Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Joi Ito at 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3)



Joi Ito (torrent, 485MB) at the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress (22C3).
Who is Joi Ito? From: http://technorati.com/about/management.html:

Vice President of International Business and Mobile Devices

Joichi Ito is in charge of international and mobility development for Technorati. He is founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm which is the lead investor in Six Apart, and is on the board of Creative Commons. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. In 1997, Time Magazine ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the “50 Stars of Asia” by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 “Global Leaders of Tomorrow” for 2002. He was appointed as a member of Howard Dean’s Net Advisory Net during the Dean campaign.

Joi’s blog is Joi Ito’s Web.

Slide overview:
  1. Open network is open society: innovation and power at the edges
  2. Democracy is broken
  3. The competition of ideas
  4. Monopolies thrive in free markets: Aggregation of power in an open market
  5. Voice is more important than votes
  6. Profiling is not about your pr0n habits
  7. ID systems -- the better to spoof you with
  8. Beware the boogymen
  9. People who share are pirates: Hollywood and big software
  10. Terrorist and child pro0agraphers use the internet: Law enforcement
  11. The network must be intelligent: government censorship and network operators
  12. What can we do?
  13. Free content and free speech: Creative Commons, blogs, alternative media
  14. Network open and whole: ICANN+, free speech
  15. Support free and open source software and sharing
  16. Amplify global voices
  17. Do not overestimate conspiracies
  18. Question authority and hack the system
Quotes:
  1. (53:50-55:20) "I think many people have an overestimation of the power of these conspiracies. I've given talks at the Trilateral Commission, which is considered, supposed to be a really scary place. It's not. It's just a bunch of really powerful people who sit around and they talk like normal people and they make decisions like normal people. It's the same at Davos, it's the same in these big country beauracracies. It's actually more like the movie Brazil than it is like 1984.
    And the thing is there is a natural inertia for things to happen. Like I tried to stop the privacy, I tried to stop the national ID bill in Japan, and I got 80% of the public, all the media, more than half of the politicians to vote ok for my moratorium until the privacy bill was passed, and it went through anyway. And I tried to find who was the guy who pushed it through and everything and I finally talked to one of the politicians, who said, "Oh it just went through because it would have been too confusing and disruptive if we stopped it, even though we all agreed it was a bad idea."
    And this is what I mean by a broken democracy, and this is what I mean that there really isn't a conspiracy. There was no person, that was why it was difficult. There was no person who was out to do the national ID. It just became a 300-, 600-million dollar project that just started rolling along, and you couldn't stop it. It's like a tanker with the driver dead over the wheel.
    That's what we're fighting against. We're fighting against momentum, we're not fighting against really smart people with lots of information. And actually we're smarter than them, which is another thing that's important. We have less power but we're smarter and we can coordinate better. And I can say anything here because I doubt any of them will be watching this video."

  2. (27:48-28:30) "And so I also think that the open internet is probably the center of democracy in the 21st century. Because I think that the revolutions that we used to have in the past were fought with pitchforks and guns, but today revolutions happen through information. We see this in terrorism, we see this in developing nations, and without open access and voices for information you can't cause change in the future. And the only way to allow a bottom-up and edge-driven process is to preserve an edge-driven network. I think open network is more important for democracy than the right to bear arms or the right to vote. That's my opinion."

  3. (29:00) "Democracy is broken, but that doesn't mean there's something better. The thing is how can we change, how can we fix, and how can we deal with the problems."

  4. (32:15-33:40) "The other important thing is very obvious, but something you have to talk about. And since we're talking about privacy, is that the correct balance is transparency of those who have authority and privacy of citizens. The problem is that the natural tendancy, the law of physics of power is, that people in power want secrecy and they would like their subjects to be transparent. And it always goes this way, there's no reason it shouldn't go this way, and if you were in power and you had all the special privilege, of course you would want your secrecy, right? And I think that one of the things you have to understand is that it's not that they're evil, it's not that they're some scheming consipracy, it's just rational. If I'm George Bush, and I want to push through a bunch of things, I'm going to try to do it as secretly as possible, and put in bills that are, it's just a normal thing. And so we have to think about how do you hack a system which natural tendency is towards more power aggregation and more secrecy and transparency for those who don't have power. One of my friends is a Chinese guy and his dad told me, "Money is lonely, it likes to go where other money is." And it's the same with power, it's just like a law of physics, it doesn't have ethics, it's just the way it is. And I think this is something you have to think about, because what the information age and the internet and all these other things is doing is increasing the ability and lowering the friction for power aggregation, it doesn't change the fundamental dynamics that have been around for a long time."
I enjoyed many of Joi Ito's insights during his keynote.

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