Episode 112: Serene - The Hacker Pianist Saving Cyberspace

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Loop.Com hi, this is Matt DeVoe and you are watching or listening to the Oodacast and I am incredibly excited today to talk to Serene, who is a hacker, developer, pianist, concert pianist and entrepreneur who has done some really interesting things and created some interesting products which we'll get into in greater detail as well. So Serene, thanks for joining us and I'd love to start by just getting your background into how you got interested in technology in the first place and wound up in your first job as a teenager at Google.

Thanks for having me today, Matt. It's a pleasure to chat and share some stories today. Yeah, I've been coding and playing piano basically my whole life and that's what I love to do and that's turned out to cause some fun and interesting things to happen lately. Yeah, I taught myself to code when I was nine and that was just fun. Early days of the Internet the Internet was a very different place back then, but you could explore and you can try things and build things. And I started off with silly things like making Zelda clones and stuff, but then that quickly turned into looking under the hood and figuring out how all this stuff worked and spent some time debugging kernels and Rowan as well. And then I was hired by Google as a teenager, spent a year doing infrastructure and then tried to quit, but they convinced me not to quit and I became the first engineer at a think tank called Google Ideas at the time, it since turned into Jigsaw. So yeah, I was at the time pretty young, not very good at talking. I don't think I'm that good at talking still, but was more the kind of person who like hid and slept at the office and wrote a lot of code and that caused a lot of things to happen. But I also yearned to focus on open source. And so while I wanted to find ways to use the context there at Google, with these vast resources and infrastructure to actually build systems that would truly help the Internet and truly help people. Because I believe at the time the mission statement of Ideas was using technology to help those confronted with conflict, instability and repression. And I also found myself at various conferences meeting lots of interesting people who believed strongly about the Internet and what it should be and its future. And that led to many things. And so I was also the first to quit the think tank and then just start figuring out things on my own and thought. And that was also the time when I started to play a lot of piano and yeah, I mean, I grew up with a single mom, immigrant kind of life, so didn't have that much as far as means. But after Google, I could finally have my first piano and that helped me play a lot and practice a lot. Yeah, so these days, that other track led to a lot of things. I was on tour a couple years ago. I've played in a lot of different places. I get invited to play with orchestras, and I'm endorsed by Bosendorfer, probably the only pianist without formal training to to be a Bose andor for artists. And I'm getting my debut in Vienna next month. And then as far as what happened with the Internet Freedom tools, well, in 2015, I pulled together a small grant and created what is now known as Snowflake. And this is just a tool to bypass Internet censorship and keep people connected. And it started to have some impact last year. Back in 2015, I threw it together as a prototype. So it's kind of a experiment, backup route. I hoped it'd be useful someday, and turns out it has. But because it was a prototype, it needed more support, given all the demand for unfettered Internet access. And that led to the creation of my new company, Snowstorm, in the last year.

Excellent. It's compelling technology because we talk about and have talked about on this podcast in particular and at our Uticon conference and other conferences that we like to think of the Internet as being decentralized and not subject to censorship. But that's not the reality, because network traffic routes and people put up firewalls and restrictions, and the Internet turns out to have borders that are very real and very impactful, and the tools that you built it sounds like are something that help re enable that original architecture of the Internet that is more censorship resistant and it's not dependent on operators creating centralized routers and firewalls, but is more focused on users helping each other. Is that a fair characterization of what you built with Snowstorm?

It is. It's at least the beginnings. And you've been around for the evolution of the Internet, and a lot has changed very quickly. And the Internet of today is very different from how it was a decade ago, two decades ago, and certainly almost unrecognizable from before then. And it's definitely not this idealized, decentralized network that was hoped for. There are forces that centralize it, incentives that centralize it, and recurring archetypes of entities that appear in different jurisdictions that end up fitting that ecological niche. And as a result, the Internet is splintering, balkanizing at the same time there are people and forces that care about making sure the Internet is the way it was meant to be. And I'm trying to do what I can.

