[00:01.180 --> 00:08.100]  There is just a small amount of plugging and unplugging that needs to happen for a brief moment.
[00:08.900 --> 00:12.360]  So Patrick is going to whistle the girl from Ipanema while we wait.
[00:14.640 --> 00:16.040]  Just to yourself, just to yourself.
[00:32.720 --> 00:34.900]  Oh, nope, that's not a slide.
[00:35.100 --> 00:36.320]  That's not a slide.
[00:37.740 --> 00:38.220]  Yeah!
[00:39.240 --> 00:40.700]  Can you read this okay, Patrick?
[00:41.540 --> 00:42.660]  Patrick's got a...
[00:42.660 --> 00:43.820]  The last thing I need is juice.
[00:44.740 --> 00:45.360]  Oh, okay.
[00:45.560 --> 00:46.780]  Patrick, you need to keep whistling.
[00:54.270 --> 00:58.630]  We start off the show looking like we don't know what we're doing, so that when we start talking we're more impressive.
[00:58.730 --> 00:58.990]  Every show.
[01:00.230 --> 01:02.030]  I don't know that...
[01:02.030 --> 01:03.590]  Is this close enough?
[01:04.290 --> 01:04.510]  Nope.
[01:04.850 --> 01:04.930]  Nope.
[01:05.750 --> 01:06.450]  Can you hear me okay?
[01:06.630 --> 01:07.130]  Is this...
[01:07.130 --> 01:07.430]  Okay.
[01:07.690 --> 01:08.050]  Okay.
[01:08.190 --> 01:08.630]  Can you hear me now?
[01:09.930 --> 01:10.570]  Hold on a second.
[01:15.690 --> 01:16.530]  Okay, I think I'm ready.
[01:18.210 --> 01:18.790]  Are we ready?
[01:19.870 --> 01:20.270]  Uh...
[01:20.930 --> 01:22.810]  Ladies and gentlemen, hello!
[01:23.430 --> 01:25.270]  And welcome to MemeFactory.
[01:25.570 --> 01:29.210]  Or maybe we should say hello, we're MemeFactory, and thank you for welcoming us to HOPE.
[01:29.350 --> 01:31.010]  We're really excited to be here.
[01:31.110 --> 01:32.510]  This is a bit of a change for us.
[01:32.630 --> 01:35.010]  Normally when we give presentations, they look like this.
[01:36.070 --> 01:45.070]  Three of us with three computers on three screens, speaking really quickly and showing more stuff than you could possibly absorb in an attempt to mimic the real life experience we all have of being immersed in the Internet.
[01:45.070 --> 01:51.310]  At this point, we've done something like 10 or 12 shows about the Internet, and we've even started writing a book about Internet memes.
[01:51.470 --> 01:53.670]  Which, God willing, will be out by Christmas.
[01:53.810 --> 01:54.670]  We hope you'll buy a copy.
[01:54.850 --> 01:55.110]  Ding!
[01:57.710 --> 02:02.210]  We're extremely lucky to have made something of a living from being experts in this kind of thing.
[02:02.330 --> 02:08.590]  And it is understandable that some of you might raise an eyebrow at the idea of being an expert in, say, this hipster puppy.
[02:09.070 --> 02:16.010]  Being an expert in this little dog or really humor like this picture of this little dog means, yes, we know that this is funny, or maybe... funny.
[02:16.450 --> 02:18.650]  But that also we know why it's funny.
[02:18.790 --> 02:22.790]  And beyond why it's funny, how it managed to get to the point of being funny.
[02:22.890 --> 02:25.110]  So we explain jokes, basically.
[02:25.330 --> 02:26.550]  Uh, but we know what all of you are thinking.
[02:26.730 --> 02:28.430]  Doesn't explaining jokes ruin them?
[02:28.530 --> 02:30.050]  Why would you ruin jokes?
[02:30.250 --> 02:33.610]  Well, as common as these jokes are to the Internet communities that make them...
[02:33.610 --> 02:39.650]  So many of the Internet memes and inside jokes and hilarious media that exist out there are still largely ignored by the general public.
[02:39.830 --> 02:46.050]  Eh, you might be able to imagine, uh, what we feel like every time we try and explain what we do to, like, a regular.
[02:47.010 --> 02:50.750]  Even without getting into the confusion over the word meme...
[02:50.750 --> 02:53.490]  It's a post-Arwinian theory of culture from the 1970s!
[02:53.490 --> 02:55.930]  It's those pictures of cats with text on them!
[02:56.110 --> 02:58.510]  It's a mind virus that can infect us all!
[02:58.630 --> 03:00.470]  It's the hottest new marketing technique!
[03:00.690 --> 03:02.190]  It's those viral tube video blogs!
[03:02.190 --> 03:04.310]  It's a French word that means same!
[03:04.570 --> 03:04.670]  Right.
[03:07.070 --> 03:14.910]  Even without getting into the confusion caused by the word meme, we still sometimes have trouble getting people to understand what we even mean by Internet.
[03:15.410 --> 03:16.830]  Oh, you guys talk about Facebook?
[03:17.170 --> 03:18.870]  Oh, you guys talk about the World Wide Web?
[03:19.090 --> 03:20.010]  Oh, you guys!
[03:20.070 --> 03:22.070]  You guys do new media, right?
[03:22.470 --> 03:23.890]  You talk about routers?
[03:24.110 --> 03:25.470]  Oh, you guys talk about the App Store.
[03:25.650 --> 03:26.710]  I love Steve Jobs!
[03:26.970 --> 03:27.270]  Oh, right!
[03:27.390 --> 03:28.230]  The series of tubes!
[03:28.470 --> 03:28.790]  Got it.
[03:29.630 --> 03:31.310]  I guess we shouldn't really blame them.
[03:31.310 --> 03:35.490]  I mean, the fact is that the Internet, that word doesn't really mean any one thing.
[03:35.610 --> 03:39.410]  It's kind of like when you talk about, if you'll allow us the comparison, the Christian church.
[03:39.730 --> 03:42.590]  What do you mean when you say, the church?
[03:43.770 --> 03:45.270]  One particular physical building?
[03:45.290 --> 03:47.590]  The sum of all people in all congregations around the world?
[03:47.750 --> 03:51.330]  The organization of bishops or deacons or popes or whatever that make up the church leadership?
[03:51.330 --> 03:57.870]  Some mystical sense of church-ness that flows from, I don't know, heaven?
[03:58.150 --> 03:58.270]  Okay.
[03:58.690 --> 03:59.530]  Religious metaphor, over.
[04:00.110 --> 04:06.670]  So, let's for the time being, let's work with the definition of the world Internet that is a, the word Internet, that is a large technical catch-all.
[04:06.790 --> 04:12.970]  Meaning that the Internet is the hardware, software, protocols, connections, data packets that are currently using or compliant with Internet protocol.
[04:12.970 --> 04:16.710]  If that's the case, then we can ask what this giant Internet thing looks like.
[04:16.870 --> 04:17.290]  Boom!
[04:17.650 --> 04:18.310]  There it is!
[04:18.510 --> 04:21.150]  Uh, courtesy of the Opti Project Online, this is...
[04:21.750 --> 04:22.710]  The Internet!
[04:23.330 --> 04:23.970]  Or really...
[04:24.650 --> 04:26.670]  A map of the Internet!
[04:27.130 --> 04:28.350]  Or really...
[04:28.350 --> 04:30.950]  Just one map of the Internet!
[04:31.290 --> 04:37.650]  You see, it turns out that mapping the Internet, trying to come up with a visual representation for the whole enchilada, is also kind of a meme itself.
[04:37.650 --> 04:43.370]  Here's another one, or part of it, anyway, that's more up-to-date, and also, uh, a little more yellow.
[04:43.650 --> 04:47.470]  And here are a couple more by a guy named Chris Harrison that overlay onto a map of the world.
[04:47.730 --> 04:50.350]  Uh, and Chris Harrison isn't, Chris Harrison isn't the only one to have done that.
[04:50.450 --> 04:52.690]  This one is from telegeography.com.
[04:53.270 --> 04:58.810]  But you also have ones that overlay websites and other web things onto imaginary subway systems, like this one by Oral Yaquel.
[04:59.230 --> 05:02.790]  Uh, or this one by Oliver Reichstenstein from Information Architects.
[05:02.870 --> 05:07.330]  Uh, this one is from the Web 2.0 Summit, and it's, like, cute and sort of, like, imaginary, and there's funny islands.
[05:07.330 --> 05:10.070]  Uh, but it's really just filled with what look like business logos.
[05:10.950 --> 05:13.410]  Uh, and here's another one that we found on InfoAesthetics.
[05:13.570 --> 05:19.930]  And that's not even to mention the whole slew of maps drawn in the recent Internet mapping project uploaded by Kevin Kelly of a few years ago.
[05:20.550 --> 05:23.750]  Apparently, mapping the Internet is not only a meme, but a pretty popular one.
[05:23.930 --> 05:25.750]  The NSA made this one ten years ago.
[05:26.130 --> 05:29.130]  We wrote this whole presentation in the last two and a half hours.
[05:29.190 --> 05:30.150]  That's true, the last two hours.
[05:30.350 --> 05:35.050]  Though, of all of these variants and styles, one of the most well-known maps is another one that was made by XKCD.
