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Yeah, okay, it's 7 o'clock and you're listening to WBAI New York, 99.5 FM. It's 7 o'clock, 7.01.
And that means it's time for Off The Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall.
I cut myself while shaving, now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could, they would.
Bum diddly bum for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood. Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
Bum diddly bum!
And a very good evening to everybody. The program is Off The Hook here on WBAI.
Emanuel Goldstein here with you on this Wednesday evening, right in the middle of rush hour.
Joined by Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
I'm sorry, say that again. The microphone is not quite up.
Good evening.
Is that a new microphone?
It might be.
Looks new.
No, no, I think it's just been shined up a little.
It's better than mine. Alex is here.
Good evening as well.
And Kyle.
Good evening.
No, no.
Nice try, Alex.
Kyle's still parking the car.
Boy, it's tight getting in here.
There are so many people on the road, and I apologize to most of them for the things
that we might have said as we were speeding by.
But, you know, everyone is driving at the same time.
How do you guys feel about maybe, let's do this a little bit later.
In fact, you know, this is just the last straw, because it's too crowded out there.
It's too much of a hassle if we were on, say, what is it, 7 o'clock now?
If we were on at 8 o'clock, wouldn't that be better?
I think that would be better.
You know, and we wouldn't have to deal with rush hour.
We could relax a little more.
And I think people are also, you know, they're finished with dinner, and they get to relax
by the radio like people do.
I think this might be a better thing overall.
What do you think?
Well, for me, it was always difficult to leave the office early enough to get here.
You know, by 7 p.m., I'd bring the dogs to the office.
I've got to walk all the way home.
Dogs, yeah.
It's almost impossible if you have dogs.
You know, the 7 p.m. hour has become a real hassle.
I've gotten used to it, but I think, you know, if we pushed it back a little bit,
I'd probably be kind of happy with that.
Yeah.
I'd be almost delirious.
But let me ask you this.
I don't understand why you have so much trouble with the traffic.
You're supposed to be going against the traffic, right?
Yeah, well, that doesn't work anymore.
The traffic is going all different directions.
It's everywhere.
It's everywhere.
You can't hide it.
Okay, so I'm glad.
This is folks.
This is how you work things out, okay?
You brainstorm.
You see a problem.
You tackle it.
There's always a solution someplace.
That's what I've been taught in the hacker community.
So now we just have to fill the slot for next week from 7 to 8.
Well, actually, you know, I assume whoever is on 8 won't have any trouble yielding to us.
So we're just going to take that slot over.
You know what I would like to hear at 7 o'clock?
I'd like to hear a program from a feminist perspective.
We don't have enough of that.
You might find that funny that BAI doesn't have enough of it.
But it's true.
We could use more.
Something like, I don't know, We Won't Go Back, Women Fight Back.
Something like that.
That's just, you know, I'm just spitballing.
That's, you know, that would be a great.
And I know.
I know there are so many qualified people who are out there who would be so qualified
to do a show like that.
Let's just assume that next week we will have no trouble having a show called that on at this time.
And we will just move to 8 o'clock.
Kyle, we just redid the schedule while you were out parking the car.
Can we be on at 8, please?
No, we are.
See, you read my mind.
We're on at 8.
I was just thinking that might work better.
There's a new show that is going to be formulated and it's going to be awesome.
It'll be on next week at this time.
They have the same name as our show, right?
No, they don't have the same name as our show.
It's called Women Fight Back.
That's not what we're called.
Oh, OK.
I thought it was Hackers Fight Back.
No.
That's a different show.
No.
That will be the show.
But no, 8 o'clock next week.
Be there.
That's when we're going to be on.
Sounds good.
Yeah.
I like how we did this without consulting anybody.
I mean, you think you've got enough juice to get this done?
I mean, I know you've been around BAI.
What's that supposed to mean?
It's not about juice, Alex.
It's not about juice.
I have enough energy.
I can stay up that late if that's what you're implying.
Is it about milk?
You got enough milk?
I don't understand.
It's the audience.
It's the audience.
They compel these decisions.
OK?
Yeah.
It is.
It's out of our hands.
Our hands are tied.
Our hands are...
Yeah.
Why is that exactly?
That makes it so much more difficult.
Invisible.
Our hands are...
You know, a velvet glove.
Our hands aren't the issue.
The issue is...
How am I going to drink my juice with that glove on?
It's what people want.
Well, the thing is, change is a good thing.
So this is a good change.
We're looking forward to it.
We'll have a better drive.
And we'll have a better audience.
And we'll have a better drive.
And we'll have another awesome program here on WBAI.
Yeah.
I mean, alert listeners might remember in the halcyon days of 2018, when we were on
at 8 o'clock on Wednesday nights.
And you know, I remember the leisurely commutes to the studio, you know, just stretching my
legs.
Stepping off on the way to get some ice cream.
A little too leisurely.
Sometimes you showed up at 10.30.
So maybe...
Yeah.
Maybe we step on it a little bit.
I'll work on it.
Yeah.
OK.
Well, you know, I think it's just...
It's about being agile and nimble.
This is the adaptable nature of hackers.
And that does not stop when you're talking about a hacker radio show.
So yeah.
We're going to be there.
