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Good morning, it's a pleasure to be here and an honor to be at re: publica.

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For the last thousand years, we, our mothers, and our fathers, have been struggling for freedom of thought.

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We have sustained many horrible losses and some imense vicroties and we are now at a very serious time.

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From the adoption of printing by Europeans in the 15th century, we began to be concerned primarially

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with access to printed material.

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The right to read and the right to publish were the central subjects of our struggle for freedom of

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thought for most of the last half milenium.

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The basic concern was for the right to read in private and to think and speak and act on the basis of

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a free and uncensored will.

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The primary antogonist for freedom of thought in the beginning of our struggle was the universal Catholic

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church, an institution directed at the control of thought in the European world.

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Based around weekly surveillance of the conduct and thoughts of every human being.

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Based around the censorship of all reading material, and, in the end, based upon the ability to predict

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and to punish unorthodox thought.

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The tools available for thought control in early modern Europe were poor, even by 20th century standards

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But they worked.

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And for hundreds of years, the struggle primarially centered around that increasingly important first

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mass-manufactured article in western culture: the book.

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Whether you could print them, possess them, traffic in them, read them, teach from them without the permission

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or control of an entity empowered to punish thought.

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By the end of the 17th century, censorship of written material in Euopre had begun to break down.

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First in the Netherlands, then in the UK, then afterwards in waves throughout the European world.

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And the book became an article of subversive commerce and began eating away at the control of thought.

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By the late 18th century, that struggle for the freedom of reading had begun to attack the substance

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of Christianity itself.

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And the European world trembled on the brink of the first great revolution of the mind. It spoke of " Liberté, égalité, fraternité"

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but actually it meant freedom to think differently.

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The Ancien Régime began to struggle against thinking and we moved into the next phase of the struggle

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for freedom of thought, which presumed the possibility of unothorodox thinking and revolutionary acting.

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And for 200 years we struggled with the consequences of those changes.

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that was then and this is now.

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Now we begin a new phase in the history of the human race. We are building a single nervous system which

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will embrace every human mind.

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We are less than two generations now from the moment at which every human being will be connected to a single

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network in which all thoughts, plans, dreams, and actions will flow as nervious impulses in the network.

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And the fate of freedom of thought, indeed the fate of human freedom all together, everything that we

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have fought for for a thousand years will depend upon the neuroanatomy of that network.

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Ours are the last generation of human brains that will be formed without contact with the net.

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From here on out every human brain, by two generations form now, every single human brain will be formed

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from early life in direct connection to the network.

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Humanity will become a super-organism in which each of us is but a neuron in the brain and we are describing

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now, now, all of us now, this generation, unique in the history of the human race, in this generation

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we will decide how that network is organized.

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Unfortunately, we are beginning badly.

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Here's the problem: we grew up to be consumers of media. That's what they taught us, we are consumers

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of media. That's what they taught us.

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Now media is consuming us.

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The things we read watch us read them. The things we listen to listen to us listen to them.

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We are tracked, we are monitored, we are predicted by the media we use.

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The process of the building of the network institutionalizes basic principles of information flow.

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It determines whether there is such a thing as anonymous reading.

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And it is determining against anonymous reading.

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20 years ago I began working as a lawyer for a man called Philip Zimmerman who had created a form of

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public key encryption for mass use called "Pretty Good Privacy".

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The effort to create Pretty Good Privacy was the effort to retain the possibility of secrets in the late

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20th century. Phil was trying to prevent government from reading everything.

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And, as a result, he was at least threatened with prosecution by the United States government for sharing

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military secrets, which is what we called public key encryption back then.

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We said you shouldn't do this, there will be trillions of dollars of electronic commerce if everybody

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has strong encryption. Nobody was interested.

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But what was important about Pretty Good Privacy, about the strugle for freedom that public key encryption

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in civil society represented, what was crucial, became clear when we began to win.

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In 1995 there was a debate at Harvard Law School. Four of us discussing the future of public key encryption

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and it's control.

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I was on the side, I suppose, of freedom. It is where I try to be. With me at that debate was a man called

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Daniel Weitzner who now works in the White House making internet policy for the Obame Administration.

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On the other side was the, then deputy, Attorney General of the United States and a lawyer in private

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practice named Stuart Baker, who had been chief council to the National Security Agency, our listeners,

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and who was then in private life helping businesses to deal with the listeners. He then became latter

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on the deputy for policy planning in the Department of Homeland Security in the United States, and has

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had much to do with what happened in our network after 2001. At any rate, the four of us spent two pleasant

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hours debating the right to encrypt and at the end there was a little dinner party in the Harvard faculty

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club and at the end, after all the food had been taken away and just the port and the walnuts were left

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on the table, Stuart said "Alright, among us, now that we are all in private, just us girls, I'll let

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our hair down" he didn't have much hair even then, but he let it down. "We're not going to prosecute

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your client, Mr. Zimmerman" he said, "public key encryption will become available. We fought a long losing

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battle against it but it was just a delaying tactic." And then he looked around the room and he said

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"But nobody cares about anonymity, do they?"

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And a cold chill went up my spine and I thought alright, Stuart, now I know, you're going to spend the

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next 20 years trying to eliminate anonymity in human society and I'm going to try and stop you and we'll

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see how it goes.

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And it is going badly.

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We didn't build the net with anonymity built in. That was a mistake.

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Now we're paying for it.

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Our network assumes that you can be tracked everywhere.

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And we've taken the web and we've made Facebook out of it.

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We put one man in the middle of everything.

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We live our social lives, our private lives, in the web and we share everything with our friends, and

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also with our super-friend, the one who reports to anybody who makes him, who pays him, who helps him

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or who gives him the 100 billion dollar he desires.

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We are creating a media that consume us, and media loves it.

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The primary purpose of 21 first commerce is to predict how we can be made to buy.

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And the thing that people most want us to buy is debt.

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So we are going into debt. We're getting heavier, heavier with debt, heavier with doubt, heavier with

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all we need we didn't know we needed until they told us we were thinking about it.

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Because they own the search box and we put our dreams in it.

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Everything we want, everything we hope, everything we'd like, everything we wish we knew about is in

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the search box, and they own it.

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We are reported everywhere, all the time.

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In the 20th century you had to build Lubyanka, you had to torture people, you had to threaten people,

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you had to press people to inform on their friends. I don't need to talk about that in Berlin.

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In the 21st century, why bother?

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You just build social networking and everybody informs on everybody else for you.

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Why waste time and money having buildings full of little men who check who is in which photographs?

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Just tell everybody to tag their friends and bing, you're done.

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Oh, did I use that word, "bing?" You're done.

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There's a search box, and they own it, and we put our dreams in it, and they eat them.

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And they tell us who we are right back.

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"If you like that, you'll love this"

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And we do.

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They figure us out, the machines do.

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Every time you make a link, you're teaching the machine.

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Every time you make a link about someone else, you're teaching the machine about someone else.

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We need to build that network, we need to make that brain.

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This is humanity's highest purpose, we're fuilfiling it. But we musn't do it wrong.

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Once upon a time the technological mistakes were mistakes, we made them.

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They were the unintended consequences of our thoughtful behavior. That's not the way it is right now.

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The things that are going on are not mistakes, they're designs.