[05:35.550 --> 05:39.510]  Which isn't just a map of the Internet, but more specifically, a map of online communities.
[05:39.930 --> 05:42.770]  Uh, Facebook and Twitter and Skype and 4chan.
[05:42.890 --> 05:47.530]  And all this stuff pictured here is just software running on hardware that communicates with other software running on other hardware.
[05:47.770 --> 05:51.770]  We use these abstractions, these maps, to help us make sense of what the Internet is.
[05:51.770 --> 05:54.250]  But it's easy to lose sight of the fact that the Internet...
[05:54.250 --> 05:55.130]  It's people.
[05:56.350 --> 06:01.210]  So, let's, for the next time being, forget our technical catch-all and try out a more humanist one.
[06:01.370 --> 06:05.310]  One that assumes that the Internet is the sum of all human actions taken on and with it.
[06:05.970 --> 06:08.590]  Sure, there are a lot of bots and servers and demons out there.
[06:08.750 --> 06:15.350]  Digital entities that have intentionally personifying names, which take actions and make connections and produce media who aren't human at all.
[06:15.350 --> 06:19.110]  But the software and the hardware, that's all something that people are doing.
[06:19.370 --> 06:24.050]  People build these things to facilitate and enhance all of the different things that we want to do.
[06:24.190 --> 06:30.610]  And where these behaviors and desires happen to be limited by technology or by the government, well then those people need to step in and do it themselves.
[06:31.090 --> 06:34.970]  Most notably might be the Chinese practice of running human flesh search engines.
[06:35.230 --> 06:38.790]  China has long been pretty infamous for its practices of Internet censorship.
[06:39.110 --> 06:42.050]  The most infamous example of which has been their relationship to search engines.
[06:42.050 --> 06:44.590]  Most of us here probably take web searches relatively for granted.
[06:44.830 --> 06:50.250]  It's not the only way to find things online, but algorithmic crawler-enabled search still accounts for a ton of web traffic.
[06:50.470 --> 06:59.150]  In the absence of reliable algorithmic searches, groups of Chinese Internet users began to gather together to perform searches through a more collaborative and brute force measure.
[06:59.290 --> 07:07.910]  Essentially creating de facto research groups, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people, hundreds, sometimes thousands of people, willing to help look for something.
[07:07.910 --> 07:13.070]  A lot of times the thing that was looked for ended up being the identity of another real person in China.
[07:13.210 --> 07:17.870]  This adds a sort of second meaning to the human flesh in human flesh search engines.
[07:17.990 --> 07:21.890]  And while certainly not always successful, it's been an often used practice in China over the last ten years.
[07:22.110 --> 07:29.090]  In fact, to read a description of human flesh search engines, they're not very different at all from the survivor spoiler communities that Henry Jenkins writes about in convergence culture.
[07:29.090 --> 07:37.170]  Loose groups of individuals who would volunteer their time to a common information-based cause, posting and collaborating on digital spaces like forums or message boards.
[07:37.270 --> 07:41.070]  A practice that, like the human flesh search engines, often require a lot of offline work.
[07:41.250 --> 07:47.470]  And, you know, a large group of pseudo-anonymous individuals bringing offline experience or research together to contribute to an online project?
[07:47.550 --> 07:49.410]  That sounds an awful lot like Wikipedia.
[07:49.890 --> 07:57.190]  Or, if you're willing to add a little, and we mean a very little, money to the equation, this is the business model or organizational model of Mechanical Turk.
[07:57.190 --> 08:06.210]  Maybe computer scientist Louis von Ahn puts it best in his description of projects like CAPTCHA, systems that combine humans and computers to solve large-scale problems that neither can solve alone.
[08:06.430 --> 08:09.770]  I call this human computation, but others sometimes call it crowdsourcing.
[08:09.890 --> 08:16.810]  A fantastic recent example of computer-aided human creativity is the often irreverent, exquisite corpse style, drawception.
[08:17.470 --> 08:22.650]  Which sees random groups of people trying their best to interpret the drawings and text of their fellow players.
[08:23.530 --> 08:24.810]  You see what's going on here?
[08:24.810 --> 08:33.290]  So there's someone writes Batman doing laundry, and then someone draws Batman doing laundry, and then someone sees that and they think Batman is changing his pants.
[08:33.510 --> 08:36.030]  So then someone draws Batman changing his pants.
[08:36.270 --> 08:39.910]  Someone describes that as Batman decides to become more fabulous.
[08:40.490 --> 08:41.970]  There is fabulous Batman.
[08:49.940 --> 08:52.340]  It's a lot of pants related ones.
[08:53.820 --> 08:54.940]  I really like this one.
[09:07.920 --> 09:09.360]  It pays off, stick with it.
[09:10.140 --> 09:11.280]  Can you guys see the bottom?
[09:11.440 --> 09:12.100]  Can you see the bottom?
[09:19.380 --> 09:20.720]  It's Don Corleone.
[09:22.260 --> 09:30.440]  Okay, and the results, why not as large a scale as Survivor Spoilers, Wikipedia, or Mechanical Turk, they are at least very funny.
[09:30.640 --> 09:35.040]  Okay, but before we move on, we think it's important to point out one of the big common threads in all these projects.
[09:35.960 --> 09:36.320]  Collaboration.
[09:36.540 --> 09:41.600]  We think that collaboration is an obvious central component to what makes so much of the Internet so awesome.
[09:41.700 --> 09:43.760]  And it's a big part of what make Internet memes what they are.
[09:44.120 --> 09:54.440]  And even though lightning speed, persistent, international, digital collaboration may feel completely new and different sometimes, it's important to remember that groups of people have been getting together to do more than the sum of their parts for as long as they've existed.
[09:54.440 --> 10:09.400]  We might be hitting the metaphor too hard, but the theorist Emil Durkheim, who kind of invented sociology, he believed that it was the power of social collaboration and people's attempts to explain that power before they could really understand it, which was the actual origin of religion.
[10:09.560 --> 10:16.560]  Like, sure, in the last ten years, we've become really comfortable with the concept that groups of people collaborating can produce some incredible results.
[10:16.560 --> 10:25.180]  But if you were an early human with little to no language and no Facebook account, you might be so mystified by the effectiveness of groups that you attributed that power to one deity or another.
[10:25.280 --> 10:26.440]  But let's jump back to modern day.
[10:26.580 --> 10:36.020]  You've got Reddit's Random Acts of Pizza, a place where those who are down on their luck can request that someone spring for their pizza dinner, and that those who are able and willing to assist do exactly that.
[10:36.240 --> 10:44.360]  Random Acts of Pizza stands as an example of how a new kind of civil collaboration where, instead of unleashing their id, people turn into kind, caring, giving citizens.
[10:44.360 --> 10:48.900]  We also see the effects of distributed collaborative work in the online gene sequencing game, Philo.
[10:49.600 --> 10:54.320]  Philo is a competitive online game which assists researchers in determining genetic patterns which can cause diseases.
[10:54.660 --> 10:56.060]  And the thing is, it actually works.
[10:56.220 --> 10:57.520]  It's funny when you think about it.
[10:57.580 --> 11:04.800]  No matter how sophisticated this online collaborative work is, collaborating to get dinner and stay healthy is probably exactly what early humans were working on, too.
[11:04.940 --> 11:07.860]  But the human experience isn't all about biological necessities.
[11:08.060 --> 11:10.280]  As people, we also have social or societal needs.
[11:10.400 --> 11:13.040]  These social needs are most focused on how we treat one another.
[11:13.040 --> 11:16.400]  The behaviors that we adopt to negotiate life around other people.
[11:16.800 --> 11:18.560]  One of those behaviors is resistance.
[11:19.400 --> 11:19.760]  Advocacy.
[11:20.480 --> 11:26.520]  Activist groups have been using memes and memetic content to spread their message and as symbols to rally behind for a very long time.
[11:26.740 --> 11:30.680]  I mean, the Crusades, a weird kind of activist movement to spread Christianity and stop other religions.
[11:30.840 --> 11:32.100]  Well, they rallied behind the cross.
[11:32.180 --> 11:35.780]  Which, you know, we don't often think of as a meme, but wow, there have been a lot of mutations on that one.
[11:37.020 --> 11:39.240]  More recently, we've had these symbols for peace.
[11:39.640 --> 11:43.020]  Memes created to spread a message and to quickly and easily express solidarity with them.
[11:43.020 --> 11:45.060]  So now, today, we have the Internet.
[11:45.120 --> 11:47.820]  A complicated electronic machine for spreading memes.
[11:48.080 --> 11:50.600]  It spreads memes, which is something that people have done forever.
[11:50.720 --> 11:51.640]  It just spreads them better.
[11:51.900 --> 11:52.800]  It archives them.
[11:53.240 --> 11:59.720]  So, unlike having a conversation or singing a song to another person, you don't have to be there every time the conversation is had or the song is sung.
[11:59.940 --> 12:05.060]  It broadcasts to everyone with access immediately and simultaneously so that the ordinary limit to the...
[12:05.060 --> 12:06.240]  Number of people or...
[12:06.240 --> 12:09.640]  Or the physical location of the people you're trying to share your message with is just gone.
[12:09.820 --> 12:11.000]  And the third thing is access.
[12:11.200 --> 12:13.040]  With television, messages could be pre-taped.
