-
So a chip, a poet, and a boy.
-
It's just about 20 years ago,
-
June 1994, when Intel announced
-
that there was a flaw
-
at the core of their Pentium chip.
-
Deep in the core of the SRT algorithm
-
to calculate intermediate quotients necessary
-
for iterative floating points of divisions
-
— I don't know what that means,
but it's what it says on Wikipedia —
-
there was a flaw and an error
-
that meant that there was a certain probability
-
that the result of the calculation would be an error,
-
and the probability was one out of every
-
360 billion calculations.
-
So Intel said your average spreadsheet
-
would be flawed once every 27,000 years.
-
They didn't think it was significant,
-
but there was an outrage in the community.
-
The community, the techies, said, this flaw
-
has to be addressed.
-
They were not going to stand by quietly
-
as Intel gave them these chips.
-
So there was a revolution across the world.
-
People marched to demand
-
— okay, not really exactly like that —
-
but they rose up and they demanded
-
that Intel fix the flaw.
-
And Intel set aside 475 million dollars
-
to fund the replacement of millions of chips
-
to replace the flaw.
-
So billions of dollars in our society
-
was spent to address a problem
-
which would come once every 360 billion
-
calculations.
-
Number two, a poet.
-
This is Martin Niemöller.
-
You're familiar with his poetry.
-
Around the height of the Nazi period,
-
he started repeating the verse,
-
"First they came for the communists,
-
and I did nothing,
-
did not speak out because I was not a communist.
-
Then they came for the socialists.
-
Then they came for the trade unions.
-
Then they came for the Jews.
-
And then they came for me.
-
But there was no one left to speak for me."
-
Now, Niemöller is offering a certain kind of insight.
-
This is an insight at the core of intelligence.
-
We could call it cluefulness.
-
It's a certain kind of test:
-
can you recognize
-
an underlying threat and respond?
-
Can you save yourself or save your kind?
-
Turns out ants are pretty good at this.
-
Cows, not so much.
-
So can you see the pattern?
-
Can you see a pattern and then recognize
-
and do something about it? Number two.
-
Number three, a boy.
-
This is my friend Aaron Swartz.
-
He's Tim's friend.
-
He's friends of many of you in this audience,
-
and seven years ago,
-
Aaron came to me with a question.
-
It was just before I was going
to give my first TEDTalk.
-
I was so proud. I was telling him about my talk,
-
laws that choke creativity.
-
And Aaron looked at me
-
and was a little impatient, and he said,
-
"So how are you ever
-
going to solve the problems you're talking about?
-
Copyright policy, internet policy,
-
how are you ever going to address those problems
-
so long as there's this fundamental corruption
-
in the way our government works?"
-
So I was a little put off by this.
-
He wasn't sharing in my celebration.
-
And I said to him, "You know, Aaron,
-
it's not my field, not my field."
-
He said, "You mean as an
academic, it's not your field?"
-
I said, "Yeah, as an academic, it's not my field."
-
He said, "What about as a citizen?
-
As a citizen."
-
Now, this is the way Aaron was.
-
He didn't tell. He asked questions.
-
But his questions spoke as clearly
-
as my four-year old's hug.
-
He was saying to me,
-
"You've got to get a clue.
-
You have got to get a clue, because there is
-
a flaw at the core of the operating system
-
of this democracy,
-
and it's not a flaw every one out of 360 billion times
-
our democracy tries to make a decision.
-
It is every time,
-
every single important issue.
-
We've got to end the bovinity of this political society.
-
We've got to adopt, it turns out,
-
the word is formafomadic attitude,
-
that's what the internet tells me the world is,
-
the ant's appreciative attitude
-
that gets us to recognize this flaw,
-
save our kind and save our demos.
-
Now if you know Aaron Swartz,
-
you know that we lost him
-
just over a year ago.
-
It was about six weeks
-
before I gave my TEDTalk,
-
and I was so grateful to Chris
-
that he asked me to give this TEDTalk,
-
not because I had the chance to talk to you,
-
although that was great,
-
but because it pulled me out
of an extraordinary depression.
-
I couldn't begin to describe the sadness.
-
Because I had to focus.
-
I had to focus on what I was going to save to you.
-
It saved me.
-
But after the buzz, the excitement,
-
the power that comes from this community,
-
I began to yearn for a less sterile,
-
less academic way to address these issues,
-
the issues that I was talking about.
-
We'd begun to focus on New Hampshire
-
as a target for this political movement,
-
because the primary in New Hampshire
-
is so incredibly important.
-
It was a group called the "New Hampshire Rebellion"
-
that was beginning to talk about how would we make
-
this issue of this corruption central in 2016.
-
But it was another soul that caught my imagination,
-
a woman named Doris Haddock, aka. Granny D.
-
On January 1, 1999, 15 years ago,
-
at the age of 88, Granny D started a walk.
-
She started in Los Angeles
-
and began to walk to Washington D.C.
-
with a single sign on her chest that said
-
campaign finance reform.
-
Eighteen months later,
-
at the age of 90,
-
she arrived in Washington
with hundreds following her,
-
including many Congressmen
who had gotten in a car
-
and driven out about a mile outside of the city
-
to walk in with her.
