Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Chris Benito, Steve Aderola, and Jeffrey Zilks. Coming up on DTNS, robots get faster at learning. The U.S. tries to ban data caps. Good luck. And Justin Roby tells us why building a PC is still a good idea for some folks. This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 22nd, 2022 at Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. And joining us, the host of Roby Tech, Justin Roby. Welcome to the show. Hi. How's it going? I'm excited. You guys have good topics today. Oh, thank you. Thank you. And one of them is you. So, you know, we can't go wrong. Let us start with a few tech things you should know. Twitter announced in its earnings report that the number of daily active users rose 15.4% over last year to 237.8 million. You might say, well, it sounds good. However, revenue did not rise. In fact, it fell 1% on the year. Twitter cited advertising headwinds for the decline in revenue. Twitter also lost $0.35 a share and noted it had spent $33 million in Q2 on the proposed acquisition of the company by... What's that name? Oh, yeah. Elon Musk. The billion-help pay-all makeup for that. Google has restored a section that showed app permissions in the Google Play Store. It lets users see what permissions an app can request so that you can make a decision if you want to download it and let it request that. Google had replaced it with a data safety screen, which had most of the same information, but not all. And the big difference was app permissions was computer-generated. It wasn't going to make a mistake. If it was going to ask for the permission, it was there. The data safety screen was written by the developer, so you were trusting the developers to behave themselves. In other words, the permissions list couldn't be fudged or gamed. Google will now show both the data safety screen and the list of app permissions. A couple interesting chip developments to pass along today. First, Infineon is selling the NAC 1080 that can be used in smart locks without needing a battery. It gets its power from the phone that uses NFC to read it, similar to how a security badge might work. It takes a few seconds to work as it builds up power so it's likely to be used in padlocks more often than door locks. In other chip updates, AMD posted a trailer to its YouTube channel and then removed it, detailing AMD's noise suppression feature that uses an algorithm similar to NVIDIA RTX voice. It also appears to be coming to AMD's Adrenaline software. Razer is selling something called the Razer Hyper-Polling Dongle for users of the Viper V2 Pro wireless gaming mouse. If you pay the $30 for the Dongle, it'll increase the polling rate of your mouse to 4,000 Hz. Now that's enough for some of you to go, hmm. But if you don't know, polling is to simplify how often the mouse tells the computer where the pointer should be on the screen. And a normal mouse might go up to around 1,000 Hz. But you can find a wireless gaming mouse that promises 8 or a wired gaming mouse that promises 8,000 Hz. So 4,000 Hz over wireless is pretty impressive. It's debatable if it makes any difference in your gaming, especially since most monitors max out at 500 Hz at the best. But hey, it's only $30. Why not try it? Microsoft confirmed it will, pardon me, in fact start blocking visual basic application macros in Office apps by default as of July 27th. The company delayed the rollout in June and added more instructions for end users and admins on how the blocks work and how to allow trusted macros. Neal Nguyen points out that the latest Windows 11 update gives you the option to update to a newer Windows 11 version at the very first start up of Windows if your device is eligible. All right. Let's talk about data caps. Everybody loves them, but there's some horrible Congress people trying to stop them, Sarah. I feel like you should strike that and reverse it. U.S. Senators Ben Ray, Lujan of New Mexico and Cory Brooker of New Jersey introduced a bill called the Uncap America Act. Does not mean you have to take off your hats. It's not going to prohibit people from wearing stylish snapbacks. Instead, we'll prohibit data caps on high speed broadband if it were to pass. And this is an exception, quote, except when tailored primarily for the purposes of reasonable network management or managing network congestion, end quote. The FCC would then be charged with developing the rules on what is considered reasonable. Now, that's an interesting proposition since most data caps exist as a financial instrument, not for any legitimate network management purpose. Data caps could theoretically ease congestion on networks if they were targeted during a time of day when networks are in heavy use. But most data caps don't do that. Most data caps are broad monthly caps that apply all the time. And so they don't really do a lot to reduce congestion. In fact, they may do stuff to make it worse by saying, well, if I'm going to use it, I'm going to use it only at the best time, which is when everybody else is usually using it. But the old devil lives in the details, Sarah. So how are they defining these terms? I will tell you, the bill defines a data cap the way you might expect as a limit on the amount of bits or other units of information a customer may download or upload during a specific period of time. It defines broadband service providers by wire or radio. So this would be home and mobile services being affected here. Not bad in concept. So is it going to pass? Tom, what are you saying? Well, okay, before I say no, the bill does have the support of InCompos, which is an industry group of ISPs that includes smaller ISPs. So if you've heard of Starry or Sonic or Zenfi, there's a bunch of them that are part of this. And they have big content providers like Google, Meta, Twitter, Netflix and Microsoft are all part of this too. But both senators proposing the bill are from the same party. So you're probably going to have party line opposition. And all the big telcos, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile can be expected to lobby pretty hard against it. Well, here we are again.  But when it comes to this, this is, like you said, it's a financial grab. And if we're going to go ahead and redefine how data caps should and should not be used and should and should not generate money. I would love for this to be the case. But as you mentioned, Tom, probably pretty slim that it would pass, at least without a lot of opposition from both the big companies and within Congress. It's a surprisingly short bill. Justin, am I right in guessing you're not in favor of data caps? Oh, yeah, no, I love them. I mean, it's my favorite thing. That's why I have three ISPs, right? Like it's literally for that reason. We have them because we shift, we literally have had issues where we've had to shift between them because of how much, how much we have to do. So no, not a fan, but like I'm kind of, I'm kind of with the both of you. I just don't, I just don't see this working, right? Like that's the thing is like, there is just nothing here.  It doesn't make me feel confident that they're going to figure out what that is. And that there isn't going to be some loophole, even if this does go through. Well, that, yeah, that's the biggest problem is, is they do leave the reasonable network management provision fairly open. And what we have seen over the years say with net neutrality is get a different member of the FCC in charge and suddenly they're changing all the rules to fit their own way of doing things. So this could be subject to that same back and forth. If you don't prescribe very clearly how to define the rules, I'm against defining rules in the legislation to clearly sometimes because conditions change, especially in technology, like, for instance, making USBC the charging standard, you're going to have to go back and change that someday. And it's going to, it's going to slow things down. This is a situation where I wouldn't want to say exactly what reasonable network management is, but I'd want to set up a way where it will stay consistent no matter who's in charge of the FCC. Yeah, yeah. Why do we think some of the smaller ISPs say, Yeah, this is a great bill. And it's just the larger companies that have the most money that say, No, no, no, this is a terrible idea. Because the smaller companies tend to not use data caps because they know they're unpopular and it helps them get customers. And it's very difficult to compete with those big ISPs. So if data caps were made illegal, then suddenly there's less money going into the big ISPs. And it gives these smaller ISPs a chance to say we fought for you, come to us, and hopefully move towards leveling the playing ground. At least that's the theory. Yeah, it's like they can't really compete otherwise. So why not at least take the other stance from an unpopular stance that the big ISPs are already taking. And it's kind of a no risk stance, to be honest, because chances of this passing are very low. Yep. All right, let's talk robots. Robots that use machine learning to learn a new task have to learn slowly, usually through a repetitious and time consuming training process. University of California Berkeley scientists, though, have a few different ways that they're attempting to simplify and shorten that process by letting the robots watch YouTube. Sarah wants the deal. Okay, so Berkeley scientist Stephen James explained in a tech crunch video where he was kind of given a demonstration. He said the technique we're employing is a kind of contrastive learning setup where it takes in the YouTube video, it being the robot, and it kind of patches out a bunch of areas and the ideas that the robot is then trying to reconstruct that image. In this case, it's a moving image is the video. It has to understand what could be in those patches in order to then generate the idea of what could be behind there has to get a really good understanding of what's going on in the world. Now you might say, okay, so robots watching a YouTube video and learning from it. How could that possibly be enough to teach a robot to do a specific task? Well, it isn't. It's not quite that simple. Human operators also move the robot in real life, either manually, you know, with their hands, or through a VR controller, in addition to the video. So the video is, it's kind of like homework. It's like supplemental information. So that the robot not only observes the task being done correctly in that video, but then is guided to do the same task itself or vice versa. They just have to work in tandem. James said that product. The project is showing success, noting, quote, normally it can take some sometimes take hundreds of demos to perform a new task whereas now we can give a handful of demos maybe 10, and it can perform that task. Yeah, the scientists have a couple of other ways they're working on speeding up learning as well. Berkeley and Google Brain Scientist Alejandro Escontrella designs models that extract data from YouTube videos. So they take the movements of animals, people or even other robots, and the robot