summarize the following youtube video transcript: let's give Mr Corey Dr o a giant Round of Applause 0:08 thank you hi hey hi uh I have a confession to make I am 0:17 now old uh I turned 52 last month I am now the full deck of cards I have two 0:24 artificial hips I have cataracts in both my eyes I am old as dirt 0:29 and you may know that uh the AARP has these uh um junk mail like doxing ninjas who 0:36 track you down on your 50th birthday to try and sell you a membership what's less well known is that if you buy the 0:42 membership on that day you get issued a card that lets you complain that things used to be better when you were younger 0:47 I got that card and I know that the complaint is trite to say that things 0:52 used to be better in the old days but I really think it's true when it comes to the internet I really do think the 0:58 internet used to be better back before I turned out into what the Kiwi hacker Tom Eastman calls five giant websites each 1:06 filled with screenshots of text from the other four and I miss the good old internet but 1:12 this isn't a talk about bringing the old good internet back it's a talk about what a new good internet could be and 1:20 why we don't have it yet and how we can get it so this is a talk about insidification 1:27 that's a term I coined to describe how platforms die and platforms they're the 1:34 endemic form of the internet a platform is a firm that mediates between end 1:40 users and business customers Uber's got drivers and Riders Amazon and eBay have 1:45 sellers and buyers Google and Facebook have Publishers and advertisers and users on the other side the platform 1:52 sits between those two different groups and mediates between them do you remember we said that the internet was 1:57 going to disintermediate disintermediate everything it did disintermediate everything and then it promptly 2:03 re-intermediated everything platforms are just intermediaries now here's how platform dies 2:11 first it's good to its users then it abuses those users to make 2:16 things better for business customers finally it abuses the business customers to claw back all the value that had once 2:22 been allocated to those end users and then to those business customers allocates it to themselves and then 2:28 there's no value left it turns into a pile of [ __ ] and it dies and we are living through math end stage 2:35 platform Decay we are in the Great in shooting and I'm going to explain how those three 2:42 stages of the process of platform and certification and then I'm going to explain the policy choices that let them 2:48 get away with it and then I'm going to tell you what policy changes would let us seize the means of computation and 2:55 build a new good internet that is the worthy successor to the old good internet it's a talk about how we make 3:02 the insurer net that we have now an intermediate stage between that old good 3:07 internet and a new good internet so I'm going to start with a case study Facebook 3:13 now Facebook is a company that was founded to non-consensually rank the 3:18 fuckability of Harvard undergraduates and it only got worse after that 3:25 now when Facebook started it was only open to people who had edu addresses and 3:32 K-12 us addresses American students but in 2006 Facebook opened to the general 3:38 public it told users yeah I know you all use MySpace but have you ever thought 3:44 about how Myspace is owned by an evil senescent crapulent Australian billionaire who spies on you with every 3:51 hour that God sends come use Facebook we are the Privacy forward alternative to 3:57 Myspace and we will never spy on you just come and tell us who in this world 4:02 matters to you uh put their names into Facebook and we will compose a personal feed for you 4:09 consisting solely of what those people publish for for consumption by the 4:14 people who follow them now that was stage one Facebook had this Surplus it had investor cash from people 4:20 like Peter Thiel and it allocated that Surplus to us the end users and then we 4:25 the end users we locked ourselves into Facebook now Facebook like most tech businesses has Network effects on its 4:33 side a product or service has Network effects if it gets better when more people use it so you joined Facebook 4:39 because there was someone there you wanted to talk to and then once you were there you were a reason for someone else to join to come and talk to you 4:45 but Facebook doesn't just have high Network effects it also enjoyed High 4:50 switching costs switching costs they're everything that you have to give up when you leave a product or a service now in 4:57 Facebook's case switching away from Facebook the cost was access to all the people that you hung out with face if 5:03 you hung out with on Facebook the people who followed you and the people that you followed now in theory you could have all gotten together and agreed on where 5:10 to go next and and and and left the platform together but in practice you were hamstrung by an insurmountable 5:16 Collective action problem it's hard to get a lot of people to do the same thing at the same time you and your six hacker 5:24 buddies are gonna struggle to figure out where you're gonna go to dinner tonight how the [ __ ] are you and your 200 5:30 Facebook friends going to agree on when it's time to leave Facebook and where you should go next 5:35 so Facebook's end users engaged in mutual hostage taking and kept themselves glued to the platform and 5:42 Facebook it saw the hostage situation and exploited it withdrawing the Surplus from those end users and allocating it 5:49 to two important groups of business customers Publishers and advertisers to the advertisers Facebook said hey 5:56 remember when we told those Rubes that we weren't going to spy on them