I just want to say to our guests that its a personal privilege for me and for my cofounder, who is floating around here somewhere, to be celebrating the publication of yet another book from the brilliant and prolific Douglas Rushkoff, who seems to have produced yet more works of brilliance every year. I dont know how you do it but fantastic that you keep doing it. As an author myself, i have to say that the publication of a book is a always a really special event. There is something about taking your words and putting them on paper between slightly thicker pieces of paper that make people look at you differently. Youre now an expert. Its more than that. Youve put them together in a way that takes us on a journey with you, reading a book Still Matters in this age of bitesized social media and tweets and likes and so on. And there is, i think, nobody who has traveled in that space since its very early days when he wrote a book called siberia which almost didnt get published because first publisher thought the internet was a fad and would go away. So no one belter to help us understand the crazy times were living in, when technology seems to be bringing us more amazing innovations every day, and yet for some reason, something about life doesnt seem right. So im really excited and thrilled to bring Douglas Rushkoff back. Georgia from the open technology institute, where she is the director of technology as part of new america, is a perfect interlock tour to bring douglas here so welcome them both and if youre interesting in learning more about civic hall, visit the web site and come join the community. [applause] this is my first time in this space so really exciting to be here. We were talking before hand and one thing you said to me is this book is different from your other books. Talk about why and how and who what your goal is. I dont know if it started out different but most of the books i write kind of end up meaning something to people about ten years after they come out. Which is cool in a way because it means i got foresight or prescient or something, but it sucks in a way because the conversation i want to have i cant have andthen ten years later when im done with that conversation, people want to talk about it. Im trying to dig up, what did that mean . This book, i started to i mean i was thinking about this book two or three books ago but didnt have an answer. I was getting increasingly concerned about why things werent working out quite like they could be or should be, why Digital Technology not yielding burning manlike rave that i had imagined society becoming in the early 90s. And i couldnt put my finger on exactly what it was. I understood that Young Developers were taking too much money too early, and then having to change their companies in order to deliver to their vc what they wanted, 100x returns, but killing the actual idea, and so i started writing about that. And decided when i would write this book, i understood what the problem was, but i didnt understand what the solution was. So i said, if i get a year or so to write other book, i will figure out not only what is wrong but how to fix it. I havent read the book. It came out today. Do you want to talk about what the problem what is your sound bite for people to understand the problem . Well, the main problem is that we in a nutshell this has to be unpacked, i guess. In a nutshell, what we have done is we have optimized the Digital Economy for the accumulation of capital instead of optimizing it for the velocity of money, and the latter, the velocity of money, is much more consummate with the distributed architecture of the internet and would lead a whole lot more happiness that what weve got. The easiest way of understanding the problem is theres all these Great Developers who are willing to disrupt one industry or another. Theyll disrupt publishing or music, but then as soon as theyve got their idea kind of down, they run to the equivalent of at Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley and they surrender their disruptive idea to another operating system that they acted if it isnt even there. They assume that Venture Capital and ipo and acquisitions, stock market, and 100x returns, but that just this preexisting condition of nature. Thats the real system that we have to somehow succumb to, and so look at something when i saw these are friends of mine. We all have friend to you now who are billionaires, which is strange. Saw the founders of twitter on the cover of the wall street journal the day they had their ipo, and under each of their faces was the number of billion dollars that each of them were worth, and im think, i know two different people who are worth over 5 billion each, but i found myself feeling sorry for them because i realize these are the guys that disrupted visa and mastercard with paypal. They disrupted journalism with twitter, and now here they were surrendering what they had done and surrendering all that disruption to the biggest, baddest industry on the block. They let you ring the bell at the Nasdaq Stock Exchange and clap for you. Not because you have done something disruptive. It is because you have confirmed the premises of Corporate Capital to the whole scheme and you have enslaved yourself and your company now to pivoting towards 100x or 1,000x return and away from whatever it did. Now were here with twitter. One of hi favorite apps, 140 character app that makes 500 million a quarter and thats considered an abject failure by wall street. That a failure. And the company now has to go become, what, video advertising, blah blah, and