the human network

*

In the beginning, there is perfect Power, Power with a Thousand Faces: pharaoh, padishah, emperor, king, Lord Protector, Generalissimo, El Presidente.   Power pure and uninterrupted.  We have but to think the word and it is so.  We are in a world apart, protected by G*d, by ritual, by blades and dumb muscle.  Nothing enters save by Our permission, and then only when stripped naked, bound, and bowing.  This is the perfect relation of perfect power: absolute and absolutely asymmetric.

While we have him questioned, Our leading economist relates a report, recently received, tying the wealth of nations to their connectivity.  The people need no one else, he tells Me with his dying breath, but We need the money.  He spoke the truth: We need the instruments of Power to reinforce Our reality, and these do not come cheaply.  Our remaining advisers, chastened and respectful, suggest beginning with television – projecting Our Presence into the homes of Our people – and an auction (to Our most loyal friends) of radio spectrum suitable for mobile communication.

Our eyes, downcast, unable to look upon the Power except in its perfect portraits, had never seen the frown, and wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command that cameras captured, passions read and broadcast: a heart that mocked us, a hand always raised in reproach, as if we, ungrateful children, needed the constant admonition of the rod.  This plain as nakedness: all the smooth words of newscasters, commentators, spokespeople and ministers could not remove that stain from Power.  Each thought ourselves alone in this treason, and quickly burying it beneath other, safer thoughts.

Hidden truths undermine us in our humour, moments of lèse majesté, whispered giggles hidden behind our hands, scribbled graffiti above the pissoir, so shocking they made us gasp, and then, thereafter, we knew them as truth.  Other lines joined them, more foul, funny, shocking and true, a vast fabric of written rebellion, expressions of everything we had always known.  On the day the first text message arrives, with a joke that could get us killed, we delete it – though not before we forward it along to a few of our friends, who send it along, who send it along.  Suddenly the secret insult is common knowledge.

**

Those who mock Us seek to destroy Us.  Those loyal to Us scrub treasonous filth from walls and streets.  We secure and question anyone nearby, their confessions Our entry points into a hidden nest of radicals, revolutionaries, and anarchists.  These We monitor closely, tapping their mobiles, looking to whom they contact, building a map from these connections, tracing the outlines of their conspiracies.  Our friends who own the telcos willingly hand over the information which spell out comings and goings of these traitors.  In one sudden strike we take them, whole, to summary judgement.  Treason troubles us no more.

They came in the night, roused us from sleep, and took him away.  We never saw him again.  Without a body, how could we mourn?  How could we bury our grief?  We could not speak of it, lest we ourselves disappear.  Someone – we know not whom – set up a memorial on Facebook, inviting those who knew him to share themselves.  We stayed away, but were told that one, then two, five, ten, fifteen, fifty, hundreds and finally uncountable thousands came to share; those who knew him, and those who only knew what he believed in.  We were afraid, but content.

Those who love traitors are traitors themselves.  We have no love for them, but We are thankful for their foolishness.  Facebook reveals them to Us, and everyone they know.  Treason breeds treason.  Traitors hang together.  We friend, and listen, and draw another map of another conspiracy until the picture, finely detailed, demands action.  Another night of gathering, judgement and cleansing.  This ends that.  There are not even whispers against Us.

Internet dating – has there been a greater invention?  Men and women who would not normally find one another can seek each other out in the privacy of their own homes.  Here, this one is pretty.  Such lovely green eyes.  And what a lovely green jacket.  And beautiful fingers, held up in such an attractive pose, count them: one, two.  And the photo, taken in the Capitol Square?  How interesting.  I’ll tell all my friends that I have a date, a Green Date, in Capitol Square, on the 2nd.  Yes.  I’ll tell them all.  They’ll want a date as well.

***

Inconceivable! They gather in My capitol, in My square, in their tens of thousands, to make demands. Impudence!  They should thank the heavens for their homes and daily bread.  Ingratitude!  By what witchcraft have they come together?  We tapped the phones, blocked the websites, and still they come, in their hundreds of thousands.  Some advise it must all be unplugged – at once – but others tell Us we have grown too dependent on the network.  Flip the switch, and We blind Ourselves, dragging Our loyal subjects into darkness, Our economy into ruin.  But the storm must be stopped, the plug pulled.

It didn’t surprise us when the network failed: half amazed it took so long. We found ourselves thrown back into another time: before instantly, before everywhere, before all-at-once.  But lessons learned lingered, taking on different forms: graffiti in hidden places, posters in public, chalk laid out on the sidewalk so anyone could add their own voice, so we could to move together, in unity.  This grew into a code: jumbled letters and numbers in text messages and spray painted street signs, which told us where and when.

And still they keep coming, in their millions.  How?  Without eyes to see and ears to hear, how do they know?  Our friends grow concerned, see Us sinking beneath this rising storm, but We apprehend the root of Our troubles, and will root it out.  This all began when We foolishly permitted our people to connect.  That must now stop, to preserve Us. Against the wishes of My friends – who will lose their fortunes so We might maintain control – We have mobile networks shut down, and wait for the inevitable collapse, as those against Us lose contact.

It took a few moments to realize that these handheld lifelines had become useless lumps of silicon and plastic.  It seemed like silence had descended in the midst of the crowd.  Then someone said, ‘Here, take this’, and gave me something that brought my mobile back to life, allowed it to connect with everyone else in the crowd, and to the world beyond.  In lieu of thanks I was asked to pass it along, and did, with the same instruction, so it spread like wildfire.  We could see around the tanks, around the police, around everything, moving faster, moving everywhere, moving NOW.

The guards join with us as we storm the palace.

****

We The People, in order to form a more perfect union, choose from amongst ourselves those fit to represent our franchise.  The elections, free, fair and hard-fought, divide, inevitably, along a spectrum from left to right.  But whatever ideology, no one argues the need to reframe power as governance, making a mystery of the obvious, placing it beyond reproach. Power – however dressed – draws those who lust for it, who benefit from the application of it, and this, too obvious, would ruin everything, igniting another Revolution.  In secrecy and silence, safety.

You can only be told ‘No!’ so many times before the blood begins to boil and overflows into action.  They’ll let us march in the streets now, but leave us impotent at the seats of government, demanding ‘process’ and ‘decorum’.  How can we be polite as our future is stolen away? This shell of democracy – perfect in form but crowded with corruption – needs to be punctured, so the rot beneath the skin can be exposed and excised.  Thankfully, someone with conscience – sick to death with the stench of power – comes forward with evidence enough to condemn everyone, bringing them down.

Madness!  How can anything be stable when everything is exposed? How can we guide the nation into prosperity with saboteurs underfoot? Incredible. The government will go on, will nail down roof nearly shorn off by these ‘revelations’.  We will ensure those who work for the government remain true to it: by oath and affirmation, surveillance and monitoring, force of law and pain of imprisonment.  Only when guaranteed privacy can we work to preserve the continued security of the nation.  It’s in these moments our democracy proves itself supple enough to meet the challenges of our times.  We can all congratulate ourselves on a crisis successfully overcome.

They threw him in jail – of course – claiming espionage, charging treason, crying for his head.  The message was clear, and silence descended, a curtain protecting them from us.  Behind it, they grow deaf and arrogant, manufacturing a managed dissent, bringing their full power down upon on anything else.  Still, a friend showed me something: a magic box.  Anything placed into that box finds finds its way to magazine editors and newspaper reporters and bloggers and loudmouthed radicals, no questions asked, in perfect anonymity.  That could prove irresistible.

*****

If secrets they want, secrets they shall have, by the hundreds of thousands, a tsunami broken silences, signifying nothing.  All of the effluvia and trivia of state, dressed up as meaning, each item seeming significant, demanding more attention than even a planet of mischief-makers, continuously clicking through pages, could possibly hope to digest.  Let them chew on that as the government draws these paranoids closer, tantalizing them with the shadows of conspiracies, just beyond the horizons of reason, yet believable enough that they will inevitably overreach into folly.  As they implode in a ruin of accusations and mistrust, the government will step in, bringing order to chaos, carrying on as before.

Do I know you?  How do I know you?  Who knows you that I know?

We have two choices before us: closely bound, connected at a thousand points of past and presence; or atomized, invisible, and ANONYMOUS.  On one hand, the tribe; on the other, legion.  The tribe is loyal, safe and steadfast, the legion strong, but mercurial and diffident.  We can subvert from within, or pervert from without.  In the right circumstances, we might even do both at once.  We might not always get our way, but we can resist, redirect, repurpose, and sometimes win.  Success is our greatest threat: the enemy learns, and nothing works twice.

Credentials, please.  Access granted.  You are now logged into the government.  You will need to re-authorize your credentials every fifteen minutes to prevent unauthorized access.  Today’s status report: sixty-five percent of systems are functioning normally; twenty percent are undergoing integrity checks, ten percent are under persistent attack, and five percent are compromised.  As a security measure your access has been temporarily restricted.  Please confine your activities to the indicated systems.  WARNING: There has been an intrusion detection. All system access has been restricted until further notice.  Thank you and have a nice day!

I ask for a password.  It comes along a few hours later, buried in the back-end bits of a cute little image of a wet kitten.  That’s a start, enough to log in.  But what then, as the network watches my every move, measuring me against the real person behind this account?  How should I behave? I whisper. Just above the throbbing dubstep soundtrack of this shooter, my fellow players feed me replies which could be actions within the gameworld – or something else entirely.  I make my moves, as advised, and when I see WARNING: There has been an intrusion detection, I know we have won.

[ Please note that this essay uses some rough language.]

Introduction: The First Billion Seconds

In a few days time, it will be exactly thirty-two years – a bit more than a billion seconds – since I learned to code.  I was lucky enough to attend a high school with its own DEC PDP 11/45, and lucky that it chose to offer computer science courses on a few VT-52 video terminals and a DECWriter attached to it.   My first OS was RSTS/E, and my first programming language was – of course – BASIC.

A hundred million seconds before this, a friend dragged me over to a data center his dad managed, sat me down at a DECWriter, typed ‘startrek’ at the prompt, and it was all over.  The damage had been done.  From that day, all I’ve ever wanted to do is play with computers.

I’ve pretty much been able to keep to that.

Oddly, the only time I didn’t play with computers was at MIT.  After MIT, when I began work as a software engineer, I got to play and get paid for it.  I’ve written code for every major microprocessor family (with the exception of the 6502), all the common microcontrollers, and every OS from CP/M to Android.  I’ve even written a batch-executed RPG II program, typed up on punched cards, exectuted on an IBM 370 mainframe.

(Shudder, shudder.)

At Christmas 1990, I sat down and read a novel published a few years before, by an up-and-coming science fiction writer.  That novel – Neuromancer – changed my life.  It gave me a vision that I would pursue for an entire decade: a three-dimensional, immersive, visualized Internet.  Cyberspace.  I dropped everything, moved myself to San Francisco – epicenter of all work in virtual reality – and founded a startup to design and market an inexpensive immersive videogaming console.  It was hard work, frequently painful, and I managed to pour my life savings into the company before it went belly up.  But I can’t say that any of the other VR companies faired any better.  A few of them still exist, shadows of their former selves, selling specialty products into the industrial market.

These companies failed because each of them – my own among them – coveted the whole prize.  With the eyes of a megalomaniac, each firm was going to ‘rule the world’.  Each did lots of inventing, holding onto every scrap of invention with IP agreements and copyrights and all sorts of patents.  I invented a technology very much similar to that seen in the Wiimote, but fourteen years before the Wiimote was introduced.  It’s all patented.  I don’t own it.  After my company collapsed the patent went through a series of other owners, until eventually I found myself in a lawyer’s office, being deposed, because my patent – the one I didn’t actually own – was involved in a dispute over priority, theft of intellectual property, and other violations.

Lovely.

With the VR industry in ruins, I set about creating my own networked VR protocol, using a parser donated by my friend Tony Parisi, building upon work from a coder over in Switzerland, a bloke by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who’d published reams and reams of (gulp) Objective-C code, preprocessed into ANSI C, implementing his new Hypertext Transport Protocol.  I took his code, folded it into my own, and rapidly created a browser for three-dimensional scenes attached to Berners-Lee’s new-fangled World Wide Web.

This happened seventeen years ago this week.  Half a billion seconds ago.

When I’d gotten my 3D browser up and running, I was faced with a choice: I could try to hold it tight, screaming ‘Mine! Mine! Mine!’ and struggle for attention, or I could promiscuously share my code with the world.  Being the attention-seeking type that I am, the choice was easy.  After Dave Raggett – the father of HTML – had christened my work ‘VRML’, I published the source code.  A community began to form around the project.  With some help from an eighteen year-old sysadmin at WIRED named Brian Behlendorf, I brought Silicon Graphics to the table, got them to open their own code, and we had a real specification to present at the 2^nd International Conference on the World Wide Web.  VRML was off and running, precisely because it was open to all, free to all, available to all.

It took about a billion seconds of living before I grokked the value of open source, the penny-drop moment I realized that a resource shared is a resource squared.  I owe everything that came afterward – my careers as educator, author, and yes, panelist on The New Inventors – to that one insight.  Ever since then, I’ve tried to give away nearly all of my work: ideas, articles, blog posts, audio and video recordings of my talks, slide decks, and, of course, lots of source code.  The more I give away, the richer I become – not just or even necessarily financially.  There are more metrics to wealth than cash in your bank account, and more ways than one to be rich.  Just as there is more than one way to be good, and – oh yeah – more than one way to be evil.

Which brings us to my second penny-drop moment, which came after I’d been programming computers for almost a billion seconds…

I: ZOMFG 574LLm4N W45 r19H7!

Sometimes, the evil we do, we do to ourselves.  For about half a billion seconds between the ages of nineteen and thirty nine, I smoked tobacco, until I realized that anyone who smokes past the age of forty is either a fool or very poorly informed.  So I quit.  It took five years and many, many, many boxes of nicotine chewing gum, but I’m clean.

A few years ago, Harvard researcher Dr. Nicholas Christakis published some interesting insights on how the behavior of smoking spreads.  It’s not the advertising – that’s mostly banned, these days – but because we take cues from our peers.  If our friends start smoking, we ourselves are more likely to start smoking.  There’s a communicative relationship, almost an epidemiological relationship at work here.  This behavior is being transmitted by mimesis – imitation.  We’re the imitating primates, so good at imitating one another that we can master language and math and xkcd.  When we see our friends smoking, we want to smoke.  We want to fit in.  We want to be cool.  That’s what it feels like inside our minds, but really, we just want to imitate.  We see something, and we want to do it.  This explains Jackass.

Mimesis is not restricted to smoking.  Christakis also studied obesity, and found that it showed the same ‘network’ effects.  If you are surrounded by the obese people, chances are greater that you will be obese.  If your peers starts slimming, chances are that you will join them in dieting.  The boundaries of mimesis are broad: we can teach soldiers to kill by immersing them in an environment where everyone learns to kill; we can teach children to read by immersing them in an environment where everyone learns to read; we can stuff our faces with Maccas and watch approvingly as our friends do the same.  We have learned to use mimesis to our advantage, but equally it makes us its slaves.

Recent research has shown something disturbing: divorce spreads via mimesis.  If you divorce, its more likely that your friends will also split up.  Conversely, if your friends separate, it’s more likely that your marriage will dissolve.  Again, this makes sense – you’re observing the behavior of your peers and imitating it, but here it touches the heart, the core of our being.

Booting up into Homo Sapiens Sapiens meant the acquisition of a facility for mimesis as broadly flexible as the one we have for language.  These may even be two views into the same cognitive process.  We can imitate nearly anything, but what we choose to imitate is determined by our network of peers, that set of relationships which we now know as our ‘social graph’.

This is why one needs to choose one’s friends carefully.  They are not just friends, they are epidemiological vectors.  When they sneeze, you will catch a cold.  They are puppet masters, pulling your strings, even if they are blissfully unaware of the power they have over you – or the power that you have over them.

All of this is interesting, but little of it has the shock of the new.  Our mothers told us to exercise caution when selecting our friends.  We all know people who got in with the ‘wrong crowd’, to see their lives ruined as a consequence.  This is common knowledge, and common sense.

But things are different today.  Not because the rules have changed – those seem to be eternal – but because we have extended ourselves so suddenly and so completely.  Our very new digital ‘social networks’ recapitulate the ones between our ears, in one essential aspect – they become channels for communication, channels through which the messages of mimesis can spread.  Viral videos – and ‘viral’ behavior in general – are good examples of this.

Digital social networks are instantaneous, ubiquitous and can be vastly larger than the hundred-and-fifty-or-so limit imposed on our endogenous social networks, the functional bandwidth of the human neocortex.  Just as computers can execute algorithms tens of millions of times faster than we can, digital social networks can inflate to elephantine proportions, connecting us to thousands of others.

Most of us keep our social graphs much smaller; the average number of friends on any given user account on Facebook is around 35.  That’s small enough that it resembles your endogenous social network, so the same qualities of mimesis come into play.  When your connections start talking about a movie or a song or a television series, you’re more to become interested in it.

If this is all happening on Facebook – which it normally is – there is another member of your social graph, there whether you like it or not: Facebook itself.  You choose to build your social graph by connecting to others within Facebook, store your social graph on Facebook’s servers, and communicate within Facebook’s environment.  All of this has been neatly captured, providing an opening for Facebook to do what they will with your social graph.

You have friended Mark Zuckerberg, telling him everything about yourself that you have ever told to any of your friends.  More, actually, because an analysis of your social graph reveals much about you that you might not want to ever reveal to anyone else: your sexual preference and fetishes, your social class, your income level – everything that you might choose to hide is entirely revealed because you need to reveal it in order to make Facebook work.  Because you do not own it.  Because you do not have access to the source code, or the databases.  Because it is closed.

Your social graph is the most important thing you have that can be represented in bits.  With it, I can manipulate you.  I can change your tastes, your attitudes, even your politics.  We now know this is possible – and probably even easy.  But to do this, I need your social graph.  I need you to surrender it to me before I can use it to fuck you over.

We didn’t understand any of this a quarter billion seconds ago, when Friendster went live.  Now we have a very good idea of the potency of the social graph, but we find ourselves almost pathetically addicted to the amplified power of communication provided by Facebook.  We want to quit it, but we just don’t know how.  Just as with tobacco, going cold turkey won’t be easy.

On 28 May 2010, I killed my Facebook profile and signed off once and for all.  There is a cost – I’m missing a lot of the information which exists solely within the walled boundaries of Facebook – but I also breathe a bit easier knowing that I am not quite the puppet I was.  When someone asks why I quit – an explanation which has taken me over a thousand words this morning – they normally just close down the conversation with, “My grandmother is on Facebook.  I have to be there.”

That may be our epitaph.

We are so fucked.  We ended up here because we surrendered our most vital personal details to a closed-source system.  We should have known better.

And that’s only the half of it.

So much has happened in the last eight weeks that we’ve almost forgotten that before all of this disaster and tragedy afflicted Queensland, we were obsessed with another sort of disaster, rolling out in slow-motion, like a car smash from inside the car.  On 29 November 2010, Wikileaks, in conjunction with several well-respected newspapers, began to release the first few of a quarter million cables, written by US State Department officials throughout the world.  The US Government did its best to laugh these off as inconsequential, but one has already led more-or-less directly to a revolution in Tunisia.  We also know that Hilary Clinton has requested credit card numbers and DNA samples for all of the UN ambassadors in New York City, presumably so she can raise up a clone army of diplomats intent on identity theft.  Not a good look.

In early December, as the first cables came to light, and their contents ricocheted through the mediasphere, the US government recognized that it had to act – and act quickly – to staunch the flow of leaks.  The government had some help, because an individual seduced by the United States’ projection of power decided to mount a Distributed Denial of Service attack against the Wikileaks website.  In the name of freedom.  Or liberty.  Or something.

Wikileaks went down, but quickly relocated its servers into Amazon.com’s EC2 cloud.  This lasted until US Senator Joseph Lieberman started making noises.  Wikileaks was quickly turfed out of EC2, with Amazon claiming newly discovered violations of its Terms of Service.  Another ‘discovery’ of a violation followed in fairly short order with Wikileaks’ DNS provider, everyDNS.  For the coup de gras, PayPal had a look at their own terms of service – and, quelle horreur! – found Wikileaks in violation, freezing Wikileaks accounts, which, at that time, must have been fairly overflowing with contributions.

Deprive them of servers, deprive them of name service, deprive them of funds: checkmate.  The Powers That Be must have thought this could dent the forward progress of Wikileaks.  In fact, it only caused the number of copies of the website and associated databases to multiply.  Today, nearly two thousand webservers host mirrors of Wikileaks.  Like striking at a dandelion, attacking it only causes the seed to spread with the winds.

Although Wikileaks successfully resumed its work releasing the cables, the entire incident proved one ugly, mean, nasty point: the Internet is fundamentally not free.  Where we thought we breathed the pure air of free speech and free thought, we instead find ourselves severely caged.  If we do something that upsets our masters too much, they bring the bars down upon us, leaving us no breathing room at all.  That isn’t liberty.  That is slavery.

This isn’t some hypothetical.  This isn’t a paranoid fantasy.  This is what is happening. It will happen again, and again, and again, whenever the State or forces in collusion with the State find themselves threatened.  None of it is secure.  None of it belongs to us.  None of it is free.

This is why we are so truly and wholly fucked.  This is why we must stop and rethink everything we are doing.  This is why we must consider ourselves victims of another kind of disaster, another tragedy, and must equally and bravely confront another kind of rebuilding.  Because if we do not create something new, if we do not restore what is broken, we surrender to the forces of control.

