[00:06.230 --> 00:10.270]  So is this guy, how do I get this guy up here?
[00:11.070 --> 00:11.830]  There we go.
[00:12.410 --> 00:12.650]  Yes?
[00:13.030 --> 00:13.310]  No?
[00:17.240 --> 00:17.720]  Hello?
[00:20.980 --> 00:22.020]  Is he not coming in?
[00:23.920 --> 00:25.320]  Wait, there we go.
[00:25.620 --> 00:26.180]  It was just loose.
[00:26.400 --> 00:26.540]  Okay.
[00:26.840 --> 00:27.960]  You can tell I'm not a hacker.
[00:29.360 --> 00:36.860]  So I used to program basic on my parents TI-99-4a when I was like 10.
[00:37.220 --> 00:41.440]  And I think that was the last time I ever did any computer programming of any kind.
[00:41.640 --> 00:43.820]  So I'm a stranger here amongst you.
[00:45.460 --> 00:49.900]  But I want to say that, you know, I'm really, really honored actually to be able to speak.
[00:51.180 --> 00:51.980]  Seriously honored.
[00:52.960 --> 01:01.520]  And I'm also very intimidated to speak to you all today because I'm going to be speaking about something that you guys probably know a lot more about than me.
[01:02.760 --> 01:09.380]  And I also want to say I'm honored to speak here because I've known the folks at 2600 for a really long time.
[01:10.180 --> 01:14.040]  One of the projects I'm going to be talking about today, which is Indymedia.
[01:14.700 --> 01:23.180]  The New York version of Indymedia would not have existed without the incredible support of the folks at 2600 for many years.
[01:23.380 --> 01:31.300]  So this is a chance for me to kind of start to pay back a huge debt I owe to Emmanuel and the other folks at 2600.
[01:31.520 --> 01:33.460]  So anyway, I will try not to be too intimidated.
[01:33.720 --> 01:34.600]  I will try to be interesting.
[01:35.260 --> 01:38.780]  I will try... I don't think I'm going to speak for the entire time.
[01:38.780 --> 01:46.520]  And I would actually really love to take questions and, if possible, in a room this big, you know, kind of get a conversation going amongst everybody.
[01:47.100 --> 01:50.060]  So we'll see if it's possible in a room this size.
[01:50.640 --> 01:52.660]  I actually don't know quite how long this is going to go.
[01:53.420 --> 01:56.180]  But we'll see and hopefully there will be a lot of time for talking.
[01:56.180 --> 01:56.880]  Okay.
[01:58.100 --> 02:02.640]  So, you know, I was asked to speak here today about kind of...
[02:02.640 --> 02:05.500]  When I talked to Mike Castle about it, he said, hey, could you...
[02:05.500 --> 02:07.800]  You know, maybe you want to talk about kind of what's going on in journalism.
[02:09.080 --> 02:10.840]  So that's what I'm going to talk about today.
[02:10.840 --> 02:12.980]  I'm going to talk about kind of what's going on in journalism.
[02:13.420 --> 02:17.180]  And I want to try, if I can, to relate it to...
[02:20.160 --> 02:20.900]  There we go.
[02:21.620 --> 02:25.980]  To a lot of the issues that you all have talked about in this conference.
[02:28.100 --> 02:29.000]  If I can.
[02:29.340 --> 02:35.840]  So basically I'm just going to be talking about some of the ideas I have about what I think is going on in journalism right now.
[02:36.840 --> 02:40.880]  And how journalism relates to a lot of the things that are going on in technology.
[02:41.480 --> 02:45.700]  And I really want to hear what a lot of you think about this.
[02:45.960 --> 02:46.120]  Okay.
[02:46.480 --> 02:48.400]  So, first of all, show of hands.
[02:48.600 --> 02:51.940]  Who here has ever heard of the organization called Indymedia?
[02:53.180 --> 02:53.880]  Most of you.
[02:54.440 --> 02:57.280]  Who here has ever heard of an organization called Demand Media?
[02:58.500 --> 02:59.320]  That's what I thought.
[02:59.580 --> 02:59.800]  Okay.
[03:00.060 --> 03:00.420]  Good.
[03:00.700 --> 03:04.480]  It's always nice when you ask that question and the show of hands is exactly what you think it's going to be.
[03:04.620 --> 03:08.360]  So, in case you were sitting in the front, you didn't see, almost everyone here has heard of Indymedia.
[03:08.980 --> 03:12.720]  Very few of you have heard of anything called Demand Media.
[03:13.380 --> 03:16.240]  And I want to talk to you about what Demand Media is today.
[03:17.120 --> 03:17.560]  Okay.
[03:17.860 --> 03:19.060]  I want to start with a story.
[03:19.980 --> 03:21.180]  And the story is this.
[03:21.420 --> 03:23.820]  So, on the last day of the...
[03:23.820 --> 03:27.180]  Who here was around for the Republican National Convention in 2004?
[03:27.380 --> 03:27.560]  All right.
[03:27.640 --> 03:28.440]  A lot of you.
[03:29.860 --> 03:38.980]  The last day of the Republican National Convention here in New York City in 2004, for those of you who weren't around or don't remember it, this was a convention.
[03:38.980 --> 03:41.700]  There were massive protests against the Republicans in New York.
[03:42.060 --> 03:43.680]  There were many, many arrests.
[03:44.800 --> 03:54.240]  Probably the Republican National Convention in 2004 was the high point of Indymedia in New York City when it came to sort of decentralized, participant-driven news coverage.
[03:54.540 --> 04:02.240]  And it was also, in addition to the journalism that was provided there, it was a massive logistical and organizational undertaking.
[04:02.700 --> 04:04.220]  It was massive.
[04:04.220 --> 04:06.180]  There was a huge space rented out.
[04:06.340 --> 04:09.400]  There was an incredible amount of coordination of volunteers and people.
[04:09.680 --> 04:10.940]  It was very big.
[04:11.320 --> 04:15.160]  And all of this, you know, blogs were around at this point in 2004.
[04:15.640 --> 04:17.140]  They were starting to become hip.
[04:17.720 --> 04:19.920]  You know, it was starting to become hip to be a blogger.
[04:20.120 --> 04:26.800]  But pretty much everything that Indymedia in New York did in 2004 regarding the Republican National Convention It predated blogs.
[04:27.120 --> 04:27.920]  It predated Twitter.
[04:28.300 --> 04:34.220]  It predated all of that stuff that we now know a lot about when it comes to sort of new forms of journalism.
[04:35.320 --> 04:43.100]  And I was intimately involved in planning the organizing for the Republican National Convention coverage in 2004.
[04:43.100 --> 04:45.580]  So I know what was going on pretty well.
[04:46.040 --> 04:47.160]  So, okay.
[04:47.860 --> 04:51.340]  So the night of September 1st, 2004, I don't know how well you can see that.
[04:51.460 --> 04:56.240]  But the night of September 1st, 2004, you know, people have been going...
[04:56.240 --> 04:58.940]  You know, it's a lot like the HOPE Conference is for the organizers, right?
[04:58.960 --> 05:01.000]  People have been going crazy for weeks.
[05:01.360 --> 05:02.580]  Everyone is exhausted.
[05:03.660 --> 05:05.120]  Everybody's getting really punchy.
[05:05.580 --> 05:07.000]  Everybody's friends have been arrested.
[05:07.440 --> 05:12.320]  You know, there are a bunch of people who are locked up in this pier on the far west side.
[05:13.120 --> 05:15.760]  You know, people are getting kind of rammy.
[05:16.080 --> 05:20.840]  And all of a sudden, this post pops up on what was called the Open Newswire.
[05:22.260 --> 05:24.440]  And it reads like this.
[05:25.740 --> 05:28.800]  The headline is from the...
[05:28.800 --> 05:30.380]  We couldn't make this up department.
[05:30.800 --> 05:36.900]  And someone called Eyes Everywhere wrote, quote, Folks, it sounds unbelievable, but it's true.
[05:37.120 --> 05:40.520]  Coming back from a brilliant and important protest against the corporate media.
[05:40.520 --> 05:44.920]  Walking back to my car parked on 48th Street, just west of 5th Avenue.
[05:45.160 --> 05:49.980]  There, on the corner, I saw a large gang of undercover slash scooter cops.
[05:50.380 --> 05:51.880]  Some in uniform, too.
[05:52.500 --> 05:53.920]  Swarming around a phone booth.
[05:54.760 --> 05:59.100]  The image was curious because the cops were bathed in what I call a television glow.
[05:59.640 --> 06:04.660]  It turns out that they were on the Internet, cruising none other than our favorite New York City Indymedia.
[06:04.660 --> 06:08.020]  And then there were about 10 exclamation points.
[06:09.000 --> 06:21.780]  In the light of the overly heavy-handed police presence and their nasty scare tactics, going so far as to even prevent us from walking down the street, I admit I was thrilled to see that they were using Indymedia as their source of information.
[06:22.100 --> 06:26.980]  I would dare say it was a potentially cool source of relief for the thankless job of a cop.
[06:27.220 --> 06:28.280]  Did anyone else see it?
