You're looking at a woman who was publicly silent for a decade.
Obviously, that's changed, but only recently.
It was several months ago that I gave my very first major public talk, at the Forbes "30 Under 30 Summit" -- 1,500 brilliant people, all under the age of 30.
That meant that in 1998, the oldest among the group were only 14, and the youngest, just four.
I joked with them that some might only have heard of me from rap songs.
Yes, I'm in rap songs.
(Laughter) Almost 40 rap songs.
(Laughter) But the night of my speech, a surprising thing happened.
At the age of 41, I was hit on by a 27-year-old guy.
(Laughter) I know, right?
He was charming, and I was flattered, and I declined.
You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was?
He could make me feel 22 again.
(Laughter) (Applause) I realized, later that night, I'm probably the only person over 40 who does not want to be 22 again.
(Laughter) (Applause) At the age of 22, I fell in love with my boss.
And at the age of 24, I learned the devastating consequences.
Can I see a show of hands of anyone here who didn't make a mistake or do something they regretted at 22?
Yep.
That's what I thought.
So like me, at 22, a few of you may have also taken wrong turns and fallen in love with the wrong person, maybe even your boss.
Unlike me, though, your boss probably wasn't the president of the United States of America.
(Laughter) Of course, life is full of surprises.
Not a day goes by that I'm not reminded of my mistake, and I regret that mistake deeply.
In 1998, after having been swept up into an improbable romance, I was then swept up into the eye of a political, legal and media maelstrom like we had never seen before.
Remember, just a few years earlier, news was consumed from just three places: reading a newspaper or magazine, listening to the radio or watching television.
That was it.
But that wasn't my fate.
Instead, this scandal was brought to you by the digital revolution.
That meant we could access all the information we wanted, when we wanted it, anytime, anywhere.
And when the story broke in January 1998, it broke online.
It was the first time the traditional news was usurped by the internet for a major news story -- a click that reverberated around the world.
What that meant for me personally was that overnight, I went from being a completely private figure to a publicly humiliated one, worldwide.
I was patient zero of losing a personal reputation on a global scale almost instantaneously.
This rush to judgment, enabled by technology, led to mobs of virtual stone-throwers.
Granted, it was before social media, but people could still comment online, e-mail stories, and, of course, e-mail cruel jokes.
News sources plastered photos of me all over to sell newspapers, banner ads online, and to keep people tuned to the TV.
Do you recall a particular image of me, say, wearing a beret?
Now, I admit I made mistakes -- especially wearing that beret.
(Laughter) But the attention and judgment that I received -- not the story, but that I personally received -- was unprecedented.
I was branded as a tramp, tart, slut, whore, bimbo, and, of course, "that woman."
I was seen by many, but actually known by few.
And I get it: it was easy to forget that that woman was dimensional, had a soul and was once unbroken.
When this happened to me 17 years ago, there was no name for it.
Now we call it "cyberbullying" and "online harassment."
Today, I want to share some of my experience with you, talk about how that experience has helped shape my cultural observations, and how I hope my past experience can lead to a change that results in less suffering for others.
In 1998, I lost my reputation and my dignity.
I lost almost everything.
And I almost lost my life.
Let me paint a picture for you.
It is September of 1998.
I'm sitting in a windowless office room inside the Office of the Independent Counsel, underneath humming fluorescent lights.
I'm listening to the sound of my voice, my voice on surreptitiously taped phone calls that a supposed friend had made the year before.
I'm here because I've been legally required to personally authenticate all 20 hours of taped conversation.
For the past eight months, the mysterious content of these tapes has hung like the sword of Damocles over my head.
I mean, who can remember what they said a year ago?
Scared and mortified, I listen, listen as I prattle on about the flotsam and jetsam of the day; listen as I confess my love for the president, and, of course, my heartbreak; listen to my sometimes catty, sometimes churlish, sometimes silly self being cruel, unforgiving, uncouth; listen, deeply, deeply ashamed, to the worst version of myself, a self I don't even recognize.
A few days later, the Starr Report is released to Congress, and all of those tapes and transcripts, those stolen words, form a part of it.
That people can read the transcripts is horrific enough.
But a few weeks later, the audiotapes are aired on TV, and significant portions made available online.
The public humiliation was excruciating.
Life was almost unbearable.
This was not something that happened with regularity back then in 1998, and by "this," I mean the stealing of people's private words, actions, conversations or photos, and then making them public -- public without consent, public without context and public without compassion.
Fast-forward 12 years, to 2010, and now social media has been born.