Yeah, to kind of re. Re enable from an access perspective. Right. I mean, there's a couple of opportunities here. One is just re. Enabling access, where access is being denied to particular sets of content, but also enabling a little bit of anonymity. Right. The ability to browse and to view sites and view content that maybe is being restricted by a particular regime or for which you might be prosecuted if you accessed it. So, I mean, these are essential technologies. And it's interesting to me that we exist in an environment today where those are necessary, given the original architecture of the Internet, given where we started, but that's the reality that we live in. So if someone wants to. To use Snowstorm, what does the process look like? You know, if I'm in one of these regimes where, you know, the Internet is being censored for me, or maybe my access is being restricted outright, or if I'm Matt DeVoe and I want to help somebody in one of those regimes get cleaner access to the Internet, what. What role does the user in the censored regime play? And then what role do I play in the architecture of the tool?

Indeed. So Snowflake, the original idea is to have the Internet help itself, have people, indeed, in regions of the Internet that are less blocked, help users in regions of the Internet that are more blocked. And we do that by establishing a WebRTC peer connection, which is something that's used very commonly on the Internet now. And so the traffic looks like video call traffic, kind of like what we're doing right now. And there's a few other fun techniques that help with bypassing even the most restrictive blockages. And it's certainly a continuously evolving landscape, but it's very easy to use. And that's also key. With Snowflake, you can contribute as Matt and by just leaving a browser tab open that's running the Snowflake JavaScript embed. And yeah, you just toggle it and you're already a proxy and the system will match you with someone who needs the help. And we can talk about the usability about of this. I mean, there's a lot of people who talk about privacy tools and that's great and we need a lot of that. But actually my focus here is the piece that's the prerequisite for privacy and anonymity and all of these other things, this access. Step one is can you even connect at all. And then after that it's, everyone has their own use case, their own thread model. And it's important to give users the choice of exactly how they want to connect. But step one is, can you connect at all?

Yeah, in those instances where you establish the connection, you know, the user is just also running something in their browser that allows them to connect to the proxy that I've enabled in my browser.

So if you're a client, someone who is needing to bypass censorship, the version one legacy Snowflake network, its first integration was with the Tor browser. So in order to use that, you would run a Tor client. The interesting here to note is that Snowflake does not depend on Tor. Even now. Snowflake is what's called a pluggable transportation, and those are transports that are pluggable into any client. Tor was the first client that we plugged it into. So actually Tor depends on Snowflake to be accessible when vanilla Tor access is blocked, as it often is, same as most traditional VPNs are also quite trivial to block by any motivated sensor. And so Snowflake is this first hop that can help any of these clients.

And they're blocked typically because, you know, a VPN requires a VPN server that I connect to or that I egress from, or Tor has exit nodes and those are known nodes. I can track multiple people, use them, I can do the traffic analysis if I don't know what they are. But with Snowflake and Snowstorm, the connection is not to some VPN server or to some Tor exit node, it is to other peers on the network. And I pulled the stats and it looked like, you know, even just to date, or at least since you've been tracking the stats, there's been over 10 million peer connections that have taken place. So it seems like it's, you know, it's enabling a lot of connectivity between folks around the world already.

It is. It's kind of wild that in, in 2022, essentially Snowflake went from almost nothing to hundreds of thousands of volunteer notes and unknown numbers of actual clients that have been benefiting from censorships or convention. One of the reasons why the exact number in the legacy network is not fully specified is an artifact of the Tor metrics system that heuristics to estimate lower and upper bounds. But we know roughly how many volunteer nodes and how many instances of peer connections are being generated, and that's what's in the visualizer. The reason for that growth, I certainly wasn't marketing anything, and it was Kind of a surprise, honestly. It's just word of mouth, the fact that it worked. And one of the first inflection points was the blockage when the Ukraine invasion began. Along with the invasion, along with any physical conflict in the world. These days, it seems even more that information war is something which goes hand in hand. And that includes Internet censorship.

Absolutely. And used by. I thought that interesting. I mean, I just did a kind of cursory look at the, at the map, you know, on the, on the dashboard on snowstorm. Interestingly, I mean, in Ukraine being used because of the degradation of the Internet and some of the issues there around being targeted in a cyber war. But it also looked like active users in Russia probably trying to circumvent the government censorship and their control on information. So you kind of saw, you know, the users that were unhappy with the activities of the regime using the tool to get access to and, you know, participate in content that was, that was contrary to the controls that the regime was putting in place. I found that fairly fascinating. And it was Ukraine conflict in particular, you think, that caused for the explosion in connections and use of the tool over 2022.

