Transcript

Public Parts: Why It's Good to Share Online

December 08, 2011

00:01

MICAH SIFRY: Hi everybody and welcome back to Personal Democracy Forum’s ongoing series of conference calls with movers, shakers, thinkers and doers in the field of technology and politics.

This week we’re going to be talking with a good friend, Jeff Jarvis, long time PDF speaker and sometime moderator of some sessions and I should say, full disclosure, personal friend. He has a new book out called Public Parts, Why it’s Good to Share Online. And we’re going to be spending the hour talking with him about the book, the ideas in the book and the reaction to it and more importantly the larger trends in society today as technology and ubiquitous connecting, makes it so easy to share and in some ways disrupts so (inaudible) patterns in society around who we are and how we handle our public and private lives.

Before we get started I want to thank our sponsor Microsoft who is actually sponsoring a number of these calls and we appreciate their support.

So, Jeff why don’t you kick things off first by telling us a little bit about why you felt the need to do this book other than your publisher wanted another one after the success of What Would Google Do? Why do we need a book about the value of sharing online and what have you learned since the book has come out? Has anything surprised you or taught you a lesson that you didn’t know?

JEFF JARVIS: First of all, thank you for having me on this and second of all I apologize for those of you who are listening, my voice is departing me and when I totally lose the voice, millions will rejoice.

Why (sounds like: public-ness); I want to make clear in the beginning that public-ness and privacy are not in opposition. And it’s not an either / or, it’s more of a continuum, it’s a set of choices that we have and so I had to deal with privacy in this.

But my fear was that privacy is the center of attention right now and having such an impact on how governments for example are looking to regulate technology, that I fear that we were losing potentially the site of the benefit of public-ness. And that in fact the internet has created this tool of public-ness since the Gutenberg Press.

And so I wanted to try and examine the benefits of being public because now we all can be. Before Mark Zuckerberg – he said, before we were all private through obscurity, you know, you couldn’t be public. Or Sam (sounds like: Lesson) the entrepreneur who works for Facebook said that privacy used to be inexpensive and public-ness (inaudible) was expensive and now it’s the opposite. Publicity’s a lot cheaper and privacy requires more effort, it’s more expensive.

So, as we look at how we’re all using the internet and how we can change society with that it allows us to each be public, it allows us to create publics, it allows us to collaborate with each other in public whether that’s politically or economically in companies and products or culturally. And it allows us to meet each other and connect around the world in new ways that simply weren’t possible before.

So, I celebrate all of those things but if the internet gets too constrained because of fears of the worst case of what it could do then we’ll never build the best case in what it can do. And so that’s why I wanted to come in and try to examine that best case and to examine it at three levels: one is the level of the individual, why would you want to share? Eight-hundred million people who joined Facebook not because their all insane or drunk but because they want to share, they want to connect. That’s what we do, we are social. And I wanted to examine then what we get out of that in terms of better relationships, in terms of disarming the notion of a stranger, in terms of collaborating with each other and with other entities like companies, and of course disarming stigmas, using public-ness to fight back bigots who forced gays and lesbians into closets. Importantly I’m not (inaudible) out of their closet of any sort, but those who do choose to stand out find public-ness as a weapon on their behalf.

Want to look at public-ness in terms of companies and how companies have to get a lot smarter about working in public. My office this morning I talked to a guy named Jay Rogers who runs a company called Local Motors, which is a pretty amazing company that’s been manufacturing cars using open source and collaborative design. And it’s really – it’s already profitable and working, it’s really quite a fascinating thing.

MICAH SIFRY: And the cars are really cool, too.

JEFF JARVIS: They are, the Rally Fighter – it’s not the kind of car I see you driving but (laughter) I drive dirtier cars, but it’s a very cool company the very notion that (inaudible) so companies need to re-think and certainly government, this goes to the heart of the PDF is that government too much today is secret by default and opened by force, whether that force is reporters or (inaudible) or wiki leaks. But in fact government should be transparent by default –

0:05:33

-- and secret by necessity and there are necessary secrets in the sense of security and crime and so on and privacy. But government would be far better off by being open, not just in terms of getting the bastards, but in terms of collaborating.

So, finally what I come around to is saying somebody has to protect this internet of ours. Is it a company? Is it the best case Google – and I’m a certified Google fan (inaudible) – no, it’s not Google. Is it governments? No, I don’t think so.

When I went to the EG-8 whereas – was it you, Micah or was it Andrew who said –

MICAH SIFRY: No, Andrew was there, yeah.

JEFF JARVIS: -- it was Andrew who was there. You said to us, that’s right, that we were (sounds like: lipstick on the pig), which is true. And I asked (inaudible) to please take a (inaudible) oath for the net and first do no harm.

Even with the best of intentions, when a government tries to start regulating the internet, changing the architecture so that anyone with the worst of intentions can also do that. And the internet is the internet because no one can claim sovereignty over it, including (inaudible).

So, at the end of the book I come around with a set of what are your principles for a public (inaudible) tools in public-ness. And I will say right off the bat that they’re not the right ones, but I want to see us have a discussion about those principles because right now (inaudible) can hold an event, the EG8 and he can invite what he thinks is the internet to his table, but (inaudible) said there that the future of the internet wasn’t there because it didn’t know how to get invited.