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They have purpose, and the purpose is to make the human population readable.

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I was talking to a senior government official in the United States a few weeks ago;

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our government has been misbehaving.

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We had rules, we made them after 9/11, they said "we will keep databases about people, and some of those people will be innocent.

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they won't be suspected of anything." The rules we made in 2001 said

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"We will keep information about people not suspected of anything for a maxium of 180 days,

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they we will discard it."

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In March, in the middle of the night, on a Wednesday, after everything shut down, when it was raining,

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the Department of Justice and the director of National Intelligence in the United States said "Oh, we're

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changing those rules. This small change: we used to say we would keep information on people not suspected

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of anything for only 180 days maximum, we're changing that a little bit to five years."

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Which is infinity.

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I joked with the lawyers I work with in NY, they only wrote five years in the press release because they couldn't get the

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sideways 8 into the font for the press release.

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Otherwise they'd have just said "infinity," which is what they mean.

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So I was having a conversation with a senior government official I have known all these many years who

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works in the White House and I said "You're changing American society" he said, "Well we realized that

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we need a robust social graph of the United States."

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I said "You need a robust social graph of the United States?"

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"Yes" he said.

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I said "You mean the United States government is, from now on, going to keep a list of everybody every

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American knows. Do you think by any chance that should require a law?"

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And he just laughed.

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Because they did it in a press release in the middle of the night, on Wednesday when it was raining.

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We're going to live in a world, unless we do something quickly, in which our media consume us and spit

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in the government's cup.

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There will never have been any place like it before.

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And if we let it happen, there will never ever be any place different from it again.

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Humanity will all have been wired together and media will consume us and spit in the government's cup.

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And the state will own our minds.

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The soon-to-be-ex president of France campaigned, as you will recall last month on the proposition that

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there should be criminal penalties for repeat visiting of jhiadi websites.That was a threat to

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criminalize reading in France.

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Well, he will be soon the ex-president of France, but that doesn't mean that that will be an ex-idea in France at all.

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The criminalization of reading is well advanced.

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In the United States, in what we call terrorism prosecutions, we now routinely see evidence of people's

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Google searches submitted as proof of their conspiratorial behavior.

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The act of seeking knowledge has become an overt act in conspiricy prosecutions.

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We are criminalizing thinking, reading, and research.

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We are doing this in so called free societies. We are doing this in a place with the 1st Amendment.

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We are doing this despite everything our history teaches us because we are forgetting even as we learn.

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We don't have much time.

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The generation that grew up outside the net is the last generation that can fix it without force.

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Governments all over the world are falling in love with the idea of datamining their populations.

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I used to think that we were going to be fighting the Chinese Communit party in the third decade

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of the 21st century.

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I didn't anticipate that we were going to be fighting the United States government and the government

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of the People's Republic of China.

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And when Ms. Cruise is here on Friday, perhaps you'll ask her whether we're going to be fighting her too.

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Governments are falling in love with datamining because it really really works.

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It's good. It's good for good things as well as evil things.

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It's good for helping government understand how to deliver services; it is good for government to understand

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what the problems are going to be; it is good for politicians to understand how voters are going to think.

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But it creates the possibility of kinds of social control that were previously very difficult, very

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expensive, and very cumbersome, in very simple and efficient ways.

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It is no longer necessary to maintain enormous networks of informants, as I have pointed out.

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Stazi gets a bargin now, if it comes back, because Zuckerberg does its work for it.

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But it is more than just the ease of surveillance it is more than just the permanence of data,

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it's the relentless of living after the end of forgetting.

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Nothing ever goes away any more.

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What isn't understood today will be understood tomorrow. The encrypted traffic you use today in relative

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security is simply waiting until there is enough of it for the crypto analysis to work.

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For the breakers to succeed in breaking it.

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We're going to have to re-do all our security all the time forever because no encrypted packet is ever

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lost again.

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Nothing is unconnected infinitely, only finitely. Every piece of information can be retained and everything

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eventually gets linked to something else.

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That's the rationale for the government official who says we need a robust social graph of the social

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graph of the United States.

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Why do you need it?

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So the dots you don't connect today, you can connect tomorrow, or next year, or the year after next.

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Nothing is ever lost, nothing ever goes away, nothing is forgotten any more.

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So the primary form of collection that should concern us most is media that spy on us while we use them.

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Books that watch us read them; music that listens to us listen to it; search boxes that report what we

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are searching for to whoever is searching for us and doesn't know us yet.

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There is a lot of talk about data coming out of Facebook.

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Is it coming to me? Is it coming to him? Is it coming to them?

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They want you to think that the threat is data coming out.

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You should know that the threat is code going in.

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For the last 15 years what has been happening in enterprise computing

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is the addition of that layer of analytics on top of the data warehouse that mostly goes, in enterprise computing,

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by the name of "business intelligence."

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What it means is you've been building these vast data warehouses in your company for a decade or two now,

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you have all the information about your own operations, your suppliers, your competitors, your customers,

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now you want to make that data start to do tricks by adding it to all the open source data

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out there in the world and using it to tell you the answers to questions you didn't know you had.

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That's business intelligence.

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The real threat of Facebook is the BI layer on top of the Facebook warehouse.

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The Facebook data warehouse contains the behavior,

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not just the thinking but also the behavior,

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of somewhere nearing a billion people.

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The business Intelligence layer on top of it, which is just all that code they get to run

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covered by the terms of service that say they can run any code they want

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for "improvement of the experience."

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The business intelligence layer on top of Facebook is where every intelligence service in the world wants to go.

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Imagine that you're a tiny little secret police organization in some not very important country.

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Let's put ourselves in their position, let's call them, I don't know what, you know Kyrgyzstan.

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You're secret police, you're in the people business. Secret policing is people business.

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You have classes of people that you want. You want agents, you want sources, you have adversaries,

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and you have "infulenciables," that is people that you can torture who are related to adversaries:

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wives, husbands, fathers, daughters, you know, those people.

220
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So you're looking for classes of people. You don't know their names but you know what they're like.

221
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You know who is recruitable for you as an agent, you know who are likely sources.

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You can give the social characteristics of your adversaries.

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And once you know your adversaries you can find the infulencables.

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So what you want to do is run code inside Facebook.

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It will help you find the people that you want.

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It will show you the people whose behavior and whose social circles tell you that they are what you want

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by way of agents, sources, what the adversaries are and who you can torture to get to them.

228
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So you don't want data out of Facebook, the minute you take data out of Facebook it is dead.

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You want to put code into Facebook, and run it there and get the results.

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You want to cooperate.

231
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Facebook wants to be a media company.

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It wants to own the web.

233
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It wants you to punch "like" buttons.

234
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"Like" buttons are terrific even if you don't punch them because they're web bugs,

235
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because they show Facebook every other webpage that you touch that has a "like" button on it,

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whether you punch it or you don't, they still get a record.

237
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The record is you read a page which had a "like" button on it and either you said yes or you said no,

238
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and either way you made data, you taught the machine.

239
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So media want to know you better than you know yourself and we shouldn't let anybody do that.

240
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We fought for a thousand years for the internal space,

241
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the space where we read, think, reflect, and become unorthodox,

242
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inside our own minds.

243
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That's the space that everybody wants to take away.

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Tell us your dreams.

