Transcripts For CSPAN3 Torie 20240706

So much for coming on this incredibly dreary night. So cheers to you all for braving it. I think that especially in the pen or whatever were in right now, it feels like the. Its a lot easier to decide not go to something than it might have been before. So cheers to all of you. Im torie bosch and im the editor of future tense, which is a Longstanding Partnership of new america. Arizona state university, slate magazine. And what we do, we look at the intersection of technology, policy and society. We have a channel slate and its up to the slate team here at slate. Com slash future tense. We cover the future and historically we have live events course. Theyve mostly been online for the past two years. So this is of our very first inperson events and its really wonderful to be back here at new america. Were here tonight. Talk about a book i edited for Princeton University press called are not expected to understand this. How six lines of code change the world. Its made up of 26 essays by technology historians and journalists about specific events in programing history. We have essays on the first Police Beat Algorithm on the code that tells your roomba how to navigate your living room. The first computer virus, the jpeg and much more. And the title comes a famous code left in comment left in the linux source code. Back in 1975. Were about code pretty broadly here in the book, so there are lines of, codes in the illustrations in the book, but were really talking kind of the Bigger Picture that each line represents. And the big idea is to help experts and nonexperts think through how technology is made by humans who are sometimes brilliant and sometimes biased and messy and sometimes just really hungry to get to lunch, get their work done. Were really lucky tonight to have three contributors with us. Unfortunately, elena patel is sick. Elena, if youre watching, we hope you feel better soon. But we have three really great speakers as well so the four of us are going to talk for about minutes or so and then well open it up to q a both here online afterwards, please, if youre in person, stick around another drink, maybe buy a copy of the book if youre so inclined and keep the conversation going. So im going to introduce contributors in chronological order, their chapters. So first we have arthur dame rich, who is director of the Smithsonian Institution levels and center for the study of, invention and innovation and in early 2023, hell be director of Arizona State universitys consortium for science policy and. So welcome to asu hes his chapter you are not expected is called space walk collaborative coding and the rise gaming culture and we have charles dwan who is a postdoctoral fellow at cornell and a senior policy fellow at american Universities Program on information justice and intellectual property. His chapter is called a failure interoperate the lost climate orbiter. And finally, we have willa ramus, who is a Technology Writer for Washington Post and my former slate colleague is chapter is the curse the awesome button. I think we should start by having each of you tell us a little bit about the chapter and sort the story behind it. So lets start with you, author. First, the story. My chapter tells the story of space, which is a kind of become law, become famous. Theres actually a lot of mythology about it online. We had the opportunity to interview the surviving seven surviving members of the people who coded the game to hear their firsthand accounts and then have used that as a basis for this. So the is coded on a pdp one. So deck and outside boston had donated and given this you know mini computer that the term at the time it was intentionally not a computer because computers at the time were room sized machines cost a fortune and they were trying to actually market this to business as something useful for payroll, for accounting, for routine operations. It was selling for 120,000 at the time, which be a little over 1. 1 million today. So not a cheap piece of equipment. So theres this loose kind of quasi pre hacker culture thats formed around a model railroad, some of and railroading of course, is about zeroes and ones switches about routing electricity about doing some of the things that then influence it. But this this group and it is all men some of them are students it others are just in area kind of working at mit, working harvard and just discover this piece of equipment and make a deal with the fact team member whos in charge of it that says if we write you a compiler, youll let us do other stuff on it. And over a weekend write the first compiler for the pdp and then start tinkering with it, writing various programs and were passionate about, goofy Science Fiction movies of the time. They would go down to south boston movie theaters and so they come with a space game and its two planes to space that shoot each other and they put a sun in the middle and the next one says, you know, the sun exert. So he adds that code. And then another one says, well, you ought to be able to escape someones shooting you. So adds hyperspace. And bit by bit, not at the same time, they code up this pretty remarkable game that again becomes legendary decked events early, starts shipping it with each of the pdp ones. So when its installed your corporation to show you that it works, they do it. Now why is that interesting . Well, in part because way they coded the game really pushed this computer to the very limit and gaming has done that throughout the history of computing and has been crucial to pushing computers. Its also been a market maker. So people have bought personal because the games available them. Lets be honest most people didnt buy a personal computer in the eighties and nineties to do spreadsheets. Corporation once did, but not at home. So, you know, the chapter kind of tells that story. And then theres an interesting second and third life to the game itself, the code, which is theres an effort to make it a commercial game in that in california, they set up a pdp and set up some stations and try to get people to pay for money that isnt economically feasible. And then it influences one of the early arcade games that produces, which is basically an unplayable game, a real