And the energy that we should be devoted should be devoted on the foundations of freedom. Freedom is very, very rare in human history, very rare. Even the limited freedom and the declining freedom we have today, we're freer today than almost at any time in human history. And 99% of human history, we are being unfree—it's only less 250 years since the Enlightenment—that this idea of freedom even exists. It's a rare phenomenon that happens very infrequently and can be stomped out relatively easily. Well, we should be devoting our energies, our efforts, is to educating people about freedom, about its value, about where it comes from, and the ideas that are necessary to maintain it. So I want to say a little bit about what we should be focusing on rather than the constant barrage of passionate, endless politics and political debate and discussion and fights and arguments. What are the ideas that freedom rests on? And how do we get those ideas out there into the culture? How do we educate people about the ideas? Freedom is not in the hearts of all men, as George Bush once said. Freedom is not self-evident to people, as I think many libertarians think. Freedom is a massive achievement. The idea of freedom is a massive achievement, and then the implementation of freedom is an achievement on top of an achievement. And we should use the fact that we still have some freedom in the world in which we have today to advocate for it, to educate people about it. Freedom rests on deep philosophical ideas. I think there are two that are fundamental, that in a sense were discovered during the Enlightenment and have led to where we are today, that we need to resurrect, reinforce, fight for, argue for, debate for, and dedicate our energies towards. The first idea, and maybe in a sense the most important idea, is that men are capable of knowing the world around them. That reason is a tool of knowledge, of cognition, that we can know the world, we can understand it. That understanding does not come from revelation. That understanding does not come from philosopher kings. That knowledge is not ingrained in our genes, in our DNA. That knowledge is an achievement, but an achievement available to every human being. Every human being has the capacity to reason and therefore has the capacity to know the world. Because think about when that idea does not exist. If you believe that knowledge is achieved through some kind of revelation, but it turns out always that not everybody has the ability to get the revelation. We need philosopher kings or popes or leaders to tell us what the truth is, how we should live our lives. As individuals, we are told we are impotent. You don't know anything. You don't know the truth. That's just your subjective feelings. We're told constantly. Well, who said that you're right or that idea is right? There's a rejection of evidence, a rejection of reason, a rejection of fact, because they believe truth comes from another dimension. Truth is only available to experts. Truth is only available to those who are uniquely qualified to discover it. Well, if truth is only available to them, then they must guide us. They must lead us. They must tell us what to do. And they're eager. They are eager to jump at the opportunity to do exactly that, to control us and to impose their values, their will on all of us. And many people accept it and many people accept it because they don't believe their own mind. They don't believe their ability to discover reason, to study, to discover truth for themselves. And then there's a whole class of people who tell us that what you know is in your DNA. Everything is in your DNA. Everything is determined by your genes. Your effort makes nothing. Well, then what is truth? What our DNA tells us or what their DNA tells us? Truth is out the window. Truth doesn't exist. Truth is impossible to discover. You either know it or you don't know it. Your effort, your thinking, your reasoning makes no difference. We hear this from intellectuals constantly, that you're just a product of your DNA. You're just a product of evolution.  And again, you don't know what the truth is. All these theories basically undermine your ability as an individual to have confidence in your ability to live, to know, to discover truth and to live by that truth. She left impotent. And there's no accident that in an environment in which we are told constantly that you cannot discover truth because either it's revealed to some or it's in your genes. And if you don't know it, you just don't know it. We see a rise in tribalism. We see a rise in cynicism, skepticism. We see a rise in dramatic rise in emotionalism and a rush to tribalism and a search for a leader to tell us what to do. People need guidance. They need some principles to guide their life. And if they can't discover those principles for themselves, then they will ask somebody else to guide their life for them. Always be in the case in human history. To get to freedom, we must first advocate for reason. We must first teach people that they do have access to truth.   