decides what movements it think it can attempt itself, then tries to replicate what it watched on the videos in real life. Escontrella says it sometimes does so well it can fool other models. So if they're using a generative adversarial network, it can fool one of the judge models into thinking it's not even a robot. They demonstrated a four legged robot that learned to run like a German Shepherd. I showed it to my German Shepherd. She wasn't impressed yet yet. They're still working on it though. And a final method eliminates the need for a simulator. A lot of times you train machine learning in a simulator because you can do a lot of things you can't do in real life and you can do them over and over again. But they are able to with one of their algorithms just go straight to the real world floor and they had a four legged robot learn to walk with the real world trial and error method in around 10 minutes. So they just put it down on the ground and it stumbled around until it figured it out. You know, the first thing I thought about when and and we'll have a link to the video in our show notes. It's really worth watching. I kind of couldn't really get my head around what was going on. I thought the video explained it a lot better, but it reminds me of like teaching a little kid how to do something that they've never done before. It's like the little kid or you know someone of any age right you're learning something new. You watch something you watch that you observe somebody doing something and you go, I want to do that. Okay, can I do that? Now let's practice. Yeah. And that's exactly what they're doing with the robot. It's it's and because you've seen it and then you have a little instruction help. Tom, when we were talking about this earlier, you're like, Oh, yeah, it's like, you know, teaching a kid how to swing a baseball bat or something, you know, you might help them at first and then they get it. You know, what are your parents like, put your arms around you and then shows you like, here's how you swing and then you start to get it. Yeah, they literally did that with the robot picking up the cube. That was kind of crazy. Yeah, yeah. So that it makes a lot of sense because at first I was like, hold on now, Rob, let's just watch YouTube and then they can figure out how to do stuff. We were not too far off turns out. There is an extra step that's involved, at least in this particular research project. But wow, it's, it's, you know, it's getting closer all the time. It's essentially the matrix, right? Where basically Morpheus jacked in, they watched a bunch of videos and then he went into a practice room and then showed him how to fight. So yeah, and it's also the beginning of Skynet. So they won't even need us anymore. They can just watch our YouTube. They will need us to make the YouTube videos though. I mean, most of them are already probably already up there.  Then it gets weird. Yeah, you got to curate that material. There's a lot of really terrible stuff on YouTube too that we probably don't want them to know. Yeah, I think that that is fair to point out. They didn't just let the robots watch whatever they want. They didn't let the algorithm make recommendations. They were selecting specific things. And to Sarah's point, they were actually even removing parts of the videos so that the robots would, or the algorithms anyway, would have to figure out like, oh, how did it move from there to there? I'm going to learn that. And that's how it was able to. I am just guessing that there are already YouTube creators who are out there making content specifically for this, knowing that there is a new audience that is emerging for robots. And they're like, this is my market. I'm beginning here. And like figuring out what they cut out and saying, they're just going to make these videos for the robots. I mean, that's like, Get in touch with the guys at Cal there that did the study, right? Not even a joke. That's actually, imagine as more and more people are like, you know, a robot, you don't do that well. Watch this video.   Yeah, I know you have a million views, but it's all bots. Literally. Yeah, literally. There's just like, and androids hungry for more. Show me how to do the next thing. I'm ready. Exactly. So what is this bot to learn how to walk, but instead it made a birdhouse somehow. I don't know. Which is still cool. It's just not what I want. It's first it'll be the ones who are actually taking it seriously. And then there'll be the new troll ones. I'm just wondering what the CTR rate and the what like what ads going to show up on that right? Like, are you lonely robot? You know what I mean? Like there's a whole new whole new universe opening up right now. Would you like to accelerate your algorithm even more? Click here. I say we come back in 10 years and see where we are on this. Yeah. I know. Hopefully Robert's got it marked down already. He's already, he's already got it flagged. I'll be back in 10 years guys. We'll look at this again. Excellent. Thank you. Well, if you've been enjoying a special guest week here on DTNS spread the word. We'd love to have you tell other folks about this fun week we've been having share our episode links. We're posting them on at DTNS show on Twitter and at DTNS pics. That's PIX on Instagram. You can share it with friends, family, followers, anybody that you think might get something out of all the stuff that we learned this week. Let them know they need to be listening to Daily Tech News show. With Intel planning on raising prices on its CPUs later this year, prices of GPUs retreating from their all time highs. The current state of building a PC might seem to be a little bit in flux. Justin, as PC components, prices rise and the supplies get constricted even if the prices come back down to earth. Who benefits most from building their own PC? Well, you know, it's funny. I literally just got finished recording a video about that article that just came out and it's suspect a little bit in timing because Intel says that it's going to be doing it in the fall with the launch of their new Raptor Lake CPUs more than likely. And that consumer inflation in general, they don't expect to be anywhere near 20%. But when you think about building PCs, I mean, right now actually is an idyllic time to build PCs because everything is super cheap. And in fact, if you look across the board, Linus, myself, Jay, everybody is essentially telling people if you're going to, if you want to build a PC and you are okay with not getting the next gen stuff right now is the time because now it's at its cheapest. And the products are ripe to basically there's no shortages right now. Even in a lot of I think a lot of people are still thinking that GPU prices are inflated, that it's really hard to get components. And currently in the market, it's actually not. Yeah, we've talked about the fact before that that you can actually walk into a store and find GPUs on the shelves. Often at MSRP even. And below. Yeah, sometimes even below. So who is building a PC good for these days? Well, right now I think I'd say if you are in need, like if you want to upgrade, right, and you're hoping to get the latest gen like, and I'm saying that the latest that's starting to sunset here pretty soon, which is like 12th gen Intel, 5,000 series Ryzen, you know, 3,000 series Nvidia or 6,000 series AMD. Now is definitely the time and especially people who are in need of upgrades for a long period of time, people getting ready to go into school. Now is a good time because a lot of the next gen stuff is really kind of going to be about like 4k. And from a gaming standpoint and even a productivity standpoint, this current gen of hardware is actually really good. So if there's a need, now is actually the time. If there's, you know, and if you have a pretty good system and you feel like you don't need to wait, then I think you're going to you're going to need to bandage up that system for a while longer because prices are only going to get worse as we get into the fall as is availability. Strike while the iron's hot is what you're saying. Yeah. All right, well, let's talk a little bit about, you know, what goes into building a PC these days. We have a lot of folks have built PCs, but I know there's some of them say, you know, it's been a while. Start with the case. What are the current trends in case design? Well, it's funny because I sent this along. We were talking about is the current trend in cases. And I think this is the part that's been kind of cool about YouTube is especially in more recent probably in the last three to five years is that you've seen organizations like Gamers Nexus J and those guys who've done a good job of actually starting to make case manufacturers aware of what it is that consumers actually need. And that's and really so the trends like, you know, here we have like the fractal pop air. We've got the new case, the late Lee and Lee Landcool three that just released from late from Lee and Lee. You've got just a number of all of these cases and every single one of them are all about airflow at this point in time. So the real the trend is, is how do I still show off the really nice awesome RGB components while at the same time having the performance and the heat dissipation now. The heat dissipation necessary to make a PC that both looks good and performs well. And I think that's what you're seeing a lot of happening in trends nowadays. So and that's in like, even in the last like six cases that I just reviewed, it's airflow plus, you know, tempered glass, whatever. Gotcha. Let's talk a little bit about the components to starting with hard drives. What do people need to know about putting a drive in? You know, it's funny, I was looking at the show notes for that and you were one of the questions you guys kind of asked is like, you know, or SSDs out. And the thing was, is that, you know, there's been the advent of NVME SSDs, which are these very fast flash type drives that people have been going to. And, you know, it was funny, we were doing, I was, I was doing a stream yesterday. And one of our guys found a deal on a two terabyte SSD and the two terabyte SSD, which is the larger three and a half inch ones were more expensive than some two terabyte NVMEs. And an SSD only have like 550 megabits per second versus even the slowest NVME SSDs are like 3500. So most people are going to these smaller flash drives. And then really what physical, especially like big massive storage drives are really used for like storing cat memes or, you know, or pictures of your baseball hats or whatever it is, right? Like places that, you know, I don't necessarily want to pay for, you know, Google Drive or OneDrive or whatever it was. But I just want to have like some sort of local storage for that stuff is really kind of what you're seeing from the larger physical metallic, sorry, magnetic drives. But I feel like SSDs are going away and everybody's kind of transitioning to NVME SSDs for most of your like fast applications and game and application storage. Now, we were talking about building now because you might not be able to afford to build later. Should people jump on ray tracing GPUs? What's the best strategy there? Yeah, I think ray tracing is here to stay.  