Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
So we have a topic here that touches on all kinds of different things.
The revolution in journalism and data
created by changes in technology,
from the psychology of communication,
the understanding of the human dedication to narrative
over our history.
And what are the stories that we tell ourselves today
about who we are, what we are doing here
and what is important in life.
We have three great speakers
who each come at this kind of area of interest in different ways.
Evgeny Morozov, originally from Belarus,
now based mainly in the United States,
writes about technology and technologists
in very interesting ways.
The author of 'The Net Delusion'
and, most recently, 'To Save Everything, Click Here'.
He's one of the few people
who punctures the grand narrative of the wonders of technology
and does so in a really interesting way.
Not a Luddite, of course,
but somebody with a much more sophisticated and nuanced approach
to the question.
Kirby Ferguson, some of you will have had the pleasure
of seeing him this morning talking about, well...
..talking about 'This is Not a Conspiracy Theorist'.
Kirby is a filmmaker, who I first saw him talk about his work,
his project 'Everything is a Remix'.
He gave a fantastic TED Talk about it,
which if you haven't seen it, go and have a look.
He is somebody who started his career as a filmmaker and has really...
..is now making films about ideas,
so using everything he's learnt about communicating through that medium
to bring a whole lot of really interesting ideas to life
in a wonderful and vivid way.
Our third speaker is Simran Sethi,
she's a journalist and an environmental activist,
but somebody who has really studied how we communicate
and looked at those questions
about how do we communicate about the big environmental issues.
She's currently a Sugden Fellow at Queen's College
at the University of Melbourne,
so we are very lucky to have her in Australia.
The shape of this session is that we will have...
The three speakers will join me on stage in a moment,
we'll have a broad-ranging discussion with them.
There will be time at the end of the session for some questions from you.
There are microphones -
there will be microphones which will appear magically
for you to come and ask the questions from.
We do encourage people to ask a question.
Our time in these sessions is always limited,
so we want to keep it focused
and hear from our speakers and what they have to say.
And can I remind you to make sure
that your mobile phones are on silent?
But feel free to tweet to hashtag FODI
if you've got something that you want to share about this session
or any of your other experiences at the festival.
So please join me to welcome our speakers to the stage,
Evgeny Morozov, Simran Sethi and Kirby Ferguson.
(APPLAUSE)
So Kirby's obviously going to be worn out after giving a big talk today.
But we have got two...
I like that you set the bar low for me.
(LAUGHS) We've got two other speakers
primed to talk about these interesting issues as well.
I want to start off by asking each of you,
what do you think 'story' is for the purposes of this conversation?
Oh, my God.
-Just a softball question. -A terrifying question.
-It's super easy. (LAUGHS) -Well, OK. (LAUGHS)
We can break it down a little bit.
I mean, I think that because we're talking about
a whole range of questions here,
that we're talking about 'story', you know,
meaning everything from what I did this morning,
what I had for breakfast, how I came to the Opera House,
to being those larger kind of stories that we tell about the world
and who we are and what we do in it.
It was in that kind of context that I just wanted...
You know, when you say that things... stories matter more than facts,
what do you think that we're talking about?
I think of narrative.
I think of something that transcends pieces of information.
It's part of a bigger fabric.
And so, to me, story is something that ignites the imagination,
offers creativity,
and certainly in my line of work includes information,
but is not just exclusively that.
I think it's, you know, again, looking at different contexts.
If you look at contexts like activism, for example,
you'll clearly see that you'll get people to act faster and cheaper
and quicker with stories more often than with facts.
So I think that the cost issue,
both in terms of attention and in terms of the least forces needed
to generate some action,
I think, is an important one that, hopefully, we'll get to today.
ANN: Yeah.
I think story is a journey,
an emotional journey that probably starts with one sort of emotion
and probably, unexpectedly, leads you to some sort of other emotion.
I don't know. That's my personal definition.
It's a journey, an emotional journey, it's not just facts.
And what is it - why do you think we love stories?
Why do stories matter to us?
Ah, because...
-That's a hard one. -No, that's so good!
Jonathan Safran Foer, I think, said it,
you know, we don't just receive stories or read stories,
we ARE story.
Yes.
And to me, that's it, you know, there's nothing else to sort of say
beyond, like, each and every one of us
is comprised of these little stories that we then offer up every day,
and every one we encounter then becomes a character in our story.
Yeah, we experience our lives as a narrative.
We've all got our own narrative about what our own journey is,
so, naturally, we want to see that reflected elsewhere.
Mmm.
One of the things that, when we're thinking of stories,
when we look into the past
and we look at all of the interpretations of the world
that were created before, you know, scientific method went out
and said, "Well, you know, that's not actually true,"
all of those explanations of the world,
effectively, are stories about, you know,
why does the sun shine for these months of the year?
-Why does it rain? -Mm-hm.
Really, a human response to explaining the world.
Do you think that that's still important to us?
Do you think that that's something that we still do in day-to-day life?
Do you think we're still making up those stories
about life as we experience it?
KIRBY: Yeah. Absolutely.
I mean, the world is impossibly complex,
we need to give it some sort of emotion.
We need to make it identifiable on a personal level
so we experience it as stories
even though stories can't possibly contain the complexity of our world.
It's interesting that you mentioned the scientific evolution
because if you look at someone like Newton, for example,
who we would associate with it,
I think for a very long time he couldn't actually understand
why gravity... you know, he couldn't explain it.
He knew that something is happening
and he knew how to describe the effect,
he couldn't understand the reason,
and yet we manage to build quite a lot on that insight that is there
without being able to fully explain it.
I think what we are seeing now, in my field, for example,
with the rise of big data, for example, right,
where you can actually gather a lot of insight
about how inputs influence the outputs
without understanding why they do so, right,
and I'm terrified that we often accept
the efficiency and the utility that we get with a lot of these new tools
without understanding the underlying process.
Because unless you understand why certain things happen,
unless you understand the causal mechanisms,
it's very hard then to go and fix things.
It's very hard to go and reform things, right.
So you might be able to generate more and more data that tells us
that, well, when my hand goes up,
then something happens in the audience,
but you wouldn't understand why that happens
then you wouldn't be able to participate
in a broader social debate about how the world works, right?