Or be square.
Yeah.
So is it settled?
8 p.m. next week?
As far as we're concerned, it's settled.
So let's just hope that that's how everybody else feels.
And yeah.
We'll be on at 8 o'clock.
But you know what?
I think we should give our listeners, our 7 to 8 listeners, the ones who cannot possibly
listen before 7 or after 8, the opportunity to call in tonight and wish us well.
If you are steadfastly not going to listen at 8 o'clock.
We can't talk to the people who will only listen between 8 and 9 because we haven't
met them yet.
But that will happen next week, I guess.
Write down the phone number.
It's 212-209-2877.
And we'll be opening up those phone lines in just a little bit.
So you can call up and tell us how you feel about this and anything else that might be
on your mind as far as technology, hacking, the internet, anything on those subjects
that we want to focus on on this, our last 7 o'clock show?
Well, it is.
I mean, it seems, I think, kind of fitting to read this sort of futuristic opinion editorial
piece that Cory Docter wrote just a few days ago on the 24th of June.
I think I saw that in the New York Times, right?
Yeah.
This is a really interesting thing that they're doing with the New York Times, which is part
of this series called Op-Eds from the Future.
Yeah, it confused some people.
If you read the comments, it confused a lot of people, actually, because they didn't know
it was from the future.
And it was mentioned in the New York Times, and some people were just, oh my god, did
that really happen?
Well, you know, it says it right up front.
I mean, this is the problem with, I think, society today.
Just because something is said right up front, you really think that's enough to make people
understand it?
Absolutely.
Definitely.
I mean, it should be.
You know how many people are going to be tuning in at 7 o'clock next week expecting to hear
us?
You know, animated gif or jif, as you call them, gifs, or op-eds, or jifs.
Yeah, we haven't even settled that.
You know, I mean, if we can't get that right, how are we going to get content filtering
through?
But anyway, so there's a series of Op-Eds in the New York Times where science fiction
authors, futurists, philosophers, scientists write Op-Eds that they imagine they might
write 10, 20, or even 100 years from now.
Do we still have philosophers walking around?
That's a thing?
Yeah, sure.
Absolutely.
Are there people paid to be philosophers?
Like, you know, back in the days of Plato?
Yeah.
I mean, most of them are academics.
That's it.
Academics, authors.
You know what?
I have a degree in philosophy.
Yeah, but you don't make money at that.
You'd be surprised.
I might be.
This might be a non sequitur, but are there people that spell out gif, like G-I-F?
Oh, Kyle, get over it.
I mean, for God's sake, it's in the past.
But why are PDFs, why do we spell out PDFs?
Because you can't pronounce PDF.
There's no vowel in it.
A pdif?
A pdif?
All right, you go around saying pdif and see how many friends you make.
That's how you say it, pdif.
This is what a semantic philosopher might call an epistemological conundrum.
Forget it.
Forget it.
So we'll get back to the-
See, there's people in rush hour traffic now listening to this.
We can't have that.
We can't have that.
That's true.
People have to be relaxed sitting by their old time radio listening at home.
I'm still going to say G-I-F.
With a Sherry or something, you know?
So back to the op editorial.
This is essentially, you know, the written word equivalent of things like Black Mirror,
which I think is a really cool idea for the New York Times to publish.
So Cory Doctorow, you know, friend of the station, friend of hope, friend of 2600, a
friend of all of ours that we hung out with at the Strand a couple of weeks ago.
He's an enemy to the right people, though.
That's just-
An enemy to the right people.
He's a friend of everybody.
That's right.
Well, he's friendly to a lot of people and unfriendly to probably more people than he's
friendly to.
Hopefully.
Yes.
That's a good way to live, I think.
I hope so.
But when he speaks about the future, he's sort of speaking about the present.
It's sort of a future-present voice because it's observational, right?
Yes, it is.
And his op-ed is hypothetically set only 10 years in the future.
Oh, my God.
Which is really quite interesting, actually, because he touches on a lot of very interesting
topics like publishing, immunity for platforms like Twitter and Facebook, algorithmic filters
to identify questionable content, something that we talk about all the time, and freedom
of the press.
So, you know, with the knowledge and the preface that all of this is hypothetically set in
the future, I'll read a few choice bits from this to the listeners.
Ten years ago, he writes, I could have published this on my own personal website or shared
it on one of the big social media platforms, but that was before the United States government
decided to regulate both the social media platforms and blogging sites as if they were
newspapers, making them legally responsible for the content that they published.
The move was spurred on by an unholy and unlikely coalition of media companies crying copyright,
national security experts wringing their hands about terrorism, and people who were dismayed
that our digital public squares had become infested by fascists, harassers, and cybercriminals.
Sound familiar?
A little bit, yeah.
Yeah.
Bit by bit, the legal immunity of the platforms was eroded from the judges who put Facebook
on the line for the platforms in action during the Provo uprising to the lawmakers who amended
section 230 of the Communications Decency Act in a bid to get Twitter to clean up its
Nazi problems.
He goes on, and this is where I think it gets really quite interesting, where he talks about
the platforms couldn't really make a dent in the fascist problem.
He says they couldn't hope to make a dent in their users' personal expressions.