mess. It then also has life in the atari 2600. At home, theres a space game and then more recently course through the diligence of number of really avid coder historians there is there are some really remarkable emulators online where you get a remarkably accurate given the constraints. I could go on but ill stop. And youve played the game right. I played the game i played it against my 15 year old daughter who can trust me in just about any video game. But not this. Although it didnt hold her attention quite as long as, the nintendo does and charles tell us about mars. Yeah. So its i dont think its quite as exciting as space, but it does involve space. So hopefully thats a bit of something. So yeah. So i came across the story many years ago, i think a lot of people have heard about the story. Where does multiplication error ends up sending sending a spaceship, a spacecraft that was meant to go sort of a mars orion spacecraft ends up all being lost, costing, you know, millions of dollars in lost Space Exploration funds. Well, i was curious, you know, exactly happened with that. And so, you know, i started looking through a lot of the reports that were generated after the after the crash and, you know, some of the articles that were written by the engineers. And it turned out to be a very interesting sort of story on. What ended up happening was that nasas was that it was basically repurposing a program that they used to estimate the position of its spacecraft. You know, when when the spacecraft is going through space, there are no street signs there. So you have to figure out where the spacecraft is basically by adding up all the forces on the spacecraft. This would be really like trying to figure out where your car is by counting up how many times you pressed the gas pedal. But none of it was actually really good at this. But in order to do that, they had to get input from. The spacecraft of all of the forces that were acting on it, particularly a couple of little thrusters that help to push the spacecraft in the right direction. And they contracted that part of the software out to, i think, Lockheed Martin. So Lockheed Martin wrote this Little Program that collected information from the spacecraft, turned into a data file that then fed into Nasas Program and Program Expected metric units, except except the the the Lockheed Martin program produced imperial and as a result, everything was off by a factor of about four and a half meaning that by the time that they got to mars, the spacecraft was off by. I want to say like millions of a percent. It was a very, very small amount. But, you know, given the amount of distance they traveled and given that youre trying to figure out where the spacecraft is by adding up all the forces it was it was enough for the spacecraft to instead be in orbit above mars to be on mars. And as a result, it probably in into into the martian or into the martian surface. And so, you know, i think it was just an interesting exploration of what happens when you have sort of collaborative coding thats potentially doesnt go the way that you would hope for it to. Now will, tell us about the awesome button. Yeah. My my chapter is the only one of these three that doesnt involve the spacecraft goes rocket but it was when facebook was Getting Started they and it was mostly just on College Campuses they would notice that when somebody posted something you know having a party just you know just aced that test or like man i was so wasted last night people would would comment like cool or great or awesome. And if it was like a post that really appealed to people, it would just get like comment after coming after comment like 30, 40 people saying great, good, awesome. And so facebook at that time was defining itself in opposition to myspace and myspace was the incumbent. It was the dominant social. It was very it was maximalist. It was very it was like, you know, Everything Everywhere all the time. And facebook, you know, prided itself on being of clean and functional, you know, user friendly. And so the designers at facebook, some of the designers were like, i dont like, you know, seeing all comments. It feels inefficient, like it it offended their their design sensibility and probably their brains as well. And so they decided to try to up with some easier way for people to express approval of a post and so they initially conceived of they started a project called props wanted a way to give props. It seems like in the like button feels, obvious or inevitable. At the time it did not was not you know, it was not clear. Would you you know, would you make would you even make a button . I mean, buttons werent common on the internet in 2007 would you if you did make it a button would it just be a picture . Would have words . Would you would it be upvotes and downvotes would it be a yes and no. And so my chapter about the process of figuring out what that should look like, about the thinking that went into it and also about the thinking that didnt go into it, which was what might have happened. This becomes the universal currency of content across the global internet. And so its partly about the the unforeseen too. So i mean, one of the goals for this book is both to help people who dont think about these things for living, understand the thinking that goes into them among those who do, but also to help people who do this for a living, kind of think Bigger Picture about the work they do and where they might be able think about it a little bit differently. So i mean, i suppose if theres like a moral to your story, what would the moral arthur wow, a moral. Thats great. Now i like morality tales about technology. So i would say one moral that we tend to resist wanting draw from it is that, you know, world in which there is no intellectual at stake and next to no financial reward feasible, it is still possible for a group of enthusiastic people to organize themselves to have some degree of hierarchy. Steve russell kind of becomes the point person, writes the initial code, but theyre also of checking with him. Is that okay as go but also can actually have a disaggregated team asynchronously producing something pretty remarkable so out of the space work coding project its not an organized project we go you know