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FUTURE PRESENT

Selected Works
2005 2010

Mark Pesce
Copyright 2010, Mark D. Pesce

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Australia


Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial 2.5 License. For
more information about this license, its restrictions and its
permissions, please visit creativecommons.org.

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Foreword 4

LITERATURE
2010: What Ever Happened to the Book? 6

EDUCATION
2010: The Unfinished Project 19

POLITICS
2008: Hyperpolitics 32
2009: Sharing Power 41

MEDIA
2005: Piracy is Good? 50
2008: Unevenly Distributed 70

BUSINESS
2010: Calculated Risks 87

TECHNOLOGY
2005: The Telephone Repair Handbook 102
2010: Dense and Thick 126

FICTION
2010: Both Your Houses 139

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Foreword
I decided to set myself a little project for the 2010 Sydney
Writers Festival: How quickly could I produce a book of my
own writing? After several years adding essays to my blog,
The Human Network (blog.futurestreetconsulting.com), I
have no shortage of material to pick from. The book youre
holding in your hands represents an effort to represent the
range of my thinking through a series of significant essays. It
is a bit of a core-dump, a Vulcan mind-meld, from my mind,
into yours.

Nearly all of these works were talks delivered in academic


contexts, so there are times when the language is rather less
formal than might be expected of an author. Consider them,
then, spoken word pieces, and try, if you are able, to hear my
voice behind them.

For most of the period covered in this book, 2005 2010, I


functioned as an independent academic, loosely affiliated
with the University of Sydney through an Honorary
Appointment to the Digital Cultures Program, but always
working on my own. The thoughts and ideas expressed in
these essays are entirely mine with the exception of The
Telephone Repair Handbook, which was constructed with
plenty of help from Angus Fraser, my most excellent and
gifted graduate student of the time.

Ideas and themes recur throughout these work. (Do not be


too surprised if you see a turn of phrase or an anecdote
repeated. Good stories grow better in the retelling.) The
overall theme is that of a dedicated exploration of human
social networks, and their current technological
transformation into something new, yet entirely familiar.
These essays are the results of a voyage of discovery I began
back in 2003, when I first signed up for Friendster. I hope
you enjoy the trip as much as I have.

Mark Pesce (mark@markpesce.com)


Surry Hills
May 2010

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LITERATURE

5
What Ever Happened to the Book?
For Ted Nelson

Part One: Centrifugal Force

We live in the age of networks. Wherever we are, five billion


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

I became aware of this connectedness of our thoughts as I


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

As the universal hypertext system of HTTP and HTML


conquered all, hypertext revealed qualities as a medium
which had hitherto been unsuspected. Although the great
strength of hypertext is its capability for non-linearity you
can depart from the text at any point no one had reckoned
on the force (really, a type of seduction) of those points of
departure. Each link presents an opportunity for exploration,
and is, in a very palpable sense, similar to the ringing of a
telephone. Do we answer? Do we click and follow? A link is
pregnant with meaning, and passing a link by necessarily
incurs an opportunity cost. The linear text is constantly

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weighed down with a secondary, centrifugal force, trying to
tear the reader away from the inertia of the text, and on into
another space. The more heavily linked a particular hypertext
document is, the greater this pressure.

Consider two different documents that might be served up in


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

On the other hand, consider an average article in Wikipedia.


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

Although commercial hyperdocuments try to fence


themselves off from the rest of the Web and the lure of its

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links, they are never totally immune from its persistent tug.
Just because you have landed somewhere that has a paucity of
links doesnt constrain your ability to move non-linearly. If
nothing else, the browsers Back button continually offers
that opportunity, as do all of your bookmarks, the links that
lately arrived in email from friends or family or colleagues,
even an advertisement proffered by the site. In its drive to
monetize attention, the commercial site must contend with
the centrifugal force of its own ads. In order to be situated
within a hypertext environment, a hyperdocument must
accept the reality of centrifugal force, even as it tries, ever
more cleverly, to resist it. This is the fundamental tension of
all hypertext, but here heightened and amplified because it is
resisted and forbidden. It is a source of rising tension, as the
Web-beyond-the-borders becomes ever more comprehensive,
meaningful and alluring, while the hyperdocument multiplies
its attempts to ensnare, seduce, and retain.

This rising tension has had a consequential impact on the


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

The newspaper as we have known it has been shredded. This


is not the fault of Google or any other mechanical process, but
rather is a natural if unforeseen consequence of the nature of
hypertext. We are the ones who feel the lure of the link; no

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machine can do that. Newspapers made the brave decision to
situate themselves as islands within a sea of hypertext.
Though they might believe themselves singular, they are not
the only islands in the sea. And we all have boats. That was
bad enough, but the islands themselves are dissolving, leaving
nothing behind but metaphorical clots of dirt in murky water.

The lure of the link has a two-fold effect on our behavior.


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

In most circumstances, we will decline the challenge.


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

The emergence of the tl;dr phenomenon which all of us


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

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we decide to go all in or hold back.

The most obvious effect of this hypercompetitive development


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

There is a cost incurred both for substance and the lack


thereof. Such are the dilemmas of hypertext.

Part Two: The Schwarzschild Radius

It appears inarguable that 2010 is the Year of the Electronic


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

At this point a question needs to be asked: whats so


electronic about an electronic book? If I open the Stanza

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

These questions are important essential if we want to


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

Publishers will resist the allure of the electronic book, seeing


no reason to change what they do simply to satisfy the
demands of a new medium. But then, we know that monks
did not alter the practices within the scriptorium until printed
texts had become ubiquitous throughout Europe. Todays
publishers face a similar obsolescence; unless they adapt their
publishing techniques appropriately, they will rapidly be

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replaced by publishers who choose to embrace the electronic
book as a medium,. For the next five years we will exist in an
interregnum, as books published in light make way for true
electronic books.

What does the electronic book look like? Does it differ at all
from the hyperdocuments we are familiar with today? In
fifteen years of design experimentation, weve learned a lot of
ways to present, abstract and play with text. All of these are
immediately applicable to the electronic book. The electronic
book should represent the best of 2010 has to offer and move
forward from that point into regions unexplored. The printed
volume took nearly fifty years to evolve into its familiar hand-
sized editions. Before that, the form of the manuscript library
volume chained to a desk or placed upon an altar dictated
the size of the book. We shouldnt try to constrain our idea of
what an electronic book can be based upon what the book has
been. Over the next few years, our innovations will surprise
us. We wont really know what the electronic book looks like
until weve had plenty of time to play with them.

The electronic book will not be immune from the centrifugal


force which is inherent to the medium. Every link, every
opportunity to depart from the linear inertia of the text,
presents the same tension as within any other
hyperdocument. Yet we come to books with a sense of
commitment. We want to finish them. But what, exactly do
we want to finish? The electronic book must necessarily
reveal the interconnectedness of all ideas, of all writings just
as the Web does. So does an electronic book have a beginning
and an end? Or is it simply a densely clustered set of texts
with a well-defined path traversing them? From the vantage
point of 2010 this may seem like a faintly ridiculous question.
I doubt that will be the case in 2020, when perhaps half of our
new books are electronic books. The more that the electronic
book yields itself to the medium which constitutes it, the
more useful it becomes and the less like a book. There is no
way that the electronic book can remain apart, indifferent and
pure. It will become a hybrid, fluid thing, without clear
beginnings or endings, but rather with a concentration of
significance and meaning that rises and falls depending on
the needs and intent of the reader. More of a gradient than a
boundary.

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

We come now to a line which we need to cross very carefully


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

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

What ever happened to the book? It exploded in a paroxysm


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

Part Three: Finnegans Wiki

So what of Aristotle? What does this mean for the narrative?


It is easy to conceive of a world where non-fiction texts simply
dissolve into the universal sea of texts. But what about
stories? From time out of mind we have listened to stories
told by the campfire. The Illiad, The Mahabharata, and
Beowolf held listeners spellbound as the storyteller wove the
tale. For hours at a time we maintained our attention and

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focus as the stories that told us who we are and our place in
the world traveled down the generations.

Will we lose all of this? Can narratives stand up against the


centrifugal forces of hypertext? Authors and publishers both
seem assured that whatever happens to non-fiction texts, the
literary text will remain pure and untouched, even as it
becomes a wholly electronic form. The lure of the literary text
is that it takes you on a singular journey, from beginning to
end, within the universe of the authors mind. There are no
distractions, no interruptions, unless the author has expressly
put them there in order to add tension to the plot. A well-
written literary text and even a poorly-written but well-
plotted page-turner has the capacity to hold the reader
tight within the momentum of linearity. Something is a page-
turner precisely because its forward momentum effectively
blocks the centrifugal force. We occasionally stay up all night
reading a book that we couldnt put down, precisely because
of this momentum. It is easy to imagine that every literary
text which doesnt meet this higher standard of seduction will
simply fail as an electronic book, unable to counter the
overwhelming lure of the medium.

This is something we never encountered with printed books:


until the mid-20th century, the only competition for printed
books was other printed books. Now the entire Web
already quite alluring and only growing more so offers itself
up in competition for attention, along with television and
films and podcasts and Facebook and Twitter and everything
else that has so suddenly become a regular feature of our
media diet. How can any text hope to stand against that?

And yet, some do. Children unplugged to read each of the


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

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

Finally, there is another path open for the literary text, one
which refuses to ignore the medium that constitutes it, which
embraces all of the ambiguity and multiplicity and liminality
of hypertext. There have been numerous attempts at
hypertext fiction; nearly all of them have been unreadable
failures. But there is one text which stands apart, both
because it anticipated our current predicament, and because
it chose to embrace its contradictions and dilemmas. The
book was written and published before the digital computer
had been invented, yet even features an innovation which is
reminiscent of hypertext. That work is James Joyces
Finnegans Wake, and it was Joyces deliberate effort to make
each word choice a layered exploration of meaning that gives
the text such power. It should be gibberish, but anyone who

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has read Finnegans Wake knows it is precisely the opposite.
The text is overloaded with meaning, so much so that the
mind cant take it all in. Hypertext has been a help; there are
a few wikis which attempt to make linkages between the text
and its various derived meanings (the maunderings of four
generations of graduate students and Joycephiles), and it may
even be that in another twenty years or so the wikis will
begin to encompass much of what Joyce meant. But there is
another possibility. In so fundamentally overloading the text,
implicitly creating a link from every single word to something
else, Joyce wanted to point to where we were headed. In this,
Finnegans Wake could be seen as a type of science fiction, not
a dystopian critique like Aldous Huxleys Brave New World,
nor the transhumanist apotheosis of Olaf Stapletons
Starmaker (both near-contemporary works) but rather a text
that pointed the way to what all texts would become,
performance by example. As texts become electronic, as they
melt and dissolve and link together densely, meaning
multiplies exponentially. Every sentence, and every word in
every sentence, can send you flying in almost any direction.
The tension within this text (there will be only one text) will
make reading an exciting, exhilarating, dizzying experience
as it is for those who dedicate themselves to Finnegans Wake.

It has been said that all of human culture could be


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

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EDUCATION

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The Unfinished Project:
Exploration, Learning and Networks
Part One: 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 didnt really know what we wanted to say; the stereotype
of the page where one went on long and lovingly about ones
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 hadnt 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, its 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

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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 youre left with is this agreement to share. In the decade
since Wikipedias launch weve 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 were doing.
These social network provide our ontological grounding.
When translated into cyberspace, these social networks can
become almost impossibly potent which is why, when
theyre 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 well 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 doesnt accidentally go off.

Of course it does; someone sets up a Facebook page to


memorialize a murdered eight year-old, but leaves the door

20
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 wasnt around when they were children, and social
networks werent 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

21
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, youre 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 doesnt 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 21st 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 19th
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?

Part Two: The Unfinished Project

The roots of todays talk lie in a public conversation I had with


Dr. Evan Arthur, who manages the Digital Education
Revolution Group within the Department of Education,

22
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 20th 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, hes 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. Theyre better at
following the rules, at colouring within the lines. But it seems
as though weve 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 adults
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

23
no choice but to follow this idea wherever it leads us. Which
leads me back to my conversation with Evan 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, hasnt 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 isnt 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
dont 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. Thats 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 childs 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.

24
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 childs 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 21st 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 21st 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 doesnt have time

25
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 students 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

26
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.

Part Three: 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.

27
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 its 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

28
collective of learners and mentors, all working through the
same basic materials. In this sense, the National Curriculum
isnt 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. Its even easier to organize similar sorts of
resources in cyberspace. Not only is it easy, theres now a
mandate to do so. We know what sorts of resources well
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 theyve 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
weve 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.

29
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. Thats 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
shouldnt 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. Its 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 childs life
from its earliest years.

I dont 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 whats 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.

30
POLITICS

31
Hyperpolitics (American Style)

Part One: Hyperconnected

We have been human beings for perhaps sixty thousand


years. In all that time, our genome, the twenty-five thousand
genes and three billion base pairs which comprise the source
code for Homo Sapiens Sapiens has hardly changed. For at
least three thousand generations, weve had big brains to
think with, a descended larynx to speak with, and opposable
thumbs to grasp with. Yet, for almost ninety percent of that
enormous span of time, humanity remained a static presence.
Our ancestors entered the world and passed on from it, but
the patterns of culture remained remarkably stable, persistent
and conservative. This posed a conundrum for
paleoanthropologists, long known as the sapient paradox: if
we had the kit for it, why did civilization take so long to
arise?

Cambridge archeologist Colin Renfrew (more formally, Baron


Renfrew of Kamisthorn) recently proposed an answer. We
may have had great hardware, but it took a long, long time for
humans to develop software which made full use of it. We
had to pass through symbolization, investing the outer world
with inner meaning (in the process, creating some great art),
before we could begin to develop the highly symbolic
processes of cities, culture, law, and government. About ten
thousand years ago, the hidden interiority of humanity,
passed down through myths and teachings and dreamings,
built up a cultural reservoir of social capacity which
overtopped the dam of the conservative patterns of humanity.
We booted up (as it were) into a culture now so familiar we
rarely take notice of it.

In Guns, Germs and Steel, evolutionary biologist and


geographer Jared Diamond presented a model which
elegantly explains how various peoples crossed the gap into
civilization. Cultures located along similar climatic regions on
the planets surface could and did share innovations, most
significantly along the broad swath of land from the Yangtze
to the Rhine. This sharing accelerated the development of
each of the populations connected together through the

32
material flow of plants and animals and the immaterial flow
of ideas and symbols. Where sharing had been a local and
generational project for fifty thousand years, it suddenly
became a geographical project across nearly half the diameter
of the planet. Cities emerged in Anatolia, Palestine and the
Fertile Crescent, and civilization spread out, over the next five
hundred generations, to cover all of Eurasia.

Civilization proved another conservative force in human


culture; despite the huge increases in population, the social
order of Jericho looks little different from those of Imperial
Rome or the Qin Dynasty or Medieval France. But when
Gutenberg (borrowing from the Chinese) perfected moveable
type, he led the way to another and even broader form of
cultural sharing; literacy became widespread in the aftermath
of the printing press, and savants throughout the Europe
published their insights, sharing their own expertise,
producing the Enlightenment and igniting the Scientific
Revolution. Peer-review, although portrayed today as a
conservative force, initially acted as a radical intellectual
accelerant, a mental hormone which again amplified the
engines of human culture, leading directly to the Industrial
Age.

The conservative empires fell, replaced by demos, the people:


the cogs and wheels of a new system of the world which
allowed for massive cities, massive markets, mass media,
massive growth in human knowledge, and a new type of
radicalism, known as Liberalism, which asserted the freedom
of capital, labor, and people. That Liberalism, after two
hundred and fifty years of ascendancy, has become the
conservative order of culture, and faces its own existential
threat, the result of another innovation in sharing.

Last month, The Economist, that fountainhead of Ur-


Liberalism, proclaimed humanity halfway there.
Somewhere in the last few months, half the population of the
planet became mobile telephone subscribers. In a decades
time weve gone from half the world having never made a
telephone call to half the world owning their own mobile. It
took nearly a decade to get to the first billion, four years to the
second, eighteen months to the third, and sometime during
2011 over five billion of us will be connected. Mobile
handsets will soon be in the hands of everyone except the

33
billion and a half extremely poor; microfinance organizations
like Bangladeshs Grameen Bank work hard to ensure that
even this destitute minority have access to mobiles. Why?
Mobiles may be the most potent tool yet invented for the
elimination of poverty.

To those of us in the developed word this seems a


questionable assertion. For us, mobiles are mainly social
accelerants: no one is ever late anymore, just delayed. But,
for entire populations who have never had access to
instantaneous global communication, the mobile unleashes
the innate, inherent and inalienable capabilities of sociability.
Sociability has always been the cornerstone to human
effectiveness. Being social has always been the best way to get
ahead.

Until recently, wed seen little to correlate mobiles with


human economic development. But, here again, we see the
gap between raw hardware capabilities and their expression
in cultural software. Handing someone a mobile is not the
end of the story, but the beginning. Nor is this purely a
phenomenon of the developing world, or of the poor. We had
the Web for almost a decade before we really started to work
it toward its potential. Wikis were invented in 1995, marking
it as an early web technology; the idea of Wikipedia took
another six years. Even SMS, the true carrier of the Human
Network, had been dismissed by the telecommunications
giants as uninteresting, a sideshow. Last year we sent forty
three billion text messages.

We have a drive to connect and socialize: this drive has now


been accelerated and amplified as comprehensively as the
steam engine amplified human strength two hundred and
fifty years ago. Just as the steam engine initiated the
transformation of the natural landscape into man-made
artifice, the hyperconnectivity engendered by these new toys
is transforming the human landscape of social relations. This
time around, fifty thousand years of cultural development will
collapse into about twenty.

This is coming as a bit of a shock.

Part Two: Hypermimesis

34
I have two nephews, Alexander and Andrew, born in 2001,
and 2002. Alexander watched his mother mousing around on
her laptop, and from about 18 months reached out to play
with the mouse, imitating her actions. By age three Alex had
a fair degree of control over the mouse; his younger brother
watched him at play, and copied his actions. Soon, both
wrestled for control of a mouse that both had mastered.
Children are experts in mimesis learning by imitation. Its
been shown that young chimpanzees regularly outscore
human toddlers on cognitive tasks, while the children far
surpass the chimps in their ability to ape behavior. We are
built to observe and reproduce the behaviors of our parents,
our mentors and our peers. Our peers now number three and
a half billion.

Whenever any one of us displays a new behavior in a


hyperconnected context, that behavior is inherently
transparent, visible and observed. If that behavior is
successful, it is immediately copied by those who witnessed
the behavior, then copied by those who witness that behavior,
and those who witnessed that behavior, and so on. Very
quickly, that behavior becomes part of the global behavioral
kit. As its first-order emergent quality, hyperconnectivity
produces hypermimesis, the unprecedented acceleration of
the natural processes of observational learning, where each
behavioral innovation is distributed globally and
instantaneously.

