Hi folks, welcome to the future of democracy. My name is Sam Gill, and in this show, what we try to do is take a look at some of the big ideas, big trends, big controversies that are really animating our democracy, our national conversation, and take you a little deeper than you might be able to get just hearing a debate on cable news or reading one article. And this month, we are teaming up with the Miami Book Fair to host an amazing set of conversations with authors, with artists focused on different topics about what they think about the future of democracy. And this is all leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair from November 15 to 22nd. The Book Fair is an incredible collection of authors and an incredible collection of books, a really vital conversation about ideas. If you're interested, please go to MiamiBookFairOnline.com or follow them at Miami Book Fair. If you're not interested, then you're not paying attention to the incredible authors they're going to have. This year, Natalie Portman, the actress is going to be a part of the Miami Book Fair. Bill Nye, the science guy is going to be part of the Miami Book Fair. And you can hear every single presentation, every single talk for free, but only if you tune in from November 15 to 22nd. One of the sets of authors that we got to talk to is a husband and wife team. It's Susan Glasser and Peter Baker. Susan Glasser is, of course, staff writer at the New Yorker, she writes a weekly column on Washington. Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and they have both written an incredible book about James Baker III. It's called The Man Who Ran Washington, The Life and Times of James Baker III. Had a chance to sit down with them, get the inside story on this incredible world-defining figure in Washington, and what his career and what his legacy means for democracy today. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Susan, Peter, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much. We're delighted to be with you. So first question to me is why James Baker, why now? Well, look, we were thinking about James Baker seven years ago. So it's not even just now, right? We started the book in 2013. And one of the reasons we were doing it, we were struck by, first of all, there had been no biography of James Baker, even though he was Secretary of State, at really the most interesting and consequential time in our foreign affairs in our lifetime. That by itself meant he was a worthy subject. But we also thought that his story was a story of Washington more generally, even before Trump came on the scene back in 2013. You know, there's a lot of dysfunction in Washington. It wasn't working the way it had in the past. We thought the Baker story could help us understand a little bit about what Washington was like then, what it's like now. What, you know, writing about someone who's so close to being contemporary, as certainly for Washington, for Washington hands, what, what surprised you? Like he's not exactly an unknown figure. What did you uncover that was surprising to you as reporters or as long time Washington observers? Well, look, first of all, any time, you know, you have a chance to dive into a life, and especially one as consequential as this. I mean, you know, just understanding Washington from the end of Watergate to the end of the Cold War, it was an opportunity for us to look on at events that we had not covered. Certainly we were, you know, around, but we weren't actually old enough to cover all these events.  And especially some of those events at the end of the Cold War, you know, it was much more touch and go, much more influenced by a whole constellation of individual choices that Baker and George H. W. Bush made in those key moments. For example, the fall of the Berlin Wall was a big surprise to Jim Baker and other people. His own State Department had sent him a memo a few months earlier saying, you know, as much as we might like it, unification of Germany remains a pipe dream, a beautiful fantasy. And so there was no playbook for that. And in fact, had it happened a few months later, it was only the next summer that Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and the whole world's attention turned to the Middle East. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev was facing challenges from hardliners that ultimately led to a coup. Imagine, you know, if it hadn't, if it played out differently. And Baker faced opposition not only from the Soviets, but Margaret Thatcher and the British were violently against it. Francois Mitterrand was against it. There were skeptics back in Washington. So, you know, I think for us, it was an exercise in looking at how much does individual agency matter in the context of, you know, the broader macro forces of history. One of the things that really struck me in reading the book is it feels like James Baker never trained for his next job, you know, whatever the next job was. And sometimes in almost farcical ways.  He becomes a campaign manager in almost unbelievable circumstances, really, as you read it. What is it, what were the attributes, having looked at the whole of the life that you think enabled him, because he didn't just take the jobs he thrived in most of these jobs in ways that are documented, in ways that become empirical almost in their force. What was it about him, do you think? Yeah, it's not something I would recommend to everybody. Just try to not study for things before you do them. But look, it happened to work for him because he had a particularly unique skill set, obviously. And I think he applied the same skills that he had learned as a lawyer in Houston to all these different positions. And it was the way he approached them that made the difference. He didn't have, you're right, a big background in geopolitics or strategy or whatever. He couldn't have talked to you about the Treaty of Westphalia, like Kissinger might have. But he had a sense for how to get people on the other side of the table to do things he wanted them to do while making them walk away from the table feeling like they had got something themselves. And that was a skill that translated whether it would be in negotiating with Congress over budgets and tax deals and social security and whether the same with negotiating with central bankers about currency rates as Secretary of the Treasury or the big questions as Secretary of State in terms of reunifying Germany and nuclear arms treaties and Middle East peace. So he took the same skill set, even if he didn't have the knowledge background to each of these particular missions. Something that sort of, you know, we're like in this current moment, we have an almost overwrought discourse about the value of humility in politics, particularly seeing its absence.  He doesn't lack for sort of a sense that he belongs, but there's a different kind of humility straight to me, which is he doesn't enter all of these situations with a clear orthodoxy about the way to get something done. He's humble in the sense that he sees that there's a space for learning. He needs to learn and to understand that one of the things that you document and maybe you could talk more about is when he takes over on the floor fight in the Ford nomination in 1976, he's commissioning all these analyses from other experts about different sorts of questions. How does, what is, what is, what was his process for entering these sorts of situations? This is such a good question. First of all, I think you're right about just to emphasize the incredible sort of improbability or unlikeliness of, you know, we looked at this and realized, of course, during the book, that he was sort of the world's most successful mid-career switch. You know, he didn't even make it to Washington until he was 40 years old. And within one year he goes from an obscure position in the Commerce Department, not the center of the action at that time or any other, and manages to become running President Ford's campaign in large part, by the way, because of his performance doing the delegate count at the 1976 convention, as you just mentioned, and he, you know, turns out to have a real knack for that. He also, by the way, learned that BSing the press is not a way either to victory or to credibility with a national press corps.  But to your point about his appetite for information was voracious. And I think that is a key aspect of the success of many people in Washington. It's underrated and not being able to look at a problem for what it is and not what you wish it to be.  I don't know if the people saying that believe that or not. If they do, then we're really in trouble, I would say. And, you know, what's interesting about Baker was that he was, according to those who work closely with him, absolutely unsentimental when it came to business, you know, and the business of politics. He didn't want to know what you felt. He wanted to know what there was. And, you know, that meant he was rigorous in seeking information and also, by the way, in hiring people who would tell him the truth and who were also A-plus people. And, you know, that's one thing, more insecure types, whether it's in Washington or in other businesses, right? They are confident enough maybe to surround themselves with top flight people, but Baker had the opposite point of view. And I think that served him very well in those jobs. You know, another sort of narrative of leadership is being driven by conviction. And one of the other things that struck me in the, I keep calling it like the early life, but as you point out, it's into his mid-40s, which just for folks who are listening, I mean, it's just a fascinating life before, even before he comes to Washington, filled with tragedy and change. But the, it really struck me, he doesn't, to me, read like he has much of an orthodoxy. Like he's very, very pregnant. He's not really an ardent Republican at a time where that is, that's not a popular, that's not a sort of a popular ideological set in the social circles that he's in, in Texas. And he's also has these amazing stories of his gentility. Like he's led more by having strong relationships and making deals is the way it reads to me, that he's led by sort of a deep sense of conviction about two or three ideas. What is there, is he more pragmatist than principle? Is pragmatism his principle? What's at the core of his sort of moral leadership? Yeah, that's a great question. Look, you've heard the book Art of the Deal. Well, this is the real deal maker, right? This is the guy who actually makes deals and knows how to negotiate. And you're right. That means he's a pragmatist. That means he is willing to toss aside orthodoxy at times in order to get what he wants. It doesn't mean he doesn't have some, a core. I think he is a conservative small C. He's from Texas. His instincts would lean on the, on the conservative side. He wasn't a flag flyer. He wasn't a part of the Reagan revolution in the sense of, you know, having an ideological fervor to remake government per se. He was the guy who took Reagan's vision and translated it into reality. He was the engineer, not the architect, right? So that is, again, that doesn't mean he wasn't loyal to Reagan's vision, but he tossed aside the parts of Reagan's vision that he thought weren't practical that weren't going to actually work. So when Reagan promised to get rid of the department of education, Baker knew that was kind of a loser.  