[06:28.420 --> 06:29.680]  I wish I had taken a photo.
[06:29.680 --> 06:31.600]  Then it says, this is all in caps.
[06:31.860 --> 06:34.400]  Cops, if you're out there, give us some of your news.
[06:34.720 --> 06:36.940]  Please, keep the protests alive.
[06:37.160 --> 06:39.540]  And then another 10 exclamation points.
[06:40.280 --> 06:42.600]  Okay, did this actually happen?
[06:43.100 --> 06:44.060]  Was this true?
[06:45.700 --> 06:47.060]  Who knows, actually.
[06:47.200 --> 06:51.260]  This could be a great urban legend that has now propagated itself for the last six years.
[06:51.520 --> 06:53.800]  But I like to believe that it was true.
[06:54.920 --> 07:03.020]  Because what this story does, and the reason why I'm telling it to you here today, is that it captures the shift in what I call the affordances of digital communication.
[07:04.900 --> 07:09.880]  And what I mean by affordances is what digital communication allows us to do.
[07:10.160 --> 07:22.680]  And I think that this moment captures what I see as a shift from communication and technology that allows decentralized participation amongst a great number of people.
[07:22.680 --> 07:29.020]  Everyone can participate and contribute journalism to a single group from all over the place.
[07:29.560 --> 07:34.060]  Two, technology that enables decentralized surveillance.
[07:34.340 --> 07:37.480]  And technology that enables decentralized surveillance.
[07:37.760 --> 07:42.500]  And even more importantly, what I like to call quantification on a mass scale.
[07:43.100 --> 07:43.460]  Right?
[07:43.660 --> 07:55.780]  So you go to... you have this event where you have all of these protesters out there, you know, everywhere submitting their information, photos of the protests, and updates, and sound, and everything else, you know, on the one hand.
[07:55.980 --> 08:02.460]  And then, all of a sudden, you see these NYPD folks show up, and they're all sitting around being like, hey, what's going on in the protest?
[08:02.600 --> 08:03.040]  Where should we go?
[08:03.100 --> 08:03.840]  Well, let's check it out.
[08:04.960 --> 08:05.320]  Right?
[08:05.320 --> 08:13.140]  I think that is... that is a... a important digital shift that I want to spend some time talking about today.
[08:13.780 --> 08:20.700]  And something also important to keep in mind is that this shift doesn't just represent a shift towards government surveillance.
[08:21.220 --> 08:29.420]  I know at this conference there is... there is a lot of talk of government surveillance and the ways that governments sort of monitor digital communication.
[08:30.340 --> 08:33.200]  Primarily here, I'm going to be talking about corporate surveillance.
[08:33.880 --> 08:40.240]  And I'm going to be talking about corporate surveillance that is directed at what I call algorithmic prediction.
[08:41.120 --> 08:48.120]  In other words, using algorithms to predict what an audience wants and what an audience is going to do.
[08:49.180 --> 08:52.900]  And that is the key shift that I'm going to be talking about here today.
[08:52.900 --> 09:08.220]  And I think that is the major storyline of journalism going into 2010, is a shift in technology that allows decentralized participation to a shift in technology that allows corporate surveillance aimed at algorithmic prediction of the audience.
[09:08.860 --> 09:09.460]  Okay.
[09:09.760 --> 09:15.760]  And I tried to capture that shift in the title of this talk which I call From Indymedia to Demand Media.
[09:16.020 --> 09:25.040]  Indymedia represents sort of one form of what technology lets us do and demand media represents another form of what technology lets us do.
[09:25.040 --> 09:26.120]  Okay.
[09:26.560 --> 09:28.360]  The nature of the shift can be seen here.
[09:29.180 --> 09:35.260]  It can be seen as a shift from technology that enables activism to technology that enables exploitation.
[09:36.240 --> 09:39.520]  Technology that enables politics to algorithms.
[09:41.440 --> 09:52.400]  Technology that... where you have an Internet that is based on what Clay Shirky called an Internet based on love to what I would call an Internet based on low wages.
[09:53.220 --> 10:01.860]  And finally, you have a shift in, you know, a organization that is represented by its extreme poverty.
[10:02.180 --> 10:04.860]  Indymedia was nothing if not perpetually broke.
[10:06.720 --> 10:10.200]  As anyone who ever was involved in it can attest.
[10:10.640 --> 10:22.440]  To the other organization I'm going to be talking about, Demand Media, which is not only broke, but is potentially going to release an IPO this fall that could be valued at anywhere as high as $1.5 billion.
[10:23.480 --> 10:25.860]  Which would make it the largest IPO since Google.
[10:26.020 --> 10:32.140]  And if they don't release an IPO they will probably be bought by Google or by Yahoo for another extreme amount of money.
[10:32.560 --> 10:33.740]  Okay, so that's the shift.
[10:35.120 --> 10:35.660]  Okay.
[10:38.200 --> 10:38.740]  So...
[10:38.740 --> 10:41.200]  The shift begins...
[10:41.200 --> 10:42.600]  It begins...
[10:42.600 --> 10:43.160]  Sort of...
[10:43.740 --> 10:44.220]  Technology...
[10:44.220 --> 10:45.160]  You know...
[10:45.160 --> 10:48.540]  There's always been decentralized participation in technology, right?
[10:49.360 --> 10:51.860]  Decentralized sort of DIY media...
[10:51.860 --> 10:53.500]  Make your own journalism...
[10:53.500 --> 10:56.300]  All of that did not start with the Internet.
[10:56.620 --> 10:58.340]  It did not start with Indymedia.
[10:58.480 --> 10:59.320]  It did not start with blogs.
[10:59.600 --> 11:01.700]  It did not start with any of that.
[11:02.980 --> 11:03.800]  You know, sort of...
[11:03.800 --> 11:04.760]  Be the media...
[11:04.760 --> 11:07.180]  All of that has been around for a very long time.
[11:07.180 --> 11:13.940]  One of the things that I like to talk about is the zine explosion that really got started in the 1980s.
[11:15.400 --> 11:26.840]  You know, the explosion that we saw in creative media making online in the late 1990s and early 2000s was only the latest step in a gradual decentralization of information production.
[11:27.420 --> 11:33.420]  And I like to argue, and this is somewhat not true, but I like to argue that, you know, the predecessor to the homepage was the zine.
[11:34.320 --> 11:34.680]  Right?
[11:34.980 --> 11:36.500]  So you had these things called homepages.
[11:37.160 --> 11:41.380]  When I was in college, you know, 1995, 1994, everybody wanted their own homepage.
[11:41.800 --> 11:43.980]  What were people making before they made homepages?
[11:44.080 --> 11:44.960]  They were making zines.
[11:45.420 --> 11:46.760]  Who here has heard of zines?
[11:47.020 --> 11:47.860]  Most of you probably.
[11:48.040 --> 11:48.800]  Yeah, that's what I thought.
[11:49.240 --> 11:49.560]  And...
[11:51.060 --> 11:54.980]  Biela Coleman a couple days ago said, you know, Chris, make sure you talk about some of the hacker zines.
[11:55.120 --> 11:59.400]  So, when she mentioned that to me, I ran home and learned a lot about hacker zines.
[11:59.400 --> 12:02.420]  So you all know about hack... you know, you all know about this.
[12:02.600 --> 12:04.880]  Probably some of you have read something called Phrack.
[12:05.000 --> 12:07.300]  I just started reading it the other day.
[12:07.400 --> 12:11.740]  This is actually... you can't really see it, but this is the inaugural edition of Phrack.
[12:12.120 --> 12:19.980]  We also had things called 40 Hex Online, the First Amendment, spelled with a PH, the Brotherhood of Warez, and of course, everyone's favorites.
[12:20.440 --> 12:23.680]  You know, sort of not really a zine, but a magazine, you know, 2600.
[12:27.340 --> 12:34.520]  So, this first trend towards decentralized, do-it-yourself information production didn't begin with the Internet.
[12:34.980 --> 12:37.640]  And it didn't begin with Indymedia.
[12:38.060 --> 12:52.620]  But, you know, I would argue that Indymedia, the emergence of Indymedia in 1999, represented a qualitative shift, a major step forward in decentralized publishing.
[12:54.120 --> 13:04.740]  And it was a major step forward in decentralized publishing, because it brought a lot of different threads together that were going on in media, that were going on in politics, and that were going on in tech.
[13:05.880 --> 13:12.940]  And I like to talk about how Indymedia's community, when it first began in 1999, was made up of sort of three groups.
[13:13.600 --> 13:19.100]  The first group was a group of kind of pre-digital community media makers.
[13:20.280 --> 13:27.460]  And these pre-digital community media makers were groups like Paper Tiger Television, the Manhattan Neighborhood Network.
[13:27.660 --> 13:29.520]  Has anybody here heard of Paper Tiger TV?
[13:29.800 --> 13:30.460]  Yes, some of you have.
[13:30.540 --> 13:40.700]  Paper Tiger TV was a video collective in the 1980s, predated the Internet, that, you know, worked on producing TV shows and specials.
