you know a colonoscopy the terrible terrible awful thing but when you come out of it, you feel strangely exhilarated because. you've been given some opium, wonderfully deflected. he doesn't deflect at all in this book. i always say this at book events that this an astonishing book. i tend not to do book events with people that i think won't like the book or i won't think anything of it by the book. read by a second one. give it to somebody else. it's astonishing. he's astonishing. thank you, thank you. thank you. thank thank you very much. thanki'm going to quickly read e bios to jennifer strong, who's moderating this fireside chat with frank mccourt around his

brand new book, actually officially out tomorrow, our biggest fight. just going to read their bios and. also, i have a quote about the book from none other than bruce springsteen, who's actually come back to asbury park. you're looking at that where he had to start. i'm going to read the bios and then i'll bring them both up on stage. jennifer strong is producer and journalist based here in new york. she is the creator of several top science and technology podcasts for newsrooms, including propublica, the wall street journal and mit technology review. her latest show launched last year, and i believe this conversation should also on shift. so do check that and a previous conversation that was also on her incredible podcast, check out shift. also frank mccourt, who we're having this chat with to celebrate our fight. don't forget our biggest fight outcome from court is civic entrepreneur and executive chairman of mccourt global along

with for our partners for today the founder and executive chairman of project liberty, which is a far reaching effort to build an internet where individuals have control over their data, a voice, and how operate and more access to the economic benefits of innovation. he's also the author of as you see it, our biggest fight reclaiming liberty, humanity and dignity in the digital age. so please give a round of applause to both of them during coming up. but you're really going to start it before frank and jennifer. i want to set the stage. yeah, one vote because. you know, i wish we had born to run or something like that we could cue, but we'll get that for time. so a lot of great comments that you'll see if you go to our biggest fight a dot com one of them that really struck me was from bruce springsteen because he love bruce springsteen. he calls it a timely call to arms of the inherent dangers of our digital revolution and a

manifesto for a new way forward. it's essential reading for our times. please give it up for frank mccourt. jennifer strong. thank you. all right. thank you everybody. thank you so much for joining us. and congratulations on the book. yeah, thank you very much. you know, in it you say internet is broken. it doesn't have be that way. let's start with that first bit. how do you think the is broken? well, it's broken because we had this awesome piece of technology was you know created that was decentralized and empower for individuals and it held so much promise and about 20 years ago, everything changed you know, instead of it being a decentral ized, human centric internet, it became a very much a centralized and autocratic and surveillance based internet. you know, it because of the apps, the big apps that showed

up and started to just scrape our data and use it in ways that some were decent. i suppose many were not very harmful as as we're learning more about it and, and there's just a a lot of harm that's being done and we wouldn't allow any utility or infrastructure to as much harm as this is doing without, you know, saying enough is enough in and let's just fix this. do you mind to spell out the harms from where you sit? well, let's all what we could spend the rest of the evening talking about the harms. right. we, we're not blind. right. we all, we all see them. we feel them. we know that they're now. we are we are benefiting now from the research that's proving them and these harms being talked about. now, often. but let's let's talk about the ability to a functioning democracy. right. you know that's that's kind of hard right now mean borderline not governable so that's a harm let's talk about civil discourse

wouldn't it be nice just to be able to have conversations and be able to kind of come to some kind of consensus and and friendly agreement on things instead having, you know, school committee meetings that armed police information, you know, which civilized advances based on our ability to to gain knowledge and to build out knowledge and what facts are and what truth is. and right now, we've taken step giant step backward because of missing disinformation. so we have a very, very polluted ankara ecosystem and their most importantly of all. and one thing that david didn't mention, i'm father of seven children, the harms to children that are being right now, which is this is not speculation, this is real, it's happening. and any of you with children or that are watching know what's happening to a whole generation

that's being preyed upon by this technology. right there. it's an addictive technology. and i'm talking about social media primarily. that is really brains and really stealing adolescent from kids. like why it's it's a how we sit back and watching a whole generation become anxious and and depressed and have thoughts. suicide. i mean, these statistics are alarming. so there are a few harms right there but. we can fix this and to call out the infrastructure of the internet is itself has always been decentralized so really you're talking about the web here when we talk about centralized internet. well i'm sort of so i'm talking about you know, the internet when it began in and as we know it, roughly 1983 with the adoption, some simple thin layer protocols. so in this case, it was tcp ip which which connected devices,

and it was designed and built as decentralized communication system. when our government was concerned, centralized telecommunication system, we had in the fear that it might be disable by at the time the soviet union and if it could if could disable a centralized hub of we would be without communication so they asked universities and to get involved to build a decent communication system again. 1983. these devices adopted this protocol. we had the internet. you decentralized, powerful, awesome. 1989 i think that's what you're to, which is the web, that's timber chris lee another thin layer protocol http hypertext protocol that we all adopted. and now we had the data linked up so devices and data now.