[12:13.140 --> 12:17.120]  And with the invention of VCRs and DVRs, the message could be played back whenever you like.
[12:17.500 --> 12:23.100]  And with first antennas, then cable, then satellite, the physical location of your audience mattered less and less.
[12:23.360 --> 12:26.980]  But only the people with access to very expensive cameras, broadcasting equipment...
[12:26.980 --> 12:27.780]  And broadcasting licenses...
[12:28.180 --> 12:29.900]  Could create the messages that were to be distributed.
[12:30.100 --> 12:34.260]  With the Internet, it's almost like everyone with a television has their own channel.
[12:34.260 --> 12:36.680]  The big breakthrough of the Internet is access.
[12:36.980 --> 12:38.960]  Well, and a much, much better archival and retrieval system.
[12:39.120 --> 12:40.980]  But the Internet isn't just for the small guys.
[12:41.120 --> 12:43.980]  It's not just for the stuff you and your peers are creating and sharing.
[12:44.060 --> 12:50.840]  I mean, we all have access, but the people who've more or less monopolized the cultural means of production and distribution up until now, they also have access.
[12:51.360 --> 12:56.120]  Regardless of how much the three of us care about communication, the com in .com stands for commercial.
[12:56.380 --> 13:03.160]  So there was a point at which we could say the Internet was largely a platform, in whatever form it was, for communication as distinct from commerce.
[13:03.160 --> 13:05.520]  That point, in the 90s, came to an end.
[13:05.720 --> 13:10.700]  And in gold rush-like fervor, there was not an invasion, but rather something quite resembling one.
[13:10.800 --> 13:12.140]  Let's just go ahead and call it an invasion.
[13:12.420 --> 13:18.740]  Some corporations arrived and realized that there were all these people looking at all this content, and alongside that content was not one advertisement.
[13:18.740 --> 13:26.420]  And furthermore, all those people looking at all that content, they figured out that in addition to looking, the Internet could probably help them do some things.
[13:26.680 --> 13:31.400]  They could use the Internet as a kind of coffee shop, mall, thrift store, back alley swap meet.
[13:31.620 --> 13:37.180]  Which, for all its convenience, didn't encourage the growth of the part of the web dedicated to the creation and dissemination of culture.
[13:37.320 --> 13:38.620]  Let's call that part free.
[13:38.880 --> 13:40.500]  But to the part concerned with profits.
[13:40.500 --> 13:41.760]  And let's call that part commercial.
[13:42.820 --> 13:43.800]  Which is totally fine.
[13:44.040 --> 13:49.080]  We want to be the first people in the room to say that we find the existence of moneyed interests on the Internet fine.
[13:49.480 --> 13:50.160]  And great.
[13:50.400 --> 13:51.080]  And convenient.
[13:51.080 --> 13:51.580]  And fair.
[13:51.720 --> 13:52.580]  And all that other good stuff.
[13:52.720 --> 13:54.840]  Equal access is the name of the game.
[13:54.960 --> 14:04.700]  As the Internet grows, both in size and purpose, from mostly discussion with, yes, some advertising and some commerce, to this crazy huge multipurpose thing where if you don't want to be a member of a community, you don't have to.
[14:04.700 --> 14:07.900]  And if you don't want to buy shoes or books or been on comic books...
[14:07.900 --> 14:08.340]  You don't have to.
[14:08.440 --> 14:09.420]  We're totally fine with that.
[14:09.760 --> 14:11.780]  Mostly, sort of, like, in theory.
[14:11.980 --> 14:15.420]  What we're fine with is when everyone can coexist and that there's peace.
[14:15.600 --> 14:21.780]  But in the same way that we saw a gold rush-like fervor sending everyone to technical adoption of the Internet...
[14:21.780 --> 14:26.580]  We now see that same gold rush-like fervor leading large organizations towards cultural adoption.
[14:27.180 --> 14:33.640]  Which is to say, the Internet's milkshake, it has brought all the marketing departments to the yard.
[14:35.240 --> 14:36.940]  And their luck is better.
[14:38.600 --> 14:41.600]  And this makes coexistence a little harder to swallow.
[14:41.820 --> 14:47.040]  If not for technical reasons, then for what might not exactly be, but sort of approach, territorial reasons.
[14:47.140 --> 14:52.220]  Well, you know, territorial, like, when you're the first kid to like a band, and then, like, two years later, all the cool kids like that band, and you're like, really?
[14:52.460 --> 14:53.060]  Like, ugh.
[14:53.700 --> 15:01.440]  Imagine the widened irises and damp upper lips present when at first it was realized that if people were excitedly passing around videos of cats jumping off of tables...
[15:05.440 --> 15:08.100]  Or kids falling into ravines.
[15:08.540 --> 15:17.220]  Made for almost literally zero dollars, they would certainly excitedly pass around multi-million dollar promotional material for their favorite...
[15:17.220 --> 15:20.040]  Cover your ears if you're sensitive to foul language.
[15:21.820 --> 15:22.200]  Brands.
[15:23.100 --> 15:28.860]  Mostly it hasn't worked, because the logic of the free culture and the logic of the commercial culture are almost exclusively opposed.
[15:29.120 --> 15:35.340]  Like, what is common on one is reject on the other, what excites one is terrifying to the other, and what is successful in one will tank on the other.
[15:35.460 --> 15:37.520]  Except for Tosh.0, it would seem.
[15:38.300 --> 15:42.980]  Which is about as surprising to us as proof the world is round was to the Portuguese in 1521.
[15:43.940 --> 15:45.200]  Also, f*ck this guy.
[15:51.890 --> 16:02.990]  Internet culture exhibits a certain characteristic irreverence and supports what amounts to a nearly dissolved sense of continuity, ham sandwich, tiny kitten explosion, speed run animated GIF of a man eating popcorn.
[16:04.610 --> 16:17.850]  Which would be easy in a way to parrot, if not for the fact that Internet culture also places a premium on authenticity, which by and large, if you're a, here it comes again, brand, you probably can't or don't or won't have.
[16:18.070 --> 16:18.950]  Not sure what we mean?
[16:19.190 --> 16:20.910]  Let's talk about smart water.
[16:22.870 --> 16:24.130]  There's audio for this.
[16:33.720 --> 16:34.420]  Sorry.
[16:36.020 --> 16:37.340]  We are professionals.
[16:38.760 --> 16:40.740]  We have done this before.
[16:44.080 --> 16:46.300]  Like a G-6.
[16:46.600 --> 16:47.760]  Like a G-6.
[16:48.200 --> 16:50.440]  Now I'm feeling so far.
[16:50.820 --> 16:51.840]  Like a G-6.
[16:52.260 --> 16:52.600]  Cut!
[16:53.020 --> 16:53.280]  Cut!
[16:53.640 --> 16:53.640]  Cut!
[16:55.500 --> 16:56.200]  Hi.
[16:56.360 --> 16:56.520]  Hi.
[16:56.660 --> 16:57.060]  How you doing?
[16:57.060 --> 16:57.620]  I'm good.
[16:57.800 --> 16:58.420]  What are you doing?
[16:59.020 --> 16:59.600]  I'm lip syncing.
[17:00.600 --> 17:02.760]  Yeah, I know that, and it's really, really adorable.
[17:03.000 --> 17:06.160]  But do you know any songs about water?
[17:06.700 --> 17:07.180]  No.
[17:08.540 --> 17:12.970]  Hi, I'm Jen Aniston, and I'm here to talk to you about smart water.
[17:13.510 --> 17:16.900]  But in this day and age, apparently I can't just do that, can I?
[17:17.290 --> 17:22.030]  I can't just tell you that smart water is the smartest, best tasting water that's out there.
[17:22.140 --> 17:26.470]  I have to make a video, apparently, that turns into a virus.
[17:26.900 --> 17:27.320]  Viral.
[17:27.860 --> 17:28.290]  So...
[17:29.010 --> 17:30.040]  We need the video to go viral.
[17:30.040 --> 17:31.490]  We auditioned for these roles, but they...
[17:31.490 --> 17:32.250]  Right, sorry, viral.
[17:32.250 --> 17:32.970]  They didn't cast us.
[17:33.010 --> 17:33.380]  Thank you.
[17:33.540 --> 17:36.380]  This is why I have these three lovely Internet boys here to help me.
[17:36.540 --> 17:40.080]  So, apparently, well, animals are huge online.
[17:40.250 --> 17:40.770]  Do we have animals?
[17:42.010 --> 17:42.840]  Oh, you're...
[17:42.840 --> 17:44.030]  Oh, so sweet.
[17:44.250 --> 17:47.100]  Can you say, I love smart water?
[17:47.980 --> 17:49.440]  No, no, no, get out of there!
[17:50.400 --> 17:51.920]  I love smart water.
[17:52.720 --> 17:54.290]  Rachel, I love your hair.
[17:54.620 --> 17:55.880]  It's a joke about friends.
[17:55.880 --> 17:56.580]  Okay.
[17:56.880 --> 17:57.460]  That's enough.
[17:57.660 --> 17:58.160]  I don't want...
[17:58.160 --> 17:59.660]  Let's try to think of...
[17:59.660 --> 18:00.120]  Mmm.
[18:01.240 --> 18:02.920]  And then let's talk about Old Spice.
[18:05.740 --> 18:06.640]  Now back to me.
