Welcome everybody, I'm Libby Clark, I'm the open source community marketing manager for AWS. And I'm Colleen Bettich, that's loud. And I am a product marketing manager for Amazon RDS. And today we're going to talk about how to build open source marketing into your product marketing. And it's all about finding the right balance, that'll be the theme of our talk today. But first I wanted to start off with a little story about a project launch that we did last fall. At AWS, we launched this project called Finch, which you may have seen in our booth. Finch is an open source command line client for building, running and publishing Linux containers on Mac. And it is built on itself, is built on four open source projects, Nerd, CTL, Container D, Build Kit, and Lima. And so that makes it sort of an interesting case study for open source marketing. Because when it launched, it was a crowded space already. There are many competitors in this space and our competitors also build on those same projects. So why does that matter? Why do you care? Our solution is better than theirs, right? If you're thinking of as a product marketer, you're saying our solution is better than theirs, it's faster, it has more features, our logo is cooler. So why don't we just go talk about our product and may the best product win? But not so fast. You're building on products with, remember how I said you're building on projects that our competitors are also building on. What happens if your competitors feel threatened? And perhaps they, we can't make important updates to Finch because they're suddenly disagreeing with some changes that we want to propose to underlying projects. The bottom line is that product success, your product success depends on the community support from the projects that you're building on. And so that's why we do open source marketing as product marketers. We need those projects, the underlying projects to be successful so that our products can be successful. So a core group within the Finch team, which is inside of our containers, Oregon AWS was experienced in open source launches and they followed a few best practices in positioning their product. One of them is communicating with the upstream. So Phil Estes, who you saw speak yesterday on the keynote stage is a contributor to Continuity. He's a maintainer and he's well respected in those communities and he was able to go before the launch and go talk to some of his community members, the people that he works with every day on those projects and tell them what we're planning and ask for their feedback and gave them reassurance that we're still continuing and planning to continue to contribute upstream to those projects. And he also made the case that this is a big ecosystem that benefits when more people join it and when your product on top of those projects, we all learn from each other in the products that we're building. We also, the second thing that we did was we credited the projects in the launch. So make sure we say these are the projects that we've built on and thank them and make sure that we're not taking credit basically for the work that they've already done and helping us to launch our product. And then the third thing that Phil and his team did was that they released the project early and gathered feedback from the community. So this creates a more open development process and shows the community that we're open to feedback and that we want to work with them and there's room for contribution. And the result was a product launch that launched with community support from the very beginning. Phil actually got approval from a couple of key community members, Akihiro Suda and Justin Cormack from Docker to use quotes in our launch blog saying we are excited to work with AWS on these projects. And so that public support when you launch or just in general for your product is really important because now the risk to the product has gone down dramatically and you're able to bring the community along with you on your product journey. So now Finch is an open source project itself which is a bit of a unique case study, right? Because, and it's an edge case because as a product marketer you're not always gonna have an open source engineer like Phil Estes helping you guide your product. But the story of Finch can be applied to most if not all product launches and products as we use marketers launch and own today. So, and this is because up to 85% of products of software out there is built on open source. So whether you know it or not your product is built on open source. Yet as product marketers we're not really integrating open source marketing enough into our product marketing strategies. And it's hard, right? We as product marketers have enough to do already and carving some time out for promoting open source projects can feel like a burden sometimes. And it may feel like additional work. It can also be hard to convince leadership to give you the funding and resources you need for a project to promote the project along with your product. And when an traditional enterprise marketing follows different kinds of metrics, right? Then an open source marketer might. So you're following leads and conversions and clicks and you have different metrics for open source. So that can be a bit of a challenge. But it's worth it. And you get the benefit as a product marketer by integrating some of these practices that we're gonna talk about today. It does take time and discipline. So an open source marketing is a skill that you build with practice and Colleen and I are not experts in that area. We're learning just like everyone else. But we do have some kind of best practices that we wanna share with you today. The key is find the right balance. If I want you to take anything away today, that's the key message, right? Find the right balance between project and product and integrate project, open source project marketing into every aspect of your marketing activities. Ideally, you're walking the right balance between product and promoting your product and promoting the projects that you're built on. And to do this, you can build open source practices and considerations into every part of your product marketing strategy. Today for the purposes of this talk, we're gonna focus on launches. But you can use these practices in any kind of activities that you are doing. But launches are fun, so we can focus there today. So the first step in product launch is doing your research. You wanna know the key players and know the launch.  And as you're doing this research, so this is kind of a standard product marketing practice, but as you're doing this research, it's a perfect opportunity to ask, are there any open source dependencies for my product? And what do we mean by a dependency? Those are the dependencies are the software components that your software is built on. And those are providing critical functionality to your product. And some dependencies are more important than others when it comes to what you're gonna market. So you should ask, how important is this dependency for my product? And a good rule of thumb is if you were to yank that project out of your product, if it were to disappear, what would happen to your product? Would you have a product anymore? If the answer is no, then that project and community needs to be in your marketing strategy. And even if your product doesn't have any strong open source dependencies, that means it's written completely from scratch in house, you should still be asking if your product has open source compatibility and that's another way to build open source considerations into your marketing strategy. So with your list of open source dependencies and compatibilities in hand, then you need to go research those communities as well and the technologies that you're building on. Talk to your, to talk to the leaders in the community. In the Finch example, that was Akahiro Suda and Justin Cormack, who are those people in your community? And do you already have connections to them? Are there engineers on your team who are working upstream already, perhaps? Or at the very minimum, if they're building on the project, they probably already have the expertise in the project and they can help you, help navigate through the technical discussions that you need to have. So you wanna find out who pulls weight on the project, who are the committers, who's influential and respected in the community, make a point of going and talking to them. And if it's not you yourself, then perhaps you send a delegate and get some questions answered through your engineering team. Some questions you wanna ask are what does this community care about? How is our company perceived in this community? Are our contributions welcome? Are we an active and valued member of the community or not? And you can use tools like the CNCF DevStats tool to find out how your company is contributing. So for example, I pulled up container D, which is a CNCF project. And I was able to see that AWS is, or Amazon is the number four contributor to that project. So doing that research and figuring out how you're contributing and what quantity and what quality are important things to consider. And then you wanna ask how will this product impact our community? And that's a really key question. Will they welcome our product or will they consider it a threat? Learning about the community is then key to being able to assess some risk, right? And I have to stop and say that free is not free when it comes to open source. So you can download the code from the internet and go use it. It's free and that means getting to market faster. It means being able to iterate and innovate. But then there are some risks to that as well because now you're taking a dependency on that community and you're reliant on people outside of your company to maintain the code that your product is dependent on. So some of these risks include supply chain security risks if there are vulnerabilities in the upstream project, governance issues, perhaps maybe there's one vendor who controls the project and all the code that goes into it. Maintenance is also an issue. Are there, is there one or more maintainer on the project and how easy is it to get changes into the project? So once you learn those, you can then start to plan for contingencies. And these are things that you should be asking before you launch, right? And if your project leadership and engineers are not already asking