From YouTube's 2,000 hours of video uploaded every minute to Facebook-Weibo's three billion
daily updates, meaning, you know, Facebook and Weibo had merged in 10 years' time, there
was no scalable way to carefully examine the contributions of every user and assess whether
they violated any of these new laws.
So the platforms fixed this the Silicon Valley way.
They automated it.
Oh my god.
Badly.
Well, they've already done that, though.
Things are automated so badly that you get no satisfaction and you get all kinds of bizarre
decisions.
And I say future-present because as prescriptive as it is, and I read it as very real because
so much of it was based in parallel to a lot of the things we've reported and experienced
in the last couple of years.
Oh, no doubt.
Or decades and so on.
No doubt.
And this is where I think it gets very relevant to what we've been discussing on this program
for a while now.
As Kyle mentioned, he writes, the platforms and personal websites are fine if you want
to talk about sports, relate your kids' latest escapades or shop, but if you want to write
something about how the platforms and government legislation can't tell the difference between
sex trafficking and sex, nudity and pornography, terrorism investigations and terrorism itself,
or copyright infringement and parity, you're out of luck.
Any one of those keywords will give the filters an incurable case of machine anxiety.
But all of them together, forget about it.
So I mean, this is exactly the problem that we're facing right now with the European directives
efforts to engage in copyright filtering on a massive scale in the EU, a measure that
has been proposed to what some people on this show had espoused themselves, which is
the censorship and de-platforming of fascism and Nazism and expecting social media companies
to jump in and become self-censors on their platforms.
And other legislative efforts to take away the platform immunity that they have under
the Communications Decency Act.
I think this is a really great op editorial that I think every one of our listeners that's
interested in this, which I imagine will be every one of our listeners, should really
take a read of because it's so well done and I think Cory Doctorow just has this innate
natural ability to slice away the fat on these issues.
And you know, op-eds for The Times, they're not really that long.
You know, we probably read half the piece on the air right now.
We don't want to violate copyright, right?
Because we're reporting on this, you know, it's fair use.
But you know, God forbid we do something to anger The New York Times.
But I think it's a fantastically well-written piece in the style of a kind of black mirror
op editorial.
So very, very cool stuff.
I did notice a lot of pushback, though, in the comments.
And the comments in The New York Times generally are more intelligent than most other places.
But a lot of people seem to be resisting the idea that people have more of a power to make
a decision as to what's acceptable and what's not, i.e. an editor of, say, a newspaper or
something like that.
I'm not sure if that's the message that he was putting forth.
But I think this idea of everybody's a publisher, everybody's a journalist, I think that's fundamentally
flawed because everybody clearly is not.
A lot of uninformed people, a lot of ignorant people, a lot of malicious people.
And I don't think everybody is equal.
And if you give everybody the same voice, the same platform, you wind up with a situation
like what we're experiencing right now.
I feel the same way about photography.
Just because everyone has a camera doesn't necessarily mean everyone is a great photographer.
And I think people are kidding themselves if they think that the best way to get information
is to not have something that is curated and edited.
And they don't really appreciate, perhaps, how much of the things they consume are curated
by people who really take it seriously and do an excellent job presenting it to them
in a consumable form.
And one other attribute I'm hearing in this is that Corey illustrates the slippery slope
that we're facing without condemning it, I think.
He's pointing it out, but he's not condemning the temptation that I think is illustrated,
that a lot of people are entertaining and maybe, perhaps, pushing for in this current
political sociocultural climate.
I think one thing we all can agree on is that we don't have the answer yet.
It has not quite been figured out.
The people running the corporations, the people using these systems, us, we're all theorizing
as to what is the best way, because this has never happened before.
We've never had this kind of a scenario.
But I do think that it's important to realize that social media platforms are not the same
thing as curated publications, and they shouldn't be.
There's no reason to equate the two.
They're different elements, and they're different important elements as well.
What social media, what people writing their own blogs without any kind of oversight are
doing is providing alternative voices and oftentimes opening up doors into places that
we would not go ordinarily.
But you can't say it's equivalent to a piece in the New York Times or something that has
been researched by somebody who spent months, if not longer, putting together a story.
I think once you start doing that, you minimize the actual work, and then everything becomes
valid and you have all kinds of flat-earth theories going around, apologies to those
people.
Yes, your opinion is—no, your opinion doesn't count, I'm sorry.
Not to me.
I want to get angry mail from flat-earth people.
I do.
I really do.
But I think there are definitely differences, but there are also certain values in these
new technologies, in these new ways of expressing ourselves.
Now, a company has every right to do whatever they want.
It's their platform.
So if they say, you know, you're not allowed to discuss this subject, and if you do, you'll
get kicked off, well, it's their ball and they can take it and go home.
You don't have to use it.
You can start something better.
But when you make it so that only the big players have the power, then someone can come
along and compete.
Someone can come along and do it better.
So you have to make sure that that playing field remains level, that, you know, the Twitters
and the Facebooks don't get an unfair advantage where, OK, they got there early, so now they
can have this and no one else has any chance because they're too small.
No, that has to remain open, because that's the only way you improve things and you do
a better job.