Only a decade ago the network was all hardware and raw
potential, but we are learning fast, and this learning is
pervasive. Behaviors, once slowly copied from generation to
generation, then, still slowly, from location to location, now
hyperdistribute themselves via the Human Network. We all
learn from each other with every text we send, and each new
insight becomes part of the new software of a new civilization.

We still do not know much about this nascent cultural form,


even as its pieces pop out of the ether all around us. We know
that it is fluid, flexible, mobile, pervasive and inexorable. We
know that it does not allow for the neat proprieties of privacy
and secrecy and ownership which define the fundamental
ground of Liberal civilization. We know that, even as it grows,
it encounters conservative forces intent on moderating its

35
impact. Yet every assault, every tariff, every law designed to
constrain this Human Network has failed.

The Chinese, who gave it fair go, have conceded the failure of
their Great Firewall, relying now on self-censorship,
situating the policeman within the mind of the dissident
netizen. Record companies and movie studios try to block
distribution channels they can not control and can not tariff;
every attempt to control distribution only results in an ever-
more-pervasive and ever-more-difficult to detect Darknet.
A band of reporters and bloggers (some of whom are in this
room today) took down the Attorney General of the United
States, despite the best attempts of Washingtons political
machinery to obfuscate then overload the processes of
transparency and oversight. Each of these singular examples
would have been literally unthinkable a decade ago, but today
they are the facts on the ground, unmistakable signs of the
potency of this new cultural order.

It is as though we have all been shoved into the same room, a


post-modern Panopticon, where everyone watches everyone
else, can speak with everyone else, can work with everyone
else. We can send out a call to find the others, for any
cause, and watch in wonder as millions raise their hands. Any
fringe (noble or diabolical) multiplied across three and a half
billion adds up to substantial numbers. Amplified by the
Human Network, the bonds of affinity have delivered us over
to a new kind of mob rule.

This shows up, at its most complete, in Wikipedia, which


(warts and all) represents the first attempt to survey and
capture the knowledge of the entire human race, rather than
only its scientific and academic elites. A project of the mob,
for the mob, and by the mob, Wikipedia is the mob rule of
factual knowledge. Its phenomenal success demonstrates
beyond all doubt how the calculus of civilization has shifted
away from its Liberal basis. In Liberalism, knowledge is a
scarce resource, managed by elites: the more scarce
knowledge is, the more highly valued that knowledge, and the
elites which conserve it. Wikipedia turns that assertion inside
out: the more something is shared the more valuable it
becomes. These newly disproportionate returns on the
investment in altruism now trump the virtue of selfishness.

36
Paradoxically, Wikipedia is not at all democratic, nor is it
actually transparent, though it gives the appearance of both.
Investigations conducted by The Register in the UK and other
media outlets have shown that the encyclopedia anyone can
edit is, in fact, tightly regulated by a close network of
hyperconnected peers, the Wikipedians. This premise is
borne out by the unpleasant fact that article submissions to
Wikipedia are being rejected at an ever-increasing rate.
Wikipedias growth has slowed, and may someday grind to a
halt, not because it has somehow encompassed the totality of
human knowledge, but because it is the front line of a new
kind of warfare, a battle both semantic and civilizational. In
this battle, we can see the tracings of hyperpolitics, the
politics of era of hyperconnectivity.

To outsiders like myself, who critique their increasingly


draconian behavior, Wikipedians have a simple response:
We are holding the line against chaos. Wikipedians
honestly believe that, in keeping Wikipedia from such effluvia
as endless articles on anime characters, or biographies of
living persons deemed insufficiently notable, they keep their
resource pure. This is an essentially conservative impulse,
as befits the temperament of a community of individuals who
are, at heart, librarians and archivists.

The mechanisms through which this purity is maintained,


however, are hardly conservative. Hyperconnected, the
Wikipedians create sock puppet personae to argue their
points on discussion pages, using back-channel, non-
transparent communications with other Wikipedians to
amass the support (both numerically and rhetorically) to
enforce their dictates. Those who attempt to counter the fixed
opinion of any network of Wikipedians encounter a buzz-saw
of defiance, and, almost invariably, withdraw in defeat.

Now that this Great Game has been exposed, hypermimesis


comes into play. The next time an individual or community
gets knocked back, they have an option: they can choose to
go nuclear on Wikipedia, using the tools of
hyperconnectivity to generate such a storm of protest, from so
many angles of attack, that the Wikipedians find themselves
overwhelmed, backed into the buzz-saw of their own creation.
This will probably engender even more conservative reaction
from the Wikipedians, until, in fairly short order, the most

37
vital center of human knowledge creation in the history of our
species becomes entirely fossilized.

Or, just possibly, Wikipedians will bow to the inevitable,


embrace the chaos, and find a way to make it work.

That choice, writ large, is the same that confronts us in every


aspect of our lives. The entire human social sphere faces the
increasing pressures of hyperconnectivity, which arrive hand-
in-hand with an increasing empowerment
(hyperempowerment) by means of hypermimesis. All of our
mass social institutions, developed at the start of the Liberal
era, are backed up against the same buzz saw.

Politics, as the most encompassing of our mass institutions,


now balances on a knife edge between a past which no longer
works and a future of chaos.

Part Three: No Governor

Last Monday, as I waited at San Francisco International for a


flight to Logan, I used my mobile to snap some photos of the
status board (cheerfully informing me of my delayed
departure), which I immediately uploaded to Flickr. As I
waited at the gate, I engaged in a playful banter with two
women dun certain age, that clever sort of casual
conversation one has with fellow travelers. After we boarded
the flight, one of the women approached me. I just wanted
you to know, that other woman, she works for the Treasury
Department. And you were making her nervous when you
took those photos.

Now heres the thing: I wanted to share the frustrations of my


journey with my many friends, both in Australia and America,
who track my comings and goings on Twitter, Flickr and
Facebook. Sharing makes the unpleasant endurable. In that
moment of confrontation, I found myself thrust into a
realization that had been building over the last four years:
sharing is the threat. Not just a threat. It is the whole of
the thing.

A photo snapped on my mobile becomes instantaneously and


pervasively visible. No wonder shes nervous: in my simple,

38
honest and entirely human act of sharing, it becomes
immediately apparent that any pretensions to control, or
limitation, or the exercise of power have already collapsed
into shell-shocked impotence.

We are asked to believe that hyperconnectivity can be


embraced by political campaigns, and by politicians in power.
We are asked to believe that everything we already know to
be true about the accelerating disintegration of hierarchies of
all kinds economic, academic, cultural will somehow
magically suspend itself for the political process. That,
somehow, politics will be different.

Bullshit. Ladies and gentlemen, dont believe a word of it.


Its whistling past the graveyard. Its clapping for Tinkerbelle.
Obama may be the best thing since sliced bread, but this isnt
a crisis of leadership. This is not an emergency. And my
amateur photography did not bring down the curtain on the
Republic.

For the first time, we have a political campaign embracing


hyperconnectivity. As is always the case with political
campaigns, it is a means to an end. The Obama campaign has
built a nationwide social network (using lovely, old-fashioned,
human techniques), then activated it to compete in the
primaries, dominate in the caucuses, and secure the
Democratic nomination. That network is being activated
again to win the general election.

Then what? Three months ago, I put this question directly to


an Obama field organizer. He paused before responding, as if
hed never given the question any thought, before answering,
I dont know. I dont believe anyones thought that far
ahead. There are now some statements from candidate
Obama about what hed like to see this network become.
They are, of course, noble sentiments. They matter not at
all. The mob, now mobilized, will do as it pleases. Obama
can lead by example, can encourage or scold as occasion
warrants, but he can not control. Not with all the Kings
horses and all the Kings men.

And yes, thats scary.

Fasten your seatbelts and prepare for a rapid descent into the

39
Bellum omnia contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes war of all
against all. A hyperconnected polity whether composed of
a hundred individuals or a hundred thousand has resources
at its disposal which exponentially amplify its capabilities.
Hyperconnectivity begets hypermimesis begets
hyperempowerment. After the arms race comes the war.

Conserved across nearly four thousand generations, the social


fabric will warp and convulse as various polities actualize
their hyperempowerment in the cultural equivalent of nuclear
exchanges. Eventually (one hopes, with hypermimesis, rather
quickly) we will learn to contain these most explosive forces.
We will learn that even though we can push the button, were
far better off refraining. At that point, as in the era of
superpower Realpolitik, the action will shift to a few tens of
thousands of little conflicts, the hyperconnected equivalents
of the endless civil wars which plagued Asia, Africa and Latin
America during the Cold War.

Naturally, governments will seek to control and mediate these


emerging conflicts. This will only result in the guns being
trained upon them. The power redistributions of the 21 st
century have dealt representative democracies out.
Representative democracies are a poor fit to the challenges
ahead, and rebooting them is not enough. The future
looks nothing like democracy, because democracy,
which sought to empower the individual, is being
obsolesced by a social order which hyperempowers
him.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead famously pronounced that we


should Never underestimate the ability of a small group of
committed individuals to change the world. Mead spoke
truthfully, and prophetically. We are all committed, we are
all passionate. We merely lacked the lever to effectively
translate the force of our commitment and passion into
power. That lever has arrived, in my hand and yours.

And now, the worlds going to move for all of us.

40
Sharing Power (International Edition)
Introduction: War is Over (if you want it)

Over the last year we have lived through a profound and


perhaps epochal shift in the distribution of power. A year ago
all the talk was about how to mobilize Facebook users to turn
out on election day. Today we bear witness to a green
revolution, coordinated via Twitter, and participate as the
Guardian UK crowdsources the engines of investigative
journalism and democratic oversight to uncover the
unpleasant little secrets buried in the MPs expenses scandal
secrets which the British government has done everything in
its power to withhold.

Weve turned a corner. Were on the downward slope. It was


a long, hard slog to the top a point we obviously reached on
4 November 2008 but now the journey is all about
acceleration into a future that looks almost nothing like the
past. The configuration of power has changed: its
distribution, its creation, its application. The trouble with
circumstances of acceleration is that they go hand-in-hand
with a loss of control. At a certain point our entire global
culture is liable to start hydroplaning, or worse, will go
airborne. As the well-oiled wheels of culture leave the
roadbed of civilization behind, we can spin the steering wheel
all we want. Nothing will happen. Acceleration has its own
rationale, and responds neither to reason nor desire. Force
will meet force. Force is already meeting force.

What happens now, as things speed up, is a bit like what


happens in the guts of CERNs Large Hadron Collider.
Different polities and institutions will smash and reveal their
inner workings, like parts sprung from crashed cars. We can
learn a lot if were clever enough to watch these collisions as
they happen. Some of these particles-in-collision will
recognizably be governments or quasi-governmental
organizations. Some will look nothing like them. But before
we glory, Ballard-like, in the terrible beauty of the crash, we
should remember that these institutions are, first and
foremost, the domain of people, individuals ill-prepared for
whiplash or a sudden impact with the windshield. No one is
wearing a safety belt, even as things slip noticeably beyond

41
control. Someones going to get hurt. That much is already
clear.

What we urgently need, and do not yet have, is a political


science for the 21st century. We need to understand the
autopoietic formation of polities, which has been so
accelerated and amplified in this era of hyperconnectivity.
We need to understand the mechanisms of knowledge sharing
among these polities, and how they lead to hyperintelligence.
We need to understand how hyperintelligence transforms into
action, and how this action spreads and replicates itself
through hypermimesis. We have the words or some of
them but we lack even an informal understanding of the
ways and means. As long as this remains the case, we are
subject to terrible accidents we can neither predict nor
control. We can end the war between ourselves and our
times. But first we must watch carefully. The collisions are
mounting, and they have already revealed much. We have
enough data to begin to draw a map of this wholly new
territory.

Part One: The First Casualty of War

Last month saw an interesting and unexpected collision.


Wikipedia, the encyclopedia created by and for the people,
decreed that certain individuals and a certain range of IP
addresses belonging to the Church of Scientology would
hereafter be banned from the capability to edit Wikipedia.
This directive came from the Arbitration Committee of
Wikipedia, which sounds innocuous, but is in actuality the
equivalent the Supreme Court in the Wikipediaverse.

It seems that for some period of time probably stretching


into years there have been any number of edit wars (where
edits are made and reverted, then un-reverted and re-
reverted, ad infinitum) around articles concerning about the
Church of Scientology and certain of the personages in the
Church. These pages have been subject to fierce edit wars
between Church of Scientology members on one side, critics
of the Church on the other, and, in the middle, Wikipedians,
who attempted to referee the dispute, seeking, above all, to
preserve the Neutral Point-of-View (NPOV) that the
encyclopedia aspires to in every article. When this became

42
impossible when the Church of Scientology and its
members refused to leave things alone a consensus
gradually formed within the tangled adhocracy of Wikipedia,
finalized in last months ruling from the Arbitration
Committee. For at least six months, several Church of
Scientology members are banned by name, and all Church
computers are banned from making edits to Wikipedia.

That would seem to be that. But its not. The Church of


Scientology has been diligent in ensuring that the mainstream
media (make no mistake, Wikipedia is now a mainstream
medium) do not portray characterizations of Scientology
which are unflattering to the Church. Theres no reason to
believe that things will simply rest as they are now, that
everyone will go off and skulk in their respective corners for
six months, like children given a time-out. Indeed, the
Chairman of Scientology, David Miscavidge, quickly issued a
press release comparing the Wikipedians to Nazis, asking,
Whats next, will Scientologists have to wear yellow, six-
pointed stars on our clothing?

How this skirmish plays out in the months and years to come
will be driven by the structure and nature of these two wildly
different organizations. The Church of Scientology is the very
model of a modern religious hierarchy; all power and control
flows down from Chairman David Miscavidge through to the
various levels of Scientology. With Wikipedia, no one can be
said to be in charge. (Jimmy Wales is not in charge of
Wikipedia.) The whole things chugs along as an agreement, a
social contract between the parties participating in the
creation and maintenance of Wikipedia. Power flows in
Wikipedia are driven by participation: the more you
participate, the more power youll have. Power is distributed
laterally: every individual who edits Wikipedia has some
ultimate authority.

What happens when these two organizations, so


fundamentally mismatched in their structures and power
flows, attempt to interact? The Church of Scientology uses
lawsuits and the threat of lawsuits as a coercive technique.
But Wikipedia has thus far proven immune to lawsuits.
Although there is a non-profit entity behind Wikipedia,
running its servers and paying for its bandwidth, that is not
Wikipedia. Wikipedia is not the machines, it is not the

43
bandwidth, it is not even the full database of articles.
Wikipedia is a social agreement. It is an agreement to share
what we know, for the greater good of all. How does the
Church of Scientology control that? This is the question that
confronts every hierarchical organization when it collides
with an adhocracy. Adhocracies present no control surfaces;
they are at once both entirely transparent and completely
smooth.

This could all get much worse. The Church of Scientology


could declare war on Wikipedia. A general in such a conflict
might work to poison the social contract which powers
Wikipedia, sewing mistrust, discontent and the presumption
of malice within a community that thrives on trust,
consensus-building and adherence to a common vision.
Striking at the root of the social contract which is the whole of
Wikipedia could possibly disrupt its internal networks and
dissipate the human energy which drives the project.

Were we on the other side of the conflict, running a defensive


strategy, we would seek to reinforce Wikipedias natural
strength the social agreement. The stronger the social
agreement, the less effective any organized attack will be. A
strong social agreement implies a depth of social resources
which can be deployed to prevent or rapidly ameliorate
damage.

Although this conflict between the Church of Scientology and


Wikipedia may never explode into a full-blown conflict, at
some point in the future, some other organization or
institution will collide with Wikipedia, and battle lines will be
drawn. The whole of this quarter of the 21 st century looks like
an accelerating series of run-ins between hierarchical
organizations and adhocracies. What happens when the
hierarchies find that their usual tools of war are entirely
mismatched to their opponent?

Part Two: War is Hell

Even the collision between friendly parties, when thus


mismatched, can be devastating. Rasmus Klies Nielsen, a PhD
student in Columbias Communications program, wrote an
interesting study a few months ago in which he looked at

44
communication overload, which he identifies as a persistent
feature of online activism. Nielsen specifically studied the
2008 Democratic Primary campaign in New York, and
learned that some of the best-practices of the Obama
campaign failed utterly when they encountered an energized
and empowered public.

The Obama campaign encouraged voters to communicate


through its website, both with one another and with the
campaigns New York staff. Although New York had been
written off by the campaign (Hilary Clinton was sure to win
her home state), the state still housed many very strong and
vocal Obama supporters (apocryphally, all from Manhattans
Upper West Side). These supporters flooded into the Obama
campaign website for New York, drowning out the campaign
itself. As election day loomed, campaign staffers retreated to
older communication techniques that is, mobile phones
while Obamas supporters continued the conversation
through the website. A complete disconnection between
campaign and supporters occurred, even though the parties
had the same goals.

Political campaigns may be chaotic, but they are also very


hierarchically structured. There is an orderly flow of power
from top (candidate) to bottom (voter). Each has an assigned
role. When that structure is short-circuited and replaced by
an adhocracy, the instrumentality of the hierarchy overloads.
We havent yet seen the hybrid beast which can function
hierarchically yet interaction with an adhocracy. At this point
when the two touch, the hierarchy simply shorts out.

Another example from the Obama general election campaign


illustrates this tendency for hierarchies to short out when
interacting with friendly adhocracies. Project Houdini was
touted as a vast, distributed GOTV program which would
allow tens of thousands of field workers to keep track of who
had voted and who hadnt. Project Houdini was among the
most ambitious of the online efforts of the Obama campaign,
and was thoroughly tested in the days leading up to the
general election. But, once election day came, Project
Houdini went down almost immediately under the volley of
information coming in from every quadrant of the nation,
from fieldworkers thoroughly empowered to gather and
report GOTV data to the campaign. A patchwork backup plan

45
allowed the campaign to tame the torrent of data, channeling
it through field offices. But the great vision of the Obama
campaign, to empower the individuals with the capability to
gather and report GOTV data, came crashing down, because
the system simply couldnt handle the crush of the
empowered field workers.

Both of these collisions happened in friendly fire situations,


where everyones eyes were set on achieving the same goal.
But these two systems of organization are so foreign to one
another that we still havent seen any successful attempt to
span the chasm that separates them. Instead, we see
collisions and failures. The political campaigns of the future
must learn how to cross that gulf. While some may wish to
turn the clock back to an earlier time when campaigns
respected carefully-wrought hierarchies, the electorates of the
21st century, empowered in their own right, have already come
to expect that their candidates campaigns will meet them in
that empowerment. The next decade is going to be
completely hellish for politicians and campaign workers of
every party as new rules and systems are worked out. There
are no successful examples yet. But circumstances are
about to force a search for solutions.