where goes twitter . And so what i wanted to do is figure out what could they have done and what could we do to have a Development Path that leads to something other than just magnifying this growth imperative, which is driving us off the cliff anyway. So, ive been talking about this and you talk about what companies can do and what individuals can do. Theres a role for government to play in this as well, as a Public Policy person, how do we incentivize change . If the system is in place, how do we take down the system . Well, i hate to sound libertarian here but i will for a moment, because im not. But one thing the government can do is change the nature of their regulations. Im not saying deregulate the marketplace so that wall street can go crazy. Or deregulate so the rich can have rich. What im saying is dont right now, regulations arent really being made in the interest of people anyway. The people who write the regulations are the very largest players in the industry. So, when a simple nontech, example, would be there was a big lead paint scare in the toy industry a bunch of years doing, door a a toys had lead paint, outsourced from china. So well form a commission, get the leaders of industry together with the leaders of government and come up with regulations to prevent this from happening again, and the regulations was a Testing Process that required 40,000 per toy that youre going to release on the market. What a small toy manufacturers supposed to do with that . If you make handcrafted toy trains that you want to sell through a toy store, how do you participate in that . You cant. So, industry used their own mistake, their own problem of big industry, as an excuse to regulate the marketplace so that it would advantage them even more. So regulation right now favors the largest players on the block. Like the reason why uber can move into new york is because they have a warchest. The investment in uber is not paying for the app. Its paying to deregulate the marketplace in their favor. So that one elm the other biggie and its a simple tax shift is i mean, the simple way to say it is, right now in the way i sound like bernie here right now, our tax thats all right. Should people write you in . No, the simple problem with the tax code is Capital Gains are taxed much, much less than real earnings, than dividends. What is that sniff youre thinking of it as a Computer Program and now biasing is so that people who make money by simply having money dont have to pay taxes but people who make money by earning money have to pay taxes. What are you billing into the system . If you want to optimize your economy or the accumulation of capital, the distract of poker chips from the playing board, into the accounts of shareholders, then optimize it that way. If you want to optimize the economy for the circulation of capital through the society so that people can create and Exchange Value between each other, then you want to reverse that bias. You want to taxes on dividends and earnings to be really low and taxes on capital accumulation to be high. How do we make that happen some get people to change and what can people who are here do in daytoday choices or that theyre working on . I mean, the easy way to disempower the sitting bags of capital that are there is to try in some ways try to ignore them, which is hard to do. You create an application with two friends and you can build it pretty much on a laptop, and then use a scalable server, even go to amazon cloud. I dont care. Go to something scalable you. Dont need ten millions of dollars from y company to get to the next level. Once you bring those people in, now youre in a different game. Now youre no longer building a business for the prosperity of that business. Now youre building a business in order to sell it. So if your goal is to create a thriving, sustainable business, then think twice about selling it. Dont sell it. Hold on to it. Thats sort of number one. As individuals its really i mean as consumers you can make way better choices howl you buy things. Its as simple if someone buys my book from a local book seller instead of from amazon i mean theyre local book seller now there is money circulating in their community. And take that eve. They dont care about the books. They care about the monopoly. So its a very different thing. You can if youre organizing a company, consider how can your company make everybody who touches your company wealthy. The traditional corporate industrial tactic is to look at everybody else as a resource to distract value from them but if youre can extracting value from your customer base, they get too poor to be your customer. Thats the problem walmart is having now. The towns walmart has gone into is going bankrupt. Theyre losing customers so walmart is Closing Stores and the towns are trying to figure out how to rebuild a local infrastructure, how to create a drug store, and a book store and Everything Else that we need to replace this big vacuum that came to our community and wiped out our connective tissue. Companies can think about communicating with shareholds differently. So instead of beingbe holden to the growth of the share praise, tell your showerholders theyre going to earn real money for owning a portion of your company. Create companies as platform cooperatives where your workers are owners in the company. Theres a competitor to uber called june bow and its the same juneau and its the same idea except they pay the cabbies more and the drivers own 50 of the company. So when that company eventually pivots to mechanical cars driven by computers you havent