Thank you so kindly.

The good part about naming a talk in 2017, Notes from an Emergency, is that it gives you a lot of latitude about what to talk about. But obviously, the emergency I want to discuss is the rise of this vigorous ethnic nationalism that is making really skillful use of internet tools that we thought we were developing to promote democracy and freedom,

and instead are being used against us. Depending on where you live, this might not be any sort of news to you, but in the United States, our moment of shock came last November with the election of Donald Trump. The final outcome of that election was actually that Clinton got almost three million more votes, but because of a bug in the operating system of our democracy,

one of the long shadows that slavery casts over American history, the Electoral College went to Trump, and so, however reluctantly elected, he is our president. And our crisis, unfortunately, is your crisis, not just because America is a superpower and not just because the phenomenon that Trump represents

seems to be broader than just the United States and has extended to Europe, but because the internet that you depend on is an American internet, which is a weird outcome. So Facebook is the social network for Europe. It has 349 million monthly active users here. Google has something like a 94% market share in Germany.

The servers of Europe are littered with the bodies of dead and dying social networks that tried to compete and failed. The few ones that are still left breathing, like X-ing, are being slowly finished off by companies like LinkedIn. So in your online life, you are completely dependent on companies that are headquartered in the United States.

And so Trump is in charge in America, and America has all of your data. In fact, it's significantly worse for you than it is for someone like me, a U.S. citizen who lives mostly in America, because at least in the United States, we enjoy a semblance of legal protection against arbitrary surveillance by our own government. I know that the NSA is seen as the bad guy,

but they're kind of like a lawfully evil bad guy. They have to follow their rules and their procedures, and some of those procedures involve secret courts and warrants and things that protect U.S. persons, as the law puts it, but do not protect you at all. So everyone in Europe is completely and kind of hopelessly exposed, and I think this is an astonishing result.

I can't imagine a world where Europe would let itself have its cheese market dominated by the United States, for example, or where everybody in Germany was drinking Coors Light or some other shitty American beer. And we've had examples like Airbus, where Boeing was becoming a dominant manufacturer of airplanes, and Europe collectively decided that we have to have a competitor,

and so they funded, with great American complaining, a viable competitor, and now you make aircraft too, and have your own airplanes. We even have farms in Western Europe, even though from an economic point of view, it's not the optimal use of a first-world economy, but we know that farms are much more than just economics.

It's something to do with national identity. It preserves the landscape. It preserves national security and food security, and it gives us a shared sense of who we are. But when it comes to the Internet, Europe basically did nothing. It didn't put up a fight. It just ceded the ground entirely to American companies, and now we're confronting a crisis over which we have really very little leverage.

So the status quo in May of 2017 looks kind of like this. There are five Internet companies. Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook. Together, they have a market capitalization that is just short of $3 trillion. Bruce Schneier has called this arrangement the feudal Internet.

Part of it is due to these network effects that make growing big beneficial, but a lot of it is driven by the problem of security. If you want to work online with any measure of convenience and safety, you have to choose a feudal lord who is big enough to protect you. And these five companies compete and coexist in complicated ways.

So, Apple and Google have a duopoly in smartphone operating systems. Android has 82% of that market, iPhone 18%. Google and Facebook have a duopoly in online advertising. Half of that revenue in that lucrative industry goes to them, and it's growing in total at about 16% a year.

All of that growth is being captured by Google and Facebook, so they're very quickly pushing everybody else out of online advertising. Apple and Microsoft have a duopoly in desktop operating systems. It breaks down something like 9 to 1 in favor of Windows. There are also, I think, three people who use desktop Linux, and they are probably in this room today.

Three companies, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, dominate cloud computing. Amazon Web Services has 57% adoption, Azure has 34%, and Google 15%. And outside of China and Russia, Facebook and LinkedIn are the only social networks at scale. LinkedIn has survived by selling itself to Microsoft.