we lied 6:01 we will spy on them from [ __ ] to appetite we will sell you access to that 6:06 surveillance data in the form of fine-grained AD targeting and we will devote substantial engineering resources 6:12 to combating ad fraud the ads will be Dirt Cheap to serve and we will spare no 6:18 expense to make sure that when you buy an ad a person sees it now to the Publishers Facebook said hey remember 6:24 when we told those rubs we were going to only show them the things that they asked us to show them we lied 6:31 upload short excerpts from your website put a link at the bottom and we'll non-consensually cram it into the 6:37 eyeballs of people who never ask to see it we are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users 6:45 to your website that you can monetize as you please and if those users subscribe to your feed they'll be stuck to you 6:51 forever and so advertisers and Publishers they got stuck to the platform too dependent 6:56 on those users so the users were holding each other hostage and the hostages took the Publishers in the advertisers 7:02 hostage too and everyone was locked in which meant it was time for the third phase of insidification withdrawing 7:10 Surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook shareholders for the users that meant that the feed 7:15 that you got the Quantum of stuff that you would ask to see was dialed down to 7:21 a homeopathic dose so that there could be a resulting void that could be filled 7:26 with ads and paid to boost content from Publishers for advertisers that meant the prices went up and the odd fraud 7:33 policing went down so advertisers paid much more for ads and many or most of 7:38 those ads never got shown to a human being for Publishers Facebook reached in and 7:44 algorithmically suppressed the reach of content and less larger and larger excerpts were put in the posts that were 7:50 posted to Facebook until anything less than a full text feed would likely not reach even your own subscribers let 7:58 alone Be boosted to other people through algorithmic recommendation and then Facebook put the knife in they started 8:04 publishing they started punishing Publishers who put links to their own content to their own website in those 8:09 posts so they were corralled into posting full-text feeds with no links back to their website becoming commodity 8:16 suppliers to Facebook entirely dependent on Facebook both for reach and for 8:21 monetization which was only available through that crooked advertising system when any of those groups squawked 8:28 Facebook just repeated that lesson that they learned on day one of the Darth Vader MBA I have altered the deal pray I 8:35 don't alter it any further now Facebook has entered the final and most dangerous phase of insidification 8:42 it wants to withdraw all available Surplus and leave just enough residual 8:48 value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other and business customers stuck to those end users 8:53 without leaving anything extra on the table so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its 9:00 shareholders but that is a very brittle equilibrium because the difference between I hate this service but I can't 9:07 bring myself to quit it and Jesus Christ why did I wait so long to quit this [ __ ] 9:13 well get me the [ __ ] out of here is Razor thin all it takes is one Cambridge analytica 9:19 Scandal one whistleblower one live streamed mass shooting and users vote for the exits and Facebook discovers 9:26 that Network effects are a double-edged sword if users can't leave because everyone is staying the once everyone 9:32 leaves there's no reason to stay that is in that is the terminal phase of 9:37 acidification the phase when the platform becomes a pile of [ __ ] and that phase is usually accomplished by Panic 9:43 which in Tech circles we call pivoting which is how 9:52 thank you all right which is how we get pivots 9:57 like in the future all internet users will voluntarily transform themselves into legless sexless low polygon heavily 10:05 surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world we ripped off from a 25 year old satirical science fiction novel 10:13 now in shidification is not inevitable plenty of tech Platforms in history died 10:19 without insidifying but when three criteria are satisfying acidification 10:24 always ensues the first is a general lack of competition 40 years ago the 10:31 Carter Administration started pulling Jenga blocks out of American antitrust enforcement then Reagan started pulling 10:36 them out by the fistful and every Administration since but not including the Biden Administration has continued 10:43 to Nerf antitrust making it progressively weaker until every industry not just Tech is dominated by 10:50 tiny handful of companies whether we're talking about Pharma health insurance appliances athletic shoes books booze 10:59 drugstores office supplies eyeglasses vitamin c bottle caps Airlines railroads 11:06 rental cars mattresses champagne candy and professional wrestling 11:13 these companies grew by doing things that were illegal until the 1980s which 11:19 is not coincidentally the time that we got the first PCS PCS the internet and 11:24 antitrust drawdown all those phenomena occurred at the same time Tech is the 11:29 first industry in a century to be born even as antitrust was getting weaker 11:35 now what laws were those companies allowed to violate well first they were able to sell Goods below cost and that 11:41 meant that if you had Deep Pockets you could bankrupt your competitors and prevent new companies from entering the 11:47 market so some of you may remember when Amazon tried to buy a company called diapers.com diapers.com said we don't 11:54 want to sell we like being our own business so Amazon