245
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Tell us your thoughts.

246
00:27:49,399 --> 00:27:50,838
Tell us what you hope.

247
00:27:50,838 --> 00:27:52,278
Tell us what you fear.

248
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This is not weekly oricular confession, this is confession 24 by 7.

249
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The mobile robot that you carry around with you,

250
00:28:03,098 --> 00:28:07,371
the one that knows where you are all the times and listens to all your conversations.

251
00:28:07,371 --> 00:28:12,224
The one that you hope isn't reporting in at headquarters but it is only hope?

252
00:28:12,224 --> 00:28:19,933
The one that runs all that software you can't read, can't study, can't see, can't modify, and can't understand?

253
00:28:19,933 --> 00:28:20,792
That one.

254
00:28:20,792 --> 00:28:27,363
That one is taking your confession all the time.

255
00:28:27,363 --> 00:28:31,357
When you hold it up to your face from now on it is going to know your heartbeat.

256
00:28:31,357 --> 00:28:34,469
That's an Android app right now.

257
00:28:34,469 --> 00:28:39,507
Micro changes in the color of your face reveal your heartrate.

258
00:28:39,507 --> 00:28:44,801
That's a little lie detector you're carrying around with you.

259
00:28:44,801 --> 00:28:52,836
Pretty soon I'll be able to sit in a classroom and watch the blood pressure of my students go up and down.

260
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In a law school classroom in the United States, that is really important information.

261
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But it is not just me of course, it's everybody right?

262
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Because it's just data and people will have access to it.

263
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The inside of your head becomes the outside of your face, becomes the inside of your smart phone,

264
00:29:12,456 --> 00:29:21,512
becomes the inside of the network, becomes the front of the file at headquarters.

265
00:29:21,512 --> 00:29:27,782
So we need free media or we lose freedom of thought. It's that simple.

266
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What is free media mean?

267
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Media that you can read, that you can think about, that you can add to,

268
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that you can participate in without being monitored.

269
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Without being surveiled, without being reported in on. That's free media.

270
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If we don't have it, we lose freedom of thought, possibly forever.

271
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Having free media means having a network that behaves according to the needs of the people at the edge,

272
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not according to the needs of the servers in the middle.

273
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Making free media requires a network of peers, not a network of masters and servants,

274
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not a network of clients and servers, not a network where network operators control all the packets they move.

275
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This is not simple, but it is still possible.

276
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We require free technology.

277
00:30:46,567 --> 00:30:55,507
The last time I gave a political speech in Berlin it was in 2004. It was called "Die Gedanken sind frei."

278
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I said we need three things: free software, free hardware, free bandwidth. Now we need them more.

279
00:31:04,330 --> 00:31:09,230
It is eight years later; we've made some mistakes; we're in more trouble.

280
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We haven't come forward, we've gone back.

281
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We need free software, that means software you can copy, modify, and re-distribute.

282
00:31:20,143 --> 00:31:31,522
We need that because we need the software that runs the network to be modifiable by the people the network embraces.

283
00:31:31,522 --> 00:31:38,742
The death of Mr. Jobs is a positive event. I am sorry to break it to you like that.

284
00:31:38,742 --> 00:31:42,875
He was a great artist and a moral monster

285
00:31:42,875 --> 00:31:53,301
and he brought us closer to the end of freedom every single time he put something out because he hated sharing.

286
00:31:53,301 --> 00:31:55,855
It wasn't his fault, he was an artist.

287
00:31:55,855 --> 00:32:02,752
He hated sharing because he believed he invented everything, even though he didn't.

288
00:32:02,752 --> 00:32:07,326
Inside those fine little boxes with the lit up apples on them I see all around the room,

289
00:32:07,326 --> 00:32:13,526
is a bunch of free software, tailored to give him control.

290
00:32:13,526 --> 00:32:18,448
Nothing illegal, nothing wrong, he obeyed the licenses.

291
00:32:18,448 --> 00:32:23,232
He screwed us every time he could and he took everything we gave him,

292
00:32:23,232 --> 00:32:29,478
and he made beautiful stuff that controlled its users.

293
00:32:29,478 --> 00:32:36,003
Once upon a time there was a man here who built stuff in Berlin, for Alberst Spare(sp),

294
00:32:36,003 --> 00:32:41,227
his name was Philip Johnson and he was a wonderful artist and a moral monster.

295
00:32:41,227 --> 00:32:49,006
And he said he went to work building buildings for the Nazis because they had all the best graphics.

296
00:32:49,006 --> 00:32:53,046
And he meant it, because he was an artist.

297
00:32:53,046 --> 00:32:56,970
As Mr. Jobs was an artist.

298
00:32:56,970 --> 00:33:00,569
But artistry is no guaranty of morality.

299
00:33:00,569 --> 00:33:04,981
We need free software.

300
00:33:04,981 --> 00:33:11,576
The tablets that you use that Mr. Jobs designed are made to control you.

301
00:33:11,576 --> 00:33:18,774
You can't change the software. It's hard even to do ordinary programming.

302
00:33:18,774 --> 00:33:26,692
It doesn't really matter, they're just tablets, we just use them, we're just consuming the glories of what they give us.

303
00:33:26,692 --> 00:33:31,591
But they're consumming you too.

304
00:33:31,591 --> 00:33:38,580
We live, as the science fiction we read when we were children suggested we would, among robots not.

305
00:33:38,580 --> 00:33:45,918
We live commensally with robots. But they don't have hands and feet, we're their hands and feet.

306
00:33:45,918 --> 00:33:52,071
We carry the robots around with us; they know everywhere we go, they see everything we see;

307
00:33:52,071 --> 00:33:58,735
everything we say they listen to and there is no first law of robotics.

308
00:33:58,735 --> 00:34:05,067
They hurt us every day and there is no progamming to prevent it.

309
00:34:05,067 --> 00:34:08,209
So we need free software.

310
00:34:08,209 --> 00:34:16,707
Unless we control the software in the network, the network will, in the end, control us.

311
00:34:16,707 --> 00:34:18,403
We need free hardware.

312
00:34:18,403 --> 00:34:27,273
What that means is that when we buy an electronic something, it should be ours, not someone else's.

313
00:34:27,273 --> 00:34:32,102
We should be free to change it, to use it our way,

314
00:34:32,102 --> 00:34:37,234
to assure that it is not working for anyone other than ourselves.

315
00:34:37,234 --> 00:34:41,646
Of course most of us will never change anything.

316
00:34:41,646 --> 00:34:48,588
But the fact that we can change it will keep us safe.

317
00:34:48,588 --> 00:34:56,437
Of course we will never be the people that they most want to surveil.

318
00:34:56,437 --> 00:35:04,750
The man who will not be president of France, for sure, but who thought he would, now says that he was

319
00:35:04,750 --> 00:35:11,530
trapped and his political career was destroyed, not because he raped a hotel housekeeper,

320
00:35:11,530 --> 00:35:17,288
but because he was setup by spying inside his smart phone.

321
00:35:17,288 --> 00:35:21,213
Maybe he's telling the truth and maybe he isn't.

322
00:35:21,213 --> 00:35:24,092
But he's not wrong about the smart phone.

323
00:35:24,092 --> 00:35:28,596
Maybe it happened, maybe it didn't, but it will.

