my name is Evan Korth welcome to the
computers in society's lecture series
I'll try not to take too much time I
know running a little late and you're
not here to see me first I want to thank
the Internet Society of New York NYU's
ACM chapter WinC Max and free
culture at NYU for helping put this
event together we really wanted to have
John Perry Barlow speak today I first
came across his name in the liner notes
of a Grateful Dead studio album that I
had back in high school back then before
the days of the internet it was
difficult to learn more about a person
whose name you came across unless we
knew someone who knew something more
about that person or they happened to be
an article or TV show about that person
it just was no way of doing research on
him or her unless you put a lot of
effort into it in the case of Barlow for
me I noticed his name associated with
other stories and projects i found
interesting as the years went on when i
learned about The Well John Perry Barlow
was very much associated with it as I
became a devoted reader of Wired
magazine again Barlow was prominently
associated with the publication and of
course when network technology started
transforming our society and the
electronic frontier foundation was
created to champion the public's
interest in critical battles affecting
digital rights I  discovered it
was co-founded by none other than our
guest John Perry Barlow think about how
different my discovery of John's work
would have been today with Google's
indexed internet not only what I've
instantly learned that he was retired
Wyoming cattle rancher a former lyricist
for the Grateful Dead and co-founder of
EFF i would also discover that he had
been a fellow at the institute of
politics at Harvard's JFK school of
government and is currently one of one
at their Berkman Center for Internet and
Society I would have immediately had
access to his influential declaration of
independence for cyberspace as well as
his other items and topics ranging from
economics to monogamy
I would even learn that in the 70s he
was active in the environmental movement
and worked as campaign manager for
fellow environmentalist Dick Cheney
(laughter)  
after recovering from my cognitive
dissonance another click would reveal
that it was that Dick Cheney what a
difference the Internet has made in the
way we get and process our information
today Barlow will investigate how it has
also changed our political campaign
process when I first met Barlow four
years ago was I first met four years ago
when he spoke an event hosted by Drazen
Pintech at location one in Soho I
remember him saying what an honor it was
to be hosted by one of his heroes today
it's my honor to host one of mine please
help me welcome peripheral visionary
John Perry Barlow sorry I'm late it's a
jungle out there well unlike I would
guess possibly anybody in this room I
grew up without television pretty much I
grew up on on a cattle ranch in Wyoming
which was this used to be an important
consideration error it was thought to be
we the nearest town which was 14 miles
away prided itself on being further from
a railroad than any other town in the
United States is if that was a
distinction
and my exposure to television growing up
was was sporadic but but by virtue is
being sporadic it was blazingly intense
my father was in the Wyoming State
Senate for most of my formative years
and the Wyoming State Senate being a
sensible deliberative body met every
other year for 40 days during which time
my family and I would move into
something called the Plains Hotel in
Cheyenne where they had a television in
the lobby and that was where I first
started to encounter television in fact
it was where I was when I saw the first
debate between Richard Milhous Nixon and
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
now I come from a long line of allowing
Republicans in fact I guess you have
guessed from the introduction have been
one and
you know there are various layers in
politics I mean there's policy and
there's there's personality and there's
charisma and there's you know
effectiveness and you know and there
there also is a very important quality
of politics that people have now
forgotten I mean they quote Tip O'Neill
about how all politics is local but they
tend to forget this but I had never
experienced I've into I've been to a
national political convention my
mother's been a delegate to the
convention of 1956 and I had actually I
should have used visual aids i guess i
have a picture that I took with a
brownie camera about this far away of
Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon you
know in those days you could do that it
even on a national level it was kind of
local but it wasn't local in that
McCluhan-esque global village since
there was a way that you could actually
have a sense of immediacy and contact so
that even though for example even in the
United States geographically was as big
as it is now unless you want to get
tricky about the space-time continuum
during the Lincoln-Douglas debates there
were a lot of people who felt an
immediacy of contact with those debates
for some reason I mean a lot of people
came from various states and
we're there and then they they heard
stories about it from other people and
they felt a sense of continuity in
contact and it felt like a local event
and in my life certainly politics it had
been local and it was all based on kind
of who you knew and what he could do for
you and for the cause and for things
that were just plain right in Wyoming
you know when things are just playing
right they lately I've been wondering
