Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Jaron Lanier: You Are Not a Gadget

When my name is Rachel Cass and on behalf of Harvard bookstore I am very pleased to welcome you to this evening's event with Jaron Lanier whose new book You Are Not A Gadget explores the history of the digital revolution and the cultural and technological ramifications of its design. Before we get started here this evening let me take just a moment to remind you of a couple of upcoming events. Tomorrow evening we host journalist and religion scholar Don Latin who will be discussing his new book The Harvard psychedelic club a history of Timothy Leary rom Das Houston Smith and Andrew Weil says should be a really fun event tomorrow evening. That will take place here in the store at 7:00 p.m. And next week we have events with novelist Elizabeth Kostova author of the historian and the new novel The Swan Thieves on Tuesday evening. And on Wednesday evening we have journalist turned lawyer Charlotte Dennett who'll be reading from her new book which outlines the movement to prosecute George W. Bush for murder. Both of those events will take place like that will take place here in the store at 7:00

p.m.. For more information about those events or any of our upcoming events please pick pick up an events flier on your way out this evening or visit us online at Harvard dot com where you fall where you'll find all of our events through the end of February. And now it's my pleasure to welcome to this story. Jaron Lanier Mr. Lanier is a computer scientist known by many as the father of virtual reality. During the late 1980s he founded veep's research the first company to sell virtual reality products and with them developed many of the early implementations of virtual reality including uses in surgical settings and virtual vehicle prototypes. He has continued to be extremely active in the tech in the technology community including stints as lead scientist of the National tele immersion initiative visiting scientist at Silicon Graphics Inc. And scholar at large from Microsoft where he is currently a partner architect. His current interests include the intersection of computer science with medicine physics and neuroscience. His new book. You're not a gadget

looks at the history of the worldwide web in particular does the decisions that were made at its outset are having far reaching ramifications today. There's no question that the Internet has has vastly changed the way we all live our lives. But you are not a gadget looks at the large scale cultural and societal impact of its original design and as well as current as current phenomena such as Wikipedia Facebook and Twitter after the talk this evening we will have time for questions followed by a signing here at the front. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank anyone who purchases a copy of the book here this evening. By doing so you're supporting both the local independent bookstore as well as this author series. And now please join me in welcoming Jaron Lanier. Hey there's something about this audience that makes me feel like I'm back home at Berkeley. I can't quite put my finger on it. Some sort of

strange time in space warp. So this is my very first little event for this book which was published yesterday I think. And I'm so glad that you're sharing this moment with me. Normally when I speak you prepare and I have a little trajectory of views and with a little ending zinger will be. I have the absolutely blank mind right now. Steve Pinker would be proud of me. So I'm I'm going to I'm going to just make up a little trajectory of things to say to you. I think when you start talking about the process by which this book came to be because it is an unusual one. And also what you might see me wiping my eyes. I'm just getting over a thing called the bill's palsy were part of your face goes limp for a while because a nerve needs to regrow and when you're healing your eyes tears. That's what it is it's not that I'm sad it's just just a little bit of that starting

about. It's scary to try to think through these times. When I last lived in Cambridge was I believe 30 years ago. It's so scary. I just I was living in the decrepit little sleazy zone that used to be surrounding my tea down the street and I started to work on a book and it's a trend. You know I think the following is true just before it was mentioned that there's going to be talk here about the Harvard psychedelic club. I think it might have been Tim Leary who told me you have to write a book and Tim's an interesting character somebody I really got to know pretty well and kind of adored but also I came to think he made some poor decisions which I'll get to in a second.

Maybe that's shouldn't be a controversial thing to say at this point I don't know. But I I started to try to book and I found it difficult to write a book. It's hard. It's hard. I can't I could write essays like crazy but I just couldn't ever write a book. And I started working with a sequence of little angels in my life who tried to help me write a book over time and I had a contract with Harcourt Brace which at that time I think was Archerd brace to Ivanovitch a nice contract a generous contract and they kept waiting for it for 25 years and I never turned it in. And there's some debate about whether I had the most overdue book contract ever near in American publishing. And the verdict I've heard is that it wasn't the most overdue one ever but it was perhaps the most overdue one where money was at stake and the author hadn't died. And so I just couldn't do it. It was just I tortured so many people in my life.

