Successful president ial candidate of 2016. He had briefly decided that he was going to make a run based on campaignfinance reform before Bernie Sanders made a run on campus on campaignfinance reform. What he is really known for is for being probably the deepest purest of the internet de epest purist of the internet that any of us have ever run into. He wrote a book that is incredibly important for technology and social change, code. This book says that there are multiple ways that we as a society regulate behavior. We are used to regulating behavior through passing a law. We are all pretty good at that. We know how laws get made. We understand why we might argue over a long getting passed. Lessigs big observation is that waysare one of only four that we regulate society. We also regulate through norms. None of you yet have started jumping up and arguing back with me yet during this talk. Maybe its that i havent said anything for you to argue with, or maybe it is that you are following a social script. The normal behavior is that you sit and wait and someone will ask questions at the end. Norms are amazingly powerful. They actually constrain us from doing huge numbers of things in life, because we fear social sanction. We fear that if we break them, other people will shun us, make fun of us. They end up being extremely powerful ways of shaping change over time. In fact, major changes that happen, major societal changes are often normative changes. Certainly, its ok for different people of different races to be married. Suddenly its ok for gays and lesbians to be out in public and to mary one another to marry one another. We constrain things through markets. We make them expensive. We make them cheap. If you are a smoker, you have noticed they are more expensive year over year. Thats a way of regulating behavior out of existence, something making behavior so extensive that it is harder and harder for people to do it. For lessig, the most subtle point in this was the code. He meant computer code, but he really meant technologies and architectures of all sorts. These also regulate us. Most of you when you walked into this building walked on paths. Those paths were designed to have you walked in a particular way. Thats a form of regulation for code. There are things that are easy to do with your computer and hard to do with your computer. Its remarkably easy to read a have to rip a cd and digital mp3 files. Its actually really hard to rip a movie. Thats not enforced in law. Thats enforced in code. There is code that makes some of that behavior easy and some of it hard. This is what lessig puts forward in the book. Im trying to envision the inverted lessig. Each of these ways that we regulate society also turn out to be ways that we can make big change. So, we know that we can make change through law. We know that when the supreme recognitions that of equal marriage is the law of the land, that is a powerful social change that affects everybody. You could alsot, make change by changing norms, by changing markets, by changing code. Let me give you a couple examples. Of all the things in the world that i am christophe about right off rightm pissed now, widespread government surveillance is pretty high on my list. I help run a network of 1400 journalists, translators, in about 120 countries. All of that communication between me and the people i work with is subject to surveillance by the nsa. We have decided that, being willing to surveillance munication Network Communication network is a price that we are willing to pay in exchange for preventing protecting ourselves from terrorism. As much as i would hope the Obama Administration might take a stand on this, so far there has been little evidence of that. I think it very unlikely that a Clinton Administration would take a stand on this either. Trying to make a change through law is not going to happen. The good news is that there is lots of geeks out there Running Software companies, trying very hard to make encryption standard. ,hen i talk to people right now i do it through a little application on my phone called signal. It looks just like an sms client. It looks just like im sending text messages, except that they are encrypted at a very high standard. They are incredibly difficult for anyone to read and are set. When i am serving on the internet, im often using the browser which disguises me, making it harder for websites and governments to see where im. Oming from i dont think the changes going to happen through law, but friends of mine are trying to change the culture of surveillance through code. I would argue that those people writing and putting that code out into the world are just as much activist as the people with the Human Rights Campaign who are working on equal marriage. I would argue the same for musk, who iselon trying to figure out to make the electric car not the compromised vehicle that we end up doing because its the equivalent of eating our broccoli, but the sexiest thing out there on the road. This is a way to take advantage of market mechanism to make social change. To look at Something Like the difficulty of passing a widespread carbon tax in the United States right now and essentially say, maybe we dont need that, if we can make things so appealing, like having an electric car or putting solar panels on your house. Maybe there is an alternative way of making change. Possibly the most important and most subtle form of change around this is around changing norms. This is a place where the folks behind black lives matter has an enormous amount to teach us about the power of change to norms. Here is the thing about social norm. When we look at the epidemic of people of color being shot by police, this is not a problem we are going to fix with law. It is already illegal to shoot an unarmed human being unless that burden is directly threatening your life. What happens when someone like Michael Brown gets shot is that a police officer, in the course of doing his or her duty, is interpreting a threat to his or her life from a person