lit a hundred million dollars on fire in the next few months 12:01 selling diapers below cost until diapers.com went bust so this is not about the best company succeeding it's 12:08 the company whose shareholders are willing to lose the most money that gets to survive 12:13 but more than anything uh these companies were able to merge with their major competitors and buy out small ones 12:20 so think about Google Google made one good product 25 years ago a really 12:25 amazingly great search engine and that amazingly great search engine opened a conduit to the capital markets and that 12:32 gave Google an effectively blank check to buy competitors so it didn't matter that virtually everything Google 12:38 developed in-house was a failure videos social media Wi-Fi balloons smart cities 12:45 they couldn't even keep an RSS reader running 12:50 it didn't matter because they could buy other people's companies and that's how they got a 12:57 mobile operating system an ad Tech Stack video Maps documents satellites server 13:02 management Google is not Willy Wonka's idea Factory they're just Rich Uncle Penny bags spending other people's money 13:10 to buy the products that they themselves are too ossified and lumbering to create and that's not just Google 13:17 Apple buys 90 companies per year Tim Cook brings home a new company more 13:23 often than you bring home a bag of groceries eliminating competition is the first 13:29 step in in shidification because it's a lot easier to treat your customers and suppliers like [ __ ] when you're the only 13:35 game in town but all Industries have Consolidated and not just Tech and shitification is what 13:42 happens when you stir two more tech-centric factors into the mix 13:47 so I want to take a quick uh interlude from economics here and do some hacker [ __ ] 13:53 um remember when I told you about how Network effects Drive explosive growth well Tech does have amazing Network 13:58 effects but it has another property an irreducible feature that operates as the 14:04 anti-network effect which is low switching costs which are driven by universality because we only know how to 14:11 make one computer right the touring complete Universal Bond knowing machine that can run all the software we know 14:17 how to write we don't know how to make a computer that runs all the programs except for the one that makes your shareholders sad we just know how to 14:23 make that one if that wasn't the case we wouldn't see people showing up every year at cons like this going like hey 14:28 guess what I figured out how to write malware and PostScript right so that means that every software driven 14:36 product or service is liable to adversarial interoperability that's when 14:41 a hacker uses reverse engineering scraping and Bots to plug something in that the OEM doesn't want plugged in 14:48 remember that Facebook case study when Facebook was telling Myspace users that 14:53 they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch's evil crapolin Australian social media panopticon it didn't just say to those 14:59 myspacers hey [ __ ] your friends come to Facebook and just hang on looking at our cool new UI until they show up instead 15:08 it gave them a bot you fed the bot your login credentials and it would go to Myspace and pretend to be you and it 15:14 would scrape the things waiting in your inbox and it would copy them into your Facebook inbox and then you could reply to it and paste it back into your 15:20 Myspace outbox the explosive growth that platforms get from Network effects draws 15:26 competitors and those competitors hack interoperability layers into their products that attack those incumbents on 15:33 their highest margin offerings draining out users draining off revenues so that every company starts with explosive 15:40 Network effects growth and then it ends with implosive low switch and cost driven contraction 15:46 every successful tech company started with adversarial interop Google presented itself to the world's web 15:52 servers and said hey I'm a user using your web pages please Apple reversed Microsoft Office and made 15:58 iWorks Suite Pages numbers keynote that could perfectly read and write the files from word excel and PowerPoint 16:04 look hard at any tech company and you'll find them ripping mixing and burning the biggest products and services of the day 16:10 water tech companies go after the biggest products and services the same reason Willie Sutton rob banks that's 16:17 where the users are but when these companies exploited the dying of our antitrust rules to grow to unimaginable 16:24 scale they joined forces and declared the end of History 16:29 adversarial interoperability was great when they did it it was necessary to Humanity's progress but anyone tries to 16:36 do that to them well that's a crime because you know every pirate wants to be an admiral 16:42 an industry with a thousand small and medium-sized companies has the same Collective action problem you and your 16:47 friends will have when you're looking for a place to have dinner tonight they won't be able to agree on anything not 16:53 only can they not agree on what the law should be for their industry they can't even agree on how to cater the annual 16:58 meeting where they would discuss the question do you remember the naster wars Tech was 17:03 much bigger than the entertainment sector back during the Napster Wars but big content kicked Tex ass because there 17:11 were five labels in seven Studios which meant that they could easily agree on a single unified response to P2P and today 17:18 there's three labels and four Studios those companies are so incestuous they've got the corporate equivalent of 17:25 a Habsburg jaw and they've decided that they're going to replace every creative worker with