I will not surrender.  I will not serve.

II: Life During Wartime (with A Design Guide for Anarchists)

Like it or not, we find ourselves at war.  It’s not a war we asked for.  It’s not a war we wanted.  But war is upon us, the last great gasp of the forces of control as they realize that when they digitized, in pursuit of greater efficiency, profit, or extensions of their own power, whatever they once held onto became so fluid it now drains away completely.

That’s one enemy, the old enemy, the ones whom history has already ruled irrelevant.  But there’s the other enemy, who seeks to exteriorize the interior, to make privacy difficult and therefore irrelevant.  Without privacy there is no liberty.  Without privacy there is no individuality.  Without privacy there is only the mindless, endless buzzing of the hive.    That’s the new enemy.  Although it announces itself with all of the hyperbole of historical inevitability, this is just PR aimed at extending the monopoly power of these forces.

We need weapons.  Lots of weapons.  I’m not talking about the Low Orbit Ion Cannon.  Rather, I’m recommending a layered defensive strategy, one which allows us to carry on with our business, blithely unmolested by the forces which seek to constrain us.

Here, then, is my ‘Design Guide for Anarchists’:

Design Principle One: Distribute Everything

The recording industry used the courts to shut down Napster because they could.  Napster had a single throat they could get their legal arms around, choking the life out of it.  In a display of natural selection that would have brought a tear to Alfred Russel Wallace’s eye, the selection pressure applied by the recording industry only led to the creation of Gnutella, which, through its inherently distributed architecture, became essentially impossible to eradicate.  The Day of the Darknet had begun.

Break everything up.  Break it all down.  When you have these components, make them all independent.  Replicate them widely.  Allow them to talk to one another.  Allow them to search one another, share with one another, so that together they will create a whole greater than a simple sum of parts.  Then you will never be rid of them, because if one part should be cut down, there will be two others to take its place.

This is an extension of the essential UNIX idea of simple programs which can be piped together to do useful things.  ‘Small pieces, loosely joined.’  But these pieces shouldn’t live within a single process, a single processor, a single computer, or a single subnet.  They must live everywhere they can live, in every compatible environment, so that they can survive any of the catastrophes of war.

Design Principle Two: Transport Independence

The inundation of Brisbane and its surrounding suburbs brought a sudden death to all of its networks: mobile, wired, optic.  All of these networks are centralized, and for that reason they can all be turned off – either by a natural disaster, or at the whim of The Powers That Be.  Just as significantly, they require the intervention of those Powers to reboot them: government and telcos had to work hand-in-hand to bring mobile service back to the worst-affected suburbs.  So long as you are in the good graces of the government, it can be remarkably efficient.  But if you find yourself aligned against your government, or your government is afflicted with corruption, as simple a thing as a dial tone can be almost impossible to manifest.

We have created a centralized communications infrastructure.  Lines feed into trunks, which feed into central offices, which feed into backbones.  This seems the natural order of things, but it is entirely an echo of the commercial requirements of these networks.  In order to bill you, your communications must pass through a point where they can be measured, metered and tariffed.

There is another way.  Years before the Internet came along, we used UUCP and FidoNet to spread mail and news posts throughout a far-flung, only occasionally connected global network of users.  It was slower than we’re used to these days, but no less reliable.  Messages would forward from host to host, until they reached their intended destination.  It all worked if you had a phone line, or an Internet connection, or, well, pretty much anything else.  I presume that a few hardy souls printed out a UUCP transmission on paper tape, physically carried it from one host to another, and fed it through.

A hierarchy is efficient, but the price of that efficiency is vulnerability.  A rhizomatic arrangement of nodes within a mesh is slow, but very nearly invulnerable.  It will survive flood, fire, earthquake and revolution.  To abolish these dangerous hierarchies, we must reconsider everything we believe about ‘the right way’ to get bits from point A to point B.  Every transport must be considered – from point-to-point laser beams to wide-area mesh networks using unlicensed spectrum down to semaphore and smoke signals.  Nothing is too slow, only too unreliable.  If we rely on TCP/IP and HTTP exclusively, we risk everything for the sake of some speed and convenience.  But this is life during wartime, and we must shoulder this burden.

Design Principle Three: Secure Everything

Why would any message traverse a public network in plaintext?  The bulk of our communication occurs in the wide open – between Web browsers and Web servers, email servers and clients, sensors and their recorders.  This is insanity. It is not our job to make things easy to read for ASIO or the National Security Agency or Google or Facebook or anyone else who has some need to know what we’re saying and what we’re thinking.

As a baseline, everything we do, everywhere, must be transmitted with strong encryption.  Until someone perfects a quantum computer, that’s our only line of defense.

We need a security approach that is more comprehensive than this.  The migration to cloud computing – driven by its ubiquity and convenience, and baked into Google’s Chrome OS – deprives us of any ability to secure our own information.  When we use Gmail or Flickr or Windows Live or MobileMe or even Dropbox (which is better than most, as it stores everything encrypted), we surrender our security for a little bit of simplicity.  This is a false trade-off.  These systems are insecure because it benefits those who offer these systems to the public.  There is value in all of that data, so everything is exposed, leaving us exposed.

If you do not know where it lives, if you do not hold the keys to lock it or release it, if it affects to be more pretty than useful (because locks are ugly), turn your back on it, and tell the ones you love – who do not know what you know – to do the same.  Then, go and build systems which are secure, which present nothing but a lock to any prying eyes.

Design Principle Four: Open Everything

I don’t need to offer any detailed explanation for this last point: it is the reason we are here.  If you can’t examine the source code, how can you really trust it?  This is an issue beyond maintainability, beyond the right to fork; this is the essential element that will prevent paranoia.  ‘Transparency is the new objectivity’, and unless any particular program is completely transparent, it is inherently suspect.

Open source has the additional benefit that it can be reused and repurposed; the parts for one defensive weapon can rapidly be adapted to another one, so open source accelerates the responses to new threats, allowing us to stay one step ahead of the forces who are attempting to close all of this down.  There’s a certain irony here: in order to compete effectively with us, those who oppose us will be forced to open their own source, to accelerate their own responses to our responses.  On this point we must win, simply because open source improves selection fitness.

When all four of these design principles are embodied in a work, another design principle emerges: resilience.  Something that is distributed, transport independent, secure and open is very, very difficult to subvert, shut down, or block. It will survive all sorts of disasters.  Including warfare.  It will adapt at lightning speed.  It makes the most of every possible selection advantage.  But nothing is perfect.  Systems engineered to these design principles will be slower than those built purely for efficiency.  The more immediacy you need, the less resilience you get.  Sometimes immediacy will overrule other design principles.  Such trade-offs must be carefully thought through.

Is all of this more work?  Yes.  But then, building an automobile that won’t kill its occupants at speed is a lot more work than slapping four wheels and a gear train on a paper mache box.  We do that work because we don’t want our loved ones hurtling toward their deaths every time they climb behind the wheel.  Freedom ain’t free, and ‘extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.’

Let me take a few minutes to walk you through the design of my own open-source project, so you can see how these design principles have influenced my own work.

III:  Plexus

When I announced I would quit Facebook, many of my contacts held what can only be described as an ‘electronic wake’ for me, in the middle of my Facebook comment stream.  As if I were about to pass away, and they’d never see me again.  I kept pointing them to my Posterous blog, but they simply ignored the links, telling me how much I’d be missed once I departed.  ‘But why can’t you just come visit me on Posterous?’ I asked.  One contact answered for the lot when he said, ‘That’s too hard, Mark.  With Facebook I can check on everyone at once.  I don’t need to go over there for you, and over here for someone else, and so on and so on.  Facebook makes it easy.’

That’s another epitaph.  Yet it precipitated a penny-drop moment.  The reason Facebook has such lock-in with its users is because of a network effect: as more people join Facebook, its utility value as a human switchboard increases.  It is this access to the social graph which is Facebook’s ‘flypaper’, the reason it is so sticky, and surpassing Google as the most visited site on the Internet.

That social graph is the key thing; it’s what the address book, the rolodex and the contacts database have morphed into, and it forms the foundation for a project that I have named Plexus.  Plexus is a protocol for the social web, ‘plumbing’ that allows all social web components to communicate: from each, according to their ability, to each, according to their need.  Some components of the social web – Facebook comes to mind – are very poor communicators.  Others, like Twitter, have provided every conceivable service to make them easy to talk to.

Plexus provides a ‘meta-API’, based on RFC2822 messaging, so that each service can feed into or be fed by an individual’s social graph.  This social graph, the heart of Plexus, is what we might call the ‘Web2.0 address book’.  It’s not simply a static set of names, addresses, telephone numbers and emails, but, rather, an active set of connections between services, which you can choose to listen to, or to share with.  This is the switchboard, where the real magic takes place, allowing you listen to or be listened to, allowing you to share, or be shared with.

Plexus is agnostic; it can talk to any service, and any service can talk to it.  It is designed to ‘wire everything together’, so that we never have to worry about going hither and yon to manage our social graph, but neither need we be chained in one place.  Plexus gives us as much flexibility as we require.  That’s the vision.

Just after New Year, I had an insight.  I had originally envisioned Plexus as a monolithic set of Python modules.  It became clear that message-passing between the components – using an RFC2822 protocol – would allow me to separate the components, creating a distributed Plexus, parts of which could run anywhere: on a separate process, on a separate subnet, or, really, anywhere.  Furthermore, these messages could easily be encrypted and signed using RSA encryption, creating a strong layer of security.  Finally, these messages could be transmitted by any means necessary: TCP/IP, UUCP, even smoke signals.  And of course, all of it is entirely open.  Because it’s a protocol, the pieces of Plexus can be coded in any language anyone wants to use: Python, Node.js, PHP, Perl, Haskell, Ruby, Java, even shell.  Plexus is an agreement to speak the same language about the things we want to share.

I could go into mind-numbing detail about the internals of Plexus, but I trust those of you who find Plexus intriguing will find me after I leave the stage this morning.  I’m most interested in what you know that could help move this project forward: what pieces already exist that I can rework and adapt for Plexus?  I need your vast knowledge, your insights and your critiques.  Plexus is still coming to life, but a hundred things must go right for it to be a success.  With your aid, that can happen.

When it does – well, let me share one of my favorite quotes, from one of my favorite novels, Illuminatus!, by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson:

The Chinese Taoist laughs at civilization and goes elsewhere.
The Babylonian Chaoist sets termites to the foundations.

Plexus is a white ant set to the imposing foundations of Facebook and every other service which chooses to take the easy path, walling its users in, the better to control them.  There is another way.  When the network outside the walls has a utility value greater than the network within, the forces of natural selection come into play, and those walls quickly tumble.  We saw it with AOL.  We saw it with MSN.  We’ll see it again with Facebook.  We will build the small and loosely-coupled components that individually do very little but altogether add up to something far more useful than anything on offer from any monopolist.

We need to see this happen.  This is not just a game.

Conclusion: The Next Billion Seconds

A billion seconds ago, Linux did not exist.  The personal computer was an expensive toy.  The Internet – well, one of my friends is the sysadmin who got HP onto UUCP – this was before the Internet became pervasive – and he remembers updating his /etc/hosts file weekly – by hand.  Every machine on the Internet could be found within a single file, that could be printed out on two sheets of greenbar.  A billion seconds later, and we’re a few days away from IPocalypse, the total allocation of the IPv4 number space.

Something is going on.

I’m not as teleological as Kevin Kelly.  I do not believe that there is evidence to support a seventh class of life – the technium – which is striving to come into its own.  I don’t consider technology as something in any way separate from us.  Other animals may use tools, but we have gone further, becoming synonymous with them.  Our social instinct for imitation, our language instinct for communication, and our technological instinct for tool using all seem to be reaching new heights.  Each instinct reinforces the others, creating a series of rising feedbacks that has only one possible end: the whole system overloads, overflows all its buffers, and – as you might expect – knocks the supervisor out of the box.

Call this a Singularity, if you like.  I simply refer to it as the next billion seconds.

The epicenter of this transition, where all three streams collide, sits in the palm of our hands, nearly all the time.  The mobile is the most pervasive technology in human history.  People who do not have electricity or indoor plumbing or literacy or agriculture have mobiles.  Perhaps five and a half billion of the planet’s seven billion souls possesses one; that’s everyone who earns more than one dollars a day.  Countless studies shows that individuals with mobiles improve their economic fitness:  they earn more money.  Anything that improves selection fitness – and economic fitness is a big part of that – spreads rapidly, as humans imitate, as humans communicate, as humans take the tool and further it, increasing its utility, amplifying its ability to amplify economic fitness.  The mobile becomes even more useful, more essential, more indispensable.  A billion seconds ago, no one owned a mobile.  Today, nearly everyone does.

Hundreds of billions of dollars are being invested to make the mobile more useful, more pervasive, and more effective.  The engines of capital are reorganizing themselves around it, just as they did, three billion seconds ago, for the automobile, and a billion seconds ago for the integrated circuit.  But unlike the automobile or the IC, the mobile is quintessentially a social technology, a connective fabric for humanity.  The next billion seconds will see this fabric become more tangible and more tightly woven, as it becomes increasingly inconceivable to separate ourselves from those we choose to share our lives with.

Call this a Hive Mind, if you like.  I simply refer to it as the next billion seconds.

This is starting to push beneath our skins the way it has already colonized our attention.  I don’t know that we will literally ‘Borg’ ourselves.  But the strict boundaries between ourselves, our machines, and other humans are becoming blurred to the point of meaninglessness.  Organisms are defined by their boundaries, by what they admit and what they refuse.  In this billion seconds, we are rewriting the definition of homo sapiens sapiens, irrevocably becoming something else.

Do we own that code? Are parts of that new definition closed off from us, fenced in by the ramparts of privilege or power or capital or law?  Will we end up with something foreign inside each of us, a potency unnamed, unobserved, and unavoidable?  Will we be invaded, infected, and controlled?   This is the choice that confronts us in the next billion seconds, a choice made even in its abrogation.  Freedom is not just an ideal.  Liberty is not some utopian dream.  These must form the baseline human experience in our next billion seconds, or all is lost.  We ourselves will be lost.

We have reached the decision point.  Our actions today – here, in this room – define the future we will inhabit, the transhumanity we are emerging into.  We’ve had our playtime, and it’s been good.  We’ve learned a lot, but mostly we’ve learned how to discern right from wrong.  We know what to do: what to build up, and what to tear down.  This transition is painful and bloody and carries with it the danger of complete loss.  But we have no choice.  We are too far down within it to change our ways now.  ‘The way down is the way up.’

Call it a birth, if you like.  It awaits us within the next billion seconds.

The slides for this talk (in OpenOffice.org Impress format) are available here.  They contain strong images.

Introduction: In The Beginning

Back in the 1980s, when personal computers mostly meant IBM PCs running Lotus 1*2*3 and, perhaps, if you were a bit off-center, an Apple Macintosh running Aldus Pagemaker, the idea of a coherent and interconnected set of documents spanning the known human universe seemed fanciful.  But there have always been dreamers, among them such luminaries as Douglas Engelbart, who gave us the computer mouse, and Ted Nelson, who coined the word ‘hypertext’.  Engelbart demonstrated a fully-functional hypertext system in December 1968, the famous ‘Mother of all Demos’, which framed computing for the rest of the 20^th century.  Before man had walked on the Moon, before there was an Internet, we had a prototype for the World Wide Web.  Nelson took this idea and ran with it, envisaging a globally interconnected hypertext system, which he named ‘Xanadu’ – after the poem by Coleridge – and which attracted a crowd of enthusiasts intent on making it real.  I was one of them.  From my garret in Providence, Rhode Island, I wrote a front end – a ‘browser’ if you will – to the soon-to-be-released Xanadu.  This was back in 1986, nearly five years before Tim Berners-Lee wrote a short paper outlining a universal protocol for hypermedia, the basis for the World Wide Web.

Xanadu was never released, but we got the Web.  It wasn’t as functional as Xanadu – copyright management was a solved problem with Xanadu, whereas on the Web it continues to bedevil us – and links were two-way affairs; you could follow the destination of a link back to its source.  But the Web was out there and working for thousand of people by the middle of 1993, while Xanadu, shuffled from benefactor to benefactor, faded and finally died.  The Web was good enough to get out there, to play with, to begin improving, while Xanadu – which had been in beta since the late 1980s – was never quite good enough to be released.  ‘The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good’, and nowhere is it clearer than in the sad story of Xanadu.

If Xanadu had been released in 1987, it would have been next to useless without an Internet to support it, and the Internet was still very tiny in the 1980s.  When I started using the Internet, in 1988, the main trunk line across the United States was just about to be upgraded from 9.6 kilobits to 56 kilobits.  That’s the line for all of the traffic heading from one coast to the other.  I suspect that today this cross-country bandwidth, in aggregate, would be measured in terabits – trillions of bits per second, a million-fold increase.  And it keeps on growing, without any end in sight.

Because of my experience with Xanadu, when I first played with NCSA Mosaic – the first publicly available Web browser – I immediately knew what I held in my mousing hand.  And I wasn’t impressed.  In July 1993 very little content existed for the Web – just a handful of sites, mostly academic.  Given that the Web was born to serve the global high-energy-physics community headquartered at CERN and Fermilab, this made sense.  I walked away from the computer that July afternoon wanting more.  Hypertext systems I’d seen before.  What I lusted after was a global system with a reach like Xanadu.

Three months later, when I’d acquired a SUN workstation for a programming project, I immediately downloaded and installed NCSA Mosaic, to find that the Web elves had been busy.  Instead of a handful of sites, there were now hundreds.  There was a master list of known sites, maintained at NCSA, and over the course of a week in October, I methodically visited every site in the list.  By Friday evening I was finished.  I had surfed the entire Web.  It was even possible to keep up the new sites as they were added to the bottom of the list, though the end of 1993.  Then things began to explode.

From October on I became a Web evangelist.  My conversion was complete, and my joy in life was to share my own experience with my friends, using my own technical skills to get them set up with Internet access and their own copies of NCSA Mosaic.  That made converts of them; they then began to work on their friends, and so by degrees of association, the word of the Web spread.

In mid-January 1994, I dragged that rather unwieldy SUN workstation across town to show it off at a house party / performance event known as ‘Anon Salon’, which featured an interesting cross-section of San Francisco’s arts and technology communities.  As someone familiar walked in the door at the Salon, I walked up to them and took them over to my computer.  “What’s something you’re interested in?” I’d ask.  They’d reply with something like “Gardening” or “Astronomy” or “Watersports of Mesoamerica” and I’d go to the newly-created category index of the Web, known as Yahoo!, and still running out of a small lab on the Stanford University campus, type in their interest, and up would come at least a few hits.  I’d click on one, watch the page load, and let them read.  “Wow!” they’d say.  “This is great!”

I never mentioned the Web or hypertext or the Internet as I gave these little demos.  All I did was hook people by their own interests.  This, in January 1994 in San Francisco, is what would happen throughout the world in January 1995 and January 1996, and still happening today, as the two-billion Internet-connected individuals sit down before their computers and ask themselves, “What am I passionate about?”

This is the essential starting point for any discussion of what the Web is, what it is becoming, and how it should be presented.  The individual, with their needs, their passions, their opinions, their desires and their goals is always paramount.  We tend to forget this, or overlook it, or just plain ignore it.  We design from a point of view which is about what we have to say, what we want to present, what we expect to communicate.  It’s not that that we should ignore these considerations, but they are always secondary.  The Web is a ground for being.  Individuals do not present themselves as receptacles to be filled.  They are souls looking to be fulfilled.  This is as true for children as for adults – perhaps more so – and for this reason the educational Web has to be about space and place for being, not merely the presentation of a good-looking set of data.

How we get there, how we create the space for being, is what we have collectively learned in the first seventeen years of the web.  I’ll now break these down some of these individually.

I: Sharing

Every morning when I sit down to work at my computer, I’m greeted with a flurry of correspondence and communication.  I often start off with the emails that have come in overnight from America and Europe, the various mailing lists which spit out their contents at 3 AM, late night missives from insomniac friends, that sort of thing.  As I move through them, I sort them: this one needs attention and a reply, this one can get trashed, and this one – for one reason or another – should be shared.  The sharing instinct is innate and immediate.  We know upon we hearing a joke, or seeing an image, or reading an article, when someone else will be interested in it.  We’ve always known this; it’s part of being a human, and for as long as we’ve been able to talk – both as children and as a species – we’ve babbled and shared with one another.  It’s a basic quality of humanity.

Who we share with is driven by the people we know, the hundred-and-fifty or so souls who make up our ‘Dunbar Number’, the close crowd of individuals we connect to by blood or by friendship, or as co-workers, or neighbors, or co-religionists, or fellow enthusiasts in pursuit of sport or hobby.  Everyone carries that hundred and fifty around inside of them.  Most of the time we’re unaware of it, until that moment when we spy something, and immediately know who we want to share it with.  It’s automatic, requires no thought.  We just do it.

Once things began to move online, and we could use the ‘Forward’ button on our email clients, we started to see an acceleration and broadening of this sharing.  Everyone has a friend or two who forwards along every bad joke they come across, or every cute photo of a kitten.  We’ve all grown used to this, very tolerant of the high level of randomness and noise, because the flip side of that is a new and incredibly rapid distribution medium for the things which matter to us.  It’s been truly said that ‘If news is important, it will find me,’ because once some bit of information enters our densely hyperconnected networks, it gets passed hither-and-yon until it arrives in front of the people who most care about it.