[18:06.800 --> 18:07.600]  Now back at your man.
[18:07.740 --> 18:08.480]  Now back to me.
[18:08.940 --> 18:10.220]  Sadly, he isn't me.
[18:10.420 --> 18:14.720]  But if he stopped using lady scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he's me.
[18:14.900 --> 18:15.460]  Look down.
[18:15.660 --> 18:16.060]  Back up.
[18:16.200 --> 18:16.720]  Where are you?
[18:16.720 --> 18:19.380]  You're on a boat with the man your man could smell.
[18:19.700 --> 18:20.500]  What's in your hand?
[18:20.660 --> 18:21.180]  Back at me.
[18:21.400 --> 18:21.980]  I have it.
[18:22.100 --> 18:24.660]  It's an oyster with two tickets to that thing you love.
[18:24.860 --> 18:25.380]  Look again.
[18:25.600 --> 18:27.140]  The tickets are now diamonds.
[18:30.740 --> 18:33.540]  So, these are two very different ways of thinking about the Internet.
[18:33.820 --> 18:42.680]  I mean, the first way is the way where the Internet can do something for you, and you very much want the Internet to do that thing for you until you try so hard to make the thing that the Internet likes.
[18:42.920 --> 18:46.940]  I mean, kudos, in a certain sense, to Smartwater for wearing their desperation on their sleeve.
[18:48.820 --> 18:55.260]  Other brands, ones we care not to mention if for no other reason than why give away any more free advertising than we already have.
[18:55.420 --> 18:59.180]  Old Spice, Smartwater, if you want you can mail us dollar bills to the MemeFactory headquarters in Brooklyn.
[18:59.420 --> 19:13.720]  Other brands have more than once set off on the nearly impossible task of attempting some kind of agility with respect to seizing the Internet moment, which is to say, making some marketing material which co-ops what's hip on the Internet.
[19:15.100 --> 19:15.540]  Whoops.
[19:16.980 --> 19:21.720]  Which is distinct, as we tend to think of it, from the way Old Spice went about their Man Your Man Could Smell Like campaign.
[19:21.940 --> 19:29.720]  Seeking not to exploit existing Internet culture, these guys set about making something which seems Internet while not really being cribbed from the Internet.
[19:30.080 --> 19:35.580]  Other similar spirit animals could be found in, say, The Tim and Eric Show, Arrested the Development, Girl Talk, or Scott Pilgrim.
[19:35.740 --> 19:38.360]  Pieces of media which sure have a stated arc or goal.
[19:38.360 --> 19:42.000]  Laughs, narrative, juxtaposition, feels, sales, or all of the above.
[19:42.140 --> 19:45.800]  But are willing to sacrifice the purity of that goal to reward, challenge, and entertain their fans.
[19:45.980 --> 19:48.600]  Or I guess in the case of Old Spice, right, like their consumers.
[19:49.240 --> 19:52.120]  Which is maybe the finer point we're trying to put on this whole thing.
[19:52.220 --> 19:57.290]  The Internet is allowing brands to turn their customers into fans.
[19:58.120 --> 20:07.320]  These two relationships are very different, and where much Internet media already has a huge fan base, how nice would it be if the corpse could just be all swoop and grab and done?
[20:07.320 --> 20:14.180]  So if the brands could make their customers as loyal as fans are, that might be just the best way for them to win the battle for attention.
[20:14.660 --> 20:16.920]  The case in point, maybe you know non-stop.
[20:17.100 --> 20:17.920]  He is a dancer.
[20:20.040 --> 20:21.080]  Also some audio here.
[21:09.350 --> 21:15.190]  So as far as French Middle Eastern pop and lockers who are really into dubstep go, this guy is basically royalty.
[21:15.510 --> 21:23.390]  And this screenshot up here is actually a couple months old, and in the intervening time this video has received another 12, ready, million views.
[21:24.530 --> 21:29.810]  So, maybe this is putting things lightly, but the people, they seem to like Mr. Non-Stop.
[21:30.170 --> 21:31.190]  Quite a bit, actually.
[21:31.390 --> 21:39.630]  He has what you might call a following, a fan base, which is an attractive thing to the people who, instead of following the following or the fan base, have instead another thing.
[21:40.710 --> 21:41.110]  Dollars.
[21:41.570 --> 21:47.590]  The union between the person with the following and the person with the dollars, especially in an Internet situation, can go really either way.
[21:47.870 --> 21:52.110]  It just so happens, though, that in the way that we're talking about to show you, that it goes actually rather well.
[22:16.540 --> 22:19.280]  So, Non-Stop did a spot for Peugeot.
[22:19.540 --> 22:20.620]  And it's pretty good.
[22:20.800 --> 22:22.740]  I mean, it's actually, it's pretty, it's pretty not bad.
[22:22.740 --> 22:24.700]  It's pretty, I mean, I like it.
[22:24.960 --> 22:27.960]  So, when we started this whole conversation, it was about coexistence.
[22:28.100 --> 22:35.640]  It was about the free and the commercial, living together, inauthentic, non-co-opting, equally beneficial, technologically determined coexistence, and here we are.
[22:35.980 --> 22:36.660]  We've made it.
[22:36.800 --> 22:43.180]  When we talk about coexistence, it seems weird to make a piece of advertising our example par excellence, but in a way, it really is.
[22:43.300 --> 22:45.720]  Non-Stop gets to dance, his fans get to see him dance.
[22:45.940 --> 22:47.640]  The music is totally in his wheelhouse.
[22:47.760 --> 22:50.620]  It's even new music, unreleased before the spot started making the rounds.
[22:50.620 --> 22:52.100]  And it's pretty good music, too.
[22:52.100 --> 22:55.620]  There just happens to be a car in the background?
[22:56.080 --> 23:03.320]  I mean, for the first few minutes of the video, it's even a little unclear that it's an advertisement at all, which is pretty nice.
[23:03.380 --> 23:08.540]  Because as Penny Arcade has recently reminded everyone with their Kickstarter campaign, people hate advertising.
[23:08.880 --> 23:16.460]  Which means people can feel a little less guilty about liking it, and a little less guilty about sharing it, and we feel a little less guilty about having shown it to you guys.
[23:16.460 --> 23:23.460]  So, also, full disclosure, none of us owns a Peugeot or really knows the correct pronunciation of Peugeot.
[23:25.040 --> 23:25.680]  Peugeot?
[23:25.800 --> 23:26.200]  Peugeot?
[23:26.220 --> 23:28.280]  Someone shouted out a correct pronunciation?
[23:28.920 --> 23:29.560]  Peugeot.
[23:29.680 --> 23:30.120]  Peugeot.
[23:30.820 --> 23:31.460]  Peugeot.
[23:31.460 --> 23:35.600]  What Kim he found is English and she tried to teach me how to say... And after five minutes I was like, it's just not going to happen.
[23:35.840 --> 23:37.320]  Pe-E-U-G-E-E-Uguet.
[23:37.500 --> 23:37.800]  Peugeot.
[23:37.980 --> 23:38.280]  Puget.
[23:38.740 --> 23:39.040]  Peugeot.
[23:39.260 --> 23:39.940]  Oh, Puget!
[23:40.020 --> 23:40.860]  It's just like the south...
[23:40.860 --> 23:42.780]  It's just like, yeah, just like that place that we have.
[23:42.780 --> 23:43.460]  That's what it sounds like.
[23:44.020 --> 23:49.780]  So what they, Peugeot, I mean, did here was to exhibit what we might call media awareness.
[23:50.040 --> 23:51.400]  They paid attention to what is good.
[23:51.540 --> 24:02.660]  And not like mainstream, zoomed out aerial view, general concepts and practices good, but rather like they found a guy who was doing a good thing, and then they probably handed him a big bag of money, and they told him to do the good thing he does well in front of one of their products.
[24:02.740 --> 24:04.040]  And hey, everyone, that's a wrap.
[24:04.200 --> 24:05.200]  Who wants Thai food?
[24:05.340 --> 24:08.400]  And even, you know, this talk of good, it's really complicated.
[24:08.540 --> 24:09.280]  I mean, says who?
[24:09.280 --> 24:19.060]  I mean, well, clearly, 56 million views says so, but remember how when we were talking about the old guard not being so good with new media and the new media not really being into the way the old guard does business?
[24:19.280 --> 24:22.140]  How free and commercial they're not exactly bosom buddies?
[24:22.480 --> 24:25.820]  Anyway, the point is they took a risk, and they did a good job, and that's nice.
[24:25.980 --> 24:29.140]  And we, everyone, we could actually learn some lessons from this.
[24:29.260 --> 24:31.420]  I mean, neither free nor commercial are going anywhere.
[24:31.620 --> 24:35.940]  And regardless of however their relationship develops, if it develops at all, they will both continue to grow.
[24:35.940 --> 24:37.860]  And growth, in this case, means many things.
[24:37.860 --> 24:40.820]  Growth means population, yes, and in technological capability.
[24:41.040 --> 24:43.880]  And maybe, most importantly, cultural influence.
[24:44.180 --> 24:49.240]  And as both of them grow, now this is a little bit, this is the confusing part, they will converge.
[24:49.680 --> 24:52.540]  Non-stops Peugeot spot, that's a bit of a convergence.