So why waste energy on it? Focus instead on the economic program, the tax cuts, things he could get through, which are conservative. So it wasn't that he wasn't, didn't have any principles. It was just that he was just driven by what could be done. And he always said that Reagan told him, you know, I'd rather get 80% of what I want rather than fly my flag and going over the cliff. And that Reagan was more of a pragmatist than people thought as well. What, so I want to ask a couple of questions of kind of what the legacy of James Baker is in our politics was sort of actually in conceptually. So one is more conceptual and it's picking up on, Peter, what you were just talking about, which is we're, we're in a moment where it's very confusing to figure out when are, when are we, when are we critiquing leadership right now on the basis of personal political virtue versus leaders as proxies for institutional political virtue? Like COVID is a clear example of this. Like what is so distressing to so many people about Donald Trump isn't just what he seems to be saying and thinking, but it leads to a general distress about are there any institutions we can count on that are going to give us expertise and guidance at a time where we feel that we, that we needed stability at a time we feel that we need it. How do you think about James Baker in this context? Is he an institutionalist or is he embodying a set of personal virtues around pragmatism and accomplishment that ultimately are able to animate and drive the kinds of change that, that he and Reagan and his colleagues are seeking during the 80s. You know what I would say is that he is fundamentally an institutionalist and you know he was a believer in a certain definition, call it an ideology if you want, but a certain definition of American leadership both at home and in the world that relied upon the idea of institutions, for example, alliances. You know we just did an event with him and he stated again that he believes that's at the core of his view of American foreign policy is the idea that it leads at the head of a table and there need to be other people at that table. And he was, you know, very adamant about that. I think that also the institutions of Washington worked at a time and in a way at that time that they no longer do. And so, you know, in his period at the Heights, you know it was after the debacle of Watergate. In fact you could argue that, you know, it was that sort of neutron bomb of Watergate taking out the existing Republican leadership that gave him the opportunity to come to Washington for President Ford and to rise so quickly. So, you know, he wasn't there for that implosion. He was there for the period of essentially the renewal and restoration of American institutions that lasted for the next couple of decades. And of course, because he broadly speaking had success in them, he tends to be a believer in these institutions and a cheer leader for them to this day. You know, Peter and I were just discussing there's a certain paradox and I think we don't know, even after many years of working on this book, you know, because Trump is such a challenge to the modern Republican Party, what is the role of character that he assesses in terms of the Oval Office and the White House? You know, his best friend was George H. W. Bush, who I think by all accounts may or may not have been a great politician, but he, you know, certainly was more or less a good man, you know, who brought a value set that Baker endorsed to the White House. And, you know, we've had great presidents of bad character before, and we've had bad presidents of bad character. And I would say that Baker is... And we had good presidents of good character. Hopefully. But what's interesting is that I would say that's not Baker's interest. He doesn't want to talk to you about character. I would add, by the way, on institutions, you point to institutions, you would not see a Baker undermining the credibility, public credibility of the CDC, or the intelligence agencies, or the Pentagon, or the FBI, or the courts, or the judges. It just wouldn't be his stuff. It doesn't mean that he wouldn't see them in a bureaucratic way, understand that they were bureaucratic players that he might not necessarily agree with, but he wouldn't publicly undermine their legitimacy in the way what we're seeing today with the Trump administration. Well, this is sort of what I'm getting at, right? I mean, like the... And Trump is the epitome of this, but he's not the only performative politician out there. There is this... There is a set of behaviors that are about undermining the legitimacy and the warrants in the logic of institutions, and then a set of behaviors that are just irresponsible, and they're commingling in a lot of public discourse, it strikes me. And so it becomes very... So it strikes me like... The person I was thinking about reading the book actually was Anthony Fauci, which is that it's not only that he's... Also clearly a committed institutionalist.  He's been committed to the idea of a sub-department within the National Institutes of Health, but also that he epitomizes these personal characteristics that are both praiseworthy, but also recall for us, to your point, like what good institutions do. Good institutions are reliable. Good institutions tell the truth. Good institutions are focused on result, not partial interest. So we almost want to read these characteristics out of them. I mean, to what extent were you guys caught up in that? To what extent were you trying to kind of, like, read out of James Baker just a nostalgia for an era in which institutional commitment was... had bipartisan adherence, if not allegiance? Well, look, I mean, you know, this is a guy who's firmly rooted in, you know, a definition of America that, you know, may not exist, but we sort of wanted to, right? But it can't be an exercise in nostalgia. And I don't think the book is either. You know, it's a study in power. It's not a celebration of it. And his own ambivalence about Trump and, you know, his both disdain for Trump, but inability to fully renounce him, I think it tells you a lot about what the modern Republican Party is and has become. And, you know, for a while, we kept sort of asking the same question over and over again, looking for a different answer. I think we came to understand that the answer was helpful for us in understanding our subject and in understanding the politics of today. So let me, I want to another question on those lines about not letting this be a hagiography of a moment, much less of a person. There's sort of two narratives right now that seem to me to pass in the night a little bit and that contradict each other. And so one of them is a very dominant narrative in Washington, certainly, that we've mentioned in this discussion is says like the era of comedy and dealmaking is dead. You know, whatever, whatever it was, it's gone. And polarization and performance have instead taken over as the, as the ascendant virtues of institutional politics at the federal level. And then there's sort of another narrative that's, that's really rearing its head right now, which says that comedy and dealmaking are tools of entrenched white male power. And, and you guys note at your pains to note that James Baker is like the American product of privilege in a way, not necessarily economically always or in the sort of most overwhelming sense, although the family was not hard up for money at all, but very much of privilege is status. And that's something that was a part of his life even before he makes this, this career shift. What's your view on how he fits into these two narratives of power? Yeah, that's a great question actually. I think you're right about a lot of putting it that way. I think I would say a couple of things. One is that, you know, we just saw yesterday the president of the United States throw up his hand and say, no COVID relief deal. And I'm going to bother to cry until after the election. We haven't had one since April. Millions of people are out of work, millions of businesses are suffering. And here we've gone six months without the federal government coming to a deal because they couldn't criticize their differences, partisan, ideological, whatever they are. I can't imagine Jim Baker allowing six months to go by without making a deal on something seen as so critical as this relief package. Remember, this is Baker Harsh. I mean, a ruthless partisan and electioneered, but he sat down in 1983 with the Democrats and they revamped the social security system to put it on a stronger financial footing for years to come. He sat down with the Democrats in 1986 and rewrote the entire tax code. Nobody's done that on a bipartisan basis since then. He sat down in 1989 with the Democrats and saw the contra wars, which your younger viewers might not remember, but was basically a debilitating, you know, force in the 1980s for Reagan administration. So he believed in getting stuff done. Now, is that a function of privilege? Yes. In the sense that he is, he is obviously a figure of the status quo. His family is aristocracy in Houston. He was not a revolutionary figure. He wouldn't be a movement figure on either the left or the right. So he was in that sense of stability force more than more than a change agent. But there's something, there's something he said for actually getting stuff done, even if you're not, you know, throwing out the whole system. And if you don't have so security on a better footing, if you don't get rid of the contra wars, if you don't have a COVID relief package, there are consequences to that. There's a great, just for folks listening, there's a great story when he first runs for office, kind of badly actually, and he refuses to let himself be conscripted into the culture in sort of the early days of the culture wars. And it's, and it drives his advisors crazy and you guys document it really, really wonderfully. So just a last question. And I'd love to hear from both of you. I want to resist the question. I'm sure everyone's asking you, which is the, you know, WWJBD question. What would, what would, what would James Baker do now, but Oscar version of, because I'm still a partial hack. So what of the Baker epic that you document? Do you want to see more of in politics today? And what of that epic? Do you want to see less of in politics today? And I'd love to hear from each of you.  I mean, that's, that's the truth of the matter. There are so many layers to the dysfunction right now. And obviously it predated the Trump era and it will post date the Trump era whenever that is over. And, you know, there are plenty of people who read our book and say, you know, it was the Jim Bakers in the world who were the precursors and the forerunners of the modern Republican party. And they want to talk about the 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis and that's legitimate. You know, there are antecedents of our dysfunction that go back a very, very long time. You know, what I would say was that for somebody who always has been a glass half full person until maybe the last few years about, you know, our politics about history, that, you know, there is a certain optimism that comes from understanding that individual women and men of good character placed in positions of power is far, far better than the alternative. And that they do make a difference and that you don't know when exactly that moment is going to be. And that as shocking and surprising as everything that's happened the last few years, none of it was inevitable. And what comes next is not inevitable. I really did come back out of this with that idea about our politics really renewed. And, you know, I keep coming back to simple things. For example, while Baker was not a big ideologue in 1981, Ronald Reagan had the chance to name the first woman on the Supreme Court and they were determined to do that. And of course he did do so and it became a big part of his legacy. It was Jim Baker. We learned in doing this who actually was the person who pushed Sandra Day O'Connor for the Supreme Court. And even at the time the Reagan conservatives were furious that, you know, the hardcore Reagan East is who already viewed Baker with great suspicion because he was an outsider to their circle and he came in, you know, because he was seen as highly confident, which he was, but he wasn't really trusted by them.  