Laurie Smith: Hello and welcome to our latest Nesta talks to..., our conversation event series with today's most exciting thinkers on the big topics related to our missions and innovation methods. My name is Laurie Smith and I lead a lot of the research in the discovery hub at Nesta, the UK's innovation agency for social good. We design, test and scale solutions to society's biggest problems. Our three missions are to help people live healthier lives, create a sustainable future where the economy works for both people and the planet and give every child a fair start.

The Discovery Hub is responsible for helping bring the outside into the organisation. Considering the consequences of trends and technologies for Nesta's work, which brings a link to a subject of today's discussion. Re-imagining the internet. Please join in the conversation in the comments box on the right hand side of your screen and ask any questions throughout the event. Closed captions can be accessed and can be accessed via the LinkedIn Live stream. And now I'd like to introduce our speaker, Ben Tarnoff. He's a writer who works in the tech industry. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, the New York Review of Books, among many other places. And his most recent book is Internet for the People: the Fight for our Digital Future, which is published by Verso in June, 2022. He's also a co-founder of Logic Magazine. Welcome, Ben.

Ben Tarnoff: Hey, Laurie. Thanks so much for having me.

Laurie Smith: Thank you very much for joining us. So shall we start, but maybe we would-- we're talking about re-imagining the internet. Maybe you could tell us about the first time that you personally used the internet.

Ben Tarnoff: Yeah. I actually vividly remember the first time I used the internet. This would have been probably 1994. I would have been about nine years old at the time. And I was with my mother at a place called the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland, Oregon, which is a beautiful building overlooking the Willamette River. And like many little boys, I was obsessed with space and astronauts. So I was walking around this huge museum, looking for rockets and astronaut ice cream and kind of things of that sort. And we stumbled across this small computer room and we were told by the attendant that all of these computers were connected to something called the internet.

I had never heard of the internet at the time. I don't think my mum had either. But we sat down and at this point, this was before the birth of the modern search engine so it might have been Yahoo or a different kind of directory that we used to try to find websites to access, but I just completely fell in love with it. I mean, I searched for information primarily about Star Trek. So I tried to figure out, how big is the Starship Enterprise by millimetres or whatever. And it just completely blew me away that there could have been so much information accessible through a computer. Of course, the irony being that the World Wide Web back then was much, much smaller than it is today. But that was the beginning of a long love affair with the internet, which continues to this day.

Laurie Smith: It sounds like our childhood's in many ways remarkably similar with interest in rockets and so forth. I suppose that brought you through your career to the book, which is sort of a central focus of our discussion. Maybe something in a nutshell, what's the sort of central argument in the book?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, the central argument of the book is quite simple, which is that the internet is broken because the internet is a business, which is to say, the various crises that we've been grappling with in recent years like the annihilation of our privacy, the proliferation of hate speech through social media, the exploitation and degradation of app-based workers, like Uber drivers, that all of these are connected to the fact that the internet is owned by private firms and run for profit. And my book is primarily history. So it's a history of where the internet came from and how it came to be a private profit-driven system because the internet actually originated as a public system. So the process by which the internet was privatised in a particularly comprehensive way laid the foundations, in my view, for the various crises that we're seeing consume the internet today.

Laurie Smith: And what made you want to write it? Why do you feel the need to tell the story?

Ben Tarnoff: It's funny, I think there are, very broadly, two kinds of writers. Writers who write about what they love and writers who write about what they hate. And I've always been in the former, I couldn't possibly spend so much time with things that I hate. And this foundational moment for me in 1994, where I did really fall in love with the internet and then went on to be a kid who spent probably far too much time sitting in front of a computer. I think there was a personal element of trying to reckon with, not exactly a sense of mourning and nostalgia because these are emotions I'm a bit suspicious of, politically, but trying to, at minimum, comprehend what had happened to this world that I love so much. Not to say that I fell out of love with it or that it's been corrupted beyond redemption because I don't feel that way, but nonetheless, these massive transformations have taken place, of course. And I wanted to understand where they came from. And then, of course, it's not purely a personal story. It's also stepping back, particularly in the past five years, the so-called tech-clash moment where the popular discourse, our political system, people are paying attention to the scandals, to the dysfunctions of the modern internet in a new way. I also wanted to make an intervention at that level and try to figure out, well, what's the root of the problem? Where did things actually go wrong?

Laurie Smith: So what is [INAUDIBLE] talk about the concern around the sort of private internet? What does that mean for people's lives? I mean, sort of day to day, maybe because it you take it through the impact on someone's life in the day that's a typical citizen?