324
00:35:28,596 --> 00:35:32,033
We carry dangerous stuff around with us everywhere we go.

325
00:35:32,033 --> 00:35:35,028
It doesn't work for us, it works for someone else.

326
00:35:35,028 --> 00:35:39,719
We put up with it, we have to stop.

327
00:35:39,719 --> 00:35:42,319
We need free bandwidth.

328
00:35:42,319 --> 00:35:46,801
That means we need network operators who are common carriers,

329
00:35:46,801 --> 00:35:50,354
whose only job is to move the packet from A to B.

330
00:35:50,354 --> 00:35:56,275
They're meerly pipes, they're not allowed to get involved.

331
00:35:56,275 --> 00:35:59,386
It used to be that when you shipped a thing from point A to point B,

332
00:35:59,386 --> 00:36:04,587
if the guy in the middle opened it up and looked inside it, he was committing a crime.

333
00:36:04,587 --> 00:36:07,002
Not any more.

334
00:36:07,002 --> 00:36:10,810
In the United States, the House of Representatives voted last week

335
00:36:10,810 --> 00:36:17,892
that the network operators in the United States should be completely immunized against lawsuits

336
00:36:17,892 --> 00:36:27,807
for cooperating with illegal government spying so long as they do it "in good faith."

337
00:36:27,807 --> 00:36:32,916
And capitalism means never having to say you're sorry; you're always doing it in good faith.

338
00:36:32,916 --> 00:36:37,838
In good faith all we wanted to do was make money, your honor, let us out.

339
00:36:37,838 --> 00:36:40,323
Ok, you're gone.

340
00:36:40,323 --> 00:36:43,434
We must have free bandwidth.

341
00:36:43,434 --> 00:36:48,566
We still own the electromagnetic spectrum; it still belongs to all of us.

342
00:36:48,566 --> 00:36:54,650
It doesn't belong to anyone else. Government is a trustee, not an owner.

343
00:36:54,650 --> 00:37:01,082
We have to have spectrum we control, equal for everybody.

344
00:37:01,082 --> 00:37:09,928
Nobody's allowed to listen to anybody else, no inspecting, no checking, no record keeping.

345
00:37:09,928 --> 00:37:12,668
Those have to be the rules.

346
00:37:12,668 --> 00:37:18,961
Those have to be the rules in the same way that censorship had to go.

347
00:37:18,961 --> 00:37:24,162
If we don't have rules for free communication, we are re-introducing censorship,

348
00:37:24,162 --> 00:37:28,226
whether we know it or not.

349
00:37:28,226 --> 00:37:31,082
So we have very little choice now,

350
00:37:31,082 --> 00:37:39,696
our space has gotten smaller, our opportunity for change has gotten less.

351
00:37:39,696 --> 00:37:48,497
We have to have free software. We have to have free hardware. We have to have free bandwidth.

352
00:37:48,497 --> 00:37:53,373
Only from them can we make free media.

353
00:37:53,373 --> 00:37:56,949
But we have to work on media too, directly.

354
00:37:56,949 --> 00:38:01,639
Not intermitently, not off-hand.

355
00:38:01,639 --> 00:38:10,858
We need to demand of media organizations that they obey primary ethics, a first law of media robotics:

356
00:38:10,858 --> 00:38:12,854
do no harm.

357
00:38:12,854 --> 00:38:19,778
The first rule is: "do not surveil the reader."

358
00:38:19,778 --> 00:38:24,441
We can't live in a world where every book reports every reader.

359
00:38:24,441 --> 00:38:31,059
If we are, we're living in libraries operated by the KGB.

360
00:38:31,059 --> 00:38:35,169
Well, amazon.com

361
00:38:35,169 --> 00:38:40,161
Or the KGB, or both, you'll never know.

362
00:38:40,161 --> 00:38:47,174
The book, that wonderful printed article, that first commodity of mass capitalism,

363
00:38:47,174 --> 00:38:48,729
the book is dying.

364
00:38:48,729 --> 00:38:51,585
It's a shame, but it's dying.

365
00:38:51,585 --> 00:38:58,644
And the replacement is a box which either surveils the reader or it doesn't.

366
00:38:58,644 --> 00:39:01,849
You will remember that amazon.com decided

367
00:39:01,849 --> 00:39:08,559
that a book by George Orwell could not be distributed in the United States for copyright reasons.

368
00:39:08,559 --> 00:39:14,016
They went and errased it out of all the little amazon book reading devices

369
00:39:14,016 --> 00:39:18,399
where customers had "purchased" copies of Animal Farm.

370
00:39:18,399 --> 00:39:25,324
Oh, you may have bought it but that doesn't mean that you're allowed to read it.

371
00:39:25,324 --> 00:39:28,041
That's censorship.

372
00:39:28,041 --> 00:39:30,757
That's book burning.

373
00:39:30,757 --> 00:39:36,725
That's what we all lived through in the 20th century.

374
00:39:36,725 --> 00:39:40,997
We burned people, places, and art.

375
00:39:40,997 --> 00:39:42,391
We fought.

376
00:39:42,391 --> 00:39:49,960
We killed tens of millions of people to bring an end to a world in which the state would burn books.

377
00:39:49,960 --> 00:39:53,095
And then we watched as it was done again and again.

378
00:39:53,095 --> 00:39:58,366
And now we are preparing to allow it to be done without matches.

379
00:39:58,366 --> 00:40:02,267
Everywhere, any time.

380
00:40:02,267 --> 00:40:08,838
We must have media ethics, and we have the power to enforce those ethics

381
00:40:08,838 --> 00:40:11,764
because we're still the people who pay the freight.

382
00:40:11,764 --> 00:40:18,474
We should not deal with people who sell surveiled books.

383
00:40:18,474 --> 00:40:24,767
We should not deal with people who sell surveiled music.

384
00:40:24,767 --> 00:40:33,521
We should not deal with movie companies that sell surveiled movies.

385
00:40:33,521 --> 00:40:39,442
We are going to have to say that, even as we work on the technology,

386
00:40:39,442 --> 00:40:48,428
because otherwise capitalism will move as fast as possible to make our efforts at freedom irrelevant

387
00:40:48,428 --> 00:40:54,837
and there are children growing up who will never know what freedom means.

388
00:40:54,837 --> 00:40:57,646
So we have to make a point about it.

389
00:40:57,646 --> 00:41:00,665
It will cost us a little bit.

390
00:41:00,665 --> 00:41:02,917
Not much, but a little bit.

391
00:41:02,917 --> 00:41:11,253
We will have to forgoe and make a few sacrifices in our lives to enforce ethics on media.

392
00:41:11,253 --> 00:41:13,645
But that's our role.

393
00:41:13,645 --> 00:41:17,012
Along with making free technology, that's our role.

394
00:41:17,012 --> 00:41:23,467
We are the last generation capable of understanding directly what the changes are

395
00:41:23,467 --> 00:41:28,320
because we have lived on both sides of them and we know.

396
00:41:28,320 --> 00:41:31,455
So we have a responsibility.

397
00:41:31,455 --> 00:41:35,634
You understand that.

398
00:41:35,634 --> 00:41:38,514
It's always a surprise to me, though it is deeply true,

399
00:41:38,514 --> 00:41:44,411
that of all the cities in the world I travel to, Berlin in the freeist.

