the human network

I: Cloud People

I want to open this afternoon’s talk with a story about my friend Kate Carruthers.  Kate is a business strategist, currently working at Hyro, over in Surry Hills.  In November, while on a business trip to Far North Queensland, Kate pulled out her American Express credit card to pay for a taxi fare.  Her card was declined.  Kate paid with another card and thought little of it until the next time she tried to use the card – this time to pay for something rather pricier, and more important – and found her card declined once again.

As it turned out, American Express had cut Kate’s credit line in half, but hadn’t bothered to inform her of this until perhaps a day or two before, via post.  So here’s Kate, far away from home, with a crook credit card.  Thank goodness she had another card with her, or it could have been quite a problem.  When she contacted American Express to discuss that credit line change – on a Friday evening – she discovered that this ‘consumer’ company kept banker’s hours in its credit division.  That, for Kate, was the last straw.  She began to post a series of messages to Twitter:

“I can’t believe how rude Amex have been to me; cut credit limit by 50% without notice; declined my card while in QLD even though acct paid”

“since Amex just treated me like total sh*t I just posted a chq for the balance of my account & will close acct on Monday”

“Amex is hardly accepted anywhere anyhow so I hardly use it now & after their recent treatment I’m outta there”

“luckily for me I have more than enough to just pay the sucker out & never use Amex again”

“have both a gold credit card & gold charge card with amex until monday when I plan to close both after their crap behaviour”

One after another, Kate sent this stream of messages out to her Twitter followers.  All of her Twitter followers.  Kate’s been on Twitter for a long time – well over three years – and she’s accumulated a lot of followers.  Currently, she has over 8300 followers, although at the time she had her American Express meltdown, the number was closer to 7500.

Let’s step back and examine this for a moment.  Kate is, in most respects, a perfectly ordinary (though whip-smart) human being.  Yet she now has this ‘cloud’ of connections, all around her, all the time, through Twitter.  These 8300 people are at least vaguely aware of whatever she chooses to share in her tweets.  They care enough to listen, even if they are not always listening very closely.  A smaller number of individuals (perhaps a few hundred, people like me) listen more closely.  Nearly all the time we’re near a computer or a mobile, we keep an eye on Kate.  (Not that she needs it.  She’s thoroughly grown up.  But if she ever got into a spot of trouble or needed a bit of help, we’d be on it immediately.)

This kind of connectivity is unprecedented in human history.  We came from villages where perhaps a hundred of us lived close enough together that there were no secrets.  We moved to cities where the power of numbers gave us all a degree of anonymity, but atomized us into disconnected individuals, lacking the social support of a community.  Now we come full circle.  This is the realization of the ‘Global Village’ that Marshall McLuhan talked about fifty years ago.  At the time McLuhan though of television as a retribalizing force.  It wasn’t.  But Facebook and Twitter and the mobiles each of us carry with us during all our waking hours?  These are the new retribalizing forces, because they keep us continuously connected with one another, allowing us to manage connections in every-greater numbers.

Anything Kate says, no matter how mundane, is now widely known.  But it’s more than that.  Twitter is text, but it is also links that can point to images, or videos, or songs, or whatever you can digitize and upload to the Web.  Kate need simply drop a URL into a tweet and suddenly nearly ten thousand people are aware of it.  If they like it, they will send it along (‘re-tweet’ is the technical term), and it will spread out quickly, like waves on a pond.

But Twitter isn’t a one-way street.  Kate is ‘following’ 7250 individuals; that is, she’s receiving tweets from them.  That sounds like a nearly impossible task: how can you pay attention to what that many people have to say?  It’d be like trying to listen to every conversation at Central Station (or Flinders Street Station) at peak hour.  Madness.  And yet, it is possible.  Tools have been created that allow you to keep a pulse on the madness, to stick a toe into the raging torrent of commentary.

Why would you want to do this?  It’s not something that you need to do (or even want to do) all the time, but there are particular moments – crisis times – when Twitter becomes something else altogether.  After an earthquake or other great natural disaster, after some pivotal (or trivial) political event, after some stunning discovery.  The 5650 people I follow are my connection to all of that.  My connection is broad enough that someone, somewhere in my network is nearly always nearly the first to know something, among the first to share what they know.  Which means that I too, if I am paying attention, am among the first to know.

Businesses have been built on this kind of access.  An entire sector of the financial services industry, from DowJones to Bloomberg, has thrived because it provides subscribers with information before others have it – information that can be used on a trading floor.  This kind of information freely comes to the very well-connected.  This kind of information can be put to work to make you more successful as an individual, in your business, or in whatever hobbies you might pursue.  And it’s always there.  All you need do is plug into it.

When you do plug into it, once you’ve gotten over the initial confusion, and you’ve dedicated the proper time and tending to your network, so that it grows organically and enthusiastically, you will find yourself with something amazingly flexible and powerful.  Case in point: in December I found myself in Canberra for a few days.  Where to eat dinner in a town that shuts down at 5 pm?  I asked Twitter, and forty-five minutes later I was enjoying some of the best seafood laksa I’ve had in Australia.  A few days later, in the Barossa, I asked Twitter which wineries I should visit – and the top five recommendations were very good indeed.  These may seem like trivial instances – though they’re the difference between a good holiday and a lackluster one – but what they demonstrate is that Twitter has allowed me to plug into all of the expertise of all of the thousands of people I am connected to.  Human brainpower, multiplied by 5650 makes me smarter, faster, and much, much more effective.  Why would I want to live any other way?  Twitter can be inane, it can be annoying, it can be profane and confusing and chaotic, but I can’t imagine life without it, just as I can’t imagine life without the Web or without my mobile.  The idea that I am continuously connected and listening to a vast number of other people – even as they listen to me – has gone from shocking to comfortable in just over three years.

Kate and I are just the leading edge.  Where we have gone, all of the rest of you will soon follow.  We are all building up our networks, one person at a time.  A child born in 2010 will spend their lifetime building up a social network.  They’ll never lose track of any individual they meet and establish a connection with.  That connection will persist unless purposely destroyed.  Think of the number of people you meet throughout your lives, who you establish some connection with, even if only for a few hours.  That number would easily reach into the thousands for every one of us.  Kate and I are not freaks, we’re simply using the bleeding edge of a technology that will be almost invisible and not really worth mentioning by 2020.

All of this means that the network is even more alluring than it was a few years ago, and will become ever more alluring with the explosive growth in social networks.  We are just at the beginning of learning how to use these new social networks.  First we kept track of friends and family.  Then we moved on to business associates.  Now we’re using them to learn, to train ourselves and train others, to explore, to explain, to help and to ask for help.  They are becoming a new social fabric which will knit us together into an unfamiliar closeness.  This is already creating some interesting frictions for us.  We like being connected, but we also treasure the moments when we disconnect, when we can’t be reached, when our time and our thoughts are our own.  We preach focus to our children, but find our time and attention increasing divided by devices that demand service: email, Web, phone calls, texts, Twitter, Facebook, all of it brand new, and all of it seemingly so important that if we ignore any of them we immediately feel the cost.  I love getting away from it all.  I hate the backlog of email that greets me when I return.  Connecting comes with a cost.  But it’s becoming increasingly impossible to imagine life without it.

II: Eyjafjallajökull

I recently read a most interesting blog post.  Chase Saunders, a software architect and entrepreneur in Maine (not too far from where I was born) had a bit of a brainwave and decided to share it with the rest of the world.  But you may not like it.  Saunders begins with: “For me to get really mad at a company, it takes more than a lousy product or service: it’s the powerlessness I feel when customer service won’t even try to make things right.  This happens to me about once a year.”  Given the number of businesses we all interact with in any given year – both as consumers and as client businesses – this figure is far from unusual.  There will be times when we get poor value for money, or poor service, or a poor response time, or what have you.  The world is a cruel place.  It’s what happens after that cruelty which is important: how does the business deal with an upset customer?  If they fail the upset customer, that’s when problems can really get out of control.

In times past, an upset customer could cancel their account, taking their business elsewhere.  Bad, but recoverable.  These days, however, customers have more capability, precisely because of their connectivity.  And this is where things start to go decidedly pear-shaped.  Saunders gets to the core of his idea:

Let’s say you buy a defective part from ACME Widgets, Inc. and they refuse to refund or replace it.  You’re mad, and you want the world to know about this awful widget.  So you pop over to AdRevenge and you pay them a small amount. Say $3.  If the company is handing out bad widgets, maybe some other people have already done this… we’ll suppose that before you got there, one guy donated $1 and another lady also donated $1.  So now we have 3 people who have paid a total of $5 to warn other potential customers about this sketchy company…the 3 vengeful donations will go to the purchase of negative search engine advertising.  The ads are automatically booked and purchased by the website…

And there it is.  Your customers – your angry customers – have found an effective way to band together and warn every other potential customer just how badly you suck, and will do it every time your name gets typed into a search engine box.  And they’ll do it whether or not their complaints are justified.  In fact, your competitors could even game the system, stuffing it up with lots of false complaints.  It will quickly become complete, ugly chaos.

You’re probably all donning your legal hats, and thinking about words like ‘libel’ and ‘defamation’.  Put all of that out of your mind.  The Internet is extraterritorial, it and effectively ungovernable, despite all of the neat attempts of governments from China to Iran to Australia to stuff it back into some sort of box.  Ban AdRevenge somewhere, it pops up somewhere else – just as long as there’s a demand for it.  Other countries – perhaps Iceland or Sweden, and certainly the United States – don’t have the same libel laws as Australia, yet their bits freely enter the nation over the Internet.  There is no way to stop AdRevenge or something very much like AdRevenge from happening.  No way at all.  Resign yourself to this, and embrace it, because until you do you won’t be able to move on, into a new type of relationship with your customers.

Which brings us back to our beginning, and a very angry Kate Carruthers.  Here she is, on a Friday night in Far North Queensland, spilling quite a bit of bile out onto Twitter.  Everyone one of the 7500 people who read her tweets will bear her experience in mind the next time they decide whether they will do any business with American Express.  This is damage, probably great damage to the reputation of American Express, damage that could have been avoided, or at least remediated before Kate ‘went nuclear’.

But where was American Express when all of this was going on?  While Kate expressed her extreme dissatisfaction with American Express, its own marketing arm was busily cooking up a scheme to harness Twitter.  It’s Open Forum Pulse website shows you tweets from small businesses around the world.  Ironic, isn’t it? American Express builds a website to show us what others are saying on Twitter, all the while ignoring about what’s being said about it.  So the fire rages, uncontrolled, while American Express fiddles.

There are other examples.  On Twitter, one of my friends lauded the new VAustralia Premium Economy service to the skies, while VAustralia ran some silly marketing campaign that had four blokes sending three thousand tweets over two days in Los Angeles.  Sure, I want to tune into that stream of dreck and drivel.  That’s exactly what I’m looking for in the age of information overload: more crap.

This is it, the fundamental disconnect, the very heart of the matter.  We all need to do a whole lot less talking, and a whole lot more listening.  That’s true for each of us as individuals: we’re so well-connected now that by the time we do grow into a few thousand connections we’d be wiser listening than speaking, most of the time.  But this is particularly true for businesses, which make their living dealing with customers.  The relationship between businesses and their customers has historically been characterized by a ‘throw it over the wall’ attitude.  There is no wall, anywhere.  The customer is sitting right beside you, with a megaphone pointed squarely into your ear.

If we were military planners, we’d call this ‘asymmetric warfare’.  Instead, we should just give it the name it rightfully deserves: 21^st-century business.  It’s a battlefield out there, but if you come prepared for a 20^th-century conflict – massive armies and big guns – you’ll be overrun by the fleet-footed and omnipresent guerilla warfare your customers will wage against you – if you don’t listen to them.  Like volcanic ash, it may not present a solid wall to prevent your progress.  But it will jam up your engines, and stop you from getting off the ground.

Listening is not a job.  There will be no ‘Chief Listening Officer’, charged with keeping their ear down to the ground, wondering if the natives are becoming restless, ready to sound the alarm when a situation threatens to go nuclear.  There is simply too much to listen to, happening everywhere, all at once.  Any single point which presumed to do the listening for an entire organization – whether an individual or a department – will simply be overwhelmed, drowning in the flow of data.  Listening is not a job: it is an attitude.  Every employee from the most recently hired through to the Chief Executive must learn to listen.  Listen to what is being said internally (therein lies the path to true business success) and learn to listen to what others, outside the boundaries of the organization, are saying about you.

Employees already regularly check into their various social networks.  Right now we think of that as ‘slacking off’, not something that we classify as work.  But if we stretch the definition just a bit, and begin to recognize that the organization we work for is, itself, part of our social network, things become clearer.  Someone can legitimately spend time on Facebook, looking for and responding to issues as they arise.  Someone can be plugged into Twitter, giving it continuous partial attention all day long, monitoring and soothing customer relationships.  And not just someone.  Everyone.  This is a shared responsibility.  Working for the organization means being involved with and connected to the organization’s customers, past, present and future.  Without that connection, problems will inevitably arise, will inevitably amplify, will inevitably result in ‘nuclear events’.  Any organization (or government, or religion) can only withstand so many nuclear events before it begins to disintegrate.  So this isn’t a matter of choice.  This is a basic defensive posture.  An insurance policy, of sorts, protecting you against those you have no choice but to do business with.

Yet this is not all about defense.  Listening creates opportunity.  I get some of my best ideas – such as that AdRevenge article – because I am constantly listening to others’ good ideas.  Your customers might grumble, but they also praise you for a job well done.  That positive relationship should be honored – and reinforced.  As you reinforce the positive, you create a virtuous cycle of interactions which becomes terrifically difficult to disrupt.  When that’s gone on long enough, and broadly enough, you have effectively raised up your own army – in the post-modern, guerilla sense of the word – who will go out there and fight for you and your brand when the haters and trolls and chaos-makers bear down upon you.  These people are connected to you, and will connect to one another because of the passion they share around your products and your business.  This is another network, an important network, an offensive network, and you need both defensive and offensive strategies to succeed on this playing field.

Just as we as individuals are growing into hyperconnectivity, so our businesses must inevitably follow.  Hyperconnected individuals working with disconnected businesses is a perfect recipe for confusion and disaster.  Like must meet with like before the real business of the 21^st-century can begin.

III: Services With a Smile

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, let’s consider the types of products and services required in our densely hyperconnected world.  First and foremost, we are growing into a pressing, almost fanatical need for continuous connectivity.  Wherever we are – even in airplanes – we must be connected.  The quality of that connection – its speed, reliability, and cost – are important co-factors to consider, and it is not always the cheapest connection which serves the customer best.  I pay a premium for my broadband connection because I can send the CEO of my ISP a text any time my link goes down – and my trouble tickets are sorted very rapidly!  Conversely, I went with a lower-cost carrier for my mobile service, and I am paying the price, with missed calls, failed data connections, and crashes on my iPhone.

As connectivity becomes more important, reliability crowds out other factors.  You can offer a premium quality service at a premium price and people will adopt it, for the same reason they will pay more for a reliable car, or for electricity from a reliable supplier, or for food that they’re sure will be wholesome.  Connectivity has become too vital to threaten.  This means there’s room for healthy competition, as providers offer different levels of service at different price points, competing on quality, so that everyone gets the level of service they can afford.  But uptime always will be paramount.

What service, exactly is on offer?  Connectivity comes in at least two flavors: mobile and broadband.  These are not mutually exclusive.  When we’re stationary we use broadband; when we’re in motion we use mobile services.  The transition between these two networks should be invisible and seamless as possible – as pioneered by Apple’s iPhone.

At home, in the office, at the café or library, in fact, in almost any structure, customers should have access to wireless broadband.  This is one area where Australia noticeably trails the rest of the world.  The tariff structure for Internet traffic has led Australians to be unusually conservative with their bits, because there is a specific cost incurred for each bit sent or received.  While this means that ISPs should always have the funding to build out their networks to handle increases in capacity, it has also meant that users protect their networks from use in order to keep costs down.  This fundamental dilemma has subjected wireless broadband in Australia to a subtle strangulation.  We do not have the ubiquitous free wireless access that many other countries – in particular, the United States – have on offer, and this consequently alters our imagination of the possibilities for ubiquitous networking.