So let me just remember Scott Kim who some of you might remember who's currently a puzzle creator for magazines like Discover and some others recorded a bunch of conversations with me and transcribed them and in something like 80 to or something. Tried to turn into but didn't work. A guy who hadn't been writing about technology named Howard Rheingold tried to help me. Total disaster he ended up with a nice writing career about technologies that worked out for him well which I'm glad about Jamie James wonderful science writer tried to help me write a book. He wrote a great book about the music of the spheres later on total disaster. I wasted a few years of his life alas. Kevin Kelly the founder the founding editor of Wired spent like a half year transcribing conversations with me tried to help me turn it into a book. Total disaster wasted a year of his life and it was horrible. It just went on and on and on.

The thing got changed in the last couple of years was I have a daughter now and I have a beautiful 3 year old daughter named Lola and she just wrote her first song called The Fish song. I think I might post it on the Internet in the next couple of days so you can hear the fish song if you check in on my website and something about that changed. My my feeling of of what it was to be human and I I almost I don't want to say this in a way that in any sense detracts from the life in which you don't have a kid. But for me this particular event shifted my perception to one in which I felt very much more part of this huge flow of what this human species is over deep time. And I started to feel less worried about what people would think of the book whether it would be perfect or not. Certainly it wouldn't be

I felt. I'm I'm a bit of an older dad by the time she's an adult I'll be in my 70s or something. And I realized I wanted to leave more for her about what my thinking was. And I also was just forced to stay home alive because those diapers just are not patient enough. And I also discovered something startling which is that sleep deprivation actually helped with my writing. And so chalk it up to biology you know somehow there was suddenly enough focus enough time to pull this thing together and it still is almost unimaginable to me that I'm seeing this thing actually finished after all this time. I was almost worried that if it did become completed and was actually published it would sort of cause some hole in space time and destroy the universe and it just seemed like almost almost an event that had been anticipated so long that it couldn't be incorporated into reality.

So getting back to Tim. I hadn't thought I would talk about this but since his name came up I used to have a lot of conversations with him along the following lines which is I love the I love the creativity and the numinous ness of the psychedelic idea. I come by it naturally. My dad actually lived with Aldous Huxley at one point and stuff and you know I've been I adore the numinous aspect of it and yet and yet something seems really awry to the cultural place of drugs was so confrontational so aligned with only one side of a huge divide. And so obviously damaging to people in some cases and also kind of disconnected from reality because in the times when we had these conversations which would have been in the 80s for the most part I suppose in the 90s there was an intense degree of

of a kind of idealism that was retained from the 60s and this notion that somehow taking a drug would make somebody more enlightened somehow it would save the world somehow it would bring peace to earth even though there was mounting evidence that that's actually not what was going to happen. That's not to say that various things would happen. It's not to say that the whole project was a loss. I think the numinous aspect of it was not a loss although personally I've never taken Tim used to call me the control group. What happens when somebody doesn't take LSD because I was the only person I knew for many years who had never taken it and I remained so I think that brings up for some reason I just don't like psychoactive things it's just like style. So Mark Harkat right now I'm with Random House good people Random House left a bottle of wine in my room but I don't drink alcohol so this is going to be a gift to whoever asked the best questions. So I have no idea if it's any good if it's if it's bad. Blame Random House blame the internet for sucking the money out

of publishing or something. So it gives you bad wine that Internet could take at Facebook. So anyway Tim would say things like you know don't worry there's like he had this faith that there was this kind of agenda almost like a Christian faith really is an Irish mystic that he was there just couldn't face that reality is sort of inexorably pulling us to a better place. And all we have to do is trust in it. And he said stay with the kids stay with the kids wherever the kids are stay with them that'll keep you young. Flatter the kids and so forth and I like you I don't want to flatter the kids. Just be honest with the kids. And I want to be empirical. You know I'm I'm I am. Aside from everything else fundamentally I am a committed technologist I'm committed engineer and scientist at different times depending on what I'm up to and the data really matters. And if it's possible to ask a question that you can test

empirically one should. So in starting around the same period a new idealism is being born about the Internet. And actually there had been traces of it earlier. If you go back into the history of people like Ted Nelson I showed up in the scene I guess late 70s and it was still pretty early in all of that obviously. And there was a relatively small number of people some of them here in Cambridge. Some of them in Palo Alto and Berkeley other places who were starting to formulate a feeling of idealism that was at the very least as potent as the idle idealism that the psychedelics crowd had perhaps even more so. A lot of the same things somehow we're going to bring peace to the world we're going to make all these things better. And I remember at that time I learned how to do the guru talk.