a chatbot which is 17:32 why the actors and writers in my hometown in Burbank has spent this summer 17:37 roasting on treeless sidewalks in front of the studios 17:43 because when a sector has five companies or four or three or two it can agree on 17:49 one policy Direction and it can screw its customers and suppliers so hard that it amasses a fortune that lets it get 17:55 that policy today's Tech is even more concentrated than the entertainment sector was back 18:02 during the Napster Wars and they've agreed that history has come to an end when Apple reversed office and built 18:09 iWork Microsoft had to just suck it up but in the ensuing decades apple and Microsoft and Google and Facebook and 18:15 the other Tech Giants have secure changes to law regulation and policy that make it illegal to do unto them as 18:23 they did unto others if you were to reverse the file formats used by iOS and 18:28 make a run time for its apps and a player for the DRM restricted media that they that you get through it Apple would 18:35 reduce you to Rubble they'd come after you with Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act the Computer 18:41 Fraud and Abuse Act tortious interference with contract copyright Patent Trademark and trade secrecy the 18:47 stuff that we call IP in other words now I know free software hackers hate it when you use the word IP they say it 18:54 doesn't mean anything but no IP means something very specific when we're talking about a business context 18:59 IP ruler law that lets me reach outside of the four corners of my business and 19:05 exert control over the conduct of my competitors my customers and my critics or as Jay Freeman from the Saudia 19:11 project puts it this is felony contempt of business model and here's what that looks like 19:18 today one in four web users has installed an ad blocker doc Searles calls it the largest consumer boycott in 19:23 history and he's not wrong ad blockers are only possible because browsers are open platforms you don't 19:29 have to bypass any IP to mod a browser and change the way the page renders in 19:34 the user's browser but if you want to add ad blocking to apps you would commit half a dozen felon federal crimes bypass 19:43 the DRM well that's a dmca 1201 violation it's punished both by a five-year prison sentence and a 500 000 19:49 fine for a first offense an app is just a name for a web page 19:55 that's been skinned with enough IP that uh it will allow Apple or Google to send you to prison for felony content of 20:02 business model if you mod it so let's get back to incidification hacker interlude over 20:07 acidification is what happens when companies do not face competition and when they are able to use that 20:13 incredible flexibility of our Universal computers to twiddle the knobs on the 20:18 back end to do Darth Vader [ __ ] altering the deal further unconstrained by 20:23 Privacy Law labor law fair trading law turning every platform into a rigged 20:29 Skinner box Casino where the payout schedule is altered from moment to moment making it impossible for end 20:35 users or business customers to figure out whether they're getting a fair deal tech companies can twiddle the knobs 20:41 whenever they want without explanation without transparency and we can't get a 20:46 law passed to make them stop compulsively touching their knobs because in a world of five giant websites each 20:53 filled with screenshots of text from the other four they can easily agree that rules that those rules will be bad and 21:00 they can mobilize the Monopoly winnings from that rig casino they've built to make sure that those laws never pass 21:07 so let's take stock step one Consolidated Industries eliminate competition through predatory pricing 21:14 and acquisition step two tech companies pay this play this high speed shell game on the back 21:20 end and use their consolidation to Bigfoot any attempt to constrain their twiddling like labor privacy or Fair 21:27 trading laws now we come to step three where tech companies Embrace Tech laws 21:33 but just the laws that make it illegal for us to twiddle back at them the IP laws that make it uh that make felony 21:40 contempt of business model a reality criminalizing adversarial interoperability the process that once 21:46 Act is acted as garbage collection for the unsurified bloated top-heavy companies letting Nimble Innovative 21:52 players drain off their users eat their lunch and dance on their graves put these three factors together 21:58 consolidation unrestricted twiddling for them and a total ban on twiddling for us 22:03 and insidification does become inevitable that's how insertification works now 22:10 let's talk about how we're going to end it throw it into reverse and build a new good internet that's a worthy successor 22:16 to that old good internet step one we got a halt consolidation and break up big tech companies this one is 22:23 actually going great after 40 years we have the first U.S Administration in two generations to 22:30 take this seriously joined by colleagues who are doing really muscular [ __ ] in the US and the EU and even in China 22:36 we they are blocking mergers demanding breakups and they're fighting alongside lawmakers who are joining Hands Across 22:43 the political Spectrum there's a Bill in Congress right now called the America Act that'll break up Facebook and Google and its two lead co-sponsors are Ted 22:51 Cruz and Elizabeth Warren 22:56 [Applause] the Federal Trade Commission and the doj 23:01 have published new merger guidelines which ban anti-competitive mergers that have been the norm for 40 years now if 23:08 you're only cursorily paying attention to this you might have gotten the impression that the amazing chair of the 23:13 FTC Lena Khan is thrashing indiscriminately