Well, I think one of the things that he's hitting at is exactly what you were talking
about here, which is that if you force the companies to make these judgment calls, you
know, we already read the bit where he said, first, we tried to do this algorithmically
and it ended very badly.
But then if you force them to make these judgment calls and you rely on human beings to make
these judgment calls, it's just not scalable.
If half of the planet is on Facebook, you have three billion people posting all kinds
of nonsense all the time.
It is just impossible to police that.
It's impossible to censor it.
It's literally shoveling excrement against the tide here because it's just not a scalable
solution to an endemic problem.
There's still going to be fascism there.
The algorithms are going to under block what they're supposed to block.
The judgment calls aren't going to be made properly.
The rules and the policies that we've seen coming out in news reports about Facebook
and the morass of rules and regulations when it comes to questionable content and especially
things like white nationalism, you know, have been all over the place and ridiculously difficult
to follow.
So it's this idea of scalability being a very, very big problem for these particular platforms.
And he also gets to the idea of, well, if we had seen this coming 10 years ago, if we
had enforced our antitrust laws, if he had prevented Google and Facebook and these other
large conglomerates from swallowing up all of these startups, then just like you said,
Emmanuel, and he mentions this in the article, you know, perhaps we would have had a different
internet now.
Yeah.
And that is definitely something we should have been on top of on this show.
I know we were urging the powers that be to not let these mega corporations come together
and take everything over because, yeah, now you have mega problems.
And these aren't, like, there really aren't easy answers to this.
There are things like the Fediverse, open source social media, which we've discussed
on this program.
We ourselves have a Mastodon account on Hacker Radio Show at Mastodon.social, which is the
open source decentralized Twitter clone.
But even over there, there is a right wing platform, alt right platform, Nazi platform
that I won't dignify by naming it on the air, but it's well known.
And they had their own app rejected from the Apple store and the Google store and everything
else.
So what they've done is forked the Mastodon project.
So they're using this open source project to basically launch their own decentralized
thing, which anybody can connect to with any Fediverse compatible apps on their phone.
So they can't be blocked that way.
And that has so many people in the Fediverse talking about, like, well, maybe we should
start thinking about blocking these at maybe the app level or the protocol level or something.
And for a system that really thrives by its interconnectivity, people are really scratching
their heads trying to find the best answers for all concerned about this.
So yeah, not even the world of free decentralized alternatives is free from this sort of mess.
Well, it's possible that when these things were developed, people were a bit too idealistic
and too optimistic about the nature of humanity.
Now that we have had a wake up call and we see just how evil and horrible people can
be, maybe we need to think about it differently.
Maybe we need to come up with different ways of doing things.
One idea I had, you know, a lot of the problems that we are constantly seeing, it's based
on algorithms.
It's based on, you know, you watch a hateful video on YouTube and YouTube says, hey, you
like that?
You'll like this too.
What if we just changed the philosophy of those algorithms?
And instead of saying, here's something that's like what you saw before, how about here's
something that's very different from what you just saw?
And maybe that'll open up your eyes to something else, a different perspective.
What if that was what we were pressuring the technology companies to do?
Change the philosophy of the algorithm.
I mean, it's quite possible.
I mean, on the one hand, it would undermine the echo chamber that these social media companies
love to create, which is feeding you more and more of what you like, right?
But then also on the other hand, it might be good in increasing engagement, showing
you something that you don't necessarily like, you know, creating this sort of antagonistic
struggle between you and another commenter or, you know, different position.
So yeah, I mean, the algorithms certainly have to change.
Transitioning or rather shifting gears and back into the text of the op-ed, I'd like
to read just a bit of the conclusion here because I think it really kind of wraps up
a lot of what we're talking about.
And, you know, writing and fiction just has a way of showing us the implications of what
we're doing now that we just can't necessarily see.
And I think this really sums it up very well.
When he talks about content regulation on these social media platforms, Cory Doctorow
wrote in the New York Times, we decided to vest platforms with state-like duties to
punish them for their domination.
In doing so, we cemented that domination.
Only the largest companies can afford the kinds of filters we've demanded of them.
We've said that all the time, by the way, and that means that any would-be trust buster
who wants to break up the companies and bring them to heel first must unwind the mesh of
obligations we've ensnared the platforms in and build new state-based mechanisms to perform
these duties.
Our first mistake was giving the platforms the right to decide who could speak and what
they could say.
Our second mistake was giving them the duty to make that call a billion times a day.
Powerful stuff.
Yeah.
Really, I mean, just really slices away the fat and gets at the implications of everything
that we're facing right now.
I mean, fantastic stuff.
And I think it, you know, it gets back to the philosophy of John Perry Barlow and the
original cyberspace pioneers with the, you know, the Manifested Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace that Rob T. Firefly is reminding me of at the moment, you know, and this sort
of free, almost libertarian-like ideal of it should just be hands-off and let's see
what happens because when the internet did exist like that, you know, it wasn't nearly
as populated as it is now, but it just felt like a better place.
Well, yeah, but we have had hands-off on many things and we've seen what happens.
So, obviously, I don't think speech and state run should ever be in the same sentence,
but as people, as citizens, we need to rethink what we are doing, what our obligations are,
what our expectations are, and see if we can come up with a better way of doing this because
I guarantee you, you hand this over to any government, it's going to be worse.