[24:52.760 --> 24:54.300]  But a small one, and a familiar one.
[24:54.440 --> 24:56.640]  Someone with a talent is paid to perform that talent.
[24:56.800 --> 24:59.480]  The wild card here is that his talent was found on the Internet.
[24:59.800 --> 25:06.800]  A larger, more complex free-slash-commercial convergence is exemplified, maybe even perfected, by the Cheeseburger Network.
[25:06.800 --> 25:11.700]  Now, perfected in the free-labor, water-marking, extremely profitable media aggregator sense, we mean.
[25:12.860 --> 25:13.260]  Okay.
[25:13.540 --> 25:22.740]  No, but really, Cheeseburger has its flaws, but as a major player in what we will right here casually refer to as the mainstreamification of the Internet, there are actually a fair number of things that they really, really get right.
[25:23.120 --> 25:30.760]  Things like how Internet culture is really entertaining and really empowering, but the places it really happens, Ground Zero, so to speak, aren't really for everyone.
[25:32.440 --> 25:37.340]  They are crowded, more than a little confusing, and sometimes they have really high barriers to entry.
[25:37.460 --> 25:39.320]  Sort of like the real Ground Zero, actually.
[25:39.540 --> 25:49.160]  But that doesn't mean that my mom or your sister or this guy's dad or this lady's cousin Jim shouldn't be able to experience the wonder and awe that is Hannah Montana raccoon repellent.
[26:05.560 --> 26:07.940]  So he's just going to spray that on himself.
[26:12.700 --> 26:18.020]  And what would appear to be his pet raccoon is no longer interested in biting him.
[26:25.980 --> 26:27.500]  It just gets me every time.
[26:30.880 --> 26:33.480]  Like, what situation does this happen in?
[26:33.560 --> 26:35.060]  I have so many questions.
[26:35.420 --> 26:36.860]  I have so many questions.
[26:37.100 --> 26:40.060]  Like, it's clearly not actually Hannah Montana raccoon repellent.
[26:40.120 --> 26:40.840]  What is it?
[26:41.000 --> 26:42.400]  What is in that bottle?
[26:42.740 --> 26:53.980]  Anyways, which is to say that the Cheeseburger Network and their sites, like Know Your Meme, I Can Has Cheeseburger, Memebase, they bring these things to the front of the line or the top of the thread or the tip of the mountain or whatever metaphor you like best,
[26:53.980 --> 26:57.280]  and it makes sure that they're seen by people who might not otherwise.
[26:57.640 --> 26:59.340]  And yes, there are ads.
[26:59.460 --> 27:01.720]  And sometimes they aren't the best at attribution.
[27:01.900 --> 27:06.020]  And sometimes their attitude about the whole aggregation thing is a little unsophisticated.
[27:06.160 --> 27:07.540]  But hey, you know what?
[27:07.600 --> 27:08.320]  It works.
[27:08.440 --> 27:11.260]  And the convergence here between free and commercial works.
[27:11.460 --> 27:17.020]  It doesn't necessarily work because of how the editorial teams treat the content or the people who made the content.
[27:17.160 --> 27:20.700]  Though clearly they try their damnedest to be good people, they're certainly not evil.
[27:20.700 --> 27:28.200]  But rather, because the editorial teams that are aggregating and editing and whatever-ing all those pictures of cats, they get what Internet culture is.
[27:28.400 --> 27:30.540]  It is, for all intents and purposes...
[27:30.540 --> 27:33.240]  And get ready here for the broadest, broad, sweepingly broad, sweeping generalization.
[27:33.380 --> 27:34.920]  The culture of people.
[27:35.620 --> 27:38.280]  Not in, like, the Soviet way, but in the Internet way.
[27:38.440 --> 27:40.320]  Internet culture is our folk art.
[27:40.340 --> 27:41.460]  Our folk culture.
[27:41.580 --> 27:47.320]  We don't think of folk culture as synonymous with our own, because it used to be that folk culture and technology culture never interacted.
[27:47.320 --> 27:49.240]  There was no Venn diagram.
[27:49.580 --> 27:51.180]  But that is no longer true.
[27:51.340 --> 27:57.960]  The ability to make complex, rich media and to distribute it and to find it and consume it is now all available, not just to the Mega Rights holders.
[27:58.140 --> 27:59.260]  It's available to every person.
[27:59.260 --> 28:00.480]  To all the folks.
[28:00.800 --> 28:02.740]  We are now at the point where this...
[28:05.760 --> 28:06.180]  Oh.
[28:06.560 --> 28:07.280]  And this.
[28:08.380 --> 28:09.580]  Nope, nope, nope, nope.
[28:09.720 --> 28:12.020]  Steve is busy showing the last slide again.
[28:12.100 --> 28:13.020]  I don't know...
[28:13.020 --> 28:15.340]  We can't go forward until it comes together again.
[28:15.340 --> 28:15.720]  I'm sorry.
[28:16.980 --> 28:17.780]  There's no...
[28:17.780 --> 28:18.760]  Did you guys get this point?
[28:19.100 --> 28:20.320]  Yeah, we can say this slide again.
[28:20.520 --> 28:21.200]  We are...
[28:21.200 --> 28:21.580]  Should I...
[28:21.580 --> 28:22.100]  We're professionals.
[28:22.200 --> 28:22.440]  Oh, and this.
[28:23.240 --> 28:23.840]  Oh, no.
[28:23.920 --> 28:24.420]  I did it again.
[28:24.520 --> 28:25.040]  I did it wrong.
[28:25.400 --> 28:25.760]  He's sorry.
[28:26.300 --> 28:27.900]  I thought it went too far ahead.
[28:28.160 --> 28:29.640]  No, it's too far behind.
[28:31.760 --> 28:32.960]  So they combine.
[28:33.260 --> 28:34.020]  This is...
[28:36.780 --> 28:38.300]  A Venn diagram is...
[28:38.300 --> 28:38.420]  Okay.
[28:38.740 --> 28:39.580]  Wait, don't touch anything.
[28:40.760 --> 28:41.480]  This one.
[28:42.620 --> 28:43.200]  And this.
[28:43.280 --> 28:43.560]  Okay.
[28:45.160 --> 28:45.960]  And this.
[28:47.000 --> 28:48.240]  Are our folk art.
[28:48.420 --> 28:49.900]  Like, this is our folk culture now.
[28:50.160 --> 28:54.600]  Folklorist Vladimir Prop said that folklore, that it circulates, changing all of the time.
[28:54.740 --> 28:58.740]  And this circulation and changeability are among its specific characteristics.
[28:59.320 --> 29:04.040]  So, in this way, this makes it so folklore and folk art have no real authors.
[29:04.340 --> 29:07.160]  This idea maps onto Internet culture in two very real ways.
[29:07.380 --> 29:10.320]  First and foremost, maybe we don't know who this guy is.
[29:10.320 --> 29:11.880]  And maybe we don't know who took the photo.
[29:12.160 --> 29:14.540]  And in a way, because of this, this work belongs to everyone.
[29:14.760 --> 29:15.780]  But then, what if we do?
[29:16.100 --> 29:17.700]  What if he ends up on a national talk show?
[29:17.820 --> 29:20.100]  And, like, what if we learn his name and we learn the name of the photographer?
[29:20.360 --> 29:25.020]  In the face of authorship, does the ours-ness of this piece of media break down?
[29:25.220 --> 29:26.980]  I mean, the old model would say, yes.
[29:26.980 --> 29:29.020]  Constantine Films owns Downfall.
[29:29.160 --> 29:35.580]  And when you try to make it your own by subtitling it in a funny way, you make it less theirs than they are comfortable with.
[29:35.720 --> 29:38.960]  And then you have to deal with the repercussions lawsuits.
[29:39.360 --> 29:42.180]  But the new model, the new folk culture, says no.
[29:42.580 --> 29:47.080]  In the face of authorship, the piece of media remains just as much ours as it is the author's.
[29:47.160 --> 29:50.340]  And we all enter into that understanding, into that cultural contract.
[29:50.340 --> 29:59.040]  It is the ownership that you feel over Downfall when subtitling it, or the ownership that you feel over My Little Pony while captioning it, practically articulated.
[29:59.480 --> 30:00.360]  And Cheeseburger...
[30:00.360 --> 30:01.420]  Yep, we're still talking about Cheeseburger.
[30:01.580 --> 30:14.860]  ...is willing and consistently able, most likely because of the cash leave amassed as a commercial enterprise aggregating free content, to go to bat for this cultural contract and this new way of treating and using and thinking about and consuming culture in a real way.
[30:14.980 --> 30:16.400]  You know, like when this happens.
[30:16.660 --> 30:17.840]  And they're not alone, of course.
[30:17.960 --> 30:21.120]  Tumblr and Reddit are right there with them, though they are maybe vaguely less commercial.
[30:21.280 --> 30:22.120]  And Facebook is up there too.
[30:22.260 --> 30:31.600]  And though decidedly commercial, is in a less concerted way concerned with Internet culture, so much as they are concerned with Internet infrastructure.
[30:31.980 --> 30:38.940]  The point is that there are different kinds of commercial entities, some that get it and some that do not, and a third group that gets it in a way we don't like.
[30:40.000 --> 30:44.440]  Unfortunately, the Internet is under constant and ridiculously misinformed legal threats.