[13:41.740 --> 13:46.380]  And, you know, they were big in sort of the open, you know, the video movement.
[13:48.000 --> 13:58.800]  Paper Tiger TV representatives from Paper Tiger TV, the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, they were involved in the early days of kind of planning what they wanted this Indymedia thing to be.
[13:58.980 --> 14:10.600]  And because they had always made media, their idea was, all right, we want something that can cover activism and cover politics from the point of view of the people who are doing, you know, the protesting.
[14:10.860 --> 14:11.900]  So that was one strand.
[14:12.520 --> 14:29.480]  Second strand, in the late 1990s, you obviously had this huge explosion in what is sort of, you can call it many things, counter-globalization movement, the globalization movement, but the good kind, the anti-globalization movement, you know, whatever you want to call it.
[14:29.480 --> 14:33.720]  You had this sort of new political, well, not new political movement.
[14:33.820 --> 14:42.960]  You had a political movement that had been going on a lot of places around the world for a very long time that had just started to sort of make an impact in the global north.
[14:46.840 --> 14:50.100]  And that sort of political strand was emerging as well.
[14:50.240 --> 14:58.260]  And this was a political strand that was very strongly influenced by a group of, by a group in Mexico called the Zapatista movement, right?
[14:58.400 --> 15:01.000]  So there, on the one hand, you have media makers, right?
[15:01.120 --> 15:11.880]  Paper Tiger TV, Manhattan Neighborhood Network that were involved in a lot of sort of journalism and media-making activities in the 1980s and into the 1990s, right?
[15:12.020 --> 15:23.140]  You had, on the other hand, you had this sort of political emergence of this new social movement that was strongly influenced by counter-globalization and the Zapatistas.
[15:23.680 --> 15:28.140]  They were involved in these early planning meetings to create Indymedia.
[15:28.340 --> 15:43.020]  And the third group, which is the group you all probably know the most about, is what I like to call the politically-oriented hacker community, which, of course, is only a small subset of the larger hacker community, right?
[15:43.020 --> 15:44.960]  Because not every hacker cares about politics.
[15:45.260 --> 15:50.720]  Certainly not every hacker would identify themselves with, you know, these other two strands that I talked about.
[15:50.900 --> 15:52.080]  But certainly there were some.
[15:52.440 --> 15:54.100]  There were some people who would.
[15:54.660 --> 16:11.880]  And so the third strand to this is what I call the politically-oriented hacker community, and particularly a group of, like, what I call coder activists, who were affiliated with the Community Activists Technology Network in Sydney, Australia.
[16:12.620 --> 16:15.920]  And again, the name here is Community Activists Technology.
[16:16.160 --> 16:18.300]  Sydney, Australia, they're also called Catalyst.
[16:18.840 --> 16:20.420]  Anybody here ever heard of Catalyst?
[16:21.300 --> 16:23.500]  Catalyst sort of is where this all starts.
[16:25.200 --> 16:29.880]  And the folks at Catalyst had this idea that...
[16:29.880 --> 16:35.960]  It actually started because the folks at Catalyst wanted to figure out a way that they could create an online calendar, right?
[16:36.100 --> 16:43.420]  They wanted to create an online calendar, and they were tired of having to photocopy their calendars every time they wanted people to know what was going on.
[16:43.580 --> 16:45.340]  So they wanted to create an online calendar.
[16:45.520 --> 16:55.560]  And then they figured, well, look, if we're going to create an online calendar, why not come up with a way that instead of sharing what's going to happen, you know, ten days from now, we can actually share what happened yesterday.
[16:56.620 --> 16:59.200]  Or we can share what happened five minutes ago.
[16:59.340 --> 17:00.860]  And, hey, we've got the Internet now.
[17:01.020 --> 17:02.480]  We can do this, right?
[17:02.480 --> 17:06.880]  We can find a way to share information about what's happening right now.
[17:07.800 --> 17:11.000]  And this was the idea of folks at Catalyst.
[17:11.320 --> 17:18.640]  And you can see right here, this is actually the J18 Sydney webcast.
[17:18.760 --> 17:22.200]  And this was the debut of a software called Active.
[17:22.620 --> 17:31.380]  From the best I'm aware, this was the first time that this type of real-time software was used in documenting a political protest.
[17:31.540 --> 17:33.000]  It was not called Indymedia then.
[17:33.140 --> 17:34.340]  It was called Sydney Active.
[17:34.740 --> 17:40.100]  But if any of you have seen an Indymedia website, you can sort of see the origins of it here, right?
[17:40.380 --> 17:41.140]  You've got...
[17:41.800 --> 17:49.040]  So instead of the list of things going down like that, you've got a list of things which are kind of going across the screen, right?
[17:49.100 --> 17:52.460]  But you can see there are things like Riot Van, right?
[17:52.540 --> 17:55.020]  By Simon Rumble at 6:37 p.m. Tuesday, June 22, 1999.
[17:57.120 --> 18:01.500]  I don't know about you, but having one of these around makes me feel less safe, not more.
[18:02.180 --> 18:02.660]  Right?
[18:02.820 --> 18:07.080]  And these sort of updates run across the page.
[18:07.360 --> 18:09.940]  And this was June 18, 1999.
[18:11.060 --> 18:13.160]  Okay, so what was new...
[18:13.160 --> 18:20.240]  And this is the page and this is the software that would eventually, in a couple months, go on to become Indymedia.
[18:20.820 --> 18:22.500]  Okay, so what was new about this?
[18:22.720 --> 18:23.700]  What was new?
[18:23.900 --> 18:24.780]  A couple things.
[18:24.780 --> 18:27.640]  The main thing that was new is that it happened in real time.
[18:28.580 --> 18:35.560]  That was the huge breakthrough that was new about the Active software which these guys in Sydney created.
[18:36.320 --> 18:43.760]  And this guy, Andrew Nicholson, who at the time was a member of Catalyst in Sydney, he wrote recently...
[18:43.760 --> 18:44.860]  He was sort of talking, actually.
[18:44.920 --> 18:50.100]  I think he gave an interview with sort of this overview of what was happening in Indymedia at the time.
[18:50.100 --> 18:58.200]  He wrote recently that the breakthrough of Active, which was the coding, which was the software, was that activists could share information in near real time.
[18:58.880 --> 18:59.320]  Right?
[18:59.500 --> 19:13.080]  So instead of updating what happened, you know, at the end of the day and you'd sort of collect all the information and say, hey, this is what happened today, somebody sitting on their, you know, computer somewhere could say, this is what happened five minutes ago.
[19:13.080 --> 19:15.480]  And they could upload it immediately.
[19:16.360 --> 19:20.620]  So Active allows for updating about what's going on in real time.
[19:20.980 --> 19:21.960]  Second thing that was new.
[19:22.140 --> 19:23.680]  It was radically participatory.
[19:24.360 --> 19:26.120]  Anyone, anywhere could upload.
[19:26.800 --> 19:27.200]  Right?
[19:27.600 --> 19:28.920]  You could log in.
[19:29.200 --> 19:30.460]  You didn't have to log in.
[19:30.560 --> 19:35.740]  You could put the page up and share what was going on.
[19:36.340 --> 19:36.940]  Right?
[19:36.940 --> 19:44.100]  And that is different than what had existed before primarily on the net.
[19:44.320 --> 19:51.200]  You had email sort of groups, chat groups that were sort of limited in terms of who was actually participating.
[19:51.420 --> 19:51.520]  Right?
[19:51.860 --> 19:55.480]  The idea here was that anybody could participate.
[19:56.660 --> 20:05.720]  The third thing that was new was that the stuff that Indymedia was covering was concerned with what I call public issues in a new way.
[20:06.260 --> 20:06.500]  Right?
[20:06.900 --> 20:10.500]  The people who were documenting this stuff were concerned about politics.
[20:11.300 --> 20:12.960]  They were concerned about politics.
[20:13.220 --> 20:17.740]  And they were theoretically gearing their coverage toward everybody.
[20:18.160 --> 20:20.760]  They were saying, look, this is politics.
[20:20.760 --> 20:24.240]  You should all be interested in what's going on here.
[20:24.400 --> 20:25.860]  This affects all of you.
[20:26.200 --> 20:26.640]  Right?
[20:26.800 --> 20:31.840]  This little story here about this riot van, people who uploaded this story said.
[20:31.940 --> 20:34.420]  They said, this relates to every single one of you.
[20:34.580 --> 20:35.580]  This is political.
[20:35.900 --> 20:38.040]  And because it's political, it impacts everyone.
[20:38.720 --> 20:42.880]  And it was not geared towards, for example, a particular zine community.
[20:43.140 --> 20:43.260]  Right?
[20:43.560 --> 20:47.000]  So in the zine world, you had a very strong sense of, this is who my audience is.
[20:47.080 --> 20:48.000]  This is who I'm targeting.
[20:48.240 --> 20:49.760]  This is who I think cares about this.
[20:49.960 --> 20:55.340]  It was not similar quite in so far as you were saying, look, here they were saying, everybody should care about this.
[20:55.440 --> 20:56.240]  This is for everyone.