but since Dick Cheney is still from
Wyoming but you know everybody kind of
knew and when i'm back up again for a
second when I met Nixon personally I
didn't like him I mean I reached out my
hand and he patted me on the head and I
thought that was a lame thing to do
thought these is about that too so
suddenly there were these people on this
thing where I also saw Elvis Presley for
the first and same time anybody else did
you know didn't know him personally and
they had this I now recognize 
surrealistic sense of being real to me
I mean I hallucinatory sense 
hallucinatory sense of being real to me
and it was borne out by the fact that
Nixon still seemed like a fool on a heart
to heart  basis and then this guy
Kennedy just seemed like a cool guy now
I'm from Coral Wyoming I'm not you know
that's the kind of cool guy that I
haven't encountered before but
nevertheless he's got something now my
father hated the Kennedys he thought
they were opportunistic glib facile
privileged spoiled in fact my father was
right about most of these things but he
didn't understand certain other things
about that particular man but i sat
there and I watched that debate and I
thought you know if I could vote I'd
vote for that guy because he makes me
believe in something and it's different
for i don't even I know what it is exactly
 I wasn't listening to the words as
carefully as I was watching him and I
think that that experience was played up
all over America and people for whom
politics had been local up to that point
found the McLuhan local
and and were able to get from the effect
of these two people that one of them was
lame and one of them was a cool guy
there's a hazard in this and we'll get
into that I mean and I don't think they
were listening to the things that those
guys said I'm very carefully I mean in
fact a lot of what Kennedy was saying
was very bellicose and he kept nailing
Nixon on the missile gap we didn't have
enough missiles and and if we were going
to go toe-to-toe and nuclear combat with
Rooskies we were going to have to have
more misses well I mean that would appall
me today would it would have apalled me
then if I knew what he was talking about
her or had actually been listening but I
wasn't even listening I was just looking
at this cool guy and and and so was
America and that cool guy was elected
and we can we could debate a great
length what he did it was right nor
wrong but it was generally received that
that was the first that was first
election has been decided by television
and I'll flash way the hell forward I
can go back at the Dick Cheney part if
you wanted at some point because I do
intend this to be a conversation more
than more than a broadcast like one of
my modest ambitions in life is to
eliminate broadcast media and I
certainly have no intention of being one
myself but all right when I was at the
institute of politics which is a swell
little cynic yer at the Kennedy School
in remember the month for sure but I
mean it seems like it's almost exactly a
decade I was on a panel there with Teddy
Kennedy and John Kennedy jr. who for a
variety of convoluted reasons had
become one of my closest friend my
father was probably spinning 2500 rpm in his grave but and I think Dan Rather
was on it too and the proposition was
that that soon there would be an
election in which the internet would
have the same decisive role that
television had in 1960 and it was
interesting because the other guys on
the panel hated the internet pretty much
didn't use it didn't understand it and
yet they were ready to think that that
you know the next election coming up
might be like that
and I didn't think so cuz I mean it I
have a friend at the institute of the
future guy named Paul Saffo who has this
idea macro myopia which is our tendency
to overestimate the influence of a
technology on society in the short term
and underestimate it in the long term and
they were all suffering from macro myopia
big time I mean really if something
is truly transforming to society at
least half of society has to die off
before it'll actually start to having
an effect so my position was that it was
going to take at least 10 years and I
wasn't even sure yet then and I 
think that you know we are at this
moment as is pretty self-evident to
anybody was thought about it at a great
crossroads in American history and one
of the many many things that is going to
be determined about our destiny and our
and our being as a nation in a few days
will be our relationship to this miracle
that I still think is you know the most
significant human accomplishment since
the capture of fire one of our
candidates doesn't share that view in
fact he yet he's proud to say that he
has his wife do all of his internet
surfing and if
McCain wins then I don't know what I'll
think about a lot of things but but I
will I will wonder about the internet
too but I know that if there were a way
to use the internet properly in politics
on a national scale in order to make
politics local and global at the same
time I cannot imagine somebody doing a
better job of it than Barack Obama who
didn't do he didn't make the same set of
mistakes that John Dean made when he
some of the people in his campaign
realized that you know the internet was
very powerful force of raising money and
maybe possibly organizing we didn't know
quite how and they created this kind of
really interesting reverse donut where
there was a big ring on on the outside
and then there was a an inner emptiness
and then there was another thing on the
inside a solid core the donut didn't
have a hole it had a you know dough
ball in the center which was the