But, I fault us, the people of the internet, people of the net for not having our own event and inviting him to our table. And so I think we’ve got to have a discussion about what it means to create this new and public society because none of this is pre-ordained, none of this is guaranteed to happen, I’m no determinist. Things could go bad as well as they could go well. These are choices that we have so I want us to think through those choices not just in terms of the worst cases, but also in terms of the best case.

MICAH SIFRY: Well I think that’s a fantastic summary of the book, actually. That’s certainly what I took away from the whole book but it’s interesting to me because as I read it, the first half of the book felt more to me like an argument against the sort of privacy, the sort of knee-jerk privacy advocates to get up in arms at the thought that Google may be is serving up ads that we’re interested in because they know when you’re searching for bed and breakfasts that you’re looking for information on bed and breakfasts.

And that there is – in the first part of the book it feels to me like you’re really arguing against some kind of privacy zealotry. And then in the second half is much more about this vision of the benefits of public-ness and the potential to create a more collaborative – whether it’s collaborative governance or collaborative businesses – that take advantage of people choosing to be open or companies or institutions choosing to be open.

But I want to go back first to the – I definitely want to come around to your point about somebody’s got to speak for the internet because the place where I think we people of the internet do genuinely have a problem is that if anybody’s eroding peoples’ privacy these days it’s both governments and private corporations are doing a great deal to undermine the person who has relatively little power in that equation to protect their own privacy.

And what hasn’t happened is we’re not controlling – we, individual citizens – are not controlling the use of our own data. And so Facebook, for example, which, you’re right, is being used by people because it’s very, very easy to use and because there’s a certain network lock-in, all your friends are using it, it’s hard to leave. But Facebook – I mean how do you respond to Julian (sounds like: Assand) who says that Facebook is like the best spying mechanism every invented for collecting data secretively on people and who knows who they will share that with?

You seem to take a very – you interview (inaudible) in the book and the sense I got was an admiring of a company like Facebook.

0:10:30

JEFF JARVIS: Yes, I think Facebook has enabled something pretty amazing. Facebook brought the notion of real people and real relationships to what was pretty much an anonymous world. And I’m not arguing for required real names on anywhere, I will defend anonymity. And I’m certainly, by the way, going to defend privacy. Privacy is very important, it needs its protectors. It has lots of protectors who are very competent; I fear that public-ness has fewer.

But let’s go to that idea of Facebook as that kind of tool. The first and most obvious lesson here is the internet is a shitty place to put secrets, right? It’s the last place to consider a (sounds like: vulch) for secrets, your head is the best place for a secret.

And so the things that people are sharing on Facebook, yes, Facebook messed up in terms of people’s understanding of how many people they were sharing with. I thought I was sharing with these 10 – oh no, it’s 100 or more. And that was wrong and stupid of them and that’s why they’ve suffered the FTC breathing down their neck as has Google now.

But generally, Facebook is a place to share and so the things you’re putting there aren’t secrets or individual secrets, that would be a fairly foolish thing to do because – not because of the technology but because any one of the people that you share with could pass it off and be a gossip.

And so I think that you were right that what I’m arguing against is not at all privacy, I have a private life, privacy needs protection. But I do argue against what you call it – I didn’t – these are your words, not mine – but (inaudible) zealotry. That oh my God, everything could go wrong, this is awful, we’ve got to close in the gates to all that we do.

You even have some people including the head of privacy in Germany talking about trying to move to private by default. Well, if that were the standard of the internet, then you’d never have Flicker. Flicker is great insight was public by default. And that was counter-intuitive. All of the photo services before Flicker thought well you could use your photos, you don’t want to share with anybody except for the (inaudible) kid in the photo booth.

But by making it public, that magic happened, right? We created communities around photos, we shared information, we shared events, we shared tags, like funny, we shared art. You know, wonderful, amazing things happened because we went to public by default in the case of that service.

And indeed, I think society is – I’d rather live in a society that considers itself social by default than secretive by default and closed in. You can stay in your room all day, you don’t have to go out. No one should ever force you out. But if you do stay in your room all day, you don’t know who you’re missing.

And so you raise a third point Micah, which is that the internet is a public entity that is controlled by private entities. And that is an issue. But I also think that it’s those companies are under more scrutiny than other companies.

I did an event in Paris last week, not unfortunately on the web, and someone asked me about that and I was thinking about it then and I said, well, you know, I think I trust Facebook and Google more than I trust most any bank these days. And Facebook and Google are under more scrutiny and when they screw up and they do screw up , whether through stupidity or whether through developing or learning as they go into betas or whatever those may be, they get called on it quickly –

MICAH SIFRY: Really, you think so? It’s worth arguing about this a little bit because I think Facebook and Google – well, first of all they’re very different companies but Facebook is almost completely untransparent about its procedures.

JEFF JARVIS: You’re absolutely right. They’re untransparent, but – (overlapping remarks) when Facebook screws up and they do screw up, that is what is open, right? The fact that Zuckerberg likes the fact that when people complained about the news feed, they used the news feed to complain.

MICAH SIFRY: Well, of course.

JEFF JARVIS: And he in the end was right that the news feed was the heartbeat of Facebook but he also changed some means in how it worked. And that’s what I’m saying is different.

If you try to complain about Bank of America, how do you do it? Well if you use Facebook you’re not going to use any tool the Bank of America is using.

MICAH SIFRY: Well for argument’s sake, banks have been around a little bit longer and maybe we have a little more knowledge going back decades about how to regulate and –

JEFF JARVIS: And we’ve done such a good job of it, haven’t we?

