Peter B. Kaufman on The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge

Peter B. Kaufman, senior program officer at MIT Open Learning and founder and executive producer of Intelligent Television, discussed his book The New Enlightenment and the Fight to Free Knowledge with John Willinsky, professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Education and founder of the Public Knowledge Project. Their conversation took place September 6, 2023, as part of the Academic Innovation for the Public Good book series. Here are the video and transcript of the event.

Transcript

This transcript has been edited; introductory and closing remarks from the live event have been removed.

JOHN WILLINSKY: It's a pleasure to be here. And I want to welcome everyone who's attending. As a way of a preface, let me just say that Peter and I know each other. This is not going to be a stilted conversation or an introduction of one to the other. We've known each other for some years, and are, I can say, fans of each other's work, and this book particularly.

Like Matthew, I am a very enthusiastic. I have been a very enthusiastic reader of it, and I want to point to some of its most exciting elements and some of its great scholarship and a good deal of its contributions. It come with wit, with grace, and just a very powerful message.

So Peter, let me begin with this question of history, the role that history plays in your thinking, the way in which you are motivated or inspired. You're talking about the future of knowledge here and yet history plays such a prominent part in how you come at it. Help me understand that role of history.

PETER KAUFMAN: Thanks John. Let me say thank you first to Matthew and then to you and to Stanford Digital Education and Trinity and the co-sponsors of this series. Academic Innovation for the Public Good is such a good title. And actually I'd rather be at Stanford today actually.

This is like virtual reality but given that it's a conversation about the public good, I'd call it virtuous reality. So we're having this conversation here. I guess this is a book that starts talking about today but in the early 16th century and draw some parallels as Matthew was saying and as you and I have discussed between those nutty years and these nutty years.

Taking a big look 500 years and then diving deep into certain centuries, the century where the Enlightenment got kicked off or the century that featured the opposite of a lot of what we're trying to talk about and further, which is the century that featured totalitarian thought control in so many parts of Europe, like in Asia, it brings you somewhere. It puts things in perspective.

So I think history is super important. I guess to get particular about it, I'm interested to looking at history, is there some kind of teleological principle that goes along with other detectable advances in civilization like the wheel, the sail, the boat, the bicycle, the car, the train, the plane, the rocket that can take us somewhere, that can take us maybe even now in an imaginary journey where we can imagine progress to a world where more and more knowledge is freely available, freely shared and produced with freedom foremost in mind? So that art is something that I'm super interested in, and I hope it exists.

JOHN WILLINSKY: Thank you, Peter. Let me push a little bit more into that because I think your fascination with history is something that you share. But I want to be clear that you have, I wouldn't say gruesome, but you have a taste for detail. You focus on very difficult moments.

William Tyndale did not end well. And this kind of fascination, do you see it as motivational or do you see it as entertaining and engaging? There's a rhetorical force to this book that I think is achieved in part by the dramatic detail. And so there's a sense in which your interest in history is driven by this.

Well, I want to suggest this fascination — the boyhood pirate in you or something — is drawn to this. Is that a fair characterization or are you just the objective historian?

PETER KAUFMAN: No, I think it is. The detail about an individual who suffers in Tyndale's case, the ultimate fate of being burned on an auto-da-fe at the same time that he's being strangulated. That's not a good ending as he put it, those two things together.

I have bad days even at MIT but come on now, I think that the detail about an individual's fate like this can serve to remind us what society's fate can look like on a larger level, in a wider scope. And I'm not shying away from suggesting that the consequences of some of the policies that we enact or some of the inaction that we render into policy. We'll have us end up in not a pretty place.

JOHN WILLINSKY: And you make that very difficult. And I think part of the force of the book is the way in which it engages. But I also want to be clear that you are a great reader of history, but you are also a recorder of history. That the work in Eastern Europe is particularly vivid. And I want to ask you whether that wasn't just incidental. That was a formative experience for you in terms of your understanding of what freedom around knowledge means and what our goals are with regard to that.

PETER KAUFMAN: It definitely accidentally or not rendered in high relief what can happen when a society is virtually destroyed by the wrong kind of policies and the wrong kind of leaders, hello. Like Timothy Garton Ash, who chronicled all those great East European revolutions in the New York Review of Books, what Jim Billington, the Librarian of Congress at the time, called the New York Review of Each Other's Books, but the New York Review of Books.

