>> i'm going to ask one more question. then my own. how would your attitude reflects your two vials? >> again, i will get back to the balanced point. i think you have to think about, you know, all of the things that you do to enjoy work and creating things. there are so many other parts of life to you need to a adjust to an export and find the balance. it's such an important thing. and these things happened you realize the importance of key friends and family. then you have to resolve. you finally have learned a time. so he go from there. >> i wanted to go back. in tenth grade, eighth grade. your dumpster diving. if that happens now in 2011 in

the age of applications and mobile devices and facebook and torture and cruel and everything else to know what do you think an acre in ticket would be looking for? >> i'm not sure how many listings people make. you know, i think today the rate at which young people have gotten new technology is breathtaking. ..

>> so we really have to put on our thinking caps and try to figure out to get kids today excited about being creators of tomorrow. >> i think i'm going to invite john up here. i should say by the way, i grew up here. i went to mountain view high school and i grew up from a few blocks here and what's interesting is going through the museum downstairs and again the first 2,000 years of computer, for me, like you were there during the birth of the personal computer revolution. i am somebody who has directly benefited from that revolution. who has been able to basically create a life for myself because the internet and computing was the way to go. so i just to personally thank you for that. >> thank you. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> for more on paul allen and his work visit

ideaman.paulallen.com. >> what are you reading this summer, booktv wants to know. >> hi, i'm jane blair and i'm the author of hesitation kills, a female marine officer's combat experience in iraq and this summer i'm reading zero through breakthrough. it's about female leadership. i'm also reading james gleek's the information. and i'm also reading outliers by malcolm gladwell. >> go to booktv.org to view other book lists. >> a discussion about micah civil if i and douglas rush -- rushkoff about the world. it's about an hour and 10 minutes. [applause]

>> hi. so welcome, everybody. my name is micah. >> and i'm doug rushkoff. >> and i thought we would talk each for a couple minutes and then maybe go back and forth a little and hopefully we'll have plenty of time to open it up to you. and i'm going to start 'cause if you know anything about doug rushkoff 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 about wikileaks and the age of transparency and it's meant not to be a book so much about wikileaks itself as the moment and the larger trend that we are living in, that wikileaks represents but is just one piece

of. the book does touch on the organization and julian assange who i know and who's spoken at personal democracy forum twice and so i do weave that into the story but i do think the larger story is the age that we're in is one where two big changes are happening at the same time and combining. and the first one is, that activism has become more social. it is a much more spontaneous phenomenon and one that anybody can start. you don't need permission to create something that the potential to go global. you need something excelling and thanks to the network, with the small n, not the old networks like abc, cbs, and so on. if your message is compelling,

it will spread and the effects of that where we're living in constantly now. the other thing that's changing is way the information itself, data, is becoming more pervasive and fluid and easy to combine and easy to 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 want to distinguish between transparency and privacy because a lot of people make the mistake of combining the two of them and so when you hear wikileaks and the fact that there is 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? what if my business dealings and what if my personal, you know, skeletons in the closet? and i think that it is 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 that when 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 flip side is that privacy

for the most part is about what people who lack power need against people who have power. at the moment, your privacy is being eroded in all kinds of ways. how many people are carrying a cell phone? how many of you have shut off your gps location button on the cell phone? so, you know, verizon or at&t is collecting information on where you are minute-by-minute. that's how they get the phone calls to get to you. but it also means that that information is now tractable. same thing with facebook. how many people here have read the terms of service on their facebook account, all the way through? not a person is raising their hands. how many of you are aware how often facebook has changed those terms to take things that are now private and make them public? i bet a few more people are aware of that. so this brave new world that we're in, that is giving us all these wondrous free services or seemingly close to free services is also stealing away our privacy and that's not even to

mention what the government can do to listen in on your phone calls or to search your email or to do these things without a warrant. so privacy is in danger but it is not endangered by transparency organizations. julian assange has said very clearly that the more power you have, the more transparent you should be. the less power you have, the more privacy you should have. and i have not seen any evidence that wikileaks is after, you know, your personal laundry list. last point and then i'm going to hand it to doug, the other key thing that's happening is -- and this is why i'm optimistic about the times that we're in, is that 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 very big one is that journalism inevitably lives somewhere, right? the newspapers that publish in the united states all sort of stop their questioning when they reach the water's edge. and they turn into state cheerleaders and so there are kinds of questions that they don't ask about the way our country is run simply because they are based here. and they also are 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 a powerful senator's staffer called somebody up at amazon and do you know you're hosting wikileaks on your servers and

when are you going to take it down? but now we have other platforms that are not state-based. and we have a network of people who are 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. so we have a new potential to hold the powerful accountable and that makes me optimistic. it's a dreadful world we live in but when was it any better? actually, i should reframe that. i think that 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 what to do with it. and with that i give you my friend doug rushkoff. [applause] >> to continue from where you left off, there's -- there's a guy in my town -- i was talking about the wikileaks thing, that i was going to come and do this event, ah, wikileaks guy.

