Named Financial Times book to read in 2022. Jamie provides a definitive guide to the great political question of our time how can freedom and democracy survive in a world of powerful technologies . Without further ado, please join me in welcoming to politics and prose. Jamie suskind suskind. Thank you so much and good evening and welcome. Thank you all for coming out tonight. Its its lovely to be doing live events again. Im a british here in d. C. , so im going to start with a story about british guest in d. C. , a much distinguished one than myself in, 2009 or so, the Prime Minister of the united, a guy called gordon brown, came here. And he really had one purpose. He wanted to boost poll ratings because he wasnt doing so well. And he thought that a good way of doing would be to come and meet the glowing new president s of the United States. Barack obama, and bask in some of his reflected glory and bring it back with him to the United Kingdom. Things didnt quite go to plan, though when gordon brown got here to the United States. There was the traditional ceremony in which gifts were exchanged between the heads of government and and gordon gave the president a series of carefully curated and carefully chosen gifts from the british people, things which was of our shared history things which were very expensive, very valuable. And there was a grand over ceremony. And then what happened was that the president of the United States, in turn, gave the Prime Minister 20 dvds of classic American Films and this was regarded in British Press as a snub and a a blow to the heart of the special relationship between the two countries. And so mr. Brown left dc without achieving his aim. But the worst thing happened when he got home to london and settled down in number downing street, where the Prime Minister lives, decides to decided to make best of a bad situation. So he rummaged the dvds that the obamas had given him, and he found one that he wanted to watch. And he put it in his dvd player. And of course, dvd refused to play because it was coded only to walk in the north american area. And i think this story a lot because it contains one of the really one of the most important principles of our age, which is that you cant get a computer or a digital system of, any kind to do something that is otherwise programmed to do. And it doesnt matter how. Powerful. You are in conventional terms. And make no mistake, this was the most powerful man in the United Kingdom. Technology will ever obey its design. And those who do the designing are the ones who determine how they work. The reason this is important is because more and more of our lives on mediated through Digital Technology. All of the actions interactions and transactions that make up a meaningful. Most them these days require interacting with tech some way and what it means is that every time we use a technology we have to follow the rules that are embed added into it. We dont get a chance to negotiate. We dont get a chance to bargain. The code enforces itself. So if you write a tweet, for instance, that longer than 280 characters, the tweet just isnt to send. The system literally allow it. Youre not going to be able to or negotiate about it. If you imagine taking a your fast drive in a selfdriving and youre rushing to the hospital, you might want car to go over the speed limit, but it may well refuse to do so. You may refuse to drive and roads, which is gps systems told. It were trespassing. You might refuse to park in particular bays. A hospital. The point is this Digital Technologies contain and when we interact with them, we have to follow those rules. And in my work i argue that those who write the rules that are coded into Digital Technology are increasingly writing rules of society. Theyre writing the rules by which the rest of us have to live. Software engineers, i argue, are becoming social engineers. And in my talk, i want to explore with you some of the implications of this and what i think we can do about it. Because the first thing i want to emphasize to you is this there is a myth about, silicon valley, and about Digital Technology. And the myth goes Something Like this tech is a scientific of objectivity, of neutrality, of rationality. Tech isnt political. Tech is separate politics. That logic has underpinned a lot of the way that people think about Digital Technology. Assumed that is something kind of scientific about. The digital tech that increasingly us. But what i think that if you look around can see that most Digital Technologies are fact saturated soaked through with biases and and priorities. And its not necessarily because the people who run them or design or own them are over political people. Its just that when you create something that exerts power, its always to have an effect on some groups rather than others. So to consider some of the mistakes that we sometimes see with Digital Technology, there are Voice Recognition systems that literally dont hear the voices of women because been trained mainly on male voices. There are facial Recognition Systems that wont see people of colour or people with facial disfigurements because none of the Training Data that theyve been trained on contain of those kinds. There were some scandals recently. Facebook designating particular racial groups as monkeys on its profile, not the people who wrote those algorithms themselves would ever have considered themselves racist, but they didnt give sufficient attention to the data on they were training that product and up with something that was incredibly offensive and ive been talking about this for a few years. And in some ways the debate has. A typical story that i used to tell google. You will recall that when you use google and you type in a question, it will often give you an answer. It itll sort of end the question for you with a number of suggested. And so three or four years ago maybe five if you tried typing in the why do you would get a number of quite unpleasant suggested questions. So things like why did have big noses . Why do love money so much . Why the control the media . And what google would say about these results was, look, were not sitting around trying to create that are offensive. Its just that what the algorithm does is that it reflects the questions people have asked in the past. Its to be useful. Its trying to give people what in fact, they want. Now, i dont doubt for a second that thats true. Right. But i also do question whether its a defence because, there is another way you can Design Technologies like that, which is instead of repeating and amplifying injustices that already exist in the world you can engineer things that reduce the injustice in the world or that make the world a little bit better. And for years google said no, this is something we cant be done. Were not social engineers, were software engineers. And then eventually, after a while they did change it. And youll find now that you type in questions on google there are far of what ive just described and course the sky didnt fall in. The point im making is this if youre someone who designs a Search Engine algorithm or runs a giant platform