discusses the american health care system, and julia england talks about the surveillance state. then former supreme court justice john paul stevens on the constitution. hillary clinton sits down to discuss her book, "hard choices," and much more. for a complete schedule, go to booktv.org. >> host: and the book is called the people's mat form: -- platform be: taking back power and culture in the digital age. the author is astra taylor who joins us from our new york studio. ms. taylor, in this book you write about openness, and you say that new media thinkers have claimed openness as an appropriate utopian ideal for our time and the concept has caught on. does that apply to the internet as well? is it open? >> guest: that's exactly what i'm asking. it seemed like the internet was going to sort of magically solve all of the problems of the old media model. and, you know, for me i'm an

independent documentary film maker, my background is in documentary film making, and i make films about philosophy. so to kind of obscure, educational films. and part of why i was drawn to making those films was because they weren't on television, they weren't on commercial media channels. and the internet seemed to be something that would usher in this amazing opportunity for independent film makers like me and independent artists and musicians and bloggers to create a kind of open media landscape, to not have to depend on gatekeepers who could say yes or no and control and influence the flow of communication. so the idea is that the internet is open and that, you know, all of our, all of the problems of the old system have gone away. and so i was very interested in this question, and the book is sort of me investigating et. well, how open is the internet?

is openness enough? and what i come -- i come to the conclusion that open is kind of a misleading term. it can mean sort of anything to anyone, very ambiguous, and it doesn't necessary hi mean equal. the media system that's emerging online is not necessarily more eagle tape or inviting than the system that preceded it. a lot of the old problems have actually carried over, and so that's what i'm especially interested in. >> host: when the internet came online, was it supposed to be an open, egalitarian platform? >> guest: well, it was kind of invented in this ad hoc way. it was a way for existing computer networks to internetwork and communicate with each other. and, you know, it was kind of an academic experiment that was partly funded by government through darpa, and so the internet wasn't necessarily supposed to be what it's become. i mean, it -- the excitement and the rhetoric of it being this

egalitarian system sort of corresponded with the mainstreaming and it becoming something lots of people used. and it, that idea really picked up on social media, when it became common. because then it was clear that users have this opportunity to not only, you know, read or watch content on the internet, but also to contribute, to post their own pictures and their own ideas and their own opinions. so, you know, the idea -- while the internet did emerge out of this sort of public-spirited, academic community, as it spread, we've sort of created this mythology around it. and i think we're at an interesting tipping point because right now we're seeing that there could be a darker side, that there could be some problems if we sort of don't intervene and try to protect the qualities that we find so

appealing about it. you know, what i'm alluding to is revelations about surveillance or invasion of privacy or fact that there are now these sort of giant multi-national corporations, google and facebook and amazon, that are engaging in business practices that respect that different than old media companies, and so we're finally being investigated and challenged on antitrust grounds and stuff like that. so it's ap interesting sort of moment -- it's an interesting sort of moment where people are becoming a bit more critical of this, of this technology that they were extremely optimistic about only a few years ago. >> host: well, i want to read two quotes along that line from your book. instead of leveling the field between small and large, the open internet has dramatically tilted it in favor of the most massive players, and people are beginning to recognize that silicon valley platitudes about

changing the world and maxims like "don't be evil" are not enough to insure that some of the biggest corporations on earth will behave well. >> guest: yeah. and i think there's a paradox at the heart of our new media landscape, and it's paradox that really intrigued me and motivated me to write this book. and it's that as our experience of engaging with media becomes ever more personalized and individualized, we have our own phones with access to, you know, an unimaginable amount of information. and, you know, we have files that exactly fit our preferences and our favorite apps. there's this intentionally personalized experience. and, in fact, personalization goes deeper than what we've chosen to put op our devices, but, in fact, popular services -- facebook, am, all of them personalize their algorithms. but the more individualized and

personalized the services is and devices are, the more connected they are to this enormous centralized system that is very opaque and that we don't really understand. i mean, few people conceptualize the link from their device that's in their pocket to this enormous infrastructure, and, you know, these data centers that are ultimately making everything run. when we talk about the cloud, which is very ethereal, actually there are these server farms, and there are a handful of companies that, you know, control a lot of the web posting. i mean, even the cia contracts its web posting to amazon, and companies like netflix and point rest do. it's -- pipt rest do. it feels like we're the agents of deciding. we are in charge of our own media deaths with the internet.