So this elimination of the 'why' question,
as we get more and more data from sensors, databases,
that I think is very important
and we need to focus on making sure
that the why dimension still remains in our debate.
And so, linking up the information into a story effectively, you know,
linking up what we know - those kind of things that data can tell us -
into something that has a coherence
because it answers the question of why.
-It can be false coherence too. -(LAUGHS)
It's not the coherence, I think, that we need to be looking for
-but it's accurate coherence, right? -Yeah.
Making sure that there is some causal relationship
that can be tested and understood,
and not just heuristically generated.
You know, A influences B but we don't even know why,
but we can just take advantage of this knowledge.
-Yeah. -That's all we want.
Well, we are going to do one more scary question
because I just want to make sure
that we're not going to get all postmodern on our audience
and say, "Nothing is true, there is no such thing as a fact."
-You're not here. -Or is reality.
(CHUCKLES)
And, you know, let's come up with a working definition,
a working idea of what we think facts are.
Or are we talking about data?
Are we talking about some idea of truth?
Or do you think, you know, it's interesting to try and do that?
In my work, facts are incredibly important
in environmental journalism,
but I would say facts are what we believe to be true
at a moment in time.
And that moment could be a long moment, it could be a century,
but it could also be, you know, something that moves very quickly.
So I think it's, like, what we believe to be true
is a critical part of that.
Yeah.
I second that.
(LAUGHTER)
-Now what do I say? -(LAUGHS) The pressure's on.
You can say it has to have huge amounts of supporting data.
(PANELLISTS LAUGH)
Well, we might...
I'd like to move into talking about...
..asking each of you to talk for a little bit
about how these kinds of issues play out in your work.
And we might talk with Simran
because I think it would be very interesting to hear you talk about,
really, trying to understand how important story...
..what the power of story is
in relation to communicating with people
about those environmental issues.
I jotted down some notes, so you'll see me referring down a bit,
but I'll start actually in a different place,
which is my pursuit of trying to understand
the psychology around storytelling.
It was born out of a deep sense of frustration.
And you'll hear me keep using the term 'storytelling'
as opposed to 'journalist'
even though that's kind of what other people will call me
because I don't believe in the traditional journalistic paradigm
of separating out information from this broader story,
so I'm trying to reclaim this term.
And what happened was, you know, everything environmental
was getting a lot of attention in the United States,
which is where I'm from, in the kind of long wake
of 'An Inconvenient Truth',
the film that was about Al Gore's presentation on climate change.
And everyone that was kind of participating in this conversation,
or having these conversations, was thrilled.
You know, like, "Ah, finally, people get it."
And you know, everyone was going green and being green
and, you know, praising this movement.
And then we saw this kind of crest and fall.
And in the wake of that...
And I also recognised at that same time
I was repeating myself over and over again
that what we thought would happen was
we were going to give you some information,
we were going to actually not give you some,
we were going to drown you in information and you would get it
and you would transform,
and it would be that simple.
That's not what happened at all, you know.
If anything, we've seen people in industry go in reverse,
particularly around climate change.
I'm pulling that out as the issue
but I could talk about a number of different environmental issues.
And also that the same things were being repeated over and over again.
You know, we didn't move from change the globes
and get your reusable bottle,
we just kept repeating that ad nauseam.
I was like, "What's happened?"
And that's kind of when I realised
we didn't tell the story well, you know?
And I started, like, I mean, I was my own focus group,
I started here and I was like, "How did I screw this up that I'm..."
Oprah Winfrey is asking me to be back on her show for the third time
saying, "Can you just say what you said on show one?"
I was like, "What? It's worse!" And there's a ton of things to say.
And why is it just one section of the 'New York Times'?
Like, why are we not, you know...
Why are we relegating this to this one slot
when environmental issues are everything?
OK, so, then one starts to understand
that the facts actually don't change people's decision-making
when you start looking into psychology,
and that what was needed was a different way
of approaching the information.
So to wrap things up, that's what's brought me to where I am today,
to understanding that this power of narrative is enduring, you know,
and that the way to certainly...
..and what I'm doing to help people not just hear information
but make sense of it and act on it,
and that's why I've come full circle on this idea of storytelling.
If you just want to share information, be a journalist.
You know, share, like, this happened, this happened, and go on,
but I'm in this for some bigger reason here
and that is because we're facing a lot of, you know,
pressing problems that need to be addressed.
And, you know, by any means necessary,
I want to get people involved
and I want to get diverse kinds of constituents involved.
And so I believe that the way to do this and to transform people
and to, by extension, transform the world
is by capturing the imagination and the heart and the mind
and doing that through story.
And can you tell us a little bit how you do that?
Mmm.
Yes. Um...
(OTHERS CHUCKLE)
-Largely through... -KIRBY: Good one.
-Yeah, a very... -(OTHERS LAUGH)
..a very careful articulation of data.
OK, so what happened was, I was just like, "What the hell?"
You know, "Why isn't this working?
"I mean, how many more facts can I tell you about sea-level rise
"or about deforestation or about the loss of biodiversity?
"Why isn't this holding?"
Ah, well, risk research tells us
that people start to tune out after magnitudes of one.
So when I tell you about the genocide, you know,
in whatever country, in whatever place,
and its magnitude's a million,
you'll feel bad for a moment
and then you'll go back to worrying about
kind of what you already care about.
And that learning was through behavioural economists
at a university in the United States called Duke University.
So it wasn't even from communications or psychology, it was, you know...
Well, behavioural economics is close,
but it was this idea of the finite pool of worry.
There's only so much people can worry about at once.
So if I want you to care about my polar bears on melting ice floes
or Tuvalu disappearing
or the bush fires in New South Wales,
well, you come to Sydney and you can see the smog and you feel it -
it's visceral, it's immediate -
but if I'm sitting in the United States,
how do I get you engaged in this?
And it's by telling the story of Ann Mossop.
-Mmm. -Do you know what I mean?
It's not by telling you about every Sydneysider
because we just start to, like, kind of glaze over.
So, really, it's the specificity of a singular narrative
that is so transformative.
And I think what that's done for my work has really moved
not away from data or away from statistics,
but ensuring that every one of those statistics
ties into, like, a real person and a real life and a real story.
