Eric Schmidt - Part 8: Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt lyrics

JA ..But no, I think that the instincts human beings have are actually much better than the societies that we have. JC Then the governments, basically. JA I am not going to say governments. The whole structure of the society. The economic structure. And that people learn that simple altruistic acts don't pay off and they see that some people who act in non altruistic ways end up getting Porsches and fast cars, and it tends to pull people in that direction. I thought about this a while ago when I saw there was this fantastic video that came out of Stanford in about '69 on nuclear synthesis of DNA. Have you seen it? SM No. JC No. ES No. JA It's on youtube. It's great. A wonderful thing. So it is explaining nuclear synthesis through interpretive dance. And so there are like a hundred and thirty Stanford students out there pretending to be DNA, a whole bunch pretending to be a ribosomal subunit and da da da. And all wearing the hippy clothes of the day. But they were all actually very bright people. And I looked at that and thought, could Stanford.. and it was a very good bit of education, so it is not that it was cool and unusual, rather that it was extremely instructive, and before computer animation was the best representation of how a ribosomal unit behaves. Could you see Stanford doing that now? Absolutely impossible. It is far too conservative for it to do that now, even though that was an extremely effective education... you can bet everyone who was in that dance remembers exactly how nuclear synthesis occurs, because they all had to remember their parts. And I remember it having seen it. No, rather that period of peak earnings for the average wage in the United States was, what, like '77? That certain things simply happened. That those people who were altruistic and not too concerned about finances and fiscalization simply lost power relative to those people who were more concerned about finances and fiscalization and worked their way up in the system. So certain behaviours were disincentivized and others were potentiated. And that is primarily I believe as a result of technology that enables fiscalization. So fast bank transfers. The IRS being able to account for lots of people, it s**s people into a very rigid fiscalized structure. So you can have a lot of political change in the United States. But will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone's bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts, and contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really. So I say that free speech in many places - in many Western places - is free not as a result of liberal circumstances in the West but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn't matter what you say. ie. the dominant elite doesn't have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not. It is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a political society. Although it is radically heading towards a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt was, are still heavily politicized. And so their rulers really do need to be concerned about what people think, and so they spend a portion of efforts on controlling freedom of speech. JC So if you were... JA But I think young people have fairly good values. Of course it's a spectrum and so on. But they have fairly good values most of the time. And they want to demonstrate them to other people and you can see this when people first go to university and so on. And they become hardened as a result of certain things having a pay off and other things not having a payoff. Studying for an exam, constantly, even though in some cases the work is completely mindless, and pointless, has a payoff at the end of the year, but going and talking to someone and doing a favour doesn't have a payoff at the end of the year. And so this disincentivizes some behaviours and incentivizes other ones. JC But let me tease out some of this, I mean it sounds like you have got a view of the globe with certain societies where the impact of technology is relatively slight, certain societies where politically the impact of technology can be quite great, and certain societies where it would be at a sort of middling way. And you would put China into I guess the middling category. JA Well, it's starting to... JC Since our book is all about technology and social transformation ten years down the line... what's the globe that you see given the structure that you are describing? JA I am not sure about the impact on China. It is still a political society, so the impact could be very great. I mean I often say that censorship is always cause for celebration. It is always an opportunity, because it reveals fear of reform. It means that the power position is so weak that you have got to care about what people think. JC Right. It's like you find the sensitive documents by watching them hunt. JA Exactly. ES This is a very interesting argument. JC Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. JA So when the Chinese express all this energy on censoring in all these novel ways, do we say that it is a complete waste of time and energy, or do they have a whole bunch of experience managing the country and understand that it matters what people think? I say it is much more reasonable to interpret it as the different groups different actors within China who are able to control that censorship system understand correctly that their power position is weak and they need to be careful what people think. So they have to censor. JC So the state is rational, at least in its repression. JA I am always worried in talking about the state, because it's all individuals acting in their own perceived interest. Some, this group or that group. JC Fair enough. JA Even the censors in China of the Public Security Bureau, people who work