Digi Financing, FOSO -- Talking Tech w/ Steve Hollingworth & Charles Cooke, Seema Sueko, Lual Mayen
Host Brian Wesolowski sits down with Steve Hollingworth, of the Grameen Foundation. Access to financing is a major obstacle to alleviating poverty for millions of people around the world. The Grameen Foundation leverages data and technology to address this issue and in this episode we hear from their president about how they are doing that.<br><br>Then, Brian takes you into our just-wrapped 2019 Future of Speech Online. At the event led by CDT, we asked six speakers to share what the future of speech looks like for a diversity of speakers. Here's the second three of those speakers, with the others coming in our previous episode:<br><br>* Charles Cooke, The National Review<br>* Seema Sueko, Arena Stage <br>* Lual Mayen, Junub Games.<br><br><br>More on Steve: https://twitter.com/shollingworthgf<br>More on the Grameen Foundation: https://grameenfoundation.org/<br><br>More on FOSO19: bit.ly/cdtFOSO19<br>Videos from FOSO19: bit.ly/2019FOSOvids<br>More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye.
CT. T.
Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. Access to financing is a major obstacle to alleviating poverty for millions of people around the world. The Grameen Foundation leverages data and technology to help address the issue. And in this episode, we hear from the foundation's president about how they are doing that. After that, we again take you to the future of speech online. At an event led by CDT back in November, we asked six speakers to share what the future of speech looks like for a diversity of speakers. These speakers are dynamic and came to the question from a variety of perspectives. You heard from three in our last episode. Now you get the second group. At its best, technology is a connecting and empowering force. For the Gramine Foundation, technology is a way to help women in rural communities around the world connect to essential services to reduce poverty and hunger. Through a variety of programs as well as actual technical products and services, Grameen drives digital innovation in finance, agriculture and health to benefit the rural poor. Steve Hollingworth is the president and CEO of the Grand Mien Foundation and he is our guest today on Tech Talk. Welcome, Steve. Thank you very much, Brian. It's so great to have you. We've met, gosh, what an event at Bloomberg a bit ago, realized we worked across the street. So sometimes things just are meant to be. You have a better view than we do. Do we? Okay. We get to see the park. That's true. And this lovely hotel behind me which our listeners cannot see, but I promise it's beautiful. So first, just give me the overview. What does the Graham Mean Foundation? Both your history, which I think is really interesting, and then what you do today. Well, thanks very much for having us.
You know, our our history really is in the microfinance movement. Our founder, professor Muhammad Yunus, had the brilliant idea of setting up a bank, for the poorest women in Bangladesh. It became known as the Grameen Bank, which is pretty well known globally. Yeah. And he won the Nobel Prize in 2006 for that. Nobel Prize in peace, for that activity. Right? And it really led to a major movement, frankly. There are now about 4,000 community banks globally that serve in excess of about a 180,000,000 poor people, primarily women, providing, basically what I'll say because we're here, analog services, paper money, paper trend, paper recording of transactions, etcetera. There were a few insights that were really important in micro finance. One was that a woman's character was enough to lend to her, didn't need collateral. Right? Didn't need physical collateral. And the second insight that I think was very important was, you know, the ability to align the ability of a poor person to pay with the services that they that they get to make it sustainable. So it's not just a continual philanthropic effort. Right? So where are we now? You know, our evolution really has has created this huge industry of microfinance, but there's there's still 1.6, 1,700,000,000 people globally who do not have access to formal financial services. 70% or more of them are very poor women in the poorest countries on earth. And frankly, the the work of Green Foundation now is really how does this transformation that's happening with the digital revolution, the fourth industrial revolution, and moving to the fifth industrial revolution, the Internet of Things, you know, how does it how can it benefit the poorest people on earth? And that that's really been the major effort of our work aside from the analog microfinance world, and that's really required us to do a number of things. Number one, look at how poor the poor the poor in the world can benefit from payment platforms, from mobile money platforms that have been growing all over the world. Things like M Pesa in East Africa or BCash in Bangladesh. There are variety of mobile money platforms that becomes a channel for including the rural poor, in in financial services. But what really is the critical element in doing that is data. Right? I mentioned that the one data point initially in microfinance was the character of the woman. Right? Yeah. But we're in a position now to have a much digitization of data. And so we combine the delivery platform, community agents who provide mobile money services, provide access to information and services through mobile