done the research and development for the thing that will replace you. Youve done the research and development for the company you own. So now the drivers are going out, doing your work, your job has been replaced but your income hasnt been taken away because you own the thing. So these are really they sound theyre just the basic steps you have to think of things. Were in a digital age, you have to think of the mechanisms that youre using and that the instruments that youre putting into place, you have to think of them like programs. And you have to bias them towards circulation and towards making people wealthy. If you have a business making its customers wealthy, making its suppliers way. Y, making competitors wealthy, theyre going to keep you around but just not the way we think. Make other people wealthy . Yes so they can buy stuff from you. And its not its not Rocket Science to do that. To that point, that another policy projection, building in mechanisms for other types of businesses, because cooperative businesses of that model youre describing arent actually possible in a lot of places. So thats some right. Luckily theres things like b corps and alternative corporate structures that let you value things other than your fiduciary responsibility to your shareholders. Its from an economics perspective its understanding that when you take in capital, and you let a Venture Capitalist by in charge of your company, then the only contribution he is going to value is capital. But if you understand economics, you understand theres three main factors of collection. Capital is one of them, but land and labor are the other two. And this is back to adam smith and any economist, any lib be tarean will tell you, land, labor, capitol. To to val all the land and labor . By building it into the core of the company to understand there are three kind of contributions, and all three have to be rewarded by the company. You cant just look at a company as Venture Capital thats extracting value from land and labor or you end up with a world thats going to die and with people with no jobs. You mentioned earlier, people people are going for the funding. Thats a mentorship model. Theres the question, does everybody know how to do this . The answer is probably they dont. If theyre not needs to change is the advice theyre getting. How to build a better support system for changing the thinking around how business happens . Are there evangelists that exist that we can start to tell their stories more . Does it need to be a special different type of incubator . How can be change the Community Around let do it. Part of a civic hall. Part of wry i wrote this book to say heres a manual. To understand what went wrong and how to do it right. Theres people around traumatic to Trevor Schulte new school who is starting a whole organization. Platform cooperatives, talk to michelle bowlines at the peer to peer foundation, youll see tons of articles. Talk to robin hood in tipland, there are a lot of groups out there, a lot of them looking at block chaining, folks looking at how can we do authentication in a peertopeer way. Those efforts get sidetracked because people invest them and think, oh, bit coins. When you see the winkleboss brothers stale stay away. There are meant years out there but i feel like a lot of people know in their gut what theyre doing right. Its not Rocket Science. The young people that when theyre in their dorm room in stanford or columbia and come up with the idea issue feel like so many of them would be better off with 50,000 and no mentorship than 5 million and the mentorship theyre getting the mentorship theyre getting that, irnot dumb. Theyre smart people but theyre smart at doing a very particular thing which is bringing something to exit. Bringing something to an exit event. And, good, have friends in here right now with a product called ready just gotten away from Venture Capital and his like, we can just do this thing. It used be to called bootstrapping, but it used to justbe called building a business. Build a business, get some revenue, use some revenue to live and some to invest back into the company. Its a Slower Growth thing but when you grow slower so much easier to develop a product that your customers like because then you can see your custom reaction. You can use good Old Fashioned quarters and semi annual feedback and adjust and change. Youre not stuck on the clock of 18 months. Ive got 18 months to turn this thing around. Thats not fair to any business in the real world. How people in the room have heard of one of these initiatives . Thats about ten hands. Two. You have a decisionmaking tool. A lot of them you wont hear of. Just like the best candidates for president you never heard of. We heard of trump. So its like just because you dont know them, doesnt mean theyre not great. The fact is a lot of them are local. There is nothing wrong with creating a business that doesnt scale up. Not everything scales up. Scaling up is an artifact of the Industrial Age where you have to become the one, the winner, the king of the hill. You can actually be one of many in your business. That actually cool. Used to be guilds. There were many people who built bridges and made houses and shoes and they had guilds and shared technologies and innovations with each other, and they understood that if everyone gets better, were all doing better. They built a culture around what they did. Now its as if the economic term is the as if the number is the number that if its a sear row, it means everything is distributed everywhere and if it goes to one it means all the