on which People Democratic deliberation or if you engineer that, decide whether people jobs, whether people get mortgages or whether people get housing, whether people get insurance, the choices you make about, those designs are going to help some groups and not other groups. Theyre going to emphasize priorities and not others. The way i put it is that the digital is political. If you design things that excite power in society, then the choices you make are always going to have to promote one group over another. Its inherent. And so what i encourage my readers to do in my is to get out of the idea, get out of the the Digital Technology. Somehow this objective or scientific thing detached from reality. Tech is all around us and it is soaked through with prints with politics. The two are inescapable. Let me just talk a little bit more about why i say tech powerful. I argue my book that there are three ways in which Digital Technologies exert. The first is the one that ive already described. Tech contains rules which the rest of have to follow. Think of the dvd that play on Gordon Browns dvd or the social media platform that wouldnt let people post an article about biden from the New York Post shortly. The last president ial election. The system contains rules the rest of us have to follow. But there are two other important ways in which Digital Technologies exert power. One is by gathering data about us now gathering data is auxiliary to power in sense that the more you know people, the easier it is to influence or even manipulate them. And that is something that many Digital Technologies try to do these days and able to do with increasing amounts of success, but actually theres another element to data gathering which is more subtle, which is that when you know that data is being gathered about, you, you are less likely to do things which others would perceive as sinful or shameful or wrong. If you think being watched. Youre more likely to behave yourself. And thats a kind of power in itself because it basically gets people to change their behaviour without forcing them to or telling them or even telling them to. And you know. I think that we are in one of these slightly strange historical where people havent quite woken up to the fact that they are constantly being surveyed, their own technologies. So you had the woman, for instance, who posted her marathon time on twitter, you know, saying, isnt it great how quickly i ran it only for her fitbit upload to the public the fact that shed run 23 miles or you have the my my particular. Favorite example is one that an audience member me not so long ago which was there are these things called smart scales if any of you have them theyre basically bathroom that connect to your iphone. Ive done it why anyone would ever want it because what it does is it gives a sort of running update of your inadequacy and you know, youve gained this amount of fat this week or whatever it is and it is always a gain. But one of the ways in which these systems are meant to be smart is that they can tell whos standing on them. So it claims so this woman in the audience was explained me that im a friend of hers and a partner had a set smart scales and the female half of the couple went away for the weekend and was therefore surprised when on the sunday morning she received an update on her iphone congratulating her on her significant loss. When, of course, what happened is that the the woman with whom i partner was having an affair sort of idly stood on the scales in the morning without thinking for a moment she might be telegraphing her presence. The one person in the world she didnt want to do it to the being we grew up. I think a world where we werent being constantly seen even in the privacy of our own homes. Thats no longer true. You dont need to dont need to have someone physically eyeballing you in order for there to be data gathered about you. So technology contained technologies, gather information. The third thing the technologies do is they filter and frame our perception of the world. We rely more and more on Digital Technologies to know whats going on out there. You and i are only capable of processing or holding a very small amount of information at a time. But whenever we use a Search Engine or a news feed, algorithmic news feed or log on to social media, we are presented with a small slice of information about society and which slice were presented with matters. Because it determines what we see true or false or right or wrong or important or unimportant. What you see on your in the morning may be completely different. What the person lying in bed to you next you sees. And thats thats interesting. I think i think a change and listen you dont need believe that you know facebook has a particular political agenda or social platforms are biased against one political view simply to note that to technology is one way or another frame our perception of the world. And sometimes might be in a way that we like. Sometimes it might be in a that we dont like. The point simply that its an immense amount power that lies in the hands of who happen to engineer these systems. And so stepping back and this is really the kind of premise of my book, i think were moving into a world now where is a new and strange form of power our midst . Think of the big forms of power that have traditionally been about by political scientists and the like. So youve got that youve got market power the power of the market to move goods and services around and to affect peoples. Youve got things like social norms of the kind that John Stuart Mill would talk about in on liberty. So we do in order to avoid being shamed, in order to avoid being criticised, whatever you have, the great clunking fist of the states, you know, the government bosses us around passing laws tells us what to do and a lot of political theory looks at these kind of social forces and analyzes the world through them. I argue that in our time there is an entirely new of social forces, which in here Digital Technology, because has power for the three reasons ive already described. And youll notice that none of those three reasons involve going through the traditional political process, there is an argument to be made that the industry has power because it can influence. People here in washington, dc, there is an argument to be made that the Tech Industry has power because it has enormous amounts of money and cash and can influence policy that way. So think about when amazon was choosing where its new headquarters be and you had the cities of the america kind of bending over backwards, change their tax regimes to try and attract it. Other people make those arguments. I think theyre important but my argument is much more directly focused on the technologies themselves. If you own and control powerful technologies, you writing the rules by which the rest of us live you are gathering data in a way that exerts power. You are filtering and framing perception of the world. And to me that is an awesome and growing form of power. Crucially growing, because we literally have just started this phase of history. What systems will