[20:56.420 --> 20:58.460]  Everyone can participate and everyone should care.
[20:59.680 --> 21:02.040]  And when you bring these three things together, right?
[21:02.300 --> 21:06.380]  Real time, radically participatory, concerned with public issues.
[21:06.600 --> 21:08.780]  What you basically have is you have a hack of journalism.
[21:09.700 --> 21:12.440]  You have now hacked journalism in a pretty fundamental way.
[21:12.880 --> 21:14.460]  Because what does journalism care about?
[21:14.580 --> 21:16.840]  Journalism tells everyone that it cares about the public.
[21:17.040 --> 21:17.120]  Right?
[21:17.700 --> 21:21.600]  It says that reporters are the ones who bring you the information in real time.
[21:21.760 --> 21:21.860]  Right?
[21:21.960 --> 21:23.220]  Because they're there and you're not.
[21:24.080 --> 21:26.100]  And they say that only a few people can do it.
[21:26.100 --> 21:31.140]  So when you bring these three strands together, you're not just hacking the media, you're hacking journalism.
[21:33.260 --> 21:37.580]  And this is, I would argue, a significant change and a significant development.
[21:38.520 --> 21:41.240]  And this is just a long quote here that I think is useful.
[21:41.700 --> 21:47.100]  This is from a recent overview of Indymedia's anniversary that got put out in February 2010.
[21:47.100 --> 21:51.180]  And it basically says, I call it the emergence of the participatory web.
[21:51.300 --> 21:57.200]  And the quote is, for Nicholson, this guy in Sydney who I talked about, who did this along with another guy, Matthew Aronson.
[21:57.800 --> 22:02.240]  These were sort of the two hackers in Sydney who invented this software.
[22:02.760 --> 22:16.420]  For Nicholson, the first Indymedia site uniquely brought together the hacker systems of communication, which had developed in the early days of the BBS and the ARPANET with an expanding counter-globalization movement and its non-expert adherents and enthusiasts.
[22:16.800 --> 22:20.680]  The interactive elements, which were so novel in the Indymedia site, had a long history.
[22:21.060 --> 22:31.080]  And the smaller base of the open source community of programmers who were writing websites for other programmers and were used to using the most advanced technologies of the time to rate and improve those programs.
[22:31.360 --> 22:43.900]  So this is the guy who helped develop the software and he is pointing to the relationship here between what the hacker community was doing and then what they tried to bring into this new form of journalism.
[22:44.580 --> 22:44.740]  Okay.
[22:45.040 --> 22:46.540]  Fast-forward ten years.
[22:47.200 --> 22:48.160]  Here we are, right?
[22:48.740 --> 22:49.720]  This is everywhere.
[22:51.120 --> 22:55.720]  What was new and unique and radical in 1999 is now...
[22:56.580 --> 22:58.080]  I mean, look, this is Twitter, right?
[22:58.460 --> 22:59.700]  From the Tehran Bureau.
[23:00.060 --> 23:01.980]  And we've all heard these stories, right?
[23:02.460 --> 23:06.080]  Iranian activists using Twitter, et cetera, et cetera.
[23:06.220 --> 23:12.340]  Hillary Clinton, the State Department, goes to Twitter and says, hey, please don't shut your site down for maintenance.
[23:12.340 --> 23:17.760]  These activists in Iran are using this technology in a new way, right?
[23:18.200 --> 23:22.300]  So there has been a mainstreamization of this.
[23:22.620 --> 23:26.740]  This has now been mainstreamed to sort of an incredible degree.
[23:26.840 --> 23:29.020]  And I call this the ubiquity of Web 2.0.
[23:29.540 --> 23:31.300]  Which is a term I hate, actually.
[23:31.600 --> 23:36.740]  But sort of using their own names to describe how they like to call themselves...
[23:36.740 --> 23:37.920]  You know, what they like to call themselves.
[23:38.060 --> 23:40.200]  This is sort of the ubiquity of Web 2.0.
[23:40.200 --> 23:49.500]  And what was once avant-garde is now nicely branded with this, you know, little bird, right?
[23:49.600 --> 23:51.240]  And it's light blue, very...
[23:51.240 --> 23:54.200]  This is black background, right?
[23:54.400 --> 23:56.280]  Twitter, light blue, right?
[23:56.520 --> 23:58.520]  I mean, the colors tell us a story here.
[23:59.280 --> 23:59.840]  Okay.
[24:00.280 --> 24:02.620]  The ubiquity of Web 2.0 protest media.
[24:04.500 --> 24:14.100]  So, the next step or sort of the counter current or the thing that's happening on the side that's really big and important that not many people are talking about in these sorts of rooms...
[24:14.560 --> 24:17.280]  Is what I like to call from Indymedia to demand media.
[24:17.600 --> 24:20.020]  And I'm going to tell you now a little bit about this thing, demand media.
[24:21.620 --> 24:29.880]  Demand media is a large company that was created in 2006 by a former sort of venture capitalist named Sean Colo.
[24:30.340 --> 24:32.760]  He was a principal in the private equity industry.
[24:33.060 --> 24:38.160]  And this other guy, Richard Rosenblatt, who was the former chairman of MySpace.com.
[24:38.880 --> 24:42.820]  And they came together in 2006 and they said, hey, I've got a new idea for a media company.
[24:43.040 --> 24:44.240]  I think this could be really neat.
[24:45.820 --> 24:48.100]  What does demand media do?
[24:48.100 --> 25:00.920]  Demand media basically creates online content and online journalism based on a combination of measuring consumer demand and predicted return on investment.
[25:01.800 --> 25:05.320]  And what that all means, I'm going to talk about in a second.
[25:06.040 --> 25:12.980]  But this is sort of the new way that these entrepreneurs and these very savvy businessmen have decided, you know what?
[25:12.980 --> 25:14.120]  Forget this.
[25:15.180 --> 25:16.040]  Everybody's doing this.
[25:16.220 --> 25:20.260]  What's really important is this new thing, this new model.
[25:20.420 --> 25:28.920]  And if the sound is working, I'm going to try to load up a brief video of them talking about it.
[25:28.960 --> 25:29.860]  Let's see if this works.
[25:34.470 --> 25:35.470]  And it may not be.
[25:38.460 --> 25:39.660]  I do not think it is.
[25:41.440 --> 25:41.960]  That's OK.
[25:42.620 --> 25:43.360]  If it's not, that's all right.
[25:43.420 --> 25:44.320]  I can explain to you what it is.
[25:44.320 --> 25:46.320]  Anyway, I mean, you should at least get a look at this guy, right?
[25:46.420 --> 25:47.280]  This is Steven Kidd.
[25:47.740 --> 25:50.060]  He is the CEO of Demand Media.
[25:51.900 --> 25:53.020]  I do have it plugged in.
[25:53.200 --> 25:53.220]  Yeah.
[25:53.840 --> 25:54.760]  But that's OK, really.
[25:54.860 --> 25:56.060]  I mean, you know, it's even...
[25:56.980 --> 25:59.760]  It's just as interesting to sort of get a look at this guy, right?
[25:59.760 --> 26:07.760]  He is not hanging out at 34 East 29th Street in New York, you know, sleeping on couches.
[26:08.560 --> 26:10.760]  He is doing something else.
[26:10.840 --> 26:13.180]  Turn a passion into a career, right?
[26:13.260 --> 26:14.520]  Reach an audience of millions.
[26:15.260 --> 26:17.920]  Make money, right?
[26:20.380 --> 26:24.940]  Very friendly, enthusiastic, clean-shaven looking guy.
[26:24.940 --> 26:25.240]  OK.
[26:25.440 --> 26:26.600]  Anyway, I'll tell you.
[26:26.720 --> 26:28.700]  I can tell you what he's talking about.
[26:28.820 --> 26:29.940]  He doesn't need to tell you.
[26:30.020 --> 26:30.860]  I can tell you.
[26:32.300 --> 26:34.260]  Let's get the slideshow started again.
[26:38.630 --> 26:39.150]  OK.
[26:39.570 --> 26:42.270]  So, I talked a little bit about what Indymedia did.
[26:42.390 --> 26:44.570]  I want to talk about what Demand Media does.
[26:44.790 --> 26:44.910]  OK.
[26:45.250 --> 26:46.650]  What does Demand Media do?
[26:46.870 --> 26:55.070]  Like I said, it creates online content based on a combination of measured consumer demand and predicted return on investment.
[26:55.870 --> 27:00.010]  Basically, Demand Media employs an army of freelancers.
[27:00.270 --> 27:03.810]  And their army of freelancers is particularly large.
[27:04.030 --> 27:04.450]  Why?
[27:04.770 --> 27:07.430]  Who's getting laid off right now in the media world?
[27:08.170 --> 27:09.090]  Journalists, yes.
[27:09.450 --> 27:15.010]  They have a huge army of freelancers, largely because nobody who wants to do journalism can find a job and they're all getting fired.
[27:15.490 --> 27:18.710]  So, he's got a large talent pool to draw from here.