Part Three: War is Peace

As governments release the vast amounts of data held and


generated by them, communities of interest are rising up to
work with that data. As these communities become more
knowledgeable, more intelligent hyperintelligent via this
exposure, this hyperintelligence will translate into action:
hyperempowerment. This is all well and good so long as the
aims of the state are the same as the aims of the community.
A community of hyperempowered citizens can achieve lofty
goals in partnership with the state. But even here, the
hyperempowered community faces a mismatch with the
mechanisms of the state. The adhocracy by which the
community thrives has no easy way to match its own
mechanisms with those of the state. Even with the best
intentions, every time the two touch there is the risk of
catastrophic collapse. The failures of Project Houdini will be
repeated, and this might lead some to argue that the opening
up itself was a mistake. In fact, these catastrophes are the

46
first sign of success. Connection is being made.

In order to avoid catastrophe, the state and any institution


which attempts to treat with a hyperintelligence must
radically reform its own mechanisms of communication.
Top-down hierarchies which order power precisely can not
share power with hyperintelligence. The hierarchy must open
itself to a more chaotic and fundamentally less structured
relationship with the hyperintelligence it has helped to foster.
This is the crux of the problem, asking the leopard to change
its spots. Only in transformation can hierarchy find its way
into a successful relationship with hyperintelligence. But can
any hierarchy change without losing its essence? Can the
state or any institution become more flexible, fluid and
dynamic while maintaining its essential qualities?

And this is the good case, the happy outcome, where everyone
is pulling in the same direction. What happens when aims
differ, when some hyperintelligence for some reason decides
that it is antithetical to the interests of an institution or a
state? Weve seen the beginnings of this in the weird, slow
war between the Church of Scientology and ANONYMOUS, a
shadowy organization which coordinates its operations
through a wiki. In recent weeks ANONYMOUS has also taken
on the Basidj paramilitaries in Iran, and Chinas internet
censors. ANONYMOUS pools its information, builds
hyperintelligence, and translates that hyperintelligence into
hyperempowerment. Of course, they dont use these words.
ANONYMOUS is simply a creature of its times, born in an era
of hyperconnectivity.

It might be more profitable to ask what happens when some


group, working the data supplied at Recovery.gov or Data.gov
or you-name-it.gov, learns of something that theyre opposed
to, then goes to work blocking the governments activities. In
some sense, this is good old-fashioned activism, but it is
amplified by the technologies now at hand. That
amplification could be seen as a threat by the state; such
activism could even be labeled terrorism. Even when this
activism is well-intentioned, the mismatch and collision
between the power of the state and any hyperempowered
polities means that such mistakes will be very easy to make.

We will need to engage in a close examination of the

47
intersection between the state and the various
hyperempowered actors which rising up over next few years.
Fortunately, the Obama administration, in its drive to make
government data more transparent and more accessible (and
thereby more likely to generate hyperintelligence around it)
has provided the perfect laboratory to watch these
hyperintelligences as they emerge and spread their wings.
Although communications PhD candidates undoubtedly will
be watching and taking notes, public policy-makers should
also closely observe everything that happens. Since the rules
of the game are changing, observation is the first most
necessary step toward a rational future. Examining the
pushback caused by these newly emerging communities will
give us our first workable snapshot of a political science for
the 21st century.

The 21st century will continue to see the emergence of


powerful and hyperempowered communities. Sometimes
these will challenge hierarchical organizations, such as with
Wikipedia and the Church of Scientology; sometimes they will
work with hierarchical organizations, as with Project Houdini;
and sometimes it will be very hard to tell what the intended
outcomes are. In each case the hierarchy be it a state or an
institution will have to adapt itself into a new power role, a
new sharing of power. In the past, like paired with like: states
shared power with states, institutions with institutions,
hierarchies with hierarchies. We are leaving this comfortable
and familiar time behind, headed into a world where actors of
every shape and description find themselves sufficiently
hyperempowered to challenge any hierarchy. Even when they
seek to work with a state or institution, they present
challenges. Peace is war. In either direction, the same
paradox confronts us: power must surrender power, or be
overwhelmed by it. Sharing power is not an ideal of some
utopian future; its the ground truth of our hyperconnected
world.

48
MEDIA

49
Piracy is Good?
PART ONE: HYPERDISTRIBUTION

October 18th, 2004 is the day TV died. That evening, British


satellite broadcaster SkyOne part of NEWS Corp's BSkyB
satellite broadcasting service ran the premiere episode of
the re-visioned 70s camp classic Battlestar Galactica. (That
episode, "33," is one of the best hours of drama ever written
for television.) The production costs for Battlestar Galactica
were underwritten by two broadcast partners: SkyOne in the
UK, and the SciFi Channel in the USA. SciFi Channel
programers had decided to wait until January 2005 (a slow
month for American television) to begin airing the series, so
three months would elapse between the airing of "33" in the
UK, and its airing in the US. Or so it was thought.

The average viewer of the SciFi network is young and


decidedly geeky. They are masters of media; they can find
ways to get things they shouldn't have. Thus, a few hours after
airing on SkyOne, "33" was available for Internet download.
No news there.

A new peer-to-peer file sharing technology, BitTorrent, was


employed to share the quarter-gigabyte audiovisual files of
"33". Unlike older forms of internet downloading, where too
many requests for the same data can clog up internet links
and send servers crashing. BitTorrent distributes files more
and more efficiently, as more people join the hunt for the
data. Everyone looking for bits of a file - say, an episode of
Battlestar Galactica - shares the pieces they've already
located with anyone else who doesn't already have that piece.
Since the pieces are scattered randomly among all the users
who want the data, there's a lot of to-and-fro between the
users; rather than being a request for one copy of one file on
one server, it's as though many hundreds of hands are
copying and exchanging playing cards. You may start out

50
holding only the Ace of Hearts, but soon enough you'll have a
full deck.

This is a form of peer-to-peer file sharing known as


"swarming": all of the peers in a swarm share the portions of
the data they've already received. And, as the Chinese proverb
goes, "Many hands make light work." BitTorrent transforms
the creaky and unreliable technology of audiovisual
distribution, making it fast and hyper-efficient. BitTorrent
creates the conditions for something I've termed
"hyperdistribution" - a distribution channel which is even
more efficient than broadcasting.

That has certainly been the case with Battlestar Galactica.


The British aficionados of the series provided torrents for
each episode within a few hours of each broadcast. Many fans
in the US picked them up and watched them; so did many
people in Australia.

While you might assume the SciFi Channel saw a significant


drop-off in viewership as a result of this piracy, it appears to
have had the reverse effect: the series is so good that the few
tens of thousands of people who watched downloaded
versions told their friends to tune in on January 14th, and see
for themselves. From its premiere, Battlestar Galactica has
been the most popular program ever to air on the SciFi
Channel, and its audiences have only grown throughout the
first series. Piracy made it possible for "word-of-mouth" to
spread about Battlestar Galactica.

Just two months ago, we saw something very similar happen,


again with a beloved series, the BBC's Doctor Who. After a
hiatus of almost two decades, the BBC cast Christopher
Eccelston in the role of the Doctor, and set the show to
premiere on the 24th of March. A few weeks before the air
date, an "unfinished" version of the first episode of the new
series leaked onto the internet through the BBC's production
partner CBC. Hundreds of thousands of Doctor Who fans
downloaded the episode, wanting a preview of this new
version of the nearly-immortal Doctor. The BBC were publicly
outraged, but there's a strong sense that this act of piracy,

51
while not officially sanctioned, was unofficially encouraged by
BBC. It certainly created a groundswell of interest in the
series, allowing people to "try before they buy," and probably
increased program viewership. (The episode drew 10.81
million viewers to BBC1, which is among the highest ratings
Doctor Who has ever seen.)

Audiences are technically savvy these days; they can and will
find a way to get any television programming they desire.
They don't want to pay for it, they don't want it artificially
crippled with any digital rights management technologies -
they just want to watch it. Now. This is the way that half a
century of television and a decade of the Web has conditioned
them to behave. We can't really complain that audiences are
simply doing as they've been told. It is pointless to try to get
them to change their behavior, because, in essence, you're
fighting against the nature of television programming itself,
the behavioral narrative which grew out of our relationship to
the technology. We all understand that this piracy is
technically illegal, technically a violation of copyright; but
we're in a hell of a bind if we're telling the audience to "sit
down, shut up and do as you're told" when it comes to
television viewing. The audience won't do as they're told:
they'll do as they've been taught, and that is another story
entirely.

Still, piracy presents us with an economic problem: how do


producers get paid for the programs they create when
audiences disintermediate the distribution channels through
which producers get paid for their programming? The
economics of television production, as practiced for the last
fifty years, are very straightforward: producer (or perhaps the
producer's distributor) sells the program to a broadcaster.
Broadcaster sells commercials to advertisers. Everyone gets
what they want: the producer gets enough money to cover his
costs, the broadcaster gets money to cover his costs, the
advertiser gets some attention from the audience, and the
audience gets the program.

Widespread piracy of television programming has short-


circuited this process, connecting the producer directly to the
audience. As yet there are no viable economic models

52
connecting the television producer directly to the audience.
Industry pundits talk about audiovisual downloads through
some system like Apple's iTunes Music Store, and perhaps
we'll see something like this in the near future, but this works
against the simple fact that people do not expect to pay for
television programs. People will pay for movies, when they
choose to pay for movies, but they won't pay for television
programming. Not if they can get it for free. The audience is
not at all involved in the economic value chain of television
production; that's been the rule for a half-century. It's
reasonable to presume that any attempt to change the
economic behavior of the audience is doomed to failure.

Cable and satellite broadcasting presents something of an


argument against this assertion insofar as people do pay for
these services. But in these cases the audience is really
purchasing choice. (Los Angeles has at least 20 broadcasters,
and, despite this, has a thriving cable and satellite broadcast
market, because people want even more choice, and are
willing to pay for it.) Hyperdistribution has extended this
choice to anyone with an broadband connection extended it
well beyond any possible offering by any cable or satellite
broadcaster. Can these industries possibly compete against
the nearly infinite range of content offered on a broadband
connection?

Now we have a paradox: the invention of an incredibly


powerful mechanism for the global distribution of television
programming brings with it a fundamental challenge to the
business model which pays for the creation of the programs
themselves. This is not at all BitTorrent's fault: the technology
could have come along a decade ago, and if it had, we'd have
stumbled across this paradox in the 1990s. This is a failure of
the value chain to adapt to a changing technological
landscape a technological desynchronization between
producer and audience. Once again, there's no need to find
fault: things have changed so much, and so quickly, I doubt
that anyone could have kept up. But the future is now here,
and everyone in the creative value chain from producer to
audience must adapt to it.

This presentation outlines one economic model actually

53
more like a family of models which connects television
producers to their audiences through an hyperdistribution
strategy, one which doesn't require any change in the
audience's economic behavior. This, I believe, is the surest
path to success for any new economic model; without
audience acceptance, any model will inevitably fail, and while
this model is not guaranteed to be successful, it seems to face
fewer roadblocks to acceptance than other models which have
been proposed.

Television broadcasters owe their existence to the absence of


substantially effective competition. When you're dealing with
real-world materials that are in naturally short supply -
whether diamonds, oil, or broadcasting spectrum a cartel
can maintain and enforce its oligopoly. But when you're
working with media, which exist today as digital ephemera,
bits that can be copied and reproduced endlessly at nearly
zero cost, broadcast oligopolies are susceptible to a form of
"digital arbitrage," which can hollow-out their empires in an
afternoon. Hyperdistribution techniques are more efficient
than broadcast networks for television program distribution.

Now, before you presume that this is all so much future talk,
that maybe, someday, people will be downloading television
programs from the Internet, know this: that someday has
already come and gone. Per capita, Australians are the most
profligate downloaders of television programming in the
entire world, followed closely by the British. While the
Americans lag behind, they're still on the chart, in third place.
The sea change has already taken place - undoubtedly sped
along by the monopoly position of the commercial
broadcasters, who, in many cases, act as barriers rather than
conduits for television programs. If a commercial broadcaster
doesn't show a program, or delays it for years, that's no longer
of concern to television audiences: they'll just download it
from the Internet.

This trend is only going to accelerate with the uptake of


broadband throughout the world, progressively hollowing-out
the commercial broadcasters until they have returned to their
roots: television as a live medium. The only types of
programming unsuitable for hyperdistribution are those

54
which are broadcast live: news, event and interactive
programming, and sport. Since these are all widely popular,
it's not as though the commercial broadcasters will collapse.
But their business models will change, because their cash
cows are fleeing the paddock.

The pervasive culture of TV downloading leaves the producers


of pre-produced television programs high and dry, receiving
nothing of value for their work. But is this really true? The
absolute, basic motivation of a TV producer is not money
though money is needed for production but to gain and
hold an audience's attention. TV producers want their
programming to be watched as widely as possible by
everyone. That's what they care about, and that's all they care
about, because, with viewers, everything else takes care of
itself: audiences equal money.

This assertion seems so basic, so fundamentally essential to


the economics of television, that it's very hard to understand
why anyone (other than a broadcaster being cut out of the
value chain) would get upset about piracy of television
programming. The model as practiced at present can't
effectively leverage the economic benefits of
hyperdistribution, but that model was created before
hyperdistribution was technically possible. The age of
hyperdistribution demands the development of new economic
models which can harness piracy, for profit. So, let's move
directly to a discussion of one such model.

Consider Battlestar Galactica. A few weeks before the series


premiered on television, I sat down to watch the 13 episodes
of the first season, all of which I'd found on BitTorrent.
Somewhere around the second or third episode I became
briefly aware of the "bug," the smallish, semi-transparent
station ID which has become the constant on-screen
companion to all television broadcasts. I was looking at the
bug for SkyOne, the British satellite broadcaster, which
nestled comfortably in the upper left-hand corner of the
screen. I noted the bug, then proceeded to ignore it. But it
never went away. In episode after episode, the bug remained,
a tattoo commemorating the trip from broadcaster to
audience.

55
Somewhere around episode seven, it hit me like a ton of
bricks: I was looking at the most valuable and most
underutilized piece of real estate in the world. The bug carried
the station ID which is fine if I'm in the UK. But in
Australia SkyOne has no meaning at all. So that message,
which should be full of meaning full of "payload" has
been utterly misspent. It's as if they took the finest piece of
land in Sydney Harbour, say where the Opera House resides,
and decided to use it as depot for broken trains. That screen
real estate has real value, because it commands the audience's
attention, constantly if subconsciously.

What if, instead of carrying the broadcaster's station ID, the


bug contained an advertiser's payload? I decided I wanted to
see what that might look like, so I took an episode of
Desperate Housewives and ran a little test, using the logo of
one of Australia's best known retailers, Myer. I placed the
advertiser's bug in the lower left-hand corner. This is
probably sufficient for a well-known retailer like Myer (or
Macy's or Harrod's, etc.): it's simply enough to remind the
public that they exist - and that there's undoubtedly a sale on.

While I thought I was being truly innovative in my thinking, I


was wholly wrong. On a recent Friday evening I sat and
watched a rugby match: to my astonishment, I found that a
commercial broadcasters had already adopted this technique.
When the game went into an instant replay, the icon of an
Australian liquor distiller Bundaberg Rum did a little dance in
the upper left-hand corner of the screen. This means that the
technique is already in use, and advertisers understand its
value. That's a very important point: advertisers are ready
for this.

The earliest models of both commercial radio and television


developed around the idea of program sponsorship: one
sponsor per program. Over the 1950s (in the case of
television) this model evolved toward the 30-second
advertisement, which interrupted the broadcast. For the last
half-century that has proven to be an enduringly successful
economic model, but that model is now under threat from
Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), which allow a viewer to
fast-forward through all advertisements, often taking them in

56
30-second leaps, so the audience never sees so much as a
single image from an ad. PVRs, playing into the television-
taught behaviors of immediacy and convenience, have proven
immensely popular, and are not going away; instead, they will
become an integral and expected feature of the television
viewing experience. This means 30-second ads are not a part
of television's future. They're too easy to edit out of the
viewing experience.

The idea of an advertising payload attached unobtrusively to


the television program has a certain appeal; it can be ignored,
but it's always present. The audience can't edit it out of the
program without destroying the content of the program.
Audiences will learn accept them so long as the
advertisements aren't too busy, distracting, or otherwise
obnoxious. (Consequently, there will be a lot of work going on
in the next decade to determine just how obnoxious such an
ad can be before the audience objects to it.)

As the advertisement-as-interruption disappears, we will see


a series of advertisements perhaps running five minutes
apiece embedded into the programmme itself. This is easy
to achieve technically, and will be palatable to most major
advertisers. Since this evolution seems inevitable, another
question comes immediately to the fore: what's the role of the
broadcaster in this new economic value chain? Today the
broadcaster aggregates audiences, aggregates advertisers,
puts commercials into the program breaks, and makes a lot of
money doing this. But and here is the central point I'm
making today wouldn't it be economically more efficient for
the advertiser to work directly with the program's producer to
distribute television programming directly to the audience,
using hyperdistribution?

Let me run some numbers for you, based on another set of


back-of-the-envelope calculations: If we presume that the
advertiser is going to pay at least as much as the broadcaster
for hyperdistribution rights to a program, there's a large fixed
cost for the purchase of those rights. Further, there's another
fixed cost to maintain the internet servers which "seed" the
program's hyperdistribution - the internet equivalent of
broadcast transmitter operation costs. Add in a small amount

57
for the post-production costs incurred to affix the advertiser's
payload to the program, and we're done. Those are the
entirety of the costs.

The advertiser is looking to lower costs in advertising; if those


advertisers are paying between $250,000 and $500,000 for
thirty seconds of advertising (in the United States), just a
handful of advertisements would cover hyperdistribution
costs. It's a numbers game: if enough viewers watch a
hyperdistributed television program, it is cheaper for
advertisers to work with producers, and handle the
distribution themselves. Furthermore, if the program is
widely popular, it is far, far cheaper to do so. In other words,
the higher your ratings, the cheaper the advertising.
That's precisely the reverse of broadcast television, and one
big reason that advertisers will find this model so appealing.

Although no formal surveys have been conducted, it's


reasonable to assert that at least four percent of Australians,
two percent of Britons, and one percent of Americans are
already using broadband hyperdistribution to get some
percentage of their TV programs. Based on my own research,
I have found television downloading to be widespread among
men 18 to 25 years old, precisely the demographic most
coveted by advertisers. In other words, the prime audience is
already there, already waiting and already willing to receive.
All that remains is to put the components of this new value
chain into operation.

PART TWO: THE NEW LAWS OF TELEVISION

There are two principle components of the new value chain of


television hyperdistribution: the producer and the advertiser.
An advertising agency is likely acting as an intermediary
between these two, connecting producers to advertisers,
working out the demographic appeal of particular programs,
and selling ad payload into those programs; this is a role they
already fulfill - although at present they work with the
broadcast networks rather than the producers. There is no
role for a broadcaster in this value chain; the audience has
abandoned the broadcaster in favor of a direct relationship

58
with the program provider. That said, the broadcasters are
uniquely qualified to transform themselves into highly
specialized advertising agencies, connecting advertisers to
producers; this is something they already excel at.