of color because we tend to associate young black men with violence. And that is a normative change we have to make over time. We are not going to get our way out of it just by putting body cameras on police. Over time, it has to be a change about how we think about each other within society. So, thats how you end up with campaigns like this. That image to the very far side of the screen is an image of Michael Brown, taken from his facebook page, not very long after his death. , if happens these days is you get killed by police, the first thing the media does is goes on to facebook and tries to find images of you to illustrate the story in one fashion or another. The image on the left is the one that showed up to illustrate who Michael Brown was for about the first 48 hours after his death. Activists looked at that image and said, you know, thats interesting. The truth is, Michael Brown posted a lot of photos on facebook, including that one right next to it. If you look at that first image, michael is being shot from below. He looks tall. He looks intimidating. He is scowling. He is throwing a peace sign, which most newspapers reported as a gang sign. He looks old, tall, potentially dangerous, probably trying to look a little bit dangerous. This other shot is headon. He is pudgy. He is a kid. He is cute. He is a high school kid. Thats who Michael Brown thats who Michael Brown was. He was a high school kid. The difference between those two images is a normative difference in how we think about this young man. So, what you saw were activists starting this campaign, asking the question, if they gunned me down, what photo with the use . theyat photo would use . They would pick the most negative portrayal the media could put forward and they could would pick the photo where the had the best where they had the best example of them being an engaged citizen . This campaign went viral really quickly. One of the things that was so interesting about it is that lots of young white kids did not get the political message behind it, just got the structure of it. So, they went onto to facebook and put a photo of them looking drunk and disorderly, passed out on the ground, graduating from college. This young woman saying, please, get out of this conversation. This is a much more conversation then you are giving it credit for being. Within three days, you saw the thet New York Timeshe New York Times putting the story on the front page. Its very difficult to find the first image of Michael Brown after this. The media was shamed by the campaign into realizing that the way we portray people has really vocations for how we think about whole category of people over real implications for how we think about whole categories of people over time. This is the ethicsbased approach the efficacybased approach. We learned it was about electing people to government. We learned it was about passing and enforcing laws. Now, the rules are different. The rules now are that you you todo whatever allows feel most effective as a citizen. If you feel like you are going to be able to make change by going onto facebook and changing how we perceive africanamerican males, do that. If you think you are going to do it by starting a social venture, go ahead, you do that. Here is the downside about this approach. The downside is equity. Equity is this idea that is quite different from equality. Quality is this idea that we all get unequal chance get an e qual chance. Equity is the idea that we might need accommodation to get unequal an equal chance. We would have to work very hard for people who have different life expense, different circumstances life experience, different circumstances to get the apple. Here is the problem with this effective version of civic. It is deeply inequitable. If you want to change social norms, we can all go on twitter but i have campaign, an advantage that you dont. I have 42,000 twitter followers. You probably dont. There are a lot of celebrities who have 2 million, and they are in a much better position than i am. When a columnist from the New York Times wants to do something, he has a great advantage over me. Fame is strongly correlated to your ability to be effective when you are trying to make normsbased change. It is inequitably distributed. If you want to start a car company that is going to change the world and conquer climate change, it helps to be elon musk and to have found a paypal and to have several billion dollars you can start with. If you want to change the world with code, if else to be one of my students at m. I. T. Who has a great engineering background or a student here at rice, who has the chance to build technology that is going to go out and change the world. The thing that is so amazing about these legalbased series of changes that, at the end of the day, we all have one vote. Under things like the Voting Rights act, now sadly suspended, we actually work, work very hard to make sure people have equal opportunity to get to the polls and cast that vote. That is something that took us years to realize that we had to build equity in spaces. These forms of change are so new that we have not thought about equity yet. We have not thought about what it means that some people have a much better chance of using these tools than us. So, i want to talk about another way people are trying to make change. Here im going to Start Talking about some books that have been very influential. This is a book by michael, who teaches at columbia journalism called the good citizen. The point of it is that, we have in our heads a model of citizenship that we think citizens should follow. So whood citizen is gets up, reads different newspapers, gets different points of view, stays uptodate on all sorts of issues, goes out to vote. When she or he is officially sufficiently incensed or worried, he writes to elected officials. One of michaels observations is that the good citizen might not exist. The good citizen turns out to be a creation of the progressive in the 1920s. It is a reaction to an earlier model of what