be capable of in ten, 20, 30 years time only makes the point more acute. And so i step back and i ask, well, given weve got this new and strange form of power in society, how if we responded to it, whats whats been our reaction to it . And if you look at other people in society who have assumed positions, power or social responsibility, you can see what we tend to do. And what we tend to do is rules and standards and regulations on them. So just think about people like lawyers or doctors or bankers. We dont we recognize that play an important social function, but we dont just trust them. We dont just hope and and kind of long for that goodwill and wisdom and hope. They do the right thing we place regime probably not enough in the case of the sector but certainly when it comes lawyers and doctors, we place regimes of on them. We subjected that to certain standards of education sets and standards of probity, certain standards of ethics. And, you know, its not just if you look at a pilot or a pharmacist or a or there are other relationships in which the law imposes responsibilities. You know, a parent owes duty legal duties to that child and they dont arise out of any contract between them. They arise because society has deemed one to be in a position of power and responsibility vis a vis the the strange thing about the Tech Industry is that people are acquiring enormous amount of power and social responsibility, but then is not coming with corresponding responsibility. So know you have to have more qualifications to be a pharmacist than you do to run social media platform that determine the health of a countrys democracy. It seems to me that something is probably slightly out of kilter, that and in the book i try to ask why you know whats going on whats going on here . Why is it that were not this in the same way as we might treat industries and other professions and the answer, i think, lies at the realm of ideas we are beholden to a set of ideas about Digital Technology, which essentially only frames tech as something that is both in and governed the markets. So obviously, we know that capitalism generates extraordinary, innovative power. We know that innovation takes place in free, open economies. But its a real stretch. I argue to argue to say that markets are also quite at regulating the people who who who are within them. In fact, my Research Suggests that market forces, market pressures often bring out the worst in people rather the best. And this is important because Tech Industry will say, well, you know, look, we dont need regulation or that kind of regulation because, you know, if we dont provide people with what they want, then theyll go elsewhere. But thats nonsense. Not least when you have Enormous Network where you know the value of facebook isnt in its its little. The value of facebook is in the that more it has more members than christianity see so if you start an alternative rival platform it might be better than facebook in every way in terms of its functionality but if there are only a hundred members of it has no value. So there are all kinds of reasons why the ordinary mechanism breaks down. The same is true of algorithms. Think of the algorithms i described a moment which you increasingly see around us. We have algorithms which are used to determine our access to loans or jobs or even criminal justice. In some states, you know, the length of sentences are by algorithmic systems. And im if you imagine in a market economy that the market does its job and it roots out the economic inefficient algorithms. So theyre those algorithms which are actually commercially valuable survive. Will those algorithms be good for society or bad for society . Well, imagine, for instance, that youve got a recruitment algorithm for for a workplace or for a university. And what that algorithm tells you is that as a matter of statistical fact, people from this part of town tend to do better at work than people from that part of town. People at this part town tend to get higher degrees than people from that part of town. The obvious problem with that, even if its true, is that people in this part of town might be more one racial group. And this people of this part of town might be another racial group. And all of a sudden youve created an algorithm thats distinct. Thats basically distinguishing between people on the grounds of their race rather than on the grounds of other stuff. And its analogies in my mind to pre Civil Rights Era in the us there was strong incentives on companies to act in a racist fashion. So for instance, you know before the Civil Rights Act there were lots of people who wouldnt want a lawyer of color and the incentive the economic incentive for law firms was therefore not to not to hire black. And because if did, then they would lose business to their competitors. That is the raw of the market economy. And so when people tell you that we can trust the markets in the market to regulate the behavior of its participants they wrong because the market often encourages us to do the wrong thing rather than right thing and what you need is an intervening set of laws which a level Playing Field and stop people from doing the wrong thing. Its the same with you know a restaurant if you have two restaurants next to each other and one is cheaper than the other all Things Considered you might go to the cheaper one in an unregulated but it might be cheaper because its hygiene standards lower but the market reward having higher lower standards because you get more customers in the end. So instead what you need to do is you need to set a level field. This is the same level of hygiene, both restaurants, or at least a baseline. The same is true in technology. If we just let the market system regulate tech in the same way that we rely on it to generate tech. Then we are likely then we shouldnt be surprised when we have outcomes that are inconsistent with our freedom, are inconsistent with our democracy because thats not what theyre being optimized to do. Theyre being optimized to make money for the people, design and control them. Not a bad thing. Its the same at every other industry. So i say its not an inherently bad. Its the same way that every other industry, the private sector works. Its just that we shouldnt be surprised when the incentives are misaligned. And the reason the book called the digital republic is that i tried to propose an alternative way of thinking about technology, a set of principles that can guide and shape our approach to the proper governance and regulation of tech and the sets of principles that i rely on is called republicanism. Now, its very important for me to. Be clear what i dont mean by republicanism. Im not talking about the the capital r republicanism of the modern republican or the obviously that that party back in the day, its roots in the republican tradition. What im talking about is the smaller republican tradition that can be traced back to the of ancient rome and has existed for a thousand years for thousands of years and has popped up at various turning points in Human History passing constitutions and revolutions both here in the United