That’s easy enough to do with emails, but how does that work with creations that may be Web-based, or similarly constrained?  We’ve seen the ‘share’ button show up on a lot of websites, but that’s not the entire matter.  You have to do more than request sharing.  You have to think through the entire goal of sharing, from the user’s perspective.  Are they sharing this because it’s interesting?  Are they sharing this because they want company?  Are they sharing this because it’s a competition or a contest or collaborative?  Or are they only sharing this because you’ve asked them to?

Here we come back – as we will, several more times – to the basic position of the user’s experience as central to the design of any Web project.  What is it about the design of your work that excites them to share it with others?  Have you made sharing a necessary component – as it might be in a multi-player game, or a collaborative and crowdsourced knowledge project – or is it something that is nice but not essential?  In other words, is there space only for one, or is there room to spread the word?  Why would anyone want to share your work?  You need to be able to answer this: definitively, immediately, and conclusively, because the answer to that question leads to the next question.  How will your work be shared?

Your works do not exist in isolation.  They are part of a continuum of other works?  Where does your work fit into that continuum?  How do the instructor and student approach that work?  Is it a top-down mandate?  Or is it something that filters up from below as word-of-mouth spreads?  How does that word-of-mouth spread?

Now you have to step back and think about the users of your work, and how they’re connected.  Is it simply via email – do all the students have email addresses?  Do they know the email addresses of their friends?  Or do you want your work shared via SMS?  A QRCode, perhaps?  Or Facebook or Twitter or, well, who knows?  And how do you get a class of year 3 students, who probably don’t have access to any of these tools, sharing your work?

You do want them to share, right?

This idea of sharing is foundational to everything we do on the Web today.  It becomes painfully obvious when it’s been overlooked.  For example, the iPad version of The Australian had all of the articles of the print version, but you couldn’t share an article with a friend.  There was simply no way to do that.  (I don’t know if this has changed recently.)  That made the iPad version of The Australian significantly less functional than its website version – because there I could at least past a URL into an email.

The more something is shared, the more valuable it becomes.  The more students use your work, the more indispensable you become to the curriculum, and the more likely your services will be needed, year after year, to improve and extend your present efforts.  Sharing isn’t just good design, it’s good business.

II: Connecting

Within the space for being created by the Web, there is room for a crowd.  Sometimes these crowds can be vast and anonymous – Wikipedia is a fine example of this.  Everyone’s there, but no one is wholly aware of anyone else’s presence.  You might see an edit to a page, or a new post on the discussion for a particular topic, but that’s as close as people come to one another.  Most of the connecting for the Wikipedians – the folks who behind-the-scenes make Wikipedia work – is performed by that old reliable friend, email.

There are other websites which make connecting the explicit central point of their purpose.  These are the social networks: Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and so on.  In essence they take the Dunbar Number written into each of our minds and make it explicit, digital and a medium for communication.  But it doesn’t end there; one can add countless other contacts from all corners of life, until the ‘social graph’ – that set of connections – becomes so broad it is essentially meaningless.  Every additional contact makes the others less meaningful, if only because there’s only so much of you to go around.

That’s one type of connecting.  There is another type, as typified by Twitter, in which connections are weaker – generally falling outside the Dunbar Number – but have a curious resilience that presents unexpected strengths.  Where you can poll your friends on Facebook, on Twitter you can poll a planet.  How do I solve this problem?  Where should I eat dinner tonight?  What’s going on over there?  These loose but far-flung connections provide a kind of ‘hive mind’, which is less precise, and knows less about you, but knows a lot more about everything else.

These are not mutually exclusive principles.  It’s is not Facebook-versus-Twitter; it is not tight connections versus loose connections.  It’s a bit of both.  Where does your work benefit from a tight collective of connected individuals?  Is it some sort of group problem-solving?  A creative activity that really comes into its own when a whole band of people play together?  Or simply something which benefits from having a ‘lifeline’ to your comrades-in-arms?  When you constantly think of friends, that’s the sort of task that benefits from close connectivity.

On the other hand, when you’re collaborating on a big task – building up a model or a database or an encyclopedia or a catalog or playing a massive, rich, detailed and unpredictable game, or just trying to get a sense of what is going on ‘out there’, that’s the kind of task which benefits from loose connectivity.  Not every project will need both kinds of connecting, but almost every one will benefit from one or the other.  We are much smarter together than individually, much wiser, much more sensible, and less likely to be distracted, distraught or depressed.  (We are also more likely to reinforce each others’ prejudices and preconceptions, but that’s another matter of longstanding which technology can not help but amplify.)  Life is meaningful because we, together, give it meaning.  Life is bearable because we, together, bear the load for one another.  Human life is human connection.

The Web today is all about connecting.  That’s its single most important feature, the one which is serving as an organizing principle for nearly all activity on it.  So how do your projects allow your users to connect?  Does your work leave them alone, helpless, friendless, and lonely?  Does it crowd them together into too-close quarters, so that everyone feels a bit claustrophobic?  Or does it allow them to reach out and forge the bonds that will carry them through?

III: Contributing, Regulating, Iterating

In January of 2002, when I had my first demo of Wikipedia, the site had barely 14,000 articles – many copied from the 1911 out-of-copyright edition of Encyclopedia Britannica.  That’s enough content for a child’s encyclopedia, perhaps even for a primary school educator, but not really enough to be useful for adults, who might be interested in almost anything under the Sun.  It took the dedicated efforts of thousands of contributors for several years to get Wikipedia to the size of Britannica (250,000 articles), an effort which continues today.

Explicit to the design of Wikipedia is the idea that individuals should contribute.  There is an ‘edit’ button at the top of nearly every page, and making changes to Wikipedia is both quick and easy.  (This leaves the door open a certain amount of childish vandalism, but that is easily reversed or corrected precisely because it is so easy to edit anything within the site.)  By now everyone knows that Wikipedia is the collaboratively created encyclopedia, representing the best of all of what its contributors have to offer.  For the next hundred years academics and social scientists will debate the validity of crowdsourced knowledge creation, but what no one can deny is that Wikipedia has become an essential touchstone, our common cultural workbook.  This is less because of Wikipedia-as-a-resource than it is because we all share a sense of pride-in-ownership of Wikipedia.  Probably most of you have made some small change to Wikipedia; a few of you may have authored entire articles.  Every time any of us adds our own voice to Wikipedia, we become part of it, and it becomes part of us.  This is a powerful logic, an attraction which transcends the rational.  People cling to Wikipedia – right or wrong – because it is their own.

It’s difficult to imagine a time will come when Wikipedia will be complete.  If nothing else, events continue to occur, history is made, and all of this must be recorded somewhere in Wikipedia.  Yet Wikipedia, in its English-language edition, is growing more slowly in 2010 than in 2005.  With nearly 3.5 million articles in English, it’s reasonably comprehensive, at least by its own lights.  Certain material is considered inappropriate for Wikipedia – homespun scientific theories, or the biographies of less-than-remarkable individuals – and this has placed limits on its growth.  It’s possible that within a few years we will regard Wikipedia as essentially complete – which is, when you reflect upon it, an utterly awesome thought.  It will mean that we have captured the better part of human knowledge in a form accessible to all.  That we can all carry the learned experience of the species around in our pockets.

Wikipedia points to something else, quite as important and nearly as profound: the Web is not ‘complete’.  It is a work-in-progress.  Google understands this and releases interminable beta versions of every product.  More than this, it means that nothing needs to offer all the answers.  I would suggest that nothing should offer all the answers.  Leaving that space for the users to add what they know – or are willing to learn – to the overall mix creates a much more powerful relationship with the user, and – counterintuitively – with less work from you.  It is up to you to provide the framework for individuals to contribute within, but it is not up to you to populate that framework with every possibility.  There’s a ‘sweet spot’, somewhere between nothing and too much, which shows users the value of contributions but allows them enough space to make their own.

User contributions tend to become examples in their own right, showing other users how it’s done.  This creates a ‘virtuous cycle’ of contributions leading to contributions leading to still more contributions – which can produce the explosive creativity of a Wikipedia or TripAdvisor or an eBay or a RateMyProfessors.com.

In each of these websites it needs to be noted that there is a possibility for ‘bad data’ to work its way into system.   The biggest problem Wikipedia faces is not vandalism but the more pernicious types of contributions which look factual but are wholly made up.  TripAdvisor is facing a class-action lawsuit from hoteliers who have been damaged by anonymous negative ratings of their establishments.  RateMyProfessors.com is the holy terror of the academy in the United States.  Each of these websites has had to design systems which allow for users to self-regulate peer contributions.  In some cases – such as on a blog – it’s no more than a ‘report this post’ button, which flags it for later moderation.  Wikipedia promulgated a directive that strongly encouraged contributors to provide a footnote linking to supporting material.  TripAdvisor gives anonymous reviewers a lower ranking.  eBay forces both buyers and sellers to rate each transaction, building a database of interactions which can be used to guide others when they come to trade.  Each of these are social solutions to social problems.

Web2.0 is not a technology.  It is a suite of social techniques, and each technique must be combined with a social strategy for deployment, considering how the user will behave: neither wholly good nor entirely evil.  It is possible to design systems and interfaces which engage the better angels of nature, possible to develop wholly open systems which self-regulate and require little moderator intervention.  Yet it is not easy to do so, because it is not easy to know in advance how any social technique can be abused by those who employ it.

This means that aWeb2.0 concept that should guide you in your design work is iteration.  Nothing is ever complete, nor ever perfect.  The perfect is the enemy of the good, so if you wait for perfection, you will never release.  Instead, watch your users, see if they struggle to work within the place you have created for then, or whether they immediately grasp hold and begin to work.  In their more uncharitable moments, do they abuse the freedoms you have given them?  If so, how can you redesign your work, and ‘nudge’ them into better behavior?  It may be as simple as a different set of default behaviors, or as complex as a set of rules governing a social ecosystem.  And although Moses came down from Mount Sinai with all ten commandments, you can not and should not expect to get it right on a first pass.  Instead, release, observe, adapt, and re-release.  All releases are soft releases, everything is provisional, and nothing is quite perfect.  That’s as it should be.

IV: Opening

Two of the biggest Web2.0 services are Facebook and Twitter.  Although they seem to be similar, they couldn’t be more different.  Facebook is ‘greedy’, hoarding all of the data provided by its users, all of their photographs and conversations, keeping them entirely for itself.  If you want to have access to that data, you need to work with Facebook’s tools, and you need to build an application that works within Facebook – literally within the web page.  Facebook has control over everything you do, and can arbitrarily choose to limit what you do, even shut you down your application if they don’t like it, or perceive it as somehow competitive with Facebook.  Facebook is entirely in control, and Facebook holds onto all of the data your application needs to use.

Twitter has taken an entirely different approach.  From the very beginning, anyone could get access to the Twitter feed – whether for a single individual (if their stream of Tweets had been made public), or for all of Twitter’s users.  Anyone could do anything they wanted with these Tweets – though Twitter places restrictions on commercial re-use of their data.  Twitter provided very clear (and remarkably straightforward) instruction on how to access their data, and threw the gates open wide.

Although Facebook has half a billion users, Twitter is actually more broadly used, in more situations, because it has been incredibly easy for people to adapt Twitter to their tasks.  People have developed computer programs that send Tweets when the program is about to crash, created vast art projects which allow the public to participate from anywhere around the world, or even a little belt worn by a pregnant woman which sends out a Tweet every time the baby kicks!  It’s this flexibility which has made Twitter a sort of messaging ‘glue’ on the Internet of 2010, and that’s something Facebook just can’t do, because it’s too closed in upon itself.  Twitter has become a building block: when you write a program which needs to send a message, you use Twitter.  Facebook isn’t a building block.  It’s a monolith.

How do you build for openness?  Consider: another position the user might occupy is someone trying to use your work as a building block within their own project.  Have you created space for your work to be re-used, to be incorporated, to be pieced apart and put back together again?  Or is it opaque, seamless, and closed?  What about the data you collect, data the user has generated?  Where does that live?  Can it be exported and put to work in another application, or on another website?  Are you a brick or are you a brick wall?

When you think about your design – both technically and from the user’s experience – you must consider how open you want to be, and weigh the price of openness (extra work, unpredictability) against the price of being closed (less useful).  The highest praise you can receive for your work is when someone wants to use it in their own. For this to happen, you have to leave the door open for them.  If you publish the APIs to access the data you collect; if you build your work modularly, with clearly defined interfaces; if you use standards such as RSS and REST where appropriate, you will create something that others can re-use.

One of my favorite lines comes from science fiction author William Gibson, who wrote, ‘The street finds its own uses for things – uses the manufacturer never imagined.’  You can’t know how valuable your work will be to someone else, what they’ll see in it that you never could, and how they’ll use it to solve a problem.

All of these techniques – sharing, connecting, contributing, regulating, iterating and opening – share a common thread: they regard the user’s experience as paramount and design as something that serves the user.  These are not precisely the same Web2.0 domains others might identify.  That’s because Web2.0 has become a very ill-defined term.  It can mean whatever we want it to mean.  But it always comes back to experience, something that recognizes the importance and agency of the user, and makes that the center of the work.

It took us the better part of a decade to get to Web2.0; although pieces started showing up in the late 1990s, it wasn’t until the early 21^st century that we really felt confident with the Web as an experience, and could use that experience to guide us into designs that left room for us to explore, to play and to learn from one another.  In this decade we need to bring everything we’ve learned to everything we create, to avoid the blind traps and dead ends of a design which ignores the vital reality of the people who work with what we create.  We need to make room for them.  If we don’t, they will make other rooms, where they can be themselves, where they can share what they’ve found, connect with the ones they care about, collaborate and contribute and create.

Introduction:  Olden Days

In February 1984, seeking a reprieve from the very cold and windy streets of Boston, Massachusetts, I ducked inside of a computer store.  I spied the normal array of IBM PCs and peripherals, the Apple ][, probably even an Atari system.  Prominently displayed at the front of the store, I spied my first Macintosh.  It wasn’t known as a Mac 128K or anything like that.  It was simply Macintosh.  I walked up to it, intrigued – already, the Reality Distortion Field was capable of luring geeks like me to their doom – and spied the unfamiliar graphical desktop and the cute little mouse.  Sitting down at the chair before the machine, I grasped the mouse, and moved the cursor across the screen.  But how do I get it to do anything? I wondered.  Click.  Nothing.  Click, drag – oh look some of these things changed color!  But now what?  Gah.  This is too hard.

That’s when I gave up, pushed myself away from that first Macintosh, and pronounced this experiment in ‘intuitive’ computing a failure.  Graphical computing isn’t intuitive, that’s a bit of a marketing fib.  It’s a metaphor, and you need to grasp the metaphor – need to be taught what it means – to work fluidly within the environment.  The metaphor is easy to apprehend if it has become the dominant technique for working with computers – as it has in 2010.  Twenty-six years ago, it was a different story.  You can’t assume that people will intuit what to do with your abstract representations of data or your arcane interface methods.  Intuition isn’t always intuitively obvious.

A few months later I had a job at a firm which designed bar code readers.  (That, btw, was the most boring job I’ve ever had, the only one I got fired from for insubordination.)  We were designing a bar code reader for Macintosh, so we had one in-house, a unit with a nice carrying case so that I could ‘borrow’ it on weekends.  Which I did.  Every weekend.  The first weekend I got it home, unpacked it, plugged it in, popped in the system disk, booted it, ejected the system disk, popped in the applications disk, and worked my way through MacPaint and MacWrite and on to my favorite application of all – Hendrix.

Hendrix took advantage of the advanced sound synthesis capabilities of Macintosh.  Presented with a perfectly white screen, you dragged the mouse along the display.  The position, velocity, and acceleration of the pointer determined what kind of heavily altered but unmistakably guitar-like sounds came out of the speaker.  For someone who had lived with the bleeps and blurps of the 8-bit world, it was a revelation.  It was, in the vernacular of Boston, ‘wicked’.  I couldn’t stop playing with Hendrix.  I invited friends over, showed them, and they couldn’t stop playing with Hendrix.  Hendrix was the first interactive computer program that I gave a damn about, the first one that really showed me what a computer could be used for.  Not just pushing paper or pixels around, but an instrument, and an essential tool for human creativity.

Everything that’s followed in all the years since has been interesting to me only when it pushes the boundaries of our creativity.  I grew entranced by virtual reality in the early 1990s, because of the possibilities it offered up for an entirely new playing field for creativity.  When I first saw the Web, in the middle of 1993, I quickly realized that it, too, would become a cornerstone of creativity.  That roughly brings us forward from the ‘olden days’, to today.

This morning I want to explore creativity along the axis of three classes of devices, as represented by the three Apple devices that I own: the desktop (my 17” MacBook Pro Core i7), the mobile (my iPhone 3GS 32Gb), and the tablet (my iPad 16GB 3G).  I will draw from my own experience as both a user and developer for these devices, using that experience to illuminate a path before us.  So much is in play right now, so much is possible, all we need do is shine a light to see the incredible opportunities all around.

I:  The Power of Babel

I love OSX, and have used it more or less exclusively since 2003, when it truly became a useable operating system.  I’m running Snow Leopard on my MacBook Pro, and so far have suffered only one Grey Screen Of Death.  (And, if I know how to read a stack trace, that was probably caused by Flash.  Go figure.)  OSX is solid, it’s modestly secure, and it has plenty of eye candy.  My favorite bit of that is Spaces, which allows me to segregate my workspace into separate virtual screens.

Upper left hand space has Mail.app, upper right hand has Safari, lower right hand has TweetDeck and Skype, while the lower left hand is reserved for the task at hand – in this case, writing these words.  Each of the apps, except Microsoft Word, is inherently Internet-oriented, an application designed to facilitate human communication.  This is the logical and inexorable outcome of a process that began back in 1969, when the first nodes began exchanging packets on the ARPANET.  Phase one: build the network.  Phase two: connect everything to the network.  Phase three: PROFIT!

That seems to have worked out pretty much according to plan.  Our computers have morphed from document processors – that’s what most computers of any stripe were used for until about 1995 – into communication machines, handling the hard work of managing a world that grows increasingly connected.  All of this communication is amazing and wonderful and has provided the fertile ground for innovations like Wikipedia and Twitter and Skype, but it also feels like too much of a good thing.  Connection has its own gravitational quality – the more connected we become, the more we feel the demand to remain connected continuously.

We salivate like Pavlov’s dogs every time our email application rewards us with the ‘bing’ of an incoming message, and we keep one eye on Twitter all day long, just in case something interesting – or at least diverting – crosses the transom.  Blame our brains.  They’re primed to release the pleasure neurotransmitter dopamine at the slightest hint of a reward; connecting with another person is (under most circumstances) a guaranteed hit of pleasure.

That’s turned us into connection junkies.  We pile connection upon connection upon connection until we numb ourselves into a zombie-like overconnectivity, then collapse and withdraw, feeling the spiral of depression as we realize we can’t handle the weight of all the connections that we want so desperately to maintain.

Not a pretty picture, is it?   Yet the computer is doing an incredible job, acting as a shield between what our brains are prepared to handle and the immensity of information and connectivity out there.  Just as consciousness is primarily the filtering of signal from the noise of the universe, our computers are the filters between the roaring insanity of the Internet and the tidy little gardens of our thoughts.  They take chaos and organize it.  Email clients are excellent illustrations of this; the best of them allow us to sort and order our correspondence based on need, desire, and goals.  They prevent us from seeing the deluge of spam which makes up more than 90% of all SMTP traffic, and help us to stay focused on the task at hand.

Electronic mail was just the beginning of the revolution in social messaging; today we have Tweets and instant messages and Foursquare checkins and Flickr photos and YouTube videos and Delicious links and Tumblr blogs and endless, almost countless feeds.  All of it recommended by someone, somewhere, and all of it worthy of at least some of our attention.  We’re burdened by too many web sites and apps needed to manage all of this opportunity for connectivity.  The problem has become most acute on our mobiles, where we need a separate app for every social messaging service.

This is fine in 2010, but what happens in 2012, when there are ten times as many services on offer, all of them delivering interesting and useful things?  All these services, all these websites, and all these little apps threaten to drown us with their own popularity.

Does this mean that our computers are destined to become like our television tuners, which may have hundreds of channels on offer, but never see us watch more than a handful of them?  Do we have some sort of upper boundary on the amount of connectivity we can handle before we overload?  Clay Shirky has rightly pointed out that there is no such thing as information overload, only filter failure.  If we find ourselves overwhelmed by our social messaging, we’ve got to build some better filters.

This is the great growth opportunity for the desktop, the place where the action will be happening – when it isn’t happening in the browser.  Since the desktop is the nexus of the full power of the Internet and the full set of your own data (even the data stored in the cloud is accessed primarily from your desktop), it is the logical place to create some insanely great next-generation filtering software.

That’s precisely what I’ve been working on.  This past May I got hit by a massive brainwave – one so big I couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t put it down, couldn’t do anything but think about it obsessively.

I wanted to create a tool that could aggregate all of my social messaging – email, Twitter, RSS and Atom feeds, Delcious, Flickr, Foursquare, and on and on and on.  I also wanted the tool to be able to distribute my own social messages, in whatever format I wanted to transmit, through whatever social message channel I cared to use.

Then I wouldn’t need to go hither and yon, using Foursquare for this, and Flickr for that and Twitter for something else.  I also wouldn’t have to worry about which friends used which services; I’d be able to maintain that list digitally, and this tool would adjust my transmissions appropriately, sending messages to each as they want to receive them, allowing me to receive messages from each as they care to send them.

That’s not a complicated idea.  Individuals and companies have been nibbling around the edges of it for a while.