one of the very first video game controllers, a button and a couple of levers that will eventually become a joystick. We go expensive to planetariums, so a star map we get expensive typewriter. So a way to code in text as opposed to having to do it, you know, on a typewriter as opposed to pure machine language coding. Um, so yeah, would guess thats one piece. How you could replicate such a thing often you could pull the right set of people would you get, you know, a much more piece of software out of it that we use today thats little less clear. Charles yeah. You know, i think thats actually just such a such an interesting i kind of carry through a lot of the stories of book, um, you know, just the, the role of the sort of open innovation, this really very academic approach, which of course contrasts very much with the story that i have where we have, you know, a Government Agency and a and a big who are who are doing the coding. You know, i think that the interesting thing about the story that i found at least was, you know, this is a book called 26 lines of code. So where was the code that went wrong on . The one hand nasas says, well, it was lockheed fault. Theyre the ones who are supposed to have multiply by 4. 45, you know the contract said that they were supposed to use metric they use metric. On the other hand, Lockheed Martin. No, no, no, no. It was nasas who made the mistake because nasa told us here are a couple of sample files and the sample files they sent in order to test the program were apparently in imperial units. So they said that everything. Right. So in a sense, Lockheed Martins code worked the way that Lockheed Martin said it should. So were correct. Nasas wrote its code the way it expected the code to be. So it was also the mistake is somewhere in between its sort of the space of communication occurs between two sets of programs thats not part of a Computer Program per say, but it is a form of code way in which theres talk with the specification of we now call interoperability Computer Programs. I think, you know, just at the time that i was writing this the oracle versus google litigation over, you know, the ability to write compatible versions of java was on the table. We had a lot of questions social Media Companies letting other social Media Companies be able to come in and interoperate with their messaging platforms and such. And so the idea that we should really be looking that sort of inbetween space as an important part of the coding that really defines what the environment is and what the technology and policy look like, that seemed like just an important lesson to me. And so i thought that that was and that was an interesting thing that i able to draw out of that story. You will. One way to think about the the moral of the story of the like button. Well, let me back up. So i talked to of the people who were involved in designing and coding and implementing the like button for facebook and all of them said that at the time were building it. They had no idea that it would go on to become such influential tool and that if they had that, you know, they might have thought it differently. One of the one of the people who designed it, a woman named lia perlman, said that she thinks the mistake was a counter on it. So if it just been like, you know, that had one thing but but when you can make the number up it turned gamify as the whole system and you know trans people to try to to try to get more likes and you know in many ways i think the Digital Media world that we inhabit today was was by the like button with the counter. So i thought that was a fair point. Another one said that they that, you know, they didnt regret it because couldnt have imagined doing it differently. They couldnt have known at the time it would turn out. I think, one, if i were to impose a potential moral i guess you know kant said that should that we should universalize our actions like we should imagine what if everybody did the thing that were proposing to do in the same circumstance you know can we envision that world wouldnt even be possible would it be desirable so you maybe coders who are working on a tool, even if theyre at a little startup that has three product managers which is how facebook had in 2007 in a little, you know, a little storefront palo alto maybe they could think what if this little thing im designing to become huge and blow up what might be the downsides. Oh thats asking a and the caveat to that moral and the reason think its not quite that clean so go back to what Ezra Callahan was the internal Communications Manager at facebook at the time and i talked to him about it and he was the one who said, you know, i dont i i feel sort of bad about some of the effects that like one has had. But i dont regret because i couldnt have done it differently. And he said even if we hadnt built the like button, somebody else would have and they probably would have outcompete us and the like button would have become anyway. I thought that was a really interesting and sort of dark point like, you know, even if you were to take this as the moral and apply it, maybe that would just mean your business doesnt win. And no one who doesnt beat you and its the chapter is called the the curse of the awesome button because that was the original name for it, right . Yeah. So there the project was code named props and the first implementation was actually theres a tie in with the collaboration stuff because the first implementation was at a hackathon so the way facebook worked in those days was, periodically they would have people put a bunch of ideas on a board and then the ones that got the most votes would be the subject of a hackathon, the most likes, if you will. And so i dont know if they had down votes. And so the props project was the subject of a hackathon and the initial the concept that won the hackathon was a button that said awesome. And it was in keeping with the ethos of facebook at the time and this is back when there was the poke, you know, there were like all sorts of weird Little Things about it, but so they ended up building the awesome button as, as according to this concept that it won the hackathon and they were pretty excited about. It, they thought it was going to get approved and they sent