And what is the kind of response you get
from scientists to that approach?
Mmm, it's a mixed bag.
-(LAUGHTER) -I've been insulted.
-You don't have to name names. -Oh, I would love to.
(LAUGHS) I won't.
I'm going to be so polite.
No, some people are like, "I disagree with your data
"and your interpretation of the data,"
because they are so offended that I'm willing to, like, swear a little bit
and gesticulate and not have a PowerPoint and not...
..you know, like not show graph charts with dots on them.
But that was never going to work anyhow
and that's what I'm trying to say to people.
Like, brains are amazing, dynamic prehistoric things.
You know, Tony Leiserowitz, who's a psychologist at Yale University said,
"Simran, we're still walking around with the same brains that we had,
"you know, and the way we respond
"is, like, immediate things in our immediate environment
"or things that are close to us emotionally
"or close to us in terms of our world view."
If you're a PhD candidate already working on your dissertation,
your brain is a little bit different than mine
and so you're, like, tuned to hear that kind of information.
If you're in a laboratory all day,
if you're publishing in obscure journals, writing in jargon,
you're prime to hear information that way,
so when I come at you, you're a little, like, freaked out
and thrown off, you know, like, off kilter.
-But for the rest of...people... -(LAUGHS)
..for other people, for people like ME,
like, that's how we receive information
and that's how it takes hold.
I'll tell you, I am meticulous with my information,
I am vicious with my data,
I am holding onto it hard and fast.
I am not trying to be loose with information or fact,
but what I am trying to do is retell or recast that information
in a way that it not only makes sense but that it, like, endures.
And you've talked a little bit
about some of the research that has given us insight
into the way our brains actually work,
you know, in the sense that our cognitive vices
are the limitations of our own thought processes.
One of the things that comes out of that research is the fact that
we are more responsive to bad news than good news,
to put it very simply.
And it seems to me that that's quite interesting,
and if you look at the way that we respond
to something like climate change, that we see it as bad news,
but it's bad news which, theoretically,
we might respond to more readily
but because it's far away and non-specific
that mitigates against us getting that message.
Exactly.
What do you think is most effective way to talk to people
about something like climate change?
I'll put one more psychological theory in there.
-You've mentioned loss aversion. -Yeah.
We are very averse to loss.
I've mentioned the finite pool of worry, right,
and then there's also single-action bias,
so I think one of the things that we've done is said to people...
I will own it for myself - maybe you gentlemen have not done this,
or you, Ann, but I have given a lot of top 10 lists in my life.
-(CHUCKLES) -Easy ways to go green.
Top 10 ways to go green.
Green, green, et cetera, top tip list.
And that was a terrible approach because of single-action bias.
You know, give me five things to do,
I'll pick one and I've moved on, right?
So what we have to do is talk about these issues as,
"This is the first step on the journey you are taking."
And when I say you, I really mean we. That's another thing that...
And I think if you leave with nothing else
from everything I have said here today
is that it is a 'we'.
Right now we are in the long shadow
of the disillusion of the climate commission here.
We are facing the fires, we are seeing things.
Like, everything is coming closer, yet a government seems to be...
You know, like, the government here
does not seem to be recognising that here,
and in many places all over the world.
So what do we do?
I think the most important thing to remember
is that the universalities between us are
physiologically, you know, we are 99.9% the same,
and psychologically we are too.
Because at the end of the day, what we all want is to be loved,
we all want to seek
what psychologists call both agency and communion.
So agency is that I want to assert myself,
I want to individuate,
I want to be the master, I want to demonstrate my mastery.
And then communion is, and I really want you to like me.
You know, and I really want to get along,
and that social norming cannot be underestimated.
We think we want to be renegade,
but there's a really deep, enduring part of us
that wants to be part of that bigger whole.
So it's balancing both of those things
and recognising in those moments
when you're encountering someone who seems like a complete ***,
who is totally like an idiot,
and you're the brilliant one and, "Why can't they understand this?"
It's like you didn't tell the story right,
that's why they can't understand it yet.
And beneath all of that, we still want the same things.
We have seen here a lot of discussion about the issue of climate change
and one form that...
We've seen in various forums people speaking,
but also there was a television series
where a prominent climate change denialist
and a prominent climate change activist
went on a journey together.
And, naturally, in spite of all of the things they saw,
nobody's opinion about anything changed much.
Some of it was quite...
For those of you who saw it,
the Nick Minchin and Anna Rose... on sort of a small road movie.
Are there cases where no matter how carefully you craft your approach,
it's just not going to work?
Well, you know, I didn't see that program,
but I'm thinking of a recent program I did see,
with David Suzuki on 'Q&A',
and, you know, people say, "Well, I have a study
"that says climate change is not caused by humans,
"but you have a study that says it is,"
and, you know, that everyone wants to sort of say, like,
"My science against your science."
Well, you know, I would say in this instance
that really was a false equivalence.
But that's actually irrelevant
because, you know, just to go back to the brain for a moment,
we also engage in confirmation bias, right,
so we want to seek out information
that confirms what we already believe to be true, and we'll go so far...
There's a brilliant study at the University of Western Australia
that we will go so far as to embrace what is not true -
disconfirmation bias -
because it makes us feel safe in the world.
So, again, I think what we need to do there, and I didn't see the program,
but that it's really about
if the program was about this data versus this data,
and what is this and what's that,
then it's like it still didn't get back to those universals.
You know, do you want a better life?
Like, what is happening right now
in the face of these environmental challenges?
And can we craft a way to move forward together,
because we all exist in this ecosystem,
to have that resiliency, to have that joy, to have that abundance.
And I think, more and more I find
that's the way to have these conversations
and to also be mindful,
like, depending on where you are in this, to listen.
Like, the most fundamental thing one can do
is, I think, really hear where someone's coming from
and then going back to the finite pool of worry,
moving in that direction, responding to those cares, right?
If you have a child,
I can talk to you about climate change and global health
in the context of what it will mean for your children, right?
If, you know, you're working in a particular industry,
but, like, to pay attention and to understand
what it is someone cares about,
and what's really immediate for them, and close.
Because if you want to talk to me about children, I don't have any,
so I will hear your message, I will be interested,
and then, again, I'll move back to what it is that I care about.
