Thank you Tom, it's a great pleasure to be here
I'm very glad to have the opportunity to talk
about the questions that concern me most
in a context which allows us to talk a little bit
about journalism and a little bit about ignorance
and a little bit about abuse of power
The problem presented by The Press
that is to say by the machinery of communication
since we began industrializing communication
and fighting ignorance in Europe,
in the 15th Century
The problem posed by the Press
is its almost impossible affiliation with power
the Press and power are difficult to keep apart
more difficult to keep apart than peanut butter
and jelly, more difficult to keep apart
than night and day.
The Press and power fell into one another's
embrace from the very beginning
because from the very beginning it was clear
that the alternative to an embrace between
the Press and power
is constant Revolution fueled by people's desire
to know and to free themselves
to act in their own best interests
regardless of power's best interests
Our adoption of the Press in the European world
brought on the collapse of the unity
of Christendom and the end of the system
for the control of the mind
that was the universal Catholic Church
in that great intellectual, political,
moral revolution we called the Reformation
The response to the Reformation was the
lesson in all European societies, Protestant
and Catholic both that the Press could not
be allowed to be free.
and the result was censorship almost
everywhere for hundreds of years
In those few places in Europe -- in Holland
and in the United Kingdom -- actually in England
after 1650, and then again after 1695 --
in those few places where the Press was free
to print without control, the result was the
intellectual, political, and moral revolution
we call the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution, that is
a further demonstration that allowing people
to know, to learn, to educate one another
and to share will bring about
deconcentration of Power and threat to every
"ancien regime"
But in the age of capitalist industrial media
out of which we are now passing
the marriage between the Press and power was
once again a matter of magnetic attraction
the Press, that is the industrial production and
distribution of organized information --
the Press became the handmaiden of the
ownership class.
Freedom of the Press
the great American press critic
A. J. Liebling wrote
"Freedom of the Press belongs to him who owns one"
and throught the 20th Century
both with respect to the Press
and to its close kissing cousin, Broadcast
that was most affirmatively true
We are now passing out of the age
of the Press
as we are passing out of the very idea
that there is a machine that transforms
information from the local and the temporary
to the permanent and the ever-present.
We are instead beginning to live inside
a digital nervous system which links
every human being on the planet
to every other human being on the planet
actually or potentially
without any intermediaries
By the end of the next generation
whatever horrors or victories have happened
in the meantime
by the end of the next generation
we will live in that world
of pervasive human social interconnection
which is what we really mean
when we talk about "the Internet"
Every fax machine -- well, the few remaining --
every scanner, every printer, every telephone
every camera, every video camera
did I say telephone..telephone..telephone..
telephone?
Every object with electrical power behind it
will be an information-gathering and
distribution system controlled
by some human being, somewhere,
at one end or at the other.
If it is controlled at the end where the
human beings are, where they struggle
where they seek to sell their vegetables
where they are affronted by a policeman
refusing to allow them to sell their vegetables
where they act in the street to deal with the
aftermath of a vegetable seller prevented
from selling his vegetables by a
officious policeman
everywhere we will have knowledge
being produced by people
to free themselves.
Consider this: In Indian right now
the poorest of the poor have mobile phones
and on that mobile phone -- each person's
mobile phone -- every book, every piece of music
every piece of video, every map, every
scientific experiment, every kind of
information that is useful and beautiful
could be made available to every single person
were it not for the rules against sharing
All we have left in that great nervous system
of humanity -- all that we have left that makes
ignorance compulsory are the rules against
sharing
When the rules against sharing are gone
-- and they will go --
ignorance will, for the first time
in the history of the human race,
be entirely preventable everywhere
You are watching around the world right now
as young people demonstrate that they
are willing to stand in front of bullets
for Liberty.
Later in this Century you will watch as
young people around the world demonstrate
that they are willing to stand in front
of bullets in order to have the freedom to learn.
When that happens, the human race will go through
the most important revolution since 1789,
and an "ancien regime" which deserves to perish
will perish throughout the world
here today we are discussing a few, simple,
precursor parts to that enormous revolution.