Outside of Russia and China, Google is the world's search engine. So that's the state of the feudal internet, leaving aside the court jester, Twitter, which occupies a strange kind of niche role as the chat room for the internet. Google in particular has come close to realizing a nightmare scenario we had in 1998,

that a vertically integrated internet would be controlled by a single monopoly player. Google runs its own physical network, it builds phone handsets, develops a laptop and a phone operating system, it makes the world's most widely used web browser, it runs a private domain name service, is a PKI certificate authority, it has photographed nearly all of the public's faces on the planet,

and it handles much of the world's email. But because it is run by more sympathetic founders than Bill Gates, and because it builds better software than early Microsoft was, and because it's built up a lot of social capital around that early don't be evil motto, we've kind of given it a pass. It has a nice booth out here, and I'm sure they're friendly.

It is an open question whether it is even possible to keep large data collections secure over time. Right now it looks like the answer might be no. But if defense at scale is possible at all, clearly the only way to do it is by pouring millions and millions of dollars into hiring the best people to form security teams to defend it.

Data breaches at the highest levels have shown us that the threats are real and are ongoing. And for every breach that we know about and have heard about in the press, there are many that we're only going to hear about years from now. But a successful defense against these threats also increases our risk. If you pile up enough treasure behind the walls,

then you're going to eventually attract somebody who is good enough to climb those walls and get at it. The feudal system makes the internet more brittle because it makes sure that when a breach finally happens, the results will be disastrous. Each of these companies, with the important exception of Apple, has made aggressive user surveillance central to their business model.

And this is a dilemma of the feudal internet as well. We go to these protectors because they can offer us more security, but their business model is to make us more vulnerable by getting us to surrender more of the details of our lives to their servers and to put more faith in the algorithms that they train and that then train us in return to behave in certain ways.

These algorithms work really well. And despite attempts to convince us otherwise, it's clear that they work just as well in politics as they do in commerce. And so, in our eagerness to find protection online, we found that this feudal internet is changing our offline world in these very unanticipated and unwelcome and scary ways.

The big five companies operate on a global scale. And partly because they created the industries that they now dominate, they enjoy a very lax regulatory scheme. Everywhere outside the United States and the European Union, they're immune to government oversight. Even within the United States, over the last two administrations,

the governments tried to play with a very light touch, to not over-regulate the internet. So in practice, it's only the European Union that has had substantive, meaningful regulation of surveillance capitalism. Thanks to their size and their reach, the companies have become really adept at stonewalling governments and evading attempts at regulation and oversight.

In many cases, the evasion is kind of noble. You don't want Bahrain or Poland to be able to subpoena Facebook and find out who organized a political protest. But in other cases, it's kind of self-serving. And Uber is a poster child of that kind of misbehavior, where it's made a sport of evading regulatory authority simply by moving fast enough to outpace the legislative process.

The lesson that these companies have drawn is that they should only be accountable to themselves, that they can handle it, and that they are the best and the brightest. But software and algorithms affect the lives of billions of people, and decisions about how this software works are not under any kind of democratic control right now.

In the best case, they're being made by idealistic people in Palo Alto with imperfect knowledge of life in a faraway exotic place like Germany. In the worst case, they're simply fed into some black-box training algorithm, and nobody knows how they work or cares what data they're trained on. This is a really colonial mentality. In fact, it's what we fought the American Revolution over,

people in a faraway country across the planet making decisions about our lives without accountability and without input from us, and not knowing what our specific conditions of life were like. But now we're returning the favor to Europe. Facebook, for example, has one manager in all of Germany

to deal with German publishers. The entire publishing industry here is at the mercy of whoever this person is. I'm sure they're very bright. I hope they're not in their 20s, maybe they're in their 30s, but they make the call about how to entirely dismantle the publishing industry in Germany and to rebuild it around Facebook. Denmark has gone so far as to actually have an ambassador

to the giant tech companies, which sounds really weird and creepy, but it's actually a pragmatic acknowledgement of the balance of power. So one question, and a rhetorical trick I like to do is say we about all sorts of groups. Now I'm going to put myself in we as EU citizens, since I have dual citizenship, one question speaking as an EU citizen is how did we let this happen?

We used to matter. We used to be a contender. We used to colonize other people. We used to call the shots, start wars, stop wars. But now some dopey kid in Palo Alto gets to decide the political future of the European Union based on some coding boot camp that they went to.

This doesn't seem right. The lack of accountability isn't just troubling from a moral perspective, but it's also dangerous in this political climate where there's a backlash against globalization all around. There's nothing that represents globalization better than these kind of nationless tech companies that rule above any sort of national system of regulation.

