it for a completely arbitrary reasons. that's why i asked have you read your terms of service because of these companies when you start using them you just check got yes to the terms of service and the wording is we can change these it any time we feel like we want and we don't have to tell you so when amazon kicked wikileaks of criminals in violation of terms of service because they were posting copyright material and material that could be harmful, first of all you can't copyright a

government documents, they are born and copyrighted and there have been had no arms or criminal case, no conviction but amazon pointed to its terms of service and said we can kick you off our servers. dennett neutrality discussion would do nothing about that. i think we have to be honest and realize how contingent and fragile this is that we've been taking for granted. it's a wonderful thing, and if we use it wisely it can liberate us, but it's hardly clear that it is this accident of an open distributed internet is going to be around for another generation unless we fight hard for it. >> when push comes to shove if i'm going to future rise, if -- >> is that aver? >> it is now. in my future it is.

if we don't teach sorted deacons program and very basics how these technologies work, and people in other places are, for everyone program that comes out of college there's probably a thousand or 2,000 where the teach programming in elementary school. what will happen and this is because the net is not politically it is most business what will happen is some group of chinese hackers or red army supported russian mob, whenever is going to chase every bit the accountability to zero and america realizes my god we put our banks, on, then the president gets up and that's when the real sputnik speech gets made. they are coming for our money. they took down our bank will have to reset to the day before to get the bank back on. they go to these mormons in utah

to get the records of the closest the day before and say we are resetting yesterday noon. go and difference going to freak out and then we will push but it's going to be exciting if we remain the sleazy and stupid. [laughter] it's going to be exciting because we have a lot at stake other than our freedoms. it's our entire economy. everything is on there. >> last question were. you, yes. >> with wikileaks one of the things that concerns me is the sort of a deluge of information has really sort of at least in my sense there's so much information that comes at us at such a fast rate in my mind it put us all in a daze and i guess that's also true with the sort

of larger media and traditional media serve as a filter of information for us telling us what's important and what's not and i also think that's one of the problems with contemporary media is a place is the really important stories and put as much weight on the important stories as lindsay lehane and other things and so i am wondering if you know of any sort of a more space filtering mechanisms or personal sheltering mechanisms. a flexible, i get all my news now from youtube i don't have a tv anymore but i have a different channel and in the sense that as a filtering process as well and i guess kind of related i keep waiting for the craigslist of facebook to come out. we complain about facebook and the things people talk about and in my opinion that happens because that's how the system

was designed, and i keep waiting for the sort of more to democratic social change mind craigslist a facebook that doesn't sell off all our data. so i guess yeah if you know democratic faltering mechanisms which could use for why something like that hasn't sort of popped up yet. >> there's a diaspora of trying to be a more distributed to facebook. i don't know what their current status is. honestly on the facebook issue i think what will happen is in a few years hafed -- i already see it with my kids who i sort of check in once a year and see what do you think of facebook now? they don't like it anymore. it's gotten annoying. they still rely on it, but it is

far from the same thing they had to have and use, and so i think there may be a sort of some other patterns of behavior will evolves whether it's people deciding to be just more connected through their mobile phone to whatever network they want to be connected to. i don't know. this changes so fast. anybody who tells you three years from now they know what people will be doing you shouldn't listen to them because they don't know either. on the faltering think the one thing i am seeing in general, the answer is find trusted sources and follow them and whether that is trusted sources in the sense of old media or individual reporters whose bylines you trust or blogs or individual people who you follow through whatever means you've

used. personally, for example i do use twittered. i follow a bunch of people on her who have in one form or another i trust, think they are intelligent or interesting or i know what they're buying is is so i can filter the information that they are sharing with me through my knowledge of their bias. but you can think of that trusted network and you can build them for yourself, as systems for filtering information for you. in the same way you trusted the editors of your favorite magazine to do that for you in the pre-digital age. the problem is that you have to go and do this. it isn't being done for you anymore and you have many more choices and are so easily distracted that you may forget what you were doing in the middle of trying to build this up for yourself. the media literacy today requires work. you have a plethora of choice.

in the past you didn't have so many choices. the choices were made for you. watch channel two, channel four, channel seven and we are done. but you have to be an active agent and think intelligently about what media you are consuming or sharing and decide for yourself whether it is good enough. now americans, we are not taught these skills. we are i think like sheep led to the slaughter, but you don't have a choice, and i think that the good news is that some of those younger hackers see this as a market opportunity so people are starting to invent better tools for filtering that enable you to take that fight your hose and instead focus it on five things you think are most important.

we may see some balance began but it's an act of process. you get the last word. >> to realize good journalism is not free. these people have to be funded. i know a lot of people now because they are blogging they think we don't need to pay anyone because we will have someone blog. governments and corporations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create the fabricated lie so we need to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to be able to spend a few days, d construct and try to figure out what's going on and if we don't think it's worth it, then we are not going to get a lot, and as a final thing the big answer to door question and this was a book called the filter bubble which is about what you're talking about and he's codified a lot of different kind of shapes and wheys this happens as

well as strategy to get beyond but i would argue find something that you think is worth, the journalistic pursuit you think is worth of them pursuing and then help fund them, by their paper. >> there's a list of groups, there's every source section in the back of the group that included so if there are groups you want to support that are doing this work in the nonprofit arena doing investigative journalism, transparency work there are many ways to get involved and not just with your money. as the mckeithen on the for-profit you can buy their paper and helped them survive. scan or by their book. [laughter] >> i think these two will be sticking around to chat afterwards. we have books for sale behind you. [applause]

[inaudible conversations] we asked what are you reading this summer? here's what you had to say.