traditional campaign and they didn't
communicate with each other and and that
was the system that collapsed now when
Obama came along you realized that had
happened and he used things like meetup
and he also recognized that that when
somebody gave to his campaign they lived
someplace and he had the means to find
out where they lived in that local place
and he could find out who else had given
in that local place then they could get
together and they could form a seed of a
self-organizing system somewhat
but it wouldn't be unconnected from the
center because they had the means to
communicate with communicate with it all
the time and the people who were out
there and those in those self-organizing
cells knew that they were part of that
organization and moreover as it as a
means of raising money they figured out
how to make it easy to give money on the
internet so you didn't have to go
through a whole rigmarole to do this so
that it was I mean there was one point
the campaign and where Obama took pride
in fact that somebody had given him like
I can't remember what it was  it was like 18 dollars and 53 cents or
something like that can you know is it
was an odd little number but she'd been
able to do that without much trouble to
herself she was an older woman can't
remember that yeah
like you know thinks about getting older
I used to think I'd start to forget
stuff instead I'm plagued by this thing
that I call jamais vu which is
remembering stuff that never happened I
have more memories now but but I think
this really happened I'm pretty sure and
and also there's this you know he
recognized that there was an anonymity to
the process which he increased and so
you have emergent phenomenon like the
fact that i read a few days ago that in
Utah which is I wouldn't say huge Obama
stay Obama has been outstripping McCain
in donations dollar-for-dollar 7 to 1 since
the first of September now i would guess
that many of those donations are made by
people who would not want even their
husbands to know that they did that but
they can what I'm seeing is a campaign
that is starting to take shape for the
future and is running as it ought to be
and
and in addition the way in which the
public is coming to understand who these
people are is well I mean there are
various publics there are many many
many publics in this great land of ours
even in its current pathetic state and there
are a lot of people who now have the
ability to get way beyond the affect not
just saying that they don't have the
affect and actually that's a big part of
it because but but they have a very
different access to the affect they have
the effect in the uptake they have the
casual  walking around affect they
have the they have the clip like Joe the
Plumber that is much too long to run on
network television you know it
personally I think that was a hugely
important clip through Obama because it
means that Obama was willing to stop
talk to this guy and explain more about
his stack program than McCain had said about any particular issue to anybody
except for maybe the issue of Obama and
people can see that
and people could research stuff and
people could take the time and in
consideration now it is also true that
we are in a time which is painfully
obvious to somebody who has never raised
with this narcotic and doesn't own a
television now and thinks there's no
safe viewing level that television has
just wreaked absolute devastation on the
clarity of the American mind and I'm not
going to put that straw man up I don't
think I'm gonna get anybody to disagree
with me but there's still a lot of
people who even though they constitute a
minority that is dwindling they have a significant
plurality because they are unified
around a very narrow beam of reality and
in fact have been trained all their
lives to not even notice the difference
between experience and reality
experience and information they confuse
them they think they are these anything
and so they are still an enormous block
of consciousness meanwhile out on the
internet since thanks to the efforts of
my colleagues at EFF and you know a lot
of people in classes like yours still a
free place you have you have a hundred
and fifty million lonely pamphleteers
on 150 million street corners preaching
their little messages and power laws notwithstanding
it is still a very fractious thing it's
not like it was if you'd been living in
a total electric home in a
suburb during the time when I was
sitting in lobby of the Plains Hotel and
watching Nixon and Kennedy debate where
you had three channels and they all had
that and America was united in an almost
totalitarian way so there's this rant and
hubbub on the internet which is a very
difficult thing to organize politically
except for the fact that now for the
first time I feel like I mean I lamented
it for a long time I thought God so this
is what free speech looks like human
beings aren't quite as good as I thought
they were but they're starting to rise to
the occasion so there's that information
flow I mean reality is what you can be
able to believe that it is reality is
what you are allowed by your cultural
filters and your media and your language
and your perceptions to see and
experience
and now there are people who are
experiencing radically different
realities in America some of whom are
real I mean a great many of them
actually a large number of them are are
persuaded that wouldn't it be great if
America were run by a hot woman I have
two words for you folks by the way just
to President Palin I got a
thousand bumper stickers today that say
President Palin if anybody wants one ok
but so you got you have a completely