they should just catch him and shoot him in the head. and this is a guy who i would normally, you know, consider a kind of -- you know, a hillary clinton leftie kind of -- basically, in accord with how i think of politically. how do they get to this place where this guy should be just shot in the head? and it's not because he's watching fox news. it's not because glenn beck got to him. i think it has to do with -- it's because of the precise moment we're in. transitioning from an electronic media age to a digital media age. the moment of transition is this transparency. the first thing that we seem to have gotten at the hinge between the electronic age, the television, the radio age, the age when you turn on the thing, you accept your programming and just watch it -- the thing that we got as we transitioned -- i

mean, if you look at the arts right before the transition we got the cut and paste of william boros and brian gison. we got the hip hop and remixing and mash up. what we got was people repurposing, deconstructing the media that they were being fed their whole lives. right? so we took it apart. we took our tools. the first thing that anybody ever noticed on a mac was cut, paste, copy. right now we can mash up this stuff. we get some transparency. we can see into the tv. we can take it apart and understand, oh, that's this man's message? oh, it's this man's message. oh, they're doing this. we reach that kind of adolescent ad busters no logoish kind of readiness to take apart what they're doing. and i look at wikileaks as kind of the ultimate, the most mature expression of that. this is what -- this is what they're saying. this is what they mean. i remember boros used to say

when he would cut up the newspaper and put it together in a random way, he would say, oh, now let's find out what the paper really says. so it's that ability is great. i don't see that as where -- because talking about us going to. it's what are we going to do with it? when i think about digital media going digital i don't think of a code on the cd-rom. i think of the digital. it's digits. it's 10 fingers. that's why i called it 10 commands. it's the human number 10, right? digital brings things back to our creative capacity. the bias of digital media is towards us creating media rather than just consuming media. the electronic media which was extremely global, global television, global radio. it led to some great revolutions because people watched what was going on the cosby show and why

don't we live like that? digital media tools are the tools through which we can begin to produce, so that we can start to recreate the society we want to live in rather than deconstruct or make transparent the society that we don't want to live in. 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 then blog it and blog it and tweet it to all their friends. it's great, but it's easy to say what they're doing wrong. right? it's much harder to use digital technology locally. to figure out how are we going to fix this problem? how are we going to let people use did csa on the pathmark? how are we going to do this? when i look at the successful uses of social media in egypt or

in the countries that are having 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 part of the global community. these are people we want our rights right here and the social media that they're doing is local -- is local in nature. yes, they'll tweet out what's happening and they'll go on cnn and get the support and all but it's about local means. so where i share that optimism is the possibility is people use these technologies for local currency, for local networks. there's towns that have found out how cheap it is to get space in someone else's satellite capsule where you throw in a communication satellite for your own town. if it's legal in your state, you can have municipal-supported wifi for everybody in your town. i mean, that's where i get excited is people understanding the value they are creating through these technologies rather than just surrendering all the value they create to

youtube to get some hits sort of facebook so they can get more friends and be part of that very internal economy where really the people -- the users are the product. there's so many environments in which we think we are the users but when someone else is paying, usually they're the customer, not you. right? we're not the customers of facebook. we are the thing that's being sold on facebook. and a lot of these 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 unto that system. privacy issues, i mean, notwithstanding. the last thing i would say -- and this is almost to 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 that it's 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,

they knew your dogs, they knew your family, they knew -- and they had enough modeling then to know if your kid is going to turn gay or stay straight or you're going to turn jewish or you're going to be a revolutionary. i mean, that's been known. the thing that's new is that now we know they know. is that we know that we have no privacy. right? so our lack of privacy is becoming transparent to us. right? and that -- and that is actually a healthy thing. >> well, i don't disagree with that at all. i think -- the thing that -- i want to respond to two things that you said. the first is the worry and the second is a little optimistic. we're going to go between pessimism and optimism. >> it's our way. >> i'm a pess-optimist. >> and i'm an pessimist. >> all right. the thing that worries me about the time that 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 own one? we're all talk. it's not clear if we're all listening. and actually i think it is clear that we're not all listening and that we're being overwhelmed by so many voices clamoring to get in the conversation and to be heard, that the ultimate result is a kind of hyper gridlock. or these huge attention swings, you know, we focused on iran for two weeks and then michael jackson died and, you know, so much for those people in iran. so at a metalevel and at a personal level, i think we have