money has been scooped up by one player. Feels like the Digital Economy is strictured so there will be one big winner. Leak a poker game. One guy gets all the chips, who is going to get everything . And thats because theyre so addicted to scale, and even in our good lefty progressive world, i have so many kids want to create i want to create a platform that can aggregate all of the web sites that are aggregating the people who are doing social change. And everybody wants to do that because everybody wants to have the thing that frames the thing that frames the thing. Get that. Its not as much fun as just doing the thing locally. Its so hard in a world where we all want 20,000 twitter followers and we all want the recognition but the satisfaction you get in creating, like, greenlight book store, in green point, and having a community of people who love what you do, that youre supporting, becoming human scaled economies are local. And when theyre local, they necessarily respect land. When theyre local they necessarily respect labor because those are the people who are paying the taxes to put your kids to school so you need everybody to be participating. Its so much more enjoyable. So, sure, you can come up with mechanisms people can model in lots of different places but in terms of having a satisfying business, this is part of what were retrieve fog the digital age is a very almost medieval approach to business, where its part of my city, part of the place i live and i do something. We make fun of people making art beers and heritage yams or whatever, but i mean, are the wealthiest people do when they retire . They go and make beer and yams and orchids and stuff. Thats actually fun to do. And if you can do it in a way that supports your community and theyre doing something that supports you, you just start to see not all of this but a larger percentage of your Economic Activity ends up taking place in the sphere between people on a more local scale, and, yeah, youre going to still buy your iphones from apple and multinational con glom rats but dent have to be the entire economy. Someone told me about what started as the occupy movement and organizing for that room and loot of them the government had a turning point, we hear you, were in, what do we need to do . And have hired them. Youre seeing these now activists are becoming Government Employees and starting to do process change. Its hard for me to i was like, that sounds awesome. How do we see Something Like that happen here . England still has some going on but less of the narrative that we are seeing at the moment. But how too we change that or find the local stories and get people to Pay Attention to the local issues. The local economy questions . Is that possible here . What needs to be the breaking point . Is my question. The attentiongetting media that we currently employ are not the very best ones for telling the kinds of stories that youre talking about. The click base. Donald trump insulting black people is way better click base than General Assembly tool employed for civic reengage independent thailand. But the people in thailand, where that app is being used, end up having a lived experience that is different. Im actually becoming okay with National Global media being the disconnected freak show that it is, as long as ive got a real life of actual connections with other people that is something else. Theres a certain the big picture of what were doing is reasserting the human agenda. That really what were doing. My bigger case here is to get people to join team human rather than Team Computer or Team Capitalism or team system. Were mistaking the metrics that we put on the wall for the betterment of humanity, and the way to get in touch with what is good for people really is on a local level. Theres these good Old Fashioned things like making eye contact with people is so rich. Its like such a weird thing to do if youve been online. Make eye contact with people, sit in spaces with people. See how your town is actually functioning. Go to a school board meeting, joint a Community Supported agricultural group. So many things you can do and youre not going you might gate some latenight msnnbc Small Business innovation, but in some ways getting a lot of Media Attention for something in some ways is a reverse indicator. Because it means in some way theyve been able to frame it as part of industrialism, as, oh, this is going to scale up. This is going to work for everybody. The fact is things work differently in all places. We all have different models. Some models can be modeled and shared but always goes to be tweaked, and thats what you want to be able to do. The beauty of a digital age this is the digits, the fingers, its handon thing. It can restore the human scale, and you start thinking less in terms of, oh, lets put this big Shopping Mall there and, rather, how are we going to create circulation of currency between the Business People in our community already. So i dont mean to not answer your question, but i think the object of the game is not to get attention for the idea. Thats my job right now. I wrote this book. Im going to go out there and stump and ill fight and hopefully some people will read it. Thats what books are for. The boy scout manual is one of them. This is another one. Get out there let people see it. Its as easy as a pdf. The trap we dont want to get into is the trap that obama fell into after the song market crashed to think business as usual. I got to get a bank to lend money to a corporation to build a factory to hire people and get them jobs. Huhuh. Thats the