different you got a completely different
way of understanding the political
process and it doesn't it still doesn't
wire in to congress very well I mean
Congress Congress gets bombarded with
email messages well what a congressman
cares about most of all is where he gets
the money for his next election well he
cares also he cares about other
things or he wouldn't be there I mean
really that's a very difficult job
people decry Congress but I mean people
don't do that rather nasty job unless
they and dull a lot of the time
unless they really believe in it
but I mean for a congressman he
doesn't know where that where that email
is coming from it could be it could be
robo even and there's a lot of it and
so it still doesn't connect in and 
also there has been a huge kind of
natural and predictable immune response
on the part of that legislative body to
the idea of the Internet I mean the
electronic frontier foundation for a
while thought that the way that we would
proceed would be to lobby Congress and
get them to do the right things
and you know pass the right laws and
that would be very helpful since the
rest of the world would probably use our
legislation's modeling and whatnot and
then we realized that they were not
simply clueless they were anti-clueful they
were dynamically anti-clueful i mean
as late as i guess it was must have been
97 or 98 Tom Daschle who
was then minority leader of the Senate
had a friend of his called me and asked
for me to come in and talk to him about
something and I came in and he said
Alvin Toffler tells me that if I want to
understand this cyberspace thing you're
the guy to talk to you then I said well
there'd be better candidates but yeah
I'd be one and he said I want you to
tell me everything you can think that
would be relevant to me because I really
don't know a damn thing about it smart
guy too and you know and and also an
unusual senator in the fact that he had
an attention span that was longer than
elevated ride and listened carefully for
a long time and finally he said what
you're telling me is that we should do
nothing I said yeah that's pretty much
right he said you know how hard it is
for us to do nothing as it looks easy to
me  (laughter)
he said nobody you know how hard it is
for us to you know ignore or appear to
ignore something that seems to be very
important and threatening to the popular mind
and I said yeah probably and he said I
didn't know how to even explain this to my
colleagues I'm not going to even try but what
you could maybe do is try to come up
with things that we could do that would
look like something but wouldn't be
anything  (laughter)
and what you know and I already
knew that was hopeless because you know
the motion picture industry and the
record industry and a variety of other
really important groups had realized
that you know you get the government you
can pay for and had done so already you
know so that you'd have things like the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
attached as a rider passed in the middle
of the night by people who had received
an enormous amount of funding for their
campaigns from that set of industries
in spite of their relatively trivial
contribution to the American economy
so we may be on the precipice of
understanding how to win an election on
a national scale using the internet I
don't actually think that we are very
far along in figuring out how to govern
using the internet for reasons that are sort of
associated with story I just told you
but but also that sense of real
immediacy and connectedness I mean I'll
bet that you are as glazed over by email
as I am i mean i have megabytes
flying over my head every every week I
mean of real stuff even after him after
95% of the spam's been cut
and you know congressman are and
senators are very busy I mean they have
they have human attention is it I mean I
wouldn't buy a modem
oh you probably don't even know
 what a modem is (laughter)
but  I wouldn't buy a modem
with the IO of
the human brain in text I mean it's a
very it's a very narrow point there and
to try to read all that stuff is
practically impossible especially when
you're thinking about other things and
you have to be so I don't know I think
we're still evolving the systems of
governance that are going to be
necessary you know for taking care of
the physical world that use this tool
we can talk about that but it's
it's not entirely relevant
but I think that the people of this
country are have been organized in a way
that they've not been organized before
and in addition I think it's a very
important addition the president of
United States even in our somewhat weakened
capacity is still one of the most
leveraged you know has more leverage than
any other human being on the planet you
know and t would only be fair for the
entire planet to vote for him and I
don't have to tell you how the election
would come out if that were the case
though McCain did honest to god he got
an endorsement day before yesterday
from a foreign Al-Qaeda endorsed him
(laughter)
because he'd be better for recruitment
so I think there are a whole lot of
questions that are opened up about the
possible misuse of the Internet in the
way that the television has been misused too
and I don't even
begin to know for sure what they are
except for the things that probably
obvious to all of you like you know the
fact that it is a hugely successful
rumor machine and you know there are
various people even known people you
know who brag about it who have been
starting rumors about you know Obama's
Moslem past how he's actually you
know this is all part of an Islamist