Ben Tarnoff: Yeah, that's a great question. And I think we have to answer it in such a way that matches the complexity of the internet itself. Because the internet is woven into, really, every aspect of our lives at this point in advanced Capitalist countries. It's indispensable to our social lives, of course, but also to our civic and political lives, to our economic lives, our ability to find a job and so on. In the book, I offer a fairly crude way of breaking down the internet, but I think one that's helpful for our purposes, which is that you can think about the internet in two parts. The pipes and the platforms. The pipes, being the physical infrastructure, how do you get online? The platforms being a fairly familiar term to all of us at this point. What do you do on the internet? The apps, and sites that mediate your experience of the internet. When we talk about, what have been the consequences of extreme privatisation?

What have been the consequences of surrendering the internet to a handful of large companies whose only purpose is profit maximisation? We have to say that the consequences look different, depending on the layer of the internet you're talking about. So when it comes to the pipes, we have the internet service providers. Now this is a landscape that looks a bit different in different countries. But using the United States as a case study, we can say that the more market-driven, the more profit-driven a system is when it comes to the provision of internet service, the more likely it will be for service to be very high cost and very low quality. And again, the United States is emblematic-- paradigmatic in this respect. We have a highly concentrated market of internet service.

We have higher internet rates than Europeans, or folks in Asia. And we have probably rank about 15th in average connection speeds below countries like Thailand and Romania. And this is the outcome of a series of policy decisions that have created a kind of dictatorship over internet infrastructure in the hands of a handful of corporations. Now when we move up the stack and talk about the platforms, the consequences of this profit maximisation model are quite different. And I'm going on and on so I'm going to just, very briefly, sketch a few and we can go deeper, If you like.

We can think about the way in which a company, like Facebook, is driven by, of course, the profit motive, as all of these firms are. But in the case of Facebook, driven by the need to acquire as much of our attention as possible so as to monetize that attention through the sale of personal advertising. And as has been thoroughly documented by research, both inside and outside Facebook, this drive towards the maximisation of this attention capture apparatus leads, quite directly, to Facebook prioritising inflammatory, bigoted, hateful content because this is content that the algorithm itself recognises, tends to spread faster, produce stronger reactions and thus grab attention.

So in the case of Facebook, we can see a quite direct link between the need for Facebook to generate revenue to grow market share and the degree to which its infrastructure prioritises inflammatory content with, as we've seen, pretty severe political consequences.

Laurie Smith: Really interesting. And you use the use of talking some of the challenges of this privatisation. I think in the book, these two quite evocative metaphors about slumlords and online moles, which I think you describe as inequality machines. What do you mean by those sort of two metaphors? They're quite evocative.

Ben Tarnoff: Well, this maps, again, to this distinction between pipes and platforms that we were talking about. So in the case of the pipes, I characterise the major firms who control the pipes of the internet as slumlords. And slumlords, because these companies are in the business of declining to invest in infrastructure so that they can use the exorbitant rates that they're charging customers to funnel that money upwards into the hands of investors, primarily through buybacks and dividends. And similarly, when it comes to housing stock, slumlords tend to very significantly under invest in things like repairs and infrastructure so that they can just leach as much money out of the system and funnel it upwards. And this has been the model, again, the United States being the paradigmatic case, but certainly replicated in various places around the world, the model of a profit-driven approach to internet provision.

Now when we move up the stack, so to speak, to the world of the platforms, I use these other metaphors. As you mentioned, the metaphor of the online shopping mall, which is my kind of attempt to provide an alternative metaphor. Metaphor when it comes to computing are really important because we can't see the bits. So all we have are these abstractions to help us understand what's going on. In my view, platform is not the best abstraction because it does a lot of work for the companies themselves. It suggests a degree of neutrality of openness, of even handedness, that is not actually happening. We know that these firms are intimately involved in the organisation of our online life. They're not just providing a flat surface for us to interact upon.

So to my mind, the idea of a shopping mall is actually a bit more accurate because the shopping mall has this architecture that is designed in order to encourage you to do certain things, like to shop. And we can go deeper into the details of that metaphor if that is interesting, but the other metaphor that I use, which you referred to, is the inequality machine. And this is my attempt to for a generalisation of, well, there are so many of these different types of platforms or online malls. Facebook is very different when it comes to its software than a company like Google or Amazon. These are different business models. These are different computational infrastructures. What do they have in common when it comes to their downstream effects?