He physically blocked them from having a meeting with Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office to torpedo O'Connor's nomination. And, you know, there were an awful lot of five to four decisions with her name on it. And so, you know, individuals make a difference. Peter? Oh yeah, gosh, I don't know that I can prove on that at all. It's a hard act to follow. She's right that we don't take a position as journalists. I don't anyway as a reporter, she's a columnist, she's a little bit more freedom than I do, but we don't generally take a position on who's right, who's wrong or how to, you know, what policy choices should be made. I would say that one thing though, that as a journalist, I think I could say is there was a fundamental respect for the role that journalism plays. You know, they, the Reagan people got mad at journalists, just like every presidency I've covered. I've covered four now. Everybody got mad at journalists as part of the system. We are adversarial in the sense of our job to present information they don't want us to present. And yet it was still professional, you know, the Baker could talk to reporters, even though he assumed that they were liberal and not Reagan supporters because he felt like it was still better to communicate a message and get information out and not vilify people just on the basis of being reporters. And we see today this whole enemies of the people stuff, you know, straight out of the Stalinist playbook is a corrosive. It's corrosive for our society to try to question, you know, the very veracity of the institutions that bring people information and help them participate in their own democracy. So I say that's one thing that I look back on that era and wouldn't mind a little more of. Well, the authors are Susan Glasser of Peter Baker. The book is the man who ran Washington, the life and times of James A. Baker, the third. If you're learning who Peter and Susan are here, you are living under a rock. But just in case Susan is at SVG one and in the New Yorker, Peter is at Peter Baker and NYT and in the New York Times. Thank you so much for joining us. Hey, thanks for having us. All right, folks, every single one of these conversations is going to be released leading up to the 37th annual Miami Book Fair. It runs from November 15 to 22nd. Every conversation is free during that period. Check out Miami Book Fair.com or go to Twitter at Miami Book Fair. And remember, the future of democracy runs every Thursday live at 1pm Eastern. You can learn more at kf.org slash fd show. You can also follow the FD podcast at Spotify, Apple, Stitcher or wherever you follow podcasts. That's also where we'll be releasing every single one of these exclusive conversations in partnership with the Miami Book Fair. And of course, feel free to send a question at any time to me on Twitter at the Sam Gill. Thanks so much for listening.


So I want to teach you to the next presentation. It's called Open Coal of the Anti-Social Network.  And I want to make him feel welcome. And hopefully you'll learn something and you'll enjoy this. Thanks. Here's John. All right, thank you very much. Hi there, thank you for coming to the talk. I was supposed to do this with Oxblood Ruffin. Unfortunately, he could not travel. So for better or for worse, you're stuck with me. So I thought I would start the talk today. It's mainly on an alternative to existing social media, but I thought I'd start with introducing myself because it's pretty relevant to the whole path that brought me here. So I was born and raised in Toronto. I got my first computer when I was 10 years old. I got a Commodore VIC-20, which really sparked my interest in computing. A couple years later, I got a Commodore 64 and then got heavily into the BBS world, which was a big precursor to the internet. It was a world where people were donating their time and their money and whatnot to build communities, which is really what I would love to see more of today.  And so that's really where I came from. My first job out of university was at the original OpenColla, which maybe some of you remember. It was 20 years ago, though. This was a company that was founded by Corey Doctro and a couple of other folks. It was meant to be a company that would... It was an open-source company that was supposed to facilitate sharing and building communities and so on. By the time I got there, Corey had left and it became a closed-source company. And it was very, very different, but I was there building all the search technology. So here is a little example of what it looked like at the time. It was a Windows XP application. At the top left, there's a search box. You enter a query. At the time, Google was not super dominant. It was just getting there. And so when you wanted to search the web, you had to search multiple sites just to find good results. So this would do that for you automatically. It would search across a various number of sites. It would give you a list of results so you can see in the top pane. You can scroll through those results if you found ones that you liked. You'd mark them as relevant. It would re-score the folder, everything in it for you that would help you draw attention to things that would be useful for you. And then it would generate new queries. It would do some light semantic analysis and generate new queries and continually add information to that folder. And so you could have as many of these folders as you wanted. You were also connected to other peers. And so when peers would go off and find interesting things and save them, you could leverage all of that. Your queries would go to them and you'd get their results as well. So that was a ton of fun for me, one of my favorite jobs ever. So what's happened since? Well, for myself, I bounced around. I did a couple startups with two of the other founders of OpenCola. I eventually ended up at Microsoft. I worked in identity for a bit, learned a bit about security. I then worked in a knowledge web team and learned a ton about semantic web and recommendation systems. And then after that, I worked at Netflix for 10 years where I bounced around a lot of the different personalization teams, building all of the algorithms that produced the Netflix experience, the homepage, the ordering videos, and so on. And at the end, I was actually running the whole organization, so I have a lot of experience with recommender systems and being in a big company, trying to balance user needs and the company's needs as well. Obviously, in that time, a lot has changed in the world. Google is the dominant search engine. We've gone through Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. All of these things have happened and along with them have come some pretty big tech problems. We've seen a large amount of information siloing and so all these sites benefit by keeping you as members and so they don't really want to unlock your data and let you use it in multiple places. So if I accumulate things on Facebook and accumulate things on Twitter, they're stuck in those silos. I can't really do anything with that data. I have to use those sites. And that serves these companies. It doesn't serve me or any other end users super well. Secondly, the majority of these companies are profit companies that really make their money through advertising. And that means they make more money if you stay on their site. And so the algorithms are really tuned to grab you in and keep you on their site as much as possible. And again, this isn't necessarily in your best interest. You're being shown things that keep you there. They may not be things that actually are the best things for you. There has been endless amounts of privacy abuse. I think the favorite story that I've linked to here is a John Oliver clip that's talking about the amount of data that data brokers have access to and that you can purchase with a credit card. And in many cases, this data is data that would require the government a warrant to get. And sometimes they even just go and buy the data from the brokers if they can't get a warrant. So it's a pretty crazy situation. We've also seen a huge amount of corporate concentration of wealth and power. There are very few companies at the top that are making a lot of money. Because of that, they can use their power and their wealth to continue to be anti-competitive and to continue their advantage. There's a great link here to the antitrust case against Facebook, which reminded me it's about how Facebook's evolution that I had totally forgotten about. They used to in the early days be really advocates for user privacy and for the end user. And they got to a point that pretty much any for-profit company is going to get to where they have to maximize profit and in order to do so, they had to stop representing the end user. Misinformation, for me, it's been huge since 2016 just trying to think about ways potentially to solve these problems and putting out information that is not accurate and distorts people's perceptions serves lots of different reasons. It could be to distort a political opinion and it could also be just simply to try and make ads. Things that people put in information that attracts attention. You click on it, that helps people sell ads. Related polarization. Strong emotion, it gets a lot of people's attention, particularly negative emotion. And so the algorithms that these companies use to figure out how to keep your attention, they're really amplifying a lot of the negative emotion which leads to polarization. It leads to us feeling that we're further apart than maybe we actually are. They're stifled innovation. These companies will build what only makes profit for them. So there may be lots of great features that would be super innovative but you aren't going to see them unless the company can make some money from it. And then lastly, in order to manipulate networks and manipulate discourse, there's been a huge rise in bots. So automated systems that pretend to be people that will manipulate the internet structure to try and trick Google or manipulate discourse on these social media platforms in order to try and get more eyes on the types of stories that these folks are interested in. So if we step back though and really ask ourselves what are these sites offering? It's actually not all that much and it's actually not all that hard to build. Up here I've got arguably the three sort of top social media sites today. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Facebook, it's really just a feed. Every post in it has just an image, some description. It's a bit of a structured item. And then you can do a few things with that like you can like, you can share and so on. And you can add a comment. On Twitter, it's pretty much the same thing. It's just an image with some text on it and you can comment, retweet, like or share on Instagram pretty much the same thing. So if you take a step back and you look at it, well, what are you really getting as an end user?  