I learned Tim's game. I really did. I I I had the skill. I could go into a room and get people just so excited and so happy with these visions of this incredibly meaningful thing. And the reason I could is because I believed that actually my real was what I did. I don't know if any of you ever had a chance to see what my talks were like back then. But the person I was really emulating even more was Alan Watts if anyone remembers him who had magnificent understated style and could just bring about this amazing portrayal of the numinous aspect of things. So I was doing that with technology but I made a promise to myself after one of my arguments with Tim that I would always follow the data and that if 10 years went by 20 years went by 30 years went by. If I looked at what was happening in the world and the ideology wasn't being borne out I would actually say so. I wouldn't do what Tim did and pretend that I would turn against it completely if only a portion of it was wrong. But if if something wasn't working out I would say

so. I would not address people who are younger with flattery. I wouldn't try to make them love me. I wouldn't try to retain the gurus sort of persona in my middle age. Instead I would try to look honestly at what the results were and report them and try to help people understand the thread that had started the whole process so that if it wasn't working we could wind back and figure out where it might have gone wrong. That's what this is. This is my attempt to not be Tim in this particular way. I hope a little bit of the Newman minority is still apparent in my writing. I still feel it actually. I mean that the the thing is that a great deal of the optimism and the idealism that we felt back then feels every bit as true and present to me today. It's more an implementation problem.

It's I think the core is still there. So since the book in order to do its job has to make a lot of negative statements maybe make a few positive statements to balance a the one of them is that people for the most part are not passive couch potatoes with nothing to offer people for the most part. Instead are unique creative and have a lot to offer and are needed. That's a difficult idea because if that's true it suggests that the job of information systems is to help people find a way to express and bring out the value that they have but also survive off it to live off it. And we succeeded in the first half

and not the second half and we got to do the whole program or it's or it's not working. And but that faith and underlying faith is very important. A lot of the stuff I criticize in the book and I don't really feel like dumping on it right now because it's already in there you can you can read the rant it's it's there it's it's it's not pretty. It's tough. I mean I'm I'm tough and I'm just as I see things. And so it's it's a the criticism is definitely present. But the thing is that the people who tend to disagree with me I think in a sense at core even though they describe me as being well he's he's sour he's he's whatever he is. And what was one of the negative reviews I think said I was oh I don't know like some old guy who wanted to stay relevant and was this or that. And the thing is though that in in in the things I criticize I detect a

pessimism about human nature because there's this notion what if we set up the kind of system that you suggest where people could actually live off their brains when technology gets good which is part of part of what I'm proposing needs to happen there will be disaster because very few people actually could have anything in their brains that they could live off of and the majority of people are like these passive people who want to enjoy the benefits of free stuff and then we'll just make up institutions to support the minority of people who feed them feed them that stuff. And I mean I'm sure the truth is somewhere in between there's some sort of ratio of creativity to passively overall in the human species that's never been revealed because we've never really tested it fully but all the evidence so far from the internet is that it's way closer to creativity. And I used to say things like every person is a genius in some way. It might not be in a conventional way

but in order for somebody just to survive in order for somebody to build a life they they have to develop themselves to some degree that there's got to be beneficial side effects to that for others. In most cases anyway. I used to say that the world that was anticipated in the 19th century by Karl Marx and H.G. Wells and Mark Twain and many others the world in which the machines get good enough that people don't have to toil all the time that when that world happens the most valuable resource in a world. I don't know that word will happen but you know technology is getting better and let's just bear with me on that one. If you're technical If you're skeptical it can happen. That's fine but just bear with me on this as a hypothetical. We're there to be a we're a world of plenty because of better technology that the most valuable asset would be creativity because it would be the thing that would forever be in short supply and the wrong turn we made

