beyond www...how a byproduct of CERN changed the world

david galbraith twitter: @daveg

I’m a technologist who has worked with the web for 20 years, in Europe and Silicon Valley.

The Internet and its development is no longer about science as much as it is about culture.

This talk is about the cultural impact of the web

The Apollo Program gave us...

velcro

CERN gave us...

The most important development since Gutenberg: The web.

The web is not the internet, it’s not even the thing that first ignited the growth of the Internet.

But it was the catalyst that fueled a technological revolution - that is now a cultural one.

The first web page was served from one of Steve Job’s rare and beautiful NeXT machines, the Stradivarius of computers.

The culture of the web started with taste and it had a connection with Silicon Valley.

“ LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life.”

Not like your accountant. Steve Jobs, world’s most successful businessman, recommends dropping acid.

the best way to get a handle on the immensity of the cultural impact is through numbers...

Big data In a second: 2.8M emails are sent

In a minute: 694,000 Google searches

In an hour: 10.5M pics uploaded to Facebook

In a year: 98 years of Youtube video uploaded

Big data Since the development of the web the amount of data produced has grown exponentially.

The majority of all the information created since the beginning of time was produced in little over the last year

And we don’t know how to process it

Big data: what type?

The majority of the web is either porn, shopping or travel The majority of data is video (by 2017 it will be 2/3)

The majority of pictures (80%) are of naked women

And the majority of email (81%) is spam

How big is big data?

Say we create a unit of measure for big data - a Library Of Congress (LOC).

Specifically all the data in the books in the print collections of the Library of Congress - roughly 10 terabytes of uncompressed textual data

How fast: Fiber optic cable is capable of transmitting data at 40 gigabits per second = 2 LOCs per hour

How much: 25 Petabytes are uploaded to the Internet daily = 2500 LOCs per day

Big followings

34% of humans are on the web

17% of humans are on Facebook

14% of humans watch an average of 4 hours Youtube videos per month

Big fame

Obama: 36M twitter followersLady Gaga, more: 40M twitter followers

Gangnam Style viewed 1.773 billion times16,000 years, viewing it continuously

Big Love In the US one of

every eight married couples started by

meeting online

Big Money

After the invention of the web:

A billion dollar Internet company created every 3 months.

2013 the year there were more Internet enabled mobile devices

than human beings

Nothing illustrates this better than the

announcement of two Popes only 8 years apart

looking at some specific sectors...

privacy

In 2007, New York Magazine identified a new cultural rift between young and old.

“Kids the Internet and the end of privacy, the greatest generation gap since rock and roll”

The change was privacy. Young people were public about what they did, by default.

Young people’s privacy behaviors have changed since 2007, they are moving to a disposable internet culture

Fast forward 6 years and the debate has switched entirely.

The NSA Gathers as Much Data as Is Stored in the Library of Congress - every 6 hours

the rise of anonymous

Cute Cat Theory of Social Activism

Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.

Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.

Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute cat theory:

China builds its own censored social networks to let people have cats while blocking social activism.

One the one hand we have the triviality of people sharing pictures of cute cats and the disposable culture of snapchat.

On the other we have social network enabled revolution, like the Arab Spring.

And this may not always be benign.

Is it Democracy or Mob Rule?

A recent study of Chinese social networks shows that hatred spreads

quicker than positive emotions

The 2nd Law of Socio-dynamics?

jobs

50,000Google has about the same number of employees as there are students at the university of Vienna.

8,000,000But if Google operated like a supermarket it would employ the same number of people as the population of Austria.

Amazon buys Kiva robots for $775M

And even the online supermarkets don’t act like supermarkets

TRAVEL AGENTS

CAMERA SHOPS

BOOKSHOPS

MUSIC STORES

TAXI COMPANIES

REALTORS

The internet makes information flow

Middle men take advantage of imperfect flow of information.

This goes away, and they are replaced by Internet platforms.

Retailers are middle men. 1 in 6 UK shops are empty and much of this retail is not coming back.

We need to redesign town centers around community activities

physical environment

Beyond mobile lies what is called ‘the internet of things’.

Where every lamp post and street sign, dog collar and wristwatch becomes an internet enabled telemetry device.

The dark side of the internet of things.

Stuxnet created a cyber warfare arms race against infrastructure attacks. We don’t know what has been compromised.

money

money is a belief systemhas to sit outside the system it representscreates value only if it moves it is virtual and networked by nature

an imaginary pile of gold in orbit

stone age banking

Mobile data is growing fastest in Africa (77%, annually).

In Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, mobile-money accounts have become much more widespread than bank accounts.

More than 17 million Kenyans (2/3 of the adult population) are using mobile-money services.

Mobile payments

Crowdfunding

The way we invest in things and lend money has become a massively distributed system, crowdsourced rather than mandated from above.

A web not a family tree.

This

Not this

A change in the economics of supply and demand.

The internet has created an all you can eat buffet, for media.It has reversed the traditional economic equation where the scarcity is in demand not supply, companies compete for attention

Back to physics...

What does the whole Internet mean in terms of particle physics?

Electronic information is stored in electrons which have higher energy and therefore mass. The weight of all information on the internet (5,000 petabytes) is 0.2 millionths of an Ounce.

That is similar to the weight of the smallest possible grain of sand.

A particle. A universe in a grain of sand

This universe was triggered by a creation in a room here

A room that technically sits in France but has a Swiss phone number and Swiss

power sockets.

So its appropriate that a technology which breaks down borders comes from a place we can pinpoint on a map but can’t say

what country it’s in.

and when we ask why we should build high energy physics experiments than cost billions, what's the use?

Even the byproduct changed the world.

Even if the hundreds of other contributions to human knowledge and understanding had not happened, with the web, it would have still been worth it.

And that is a wonderful thing.