And I think in different ways, all of these firms and systems generate inequalities. Now these could be inequalities of the form of Uber developing more sophisticated techniques of algorithmic management in order to better exploit workers and contribute to greater inequalities, simply at the level of wages, by displacing what was once a low or middle class profession of taxi drivers and replacing them with folks who are earning poverty wages. That would be one direct example of that, but as we've already discussed in the case of Facebook, for instance, that inequality can also be generated at the level of our informational environments. It can be generated by giving new resources to the forces who want to promote inequality. By giving a megaphone to the forces of bigotry and hatred, as we've already seen. But I think inequality, once again, is the guiding thread in terms of what have been the consequences of the forces of privatisation reaching up the stack, if you like.

Laurie Smith: Even since you've written the book, it came out last year, it means great strides in digital technologies, such as say the release of Chat GPT 3, which is getting lots of attention at the moment. What might be the consequences of such technological change be on both, the internet and the case you make in the book? Does it change anything, or is it essentially just another layer on the stack, but it's part of the same problem?

Ben Tarnoff: It's a good question. And it's a question I'm hesitant to answer directly because the history of the internet is littered with people making pronouncements and prophecies that turn out to be completely false. And when you write a book about the history of the internet, you find all these people saying, in five years, it's going to be like this, in 10 years it's going to be like this. And they're all wrong. And you're like, wow, I don't want to end up like one of them. So I wouldn't put anything down in stone. I would say, in general terms, that the basic core architecture of the internet is remarkably robust and resilient. The internet, fundamentally, has a set of protocols, the TCP/IP protocol stack.

And the original protocol, the father protocol if you like, is developed in the mid 1970s and the series of experiments that are funded by the Pentagon, which I talk about in the book. And that-- the code, the rules have changed a bit over time, but the fundamental principles that were developed in the mid 70s are still the fundamental principles on which the internet runs. And I find it hard to believe, although it's certainly not impossible, that will change in any significant. Way I remember-- this already feels like a century ago, but when there was enthusiasm around the concept of Web3, which was essentially a re-branding of Blockchain, there were some, I think, overly enthusiastic speculation that Blockchain could serve as a new fundamental architecture for the entire internet, that it could somehow displace TCP/IP and these basic principles that have been at the centre of it for decades.

I find that hard to believe, but certainly, all sorts of things can happen at the top of the stack. And the platform model, again, I don't love the word platform, but the kind of set of computational infrastructures, this approach to doing the web in a particular way, which really emerges in the early 2000s and has become completely dominant in our own era. I think it's fair to assume that, at some point, that paradigm will break down. What replaces it is an open question. Web3 was a kind of bid for that. VR and the metaverse was another bid for that. Those bids appear to have failed, or at least receded. More will emerge. So it's hard to know.

Laurie Smith: So should we move to thinking about, obviously, you got a really helpful diagnosis of this challenge. Maybe some consult having it-- opening up the box around sort of solutions and turning to various solutions. You talk in the book about early pioneers of public and community approaches to the internet, so as alternatives to the private sector. One of which, rather to my surprise, maybe it sort of shows my ignorance, came to London's GLC back in the 1980s. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that?

Ben Tarnoff: Yeah, so in the 1980s, the Labour Party Left controls the GLC and they undertake a number of experiments, largely, at the level of industrial policy, which are quite interesting. One of them is to establish a number of centres throughout London, which they called Technology Networks. And these were spaces that, today, we might think of as hacker-spaces, or maker spaces. But these were, essentially, spaces in which ordinary people could walk in, get access to different types of tools, machine tools and other tools, get access to various forms of expertise, so be partnered with people who knew what they were doing and develop technologies that were designed to improve their lives.

Many of the technologies that came out of the technology networks focused on energy efficiency. It's kind of interesting, kind of early sustainability technologies. And technologies that were developed went into a common database where other people could access, corporations could licence them for a fee, which helped support the technology networks. When I stumbled across this history, I found it really generative because I think it gives us a model for how we could put resources into creating spaces in which ordinary people can come together to try to begin to imagine the internet that they want. In the book, I talk about a lot of existing alternative models to the profit-driven internet.

And I think it's very important to point out that many of these models already exist, are already functioning, and we can think about them as providing some of the building blocks for what we might call de-privatised internet. But it's also important to acknowledge that none of these existing alternatives are quite enough. And part of the problem is that they're not quite imaginative enough. We actually need more imagination to really try to remap the internet, to try to think outside of the paradigms that we have been provided by the corporate internet. And really try to stretch the parameters of possibility.