I hear that, just in that last part, that, you know, it's him saying, you know, think
very, be very cautious, you know, world and society, regulators, you know, political parties,
be cautious about how you handle this problem and we need to think of creative ways to address
it that put forth something that is current for today and I think when you're talking
about the nascent emergence of these ideals, yeah, that was great.
You could walk away and people would read a newspaper, pick up a magazine, go put on
a record and tune their radio.
Everyone is depending on these networks now.
They're living on these networks now.
So, the distinct reliance is, it was a small part of life.
Now, it is the lion's share of how life occurs for a lot of people and how they experience
information and networked communities.
So, to that end, you know, their dependence and reliance is magnified, I think, in contrast.
So, we need to think critically about how those gatekeepers are managed without falling
into this sort of slippery slope, I think.
I think you touched upon something that we often talk about here as kind of a theme of
embracing new technology but not relinquishing the old technology.
Continuing to use that as kind of a baseline and embracing new ways of doing things with
some caution because they're new and they might break but, you know, you're talking
about listening to music online.
Well, you know, you could download something online but somebody can change the ID3 tags
and your MP3 and make it to be something completely false.
The online publication that you see on a website could be completely made up because there
are no actual standards that they have to adhere to like a newspaper or a magazine.
So, while these things are great, while they open up doors, they can also be abused and
they can also cheapen and minimize the trust that we have in general for things that are
true, for things that people spend a lot of time putting together.
So, I think, you know, we need to have these new things, these new ways of doing things
but also hold on to the newspapers, hold on to the records and the bookstores and just
those things that have mattered throughout time that have formed this cornerstone where
we all kind of come together and share ideas.
Yeah, it's this whole thing about like the way we interact with data and things that
we once were things we used to have and own in some fashion but these days we just depend
on to be there when we need it.
There was recently, I think it was today or yesterday, the servers for the OUYA console
which was a games console that came out five, six years ago that was meant to be a new low
price thing with all these innovative games on it.
The servers for the games were shut down because the console was not a success, but so anybody
who had them and use them for their original purpose can no longer.
The things are hackable so you can tweak them to still do stuff if you want to but you cannot
use this thing in the manner in which it was originally sold but meanwhile I can take a
30 year old Nintendo cartridge and plug it into a working console and the same thing
happens that happened back then.
I want to build off I think three things that you all said.
I mean Rob's example, you mentioned Emmanuel this idea that we shouldn't relinquish old
tech and Kyle's I think great point that people have become very reliant on these particular
types of networks and I think they're all valid points but I think some of that reliance
on these networks should actually turn into self-reliance now and the old tech that we
shouldn't abandon is our actual brains.
What's in between our ears, the gray matter that we have, I believe that the power of
education, the power of providing people an understanding of what is rational, what is
logical and what is not rational and what is illogical is so much more powerful in distinguishing
what's absolute malarkey.
I would use a stronger phrase if it wasn't for FCC versus Pacifica and what is a legitimate
argument and I think that we really instead of putting money and instead of putting all
this effort into all these new regulatory regimes that are designed to stamp out fascism
and shovel you know what against the tide, I think our time and effort would be better
spent on education and going back to philosophy, that's what really teaches you to think rationally,
to understand what an argument is, to deconstruct an argument because ideas are things that
take a lot of time to cultivate, to unpack and bad ideas are very, very easy to spot
if you have a well-trained mind.
I think that education would stem the tide of white nationalism, I think it would stem
the tide of prejudice and I think it would stem the tide of terrorists' ability to radicalize
weak minds on the internet.
I mean I think education should be a foreign policy priority in the fight against terrorism
and it should be a domestic priority in the fight against fascism and disinformation and
misinformation campaigns.
I think honestly that's the only way we're going to ever effectively combat this over
the long term.
The old tech that we have in between our brains should be the bulwark of our democracy.
Mad Fientist Yeah, I'm with that and the education thing
is an important point from the perspective of how a lot of the power business plans and
the corporations that emerged from the cool factor as social media and like web 2.0 services
started up and the variety of things in the market began to fall into basically these
now three or four companies.
And a lot of that, the gobs and gobs of cash was made from young people embracing this
technology and using it in fun ways.
Also the handsets allowing a lot more features and things to be processed on the handsets
themselves.
But the advertising models themselves made just an incredible amount of money for these
companies and I think instead of them investing in more technologies that consume people's
time and have them really addicted almost or dependent, instead of putting cash into
those projects or cash into filtering that goes down this slippery slope, I do think
education is critical.
Because when we go to like Maker Faire events or when we talk to kids that are hacking,
their understanding of the internet is even, it may be less historically evident, but it
is an understanding that it is more than just an app or a game that they're playing.
And that's the cool thing I think people who live through these changes in technology
and the other generations of hackers can pass along is that these little apps and these
sites that you're visiting aren't necessarily all of the internet and it's the companies
that have profited so much that want to keep the engagement and keep the algorithms as
E had pointed out, either going one way for just reinforcing good things or antagonizing
you, or what I suspect is really going on, E, both.