one footnote here, we are still an ip address on the internet right. we're not a person. you're not on the internet. your device is on the internet. so this was a devices, machines and then data. so but still. in roughly 20 years ago began the app age and the app age changed the intent of the internet and how it operates. and so now we entered a central a phase of the internet where the game was now that this data has been freed let's build machines right at the operating as platforms that can gather the data as fast as we can and centralize it aggregate it and then we'll figure out how to commercialize it. and so now that's when things

got off the rails and. so it's it's really the the the user as we know it now, which very app centric and app driven that's changed the original intent of the of the men women who created the internet and the worldwide web. all right. throughout the book, you say when we hear the word data should actually hear the word personhood. can you unpack that? what does that mean. well? well, it means as this app age upon us, the the these apps ended up collecting the information they could about each of us. right and it the term that most of you are familiar with is they began to you know, collect our personal information, our social graphs and it is the became the the real holy grail of the business was to to really map us

so create human mapped network of of all of us and not just our relationships and where we shop or, where we physically are, but everything we do and and in kind of our behaviors, our preferences and now there's enough information on each of us to predict will react to certain and how we can be triggered into certain behaviors. so now it's gotten to the point of being a predictive tech that understands and is making judgments about our personality and our emotional makeup. so it's we're way, way beyond, oh, isn't this cool? i can go buy something and have it delivered to me tomorrow. this is now very predatory exploitive technology and it's in it's what it's exploiting is

us our information in the point i make in the book along with michael casey and i saw him earlier so that you are michael and it was a great pleasure to work with you on this michael is that when you begin to understand that what valuable to these platforms is our social graph information that's our data it's just an abstract thing it's everything about us. we're not talking about a hundred or a few hundred attributes about us. think tens and hundreds of thousands of attributes about us all collected. and that's what is the value, let's call it, of of this aggregated data. and i would argue that this is a

value that should be here for society. and what we need to do is, i believe is is add another thin layer protocol which puts us in charge of the internet. so we own and control our data and by owning and controlling our personal information, our social graph, we own us right. now, you don't own you you don't own you you don't own your own by the these large platforms because they have they they they know everything about us. so how would that. well if you think of of these relatively thin layer protocol as i referred to one connected the devices, another connected the data. imagine one that connects us. so it's a a thin layer protocol developed by project liberty two

gentlemen braxton, william harry evans for the brain brains behind it that would if adopted at scale, would connect all of us. so for the first time we would actually a social internet or a socially internet one where we were in charge. so imagine an internet where and by the way, this is built in and used along tcp ip and http. it's not like you throwing one internet out in your building another. you're you're actually creating a a very core layer protocol that amends how it works changes it works and actually puts us at the center. so an internet where where we are verifiable individuals on the internet, it's just not a complete chaos where anybody can be anybody.

you can be as many people as you'd like can be a machine spewing out information and that imagine that there's integrity back in the internet where we are identifiable human beings. you can only be one person you can control what you reveal about yourself, but you can only be one person in your social graph is portable. the apps are interop operable. so imagine a internet where the the the new apps are clicking on our terms of use for our data. we're not clicking on the terms of use of these big platforms that the data is actually part of the internet think of it as part of the internet. so it's a rather than billions of atomized social graphs that are being vacuumed up by some big platforms think of it as being a global social graph, universally accessible where we control our information.

so it's maybe oversimplify. what a bit in the interest time, but it's actually a relative li relatively simple fix to to the problem of of individus is being abused taken advantage of and quite frankly i go back to this notion that it's please don't think it as your data because that feels like yeah what's data what does it mean it's just think it as you it's you are in a digital era the internet is is is something that's not going away we depend on it we use it we're connected to it. morning, noon and night let's actually have it be human centric and human focused in the first instance and not be an internet of machines. we're in a room of people who are either ethicists themselves or deeply interested tech ethics. so it's probably safe to assume that most people here agree with