It was, that was the first inflection point. And the second major inflection point was the Masamini protests in Iran.

Yeah.

Interestingly, activity against VPNs, Tor and Snowflake actually started in 2021 in December. Rustcomnodes were actually already tried to block Snowflake. They were anticipating this, but they were unable to block Snowflake. Some. Some more fun details in that. But certainly it's. It's not that I have a particular attachment to any particular event. I care about the Internet as a whole for, for humanity and for all users. And I don't think it's my job or anyone's job to dictate content, but rather what I can do is ensure the Internet itself at the network layer behaves as it should.

Yeah, similar to the network itself. Right. I mean, you're an extension of that layer where the network should be agnostic to, to the client, to the circumstances. It, it exists for the purpose of establishing the connectivity and then the users do with it what they may. Right. And obviously sometimes it might be used for nefarious purposes, but you know, in most instances with, with tools like this, it is legitimately people trying to circumvent censorship, trying to circumvent, you know, cyber war, degradation of their access points to the Internet. So definitely of huge value. And I think a fundamental component of being able to, you know, establish More controls over just how regular users operate over the Internet. I mean we, we always talk about how tracked users are, you know, by ISPs and other folks. And it just gives also folks who are a little bit more privacy conscious and alternative mechanism to access content that maybe is a little bit more, more focused on that access vice control or monitoring the exactitudes of their behavior in order to sell them products or you know, who knows what else in this time, in this time and day. So it started as Snowflake and then you took some time as a professional musician. I went down that rabbit hole several weeks ago when I was researching for this interview. You're incredibly talented pianist. So put a couple of links to a few of those concerts in the show notes for this. I would encourage people to go and watch that or to listen to them. Do you feel like there's a connectivity between coding and music? Because I have a lot of friends who are hackers and developers who are also musicians and it seems like works on kind of the same frequency in the brain between the two. What are your thoughts on that, that connection?

Absolutely. I think it's a very deep connection and we can talk about that connection between music and code or our math, but there's also a even broader connection that I want to get into. Once we've covered that. Certainly for me, the specific nature of what I do, I find that when I'm playing a lot of piano, it makes me a better coder and when I'm doing a lot of code, it makes me a better pianist. It's definitely tapping into similar parts of the brain and creating some kind of, some kind of connection at a deep level for how to think about and process problems. Debugging, learning, neuroplasticity. I think all of these are combined. For instance, if you're, if you're developing code over many years, you learn many things about how to be a better developer. You develop patterns, you avoid anti patterns, you have libraries that you frequently use, you develop habits, you improve your setup. Maybe you have a crazy MRC file or something. And similarly, when you're learning an instrument and trying to get better at it, you have to develop a library of personal techniques that you solidify over time. And those help you execute at a higher level because things that you do all the time become automatic. And you can debug the code or you can debug your brain. You know, if you mess up on some piece of music, you can kind of isolate what actually happened by digging down into the subsystems and the subsystems of those subsystems, and just kind of really isolating the bug in your brain, really. And we can. We can keep digging into that, but it's. It's something I find very interesting, and there should probably be more. More talk about this.

Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, I first noticed in college the, you know, the kind of, the. The weirdness of how the brain processes stuff when I would have bugs in my code and I would go to sleep and I would wake up and I would know where the bugs were. It was like my brain was continuing to process, but without me deliberately thinking about it. For me, you know, and I can only speak from my own experience, and my foray into music was primarily through d. When I'm DJing, you're so immersed in the code that you're writing, right? Which in that instance is the music, the combination of music, the tempo, et cetera, that you're not thinking about anything else. And if you start thinking about your code, you're going to be really bad at being a DJ in that moment in time. And I feel like maybe that unlocks or gives freedom for the brain to be processing or thinking about code unconsciously in the background, and vice versa. When you're coding, you're not thinking. Thinking about music. So I love the fact that you kind of draw that connection, at least for me. I feel it, and I feel like there's this processing that takes place. One of the things I really loved about DJing is that fact that, you know, my philosophy professor in college used to refer to it as monkey mind. You know, you lie in bed and you think about this thing, and you think about that thing, and you're restless and you can't go to sleep. But when I am DJing, I have no monkey mind. It is. It is 100% purely immersed in what I'm doing, and that's a little bit refreshing and freeing as well. So do you experience something similar, you know, where you're. You feel like maybe your brain is. Is processing, you know, either the code while you're playing the piano or the piano while you're. While you're writing code?