I think a lot of what I've read is that there's a lot of positive affirmation and then the
algorithms start to flood with stuff that might agitate or create anxiety and thus engagement,
but keep you on the platform.
If we only went with stuff that was abhorrent to users, the users would leave the platform
and thus the business model for these companies wouldn't proliferate in quite the same way.
So absolutely, putting money into education so that young people that are exploring this
technology, yeah, perhaps can push the boundaries of how it's used and do cool things with cool
new services, but also get an idea that, yeah, perhaps this is a good tool for knowing what's
up or talking to people or doing funny things, but that's distinct from the other many and
varied resources that are accessible through the internet itself.
You mentioned the cool factor and that's a bit that I've always found really fascinating
because we've got a good range of ages in this room, I think, but we all, I think it's
safe to say, grew up as the web did, where we watched it become a thing that was in general
use in our time using it.
And the cool factor, as social media grew as a function of the web itself and as a thing
that the general public was using, there was this feel about the beginning of it, like
it was a cool new thing to explore, but it was just part of the web.
It wasn't the reason for being for the web.
And there were lots of companies that tried to make things happen and people would hang
out on one for a while, then it wouldn't be cool anymore, they'd all go to the next thing.
A lot of us went from LiveJournal to MySpace to whatever else and a million companies that
are dead now, but Facebook was the first time that one company managed to keep hold of its
user base and as a result of that has grown into a 900 pound gorilla with the power to
change the world for the much worse.
It's amazing to me too.
That's I think the power of what we can communicate and create understanding.
The things that perhaps early adopters for that generation might think are really cool
and like, yo, this is the end all and be all of the internet.
Why?
Because you have weird social media endorsements or you feel like you have a huge audience
even though you're just basically known on some platform through, I don't know, endorsements
or whatever the heck they're doing.
I think it needs to be that people get why other people would look at that and say,
no, that's really kind of lame actually.
That's not doing much for the internet.
It is designed for you to think it is cool and it is the only place for you to be.
There's just one tiny aspect of this really powerful tool that you can make up how you
use it.
You can make up these services for yourself.
That's I think where we lose some of it.
Is it like, well, it's hard or it takes being a geek.
Well, hello, like we're hackers.
That's the point.
Like that's what we're about is getting into how all of this stuff comes about.
So I think realizing that, yeah, okay, getting some stupid endorsement on a photo sharing
site is not like the pinnacle of internet success, right?
Even starting 10 crappy startups is not necessarily the pinnacle of success.
Even using technology, you know, just because you're in Silicon Valley doesn't mean you've
made it.
So like there are all these sort of misnomers I think floating around and it's about that
education and intergenerational learning that, you know, someone who might think they're
onto something can maybe understand how it fits into the grand scheme and like why others
might think, nah, that's just kind of limiting you, you know, that both are valid, right?
It's cool to see new stuff, but it's also, it's cool to understand why others aren't
into it and under, you know, the sort of the ramifications of a lot of things we discuss
here.
Well, a lot of it is so very fleeting, you know, so you're involved in something that's
extremely popular right now, but in 10 years, is anybody going to remember it?
Is anybody going to read what you were writing?
I think that is the measure.
If you are involved in something that is more or less timeless, that is still of interest
years, decades down the road, then you're contributing something, not just to an immediate
gratification type of a thing, but also to our development, our history.
And I think that's something we need to focus more attention on because so many things that
I see these days online, they disappear.
I mean, we say that the internet is permanent, when you put something online, it's there
forever.
It's not.
It disappears really, really quickly and it gets swallowed up in all kinds of noise.
Sure, there are things on there that you'd rather not be on there, but there's a lot
on there that you think is going to last and it doesn't because we don't do enough to preserve it.
I sort of wish we were fundraising because it would have been a perfect segue to the
Hacker Digest that you created, right?
It's so true what you say.
I just want to reiterate.
I mean, even I know for our own projects and things like that, just keeping up software
and security, stuff we're talking about all the time, we hammer it constantly, you know,
keeping your equipment up to date and backing things up.
All of those things, I know for our own site, we marvel at, you know, oh, where did that
go?
Oh, we backed that up here because we were updating this.
We're always moving things around.
I think you need to think of the internet as a very alive, fluid, constantly morphing,
constantly changing and refreshing.
And yeah, there may be backups somewhere, but who has them?
There are the things that you thought were permanent or mirrored somewhere.
Unless you're building an understanding and controlling, it's kind of, you'll wake up
and be like, oh, well, and guarantee if you haven't seen it or you haven't felt that way
and you're just, you know, the most you can confront about technology is like fear of
missing out, I got news for you.
Once you see a couple of these like platforms and things go away, you'll start to see this
pattern of people trying a business thing and it maybe consumes with data or it is intertwined
into people's lives and then it just disappears.
So it's probably that a lot of the people that are being turned into just solely dependent
on these platforms, they could probably do a better job, you know, but they're not being
inspired.
And I really hope that's something that people are able to embrace and to build in the face
of companies like this and, you know, getting attention from bureaucracy and from government
and you know, of course, hearing people like us talk about, hey, this might be a worthy
point of alarm in the grand scheme of history and what the future will hold for us.
Well, as I threatened to do earlier, I'm opening up the phone lines, 212-209-2877 if you want
to join the conversation.