Tariffs are now low enough that customers ought to be encouraged to offer wireless networking to the broader public.  There are some security concerns that need to be addressed to make this safe for all parties, but these are easily dealt with.  There is no fundamental barrier to pervasive wireless broadband.  It does not compete with mobile data services.  Rather, as wireless broadband becomes more ubiquitous, people come to rely on continuous connectivity ever more.  Mobile data demand will grow in lockstep as more wireless broadband is offered.  Investment in wireless broadband is the best way to ensure that mobile data services continue to grow.

Mobile data services are best characterized principally by speed and availability.  Beyond a certain point – perhaps a megabit per second – speed is not an overwhelming lure on a mobile handset.  It’s nice but not necessary.  At that point, it’s much more about provisioning: how will my carrier handle peak hour in Flinders Street Station (or Central Station)?  Will my calls drop?  Will I be able to access my cloud-based calendar so that I can grab a map and a phone number to make dinner reservations?  If a customer finds themselves continually frustrated in these activities, one of two things will happen: either the mobile will go back into the pocket, more or less permanently, or the customer will change carriers.  Since the customer’s family, friends and business associates will not be putting their own mobiles back into their pockets, it is unlikely that any customer will do so for any length of time, irrespective of the quality of their mobile service.  If the carrier will not provision, the customers must go elsewhere.

Provisioning is expensive.  But it is also the only sure way to retain your customers.  A customer will put up with poor customer service if they know they have reliable service.  A customer will put up with a higher monthly spend if they have a service they know they can depend upon in all circumstances.  And a customer will quickly leave a carrier who can not be relied upon.  I’ve learned that lesson myself.  Expect it to be repeated, millions of times over, in the years to come, as carriers, regrettably and avoidably, find that their provisioning is inadequate to support their customers.

Wireless is wonderful, and we think of it as a maintenance-free technology, at least from the customer’s point of view.  Yet this is rarely so.  Last month I listened to a talk by Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and Lead Anthropologist at the chipmaker.  Her job is to spend time in the field – across Europe and the developing world – observing  how people really use technology when it escapes into the wild.  Several years ago she spent some time in Singapore, studying how pervasive wireless broadband works in the dense urban landscape of the city-state.  In any of Singapore’s apartment towers – which are everywhere – nearly everyone has access to very high speed wired broadband (perhaps 50 megabits per second) – which is then connected to a wireless router to distribute the broadband throughout the apartment.  But wireless is no great respecter of walls.  Even in my own flat in Surry Hills I can see nine wireless networks from my laptop, including my own.  In a Singapore tower block, the number is probably nearer to twenty or thirty.

Genevieve visited a family who had recently purchased a wireless printer.  They were dissatisfied with it, pronouncing it ‘possessed’.  What do you mean? she inquired.  Well, they explained, it doesn’t print what they tell it to print.  But it does print other things.  Things they never asked for.  The family called for a grandfather to come over and practice his arts of feng shui, hoping to rid the printer of its evil spirits.  The printer, now repositioned to a more auspicious spot, still misbehaved.  A few days later, a knock came on the door.  Outside stood a neighbor, a sheaf of paper in his hands, saying, “I believe these are yours…?”

The neighbor had also recently purchased a wireless printer, and it seems that these two printers had automatically registered themselves on each other’s networks.  Automatic configuration makes wireless networks a pleasure to use, but it also makes for botched configurations and flaky communication.  Most of this is so far outside the skill set of the average consumer that these problems will never be properly remedied.  The customer might make a support call, and maybe – just maybe the problem will be solved.  Or, the problem will persist, and the customer will simply give up.  Even with a support call, wireless networks are often so complex that the problem can’t be wholly solved.

As wireless networks grow more pervasive, Genevieve Bell recommends that providers offer a high-quality hand-holding and diagnostic service to their customers.  They need to offer a ‘tune up’ service that will travel to the customer once a year to make sure everything is running well.  Consumers need to be educated that wireless networks do not come for free.  Like anything else, they require maintenance, and the consumer should come to expect that it will cost them something, every year, to keep it all up and running.  In this, a wireless network is no different than a swimming pool or a lawn.  There is a future for this kind of service: if you don’t offer it, your competitors soon will.

Finally, let me close with what the world looks like when all of these services are working perfectly.  Lately, I’ve become a big fan of Foursquare, a ‘location-based social network’.  Using the GPS on my iPhone, Foursquare allows me to ‘check in’ when I go to a restaurant, a store, or almost anywhere else.  Once I’ve checked in, I can make a recommendation – a ‘tip’ in Foursquare lingo – or simply look through the tips provided by those who have been there before me.  This list of tips is quickly growing longer, more substantial, and more useful.  I can walk into a bar that I’ve never been to before and know exactly which cocktail I want to order.  I know which table at the restaurant offers the quietest corner for a romantic date.  I know which salesperson to talk to for a good deal on that mobile handset.  And so on.  I have immediate and continuous information in depth, and I put that information to work, right now, to make my life better.

The world of hyperconnectivity isn’t some hypothetical place we’ll never see.  We are living in it now.  The seeds of the future are planted in the present.  But the shape of the future is determined by our actions today.  It is possible to blunt and slow Australia’s progress into this world with bad decisions and bad services.  But it is also possible to thrust the nation into global leadership if we can embrace the inevitable trend toward hyperconnectivity, and harness it.  It has already transformed our lives.  It will transform our businesses, our schools, and our government.  You are the carriers of that change.  Your actions will bring this new world into being.

For Ted Nelson

I: Centrifugal Force

We live in the age of networks.  Wherever we are, five billion of us are continuously and ubiquitously connected.  That’s everyone over the age of twelve who earns more than about two dollars a day.  The network has us all plugged into it.  Yet this is only the more recent, and more explicit network.  Networks are far older than this most modern incarnation; they are the foundation of how we think.  That’s true at the most concrete level: our nervous system is a vast neural network.  It’s also true at a more abstract level: our thinking is a network of connections and associations.  This is necessarily reflected in the way we write.

I became aware of this connectedness of our thoughts as I read Ted Nelson’s Literary Machines back in 1982.  Perhaps the seminal introduction to hypertext, Literary Machines opens with the basic assertion that all texts are hypertexts.  Like it or not, we implicitly reference other texts with every word we write.  It’s been like this since we learned to write – earlier, really, because we all crib from one another’s spoken thoughts.  It’s the secret to our success.  Nelson wanted to build a system that would make these implicit relationships explicit, exposing all the hidden references, making text-as-hypertext a self-evident truth.  He never got it.  But Nelson did influence a generation of hackers – Sir Tim Berners-Lee among them – and pushed them toward the implementation of hypertext.

As the universal hypertext system of HTTP and HTML conquered all, hypertext revealed qualities as a medium which had hitherto been unsuspected.  While the great strength of hypertext is its capability for non-linearity – you can depart from the text at any point – no one had reckoned on the force (really, a type of seduction) of those points of departure.  Each link presents an opportunity for exploration, and is, in a very palpable sense, similar to the ringing of a telephone.  Do we answer?  Do we click and follow?  A link is pregnant with meaning, and passing a link by necessarily incurs an opportunity cost.  The linear text is constantly weighed down with a secondary, ‘centrifugal’ force, trying to tear the reader away from the inertia of the text, and on into another space.  The more heavily linked a particular hypertext document is, the greater this pressure.

Consider two different documents that might be served up in a Web browser.  One of them is an article from the New York Times Magazine.  It is long – perhaps ten thousand words – and has, over all of its length, just a handful of links.  Many of these links point back to other New York Times articles.  This article stands alone.  It is a hyperdocument, but it has not embraced the capabilities of the medium.  It has not been seduced.  It is a spinster, of sorts, confident in its purity and haughty in its isolation.  This article is hardly alone.  Nearly all articles I could point to from any professional news source portray the same characteristics of separateness and resistance to connect with the medium they employ.  We all know why this is: there is a financial pressure to keep eyes within the website, because attention has been monetized.  Every link presents an escape route, and a potential loss of income.  Hence, links are kept to a minimum, the losses staunched.  Disappointingly, this has become a model for many other hyperdocuments, even where financial considerations do not conflict with the essential nature of the medium.  The tone has been set.

On the other hand, consider an average article in Wikipedia.  It could be short or long – though only a handful reach ten thousand words – but it will absolutely be sprinkled liberally with links.  Many of these links will point back into Wikipedia, allowing someone to learn the meaning of a term they’re unfamiliar with, or explore some tangential bit of knowledge, but there also will be plenty of links that face out, into the rest of the Web.  This is a hyperdocument which has embraced the nature of medium, which is not afraid of luring readers away under the pressure of linkage.  Wikipedia is a non-profit organization which does not accept advertising and does not monetize attention.  Without this competition of intentions, Wikipedia is itself an example of another variety of purity, the pure expression of the tension between the momentum of the text and centrifugal force of hypertext.

Although commercial hyperdocuments try to fence themselves off from the rest of the Web and the lure of its links, they are never totally immune from its persistent tug.  Just because you have landed somewhere that has a paucity of links doesn’t constrain your ability to move non-linearly.  If nothing else, the browser’s ‘Back’ button continually offers that opportunity, as do all of your bookmarks, the links that lately arrived in email from friends or family or colleagues, even an advertisement proffered by the site.  In its drive to monetize attention, the commercial site must contend with the centrifugal force of its own ads.  In order to be situated within a hypertext environment, a hyperdocument must accept the reality of centrifugal force, even as it tries, ever more cleverly, to resist it.  This is the fundamental tension of all hypertext, but here heightened and amplified because it is resisted and forbidden.  It is a source of rising tension, as the Web-beyond-the-borders becomes ever more comprehensive, meaningful and alluring, while the hyperdocument multiplies its attempts to ensnare, seduce, and retain.

This rising tension has had a consequential impact on the hyperdocument, and, more broadly, on an entire class of documents.  It is most obvious in the way we now absorb news.  Fifteen years ago, we spread out the newspaper for a leisurely read, moving from article to article, generally following the flow of the sections of the newspaper.  Today, we click in, read a bit, go back, click in again, read some more, go back, go somewhere else, click in, read a bit, open an email, click in, read a bit, click forward, and so on.  We allow ourselves to be picked up and carried along by the centrifugal force of the links; with no particular plan in mind – except perhaps to leave ourselves better informed – we flow with the current, floating down a channel which is shaped by the links we encounter along the way.  The newspaper is no longer a coherent experience; it is an assemblage of discrete articles, each of which has no relation to the greater whole.  Our behavior reflects this: most of us already gather our news from a selection of sources (NY Times, BBC, Sydney Morning Herald and Guardian UK in my case), or even from an aggregator such as Google News, which completely abstracts the article content from its newspaper ‘vehicle’.

The newspaper as we have known it has been shredded.  This is not the fault of Google or any other mechanical process, but rather is a natural if unforeseen consequence of the nature of hypertext.  We are the ones who feel the lure of the link; no machine can do that.  Newspapers made the brave decision to situate themselves as islands within a sea of hypertext.  Though they might believe themselves singular, they are not the only islands in the sea.  And we all have boats.  That was bad enough, but the islands themselves are dissolving, leaving nothing behind but metaphorical clots of dirt in murky water.

The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior.  With its centrifugal force, it is constantly pulling us away from wherever we are.  It also presents us with an opportunity cost.  When we load that 10,000-word essay from the New York Times Magazine into our browser window, we’re making a conscious decision to dedicate time and effort to digesting that article. That’s a big commitment.  If we’re lucky – if there are no emergencies or calls on the mobile or other interruptions – we’ll finish it.  Otherwise, it might stay open in a browser tab for days, silently pleading for completion or closure. Every time we come across something substantial, something lengthy and dense, we run an internal calculation: Do I have time for this?  Does my need and interest outweigh all of the other demands upon my attention?  Can I focus?

In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge.  Whatever it is, it is not salient enough, not alluring enough.  It is not so much that we fear commitment as we feel the pressing weight of our other commitments.  We have other places to spend our limited attention.  This calculation and decision has recently been codified into an acronym: “tl;dr”, for “too long; didn’t read”.  It may be weighty and important and meaningful, but hey, I’ve got to get caught up on my Twitter feed and my blogs.

The emergence of the ‘tl;dr’ phenomenon – which all of us practice without naming it – has led public intellectuals to decry the ever-shortening attention span.  Attention spans are not shortening: ten year-olds will still drop everything to read a nine-hundred page fantasy novel for eight days.   Instead, attention has entered an era of hypercompetitive development.  Twenty years ago only a few media clamored for our attention.  Now, everything from video games to chatroulette to real-time Twitter feeds to text messages demand our attention.  Absence from any one of them comes with a cost, and that burden weighs upon us, subtly but continuously, all figuring into the calculation we make when we decide to go all in or hold back.

The most obvious effect of this hypercompetitive development of attention is the shortening of the text.  Under the tyranny of ‘tl;dr’ three hundred words seems just about the right length: long enough to make a point, but not so long as to invoke any fear of commitment.  More and more, our diet of text comes in these ‘bite-sized’ chunks.  Again, public intellectuals have predicted that this will lead to a dumbing-down of culture, as we lose the depth in everything.  The truth is more complex.  Our diet will continue to consist of a mixture of short and long-form texts.  In truth, we do more reading today than ten years ago, precisely because so much information is being presented to us in short form.  It is digestible.  But it need not be vacuous.  Countless specialty blogs deliver highly-concentrated texts to audiences who need no introduction to the subject material.  They always reference their sources, so that if you want to dive in and read the lengthy source work, you are free to commit.  Here, the phenomenon of ‘tl;dr’ reveals its Achilles’ Heel:  shorter the text, the less invested you are.  You give way more easily to centrifugal force.  You are more likely to navigate away.

There is a cost incurred both for substance and the lack thereof.  Such are the dilemmas of hypertext.

II:  Schwarzschild Radius

It appears inarguable that 2010 is the Year of the Electronic Book.  The stars have finally aligned: there is a critical mass of usable, well-designed technology, broad acceptance (even anticipation) within the public, and an agreement among publishers that revenue models do exist. Amazon and its Kindle (and various software simulators for PCs and smartphones) have proven the existence of a market.  Apple’s recently-released iPad is quintessentially a vehicle for iBooks, its own bookstore-and-book-reader package.  Within a few years, tens of millions of both devices, their clones and close copies will be in the hands of readers throughout the world.  The electronic book is an inevitability.

At this point a question needs to be asked: what’s so electronic about an electronic book?  If I open the Stanza application on my iPhone, and begin reading George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, I am presented with something that looks utterly familiar.  Too familiar.  This is not an electronic book.  This is ‘publishing in light’.  I believe it essential that we discriminate between the two, because the same commercial forces which have driven links from online newspapers and magazines will strip the term ‘electronic book’ of all of its meaning.  An electronic book is not simply a one-for-one translation of a typeset text into UTF-8 characters.  It doesn’t even necessarily begin with that translation.  Instead, first consider the text qua text.  What is it?  Who is it speaking to?  What is it speaking about?

These questions are important – essential – if we want to avoid turning living typeset texts into dead texts published in light.  That act of murder would give us less than we had before, because the published in light texts essentially disavow the medium within which they are situated.  They are less useful than typeset texts, purposely stripped of their utility to be shoehorned into a new medium.  This serves the economic purposes of publishers – interested in maximizing revenue while minimizing costs – but does nothing for the reader.  Nor does it make the electronic book an intrinsically alluring object.  That’s an interesting point to consider, because hypertext is intrinsically alluring.  The reason for the phenomenal, all-encompassing growth of the Web from 1994 through 2000 was because it seduced everyone who has any relationship to the text.  If an electronic book does not offer a new relationship to the text, then what precisely is the point?  Portability?  Ubiquity?  These are nice features, to be sure, but they are not, in themselves, overwhelmingly alluring.  This is the visible difference between a book that has been printed in light and an electronic book: the electronic book offers a qualitatively different experience of the text, one which is impossibly alluring.  At its most obvious level, it is the difference between Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia.