MICAH SIFRY: -- well actually we – in the last decade or so there was an ideological and very well financed push to de-regulate and now we see the results. But still we talk about transparency and the value of public- ness. We have more transparency thanks to the SEC in terms of knowing what publicly traded companies are doing –

JEFF JARVIS: Well my point is that Facebook and Google are held to public account more effectively than those companies. And Google says, Eric Schmidt says regularly – and this is true of everything in advertising which is (inaudible) advertising they have according to an estimate I saw yesterday, 44.1% market share of online advertising. There’s definitely alternatives there.

But every other service they offer to us as consumers, there is a perfectly good and legitimate alternative for everything they do. And if Google messes up badly, really pisses off whole bunches of us –

0:15:44

-- you know, we can all go to Bing, we can all go to (inaudible) store around. And there are those alternatives. And so that’s all I argue here is that the – it’s not so much credit to those companies, it’s credit to the internet and internet companies and how they have to operate.

MICAH SIFRY: Well I would say let’s not get into an argument about which sector is better. I think the core point you’re making is absolutely right, which is when there is competition then we can get some accountability and I think you’re wrestling with the same question that people like Rebecca McKinnan who has a new book coming out called The Consent to the Network is also wrestling with, which is we have this amazing new thing, the network public sphere where if you choose to join, and many of us do, we can create immense value that is just beginning, we’re just beginning to see the benefits of.

And yet it is almost entirely on private platforms that don’t have to be good about what they do and –

JEFF JARVIS: Right, so what do we do about that? We should be building more public platforms and using them. You know, the fact that Chrome is about to pass Firefox in market share – and frankly, I use Chrome because it’s a really good browser. You can look at that negatively and say, oh the open platform is losing. On the other hand, it’s the open platform that forced the quality in other platforms, including Chrome; the fact that Apache exists, open platform is hugely transformative to the economic (inaudible).

So, what do we do about that? Well rather than sitting back and complaining about the companies – they’re doing what companies do, which is to exploit opportunities and make money and provide services out of that – then we create more (inaudible) platforms and (inaudible) to bring out more information to get us away from media hedge money. These are things we can do stuff about.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. No, that’s a very important point in the book.

Tell me in terms of the reaction to the book, anything that’s really surprised you or made you stop and say, damn, I wish I had covered this or made you go back and re-think?

JEFF JARVIS: I think it’s still early in that process. I think that I probably – I think a point very early on that’s very important point to make that I am a privileged, white, well to do, well educated American male. And so it’s a hell of a lot easier for me to be public than a member of a vulnerable group in a tyrannical and conservative (inaudible) nation.

But even so, I also was a columnist on a newspaper, I’ve been a journalist so I have some experience with public-ness that goes beyond most and I probably should be really clear about that, I should have looked inside that (inaudible) understand in my own head what – how that’s trained me for good (inaudible) or however you want to look at it.

And then once public, there is a downside, which is you become more vulnerable to attack and as you know, I’ve been attacked by a few, not many, I’ve gotten good reviews but a few people don’t like people like me. And so when you are public there are those who think you kind of almost asked for it. And I think that that’s a warning to people.

MICAH SIFRY: Do you think that the public’s fear that you’re describing actually – I mean, let’s stay on that point for a second – that in some ways because of what happens to people when they become public in the sense of highly visible and it’s because it’s two way, you could feel more vulnerable.

I’m thinking two examples of this; one is what happened to Kathy Sierra who is a very prominent woman blogger who completely stopped being public because she was getting death threats and –

JEFF JARVIS: Also remember that one of the parties that was accused of making threats did not and was also hurt in that episode.

MICAH SIFRY: -- yeah, but her experience was a really negative one. I’ve, from time to time, I’ve sat down with Thomas Schriedman at the New York Times who cited me in his book, The World is Flat and so we’ve gotten to know each other a little bit –

0:20:26

-- I said to him, why don’t you blog, why don’t you Tweet? And his answer is partially that when he does go online to see what people are saying about him, he hears every negative comment and it’s overwhelming.

Now it’s very bruising to an ego to hear what people really have to say about you and online now, a lot of that chatter is out there. I mean you I think have grown up sort of naturally with the whole space and I’m sure you feel like, okay, I have some critics, I’m a big boy, I can take it. I can certainly dish it out, too from time to time.

But what do you say to people who say, this is too disruptive. I can’t bear to hear what other people are saying.

JEFF JARVIS: There’s other – let me give you a more benign example of new disruption in life and we’ll go to that. I’ve been (inaudible) is that I wish to bring back the (sounds like: busy signal). That emails (inaudible) there’s no idea that you aren’t available for contact. There’s no way to (sounds like: sign) yourself off, that causes all kinds of disruption. Now what do we do about that?

We’re trying to find new norms and new systems at the same time to deal with that. Norms include lying to people. Oh, sorry my email is broken, that works for a while until (inaudible). And then it was, oh, it got caught in the spam filter. And these days my favorite is, well, I guess Google didn’t consider you a priority.

MICAH SIFRY: (Inaudible) and I didn’t get the call.

JEFF JARVIS: Yeah, so what are we doing? We’re trying to come up with new norms, new systems, Google priority (inaudible) is a system that’s trying to help us out of this. And society is trying to adapt and figure that out. Just as we had norms to figure out what time it was okay to call somebody, that went out the window and now you can email somebody at any hour and what becomes rude is to expect an immediate answer.