We had a listener right in, Flip Chan wrote to us asking about, well, I'll read the letter.
I'm sure you guys heard the news about Chelsea Manning going into personal bankruptcy.
I heard Chelsea speak at Hope and if she is not a hero of the hacker community, I am not
sure what we have become.
I think we should do a Chelsea Manning fundraiser in order to raise capital to help him, 2600
fundraiser event or campaign similar to Free Kevin, reaching out to you because you have
an audience that cares about her.
She's a hero of the hacker community and it's up to us as fellow hackers to help her.
I agree on all that, Flip Chan, absolutely.
I think we should look towards the official Chelsea Manning website for that rather than
have all kinds of different fundraisers going on.
Let's focus on one source to make it simple and also to keep updated because we don't
always have the latest updates.
Website xychelsea.is, that's x-y-c-h-e-l-s-e-a.is.
On there, you can contribute.
You can get updates.
You can hear all the latest news and it's really an important site.
I say that for people that agree with what she's done or disagree with what she's done
because no matter how you feel about it, the conversation is a vital one to have and she
certainly is somebody who is a figure in history and does not deserve to be in prison.
Well, I mean, I might disagree with that slightly only because I think that she is somewhat
irrationally deciding to disobey a grand jury subpoena.
I don't really understand that.
And somehow all the Trump people manage to walk around freely when they do the same thing.
We don't have time for this debate right now, Alex.
Well, perhaps.
But we only have a few minutes but I want to take a phone call.
Sure.
All right?
And we can certainly hammer this out on the street afterwards if anybody wants to watch.
Or arm wrestle.
Good evening.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Go ahead.
Hi.
Hi.
What's up?
I just wanted to say that I think that you're coming after the news and Trump Watch is the
perfect lead in for you.
And I don't want to turn off the radio for an hour and hope I remember.
Don't turn off the radio.
Listen to this new show that's coming next week and just know that we'll be driving in
a much more relaxed manner and not dealing with everybody else that's driving at the
same time.
When you got back to 7 p.m. you were nostalgic about how great it was and how glad you were.
Yeah.
But I'm always like that no matter where I go.
That's just how I am.
Well, I like 7.
All right.
Well, that's a vote for 7.
But it's not really something that we're taking votes on.
It's kind of...
You said it.
People who could only listen at 7 should call in.
Yeah.
If you make me tune out at 7 because you're not on at 7, you can't count on me tuning
back at 8.
Well, you know what?
We can call you and remind you.
How about that?
Are you going to?
Well, we don't have caller ID, but if we did, we could be evil like that.
That would be a good service, actually.
Hey, it's your wake up call.
Time to listen to Off the Hook.
Yeah.
You could offer that service, but are you going to?
It's something we're going to take under advisement.
I like saying that.
Ha.
All right.
All right.
We hope to hear your voice at that later hour.
I hope you stay where you are.
All right.
Well, we'll see what happens.
Go ahead, Rob.
I think one thing that's always been central here at BAI is giving new voices a chance.
And I, for one, really want to hear the show that's going to be on at 7, because I think
that's something that we do need more of on these airwaves, and I look forward to listening
to it.
So you don't have to turn on the radio.
You can just leave it on for an hour longer, and we'll still be there.
But yeah, there's so much more to discover on the station than just us.
And for those people who are very literal-minded, I did not just make up that show.
That show is being planned, and this was not our decision, but it's one that I think is
a good one, because, well, just for the driving alone.
So there's good and bad.
And look, I can attest to the fact that there is a much lower probability of Emmanuel and
Kyle missing the show at the 8 o'clock session, because these guys, I've never seen them so
stressed out as they have been over the last few weeks.
I still haven't taken my coat off.
I know.
And why are you wearing a winter coat?
Well, that's the second part of that.
That's why I'm sweating.
Well, you know, we'll talk about my issues later.
Let's take a phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Oh.
See, that's what happens.
That's what happens when we talk too long.
I missed dial tone.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Speak up.
Good evening.
Hi.
I'd rather have things stay the way they were.
I've been away for so long that technology has definitely blown past me.
Wow.
Where have you been?
I've been in federal prison.
You've been in federal prison.
Oh, my goodness.
Wow.
It's Stormbringer.
Oh, my God.
It's Stormbringer.
You're a name from the past.
And you've been in there for a very long time.
Decades, actually.
Welcome back.
And I'm sorry for the state that the world is in.
We did not keep in as good a shape as we should have.
I'm sorry.
We're losingfficiency.
We're losing efficiency.
Bits are still ones and zeroes.
They just move faster nowadays.
Storage has gotten bigger, but really we're still moving bits.
Absolutely.
That's what it's about.
All right, Will Stormbringer, great.
Great to hear from you, and please keep in touch.
We want to hear how things are going as you get initiated back into society, and I'm sure
you have stories to tell from inside as well.
Hey, you mind if I give off my email address in case there's potential employers?
Go right ahead.
It's Bill at StormBringer.TV.
Okay, and I hope you are inundated with offers.
The people who hire you certainly will not be sorry for that.
And great to hear from you again.
All right, hopefully see you at one of the cons in the future.
Yes.