a problem which we have not yet solved which is how do you drink from these fire hoses? and how do you -- in your efforts to add to the public conversation do something other than just add to the cacophony. we have not solved this problem yet and i don't think the facebooks, et cetera, of the world are interested in necessarily in solving them. we're going to have to figure them out and demand better filters to deal with the deluge. and if we don't, we're in big trouble as a society. we have an 18th century machinery that is still the only collectively way of solving problems. i talked in the book we at personal democracy forum called we government and the notion that there may be a path through but this is neither about big

government or small government left or rights, the governments cocreates better services by sharing information more openly and by making the process transparent and participatory. some of you may have heard a site see click fix which i'm a big fan of. it grew out of one guy in new haven wanting to report his potholes. the pothole or graffiti problem in his neighborhood and he was about to send the information the old-fashioned way. you make a phone call and you send in a letter and it disappears into a black hole. and he thought that's -- that doesn't seem good enough. what if i could make my report to the relevant person in my town but for the report to be visible on a website where everybody could see it and we all could tell whether or not other people had the same

problem and whether that problem was getting resolved, right? and so he built the platform and made it really easy for you -- you could take a picture. you can upload the picture. you can designate where the person was sent to and tells you. it will send it to the relevant city agency and you can track how long for problems to be resolved and because the information is transparent, everybody pays attention to it in a different way. they can't bury it the way they used to be able to bury it and now see click fix is in more than 500 cities. and it's already in just two years gotten 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 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 hyper nationalistic tendencies getting amplified for people wanting to use that. what's amazing, just take the difference between tiananmen square and tahrir square, okay? first of all, it was impossible to suppress the news from egypt. but secondly, the act of sharing, whether you were there or you were here or somewhere else, builds networks. it's like -- think of the way the brain creates new memories, you know, the tendrils reach out and make a connection and then that connection gets reinforced

the more that action is done or that memory is pulled up. i think that we're seeing the same sort of thing, a kind of global nervous system that emerges around these episodes. 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 meta-effect developing. and we are not just relying on the internet itself. we're obviously going to quality media, in this case, algiers -- al-jazeera was creating the best content and it was the only place they could get it. but i'm optimistic about this wave of change because i think one of its products -- of the things it's doing is like a carrier wave spreading this new

culture of global connection. 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, though, people did find ways to route around the censorship and at least some essential information was able to get out. but i think that further clarifies for us what the challenges are that we have ahead. and one of them is building a truly resilient network. that is not solely in the hands of private companies who, you know, may say when the state says shut off service on the vote-a-phone, they shut it off and we need to build something more resilient. >> yes and no. absolutely, we need a genuinely functioning internet. that's what i've been writing about for the last year or two. we think the net is free and

it's not. it's completely controlled top-down, dns, the whole thing. and it's centralized and it's built to share processors and we can create another one, a genuine mesh-like open thing. it's not hard. it's just a matter of do we understand why that's important or not? as far as a development of global consciousness, the 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 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 'cause 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. so when they turn off the net we

go out and then the real thing happens. >> no, no. i'm going to tweet that a little bit. forgive me for interrupting. but i think what happened in egypt is there was a networked public, okay? so they shut off the public internet but they couldn't shut off the internet public. enough people had gotten the taste of what it was to be connected to each other and not just from the internet, from cell phones and text messaging and many of them were already in the streets. i think you would agree with me, doug, that many of them were already -- >> they were. but this was the tipping point, though. >> right. >> i think -- >> we'll see what those great historians say. >> i think it was a huge strategic error on their part to turn off the net at that point because -- and it was interesting. i've always 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 got guns, they can blow us up, right? they can 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 actually decentralized and ours, they would have to take a positive action to turn it off. they would to have attack our network to shut it down as opposed to now just turn it off at the master switch, which they have. one is a much more attack they have to make. the other is sort of passive, just turn it off. that said, turning off the net in egypt it was such a provocative act in itself that it turned -- it really did change the way the world looked at that event. all of a sudden, it was like, oh, my god, you know, you can kill them, you can enslaved them but turn off their net? all of a sudden we could relate to these folks. it's a sarcastic way of seeing it. but it seemed like it was unfair at that point, you know, and it

