Hello and welcome to Downstream. If politics is downstream from culture, then consider this show a sewage treatment plant. And tonight, we are going to talk in love in this club, euphoria, wisdom in the rave, and whether the left needs to rediscover a sense of fun. And I'm very pleased to be joined by the always lit Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, and the Chief Psychonaut at Navarra Media's very own ACFM, which makes this the most ambitious crossover event since we got James Butler to come on Tisgy Sour. So, Gem, welcome. Thank you so much for joining us. So, this show really is kind of a rip-off or a continuation, whatever way you want to look at it, of some hot BBC Radio 4 content. What happened was that a couple of weeks ago, Jeremy made an appearance on Radio 4's Moral Maze to talk about the morality of clubbing, which was about as surreal as having a discussion about raving with Melanie Phillips is probably going to be. So, I really recommend going back and listening to that show after you watch this one, of course, just to get a glimpse of how weird and remote the prestige British broadcasting environment can really be. Because here we all are talking about something which most people do at some point in their lives with the kind of alien distance, which is usually reserved for analysing, you know, a kind of microscope sample of bacterial ooze. So, I heard Melanie Phillips describe dancing as a bacchanalian orgy and later on, and I'm not sure if this bit got edited out or not, one of the panellists compared the relationship between crowd and DJ to Hitler and his followers. So, all in all, some pretty weird stuff. I was on the show as well, but because of the setup, I didn't actually get to talk to Jim directly, but I did want to explore some of what came up and much more besides, because I think that there are questions, interesting questions, sticky questions about euphoria, about hedonism, about excess, about fun, and the rave that the left should address in as light and playful, but serious away as it can manage. So, Jim, maybe to kick us off, what's so good about bacchanalian orgies? I mean, I would want to say there are good ones and bad ones, right? I mean, it was sort of a point I tried to make on the show that I'm not, I wouldn't want to, I'm all for on the one hand, like defending the bacchanalian orgy as a potentially progressive and liberating practice, but I don't think you can really do that without some sense of discrimination without the idea that there are good parties and bad parties. So, I mean, at their best, as Giles Fraser said on the show at one point, the rave, the party, is an expression of what Nietzsche called the Dionysian aspect of human existence, which is, I mean, he was making a distinction between different kinds of philosophy, really, a different kind of worldview. And the Dionysian is that which celebrates sort of the messy, the carnal, the physical, the, you know, the non-rational. And all of those are really important aspects of human experience. I mean, all of those are things that we can't really get away from and that we can't, not that we shouldn't have to get away from. And I think one of the things that's really crucial in contemporary culture and contemporary society is, you know, we're really heavily encouraged by our existence in a precarious labour market, a competitive property market, a kind of highly competitive education system, which is increasingly instrumentalised, and all the other ideological paraphernalia of neoliberal culture. We're generally encouraged to experience the presence of other people, really just the existence of other people as like a problem. And if it really works, then the Bacchanali and Orgi, or just the party, really, it enables us to experience the pleasure, the presence and the existence of other people in a completely non-instrumental way as just as something which is good, which is empowering, which is enlivening. And to experience sort of getting out of your head as a sort of thing, which is potentially enlivening. And this is something we talk about quite often on ACSM, the idea that, you know, getting out of your head can be seen as just a kind of negative thing. It's about losing control, it's about not having, you know, a kind of loss of agency. But it can also mean getting out, not getting out of your head can mean getting out of your head, not just getting out of your head, getting out of your head into some other kind of mental and emotional and physical space where you're sharing an experience with other people, which is bigger than you, which is more than you, which is not just confined by the limits of the kind of little prison, which is your atomised personality in a highly privatised culture. And I think that's always what, that's what those kind of things have always been used for, you know, that's what, you know, festival, dance, music, trance, really, as far as we know, like going right back into human prehistory, I've always been used for that purpose, they're a way of sort of groups bonding with each other and they're a way of accessing some aspect of experience, which is more than simply, you know, that which is bounded by your immediate individual rational brains for processing information and making preference choices based on, you know, the, its desire to maximise its, you know, its immediate self-interest. So that's what's good about it. It's not to say it can't be bad, not to say it can't go wrong.  I've been at raves in my life, I thought were really bad, and I thought the music was rubbish.  And so I think it can't, you know, it can go bad, but it's really sort of crucial. I mean, it's a crucial element of any kind of left thought, I think, to recognise that when you get people together in large numbers, they're not necessarily going to behave that way. And then they're not, it's not necessarily kind of bad. I want to get into the hips a bit later and about that kind of sideways movement, that sensuality that you're talking about, because for me, the mark of, am I going to have fun at this party is, can I conceivably slut drop to the song that's playing?  But maybe just to get into the history of it a bit, because obviously there is prehistory of music, dance and collective experience. But when we're talking about club culture, dance culture, we're talking about something else a bit. And I was wondering if you could sort of sketch out the historical development of what we now call club culture, dance culture. Well, this is something I'm trying to do in a lot of detail on the podcast I'm dealing with Tim Lawrence, actually called Love Saves the Day. So this will only be a real sort of thumbnail sketch. But I mean, where you trace that history really depends on which historian you ask. So some people will just say, you know, the history of social dance is just continuous. It goes back into sort of prehistory and into medieval times. And then sort of, you know, you can look at the popularity of dancers, for example, in the early to mid 20th century. What we think of is contemporary club culture, I would say sort of begins when you are you have people dancing to records. And you have a real kind of detachment of social dancing from, you know, basically heterosexual courtship rituals. So as far as I know, as far as we kind of, you know, as far as I'm able to tell, I mean, what's going on when people go out dancing a weekend in the mid 20th century is that it's usually, you're usually dancing to live music, and it's usually couple dancing. And, and it's very much about, you know, people, you know, it's kind of ritualized enhancement of the way in which people form relationships prior ideally to getting married in that cultural moment. And so what happens, and I think you can definitely set, you can talk about gradual processes, you can talk about the sort of the evolution of jazz, you can talk about rhythm and blues as kind of promoting more kind of sensual kinds of dance. But I think there is some kind of turning point around to 1970. And there's several things happening. I mean, one is people dancing to records, which sort of, you know, it's sort of in some ways it has potentially limiting fact is a potentially limiting factor from some people's point of view, because you don't have a kind of live relationship with actual performing musicians. But from another point of view, it actually it frees up the kind of range of music that can be heard in a club space, because you can get records from all over the world. And people do you from quite early on in the 70s, start doing that in some places.  But you also get people more dancing just in a sort of crowd in a group, sort of everybody dancing with everybody. And this happens in various various kind of sites around the same time. I mean, the thing that I know most about and I'm most preoccupied with is sort of the emergence of disco in New York in the early 70s. But you could also point to Northern Soul in Britain, for example, as being quite similar in some ways. It's about, you know, the dancing, you know, dancing becomes a sort of end in itself, and it becomes a sort of purpose of the experience. And then that's all happening in the 70s. And then there's obviously a big wave of interest to kind of the late 80s, sort of early 90s, which I mean, we could get into, but I think, I mean, I would say I'm of the generation who sort of thought we had discovered like going out dancing and going out dancing in this very kind of liberated way at the kind of end of the 80s, early 90s. And it turned out, you know, the more we kind of I think, I think something that happened to a whole cohort, actually, of kind of music fans of DJs, sort of researchers that I was part of is that over the course of the 90s, we sort of gradually realized that actually, we hadn't invented it. The only people who were going out dancing for the first time in the late 80s were sort of post-punk sort of indie boys really, like everyone else had already been doing it, like they'd been doing it all through the 80s with kind of warehouse parties and jazz funk and all this kind of and the kind of rare groove scene and all kinds of scenes. So it wasn't really as huge a shift in many ways as people would like to think, but it was a shift to some extent in the emergence of rave and the emergence of sort of ecstasy fuel club culture sort of out of rave. It did sort of shift it moved clubbing from being something that was a soap that apart from a few years when disco was trendy in the 70s was something that was really associated with quite niche subcultures. By the end of the 90s, it had become I think the sort of dominant leisure activity for a lot of young people. It had become a kind of default thing to do with a weekend, like to go out and have these still often this really quite intense experience of kind of music and drugs and sound and lighting. And so that and I'd say by the end of the 90s, you've got a situation where it's become a sort of default thing for people to do it a weekend. And I think probably the subsequent history is pretty familiar to most people watching. I suppose one of the interesting things to talk about is that live record distinction and the places where it starts to blur and break down a bit. One obvious place in which it breaks down is when you start bringing in emceeing. So rather than DJing being something which is kind of almost passive or curated, suddenly you've got someone like emceeing over the record and then that turns into jungle, it turns into dance hall, it turns into garage, it turns into grime, it turns into drill. And so thinking about how I mean, my experience of the dance is one which has been kind of racialized in some ways. And I remember like going to uni and then starting to go like clubbing with white people and it was different. They expected their DJs to be quiet. And I was like, why is this guy not talking? So I guess maybe I just wanted to ask you about the different ways in which the DJ is imagined and what the kind of archetype of the DJ is in different settings. Because for me, the DJ is noisy, the DJ is also an emcee.  