It's really just post, like, rate, comment, tag and share. And I include even things like Amazon and YouTube which may not be considered directly social media but they're places where that fit this pattern very well. And what you get back is a feed. But in order to get access to all of this, you're really building, we're really allowing all of these other problems to exist. So you also get all the aforementioned problems. So I found a great quote in the antitrust case against Facebook that really is just asked the question of why is it that in a country that's so paranoid about government or corporate surveillance, why is this really the only option that we have? And I would say it's probably because people that go and want to build these type of companies have two things in mind. They either want to make money or they want to control what's going on. And I think that's sort of very different than the types of companies that have been built up to give us these products today. So for me, fundamentally the question is how can we have a more trustworthy internet? And I do not think that profit seekers can really offer a solution to this. For example, there are certain things they just don't do. They did not and could not really have produced the internet in the first place. It would be it was too risky, too long run. All of that was based off of public funding to start and then at some point was taken over by private companies. But they did create all the problems we've seen. So I don't really feel like I would trust them to solve these problems. So I think we need to start with just a different incentive model, which is rather than thinking about how to make money solving the problem. This is a problem probably we're solving. So let's just figure out how we how we should solve this problem from principles first. So in terms of trust then I've enumerated at least what I think is a minimum set of principles. So any system that's built to try and solve these problems, I believe needs to be transparent. You need to know what it's doing and why it's doing what it's doing. So you can choose to use it based on what it's doing and you can detect misuse. The system also needs to provide for accountability if somebody abuses the system. There has to be some mechanism to punish that person or that entity in order to disestablish that misuse. You need as well you need some personal control. Your information or your data you should know what's happening to that data. You should know where it's going, who's seeing it and how it's being used whether it's for your benefit or not. And then lastly but obviously not least you need some degree of security. You shouldn't be able to pretend to be somebody that you're not in the system and you shouldn't be able to access information in an unauthorized fashion. So if we look at these principles though a closed source for profit model generally will minimize each one of these principles. And in this in the security sense you know you you might be able to argue that some of these companies do a good job of securing your data from maybe from hackers although you probably know a lot more about this than I do. In the very least they're just going to sell your data if it's profitable for them. So that's clearly not a trustworthy behavior. So from my perspective this really strongly suggests a free open source distributed software model. So before I dive into how it all works under the hood I'll give you a little demo to show you what has been built so far in OpenCola and so this is really just a re-envisioning of what was originally in the product and the ideas that came from the original OpenCola. It's going to be slightly different it's very similar to the existing social media but there are a couple things in it that we do a bit differently. But just keep in mind that this is just a reference application. Fundamentally this is a platform and the idea of it being open source is that you can build whatever you want on top of this. So I'll switch over to the demo which is visible Okay So let's look at setting up the application I've skipped over just the install there's a server that you that you can run and then there's a what we'll see is the use of a browser extension I've skipped over the install just for the sake of time but I'll show you how to set it up once it's been installed. With your browser extension basically it allows you to take a few actions again this could be extendable but I've just got a small set here for now the little green bubble on the end is just a status indicator green means everything's okay yellow means it's doing something and red means something bad happened there's a little disc icon that allows you to save the site that you're on there is a thumbs up icon that allows you to like the site you're on and then there's a trust action which I'll talk a lot more about later and is something I think novel in the for social media and the last thing is there's a little search icon that lets you go to your feed and then you can search things that you've interacted with and we will go into the peer view at this point you're the only person in the system so this peer is you and you can go and set up your name and an image for yourself so I'm going to pretend this is Nola who is the original open cola mascot put an image in and then there are three other fields that are set for you automatically you get a you global unique open cola ID you get a public key which is used to secure your at communication and make sure that you can validate that it came from the person you thought it did and then there's an address right now this is an HTTP address because it's a local machine I'll explain a bit more about that later okay so now we're set up let's go and take a look at what posting looks like so in order to do some posting you are when you're browsing the web you can take some action on the pages this is where we're slightly different you're not you can I'll show you in a second how you can create more organic posts but the post that we're looking at here everything is very information centric so when people interact with the same resource all of that gets combined so you can see what everybody in your network is thinking and talking about on that particular item so we can start here and we can go and say that we like the DEF CON page and then we can go and say that we want to save a Wikipedia page if we go back to our feed notice that now we have those two items that we interacted with are sitting in our feed this feed is just reverse chronologically orders it's done some convenient extraction of a text description and an image for you under each posts it indicates who posted it and then there's a few there's actions that you can take and also that you can see all the activity of your peers so you can resave stuff you can resave and see activity of saves you can like you can tag you can comment and you can edit the post itself one of the nice things that it does for you as well is that when you actually interact through the web browser it's actually taking that whole page and it's storing it as a single page archive so not only can you just click on the link and see the current page but I'll show you what I'll show you right now is that you can click on the archive link and if you notice this is being served off your local computer so you can go back and see exactly what you interacted with and you can do that without being tracked okay and so this is the more traditional social media post this is a bit of a an expert form right now I'm going to make it a bit simpler but you can edit you can edit any of the fields that go into the template that gets rendered in the feed normally in social media often you're often just wanting to type something in the description so if you've got something that you want to to share you can just put it in the description box and when you save that it just creates relatively empty entry with your image in it and that's sort of the more traditional path so it's great to have your own personal repository I find it super useful just to keep track of things but of course you want to be able to connect to your friends and leverage all the things that they're doing as well so we'll take a look at how you connect two peers together first we need a peer so luckily I have one pre-created here Clippy and Clippy already has some existing posts and these two Clippy and Nola want to connect and so what they each do is they go into their peer view and they basically there's a token that's given to them that they are they basically exchange with each other and so I'll just mention that this is adds a bit of friction to connecting that doesn't exist in existing social media and as you'll see later this is actually pretty valuable it actually provides some great functionality on the other side you do this token exchange out of band of the application so you can use you can use whatever you're comfortable with it's not hyper critical but if you want to be super secure you could use something like a signal to send that token to a friend but the point is that you only connect to people that you actually know that you've verified you know this person so you talk to them out of band once you add them if you want to you could edit the name or their image and see that person how you want to see it on your side and now you're connected and if we go back and look at the individual feeds we'll see that they are now synchronized and on Clippy's side Clippy can go then and interact with the posts that were posted by NOLA add in a comment maybe like a post and if we go back over to NOLA's feed and refresh notice all of those changes took effect immediately and again it's reverse chronologically sorted so every the most recent activities at the top so now you're connected you've got your all your data you probably also want to be able to search that data that's something it's somewhat different again we're a bit more content-centric so the idea is that you share this information and then it should be really easy for you to find afterwards you've got your a single repository of the things that you care about across all the sites that you interact with so searching is pretty straightforward just enter your query in the query box here we entered writing what we got back was the one writing result that made sense notice that this looks exactly like the feed and the feed and the search results are totally unified everything you can do in one you can do in the other so it's super convenient so you can go down and say edit the search result if you didn't like the description that it had extracted you can edit it this changes it for you and anybody that you share with but anybody that already has saved it it won't change it for them and then you can like the item you can add a tag on and if you go back to the main feed once again everything has has been updated and you see that at the top of your feed and so would Nola on her side we didn't specifically build a mobile version but just to show you what it looks like right now it's actually pretty functional it looks pretty good the one challenge on mobile is that you probably don't have the plugin and so we had to figure out how to make it easy to add content in that's actually pretty straightforward you just use the share functionality in a browser you copy the link you post