Berkman Klein Center For Internet And Society: Audio Fishbowl

More than any other recent event, the Year 2000 problem (better known as the Y2K bug) established the public awareness of the temporal and calendrical contingencies of computer systems. This talk revisits the Y2K bug to see what lessons can be drawn from this (non) event. Using archival research conducted at the Charles Babbage Institute, this talk undertakes an analysis of the Year 2000 Problem and the large-scale practices of technological repair and management that addressed it. By recovering the organized response to the perceived threat of the Y2K bug, this project treats the crisis as one of the greatest, public-facing attempts to educate and train individuals and organizations to manage the unforeseen and potentially devastating effects old code can have on contemporary computerized infrastructures. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/03/Mulvin

The world is facing five global challenges: democratic, environmental, technological, economical, and geopolitical. Challenges that will require both enormous amount of knowledge and citizens capable of using such knowledge in scenarios that today are hard to predict. The University is clearly the main institution that could help society on both counts. However, if University truly wants to maximize its social utility, it needs--as argued by De Martin in his book 'Università Futura' (Codice Edizioni, Italy, 2017)--to critically question the last 30 years of its development and re-discover its roots, updating them for the 21st century. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/02/DeMartin

As the Internet grows more sophisticated, it is creating new threats to democracy. Social media companies such as Facebook can sort us ever more efficiently into groups of the like-minded, creating echo chambers that amplify our views. It's no accident that on some occasions, people of different political views cannot even understand each other. It's also no surprise that terrorist groups have been able to exploit social media to deadly effect. Welcome to the age of #Republic. In this revealing book, Cass Sunstein, the New York Times bestselling author of Nudge and The World According to Star Wars, shows how today's Internet is driving political fragmentation, polarization, and even extremism—and what can be done about it. Thoroughly rethinking the critical relationship between democracy and the Internet, Sunstein describes how the online world creates "cybercascades," exploits "confirmation bias," and assists "polarization entrepreneurs." And he explains why online fragmentation endangers the shared conve

As the internet connects makers, manufacturers and shippers across supply chains, a new form of producing and distributing global objects is arising, one that relies more on bottom up networks than top down oversight. When you look carefully, you see the signs of them: in the US, they might be t-shirts with hashtags on them, pussyhats at marches, and creative protest signs, and in Shenzhen, China, we see a plethora of hardware objects, such as selfie sticks, hoverboards and e-cigarettes, that rapidly reach global markets. What sorts of objects do new forms of hardware culture enable, and what role does the internet now play in all steps along the way, from ideation to sales to manufacturing to shipping? How might we now incorporate physical objects into our notions of internet memes? And what does this suggest about the future of object culture more generally? For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2017/03/Mina

Shoppers with Internet access and a bargain-hunting impulse can find a universe of products at their fingertips. In this thought-provoking exposé, Maurice Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi invite us to take a harder look at today’s app-assisted paradise of digital shopping. While consumers reap many benefits from online purchasing, the sophisticated algorithms and data-crunching that make browsing so convenient are also changing the nature of market competition, and not always for the better. Computers colluding is one danger. Although long-standing laws prevent companies from fixing prices, data-driven algorithms can now quickly monitor competitors’ prices and adjust their own prices accordingly. So what is seemingly beneficial—increased price transparency—ironically can end up harming consumers. A second danger is behavioral discrimination. Here, companies track and profile consumers to get them to buy goods at the highest price they are willing to pay. The rise of super-platforms and their “frenemy” relationship w

Speech on the Internet is often viewed as unregulated, yet platforms still have Terms of Service that prohibit defamation and community guidelines that prohibit incitement. How do we reconcile the reality of online life with the legal meaning of those terms? What do we lose when we try to adapt words torn from centuries-old American jurisprudence to online spaces? In this talk, Kendra Albert explores how introducing legal terms of art invoked for their weight but often divorced from law, known as “legal talismans”, impacts online platforms and how we can move beyond legalities to systems that are more considerate of all users. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/10/Albert

There is abundant research on commons-based Peer Production communities, from free/open source software and wikis to fablabs and even community gardens. Research shows how these communities, regardless of their type, follow a deeply unequal distribution of effort (the 1-9-90 rule). This fact frequently generates feelings of frustration and guilt among contributors and users. How can we translate social research into evidence-based interventions to aid these communities? Which online tools would help reduce the invisible wall between contributors and users to facilitate participation? How can we ensure the tools we build respond to the communities' needs? Associate Professor Samer Hassan shares three years of research within the EU-funded P2Pvalue.eu project, aimed at translating social research into the building of online tools to increase the participation and sustainability of commons-based peer production communities. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/

The Responsive Communities Initiative led by Susan Crawford at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University addresses some of the most important issues of economic development, social justice, and civil liberties of our time – those prompted by Internet access. The program has three areas of research involving the Internet, data, and government: Internet Access Infrastructure, Data Governance, and Responsive Communities Leaders. Come learn about the current state of the program's research, what they hope to achieve, and how Internet access could be regulated as a utility and open government data can improve our communities. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/09/ResponsiveCommunities

Organizations that develop open source software are often inherently fragmented and loosely-networked, which can make governance and decision-making a challenge. In addition, as the open source community grows and becomes more global, so too has the need to establish strong governance models and corporate structures that allow an organization to achieve its mission, and foster a sustainable community both creatively and financially. In order to do this, it is helpful for open source organizations to understand the corporate structures and governance models available to them so they may evaluate the pros and cons of different approaches to institutional management and financial structure. In this session, we plan to discuss the various corporate structures and governance models available to open source organizations, including a discussion on when it is appropriate for an open source organization to seek tax exempt status. For more about this event, visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheons/2016/05/Ri

Dr. Adrian Gropper is working to put patients in charge of their health records, arguably the most valuable and most personal kinds of connected information about a person. They encompass elements of anonymous, pseudonymous, and verified identity and they interact with both regulated institutions and licensed professionals. Gropper’s research centers on self-sovereign technology for management of personal information both in control of the individual and as hosted or curated by others. The HIE of One project is a free software reference implementation and currently the only standards-based patient-centered record. The work implements a self-sovereign UMA Authorization Server and is adding blockchain identity as self-sovereign technology to enable licensed practitioners to authenticate and, for example, write a compliant prescription directly into the patient’s self-sovereign health record. The public interest threads through many aspects of this work. Detailed health records are valuable sources for medical

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 t

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?

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 ex

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

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

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