So that framing of the conversation, I think, is vital.
And it is achievable.
Like, that's the thing that we haven't really done,
has been that specific or paid that much attention.
ANN: Mmm.
I can see some of us now trying to pay attention
to Nick Minchin's views, but...
(LAUGHTER)
..whether that would bear fruit or not would remain to be seen.
Evgeny, can we talk a little bit about your work?
Because there are two things that I think are really interesting.
Mmm.
We live in a time when, you know, for various complex reasons,
most of the technology that is accessible to us,
not so much on a larger scale
but the kind of technology that we live with every day,
is seen in a very positive way,
that there is a narrative that technology does amazing things,
it's fun, it's for you.
You know, that everybody is going to have
these little devices in their hands,
and that at that level, you know,
some of the concerns that we have in other contexts
about, you know, science and technology
being potentially scary and disruptive,
are not present.
And this is a narrative that, you know,
for companies like Google, like Facebook,
like, you know, the big...like Apple, are really kind of...
..it's a world view that this is an unambiguous positive.
And this is something where you really critique this narrative
in quite an interesting way, I think.
I just want to get you to respond to that.
Do you think that's something that you're doing in your work?
Sure.
I mean, there are several critiques here,
and they all work differently
and they are all target very different parts of the message.
As we hear from Silicon Valley,
there is clearly an attempt from them
to present their tools as being very efficient, frictionless.
You know, frictionlessness is one of the big terms that they like to use,
that our life will suddenly become...
-Smooth. -..highly smooth and well organised
and frictionless,
and we would be able to do things
in ways that will completely eliminate any friction
from your day-to-day existence.
And I think there is a need to go and start challenging that narrative,
and to show that while there is probably some value in having some,
not, you know, everywhere,
but some challenges and some barriers
and some obstacles that need to be overcome
because there is something about the human condition itself
that does require us to perhaps pool resources together
to overcome certain things or to struggle.
I mean, there are certain things at a deeper level
that I think a lot of engineers are not recognising.
And I think this is a rather, you know, shallow response.
Or it's not the whole package that they're trying to sell us.
I think there is a much more insidious, if you will,
agenda out there,
and that agenda is that now that all of us are carrying devices,
smartphones,
gadgets that have interfaces that can actually monitor what we do
and can provide us with extra feedback,
we might be able to tackle problems in new ways.
Problems like the environmental change, problems like obesity,
problems like crime,
there are all sorts of social problems out there
that can be tackled
simply by the fact that you can monitor everything that citizens do
and you would be able to,
as a technocrat who is a policymaker or as a company,
you would be able to intervene with some kind of a public message
telling them that, "Well, you have not exercised enough,
"and we know this because your cell phone has a sensor in it
"which actually tracks how much you're walking."
-(CHUCKLING) -Which is actually true,
-I mean, all of your smartphones... -Or your special wristband.
All your smartphones have accelerometers
which actually can monitor how much walking you do on a daily basis,
so Google has now come up with an interesting app called Google Now,
which does a lot of other things,
but one of the things it does is that at the end of every month,
it actually generates a little pop-up, a little reminder
that tells you how many miles you've walked this month
compared to the previous months.
And it does it without you ever asking it for it, right?
(LAUGHTER)
-You see how this logic... -He's quite serious.
..how this logic might be appealing
to a lot of policymakers who have suddenly found
that there is an industry out there, and it's all there -
entrepreneurial, it all looks very sexy,
people, they love innovation -
and this industry has built this new infrastructure for problem-solving.
Now, even this industry itself
is very keen to play up its own future role
because it allows them to position themselves,
and that's essentially a story that they are telling us,
it allows them to position themselves
as essentially being much better than Wall Street,
which is keen on destroying the world,
and Silicon Valley, in contrast, is there to save us,
and they are all competing for the same pool of people.
It's the same bright kids coming out of the Ivy League.
And, of course, they would rather be seen as people who are saving Africa
rather than people who are destroying the world
with derivatives and whatnot.
Alright, so there are all sorts of reasons
why I think the companies are beginning to engage in this effort.
My own fear is that we, in buying what these companies are telling us,
we risk running into what some sociologists call problem closure.
And it's the fact that we are redefining,
or defining, the problem based on
a set of solutions that are already available to us.
So we're not actually looking at some of the deeper causes of obesity
or climate change or crime or you name it, right?
So, of course, you can be told through smartphones
that you are not walking enough, you're not eating enough vegetables,
which, of course, you can also now monitor
with, you know, enough sensors in your pocket,
you can even monitor your food intake, right?
But this is a very simplistic story because you're not actually asking
why you're not eating enough vegetables, right?
It's not just because you don't have the courage, right,
that's the story - that you don't have the power,
you don't have the conviction to do it.
It might be that you don't have the money
or it might be that the farmers market
is too far from where you live.
Or it might be that you can't afford the car to drive there,
which is the case in many places if you live in America.
There are many other factors that ought to be tackled
and not simply reduced to the level
where we can tackle everything through apps, right?
Apps cannot tackle structural problems and causes.
Whether it's poverty or whether it's racial discrimination, you name it,
right, and my fear is that,
having bought into this narrative that we get from Silicon Valley,
what we're doing is that we are tackling problems
that our apps know how to tackle
instead of tackling actual causes of those problems
that, you know, we need to keep debating and debating, right?
And not just settling on the low-hanging fruits,
and by pushing all the responsibility on citizens, right,
and this is where I get very troubled
when I hear a lot of people from Silicon Valley
when they talk to the public to say that,
"Well, we know how to solve
"a problem like obesity or climate change, you name it."
And of course they know how to solve it,
but they solve it in a very particular way,
and, you know, that story, I think, does need to be challenged.
We need to figure out how their own tools are narrowing the options.
And perhaps by narrowing the options,
we're actually shrinking the space for politics,
and this is something that we shouldn't do.
So how can that narrative be challenged effectively?
Given that it's a story that they have told with...
I mean, I think they have told it well
and that it has been received by willing listeners,
by a willing audience in a way.
I mean, I think people would rather hear,
"There are problems and we can solve problems, and here's the tool..."
-Sure. -"..than there are big problems
-"and they're complicated." -Sure.
"There isn't a right answer, there isn't an easy solution,
"and we're all going to have to work together
"for years and years and years to solve them."