They know this at work, but they need to know it in a deeper sense. They need to know it. That reason applies to all knowledge, not just the engineering that they do or whatever their profession is, but in every aspect of their life, in every aspect where knowledge is required. We need to denounce the idea that they're just products of their DNA. No, knowledge requires effort. It requires focus. It requires you committing yourself to truth, to discovery. So people need to understand that they have the means to live, to live well, to achieve their happiness, to discover their values. So one, they have to know they can do it. They have the capacity to reason and they can live and they can survive and they can thrive and they can flourish. Second, we have to convince them. We have to teach them. We have to explain to them that their life is worthy. That the purpose of their life should be their life, should be their own survival, their own success, their own flourishing and ultimately their own happiness. That they are, that they're morality, that they're more code, that it's taught them for generations after generation after generation, that the purpose in life is to serve others, to serve God, to serve the community, to serve the needy, to serve their fellow man. That that idea is wrong. Indeed, that idea is evil. Their purpose in life is to live, to live the best life that they can live. They have the tool to do it, their reason. And they need the moral confidence to actually engage their reason in pursuit of their own happiness. So the two fundamental ideas at the heart of the battle for freedom are not Biden versus Trump or politics or left versus right or any of that. It is the two fundamental ideas, a reason, the fact that we can guide our lives and individualism, the fact that it's right for us to guide our lives towards success and happiness. That's where the battle is. It's epistemological in a sense of convincing people they have the tool and it's ethical in a sense of convincing people that they should live for themselves. And that is ultimately the spectrum, if you will, the meaningful spectrum politically. It's one side all the different people who think you cannot think for yourself. You cannot discover the truth for yourself. You cannot actually live guided by your own mind pursuing your own values because you don't have the capacity. To discover those ideas, those principles, those values. So all the mystics on one side. And on the other side is reason. Other people believe that you have the tool to discover truth, that you have the tool to make choices for your own life. That's the spectrum and then the people in between that think oh some truths you can discover and some stuff and do reason is sometimes good but not always. So you need that spectrum. That's the spectrum that is meaningful. Mystics, reason based. And if you think about mystics, you can see it on the left and on the right today. Well, the right has religious conservatives and religious, you know, people of all kinds, including, you know, President Trump, who I think has a really bad case of primacy of consciousness, which is a form of mysticism ultimately, attachment from reality. And then on the left, the mystics, the mysticism and environmentalism, the complete irrationality and mysticism of the anti-racist, the so-called anti-racist of critical race theory, and you can go postmodernism and all that irrationality on one side rationality on the other side. That is a meaningful spectrum. It's not left and right. Irrationality, rationality. We are on the rational side. We need a fight for the rational side. The second spectrum is individualism on the one side and collectivism on the other. Who does your life belong to?  That's a spectrum. Individualism on one side, collectivism on the other side. That is a spectrum worth fighting for, fighting for the side of individualism.  We should care about politics because of that. It determines the scope of our freedom. But think about it. Collectivists and mystics are never going to be pro-freedom. Not fully, not really. They might be pro what seems like freedom for a while because it serves some other purpose. But collectivists and mystics are ultimately authoritarian. The more collectivists, the more mystic, the more authoritarian they are. The more they want to be told what to do. The more the leaders want to tell you what to do. So collectivism and mysticism are the path towards authoritarianism and the end of any kind of freedom we have. The leaders on power and control, the masses want to be told what to do. On the other hand, if somebody is an individualist and an advocate of reason, somebody who knows that rationality is the path to truth, then they trust their own mind. It doesn't mean when I say trust your own mind and discover the truth, it doesn't mean that every truth you have to in a first-handed way discover. It means that you have a tool to do it and you can then refer to experts and analyze what experts are saying or telling you, evaluate them. You have the tool to evaluate what the experts are telling you. I mean, we all go to doctors, we don't expect to know everything, but when I go to a doctor, I don't go to a doctor blindly. So we depend on people. So when people have reason and are confident, confident in their own ability to live a good life, to discover truth, to discover the values that are going to lead to their own happiness. And they believe that that's a worthy cause. People like that don't want mother government on their shoulder telling you what they can and cannot eat, what they can and cannot drink, what drugs they can and cannot take, when they can get a vaccine. They demand to be left alone. They demand their freedom. They demand their liberty. They demand to make decisions for themselves. People who respect reason and people who respect their own life and their own happiness will be free people because they will not tolerate anything else. So if we care about freedom, if we care about liberty, it is those ideas that we must fight for. The politics will take care of itself. The politics will resolve themselves. Now, so in my view, a focus should be on education. A focus should be on philosophy. A focus should be on ethics. A focus should be on undoing the damage that hundreds of years of bad ideas have done to the culture. What we have today is dependent on one short brief period of a more rational philosophy that was embraced in the Enlightenment. But philosophically, that is dead a long time ago. We're still living on the fumes, on the intellectual fumes of the Enlightenment. And so, has given us a philosophy, an integrated system that grounds the ideas, the better ideas of the Enlightenment, and solid footing