these questions, then that is a huge red flag as a marketer. You need to take it upon yourself to ask them those questions because otherwise it can put the product at risk. Maybe not in the short term because you can still get a product out the door. But when you start to build your product on a community over the long term, it can have deleterious effects if you're not taking those things into consideration. So don't sacrifice the long term growth of the project for the short term gain of your product. So the next phase of the launch process for a marketer is positioning and messaging and I'm gonna turn it over to Colleen then to talk through some of the rest of the steps. Thank you Libby. So hopefully everyone here today has a basic understanding of what positioning and messaging is, if not, no worries. I'm gonna go into it a little bit. So great positioning is vitally important in a product marketing strategy. This is because this helps define what your product is, who you're targeting for it, and when they should buy it. It is ideally well thought through, research backed if you can, and it is an internal tool to help you determine what are the gaps in the market? How does my product help to fill those gaps? What are some of the similar products available on the market today that I'll be competing with? So if positioning is your tool for defining what your product is, then your messaging is your vehicle for communicating directly with the customer the unique value of your product. Ideally, good messaging is crisp, clean, and accurate. And unlike positioning, messaging is an internal or an external tool to communicate that value. So I already said messaging positioning is probably one of the most important things that we can do. If you are wanting, if you are considering the fact that whether your product includes an open source project or it's strongly tied to an underlying project, then you might be asking yourself, how do I incorporate open source marketing into my positioning and messaging strategy? Well, to do that, let's take a step back and think about how marketers today might begin to form their messaging and positioning strategy. One way we do this today is a tool we like to use as a messaging framework. This includes all kinds of normal sections typically, such as your positioning statements, key problems that your customer may be facing, how your product solves for those problems, AKA your benefits, and usually a detailed competitive analysis. You can include other sections, of course, as well, depending on your product and what you need, but these are kind of the core things that you can focus on. So as you're developing this, it's important to ask yourself, through each of these sections, how does open source come into play for each of these sections? You've got to invoke the project with purpose. Don't just sit there, what this means isn't that you need to mention the project in every single one of these sections, rather that you have actually thought through how it fits into it. So one thing that we've done, this can be a difficult task sometimes, so we've come up with a list of questions as well, that you can use as you begin thinking through each of these sections, such as what does my product do that the open source project does not, and vice versa. How would the community feel about this statement? Who is our real competitor? Let me tell you, it's not the community. And these can be difficult questions to answer. So to help you kind of think through these as you're going through this exercise, we've come up with a list of tenets to keep in mind. The first being relevant. Good product messaging, references, relevant open source communities, and positions your product compared to them, or not compared to them, but next to them. Second is collaborative. Community involvement informs your positioning. Good collaboration with an open source community is going to be better than any single marketing statement or campaign that you come up with. Third is humble. Demonstrate your open source knowledge by accurately and humbly talking about your contributions to the community. Four is positive. Don't disparage your open source community. Always talk and don't compare your product directly to the community. Five is appreciative. As Libby already mentioned, open source is not free. Appreciate and publicly acknowledge the innovation that has driven the creation of your product. And then finally, balanced. Again, a common theme you'll see out the presentation, but balance the promotion of your product with the promotion of your product or project. So another example of what this might look like in practice is we're gonna look at is naming. This is something else you might be doing at the positioning and messaging stage of your launch. So if you have a launch and it is strongly tied to an open source community, one thing you might be asking, you might need to ask yourself, does it make sense to include the project name in the name of my product? So let's take AWS, for example. Today we have somewhere around 30 managed open source services. These are services that utilize communities that are well-loved and popular today. And we have AWS's operational expertise built on top of these. So AWS takes care of things like provisioning, scaling your clusters, software installation, et cetera. By including the project's name directly in these services, it's automatically clear to customers that this is something that they're already familiar with and that is similar to something that they're already using today. On services that don't include the name of the project, sometimes we have customers coming to us confused. We might have someone come up to us and say, I had no idea you offered a managed version of this project. So in order for, and whenever you have a number of services available, it makes it that much harder for the customer to find the product that is gonna be most relevant to them. More specifically, when determining whether or not to include a product name in your project, you also have to think about your product, the industry it's in and where your product's gonna be in one years, three years, five years. I know it's a fun conversation to have with your product management engineering teams, but it's one that often needs to come. So looking more specifically at an AWS example, we have the Amazon Relational Database Service. We launched the Amazon RDS service in 2009 with RDS for MySQL. And when you think about the relational database market, not everyone in the world is going to want to build on a MySQL database. Some folks are gonna wanna build on a commercial offering and others are gonna wanna build with other open source projects, such as MariaDB or PostgreSQL. So in scenarios like this, this is why we were able to expand our services to seven engines today and five of which are open source or open source compatible. To be able to reach market the other folks in our market. So this is something that you should keep in mind with your product in thinking about the future of your product. Is this going to be something that you're gonna have to expand yourself into other open source projects? And as you think about this, one of the advantages that we had in naming our products this way is that we were able to name them in such a way that it clearly shows who should care about our service. By having Amazon RDS as a family of services, we created a broader umbrella brand that ubiquitously speaks to the unique value while each service within that umbrella speaks to the end user. When our customers think of Amazon RDS, they should think of a managed relational database that is easy to set up, operate and scale. And when customers think of RDS for PostgreSQL, they should think of their favorite PostgreSQL features and extensions made available on Amazon RDS's managed environment. So whenever you're thinking through your own product naming, that's what you need to come back to. Think back about your product and the industry that you're in. Think about where your product's gonna be in a couple years and think about whether it makes sense to include other projects with your product. So the next phase of our launch that we're gonna go through is now your tactics. You've built a strong foundation of messaging and positioning and guardrails to begin to create content that increases the awareness and education of your service. So how do we begin to put this into practice whenever we're thinking about building the community into our content? Well, one thing you have to keep in mind is that whenever you're building content as a product marketer whose service relies on an open source technology, is the fact that you're gonna be wearing different hats at certain times. Sometimes you're going to need to focus on your product and promoting your product and wearing your product marketing hat. Other times you're going to have to think about your product through the eyes of the community and wearing your open source marketing cap. What would people think about the content you're creating through that lens? A lot of times you might have to be wearing both of these at the same time. And then there are other scenarios where it might make sense to bring in somebody else from your team to wear your product hat or open source marketing hat for you. So you can remove yourself if you are trying to talk to someone from the community. Someone else can talk about your product without creating this bias or conflating your two different offerings. So let's go back to our launch. As a marketer there's a lot of content that goes into creating awareness and education for your product. You're gonna have to think about your marketing pages and what that copy's gonna say, blogs, videos, social media and on-site advertisements. As you begin to develop this content it's important to think about key considerations with the community such as first what type of content are you creating? Where is this content going to live? When you're thinking about open source are you allowed to use the community's logo or branding? Think about things like how does the community typically create content? Do I wanna replicate that? All of this will help you create content that is better able to talk to both your customer base and the broader open source community. So another example we have from the Amazon RDS team is a webinar that we completed in the past year. So to give you guys some