Small Technology

Transcript

1. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 ARAL BALKAN: Thank you for that introduction. Hello, everyone. We have a problem. And that problem is called surveillance capitalism. It is about capitalism, which in turn is about the accrual of wealth. And surveillance, the accrual of information. What happens when those of us who have accrued wealth invest that wealth in mechanisms of surveillance, which gives us intimate insights into everyone's lives, which we then exploit to manipulate their behaviour so that we can accrue more wealth? We get this feedback loop that we call surveillance capitalism. And this has given us a world in which a handful of people know everything about us and we know nothing, or next to nothing, about them. A huge power differential. In the movie 'The Matrix' people live in a virtual space while their physical bodies are farmed in a physical space. Today we live in 'The Matrix' inverted, where we live in a physical space, but we are increasingly being farmed from virtual spaces. And the people doing this farming are the first to tell us – don't worry about it. Privacy is death, that his Mark Zuckerberg. He is talking about your privacy, not his. When Mark buys a house, he buys the four houses around his house because his privacy is alive and well, thanks very much. And yet Mark and his corporation, Facebook, has 60 people literally working on reading your mind. And whether or not these corporations should have all these insights into our lives is a question you have to ask yourself. But they are also sharing this information with governments. Here you can see the heads of some of the top corporations in the world who amongst themselves have more information about more people than any organisation has had on the history of mankind, sitting at the same table as then President-elect Donald Trump. Here you see Tim Cook, head of trillion dollar company Apple, sitting at the same table with far right Brazilian president and psychopath Bolsonaro. Here is another photograph from the 1930s. The elderly gentleman at the back is Thomas J Watson, CEO of IBM. The other person at that table is Hitler. Why is he sitting at the table with Hitler? Because they were working together, in fact they were working together so well that Thomas Watson got an award that was never awarded to any other foreigner during Hitler's regime for services to the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany. What kind of services? Was it hands off? No. IBM, as Edmund Black in his book says, maintained a customer site known as 'the Holocaust department' in virtually every concentration camp to track prisoners, hands on. IBM engineers had to create codes and print the cards, configure the machines, train the staff, and continuously maintain the fragile systems every two weeks on site in the concentration camps. What kind of codes are we talking about? 001 means one of the concentration camps. One means you are homosexual, one means you are antisocial, and we have codes for Gypsy and Jew. We have other codes to describe how you are murdered. Another was for special
2. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 2 of 14 treatment, a euphemism for the gas chamber. The president of IBM committed genocide by any standard. The thing that scared me most from that book is this quote – he said, "It was never about the anti-Semitism, never about national socialism, it was always about the money." Business was their middle name. Guess what, folks? Business is still their middle name. What are they doing these days? They don't have mainframe computers anymore, today they have artificial intelligence. Who did they name their artificial intelligence after? Mr Thomas J Watson, decorated by Hitler himself. Awesome. They were doing video surveillance program for the man in the Philippines who has death squads. They were working with the US government on the drone program which is fine because it only kills people of a certain colour. When Donald Trump came to power the current CEO of IBM could not wait to congratulate him and say, "I'm looking forward to working with you, Donald." One of their employees, Elizabeth Ward, resigned. She wondered what she was contributing to. We are at a stage right now where everyone of you in this room has to ask yourself this question – why? What am I contributing to? Ask it honestly and then listen to yourself. If you feel you are unhappy about it, no, you can change it. There are many ways you can change it. Who you are is not defined by who you work for today. I don't care if you work for IBM today. She went on to say – when the president-elect follows-through on his repeated threats to create a public database of Muslims, what will IBM do? IBM responded to this and said, "IBM would not work on this hypothetical project, our company has long-standing values and a strong track record of opposing discrimination on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation or religion. That perspective has not changed and never will." What about that little blip? The Holocaust? IBM was asked about this. One of their other spokespeople said, "IBM does not have much information about this period. We are a technology company. We are not historians." Well, fuck you, Carol. (Laughter) Maybe it's time we all became historians so we do not repeat the atrocity of our very near past. Maybe we need to do that. It's not just IBM. Who has heard of Peter seal? Anyone know where that comes from? It is the name of the all seeing eye used by the evil sorcerer in the Lord of the rings. They are not even hiding it. This is not a conspiracy, this is what we are doing. What does Denmark's government say? Come on in, let's do a contract, let's give you all of the information we have on our citizens, video, license plate reader reference. Why? We want you to do pre-crime for us. Remember that film? We want you to tell us which one of our citizens are going to be terrorists.
3. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 3 of 14 Tell us that. Peter Thiel, by the way, is one of Donald Trump's right-wing donors. They had to pass an exemption to the EU data protection act in order to be able to do this. And what else is happening in Europe? The EU is going to create a gigantic biometric database of all EU citizens. Who do you think will have access to that database through Denmark and their datasharing? If you think that is... "I don't really like IBM, we haven't talked about Google or Facebook, I'm getting scared." You haven't seen anything yet if you haven't heard of a company called SoftBank. This is the CEO of SoftBank and he has created the largest venture capitalists fund in the world. $100 billion, larger than anything in Silicon Valley. And 45 billion of that $100 billion, do you know where it comes from? You might have heard of this gentleman called Mohammad bin Salman. He is the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, a really lovely guy. He doesn't like journalists. If you are a journalist and you go to one of his embassies, you might be murdered and chopped up into little pieces. But that's OK. As the CEO of HSBC and other business leaders have told us, there is a bright future in Saudi Arabia. After that murder, we are undeterred by that sort of thing because business is our middle name. It's all body parts under the bridge, we are OK with that. He is one of the biggest contributors to the $100 billion technology venture capital fund. Who else was partnering with this lovely guy? Apple, trillions on the company. Who keeps stressing they care about out human rights, our privacy. Qualcomm, Sharp, they contribute 20 billion to this fund and are working together. What are they doing? Their CEO says that they need to scale first. Get as big as you can – once you scale first, you will get everything else right. Or maybe then you define what right means. What this reminds me of is a quote from Edward Abbey – "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell." Think about that, what is cancer? When a cell can only rely on one thing – growth, growth, growth. What is the ideology of silicon valley? Growth, growth, growth. What is it about, though? It is really about data. And the merger of human and machine and this notion of the singularity, and artificial intelligence, is what the $100 billion fund is really about. The person who would this article in 'Wired', said, "the vision is a future where every time you use a smartphone, order a taxi, stay in a hotel, make a payment, receive medical treatment, you will be doing so as part of a data transaction with a company that belongs to the SoftBank family. And as people like to say, whoever controls data, controls the world." How are we doing? We know the ramifications of this toxic, toxic system. We have seen them and can't ignore them anymore. Cambridge Analytica, a tiny company with a small amount of Facebook data and none of their algorithms, was able to sway the presidential election in the United States and the Brexit referendum in the UK.
4. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 4 of 14 This man is the new Prime Minister of the UK, by the way. I guess 'Idiocracy' was just a documentary from the future. And why is this important? Because Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have the same business model. Facebook has two audiences that it services. One is users. This is user business Australia. We are one of two industries that uses that term – user. The other is drug dealers. Think about that. So, there are users and they have their customers. Now, the users are you. What they do is they track everything that you do, they store it forever, they analyse it continuously to build profiles of you. They track your data but they build your profiles, which are what are really valuable. That is what they monetise. The organisations pay you. You don't, you are the livestock and it's your job to get farmed. Companies like Facebook and Google are factory farms for human beings. That is their business model. I call it people farming. So this world is far greater, of course. It starts with the funding model, with venture capital. It is the world of start-ups. Start-up doesn't mean any new organisation or company, it is a silicon valley brand. It's a certain type of temporary company that either has to fail fast or grow exponentially. That is part of the Church of exponential growth – unicorns, billion-dollar unicorns. If you want to know how I feel about this, I did an illustration of a cloud throwing a rainbow on a unicorn. But the thing that scares me the most is the church of exponential growth. Let me tell you what it looks like. Let me tell you what infinite growth with finite resources looks like, with an analogy. You take a Petri dish, put some nutrients in it, put a few bacteria into it. Generation upon generation, the bacteria will thrive, and grow exponentially, until they reach their most successful stage, one or two generations before they go extinct because of lack of resources. That is exponentially growth. That is infinite growth with finite resources. If you need me to spell it out for you, the Petri dish is the world and we are the bacteria. The question is, can we be smarter than bacteria in a Petri dish? And that is the problem. If I were to leave it here, you would probably be quite depressed at this point. So it's important to have an honest appraisal of the problem. But let's move beyond it. What does the solution look like? What are aspects of the solution? What is the general shape of the solution or solutions we could explore? Now, again, this is a social problem, not just a technology problem. But on the technology side of things, it's very clear. We the people must control and own our data, devices, all of it. We need to control it as individuals. Let me just go into detail on this because this is an important point. A simple but important one that we get wrong all the time. Here is a flowchart. Who should own and control the data? The
5. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 5 of 14 question you have to ask is, is it data about you? What kind of data are we talking about? We use the word data generically, and we could have data about rocks and also about people. What happens if we create policies that conflate the two? Who gets the short end of the stick? The rock or the person? I think it's the person. We have to be careful about understanding what we mean when we say data. Data by itself qualifies as meaningless. Is it data about you? Yes? Who should own and control it? You. What other type of data is there? Is the data about the world? About the Commons? Then, the Commons should own and control it. Now, should corporations own and control our data? If you have been listening to the first half, probably no. Should nations, though? There is an idea. Should be privatise Facebook, fuck no. The only thing worse than a corporation having all of your information is a government with a military force having all your information. Remember, these aren't two separate things, they work together. But should be, like people on the left wing side of things say, like Jeremy Corbyn in England, have a government wing of data? No. Jeremy says it's because he trusts himself and the Labour Party. Remember, Schmidt at Google would say the same thing because he trusts himself and Google. Now we're getting people in Barcelona saying, "Well, no, that's a bit too dangerous. Why don't we make it so that cities can control your data? We are good people, we are in Barcelona doing good things. I trust myself." Should we deploy socialised intelligence and big data? No. That is the 1930s again. In Amsterdam when they made a census, they just wanted to know the demographics they were faced with. When Hitler invaded, they use that Census to find out who is Jewish and who is. The question we should ask is, do we trust myself and my friends? Who is in power next? Do you trust them? We trusted Obama in the US, and we let him build a surveillance state, and then went Trump came to power, we didn't see that coming. Should you be the one? Yes, it's not rocket science. If it's data about you, you have control of it. Why? What is data? Let me give you another example. If I have enough information about this, I can scan it into this 3-D printer and create an exact replica of it. I want you to think what I could do if I had enough data about you. And I don't want to 3-D scan you, I want to own you. I could own your whole body and everything about it. But what will we do with that? But I can own everything else about you that makes you who you are apart from your body today. That is legal. Remember, slavery was legal. It still exists in the world it is just illegal now. Slavery 2.0 is legal. I can own everything about you except your body. I don't need your body. I have a very powerful proxy with which to manipulate your behaviour. In fact, if the data I have about you is wrong, if it is bad, you still don't win. Because then I think
6. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 6 of 14 you are a terrorist when you are not. Either way, you lose. We have to start to understand that data about us, if there is enough of it and we have the right algorithm, begins to approach us. Data about you is you. And we have to understand the nature of the battle we are faced with. This is a battle for personhood. We are experiencing a personhood crisis today. That is one of the reasons why a couple of years back I published the 'Universal Declaration of Cyborg Rights'. This is a hack on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It says it today if we use digital technology to expand our mind and extend our beings, ourselves, then we need to extend the human rights we have, to that expanded notion of the self. Otherwise we can't protect the 'self', because we are never confined within our biological borders. As a person, you live in a cloud somewhere today and you don't have control over that aspect of yourself. We have to change that. There are no such things as digital rights. Some people call me a cyber rights activist. I am not – I am a cyborg rights activist. Because today we are all cyborgs. You have to implant yourself with technology. If you use a smart phone, you are a cyborg. You extend your capabilities using technology. So we have to be able to protect these new boundaries of the self. People who tell you about digital rights etc, they're trying to make them less important than human rights. We have to keep our human rights and apply them to the new self of digital rights. What can we do about this? How can we combat surveillance capitalism? Simple, we regulate and replace. It is simple theoretically but not in practice. Regulation. In Europe, we have the GDPR. The General Data Regulation Agency. But data protection isn't enough. That's what you do want to do has already been collected by Facebook or Google and you asked them to be kind. "Please don't hurt us too much. Those quote that is data protection, better than nothing, but what can we do beyond that? An MP from the Netherlands recently wrote, "We are largely unaware of the impact algorithmic ranking has on people's choices. Because we have no way of looking under the hood." She didn't use the term, but what is called for here is algorithmic transparency. That is the next step. We need to tell these companies, "We need to see your algorithms. Show us them. We need to know exactly what you are doing." That is the next. Hypothetically I put forward – GDMR. The General Data Minimisation Regulation. The two things to stipulate – one, if your data and algorithms can be kept on your device, they must be. If technology can be built this way, we must legislate that it must be built this way. And most technology can. It is very rare that a company has to collect data to give you features. Two – any device that holds your data must be end to end encrypted. Three – only you hold the key to that encryption.
7. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 7 of 14 If you do these three tomorrow, you kill surveillance capitalism tomorrow. Don't hold your breath. There is absolutely zero political will for anything approaching anything that looks like this. Why? Why are our policymakers not even thinking about this? Talking about this? Because our institutions are corrupt. Lobbying, the effect of corporate finance in public policy-making. The New Yorker had an article, because Elizabeth Warren was campaigning to regulate big tech. And Eric Schmidt wrote that Google alone spent $11 billion on lobbying last year. Much of it to stave off regulation. This is put into perspective. This is what Eric Schmidt told me a few years ago when I became part of these issues. Because I was part of the mainstream, I thought we were doing good and what we were saying we were doing. So they got me as well and I don't like being duped. He said to me, "I wake up every morning and fight regulation. It's my job." When they talk about and trying to do the right thing, know it's bullshit. Know that they know exactly what their jobs are. We have revolving doors. People working to protect your rights as policymakers today will be working at the same companies they are regulating tomorrow. I was presenting at a conference on privacy in Sweden and this was a data protection conference of data protection officers, and Facebook has a keynote at the event. We learn how to make a Facebook ad, and here is the worst bit – the guy presenting, his previous job was at the data protection office in France. And then we have the doctors and the cigarette ads, and these guys are harmful.We have conferences like data protection and democracy – who are they sponsored by? Facebook and Google! They must be fine if they are allowed to sponsor a data protection conference. If you have a health conference sponsored by Philip Morris, that's fine. We have the Free Software Foundation who see nothing wrong with putting their logo next to Google. Then we have people we think are supposed to be protecting us, Mozzilla, defenders of the open web, they love your human rights and are defending it. Do you know how much money Mozilla get from Google every year? Several hundred million dollars. "I spent eight years at Mozilla," Jonathan Nightingale said on Twitter, "working on Firefox, for all of that time Google was the biggest partner." You go out and say, "We are here to protect your privacy, don't make Google your search engine." We have democratically elected governments in countries like Denmark who are giving up their democratic legitimacy and sending ambassadors to Silicon Valley. It is not the role of the government to send an ambassador to a corporation, it is the role of the government to regulate corporations. The only legitimacy that corporations don't have is... You send an ambassador and say we are giving that one up. Is your government more powerful when it comes to money and how they
8. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 8 of 14 can spend it? The corporations are. They have given up the only card they have. We have organisations that we take at face value, they are not a university, they are a front for lobbyists. They have the ear in Denmark of the Prime Minister. At the least, what we shouldn't be doing is having members of European Parliament who after a hearing where they are supposed to be taking Mark Zuckerberg to task, take a selfie with him. There are things we can do to start changing things, maybe don't take the selfie. Start with that. It's hard because we are institutionally corrupt. We have to push for that but I'm not holding my breath. We could technologically regulate them, we don't have to ask. We can use open source and available on Mac and iOS. It's to stop them from tracking people as best we can. That is only a stopgap. That won't change the system, it's trying to prevent the harm. That's all regulation can do. Regulation can reduce the harm in a harmful system. It's naive to assume you can, from the inside or the outside. If Facebook is a factory farm for human beings, what it will never become is an animal sanctuary. Those are two different things. Don't expect that, you will be let down. There is also social regulation and this is where every one of us can play a role. In Berlin when Google tried to set up their campus it started a movement called – Fuck Off Google! They shelve their plans. They do