-
(Laughter)
-
Now, I don't have 13 months
-
to walk across the country.
-
I have three kids who hate to walk,
-
and a wife who, it turns out,
-
still hates when I'm not there
-
for mysterious reasons,
-
so this was not an option,
-
but the question I asked,
-
could we remix Granny D a bit?
-
What about a walk not of 3,200 miles
-
but of 185 miles across New Hampshire
-
in January?
-
So on January 11,
-
the anniversary of Aaron's death,
-
we began a walk that ended on January 24th,
-
the day that Granny D was born.
-
A total of 200 people joined us across this walk,
-
as we went from the very top to the
very bottom of New Hampshire
-
talking about this issue.
-
And what was astonishing to me
-
is something I completely did not expect to find
-
was the passion and anger
-
that there was among everyone
that we talked to about this issue.
-
We had found in a poll that 96 percent of Americans
-
believe it important to reduce the influence
-
of money in politics.
-
Now politicians and pundits tell you,
-
there's nothing we can do about this issue,
-
Americans don't care about it,
-
but the reason for that is
-
that 91 percent of Americans
-
think there's nothing that can
be done about this issue.
-
And it's this gap between 96 and 91
-
that explains our politics of resignation.
-
I mean, after all, at least 96 percent of us
-
wish we could fly like Superman,
-
but because at least 91 percent
of us believe we can't,
-
we don't leap off of tall buildings every time
-
we have that urge.
-
That's because we accept our limits,
-
and so too with this reform.
-
But when you give people the sense of hope,
-
you begin to thaw that
absolute sense of impossibility.
-
As Harvey Milk said, if you give 'em hope,
-
you give 'em a chance, a way to think
-
about how this change is possible.
-
Hope.
-
And hope is the one thing that we, Aaron's friends,
-
failed him with, because we let him
-
lose that sense of hope.
-
I loved that boy like I love my son.
-
But we failed him.
-
And I love my country, my country,
-
and I'm not going to fail that.
-
I'm not going to fail that.
-
That sense of hope, we're going to hold,
-
and we're going to fight for,
-
however impossible this battle looks.
-
What's next?
-
Well, we started with this march with 200 people,
-
and next year, there will be a thousand
-
on different routes
-
that march in the month of January
-
and meet in Concord to celebrate this cause,
-
and then in 2016, before the primary,
-
there will be 10,000 who march across that stage,
-
meeting in Concord to celebrate this cause.
-
And as we have marched, people around the country
-
have begun to say, "Can we do the same thing
-
in our state?"
-
So we've started a platform called GD Walkers,
-
that is Granny D walkers,
-
and Granny D walkers across the country
-
will be marching for this reform. Number one.
-
Number two, on this march,
-
one of the founders of Thunderclap, David Casino,
-
who is with us,
-
and he said, "Well what can we do?"
-
And so they developed a platform
-
which we are announcing today
-
that allows us to pull together voters
-
who are committed to this idea of reform.
-
Regardless of where you are,
-
in New Hampshire or outside of New Hampshire,
-
you can sign up and directly be informed
-
where the candidates you are are on this issue
-
so you can decide who to vote for
-
as a function of which is going
-
to make this possibility real.
-
And then finally number three, the hardest.
-
We're in the age of the SuperPAC.
-
Indeed yesterday, Merriam announced
-
that Merriam-Webster will have SuperPAC as a word.
-
It is now an official word in the dictionary.
-
So on May 1st, May One, aka. May Day,
-
we're going to try an experiment.
-
We're going to try a launching
-
of what we can think of as a Super PAC
-
to end all Super PACs.
-
And the basic way this works is this.
-
For the last year, we have been working
-
with analysts and political experts
-
to calculate how much would it cost
-
to win enough votes in the United States Congress
-
to make fundamental reform possible.
-
What is that number? Half a billion? A billion?
-
What is that number?
-
And then whatever that number is,
-
we are going to kickstart, sort of,
-
because you can't use KickStarter for political work,
-
but anyway, kickstart sort of
-
first a bottom-up campaign
-
where people will make small dollar commitments
-
contingent on reaching very ambitious goals,
-
and when those goals have been reached,
-
we will turn to the large dollar contributors,
-
to get them to contribute to make it possible
-
for us to run the kind of Super PAC necessary
-
to win this issue,
-
to change the way money influences politics,
-
so that on November 8th,
-
which I discovered yesterday is the day
-
that Aaron would have been 30 years old,
-
on November 8th,
-
we will celebrate 218 representatives
-
in the House and 60 Senators
-
in the United States Senate
-
who have committed to this idea
-
of fundamental reform.
-
So last night, we heard about wishes.
-
Here's my wish.
-
May One.
-
May the ideals of one boy
-
unite one nation behind one critical idea
-
that we are one people,
-
we are the people who were promised a government,
-
a government that was promised to be
-
dependent upon the people alone, the people,
-
who, as Madison told us,
-
meant not the rich more than the poor.
-
May One.
-
And then may you, may you join this movement,
-
not because you're a politician,
-
not because you're an expert,
-
not because this is your field,
-
but because if you are,
-
you are a citizen.
-
Aaron asked me that.
-
Now I've asked you.
-
Thank you very much.
-
(Applause)