States, probably greatest republican experiment, but also elsewhere in, europe and beyond. And republicanism basically the philosophy of republicanism, if its taken back to its core basically involves objecting to unaccountable power. And those two words unaccountable feature a lot in my book because what the republicans said back in the day was were not just opposed to having bad kings, you know, were not just hoping for a better king. What we oppose is the idea of kingship itself. What object to is is one group in society able to exercise power over another group in Society Without controls or accountability so in the field of employment . For instance, republicans dont argue for better bosses. They for workplace protections in housing. They dont argue for kind of landlords. They argue for tenants rights in gender relations. Back in the day, they didnt argue. For nicer husbands, they argued for equal for women. In abolitionist movement. They didnt argue for kinder slave. They argued for the abolition of, the institution of slavery itself. So republican ism is a philosophy which has been with us for a long time, but it hasnt always been at the forefront of kind of thinking. Its had its good moments in its bad moments, but i hope you can see how it might naturally apply to the problem of Digital Technology that ive just been describing. If you take a republican approach to big tech, the problem isnt Mark Zuckerberg or elon musk you know asking elon musk going to do with twitter back in the day back when it looked like he was actually going to buy it. The problem is the idea of Mark Zuckerberg, the idea of elon musk, the idea that by acquiring great wealth or even just by a company, you can have political power within a society. The idea that we have to rely on that wisdom and goodwill to make important decisions about the future of the way that we live. And one of the things that really focused my mind when i was the book was three things happening within the space of about weeks before the last president ial election here in the us. The first thing that happened was that the new published an article which was unironically headlined can Mark Zuckerberg fix facebook before it destroys democracy . And i read that and i thought, hmm, is that really the question we should be asking . I think it shouldnt. The question were asking is why does Mark Zuckerberg have the power to destroy democracy . The next thing that happened was that joe bidens started a petition. A petition to stop facebook from spreading misinformation during the election campaign. And again, i thought if a petition is our best weapon against, the disintegration of the democratic system, then we might be in some trouble. And then you the spectacle, the ghastly spectacle of nancy pelosi, one of the most powerful politicians in the country going not to the platforms themselves, but to their advertisers and asking them to ask the platforms to ensure that there was a free and fair flow of information before the election. These examples, to my mind, show how far we have slid as a civilization. It shouldnt be for political figures in a great democracy to be begging companies and the sector not to do things that harm the political process in a in a in a digital of the kind that imagine that wouldnt be within the gift and power of those who own and control those technologies or if they did retain that power, it would be subject to the same kinds of oversight and regulation that we subject other people in a free to other people who happen to acquire great amounts of power themselves. And so when i about digital republicanism, i have in mind a few principles i lay out in the book. One is that we should reduce, so far as possible, the unaccountable power of Digital Technology. And i suggest a number of political policies and laws and regulations for doing that, ordinary things of the kind that we have in other sectors, but which are somehow oddly missing in the tech sector. I but also what call the democracy principle, which that the technologies in a given society should never be allowed to stray too far from norms and values of that society. Just to give you one example, its not at all clear me why people in france or should, when they use social platforms have to operate according to american First Amendment norms right. These countries have different free speech in france. In germany, for instance, illegal to to show a swastika or to to to say things about nazis. And for whereas here in the United States is not fine, they both have that free speech traditions. Why should people in france be governed by american norms and vice versa that should thats just a small example. So people for argue should have global principles for the governance of free speech on the internet. I just dont agree i think that i think that even democracies take different approaches to these things. And one of the really important things about getting the future is making sure that people in individual countries have a say over. The rules that govern them when it comes to Digital Technology. So youve got the firstly, the domination principle reduced power. Secondly, the democracy principle that technology should, as far as possible should be engineered to reflect the values and norms of the societies in which they exert power and the final one is the the parsimony, as i call it, which basically says keep an eye on the state, keep an eye on government, because the prime beneficiary really of the power of Digital Technology in our time is not just the corporations. But by governments. I mean the Digital Technology gives an extra amount of power if they want it to. Governments even you know you dont need to go the china to know that im and there is always a risk when youre trying to rein in the power of the private industry you inadvertently either forget about or give too much power to government. And that i think would be a real risk as well for us in the next 20 or 30 years. So what ive just described to you is the sort of principle called basis for the book, but actually the reason i think its different from a lot of tech books out there in this may may not be a strength of the book depending on how you feel is that i think most books about tech and politics tend to follow a particular structure which is basically ten, ten chapters of diagnosis and or complaint and then kind of one chapter, the end, which says, what are we going do about it . And then the ideas are tend to be not as well thought out as the ideas in the previous ten chapters. This book strikes a 5050 balance if youre actually interested in ways that we might regulate algorithms, regulate data flows, powerful robots and Artificial Intelligence systems, regulate social media platforms. This book seeks to offer a number of solutions. And what unites those solutions is that they are all small. Our republic in the way that ive described because the only thing that would be worse not doing anything is trying to regulate in a way that was kind of a Governance Technology in way that was intellectually incoherent, that just responded to crises or popular kneejerk complaints. We need a sound