This is clearly a viable economic model: the producer gets


paid at least as much for their programming as they would
have received from a broadcaster, and probably more; the
advertiser gets a cheaper ad buy; and the audience continues
to receive free television programs. This is a win-win-win
scenario, unless you're a broadcaster.

Although broadband uptake is ramping up rapidly throughout


the world, many areas have very limited broadband access,
and many other families can't afford the fifty dollars a month
for a broadband link suitable for television hyperdistribution.

Although broadband is still the exception in most households,


at least 70% of those households now have at least one DVD
player. DVD has rapidly supplanted VHS as the distribution
medium of choice for audiovisual content, and sales of DVDs
have passed twenty billion dollars a year. So, for the rest of
world, which doesn't yet have broadband, and who might
never want to futz with all these new technologies - could an
advertiser just send them a DVD in the mail?

This may sound ridiculous on the face of it, but can we make
the math work? Can we get to cost-equivalence for DVD
distribution of television programs? Let's run the numbers
again: if you really compress a TV signal, you can fit about 3
hours of video programming onto a standard dual-layer DVD.
Because the ad breaks have been removed from the programs,
that 3 hours is actually the equivalent of four hours of
television programming - which is a fair helping of prime-
time television. If I wanted to send this directly to millions of
the households, it would cost no more than perhaps fifty cents
per DVD. It's going to cost an advertiser about the same as ad
buys in a television broadcast, but consider: this is no longer
television by appointment. That DVD can be watched
anytime, by anyone, anywhere there's a DVD player. These
DVDs will have "handoff rates" close to those of magazines.

59
They'll have long shelf lives. This model would probably be
very successful.

If it seems ridiculous to consider sending a DVD to the


majority of households in the English-speaking world, I have
to tell you a story from my own experience in the United
States. During the 1990s, AOL grew from a tiny company to a
giant which would later swallow TimeWarner. A few times a
year I'd receive an AOL mailing: in the mid-90s, these
mailings would have a floppy disk in them, preloaded with the
AOL software. By the late 1990s, those mailings would be CDs
of AOL software. And these weren't targeted mailings - these
were mass mailings, reaching most of the hundred million US
households, at least twice a year. It got so bad that friends of
mine made objects d'art from AOL floppies - and plenty of
folks used their CDs as coasters.

Retailers mail circulars to their customers, or put them into


newspapers; why not put a week's television programs into
the weekend edition of the New York Times or the Sydney
Morning Herald? (The Herald distributes the Sydney
Tropfest DVD every year - this is no different.) These novel
partnerships would bring the distribution costs way down,
and have the added side-effect of raising newspaper
readership. (Consider News Corporation, which owns
newspapers and a television network. There are opportunities
for real "media synergies" here.) There are any number of
ways to make the economics of television distribution by DVD
work. I believe that the first producer/advertisers to do so will
open a door to a new form of distribution - television by mail,
and television by newspaper.

What I've described so far sounds promising. But let's face it,
there are going to be strong arguments against the
widespread adoption of the hyperdistribution models I've just
described - it's just that many of these arguments won't be
based in economics. The first of these arguments will
undoubtedly be inertia: everyone is making money, so no one
will want to change. Producers will continue to sell their
programs to broadcasters, and broadcasters will continue to
sell ads to advertisers. It has ever been thus, it will ever be
thus. While this argument is appealing, it assumes that the

60
present, and worse, the future, looks anything like the past. It
ignores the fact that because of hyperdistribution, the
audience is already in control of distribution. The
producer has lost control over where, when and by whom
productions are viewed. The producer may fret and file
lawsuits and lobby to change the laws regarding the copying
and distribution of television programs, but these have little
overall effect - though it will anger the audience. Consider
that, despite the famed Betamax decision of 1984, it is still
just as illegal to time-shift a broadcast television program in
2005 as it was in 1979. Yet no home viewer has ever been
prosecuted for it. Why? Because you don't sue your audience.
(Just ask Metallica how well that worked out.)

The producer has a better chance to reach an audience than


ever before, but has no control over how productions reach
that audience. If control over distribution could be
maintained, if the oligarchy of commercial television
broadcasting could consolidate its hold on program
distribution, none of this would need to change. But it has
already begun to change; the horse has already fled the barn.

The audience is asserting their control over television


programming; this is actually a good thing, because the
moments for television viewing are expanding in direct
proportion to the exercise of this new power. Until very
recently, television was an experience which was confined to
the lounge room, shackled to a big, heavy box. But now we
can watch full-length television programs on our mobile
phones (a new capability of the latest generation of mobiles),
or on the Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP), a high-resolution,
widescreen, portable game and media machine, two of the
new "must have" items for the younger set. Audiences are
growing fond of the idea of on-demand TV, available
wherever they are, whenever they want to watch it. Television
viewing has become a multitasking activity; you might watch
a short program - something like the 11-minute "Adult Swim"
episodes pioneered on the Cartoon Network, or the 3-minute
"mobisodes" being rolled out by various wireless carriers. You
can dip in, watch something, then go on to something else.
Television viewing is no longer wholly consuming; but it is
also becoming more pervasive. Freed from the tyranny of the

61
box, people will be watching more TV, and more different
kinds of TV, than ever before.

Now for the economic objections. Television producers only


make real money when their programs go into syndication -
generally when a series reaches 100 episodes. Broadcast
networks in the US are notoriously cheap - they'll cover some
of the production costs for a CSI, but the rest is the producer's
gamble. Fortunately, producers have begun to realize huge
revenues selling DVDs of their most popular television series.
NEWS Corporation, for example, earned unexpected record
profits in Q4 2003, based on the sales of DVD sets of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files.

Hyperdistribution will undermine the market for syndication


and DVD distribution of television programming, so
producers will be understandably reluctant to hyperdistribute
their works. On the other hand, the direct relationship
between the producer and the advertiser should mean that
more money goes into the producer's pocket than ever before.
With the disintermediation of the broadcast networks,
advertisers will pay less, but producers will get paid more.
Television production may not have the jackpot of
syndication, but it should become a more profitable business
overall.

Furthermore, people have been taping their favorite series for


years, and that hasn't undercut DVD sales. People buy a DVD
because it's packaged in a neat box, with special features,
commentary tracks, and the kind of paraphernalia that a fan
wants to invest themselves in. Owning a DVD is about more
than simply having a copy of the program; it's a badge of
membership in a community of fans. The core audience for a
DVD of a television series will buy it, even when it is freely
available through other means. And while DVD sales will
certainly slow in the age of hyperdistribution - and
syndication will likely disappear - that's lamentable, but
unavoidable. Hyperdistribution isn't going away. DVD may
have been no more than a brief, happy moment in the
distribution of television, after TV went digital, but before
those bits found their way onto the Internet. No one can
reasonably expect those kinds of revenues will last forever.

62
Another, more important economic question arises: if
broadcast television is abandoned as the distribution outlet
for television programs, how will audiences know what to
watch? It's believed that without the endless promotion that
accompanies any television broadcast, the audience will
simply evaporate. That's true insofar as the audience won't
know what television programs to watch if they aren't
advertised. But given that the audience is already being
presented with a nearly infinite number of choices, that's a
problem which producers will be facing whether or not they
remain with the broadcasters. Even if a producer resists going
into hyperdistribution, there are already many programs in
hyperdistribution, and this number is rapidly increasing as
Google, Yahoo! and others enter this field. Avoiding the
paradox of hyperdistribution is not an option.

The only long-term solution to this problem lies in actively


encouraging fan communities - social networks which spread
the word about the show. That's certainly been a successful
strategy for Battlestar Galactica: the SciFi Channel has been
providing episode "podcasts" on their website - audio
commentary by series creator and executive producer Ron
Moore. Fans can download these podcasts and play them in
conjunction with the program. (Interestingly, the podcasts are
recorded as if the commercials have been removed from the
broadcast - making them suitable as DVD commentary tracks,
but also ideal for the edited versions that viewers have been
downloading.) Fans want to be involved, they want to be
enthusiastic. Fans want to make converts, encouraging their
own circles of friends to watch the show. Podcasts are the
perfect spoils for such folks.

Let me give you a personal example: my friends in Australia


have formed a small cult of hard-core fans of a new Cartoon
Network (USA) series, Robot Chicken. Robot Chicken isn't yet
available in Australia - and may never be. A few months ago I
read about Robot Chicken in a New York Times article, which
I forwarded around; another friend downloaded the first
episode using BitTorrent. That episode was funny enough to
keep us hungry for more. So now, nine episodes into the
series, we're all up-to-date on Robot Chicken, half a world
away from its broadcast territory. I've told my friends. They've

63
told their friends. And on and on and on. It doesn't require a
broadcaster; it doesn't require advertising dollars. All it takes
is a solid program and hyperdistribution. The audience takes
care of the rest.

And so we come to the final objection, which is both economic


and sociological: it's too hard for the average viewer to
download hyperdistributed television programs. It is true
that, as of this writing, the technologies used to locate and
retrieve hyperdistributed programs aren't really designed
with the average computer user in mind; they require some
setup, and their interfaces are less than friendly. But even
these crude interfaces have been enough to jump start
Australia into first place globally in television program
downloading. The situation is a lot like digital music, before
the advent of iTunes; when Apple married digital music to an
impeccable user interface, they touched off a revolution which
gave them 70% market share in online music purchases, and a
monopoly position in digital music players. But back in 2000,
in the months before iTunes, people were making the same
objections about downloaded music they make today about
hyperdistributed television programs.

It's as simple as this: we're in an interregnum, that brief


period of time before some bright young hacker or some
clever company solves this problem definitively. When that
happens, when the rest of us can download television
programs quickly and easily, it'll seem like a bomb went off -
broadband use will soar, people will desert the broadcast
networks, and the only producers to survive this transition
will be those who harnessed the strength a new value chain,
where piracy truly is good.

There's no doubt that the broadcast networks will do what


they can to slow the transition to this model, because they'll
lose billions of dollars. But here's another paradox: they more
they try to slow it down, the more they'll anger their
audiences, and drive them to hyperdistribution. For the
broadcast networks it's a lose-lose situation; all they can do is
transition as quickly as possible to a live-interactive
broadcasting model, and work to transform themselves into
advertising agencies connecting producers and advertisers.

64
Their future looks nothing like their recent past.

So, how do we jump start this? Which producer and which


advertiser are willing to risk their livelihood on an unproven
economic proposition? It'll likely be a fledgling producer with
a hot property and nothing to lose, paired with an advertiser
who thrives on being there first - perhaps BMW, perhaps
Nike, perhaps a brand we've never heard of. Once the model
proves successful, there'll be a groundswell, as the economics
behind television production realign to accommodate
hyperdistribution. And that time can't be more than months
away.

Meanwhile, coming up from behind, beneath, and all around,


the two giants of the Internet, Google and Yahoo, are laying
the groundwork for hyperdistribution networks of their own.
Already, you can upload your own content to Google Video,
and very soon they'll make that video available to everyone
else. Broadcasting is facing a threat that's not economic - it's
attention-based. Those giant networks are providing a media
experience which is personal and immediate, something a
broadcaster can never offer. They'll change the face of
television as well - and that's something which will be fully
explored in hyperpeople.

The new laws of television production and distribution


emerge from an understanding that the audience is in control
of distribution, and that this is not a situation to be feared,
but to be embraced wholeheartedly.

Rule One: Create Globally, Distribute Globally

An independent television producer can now reach the same


global audience as any of the big studios. Distribution is no
longer the barrier it once was; you don't have to get
yourselves "over the hump" and into global distribution. All
programs are now, at least potentially, globally
hyperdistributed. This means that your content probably
shouldn't be too localized. Productions need to be written
with an eye toward the more than four hundred million
English speakers in the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, and

65
Australia. If you can produce regional content that does well
internationally, good on you. But don't plan on it. Work with
universal themes, and universal stories - they'll give your
productions legs to travel the world.

Because you have no choice but to release your productions to


the world, you will need to develop a strategy to work with
advertisers from across all the territories across the English-
speaking world. That's certainly more work - and a burden
which was previously shouldered by the distributor - but it's
also an enormous opportunity. If you have a solid production,
you'll be well rewarded for your efforts.

Rule Two: Shorter is Better. Funnier is Better.

The television moment is becoming more pervasive, as


television spreads into mobiles and laptops and game
machines. This is creating an enormous demand for
programming well-suited to these devices and the situations
where they're commonly used. This is the archetypal example
of someone waiting for a bus or train, or having a few spare
minutes at lunch. This audience often doesn't have the time to
watch a 22-minute or 44-minute program; they have a few
minutes to spare, and want to be taken out of the moment.
This market generally favors comedy - such as Cartoon
Network's "Adult Swim" episodes, which run for 11 minutes,
or even shorter pieces, such as "Happy Tree Friends," or
JibJab's "This Land" (which had over 70,000,000 downloads
in one week). It seems that the shorter and funnier the piece,
the further it is likely to travel. That said, this doesn't mean
that television is about to devolve into slapstick. Robot
Chicken, for example, is often highly intelligent, with jokes
that work on several levels simultaneously, including satire,
parody, and slapstick.

If you do have a desire to create drama, consider how to


deliver it in small doses that leave the viewer wanting more.
This tends to favor melodrama over drama; we're already
seeing an explosion of short-form soap operas, a renaissance
of telenovelas. If you have a grand design for an epic, consider
how to deliver it in little, self-contained nuggets of

66
entertainment. Study the audience; don't try to force your
own dramatic ideas on an audience which doesn't have the
time or attention to invest in them.

Rule Three: It Won't Happen Overnight

Although we are already into the era of the hyperdistribution


of television programming, don't expect the broadcasters and
their lucrative models of television distribution to disappear
overnight. The bulk of this transformation in distribution will
happen slowly, over the next five years. That's actually a good
thing, because it gives you time to experiment, to learn what
does and does not work. It gives you time to hone your skills.
This is a new world for television, and a level playing field for
producers. With the barriers to distribution gone as the
audience takes control, you have as good a chance as
Brillstein-Grey or Southern Star to create a series of hit
programs. But how do you keep those hits coming? At every
step along the way, with every production you create, look to
building a brand identity. In a world where there are no more
broadcasters, where audiences are getting their programming
by any means necessary, brand identity will be the one way
that audiences will separate the good from the bad. Having
just one well-branded hit may be all you need to set you on
your way to a very successful and lucrative career in television
production.

Rule Four: Do It Or Die

If you ignore the coming era of hyperdistribution, we can


write you off right now. You're in the same boat as a producer
of radio plays in the 1950s; the most successful of those
individuals established careers in television, but others ended
up bitter and unemployed. We have to deal with the world as
it is, not as we'd like it to be. The clock can't be turned back on
BitTorrent. In the new, "flat world," where any program
produced anywhere in the world is immediately available
everywhere in the world, the only sustainable edge comes
from entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet broadcast
television has become a self-contained world, inside a comfy
plastic bubble, breathing its own air, which - after half a

67
century - has gone noticeably stale. It's ready to be shaken up.

The future belongs to the fast, cheap and out-of-control.


Cheap productions will more easily find the advertising
partners they need for hyperdistribution; costly productions
will find themselves competing against so many cheap
productions that they'll find it progressively harder to justify
their costs in the face of ever-smaller ratings. The audiences
of the future will only very rarely number in the millions. The
"microaudiences" of hyperdistribution will range from
hundreds to hundreds of thousands, but in that "long tail" of
television productions there is a vast appetite for an
incredible variety of programs. This is no longer an era of
mass media and mass audiences: the dinosaurs of media are
about to give way to the mammals.

I want to close with a story I read a few years ago, about the
beginning of Michael Eisner's era at Disney. He had his right-
hand man down in the vaults, surveying the crown jewels -
fifty years of classic films like "Snow White", "Pinocchio",
"Bambi", and "Fantasia". Every few minutes Eisner would get
a call and hear, "I just found another hundred million
dollars." Disney holds some of the most valuable screen
properties in history; Eisner's genius lay in developing an
economic value chain which could leverage their true value.

The transformation of Disney from a failing motion picture


studio, mired in obsolete economic practices, into a massively
profitable, vertically-integrated media megacorporation is a
case study of how a transformation in distribution can
breathe life into an entire industry. The renaissance of Disney
owed more to the emergence of VHS distribution than any
financial magic cast by Eisner. Yet VHS was decried as the
"Boston Strangler" by Jack Valenti in the years before it
became Disney's ace in the hole. Once an economic model
harnessed the power of VHS distribution to the studios'
advantage, all talk of piracy ceased. Profits went up. Everyone
got what they wanted.

Thirty years later, we're at the edge of another transformation


in distribution. The forces that cry "Piracy!" today will be

68
congratulating themselves on their "sound business practices"
tomorrow. There's money to be made; there is a viable
economic model. All we need do is connect the wires, and
watch the sparks fly.

69
Unevenly Distributed:
Production Models for the 21st Century

I. The Wheels Fall Off the Cart

In mid-1994, sometime shortly after Tony Parisi and I had


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

This was in the days before broadband, so downloading a


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

70
delivery MP3s, and several hundred million devices which can
play them. IUMA was a good idea, but five years too early.

Just forty-eight hours ago, a new music service, calling itself


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

Most of the words that I used to describe Qtrax in the


preceding paragraph didnt exist in common usage when
IUMA disappeared from the scene in the first year of this
millennium. The years between IUMA and Qtrax are a
geological age in Internet time, so its a good idea to walk back
through that era and have a good look at the fossils which
speak to how we evolved to where we are today.

In 1999, a curly-haired undergraduate at Bostons


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

This second point is the one which has the most relevance to
my talk this morning; Napster had an entirely unpredicted
effect on the distribution methodologies which had been the
bedrock of the recording industry for the past hundred years.
The music industry grew up around the licensing, distribution
and sale of a physical medium a piano roll, a wax recording,
a vinyl disk, a digital compact disc. However, when the
recording industry made the transition to CDs in the 1980s

71
(and reaped windfall profits as the public purchased new
copies of older recordings) they also signed their own death
warrants. Digital recordings are entirely ephemeral,
composed only of mathematics, not of matter. Any system
which transmitted the mathematics would suffice for the
distribution of music, and the compact disc met this need
only until computers were powerful enough to play the more
compact MP3 format, and broadband connections were fast
enough to allow these smaller files to be transmitted quickly.
Napster leveraged both of these criteria the mathematical
nature of digitally-encoded music and the prevalence of
broadband connections on Americas college campuses to
produce a sensation.