400
00:41:44,411 --> 00:41:48,034
You cannot wear a hat in the Hong Kong airport any more,

401
00:41:48,034 --> 00:41:52,376
I found out last month trying to wear my hat in the Hong Kong airport.

402
00:41:52,376 --> 00:41:58,436
You're not allowed, it disrupts the facial recognition.

403
00:41:58,436 --> 00:42:03,057
There will be a new airport here. Will it be so heavily surveiled

404
00:42:03,057 --> 00:42:08,955
that you won't be allowed to wear a hat because it disrupts the facial recognition?

405
00:42:08,955 --> 00:42:12,763
We have a responsibility. We know.

406
00:42:12,763 --> 00:42:16,478
That's how Berlin became the freeist city that I go to.

407
00:42:16,478 --> 00:42:19,729
Because we know. Because we have a responsibility.

408
00:42:19,729 --> 00:42:26,765
Because we remember, because we've been on both sides of the wall.

409
00:42:26,765 --> 00:42:30,085
That must not be lost now.

410
00:42:30,085 --> 00:42:35,054
If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen.

411
00:42:35,054 --> 00:42:37,121
Everything will be remembered.

412
00:42:37,121 --> 00:42:42,020
Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to,

413
00:42:42,020 --> 00:42:46,200
everything you watched, everything you searched for.

414
00:42:46,200 --> 00:42:53,560
Surely we can pass along to the next generation a world freeier than that.

415
00:42:53,560 --> 00:42:56,091
Surely we must.

416
00:42:56,091 --> 00:42:58,599
What if we don't?

417
00:42:58,599 --> 00:43:08,096
What will they say when they realize that we lived at the end of a thousand years

418
00:43:08,096 --> 00:43:12,392
of struggling for freedom of thought, at the end.

419
00:43:12,392 --> 00:43:19,126
When we had almost everything we gave it away.

420
00:43:19,126 --> 00:43:23,654
For convenience. For social networking.

421
00:43:23,654 --> 00:43:28,205
Because Mr. Zuckerberg asked us to.

422
00:43:28,205 --> 00:43:33,150
Because we couldn't find a better way to talk to our friends.

423
00:43:33,150 --> 00:43:40,558
Because we loved the beautiful pretty things that felt so warm in the hand.

424
00:43:40,558 --> 00:43:46,525
Because we didn't really care about the future of freedom of thought.

425
00:43:46,525 --> 00:43:50,240
Because we considered that to be someone else's business.

426
00:43:50,240 --> 00:43:52,168
Because we thought it was over.

427
00:43:52,168 --> 00:43:55,767
Because we believed we were free.

428
00:43:55,767 --> 00:43:59,250
Because we didn't think there was any struggling left to do.

429
00:43:59,250 --> 00:44:01,177
That's why we gave it all away.

430
00:44:01,177 --> 00:44:03,940
Is that what we're going to tell them?

431
00:44:03,940 --> 00:44:07,400
Is that what we're going to tell them?

432
00:44:07,400 --> 00:44:13,298
Free thought requires free media.

433
00:44:13,298 --> 00:44:19,498
Free media requires free technology.

434
00:44:19,498 --> 00:44:29,714
We require ethical treatment when we go to read, to write, to listen, and to watch.

435
00:44:29,714 --> 00:44:38,445
Those are the hallmarks of our politics. We need to keep those politics until we die.

436
00:44:38,445 --> 00:44:43,368
Because, if we don't, something else will die,

437
00:44:43,368 --> 00:44:50,473
something so precious that many many many of our fathers and mothers gave their lives for it.

438
00:44:50,473 --> 00:44:56,278
Something so precious that we understood it to define what it meant to be human.

439
00:44:56,278 --> 00:45:00,713
It will die if we don't keep those politics for the rest of our lives.

440
00:45:00,713 --> 00:45:09,049
And if we do, then all the things we struggled for, we'll get.

441
00:45:09,049 --> 00:45:15,434
Because everywhere on earth, everybody will be able to read freely.

442
00:45:15,434 --> 00:45:21,634
Because all the Einsteins in the street will be allowed to learn.

443
00:45:21,634 --> 00:45:27,973
Because all the Stravinskys will become composers.

444
00:45:27,973 --> 00:45:31,735
Because all the Saulks will become research physicians.

445
00:45:31,735 --> 00:45:37,308
Because humanity will be connected and every brain will be allowed to learn

446
00:45:37,308 --> 00:45:43,159
and no brain will be crushed for thinking wrong.

447
00:45:43,159 --> 00:45:46,619
We're at the moment where we get to pick.

448
00:45:46,619 --> 00:45:52,075
Whether we carry through that great revolution we've been making

449
00:45:52,075 --> 00:45:57,393
bit by bloody bit for a thousand years,

450
00:45:57,393 --> 00:46:02,501
or whether we give it away for convenience,

451
00:46:02,501 --> 00:46:07,424
for simplicity of talking to our friends, for speed in search,

452
00:46:07,424 --> 00:46:12,904
and other really important stuff.

453
00:46:12,904 --> 00:46:19,847
I said in 2004, when I was here, and I say now, we can win.

454
00:46:19,847 --> 00:46:28,182
We can be the generation of people who completed the work of building freedom of thought.

455
00:46:28,182 --> 00:46:35,079
I didn't say then, and I must say now, that we are also potentially the generation that can lose.

456
00:46:35,079 --> 00:46:42,347
We can slip back into an inquisition worse than any inquisition that ever existed.

457
00:46:42,347 --> 00:46:49,731
It may not use as much torture, it may not be as bloody, but it will be more effective.

458
00:46:49,731 --> 00:46:53,167
And we mustn't mustn't let that happen.

459
00:46:53,167 --> 00:46:57,695
Too many people fought for us. Too many people died for us.

460
00:46:57,695 --> 00:47:02,432
Too many people hoped and dreamed for what we can still make possible.

461
00:47:02,432 --> 00:47:05,737
We must not fail.

462
00:47:05,737 --> 00:47:06,577
Thank you very much.

463
00:47:06,577 --> 00:47:59,561
[Applause]

464
00:47:59,561 --> 00:48:03,196
Let's learn how to take questions here.

465
00:48:03,196 --> 00:48:08,227
It's not going to be simple but let's set a good example.

466
00:48:08,227 --> 00:48:20,828
[pause]

467
00:48:20,828 --> 00:48:21,794
[Questioner 1] Thank you.

468
00:48:21,794 --> 00:48:26,136
[Questioner 1] You put forward a very gruesome picture of the possible future.

469
00:48:26,136 --> 00:48:29,154
[Questioner 1] Could you name some organizations or groups

470
00:48:29,154 --> 00:48:35,586
[Questioner 1] in the United States that put forward actions in your way,

471
00:48:35,586 --> 00:48:40,764
[Questioner 1] in your positive way of transforming society?

472
00:48:40,764 --> 00:48:44,503
Not only in the United States, but around the world we have organizations

473
00:48:44,503 --> 00:48:48,032
that are concerned with electronic civil liberties.

474
00:48:48,032 --> 00:48:51,353
The EFF, the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the United States.