Everybody's into it.  So I was a before I got into doing tech, I was a 20 year game developer. And, you know, being on the edge of ray tracing. So even for games that I worked on, whether that's age or halo or whatever it was, right? Like this is something that's here to stay in ray tracing is what you're seeing improvements. In fact, there was a leak yesterday about being able to play control at 160 frames per second with ray tracing on at 4k with the new 4000 series NVIDIA GPUs. Right. And again, AMD has been working with FSR and their their tech to make sure that you can also have ray tracing. So yes, I think ray tracing is a thing. I think if you're getting a new GPU, you're going to get that already. You just want to make sure that you stick with either 6000 series AMD or 3000 series NVIDIA. Don't do 2000 series or younger because, you know, all in all, that was like kind of the birth of the tech. And so 3000 and newer is much better. Gotcha. And then for CPUs, there's essentially parity right now between Intel and AMD. Everybody's got their opinion about which one they should go to first. What about you? Well, so if you're buying right now, 12th gen Intel is definitely the more powerful but more power hungry and heat hungry of the two. But we are so close to the release of 7000 series that I think people like there was a leapfrog unlike 11th gen and 5000 series 12th gen was actually there was an actual jump. So right now the current king, you know, for a couple months is 12th gen Intel with AMD probably leapfrogging there. And then of course, then Raptor Lake in October rumored after that. So we're in this really interesting time where you really can choose AMD and Intel. Parity is an interesting word like all in all, you're not going to be in bad shape, whichever you decide. They're both great. But if you want the most powerful 12th gen is currently considered the most powerful. Yeah, you just need a solar generator and you're fine. Yeah, a solar generator and an air conditioner. Yeah, exactly. Before we finish this up, what about parts? Where are your favorite places to tell people to go to find them? Well, I mean, honestly, at this point in time, they're still the same. And there's a new there's a new kid on the block a little bit because Best Buy, believe it or not, you can get parts from Best Buy. It's the only place to get Founders Edition 3000 series GPUs. But most of us still get them from a new egg, right? Even though we had the whole thing happen with Gamers Nexus, you know, it's still one of the best places just in the fact that they have the largest kind of breadth. And at the same time, some of the better prices. Amazon's always a good backup. It's just sometimes it's hard to want to give money to Jeff. Even though he's not there anymore, he still gets money from it. Yeah, somebody gets it. Yeah. Yeah, somebody gets it. And it's usually a lot. So it's, you know, push out some other boutique. And then new to the the other one that's kind of new is Gamestop. Gamestop has started selling not only not along with NFTs, but also PC parts and their prices have started to come down. But the two primaries are a new egg, Amazon. And then, of course, then you've got Best Buy there and a little bit of a third place. Fantastic. That's great information. Thank you so much, Justin. That's awesome. Oh, you're welcome. I can go now, right? That's it. Well, you're going to hear this next one. You have to listen to the future of airline travel, Justin. Man, I'm on a plane every week. So yeah, sure. Let's hear, let's hear about it. All right. So after a trial run back in 2015, Alaska Airlines announced it'll start rolling out free electronic bag tags to a group of 2,500 folks on its mileage plan elite. These are customers flying out of San Jose, California to start. So, you know, you have to be kind of a specific person, but 2,500 of you can get these for free. Instead of printing a tag at the airport, which can sometimes lead the bottlenecks happened to me just a couple of weeks ago with these new electronic tags. You check in on your phone as usual. You say you want to check a bag, then you hold your phone next to the tag. You transfer that data to the tag to display a barcode, kind of like how it would look if you printed it out on the built in eink display using your phone's NFC chip. The tags also have an RFID chip, which some airports already use for their automatic baggage system. So if the bag gets lost, we can track it down. After the initial 2,500 elite customers get their free tags, all mileage plan members on Alaska Airlines will be able to purchase these tags in early 2023, although the airline hasn't given a price for how much they'll cost you. All right. Sorry. Are you not entertained? Yeah, I'm just worried. Like I'm just like I just feel like I don't know if I would like safer. I travel with a lot of expensive camera gear. I do not want to put something that can be written like or overwritten. You know what I mean? I know it's a plastic thing and there's there's some some bag of channeling. But man, I just, I don't know, like there's been some really interesting videos that those robots have made about NFC, you know, about about near field communication. Right. Like, I don't know that that could be interesting. Yeah, I would I would want to know a lot more about their security. Because I'm comforted that it's a ink, right? Because I'm not worried that this is going to like suddenly just lose power, right? Works without power. So that's a great choice. It's very stable. Unless someone tries to change it, right? I'm I'm granted you have to have physical access. It's probably not something that most of us have to worry about.  It's not like you can't go modify paper tags to but I'm with you. I would like to be comforted that this is going to have better security than a paper tag and not not eat less. I hate to be that guy. Like it's like I know it's like I love cool new tech, but it just it felt like that was the first thing went in. There's like, I don't think I would put this on my bag with like, you know, $20,000 in camera gear on it, right?  But there's just sometimes there's the ability, right? Like just do it wirelessly. Technologically. And yeah, you don't even know something has happened. I don't know. And I think it's rad, though. I think it's not so much about it being picked up by the wrong person at the carousel because that could happen anyway. Right. Check those tags. It's about like having it routed somewhere that you could then run a scam or something like that. I mean, but it's cool to see, right? I mean, I was excited at first, but then, you know, I started going down the dark, the dark world of, you know, just, hey, not my stuff. It would take a lot to make it get routed to a place that if you are not already an employee who could steal it anyway, that that would be advantageous. So maybe it's not as bad as we're thinking, but it does give me it does give me pause. I will. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbags there. Yeah, let's do it. This one was one of our patrons David sent us a note about the company gated's idea for reducing spam by making spammers donate to charity in order to reach your email inbox talked about it yesterday. David says, I work for a medium sized nonprofit. Perhaps a funny way to use gated would be to earmark your own nonprofit, and then use the system across corporate email. So I hope this doesn't just move the bottleneck to where it has that validate thing Tom that Tom mentioned as the alternative to pain. In other words, a script spammers right just fills that in with their junk fishing, etc, etc. David says, I do think it would eliminate a ton of spam just by round Robin approach since I can see a situation where the origin from line is spoofed. I assume that's still a thing. Yeah, totally is still a thing. I don't want to know that verification procedure. I can't imagine it's easy to get around or the whole gated system would just not be worth it and people are signing up for it. So I just need to find out how that works. I can't sign up for it because the place is swamped. But I love this idea of a nonprofit going, wait, we can get people to have to donate it to us to get into our email. That's amazing. Let's do it. Well done, David. Good, good thinking. Also, good thinking from you, Justin Roby. And thanks for being with us today and bringing the knowledge. Let folks know where they can keep up with all that you do. Oh, yeah. Well, it's actually pretty easy. It's at Robitech absolutely everywhere. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Roby, Twitch. So the good thing is I got actually got it everywhere. So which is always good to go. So yeah, we, we, we live stream builds almost every day. And then you can always catch YouTube videos that come out on our second channel pretty much once or twice or three times a week. Plus, TikTok content, Instagram content and all that stuff as well. Very cool. I want to give a special thanks to one of our lifetime supporters, top lifetime supporters. Matt Thompson is, is who we're thanking today. Thank you for all the years of support with us. And thanks for being part of the team, Matt. The way you become the next Matt Thompson and get thanked like this on the show is to become a patron right now. Do it. That's right. Yeah. There's a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet. If you're a patron, you already know all about it. But if you're interested, it's available at patreon.com slash D T N as we roll into it right when we wrap up this show. But this show is live Monday through Friday at 4pm Eastern, 200 UTC. We're always on demand. But if you want to watch live or listen, find out more at daily tech news show.com slash live. We're back on Monday with Terence Gaines. Have a great weekend, everyone. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer, Tom Merritt, host producer and writer, Sarah Lane, executive producer and master booker this week, Roger Chang, producer, writer and hosts, Rich Strafilino, video producer and Twitch producer, Joe Kuntz, technical producer, Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer, Dan Campos, news host, writer and producer, Jen Cutter, science correspondent, Dr. Nicky Ackermans, social media producer and moderator, Zoe Deterding. Our mods, Beatmaster, W. Scottus 1, BioCow, Captain Kipper, Gadget Virtuoso, Steve Godorama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stephens and J.D. Galloway. Mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, video feed by Sean Wei, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, Acast and Len Peralta. Acast adds support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Dylan Harari. Contributors for this week's shows include Scott Johnson and guests on this week's show included Jack Reciter, Will Smith, Quinn Nelson, Joel Telling and Justin Roby. And thanks to all the patrons who make the show possible. Thank you.