The technology network seemed like one model for leveraging the power of the public sector to direct resources towards spaces in which people can come together and do that imaginative work in space, in an embodied way.

Laurie Smith: So if you are thinking about re-imagining the internet, I think, it's a really powerful way of putting it. What should we do to re-imagine the internet now? What practical action should be taken? Is it recreating what the GLC did? Is it something different? What would be the fora or the spaces or the institutions that would do that?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, I think the GLC is one model. So you could imagine municipalities, for instance, putting together their own maker spaces or hacker-spaces and saying, we want to create a space in which ordinary people can come in, get paired with software developers, get access to the tools they need and develop, perhaps, hyper-local or local or municipal or even regional alternatives to social media. So maybe we want to create a decentralised social media system of the kind that is already prefigured somewhat by mastodon, but we want to do it at the municipal level. How do we put local citizens together with the people with the expertise and start to develop some prototypes?

Maybe we want to develop a worker-owned alternative to Uber, that only operates within this municipality. Can we get some taxi drivers together, maybe the taxi Union, software developers. So you could see it as a kind of clearinghouse for these different initiatives that will necessarily need to activate different kinds of expertise, but through this prototypes, can emerge and potentially be scaled with of course, the appropriate resources. But I think, again, this thing about imagination, it's tricky because on the one hand, we want to empower people to think very creatively about what an internet that serves their needs would look like. On the other hand, it's important to give them existing alternatives so that they can recognise that a different internet is possible.

It's hard to be sitting purely in Facebook world and imagine from there. It helps if you have some kind of intermediate step. For instance, if you've used mastodon. Again, mastodon is incomplete. It has a lot of issues as people have discovered, particularly, recently as folks have been looking at it as an alternative to Elon Musk's Twitter. But nonetheless, I think mastodon is a perfect intermediate step because it starts to de-familiarise the internet that we know. It starts to show you, oh, maybe there is a different way of organising it. But it's not enough. From there, we need to do something a bit more creative. But it is this process. I think there are stages involved.

Laurie Smith: And you talk-- I'm digging into some of that. You talk in the book about the importance of content moderation. You have to deal with some of those that polarisation. You talk about it as a form of care, which I think is a really interesting analogy. Perhaps you can unpack that because often care is associated with a technological or digital view of the world.

Ben Tarnoff: Well, when you think about what content moderation is, it's really a way of reproducing our social lives on the internet, making it possible for our social lives to be able to continue on the internet in a safe way. And so there is a direct analogy, I think, to the work of care, to broadly the work of social reproduction, to the work of healing people's bodies, healing their minds, showing them love. I think that is, without being excessively sentimental about it, the basis of how the world continues. If we didn't have care, societies could not continue to function, regardless of how poorly compensated that work tends to be.

So I think there is a quite direct analogy to caring for our online spaces. I think the hard part with one of the many hard things about content moderation however, is that it's very difficult to arrive at decisions about what kind of content should circulate in social media spaces and how precisely it should be moderated. And I think it's important to note that I don't imagine that any of the solutions, or not even solutions, any really of the frameworks provided in my book will provide a magic bullet to that question, or to any of the questions. I think the de-privatisation paradigm that I'm trying to explore is not so much a way to answer all of these questions, but to provide a space in which the answers can be found.

I think so long as you have an internet that is owned by private firms and run for the principle of profit maximisation, all of these decisions are going to be very heavily constrained by the parameters of profit. And we've already seen this with content moderation. Content moderation can only happen in a particular way, so long as it's existing within the confines of a capitalist firm.

What I want to suggest is how we might do content moderation differently if we were working outside of the constraints of the profit motive. What might it look like? What kind of practises could we develop towards it? And this will involve difficult decisions and this will involve deliberative processes and politics and collisions around values. But that's, I think, ultimately, the best way to do content moderation, to not have Mark Zuckerberg and his investors get to determine how content is moderated, but to have some type of Democratic process where we have difficult and indeed angry conversations, but we have a deliberative process.

Laurie Smith: So that's really helpful. I'm going to turn things over to the audience, who have been asking some questions as you've been speaking. The first one I got up is from Fran Bernhardt, I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly. And one of the questions she puts is, I'd like to know if you've got any advice on how to effectively address industry lobbying, which is currently successfully undermining many worthwhile public health policies, presumably she means in relation to the internet.