Publishers will resist the allure of the electronic book, seeing no reason to change what they do simply to satisfy the demands of a new medium.  But then, we know that monks did not alter the practices within the scriptorium until printed texts had become ubiquitous throughout Europe.  Today’s publishers face a similar obsolescence; unless they adapt their publishing techniques appropriately, they will rapidly be replaced by publishers who choose to embrace the electronic book as a medium,.  For the next five years we will exist in an interregnum, as books published in light make way for true electronic books.

What does the electronic book look like?  Does it differ at all from the hyperdocuments we are familiar with today?  In fifteen years of design experimentation, we’ve learned a lot of ways to present, abstract and play with text.  All of these are immediately applicable to the electronic book.  The electronic book should represent the best of 2010 has to offer and move forward from that point into regions unexplored.  The printed volume took nearly fifty years to evolve into its familiar hand-sized editions.  Before that, the form of the manuscript volume – chained to a desk or placed upon an altar – dictated the size of the book.  We shouldn’t try to constrain our idea of what an electronic book can be based upon what the book has been.  Over the next few years, our innovations will surprise us.  We won’t really know what the electronic book looks like until we’ve had plenty of time to play with them.

The electronic book will not be immune from the centrifugal force which is inherent to the medium.  Every link, every opportunity to depart from the linear inertia of the text, presents the same tension as within any other hyperdocument.  Yet we come to books with a sense of commitment.  We want to finish them.  But what, exactly do we want to finish?  The electronic book must necessarily reveal the interconnectedness of all ideas, of all writings – just as the Web does.  So does an electronic book have a beginning and an end?  Or is it simply a densely clustered set of texts with a well-defined path traversing them?  From the vantage point of 2010 this may seem like a faintly ridiculous question.  I doubt that will be the case in 2020, when perhaps half of our new books are electronic books.  The more that the electronic book yields itself to the medium which constitutes it, the more useful it becomes – and the less like a book.  There is no way that the electronic book can remain apart, indifferent and pure.  It will become a hybrid, fluid thing, without clear beginnings or endings, but rather with a concentration of significance and meaning that rises and falls depending on the needs and intent of the reader.  More of a gradient than a boundary.

It remains unclear how any such construction can constitute an economically successful entity.  Ted Nelson’s “Project Xanadu” anticipated this chaos thirty-five years ago, and provided a solution: ‘transclusion’, which allows hyperdocuments to be referenced and enclosed within other hyperdocuments, ensuring the proper preservation of copyright throughout the hypertext universe.  The Web provides no such mechanism, and although it is possible that one could be hacked into our current models, it seems very unlikely that this will happen.  This is the intuitive fear of the commercial publishers: they see their market dissolving as the sharp edges disappear.  Hence, they tightly grasp their publications and copyrights, publishing in light because it at least presents no slippery slope into financial catastrophe.

We come now to a line which we need to cross very carefully and very consciously, the ‘Schwarzschild Radius’ of electronic books.  (For those not familiar with astrophysics, the Schwarzschild Radius is the boundary to a black hole.  Once you’re on the wrong side you’re doomed to fall all the way in.)  On one side – our side – things look much as they do today.  Books are published in light, the economic model is preserved, and readers enjoy a digital experience which is a facsimile of the physical.  On the other side, electronic books rapidly become almost completely unrecognizable.  It’s not just the financial model which disintegrates.  As everything becomes more densely electrified, more subject to the centrifugal force of the medium, and as we become more familiar with the medium itself, everything begins to deform.  The text, linear for tens or hundreds of thousands of words, fragments into convenient chunks, the shortest of which looks more like a tweet than a paragraph, the longest of which only occasionally runs for more than a thousand words.  Each of these fragments points directly at its antecedent and descendant, or rather at its antecedents and descendants, because it is quite likely that there is more than one of each, simply because there can be more than one of each.  The primacy of the single narrative can not withstand the centrifugal force of the medium, any more than the newspaper or the magazine could.  Texts will present themselves as intense multiplicity, something that is neither a branching narrative nor a straight line, but which possesses elements of both.  This will completely confound our expectations of linearity in the text.

We are today quite used to discontinuous leaps in our texts, though we have not mastered how to maintain our place as we branch ever outward, a fault more of our nervous systems than our browsers.  We have a finite ability to track and backtrack; even with the support of the infinitely patient and infinitely impressionable computer, we lose our way, become distracted, or simply move on.  This is the greatest threat to the book, that it simply expands beyond our ability to focus upon it.  Our consciousness can entertain a universe of thought, but it can not entertain the entire universe at once.  Yet our electronic books, as they thread together and merge within the greater sea of hyperdocuments, will become one with the universe of human thought, eventually becoming inseparable from it.  With no beginning and no ending, just a series of ‘and-and-and’, as the various nodes, strung together by need or desire, assemble upon demand, the entire notion of a book as something discrete, and for that reason, significant, is abandoned, replaced by a unity, a nirvana of the text, where nothing is really separate from anything else.

What ever happened to the book?  It exploded in a paroxysm of joy, dissolved into union with every other human thought, and disappeared forever.  This is not an ending, any more than birth is an ending.  But it is a transition, at least as profound and comprehensive as the invention of moveable type.  It’s our great good luck to live in the midst of this transition, astride the dilemmas of hypertext and the contradictions of the electronic book.  Transitions are chaotic, but they are also fecund.  The seeds of the new grow in the humus of the old.  (And if it all seems sudden and sinister, I’ll simply note that Nietzsche said that new era nearly always looks demonic to the age it obsolesces.)

III:  Finnegans Wiki

So what of Aristotle?  What does this mean for the narrative?  It is easy to conceive of a world where non-fiction texts simply dissolve into the universal sea of texts.  But what about stories?  From time out of mind we have listened to stories told by the campfire.  The Iliad, The Mahabharata, and Beowolf held listeners spellbound as the storyteller wove the tale.  For hours at a time we maintained our attention and focus as the stories that told us who we are and our place in the world traveled down the generations.

Will we lose all of this?  Can narratives stand up against the centrifugal forces of hypertext?  Authors and publishers both seem assured that whatever happens to non-fiction texts, the literary text will remain pure and untouched, even as it becomes a wholly electronic form.  The lure of the literary text is that it takes you on a singular journey, from beginning to end, within the universe of the author’s mind.  There are no distractions, no interruptions, unless the author has expressly put them there in order to add tension to the plot.  A well-written literary text – and even a poorly-written but well-plotted ‘page-turner’ – has the capacity to hold the reader tight within the momentum of linearity. Something is a ‘page-turner’ precisely because its forward momentum effectively blocks the centrifugal force.  We occasionally stay up all night reading a book that we ‘couldn’t put down’, precisely because of this momentum.  It is easy to imagine that every literary text which doesn’t meet this higher standard of seduction will simply fail as an electronic book, unable to counter the overwhelming lure of the medium.

This is something we never encountered with printed books: until the mid-20^th century, the only competition for printed books was other printed books.  Now the entire Web – already quite alluring and only growing more so – offers itself up in competition for attention, along with television and films and podcasts and Facebook and Twitter and everything else that has so suddenly become a regular feature of our media diet.  How can any text hope to stand against that?

And yet, some do.  Children unplugged to read each of the increasingly-lengthy Harry Potter novels, as teenagers did for the Twilight series.  Adults regularly buy the latest novel by Dan Brown in numbers that boggle the imagination.  None of this is high literature, but it is literature capable of resisting all our alluring distractions.  This is one path that the book will follow, one way it will stay true to Aristotle and the requirements of the narrative arc.  We will not lose our stories, but it may be that, like blockbuster films, they will become more self-consciously hollow, manipulative, and broad.  That is one direction, a direction literary publishers will pursue, because that’s where the money lies.

There are two other paths open for literature, nearly diametrically opposed.  The first was taken by JRR Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings.  Although hugely popular, the three-book series has never been described as a ‘page-turner’, being too digressive and leisurely, yet, for all that, entirely captivating.  Tolkien imagined a new universe – or rather, retrieved one from the fragments of Northern European mythology – and placed his readers squarely within it.  And although readers do finish the book, in a very real sense they do not leave that universe.  The fantasy genre, which Tolkien single-handedly invented with The Lord of the Rings, sells tens of millions of books every year, and the universe of Middle-earth, the archetypal fantasy world, has become the playground for millions who want to explore their own imaginations.  Tolkien’s magnum opus lends itself to hypertext; it is one of the few literary works to come complete with a set of appendices to deepen the experience of the universe of the books.  Online, the fans of Middle-earth have created seemingly endless resources to explore, explain, and maintain the fantasy.  Middle-earth launches off the page, driven by its own centrifugal force, its own drive to unpack itself into a much broader space, both within the reader’s mind and online, in the collective space of all of the work’s readers.  This is another direction for the book.  While every author will not be a Tolkien, a few authors will work hard to create a universe so potent and broad that readers will be tempted to inhabit it.  (Some argue that this is the secret of JK Rowling’s success.)

Finally, there is another path open for the literary text, one which refuses to ignore the medium that constitutes it, which embraces all of the ambiguity and multiplicity and liminality of hypertext.  There have been numerous attempts at ‘hypertext fiction’; nearly all of them have been unreadable failures.  But there is one text which stands apart, both because it anticipated our current predicament, and because it chose to embrace its contradictions and dilemmas.  The book was written and published before the digital computer had been invented, yet even features an innovation which is reminiscent of hypertext.  That work is James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, and it was Joyce’s deliberate effort to make each word choice a layered exploration of meaning that gives the text such power.  It should be gibberish, but anyone who has read Finnegans Wake knows it is precisely the opposite.  The text is overloaded with meaning, so much so that the mind can’t take it all in.  Hypertext has been a help; there are a few wikis which attempt to make linkages between the text and its various derived meanings (the maunderings of four generations of graduate students and Joycephiles), and it may even be that – in another twenty years or so – the wikis will begin to encompass much of what Joyce meant.  But there is another possibility.  In so fundamentally overloading the text, implicitly creating a link from every single word to something else, Joyce wanted to point to where we were headed.  In this, Finnegans Wake could be seen as a type of science fiction, not a dystopian critique like Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, nor the transhumanist apotheosis of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (both near-contemporary works) but rather a text that pointed the way to what all texts would become, performance by example.  As texts become electronic, as they melt and dissolve and  link together densely, meaning multiplies exponentially.  Every sentence, and every word in every sentence, can send you flying in almost any direction.  The tension within this text (there will be only one text) will make reading an exciting, exhilarating, dizzying experience – as it is for those who dedicate themselves to Finnegans Wake.

It has been said that all of human culture could be reconstituted from Finnegans Wake.  As our texts become one, as they become one hyperconnected mass of human expression, that new thing will become synonymous with culture.  Everything will be there, all strung together.  And that’s what happened to the book.

Recorded in New York City, 23 June 2008 – the day before I delivered “Hyperpolitics, American Style” at the Personal Democracy Forum. A wide-ranging discussion on hyperconnectivity, hyperpolitics, media, hyperdistribution, and lots of other fun things.

Many thanks to Mark for getting it up!

Here’s a link to the big version.

I.

Everybody talks about the weather. It happens in Singapore, where the weather never changes much, and in Melbourne, where four seasons unfold over the course of an afternoon. Why? It comes down to trust. Conversations with strangers are among the most difficult tasks humans manage: without any mental model of another human being’s behavior, peccadilloes and preferences, common ground is the safest place to begin. A few lines about the rain (or snow or humidity or wind) reveal the inner workings of another person’s mind. Face-to-face, we watch the other person intently, reading the body language, while we listen to the words being said. In the first moments of conversation, sweeping judgments about this stranger are made and welded into place. Their behavior finds a best fit with some other person whose behavior and habits we are already familiar with. A conversation about the weather isn’t idle banter; it’s the rapid-fire exchange of the human protocol.

Should the stranger turn out to be truly strange – prattling on about how aliens from Zeta Reticuli are secretly using their energy beams to melt the icecaps, fooling us into believing in anthropogenic global warming – we’d likely disengage ourselves from that conversation very quickly (and probably very politely), breathing a sigh of relief under our breath. Of course, we might share their belief in Grey Alien conspiracies, in which case the conversation would shift to an entirely different level. Talk about the weather is an opening parley, an invitation to a deeper involvement.

Some individuals are incredibly adept in conversational forms; some much less so. Some give you everything up front, others are more mysterious. In each case it’s a trial by fire, a strategic assessment: are you sufficiently like me that we can communicate? Extroverts can talk themselves into loneliness, consistently denying to others the openings they need to introduce themselves, while introverts will hang back from that opening until the moment has passed. The middle approach is best, a mixture of forwardness and reticence, but this is a difficult balance to achieve, because all of the human neuroses of rejection (at a biological level, a rejected human faces an uphill battle passing his genes along to subsequent generations) are amplified during the first moments of conversation. There are so many ways a first conversation can run off the rails – a misinterpreted word, an inappropriate joke, a whopper of a prejudice. Children, unformed and blissfully ignorant, have an easier time of it, for they haven’t learned what to reject. As we grow older, and into a better sense of our likes and dislikes, conversation becomes a minefield. It’s amazing that adults make any friends at all, but then, as adults we tend to seek the company of the like-minded for precisely this reason. We know we won’t like everyone we meet.

II.

Beginnings are delicate times. In the social sphere this is most true in those first few words exchanged in conversation, when everything is at risk. In the online world, these risks are modulated, both amplified and attenuated. Over a decade ago, psychologist Sherry Turkle noted that the ability to redefine one’s self online could bring out profoundly extroverted qualities across a wide range of otherwise “introverted” individuals. Students who would never raise their hand in a classroom often become prolific contributors to class discussions when given the opportunity to submit their comments electronically. In a given set of students, some will be more verbal, while others will be more discursive, needing time to think through a response before presenting it to an instructor or peers. The classroom environment is not anonymous, unlike the wilder corners of the Internet, so any contribution carries with it the risk of embarrassment and failure. Yet, allowing individuals to define themselves through expository practices, instead of relying solely on verbal expression, has helped a broader range of students participate in the educational process, bolstering self-confidence, and increasing participation.

The amplifications associated with electronically-mediated conversation are not wholly positive. When the mediation is complete – that is, when there is no real-world embodiment accompanying the electronic communication – individuals have tendency to project their own preconceptions onto the words of others. This is a classic quality of a low-resolution medium, as first defined by Marshal McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Words are a very low-resolution medium, so the mind of the reader fills in all the missing details, ascribing all sorts of motivations to the author which may not be true. We enjoy an novelist’s words when they grow into a world inside our minds, but online, in the absence of the embodied experience that grows out of a face-to-face meeting of minds, we work overtime to fill the gaps in our understanding with stereotypes, assumptions, and emotions.

From the earliest days of USENET, the original Internet-wide bulletin-board system, “flame wars” have erupted in every thread, on nearly every conceivable topic – from atheism to dog care – precisely because individuals assumed too much about the other parties to the conversation. Too quick to attack the perceived indiscretions of others, and too slow to see their own faults, online conversationalists have a tendency to amplify the worst qualities of human communication. Some of this comes from the novelty of the situation: we’ve only had the Internet-as-conversational-space for half a generation. The normative behaviors which govern our conduct in the embodied world are being rewritten to encompass life online. At the best of times, this is a trial-and-error process conducted by individuals full of good will. There are numerous other occasions when individuals, fully aware of the disruptive potential of the Internet as amplifier, set out to deliberately poison the conversation. These efforts are frequently effective, particularly when the conversation is in its opening stages, and trust relationships between the participants are still being established. As a general rule of thumb, the longer a conversation has been going on, the more resistant it is to these sorts of attacks; the trust built up by the continuing interaction between all parties to a conversation provides an increasingly effective firewall.