background over the past couple of years the Amazon RDS team has been working on bringing in more folks from our relevant open source communities and amping up our participation with our existing team in those communities as well. As part of this for PostgreSQL in particular over the past couple of years we have been creating webinars talking about the latest major versions of PostgreSQL. The purpose of this is to of course just educate our customers on what are the latest features, capabilities, bug fixes that they can get in the newest version. So in 2022 when this blog was made the latest version at the time was PostgreSQL 14. And because we have folks from the community on the team something that we were able to do with this latest version was to provide our customers with a sneak peek into PostgreSQL 15. By doing this we were able to create excitement not only for our own customer base but also for the broader PostgreSQL community. And doing something like this would not have been possible without our team's collaboration with the community. So with this in mind you might be asking yourself to what extent can I include the community in my marketing? And so it's always important to keep in mind how much you're using them in your marketing against how much your company is giving back to the community. If your company really isn't giving a lot back but you're using them a lot in your marketing then this might create the negative perception that your product or the negative perception that you're taking too much from the community. If you on the other hand might be giving or sorry contributing quite a bit sometimes depending on the project some folks might see this as you trying to take over the community, which is also not great. In addition to this you also wanna balance the importance of considering which product, sorry, you need to balance the consideration of when you're conflating you don't wanna conflate your product tactics with your project tactics because when you get too involved it can be easy to get these two intertwined and folks can't tell which one you're talking about when. So a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that you can take a bit or you can use the community to the extent that you are giving back to that community. So the next phase of your launch as a marketer is to actually launch the product. And in order to see how your product is performing you need to start thinking about how what a successful launch looks like. For a product that's based on open source you especially have to consider what it looks like to be successful in having your project succeed and your product succeed. What is one mechanism for doing this? Goals. So a common issue that folks might have is asking yourself what are the right kind of goals to take?  And depending on your company this can be very difficult to do if not impossible. Furthermore the connection between product and open source isn't always obvious to everyone on your team. As product marketers we need to be able to make the case for the purpose of including open source in our marketing. But you might ask it's already difficult to get alignment on goals. How can you develop the right goals to ensure how your product is being perceived by the broader community? So coming back to our launch we'll chat through some examples of goals you can consider depending on your product and the project it relies on. As you're doing this it's important to ask a couple key questions. Is your project one that's been around for a couple decades? Or has it only been around for a couple years? Is the project important for a wide variety of use cases or something that's quite niche? As you're thinking about this if your product is more well established a better type of goal it might be for you to focus on is expanding your awareness in the existing project today. Versus if it's somewhat newer a better goal for you might be to look for ways to grow the community and therefore your business as well. So what are some different type of goals you can take? The first one is social listening goals. You can look at this through a number of different lenses. One example is considering the sentiment of your project or your product being mentioned alongside the product. You can use social listening tools to see how the community is thinking about your product and talking about it. Ideally you start from a neutral to positive place and as you begin to build trust with the community it grows more positive over time if you're doing it right. Then you can also consider more impactful social listening methods such as looking at key influencers in your community such as committers or maintainers of that open source community. What you can do is create a key list of influencers in this community and like you would on launch day look at the number of press mentions of your product. You might go look at each of these influencers and whether they've been talking about your product. Ideally this list of folks should already heavily overlap with the folks you've been working with closely during the research stage that will be covered. And then another key social listening method. And one of the great things about an open source community is the fact that they have their own channels as well. Oftentimes these communities have their own newsletters they have their own flat slack forums and other types of forums. If you aren't already plugged into these it makes sense to reach out to your product and your engineering teams and ask them what are the best channels to be plugged into? And then looking into these communities and seeing again how your product is being talked about. Another key type of goal you can consider is ones that help the project grow. So one key way you might look at it is looking at how many pull requests you might have on GitHub or other similar platforms. Is it more or checking how many that happened before the launch and after? Although I do always caution folks from taking a goal like this. Important thing with the community of course is quality contributions over quantity. So if you do decide that this is something you wanna focus in on to make sure to build that nuance into your goal. Another important one is you can consider sponsoring a certain number of community events. By doing this you not only help the event be more successful and create a more interactive community event for everyone. But in addition to that you have the opportunity to potentially increase awareness of your product in these places where folks are gonna be most interested. And then finally you can tie in open source into your existing tactics. If you have a content goal for example where you're trying to create a white paper or two infographics this year or five different webinars. Something you might need to consider is whether you're gonna put that content into a gated content format. You'll have to think of course whether this makes sense for your use case. But by doing this you could include a question in the form. Where did you learn about our product? Where did you learn about this piece of content? And include any sources where someone might have learned about your product from the open source community. From here you can begin to understand how many leads, how much money, or how many folks from sales are coming in from the community. And then using all this information together you can begin to start to build a use case with your leadership about why open source is important. But as you're doing this it's important to think through each of your goals very carefully and think of course about all of the effort, the time, the money that goes into successfully completing your goals. Ask yourself, also if I'm doing this goal how does this impact the community? If I don't do it or do anything related to these tactics is the community gonna notice? Is there gonna be a negative reaction if I don't do this? Wave that cost against the cost of your development and your engineer teams and your future revenues. From here you can begin to really start to see create data points to create an argument for open source marketing. All right, final step. Your product's been out for a while. You are starting to see the benefits of all of your hard work with a growing customer base and positive feedback from the community. You have laid the groundwork for getting involved, building trust and giving back to your community. But now what? In order for you to succeed you need to think about how your project is going to grow or the project your product works with is gonna grow as well as your product. So the one of the most important things of course is to stay involved with the community because as the old adage goes trust is built over a number of years. It can be broken in a second and then it takes forever to rebuild. As a product marketer your role is to keep these best practices that we talked about today in mind as you're going through as time progresses and then your product and project evolve. As mentioned earlier you must balance how you're including open source in your messaging and marketing with how much your company is involved with these products or projects. For example, of something that could look what this could look like in practice is if your company and your project were together on a long-awaited capability for the broader community. Something you might be able to do as a result of this collaboration is work with the community to test new messaging and positioning involving this new capability. As a result of course you get better messaging and have the opportunity have also helped the community achieve this accomplishment of improving the community with this long-awaited capability. So the next thing is of course a part of creating a positive sentiment around the community is staying involved. Encourage your product and engineering teams to look to continue to give back to continue to have contributions. Of course, like I said, quality over quantity. Encourage folks to become maintainers. Have them also set up regular cadences with members of the community. All of these things together will help ensure that your product and your project are moving in the same direction. And as you continue to build this positive reputation with customers and the community it is important for people for you to look for people who are willing to advocate for your product. Having people and companies that are willing to testify to