fascistic plot been underway for a long
time etc etc a lot of people see that
believe it and on the internet nobody
knows you're a liar
I used to think in my
 palmier more optimistic days
that the truth would
automatically self-correct in
cyberspace because you know you said
something that wasn't true there would be a
million people that would come along and
tell you that that was wrong and
you know in wikipedia
provide some evidence that
that can be done
but you know wikipedia
is a community of folks that have an
ethic
the internet is another matter and
there are a lot of very loud voices out
there on the internet that are
spreading some amazing crap and it's not
that easy to stop it because it
multiplies exponentially just like
anything else
and of course as you know as well as me
the actual possibility of achieving real
connection with other human beings in
the same way that that i felt i had with
Nixon and Eisenhower that day in 1956
San Francisco is diminished in
cyberspace I think there's there is a
risk of feeling like we're actually in
communication electronically with one
another one we're not and that's going
to affect the political process because sort
of it really will always come down to
the to the true bandwidth which is you
know prana face-to-face breathing the same
air feeling one another's body language
and God knows what all pheromones and
and we probably are in peril
substituting this
this thing
for that
all right so since I said I wasn't gonna
broadcast yet at you too long and I know
I see one of the things about being
raised with that television and not
having it around is I really forget
about the attent ion span of people yeah
I mean we live in an era now where
 if you don't have attention
deficit disorder you're not paying close
enough attention (laughter)
I mean you can program  to like huh
so I mean I've been going on in
this laconic Wyoming way you're probably
just like your heads are just huh it's
like watching 2001 a space odyssey
<laughter)
so could
we start a conversation now this is what I
really came for
Ted Stevens got
convicted on all counts
what's that
Stevens got convicted on all counts
(laughter)
I just got that
yes
what a mean little bastard
tubes
yeah
um yeah you might take this as nitpicking
but I read a thing in the press i think it was
just today about campaign financing and
and what they were doing they were
going to a Obama's website showing that
you could make a donation under any name
or address that you fancied and there
was no address verification on the
credit card they've done the same
they've done several credit cards and
so on and you know you were saying the
people put money in in Utah and people
wouldn't want to know about it so what
you think about that
I'm really glad you brought
that up because that's one of the things
it scares me about it I know that that's
being done hugely I mean there are
private individuals on both sides
but if you go up to McCain's site  your
credit card won't go through without address verification this is what they
showed  in the article
yeah but the way in
which this is
you can do
I don't have to tell you how easy it is to have
a variety of credit cards with slightly
different identification you know I mean
this is not
that hard to do I mean I grant you that
that it is true that the McCain
site has been more scrupulous about this
then there is this other thing of privacy
what if everybody in the world can see
who you've been giving money to and so
on but people but it would you know have
a restricting it back
well you know how
many people here are familiar with the
Electronic Frontier Foundation
I recommend this I mean look us up EFF.ORG
I mean we've been fighting for
privacy in the electronic domain for 18
years
I don't personally think that
privacy's all that good a thing
I think there's something
sort of pathological
about a desire for privacy
I mean I think
it's related to a sense of shame
but that's just me I was brought up in a
small town in Wyoming where nobody had any
I mean like the framers of the
Constitution who top it not to even
included as a right I mean it was a
foreign concept to them I mean what the
hell would privacy be living in you know
in the conditions they did everybody
knew everything about everybody you know
everybody's famous in a small town but
that you know and the thing is that you
you have  as a
in a small town you have
this mutually assured destructive
capacity
you know somebody wants to
rattle your skeleton you know where
their bodies are buried too and it's
just best to leave people alone on that
stuff and in addition
well
there is that amnesty that is
involved by looking somebody else in the
eye and knowing them really and
unfortunately now we are in conditions
where you can you know dial you can roll
up the digital slime trail that anybody
leaves in a contemporary society just by
being and come up with a simulacrum
of that person that you know
that can gradually dance but you will never be
able to look in the eye of and have no
sense of human warmth toward and can do
anything to because it is an information
thing it is the ultimate sort of bot
and so I worry about that even though I
still have no privacy whatsoever I mean
if you look up my name in Google
you'll get all my home addresses the
pictures of my children and the number
that rings in my pocket
then I leave my  doors unlocked
yeah
so your talk was mostly addressing 
national politics and the presidential campaign
how do you think or I'd like to have a
discussion around how internet organizing
changes local political elections
which is in many ways a different