devices. We've created in the last ten years over 300,000 poor women who essentially are representatives of mobile money, providing all kinds of goods and services in various communities with a data push and pull. And because the data complements the decisions, the decisions that a poor person makes, the decisions that, a lender would make, to provide the right kind of product, the decision that a buyer may make for an agricultural good. So the digitization of data is a very, very big opportunity for addressing global poverty. That's great. So So where do you do most of your work? You touched on us some, but, you know, kind of all over the world. Yeah. We we work historically, we've worked in over 26, 27 different countries. Wow. Largely Sub Saharan Africa, South Asia, India, we have a very big presence, Indonesia, Philippines,
Andean countries, Central America. So Yeah. So all over the world. Well, we do. Yeah. That's impressive. That's impressive. Partners, of course. Of course. So what are you also create products yourself. We do. What are some of the things that you've created or built? We do.
You know, a number of things actually, but all around, you know, this this use of data to inform decision makers. One of the key, products that we do have, and it's very consistent with the work, of course, that Professor Yunus outlined is we have a social enterprise that we solely owned. It's called Tar O Works, t a r o works, and essentially it's a it's a customer relations management tool. It can be configured offline, to be used by field workers in remote parts of the world, remote Africa in particular, and it can be configured to support whatever business operation or enterprise operation you may have to support your field staff, to push information to clients, and then to derive information about the clients and about the performance of your field worker. Now Tar Works is applied in the financial services sector. Services sector. Mhmm. It's applied, in things like, pay as you go solar power. It's applied in clean cook stove programs, in animal waste digesters, in some fast moving consumer items. But wherever you may have, you know, an enterprise that uses a mobile money channel as a payments platform to buy a product or to extend the loan or collect the loan, you can, and our our partners employ Tar Works basically to manage the the whole process of supporting clients. So sales, service, maintenance, education about the financial products that may be their tracking, you know, where things are happening, how repayments are going on loans, etcetera. And so it uses Salesforce as its backbone Not at all. For all of its analytics. But essentially, it's the front end of that that can be configured for any, any enterprise in any decision make any decision making it within enterprises that reach the poor. We're very proud of it because there's been really strong evidence of approved efficiency in the companies that we've worked, you know, we've helped to install it in. The second area that we've done a huge amount of work in is something called Ledger Links. This is not a social enterprise for us yet. But Ledger Links. Ledger Links is, you know, we've done in a lot of organizations, but Grameen is one of, you know, the leaders in it, have done a lot to support the savings with the world core. Savings is actually probably even more critical than lending because it can be very helpful in addressing seasonal variations in income and ensuring access to food if women control savings at the at the during the period of the lean season. Right? So savings is really a big deal. And so what LedgerLink does basically is the the savings group methodology in rural parts of Africa has largely been in a tin box, a group meeting, putting their money in the tin box. But LedgerLink allows the whole process of a savings group to track the contributions of members to savings, to track, you know, the repayment of loans that the savings group will take from one another on a digital device, on a mobile phone. Okay. Right? So that that's taken off in quite a big ways and used a lot by a lot of our NGO partners, not so many social enterprises. And then the third area that we've spent a lot of time developing is a joint venture with a Rainforest Alliance. The Rainforest Alliance, works, of course, on the certification of sustainable forestry Oh, yes. Globally. And we have a joint partnership with them in a program called Farm Grow. And, essentially, it's a CRM but not it's a customer relations management tool but aimed at creating digitized profiles of farmers. Right? And the digitized profiles of farmers consider both the adoption of good agricultural practices depending on the cropping regime. Right? It tracks things like rainforest certification, organic, child labor issues are very big in some crops like cocoa, for example. So it can track all of that from observable data and it also tracks farm economics. The, you know, the input outputs of the farmer, the what are tied to the practices that they've adopted. And that farmer profile then, particularly as it as we get longitudinal data on it, becomes very valuable for a network around the farmer. You know, within value chains, Coco is one of the most active ones that we're working in now. You know, the the buyers get information on availability, quantities, traceability, rainforest certification as I mentioned, organic as I mentioned. The lenders get visibility on the credit
worthiness of a farmer. Oh, interesting.
