So, I wanted to come here to get you to see something about governance by seeing something about how culture and commerce has changed. I want you to see a pattern here, and I think this pattern can teach us something about the future of governance, or what governance can be.

But to introduce this argument I wanna start with 3 stories.

So, here is the 1st story:

About a 100 years ago, 1906, this man, John Philip Soussa, traveled to this place, the United States Capitol to speak about this technology, what he called "talking machines". John Philip Soussa was not a fan of the talking machines, this is what he had to say. "This talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy... in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day". "We will not have a vocal cord left," Soussa said, "the vocal cords will be eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man when he came from the ape."

Now this is the picture I want you to focus on, the picture of the young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. This is a picture of culture, we can call it using modern computer terminology a kind of read-write culture. It's a culture where people participate in the creation and the re-creation of their culture and in that sens it's read-write. And Soussa's fear was that we would lose the capacity to engage in this read-write creativity because of these "infernal machines". They would take it away, displace it and in its place we would have the opposite of read-write creativity, what we can call using modern computer terminology a kind of read-only culture. A culture where creativity is consumed, but the consumer is not a creator. A culture in this sens top-down where the vocal cords of the millions have been lost. That's the 1st story.

Here is the second. Not really a story, but pretend for a second, OK?

I wanna talk about "economies", by which I mean repeated pattern of interactions that extend over time. And I want you to think about different kinds of economies. Some economies are related to money, call those "a commercial economy". Think about going to the grocery store, where your relationship to the grocery store and the things in that grocery store are simple quid pro quo. This amount of money for that bar of soap. Money in this context is how we speak, it expresses value, it expresses a normal way to interact within the commercial economy. But some economies have nothing to do with money, you can call those sharing economies".

These too extend over time but money is not a component of these economies. So, here is a sharing economy, here is a sharing economy, here is a sharing economy. These are economies in the sens I mean because if there isn't an interaction which is reciprocal over time they do, or ought to, fail. But for these economies money is not how we speak. Indeed if we'd introduced money in these economies we would radically change the nature of that economy. Imagine one these women saying to the other "How about lunch next week?" and the other responding "Nah, what about $50 instead?" or imagine introducing money into this economy, it radically changes into something like that. The point to recognize is that these sharing economies are rich and an important part of our cultural life and they coexist with commercial economies.

Ok, that's the second story, here is the final story:

Think about trust for a second, or in particular how trust gets build. Here is some examples, examples of producing trust, in the market for one case. Think about that fantastic publication, Lonely Planet, Lonely Planet sets itself up as being a reliable source of information about places around the world that you might want to travel to. How does it establish its reliability? Well, here is what it says: "Lonely Planet books provide independent advice. Lonely Planet do not accept advertising in guidebooks, nor do we accept payment in exchange for listing or endorsing anyplace or business. Lonely Planet writers do not accept discounts or payments in exchange for positive coverage of any sort."

But the point is not that money in this context would make what was said false, it's that money in that context would induce a mistrust of Lonely Planet as a source. Or think about Wikipedia. Wikipedia does not permit adds on its site, because it's the 9th largest site in the world it means that it leaves about 100 million dollars on the table every year. I've asked Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, why exactly they would leave a 100 million dollars on the table every year. This is what he said:

"But we do care how the general public looks to Wikipedia in all of its glories and all of its flaws, which are numerous of course. But the one thing they don't say is "Well, I don't trust Wikipedia because it's all basically advertising fluff.""

So once again the point is not that money here would entail that what was said was false. It's that money would suggest mistrust in the context of what Wikipedia does.

Or think about courts as an other example. United States Federal Court has been quite good at establishing trust as an institution that is not influenced by money. It does so directly by excluding judges who have financial interest in cases and also indirectly. Here is for example a case the Suprem Court decided this year: Exxon Shipping vs Baker. It was a case about punitive damages in a context of admiralty law. The court had to decide whether to limit punitive damages and the court did decide to limit punitive damages but in the course of that decision it dropped this footnote 17. Court said "Court is aware of a body of litterature running parralel to anecdotal reports examining the predictability of punitive awards by conducting numerous "mock juries", where different "juries" are confronted with the same hypothetical case." But then it went on to say "Because this research was funded in part by Exxon, we decline to rely upon it."