it to Mark Zuckerberg and surprised them by saying, no, he didnt like it he didnt like he was worried about several aspects of it. One of them was he was worried that it would cannibalize his other forms of engagement so people could just like then why would they craft a thoughtful reply, right. Or why would share something so and but he also didnt like the name awesome he thought it should be like. And the project got tabled it sort of like lost its momentum and it was it did it kind of languished a while and people were like i dont want to work on that its just going to get shut down again. So it didnt get really taken up again for another year or two and finally implemented think in in 2009 so it was in it was the project was considered curse they call it the curse of the awesome button because nobody could figure out how to do it in a way that would get approval from the top or that would work in all the ways it needed to work. Yeah. So this was this, that like if we hadnt done, someone else would have. I mean, i guess reasons me this question of sort of responsibility and. Is it sort of like decrying your role in it to say it would have just kind of happened anyway i mean and guess this goes to your points about collaboration as well. So like in a collaborative coding environment or in any kind of innovative, collaborative, i mean, are there ways in which people kind of start to Work Together in sort of directions . There need to be course corrected. I mean, i know if you thought at all about, you know, how collaboration can kind and the kind of obscuring responsibility in that sort of thing. Yeah. I mean, a pretty profound philosophical question how we do technology development, but absolutely i mean, weve certainly seen that, you know, greater diversity of teams generally leads to more innovation. So innovation, the sense of a better understanding of the eventual a better understanding of the breadth of a market, um, certainly the space. It was a narrow band. It was white and the users, the game for a very long time were white because its a pdp thats either going into corporate or University Settings in a time in which we know women were active coding in the fifties and actually in the sixties. But these Mini Computers in the computer lab become a very domain. And so, you know, i think thats something to point to of how, you know, where do we draw boundaries of what we consider to be in group for collaboration and the that can you know engender are for lack of a better word. And there are other chapters in. The book, most notably think joy leakey ranking on dartmouth and basic and then claire evans, cobol and jeannie sam at the talk lot about the history of women in computing and how it was you know a much more egalitarian sort of system until the and specifically at elite universities like mit and dartmouth kind started to dominate and and started to sort of overcome the preexisting structures of more equality or at least more access. So, charles, you know you talk a little bit about interoperability and social media at the time youre writing the chapter. Its something that i think its a lot more on peoples minds now as twitter is. And its strange moments, you know, and im curious whether, theres any discussion going on now about interoperability and sort of the next phase of the internet as were sort of starting to see kind of the as the olympics at the end of these sort of Major Social Networks and more sort of atomization . Yeah i think its there theres sort of pressure coming from directions that i have at least been following. So the first is that there is some know theres a lot of concern about, you know, these big you know, when when you want took over twitter there was a lot of talk about moving over to mastodon which is a more distributed of sort of microblogging that allows for people to have different different servers of their work. And also all of that, of course, depends on the ability of these different servers help with each. So the sort of idea of a distributed in which you dont ha ae platform kind of controls everything much like what the internet kind of looked like, you know, back in the eighties and early 2000. Thats becoming i think, more popular just as people get concerned about this. At the same time at the top, legislators are starting to worry about a number of things with regard to some of these these larger platforms of their content, moderation, policy is on whether or not they have too much influence advertising. And so, you know, there have been a number of efforts to look at different ways of to deal with that in in terms regulation or policy. But the idea that maybe we should let some of the smaller platforms come in and, be able to communicate with these Large Networks of friends or messages or is on facebook or some of the other platforms. Thats become a very attractive idea because of the fact that it lets people it lets these smaller platforms at least have foothold in the market. So i think its going to be an interesting going to be an interesting conversation. Now whats been kind of going on on the technical side, of course, is that we went from this sort of era of like free innovation, you had like the ietf. Who are saying, you know, here are the standards for, you know, anybody can use them. Anybody can build a anybody can you know, follow these specific nations to a world in which a lot of the standards organizations much more dominated by these bigger that really want to kind of keep things to themselves. And so sort of as a technical matter, thats where the era of sort of easy compatibility, open collaborate and i think has changed a lot and whether or not these sort of political changes push that technical environment a different way i think its something that will well well have to see. The webs like such a beautiful thing because anybody can a website and they dont need the permission of any platform to build it and you know all these different browsers access the websites and mozilla you know is a force for for to keep that alive. It is it is interesting that the interoperable stuff i mean its also become an issue in the antitrust scrutiny. You have the big tech platforms. I run into something at home thats as momentous as sending out a spacecraft