the benefits of your product will always be valuable. However, one of the key advantages of creating a product that is built on top of an open source project is its community of passionate users. If you're able to create a product that is well loved by an open source community you're able to more quickly build a loyal customer base and credibility for your product. By continuing to work with the community it should help you find advocates who are willing to act as references for your product whether it be on an event stage in a quote or in a case study. Like any other content you develop whenever you work on a customer reference it's important that you begin to pull out why open source mattered and helped with that customer's benefits and success story. Work with them to understand did they rely on a specific community capability or feature? Did they start using your product because of the fact that it was built on this open source project? Were you able to innovate with the community to create something that the customer needed? By asking these questions you are further building trust and creating content that is relevant to other project users that your product can help them while also showcasing the benefits of your product. Furthermore, if there's a member or a group of members in the community who are extra passionate about your product do what you can to activate them. See if they'd be willing to become influencers for your product. Whenever you wanna create a blog or if you wanna co-speaker on stage you can utilize these folks to hopefully speak to the benefits of your product and share it out with an audience you might not be able to reach by yourself. By doing so though, I do emphasize it is of course important to be respectful of folks time, understand what they are and what they aren't willing to do, keeping in mind that product marketer and open source marketer had. So in conclusion, marketing open source alongside your project is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time to build trust and effort to build and maintain. Just because your product is alive does not mean that your work is done. As you begin to build out your marketing content and campaigns, your messaging and positioning you have to think about how the open source community can impact this at every stage of the way. You wanna build campaigns and begin to measure them. And by measuring them you will be able to start building a use case with your leadership as to why your product is, or open source is important to your product. And this is probably one of the most important points of this presentation. Whether you're determining your messaging and positioning, building this content, it's always important to maintain a humble tone. You are one of many contributors helping to make this technology better for all users. Finally, for looking for opportunities, finally look for opportunities to amplify the story of those who are most passionate about your product. Look for opportunities to highlight how open source has contributed to your customer's success. Work with others in the community to put your content in front of new audiences. And with that, that's the conclusion of our presentation. If you guys have any questions, Libby and I will be outside for the next 10 minutes or so. Before you guys go though, one thing that would be super helpful to us if you are willing is to just quickly take this survey, it takes two minutes. And it helps Libby and I do other presentations like this. It'll say something about an emergent day, just ignore that. Think about it in the context of this session. Thank you.


Great, and we're live and I'm with Elizabeth Renaris right now for the breakout session exploring legal frameworks that should apply to our identity, like as humans, as people, and our most intimate personal data. So we've got one viewer so far and three, okay so I know there's people who are just logging in now, why don't we give them two or three minutes to log in and a little something I'm going to do is screen share, hold on, before I do that let me make sure I know what I'm doing, competing legal frameworks, boom, make sure we're broadcasting, I think that we are, yes we are, okay awesome, okay so I'm going to do a quick screen share so everybody knows what's going on and then why don't we get started Elizabeth as soon as I'm done with that, so hopefully my screen is sharing, I think that it is, so won't you please join us on the agenda page for this IAP class just by clicking agenda at the top of our GitHub repo, that's right this is what we're talking about, and then scroll down to the breakout group on competing legal frameworks for humanity, i.e. our digital identity in the data-driven age, if you click on that you'll see we'll get the live stream at the top of the page and then go ahead and provide your questions and comments and ideas in this embedded pigeonhole which is just underneath the live stream and I'll keep track of that for Elizabeth as she leads us through this session and kind of be the voice of the people as best as I can be, so with that I just want to say how thrilled we are to have you back virtually but in a very real way at the MIT Media Lab and then hacking the law along with us again Elizabeth, so welcome home to a place you're always welcome and thanks for bringing up this great way to look at the legal frameworks that should apply to our digital identity and our personal data, you know is everything property, is everything for sale, are we for sale, or is there a better way, what are the alternatives, so thank you and take it away, could you actually let people know a little bit about who you are, a little bit of introduction would be helpful and then and then please talk us through the session and I'll help and I'll just be verbally letting you know from time to time is there's questions and comments or if you want to pause from time to time and ask about questions and comments that would be great and just allow for like a 30 second to a minute lag for me to collect them, sound good? Sounds great. Okay thanks Elizabeth, your show. Thanks Dazza and thank you so much for having me, it's a real pleasure to be back, obviously a lot happens since the last legal forum and so we'll get into some of that, but as a reminder I am a data privacy lawyer, I've been practicing on three different continents for nearly a decade now on data protection and privacy issues, focused very much on the intersection of those issues with emerging technologies and for the last three and a half to four years very much focused on blockchain distributed ledger technologies, artificial intelligence and machine learning and now of course all of these issues around data protection and privacy are converging with those emerging technologies and their use in governance so I've developed sort of this niche interest in the intersection of all of those things and I think the legal forum at the Media Lab is the perfect place to explore this because of course it's bringing together the law and the technology in that really meaningful way so it's a real pleasure to be here, at the moment I am serving as Global Policy Council of an identity startup known as called Evernim which is known for this vision of something called self-sovereign identity which we can dive into a bit but the first thing I wanted to talk about before we dive into the subject which is competing legal frameworks for humanity in the data-driven age is this notion as you mentioned of our identity and what is the connection between our identity and data because what's happening now is that often in a conversation around data so whether it's you know a panel and a conference or an article about identity or a new blockchain project for identity management the conversation quickly turns into a conversation about data without anyone ever really stepping back to articulate you know why why do we go from talking about identity to talking about data and we actually sort of lose sight of the identity conversation so I think something important to understand is that you know data is increasingly becoming a proxy for expressions of our identity for expressions of who we are what we do you know what we think and feel our preferences the way we relate to ourselves and to the world around us our commercial power and activity so this digitization of everything turning everything into data into you know binary information zeros and ones is is relevant in identity conversation because we are doing more digitally we are doing more connectedly not just online but offline of course so our offline or sort of you know so called real world experiences are increasingly being turned into data as well because everything now has this sort of smart capability with sensors attached and everything that we do both online and offline is is aggregating and collecting all of this data about us and creating all of these data points about how we live our lives and how we go about you know every every second of our day so I think we're all aware of this increasing you know digitization the digitization of everything and there's certainly been a lot of really high-profile works and research that have come about to explore this phenomenon some of some of these I recommended in the course page so you know two really notable books that have influenced my thinking on this topic recently are Victor Meyer Schoenberg's reinventing capitalism in the age of big data and the fundamental premise of that book is that we're replacing this idea of financial capitalism of money-based capitalism that makes the world go around with a notion of data capitalism where data becomes this new capitalist mechanism becomes the new driver for the global economy and underpins all of our commercial interactions now we want to impact that of course in this in the context of these competing frameworks and the validity of that premise but the fact of the phenomenon occurring is a little bit hard to to deny so that's the first work that frames my thinking on this the second is has just come out in the last week is a book by Shoshana Zuboff called the age of surveillance capitalism and the age of surveillance capitalism is incredibly interesting in fact the subtitle is even more interesting the subtitle is the fight for a human future at the new frontier of power and so what Shoshana Zuboff explores in this book is this idea that our human experience itself is becoming