So, the mere fact that money came from Exxon was enough for the court to say they will not even read the research, eventhough the research supported the court ultimate conclusions. Why is that? Now I know this research, its import and substantial. I know the people who produced this research, there is zero chance that any of them was affected by the money. And you might say, why can't they rely on this research when of course they are relying upon briefs that was funded in part by Exxon, they rely on oral argument in the Supreme Court funded in part by Exxon, why not research funded in part by Exxon?

And I believe the answer is the Court faces a certain fear here. A fear that researchers providing data or information to the court indirectly through the legal academy will develop a certain dependence on outside sources of funding that they view as improper. And to avoid that incentive, the Court simply takes a class of speech and disqualifies it, whether it's trustworthy speech or not. This is a tool for establishing trust and making contrast of that tool with cases of mistrust that have developped in the context of public institutions in the United States, in particular in the context of public health institutions.

Here is an example:

Everybody knows about the danger of environmental lead. In the United States, in 1972, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put the country on notice that it was going to do something about it by banning lead in gasoline and by 1976 they began the process of ending the sale of any gasoline with lead and in 1995 that was ended in the United States. Now many people look at this and say "Why didn't the EPA do this sooner?" Because of course there is not secret of the danger of lead in the environment. Indeed in 1921 the president of the National Lead Company explicitly stated that lead in the environment would cause significant harm. Nonetheless, after that statement gasoline companies began to add lead to gasoline to improve their efficiency. And then this series of arguments began.

The American Petroleum Institute, 1965, said "All accepted medical evidence proves conclusively that lead in the environment presents no threat to public health." Twenty years later it's not much different, the lead industries association says "Lead has been used in gasoline for 60 years and there is no evidence that anyone has ever been armed." Now of course, as we know now, those statements are simply not true, but this research that guided regulatory agencies was of course research funded in part, as the excellent court said "by interests directly affected by the regulation." And that interest delaid the regulation to significant consequences.

In 1995, after lead was banned, study showed that there was an 80% drop of lead in the blood of children, leading to a statistically significant increase in the IQ of our children. Our children are smarter than we are simply because we have removed this single contaminant from the environment. Yet the delay to do this was caused by studies funded in part by interested industry.

Think of an other example, chromium 6. There is a famous series of stories about working in chrome plating factories early in the 20th century in the United States where old workers would introduce new workers to their job by taking a dime and passing it from one side of their nose to the other side of their nose because of the hole that have developped inside their nostril. Now that was a signal to some that this was a dangereous chemical and people began to investigate it. And the Occupational Safety and Health Administration in 1976 said they "had concluded that a comprehensive occupational health standard is urgently needed to protect employees from this chemical, chromium 6." and that they would "complete this process in the shortest possible time." That was 1976. The regulation that finally banned chromium 6 came into effect in 2006, a delay caused because of studies funded in part by the industries regulated.

Now in both cases, indeed in all cases in american regulatory process, the regulatory proceedings here are driven by data funded in part by the industries regulated, leading in the health context to decades of delay, not an exageration to say litterally thousands of people dying because of this delay. This change is an opportunity for trust in regulation to mistrust in regulation.

Here's the second example, 'medefal' is this drug, Activ- Activase or Alteplase it's the generic name forwards, you might be a little confused with the language choose for "reperfuse", you might think is a word you don't know because you're not a native speaker, actually the Oxford dictionnary doesn't know that word eather, there's no such a word as "reperfuse", there "reperfusion" but I don't know what the verb form would be, but anyway, if you need to reperfuse, this company thinks you should do it with Activase. Ok well, Activase is design to deal with what we use to call strokes, the industry now is to call it brain attacks, and they released the drug around late 1990s and in 1998 the American Heart Association conducted a study of this drug. And the study concluded suptential support for the safety and effect of this drug, but there was a dissent to that report. But, when the report was publised in 2000 the dissent was eleminated, indeed the name of the doctor who submitted the dissent was removed from the report. And then it was reported by a british medical journal researcher, Jean Lenzer, that the company, whos drug, this was Genentech, given AHA 11 million dollars, raising obvious questions. As Lenzer putted "This recommendation may have been made in the true spirit of unbiased scientific inquiry, but the appearance of dispassionate analysis was eroded by large donations from a drug company." Donations from an interested funded in part by the interested regulator. Again taking trust translating into mistrust.