feel -- destiny with the internet. and yet there are these maybe not gatekeepers per se, but there are these channels that we are shunted down because they're kind of unavoidable. you have to use google if you want to find other things on the internet. so that contradiction is important. and as these companies become more complicated, they do amass an enormous amount of influence and power, and i think we have to ask ourselves what their responsibilities are. you know, if we give them so much of ourselves and trust them with so much of our private data, then what's their public responsibility? >> host: and where does the public interest lie when so much of the internet t is in private hands? >> guest: well, you know, a good example is this, example is this incident from last week where facebook released news that it was conducting -- it had

conducted an experiment in january of 2012 where for a week it segmented about 700,000 facebook users and did a sort of controlled experiment where it hid either sad or happy posts from users to see the way that would affect what those users then posted, right? so it manipulated the news feed to see if there would be a kind of emotional contagion. and there was an enormous public outcry because people, obviously, felt that facebook was treating them as lab rats and that this was very worrisome. but what was unusual about the incident was really that facebook wrote up the results and proudly announced them to the world with the press release and thought that people would be excited about it. i mean, i think they were responding to news that was going around in 2011 and '12 that facebook was actually

making people sad because they were comparing themselves to their friends, and so they thought they would do their experiment that showed, no, if there's happy news, you become happy. it turned out people actually felt simply manipulated and creeped out. so that shows that these are not neutral platforms. you know, and that they are very powerfully shaped by the people behind them, and the decisions that people are making are are not clear or transparent to users. and that, ultimately, facebook does, you know, tweak its news feed and the algorithms that determine what we see because it has to create an environment that's conducive to its business model which is advertising. we don't pay money to use facebook, right? we pay with our data which is then useful to the advertisers who are facebook's ultimate customers. so the responsibility of facebook, it presents itself as

a channel for us to communicate with our friends or with organizations or even companies that we like, and yet it is at the same time not a neutral channel, and it has its own, you know, bottom lines that it has observe. that it has to serve. and it ultimately needs to figure out or be regulated in such a way that there is some aspect of transparency, that there's some aspect of clarity. because it's not enough just that we see little ads on the side of the screen and we say, okay, we know these are advertisements because there's also this sort of tweaking and manipulating happening, you know, layers down that are completely invisible to users but that could ultimately impact society in big ways. not just affecting users' moods as this one experiment indicated, but there was also an experiment in 2010 that showed that facebook could have very

demonstrable consequences in voter turnout. you know, and when elections have been decided with just a few hundred vetters in the past like -- voters in the past like with bush winning the election, that's very senate because basically some researchers determined they had influenced over 300,000 facebook users to actually vote by doing a massive experiment with tens of millions of facebook users. so this is incredible power, it's pretty stealth, it's not always visible, and, you know, i think the public does have an interest in there being some transparency and some limits to what these companies can do with these channels. >> host: many structures of the old media system, you write, astra taylor, however flawed relieves some of the burdens now borne solely by individuals. institutions provide capital, legal protection, leverage and also continuity, facilitating the transmission of knowledge

and skills from one generation to the next. at their best institutions can help support challenging efforts through a process called risk aggregation. >> guest: yeah. this is a, it's an interesting argument for me to make because my identity is very much as an independent film maker and as an outsider, doing something that i felt the existing institutions were not doing. and so it was quite a challenge for me as i was, you know, following this debate about the internet and looking at what was actually happening to institutions of journalism or look at what was happening to the publishing industry and going, actually, maybe there is a productive and necessary role for these cultural institutions to play in a democratic society. and i think we've all heard the initial, you know, myths of the internet, the idea that there would be disintermediation was the word. that, basically, the middlemen

would be eliminated, and creators -- whether we're talking film makers, musicians or bloggers -- would just be able to go direct and find their audience. and this was a very appealing, you know, democratic, seemingly straightforward vision. and so what i'm pointing out is that simply, well, it really hasn't come to pass. there's this new wave of gatekeepers that, you know, yes, there is a challenge to the publishing industry through a company like amazon, but amazon is also now a pretty powerful middleman, and so we have to contend with that. but i also, you know, wanted to ask, well, what is it we want of our institutions? if we're so critical of them, if we feel that, you know, the mainstream media and journalism have disappointed us, you know, ask that we'd rather put our faith in an independent blogger, my question is why don't we

think about ways to make the practice of journalism, you know, more ideal? more what we want it to be, more accountable, more diverse, more able to do the important work of, you know, of challenging the powers that be and not being as beholden to them. and you have to do that by finding ways to fund these institutions and giving people who practice these, you know, creative forums the space to actually do that work. and, you know, i think that it's very easy to get caught up in this idea that, you know, individuals can just do it on their own. now that we have the internet, we can just kind of pull ourselves up by our boot straps and, like, go to city hall and tweet out the results. but, you know, i talked to many journalists and many bloggers and, you know, one thing that i talked to, for example, one