Sometimes, for the very best of reasons, online conversations can turn ugly. From 1990 through 1994, I was a reader of and occasional contributor to sci.virtual-worlds, the USENET group for discussion about all things relating to virtual reality and computer simulation. At the time, I was deeply engaged in the engineering and development of virtual reality systems, so I considered sci.virtual-worlds an indispensable resource, a place where I could ask others about their own experiences, answer questions in areas where I possessed expertise, and share in the growing recognition that VR enjoyed in the early 1990s.

On a Saturday afternoon late in 1992 I read a post on sci.virtual-worlds which greatly excited me. An individual was claiming that he’d made a mathematical breakthrough in the computation of real-time computer graphics – the sorts of imagery you see in every video game – that would speed it up by a factor of ten to a hundred times. He posted his almost unbelievable results, and asked for expressions of interest in his work. I quickly wrote back, introduced myself, stated my credentials, listed my needs, and set up a meeting with this bright lad.

A few hours later, an expert in computer graphics – an individual who’d been working in the field for a decade or more – posted a lengthy rebuttal to these supposed “results,” giving a half a dozen reasons why these claims were absolutely impossible, ending with a wry suspicion that someone had left their computer logged in over the weekend, and that this post had simply been sent out as a prank to excite the more gullible readers of sci.virtual-worlds. This person, speaking from the undeniable authority of his position as a respected academic and researcher, essentially shut down all consideration, on sci.virtual-worlds, of this breakthrough in computer graphics.

As it turned out, the researcher was wrong. This innovation, known today as “software rendering,” became the cornerstone for almost all the computer graphics in use today. I took my meeting with the inventor (who quietly laughed at the ignorance of this famous researcher), saw the results of his efforts for myself, and knew the truth of the matter. Because I had no pre-conceptions (or rather, less prejudices than this expert) I was open to this startling, unexpected discovery. I got there first, and used that technology to create the very first VRML browser – over a year before anyone else was putting the technology to work for them.

Expertise is not enough to carry a conversation. Reputation may open the door, but conversations are not lectures. Trust emerges over time, and that which is believed to be true – rightly or wrongly – emerges from trust. The many parties to a conversation are constantly reinforcing their trust relationships with every message they read, and every word they post. Pronouncements made Ex Cathedra do not have any great effect on the conversation – unless the individual making the pronouncement is greatly trusted, and is willing to engage in conversation. This places experts at a disadvantage, because expertise carries only modest weight within a conversation, and assertion of expertise, in advance of trust, sours the conversation. Humility is the only successful long-term strategy.

III.

Institutions do not have conversations. It is a capability only given to individuals. The voice of the institution is never conversational; it can be pedantic or persuasive, but it is never engaged, because there is no singular human to engage. Institutions aggregate individuals in order to maximize their institutional effectiveness, but that aggregation is not without its costs. (Nor do institutions maximize the effectiveness of the individuals thus aggregated, except as an afterthought.) The trepidation with which institutions treat bloggers within their own ranks is a reflection of institutional inability to winnow itself down to a single voice, engaged in conversation. The pieces do not match up. The blogger can not speak for the institution, but neither can the institution converse with an individual. This was of modest consequence in a era, only recently past, when our ability to conduct these conversations was restricted by proximity and synchrony.

With the advent of hyperconnectivity – the ability of every human being to effectively communicate with every other human being on the planet at little or no cost to themselves – the individual is hyperempowered in conversational abilities, relative to the institution. Individuals can (and regularly do) have conversations that confound institutions, because these conversations lie beyond any institutional zone of control. In a hyperconnected era, each conversation is a Temporary Autonomous Zone, where individuals can quickly form trust relationships (ad hoc social networks) around any topic of interest, exchange opinions, share information, and develop strategies. These are not the necessary outcomes of any conversational moment (there is a pure joy in conversation which frees it from any utilitarian requirements) but they are the potentials of any conversation. These potentials are inherently dangerous to all institutions.

The institution finds itself caught in a paradox: aggregation makes it powerful, but takes away its voice. When power was important, the institution prospered. Now that the cultural balance is shifting toward hyperempowered individuals engaging in conversation, the institution is under threat. It is being disempowered in a way that it can not adapt to without a fundamental restructuring of its organizational behavior. This is something that governments are only slowly coming to recognize, but educators (and, in particular, educational administrators) are already well aware that their students are more empowered than the educational institutions they attend. The desynchronization between the scope of institutional power and the chaos of unconstrained and unconstrainable conversational hyperempowerment presents a challenge that will transform the institution – or kill it.

Some institutions will be entirely unable to adapt to the new selection forces of hyperconnectivity and hyperempowerment. They will trudge along, facing a growing set of roadblocks, until, exhausted, they collapse. Some others will change by degrees, reacting to the changes of the environment, but always with some delay, and therefore consistently missing opportunities for advantage, as they change just enough to satisfy the requirements of the moment’s pressures.

The smartest institutions will embrace conversation wholeheartedly, and mutate into new forms of organization which favor transparency and the free flow of information in highly decentralized forms. Instead of a hierarchy, these institutions will look more like a highly-reinforced social network of experts, banded together in common pursuit of a goal, utilizing all the tools of communication and conversation to amplify their effectiveness both within the institution, and beyond these newly permeable institutional boundaries, to other individuals. This kind of institution can participate within a conversation, because individuals have not be aggregated, but rather, use their institutional/social network to become more expert individuals. They speak for themselves, but from the expertise of the network which supports them.

How does an institution manage this transition? How does it restructure itself into a network of highly empowered individuals? How does it avoid being drowned out in an a noisy cacophony of ever-more-vital conversations? Once again, humility is the only successful long-term strategy. The institution must recognize its disempowered state, and embrace the opportunity to relearn, revision and redirect its organizational energies.

This is not easy, nor do I make any claims to a simple five-step program which might produce a seamless transition from the aggregated institutional form to the social-network model. But consider this: The individuals who make up institutions are already hyperempowered in the conversations they have outside the institutional form. There is, at least, a place to begin. Without humility none of this will happen. We must be honest enough to acknowledge that institutions and individuals rarely surrender their own power. Yet the exercise of power inevitably breeds that which is capable of resisting power. This has now happened – across all human institutions. Humility is the only viable option.

I. The Wheels Fall Off the Cart

In mid-1994, sometime shortly after Tony Parisi and I had fused the new technology of the World Wide Web to a 3D visualization engine, to create VRML, we paid a visit to the University of Santa Cruz, about 120 kilometers south of San Francisco. Two UCSC students wanted to pitch us on their own web media project. The Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA, featured a simple directory of artists, complete with links to MP3 files of these artists’ recordings. (Before I go any further, I should state that they had all the necessary clearances to put musical works up onto the Web – IUMA was not violating anyone’s copyrights.) The idea behind IUMA was simple enough, the technology absolutely straightforward – and yet, for all that, it was utterly revolutionary. Anyone, anywhere could surf over to the IUMA site, pick an artist, then download a track and play it.

This was in the days before broadband, so downloading a multi-megabyte MP3 recording could take upwards of an hour per track – something that seems ridiculous today, but was still so potent back in 1994 that IUMA immediately became one of the most popular sites on the still-quite-tiny Web. The founders of IUMA – Rob Lord and Jon Luini – wanted to create a place where unsigned or non-commercial musicians could share their music with the public in order to reach a larger audience, gain recognition, and perhaps even end up with a recording deal. IUMA was always better as a proof-of-concept than as a business opportunity, but the founders did get venture capital, and tried to make a go of selling music online. However, given the relative obscurity of the musicians on IUMA, and the pre-iPod lack of pervasive MP3 players, IUMA ran through its money by 2001, shuttering during the dot-com implosion of the same year. Despite that, every music site which followed IUMA, legal and otherwise, from Napster to Rhapsody to iTunes, has walked in its footsteps. Now, nearing the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we have a broadband infrastructure capable of delivery MP3s, and several hundred million devices which can play them. IUMA was a good idea, but five years too early.

Just forty-eight hours ago, a new music service, calling itself Qtrax, aborted its international launch – though it promises to be up “real soon now.” Qtrax also promises that anyone, anywhere will be able to download any of its twenty-five million songs perfectly legally, and listen to them practically anywhere they like – along with an inserted advertisement. Using peer-to-peer networking to relieve the burden on its own servers, and Digital Rights Management, or DRM, Qtrax ensures that there are no abuses of these pseudo-free recordings.

Most of the words that I used to describe Qtrax in the preceding paragraph didn’t exist in common usage when IUMA disappeared from the scene in the first year of this millennium. The years between IUMA and Qtrax are a geological age in Internet time, so it’s a good idea to walk back through that era and have a good look at the fossils which speak to how we evolved to where we are today.

In 1999, a curly-haired undergraduate at Boston’s Northeastern University built a piece of software that allowed him to share his MP3 collection with a few of his friends on campus, and allowed him access to their MP3s. This scanned the MP3s on each hard drive, publishing the list to a shared database, allowing each person using the software to download the MP3 from someone else’s hard drive to his own. This is simple enough, technically, but Shawn Fanning’s Napster created a dual-headed revolution. First, it was the killer app for broadband: using Napster on a dial-up connection was essentially impossible. Second, it completely ignored the established systems of distribution used for recorded music.

This second point is the one which has the most relevance to my talk this morning; Napster had an entirely unpredicted effect on the distribution methodologies which had been the bedrock of the recording industry for the past hundred years. The music industry grew up around the licensing, distribution and sale of a physical medium – a piano roll, a wax recording, a vinyl disk, a digital compact disc. However, when the recording industry made the transition to CDs in the 1980s (and reaped windfall profits as the public purchased new copies of older recordings) they also signed their own death warrants. Digital recordings are entirely ephemeral, composed only of mathematics, not of matter. Any system which transmitted the mathematics would suffice for the distribution of music, and the compact disc met this need only until computers were powerful enough to play the more compact MP3 format, and broadband connections were fast enough to allow these smaller files to be transmitted quickly. Napster leveraged both of these criteria – the mathematical nature of digitally-encoded music and the prevalence of broadband connections on America’s college campuses – to produce a sensation.

In its earliest days, Napster reflected the tastes of its college-age users, but, as word got out, the collection of tracks available through Napster grew more varied and more interesting. Many individuals took recordings that were only available on vinyl, and digitally recorded them specifically to post them on Napster. Napster quickly had a more complete selection of recordings than all but the most comprehensive music stores. This only attracted more users to Napster, who added more oddities from their on collections, which attracted more users, and so on, until Napster became seen as the authoritative source for recorded music.

Given that all of this “file-sharing”, as it was termed, happened outside of the economic systems of distribution established by the recording industry, it was taking money out of their pockets – probably something greater than billions of dollars a year was lost, if all of these downloads had been converted into sales. (Studies indicate this was unlikely – college students have ever been poor.) The recording industry launched a massive lawsuit against Napster in 2000, forcing the service to shutter in 2001, just as it reached an incredible peak of 14 million simultaneous users, out of a worldwide broadband population of probably only 100 million. This means that one in seven computers connected to the broadband internet were using Napster just as it was being shut down.

Here’s where it gets more interesting: the recording industry thought they’d brought the horse back into the barn. What they hadn’t realized was that the gate had burnt down. The millions of Napster users had their appetites whet by a world where an incredible variety of music was instantaneously available with few clicks of the mouse. In the absence of Napster, that pressure remained, and it only took a few weeks for a few enterprising engineers to create a successor to Napster, known as Gnutella, which provided the same service as Napster, but used a profoundly different technology for its filesharing. Where Napster had all of its users register their tracks within a centralized database (which disappeared when Napster was shut down) Gnutella created a vast, amorphous, distributed database, spread out across all of the computers running Guntella. Gnutella had no center to strike at, and therefore could not be shut down.

It is because of the actions of the recording industry that Gnutella was developed. If legal pressure hadn’t driven Napster out of business, Gnutella would not have been necessary. The recording industry turned out to be its own worst enemy, because it turned a potentially profitable relationship with its customers into an ever-escalating arms race of file-sharing tools, lawsuits, and public relations nightmares.

Once Gnutella and its descendants – Kazaa, Limewire, and Acquisition – arrived on the scene, the listening public had wholly taken control of the distribution of recorded music. Every attempt to shut down these ever-more-invisible “darknets” has ended in failure and only spurred the continued growth of these networks. Now, with Qtrax, the recording industry is seeking to make an accommodation with an audience which expects music to be both free and freely available, falling back on advertising revenue source to recover some of their production costs.

At first, it seemed that filmic media would be immune from the disruptions that have plagued the recording industry – films and TV shows, even when heavily compressed, are very large files, on the order of hundreds of millions of bytes of data. Systems like Gnutella, which allow you to transfer a file directly from one computer to another are not particularly well-suited to such large file transfers. In 2002, an unemployed programmer named Bram Cohen solved that problem definitively with the introduction of a new file-sharing system known as BitTorrent.

BitTorrent is a bit mysterious to most everyone not deeply involved in technology, so a brief of explanation will help to explain its inner workings. Suppose, for a moment, that I have a short film, just 1000 frames in length, digitally encoded on my hard drive. If I wanted to share this film with each of you via Gnutella, you’d have to wait in a queue as I served up the film, time and time again, to each of you. The last person in the queue would wait quite a long time. But if, instead, I gave the first ten frames of the film to the first person in the queue, and the second ten frames to the second person in the queue, and the third ten frames to the third person in the queue, and so on, until I’d handed out all thousand frames, all I need do at that point is tell each of you that each of your “peers” has the missing frames, and that you needed to get them from those peers. A flurry of transfers would result, as each peer picked up the pieces it needed to make a complete whole from other peers. From my point of view, I only had to transmit the film once – something I can do relatively quickly. From your point of view, none of you had to queue to get the film – because the pieces were scattered widely around, in little puzzle pieces, that you could gather together on your own.

That’s how BitTorrent works. It is both incredibly efficient and incredibly resilient – peers can come and go as they please, yet the total number of peers guaratees that somewhere out there is an entire copy of the film available at all times. And, even more perversely, the more people who want copies of my film, the easier it is for each successive person to get a copy of the film – because there are more peers to grab pieces from. This group of peers, known as a “swarm”, is the most efficient system yet developed for the distribution of digital media. In fact, a single, underpowered computer, on a single, underpowered broadband link can, via BitTorrent, create a swarm of peers. BitTorrent allows anyone, anywhere, distribute any large media file at essentially no cost.

It is estimated that upwards of 60% of all traffic on the Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers. Much of this traffic is perfectly legitimate – software, such as the free Linux operating system, is distributed using BitTorrent. Still, it is well known that movies and television programmes are also distributed using BitTorrent, in violation of copyright. This became absolutely clear on the 14th of October 2004, when Sky Broadcasting in the UK premiered the first episode of Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore’s dark re-imagining of the famous shlocky 1970s TV series. Because the American distributor, SciFi Channel, had chosen to hold off until January to broadcast the series, fans in the UK recorded the programmes and posted them to BitTorrent for American fans to download. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the episodes circulated in the United States – and conventional thinking would reckon that this would seriously impact the ratings of the show upon its US premiere. In fact, precisely the opposite happened: the show was so well written and produced that the word-of-mouth engendered by all this mass piracy created an enormous broadcast audience for the series, making it the most successful in SciFi Channel history.

In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace. The ability to “hyperdistribute” a programme – using BitTorrent to send a single copy of a programme to millions of people around the world efficiently and instantaneously – creates an environment where the more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes. This seems counterintuitive, but only in the context of systems of distribution which were part-and-parcel of the scarce exhibition outlets of theaters and broadcasters. Once everyone, everywhere had the capability to “tuning into” a BitTorrent broadcast, the economics of distribution were turned on their heads. The distribution gatekeepers, stripped of their power, whinge about piracy. But, as was the case with recorded music, the audience has simply asserted its control over distribution. This is not about piracy. This is about the audience getting whatever it wants, by any means necessary. They have the tools, they have the intent, and they have the power of numbers. It is foolishness to insist that the future will be substantially different from the world we see today. We can not change the behavior of the audience. Instead, we must all adapt to things as they are.