I am going the rest of the way, creating a tool that functions as the last 'social message manager' that anyone will need.  It’s called Plexus, and it functions as middleware – sitting between the Internet and whatever interface you might want to cook up to view and compose all of your social messaging.

Now were I devious, I’d coyly suggest that a lot of opportunity lies in building front-end tools for Plexus, ways to bring some order to the increasing flow of social messaging.  But I’m not coy.  I’ll come right out and say it: Plexus is an open-source project, and I need some help here.  That’s a reflection of the fact that we all need some help here.  We’re being clubbed into submission by our connectivity.  I’m trying to develop a tool which will allow us to create better filters, flexible filters, social filters, all sorts of ways of slicing and dicing our digital social selves.  That’s got to happen as we invent ever more ways to connect, and as we do all of this inventing, the need for such a tool becomes more and more clear.

We see people throwing their hands up, declaring ‘email bankruptcy’, quitting Twitter, or committing ‘Facebookicide’, because they can’t handle the consequences of connectivity.

We secretly yearn for that moment after the door to the aircraft closes, and we’re forced to turn our devices off for an hour or two or twelve.  Finally, some time to think.  Some time to be.  Science backs this up; the measurable consequence of over-connectivity is that we don’t have the mental room to roam with our thoughts, to ruminate, to explore and play within our own minds.  We’re too busy attending to the next message.  We need to disconnect periodically, and focus on the real.  We desperately need tools which allow us to manage our social connectivity better than we can today.

Once we can do that, we can filter the noise and listen to the music of others.  We will be able to move so much more quickly – together – it will be another electronic renaissance: just like 1994, with Web 1.0, and 2004, with Web2.0.

That’s my hope, that’s my vision, and it’s what I’m directing my energies toward.  It’s not the only direction for the desktop, but it does represent the natural evolution of what the desktop has become.  The desktop has been shaped not just by technology, but by the social forces stirred up by our technology.

It is not an accident that our desktops act as social filters; they are the right tool at the right time for the most important job before us – how we communicate with one another.  We need to bring all of our creativity to bear on this task, or we’ll find ourselves speechless, shouted down, lost at another Tower of Babel.

II: The Axis of Me-ville

Three and a half weeks ago, I received a call from my rental agent.  My unit was going on the auction block – would I mind moving out?  Immediately?  I’ve lived in the same flat since I first moved to Sydney, seven years ago, so this news came as quite a shock.

I spent a week going through the five states of mourning: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  The day I reached acceptance, I took matters in hand, the old-fashioned way: I went online, to domain.com.au, and looked for rental units in my neighborhood.

Within two minutes I learned that there were two units for rent within my own building!

When you stop to think about it, that’s a bit weird.  There were no signs posted in my building, no indication that either of the units were for rent.  I’d heard nothing from the few neighbors I know well enough to chat with.  They didn’t know either.  Something happening right underneath our noses – something of immediate relevance to me – and none of us knew about it.  Why?  Because we don’t know our neighbors.

For city dwellers this is not an unusual state of affairs.  One of the pleasures of the city is its anonymity.  That’s also one of it’s great dangers.  The two go hand-in-hand.  Yet the world of 2010 does not offer up this kind of anonymity easily.  Consider: we can re-establish a connection with someone we went to high school with, thirty years ago – and really never thought about in all the years that followed – but still not know the names of the people in the unit next door, names you might utter with bitter anger after they’ve turned up the music again.  How can we claim that there’s any social revolution if we can’t be connected to people whom we’re physically close to?  Emotional closeness is important, and financial closeness (your coworkers) is also salient, but both should be trumped by the people who breathe the same air as you.

It is almost impossible to bridge the barriers that separate us from one another, even when we’re living on top of each other.

This is where the mobile becomes important, because the mobile is the singular social device.  It is the place where our of the human relationships reside.  (Plexus is eventually bound for the mobile, but in a few years’ time, when the devices are nimble enough to support it.)  Yet the mobile is more than just the social crossroads.  It is the landing point for all of the real-time information you need to manage your life.

On the home page of my iPhone, two apps stand out as the aids to the real-time management of my life: RainRadar AU and TripView.  I am a pedestrian in Sydney, so it’s always good to know when it’s about to rain, how hard, and how long.  As a pedestrian, I make frequent use of public transport, so I need to know when the next train, bus or ferry is due, wherever I happen to be.  The mobile is my networked, location-aware sensor.  It gathers up all of the information I need to ease my path through life.  This demonstrates one of the unstated truisms of the 21^st century: the better my access to data, the more effective I will be, moment to moment.  The mobile has become that instantaneous access point, simply because it’s always at hand, or in the pocket or pocketbook or backpack.  It’s always with us.

In February I gave a keynote at a small Melbourne science fiction convention.  After I finished speaking a young woman approached me and told me she couldn’t wait until she could have some implants, so her mobile would be with her all the time.  I asked her, “When is your mobile ever more than a few meters away from you?  How much difference would it make?  What do you gain by sticking it underneath your skin?”  I didn’t even bother to mention the danger from all that subcutaneous microwave radiation.  It’s silly, and although our children or grandchildren might have some interesting implants, we need to accept the fact that the mobile is already a part of us.

We’re as Borg-ed up as we need to be.  Probably we’re more Borg-ed up than we can handle.

It’s not just that our mobiles have become essential.  It’s getting so that we can’t put them down, even in situations when we need to focus on the task at hand – driving, or having dinner with your partner, or trying to push a stroller across an intersection.  We’re addicted, and the first step to treating that addiction is to admit we have  problem.  But here’s the dilemma: we're working hard to invent new ways to make our mobiles even more useful, indispensable and alluring.

We are the crack dealers.  And I’m encouraging you to make better crack.  Truth be told, I don’t see this ‘addiction’ as a bad thing, though goodness knows the tabloid newspapers and cultural moralists will make whatever they can of it.  It’s an accommodation we will need to make, a give-and-take.  We gain an instantaneous connection to one another, a kind of cultural ‘telepathy’ that would have made Alexander Graham Bell weep for joy.

But there's more: we also gain a window into the hitherto hidden world of data that is all around us, a shadow and double of the real world.

For example, I can now build an app that allows me to wander the aisles of my local supermarket, bringing all of the intelligence of the network with me as I shop.  I hold the mobile out in front of me, its camera capturing everything it sees, which it passes along to the cloud, so that Google Goggles can do some image processing on it, and pick out the identifiable products on the shelves.

This information can then be fed back into a shopping list – created by me, or by my doctor, or by bank account – because I might be trying to optimize for my own palette, my blood pressure, or my budget – and as I come across the items I should purchase, my mobile might give a small vibration.  When I look at the screen, I see the shelves, but the items I should purchase are glowing and blinking.

The technology to realize this – augmented reality with a few extra bells and whistles – is already in place.  This is the sort of thing that could be done today, by someone enterprising enough to knit all these separate threads into a seamless whole.  There’s clearly a need for it, but that’s just the beginning.  This is automated, computational decision making.  It gets more interesting when you throw people into the mix.

Consider: in December I was on a road trip to Canberra.  When I arrived there, at 6 pm, I wondered where to have dinner.  Canberra is not known for its scintillating nightlife – I had no idea where to dine.  I threw the question out to my 7000 Twitter followers, and in the space of time that it took to shower, I had enough responses that I could pick and choose among them, and ended up having the best bowl of seafood laksa that I’d had since I moved to Australia!

That’s the kind of power that we have in our hands, but don’t yet know how to use.

We are all well connected, instantaneously and pervasively, but how do we connect without confusing ourselves and one another with constant requests?  Can we manage that kind of connectivity as a background task, with our mobiles acting as the arbiters?  The mobile is the crossroads, between our social lives, our real-time lives, and our data-driven selves.  All of it comes together in our hands.  The device is nearly full to exploding with the potentials unleashed as we bring these separate streams together.  It becomes hypnotizing and formidable, though it rings less and less.  Voice traffic is falling nearly everywhere in the developed world, but mobile usage continues to skyrocket.  Our mobiles are too important to use for talking.

Let’s tie all of this together: I get evicted, and immediately tell my mobile, which alerts my neighbors and friends, and everyone sets to work finding me a new place to live.  When I check out their recommendations, I get an in-depth view of my new potential neighborhoods, delivered through a marriage of augmented reality and the cloud computing power located throughout the network.  Finally, when I’m about to make a decision, I throw it open for the people who care enough about me to ring in with their own opinions, experiences, and observations.  I make an informed decision, quickly, and am happier as a result, for all the years I live in my new home.

That’s what’s coming.  That’s the potential that we hold in the palms of our hands.  That’s the world you can bring to life.

III:  Through the Looking Glass

Finally, we turn to the newest and most exciting of Apple’s inventions.  There seemed to be nothing new to say about the tablet – after all, Bill Gates declared ‘The Year of the Tablet’ way back in 2001.  But it never happened.  Tablets were too weird, too constrained by battery life and weight and, most significantly, the user experience.  It’s not as though you can take a laptop computer, rip away the keyboard and slap on a touchscreen to create a tablet computer, though this is what many people tried for many years.  It never really worked out for them.

Instead, Apple leveraged what they learned from the iPhone’s touch interface.  Yet that alone was not enough.  I was told by sources well-placed in Apple that the hardware for a tablet was ready a few years ago; designing a user experience appropriate to the form factor took a lot longer than anyone had anticipated.  But the proof of the pudding is in the eating: iPad is the most successful new product in Apple’s history, with Apple set to manufacture around thirty million of them over the next twelve months.  That success is due to the hard work and extensive testing performed upon the iPad’s particular version of iOS.

It feels wonderfully fluid, well adapted to the device, although quite different from the iOS running on iPhone.  iPad is not simply a gargantuan iPod Touch.  The devices are used very differently, because the form-factor of the device frames our expectations and experience of the device.

Let me illustrate with an example from my own experience:  I had a consulting job drop on me at the start of June, one which required that I go through and assess eighty-eight separate project proposals, all of which ran to 15 pages apiece.  I had about 48 hours to do the work.  I was a thousand kilometers from these proposals, so they had to be sent to me electronically, so that I could then print them before reading through them.  Doing all of that took 24 of the 48 hours I had for review, and left me with a ten-kilo box of papers that I’d have to carry, a thousand kilometers, to the assessment meeting.  Ugh.

Immediately before I left for the airport with this paper ball-and-chain, I realized I could simply drag the electronic versions of these files into my Dropbox account.  Once uploaded, I could access those files from my iPad – all thousand or so pages.  Working on iPad made the process much faster than having to fiddle through all of those papers; I finished my work on the flight to my meeting, and was the envy of all attending – they wrestled with multiple fat paper binders, while I simply swiped my way to the next proposal.

This was when I realized that iPad is becoming the indispensable appliance for the information worker.

You can now hold something in your hand that has every document you’ve written; via the cloud, it can hold every document anyone has ever written.  This has been true for desktops since the advent of the Internet, but it hasn’t been as immediate.  iPad is the page, reinvented, not just because it has roughly the same dimensions as a page, but because you interact with it as if it were a piece of paper.  That’s something no desktop has ever been able to provide.

We don’t really have a sense yet for all the things we can do with this ‘magical’ (to steal a word from Steve Jobs) device.

Paper transformed the world two thousand years ago. Moveable type transformed the world five hundred years ago.  The tablet, whatever it is becoming – whatever you make of it – will similarly reshape the world.  It’s not just printed materials; the tablet is the lightbox for every photograph ever taken anywhere by anyone.  The tablet is the screen for every video created, a theatre for every film produced, a tuner to every radio station that offers up a digital stream, and a player for every sound recording that can be downloaded.

All of this is here, all of this is simultaneously present in a device with so much capability that it very nearly pulses with power.

iPad is like an Formula One Ferrari, one we haven’t even gotten out of first gear.  So stretch your mind further than the idea of the app.  Apps are good and important, but to unlock the potential of iPad it needs lots of interesting data pouring into it and through it.  That data might be provided via an application, but it probably doesn’t live within the application – there’s not enough room in there.  Any way you look at it, iPad is a creature of the network; it is a surface, a looking glass, which presents you a view from within the network.

What happens when the network looks back at you?

At the moment iPad has no camera, though everyone expects a forward-facing camera to be in next year’s model.  That will come so that Apple can enable FaceTime.  (With luck, we’ll also see a Retina Display, so that documents can be seen in their natural resolution.)  Once the iPad can see you, it can respond to you.  It can acknowledge your presence in an authentic manner.  We’re starting to see just what this looks like with the recently announced Xbox Kinect.

This is the sort of technology which points all the way back to the infamous ‘Knowledge Navigator’ video that John Sculley used to create his own Reality Distortion Field around the disaster that was the Newton. Decades ahead of its time, the Knowledge Navigator pointed toward Google and Wikipedia and Milo, with just a touch of Facebook thrown in.  We’re only just getting there, to the place where this becomes possible.

These are no longer dreams, these are now quantifiable engineering problems.

This sort of thing won’t happen on Xbox, though Microsoft or a partner developer could easily write an app for it.  But that’s not where they’re looking, this is not about keeping you entertained.  The iPad can entertain you, but that’s not its main design focus.  It is designed to engage you, today with your fingers, and soon with your voice and your face and your gestures.  At that point it is no longer a mirror; it is an entity on its own.  It might not pass the Turing Test, but we’ll anthropomorphize it nonetheless, just as we did with Tamagotchi and Furby.  It will become our constant companion, helping us through every situation.  And it will move seamlessly between our devices, from iPad to iPhone to desktop.  But it will begin on iPad.

Because we are just starting out with tablets, anything is possible.  We haven’t established expectations which guide us into a particular way of thinking about the device.  We’ve had mobiles for nearly twenty years, and desktops for thirty.  We understand both well, and with that understanding comes a narrowing of possibilities.  The tablet is the undiscovered country, virgin, green, waiting to be explored.  This is the desktop revolution, all over again.  This is the mobile revolution, all over again.  We’re in the right place at the right time to give birth to the applications that will seem commonplace in ten or fifteen years.

I remember the VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet.  I remember how revolutionary it seemed, how it changed everyone’s expectations for the personal computer.  I also remember that it was written for an Apple ][.

You have the chance to do it all again, to become the ‘mothers of innovation’, and reinvent computing.  So think big.  This is the time for it.  In another few years it will be difficult to aim for the stars.  The platform will be carrying too much baggage.  Right now we all get to be rocket scientists.  Right now we get to play, and dream, and make it all real.

At the close of the first decade of the 21^st century, we find ourselves continuously connecting to one another.  This isn’t a new thing, although it may feel new.  The kit has changed – that much is obvious – but who we are has not.  Only from an understanding of who we are that we can understand the future we are hurtling toward.  Connect, connect, connect.  But why?  Why are we so driven?

To explain this – and reveal that who we are now is precisely who we have always been, I will tell you two stories.  They’re interrelated – one leads seamlessly into the other.  I’m not going to say that these stories are the God’s honest truth.  They are, as Rudyard Kipling put it, ‘just-so stories’.  If they aren’t true, the describe an arrangement of facts so believable that they could very well be true.  There is scientific evidence to support both of these stories, but neither is considered scientific canon.   So, take everything with a grain of salt; these are more fables than theories, but we have always used fables to help us illuminate the essence of our nature.

For our first story, we need to go back a long, long time.  Before the settlement of Australia – by anyone.  Before Homo Sapiens, before Australopithecus, before we broke away from the chimpanzees, five million years ago, just after we broke away from the gorillas, Ten million years ago.  How much do we know about this common ancestor, which scientists call Pierolapithecus?  Not very much.  A few bits of skeletons discovered in Spain eight years ago.  If you squint and imagine some sort of mash-up of the characteristics of humans, chimpanzees and gorillas, you might be able to get a glimmer of what they looked like.  Smaller than us, certainly, and not upright – that comes along much later.  But one thing we do know, without any evidence from skeletons: Pierolapithecus was a social animal.  How do we know this?  Each of its three descendent species – humans, chips and bonobos – are all highly social animals.  We don’t do well on our own.  In fact, on our own we tend to make a tasty meal for some sort of tiger or lion or other cat.  Together, well, that’s another matter.

Which brings us to the first ‘just-so’ story.  Imagine a warm late afternoon, hanging out in the trees in Africa’s Rift Valley.  Just you and your mates – probably ten or twenty of them.  You’re all males; the females are elsewhere, doing female-type things, which we’ll discuss presently.  At a signal from the ‘alpha male’, all of you fall into line, drop out of the trees, and begin a trek that takes you throughout the little bit of land you call your own – with your own trees and plants and bugs that keep you well fed – and you go all the way to the edge of your territory, to the border of the territory of a neighboring troupe of Pierolapithecus.  That troupe – about the same size as your own – is dozing in the heat of the afternoon, all over the place, but basically within eyeshot of one another.

Suddenly – and silently – you all cross the border.  You fan out, still silent, looking for the adolescent males in this troupe.  When you find them, you kill them.  As for the rest, you scare them off with your screams and your charges, and, at the end, they’ve lost some of their own territory – and trees and plants and delicious grubs – while you’ve got just a little bit more.  And you return, triumphant, with the bodies you’ve acquired, which you eat, with your troupe, in a victory dinner.

This all sounds horrid and nasty and mean and just not criket.  That it is.  It’s war.  How do we know that ‘war’ stretches this far back into our past?  Just last month a paper published in Current Biology and reported in THE ECONOMIST described how primatologists had seen just this behavior among chimpanzees in their natural habitats in the African rain forests.  The scene I just described isn’t ten million years old, or even ten thousand, but current.  Chimpanzees wage war.  And this kind of warfare is exactly what was commonplace in New Guinea and the upper reaches of Amazonia until relatively recently – certainly within the span of my own lifetime.  War is a behavior common to both chimpanzees and humans – so why wouldn’t it be something we inherited from our common ancestor?

War.  What’s it good for?  If you win your tiny Pierolapithecine war for a tiny bit more territory, you’ll gain all of the resources in that territory.  Which means your troupe will be that much better fed.  You’ll have stronger immune systems when you get sick, you’ll have healthier children.  And you’ll have more children.  As you acquire more resources, more of your genes will get passed along, down the generations.  Which makes you even stronger, and better able to wage your little wars.  If you’re good at war, natural selection will shine upon you.

What makes you good at war?  That’s the real question here.  You’re good at war if you and your troupe – your mates – can function effectively as a unit.  You have to be able to coordinate your activities to attack – or defend – territory.  We know that language skills don’t go back ten million years, so you’ve got to do this the old fashioned way, with gestures and grunts and the ability to get into the heads of your mates.  That’s the key skill; if you can get into your mates’ heads, you can think as a group.  The better you can do that, the better you will do in war.  The better you do in war, the more offspring you’ll have, so that skill, that ability to get into each others’ heads gets reinforced by natural selection, and becomes, over time, evolution.  The generations pass, and you get better and better at knowing what your mates are thinking.

This is the beginning of the social revolution.  All the way back here, before we looked anything like human, we grasped the heart of the matter: we must know one another to survive.  If we want to succeed, we must know each other well.  There are limits to this knowing, particularly with the small brain of Pierolapithecus.  Knowing someone well takes a lot of brain capacity, and soon that fills up.  When it does, when you can’t know everyone around you intimately.  When that happens your troupe will grow increasingly argumentative, confrontational, and eventually will break into two independent troupes.  All because of a communication breakdown.

There’s strength in numbers; if I can manage a troupe of thirty while all you can manage is twenty, I’ll defeat you in war.  So there’s pressure, year after year, to grow the troupe, and, quite literally, to stuff more mates into the space between your ears.  For a long time that doesn’t lead anywhere; then there’s a baby born with just a small genetic difference, one which allows just a bit more brain capacity, so that they can handle two or three or four more mates into its head, which makes a big difference.  Such a big difference that these genes get passed along very rapidly, and soon everyone can hold a few more mates inside their heads.  But that capability comes with a price.  Those Pierolapithecines have slightly bigger brains, and slightly bigger heads.  They need to eat more to keep those bigger brains well-fed.  And those big heads would soon prove very problematic.

This is where we cross over, from our first story, into our second.  This is where we leave the world of men behind, and enter the world of women, who have been here, all along, giving birth and gathering food and raising children and mourning the dead lost to wars, as they still do today.  As they have done for ten million years.  But somewhere in the past few million years, something changed for women, something perfectly natural became utterly dangerous.  All because of our drive to socialize.

Human birth is a very singular thing in the animal world.  Among the primates, human babies are the only ones born facing downward and away from the mother.  They’re also the only ones who seriously threaten the lives of their mothers as they come down the birth canal.  That’s because our heads are big.  Very big.  Freakishly big.  So big that one of the very recent evolutionary adaptations in Homo Sapiens is a pelvic gap in women that creates a larger birth canal, at the expense of their ability to walk.  Women walk differently from men – much less efficiently – because they give birth to such large-brained children.

There’s two notable side-effects of this big-brained-ness.  The first is well-known: women used to regularly die in childbirth.  Until the first years of the 20^th century, about one in one hundred pregnancies ended with the death of the mother.  That’s an extraordinarily high rate, particularly given that a women might give birth to seven or eight children over their lifetime.  Now that we have survivable caesarian sections and all sorts of other medical interventions, death in childbirth is much rarer – perhaps 1 in 10,000 births.  Nowhere else among the mammals can you find this kind of danger surrounding the delivery of offspring.  This is the real high price we pay for being big-brained: we very nearly kill our mothers.

The second side-effect is less well-known, but so pervasive we simply accept it as a part of reality: humans need other humans to assist in childbirth.  This isn’t true for any other mammal species – or any other species, period.  But there are very few (one or two) examples of cultures where women give childbirth by themselves.  Until the 20^th century medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, this was ‘women’s work’, and a thriving culture of midwives managed the hard work of delivery.  (The image of the chain-smoking father, waiting outside the maternity ward for news of his newborn child is far older than the 20^th century.)