I mean, I think, you know,
what might be a more complex answer is not appealing.
Mm-hm. Sure.
As "I can fix it for you" kind of thing.
Sure.
Well, I think what we're dealing with here
is not just a function of the technology debate,
it's a function of our broader political debate
and the fact that we have less and less trust in public institutions,
and a lot of the people we elect to our offices
seem to have even less trust
in the institutions that they have been elected into...
(OTHERS CHUCKLE)
..and they're interested in shrinking them.
And bringing the seemingly apolitical technological solutions allows them
to continue shrinking those services
while claiming that they're actually innovating, right,
so you have to figure out
what are some of the key discursive interventions you can make.
You can then go and argue that the story about innovation that we hear,
that innovation is always good, that disruption is always good.
Again, if you hear people from the technology world of Silicon Valley
talk about it, for them, disrupting things is just...is great.
I mean, the bad thing that can happen, I mean, all of the...
-Don't try this at home. -(SIMRAN LAUGHS)
All of the most popular technology conferences in Silicon Valley
have the name Disrupt - the word 'disrupt' in them.
-Mmm. -Right?
To me, this is just awful.
I think that the welfare state
and the whole idea of social democracy was founded
precisely so that we can avoid disruption in our everyday living.
We wanted to build institutions, you know, insurance, I mean, you name it,
to make sure that when life throws things at you,
you have some kind of a social net there to catch you, right?
And I think a lot of people in Silicon Valley
have the opposite mentality.
And they don't even realise that, that's the problem.
They think that all they're doing is just innovating,
and they're just disrupting things,
and disrupting things is OK and it's actually good
because, look, it helps the investors, it helps them,
and who cares that it might also then disrupt the living of professors
who now would not be able to do what they do in universities
because now you have these online courses out there, right?
And again, it's a particular story that they're telling us,
that by essentially creating these Massive Open Online Courses,
for example, one of the hot issues, MOOCs, right?
Yes.
You would be able to allocate all of the kids in Africa.
I mean, that's a story I hear almost every week.
And that comes after 10 years of trying to convince us
that all we need to do
is to just drop laptops from helicopters on Africa
and kids will just educate themselves.
Now it has shifted from laptops to tablets, and from tablets to apps,
and now it has shifted to online videos,
so all we need to do to save Africa is just to produce more videos...
-(LAUGHS) -..and they already have the laptops.
-But this is... -(LAUGHTER)
But this is just one particular sort of part of the problem, right,
and part of what we always hear -
there is another layer here which remains invisible.
And the invisible layer is that a lot of professors who are not superstars
will not be able to keep their full-time jobs,
and they won't be able to keep their full-time jobs
'cause all the teaching will be done
by a couple of superstars in the Ivy League
and then everyone else essentially becomes a teaching assistant,
who becomes an adjunct where all they do
is just to administer the online forums
where students grade each other.
I mean, this is the future of teaching, right,
and then you have to figure out
what will the social consequences of that be
in addition to just a lot of unemployed people.
And I think what the consequences of that would be
is that we might actually lose a very robust layer of society
where, you know, it was people - academics who had tenure,
who could participate in public debates and take active positions
and pursue them aggressively as public intellectuals.
As you lose tenure, and as all those people become adjuncts,
that security is gone, right, and that's one of the consequences
of the - I don't even know what the proper term here would be -
MOOCisation, if you will, of the world...
-So that's Massive Online... -Open Courses.
-Open Online Courses. MOOCs. -MOOCs.
That's the buzz word that, you know...
Thomas Friedman writes a column about them probably every month,
which, if not every week...
..which suggests that it's still at the top of the buzz level in America.
But there are all sorts of consequences which are invisible,
which is what I've just mentioned, you know.
The fact that you will not be able to have those people
doing the kind of activism that they used to do while being on tenure
is something that no-one at Silicon Valley talks about
because they never think about it that way.
So, for them, there is a group of people that they're helping,
it's the kids in Africa,
and, you know, God bless them, let's help them,
but let's not forget that there are many other functions
that a place like university serves, right,
and that we need to be offering competing stories,
and I think that the faculty who are about to get unemployed...
-(ANN LAUGHS) -..should hurry up.
KIRBY: But some of what you're saying sounds like...
..you know, the enormous social and potentially economic gains
that we get from anybody anywhere being able to educate themselves.
Sure.
That that's a lower priority than some professors keeping their jobs,
and that seems kind of nuts.
No, that's not what I'm saying at all.
All I'm saying is that
there is a particular narrative that you hear from Silicon Valley
about what the introduction of Massive Open Online Courses
is going to...how it's going to impact the university.
They have to justify them
because they have to go and sell those courses to the universities.
-Mm-hm. -So they have to go and make deals.
Now they have, for example, made a deal with the US government,
so that the US government now will be spending some of its money
on bringing courses by one of these private companies
to embassies around the world,
so that other students can come and sit on those lectures, right?
It's a private company stepping in,
making justifications for how it thinks about the future, right?
And I'm not saying that we should ban people from going and looking up
interesting videos on YouTube and pursuing their education.
All I'm saying is that as long as we are putting,
for example, public money,
we are transferring public money to a lot of these companies,
we have to figure out what they are actually going to mean
for the future of education
because of lot of the education is public education,
I mean, in America, right?
And the stories and the answers that they have give us so far,
to me, sounds rather shallow and unconvincing
because, again, they don't want to talk about
any consequences for employment, for labour,
for what it's going to mean for the university itself
beyond just, you know, using it as a fact
that it would produce those courses,
which they will then be able to package and sell at cheaper rates.
It's not as if they just go and hire some random people from the streets,
produce courses and then give them, you know, to kids in Africa.
Mm-hm.
They're serving essentially as parasites
on the existing university system, leveraging its resources...
-Sure. -..while claiming that,
"Hey, it's all going to work out for you
"because you'll have more students everywhere
"and you don't have to start questioning
"how you're allocating your resources."
This is the deal we are getting right now.
It's not a story about democratisation of knowledge
and democratisation of education at all.
-Mm-hm. -That story I buy and I like it.
But what we are hearing from them right now
is all about using public resources
to advance the interest of the private sector.
KIRBY: Right.
