The 2025-26 Beyond the Web/After Analog Speaker Series, presented by the Ostrom Workshop with Dr. Angie Raymond and the Hamilton Lugar School with Dean Isak Nti Asare.
Events listed below are held 3:55–5:10 in the HLS building. They are available at their conclusion on the Workshop's YouTube Channel
The Case for MyTerms
It's time to blow up cookie notices and tracking online. The only way to do that is by getting websites and services to agree to your requirements, rather than the reverse.
There is a new standard for that. It's called IEEE P7012 and nicknamed MyTerms.
Doc Searls, a visiting scholar with the Ostrom Workshop at IU, is chair of the working group for MyTerms. And on Tuesday, October 14 he will make the case for why MyTerms will:
Doc will speak at 4pm in Room 421/423 at the Hamilton Lugar School to inaugurate this year’s “Beyond the Web” salon series, which he also co-leads. Students from Mauer, Kelley, Luddy or any discipline at IU where people care about personal privacy and changing digital life for the better are all invited. Help make MyTerms the biggest thing on the Net since the Net itself. The talk will also be live online.
How (NOT) TO Regulate Attention Platform Business Models
Elettra will discuss the business models of data attention platforms, which are organized around generating revenue based on data and attention. Such business models, guided by what she calls the “data-attention imperative,” produce an impoverishment of our attentional processes.
The talk will consider and reject several policy approaches to the problem: productivity tools, consumer privacy laws and traditional media and telecoms regulation. It will argue that addressing the disorders generated by data attention platform business models requires an infrastructural approach focused on reducing our time online and safeguarding our collective attention. It will end with a three-fold agenda aimed at protecting our attention by inserting technological friction into our collective infrastructures of attention, making it economically costly for platform companies to keep us online for long stretches of time through taxation, and fostering new possibilities for regulation through First Amendment jurisprudence and torts litigation.
Registration Information coming soon!
"What Might “Public Parks of the Internet" Look Like?”
There's something special and important about public space — something lost in most of the places where we interact today. But there's a growing movement to bring public-friendly design back. In this talk New_ Public cofounder Eli Pariser will not only discuss the principles of public space-making online but take a tour of some of the emerging formations and demo the New Public projects that aim to build on these values.
Bio: Eli Pariser is co-founder and co-director of New_ Public, a community and experimentation hub for digital public spaces. He’s been an author, activist, and entrepreneur focused on how to make technology and media serve democracy. In 2004, at 23, he became Executive Director of MoveOn.org, where he helped pioneer the practice of online citizen engagement. In 2006, he co-founded Avaaz, now the world’s largest citizen’s organization. His bestselling 2011 book The Filter Bubble introduced the term to the lexicon. And Upworthy, the media startup he co-founded in 2012, reached hundreds of millions of visitors with civically important content. Now his work is focused on bringing together community entrepreneurs, researchers, engineers, and designers to envision, architect and scale digital public spaces.
“Why Obfuscation is (still) Needed (more than ever)"
"The Alchemy of Confidence"
Arms races between honesty and deception have profoundly shaped the living world. Lying can be profitable: persuading others that you are smarter, faster, more threatening, or better-intentioned than you actually are can pay off. But for the audience, being deceived is costly, and so when a signal is false too often, they learn to ignore it. That drives honest signalers to evolve more reliable ways to convey that information; this increased reliability is enforced by costs, creating signals are affordable for honest signalers but are prohibitively expensive for dishonest ones.
This is the core of signaling theory, an evolutionary model that over recent decades has explained many puzzling biological traits and behaviors— expensive yet seemingly useless features whose costs are now recognized as the guarantee of their trustworthiness. This theory also provides powerful insights about human culture. In my work, it has been invaluable for analyzing the impact of new technologies on disinformation and identity deception. But to fully explore these issues and to assess rapidly changing communicative practices in human societies we must go beyond the narrow focus on the form and cost of signals.
Reliability among people depends not only on costly signals but also on interpersonal trust and third‑party enforcement—the carrot of affective bonds and the stick of surveillance and institutionalized punishment. In this talk I will introduce these concepts and examine how signaling costs, affective trust, and technological surveillance interact. My focus will be on trust—on the circumstances in which technologies support it vs those in which they displace it, and on its essential role in human society beyond its functional contribution. These issues are particularly urgent now, as rapid technological change alters the incentives and tools for both deception and detection.
"To Make Big Tech Less Harmful, Make it Less Important"
"Lifting the Lid on the Golden Dome: How SmartTranscripts Open Legislative Sessions to Everyone in Vermont—or Anywhere"
"What Works after a Disaster Happens? A live report on progress in Western North Carolina"
“World Librarians:How any community can build their own local library”
A socio-technical system providing information to offline learners in Malawi
World Librarians is a socio-technical system that strives to solve the information access problem many remote offline schools and libraries have in lesser developed contexts. In this presentation, we describe the operational system we have developed over the course of eight years, where we establish solar-powered computer labs in remote schools and libraries in Malawi, and then provide them digital information that they want, rather than what we in the Global North think they need. World Librarians represents an operational program in one locale where global citizens care and support others in need for information. It provides a model that could be easily replicated to other offline rural locations across the globe.
Join us in welcoming Keitlyn Alcantara present, “The Common[ing] Weed: TheMesoamerican milpa as a lesson in collaborative governance.”
Central Mexican campesinos and Indiana farmers produce corn at large scales yet hold distinct histories that have led to unique value systems around land stewardship and ecological and community wellbeing. In this presentation, I lean on the framework of the milpa, a multispecies agricultural strategy used across Mesoamerica, and the Americas more broadly (known as “The Three Sisters” in Mississippian farming). I argue that understanding the role of “weeds” and other “nonproductive” crops in campesino and precolonial food systems reveal an invisible dimension to strategies of survival and resilience that emerge from interspecies relationships. Reframing management of the commons as a multispecies endeavor, a lens common in indigenous science, I show how campesinos of the past and present to create adaptable and diverse economic and biocultural networks. I conclude the presentation by exploring how ecological pedagogies at IU can integrate multispecies commoning into lesson plans to address emerging local issues around sustainability.TH A525: Community Based Research (Spring 2020). Syllabi for these and previous courses can be found here.
 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. |
"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