And China and Russia have shown us that the internet doesn't have to be a world wide web, that it can be subverted and appropriated by the state. So by creating this political toolkit for authoritarian movements, those global companies could be signing their own death warrant. Given this scary state of the world

with ecological collapse waiting for us on the one hand and a population that is sharpening its figurative pitchforks on the other, an important question is how is this globalized and unaccountable tech industry seeing its own mission? What does it want? Where does it think it's going? Where is it spending all of this money? What is the plan?

And the honest answer I have for you today is rocket ships and immortality. That is a two-pronged plan of Silicon Valley. The best minds in Silicon Valley are preoccupied with a science fiction future that they consider their manifest destiny to build.

Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are racing each other to Mars. Musk gets most of the press, but Bezos is now selling one billion dollars a year in Amazon stock to fund Blue Origin, his space company. Investors over the last five years have put over eight billion dollars into space ventures as part of a push to export our problems from Earth

out into the broader solar system, where they will presumably be easier to solve. As happy as I am to see Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos fired into space, I'm not sure that it's worth the price that we're paying. Our cohort of tech founders is starting to feel the chill breath of mortality as they drift into middle age.

And so part of what is driving this push into space is a more broad concern with what they call existential risk. Musk thinks that we may be living in a simulation. He's in fact quite convinced of it. He's hired two people to hack into it, which, if you believe it honestly, is a really, really rude thing to do, because I'm using the simulation, you are as well,

and if someone segfaults it, we're all done. So if you believe this, please don't hire hackers to try to break it. But he believes it and he's done so for reasons that remain opaque to me. Peter Thiel, unfortunately, imported from here in Germany, has built a survival bunker for himself and close friends in New Zealand.

OpenAI, which is a religious cult disguised as a research institution, has received a billion dollars in funding to forestall the coming robot rebellion. But of course the biggest existential risk is death. And a lot of money is going to make sure that our big idea men don't expire before the world has had the full measure of their genius.

Google Ventures started the very secretive life extension startup Calico, which had one billion dollars to begin with. Google is now losing four billion dollars a year on so-called moonshots, which include all their life extension projects. The employer Ray Kurzweil, who honestly believes that we are still on track for

singularity and therefore immortality by the year 2045. Larry Ellison has put 350 million dollars towards anti-aging research, as if the world needed an immortal Larry Ellison. People are very eager to make death an opt-out experience. Now, I'm no fan of death. I want to be very clear. I don't like the time commitment, I don't like the permanence.

The number of people I love very dearly are dead and it has strained our relationship. But at the same time, I am not convinced that a civilization that is struggling to cure male pattern baldness is capable of taking on the grim reaper. And if we're going to worry about these existential risks, I propose that we address the two existential risks that already exist and we know for a fact are real,

which are global nuclear war and climate change. But these real and difficult problems are messy. Tech culture prefers to pick more difficult abstract problems that haven't been sullied by any sort of contact with reality. So they worry about how to give Mars an Earth-like climate

rather than how to give Earth an Earth-like climate. They debate how to make a morally benevolent God-like artificial intelligence rather than figuring out how to put ethical guardrails around the real artificial intelligence that they're already deploying across the world. Our industry enjoys tearing down flawed institutions but it refuses to put work into mending them.

Their runaway apparatus of surveillance and social control is making them a fortune, but in the process it's destroying everything around it. And all they can think about is the cool toys that they'll spend that money on. The message that's not getting through to Silicon Valley is the same message that you heard from your mother over and over again. You don't get to play with the new toys

until you clean up the mess you've already made. But the circumstances that have given the tech industry all this power are not going to last long. There is a limited time in which the small cast of tech nerds who hold power will have the latitude to make decisions that shape the world. And by wasting the talents and the energies of some of the smartest people on fantasy role-playing,

we're ceding the ground to a more practical group of successors, some truly scary people, who will put their inventions to use in a ruthless and much more practical manner. So to recap, the Internet has centralized into a very few hands. We have an extremely lucrative apparatus of social control and it's being run by chuckleheads. And the American government is also being run by chuckleheads.