Yeah, well, that's true. I mean, that is a difference. I think the difference is really to do with how much particular scenes owe to Caribbean tradition and sort of reggae. Because that's where that is the sort of origin point, if you like, of of toasting, chatting, emceeing, rapping.  So it really only gets going when Jamaican DJs are bringing those some of those kind of techniques to New York. I mean, they're not I mean, usually it's not the same person has to be said the emcee isn't the DJ usually the emcee isn't the selector, there is a specific role. And I'm not sure how different the role of the sort of the selector of the DJ is in all those different contexts. Well, it's interactive, right? It's interactive.  I mean, the DJ is always responding to the crowd. And I think in those contexts where emceeing isn't really highly valued, I mean, it's seen as a sort of interruption, actually. It's experienced by people as an interruption of that relationship between the DJ and the crowd, rather than as a sort of facilitation. So I think in some contexts that you're talking about, it facilitates the emcee. I mean, the role of the emcee is to kind of hype up the crowd and also to help to facilitate the sort of feedback between the crowd and the DJ. But then in other contexts, like the ones you're describing, that seems like that people experience that as like an interruption. They don't want to load words that kind of interrupting interrupting the kind of meditative or ecstatic flow. And I don't think one is better than the other, but yeah, it is quite different. Yeah. One of the things that's interesting to me is the way in which you talk about vibe almost. And I mean, a thousand academics are about to like launch arrows at me, but I use the word vibe completely interchangeably with like affect because I think it kind of means the same thing. But to think about differences in vibe, and they can be really subtle. They can be really subtle. So a kind of euphoric experience of like, I'm in a crowd and we're all doing the same thing. So that I didn't experience that a bit later. And I started going to nights which had, you know, dance music techno, I was used to something else, which was that emcee being a mediator of you experience with him what he's rapping in some way. And so you're kind of enmeshed in this kind of more narrative experience. And so I kind of was wondering if you could talk us through different kinds of vibes a bit with that great seriousness, which I know academics to talk about playful things. Well, I think yeah, I mean, I understand what you're talking about.  It's as good a synonym for our faith as any. And I think, I think it is, I mean, it's just true what you're saying, but in different contexts, you know, people are trying to create a different kind of vibe. There's a different, what I would call sometimes a different affective regime of a different set of a different set of, you know, experiences which are supposed to be sort of good, or which the, or which what, you know, the assemblage of elements in that place is trying to cultivate. And yeah, I mean, I think there are really, I mean, I think the difference you've described is one of them is that whether it's based to have a sort of whether you want a kind of a sort of verbal element or a sort of vocal element, I mean, that's that's quite a significant difference. And it's not just a difference between, that's not just a difference between sort of MC based scenes and another scene. It's also a difference between, say, scenes where people are playing a lot of sort of gospel influence stuff like house or, you know, sort of gospel house or sort of disco where vocals are really important. And the kind of anthemic quality of the disco of the vocal is the thing that manages that really helps to unify the crowd and sort of give the experience some kind of content. And then scenes where the vibe that they're trying to cultivate is more sort of is more sort of meditative in some way, I think, which is quite a lot. I mean, there's quite a lot of sort of side charts, a lot of sort of minimal techno is really trying to do that.  And Bergen is like, I remember thinking when when we were here, having all these debates last year about whether you could do social distancing in a club, I remember thinking, well, Bergen could just stay open because that's just how everybody dances there anyway. Like my experience of it, at least the time I went was everybody is in their own space. Like, and they're sort of, they usually are about a meter, not quite two meters, I would say about a meter and a half from each other. And everybody just sort of, and there's very little sort of verbal interaction. There's definitely no sort of winding or grinding of any kind. But again, in some context, it means important to say that is that is important for people. It's important for a lot of people that they should be in a space where they're not expected to perform sexually or perform, perform sexuality. And that is the whole thing that's liberating for them. So that is really important. But yeah, there are really big differences. And you know, I mean, personally, I found by going just really boring, like it was just, I just felt like I could have just, I felt like I was at a sign disco or something.  And that to some extent, you know, dance scenes are more, you know, where people are kind of, you know, playing lots of hands in the air anthems and listening to a lot of vocals are kind of cheesy and kind of banal and not really not and can't generate the kind of sort of personal intensity that they're looking for. So yeah, it definitely is the case. And it does I mean, it does raise a really interesting question that you're pointing to it does raise an interesting question as to whether you ever want to make some sort of political critical discrimination between what it is that different kinds of scenes are actually trying to create like what it is they're trying to cultivate. So there was a really interesting moment in I would say in the sort of especially the sort of second half of the 90s into the early 2000s when in Britain, the sort of British club scene was going to cutting edge of it is producing these incredibly kind of innovative, so formally innovative music. So drum and bass coming out of jungle, UK garage, UK garage is always the most fascinating example for me because UK garage, I remember I remember being I remember reading some blogger in the early 2000s who had read stuff that I and other people other other academics had written about what we liked about disco or rave or dance culture and he said on he said, theoretically, like UK garage is the perfect music, like it means it's sensual, it's erotic, it's but it's not it's never really cheese never too cheesy. It's never it's also it's sort of formally innovative. But the actual scene around UK garage was just horrible. I mean, the scene was these clubs where you weren't allowed to wear trainers, you weren't allowed to wear jeans, they wouldn't let women in if they weren't dressed sexy enough. And what you were supposed to do is order champagne at the bar and take a cane of that was the kind of it was the kind of high moment of early Blair right aspirationalism. And it was and it was a kind of a mostly black iteration of this completely depoliticized, you know, politically, if it what if it has any politics, it was a reactionary politics, basically. It's interesting you say that because when I was working with Wiley, this is obviously before the horrible Twitter rant. But one of the things that he said is that garage was always quite American to us. And so then for the people who then kind of started that grime scene, it's part of it a rebuke to what they perceived as the Americanism of garage of like, you want the champs, you want the cars, you know, you want no trainers in the club, whereas we're doing something different, and it is much more English, it's trackies, it's trainers, it's taking elements from even like football chanting and a bit of like laddiness. But that was what he considered in the rebuke to garage in a way. Yeah, that's right. Well, it wasn't. I mean, it was a sort of fantasized American.  And it was also a reaction against the fact that we're really, I mean, I was sort of teaching, you know, I was already teaching undergraduates in the second half of the 90s. And it was the it was quite disturbing, you know, especially for that it was only a quite a short period. It was quite disturbing to me, but it was also disturbing. I mean, people like Paul Gilroy have written about this that, well, that really the sort of the whole the MTV base had for a few years over the imagination of a lot of kind of young black people was really kind of hypnotic hold. I mean, that was the kind of that became the sort of horizon of aspiration. And then grime did represent a sort of reaction against that because partly it was a sort of rejection of the perpetual aspiration to create sort of commercially successful British hip hop. I mean, that's the I mean, initially, grime was really proud of being something distinctive, being not hip hop. It's something it's our own thing. It's MC based, but it's but it's based on it's based on raga tasting.  So yeah, it was and it was a real sort of it was a real sort of reaction. But also, I mean, grime is also an interesting example of a scene where I mean, you'll you'll wait. I mean, what I was going to say about garage was that was that people there was this real kind of interesting split between people who were just listening to this stuff at home or on the radio sort of great sort of advocates of it, like Simon Reynolds and people who were actually involved in kind of going out clubbing regularly who mostly didn't want to go near it. And grime again, as you say, grime is very sort of interesting because grime is, you know, grime is this very kind of complicated, especially that early grime moment. It's very sort of complicated phenomenon because on the one hand, it's reacting in these quite positive and innovative ways against, you know, against the exactly the things we've been talking about. But also, it's not really connected to any kind of political critique of those things. It doesn't really any and often, you know, the scene around grime again, it was often, you know, it was violent. It was kind of quite internally sort of destructive, not always, but it was like a lot a lot of the time. So and I think that sort of aesthetic. I mean, for me, the thing that really the real kind of limit of point of this for me was actually dubstep. It was dubstep was dubstep was the kind of an old offend lots of people now saying this but dubstep I thought mostly created this amazing scene, creating a very, very specific vibe. But but it wasn't a good vibe to me to me. I used to I always thought this is a bad vibe. This is a vibe that somehow it borrows the kind of aesthetic of dread and menace mostly from dub and reggae, but it depoliticizes it. Like it's not you're not you're not cultivating a sense of dread because you're building up revolution, you know, you're building up revolutionary pressure, you're just aestheticizing the experience of being aviated in the city. Like that's a good thing in and of itself. And so for me, I thought that was really problematic. It was really problematic because from an objective point of view, I was very interested in it. I was impressed by it. I knew it was formally innovative music, the way they were using sounds and club spaces to cultivate a very specific vibe was was really, you know, was really sort of impressive on its own terms, but it wasn't progressive in any sense for me. I mean, it was basically sort of reactionary, as far as I could see. It was reacting against a bunch of stuff, but it wasn't really giving any people a sort of sense of hope and aspiration. So I guess for me, the question is then what would it mean for it to be politicized in your view? Because I guess like dubstep is happening just when I start going clubbing, right? Sneaking out. Obviously, Marm, if you're watching this, I was over the age of 18 when all of this happened. And there was never any psychoactive substances. But that for me was like one of my first like club experiences. And so it was often like on the one hand, the parties I was going up to were like very grime, rap and MC driven. And then it was like club experiences were kind of like dubstep-y. And I suppose for me at that age, that experience of what you identified as the dread and the menace felt thrilling and real in a way, captured a sense of place. And so I guess in a way I can't imagine what it would have looked like or sounded like or felt like for it to have been more politicized. So genuinely, it's an open question of like well, it's not necessarily the case that it could have done. I mean, it could have done at that moment. So I'll say two things in relation to that.  