Onward! Draft Session Transcript

View the Onward! video by clicking on the link to your right.

John Palfrey: First off and most importantly, thanks to everyone for the great spirit here for the birthday party celebration, wedding, and anniversary for Berkman@10, and to have celebrated it with all of you.  We're going to end the substantive portion this afternoon with a series of questions.  But we're literally going to go just until 5:30 and then release everyone.

Pretty much everything I have learned at the Berkman Center has come from two great teachers sitting here today Charles Nesson and Jonathan Zittrain, our founding directors.  And one of the things they are such masters at is teaching in every possible sense, Nesson as an evidence about the nature of truth and everything that flows from that and Zittrain iconic teacher of cyber law and internet at societies and technologies the class that many of us have taken that got us right here...

And one of the things they do in class in addition to using computers in the classroom actually to good effect, an unusual skill, is they pass out a feedback form often in the middle of the semester as well as at the end.  At the top of that page, they write "what is your biggest thought" and "what is your biggest question".  So what we're going to do here for the last half hour is just put big questions for the next decade in the spirit of Nesson and Zittrain.  We’re going to do it in real space here but we're also going to collect it on the question tool.

This is not about answers. This is about what we're going to do in the next decade as scholars and activists, and occasional crazy people and whatever as Charlie would put it.  So that's the game and at 5:30 we'll release everyone and those who are going to the gala we'll see you at that point.  Charlie you're also having some people over tomorrow.  Do you want to mention this before everyone goes to the four winds?

Charles Nesson: The idea is that I have an open house starting at 10 so you can stop by on your way to the airport, meet people on the way out.  It’s a very nice walk from here, 10 minutes from the common.

John Palfrey: Just follow the crowds; they'll all be going to chez Nesson.  It’s a great place.   So what's your biggest question, what should we be doing, just raise your hand and throw out big questions... we have a lot o people in the room so perhaps the questions can be short and with a question mark.

Our friend from Trinity College Dublin who has just gotten a teaching job, a lectureship, Daithí -- will you start us off with the biggest question that we ought to be asking.

Daithí mac Sithigh: Okay the question that I’ll be left with at the end of this session, looking back on what the Berkman center has done and as someone who is relatively new, the Berkman center was founded before I started university studies.

We're looking back then and saying lots of important work has been done by the center, internet studies, cyberlaw and so on.  What I’ve noticed is the level of convergence between things you would perceive as internet law issue, concerning those who self identify as research into policy interventions in name of the internet.  The question is obviously -- you said yesterday that Berkman is center of the university rather than the law school -- but what the specific role of the center, as well as similar centers around the world, will be.  Many of you have come from centers around the world while not duplicating what is done here have take their cue from this center.  What is the idea of doing Internet studies when there is so much overlap between these issues. We heard from Zuckerman and with Gobal Voices is a classic example of overlap, when there is so much overlap between cyberlaw and internet studies.

I would ask the question of what in 10 years time will the role of the Berkman center have been?  Will it have expanded even further given its role as part of the university, and is it possible to have the whole universe of human thought within one center

John Palfrey: Andrew McLaughlin from Google.

Andrew McLaughlin: So I got a question for the Berkmanites: so the thing that I’ve learned from the Berkman center when I first showed up was that it was motivated that the insight that information is power.  The reason it made sense to study this tech/nerdy stuff at a law school is that it was really about power.  So talking to Jonathan will teach you about control, and control was about how different actors who used to have power were trying to exercise that in a new environment.  And the tension that arose about the Berkman center is very normal one to arise around an academic center over the last 10 years.  The tension between studying and describing and doing, and that tension has been interesting and healthy.  And the different camps that have been leaning in each direction -- the activistis academic, studying vs. geek, punky doing.  What united them was that both sides respected the other side’s devotion to rigor and data, and actually measuring stuff.

My challenge for the next 10 years:  how are you going to take the academic work which can uniquely been done at a place with the resources, brand name depth, and now history of Harvard and the Berkman Center, but maintain the aim of actually getting tings done in the real worked that make a difference for the people for whom the power flows through these networks can really change their lives.

John Palfrey: I love it, I love it.  David Hornik, my co-teacher for venture capital, the best VC on Sand Hill Road.