Be fat.  Main problem is, I eat like a dumpster. Apparently things with loads of fiber is going to save my filthy soul. Fiber is digested slowly, leaving you feeling full longer, and helps with digestion. Go out and buy two boxes of fiber-heavy breakfast bars. The first day I have fiber bars for breakfast, lunch, and a lot of snacks.  This day I fiber myself up even more.  Fiber Jesus is surely working his magic in my colon.    The final day dawns.mp3. I have my morning coffee and feel my insides rumble in that familiar way. The second I hit the toilet, the weirdest fart in the world exits me. It's whistling. Just a thin, continuous airstream of fart that smells like grandpa's coffin. Those sound other than the whistling hiss. Suddenly stops. The hole is plugged. SOS.  Hang on to the shower curtain and pray.   Now the fun begins.  Solid and perfectly round nuggets. The smell is killing me. Blacking out. The thuds of nuggets shooting around the bowl propelled by my insane fiber flagellants is giving me war flashbacks. I wasn't even a nom.jpg. My guts are yelling in German. Sounds like a moose in heat lives in my belly.  Just forced out by all the gas I've been building up to my throat. After an hour it finally seems to be over. I'm shivering and crying. Both legs collapse as I try to stand up. My stomach hitting the bathroom tile forces one last trumpet.  Completely clean.


Hi Audrey. So I can hear you fine. Can you hear me? I can hear you fine. Absolutely. One quick thing before we start. I mean, it's it's fine either way. Are you alright with me recording this? It won't be for public. It would just be for our records as we're writing the book. Are you okay with me recording this and publishing this on YouTube? Yeah, if you would like to. Okay, so let's both record. So that we have at least two copies and and I'll release to YouTube at the end of the talk if you don't have any parts that you want to modify. Excellent. Excellent. Okay, so let me let me start this. Actually. Apologize I practiced with this yesterday. I usually use my Skype for at work, not my personal one, which has so I'm not used to using this one. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if it's letting me record. Okay. Well, I'm recording. So, okay, why don't we why don't we just go with your record? Is that alright? Sure, of course. Excellent. So thank you so much for agreeing to the interview. It's a real honor. And as I mentioned in our original message, I mean, I think for a variety of reasons, we've been very inspired by the work you've been doing. And we're trying to find out a little bit more about it, particularly for our project that we're working on in terms of our book Gorilla democracy, but also in terms of broader issues about how we can use technology as a kind of disruptive and positive political force. Um, so I guess if it's alright, and I know you've probably done this many, many times. Yes. If you want to take a couple of minutes just to give a little bit of your background and how you kind of move from the point of view of kind of coding and free software into work into a more political domain. Sure. My background is pretty transparent. I started coding when I was eight years old. That was 1989. And I moved to basically start my own web based startup with a bunch of friends when I was 14 years old. That was 1995. And where I was just starting. And I dropped out of junior high school because of all the research that I can do on the world web is now free and all the researchers just roll back to me instantly. I don't have to go through the, you know, letters anymore. And the principal actually supported me and which is very rare. And then that instilled me a lot of hope in the flexibility of bureaucracy.  It's very cutting edge. People put their cutting edge research on it. And I also work with the earliest like the Gutenberg project and so on, which doesn't digitize a lot of early commons. That is to say the works that have fallen out of copyright, which we are just getting a new batch as of this year. And but by the time that I'm a dropped out of junior high, the Gutenberg project is mostly work that has been written before the First World War. That is to say the classics, which again instilled in me a reasonable optimism because I don't have access to any depressing works. And so that's my myself self educated background, more or less. And then I worked in the free software movement, which then rebranded part of ourselves into the open source movement. And to me, it's always political. There is no coercion, of course, across the Internet. You can't beat someone or coercively take away their possessions, but nevertheless, it is politics. It is how to figure out rough consensus. It is how to set a standard setting agenda. It is how to moderate between the various different interests that want to take the Internet on various directions and so on. And so that is the kind of politic that I'm most familiar with the ITF style politics. That is anarchism, really, which I'm versed in in maybe for five years before I get my first voting right in representative democracy, which would be in 19, actually, no, it would be in 2001. So for me, I think participative democracy over the Internet is my kind of native tribe and representative democracy is kind of a new thing to me. But that is not just to me alone, because in Taiwan, we only got the first presidential election in 1996, but that's already almost a decade after lifting up the martial law. So I'm not that unique in the sense that people mostly experimented with a lot of community level or Internet level consensus making before we actually get to elect for our own president about 30 years ago. And so in Taiwan, representative democracy is kind of a new overlay, but people take a lot of consensus based participative decision making processes that they are already very versed in and just overlay on top of it representative democracy. So which is why I think many people, what we call the civic hackers in Taiwan are at once technologists, but also people working on democracy because in Taiwan, there's no 200 years of democratic or Republican or federal tradition. For us, it's all the very same generation that gets to experiment with all these things. And so I think I formally began working in politics at the end of 2014 as an advisor to the cabinet at that time because of the sunflower Occupy. Many people saw that over the course of three weeks, it's possible to use Internet to mediate half a million people on the street and many more online so that people gradually converge on consensus without the need of using traditional representative mechanisms, and which kind of were on strike anyway because the MPs were refusing to deliberate the service and trade agreement. So people occupied the parliament and doing without the overlaid representative democracy, but actually going back to the communal participative democracy and actually worked and delivered a pretty good set of consensus. And so many ministries at the end of that year really wanted to learn how to harness this kind of potential as offered by Internet based participation. And so we built quite a few systems together, and I was kind of a understudy minister, kind of a reverse mentor to the minister, the minister was a portfolio in charge of cyberspace law. And so that continued for a couple of years and then I became the additional minister kind of no longer understudy, but still running pretty much exactly the same thing as I started participating at the end of 2014. So that's like the six minute version. No, that's perfect. I think that's a really kind of nice background and foundation. And I think it opens up a lot of kind of really interesting ways in which we can kind of explore this a bit further theoretically and politically. So I think one of the first things that I was really interested in that you were saying and that some of the work that you're doing is the fact that you come from a tradition and I like how you said you kind of native tribe is this kind of free software movement and also some of the anarchism. That's part of it that isn't actually nationally based. And in fact, I think a lot of the kind of hacker original hacker politics was almost an alternative form of globalization, which is saying, you know, we don't have to respect your kind of non digital borders because we have different forms of community. So I wanted to explore a little bit about, if it's all right, how you see this creating kind of transnational democratic communities. And then we can talk about a little bit about how that relates to kind of more local political struggles and how they're related to each other. Certainly. So my first experience with democratic processes includes, for example, the Debian Constitution. And the Debian Constitution explicitly says, you know, nobody forces anyone to do anything as a volunteer community. Even as you agree to play by the Debian rules, it is actually very intricate relationship between proposals between running for leaders between a condorsed voting system, very complex tie breaking system, a lot of checks and balances, which is why it's called a constitution. So it means that the process itself is in the commons, right? Everybody can amend the Debian Constitution. Certainly easier than amending the Taiwan's constitution. And it keeps the constitution alive in the sense that it's this relevant to everybody who participate in the Debian community. And so even if no Debian developer would dedicate 100% of their time on the democratic process, I would say that on average, they're much more aware of a democratic process that is powering the community than a average citizen in any democratic community. And so I think that's the first difference, I would say, of this transnational idea. And the second thing is that we see a lot of democracy bookkeeping as something that could be automated. Anything that doesn't interfere with the judgment process, that doesn't require a value judgment basically, could potentially be automated. So a lot of voting systems and a lot of opinion systems, a lot of headnotes, notifications, things like that, people experimented with a lot of bots or discussion boards or a lot of systems that lets people take care of more than, say, 100 issues without completely getting lost. So there's also a lot of early experiments on the slash community, on the corrosion community, on many other communities that intentionally experiments about what I would call attention management issues. Then again, once you can take care of many dialogue at once, it opens the possibility of looking at one common issue from many different angles. That is to say to take all the sides, or even if not all the sides, more sides than one side, which is what you get if you don't have sufficient bandwidth. Like if you only have three bits of upload per four years, which is a vote basically, then it kind of forces people to only take one side. But if you do attention management with good symmetrical bandwidth, then of course enables people to listen to one of the much easier and with what I call a scalable listening apparatus. So I think it's two things. It's one of the background awareness of a mailable, relevant constitutional system. And the second is that the system itself using automated tools also lets people manage their attention much more efficiently. And so they can take more sides than one. Excellent. I mean, one of the things that we've seen in a lot of these movements that have used before going to the more governance part of quote unquote, e-democracy is actually the ability to use mobile technologies in the broader sense of the term. To mobilize support and to actually mobilize support across a large group of people and focus it. But one of the aspects that we're looking at is how much actually of a civic hacker mentality is actually informing this and how much is just a tool. So for example, a lot of the work that you've done, if I can be so bold, is trying to bring in ideas of like open source collaborative problem solving. That's right. So more voting or more than just reading about issues. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about what you think are some of the kind of civic hacker and even anarchist values that can inform this. And also what are some of the obstacles to actually getting people to think in this more expansive democratic way. So I think the foremost, the difference is that in the agenda setting stage, that is to say long before voting anything. One need to agree that there is something wrong with the current social environmental or economic situation and or that there is some potential to change. And that is kind of the initial call to action. So it's interesting that you mentioned mobile technology because to me mobile, especially in terms of mobile phones, to me its main factor is that it's operating on a slide. It applies of attention, meaning the screen is smaller. The engagement is shorter and that it mostly motivates by people's outrage or other viral emotions rather than a dedicated time to think about to deliberate about any certain things. And so usually when we utilize mobile technologies, we make sure that we use it only in the very front of the stage. That is to say we make sure that it is to raise the awareness that something is wrong or that something needs talking about. But we actually don't use mobile technologies to replace the face to face talking about or to this kind of one on one Skype session. That we explicitly use a desktop form factor to make sure that we're talking at each other with better entombment than those slides of conversations. So I would distinguish between two polar, not really polar but connected sides. One is to the outrage part and the second is the deliberation part. And I think there's a psychological phenomenon called the empathy gap, meaning that if one is outraged, it's very hard to empathize a calm person and vice versa. And if you're very calm, it's very hard to empathize with an outraged person. And so I think there's both of these in all of us. So what was important is that we designed engagement principles so that we don't confuse or mix those two modalities too much together. We use the outrage part to spread the message and to invite people who are outraged two weeks after this initial call for complaints into a physical space and with good, safe design. And that people can still participate over the internet, but always with a much more dedicated synchronous, if not the same place design. And so the asynchronous part I think is important, but it cannot replace the synchronous part. Absolutely. I mean, and I think that's a really interesting way because what we've been looking at a little bit as well is how mobile technologies can serve as like you said a very nice upfront ability to not just do that. It's not just the outrage part, but also form connections through things like WhatsApp and create solidarity, but then the governance part, even if it's something like creating a strike. Okay, so you use WhatsApp to organize a strike, then what comes next? How do you engage in collective bargaining? How do you engage in actually, you know, a vibrant economic union or co-op or in a more political sense? And I think one of the things though that is really interesting is though, as well is in terms of 21st century solidarity.  It also means like the kind of common turn. But one of the things that I found really interesting and again, if I can be so bold as I've seen in some of your other interviews is that while you yourself work within Taiwan, you see and others, you know, in the kind of civic movement and also in the kind of more technological politics and certainly with the anarchism, see solidarity as more of a kind of sharing of knowledge and information and learning best practices and things. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about that in terms of you seem to have a lot of different kind of progressive technological movements coming like from momentum in the UK to our revolution in the US. And how do you create solidarity in which you're actually speaking to each other, recognizing their local issues and that, you know, these are local struggles, but actually also sharing best practices and things and creating a kind of digital solidarity. Yes. I think there's quite a few things. For example, when I first encountered the phenomena of free software, it's very interesting that people talk about all the fine details of free software license. There's lots of flame wars being fought about the nitty gritties of open source licensing, sorry, free software slash open source licensing. But there's absolutely nobody putting into the license a limitation based on countries, right? When we get into this century with open data license and so on, when it's being pushed by the government, we see sometimes a restriction based on borders and so on. But people in the open knowledge, people working on open definition were very quick to say you should not discriminate between people of different countries or jurisdictions. And so I think it's very kind of taken for granted that anyone who participate in the digital commons is kind of in its own tribe because once you agree to those self-ruling the Debian Constitution that I alluded to, it's kind of a new jurisdiction. And the jurisdiction is not based on, of course, coercive police power, but it is based on some kind of power that is at once a norm, which means the hacker ethics and everything, but also automated tools which delineates what's easy and what's not, what's done and what's not done. And so because of I think this jurisdiction no view of the commons, it kind of take partly from the scientific tradition in the sense that if you publish, you donate your work into the commons. But it's recursive, meaning that you also let others work kind of co-determine what you do next. Because for example, if I make our discussions on the, for example, the discourse system or on the media wiki system, any software update is going to shape actually how I talk about these things with my fellow citizens. So on the technique level, it doesn't have to pass a vote or anything like that just by improving the tools that we each other use is a kind of solidarity. And I'm keenly aware that as a digital minister of Taiwan, almost none of the tools that I'm using daily is from, you know, people who identify as Taiwanese. The, right, the sense from system that we use for collaborative editing, the state system that we use for transcript keeping, and basically they all came from like the vocabulary that we use, which is African and so on. The names itself kind of carry their local cultural traditions and it also reminds us like Ubuntu, right? It reminds us there's different philosophies in the world. And just in the in the course of translating these concepts into everyday conversation or even to our local language like Mandarin or Taiwanese or whatever, we are forced to kind of look back at the tradition that produced these ideas. And the traditions are automatically our kin, because we are using their products in a culture forming way, but not explicitly with these people, but rather with their work that kind of imbues, they imbue their philosophy into those works. And so I would argue it's both ways. It's the norms that's created that creates a people to people solidarity, but there's also people to object and objects shapes people and people goes and create more object that more recursive kind of solidarity and both are of course very important. No, and I think that's really interesting because that goes to a kind of another issue that I want to speak about, which is the fact that I think sometimes when kind of the work that you're doing, but also the work that others are doing or spoken about is that it's not really the democracy if I can be so bold movement of the nineties right in that you're not simply trying to create tools, they're actually trying to show how, you know, technology is not inevitable, if I can be the world. A lot of disruptive things and I think the point you made about automations really interesting because most people view automation as something a threat, particularly to jobs, but you've actually shown how automation can be something very positive. So I'm wondering, we could talk a little bit about how this is ideological in a sense of being more than just tools but also showing people that they can have democratic control over technologies and juice. Right. So, for example, when I see AI I always pronounce it assistive intelligence. And I think it is an ideological choice of words, because AI, unlike deep learning or whatever that has a fine scientific definition, AI is really anything that the humans choose not to do. And then machines somehow does it, right? It doesn't prescribe anything about, it doesn't even have to be computer, right? So it could be any assistive intelligence. It could be, you know, animal intelligence. So what I mean is that if we look at an assistive intelligence kind of view, it's less threatening precisely because it kind of says just as in personal computer, when the first personal computers were being forged, you know, the IBM PC clones or prior to that, Apple too or whatever. It kind of promised the idea of a maker or a tinkering spirit in a sense that if you don't like what your computer does, there's always an easy way for you to find some neighbor kid who, you know, hack the computer until the computer does things that you personally find more gratifying. And that's what personal computing means. Prior to personal computing, it means a terminal, right, which is just a screener keyboard or a, you know, a teletype keyboard. And that connects to a mainframe and have all the programs being determined or predetermined by the programmers in the mainframe. But personal computing means, well, you can do anything and nobody can stop you from installing a new application on your personal computer because, hey, it's personal. And so I think that's the same idea that we're taking to be an assistive intelligence or to share the reality, augmented reality and things like that in the sense that if we start with a few exams like broadband as human right, which is a thing in Taiwan, and K to 2 of education of equal access to the computing resources and basic literacy that includes media literacy and digital literacy. If we start with this axioms, we are basically saying, you know, the AI is co-determined by the social norm because we expect the local people to tinker the self-driving tricycles or whatever, including the norms and parameters and everything so that they are comfortable with it before releasing it to the public. And but if we don't have that, then it's mostly just a few people. And no matter how they design, you know, privacy by default or whatever by default, it never works because it is not really a participatory design. The designer would be arrogant just as in mainframes and not humble as in personal computing. Excellent. No, and I think that's a really interesting thing about how, you know, we don't do this enough recognizing the continuous political democratization within, I think, digital and computerization in general. I want to talk a little bit about when we think about democracy and moving it beyond just traditional politics. And one of the interesting kind of things about your career, if I can be or if careers may be a big trajectory, is that, like you said, I mean, representative democracy was not where you started. You definitely, I would say, did not have the kind of West