-Kirby. -Yes.
-Time for you to talk. -I'm on.
-OK. -(LAUGHS) So, Kirby...
I mean, when I first saw Kirby's work,
I was really struck by the fact
that this was somebody using a whole lot of media,
both that sense of using visual media
but of also very much using storytelling,
to talk about ideas in a complex and interesting way,
and that we were seeing something that is, you know,
the transition from a way of
if somebody had a set of ideas that they wanted to convey
writing them down,
to really taking it into this medium which...
I mean, essentially it's filmmaking, which is not new as a medium,
but I felt the way that you were doing that...
-I reinvented it, though. -Yes. Yes, of course.
-Sorry, I'm joking. -(SIMRAN AND ANN LAUGH)
So what would be great is to tell us
about how you came to be doing the kind of work you're doing,
those sorts of ideas-driven film projects.
Yeah. I mean, I guess I started with doing...
I started doing comedy stuff, I started doing just monologues,
so it was just about, you know, me talking,
and at a certain point I wanted to get myself out of it.
I wanted to just be... I wanted to do some sort of a merger
of, like, a music video and a movie trailer and a book...
I don't know, just...and music just sort of all mashed together
into something that's really dense,
and that is about ideas that isn't character driven.
So it was just sort of a format that I stumbled upon.
I think I was really influenced by hip-hop when I was a kid,
when I first heard, like, really sample-heavy albums back in the '90s,
like when I heard 'Paul's Boutique', the Beastie Boys' album,
and there's hundreds of samples in it,
I wanted to do something like that,
or something that is, like, much bigger than you,
or you're bringing this whole world and you're expressing it,
you're channelling it in your voice
but you're sort of like a DJ for all these other voices.
So I wanted to do something like that
that was about ideas that wasn't character driven
and that could kind of go anywhere in the way that a good book can.
I feel, like, a fictional film, you really get...
..people really expect a certain structure from a fictional film
whereas with a book you can weave all over the place,
and I wanted to kind of bring that to video.
And do you feel that it's a way to talk...
I mean, do you feel that you can talk about things
that it would be to an audience -
to a young audience, in particular.
-I think. -Right.
Does that medium allow you to talk about things
that, you know, it's not going to work if they're in a book?
-Absolutely. Yeah. -Yeah.
I mean, I can make it move, I can make it...
-(LAUGHS) -Yeah!
I mean, it's filmmaking - I can make it move.
But I can give it emotion that it wouldn't have
if it's just sitting there on the page.
I can illustrate more abstract ideas in visual ways.
So it doesn't have the limitations.
Like, I don't think I could write a book, really.
Like, when I express ideas, I want to have motion, I want to have music,
I want to have words, I want all these avenues available to me,
so I think...
And young people have really responded to my stuff, actually.
There's, like, 10-year-olds and stuff who like my stuff,
which I'd never have thought of.
Like, I totally did not intend it for them,
but it seems like the format works pretty well.
Can you tell the audience a little bit about
the current project that you're working on?
Yeah.
Because the first part of that will be released in a couple of weeks.
Yeah. That's right. It comes out November 22.
And it's called 'This Is Not a Conspiracy Theory' and it's a...
Some of you might heard about this in more detail...
-In the talk this morning, yeah. -But this is the two-minute version.
The two-minute version, OK. I'll try to squeeze it down.
About what the idea is and what is in it.
Yeah, OK, it's a movie, basically,
that's going to be released episodically on the Net,
sold and distributed on the Net.
And I sort of used the conspiracy theory as a way to show bad thinking.
I don't think the conspiracy theory
is this really foreign way of framing stories.
I think it's very elemental to... maybe to human nature,
but especially in the United States,
we like to think that somebody is controlling things.
That's the nightmare of the conspiracy theory.
So, you know, it shows up in politics lots in the United States,
like, it's the 1% or the 1% of the 1%
or it's the government, or whatever.
There's somebody who is controlling things,
and if we could just get them out of the picture
or punish them or whatever, then things would be better.
So I want to use that as sort of one side of my argument
and I want to do something that's sort of about complexity science
and about systems thinking
that is about an interdependent, complex world.
I want to show models of how things work,
the forces that shape events
and place those events within that kind of model.
I know that sounds crazy abstract but it will be...
It won't be when it actually is together.
We've got 15 minutes left in the session,
so it's time for any of you who have questions to ask
to come to the microphones down here
if you want to ask any of our panellists
something about the range of things that we've talked about.
While we are waiting to see who appears,
I want to ask you all to respond a little bit
to the current state of journalism.
Even though I know we've rejected the journalism paradigm.
(KIRBY CHUCKLES)
Because Evgeny has, I know, written
and talks about this very interestingly,
which is the changes that social media have brought
to the way we find things out, the way we get information.
How we know... How we interpret things.
Whether we interpret them as credible or not.
And I just wanted you to kind of respond a little bit to that issue.
Me? Oh, alright. (LAUGHS)
You start.
None of you seem very keen to talk, but...
-(LAUGHS) -Sure.
I mean, look, I have...
Again, I can give you a top 10 list of my concerns
or I can give you just one.
So why don't I just try with one? Having learned something today.
(LAUGHTER)
The finite pool of worry.
So, what really bothers me right now
is that we tend to think of online and digital stories
very often as just the product of some viral culture, right.
We tend to think that things tend to go viral
because they are naturally made that way.
It goes viral because it has been funny
or it has been just, you know, coincidence,
but we don't actually see
a conspiracy theory behind something going viral.
And I think, as much as we'll probably disagree,
actually, I think there are often...
You know, the reason why there are conspiracy theories
is that there are often actual conspiracies behind things.
-(LAUGHTER) -So...
Behind every second viral video that...
My take on this - behind every single second viral story or viral video,
there is someone who's actively trying to make it viral, right,
and they are hiding their tracks really well.
And there is an entire science, I would say, now
in different PR agencies and in different advertising agencies
for how can you make things go viral and make it look completely as if
it went viral on its own completely, autonomously,
without any other intervention.
And I think we have to understand how it works
and we have to understand what are the forces that contribute to it.
Who has the resources to explore the algorithms that YouTube has
to identify what counts as relevant when you search for something, right?