thing that just failed. What he should have done was sent a pdf to lapsing and say here how you set up a time bank, saver bank, local currency so that people understand, if you have people with skills and people with needs, thats all you need for an economy. That all we used to need for an economy. Thats why i go back to 1100, the last time we had a freeform bizarre, a marketplace with market currency that were only good for the day, that were biased temperatures traps action. Get people the goods they need, the chickens they need and and the shoes they need and invest in the local bridge. They optimized their currency for that. The problem was really wealthy people were getting relatively less wealthy also the middle class rose. So they made local current sides illegal you. Had to borrow money from a central bank. Made business foroffs illegal. They formed the charter monopoly which were defend bid laws. Todays platform monopoly is defended by technology. These are oneway technologies. Once you bring this technology into your business, into your life, really hard to get it out. You become dependent on it. They use what is called defensible outcomes. Thats the startup term. You want defensible outcomes. That means people use what youve got but then cant go to something else. That not the way to do business. Seems to me like its just at odds with using technology to solve problems. One thing i think about when you look at romeo, the technology isnt super crazy advanced. Its a Pretty Simple tool. What it comes down to is people enforcing the rules of using the tool. It is about the human interaction. Its just easy to use absolutely. Im not a tech know solutionist. I dont think theres a Computer Program, we write, new operate system that changes everything. Theres not an app to fix this. We cant just do an update overnight and then the economy and the government and everything works. It doesnt happen like that. But we have moved from a broadcast era, an electronic age, into a digital age, were living in a Digital Media environment. And that doesnt mean digital just that were all going to use Digital Tools but means the way in which we make decisions is going to be informed by a more digital programattic,kingking algorithmic. Its not a matter of better encryption. Its a matter of better listening, better connection, better contact. The thing i think is interesting is right now we have such focus on the tools solving the problem. So even when we tell the stories where there are good things happening we focus on the technology as opposed to the interaction. The perfect ted talk. Its about the tool facilitating getting people in a room together. Taking twitter as an example. What is interesting is when people organize online to end up somewhere together to do something. Which we still see a lot of, but and how too you negotiate that how do you stay running . They have to figure something out to function they get asked for donations. Theyre still private. Just get out from under their shareholders. More than profitable. Thats kind of an easy one. I did this talk a long time ago where i quoted tim the leary who was doing talks at berkeley and a woman said i had this experience and asaw light now what die do . And he said, find the others. And i gave a talk where i framed that, and then scott helperman was at the talk and that week he came up with the idea to do meetup, and the idea of meetup was, lets do something that is like yahoo groups sent the purpose of the net is to get people connecting in real places offline, to facilitate the real world rather than replace it. This only people who want the note replace the real world are people who dont mean us any good. People who want to just market us to death and monetize our social block and make our behaviors more predictable. Thats what big data is for. They use big data to advertise to the future to us that we havent yet realized were going live. And turn us from 80 probability of going down that lifestyle path to 90 . So theyre trying to reduce anomalous, strange, unique Human Behavior in order to amp up their returns. Technology should be for the opposite purpose. Technology should be to get us together and get out of the way. Were only here for some much time. You have 100 years. What do you want to do that . Do you want to do that with Google Cardboard . Its 3d already. I feel like thats a good moment to see if people have questions. Theres hand back there. You began with the argument that the philosophy of moneys, some you said Community Based solutions can develop goods that are both economic and social and moral put at some point you noted, oh, you till have your iphone that got made here and there. So im curious about where is the division between this communitybased economy, this pry ore prioritization of the money, and what is necessary for a more industrialized society. Im not the head of the politburo so i cant come up with a specific the plan. Right now i would guess were at like a 90 to 10 industrial to local balance in what we do. And what i would encourage is that we make more of our choices on the local scale, and then start to see how that balances out. There will still be walmarts but i think there could be fewer of them. Its really its about balance. I dont think its a matter we dont crash the gatees. This is not about a revolution where we take down the big companies. Theyre all going to go. Theres some things that industrialism is really good for. Making power plants. Making cars. Theres a lot of stuff that its good at but a lot of stuff its doing that it doesnt need to do like