it meant to be a good citizen. Before the progressives come along, to be a good citizen is to be a loyal party member. It is to show up and represent your social class, your tribe of people, by showing up in the election, holding up your ballot to the public, filling it out, fighting your way to the polls, because there were often drunken brawls at that point, and going and casting your vote in solidarity with your brothers who had the same background that you do. That changes with the progressive movement. Suddenly, we have muckraking journalism. We have a secret ballot. We have ballot initiatives. We put an enormous amount of responsibility on the citizens to be hugely informed. What happens . Voting rights voting rates down to about0 35 percent in our cycle elections, where people are just electing representatives rather 35 in 70 down to about off cycle elections, where people are just electing representatives rather than president s. What michael thinks citizens really do is that they monitor. They scan the horizon for issues that they care about, where they think they can be effective and they think that they can make change. I have an example from my hometown. I live in a town of 3500 people. My local politics are not usually all that interesting. I generally dont spend a ton of time thinking about them. But i have a sixyearold child. He is in public school. In six more years, he will be heading to the high school. The high school is falling down because it has not been fixed since the 1960s. There is a bill on the ground to try and figure out how we fix it. Lanesborough, massachusetts. We had a giant controversy over whether we should increase the tax rate to improve the high school. This came on my radar screen, and i got incited excited. I have been monitoring for the issue that i cared about. When it came on the horizon, i figured out a way to jump in. Mike puts this idea forward. On australian scientist says, wait, this expands a lot of how we do politics now. Its not just individuals who monitor. It is whole organizations. We have groups like the Sunlight Foundation that do nothing but try to monitor the performance of government. Are people showing up for votes . Where are they getting their Campaign Contributions from . Are they living up to their Campaign Promises in one fashion or another . It feels like a very passive, very washingtoncentered form of citizenship, but it doesnt have to be. There is a wonderful documentary going around right now, pbs put it out a couple of weeks ago, about the black panthers. When you go to the emergence of the black panthers at the height of the civil rights movement, the first thing the panthers did was start following the Oakland Police around, driving behind police cars, four men to a car. When the Oakland Police would stop someone and try to make an arrest, four members of the black panthers, armed, would get out and monitor the police arrest. It is kind of amazing that no one got shot. This was a way of standing forward and saying, Police Brutality is a problem in oakland. We are watching. Part of our job as citizens is to be monitors of power. And you see this right now with groups like top watch that are actively going out and teaching that are like copwatch actively going out and teaching people how to monitor police making arrests. Santana was able to monitor what was going on. This is a very, very old way of thinking about citizenship. Actually, it goes back to the french revolution. Rosanvallon has a brilliant book called counterdemocracy. What he argues in it is that, for all that makes democratic systems work, what may be most powerful is people watching those democratic systems, putting under surveillance the people in power. If we look at people, if we are nounce when wee de see wrongdoing being done, if we evaluate the performance being done, we are not doing performance in a way that we normally think about it, we are doing something much closer to surveillance, watching from below rather than above. Rosanvallon makes the argument that this really emerges during the french revolution. Once you get new forms of political power, the citizenry see themselves as empowered to hold responsible their new leaders. Monarchs never had to be responsible. But when you have leaders coming from the people, there is this need to be constantly watchful, constantly trying to ensure that the power does not get abused. Vallon, this idea of counter democracy is not that this watching is against democracy, but that it is a tension that is structural. Its a buttress. Its a way in which this counterpower keeps that wall from falling down. So, whats interesting to think about is that there are two ways that watchfulness can go wrong. ,ne is that it can be too weak and that may be the situation we have right now. We have the great and good groups like the sound the Sunlight Foundation. Yes, we can document how much money is in politics, how likely it is this vote is paid for. The danger is that, where the french revolution ends up is invention. Illotines it is literally people who came under surveillance and were found wanting in the eyes of the public, including robespierre. So, what do we do . Im offering two ideas to try to find a way out of what looks like an otherwise very difficult method for civis. Dont have it for civics i dont have an answer for what you should do. I have what i do. Im going to spend a lot of time in places like this. This is a favela in brazil, the thirdlargest city in brazil. Its quite a Poor Community in the middle of a fairly wealthy city. It is built on reclaimed land on a very steep hillside. Its a neighborhood that has a lot of problems. Its also a neighbor that has a lot of social capital. A lot of what im doing these days is going out and meeting with Community Organizations like this and saying whats wrong with your community, what are things that you would like to document and try to figure out how to fix. We do this with the highest of high technology. We use the best postit notes and finest of magic markers. We br