So the point that I'm trying to make in all of this cases, is a recognition, it's obvious once made but let's keep in on the table : money poisons trust. Money in some places poisons the possibility of trust, because we begin to believe that the decisions or actions or will of some entity is guided by something that it should not be, a reason that is improper, a dependence that is improper, and then improper dependence destroys this trust. Ok, thats the 3rd story.

Here's the argument. We have to first see an emerging dynamic, that's happening in the context of culture to see what's interesting that's happening in the context of governmence. So there are two parts to this dynamic, the first is something that would make Soussa extraordinatly happy. It is evolution through the Internet, of how culture gets made. Now I think we could see two steps in this evolution, one around 2000 when the technologies on the Internet begin to extend the Read-Only culture of the 20th century. Massively efficient technologies enabling people to get and consume culture created elsewhere. This is the poster child for that conception of culture : Apple with its iTune music store allowing you to buy for 99cents any song that you want and download it to your iPod, of course only to your iPod, but anyway in the United States you're guaranteed to be cool if you engage in this form of culture consumsion. This is an extraordinary important part of the market for culture right now, giving you access of an extraordinary diversity of culture. It's the celestial jukebox where anywhere one can get access to an enormous range of culture at a relativly low cost, critically important to the futur of cultur and the Internet. But interestingly about 2004 we began to see the real revival of the opposite to Read-Only culture, a Read-Write culture.

This is the poster child for that: "Wikipedia". But I want to focus on a particular slice of this Read-Write cultur which I called "remix". I want to give you some examples so we all know exactly what I'm talking about. For example in the context of music. Everybody knows this album by the Beatles called the white album, which inspired this album by Jay-Z called the black album, which then inspired this album by DJ Danger Mouse called the grey album, an album which synthetized the tracks of the white album and black album together, to produce something grey, ok that's 2004, these two sources synthetized to produce something new. 2008 Girl Talk released an album were in one particular song there is 280 separate tracks that have been remixed to produce one new form of song. So that's remix for music.

Or think about think about anime music videos. Everybody knows what anime are, these are these japenese cartoons, swipping american culture right now. Anime music videos are made by somebody taking the anime, and re-editing them and setting it to a new music track. So it can be something as trivial as this. Or something like this (il passe 2 extraits d'anime : un avec une musique dance/techno entraînante et émouvante, l'autre avec une reprise d'une chanson humoristique américaine à base de Meumeumage).

Well think about the role Youtube as had in encouraging this kind of Read-Write creativity, and I want to focus you not of the things that you hear about in the press, of people ripping off other people work and posting it on Youtube, but on an extraordinary kind of call and response, that Youtube is inspiring. Where poeple creates something that somebody else copies by remaking in a slitely different form, so for example I came across this video. When I saw it, it had about 1 703 409 views. That then inspired this video, this one had about 3 268 983 views. So one responding to the other and then this continues, as litterally 'squores' of peoples produce the same thing and reproduce it for others to see (il diffuse une première vidéo où des jeunes rappeurs américains se filment entrain de danser (ils sont mal préparés et un peu ridiculs), et une seconde vidéo montrant deux jeunes filles d'apparence asiatique faire semblant de se préparer sur début de la même musique pour danser à leur tours avec semble-t-il un peu plus de grâce et d'assurance). Hum there's another example. Which inspired this, which inspired this (il montre une vidéo montrant super man faisant la morale, reprise avec des images des Simpson, reprise avec des images de Bambi).