intellectual basis for. What i think is actually the most important political of all time in the last century, in the 20th century, the great political was to what extent should the state be getting involved in the economy and Civil Society . And i think that political question was divided left from writing societies like this one, but it also divided the kind of eastern hemisphere from the western hemisphere. I think the great political debate this century is actually going to be different as the century wears on. I think it will come down to the to what extent should our lives be governed by powerful systems and on what terms. And in this book, i tried to offer one answer to that. Im digital republican. I say, heres we can order in a Structure Society in a way that allows Technology Make our democracy stronger not weaker, in a way that in is our liberty rather than shrinking it. But there are going to be rival philosophies, not contended for in my book. There will be digital nationalists who say that the key purpose of any Technology Policy should be to enhance the National Power your country. Thats definitely the view in russia, for instance, partly in china, partly in the eu and also its flirted with here, therell be digital socialists who say lets take the most powerful technology and bring them into state ownership. There will be digital liberals who are all about customization and saying should have individual about what they do and do not do in their interactions with technologies. My concern is that these these rival philosophies which think will dominate political debate in the next few decades. Theyre very young and theyre not very well through and the big worry that i have is that were not ready. Were not ready in. Were definitely not ready legally. And politically, but were also not ready intellectually for the world that we are building. And so my book is a modest not just to to suggest new policies, but to suggest a new vocabulary, a new way of speaking and thinking about politics, which might make the nature of the problem a little clearer and perhaps actually show show one direction in which we might go. Finally, a kind of realistic note im aware that given the state of politics in this country and elsewhere, the idea we might actually pass lots of great laws relating to the governance of technology seem remote. And i dont have an answer to that question. This isnt a book about how to fix american democracy. Im afraid im going to have to leave that to someone smarter than me. But to the extent that our failure to govern Digital Technology properly, and i do believe it has been serious failure to the extent that that has been caused by a lack of intellectual, a lack of clear diagnosis of what the problem actually is. The challenge and a lack of Clear Thinking about it could be improved. Thats the problem which i seek to tackle in the book. And if those are the issues that interest you, i hope youll enjoy it. Thank very much. I, i think were doing questions. If anyone, if anyone, any. Hi. You know, its really interesting i have two questions. What do you feel . Section two theories and efforts to it and how they might impact the future. The other thing is which a proposal will create do something akin to a have in china, there is a chinese internet that censors words or has its own rules and but then a lighter version. Theres a france and theres a britain net. Theres a germany net. Theres an american net. How do you avoid that fragmentation by out their networks both brilliant questions ill talk to them in the order that you ask them section 30 for those of us in the room who arent at nodes about this sort of stuff youre talking about section 30 of the Communications Decency act. Basically, it is a rule is almost unique to the United States. Its a law which gives very high degree of protection to internet platforms for the content that is posted on them. So if i post something insane on facebook or defamatory or whatever by and by and large cant be sued for that. And that was a decision that Congress Took back in the nineties. It was a really important decision and possibly at the time the right one because what people were saying in those days, what you were dealing with was kind of internet websites. The internet was still a kind of jumble of reasonably small websites back then, reasonably small. And the great concern was that online commerce and online would be crushed and stifled by a series of of lawsuits and. What it led to unquestionably is the modern internet that we know now. So Something Like facebook i think would probably never have taken the form that did were it not for section two society. Likewise Something Like twitter what people are now asking is whether section 230 should be repealed, but there is also a kind of subtler middle way, which i sort of which i approve of, which would bring it closer to the the model that is being used, has been used in europe and is going to be used in europe in the future, which is this, i dont think the platforms should be liable. All of the mad stuff that is posted on them. And so to that extent, there has to be some degree of insulation from liability, but that protection should be conditional. It should be conditional in my mind on the platforms convincing the regulator that they have adequate systems place to protect against certain social problems. So if youre facebook by the law, to my mind, should require you to have adequate systems place to prevent the spread of terrorist material or child pornography, the more extreme end and, if you can show, the regulator that you have adequate systems place adequate, reasonable proportionate. Then when something goes wrong and something slips through the cracks as inevitably will, when youre trying to regulate hundreds of thousands or millions piece of content a week, facebook isnt going to get sued for that because it has protection. But that protection, as is, i say, conditional on, showing that it has proper systems in place. So i wouldnt scrap section 230. I dont think you can make platforms liable for everything that happens them but i would i would only i dont see why we give unconditional protection platforms in circumstances where they do and cause real social harms. So i would make the the immunity conditional on the meeting of certain topics. Your second question is the kind of fragmentation of the internet and you asked how can we prevent it . I mean, controversial early. Im not sure preventing the fragmentation of the internet should be the number one policy goal. Me let me justify why i say that. I think from the 1990 onwards theres been this kind of utopian of the internet as kind, breaking down National Boundaries. And, you know, the internet doesnt recognize boundaries and the like. Im not sure that was ever really true, but its definitely not true nowadays. Already the internet very different in china than it in the United States. But the internets also different in germany and france as it is in the united. So, for instance, if i tweet us, the guy in germany, twitter, probably show it to other people in germany. But if i tweeter in i because it systems