The landscape has sadly become much more populated with instances like mine, whether or not someone actually made a mistake, and now, it's for both public and private people.
The consequences for some have become dire, very dire.
I was on the phone with my mom in September of 2010, and we were talking about the news of a young college freshman from Rutgers University, named Tyler Clementi.
Sweet, sensitive, creative Tyler was secretly webcammed by his roommate while being intimate with another man.
When the online world learned of this incident, the ridicule and cyberbullying ignited.
A few days later, Tyler jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death.
He was 18.
My mom was beside herself about what happened to Tyler and his family, and she was gutted with pain in a way that I just couldn't quite understand.
And then eventually, I realized she was reliving 1998, reliving a time when she sat by my bed every night, reliving -- (Chokes up) sorry -- reliving a time when she made me shower with the bathroom door open, and reliving a time when both of my parents feared that I would be humiliated to death, literally.
Today, too many parents haven't had the chance to step in and rescue their loved ones.
Too many have learned of their child's suffering and humiliation after it was too late.
Tyler's tragic, senseless death was a turning point for me.
It served to recontextualize my experiences, and I then began to look at the world of humiliation and bullying around me and see something different.
In 1998, we had no way of knowing where this brave new technology called the internet would take us.
Since then, it has connected people in unimaginable ways -- joining lost siblings, saving lives, launching revolutions ...
But the darkness, cyberbullying, and slut-shaming that I experienced had mushroomed.
Every day online, people -- especially young people, who are not developmentally equipped to handle this -- are so abused and humiliated that they can't imagine living to the next day.
And some, tragically, don't.
And there's nothing virtual about that.
Childline, a UK nonprofit that's focused on helping young people on various issues, released a staggering statistic late last year: from 2012 to 2013, there was an 87 percent increase in calls and e-mails related to cyberbullying.
A meta-analysis done out of the Netherlands showed that for the first time, cyberbullying was leading to suicidal ideations more significantly than offline bullying.
And you know, what shocked me -- although it shouldn't have -- was other research last year that determined humiliation was a more intensely felt emotion than either happiness or even anger.
Cruelty to others is nothing new.
But online, technologically enhanced shaming is amplified, uncontained and permanently accessible.
The echo of embarrassment used to extend only as far as your family, village, school or community.
But now, it's the online community too.
Millions of people, often anonymously, can stab you with their words, and that's a lot of pain.
And there are no perimeters around how many people can publicly observe you and put you in a public stockade.
There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the internet has jacked up that price.
For nearly two decades now, we have slowly been sowing the seeds of shame and public humiliation in our cultural soil, both on- and offline.
Gossip websites, paparazzi, reality programming, politics, news outlets and sometimes hackers all traffic in shame.
It's led to desensitization and a permissive environment online, which lends itself to trolling, invasion of privacy and cyberbullying.
This shift has created what Professor Nicolaus Mills calls "a culture of humiliation."
Consider a few prominent examples just from the past six months alone.
Snapchat, the service which is used mainly by younger generations and claims that its messages only have the life span of a few seconds.
You can imagine the range of content that that gets.
A third-party app which Snapchatters use to preserve the life span of the messages was hacked, and 100,000 personal conversations, photos and videos were leaked online, to now have a life span of forever.
Jennifer Lawrence and several other actors had their iCloud accounts hacked, and private, intimate, nude photos were plastered across the internet without their permission.
One gossip website had over five million hits for this one story.
And what about the Sony Pictures cyberhacking?
The documents which received the most attention were private e-mails that had maximum public embarrassment value.
But in this culture of humiliation, there is another kind of price tag attached to public shaming.
The price does not measure the cost to the victim, which Tyler and too many others -- notably, women, minorities and members of the LGBTQ community -- have paid, but the price measures the profit of those who prey on them.
This invasion of others is a raw material, efficiently and ruthlessly mined, packaged and sold at a profit.
A marketplace has emerged where public humiliation is a commodity, and shame is an industry.
How is the money made?
Clicks.
The more shame, the more clicks.
The more clicks, the more advertising dollars.
We're in a dangerous cycle.
The more we click on this kind of gossip, the more numb we get to the human lives behind it.
And the more numb we get, the more we click.
All the while, someone is making money off of the back of someone else's suffering.
With every click, we make a choice.
The more we saturate our culture with public shaming, the more accepted it is, the more we will see behavior like cyberbullying, trolling, some forms of hacking and online harassment.
Why?
Because they all have humiliation at their cores.
This behavior is a symptom of the culture we've created.
Just think about it.
Changing behavior begins with evolving beliefs.
