We are going to get started here tonight. My name is seth mnookin im the director of the Communications Forum and a couple of quick announcements before we start. First Communications Forums are held three times a semester, six times a year. If you would like to be informed of future events theres a signup sheet over their. Put your name and email and we promise we will only send you information about our six events a year. We had judge john hodgman last semester. We have great stuff planned for next semester already. Also tonights form is being filmed by cspan so during the question part of the forum if you would go up to one of the microphones and hopefully state your name and your question. Another reason we ask you to state your name is we then go right up to the forums afterwards which you will be able to read a couple of days after the event on our web site and the last announcement is that this event tonight is cosponsored by radius which is another group here at m. I. T. I am thrilled to be able to introduce these three. It is a different breed than we initially thought would he here because jeff howe called me up at a little past five and said his daughter was and as the father of two young kids myself i said please stay home. Fortunately christina couch who writes about technology and is a brilliant journalist in her own right has agreed to fill in as the moderator. Let me introduce everyone. Noam cohen is the author of the new book the knowitalls and that is the tonight and i think moving forward. Noam and i worked together at decade and a half ago. I have known him ever since. He is a great guy and a brilliant journalist. He covered the influence of the internet on the larger culture for the news york times where he wrote the link by link beginning in 2007. His first book the knowitalls as a political powerhouse social wrecking ball. The history of Silicon Valley and critically examines how disruptive culture and ideology belittles ability empathy and even democracy. It was published in october of 2017 and it is available for purchase right here and in addition to supporting open discussion we also support both bookstores and authors. Please by all means buy the book book. Its a great look. Chris and i both read it and loved it. To noams left is sarah watson. Sarah is a Technology Critic who write a piece about the intersection of Technology Culture and society printer work has appeared in the atlantic wired the Washington Post slate and motherboard to choose the philly with the berkin Client Center for Internet Society and Harvard University and author of the town center for journalism on the current state of technology and then to noams right into my left is christina couch. Chris couch i had the absolute pleasure of working with for several years now. Shes the coordinator for the Communications Forum. The intersections of technology and psychology and her bylines appear in nova Net Technology review. The company coexist with wired magazine. We have for your convenience all of the twitter handles on the board noam cohen and couch cf. And without further ado i will turn it over to them. In addition to noams look we have book that jeff cowrote with the head of the m. I. T. Media lab called whiplash which is also a great book. Those books are available immediately afterwards and noam will be here to sign. Thank you. We are so excited about this panel. If i feel like it addresses a lot of really important issues. I would encourage you to buy the book. Its a great book. First of all i want to start off this panel by talking about the central argument of the book and correct me if im wrong here, is really the disruption and individualism to Silicon Valley has in a lot of ways eroded humanity. Is that fair to say . I was thinking about the question the premise of this gettogether and the glib answer is they havent. The deeper question is every person has humanity so whether we are talking about this happening i approach some of this from the computer aspect Computer Science aspect. Its one of the crucial mistakes or paths that we are on that is scary so i think that is denying the humanity of people when you think of them so individualistic way. Its a wellknown and it does about googles design director who created the design for gmail. Instead of using the color they tested 40 different shades of blue. The one that people use the most would be the one they would choose. Whats it like an oxymoron to have a human vision for what they were doing and they dont apologize for that. They say that shape who we picked as the most popular one and worth 200 million in additional revenue so its that rate down. Ive seen people at data points and i think they are not apologetic about it, at least the bad outcomes. Can you speak a little bit to what those outcomes are . For people that are not familiar with the intricacies of Silicon Valley can you tell me about how does that play out . They are taking the french ideology and make it seem very normal and mainstream. Resisting regulation and the idea that we should regulate taxis or hotels and he think of all the Different Companies that we should regulate what children see on video and regulate should they live in america and should they declare what they are doing. Thats one part of the ideology. Distrust of government which i think is really on that side. I think the extreme idea of free speech is another one. To me i wrote a piece in the new yorker. Com about an issue at stanford and whether back in the 80s whether there should be any limits on free speech. There was a group that told very racist and sexist jokes. There were such a severe pushback from the Computer Science department that it was reversed. To me having limits on free speech is a community that is cohesive. Thats another dangerous aspect of the libertarian ideology. I think some of it is done in good faith but i think its having