There are people who have mastered the algorithm
and who know how relevance, as an idea, is produced.
And people who know how relevance is produced
can then target their content in a specific way, right,
so I think we have to be critical.
And journalists have a role to play here, I think.
We have to understand that all of the stuff that we are seeing online
is not there because it has just randomly generated 25,000 clicks
or likes or shares, right,
and we are often...we do need someone to scrutinise
the provenance of much of this,
and I think journalists, if they persevere,
will help us uncover some of that virality.
-And if I could just say... -Yeah.
..in regards to journalism, I reject this paradigm,
but I don't suggest that we all do with everything.
It's the specificity of what it is that I'm doing, right?
And when we talk about this as an abstraction,
and when I interviewed for my, like, big TV job,
they are like, "Well, you know, do you have an agenda?
"We're worried you might have an agenda."
Yeah, I have an agenda for clean water!
You'd better believe I have an agenda.
But if I strip away my passion, if I strip away my agenda,
then you just think, uhh, it's just another thing, right?
So just to clarify that. Critically important.
To know who is telling the story, what and why...
-Why they want to, yeah. -..the motivation for you...
..for them wanting you to hear the story, yeah.
Over here from the audience.
And if I can ask people, we've got about 10 minutes,
so please do hit us with a question.
-This works? Yeah? OK. -MAN: Yeah.
I'm kind of interested in a story from each of the panel
that you feel actually did transform culture or values in some way.
I know you mentioned, Simran,
that you didn't think 'Inconvenient Truth' did,
so I'm just kind of interested if you can find an example
of one that you think the narrative completely worked,
completely changed something.
Great question.
So stories that really had that kind of impact, from each of you.
One-in-four people in the world has a mobile phone.
They don't have a bank account.
That story took hold, right, exactly what Evgeny was saying,
I believe that, like, this is the tool for good,
and I actually believe it is, but now I'm learning today
that it can also be something else.
So I think that's a really good example
because also the messenger seemed quite faceless in that instance,
you know, it was just this decentralised thing,
whereas the challenge with something like climate change was
it was Al Gore, a politician,
and that, like, really distorted what the story was.
Like, you know, a lot of people kind of co-mingled those things.
But who's against mobile phones other than me? I mean...
(LAUGHTER)
No-one.
I'm panicking that I don't have mine right now!
Well, again, I think much depends on
how you define 'success' behind the story.
I mean, last year you've all seen the very successful, again, viral story,
Kony 2012, right?
An attempt to hunt down the Ugandan warlord, right?
The video that was very emotional, very successful,
raised a lot of money.
I mean, if you defined success of your campaign by raising money,
then it was a very successful campaign.
Well, Joseph Kony is still out there a year after,
and so I think we have to understand how we measure success, right,
and that might be that we measure success
through individual organisations that say that,
"Well, we just want to do a very specific thing
"and we don't actually know
"whether it will contribute to a larger project
"or whether we actually measure it
"with that mission and project itself in mind."
And I think, what I have seen in the last five years
is that precisely because of cell phones and because of social media,
the cost of producing stories and narratives
have fallen down significantly,
so anyone can produce a story
and that's what happened with the Kony 2012 campaign.
Those guys were not expecting to be seen by millions of people,
and that's why they reacted, if you all know the story well, so weirdly.
So, I mean, there are loads of complications here,
but I think we have to figure out how to live in a future
where everyone can produce a story
that might eventually bring far more attention than you expect.
And then, you know, what do you do? Then how do we mobilise?
How do other entities that have been pursuing the same story for decades
can actually mobilise the resources
once that story has already gone from the newspapers?
The 'New York Times' is not going to run another story on Joseph Kony
because they've already exhausted all the editorial coverage
covering that particular campaign last year, right?
-Yeah. -That's the challenge
and that's the responsibility and the ethics of storytelling
that we are not yet handling well.
We don't know what the ethics of this is or should be.
I would...
What sprang to mind for me was actually a platform, not a story,
but I feel like the platform of Kickstarter...
Can you use Kickstarter in Australia, by the way?
-Does anybody know? Can you? -WOMAN: Yes.
Kickstarter spawned, I don't know, dozens
or, I don't know, a lot of stories that I heard about,
so it has this gamified experience,
you know, where you set a goal
and then some people just wildly exceed that,
and then you get to hear all these stories
about the unfolding experience of people making these things.
So, for me, it spawned, you know,
all these success stories of people who are able to do things
that I don't think they could have done five years ago or whatever.
And it's just...
It's also been enlightening for me to see how these projects unfold,
to see the problems that they encounter, the successes.
And they're usually happy endings, so usually it works our pretty well.
So I think Kickstarter for me
has spawned just dozens and dozens of amazing stories.
-WOMAN: Thank you very much. -You're welcome.
-Thank you. -Over here.
For the whole panel, I was just wondering,
don't you guys think that the problem with the narrative form
is that it's not constrained by facts in any way?
So, for example, I can tell, if I'm rhetorically gifted,
a very persuasive racist story.
Or, I mean, Kirby's presentation this morning
was replete with examples of completely false stories...
-KIRBY: Yeah. -..that managed to persuade
millions of people of the most bizarre ideas.
Isn't that the problem with using stories to define what matters to us?
-Absolutely. That's a great question. -Great question, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there's no boundaries about storytelling
that makes them factual.
I guess it's probably a social movement that we're looking for.
Like it has to be...
Like, I actually think the ridicule of conspiracy theories is good.
You know, I think maybe we need...
Just socially, it needs to be very unacceptable
to put disreputable facts into your story.
That needs to be... People need to get hit a lot harder for that.
Like, I remember during the last election,
there were campaign speeches
that were just riddled with outrageous falsehoods,
and they just came and they go like, "Politician lie, whatever,
"it's just happening all over the place."
So I think people... I think it's up to all of us
to sort of, like, get a lot more serious
about what we're expecting from these stories.
And that, in and of itself, is a story that has taken hold,
that it is acceptable for media outlets to be biased,
for politicians to lie.
Like, we've come to adopt that as, like, truth,
but to go back to your point, I think one of the challenges is
we hear all these nutty stories through...with compelling speakers,
but then we counter it with the fact
that maybe it doesn't have as compelling of a package,
and that, like, has to be changed.