industrial agriculture, which is ultimately less efficient. Its less resource efficient than organic farming can just is, but its regulated into existence. Have you looked at a map of the top soil condition of america . We have screwed it up. We addicted our crops to industrial agriculture so unwinding that slowly is something id like to see, and it might mean in some cases eating food that happens to be available in that season. But then you start to find out that im not getting sick because im not eating stuff that my body isnt kind of ready to be eating. When you start doing you start reading all your health stuff and you see it happens to just grow right then. Its not a matter of me saying, we have to stop all this and do all that, but to say lets start making some choices. Theres a whole lot of companies that could be structured in ways that promote more either local activity or promote the velocity of money. So, walmarts biggest competitor now is winco, giant Supermarket Chain and theyre taking walmart down, and the difference is winco is owned by to the employees. Its a co an. Walmart residents efficient is were going to pay the workers as little as possible and let their health care paid for by welfare because they dont make enough money to have insurance wincos way of cutting corners is saying were not going to hear shaveholder to pay money to. We dont that deliver profits to people who dont give a hoot what were even doing theyve just want their money. So it is possible. As you do that theres going be less shareholding opportunities for people. Then what do we do . Then we have to start investing locally. Youre going to invest in the local pizzeria, the local book store, and youre going to get at the ground level because you the that guy. Youre not buying shares retail 90 layers of investment after. Youre the if youre buying a stock, youre at the bottom of the pyramid. Thats by definition. If the stocks able to you it too late. Its too late. If you can actually support a local business, this is what ive been suggesting to banks is that instead of just lending if that pizzeria wants to expand and have a couple now bathrooms and another dining room. Instead of just giving that guy 100,000 he has to pay back with interest, what if you give him 50,000 contingent on his ability to raise the other 50,000 from the community, and you give him the tool theyd can raise, you get 100 from somebody, get 100 from a patron and they get 120 worth of pizza when the new restaurant opens. So now that person has got an 20 return on their money in the first year, which is more than theyll get in the pizzeria can pay it back in pizza and the bank is not the pure distracter of value from the community but its the facilitator of Community Reinvestment in the community. With that 100 ive got a bigger pizzeria on my main street, more thriving main street, my Property Value goes up. Tax base goes up. My schools get better. What has happened here . Really simple. So its matter of just rebalancing things. Not shooing the banks 0 evident the room but a get them to participate rather than extractors. I havent read the book but in listening to you bring up examples im remind that for all the oneds you say they can do this and have done this or whatever, im thinking also about the places theyve had problem. Rei is a coop and have had some labor problems lately. Just being a memberowned coop or being local does not ensure all these evillers away eel evils are away. This isnt necessarily a panacea for all things. The other thing, too greenlight book store is which in port green and not green point also now doing a second doing the funding model for the second store in park slope, and i think about it and its great theyre doing that. I love the book store. I thought about investing but also occurred to me that theyre going to do it in park slope. Whats the chances theyll do it in bedstuy or East New York . Theyre not. So while it is great that you have a local model that fund athlete community, for communities without economic wealth and development the request becomes how we ensure that theyre able to participate in it. So walmart at least is bringing to those communities something, and maybe its taking more but at least how do we then ensure if youre saying regulations for the big players who want government or regulation out, how do we then ensure, put a mechanism in place that ensures equity in the model. This is not a phenomenon of the cultural creatives of ithaca. All the stories about local currency, always talk about ithaca or berkeley or somewhere. Its also happening in east lansing, and in the steel belt. Look at what carter did in the south bronx. Its not in some ways the people who are experiencing the greatest Economic Hardship have the least attachment to these bankrupt models and the most willingness to do things. When i think about what is going to happen, i feel like either were going to do this by choice and those of white house have the choice to do it are in the best position to do it by choice, or were going to do it by necessity the way they did back in the depression, when we saw local currencies come up, we saw different kinds of community script evolve and. So, as far as greenlight, the popes who came up with the theory of distributivism and subsidiaryism, in response to marxism. The popes got asked what are you guys, communists or capitalists in and they said, well, kind of both. We believe in the free market and people should have the ability to make money bit we belief in distributeism. Works should have access to the means of production. They