They they can understand, you know, how the crop is gone, what's the animal what's the crop husbandry techniques that the farmers adopting. And we're able to help the lenders develop a credit ranking, a risk ranking for the for the for the for the borrower. And we're also able to help the lenders, structure the financial product in the most appropriate way. Right? Because cocoa is a perennial crop, so there's a long term loan need. There's also short term seasonal loans needed. Needed. But in addition to that, the data is valuable to extension workers and extension agencies because they can slice and dice, look at which What are extension workers? You know, somebody who's training a coco a cacao farmer Okay. To grow their crop. Right? So we can get insights into, you know, which extension workers are having the most impact lifting productivity. What are they doing to do that? Right? It it's also valuable to those who provide inputs and supply inputs. So the in that concept very different than Tarworks is not enterprise based. It's actually value chain networked. Yeah. Right. So data is data is critical. Yeah. That's fantastic. Could you share kind of one story that that humanizes us a bit more? It's easy when you're talking about finance and processes to forget, you know, the people that are really benefiting from it. Is this something that really stands out for you that you're proud of? Yeah. No. There is. You know, I I spent many years in India. I lived in India for five years, and I've focused a lot of my professional work on on what India has done and how we can learn from India. India has an amazing, you know, exercise going on now, you know, to do biometric identification. Oh, I have a whole bunch of options here. Right? Yep. And to link that to bank accounts and to expand financial inclusion to do it. We have a wonderful program in India called the Grameen Mitra program. And, essentially, Grameen Mitra translates to village friend. And these are women who essentially start out as the the as the channel through which people can be biometrically identified and they can have, electronic payments paid into their bank accounts. She can handle that on on a mobile phone with a fingerprint device, a Grameen Mitra. Right? And one of the one of the most compelling stories I've seen is that, you know, we we work, in a in a Central India in very, very poor communities. And there's a woman, her name is Lilaba, and she has been dealing for years with a very, very debilitated husband, right, who essentially is paralyzed and with dementia. And she he receives a government payment for his disability, and she, twice month twice monthly basis, had to take him physically on a on a two and a half hour walk to find a bus. Right? Wow. Right? To a center where he could present himself with his the right paper documentation for him to receive his disability payment. Right? This was a tremendous physical burden for her. Right. Right? And, you know, at time And I would imagine putting him at risk as well. Yes. Right. And now because of the Mitra program that we have, there is a village extension worker that is a Grameen community agent. She's a Mitra, a friend of the village, and she's able to go right to the house with the mobile phone and with the biometric device to the husband who is very, very physically disabled. And she's she's able to certify his identity on the biometric device and have the the government payment paid directly in cash through the mobile phone operator to the family. Right? That's a small example. Yeah. But a transformative one for that for the individual. Yeah. Another, you know, big, I think, example is work that we do in Kenya around agricultural lending. You know, agricultural lending. You know, a lot of growth in urban areas in Africa, a lot of demand in particular for higher value crops like vegetables. And, you know, we we've been very proud of a partnership that we've had in Kenya for a long time with a group called Musoni, which is a a paperless microfinance bank. We've helped them to develop all of their agricultural lending work, and they have a client that we supported there. A gentleman called James Mwangi who started out as, you know, basically a mason, and he recognized the big demand for spinach.