Take care, guys.
Wow, that was a voice in the past.
We have not heard from him in many years.
Really, really incredible.
Let's see if we can squeeze in one more phone call.
Good evening.
You're on off the hook.
Good evening, folks.
Hi.
What's on your mind?
This is Bobson.
Oh, it's Bobson.
Bobson from Bulgaria.
Wow, we've spanned the globe tonight.
What's on your mind?
Well, I wanted to call in about the 7 p.m. New York time slot being.
Well, I know what you're going to say.
You're in Bulgaria.
It's already late there.
Now it's another hour later.
So you're not going to be in favor of this, are you?
Well, I like the 7 p.m. of New York time slot better than the 8.
And that goes, I'm guessing, for your listeners in Finland, South Africa, Egypt, and Romania.
What else is there?
Pretty much every country that's, yeah.
In that time zone.
It's better for people in California.
It's earlier for them, right?
Yeah, but 4 p.m. in California gives them an excuse to wait for an hour and let the traffic go down.
Well, I hope somebody is happy about this someplace.
A lot of people listen to us online, too.
They download the show.
They listen to it whenever they damn well please.
Yeah, don't discount the time shifting that's going on as far as people catching it later.
But I do hope, Babson, you are able to keep listening live because one thing I always enjoy,
like when I miss the show for whatever reason and I'm home in front of my computer,
is signing on to the listeners IRC.
And you're a constant presence there and always nice to chat with while we listen to the show together.
How do people do that for those people who have never done that?
Yeah, talking about old school social media.
If you use Internet Relay Chat, which is IRC, our server is irc.2600.net.
And on there, there are many channels, and one of them will be pound off the hook,
which when you listen during the show, when you're online during the show,
you can get on there and talk to some other listeners.
If there are any, because lately there hasn't been too many people.
Maybe because we haven't told people how to do that, so maybe now there will be an influx of more people.
But Babson, anything else before we move on to another call?
Well, I can't think of anything right now.
I know I had a question for you, but I can't remember.
So, Doug, have a wonderful evening and thank you for everything.
Thanks for calling and good to hear from you.
Babson sounds pretty tired at 7 o'clock, and no doubt he'll sound more tired at 8 o'clock,
but maybe Babson can wake up early instead.
Go to sleep early, wake up at 8 o'clock Eastern Time, which is what, 3 in the morning their time?
I don't know. I can't make everybody happy.
I just want to make somebody happy.
Good evening. You're on off the hook.
Good evening. I also like the 7 p.m. better, and the reason is that there are two stores I like to go to.
They close at 9, so if you're on from 8 to 9, I can't get to them.
Unless, of course, I went before, but most of the time that wouldn't happen.
Do they deliver, maybe?
No, no. These are like a health store and another kind of store like that.
But also I'm glad to hear that this was not your decision, and that makes me feel a little better,
and I remember you were happy to get back to 7,
and I'm glad to hear that they wanted something else in that slot.
And the only other thing I could say is the man who was in prison, I missed.
Well, I got his e-mail, so I can ask him, but what was he in prison for?
You don't have to tell me, because I was tuning up the radio because I was hoping to get picked up on the phone.
I don't want to give misinformation, so I'm not going to say what I believe it is,
but it's easy to find out, and you can certainly ask him, and he'll probably give you all the details.
But I can tell you this, he's a good guy and did not deserve that.
And I just thought I had missed something. That's why I asked you about it.
Okay, thanks so much. Great show. Wonderful show.
Thank you for calling. Thank you so much.
And we are in the waning moments of our 7 to 8 slot.
I'll miss it here. I really will.
Next week will be completely different.
We'll be arriving at this hour instead of leaving at this hour.
I'm not sure. It's going to take some getting used to.
We might get confused. We might walk in at the wrong time and make fools of ourselves.
And then we'll be leaving at 9 o'clock at night instead of 8 o'clock at night.
But I have a feeling as humans, as hackers, we'll adjust. We'll get used to it.
I mean, it's going to feel like daylight savings time all over again.
Oh, don't say that. Don't say that. That's coming up soon, isn't it?
Oh, God. Yes, probably.
I know I'm going to miss this slot too.
I tend to agree with all of the listeners out there, but we make the most of any situation.
I think we'll do just as well at 8 p.m.
All right. Well, here's hoping.
oth at 2600.com, our email address.
Tune in again next week at this time when we'll be just about to go on the air.
Yeah, we'll see how that goes.
Good night.
I've been waiting for the man, just buzzing around downtown.
Waiting for that very special.
Comes in to see what I got.
Orange popsicles and lemonade.
It's a summer of love, love, love.
I'm in love with the love, love, love.
I'm thinking of you.
Is.
Feeling the nitty gritty of the whole thing.
Everything is very special.
Look in and see what I got.
Orange popsicles and lemonade.
It's a summer of love, love, love.
I'm in love with the love, love, love.
Everyone turns into.
I'm thinking of you.
Love energy is giving us a chance.
Making this the summer of love.
Hi, I'm Laura Flanders of The Laura Flanders Show.
The Left Forum is right around the corner and they have generously donated weekend passes to WBAI listener supporters who make a $50 pledge in support of WBAI.