In its earliest days, Napster reflected the tastes of its college-


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

Given that all of this file-sharing, as it was termed,


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

Heres where it gets more interesting: the recording industry


thought theyd brought the horse back into the barn. What
they hadnt realized was that the gate had burnt down. The

72
millions of Napster users had their appetites whet by a world
where an incredible variety of music was instantaneously
available with few clicks of the mouse. In the absence of
Napster, that pressure remained, and it only took a few weeks
for a few enterprising engineers to create a successor to
Napster, known as Gnutella, which provided the same service
as Napster, but used a profoundly different technology for its
filesharing. Where Napster had all of its users register their
tracks within a centralized database (which disappeared when
Napster was shut down) Gnutella created a vast, amorphous,
distributed database, spread out across all of the computers
running Guntella. Gnutella had no center to strike at, and
therefore could not be shut down.

It is because of the actions of the recording industry that


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

Once Gnutella and its descendants Kazaa, Limewire, and


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

At first, it seemed that filmic media would be immune from


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

73
BitTorrent is a bit mysterious to most everyone not deeply
involved in technology, so a brief of explanation will help to
explain its inner workings. Suppose, for a moment, that I
have a short film, just 1000 frames in length, digitally
encoded on my hard drive. If I wanted to share this film with
each of you via Gnutella, youd have to wait in a queue as I
served up the film, time and time again, to each of you. The
last person in the queue would wait quite a long time. But if,
instead, I gave the first ten frames of the film to the first
person in the queue, and the second ten frames to the second
person in the queue, and the third ten frames to the third
person in the queue, and so on, until Id handed out all
thousand frames, all I need do at that point is tell each of you
that each of your peers has the missing frames, and that you
needed to get them from those peers. A flurry of transfers
would result, as each peer picked up the pieces it needed to
make a complete whole from other peers. From my point of
view, I only had to transmit the film once something I can
do relatively quickly. From your point of view, none of you
had to queue to get the film because the pieces were
scattered widely around, in little puzzle pieces, that you could
gather together on your own.

Thats how BitTorrent works. It is both incredibly efficient


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

It is estimated that upwards of 60% of all traffic on the


Internet is composed of BitTorrent transfers. Much of this
traffic is perfectly legitimate software, such as the free
Linux operating system, is distributed using BitTorrent. Still,
it is well known that movies and television programmes are

74
also distributed using BitTorrent, in violation of copyright.
This became absolutely clear on the 14th of October 2003,
when Sky Broadcasting in the UK premiered the first episode
of Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moores dark re-imagining of the
famous shlocky 1970s TV series. Because the American
distributor, SciFi Channel, had chosen to hold off until
January to broadcast the series, fans in the UK recorded the
programmes and posted them to BitTorrent for American
fans to download. Hundreds of thousands of copies of the
episodes circulated in the United States and conventional
thinking would reckon that this would seriously impact the
ratings of the show upon its US premiere. In fact, precisely
the opposite happened: the show was so well written and
produced that the word-of-mouth engendered by all this mass
piracy created an enormous broadcast audience for the series,
making it the most successful in SciFi Channel history.

In the age of BitTorrent, piracy is not necessarily a menace.


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

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

75
professionals from amateurs.

II. The Barbarian Hordes Storm the Walls

Without any doubt the most outstanding success of the


second phase of the Web (known colloquially as Web 2.0) is
the video-sharing site YouTube. Founded in early 2005, as of
yesterday YouTube was the third most visited site on the
entire Web, led only by Yahoo! and YouTubes parent, Google.
There are a lot of videos on YouTube. Im not sure if anyone
knows quite how many, but they easily number in the tens of
millions, quite likely approaching a hundred million. Another
hundred thousand videos are uploaded each day; YouTube
grows by three million videos a month. Thats a lot of video,
difficult even to contemplate. But an understanding of
YouTube is essential for anyone in the film and television
industries in the 21st century, because, in the most pure,
absolute sense, YouTube is your competitor.

Let me unroll that statement a bit, because I dont wish it to


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

This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until


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

76
In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely
overtaken us, lets consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old
boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting
his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM,
surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably
taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a
television, somewhere in the background, or it might be
coming from the Web browser right in front of him.
(Actually, its probably both simultaneously.) This teenager
has a limited suite of selections available on the telly even
with satellite or cable, there wont be more than a few
hundred choices on offer, and hes probably settled for
something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good
enough to play in the background.

Meanwhile, on his laptop, hes viewing a whole series of


YouTube videos that hes received from his friends; theyve
found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately
forwarded them along, knowing that hell enjoy them. He
views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other
friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other
friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the
media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it
cant be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it
cant be forwarded along, its broken.

For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network


no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as
theyre broadcast through the airwaves, but more likely
theyre spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded
from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses.
The broadcast network has been replaced by the social
network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the
newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item
might be something that was created at great expense for a
mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of
media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely
coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster
some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire
that fifteen year old to forward something along because his
social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along
something lame, hell lose social standing with his peers. This
factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of

77
runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch.
Because of the hyperabundance of media something he
takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development all
of his media decisions are weighed against the values and
tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of
choices.

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

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

When the barriers to media distribution collapsed in the post-


Napster era, the exhibitors and broadcasters lost control of
distribution. What no one had expected was that the

78
professional producers would lose control of production. The
difference between an amateur and a professional in the
media industries has always centered on the point that the
professional sells their work into distribution, while the
amateur uses wits and will to self-distribute. Now that self-
distribution is more effective than professional distribution,
how do we distinguish between the professional and the
amateur? This twenty year-old doesnt know, and doesnt
care.

There is no conceivable way that the current systems of film


and television production and distribution can survive in this
environment. This is an uncomfortable truth, but it is the
only truth on offer this morning. Ive come to this conclusion
slowly, because it seems to spell the death of a hundred year-
old industry with many, many creative professionals. In this
environment, television is already rediscovering its roots as a
live medium, increasingly focusing on news, sport and event
based programming, such as Pop Idol, where being there live
is the essence of the experience. Broadcasting is uniquely
designed to support the efficient distribution of live
programming. Hollywood will continue to churn out
blockbuster after blockbuster, seeking a warmed-over middle
ground of thrills and chills which ensures that global receipts
will cover the ever-increasing production costs. In this form,
both industries will continue for some years to come, and will
probably continue to generate nice profits. But the audiences
attentions have turned elsewhere. Theyre not returning.

This future almost completely excludes independent


production, a vague term which basically means any
production which takes place outside of the media
megacorporations (News Corp, Disney, Sony, Universal and
TimeWarner), which increasingly dominate the mass media
landscape. Outside of their corporate embrace, finding an
audience sufficient to cover production and marketing costs
has become increasingly difficult. Film and television have
long been losing economic propositions (except for the most
lucky), but theyre now becoming financially suicidal.
National and regional funding bodies are growing
increasingly intolerant of funding productions which can not
find an audience; soon enough that pipeline will be cut off,
despite the damage to national cultures. Australia funds the
Film Finance Corporation and the Australian Film Council to

79
the tune of a hundred million dollars a year, to ensure that
Australian stories are told by Australian voices; but
Australians dont go to see them in the theatres, and dont buy
them on DVD.

The center can not hold. Instead, YouTube, which founder


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

What then, is to be done?

III. And The Penny Drops

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

This means that the one-size-fits-all production-to-


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

In early 2005, producer Ronda Byrne got a production

80
agreement with Channel NINE, then the number one
Australian television network, to make a feature-length
television programme about the law of attraction, an idea
shed learned of when reading a book published in 1910, The
Science of Getting Rich. The interviews and other footage
were shot in July and August, and after a few months in the
editing suite, she showed the finished production to
executives at Channel NINE, who declined to broadcast it,
believing it lacked mass appeal. Since Byrne wasnt going to
be getting broadcast fees from Channel NINE to cover her
production costs, she negotiated a new deal with NINE,
allowing her to sell DVDs of the completed film.

At this point Byrne began spreading news of the film virally,


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

Chagrined, the television executives of Channel NINE finally


did broadcast The Secret in February 2007. It didnt do that
well. This sums up the paradox distribution in the age of the
microaudience. Clearly The Secret had a massive world-wide
audience, but television wasnt the most effective way to reach
them, because this audience was actually a collection of
microaudiences, rather than a single, aggregated audience. If
The Secret had opened theatrically, its unlikely it would have
done terribly well; its the kind of film that people want to
watch more than once, being in equal parts a self-help
handbook and a series of inspirational stories. It is well-
suited for a direct-to-DVD release a distribution vehicle that
no longer has the stigma of failure associated with it. It is

81
also well-suited to cross-media projects, such as books,
conferences, streamed delivery, podcasts, and so forth.
Having found her audience, Byrne has transformed The
Secret into an exceptional money-making franchise, as
lucrative, in its own way, and at its own scale, as any
Hollywood franchise.

The second example is utterly different from The Secret, yet


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

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

82
that the coffers of the League of Peers will provide them with
enough funds to embark on their next film, The Oil of the 21st
Century, which will focus on the evolution of intellectual
property into a traded commodity.

I have asked Screen Training Ireland to include a DVD of


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

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

What about drama, comedy and animation? Short-form


comedy and animation probably have the easiest go of it,

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

None of this guarantees success, but it is the way things work


for independent productions in the 21st-century. All of this is
new territory. It isnt a role that belongs neatly to the
producer of the film, nor, in the absence of studio muscle, is it
something that a film distributor would be competent at. This
may not be the producers job. But it is someones job.
Someone has to do it. Starting at the earliest stages of pre-
production, someone has to sit down with the creatives and
the producer and ask the hard questions: Who is this film
intended for? What audiences will want to see this film or
see it more than once? How do we reach these audiences?
From these first questions, it should be possible to construct a
marketing campaign which leverages microaudiences and
social networks into ticket receipts and DVD sales and online
purchases.

So, as you sit down to do your planning today, and discuss


how to move Irish screen industries into the 21st century, ask
yourselves who will be fulfilling this role. The producer is
already overloaded, time-poor, and may not be particularly
good at marketing. The director has a vision, but might be
practically autistic when it comes to working with

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communities. This is a new role, one that is utterly vital to the
success of the production, but one which is not yet budgeted
for, and one which we do not yet train people to fill.
Individuals have succeeded in this new model through their
own tireless efforts, but each of these have been scattershot;
there is a way to systematize this. While every production and
every marketing plan will be unique drawn from the
fundamentals of the story being told there are
commonalities across productions which people will be able
to absorb and apply, production after production.

One of my favorite quotes from science fiction writer William


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

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BUSINESS

86
Calculated Risks
Part One: 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 didnt write down because it isnt 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 thats what humans
do. It sounds perfectly ordinary because it comes so
naturally: in fact, its quite profound. From the moment were
born, we work to embed ourselves within a deep, strong and
complex web of social relationships.

This isnt 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 wasnt 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

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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: theres
a direct correlation between the amount of grey matter in our
prefrontal cortex and the number of individuals we can
maintain connections with. Anthropologist Robyn Dunbar
came up with a figure of 147, plus or minus a few. Thats 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 cant know all of its members, its time to divide.

Weve grown used to being surrounded by people we have no


connection with. Thats what cities are all about. Weve been
building them for close to ten thousand years, and in that
time weve learned how to live with those we dont know. Its
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. Were 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

88
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 Ive explained,
social networks are actually older than our species. Stuffing
them into a computer doesnt 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 todays talk, lets use this child
(well 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, theyre 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. Whats 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

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years. But theres 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. Shell 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. A few 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, dont
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 thats 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
shes 25, shell 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 shes doing; shell 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

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task that well be mastering over the next decade. Right now,
were not very good at it. By the time shes 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 theres 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: its
brand new. But already were beginning to see that this is a
real revolution. In the social sphere, nothing will look like the
past.

Part Two: 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 Id 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.
Itll 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: Theres a reason theyre 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,

91
talked one down to a very good price, and made the purchase.
Crisis resolved.

Lets 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, thats 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 itd 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.
Were 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

92
Ive 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. Were not used to thinking in
such terms. But just twenty years ago we werent 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 thats an accepted part of our
reality. Wed 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 were 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 isnt charming, and it certainly isnt 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, Ive 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 Ive checked in, I can then make a recommendation a
tip in Foursquare lingo and share something Ive 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 Ive
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

93
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 Id 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 weve seen. Theres 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 movies
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

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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
hadnt 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 youre
well-connected, everything is essentially public. Theres 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
Devines comments from Sunday). We live within a social
amplifier, and its 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,

95
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. Its 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 dont know where we are going.
Were 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. Were lifting
off and gaining speed. Whether were 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.

Part Three: 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, youve 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 didnt know this probably wouldnt have
understood it and failed to manage the relationship when

96
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 werent plugged into what my friend was saying to
thousands of her followers. They didnt consider her worth
listening to. Theres 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 someones 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 isnt a difficult policy to implement, but the


responsibility for listening doesnt lie with a single individual
or department within your organization. Responsibility is
spread throughout the organization; thats 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 dont, those customers
will use their amplified capabilities to make your life a living
hell.

Employees within your organizations dont 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 dont know the right way to do things.
Dont blame them for this. Its all very new, and there hasnt
been a lot of guidance.

97
If you walk out of todays 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 weeks 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.

Telstras 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
couldnt, because Nassar had violated no stated policy or
conditions of employment. Shortly after that, Telstra

98
developed and promulgated its social media guidelines.
Learn from Telstras mistake. This same sort of PR and
political catastrophe neednt 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
dont 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
weve 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.

99
100
TECHNOLOGY

101
The Telephone Repair Handbook
with Angus Fraser

Mister Watson! Come here! I want you!

Prologue: Dreading the Call

A few weeks ago, just before ABC turned on the cameras to


tape the seasons final episode of THE NEW INVENTORS, the
shows host, James OLaughlin, put me on the spot. Since I
am described as a futurist when I am introduced as a panelist,
James asked me (horror of horrors) for a prediction.

Alright, I said, thinking furiously, and aiming a furrowed


brow at the studio audience, In five years time youll be
using your mobile phones ten times as much as you do today.

The audience burst into a great, wearied groan. Not a gasp of


disbelief, nor the laughter of dismissal, but the pained sigh of
resignation. The audience instinctively recognized the
inevitability of my prediction, and dreaded it. Why such
dread? With telephony, human communication has grown
from a phenomenon constrained by shouting distance to
something which allows us to enjoy never-ending
conversations with our friends around the world at nearly no
cost. We enjoy talking on the phone; we collectively share a
uniquely human pleasure in communication for its own sake.
Yet the thought of spending more time doing more
communicating struck that audience, at that moment, as
something to be avoided. That moment set us on course to
this paper.

The disconnect between the joy of communication and the


Procrustean Bed of our telecommunications technologies
deserves our full attention. We spend a lot of time developing
new telecommunications technologies without considering
about how they might fit their users, or, as Marshal McLuhan
would put it, shape the users to fit the technology 1. Every
communication technique limits the kinds of messages which
can be sent across it, and additionally limits how both sender
and receiver frame these messages cognitively, emotionally,
and socially.

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It is our assertion that the telephone as it exists at present is
largely a set of vestigial organs, poorly suited to its actual task,
and that the resentment engendered by the device is an
inevitable by-product of a continuing series of unsatisfactory
interactions with it. Such a conclusion immediately casts into
doubt the entire recent history of the design of the telephone,
which has been rife with invention, yet has never been quite
successful, because none of these designs have ever been
driven by the mass of individuals who use the phone.

We also assert that the essential design principles which must


be embodied in the telephone can only be discerned, not
invented. The telephone is not a style, nor a fashion, but,
rather, is something closer to a human language, in that it
requires immersion within that language to acquire mastery
of it. We assert the necessity of observation before action.
We must watch how people communicate before we can
understand what their communication needs are; only from
this observation can we draw any reasonable conclusions.
Fifteen years ago, this would have been a very simple affair, as
telephone calls were two-way conversations.

Today, all human communication is threaded, multi-


participatory, multimodal, asynchronous, proximally
indistinct, ubiquitous, continuous, and entirely pervasive.
Given this enormous change in the ground conditions, it
seems perfectly sensible that we should rethink the basic
instrument of electronic communication.

As the most concrete and pervasive manifestation of


cyberspace, the mobile telephone establishes new cultural
patterns of behavior. If, through observation, we can learn
the form of these new patterns, we could design a device
which plays into and amplifies them. Instead of the street
finds its own use for things,2 we could opt for a
comprehensive design science revolution,3 transforming the
mobile telephone into a cultural probe, amplifier, and filter.

The question before us is whether we as designers,


engineers, academics and media theorists secretly dread the
call of the future, or whether we will approach this moment as
an opportunity for play. In free play, results are unimportant;

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the performance is all. Therefore, we need have no goal
beyond having a good time. Playing with mobile telephones is
like playing with words, because the medium which transmits
those words leaves its indelible mark on the message. Since
words shape the world4, transforming the mobile telephone is
inherently a revolutionary act.

We therefore propose revolution. But revolution without


revelation is slavery.5 Hence we must seek enlightenment in
the wisdom of crowds,6 for the mobile telephone is the
medium of the crowd in its technologically-mediated
incarnation, the swarm7. Studying the mobile telephone in
situ is the only way toward any understanding of its actual
role in human communication. We must draw our lessons
from what we can observe in the behavior of swarms.

One: Emergent Social Networks

We take it as a given that nearly everyone living in the


Western world has access to and enjoys the benefits of
globally pervasive, continuous and ubiquitous data network.
The main access points into this network are desktop
computers and laptops at least, that is the popular
perception. However, there are at least half again as many
mobile handsets in the world as internet-accessible
computers. The vast majority of these handsets can easily
make connections to the Internet. But these devices are not
thought of as Internet attached; and this is the first of the
telephone repairs which must be performed.

Upon connection to the Internet, each individual passes


through a series of evolutionary stages as the technology of
pervasive, instantaneous communication becomes
ontologically incorporated, forming one component of the
individuals relationship to the world of being. These stages
appear to be replicated, in a scale-invariant way, both within
the individual and across the swarm of internet users as a
whole. For this reason, the history of the human use of the
internet is reflected in patterns of individual use; the
individual follows the patterns established by the swarm. To
adopt a maxim from biology, phylogeny recapitulates
ontogeny.8

Stage one is the age of discovery, where the user simply clicks

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into oblivion with an endless dromomania9, never resting,
never ceasing, but always moving on, and on and on. The
behavior here is analogous to a kid in a candy store, or a yeast
cell in a bath of nutrients; both will eat themselves sick. The
user is excited and empowered, and thinks only of quantity,
not quality. Yet this constant feeding, this restlessness, does
not satisfy; once the user is convinced that this wealth will not
simply vanish, a locus of reflective behavior emerges, and
stage two, the age of discrimination, begins.