Absolutely. There's a really special kind of focus, as people also call that flow state, when you're doing something that's engaging your whole being in that moment. You can get there with music, definitely. And that's part of why I think music is so powerful and why people love it. And you can get there with coding, too. I'm sure you've had times when you've Found yourself kind of just in the zone with something and all the gears are turning and you see the whole landscape of, of the logic. I mean, that's another, that's another correspondence, right? You can kind of think of music as architecture that moves through time, as sound and emotion, and you can think of code as architecture that moves through logic. And so understanding how, how that architecture gets created, how it can be changed, how it can be optimized, I think is a more generalized concept that also applies outside of these domains. There's so many fields out there with people who've devoted their lives to mastering them. And what I find is that as a tangent, have you heard about the foxes and hedgehogs metaphor?

I have not, no.

Oh, well, it's this idea that. So hedgehogs are specialists, they're just spiky, they know how to be. Hedgehogs and foxes are very versatile and crafty and they can do lots of different things. So just kind of like generic archetypes that can apply to people as well. The jack of all trades versus the hyper specialist master. Now, if you graph this concept of depth and breadth, unlike a 2 axis plane, then you can kind of think of the hedgehog as this broadcast but shallow line and the hedgehog as a deep, focused vertical line. So occasionally you'll have hybrids who are, have both, who are foxes, but with a hedgehog specialty. So this might be someone who is a jack of all trades, but is also really good, really good hacker or something. And then sometimes you'll have, you can extend this and occasionally you'll have people with more than one hedgehog specialty. And so it begins to look like a PI symbol in the graph where you have the shallow line and two, two focus areas. You can keep going. And like, occasionally you'll have like three, three legs or four legs or something. And I think the really interesting part is when people start to get into those, those depths, but with a lot of broad context and they've climbed a lot of peaks and they know what it takes to climb those peaks. And you get this, you occasionally have the graph turn into a Roman numeral where now there's this horizontal bar that's connected at the bottom connecting all of those focus areas but at a much deeper level. And I think that is the. When people talk about interdisciplinary as a concept, I think that's what they're actually trying to get at. And I think the information environment, which includes the way the Internet is today, is not doing its best to encourage people to have the freedom and agency to and do that. Yeah, to develop all those things. But I think it's very important.

Yeah, it reminds me. And I think you know him as well. My friend Strat used to have this saying where he's like, I know a lot about a few things and sorry, now I'm messing up the paraphrase, but basically was talking about that where he could go very deep on a few things, but he could go very broad on lot of things and develop that domain expertise. And I think you can kind of see in the top shelf of my bookshelf, the great books of the Western world. He and I shared that as well. That was kind of like our intro point from an education perspective, to go and read what had been done and learn about many, many different things in many different perspectives as kind of this kind of broad access to information and probably a good way to describe myself as well. I can go deep on a few things, but have broad experiences across a very big spectrum of things over the past. So love that. Love that connectivity. So beyond the music. So we have, you know, you write this Snowflake tool, it is released as open source code, you go and become a pianist and then are traveling around the world and then 2022 happens and you realize that the code is being used with great consequence and by millions of people. And that's where we are now, where you decided that if the crowd, the code was going to provide value, if Snowflake was going to provide value, is going to have to go through that next level of maturity, which is Snowstorm. So can you describe a little bit about what you're hoping to accomplish with Snowstorm and the next evolution of the Snowflake tool?

Yes. So the original version one, Snowflake, this legacy network that's out there right now, was just a prototype. It was a experiment that I threw together. And then with a couple of colleagues in the Internet Freedom community, we integrated it into Tor. But there's much more to be done. Because it was only a prototype, it hit initial scaling limits pretty quickly. And in order to build it out much better and much to work better, faster, more reliably, more generalized, with more choice for users on how they actually use it, more transparency and to sustain this development and maintenance, as you know, any code project has to be maintained, has to have really good developers and folks around to actually build and maintain this. And those people also need to exist and be able to support themselves. And so it's very simple. With Snowstorm, I'm building a system that can build the version 2 upgrade on Snowflake and sustainably support this project both technically and economically, and have that be transparent model that's just quite simply based on users who are willing and able to support the project to do so. And, and I can dig into more of that if you like.