the raw material that's driving the commercialization and exploit commercial exploitation of our experience by corporates by firms that have actually distorted the free market mechanics that we rely upon to sort of protect our rights so two very important books you know on this topic as I said they're framing my thinking but both are really approaching things from either an economic you know commercial perspective and we haven't seen a deep dive exploration of how do we respond to this phenomenon how do we respond to these new economic commercial realities from a legal point of view and should we respond from a legal point of view and what should the relevant legal frameworks be so that's really the heart of this session you know is to think about as we move into this digital future as we ourselves you know whether it's embedding actual sensors in our bodies or turning ourselves into sort of extended you know enhanced individuals with AI capabilities and you know robotic features and perhaps smart limbs as we're in ourselves becoming data up until the point that we are you know we are no longer human right to the extent that there is a degree of humanity left in us what should the correct framework be legal framework be around the data that the experience of being human is creating so you know that's the extremely high level overarching problem that we want to address and really what I would like in this session and I you know unfortunately does I can't see how many participants we have at the moment but as we go through this I want to start thinking about the principles that are going to guide us in trying to develop a framework or a you know a number of frameworks um for addressing this issue from a legal perspective so I'm sorry about that I just want to leave the we've got like three concurrent sessions going on at the same time this teeny tiny little room in the media lab so come with me come with me around the corner to the here we go to the bitcoin vending machine a cool hack from one of his one of our cool students anyhow I'm viewing here and we've got a little bit of stock channel chatter and telegram which I'll look at in a moment but it's unlike a different device so let's see what we have in the pigeonhole okay um here's here's one question um what if both property and human rights uh what's it say um what if both property and human rights law applied to the same data at the same time but they would but the but they but create different requirements or legal results how is it how is this dealt with or managed um I think that makes sense does that question make sense to you I think so and I think that um you know we don't necessarily we're not necessarily driving in the direction of you know there is one exclusive framework that will apply in all circumstances under all circumstances in all situations I think one of the the fundamentally different things about digital versions uh of real-world experiences or digital analogs digital twins if you will is that data is highly contextual it's highly dynamic and really can't be evaluated or assessed in a vacuum so you know there are things and and this is true in the real world as well right so we've again Daza we've had the conversation example around you know personal effects or uh belongings that you know might have certain property rights that attach but also have certain rights um fourth amendment protections or privacy rights that attach um at the same time but they apply in different ways and they don't preclude one uh or the other from being true so I think what we the the reason part of the reason for this session is to raise awareness around what we lose right if we only go for example with a property-based approach and the risk is that we lose exactly to this question um fundamental rights whether they're human rights civil rights constitutional rights uh dignitary moral rights we we lose we risk losing sight of all those other important rights that attach to things that may very well be property like or even property um and what we see in the rhetoric you know particularly from large corporates and commercial entities you know when when Mark Zuckerberg starts talking about you know you own your data you know we know there's a problem with that framework and that there's a catch right so what we're trying to avoid is this kind of um overly simplistic thinking about data because of its nature which is so uh amorphous and dynamic and contextual so it's a really brilliant question and I think one of the things we can work towards in this session is um perhaps there's a guiding principle in there around you know um avoiding reductionism or you know embracing complexity or there must be some guiding principle to extract from you know these things not being exclusive yes that's great and so it's just to highlight some of that that um those reflections on the question um at the end um having maybe some set of principles or guidelines that apply to um the this imperative is what I would call it of uh of um of um ensuring we that we know that we can and that we must sometimes apply human rights legal frameworks to identity and personal data would include um well I like the word um to avoid reductionism or you know binary thinking that it's one or the other or a bright line test of under these three circumstances apply framework a under those two circumstances apply but rather iterate this a little bit but you know something that's like proportional that's response to the circumstances we can talk about factors to consider maybe give two or three clear examples at the extremes or one applies quite well or where the other applies quite well but um that idea of um of um not of avoiding reduction is a highlight from your answer um seems quite good uh for a principle um that reminded me one thing so we've got a bunch of comments but I want to just take the chairs prerogative for a moment or the um co the moderators prerogative to say um Mila and uh Brian and TMA and I when we were thinking about your session excuse me last night we're thinking it would be what would be really helpful would be if there was sort of like a table or something like that where we could start to maybe like one column is property law and another column is human rights frameworks or or maybe even another column is civil liberties kinds of things like you know bill of rights in the United States or something like that um where um and then one row and then you know row by row by row we start looking at um different types of um features and you know universal uh inalienable and oh god what was the third one um and stuff like that our prop our own properties of human rights um and then there's other properties uh and factors and elements that sort of thing that might fall in different columns and rows so come starting to um hack out a table we thought would be um a nice um project or a nice kind of exercise that maybe we could start to explore um what how does that sound to you does that actually risk the reductionism that we seek to avoid uh could it shed some light or what do you think about this idea it's an interesting idea so I've actually undertaken the exercise myself and you know for preparation of this session and what I found was that um again that you know it's useful to a limited extent so I think it's useful in framing the thinking and um you know forcing oneself to go through the exercise of comparing and contrasting um but as soon as you get into any sort of thought experiments to test you know whatever you faked into such a table or framework um things get really messy that said I think it's still valuable and I'm happy to you know take what I've started and circulate with this group after the session and maybe we could crowdsource you know some additional features and flesh out the the table a bit more um so some of the dimensions for example that I would look at are you know the source of rights so you know is the source natural law is it norms of society you know what where where are the rights deriving from you might look at the nature of the rights are they focused on you know the economic or commercial features are they focused on you know the dignitary and human nature of our resistance you know we might look at examples within those categories of where are those rights codified you know where do they live if they're codified you know do they require codification um we might look at you know what recourse mechanisms there are if those rights are violated or what the individual recourse uh you know is in a situation like that mechanisms for changing um or amending rights or their their nature um so they're they're definitely um you know useful ways to frame and uh select certain features to compare and contrast these frameworks but again I think the real heart of it comes in thinking through uh you know actual thought experiments or applications of them in in living environments um here here um so I'd like to make a request of um of all the people who are with us in the session um and especially those of you that have provided feedback um could you please go back into the whole widget scan through the feedback and upvote the ones that you most want Elizabeth to address um you know there's some that I think are more interesting but what really matters is about the um point of view that Elizabeth already lectured on you know I've never seen the lecture um in the flipped classroom so now let's have a conversation and here's the good news is you can all talk at once um so you get don't usually get to have that in physical space so um with that in mind um let me go take another look and see what's being upvoted okay we've got some votes got some votes um so here's one um you referred to quote the experience of being human um I would be interested in your thoughts um about what that is and how is it different from the experience if we can put it that way of being a machine the experience of being human like can you extrapolate on that a little bit and I think it you know deserves its own its own session seminar you know dissertation really uh because it's such a complex question um but that is one of the things that we are desperately trying to figure out right now um so you see a lot of efforts towards you know a Magna Carta on AI or um these sort of global charters on um defining what it means to be human you know in this big data data driven uh digital ecosystem um and I think what what we're the