So the point is to see how these become conversations. Conversations that are held in this digital plateform it's the equivalent of what Soussa spoke of when he spoke of the young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. But they do it none in corners or in backyards, they are doing it now on a digital plateform all accross the world where they're creating and sharing their creativity with others.

We think most importantly about politics. This actually comes from sweetness example, it's my favourite. (Il montre un remix d'images politiques montrant une idylle entre G.W. Bush et Tony Blair, sur une chanson d'amour de Johan Söderberg). Ok so that's what I mean by remix here. And obviously its importance has nothing to do with the technique, that you've seen here. Because of course from the beginning of the video or film people have been able to produce exactly what you have seen, but what is important here that the technique has been democratized. It's anybody with access to a 1 500 hundred dollars computer who can take sounds and images of the culture around us and remix them in ways that says thing differently, indeed say things in a way that their kids understand exclusively. Those of us who spend our lifes writing words, texts we're irrelevent to this generation. People who takes images and sound and produce things for them, they speak to that generation. Now this is the one change, the change in the Read-Write culture that we are seeing restaured as the technology spreads, but that's only one. There's another here, that I think is equally important, even more important ultimatly to the sustainability of the Internet. This is a change in the makes of economies out there. An evolution from a commercial economy into a sharing economy, to produce what I wanna call hybrids in the context of these economies. Hybrids are commercial entities that are trying to leverage a sharing economy to produce value for the commercial entity.

So for example, Flickr is a famous example here, Flickr set up originally as photo sharing sites, built-in to its DNA was the permission to share, indeed you can explicitely licence under creative commons licences the right to share the images that are on Flickr. But that sharing that was enabled by Flickr was not the reason that Yahoo! bought Flickr, Yahoo! intended to leverage value out of that activity for Yahoo!. Or think about Yelp, it's blowing accross the United States now, it's a site which enables poeples to share reviews of places that they have visited, restaurants primarily but including everything like hotels, again these are people voluntarily sharing their views here but Yelp obviously intends to leverage that for money to the company. Or Second Life, a virtual world which when it was created looked very much like that slide, empty fields, empty oceans, but very quickly began to be populated by creatures and building and devices, that users of Second Life had created themselves, for free, indeed they paid for the right to be creating this work, and they produced a much more valuable site for Linden Lab to sell to others.

Now when you see this example of a hybrid, I suggest you gonna begin to see it everywhere. Think about Amazon, which you might see as a commercial part of the commercial economy, but is Amazon value produced exclusively through this commercial activity, or is it an extraordinary part of the Amazons value produced by people willing volontarily to produce reviews and rankings that then get fed-back into the system and makes the site more valuable for Amazon. Apple is doing the same thing, even Microsoft gets this point deeply, if you go to Microsoft users site where support services are offered, there is discussion spaces which are achitected and cared for by an extraordinary man, Marc Smith, a former academic who runs these community technologies group. And that group studies healthy online communities and designs these community to maintain their health, so that poeple find it important and valuable enough on sunday morning, not to go to church, but to sit around and help other people to use Microsoft products for free, making more money for Microsoft through their voluntary activities. So it wasn't a surprise when I saw Steve Ballmer about a year and a half ago saying every successful Internet business will be, what I define here a hybrid.

Now if you look at these hybrids, there are actually 3 different kinds. One kind we can call a kind of Darth Vader hybrid or we can call it a David Bowie hybrid, but these are hybrids where the activity that people engage in is owned by the man. So StarWars mashup site, all of the mashups on that site, where the kids come in and they takes StarWars video and they add their own stuff to it, and remaking it, uploading it back to the site, all of those are owned by Georges Lucas. Indeed the stuff that you add to the site, if you upload a song you have composed, LucasFilms has a world wide perpetual licence to use that music for free. Now this is a site where the creator, here the remixer, has no rights. It's instead, a little bit of exageration here but to say it's more like a share-cropping (NdT: métayage) site for the digital age. So that's one model : the share-cropper (NdT: métayer). The second model is more like the 'autruches' or I think it's what Google and Youtube are, these are sites where enormous values being creating by poeple participing in these sites, but these company take that value and simply ignore that contribution of these creators, they don't want to think about it, they put there head in the sand because its too complicated to negociate. But then there is a third class of sites here, a class of sites like flickr and Second Life, which expressely affirm that the creators owns the creativity they produce on those sites, and then enables those creators to license that creativity freely or even for profit using Creative Commons licenses.