it into the description and if the only thing you've put in your feed your post is a description it's going to do the same parsing that it did before and show you a result that has the image that that the description and the title parsed out for you okay and then the last thing I'm going to show talk about is just the persistent web and so this is just to sort of underscore the fact that you're not just bookmarking things you're also maintaining an archive of the things that you've interacted with so I was showing this to a friend and I just typed in the search Corey and up came four results and they three of them looked like they made a ton of sense to me they either were articles written by Corey or referred to him I'd recently read a book called the dawn of everything and was a bit confused I didn't know why that would pop up so I went over the Wikipedia page searched for it he wasn't the name wasn't there so I went back and said okay well what was actually indexed so I went into the archive version instead and I did a search for Corey and lo and behold the original version that I interacted with actually directly mentioned Corey so when I do my search if you're interacting with pages that are changing you still you have a record of the things at the time that you interacted with them okay let me bounce back to the slides okay so what I thought I'd just give a sort of brief explanation as to how this was all put together it's it's actually pretty simple what you just saw was the browser extension in the web UI there is a main API that is how that's running the server and that was written in Kotlin Kotlin is sort of a more functional and fun version of Java you can use all of the existing open source libraries with it and it just seemed like a sort of open source friendly choice but the meat of open of open cola is actually all of these components at the bottom so the first one is the entity store this is where all the metadata is stored about the post that you're interacting with so it has like all the links to the images the descriptions and everything you've interacted with we have a SQL light version of this and a Postgres version of this so you can run it in process as a library or if you choose you could host your your your entity store somewhere else or at least scale it differently there's a file store which stores all of the archive information and it will store everything that if you're sharing larger sets of files or whatever it will store any actual binary files it is a hash based store so it's globally addressable it's currently it stores things locally on your machine but it it is a very simple interface and you can imagine sharing one and putting one up remotely if you wanted to so that you could be a bit more efficient with it the search index is just built based off of Lucene which is an open source search engine it's super scalable there's a Lucene one that uses the directly the library so you can run it as a single process but again you can run it in solar as well which is a wrapper around Lucene and can scale to fairly massive situations and you can run it remotely if you want to and then the last piece is the network provider and this is it allows a node to communicate between to each with each other currently we are actually communicating over HTTP but we're using zero tier as VPN solution that allows us to make it look like remote peers are on your own network which is convenient for directly communicating and being able to view other people's feeds we're definitely looking for better ways to do it we're stretching what it was meant to do and we want really secure connections between people and it's not really meant for setting up as many VPNs as you have friends so we're we're looking for a different way to do that at the core of all this though really the core of open call is just this data representation we everything is stored as a fact these are not informational facts these are database facts and so in a post the description has a fact the title has a fact and this is basically every fact it's just a tuple it has these components it has an authority ID which is essentially who is asserting the facts that would be my user ID there is an entity ID which is what you're talking about it could be a resource or a file or another person in the network there is an attribute which is what property of that entity you're talking about the value there's an operation about whether that indicates whether or not you're asserting or retracting the facts and then there's a transaction ID so these facts get groups when you take an action that generates a set of facts they get grouped into a transaction that transaction is signed and that's the unit that's communicated between nodes and so it's actually you can this is really extendable this is the type of thing that you probably wouldn't want to run in a big enterprise database but for the user scale that we're talking about this is a really great choice and then another just fun fact about this database is because of the way that it models data it's actually always accreting data it's not deleting old data and so if you wanted to go back and look at what your feed looked like five years ago you could actually just generate a query just slightly modify the query to get the feed and it would produce that for you okay great so you've seen the demo you've seen a bit of how the architecture looks like so how does this help I listed a bunch of problems at the beginning your data is your data it goes wherever you want it to go you're sharing it with your friends in terms of whoever you connect with it's automatically replicated to your friends your friends can see your data right now on social media sites so that's nothing new there's some nice features of that though if you lose all your data you can go back to your friends and say hey can you repopulate my data store for me so you've got a backup of your data but the point is that you can take that data and put it wherever you want and we imagine situations where you might actually want to share it with applications that you trust and you can take the that trust away if you want to but to get larger features in the future in terms of the attention economy there's no advertising in the system it's possible that your friend may try to advertise you but there's no advertising component to this whatsoever and so there's really no there's no incentive to keep you in the site and from my perspective we're not doing anything to bug you we're not SMSing you all the time to tell you if you've got new content it's up to you if you want to come and use the site if it's useful in terms of privacy abuse your data is yours and you should share it with people that you trust and you now are actually in the power to do that you can take it you can revoke it I think there's an opportunity potentially here as if they're at the point that there are potentially applications out there that want to use your data and aggregate it in larger sets we pretend you you could potentially think about creating and service agreements versus end user agreements meaning that since I have all my data is valuable and it's across every single site if I want to use it if a service wants to use my data you could conceivably create some sort of licensing such that you say you're only allowed to use it for these reasons which is very different than the world is today so it's just something that we'd like to explore in terms of concentration of wealth and power this just provides you with an opportunity to move away so to the degree that people do move away you take away the big companies power and I'll talk a bit later about how we're trying to make that easier to do because of course the big question is well will people do this in terms of misinformation every piece of data that comes to you in the network comes from somebody it's not random it comes from somebody so if you see an article say from the Washington Herald let's pretend that's not a real site and it's saying this incredible story and you go and look at it and say well wait a sec this comes from some weird bot farm that I'm aware of you can mark that story that the point of that trust button in the toolbar was that you can mark a story as untrustworthy that signals to your friends that if they ever come across that that you probably they probably shouldn't take it seriously and it can also be used to penalize throughout the network wherever that information came from and obviously you can also just turn off people if they abuse your trust too much but the point is that once you get all of this trust data in the network you potentially can actually build some interesting algorithms that help you to be able to sort of navigate things that you haven't seen before. So anyway people can still put to be clear people can still post fake news but you are a moderator yourself you can control whether or not it replicates beyond you in terms of polarization there's less incentive to share negative emotion I definitely wouldn't claim that people won't do it but it's definitely not being amplified by advertising don't need to say much about stifled innovation this is an open this will be an open source project soon I'm just not quite at the point of releasing everything but since it will be open source anybody can do whatever they want with it and that means you can build whatever feature you want and then in terms of bots bots exist because they're super easy to create and scale you can go and create a bunch of Facebook users or you can create fake links that try and trick Google and it's really cheap to do that and it's an arms race to try and figure those things out but there are definitely cases especially we know now with the potential acquisition of Twitter where it's like there are lots of bots that are actually affecting the social discourse and actually distorting conversation but in this world to get in the network you actually have to exchange a token so I think it would be practically impossible for somebody to automatically trick enough people to actually have large scale effect on the network and if it does happen it really is your fault it's not some company's fault who's not spending enough time on the problem it's because you let it happen in your network and then there's an easy way to turn it off once you do find them a question I often get about is well what about information bubbles I don't I don't know that I have a really great answer for that I don't think we directly solve this I think it might be reasonable to say that in a world that's less polarized where you have more control you might be more accepting of opinions outside your own perspective I think the challenge though with information bubbles that they're natural they've existed forever I just don't think we've been as super as aware of them as we are right now and I think it's really a social problem of people really desiring to understand to build empathy and understand people not like them versus a technical problem and I don't believe that any algorithm is ever going to solve this problem personally so I think that's something that's a bit out of bounds of what we're doing however when we do get to the point where we're thinking about algorithms where you know people if people are willing to share with algorithms that are help like help them discover new information any algorithm how you can basically tune it in such a way sorry you can tune it on a spectrum between exploring and exploiting where exploring is just randomly giving data