Ben Tarnoff: It's a great question, Fran. And my book is, in part, a history of industry lobbying because it's really the influence that industry brings to bear on the political system that has ensured that privatisation has taken the particularly extreme course that it has, that different possible internet's have always existed. There have always been other paths that we could have taken, but the extent of industry influence has ensured that we have ended up with a extremely privatised model with the various attendant social consequences that we've been discussing so far in our conversation. How does one counter that power? One has to build a counter power through mass movements from below. I think that's the only way we've ever had a degree of Democratic control in our political system.

And these mass movements have taken different forms over time. The Labour movement obviously comes to mind, the Civil Rights movement in the United States being another great example of a mass movement. But it takes large numbers of people undertaking disruptive action in their communities and through electoral processes. And that can feel like a big lift, particularly these days, living in a kind of demobilised era, I'm afraid. But I think it will take a movement to build a better internet.

Laurie Smith: So to another question in fact, there's a submitted in advance of the talks. I'm not sure who it's from. This is about, you touched on how the GLC, lots of it's-- the work it did involved both the internet and environmental issues as well. And this question is, how can the pathway to net zero be facilitated by new technologies and presumably, also the internet? What the most important technological applications of, say, the internet in the environmental space so the intersection of those two trends?

Ben Tarnoff: Yeah, it's an important question. I should say, first of all, that the internet poses a major problem for the climate because data centres, in particular, are extremely energy intensive and are only becoming more so with certain AI applications. So if folks, you mentioned Chad GPT, Laurie, ChatGPT runs on these large language models, which are very, very, very energy intensive. So there is already a significant difficulty that the internet poses for climate. In terms of the more positive examples of how could the internet and digital technology contribute to energy efficiency, we do have some examples if we're looking for a bit of hopefulness. In fact, one of the community networks that I discuss in my book, which is a major success story here in the United States, this is a municipally owned broadband network in Chattanooga, Tennessee that is actually one of the most popular ISPs in the country, is known for delivering very good service, very reasonable rates. It actually originated because the local electric utility used federal stimulus funds during the Obama era to build what is called a Smart Grid.

So they essentially embed these various sensors throughout the grid and it improves energy efficiency, it makes it easier for them to know if there are outages instead of waiting for a call, the pole fell down, we can see, oh, this neighbourhood doesn't have electricity. So you embed all these sensors into the grid and then you connect them with a fibre optic network so they can all talk to each other and talk to you. And they realise once they put in all this fibre, hey, we could also actually use this to serve broadband to the city of Chattanooga. So that is one example of, as we are improving our energy infrastructure, in particular, our electricity delivery infrastructure, it's possible to do so in such a way that we are also improving our broadband infrastructure.

Laurie Smith: And then we've got another question from David Barker, which is a live question. And he asks, when do we as citizens have to take responsibility for what we buy and how we behave as that also drives the dystopian markets of products and services that do not benefit society as negative impact, locally and globally. So I suppose how much of is our responsibility as citizens and how much of it is the responsibility of these private companies?

Ben Tarnoff: The issue of responsibility is always a tricky one I think because on the one hand, I think particularly, these days, there's a lot of resistance to the idea of individuals taking too much responsibility for their behaviour. One will often hear the argument that, well, it's difficult to buy things not on Amazon. These companies have gotten so big, or so invasive. And even if you try not to buy things on Amazon, you're almost certainly using websites that are running on Amazon Web Services. There's a kind of ubiquity to it. And I think we have to recognise that there is a kind of basic truth to that, that it is increasingly very difficult to live your lives in such a way that you do not come into contact with any of these companies. Even if you are not conscious of using their services, you may in fact be relying on their services without knowing.

On the other hand, I do think that personal responsibility is important. It's maybe a bit unfashionable to say, but the only way the world changes is when individuals do make different choices. Now those choices have to be made at scale. They have to be made with one another. They have to be made on a collective basis. But it does have to start somewhere. So I'm afraid that's a very unsatisfying answer, but I think there is obviously space-- and more than space, a kind of requirement for individuals to begin to live differently. But if they can't do so in such a way that those different choices are magnified through some type of broader social process, then it doesn't go anywhere.

Laurie Smith: And another aspect to think about the relationship of the individual to the internet, there's a question here from Mian Todorovic, I hope I'm pronouncing that name correctly but, how do we regulate the internet without impinging on personal freedoms while also preventing its misuse? The trade-off, the other end is individual and collective.