was in pretending creativity didn't exist. And the reason it happened is because of this very strange spiritual turn of events. And this could go on into hours and hours. I think I'm only supposed to talk for 20 minutes or I'll tell just a little bit of the story that's in the book and then I'll include the the the wrong turn actually started before I was born and started at the in the aftermath of World War 2. A fellow named Alan who knows who Alan Turing was everybody. So nice to be in a smart town. So Alan Turing might very well be the guy who saved us because he broke the Nazi secret code enigma. Had he not done so. It's not clear what would have happened to England and if England had fell it's not clear what would happen to the US. Problem was that he was gay and it was illegal to be gay and he was

tortured by the U.K. government basically he was subjected to and enforced bizarre medical regime that was supposed to make him straight. And it consisted of forcing him to accept high doses of female hormones. And in this sort of Freudian steam engine metaphor world that preceded our current digital mistaken metaphor is in that strange world. It was supposed to balance him out. Instead he developed breasts and other female characteristics which he didn't seek and he became terribly depressed and committed suicide by turning turning himself into an anti-hero sort of he laced an apple with cyanide and killed himself in his lab. Now the reason this story is relevant to us is that just before his death he read something down which was one of the most rare sorts of things that can be written down a genuinely new spiritual idea I don't think they come along very often and the spiritual idea

was human machine equivalence. He proposed the thought experiment called the Turing Test in which a machine pretends to be a person and a judge is asked to distinguish them just from I guess we would call tweets today. And if the judge can't tell them apart from the Tweed's Then he asks doesn't the machine definitely deserve equal rights. And I think this is a very tender and tragic story because here's this man who helped defeat the Nazis who wear identity based murders and he himself was murdered based on his identity and he asks the question What is the limit that we we should fine for granting empathy. But that idea somehow aligns with a certain aspect of that of a lot of technical minds. We could say slightly Asperger quality perhaps in current in current nomenclature

in which you identify with what Turing anyway believed would be this pristine plutonic perfect world of a machine that frees you from mortality from sexuality from imperfection messiness ambiguity. And in this pristine world you find in other form of life a form of life that isn't subject to these tortures. And I think that amazing leap that Turing made essentially a new kind of religion if you will and a new form of solace has been in competition with the sort of numinous stuff I was talking about another what I would call a humanistic approach to competition for all of these years since. And with the highest respect for Turing I think inadvertently and understandably he started this other idea. And so

if you think that way you might start to think that the Internet is coming alive. It's turning into a big living thing that one of the co-founders of Google says and all the time in public. If you don't it's coming alive then we are all just the thoughts and we become neurons we become less important and you make designs that de-emphasize person how do you make designs that de-emphasize personal responsibility or personal reward or personal narrative personal identity. Crucially you create designs that don't allow personal forgetting. Facebook would have destroyed Jack Kerouac or Bob Dylan or Mark Twain. Can you imagine Bob Dylan showing up in the village with a Facebook a Facebook page from Minnesota. Forget it. He's dead. He wouldn't have. Happen so. So there's it it it's this information being more important than self-invention and putting information about people is essentially the mistake I'm criticizing in the whole book is simply about the.

It's ultimately a story about which forms of spirituality are the most survivable. That's fundamentally what the contest as and finding survivable authentic spirituality is really the only path to survival for us. So that's that's what I'll say for now. And I'm so grateful that you're here. So now I think we're going to take questions. Bruce there's no need to clap. So remember in true Web 2.0 fashion you're competing you're competing for this one. Yes. All right. Well the core of it would have been almost the same but the thing is that that one would have been from before the results were in. So it would have been about these ideas about spirituality and information

science but it wouldn't have been based on it would have still been in the world of theory and speculation. And this is this is motivated by empiricism So it has quite a different character. So. All. All. No no

no no. All right so I think it's it's absolutely crucial to draw distinctions here between what I'm criticizing or what I'm not. To me the web is a tremendous success and Web 2.0 is a pile of crap. So you know to me those are two totally different questions. So the Web the web itself is amazing. I mean consider what the web gave us as a gift. How often do we get fundamental new good news about human nature. So when the web was just being born there were all these debates going on. I mean people screaming matches like nobody will want to contribute unless they're being told to. You need leaders you need advertising you need coersion you need all the stuff. And what happened is the whole thing just happened by volunteer and I'm not opposed to volunteer stuff.