Okay. Right? I eat spinach almost every day. There you go. So there we go. Yeah. And,
he started growing spinach. Right? And he became involved in our program. We were able to track his progress in spinach growing and basically identify what a significant market niche, you know, he was meeting and arrange, you know, for him to get a $400 loan to expand very significantly spinach production. And he's actually more than doubled his income just as a result of expanding his spinach production in, in Kenya. But it's all about, you know, showing to the lender that he's a responsible farmer. He's adopting the right kinds of techniques and that the their visibility on his farm economics and then that opens up
the confidence to to lend. That's incredible. So data is a big a big enabler. That's incredible. Now I can't let you go before I ask about kind of buzzwords, you know, I always have to. Cryptocurrency, everyone wants to know about this. Is that something that you all are thinking about and might leverage in the future?
Well, you know, the I guess there are two aspects to it. You know, we've studied a lot blockchain in general. Sure. And, yeah, I guess you can see, you know, the majority of applications that we currently look for actually are about data analytics. Right? And so, you know, I know that there's some, growth in an attention going on about how, you know, Blockchain can you could slice and dice across Blockchain and do more data analytics. We haven't seen many applications that do that yet, but, certainly, some of the open source platforms certainly, Salesforce that does that. So blockchain hasn't hit us yet, in in what's happening. Cryptocurrencies, another of course, you know, the stigma, the speculative nature of so many of them is a big issue. But we we do believe that there are some significant potential use cases that can benefit the poor with Stablecoin in particular. Okay. You know, people who live in high, currency volatility or high inflation situations, that could be very beneficial if they could store their currency in a stable store their value in a stable currency. You know, you you could envisage the global supply chain, things like coffee, cocoa, you know, for example, where if a payment could come more directly, from a buyer, in a, you know, in a major, you know, Western center directly to the farmer that could cut out a lot of middlemen Sure. Issues. Also, you know, there we could be coming to a day too when things like access to finance could be more globalized, and, you know, cryptocurrency blockchain identity issues could, you know, could be very, very helpful. I think, you know, we we tend to focus a lot in the West on issues about convenience and, and, you know, facility Use. Yep. Right. And, you know, I think for the for the rural for the for the developing world poor, I think one of the critical first steps is identity. Right? A a big part of poverty is basically being excluded. Yeah. You know, not having a, you know, maybe a legal identity, not having a credit history. And, yeah, I think one of the things we're finding is is the is the initial kind of big win is using the digitization of data as a way of creating, you know, an identity that opens the doors to to to other areas. At the moment, most of the applications we have are are served very, very well with mobile money platforms using domestic currencies. It's not a big issue, but but I think, you know, we do foresee some very interesting use cases with things like stable coins,
in the in the future for sure. Alright. Well, we're gonna leave it at that. Steve, thanks so much for joining us, coming across the street and visiting, and sharing more about your great work at the Grand Mean Foundation. Thank you. Thanks so much,
Brian.
On November 15, CDT along with partners at the Freedom Forum Institute and the Charles Koch Foundation hosted the future of speech online. The focus of the event was on technology, empowerment, and censorship. As part of the event, we asked six incredible speakers to share their thoughts on what the future of speech online looks like for a diversity of speakers. We wanted to know if today's challenges could be overcome to shape an Internet where speech and democracy thrive. Now you get to hear from three of those speakers. If you missed our previous episode of Tech Talk, you should go back and listen to hear from the other three. So now enjoy talks from Charles Cook of The National Review, artistic director Simas Waco of Arena Stage, and Lewal Maayan of Juneau Games. And it is Charles Koch from the National Review. Welcome, Charles.
Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. In America in 2019, the biggest challenge to free speech online is me and and you. I'm not being facetious. It's us. It's not the man anymore. It's not a lack of accessible technology, and it's not the size of our wallets. There is a paradox here. Legally speaking, free speech has never been better protected in The United States. Never. In fact, legally, we're freer to speak today here than anyone has ever been in the history of the world. We have no alien and sedition act, no pro slavery gag rules, no blasphemy laws, no First World War era espionage acts, no fire in a crowded theater Supreme Court decisions that sound good in theory, but in practice lead to the imprisonment of presidential candidates or to immigrant socialists handing out leaflets against war. In America today, you can call for an actual revolution. That is that's sedition. You can call for a revolution and you're fine. You can say pretty much whatever you want about the president, about congress, about your least favorite billionaire or celebrity, and nobody will do anything. You can mock the government and its employees, you can call the Speaker of the House a dictator, you can say the governor of Texas is plotting a coup, or the IRS is hiding in your basement, or the member from Delaware fantasizes about torturing animals, and you can lie horribly about history. I don't take any pleasure in that as a historian, but you can. You can endorse slavery. You can praise the Holocaust. You can say the Holocaust didn't happen. You can string together into a sentence all of the most upsetting words and ideas that you can conceive. And you can do this and nothing will happen to you. And if it does, it'll likely be overturned because the Supreme Court is uniformly in favor of free speech these days. Nine to nothing. It's It's unanimous, united, one of the only things in the country, on which there is agreement. Now the question before us is can we overcome present day challenges to grow an Internet where speech and democracy thrive. Speech and democracy, of course, are not the same thing. The first amendment that is emblazoned on the side of this building represents a paradox too because although free speech is necessary to the operation of democracy, its regulation is taken away from that democracy. The first amendment starts, Congress shall make no law. Libertarians such as myself sort of wish that was the beginning and end of the whole constitution, but they put it in the first amendment, and that limits the democratic, participation in setting speech regulations. And finally, it was not always true in America, finally we've got to the point at which that is true. So I think a better question is can we overcome present day challenges to grow an Internet where speech thrives? Now, the first part of the answer to this is yes if we continue to insist that democracy stays away in this narrow area. About the Internet bit, it has never been more easily utilized. Whatever you want to say in America, you will not lack for a microphone or for a front page. I wouldn't have my job, but for the Internet, I wouldn't be in America, but for the Internet. The barriers to entry are just hilariously low. Facebook is free. Medium is free. WordPress is free. Twitter doesn't just give you a free account. It actually, in practice, allows you to send messages to almost anyone in the world without knowing their phone number, their address, or anything about them. Trust me, I know. This can this can be good. I mean, I've been able to ask questions of the world's greatest experts simply by logging on to Twitter and giving it a shot. People will, respond. This idea would be alien and incredible to my grandfather. In 2019, if you look at it from the perspective of history, every single one of us has both our own printing press and a guarantee that the government will not come in and smash it, or confiscate its fruits. This situation would be regarded as extraordinarily enviable to almost any person who has ever lived, be they rich, poor, black, white, devout, atheist, what you will. And yet, in my industry at least and in others I see, we spend an awful lot of our time trying to ruin that voluntarily. In a formal sense, we don't have gatekeepers in the way that we once did, but de facto, we do. People who can leverage mobs to drive others off of social media are gatekeepers, People who call up the employers of those who have different views than they do are gatekeepers. People who put into place rules that force others to be silent are gatekeepers. People who have decided that they know what is reasonable and what is not and set about enforcing that are gatekeepers. A couple of years ago, I debated NYU's Ulrich Baer at, Kenyon College in Ohio, And he told me very openly that it was his job at the college to work out what speech was too offensive to minorities to hear. He's just written a book making exactly this case. How arrogant. How condescending. There are a lot of Auric Baers on the Internet, unfortunately. When you think about it, that is deeply peculiar. We got rid of the laws, we cut out all the men in the suits, and then we set about replacing them with whomever manages to gain enough followers and institutional power to exile their enemies. Now I'm not talking here about argument. I'm not talking about debate. I'm not talking about pushback. I'm not