starting point has been let's uh let's start with the process of elimination right and let's um remove all of the things that we know machines can do let's um catalog all the functions that we know that AI is is sophisticated enough to undertake at this stage and work from sort of you know a what's left mindset um what's left that we know more than more than parties more than parties so um you know if we if we think about you know logic and and mathematics and logical reasoning and pattern recognition and um observational sort of statistical methodologies all those things you know we know um we've demonstrated that AI can do you know can do all of those things um but if we think about you know for example the I think it's called the UDA loop you know in in sort of military speak where I think it's observe uh orient decide and act right um we've probably gotten to a stage where you know machines are really good at sort of the orienting and observing and the pattern recognition but not so good necessarily at deciding um because of things like the quality of the data you know the quality of the the algorithm um the the you know contextual environment the feedback mechanisms the responsiveness um so there you know there's that perspective but then of course there's you know the more um philosophical questions around human autonomy and agency and free will um and um you know of course all the things around emotional intelligence and we've seen how you know even the really sophisticated Sophia's and other AI are perhaps lacking empathy right or lacking um some of the the uh emotionally intelligent features that that humans have come to to develop and acquire so I think when I talk about our human experience you know that's um and that's something that I take from Shoshana Zuboff is this idea of commercializing you know our human experience um it's an imperfect that's really an imperfect description because what that's talking about is um the experience that can be captured by data and you know your question points out makes a really great point that you know there are going to be things that can't be captured by data and the problem is is that if we go with a data first framework right then we're losing again we're crowding out some of those things that can't be captured by data and that's the risk because there might be really important rights that attach to the things that can't be digitized or return it to data. Awesome um that was a great question and I see I love the fact that some of these questions are not ones that would have occurred to me but not once I see them like yeah that's a good idea and then to hear you you reflect upon them it's very enriching so quick feedback um so far I kind of like this breakout format and gathering questions so let's go to one more um we actually have a sort of a kind of a winner of with the most votes um from Johnny Peck um um what hope do we have of um mounting a data governance paradigm founded in human rights given the pressure from the capitalist side is there an integrated versus a piecemeal solution then so it's just a very real practical kind of question yeah it's a good question um so from my point of view the uh the property you know ownership commodification paradigm has a lot of momentum and it has a lot of momentum because the firms the sort of hierarchical firms you know be them corporations or any type of other organized um means and access to capital have really embraced this this ownership model because I think they appreciate the the benefits that they can extract from it um so I think momentum is in favor of you know a sort of property-based approach um that said I think there is an elevated consciousness around this at the moment uh on the part of individuals and you know conversations like the one we're having now where there are there's a small but growing and vocal minority of us who are raising awareness around the risks with that approach and I think there is a fear of you know do we lose our humanity and I think that you know whether it's been well articulated or not there is kind of an assumption that there is some value in retaining some degree of our humanity so um you know my hope is that is that people having a conversation like ourselves you know grow louder to to counteract some of the uh the surveillance capitalist right um because if you put together again the sort of the two theories that I mentioned the two books that I mentioned um if you look at if if you look at Victor Meyer Schoenberger's book on reinventing capitalism um what he says is that a sort of free-for-all around data capitalism does not enhance you know anyone's rights really because it distorts market forces so you end up you know through the feedback effect and the power law and the law of networks you end up with a situation of you know the concentration of power in in a handful of firms and you know Scott Galloway always makes this point around GAFA um so you actually don't end up with a free marketplace um for you know for an expression of individual rights and meaningful uh benefits occurring to individuals you you end up with a really distorted situation so um even for the sort of data capitalists that think that there is positive value in um the commercialization of our data there are some fundamental assumptions around preserving sort of the dynamics of a truly free marketplace where individuals can meaningfully participate so so even those so I think there is room um to engage on you know on the terms of all of these frameworks um if we focus on if we focus on our collective interest in retaining that shred of humanity and that may be a very unsatisfying answer um but you know I think there is a real risk right now of right um so I do think that for any of us who think there's any merit to competing frameworks I would encourage folks to really challenge the you know surveillance capitalists um vocally and and aggressively okay your hair um and that actually kind of brings us to um I think the next the next question um um um Nicholas observes that there's differences um in legislation enforcement at the international level what is the international relations now it probably probably say, international law dimension of the relevant problem of the problem that you're presenting about the application of a human rights and civil liberties legal framework to identity. Is this something you're particularly well situated to speak to, I think? Yeah, I mean, there's the sort of legislative history, if you will, of international law. There is the century-old body of international law around human rights, even before World War II, but really the first meaningful stake in the ground in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights around freedom from arbitrary interference with privacy, family, home, and correspondence. And that was obviously motivated by some of the atrocities of World War II and the unified sense amongst the international community that there were real fundamental rights that attach to all of us universally that are, again, even though they adhere to our person because they're an extension of our humanity, the international community felt that it was kind of worth putting a stake in the ground and codifying this in the form of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And then you see sort of reiteration decade after decade. So another meaningful evolutionary step in 1976 with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which I know, Dazza, you have great interest in right now because we're kind of at a point where we're taking comment on the extent to which member states have actually complied with their obligations under the ICCPR. So we can get into that a bit. But again, this idea of freedom from arbitrary interference with our privacy and the same things that are codified, for example, in the US Constitution, but on an international scale. So there's sort of a broad agreement around what privacy might look like. We certainly don't have, it's really interesting to look at it from a comparative law perspective or international perspective. I'm not aware of international legal covenants or agreements around identity because I don't think there's any single understanding or consensus around what that even means. And so, actually this idea that we use proxies for identity isn't so new, right? It might be new in the way it's expressed as our digital identity or through data. But if you look at the evolution and genesis of international law around privacy from a human rights point of view, the reason that these things are called out in these frameworks around home and family and effects and correspondences is because there are deemed to be expressions of who we are. There are deemed to be extensions of our identity or humanity. So those are kind of the foundational pieces in international law. Daz, I see you shaking the agreement. I just, every time your mouse is speaking, I find myself just saying yes, yes, yes. Like it's, I wish I had a better understanding of international law and kind of what's happening in the rest of the world outside of the United States with respect to law generally, but especially legal frameworks that apply to this essential aspect of online life and online, you know, I guess, online activities, which is identity and the reasonable expectations and frameworks of rules that apply to the use of identity and the rights and the obligations for identity. Part of the reason I was shaking my head to aggressively there and after I thought that I was off mute, video mute was because I was just thinking in the physical world, we've got a lot of context that tells us a lot of information about what rules to apply, you know, like for just a simple example is you go to someone's house and you mention papers and effects and that gets me into a fourth amendment kind of mindset where there's one aspect and kind of frame, set of frameworks for managing our persons and our identity and our personal data, you know, in the form of stuff we have on our body. So you go to someone's house, you're on the sidewalk and you're kind of on the public street and looking at their house. There's very little, you know, sense of access or authorization to know much about that person that isn't very much public facing.  