there. Why do they censor stuff and what do they censor first? I'll tell you what they censor first? They censor first the thing that someone in the Politburo might see. That's what they censor first. They are not actually concerned about darknets. JC Sorry, about? JA They are not concerned about darknets. Because their bosses can't see what is on the darknet, and so they can't be blamed for not censoring it. We had this fantastic case here in the UK, we had a whole bunch of cla**ified documents from the UK military, and published a bunch. And then later on we did a sort of preemptive FOI which we do occasionally on various governments when we can. So we did it on the UK ministry of defense, just to see whether they were doing some investigation, sort of a source protection to understand what is going on. So we got back... first they pretended they were missing documents and we appealed and we got back a bunch of documents. And so it showed that someone in there had spotted that there was a bunch of UK military documents on our website. About their surveillance programme. Another two thousand page document about how to stop things leaking, and that the number one threat to the UK ministry was investigative journalists. So that had gone into some counterintelligence da da da da, and they had like, oh my good, it has hundreds of thousands of pages, and it is about all sorts of companies and it just keeps going, and it's endless, it's endless! Exclamation marks, you know, five exclamation marks. And that was like, okay, that is the discovery phase, now the what is to be done phase. What is to be done? BT has the contracts for the MoD. They told BT to censor us from them. So everyone in the UK MoD could no longer read what was on WikiLeaks. Problem solved! ES Interesting. JA It's like all the generals and their bosses and all these people could no longer see that we had MoD stuff on there. And so now there is no more complaints and their problem is solved. So understandings like this might be quite advantageous to use in some of these systems. So it means that darknets for example, if you understand the bureaucratic structures that employ people and give them tasks always have that sort of thing going on then that means that darknets are gonna have a pretty easy time of it, until they are so big that they are not darknets anymore. JC Hm. That's really... that's really really interesting. You mentioned investigative journalism, do you... you've had a lot of experience with journalism by now, in many different respects, i mean, how do you see the kind of freedom of information that you are describing, that you were describing earlier, as fitting into journalistic processes, if at all, or is it replacing it? JA No it is, I mean it's more how these journalistic processes fit into something that is much bigger, and the much bigger thing is that we as human beings shepherd and create our intellectual history as a civilization. And it is that intellectual history on the shelf that we can pull off to do stuff, and not do the dumb thing again. Someone already said said it was done and wrote about their experience and we don't do it again. And so there are several different processes that are creating that record and other processes where people are trying to destroy pieces of that record and others that are trying to prevent people putting things into the record. We all live off that intellectual record, so what we want to do is get as much into the record, prevent as much as possible being deleted from the record, and then, and then have the record as searchable as possible. ES But one consequence of this view is that actors will find the generation of very large amounts of misinformation strategic for them. JA Yeah. So this is another type of censorship that I have thought about but don't speak so much about. Which is censorship through complexity. ES Hide it. Too complicated. JA And that is basically the offshore financial sector. Censorship through complexity. Censorship of what? Censorship of political outrage. With enough political outrage there is law reform and enough law reform you can't do it anymore. So why is it that all these careful tax structuring arrangements are so complex? I mean, they may be perfectly legal, but why are they so god damn complex? Well, because the ones that weren't complex were understood and the ones that were understood were regulated, so you're only left with the things that are incredibly complex. ES More noise less signal, kind of... JA Yeah, exactly, exactly... SM But how in the future will people deal with the fact that the incentive to publish information that is misleading, wrong, manipulative, is very high. Furthermore you can't figure out who the bad publisher was as well as the good...because there's anonymity in the system. JA Yeah, so I suggested. Well, the way it is right now is there is very... first we must understand that the way it is right now is very bad. Friend of mine Greg Mitchell wrote a book about the mainstream media, So Wrong For So Long. And that's basically it. That yes we have these heroic moments with Watergate and Bernstein and so on, but, come on, actually, it's never been very good it's always been very bad. And these fine journalists are an exception to the rule. And especially when you are involved in something yourself and you know every facet of it and you look to see what is reported by it in the mainstream press, and you can see naked lies after naked lies. You know that the journalist knows it's a lie, it is not a simple mistake, and then simple mistakes, and then people repeating lies, and so on, that actually the condition of the mainstream press nowadays is so appalling I don't think it can be reformed. I don't think that is possible. I think it has to be eliminated, and replaced with something that is better. JC Which does seem to be happening!