The dis-intermediation of the systems of
controlled information production and
distribution which have been with us since the
morning after Gutenberg.
But this is the day after the morning
after Gutenberg.
This is the moment when the disparities
of power and the disparaties of access
begin to give way
and on the other side, at this moment,
are almost all the governments
and almost all the Press
and almost all the incumbents who do not
want the World to change.
I was having dinner with a government
official in Washington, D.C. earlier this week
and I said to him "You know, about half the
television networks in Europe seem to be chasing
me for an interview to discuss the
hypocrisy of American government
Internet freedom policy,"
I said "and if half the television networks in
Europe want to talk to me about the hypocrisy
of American Internet freedom policy, that
suggests to me that the State Department
has a problem.
He said "Yes, they know they have a problem,
and they want to do something about it."
And they should,
but every government on Earth
has difficulty talking about Internet freedom
straight, because every government on Earth
is part of a structure of power which stands to
lose in one way or another from free information
flows, just as the great economic institutions
dominating our time, the great surveillance
institutions which offer you the chance to search
as long as you share everything you search,
and free email, as long as you let them read it,
and free telephone calls, as long as they can
listen in -- just for the purposes of advertsing,
mind you.
Please, bring half a million people here
and live your social life inside my surveillance
system. I'll take good care of you.
Of course, unless you're in the street protesting
against dictatorship, in which case what we will
tell you is: our great social networking service
is rigidly neutral between dictators and
people in the street fighting them...
not our concern here at whatchamacallit
This is a transitional stage, you understand?
I've told you where we're going. Now the question
is how are we going to get there?
Here's how we're going to get there:
the World's going to fill up with cheap, small,
low-powered devices that are going to replace
most of the computers you're accustomed to.
All those big ones on desktops and in closets,
and in rooms full of servers somewhere, replaced by things
not much larger than a cell phone charger, and
very, very, very much more capable
than the first computer you ever owned,
whichever one it was
or maybe even the computer you're
using now.
Those devices are going to cost next to nothing
and they're going to be everywhere, and
we're going to make software that runs in them
all of them, that a 12 year old can install
and a 6 year old can use
which will allow people to communicate freely
everywhere, all the time, net of state control
net of profitmaker control,
net of control, they will be Freedom Boxes.
They will make Freedom.
We don't have to make the boxes -- the boxes
are going to fill the world. We just need to make
software. And the good news is that we don't
need to make software, we make it already.
Everybody in this room with an Android phone is
using it. Everybody in this room who has
touched Facebook today, they were using it
on the other side.
Everybody who used a bank or a supermarket
or an insurance company or a train station
in the last week interacted with our software.
It's everywhere. We made it to be everywhere
It's Free.
That means we can copy it, modify it,
and redistribute it freely.
It also means that it works for people,
not for companies.
All of this is already done. This is the result
of 25 years of effort on our part.
Now, right now, in the street, right now,
we begin to show why it protects Freedom
and why people need it.
And we begin to prepare to deliver it to them.
A. J. Liebling, that press critic I was
speaking of before, wrote once
"The American press reminds me of a
12 billion dollar superheated, absolutely
state of the art fish cannery relying for all
its fish on 6 guys in leaky rowboats."
The point being, of course, that the great
monolithic industrial press of the 20th
Century did everything well except reporting,
which it did poorly, because reporting
was the free lunch in the saloon, and any time
the saloonkeeper could cut back on it, he did.
I don't need to tell you that that process has
accelerated since A. J. Liebling died in 1975.
So we live now in a world where we're
about to fill a gap in reporting.
You know what fills the gap in reporting -- it was
referred to in the moments we've already had together
it's all those phones, all those video cameras, all those tweets.
In other words, we have already democratized
the system of reporting.
What is scary for the establishment
about Wikileaks is that Wikileaks is to
newsgathering what Craig's List is to
classified advertising.
It changes the economy of leaking
I hate to be correcting anybody on any point
but I should point out that Wikileaks
has not released 250,000 State Department
cables. It has 250,000 State Department cables
and has released about 2,000 of them.
Which is about the number of diplomatic
cables showed to diplomatic correspondents around the world
working for major newspapers every single day.