He called what happened in Central Europe and the challenges that faced all those societies after 1989, the challenge of recreating the aquarium after it had been made into fish soup, not easy. It drew everything in stark relief for me.

I started as a Sovietologist, skills that are also useful, by the way in the academy. We can talk about that later. And in Central and Eastern Europe and then the former Soviet Union, you could see what the consequences are for living in an information environment that's upside down and inside out.

JOHN WILLINSKY: Well, so jump with us into the parallels with today. Take that very direct experience you had in Eastern Europe and the counter movement in Eastern Europe as well to circulate literature on photocopies or even more primitive systems.

So where do you see the most direct parallels with the world that we're facing today, with book banning on the rise, censorship in schools and education systems, with the lack of trust around the press that we're experiencing. Matthew mentioned disinformation and misinformation is another aspect.

PETER KAUFMAN: I mean, there's three aspects to it I guess. One is that I spend a chapter in this book talking about the consolidation of media in book publishing, I address it in television and radio, that existed in these countries. There was almost a blueprint for how to run a totalitarian Orwellian, Huxley-ish system. It's unbelievable.

And a number of these revolutionaries before 1917 from Russia but other thinkers too put some of this forward in a way that they thought could be progressive if it fell into the right hands. So there are a lot of lessons there that we have to study, but that consolidation involved then one major bookseller, only a handful of publishers.

And when you study the landscape of scientific scholarly, technical, medical publishing today or trade book publishing or the film industry or the music industry but really those first things that have to do with knowledge as opposed to entertainment or academic knowledge, academic innovation for the public good, what we should pay attention to, you see that kind of consolidation happening. So that is an issue.

And then the second thing would be there are a lot of people who tried to express themselves and build alternative systems. Many of them did not end well by the way with samizdat, self-publishing, and other things.

And I think there's some call I'm making in this book to explore whether the Commons, some of the things that we treasure so much like Wikipedia or the internet, I treasure, the Internet Archive and others might be even more essential than we imagined when they first started some 20, 25 years ago. And the third thing, I can't remember, but those are the first two.

JOHN WILLINSKY: Pick up on the question about commerce and capitalism because I think one thing, and this would be helpful for me too because I wrestle with this as well as an advocate of the commons and advocate of open access to research and literature, so where is the line in terms of the role of capitalism? You could be accused or said to vilify commerce and capitalism.

And so I'm happy to draw up examples for you. I think Brewster Kahle is a good example. The Internet Archive is essentially funded by the profits he made from his sale of the search engine to Amazon. MIT and Stanford are quite implicated in terms of the support of capitalism and contributions to it. So where do you draw that line?

I'd even ask you about the computer in which you compose the book or whatever but not to put you on the spot on this but I think in arguing, in the fight for free knowledge, you are drawing a very clear line about commerce in the commons. But I think there has to be — Google Scholar is a good example for me, where it is a commercial entity producing a public — I'm sorry, but a public good.

PETER KAUFMAN: It's a great question. I think there's enormous room for both commerce and the commons. I think one has to step back like way back. Maybe not 500 years back, but you could step back to the Enlightenment. You could step back to some of the areas that I know, John, you studied in your work extensively and written about, the origins of copyright.

There was a balance intended in those early, in those early years of copyright, between commerce and ultimately the public good — that commerce was intended to facilitate creativity and expression and ingenuity. But ultimately, the idea was that something would wind up as a public good after a certain patch of time.

The other day I was driving out of Cambridge to come here in Connecticut. And GBH Radio was going on about the Sumner Tunnel reopening, and this is Charles Sumner, named after this guy. And if you think about the conversation we're having, if they had had a Zoom conversation 200 years ago about the relationship of commerce and the Commons or freedom and commerce, we would be watching it today, the recording of it. And we would study also in stark relief the evolution of our own approaches to property.

Owning people was OK for so many people. It was a norm for a lot of people, not so much Charles Sumner. They were talking about the fact that all these moving vans on September 1st get stuck in the Sumner Tunnel because there's always some guy. So they have a clock in Cambridge to actually tell you what minute of the day the first moving van gets stuck in the Sumner Tunnel.

