The 2024-25 Beyond the Web Speaker Series, presented by the Ostrom Workshop with Dr. Angie Raymond and the Hamilton Lugar School with Dean Isak Nti Asare.
All events are available at their conclusion on the Ostrom Workshop YouTube Channel
Hosted by Doc and Joyce Searls
We live in a digital world now, as well as a natural one. This new world is a few decades old at most and sure to last for centuries or millennia to come.
This world is also run, at this early stage, by corporate giants. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta control how technology operates, how commerce flows, how culture is made, how politics are done, how questions are answered, how business is conducted at every level, from global to local. And now all of them are spending massively on AI development, while working on ways to lock us into the walled gardens of their own private AI systems.
Yet we still live our lives in the natural world, in physical places and spaces. There are many things that can only be done by people who live, work, interact, and rely on each other in real time and space. All our community institutions schools, churches, libraries, service organizations, stores, restaurants, law enforcement, and government still retain the potency of face-to-face and voice-to-voice interactions, even if they use technology to make things more efficient.
So, some questions—
What can we do at the local level to disrupt, replace or overthrow our corporate overlords?
How can we make culture, do business, and govern with better care for each other and our local institutions than we have seen so far in a digital world run by those overlords?
What technologies and approaches to work, play, and social engagement can we invent or harness and model that can be replicated and adopted in many places, for the good of us all?
Are we stuck with Big Tech overlords forever? If so, why?
For the past three academic years, the Ostrom Workshop and the Hamilton Lugar School at Indiana University have co-sponsored a Salon Series toward answering these kinds of questions.
This year we are focusing on approaches using AI and other digital technology to address problems and opportunities in local communities. This exploration should lead us to discover some human driven solutions for global problems, including cybersecurity crimes against local governments and institutions, hollowing out of Main Street businesses and a massive loss of public trust driven by minimally protected digital spaces and actors with misaligned incentives.
We anticipate that this year-long series of talks will be aggregated into a book highlighting each speaker's contribution.
In addition to the speaker series, we will have a full day workshop in the Spring featuring experts in several fields to engage with students and other attendees to explore answers to the questions such as those above.
In today’s digital commerce landscape, where major platforms hold significant influence, small businesses and local communities often face substantial barriers. Open networks are helping to shift this landscape by creating a more inclusive and accessible digital economy. A leading example is India’s Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC), which demonstrates how decentralized systems can boost digital access and economic opportunity. Unlike traditional platform-centric models, ONDC enables buyers and sellers to transact across various applications, breaking down barriers and fostering inclusivity. This government-backed initiative now connects over a million sellers with shoppers in 600+ cities, supporting small businesses and rural entrepreneurs.
Ostrom Workshop | HLS Beyond the Web: Charlie Schweik
Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies
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“World Librarians: How any community can build their own local library” A socio-technical system providing information to offline learners in Malawi
 Don Norman | See IU Hamilton Lugar for details. Attend in person or over Zoom. |
 Jeff Jarvis | See IU Hamilton Lugar for details. Attend in person or over Zoom. |
 Bruce Schneier | See IU Hamilton Lugar for details. Attend in person or over Zoom. |
 Dame Wendy Hall | See IU Hamilton Lugar for details. Attend in person or over Zoom. |
 Clay Shirky | Small technological changes can make life better or worse. Anti-lock brakes are good, robocalls bad. Big changes -- automobiles, the internet, smartphones, now AI -- make life weirder. With large-scale change, it becomes impossible to say if things have gotten better or worse, because the technology upends old benchmarks. Generative AI can easily generate office memos or spam. However, it can also clone voices, evolve behaviors, confidently explain non-existent memes, and create pictures of the Pope rocking a white puffer good enough to fool people. Away from the '3 day workweek/AI will kill us all' predictions, the most surprising near-term uses of AI will not be good or bad so much as discombobulating. What can we expect in a world where unexpected new skills have become widely available? |
 Marina Zannoli | The new wave of AI advances (think ChatGPT!) relies on unprecedented access to large-scale computing and vast corpora of data available almost exclusively in industry research settings. Building these technologies responsibly and for the benefit of all poses new challenges that can only be tackled by close collaboration between academic, industry, and governmental organizations. Using Generative AI as an example, we’ll discuss how academia and industry can work together to build AI for everyone. |
 Andrew McLuhan | No, we can’t: AI is poised to revolutionize the way we do many things, which will existentially change who we are and what it means to be human. Yes, we can: Ours is a history of developing technologies which revolutionize our ways, changing who we are and what it means to be human – and that might just be the definition of what it means to be human. Yes, we will survive; no, we will never be the same. The choices we make today will determine our tomorrow. |
 | People are rich, complex economic and social beings. Colonized people of yesteryear are precursors to the “users” of today. Participation and feedback systems can pave a new participation frontier trail that we can pioneer equitably together. |
"Seize the Means of Computation: The Big Tech Disassembly Manual"
40 years ago, we shot antitrust law in the guts, and we let companies led by mediocre idiots no better than their forebears establish monopolies. These donkeys were able to parlay their monopoly winnings into policies that prevented new technologies from supplanting their own. They got to decide who was allowed to compete with them, and how.