The question everybody is worried about, the $64 million question, what happens when you put these two chuckleheads together? For many Americans, the election was a moment of profound shock. And it wasn't just the policies of Donald Trump, but it was the person of Donald Trump,

this deeply irresponsible, obscene human being who was being handed power that he could never hope to responsibly exercise. But there was no change of course when this happened, either at Facebook or at Google. They had an emergency staff meeting, but it was only to placate

concerned employees that worked there. No one in the press or at these two companies had the courage to say, honestly, we really fucked this up. After the election, both Facebook and Google looked at the mountains of data they'd collected, they looked at the threats that the Trump administration posed, that it was making its threats to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants,

and it said, alright, we can handle this. But the people who did care were tech workers. For a moment, we saw this gap of political daylight between the hundreds of thousands of people who work in the tech sector and the small group of billionaires who run it. While the latter filed into this famously awkward meeting with Trump up in his golden tower at a table with his children,

wearing neckties that they had found in drawers that clearly hadn't worn since their high school days, workers began organizing. The first thing they organized around was a simple but very effective pledge that they simply would refuse to work on anything like a Muslim registry.

This was a small gesture in the grand scheme, but it represented the first collective action by tech workers around a political agenda that I remember that was outside of just the tech sphere. It was also the first time I can remember where tech workers were organizing against the wishes of their management. A forest of new organizations sprung up around this time.

I started one myself called Tech Solidarity, so I started traveling around the country and holding meetings with tech workers in big cities. I had no idea what I was doing. Other than that, there was this window of time in which it was important for us to act, and we had to do something. And that feeling of momentum continued when Trump took office. The Women's March brought 5 million people out onto the streets.

America is not a place where you often see mass street protests, but this was exceptional. And you saw things including three generations of women, grandmothers, mothers and daughters all marching hand in hand for the same thing. It was extraordinarily moving. And hard on the heels of this came the travel ban, this executive order that was astonishing not just in its cruelty.

Families were split apart at the airport. In one case, a nursing baby was physically pulled from its mother like in a bad Dickensian melodrama. For a week or two, lawyers were camped out at airports. They were working frantically, sleeping little, with this spontaneous effort to bring those lawyers supplies, to get them funding to do anything we could to help.

We had a rally in San Francisco that raised $30,000 from a room of just over 100 people. The organizations we were raising the money for couldn't even send a representative. They were so busy trying to fight the legal fight, but it didn't matter. The tech companies did as little as they could to get as little as they possibly could in this period to placate their employees.

Facebook, for example, has a special safety check feature. If there's something going on and you're worried about someone's well-being, they can go onto Facebook and when the feature is activated, they can say, I'm alright. But they chose not to turn this on at airports, even though people were waiting for hours to find out if people had been let through immigration or not. They promised what they could do to help their own affected workers,

but that was about the extent of it. The employees, however, were electrified. It looked like not only visitors, but permanent residents of the United States were going to be barred from living there. And Google employees, of all people, staged a walkout. They had the support of their management, and Facebook, of course, competing with Google, not wanting to be left behind, decided to hold its own walkout,

but they turned it into a town hall meeting and then they made sure it was confidential so that no one could hear about it. But they had their own secret protest. And immediately, you saw effects. As soon as there was the slightest pressure on management, management relented. Google released official statements. Mark Zuckerberg penned an expositely wooly letter about how he was just so sad that things had gotten as bad as they were.

People even briefly got mad at Elon Musk, who's normally a darling of the tech industry, for his failure to resign from the President's Advisory Council, and they got Travis Kalanick, who's not the world's greatest human being, to resign from it under pressure. And then, after that, not much happened.

The tech workforce had gotten a taste of its own power, its smallest efforts at collective action had resulted in immediate success, and so they just went back to work. The worst of Trump's travel ban was blocked by the courts, and we moved on. The initial shock had kind of gone away, and this American discomfort with prolonged and open disagreement had kicked in.

When I started trying to organize people in November, my theory was that tech workers were the only way to apply leverage against these giants. And my reasoning went like this. The large tech companies are not susceptible to public pressure. Like I said, they're monopolies. They control the outlets that the press has to their readers.