into, mars. But i have a sonos Smart Speaker and it runs it can run either google or alexa, but it doesnt run them that well as have a sonos. And then i have a little google and they both run google. Theyre supposed to talk to each other, but they always get confused as to which one im talking to. Like the wrong alarm would go off on the wrong one. Its because google doesnt care to help sonos interoperate with its technology and sonos has actually i think theres theres a los dont call me on that theres some kind of lossy some kind of kerfuffles a lot of lawsuits associated with that but just just an of like how like even in our daily lives, the failure to interoperate has impact. Yeah. I mean, you know, my favorite example is you ever tried to open a non microsoft word document on microsoft word like why does this look all weird . Like thats sort of the classic example of what can happen with interoperate. Interoperability doesnt work. In fact, actually one of the things i found when i was researching the, the, the mars climate orbiter is that for a while there was a file format problem and some some poor clerk over actually had to hand rewrite all of the data files and send them over to basically to try translate them between the two computers. So yeah, it could be an annoyance for four months, right, every four months or Something Like that. So i can just imagine that every day your job was to take this word file and retype it as a microsoft word document that was organized up. Yeah, its you know, i think thats we often take for granted that coding is going to be the sort of like easy thing thats going to be open for a lot of people. Its i think the environment changed a lot in that way at one point that was the way you generated and transmitted knowledge rewriting old text medieval monasteries for the im curious about sort of the the test the absence of testing you know so the spacewalk story is all abt incremental change they keep changing the code running the program does it run have we now overtax the machine. How can we tinker and how can we, you know, make work . It sounds like they did one test run and then they did this. So is this like a failure of modeling or is it really if youre going to launch a spacecraft, you cant really test it. Yeah, i think that they they they had some that at least from what i read they had some sample files and. So they ran the sample files. But it seems like the sample did not actually match what a wanted. So there may have been some sort of disconnect there. Its not exactly i mean, like everybodys blaming everybody in this in the sort of in the sort of situation unfortunately. And i think part of the problem was it was such a small error that it would have been hard for them to sort of numerically see it was this. Oh, yeah. I mean, like in terms of the overall calculations, like if they were look at if they were only to look at the final results. They would see numbers that were not very marked. But yeah, i think that, you know, one of the questions is, you know when you have code that is so easy to write but also so easy to write wrong. Right. What do you do to make sure that things are going correctly . You know what were talking about sort of the ethical issues ive been lucky enough to be on couple of National Science foundation funded projects. And one of the things that they do is they asked how they asked, have lawyers and ethicists work with the computer to see if they can identify any sort of any sort issues with these new technologies that theyre that building . And, you know, i think its a its a really interesting opportunity for its also really hard because, you know, as as a lawyer im seeing these technologies sort of in the frame of mind of what know and i cant imagine what people are going to use these sorts of things for like with with like but we didnt know that, that would end up kind of creating of these sorts of problems. So there is sort of that difficulty there . Right. I also you cant get bogged down every single day in like what are the greater ramifications of this tiny thing im working on . Because most of the time it will be nothing. Its just that periodic will be something in another sort of example of we have a chapter from ethan zucker, whos a tech advocate, who in a story hes now probably really tired of telling at this point, but he told it one more time for us. He coded the first pop up ad, which then, you know, completely changed the internet made the experience worse for all of us. You remember the internet in the nineties and i had my Backstreet Boys fan site on geocities, the pop up ad just they just never stopped. But you know, he was just trying to do his boss told him to do. And then it ended up kind of infecting the entire internet in ways hes still sort of grappling with. So its you dont know exactly what could end up having those huge consequences is and were going to move to questions in just a moment. But mean one other question i had for you is, of course, again, going back to twitter, its as will knows better than anyone the tech story at the moment or one of the several tech stories at the moment. You know, when elon musk came in there was brief edict that all the engineers to print out all of the code they had worked on in the past 30 to 60 days to reviewed by musk and his team. And then that was overturned and everyone had shred their code. But im curious that first initial impulse, which is the idea of looking at code as a proxy for productivity and you know, does that seem like an effective way to think about it . Yeah, this is this is really i mean, the musk twitter saga. Its like watching what, you know, will be a future movie like unfold day by day. Like we can all imagine the scene in the movie where the tesla 50 tesla engineers show up at the twitter offices and start making everybody print out their code. Everybody lines up at the printer and like, get his chiefs of code and then working in the offices. And then later they have to shredded all that because theyre like, oh, i guess i do work so well. But yeah, it was really funny. There was this musk, i guess had the idea that, you know, he wants to keep the people who are like the hardcore coders who are really, you know, churning out the code and not, you know, hes