and losing big Tech mergers like the Activision Microsoft 23:20 merger that she tried to block but the reality is one is trying to make new law after four 23:27 Decades of complacency and a bias in favor of monopolies she is taking swings 23:33 no one has taken since the Carter Administration she is a goddamn American hero and her colleagues like Rohit 23:41 Chopra at the cpfb and Jonathan Cantor at the doj are doing the Lord's work 23:47 thank you but it takes a long ass time to do these 23:53 breakups it took 69 years to break up a t i don't want to wait that long for a 23:58 new good internet and we don't have to because Tech is different it's Universal it's interoperable and that means we 24:05 have options that we've never had before when we were fighting rail Barons and Oil Barons and the whiskey Trust 24:11 those options that are interoperability driven and they will devolve control over technology from giant companies to 24:18 small companies or co-ops or non-profits or communities of users themselves interop is how we seize the means of 24:24 computation so how do we do that well first things first we gotta limit twiddling we've got 24:29 to pass comprehensive Federal privacy laws with a private right of action meaning that you can sue if your privacy 24:34 is violated even if your local public prosecutor doesn't think you deserve it we need to end worker misclassification 24:41 through the so-called gig economy meaning that every worker will be entitled to minimum wages a safe 24:46 workplace Fair scheduling and apply normal consumer protection standards to e-commerce platforms and search engines 24:52 that ban deceptive advertising fake reviews and misleading search results that put fake businesses and products 24:58 ahead of the best matches thank you 25:06 then we need to open up those walled Gardens there's laws like the digital markets Act and the European Union that 25:11 are going to force Tech platforms to stand up apis that allow new platforms to connect to them 25:17 this interop will make switching costs low again so you can leave Facebook or Twitter and go to Mastodon diaspora or 25:24 Bluesky or some other new platform and still exchange messages with the people you left behind and participate in the 25:31 communities that matter to you and connect to the customers that you rely on these new platforms they need to be 25:37 fiddle constrained the way the big ones should be subject to the same privacy Fair trading and labor rules but 25:43 mandatory apis there's a there's a fatal flaw in administering them because they are so easy to cheat on because if we 25:51 order Facebook to open an API to allow interoperators to siphon off their users it doesn't mean that we don't want them 25:57 to pull the emergency brake if they think someone's exploiting it to steal millions or billions of users data and 26:03 that means that Facebook can cheat because they can claim that they pulled the plug because they thought there was a breach when really they just wanted to 26:10 destabilize those new platforms teach their Founders their users their investors you don't bet against Facebook 26:16 if you want to win and even if you drag Facebook in front of a regulator to get them punished for this it's going to 26:22 take years to get Justice because to a first approximation everyone who understands Facebook's infra well enough 26:28 to to determine whether the shutdown was pretextual is a Facebook employee so 26:33 we're going to have a dispute shutdowns that turn into years-long fact intensive 26:39 inquests that will make nobody happy to make mandatory apis work we need to make 26:45 robust interoperability preferable to that behind the scenes [ __ ] we need to align Tech Giants incentives so that 26:52 they encourage competition rather than sabotaging it and this is where you all 26:57 come in this is the part that we need hackers for because in addition to mandatory 27:03 interrupt that's already coming down the pike we need to restore the right to mod Tinker reverse and hack these Services 27:09 I'm going to tell you why and how and how we're going to make it safe for users 27:15 first why do we need to do this well companies do hate competition but the 27:20 one thing they hate more than competition is surprises if we have the right to mod existing services to 27:26 restore busted API functionality then any company that is tempted to Nerf its 27:31 apis has to consider the possibility that you're going to come along and scrape its site or reverse its app and 27:38 make that API work again and that means that the choice for Tech Giants isn't keep the API and lose my discontented 27:45 users or Nerf the API and screw my competitors it becomes this keep the API 27:50 and lose my discontented users or Nerf the API and get embroiled in an 27:56 unquantifiable guerrilla warfare against Engineers who have the attacker's advantage meaning I have to be perfect 28:01 and they only need to find one mistake I've made and exploit it Tech Giants hate surprises because 28:07 investors hate surprises when you get a quarterly earnings call and announce worse news than predicted your company's 28:14 share price tanks remember the start of 2022 when Facebook told its investors 28:19 that it attracted slightly fewer American users than I thought it would in the previous quarter and they engaged 28:24 in a mass sell-off that lost a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's share price in one day the single 28:31 largest tanking of any corporate valuation in the history of the human race 28:36 now the people who make the call to break an API they're Executives at those 28:42 companies those Executives more than anyone else in the world have portfolios that are top heavy with shares in the 28:49 companies they work