But he has a larger legacy in that he advocated for freeing people. And what is it that makes everything we create as scholars or as musicians or as artists automatically a piece of property first? I don't know. I think it's worth examining that in a little bit more detail, recognizing that we've advanced along in our sense of what is and is not property before, and maybe we need to do that again.

JOHN WILLINSKY: But there's some responsibility with taking ownership of property. In the world of intellectual property, you do talk about the public domain and you talk about the gravitational force. You do a lovely analogy with Newton and the gravitational force in copyright. We're talking about your work, and we're holding you responsible.

And the properties of the work, I would argue, are to be admired. The property is a nice diverse term. The capital invested in its publication, in the book's publication, might be another kind of question. So I think our finding the balance is absolutely crucial and trying to understand where that would come.

I think the Creative Commons license is a really good example of keeping the responsibility, that is the attribution, while allowing for the use and reuse and, yes, derivative use potentially. So I'm looking for your sense then of examples of that balance as opposed to simply the vilification of capitalism.

PETER KAUFMAN: So here's one balance, this paperback edition 1895 to give you a sense that I'm pro commerce. But also my publisher at Seven Stories Press agreed without outside compensation. I probably shouldn't say this because it may pressure other publishers in ways that they don't find comfortable. But to allow a freely license CC BY, if that means things for our audience members, I'm sure it does, CC BY edition to go out into the world at and the same time.

And there are examples in this universe we live in of things that may not be sustainable by commerce alone. The very first thing I did with the funding in this field from the Mellon Foundation was to do a study in which someone said to me in an interview, there's no business plan for saving the redwoods, which is probably true.

And there's no business plan, likely is not, for sustaining public parks like Central Park in New York. And Central Park in New York — I grew up in New York. I'm a native New Yorker. A lot of people in Cambridge and Boston. It's tough for me.

But in New York Central Park exists as a daily reminder of the fact that if you put this public philosophy or the public good first and foremost, that is maybe the most valuable real estate in the world. I forget how many acres it is that Frederick Law Olmsted got to design. But we've kept it that way since that day. By sound collective will, it has not apart from a brief moment when Tavern on Green in the center of it got busy. But it has not been...

And there are numerous other examples in this world of our society sense of balance expressed in public works like that. And the question is, in the academy, what is the balance? Has the balance been achieved to everyone's satisfaction, to your satisfaction and mine? Mine is less important than yours, by the way because you're — but also to the satisfaction of the people on this call. I would say it —

JOHN WILLINSKY: I was going to jump into Wikipedia as an example of that balance. And I was going to contrast the dependence of Wikipedia on professional authors, on journalists, on sources, and to see, again, if there could be a reconciliation. You could take a more — I mean, the book itself is strident in this regard.

And I think it's strident with wit and grace. Don't get me wrong. And it does champion Wikipedia in a way that I think is entirely to your credit because the efforts that go into it are — the whole world benefits from that. But it does call for that acknowledgment that there is an element of volunteerism, an element of dedication to the commons, but there's a dependency as well.

PETER KAUFMAN: I love Wikipedia. Is it incumbent upon those of us who produce knowledge to produce sometimes or all the time or somewhere in between, something other than none of the time, knowledge that is directly able to drop a Newtonian apple immediately into the commons? I would say yes.

I would say that if we are shooting video of courses — and this is my personal view because I get in trouble not only for being a native New Yorker but also for having sometimes these extreme. I would say yes when we're writing books.

When DVDs first came out, if anybody's old enough to remember that on this call, people were producing extra content all of a sudden, grumbling for the DVD edition of a film or a television series or whatever. And then the web came along and people were like, oh, I guess. And the question is, should we be attending to this call? Is there a mandate?

And I would say now more than ever because so many people are trying, in the words of Steve Bannon in another book that I'm trying to write, to flood the zone with bull****. You can bleep that out in the report. The alternatives are on our shoulders. Who's who else if not us kind of thing.

JOHN WILLINSKY: But wait, Peter, we don't want to — the fight against misinformation is not a matter, I don't think at least of the commons, I think it's on multiple fronts, including professional journalism and including the commerce, if you like, of book publishing. So I think there is a place and maybe it's more like charity that everyone should have an element of charity in their lives when they're contributing to the commons. Go ahead.

