View video interview here: http://www.collaborativesociety.org/2016/04/05/elizabeth-stark/
The Importance of Open Internet Culture
What is SOPA?
SOPA was the Stop Online Piracy Act which was proposed in the U.S. Congress in the house last October of 2011. Now there had been some previous bills along these lines that were proposed but shot down. And the basic premise of SOPA was, not surprisingly, to stop "piracy." The method that SOPA sought to take was to create an Internet blacklist. So it would create a list of websites that then could not be accessible to users in the states. Now interestingly, for example, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State for the U.S. has fought very hard for online freedom around the world. There are lots of countries like Iran, Burma and China that censor the Internet for their citizens. So on the international scale the U.S. had been very active in promoting Internet freedom, free speech and access to information. So there's been a very long history and if you look throughout the years even when radio came out it was seen to be a pirate industry, clearly the VCR came out. So what we often see with new technologies and in particular industries is that we have new technologies that are developed that people couldn't have even anticipated previously. And unfortunately those that are in the old industries don't necessarily want to see that happen or they're unable to really see what's going to come out of it so what they end up doing is trying to stop this.
This is the theory of disruptive innovation and it's often seen that traditional industries try to block new technologies because they see it as a threat and they would rather preserve the status quo. So what the recording and movie industries have done in the past on copyright law in the U.S. is engage very substantially in lobbying, working with politicians and trying to get laws that they want to see passed even in writing the laws and handing them to congresspeople that try to get them passed. Larry Lessig is now very engaged in this issue of what he calls "congressional corruption" because in working in copyright he got so frustrated seeing that so many people in the industry were working in this matter. So we saw this in 1998 in the U.S. when copyright was extended 20 years in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, otherwise known as the Mickey Mouse Act because Mickey Mouse was about to enter into the public domain. This meant the copyright would expire, anyone could use at least the copyrighted portion, there are other trademark issues that could have surrounded it and Disney was not happy about this so Disney and other people in the industry lobbied Congress to extend copyright another 20 years.
Believe it or not in the U.S. we have a bit of a different approach to copyright than in Europe. In Europe there's often an author or rights-based approach, in the U.S. it's all about incentivizing. So we have the consitutional basis to incentivize artists and creators to make their work to promote the progress of the arts and useful sciences. So if you're going to extend copyright that already exists, that does nothing to incentivize people to create because they've already created it.
Now to get back to SOPA, we saw yet another example of industries that were being affected by technology using their weight and muscle and money to try to engage the legal process to "solve their problem" instead of developing new and innovative technologies around it. And this is what SOPA effectively was. Now actually I've given quite a lot of talks about my involvement with SOPA but what we saw was entertainment industry spent over two years, about 200 million dollars to lobby for this. On the flip side, the technology industry, and there are companies, most notably Google and Facebook, are engaging in the lobbying game but they've spent only about 20 million. So one order of magnitude less in lobbying. And I've been very active in the Internet policy space and the open Internet space so I heard about SOPA back in October when it first came out and started talking to some friends of mine that are involved in Internet activism and we were basically saying "okay, so what can we do. We know the other side has tons of money, 100s of millions, we don't have that. But what do we have that they don't." And the answer was effectively that we have the people. And we have the Internet. And we have the capacity of the Internet to connect people in a way that the other side, with their very hierarchical and top-down approach, does not have.
So I actually e-mailed some of my friends over at Mozilla including the general counsel, Harvey Anderson, there. I'd known them through my work teaching at Stanford. They're great, they're passionate about promoting the open web. And I said to them "we as the technology community have to do something about this. It is about time." Traditionally, Silicon Valley and the technology industry has stayed out of politics. They've seen their role as something where they need to innovate and create new technologies and Washington and the U.S. and the political realm were outmoded and not something that Silicon Valley needed to engage with. Now the risk of this approach of course is that then D.C. and Congress would go and regulate the Internet and Silicon Valley would be blind-sided there would be nothing we could do. So it was about time that people within the technology community, and granted it's not just in California but elsewhere around the country and even around the world, stood up against effectively Congresspeople that didn't know anything about the Internet, that were seeking to regulate this very medium.