475
00:48:51,353 --> 00:48:53,760
La Quadrature du Net in France

476
00:48:53,760 --> 00:48:57,274
Bits of Freedom in the Netherlands and so on.

477
00:48:57,274 --> 00:49:01,593
Electronic civil liberties agitation is extraordinarily important.

478
00:49:01,593 --> 00:49:05,229
Pressure on governments to obey rules that came down from

479
00:49:05,229 --> 00:49:09,559
the 18th century regarding protection of human dignity

480
00:49:09,559 --> 00:49:14,729
and the prevention of state surveillance are crucially important.

481
00:49:14,729 --> 00:49:20,393
Unfortunately, electronic civil liberties work against governments are not enough.

482
00:49:20,393 --> 00:49:26,047
The free software movement, the FSF, the Free Software Foundation in the United States,

483
00:49:26,047 --> 00:49:29,224
and the Free Software Foundation Europe, headquartered in Germany,

484
00:49:29,224 --> 00:49:35,607
are working in an important way to maintain that system of

485
00:49:35,607 --> 00:49:41,520
the anarchistic creation of software which has brought us so much technology we can control.

486
00:49:41,520 --> 00:49:43,850
That's crucially important.

487
00:49:43,850 --> 00:49:48,099
The Creative Commons movement, which is strongly entrenched,

488
00:49:48,099 --> 00:49:52,991
not only in the United States and Germany, but in more than 40 countries around the world

489
00:49:52,991 --> 00:49:59,732
is also extraordinarily important because Creative Commons gives to creative workers

490
00:49:59,732 --> 00:50:05,977
alternatives to the kind of massive over control in the copyright system

491
00:50:05,977 --> 00:50:10,916
which makes surveillance media profitable.

492
00:50:10,916 --> 00:50:15,342
The Wikipedia is an extraordinarily important human institution.

493
00:50:15,342 --> 00:50:21,132
and we need to continue to support the Wikimedia Foundation as deeply as we can.

494
00:50:21,132 --> 00:50:26,479
Of the 100 most visited websites in the United States,

495
00:50:26,479 --> 00:50:29,357
in a study conducted by the Wall Street Journal,

496
00:50:29,357 --> 00:50:32,917
of the 100 most visited websites in the United States,

497
00:50:32,917 --> 00:50:36,826
only one does not surveil its users.

498
00:50:36,826 --> 00:50:40,600
You can guess which one it is, it's Wikipedia.

499
00:50:40,600 --> 00:50:47,681
We have enormously important developments now going on throughout the world of higher education

500
00:50:47,681 --> 00:50:54,232
as universities begin to realize that the costs of higher education must come down.

501
00:50:54,232 --> 00:50:57,624
and that brains will grow in the web.

502
00:50:57,624 --> 00:51:04,324
The Universitat Oberta de Catalunya the walk is the most extrodinary

503
00:51:04,324 --> 00:51:07,850
online only university in the world right now.

504
00:51:07,850 --> 00:51:13,500
It will soon be competing with more extraordinary universities still.

505
00:51:13,500 --> 00:51:19,113
MITx, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's new program

506
00:51:19,113 --> 00:51:24,111
for web education will provide the highest quality technical education on earth

507
00:51:24,111 --> 00:51:30,343
for free to everybody everywhere all the time, building on existing MIT OpenCourseWare.

508
00:51:30,343 --> 00:51:35,902
Stanford is about to spin off a proprietary web learning structure

509
00:51:35,902 --> 00:51:39,933
which will be the Google of higher education if Stanford gets it lucky.

510
00:51:39,933 --> 00:51:44,493
We need to support free higher education on the web.

511
00:51:44,493 --> 00:51:49,166
Every European national ministry of Education should be working on it.

512
00:51:49,166 --> 00:51:56,658
There are many places to look for free software, free hardware, free bandwidth, and free media.

513
00:51:56,658 --> 00:52:02,419
There's no better place to look for free media right now on earth than this room.

514
00:52:02,419 --> 00:52:06,299
Everybody knows what they can do, they're doing it.

515
00:52:06,299 --> 00:52:11,811
We just have to make everybody else understand that if we stop, or if we fail,

516
00:52:11,811 --> 00:52:16,284
freedom of thought will be the causality and we will regret it forever.

517
00:52:17,641 --> 00:52:21,751
[Organizer] We've had three more questions in the meantime.

518
00:52:21,751 --> 00:52:23,701
[Organizer] The gentleman with the microphone over here will begin.

519
00:52:23,701 --> 00:52:26,998
[Organizer] And then one, two, I'm sure there are more of you in the back

520
00:52:26,998 --> 00:52:28,902
[Organizer] so raise your hands high.

521
00:52:28,902 --> 00:52:32,153
[Organizer] We'll take maybe your first please.

522
00:52:32,153 --> 00:52:35,683
[Questioner 2] Thank you very much, I just wanted to ask a short question.

523
00:52:35,683 --> 00:52:42,161
[Questioner 2] Can Facebook, can iPhone, and free media coexist on a long range?

524
00:52:42,161 --> 00:52:44,065
Probably not.

525
00:52:44,065 --> 00:52:46,596
But we don't have to worry too much.

526
00:52:46,596 --> 00:52:52,587
iPhone is just a product and Facebook is just a commercial version of a service.

527
00:52:52,587 --> 00:52:56,139
I said recently to a newspaper in New York that I thought Facebook

528
00:52:56,139 --> 00:53:00,087
would continue to exist for somewhere between 12 and 120 months.

529
00:53:00,087 --> 00:53:02,153
I still think that is correct.

530
00:53:02,153 --> 00:53:05,915
Federated social networking will become available.

531
00:53:05,915 --> 00:53:10,791
Federated social networking in a form which allows you to leave Facebook

532
00:53:10,791 --> 00:53:14,623
without leaving your friends, will become available.

533
00:53:14,623 --> 00:53:19,801
Better forms of communication without a man in the middle will become available.

534
00:53:19,801 --> 00:53:22,494
The question will be will people use them?

535
00:53:22,494 --> 00:53:26,883
FreedomBox is an attempt to produce a stack of software

536
00:53:26,883 --> 00:53:31,434
that will fit in a new generation of low power, low cost hardware servers

537
00:53:31,434 --> 00:53:34,545
the size of mobile phone chargers.

538
00:53:34,545 --> 00:53:37,355
And if we do that work right, we will be able to give

539
00:53:37,355 --> 00:53:40,281
billions of web servers to the net.

540
00:53:40,281 --> 00:53:44,530
Which will server the purpose of providing competting services

541
00:53:44,530 --> 00:53:49,754
that don't invade privacy and are compatible with existing services.

542
00:53:49,754 --> 00:53:54,213
But mobile phones get changed very frequently so iPhone goes away

543
00:53:54,213 --> 00:53:55,792
it's no big deal.

544
00:53:55,792 --> 00:53:58,230
and web services are much less unique

545
00:53:58,230 --> 00:54:00,459
than they appear right now.

546
00:54:00,459 --> 00:54:03,802
Facebook's a brand, it's not a thing that we need to worry about

547
00:54:03,802 --> 00:54:05,381
in any great particular.

548
00:54:05,381 --> 00:54:08,191
We just have to do it in as quickly as possible.

549
00:54:08,191 --> 00:54:10,397
Co-existence?