question like Obama has been
able to create a sense of human
reaction in many ways using
television like his speech in 2004
was a nationally televised event
it's obviously very different
organizing challenges on a local level I
would just like to have a discussion around that
well what do you think  what do
you think
I worked as a journalist and
i think there's a lot of potential in you
know folks write about their community
on the internet and new york city in
particular has a really strong local more
like neighborhood focused blogging
community yeah so I see that is one
potential place to start
it's like
you go to people that already do the
work of talking about their communities
but still even then you end up falling
back on a little bit of a broadcast
situations
there are definitely people
who write to a much larger audience that have
a great deal more power than
other folk who even though you write a lot
you can be ignored
it's definitely harder
to catch on to the unifying themes
around local politics and it creates a
different organizing challenge
I think you're absolutely right i mean i
think this is a really
important question and and when Andrew
Raziej was running we'll be hearing from
him in a few weeks right
one of the suggestions i made to him
i think he thought it was sort of a
cockamamie idea but
i was thinking about how well
machine politics works it
really kind of does you know what most
people really care about a lot of the
time is the fact there's a big gaping
pothole out in front of their house
that's a real local issue and you know
something that government is supposed to
be doing something about and they want
 government that will go out
and fix that pothole
well government
often now is to you know engaged in a
bureaucratic clusterfuck to do
anything about that pothole or anything
else I mean you know we're paying five
times more taxes on this on this island than
we were during the second Koch
administration per capita and the
streets are now worse than they were
then because there isn't much local
accountability and I suggested to Andrew that
you could come up with a new way
of Ward Heeler system you know a ward
 system where there really was a
kind of immediate feedback and you could
actually involve people in fixing their
own problems you know so that you can
use the internet if you got a pothole
out in the street there you
could go in through the
internet and have a truck show up with
asphalt and one guy that could tell
the people how to rake it in and tamp
it and organize a few volunteers in the
neighborhood and actually fill the pot
hole tomorrow just having wait for the
you know whole elaborate process to to
rattle down to but that was sort of an
idealistic notion anybody else got ideas
what to do about how to make
the internet local politics because I
think that's really important
I'm going to comment that the New York City
Council does not webcast and the only
time of their things are webcast is when I
actually go there with the camera and
put it up on the Internet myself
good for you and I bet
you see some amazing stuff
I've just been doing the tech committee but 
yes
do people here watch c-span ever
I mean that's one of the best things about
television i mean we can' get it on the internet
fortunately but it's really cool people
talk about you know you don't want to
watch sausage or legislation being made
I actually well I really don't like
watching sausage being made I've
done it but legislation being made us
really pretty interesting I
recommend it
anybody else I mean I'm  not on
that topic
well as far as doing local
politics organisation there is um
another charity
probably people are familiar
it's called donorschoose
 it's a sort of its current
I believe only oriented towards
donation into like an education-based
you know local people show up say ok I
have school here and I'd like 300 books
or something like that please donate but
in the same vein you could set up
exactly the same concept as for filling
in local potholes or something they now
just organized everybody to pay
ten dollars to fill potholes on our
streets and keep it local as opposed to
be redistributing it back to City Hall and
then hoping that it comes back as a
(unintelligible) and the problem once
again comes up is
it's not clear is the problem the fact
that it doesn't exist yet  or the problem is the fact that if
even if it exists then nobody would
actually use it because it seems like in
our communities we're sort of disconnected
yeah right exactly
both yeah half but
you know it is great to have at least
two or three other people who agree with
you that there's a problem and working
together with you to fix it and now the
internet is already starting to be able
to provide you know a substrate where that
can form at least maybe
but you know I just
I just remembered something that that I
meant to mention
I think a really
important possibly and profound shift that
could come of what's going on at the
moment would be I'll tell you a quick
story there was guy named Pete Wilson
who was senator from California
and had been governor of California
and was not
I mean he was a Republican at a time
when I was but he came to speak at the
Institute of Politics when I was there
and I had dinner with him and he told me
that he was he was going to quit the
Senate I said why you are you doing that I mean
you're like one of the only people there
that actually reads the legislation
and he said no i don't
(laughter)
i can't i can't begin to
I said I know there's a lot of it
he said no no that's not the problem
from the moment I get elected until the