But things as the are have changed more than you might know. This is not the story of how piracy destroyed the film industry. This is the story how the audience became not just the distributors but the producers of their own content, and, in so doing, brought down the high walls which separate professionals from amateurs.

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the second phase of the Web (known colloquially as “Web 2.0”) is the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTube’s parent, Google. There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I’m not sure if anyone knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube grows by three million videos a month. That’s a lot of video, difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure, absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I don’t wish it to be taken as simply as it sounds. It’s not that YouTube is competing with you for dollars – it isn’t, at least not yet – but rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet, even as we’ve become so time-poor, the number of options for how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone from an essential scarcity of filmic media – presented through limited and highly regulated distribution channels – to a hyperabundance of viewing options.

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until recently, would lead to a sort of “decision paralysis,” whereby the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into ever-smaller “microaudiences”. It is these microaudiences that YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences is YouTube’s native tongue.

In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely overtaken us, let’s consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM, surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a television, somewhere in the background, or it might be coming from the Web browser right in front of him. (Actually, it’s probably both simultaneously.) This teenager has a limited suite of selections available on the telly – even with satellite or cable, there won’t be more than a few hundred choices on offer, and he’s probably settled for something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, he’s viewing a whole series of YouTube videos that he’s received from his friends; they’ve found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately forwarded them along, knowing that he’ll enjoy them. He views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it can’t be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it can’t be forwarded along, it’s broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as they’re broadcast over the airwaves, but more likely they’re spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses. The broadcast network has been replaced by the social network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item might be something that was created at great expense for a mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire that fifteen year old to forward something along – because his social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along something lame, he’ll lose social standing with his peers. This factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch. Because of the hyperabundance of media – something he takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development – all of his media decisions are weighed against the values and tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of choices.

This means that the true value of media in the 21st century is entirely personal, and based upon the salience, that is, the importance, of that media to the individual and that individual’s social network. The mass market, with its enforced scarcity, simply does not enter into his calculations. Yes, he might go to the theatre to see Transformers with his mates; but he’s just as likely to download a copy recorded in the movie theatre with an illegally smuggled-in camera that was uploaded to The Pirate Bay a few hours after its release.

That’s today. Now let’s project ourselves five years into the future. YouTube is still around, but now it has more than two hundred million videos (probably much more), all available, all the time, from short-form to full-length features, many of which are now available in high-definition. There’s so much “there” there that it is inconceivable that conventional media distribution mechanisms of exhibition and broadcast could compete. For this twenty year-old, every decision to spend some of his increasingly-valuable attention watching anything is measured against salience: “How important is this for me, right now?” When he weighs the latest episode of a TV series against some newly-made video that is meant only to appeal to a few thousand people – such as himself – that video will win, every time. It more completely satisfies him. As the number of videos on offer through YouTube and its competitors continues to grow, the number of salient choices grows ever larger. His social network, communicating now through FaceBook and MySpace and next-generation mobile handsets and iPods and goodness-knows-what-else is constantly delivering an ever-growing and increasingly-relevant suite of media options. He, as a vital node within his social network, is doing his best to give as good as he gets. His reputation depends on being “on the tip.”

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of distribution. What no one had expected was that the professional producers would lose control of production. The difference between an amateur and a professional – in the media industries – has always centered on the point that the professional sells their work into distribution, while the amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that self-distribution is more effective than professional distribution, how do we distinguish between the professional and the amateur? This twenty year-old doesn’t know, and doesn’t care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film and television production and distribution can survive in this environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the only truth on offer this morning. I’ve come to this conclusion slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred year-old industry with many, many creative professionals. In this environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and “event” based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely designed to support the efficient distribution of live programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form, both industries will continue for some years to come, and will probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audience’s attentions have turned elsewhere. They’re not returning.

This future almost completely excludes “independent” production, a vague term which basically means any production which takes place outside of the media megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have long been losing economic propositions (except for the most lucky), but they’re now becoming financially suicidal. National and regional funding bodies are growing increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off, despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but Australians don’t go to see them in the theatres, and don’t buy them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder Steve Chen insists has “no gold standard” of production values, is rapidly becoming the vehicle for independent productions; productions which cost not millions of euros, but hundreds, and which make up for their low production values in salience and in overwhelming numbers. This tsunami of content can not be stopped or even slowed down; it has nothing to do with piracy (only nine percent of the videos viewed on YouTube are violations of copyright) but reflects the natural accommodation of the audience to an era of media hyperabundance.

What then, is to be done?

III. And The Penny Drops

It isn’t all bad news. But, like a good doctor, I want to give you the bad news right up front: There is no single, long-term solution for film or television production. No panacea. It’s not even entirely clear that the massive Hollywood studios will do business-as-usual for any length of time into the future. Just a decade ago the entire music recording industry seemed impregnable. Now it lies in ruins. To assume that history won’t repeat itself is more than willful ignorance of the facts; it’s bad business.

This means that the one-size-fits-all production-to-distribution model, which all of you have been taught as the orthodoxy of the media industries, is worse than useless; it’s actually blocking your progress because it is effectively keeping you from thinking outside the square. This is a wholly new world, one which is littered with golden opportunities for those able to avail themselves of them. We need to get you from where you are – bound to an obsolete production model – to where you need to be. Let me illustrate this transition with two examples.

In early 2005, producer Ronda Byrne got a production agreement with Channel NINE, then the number one Australian television network, to make a feature-length television programme about the “law of attraction”, an idea she’d learned of when reading a book published in 1910, The Science of Getting Rich. The interviews and other footage were shot in July and August, and after a few months in the editing suite, she showed the finished production to executives at Channel NINE, who declined to broadcast it, believing it lacked mass appeal. Since Byrne wasn’t going to be getting broadcast fees from Channel NINE to cover her production costs, she negotiated a new deal with NINE, allowing her to sell DVDs of the completed film.

At this point Byrne began spreading news of the film virally, through the communities she thought would be most interested in viewing it; specifically, spiritual and “New Age” communities. People excited by Byrne’s teaser marketing could pay $20 for a DVD copy of the film (with extended features), or pay $5 to watch a streaming version directly on their computer. As the film made its way to its intended audience, word-of-mouth caused business to mushroom overnight. The Secret became a blockbuster, selling millions of copies on DVD. A companion book, also titled The Secret, has sold over two million copies. And that arbiter of American popular taste, Oprah, has featured the film and book on her talk show, praising both to the skies. The film has earned back many, many times its production costs, making Byrne a wealthy woman. She’s already deep into the production of a sequel to The Secret – a film which already has an audience identified and targeted.

Chagrined, the television executives of Channel NINE finally did broadcast The Secret in February 2007. It didn’t do that well. This sums up the paradox distribution in the age of the microaudience. Clearly The Secret had a massive world-wide audience, but television wasn’t the most effective way to reach them, because this audience was actually a collection of microaudiences, rather than a single, aggregated audience. If The Secret had opened theatrically, it’s unlikely it would have done terribly well; it’s the kind of film that people want to watch more than once, being in equal parts a self-help handbook and a series of inspirational stories. It is well-suited for a direct-to-DVD release – a distribution vehicle that no longer has the stigma of “failure” associated with it. It is also well-suited to cross-media projects, such as books, conferences, streamed delivery, podcasts, and so forth. Having found her audience, Byrne has transformed The Secret into an exceptional money-making franchise, as lucrative, in its own way, and at its own scale, as any Hollywood franchise.

The second example is utterly different from The Secret, yet the fundamentals are strikingly similar. Just last month a production group calling themselves “The League of Peers” released a film titled Steal This Film, Part 2. The first part of this film, released in late 2006, dealt with the rise of file-sharing, and, in specific, with the legal troubles of the world’s largest BitTorrent site, Sweden’s The Pirate Bay. That film, although earnest and coherent, felt as though it was produced by individuals still learning the craft of filmmaking. This latest film feels looks as professional as any documentary created for BBC’s Horizon or PBS’s Frontline or ABC’s 4Corners. It is slick, well-lit, well-edited, and has a very compelling story to tell about the history of copying – beginning with the invention of the printing press, five hundred years ago. Steal This Film is a political production, a bit of propaganda with an bias. This, in itself, is not uncommon in a documentary. The funding and distribution model for this film is what makes it relatively unique.

Individuals who saw Steal This Film, Part One – which was made freely available for download via BitTorrent – were invited to contribute to the making of the sequel. Nearly five million people downloaded Steal This Film, Part One, so there was a substantial base of contributors to draw from. (I myself donated five dollars after viewing the film. If every viewer had done likewise that would cover the budget of a major Hollywood production!) The League of Peers also approached arts funding bodies, such as the British Documentary Council, with their completed film in hand, the statistics showing that their work reached a large audience, and a roadmap for the second film – this got them additional funding. Now, having released Steal This Film, Part Two, viewers are again invited to contribute (if they like the film), promised a “secret gift” for contributions of $15 or more. While the tip jar – literally, busking – may seem a very weird way to fund a film production, it’s likely that Steal This Film, Part Two will find an even wider audience than Part One, and that the coffers of the League of Peers will provide them with enough funds to embark on their next film, The Oil of the 21st Century, which will focus on the evolution of intellectual property into a traded commodity.

I have asked Screen Training Ireland to include a DVD of Steal This Film, Part Two with the materials you received this morning. You’ve been given the DVD version of the film, but I encourage you to download the other versions of the film: the XVID version, for playback on a PC; the iPod version, for portable devices; and the high-definition version, for your visual enjoyment. It’s proof positive that a viable economic model exists for film, even when it is given away. It will not work for all productions, but there is a global community of individuals who are intensely interested in factual works about copyright and intellectual property in the 21st century, who find these works salient, and who are underserved by the media megacorporations, who would not consider it in their own economic best interest to produce or distribute such works. The League of Peers, as part of the community whom this film is intended for, knew how to get the word out about the film (particularly through Boing Boing, the most popular blog in the world, with two million readers a week), and, within a few weeks, nearly everyone who should have heard of the film had heard about it – through their social networks.

Both The Secret and Steal This Film, Part Two are factual works, and it’s clear that this emerging distribution model – which relies on targeting communities of interest – works best with factual productions. One of the reasons that there has been such an upsurge in the production of factual works over the past few years is because these works have been able to build their own funding models upon a deep knowledge of the communities they are talking to – made by microaudiences, for microaudiences. But microaudiences, scaled to global proportions, can easily number in the millions. Microaudiences are perfectly willing to pay for something or contribute to something they consider of particular value and salience; it is a visible thank you, a form of social reinforcement which is very natural within social networks.

What about drama, comedy and animation? Short-form comedy and animation probably have the easiest go of it, because they can be delivered online with an advertising payload of some sort. Happy Tree Friends is a great example of how this works – but it took producers Mondo Media nearly a decade to stumble into a successful economic model. Feature-length comedy and feature-length drama are more difficult nuts to crack, but they are not impossible. Again, the key is to find the communities which will be most interested in the production; this is not always entirely obvious, but the filmmaker should have some idea of the target audience for their film. While in preproduction, these communities need to be wooed and seduced into believing that this film is meant just for them, that it is salient. Productions can be released through complementary distribution channels: a limited, occasional run in rented exhibition spaces (which can be “events”, created to promote and showcase the film); direct DVD sales (which are highly lucrative if the producer does this directly); online distribution vehicles such as iTunes Movie Store; and through “community” viewing, where a DVD is given to a few key members of the community in the hopes that word-of-mouth will spread in that community, generating further DVD sales.

None of this guarantees success, but it is the way things work for independent productions in the 21st-century. All of this is new territory. It isn’t a role that belongs neatly to the producer of the film, nor, in the absence of studio muscle, is it something that a film distributor would be competent at. This may not be the producer’s job. But it is someone’s job. Someone must do it. Starting at the earliest stages of pre-production, someone has to sit down with the creatives and the producer and ask the hard questions: “Who is this film intended for?” “What audiences will want to see this film – or see it more than once?” “How do we reach these audiences?” From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online purchases.

So, as you sit down to do your planning today, and discuss how to move Irish screen industries into the 21st century, ask yourselves who will be fulfilling this role. The producer is already overloaded, time-poor, and may not be particularly good at marketing. The director has a vision, but might be practically autistic when it comes to working with communities. This is a new role, one that is utterly vital to the success of the production, but one which is not yet budgeted for, and one which we do not yet train people to fill. Individuals have succeeded in this new model through their own tireless efforts, but each of these have been scattershot; there is a way to systematize this. While every production and every marketing plan will be unique – drawn from the fundamentals of the story being told – there are commonalities across productions which people will be able to absorb and apply, production after production.

One of my favorite quotes from science fiction writer William Gibson goes, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” This is so obviously true for film and television production that I need only close by noting that there are a lot of success stories out there, individuals who have taken the new laws of hyperdistribution and sharing and turned them to their own advantage. It is a challenge, and there will be failures; but we learn more from our failures than from our successes. Media production has always been a gamble; but the audiences of the 21st century make success easier to achieve than ever before.

I. The Wheels Fall Off the Cart

In mid-1994, sometime shortly after Tony Parisi and I had fused the new technology of the World Wide Web to a 3D visualization engine, to create VRML, we paid a visit to the University of Santa Cruz, about 120 kilometers south of San Francisco. Two UCSC students wanted to pitch us on their own web media project. The Internet Underground Music Archive, or IUMA, featured a simple directory of artists, complete with links to MP3 files of these artists

Introduction

Australians have just gone to the polls, and made a collective decision to reinvent their government. John Howard was uncommonly truthful when he stated, “When you change the government, you change the direction of the nation.” Just at this moment, as the front bench of the Government is being sorted out and ministers sworn in, we straddle a liminal space, where anything is possible. Before the Government does anything, it remains entirely potential. This is a space for dreaming big dreams.

All institutions inevitably disappoint – governments included – and as the Rudd Labor government moves from potentiality into actuality, these dreams will inevitably fade. We will wake up into a new reality. But just now, in these few days remaining to us, we have a unique opportunity to re-vision both the means and ends of governance. We can take a longer view than is normally allowed by a 24-hour news cycle, or the constant chatter of the blogs, and the endless sniping of a fractured and demoralized Liberal Opposition. This is the last moment – perhaps for the next decade – to rethink our assumptions.

In this essay, I will a new picture of politics, a “Theory of Everything”, which unites the Right-Left divide within an underlying model of human behavior. This is not a new political philosophy, but rather, the application of current research into sociobiology to sociology. Although sociology has historically stood at some distance from the “hard” sciences, the same was said of biology less than fifty years ago. When Watson and Crick discovered DNA, back in 1953, they unified biology and the “hard” sciences of chemistry and physics. We are at the cusp of another such union.

At the same time, the study of sociology, ethnology and anthropology has become the most vital area of research in technology. For a decade now, although I have continued to work with and invent new technologies, I have focused my research toward an understanding of how technologies change the people who use them, and how people change the technologies they use. This emergent, or “autopoeic,” relationship between technology and society is now having a significant impact upon the organization of all aspects of human life – and, in specific, the relationships between vast collections of individuals: that is, politics.

So let’s start with biology, and, as we work our way up, moving from the individual body to the body politic, I will to show you how our technologies have amplified some of our innate capabilities to such a degree that the previously unquestioned truths of political life no longer apply. The political environment of the 21st century bears little resemblance to the mass movements of the 19th and 20th centuries; this is a reality that political institutions are about to confront, and an environment which all of us – as political animals – must learn to exploit.

I: Biopolitics

In 1871, when Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, he stated that,

Although a high standard of morality gives but a slight or no advantage to each individual man and his children over the other men of the same tribe…an advancement in the standard of morality will certainly give an immense advantage to one tribe over another.

This statement has caused no end of trouble, being taken up by those seeking a scientific rationale for the “White Man’s Burden,” which the British, Americans, French and Germans used as rationale for the “Great Game” of colonization. The European races, seeing themselves as morally superior to the uncivilized barbarian races (even if both India and China had been civilized since time out of mind), used their hundred year head start in technological advancement to trump the highly moral cultures of Asia. It was, they claimed, survival of the fittest. Darwin and all that.