So, what we see as a process here as a society is trying to figure out new norms for new structures. Now that goes true to the issue of nastiness. Part of the problem here is that in my world, media world, we tend to look at the world god-like in our own image and think that the internet is a medium and that if anybody said something nasty, it schmussed the whole thing, right? Schmussed is a verb, right?

MICAH SIFRY: I’m not sure if you would schmuss something.

JEFF JARVIS: Oh, okay. But anyway, that’s not what the internet is, right? And the metaphors fail us very quickly but the internet (inaudible) taught me that it’s not a medium that brings too much baggage, it’s a place – we can argue with that, too – but the internet is Times Square.

There are bozos, twtis and assholes in Times Square but we don’t choose to dismiss all of Times Square and New York City and vomit and regulate the hell out of it as a result. We all have an awareness that life has assholes. The internet is life, ergo the internet has assholes. And so what we’re trying to do is figure out how to deal with that.

You know, one is – I think you and I have both been in communities where the community finally has it and they start to go after the trolls because they want to keep the community safe. On the other hand, we all learn that being a troll is the worst thing you can do. We’re trying to figure out – and then we are also looking for an authority system – the New York Times just instituted a system of commenting. We’re trying to figure out norms and systems to deal with life, it’s still life.

So, can Tom Friedman hear more complaints about him? Yes, he can. But go look what Nick Christoff has done. Nick Christoff is using (inaudible) online to do miraculous and wonderful things because he’s open and generous and we just have to find the systems and means to ignore the assholes and separate them from the people who actually have something legitimate to offer.

And it’s not that hard to tell the difference – we all know who the bozos are.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, yeah. Do you think younger people are – I mean there’s this myth, I think that the younger generation, they’re all digital natives as if they are savvy to all of this and it all works just fine.

Now do you agree with that –

JEFF JARVIS: No, and (inaudible) is the brilliant person at demolishing that myth. Children don’t come out of the womb with a Facebook page and the wisdom to do these things. They have to learn – and (inaudible) a very little bit of research I did talking to teenagers, nothing compared to what (inaudible) does. I found that all of us are burned to learn.

And you learn this on the school playground as well, too. You (inaudible) and thought in confidence to one friend and then it’s around the lunch room table.

0:25:08

And you learn not to trust that friend or you learn not to talk about certain things and that’s an unfortunate lesson we have in life, but that again is just life, it’s not technology. Technology can make it broader and faster.

MICAH SIFRY: Right, that seems to be the key.

JEFF JARVIS: (Overlapping remarks) (inaudible) break point is that young people find the means to control meaning online, and they use these (inaudible). Look at Facebook, the fact that kids get married and divorced and they know what that means in that world, they’re using that tool to impart the meaning that they want to impart and they’re in control of the medium. I think that’s where we can learn from young people.

And then there’s a lot of talk about having to train young people in digital (inaudible), I think that’s true to teach them lessons like self (inaudible) the internet (inaudible), you know, you can’t erase it and things like that. But on the other hand, and we also have to learn from young people and see how they use these tools.

Quick example: when I went to go interview Zuckerberg I took along my son, Jake and our kids have met at your conferences. And Jake is a developer and Zuckerberg is a bit of a hero so it was a big deal. As we went there, Jake was saying, you know, I think the wall is something really entirely new. And I said this to Zuckerberg and he disagreed. He said, no, we’ve always (sounds like: signaled).

But I’ll side with Jake here because what Jake said was, no, we have conversations in public. You know what? When he said that, I thought, oh, that’s not how I look at the wall. At my age, I look at the wall as medium, a place where I publish things. And so I’m looking at it in my analog from my day and he looks at it at the different analog and so he just sees it differently which is Clay (sounds like: Sherkey’s ) point about why – as he says he’s not a good entrepreneur but he is a good analyst because he learned that you had to go to a store to buy pants and try them on, you had to go to a record store to buy records, you had to get a newspaper to get news, he had to unlearn all those things.

So, we’re capable of unlearning all those things and seeing a new world but it’s not as clear to us that perhaps as it might be to a young person to learn separately.

MICAH SIFRY: Right. I think one unaddressed danger here is the degree to which our reliance on and addiction to screens, you know the little ones with text messages and bigger ones with photos and Facebook pages or whatever, are still only allowing us to transmit about five percent of what we do when we communicate face to face.

And so the loss of nuance and the ability to understand what somebody’s actually saying –

JEFF JARVIS: Well we’ll figure that out, let the norm speak up. (Inaudible) norms you figure out that’s when Fred Wilson announced on his blog, The VC, that if you weren’t in his priority in box, he wasn’t going to see it.

So, he tried to create a new system that this is how you’re going to communicate with me. A company last week said it was going to take all of its employees off email because it doesn’t work anymore, they’re going to use IMs.

There’s norms and ways to figure this out. In my book, it’s not a very good example, but Eric Schmidt said that there was a time in history when a mother and child crossing the path didn’t have to hold hands. And the only other thing on the path was a person walking. It was when the chariots and the horse drawn carriages and the cars came along that you had to hold hands. Society adapted.

So, I have every confidence that we’ll adapt to this. Yet –

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) This is where you and I are slightly in disagreement. I want us to adapt, I want – and I think there are lots of things that we can do to help that process along. But I’m mostly struck by what society – what happens sometimes when change is too fast.