David Hornik: Wow, that's a quite a lead up.  But it’s a perfect intro to my follow up to that question and comment.  Which is that there is this tendency to talk about power and the dynamics of  law and how it influences power and I would say what is not considered or focused on as much as power is money, and money whether it is the proxy for power, but it is a massive motivator -- in my world it is arguably the only motivator in these eco systems. How can the Berkman Center, without feeling dirty, consider how money is influenced and will influence these decisions.  For example, as I sit here next to my colleague from Google as we start to have some very significant data wars. The important arguments right now about data and profiles in Facebook, Google, Myspace all trying to vie for your profile.  Those wars aren't about the data, they're about the dollars that come off the data.  So the question is: how can we continue to focus on the import legal aspects but with an understanding that these things are at least partly motivated and influenced by the money that falls off of them?

John Palfrey: It’s not all cooperation after all.  Prof Zittrain, you've got to press your button.

Jonathan Zittrain: Maybe it’s trying to tell me something.  I was just saying he should fund us a study on money.

John Palfrey: Prof Best from Georgia.

Mike Best: I was just going to say the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, well 3 billion people on this planet are not on the internet and their society is invisible to the net.  Discuss...

John Palfrey: I love it.  Concise.  Prof Shieber from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, what should we be studying for the next decade?

Stuart Shieber: I have no clue.  But let me just say that I’ve found interesting was the relentless discussion of openness.  Of course, it was  theme of the workshop.  Discussion about how openness doesn't happen by itself.  Eternal vigilance is necessary, makes you kind of wonder if it’s so wonderful, why is eternal vigilance necessary?  What’s holding it all back?  But it is necessary and this kind of thought has to be broad based because the benefits of ones often come in small amounts to many people instead of a benefit that comes in large amounts to a small number of people which is the kind o benefit that.  And that means that we need to keep thinking about how to achieve openness, something I’ve been thinking about myself, which means (shameless plug) we need places like the Berkman Center to provide the critical intellectual mass so that the distribution of the thinking isn't so widely dispersed that we can't get the ideas percolating up into some kind of centrally coalesced place so that the next step can be taken.  How do we maintain the Berkman this critical mass of intellect?

John Palfrey : Ronaldo Lemos, one of our great partners.

Rondaldo Lemos:  So one of the things I think is important, and something I can testify, is the fact that the Berkman has inspired the creation of other center has inspired the foundation of other centers in the developing world.  The center that I run in brazil, we are now 12 people working full time is called Center for Technology and Society... might wonder why, and that's one of the things.  The type of work that the Berkman Center has done is inspiring new ways of thinking that are developing on its own in the developing world.  So one of the things that I think is important for the next 10 years, is to see how the regional lines of thought initiated here grew in other contexts.  One thing that I can say is that there are a lot of innovations that are coming from the peripheries like developing countries and even peripheries in developed nations.  So one of the issues that is really important is: how do you learn from the innovation that takes place at the margins and how do the ideas that originate here grow differently in different contexts.

John Palfrey: Great.  Let’s here from Europe. Where is Juan Carlos de Martin?

Juan Carlos de Martin: As director of another center inspired by Berkman center I agree with Ronaldo.  We need to develop our line of thought in our own regions of the world.  I think its crucial in the next 10 years,  I perceive an imbalance of power between the individual networked citizen with respect to other entities, meaning that companies and governments are developing a panopticon, where they know what we are doing but we don't know what we are doing. So finding ways to like the Herdict project where we can collectively and individually put together information about what we are doing to try and restore that imbalance of power.

John Palfrey:  Ethan Zuckerman talks about light weight collaboration -- it's a great concept.  Victoria Nash from Oxford Internet Institute.  Will you tell us what we should do?

Victoria Nash:  Well I guess picking up from the theme of power that we were talking about.  one of the other corresponding values has been equality.  My question to you would be research based question which is "how egalitarian is the net" and the values oriented questions which is "how egalitarian could or should it be", and specifically to break that down into 2 type of research.  We've been talking about the possibility of their being more voices on the internet / more information on the internet, but we don't have that much evidence on how many voices are on the internet or whose voices are being heard on the internet what's the difference between speaking and being heard.  Second: I think it's Persephone, one of the ideas she tried to get a break out session on was Gatekeepers.  Now we often talk about Gatekeepers in a negative sense but we need to think about whether or not we could have an internet without gatekeepers, and I don't think we could.  Given that we have to have gatekeepers, how can we ensure an appropriate balance of power?