horrible consequences. I wrote this book for the 2000 election. I was certainly thinking about it but what happened in the election bears obvious points. The fact is Companies LikeGoogle Facebook and twitter are so blase about the idea that a foreign country could influence our election and whether these powerful tools should be used by anybody to stir up anger and resentment shows a disconnect. They are not custodians of this power they have and utopian visions like Mark Zuckerbergs dream of connecting the world. I would add one thing. In talking about the book what prompted me to do it because clearly it wasnt the 2016 election. You can look at me as a hypocrite and the issue of gmail. Remember thinking having a computer read your email in order to place ads. My mom how i never mentioned the word cancer and email. I didnt want hey at the thought of radiation treatment . It would still feel like they had a right to commercialize it in dowsett crystallizing moment for me too. A lot of people work with not just the criticism itself but the cultures rounding it. From your perspective do you believe or how do you feel about the premise of the culture of the Technology World having an impact on humanity and empathy and civility . I absolutely agree with noam noams overall premise and a lot of people have started to unpack the way that technology is built and also the assumptions and ideology that are acted out and obviously looking at the individuals who are leading these companies in coming up with these designs and looking at their assumptions and ideologies really do matter. The biggest thing for me is i like to think about this in terms of occupation. Most Silicon Valley leaders and companies are designed around question is of optimization whether its the design itself, whether its giving you the information as fast as they can or connecting people as efficiently as possible or connecting you to all of the worlds material goods. Those are efficiencies and optimizing forprofit. Those are taken for granted in the terms of optimization. I think trying to unpack what those assumptions are ken really be a productive point to say well what if spending more time on a spoke wasnt in the optimization model . What if it was a quality experience on facebook . What would that look like . How would that change the design of platform but also what would that change about what facebook in our lives is. I thought the crux for a lot of the questions i would ask about to algae, i think the trick is using the terminology of the industry optimization and away they are thinking about problems and problem solving. Its actually a productive way of sharing language and trying to get at, we havent necessarily agree to the terms of optimization but they are coming from it with a market perspective and is a natural way for things to evolve. But we as a society can turn to the question whether those are the terms we agree to or not. One of the things i thought was really well done and the look is how many of the issues that we associate with Silicon Valley now and the Technology World issues of privacy issues of commercialization issues of users being assessed in ways that others dont agree to but some of the companies that are major giants currently google being one that sticks out of my mind, really started with an ethos that was entirely against all of those things. How did we get there . I think all of that was spot on. She kind of classified critics and i think what she is talking about are practical ways of trying to get to a better place than this book i was looking at the history and also trying to ask Bigger Picture questions. I was almost going to make it the beginning of the book. In the bible theres this instruction. You should give but one pass and harvesting and you shouldnt go back a second time and officially get every little fruiting colonel you missed. People are traveling or poor people who live off of the. Here again i have a farm and i need all of the content out of it. You are part of the society and the efficient thing is to let leave some scraps there for other people. You think about the picture there. An editor sent me a tweet where it was pointed out the Mark Zuckerberg said he cared so much about election meddling that he was cool the company was going to spend all this money to hire people and thats why he mentioned it in an investment call. Of course the natural comment is you are basically saying you make up for the current bad situation. I was trying to look back and i didnt know these answers learning about how did we get here . That was the question now is trying to ask ray it accounts for some of these extreme ideological ideas about free speech and will i credit stanford for a lot of the prophecy. For me the google case was very enlightening. It was really an incredible invention like the Google Search engine. Everyone agrees that they were standing on the shoulders of others but they really have this chaotic thing called the early web. They made it incoherent. The reason why it became so popular but they explained why it needed to be advertising free and in the actual academic world world. There shouldnt be these lacked boxes and of course we have come to accept the idea that the bookal algorithm is a secret thing and no one should know what they were doing. They were arguing thats bad for science and buried bad for test. The way i see the story going is basically they are serious academics and their parents were academics. They offered this incredible idea that they had an there was so much bandwidth at sanford they were told we have to start figuring out how to pay for this. Couldnt sanford had said this is great. Its very important for our society and science to do this but instead they were told you had better figure out a way to do this and they were immediately connected to the stanford network. Some of them werent incorporated