There's a little bit more. Now you've been invited inside a threshold. You know, from a property perspective, you have a little one second, hey, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. Oh, sorry, somebody wanted to bring into the conversation. You've got, you know, if you really slip and fall, for example, there may be some responsibility for that person inside of your house. So they have a certain kind of, there's certain expectations that they see stuff in their house. You know, they have a right to know that in your foyer, but there's not much there. It's kind of a quasi-public space almost. When I come back into the kitchen in the living room, it's a little bit deeper. I'm going to go right back to like the bedroom where you may have like much more personal things there. And people kind of know from the context, you know, what to expect and how to behave. And so like, you know, we know when it's our home and people know when it's someone else's home. And that's from centuries and millennia of socialization and development of these underlying frameworks, which are reflected in law, but fundamentally come from, you know, much deeper social layer, I think. But all that is just totally blown up in cyberspace. You know, we've got such little information about whose location are we in. What kind of location is this commercial? Oh, good. Is this commercial?  Is this commercial? Or is this, is this residential? Is this industrial? Is it educational? Is it a public space? Is it a government space? So, we know very little.  And so when I now try to think about, you know, the context of just what kind of culture applies here. Is it European culture? Is it Asian culture? What Asian culture? In a sense, this thing is a European culture or an Asian culture or American, well, United States, Massachusetts or Texas. And so, I just would love to know how to, how to do a better job of knowing what context we're in and what which underlying frameworks of human rights or property law for that matter would even apply in the first place before we even get to which one should apply. But leading that aside, I have a treat for you, Elizabeth. A very special treat. It has a name and an identity. This is Johnny. Johnny, this is Elizabeth and I wanted you two to meet for a while. And Johnny is leading a session that we're gonna actually postpone and do after the class on an adjacent topic related to basically workers in a, in this case, an employment environment and rights with respect to data, identity, personal data, expectations that could have a major impact on your life opportunities, you know? And your livelihood.  And so, I just wanted to allow Johnny to ask or to first of all express how is this question of human rights versus property rights show up in the big world of labor and work? And how would it show up if I was now in, whether in the United States or Europe or somewhere, but I'm now at my work place? You know, and when I was in the 90s, I was practicing law and had to deal with, you know, an organization that had tens of thousands of workers and some things that came up was, you know, that they have a mobile phone now that was new, believe it or not, once a time, once upon a time and they're doing some conversations. Is that private? I mean, they're not using the work phone, but they're sitting in the work desk and then they have lockers, but the lockers maybe don't have locks. Can we look in their locker if we were wondering if that's where the stapler is or something? Can we inspect the locker if we're wondering if they're stealing stuff? And then can we look at the top of their desk, can we open a drawer? Can we strip search people in their work? Just what are the expectations in a work environment? And now what are the major implications now that so much of our stuff and our identity exists online? It's not even a physical drawer. So, I mean, can you just say a few words on how does this kind of question of privacy and liberties and rights show up in this world of work? And what are the big issues with respect to, you know, from the labor perspective going forward? Can you hear me if I speak from here? Yeah. Put this on, okay. I can just say briefly that you see this with professional athletes, I think, initially because their data is really valuable and so it's being harvested to make a lot of money. Currently, right now in the NFL, every player has a little chip on their shoulder, literally a chip on their shoulder that all the teams have access to when they're choosing who to keep and trade, et cetera. Players don't currently A, get access to the data or B, get paid for the value that that data is generating. So there was a contract for $10 million in a hotel in Las Vegas that was using this to kind of place bets about who's gonna skate the fastest on a hockey game or something like that. I hope I'm not repeating your research and mentioning this. I can't remember. At least it's new to what Elizabeth has said so far. Okay. Uni Global Union is a federation of 650 unions around the world, private sector trade unions that I've been working with, helping them think through how they can use, how they can represent workers' interests in this. I think the core immediate challenges there about surveillance that if you lose your job because of something that's been revealed about your activity at work that you feel is totally unethical, that becomes a very difficult case to fight if your employer also owns that data. And then as I mentioned or kind of alluded to with the professional athletes, the value of it, that's an open question too. If you're a Uber driver in New York City and the data that you are helping, build around the traffic patterns is sold for millions of dollars to the city, do you get access to that money? Not currently. The point is just I guess that some of the stuff that I think we'll face around identity, the really interesting questions you talked about today, Elizabeth, I think are hitting workers first. And that's one reason I've been trying to engage with that community. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I think it goes to what Dad was saying about you arrive at someone's house and you've got, like you said, you're on their property outside and you're progressively growing closer to the core. And it's the same idea that this digital creep has blurred all of these boundaries where there's no longer any separation between personal, professional employment or non-employment context, online or offline. You have this blurring of everything, this convergence and all these lanes breaking down. And the digital is length claimed to all of it, right? But that can't be valid because then there's no space left for us to be ourselves, right? There's no space left to completely crowds out any kind of autonomy or freedom of interference, right? It's really this notion of like, where is that space? If the digital is everywhere, if everything is data, where is that sort of freedom to be ourselves? And I don't think it's something that we can, that we should turn over. I think it's critical to, again, this conversation around what's left of humanity. I think we need a place that is not censored, right? And this movement, one of the things that I worry about a lot in the blockchain space that I've been spending the last three and a half to four years in is this drive towards, you know, we want everything to be transparent and readable and censorship resistant. But actually, what does that do to us? It makes us censor ourselves, right? It makes us worry about every transaction, every activity and we're no longer ourselves, right? We're completely subject to manipulation. So I think it's true in the employment context and, you know, obviously in the US, employees have always had more limited rights than they've had in a lot of other jurisdictions. And again, that's in part because what is the legal framework that we're applying? And in the US, we're often applying this sort of property, this commercial, commercially led framework around, well, the employer, you know, owns you and owns your work, works for hire, right? Owns the products and efforts of your labor, whereas in other jurisdictions, you know, like in Europe, you don't lose, you know, fundamental rights, human rights, privacy rights in the context of the employment relationship. So I think it is that, you know, that convergence of everything and data that's challenging these legal frameworks. And I think that's one of the problems around to these data-specific regulations is that, you know, we have, for example, even with the GDPR, which I think has been extremely useful in elevating this conversation and, you know, elevating our consciousness around it, data-specific regulations kind of fall flat because they ignore these other aspects that are, you know, you can't regulate data as data. Data takes on different significance and meaning, you know, in different contexts to different people. So, you know, even this idea of trying to demarcate, you know, this trend right now is, I've seen a lot of draft legislation in the US for privacy bill. And a lot of the common features are they'll try and draw a line between, you know, sensitive and non-sensitive data, right? Well, what does that mean? I don't think there's any way to pre-stipulate, you know, what's sensitive and what's not sensitive. We use very antiquated, backward-looking notions around social security number, which is public and on the dark web anyway, right? Or are these things, whereas, you know, for example, when we had the target data breach a few years ago and target was, you know, identifying pregnant women before their families knew they were pregnant, right? On the basis of their ordinary commercial purchases, the lotion they were buying or, you know, that wouldn't be classified as sensitive data. And yet it was highly revealing of very intimate details of their lives and personal information. So there's a lot of red herrings around there, around, you know, data-specific regulations of how we treat data. And, you know, I think most of them really fall short because they're losing sight of these aspects. So the employment context, you certainly highlight some of the issues, but it's really just this, the breaking down of all of these boundaries, right? They don't exist anymore. So it's a really interesting point. You're gonna follow up? What do you think, Will? Okay, I have a follow-up, please. So what is, could we just take one second on what is identity to start with? So I'm pretty comfortable with stuff.    