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[ ] German
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Amara Link: http://www.amara.org/de/videos/2kGOoOdz2i5w/en/628531/ 
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No neutral ground in a burning world

Today we want to talk to you about the role of technology and society in the longer arc of human history. 

We'd like you all to take away a couple of things away from this talk. The interaction between  a piece of technology and society is rarely settled in two or three years. Or ten years. We are still, as a society, barely learning how to use email. 
If you think even in the past five or ten years the way email's used in a professional context has changed radically. We don't really know what it means yet. We think we have a reasonable understanding of how to use an auditorium. We've figured that one out. Mostly. 
The other thing we'd like to talk about here and that we'd like you to take away frome here
is that, while geek-culture kind of grew up as an outsider-culture, that changed. It's at the heart of politics and social movement now, because it's the heart of how we communicate now. 
Geek-culture and hacker-culture used to be relatively apolitical. But now, every action that you take and every piece of code that you write has political effects. Now, you may intend some of these effects, you may not intend most of these effects. But they're there and we need to start thinking about, and understanding these changes.  

And this is a change that has happened in our life times.

Quinn is mostly an incoherent blend of anti-capitalist anarchism and Californian libertarianism. 

And Ella is a Marxist Syndicalist, presumably with blood on her hands, but since she likes me a lot she's promised me a six minutes notice on the purge before it happens so I can get a head start.

Despite the political parts of this talk, this talk is not about our politics. It's not about what Ella or I want you to do. It's about what we've learned from examining the network effects that we live with now. 

Because fundamentally — many of you will recognise this — architecture has a politics and it has a culture. And while we were all kind of sitting around in our culture, in Usenet in the nineties and wherever we got our start, kind of being, like Ella said, outsiders, the world pivoted, it changed and surrounded us and put us at the heart of these matters. 

And so whatever you want to do politically, what we are going to be talking about is the framework of the politics that technology is creating around the world right now.

One of the really interesting structures in the world right now that we spend a lot of time dealing with are states.
States have a couple of very basic things that they require to be able to interact with the world. 
They need to be able to see their territory, and the people who live in that territory, if they are going to be able to interact with them.
This is simply a truth that applies to anything, to anytime when someone needs to interact with a thing. 
If you can't percieve a thing you can't interact with it.
This map here is the planned city of Brasilia, which is a city that was built to be legible, to be understandable to the state.

The notion that a state should — if it nothing else, even if it can't understand all of the rest of the territory, all of its other cities, it should be able to understand the city from which it governs.
Of course, I don't know how many of you are familiar with the actual city of Brazlia, but it doesn't look much like what's indicated on that map — reality has kind of come back in and gotten a lot of messier again.

So, a lot of the time the ability of a state to see its citizens and to see its terrain is actually a very, very good thing. 
This is the snow map which founded modern epidemiology. It's a map of cholera deaths in London around a particular well, when they didn't understand that cholera was spread through water. 
This map told us things about human disease transmission that have saved at least tens of millions of lives. And this is a form of surveillance. 

Some times this is a bad thing. This is a map that the city of Amsterdam prepared from their very complete census records of where all the jews were in Amsterdam, for the Nazis.

During the process of the kind of societal adjustments following the revolution in France — and this was actually one of the demands leading up to the revolution from certain sectors in society — the revolutionary government, and this continued under Napoleon, standardized on the metric system.

One of the things that this did was that it eased a lot of the burdens on farmers who were having to deal with incompatible local unit systems being used to, basically, rip them off from what they should've earned on their profits, but it also laid the groundwork for tax standardization, and for central control.

To paraphrase Chateaubriand said at the time, you know if someone's using the metric system, that they're a narc. In order words, you know if someone is using the metric system, they worked for the government, they worked for the order that is attempting to impose legibility on society.

In the state of Qin, in the fourth century BC — umm, no relation — the emperor decided that imposing surnames on the population was good idea
They needed to be able to conscript people for labour, and for the military, they needed to be able to tax people, and they needed to be able to apply laws to families.
Now, many of the ruling families — and this is true throughout the world in places where names have been put into force and been imposed on people, many of the ruling families already had surnames that were frequently attached to where they lived or where they ruled, but common people had all sorts of different ways of being known.
And if you imagine you've got a dozen different ways that you can be named — and you might have some reasons to not want to be legible to the state — this is very, very convenient for you.
So assigning patronyms was a way of changing that power structure. And long the way, it may have also changed some of the power structures in the family.
It's not clear, but one of the things that they attempted to do was to make the head of the family responsible for all the actions of the rest of the family, which you could reasonably see might have some cultural shifts.
Now this is really interesting because it shows that the vision of the state has consequences. When the state looks at the world, it makes things fall into the boxes that it's measuring, even if they didn't before.

In other words, networks weird legibility.