So we organized this meeting at Mozilla. We had representatives from start-ups, from activist and advocacy organizations, universities, folks from Stanford, lawyers, non-profits, everything in-between, and we coordinated what was ultimately this first day of protest on November 16 where it was a day where we blacked-out logos. So Mozilla took their first-ever policy stance on a law and they chose to create this page where they blocked-out their logo and they engaged their users, they have several hundred million of them, to take action. Tumblr, similarly, had been alerted about this through their investors that were concerned and friends and colleagues and created an amazing app to engage their users to call Congress. And on that day there were over 86,000 calls made to different Congresspeople around the country. And I believe at the time it was the largest single number of calls to Congress in any one day and we effectively shut down the phone lines of Congresspeople. And this was a group of people that were largely not involved with politics and whose voice was generally not heard because it was a younger, tech-saavy community that was often skeptical about the political process.
So what we had was a goal. It was to stop this law. We saw that it was going through Congress and by the way I should clarify, that day at Mozilla we had several staffers from Congresspeople present at the meeting and this is what they told us, they said "guys look, this bill has a ton of sponsors, in fact there are so many of them, they're both Republican and Democrat, they have the labor unions lined-up, they have lots of industry, I mean there's so much support for this if you don't do something huge, this will pass." So we knew that the task that was up to us was to do something huge and in all honesty I could never have imagined that what ended up happening that day would have been the end result. So even I was pleasantly surprised and excited as to how engaged people became. So effectively what happened was on January 18 of 2012, 18 million people took action against SOPA and this didn't happen merely by, as the media has often reported, executives or technology companies but it was really the online communities that came together, for example Reddit and Wikipedia, where the individual members and 1000s or 10s of thousands decided for themselves that they wanted to use their community as a platform to enable people to take action and stop SOPA. And this couldn't have happened without the power of not only the networked Internet but these communities and the companies like Tumblr and Google that saw the immense value in engaging the very people that were their users.
So in the end SOPA was stopped and it was actually heralded as the first time that people engaged in taking action on a political issue around the Internet on a massive scale in the U.S. In fact, SOPA not only became somewhat infamous in D.C. circles but it became a verb as in you did not want to risk getting "SOPAed" if you were a politician. You don't want to support a bill that people are going to rise up against in the form of millions and actually counteract that. What we saw was that politicians, on that day when people protested, were dropping like flies. They all decided they heard from their users, they heard from their constituents, if you will, not users and they decided that they were going to go with the people and not necessarily the money or the industries. So what this shows is there's a huge potential power for a significantly more engaged community when it comes to the political process and open democracy. And, after SOPA, this community is very interested in how can we keep this momentum going. How can we engage millions of people that care about the open Internet.
And, by the way, why is this so important? Well, the very basis of innovation, technological progress and scientific progress depends on having an open Internet without gatekeepers, without laws that will restrict people from visiting certain sites or creating certain technologies.
The Internet's Impact on Knowledge
I do think this comes down to the issue of knowledge and how the Internet is transforming knowledge. You mentioned earlier about universities and in particular the role of universities previously was to largely produce knowledge. And what we saw actually even in the U.S. there was some policy around patents that actually changed to an extent the role that universities played in patenting and promoted the commercialization of technologies coming out of the universities and the goal was to spur more scientific progress. Now a lot of people are looking back on that and saying "well is that necessarily a good thing?" In particular, say you have a life-saving drug that comes out of a university and one company patents that and then maybe it's a cure for a disease for millions of people in developing worlds but those people can't afford it so on and so forth. But what we're seeing is a significant shift in the way that knowledge is produced and the potential that the Internet provides from that through the ability for people to network is huge.
So for example Wikipedia I would actually count as one of the best examples of the democratization of knowledge on the Internet as we've seen it today. And previously you had Encarta or Brittanica and these large publishers of encyclopedias, now granted encyclopedias provide an overview, but the Internet enabled something that many people, if you told somebody 15 years ago "oh yeah, there's this resource and anyone can change it and in fact it's probably the most accurate encyclopedia out there today" people would have thought you were crazy because there was this prevailing idea that only experts could produce knowledge. So what the Internet has shown is even though they don't have say PhDs or advanced degrees or decades of experience, in a given space can be incredibly knowledgeable and can contribute. For example, on Wikipedia even if you don't know so much about a subject you can research it and look it up and get involved.