JEFF JARVIS: Ah, see Micah, I’m not sure that change is actually happening fast.

MICAH SIFRY: No, I think the perception of what –

JEFF JARVIS: I’m coming to the belief that the change is actually occurring very slowly. That if you look back – pardon me for this – but if you look back to Gutenberg, (inaudible) is the key (inaudible) scholar who said it took 50 years before the book began to take on its own form.
Well look what media are doing with the web and iPads. Newspapers, books and magazines are still (inaudible) as such. It took 100 years, say Eisenstein, for the impact on society on the book to become fully apparent.

What if the change that we’re going through is indeed not that fast, we just think it is. What if in fact we haven’t seen nothin’ yet. (Overlapping remarks) The point is is that there is not an inevitability to how the change will turn out, but there is an inevitability the change happening.

MICAH SIFRY: Sure, but think about this problem; the social demographer, Myron Moorefield, wrote a book about basically political geography, really interesting book. And I went to interview him, this was many years ago and I was writing a story about Jesse Ventura’s surprising success in Minnesota and why there were certain counties that he had done particularly well.

0:30:01

And Moorefield told me that he had noticed a very interesting pattern in fast growing counties which is when the pace of growth hits double digits, and this means that much more traffic, that much more housing developments going up, that many more kids showing up in the schools, people start voting no on local budgets.

And the reason he thought was that it was too fast, it’s happening too fast for –

JEFF JARVIS: (Overlapping remarks) What do you propose to do about that?

MICAH SIFRY: I don’t know. I actually don’t know what the answer is but I’m just saying that you know you’re putting your finger on something very important which is that there is a backlash to the change that we’re already experiencing and we’re seeing really dumb things like State Attorney Generals demonizing Craigslist as if Craigslist is causing crazy people to go lure innocent victims to murder them. You know, obviously that’s been going on for forever. It isn’t Craigslist’s fault, but they love having a target because they know their constituents --

JEFF JARVIS: And that’s exactly my point. That’s why – if the entire conversation is only the worst that could happen, only oh, my, my, my, then what we’ll do is that we enable those that empower to regulate and those in power are doubly motivated to regulate because technology disrupts them.

If instead we also say, well actually what we have here is choices and these choices can enable us to go wrong or go right, they can be used by bad people for bad ends or good people with good ends, these are actually responsible choices we have to make.

We need to imagine the edges of possibility and there are many people who imagine the worst to happen. If we don’t imagine the best that can happen, we won’t build it. So, I’m not a utopian, but I am an optimist and I think there is a necessary inclusion of optimism in the discussion.

And the other argument though is that I’ll come back to say, well if change is happening, what do you want to do about it? I don’t think you can slow it.

Now Eric – there’s this great ebook out now called Race Against the Machine by Eric (inaudible) and Andrew MacEvy that argues that if you do the old one grain of rice on each square of a chess board that meets (inaudible) yeah, he says it’s pretty ridiculous. They say we’re at the second half of the chess board now where you start to see - -this is the same argument where you come post Gutenberg with huge changes in the world – I think these changes to be so fundamental as to change our notion of what a nation is and to change economies and to change education away from its Industrial Age roots and to change how we interact with each other and what societies we think we’re in – I think it’s that big.

So, to me to stand back and say – it’s always fine to say, what can go wrong and to try to guard against that possibility. I have no objection to that and that’s only wise. It’s wise to stand back and try to abstract and say what’s happening around us. But I think we’ve got to accept the inevitability of change. I think that we’ll agree whether it’s how far along we are, it is fast, it is big. And to me we’ve got to go try to find the good things in it.

MICAH SIFRY: Tell me – and I’m noting that we’re at the half way point so if any of the folks listening want to interject with a question, go ahead and hit *6 – or an argument – I like to say – could you phrase your argument as a question? But go ahead and hit *6 and I’ll pull you in.

But I was going to turn us towards what you think both since the book has come out and since you’re writing of it, how well do you think government is doing in adjusting to this new world and do you see anybody doing things that you admire or that would be a positive example of embracing openness as opposed to this sort of major reaction of trying to clamp down.

JEFF JARVIS: Well this is where I was so impressed with your book Micah, that – oh, no, no, no, I’m serious – because you as an obvious – we’re both fans of openness expressed your disappointment at the current state of the art, even in the Obama Administration.

And I think that we are at a point where it’s really hard to think how to get to some quantum leap year – we ain’t there.

MICAH SIFRY: But you were pointing – I mean there were a couple of places in the book where you point to businesses. Like the section on Best Buy, maybe you should describe that a little because it’s – I don’t know if people realize just how much this big corporation retail outlet is relying on systems like Twitter and is thinking about empowering its -- the guys in the blue shirts who work in the stores.

0:35:23

I’ve long that that we often thought that we often see adaptation – creative adaptation happen first in the private sector mostly because they’re just such a cut throat, competitive environment that somebody is looking for an innovative edge, government moves much more slowly, they’re much more risk adverse. You know if government makes a mistake, you don’t get a second chance. Whereas you can have companies now that where the adages fail quickly.

So, tell us about that –

JEFF JARVIS: (Overlapping remarks) a few things: one is that they have (inaudible) force, the badly named but still charming Twitter account where they have 3,000 blue shirts, employees, on it. If you have a question about where does this HDMI go, go to (sounds like: 12 Force), ask them the question and somebody’s going to know that answer in minutes.