Now their are important differences between these three kinds of hybrids, and these differences are incrisingly important. Because there is a growing skepticism out there, about this activity of a Hybrid. As Om Malik put in his blog : « [Does] this culture of participation ... build business on our collective backs ? ... whatever 'the collective efforts' are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will we share in their upside ? Not likely ! »

Now what it's interesting here is, we actually don't have a good sets of what a just Hybrid is. In this context different rules are gonna to produce different intuitions, and companies that are trying to succeed here are moving through a whole range of options to try to decide what continues to earn the loyalty of their community. I predict that the one thing we know is that this (share-croppers) would not be just hybrid.

Ok, now take this two ideas : ReadWrites Hybrids. And think about how they apply in the context of governance. Because what I want you to see is that we have the same dynamic now happening with governant. We have ReadWrite government, everybody is familiar with the blogs that incrisingly constitute political speecher where poeple are participate in creating and re-creating and re-expressing the news. A more interesting for our purpose I think is a think about an emerging new kind of hybrid. So I give you a hybrid that was a commercial and sharing hybrid, there is an equivallent here that is emerging of a command government and sharing hybrid. Where by command I mean entities that have the power to say you must do something or do this because you must, that's what governments are, and sharing communities where poeples are doing things because they want to that Wikipedia. This kind of hybrid then tries to mix those two where command entity tries to leverages a sharing economy to produce value for the governement.

So historically we have lots of examples of this, in the United States for example, where private parties run primaries, election processes to select a canditate to run a general elections, that's a kind of hybrid where the government gets this private parties to do the work of the government. Disaster relief, accross the world supported by entities like the American Red Cross, that provide volontary support to a government activity, that's a kind of government hybrid. But what interesting here is the potentially that you are seeing an emerging in the context of the net.

So entities like the Sunlight Foundation, which have exploded in a enormous number of projects that invite poeple to participate in the action of superving or making more transparent what the american government does. So here's one project they support at the Public Markup project where bills are posted and the public is invited to come in mark it up suggesting changes or flagging things in the significant to be watch, or the Earmark Watch site which allows citizen to go in and track down who really was responsible for what Earmark, and what potential conflicts might have been raised by that earmark. Or there's the Party Time site, whenever a party where founder involve member of congress or political candidates they then identify who went to the party and what they gave to the party. All of this been produced by wikified workers, workers out there who just candidate and pull the data necessary together, to produce the information and make more transparent this part of government.

And this idea of course is much further than just Sunlihgt, the british site TheyWorkForYou.com has an enormous amount of influence now in affecting poeple understanding of what going on in the british government and I Believe in Open . ca has an enormous collection now of poeple pledging to support transparent activities in government again supported and pushed by volonteers who build this activity through their interest in the saring economy they support.

And maybe most famously and importantly the recent transition site of Barack Obama, change.gov, which also tries to include poeple in this process of facilitating a transition to a government that will strike America as significantly different from the last.

Now the point to recognise here is that norms are important in this context as well. Just as we had to think about what a just hybrid was in the context of commercial economy, so too here we gonna have to think about what a just hybrid is in the context of this command hybrids. So the Obama' site has responded directly with that. Last week they released a change in their copyright policy explicitly saying that everything they put up on the site is licensed under a creative commons license permitting the maximum freedom to download, and share, and remake that contents without permission from the site. The push to get Obama to do this has been framed in the context of more values that have been pushed in front of the administration, which they're considering right now, with a site I was involved with: OpenTransition.gov (le site auquel Lessig se réfère n'existe pas, il s'agit en fait de open-government.us). That site proposed principals for an open transition. Those principals were three.