But to go even further we now have scientific communities where people engage and where things have become more open. So there's the Public Library of Science, which is an open access journal. They now have changed certain models of not only publishing to make articles available to the entire world but are rethinking the very concept of peer review. So to get to the idea of scientific progress, to me the way that the Internet is transforming the production of knowledge and disintermediating the way that it was previously produced in siloed universities often then with the knowledge coming out of that published in journals that a) are now incredibly expensive and b) relatively few people had access to. There's this huge amount of potential and things along the lines of Wikipedia there are now all sorts of efforts along the lines of enabling the "crowd."
I actually don't like the concept of crowdsourcing. I think that it implies a certain automation on the part of humans. I dehumanizes it in a way. But there are all sorts of examples, Kickstarter even if you will, the idea of crowdfunding or enabling the democratization of funding of cultural and some technological and scientific projects coming out of that. So the Internet is playing a huge role in changing the very structures and flipping them and turning them on their head. But as an example, for universities that don't allow students to use Wikipedia as a source, what if instead they said "yes, Wikipedia much like every source has errors."
By the way, I see errors in mainstream media, in The New York Times and other publications, constantly. Particularly in areas of my expertise. And everytime I see an error I send an e-mail to the journalist saying "hey, this is not correct. I wanted to let you know." Now how many other people do that. It's a lot harder to correct an error when you have to Google around for somebody's e-mail address as opposed to, say, editing on Wikipedia. But instead of saying "well, Wikipedia is not trustworthy" and these old models and ways in books there are errors, there are errors everywhere. There's a great saying coming from the open source software movement by Eric Raymond dubbed Linuses Law: Given enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow. And the idea there is within open source software and communities, if there is a bug and a lot of people have access to that code then they will find it far quicker or there's a higher likelihood that they'll find it than, say, if it's closed source and no one can see it. So that applies to the knowledge base more generally.
Now instead of university professors saying "well a student shouldn't use Wikipedia it's not trustworthy" they should say "go find articles on Wikipedia. If there are errors, correct them and make the resource better." And in fact that's what a colleague of mine in the course that I used to teach at Yale is doing, where all of the students in her course not only learn about Wikipedia but as assignments they edit and improve and make articles better.
The Need for New Models
So to tell you the truth I'm actually really frustrated with the debate over online music and online media. And there's this assumption that there's one model and that's the model that has been the predominant paradigm for so many years and that's the model that needs to carry-on and continue into the future. And that model is one in which people pay specifically for copies of a given piece of music or movie and those copies are restricted and therefore that's how the producers make money. Now if you look at the history of music there are all sorts of models prior to the advent of the pay-per-copy model that enabled musicians such as live performances even things like patrons, say cultural funding and institutions. So basically my take on the future of enabling artists to continue to create is that there's no one-size-fits-all model. There's no one way that is going to work for any given person in the cultural field. But that's okay and I actually think that's better because what that means is individual artists and creators can find what works best for them.
Now for example Kickstarter is a great way in which people can fundraise for their cultural creation and not only fundraise but engage people. Traditionally within the say music or movie industries, somebody's a passive consumer. They're not actively involved but they might go watch a movie or buy a copy of a CD. Kickstarter flips this on its head and changes it such that every single person that contributes to say the creation of a film feels part ownership over it. And this is the way that the Internet can transform this very idea of ownership. What always happens with technological progress and the advent of new technologies is a form of creative destruction if you will. Where previous approaches, previous ways of making money or creating value are no longer as applicable or they are being disrupted or destroyed by the new technologies and that's always difficult for say the individual person whose previous model did not work. And I know it's hard to say but the answer is really to be creative, to innovate and to find new models.
Those today are using the Internet to their advantage. They are creating memes. They're getting 10s and 100s of millions of views of the videos that they've created and that have gone viral. And they're not necessarily making all of their money by controlling access to their work. They're actually profiting and making their careers by making their work more available and not less available. So we'll be seeing more and more of this in the future but in the end, so Tim O'Reilly actually has a great axiom if you will right now about creating and capturing value. And his idea is generally for technologies and industries they should create more value than they capture. So there's a significant opportunity in the cultural realm for people to innovate and to create new technologies that not only capture value, so that's kind of reaping the benefits or making lots of money off of it, but also creating significant value for society.