to see what people react to and exploiting is when the algorithm says I'm going to give you exactly what you want what we think you want that's going to actually get an action and you can relatively easily tune between these things so that what I would love to see is a case where the user could decide the level of explore exploit that they want which would allow them experiment with their bubbles and for me I look at something like YouTube I get stuck in bubbles all the time I see a friend's YouTube feed and I'm like why am I not seeing any of this stuff and I'd love to be able to have control over that in the algorithms that I interact with so we do have some thoughts on that so what are we thinking about well we're we're still pretty early on in what we're doing and right now the the visibility is right now just restricted to your peers which actually may be a good thing we don't know what it's going to feel like for people once they've been using it for a while but definitely at some point we want to think about introducing peers and so on and maybe being able to see a bit further out as long as people are willing to share their information maybe more than one degree away one of the big things is how how do we help people get off existing social media there are two ideas that we're experimenting or thinking about one is that because we are not actually an application in the way that say Facebook is we're we're running in the in the browser in an extension that extension can know when you're on Facebook and it can know when you're doing things on Facebook so if you decide that you like a post or you you save something that information can be replicated in your own data store which means you can sort of like get the value in open cola and still live on regular social media if you want to furthermore with privacy law you have the right to request whatever data these sites have on you and so we are thinking about writing bulk importers that allow you to go and say give me all my data I want to pull this data back in so that allows you to move your data over and then the real question is how do you get people over and I think we can potentially slowly map people between these worlds as people move over but I think we've got a couple of ideas about how to make it a bit easier than it has been in the past we're also thinking about identity I think one of the my big criticisms of say something like Facebook is that I post something that is about my family and then everybody random person I know sort of sees it and I'm kind of like that's not really what I want I want to be able to create my own communities I want my family community I want my tech community I want my music community and I want to be able to control where that information goes and so I think that's something that is definitely not in the best interest of the existing social media companies but I think there's actually a reasonable solution where you can have an integrated feed but when you post things you choose what identity it goes to you can copy things between those identities and so on but I think that would be improvement of over what we have now we're looking at building a better mobile app maybe it allows you to bump with somebody to be able to exchange your contact details and allow a bit more rich functionality on a mobile device I think one of the things that I would be super excited about would be if we do get to a point where there are lots of people and they're willing to share their data with trusted applications I imagine maybe an academic institution is saying hey you know what we'll do for you is if you give us your data we can do some research and understand social structure and opinion and that kind of stuff and in return we'll give you we'll we'll host algorithms for you so that you can get broader algorithmic results to help you find new information and in that world because your data that open coal has access to data across all the systems that you're on it's got a much richer set of data than any one particular site does and and if since all that data is shared with this system and it even knows things that you've done on youtube you could potentially build a youtube recommender that was not even did not even involve youtube and so that algorithm could produce different results for you that were optimized for your purpose versus youtube's purpose and I think similarly you could apply this idea to amazon when I go into amazon and I look for I look at all the star ratings I have no idea who those people are I don't really know if they're bots I don't know if they're like me but you could potentially use this data to help recommend even products for you which sometimes is a good thing and they could probably do a more authentic job of doing that than amazon would in terms of trying to maximize the revenue we're also thinking of the notion between publishers and consumers so obviously in the social media world today there are a lot of people that just publish out data for people and so it's relatively straightforward for us to allow people to create a one-way connection we just haven't done this now done this yet I think it'd be super interesting if we could even get newspaper newspapers to be interested in this and if they were signing the information that they were propagating through the network if the more people you got doing that the harder it would be to inject fake information from unknown sources into the system I'll skip over the leveraging the network to enable trust algorithms I think I've sort of touched on that the really just a platform from doing these things everything I've shown you is meant to be pluggable and everything I've shown you is meant to be extendable and I think on top of what's been built it would be fairly straightforward to build an application ecosystem and even a recommender ecosystem all the data is standardized and the APIs are standardized so you could anybody could make what they want out of this it could be different somebody could make it look exactly like Facebook if they really wanted to but having some basic tooling at the bottom to enable that would be great the last thing is search filters so right now when you're there's probably many different ways you want to look at your data and so enabling rich search filters where you can actually specify people and tags and keywords and say this is the my named filter that does this allows you to build your own feeds basically okay so now what you've seen sort of where we're at right now just to reiterate we're we're just we believe this problem as we're solving whether or not we make any money we're not looking for easy funding we are a non-profit company we want to work with other smart cool people we're looking for debate collaboration and other ideas we're specifically interested in alternatives to the network providers Tor is it probably the next thing I want to take a look at but there may be other options that just allow two nodes that are sort of arbitrarily placed on the internet to be able to talk to each other and so just want to explore and have some options there peer-to-peer systems also have some challenges with the fact that nodes are you know transient they're not always online and so the question is how do you make how do you create a seamless experience like you get with sort of centralized control right now we do have as I mentioned all the data is replicated amongst your peers so there's an easy solution is potentially to delegate to your peers when you're offline and that can allow you to get get updated even if you're offline but I think there's other cases things that would be interesting to like creating dead drops to pass information around or just having some other storage that allows for information to persist outside of your actual system so that's all I had to talk about today hopefully you enjoyed it if you want to ask any questions or if you have any ideas I will be out front or you can reach me at John dot Minjely at opencola.o thank you


Dear students, in this module we are going to talk about a very interesting and perhaps one of the very dominating perspective of sociology which is the conflict perspective. Conflict perspective as postulated by Karl Marx describes the inequality or the inherent inequality being produced by the modern societies. Karl Marx thinks that the society can be explained only by conflict, especially the modern society. Conflict is the essence of modern social life. Conflict emphasizes the role of conflict and power and the ability of some of those in power to influence on those who are not in power to have that social control. Marx thinks that there are two types of groups in the society.  Those who have the resources and those who do not have the resources. And those who have the resources, they can exploit those who do not have the resources based on the certain composition of the society. Society as a group is heavily determined by the economic system, as per Karl Marx. Why it is heavily determined by the economic system is that all the social institutions of the society have a predominant role in economic resources or economic functioning. And those who have resources can control other people with the help of exploitative positions. And these controlling positions reflect dominantly in your political powers. The second type of system is not only producing your economic system, but also your other predominantly political institutions. And social order is maintained not by the consensus but by the domination of power in the hands of others, in the hands of those with the greatest political and economic social resources. When consensus exists, people being united around common interests are often in opposition to the other groups. Continuous tussles are in two groups, one is called proletariat and the other is called bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie class keeps generating maximum capital or maximum resources for the exploitation of the workers in the economic system. And the working class keeps the subsistence level only. So persisting only because of the groups who are economically at advantageous position and by using these social positions they can do their personal betterment. While on the other hand those who are on unequal positions they are always being submissive, they are always being disadvantageous position at the disadvantageous position. So in a nutshell shaping the beliefs of the other members of the society by controlling the public information holding power in institutions such as education and religion that shapes what people think and what people know. Overall a functionalist perspective it explains by the fact that whatever is happening in society is happening because of the conflictive nature that is inherently being produced by the modern capitalist economic system.


I am Pawan Shah from ThoughtWorks. So what I am trying to do is, I am trying to build a service which calls multiple systems which hold unique profile data and club this into one profile object which can be utilized by any other system which requires profile data. So what I am trying to understand is this asynchronous programming not just how can I utilize this and call these various systems. So this was kind of eye-opener for me.  You should use JavaScript for asynchronous programming not coffee script. That was my big learning I had which I had to do some major changes in my progress. But yeah now it's a bit easy now. At least I know how can I achieve this so-called integrated profile and prank.