Yeah. And so if, if people want to support the project or kind of, you know, how is the model expected to persist? You'll have the company that is basically maintaining and maturing the tool. But then what role the users play? Like if they want to be helpful, if they want to help, you know, circumvent the censorship that exists out there, this balkanization of the Internet, what role can those users play in supporting the project?

Yeah, so there's a lot of users already supporting the project simply by running those Snowflake proxies right.

Now, which is as simple as having a web browser open. You said that's the, that's the extent of it, yes.

Now, one of the things that I've already done with Snowstorm is build a new REST client, a system wide client that now simplifies things for people who, if they want to leave Snowstorm running and helping people, whether or not they're browsing, they can have a client running, just as any VPN client might. Look at the same time, this is not a VPN. It's the first step before a VPN, even VPNs could happen. It's the step help VPNs also be unblocked. And that's, that's the broader goal with Snowstorm. It's, it's not to, it's not to dig into it like one particular instance or another. The Internet has become this place where every, everything is dividing and separating and people are also drawing lines in the sand for all sorts of reasons and drawing lines in the sand on those lines in the sand. But with Snowstorm, we should actually build those bridges and reverse the splintering and balkanizing of the Internet.

Get back to the, to the root architecture. Are there other. Obviously you'll be focused on Snowflake and Snowstorm, but when you look at it from an Internet freedom perspective, or enabling users to operate and, you know, at times access is one piece, but enabling people to really, you know, operate and access the Internet also requires that there's some level of anonymity or control that's provided over their own identity and over their own information. Are there other technologies that are kind of adjacent or essential that you think are being developed or need to be developed that are, you know, support that overall ecosystem?

Absolutely. There's so many things that are needed. It takes a village. Right. There's, there's a lot of talk about VPNs right now, but I find that kind of, kind of strange. Kind of strange because VPNs kind of also etymologically have shifted from what they used to be. Right. Like they used to be, well, virtual private networks for securing, like workplace networks for getting access to a very specific limited context. But now it's kind of turned into this other thing that's this. Mostly it means this consumer bypassing of geoblocks access to the global Internet. Except most of the VPNs don't fully deliver on that and don't fully work because they're easy to block, being decentralized services. And like, you can certainly do lots of Marketing on YouTube and get people on board and it will work sometimes. But the key thing here is access. And I don't see a very good global access layer. And we need that. And adjacent to that there's future work that would have to be done, including just actual off offline networks as well. Like if the Internet itself, if there's no link available, can you, can you actually integrate that with like a Bluetooth mesh net and. No, there's people working on that and they're doing cool things and I, I love what's going on in the, in the space.

Yeah, yeah, I've played with that here as well with some of the Bluetooth mesh networking or the Lora networking, you know, devices with the kids that we attach to different sensors that have no Internet requirement whatsoever. What about for, you know, one topic that we've talked about on this podcast in the past and also when we were at Uticon was this concept of kind of digital self sovereignty, of creating the tools that allow the users to take control over the data that's collected around them or the identities associated with how they access the Internet. Do you see that as playing a role in this future architecture that is, you know, disrupting censorship but also enabling privacy?

Absolutely. There's a lot that has to be done to give control back to the users on exactly how they want to be on the Internet, how they want to connect to the Internet, but also how they want to relate to various services on the Internet. And right now we're far along a path that is the opposite of this. This goal.

Very far along, unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, I would like to see more development on that that is based on real substance that can get these baked in at the protocol level. And there is kind of A funny hype cycle on, on crypto related things recently that you know, burst a little bit and now we have a different cycle but, but these things will come back in different forms. In some ways it's reminiscent of the.com era, right, where at the time there is a lot of hype around just broadly Internet software businesses and a large number of those folded because they didn't have enough substance. But very, very small subset became very important.