talking about revulsion, the revulsion that we all feel when we see somebody who is bigoted or exclusive. I'm talking about mob rule. One of the most popular concepts on Twitter among the journalist class, the people to whom this building is dedicated, is the ratio. And for those who don't know, one is said to have been ratioed when one writes a tweet that yields many more negative responses than it yields likes or retweets. Why is that important? What of value does that tell us? Why on earth would we assume that that is reflective of truth or quality? Others among us have responded to our opportunity by quite literally asking to put more men in suits in charge of the Internet and its platforms. Some of these people are conservatives. They want Washington to tell Facebook or Twitter what to do. Others are progressives who want to empower the government to decide what is permissible to say and what is not. They're all wrong. The solution here has to be cultural. We have the legal regime, finally, in America. We have the technology. What we lack still is the heart. I'm worried that we're going in the wrong direction. I'm worried we're seeing a rapid growth of a cultural attitude predicated upon the idea that free speech is advantageous to the powerful, and maybe that it's even part of a long held establishment plot. This is nonsense. It ignores human history. It ignores that it was protestants that benefited from the printing press, not Rome. It ignores that it was the revolutionaries who benefited from the pamphleteers, not the king. It ignores that it was the abolitionists and the civil rights champions who benefited from the open exchange of ideas, not the advocates of the status quo. Conservatives will not change the culture by asking Josh Hawley to superintend the Internet, and the marginalized will not improve their station by handing the powers of censorship to those who live in marble towers or to Donald Trump and the police. None of us will become more intelligent or more interesting if we join the roaming mobs. So the threat today is us. It is me. It's everyone in this room. Can we overcome present day challenges to grow an Internet where speech and democracy thrive? Depends on the users. We have before us the greatest opportunity we've ever had to learn, to share, to argue, to convince. If we don't take it, we only have ourselves to blame. Thank you.
Speaker is Seema Suiko from Arena Stage. If you have not been to Arena Stage, go. It's fabulous.
Sima.
Good afternoon, everybody. So, I work in theater, not technology, not the law. At Arena Stage, we produce a diversity of American voices. Our work is live, and at our best, it's passionate, thought provoking, dangerous, deep, and dependent on the freedom of speech. Theater thrives when the characters in our plays and musicals can speak freely, not just from the heart, but from their guts, and say things that may be disagreeable to some. Our industry of live theater depends on this. So yes, speech free of government censorship is critical. And with more and more theater being recorded and posted online, this freedom of government control in the online space is also very important to theater. But those of us who work in theater, we deal in words and dialogue. We use words to make meaning, to make story, and we know that speech and words have a cost. While the theater needs freedom from government control over content, our characters words cost them something. And in fact, that is what makes drama. The building blocks of drama are action, conflict, event. Action in theater terms is what a character wants. Conflict is what is keeping your character from getting what they want, what's their obstacle. An event is whether or not they get what they want, and if they don't get what they want, did they get something else? Something they didn't bargain for. And that event causes a change. Now your character wants something new. They have a new action. That's how drama works. That also happens to be how life works. For example, action. Let's say your action this morning was that you wanted to come to this event early. Conflict, your obstacle was your morning commute. And today, someone cut you off on the road, you got into an argument, you were in an accident, and you became an hour late to the event. So event, you did not get what you wanted, which was to get here early. Instead, you got mad, you got insurance problems, and now you have a new action. You wanna get your car fixed, and sitting at this event is your new obstacle to fixing your car. So now in this example, your speech and the speech of the other driver wasn't censored, but your speech and your actions cost you something. So it is in theater. The words the character uses cost them something. It's not free. And so when I think of free speech online, I think, yes, let's preserve freedom from government control, while we also think of our own self government. We've been living with the public web for about thirty years. How have we each self governed ourselves in the online space? What are the norms we've created and evolved over time? When I think of the future of free speech online, I think of about the need to develop online literacy in our citizenry, cultivating in each person the ability to think critically, rigorously, research what one encounters online to surface truth, while also developing self government and an awareness of the cost