you. the internet is broken in the ways that you describe and that it doesn't have to be that way. but we might also wonder how, practical this approach would be and what the adoption might look like. well, the reason michael and i used thomas paine as an inspiration in the book and thomas paine in 1775 wrote a pamphlet called common sense, and it was a time when he was actually reaching out to the his fellow. they weren't citizens yet. they were settlers, i guess they were was the the. the actual existence of the united states. and he was calling out a question for know for folks. and he was saying, look, we a choice to make. we can either continue to be subjects of a monarch and just

have, you know, few or no human rights own little and and really just by the by just, you know, fates born into a royal family and they only control me. and i'm you know, i get to in the case of my ancestors, you know, just work the land and maybe keep to survive. and the rest of what we they produced went to you know, went to the royal manor, so to speak, or we could be citizens and with that came a whole list rights, right? that we could, which became known as rights in our declaration of independence. in other words, you're born with it, you have the same rights as the king or the queen. and and you, you, you, you're equal. and we create a government of them by people of and for people

we can self-govern. we we actually are someone we have agency. we have a autonomy we have control. we can own things. we can we can live our life the way we want. we have choice and and this unlocked a whole this country and and what was built in a relatively short period of time and incredible incredible was built around that of liberty, you know individual, rights. and by the way, a social which said for those rights to matter, we need to respect those rights in others. so and off we went and. this was a revolutionary right. so now we're living in a world where seeing massive innovation

and strides with technology, which is, you know, quite breathtaking on the one hand. but as fast as the technology moving in in in just in terms of innovation, we're moving in the opposite direction we argue in the book when it comes to our rights, we're losing them. we're become subjects in the digital world and we should be digital, not now. subjects and owned by these platforms. why in the world would we exchange all of our rights, everything we love, the health and safety of, our kids, the strength and sustainability of a democracy to get to use the internet. why not have an internet that actually is optimized for the things want as individuals and society and i and really comes

right back to who's in charge, who owns the data we create and i think this is and we argue in state in the book this has become now a human right think of it as as a as a a human not just a digital right. a human right in this world we live in your digital dna, your lived experience, everything about is part you as much as your biological dna is. and by the way, even biological dna is now digitized okay. so this is is our personhood. this is who we are. if we're going to really, really change what's going and reclaim, you know, our personhood from the machines of big tech. we need to think of this as social project, as a political

project not just as a tech project. and that's why project liberty has three tracks, not just a tech track, although i do think it's innovation, it's important. and we people are now iterating and making better and better because without the tech, i don't think we can tackle all the big problems we have. but also need the social scientists involved. you know, the the psychologist the economists, the policy and governance expert to this time around not just move fast and break things let's let's move deliberately and fix things and really optimize for what all want. and then lastly, we to get civil citizens involved, you know, just just men and women and of all ages who care about this issue to effect the change that we need, because i don't think it's necessarily going to come from the tech the big tech

companies or are elected officials at the moment. and how would you envision shift taking place? because. right, it would seem unlikely for the big companies to begin to work against their own business models. yeah, it's it's unlikely. and but so what really i mean, we can all sit back and say, jesus, really big. this seems daunting. it seems like. i don't know. well, then our choices, we're stuck with it. and so, you know, i just i just can't see that honestly. i just. i think we're better than that. and we we know that things are not right, and we need to fix. i don't think there's a bigger issue. in our time. i think this is biggest issue of our time and it's not an issue that's being talked about in

that, for instance, in this presidential, it should be the number one issue if we want to get really to the other issues. unfortunately, we're seeing the same technology and what it's optimizing for is the same dysfunction in our political system. so how do you change it? you change it by getting people involved who care deeply about the issue and and who get involved in a, you know, a cause or that's why i say it's a social. i, i don't want to say movement. it sounds like, you know, no one creates a movement, movement movements, you know. and so but how our if if tech companies aren't going to change it and our elected officials going to change it, then it's left to us. it's left to us. so let's just cause the change it may be months who just are

fed up, you know, who have tragically lost children or, afraid of losing children that are just saying enough is enough, not going to do this. and and we have, you know, something that looks like the mothers drunk driving, you know, that force forces this change. it may be people that are concerned about democracy. it may be know people that are concerned about missing just information or all of the above it's this is our lives. this is like why would we let everything we love be destroyed and harmed so we can we can be connected to the internet. this is just a tool. it's tool that we can use to optimize all the great things. what right now, you ask kids, is your life going to be better than your parents? the majority of kids say, no, i don't believe so. if that isn't what like the ultimate metric for failure our