[30:44.640 --> 30:49.360]  And also, unfortunately, most of us here are not lawyers and do not have the money to hire them.
[30:49.440 --> 31:00.960]  Also, unfortunately, people like this guy, the late Senator Ted Stevens, who coined the phrase series of tubes, are the ones authoring pieces of important legislation like the Communications Consumers Choice in Broadband Deployment Act of 2006.
[31:01.280 --> 31:04.280]  That is, that's not a joke we wish it was, but that is, that is truth.
[31:05.360 --> 31:09.800]  So, it would be great if some of those commercial groups that get it want to go to bat for us.
[31:09.920 --> 31:17.500]  It's almost like the marketing team at Smart Water, having perhaps heard of the Internet, but maybe never been there, have suddenly been put in charge of legislating it.
[31:17.500 --> 31:29.560]  While the people, like the people who made the non-stop Peugeot spot, who seem engaged, interested, and knowledgeable about the Internet, aren't really even allowed in the chamber with the other folks because, you know, that's where the grown-ups are talking.
[31:30.120 --> 31:35.680]  A lot of the people in power who get to make the decisions that affect the Internet think we're just a bunch of cretins.
[31:35.880 --> 31:37.620]  Pirates, perverts, and perps.
[31:37.760 --> 31:46.140]  And while we know that we are not, all the change.org petitions in the world can't speak louder than them fatty fat fat cat greasy sweet lobby dollars.
[31:47.640 --> 31:49.960]  Lobby dollars, sorry, that was the... lobby dollars.
[31:50.260 --> 31:53.600]  So there's a battle that's happening on the Internet, a battle for attention.
[31:53.840 --> 32:01.780]  You've got the old guard of moneyed media interests battling for your attention, with people who are working all the time for free because they love making things.
[32:01.980 --> 32:03.140]  And that's a hard fight to win.
[32:03.320 --> 32:08.760]  So if this battle for your attention is the battle on the Internet we've also got the battle over the Internet.
[32:09.000 --> 32:13.320]  One of the reasons this battle is taking place is because it's a kind of like, meta battle, right?
[32:13.320 --> 32:19.360]  So the big media interests don't need to fight for your attention if they get to decide who gets to talk on the Internet.
[32:19.580 --> 32:23.080]  They just say, we get to talk, and people who threaten our profits don't.
[32:23.200 --> 32:29.360]  They don't even need to win the fight on the Internet if they win the fight over the Internet.
[32:29.600 --> 32:36.100]  The most recent serious contentions for seriously screwing up the Internet via the government were a string of really, really shitty pieces of legislation.
[32:36.340 --> 32:38.780]  SOPA, PIPA, and ACTA.
[32:39.480 --> 32:45.700]  These proposed pieces of legislation and their responses to them are a very good illustration of the type of conflict that's being worked out.
[32:46.000 --> 32:53.560]  Certain moneyed interests are very happy paying money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money to lobbyists in order to influence the creation of, you know, law.
[32:54.260 --> 32:58.540]  While other interested parties don't necessarily have access to that same tactic, and they have to take others.
[32:58.820 --> 33:03.280]  When SOPA and PIPA were building steam to get voted through the Internet, threw itself a blackout.
[33:03.460 --> 33:08.660]  Different sites and different companies did it in different ways, but the central idea was the same, a sort of digital strike of civil disobedience.
[33:08.780 --> 33:13.220]  The SOPA PIPA blackouts were meant to illustrate a non-monetary source of power and influence.
[33:13.420 --> 33:15.240]  And when you think about it, it was a kind of meme.
[33:15.460 --> 33:20.140]  It was an idea that some people had that caught on and that spread to other people and they varied it and then passed it on.
[33:20.500 --> 33:24.180]  It's just that instead of making us laugh, it helps keep the Internet the way it is.
[33:24.320 --> 33:27.500]  It's nice to think about the fight over the Internet as the little guys versus the big guys, right?
[33:27.660 --> 33:32.420]  The pure and the righteous Internet citizen majority against the evil corporate overlord minority.
[33:32.420 --> 33:38.840]  But the blackout was a reminder that today's fight over the Internet, in the United States anyway, isn't David versus Goliath.
[33:38.960 --> 33:40.620]  It's Goliath versus Goliath.
[33:40.700 --> 33:43.920]  You have entrenched media conglomerates versus emerging but powerful Internet companies.
[33:44.180 --> 33:53.440]  To some extent, the fight in Washington over the Internet is about what we, end users, want only insofar as our interests align with corporate interests on one side or the other.
[33:53.440 --> 34:00.580]  But there are lots of other examples where the conflict is more direct, where one party is directly against the government or some other party.
[34:00.780 --> 34:04.140]  Take, for instance, the anti-Solontology protest staged by Anonymous.
[34:04.420 --> 34:07.520]  This isn't the King of the Hill contestation over some third separate goal.
[34:07.660 --> 34:11.840]  These two groups never vied for control of the same other... of some other thing.
[34:12.320 --> 34:14.680]  The conflict was direct and head-to-head.
[34:14.840 --> 34:18.240]  And this pattern holds pretty true for most of Anonymous' more political actions.
[34:18.700 --> 34:21.820]  For instance, when Anonymous users came to the defense of WikiLeaks...
[34:21.820 --> 34:24.260]  Or when on the offense against web security firm H.B.
[34:24.400 --> 34:24.840]  Gary...
[34:24.840 --> 34:28.760]  Or any of the various actions performed by or attributed to LulzSec...
[34:28.760 --> 34:32.340]  Even their involvement in Tunisia had a distinctly us-versus-them feel.
[34:32.580 --> 34:35.200]  One notable thing, though, about all these actions is how they're organized.
[34:35.420 --> 34:39.640]  Because for the most part, without a strict or central form, Anon projects look like this.
[34:39.800 --> 34:46.700]  A set of instructions uploaded to the web in the hopes that others, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe thousands, might take up these instructions and contribute to the effort.
[34:47.020 --> 34:49.120]  And sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.
[34:49.120 --> 34:53.140]  Which is almost exactly the same working model of the Chinese human flesh search engine.
[34:53.240 --> 34:54.080]  We should be careful, though.
[34:54.280 --> 34:55.740]  Anonymous is a tricky thing to talk about.
[34:55.820 --> 35:00.220]  And it's a topic that's been, perhaps, overly fetishized in the last few years.
[35:00.440 --> 35:05.480]  People rarely take the time to distinguish between a group that calls itself Anonymous and takes actions as such...
[35:05.480 --> 35:10.320]  Various actions taken by connected or not individuals which are attributed to Anonymous by others...
[35:10.320 --> 35:15.740]  Actions that are made anonymously, and we could go on, but there are other people who are more qualified to discuss such matters.
[35:15.740 --> 35:16.540]  Biela Coleman.
[35:17.000 --> 35:17.640]  Biela Coleman.
[35:18.360 --> 35:22.680]  It's no surprise that Anonymous's political actions might be dripping with memes or memetic behavior, though.
[35:22.800 --> 35:24.200]  I mean, given, you know, recent web history.
[35:24.380 --> 35:27.620]  But there are a lot of local examples that we can talk about in the same way.
[35:27.840 --> 35:29.920]  Consider the Tea Party and the Occupy movement.
[35:30.020 --> 35:33.980]  Both of these groups, movements, ideas, they are each against the government in their own way.
[35:34.140 --> 35:36.880]  One of the Tea Party's main talking points is less government.
[35:37.080 --> 35:42.440]  And Occupy Wall Street might not want smaller government, but they are against the business-as-usual state of the country.
[35:42.440 --> 35:45.980]  And if we want to be cute about it, well then Occupy Wall Street is also a meme.
[35:46.120 --> 35:49.180]  It's a central set of ideas that can be transmitted, altered, and copied.
[35:49.980 --> 35:55.080]  In addition, though, the events surrounding OWS sparked more than a few more traditional Internet memes.
[35:55.380 --> 35:57.120]  The most notable of which is this guy.
[35:57.660 --> 36:00.620]  Pepper Spray Cop wasn't actually in New York City at all.
[36:00.760 --> 36:02.960]  He was on the campus of University California Davis.
[36:03.240 --> 36:08.880]  And the Internet has learned, oh my, the Internet has learned what to do with images like this.
[36:17.510 --> 36:18.770]  It's Mr. Rogers.
[36:19.050 --> 36:19.830]  Mr. Rogers?
[36:19.990 --> 36:20.330]  No!
[36:21.450 --> 36:22.910]  I never, I didn't see that before.
[36:27.470 --> 36:29.790]  So this kind of thing is no surprise these days.
[36:30.010 --> 36:31.430]  I mean, image macros, right?
[36:31.570 --> 36:32.650]  We love these things.
[36:32.930 --> 36:36.390]  But this is a new twist on a very old tactic, non-violent resistance.
[36:36.670 --> 36:41.150]  I mean, during the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. advocated for non-violence in all protests and activities.
[36:41.150 --> 36:50.310]  When something like this is photographed, a man walking down the street being viciously attacked by dogs on leashes held by men with guns, the image delegitimizes the opposition.
[36:50.550 --> 36:52.470]  This image works for the protesters.
[36:52.710 --> 36:55.990]  It says, all we're doing is walking, and look what they're doing to us.