John Palfrey: To keep with the accent Phillip Hallam-Baker from Verisign

Phillip Hallam-Baker: Couple of points. One of them criminal activity on the net.  We're really going to need much better tracking on the net.  But more widely, I can't tell you what problems you're going be looking at in 10 years, but I think the nature of the problem is going to be something that comes up between the cracks.  Now I’ll give you an example.  At the moment the hardest field in security is security usability.  The problem is that we have security people and we have usability people, and the two are still not talking.  The problem is that the usability people have defined their field in terms of cognitive science and "this is how we do it and this is our template for how we approach it" and the security people say “yes but you're not listening to us and you're not even hearing us what the security issues are, you're solving the wrong problems.”  We've been beating our heads together for the last 18 months and it will probably be another 2 years.  I think that's the type of issue you'll be dealing with, the pieces that come up between the cracks and don't belong to any one department in the university.

Jonathan Zittrain: So we need a new field called use-curity. 

John Palfrey: Eszter Hargittai is next, but before that let's hear about the new book.

Phillip Hallam-Baker:  Its the "Dot Com Manifesto, How to Stop Internet Crime"

Eszter Hargittai: So back to social inequality one more time.  We actually know a lot about social inequality, you tell me your age, your education, you parents' level of education, your ethnicity and I can tell you a lot more about what you do online.  What we know less about is if that is actually having real world affects on social status and how.  So that's the really big next question, is it feeding back into people's position in society.  Then to tie it to what Andrew was asking about, real world aspects, and what can we actually do about it.  I would like to know what we can do to improve people's skills in that realm, and there is so much that we can do and we're basically clueless at this point in knowing how to improve people's skills.  Like if we want more people to be heard, or to be participating, we don't really know how to get them to do that.  There is too much focus on assuming that people do or do not do things by choice; not realizing that people are actually very much influenced by their position in society.  I think we need to more past the discussion of "oh they want to, its just a luxury or whatnot" and recognize that if people don't understand and don't have the tools they won't be participating.

John Palfrey: Something we can't wait to work on. Doc Searls

Doc Searls: The short one: is the internet public and if so then what?  We've framed it a great deal in commercial terms, as in what the telecos are doing and how to fight the telecos, but is it inherently public in the same way that water, roads, sunlight or other things are?

John Palfrey: A question that Yochai Benkler has asked once or twice.  Ari Melber, what should we be focused on?

Ari Melber: How can we better understand and mitigate participation exhaustion particularly among active users or popular people?… Lessig says he doesn't do email.  Joshua Michael Marshall told us at lunch he can't review a lot of the emails they're getting, even though he told us that's a core part of his iterative process.  If we're going to have a port of online identities, but then have push back and commenting on a blog ands responding to five more comments, or feeling like you gave up the fight in a political context. Then how does the lower barrier to entry in participation actually end up, at least in active universes, create a paradox where you have to come back up to participate to pay more in your exhausts than if you don't participate at all?

John Palfrey: Oliver Goodenough will you give us a question for the next 10 years?

Oliver Goodenough: Question for the next 10 years. I would follow along with my own interests which is how are we going to organize all of these wonderful communities that the internet makes possible.  What is going to be the interface between law and social custom that will provide both new and astonishing ways of doing it and how do we make some of the old ways work?

John Palfrey: Harry Lewis, professor of computer science, former dean of Harvard College, one of the gatekeepers of the past

Harry Lewis: The merger of computer and communication has not been completed yet.  We're still in some intermediate stage, and 10 years from now we're not all going to be walking around with both laptops and cellphones.  And the rest of the world that doesn't have the laptops  is probably not going to be walking around with laptops and cellphones either, that's not the direction in which progress is going to be made.  So can we invent that thing?  And if we can't invent that thing at Harvard, can we at least be in early enough on how its develops -- whatever the device is that everyone is going to have 10 years from now, so that it's the captive of the forces of good rather than the forces of evil?

John Palfrey: Will you please tell us that title of your book?

Harry Lewis: The book is with Hal Ableson and Ken Ledeen coming out next month called "Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion."