for meaning that if they do something that creates a surprise that creates a mass sell-off that tanks the company's share price 28:55 they themselves are the ones who are going to get hurt so you put the decision makers on the front lines of 29:01 their own bad decisions and you know what no one ever lost money betting on the hubris of tech leaders so maybe 29:07 they'll go ahead and do it anyway and if they do we'll have adversarial interoperability we can hack scrape and reverse our way back to the API that 29:14 they've shut down so how do we get adversarial interoperability well we should roll 29:20 back every law or a regulation that constitutes felony contempt of business model anti-circumvention criminalizing 29:27 terms of service violations over broad patents and copyrights all of it but that's a project of years and we need 29:33 adversarial interop now and here's how we can do that first 29:38 wait for these companies to cheat because they're gonna cheat right when we pass the digital markets act or any 29:43 other law that constrains their twiddling they're going to cheat because they're incapable of not cheating they've proven that over and over again 29:49 and when they cheat we'll penalize them we can stick them with a special Master this is a kind of court appointed adult 29:56 supervisor who has to approve their legal threats against interoperators and verify that those threats are about 30:02 protecting the company's users and not its shareholders now while we're waiting for them to cheat we can put the government to work 30:09 for us specifically government procurement governments should require that every tech company that sells them 30:17 a product or a service has to promise not to interfere with interoperability 30:23 I mean that's just good prudent Administration the Lincoln Administration only bought rifles from 30:29 companies that agreed on standard tooling I mean of course they did where's canceled boys the bullet Factory 30:36 shut down this week right that has been the Bedrock of good public procurement 30:41 for centuries we just forgot it every digital system procured by every level of government should come with a binding 30:48 covenant not to impede interoperability from the cars and your government motor pool to the Google classroom and our 30:54 public schools to iPhones and our public agencies now those companies they're going to squawk but no one forces a tech 31:01 giant to sell to the American government if you're too emotionally fragile to sell to the American public on Fair 31:07 terms or find another line of work better suited to your delicate sensibilities your shareholders 31:13 priorities are your problem public engineer public agencies are charged with doing the people's business 31:20 thank you okay so we're going to use adversarial 31:27 interrupt to keep big companies from sabotaging mandatory interrupt and we're going to use procurements conduct 31:32 remedies and new law to get adversarial interrupt but how do we keep the inter-operators honest after all if you 31:38 squinch us right Cambridge analytica is just an interoperator now remember I 31:44 talked about putting limits on twiddling Privacy Law labor law fair trading laws that's how we do it I mean frankly it's 31:50 surreal that the primary mechanism by which we keep Facebook's users from abusing Facebook's uh or Facebook's 31:56 Partners from abusing Facebook's users is by asking Facebook to decide what is and isn't good for its users remember 32:03 Cambridge analytica was a Facebook partner so whether you're using an API or 32:09 whether you're Fielding an interoperable app that relies on scraping and reversing we want you Bound by those same laws but these should be laws that 32:16 are passed by democratically accountable lawmakers and public proceedings not by shareholder accountable Executives and 32:22 closed-door boardrooms the shitification didn't happen because today's companies are run by Evil 32:28 Geniuses they are no more wicked than the everyday mediocrities who founded deck and sun and AOL 32:35 all of those companies would have happily abolished their competitors captured their regulators and abused 32:40 their users and business customers if they could have gotten away with it we didn't let them get away with it but we 32:46 let the current crop get away with murder they are just able to buy their way to dominance merge with their 32:52 competitors until they have the money and unity of purpose to capture our laws to give them the freedom to abuse us 32:58 without limit and criminalize anything we do in our own self-defense to stop them we need to block new 33:05 mergers and unwind existing ones we need to limit their ability to twiddle the back end to keep their users and 33:11 business customers in a constant state of confusion and we need to restore our ability to twiddle back to give 33:17 ourselves an internet operated buy-in for the people who use it that new good 33:22 internet would be a worthy successor to our old good internet 33:27 now for millennium the indigenous people of California used controlled Burns to wipe out old and sick trees opening the 33:34 canopy for New Growth but when the settlers banned good fire California started to accumulate fire debt and that 33:40 means that every year California Burns because the alternative to good fire isn't no fire it's Wildfire when tech 33:49 companies had to contend with the implosive contraction of low switching costs they were Dynamic springing up and 33:55 disappearing all the time when we stopped enforcing antitrust law we ended good fire and we got Wildfire our tech 34:03 companies have terminal gigantism and they're on fire all the time it's time 34:10 to stop making the tech Giants better and time to start evacuating them