550
00:54:10,397 --> 00:54:12,463
Well all I have to say about that is that is

551
00:54:12,463 --> 00:54:15,621
they're not going to co-exist with freedom

552
00:54:15,621 --> 00:54:18,013
so I'm not sure why I should co-exist with them.

553
00:54:18,013 --> 00:54:25,536
[Applause]

554
00:54:25,536 --> 00:54:27,603
[Questioner 3]Hi, I'm Trey Gulalm(sp) from Bangladesh.

555
00:54:27,603 --> 00:54:32,108
[Questioner 3]Thank you for that wonderfully lucid, sintilating,

556
00:54:32,108 --> 00:54:35,358
[Questioner 3] and hugely informative presentation.

557
00:54:35,358 --> 00:54:39,120
[Questioner 3]I was involved in introducing email to Bangladesh

558
00:54:39,120 --> 00:54:43,718
[Questioner 3] in the early 90's and, at that time connectivity was very expensive

559
00:54:43,718 --> 00:54:46,829
[Questioner 3]we were spending $0.30 US cents per kilobyte

560
00:54:46,829 --> 00:54:51,380
[Questioner 3]so a megabyte of data would be $100, $300.

561
00:54:51,380 --> 00:54:55,119
[Questioner 3]It's changes from them but it is still very tightly constrained

562
00:54:55,119 --> 00:54:59,159
[Questioner 3]by the regulatory bodies. So we on the ground find it

563
00:54:59,159 --> 00:55:01,156
[Questioner 3]very difficult because the powers that be,

564
00:55:01,156 --> 00:55:05,150
[Questioner 3]the gate keepers have a vested interest in maintaining that.

565
00:55:05,150 --> 00:55:09,515
[Questioner 3]But in that gatekeeper nexus there is also a nexus

566
00:55:09,515 --> 00:55:13,625
[Questioner 3]between governments in my country and governments in yours,

567
00:55:13,625 --> 00:55:18,919
[Questioner 3]and right now the largest biometric data in the world

568
00:55:18,919 --> 00:55:21,589
[Questioner 3]is the census of Bangladesh

569
00:55:21,589 --> 00:55:25,119
[Questioner 3]and the company that's providing it is a company

570
00:55:25,119 --> 00:55:27,719
[Questioner 3]that's directly linked to the CIA.

571
00:55:27,719 --> 00:55:30,227
[Questioner 3]So what do we as pracatitioners do

572
00:55:30,227 --> 00:55:33,222
[Questioner 3]to overcome very very powerful entities?

573
00:55:33,222 --> 00:55:38,958
This is why I began by speaking about the United States Government's recent behaviors.

574
00:55:38,958 --> 00:55:43,718
My colleagues at the Software Freedom Law Center in India

575
00:55:43,718 --> 00:55:48,803
have been spending a lot of time this past month trying to get a motion

576
00:55:48,803 --> 00:55:51,613
through the upper house of the Indian Parliment

577
00:55:51,613 --> 00:55:56,628
to nullify Department of IT regulations on the censorship of the Indian net.

578
00:55:56,628 --> 00:56:00,320
And of course the good news is that the largest biometric database in the world

579
00:56:00,320 --> 00:56:04,082
will soon be the retinal scans that the Indian government

580
00:56:04,082 --> 00:56:07,542
are going to require if you want to have a propane gas cylinder,

581
00:56:07,542 --> 00:56:10,885
or anything else like energy for your home.

582
00:56:10,885 --> 00:56:16,992
And the difficulty that we've been having in talking to Indian government officials this month

583
00:56:16,992 --> 00:56:22,008
is that they say "Well if the Americans can do it, why can't we?"

584
00:56:22,008 --> 00:56:25,003
Which is, unfortunately true.

585
00:56:25,003 --> 00:56:29,392
The United States government has this winter lowered the bar around the world

586
00:56:29,392 --> 00:56:35,359
on internet freedom in the sense of datamining your society to the Chinese level.

587
00:56:35,359 --> 00:56:37,426
They've fundamentally agreed.

588
00:56:37,426 --> 00:56:40,514
They're going to datamine the hell out of their populations

589
00:56:40,514 --> 00:56:45,042
and they're going to encourage ever other state on earth to do the same.

590
00:56:45,042 --> 00:56:49,012
So I'm entirely with you about the definition of the problem.

591
00:56:49,012 --> 00:56:54,771
We are not now any longer living in a place, in a stage in our history

592
00:56:54,771 --> 00:56:58,231
where we can think in terms of a country at a time.

593
00:56:58,231 --> 00:57:01,365
Globalization has reached the point at which these questions

594
00:57:01,365 --> 00:57:05,292
of surveillance of society are now global questions

595
00:57:05,292 --> 00:57:09,993
and we have to work on them under the assumption that no government

596
00:57:09,993 --> 00:57:14,660
will decide to be more virtuous than the super powers.

597
00:57:14,660 --> 00:57:17,958
I don't know how we're going to deal with the Chinese Communist Party.

598
00:57:17,958 --> 00:57:19,978
I do not know.

599
00:57:19,978 --> 00:57:22,230
I know how we're going to deal with the American government.

600
00:57:22,230 --> 00:57:26,154
We're going to insist on our rights.

601
00:57:26,154 --> 00:57:30,496
We're going to do what it makes sense to do in the United States.

602
00:57:30,496 --> 00:57:32,145
We're going to litigate about it.

603
00:57:32,145 --> 00:57:33,283
We're going to push.

604
00:57:33,283 --> 00:57:34,560
We're going to shove.

605
00:57:34,560 --> 00:57:38,786
We're going to be everywhere, including in the street about it.

606
00:57:38,786 --> 00:57:43,035
And I suspect that's what's going to happen here too.

607
00:57:43,035 --> 00:57:46,147
Unless we move the biggest of the societies on earth,

608
00:57:46,147 --> 00:57:49,839
we will have no hope of convincing smaller governments

609
00:57:49,839 --> 00:57:53,368
that they have to let go of their controls.

610
00:57:53,368 --> 00:57:55,272
So far as bandwidth is concerned, of course,

611
00:57:55,272 --> 00:57:58,337
we're going to have to use unregulated bandwidth.

612
00:57:58,337 --> 00:58:01,449
That is, we're going to have to build around 802.11 and wifi

613
00:58:01,449 --> 00:58:06,836
and any other thing that the rules don't prevent us from using.

614
00:58:06,836 --> 00:58:10,621
And how is that going to reach the poorest of the poor?

615
00:58:10,621 --> 00:58:13,987
When the mobile phone system can be shaped to reach

616
00:58:13,987 --> 00:58:16,913
the poorest of the poor? I don't know.

617
00:58:16,913 --> 00:58:20,837
But I've got a little project with street children in Bangalore trying to figure it out.

618
00:58:20,837 --> 00:58:22,347
We have to.

619
00:58:22,347 --> 00:58:24,065
We have to work everywhere.

620
00:58:24,065 --> 00:58:30,149
If we don't, we're going to screw it up for humanity and we can't afford the risk.

621
00:58:30,149 --> 00:58:32,308
[Organizer]Thank you. The gentleman over here please.

622
00:58:32,308 --> 00:58:35,373
[Questioner 4]Yes, Professor Moglen,I also want to thank you.