PETER KAUFMAN: No, no, I would agree with you as always. But I would say that the way the web is structured today and the way Google in particular, the search engine that rules our lives is structured is such that when you search for something the results that come up are generally speaking results that have been favored by knowledge institutions or in general.

And it's also the case that Wikipedia results usually land first. If I search for proper noun or anything, we've seen Wikipedia pops up there first. The way it is. The way things are today.

And we need to make sure if that's the case, that search results that they get delivered to our children and to ourselves have within them material that is accurate, that could be a function of personal charity, that could be a function of you and me, two white men, which is a problem that we need to also unpack in terms of Wikipedia and probably other things too but like on that.

But more importantly, could knowledge institutions commit to contributing to the commons in ways that allow that knowledge to surface, to rise to the surface in search and elsewhere.

JOHN WILLINSKY: So you've done that at MIT. You've been a leader in this field with OpenCourseWare and with MIT's other initiatives. Do you find the institution — is it a given that this is going ahead in terms of the sharing, or is there a struggle? I know at Stanford, we passed an open access policy but only three years ago compared to MIT and Harvard that did it 15 years ago.

We can't expect the institutions to be there in this regard. And it's part of a struggle and a mission. And I imagine that part of your work and part of what this book reflects is a sense of that mission and importance.

PETER KAUFMAN: Stanford is better weather, so you have that even if you're [INAUDIBLE]. But in terms of the sharing, the sharing is unbelievable in the sense that MIT OpenCourseWare is one of the greatest things that has ever come about. And it continues to get revised and enhanced in extraordinary ways.

Can I read a few lines of something that Charles Vest, the president of MIT at the time wrote? This is in this book.

JOHN WILLINSKY: As part of the infomercial, yes. Yes, go ahead.

PETER KAUFMAN: Yeah, that's right. I should probably and have a chyron if the folks in Trinity could figure out how to put an 800-number rolling across it. MIT's former President Charles Vest wrote about, at the time, OK, first word, "A transcendent, accessible, empowering, dynamic, communally, constructed framework of open materials and platforms on which much of higher education worldwide can be constructed or enhanced, the meta-university which will enable not replace residential campuses.

"It will bring cost efficiencies to institutions. It will be adaptive, not prescriptive. It will serve teachers and learners in both structured and informal contexts. It will speed the propagation of high quality education and scholarship. It will build bridges across cultures and political boundaries. It will be particularly important to the developing world."

Have we gotten there? No, we haven't. What's particularly important to the developing world is Sci-Hub. That's what's particularly important to the developing world because notwithstanding the efforts that we've made in everything which has been extraordinary from where we were, there remains much to be done.

And much of that remains to be done, I think, has to do with thinking about the commons in a closer attention to the detail about what licenses serve the commons and how information in 2023, 2024 can be shared as differently than in 2001.

JOHN WILLINSKY: Well, let me pursue that in a different way, a slight other angle, and that is the role of video. So you are, for someone who writes, again, with such charm, you are an advocate of video and a champion in fact of the motion picture, the moving picture and knowledge.

And I would want to draw the connection with the fizzing out of the MOOCs of an example where there was such promise for the openness not just OpenCourseWare but open course. And to me it's tied to the limits of our knowledge of video of film. And I want to give you a chance to do a defense or to talk about your faith and understanding in the power of film, which I'm all for in terms of film but as a medium of knowledge transfer, of a medium of knowledge sharing in particular.

PETER KAUFMAN: Am I already on the defensive? That's tough. But I can say this. January 6, remember that. So we had this attack on the Capitol. And it turns out that the January 6 committee that got together to investigate all this stuff, whatever your politics might be, it's an indisputable fact that this committee had to deal with 22 million pieces of evidence. That's the number of things that these guys —

And in my view, people like Jamie Raskin and others, just heroic, chair of that committee, unbelievable work, the cops who defended us. So much of that was video. So much of that was video records that got shown, edited, by the way, masterfully.

The great video editors whom I can tick off and who I name in a new thing, have nothing on the editing ability of that January 6 committee. I'm still trying to track down who was in charge of those audio visual presentations that millions of Americans watched around the world, right.

How will historians in the future be able to tell the world what happened that day without recourse to those primary sources? And in fact, are the historians of the future likely to be telling that history in text, in print, or in an environment much like the one we're in right now, this virtuous reality where we could then click on a clip and show people?

