A Talk given at CERN for the Open Day 2013

1. beyond www...
how a byproduct of CERN changed the world
david galbraith twitter: @daveg

2. I’m a technologist who has worked with the web for 20
years, in Europe and Silicon Valley.
The Internet and its development is no longer about
science as much as it is about culture.
This talk is about the cultural impact of the web

3. The Apollo Program gave us...

4. velcro

5. CERN gave us...

6. The most important development since Gutenberg:
The web.

7. The web is not the
internet, it’s not even the
thing that first ignited the
growth of the Internet.
But it was the catalyst that
fueled a technological
revolution - that is now a
cultural one.

8. The first web page was served from one of Steve Job’s rare
and beautiful NeXT machines, the Stradivarius of computers.
The culture of the web started with taste and it had a
connection with Silicon Valley.

9. “ LSD was a profound
experience, one of the most
important things in my life.”
Not like your accountant. Steve Jobs, world’s most
successful businessman, recommends dropping acid.

10. the best way to get a handle on
the immensity of the cultural
impact is through numbers...

11. Big data
In a second: 2.8M emails are sent
In a minute: 694,000 Google searches
In an hour: 10.5M pics uploaded to Facebook
In a year: 98 years of Youtube video uploaded

12. Big data
Since the development of the web the
amount of data produced has grown
exponentially.
The majority of all the information created
since the beginning of time was produced
in little over the last year
And we don’t know how to process it

13. Big data: what type?
The majority of the web is either porn, shopping or
travel
The majority of data is video (by 2017 it will be 2/3)
The majority of pictures (80%) are of naked women
And the majority of email (81%) is spam

14. How big is big data?
Say we create a unit of
measure for big data - a
Library Of Congress
(LOC).
Specifically all the data in
the books in the print
collections of the Library
of Congress - roughly
10 terabytes of
uncompressed textual
data

15. How fast: Fiber optic
cable is capable of
transmitting data at
40 gigabits per
second = 2 LOCs
per hour
How much: 25
Petabytes are
uploaded to the
Internet daily = 2500
LOCs per day

16. Big followings
34% of humans are on the web
17% of humans are on Facebook
14% of humans watch an average
of 4 hours Youtube videos per month

17. Big fame
Obama: 36M twitter followers
Lady Gaga, more: 40M twitter followers
Gangnam Style viewed 1.773 billion times
16,000 years, viewing it continuously

18. Big Love
In the US one of
every eight married
couples started by
meeting online

19. Big Money
After the invention of the web:
A billion dollar Internet company
created every 3 months.

21. 2013 the year there were more
Internet enabled mobile devices
than human beings

22. Nothing illustrates this better than the
announcement of two Popes only 8 years apart

23. looking at some specific sectors...

24. privacy

25. In 2007, New York
Magazine identified a
new cultural rift between
young and old.
“Kids the Internet and the end of
privacy, the greatest generation
gap since rock and roll”

26. The change was
privacy. Young people
were public about what
they did, by default.

27. Young people’s privacy behaviors have changed since
2007, they are moving to a disposable internet culture

28. Fast forward 6 years and the debate has switched entirely.
The NSA Gathers as Much Data as Is Stored in the
Library of Congress - every 6 hours

29. the rise of anonymous

30. Cute Cat Theory of Social Activism
Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers.
Web 2.0 was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats.
Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute cat theory:
China builds its own censored social networks to let people have cats while
blocking social activism.

31. One the one hand we have
the triviality of people sharing
pictures of cute cats and the
disposable culture of
snapchat.
On the other we have social
network enabled revolution,
like the Arab Spring.

32. And this may not always be benign.
Is it Democracy or Mob Rule?

33. A recent study of Chinese social
networks shows that hatred spreads
quicker than positive emotions
The 2nd Law of Socio-dynamics?

34. jobs

35. 50,000
Google has about the same number of
employees as there are students at the
university of Vienna.
8,000,000
But if Google operated like a supermarket
it would employ the same number of
people as the population of Austria.

36. Amazon buys Kiva robots for $775M
And even the online supermarkets don’t act like supermarkets

37. TRAVEL AGENTS
CAMERA SHOPS
BOOKSHOPS
MUSIC STORES
TAXI COMPANIES
REALTORS

38. The internet makes information flow
Middle men take advantage of
imperfect flow of information.
This goes away, and they are
replaced by Internet platforms.

39. Retailers are middle men. 1 in 6 UK shops are
empty and much of this retail is not coming back.
We need to redesign town centers around
community activities

40. physical environment

41. Beyond mobile lies what is called ‘the internet
of things’.
Where every lamp post and street sign, dog
collar and wristwatch becomes an internet
enabled telemetry device.

42. The dark side of the internet of things.
Stuxnet created a cyber warfare arms race against
infrastructure attacks. We don’t know what has
been compromised.

43. money

44. money is a belief system
has to sit outside the system it represents
creates value only if it moves
it is virtual and networked by nature
an imaginary pile of gold in orbit

45. stone age banking

46. Mobile data is growing fastest in Africa (77%, annually).
In Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, mobile-money accounts have
become much more widespread than bank accounts.
More than 17 million Kenyans (2/3 of the adult population) are
using mobile-money services.
Mobile payments

47. Crowdfunding
The way we invest in
things and lend money
has become a massively
distributed system,
crowdsourced rather than
mandated from above.
A web not a family tree.
This
Not this

48. A change in the economics of supply and demand.
The internet has created an all you can eat buffet, for media.
It has reversed the traditional economic equation where the
scarcity is in demand not supply, companies compete for
attention

49. Back to physics...

50. What does the whole Internet mean in terms of particle physics?
Electronic information is stored in electrons which have higher
energy and therefore mass. The weight of all information on the
internet (5,000 petabytes) is 0.2 millionths of an Ounce.
That is similar to the weight of the smallest possible grain of sand.
A particle. A universe in a grain of sand

51. This universe was triggered by a creation
in a room here
A room that technically sits in France but
has a Swiss phone number and Swiss
power sockets.
So its appropriate that a technology which
breaks down borders comes from a place
we can pinpoint on a map but can’t say
what country it’s in.

52. and when we ask why we should
build high energy physics experiments
than cost billions, what's the use?
Even the byproduct changed
the world.
Even if the hundreds of other
contributions to human knowledge
and understanding had not
happened, with the web, it would
have still been worth it.

53. And that is a wonderful thing.