Wing culture or background. And in fact, from an entirely different, as you said, truck and politician things. So I'm wondering how do we begin to think about this as more than just, you know, helping governments or working within a traditional political frame and actually think about, well, we can democratize workplaces. We can democratize the gig economy, these types of things, because I think that has been a kind of difficult link. And what you've then seen is the fact that, you know, the workers have kind of taken upon themselves. You saw in the US, for instance, they use a Facebook for teacher strikes, right? And that was a little bit of a surprise, I think, to a lot of people working in this realm, particularly within even activist communities like Occupy, but then people working, you know, in good faith in the government. They kind of say, oh, well, you know, industrial democracy is something we just hadn't really thought about. And actually, it's something very important. So I'm wondering, you know, how we move beyond traditional realms of democracy to think about digital democratization more widely. Yeah. So I think it's much easier if you start with small scale organizations, think of a small community of maybe 50 people, or a small co-op of maybe 30 people. I think these are the places where we see the most inventions of self-organization, mostly because if people already know each other, they trust each other more to introduce more, you know, experimental digital apparatus, whereas it's 23 million people. Of course, you take a referent as something to make a drastic change. Yeah. So I think, for example, the Lumio folks in New Zealand, they didn't start from scratch, right? They started from Occupy, Wellington. They started from a co-op culture called Inspiral. And so they're decision making apparatus, the so-called democratizing the workplace product called Lumio. It is almost entirely driven by the real demand of maybe 30 people or 50 people who really want to keep track of who's working on what together and to do like straw pose or conversations in a way that really empowers each individual person instead of some abstract ideal goal. And I think that's really the most creative or substantially creative thing that I can imagine, because we use a lot of tools in our civic tech community. We actually recycle through a lot of tools as soon as new tools come up, we just take new ones into our ecosystem. We can do that because we have a firm understanding of what each stakeholder in the co-op or in the social innovation lab or whatever, what their real interests are and where the tools are there to speed up some chores or whether it's there to capture some moments to make like remote conversations possible, to take an actual gov tech example. Starting this year, Taiwan is doing a regional revitalization plan where we identified 100 or so counties that have a shrinking brain drain or whatever aging population. And we encourage people who work in the national government to relocate back to their hometown basically and telework. And with such a simple thing as telework, because I entered the cabinet with a teleworking kind of working condition, right? With such a simple thing as telework, we actually have to do a lot of service design to look at the everyday work of paper pushing in any workplace government just being one and to make them amenable to remote work. But once you do that, everything gets digitized automatically. And then so the analytics, the searching, the various network forming becomes much easier because back in the days of paper and telephone, once there's an emergent issue like people who want to talk about digital democracy. I can't really pick up a phone and call each of my colleagues saying, do you have anything to say about digital democracy? If someone emailed everybody in their organization, government or not, saying, hey, do you have anything to say about digital democracy? They probably get fired the next day. But once you have reply optional kind of work out loud hubs for things like the activity stream, like we use rocket chat, but it could be slack. Then it's actually very easy to just type out something that's reply optional and people who then reply automatically form a team and things like that. So it enables a workflow that is only possible if people already get into the habit of working in the remote. But then that only becomes possible because people already have some comfortable experiences working in the same room. And so for me, a lot of that is grown out of the organic need of small scale organizing needs. And we don't start thinking about like 5 million people or anything like that. We just think about maybe 50 groups and each of maybe 50 people and how do we scale that? And I think that then is a really interesting point as well about what is the relationship between systematic change and the experimentation that is really implicit within any system within these. So I know that there is a bit of a discussion about how anti-capitalist, for instance, we should be and about are we when we're looking at things like innovation hubs, which are very interesting? Are we though really, you know, are we just working around the edges, so to speak? While others say, I think very much of this, you know, this has always been a bottom up movement. You create these kind of local technological communities. You know, and I'm wondering for yourself, how do you balance those things between having clear kind of anti status quo agenda that does want a different type of world with also recognizing that this has always been a local bottom up movement? Yeah, well, I'm going to be a lot biased because we had this debate when the term open source was coined. The term open source was coined because a bunch of people, ESR and friends wanted to form a marketing campaign of a traditional human right based narrative that is the free software movement. And basically it's not selling human right, right? It is basically telling the capitalist that the way you're making, you know, software using your capital is creating social and a challenge in solidarity. Let's talk about this way. And we can solve it not because we want to do away with capitalism, but actually you can shift the capital first from a entirely harm causing capital into capital that avoids harm, right? Like at least being honest of what kind of software stack you're using. And then generally turning into so-called benefit stakeholder or stakeholder benefiting capital, meaning that if there's things that you don't want to maintain yourself, you just use the open source license and the community shares the maintenance cost. And finally you can have capital that contributed to solutions. For example, the Mozilla Corporation being the flagship example. And so I think there's capital and there's capital. And if you do the marketing and communication right, you can shift the color of the capital itself into at least benefit capital that is good for both bottom lines or triple bottom lines as we call it nowadays. But if you really do the value alignment right, like for example, during the Mozilla Corporation's rebranding and how they did the Firefox market communication, you can say, okay, so we earn a lot of money, but 100% of which is going back to the open source community. And I think that creates a lot of interest in people using those grants or whatever research money that Mozilla is putting forth into really fundamental infrastructure where it lets encrypt the Rust language and things like that. Things that traditionally would not get funded by the private sector, but it's now nevertheless being funded by the private sector. So I think if you have a strategy that begins with scaling impact, but without being too discriminating of what kind of early stage solutions that you're looking at, basically you're saying any early stage solution that shows promise, I'm happy to scale it up. And then it gives people who are traditionally trained in capitalistic regimes something more meaningful to do with their lives or something like that. I think that's a really interesting point because that takes them to I have just a couple more questions if that's right. Which is, you know, we mentioned a lot of fact that there's a lot of different types of communities from, I would say things that are happening like in Barcelona and parts of Europe, which is very much like, you know, these kind of urban labs, then you have within, I would say business schools, sometimes innovation hubs, which are much more about, you know, market based solutions. And then you have kind of, you know, really strong, often subversive civic hacker organizations that you sort of know and sort of don't know. And then like you said that you have a lot of gov tech and civ tech types of organizations and I'm wondering, you know, how do you actually begin processes of bringing those together in kinds of open dialogues and discussions and also saying that you know, we're not trying to tell you how to, what your culture should be. But we do want to actually create, you know, mobile spaces for sharing information and changing, like you said, culture so that we can scale up good ideas that you find beyond just, you know, your own place that you're working in. Well, you start with the open source license. Well, that's, that's without goes without saying, but really without a good license management apparatus where we're back to square one where people only work with people who they already know, right. It is the fact that you can go to a Microsoft website called GitHub and look at whatever creations that fits maybe solves 50% of whatever problem you're working on. And starting building an ad hoc community based on these offerings that creates a kind of an easy solidarity with anyone who puts forward their half finished work and for people's critique. I'm not pretending that it's, it's, it's completely open or it's completely fine. But, but it begins a point of conversation around which just as I like to quote Leona Cohen, right is the crack, like where light gets in right without this mismatch between cultures between offerings and needs between people's expectations and the actual deliverings. There's no chance of starting a conversation because there's no object that could be a social object. It could be just, you know, internal objects that people don't get to form a social relationship. And so that's always the first step. And now once you have those social objects, I would argue that a regular safe space that people can return to is really the second thing. We have in various different communities, like, for example, for, for the World Economic Forum, there's a synchronously done World Social Forum, or, or in all those civic tech communities, there's tic-tac and friends, but in the gulf tech community, we have the open government partnership and friends. And so I think it is something predictable that you can always say, okay, one year ago or a quarter ago, it's not quite good. We had a fight with our technologies don't match or ideologies don't match and whatever, but you can always return a quarter later into this quarterly gathering and say, oh, but by the way, there's some new developments and things have changed. And, and, but without this regular, it could be every quarter, every year, or in the, in the case of the VTaiwan project is every week, every Wednesday, without this kind of place where you can return to there is no public of that you can recurse. Right. So, but to be a recursive public is to be a bunch of people that cares about how these people relate, not just one shot transactional stakes, but rather how we hold the stakes and how we collectively hold these stakes. So I would argue that a safe space both temporal and spatial if possible is the next step beyond the open license and open invitation for people to have a conversation. Absolutely. And I think that like that kind of goes down to my last question if it's all right, because I think you're absolutely right. You know, one of the projects that we're doing, well, we'd like to go on the back this book is create kind of like a global consortium that does create these kinds of temporal and spatial safe places. But one of the aspects about this is, if I again can be a bit provocative. Sure, of course. It's the fact that sometimes I see a bit of a disjuncture between the narratives that emerge around these particularly around people like yourself, and what is actually being said so when I see articles if I again can think about, you know, oh, Audrey Tain, you know, just kind of genius coder if he's now been able to do this. And then what you actually say is, well, anyone can do this. That's right. Do it yourself.  