established reporter in baltimore, and he said that's a wonderful vision, but i've been to city hall every day for year, and there are never any bloggers there. somehow we do need to find a way to make this work sustainable for people. and and the internet can't just magically do it for us. >> host: how does can it happen then? >> guest: well, i think that, you know, the problem is that many of the problems with the old business model, the sort of his model legacy of the media actually haven't been altered at all with the development of these new communication channels. and is that's one sort -- ask so that's one sort of very obvious point that just wasn't being made very often in these conversations. basically that, yes, we have new tools, but the model of funding things p hasn't changed at all. so to go back to that term disintermediation, we talk about the fact, people talk about the

fact that, okay, journalism is in a period of transformation because you no longer need to go to the newspaper to get the classified, to get the cross word puzzle, you can get all these thicks separately. -- things separately. you can go to crossword puzzles.com on the internet. so there's been this significant change. but the thing is that for whatever new online start-ups there are online, you know, the model of funding them is still advertising. and it's digital advertising which brings in quite a bit less revenue than traditional print advertising, be but it's advertising nonetheless. and, in fact, advertisers have been really empowered by move to the digital sphere and what is called convergence, the fact that now once these formerly distinct areas of life are now all on line. you go online to watch your movies, to read your books and to do your crossword puzzles and to talk on the telephone, and

advertisers can attract you through all these different realms of your daily practice and collect data from you and are very empowered compared to the old days when they depended on the newspaper man in order to reach, so they could reach an audience. i think we have to imagine, first and foremost, alternatives to the advertising model. and that's something that has not been widely discussed. there's some enthusiasm for crowd funding, things like kickstarter and that, but discussions of things like public financing or having some sort of lick interest demand -- public interest demand on these giant corporates or just things that have been out of the public conversation. and so one thing i do in the book is i just remind people that at the onset of television, there was public outcry when

there was a kind of tipping point when people realized advertisers were controlling too much of the media. and there was a quiz show scandal where people realized the quiz shows worryinged, and there was kind of a -- rigged, and the citizens just got disgusted that camel news hour was sponsored by by camel cigarettes. and i think we might be reaching a similar moment online where we need to to carve out space for something that's not totally handed over to the advertiser funding model. because that is, that's what's supporting so many of the services and platforms and as much of the contempt that we consume -- content that we consume in that space. >> host: and one of the things you write is that the public good is increasingly financed by private money. do you support moving the internet under title ii?

>> guest: oh, to reclassify it? >> host: right. >> guest: yes. i mean, definitely. this is the issue of, you know, net neutral the city and -- neutrality, and i think it's really captured the public's imagination for good reason. all hits online should be treated equally and internet service providers should not be able to charge for an internet fast lane which is essentially discriminating against smaller sites, sites of individuals or smaller businesses or start-ups or nonprofits or whatever in favor of big companies that can pay for their service. and so one way, perhaps the only way of really solving this problem at the root is to reclassify the internet as a telecommunications service which means it could then be be regulated as a public utility or treated as common carrier which is just how we treated landline telephones or the post office.

the post office can't, you know, the post office ultimately has to offer service to everybody at fair rates and is not in the business of discriminating. so i think that would be an extremely intelligent first step if we want to maintain some of the wonderful and truly democratizing aspects of the internet that we've come to just take for granted. and it's just, it's not a sort of the radical step i think some people, oh, it's regulating the internet. it's actually about access to the internet and the people who control the sort of onramps to the internet. and unfortunately, there aren't that many companies, there are really just two big cable companies that might be merging -- time warner and comcast -- that a lot of us depend on to access the internet. and they should, they should have to allow us to access the

sites we want and to, and not be able to pick winners and losers. i think that's a very reasonable and minimum baseline for, you know, protecting the people's hat form aspect of the inter-- platform aspect of the internet as we know it. >> host: astra taylor, you're critical of google books as well. why? >> guest: well, what i'm trying to do in that section at the end when i talk about google books is to say that we like to ip voc voc -- invoke these analogies, and so we like to talk about google books as a universal library. and that's actually language that, you know, representatives of google use. we're building a universal library. and i quote people from the photo sharings at

flicker saying they're stewards creating space for people to share their photographs. and wherever there are social movements, especially we saw these amazing upheavals in the middle east, we talked about how they used twitter and facebook and twitter was often referred to as the sort of town square. so what i'm looking at is the way that these metaphors -- library, town square, land trust -- they're very public spirited, they're civic minded. and yet, ultimately, we're entrusting those duties to these private corporations, you know? and ultimately, in the end google is not a library. google is actually an advertising advertise wiz. it gets, you know -- advertising business. it gets 90 percent of its revenue from advertisers. so i really would like to challenge people. if we want a library, if we want this digital universal library, if we want something that protects knowledge is and is