are designed comply with the law there but if i tweet a swastika here in the United States, it will probably off of my profile. So the internet has already become significantly fractured. You know the rules in turkey are completely different from the rules in europe. Next door. And so this idea of a kind of unified internet to the extent that it ever existed im not sure it does exist now, something i would add to this is rightly wrongly, a lot the things that people kind of took as the default, the internet, even things like the kind of basic protocols that underpin how the internet works. Countries like china now saying actually, we dont accept as being the basic protocol. We actually see as a kind of american system that benefits america. And so even at the kind nerd level, not even the political level, but right down in the details, there is significant political disagreement. And if you go to the International Bodies where things like internet standards agreed, you will find that they are significantly more fractious than they were 20 years ago. There isnt this cozy American Engineering consensus. So thats the sort negative. I dont actually. I think we do live in a world of the splintered net. And theres a recently a very good book who came out, which is, quote, i think the for you know, youve got the chinese, youve got the european internet, youve got the americans and that and i cant i cant actually remember what the fourth one was. But its basically saying that we weve lost weve lost the idea of a Global Internet anyway, just to cycle back to something i was saying during my talk, though it isnt i wouldnt want to be governed by chinese norms. People in china. I dont know what they would want to be by, but im pretty sure that in france and germany, in the United Kingdom want the chance to have their own, their internet kind of and this and the platforms that work on the internet reflecting the values and norms of their countries. So im i think what youre seeing and i dont actually necessarily think its a bad thing is a bit of a sin. But you are you are seeing some countries better than others. Im afraid you, are just better protected on the internet. If you in europe than in the United States. In the United States, there is no federal omnibus Data Protection law all in in in in europe, there is. But i wouldnt if you offered me the chance to come for those two systems to kind of reach a transatlantic compromise. I think a lot of people in europe would say. No, thank you. Well stick with what weve got. So thats a long way of answering the question, which basically i think that this is this kind of californian new ideology thing thats been happening in the in the study of tech for the last 20 years, where theres been this assumption that . What the internet is is something which destroys or doesnt observe National Boundaries and i say im not actually sure that was ever true. Dont think its true now. But i also think there are some good things about that which shouldnt be forgotten. Thank you. Good. Thanks. Any other questions questions. You to try it . Youve got to go to the mike this is your big moment. Yeah, i dont have a specific question. Were just like general thoughts. So im from the industry. I build products for a living. Some of the things that you said i will readily admit are real problems, like when youre trying to build a product and usually you have a group of users in mind and you want to build for them yeah. If you were to account every edge case from the beginning like you just wont anywhere. Right. So one question i had was it seems like theres one size fits all regulation and that theres never any consideration to scale if. Youve given any thought to how that work, where you can retain innovation, but at same time prevent facebook from destroying the world is such a good question. And actually really glad youve asked it. Its absolutely crucial that any sensible of regulation recognize is the difference in threats that are posed by different essentially levels of company and when it comes to social regulation. For instance, i know its not really on the table here because of the First Amendment, but if you look at whats happening in the and in europe, what you are what youre seeing a move towards a see i a system of regulation which begins by ranking platforms or categorizing platforms according to the level social risk that they pose but basically youve got massive platforms, facebook, which are super risky and then youve your kind of local knitting forum, which is not risky and. The regime immediately recognises the latter system must be subject to significantly less regulation than. The former system, a big thats been made of the gdpr, which is europes data regulation, is that it much easier for Big Companies to because it requires lots of exactly it requires lots of compliance, but you enter the market as a small company. All of a sudden youve got these myriad rules applying to you and you need to employ loads of lawyers. And its really difficult and has the opposite effect that you want regulation to have. You want regulation to encourage, you want it to allow challenger companies, you want it to allow Smaller Companies. And i think its a big problem with gdpr. So a lot of what i talk about the book is how do you Design Systems of regulation that do that dont just harm Smaller Companies but actually give them a kind of leg up buy in by basically having a kind of gridlock, heated form of social responsibility according to the level of social that a product or company tends to have. And to me thats very small are republican. What youre trying to do is have a level of responsibility through the law that is corresponding to the level threat of harm that you pose to society. And so that cant be one size fits all, one quick sort of tangential question, theres no one behind me, so im going to i think most people in tech understand the power they have. Its just impossible to do right. Everybody all the time. So, you know, i dont know if you know this anecdote train tracks leaving russia when they to europe like the widths are different the trains work you have to transfer the goods from one car to the other at the border its and i see this happening tech now right you are seeing the balkanization of all these internets. You call it the internet. Theres a lot of other names for it. What do you do in a case of like web3 . So essentially what for all of you dont know . Web3 is essentially crypto. You know, you guys can say you cant have free speech. We can say that we will prevent facebook from launching or loading in france, but with web3 it undermines all of that. I mean, the only way to prevent this essentially because it has an end to end encryption. You cant stop it. Right . There is an inherent power protocols which you did mention. So, i mean, on one hand, you understand the tension between protocol and the power that it provides. But well just make a new protocol soon as you regulate. I mean, this is the problem with financial industry. Theyre always one step ahead of the regulators and. This will always be the case, especially with tech like how do you