The reductio ad absurdum of “moral fitness” justified the mass slaughter of indigenous Australians, Americans, Africans, and the extinction of the Tasmanians. The jump from Charles Darwin to King Leopold took just twenty years. When biologists realized what Darwin had wrought – and certainly Darwin had never intended his words to be twisted toward such malevolent ends – the entire idea of “moral selection” was quietly dropped from the canon of evolution. That presented a problem of its own; Darwin was working as a scientist, and you can’t just abandon an idea which has a sound scientific basis. While no one talked about “moral selection” in the context of human cultures, a new word, “altruism,” came to take its place. We’ll come back to that.

Meanwhile, over the next hundred years, evolutionary biologists studied the behavior of other social animals – specifically, the insects. E. O. Wilson, the Harvard myrmecologist and evolutionary biologist, studied the social behavior of ants. Ants, bees and other social insects flout the hard-and-fast laws of natural selection as laid down by Darwin: they often do not act in their own best interest, instead acting in the best interest of the colony or nest or hive. The individual selfishness predicted by natural selection has simply been written out of their repertoire of behaviors. Worker ants and worker bees simply toil until they drop dead from exhaustion; they do not breed, and do not pass their genes along to the next generation. In evolutionary terms, they do not succeed. Yet ants and bees are wonderfully successful life forms, found all across the habitable regions of the Earth.

This behavioral altruism has been a thorn in the side of evolutionary biologists; selfishness is considered an essential feature of natural selection – after all, the most selfish animals should, on the whole, do better than their less-selfish peers. This seems true on its face, but other social animals – the lions of Africa, who live in prides of up to fifteen females and children – also practice altruistic behaviors. Some females will forego breeding – and the chance to pass their genes along – instead, investing their energy in protecting and providing for the new mothers and their young. In other words, a pride which practices some degree of altruism will be more successful, in the long run, than a pride where it’s every lion for herself. This phenomenon has been recognized for some years, but, because it did not fit the existing theory, it’s been ignored.

Forty years ago, a consensus developed in the community of evolutionary biologists that natural selection occurred only at the level of the individual. That is, evolution would only select for traits useful in a single individual. The idea that traits such as altruism might be selected for within a social collection of individuals was declared heterodox. To the evolutionary biologists, there was no such thing as a social collection – despite some rather obvious evidence, from the insects and higher animals, that social collections are fairly common. As a consequence, evolutionary biologists have spent the last forty years developing some rather weird theories to explain away altruistic behavior, that is, trying to describe how unselfishness could emerge from selfishness.

The lovely thing about science is that the truth eventually triumphs. Just this year a number of papers – including a few by E. O. Wilson – describe what biologists are now calling “multi-level” selection; that is, a process of natural selection which includes both the individual and groups of individuals. Within the individual, selfish behaviors are selected for, but with social groups, altruistic behaviors can be just as strongly selected for. Consider two prides of lions, one of which has a number of females who have opted-out of breeding, while another has an assemblage of selfish individuals, all of whom are breeding. When each pride is threatened, or needs food, the pride with the altruistic individuals will tend to succeed, while the pride with only selfish individuals will tend to fail. The pressures of natural selection will tend to select altruism over selfishness when selecting between groups, but tends to select selfish individuals within either group.

This basic tension is at the core of what I want to explore this morning. Social animals do better for themselves and their children if they are selfish; but they do better against other similar groups if they are altruistic. Both of these selection pressures are acting simultaneously, both within the individual and within social groupings. If this is true for prides of lions, why would it be less true for the hominids? Neither altruism nor selfishness are extraordinary behaviors for social animals; they are both strongly selected for. All social animals, ourselves included, must display both of these behaviors to be successful. And, as we all know, humans have been very successful.

Let’s cross the tiny chasm that separates us from the “lower” animals. We’re less than two hundred thousand years away from the animal state ourselves, and we know that we haven’t evolved very much in that period of time. We’re remarkably similar to early modern humans found in South Africa. These early humans contained within them the same drives toward selfishness and selflessness; the selfish individuals within a tribal grouping would receive the “lion’s share” of the calories, and would raise healthy children. At the same time, starving your fellow tribespeople would leave you (in the plural, social sense) fatally weakened. Food sharing is an antique behavior, common across the hominids, strongest in humans, and is a signifier of altruism. Consider the emphasis we place on teaching children to share – an emphasis which is common across human cultures. Somewhere in our deepest roots, we understand that sharing is essential to survival.

Now, let’s step across a a larger chasm, and come forward two thousand centuries. In just the last ten thousand years, we’ve gone from tribal groupings driven by the “Dunbar Number,” which limits the effective size of human social networks to roughly 150 people, to urban groupings. Cities of a few thousand were commonplace at least eight thousand years ago, at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia, and Jericho in Palestine, social assemblages of humanity which far surpassed the ability of any human to contain all those other humans in their heads. As numbers grew, the basic human drives of selfishness and altruism, selected for over tens of millions of years of evolution, did not fade away. Instead, we see the emergence of differing ideals for human social organization – that is, political models. Each human culture of the past ten thousand years found its own balance point between selfishness and selflessness – often coded into the laws and moral teachings of religion.

By the nineteenth century, in the first city to pass a million inhabitants – London – we saw the emergence of two mutually exclusive political philosophies that are the absolute embodiment of these fundamental selection pressures. On the one hand, Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan announced the “War of all against all,” and John Stuart Mill, with his philosophy of Libertarianism, asserted the absolute right of the selfish individual to make his own way in the world. On the other, Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels distilled the essence of altruism: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” The polar play of Libertarianism and Socialism stand outside the Left/Right divide of politics: Libertarianism is a philosophy of both the Left (anarcho-capitalism) and the Right (Objectivism), while Socialism can be Kropotkin’s anarchism, or authoritarian Marxism-Leninism. The important thing to note here is that both philosophies emerge from natural selection pressures. Libertarianism springs from the selfishness of the individual, Socialism from the altruism of the group. Neither is superior to the other. Both are natural and both are necessary. Yet so much of the tragedy of the last two hundred years has grown from one innate and natural drive asserting its primacy over its mirror twin.

Despite the fighting, the deaths and proclamations of the absolute, unquestionable truth from both camps, reality lies somewhere in the middle. It’s the mixture of selfish and altruistic tendencies which the body politic expresses; only in some very rare instances of revolution does one tendency achieve any lasting dominance over the other, and that invariably ends in debacle, because pressures selecting for both are never removed. Soviet Marxism-Leninism collapsed because it could not honestly incorporate individual selfishness; it was replaced by its opposite, a form of Crony Capitalism (the Age of the Oligarchs) which, in its own way, was just as noxious. China since Deng Xiaoping has moved from collectivism toward a mixed socialism which looks a lot more like American capitalism than Marxism-Leninism. This is not, as Francis Fukuyama would have it, “The End of History,” and the triumph of neo-Liberalism. Far from it. Australians have overwhelmingly rejected neo-Liberalism as too radical, too far from the mixture of selfishness and altruism which must be maintained in order to prevent catastrophe. There is a moral cost in adhering to selfishness, just as there is an opportunity cost inherent in altruism. Only in a mix can a healthy, vital balance be maintained.

While the preceding argument advocates for a moderate, middle-of-the-road approach to politics, this model works only with respect to politics before the network era. When looking toward a comfortable median in the behaviors and drives of thirteen million voters, a Government that mixes economic conservatism with a degree of socialism would seem to be as near to the ideal as can be achieved in the real world – and this is precisely the government Australians have elected. But the Australian body politic is now, suddenly, connected in entirely new ways, and, as a result, the political formations and pressures which characterized centrist politics will be increasingly destabilized by radically empowered polities within the larger body politic. These forces, too, are driven by the same essential selection pressures that characterize all social groupings, but these pressures have now accelerated to the speed of light, and amplified beyond all recognition.

II: Hyperintelligence: Or, What I Learned From The Poll Bludger

For the past three years, I have been intently studying the new digital social networks which have become such a prominent feature of life online. This study led me to a more complete understanding of all human social networks. We are all, all the time, immersed in social networks. It is a basic, essential part of human biology, and the one which takes the longest to mature. The cognitive apparatus which manages our social networks doesn’t come into its own until the mid-to-late teenage years, and is a big reason why teenagers, as a population, are so miserable: learning the rules of social networks is perhaps the most challenging of all human tasks.

A human isn’t completely human in the absence of our social networks. As a social species, we are not defined solely as individuals, but as members within some grouping. We do not end at our skin. Here too, we can see the echo of the selfish vs. altruist tug-of-war; the selfish bits of our biology seek to be self-contained; the drive to altruism reminds us that no man is an island. We are all actors within dynamic, evolving networks of individuals, gathered together around some shared goal. For tens of thousands of years, survival was the only goal of these human networks. While improvement in survival fitness remains the core goal of our participation within any social network, we now have many ways of reaching that goal. The explosion of cultural forms which define modernity is proof of this.

Social networks are now as ubiquitous as at any time in history, and have become instantaneous and global. Furthermore, these networks can capture their activity in a persistent form which lies outside of any one head – collective intelligence. It is now possible for a global human social network to pool its energies around a single effort, and – in the process – create something with value that far exceeds the contributions of any single member of the network. In the network era, the benefits of altruism can disproportionately outweigh the selection pressures of selfishness.

Consider Wikipedia. There are, globally, approximately 2000 “Wikipedians,” that is, core members of the global social network who create, maintain, arbitrate and improve upon the globally accessible, freely available and openly editable encyclopedia. The efforts of these Wikipedians (and additional contributions by millions of “fellow travelers”, who loosely affiliate themselves with the Wikipedians around a specific topic of interest) have completely redefined our understanding of knowledge formation. It is now clear, in the aftermath of the Britannica vs. Wikipedia Wars, that knowledge formation is not the exclusive province of elites: anyone, however marginalized, can make a meaningful contribution to the common font of human knowledge. Furthermore, everyone literate person can benefit from Wikipedia. As Wikipedia becomes ever-more-ubiquitous, as it extends its entries into every factual category, in every language with more than a million speakers, it should help us make better decisions: we have immediate access to (reasonably) accurate information in a way that no human has ever had before. If knowing the facts is a necessary precondition to good decision making, Wikipedia has already increased the selection fitness of all of its users. Anyone who uses Wikipedia has an enormous advantage over anyone who does not. This, in itself, is driving us all toward using Wikipedia.

In her book Continuities in Cultural Evolution, anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote:

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

The Wikipedians, a 21st-century digital social network, have indeed changed the world – not just for themselves, but for all of us. Their single-minded dedication to an activity of nearly unalloyed altruism (Wikipedians are not paid, and, moreover, frequently confront powerful disapproval for their efforts) has had a profound and continuing influence on human culture. This is not just Wikipedia in itself, but the idea of Wikipedia. Collective intelligence, harnessed, recorded and shared, leads to what I have termed hyperintelligence, a social network that is vastly more intelligent than the sum of its parts. Wikipedia is only one variety of a hyperintelligence; there are others, and there will be many, many more to come.

Most are already familiar with the example of Wikipedia; while it is the archetypical example of hyperintelligence, and many believe that lightning will not strike twice, that this revolution begins and ends with Wikipedia. This is not the case. There are examples of hyperintelligence emerging everywhere we care to look. Having just returned from an encounter with another emerging hyperintelligence, I want to share with you one such example, as I believe that in this example we can locate the definitive features of a generalized model which then can be put to work.

As a subscriber to Crikey.com.au, I’ve kept careful note of links to other Australian political blogs when published in the newsletter. Among the most interesting of these are Possum’s Politics, run by the anonymous and mysterious “Possum Commitatus,” and The Poll Bludger, run by William Bowe, a 36 year-old PhD student at the University of Western Australia. Both Possum and Bowe are psephologists – they study the statistics of polls and elections. A few months ago, I hadn’t ever heard the word psephologist. Now I have something of an understanding of what they do, and how they do it. Psephologists use statistical tools to determine the accuracy of polls, the trends indicated by polls, and attempt – insofar as it is possible – to remove the noise from the soundings received from the electorate, to predict the outcome of elections. As with anything statistical, it’s not a precise science, but a psephologist can give you a margin of error for his predictions. In fact, I can now give you the formula for the margin of error associated with any statistical sample:

MoE = 0.98 / sqrt(sample size)

With this formula I can tell you that with a random poll of 2701 voters – such as in the last Newspoll taken before the election – the margin of error is about 1.9%, with a confidence level of 95%. I can tell you what a confidence level is. I can also tell you that Newspoll misallocated their preferences, based on an assumption, now shown to be erroneous, that preference distributions from 2004 would remain an accurate guide to preference distributions in 2007. The final Newspoll of the Federal election yielded a surprisingly low value for the two-party-preferred result for the ALP, which showed the race narrowing at its close, while, in fact, very little narrowing took place.

How do I know all this? I am not a psephologist, and I assure you that I have never in my life taken a statistics course. I know all of this because, for the last several weeks, and, in particular, for the two weeks leading up to the Federal election, I was deeply immersed in The Poll Bludger. I wasn’t the only one. From serious psephologists such as Bowe and Possum and the rock-star-like Antony Green, to tens of knowledgeable amateurs, through to complete newbies like myself, we opened up the entrails of the electorate and augured its meaning. We knew that the final AC Neilsen poll, showing a 57-43 TPP couldn’t possibly be right, because it swung to the top of the range of the earlier AC Nielsen polls; for the same reason, the much-touted narrowing in the final 48 hours was nothing but bad statistics, assumptions, and wishful thinking. We knew this, because those of us with knowledge shared it freely with those eager to learn. And I, being very eager indeed, spent hours and hours reading through the postings, ignoring the ever-increasing noise of various partisans as the campaign grew more heated and more desperate, focusing on the raw meat of poll data.

This was doubly an education for myself: as someone familiar only with the American electoral system, the concept of “swings” was entirely alien. But, because I listened intently, regarding each post from Possum and Bowe and Antony Green as pure psephological gold, I learned. I was hardly alone in this. Many of the individuals posting on Poll Bludger knew as little as I did – but we all learned together, and grew confident enough to share what we little we knew with each other.

At this point, it feels as though I’ve been through a crash course in psephology, statistics and Australian politics. I know far too much about far too many of the 150 electoral divisions in the House of Representatives, their voting histories and their members. I know how the “Latham swing” artificially distorted the preferences of the 2004 election. It may even be, when all the votes are counted, that I have correctly predicted the number of ALP seats (84) in the House of Representatives. I am, in short, a wholly qualified amateur psephologist, because other individuals in the blogging community freely and altruistically shared their knowledge with me in a way that allowed me to analyze, dissect and meditate upon their pedagogy.

A blog is a mechanism not just for conversation, but for knowledge capture. It is not as neat and accessible as a wiki, insofar as the blog must be read in its entirety, but it can record the collective intellectual output of a social network. Some of that is opinion, and some of that is factual; as I spent more time on Poll Bludger, it became easier to discern one from another. Raw knowledge, through experience, translated into understanding. That understanding, once earned, was also captured. It is impossible to translate one person’s understanding directly into another’s head, but captured understanding is a necessary prerequisite for hyperintelligence.

Wikipedia captures its understanding through its still-evolving processes: its standards, and (more significantly) its practices represent the embodied understandings of the Wikipedians, as Wikipedia has evolved from possibility through viability and into ubiquity. The Poll Bludgers learned very quickly not to feed the trolls, learned to detect and expose the “concern trolls,” and, over time, have grown into a community. Over the last four weeks, The Poll Bludger has become the place for “political tragics” to come and learn about and (perhaps) discuss the hot topics of the election. In that, The Poll Bludger is filling a very obvious void in Australian political life; the US has Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, Huffington Post, Little Green Footballs, and countless other politically-focused blogs; before this electoral cycle, Australia’s political blogs were mostly personal sites, or professional journalistic endeavors. Possum’s Politics and The Poll Bludger mark the emergence of a political blogging community which, through shared, altruistic effort, are producing the first hallmarks of hyperintelligence.