there for us to learn and to, you know, remember our history and to engage as citizens, then i think we have to create some structures that will explicitly support those ends instead of trusting that important role to these private corporations that are, you know, right -- they are there to serve their shareholders and to generate profits, and, you know, they have their responsibilities. they have their fiduciary responsibilities as corporations. and, you know, they're not, they're not the library of congress. and is google books has a lot of utility, but ultimately, it could be shut down at any moment if it's not profitable enough whereas the library of congress does not get shut down if it's not turning a profit. it's interesting that we use these analogies, and yet we haven't really figured out how to bolster them and how to take them to the next level and really, you know, create, create

these things that we seem to want the internet to be. >> host: and you write -- >> guest: right now it's more of a shopping mall than a town square. and so, you know, i just wanted to ask this, how do we actually make a town square, a digital town square? >> host: yo -- and you write about some of these companies they are commercial enterprises designed to maximize revenue tot to preserve our heritage or facilitate kit -- creativity, and the people who work there are private employees, not public servants. something else you write, astra taylor, is that in order to find this world that you're looking for, other options would be to demand that radio and television broadcasters pay the market rate for spectrum licenses or make technology compatible. >> guest: right. i mean, i think there's this

idea that, you know, all these, all these old tools, the tool kits of the sort of pre-internet, pre-internet age like, you know, the idea of public broadcasting and public media or the idea of grants to fund things or, i don't know, the national endowment for the arts, all these things just seem like they're obsolete because we live in a digital age. and the internet is somehow technologically and socially beyond regulation, and i don't know, of its own or something like that. i just go through some basic examples, and there are lots that i don't talk about in the book, but basic examples of the way, actually, public subsidies still exist in the system we have today, it's still dependent on public subsidies, but the public is not reaping the rewards. the rewards are

disproportionately going into private hands. so we give away an enormous amount of our public spectrum to broadcasters, traditional broadcasters, but then also to wireless companies who with, you know, pay arguably hess than the market -- less than the market rate, and it's a complicated issue. but, you know, should there be more robust demand for public service requirements or some sort of exchange? there are subsidies for internet infrastructure and broadband. there are subsidies through copyright which is, has been extended and extended and extended long beyond what the sort of founders intended. and, you know, there's an argument to be made that once you are extending copyright, you know, for decades and decades, in a way the government -- granting these corporations, a

monopoly on something, and it is a kind of sub is i ity -- subsidy. there are plenty of examples. but i think that we need to sort of take them all into account and look at the way that the public is not reaping the rewards. and meanwhile, we're told, well, you know, journalism is in crisis, and there's no money, and, you know, advertising the only rational way to do things. and so i'm just kind of trying the challenge the underpinning, the economic logic that we take more granted and to show that there's lots of money flowing behind scenes, and there are other ways that we could organize the entire system. and there are precedents for it. there are rest departments in our past, and there are precedents if we look at other countries that are doing things in different ways. >> host: and astra taylor, finally, what's your background?

i've got a note here that you were unschooled until you were 13 be years old. [laughter] >> guest: i was. i was unschooled in athens, georgia, and so unschooling is a kind of radical version of home schooling where the idea is that human beings are naturally curious, and if left to their own devices, they will find out what they're interested in and do their open thing. then when i was 13, i decided that i should try public school and see how everybody else, everybody else did it, and it was quite a cultural shock. >> host: are you glad you -- >> guest: i do think it sort of -- yeah? >> host: are you glad you did it? >> guest: oh, i'm glad i did it. i mean, it was a real education. maybe not of the kind that we think of as being a conventional school education, but certainly expanded my horizons. but i think the part of -- you can see the sort of after effects of being up schooled in

even this project which for me as an unschooler, school was always a sort of institution that we would imagine could be different. it was not taken for granted and just something that we had to go to. and you can see that in this book and in my reflections op our entire media system. you know, why do things have to be organized this way? why do we just have to accept that things are inevitably going in one direction when, you know, these are manmade institutions, and as such, we could change them and headache them into something better -- make them into something better. >> host: "the people's platform," astra taylor is the author. this is c-span. >> on this labor day, booktv continues with programs on nonfiction authors and books until 8 a.m. tuesday. today dr. ezekiel emanuel discusses the american health care system, and julia england talks about the surveillance

state. then former supreme court justice john paul stevens on the constitution. hillary clinton discusses her book, "hard choices," and much more. for a complete schedule, go to booktv.org. ..