Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Selected Works
2005 2010
Mark Pesce
Copyright 2010, Mark D. Pesce
2
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
3
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.
4
LITERATURE
5
What Ever Happened to the Book?
For Ted Nelson
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.
9
we decide to go all in or hold back.
10
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?
11
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.
12
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.
13
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.
14
focus as the stories that told us who we are and our place in
the world traveled down the generations.
15
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
16
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.
17
EDUCATION
18
The Unfinished Project:
Exploration, Learning and Networks
Part One: The Educational Field
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.
19
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.
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.
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.
But how?
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.
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.
24
That has now changed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
30
POLITICS
31
Hyperpolitics (American Style)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
37
vital center of human knowledge creation in the history of our
species becomes entirely fossilized.
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.
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.
40
Sharing Power (International Edition)
Introduction: War is Over (if you want it)
41
control. Someones going to get hurt. That much is already
clear.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
46
first sign of success. Connection is being made.
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.
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.
48
MEDIA
49
Piracy is Good?
PART ONE: HYPERDISTRIBUTION
50
holding only the Ace of Hearts, but soon enough you'll have a
full deck.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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They'll have long shelf lives. This model would probably be
very successful.
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
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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.)
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box, people will be watching more TV, and more different
kinds of TV, than ever before.
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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.
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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.
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Their future looks nothing like their recent past.
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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.
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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.
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century - has gone noticeably stale. It's ready to be shaken up.
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.
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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.
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Unevenly Distributed:
Production Models for the 21st Century
70
delivery MP3s, and several hundred million devices which can
play them. IUMA was a good idea, but five years too early.
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
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(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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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
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professionals from amateurs.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
85
BUSINESS
86
Calculated Risks
Part One: Baby Books
87
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.
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.
89
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
94
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.
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.
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she ran into trouble.
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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.
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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.
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100
TECHNOLOGY
101
The Telephone Repair Handbook
with Angus Fraser
102
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
106
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:
107
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.
108
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
117
The server then puts these results into a database, so they can
be retrieved and analyzed as needed.
118
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.
119
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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and unexpectedly powerful.
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.
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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?
133
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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
137
FICTION
138
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.
Fifteen percent.
Filling up faster now. Both looked toward the
pulsating fuel lines.
It doesnt make sense
139
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.
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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.
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