hes this meme where theres like the one construction worker digging in the hole and like the ten standing around. He thinks thats what things are like. And Tech Companies like twitter. And so he wants to get rid of the ten people standing around and just keep the one whos in, you know, in hole digging. And so looking at how much code they written that was in the twitter code. Bits was his proxy. I think most people who in Software Development would probably tell you thats a terrible proxy. I mean, just, you know, at the most basic elegant code has fewer lines rather than more lines. But i dont know. What do you what do you all think about that i didnt get the printing part like why didnt you just write it on a screen. But yeah, i mean, you, i, i used to work as a programmer and, you know, we didnt do this at my company, but a lot of Companies Back in the, you know, back and sort of the mid 2000, 2000, ten even, they would use what was, lets say a slow it was sort of this measure of how many lines of code that you write and people realized that if they just put line breaks in their code, they would get more of code. And so ended up just with the sort of odd of gaming of the metric. So yeah, i i was thinking like that really like a throwback to a practice that im pretty sure everybodys by. Now im imagining the twitter engineers like changing the font to 60 like double spaced, just like this alternate like a dozen subroutine. And im im struck that in part because musk course actually coded at times and created a video game when he was young and you know in theory he knows thing or two or in practice does so im astonished because absolutely you know theres a legacy certainly in the video game, but other programs as well that you really for have to optimize shrink the code as much as possible because youre pushing the computer to the very limits of what its going to be able to do. Well, i think we are at question time, which feels crazy to me. If you have a question, weve a microphone at the back since. This is going to be is is also online. So if you could go there just so people can hear you, that would be wonderful. Thank you so and people online, if you have a question, we are monitoring the zoom so you can submit it. And your question be asked. So one quick follow, guys. Could theres some sorry i forgetting which engineer it was maybe it was linuxworld who like did some or he deleted 40,000 lines of code and replaced it with 200 much cleaner, clearer lines of code and wrote down, you know, contribution deleted 40,000 lines of code. So my the question i had was first directed something will this talking about with the mars probe but it actually i think ties over to one of things everybody should understand about software theres not a single programmer that writes perfect code that is correct as it comes off their not a single programmer. Right and a lot of things about software is how you test the software and ensure correct. And that typically means not just running it. On the one sample file you came up you first thing, but how do you get realistic data and certainly these days anybody thinking oh were going to take two pieces of software that were developed independent only and put them together and not test that combination that would never fly in mind. You always do integration tests, but this actual problem of test in software that might work well and do what it was intended to independently in testing combination is actually a much bigger problem. You talk about the awesome button. One of the problems is that when they thought about the system, they were just thinking about the software system. They werent thinking about the system of the people and the impact it would have on people when you gave them the like button. Right. You know, one of things about space were a lot of games a lot of companies, they talk about dogfood, software, which is where the developers use software as soon as it is possible to. Use the new version of software for your own purposes. Do it. The fact that the people playing space were insistently probably really helped them get all the bugs out, but so particularly for charles, getting that question, so what was the status nasa doing integration testing where they really not doing any integration testing at that point in their journey . Yeah. So so no, i cant im not going to defend them because i think. Yeah. So at from what i saw, they did not seem to have that sort of testing. So i think that that was part of the recommendation from the task force that they needed to do that sort of testing and yeah, so, so my recollection is that that was that that came out of is that thats what came out of there, there there was a moment passed before, but i think its its correct and this was know obviously you know some years ago at time that that sort of testing activity wasnt quite as valued in all were talking about the almost code thing. You know one of the things i was surprised is that he didnt ask only we test people name because is probably more indicative of whether or not your code is any good. So yeah, i think youre exactly right that that that really is something that will kind of trouble and for well was there ever any thought in you know maybe there is but at the time in facebook were people thinking about how this going to change the users how . Is this going to change User Behavior . There was to some degree and and so, again, there was that concern that by offering people but by just offering one button to express approval that it would that people would just be lazy and that button and then not actually have sort human exchanges. Interestingly it was testing that saved the idea of like button so one of their one of their data scientists put out a test where they had you know some of users with access to the like button. And this is extremely common practice now and and they looked at the results and they found that actually the number of comments did not go down when people were given access to the like button and fact engagement went up and that when they brought that to Mark Zuckerberg, he said, all right, lets go for it. Thats the thing Like Companies do now, they do some called testing where some percentage their users are randomly selected to get a proposed new version