Welcome to East to East to East to East to East. Everybody hear me? Yay. No. Okay.
You sure? This is going to be a bit out of left field. So, if you're enjoy like 5:45, you can come in and um I am a doctor. Uh twice over. Let's see.
One is mail order. Um I'm actually Let's see. Is this going to work maybe? Okay. Um right.
So this is about cypher function the law. Not a lot of law. Um but uh definitely some stuff about internet regulation. Your computer. Oh okay.
You switched. Yeah. Great. So, um, cyberpunk, who knows what cyberpunk is maybe. Yeah, a bit science fiction, uh, started as literary, um, with a lot of sci-fi novels, uh, then went into film.
It's high tech, low life. It's a typically a dystopian near future and then you know there's usually the standard dramatic story arc with a protagonist against uh you know whoever the antagonist have to be. There's going to be a lot of cats in this as well. Cipher punk of course I shouldn't have to uh really tell to this audience. Just think code is activism.
Now, what's the timeline between these two sort of trends? Um, the main takeaway is just cyberpunk is older than cippher punk, right? So, uh, 1984ish for cyberpunk. So between the two movements and if you think about all the punks, you think if you like to think in binaries, which I know a lot of programmers do, zeros and ones, um, dystopia or utopia, I would argue there's always a third option. So meh, um, but, uh, cyberpunk and cipher punk are fundamentally dystopian, right?
So they look at the future and see that it's going to be up. Uh solar punk, uh I see is a utopian movement looking at the future and saying we're going to build this next new beautiful future. Cipher punk within a dramatic story structure, right? Is the protagonist actually I would argue in cyberpunk's story arc. Okay, so uh this is where I do a little bit of magic.
Um idea space. uh who knows Alan Moore reads comic books like FIFA Vendetta etc. Right. So Alan Moore comes up with a lot of great comics that a lot of them have been made into movies, a lot of them on what you've seen. So when asked about his ideas, Alan Moore believes that idea space is a real space.
So when you're going and you're thinking about things, uh so you can think about, I don't know, the invention of the light bulb or whatever characters or coding, um that there's actually this place he goes to and he plucks out ideas from this place. Um so there there is an unconscious metaverse. So a second life or insert metaverse here uh where you can discover ideas. Now chaos magic is like a branch of uh magic or a belief system or religion is that beliefs can condition perception. Therefore you can change the world around you by changing your belief system.
Right? So, if you're really into conspiracy theories, everything's a conspiracy theory. Um, if you don't believe that chaos magic is a real working thing in culture today, Google manifestation, right? A lot of people are really into the idea or they may say, I manifested this or that, right? Um, keyboard cat.
So, this is the idea. is a long-standing idea. Been a lot of research on culture about uh memes about like different cultural things. Maybe it's a particular technology or a cultural idea behaving like viruses, right? So, uh memes are media viruses.
Um so what do you get when you put it all together? Uh cyberpunk is an idea that came out of idea space. Uh media viruses are running a mock. So, it behaves like a virus and it's influencing our reality as it is today. Or to say it with cats, uh you're monkeying around an idea space finding an idea.
You pull out a particularly virilent viral strain and it has an impact on the real world. So, back to cyberpunk. Um cyberpunk is a virus. It's done actually really well. So, this is my not very convincing data chart.
hockey stick, lots of cyberpunk, right? Um, I would argue that it's not necessarily the good kind of virus. So, it's dystopian. Typically, the landscape in this dystopian uh hell for films like Johnny Pneumonic, The Matrix, etc. Uh, there's a lot of corporate oligarchs.
There's great disparity in wealth. Uh, there's technologies, but they benefit the few and not the many. Um, and there's lots of systems of control. So that's Burrow's up there. He's very big on control.
Uh, but the tech is sick. And a lot of you use the tech, uh, like the tech, follow the tech. We can all agree there, right? Um, I call this virus the dystopian cyber future 84, DCF84 for the rest of the talk because you have to have TLAs, three-letter acronyms whenever you're giving a talk at a tech thing. So now we're going to jump over to generations.