And companies were afraid of having their employees speak to the whole world and Robert Schoble was a big deal when he started blogging at Microsoft. But now Best Buy even has 3,000 guys and gals in the store in there doing that.

Best Buy also created an API for its ecommerce back end so if you wanted to start a store, Micah’s Gadgets, you could start that and make affiliate fees and so on.

MICAH SIFRY: And so they’re just like Amazon that way.

JEFF JARVIS: It does, it does. Well no, it’s actually a little more open than that. Can you really use Amazon to create your own store with –

MICAH SIFRY: (Overlapping remarks) no you can create a store on Amazon’s (overlapping remarks) –

JEFF JARVIS: Oh, on Amazon, that’s a little bit different. You can sell Best Buy stuff and make money doing so.

MICAH SIFRY: I see.

JEFF JARVIS: Which is kind of cool, so they’re doing things like that that are kind of open. (Inaudible) motors as I mentioned, they’re a media company just trying to open up.

The problem with government is (inaudible) fold; 1) is that government as you alluded to has no license to fail. And in an era of the beta, when people are going to try to – just try things in public and be able to fail openly at it then that doesn’t work very well for government.

So, when I talked to our mutual friend Beth Novack about this –

MICAH SIFRY: Beth was the head of the open government portfolio in the White House for the first two years.

JEFF JARVIS: And she did the peer to patent pilot project which brought in experts into the messed up patent system and it’s been successful and added on to.

What became apparent was that what government needs to do sometimes is hand over the experiments to outsiders and then take the best of the bunch because government is more risk adverse than outsiders could be. So, the question becomes – it falls to us then, the public, to try to change government from the outside by doing things for and instead of government.

Now of course we don’t have the power of taxation or the gun or jail and so we basically we don’t have the power of most of the government. But there are things that I think we can do – Beth’s example – of speculating what if we fixed up the Social Security site which is awful in terms of speaking to people who speak English or speak other languages as opposed to speak bureaucrat-ease.

If the world translated to Facebook into many languages, could we Americans translate Social Security into real person English or Spanish. Yeah, we could, somebody’s got to organize it, somebody’s got to do it, but this go to Clay (sounds like: Sherke’s) point, the law by the way that says we internet optimists have to quote Clay at least once a day.

MICAH SIFRY: I think you’ve done it twice within the first 40 minutes –

JEFF JARVIS: (Overlapping remarks) I’m set for tomorrow, too. You know, as Clay says, this is cognitive surplus that if we used this extra time we have doing these wasted things like watching TV or doing Twitter, could we accomplish things as a society? Yeah, we could but how many Jim Wales are there out there, how many Drew (sounds like: Shahite’s) are there out there to give us the platform and the motivation and the structure to accomplish these things. We need more.

MICAH SIFRY: No, yeah, I mean the exciting stuff is you know, all the innovation that we’re seeing around the edges. I actually think on the government side, the place to watch is less going to be Washington and it’s going to be more City Hall. That cities are – for a number of reasons, you know, it’s where more of us live, it’s also where the rubber hits the road in terms of services ranging from education to crime to the local environment.

0:40:03

Here now where lots of cities are beginning to recognize the value of opening up a fair amount of the data that they collect, some more than others, and inviting the public in, lowering the walls a bit, and in fact our next call in this PDF series, in January will be with John Tolva who’s now the CTO of the City of Chicago and who for many years was running IBM Smarter Cities program. And he is all about what cities can do with big data and sharing.

And so I think we may see a lot more fruitful developments come from that side. But politics is still the most closed system I know because they write the rules.

JEFF JARVIS: Well – and I’m an amateur at this kind of stuff. One thing I (inaudible) about the book is what if we had for example, a shadow SCC. Michael (sounds like: Kopps) one of the SCC Commissioners announced that he’s retiring at the end of the year and of course I must nominate Susan Crawford for that role, though she won’t make it because they don’t like her in the industry. But that’s exactly why we need a Susan Crawford.

What if we had a shadow SCC that was made up of experts that wrote – for every question the SCC faces wrote their own reports, held their own hearings and created some measure of cover actually within the SCC for the commissioners to say, well, these experts over here are saying this, it becomes a sort of anti-lobbying effort. Is that possible? Well yeah, but it takes a lot of work, probably not, just dreaming.

But I think that it’s one matter to complain about government, it’s another matter to go fix it, a lot of that we can’t do from within because it’s a messed up system.

MICAH SIFRY: Well speaking of government, I see we have a person on hold here calling from the D.C. area code. Unmuting, tell us who you are and go ahead, make your comment, question or argument.

PARTICIPANT 1 : Hi, I think it’s me, it’s (inaudible) Kelly, thank you for this discussion. I’ve worked for Congress for years and I’m really interested in just the last theme that you’re addressing is how do we improve the practice of democracy here in this country?

And I’m wondering just from your experience and talking outside the United States, but also with communities, the irony and the real conflicts and contradictions that the United States represents with technology and democracy.

For example, today Hillary Clinton’s in the Netherlands I believe at a (inaudible) at a big net freedom conference while the Congress here in the United States is contemplating a defense bill that really trashes the Constitution with some provisions for detainment.