For at least a few hundred thousand years – and probably a great deal longer than that – the act of childbirth has been intensely social.  Women come together to help their sisters, cousins, and daughters pass through the dangers and into motherhood.  If you can’t rally your sisters together when you need them, childbirth will be a lonely and possibly lethal experience.  So this is what it means to be human: we entered the world because of the social capabilities of our mothers.  Women who had strong social capabilities, who could bring her sisters to her aid, would have an easier time in childbirth, and would be more likely to live through childbirth, as would their children.

After the child has been born, mothers need even more help from their female peers; in the first few hours, when the mother is weak, other women must provide food and shelter.  As that child grows, the mother will periodically need help with childcare, particularly if she’s just been delivered of another child.  Mothers who can use their social capabilities to deliver these resources will thrive.  Their children will thrive.  This means that these capabilities tended to be passed down, through the generations.  Just as men had their social skills honed by generations upon generations of warfare, women had their social skills sharpened by generations upon generations of childbirth and child raising.

All of this sounds very much as though it’s Not Politically Correct.  But our liberation from our biologically determined sex roles is a very recent thing.  Men raise children while women go to war.  Yet behind this lies hundreds of thousands of generations of our ancestors who did use these skills along gender-specific lines.  That’s left a mark; men tend to favor coordination in groups – whether that’s a war or a footy match – while women tend to concentrate on building and maintaining a closely-linked web of social connections. Women seem to have a far greater sensitivity to these social connections than men do, but men can work together in a team – to slaughter the opponent (on the battlefield or the pitch).

The prefrontal cortex – freakishly large in human beings when compared to chimpanzees – seems to be where the magic happens, where we keep these models of one another.  Socialization has limits, because our brains can’t effectively grow much bigger.  They already nearly kill our mothers, they consume about 25% of the food we eat, and they’re not even done growing until five years after we’re born – leaving us defenseless and helpless far longer than any other mammals.  That’s another price we pay for being so social.

But we’re maxed out.  We’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.  If our heads get any bigger, there won’t be any mothers left living to raise us.  So here we are.  An estimate conducted nearly 20 years ago pegs the number of people who can fit into your head at roughly 148, plus or minus a few.  That’s not very many.  But for countless thousands of years, that was as big as a tribe or a village ever grew.  That was the number of people you could know well, and that set the upper boundary on human sociability.

And then, ten thousand years ago, the comfortable steady-state of human development blew apart.  Two things happened nearly simultaneously; we learned to plant crops, which created larger food supplies, which meant families could raise more children.  We also began to live together in communities much larger than the tribe or village.  The first cities – like Jericho – date from around that time, cities with thousands of people in them.

This is where we cross a gap in human culture, a real line that separates that-which-has-come-before to that-which-comes-after.  Everyone who has moved from a small town or village to the big city knows what it’s like to cross that line.  People have been crossing that line for a hundred centuries.  On one side of the line people are connected by bonds that are biological, ancient and customary – you do things because they’ve always been done that way.  On the other side, people are bound by bonds that are cultural, modern, and legal.  When we can’t know everyone around us, we need laws to protect us, a culture to guide us, and all of this is very new.   Still. Ten thousand years of laws and culture, next to almost two hundred thousand years of custom – and that’s just Homo Sapiens.  Custom extends back, probably all the way to Pierolapithecus.

We wage a constant war within ourselves.  Our oldest parts want to be clannish, insular, and intensely xenophobic.  That’s what we’re adapted to.  That’s what natural selection fitted us for.  The newest parts of us realize real benefits from accumulations of humanity to big to get our heads around.  The division of labor associated with cities allows for intensive human productivity, hence larger and more successful human populations.  The city is the real hub of human progress; more than any technology, it is our ability to congregate together in vast numbers that has propelled us into modernity.

There’s an intense contradiction here: we got to the point where we were able to build cities because we were so socially successful, but cities thwarted that essential sociability.  It’s as though we went as far as we could, in our own heads, then leapt outside of them, into cities, and left our heads behind.  Our cities are anonymous places, and consequently fraught with dangers.

It’s a danger we seem prepared to accept.  In 2008 the UN reported that, for the first time in human history, over half of humanity lived in cities.  Half of us had crossed the gap between the social world in our heads and the anonymous and atomized worlds of Mumbai and Chongquing and Mexico City and Cairo and Saõ Paulo.  But just in this same moment, at very nearly the same time that half of us resided in cities, half of us also had mobiles.  Well more than half of us do now.  In the anonymity of the world’s cities, we stare down into our screens, and find within them a connection we had almost forgotten.  It touches something so ancient – and so long ignored – that the mobile now contends with the real world as the defining axis of social orientation.

People are often too busy responding to messages to focus on those in their immediate presence.  It seems ridiculous, thoughtless and pointless, but the device has opened a passage which allows us to retrieve this oldest part of ourselves, and we’re reluctant to let that go.

Which brings us to the present moment.

I: The Drive to Connect

Recently I spent a weekend in Melbourne visiting my good friends Darren and Leah, whom I’ve known since I first moved to Australia.  Last December they conceived, and in early September Leah will give birth to their first child.  They’re excited and a bit scared – just like most first-time parents. Knowing it would be my last visit before their lives changed irrevocably, we enjoyed our weekend all the more, and talk inevitably shifted to The Right Way To Raise A Child.  There are theories upon theories, everything from controlled crying, to cosleeping, to carrying the child continuously for its first eighteen months of life, to teaching preverbal children sign language, to Steiner’s theories about the acquisition of reading and writing skills, and on and on.  For as long as there have been parents, there have been theories about the right way to raise a child.  We look back upon our grandparents and they seem almost barbarians to us: corporal punishment, children seen and not heard, spare the rod and spoil the child, everything that modern behavioral psychology tells us can warp and damage a child, turn them from positive and loving into neurotic and perpetually unhappy individuals.

Somehow, somewhere along the way, for some of us, this process of beggars maiming their own children so they can be better beggars came to a stop.  We wised up, stopped hitting our children, and started to respond to them as beautiful and unique individuals.  This is rather interesting in itself because, on occasion – and sometimes more than just on occasion – children are monsters.  They are self-centered, narcissistic, greedy, unthinking, unfeeling, controlling, manipulative, and ugly.  Yet this is as it should be; we accept behavior from children that would be shunned in an adult precisely because they are children.  We teach them the bounds of acceptable behavior, and we do this by interacting with them.  Alone a child will never learn self-control, or courtesy, or any affection for others.  It is only because we are social that we can impart the social graces.

That social part of us goes back far beyond our origin as a species, up the family tree at least ten million years, to Proconsul, the common ancestor of gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos and humans.  Our ancient forbears had social graces of their own; we know this because all of the species descended from them have unique social capabilities.  This social capacity has been the cornerstone of our success.  Humans hunt in groups, forage in groups, share childbirth and childcare.  It is nearly impossible for a single adult to give birth and raise a child entirely on their own.  Our socialization is the safety net that allows humans to be children far longer than any other species, acquiring the enormous range of knowledge required to be wholly functional and well-integrated participants in civilization.  It’s a self-reinforcing loop: we spend a long time as children so we can become productive members of a culture whose offspring spend a long time as children.  Natural selection in action.

Our social capacity is the one thing that natural selection has always worked to optimize.  The most effectively socialized people have been able to use their social skills to make their way in the world, ensuring that they would live to pass those skills along to their children.  Nature has made us naturals.

In early September, when Leah gives birth, her child will know what to do without being taught, without being shown: that child will begin to form a deepening connection with the one person in her universe – Leah.  That bond will set the tone for all of the other human connections that follow.  Attachment theory – yet another of the popular theories of childhood development – rests the entire psychosexual development of the adult on this bond.  If it is interrupted, or corrupted, or simply does not exist, the child has little hope of normal development.  The connection to the mother is the primary connection.  As only makes sense.

As that child grows into a consciousness greater than that of the mother-child relationship, she recognizes the presence of her father.  This relationship will never have the same essential depth of her first relationship, but it represents the first echo; its form betrays the patterns of intimacy between mother and child.  Even if this relationship is fraught with difficulties, if the primary relationship is secure, the child will survive emotionally intact.  But should this relationship also prove secure, it will reinforce the child’s sense of emotional security.

And so it goes.  The child’s world will expand to encompass grandmother and grandfathers, aunts and uncles, and – with a bit of luck & time – siblings.  Each of these bonds will echo the primary bond, with opportunities within each of them for the child to explore her ever-increasing capability to connect, to communicate, to collaborate.  We know that these bonds are fundamental to our nature, that they sit within the prefrontal cortex, the newest part of our brains, the part which is freakishly bigger than in chimpanzees or gorillas.  We have a lot of room for these bonds, so as she grows up they come to fill her head.  In a very real sense, she carries around within her a miniature, interactive version of each person she has made a connection with.  We are finite, and these miniatures are terrifically rich and complex creations, so we can only find space between our ears for about 150 people, a physical limit known as ‘Dunbar’s Number’, after the anthropologist who discovered this rule nearly 20 years ago.  We can know more than 150 people, but we won’t know them well.

At least, that’s how it used to be.  For all of human history, until about three years ago, we were fundamentally constrained by our biology.  Now, with the rise of ‘social networks’ – which, I want to remind you, are not new in any way – we’ve accelerated our innate capabilities with the speed and power of computers, and amplified them with the reach of a global network which, in both Internet and mobile versions, touches nearly five billion people.  We can maintain some form of connection with several hundred – even thousands – of others.  This isn’t easy; it requires care and attention that could be directed to other, often more important things – such as driving a car, or listening to your partner at dinner, or doing your homework.  Nothing comes for free, and just because we can establish connections with thousands of others doesn’t mean we can manage those connections meaningfully.

This is the knife-edge of the present, because many of us – and certainly many of your students – are establishing far-flung networks of connections, but don’t wholly understand the cost/benefit relationship that comes with these networks.  We can give ourselves a pass on this – after all, this sort of thing simply wasn’t possible just a few years ago – but it’s a dilemma that will become a permanent fixture of 21^st century life.  We want to be able to ‘multitask’, to do everything at once, with everyone, everywhere, but studies show that the divided mind is incapable of depth.  We want to be connected, but we don’t want to be interrupted.  We want to be the life of the party, but we also want time to think.

This is the world of 2010.  This is how children present themselves as they enter secondary school.  And it’s only going to become more connected.  Leah’s child will grow up in a world which has begun to fetishize human connection.  We will manage those connections digitally, from the time we’re born until the moment we shuffle off this mortal coil.  This means that each child you encounter is not just one child, but the visible representative of an entire network that surrounds them, stretching outward, connecting them to friends and classmates and family, and finally, at the core, to mom.  This has always been the case, but it has always been implicit and inferred rather than explicit and immediately present.  Given that a child acquires their first mobile sometime between grade 3 and grade 7 (and that age is dropping) that network is always at arms reach, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice.

How will these connections be used?  We have only the dimmest sense of that.  This is all so new and so raw there are no protocols, no learned behaviors, nothing that can be passed down from parent to child, or teacher to student, about the right way to behave, the right way to put all of this connectivity to work.  What we have now is chaos, as we cross a turbulent boundary between the calm but disconnected and internal world of the ‘before time’, and the unexpected, hyperconnected and immediate world of the present.

II: Call Centre

At the beginning of June, the London-based National Literacy Trust released a report with a stunning finding: kids were more likely to own a mobile (86%) than a book (73%).  I personally believe this finding highly suspect – all the children I know own tens or hundreds of books, that being how they learned to read – but it does point to the scale of the transformation underway, and how frightened we have become.  Another segment of the public is debating the death of the printed book, you are beginning to distribute textbooks in electronic form on your student’s laptops, and all of that is contributing more to the disappearance of the book than anything that might be caused by the sudden multiplication in human connectivity.

That multiplication begins somewhere between year 3 (on the low end) and year 10 (at the high end), when a child acquires their first mobile.  The age at which the child receives the handset frames the experience for the child: in year 3 the mobile is nearly always used to call mommy or daddy for a ride home from soccer practice, or a pickup from a friend’s party, or in case of emergencies.  It is not yet a fully realized social tool because these children don’t yet think in those terms.  But the device itself has a catalyzing effect on the bond between the child and her parents.

The maturation of the child into an adult can be characterized as a movement from complete dependence to complete independence.  Along the way the child explores all sorts of strategies to assert and maintain independence, starting with the ‘terrible twos’ and coming to a conclusion (one hopes) with the final send-off to university.  In the beginning, the child doesn’t want to be left alone, except on her terms.  By the teenage years, a hypersensitivity to embarrassment causes the child to flee from the parent in many public situations.  Underneath all of it, the strong, healthy, nurturing bond between parent and child gives her the belief that she can explore her freedom in safety.

That bond has been amplified and accelerated by the presence of the mobile.  Where the child would formerly have to ‘go it alone’, now she can turn to mom or dad with the press of a few buttons.  Any situation she finds confronting can instantly be elevated.  The cavalry is always on call, always available to come to the rescue.

Child psychologist and researcher Sherry Turkle recently made a cogent argument that this ‘tethered’ relationship leads to an extended period of infantilization in the child.  Always connected, the child never fully individuates, never ‘cuts the cord’ which binds the parent to the child.  I can see Turkle’s point – I even agree with it – but I would like to suggest that this entire process of individuation is very recent, an artifact of the last hundred years.  Before that, most families lived in close quarters for most of their lives.  Mom and dad were always available to solve a problem because they were always nearby.  In this sense, the mobile handset has retrieved a state of affairs which our highly mobile era of automobiles and jet travel had pushed into obsolescence.  And even more so: in the village the child could still wander some distance from the home; in 2010, home is no further away than the time it takes to dial mom.

The connectivity of the mobile is bilateral, and reinforces the relationship on both sides.  Parents have never before had the ability to stay continuously connected to their children, so we have no frame to help guide them into a healthy expression for this newfound capacity.  For some parents the lure of this connectivity is so strong it overwhelms whatever instinct they might have to allow their children to individuate naturally.  They become the child’s constant companion, ‘hovering’ nearby, either physically or virtually.  This phenomenon – ‘helicopter parenting’ – has become a topic of conversation in the United States, where it was first noticed, and where it is appearing with increasing frequency.  The helicopter parent manages the child’s life more-or-less completely, using a combination of strategies – some physical, and some virtual – to place the child within a protective cocoon.  The vicissitudes of the real world never impinge on that cocoon; the child is safe and protected every moment of the day.

Why would anyone opt for such a parenting strategy?  Here I’ll go out on a bit of a limb, and propound a theory in the absence of any proof – but a theory which can be put to the test.  The new field of sociobiology attempts to map observed behaviors in the animal kingdom to strategies for reproductive success.  For instance, it tackles the thorny problem of altruism – which vexed Darwin a hundred and fifty years ago – by observing that altruistic behavior tends to favor closely-related individuals.  Your genes may receive no immediate benefit from your selfless acts, but the genes of your sisters and their offspring probably will.  Sociobiology explains why a population of sterile worker bees will toil until mortally exhausted for their queen.

One of the key concepts in sociobiology is the idea of ‘genetic investment’; the greater the genetic investment, the stronger the relationship between parent and offspring.  Fish have tens of thousands of offspring, and release them to their fates.  Humans have just a handful – generally just one at a time – and consequently have a huge genetic investment.  I strongly suspect that the observed cases of helicopter parenting are, in the largest part, the parents of a single child.  The entire genetic investment is being wagered on a single throw of the dice.  This would naturally amplify any tendency toward the expression of highly protective behaviors – preserving the genetic investment.  When that becomes coupled to and amplified by the mobile, we get the world of 2010, where parents are now so tethered to their children that Forbes magazine recently reported on another and somewhat more disturbing phenomenon: Parents are now making follow-up calls to recruiters who have interviewed their children.  Some children even bring mom along on the job interview.

I’m not making that up.

We may be amused by these sorts of excesses, but they’re to be expected.  They’re a natural outcome of two intersecting trends: the decline in fertility, and the rise of hyperconnectivity.  When you have everything riding on a single child, you’re willing to assume a lot of the risk yourself.

This also means that the parent-child connection has assumed an immediacy and potency never before possible.  It is as if the child has the parent with them at all times, in every situation.  This is changing the nature of all of the child’s relationships, in particular those within the classroom.  A story related to me last year by a Victorian school administrator sums up this state of affairs perfectly: one day a teacher was giving one of her students a hard time because that student hadn’t completed his homework assignment.  During this verbal chewing out, the student carefully took his mobile out of his backpack, then dialed it.  He said hello to his parent, and then just after he said, “You listen to the bitch,” held the handset next to the teacher’s mouth.

I’m not making that up, either.

In that moment, the entire power relationship in the classroom, in the school, in the culture gets short-circuited.  That’s what networks do – they find a way around any neat systems or hierarchies or rules that they have no use for.  If that network happens to belong to a fourteen year-old with poor study habits and an attitude problem, then the fact that the homework assignment wasn’t completed is suddenly no longer his problem.  It has been elevated.  It has burst out of the cozy confines of the teacher-student relationship, and overflowed into all of the other connections that student chooses to invoke: parents, siblings, relatives, friends, and so on.  It is as if every student walks into the classroom equipped with a panic button which can instantly bring the educational process to a screaming halt.  If that panic button is connected to a parent already neurotically hypersensitive to anything which could disrupt the careful cocooning of the child, the educational process will break down from stresses it was not designed to accept.

That is the world we have walked into.

Many of you have specific policies in your schools regarding the use of mobiles, protocols over where and how and when and why they can empower students.  Some of you even ban mobiles outright.  Let me be clear: all of your policies are for naught.  All of your protocols mean nothing.  Any child who tastes the empowerment that comes with the network will not ever willingly surrender that empowerment.  If you try to suppress it, you will simply ensure that it will show up somewhere else, in a form that you can not control.

Your only solution is to make peace with the network, to embrace it and the new power relationships which it engenders.  In order to do that we must have a good think about how the network can be used to tame the network, about how you can empower yourselves.  You’re going to need to fight fire with fire.

III: Cry Havoc

So what do we do?  Issue teachers with mobiles and press them to sign up for Facebook accounts?  If only it were that straightforward.  If it were, I could send you out of here with marching orders, a battle plan that would bring a certain, sweet victory.  But this is not that kind of war.  This is a guerilla conflict, where progress is measured in inches and only after a long, hard slog.

By the time a student lands on your doorstep, they will have been connected – hyperconnected, really – for several years.  They will have forged and strengthened the bonds that tie them to their parents and their peers.  They bring that into every interaction with you, a classic example of asymmetric warfare.  You’re outmatched, outgunned and outwitted, not because you’re weak or dull, but because there are a lot more of them than there are of you.  They’re starting to recognize this, and put it to work.

You can not ban the mobile.  It’s here to stay, and it’s increasingly indispensable.  You can not sever the connections that come with the mobile, or Facebook, or Twitter, or text messaging, or whatever flavour-of-the-month gets invented tomorrow afternoon.  You can’t even reasonably hope to downplay their influence within the classroom.  They’re becoming too potent, and they will leak into your pedagogical spaces by any means necessary.

You must engage.  But we can not hand you a teenager and ask you to suddenly engage with them.  That simply won’t work.  Building the bond takes time; it’s a labour of love and an exercise in trust-building.  The best mentors and teachers know this and practice it within their classrooms.  But the classroom is suddenly everywhere.  The network has swept in, swept through, and blown down the classroom walls.  Educators and students are immersed in an ‘educational field’, something like a magnetic field, where amazing educational resources lie at tip of fingers, at the end of our hands.  We may worry about the accuracy of Wikipedia, but no one argues about its impact.  Anyone who has seen iTunes University, or downloaded an educational podcast knows about this ‘educational field’.  Education is freely available.  That is not in short supply.  What is in short supply – and always has been – is that moment of human contact, the connection which produces the transfer of insight, of skills, and understanding that won’t come from any webpage, however brilliant, or any podcast, however well-produced.

Students are connected as never before, but few of those connections lead to understanding.  This is the failure and the challenge of our generation.  It is a failure because we let the school grow up outside of the network, where we should have been binding the two together at every point.  It is our challenge because unless we do begin the hard work to knit these two together, we will see formal education become increasingly irrelevant in the presence of an ever-more-potent educational field.

Because the network is everywhere, the school is everywhere.  Because the school is everywhere, the hard-and-fast boundaries between school and the rest of life, as we live it in modern-day Australia, must collapse.  The idea that school is something that happens ‘over here’, while the rest of life is lived ‘over there’ doesn’t make sense anymore.  Given that the connections a child establishes from her earliest years persist throughout her lifetime, shouldn’t some of those connections – arguably, the second most important, after family – be to educators and educational resources?  These connections would become the core of the mentoring bond, which rises to work in partnership with the parental bond, a constant nurturing force throughout the passage into adulthood.

This is not the way we think of education today.  It’s not the way we think of culture today.  Yet it is the way culture is being practiced.  Helicopter parents are proof positive of this.  They represent a leading edge of a new wave of cultural forms which are the consequential result of hyperconnectivity.  Plug people together and they will behave differently.  Plug institutions into people and the people will transform those institutions.

We must begin somewhere.  Giving kids laptops is interesting and important but entirely insufficient.  We must give kids a reason to connect, something beyond pure sociality (which is also important but outside of the task at hand).  We must give them a reason to connect with knowledge.