I mean, precisely what culture does a lot of the time is in fact to generate vibe. But then if that vibe, if you want that vibe to become something more than just vibe, which is actually informing a kind of relevant, an actual sort of identifiable political project, then there has to be a political project somewhere out there for it to connect to. And the big problem actually, I mean, when I've written about sort of academic stuff about this, my argument is always that well, the big problem for that whole sequence of highly innovative British sort of dance music from jungle onwards, what Simon Reynolds called the hardcore continuum is that there wasn't, there wasn't a kind of active left for it to connect with. Like they emerged in the wake of a really a series of historic defeats for the left and including sort of black radicalism in Britain. So there wasn't anything there for them to connect with. And if there had been, then it might have connected. I mean, dubstep specifically, I would tend to say is not, you know, dubstep for me, if you're talking about dubstep, dubstep specifically has to be understood as part of that sequence. And, you know, my relationship to it was obviously conditioned by the fact, you know, I'm a lot older and I'd been through, I was there for the early days of jungle and the kind of excitement, the kind of drum and bass and even UK garage. And it seemed to be, it didn't really have that sense of, you know, for me, it didn't have that sense of radical novelty in the same way that it seemed to be sort of distilling elements out of those things rather than really adding anything. But ultimately, the answer to your question, well, what would it be? Well, there's two things at an aesthetic level, it would, it has to have some sense of hope. Okay, so I'm going to say, and this is something lots of people always want to disagree with me about, don't at me on Twitter, because I'm just not replying the arguments on this. All I can say is, yes, I've thought about this, I've been thinking about this for decades. And I know all the reasons why people think that music is really dark, and that it's really angry, is really sort of angry, has this kind of radical potential. I would say, I would just say, I like a lot of that music, I admire it, and I see why it's necessary for people. But if you want to look at historical examples of where kind of music scenes have connected up productively with some kind of wider political struggles, it's only ever with music that carries some sense of hope in it. It's never with music that it's just a scepticizing the experience of alienation. There's just sort of making a sort of making a sort of virtue of necessity by just creating a sort of accentuating the darkness and the anger of your vibe. And I would like to believe differently, you know, I was sort of, you know, I was sort of not by my parents, but by my cultural parents, the people writing in the music press of the 80s, you know, I was raised a postpunk, like most kind of what white guys my age were. So I would love to believe it, but the historical evidence is really weak. So I would say my answer to you would be on a purely aesthetic level, it has to have some sense of hope. The music has to have some sense of hopefulness about it, some level of some kind of optimism. Which for example, even the most, I mean, you can argue that like especially the early really innovative grime like does, like even though it's really kind of angry, for me, there's something about the sheer kind of, the sheer weirdness of those early, like why the indizzy records, which make it just feel like anything is possible. Like if you can make this record, like you could do anything, anything could happen after, after, you know, that first dizzy album, you think, well, the lyrics are really scarily kind of dark, you know, they're really about the narrating and experience of kind of, you know, borderline kind of mental illness in. But there's something about the music is so sort of sonically variable and so kind of energetic that you just feel like this could go there's a real sense of sort of possibility implied in it. But of course, I would say for that then to have then developed into something else, you can imagine a different history in which that kind of really experimental dimension of that early grime then develops into some music we haven't heard yet, you know, some new kind of double some really kind of some very kind of, you know, something that would have gone more in the direction of the UK funky was trying to go in, except it would be a bit more sonically experimental. That all could have happened. But for that to happen, I suspect we didn't need different social and historical conditions. We just had to not be in like the worst time in one of arguably the worst period in history, or at least in my lifetime sort of politically, the early 2000s. What you said about that first dizzy album and that early grime of, you know, Wiley and dizzy for me, the ingredient there isn't necessarily hope, but it's fun, cheekiness and a bit of mischief. So you kind of get this sense of a kid who is just like, you know, being parked in front of Nickelodeon and has all of those cultural reference points and is bringing it in through lyrics, which are also really dark and really challenging. And for me, it was that combination was this kind of like, you know, cheeky youthful energy, which I think is one of the reasons why POW then became like the anthem of like 2010, 2011, right? It was kind of like resurrecting this tune, you know, this beat forward rhythm. And it's because I think it's obviously incredibly angry and incredibly violent, but it's mischievous and it's cheeky. And then when I go, well, who is doing that now? Well, I would say maybe, you know, it's not Dave and it's not Stormzy, but it is J-Hus, you know, he's making this album where it's about somebody who is on the edge of losing their mind. He conjures, Kojo Karam writes about this very well, you know, this kind of alter ego of Juju J to like embody all that darkness and all that chaos. But I guess I go, how do you, how do you weave hope into that without undermining in some way the authenticity of the artist who's making it? If they're not feeling the hope, then how do you bring it in? You know, I'm not saying, I've got no interest in saying what individual artists should do. I mean, that's not, I don't see that's my sort of job. I mean, I'm not, I mean, individual artists can only really do what they do, I think. So I, but I think all I can say is historically, if you want to look at, if you want to, for a mute, yeah, there are music scenes, you know, like soul, for example, historically, that have connected, have made sort of connections with broader currents of political change. And they've always, one of the things they've always had in common is this sort of, you know, in a sense of optimism. I mean, that might not be what grime is for. I mean, grime might be something else. It might be just carrying out a different function. And that's not to say it's bad. I think it's probably to say we shouldn't be complacent. I mean, I do think that I do think there's a certain complacency about some people wanting to say like grime is brilliant because it's now. And that's all we should really say about it.  They're not, they're mostly very demoralized. They're not very politicized and and I and that suggests to us something that we all know, there's something that completely outside the world of culture and music, you know, there's a lot of work to be done in kind of rebuilding that and rebuilding that sense of hope. So my point is not that artists should deliver hope for people at all. Actually, that's not my point. My point is that I think there's a limit to how far we should just say, look how cool this is about music, which is expressing a sense of hopelessness. Actually, I think we could admire it and we can love it, but I think we should also say that we should be a bit, we should be kind of concerned about the fact that we're living in a world where like the only music that sounds that's quite innovative is also really dark and hopeless. And I also think this about sort of hip hop in the States, I think on the one hand, I think, you know, and it's, you know, just saying like X, X, X, Tentacion was cool because it's what young people are listening to now isn't isn't really responsible so to criticism like it's fascinating and it's powerful, it's kind of fantastic art, but also if that's where kind of young people are at or at least large numbers of young people, then we should be worried about that the same way we're worried about lots of other things. I think the difficulty is saying that without like condemning the art or condemning the music. And I think it is really important also not to do that because in the end, I mean, and I'd say this about the experience of rave and its kind of legacies in Britain, like really why did British rave not turn into the soundtrack to a kind of a real kind of revolutionary counterculture like we as we would have liked to have happened and as some of people thought would happen. Well, it basically wasn't the fault of Ray, it was the fault of the left to be honest, it was because the labour movement and the leadership of the labour movement at that time in the mid 90s wanted nothing to do with any form of countercultural activity, any kind of alternative culture. And even when people involved in rave culture did really try to build connections with the labour movement and the left that they were rebuffed or ignored for the most part. There is a disapproving vein within the left which would treat all of this discussion as froth. Do you know what I mean? It's frivolous, it's hedonistic, who cares what's going on in the club, get down to your CLP, that kind of thing. And so I guess I wanted to ask you, is that bit of the left which says not only is this useless but it's actively alienating to the real decent working class, are they right? Is this a fundamentally boring country and what you've got to do is connect with them in boring ways? Well, no, they're not right, but also they're not pointing to something that's totally wrong.  