We've seen that to be true with racism, homophobia and plenty of other biases, today and in the past.
As we've changed beliefs about same-sex marriage, more people have been offered equal freedoms.
When we began valuing sustainability, more people began to recycle.
So as far as our culture of humiliation goes, what we need is a cultural revolution.
Public shaming as a blood sport has to stop, and it's time for an intervention on the internet and in our culture.
The shift begins with something simple, but it's not easy.
We need to return to a long-held value of compassion, compassion and empathy.
Online, we've got a compassion deficit, an empathy crisis.
Researcher Brené Brown said, and I quote, "Shame can't survive empathy."
Shame cannot survive empathy.
I've seen some very dark days in my life.
It was the compassion and empathy from my family, friends, professionals and sometimes even strangers that saved me.
Even empathy from one person can make a difference.
The theory of minority influence, proposed by social psychologist Serge Moscovici, says that even in small numbers, when there's consistency over time, change can happen.
In the online world, we can foster minority influence by becoming upstanders.
To become an upstander means instead of bystander apathy, we can post a positive comment for someone or report a bullying situation.
Trust me, compassionate comments help abate the negativity.
We can also counteract the culture by supporting organizations that deal with these kinds of issues, like the Tyler Clementi Foundation in the US; in the UK, there's Anti-Bullying Pro; and in Australia, there's PROJECT ROCKIT.
We talk a lot about our right to freedom of expression.
But we need to talk more about our responsibility to freedom of expression.
We all want to be heard, but let's acknowledge the difference between speaking up with intention and speaking up for attention.
The internet is the superhighway for the id.
But online, showing empathy to others benefits us all and helps create a safer and better world.
We need to communicate online with compassion, consume news with compassion and click with compassion.
Just imagine walking a mile in someone else's headline.
I'd like to end on a personal note.
In the past nine months, the question I've been asked the most is "Why?"
Why now?
Why was I sticking my head above the parapet?
You can read between the lines in those questions, and the answer has nothing to do with politics.
The top-note answer was and is "Because it's time."
Time to stop tiptoeing around my past, time to stop living a life of opprobrium and time to take back my narrative.
It's also not just about saving myself.
Anyone who is suffering from shame and public humiliation needs to know one thing: You can survive it.
I know it's hard.
It may not be painless, quick or easy, but you can insist on a different ending to your story.
Have compassion for yourself.
We all deserve compassion and to live both online and off in a more compassionate world.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause and cheers)
We're 25, 26 years after the advent of the Macintosh, which was an astoundingly seminal event in the history of human-machine interface and in computation in general.
It fundamentally changed the way that people thought about computation, thought about computers, how they used them and who and how many people were able to use them.
It was such a radical change, in fact, that the early Macintosh development team in '82, '83, '84 had to write an entirely new operating system from the ground up.
Now, this is an interesting little message, and it's a lesson that has since, I think, been forgotten or lost or something, and that is, namely, that the OS is the interface.
The interface is the OS.
It's like the land and the king (i.e. Arthur) they're inseparable, they are one.
And to write a new operating system was not a capricious matter.
It wasn't just a matter of tuning up some graphics routines.
There were no graphics routines.
There were no mouse drivers.
So it was a necessity.
But in the quarter-century since then, we've seen all of the fundamental supporting technologies go berserk.
So memory capacity and disk capacity have been multiplied by something between 10,000 and a million.
Same thing for processor speeds.
Networks, we didn't have networks at all at the time of the Macintosh's introduction, and that has become the single most salient aspect of how we live with computers.
And, of course, graphics: Today 84 dollars and 97 cents at Best Buy buys you more graphics power than you could have gotten for a million bucks from SGI only a decade ago.
So we've got that incredible ramp-up.
Then, on the side, we've got the Web and, increasingly, the cloud, which is fantastic, but also -- in the regard in which an interface is fundamental -- kind of a distraction.
So we've forgotten to invent new interfaces.
Certainly we've seen in recent years a lot of change in that regard, and people are starting to wake up about that.
So what happens next?
Where do we go from there?
The problem, as we see it, has to do with a single, simple word: "space," or a single, simple phrase: "real world geometry."
Computers and the programming languages that we talk to them in, that we teach them in, are hideously insensate when it comes to space.
They don't understand real world space.
It's a funny thing because the rest of us occupy it quite frequently and quite well.
They also don't understand time, but that's a matter for a separate talk.
So what happens if you start to explain space to them?
One thing you might get is something like the Luminous Room.
The Luminous Room is a system in which it's considered that input and output spaces are co-located.