We’re very lucky, because just at this moment in time, the Commonwealth has gifted us with the best reason we’re ever likely to receive – the National Curriculum.  Now that every student, everywhere across Australia, is meant to be covering the same materials, we have every reason to connect together – student to student, teacher to teacher, school to school, state to state.  The National Curriculum is thought of as a mandate, but it’s really the architecture of a network.  It describes how we all should connect together around a body of knowledge.  If we know that we should be teaching calculus or Mandarin or the Eureka Stockade rebellion, we have an opportunity to connect together, pool our knowledge and our ignorance, and work together.  We can use our hyperconnectivity to hyperempower our ability to work toward understanding.

Again, this is not the way we’re used to working.  We ask kids to collaborate on their projects, but a broader collaboration – which doesn’t end with the student, or the classroom, or the school, or the state – has remained frustratingly beyond our grasp.  It doesn’t even have a location in time; collaboration is not something that has temporal boundaries.  We collaborate while we have a need to do so, not because it’s ‘collaboration time’.  The network intrudes everywhere and everywhen.

Collaboration begins as soon as the child can communicate, though it is informal and ad-hoc.  As educators we need to think about how to begin the process of formal collaboration in pre-kindy.  At first, collaboration is a network between parents and carers and educators, but as the child progresses through the educational system, that network extends to other educators, other students, and other resources as the child has need.  The network constructs itself around the child at the same time the child is busily building her own network.

If we build an educational system which can do this (and I honestly don’t know that there’s any educational system, anywhere in the world thinking in these terms) we will have solved the problem of hyperconnective asymmetry.  We will be as connected as our students, we will be connected to them from long before they become our students, and will remain connected with them long after they have been our students.  School will not be a boundary.  It will be a gradient through which children move on their passage to adulthood, and, even then, will not leave them behind, because these connections open the doorway to lifelong learning.

Let me leave you with a warning, and a promise.  First the warning: If we simply try to make the teacher the locus of all of this hyperconnectivity, they will collapse from the over-connectivity.  Teachers are not switchboards; it is not up to them to hear every problem, arbitrate every dispute, or make every opening.  In a network the burden should be distributed – to other students, other teachers, other mentors, other parents, and other schools.  That means that power is going to be distributed very differently in the classroom.  It won’t always be clear who has the power.  That may look like chaos, but it will be a fecund chaos, where real learning takes place.

The helicopter parent is a herald of a new type of connectivity, which both empowers and infantilizes in equal measure.  As we come to embrace this more comprehensive connection, we will find ourselves both hyperempowered and disempowered.  Some things will not work, others will work far better than before.  It all comes back to the child, who always has the drive to connect.  It is in her genes.  It is all she is about.  If we can harness that drive to connect to the desire to learn, we will have comprehensively solved the problem of education in the 21^st century.  We will have created a platform for life-long learning, for a cradle-to-grave immersion in the educational field.  It’s worth working toward.  It restores the balance we lost as soon as we began to hyperconnect.  We’re near enough now to see the goal.  We have the vision.  All we need now are the will and the persistence to reach toward that promise.

I: My Cloud

This is the age of networks, and we are always connected.  If that seems fanciful, ask yourself how often you are parted from your mobile, and for how long?  All of our hours – even as we sleep – the mobile is within arm’s reach for almost all of us.  A few months ago a woman asked me when we might expect to have implants, to close the loop, and make the connection permanent.  “We’re already there,” I responded.  “It’s wedded to the palm of your hand.”  In a purely functional sense this is the truth, and it has been the case for several years.

Connection to the network is neither an instantaneous nor absolute affair.  It takes time to establish the protocols for communication.  We understand many of these protocols without explanation: we do not telephone someone at three o’clock in the morning unless vitally important.  Three o’clock in the afternoon, however, is open season.  Lately, there are newer, technologically driven protocols: I can look at a caller’s number, and decide whether I want to take that call or direct it to voice mail.  The caller has no idea I’ve made any decision.  From their point of view, it’s simply a missed call.  Similarly, I have friends I can not text before 10 AM unless it’s quite urgent, and I ask my friends not to text me after 10 PM for the same reason.  We set our boundaries with technology, boundaries which determine how we connect.  We can choose to be entirely connected, or entirely disconnected.  We can let the batteries run flat on our mobile, or simply turn it off and put it away.  But there’s a price to be paid.  Absence from connection incurs a cost.  To be disconnected is to cede your ability to participate in the flow of affairs.  Thus, the modern condition is a dilemma, where we balance the demands of our connectedness against the desire to be free from its constraints.

Connectedness is not simply a set of pressures; it is equally a range of capabilities.  As our connectedness grows, so our capabilities grow in lock-step.  What we could achieve with the landline was immeasurably beyond what was possible with the post, yet doesn’t compare with what we can do with email, mobile voice, SMS, or, now, any of a hundred thousand different sorts of activities, from banking to dating to ordering up a taxi.  The device has become a platform, a social nexus, the point where we find ourselves attached to the universe of others.  Consider the address book that lives on your mobile.  Mine has about 816 entries.  Those are all connections that were made at some point in my life.  (Admittedly, I haven’t been weeding them out as vigorously as I should, so some of those contact are duplicates or no longer accurate.)  That’s just what’s on my mobile.  If I go out to Twitter, I have rather more connections in my ‘social graph’ – about 6700.  These connections aren’t quiescent, waiting to be dialed, but are constantly listening in to what I have to say, just as I am constantly listening to them.

No one can give their full-time attention to that sort of cacophony of human voices.  Some are paid more attention, others, rather less.  Sometimes there’s no spare attention to be given to any of these voices, and what they say is lost to me.  Yet, on the whole, I can maintain some form of continuous partial attention with this ‘cloud’ of others.  They are always with me, and I with them.  This is a new thing (I view myself as a sort of guinea pig in a lab experiment) and it has produced some rather unexpected results.

At the end of last year I went on a long road trip with a friend from the US.  On our first day, we struck out from Sydney and drove to Canberra, arriving, tired and hungry at quarter to six.  Where do you eat dinner in a town that closes down at 5 pm?  I went online and put the question out to Twitter, then ducked into the shower.  By the time I’d dried off, I had a whole suite of responses from native Canberrans, several of whom pointed me to the Civic Asian Noodle House.  Thirty minutes later, my American friend was enjoying his first bowl of seafood laksa – which was among the best I’ve had in Australia.

A few days later, at the end of the road trip, when we’d reached the Barossa Valley, I put another question out to Twitter: what wineries should we visit?  The top five recommendations were very good indeed.  Each of these ‘cloud moments’, by themselves, seems relatively trivial.  Both together begin to mark the difference between an ordinary holiday and a most excellent one.

Another case in point: two weeks ago today, my washing machine gave up the ghost.  What to replace it with?  I asked Twitter.  Within a few hours, and some back-and-forth, I decided upon a Bosch.  Some of that was based on direct input from Bosch owners, some of that came from a CHOICE survey of washing machine owners.  I was pointed to that survey by someone on Twitter.

As I experiment, and learn how to query my cloud, I have sbecome more dependent upon the good advice it can provide.  My cloud extends my reach, my experience and my intelligence, making me much more effective as some sort of weird ‘colony individual’ than I could be on my own.   I have no doubt that within a few years, as the tools improve, nearly every decision I make will be observed and improved upon by my cloud.  Which is wonderful, incredible, and – to quote Tony Abbott – very confronting.

Let me turn things around a bit, to show another side of the cloud, specifically the cloud of my good friend Kate Carruthers.  Last year Kate found herself in Far North Queensland on a business trip and discovered that her American Express card credit limit had summarily been cut in half – with no advance warning – leaving her far away from home and potentially caught in a jam.  When she called American Express to make an inquiry – and found that their consumer credit division closed at 5 pm on a Friday evening – she lost her temper.  The 7500 people who follow Kate on Twitter heard a solid rant about the evils of American Express, a rant that they will now remember every time they find an American Express invitation letter in the post, or even when they decide which credit card to select while making a purchase.

Hollywood has been forced to take note of the power of these clouds.  There’s a direct correlation between the speed at which a motion picture bombs and the rise in the number of users of Twitter.  It used to take a few days for word-of-mouth to kill a movie’s box office:  now it takes a few minutes.  As the first showing ends, friends text friends, people post to Twitter and Facebook, and the news spreads.  After the second or third showing, the crowds have dropped off: word has gotten out that the film stinks.  Where just a few years ago a film could coast for an entire weekend, now the Friday matinee has become a make-or-break affair.  An opinion, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of connections, carries a lot of weight.

That amplification effect has been particularly visible to me over the last week.   I’ve been participating in a ‘social review program’ sponsored by Telstra, who sought reviewers for the handset du jour, the HTC Desire.  I received a free handset – worth about $800 – in exchange for a promise to do a thorough, but honest review.  This is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and when I started to post my thoughts to Twitter, I immediately got a big pushback.  Some of my cloud considered it an unacceptable commercialization of a space they consider essentially private and personal.  I spruik The New Inventors on Twitter every Wednesday.  That’s just as commercial, but Telstra is held out for particular contempt by a broad swath of the Australian public, so any association with them carries it own opprobrium.  I’ve come to realize that I’ve tarred myself with the same brush that others use for Telstra.  Although I did this accidentally and innocently, some of that tar will continue to stick to me.  I have suffered the worst fate that can befall anyone who lives life with a cloud: reputational damage.  Some people have made it perfectly clear that they will never again regard me with the same benevolence.  That damage is done.  All I can do is learn from it, and work to not repeat the same mistakes.

This marked the first time that I’d been ‘chastised’ by my cloud.  I’ve always operated within the bounds of propriety – the protocols of civilized behavior – but in this case I found I’d stumbled into a minefield, a danger zone filled with obstacles that I’d created for myself by presenting myself not just as Mark Pesce, but as Telstra.  I’ve learned new limits, new protocols, and, for the first time, I can begin to sense the constraints that come hand-in-hand with my new capabilities.  I can do a lot, but I can not do as I please.

II: Share the Health

Social networks are nothing new.  We’ve carried them around inside our heads from a time long before we were recognizably human.  They are the secret to our success, and always have been.  We’re the most social of all the of the mammals, and while the bees may put us to shame, we also have big brains to develop distinct personalities and unique strengths, which we have always shared, so that our expertise becomes an asset to the whole of society, whether that is a tribe, a city, or a nation.

Others have been studying these ‘old-school’ human social networks, and they’ve learned some surprising things.  Harvard internist and social scientist Dr. Nicholas Christakis has published a series of papers that illustrate the power of the connection.  In his first paper, he studied how smoking behaviors – both starting and quitting – spread through social networks.  It turns out that if a sufficient number of your friends start to smoke, you’re more likely to begin yourself.  Conversely, if enough of your friends quit, you’re more likely to quit.  This makes sense when you consider the reinforcing nature of social relationships; we each send one another a forest of subtle cues about the ‘right’ way to behave, fit in, and get along.  Those cues shape our choices and behaviors.  Hang out with smokers and you’re more likely to smoke.  Hang out with non-smokers, and you’re likely to quit smoking.

Dr. Christakis also found that the same phenomenon appears to hold true for obesity.  Again, people look to one another for cues about body image.  If all of your peers are obese, you are more likely to be obese yourself.  If your peers are thin, you’re more likely to be thin.  And if your peers go on a diet, you’re likely to join them in slimming.  The connections between us are also the transmitters of behavior.  (It may be the secret to the success of other groups, such as Alcoholics Anonymous.)  This is a powerful insight, one which caused me to have a bit of a brainwave, a few months ago, as I began planning this talk: what happens when we take what we know about our human social networks as behavioral transmitters and apply that to our accelerated, amplified digital selves?

I can take any bit of data I like and share it out through Twitter to 6700 connections, and I frequently do.  I post articles I’ve read, interesting films I’ve watched, photographs I’ve taken, and so forth.  My cloud is an opportunity to share what I encounter in my life.  Probably many of you do precisely the same thing.  But let’s take it a step further.  Let’s say that my doctor wants me to lose 15 kilos, in order to help me lower my blood pressure.  I agree to his request, and perhaps see a nutritionist, but after that I’m pretty much own my own.  I could spend some money to join a ‘group’ like Weight Watchers or whatnot; essentially purchasing a peer group with whom I will connect.  That will work for the duration of the weight loss, but once the support ends, the weight comes piles on.

Instead of this (or, perhaps, in addition to it), what I need to do is to bind my cloud to my intention to lose weight. I need to share this information, but I need to do it meaningfully.  This is more than simply saying, ‘Hey, I need to drop some pounds.’  More than posting the weekly weigh-in figures.  It means using the cloud intelligently, sharing with the cloud what can and should be shared – that is, what I eat and what exercise I get.

When I say ‘my cloud’ in this context, I doubt that I’m speaking about the full complement of 6700 souls.  Although all of them wish me well, this sort of detail is simply noise to many of them.  Instead, I need to go to a smaller cohort: my close friends, and those within my cloud who share a similar affinity – who are also working to lose weight.  These connections – a cloud within my cloud – are the ones who will be best served by my sharing.  I now keep track of what I eat and how I exercise, using some collaborative tool developed an some enterprising entrepreneur to track it all, and everyone sees what kind of progress I’m making toward my goal.  I also see everyone else’s progress toward their own goals.  We reinforce, we reassure, we share both new-found strengths and our moments of weakness.  As we share, we grow closer.  The network is reinforced.  All along, my friends (and my GP) are looking in, monitoring, happy to see that I’m on track toward my goal.

None of this is rocket science.  It’s good social science, and plain common sense.  It needs to be supported by tools.  At this point, I began to think about the kinds of tools that would be useful.  First and most useful would be a food diary.   Rather than a text-based listing of everything eaten, I reckon this will be a bit more up-to-date; there’ll be photographs, taken with my mobile, of everything that goes into my mouth.  As a bit of an experiment, I tried photographing everything I ate from the beginning of this month.  I always got breakfast, mostly lunch, and by dinner had forgotten completely.  My records are incomplete.  That wouldn’t do for any sharing system like this, and it points to the fact that technology is no substitute for effective habits, and those habits don’t develop overnight.  They require some peer support.

As I was beginning to think through the requirements of such a hypothetical system – so that I could share that system with you– I learned that someone had already implemented a real-world system along similar lines.  Jon Cousins, an entrepreneur from Cambridgeshire recently launched a website known as Moodscope.  This site allows individuals who have mood disorders to track their moods daily, and then shares those daily updates with a circle of up to five trusted individuals.

It’s known that individuals with mood disorders can be supported by a network – if that network is kept abreast of that individual’s changes in mood.  I decided to give Moodscope a try, and have been charting my daily moods (which average around the baseline of 50%) for the past 26 days, sharing those results with a close friend.  Although it’s early days, Moodscope is showing promise as a tool that can support people in their struggle for mood regulation and overall mental health, and might even do so better than some pharmaceutical treatments.

In these two examples – one imaginary and one wholly real – we have a pattern for health care in the 21^st century, a model which doesn’t supplant the existing systems, but rather, works alongside them to improve outcomes and to keep patient care costs down, by spreading the burden of care throughout a community.  This model could be repeated to cover diabetics, or hypertensives, or asthmatics, or arthritics, and so on.  It is a generic model which can be applied to every patient and each disorder.

We’ve already seen the birth of ‘Wikimedicine’, where individuals connect together to try to learn more about their diseases than their treating physicians.  This is sometimes a recipe for disaster, but that’s because this is all so new.  Within a few years, doctors, nurse practitioners and patients will be connected through dense networks of knowledge and need.  The doctor and nurse practitioner will help guide the patient into knowledge using the wealth of online resources.  That’s not often happening at present, and this means that patients fall prey to all sorts of bad information.  In our near future, medical knowledge isn’t simply locked away in the physician’s head; it’s shared through a connected community for the benefit of all.  The doctor still treats, while the patient – and the patient’s connections – learn.  From that learning comes the lifestyle changes and reinforcements in behavior that lead to better outcomes.

We have the networks in place, both human and virtual.  We merely need to institute some new practices to reap the benefit of our connections.  As the population ages, these sorts of innovations will seem both natural – relying on others is an essentially human characteristic – and cost-effective.  The population will adopt these measures because they find them empowering (and because their GPs will recommend them), while governments and insurance companies will adopt them because they keep a lid on medical costs.  The forces of culture and technology are converging on a shared, hyperconnected future which aims to keep us as healthy as possible for as long as possible.

III:  The Ministry of Love

I have a good friend who was diagnosed with a mood disorder sixteen years ago.  A few months ago he decided his psychiatric medication was doing him more harm than good, and took himself off of it.  Although it’s been a difficult process, so far he’s been reasonably stable.  When I found Moodscope, I told him about it.  “Sounds good,” he responded, “I can’t wait until they have it as a Facebook app.”  I hadn’t thought about that, but it does make perfect sense: your social graph is already right there, embedded into Facebook, and Facebook applications have access to your social graph: why not create a version of Moodscope that ties the two together?  It sounds very compelling, a sure winner.

But do you really want Facebook to have access to highly privileged medical information, information about your mental state?  That information can be used to help you, but it could also be used against you.   Sydney teenager Nona Belomesoff was lured to her death by a man who used information gleaned from Facebook to befriend her.  Consider: If someone wanted to cause my friend some distress, they could use that shared mood data as a key indicator which would guide them to time their destabilizing efforts for maximum effectiveness.  They could kick him when he was down, and make sure he stayed down.  Giving someone insight into our emotional state gives them the upper hand.

Were that not dangerous enough, just last Friday the Wall Street Journal reported the results of an investigation, which revealed that Facebook was sharing confidential user data with advertisers – data which they’d legally agreed to hold in closest confidence.  The advertisers themselves had no idea that this information was provided illegally.  Facebook, the supreme collector of marketing data, simply didn’t know when or even how to restrain itself.

With that in mind, let’s imagine a situation bound to happen sometime in the next few years.  You and your Facebook friends decide that you want to quit smoking.  It’s too expensive, it’s too hard to find a smoking area, your clothes stink, and you’re starting to get a hacking cough in the mornings.  Enough.  So you tell your friends – over Facebook – that you’re thinking of quitting.  And they think that’s a great idea.  They want to quit, too.  So you all set a date to quit.  That’s all well and good, but then an invitation arrives to a very swanky party in the City, an exclusive affair.  You go, and find that the whole space is a smoking area!  All of these elegant people, puffing away.  Because smoking is glamorous.  And you begin to reconsider.  Your resolve begins to weaken.

Or you want to lose weight.  You even add the Facebook ‘Drop the Fat’ app to your account, to help you achieve your weight loss goals.  But, just as soon as you do that, you start seeing lots more Facebook advertisements for biscuits and ice cream and fresh pizzas.  That has an effect.  It weakens your willpower, and makes those slightly-hungry hours seem more unbearable.

This is the friendly version of ‘Room 101’ from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. In that room, you met your greatest fear.  In this one, you meet your greatest weakness.  When a tobacco company has access to a social network which is trying to quit smoking, it will be tempted to disrupt that network.  When a soft drink company has access to a social network which is trying to lose weight, it will be tempted to disrupt that network.  Our social networks are too potent and too powerful to leave exposed to anyone, for any reason whatsoever.  Yet we leave them lying around, open to public inspection, and we allow Facebook to own them outright, to exploit them as it sees fit, to its own ends, and for its own profit.  Hopefully that will come to an end, unless we’re too far down the rabbit hole to pull out of Facebook and into something else that preserves the integrity of our social graph while granting us control over how we share our inmost selves.

This is where you come in.  You’re the policy folks, and I’ve just thrown a whopper into your lap.  Securing the safety and prosperity of our social future means that we need to establish clear guidelines on how these networks can be used, by whom, and to what ends.  As I’ve explained, there is enormous potential for these networks to lead to breakthroughs in public health, disease prevention, and medical cost management.  That’s just the beginning.  These same networks can organize toward political ends.  We got just a taste of that in the Obama presidential campaign, but the next decade will see its full flower, whether in America or in Iran or in Australia.  As social networks become identified with power networks, all of the conservative and power-seeking interests of culture will work to interfere with them as a means of control.

As public servants and policy makers, you will see the politicians, the doctors, and the advertisers come to you crying, ‘Can’t we do something?’  All of them will want you to weaken the protections for social networks, in order to make them more permeable and less resilient.  In this present moment, and with our current laws, social networks have no protections whatsoever.  They used to live inside our heads, where they needed few protections.  Now they live in public, and with every day that passes we come to understand that they are perhaps our most important possession, the doorway to ourselves.  First you must protect.  Then you must defend.

Protection is not enough.  It’s not clear that any commercial interest can be trusted with the social graphs of a community.  There’s too much potential for mischief, particularly right now, when everything is so new and so raw.  Government must play a role in this revolution, encouraging government-affiliated NGOs and other not-for-profits to foster networks of connections to spring up around communities which need the empowerment that comes with hyperconnectivity.  In the absence of this sort of gardening, the ground will be ceded to commercial forces which may not have the best interests of the citizenry foremost in mind.  By doing nothing, we lay the foundation for a new generation of grifters, criminals, and brainwashers.  But if these networks are built securely – by people who believe in them, and believe in what is possible with them – they become hyper-potent, capable of transforming the lives of everyone connected to them.  It’s a short path from hyperconnectivity to hyperempowerment, a path which will be well-trodden in the coming years.

The 21^st century will look very different from the century just passed.  Instead of big wars and major powers, we’ll see different ‘gangs’ of hyperempowered social networks having a rumble, networks that look a lot like families, towns, or nations.  We’ll all be connected by similar principles, for similar reasons, and we will use similar tools to rally together and mobilize our strengths.  As is the nature of power, power will seek to use power to undermine the power of others.  Facebook is already doing this, though they seem to have stumbled into it.  The next time it happens it will be more deliberate, and more diabolical.