Yeah, for certain. I'd like to talk about the blockchain environment as our period of creative destruction. The house got built and then it got burnt down through the fraud and kind of the, the transiency of it. But the foundation is still, still solid and will be rebuilt. And you know, in the dotcom bubble, pets.com went under. But today I buy my pet food from Chewy.com, right, which is the exact same business model just executed with fewer super bowl ads and a little less bravado and you know, waiting for the technology to mature a little bit. So I do feel like we go through these cycles and you have periods where things get, you know, overly, overly excitable and you get a lot of opportunities, opportunists that enter into the space, but the foundations of the technology are still there. You know, you, you found great inspiration in just trying to get back to kind of the core of the, the Internet. Right. And re enabling access. Are there things about, you know, the way that folks have used Snowflake in the past that caught you by surprise or something that caught your attention, you know, via an email or a feedback that was kind of a wow moment for you. We write these tools or you write the tool and you release it and then it's wildly, wildly used out there. What were some of the things that were surprising for you about the adoption and use of the tool?

Yeah, there were many. One was that I started coding this back in 2015 and by 2016, early 2016, it was working. And it was for me just mostly a curiosity. Would such a basically two sided volunteer network actually be able to help bypass censorship? And part of that was like early days doing things like writing the very first golang library for WebRTC. Nowadays that's been superseded by PION. There's a whole group of folks doing much better work than I did on a native implementation of WebRTC. And GO. And now there's things happening in rust, a lot of things happening in rust. But with, with this, it began as just, just throw some code together and I've gotten it over the last few years as it has started to have an impact. Lots of letters, lots of emails of thanking me, random messages here and there, sometimes less positive messages that might. And then knowledge that like for instance in the Ukraine invasion, this was the fact that Snowflake was able to help people in Russia, as you mentioned, access videos that were blocked, like on 200rf of like captured soldiers, kind of giving their side of the story that would have otherwise been suppressed in. I wasn't building this to get involved in a land war. It was to make sure that people have access to truth. I think that the best chance at having access to truth is to not filter and manipulate and mess with people's connections. Because the Internet is so fundamental to our lives now. If the Internet is, is messed with in any way, really bad things can happen.

Yeah, it would be, it would be such a tragedy. Right, to. To lose the capabilities kind of the original, the original intent was that it was you know, not. Not just censorship sense, censorship resistant, but destruction resistant. Right. That it would be that have this persistent access. Are there other projects or you know, or thought leaders or ideas out there that you track that you know, that you get excited about when you see that those use cases are emerging as well?

Yeah, I find that the most interesting implications of our work is anything that's in cultural technology. There's a lot of talk in, in the Internet freedom community about just building good tools and having, you know, entities that get funding from, from wherever, but to just like build the tools. But there's smaller subset that talks about very important things like usability and accessibility and internationalization and making sure it's just actually the communication layer and the glue that actually makes the tech usable and makes sense to all users. That's a piece that's been historically neglected. I find part of that is a cultural question. But when that piece is solved, when it is more integrated, it has. It will certainly have wide impacts on social technology that we also need like more broadly speaking. You know, people talk about how the world has all of these large scale challenges, whether like ecological or economic or more. More finely scoped as like a conflict between whatever groups. But in order to solve that we need coordination and we need communication. And the prerequisite for that is technical infrastructure that maintains this global communications network and the social technology that we have as a peoples to actually make use of that.

Well, yeah, the cultural piece I think is essential. I had a great conversation actually done I think year before last, maybe early 2021 with Jan Chipchase, who's A field researcher and technologist and he talked about the ways that different cultures adapt to technologies or you know, they, they create use cases for technologies that we didn't think would exist. And then similarly, you know, found fascinating. We talk about users getting more control over their data from a digital self sovereignty perspective, but we also have the opposite problem where there is a subset of users and cultures for which the being excluded. And great conversation with Jared Thorpe about that. You know, where you, if you have data science that is being used by governments or corporations or whomever hoping to advance, you know, for the benefit of all of society, but it is excluding subsets of data or it is excluding data adjacencies, it can start to have a negative impact. So I think the lesson that I'm drawing from this conversation and from those conversations is that we need to make sure that the technology is inclusive and kind of all have access to it. Right. That it's, it's an enabling where we're relying on data, that that data is inclusive, where access is providing value, that we're ensuring that people have unfettered access, where privacy is important, we're ensuring that people have the ability to operate privately though, which are all, you know, early essential challenges of the Internet. Right. We probably, I've all read the, you know, the True Names and other books like that that talked about the importance of control over your identity and other science fiction novels that provided for the value of technology or the way technology might be used for evil means. And I think there's a subset of us, and I appreciate all your excellent work in this space that are focused on maintaining that original value proposition. Let's enable that access to the network for everybody.