Ben Tarnoff: This is an important question. And again, I think it's one that has fallen a bit out of view. In the 1990s, there was quite a lot of discourse from cyber-libertarians about the need to protect the internet from government regulation. Figures like John Perry Barlow, for instance, were quite foundational, or the kind of early days of Wired Magazine, if folks remember that. These days, those figures and that way of thinking has, I think, largely fallen out of fashion because much more of the focus these days is on our corporate overlords, rather than on government. Now of course, that depends on where you live globally. But let's say particularly, in the West, that is where the focus of the so-called tech clash has been concentrated.

But I think it's quite important to remember the Barlow era because you did have-- in the case of the United States, we had something called the Communications Decency Act, which large portions of which got struck down, but there was quite concerted effort to regulate speech on the web. And that effort was largely defeated. And of course, once these very big businesses were built on the basis of the web, I think the desire to do so receded.

But nonetheless, I think we have to keep in mind the ever present threat of government censorship of the web. I think that remains-- censorship itself has become somewhat politicised term in the US context because of allegations, particularly, from folks on the right that social media firms censor their speech. But I think this original threat of government censorship of the internet, which of course, is a reality in many parts around the world, has nonetheless, I think, often receded from our view and we have to be very conscious of it, particularly, if what we're talking about, as I am in the book, is leveraging the power of the public sector to grow a kind of de-privatised internet.

The interesting thing about government censorship, I remember reading somewhere that someone-- somebody did some research into what Chinese censors on the internet censored and apparently, the top thing they censored was criticism of the censors. So they set a paradigm of-- [INAUDIBLE]. Circular quality.

Laurie Smith: Yeah. So moving onto a slightly different topic that was raised in some of the questions that were sent in advance. Someone asked, is there an official or international movement for the new internet? There's some work Nesta did a little while back called the Next Generation Internet, you may have heard of that. But are you aware of any sort of movement to try to regulate and manage those beyond national boundaries?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, I would say there are reform impulses throughout the world, whether they take an international cast, I think, it tends to be quite limited because these reform impulses tend to be operating at a regional or a national scale. And I think there are some points of contact between them, some common concerns. But nothing that really resembles a robust global movement around a set of principles.

It's an interesting question because here, in the United States, we have a couple main reform currents. One of them is anti-monopoly, which has become quite influential in recent years, particularly in the Democratic party. Another is a bit older and continues to be concerned with questions of privacy, primarily. And I mentioned the cyber libertarian tradition, there remain organisations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who remain very committed to this question of personal privacy rights and trying to protect them, particularly in an era of platform surveillance.

On the European side, of course, you also have some of these same reform impulses operating, but it's a somewhat different political picture. Of course, the European regulation landscape tends to be much more sophisticated than the American one. You have obviously GDPR, and now these newer regulations around anti-monopoly and content moderation coming in at the European level. I think the bottom line is that there really isn't a coherent movement for a better internet. Not just does one not exist at the International level, but I would venture to say that there isn't a robust movement of that kind at the National level either.

You have different reformers with different ideas and some coalitions that have been assembled, but whether any of this deserves the word "movement", I would be sceptical at this stage.

Laurie Smith: These talking points, we talk about movement just now, and also in the book as well. And I suppose, just to play devil's advocate a little bit, often, when there's a big problem to solve, the solution is often a movement of some sort, then it's just this bottom up thing that's sort of driven from the grass roots, rather than being top down. But I suppose at a practical level, how do you go from now to social movements if you see what I mean?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, that's always the question. That's always the question. Well, I think, look, there is immense utility in having practical alternatives that you can point to. And this is why in the book, I talk a lot about these publicly and cooperatively owned broadband networks, like the one in Chattanooga. We have hundreds of these in the United States. These are not experiments. These are completely operational. They tend to provide much higher speeds at much lower cost than their corporate counterparts.

They tend to have a degree of Democratic control, where member owners, for instance, in the case of cooperatively owned networks, can vote for the Board of Directors. So when we're having conversations with people in order to try to build up something that resembles a mass movement, in terms of how we get from here to there, which is the core of your question, Laurie, I think it's really important that we can point to existing alternatives that are not perfect, that have a lot of limitations. But nonetheless, begin to stretch people's imagination of what's possible. If those alternatives didn't exist, then it would be harder to take those steps because they figure, well, it's all impossible anyway. What do you mean?