So, this is kind of a controversial statement in this room right now, but I think that surveillance is actually a form of human concern — human attention and human concern — and surveillance is what we do when we care about something, and somtimes that care takes positive forms, coming back to the cholera map, sometimes it allows us to build infrastructure that works for a lot of people, sometimes it allows us to prevent disease and to feed children, and so on and so forth, and sometimes it's used for  control, but it's always used in some way of concern. And like technology, and many political qualities, it is
neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral, and I think that one of the things we have to bear in mind in this particular age of surveillance is that in many ways, surveillance is the small touches we do on one another, surveliance is when we check up on each other.
So finding a way to cast that, so we can recalmin the positive and suppress the negative is, I think, much more the task than to fight all surveillance — it's a much more subtle question than it would seem right now.
But when we talk about this kind of vision of the state — the state as watcher, the state as arbiter of money, for instance — the the new cycle we have right now if we want to take it back to all the way to the fourth century BC China, this all makes more sense. It makes sense that nations are trying to get all the information they can because they're trying, again, to make their world more legible.
And when they get all that information, they're putting it into categories that they perceive are meaningful. And that means destroying, by ignoring, the ones that aren't. I think one of the things that is really useful about reading this history is that gives you a measure of prediction on what states are going to want to do with technology. They want to tabs on their people for good and bad reasons, and there's always good and bad reasons.
And they want to take the power that they get by being the state, and use it to mold the country that they're in. That has been a tremendously progressive force in history, and it can be a tremendously destructive one, but it still comes from the same fundamental impulse.

And this is why it's really easy for me to stand up and say a state will always spy on its people as much as it possibly can, because states always have. Not just to maintain their power, but to maintain the ability to control consequences, which is a point we'll return to later.

So we're in an odd time of history, and I want to actually roll-back to another moment in history, and introduce you to William Tyndale from the 16th century. And Tyndale had to flee one day from his native England, and he never set foot in England again — he died outside of England, because he decided to translate the Bible into English. Now, centuries before this — this was always a contentious issue, translating the Bible into the local language — Pope Innocenct the third had essentially sentenced to death people who had tried to do this. The laity wasn't even to touch the Bible, it was to be interpreted and handed down from on high by the church, because the church were the people who had the knowledge to understand it. It was a top-down picture.

And Tyndale was part of a movement that wanted people to be able to take control of their own Christianity. He was opposed by Sir Thomas Moore, now saint Thomas Moore, who believed that the church was necessary to keep order. If this is sounding a bit Hobbesian, that's because it is a Hobbesian debate. And it's one that we're still — I'd say we're still in the third act of this. I used to think this was a good metaphor for where we are now but, actually, I think this is just the same thing, going on. 
So, Moore and Tindale got in a huge fight. Tyndale was on the run, Moore was sitting with King Henry the Eight, and they got into a big argument — and this argument spanned the continent at various points — about whether or not the Bible should be in English, and if people should be able to interpret their own religion. 
And, of course, that got started because of Martin Luther, who created a bunch of theses and stapled them to a door, and then sent them all around the continent.
Again, nothing on this list of church reforms that Luther and Tyndale wanted, was new. Not a thing was new. What was new was that if you were Martin Luther and you wanted to say the church needs to reform, and you got on a horse to go tell people that's what you believed, the church would burn you. But something had changed, and this is also how Tyndale — the statement Tyndale ran away and then they had a fight for a year, doesn't make any sense to most people in that era, and it just sounds assumed to us because of a communiation tehnology, in this case the communication technology is the printing press. [13:34]

I'll stay here in Germany,
The printing press had been a huge too of the church, they had been the best customers

Legibility on their religion: Make sure everybody had the right ...

then the dissidents found out they can do the same
Printin press going to reform the caholic churhc?
Printing press changed everything on the planet but not the catolic church

Power of guns, power of money and power of god are just three kinds of different power.
Lot of subltlety here on how power acts.

Corporate/state each are the same bad things?

You need your own kind of legibility, your own kind of surveillance.

Rule of law wihle the state ist panicking

how do we deal with this we don't know?
we can't interpret it anymore.

[]

On a personal level, things have gotten weird, too.

When you join a network that network or institution has a set of ethics.
You become
Infrastructure does this, too
Infrastructure has an ethics.
We're dealing with suicidal infrastructure we're embedded ourselves.
Things in our live kan somtimes override ethics. If you have kids .. do anything to feed those kids
We don't just have a single set of ethics.

We're literally fighting ourselves. That is one of the conditions of the next century.

Network we're on makes people weird.

Uncontrollable magic. That's what you have become.

We're kind of living thru this process. No language or infrastructure to describe.

[RIAA uset to fulfill a job to make music available cross country]

[Trying to keep the net to do things better, trying to feed the children]