That’s it.  The future is much bigger than hyperconnected health, but as someone who will be a senior in just 20 years, hyperconnected health means more to me than whatever might happen to politics or business.  I need the support that will keep me healthy long into my sunset years, and I will join with others to build those systems.  If we build from corruption, corruption will be the fruit.  We must be honest with ourselves, acknowledge the dangers even as we laud the benefits, and build ourselves systems which do not play into human weaknesses, or avarice, or megalomania.  This is a project fit for a culture, a project worthy of a nation, a people who understand that together we can accomplish whatever we set our sights upon, if we build from a foundation of trust, respect and privacy.

I:  Baby Books

Forty-eight years ago, when my mother was pregnant with me, her friends and family threw her a baby shower.  Among the gifts, she received a satin-covered ‘Baby Book’, with spaces to record all of the minutiae of the early days of my existence.  I know for a fact that Dr. No and Lawrence of Arabia were playing in the movie theatres in Massachusetts at the time I was born, because it is neatly recorded on a page of my baby book.  I know how much I weighed when I was born (7 lbs, 7 oz – or 3.3 kg), when I got my first tooth, when I started to walk, and so on.  All of it is there, because my mother took the time to write it down as it happened.

What my mother didn’t write down – because it isn’t at all remarkable – was that I was busy reaching out, making connections with everyone I came into contact with.  Those connections began with my mother and my father, then my aunts and uncles and grandparents, and, just a year later, my sister.  I made those connections because that’s what humans do.  It sounds perfectly ordinary because it comes so naturally: in fact, it’s quite profound.  From the moment we’re born, we work to embed ourselves within a deep, strong and complex web of social relationships.

This isn’t a recent innovation, something that we ‘thought up’ the way we dreamed up art or writing or the steam engine; you need to go way, way back – at least ten million years, and probably a great deal more – before you get to any of our ancestors who wasn’t thoroughly social.  A social animal will, on the whole, outperform a loner.  A social animal can harness resources outside of themselves to ensure their survival and the survival of their children.  Ten million years ago, a social animal could share the hunting and gathering of food, childcare, or lookout duties.  Those with the best social skills – the best ability to communicate, coordinate, and function effectively as a unit – did better than their less-well-socialized relatives.  They survived to pass their genes and behaviors along, down the generations.  All along, a constant pressure accompanied them, driving them to become ever more social, better coordinated, and more effective.  At some point – no one knows how long ago, or even how it happened – this pressure overflowed, creating the infinitely flexible form of communication we call language.

The more we study other animals – particularly chimpanzees – the less unique we seem to ourselves.  Animals think, they even reason.  They can carry around within themselves a model of how others think and think about them.  They can deceive.  They even appear to have empathy and a sense of fairness.  But no other animal has the perfect tool of language.  Animals can think and feel, but they can not express themselves, at least, not as comprehensively as we can.  The expressiveness of language has one overriding aim: it allows us to connect very effectively.

The more we study ourselves, the more we understand how our need to connect has worked its way into our bodies, colonizing our nervous system.  Our big brains are the hardware for our connection into the human network: there’s a direct correlation between the amount of grey matter in our prefrontal cortex and the number of individuals we can maintain connections with.  Anthropologist Robin Dunbar came up with a figure of 148, plus or minus a few.  That’s the number of individuals you carry around in your head with you, all the time.  For a long, long time – tens of thousands of years – that was the largest a tribe of humans could grow, before they hived off into two tribes.  When a tribe grows so big you can’t know all of its members, it’s time to divide.

We’ve grown used to being surrounded by people we have no connection with.  That’s what cities are all about.  We’ve been building them for close to ten thousand years, and in that time we’ve learned how to live with those we don’t know.  It’s not easy – it requires police and courts and prisons – but the advantages of coming together in such great numbers outweigh the disadvantages.  In 2008, for the first time in history, half of humanity lived in cities.  We’re in the final stages of the urban revolution – a revolution in the making for the past hundred centuries.  Urban life is now the default human condition.

Just as that revolution reaches is climax, we find ourselves presented with a new technology, which takes all of our human connections and digitizes them, creating an electronic representation of what we each carry around in our heads.  We call this ‘social networking’, though, as I’ve explained, social networks are actually older than our species.  Stuffing them into a computer doesn’t change them: We are our connections.  They are what make us human.  But the computer speeds up and amplifies those connections, taking something natural and ordinary and turning it into something freakish and – hopefully – wonderful.

Before we discuss how these newly amplified connections can be used, it may be useful to step back, and reframe this latest revolution – just three years old – in the context of a child born, not in the early 1960s, but in 2010.  I have good friends in Melbourne who are expecting their first child in early September.  For the sake of today’s talk, let’s use this child (we’ll call her a daughter, though no one yet knows) as an example of what is now happening, and what is to come.

Will this child have a baby book?  Certainly, some beloved relative may provide one to the lucky parents, and mom and dad may even take the time to fill it in – between the 3 AM feedings and the nappy changes.  But the true baby book for this child will be the endless stream of digital media created in her wake.  From a few minutes after birth, she will be photographed, recorded, videoed, measured and captured in ways that would seem inconceivable (and obsessive) just a generation ago.  Yet today think nothing of a parent who follows a child everywhere with a video camera.

As parents collect that all of that media, they’re going to want somewhere to show it off.  An eponymous website. YouTube is already cluttered with videos of babies doing the most mundane sorts of things, precisely so they can be shown off to proud grandparents. Photo galleries on Picasa and Snapfish and Flickr exist for precisely the same reason – they provide a venue for sharing.  Parents post to blogs documenting every move, every fitful crawl, every illness.  What’s the difference between this and what we think of as a baby book?  Nothing at all.

It seems natural and wonderful to gather all of this documentation about her.  This is who she is in her youngest years.  But there’s other information that her parents do not document, at least not yet: who does she connect with?  This list is small in her very first years, but as she grows into a toddler and heads off to day care and pre-kindy and grade school, that list grows rather longer.  Will her parents keep track of these relationships?  Even if they do not, at some point, she will.  She’ll go online to a site patrolled by Disney or Apple or Google or Microsoft and be invited to ‘friend’ others on the site, and enroll her own real-world friends.  Her social network will begin to twin into its physical and virtual selves.  Much of each will be a reflection of the other, but some connections will exist purely in one realm.  Some friends or family members will have no presence online; a few friends might remain life-long ‘pen pals’, never meeting in the flesh, but maintaining constant, connected contact.

The most significant difference between these real-world and virtual networks centers on persistence.  We only have room for 150 people in our heads.  When we fill up, people start to get pushed out, crossing that invisible yet absolutely real line between friend and acquaintance.  We may have a lot of acquaintances, but these relationships, in the real world, don’t consist of very much beyond a greeting and a few polite words.  Contrast this to the virtual world, the world of Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, where connections persist forever unless explicitly deleted by one of the parties to that connection.  There is no upper limit to the number of connections a computer can remember.  (Facebook has an upper limit of 5000 friends, but that’s entirely artificial and will eventually be abandoned.)

As she passes through life, this child will continue to accrue connections, and these connections will be digitized for safekeeping – just like the photos and videos her parents shot in her youngest years.  That list will naturally grow and grow and grow, as she passes through years 1 through 12, moves on to university, and out into the world of adults.  By the time she’s 25, she’ll likely have thousands of connections that accreted just by living her life.  Each of these people will be able to peer in, and see how she’s doing; she’ll be able to do the same with each of them.

Managing the difference between our real-world connections, which top out, and our virtual connections, which do not, is a task that we’ll be mastering over the next decade.  Right now, we’re not very good at it.  By the time she’s grown up enough to understand the different qualities of real and virtual connections, we will be able to teach her behaviors appropriate to each sphere of connection.  At present there’s a lot of confusion, a fair bit of chaos, and a healthy helping of ignorance around all of this.  We can give ourselves a pass: it’s brand new.  But already we’re beginning to see that this is a real revolution.  In the social sphere, nothing will look like the past.

II:  Pillar of Cloud, Pillar of Fire

On Friday evening, my washing machine – which I bought, used, just after I moved to Australia – finally gave up the ghost.  The motor on my front loader seemed less and less likely to make it through an entire spin cycle, so I knew this day was coming, and had some thoughts about what I’d do for a replacement.  One of my very good friends recommended that I buy a Simpson brand washer, just as she owned, just as her mother owned.  ‘Years of trouble-free service,’ she said.  ‘It’ll last forever.’  I took that suggestion under advisement.  But I knew that I had a larger pool of individuals to interrogate.  About thirty minutes after the unfortunate passing of the washer, I posted a message to Twitter, asking for recommendations.  Within minutes I was pointed to Choice Magazine, wher I read their reliability survey.  Many people chimed in with their own love or horror stories about particular brands of washers.  I was quickly dissuaded from Simpson: ‘There’s a reason they’re cheap,’ one person replied.  A furious argument raged about whether LG should be purchased by anyone, for any reason whatsoever, given that they were caught cheating on a refrigerator efficiency test.  Miele owners seemed fanatically in love with their washers – but acknowledged that they paid a big premium for that love.  And so on.  After reviewing the input from Twitter (and Choice), I made a decision to purchase a Bosch, which seemed both highly reliable and not too expensive, good value for money.  I put my decision out to Twitter, and the Bosch owners all chimed in: very happy, except for one, who seemed to have gotten one of those units that inevitably break down a few days after the warrantee expires.  That settled it.  On Saturday morning I played Bing Lee off Harvey Norman, talked one down to a very good price, and made the purchase.  Crisis resolved.

Let’s step back from the immediate and get a good look at this whole process.  In considering what to replace my dead washing machine with, I first consulted my real-world network – my friend who recommended Simpson.  Then I went out to my virtual network, a network which is much, much larger.  I follow about 5700 people on Twitter.  This means I have access, potentially, to 5700 opinions, 5700 sets of experiences, 5700 people who may be willing to help.  Even if only a small proportion of those do decide to offer assistance, that’s a lot of help, and it comes to me more or less immediately.  The entire process took about half an hour – and this on a Friday night.  If it’d been on a Tuesday afternoon, when people idly monitor Twitter while they work, I would have received double the response.

Wherever I go, I carry this ‘cloud’ of connections with me.  These connections have value in themselves – they are a record of my passage through the human universe – but they have far greater value when put to work to accomplish some task.  This is it; this is the knife-edge of the present: We have been busily building up our social networks, and though I freely admit that I am better connected than most, this will not long remain the case, as a generation grows into adulthood keeping a perfect record of all of their connections.  Within a few years, nearly everyone who wills it will enter every situation with the same cloud of connections, the same reliable web of helpers who can respond to requests as the need arises.  That fundamental transition – at the heart of this latest revolution – makes each of us much more effective.  We’re carrying around a whole stadium of individuals, who can be called upon as needed to help us make the best decision in every situation.  As we grow more comfortable with this new power, every decision of significance we make will be done in consultation with this network of effectiveness.  This is already transforming the way we operate.

Some more examples, drawn from my own experience, will help illuminate this transformation.  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 Valley, I asked Twitter which wineries I should visit – and the top five recommendations were very good indeed.  In the moment these can seem like trivial affairs, but both together begin to mark the difference between an ordinary holiday and an awesome one.  Imagine this stretching out, minute after minute, throughout our lives.  We’re not used to thinking in such terms.  But just twenty years ago we weren’t used to the idea that we could reach anyone else instantly from wherever we were, or be reached by anyone else, anywhere.  Then the mobile came along, and now that’s an accepted part of our reality.  We’d find it difficult to go back to a time before the mobile became such an essential tool in our lives.  This is the same transition we’re in the midst of right now with social networks.  We look at Twitter and Facebook and find them charming ways to stay in touch and while away some empty time.  A social network isn’t charming, and it certainly isn’t a waste of time.  We are like children, playing with very powerful weapons.  And sometimes they go off.

Before we explore that more explosive side to social networks, the ‘pillar of fire’ to this ‘pillar of cloud’, I want to introduce you to one more social networking technology, one which is brand-new, and which you may not have heard of yet.   Just over the past month, I’ve become a big fan of Foursquare, a location-based ‘social network’.  Using the GPS on my mobile, Foursquare allows me to ‘check in’ when I go to a restaurant, a store, or almost anywhere else.  That is, Foursquare records the fact that I am at a particular place at a particular time.  Once I’ve checked in, I can then make a recommendation – a ‘tip’ in Foursquare lingo – and share something I’ve observed about that place.  It could be anything – something absurdly trivial, or something very relevant.  As others have likely been to this place before me, there is already a list of tips.  If I peek through those tips, I can learn something that could prove very useful.

As every day passes, and more people use Foursquare (over a million at present, all around the world) this list of tips is rapidly growing longer, more substantial, and more useful.  What does this mean?  Well, I could walk into a bar that I’ve never been to before and know exactly which cocktail I want to order.  I would know which table at a restaurant offers the quietest corner for a romantic date.  Or which salesperson to talk to for a good deal on that washing machine.  And so on.  With Foursquare have immediate and continuous information in depth, information provided by the hundreds or thousands in my own social network, plus everyone else who chooses to contribute.  Foursquare turns the real world into a kind of Wikipedia, where everyone contributes what they know to improve the lot of all.  I have a growing range of information about the world around me in my hands.  If I put it to work, it will improve my effectiveness.

Last weekend I went to the cinema, to see Iron Man 2.  As soon as I left the theatre, I sent out a message to Twitter: “Thought Iron Man 2 better than original.  Snappier.  Funnier.  More comic-book-y.”  That recommendation – high praise from me – went out to the 6550 people who follow me.  Many of those folks are Australians, who might have been looking for a film to see last weekend.  My positive review would have influenced them.  I know for a fact that it did influence some, because they sent me messages telling me this.

On the other hand, if I’d sent out a message saying, ‘Worst. Movie. Ever.’ that also would have reached 6550 people, who would, once again, consider it.  It might have even dissuaded some from paying the $17.50 to see Iron Man 2 on the big screen.  If enough people said the same thing, that could kill the box office.  This is precisely what we’ve seen.  There’s a direct correlation between the speed at which a motion picture bombs and the rise in the number of users of Twitter.  It used to take a few days for word-of-mouth to kill a movie’s box office (think Godzilla).  Now it takes a few minutes. As the first showing ends, friends text friends, people post to Twitter and Facebook, and the story spreads.  After the second or third showing, the crowds have dropped off: word has gotten out that the film stinks.  Where a film could coast an entire weekend, now it has just a Friday matinee to succeed or fail.  Positive word-of-mouth kept Avatar at the #1 spot for nine weeks, and the film remained a trending topic on Twitter for half of that time; conversely, The Back-Up Plan disappeared almost without a trace.  An opinion, multiplied by hundreds or thousands of connections, carries a lot of weight.

These connections always come with us, part of who we are now.  If we have an experience we find objectionable, our connections have a taste of that.  A few months ago a friend found herself in Far North Queensland with an American Express card whose credit limit had summarily been cut in half with no warning, leaving her far away from home and potentially caught in a jam.  When she called American Express to make an inquiry – and found that their consumer credit division closed at 5 pm on a Friday evening – she lost her temper.  The 7500 people who follow her on Twitter heard a solid rant about the evils of American Express, a rant that they will now remember every time they find an American Express invitation letter in the post, or even when they decide which credit card to select while making a purchase.

Every experience, positive or negative, is now amplified beyond all comprehension.  We sit here with the social equivalent of tactical nuclear weapons in our hands, toying with the triggers, and act surprised when occasionally they go off.  Catherine Deveny, a weekly columnist for The AGE, was summarily dismissed last week because of some messages she posted over Twitter during the Logies broadcast.  It seems she hadn’t thought through the danger of sending an obscene – but comedic – message to thousands of people, a message that would be picked up and sent again, and sent again, and sent again, until the tabloid newspapers and television shows, smelling blood in the water, got in on the action.  When you’re well-connected, everything is essentially public.  There’s no firm boundary between your private sphere and your public life once you allow thousands of others a look in.  That can be a good thing if one is hungry for celebrity and fame – Kim Kardashian is an excellent example of this – but it can also accelerate a drive to self-destruction (witness Miranda Devine’s comments from Sunday).  We live within a social amplifier, and it’s always turned up to 11.  When we scream, we can be heard around the world, but now our whispers sound like shouts.

This means that no one can be silenced, anywhere.  Last June, the entire world watched as an abortive Iranian revolution broke out on the streets of Tehran, viewing clips shot on mobile handsets, uploaded to YouTube, tagged, then picked up and shared throughout social networks like Twitter, which brought them to the attention of CNN, the New York Times, and the US State Department. Mobiles brought into North Korea puncture the tightly held reins of state control as information and news seeps across the border with China, the human connection amplified by a social technology. It’s no longer the CIA or ASIO station chief who gathers intelligence from far-flung places.  It courses through our human networks.

You can begin to see the shape of this revolution-in-progess.  Everything is so new, so rough, so raw, so innocent of intention that we really don’t know where we are going.  We’re all stumbling through this doorway together.  Each of us hold our connections to one another; like balloons that, in sufficient numbers, might cause us to take flight.  We’re lifting off and gaining speed.  Whether we’re a glider or a guided missile is up to us.  We must pause, take stock, and ask ourselves what we want from these powerful new tools.  And, in return, ask what we must be prepared to accept.

III:  Threat Assistment

Individuals are becoming radically hyper-empowered.  Our connections give us capabilities undreamt of a generation ago.  As individuals who assess the various risks for your organizations, you’ve just learned about a brand new one, a threat that will – relatively quickly – dwarf nearly all others.  The risk of hyperconnectivity is coming at you from three distinct but interrelated axes: hyper-empowered individuals who want to interact with your organizations; hyper-empowered individuals who compose your organizations; and your organizations, when they grasp the nettle of hyperconnectivity.

What do you do when a hyperconnected individual wants to become a customer, or just interact in some way with your organization?  What happens when an existing customer becomes hyperconnected?  Both of these situations are becoming commonplace affairs.  My friend who had her troubles with American Express typifies this sort of threat.  She had a long-term relationship with the company, but in the last years of that relationship she became hyperempowered.  American Express didn’t know this – probably wouldn’t have understood it – and failed to manage the relationship when she ran into trouble.

The key attitudes for managing external relationships with hyperconnected individuals are humility and openness.  American Express had no idea what was going on because they weren’t plugged into what my friend was saying to thousands of her followers.   They didn’t consider her worth listening to.  There’s no reason for this sort of thing to happen.  Excellent tools exist that allow you to monitor what is being said about your organization, right now, who is saying it, and where.  You can keep your finger on the pulse; when a customer has an issue, you can respond in a timely manner, humbly and transparently.  Social media places an enormous value on transparency: unless someone’s motives – and connections – are apparent to you, you have no real reason to trust them, and no basis upon which to build that trust.

This isn’t a difficult policy to implement, but the responsibility for listening doesn’t lie with a single individual or department within your organization.  Responsibility is spread throughout the organization; that’s the only way your organization will be able to handle all of the hyperconnected customers you do business with.  Spread the load.  The Chinese have a proverb: ‘Many hands make light work.’  That same rule applies here.  Make listening to customers a priority throughout your organizations.  If you don’t, those customers will use their amplified capabilities to make your life a living hell.

Employees within your organizations don’t leave their own networks at the door when they walk into the office.  Although employers often block access to services like Facebook and Twitter from employee workstations, mobiles and pervasive high speed wireless connectivity make that restriction increasingly meaningless.  Employees will connect and stay connected throughout the day, regardless of your stated policy.  Soon enough, you will be encouraging them to stay connected, in order to share the burden of all that listening.  Right now, your employees are well connected, but poorly disciplined.  They don’t know the right way to do things.  Don’t blame them for this.  It’s all very new, and there hasn’t been a lot of guidance.

If you walk out of today’s talk with any one thing buzzing in your head, let it be this: develop a social media policy for your employees.  Employees want to know how they can be connected in the office without damaging your reputation or their position.  In the absence of a social media policy, organizations will get into all sorts of prangs that could have been avoided.  Case in point: last week’s sacking of AGE columnist Catherine Deveny happened, in large part, because Fairfax has no social media policy.  There were no guidelines for what constituted acceptable behavior, or even which behavior was ‘on the clock’ versus ‘off the clock’.  Without these sorts of guidelines, hyperconnected employees will make their own decisions – putting your organizations, your stakeholders and your brands at risk.

Two well-known Australian organizations have established their own social media policies.  The ABC boiled theirs down to four simple rules:

1)    Do not mix the personal and the professional in ways likely to bring the ABC into disrepute;

2)    Do not undermine your effectiveness at work;

3)    Do not imply ABC endorsement of your personal views;

4)    Do not disclose confidential information obtained through work.

This could be summed up with ‘use common sense’, but spelled out as it is here, the ABC has given its employees a framework that allows them to both regulate and embrace social media.

Telstra’s policy is wordier – it runs to five pages – but it is, in essence, very similar.  It is good that Telstra has a social media policy, but that policy was only developed after a very public and very embarrassing incident.  Last year, Telstra employee Leslie Nassar, who posted to Twitter pseduonymously  under the account ‘Fake Stephen Conroy’, revealed his identity.  When Telstra realized that one of their employees daily satirized the senator charged with ministerial oversight of their organization, the company was appalled, and quickly moved to fire Nassar – only to find that it couldn’t, because Nassar had violated no stated policy or conditions of employment.  Shortly after that, Telstra developed and promulgated its social media guidelines.  Learn from Telstra’s mistake.  This same sort of PR and political catastrophe needn’t happen in your organizations, but I guarantee that it will, if you do not develop a social media policy.  So please, get started immediately.