Hey guys, welcome back to another YouTube video blog for myself Daniel Rosal here on my YouTube channel I am not out shooting videos today on my new toy my Femi because it's a real winter's day here in Jerusalem It's windy It's I don't think it's been raining, but it's just kind of like an almost an Irish winter's day We just want to kind of cuddle up under the blanket and watch Netflix or speak into a webcam as I'm doing now It's also the last night of Hanukkah. It must be said. It's been a pretty Slightly dismal Hanukkah season here because of the fact that Israel has instituted these Restrictions in view of the Omnicron Covid variant and especially for immigrants like me. I haven't seen my family in Going on three years. It's crazy Especially for us, you know people who are looking for its trips abroad around the holiday season Now it's just added a huge layer of complication because Israel's both added Additional at restrictions for its its own citizens returning from abroad There's already course the whole PCR test situation and Now you've got to deal with the fact that if something goes wrong You may not be able to get back into Israel and Israel's blocking basically all Non-nationals from entering the country. So Israel is going really cautious about this I actually support it 100% but yeah, it's a bit of a bit of a downright must admit Anyway, I want to talk today about one of the facets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that I think is one of the lesser known factors And that's the fact that Israelis can't enter Palestine Legally now I'm gonna just unpack that a little bit here. So firstly regarding the word Palestine I've written before a blog. I think entitled a why I don't use the word Palestine for a website called geopolitical monitor It's a Canadian Intelligence publication and the reason I do so is I actually this is my argument. It's not a popular argument, but I will make it anyway I Actually don't think it does the Palestinian cause or the cause for Palestinian state with any any service by pretending that what exists at the moment isn't it is anything like a state because if you go to Israel and And you know, just look at the facts on the ground here You can see that well What is Palestine if if we're gonna agree that there is something called Palestine today now? We're not I'm not talking about historical That's a completely different argument. I'm talking about the situation today and you'd have to say well Palestine is Gaza Plus area A and B of the West Bank and I'm gonna be talking in this in this vlog about what that means area A and area B And that like that's just not a country. It's not contiguous even the West Bank's not contiguous There is checkpoints. There are, you know, some road restrictions Gaza and the West Bank needless to say are not contiguous there's Israel in the middle of them and There's no airport. There was one in Gaza called the Arafat Airport. That's not been running for a long time There was also an airport in Jerusalem called Atarot Airport Also, not no prospect of that ever returning to operation. No seaports that are really under their control There is a port in Gaza, but that's affected by the blockade Needless to say the West Bank is landlocked and Israel even exercises full control pretty much over its land borders with Jordan. So That to me just doesn't sound or feel very much like a state. So when people talk about oh, I'm going to visit Palestine I say to me it's it's much more logical to say I'm if you want to say I'm visiting occupied Palestine or the Palestinian territories or the occupied the OPT, which is one of the UN Nominal nomenclature is for that part of the part of the West Bank I actually have a much easier time even though it may not be my political opinion Understanding that when people say oh, yeah, I'm going to Israel and I'm going to be in Palestine for a few days as well Because again, anyway, this is just a totally separate rant. It's my opinion. Most people probably disagree with it What I want to talk about is yes the area a ban so under Oslo under the Oslo Accords the West Bank It are over the green line essentially except for Jerusalem because the status of Jerusalem was left to be determined between the parties So Jerusalem was excluded But the rest of the West Bank was largely Divided between areas a B and C Area C is under full Israeli control. So it basically functions Sort of as part of Israel You can take a bus from Jerusalem to one of the Israeli settlements Now people are gonna dislike dislike these words settlements West Bank That's something I've only realized recently is in the right-wing world. These terms are ineffable Unfortunately, and I I've just got no time for such semantics. I'm gonna use a term familiar to me You can take a bus from Jerusalem to one of the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and You will not notice anything the bus likely won't stop at a checkpoint. It won't be searched The reason for that is that Israel's checkpoints Israel's network of checkpoints alongside the West Bank and in East Jerusalem alongside a secure security barrier are there to Prevent suicide bombings and terrorism from the PA into Israel. That's why the barrier was built That's why the checkpoints exist so There are sometimes checks going into the area a cities like Ramallah Janine Bethlehem. I Hasn't happened to me, but I've heard of it happening to people where they'll stop traffic and say if there is a suspicious Car and in this case suspicious would mean you look like you're Jewish And you look like it wouldn't be a good idea for you to be going into these areas or illegal They'll turn you back at the checkpoint and tell you to go back where you came from so that does happen But it's for the most part It's the checkpoints are there to control access coming into Israel. So areas C is basically Israel Functions is as a part of Israel despite being in the West Bank Israel hasn't formally annexed area C but it you know operates sort of under Israeli a mixture of Israeli law and Martial law applied by the IDF so a little bit different, but mostly the same For most intents and purposes Israeli institutions are there as supermarkets post offices banks It functions really as part of Israel Here so that's basically the settlements Ariel Like there's a there's there's a long list of them area Area a on the total opposite side is under the full control of the Palestinian Authority Full control means they basically run their own affairs although in practice Israel does sometimes IDF sometimes does go into area a and for what it calls hot pursuit. So if there is a Wanted person or you know a terrorist the IDF will quite routinely go into area a technically It's a violation of the the you know the the fine print of the Oslo records, but Israel Lot for long-standing policy has been that it goes in to area a and it does it probably Probably every night of the week in fact But area a besides that is under full PA authority.  They're responsible for providing education and schooling Etc. It's their show Area B is the in-between category and it means that the PA has civil responsibility and IDF maintains security responsibility So that means that the IDF Does it for security there without any sort of without that being in any way questionable Although the PA police also do operate in area B So it's kind of a mixture in between situation, but mostly mostly PA So that's a BC now. What does that mean in practice? It means that area a would be the Palestinian city. So we're Mala Janine Calculia Tolcarum. Those are all located in area a The West Bank is really really small So if you open up Google Maps, you can just see look at the scale at the bottom You'll see what a tiny piece of territory. We're talking about so typically around the major Palestinian cities like Ramallah Janine Etc. Bethlehem. There are satellite villages and area B is mostly villages. So it's kind of places that are on the outskirts of those cities like Taiba like Hisma for instance and there is Lots of them dotted throughout the West Bank. So that's area B. Also sometimes the periphery of the area cities is classed as area B So it's a little bit confusing, but that's how the distinction works So Israelis are banned from entering area A The reason this is is because it's been in place since basically the second Intifada and specifically a very unfortunate incident In which I'm just going on to my screen here. I've got a couple of things. I want to show you the Ramallah lynching basically Okay, so just opened that Wikipedia page the Ramallah lynching occurred on the 12th of October 2000 making it 21 years ago Vadim Norzic and Yosef Abrahami So these were basically two IDF service people who accidentally went into Ramallah In an IDF service vehicle Whereupon they were lynched basically and this horrific photo is of one of the lynchers was holding up It's a iconic photo holding up their hands with blood And they threw the body outside of the window of a PA police station down to the crowd And they were just clubbed clubbed to death essentially absolutely disgusting so that occurred in October and The actual order prohibiting Israelis from entering area A is actually was actually also issued in October now Not not a lot of I'm gonna go ahead and say not a lot of even Israelis or Olim Know exactly why entry to area A is banned. Most people know it's banned because wherever you go in the West Bank You come across these big red signs and they say like this this road leads to area A under the Palestinian Authority The entrance for Israeli citizens is forbidden dangerous to your lives and is against the Israeli law This is the English text I'm reading below now. You can't really drive anywhere in the West Bank without coming across these big red signs And that's basically telling you that area A entries illegal. Now. The reason it's illegal is because of this order It's a army order That was included. So this is like the official Israeli legal Order journal out to the best of my knowledge. I'm just gonna keep the PDF here. This is on page 12. This is from this publication It's in Hebrew In which the army promulgates in an official manner It's that military orders and if you go on to page 12 of this PDF, you can see here Israel So it's number 378 And it says here basically an order Regulating access to area A Now there is you can get this as a word document as well This is just a scan of the original document as a PDF You can also get this from the Nevo website. That's any vo.co.al. You can just get a more friendly Textual version of the actual order itself. So basically what it says is as follows It was it was issued by this guy who's actually quite a quite a well-known army figure Yitzhak Hitan eluf Mifaked Kuchot Zahal as all you would have a summer on so at the time he was the commander of the army in the West Bank basically in Yudah and Chomron and this was 5 5th of