handle this fundamental problem . Yeah. Okay. So theres a few Different Things and again, great questions. Im the first is i mean, ill take last point you made for us. There are obviously loads of things that make the regulation of digital really hard. One of them is the transnational nature it that the person you write you want to regulate might not be situated in your jurisdiction another is a kind of financial often more money is in the private sector than the kind of regulators who are trying to pursue them. A third one relates to talent often smartest coders and programmers. Theyre working for the government. Theyre working for companies. Another is the speed of technological change. Just when you think that a law is tackling a difficult social problem raised by the Technology Changes and you stuffed all of those things make it difficult. Again, in the book i have ideas about how to get around some of those problems, but i dont for a second see it as easy is web three unregulated table. So you refer to it as crypto. Again, just to kind of expand on that. The main web3 application people will have heard of is cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, but there other purported applications of crypto technologies, one of which is the idea that you might have decentralized organizations which yeah, decentralized anonymous organizations. There is no headquarters, there is no person you can point to and say youre responsible for this. And so how does how a traditional laws, which are kind of jurisdiction based and usually kind of entity based, how do they deal with that . Im. Its not the main problem tackled in this book. I dont think it has become a problem yet. And i this is a im sorry to cut you off. Yes. This is what im terrified of. Yeah. Youre going to have decentralized systems from people on the internet. Yeah. Building that people use and it will be entirely unaccountable. Yeah. Systems will essentially lock you out and prevent you from functioning society and theres no method of recourse. This. Yeah, i mean, i think. Theres a number of different ways that you might regulate a Technology Like one might be for instance regulating the people who it making laws for people who use it. So those laws might prevent people from using it if its essentially a wild west. And so that makes it a kind of socially unacceptable option. Another is to regulate the people who engineer it now i know you say theyre anonymous, etc. But thats fundamentally an enforcement im you know, anonymous have been using cryptographic methods for decades now and sometimes theyre cool and sometimes not. So its not a kind of its not entirely new problem. I have to say, i dont like going down the rabbit hole too much because my own view about web three is i dont think that. Im aware of being recorded here. So im bit this is a bit of a hostage to fortune none of the evidence that see suggests to me that in the future we will have widespread social usage of products and services that are entirely anonymously provided. The reason for that is that people want to that they have recourse if something goes theres a reason why bitcoin, for instance, appeals to a very small group of society. Most people think, actually, i dont want to invest in something, whether its literally to my mind zero legal accountable if the technical system for protecting breaks down and you know in my work a lawyer i see an increasing amounts of bitcoin frauds which are not inherent in the products but they are inherent in a murky world of anonymous actors. And i think by and large if youre going to bank with by and large, youre going to choose to bank with a regulated entity that has rules governing, the probity of the people who run it. And most people take the view that the enemy, the government, or that the enemy, the bank, they take the view i someone whos going to store my money safely. So im not yet of the potential of Blockchain Technology on cryptographic methods to kind of replace traditional enforcers in if you at whats happening in the crypto space youre not seeing the kind of because what people in cryptocurrency said was well you know if crypto becomes a huge thing then it will in a sense make banks and the like which are the kind of intermediaries just now make them bit more irrelevant but instead youre seeing you know the Barclays Blockchain the Goldman Sachs blockchain or whoever is people want to combine the strength of cryptographic methods with the fact that way the system is being run by a named person in a particular place. So i dont i dont identify the problem in the same way that you do. But if you do identify the problem, i can and readily accept that its going to pose a really difficult regulatory challenge. Thanks for asking. Any final questions . Go on. Thank you. Love your leadership thank you for being here. Two questions kind of related. One is, do we really need regulations . Because as you hinted the federal Agency Rulemaking process years right and it never keeps up to with regulations and to whether its congress or federal officials. I think as we saw with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, we are woefully naive when it comes to in regulating these technologies. I think it was an embarrassing of riches when we saw congressional members asking, Mark Zuckerberg, about his expertise and how they should be regulating. So are your thoughts to those questions . It is definitely true. Many governments around the world appear. Frighteningly. Ignorant of the problems that they are supposed to be solving and just to be really brutal about this until about five years ago, i say it was socially acceptable for of politicians of a particular generation to say things like i dont even know how to use my computer ive never ive never sent an email in my life my does it for me which. I think today would be a bit like a politician saying i cant perform basic arithmetic or i dont understand law or economics. I think it is becoming less socially for politicians to know nothing about this stuff and even just even just the difference between because what you were referring was, you know, the hearings that took place and orrin hatch asked Mark Zuckerberg, did facebook make money that . Was about five years ago now. And actually theres been quite a big change since then, which gives me a little bit of optimism i would also say, im afraid no offense, i think america is particularly bad when it comes to stuff. I think if you look at whats just happened in europe, the Europeans Union has a draft Artificial Intelligence which is super sophisticated. Weve had the gdpr since 2018. Last week, europe passed, two massive laws, Digital Services act, digital platform act, really far reaching bits of which are designed to not just apply to tomorrows problems, the futures problems as well. So the laws, the laws are framed in a way that tries to tackle generic problems rather than specific technologies and issues. Congress actually used have a specific advisory body on scientific, which i think was abolished in nineties, which you could definitely do with having back. But the problem is bigger that i mean i think