On the other hand, I also think the sort of just being really complacent about sort of cultural conservatism on the left is also, is also sort of a problem. So I think it's, there isn't any kind of easy answer to how, to resolve all those questions. I think my, I would also say that one thing I would say is that some of that, some of that kind of anti-culturalism, which is a phrase I've just invented, does, it does, it partly it's a reaction against something that was fairly typical certainly of my generation. It was typical of a lot of academic work, and it was typical of some wider thinking actually, on the left or not, or in the wider culture, which was that somehow cultural practice, cultural activity could really substitute for political work, for kind of formal political work, that it would kind of lead it or it'd inspire it, and it could substitute for it. And my own, and this doesn't make me popular. I mean, a lot of the time when people want me to talk about rave, like a lot of people, they want me to say, yeah, like rave is just as radical as like, you know, being active in the labour party or something, which has never really been my position. It's always been my position. Well, so can you imagine if those are the only two elements of the human experience that you could imagine?  Well, that's a really good point, actually. I think you've hit on the crucial thing, because for me, I mean, from my kind of the conceptual and historical perspective, if you want a really healthy kind of political left, then or any kind of movement really, you need a range, you need a whole ecology of institutions and practices, and you need intermediary institutions to some extent, which kind of sit in between the zone of sort of pure culture and the zone of, you know, formal politics. And that is something, and part of the problem, I mean, certainly a problem in the 90s and 2000s, there was none of that. We didn't really have any of that. And I think it's one reason, it's funny, because I was talking to somebody, I was talking to somebody in the States about this just last week, actually, a guy who had been really involved in, been really involved in rave culture in California, like all his life and club culture, but also he's kind of in, you know, he's a supporter of things like DSA, Democratic Socialist in America. And he, and he, we were sort of comparing the experience of people being really frustrated there, by the lack of any real connection, potential connection, it's seen between those things. And here, where, at least in some kind of zones, there has been a fair amount of interchange between some of those things. And in, you know, in the UK, I think the real, the thing that's really, you know, it's quite small scale, it's quite localized, but what's done quite a lot of work to create some of that sort of bridging is the wheel transform. So the wheel transform has done, has been really successful, I think, in its, you know, with the resources it's had in its quite limited way, sort of, you know, at least facilitating conversations, points of conversion, points of relay between kind of radical culture and, you know, and radical politics. And so I think that, and I think it's, I think what you really need is sort of institutions and you need places where people can have these sort of conversations and you need, you know, programs like this one and you need, and you need, you know, you need podcasts now and you need kind of a broad range of ways of those things happening. And that's how you end up getting, that's how you end up getting sort of, you know, you only end, I mean, historically, one of the things that sort of, you know, I think there's things that typifies a certain attitude of, on the left is the assumption that, you know, the only kind of music, for example, that is politically valuable is some that is, is music that has the didactic explicit content that is just has its, you know, wears its political slogans, you know, on its sleeves and makes them very explicit. And I think that's clearly not true. That's clearly wrong. And I think it's the case that you only get the, you get these really sort of vibrant relationships between musical innovation and cultural innovation and sort of political, you know, political progress and forces political progress when there are enough kind of, there's enough for kind of intermediate zone. There's enough of a sort of ecology of institutions and practices, which is, but of course, those things don't happen by themselves. I think it's weird thinking about this, you know, I mean, if you think about historical moments, I would say when, for example, you know, there have been, there seems to have been really productive relationships between things going on in music, things going on in politics. I mean, in Britain, in some ways, you know, the high moment is the early 80s.  On the other hand, it is quite innovative, you know, it's reviving this scar music from 15 years earlier, but it's mixing them, mixing it with punk and postpunk is genuinely kind of novel, it's really interesting. But you get that as the culmination, really, a sort of 20 years of people doing all kinds of different political activism of people organising music festivals, of reggae being understood as a sort of political form, like even though a lot of it's, even though it isn't often explicitly, often it isn't explicitly political in its lyrics. And also, it's also informed by the fact that, you know, people are talking about theory, you know, it's also informed by the fact that people in the music press are kind of, for a few years, are kind of it's considered cool to, to cite kind of cultural theorists and to have some kind of intellectual pretension and all that stuff got derided years later. But actually, it was part of a general ecology, which made possible all those sort of exchanges. And I think, so I think it is really, it's just, it's about proliferating the number of sites, number of texts or programs or institutions where interchange can happen and where conversations can happen. And that's what produces the culture, which can, which produces things. But I think it is, it's really, but it is also really important to say that culture ultimately can't be a sort of substitute for political struggle, like it isn't, like rave wasn't, like rave ultimately as a political force got neutralized, captured, sold back to us in a fairly, you know, crappy form base of the time.  It's not historically normal. You get a black led musical form as radically distinctive and popular as drum and bass was, and it isn't associated with explicit black radicalism. Like if you go back to the 20th century, it's not just me as a sort of critic saying it should have been. It's like it's weird that it wasn't, or why wasn't it? Well, it wasn't because there wasn't because the anti-racist movement had suffered some real organizational defeats. And the left has suffered real organizational defeats. And it was in retreat. And there just wasn't really a left for it to connect to. So I think it is really...  And one of my real clangors of a misunderstanding was before I was familiar with her work. I saw in a bookshop, Jody Dean, crowd and party. And obviously, I bought it thinking that was like, it was about like rave culture and club culture. And then suddenly I opened it. And it's about like revolutionary discipline and the party form and, you know, channeling class struggle. And I was like, well, maybe there is a truth in my misunderstanding and my misapprehension that when we're talking about crowd and party, we're talking about parties and parties. Well, it's... Yeah, you're right. Well, the use of the term is really interesting, you know, because party, you know, party just means almost any form of collectivity. But it's a collectivity... I mean, the term party in the political sense, or even or in the sense of like a party, a specific group of people, it implies both collectivity and specificity, right? So, I mean, the political party, you know, has the same root as the idea of the parties and the term party. I mean, the part... And when the third term political party first started to be used, it just meant a particular group, like a faction of people who went together to the same coffee houses or the same pubs or restaurants. So, yeah, I mean, there definitely is something there. And there is something... But then there's always the question as to what, you know, well, what can formal politics learn from the kind of energy of the dance floor party and all what does the kind of energy of the... What does the rave and the dance floor party have to learn from formal politics? That's the...  And my argument then was actually, well, rave... One of the problems with rave was that the movement around it didn't have any sort of... Didn't exactly... Didn't have any discipline. I mean, this isn't just true... This isn't just saying you need discipline to win elections.  You know, it just laid... You know, rave was subject first in the 90s, first to direct political repression and then to very open, like almost explicit attempts to sort of depoliticize it and commercialize it and turn it into a site of capital accumulation and profit making. And it was completely unable to resist it. Why was it unable to resist? It was unable to resist partly because the politics of most of the people involved who might have tried to resist was kind of anarchist politics, explicitly anarchist, and was basically opposed to any notion of political strategy or long range organization or sort of counter hegemony, because all that was considered to be basically Stalinist in its implications. So you couldn't have a sort of strategy. Whereas for example, actually in places like Austria and Germany, there was all... There was a sense that there was a big risk of rave as a cultural form becoming kind of radically depoliticized by these kind of attacks. And they were more successful. You didn't need membership organizations or political parties, but you did need some sense actually of strategy, of strategy and organization and discipline and sort of message discipline and coherence in order to defend the sort of radicalism of that culture from, you know, sort of predatory capitalism. So I think it is true, actually. I think even, you know, I would say my own experience as a promoter and as a party organizer actually is that you do, you do need quite rigorous discipline to have a really good party. You do need to be organized and you need to have a clear idea of what you want and you need to have a clear idea of what people are going to try and take from you or stop you doing because otherwise they will. So what I'm hearing is that as radical praxis, me cornering somebody in the dance with a copy of the prison notebooks is absolutely the thing to do. Obviously, there's so much more that can be said on this. And for those of you who are listening and really are just into what Jeremy is saying, head on over to ACFM where you can hear him joined by Keir Milburn and Nadia Idle talking about all of this and more besides. It's one of the most fun things I think that we do at Navarra Media and also I think one of the most culturally valuable. It takes play with the utmost seriousness and that's why I love listening to it. And if you're not sure about it, just take half and see how you go later. Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a real pleasure. Thanks a lot.