our whole lives be built upon making the world better than we found it. making life better for our children than it was us. we're failing. we are failing so need to fix this and and if we fix it however, what's available with this technology and, the ability of being connected and have access to the data on a permission using it in a transparent where people actually know what's happening with their data. we those kids will be saying my life is going to be way better than my parents. i'm going to live till i'm 150 and i'm going to be healthy. i'm going to do this. i'm going to and the economics that will be opened up by. a new data sharing economy will massive the innovators here the possibilities are massive we just need to have the will to change this and really make this a project that's of collective

action and that's just a matter do we have the the will and the courage because there's plenty of means to do this and and the tech can it is it's it's but it actually turns out to be the easy part. the more difficult is like, can we get motivated? was there particular moment that drew you into work? how did you come to be doing this to found project liberty and to write the book? well, first of all, i see. and and and feel the same things. i think most all all of you do that something is amiss. something is fundamentally broken and you, you know, without that, you know, without getting too carried away about, it i do i do immediately to my dinner table growing up you know i'm i'm one of seven children myself, a big irish family growing up in.

and me and my my siblings were pretty good at, you know. defining problems and complaining like most kids. right. and not a dinner ended without, you know my mum saying, okay, you kids have done a good job of defining the problem. now what are you going to do about it and you know i think that's not a unique i think many of us are blessed with with parents that said like do something you're capable doing something, go do something. so it's kind of hard wired. but then i would i would i would to that i come from a a family of of builders great great grandfather started building roads when henry ford started building cars and we've been building infrastructure and designing it for over 130 years. so i'm a fifth generation builder sort. come at these things from a problem solving perspective as opposed to a just a problem perspective and.

yeah so i've i've seen a problem that i can't unsee and that's that's where i am right? i want to be conscious of time and we have stack of questions from folks in the audience the first one here is from ken anthony, who asks how can tech better support the journey humans to be more human not, increasingly tied to the latest tech tool. let's make the tech. let's make the internet a social internet. make it socially aware. make it give us control. ownership of us. you know reclaim our personhood take it back from the machines of big and then build from. kimberly wright asks how at all has heritage affected your and your position on tech? well, i think i just was alluding to that. i mean, we all come from someplace with that perspective and i refer to my my my mother's dining room table and yeah, i'm blessed because come from a

family of inherited image of of building and problem solving and you know, this is at end of the day, a infrastructure or engineering problem. and we can fix that. as i said earlier at the the bigger challenge, i think, is going to be the how do we create momentum around, you know, adopting an alternative to the current internet and really people understand how they fit in know really and the reason we wrote the book is really as a call to action. it's really to say you know, this is and please spend a couple of hours reading it won't take long it was written in kind of a thomas paine style it's a couple hundred words. the language is intended to be accessible. but i did ask tim berners-lee to read it. and and he he said i kept putting red checkmarks in the margin. agree agree. agree, agree. so i felt really good about that that it's michael we didn't dumb it down too much so i think we we passed that that test i read

this weekend and would agree it's a it's a quick and easy and quite interesting the related question down here and ella drury asks do you believe that our technology drives our cultures and norms or is it the other way around? yeah, tech definitely, in my opinion, drives our cultures and norms. and it's it's it's and we talked a lot about this david mentioned unfinished which is sort of that the the parents of project liberty are this unfinished project that we started i saw apollo richard here who and laura who deeply in within finish and now are part of project liberty unfinished was something we started five or six years ago which was to really begin to understand what the heck was going on because just things felt very and you know things we really, really care about and we our first project was an unfinished project and we

crowdsourced questions around the world and technology kept coming up and so forth. so we really started to in on technology and that really burst. this project and it was really we talked a lot about like how does how do we get here? and if you think about it, culture which is really what houses are our norms, our behaviors and our beliefs really affects kind of who we eventually elect right to? represent us and what we stand and then we expect to go ahead and put policies and so forth into place. well, we have the most arguably the most powerful technology that we've ever had in connecting our culture right now. right it's actually profound the it impacting what is talked

about or about. and by the way, in a way i just described really in a very manipulative way as well and it's, you know, we were talking just earlier about the media you know, went from being one business to something that was just following search engine optimization. right so it just what's trending well that doesn't mean that's well sourced or or the most important news. so we we're really have become almost victims of of this omnipresent ubiquity technology which is driving our culture and that everything downstream from that so we're getting the we're getting the sign that we need to wrap this up but i want to squeeze in a few more questions if we can quickly, when talking about responsible technology, how do you think artificial can be used responsibly without causing harm to someone's privacy? and this comes from past batavia. yeah, i think this is. i hope that i you all are

reflecting on how important our our social graphs our personal information is to to how the internet and, how it is operating. and i say that because we can see now the exploitation in manipulation and how what was decentralized became centralized and it's surveillance based. it doesn't feel at all like a democratic thing. if i said central surveillance based autocrat technology, i don't think you'd say, well, that's a great thing for democracy. i awesome autocracies. right. which could would would use that so we have this broken thing we talked about the harms to kids etc. so why why we take something broken, make it powerful, you using generative ai language models without fixing the problems.

