Conversation Series

This interview series invites internet pioneers to reflect on the first wave of decentralization: What choices drove the adoption of web technologies and cultivated a vibrant internet culture? What false assumptions allowed the platform centralization and structural injustices of today’s web? With the opportunity to re-decentralize, how can we ensure this process advances inclusivity, equity, and sustainability?
Theodor Nelson and Charles Broskoski
Cathy Marshall and Claire L. Evans
Whitfield Diffie and Jay Graber
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Whitfield Diffie is one of the world’s preeminent cryptographers and a co-creator of Public Key Encryption. Currently, Diffie is Chief Scientist at Cryptic Labs, an innovative research lab primarily focused on solving fundamental problems to advance the viability and growth of the Blockchain.
A mathematician, computer scientist and author, Whitfield is winner of the 2015 Turing Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of Computing. Among his other honors, Whitfield is also an elected Foreign Member of the Royal Society, a IEEE Hamming Medal winner, winner of the Franklin Institute’s Louis E Levy medal, a Fellow of the Computer History Museum and a Marconi Foundation Fellow.
Whitfield received a B.S. in Mathematics from M.I.T. He also holds both an honorary doctorate from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and a Degree of Doctor of Science (Honoris Causa) from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Whitfield is also the co-author with Prof. Susan Landau, of the University of Massachusetts, of the book ‘Privacy on the Line: The politics of wiretapping and encryption’, which has won the Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research and the IEEE-USA award for Distinguished Literary Contributions Furthering Public Understanding of the Profession.
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Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer and coauthor of the pop group YACHT, the founding editor of Terraform, VICE's science-fiction vertical, and the author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet. She is the former futures editor of Motherboard, and a contributor to VICE, Rhizome, The Guardian, Quartz, WIRED, and Aeon Magazine. She is an advisor to design students at Art Center College of Design and a member of the cyberfeminist collective Deep Lab. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Jay is a software developer with an interest in privacy and decentralization tech. She's currently at work on the Happening app.
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Cathy Marshall is a Principal Researcher in Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley Lab. She has led a series of projects investigating analytical work practices and collaborative hypertext, including two system development projects, Aquanet and VIKI. Marshall is mainly interested in studying human interaction when mediated by technology. From her early experiences with hypertext, Marshall discovered the negative effects of having analysts work with formal representation. Marshall learned that information which does not fit in formal representation gets lost as people try to force it into this area.
Cathy has a 20-year history working with hypertext. She worked at Xerox PARC for 11 years and Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Lab for one year. Between 1993 and 1996, while working with PARC, Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall collaborated on Forward Anywhere: Notes on an Exchange between Intersecting Lives, a hypernarrative work based on electronic communication that passed between the two in which they sought "to exchange the remembered and day-to-day substance of our lives". In the essay, "Closure was never a goal in this piece," the two, (Judy Malloy and Cathy Marshall) share their experiences and thoughts about collaborating in "Forward Anywhere," excerpts of which can be found in the site itself. She has also produced works such as "Do Tags Work?" which is a narrative on the effectiveness of archive tagging on the internet.
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Designer, generalist, author. Visionary of an on-line world since 1960; Still working on an alternative system of hypertext. Coined many words now in use, including hypertext, hypermedia, micropayment, transclusion, dildonics. structangle, intertwingled.