For me as a PhD student at the Open University, I have this unique opportunity to spend three years just first focusing on what I think is interesting. My research is about using learning analytics, which is analysing students' behaviour in online learning environments such as the Open University. And I'm looking at students' behaviour patterns, how they study online. One of the unique elements of my research is the development of big data. So nowadays we can see a lot of data around us and especially in education, more and more institutions are using online or blended learning. So that gives us an extra opportunity to really capture and make the learning behaviour of students visible. One of the unique opportunities for the Open University is the amount of data that they collect. My research contribute to this broader scale is to help the Open University to make use of this data to produce insights that could help teachers to design the course better. We are collecting a lot of data sources from the students' background information and also their prior qualification. The course grade of course and the choice of course but also behavioural patterns. So when do they access the course material? How often do they access the course material? Do they access the course material in time with the course timeline or they are falling a bit behind? The Open University have these ethics for learning analytics guidelines. So we have a clear guidelines of what kind of data can we collect, who should have access to the data, how long the data could be kept, and how we anonymise the data or anonymise any identifiable information before we publish the result to the public. Originally I'm from an economic background so I'm doing sort of similar research but in economics context, in business context. But I'm really interested in the application of business analytics but also data science in education because that's where I feel we can bring more value to the students instead of just getting more money from customers as most of the goals of the e-commerce business nowadays. Meeting new people especially at conferences is very inspiring so you get to know what kind of research is being done out there and you get new ideas from your colleagues, you get also feedback from the people that you've only seen on paper before so you cite them but you never actually meet them. So it's very exciting. So every time I go to a conference and I come back to the OU, I get new ideas and I'm very motivated to push myself and to push my research to the same level at that international excellence level of research.


Hey everybody, this is Jennifer Gonzales for Cult of Pedagogy. I wanted to share with you a really great career searching tool called the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which is put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So I would like to just show you real quickly how to use it. This is fantastic for someone who is really struggling with trying to figure out what they want to do when they graduate from high school or maybe somebody who's already out of high school and is just at a crossroads in their career. This is a really robust tool for learning a lot more about different kinds of jobs, what is required to get those jobs in terms of education and training and salary and growth projection and all kinds of stuff. So if you go to www.bls.gov slash o-o-h, that's for the Occupational Outlook Handbook, you will be taken here. From this page, you can explore a lot of different occupations. You could look at Arts and Design. Once you click on that, you'll be taken to a long list of different jobs. It lists the kind of education that you need. It gives you a summary. From here, you can click into an even more in-depth description. So if we look at floral designers, for example, we get all kinds of information about what floral designers do, their work environment. If you look at all these different little small bits of text, you can click on each one and go to a more lengthy article. For example, this description of what floral designers do, it gives you lots and lots of information about what the work day is like and the skills that are required. There's also information on how to become one. It talks about the education and the training and also information on pay. So you really get an in-depth look of what each job looks like. The Occupational Outlook Handbook also has a tool called an Occupation Finder, which I think is especially helpful to people who really just don't have any idea what they want to do. So let's take a look at that. From up here, click on Occupation Finder. So you'll be taken to a long list of all of those different articles that they have that describe each of those jobs. What you can do is start filtering down on this list.  You're not even sure you want to go to college. So what you can do is start by filtering this list down by, say you said, let me see what I can do without getting any college education at all. So you can go right over here under Entry Level Education and you can select just high school diploma or equivalent, no college at all. What that does is it filters down the list only to jobs that require just a high school diploma. So you can start exploring those. And it's a pretty good list. You could add another filter. Let's say you want to see what is going, what's a really growing profession that you know there's going to be lots of new jobs. We could go right here to Projected Number of New Jobs. Let's go to 50,000 or more. It gives you quite a few jobs still with no college and there's a pretty good number of new jobs that are coming. Say you want to look at salary next. Let's look at between 35 and 54. Once you start filtering down, then you can start exploring each one and basically clicking on each of these will take you to that same article that describes you know what the job is like. So I'll show you right here. Bookkeeping, Accounting and Auditing Clerks. And you get that same article, what they do, what the work environment is, how to become one, the pay. So if you've got someone in your life or if you yourself are wanting to explore careers, consider the Occupational Outlook Handbook put up by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Thank you so much.


For this one-on-one session, as I told you, I would now like to invite on stage Mr. Sai Nagesh. He is a Chief Strategy Officer of Laxay Media Group. Please give a big round of applause to him and welcome him. Can you all hear me? Good evening and I know it's not seeming a good evening for you all. I also know I have a very dangerous job, engaging with the speaker after the last session and keeping you away from the bar. I promise on my heart I will not take more than couple of minutes. Okay, so thanks for coming. It was very interesting. Okay, I had some thoughts which got further enhanced after hearing you all. While most marketers in this country have been about changing brand choices and switching from one product to another, you as a company have been on the forefront of creating something new altogether. So while doing that during the entire journey of building PTM, what's been the single biggest learning and how did you apply it to your business? Okay, I think the single biggest learning for me and for our organization has been that you need to define your competition set in a very, very broad way. And I'll illustrate that with an example. So basically, ours is an app-based business, right? And we can very conveniently tell ourselves that if I'm doing a lot of mobile recharges and there are one or two companies I'm fighting with, then if I'm doing online shopping, then there are the big daddies of Amazon and Flipkart and so on and so forth. Now it's very easy to take that view and only focus on those one or two different industries that you are kind of working on. But the real fact of the matter is that if you are an app, at the most the consumer is going to have 15 or 20 apps in his phone. So your competition set is not these two or three guys who are in your industry, but you are fighting against a whole plethora of apps which may be there. And against those, you have to be in the top ten because otherwise chances are that the person will just kind of install but immediately one day later uninstall you. Now it's a very expensive battle that way because there's a lot of cost behind getting an installation done. And if that happens, then you're gone. So essentially what we realize is to be relevant in the day-to-day life of a person, you need to have multiple uses. And because only then if I need to come back to you once a day is when I would kind of keep you in my phone because, okay, phones have improved a little bit now, but till about a year back, I just didn't have space for more than 15 apps. So I was very data conscious because if I won't need to install an app, how big is the app? That's the question. So there are a lot of things that you need to consider and don't have a very straight jacketed view of who your competition is because you are fighting against a much, much wider universe. So with that 95% app on install rate, right? That's the current rate in the industry. I wouldn't know the industry rate too well but what happens is that, at least for us, the basis has become wider over a period of time. Every day if I'm getting 100 apps installed with all the uninstallations that go on because that's a historically cumulated base, maybe I add only 20 new people because there's a lot of people from behind over the last three or four years who are still uninstalled. But that I think is still healthy. There are situations where you may have a net uninstall rate, I mean your net installation rate may be negative because more people are removing you than new people coming and going and I think it's a function of how many use cases you have. Okay. One of the biggest challenges being faced with the marketeers is the moving away from traditional media by consumers and also the embracing of new forms of media which have got no ads, whether it's Netflix or Amazon Prime, etc. And also it's been reported that 33% of the reason why Netflix is being seen in this country is that there are no ads in it. And India is witness to very high ad avoidance rate and it's said that Indian marketeers have gone over jealous in trying to over engage with the customer and hence not seeing the law of diminishing return and just spending money blindly on advertising. You yourself have been a heavy advertiser. How have you drawn the line, the thin line between over engaging or do you think that word exists at all? No, it definitely exists because you can sometimes, there are two mistakes that you can make. One is the same communication which is maybe not very relevant for your users. You keep pushing it down and beyond the point it just gets irritating. And I see a lot of that in social media in India because I think the social channel for engagement is when you have nice stories, when you have good either humor or some amount of emotion. And there are certain such instances we see on social. Some campaigns go viral. But you see so many brands which are just pushing content on social about a sale which is going on or about all these e-commerce sites are bombarding you with sale news. Beyond the point I just don't care. And it's irritating. I mean if you have apps, the notifications that keep coming all the time. It's blanket. I mean it's just carpet bombing. I mean I get from certain apps 7, 8, I'm not talking about news apps, but otherwise the 7, 8 notifications have come and after a while I get so irritated that they're uninstalled. So if you use some amount of intelligence and target the user in a slightly better way that there is a better probability of me taking action. But just carpet bombing me with 15 messages in a day is just over engagement. It's useless. It's irritating and I will uninstall you. On the other hand on TV we see what is happening of course is that ads are playing, Hindi movie may be playing and then there is 5 minutes of ads in between and obviously no one is watching. So is that ad and waste? I think so completely. The only way to maybe counter that is and you see that in the rates that are being quoted is sports is becoming very important. Because sports and news of course to an extent is that's the only real time content you have. Because that guy, I mean you may have a cricket match and T20 match may you have at the most 45 seconds, 60 seconds between two overs, right? The person won't go anywhere. So that I think has become important. Sports and I think that is perhaps one of the reason behind Disney trying to take, I mean buying stars. I had a couple of questions but you have already answered them in your talk. One last question I had, sir is with increasing complexity of technology, more and more listening devices, customers getting more and more used to various things, will consumer understanding get more complex for marketers? Of course, I definitely think so but because there is so much data also that's being generated, right? Across but I think on the digital side what's happening is that there is a significant digital footprint that people are leaving behind. And of course in the last two, three months you've seen all that's gone on with Facebook and people have. Because still I think two months back India frankly didn't care. I mean we as people we would think that my data is being used by someone I don't really care but there was not too much of a premium to it, right? And people could have misused it in whatever form and manner. But I think going forward in the next there will be a lot of regulation which will come in terms of how you can use that digital footprint and that which is being left behind. So once that goes away or that becomes more restricted your understanding of the user might reduce because still now it was free for all. I mean on an Android phone today I can know everything that you do, right? Because you have I mean you'd have put an app, an app would have taken your SMS permission. Moment he has taken your SMS permission to read your SMS, right? To read your SMS and the moment that happens everything that has come to you is very very easily readable. There are apps which are taking access to your phone to the voice that it's recording everything that you are doing. So but those measures will go away. I think the market will mature. The user will obviously get fragmented across media. So where exactly do you catch him? It's going to become a very very big problem. Thank you. Thank you so much.