A Common Ground for Collaboration
What we saw in the anti-SOPA community and the open Internet community was that a lot of sides weren't talking to each other. So one thing I care deeply about is inter-disciplinary thinking. There's a scenario right now where you have, particularly in academic institutions, people that are hyper-specialized and they spend 10 years working on this one sub-sub-sub-topic of one very minute thing but often the answer might come from a totally different say discipline or somebody who's alternate take, I'm also a firm believer that diversity breeds innovation so bringing in people with different perspectives, being in new environments, all of that helps to think about creative ideas and solutions to solve real problems. So with regard to the bio-innovation space and the existing people in the field, my advice to them would be to go and talk, don't be afraid embrace it.
That doesn't mean you have to change your entire business model overnight but to go and to talk to the open science community. Glean from them certain aspects of what will work. Don't be so opaque in your innovation process. You don't have to make everything you're doing available but maybe make some of your data available because through a community, I'm very into community and democratization, of individuals that care about an issue you might actually be able to not only create value by putting your data out there but capture some value from people around the world that have knowledge or expertise that might be able to provide feedback and share. So right now there's a lot of still siloing in the space of scientific progress. Within the academic institutions people often don't talk to each other. There are disincentives to share data because everyone wants their own big break and their own big publication as opposed to collaborating. It's not seen to be as prestigeous if you happen to contribute and work with others. Everyone wants to make their own success but unfortunately this disincentive to collaboration is doing a disservice to scientific progress generally because we're not seeing advances that are as substantial, we're seeing more incremental progress, something being improved by say a couple of percent as opposed to an entire rethinking and reinvention and new approach.
The Problem With Peer Review and Why It Affects Innovation
Now there are some good things about peer review and there are some bad things, right? You have all sorts of structures within this community that don't necessarily incentivize greater interaction. Now on the one hand, having peers in a given field seems like it would be a good thing because you want to get feedback but on the other hand this process is often locked-up within big publishers that don't even, their journals aren't open access, right? They charge 10s of thousands of dollars a year for access to the journal so that the process is rather opaque. Although this may seem radical to people that are in the community, my take on this would be that peer review needs to be in a much more open manner. There are certain communities, have you guys heard of peer-to-patent? So it's a community where there's effectively peer review from people with expertise to comment on patent applications to strengthen them and to give feedback. So there's significant potential now. Unfortunately, there's not really this norm within the scientific community of necessarily going public and making feedback available.
But things are shifting and we're going to see this more and more. As people that get into the scientific community that have been Wikipedia editor s, that have grown-up with the Internet, that have been digital natives start entering into the field, they're going to engage more and more, they're going to make things more open, more collaborative and more public. So if that's put out there earlier and if the research is made available in a way that solicits feedback, we can improve the quality of scientific data and research. And if you're only surrounded by people who all think the way that you do, you won't necessarily think of a new approach. I mean what is innovation? Innovation, in essence, it is the creative problem-solving and coming up with new approaches to problems and implementing them, right?
The Incentives
But in the end so much of life and society comes down to incentives and also feedback loops. So for example, what you'll see is there's a scenario in which there are mismatched incentives. In the academic context the incentive for somebody that's pursuing a career in academia is generally to gain tenure. What's the best way to get tenure? It's to publish in academic journals. What if universities instead of saying it's merely going to be on the basis of publishing in a journal were to say well we'll look at the breadth of your work, we'll look at what projects you're working on, we'll look at your research and experiments. Maybe you actually developed this world-changing technology and made it available to the entire world. Even though that didn't go in a journal, you've actually had a huge impact on the world. And we're seeing the seeds of this right now. I've heard of some scenarios where people were recruited and potentially granted tenure on the basis of projects that were outside of the traditional confines of journal publishing. But this is only at the very beginning. And what we're seeing right now and one of my major interests these days is in the learning space and it's one of disrupting the learning space outside of the traditional institutions because much like with other industries, in education institutions are risk-averse, they're change-resistant and it's much harder to get change from within than from outside of it.
And what we're seeing is an explosion of resources for online learning. There are courses now called "MOOCs." I don't really like that name but "Massively Open Online Courses" where 10s, 100s of thousands of people are signing-up to take classes. But interestingly we're largely seeing the traditional model of the lecture, which by the way has been around for centuries if not millenia dating back to say ancient Greece, being put online. So what I'm actually interested in right now is a disruption of the very models by which people learn and create knowledge and then disseminate it that involves much more of the actual solving of real problems, developing of new technologies, innovating and creating of new approaches to problems while engaging in learning. What's the best way to learn? It's often to solve a real problem or to actually make or create something as opposed to merely listening to some lectures and say answering a few quiz questions.