time I'm reelected I spend a minimum of
four to five hours every day raising
money for my next campaign
and often it's a lot more time
than that which
doesn't leave me a lot of time to
actually do the job that I'm doing and I
realized recently that all I am is a
thing that gets reelected
you know
and a constitutional impediment to my
staff
and I just don't want to be that any more
now I would bet that Barack Obama
during his campaign
has spent a hell of a lot less time
raising money himself personally than John
McCain because the internet was doing it
for him and I think that will be true
after he's elected if he is and that
could be true in a lot of cases
go someplace else
oh you good
didn't you have
your hand up a little while ago
ok there
about this raising money will it
by the next campaign be the same
for Republican as well
maybe at this stage McCain 
is lagging in terms of internet fundraising
but four years from now it will 
be the same for both candidates
well that's fair 
I mean you know cool if
that's the case and you know I expect that
the Republicans are going to be doing a
hell of a lot better in the next
election than they might do in this one
because they will give Barack Obama the
most insurmountable set of problems that
anybody has ever had to deal with
you talk about somebody who has been
given a failure package what the hell's
he going to do even if you weren't black
which is going to be a liability it
really is anybody who doesn't think that
that's a problem he's not living in America for
very long
I mean I know I have among my
more dubious acquaintances this guy
named James Baker who was actually a
really good guy believe it or not was
secretary of state and secretary of the treasury
a neighbor when I was
still in the cattle business  he
owned the ranch right nearby and I was
talking to him recently he's voting for
Obama this is the guy that was
the lawyer for Bush during the judicial
coup that made him president in the first
place
an act for which he is sorely repentant
he thinks that's the dumbest
thing he ever did
but he's still a Republican
so he's not just voting for
Obama because he thinks Obama would be the
best guy but he knows that if Obama wins
then Obama is going to take blame for
all the crap that W did
in the final analysis because
he won't be able to fix
it so very there are a lot of
Republicans going to do that
I think the only way to have a fair election ever is I mean
I don't think it's sufficient but  I think it's necessary
is for there to be no such thing as paid
advertising by either side by anyone I
mean  it shouldn't be a question of
who has most money whether by birth or
by virtue of having the best PR team out
there but I mean having said that
there's something immensely moving that
about the fact that Obama has raised a
lot of money in little increments by a
lot of people and that is really meaningful
but I mean I think there should be
no advertising period the newspapers and
the television media that the radio
national public radio should summarize
the positions of the candidates or let
them do it but you should not be able to
buy advertising
yeah well I think that
that's you know the cool news is that
you know among the you know after
I've killed broadcast media I will have
also killed advertising
(laughter)
I mean you know
that's going to become less and less
relevant you know in the form that we
understand advertising today you know
the advertising industry is still
totally clueless about the freight train
is about to run them over but I mean they
they're in a state of even glassier denial
than the record industry was but
I mean there are better ways to
advertise there are better ways to you
know develop a relationship with you
know your product whether it's a
candidate or anything really I mean
for example how many people here have
ever in their lives clicked on a banner ad
really
fools
(laughter)
you could just you know back on shiny things
I'm sorry I'm very arrogant
i don't think I ever have because just I
know what I'm gonna get
but on the other hand
i click quite frequently on the
right hand side of a google search
I do that all the time
and often buy the thing
that I get is a consequence so you know
that's a new kind of advertising which
will also be relevant I think politically
you
I was just going to say that I want to agree with you
and I think that YouTube actually is one
 of the most proficient ways of campaign advertising
that is not funded
however I think that the way in which
advertising is done is a
very good illustration of the management
abilities of each candidate
so I don't necessarily think that would
necessarily be a bad thing because it is
proven that McCain's negative advertising
has harmed his
campaign and Obama will carry out
everything that he's been discussing in
the campaign even with his advertising and dealing with this huge surplus in budget and also
the big jury's still out on that by
the way
well hopefully we'll see
but I also think  that the internet has created an unusual role
in this campaign
because you know it is on such a global
level I personally have felt so much
more involved in this election because I
been getting so much information so
frequently and I know that my roommates
are getting the same Barack Obama emails
snd the same Keating economic videos and
I go over to my friends houses watch the
debates on their computer while they're
livestreaming it's just amazing that all
this information is out there at our fingertips
and I know that we're in New York City
which is a country in of itself, but
I don't know,  if it's part of America.