How do we make sure as other people at Stanford are doing — I'm going to be out there soon — folks at Stanford supported. If I can plug one foundation, there are a million that are worth plugging, I should say. And I should stop and probably unscroll.

If I could plug one foundation, this Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. They're supporting the work of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. I think there are 52,000 Holocaust testimonies that Spielberg and others have reported up from survivors of the Holocaust.

And there are people out there denying the Holocaust. There are people out there doctoring those videos in many ways, creating deepfakes. So how do we make sure that in the same way that you're so attentive to the apparatus of verification in scholarly publishing and what I devote a chapter to talking about in this book, how do we make sure that video can be defended and certified in similar ways? That's a challenge that we have to really get behind now.

And so Starling Lab at Stanford is doing extraordinary work in this area with Filecoin support so is all of the libraries of Stanford. In general, California is way ahead of us.

JOHN WILLINSKY: That's very good. And I think those points are important to make. And I would only pick up on the notion of it as source that the terrible events, the terrible threat to democracy that was raised on January 6, the immense amount of video.

And I think actually what the New York Times did with it was equally brilliant. But that was a source of understanding. The actual knowledge comes in the analysis for me, comes in the way in which people make sense of it and give us — that was chaos in front of the Capitol. And we need sense-making behind it. So that's my check on this aspect of knowledge.

But I'm interested, and I appreciate the work that you've done and the idea of an intelligent net television group that you're involved in. I think it's promising. And maybe if we had been raised with intelligent television, we wouldn't be so skeptical, or I wouldn't be so skeptical today with regard to its powers.

So with Intelligent Television, tell me how you're moving in that direction. And I want to call knowledge into question in a moment. But let me just go one more with this one. You're working intelligent television, the oxymoron that it is.

PETER KAUFMAN: Now, now, now, now. It was a name that was good at the time maybe. I focus my work now pretty much on writing and producing some stuff where I can but on MIT Open Learning. Intelligent Television gave me a background in understanding, to your point, the dearth —

If you watch television, apart from some great US Open matches going on right now, it's very hard to find things that are of the kind of quality perhaps that the participants in this conversation would look to in a library or a bookstore. And there's no reason for that really because there is so much quality that can be produced for television.

WGBH in Cambridge is one of the most extraordinary. Some of the greatest intellectual property in the world, if we're going to use that term, has been created for television. These 14-hour documentaries on the Civil Rights movement, incredible films about everything, the cosmos, Emmett Till, music.

I think there needs to be a little bit more attention to this universe of video now because that's the way so many people get their information. It's through the moving image. We're going to be, these books — please everyone buy this book now while it's still available before publishers completely collapse.

JOHN WILLINSKY: OK, by all means. Let me pick up just a couple more points, then we'll turn to some questions from the audience. One is your investment in knowledge, which I'm all with you on that. But the question of learning, just in San Francisco here, one of the things kind of struck me on passing the Jewish Community Center was written an inscription that, "Who is wise? One who learns from all people."

PETER KAUFMAN: Yes.

JOHN WILLINSKY: And the emphasis on learning rather than knowledge. And that question of knowledge is part of the controversy, that it's given, it's certified to be knowledge. And who is able to contribute to knowledge has been an open question in this country since its founding. And the right to learn has also been a source of great controversy.

So your choice and the kind of reification of knowledge that is making it into something solid and given versus a more open sense of open learning.

PETER KAUFMAN: It's a great, but can I riff off that?

JOHN WILLINSKY: Yes, please, we can jam.

PETER KAUFMAN: It's a great question and part of the next 20 years perhaps of OpenCourseWare involves, as I understand, some of the things that we're working on now, involves looking at OpenCourseWare as an interactive environment. Right now, what do they call it? Sage on the stage or whatever.

It's a person in front of the final lecture that Gil Strang gave, MIT's mathematics professor, on linear algebra, I'm sure you're going to watch that, has over a million views and we posted it just a few weeks ago. Those are extraordinary things, but you should see the dynamism in the chat.

Is chat on YouTube really the only way that we can have an — I don't think. I'm writing a book for the MIT Press. I've turned it in. It's past peer review. It's on video, and it includes a profile of the very first video ever posted on YouTube.