In fact the first wave of web stuff wasn't anonymous. You know it's potential to be a person and be a volunteer. I'm not. But all this Web 2.0 stuff try to figure out some way to exploit that amazing piece of good news. So the Web itself was a huge success. Absolutely without question and remain so and remain. You know it is so so a world without the web would be said you know. And similarly a world without the Internet which is sort of the layer below that we're sort of piling on these layers of ever greater madness which is the thing I talk about in religion the quest for men and this is the new meaning of life you know. So I would peel back that layer. And I am so sorry I don't remember your question. Oh good it couldn't have been better. Well you know Ted's kids the worst software manager in the history of software. He actually he actually and I adore Ted I just adore

Ted and I'm one of my missions with this book is to raise awareness about it. But oh my god it was I mean even the most countercultural hippie ish tolerant people in the world were driven crazy by how crazy Ted was. But so you know I remember oh god I can't even say some of the things I can't even say but it was it was just like the stupidest stuff from the 60s like all bundled into like a soccer team and there's always like we're going to change the world and then. Well yeah. One of the guys is living with his mom and the other one the other one is drunk and then this. I bet there's an empty person here not all the people but there was like This is a 10 just head like this crazy thing going on. And then Ted what Ted would like. Oh I have this vision of this other Larry we're going to put on it we're going to like have this like incredible abstract we're going to build the entire user interface out of nothing but these little L-shaped things on the screen and they're going in and locked together and they'll make your word processor and make your spreadsheet know do everything you like

and there can be anything but the piece that's the way it's going to be. So the thing is he was actually you know the wrong person for that part of the job and it's terribly sad. But it also has to be said that he had to endure an extraordinarily difficult environment because it's hard to do that stuff's contentious today. But it was contentious even back then. And I mean I remember. One of these events at some hippie place in parking lot or something in the late 70s. Ted's giving his standard Xantippe to talk. And this band of Maoists flash mobs and before there was digital technology jumped off on stage you're going to keep money in there. The Internet didn't exist as a word then but you're going to keep you're going to bring money into the world of computers. They got to be free. You're a capitalist evil pig evil. We've been watching you we're watching you. And he was like and he was like well look you look like this. This is not this is not going to get anything built. It's just not going to happen. So that's that's what it was like.

And I I think had he said this there's this principle of first thought best thought that often are beginners like the first person who approaches something often just nails it because they just see it with fresh eyes and they take in the whole thing. And Ted had that extraordinary vantage on all this stuff that became the web and NEHTA the HD as hypertext which was Ted's term for it. So he really foresaw he invented this whole thing. And his if he had actually been able to realize even a portion of his amitie design I'll make one. I'll I'll I'll state this. I'm certain if Ted actually succeeded at engineering anything there wouldn't have been a recession because there would have been so much wealth growth. I feel quite certain of the you know it's a combination of that and the Maoists and the fact that all of us were flaky and every single one

of us including me was convinced we had infinite powers as technical kids and we were all idiots. All right. So it's all of those things. It's like a confluence of idiocies. So that's why I didn't get to the core. His his his clarity of vision was absolutely spot on though. Yeah. He was on the. There's a tremendous fascination with complexity. And in fact there's this

sort of strange thing that happened where the design of the Internet evolved at a time when there was a particularly heightened fascination with complexity was disturbing. It was coincident with the time when some of the ideas about being on the edge of chaos were becoming popular and the the the outcome was really rather strange. The design of the internet was made more obscure than it needed to be because the site. Well even though we're laying this out and people are doing this. We're going to pretend that we can possibly remember what we did or understand what we did because we really want to enjoy seeing it do its own thing and a bit of that is one thing but we really did it to access. So we have this sort of insane situation now where we have to investigate the Internet as if it's like some alien planet that we know nothing about. Even though we just built the damn thing really pretty recently you know and it's sort of a ridiculous kind of practical data loss. That was a deliberate creation of hassle for ourselves in order to create a certain fantasy on a massive global scale at

great expense and it's extraordinary. That's what we did. Yes the original. Absolutely. The original core de-centralized is different from unknowable though. So the packet the idea packets was to be able to route around in case a nuclear bomb took out part of the network. Ironically we've kind of evolved the thing in such a way that it doesn't quite have that robustness anymore in various ways and yet we increase the degree of unknowability beyond where it needed to be to have robustness. So I mean yes of course that was the origin but it wasn't what guided it. Here is Richard Stallman here. OK I'm just checking. I don't know.