And so I'm wondering, you know, this really brings to the forefront a really serious question about the fact that I think governments across the ideological spectrum are realizing that we need to redo education, particularly among young people, particularly even re educating some older people around coding and these types of things to make them and more accessible for language and use. But I think one of the real questions is, what kinds of civic education do we need to really be doing this digital civic education, ones that allow us to go beyond what if I can again be so bold. What I think is a very liberal capitalist notion of this kind of individual genius, which is precisely, again, what I think you and others in a moment are trying to do away with. So how do we create that kind of narrative that this is a do it yourself, anyone can do this, this is democratic in its most pure sense, and then educational ways of thinking and agendas that actually say, you know, we have to combine, you know, digital education with civic education from a very young age. Right. So, first of all, I would like to address the genius thing. Yeah, my first experience reading the Cathedral and the Bazaar, which is a yes our thing is basically, I remember the quote that I think it's in the chapter of the importance of having users and there's really no users. There's only co-developers and Linus Tolvats were quoted in that chapter. It's not the exact quote. I think he says something like, I'm basically a very lazy person who happens to get a credit for things other people who want to do. Right. But that's the structure of the Linux development.  And so I think this philosophy of not taking credit part, the creating possibilities part, I think is most important. If Linus is very strict in the milestones or in the nitty gritty details, that is, if he micromanage, then I don't think the community will grow as we see today to the Linux community. So always, I think being humble in one's design is the most important thing. And if that is something that could be learned, I think it could be learned only in a safe space where people share their aspirations, where they're not afraid to fail, where everything learned good or bad is treasured as a community asset and things like that. And I can say now something about Linus' home country and their culture. But I think that will be going a bit too far. But I do think that it really creates a different kind of non-individualistic, certainly not American hero kind of personality that is really required to start a very large project and still manage to make it work somehow. All the leaders that I work with in the programming language community, it could be Mats from the Ruby community, Larry from the Perl community, they all have the same kind of humbleness in them. I think that is the most important thing. So I really don't think this heroic narrative is helpful in the least. But some journalists want to write it that way and I cannot edit my own Wikipedia article and so it's a lie. So that's the first part. And the second part is how to make it the civic education. I think that when I did the pro six work together with the pro community, we had a rallying quite called Optimize for Fun. For short. And that basically means we optimize the subjective experience of a so-called user becoming a so-called co-developer. And I think this is, we can use any number of social hacks to do so. It could be good food, it could be music, it could be chivalrous, it could be shared memes, it could be a bot that automatically hugs someone when someone gets a plus plus or whatever. It's really anything goes but with the same angle of turning the act of contribution into a very interesting one, a fun experience. And once people get the intrinsic motivation, I don't think we need to externally impose the so-called civic or civilized or whatever regime that disciplines people being good citizens because then they find joy in making others people's experience better as they have been shown before. And so a lot of techniques that I share like hugging the trolls and things like that all builds on the same pre-meas that is basically to make the newcomers or people who are contemplating a real contribution, a experience, a really positive experience to the same degree as I myself was welcomed into the community in the first place. So there's actually a lot of Ubuntu or a lot of indigenous culture is predicated on that before the transactional industrial revolution view. And I think some part of it is still very much alive in the free software and open communities in the sense that if they don't treasure their newcomers, they really don't get very far. So all the large communities nowadays Wikipedia, OpenStreamMap and so on all nurtures their newcomers this way in a sort of civic education but never a indoctrinating education but rather a co-developing experience. And it's also Darwinian because if they don't do that, they don't exist after a couple of years. So all the large communities we see are pretty good at doing this. And I think that thing goes then to, you know, and then we can open up for any questions that you may have is, you know, we've talked about these types of communities that can things in this type of, you know, really dynamic and supportive culture. But we are living in an age in which a lot of our politics isn't so supportive like that. And I know that there are serious debates and I imagine one that you've thought about ethically about how much is one willing and on what basis is one willing to work with different government regimes. So I mean, I know, for instance, many people would find if the Trump administration, for instance, I said, you know, we're really interested in some of the things which would you like to come and help that a lot of people would say, Well, no, I mean, because, you know, even if I like this particular aspect, the discourses in general that you're using are discriminatory and, you know, against a kind of inclusive ethics. Well, I think others have said, you know, you have to create spaces anywhere that you can. And you can't simply, you know, we're not at a place where we can easily pick and choose what opportunities we take or not because, you know, like, you know, they said you have to create any opportunities you can. So what are some of the ways in which we can, do you think we should begin thinking about this as a kind of digital democratic, and I would say radical community. Right. It reminds me of the old days of the millennium development goals, where the UN basically took a very deontological position and say if you're a developed nation, no matter how much you don't like the developing nations, politics, military, infrastructure, human rights, you still have to help because it is kind of your burden as a developed nation. And that there's human suffering and there's really no ideological dispute that can prevent the critical help that needs to put people out of poverty and things like that. And of course that kind of worked, but I very much like the new narrative around sustainable development goals, which I wear as a t-shirt wherever I go. And the 17 colors for once doesn't make a distinction purely based on developed versus developing or the people who can help versus people who need help. But rather it basically says, okay, we understand that there's 169 different important things. And we know this because we consulted more than one million people around the world. And we understand that these are not commensurable, meaning that you can't really trade one thing for another. But we do understand that there's 17, roughly speaking, 17 communities worldwide that would consider one or two of these different goals as more important than the others. So you just work on whatever you want to work on basically regardless of whether you're developing or developed. You can still identify through the sustainable goals one of the 17 tribes that you identify with. And then the shape of the 169 targets are shaped in the sense that it minimizes trade-off and maximize synergy in the sense that if you work on any of those goals, you kind of automatically contribute to the other goals, even if you don't like their politics. And so I think this kind of automatically synergistic accounting in the sense of accountability. I think it's the most important thing that we can work in the era of post-GDP radical narrative because we all agree that GDP is bankrupt in terms of measuring social progress or any kind of progress, really. But not many people agree on what's next. The well-being index is not fine-grained and flexible enough. The happiness index maybe doesn't capture the different scale between communities and countries. And the sustainable goals only talk about goals. It doesn't talk about how to get there, right? So the radical community, I think, can really work well if we seize the term of measurement and management and accountability from the very capitalistic interpretations. And just starting working on being accountable to each other means that we can answer much easier than before, like what kind of impact one's having. Without even agreeing on what kind of thing that really requires doing, what kind of priority, because we kind of accept that 17 different tribes have different priorities anyway. But if they keep each other accountable, then that's the spirit of SDG 17, is that if we have reliable data from all the different parties, it kind of automatically creates opportunities of synergy and opportunities of collaboration. And if you see that there's no synergy, well, you just don't, right? So I think it is the kind of overview effect of the mapping of the impact that we are creating and being accountable first to ourselves and then to the people we're collaborating with and not being afraid of working out loud in the sense of not being afraid of publishing all these things, and in this role and very, you know, very easy to challenge form to the public internet. I think it's the first step of building a solidarity that is based on evidence and impact and people's self setting priorities, rather than imagined, common utopian thoughts because really people cannot really agree on imagined utopia because we all have a lot of imaginative capabilities and I'm sure that our stone really overlap but it doesn't really matter because we're not even there, right? So what happens is that what have I done, what have I done in the past couple of months and am I happy enough to share it with anyone who asked? And if I share it, do we upload it everything on YouTube and things like that and gradually based on those trails, I think we can form opportunistic synergies and collaborations without pre agreeing on the doctrines and ideologies. Wow, no, and I think that's a very inspiring and powerful place. And if I can say radically pragmatic place to end. Very