Hi, folks. Good afternoon. Thank you so much for being here. I hope you're having a great time. Awesome. So in the recent history, we've seen a lot of security attacks. We've seen solar winds, log4j, even sunbursts. This has very rightly switched or, you know, transitioned our focus to securing supply chain. In this session, Vishal and I, we will, you know, we'll talk about, or we'll walk you through starting from what container images are, what it's made up of to going into the importance of signing and verifying images, and finally talking about where and how Kivarno fits in. Right. By the end of this session, we hope that you'll be equipped with the right tools, insights, some understanding that will help you achieve a secure supply chain. Yeah. So let's start with the software part of the software supply chain, right? So a container image is basically a standard way of packaging the executable code along with all of its dependency in a way that can easily be shared across users, right? And in terms of Kubernetes, container image is a basic unit that can be used to run your own code inside of a cluster. By that, what I mean is that, let's say you want to run your binary inside of a cluster, what you can do is you can create an image from it, and then you can run a pod and then expose it for it to be accessed, right? And let's say you want to create an API endpoint and you will create a Kubernetes service and expose it to all of its users using HTTPS. One more thing to note is that a container image is stored in a content addressable storage, which is basically a way of saying that the URL of a container image is the proof of the content that lives there. So the URL of a container image has a digest, and when you go to the URL and you pass it through a SHA256 checksum generator, you will get the digest back. This is a guarantee of immutability, which means that if the content changes, the digest will change too, and this will change the URL as well. And this immutability comes in really handy when we want to ensure supply chain security. So the basic is out of the way. Now let's dive into what are the contents of a container image. So a container image has configs and layers as well, right? So let's start with the config. So config, as the name suggests, is the configuration of the container image, which can be used to create the container properly and make sure that everything is in place. So it is a JSON object that contains the history, which contains a list of the authors. It contains the OS information as well as the informant variables that should be used while we start the container. Another thing is layers. So a layer is basically a chunk of the executable code of the container image, and when we go to a container image layer and fetch its content and pass it through the right parser based on its media type, we get the binary of the container image that was placed in that layer. So here we have a layer of type tar, and when we pass it through the tar CLI, we get the binary of the stored in that layer. So I actually like to think of this as like layers of a cake. So for example, a cake needs multiple layers and icing on top to make it, you know, perfect. Similarly, we need a container image to have all of its layer in the right order, along with the config to wrap it all up to make the container image work. Okay. So moving on. So the question is now we have the config and the layers. How do we distribute this to the users, right? So to do that, we have another data type called an OCI manifest. So what a manifest has, it is basically a JSON object that has all the layers, the information of all the layers as well as the configuration that needs to be used. And when you fetch the image, you basically fetch this JSON object. And the client that you're using will use the config and the layers to start the container with all of everything put in place, right? But what if you have a container image that supports multiple platform, right? So for that, there is another type called a manifest list. This will be stored at the root of the container image. So when you pull a multi-platform container image, it will give you a list of all the manifest with the information of the OS that they support. And you can use the right manifest in your environment to do what you want. Okay. After that, these were the basic until last year. And recently, there has been another addition to the OCI spec, which is referrer. So basically, referrer is another OCI artifact that can be tied to an image without sacrificing the immutability. So let's say you have a use case where the image has been published, but you want to add additional data, additional information besides of the executable code, and you want to attach it to the image. So to do that, what you will do is you will create another OCI artifact in a registry and make that artifact point to the image. So what will happen is that when you want to access everything that is attached to the image, the referrer's API will look for all of those pointers and will give you a list of all of them. So here we have an image, and when we use the ORA CLI to fetch all of the reference, it finds that it has a vulnerability scan report, an S-bomb, and everything attached to it. So before we summarize everything, I would like to give the shout out to Brendan Mitchell for this amazing image and an amazing explainer video on what OCI images are. It is highly recommended to watch that if you want to learn more. So let's explain what we just discussed. So here we, on the left side, we have the tag, which is pointing to the manifest, and the manifest has a config and multiple layers, and on the right, we have all the referrer's that are pointing to that image. So this explains how container images work and the contents of a container image. So moving on. Great. So now there are scary things that can creep into your images. What I'm talking about is vulnerabilities. What is your vulnerability? Now that's a security risk that can be embedded into your container image. Why do we care about it? We care about it because if you have a vulnerability in your workload, this could leave space for a security attack. Now that's definitely a big no-no, right? So we came up with, this is a norm now where we scan our images, we scan our repositories for vulnerabilities, we produce reports, we deal with these vulnerabilities, we resolve them according to the threat they pose. But vulnerability reports are sort of like a snapshot of what vulnerabilities existed at a certain point in time. They're not stable. It's actually a moving target because there are new vulnerabilities that come up every day. And when this happens, this is not a stable way to communicate about vulnerability information. Enter SBOM. So SBOM, SBOM refers to a software bill of materials. This contains a list of everything in your software, right? A list of everything that makes up your software. Once you have this, this provides a static way of keeping a track of all the updates, of all the known vulnerabilities in your software, making vulnerability, you know, dealing with vulnerabilities much easier. We've even got a certain image showing how a developer builds the image, pushes it along with SBOM and vulnerability reports. This is together pushed to container registries and when pulled from it, we verify the SBOMs, we verify all vulnerabilities, make sure we are okay with what exists and then push it to a workload. Awesome.  So the problems that we're talking about, the first one is how do you store this metadata? Your image is immutable. But now, with every artifact, you have a SBOM or report and whatnot. So this was actually covered by Vishal a few slides ago where he talked about the referrer's API where you can essentially have a SBOM and point it to the image that it's, you know, supposed to be a SBOM for. And the next problem that we want to look at is how do I trust the metadata? Now, any Tom, Dick and Harry could have, you know, some artifact pointing to my image. How do I know that this is a trustable metadata or how do I trust this information? Yeah. So as Anushka just mentioned that since anyone can attach anything to your container image, how can you be so sure that the manifest or the SBOM that you're looking at is the one that is created by a developer, right? It can be created by someone who wants to take advantage of you, right? A more general question would be how can you be so sure that the container image that you're using is a trustable image out of all the bad images that can be used to do container breakout attacks on a cluster, right? So we need a way to communicate this information of trust from the consumer to the developer to the consumer of the image, right? We can achieve this by using signing. So an image signing method can be used to sign the digest of the image, which is immutable in nature. So when you sign the digest of an image, what will happen is that it will provide your identity and it will attach it to the current digest. So anything that is added on top of the current image will lead to a new digest, right? And since the image signature was attached to the previous digest, the consumer of the image will know that up to this point was the code that you came up with and anything that has been added on top of it has been created by someone who is not trustworthy. So they will know who to trust and whom to not, right? This image signing and verification flow can then be used by any Kubernetes dynamic admission controller to enforce rules inside of a cluster to build integrity and create a trusted environment, right? This will ensure that no bad actors can get access to your cluster. So now that we have discussed how why we sign and verify image, let's discuss the options that we have for signing and verification. Right, so a signature can be created using multiple ways. You have multiple tools available. There are even many mechanisms involved, you know, there could be a C authority verifying your signature.  