with solid foundations. It provides us a proper moral defense of freedom, of capitalism, of individualism. A proper philosophical understanding of the world of reason in human life. We have no excuse today not to be fighting for freedom and philosophical ground. The tools are there. The tools have been granted to us in Atlas Shrugged, in the virtue of selfishness and capitalism not known ideal. In Ayn Rand's brilliant philosophical writings and her novels, there's so much work to be done. There's so much to be achieved. A future of real freedom, of real liberty is such a value, is so important. That is where we should be focusing our energy. That is where we should be focusing our time on writing, speaking, engaging, discussing, debating with people on these issues. Because once we can convince people of the power of reason and the importance of individualism, freedom, the politics will all take care of ourselves, and we will finally achieve kind of the world which we all desire, which we all want. So let's refocus that energy, that passion on what matters. Thank you all. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual, would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of despair, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist. All right, before we go on, reminder, please like the show. We've got 163 live listeners right now, 30 likes. That should be at least 100. I figure at least 100 of you actually like the show.  There you go. Start liking it. I want to see that go to 100. All it takes is a click of a thing, whether you're looking at this. And you know the likes matter. It's not an issue of my ego. It's an issue of the algorithm. The more you like something, the more the algorithm likes it. So, you know, if you don't like the show, give it a thumbs down. Let's see your actual views being reflected in the likes. But if you like it, don't just sit there, help get the show promoted. Of course, you should also share. 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Dear students, now we are going to discuss the contribution of Barry Wellman. Barry Wellman is an eminent scholar of social media research and internet research in contemporary days. He is actually a candidate American sociologist and he is currently co-director of NetLab of Toronto. He remained a professor of communication and new media at National University of Singapore till 2015 and he also remained SD Clark professor at Department of Sociology University of Toronto from 2006 to 2011 and he also remained professor at Department of Sociology University of Toronto from 1967 to 2013. His basic research interest to see the social implications of the internet and human computer interaction. He has published many books and few of them are Network, the New Social Operating System, a Network in the Global Village, Life in Contemporary Communities and the Internet in Everyday Life. When he talked about computer networks, he published an article in annual review of sociology in 1996 and he terms computer networks as computer supported social networks. So he believes that computer networks are actually social networks and he believes that computer supported social networks sustain strong intermediate and weak ties that provide information and social support in both specialized and broadly based relationships. So he believes that the social networks enabled through computer system or through internet these are the relationships that we carry and we form these relationships on the basis of the interest, on the basis of our motivations and these relationships are not only in online life but we also convert them into our physical life and they convert them into our strong ties or transform them. So he says that CSSNs post-virtual communities that are usually partial and narrowly focused and CSSNs accomplish a wide variety of cooperative work connecting workers within and between organizations who are often physically disappeared. So this was believed by Prof. Wellman that these computer supported social networks provide access to you to those people who physically cannot interact with you, where time and space is a barrier, you do not have that much time or you cannot travel to them, then your access to them is enabled when these e-mail and messengers come forward. So he believes that these systems and computer supported social networks have created an easy way in our life to connect other people outside the organization and outside the corporations and outside of our community. And CSSNs also linked tele-workers from their homes and remote work centers to maintain organizational offices. Like we have seen in COVID-19, we have seen the phenomenon of work from home. So the phenomenon of work from home is quite old in the developed world and it started when the internet was available for common use and when people started working through e-mail and through messaging sites from home. According to Prof. Barry Wellman, computer supported social networks have developed their own norms and structure. So he believes that the computer supported social networks have their own normative structure. They have their own culture which can be a little different from our physical life's normative structure and its culture because you are interacting online and with space and without time bounding. The nature of the medium both constraints and facilitates social control. So where these internet enabled platforms which Barry Wellman, computer supported social networks say that they have facilitated social control and there is a barrier to restrict social control. We will see this in the next lecture in detail. And their second point is that CSSNs have strong societal implication in today's society that the computer supported social networks generate social capital and this increases participation and increases community engagement and we will talk in detail in the next lecture.