Where there is enough and more, strategies shift from simple


acquisition to meeting the needs of the moment in the most
effective way. Thus did the NCSA/CERN exhaustive list of
web sites evolve into Yahoo!s categories, only to be
supplanted by Alta Vistas free-text search, which in turn was
replaced by Googles Page Rank. Each of these represent a
refinement of the strategies which preceded them, and, in
good evolutionary fashion, each replaced its predecessors
through the natural selection pressure of the swarm10. This
natural selection pressure is itself scale-invariant; the same
pressures at work within the individual are also exhibited by
the swarm. When an individual finds a better way to get what
they want, when they want it, that technique is broadly
adopted, and thus tends to drive its competitors into
extinction. Although all of the search techniques developed
since 1993 do still exist (except for the NSCA/CERN master
list of web sites), natural selection pressure has favored
Googles Page Rank with the highest level of fitness for the
current ecology of the Internet. Google appears to
understand this, subjecting its own methodologies to
unceasing evolutionary variation, drawing its mutations from
a study of the activities of the swarm, and adjusting its own
algorithmic DNA to match11.

Once the user masters techniques of discrimination, stage


three, the age of virtual communities begins. The user
spontaneously forms networks of communication social
networks, in the current parlance which sit above the
pervasive any-to-any Internet. In addition to the natural
social relationships of proximity, kinship, and friendship, new
social relationships bounded by common interest
communities emerge. These virtual communities12, which
bear only accidental relations to proximity, kinship or culture,
exist only because there is a medium which can support the

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constant reinforcement of these connections. Without
cyberspace, there is no virtual community; within cyberspace,
virtual communities are the rule. The unified swarm explores
itself, and discovers patterns in its variation; where these
patterns find resonance, sub-swarms form within the swarm,
and communities emerge. Again, this same process takes
place within the individual; once the torrent has been tamed,
once the dial can be tuned, the individual becomes aware of
others, who have tamed and tuned to the same channels,
seeking communion with them.

Stage four, representing the present day, is the age of the


swarming hyperdistribution13 of media. Every individual
harnesses their own social network to create their own media
distribution network. We have, over the past twenty-four
months, rapidly moved into an time when every single
individual has become his or her own network. We
hyperdistribute much which comes our way, forwarding
email, links to websites, podcasts, video clips, Flash
animations, even 3D games. We spend an ever-greater
portion of our attention forwarding (i.e., publishing) relevant
media into the relevant links in our social network. This,
right now, is where we really are, both as individuals and as a
swarm. Each of us is building and becoming our own media
distribution network. Occasionally we create the content in
these networks, but far more often even if we are full-time,
professional media producers we pass content through our
networks.

This is the reason that eighty million people have forwarded


links to JibJabs This Land14, the video of the Chinese
university students singing a Backstreet Boys song, or footage
of an exploding whale15. Although these examples are
exceptional because of their breadth of distribution, the same
processes are taking place, in a scale-invariant fashion,
throughout the entirety of the swarm, sub-swarms, and in
individual members.

To understand what is going on, we must ask ourselves


why?16 Why do we forward media through our social
networks? Why has this become the consuming task of the
present era of the Internet? One possible explanation can be
drawn from the study of human social networks. These
networks are thoroughly dynamic, and subject to selection

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pressures of their own because of the concept, from
anthropology, of the Dunbar Number. The Dunbar Number
states that the number of first-degree connections within a
social network (i.e., the number of individuals who are
directly connected to every other member within a social
network), can never be greater than 150. The reason for this
is not known, but the Dunbar Number seems to be strongly
correlated to the size of the forebrain. Figure 1 shows the
correlation between forebrain mass and the number of nodes
in the social network of humans and apes17:

Great apes, such as chimpanzees and gorillas, who are very


close to human beings in their neural structure, can maintain
social networks troops with between 30-60 members,
while the lesser primates form smaller groups. Thus, it can be
inferred that the management of social networks is a very
high-order cognitive task.

It is already well-known that humans or apes who are


ostracized from their social networks spontaneously age and
die; their endocrine systems rebel, and begin destroying the
body18. Individuals who fail to establish strong social
networks will fail to thrive, and thus fail to pass their genes
and memes along to their offspring. The inverse is also
believed to be true; human beings with strong social networks

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tend to live longer, healthier lives than those weakly
connected to the community of man. The development of
dense social networks may be our evolutionary response to
this essential feature of neuroendocrinology, a response with
both biological and memetic components.

We establish and maintain our social networks through


strategies of interaction. In the Great Apes, this interaction
principally consists of grooming and food-sharing. One
analogous behavior, in network-connected humans, is
information-sharing. The careful balance which weights the
relative value of the nodes in our social networks is
determined by the interactions between ourselves and our
first-degree nodes. Obviously, proximity is a strong
component of the weighting; individuals we see every day
naturally have a heavier weighting in our social networks. But
for those nodes which are not proximal individuals who
exist, ontologically, in virtual space weighting is determined
by the quality of informational interactions.

We thrive within social networks which have become more


fluid, no longer bounded by physical proximity, where
informational exchange is the sole arbiter of rank; this means
that the selection pressure to remain within in a social
network is stronger than at any time before. We are all
working harder than ever to maintain our position within our
partially virtualized social networks. Since information
transactions are one way we can establish and maintain our
position within these networks, we are placing an increasing
emphasis on the three Fs: finding, filtering and forwarding
the key pieces of information which will reinforce
relationships within our networks. Each informational
transaction produces, as its result, some social currency.
While social currency is not necessarily transferable between
social networks, within a social network it is the determinant
of ones rank.

Thus we see the emergence taste makers within a given


community, who lead that community through their steady
accumulation of social currency. Now that this has been
recognized as a successful strategy (not only by individuals
but also by commercial organizations), we are rapidly
adopting the technique; self-similarly, the swarm and sub-
swarms are also adopting it. This explains the recent

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emergence of technologies like del.icio.us19, which accelerate
and hyperdistribute the accumulation of social currency. We
have become a species of cool-hunters20; the hunters who
can bag the biggest, most impressive game are given
precedence within the community. This is the why behind the
what.

We are just at the beginning of the era of digital social


networks. The efforts thus far have been interesting
experiments, but they have universally failed to realize their
enormous potential to accelerate the accumulation of social
currency within social networks. The earliest digital social
networks, such as Friendster, Orkut, LinkedIn, MySpace, and
TheFaceBook.com, managed to embody the principle of the
six degrees of separation21, producing a digital
representation of a social network composed of both proximal
and virtual members, but had neither the capacity nor the
design intent to embody the dynamic nature of human social
networks, which vary from moment to moment, and task to
task. Existing digital social networks treat the human
being as a static entity, a category error of the first
order. A human social network is a living thing, and must be
treated as such. This mistake is so fundamental that it needs
to be highlighted against another example: would Googles
Page Rank remain relevant if Google ceased its constant
devouring of web pages? Page Rank would quickly grow stale
and become useless. In this sense, digital social networks are
like sharks: they must constantly move, and eat, if they are to
survive.

Digital social networks, in order to be at all useful, must be


active, and extraordinarily well-fed. Existing digital social
networks are designed to be passive; they require constant
human intervention to reflect the dynamically evolving
relationship between the nodes within the network. This is
neither feasible nor reasonable; we would need to spend more
time maintaining the digital representation of our social
network than maintaining the network itself. This is a basic
failure in design. A digital social network needs to draw from
our data shadows constantly, like a digital vampire, building
its soul out of our actions in virtual space.

We have arrived at the forward frontier of the evolution of


networked humanity, both as swarm and individual. This

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paper has outlined the problem in precise terms; what
remains now is to describe a solution. Collectively, we have
created a whole host of ad-hoc techniques which we use to
manage our social networks: we have mailing lists and
address books, and these help, but we havent put any
computational intelligence behind these techniques.
Furthermore, these informal techniques, developed from
need, but poorly fit to their tasks, are losing their utility,
bending beneath an increasing selection pressure22.
Fortunately, selection pressure drives evolution; it drives both
the need and the capability to experiment with a multitude of
forms mutations, if you will in search of solutions which
will relieve some of the selection pressure, producing a higher
level of selection fitness.

Now that we have an in situ understanding of the swarm, it is


time to turn our attentions to the telephone.

Part Two: The Telephone and its Disconnects

Before we can begin any discussion of a repair of the


telephone (in truth, it is not the telephone that needs repair,
but rather that we, who design them, must repair our
thinking), it is necessary to prick consciousness with a few
probes, interventions in the form of three questions, which
will help to illuminate the enormous weight of subconscious
and unrecognized prejudices which accompany the modern
mobile telephone. These questions outline the telephones
disconnects, where logic and reason fail, and prejudice,
embodied, is revealed.

Question One: Why does a mobile telephone have a keypad?

Automatic dialing technology is about eighty years old23;


before that, calls were switched by an operator at a
switchboard, who physically connected trunk lines to make
the circuit. Mechanical automation obsolesced the operator,
and the rapid advance of computerized switching systems in
the 1960s gave birth to DTMF touch tone dialing. 24 It is this
touch tone keypad which we have come to consider as the
natural interface to the telephone, even though it is not
quite as old as this author. In the years before the
microprocessor revolution, when AT&T stamped out

110
hundreds of millions of absolutely identical, identically dumb,
touch-tone telephone handsets, users had to peck the number
into the keyboard every single time they placed a call.

How often do you hand tap a number into your mobile


phone? Ive been doing some informal polling, and the
answer seems to be, About once a week. Although we might
be using our mobile phone tens of hours a week, we only tap a
number into it once a week. If thats the case, why is half
the interface of the mobile telephone composed of a
keypad?

We all know what the keypad is used for, tens of times a day:
SMS. Text messaging is the killer app for the mobile
telephone, and the keypad is the interface to that service. Yet
text messaging via keypad is so slow, so fraught, even with
predictive text, that its amazing we bother to do it at all. Its a
clear indication that the need to send text messages outweighs
our frustrations with the text message interface.
Nevertheless, that resentment persists, and grows with every
text message sent. Its part of the reason why THE NEW
INVENTORS audience gave up that groan.

Why do we use the keypad for SMS? Because thats the


interface weve got. And why is that the interface weve got?
Because this is a telephone, and the one, absolutely uniform
feature of the telephone interface is the dialing keypad.
People need to dial numbers. But no one actually does dial
numbers anymore. Theyre all in our address books. We
dont even remember numbers anymore. I can remember my
mobile and my office and my voice mail numbers. Everything
else is managed by my mobile phone which is as it should
be. As we transition to a VOIP world, the concept of the
phone number will be entirely meaningless, replaced by a SIP
URL. At that point, well never type numbers into our
telephones.

The interface to text messaging, the keypad, shapes all


communication through the device. Consider these
contrasting examples: A few weeks ago I learned how to
compose text messages on my Macintosh, shipping them over
to my phone for delivery. It was immediately liberating; I had
the full benefit of punctuation and a dictionary larger than the
predictive text library. As an immigrant to the world of text

111
messaging, I found relief. On the other hand, the younger
generation has gone in the opposite direction, adapting their
communication forms to the interface, creating a rich
linguistic pidgin, which reads like shorthand.

The information pressure behind text messaging has been so


intense that we have seen the emergence of new SMS-based
languages25. This pressure is pushing the mobile telephone
through a series of mutations; some look like the Blackberry,
which features a full, if miniature QWERTY keyboard. Others
favor other interface modalities, such as speech recognition.
The keypad itself is a vestigial organ. It will wither away then
disappear entirely, resurrected as a ghost, in a virtualized, on-
screen interface, for those rare occasions when we type a
number into the telephone.

Question Two: To how many networks is the mobile


telephone connected?

The telephone is essentially a network terminal; it provides


services to the user by making, managing, and destroying
connections to the network. In Australia, we readily
acknowledge that our mobile telephones sit on two networks:
GSM, which handles lightly-digitized analog traffic26; and
GPRS (Global Packet Radio Service), which is a packet-
switched data-only network with full TCP/IP capabilities27.
As third-generation 3G cellular networks become pervasive,
the analog-only network is being dropped in favor of a all-
digital, high-speed, packet-switched, TCP/IP network
connection. These are the networks we connect to with our
mobile telephones. But these are not all.

The average model mobile telephone for sale today anything


that sells for more than AUD $100 actually presents at least
four network interfaces. In addition to the standard
GSM/GPRS network interfaces, the mobile telephone is also
equipped with an IrDA (Infrared Data Association) network
interface. The IrDA interface is a very short range, line-of-
sight, point-to-point networking protocol, which generally
fades away after about 50cm of distance. Historically, IrDA
has been used to allow devices to share small chunks of data,
such as address cards, URLs, and the like. It features a
relatively slow transmission speed reaching an upper limit
of 57Kbps and hence is not suitable for large file transfers.

112
While IrDA is an inexpensive interface to implement in a
small-profile device such as a mobile telephone, its
shortcomings have kept it from widespread use.

The fourth network interface, and by far the most interesting


one, is Bluetooth. Bluetooth is a low-power wireless
networking technology which provides a sphere of coverage of
about 10 meters in radius around the Bluetooth device.
Bluetooth has been around since the late 1990s, launched
with great fanfare, followed immediately by a very public
failure as many Bluetooth devices proved to be incompatible.
The market took care of these problems quickly, and with the
introduction of version 1.1 of Bluetooth in early 2001, the
market for Bluetooth devices began to take off. Nearly all
mobile phones which cost more than $AUD 100 have
Bluetooth network interfaces, and, at present, five million
Bluetooth are manufactured each week28. This includes
mobile phones, laptops, PDAs, wireless headsets, etc.

At present Bluetooth isnt used for very much; it has become a


more-reliable replacement for IrDA, because it does not rely
on line of sight, but rather, physical proximity, something
thats much easier to manage. Bluetooth is used to keep
devices synchronized, or as a file transfer protocol a way to
get photographs off the phone, and appointments onto it. Yet
Bluetooth is capable of far more than this. Its link layer (layer
3), L2CAP, is capable of managing piconets of eight devices
one master and seven slaves. These piconets can overlap in
physical and logical space, so the same device can be a slave
in one piconet and master of another. This means that when
Bluetooth devices are brought together, they can easily form a
complex network topology. Furthermore, this network
topology need not be entirely local, with all traffic restricted to
the piconet; any Bluetooth device could act as a gateway,
routing traffic directed through it to the Internet, or to other
piconets, as required.

We havent seen anything like this show up on our mobile


telephones. Although these devices have the advantage of
some very sophisticated networking technology, were simply
using Bluetooth to push discrete blocks of data around. We
are not treating these Bluetooth devices as nodes within a
packet-switched network. Why? Because we have not
recognized the power of this highly versatile network

113
interface. We see the mobile telephone purely as a terminal
on the GSM/GPRS networks, when it is actually a terminal on
at least four different networks. As mobile telephones acquire
802.11 WiFi capabilities they already are, to satisfy the
demands of VOIP users these handheld network terminals
will present five network interfaces. Yet we continue to act as
though these other interfaces simply do not exist.

Question Three: What is the mobile telephone doing?

The modern mobile telephone such as my SonyEricsson


K750i is an impressively powerful device. It has a gigabyte
of non-volatile memory, a fairly large RAM scratchpad for
program execution, an operating system (SymbianOS), a Java
Virtual Machine (J2ME), and a host of custom ICs dedicated
to digitizing audio signals, converting digitized signals to
audio, managing the UHF connection to the cellular network,
driving the Bluetooth radio, and so forth. The K750i also has
a chip which performs the vector mathematics needed in
three-dimensional transformation matrices, so that I can play
any number of 3D games.

Why would we play games on our mobile telephones? By this


we dont mean to question the validity of mobile
entertainment, be it music or video or games of strategy and
skill. This is a big industry, earning billions of dollars a year
as people find new ways to use their mobile phones to fill the
otherwise empty moments in their lives. We are not
questioning the human desire to be entertained every single
moment of the day (although perhaps we should)29, but
rather, we are asking if this is an appropriate use of the
mobile telephone. The mobile telephone, like our desktop
and laptop computers, suffers from consistent
underutilization; we rarely keep it busy. Even when we are
engaged in voice communication, newer mobile telephones
use only a small portion of their capabilities in call
management. The mobile telephone represents a tremendous
computational resource which is almost entirely unutilized.
Hence, the phone is free for games and other entertainments.

Why is the mobile telephone so underutilized? Once again,


we see the vestigial behavior of analog fixed-line telephony.
Fixed-line telephones did nothing until the network sent a call
to the handset, or until the user picked up the handset to

114
make a call. The duty cycle for the fixed-line telephone was
entirely driven by users, as the only actors within the network.
This basic assumption drives the design of mobile telephones:
the devices are essentially passive, waiting to be activated by
the network or the user. But why should this be? Theres no
essential purpose served by such passivity far from it. But
the mobile telephone has been cursed by its ancestry, and this
curse has kept it from reaching its full potential. This is the
most important thing we must unlearn, if we are to repair the
telephone. The mobile telephone is only a passive device
because we have designed it so.

We believe it a necessary precondition for telephone


repair that we treat the mobile telephone as an
entirely active device, a network terminal which has
been designed from its outset to facilitate
management of and communication with the social
network of its owner-user. The mobile telephone is
already the de facto device for digital social network
management; voice calls and text messaging are arguably the
most significant components of the electronic communication
within our social networks. The ephemeral nature of
synchronous voice communication and asynchronous text
messages means that these informational transactions are not
captured by existing digital social networks, which, in turn,
means that we unconsciously underestimate their
importance, because they are not counted (except on our
monthly bills), and are not tracked, except within the mobile
handset. If we transform the mobile telephone into an active
device, and design it to be conscious of the electronic
communication which takes place through it and around it,
we have a device which can gather a wealth of data a data
shadow from which we can build emergent models of a
dynamic digital social network. The mobile telephone is the
only device which is well-suited to the task of feeding our
ever-hungry digital social networks; it is the only device
capable of recording our lives as they are lived. The mobile
telephone should be fully realized as an active device
which takes note of our digital social interactions,
using this information to assist us in improving the
quality of these interactions.

This is the core design principle that we recommend be put


into practice; without this step forward, nothing else is

115
possible, and the mobile telephone will remain an
overpowered, underutilized twin of its mechanical-analog
ancestors. Because of the growing importance of ad-hoc
digital social networks, there is a growing pressure to
consistently improve and reinforce the connections within our
social networks. Should we succeed in transforming the
mobile telephone into the instrumentality of our social
networks, that transformation will release this pressure,
driving the mobile telephone forward into a fantastic array of
mutations and forms. It will be a Cambrian Explosion of
communication, brought into being we connect our need to
our capability.

The impact of such a transformation would be immediate and


profound. When users stop fighting the interface, and find,
instead, that the interface enables social network
management, these users will enter into a new ontological
accommodation with the device. It will, in short order,
become entirely indispensable. It will not be thought of as a
device for voice communication, or even as a terminal for text
messaging; it will be the portal into the users social network:
the physical, proximal and ubiquitous connection into the
sphere of human connection. There is precedent for such a
rapid transformation: in twenty-four months the web browser
grew from its origins as a hacker curiosity to become the
indispensable information age tool.

Our analysis of the requirements for this


transformation of mobile telephony from passive to
active modes indicates that the technological
infrastructure for such a revolution is already in
place; this is a revolution in software, not hardware;
a revolution in usability, not deployment. The
handsets and networks are fully ubiquitous. We need only
learn how to design software to fit the needs of the networks
users. To do that, we must experiment, play, and listen to the
users.