But if you can actually point to stuff that works, it could be mastodon, it could be these community networks. It could be, say, a worker owned Uber alternative in your municipality, whatever it is, it starts to get people's minds thinking, oh, maybe there is something there. Maybe it makes sense to start to take these little steps towards something. And of course, like with any of these movements, you have to demonstrate that it is within their interest to do so. It's going to be very difficult to create a mass movement on the basis of moral claims to say, well, you should do this because it's good for the world, it's the ethical thing to do. I think you get a few people that way. But that's not how you get mass movement. You have to actually knock on doors and say to people, a community network would be better for you. It will give you higher speeds at lower cost and it will give you a Democratic input into how that network is run.

A decentralised, democratically moderated social media network will be better for you than Facebook for X, Y and Z. So those are the kind of conversations that you have to have I think in order to build up a movement. I think the last piece though, is that we can't be excessively voluntaristic stick about this, unfortunately. I think there are strategies that we can develop of the kind that I've been discussing. But at the end of the day, one doesn't really get to choose when a movement occurs. And I think you see that throughout history. There's a confluence of factors that are way beyond the control of any individual that has to emerge in order for a period of social mobilisation to erupt. And I think it's fair to say that we're not going to get just a movement to build a better internet. The movement to build a better internet is going to be integrated into a wider movement to transform society. And when precisely that movement arrives, we can't know and we can't control.

Laurie Smith: And sticking with that, just as we started this particular thread talking about international movements. And we've got a question here from Giorgio Scardino who asked, what do you think about the fed Fediverse approach, which I must confess isn't something I've heard of, the next generation internet initiative working for alternative feature of the internet. I don't know if this is something about?

Ben Tarnoff: Cool. Yeah, so I think the Fediverse is very cool. The Fediverse for folks who don't know, is essentially the broader Mastodon ecosystem. So Mastodon, through a particular protocol, can interconnect with these various other services that are, essentially, decentralised versions of services that folks know, like, YouTube and Instagram, and so on. And together they all form the Fediverse. And the basic principles are the principles on which the internet is built, which is interoperability around a common set of open protocols.

You publish the protocols and people can write services that interact with one another through these protocols. So these are kind of time-honoured traditions. And I happen to think that that's the right technical architecture going forward. I think unfortunately, most of the difficult issues are not technical. They're social, they're political, it actually doesn't take that much time to write really interesting, cool code that does cool things. It takes a lot of time, comparatively, to create the kind of social and political conditions in which those types of alternatives can really flourish. And I think that's what we're already seeing, as folks migrate to Mastodon. Is like, hey, there's some really cool stuff here, but a lot of the missing pieces aren't technical so much as they're social and political.

Laurie Smith: And harking back, you chatted much earlier in our discussion about Web3. There are a couple of questions that are sent in advance. I don't know who sent them in about that topic. I know you sounded a little bit sceptical. But I'll put the questions to you anyway. So one of the questions is, how do you see public nonprofit organisations integrating digital and Web3 in their day to day? What value of the add to both the organisations and the users and visitors? There's a second Web3 question, which says that, Web3 Plus 2, or Web5, which is something I haven't heard of, of identity management as a tool for a new person centric internet. They'll be interesting your comments on that. So two Web3 related questions.

Ben Tarnoff: I think it's incumbent on Web3 to demonstrate it's value to everyone else before we begin to think about those experiments. I guess, I'm not convinced that the case has really been made. Again, Web3, I think, it's important to say is a kind of re-branding of Blockchain, which was developed by venture capitalists in their own interest. So I think there's also an open question whether we are wise to even accept the term Web3. I think Blockchain itself is a very divisive issue. As we've discussed in its current iterations, it doesn't always have to be this way, but certainly in the case of Bitcoin, it's enormously energy intensive. So I think we have to say it as a direct contributor to the climate crisis.

And it's also-- again, in its current iteration, quite sleazy. I mean, there's a lot of very scammy stuff that is happening within the Blockchain ecosystem. Now if one goes back and reads the original whitepaper, the technology is kind of interesting. So I think my position is that we don't exactly know all of the purposes to which Blockchain could be put. And it's possible that in two, five, 10 years, an implementation of Blockchain that is socially useful emerges. But I don't think we've seen it yet. And I think Ethereum, which initially seemed to gesture in that direction, I think has really not fulfilled its potential.

Laurie Smith: And then on a slightly different topic. We've got a question from Tina Harkonen who says, how do you see digital education as a tool to reinvent the internet? In Finland, we're currently creating new material for teachers about the basics of the data economy, not just data protection or about media literacy, but also business models of other major platforms. What are your thoughts on that one?