did -- it did tip opinion in a lot of ways. >> i want to ask you a question about your book 'cause program or be programmed. i remember asking you the question what our kids are learning or not learning. now, i have teenagers -- well, actually i'm almost done with teenagers. he's got a younger daughter who isn't yet on the net as far as i know. >> a 6-year-old. >> is she on the net? >> she discovered moshi monsters but that's it so far. >> we are both, obviously, optimistic about the future that's in our hands and yet i have to ask, do you think that 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 learn about how they worked and the schools certainly don't teach it, right. technology seems to be now about learning how to make a powerpoint. 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 cobell or some other basic thing. it's not. it's about making a basic presentation. have you noticed since your book has come out is there a change underway in how kids are being taught or what they're demanding to learn 'cause after all they are the ones who are going to live in this future that we're talking about? >> not what they're demanding to learn but i have noticed a shift. that there's a bit of readiness for schools to engage with

computer programming more as a liberal art then as an office skill, you know, which has really gotten to. if you take a computer class now, it was sort of like when you're taking typing. you're learning how to do spreadsheets and learning microsoft office so you can get a job and i have noticed some, but not all, 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, this is 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 bios of a program and once you've understood that this environment is programmed to make us behave in different ways, you look at the city oh, this is a grid pattern. why did they pick a grid pattern. i didn't know this was a grid pattern until after i took

programming in seventh grade and then i looked oh, my gosh this is a program. there's other cities -- they wind and they have cables and they do all these other things. why did they pick this. oh, it's not the evil robert moses wanted to program my mind. it was for maximum movement and movies and it has tide pools and contemplation. it's about moving money and when you start looking at your world that way, it becomes much more open to our reengineering. i may sound a little bit like buckminister fuller. these are not problems of design and i did a book life, inc., it's about money. money was programmed in about 12 or 1300 with monarchs with a very particular bias. those guys are dead. the money is still functioning the way we want. it's not servicing anyone and we're trapped. and you program new monies to do

other things. so that's the -- that kind of insight is literacy in the 21st century. that's -- to have what used to be called just being able to read and write in the 20th century to understand the narrative of human history is composed by people, right, that there was a bible, there's marxism, there's capitalism. we understand all that because we're litterate and we have to understand what programming is even though we can't program ourselves. we have to know this 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. i mean, i'm not completely enamored of julian assange's analysis but his analysis of what the attack on top-down organizations needs to be is actually -- 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, you know, he's trying to hack their program. >> or crack it. >> or crack it. it's not at all clear if that makes sense, but -- >> transparency is sabotage. >> what's so fascinating to a lot of us about assange, he hacked a superpower. and it wasn't just 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 wizards who are making a new world for us, the mark zuckerbergs who, you know, grew up the next town over from where we live. so you just made a very radical

point about what programming, what learning programming does enable you to see. but when you talk to these young programmers, right, the ones who are building companies like foursquare and, you know, twitter and so on, you think they really want to remake the world or is this a massive opportunity? >> it depends which one you talk to. if you talk to twitter, he's not talking about remaking the world. you talk at dennis at foursquare, yeah, he does want to remake the world. he's the first guy to admit, yeah, you know, we have all this stuff where you can become the mayor of this and the mayor of that. that's a come on and to get the people to use the thing. what we want people to be able to say what they think of the reality that they are living in so he gets it. 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 aren't living up to their responsibilities,

the ones that become true platforms. i mean, like 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 -- >> where we have a responsibility of people keeping facebook alive to use services that promote that logic. i mean, they don't owe anything to anybody, right? >> well, yeah. >> they're just -- >> yeah. >> i mean, the interesting thing is you talk about, you know, assange and the idea of, you know, hacking the political system. hackers are using what their tools are to break the political system. what i'm trying to get us to is that next place. what you're talking about now rather than hacking the political system, how do we program the social system? right? the political system is this just this -- it's like -- and then what politics do we need in order to -- in order to -- in order to do that? most people running these