And it’s just the – I guess if you’re immersed in the policy world that I am it seems so obvious that we’re going to collide at some point, that we can’t have one or be this beacon of technology and freedom and redistributed knowledge on the one hand then have our first branch of government actively sabotaging it on the other and maybe I’m making a false comparison of apples to oranges but saw this today in the news and it just seemed like a glaring contradiction that other people must be noticing it and it’s not the Executive Branch that’s always gets all the attention as the Congressional half I have to say. The Executive Branch always gets all the attention and it’s true also with open government that what are we going to do about the first branch of government on this?

MICAH SIFRY: Great question Lorelai, stay on the line, Andrew, go ahead. Andrew, I’m sorry, Jeff --

JEFF JARVIS: You’ve been hanging around with Andrew for far too long.

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, I guess so.

JEFF JARVIS: (Inaudible) your wife. Yeah, government is filled with these paradoxes and these inconsistencies. You know, Hillary Clinton is giving a big speech today about internet freedom and she’s given some very good speeches in the past and on the other hand she’s attacked Wikileaks which in some measure revealed things that led to the (sounds like: Arab Spring).

Government is always going to be filled with these paradoxes. I guess part of my question is is politics fixable? I mean, Micah, talk about optimism. The fact that (inaudible) in trying to fix politics I think beats my optimism. I’m not sure it’s fixable at all. I think we have to – hackers hack around with things and I think we have to work around government and extra government in many ways.

MICAH SIFRY: Well I would argue that it’s all politics and politics is basically the arena where we come together to identify and address problems that are not private problems but that are public problems, using your definition of public so there’s inside the beltway politics and then there’s the politics of the institutions of everyday life and it is as in flux as everything else.

0:45:30

I mean I work in this space because I think that we are in the early days of a (inaudible), right? I mean that was happening before we had the internet or these issues that come up around freedom and freedom to connect or the government’s ability to spy on us or detain us without a warrant. I mean it’s older than the technology, these kinds of contradictions.

I think the interesting thing now is the degree to which more of us are watching and feeling like we can get up off our couches and do something, that that keeps growing and the forms its taking are quite confusing. I’ve very struck and we’re doing an event this Monday night at MYU looking at from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street and beyond, how the ability to network, share, collaborate and act without permission, without the authority’s permission to have voice in the public arena is really, really disruptive but it’s also allowing a lot of new energy to flow into the public conversation in ways that could be quite beneficial.

God knows that the other system, which was top / down, money intensive, highly controlled, that’s what everybody thinks is broken. And my big worry, Jeff is just that as we celebrate the expansion of the public arena and the ability of more people to speak that we also recognize how much cacophony that’s making and that people need to read your book to understand that there are ways to navigate and that new norms for teasing the signal out from the noise are emerging.

But I think we would be foolish to assume that the experience that most people have of all this stuff is benign. I think a lot of people are overwhelmed. A lot of people don’t know how to deal with it.

JEFF JARVIS: Right, but we’re shifting from a media controlled mediated world back to – I would argue – back to a less (inaudible) world and I think that cacophony you hear is the sound of democracy. And democracy –

MICAH SIFRY: But democracy use to be – it is noisy but think of the difference when in the early days of the American Republic, democracy was something that happened amongst people who knew each other and face to face. It took days for information to move from one town and one end of the thirteen colonies to the other. Now it’s all instantaneous.

JEFF JARVIS: Which also enables Occupy Wall Street (inaudible).

MICAH SIFRY: I agree. But I’m just – again, the point being it isn’t the same democracy – you know, you say we’re going back, I think we’re probably retrieving some things that we lost, but we’re definitely not going back –

JEFF JARVIS: Oh, yeah, yeah, but I think we retrieve the less mediated, less about turning this into a mass. Now what we might change is the idea to Occupy Wall Street and the (inaudible) of Spain and the (inaudible) have more in common with each other than Occupy Wall Street has with the one percent. We have a different concept of what society is and what you belong to and how it’s organized and what your responsibilities are.

I think it can be that big. John Knotten who is a (inaudible) observer, go back to Gutenberg one more time, this is (inaudible) by now, and said we should imagine ourselves polsters on the bridge in mind in 1472 which is about as far away as we are from the commercial web today. And ask people, do you think this thing of Gutenberg’s will disrupt the entire Catholic Church, fuel the Reformation, fuel the Scientific Revolution, change our notion of societies and nations, change our idea of education and (inaudible) childhood. I think (inaudible) bahhhhhh, right? You’re going too far.

Well so we don’t know where we are in some unknown line going forward, but I think that part of the problem is we keep judging this future in the –

0:50:00

-- terms of the immediate past, which is fine, which is understandable, but the idea that we had one newspaper and one – three networks and that was our entire view of the news of the republic is a very short lived world view.

MICAH SIFRY: Yes, yes. Loralei, are you still there?

PARTICIPANT 1: Yeah, I am. Thank you for that. Very helpful.

MICAH SIFRY: And this is Loralei Kelly, right? You work on Capitol Hill, you’ve been there for a while, what do you think has anything changed as they all start Twittering or to some degree using these tools in their own personal lives? Do you think anybody in Congress understands that maybe they could be smarter and do a better job if they were more open to their constituents or is it basically, hey, we’ve got another distribution channel to kind of message at people. This one happens to be free and hey, it makes us look hip.

PARTICIPANT 1: That’s a great question and I think first, I’d like you to know that I’m not working on Capitol Hill now, I’m working with Congress on this issue, the impact of social media and global consequences and global issues like the big national picture of issues we’re not dealing with.