John Palfrey: Where's Rhod Sharp?  You must have a question for us, the voice of the BBC…

Rhod Sharp: I was very grateful that we started with a session from Jonathan Zittrain because it helped me discover what this was all going to be about band my question is taken from a quote from Gene Spafford, which is a quote from Jonathan's book, which is "how are we going to deal with people -- another billion users online who have been raised in environments of poverty, so much is seems to me of what the burden has been about has been evolving rules and procedures and ways of living.  Our internet experience now is vastly different from what it was is 1992 when I used Netscape 1.2 to download in about 2 minutes one picture from the Nottinghill carnival on the Guardian website and I thought that was wonderful.  What's my experience going to be like in 10 years with another billion users jostling for finite space, is that the question, i don't event know.

John Palfrey: The person to answer it is right behind you, Vera Franz from the OSI. Your London neighbor and somebody funding just this expansion.

Vera Franz: My question is very short, how can we make Berkman thought mainstream, to the point of being boring, in the next 10 years.  That would be, i think, then the world will be a better place.  If we can work on that it would be great.  And a footnote, one thing we're thinking about a lot is the meaning of Open Society. For example, pointing to Russia where possibly the Open Society Russians want, and i am being blunt here, is not necessarily the society that is our ideal.  So we know the internet in Russia is not really being censored in a great way, yet it is a closed society, and how do we really face that challenge, and what role does the internet here and how can we solve that problem?

John Palfrey: Tom S. from the NSA/Kennedy School/ Berkman Center.

Tom: I think a great challenge for the Berkman Center over the next 10 years would be sort of along Andrew's point of connecting with the real world, and not the commercial side but the government, that you reach out, bring in the people that have to made decisions about internet governance, or how we control these tempers.  All of the questions that are there, so i think that would be tremendous.  because you have great intellectual horse power that we need.

John Palfrey: Richard.

Richard: I was talking with someone from an Italian newspaper about the question of where is privacy in all of these issues.  we've talked a lot about openness, and a lot about government secrecy, but personal privacy...  when i was a fellow about 10 years ago my project was privacy in cyberspace, so i hope, well i ask, what will the Berkman  center do about the questions of privacy, specifically government data banks, ID scans, keeping information to control people where the internet is part of this process, but the larger internets...

John Palfrey: If only Zittrain will say yes, than we'll be all set.  Professor Bracken.

John Bracken: How can you help us re-conceive of government as a "we" instead of a "they?"

John Palfrey: Very good, very good.

Jonathan Zittrain: Come on john, its "they the people"! what are you talking about?

???: So the question I would say now needs to be looked at now that the Berkman is a Harvard center and not just a law center: what can be done to bring in other parts of the school and by extension the world that haven't been here. For example, the school of education, some of the issues today we dealt with in terms of the Ed world, and then the school of theology and any of the other parts of Harvard that are many but that i don't even know about who may have something to say in this discussion.

John Palfrey: Charlie Nesson keeps saying that there is divinity in the net...  Wendy Kowlow will you tell us what we should be studying?

Wendy Koslow: Well what I am doing right now is all unconferences all the time.  And what I've put on the board out there is "will unconferences become the norm and eventually you will have to explain to a newbie what a panel is?"

John Palfrey: Very well put.  Beth Kolko.

Beth Kolko: So going back to privacy and device question, and as the phone and computer come together and its not just databases of what you're looking for but its where you're when you are looking for it, and where you are when you're making a call.  How are those privacy questions going to be addressed? 

John Palfrey: David Weinberger

David Weinberger: I actually want to steal a point from Beth.  I'm going to ask the squishiest question possible.  Yesterday as everyone was talking about open this and open that, and openness as the value that holds Berkman together, but we don't all agree on what openness means.  It occurred to me that what does hold Berkman together and probably for everyone here is that we really really love the internet, just love the internet. How many people were at ROFLCon?  The atmosphere at ROFLCon (an internet pop culture conference) was very different type of love of the internet.  So in 10 years, how are we going to love the internet?

John Palfrey: That's great. Veronica Alfaro, what should we be studying for the next 10 years?

Veronica Alfaro: I have a question from the other side: how do we keep Berkman center out of mainstream thought?  That will still be critical thinking, what's wrong, what's good, pointing fingers and what should be done?  What people can do to keep the internet going on an everyday basis and social change.  Taking a cue from JZ, how the grandmothers with their iPods can no expertise can make a change.