should own the means of their own production and as long as they can, then theyll participate. The other thing they argue for is something they called subsidiaryism, and the principle is that a business shouldnt be bigger than it needs to be in order to do what it does. They would probably argue, look, you probably shouldnt open that second store in park slope. You should probably find someone in park slope and teen them how you did what you did. If they want to give you a little percent for bringing them the model, the technology, then fine, but dont expand. Dont grow for the sake of doing it. Its got to work for itself. And if greenlight doesnt work at the scale that its operating in its own community, if it needs to expand in order to do what it does, then it needs to look at how its operating and how its creating value in its comment, because if it has a imperative, this Company Needs to grow in order to stay alive, then it either hasnt found the right size or the right model yet. A couple hands up here. Two things. One, how do you feel your ideas work in a world where the little guy trying to start a business is faced against almost insurmountable odds. A small news site tries to come up. They cant afford google ad dollars to make themselves shown. They can sell good homegrown stories but if they cant get the word oust because no one can find them, how do they compete and how do you see this world you talk about Small Businesses. How do you open a Small Business in new york that rents only allow for duane reed and the next nyu expansion . The two models youre using are the wrong locations to try to start a Small Business. So if youre trying to start a small publication, you cannot compete on the generic internet. Its not going to work. Theyre bigger players there. Say what you like about net neutrality. Its already again. There is no net neutrality. The net is not neutral. Already worked you know more before the this than me but theyve done the work around. If you have a publication, then you have to target it to the humans that you can relate that you can talk. To you cant be in everything youch cant compete with the new york times. You cant be a news site but if you are the pizza site, you know, then you can find your community, and the net is actually really good for finding the nonlocal community of people who want to be in your want be to part of your community. Wouldnt call it an affinity group. Thats what facebook is. If you want to start a publication, its got to be so targeted so tagged, that you find those people and then build from there. Same thing if you want to start a store, starting in manhattan is tricky. If you want to open a restaurant in manhattan you need vc. Where are you competing . Youre competing in millionaires row. Im an author issue cant live in manhattan. Not since the bloomberg bubble. Cant imagine how you do that. Even this, civic hall, they got google and giant partners feeding into this. Theyre able to operate at that scale. You can stake out real estate online but its going to have to be focused and specific and in a way where youre going to have to address a need that is not being met, and then people will come. A couple more hands down here. A question about the global conversation. Are there for example, wikipedia or sort of decentralized opportunities where the global aspect of it allows for certain virtues that i think fit with what youre talking about. Im just wondering how we differentiate between those two. Does that make sense . Not yet. Okay. How we differentiate between some of the Global Opportunities that allow us to first find the niche out there of all the weird people that way want for that small but also be able to have the ensign psych low media that can beat microsoft because we have the whole world or because block chain possibilities . I dont mean bit coin but the possibility of global voting and also a conversation about nation states probably not the solution to most of our major climate problems. Well have to have some kind of Global Coalition or initiative. Im just wonder where you see the virtuous possibilities i completely see where youre coming with the local and i completely agree, but im just wondering where you leave the Solutions Space nor virtue Global Opportunities. I see the global space to me is more ideabased than commercebased. I think its easier to disseminate an idea for a lot of different places and then different people can work on that idea in different ways. Sort of the way the open source caterpillar trucks and stuff, disseminate those to places and let people build things themselves. I love disseptember nateing plans to a disseminating plans to a lot of places i think back to when you could start a National Movement by send ought handbooks, the boy scouts or heres how you do it then you kind of do it your way. Its sort of i mean, people you have your community will decide what is co sure and what is not. You guys eat that . Which is the way it went. But it worked. It worked. In that in a decentralized fashion. So i think the idea of Global Commerce is very different than the global idea space. Thats interesting, very interesting switch because in the early internet we thought of everything globally and wanted to get government off there because theyll make it all national and put up boundaries. What way didnt realize best getting government off we created an open market for corporations to come in. Its sort of like if you get rid of all the bacteria, the fungus rises. You actually need some bacteria to fight the fungus together so you can just live. Let them battle