At Google and Facebook, shares are structured in such a way that the founders will always have the controlling vote. You can't boycott them because you're not even their customer. The only people left are the tech workers. They're expensive to hire, they take a long time to train, they have a lot of options, and they're culturally cohesive.

So if you start losing your tech workers, you're in serious trouble as a tech company. Unfortunately, trade unions in the United States are under siege and are not as powerful a force as they are in Europe. There's no union culture in technology. I held a May Day rally in San Francisco, and we got 13 people to come out in total.

One woman emailed me later explaining that next time I should hold it on a weekend because then it would be easier to take the time off of work. But we're trying. We're trying. So I'm here to ask for your help. What I think we need to do is connect the tech industry back to reality in a way it hasn't been connected.

When communism collapsed in Poland in 1989, I started visiting the country again every eight months or so. And even in the darkest period of the 1990s, it was striking to me to see how the overall standard of living was going up. Suddenly, people had cars and phones and appliances. The gains were uneven, but they were broad. Even farmers and retirees, who were the hardest people hit,

finally had access to consumer products that had never been available before. And for all the looting and corruption and inefficiency, enough of the new wealth got through that the broad standard of living rose. And it went up 2.2 times from 1990 to 2010. I'm sure you saw something similar happening in East Germany.

It cost a lot of money, but it worked. In the same time period in the United States, I have seen a whole lot of nothing. Despite fabulous technical progress, practically all of it pioneered in our country, there's been a singular failure to bring this prosperity to the average person. A study just out shows that for the median male worker in the United States,

the highest lifetime wages came if you entered the workforce in 1967, which is astonishing. People born in 1942 had higher total lifetime earnings than someone who is entering the workforce today. That is the median male worker. And you can see this with your own eyes if you ever visit Silicon Valley. There's a homeless encampment literally across the street from the Facebook headquarters.

California has a larger GDP than France, and at the same time, it has the highest poverty rate in America when adjusted for cost of living. And the reason cost of living is high in California is the tech industry hasn't just failed to help raise the standard of its own communities,

but it's actually made it too expensive for people who grew up there to continue to live in their own home state. The people who run Silicon Valley, they identify with progressive values. They're not bad people. They worry about these problems just like we do, and they want to help. So why is this failure to connect? There's a great line by the poet T.S. Eliot,

that between the idea and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow. One reason nothing happens is plainly just a culture of tax evasion. There's this folk belief in American business that if you pay your taxes, you're not performing your fiduciary duty to your shareholders

and that you're going to be fired as CEO. Apple now has a quarter trillion dollars offshore that it refuses to put into direct productive use in California and in the United States. Apple will sell you a book that is called Designed by Apple in California. It shows every Apple product. It costs $300.

But Apple fights its damnedness to make sure it doesn't pay a cent of taxes that it doesn't have to in the state of California that it is so proud of designing in. And you and the EU are all too familiar with these tax evasion strategies. And a second reason that good intentions just don't translate is that capitalism, and especially venture capital, just doesn't work well when there's too much income inequality.

The richest 20 people in technology control a fortune that is half a trillion dollars. That is personal wealth. That's not even the money they control running their companies. So this small subculture of wealthy technophiles just provokes investment into luxury goods in this kind of closed ecosystem, things that I call mom-as-a-service.

That's why you get things like a $120 million juicer that can be replaced by someone squeezing a pouch of fruit. We get the worst of both worlds. We get the inefficiency of a command economy because that's what this is, but we also get the total absence of a safety net of laissez-faire capitalism.

Now, I had a solution and a request, but my time is up. So you're going to have to guess what I want you to do. Mostly regulate, regulate, regulate, regulate the hell out of us. Regulate data retention. The EU is the only agent that has both the independence, the will and the ability to affect these tech companies.

Unionize your tech companies here, and please, please regulate, specifically around how long data can be kept, whether it can be transferred or sold. Hint. No. And whether it can be used to target advertising. Advertising needs to reform so that it targets content and not users, and that step alone will take a lot of the hot air

out of this horrible ad bubble that is distorting democracies. Most of all, don't repeat our mistakes here in Germany or here in Europe. Learn from them. Don't let the disaster that's befallen the United States. Happen on this side of the ocean. Thank you so much for your attention and time.