It's Cambridge you know he can show up. We used to go to the Maxson Balios and stuff. So I remember like 30 years ago I was like in Richard's decrepid falling down apartment and we we were fighting off this over this girl we both wanted to date and it's like the stupid ass kid thing. And I think we would know if she was here. And and and Richard was crying and you say Oh my beloved work is going to be destroyed because this little startup is going to own it and they're going to go out of business and the world will never benefit from it. And it's such an interesting question because so my response at the time this was another one of these first thought best thought things what I said to him is you know there's a lot of levels of idealism and what if in order to keep up all the energy to have this idealism that you don't want to lead a business own software you want to keep it

all part of a commons. What if to keep that going. You don't have enough energy to also make the software itself in its content. Remarkable because the immediate thing he was going to do is make a version of Unix which became you know the new thing and then eventually Linux and Unix. I mean even back then I thought it was like the like it's pretty boring. It's sort of like saying I'm sure a bookstore like this doesn't have any boring book you're going to hear it's like say. We are going to collectively write a version of this that we will give away. And it's like OK that's great. And so that's how that's how I felt about it. Like you know if you're going to choose which idealism and actually so this

brings up and I remember Richard Richard did something extraordinary at a time when China was just barely open at all. He went to China and he said Here take this free software so you don't have to buy it from the evil American companies. And I just think of that not because there's all this controversy with companies having to compromise or not with China. Mean it's such a it's you know I mean you don't you don't necessarily get to be so competent and so powerful in your life that you can live out all ideologies to perfection and all your ideals. You have to make some choices you have to prioritize and I just honestly don't care if my web server was written by an unpaid collective or some paid team somewhere or you know as long as a code is good you know it could be trained penguins in Antarctica as far as I think the code is actually pretty important too. So. So that's you know but you know Richard Richard is another character from that era who is like Ted you know very brilliant and very

original and also just extraordinarily difficult. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. You are right. They can charge for all the amount of

time you know where people may be. Life is far more like an oracle. OK. So I think on a macro economic level the usual the way the open open creative commons would Hy-Vee kind of world the Hy-Vee league I could call them that the Hy-Vee league interprets the sort of abundance of bits the fact that you can have so much stuff you can only have so many gardens because of the limited amount of land but you could have lots. So you can make a copy without destroying the original so they interpret it as well that just makes it all the more reason to to make it more of a common sort of a thing. But see the way I see it is the first bits in history were

money right. And the thing about a money supply is that if it's too loose it doesn't work if it's too tight it doesn't work. It has to be just about right. And what that means is there has to be a homeopathic amount of artificial scarcity in it in order to support a growing economy. And this gets into this whole economic theories. So I think that's exactly what's also needed online on a macro level. The problem with taking a file and not isn't that the original file is missing. The problem is that it removes the possibility for that homoeopathic bit of artificial scarcity that allows an economy to happen so that you can have investment and get a return and so forth. I mean you need that time. That's a necessary component for for a growing market. Now you can say I hate capitalism I hate markets do differently and that's a conversation too. But if you're going to go down this path I think you really do need that component. Yes.

Thanks for coming on. There's a lot there's a lot there's a lot there. First of all Google as people I really like. I've known the google the kids who started it since they were really kids. I the guy who's running it now somebody I've known for decades and I and I I was chief scientist of the company they bought and I benefited from Google. I'm totally conflicted and talking about the because I actually I like them and I personally benefit from them so I have every incentive in the world to say positive things about him. All right. But but a couple of things about Google. One is

in my opinion there's a natural monopoly around the ad exchange that's of the category of natural monopoly that arises in something like a paypal or an ebay that when you have a digital exchange the boundaries of that exchange are so literal and so sharp edged and so hidden inside a server that it's harder than in other types of markets for a competing exchange to arise. So you have amplified network effect. There is some controversy about this. There are some people who are arguing that we all make too much of this particular phenomenon but come on. I mean it's crazy look at it. I mean Microsoft which I'm also conflicted with I'm like massively conflicted in all directions. I'm an honest broker. That's that's suspended between us. So Microsoft puts all this money into being to compete with it. There's like inching little little bits of market share and it's because of its effect. So Problem number two is that a pervasive monopolistic advertising seen service does become chorus of at some point you just have to start treating it as a business expense to make sure you're in charge of your own