[27:19.050 --> 27:22.330]  They employ an army of freelancers and laid off journalists.
[27:23.490 --> 27:32.810]  So, they employ multiple algorithms when they're deciding what content they want this army of freelance journalists to make.
[27:33.450 --> 27:39.230]  They monitor search engine query data and they monitor bids on advertising auctions.
[27:39.590 --> 27:43.250]  So, they have an algorithm that monitors what people are looking for on Google.
[27:43.250 --> 27:49.930]  And they also have an algorithm that monitors how ad space is being auctioned off.
[27:50.050 --> 27:53.170]  So, how much is ad space on the front page of the New York Times going for?
[27:53.290 --> 27:55.070]  How much is this space going for?
[27:55.210 --> 27:56.790]  And what are people searching for?
[27:56.930 --> 27:58.550]  What are people trying to find on the web?
[27:58.770 --> 28:00.690]  So, those are two algorithms.
[28:01.830 --> 28:03.450]  And from these, right?
[28:03.570 --> 28:05.430]  So, you figure out what people are searching for.
[28:05.510 --> 28:08.790]  And you figure out how much advertising space is going from.
[28:08.970 --> 28:13.750]  From these, potential article topics are generated, right?
[28:13.910 --> 28:19.770]  So, if all of a sudden, a thousand people, you know, say they've been to HOPE.
[28:19.950 --> 28:24.210]  And all of a sudden, a thousand people just learned about how to hack your GPS.
[28:24.210 --> 28:29.290]  And everybody starts typing into Google, how to hack your GPS really quickly.
[28:30.390 --> 28:31.870]  Demand media finds that.
[28:32.070 --> 28:33.450]  They know that's going on.
[28:33.590 --> 28:39.930]  And then they will say, hey, maybe we need a short 500 word article on how to hack your GPS.
[28:40.590 --> 28:41.150]  Right?
[28:41.330 --> 28:44.350]  Because they've monitored that this is actually something that's happening on the Internet.
[28:44.630 --> 28:52.890]  And then what they do is, they use a second algorithm to determine how much money this article could make.
[28:52.890 --> 28:53.670]  Right?
[28:53.770 --> 29:02.470]  So, they say, if we create this article, how much money is it going to make for us based on how much, based on a lot of things.
[29:02.570 --> 29:02.630]  Right?
[29:02.690 --> 29:08.030]  They crunch all these numbers together and they say, how much, you know, could this article, how much money could this article make?
[29:08.710 --> 29:15.290]  And then they say, they use a third algorithm to try to farm this article out to their army of freelancers.
[29:15.470 --> 29:15.790]  Right?
[29:15.850 --> 29:17.310]  They have their database of freelancers.
[29:17.450 --> 29:18.270]  They use a third algorithm.
[29:18.270 --> 29:23.770]  And they say, okay, X, Y, Z, and A people would be really good to write this article.
[29:24.010 --> 29:28.390]  And based on how much money it would make, we're going to know exactly how much to pay them.
[29:29.650 --> 29:30.050]  Right?
[29:30.110 --> 29:33.550]  We're going to know to the sense how much this article is worth.
[29:33.650 --> 29:36.210]  So they know exactly how much this article is going to be worth.
[29:36.370 --> 29:38.490]  They know exactly who can write it.
[29:38.570 --> 29:43.110]  And they know exactly how much to pay them so they can make the most money that they possibly can.
[29:43.970 --> 29:44.370]  Right?
[29:44.430 --> 29:57.010]  The article is then farmed out to one of the thousands of freelancers, Employers employed by Demand Media who take on the assignment and generate a story loaded with SEO keywords, search engine optimization keywords.
[29:57.330 --> 29:58.850]  And I'll get to that in a second.
[29:59.010 --> 29:59.950]  It's actually kind of amazing.
[30:00.850 --> 30:03.510]  Demand Media publishes 7,000 articles a day.
[30:05.050 --> 30:06.570]  And there are other companies.
[30:06.750 --> 30:09.890]  There's another one called Associated Content, which I'm going to talk about in a minute.
[30:10.090 --> 30:13.150]  They publish, I think, 20,000 or 30,000 articles a day.
[30:14.290 --> 30:14.930]  A day.
[30:16.990 --> 30:25.210]  If you're one of the people who is lucky enough to work for one of these companies, your compensation is between $3 and $30 an article.
[30:25.870 --> 30:28.810]  Usually the average price is about $6 per article.
[30:29.330 --> 30:34.130]  So you can make $50 a day if you churn out, you know, 10 articles.
[30:34.690 --> 30:35.510]  50 bucks.
[30:36.890 --> 30:37.610]  All right.
[30:37.830 --> 30:39.410]  What does this content look like?
[30:39.550 --> 30:42.130]  This is almost beautiful, really.
[30:42.830 --> 30:46.950]  I don't know if you can read this, but the title of this article, this is by Associated Content.
[30:46.990 --> 30:51.830]  It's not by Demand Media, but it's the same type of company.
[30:52.070 --> 30:58.230]  And the title of this article is Speed Stick Musk Deodorant Product Review.
[30:59.110 --> 30:59.490]  Okay.
[31:00.490 --> 31:05.930]  Obviously they monitored that somebody was looking, you know, how good is Speed Stick Musk Deodorant?
[31:07.190 --> 31:09.150]  Maybe we should do a product review.
[31:09.450 --> 31:10.370]  This is what it says.
[31:10.510 --> 31:19.390]  It says, as I was browsing the articles in our local CVS drug store, I noticed several deodorants with 80% off.
[31:20.030 --> 31:23.630]  One of them was a hefty size Speed Stick by Menin.
[31:23.970 --> 31:33.270]  The real-tail price was $4.19 and it was discounted by $2.39, making my cost just 80 cents.
[31:33.370 --> 31:33.490]  All right.
[31:33.570 --> 31:34.630]  First of all, that's wrong.
[31:34.850 --> 31:39.210]  The cost was $1.80, making my cost just 80 cents.
[31:39.410 --> 31:45.030]  I figured this big guy was twice the size of the arid deodorant I often purchase.
[31:45.190 --> 31:45.430]  Okay.
[31:45.610 --> 31:46.730]  What's a keyword there?
[31:46.950 --> 31:49.490]  This big guy was twice the size.
[31:50.110 --> 31:50.710]  Right?
[31:51.170 --> 31:53.090]  This big guy was twice the size.
[31:53.590 --> 31:54.370]  Rare it is.
[31:54.830 --> 31:56.650]  This big guy was twice the size.
[31:56.870 --> 32:00.450]  Why else would you write something so totally... I mean, that doesn't even make sense.
[32:00.830 --> 32:02.490]  That's barely English.
[32:02.490 --> 32:03.170]  Right?
[32:03.550 --> 32:04.370]  But you get it in there.
[32:04.690 --> 32:06.390]  This big guy is twice the size.
[32:06.710 --> 32:07.630]  It goes on.
[32:08.370 --> 32:10.630]  The deodorant is made for... Here it is again.
[32:10.870 --> 32:13.890]  The deodorant is made for a guy's big hand.
[32:14.630 --> 32:17.270]  But my smaller hand was able to hold it.
[32:17.490 --> 32:22.250]  It is really neat because it has black grips on both of the sides.
[32:22.610 --> 32:29.630]  The front and back are white with the logo in black and white on white, bronze, and black backgrounds.
[32:30.150 --> 32:33.890]  The top of the deodorant is a clear plastic... No.
[32:34.050 --> 32:36.930]  The top of the deodorant is a clear bronze plastic.
[32:37.290 --> 32:41.930]  On this state's, quote, smells great all day.
[32:42.970 --> 32:44.050]  It goes on.
[32:46.190 --> 32:51.450]  I lifted off the top of the deodorant and there was a clear plastic protector on it.
[32:51.950 --> 32:52.590]  Okay.
[32:53.650 --> 32:59.230]  I pulled this off to show the deodorant, which was a clear, solid, see-through product.
[33:01.690 --> 33:05.650]  The musk smell was very refreshing and not over the top.
[33:06.090 --> 33:09.070]  Some of the... Oh, and here's your final keyword, I think.
[33:09.330 --> 33:15.770]  Some of the men's deodorants were just too strong a fragrance for me to try out.
[33:15.770 --> 33:24.510]  See how men, big, too big, too strong, black, handle on both sides, rubber, right?
[33:25.130 --> 33:26.010]  What is this?
[33:26.130 --> 33:27.310]  This is porn, right?
[33:27.870 --> 33:34.250]  I mean, this is, this is speed stick reviews disguised as pathetic pornography.
[33:36.550 --> 33:43.430]  And, and this is getting churned out, like I said, at a rate of, for some companies, 7,000 to other companies, 20,000 a day.
[33:44.050 --> 33:45.370]  And who's doing them?
[33:46.010 --> 33:49.690]  Some combination of human beings and machines, right?
[33:49.790 --> 33:55.250]  What you've really got going on here is this, this hybrid of human beings and machines, right?
[33:55.550 --> 33:59.790]  So anyone who wants to learn anything about speed stick deodorant, right?