much so. Um, did you want to, I mean, those were the kind of main things that we were interested in. Was there anything that you wanted to kind of follow up on or discuss? No, I think it's the mobile democratic communities. I really like how you put it in air quotes, because it really means different things to two different people, right? Like during the conversation, I had the idea that what you say mobile is kind of overlapping with what I call recursive public in the sense that it mobilize itself, right? So why do you choose to turn mobile in the first place? I think that's a really good question. We chose it, I think for three particular reasons. One is because we did see mobile technologies, as you say, kind of dominate some of these discussions. But in fact, they're quite partial in what they can achieve. So we were interested in why kind of mobile phones and mobile technologies were taking such a strong political kind of organizing role and what they were kind of marginalizing as well. I think the second is their theoretical point about kind of going from mobile neoliberalism or mobile technologies in the sense of flexibilities and the recursive aspects, which we see within neoliberalism and which we see in dominant hegemonic ideologies, which is being flexible and adaptive enough to local and seeing how that's then being changed, actually. So how can you make revolutionary revolutions mobile? And I think the third was the ideas of resilient mobile communities. And one of the aspects that I found most problematic is that if you look at a lot of the discussions around community, it's still very, I would say, 20th century location based. But people are actually forming more than just communications mobile digital entities. That's right. And what does that mean? How do we create ones that are resilient ones that have interesting cultures, ones that don't try to apply particular past paradigms on to them, but still that they can draw up on. So we were interested in that in terms of then saying, what does this mean for quote unquote mobile organizing in quotes? And I think the book project we're working on, which we should have out next year is we saw this as a kind of guerrilla democracy in terms of, you know, in this interesting way of being flexible, mobile, revolutionary, but also in many ways willing to establish its own systems, I think in the broader sense you really hit it perfectly, which is how do you create mobile safe spaces that actually allow for people to make more sustained connections with each other that are radical about possibilities as opposed to just resistance. That's right. So how do we make the safety move as you move, which is what mobile means anyway. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, I think that was a lot of what we were looking at. And one of the interesting points that, you know, it'd be worth following up on, you know, as we address is also this relationship between, I think, traditional types of social movement politics, which certainly And some of the things you're talking about, which is a broader epistemological and ontological people from users, consumers, the co developers and co creators. And that's a move that I think goes beyond just saying we're against austerity, for instance, or, you know, word for this political party, as opposed to that political party. And I do think that I found it interesting. We didn't get to talk about in this conversation about this type of, you know, if we're being very literal app culture, how this app culture, which I think started in many ways as something that was more co creating, become more Consumptive. And what does that show about the dangers of some of this kind of mobile organizing and these types of things. And what we need to do to actually, you know, look beyond immediate political struggles to actually what kinds of radical cultures are we creating. Yeah. And I think mostly it's just suddenly a lot of people can, for example, get on the wire web, but without the understanding that you can view source on all the web page, but pretty much everybody on the early web knows that you can view source on the web page. So it is something I think that is just, you know, like the use net and the summer that never ends or something like that. So once you hear the critical kind of mass of newcomers who brings a different culture, it's a face change for the original culture. And I think the thing to do is not to kind of rediscover the old culture because it's gone, right? But rather to identify what's important for the new commons. And for a lot of people that I'm working with, especially school children, because we're now teaching media literacy, AI and whatever in K212 now. What we found is that what they're looking at is to make meaningful interpersonal connections. And if they want, for example, a Arduino or Raspberry Pi project to make useful interpersonal connections like showing their families how many steps they're from the home so that they can predict where they go home and things like that. But suddenly there's much more motivation to look under the hood and to view source on even the apps or on even any technologies that's between them and the kind of interpersonal relationship that they're keen to do. Otherwise, yeah, I would agree that it's now much easier to just browse through the scratch projects without modifying any of the scratch projects and from people in kindergarten and so on. But certainly I don't think it's a bad thing. I think it's just a face, right? You immerse yourself in the Wikipedia community for a couple of years without editing one single article. That still prepares you better, right? To become an eventual editor. So I think to have a community that lasts longer than a average lifetime of engagement. I think that's the important thing, which is why sustainability is the key word of SDGs. And I think that also touches on another of the mobile aspects that we really invested in. It'd be good to also follow up some of this conversation, but also, you know, there's so many aspects of the work that you're doing and others are doing, which is, you know, 20 years ago, you probably remember these conversations. People forget this. But one of the main arguments against some of the smart technology and mobile technology is that, well, we can do it and, you know, we can make the processors we can do it. But how are people going to learn to use it?   That's right. And what you saw was that actually, if you make it into something usable and fun, people, you know, for both good and bad will learn to use. Yet, I think in many ways we teach some of our more radical civic education in a traditional way, like let's have people in classrooms and just do it. And it's like, well, what I mean, I would not necessarily want us to learn from, you know, Apple in terms of their ethics. But I would ask, as I said, what can we learn about actual, you know, from capitalism that they've actually had this kind of pervasive learning of, they're actually asking people to do huge amounts of learning in short amount of time. And they've been successful at it. So what can we learn from a different ethical framework from that? Right. I would like to kind of conclude with a real example, which is a real civics class in a senior high school, the first grade of senior high. And that's I think the 10th grade. And the teacher just told their students to go to the e-petition platform in Taiwan, join the GOV.tw and find whatever cost that you think that can mobilize more than 500 people and therefore demanding the ministries to give you a reasonable response. And so a young girl just found this, I think, photo of a turtle being choked on a plastic straw or something like that. And so she mobilized to advocate to take out plastic straws everywhere and certainly in indoor drinking, which is kind of controversial because in Taiwan, bubble tea is national identity drink and the straw always goes with it. But she's really good at mobilizing that message. And lo and behold, there's more than 5,000 people petitioning together. And so I as the minister in charge of open government have to do a collaborative workshop and we met with the petitioner and they're all young people. And it's very hardening to see that they were able to mobilize so well on the internet much better than I would have done where I at age. And so what I think is most important is that to let the young people be part of the civics. It's not just the teacher teaching them how to be effective. It's rather the teacher learning from them how to be effective because it's really open-ended question out there. And by the way, starting this year because of that petition, indoor straw, plastic straw is banned. So they really affected a social change. And I think that's one of the best way to teach civics. Absolutely. That's fantastic. And like I said, I think that's a really inspiring place again to end. Thank you so much. I mean, this was fantastic and I think really eye-opening as I expected. And some of these things hopefully we can follow up further with. But thank you again. And I think that people will be interested in this and certainly this is going to help with our research. Okay. So I'm going to publish this right away and send you the link and it will be under a Creative Commons attribution license.


He's happy. He's loving. He's caring. He's, he's amazing. I mean, honestly. Family and community members, including those from Preston's Bergs, police and fire stations, came out in support of Blade Codel, a 17-year-old who will be receiving a blood stem cell transplant next month. We are excited for the parade today and I know he's going to be tickled to see the fire trucks and the firefighters and all that. I know it's going to really make his day. And I know with everything going on, he'll have to be in the hospital for six months. The fire trucks and stuff will really just help him with it. Following over 232 surgeries to help treat a disorder known as DeGeorge syndrome, Codel has developed a rare form of blood cancer known as MDS, or Myelodysplastic syndrome. With the donor match, I didn't really have to do much because Cincinnati Children's Hospital was able to get a hold of being the match and they was able to find a donor that matched his anomalies and stuff that's in his blood. Here at Pikeville Medical Center's Heart and Vascular Institute, we have assembled a comprehensive team of cardiac specialists bringing expertise from all regions of the nation and the world. We have coupled that with cutting-edge technology, providing them the best equipment and operating rooms available. The result is comprehensive cardiac care for the people of our region that is second to none. The Heart and Vascular Institute at Pikeville Medical Center. With help from Be the Match, Codel will go to receive the help he needs. Afterward, we spoke with Lee Liaison of Be the Match, Linda Alexander, about the program. Basically, at Be the Match, we save lives through cellular therapy. What that means is that the cells that we are able to transplant into patients with blood cancers, blood diseases, the immune system, basically, of the donor goes in and kills off the disease cells. There's not enough people in the registry. There's about 10,000 people a year that need a transplant. Last year, we facilitated a record number 6,649. But you can see there's a gap of about 3,000 people that we couldn't find a match for. And so a lot of it is just lack of education, lack of knowledge, and understanding as to how to even join the registry. So I come out to meet people and share information about Be the Match, hopefully motivate them to join. If you are interested in joining Be the Match, you can text 4Blade at 61474. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joel Korgel.