So the responsibility, unfortunately, maybe it's on us.
Like, if we want that to shift,
it really comes to being able to captivate
the spirit and the heart and the mind
and engage people and, you know, raise the bar
beyond just, like, you know,
here's the facts that dispute your beautiful, nutty story, you know.
-Or horrible story. -Yeah.
Nobody's going to be that interested in that.
Like, here's why that was wrong, "Oh, wow, fascinating,"
but the horse is already out of the barn.
It is actually happening, I'm afraid, with fact checking.
I mean, there is some bizarre fetish for fact checking in America.
-(ANN LAUGHS) -SIMRAN: Yeah.
Where there is probably every single...
Because some people are lying that you have to have that.
But it's not as if more fact checking will automatically get you there
because the way in which you do fact checking is also very political.
It depends on who you use as your experts, right?
So now there are lots of fact-checking entities in America,
where they want to fact check a claim made by, you know,
let's say, Noam Chomsky or Glenn Greenwald,
I mean, pick someone who by American standards
looks very, you know, fundamentalist, right...
-(ANN LAUGHS) -And...
The way they would fact check the claim about drones is that...
..or drone warfare and the legality of it,
they would call up three experts
sitting in different Washington think tanks, and ask them,
"Well, what do you think, like, about what Noam Chomsky has just said?"
And then those people say, "Well, this is outrageous.
"This is not correct at all."
But, you know, those are three people sitting in three think tanks
that get all their money from the defence industry.
Why should they care, and why should we then take their opinion
and reduce it to some kind of a star system
where we rank Noam Chomsky on one to five
based on what some three random experts
in three, you know, highly dubious think tanks think of his claim?
And that, I think, is problematic.
And now that you try to use technologies and databases
to automate that will actually be introducing
more falsities than truth-hoods into the public sphere,
and that's what I fear, not that...
A lot of the fact checking that happens happens invisibly.
-ANN: Yeah. -We don't ask any questions
about how power actually shapes the process of fact checking.
-No. -And making sure that we know
that those are still defined by relations of power,
you know, those processes, I think would be very helpful.
And the traditional role of fact checking was before publication.
-Mm-hm. -Right.
So that nothing would go into a credible publication
unless it had been fact checked.
Now, you know, certainly what we saw happening here in the last election,
where we had the first appearance of fact checking
which was that the media organisations have shrunk
to such a degree, effectively the fact checking is outsourced
and after the event.
So that you report on it
and the little fact-checking thing is down there.
But it's not like, "Let's prevent anything that's not true
"getting into the paper in the first place."
SO, yeah, it's an interesting paradox.
A question here?
We'll just take, I think, this question
and quickly that question if we can.
Just quickly to dovetail on this gentleman's point
and maybe to make it a little more provocative.
Isn't it true that actually all of human catastrophe
is based on storytelling?
And all of human catastrophes that occur
are because people buy into narratives.
It's great to live by the ocean,
so I'll build my house on an unsustainable cliff.
Or it's great to do this or that.
What you were talking about before, the lady, Ms Simran,
was about the fact that the human brain is so hardwired for simplicity
and basic needs being satisfied
that the more simple narrative
of your comfort over any other greater good
is really what's gonna win at the end of the day.
And in fact, as I said, if you look basically at all of human misery,
basically it all begins with stories.
So how do you combat that sort of human nature, if you will?
We might quickly take this question
and take both of them for a final response from each of the panellists.
MAN: The previous government, according to Paul Keating,
lacked a narrative,
but maybe some people think 60 to 70% of the electorate
had stopped listening.
Coleridge's great narrative poem 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner'
has one person in three who's able to hear the story.
I'm just wondering what proportion of your readers you'd have
as adherence, you'd be happy.
Do you think it's one in three for you, or is it higher?
So two questions.
Are all human catastrophes caused by stories?
And if you manage to convince one in three people with your storytelling,
is that a satisfying target
or do you think it's possible to aim for more, I guess?
-So we'll get an answer from... -Do I pick 'em?
-Pick, pick, pick. -OK. I'll... Go ahead.
I think that stories are definitely associated with tragedies.
Like, in my research, I came across
the 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion', right,
which is this literary forgery
that is supposedly a Jewish plot to take over the planet,
and there's a book called 'Warrant for Genocide'
that claims that that was, you know, the warrant for the holocaust.
So it is certainly associated with terrible, terrible tragedies,
but, I don't know, I tend to think it applies the other way as well.
I don't have as a dramatic an example. Pardon me?
-MAN: What about the New Testament? -(ANN LAUGHS)
-The New... Right. -Oh.
-Great story, isn't it? -That's too big for 30 seconds.
-SIMRAN: It's too biblical! -(LAUGHTER)
-Simran. -We're all so hardwired for altruism.
The parts of the brain that ignite when we are generous
and care for other people are the reward circuits,
which are the same parts of the brain that ignite
when we win a prize or when we make love.
So I would argue that story is also the foundation
of some of the most beautiful things that have happened in our lives.
And it's up to us to make that decision
in every moment of how we want to write and tell our stories.
-Great. -(APPLAUSE)
Yeah, I mean, I'm...
Look, I think essentially the issue is
whether you can actually have politics without stories,
and I think the answer is no.
So if the other option is to have technocracy
that will be strictly based on facts,
where, you know, you don't actually need to involve citizens
and to engage them in the liberation,
then, you know, I'd rather stick with politics and stories.
So I think you're looking at the challenge of using language itself
rather than storytelling,
and I, personally, would rather accept the risk
that some of those stories will turn out to be crazy
than to avoid stories and argumentation altogether
and just to delegate all the decision making
to a bunch of people who are supposedly armed with facts
while everyone else is playing Angry Birds on their cell phones.
-I mean, that's... -(LAUGHS)
We've got it all in that answer, Angry Birds...
(LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)
And I'm sorry we didn't get to an answer for that,
but I would like you very much to join me in thanking our speakers.
Evgeny will be in the foyer signing copies of his books,
if you're interested.
And I hope to see you at other sessions this afternoon.
Please continue the conversation by using the hashtag FODI
and I'm sure we'll see you soon.
-Thanks very much to our speakers. -Thank you.
-(APPLAUSE) -Thank you, Ann.