[33:59.990 --> 34:04.710]  You type in how good is speed stick, uh, musk deodorant, right?
[34:04.810 --> 34:05.950]  People type this stuff in.
[34:06.050 --> 34:06.650]  That's the thing.
[34:06.790 --> 34:08.990]  People look up stuff like this all the time.
[34:09.970 --> 34:16.010]  And the idea is that this is going to be at the top of your search engine results when you type this in.
[34:17.230 --> 34:17.630]  Okay.
[34:19.430 --> 34:21.930]  So here's how I want to frame the shift.
[34:22.110 --> 34:26.910]  And as I start to head towards wrapping up here, um, this is the shift.
[34:27.030 --> 34:30.750]  So, you know, and like I said, these are not the only things going on online.
[34:31.270 --> 34:34.410]  These are what I might call, you know, kind of ideal types, right?
[34:34.570 --> 34:36.570]  Indymedia and demand media ideal types.
[34:36.670 --> 34:38.370]  They just sort of represent bigger trends.
[34:38.370 --> 34:46.750]  So you shouldn't assume that this is the only meaningful thing going on in journalism, but these are trends and they are represented by these two organizations.
[34:47.710 --> 34:50.090]  Um, with Indymedia, who was a participant?
[34:50.390 --> 34:50.910]  Right?
[34:50.990 --> 34:52.870]  The participation was activists, primarily.
[34:53.170 --> 34:55.830]  People who were passionate about politics.
[34:56.270 --> 35:01.290]  People who deeply cared about these very unpopular things a lot of the time, right?
[35:01.690 --> 35:02.870]  These were the participants.
[35:03.510 --> 35:05.550]  Who is the participant in demand media?
[35:05.790 --> 35:07.590]  Well, people who are getting screwed.
[35:08.630 --> 35:10.290]  Basically laid off journalists, right?
[35:11.230 --> 35:24.150]  Laid off journalists and just people who, you know, they want to make $6 an article to earn, you know, spending money or, you know, drug money or, you know, alcohol money for that.
[35:24.310 --> 35:25.610]  You know, college kids, right?
[35:25.690 --> 35:27.990]  Say you want to earn, you know, buy some pot, right?
[35:28.230 --> 35:30.510]  You know, you want to earn a couple bucks, you know.
[35:31.090 --> 35:31.670]  What do you do?
[35:31.730 --> 35:32.750]  You work for demand media.
[35:32.850 --> 35:33.930]  The opportunities are endless.
[35:34.890 --> 35:38.130]  You can write about all the things that, that I mentioned earlier.
[35:38.830 --> 35:43.010]  Um, so demand media, who's your, who's your participant, you know, laid off journalists?
[35:43.890 --> 35:48.810]  Um, who, who, second thing, who's your, who are the people you're aiming your product at?
[35:49.670 --> 35:50.730]  Who's your community?
[35:50.910 --> 35:52.150]  Who are you trying to reach?
[35:52.870 --> 35:56.170]  Um, for Indymedia, you're trying to reach an engaged community, right?
[35:56.350 --> 36:00.010]  You are trying to reach all of those people out there like you.
[36:00.010 --> 36:10.290]  Those people out there like you, who really care about these topics, who really care about these politics, who, for one reason or another, are passionate about this, this thing, right?
[36:10.390 --> 36:18.230]  Whether it's the World Trade Organization, or whether it's community gardens in New York City, or, you know, whatever it is, that, those are the people you're trying to reach.
[36:19.150 --> 36:21.950]  Who are you trying to reach with this sort of demand media idea?
[36:22.190 --> 36:26.490]  With demand media, you're trying to reach the algorithmic web, right?
[36:26.590 --> 36:27.550]  That is your public.
[36:27.950 --> 36:31.930]  Your public, it's not really even people anymore, right?
[36:32.010 --> 36:41.730]  Your public is sort of these mashed together algorithms, Google, people, keyword searches, SEO optimization, right?
[36:41.790 --> 36:45.350]  It's almost hard to talk about these things as if they're people, right?
[36:45.370 --> 36:48.190]  They're all these things sort of mushed together, right?
[36:48.210 --> 36:53.510]  So you've got this, this public that's kind of generated out of this algorithm, right?
[36:54.030 --> 36:54.950]  Who's the idea?
[36:55.090 --> 36:56.790]  What's the idea of what you're trying to reach?
[36:57.010 --> 37:00.570]  It's sort of this, this human soup, right?
[37:00.770 --> 37:03.390]  That's been mushed together from all these things.
[37:04.730 --> 37:10.790]  And one can sort of quibble with that in a lot of ways, you know, I'm sort of being extreme in my generalizations here.
[37:10.970 --> 37:26.670]  But, you know, I think that there is, when you compare these two things, you see a real difference between the idea of trying to reach an engaged community of activists and trying to reach the random million people a day who type in a keyword search for speed stick musk deodorant.
[37:27.130 --> 37:27.770]  Right.
[37:28.090 --> 37:28.410]  Okay.
[37:31.250 --> 37:42.750]  The politics, well, the politics for Indymedia are obviously radical, and you can certainly apply radical politics to many things, I mean, right?
[37:42.910 --> 37:49.750]  You can, you know, the messages you can use, you can talk about the daily costs, you can talk about a lot of the sort of lefty liberal blogs, right?
[37:49.810 --> 37:51.150]  You can talk about the conservative blogs.
[37:51.230 --> 37:56.230]  Look, I like the conservative blogs a hell of a lot better than I do demand media, because at least they're people who care.
[37:57.650 --> 37:58.010]  Right?
[37:58.450 --> 37:59.490]  That's who you're trying to reach.
[37:59.590 --> 38:01.050]  With this, what are your politics?
[38:01.250 --> 38:01.370]  None.
[38:01.550 --> 38:02.010]  I mean, none.
[38:02.490 --> 38:03.310]  There's, there's...
[38:03.310 --> 38:05.230]  Well, yeah, right?
[38:06.070 --> 38:08.950]  But capitalism in a really stupid way.
[38:09.330 --> 38:12.350]  I mean, capitalism in the most sort of banal way possible.
[38:12.350 --> 38:13.330]  What other way possible?
[38:16.230 --> 38:18.470]  We will, we will, we will get to this in a minute.
[38:18.650 --> 38:21.610]  I'm, I'm almost done.
[38:22.170 --> 38:22.730]  All right.
[38:23.070 --> 38:25.350]  And what's the paradigm here?
[38:25.490 --> 38:27.490]  The paradigm in the media is agonistic.
[38:27.890 --> 38:31.510]  The paradigm with demand media is what I call algorithmic, right?
[38:31.610 --> 38:36.030]  By agonistic, I mean people who want to participate and sort of fight back.
[38:36.830 --> 38:38.870]  Demand media, the politics is the algorithm.
[38:38.870 --> 38:45.810]  So, before I conclude, I just want to say, you know, what are we, what are we looking at here?
[38:45.890 --> 38:53.930]  We're looking at this transition from a dominant journalistic paradigm where media creation is based on love.
[38:54.210 --> 38:54.490]  Right?
[38:54.990 --> 38:55.870]  In some ways.
[38:56.250 --> 38:58.390]  Love of what you're covering.
[38:58.670 --> 39:00.330]  Love of the people you're trying to reach.
[39:00.330 --> 39:03.650]  Love in the way that you care so much about it.
[39:03.770 --> 39:05.050]  You are willing to do it for free.
[39:05.670 --> 39:05.770]  Right?
[39:06.510 --> 39:07.790]  That sort of exists.
[39:10.330 --> 39:13.090]  Quasi, you know, sort of tangential to exploitation.
[39:13.570 --> 39:13.690]  Right?
[39:13.790 --> 39:14.410]  I mean, look at this.
[39:14.530 --> 39:16.370]  This is a flyer from 1999.
[39:16.370 --> 39:19.950]  This is nothing if not, you know, based on some sort of love.
[39:21.010 --> 39:21.610]  Right?
[39:23.210 --> 39:24.410]  And then there's this guy.
[39:27.190 --> 39:32.530]  So, I just want to conclude by saying that I think this is an importance.
[39:33.170 --> 39:44.030]  And in this community, and in the community of people who are doing this form of radical media production, this is an unacknowledged shift that needs to be acknowledged.
[39:44.330 --> 39:49.110]  Because in the boardrooms of journalism right now, people are not talking about this.
[39:49.290 --> 39:51.710]  They're not even talking about this.
[39:51.950 --> 39:53.530]  They don't care about this.
[39:53.850 --> 39:55.470]  This is not important to them.
[39:55.750 --> 39:59.410]  What's important to them is this.
[40:00.170 --> 40:04.710]  Yahoo bought associated content a couple months ago for some untold millions of dollars.
[40:04.870 --> 40:09.190]  You know, the company that made this was bought by Yahoo for a giant sack of money.
[40:09.830 --> 40:15.290]  USA Today is sort of taking its stories about travel from this guy.
[40:16.090 --> 40:16.190]  Right?
[40:16.430 --> 40:19.450]  The dominant trend in journalism is not about this.
