Navigating the Age of Democratized Media conference keynote

Eben Moglen gives this keynote at the Feb 25, 2011 Morningside Post Conference on Digital Media, the theme of which was "Navigating the Age of Democratized Media".

Eben talks about the FreedomBox, a project to return control of digital communications to individuals
and take it away from the corporations that spy on people as a way of
life and the governments that use control over communications to stifle
political organization and dissent.

This project serves as a particular example of his larger theme that the digital networking of each person to each other person through the internet will level the media landscape of the 21st century and make ignorance obsolete, something we could make a technical reality today if not for the "rules against sharing."

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.