Now this map is of course biased towards the west uh and a very particular view about generations, but you've of course got the lost generation uh the greatest generation and the GI generation having just celebrated 80 years of the end of World War II. um all the way up through the boomers, which a lot of people talk about, Gen X, which is actually my generation, uh millennials, zoomers, and then alpha, right? Um so if you think about the uh the arc of the infection rates uh or the spread of u DCF84 uh and you compare it with the generations my hypothesis is that gen X and millennials um have high infection rates of DCF84. So here it is in another graph right data point. Zuckerberg calls his company meta.
Meta the metaverse is actually uh as a term was coined in snow crash uh which is a cyberpunk novel from 93. This guy of course this guy's baby mama Grimes who has a song called I want to be software. Right. So what? Um, so my hypothesis is if you think in web 1, web two, web three terms, uh, that the internet of the 90s into the 2000s was actually shaped by the generation before and they were, uh, fundamentally, especially the builders of the internet, um, infected with a very optimism virus.
So they were very much utopians. Um, my data points for this is the gentleman on the left, who knows who that is? Anyone? That's John Perry Barlo. Uh he's one of the founders of uh the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I see a few nods.
Uh he drafted something in the '9s called the Declaration of Independence for Cyberspace, which you should all read just for shits and giggles. Um he's also a lyricist for the Grateful Dead hippie. Second one in. Who knows who that is? You should.
It's a cyberpunk conference. That's John Gilmore. He's one of the original cippher punks, also founded EFF. This guy on the right is Larry Leig. Um he in addition to finding creative comments, which is legal tools for we talk a lot about open source at this event, but doing uh open content and so on.
uh he founded uh creative commons along with some other people uh and has done a lot of work on uh legal things around this area. So some other loose facts uh legislators are now just having Gen X and millennials represented in them. Right? Zoomers generally are too young for a lot of legislators uh because of age restrictions but there are a few now. Um this is from not the current Congress in the US but the one before.
Um but you can see overwhelmingly uh actually boomers, right? Um and if you think that this isn't relevant to thinking about internet regulation, this guy on the bottom is from Thurman. Um he lived to 102 almost. He died in office, right? So he's a representative from um South Carolina and in the 60s he's one of the people that uh filibusters have protested against racial equality in the US and he also you know continues to vote on many of the laws that are with us today in the 90s on the first part of internet regulation.
Um so my hypothesis is just uh web 3 right so all the technology that we're talking about and it's been a theme throughout this conference is built by the hero protagonist it's the the infrastructure at least is there for the cipher punk um ideals um but the tech has been co-opted by those infected with DCF84 and regulated by people with old models right with generations before. But in the future, if you look ahead, uh as more Gen Xers and millennials start taking up more and more positions of power within uh legislatures, executive branches, etc., you're going to see people with more and more uh infection rates of DCF84 looking to make these decisions. And you can look at that dystopian cyber future, right? um and say I don't want that to happen.
I'm going to develop tools or um put my effort and time into preventing it from happening. Or you can say the tech sick actually the life of a corporate oligarch is pretty good. I think I'm going to try to go for that route. So what to do? Um, so those two gentlemen, uh, boomers, uh, really involved with the early days of the internet in many different ways.
Um, they started the Electronic Frontier Foundation. We heard this morning from PG about all the different disparit groups in the privacy space. Um, this is an OG one. Um this gentleman has a thing called pathetic dot theory which probably most of you haven't heard of but is worth looking at uh in terms of how uh internet technology etc gets regulated. I'll quickly go through it.
You have the law obviously you have the architecture which is the code um norms and the market. So two recommendations actually uh within the space more broadly maybe not investing in privacy coins as we heard in the keynote last night um but within the space more broadly there is a lot of money there so I know a lot of the focus is on building the tech that's good that's part of the puzzle but actually taking some of the money that you may make um or the time and effort that you may have to give and putting it into organizations that can help influence uh regulation or law or maybe perhaps even standing for um you know an election yourself. Those are the kinds of things that will make a difference. Um there's been I think we did the survey yesterday um where we talked about the what are some of the problems with privacy. These are a lot of the things that come up.
The norms part like I hear a lot of complaints that people don't value privacy. They're not using the tools that we're building. I this I think is a big focus because it's not the architecture that's being built. It's really focusing on the human and the culture and the behavior behind it. So that's it.
Thank you. And there's a minute 30 for questions. Thank you, Dr. Jordan. Spoke like a real doctor right there.
Um, if you have any questions, you can ask him outside. I have a minute. I know, but like actually
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