And I've talked to the guy who shot it when YouTube first started in 2006, I think. It was at a zoo in San Diego. It has 11 million comments. It's like there are people who want to engage. Now some of those comments are goofy but some of them are deep and wonderful. And how do you create an interactive environment where the world can participate in this learning that you speak of, where we can learn from the world? I will say that when I was at — no, the great professors are thinking about this.

JOHN WILLINSKY: OK. Well, then could you take us through, just looking at some of the questions here, the question of AI, you touched on it, and it would be hard to keep current in a book on the developments happening so quickly. You talked about video detection, the deepfakes and areas like that. Do you see, again, a mixed bag or what would be the hopeful course for a generative AI going forward in terms of the fight for free knowledge and the new Enlightenment?

PETER KAUFMAN: Well, echoing the perspective that you're bringing into this conversation, I'd rather hear your views on it than — I'd welcome your views on it rather than expounding myself. But if you pressured me, I'd say one aspect that's super important to respect is the need — given

the ability of machines to generate content that is virtual facsimiles in look and feel of some of the content professionals can publish or people without an axe to grind or knowledge institutions can copy — is to make sure that the content we do publish is certified and verifiable such that it's clear that when something comes out as a Columbia University course or as a Yale course or as MIT course or University of Colorado course —

it is clear that it is that course and not some Canal Street knockoff where someone who might be talking about how essential it is to change our policies given climate change can be made to say by a machine that climate change is a hoax. It's really important to figure out that verification strategy, that apparatus for the future of scholarly publishing online.

JOHN WILLINSKY: OK. Let me keep going with these questions. An anonymous, anonymity is an important aspect of this whole aspect of contributing to knowledge and being able to remain anonymous. Ask, how do we help ensure that our knowledge commons is representative across the diverse human experience without asking too much from those that are already disadvantaged? What about the equity aspects of this fight for free knowledge?

PETER KAUFMAN: I kneel before that question. I think that's essential to figure out. I don't know quite how to do it. Because I don't know how to do it doesn't mean — hopefully, it doesn't mean I'm an idiot. Hopefully, it doesn't mean that I'm in some way biased against those people whom we're discussing right now in terms of economic disadvantage or geographic disadvantage or technology disadvantage.

I don't know, but I recognize that question as essential. I think it's one of the key questions of our time. If I were tsar of all the Russias, I'd take a look at the United Nations sustainable development goals. I think are 16 or 17 of them. And I'd add one or two more around these areas of information and the rest of the world. Worth another conversation perhaps, super important.

JOHN WILLINSKY: OK. These questions are covering a lot of territory. One wants to come back to Central Park, the most highly funded park per acre in the US, thanks to private sponsorship, also makes reference to the amount of money contributed by people who live close by and challenges the notion of is this really a public good. And maybe this gets back to that balance or better an example of private efforts being channeled in the right direction. Would you suggest that that's part of what it exemplifies?

PETER KAUFMAN: I mean it exemplifies a lot. I saw another question related to the park that acknowledged the fact that it destroyed entire New York communities in order that the park be built. It's a complex story. There's no question about it.

Today, I look at it as an example of a public good that is somehow sustained in public private-partnerships and that has never in my lifetime anyway — I don't know. I don't think I've lived. Yeah, but in my lifetime anyway, which is long, it's always been there. And it's been there. The extraordinary thing to me about the park is that it's still there given the value that exists, and given —

For example, if you take a look at television and you look at what was the Discovery Channel or the Learning Channel if anybody remembers these things or what was the promise of public broadcasting, which I write about in the book, in the 1960s and you look at what it's become, those things, in particular cable, et cetera, the pressures of capital, reverting to an earlier question, and the dynamic that you were unfurling earlier has propelled the Learning Channel into TLC. And now these are half-hour shows about tattoo parlors.

One show that was called 17 and Pregnant was bested by another show called 16 and Pregnant. That's the trajectory that capital can sometimes take you on. It's a minor miracle that Central Park exists today given the amount of moneyed interests that surround it physically and otherwise.

JOHN WILLINSKY: All right. Let me take the broad question. We're just coming to the top of the hour here. And this is the question that maybe divides us as well, Peter, if I can say that. Not that so many things do, I know. But this question of the project versus the manifesto.