623
00:58:35,373 --> 00:58:40,063
[Questioner 4]I can tell you that I from transformingfreedom.org in Vienna

624
00:58:40,063 --> 00:58:45,311
[Questioner 4]and some years ago I saw you talking on a web video

625
00:58:45,311 --> 00:58:48,817
[Questioner 4]at FOSDEM, and there I saw you pointing out

626
00:58:48,817 --> 00:58:54,019
[Questioner 4]the role of Zimmerman, Fredrick, and we tried to help him as well.

627
00:58:54,019 --> 00:58:58,709
[Questioner 4]But listening to you today, I see that this is just too slow,

628
00:58:58,709 --> 00:59:04,189
[Questioner 4]too little, and I'm a bit amazed at two things.

629
00:59:04,189 --> 00:59:08,717
[Questioner 4]The first is the academic system, let's say the European one

630
00:59:08,717 --> 00:59:12,502
[Questioner 4]was founded by Plato and was closed down by force

631
00:59:12,502 --> 00:59:15,590
[Questioner 4]about a thousand years after.

632
00:59:15,590 --> 00:59:20,164
[Questioner 4]The second start of the European University was

633
00:59:20,164 --> 00:59:23,392
[Questioner 4]around the last few century and let's see if we get there,

634
00:59:23,392 --> 00:59:28,477
[Questioner 4]to have it running as long as a thousand years.

635
00:59:28,477 --> 00:59:32,355
[Questioner 4]So my question is why is it not deeply in the cell structure

636
00:59:32,355 --> 00:59:36,859
[Questioner 4]of academia to help the cause that you have talked about today

637
00:59:36,859 --> 00:59:41,875
[Questioner 4]and why don't we have philanthropists helping

638
00:59:41,875 --> 00:59:46,077
[Questioner 4]our little projects, running for three or five

639
00:59:46,077 --> 00:59:49,281
[Questioner 4]thousand euros here and there, much more let's say

640
00:59:49,281 --> 00:59:53,159
[Questioner 4] efficiently, like maybe you would agree that Mr. Soros

641
00:59:53,159 --> 00:59:56,131
[Questioner 4]tries to do?

642
00:59:56,131 --> 01:00:01,704
Some years ago, at Columbia, we tried to interest Faculty

643
01:00:01,704 --> 01:00:07,361
in the state of preservation of the libraries and I saw

644
01:00:07,361 --> 01:00:13,476
more distinguished scholars at my own university than at any other time

645
01:00:13,476 --> 01:00:17,493
in my 25 years there, engaged politically.

646
01:00:17,493 --> 01:00:22,393
Their primary concern was the aging of the paper

647
01:00:22,393 --> 01:00:26,154
on which were printed the 19th century German Docterate

648
01:00:26,154 --> 01:00:32,099
that conserved more philological research than any other literature on earth

649
01:00:32,099 --> 01:00:33,190
right?

650
01:00:33,190 --> 01:00:36,511
But it was 19th century books that they needed to preserve.

651
01:00:36,511 --> 01:00:40,946
The problem with academis life is that it is inherently conservative

652
01:00:40,946 --> 01:00:44,011
because it preserves the wisdom of the old.

653
01:00:44,011 --> 01:00:45,752
And that is a good thing to do

654
01:00:45,752 --> 01:00:48,237
but the wisdom of the old is old,

655
01:00:48,237 --> 01:00:52,904
and it doesn't necessarily embrace the issues of the moment perfectly.

656
01:00:52,904 --> 01:00:56,456
I mentioned the walk because I think it is so important

657
01:00:56,456 --> 01:01:02,192
to support the university as it maneuvers itself towards the net

658
01:01:02,192 --> 01:01:06,279
and away from the forms of learning that have characterized

659
01:01:06,279 --> 01:01:10,063
the matriculatry university of the past.

660
01:01:10,063 --> 01:01:15,543
For the last thousand years mostly we moved scholars to books,

661
01:01:15,543 --> 01:01:19,142
and the university grew up around that principle.

662
01:01:19,142 --> 01:01:22,068
It grew up around the principle that books are hard to move

663
01:01:22,068 --> 01:01:23,461
and people are easy.

664
01:01:23,461 --> 01:01:25,505
So you bring everybody to it.

665
01:01:25,505 --> 01:01:28,546
Now we live in a world in which it is much simplier

666
01:01:28,546 --> 01:01:30,915
to move knowledge to people.

667
01:01:30,915 --> 01:01:36,697
But the continuance of ignorance is the desire of businesses that sell knowledge.

668
01:01:36,697 --> 01:01:39,878
What we really need is to being ourselves to help

669
01:01:39,878 --> 01:01:42,943
to turn the university system into something else.

670
01:01:42,943 --> 01:01:45,822
The something which allows everybody to learn

671
01:01:45,822 --> 01:01:49,746
and which demands unsurveiled learning.

672
01:01:49,746 --> 01:01:52,347
The commissioner for Information Society will be here;

673
01:01:52,347 --> 01:01:56,546
she should speak to that.

674
01:01:56,546 --> 01:02:00,590
That should be the great question of the European Commission.

675
01:02:00,590 --> 01:02:03,516
They know, they printed a report 18 months ago,

676
01:02:03,516 --> 01:02:06,256
that said for the cost of 100km of road you

677
01:02:06,256 --> 01:02:10,273
can scan 1/6 of all the books in European libraries.

678
01:02:10,273 --> 01:02:14,824
That means for the cost of 600km of road we could get 'em all.

679
01:02:14,824 --> 01:02:17,424
We built a lot of roads in a lot of places,

680
01:02:17,424 --> 01:02:19,328
including Greece, in the last 10 year,

681
01:02:19,328 --> 01:02:22,068
and we could've scanned all the books in Europe at the same time,

682
01:02:22,068 --> 01:02:28,407
and made them available to all humanity on an un-surveiled basis.

683
01:02:28,407 --> 01:02:31,960
If Ms. Cruise wants to build a monument to herself,

684
01:02:31,960 --> 01:02:35,815
it isn't going to be as a feif a day politician.

685
01:02:35,815 --> 01:02:38,601
She's going to do it this way, and you're going to ask her.

686
01:02:38,601 --> 01:02:41,109
I'm going to be on a plane on my way back across the Atlantic,

687
01:02:41,109 --> 01:02:43,593
or I promise you I'd ask her myself.

688
01:02:43,593 --> 01:02:45,637
Ask her for me.

689
01:02:45,637 --> 01:02:50,745
Say "It's not our fault, Eben want's to know. If you want to hurt somebody, hurt him. You should be changing

690
01:02:50,745 --> 01:02:55,993
the European University. You should be breaking it up into un-surveiled reading. You should be putting

691
01:02:55,993 --> 01:03:04,027
Google books and Amazon out of business. That's some North American, Anglo-Saxon, elbow capitalism thing.

692
01:03:04,027 --> 01:03:07,185
Why aren't we making knowledge free in Europe

693
01:03:07,185 --> 01:03:10,273
and assuring that it's un-surveiled?"

694
01:03:10,273 --> 01:03:15,648
That would be the biggest step possible and it is within their power.

695
01:03:15,648 --> 01:03:27,933
[Organizer] Thank you so much. [Applause] Brilliant. thank you.