But what is the identity part of this equation? And is it the same as just a bucket of data that's really personal? Or is there something essential about an object or an essence of something that is our identity, or it is us, literally is us, and to which things like, I don't know, the prohibition against slavery would apply versus the prohibition against theft of property. I know there's a lot of blurry lines there because it's in the slaves that are deemed property, but there's also some distinctions between objects and live people. And I'm just wondering, what's the live people part of this equation online? Do you have any thoughts? Yeah, so if you take, you know, Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism and you take it to its full dystopian expression, right? And we fully submit to that kind of world order. There's still gonna be, and we're subject to all kinds of manipulation, all the data in real time is affecting all of our behavior and engineering, all of our decisions and all of our activities. And yet, they're probably, as individuals, we're gonna have different responses. So some of us might be more resistant to that even though we're making the same decisions outwardly. We might be, you know, we might harbor kind of anger or different sentiments towards it, our attitudes towards the same activities and the same behavior generating the same data might be different. I think there are still, I don't think you can, I think the whole point of identity, right? And as much as the term self-sovereign identity is like Marmite and divides a lot of people, I think the real value in it is that, you know, I am the only one who can determine, you know, what that means. And so the best that I think law and regulation can do is preserve space, hold space for someone to be someone, right? For a person to be themselves or an identity to express itself. And I don't think any law or regulation should seek to define what identity is.  Because I have no control over the myriad unperceivable uses that these firms are gonna make of it with their, you know, their high tech tools and their algorithms and their asymmetric power. So it has to be driven by the individual, by their own selves to really be meaningfully identity and kind of a self-sovereign point of view. Can I just do a follow-up about that? Yeah. So, Jonathan Zittrain at Harvard Law School has made similar argument, I think, about like all data is personal data. I think of it as like a wave of inference that they're just in a world in which we have ubiquitous kind of surveillance technology, we can find out like the unusual cases are just gonna grow and grow and grow the way we find each other or find out things about each other. I guess my first question is what do you see as a kind of, I'll ask them, I guess the boldest version of the question is, do you think that the law as an iterative measure is going to be able to keep up with the sort of challenges that this poses? Or do you think in sci-fi land we might need some sort of paradigm change? I don't know what that would look like. I've never really thought about it till right now, but I can maybe gesture in the direction of something, which is the second question, what do you think of both the balance between individual and collective rights? Knowing that, yeah, I guess in this world. Yeah, it's a really great question. I'll start with the second one, because it's easier. So I think that technology is driving us to be more atomic and it's hyper focused on the individual right now. And I think commercial hierarchical firms are really exploiting that atomic sort of individualistic view because it just, it increases the information and the power asymmetry. And as much as there's an aversion, obviously, especially amongst Americans to any kind of collectivist approach, I think if we focus on what we're actually trying to achieve, if we're actually trying to achieve more human autonomy and freedom of expression and identity expression, all these things, we might have to rethink the means to get there because I think this highly individualistic focus is part of why we've lost so many individual rights. I think it, similar to what happens, what's happened in the self-help sector, right? It's all on you, it's all on the individual. There are no structural problems, right? There's nothing that you are so uncontrollable. That's not true, right? If you've got this entire world order built around surveillance capitalism, it doesn't really matter what you do as an individual. You go completely off the grid to your own detriment and still data inferences can be made about you or proxies or digital twins are built for you. So I think we have to stop being in denial around the fact that achieving individual ends and empowering individuals might require a more collectivist approach. That's your second question. Is there a follow-up to that? Well, another way to phrase the first question, which is connected to the second question is, historically, you mentioned that the example you gave around, I don't know what was it, kind of paradigm changes, but significant change in law emerging in response to kind of societal trauma. So during World War II, we have in response, yeah, new conceptions. Short of the sort of traumas, I guess my intuition says because the harms that we deal with these are often seemingly minute and distributed and difficult to characterize legally as true harms, to my understanding, I'm not a lawyer. It is probably anticipating a really traumatic event. Short of the sort of, there's a fire around here. People don't have to listen to this.  So I think I know what you're getting at and I hope you can evacuate if you need to. So for me, I'm a minimalist about most everything and I would extend that to the law. And I think that, again, there's a lot of drive right now. You guys okay? Everybody? I'm going to ask you if there's a problem that shall follow the bill to meet the next situation. Hey, I don't know if you can hear this emergency. Attention please. Apparently there's been an emergency in the media line and we're all supposed to scramble out the shoot or something. So unfortunately, I have to terminate the broadcast a little bit early. I'm so sorry. We're all due. Thank you for, thank you Elizabeth. Thank you guys. You're welcome. You're welcome. Watch Telegram and we'll do a report out to your group and we'll keep you posted. Okay, thank you. Be safe. Thanks. You too. Bye.


Okay, checking in on bond markets now, we've got Simon Michelle from FIG Securities joining us live. And of course Simon, we should start with those US labor market numbers out on Friday. They seem to tick the final box for an increase in the Fed funds rate next week. Yes, good afternoon. The market was very much keen to see how this last job report came out in the US, whether it would continue to build on positive sentiment we've seen in the labor market there, which it did. So it really has ticked that final box and market very much looking to hear from the Fed that they will lift the Fed funds rate from virtual zero, likely to occur after their meeting next Tuesday, Wednesday. Which of course brings us to the pace of the increases. This is what we're all talking about now. And I'm guessing this is what everyone will be listening out for when Janet Yellen speaks to the press as well. Exactly any indication of how slowly and how steady we can expect the Fed fund rate to be lifted. We know that she's not going to follow any kind of process where we see 25 every three months or something like that. Data dependent, she says. Is that right? Very much so, very much so. And I think this is a great opportunity for the Fed to reset their messaging. They missed the September lift off that caused a little bit of volatility in the market. So I think now that the market's sort of built in that increase in December, it's all about where to next. And I think what you'll hear from the Fed is that they've now reset that Fed funds rate off of the virtual zero level. But if market should not be looking for a flurry of further increases, they're likely to be very slow, very moderate. It could be that the Fed actually indicates that they don't expect any further move for them for 2016. They'll certainly be looking to see a global reaction, looking to see how the other central banks react as well. That's also reflected on the yield curve at the moment. So while we are positioning for higher rates or higher cash rate in the near term, we're actually seeing the longer end of the yield curve, longer dated interest rates actually move a little bit lower. And that reflects an environment where you've got lower inflation expectations. You've still got a number of commodity prices hitting new lows. So the market while preparing for that increase is not preparing for a flurry of interest rate increases on the back of it. I wonder what impact are commodity prices having at the moment on longer term rates? We saw iron ore fall into the 30s. For example, oil's still under pressure at the moment. Look, they certainly do play into that lower inflation forecasting. And as those prices have lowered, as we've also seen intervention by China as well and devaluation of the yarn, that certainly had an impact on those countries that import those goods. Obviously, a lot of our export markets that are buying our iron ore, for example. As those prices fall, that is built into what would then be a much lower inflation expectation, and that builds into lower rates on the horizon. So it is very much driving those lower yields we're seeing, especially out in the 10 year and beyond part of the curve. And let's just finish off with a preview of the Aussie unemployment numbers, which are due out on Thursday. Of course, do you think we'll stick to that 5.9%, which was a bit of a shock for us, I must say. Look, it was. And I think, you know, it's all about the use of the moment. So let's not forget we do have a bit of info coming out for Australia. And obviously, our employment market has been a big focus, you know, still very much a high level of under employment and a very low wages growth. Look, I think at the market, certainly looking for some improvement or some jobs growth, it'll be really about the participation rate, whether we get an increase there, but market pretty much on point for a steady, same unemployment rate as last month of 5.9. All right, Simon, Michelle, thank you so much for joining us. Have a good afternoon. Thank you.