[40:19.610 --> 40:20.950]  It's not about this.
[40:23.330 --> 40:24.490]  It's about this.
[40:24.990 --> 40:41.550]  So, before we get to, you know, before we congratulate ourselves too much about the fact that we have had all these successes with things like this, I think we really need to think about as people who are, you know, participating in the world of sort of technology and media and activism,
[40:42.270 --> 40:45.110]  you know, what do we do about this guy?
[40:45.450 --> 40:48.210]  What relevance does this guy sort of have to us?
[40:48.830 --> 40:50.230]  And with that, I want to conclude.
[40:50.750 --> 40:55.170]  And I want to, you know, so it's 1143, so we've got 15 minutes for questions.
[40:55.210 --> 40:56.010]  I love to talk.
[40:56.230 --> 40:57.730]  I've got a mic there and a mic up front.
[40:57.750 --> 40:58.610]  So, thank you very much.
[41:06.660 --> 41:07.380]  In the back, yeah.
[41:08.040 --> 41:10.640]  And you can, if you want to say your name or anything beforehand, that's cool.
[41:10.680 --> 41:10.680]  Hello.
[41:11.000 --> 41:11.220]  Hello.
[41:11.480 --> 41:11.760]  Hello.
[41:12.100 --> 41:12.380]  Hello.
[41:12.680 --> 41:13.060]  Thank you.
[41:14.360 --> 41:18.180]  Yes, my name's Ian, and I really enjoyed the talk.
[41:19.980 --> 41:25.900]  I was, yeah, I actually was part of the Imagine Festival that ran during the RNC.
[41:26.760 --> 41:28.160]  So, yeah.
[41:29.020 --> 41:30.260]  And we love you guys.
[41:32.760 --> 41:39.140]  I guess my question is, so we have the porn, you know, the barely masked porn article.
[41:39.140 --> 41:54.040]  So, the idea, just so I'm clear, maybe this is obvious, is that people searching for porn, which people tend to do probably more than anything else, as we know, hit on that article and get exposed to the advertising.
[41:54.160 --> 41:54.680]  Is that the idea?
[41:54.900 --> 41:55.080]  Basically, yeah.
[41:55.260 --> 41:56.740]  Okay, just want to be clear about that.
[41:57.040 --> 41:57.220]  Yeah.
[41:57.420 --> 41:57.920]  Okay, thanks.
[41:58.680 --> 42:05.480]  I mean, and it's, you know, it's sort of like how, you know, back in the days of pre-Google, you would just load your site up with, you know, Britney Spears' crotch shot, right?
[42:05.480 --> 42:10.140]  That would be the text on the entire page and there would be like a blinking sort of ad in the corner.
[42:10.380 --> 42:12.520]  It's sort of the Google-ized equivalent of that.
[42:13.260 --> 42:13.440]  Gus.
[42:13.760 --> 42:14.080]  Cool.
[42:14.320 --> 42:15.120]  Chris, this is great.
[42:15.240 --> 42:16.200]  I was really excited to hear it.
[42:16.200 --> 42:18.160]  And Dr. Andrews, congratulations, by the way.
[42:18.440 --> 42:18.560]  Thank you, thank you.
[42:18.560 --> 42:19.140]  Thank you, Dr. Anderson.
[42:20.680 --> 42:24.060]  A little mutual frottage going on there.
[42:25.340 --> 42:27.080]  So, I loved hearing about Demand Media.
[42:27.180 --> 42:30.880]  I'd like to get you on the media show to talk about that because it's just fascinating what they're doing.
[42:31.240 --> 42:34.400]  I'm sort of wondering, though, I've encountered a lot of pages like that in the past years.
[42:34.400 --> 42:36.300]  I've been trawling the nether regions of the Internet.
[42:36.520 --> 42:44.640]  And I can't help but wonder, like, in terms of PageRank, which I feel like is sort of one of the main currencies these days, how do sites like that actually do?
[42:44.820 --> 42:45.680]  I'm honestly not sure.
[42:45.780 --> 42:54.060]  I mean, because I feel like there's sort of different audiences of people running into, you know, the stuff that might end up in the New York Times versus the stuff that ends up here.
[42:54.140 --> 42:55.080]  So, do you have any thoughts on that?
[42:55.700 --> 42:56.980]  That's a great question.
[42:57.680 --> 43:08.300]  I think what Demand Media says they will be doing, what they say they're doing with regards to PageRank is they say they're hitting what they call the long tail of the web, right?
[43:08.400 --> 43:12.680]  So, if you look up deodorant, that page may not come up very high.
[43:12.840 --> 43:24.640]  But if your Google query is, you know, I want a product review of speed stick musk deodorant, that page is definitely going to show up, right?
[43:24.840 --> 43:27.160]  And think about how you're using Google.
[43:27.300 --> 43:34.660]  A lot of people are using Google more and more to type in these very long phrases, a lot of times in quotes, right?
[43:34.740 --> 43:36.020]  Think about your own Google use.
[43:36.380 --> 43:39.340]  Probably you yourself are doing this more and more, right?
[43:39.480 --> 43:41.600]  You want to find exactly what it is you're looking for.
[43:41.720 --> 43:44.340]  So, you're no longer typing in, you know, speed stick.
[43:44.580 --> 43:49.180]  You're typing in, you know, how good a product is musk deodorant.
[43:49.180 --> 43:50.900]  I mean, that big guy.
[43:51.060 --> 43:52.320]  Right, yes, right, right.
[43:52.940 --> 43:55.000]  But, so that's their sweet spot.
[43:55.180 --> 44:09.120]  And that's so, yeah, in the world, in sort of the front end world of page rank, you know, where the sort of, you know, safe, you know, generalizable search queries show up, this is probably not coming up that high.
[44:09.340 --> 44:13.740]  But, again, what they call the long tail of the Internet, this is showing up.
[44:14.560 --> 44:15.480]  Go ahead, Beck.
[44:15.600 --> 44:17.620]  Hi, I'm Jamie from May 1st Peopling.
[44:17.760 --> 44:18.120]  Hey, Jamie.
[44:18.120 --> 44:23.420]  I really appreciated the contrast between Indymedia and demand media.
[44:23.660 --> 44:25.640]  I learned a lot about demand media.
[44:26.280 --> 44:37.100]  And I also understand, from what you said, the transition from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to demand media.
[44:37.420 --> 44:42.440]  But I'm not following why you're calling it a transition from Indymedia to demand media.
[44:42.440 --> 44:53.640]  And as someone from Indymedia, I'd be really interested in hearing what you think the transition from Indymedia is going to, in the sense of Indymedia's politics.
[44:53.840 --> 44:54.060]  Right.
[44:54.060 --> 44:55.600]  That's what I'm interested in.
[44:55.780 --> 44:56.920]  More than anything else.
[44:57.280 --> 44:57.400]  Yeah.
[44:57.640 --> 45:00.160]  I mean, you know, in some ways they're...
[45:00.160 --> 45:01.260]  You know, it's...
[45:01.260 --> 45:02.160]  This is a good question.
[45:02.320 --> 45:05.340]  It's sort of the thing that I struggled with the most when I was putting this talk together.
[45:05.340 --> 45:07.520]  Because in some ways it's not a transit...
[45:07.520 --> 45:09.500]  It's not one goes to the other, right?
[45:09.600 --> 45:21.820]  So it's not like all of a sudden all these cool hackers who were doing Indymedia work, you know, in 1999, are now sitting in Rosenblatt's, you know, room and they're now, you know, creating demand media.
[45:21.820 --> 45:23.460]  That is definitely not happening.
[45:23.640 --> 45:26.180]  So in some ways the transition is not organizational.
[45:27.820 --> 45:29.780]  The transition is...
[45:31.460 --> 45:36.600]  The sort of spirit of the age, to not get too highfalutin about it.
[45:36.780 --> 45:38.580]  But, you know, it's the sort of...
[45:38.580 --> 45:42.340]  The dominant, most important thing that's happening online.
[45:43.020 --> 45:44.840]  And I would say that in my...
[45:44.840 --> 45:55.940]  Sort of from my observations, the sort of dominant, most important thing that's happening online And this line has gone from sort of, like I said, decentralized participation to sort of centralized algorithmic surveillance.
[45:56.720 --> 46:11.720]  So, you know, now that said, I think that for many, many reasons, you know, which are too sort of fraught and complicated to get into here, I think that Indymedia is not as strong as it once was, certainly.
[46:12.480 --> 46:25.700]  I think that, you know, many of these sort of radical media projects are not as strong as they once were, partly because they're sort of, their energy has been absorbed into Twitter and Facebook and those sort of more friendly Web 2.0 environments.
[46:27.400 --> 46:42.320]  So, you know, I think that there, you know, while the people or the organization may not have been making a transition from Indymedia to demand media, the spirit of protest and sort of participation have, like you said, moved into Web 2.0.
[46:42.320 --> 46:49.640]  And the, the potential of the Internet is now being realized in this sort of totally different other thing.
[46:50.220 --> 46:53.220]  You know, so Indymedia is sort of exactly, right?