This is actually a good way to go to your presentation, Mr. Nicolas, because we're going to talk about politics, geopolitics and data. All of this, as I'm sure you've noticed, is a little intrusive, because if according to François, I haven't started to have sensors in my body, and if you're mapping my emotions, that doesn't leave me much room left. So Mr. Nicolas, if you want to, I don't know if you want to be on the stage or stay here. You're fine. So it's up to you. Thank you. Thank you, Virginie. So, yeah, what I want to focus on is the geopolitical importance of data. So first, a few numbers on data. There is an explosion of data production. It has been, the production of data has been multiplied by 20, is forecasted to be multiplied by 20 between 2015 and 2025. The big part of this will be data generated by machines, not only human interaction for sure. The volume of cross-border exchange of data has been multiplied by 45 between 2005 and 2014, and it shows the importance of it. And then the infrastructure that support this, called cloud computing, was covering less than 30% of global data in 2010, and will cover more than 50% by 2025, considering that there is, from a geopolitical standpoint, an imbalance already because the big part of this infrastructure is controlled by US companies and now, more recently, with big investment from Chinese companies. So what does it mean for us? And I will try to give some of the pattern we see about the strategies or the priorities given by key geographies and countries. In the US, very clearly, there was no government direction, but US firms went after wealth. They were the first to identify that data was a source of wealth, and they focus on generating money. That's what you read about the GAFAM, the Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and they are. You look at their market capitalization these days. You look at the volume of CAPEX. The big cloud providers can spend up to one billion of capital expenditure per month. It's not only on cloud, it's on software, hardware, on all the services they develop. This is a formidable force. And so they are going after this and creating these wealths, which give them an extraordinary means to take different action. In China, if I would look today, it's more about the power. It's not so much about the wealth. They will go after it. And one good example is China's social credit system, which is a use of data to rank citizens based on data that you can collect on them, and then you define where you add some information that you get from the community, and then define which kind of public services you can access, even if you can have a passport, if you can go out of your region, and if you have a passport, if you can leave the country. So there is a use of data around power. If you look at Russia, I would make a shortcut to say it's more an intelligence-based use of data, including deception. You see it in the intervention, and again, I have to be careful because formal attribution has not been done everywhere. So I have to be careful, but there are evidence of interference in election in the Western society. There is a way also about how you use data, not only around fake news, but to create real disinformation campaign. And Europe has given what we would expect, the classical social democratic answer, which the symbol of it is a new regulation called GDPR, which is the protection of privacy related to data, considering that what I often say is that we try to manage schizophrenia here in Europe, because the consumers have given already all their data without many considerations on their privacy to the big American players first and foremost. But as a citizen, they are asking protection, they are asking now the right to be forgotten, et cetera. And Europe, and I don't see it's unnecessary, Europe has responded this way. And that creates, we see this clear imbalance in my view about what we do and related to the importance of data and how this will shape eventually. And this will, in my view, fundamentally influence the relationship and the geopolitical relationship. And I would propose to be practical three areas where we might want to focus on. And the number one is the redefinition of trust through technology. Trust is fundamental to all human interaction, be it business, be it between state and everything. Technology is fundamentally changing the way trust will be handled. Part of trust will be in technology. The relationship of the citizen to trust, if you think of a platform like RBNB, how is it that you would let foreigners sleep in your bed? Just because the platform is telling you that it's OK to do it. So we see these changes in the way people approach, including the relationship to their government, to their authority. And there is an element of mistrust, because through fake news, we discussed it last year, by the way, the World Policy Conference, this is creating a difficult path forward, because you don't have the trust within your own nations, and then you have to build trust with other nations in the context that I just described. The second thing, in my view, the second topic, and it's one that is hard to start upon. And I know it looks like a buzzword. It's around ethics. I think we underestimate the importance of this discussion when it comes to artificial intelligence. And I don't speak of transhumanism, because it's an extreme, and people can say, yes, we know, we know. But how is it that we had an extensive debate when a biotechnology came? And here, probably because the level of abstraction is too high, we don't have it. But this creates fundamental questions about how you are going to design the technology and the technology solution going further. And the last point, obviously, is how you are going to govern. And I know this will be addressed, probably by you, how you govern these elements. But I take one example, and I know Toby will develop on it, and I will finish on this, take cybersecurity. I mentioned it briefly this morning during the young leader panel. But it's a real issue. This is the Wild West. Cyber warfare is going as we speak. All our companies, corporations are attacked as we speak right now during the entire day.  There is no regulation, nothing. We just have to protect ourselves. It's a cost of doing business. It's a cost of operating your administration. So it's a tax that comes on top of it. The reason is that wealth is moving online, obviously. But we need something to govern. And I want to mention one practical initiative to which we'll adhere to. It's the general counsel of Microsoft, Brad Smith, has identified this problem a while ago in his launch, an initiative called Tech Accord, which is an industry-wide initiative where people can join and promise that they will behave appropriately to be defined. And then also to create a kind of Geneva Convention for the United Nations that will set the rules of engagement, as we had to do it in war. Because this is cyber warfare, what is happening on top of cybercriminality. And just to finish on this also to be concrete and to mention because you are the WPC, we have launched with Thomas, who is here, a study with the IFRI that you can find here on Europe's object in the geopolitics of data. So you will find here more information. We will continue with the workshop. And we will continue to work on this. Because I think this is a theme, a topic that didn't get the level of attention it should have. And I tried to explain that there are already broad implications. We don't see it. We don't pay enough attention. In particular in Europe, I think our partners are much more aware of the power of data than we are. And we should take conscious of it. I'm happy to take questions afterwards on some of my statements. Thank you. It's a very sharp contrast with the ideal world of smart cities, where everything is for ecosystem stability and growth. And the world you're describing that it's much, much more worrisome.