That's a strangely simple, and yet unexplored idea, right?
When you use a mouse, your hand is down here on the mouse pad.
It's not even on the same plane as what you're talking about: The pixels are up on the display.
So here was a room in which all the walls, floors, ceilings, pets, potted plants, whatever was in there, were capable, not only of display but of sensing as well.
And that means input and output are in the same space enabling stuff like this.
That's a digital storage in a physical container.
The contract is the same as with real word objects in real world containers.
Has to come back out, whatever you put in.
This little design experiment that was a small office here knew a few other tricks as well.
If you presented it with a chess board, it tried to figure out what you might mean by that.
And if there was nothing for them to do, the chess pieces eventually got bored and hopped away.
The academics who were overseeing this work thought that that was too frivolous, so we built deadly serious applications like this optics prototyping workbench in which a toothpaste cap on a cardboard box becomes a laser.
The beam splitters and lenses are represented by physical objects, and the system projects down the laser beam path.
So you've got an interface that has no interface.
You operate the world as you operate the real world, which is to say, with your hands.
Similarly, a digital wind tunnel with digital wind flowing from right to left -- not that remarkable in a sense; we didn't invent the mathematics.
But if you displayed that on a CRT or flat panel display, it would be meaningless to hold up an arbitrary object, a real world object in that.
Here, the real world merges with the simulation.
And finally, to pull out all the stops, this is a system called Urp, for urban planners, in which we give architects and urban planners back the models that we confiscated when we insisted that they use CAD systems.
And we make the machine meet them half way.
It projects down digital shadows, as you see here.
And if you introduce tools like this inverse clock, then you can control the sun's position in the sky.
That's 8 a.m. shadows.
They get a little shorter at 9 a.m.
There you are, swinging the sun around.
Short shadows at noon and so forth.
And we built up a series of tools like this.
There are inter-shadowing studies that children can operate, even though they don't know anything about urban planning: To move a building, you simply reach out your hand and you move the building.
A material wand makes the building into a sort of Frank Gehry thing that reflects light in all directions.
Are you blinding passers by and motorists on the freeways?
A zoning tool connects distant structures, a building and a roadway.
Are you going to get sued by the zoning commission?
And so forth.
Now, if these ideas seem familiar or perhaps even a little dated, that's great; they should seem familiar.
This work is 15 years old.
This stuff was undertaken at MIT and the Media Lab under the incredible direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii, director of the Tangible Media Group.
But it was that work that was seen by Alex McDowell, one of the world's legendary production designers.
But Alex was preparing a little, sort of obscure, indie, arthouse film called "Minority Report" for Steven Spielberg, and invited us to come out from MIT and design the interfaces that would appear in that film.
And the great thing about it was that Alex was so dedicated to the idea of verisimilitude, the idea that the putative 2054 that we were painting in the film be believable, that he allowed us to take on that design work as if it were an R&amp;D effort.
And the result is sort of gratifyingly perpetual.
People still reference those sequences in "Minority Report" when they talk about new UI design.
So this led full circle, in a strange way, to build these ideas into what we believe is the necessary future of human machine interface: the Spatial Operating Environment, we call it.
So here we have a bunch of stuff, some images.
And, using a hand, we can actually exercise six degrees of freedom, six degrees of navigational control.
And it's fun to fly through Mr. Beckett's eye.
And you can come back out through the scary orangutan.
And that's all well and good.
Let's do something a little more difficult.
Here, we have a whole bunch of disparate images.
We can fly around them.
So navigation is a fundamental issue.
You have to be able to navigate in 3D.
Much of what we want computers to help us with in the first place is inherently spatial.
And the part that isn't spatial can often be spatialized to allow our wetware to make greater sense of it.
Now we can distribute this stuff in many different ways.
So we can throw it out like that.
Let's reset it.
We can organize it this way.
And, of course, it's not just about navigation, but about manipulation as well.
So if we don't like stuff, or we're intensely curious about Ernst Haeckel's scientific falsifications, we can pull them out like that.
And then if it's time for analysis, we can pull back a little bit and ask for a different distribution.
Let's just come down a bit and fly around.
So that's a different way to cwalker@example.org.
If you're of a more analytical nature then you might want, actually, to look at this as a color histogram.
So now we've got the stuff color-sorted, angle maps onto color.
And now, if we want to select stuff, 3D, space, the idea that we're tracking hands in real space becomes really important because we can reach in, not in 2D, not in fake 2D, but in actual 3D.
Here are some selection planes.
And we'll perform this Boolean operation because we really love yellow and tapirs on green grass.