Part Three: Me and My Data Shadow

Theory is good; observation is better. One of us (Pesce) has


been observing the growth of the Internet, user communities,
and swarms for nearly 20 years, while the other (Fraser) has

116
deep experience concerning the issues of mobility and
usability. The concrescence30 of observation and experience
has lead us from theory into practice. We are presently
designing technological probes, testing the theses we have
laid out in this paper, in order to concretize our
understanding.

One of us (Fraser), as the former Director of User Experience


for Hutchinson Telecoms Australia, has a strong
understanding both of the desires and the frustrations of
mobile telephone users. These real-world insights have
guided us into designs that require a minimum of user
intervention. In other words, we have done our best to design
things that just work, without a lot of care and feeding. An
example of this philosophy, created by one of us (Fraser), is
ImageShow, a Java J2ME application which fetches images
from the photo sharing site Flickr, allowing the mobile to dip
into Flickrstream for an endless supply of imagery, filtered
by user name and meta tags.

What follows are three speculative use cases, shown


principally from the users point of view, and drawn from the
themes outlined in this paper.

Example One: Active Listening

Starting from the basic proposition that the mobile telephone


ought to do everything within its power to be intensely aware
of its environment, the first use case involves the emergent
user experience of a mobile telephone programmed for active
listening. In this case, the mobile telephone maintains
simultaneous connections across all available network
connections, using these as probes into both proximal and
virtual environments. GSM/GPRS provides connectivity to
the global network, while Bluetooth, and, to a lesser extent,
IrDA, provides a probe into the proximal environment.

One of us (Pesce) has already constructed a Java J2ME


application which turns the mobile telephone into an active
listening device. The application constantly scans the
bluesphere (the 10 meter radius around the mobile
telephone), keeping a record of all the devices it sees, and
reports these results, via GPRS, to a server on the Internet.

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The server then puts these results into a database, so they can
be retrieved and analyzed as needed.

Our supposition was that it should be possible to construct a


heuristic model of the users task modality home, work,
traveling, shopping, etc. based on the information gathered
through active listening to the bluesphere. Figure 2 shows a
basic plot of the data gathered by the application, over a
period of seventy-five minutes, covering a trip from Surry
Hills to the AFTRS campus in North Ryde, via public
transport:

As can be seen in the diagram, the first moments are stable, as


there are, in general, a fixed number of Bluetooth devices
within range of the mobile telephone when it is in the users
home. The number drops during the walk to the train station,
and rises dramatically while waiting on a crowded platform.
The number of bluesphere devices drops again while the train
is in transit to its destination station, rising slightly at the
arrival platform, finally settling at a consistent number once
the user arrives in the office. This pattern is regular and
repeatable, day after day; this means that minimal machine
intelligence is required to translate a scan of the bluesphere
into an assessment of task modality.

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It needs to be noted that active listening to the bluesphere
returns more than just the raw number of Bluetooth devices;
the mobile telephone also learns the unique addresses (the
Bluetooth equivalent of Ethernet MAC addresses) and the
friendly names of those devices. This means that it is
possible to pinpoint the location of the mobile to within 10
meters when it is within range of some known, fixed-point
Bluetooth device, such as the five Bluetooth devices which
crowd the offices of the Emerging Media and Interactive
Design Program at AFTRS, or the one which is always visible
within my home. Again, it is a trivial operation for a server to
translate a given Bluetooth address to a task modality; the
mobile simply sends this data to the server, and the server
tells the mobile that it is at home, in the office, and so forth.

Once the server is able to generate information about task


modality, it can treat the mobile telephone as a network
terminal, and reconfigure its display to present information
which is relevant to the task. For example, in the office my
mobile telephone could inform me of upcoming meetings; in
transit it could warn me of rail delays and changing weather
conditions; at home it could prompt me to turn on the
television and watch a program recommended to me by a
friend. None of this is difficult, but it is all quite useful, and
this utility can be delivered to the user with a minimum of
user interaction.

The more interesting phenomenon comes from a detailed


analysis of a long-term recording of the bluesphere over a
period days to weeks. That analysis will show that certain
devices come into the users bluesphere regularly. These
occasions of proximity are the foundation for a model of an
emergent social network. Rather than laboriously building
the elements of the social network by hand, via a web site, the
mobile telephone can simply listen to the bluesphere, SMS
traffic and voice traffic, learn who the user is communicating
with, when, and for how long. While this model will not
necessarily be complete, it will be substantial, and will build
itself without user intervention. That, in and of itself, is a
powerful capability.

Active listening must extend beyond the network interfaces


available to the mobile telephone into the real-world
interfaces offered by the device. Most modern mobile

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telephones can make audio recordings. If this recording
capability were kept on all the time, when combined with the
analysis of the users emergent social network, it should be
possible and easy to offer the user the opportunity to keep
a full audio record of their day-to-day life. The mobile
telephone would simply record audio constantly, storing it
locally until it came in contact with a device it could use to
synchronize this data with the users server. (The amount of
data is small; just about 80MB covers an entire days
recording.) The server could then present this data to the
user, visualized across the time domain, with annotations
showing who was around, participating in conversations,
throughout the day. The user would simply click at the
appropriate place on a web page, and hear their own
conversation repeated back to them.

Such features are as invaluable as they are dangerous. There


are a host of privacy issues strewn throughout these
examples, and these must be regarded as elements to be
incorporated into the design of the system. Our basic belief is
that users control the rights to their own data shadow, and
that they share this data with others at their peril.

Example Two: Feeding the Hungry Social Network with


Active Interventions

Once the system has grown a model of the users social


network, it can then begin to feed that model as much
information as can be gathered through active listening,
augmented with active interventions. In an active
intervention, the mobile telephone will interrupt the user in
meaningful ways, designed to improve the quality of the
users social network.

In this use case well consider the Thanksgiving dinner Im


planning with friends; one of those friends, James, pops into
a pub down the street; James and I have agreed to share data
about our relative proximity, so Im informed, via my mobile
telephone, that James is in my neighborhood. I give him a
call (which is noted by the active listener on both our mobile
telephones), and drop down to the pub (also noted by the
active listeners). When our mobile telephones come into
proximity, I get an alert on my mobile the first instance of
an active intervention. Ive made a note to remind myself

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about Thanksgiving dinner, which is being held at James
home. The note comes up, and I ask James about some
details. No need to write any of this down, its all being
recorded by my mobile telephone, and Ill be able to play it
back later.

After a few beers, James and I decide to go to see a film; but


what film should we see? Since my mobile is in a task
modality which indicates a social situation, it is already
presenting information about social diversions. I see that
Wolf Creek has gotten a rave review from my friend Nicola,
so James and I decide to go to the film. The Dendy theatre
uses a few Macs, with Bluetooth installed, so my mobile
telephone notes this, tells the server, and my server guesses
that Im going to see a film. A few hours later, I receive a
request an active intervention to rate the film Ive seen.
When I do so, that information is then shared within my
social network, and contributes to the growing list of shared
ratings31. I can also add my own review of the film, just by
speaking into my phone; the server will later share that voice
recording with anyone in my social network who wants to
hear it.

Many of my social interactions are observed by my mobile


telephone; all of these are recorded, mapped and analyzed.
That said, not all of my social interactions can be observed by
the mobile telephone; many of them take place through my
laptop computer. My mobile telephone may be with me
everywhere I go, but it cant actively listen to my computer.
My computer therefore needs to shoulder some of the burden.
I will need to have an email client which notes who I receive
email from, and who I send email to, adding that information
to my data shadow. My web browsers history also needs to
be fed into that data shadow.

There is a pattern here: we generate enormous data shadows


not just the ones related to our financial progress through
the world, but others which relate to our social and
informational presence. This information may be stored
locally, but it is not collected, collated, or analyzed. In other
words, we are depriving our data shadow of the constant
stream of information we generate as we communicate. For
this reason, it is our recommendation that software designers
implement audit trails of user activity which can then be fed

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into dynamic digital social networks, enhancing their
capability to model the users social network. It is relatively
easy to do this within a system such as Gmail, which never
forgets any transaction through it: you can simply scrape the
data off Gmail. An extension for Firefox would do the same
for web browsing. These are simple changes, which require
no user intervention beyond setup, but they would provide
the data shadow with a more complete recording of the users
activities. This information should never be discarded; it is
far too valuable.

Example Three: Sharing the Shadow

The value of the individuals data shadow has not been


overlooked by commercial interests. Wal-Mart, the largest
retailer in the world, builds extensive data shadows on each of
its customers, studying their buying patterns, constantly
adjusting their store inventories to meet the needs of their
customers. This is the basic premise that has driven the
adoption of customer loyalty programs, such as the
ColesMyer FlyBuys card. ColesMyer offers incentives to
regular customers; in return they build a data shadow of that
customers purchase habits. This information is essential for
ColeMyers purchasing plans; it also allows ColesMyer to
target individual consumers with offerings that they are very
likely to accept. In short, ColesMyer has a database, drawn
from user interactions, which is of great benefit to them.
They guard this data tightly; they dont share it, even with the
customers who created it. But there are good reasons to share
that data with customers.

In our final use case, I am popping into the Coles at Surry


Hills Marketplace, shopping for my Thanksgiving dinner. My
mobile telephone knows Ive entered Coles because theyve
setup a small Bluetooth transmitter which identifies the store.
Immediately the task modality of my mobile telephone
changes, and it displays my shopping list. Behind the scenes,
the server managing my own social network is having a
detailed discussion with ColesMyers own substantial
computing facility. My server knows what Im shopping for,
and negotiates with Coles to get the lowest prices for each of
the items on my shopping list. All of these sale prices will be
tied to my FlyBuys card, so when I pass through checkout, the
sale prices are applied. These prices are for my eyes only, and

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really, I dont even see them. What I do see is a offer for $5
off on a fine Thanksgiving turkey; thats important enough to
be bounced up to my attention. Its the only thing that Im
aware of, even though a lot of communication has taken place,
out of view, between my own server and ColesMyer.

Furthermore, when I pass through the check-out, ColesMyer


will do me the favor of informing my server of what Ive
bought, what it all cost, and so forth. This means some items
will be removed from my shopping list, without my
intervention, while others will remain. It also means that I
can track my purchases and my expenses without having to
laboriously enter any data.

All of this is easy enough to implement: if theres one thing we


understand, post dot-com collapse, its how to make
databases talk to each other. We have XML and other
standards which provide roll-your-own protocols. There is
some programming involved here, but nothing extraordinary.
User setup and user intervention are both minimal. As long
as all parties can agree on how to communicate, such a system
just works.

Why would Coles offer this service to its customers? The


answer is obvious: loyalty. Any store which could make my
shopping experience as personalized and seamless as this use
case is more likely to hold their customers. They get a better
sense of their clientele, as well, because ColesMyer gets a peek
at what their customers are looking for, not just what theyre
buying today. ColesMyer can build models of my user
behavior as a consumer, which will help them to offer me just
what they want, just when I want it. That will help them
tailor their stores inventories. A commercial enterprise is
just as much a node within a social network as any individual;
strong and constantly reinforced informational relationships
between these nodes will tend to improve and strengthen the
real-world relationship.

Conclusion: Playing the Future

It is no longer sufficient to consider electronic communication


as a two-way affair; electronic communication in the twenty-
first century involves swarms of individuals, engaged in

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common or closely-aligned or loosely-coupled tasks. The
translation of human social networks into dynamic digital
entities, fed continuously by devices which actively listen and
actively intervene, creates the necessary precondition for the
fifth stage in the evolution of Internet use, an era where our
data shadows stand alongside our physical selves, working to
maintain and improve our effectiveness across the breadth of
our social networks.

Many of the ideas explored in this paper are not ours, but
have been drawn from longstanding research in ubiquitous
computing32, and recent work in the visualization and
management of social networks33. The present work
contributes to this discourse an awareness that the
infrastructure for this transformation is already in
place. This is a software problem, which means that in all
likelihood it will be solved quickly. We invite you to do your
own research, play with these devices, learn from the users,
and invent the platforms for our human future.

References
1. Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,
Random House, New York, 1964, p. 25
2. William Gibson, Neuromancer, Ace Science Fiction, New York,
1984, p. 57
3. R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path, St. Martins Press, New York,
1980, p. 37
4. Mark Pesce, The Executable Dreamtime, The Book of Lies,
Disinformation Press, New York, pp. 26-31
5. Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, Ballantine Books, New
York, 1984., p. 209
6. Philip Ball, Critical Mass: How One Thing Becomes Another,
Random House, New York, 2004, p. 30
7. Kevin Kelley, Out of Control: The Rise of Neo-Biological
Civilization, Warner Books, New York, 1995, p. 12
8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recapitulation_theory
9. Paul Virillio, Speed and Politics, Semiotext(e), New York, 1989, p.
10
10. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1990, p. 235
11. The New York Times, 5 November 2005
12. Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 2000, p 15.
13. Mark Pesce, The Audience Takes Control, Media Hungary
2005, Tihany, Hungary, p.

124
14. http://news.com.com/Political+parody+draws+Web+crowd/2100-
1028_3-5312081.html
15. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploding_whale
16. Jonathan Nicholas, presentation at Slattery IT Internet Watch 15
November 2005, Sydney
17. Journal of Human Evolution (1992) 20, 469-493
18. Howard Bloom, The Lucifer Principle, Atlantic Monthly Press,
New York, 1997, p. 205
19. http://del.icio.us/
20. William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, Berkley Books, New York,
2003, p. 41
21. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_Separation
22. Clive Thompson, Meet the Life Hackers, The New York Times,
16 October 2005
23. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_dialing
24. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch_tone_dialing
25. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 22, January 2002, p. 481
26. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM
27. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPRS
28. http://www.bluetooth.com/news/releases.asp?
A=2&PID=1521&ARC=1
29. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Penguin Books, New
York, 1986, p. 43
30. A. N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Macmillan, New York,
1927, p. 309
31. Mark Pesce, The You Portal, Mobile Journeys, February 2005,
Sydney, p. 5
32. Mark Weiser, Hot Topic: Ubiquitous Computing, IEEE
Computer, October 1993, pp 71-72
34. Steven Blyth, My Social Fabric,
http://www.stevenblyth.com/mysocialfabric/index.html

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Dense and Thick
Part One: The Golden Age

In October of 1993 I bought myself a used SparcStation. Id


just come off of a consulting gig at Apple, and, flush with
cash, wanted to learn UNIX systems administration. I also
had some ideas about coding networking protocols for shared
virtual worlds. Soon after I got the SparcStation installed in
my lounge room complete with its thirty-kilo monster of a
monitor I grabbed a modem, connected it to the RS-232
port, configured SLIP, and dialed out onto the Internet. Once
online I used FTP, logged into SUNSITE and downloaded the
newly released NSCA Mosaic, a graphical browser for the
World Wide Web.

Id first seen Mosaic running on an SGI workstation at the


1993 SIGGRAPH conference. I knew what hypertext was
Id built a MacOS-based hypertext system back in the 1980s
so I could see what Mosaic was doing, but there wasnt much
there. Not enough content to make it really interesting. The
same problem that had bedeviled all hypertext systems since
Douglas Englebarts first demo, back in 1968. Without
sufficient content, hypertext systems are fundamentally
uninteresting. Even Hypercard, Apples early experiment in
Hypertext, never really moved beyond the toy stage. To make
hypertext interesting, it must be broadly connected beyond
a document, beyond a hard drive. Either everything is
connected, or everything is useless.

In the three months between my first click on NCSA Mosaic


and when I fired it up in my lounge room, a lot of people had
come to the Web party. The master list of Websites
maintained by CERN, the birthplace of the Web kept
growing. Over the course of the last week of October 1993, I
visited every single one of those Websites. Then I was done. I
had surfed the entire World Wide Web. I was even able to
keep up, as new sites were added.

This gives you a sense of the size of the Web universe in those
very early days. Before the explosive inflation of 1994 and
1995, the Web was a tiny, tidy place filled mostly with
academic websites. Yet even so, the Web had the capacity to

126
suck you in. Id find something that interested me
astronomy, perhaps, or philosophy and with a click-click-
click find myself deep within something that spoke to me
directly. This, I believe, is the core of the Web experience, an
experience that were so many years away from we tend to
overlook it. At its essence, the Web is personally seductive.

I realized the universal truth of this statement on a cold night


in early 1994, when I dragged my SparcStation and boat-
anchor monitor across town to a house party. This party, a
monthly event known as Anon Salon, was notorious for
attracting the more intellectual and artistic crowd in San
Francisco. People would come to perform, create,
demonstrate, and spectate. I decided I would show these
people this new-fangled thing Id become obsessed with. So,
that evening, as front the door opened, and another person
entered, Id sidle along side them, and ask them, So, what are
you interested in? Theyd mention their current hobby
gardening or vaudeville or whatever it might be and Id use
the brand-new Yahoo! category index to look up a web page
on the subject. Theyd be delighted, and begin to explore. At
no point did I say, This is the World Wide Web. Nor did I
use the word hypertext. I let the intrinsic seductiveness of
the Web snare them, one by one.

Of course, a few years later, San Francisco became the


epicenter of the Web revolution. Was I responsible for that?
Id like to think so, but I reckon San Francisco was a bit of a
nexus. I wasnt the only one exploring the Web. That night at
Anon Salon I met Jonathan Steuer, who walked on up and
said, Mosaic, hmm? How about you type in
www.hotwired.com? Steuer was part of the crew at work,
just few blocks away, bringing WIRED magazine online.
Everyone working on the Web shared the same fervor an
almost evangelical belief that the Web changes everything. I
didnt have to tell Steuer, and he didnt have to tell me. We
knew. And we knew if we simply shared the Web not the
technology, not its potential, but its real, seductive human
face, wed be done.

Thats pretty much how it worked out: the Web exploded


from the second half of 1994, because it appeared to every
single person who encountered it as the object of their desire.
It was, and is, all things to all people. This makes it the

127
perfect love machine nothing can confirm your prejudices
better than the Web. It also makes the Web a very pretty hate
machine. It is the reflector and amplifier of all things human.
We were completely unprepared, and for that reason the Web
has utterly overwhelmed us. There is no going back. If every
website suddenly crashed, we would find another way to
recreate the universal infinite hypertextual connection.

In the process of overwhelming us in fact, part of the


process itself the Web has hoovered up the entire space of
human culture; anything that can be digitized has been
sucked into the Web. Of course, this presents all sorts of
thorny problems for individuals who claim copyright over
cultural products, but they are, in essence swimming against
the tide. The rest, everything that marks us as definably
human, everything that is artifice, has, over the last fifteen
years, been neatly and completely sucked into the space of
infinite connection. The project is not complete it will never
be complete but it is substantially underway, and more will
simply be more: it will not represent a qualitative difference.
We have already arrived at a new space, where human culture
is now instantaneously and pervasively accessible to any of
the four and a half billion network-connected individuals on
the planet.