You cite manifestos, a great number. Richard Stallman gets an appendix and Tim Berners-Lee, Wikipedia, Brewster Kahle, Aaron Swartz, Diderot's Encyclopedia, Marx and Engels, Taylor and Weaver, even on enlightenment via television, all these manifestos in your book forms a kind of manifesto.

And one of the questioners asks about how do we convince people who are hooked on entertainment and distraction to come around to reality and truth? And that the manifesto, like the New York Review of Each Other's Books, it can be insular versus the kind of project work where you have a specific project where you want to bring an aspect of knowledge to Central Park, where you want to build a library or you want to free research or you want to make it open courses instead of OpenCourseWare at MIT.

What about this argument in terms of how we live, the pull of manifestos versus the attraction of projects?

PETER KAUFMAN: I think it's a great question. A manifesto is only so good. You have to actually then, what is it? That challenge is not to interpret the world, someone said that, but to create it or —

JOHN WILLINSKY: Change it. Yeah, it's Marx.

PETER KAUFMAN: That guy. I didn't know he'd come up today. But you brought him up, not me. You mentioned him. Yeah, I think there's a necessary balance between manifesto, project, and somewhere in there is education. Somewhere in there is tool building such that everybody has access to these tools.

In a way, it's amazing what the mobile phone, cell phone revolution has accomplished by putting in effect a camera and a speaker in everybody's pocket. It remains to be seen. Worldwide, by the way, it remains to be seen where that'll take us.

But, yeah, I agree. And I mean if I can pull what should be like the Zoom version of a Greco-Roman wrestling turn, I can say that the books that I have of yours that are here — you didn't know this was coming — are history books in many ways but then they're coupled with a recent plan of action.

I think you embody that complementarity in your work, and we should only be so lucky as to all have both of those aspects in what we accomplish.

JOHN WILLINSKY: Oh, that's very kind of you. Let's take that copyright as an issue that you just held up because I think we — it's something we have different views on it but it is my project at this moment, the broken promise and something we can repair for research publications.

Your sense of it, your Eyes on the Prize. You do such a touching job on what copyright has done to producing such an important documentary about the Civil Rights movement. Tears welled up and we were reading about rights and permissions.

Again, the credit to your writing. But what do you see then for copyright in the years ahead. I think it's one place where knowledge and learning and intellectual property is part of jurisprudence, part of the legal structure and the legislative aspects of our lives.

PETER KAUFMAN: In the case of Eyes on the Prize, film is still such an early medium. That's the point of this new thing I'm turned in. What is it? Gutenberg 1450s, the Lumiere brothers 1890s. So print has had a 440-year head start on the moving image and already the moving image now 130 years old, I guess, is stumbling down the same messed up — I know this is a family — messed up path that print.

JOHN WILLINSKY: Muck, you do go on, but you do you —

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

PETER KAUFMAN: Right, so in the case of Eyes on the Prize, those videos in VHS form and then DVD form were actually pulled off library shelves because underlying rights had expired. If you look at Maria Bustillos' article in the current edition issue of The Nation, she writes about the fact that it's the same thing is happening with the way publishers are treating electronic books now, where they can disappear, and I've had experience of that.

I think we need to make sure we find a world. All of this is in flux. There's nothing fixed. Wikipedia is the most primary example of a knowledge enterprise that's completely on the move every day with edits being made. Probably 1,000 edits were made during this conversation we've had, seriously.

JOHN WILLINSKY: On your entry.

PETER KAUFMAN: Yeah, that's right, that's right. And on yours. But what is the balance between all those objectives that we outlined at the very beginning of this hour? I think we have far to go to figure that out. But my hope is that in video and in copyright around the moving image, we can exert an influence that reflects our learning from the print experience as opposed to duplicating it.

JOHN WILLINSKY: OK. That's a very good note. We need to wrap this up. Peter, I want to give you a chance to say — I certainly would join you in the thanks to the group, to Trinity and Stanford, in terms of this whole webinar series. I think your book encapsulates, as much as any book could, the spirit of this series in terms of advancing the public good.

So to me, it's been an honor and a pleasure to be a part of this. And thank my colleagues at Stanford.

The Academic Innovation for the Public Good book series is co-organized by Stanford Digital Education and Trinity College. Visit Academic Innovation for the Public Good to learn about upcoming events and to view our program partners and co-sponsors.