John Palfrey: Glen Otis Brown, may i call on you as one of the original Berkman students.

Glenn Otis Brown: I will hazard a question in an area i know nothing about.  I will say: is there a place for bio-science at Berkman.  Like Andrew said, One of the core issues that Berkman was about is power and studying power, I think looking back over the years one of the core things that Berkman has been about is studying the internet as an exercise in existential living, Lessig's first book said there is no inherent nature to the internet, we have to figure out what its going to be.  The same type of questions about divinity that Charlie discusses are right in the middle of bioscience/ethics.

John Palfrey: Prof Yochai Benkler

Yochai Benkler: A couple of things.  One is how we think beyond the internet not in the terms of what we think the device will be, but what have we learned through living through a moment of perturbation, about ourselves and how we can be together and structured our relations.  so how to think about human systems design generally, about our ability to collaborate and act socially in effective ways, using technologies but not only that --  using habits, institutions, using different ways of putting things together and building on the fact that we have a generation that loves the internet in a different way, but is also deeply about creating and sharing and being social.  So how do we builds systems more generally moving beyond only the internet, to learning what we learn, and extending it to all forms of ways of being together and living together.  And secondly, I just want to emphasize this last point, how do we mature methodologically, institutionally, organizationally without becoming old?  How do we mature and remain using the incredibly privileged we have to ask questions that we know will fail many times?

John Palfrey:  Jonathan Zittrain will you give us a question?

Jonathan Zittrain: I guess my question has to do with, thinking that most books are written by authors, and it's great to see books not written by authors, people, that for whatever reason, have the time and the space to full time devote themselves to writing a book -- and now there's the possibility that people might write books that aren't in that very self-selected and unrepresentative group.  Part of the magic of the net is that it let's people not have to be the identity of the thing to do the thing.  I was struck by David Weinberger's description of ROFLCon. I wasn't there , but i can't help but think  that some of the goofiness, and the wonderful inanity of it, is exactly the spirit of the internet that we celebrate here that i am continually amazed and amused by. And that connects to Yochai's observation about how do we age without getting old. It's the ability not to take ourselves so god damn seriously, while doing serious things and worrying about things like billions of people who are about to join the club, digitally speaking.  And that's part of what has made this enterprise so great over the last 10 years so great,  and part of what is a thread for basically everyone here and people I talk to.  We're doing serious things but we don't take ourselves too seriously.

John Palfrey: John Perry Barlow you're about to be cold called having walked in the room as, one of the people who asked the key question at the beginning: what's the question we should be asking for the next 10 years of the Berkman Center?

John Perry Barlow: I think the question we need to ask is the question that is going to be asked, a series of questions, that are going to be asked by people who are not like us.  I mean we have been fairly representative of the people in cyberspace for most of the 10 years of our history, but we're not any longer representative in terms of our backgrounds, our languages, and our understandings of what this thing is.  And we need to go on helping those questions to be asked and give them a framework in which to understand the answers that have already be given, and be very open to answers that they may come up with that are quite different than ours.

John Palfrey: Bob Frankston, give us a question.

Bob Frankston: I want to go a little, starting with what Yochai said.  The internet itself is just an artifact, the question is what is society going to be like once the internet has become internalized as basic literacy.  How are we going to reexamine the legal system, and many of the precedents and assumptions deeply embedded through centuries... just one example that meaning is no longer intrinsic in the wild but is something we create at the edge.

John Palfrey: David Liroff of CPB, are you in the room?

David Liroff: The public broadcasting emerged in this country when it was clear that market forces were going to treat listeners and viewers as nothing more than consumers, this was just about 40 years ago.  And the question is "are we at a similar inflexion point when we can conclude that market place forces alone will not assure that the needs of the democratic society are well served", and so the question is "what is the role of public service media, however defined, in this emerging media market"?  I think that our conversations over the last 2 days should make all of us somewhat nervous about relying solely on market place forces to serve the old fashioned notion of the public interest. 

John Palfrey:  Second to last question, where's Eric Osiakwan?

Eric Osiakwan: How do we understand Africa more from the internet, that would be my question. 