of words and the examination of one's own core values. I don't think kids learn that today, and I don't think many adults ever learned it. The idea of critical thought and the examination of core values. Online literacy and education is an area where I think we need to invest deeply to preserve democracy. After all, it's been said, democracy without education is hypocrisy without limitation. Now when I think of self government online, I extend this to corporations and businesses that exist online. I just directed a play at Arena Stage by Sharon Rothstein called right to be forgotten. It told the story of a young man who stalked a girl for three months when he was a nerdy kid in high school. Someone wrote a blog about it and he became a meme. And now ten years later, when you Google him, what comes up is stalker, rapist, attacker, and most of that isn't true. So while working on this play, I had the chance to speak with the folks from Center for Democracy and Technology, experts from ACLU, Google, Facebook, the FTC, future of privacy forum, electronic privacy information center, international association of privacy professionals, etcetera. And I heard from people all along the full spectrum of opinion about whether or not we should have a right to be forgotten here in The US. And I flip flopped my opinion throughout the process of directing this play. But where I've landed now is, yes, people should have a right to petition a corporation to adjust the curation of their online life. After all, search engines are already deciding the order in which you encounter information when you search for someone or something. It's an algorithm, but that algorithm was built with assumptions. The current system already puts the control and the power in the hands of the search engine. Let's allow individuals to harness some dignity back. The potential for self government by providing the opportunity to petition that choice that the corporation has already made for you. Now, since I work in theater, I could not leave you without playing a theater game. Right? I seeing the eye rolls already. This is a game about interpretation. This is one example of what I mean about online literacy. So many fights on the Internet start from misinterpretation. An actor knows that any line can be read a thousand ways. So here's a little acting exercise for all of you. Let's say that someone tweeted these words, I love you. Can everyone say that out loud? One, two, three. Great. Now what did that person really mean? Let's say it was a tweet from you to your significant other. How would you say that out loud? On the count of three, one, two, three. Oh, so much love in the room. Right? Now let's say it was a tweet from someone you just argued with and you are apologizing. How would that sound? On the count of three, one, two, three. A little remorse in there. Now let's say it was a tweet from you to the president of The United States, so take a moment to think about how you feel. I know there are diversity of feelings in this room. And on the count of three, one, two, three. I didn't say to change the words. So, yes, speech, free of government control in real life and online is necessary, but emotional intelligence to interpret meaning. Education to research and surface truth, exploration of one one's own core values, and ultimately self government is necessary to democracy and civil society online and in real life. Thank you.
And now for our final lightning talk speaker, very excited to have him here. Lou Almayan with Juneau Games. They are games for peace. Right? Welcome, Lewal.
Thank you so much. It's not easy to be the last speaker. Right? But it's, it's really amazing to be here today and also, like, share my thoughts about, and my vision of, the future of speech online and, especially with my background. First of all, my name is Noel Maine. I'm from South Sudan. How many people been to South Sudan? So, yeah, we're talking about, like, the future of online speech. Imagine a country like South Sudan. What what should we be talking about right now? Because it's a country that has been raped by civil war for a long time. And and one of the most dangerous thing in the country right now is the hate speech online. It's, it's people telling, you know, stories that are not true, and that has actually caused so much violence in the country. And especially because we are from a country that has almost 64 tribe. There's so much diversity. There's so much people don't understand really what one person is saying. And that's actually one of the major causes of the of the conflict in South Sudan. So until we really find out what can we do with the information, what can we be able to tell people. And, today when I, when the organization reached out to me and said, hey. Lual, come and share your thoughts. And I was like, okay. That's because, like, with real my background, you had before, like, I'm a founder of Genu Game. It's a video game company. So our main focus, of the of the company is to make video game for peace and conflict resolution. Because when you look at the video game industries, it's one of the most growing industry right now in the world. And, and especially when people right now just sit down and watch people playing video game. And and even, like, on Twitch, people, like, the information, people shouting and everything. How do we filter that out? How do we it's not about, like, countries