you need an entire government in country federal department whose sole job it is is to anticipate regulatory issues in the digital space. I dont see how you can manage without that. I dont see why a modern country like the United Kingdom would have a for education a department for health, but not a department dealing with tech issues at if you accept the premise of argument, which is that this is going to be one of the biggest political issues of our time its mad just to treat as a kind of ancillary or kind of on the on on the ship of state is much bigger than that but i fundamentally sympathize with you why do i do what i do . Why i write these books . Why do i come to bookshops and talk about this stuff . Because i dont think were ready. And im going to be an apologist for that lack of readiness. Im trying to change it. What do i take . Encouragement from i look at, for instance, Climate Change, 20 years ago, kind of people knew what Climate Change was. It wasnt a cool or mainstream political issue. And in fact when most people were asked about its kind of salience, know whats most important to you in politics would always be down at 15th or 20th in the list of things that matter to them. 20 years of solid campaigning by people who care about Climate Change and kind of effects of it becoming clearer have changed that its still obviously a really controversial political issue, but its definitely something thats at the top of the political agenda. And the people on both sides talk about maybe the same will be true attacking in ten years. I think that will be long. But, you know, im trying to make it happen faster. It keep coming back for more. Lets see. Anyone else does a question sure. There was a rather i saw a rather interesting regarding the thing you were mentioning is after Science Technology it was a independent congressional body that talked about basically like Technical Solutions means and problems of future they had a very prescient prediction of what a pandemic might look like. For example, or what like a they got axed because basically Newt Gingrich decided they didnt like what they were saying and he he learned that if he axed it and then he could bring in whatever Heritage Foundation experts he wanted, itd be so much easier. Okay. But yeah, the other things were to ask is like the generation z gen has lived most of their life. Life documented on the internet and. Do. And so in they didnt really have a voice in how that was done or what was done the information you feel therell be some retroactive a settlement build to be will there be some rules postpartum. Well i mean interesting question so im 33 and i think im just about as old as you can be as young as you can be while still remembering a time before the internet. And because i think if i was just slightly younger, i wouldnt remember a time before the internet at so im not a digital native, but obviously everyone younger than me is with gen z i dont really know. I mean, if you go if you go on social platforms these days and see the kinds of stuff they post about themselves in some ways its great because theres so much less shame and judgment than there was in the past. In some ways its super unhealthy, you know, theres loads of really body image stuff and, you know, i was insecure as a teenager without that stuff. I cant imagine i would have found it these days. But mostly what i think is this. I had facebook from the age of about thousand. Its from about 2007, which i was in and onwards when i was kind of in my late teens and early twenties, i was just about old enough to to just to clock that, youve got to be slightly careful about what you do on the public internet. Obviously, many of my friends and contemporaries didnt do that. And for many it comes back to bite them. I mean you you see it not just with politicians but particularly a politician you know, a tweet that they did ten years ago, which is at the time no one batted an eyelid. Let give you let me give you a really specific example there was a really common word when i was a teenager, a teenager on facebook, a really common word. It was used all the time by and female users of facebook. That word was facebook. And it was when someone would go onto your profile when you left it logged in and type silly or or silly or kind of they basically messed with your profile that and if you go back facebook from 2008 and look at it, that word is everywhere, everywhere. And now even uttering it feels is offensive because the way that we talk and think about that issue has completely changed. Thats a long way of saying. I think there are two ways that Society Might when it comes to these folks who just put their entire lives the internet. And then when you put your entire lives on the internet theres going to be some embarrassing stuff is going to be stuff that doesnt well, every generation does stuff that age. Well, its just part of growing up. Either Society Changes norms. Ill come back to the second. The first is its a massive peoples lives up. So you post something when youre 18 and then you apply for a job five years later and all of a sudden that is being taken account by the person who is considering you for a job application. And thats one option. The other option is that social norms change. We become much more forgiving than we currently are of what people did when they were younger. My parents who are in their sixties they will have said and done a lot of really stuff in the seventies but most of it was never recorded. Most of it was never caught and. I dont think its i think everyone stuff theyre ashamed of it embarrassed stuff. Its not just you know, an off color or prejudiced remark. It might be the way you treated an expartner or, you know, something you said to a friend, which was hurtful. Were the first generation where all of that is recorded it. And so either we have to become a much more forgiving society or will become a much more society with loads, more ammo from which to judge people. I think weve probably got to become forgiving and. I think maybe a good thing for society and. So hopefully with the things that you describe, you know, like gen z suing to get all their information back or to to sue on the basis that they were misled or whatever, maybe that wont be necessary because the kind of political and social consequences of that useful conduct will be less obvious. But nowadays, as things stand, were stuck in this awkward position where we still have kind of 20 a century norms and values about people to account for things that they say. But weve got 21st century technologies, which means that the things people say are recorded to an extent to which they werent when the 20th century norms were developed to. Thank you all once again for joining us tonight. A quick reminder, if you could please fold your chairs and lean them up against anything sturdy, that would be wonderful. And then if youd like your books, fine, just line right here behind me. If still need to purchase a book to be sat. And one of our booksellers can help you at the register or up there at. Let us know if theres anything you need help with. Thankthank you so much