Number 1: there should be no legal barrier to sharing and the Obama' site has adopted that by adopting the creative commons licences

Number 2: there should be no technical barrier to sharing. So, if you upload stuff to YouTube, one feature or bug of YouTube is that it doesn't permit you to download it, or at least download it legally, so that suggested if they're using YouTube, they must also use sites like blip.tv which, number one explicitly marks the contents as free to be shared, and number two gives you a simple way to get any number of formats of that content and download it to do with it as you wish,

and number 3 in these principles is the idea of free competition. There should be no favourites that the government produces as it makes this work available to others.

These principals of Open Transition actually grew out of a much larger project that produced last year Open Government Data Principals; again, principals that would establish the relationship of this government hybrid in a way that would encourage people to participate. These principals that are to be respected for any government that wants to assert that it's an open government say that the data here must be complete (at least if it's public data, and by that it means data that is not subject to privacy, security or privilege limitations), it must be primary data (meaning not the interpretation but as well as the interpretation the primary sources), timely and accessible, and machine processable (meaning people can download it in a standard format and do the analyses on their machine). You have to have non-discriminatory access. Everybody must be able to get access to it in a non-proprietary format (so you don't need to buy into one particular format in order to use it) and it must be license-free (that's freer that change.gov because it must essentially be in the public domain).

Now the aim of this process, both the open government data principals and the process that the Barrack Obama administration is going through right now is to give people a sense of ownership here in this hybrid government economy. A sense of control and equality that would encourage them to feel like it's a community they're participating in as they produce stuff that's valuable to the government. And my view is that the potential here is actually quite large, that we can actually see people being used in a way that they want to be “used” to facilitate the objectives of the government in ways that all of us feel proud of, ?either policing activity that's actually helpful to be policed in this wikified way or supporting activities that support objectives of the government.? But many people look at this and say : “Will people actually want to help the government? Will the citizens want to help their government? And I submit to you : If people want to help Microsoft in a way that apparently people want to help Microsoft, then at least there are some governments out there that people would want to help in precisely this way. The harder question here is whether this will be enough. As one commentator in the United States recently put it, in a breathless analyses of what the Obama administration is doing: “ Will it be enough to “Revive democracy”?”

And here I'm more sceptical, because there's this other issue I put on the table, that these democracies need to think of as well, what I call the issue of trust and here I want to be very clear, I speak as an American about America, about a North-American country called the United States of America. I don't mean to speak about any other government, or any other democracy. And I don't need to point to the obvious examples like Ted Stevens been found guilty of impropriety and the reports to be filed in the senate or the recent news from yesterday of the governor of Illinois being arrested for his activity of selling the replacement to Obama in the United States senate by accepting offers, half a million dollar offer, to appoint somebody to that position. Those are not the examples that concern me. The examples and the ?????? that concerns me are much more subtle and much more damaging. Because the single thing that's most important about people's relationship to any institution of trust is that they feel that the institution is being authentic. And the biggest problem American democracy faces now is that the core actors in this democracy aren't treated or viewed as authentic.

One more example to suggest this: You might have seen this film: Maxed Out. Fantastic story about credit card debt in the United States, a huge problem. Now there're many dimensions to this particular problem but one is the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005. There's actually a little typo ; there's no consumer protection in that act at all, but ok... This bill had the effect of making it effectively impossible for lower middle-class income earners to discharge credit card debts. So companies like Bethleem Steel can escape credit card obligations or pensions obligations I guess and credit card obligation I don't know about that. Or companies like Enron can escape the obligations to deliver power but you can't escape credit card obligations in the United States. You will literally carry this for ever as long as you are alive. Now this change was first proposed in the administration of President Clinton. He was originally in favour of the change. But then, an op-ed was written in the New-York Times by professor Elizabeth Warren of the Harvard Law School and First Lady Clinton saw the op-ed and started speaking of that awful bill Note that's a small “b” in that statement. And she's credited with single handedly keeping that bill from becoming law. To her great credit, so to speak, right? Like Jason in Friday 13th, this bill would not just go away. So in 2001, it came back. By now First Lady Clinton was Senator Clinton, and by now she had received about $140,000 in campaign contributions from financial and credit card services industry. So what did she do in 2001? Well, she flipped. She voted for that “awful bill” twice. Now why did she do that? Well, if you ask Senator Clinton she'll tell you it's not about the money. Did she make this plea very strongly at the ???yearly Coast Conference??? about a year and a half ago?