companies don't think that way. but i think they are thinking that way some of them, at least enough, that we can get traction. the sweet guy, the google guy, you know -- >> larry or sergy? >> the guy who lives in egypt. it's -- i mean, i was over there. it's a corporate culture that at least is tolerant of these applications what it would mean to you rather than just, you know, what are the applications of these technologies that will mean something to our shareholders. >> we should let folks in on this. we could obviously keep going. but it's -- i don't see whether we have a clock up. yeah. you want to run around with a mic and we'll take some

questions? >> two quick things, you mentioned that you thought julian assange hacked a superpower. my understanding is he just got a whistle blower to dump some information to him. he actually didn't break through the superpowers firewalls and whatnot which is what we -- >> metaphorfully. >> great hackers, they talk about social hacking and the way you open the codes you open the desk drawer and you open up the codes -- >> the more important thing i want to talk about your neighbor, you know, the progressive neighbor whom you're concerned about he looks about -- he looks at wikileaks, you know, and assange and he says kill the guy. he's looking at it black and white or all black. you on the other hand are looking 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 some useful info that we needed to know about but he dumped a lot of info that wasn't necessary to dump, that caused problems that weren't necessary to cause.

he put people's lives at risk and he -- he caused our diplomatic service. they were talking about people's personal peck dillos, what was the point of dumping that stuff. it was to make our diplomatic functions difficult to do. so my point is, the guy who wants to shoot him, he sees him more black and not white. your point everything is beautiful, full transparency, that's not good either. the world is gray. >> so is there a question or do you want me to respond? >> yeah, i'd like to hear you respond to that. >> okay. well, first of all, it is not true that assange dumped raw information onto the web. they redacted a lot of information in terms of the war logs, the iraq and the afghanistan war logs and so far the state department cables, a few have been posted of the 250,000-plus that are in his and the "new york times" and the

guardian's possession. so dump is really, i think, the wrong word. and of the ones that have been released, they've 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 cable set. they chose to pick those things as the ones that they wanted to highlight, not julian assange. and they also redacted material that the state department and the defense department asked them to pull out and so far the pentagon says nobody has been harmed by any of the releases so far, okay? yes, there's the potential that somebody might be harmed, i would argue that lying about what we're doing in and hiding what we're doing is also creates potential for harm and in many

cases needs to be balanced. i never had and i never do say in my book that what we should have is 100% full transparency and the inability of government to ever do anything in confidence. obviously, no the. the government's job is to keep the secrets they keep. okay? when you give three million people access to, quote, classified information, you can't really say with a straight face that it's still secret. something is broken here. we have a metastasized secrecy system. keep the secrets that are most important to keep and the rest, stop with this ridiculous classification. last point, i think we also need to recognize that in the united states in particular it's like we have two governments. we have the one that we elect and we have the other one that is permanent since world war ii and that seems to just operate on its own momentum and according to its own rules. and every president we elects

seems to get -- seems to be absorbed if he isn't already 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 don't we even know the size of that national security system? we have no idea how big its budget is. we don't know how many people it employs. 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, in the united states every other media entity operates under threat of what the government might do to them. the "new york times" cooperates with the pentagon and the state department and the president in withholding information from the public all the time. wikileaks is not bound by that same rule. in some ways it's the opposite -- you know, folks here you may not know this after world war ii there were laws on

the book that prevented all the national spying agencies in the united states, britain and australia -- each had laws on the books from preventing them on their own citizens and they had gotten information on each other about the germans and our enemies in world war ii so they created a pact where they would share information on spying on each other as citizens so they're not allowed to spy directly, they just share. so now we have something similar, only it comes from civilians. and it's a civilian intelligence system that wikileaks is forcing on us. i may not like it. i think sometimes the choices other people may be okay to turn out may not be acceptable for everyone. and the point the genie is out of the bottle. that the ability to do this is now inherent. we have a distributed and

relatively uncontrolled -- with all of doug's caveats which are true, we have a distributed system that has some resilience to it. and so you can kick them off amazon and they'll go to a server in switzerland and so far they haven't managed to shut them down. we have to live with that. >> i'm not in the white and the black camp in terms of the politics of it. i'm almost apolitical when it comes down to it. i'm just kind of blah. i don't even see it as real. the thing that interested me about my local neighbor's reaction was not the politics of it -- i wasn't going to -- leaking into my next book, but i believe what is happening is the narratives that people have been using to organize their experience of reality are collapsing. and without a new narrative to jump onto, they get angry. they get lost.