of the software and then they collect data on how that does. Thats right. And facebook is was is really aggressive about that. They had a system, at least when i visited their offices a few years back, they had a system where you could first deploy with like very little permission very little bureaucracy in the way you could deploy a test to like an infinity small fraction of users when you have like you know whatever it is, 1,000,000,002 billion users you know, you can still get you know several thousand people and you break that the site for several thousand. Its like not the end of the world right. And so there was that level then if it if it passed certain benchmarks at that level you could get to do a 1 test and then like a 10 test and then they would like roll it out in ireland and then yeah, so it was like a, a whole cascading process. It was the testing has raised some ethical issues as well because of that experimentation without consent. Absolutely. Yeah. I think we hey, everyone says are more of a question than a comment, but tori, what is the most someone just needed to get to lunch story from the book. Oh i mean probably has to do with the pop up ad, which is the the most like sort of hands. I was the person doing this and i just to get my job done and you know, we needed to find a way to present more ads because at the time that was the only to really monetize on the internet. Now its still one of the best ways, but at that time it was really the only way how can we show more ads to people like, i know, lets force them to open up a new window. And yeah, that was a just try to get it done and deal with it later kind of situation situation. Josh levine hello. Thank you guys. This was great. Well, so you would have us believe that facebook was just this naive company. They really have, you know, only three project managers. But just the fact that this thing will like completely like rocket our company, the moon and just like have just addicted to them. That wasnt something that was on their mind that that was absolutely Mark Zuckerbergs goal from everyone from everybody i talked to. He was he had World Domination in mind from the very beginning. He idolized bill gates growing up, which is funny because bill gates was sort of as the villain back then. You know, like steve was the hero, but was like identified with gates. And so, i mean, that was always zuckerbergs goal. But no, for that, for the designers and engineers who were working on it, i think they i think they really did. I think they really were naive. I mean, maybe im just buying, you know, line from them. But they really thought that connecting people was like a good in and i think there was theres like a part in my chapter where i talk about how at google and facebook the idea was that you can do good and make money at the same time theres no conflict its all win win and i think some of them really believed i just had other thing, which is that you mentioned that they considered upvoting and downvote ing. And i remember like from that area, digg and reddit and that was huge. And i would have thought back then that that would have been the thing they would have kind of come to dominate the way the like button has. So did anybody kind of tell you or have you thought about why are voting and downvoting seemed like it would become the dominant thing is kind of receded. Yeah and it goes back to the same theme i mean they they the people i talked to who worked on it said, it was about positivity. They wanted facebook to be a happy place where were encouraging each other, not, you know, some of them again, probably idealistically and naively think in zuckerbergs case, because he that that was what would keep people coming back. I mean if you get if you get positive validation when you post youre going to post more if you get negative validation when you post youre going to youre going to be deterred. Youre going feel bad. Youre going to feel angry. And so it was it was absolutely intentional that they only had a thumbs up and a thumbs down. If we think through of the ramifications of that over the years, it means that, you know, if half of people like a post and half of people hate it, the people who hate it have no way to to register that. Its just the people who like and so very divisive posts get amplified without the chance of other people saying. No, dont dont amplify that. So i think theres actually a really point that comes out the book that edited did, which is, you know, in the history of computing in the history of this field, theres been this push, pull, tug of war or is it about hardware or is it about software and now we need to tell integrative Hardware Software stories, what youre now doing, pushing in a way, the way we think and write and talk about this in saying well, yeah, hardware, software. But also the human behave role engineering thats whether its very explicitly tacitly. Yeah and thats one of the big sort of goals of the book is help people realize that technology is not necessarily inevitable, that every bit of technology is the result of a human decision. Well, one more question now. Um, thanks. I and bobby and im with mozilla foundation, actually, its i was really excited when mozilla came out. Yay open source. But my my question is im part of this program called trustworthy a. I. So when i encountered a book, i really was thinking about transparency. And i was really curious about how did that like what is meaningful transparency and like actionable transparency for you in the context of the different case studies. Right. That explore . And how do you see like transparency to whom as part of the work like is it users it policymakers is it advocate groups and yeah like curious about that notion of transparency. Well, i mean, one thing that comes to mind for me is just, you know, we we tried to have a line of code to represent chapter and you know, for some these its actually hard to get right, you know, a lot of these companies dont want to release their code for very obvious reasons, mean it was a bit of a coup that we were to get the roomba code that we use that chapter right, that, um, and that lack of transparency makes it difficult for, for everybody to, of take a look at under the hood and understand how these