I don't think based on my 35-year of fighting for what I believe, that anybody seriously believe I'm gonna be influenced by a lobbyist or a particular interest...

Now the bloggers in that conference did not believe her, but I certainly do believe her. You don't get to be Hillary Clinton by caving the special interests and that's not what I think she was doing in this case, and I think you too should believe her. But even if we believe Hillary Clinton, what we Americans need to recognise is what others see or hear when they hear exactly this. What do they hear in the debate AFTER they hear that she received $140,0000 in contributions from credit card companies. Can they trust? Can they even believe that the answer she gave was the right answer for the right reason? Do they believe she's being authentic as she explains why she changed her view. Would they even engage with her as she explains why she changed her view.

The core insight I want to put here, is to recognise how this dynamic is the production of this mistrust in this government, producing the sense that what the government does is inauthentic. And indeed, it has had that effect with respect to this institution. In my district in California, 88% of people believe money buys results in congress. And indeed, in July and August this extraordinary statistic was published by Rasmussen. For the first time in American history, less than 10% of the American public believe congress is doing a good or an excellent job. There were more people who supported the British Crown at the revolution than support the American Congress today. And when you look at this, the question we should ask is “but what the hell do we expect here”? You can't trust this institution, you won't trust this institution, you won't have faith in this institution until you can believe as we all want to believe that they got it wrong either because they were stupid or because they were more Republicans than Democrats or Democrats than Republicans but whatever reason, not because of the money.

That's the argument, let me end with one more point here. We, geek types, like to believe that all our problems are just technical, that we can solve them if we just get better technology out there. They're not. We speak as if better machines would fix the problem that cause democracy at least in America to founder. I don't believe that. I believe our problems are much more fundamentally substantive. Whether democracy works is an open question right now. Now addressing that question... I'm a little bit of a ??guru?? of Al, Al is in some ways my hero. Here's what Al said at Ted this year.

Optimism is sometimes characterised as a belief, an intellectual posture. As Mahatma Gandhi famously said “You must become the change you wish to see in the world”. And the outcome about which we wish to be optimistic is not going to be created by the belief alone, except to the extent that the belief brings about new behaviour. But the word “behaviour” is also I think sometimes misunderstood in this context. I'm a big advocate of changing the light bulbs and buying hybrids and Tipper and I put 33 solar panels on our house and dug the geothermal wells and 'done all of that other stuff, but as important as it is to change the light bulbs it's more important to change the laws and when we change our behaviour in our daily lives, we sometimes leave out the citizenship part and the democracy part. In order to be optimistic about this, we have to become incredibly active as citizens in our democracy. In order to solve the climate crisis, we have to solve the democracy crisis.

So that's the idea: “the democracy crisis”. The democracy crisis is not that we can't count votes, we can't do that in the United States, but that's not the source of the crisis. The democracy crisis is that people don't view democracy as a tool for solving public problems because, ?as I suggest?, of this view, of this improper dependence destroying the place of trust in government. Now this term “dependence”; I think is useful in thinking about the problem. We all understand problems of dependence. I want to think about one in particular, think about alcoholism. I don't think there's anybody in this room that hasn't been affected by, or has affected others because of the problem of alcoholism. So if you think about the alcoholic, in the problems he might face, he might be losing his family, his job, his liver. These are all extraordinary important problems. But he won't solve any of these problems until he solves his alcoholism first. So it's not that the alcoholism is the most important problem he faces, of course it's not. But it is the first problem he faces. And so too with us in the United States. There's no end to the problems we face as people, extraordinary significant problems from global warming all the way even to that copyright policy, but we won't address these problems sensibly regardless of the explosion of these exciting new R/W technologies for government until we solve this first problem first.

Thank you very much.