they get confused. so the new narrative, if they're going to have one, is going to be a participatory narrative that they write instead of what they hear. now, the program that you were talking about before the potholes. >> see click fix. >> the potholes lets you be something that has a narrative feeling to it, a narrative style to it so i can get a sense of continuity rather than just the shock. i mean, when you have no narrative at all, you're living moment to moment in a distracted way with every little piece of facebook and tweet coming at you, the only thing that's really going to get your attention, the only thing that will organize you is terror. that's the only thing that will get you to take action that is so frightening that you're going to respond to it; otherwise, you got 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 messenger. >> other questions?

somebody back here, yeah. >> i have a question, how you view -- what's happened to us in this age of new media in the full transparency? what happened to average people? what happened to people when printing press was introduced? so 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 media renaissance. it feels like what happened we get a new medium and then the elite seem to actually capture the real capacity of the medium while the people gained the capability of the medium before. so we get text, right, and the rabbis learn how to read and the people learn how to hear. they gather in the town square and listen to the torah scroll be read to them. we get the printing press and the elite can print books, while we learn to read. now we get the internet.

we get computers and we learn to write, right, so we can blog, write and tweet while our elite learn to program. we've finally gotten the program of the 13th century but we're in the 21st century so i feel like we stay one step behind. what we've gotten is we've gotten the world where instead of paying money to watch movies made by studios, we pay money to buy the equipment to make our own movies and then upload them for more money onto servers that we don't own. so i feel like what we've done is we've turned our protective capability into a new form of consumption but not actually not learn to seize the value we create through 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 actually seize the capability of this medium. if it doesn't happen this time, maybe it will happen next time but all i can while that window

is open, say, hey, there's more 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 what we had before? and i think yes. i think 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 just have to 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 lifesaving connections i just happened to be on the phone today with a guy who was helping run the spreader project which started six months ago after a gay college student committed suicide. it was 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 lives every day, but that what a sea 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 confine others. and while doug is right that the elite programs, while the rest of us may be just, you know, use the tools they made for us to

use, that the beneficial effects of these tools can be tremendous. they're also very disruptive and destabilizing and we are learning every day how do we adapt? how -- you know, what are the new social norms that we need to live with each other? and 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, one of his roommates, so, you know, it's the good and the bad together are now possible but 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 dan rather and a few other white guys to tell us what the news was. and now we can tell us 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 either build the tools or trust twitter and facebook and google to transmit what's actually happening. >> right. >> another question. >> hi. so i was thinking about that moment when the both of you were talking about learning programming in school. and i guess for what it's worth i'm in my late 20s and i learned basic in seventh grade. so i was thinking about this almost that one level of distraction and thinking about school and just the way you go from year to year. it's 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 that are 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 there. >> there's experiments -- in new york there's charter schools and the quest for learning where they're using kind of gaming as a model for many other academic disciplines people think oh, they're teaching kids how to make video games. they are teaching kids game as model so you can look at politics, you know, through gaming. and through programming, you know, how are different systems programming and how would you reprogram it? so there are some 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 one is on the exciting side there are things like the con academy which is 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 programs or any of those things to address the crisis of education and how unequal it is and what a joke we've allowed public education have come and we're going to demonize public school teachers 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 and focus on these days, though, i'm the child of two public school teachers. and i'm kind of amazed to see, you know, just when you think it couldn't get worse, 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 safe setting and, yes, we have to recognize that learning moments can happen in many places, not just in that box called the classroom. but i would hate to see, you know, people waving technology around as a way -- as yet one more reason to cut funding for the basics. >> or for face-to-face contact with another human being. i mean, kids have so much -- there's so much screen time and screen time you don't activate your mirror neurons at all. you don't see the 94% of human communication that's body language and your pupils getting bigger and you're pacing and leading with your breath. i mean, that's where humanity happens when you're online you're basically in a kind of forced asperger syndrome and you don't have queues and that's why are so kids.