There are mechanisms like storing the timestamp of when a signature was made, having transparency log of signatures and so on. The two tools that we'll be discussing today are six tools, cosine and notary. These tools are used for image signing and verification. Right, so talking about notary, notary is like this simple, easy to understand, straightforward way to achieve image signing and verification. It achieves so by using X509 key cert pairs, right? It supports OCI 1.1 attestations, it is a CNCF open source project and yeah, it's a pretty cool tool to check out about cosine. It adds certain features and complexities to image signing and verification. It supports both keyed and keyless based signing and verification. It even supports in-toto attestations. Now cosine helps you store, you can store the signature timestamps and verify that the signature was created at some point in time that you expected it to be created, not before or after. It also helps storing a transparency log of signatures. Now this can be then used to monitor and detect malicious activity. So if you don't want this transparency log to be public, you can even have a private infrastructure which cosine supports using TUF. Now both these tools, cosine as well as notary have new releases with some really cool features to check out. Right, so now that we have talked about how we can sign and verify images, now let's talk about how we can incorporate all of that inside of your Kubernetes cluster to ensure security and enforce policies to make sure that no one bad can get access to it. Right, so for that we can use Kiverno, which is a CNCF incubating project, and Kiverno at a very high level is a policy engine that is built to work with cloud-native ecosystem and Kubernetes. So Kiverno is native to Kubernetes, which means that it only requires you to know YAML and you don't need to know anything else to get started. So basically to get started, what you can do is just install Kiverno in your cluster and start writing policies using YAML and you can start on a journey on improving security in your cluster. Right, a Kiverno policy can be used to do validation, mutation, mutate existing generation of new resources as well as scaling up old resources, but for this demo, we will be focusing on image verification rule. So what a Kiverno image verification rule allows you to do is that it allows you to verify signatures on an image, as well as signature on image attestations, as well as the payload of the attestation to make sure that that also complies with your requirements. Right, so in Kiverno image verification rule, you can do image signature verification using both cosine and notary. You can verify in total attestation as well as reference API attestation and you can use any OSIR industry. So we have support for all of the possible OSIR industry, be it public or private. We also have support for the newly added Jeffers API and we support keyed and keyless verification using cosine as well as cert pair verification using notary. Right, and to speed this up, we also have caching, so once you have verified an image once, when you try to verify the image for the next time, it will hit the cache and it will try to do it more efficiently so you save some time on subsequent verification. Right, and you can be very flexible with your checks in an image verification policy. You can verify all the conditions as well as any as well as make a required count so that if that count is hit once, like you don't have to do anything else after that. So this actually allows you to basically implement any type of requirement that you can have with a rule. Right, so let's say you want to verify that your image has a vulnerability scan report attached to it, which is signed and it has no critical vulnerability. You can easily do that using image verified rules. So to see examples of the image verified rule, we will be showing some demo, but we also have a very vast library of policies on our website, which is open source and anyone can get access to it. Great, so now let's move to the demo. Awesome, so now we have a good understanding of, decent understanding of what Kivono is, what cosine is, what notary is. Let's see how this all fits in in a couple of demos we have prepared. Yeah, let's start with cosine. So the first demo I have for you here is, you know, using Kivono and cosine together. Great, of course I had to record this because I was in short of the internet situation here. So let's see how this goes. So we have a policy YAML that, you know, looks something like this. We are creating a namespace to test this situation. We have a cluster policy. Now let's examine the cluster policy in detail. It's called keyed basic policy. In the specs we have set it to enforce. That means we want to block a resource if it doesn't comply. Great, so you'll see that there is a single rule. It's called keyed basic rule. It is trying to match a resource of kind pod. In the verify images block we have an image reference given. So here essentially you have a pattern to match with the image in your resource. Right, next block that we have right after image reference is attesters. Here we are giving the public key that will be used while we run cosine verify to, you know, ensure that the signature on the resource is correct. Awesome. So now that we've looked at the policy, let's also look at the resource that we'll be trying to apply. So it's a simple pod. It's running in a namespace test verify images. It has an image which will match the image reference in the policy. So in the policy essentially we want to match the resource being a pod as well as the image reference being the pattern that we saw earlier. Now that we know this let's go and try applying the policy and then the resource. So you do a cube CTL apply for the policy, create the policy and now I'll try to apply the resource. So what will happen in the background is that Kivarno will look that oh a resource is being created it's of kind pod and it matches the image reference that is stored in the cluster policy. Now I'll use the public key stored and check if the image running is signed correctly using cosine or not. It takes a second or two and you see the pod was created. That means the signature was verified and the pod is good to go. That was you know using keyed signature and cosine along with Kivarno. Now let's look at keyless signatures using cosine. Great. So again let's examine the policy. It's a cluster policy called check SLSA attestations. In the spec we have again set it to enforce. We have a single rule. In this rule again we are checking for resource of kind pod. In the verify images block here we have again given a pattern for image reference. In attestations we have provided the type of attestation. In this case in my policy it is of type provenance. It's provenance information. In attestors we've given we've specified keyless and we've given some details. So what it'll essentially do is check that the image is signed in a github workflow and the signature will be verified using the github OIDC provider in this case github. Also you'll see there's a conditions block at the end. So this place is yeah so we are trying to add conditions to the payload the attestation payload. So after seeing that the attestation is signed correctly we also want to ensure that the attestation itself is compliant for our requirements. Right we want to be able to check the attestations themselves. So we are looking for some condition and making sure it's equal to true. That's your policy. Let's go back to the resource and look at what we're trying to apply now. Now again it's a pod. It will match the image reference will match the image given here and Kivono will try to apply the policy against the resource. I've created the policy and now I'm trying to apply the resource. So again a similar thing will happen here. Kivono will see oh again there's a pod trying to come up which matches my requirements of being a pod and the image reference that I had earlier given and it'll see if the image is correctly signed the attestation sorry is correctly signed and the attestation is in compliance with the condition that was mentioned in the policy report I mean policy not report. I think I took it back. Sorry about that. We were looking at the policy being applied and once that's applied we want to see the resource being applied and we see the pod is created. Awesome. Now that we've looked at some core sign examples let's look at notary signature and verification examples. The first one I have for you is right here. So let's examine the policy. Here again we are trying to create a namespace in which we'll test and we are storing the certificate like we had earlier mentioned. Notary use key cert pair for image signing and verification right. In the policy that you see it's a cluster policy which is again set to enforce and you have a single rule in it. The rule will look for a resource of type pod in a namespace notary verify images and the verify images part of the policy that you see have type mentioned notary because we're checking for notary signatures and we'll pass the certificate that was stored earlier in the policy that will be used to verify the signature. So the certificate is corresponding to the private key which was used to sign the which we want to make sure the was used to sign the image. Sorry. Yeah. So now that we've looked at the policy we'll quickly look at the resource as well. The resource again would be a pod. Yeah. You'll see a pod that matches the image reference that was given in the cluster policy. Let's apply it. We're creating the policy. We are creating trying to create the report just like before Kivirna will try to ensure that the resources compliant the signatures valid verify that signature using the serve that was provided. And once all the verification is done great. I have my pod test ready. With that I come to the last demo bit that I have here for you today. It's a little lengthy but should be fun. Great. So in this case what I'm going to do is I will take an image which has some attached attestations. I'll first pull these attestations. Great. So I see I have some four attestations. I want you to specifically pay attention to the second one because I'll try to play around with the vulnerability scan attestation here. So first I'll pull it. Wait for it to be successfully downloaded. Now that it is let's let's you know walk through that station and a very particular part that is a timestamp that you see. Now in this timestamp let's focus on it. And you'll see that it was created on 25th May 2023. That's a couple of months back. Right. Cool. Duly noted. Let's go back and look at what we can do with the policy and the timestamp. So that's my policy. Again I'm creating a namespace to test and storing the certificate. Let's go down to the cluster policy in place. Great. The cluster policy is of name check image attestation. It's set to enforce. We have a rule. It's looking for a pod, a resource of kind pod. And in the verify images part we are specifying that it's of type notary. In image references you've given a pattern to match. And in attestations first you're specifying what type of attestation is being looked for. In our case it's a vulnerability scan. In attesters part we are giving or we're providing the certificate corresponding to the private key which was used, which should have been used to sign the image. And now here we have the condition. Now this is what I want to like spend maybe a minute on. So the condition says the key is a timestamp that we looked at before. And we want that value to be less than 730 hours. So essentially 730 hours is one month and we want whatever scan reports we have in our attestations to be not older than one month. If it's older than one month we don't want it. Great. And we just saw the attestation and we know it will, it's not compliant. So what I'll try to do is I'll apply the policy and I'll apply a resource which is using that image I pulled. Takes a minute, does a check, checks the attestation, pulls the attestation, verifies the image signature, and finally fails giving you the reason why it failed. It says scan reports generated more than one month ago are prohibited. Great. Now let's play around with the policy a little more and change that 730 hours to 7300 hours. That's 10 months and that should