Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Every 500 years or so, European civilization and now world civilization, has been rocked by fundamental shifts in its value regime, in which the rules of the game for acquiring wealth and livelihoods have dramatically changed. Following Benkler's seminal Wealth of Networks, which first identifies peer production, the P2P Foundation has collated a vast amount of empirical evidence of newly emerging value practices, which exist in a uneasy relationship with the dominant political economy, and of which some authors claim, like Jeremy Rifkin and Paul Mason, that it augurs a fundamental shift. What would be the conditions for this new regime to become autonomous and even dominant, and what are the signs of it happening? As context, we will be using the Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks framework of David Ronfeldt, the Relational Grammar of Alan Page Fiske, and the evolution of modes of exchange as described by Kojin Karatini in The Structure of World History. We will argue that there is consistent evidence that the structural crises of the dominant political economy is leading to responses that are prefigurative of a new value regime, of which the seed forms can be clearly discerned. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Bauwens

While 94% of parents raising school-age children below the U.S. median household income have an Internet connection, more than half are “under-connected,” in that their Internet connection is too slow, has been interrupted in the past year due to non-payment, and/or they share their Internet-connected devices with too many people. Katz will discuss how being under-connected impacts the everyday lives of lower-income parents and children, how parents assess the risks and rewards that connectivity can offer their children, and the implications of under-connectedness for policy development and program reform. She draws from two linked datasets of lower-income parents with school-age (grades K-8) children that she has collected since 2013: in-depth interviews with 336 parents and children in three states, and a telephone survey of 1,191 parents—the first nationally representative survey of this U.S. demographic. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Katz

The social nature of today’s Internet is creating new public health and policy challenges. For example, the US in 2014 experienced the largest measles outbreak in nearly a generation, which led to the passing of the nation's most conservative vaccine legislation, eliminating the personal belief exemption in California. Research has identified online misinformation about vaccines as one of the risk factors for this outbreak. Through three big data case analyses on water fluoridation, the Ebola epidemic, and childhood vaccinations, we analyze the influence of scientific evidence and the influence of “social proof,” a form of imitation where individuals ascribe to the behavior of others in order to resolve uncertainty. Our work aims to answer the question, how can we employ network science to develop social communication strategies for public health that build on the strengths and opportunities provided by today's Internet? In other words, instead of asking "How can we share our message with our target audience?" should we be asking "How can our target audience share our message?" For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2016/05/Seymour

Following the 2014 Google Spain decision rendered by the European Court of Justice of the European Union, search engines – and, first among them, Google – are tasked with the delisting of search results leading to outdated or inaccurate information about European citizens. This ‘right to be delisted’ has since then revealed itself as a highly controversial concept, raising issues such as the desired degree of protection of personal data over the Internet and the role of the act of forgetting in the digital age; it also highlighted the lack of an existing consensus over these questions between individual jurisdictions – and namely between the European Union and the United States. On 14 April 2016, the European Parliament has adopted the General Data Protection Regulation, which will, in two years from now, update and harmonize data protection law all across the Member States of the European Union. Its article 17 contains a ‘right to erasure’ or a ‘right to be forgotten’ which is set to formalize, unify and extend the existing Google Spain ruling. But how to make that happen in practice? How can legal fragmentation be prevented? Relying on his background in conflict of laws, Dr. Michel Reymond shows that finding common standards for the Right to be Forgotten will prove extremely difficult – not only regarding its procedural elements, but also when addressing its substance. He also argues that, before even starting a conversation between the U.S. and the E.U., some soul-searching about the nature of the right may need to be performed inside the E.U. itself first. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Reymond

What is it like to use the Internet in fits and starts? How do communities with limited access to the global Internet use digital tools? Beyond sensational media narratives about Havana’s WiFi hotspots and the paquete semanal, there is a complex landscape of Internet access, digital media use and open source software development in Cuba. This talk offers a primer on Cuba’s digital culture and critique of Western political narratives surrounding technology, freedom and empowerment as they apply in the Cuban context. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2016/5/Biddle

With Internet censorship and mass surveillance on the rise globally, understanding regulatory "chilling effects"— the idea that laws, regulations, or state surveillance can deter people from exercising their freedoms or engaging in entirely legal activities— has thus today, in our Post-Snowden world, taken on greater urgency and public importance. Yet, the notion is not uncontroversial; commentators, scholars, and researchers, from a variety of fields, have long questioned such chilling effects claims, including their existence or extent of any "chill" and related harms, particularly so in online contexts, leading to recent calls for more systematic and interdisciplinary research on point. In this talk, Jon draws on his doctoral research at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, to help fill in some of the gaps in our understanding of chilling effects online. Through discussion of three empirical legal case studies— one on surveillance-related chilling effects and Wikipedia, a second on the impact of the DMCA's copyright enforcement scheme, and a third survey-based study on "chilling effect scenarios"— Jon offers insights on these and other questions: What is the nature and scale of regulatory chilling effects online? Do they persist or are they merely temporary? What factors may influence their impact? Jon also reflects on the importance of open data platforms like the Lumen Database and Wikimedia Foundation's data portals to future research in this, and related, areas. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/04/Penney

Carl Williams joins us to speak about the current Black Liberation movement. What and who it is, how it started, and how Twitter, Facebook (yes, Facebook) and other social media played a part. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Williams

The U.S. still lags behind much of the developed world in terms of the speed and density of its internet infrastructure. In the 21st Century this disparity in access to high speed internet could stand as a critical challenge to competitiveness in many areas, from industry and commerce, to healthcare and education, to civic life and culture. In this conversation, Susan Crawford discusses the potential futures we face as we consider how to invest in the wires that bring us our internet. For more information about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/04/Crawford