if kids are going to spending their education hours in there, where are they going to learn how to interface with humans, you know? it's valuable -- a few hours a day just to be unconnected is just too valuable to give up. >> this woman up front here. >> thank you. i wrote my first computer program in 1977. it's now 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 yet ready to do it and i'm concerned about privacy. what i tell people is that i'm not a luddite i studied college and math and science in college and they are meant to augment our lives and not take over our lives which seems to have happened a lot today. and people just look at me oddly all the time. as i've been called a many things. aside from what you've already said, have you had any thoughts on that, on just 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 as opposed to that dependency of just, you know, living every moment on twitter and facebook? >> i think -- well, there's many ways to answer that question. and first of all, i -- what you're doing is totally cool. i barely use facebook. it's like it's there for the same reason maybe you need, you know, a mailing address. but i can see why it's seductive for some 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's 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 more of a pulse of what people are -- who are using it are thinking and doing. it happened 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 three, four times as high. it was like a huge peak. there's a need for magic. people are hungry for transcendence. they're not getting it. we went looking for it in politics this 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 that we're -- we haven't stopped looking for things that will change our lives. we're just temporarily distracted by the toys and the marketing is amazing and all the rest and there's some definitely fun things you can do with them including creative things that you can do, but you can't program an ipad, you know? the other thing i worry about, other than the fragmentation of attention is that we will be seduced by the perfection into some of these things into not knowing how to hack them, not knowing how to program them because they're not

programmable. they're not made to be, you know, your computer that you programmed on, right? you could program on it. you can't do that with many of these devices now. and that's -- that's the 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, right? oddly enough we all call windows evil but windows bent over backwards to work with everything and everybody. you got drivers and you just throw them in there and try to make it work and it would crash, oh, windows sucks. all right. we'll just buy a macintosh and apple and it will all work together, i wonder why because it's in its own little world. when systems are open to us, they're messier. right? you don't get that complete wonderful kind of catholic feeling, but, you know, which is a nice feeling to have is that you don't get that kind of transcendence, right, but you

end up with a different possibility. i suppose, it's almost an agnostic tradition and we'll build this thing and out of this activity will come a stranger activity which will transcend our efforts, you know, the 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 to 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. i mean, we all know. it never satisfies. it never does. the reason on facebook the reason why your friends is so facebook, remember esther the landmark forum and somebody got that -- if they get it, they have to get you to get it because otherwise they're getting it wasn't getting it? it's like that mafia wars farmville quality. facebook is that. i mean, the value of their experience goes up when you're all there, right?

so on the one hand, that seems like a virtuous circle, but on the other hand all they're doing for what? all they're just basically giving who we are, you know, surrendering ourselves to the marketers so they can better model our behaviors and predict with more accuracy and even more accuracy what we know ourselves what we're going to do next. it's fascinating how well -- >> what are we going to do in the next five minutes? ..

but for the grace is the government is our neutrality. if someone else comes end, if michele obama is elected president and net neutral the goes away you will wish we had that network that would take 15 minutes. >> but it isn't. one mistake. i have a lot of respect for the people who have been fighting despite. they never defined completely. in a shoddy of moving information through the network is only one piece of the sort of system that we need. for example, you know, what about search and agility.

does anybody here, you know car realize that when you used to will to search you're not necessarily going to get the same results as the next person on the same term. kugel is shaping results on what it thinks and knows about you and where you're searching from. it tweaks results sometimes for political reasons to abide by local laws. he may not know this, but of the complete on global surge, if you start searching for the phrase deterrent -- it's the web plain nice with copyright holders. they do all sorts of things. it is not a pure neutral practice. lastly, you know, that neutrality sounds nice, but if a company wants to kick you off the services for other reasons it can do it for completely arbitrary reasons. have you read your terms of service? all of these companies, you

know, you just check off yes to the terms of service. in the wording is, we can change these in a town we feel like for whatever reason we want, and we don't have to tell you. when amazon kicked with the leaks of claiming that it was in violation of terms of service because there were posting government cereal and material that could be harmful. first of all, you can't copyright government documents. they're born on copyrighted. secondly, there have been no harm, no criminal case, no conviction. amazons is pointed to its terms of service and said, we can kick off our servers. the neutrality in the station would do nothing about that. so i think we have to be honest with ourselves and realize how contingent and fragile this thing is that we have been taking for granted him. it is a wonderful thing. if we use it wisely it can liberate us, but it is hardly

clear that is -- this accident of an open, the services incident is going to be around for another generation unless we fight really hard for it. >> and this kid ourselves. when push comes to shove if i'm going to feature rise -- >> is that the word? >> sure. it is now. it wasn't before. if we don't teach our kids programming or the very basics of how these technologies work, people in other places are. for every one programmer that comes out of college there are probably 1,000 or 2,000 this come out of china with it ditch permanent in elementary school. what will happen is. not much supply medical. some group of chinese hacker kids are red army supported russian mob whatever well hack.