Assuming that the community of Poll Bludgers hangs together past the fag-end of this electoral cycle (there are signs that Bowe intends the site to transition into broader discussions of the political affairs of the nation) there is now a highly knowledgeable and reasonably strong digital social network of politically-aware Australians. How the hyperintelligence of this community translates into a transformation of the Australian political landscape is, as yet, an open question.

As I stated at the outset, this is a period of profound liminality. We are between things. But what we do know, from Wikipedia and now The Poll Bludger, is that a community can share its wealth of knowledge – from each according to his ability, to each according to his need – and produce a highly disproportionate, asymmetric result. A small but motivated group of citizens can change the world. We need only to dissect the mechanics of this process, and abstract a model which can be put to work. This model will form the template for 21st-century political activism.

III: Nothing Like Democracy

Earlier this year, I was privileged to go “on tour” with Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, the founder and public face of Wikipedia, as we crisscrossed the nation, talking to educators in Adelaide, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. Everywhere we went, people asked the same question: why is Wikipedia such a success, while my wiki languishes? What do you need to achieve critical mass? The answer, Jimmy said, is five people. Five individuals dedicated to an altruistic sharing of collective intelligence should be enough to produce a flowering similar to Wikipedia. Jimbo has learned, through experience, that the “minor” language versions of Wikipedia (languages with less than 10 million native speakers), need at least five steady contributors to become self-sustaining. In the many wikis Jimbo oversees through his commercial arm, Wikia, he’s noted the same phenomenon time and again. Five people mark the tipping point between a hobby and a nascent hyperintelligence.

Five people is not a very big ask. Anything that people are passionate about should be able to gather together that many dedicated altruists. Since we are now constrained neither by location nor synchronous activity, the barrier to entry has become nearly non-existent. Just five people can easily enter into a pact to change the world. As their work catches on and catches fire, as they capture their collective intelligence, and as the social network forms, hyperintelligence will emerge. Everyone involved in the social network benefits from it, and every member of the network increases their own selection fitness by pursuing an altruistic end. They will be more effective in pursuit of their ends (insofar as those ends are those of the network), because of their participation within the network.

Effectiveness is a highly reinforcing reward. If, through participation within a social network, an individual can pursue his or her goals with greater effectiveness, those individuals are more likely, through time, to become more deeply involved in the network, further increasing their effectiveness. Thus, altruism – that is, investment in the network – reaps the selfish reward of increased effectiveness. Both basic biological drives are simultaneously served. This marks the fault line between the network era and the politics which came before it. In the era of hyperpolitics, altruistic investment yields selfish results, and does so in such a disproportionate manner that the drive toward altruistic behavior is very strongly reinforced.

Hyperpolitics have completely scrambled the neat continuum from selfishness to altruism which provided the frame for a hundred centuries of human civilization. We are entering uncharted territory. It is now almost impossibly easy for networks of individuals to appear out of nowhere, harnessing hyperintelligence to achieve their ends. This phenomenon, known as hyperempowerment (Robb, 2007), is a radically destabilizing force.

Wikipedians have put hyperintelligence to work for the benefit of all humanity, but the hyperempowerment created by Wikipedia has unintentionally destabilized educational, informational and governmental elites throughout the entire world. Daily Kos has put its social network to work for the benefit of progressive politicians throughout the US: for the next decade, psephologists will be debating the impact of the “Kossaks” on the 2006 US Congressional elections; there is no doubt that Kossaks strongly influenced candidate pre-selection. Hyperempowerment means you punch far above your weight; institutions – all institutions – formed during an earlier period, are ill-prepared for this.

The 21st century is witnessing the balkanization of a single body politic into a mass of hyperempowered polities, each leveraging its own resources of social networks and hyperintelligence to achieve its own ends. This is where we see the ageless conflict of selfishness against altruism emerge again, but in a different configuration. Within any hyperempowered network, altruism is strongly rewarded; when working against the aims of a similarly hyperempowered network, selfishness will rule the day. However, these polities are likely to be quick to recognize the advantages of cooperation as frequently as they choose to compete, so we will see meta-polities, and mega-polities. Political life will not re-integrate into the singular political blocks of the 19th and 20th centuries, but massive, if inchoate forces will emerge periodically before melting back into the chaos.

None of this involves voting. None of this involves government as we currently conceive of it. The “Reassurance Ritual” which Alvin Toffler wrote about in The Third Wave, the triennial trip to the polling booth to assert your continuing belief in and respect for the institutions of representative democracy simply doesn’t apply. Political pressure will be applied directly to the institutions of influence, and these institutions are already deforming due to the informational stresses placed upon them. They simply can’t respond fast enough to hyperempowered polities and hyperpolitics. There is little doubt that most of our familiar institutions, including governments, will rapidly disintegrate as the number of hyperempowered single-interest and special-interest and meta-interest groups begins to climb. We will be left with the hollowed-out remains of the institutions of government, but with nothing that looks anything like democracy.

This is already happening. And it’s a little late to reform our ways; these transformations emerge naturally from our interactions with each other through the network. We’d need to junk the infrastructure of the last forty years of development, everywhere in the world, to prevent this process from continuing and accelerating. Yet there are dangers, great dangers. Turn hyperempowerment one way, and you get Wikipedia. Turn it another way, and you get Al Qaeda, which is the very definition of a hyperempowered polity: loosely joined, knowledge sharing, altruistically focused on bringing a Wahabist Caliphate to the entire Muslim world. Al Qaeda will not surrender its network. It is its network. And that network has proven incredibly resilient, despite every attempt from a nearly universal collection of institutional powers to extinguish it. (The same can be said about the file-sharing networks which have become the permanent bane of institutional media interests.)

For this reason, we don’t have any easy options. We must understand how the processes of hyperintelligence, hyperempowerment and hyperpolitics work, and make them work for us. Because someone will make it work for them. Indeed, some already have. Unless hyperempowerment is met with hyperempowerment, in a new balance of power, we will simply be pushed around more effectively than ever before, by forces which, acting selfishly, are unlikely to have our own best interests in mind.

So, as we sit and talk pleasantly about blogging and conversational media and Web 2.0, discussing their impacts on Australia’s political system and the global political order, please realize this: we are sitting on a bomb, now half-exploded. Everything we know about how institutions behave is likely to be proven hilariously wrong. We are the institutions now, and we, here in this room, bear full responsibility for our actions. This is the between time, the time when anything can happen. As we rise into hyperempowerment, we need to be mindful of what we want to share, and to what end. For sharing is the shape, the promise, and the danger of our common future.

Mob Rules is also available on YouTube, just click here.

Chaos

The world has changed. The world is changing. The world will change a whole lot more. We lucky few, we band of coders, bear witness to the most comprehensive transformation in human communication since the advent of language. We are embedded in the midst of this transition; we make it happen with every script we write and every page we publish and every blog we post and every video we upload. For that reason, it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. No wonder it looks so crazy and chaotic.

In the mid 20^th century, American philosopher H. Richard Neibur wrote that the first question of ethics is not, “What is right?”, but rather, “What is going on?” This arvo, before we retire to the Shelbourne for drinks and conversation, I’d like to take you on a tour of our very peculiar present. Something’s happening that is so unexpected, most of us don’t even know it’s going on.

Confusion: Three Billion

We begin on the shores of the Indian Ocean, in the south Indian state of Kerala. For at least a thousand years the fishermen of Kerala have sailed their sturdy dhows to sea, lowered their nets, prayed to their gods, and – if their prayers were heard – hauled in a bountiful catch. Fully laden, the fishermen set their sails to shore, to any one of the many fishing villages and fish markets which dot the Kerala coast. The selection of a port is done more or less at random, so throughout all these thousand years too many boats pulled into one port, leaving the markets oversupplied, and the fisherman selling their catch at a loss, while another market, just a few kilometers away, has no fish for sale at any price. This kept the fishermen poor, and the markets consistently either oversupplied or undersupplied.

From 1997 through 2001, as India’s rush to industrialization gathered momentum, several of India’s mobile telecoms firms strung the Kerala coast with GSM towers. GSM is a radio signal, and travels in line-of-sight, which means that, out at sea, the signal can reach 25 kilometers, the point where the curvature of the Earth blocks the view of the shore.

GSM handsets cost a month’s wages for a Kerala fishermen – imagine if a handset here cost four or five thousand dollars. (Even my Nokia N95 didn’t cost that much.) Yet, some wealthy fisherman, somewhere in Kerala, bought a GSM handset and took it to sea. At some point during a fishing voyage that fisherman had some communication with the mainland – perhaps a trivial family matter. But, in the course of that communication, he learned of a village going wanting for fish, at any price. So he made for that port and sold his catch at a tidy profit that day. The next day, perhaps, he called into shore, talking to fish sellers to the various ports, and learned which market needed fish the most – and was willing to pay for it. So it began.

Fishermen form a tight-knit community; while they might be secretive about their favorite spots to fish, they all trade technique with one another, and – within a very short period of time – all the other Kerala fishermen had learned of the power of the GSM handset, and each of them brought their own handset to sea, made calls to the markets, and sold their catch for a tidy profit. Today, the fish markets in Kerala are only rarely oversupplied with fish, and are almost never undersupplied. The network of fish sellers and fishermen have created their own bourse, a marketplace which grows organically out of an emergent web of SMS and voice calls which distribute the catch efficiently across the market. The customers are happy – there’s always fish for sale. The fish sellers are happy – they always have fish to sell, and at a good price. And the fisherman are happy – and earning so much more, these days, that a GSM handset pays for itself in two months’ time.

None of this was predicted. None of this was expected. None of this was anything but shocking to the legion of economists who are now studying this unprecedented phenomenon. To our Western eyes this doesn’t even make much sense. We think of mobile phones as a bit of bling, a technological googaw that makes our lives a bit easier – something that removes the friction from our social interactions. In the age of the mobile, you’re never late, just delayed. You can always call to say you’re sorry. (Or text to say you’ve broken up.) While they can be useful in our economic lives, they’re hardly necessary – and, given that the boss can now reach you 24 hours a day, wherever you are on Earth – they’re often more of a pain in the arse than a blessing. But at the end of the day they’re extraneous. Nice, but non-essential.

Except they’re not.

Study after study is confirming something that many were already beginning to suspect: the very poorest people on Earth – the five billion of us who earn less than a few thousand dollars a year – can benefit enormously from pervasive wireless communications. It seems counterintuitive – why would a subsistence farmer in Kenya need a mobile phone? As it turns out, that farmer – and farmers in Nigeria, and Bangladesh and Peru – will phone ahead to the markets, and learn where their produce will bring the best price. Left to their own devices, human beings with things to trade will create their own markets. When mobile communications enter the mix, their ability to trade effectively increases enormously.

Those who serve the poor – microfinance institutions like Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank – have real experience of the power of mobiles to help the poor. So many of Grameen Bank’s loans went to finance mobile handsets that they recently founded their own telecoms firm – Grameen Phone – to provide services to the poor. None of this is charity work – all of these are profit-making enterprises; but it turns out that helping the poor to communicate is one of the most effective ways to help them to improve their economic effectiveness.

That, too, wasn’t predicted by anyone. After all, don’t the poor need schools, clean water, inoculations and transparent governments? Yes, certainly they need all these things, but they also need the tools that let them help themselves. Near as anyone can tell, a mobile handset pretty much tops that list of tools. And although this singular discovery is nearly unknown in the Western world, the poor of the world know it – because they’ve been snapping up mobiles in unprecedented and unexpected numbers.

Sometime in the next 30 days, the telecoms firms of the world will have reached a new milestone – three billion subscribers. About ten percent of that number are customers who have multiple accounts, but – somewhere in the middle of 2008, half of humanity will own a mobile handset. In just a decade’s time, we’ll have gone from half the world never having made a telephone call to half the world owning a phone. Unprecedented. Unexpected. But, given what we now know, perfectly natural. And it’s not slowing down. It took a decade to get to the first billion mobile subscribers, four years to get to the second billion, and eighteen months to get to three billion. In a year, more or less, we’ll hit four billion, then things will begin to slow, as we reach the ranks of the desperately poor, the two billion who earn less than a dollar a day. Yet these are precisely the people who would most benefit from a mobile. Expect to see some big campaigns in the next few years, from Oxfam and World Vision, asking you to buy mobiles for the poor.

Nokia looked at the curves, figured out what’s going on, and created a mobile handset targeted directly at the emerging markets of the world – the Nokia 1100. It’s cheap, simple, has predictive text for just about any language with more than 10 million speakers, and – in the four years since its introduction – they’ve sold well over 200 million of them. By comparison, Nokia sold twice as many 1100s as Apple sold iPods – in half the time. The most successful consumer electronics device in history, the 1100 is the Model T of wireless networking. Put an 1100 in someone’s hands, and they’ll use it to improve their life. It’s as simple as that.

And – what’s really interesting here – these farmers and fishermen and spice traders and so forth didn’t need an eBay to help them trade. They don’t need fancy services – and wouldn’t use them. They only need to be connected to other people. That in itself is entirely sufficient. People come fully equipped to provide all the services they need. Nothing else is required. Five thousand years of civilization have seen to that. We know how to organize our own affairs – and can do so without any assistance. But now we can do so globally and instantaneously. That’s not a power restricted to the billion richest of us; it’s now within reach of half of us, and improves the lives of the poor far more than it helps us. Our innate capacity for self-organization, now extended and amplified almost infinitely, has itself produced some unpredicted and unexpected effects.

Discord: The Center Will Not Hold

In the Jurassic Era of the Internet, before the Web was more than a few hundred pages in size, and still mostly run off a series of servers in Geneva, John Gilmore, who co-founded SUN Microsystems before going off to found Cygnus Support and the EFF, recognized an inherent quality of networks: they promote the sharing of information. This was codified in what I (only half-jokingly) call Gilmore’s Law:

“The net regards censorship as a failure, and routes around it.”

At the time Gilmore made this statement, he was talking politics. Gilmore is a political animal – many of you probably know of his long-running tangle with US Homeland Security over the free right to travel within the States without having to display ID. And, for many years this aphorism was interpreted as a political maxim – that political censorship of the net was essentially impossible.

As we all know, the Chinese have tried, with their “Great Firewall of China”, but even they’ve given up. Just two months ago, Wang Guoqing, the Vice-Minister for Information in China was quoted as saying, “It has been repeatedly proved that information blocking is like walking into a dead end.”

At around the same time as that shock admission of failure, Senator Coonan introduced the Government’s latest attempt to appease its conservative base by locking down the Australian Internet, because, well, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?” Turns out that’s just what the children were doing – it took a 16 year-old Australian boy 30 minutes to crack through that filter, and another 40 minutes to crack it again, after the filter was “upgraded.”

In that same week, a fifteen year-old in the United States got his hands on a copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, photographed the entire text, bound it up as a PDF, and uploaded it to the Pirate Bay so that tens of thousands could use BitTorrent and download their own copy – four days before the much-hyped simultaneous international release.

Gilmore, it seems, wasn’t thinking broadly enough. He assumed that censorship necessarily has a political dimension. It doesn’t. Censorship can be driven by a wide range of motives: some are political, some are moral, some are cultural, and some are economic. In the end, it doesn’t matter. All censorship inevitably encounters Gilmore’s Law, and loses. The net finds a way around it.

Before we get all hippy-dippy and attribute agency to something that we all know is really just a collection of wires and routing boxen, we need to clarify what we mean when we use the word “net”. The wiring isn’t the network. The routers aren’t the network. The people are the network. We had social networks ten million years before we ever had a telephone exchange; we carry those networks around in our heads, they’re part of the standard “kit” of our cortical biology. We have been blessed with the biggest and best networking gear of all the hominids, but we all share the same capability. The social sharing of information has played a big part in the success of the hominids, and, in particular, human beings. We are born to plug into the network of other human beings and share information. It’s what we do.