[36:56.590 --> 37:01.950]  Pepper Spray Cop has been remixed over and over again, but documenting violence and abuse to gain support for your cause is as old as Gandhi, really.
[37:02.210 --> 37:04.790]  The guy Martin Luther King learned non-violence from.
[37:04.790 --> 37:13.130]  But the other thing that we should point out is that in addition to being a meme, and in addition to inspiring memes, the Occupy movement also contains several memes.
[37:13.450 --> 37:18.730]  The use of the people's mic, the use of general assemblies, the chants and slogans, and the concept of the 99%.
[37:18.730 --> 37:22.310]  All of these have become integral parts of what the Occupy movement is.
[37:22.510 --> 37:24.890]  And none of these things were created exclusively by OWS.
[37:25.110 --> 37:29.470]  All of these things have been tried out by other protest movements, developed and changed, and passed on over time.
[37:29.470 --> 37:35.990]  It does beg the question, though, how much of Occupy's spread was made possible because of the Internet?
[37:36.270 --> 37:40.850]  Which is, of course, the same kind of impossible question that people have asked about the various events at the Arab Spring.
[37:40.970 --> 37:42.190]  Did Facebook start a revolution?
[37:42.430 --> 37:43.790]  Did Twitter overthrow a government?
[37:44.030 --> 37:48.830]  It's not hard to believe that Internet-savvy Americans might have a slightly skewed view on the role of the Internet in the world.
[37:49.030 --> 37:49.810]  What do we mean?
[37:50.190 --> 37:52.090]  Well, as it turns out, the Internet is not global.
[37:52.610 --> 37:53.390]  Uh, even a little.
[37:53.870 --> 37:56.850]  Well, okay, so maybe a little, but not much more than a little.
[37:56.990 --> 37:58.990]  The truth of the matter is that the Internet is still growing.
[37:58.990 --> 38:00.550]  In almost every way.
[38:00.670 --> 38:07.730]  Uh, one thing that we struggle with and struggle to remember is that although we think of the Internet as a global Internet, it really is in a certain sense the American-European Internet.
[38:07.970 --> 38:15.270]  The cross-cultural warm fuzzies we feel about being able to visit foreign websites, look at foreign media, support foreign causes, are really only of a poetic importance.
[38:15.290 --> 38:20.310]  We are far from any kind of Internet saturation point in vast parts of the globe.
[38:20.470 --> 38:23.810]  Notice, most of Africa is not even represented on this map.
[38:24.670 --> 38:29.450]  And China, though a large segment, is only at 20-40% Internet saturation by population.
[38:29.710 --> 38:38.630]  And while we are very attracted to this idea of user-generated culture as a way to talk about the state of the world, the fact of the matter is that many countries don't have near as much user-generated content as we do.
[38:38.750 --> 38:43.030]  And many countries that do have the Internet are re-sharing the UGC of countries with higher saturation.
[38:43.310 --> 38:45.790]  There are American and European memes everywhere.
[38:45.790 --> 38:59.110]  So we put on our party hats to celebrate all the great things a global network can accomplish, but then we also put on our other hat, knowing full well that the network is not really global, knowing that this is something we have to work at, a goal we need to be aware of as programmers,
[38:59.370 --> 39:01.930]  researchers, anthropologists, artists, and even users.
[39:02.110 --> 39:03.130]  We're not saying that the U.S. Internet usage is more important than any other country's usage.
[39:05.970 --> 39:12.590]  We're saying that it can sometimes be very hard for us to understand what Internet culture is like in other places around the globe.
[39:12.590 --> 39:16.550]  I mean, take this example from Brazil, for instance, the campaign to save the galvowl birds.
[39:16.830 --> 39:23.890]  It turns out a few smart Brazilians noticed that Americans on Twitter loved to join what they thought of as humanitarian causes.
[39:24.230 --> 39:29.690]  Countless Twitter users made their avatar pick green or set their location to Tehran to support the Iranians.
[39:29.770 --> 39:33.130]  And two years later, a lot of people started adding these stop-soba banners to the bottom of the saying.
[39:33.610 --> 39:38.290]  So these Brazilians, they figured out that if the Americans are so keen on tweeting and retweeting for various causes...
[39:38.290 --> 39:41.670]  And so, save the galvowl bird campaign began.
[39:41.670 --> 39:46.810]  Asking people to tweet and retweet calaboca galvowl in order to save these endangered birds.
[39:47.030 --> 39:49.070]  Except, there are no birds.
[39:49.490 --> 39:53.030]  And calaboca galvowl actually translates to shut up galvowl.
[39:53.210 --> 39:57.090]  And galvowl is the name of a particularly unpopular Brazilian sportscaster.
[39:59.990 --> 40:00.510]  Whoopsie!
[40:01.270 --> 40:04.450]  Though, to be fair, as a political example, this one is pretty low stakes.
[40:04.450 --> 40:06.630]  But remember when we mentioned China earlier?
[40:06.990 --> 40:09.310]  We recently got a chance to see digital artist...
[40:09.310 --> 40:11.110]  I'm sorry, I'm going to murder this...
[40:11.110 --> 40:14.750]  And Zhao Mina talk about any number of Chinese Internet memes.
[40:14.950 --> 40:18.830]  Which is good for us, because our attempts to research Chinese Internet memes look a lot like this.
[40:21.570 --> 40:24.830]  The poster child for political memes in China is the grass mud horse.
[40:25.030 --> 40:31.730]  Long story short, the grass mud horse is a mythical creature that was invented in order to circumvent China's tight-fisted digital censorship.
[40:31.730 --> 40:34.910]  The Chinese language, apparently, is rife with similar phonemes.
[40:34.970 --> 40:36.330]  So it wasn't hard to pick three.
[40:36.550 --> 40:38.610]  Grass, mud, horse, or...
[40:40.170 --> 40:43.150]  Which sounds almost exactly like the characters for F*ck Your Mother.
[40:44.770 --> 40:52.950]  Since then, there have been even more pun-splicit animals that have been invented, but the grass mud horse, and secondly these river crabs, have become the two most popular symbols of this clever resistance.
[40:53.150 --> 40:54.690]  Oh, and the river crabs?
[40:57.210 --> 40:57.650]  Yeah.
[40:58.690 --> 41:03.510]  Grass mud horse has a pretty easy time crossing borders, but there are other related practices that we found out about.
[41:03.630 --> 41:05.730]  All of which orient themselves to political resistance.
[41:08.110 --> 41:14.630]  If the U.S. Internet is dominated by businesses who are in control, it makes sense that so much of the user-generated culture uses commercial or anti-commercial imagery.
[41:14.790 --> 41:21.230]  And if the Chinese Internet is dominated by the government, then it makes sense that so much of its user-generated culture uses governmental or anti-governmental imagery.
[41:21.530 --> 41:25.670]  Some of which, due to government censorship of the Internet, has been taken offline into the streets.
[41:27.830 --> 41:28.790]  Seriously, there's a lot of...
[41:28.790 --> 41:29.790]  No, really, yeah, you really should.
[41:29.930 --> 41:30.930]  A lot of great presentations.
[41:32.350 --> 41:34.430]  And now we've circled back almost full circle.
[41:34.490 --> 41:40.510]  We've seen non-political memes and political ones, we've seen ways that people have censored communication, and we've seen ways that people have circumvented that censorship.
[41:40.710 --> 41:49.410]  The issue is a complicated one, and one that we don't pretend to know everything about, but it's important, and the relationship between web culture and political power are not only likely to become stronger and more important.
[41:49.930 --> 41:51.990]  I'm sure a lot of you in the audience are familiar with this quote.
[41:52.130 --> 41:54.550]  And if you haven't heard it before, I'm sure you can get the gist.
[41:55.490 --> 42:01.170]  This, along with slogans like, information wants to be free, and there is porn of it, are big pillars of Internet culture's history.
[42:01.250 --> 42:03.990]  It's like our, I regret I have but one life to give.
[42:04.170 --> 42:05.450]  Or, the British are coming.
[42:05.770 --> 42:11.930]  But if we think about this quote, we could, if we wanted, play devil's advocate and explore a contradictory view.
[42:12.670 --> 42:14.850]  We started today by talking about maps of the Internet.
[42:14.990 --> 42:17.190]  And in a way, this is the first ever map of the Internet.
[42:17.350 --> 42:22.130]  This diagram was part of the original publication that theorized how a distributed Internet work could be created.
[42:22.750 --> 42:25.550]  This was at a time when the world was very different than it is now.
[42:25.690 --> 42:30.790]  The nuclear arms race of the Cold War caused the U.S. government to consider what would happen if we were ever bombed.
[42:31.090 --> 42:36.950]  And so the birth of the Internet we know today was a national communications system to ensure against nuclear attack.
[42:37.150 --> 42:40.370]  This is actually the same logic that drove Eisenhower to create the national interstate system, right?
[42:40.450 --> 42:45.550]  If the U.S. was ever invaded in wartime, we'd need several redundant and efficient systems for moving troops from place to place.
[42:45.550 --> 42:49.050]  Except that by the 1960s, we weren't afraid of Germans landing on the beach.
[42:49.230 --> 42:50.510]  We were afraid of this.
[42:51.470 --> 42:53.990]  The point being that this never happened.
[42:55.130 --> 43:02.050]  Meaning that you could argue, if you wanted, that the only type of threat that the Internet is technologically built to withstand is this kind.