but we are making some progress
yeah I just watched I just
watched this debate this last debate on
the internet first time I've ever done
that and and I found that there was
there were subtle ways in which McLuhan
was right about that you know you're
still looking at a thing on a screen but
because that thing is coming
through this box I could do stuff with
the image in real time you know like
honing in on the pulsating veins on
McCain's forehead real close you know
and evaluating in my own intuitive way how
close he was to popping a valve so we'd
have President Palin if he got elected
and stuff like that i mean
 i could i can do
stuff with that signal that was that was
quite different so watching the debate
on the internet wasn't the same as
watching it on tv.
ah over here
you mentioned that the internet is like the
last real free speech kind of thing
and you know you don't own a
television and kind of just you know
there's only so many channels and this and that
and obviously there's an unlimited
amount on the Internet
what do you feel about  I know a lot of
people making a lot of money in PR who
like you know will just hits and hits
and hits so then when you go to that
Google search this is what comes up
maybe in future elections or whatnot you
know all the candidates will be spending
money making sure that searches lead to
this searches lead to that and it seems
like there's a filter you know they're
still a way enough to focus it just like
a television you know I what I mean
click fraud
life is an arms race you know
I mean from the Paramecium
I mean from blue-green algae
on up I mean there is 
competition which asserts itself in the
possibility space as best it can and
armed with technology human beings have
a better capacity to come up with ways
to game the system and gain an advantage
than any other creature on the
planet and so I have no doubt that there
will be  lots of that but
there's always
one technology and then there's another
technology to counter it and you know
that's how it goes
i mean the reason we
called it the Electronic Frontier
Foundation was because we knew it would
always be a frontier that it would never
be settled because there would be
constantly new things to deal
with social questions to be asked
exactly like the one you just mentioned
I asked because you know 
on television there's cable access
(unintelligible)
it's a powerful force
it  becomes irrelevant because everyone is tuning
into these other stations and if
everyone's tuning in to what people want
them to tune in to buying these megaclicks
and if people are using these
search engines like Google or Yahoo
and that's where it leads them you know
whether or not search engines need to
have a ethics clause or you know I don't
know
well hell Google's got an ethics clause
don't be evil
(laughter)
yeah I gotta say
anybody any company that says don't be evil is this just like doomed to be evil
you know with all these camera phones
the ability to take a picture and send
it to someone so quickly
you can do video now send it quickly
I feel like at least in this
country which is different than other
places like Britain where you have
Parliament and they yell at each other and
go crazy you know here you watch c-span
that you mentioned before but C-SPAN
 can be really boring because the
politicians are so afraid here to let
their guard down in many ways because
they know they're being watched all the
time I just think I wonder what
you feel about that being a good thing
or a bad thing that communication
is so fast and when are we going to see
our politicians and our system become more
like it is maybe over there we were
there not afraid to let their guard down
I think we are going to re-adapt
I mean I'm a pronoid I mean
this is a pathological condition where
you think the universe is a conspiracy on
your behalf but so I can't I can't
tell you for sure that this is going to
be the case but I I really feel like
that  one of the things about
being like completely transparent and
visible is that gradually you become
at home with being yourself and natural with it.
it's when you've had the experience of
being able to hide that you're awkward
about letting yourself be visible
I think eventually people are going
to are we reaching a cut point here
we are
okay what time does this
right now
I'm sorry
 I didn't mean to hold you guys
You probably have classes to go to
but I mean we are reaching a point
where you know people will get used to
it I think again and you know and will
realize that there's a great virtue and
just being who you are
thank you all for coming
(applause)
that's eff dot org
you