Notably, tech giants today are able to wield the law against interoperators: new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms. That’s a privilege that none of yesterday’s easily toppled tech giants had - if IBM wanted to prevent its competitors (the “seven dwarves” of the mainframe era) from making software, printers, keyboards, and storage for its mainframes, it had to figure out how to build a computer that no one else could reverse-engineer and improve on.
For complex reasons, this is impossible. The very bedrock of computer science - ideas named for midcentury computing demigods like “Turing completeness” and “Von Neumann machines” - dictates that the creation of noninteroperable computers is a fool’s errand. It’s fantasy, not science fiction, like a time machine or a faster-than-light drive.
Today’s tech giants have not invented an interop-proof computer. They’ve invented laws that make interoperability illegal unless they give permission for it. A new, complex thicket of copyright, patent, trade secret, noncompete, and other IP rights has conjured up a new offense we can think of as “Felony contempt of business model” - the right of large firms to dictate how their customers, competitors and even their critics must use their products.
"Beckn: A Radical New Open Protocol Leveling the Field in the Digital Economy"
In this conversation, Sujith Nair, CEO & Co-founder of FIDE.org will walk us through recent developments of how the Beckn Protocol, an open resource discovery and transaction protocol is enabling the creation of decentralized Open Networks. He will give examples of evolving success stories using this approach in critical sectors like Urban Mobility, eCommerce and Social protection. Get ready for some intriguing implications in a Beckn-enabled world—and how the Byway in our home town of Bloomington might be the first place Beckn gets put to use in the U.S.
“How the Species Killing the Planet can Save It”
In order for 8 billion people to live on the planet, we have to get our per-person environmental consumption down by about 10x. There are people that have those kinds of footprints today, all over the world, living successfully. What can we learn from their lives, and how can we apply it to our own?
"Saving us from Big Tech: the Gen Z Solution"
Tech monopolies profit from undermining public health, democracy, human autonomy, and competition in the economy. The incentives of industry, politicians, and journalists are misaligned with the needs of consumers, but that means that young people are our best hope for both political solutions and new technology alternatives.
"Infrastructure for Community Governance: Two Prototype"
Join Professor Nathan Schneider of the University of Colorado for a lively discussion asking what kinds of tools would we need to enable robust, creative shared governance in online spaces? This talk introduces two prototypes that attempt to answer that question: CommunityRule (for designing group structures and processes) and Modpol (for embedding governance in online games).
If Doc Searls’ theory is right, markets will change radically—in compliance with what customers actually want, rather than what marketers can guess at (mostly by spying on people). His theory is that free customers are more valuable than captive ones—to sellers, to markets, and to customers themselves. Doc has been probing that theory since 2006 through ProjectVRM at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and lately also at the Ostrom Workshop, where he and his wife Joyce are both visiting scholars.
The main business model of the Web goes by a label we all now know from the title of Shoshana Zuboff’s landmark book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. How do we fight surveillance capitalism? And how do we work around it? How, especially, can we keep our new Byway from becoming infested with it—or with the mendacities behind it?
The Web is wonderful. Yet, while it’s a place where you can gather easily and find nearly all the information you want, it’s also where it’s easy to unknowingly have your thoughts, opinions, prejudices and choices of friends hacked by algorithmic nudging and viral misinformation. How can we do better, elsewhere on the Internet—such as on the Byway we’re exploring in this salon series?
Watch the stream on YouTubeMore information“Back when the Internet took off, in the mid-1990’s, it was called the “information superhighway.” (See the usage trend here.) While that term has fallen out of use, the need for original approaches to transport, both offline and on, is greater than ever—especially since we seem to have entrenched status quos in both. Can we meet that need?”
Watch the stream on YouTubeMore information“How can the Internet do what its parents wanted it to do: extend human reach and cognition, facilitate coordination and cooperation, work as an architectural foundation, and have no owners? And why has the Web failed at much of that? Also, how can the Byway succeed while the Web is still busy failing, yet clearly satisfying a great many needs?”
Watch the stream on YouTubeMore information“What was the Internet in the first place? And can we get past seeing it through the lens of the Web?”
Watch the stream on YouTubeMore information