Why the Internet Empowers People
So in the end the Internet provides this power for anyone to take action and for anyone to really make or do something. That's really its beauty, right? So we have these great examples of websites that were created by people in their dorm rooms or even Wikipedia, something that started out as something so small that ended up becoming one of the most popular websites in the entire world. And it empowers anyone to create a technology and put that out there and make that available. But it also enables anybody to have his or her voice being heard. And what was so important with SOPA and then following on from that, ACTA, which was a law that was an international treaty that actually got shot down in Europe when a community within Europe of people that care deeply about the open Internet took action and protested, believe it or not, on the streets of Poland, for example. And we also by the way had protests in the U.S. around SOPA when people took to the streets. So it was pretty amazing to see. I never thought I'd see in-person protests for people that cared about copyright and the Internet. And then you actually have people that are technologists, entrepreneurs, Internet users that really care deeply about these issues.
So for people that want to take action there are quite a lot of things: first of all, talk to your community members, talk to your friends. Educate them. Tell them how important the open Internet is. Depending upon where you live, get in touch with your Congresspeople or member of Parliament. This is something that people think "no one will ever listen to me." Believe it or not, these people do want to hear from their constituents. In fact if you don't vote for them they won't be in office if you're in a democratic regime. So communicating with them, send them an e-mail, call them up, ask to set-up a meeting, tell them why you care about the Internet and why this is so important to you. That can actually be hugely empowering and what we saw with the SOPA and then ACTA movement was that it was only because of the people that stood up and cared that things were substantially changed. When it comes to knowledge and learning, if you've never edited Wikipedia just sign-up for an account, make an edit, get involved in that community.
For a lot of people they think "oh well, this is something other people can do but maybe I don't know enough." No. There are lots of things you can do to contribute. If you are a technologist, start contributing to open source software. Write-up some code for something that you want to see exist. Put it up on GitHub. Put your work out to the world. There's substantial opportunity for people, just post things on Twitter or Facebook. Spread the word and get other people to know because without the power of the people on the Internet it won't actually remain free. There are forces out there that are seeking to stifle the very innovation, be it scientific, cultural or technological, because they want to preserve their old model and old way of doing things. So it's up to us as the Internet community to stand-up against this and to actually have our voices heard. And we've seen this already. Historically, 18 million+ people around the world, it was not just in the U.S., stood up and had their voices heard about SOPA, they did it again with ACTA, so this is only the beginning. And when it comes to democracy, the Internet is transforming the way that democracy functions and the way that government functions.
So there are many ways to actually take action. Go take an online course. Go learn more about programming. Go learn more about science. Go get involved in a local hackerspace or scientific community. Go talk to friends and start a study group with them to learn more about these issues. So one other thing people can do is to actually, if you are facing a problem say with science or technology, figure out a way to solve it. Because often people assume "well, I'm not qualified to solve that. I don't have a PhD. I don't have all the knowledge other people have so maybe those people are smarter than I am and they're going to solve it." But actually there's significant power in people coming up with their own solutions and we have communities now like The Quantified Self, the Maker communities, there are all sorts of people now that are focused on hacking their own solutions to problems. So while you're learning you should be able to solve problems and in fact people that are learning often have ideas and solutions and I have examples of this from say even the pre-Internet days where people that were grad students.
This is really interesting. In a talk I gave there's this one case where someone who was a statistics grad student actually, because he thought it was a homework problem, solved what was then an unproven theorem. And often it's psychological. It's knowing. If you think "well, this is unsolved, I'll never be able to do it" you won't actually be able to do it. But if you think "okay, this is something that I can do," because maybe you thought it was a homework problem, but going forward because you know that anyone can solve a problem then you're far more likely to actually come up with a solution because you don't have that psychological barrier. There's a great quote by Steve Jobs where he talks about how there's a point in life when you realize that everything around you, when you look around, was created by humans and that you too can be one of the people in the world that can change that. And often people go throughout life and they don't realize that they actually have that agency and that power. So as long as you know that you have the power to change and create the things around you then you will actually be much more likely to do it.
CollaborativeSociety.org is a site which explores the thinking of researchers, academicians and thought-leaders on the topic of collaboration, among other things. Thanks to Alfred Birkegaard and Katja Carlsen for providing the video content. The contribution of The Collaboration Project is these transcripts.