communication with people. And that's a problem. And I don't get into this too much because I'm sure it'll turn into some huge court thing eventually and I shouldn't really get in the middle of it but it's a problem. Third thing is I mean the idea of funding information systems through advertising actually so far as I know originated with a guy named Chris Swindell who proposed to solve the problem of how to fund advertising in America by putting advertising in classrooms in the 80s or 90s or something. And I was once asked to debate him at one of these conferences and I said funding education or culture through advertising it's like trying to get nutrition by connecting a tube from your butt to your mouth. And now that I realize I'm presenting a rather formal theoretical economics argument here but the thing is I think precisely the same argument applies in

the long term to Google that you know once everybody's aggregated for all of this advertising there's nothing left to advertise. You know it's like it eats itself like a or an herb or a snake instead of a tube. It's up to you to say so. So this is this is not sustainable and it is it is a problem. And I think it ultimately I mean Google I like the idea page rank was great and the having search engine is great but the advertising model the advertising business is where I have a problem. And what I'd much rather Google did is had us pay for the search. I'd rather I'd rather pay a penny per search than have the whole of society turn into an advertising agency. Yeah. Yeah. Oh no I started with computers before that but I did have to get with the

Tari. And in fact at one point I was a researcher when I was very young at a place called Atari Cambridge working with a guy named Alan K. of Kendall Square that other square. And I did have I think what you're thinking about the moon related thing was I did a video game called moondust in 82 or something that was in its successful and it was the first improvising music product and the first sort of art videogame I think that's what people thought anyway and it was pretty successful I think it's pretty much forgotten what's the single biggest one. Going back to Ted Nelson the single biggest mistake is that there's what more than one logical copy of any file. Yeah. Are you kidding. Oh my God. Yeah.

I mean an amazing amount flows out of that. I mean Tanzania's it should only be one logical copy of a file of course there might be cast for performance but there's only one. Then you can have a micro system where you pay to access it so the whole idea of cut copy paste goes away and make another green argument. The Internet actually is a big energy hog these days and almost all the bits flowing over it are total crap that are needed. And it's unconscionable. Print. Well where it's going to go is a really interesting question and it's such an interesting it's the I don't know where it's going to go. I'm trying to influence it. If I knew why would I bother to

go. Yeah. OK. So I believe there's there's a generation gap in Social networking users that's actually the inverse of the cliche where people who are old enough to have jobs and kids say I don't know what the age cut off is early 20s or something tend to have pretty good experiences on Facebook. They might say oh I can reconnect with my old friends maybe I can meet 20 people all the sort of usual narrative that applies for what a great thing it is. Applies to that age group people who are younger are the ones who I've I've personally found and I can't give you data on this because I just don't think it's been studied properly. But the ones I've communicated with who are younger let's say 17 tend to first of all use it religiously but also have a tremendous amount of anxiety about it and the anxieties they express are. Am I in the right crowd. Do I have enough friends and my high

enough status as perceived. Am I cool enough now. All of these things are precisely the things that all of us have worried about and all kids are worried about since the species came into existence. However the difference with Facebook is that when you put in the digital representation you simplify the thing itself you turn everybody into a an entry on a tax form or something and there's a feedback loop where people are sort of stuck within their representation on various levels and I can go into different details about this but you can't be both in and out of a relationship at the same time which you can be in real life because it's hard to understand but you're just like on Facebook you're sort of you know there's a bit that you say. Another issue is what I talked about before the inability to forget the inability to race. So you can end up being sort of trapped if you happen to go down a path that you don't like it's very hard because there's a commercial incentive in controlling and controlling that information. Facebook has influenced society so much and it's influenced by quest for for profit that's totally failed you know the thing is a

complete it doesn't make money so or it doesn't make money to speak up. So it's basically this religious experiment it's like this ideology say oh maybe this will work and it changed everything but to no effect. You know it's just so strange. So I mean what else to say about Facebook. There's a it it empowers geeks because if you are if you have any geeky digital skills then you can actually control your privacy settings and if you don't you can't. They're just complicated enough that they're at the threshold where this empowers the non-key and turns them into a more passive consumer sort of abused person. But I like the kids you know I know them too. And the thing about I want to make another comment which is this is sort of the technical communities that make stuff are made of weirdos you know like if you go to a good physics or math department you don't see GQ models and stuff. You know you see like this whole weird variety of all kinds of different people.