not go away, they rest and come back. They can afford to do that. But it works. In 'Wired' there was an article about Facebook and their trials. When I joined Facebook, people would say, "That's cool," not anymore. Now it's hard to go home for Thanksgiving. Another thing Eric said was, "If we ever become too evil as Google, we won't be able to find anyone to work for us." When someone told me they were headhunted by Google and they told them, "Fuck no, because of who you are..." Next time someone sells their start-up to Google, ask them why? Why are you contributing to the system that is hurting our democracy and our human rights? Regulation is one thing. We already have stopgaps, things we can do. You will buy a phone, you are looking at android and iPhones, is Apple not perfect by any means? The only thing you can trust is their business models and how they make money. Apple has a competitive advantage in privacy today. The one thing they can compete on that would make Google bankrupt, Google can compete on the quality of the camera and the specs of your screen. If Google tomorrow gave you a private experience, they would go bankrupt because that's how they make money, by eroding your privacy. Apple can do it without breaking a sweat. They can do it by selling expensive devices. The rich have always had privacy. Today you want to make a decision, use your dollars in the capitalist system, protect yourself. There are private messaging applications you can use. So
9. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 9 of 14 stop using WhatsApp, owned by Facebook. Sure, they say that the content of your messages is encrypted but your metadata isn't and it's linked to your social graph on Facebook – they know who you are talking to and when you are talking to them. Someone from the CIA said, "We kill people based on metadata." If someone talks to a known terrorist, they get a drone strike. Use alternatives like FastMail. I believe they are Australian. Does anyone know? An interesting story there. They were part of the system and got spat out by it. Instead of Twitter, explore alternatives like Mastodon. You can have your own Twitter for your family and that can talk to everybody else's Twitter. Not an account, you can run your own Twitter or have someone run it for you. All of these Twitters can talk to each other. Twitter's algorithms decides what you can see. Just like Facebook. Twitter decides. Just like Facebook decides which one of your posts get seen. If you want to see a whole list of alternatives today, go to switching.social. And if you are going to tell me that your friends run WhatsApp and how do I get them to download Wire? If your friends can't open up the app store on their phone and tap once to download an app to protect your privacy, reconsider whether they are your friend. Because they can do that with Candy Crush without a thought. Companies like Systems76 build hardware and software based on LINUX, you have control over the whole experience. I am running it on my laptop right now. It is running, even the illustrations, in a video switcher on my laptop so I can switch between things as you will see in a second. This stuff works. Play with it at least, don't ignore it. There is a company called Purism coming out with laptops for everyday people, they have control of hardware, software and now services. Which is what you need, you need full control over these things, that's what Apple has. They are coming out with a phone, it won't be the best thing ever when it first comes out but neither was the iPhone at first. I was sitting in the audience when Steve Jobs announced it. I was talking about Flash at the time... (Laughter) They have adopted our principles on ethical design which is a simple concept. It is about respect for three things – human rights, human effort, and human experience. But everything we do in UX respects human effort and human experience, but if we're working for companies that are venture capitalist-funded and whose business model is surveillance capitalism, we are not respecting human rights. In which case we are not practising design. The core of our businesses is rotten. If we were to present that to people as it is, if Google said, "We will track you across the web and build a profile and we will exploit that information to make more money," none of you would use it. That's why they use decorators who use the youthful flesh around the rotten core of the apple.
10. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 10 of 14 You have to make the rind shiny to hide all of that. Ask yourself if you are designing or decorating. What is missing? This is what we are working on. Let me tell you what we are not working on. You hear that if privacy is dead we should sell our own data. No. We did not make slavery illegal because we thought people should be selling their own bodies. We did it because we thought, "Everybody deserves dignity." The reason you have control over yourself is not so you can sell it. If you want to, that's OK, but that shouldn't be the primary motivator. We believe people deserve dignity. It's not about Blockchain. Please be careful of Blockchain sales people. Blockchain is 99% a right libertarian masturbation fantasy that translates our natural habitat, through electricity, into money in the pockets of very few right libertarians. So this is not about Blockchain. You don't need proof of work that you can make use of, but it's not Blockchain. What is the problem? We have all these things coming out. Your phones and devices they connect to a large degree to the centralised services that farm you. We need to replace that. We need to do the opposite of what we are told. We are always told to think big. I will ask you to think small. Think about how we can do technology differently if we are working on small technology. What is small technology? It is everyday tools for everyday people, designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profit. Important everyday tools for everyday people. Not tools by start-ups for start-ups. Not tools by enterprises for enterprises. By people for people. And then you get certain principles that come out of that. These things have to be easy-to-use or no-one will use them. They have to be personal. They need to be private by default. If you don't have the original right to decide whether you keep this to yourself or share it with others, that is the definition of privacy. You have the right to decide. Then you don't have privacy. It isn't an option you opt into. We must share in interoperable likenesses. Why? Data is non-colonial in its design. One group designing for another group is always a colonial relationship. A diverse group designing for themselves is non-colonial. If we haven't got that Diversity we can't design for ourselves. But we can do it in a way where other groups can take the basics of what we have and specialise for their own needs. Silicon Valley says that we know what is best for everyone. We can't do that. Somewhere between Singapore and Australia, in the air, we announced the Small Technology Foundation, to actually advocate for this and build examples. You can see that at smalltech.org. We are calling this Project Tin Can. We are building a bridge between networks, a peer-to-peer network. Imagine you have the keys, and one of the nodes is a web node which is always on and findable and is entirely untrustworthy. Today we trust the web. This web node is entirely
11. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 11 of 14 unflustered. Even the people hosting it can't see what is on it. Why is that important? Because peer-to-peer networks have two experienced issues. One is findability, because, how do I find you on a peer-to-peer network? Well, here you can have a domain name. That works. I can be at my own domain name and find you. If we all had owned domain names we could find each other. The other is availability. If devices are off, I can't send you a message. But if you have one mode which is on, then you can. And we can be private between our nodes, but we are not there yet. Because we lack tools. All of our developer tools are coming out of start-ups and enterprises to meet the needs of start-ups and enterprises. So we need those first. And that is what I am working on right now. Site JS is the precursor to Tin Can. Site JS is a tool. What if the web were built for people? What if one person could deploy a website in 30 seconds? This is important for the web nose. Let me show you quickly what I mean by that. Let me go into a terminal and connect to my MyDemo site. This is the hardest part. Getting a domain name, getting a server, pointing to it. We have to fix these issues. But right now, on the development side, I am on my server which has nothing installed. So I will go to sitejs.org, and here I will just copy this installation line. And I will pasted in here, and I will run it. It is downloading and installing, now it's installed. And I will create a demo directory in there. I will go into that directory. Let's create a website, shall we? Hello, UX Australia. Can I spell? No, I'm a developer. And I will put that into an HTML file. That is their website. The web is very forgiving, thank goodness. I now want to deploy a production server. Shall we do that? A secure production server. So I will say site enable. I am done. Now I am going to go into my browser and go into my-demo. You see it doing a handshake? It is getting your secure certificates for you. Once that is loaded, there we go. We have just deployed the website. (Applause) You are the first people, apart from the meet-up and a few days ago with UX and ISPA that are seeing this. OK, that is great. I can leave this now and it will survive restarts, etc. It is a secure production server running there. But this is not how we develop. We don't develop into a box. We develop locally and then we sync. What would that look like? Let me exit from there. Let me create a different file. Let me say this is local and put this into HTML.
12. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 12 of 14 I would just run sites already installed on my machine. And I will ask you to sync to my-demo site. Now if I hit my-demo site, it says is local. So I have synced. And it's keeping it going. If I now go over here and, in a different window, I start my code editor, for example, and I say, "How do you like this?" And I save it, and I go to my-demo site and I refresh, and if the internet is fast enough... There you go – How do you like this? It is keeping that sync going. That is pretty cool. I like that. What else can we do? Is it all static? Static is great. No, you can also build dynamic sites using everything nodejs without knowing any of that. Here I will stop this sync, I will clear this, I will create a folder called dynamic. In the dynamic folder I will create a counterjs file. And I will go back to my code editor here and I will open that counter file I have. We will create a counter, a dynamic page. It will tell you how many times it has been loaded. I will say that counter equal zero and I will say… Don't worry about this now, it is easy as it goes. Request, response, this is a request that will come in from the client. And I will say, "Response type is HTML. And I want you to send this piece of HTML I am writing." And I'm going to say, "This page has been loaded." And here I will say, "plus, plus, times." Was good, but let's make it a bit nicer and say, "counter equal to one." Don't put a suffix. You are learning coding, amazing. That is it! I have created a dynamic site. Here I am going to say 'site' to run it locally. And if I hit localhost, and then refresh, I have a dynamic page. This is like bringing the simplicity of PHP to JavaScript. That is all you have to write. And you can deploy this, like that of the other one, and you have a secure dynamic site running. But I am the only one who can hit this counter right now. That sucks. What I wanted to show you what I am working on my device? What if I wanted to give you access? Watch this. I will say, "Site at hostname." And that has created a site at dev.ar. And I'm using a site and I will start that. And now if you go to dev.aral/counter on your devices, and you refresh, then you will see the counter update as well. That is coming from my computer. Staging, etc. And there is no magic here. It is wrapping nodejs. Anything you can do there you can do here as well. You see that, that is all of you hitting it. You are a determined bunch. Perfect, I will stop that now and you will get errors. That is staging that you can do with it. You can do anything you can do in nodejs. In the same way, if I go into my dynamic folder and I create… Let's make an example called 'cows'. And for this I have to create (inaudible). I will initiate a node project. I will initiate everything. I will install this project called cows. You have a huge variety you can use. I have installed cows onto my machine. Let's make use of the cows. I will open them here and I will require... I will run that to create cows. That will create a bunch of random cows.
13. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 13 of 14 And I will make my route again. All I need is my route. So I will say, "request, response" here just like before. And I will put out a random cow. I will say, "constrandomcows=", and that is what a random cow does, believe me. And then I was a response type HTML, and here I will put it as a preformatted random cow. A random cow app, amazing. This is why I flew 24 hours to get here. And then I will do it locally, you can believe me that it works. And of course local host is what we had. If I go to cows, it says undefined, urgh. Where is my typo? Tell me. Can I spell? No. Yay! There we go! Cows! We have cows! Excellent. That is https. Those are web routes. You can also do web sockets with it as easily. Here in my dynamic folder, if I created a web sockets folder and I went in there, and I said, for example, "Let's create an echo socket," do you all know what web sockets are? You can create a chat app basically using web socket. Maybe I should show you that. Do I have a couple of minutes left? Let's do a chat. Let's say you want to do a chat app. I will go back in and take my chat. The thing that is different here is I will say module exports equals… I need to use a full function declaration for reasons. And I will get a reference to the website it and have a reference to the request here. And on that website, I am going to say, on message, let's do something with that message. What we're going to do is we are going to say, on this website socket server – this is the bit I can signify – this web socket server gets all the clients that are connected, and then on them, send the message. Now I will go into a browser and I will open up my window here. Let's create a web socket... Let me do this in two browsers. I will say 'and new web socket and chat'. You have to start the server or this doesn't work. Let's try that again. And you have a connection to the web socket server. On message we are doing this really rough. When a message comes in I am saying put it into the console log. And I will send a message. Hello. Can you see this? Client send is not a function. Never do live coding. It's horrible. Here's one I did earlier. Backup, demo... I wrote the thing as well and I don't know how to use it. What have I done wrong here? Basic chat, dynamic, WSS... I am an idiot. Client send is an array, we need to get the client and there we can say 'client send message' if that doesn't make sense to you, don't worry about it. Look at how little code there is. Let's try this again. I am in Vivaldi, let's clear this. I will clear this, create my web socket, chat, say on message, let's put it onto the console log, and we send 'hello' and we get hello back!
14. UX Australia 2019 (AUUXAU2908A) Main Room, Day 1 – 29th August, 2019 Page 14 of 14 If on this one I do the same thing... We are doing this. And I say on message equals console log, and I say W send. Look at that! I say yo here and you get yo there? Download it, play with it, it doesn't take much to get started. We need more of you. I am a designer, I am also a developer. We have to understand our whole medium and our medium includes code. We need you to understand it but we also need to make it easier for ourselves. The reason for all of this? We are at a point in our existence where we are faced with multiple existential crises. We have a climate crisis, and ecosystem crisis. To this today I am adding a personhood crisis. These are related. It's up to us as people who make the everyday things to make sure the things we make do not contribute to these crises, but maybe even go to solving some of them and making people's lives better. I hope you will join me and look at what we are doing with the Small Technology Foundation. I hope you will support us, maybe by becoming a patron. I hope we can build the bridge from where we are right now to a future where we as a species can go beyond this narrowminded, shortsighted navelgazing we are engaged with, with destroying a habitat, with war and all of this crap, to exploring the potential of a species within the endless expanse of the universe. That's what I hope we can do together. Thank you so much.