Finally, what happens when organizations hyperconnect?  For hundreds of years, organizations have been based on rigid hierarchies and restricted flows of information.  Hyperconnectivity puts paid to the org chart, replacing it with a dense set of hyperconnections between individuals within the organization, and between organizations: from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.  We don’t really understand much about this new form of organization, other than to say that it looks very little like what we are familiar with today.  But the pressure from hyperconnected individuals – both within and outside of the organization – will only increase, and to accommodate this pressure, the organization will increasingly find itself embedded in hyperconnections.  This is the final leg of the revolution, still some years away, but one which requires careful planning today.  Can your organization handle itself as it connects broadly to a planet where everyone is connected broadly?  Will it maintain its own integrity, will it dissolve, merge, or disintegrate?  This is a question that businesses need to ask, that schools need to ask, that governments need to ask.  Everything from mass production to service delivery is being re-thought and re-shaped by our hyperconnectivity.

Organizations that master hyperconnectivity, putting social media to work, experience a leap forward in productivity.  That leap forward comes at a price.  Every tool that enhances productivity also changes everyone who uses it.  None of us, as individuals or organizations, will be left behind, even if we choose to unplug, because we remain completely connected to a human world which is increasing hyperconnected.  There is no going back, nor any particular safety in the present.  Instead, we need to connect, and together use the best of what we’ve got – which is substantial, because there are plenty of smart people in all your organizations, throughout the nation, and the world – to mange this transition.  This could be a nearly bloodless revolution, if we can remember that, at our essence, we are the connected species.  Thought it may seem chaotic, this is not a collapse.  It is a culmination.

The slides for this talk can be found here.

I: The Educational Field

We live today in the age of networks.  Having grown from nothing just fifteen years ago, the network has become one of the principal influences in our lives.  We trust the network; we depend on the network; we use the network to make ourselves more effective.  This state of affairs did not develop gradually; rather, we have passed through a series of unpredicted and non-linear shifts in the fabric of culture.

The first of these shifts was coincident with the birth of the Web itself, back in the mid-1990s.  From its earliest days the Web was alluring because it represented all things to all people: it could serve as both resource and repository for anything that might interest us, a platform for whatever we might choose to say.  The truth of those earliest days is that we didn’t really know what we wanted to say; the stereotype of the page where one went on long and lovingly about one’s pussy carries an echo of that search for meaning.   The lights were on, but nobody was home.

Drawing the curtain on this more-or-less vapid era of the Web, the second shift began with the collapse of the dot-com bubble in the early 2000s.  The undergrowth cleared away, people could once again focus on the why of the Web.  This was when the Web came into its own as an interactive medium.  The Web could have been an interactive medium from day one – the technology hadn’t changed one bit – but it took time for people to map out the evolving relationship between user and experience.  The Web, we realized, is not a page to read, but rather, a space for exploration, connection and sharing.

This is when things start to get interesting, when ideas like Wikipedia begin to emerge.  Wikipedia is not a technology, at least, it’s not a specific technology.  Wikis have been around since 1995, nearly as old as the Web itself.  Databases are older than the Web, too.  So what is new about Wikipedia?  Simply this: the idea of sharing.  Wikipedia invites us all to share from our expertise, for the benefit of one another.  It is an agreement to share what we know to collectively improve our capability.  If you strip away all of the technology, and all of the hype – both positive and negative –from Wikipedia, what you’re left with is this agreement to share.  In the decade since Wikipedia’s launch we’ve learned to share across a broad range of domains.  This sharing supported by technology is a new thing, and dramatically increases the allure of the network.  What was merely very interesting back in 1995 became almost overpowering in the years since the turn of the millennium.  It has consistently become harder and harder to imagine a life without the network, because the network provides so much usefulness, and so much utility.

The final shift occurred in 2007, as Facebook introduced F8, its plug-in architecture which opened its design – and its data – to outside developers.  Facebook exploded from a few million users to over four hundred million: the third largest nation in the world.  Social networks are significant because they harness and amplify our innate human desire and capability to connect with one another.  We constantly look to our social networks – that is, our real-world networks – to remind us who we are, where we are, and what we’re doing.  These social network provide our ontological grounding.  When translated into cyberspace, these social networks can become almost impossibly potent – which is why, when they’re used to bully or harass someone, they can lead to such disastrous results.  It becomes almost too easy, and we become almost too powerful.

A lot of what we’ll see in this decade is an assessment of what we choose to do with our new-found abilities.  We can use these social networks to transmit pornographic pictures of one another back and forth at such frequency and density that we simply numb ourselves into a kind of fleshy hypnosis.  That is one possible direction for the future.  Or, we could decide that we want something different for ourselves, something altogether more substantial and meaningful.  But in order to get that sort of clarity, we need to be very clear on what we want – both direction and outcome.  At this point we are simply playing around – with a loaded weapon – hoping that it doesn’t accidentally go off.

Of course it does; someone sets up a Facebook page to memorialize a murdered eight year-old, but leaves the door open to all comers (believing, unrealistically, that others will share their desire to mourn together), only to see the overflowing sewage of the Internet spill bile and hatred and psychopathology onto a Web page.  This happens again and again; it happened several times in one week in February.  We are not learning the lesson we are meant to learn.  We are missing something.  Partly this is because it is all so new, but partly it is because we do not know what our own intentions are.  Without that, without a stated goal, we can not winnow the wheat from the chaff.  We will forget to close the windows and lock the doors.  We will amuse ourselves to death.

I mention this because, as educators, it is up to all of us to act as forces for the positive moral good of the culture as a whole.  Cultural values are transmitted by educators; and while parents may be a bigger influence, teachers have their role to play.  Parents are simply overwhelmed by all of this novelty – the Web wasn’t around when they were children, and social networks weren’t around even five years ago.  So, right at this moment in time, educators get to be the adult cultural vanguard, the vital mentoring center.

If we had to do this ourselves, alone, as individuals – or even as individual institutions – the project would almost certainly fail.  After all, how could we hope to balance all of the seductions ‘out there’ against the sense which needs to be taught ‘in here’?  We would simply be overwhelmed – our current condition.  Fortunately, we are as well connected, at least in potential, as any of our students.  We have access to better resources.  And we have more experience, which allows us to put those resources to work.  In short, we are far better placed to make use of social media than our charges, even if they seem native to the medium while we profess to be immigrants.

One thing that has changed, because of the second shift, the trend toward sharing, is that educational resources are available now as never before.  Wikipedia led the way, but it is just small island in a much large sea of content, provided by individuals and organizations throughout the world.  iTunes University, YouTube University, the numberless podcasts and blogs that have sprung up from experts on every subject from macroeconomics to the history of Mesoamerica – all of it searchable by Google, all of it instantaneously accessible – every one of these points to the fact that we have clearly entered a new era, where we are surrounded by and saturated with an ‘educational field’ of sorts.  Whatever you need to know, you’re soaking in it.

This educational field is brand-new.  No one has made systematic use of it, no teacher, no institution, no administration.  But that doesn’t lessen its impact.  We all consult Wikipedia when we have some trivial question to answer; that behavior is the archetype for where education is headed in the 21^st century – real-time answers on-demand, drawn from the educational field.

Paired with the educational field is the ability for educators to establish strong social connections – not just with other educators, but laterally, through the student to the parents, through the parents to the community, and so on, so that the educator becomes ineluctably embedded in a web of relationships which define, shape and determine the pedagogical relationship.  Educators have barely begun to make use of the social networking tools on offer; just to have a teacher ‘friend’ a student in Facebook is, to some eyes, a cause for concern – what could possibly be served by that relationship, one which subverts the neat hierarchy of the 19^th century classroom?

The relationship is the essence of the classroom, that which remains when all the other trivia of pedagogy are stripped away.  The relationship between the teacher and the student is at the core of the magical moment when knowledge is transmitted between the generations.  We now have the greatest tool ever created by the hand of man to reinforce and strengthen that relationship.  And we need to use it, or else we will all sink beneath a rising tide of noise and filth and distraction.

But how?

II: The Unfinished Project

The roots of today’s talk lie in a public conversation I had with Dr. Evan Arthur, who manages the Digital Education Revolution Group within the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.  As part of this conversation, I asked him about educational styles, and, in particular, Constructivism.  As conceived by Jean Piaget and his successors across the 20^th century, Constructivism states that the child learns through play – or rather, through repeated interactions with the world.  Schema are created by the child, put to the test, where they either succeed or fail.  Failed schema are revised and re-tested, while successful schema are incorporated into ever-more-comprehensive schema.  Through many years of research we know that we learn the physics of the real world through a constant process of experimentation.  Every time a toddler dumps a cup of juice all over himself, he’s actually conducting an investigation into the nature of the real.

The basic tenets of Constructivism are not in dispute, although many educators have consistently resisted the underlying idea of Constructivism – that it is the child who determines the direction of learning.  This conflicts directly with the top-down teacher-to-student model of education which we are all intimate familiar with, which has determined the nature of pedagogy and even the architecture of our classrooms.  This is the grand battle between play and work; between ludic exploration and the hard grind of assimilating the skills that situate us within an ever-more-complex culture.

At the moment, this trench warfare has frozen us in a stalemate located, for the most part, between year two and year three.  In the first two years education has a strong ludic component, and students are encouraged to explore.  But in year three the process becomes routinized, formalized and very strict.  Certainly, eight-year-olds are better able to understand restrictions than six-year-olds.  They’re better at following the rules, at colouring within the lines.  But it seems as though we’ve taken advantage of the fact that an older child is a more compliant one.  It is true that as we advance in years, our ludic nature becomes tempered by an adult’s sensibility.  But humans retain the urge to play throughout their lives – to a greater degree than any other species we know of.  It could very well be that our ability to learn is intimately tied to our desire to play.

If we are prepared to swallow this bitter pill, and acknowledge that play is an essential part of the learning process, we have no choice but to follow this idea wherever it leads us.  Which leads me back to my conversation with Dr. Arthur.  I asked him about the necessity of play, and he framed his response by talking about “The Unfinished Constructivist Project”.  It is a revolution trapped in mid-stride, a revelation that, somehow, hasn’t penetrated all the way through our culture.  We still insist that instruction is the preferred mechanism for education, when we have ample evidence to suggest this simply isn’t true.  Let me be clear: instruction is not the same thing as guidance.  I am not suggesting that children simply do as they please.  The more freedom they have, the more need they have for a strong, stabilizing force to guide them as they explore.  This may be the significant (if mostly hidden) objection to the Constructivist project: it is simply too expensive.  The human resources required to give each child their own mentor as they work their way through the corpus of human knowledge would simply overwhelm any current educational model, with the exception of homeschooling.  I don’t know what the student-teacher ratio would need to be in a fully realized Constructivist educational system, but I doubt that twenty-to-one would be sufficient.  That’s the level needed to maintain a semblance of order, more a peacekeeping force than an army of mentors.

There have been occasional attempts to create a fully Constructivist educational system, but these, like the manifold utopian communities which have been founded, flourish briefly, then fade or fracture, and do not survive the test of time.  The level of dedication and involvement required from both educator/mentors and parents is simply too big an ask.  This is the sort of thing that a hunter-gatherer culture has no trouble with: the entire world is the classroom, the child explores it, and an adult is always there to offer an explanation or story to round out the child’s knowledge.  We live in an industrial culture (at least, our classrooms do), where there is strict differentiation between ‘education’ and the other activities in life, where adults are ‘educators’ or they are not, where everything is highly formal, almost ritualized.  (Consider the highly regulated timings of the school day – equal parts order from chaos, and ritual.)  There could never be enough support within such a framework to sustain a Constructivist model.  This is why we have the present stalemate; we know the right thing to do, but, heretofore, we have lacked the resources to actualize this knowledge.

That has now changed.

The educational field must be recognized as the key element which will power the unfinished Constructivist revolution.  The educational field does not recognize the boundaries of the classroom, the institution, or even the nation.  It is simply pervasive, ubiquitous and available as needed.  Within that field, both students and educator/mentors can find all of the resources needed to make the Constructivist project a continuing success.  There need be no rupture between years two and three, no transformation of educational style from inward- to outward-directed.  Instead, there can and should be a continual deepening of the child’s exploration of the corpus of knowledge, under the guidance of a network of mentors who share the burden.  We already have most of the resources in place to assure that the child can have a continuous and continually strengthening relationship with knowledge: Wikipedia, while not perfect, points toward the kinds of knowledge sharing systems which will become both commonplace and easily created throughout the 21^st century.

Sharing needs to become a foundational component in a modern educational system.  Every time a teacher finds a resource to aid a student in their exploration, that should be noted and shared broadly.  As students find things on their own – and they will be far better at it than most educators – these, too, should be shared.  We should be creating a great, linked trail behind us as we learn, so that others, when exploring, will have paths to guide them – should they choose to follow.  We have systems that can do this, but we have not applied these systems to education – in large part because this is not how we conceive of education.  Or rather, this is not how we conceive of education in the classroom.  I do a fair bit of corporate consulting, and this sort of ‘knowledge capture’ and ‘knowledge management’ is becoming essential to the operation of a 21^st century business.  Many businesses are creating their own, ad-hoc systems to share knowledge resources among their staff, as they understand how important this is for professional development.

This is a new battle line opened up in the war between the unfinished constructivist project and the older, more formal methods of education.  The corporate world doesn’t have time for methodologies which have become obsolete.  Employees must be constantly up-to-date.  Professionals – particularly doctors and lawyers – must remain continuously well-informed about developments in their respective fields.  Those in management need real-time knowledge streams in order recognize and solve problems as they emerge.  This is all much more ludic than formal, much more self-directed than guided, much more juvenile than adult – even though these are all among the most adult of all activities.  This disjunction, this desynchronization between the needs of the world-at-large and the delivery capabilities of an ever-more-obsolete educational system is the final indictment of things-as-they-are.  Things will change; either education will become entirely corporatized, or educators will wholly embrace the unfinished Constructivist project.  Either way the outcome will be the same.

Fortunately, the educational field has something else to offer educators beyond the near-infinite supply of educational resources.  It is a network of individuals.  It is a social network, connected together via bonds of familiarity and affinity.  The student is embedded in a network with his mentors; the mentors are connected to other students, and to other mentors; everyone is connected to the parents, and the community.  In this sense, the formal space of the ‘classroom’ collapses, undone by the pressure provided by the social network, which has effectively caused the classroom walls to implode.  The outside world wants to connect to what happens within the crucible of the classroom, or, more specifically, with the magical moment of knowledge transference within the student’s mind.  This is what we should be building our social networks to support.  At present, social networks like Facebook and Twitter are dull, unsophisticated tools, capable of connecting together, but completely inadequate when it comes to shaping that connection around a task – such as mentoring, or exploring knowledge.  A second generation of social networks is already reaching release.  These tools display a more sophisticated edge, and will help to support the kinds of connections we need within the educational field.

None of this, as wonderful as it might sound (and I admit that it may also seem pretty frightening) is happening in a vacuum.  There are larger changes afoot within Australia, and no vision for the future of education in Australia could ignore them.  We must find a way to harmonize those changes with the larger, more fundamental changes overtaking the entire educational system.

III: The National Curriculum

Underlying fear of a Constructivist educational project is that it would simply give children an excuse to avoid the tough work of education.  There is a persistent belief that children will simply load up on educational ‘candy’, without eating their all-so-essential ‘vegetables’, that is, the basic skills which form the foundation for future learning.  Were children left entirely to their own devices, there might be some danger of this – though, now that we live in the educational field, even that possibility seems increasingly remote.  Children do not live in isolation: they are surrounded by adults who want them to grow into successful adults.  In prehistoric times, adults simply had to be adults around children for the transference of life-skills to take place.  Children copied, imitated, and aped adults – and still do.  This learning-by-mimesis is still a principle factor in the education of the child, though it is not one which is often highlighted by the educational system.  Industrial culture has separated the adult from the child, putting one into the office, the other into the school.  That separation, and the specialization which is the hallmark of the Industrial Age, broke the natural and persistent mentorship of parenting into discrete units: this much in the home, this much in the school.  If we do not trust children to consume a nourishing diet of knowledge, it is because we do not trust ourselves to prepare it for them.  The separation by function led to a situation where no one is responsible for the whole thread of the life.  Parents look to teachers.  Teachers look to parents.  Everyone, everywhere, looks to authority for responsible solutions.

There is no authority anywhere.  Either we do this ourselves, or it will not happen.  We have to look to ourselves, build the networks between ourselves, reach out and connect from ourselves, if we expect to be able to resist a culture which wants to turn the entire human world into candy.  This is not going to be easy; if it were, it would have happened by itself.  Nor is it instantaneous.  Nothing like this happens overnight.  Furthermore, it requires great persistence.  In the ideal situation, it begins at birth and continues on seamlessly until death.  In that sense, this connected educational field mirrors and is a reflection of our human social networks, the ones we form from our first moments of awareness.  But unlike that more ad-hoc network, this one has a specific intent: to bring the child into knowledge.

Knowledge, of course, is very big, very vague, mostly undefined.  Meanwhile, there are specific skills and bodies of knowledge which we have nominated as important: the ability to read and write; to add and subtract, multiply and divide; a basic understanding of the physical and living worlds; the story of the nation and its peoples.  These have very recently been crystallized in a ‘National Curriculum’, which seeks to standardize the pedagogical outcomes across Australia for all students in years 1 through 10.  Parents and educators have already begun to argue about the inclusion or exclusion of elements within that curriculum.  I was taught phonics over forty years ago, but apparently it’s still a matter of some debate.  The teaching of history is always going to be contentious, because the story we tell ourselves about who we are is necessarily political.  So the adults will argue it out – year after year, decade after decade – while the educators and students face this monolithic block of text which seems to be the complete antithesis of the Constructivist project.  And, looked at one way, the National Curriculum is exactly the type of top-down, teacher-to-student, sit-down-and-shut-up sort of educational mandate which is no longer effective in the business world.

All of which means its probably best that we avoid viewing up the National Curriculum as a validation, encouraging us to continue on with things as they are.  Instead, it should be used as mandate for change.  There are several significant dimensions to this mandate.

First, putting everyone onto the same page, pedagogically, opens up an opportunity for sharing which transcends anything before possible.  Teachers and students from all over Australia can contribute to or borrow from a wealth of resources shared by those who have passed before them through the National Curriculum.  Every teacher and every student should think of themselves as part of a broader collective of learners and mentors, all working through the same basic materials.  In this sense, the National Curriculum isn’t a document so much as it is the architecture of a network.  It is the way all things educational are connected together.  It is the wiring underneath all of the pedagogy, providing both a scaffolding and a switchboard for the learning moment.

Is it possible to conceive of a library organized along the lines of the National Curriculum?  Certainly a librarian would have no problem configuring a physical library to meet the needs of the curriculum.  It’s even easier to organize similar sorts of resources in cyberspace.  Not only is it easy, there’s now a mandate to do so.  We know what sorts of resources we’ll need, going forward.  Nothing should be stopping us from creating collective resources – similar to an Australian Wikipedia, and perhaps drawing from it – which will serve the pedagogical requirements of the National Curriculum.  We should be doing this now.

Second, we need to think of the National Curriculum as an opportunity to identify all of the experts in all of the areas covered by the curriculum, and, once they’ve been identified, we must create a strong social network, with them inside, giving them pride of place as ‘nodes of expertise’.  Knowledge is not enough; it must be paired with mentors who have been able to put that knowledge into practice with excellence.  The National Curriculum is the perfect excuse to bring these experts together, to make them all connected and accessible to everyone throughout the nation who could benefit from their wisdom.

Here, once again, it is best to think of the National Curriculum not as a document but as a network – a way to connect things, and people, together.  The great strength of the National Curriculum is, as Dr. Evan Arthur put it, that it is a ‘greenfields’.  Literally anything is possible.  We can go in any direction we choose.  Inertia would have us do things as we’ve always done them, even as the centrifugal forces of culture beyond the classroom point in a different direction.  Inertia can not be a guiding force.  It must be resisted, at every turn, not in the pursuit of some educational utopia or false revolution, but rather because we have come to realize that the network is the educational system.

Moving from where we are to where need to be seems like a momentous transition.  But the Web saw repeated momentous transitions in its first fifteen years and we managed all of those successfully.  We can absorb huge amounts of change and novelty so long as the frame which supports us is strong and consistent.  That’s the essence of the parent-child relationship: so long as the child feels it is being cared for, it can endure almost anything.  This means that we shouldn’t run around freaking out.  The sky is not falling.  The world is not ending.  If anything, we are growing closer together, more connected, becoming more important to one another.  It may feel a bit too close from time to time, as we learn how to keep a healthy distance in these new relationships, but that closeness supports us all.  It can keep children from falling through the net of opportunity.  It can see us advance into a culture where every child has the full benefit of an excellent education, without respect to income or circumstance.

That is the promise.  We have the network.  We live in the educational field.  We now have the National Curriculum to wire it all together.  But can we marry the demands of the National Curriculum with the ludic call of Constructivism?  Can we create a world where literally we play into learning?  This is more than video games that have math drills embedded into them.  It’s about capturing the interests of a child and using that as a springboard for the investigation of their world, their nation, their home.  That can only happen if mentors are deeply involved and embedded in the child’s life from its earliest years.

I don’t have any easy answers here.  There is no magic wand to wave over this whole uncoordinated mess to make it all cohere.  No one knows what’s expected of them anymore – educators least of all.  Are we parents?  Are we ‘friends’?  Where do we stand?  I know this: we stand most securely when we stand connected.