So, from there to the world of real work.
Here's a logistics system, a small piece of one that we're currently building.
There're a lot of elements.
And one thing that's very important is to combine traditional tabular data with three-dimensional and geospatial information.
So here's a familiar place.
And we'll bring this back here for a second.
Maybe select a little bit of that.
And bring out this graph.
And we should, now, be able to fly in here and have a closer look.
These are logistics elements that are scattered across the United States.
One thing that three-dimensional interactions and the general idea of imbuing computation with space affords you is a final destruction of that unfortunate one-to-one pairing between human beings and computers.
That's the old way, that's the old mantra: one machine, one human, one mouse, one screen.
Well, that doesn't really cut it anymore.
In the real world, we have people who collaborate; we have people who have to work together, and we have many different displays.
And we might want to look at these various images.
We might want to ask for some help.
The author of this new pointing device is sitting over there, so I can pull this from there to there.
These are unrelated machines, right?
So the computation is space soluble and network soluble.
So I'm going to leave that over there because I have a question for Paul.
Paul is the designer of this wand, and maybe its easiest for him to come over here and tell me in person what's going on.
So let me get some of these out of the way.
Let's pull this apart: I'll go ahead and explode it.
Kevin, can you help?
Let me see if I can help us find the circuit board.
Mind you, it's a sort of gratuitous field-stripping exercise, but we do it in the lab all the time.
All right.
So collaborative work, whether it's immediately co-located or distant and distinct, is always important.
And again, that stuff needs to be undertaken in the context of space.
And finally, I'd like to leave you with a glimpse that takes us back to the world of imagery.
This is a system called TAMPER, which is a slightly whimsical look at what the future of editing and media manipulation systems might be.
We at Oblong believe that media should be accessible in much more fine-grained form.
So we have a large number of movies stuck inside here.
And let's just pick out a few elements.
We can zip through them as a possibility.
We can grab elements off the front, where upon they reanimate, come to life, and drag them down onto the table here.
We'll go over to Jacques Tati here and grab our blue friend and put him down on the table as well.
We may need more than one.
And we probably need, well, we probably need a cowboy to be quite honest.
(Laughter) Yeah, let's take that one.
(Laughter) You see, cowboys and French farce people don't go well together, and the system knows that.
Let me leave with one final thought, and that is that one of the greatest English language writers of the last three decades suggested that great art is always a gift.
And he wasn't talking about whether the novel costs 24.95 [dollars], or whether you have to spring 70 million bucks to buy the stolen Vermeer; he was talking about the circumstances of its creation and of its existence.
And I think that it's time that we asked for the same from technology.
Technology is capable of expressing and being imbued with a certain generosity, and we need to demand that, in fact.
For some of this kind of technology, ground center is a combination of design, which is crucially important.
We can't have advances in technology any longer unless design is integrated from the very start.
And, as well, as of efficacy, agency.
We're, as human beings, the creatures that create, and we should make sure that our machines aid us in that task and are built in that same image.
So I will leave you with that.
Thank you.
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So to ask the obvious question -- actually this is from Bill Gates -- when?
(John Underkoffler: When?)
CA: When real?
When for us, not just in a lab and on a stage?
Can it be for every man, or is this just for corporations and movie producers?
JU: No, it has to be for every human being.
That's our goal entirely.
We won't have succeeded unless we take that next big step.
I mean it's been 25 years.
Can there really be only one interface?
There can't.
CA: But does that mean that, at your desk or in your home, you need projectors, cameras?
You know, how can it work?
JU: No, this stuff will be built into the bezel of every display.
It'll be built into architecture.
The gloves go away in a matter of months or years.
So this is the inevitability about it.
CA: So, in your mind, five years time, someone can buy this as part of a standard computer interface?
JU: I think in five years time when you buy a computer, you'll get this.
CA: Well that's cool.
(Applause) The world has a habit of surprising us as to how these things are actually used.
What do you think, what in your mind is the first killer app for this?
JU: That's a good question, and we ask ourselves that every day.
At the moment, our early-adopter customers -- and these systems are deployed out in the real world -- do all the big data intensive, data heavy problems with it.
So, whether it's logistics and supply chain management or natural gas and resource extraction, financial services, pharmaceuticals, bioinformatics, those are the topics right now, but that's not a killer app.
And I understand what you're asking.
CA: C'mon, c'mon.
Martial arts, games.
C'mon.
(Laughter) John, thank you for making science-fiction real.
JU: It's been a great pleasure.
Thank you to you all.
(Applause)