But the Web 2.0 is so based on popularity that all the other entrepreneurs are like these alpha guys who are like It's so weird like they're your super conformist and this might be a mean thing to say but it's really true and there's there's a very strange sense of entitlement because the business because of the monopolistic aspect of the Google ad exchange. There's no hope for any of these people to make money. So their only hope is to be popular enough to be bought by Google or Microsoft or somebody. So it's not really a marketing min. It's sort of a fake market. In my opinion. Well I care a great deal about tools and I have

a tremendous passion for trying to build better tools and I feel like I've been able to make some contributions in that area. But I want to do more and more is desperately needed because tools are everything. You know obviously now we've evolved enough here that we can look empirically at some results of different approaches. So I do really think and this is this is something that upsets the Linux crowd and stuff but the Linux movement and also the Wikipedia on a lot of other things tend to emulate designs that already exist. They might evolve them a bit incrementally but basically there was already Uncyclopedia there's already Unix and then these things are evolutions of those things. The really different stuff comes out of shops are closed. And the reason being closed temporarily matters is for the same reason that it's important to be able to be confidential before publishing publishing an academic paper. It's because you need to have encapsulation to get your ducks in a row and do testing without the whole world being in like if everything in the world is connected to everything else you get what I call global mush

and you can't achieve excellence. You need to have another term is punctuated equilibrium punctuated encapsulation. Life on Earth evolved cells for exactly the same reason evolution without cells cell walls separating genes would create just more glue on the earth it wouldn't create. So iPhone apps are made by General developers are better than Android apps. I mean seriously. I mean you know this shouldn't be something that's controversial. Why. Because you can make money. The bad thing is Apple can reject you you know tradeoff tradeoff in life just like my argument with Solomon way way back. It's a genuine tradeoff. I'm not saying it's perfect. The apple is also so. So you know the the the paid model spawns off new companies like on the Windows system and I've criticized it a great deal in the past. I think it's become much better lately spawned whole industries of

developers building things some of which were quite good. Mathematica. I don't know I mean I could give you all these examples. The open movement doesn't do that. Punctuated Equilibrium capitalistic team based paid for content gave us will write the open source world cannot give us will right. It's just too much work. Too much risk too much speculation and also to do original work. You have to get an investment and then separate yourself from the world a while to do it. You can't be engaged in this constant like oh I just added line 13 to this piece of code for the this part of the Apaches. The thing is it's like ridiculous you can't work that one or two more questions. Yes. You know there's been a whole bunch of them that have been developed over time.

I. So there's one I was involved with which is an interesting semi-successful failure which was called Second Life. And I know there's a second life group in town so there might be some people here from it. OK. OK. And obviously I'm a vitriolic guy so I like the virtual world approach. But the interesting thing about that is when you go to somebody's face it it does give you a sense of them you know if there's some personal eccentricity or something you can get it you know just a bit of a feeling of that person it's their land you know. And Commerce also works within it. It has a lot of qualities that I think are good. I think the tricky part with it is honestly I think it's I'm sorry to say this but the tools just need to get a lot better because it's just there's a point where the content started looking the same you know and the tools just really need to get better the avatars. But another issue is that this geography thing can be a pain in the butt because an infinitely large planet just gets hard to navigate and hard to deal with.

And you end up just using some abstraction anyway and then you wonder why. If you're just teleporting Why did you even bother with geometry and that whole thing is a really interesting nexus of problems. But what I like about it is it does give people a space that really can be quirky. So you know in my mind there's just sort of the spectrum of how much design and racist people. So MySpace lets people be a little bit more to show their freak flag a little bit more than Facebook because in Facebook you can put up with pictures but it's within this framework. My space you can really just make an ugly crazy thing which is good. Second Life is even better. You really. And it forces you to put some work into it there's a tradeoff but obviously a lot of people do it so we know what people have it in them we shouldn't worry that people don't have it in them. So one more. Oh oh.

Oh oh oh. Yeah totally legitimate question. You might get the wine actually. And the thing is that one is I think one of the most important messages of my book is that especially if you're an engineer especially if you're a technologist it's really crucial never to pretend that you know an answer that you don't actually know. And I won't pretend to know the answer to your question but I will tell you why I'm searching for it.

Thank you