everybody's accounts cut to 0n america realizes, oh, my god. you know, we put our -- focal my god. then the president gets up, and that is when the real sputnik speeches made. they said they would put a signal on the moon. coming for our money. took down our bank. we have to reset. the mormons in utah get the record of the close the day before. okay. we are resetting yesterday. go. and everyone will freak out. then we will educate and then we will push. but it is going to be exciting if we remain this lazy and stupid. [laughter] it will be exciting because we have all love this state other than our freedoms. it is our entire economy. everything is on there. >> last question back there. that think we should -- yes.

yes. >> side. well, with added to call one of the things that has concerned me -- and i am definitely pro wikileaks, but the daily's seventh formation that has at least from my sense, there is so much impression that comes as in such a fast rate that in my mind it has put us all and then days. i guess that is also the true with the larger media. i think that is one of the problems with contemporary media. really important stories. so i am wondering if you know of any sort of, you know, more democratic filtering mechanisms or personal faltering mechanisms. for example, i get all of my news now through you to.

i don't have a tv anymore. i have subscribed to different channels. and since that is a filter in process as well. i guess kind of related. i keep waiting for, you know, the facebook to come out. we complain about the facebook and all the things that people talk about compost. and it is my opinion that happens because that is how the system was designed to do. i keep waiting for this more democratic socially social change minded that doesn't sell off all of our data. i guess. yes. if you know more democratic the brain -- those are mechanisms we could use all why something like that hasn't popped up get. >> popping. i mean, trying to be a more

distributed to facebook. i don't know what the current status is here. honestly on the facebook issue i think what will happen is in a few years it is going to -- the federal and. i already see it with my kids who, you know, i check in once a year. what do you think now. they don't like it anymore. his dad and annoying. that is the word. they still rely on it, but it is far from the same thing that they had to have and use so i think that there may be of pique. and some other patterns of behavior will involve whether it is people deciding to be, you know, more connected through their mobile phone to lever network of friends there want to be connected to. i don't know. this thing changes so fast. anyone who tells you the years from now they know what people

will be doing, you should not listen. on the filtering thing, the one thing that i am seeing in general, the answer is find trusted sources involved in. and whether that is suggested sources in the sense of all media or individual reporters his bylines you trust or blocks or individual people who you follow through whatever means you use, for a slave, for example, i do use twitter following a bunch of people who have been one form or another i trust. i think there are intelligent, interesting. and know what their biases. i can filter the information that they're sharing with me to my knowledge of their bias. you can think of that justed network and you can build them for yourself as systems for filtering information for you. in the same week just to the editors of your favorite

magazine to do that for you in the pre drizzle age. the problem is that you have to go and do this. it is that being done for you. you have many more choices and you are so easily distracted that you may forget what you were doing even in the middle of trying to build this up free self. media literacy today requires work. you have a plethora of choice. in the past did not have some many choices. there were made for you. watch channel two, four, seven. now you have millions, but you have to be an active agent and think intelligently about what media you are consuming more sharing and decide for yourself whether it is good enough. now, americans, we are not taught the skills. you know, we are, i think, like sheep, led to the slaughter.

but you don't have a choice. i think that the good news is that some of those younger hackers also see this as a market opportunity. some people are starting to invent better tools for filtering that enable you to take that fire hoses and focus it on the things it you think are most important. so over time we may see some balance began. it is an active process the have to participate in. >> the last word. >> another important thing is to realize that good journalism is not free. these people have to be funded. i know a lot of people now that because they're blocking and creating think they don't need to pay anyone. no, the problem is governments and corporations are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to create the fabricated line.

we need to spend hundreds of dollars to hire people to be allowed to spend a few days to deconstructs the line and try to figure out what is going on. if we don't think that is worth it then we are not calling to get a lot. as a final thing, the big answer to your question is, there was a book published all the filter role which is about what you're talking about. yes codified a lot of different shapes and waves this happens as well as strategies to get beyond it. i would argue, find something that you think is worth. find a journalistic pursuit that you think is worth them pursuing and then help fund them. you know, by the paper or fund them. >> there are actually a list of groups. there is a resource section in the back of the booked here that i included. if there are groups you want to support that are doing this kind of work in the nonprofit arena that doing investigative journalism, transparency work, there are many ways to get involved, and not just of money.

>> you can buy their paper. you can. help them survive. >> by their book. >> by their block. [laughter] >> these people will stick around. we have tons of books for sale. many thanks to these two. [applause] [applause] [applause] >> for more information about both authors and their books visit or books dot com. >> what are you reading this summer? book tv wants to know.