be allowed. Let's do that, that's 10 months. Go back, configure our policy and now try to apply the resource hoping that it won't be blocked. And as expected the resource port test was created because the attestation vulnerability scan was like five months, it was created five months ago. Awesome. So I think with that we are done with the demo bit that went fast. So here in the slides I have linked a couple of links to understand Kivono better, join some channels to ask questions, to discuss more, to understand where Kivono can fit in your use cases and how it can help you. Of course there's also links to the monthly community meeting and the weekly contributors meeting. We are always looking forward to having more contributors and more discussions. And before we wrap the session up, don't be a stranger, reach out to us. Let's talk about kibernities, kivono and whatnot. We've added some of our handles looking forward to more conversations. And that would be all. Thank you very much. And I think we do have like a minute or two to address some questions, some quick questions. And if we're not able to deal with them right now, we'll be walking around. Let's meet and chat. OK. Hi. Is there a way to? I think there's a mic. There's one. This is Manas. Actually when this policy is applied and typically in a loaded environment when the pods are coming up, if it takes that much time, what we saw in the demo, it may slow that thing because especially if you are running in something which is more on the serverless side of it, where not of what's are coming in. So is there any caching enabled where already verified images are cached and not checked again? Yeah, I think we shall. Yes. So when you verify an image, it has to fetch the data of the image as well, right? So that is making a network call that is taking so much time. So if you are in a private environment where the both of them are in the same network, it won't take this long. And to fix this, we also have a caching. So once you have verified the image using a policy, it will be cached. And for the next time when you try to do it, yeah, here, when the next time you try to do it, it will hit the cache and it won't make network call. It will be instantaneous. OK. Yeah. So we, sorry, go ahead. Yes, this is fine. Yeah. So we have decision caching to sort of fasten the process and make sure we can, you know, handle performance better wherever we can. So this cache is maintained centrally at the API server level or it's maintained at the node level or at the repository level. Yeah. So it is maintained at the Kibirno admission controller level, right? So it is maintained in the pod of the admission controller that you have that we have. We store at ETL-based cache and yeah, that's fine. OK. And is it persisted or it's an in-memory cache? I'm sorry? It's persisted cache or in-memory cache? Oh, it's persisted. Persistent cache. Yeah. And later this referrals, 1.1 referrals API support, is it a new support that has come up or? So this reference API was added in OCI 1.1 spec. So it was added earlier this year and we have added this, added support for it in Kibirno 1.11, which was released a few weeks ago. Yeah. So referrals API is recent and support for it in Kibirno has recently come up like about a month back. Yeah. And is there a limitation in size of it? Sorry? The reference artifacts that we are putting in, is there any limitation on size because at runtime when it is downloading, it may cause delays due to that? I don't think, are you? Yeah, OCI spec does not define any limitations on size of any artifact, right? So there's no limitation of size. OK. OK. Thank you. Awesome. I think we've, you know, that was our 30 minutes folks. Thank you so much for attending and we'll be around to have a conversation later. Yeah, we'll be answering your question. Oh. Hi. He had a question. Can you hear me? Yeah. So what level of Salsa does this comply to? What level of? Salsa, the SLSA that you were talking about. You know, so what level does it? I mean, Salsa has like level 0, level 1, level 2. So this process of signing attestation and verification. So what level does that comply to? I think you can like verify any JSON object, right? So it does not have anything to do with the SLSA level. So you have attached any JSON object. You can run conditions like using James Path on that JSON object. So I don't think like that will be a limitation here. OK. Awesome. Thank you guys. Thank you so much.


But personal growth, when you look at that, if you, you know, if you consider other avenues of personal growth, they're usually not that pleasant, right? So in general, the purpose of personal growth in its very definition, if you believe in personal growth, means that you're going to be in moments of increased pressure that will either cause you to break or grow. That's what personal growth is about. How the motivations for personal growth can be anywhere from really healthy to really fucked up, right? So when you come from a place of, I'm not good enough and hence I need to grow, that's a battle you can never win. You can do Tony Robbins, whatever, the Platinum Club, and do your daily affirmations.  But that's the, that's the very one end. The other end is that you're intrinsically interested in your development, human development and skill development and service, right? And so you develop yourself for the sake of others, for the sake of your best self, for the sake of, you know, why not, essentially? So that's the full spectrum of personal growth. But nowhere on that spectrum is it pleasant, really, right? So when your idea of relationship changes, because maybe you've had enough personal growth for the time being or you've worn yourself out and there's only so much a human can do till they need some break or some rest, because you wouldn't do personal growth every day all day in any other domain, right? You wouldn't work out every day all day or, you know, acquire a new skill every day all day. So if your idea of a purpose in a relationship changes but hers doesn't, then you become incompatible. That's one of the things that can happen where you go, well, I'd actually just like a little bit of fun and an easy time and I'd like it pleasant and would like to come home and not have to work and maybe I'd like to catch a breath ever so often and the night sleep without waiting for the next upset, right? So at that point if she goes, yeah, that would be nice. I think that would be lovely. I don't know how we'll do that, but I'm up for that, then you'd go and do some relationship counseling or something and figure out how can you create peace and breath and, you know, all of that kind of stuff. If that's possible, great. If not, then you'll break up, right? But if she says, no, I like this or demonstrate that she likes it, even though she might say that she doesn't and you are done, then that's one consideration, right? However, the other consideration is that if you've entered a relationship for the sake of personal growth, like I was asking you somewhat in jest earlier, or if you're a masochist, right, there is a bit of that in there. You have to look at why have you chosen a woman who is that difficult to deal with? Right? And I'm sure we could find the answer probably in your upbringing somewhere. That's usually how it goes. We pick people who replicate the patterns of our childhood.  You always feel a little bit bad and insufficient. So you need to grow a little bit more, you know, all of that. And that's a losing battle because as long as you engage in that, you're going to be stuck in that particular pattern and there's no pushing through.


Fy hoffi am y cwrsdyn nhw am yr ydydd y 19 ar y Proses Cymru, y Comitee ac roedd y rhai i'r cymdeithasol yng nghymru yng Nghymru. Rwy'n gweld bod yn y cymdeithasol yng nghymru yn y Gyrnodol Cymru yn y Cyfraffi'r ystafell. Rwy'n gweld yn gweld y cymdeithasol o'r cymdeithasol o'r cymdeithasol. Rwy'n gweld bod yn cymdeithasol yng nghymru yn gŷlio ar y cyfieithi ein cyffredinol. No points have been raised on the draft, public appointments and public bodies, etc. Scotland Act 2003, treatment of south of Scotland enterprise, as specified authority order 2019. Is the committee content with this instrument? Item 3, considering instruments subject to the negative procedure and the first one is the non-domestic rates relief for new and improved properties Scotland amendment regulations, SSI 2019-116. The regulations were laid before the Parliament on 22 March and came into force on 31 March. This does not respect the requirement that at least 28 days should elaps between the laying of an instrument subject to the negative procedure and the coming into force of that instrument. The reasons for the breach are set out in correspondence with the Presiding Officer, which is available in our published papers. Standing orders require the committee to draw to the Parliament's attention any failure to respect the 28 day laying requirement. Does the committee wish to draw the regulations to the attention of the Parliament on reporting ground J as the regulations fail to comply with the requirements of section 28.2 of the Interpretation and Legislative Reform Scotland Act 2010? Is the committee content that the failure to comply with section 28 is acceptable in the circumstances? The next instrument is the TSE Scotland amendment regulations, SSI 2019-118. Before the committee jumps in, I'm going to have a stab at what TSE actually means. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy. Got it. The instrument amends the 2010 regulations to align them with an EC regulation on rules for the prevention, control and eradication of certain types of the disease prior to EU exit. The instrument contains an error in relation to the failure to follow proper drafting practice when referring to an EU instrument in the preamble. Does the committee wish to draw the instrument to the attention of the Parliament on the general ground, as there has been a failure to follow proper drafting practice in the preamble? No points have been raised on SSIs 2019-121 and 133, so is the committee content with these instruments. Gender item 4, considering instruments not subject to any parliamentary procedures, no points have been raised on SSIs 2019-122, 123 and 134. Is the committee content with these? Okay. Okay. Gender item 5, considering the Scottish Government's response to our stage 1 report on the Transport Bill, the Government agreed to look at some of our recommendations. I'm sure we'll look at the bill again following any amendments at stage 2. Does the committee wish to note the Government's response to our stage 1 report on the Transport Bill? Okay. And agenda item 6, considering the Government's response to our stage 1 report on the climate change emissions reduction targets bill, we made only one recommendation at stage 1, which can be read in the accompanying paper that the Government has agreed to. It will therefore seek to amend the bill in line with the committee's recommendation at stage 2. Does the committee wish to welcome the Government's response to our stage 1 report on the climate change bill? Thank you and I'll move the meeting into private.