Thank you. Yeah, there's, there's a lot of things to consider here. Anything that improves our chances to actually have a future that doesn't suck and an Internet that is actually in shape seems to be one of those prerequisites. And I have a few more minutes before my next thing, so we can keep going if you like.

Sure. Yeah. I forgot to warn you, but maybe, you know, off the cuff you'll have a response. I'm an avid reader and I always ask folks for book recommendations. Is there. And it doesn't have to, you know, be a book that you've recently read, but is there a favorite book of yours that you might recommend that people take a look at?

Sure, there's, there's a lot. Depends on what, I guess, what flavor of book you'd like.

Excellent. Give me a couple. I always, I'LL take several. So, you know, I guess what would be. What's your most recommended or most gifted book regardless of topic.

Depending on where you're approaching things. It's nice to look at systems thinking and look at like more concrete examples of that. There's recently I've been going through this book that's a thousand years of nonlinear history and that's been pretty interesting just kind of examining the way at different layers that kind of intersect with humanity but also include resource flows, germline flows, all sorts of other things that you wouldn't ordinarily consider conceptually. In that framing is very helpful. It's a fun way to think about it and I would be interested to see a treatment of that on the Information Age. I haven't seen much of that. Oh yeah, I have a correspondence with Richard Rhodes who is the author of the Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is a wonderful Pulitzer Prize winning book on the history of how the atomic bomb was made and its impact and all the way from its initial origins. And I'm hoping to see more treatment on the Information Age kind of from a similar perspective and an in depth lens for other crazier like maybe sci fi type books. There's also like short stories that I've enjoyed recently like the Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect. There's sounds a bit out there, but there's a lot of people talking about concepts that you know nowadays. There's a. A lot of hype and then also fear mongering around AI and all of that. And some of it's legitimate and I think some of it is the self referential social field replicator effect thing that. And actually one of the things I'd like to see more of is people inoculating themselves against becoming essentially turned into just a replicator of the social field. Because I think that leads to a lot of the craziness that we see on the Internet and certainly the way and this has been treated many times already, like the way engagement algorithms tend to take advantage of people's social hooks to cause that to happen.

Yeah, to manipulate them. That's one of the biggest challenges I feel like I've had as a parent in the Information Age is getting your kids to understand the ways in which they're being manipulated by the services that they use, but also to think critically. Right. To make sure that they're thinking deeply or looking at alternative sources or not just taking at face value the content that they're being presented with for sure is a challenge. I love those recommendations. Because I haven't read any of those books, so that gives me something that I will be able to dig into. Given your backdrop, that makes me think of a set straight out of a William Gibson novel. Do you have a favorite book in the cyberpunk genre?

Yeah, well, there's the classics, you know, there's. There's, there's always Neuromancer, there's always Snow Crash, et cetera. There's an interesting treatment of the foundation trilogy, but only like a very tiny subset on in the television format recently. But let's see. And some of these books are fun and I think entertaining or like parodies or. I like those. Accelerando by Charles Stross is a funny one too. It kind of just like goes for it. Yeah.

Excellent. Have you read Stealing Worlds yet by Carl Schroeder?

I've not, no.

I would recommend that one that definitely touches upon a bunch of the topics that we've discussed today. It's a, it's a great read, but it talks about digital self sovereignty and access to networks and people actually achieve some layer of anonymity in the future by participating as almost like proxies in games, you know. So kind of similar if you think about people as proxies instead of my web browser, as a proxy for content and as a way to kind of circumvent the censorship of everyday life, not just the network based censorship. So I think you would enjoy that one for sure. Excellent. Hey, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat. I will also include links to Snowstorm so that people can check out the tool and make use of it or offer up their connectivity to the global network to enable others to get access to content. Thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed the conversation and really do appreciate not only or I guess all forms of your art, the code and the piano. And I will encourage people to check out the piano sessions as well.

Thank you so much for having me, Matt.

Great.

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