But just now we’re facing increasingly frequent collisions between Gilmore’s Law and old-fashioned and time-tested ways of the world. We’ve long known that there are no secrets in a small town; now that same law of interpersonal relationships are being applied to businesses, to governments, to institutions of every shape and description. Consider these examples:

• Encyclopaedia Britannica hides behind a walled garden and is subsequently obsolesced by Wikipedia;
• Television shows and films end up on BitTorrent before they’re broadcast; the torrent for Halo 3 was posted last week. The video game was released on Monday.
• A tight group of reporters and bloggers just brought down the US Attorney General, who attempted to stonewall all investigations into his politically-motivated firings of eight US Attorneys.
• And – oh yeah – there’s that whole open-source movement which is, ever so slowly and carefully, eating Microsoft.

What’s happening here? What is it about the network that makes it so potent? Simply this: the network, in every form, is anathema to hierarchy. The network represents the other form of organization, not a contradiction of hierarchy, but, rather, a counterpoint to it. I’ve rewritten Gilmore’s Law to reflect this:

“The net regards hierarchy as a failure, and routes around it.”

For the fifty-five hundred years of human civilization, hierarchy has always had the upper hand. Now the network, amplified by all those wires and routers, is stronger than hierarchy, and battle has been joined. But this isn’t going to be some full-on Armageddon, a battle between the Empire and the Alliance; this is the Death of a Thousand Cuts. The network is simply kicking the legs out from under hierarchies, everywhere they exist, for as long as they exist, until they find themselves unable to rise again. What it really come down to is this: we are assuming management of our own affairs, because we are now empowered to do so. It doesn’t matter if you’re a maize farmer in Kenya or a video producer in Queensland; these mob rules apply to us mob.

Unexpected. Unprecedented.

In a future which looks increasingly like the present, there is no center anywhere, no locus of authority, no controlling power ordering our daily lives. There are no governments, no institutions, no businesses that look anything like the limited liability enterprises born in the Netherlands five hundred years ago. Instead, there are groupings, networks within the network, that come together around a project or ideology, a shared sense of salience – meaning – for that group. The product of that network could be Wikipedia – or it could be al Qaeda. Buy the ticket, take the ride.

And it’s not over yet. The network hasn’t finished changing, and it hasn’t finished changing us.

Bureaucracy: Collapse and How to Profit From It

To recap: we know where we are, and we have some idea of what is really going on. But enough of philosophy: let’s play!

But. Well. One more thing…

Although the network has done a tidy job of disassembling the hierarchies of the world, there is still one hierarchy which remains stubbornly resistant to change, which retains its top-down, command-and-control hierarchical model of authority – and has for well over a hundred years. Telcos.

I find this endlessly ironic: the firms which created the network are somehow immune to the effects of the network. And, in consequence, so are the networks themselves. In fact, you can look at any of the networks – telephone, broadband, or wireless – and see in them the physical embodiment of hierarchy. It’s curious. It’s damned interesting. It’s also over.

Four months ago, a small startup in Silicon Valley named Meraki (Greek for “doing it with love”) for unveiled a cute little device, a wireless router that they simply named the Mini. Inside it has a RISC CPU running a custom version of LINUX which handles all of the routing tasks. That’s where it gets interesting. You see, Meraki have pioneered a new technology known as “wireless mesh networking”. You can power up a Mini in anywhere you like, and if there’s another Mini within distance – and these devices can reach nearly half a kilometer, outdoors – it will connect to it, share routing information, and route packets from one to another – all without any need to configure anything at all. Add another, and another, and another, and all of a sudden you’ve created a very wide area WiFi network. Only one of the Minis needs to be connected to the Internet as a gateway; the others will find it and route traffic through it. The Minis are small – and they’re also cheap. For just $49 dollars US, you can order one complete with an Australian wall wart. That’s cheaper than most access points out there, and because of the mesh networking, it does a whole lot more.

But what does the Meraki Mini have to do with the end of the telcos? Just this: a mesh network is a network that’s been subject to the corrosive effects of a network. There is no center anywhere. There’s no hierarcy or preferred route. There’s no gatekeeper anywhere. You can have one gateway, or twenty. You can have one mesh node or a thousand. Just throw another mesh node into the mix, and it’ll all work seamlessly. And mesh networks scale: the dynamics of a network of a thousand mesh repeaters aren’t substantially different from a network with ten. Packets still find their way, with minimal delay.

What this means is that we all have the capability to create our own large-scale, low-cost wireless networks within our grasp. Meraki is already proving this in San Francisco, where Google and Earthlink had been fighting the telcos for years to get a city-wide free wireless network installed. Last week, Earthlink pulled out – they just couldn’t fight the politically power of AT&T. Meanwhile, since February, Meraki has been offering free Meraki Minis to anyone in San Francisco who wanted to donate a little of their own broadband to a free municipal WiFi network. Lately that network has been growing by leaps and bounds – no easy feat in a city which effectively broken up by a series of large hills. The “Free the Net SF” project already has almost 14,000 users – that’s nearly triple the number two months ago – and hundreds of nodes. It is proof that us mob can seize control of the spectrum and use it for our own ends.

That’s fine and dandy for San Francisco, but what about here in Australia, where we’re suffering under a decade-old peering agreement which makes us pay and pay and pay for every bit we take out of the cloud? Which costs us tens of dollars an hour if we want to use a public WiFi hotspot, or, in the case of the Sydney Convention Centre, $800 for an hour’s access? (That was the quote Maxine received when I asked if we could have public WiFi during my talk.) Internet access in Australia has always been about bending over and taking it like a man.

Or at least it was.

But for the past thirty five minutes, you’ve all been bathing in WiFi, which I’m providing to all of you, free of charge. Here’s how I did it: my Nokia N95 connects to Vodofone’s HSDPA network at a couple of megabits per second. That’s piping through the Bluetooth connection of my mate David’s MacBook Pro, which is Internet Sharing the Bluetooth connection out to his Ethernet port. That Ethernet port is connected to a Meraki Mini, which, in turn, is talking to three more Meraki Minis scattered throughout the auditorium. You’ve all got good signal, and (I hope) plenty of bandwidth to blog, or check email, or whatever you might want to do when I get boring.

But here’s the kicker – it’s all running off batteries. The Meraki Minis only use three watts, so I built some simple power supplies for them. The N95 and the MacBook Pro already have their own batteries built into them. The whole thing is good for at least four hours of fun before someone needs to go find the mains. And, because it’s both entirely battery powered and entirely wireless, I can drop it anywhere in Sydney. Were we out-of-doors, I could probably cover a square kilometer, with just these four Minis. Of course, you can always add a few more. Or a thousand more.

Ok, Mark, that’s nice, you might be saying. That’s kind of cool. But big deal. We don’t own Meraki Minis – and we don’t really plan on buying one. That’s fine, and it doesn’t matter at all. You see, a mesh network node isn’t hardware device. It’s software which runs on arbitrary hardware. You can mesh network WiFi. Or Bluetooth. Or infrared, if you wanted to be perverse. It’s software. Which means that every laptop in this room is potentially another mesh network node, listening to the traffic and passing packets along. Consider the density of laptops and desktops (equipped with WiFi adapters) in Sydney, or Melbourne. Now imagine them as nodes within a vast mesh network. That’s where we’re going – and it’s just a software update away.

When I originally composed this section of the talk, I was going to make a prediction: because mesh networks are just software, and because my Nokia N95 has built-in WiFi, I predicted we’d soon see mesh networks for mobile phones. But I don’t need to make that prediction: a Swedish start-up, TerraNet, came out of stealth mode two weeks ago to announce they were doing precisely this. With their software, the mobile doesn’t even need the carrier’s wireless network. Mobiles simply route packets between themselves until they reach their destination. You wonder why the wireless telcos fought so hard and so long to keep WiFi out of mobiles? Was it just to prevent VOIP? Hardly. The telcos have known about mesh networking for a long time. And they know it spells their doom. So watch now, as the network frees itself from the authoritarian forms of those most hierarchical of organizations, the telcos.

But I said it was time to play. And it is. It’s time to put the mob rules to work for you. Because you all need to earn a living. But this world we’re entering is so chaotic, so accidental and unplanned for, everything we believe to be absolutely true is about to be severely tested.

ONE: The mob is everywhere.

There are very few places left on Earth where you can’t receive a text. Ulaanbataar to Timbuktu, Tierra del Fuego to Vladivostok, the network is truly global, and now encompasses the majority of humanity. It’s interesting to note that within the same year that half of humanity is urbanized, half of humanity will have a mobile handset. That’s not coincidental; they’re two sides of the same process. Just as we’ve been lured out from our villages into the vitality and opportunity of the city, we’re being drawn into the unexpected and unpredictable global mob.

TWO: The mob is faster, smarter and stronger than you are.

William Gibson put this much more elegantly when he wrote, “The street finds its own use for things, uses its manufacturers never intended.” No one set out to create arbitrage markets for the fishermen of Kerala; that’s something that emerged from the mob. SMS was meant to be used for emergency messaging; now the world sends several billion texts a day. Just add mobiles, and you get a mob.

You can’t push a mob any more than you can push a rope; you can pull them, lure them, and, if you’re very lucky, dazzle them for a moment or two, but then, inevitably, they’ll move along. That’s bad news for anyone building web sites. The world of mob rules isn’t about sites; it’s about services, things that the street uses and permutes indefinitely. The idea of web sites dates from a time before the network ate hierarchy; sites are places where you go and follow the rules laid down by some information architect. Well, there’s no way to enforce those rules. The first Google Maps mashup didn’t come from Google. Or the second. Or the third. Or the hundredth. Google resisted the mashup. Claimed mashups violated their terms of use. Mashups come from the mob, the street finding its own use for things. The mob pushed on through; Google bowed down and obeyed. The most powerful institution of the Internet era, pushed around like a child’s toy. Ponder that.

THREE: Advertising is a form of censorship.

The Web of 2007 is a house built upon sand. Nearly everything online hopes to fund itself through some sort of advertising and sponsorship. Advertising is a demand that you pay attention – a demand which can no longer be enforced. But the mob doesn’t like advertisements; it either ignores them or actively filters them away. In just the last few weeks, certain sites have been blocked to Firefox because it frequently incorporates the AdBlock extension. That’s upset some institutions which built their business model on the delivery of ads – demanding the attention of the mob. But the mob doesn’t like that. Even worse, for those who are raising a hew and cry about the “theft” of their precious content, the more they scream, the more they thrash about, the stronger the mob becomes. Consider: filesharing has only grown more pervasive despite every attempt of every copyright holder to bring it to heel. Each move has been met with a counter-move. There is no safety in copyright, nor any arguing with the mob. Music and movies are freely and broadly available, and will remain so into the indefinite future. Sadly, we’re now seeing that same, sorry battle repeated in double-time as advertisers – and those dependent upon them – assert an authority they no longer possess.

FOUR: The mob does not need a business model.

But what about your precious business models? How do you get paid for all this work you’re pouring into your projects? I have to be honest with you: the mob simply doesn’t care. The mob doesn’t need a business model. Heck, the mob doesn’t even need all this lovely wireless technology. If we took the mobiles away from the Kerala fishermen, they’d develop something – semaphores, mirrors, smoke signals – to maintain the integrity of the network. Once networks are created, they can not be destroyed. Networks are intrinsically resilient against all sorts of failures, and they’ll simply find a way to route around them. So if your business goes tits up because you built it around an economic model that is not viable in the era of mob rules, it will make no difference – the mob will simply route around you and find another way to do it.

So forget your business models, and remember the golden rule, as expressed by Talking Heads, in the song “Found a Job”:

“If your work isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right.”

If you – you folks in this room, who have the mob in your hands, who play with it as if it were a toy – if you don’t wake up in the morning completely possessed by the knowledge that what you’re doing is simply the coolest thing ever, you need to quit that job and find another. You need to reach into that bucket of dreams and ambitions and pull something out to share with us mob, something that will dazzle and excite us. It might only do so for a moment, but, in that moment, your social stock will rise so high that you’ll never have to worry about putting food on the table or paying the mortgage. You may not retire a millionaire, but you’ll certainly never go hungry. The mob is a meritocracy – admittedly a very perverse and bizarre meritocracy – but it is the one place where “quality will out”. Quality only comes from the marriage of craft and obsession. You have the craft. Embrace your obsessions. You will be rewarded.

FIVE: Make networks happen.

I need to leave you with one concrete example of how this is all going to work, and for this example I’ve selected the last bastion of authority and hierarchy – after everything else has dissolved into the gray goo of the network, one thing will remain. It won’t be government – that’s half gone already. It’s medicine. Medicine is very nearly the oldest of the professions, and has been a closely held monopoly for half a thousand years – closer to a guild than anything resembling a modern profession. Why? Medicine is guarded by the twin bulwarks of complexity and mortality: medicine is rich and deep body of knowledge, and, if you screw it up, you’ll kill yourself or somebody else. While the pursuit of medical knowledge is conducted within the peer-review frameworks of science, that knowledge is closely held. That leaves all of us – as patients – in a distinctly disempowered position when it comes to medicine. But that is all going to change.

In twenty years’ time, one in four Australians will be 65 or older – and I’ll be one of them. There is no medical authority big enough to deal with such a mass of gerontology; the system will be overloaded, and it will begin to collapse. Out of that collapse, we will see those of us who grew up within the Network Era – and I’m among the oldest of that generation – begin to work the network to our own ends. We will not be alone. There will be tens of millions of us – first in the West, then throughout the world – who will be facing the same problems, and searching for the same answers. We might not get to live forever, but we’ll want to die trying. So we’ll set to work, creating a common base of collective intelligence – think Wikipedia, but with a depth of medical knowledge that it doesn’t even begin to explore – together with strong social networking tools that embeds us deep within a network of experts – who may or may not be “board qualified”. I’ll probably come to expect that my GP and other specialists are members of this network – peers who share their expertise, not experts pronouncing solutions. And this network will never leave me; in fact, it will probably watch every move I make, every breath I take, every calorie I eat, and every heartbeat. It sounds Orwellian, but I will want this – because I will see it as a profoundly empowering form of surveillance. In other words, my wellness becomes a quality of my network.

This is not a website. This is not WebMD or Healtheon or a cancer support group, or anything that looks like anything we’ve seen yet. This is a self-organizing quality of the mob, painfully aware of their own accelerating senescence, and fully empowered to do something about it. And it represents an enormous opportunity for you. In just the last paragraph I’ve dropped a half a dozen strong business ideas onto you; but they’re so different from how we’re thinking about the network today that it will probably take some time to work it all out. But the mob won’t wait forever. Remember: it is smarter and faster and stronger than you. You can try to get in front of it, and get picked up by it – I’ve given you more than enough clues to do that – or you can get run down. That choice is yours. But if I’ve learned anything from my study of mob rules, it’s that the future lies in making networks happen. If you do that, there’s a place for you with us mob.

Aftermath

We live in increasingly interesting times. Half of humanity has suddenly dropped in – uninvited and unannounced – crashing our private party, eager to participate in an exploration of the possibilities of human communication. Whatever they want, they’re going to get. That’s the way things work now. Fortunately, they want what we want: better lives for themselves and their families. How they get it – that’s in their hands. We can assist them, but they don’t really need our help. That mob will work it out for themselves. And in the process, everything will change for us, as well.

Journalist Norman Cousins wrote, “Wisdom consists of the anticipation of consequences.” Sound advice, particularly in an time when everything is fluctuating out of control. We can’t know what to do – there’s too much uncertainty and potency in us mob for that – but we can know what not to do. For now, that will have to be enough.

Still, there is one thing I can recommend: have courage and keep moving. Standing still is not an option. The world has changed. The world is changing. The world will change a whole lot more. Good luck.

The adoption of mobile phones by fishermen and wholesalers was associated with a dramatic reduction in price dispersion, the complete elimination of waste, and near-perfect adherence to the Law of One Price.  Both consumer and producer welfare increased.

The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to another and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.