so as the story and openness look about how a person who is when the stanford graduate will send a check to google incorporated. There is no google incorporated. A month later there was a google incorporated. The rest is history. I feel like maybe its a little corny but its a corruption narrative for them and for facebook is well worth a had ideals of being and not the computer. In the book there other characters who are bankers. That is what they were really trying to do. I feel we were led astray a bit. Thats my view. Zmax sarah you have talked about how coverage of the Technology Roles have changed. Can you explain how has the media involved as the tech world has evolved . The Research Report i did at columbia i think one of the things i was trying to look at was coverage from that early on most breathless excitement about Silicon Valley moments in the dot. Com boom and all the energy that went into covering before the amazon error and later in the google and facebook and others era. Thats during from a business oriented coverage model or from it text logger model. That coverage moving into something a little bit more as the technology starts to intersect with a lot of things like politics and people in society shifting the narrative about what matters about technology and why its changing and affecting our lives. That shift happened at a couple of different points. In 2007 or so all of a sudden things have dramatically changed our daytoday relationship with a computer in her pocket basically. Yes that was in that excitement phase and we have 2013 moment which was the snowdon mode and and snowdon moment. Everybody comes to terms with the fact that technology has good and bad uses. That is a larger moment where everyone specifically journalists and publications are willing to a knowledge that we need to think about this and so on. I wanted to touch on this a little bit. Right now at this very moment your book came out and franklins book came out a World Without and which is more about companies controlling her access to knowledge and information. Theres also the four by Scott Galloway which is more about the monopolistic approach is to company so a little bit more on the market side of things but you also have tam wu writing about merchants talking about companies monopoly over information. I think its an interesting moment right now and part does all of these books were being written before the crisis hit. The writing has been on the wall for a long time. Publishers seem to have acknowledged this to think that there was a market for this book book. I like to think of this in terms of a meta, wheres the audienc . I wrote a piece earlier than that about this german politician a young guy who petitioned data. It was you kind of point out in the paper you wrote the breakthrough is hard. Isnt that where they are keeping all but data about you. I think that probably was big. We are talking earlier about the public access. I would be curious to hear your take on this. For journalist to have access to these companies they have to stay on the good side to a degree and that is especially true if you are a Business Tech journalist covering a story. As more journalists from different walks of life are also coming to terms with technology technologys impact on society the narrative starts to change. What you are pointing out is leaving that gadget phase. There was a sense in 2007 getting the first gadget is important but now we are beyond the gadget phase now. The ramifications become as important. I knew it wasnt the issue they were talking about. Theres an incredible sight called zuckerberg files were a professor at the university of wisconsin milwaukee saying it was a privacy issue. Everything about Mark Zuckerberg that was ever said. Usually its videotaped streaming. I read i think almost all of it. Until the deleted all of his tweets he tweeted 100,000 times. One book talks more about it than the other one but there was a look reeling about his worldview. They all have a lot of applications. When i did try interviews it was very stenographic and not that revealing. There is an appreciation for the critical journalism. It has to be supported by a the institutions publications willing to stick their neck out and put that forward. I think specifically of the amazon Workplace Environment example. Their reactions for that piece was like, what are you talking about . The news york times ran a pretty large piece on the inner workings of amazon employees and are really spanned from very low level all the way up to high levels but not all the way to the top. They really detailed the Network Conditions and it ended up getting lots and lots of attention. I felt the response wasnt really a classic libertarian response. The owner of the Washington Post they think he embodies a lot of what i say in the book. His response was very clear. He said you cant be sure because these are people and go to another company. If they were being treated right they would work here. They are being treated right. There cant be discrimination because the company would take all the great women programmers and therefore the market would correct for it. Its bad and that is another theme of the book this detachment from reality. Theres something very productive about the internet erases all the past. Its a new world. This company get up are really proud of this carpet they had. They were like we are so proud and the women were saying this is really offensive. Whats offensive . By having that saying what we have now is fair and if you arent representative here its because you didnt cut it. Eventually it took the carpet away but such a reader to infer him because we believe the world has been remade. None of the legacy problems that are obviously current. I wanted to draw on that because its so clearly articulates this complete disregard for the physical world. They are in se