AI technologies have the potential to vastly enhance the performance of many systems and institutions, from making transportation safer, to enhancing the accuracy of medical diagnosis, to improving the efficiency of food safety inspections. However, AI systems can also create moral hazards, by potentially diminishing human accountability, perpetuating biases that are inherent to the AI's training data, or optimizing for one performance measure at the expense of others. These challenges require new kinds of "user interfaces" between machines and society. We will explore these issues, and how they would interface with existing institutions. About Joi Ito Joi Ito is the director of the MIT Media Lab, Professor of the Practice at MIT and the author, with Jeff Howe, of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future (Grand Central Publishing, 2016). Ito is chairman of the board of PureTech Health and serves on several other boards, including The New York Times Company, Sony Corporation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation. He is also the former chairman and CEO of Creative Commons, and a former board member of ICANN, The Open Source Initiative, and The Mozilla Foundation. Ito is a serial entrepreneur who helped start and run numerous companies including one of the first web companies in Japan, Digital Garage, and the first commercial Internet service provider in Japan, PSINet Japan/IIKK. He has been an early-stage investor in many companies, including Formlabs, Flickr, Kickstarter, littleBits, and Twitter. Ito has received numerous awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute and the Golden Plate Award from the Academy of Achievement, and he was inducted into the SXSW Interactive Festival Hall of Fame in 2014. Ito has been awarded honorary doctorates from The New School and Tufts University. About Iyad Rahwan Iyad Rahwan is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Scalable Cooperation group. A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of Artificial Intelligence. His team built the Moral Machine, which has collected 28 million decisions to-date about how autonomous cars should prioritize risk. Rahwan's work appeared in major academic journals, including Science and PNAS, and was featured in major media outlets, including the New York Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/04/Ito

Alan Weinberger started out as a traditional law student. Soon after, he found himself on Wall Street with a major Wall Street law firm. He then took an academic route as the founding Professor at Vermont Law School (at the same time Bernie was just a carpenter). And, in the early 1980s, he saw that the revolution for the next hundred years was taking place right before our eyes. Mr. Weinberger had the simple idea to create a community (a digital nation) of like-minded professionals for mutual gain, marketplace leverage, and collaborative group learning. He also saw that the lynchpin, the smartest and most valuable element in this revolution, was local information technology (or "IT") experts. This talk will address the development of the information technology marketplace over the past three decades and the continued importance of small IT companies. For more information, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2016/04/Weinberger

The relationship between burglary and architecture is far from abstract. While it is easy to focus merely on questions of how burglars use or abuse the built environment — looking for opportunities of illicit entrance — burglary, in fact, requires architecture. It is an explicitly spatial crime, one that cannot exist without a threshold to cross, without “the magic of four walls,” as at least one legal theorist has written. Join Geoff Manaugh, author of the new book A Burglar’s Guide to the City, to discuss more than two thousand years’ worth of heists and break-ins, with a discussion ranging from the surprisingly — one might say uselessly — complicated legal definition of an interior space to the everyday tools burglars use to gain entry. Written over the course of three years of research, Manaugh’s Burglar’s Guide includes flights with the LAPD Air Support Division, a visit with a panic room designer and retired state cop in his New Jersey warehouse, an introduction to the subculture of recreational lock-picking, a still-unsolved bank tunnel heist in 1980s Los Angeles, and much more. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/04/Manaugh

Based on the authors’ recent Harvard Journal of Law and Technology article, Reconceptualizing the Right to be Forgotten to Enable Transatlantic Data Flow, Sanna Kulevska and Michael Rustad will lay out the legal dilemmas that flow from the European Union’s far-reaching right to be forgotten (RTBF). Google Spain v. AEPD (May 2014) and Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will go into effect in 2018, are already driving a significant legal, economic and cultural wedge between the U.S. and its EU trading partners. In October 2015, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) struck down the U.S./EU Safe Harbor agreement that enabled data to be freely transferred from Europe to the United States and in February 2016, the EU/U.S. Privacy Shield was proposed as a replacement. Sanna and Michael will lead the discussion of the legal dilemmas that policymakers face in walking the tight rope between the Scylla of constraining the right of expression and the Charybdis of diminishing an individual’s right to control their personal data. The authors will use current case studies of takedown requests from Google to provide context for their discussion of how a Safe Harbor 2.0 might achieve the proper balance between expression and privacy. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/03/Kulevska%20Rustad

What ties together cheerleader outfits, monkey selfies, the Batmobile, a chicken sandwich, Yoga, and Yoda? Professor Peter Menell will provide an exhilarating copyright year in review. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/04/Menell

In 2013, the ACLU of Massachusetts set out to get a snapshot of student privacy policies in diverse communities statewide. We filed public records requests with dozens of school districts, asking for information about how they manage student information and handle digital student privacy issues. The responses were stunning: almost across the board, schools told students they had “no expectation of privacy” on school networks, using school email, or on school devices. The Supreme Court has said students don’t shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gates. How can we apply this maxim in the digital age? For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/03/Rossman%20Crockford

Discrimination and harassment have been persistent problems since the earliest days of the social web. As platforms and legislators continue to debate and engineer responses, most of the burden of dealing with online discrimination and harassment has been borne by the online citizens who experience and respond to these problems. How can everyday Internet citizens make sense of social problems online, including our own racist and sexist behavior? How can we support each other and cooperate towards change in meaningful, effective ways? And how can we know that our interventions are making a difference? Nathan Matias shares four years of research and design interventions aimed at expanding the power of citizens to understand and develop effective responses to discrimination and harassment online. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/02/Matias