things operate, which is, you know, better. Anyone has all sorts of implications, things like equality right i mean, we cant see whats in the algorithm that determines how someone is sentenced to prison. You know, we dont know what. The factors are and those factors come from the existing structure as a child make allowance chapter on the Police Beat Algorithm chronicles. This is a problem that goes back to the 1960s with Law Enforcement technology. So i mean, thats my first sort of response is that we just dont know what we dont know with this lack of transparency, there. But im curious, what do you think you know, i was thinking, you you were talking about how we had, you know, at one time this era, which people would just share code with each other. We would kind of know how everything worked and and obviously changed a lots given the sort of commercial stakes the intellectual property concerns have come. Of course, there are limits and, you know, i thought that the hartley story was actually really in that respect because that dealt with a bug that was in open Source Software all but just because there wasnt sort the there wasnt the architecture for for maintaining the code for a kind of a code review. Um there ended up being this very serious bug that implicated like single web server that was out there. So you know i think that its so code transparency is kind of a part of it. But then also building the institutions that make sure that the sort of code is working way that you expect it to and is being being taken care of. I think that thats another aspect of what youre talking about, good, tougher, one more question and then. Hi. So i think well mentioned how the thinking behind of not wanting to have light button was you know it might cannibalize of other kinds of engagement. Im wondering you or anyone else on the panel know knows or has a guess about, you know, the thinking behind was it instagram think that briefly sort of got rid of like having the like you could sell you know like a post or whatever but it wouldnt you how many people actually liked it and it seemed like you could go back and like change and people sort of didnt like but like, what do you know or have a sense of like what the thinking was behind like getting rent rid of the the counter was it also guided by, you know, thinking about engagement or . Was it more sort of like the, i guess the moral or ethical reasons about you know, like, oh, you know, thats not the important part. No, its not like the number, but its about engagement. But do you have a sense about any of that sort of, you know, decision making. Yeah, i actually dont know the latest status of it. I havent kept up with it, but the guy who was put in charge of instagram, the founders were forced out out of missouri, a guy i know and hes pretty know, in my experience, is pretty thoughtful about about the social impacts of technology. He was attuned to some of these debates that, you know, maybe starting to surface between 2017 and 2020 about the pernicious impacts of gamifying media and in particular on instagram. You know, when when young people are using their instagram posts, you know, their public facing identity and able to compare how many likes their selfie got with their friends, selfie and that can be, you know, it can be a hard and stressful thing. And so, you know i dont want to paint them as too idealist, but i think they they saw a way to address that issue without losing any of the data that they have. So they still count. Right. They can still tell many posts alike gets on instagram. They use that to decide how other people to show it to with the algorithm and the person who posts can still see theirs, they just cant see peoples. So again, i dont know the status of that experiment. I do the one other thing ill say and then also its like theres a ive profiled whos an artist and professor in illinois named ben and he does this he did this experiment called the metric hater. And its a browser plug in that you can use. He has one for facebook, one for instagram, one for twitter. It takes all the numbers away. And he was showing what it feels like. And i used a domesticated version, twitter and facebook for a while while i was writing him. And the best analogy i could come up with is this is like watching a 60 or 70 sitcom with the laugh track taken. It was like it. You didnt know what was supposed to be funny exactly. And it was like disorienting music, which is not to say its a bad idea in the long term, but i can see how in terms of like, you know, the gamification of of social media is part of what makes it what keeps coming back. And its how weve all learned to engage with it. So it would be significant change. So its funny you talk about gamification, right . So the video area, of course, built initially for years, all about leaderboards, about but of course theres so games now there are all kinds of different kinds of games. So theres certainly a way for people to find the game they love where youre exploring a universe, you know, maybe fighting and killing, but youre not scoring per se. Theres not really a leaderboard the same way. So yeah, itll interesting to see if eventually social media can evolve into, i dont know, more of an open world terrain. I mean, i guess the other thing is also that, you know, in conjunction with all of the metrics and the numbers that you see on social media, theres a whole industry built around trying to manipulate those numbers. Right. And some of it is somewhat less than we would like. And so i imagine that a lot of these efforts are on our the platforms trying to deal with that sort problem of people trying to lift their numbers or hiring people, buying likes and such. Well, i could talking about this for a really long time, but i think we have to leave it there. Please do stick, have a drink, keep speaking with our wonderful panelists. Thank you all so much for coming. Thank you so much to everyone. New america, asu and slate for supporting the book and future tense. And thank you all for your contributions to the book and your contributions tonight. If youre here, please consider it. Or if youre online, please consider purchasing it and congrats. Congrats to you. As many of you know, david boaz, ive been here a long