and letting them burn 34:16 in your heart you know we could have a better internet than this one and A Better Tax sector do you remember when 34:23 Tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years before striking out on their own to start their 34:28 own business that put that big company out of business then that dream shrank to working for a tech giant for a few 34:34 years quitting and doing a fake startup to get Aqua hired back by your own boss and the world's most inefficient way to 34:40 get a raise and then it shrank even further to 34:46 working for a tech giant for your whole life but there'd be free kombucha in the cafeteria and you get massages on 34:51 Wednesdays and now that dream is over and all that's left is work for a tech guy until they fire your ass like those 12 000 34:58 googlers who got fired six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years 35:05 we deserve better than this and we can get it I want to take a lesson here from my arch nemesis a guy called Milton 35:11 Friedman a court Sorcerer of Ronald Reagan architect of the neoliberal Revolution author of our misery and he 35:18 was a monster but he knew a thing or two and when people would ask him Milton how will you ever put your cookie Fringe 35:24 ideas into operation he would say someday there will come a crisis and 35:30 when crisis comes ideas that are lying around can move from The Fringe to the center in an instant 35:36 I love quoting Freeman I imagine that when he hears his words in my mouth he looks up from that spit he's roasting on 35:43 and gargles a curse at me around that red hot iron bar sticking out of his Jaws while the demons around him laugh 35:48 and laugh and we are lurching from crisis to crisis and thus far we do the same thing 35:54 with every crisis we do the same thing we did last time but harder and hope for a different outcome 36:00 we need to start spreading good ideas lying around so that that next Crisis doesn't go to waste 36:06 now I'm not a hacker I haven't written commercial software since the last century these days I run my mouth I 36:12 write books my next book is called the internet con how to seize the means of computation it comes out in three weeks 36:18 and it explains this stuff in detail but it's not my only book because I write when I'm anxious so I came at a lockdown 36:24 with eight books uh there's two of them in the Dealer's room uh at the no starch press Booth the 36:31 first one's a a hacker novel about the old good internet and the people who built it called red team Blues that's uh 36:38 dedicated to Dan Kaminsky I finished it the week he died and then there's a book called thank you 36:44 yeah one for Dan uh and then there's a book called show Point capitalism I wrote 36:49 with my friend Rebecca Giblin about creative labor markets and how they were captured by big Tech and big content how 36:55 to win them back I'm going to be at the no charge Booth from 2 30 to 3 30 if you want to come by and I can make your 37:00 books non-returnable with a sharpie and you can ask me questions um but you don't have to buy a book or 37:06 line up for that you can email me I'm Corey eff.org uh I've been with the eff since 2002 it's 21 years now 37:14 and so I remember that old good internet and 37:21 with my colleagues there we're fighting for a new good internet and so the last thing I'll say to you I don't know if 37:26 we've got time for questions but the last thing I'll say to you is I hope that uh those of you who do support eff will continue to do so and I thank you 37:33 for it and I hope that if you haven't looked too hard at eff yet that you figure out why so many people are wearing our swag at this Con and uh find 37:40 out a little more and see if you can find in your heart to support us too so that's what I had to say to you today that's the plan thank you very much for 37:48 coming and listening [Applause] 37:56 10 minutes so we got we got 10 minutes 38:02 a long rambling statement followed by what do you think of that as technically a question but it's not a good one 38:08 um if anyone has questions I'm happy to take them uh sir 38:14 shout and I'll repeat it back 38:24 so the question is your booth start happening at company and you don't want to get sucked up by big companies you're avoiding VCS what can you what can you 38:30 do well there's a whole class of stuff that economists call uh Ulysses Pact 38:35 so um Ulysses you may know the story right Ulysses was a hacker he knew that if you sailed through the Sea of the 38:41 sirens and you heard their song you would jump into the sea and that the sailors had a standard protocol for not 38:46 being lured to their death they fill their weird ears with wax but Ulysses being a hacker he wanted to hear the 38:53 song so he improvised the solution he said tie me to the mast and whatever I do don't untie me I want 39:00 to hear the siren song and he did um a Ulysses pact is is when you anticipate a time in the future when you 39:06 can reasonably assume that you will be weak and you take a step now to prevent yourself uh now while you're strong from 39:13 giving into that weakness so you know you ever go on a diet and throw away all the Oreos that's a Ulysses pact and we 39:19 have Ulysses packs in Tech right the the reason GPL and Creative Commons licenses and other free and open licenses are 39:26 irrevocable is so when the day comes that your VC says all right hippie we 39:31 went along with this [ __ ] open source stuff at the start but now you got to make a choice right we can pull 39:36 the plug on you and you can put those 150 people who quit their jobs to follow you into the startup out on the 39:42 breadline and costing their kids uh college fund or you can put this Source back in the proprietary box you can say 