let's fix the problems and then enjoy the benefit of generative ai. but. but i don't. there's only one reason why would not stop fix the problems now knowing they exist and that if just going to be dragged into this future by the same companies that are the only companies that can benefit from these large language models because you need massive datasets and huge compute power that resides in essentially platforms. so for them, i understand why they want to rush and move forward and you see them all now just frantically, you know, pushing and shoving to see who's going be the dominant player. but, you know, let's make no mistake about it. algorithms are artificial intelligence, generative ai. this is just a more powerful version. the same thing i've been describing, which is an exploitive technology.

what is what's going what what data is being trained in these large language models? it's your data that's being trained. i mean that the static like books and journals and all that that's been ingested by these machines long time ago we're seeing ingested right now is what's on the internet and without to who created it could care less it's just ingest all of human creativity right up to the present moment and train and profit from it and i'm a capitalist i'm all for people making profit, but not at the expense of the things i love and the things i care about. so there's a direct correlation between artificial intelligence and in our data, and that's what we need to fix. and again, the passive equities are awesome and. it could be great, but not the direction we're going now in

thinking about ai in this conversation and, in the book, you cite the tech ethicist tristan harris who said that tech can get new forms of rights. right? you think the right to be was not a right we had or until, you know basic changes within tech brought to us but with a.i. you also oh is it going to be possible to be forgotten i think is something we're all going to think about a lot more in the year ahead. right yeah, well, i'd certainly like to have models that were built where i was in control of my data. i got to decide who got to use it for what purpose if it's in a large language model? i want to know it? i want to have transparency. if people are going to make $1,000,000,000, i want to participate. okay. so it's it's in and i but i agree with tristan and we've talked about this. there are new rights that get created as technology and evolves. right. the rights i described going all

the way back to 1775 and the founding of this country were there there were rights that exist and then there were rights that were created. and then along the way there were adjustments to that right there were women got the right to vote the the, you know, the the original sin of the us, you know, around slavery and so forth was was addressed sort, you know, and we've, we've, we've created as we've gone along and things changed and, and so on and so forth. but i would, i would also connect the following to to what's broken here. the the the u.s. project has been moving a in a direction. it's empower effect. and we can sit and talk about the things that we haven't done right. but we were moving in a direction where it felt like we were all together in a direction that was positive, that was getting closer, closer to the to

the words that were written. and now we see things we see right being taken away and we feel like we're moving backward. and i would argue it's it's connected to the same thing. we're being ripped apart by technology that not optimizing for us. it's just being it's optimizing the machines and of data if we can want to squeeze in one more. thank you, everybody, for all these questions. there's so many great questions that not going to get to but to close on. think this one is particularly relevant from. a delicate time to our biggest fight here may be motivating people to take action to reclaim digital freedom. how do you think will achieve this? do you think achieve this? yeah, i will. first of all, it's not my biggest fight. it's our biggest fight. so i we will achieve it if we decide to all all really what's at stake and embrace this set issues and and get involved and

so i said earlier that if we don't fix the tech, i don't think we can fix lots of other problems that we have address in the world but i also don't believe that the tech alone will solve the problems. we now know how powerful the internet is and what promise it holds. imagine we get to reset how. it works. we get to actually now embed values and principles that weren't embedded in a move fast and break things you know kind of era we get to re decentralize we get to put people first to own and control your data we get to use the technology for society's sake and optimize for what we all really care about and protect our children and so on and so forth. if we can get a the kind of the people involved moved in this to really reclaim future, then i

think can win this fight. if we just new better tech to do i think we lose the fight because it's these platforms are so big and powerful that there's one thing that's going to change and that's when we insist that it be changed. thank very much. thank you all for being. all right. let's keep it goinso now, witho, very excited to introduce and diane foley coauthor of american mother the story of diane's son jim foley, who was kidnaped, tortured and murdered in 2014 by the isis group known as the beatles, an american mother, legendary author colum mccann,