that are going through war. It's about really how do we really modify that and tell people the truth. And and that's why I started my my company to be able to make video game that can be able to, like, to change the mindset of people. I remember my my family flees South Sudan in 1993. So and I was born on the way as they were going to a refugee camp. I've been living in a refugee camp for twenty two years. And, I came to The United States about, two years ago when I started my company. And really what inspired me to start making video game for change was one day I was sitting on my computer and, my friend because I was living in Northern Uganda. My friend installed for me a video game called, Grand Theft Auto on my computer. And then on my mind, I never thought actually video game are created by people. I thought they just fall from heaven. Because, like, I have no idea I was at this environment where, like, what you think about is to is to survive. There's no food. There's no water. Like, living in a refugee camp was not easy for us. But when I start playing Grand Theft Auto on my phone and my computer, I realized the power of video game. I realized that video game are not like movies where you just sit on your couch and watch. You make decision when you're playing video game. And I can give you one example. When you play with your friend and your friend kill your character, the way you react is it's not like, why did you kill my character? It's like, why did you kill me? You see, like, it's it's becoming part of you. And I feel like that medium, that community can be a very good protocol way that we can shape the future. I'm launching my my mobile game called Salam. It's coming, on a platform that have over 700,000,000 players. It's an online game, and the game is about putting a choose of a player in a refugee. It is it's it's about, like, for a player to be in the choose of a refugee, for them to understand the journey of a refugee. Because the whole idea is because when we think about making policies about refugees, we really don't understand them. Today, when I go and meet someone who make policies and I tell them, like, I'm a refugee. Really? Like, they they they they're surprised. Like, how did you actually start making video game? I had to work three hours every day to charge my computer. There was no power in the refugee camp I was in. But I was so passionate about creating something that can be able to change the world, that can be able to, like when I was in a refugee camp, my mother worked for three years looking for $300 to buy for me a laptop just for me to be able to create a medium that can bring people together, that can bridge the communities together. And I feel like video game are really very, very good tool. And I can tell you one example of the of the industry. We have a lot of video game coming up. There are millions of players online playing. And and we look at serious game. Serious game are not already, like, in the platform. People, like, create your own game and and publish them by themselves. But my main focus and with with my company is to be able to, like, publish this game. People play them on on Steam. We have, like, the world premiere for my game is coming on December 12. We are premiering at a Microsoft here in LA because we want people to really understand the power of video game and how this medium can be able to change the world and how this medium can actually lead to, like, a betterment of of of of of of online speech because this this is this is a product that people that is with people every day. You you go on a plane, you play video game. You you go on a train, you play video game. Every time you play video game, but how do we utilize that resources to be able to create something that can better? I know we have children that play video game every day, but, like, have you thought about it? How can you actually, like, use this to be able to, like, help other people? I have a board game called Wider. It's about conflict resolution. It's a game that bring people together on a table, and they discuss about conflict and creating their own resolution to conflict. And they've been using it right now for teaching in school like George, Georgetown, University of San Diego to be able to, like, utilize the gaming space. Because we cannot have, like, a better online speech when we don't have peace, when we don't know how to resolve conflict. Because those are pressures that are given to us. That's why, like, I'm so frustrated. So what should I do? I go online, but because that's that's what I that's the only resource that I have to be able to, like, to express my feeling or whatever, whether it's right or not. We don't have it's so hard to control that until you you help people to change their mindset to understand really what what the future mean for them. And that's why, like, I was like, it's great for us, like, half second of a medium to be able to help other people. So that's what we do, and thank you so much. Yeah.
That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. If you enjoyed the talks you heard from the future of speech online, you can find the videos and more great speakers on CDT's YouTube channel. And while you're checking out our YouTube channel, be sure to also follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, and add us on LinkedIn. I'm Brian Wasilowski. Thanks for listening.