[46:53.300 --> 46:54.940]  Indymedia is exactly what it's always been.
[46:55.120 --> 46:55.860]  Here it is, right?
[46:56.040 --> 47:00.640]  It's got this, this third, this like sliver of the Internet.
[47:01.040 --> 47:01.500]  Right?
[47:01.580 --> 47:07.000]  It just so happens that the Internet is now here, now as opposed to here.
[47:07.000 --> 47:08.480]  It's here.
[47:08.680 --> 47:15.040]  And what's going on all over here, especially financially, is, is this thing.
[47:15.300 --> 47:18.520]  So, that's not a great answer, I will admit.
[47:18.940 --> 47:19.720]  But, you know...
[47:19.720 --> 47:20.280]  It's the hope.
[47:21.360 --> 47:22.160]  Well, okay.
[47:22.440 --> 47:30.180]  So, you know, so the, the hope, I mean, no, so the hope is, you know, what Julian Assange and those people are doing, I think.
[47:30.180 --> 47:38.600]  I mean, we shouldn't think that, you know, what we need are, we need new radical projects that will break through.
[47:39.340 --> 47:39.740]  Right?
[47:39.840 --> 47:45.720]  We need the kind of thing that these guys in Sydney were doing in the 19, you know, 1998, 1999.
[47:46.300 --> 47:46.740]  Right?
[47:46.740 --> 47:48.880]  That's, that's the stuff that we need.
[47:48.960 --> 47:52.460]  We're never gonna, we're never gonna take that space back from these guys.
[47:52.580 --> 47:58.920]  We're never gonna take it back from them, but we can build new things that will get people excited again.
[47:58.920 --> 48:00.080]  I guess that's what I mean, right?
[48:00.180 --> 48:06.800]  We need new stuff, new projects, new organizations, new people who will get people excited again.
[48:07.260 --> 48:09.940]  And maybe not in the same way, but, but in a new way.
[48:11.580 --> 48:15.120]  You know, and, and in some ways, that's your job.
[48:16.280 --> 48:23.440]  You know, not to put any pressure on you, but, you know, we need people to get involved and to, you know, not let this be the only thing out there.
[48:24.180 --> 48:24.580]  Yeah.
[48:24.880 --> 48:25.180]  Hi.
[48:25.780 --> 48:28.020]  Kind of in a similar vein to that gentleman's question.
[48:28.020 --> 48:39.520]  Don't you feel that the growth of things like demand media is probably caused by the relative growth of the Internet from a hobbyist and technologist and sort of a novelty to more of a necessity these days?
[48:39.660 --> 48:39.760]  Yeah.
[48:39.840 --> 48:41.300]  Obviously, a lot more people are connected.
[48:41.680 --> 48:45.160]  And that's why we have a lot more shallow people on the net, I guess.
[48:45.380 --> 48:46.820]  I mean, just to put it bluntly.
[48:47.400 --> 48:47.420]  Yeah.
[48:47.420 --> 48:54.480]  In that regard, I don't think there's really a threat to people like Indymedia because the audience is still there and it's pretty much the same thing.
[48:54.700 --> 49:01.000]  I don't think sites like Indymedia generate as many of those people as it is that they provide to an audience that already exists.
[49:01.160 --> 49:02.580]  And the same goes for demand media.
[49:02.800 --> 49:05.540]  Here, here's, I think on one level that's true.
[49:05.540 --> 49:10.360]  I think the way it's not true is that, you know, here's the thing.
[49:10.620 --> 49:15.900]  Demand media is not a mirror of the way people are, right?
[49:16.020 --> 49:25.040]  Demand...so it's not like you've got people and then their own sort of shallow banality shows up in the...I mean, some of that happens, right?
[49:25.040 --> 49:28.080]  But this creates a certain kind of person.
[49:28.600 --> 49:33.260]  So it's not, you know, shallow people flock to demand media.
[49:33.500 --> 49:40.180]  It's that shallow people and...people and demand media create each other, right?
[49:40.380 --> 49:46.280]  The existence of this creates the idea of the shallow Internet user.
[49:46.460 --> 49:49.040]  Yeah, but how much of that existed before demand media?
[49:49.160 --> 49:51.500]  And it's just now being brought to light by its existence.
[49:51.760 --> 49:54.160]  Yeah, I mean, in some ways it's a philosophical question, right?
[49:55.060 --> 49:57.340]  And, you know, there's no right answer.
[49:57.660 --> 50:12.740]  I mean, I, you know, I...all I would say is that I'm just a little reluctant to say that demand media solely mirrors the shallowness of the idiots on the web.
[50:13.000 --> 50:14.440]  Either way, f*ck demand media.
[50:14.680 --> 50:15.440]  Right, yes, okay.
[50:16.040 --> 50:17.020]  In the back, yeah.
[50:17.660 --> 50:18.140]  Hi, Chris.
[50:19.200 --> 50:27.640]  So I just have to say that this idea of the ultimate audience of demand media being the algorithmic web is incredibly scary to me.
[50:27.880 --> 50:38.880]  Because it kind of seems like, especially with what you're saying about how all these companies are being bought up by the existing big Internet companies, that it's like they're accomplishing two things at once, which are both terrible.
[50:38.880 --> 50:42.160]  They're consolidating the media outlets that people view.
[50:42.620 --> 50:47.260]  And they're fragmenting the audience to the ultimate degree so that there's absolutely no possibility for community.
[50:48.460 --> 50:49.820]  And it's like, I kind of like...
[50:49.820 --> 50:49.900]  Yeah.
[50:50.040 --> 50:51.820]  What do you, what do you think about that?
[50:51.900 --> 50:58.720]  About like that they're stealing because they're, because they're running the system effectively to get, to come up in searches?
[50:58.740 --> 51:03.260]  Are they stealing audience from people who have something more substantive to say about that?
[51:03.800 --> 51:05.120]  Here's sort of what I think they're doing.
[51:05.320 --> 51:11.800]  I think they're fragmenting, they've got, they're doing two things simultaneously.
[51:12.220 --> 51:16.580]  They are fragmenting the audience as much as they possibly can.
[51:16.780 --> 51:21.260]  But then they're reuniting that audience through the sort of algorithmic mush maker.
[51:21.900 --> 51:22.260]  Right.
[51:22.260 --> 51:22.900]  So is that...
[51:24.540 --> 51:33.160]  You know, I don't know if they're taking, you know, I don't know if they're taking audience away from better products, But they are certainly consuming a huge amount of money.
[51:35.120 --> 51:39.280]  And that's what you were meaning by, demand media makes stupid people.
[51:40.100 --> 51:44.360]  Like, they take people in and they inculcate them and spit them back out.
[51:44.440 --> 51:45.580]  Yeah, I would say that's one way.
[51:45.720 --> 51:47.840]  So we've only got two minutes left.
[51:48.380 --> 51:53.060]  But I guess what we could do is, if people just want to...
[51:53.060 --> 51:55.800]  Can people talk for like five seconds at the mic?
[51:56.060 --> 51:57.820]  And you can also go to Morse afterwards.
[51:57.820 --> 51:58.100]  Okay.
[51:58.440 --> 51:59.480]  Yeah, I'll hang out at Morse.
[51:59.620 --> 52:06.640]  And you know, I guess what we can just have is, rather than me responding, if people just want to sort of say what they want to say, we can get through everybody.
[52:06.800 --> 52:07.200]  So go ahead.
[52:07.780 --> 52:08.980]  No, I actually had a question.
[52:09.080 --> 52:13.320]  I just want to know if maybe we could subvert the techniques of the Corporate America guy to our ends.
[52:13.480 --> 52:13.760]  Yes.
[52:17.440 --> 52:18.700]  The contact page, yes.
[52:21.920 --> 52:22.460]  That's me.
[52:23.800 --> 52:34.880]  So if we've established that demand media calls itself journalism, how does it ever address the fact that sometimes things happen that we have no idea about, like people shooting people from a helicopter or something like that?
[52:35.000 --> 52:35.160]  Yeah.
[52:36.580 --> 52:36.940]  Okay.
[52:37.240 --> 52:38.500]  And that's going to have to be the last one.
[52:39.000 --> 52:39.360]  Sorry.
[52:39.820 --> 52:41.160]  But like I said, I'll be in the back.
[52:42.520 --> 52:43.900]  Journalism still exists, right?
[52:44.040 --> 52:45.720]  Because like you said, journalism...
[52:45.720 --> 52:50.580]  There are always going to be new things that happen in journalism that this algorithm can't capture.
[52:52.140 --> 52:52.640]  And...
[52:53.160 --> 52:54.820]  Well, maybe there will be.
[52:57.060 --> 53:07.020]  But the importance of those people in the sort of widespread digital ecosystem is going to be less and less valuable, would be my answer.
[53:07.640 --> 53:08.140]  Okay.
[53:08.500 --> 53:09.180]  That's it.
[53:09.340 --> 53:09.960]  Thanks again.
[53:10.480 --> 53:11.240]  Enjoy the rest of the time.
[53:11.240 --> 53:11.320]  Thank you very much.