October 2000 and that was on the 12th of October 2000 I'm not sure exactly what sequence whether this was issued just before that or whether the whether there was causation But it doesn't really matter. They were issued within 10 days on another. It says here basically This is quite interesting Yisraeli Toshav Yisrael Misha more calm be a zoo me some a calm Megurove be a zoo who has a lot Yisraeli or she was a kind of a lot Yisrael Luffy hook Hushabot, I'm probably getting the pronunciation wrong by the way Kifi talk a fob Yisrael Vichain me she ain't a Toshav Haas or oh be a door as you're at can you saw the talk of the Israel so what this means basically is It's defining for the purpose of this army order who is in Israeli And it's an Israeli citizen who lived basically someone who lives within a summer on under Israeli control Now that can be either a citizen or it can be a permanent resident who doesn't necessarily have full citizenship So they're really it's really a very expansive definition here, and it doesn't mention Anything about religion. So this is one of the more controversial things about this order is that it's applied on equally de facto in actuality this is only applied And punishments are only brought against Israeli Jews Israeli Arabs or Palestinian citizens of Israel are allowed to freely come and go to To area in between area a and Israel lots of them have family in area in area a cities It's cheaper in area a cities. They don't have the Shabbat shutdown that you have in the Jewish cities So in practicality this order is only actually levied against Israeli Jews so and then it says here as well as somebody who's eligible for Oh She who's a guy? La loti leesrael if you hook, so this is a law of return to basically It's not actually only against Israeli citizens if they want to stick you with this for Because you're Jewish basically you're eligible for aliyah technically you are encompassed under this ban and Finally not only that We can meet she ain't no at the shop is and also somebody who isn't he wasn't resident in area controlled by Israel IE Israel will be a dough ashireth can he saw the talk of but he just has an entry permit That's valid to Israel that person's also defined as an Israeli for the purpose of this of this ban here essentially Then it says the shaytah shaytah sagor. So that's the to safe to Part alif first he says it's not allowed to be there No, you can ask Israeli shaytah shaytah sagor below a you should also an Israeli as defined above Should not enter the area and can't stay there Israeli shenem saw the shaytah shaytah sagor Chayab let's say it me menu let's also somebody who happens to find themselves in area a so this is a kind of Allowing us sort of get out clause for somebody who accidentally drives into the area is obligated to leave that area as soon as Possible so this routinely happens what happens routinely is that Israelis driving by accident to an area a city a Lynch mobbed forms and they're handed over to the Palestinian Authority police who Then hand them over to Israel at the checkpoint. This happens. This has happened There's dozens and dozens of occasions if you don't believe me look at Google news This is not an isolated occurrence. This is a routine Occurrent sadly and in fact this just happened literally last week This is from the times of Israel to Israelis attacked car torched by Palestinians After entering downtown Ramallah on the 1st of December to 2021 So you can see what happened here. It was that these guys these two Israelis who were conspicuously Jewish to be To be politically incorrect They entered Ramallah somehow and they were set upon by a lynch mob and their car was burnt to a cinder as you can see here This is our car in Ramallah. So they were rescued basically saved from death by the Palestinian police who then turned them over to to Israel Why do they do that it's part of the security cooperation So This is kind of the context against which this sits. So just to kind of finish off with the legalese here So it just gives a few exceptions if you're a soldier or a part of security forces You're allowed the other thing that isn't mentioned here is that if you have a written permit. It is it is actually sorry me You know ten low I a tear back to have all the chain of the day or I'll you day I'll you day me show Husmach will again I'll you day Basically if you have written permission from the army, so there there are these routine visits I've been on them once to cover yourself which is one of the The tomb of Joseph which is located in Nablus just past the Balata refugee camp and They can go in now. There's actually a form you fell out if you are an Israeli citizen Saying requesting entry to area aid army evaluates that and let's approves the form There's also these co-existent tourists called to your Riddler and they operate So it's not 100% there are sort of exceptions and you can apply for an exception But that's the default position is you can't enter area a now a lot of people think you can't enter area B To the best of my knowledge. This isn't the case Not a lot of people I would say Know the difference between these two are noticed the difference between the red sign the red sign here It says this is an area a sign It says this road leads to area a under the PA entrance for Israeli citizens is forbidden And is against Israeli law and this is an area B sign This is a courtesy of the Irish times this image it says here This road leads to Palestinian a Palestinian village. The entrance for Israeli citizens is dangerous I can he saw there's a dream Israel in Missoukenet in Hebrew So basically that's between the lines if you actually look at the verbiage saying Acknowledging the fact that it's not illegal to enter area B It's dangerous and unadvised and sometimes in practically speaking the idea will close off access to An area B locality or turn Jews back at the checkpoint that would probably happen in fact So this is there is what exists on paper and what exists in practicality and those aren't necessarily the same But that is those are the positions now what's area just just to kind of wrap this up What is area A and area B? How do you find out that so there's a good resource the the GIS system of the Israeli government's actually a freely available resource called govmap.gov.al And they have a layer. This is only available in Hebrew I don't know if it's available in Arabic not available in English anyway You can turn on the azor ABC filter slash layer and then you can search around The West Bank and you can see exactly what's area. So just give you an example of how this works So let's go into Jerusalem here And you do have chunks of Jerusalem Very close to the city like an auto That's to find is area B His ma is area B, and you can actually really zoom in here. I've done a video on this before and you can see On satellite view how kind of arbitrary. I don't know it says not to rely upon this layer It's received from the army, you know If you really really push it you can see that even in this village of his ma Technically speaking this house is an area B and this house is not according to the satellite imagery I don't know if you don't want to argue with the army and use this map for to rely upon but basically that's it And then area A if we go up to Ramallah here So here's the city of Ramallah, and you can see it's red. So this is all defined as area A and it starts here Before Ramallah there is a cover a cub on the way in and that's actually technically to make this even stranger Within the perimeter of the Jerusalem municipality. So not only is it not area A technically it's part of Jerusalem You can as an Israeli citizen if you are standing at this point in Kaffir Aqab to the best of my knowledge You are not breaking any law, but the moment you go into this territory here in the blue zone You are in violation of the law. What happens if you break the law? I'm really not sure I do know of a couple of people. This is kind of a popular pursuit among Coexistence people and peace activists illegally entering the Palestinian cities. I don't know What happens if you get caught? I have heard of somebody being fined And I don't know if you can be thrown in jail. I've no idea that it's a very very sparse Order and just the order in full This is the original text here, it's actually only one page. So I got to the definitions section here And that is it. I'm gonna see later if I missed anything, but that's the situation. So basically If I as an Israeli Jew Wanted to Meet up with Palestinians living in Ramallah. We'd have to try to find somewhere that was mutually accessible Area C the West Bank that they could get to so this makes coexistence very very very very difficult When it's technically illegal for you to go into the other territory Again, the rationale for this was the immediate rationale was the second into Fada specifically or Seemingly the Ramallah lynching and it's just been on the books since and the army in Israel has position signs all over the West Bank Saying don't go in and the crazy thing is that Before this was issued in What did I say it was the 5th of October? Yeah, 5th of October 2000 before this went on the statute book so to speak it was actually fairly normal for Israeli Jews to go into these Cities of area a to go into Bethlehem to go into Jericho Someone told me there was even a kosher restaurant in Jericho So there's actually people would drive through these places or go into them on their way to other places and Nobody really thought much of it. This is what people have told me. It's really easy to go into Gaza to eat fish in Gaza Which is these days inconceivable as is really going into Ramallah as you know completely openly and not expecting any problems So sadly the times really really changed very radically around the time of the second into Fada And since then, you know, there's been no no progress essentially on the peace process and this remains the case today So I just wanted to make this video for those who don't live in this area one of the major impediments to Coexistence or efforts to sort of try to find common ground with Palestinians Dialogue efforts is the fact that it's actually illegal for Israelis to go into area a as he said to the best of my knowledge Not area B but even then it's the army advises against it warns against it and Probably there's a good chance. We'll turn away somebody trying to do that So tricky situation full of not only Palestinians are restricted according to a permit system Israel's own citizens are limited in where they can go practically speaking Because it's too dangerous for them to go into area a or that's what the army has determined and on the basis of the repeated Attempted lynchings and that one lynching I tend to think they're probably 100% correct in their assessment Thank you guys for watching if you'd like to get more videos from me feel free to subscribe to this YouTube channel