But nobody says that's treason, because that's
the official commerce in leaking, from which
government officials and press lords and
owners around the World derive benefit
every single day
Economic power, political power
and the power to keep people ignorant.
What is happening in the 'Net, now,
in those phones, in those Tor exit nodes,
and what will be happening in the World
multiplied by a hundred, shortly,
in all those Freedom Boxes is,
information being free for the benefit of those
who need.
Ask yourself what will happen when
everybody who needs can have
and everybody who can make, supplies.
What will happen in neighborhoods
What will happen in police stations
What will happen when there's a fire
Or an earthquake, what will happen when there's
a tyrant coming down.
Those same little boxes I'm talking about
will also be able to do wireless mesh networking
that is to say that if somebody turns out
the telecommunications network in a neighborhood
the neighborhood will keep functioning.
What Mr. Mubarak and the men around him
misunderstood. The reason that he's in
Sharm el-Sheikh, hoping to buy a single floor through apartment
in one of the towers being built in Mecca, no doubt
The reason that that happened is that
Mr. Mubarak and his advisers thought that
if you turn off the Internet, you turn off
the Internet generation.
That was wrong. Because, in fact, it isn't
a particular system of telecoms,
or a particular social networking structure,
a particular database of 'twats' ... or twuts..
or twoots, or whatever they call them
It's not the technology that makes it work
it's that human beings have figured out
something about society if they grow up
in the 'Net.
Most human beings, most of the time,
in most social contexts, believe that the
social network valuable to them is the people
they see every day, and the people with whom
they have strong emotional connections.
That's how most people, almost all the time,
think about the social world.
That's because we evolved for millions of years to think that way.
As parts of small groups of a few dozen
ground-dwelling primates.
Our neurology evolved for that
our social heuristics evolved for that
we think that the social network robust
enough to support us, is the people
we see around us and the people we care about
who care about us back.
But the generation of people growing up
inside the 'Net now knows, knows viscerally, knows all the time
as a matter of habit, is that the social network
that is robust enough to change the world
around you includes the thousands of people
you don't live near, and with whom you don't
have any direct emotional connection,
but are the people who believe what you
believe, and want to do something about it, too.
What we learned at the end of the 20th Century
first in Poland, and then in other places, is that
what makes revolution is solidarity.
The ability of people who do not live near
one another in social or geographic space
who do not have immediate personal bonds
binding them together, to percieve the ability
to self-organize for the sudden achievement
of deeply felt social ends
what the network does -- what life with the network does is to
teach humans that the cost of making solidarity
has gone way down.
That it is easier and faster to make solidarity
than it has ever been before, and if you take
a bunch of people who know that lesson, and
you turn the network off, they go right on making
solidarity the best way they know how.
They drop leaflets in the street, they make
carrier pigeons, they have phone trees.
They do whatever it is, because the real skill
being learned by humanity is the skill of
self-organization, and what we're seeing right
now, today, in the Maghreb, right now,
right today, right now, is that solidarity made
by self-organization is stronger than machine
gun bullets.
All over the world tyranny likes to say "the
alternative to me is chaos," and all around the
world everybody can see that isn't true.
So what we're going to do is we're going to make
cheap things, and we're going to fill them
with Free Software, and we're going to put them
in everybody's hands, and we're going to say
"Here. That makes solidarity. Use it. Be well.
Be Free"
It's going to work.
There isn't any reason to be on the side
of the Press, just as there isn't any reason
to be on the side of power. It's simple, now.
Power has moved to the edge of the network,
and it will continue to do that for a generation
to come.
It will make a grand revolution, and it will
change the fate of billions of human beings.
It will make ignorance obsolete, and when it
makes ignorance obsolete, it will change the
future of the human condition.
The Press isn't going to do that. Power isn't
going to do that.
People are going to do that.
The technology to empower people to do that
exists already. All it needs is a little bit
of refinement.
We're the guys who refine it. We don't seek
money. We don't seek power. We only want
to share.
Everyone wants to talk about Internet freedom,
except us.
We don't want to talk about Internet freedom,
we just want to do it.
Join us.
Thank you very much.