39:48 you know I would do it if I could but I can't I tied myself to the Mast and no one's 39:54 going to untie me I have an irrevocable license on my code so the the answer to this is like not being strong right the 40:02 answer to this is anticipating your weakness and taking steps now while you are strong while you are not stressed 40:07 well you're not in those circumstances to ensure that you won't be tempted 40:12 right the lesson of insidification is not that we have uniquely evil Tech leaders the lesson of insidification is 40:20 that we have uniquely weak constraints on ordinary people that leads them into this absolutely Wicked course of action 40:27 other questions I think we've got time for one more yes ma'am 40:52 right so the question is like the the kind of 40:58 fediversity validity kind of world of cool open federatable hard to capture 41:04 services will they uh be able to find enduring success and I would say that 41:10 I'm way more interested in their success than their enduring success because the whole point about Federated open 41:15 Services is that they fail really gracefully right if like I remember trying to get X to work on my Linux box 41:22 the fact that it doesn't exist anymore is fine right because we weren't locked in like if you if you have an old toilet 41:28 seat iBook that you put X on and um and it's not like you have you can't you 41:33 know put Wayland on now right like you you have the choice you can migrate right so I actually think it's I I am 41:39 way more interested in those Services attaining however brief a success because they will they have a nice 41:44 grease skid into the next open platform the next the next and what you know this often happens that we forget a lesson 41:50 right we we put our rat poison for years we don't have any rats we take the rat poisons away rap toys in a way because 41:56 who needs it right we haven't had rats for years and then there's rats everywhere we're like where these [ __ ] rats come from right we used to 42:02 know that we needed open Platforms in the early days of the web we'd all we all remembered the hard lessons of CompuServe and Genie and AOL and then we 42:09 forgot right and now we're learning those lessons again and so like we need to keep those lessons open the question 42:14 of whether they can attain liftoff you know it's this hard equilibrium where uh 42:20 if the existing services are so terrible that people are willing to endure the 42:25 high switching cost of leaving their friends and everything that matters to them I mean yeah those those services are 42:31 going to get a lot of users but it will be because we just let this like point of no return arrive which is actually 42:39 not great like I would much rather make it easy to evacuate those Services you 42:44 know by getting the European Union to mandate interop for them through the digital markets act then like wait for 42:49 them to become so unbearable that even people for whom they are very important can no longer stay and end up in the 42:56 federal verse like that I'm a committed fediverse user but like that's not how I want people on the platform I I want to 43:03 minimize the amount of harm that people have to go through on the other hand you know let's not let the crisis go to 43:09 waste if it does get that bad let's make sure we welcome them uh yeah last question 43:26 intransigent yeah so the the question is the Biden Administration is the first 43:31 Administration and two generations to to take antitrust seriously how do we how do we hurt the politicians who are 43:37 standing in their way you know um there's an old joke from Ireland not an Irish joke a joke from 43:42 Ireland whose punch line is if you wanted to get there I wouldn't start from here uh and um you know it's 43:49 corollary is like the best time to have done something about corporate corruption and our politics was 40 years ago and the second best time is now it's 43:56 going to be a slow process right like Chuck Schumer blocked the floor vote for the um the access act last uh last 44:02 quarter and you know or last session it's going to be really hard to say well you know everybody should vote for Mitch 44:09 McConnell to show Chuck Schumer you know what what he's uh what what he deserves 44:14 I mean not least because it's not a plausible path right I mean even if you are not partisan in any way the number 44:21 of Chuck Schumer voters who are going to become Mitch McConnell voters off the back of this is going to be very small and so you know I think a lot of this 44:28 happens at the primary level it happens at the state level level it happens you know Larry lessig says that we have four 44:34 forces Norms laws code and markets it happens at the normative level like I think all of us are the people that are 44:40 the tech support Army for all the normies in our lives and like we've had this attitude that um well 44:48 it's it's more important that it be easy so that you can use it than it be right and we all get that there's that that's 44:54 not a completely indefensible position but that it also has limits right like your password just can't be password one 45:00 two three on all your services no matter how hard you find it to use a password manager and maybe we need to move this 45:07 question about uh big Tech Independence interop and so on out of the realm of uh 45:13 things that are so much of a pain in the ass that you shouldn't bother this is just for for like us ninjas and not for 45:19 you normies and maybe we need to do what we did with passwords and start talking about how we make it for for everybody they deserve it all right so uh 2 30 I'm 45:28 going to be down in the Dealer's room at no starch come by corey80ff.org thank you all for coming 45:35 [Music] 45:40 exactly