[43:02.310 --> 43:07.090]  The problem of censorship isn't one that the Internet as a technology is programmed to deal with.
[43:07.190 --> 43:12.390]  So, okay, if freedom from censorship isn't hard-coded into the technology of the Internet, then where does it come from?
[43:12.390 --> 43:16.010]  Given everything that we've talked about so far, our answer probably won't surprise you.
[43:16.130 --> 43:17.330]  It comes from the people.
[43:17.890 --> 43:22.610]  We've already talked about how the all-inclusiveness of the Internet is maybe not all that it's cracked up to be.
[43:22.710 --> 43:28.310]  But during the first 20 years of its history, basically when the Internet had no World Wide Web, it was even more non-inclusive.
[43:28.530 --> 43:34.030]  Meaning that in general, you had a pretty limited set of characteristics that described most of the people making the big decisions online.
[43:34.150 --> 43:37.850]  White, American, middle-class, college-educated, male, liberal, technologist.
[43:38.350 --> 43:44.570]  Which, just to put it into perspective, we're not claiming that those were the only type of people who shaped the early Internet.
[43:44.810 --> 43:46.990]  But it might help to think back to our Founding Fathers reference.
[43:47.410 --> 43:52.050]  Given that a whole lot of decisions about how the United States is shaped was determined by...
[43:52.050 --> 43:56.590]  White, American, upper-class, Enlightenment-influenced, Christian, male, good writers.
[43:57.290 --> 44:01.210]  Now, obviously there are a lot of bad things that come from the result of this narrowest.
[44:01.570 --> 44:05.010]  And there are a lot of people out there who say awesome or intelligent things about them.
[44:05.010 --> 44:07.890]  Racialicious and Is This Racist... Yo, Is This Racist?
[44:07.910 --> 44:08.350]  Yo, Is This Racist.
[44:08.350 --> 44:09.190]  Yo, Is This Racist.
[44:09.570 --> 44:13.270]  Deal with, often hilariously, with issues of race on and offline.
[44:13.610 --> 44:16.210]  Feminist frequency deals with representations of gender.
[44:16.470 --> 44:21.170]  And Global Voices, which is organized by Ethan Zuckerman, is doing its best to get past the American label as well.
[44:21.430 --> 44:26.770]  But there was also, we think, one very good thing to come out of the homogeny of those early computer scientists.
[44:26.890 --> 44:36.330]  Which is that their belief in a liberal ideal of free speech and free access and free information, those people and beliefs are responsible for structuring many of the freedoms that make Internet culture what it is today.
[44:36.550 --> 44:40.050]  And this is just as much a cultural innovation as it is a technical one.
[44:40.190 --> 44:44.690]  And we should clarify that we don't mean liberal here in the way that it gets used on most contemporary news media.
[44:44.790 --> 44:46.390]  Liberal is not a shorthand for Democrat.
[44:46.390 --> 44:50.450]  It denotes something more similar to the Founding Fathers' Enlightenment ideals than anything else.
[44:50.770 --> 45:00.010]  It's probably not too much of an exaggeration to say that for a while there, the Venn diagram circle of sysadmins was pretty much entirely in the much larger free speech activist circle.
[45:00.010 --> 45:02.410]  But maybe that's no longer the case?
[45:03.050 --> 45:07.030]  Just like the interstates have long been disassociated from anything militaristic.
[45:07.170 --> 45:10.010]  And taken up by a public intent on work and or relaxation.
[45:10.230 --> 45:15.510]  The Internet has been distanced from its military origins and flooded with people looking to both work and play.
[45:15.690 --> 45:18.670]  And with all that energy has come the commercial interests we've described.
[45:18.870 --> 45:24.470]  And with all those commercial interests come a flood of people who maybe aren't the most liberal or altruistic of people.
[45:24.470 --> 45:33.010]  When the goal of your job is to increase shareholder profit to the detriment of any other goal or value, you are less than likely to stick up for free expression.
[45:33.210 --> 45:38.030]  And when network technology proves the newest opportunity to make you a shitload of money, you can bet you're going to get involved.
[45:38.250 --> 45:45.490]  Which is to say, we can no longer assume that the Internet as a whole is just the home of the good guys, or even one of the good guys itself.
[45:45.670 --> 45:49.030]  Saying this would be like saying only Democrats use phones.
[45:49.030 --> 45:51.170]  Or even phones can only be used for good.
[45:51.310 --> 45:53.410]  But we can't lose the war on attention.
[45:54.070 --> 45:54.690]  We can't.
[45:54.830 --> 45:57.330]  I mean, for as long as there have been people, there has been communication.
[45:57.830 --> 46:00.390]  The Internet's very design affords and facilitates sharing.
[46:00.690 --> 46:04.190]  We, people, make the culture like apple trees make apples.
[46:04.370 --> 46:05.010]  It's what we do.
[46:05.150 --> 46:07.050]  So don't worry about winning the war of attention on the Internet.
[46:07.190 --> 46:08.350]  I mean, we can't really lose.
[46:08.650 --> 46:11.530]  But if we lose the war over government, it won't matter.
[46:11.650 --> 46:13.690]  We won't have a choice on the Internet anymore.
[46:14.090 --> 46:18.130]  A user-generated culture threatens the revenue models of media conglomerates by its very existence.
[46:18.130 --> 46:23.090]  And as far as the conglomerates are concerned, eyeballs on competing media are a threat to their bottom line.
[46:23.270 --> 46:27.230]  And their market researchers are working out how to get you back onto their content.
[46:27.490 --> 46:31.370]  And lawyers and lobbyists figuring out how to take away the option to see or hear anything else.
[46:31.490 --> 46:33.450]  Some is never enough in the capitalist game.
[46:33.590 --> 46:35.130]  It is winner-take-all.
[46:36.210 --> 46:44.310]  Countries like China and Iran give us a window into a world where we've lost the battle over government and powerful forces control who can talk and what they can say on the Internet.
[46:44.310 --> 46:50.610]  Censorship and human rights abuses that take place in countries like those inspire us to advocate for change in those countries.
[46:50.850 --> 46:53.550]  And provide a real motivation to win the battle over government here.
[46:53.690 --> 46:58.930]  We don't want that world for ourselves, and we don't want to pass a Chinese or Iranian-style Internet on to our children.
[46:59.130 --> 47:00.190]  But what if we lose?
[47:00.430 --> 47:04.730]  What if a Chinese or Iranian-style Internet becomes the model for the Internet worldwide?
[47:05.110 --> 47:09.950]  Protecting either corporate or government interests at the expense of everyone who isn't a member of the elite.
[47:09.950 --> 47:14.450]  If we lose the battle over government, the next struggle will be a battle against the Internet.
[47:14.710 --> 47:17.270]  A world where we're forced to build alternative networks.
[47:17.450 --> 47:19.990]  Or take our messages of resistance exclusively offline.
[47:20.190 --> 47:21.910]  We're not scared of this future.
[47:22.070 --> 47:25.170]  The very real possibility that this could happen makes us angry.
[47:25.390 --> 47:31.490]  The greatest tools ever constructed to do the very thing that separates humankind from all the other animals in the world could be turned against us.
[47:31.510 --> 47:33.810]  For the financial and political benefit.
[47:33.810 --> 47:39.430]  Of people who already have so much money and power that they spend all of their free time figuring out how to get more.
[47:39.750 --> 47:42.550]  There are a lot of things that we can do to prevent this future.
[47:42.690 --> 47:50.870]  And a lot of organizations and people here at the conference you can collaborate with to make today's Internet better and more resistant to this kind of top-down control.
[47:51.090 --> 47:52.690]  But still, there may come a time when...
[47:52.690 --> 47:55.870]  For the good of all of us, we might actually have to...
[47:55.870 --> 47:56.930]  Kill the Internet?
[47:58.110 --> 47:58.750]  Thank you.
[47:58.990 --> 47:59.110]  Thanks.
[48:16.100 --> 48:19.540]  So we have time for literally one third of a question.
[48:20.500 --> 48:21.820]  Turn to the back room.
[48:21.980 --> 48:22.900]  What do you think about?
[48:23.900 --> 48:25.440]  Oh, actually we only have 60 seconds.
[48:25.620 --> 48:26.480]  So we're gonna go to the back.
[48:26.620 --> 48:28.020]  And if you have questions, we can do it back there.
[48:28.240 --> 48:29.100]  Yeah, we'll go to the back room.
[48:29.260 --> 48:29.320]  Thank you.
[48:29.320 --> 48:30.400]  If you have questions, you can talk to us.
[48:30.500 --> 48:31.380]  We'll be hanging out back there.
[48:31.500 --> 48:34.280]  Just follow the sound of the Venn diagram slowly moving.
[48:35.380 --> 48:35.700]  Awesome.
[48:36.620 --> 48:37.360]  Thank you.
[48:37.680 --> 48:37.780]  Whew.
[48:38.040 --> 48:38.220]  Thanks.
[48:39.460 --> 48:39.840]  Right?
[48:40.720 --> 48:41.120]  Right?
[48:41.640 --> 48:42.860]  It is totally...
[48:43.620 --> 48:44.560]  Did we go over?
[48:44.660 --> 48:44.760]  Did we go over?
[48:44.760 --> 48:45.460]  We were totally...