John Palfrey: The last question should go to the man who asked the first question.  Charlie Nesson, what is the question for the next 10 years?

Charles Nesson: Well the question for me is always the meaning of existence, but I guess that's a bit broad.  Uou wouldn't believe it if you found the answer.  The question in shorter term for me really is, can we figure out how to engage kids of all ages in an open integrated media educational environment in a way that has them learning critical, algorithmic, strategic, thinking skills, in a form that we can measure -- and that can be used as a meaningful credential.  The step beyond that for me is, what is the business plant that would support that?  I myself don't think the answer is in philanthropy, I think that philanthropy could be a wonderful source of venture capital for learning how to do it, but ultimately if the open net is going to survive and fill the commons, I think it is going to have to find its own way of supporting itself.

Thank you all so much for this.  It has been like a birthday party, a wonderful party.  Thank you.

(applause)

Terry Fisher: So as Charlie says it has been an amazing two days.  The suggestions of the last 40 minutes like many of the suggestions over the course of 2 days, have been profound, stimulating, somewhat humbling. I was nudged by John sitting here thinking how to respond.  I concluded a comprehensive response is hopeless, we'll just have to mull over the different suggestions, so here's a deliberately partial set of reactions.

First, the Berkman Center has, from the beginning, been committed to serving the public interest.  May seem an obvious objective, but not necessarily so.  One of the implications of that commitment to the public interest is that it is has posed from the beginning, just as Andrew suggested, a tension between a research agenda and an activist agenda.  And that tension continues at the present and will likely exist for the next decade.  Its exemplified within the center by different tilts of its faculty. I myself find the research side more often engaging, but each of us shares -- to different degrees -- this pull. And Charlie's most recent reference to education is an example of the activist side that I think we all share.  So, not much more to say than to acknowledge the continued salience of this dialectic.

Second thing, with respect to substance, several of the comments made here, and several of the comments made over the past few days, properly remind us of the importance of paying continued attention to the degree to which the communication medium of the internet or any subsequent medium of communication is available to all persons in the world.  To some extent this is a matter of the digital divide, a matter of continuing importance..  but the digital divide presents an on, off distinction where as we all know that access is not on off, access is mediated, access is filtered, access is burdened by surveillance, its curtailed by economics.  So studying the extent, the degree to which the medium is available to all persons remains a matter of importance to all of us giving the activist theme attending to ways to which we can help to expand access. 

But pause there, as even if things become complicated on that issue, access is not an unmitigated good, or access to an unfiltered, unmanaged, unmoderated environment is not obviously socially beneficial, and we have to, despite our continued long standing attachment to the idea of openness, recognize that some points of closure may not be such a bad idea.

Third thing. Comments in the last 40 minutes have reminded us of the extent to which the Berkman Center is far from alone in this space.  And that the study of the relationship between the internet, law, policy, society, economics, and culture properly should be distributed, in the straightforward sense in that there are now many such centers springing up all around the world, pursuing some similar and different topics.  We need to remain in constant communication among ourselves, as a group of centers.  And more broadly in the ways that Yochai and Jonathan have taught us, we have to, or we can best, do our work if we engage a large number of people not formally organized in centers at all -- netizens in the broad sense of the term. So carrying on the work of the next decade in a distributed fashion seems critical.

Fourth and last thought, is how can we as a center best relate over the next decade to the other estates: government, for profit sector, the not for profit sector.  How can we as an arm of the university, now, relate to each of these fundamental, and actually, scale and more important institutions that we are.  Here are two.

Try and sustain a delicate balance is critical. We have to, on the one hand, preserve our independence We have to keep posing hard questions and when necessary making hard answers, and we have to be careful in the projects we take on and the funding we take on to ensure that we never imperil our independence. On the other hand, it's important that we listen and cooperate and assist in the project of shaping this environment, avoid the sins of hubris and arrogance.  I'm brought back in this context to a line in Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" in which he celebrates a particular epistemological posture, which he summarizes as "both in and out of the game, and watching and wondering at it," something of that sort seems necessary if we are going to sustain a both constructive and independent role in this environment. 

So as i say and suggest at the beginning, your suggestions are stimulating and humbling.  We will do our best over the next decade to pay attention to them. Thanks so much to everyone for coming, we look to be in touch with all of you for the years to come.  Thanks.