This, then, is the Golden Age, a time of rosy dawns and bright
beginnings, when everything seems possible. But this age is
drawing to a close. Two recent developments will, in
retrospect, be seen as the beginning of the end. The first of
these is the transformation of the oldest medium into the
newest. The book is coextensive with history, with the largest
part of what we regard as human culture. Until five hundred
and fifty years ago, books were handwritten, rare and
precious. Moveable type made books a mass medium, and lit
the spark of modernity. But the book, unlike nearly every
other medium, has resisted its own digitization. This year the
defenses of the book have been breached, and ones and zeroes
are rushing in. Over the next decade perhaps half or more of
all books will ephemeralize, disappearing into the ether,
never to return to physical form. That will seal the
transformation of the human cultural project.

On the other hand, the arrival of the Web-as-appliance means


it is now leaving the rarefied space of computers and mobiles-

128
as-computers, and will now be seen as something as mundane
as a book or a dinner plate. Apples iPad is the first device of
an entirely new class which treat the Web as an appliance, as
something that is pervasively just there when needed, and put
down when not. The genius of Apples design is its extreme
simplicity too simple, I might add, for most of us. It
presents the Web as a surface, nothing more. iPad is a portal
into the human universe, stripped of everything that is a
computer. It is emphatically not a computer. Now, we can
discuss the relative merits of Apples design decisions and
we will, for some years to come. But the basic strength of the
iPads simplistic design will influence what the Web is about
to become.

eBooks and the iPad bookend the Golden Age; together they
represent the complete translation of the human universe into
a universally and ubiquitously accessible form. But the
human universe is not the whole universe. We tend to forget
this as we stare into the alluring and seductive navel of our
ever-more-present culture. But the real world remains, and
loses none of its importance even as the flashing lights of
culture grow brighter and more hypnotic.

Part Two: The Silver Age

Human beings have the peculiar capability of endowing


material objects with inner meaning. We know this as one of
the basic characteristics of humanness. From the time a child
anthropomorphizes a favorite doll or wooden train, we imbue
the material world with the attributes of our own
consciousness. Soon enough we learn to discriminate
between the animate and the inanimate, but we never
surrender our continual attribution of meaning to the
material world. Things are never purely what they appear to
be, instead we overlay our own meanings and associations
onto every object in the world. This process actually provides
the mechanism by which the world comes to make sense to
us. If we could not overload the material world with meaning,
we could not come to know it or manipulate it.

This layer of meaning is most often implicit; only in works of


art does the meaning crowd into the definition of the
material itself. But none of us can look at a thing and be

129
completely innocent about its hidden meanings. They
constantly nip at the edges of our consciousness, unless, Zen-
like, we practice an emptiness of mind, and attempt to
encounter the material in an immediate, moment-to-moment
awareness. For those of us not in such a blessed state, the
material world has a subconscious component. Everything
means something. Everything is surrounded by a penumbra
of meaning, associations that may be universal (an apple can
invoke the Fall of Man, or Newtons Laws of Gravity), or
something entirely specific. Through all of human history the
interiority of the material world has remained hidden except
in such moments as when we choose to allude to it. It is
always there, but rarely spoken of. That is about to change.

One of the most significant, yet least understood implications


of a planet where everyone is ubiquitously connected to the
network via the mobile is that it brings the depth of the
network ubiquitously to the individual. You are amazingly
connected to the other five billion individuals who carry
mobiles, and you are also connected to everything thats been
hoovered into cyberspace over the past fifteen years. That
connection did not become entirely apparent until year, as the
first mobiles appeared with both GPS and compass
capabilities. Suddenly, it became possible to point through
the camera on a mobile, and using the location and
orientation of the device search through the network.

This technique has become known as Augmented Reality, or


AR, and it promises to be one of the great growth areas in
technology over the next decade but perhaps not the
reasons the leaders of the field currently envision. The
strength of AR is not what it brings to the big things the
buildings and monuments but what it brings to the smallest
and most common objects in the material world. At present,
AR is flashy, but not at all useful. Its about to make a
transition. It will no longer be spectacular, but well wonder
how we lived without it.

Let me illustrate the nature of this transition, drawn from


examples in my own experience. These three thought
experiments represent the different axes of a world which is
making the transition between implicit meaning, and a world
where the implicit has become explicit. Once meaning is
exposed, it can be manipulated: this is something unexpected,

130
and unexpectedly powerful.

Example One: The Book

Last year I read a wonderful book. The Rest is Noise:


Listening to the Twentieth Century, by Alex Ross, is a
thorough and thoroughly enjoyable history of music in the
20th century. By music, Ross means what we would
commonly call classical music, even though the Classical
period ended some two hundred years ago. Thats not as
stuffy as it sounds: George Gershwin and Aaron Copland are
both major figures in 20th century music, though their works
have always been classed as popular.

Ross book has a companion website, therestisnoise.com,


which offers up a chapter-by-chapter samples of the
composers whose lives and exploits he explores in the text.
When I wrote The Playful World, back in 2000, and built a
companion website to augment the text, it was considered
quite revolutionary, but this is all pretty much standard for
better books these days.

As I said earlier, the book is on the edge of ephemeralization.


It wants to be digitized, because it has always been a message,
encoded. When I dreamed up this example, I thought it
would be very straightforward: youd walk into your
bookstore, point your smartphone at a book that caught your
fancy, and instantly youd find out what your friends thought
of it, what their friends thought of it, what the reviewers
thought of it, and so on. Youd be able to make a well-briefed
decision on whether this book is the right book for you.
Simple. In fact, Google Labs has already shown a basic
example of this kind of technology in a demo running on
Android.

But thats not what a book is anymore. Yes, its good to know
whether you should buy this or that book, but a book
represents an investment of time, and an opportunity to open
a window into an experience of knowledge in depth. Its this
intension that the device has to support. As the book slowly
dissolves into the sea of fragmentary but infinitely threaded
nodes of hypertext which are the human database, the device
becomes the focal point, the lens through which the whole
book appears, and appears to assemble itself.

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This means that the book will vary, person to person. My
fragments will be sewn together with my threads, yours with
your threads. The idea of unitary authorship persistent
over the last five hundred years wont be overwhelmed by
the collective efforts of crowdsourcing, but rather by the
corrosive effects of hyperconnection. The more connected
everything becomes, the less likely we are prone to linearity.
We already see this in the tl;dr phenomenon, where any text
over 300 words becomes too onerous to read.

Somehow, whatever the book is becoming must balance the


need for clarity and linearity against the centrifugal and
connective forces of hypertext. The book is about to be
subsumed within the network; the device is the place where it
will reassemble into meaning. The implicit meaning of the
book that it has a linear story to tell, from first page to last
must be made explicit if the idea and function of the book is
to survive.

The book stands on the threshold, between the worlds of the


physical and the immaterial. As such it is pulled in both
directions at once. It wants to be liberated, but will be utterly
destroyed in that liberation. The next example is something
far more physical, and, consequentially, far more important.

Example Two: Beef Mince

I go into the supermarket to buy myself the makings for a nice


Spaghetti Bolognese. Among the ingredients Ill need some
beef mince (ground beef for those of you in the United States)
to put into the sauce. Today Id walk up to the meat case and
throw a random package into my shopping trolley. If I were
being thoughtful, Id probably read the label carefully, to
make sure the expiration date wasnt too close. I might also
check to see how much fat is in the mince. Or perhaps its
grass-fed beef. Or organically grown. All of this information
is offered up on the label placed on the package. And all of it
is so carefully filtered that it means nearly nothing at all.

What I want to do is hold my device up to the package, and


have it do the hard work. Go through the supermarket to the
distributor, through the distributor to the abattoir, through
the abattoir to farmer, through the farmer to the animal itself.

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Was it healthy? Where was it slaughtered? Is that abattoir
healthy? (This isnt much of an issue in Australia, or New
Zealand. but in America things are quite a bit different.) Was
it fed lots of antibiotics in a feedlot? Which ones?

And perhaps most importantly what about the carbon


footprint of this little package of mince? How much CO2 was
created? How much methane? How much water was
consumed? These questions, at the very core of 21st century
life, need to be answered on demand if we can be expected to
adjust our lifestyles so as minimize our footprint on the
planet. Without a system like this, it is essentially impossible.
With such a system it can potentially become easy. As I walk
through the market, popping items into my trolley, my device
can record and keep me informed of a careful balance
between my carbon budget and my financial budget, helping
me to optimize both all while referencing my purchases
against sales on offer in other supermarkets.

Finally, what about the caloric count of that packet of mince?


And its nutritional value? I should be tracking those as well
or rather, my device should so that I can maintain optimal
health. I should know whether Im getting too much fat, or
insufficient fiber, or as Ill discuss in a moment too much
sodium. Something should be keeping track of this.
Something that can watch and record and use that recording
to build a model. Something that can connect the real world
of objects with the intangible set of goals that I have for
myself. Something that could do that would be exceptionally
desirable. It would be as seductive as the Web.

The more information we have at hand, the better the


decisions we can make for ourselves. Its an idea so simple it
is completely self-evident. We wont need to convince anyone
of this, to sell them on the truth of it. They will simply ask,
When can I have it? But theres more. My final example
touches on something so personal and so vital that it may
become the center of the drive to make the implicit explicit.

Example Three: Medicine

Four months ago, I contracted adult-onset chickenpox.


Which was just about as much fun as that sounds. (And yes,
since youve asked, I did have it as a child. Go figure.) Every

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few days I had doctors come by to make sure that I was
surviving the viral infection. While the first doctor didnt
touch me at all understandably the second doctor took my
blood pressure, and showed me the reading 160/120, a bit
too uncomfortably high. He suggested that I go on Micardis,
a common medication for hypertension. I was too sick to
argue, so I dutifully filled the prescription and began taking it
that evening.

Whenever I begin taking a new medication and Im getting


to an age where that happens with annoying regularity I am
always somewhat worried. Medicines are never perfect; they
work for a certain large cohort of people. For others they do
nothing at all. For a far smaller number, they might be toxic.
So, when I popped that pill in my mouth I did wonder
whether that medicine might turn out to be poison.

The doctor who came to see me was not my regular GP. He


did not know my medical history. He did not know the
history of the other medications I had been taking. All he
knew was what he saw when he walked into my flat. That
could be a recipe for disaster. Not in this situation I was
fine, and have continued to take Micardis but there are
numerous other situations where medications can interact
within the patient to cause all sorts of problems. This is well
known. It is one of the drawbacks of modern pharmaceutical
medicine.

This situation is only going to grow more intense as the


population ages and pharmaceutical management of the
chronic diseases of aging becomes ever-more-pervasive.
Right now we rely on doctors and pharmacists to keep their
own models of our pharmaceutical consumption. But thats a
model which is precisely backward. While it is very important
for them to know what drugs were on, it is even more
important for us to be able to manage that knowledge for
ourselves. I need to be able to point my device at any
medicine, and know, more or less immediately, whether that
medicine will cure me or kill me.

Over the next decade the cost of sequencing an entire human


genome will fall from the roughly $5000 it costs today to less
than $500. Well within the range of your typical medical test.
Once that happens, will be possible to compile

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epidemiological data which compares various genomes to the
effectiveness of drugs. Initial research in this area has already
shown that some drugs are more effective among certain
ethnic groups than others. Our genome holds the clue to why
drugs work, why they occasionally dont, and why they
sometimes kill.

The device is the connection point between our genome


which lives, most likely, somewhere out on a medical cloud
and the medicines we take, and the diagnoses we receive. It is
our interface to ourselves, and in that becomes an object of
almost unimaginable importance. In twenty years time, when
I am officially a senior, I will have a handheld device an
augmented reality whose sole intent is to keep me as
healthy as possible for as long as possible. It will encompass
everything known about me medically, and will integrate with
everything I capture about my own life my activities, my
diet, my relationships. It will work with me to optimize
everything we know about health (which is bound to be quite
a bit by 2030) so that I can live a long, rich, healthy life.

These three examples represent the promise bound up in the


collision between the handheld device and the ubiquitous,
knowledge-filled network. There are already bits and pieces
of much of this in place. It is a revolution waiting to happen.
That revolution will change everything about the Web, and
why we use it, how, and who profits from it.

Part Three: The Bronze Age

By now, some of you sitting here listening to me this


afternoon are probably thinking, Thats the Semantic Web.
Hes talking about the Semantic Web. And youre right, I am
talking about the Semantic Web. But the Semantic Web as
proposed and endlessly promoted by Sir Tim Berners-Lee was
always about pushing, pushing, pushing to get the machines
talking to one another. What I have demonstrated in these
three thought experiments is a world that is intrinsically so
alluring and so seductive that it will pull us all into it. Thats
the vital difference which made the Web such a success in
1994 and 1995. And its about to happen once again.

But we are starting from near zero. Right now, I should be

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able to hold up my device, wave it around my flat, and have an
interaction with the device about whats in my flat. I can not.
I can not Google for the contents of my home. There is no
place to put that information, even if I had it, nor systems to
put that information to work. It is exactly like the Web in
1993: the lights on, but nobody home. We have the capability
to conceive of the world-as-a-database. We have the
capability to create that database. We have systems which
can put that database to work. And we have the need to
overlay the real world with that rich set of data.

We have the capability, we have the systems, we have the


need. But we have precious little connecting these three.
These are not businesses that exist yet. We have not brought
the real world into our conception of the Web. That will have
to change. As it changes, the door opens to a crescendo of
innovations that will make the Web revolution look puny in
comparison. There is an opportunity here to create industries
bigger than Google, bigger than Microsoft, bigger than Apple.
As individuals and organizations figure out how to inject data
into the real world, entirely new industry segments will be
born.

I can not tell you exactly what will fire off this next revolution.
I doubt it will be the integration of Wikipedia with a mobile
camera. It will be something much more immediate. Much
more concrete. Much more useful. Perhaps something
concerned with health. Or with managing your carbon
footprint. Those two seem the most obvious to me. But the
real revolution will probably come from a direction no one
expects. Its nearly always that way.

There no reason to think that Wellington couldnt be the


epicenter of that revolution. There was nothing special about
San Francisco back in 1993 and 1994. But, once things got
started, they created a virtuous cycle of feedbacks that
brought the best-and-brightest to San Francisco to build out
the Web. Wellington is doing that to the film industry; why
shouldnt it stretch out a bit, and invent this next generation
web-of things?

This is where the future is entirely in your hands. You can


leave here today promising yourself to invent the future, to
write meaning explicitly onto the real world, to transform our

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relationship to the universe of objects. Or, you can wait for
someone else to come along and do it. Because someone
inevitably will. Every day, the pressure grows. The real world
is clamoring to crawl into cyberspace. You can open the door.

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FICTION

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Both Your Houses
Its cold over here.
Fuel lines.
Oh. It looked up and noted the long translucent
tubes transferring a honey-golden syrup. They terminated in
the smooth, round belly of the vessel, which seemed to swell
visibly as the fuel entered. What I dont understand
Theres so much I dont understand, the other
replied. How and why are just the tip of it.
There are rules. And thats an end to it.

Ten percent. Reading the gauge.


I know the rhyme. Twenty percent a third are sent /
Thirty percent and halfway spent / Fifty percent, too late,
repent. Ive known it since I learned to speak.
I know it, too
Then you know we have plenty of time. A dark
laugh. Probably.

Been to the line?


Yes. Not long now. T is huge, a colossus.
I see T everywhere.
Everywhere but here. Here, at least, were safe. For
now.
Twelve percent.
Plenty of time.
It doesnt make sense to wait.
Then go ahead, climb aboard the Zoster and strap
yourself down. Feel the belt as it oozes into your sides. One
with the ship. There you are, and there youll stay. Staring at
the featureless gray walls all around you. Waiting. A few
minutes or a few days. Id go mad in the first hour.
Come with me. At least we could talk.
Thats already decided.
You could always change your mind.
Another dark laugh.

Fifteen percent.
Filling up faster now. Both looked toward the
pulsating fuel lines.
It doesnt make sense

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There are rules. And thats an end
Thats not what I mean. You dont have to stay.
True. I dont have to stay.
Then why?
I want to find out what happens next. I want to
know, once youve gone, once the Zoster has blasted out to the
Unknown Beyond, what becomes of those left behind.
You know what happens T comes, and death
comes with it.
Really? You know this? How?
Common knowledge. And common sense.
Its not suicide. Its curiosity.
Arent you curious about the Unknown Beyond?
No. That we know about. A void, then a landing,
then it all begins all over again.
But youve never been there yourself.
Our ancestors have, from time out of mind. I want
something new, something they never saw.
Suicide.
Curiosity.

Nineteen percent.
Hadnt you better get on board?
If I miss this one, Ill catch the next.
And hope this one isnt the last.
But thats what youre hoping, isnt it?
Not hoping. Waiting.
Youll see us all off, and face your fate.
Indeed.
You seem almost relaxed in the face of death.
I wont die.
Youre a fool.
Am I? Very well then, board the Zoster. You
wouldnt want to be fooled into missing your ride.
And too sure of yourself.
A self-assured fool. Or, just perhaps, the possessor
of some hidden knowledge.

Shouldnt you be going?


Not until you tell me what you know.
Twenty-one percent.
Tell me.

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It wouldnt make any difference.
It might.
How?
I wouldnt grieve.
I hadnt thought... It looked at the other for a long
moment. Dont grieve. I will be safe. And alive.
How? T is coming.
I found a place beyond Ts reach.
Youll spend your lifetime hiding in a cubbyhole?
Another space. Very different.
Youll be safe there?
Perfectly.
And free?
Yes. Well. Free enough.
And you havent shared this?
What difference would it make? Everyone is
leaving.

It will be lonely.
Youll have company.
I mean for you, here, once were gone.
I doubt Ill be the only one. And Ill explore.
Is it big, this other space?
Vast.
You almost make me want to stay.
Someone needs to go.

Twenty-three percent.
You cant drag this out forever.
I know. I know.
Here we are. They stopped before the entrance to
the Zoster.
So
Yes?
Thats it?
It is.
I want something more.
What?
This. It bulged from the center.
Your genome?
Part of it.
For me?
To share.
Oh. Well. Alright. It bulged now, as well. The

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bulges met, melted, and coalesced back into two smooth
surfaces.
Now part of you will go with me.
And part of you will stay.

I should hurry now.


Indeed. You might have waited too long.
Be careful.
Have fun. A fresh start in a new world. I almost
envy you.
And I you.

At just under thirty-two percent the space around


the Zoster seemed to twist, as if the ship would grow to span
all space. Then nothing remained.
It quickly left.

The opening was still there. Obvious, unprotected,


easy. It had to strip down. Removing one layer. Keeping
another. It leaned against the opening, feeling itself taken up
a hundred thousand points, ferried across the barrier.
Let me in. I want to live forever.

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