it out. We should have let them be there rather than just declare, this is a governmentfree zone with dont need you. Its like, oops, well, theres a player wes didnt recognize and they took over the thing. Now when we say global, so many people back to the wt protest, think we mean global market. Which is what wired meant by global internet. The mass tack is going to go around the world and grow more and the tech bubble is no more and we have infinite expansion. Were in the long boom. Going to grow forever. That was just imperialism by another name. Is all that was. But it doesnt negate the fact that the internet is still a global network, and it still has the potential disseminate ideas and entrepreneurial idead. A global time dollar would be really interesting. How to network a whole bunch of local time dollars. Thats almost a holy grail. So i can make money here and it is still somehow good over there. Its interesting stuff. Even when youre on ebay and you get something, i just bought something from turkey. That was kind of weird and i know ebay is evil in its way but facilitated commerce between people in a way rather than just extracting value from people. We have time for one more question. A woman. Trying to see if there irany women who want to ask a question. That is what i was looking for. Anybody . Person of color. Next week in new rochelle we have a meeting about building a fiberoptic network. What advice would you have us for the meeting and we have fliers if finch is interested. She would have better advice than i would the advice i would have is to look out for the lawsuit that time warner or verizon or whoever your Cable Provider is going to pitch against you. When people tried to create municipal wifi or broadband, the companies sue on the basis that locals have an unfair advantage because theyre local. What . Thats horse pucky. Locals should have a home field advantage. This is thats the one thing we humans have, a homefield advantage on planet earth. Corporations are alien. They are abstract. They are not real. They are just Computer Programs. Theyre algorithms. So defend your homefield advantage and argue that in accurate law which is still adjudicated so far by human judges. And then you stand a chance. This is really all were doing. Then you stand a chance of fighting against the regulation that prevents people from engaging in commerce on equal or better footing than the corporations that have usurped it. Im happy to talk about it. A lot of good examples to learn from that a lot of how you manage the partnerships to allow it to be owned by the community. With that i think we are going to close. Which means everyone can come ask questions individually. Ill be here. Or talk to me about municipal fiber. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. [applause] [inaudible conversations] heres a look at some books being published this week. Josh king former direct record of production for president ial events at the white house recalls some of the most unsuccessful examples of political stagecraft in american history. And recalling the friendship between twain and john hey. And we are gods, a look at the 1970s back to the land movement. Also being released this week is the new arab wars in which George Washington universitys institute for middle east studies director mark lynch explores why many dictators and failed states have emerged in the aftermath of the arab spring. And then a book about Police Departments should return to Community Policing strategies. In tied up in knots, fox news host argued that women have become less happy as a result of the feminist movement. Look for heres tights and watch for the authors on booktv. President obama recently nominated karla hayden to become the 14th librarian of congress. She is currently ceo of the president free library in baltimore. If confirmed, dr. Hayden would succeed James Billington and become the first africanamerican woman to serve in the position. During haydens congressional confirm make hearing she laid out her vision for the future of the library of congress. S i envision the future of this wonderful institution i see it growing in its stature, not only in library yapship but how people view libraries in general, as more of its resources are readily available for more people online, users will not have to be in washington, dc. Everyone will have a sent of ownership pride in this national treasure. A child on a reservation in new mexico has the same access a High School Student in st. Louis, missouri, fifth grader in kentucky would be able to view abraham lincolns papers from this home computer. And a shy, tenth grader from meridian, mississippi, with dreams of performing would be able to view the librarys Leonard Bernstein collection, a student from a Community College in kansas could look at and even download revolutionary war maps for a class assignment. And this would help libraries across the country, a Small Library in arkansas with a modest budget would be able to help patrons assess primary studies of George Washingtons papers, and a Rural Library in alabama will be able to connect through a live feed to the National Book festival and see and hear their favorite authors. I envision a library of congress that can balance its very various roles and important rolfes in a digital age, at time when libraries throughout the world face many of the same challenges, when their very existence is being questioned, the library of congress should continue to be a leader. I would be honored to be part of a legacy and a accomplishments of my predecessors in this position