Ben Tarnoff: Yeah, I think it's essential. I mean, digital education used to mean teaching people how to use the internet, basically. And I think more recently, we've seen an effort to deepen and broaden the definition so that we're teaching people about how is data being generated about them? Who holds that data? How is that data monetized? What are the business models that have been constructed around it? That's the kind of digital education, the kind of digital literacy that I think we really need to develop because particularly young people don't know how to use the internet. In fact, they could stand to use it a lot less. What they need to learn is how is the internet using them? What is the political economy of the internet that they've been born into? and again, with an eye towards de-familiarising it, with an eye towards historicising it, towards telling them it doesn't have to be this way, this is the outcome of certain choices, certain political forces and we could do something different. So I think this brings us back once again, Laurie, to this question of imagination. I think digital education is actually a place where that kind of imagination can start to be encouraged.

Laurie Smith: Really interesting. We've got another question from Gail Freeman. He says, at Global Action Plan we are campaigning for a UK ban on surveillance advertising. This would address the system behind the toxic content, as opposed to regulators playing whack-a-mole with harmful content. What do you think of this?

Ben Tarnoff: I love it. I mean, I think a ban on so-called targeted advertising is a great step forward. I've seen proposals for this in different forms in different contexts. But it's a good step. I think this is also one in which you could imagine developing a broad degree of popular support. People really dislike the idea of being spied on invasively by these firms. So I think it's a great step, but again, it's a first step. I think we want to use that as a wedge into this broader conversation of what would it mean to build an internet that didn't spy on you? What kind of online communities and structures could we develop where surveillance wasn't at the centre?

Laurie Smith: And this leads us nicely to another question from Stefanie Elles, who asks-- which you sort of touched on a little bit already, but how can a public data infrastructure and data collectives contribute to a Democratic and discrimination-free internet and society? How can people participate?

Ben Tarnoff: Yeah, these are big questions. And this last piece of how can people participate is really the key because you can do public and cooperative ownership in a variety of different ways. The critical thing to my mind is not so much the ownership model itself, but what new kinds of practises does that ownership model make possible? Why construct publicly and cooperatively owned entities in the first place? It's because unlike capitalist firms, they have the potential, not the guarantee, of course, but the potential to Institute more Democratic forms of decision-making. And that's what I always look for because particularly terms like public data infrastructure that can be mobilised in kind of bureaucratic ways, particularly in an industrial policy context that do not put popular participation at the centre. And I think that's what we really need to prioritise when we're thinking about alternative ownership models.

Laurie Smith: We're coming up to time, but I'm going to use my chair's prerogative to ask one final question for me. Late last year, Nesta published a supplement with a UK-based magazine called Prospect called Minister for the Future, in which we imagined a fictional minister who faced eight long-term challenges. And asked doers and thinkers, such as yourself, to propose solutions. One of the challenges was that of a privatised winner-takes-all internet. What would be your suggestion for a minister of the future to tackle this challenge?

Ben Tarnoff: Well, my suggestion would be to leverage the power of the public sector, to direct resources towards publicly and cooperatively-owned alternatives to the big corporate providers. Now what that looks like is going to depend on a local and regional basis, but fundamentally, we need a de-privatised sector that can cultivate true Democratic alternatives to the Facebook's, the Google's of the world. That's what I would tell Mr. Minister or Ms. Minister.

And that might not be so-- that might be particularly relevant in the UK as we're coming up to an election. It's surprisingly [INAUDIBLE].

Laurie Smith: Perfect.

Laurie Smith: First, I want to thank everyone for a really interesting discussion, which has provided lots of food for thought. I hope that the audience has found it useful. Now that we've reached the end of the event, I'd be really grateful if those joining us could please fill out a short survey. The link will be shared in the chat and it's also available in the event's description as well. As a thank you for filling in the survey, you'll be entered into a prize draw to win a £50 voucher for bookshop.org. And hopefully you could buy Ben's book, amongst many others, though Nesta will be a [INAUDIBLE].

So I'd also like to say join me again on Thursday the 16 March for another episode of Nesta talks to. I'll be sitting down with Gaia Vince to discuss climate migration solutions and opportunities. So registration for this event is now live. It's on our website and also if you sign up to our newsletters, we'll let you know about other events that are coming up. So thank you so much, again, for joining us and thank you, Ben for speaking with us.

Ben Tarnoff: Thanks so much Laurie.

Laurie Smith: Thank you very much indeed.