But remember the Congress are everything from Renaissance people to sort of snake oil salesmen and so it depends on is it a two way street? Is it a one way street? Is it an opportunistic (inaudible), going to improve my representative capacity?

I just finished doing a whole bunch of interviews on the Hill with about of staff about how they’re filtering the noise and it’s so interesting and I said, what’ s your field of dreams for an information support system that would create (inaudible) incentive for you to act on facts rather than scandal because the institution kind of has a scandal bias right now where social media is concerned, I mean Anthony Weiner stuff, there’s – you know, that’s how it’s talked about.

There’s a lot going on with Tweeting but it –

JEFF JARVIS: Would you blame social media for that? Hasn’t –

PARTICIPANT 1: yeah, that’s the accelerant but there’s some sophistication in proving dramatically all the time that says Tweeting your press releases.

Do you see, in Congressmen in particular, an vestige mentality and a sort of topic state of knowing enough to change and resisting it at every level but I’ll just say that the most interesting thing that a staff person said to me when I kept asking what kind of knowledge could we provide you on climate change for example, that would get this institution to act on behalf of collective outcomes and common goods when it’s so obvious that the (inaudible) have been had and this is (inaudible) in our future. And he just stopped and said, listen, stop trying to give me information. I don’t need information, I can (inaudible) on Wikipedia, I can use Google and I know a few smart people. What I lack is context and judgment.

I thought that was so interesting for Congress which has its own think tanks but the think tanks are either documenting and documenting or presenting information that’s not useful in a real time environment. So, where I really feel the interesting (inaudible) to happen is sort of the in the real time, knowledge support that exists in your district because unless we start distributing knowledge on ramps for people that are also voters and parts of your social network, I don’t see us being able to crack the money, that sort of cartel like feature that the money and the system has created.

It’s a triage thing and most members of the Congress, even Tea Party members I would imagine, have some level of disappointment in themselves in being able to serve their constituents and they are public servants despite the fact that they hate the government.

And I guess I feel like the ball is in our court. I mean all of the people on this phone call, you, (inaudible) a guest, thank you for this. But I think that’s where the really interesting problem solving needs to happen and again, just as someone who’s relatively new to the open government world but has worked in DC for 15 years now, the Executive Branch is just overstepped and over fed and over pampered on all these new experimental efforts. And Congress is so often the orphan and it’s really the most accessible onramp to the federal government for Americans.

So, the whole areas of convening could be reinvented, whole areas of civic narrative, whole areas of expertise -- anyways –

0:55:01

MICAH SIFRY: Yeah, that’s great, great points. Well we should – appreciate that Loralei, thank you. We should definitely take some time. There are a number of groups doing interesting things here both from the staff side, I can think of people like the folks that just ran this Facebook developers’ conference on Capitol Hill, which we’ve been covering on Tech President. And I can also think of new startups like PopBox that are trying to play a helpful role in between the sort of – the firehose that’s aimed at Congressional offices and their need to figure out how to listen more effectively.

So, I think that’s a – Jeff, I mean, what I should say as we start to wind down here, is you’ve done a great job in this book and in sticking all kinds of pins in the need to tell the good news side of the story of the virtues of sharing. And that if anything, we all need to do a better job in – if we’re going to depend the values of the open internet, it cannot be based on abstractions like the many to many or end to end principle, it has to be about how this can make peoples’ lives better, how it can make the system work better or how we can save money or how we can be healthier.

And the reason why I’m most optimistic, I have to tell you is – I’ll share one last anecdote – I was really struck when Steve Jobs rolled out the iPad, the mania, the excitement that was visible. I happen to be looking at Twitter that day and I’ve never seen a spike, I was actually watching the hash tag for the iPad and at one point it was about 15 percent of all Tweets, worldwide, according to Trendistic just telling you this is a very big deal to people and why.

And I think the answer is that in fact there is a very deep hunger for not just toys, but tools that people think can really make a difference. There is still a great possibility we vest many of us in the potential for these new products that are starting to emerge, that they can potentially be as Arthur C Clarke said, the closest thing we have to magic, in making our lives better.

And the iPad obviously doesn’t do that in every way, but it’s that deeper hunger that interests me. And I think that’s what we have to figure out how to speak to and with if we’re going to defend the open internet in explaining these things, your ability to be healthier or smarter or more successful or part of a more meaningful life or stronger community, those are the values that really motivate people.

And so I have to thank you for the job you did in Public Parts. Can you tell us what the next book’s going to be about?

JEFF JARVIS: I don’t know it’s going to be a book. I confessed in both these books that I was a hypocrite, that I (inaudible) my own dog food, that I took the publisher’s advance. I’m playing with the idea that technology now leads more to efficiency than growth and trying to think through what that means but I don’t know enough about that, never will.

So, what I want to start is a series of conversations with people and blog books and things and maybe a book comes out of it as a by-product, maybe it doesn’t. I think Megan Garber who just moved from Nieman to the Atlantic Wire is a wonderful writer, wrote using this book just a jumping off point about the idea of the book being the starter of conversations. And books I think become one milestone in a path of the conversation.

MICAH SIFRY: Speaking of that, is there a place where if people want to continue the conversation about Public Parts where that’s happening?

JEFF JARVIS: Sure, the best is just come to my blog and find a post and start going and publishing.com. I’m on Google Plus.

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