Internet ex Machina

Recorded yesterday morning, edited with slides last night; transcoded and uploaded to YouTube just five minutes ago.

OR,
How I Quit Worrying and Learned to be a Commodity

Introduction

“The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
– John Gilmore

I read a very interesting article last week. It turns out that, despite their best efforts, the Communist government of the People’s Republic of China have failed to insulate their prodigious population from the outrageous truths to be found online. In the article from the Times, Wang Guoqing, a vice-minister in the information office of the Chinese cabinet was quoted as saying, “It has been repeatedly proved that information blocking is like walking into a dead end.” If China, with all of the resources of a one-party state, and thus able to “lock down” its internet service providers, directing their IP traffic through a “great firewall of China”, can not block the free-flow of information, how can any government, anywhere – or any organization, or institution – hope to try?

Of course, we all chuckle a little bit when we see the Chinese attempt the Sisyphean task of damming the torrent of information which characterizes life in the 21st century. We, in the democratic West, know better, and pat ourselves on the back. But we are in no position to throw stones. Gilmore’s Law is not specifically tuned for political censorship; censorship simply means the willful withholding of information – for any reason. China does it for political reasons; in the West our reasons for censorship are primarily economic. Take, for example, the hullabaloo associated with the online release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, three days before its simultaneous, world-wide publication. It turns out that someone, somewhere, got a copy of the book, and laboriously photographed every single page of the 784-page text, bound these images together into a single PDF file, and then uploaded it to the global peer-to-peer filesharing networks. Everyone with a vested financial interest in the book – author J.K. Rowling, Bloomsbury and Scholastic publishing houses, film studio Warner Brothers – had been feeding the hype for the impending release, all focused around the 21st of July. An enormous pressure had been built up to “peek at the present” before it was formally unwrapped, and all it took was one single gap in the $20 million security system Bloomsbury had constructed to keep the text safely secure. Then it became a globally distributed media artifact. Curiously, Bloomsbury was reported as saying they thought it would only add to sales - if many people are reading the book now, even illegally, then even more people will want to be reading the book right now. Piracy, in this case, might be a good thing.

These two examples represent two data points which show the breadth and reach of Gilmore’s Law. Censorship, broadly defined, is anything which restricts the free flow of information. The barriers could be political, or they could be economic, or they could – as in the case immediately relevant today – they could be a nexus of the two. Broadband in Australia is neither purely an economic nor purely a political issue. In this, broadband reflects the Janus-like nature of Telstra, with one face turned outward, toward the markets, and another turned inward, toward the Federal Government. Even though Telstra is now (more or less) wholly privatized, the institutional memory of all those years as an arm of the Federal Government hasn’t yet been forgotten. Telstra still behaves as though it has a political mandate, and is more than willing to use its near-monopoly economic strength to reinforce that impression.

Although seemingly unavoidable, given the established patterns of the organization, Telstra’s behavior has consequences. Telstra has engendered enormous resentment – both from its competitors and its customers – for its actions and attitude. They’ve recently pushed the Government too far (at least, publicly), and have been told to back off. What may not be as clear – and what I want to warn you of today – is how Telstra has sewn the seeds of its own failure. What’s more, this may not be anything that Telstra can now avoid, because this is neither a regulatory nor an economic failure. It can not be remedied by any mechanism that Telstra has access to. Instead, it may require a top-down rethinking of the entire business.

I: Network Effects

For the past several thousand years, the fishermen of Kerala, on the southern coast of India, have sailed their dhows out into the Indian Ocean, lowered their nets, and hoped for the best. When the fishing is good, they come back to shore fully laden, and ready to sell their catch in the little fish markets that dot the coastline. A fisherman might have a favorite market, docking there only to find that half a dozen other dhows have had the same idea. In that market there are too many fish for sale that day, and the fisherman might not even earn enough from his catch to cover costs. Meanwhile, in a market just a few kilometers away, no fishing boats have docked, and there’s no fish available at any price. This fundamental chaos of the fish trade in Kerala has been a fact of life for a very long time.

Just a few years ago, several of India’s rapidly-growing wireless carriers strung GSM towers along the Kerala coast. This gives those carriers a signal reach of up to about 25km offshore – enough to be very useful for a fisherman. While mobile service in India is almost ridiculously cheap by Australian standards – many carriers charge a penny for an SMS, and a penny or two per minute for voice calls – a handset is still relatively expensive, even one such as the Nokia 1100, which was marketed specifically at emerging mobile markets, designed to be cheap and durable. Such a handset might cost a month’s profits for a fisherman – which makes it a serious investment. But, at some point in the last few years, one fisherman – probably a more prosperous one – bought a handset, and took it to sea. Then, perhaps quite accidentally, he learned, through a call ashore, of a market wanting for fish that day, brought his dhow to dock there, and made a handsome profit. After that, the word got around rapidly, and soon all of Kerala’s fisherman were sporting their own GSM handsets, calling into shore, making deals with fishmongers, acting as their own arbitrageurs, creating a true market where none had existed before. Today in Kerala the markets are almost always stocked with just enough fish; the fishmongers make a good price for their fish, and the fishermen themselves earn enough to fully recoup the cost of their handsets in just two months. Mobile service in Kerala has dramatically altered the economic prospects for these people.

This is not the only example: in Kenya farmers call ahead to the markets to learn which ones will have the best prices for their onions and maize; spice traders, again in Kerala, use SMS to create their own, far-flung bourse. Although we in the West generally associate mobile communications with affluent lifestyles, a significant number of microfinance loans made by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and others in Pakistan, India, Africa and South America are used to purchase mobile handsets – precisely because the correlation between access to mobile communications and earning potential has become so visible in the developing world. Grameen Bank has even started its own carrier, GrameenPhone, to service its microfinance clientele.

Although economists are beginning to recognize and document this curious relationship between economics and access to communication, it needs to be noted that this relationship was not predicted – by anyone. It happened all by itself, emerging from the interaction of individuals and the network. People – who are always the intelligent actors in the network – simply recognized the capabilities of the network, and put them to work. As we approach the watershed month of October 2007, when three billion people will be using mobile handsets, when half of humanity will be interconnected, we can expect more of the unexpected.

All of this means that none of us – even the most foresighted futurist – can know in advance what will happen when people are connected together in an electronic network. People themselves are too resourceful, and too intelligent, to model their behavior in any realistic way. We might be able to model their network usage – though even that has confounded the experts – but we can’t know why they’re using the network, nor what kind of second-order effects that usage will have on culture. Nor can we realistically provision for service offerings; people are more intelligent, and more useful, than any other service the carriers could hope to offer. The only truly successful service offering in mobile communications is SMS – because it provides an asynchronous communications channel between people. The essential feature of the network is simply that it connects people together, not that it connects them to services.

This strikes at the heart of the most avaricious aspects of the carriers’ long-term plans, which center around increasing the levels of services on offer, by the carrier, to the users of the network. Although this strategy has consistently proven to be a complete failure – consider Compuserve, Prodigy and AOL – it nevertheless has become the idée fixe of shareholder reports, corporate plans, and press releases. The network, we are told, will become increasingly more intelligent, more useful, and more valuable. But all of the history of the network argues directly against this. Nearly 40 years after its invention, the most successful service on the Internet is still electronic mail, the Internet’s own version of SMS. Although the Web has become an important service in its own right, it will never be as important as electronic mail, because it connects individuals.

Although the network in Kerala was brought into being by the technology of GSM transponders and mobile handsets, the intelligence of the network truly does lie in the individuals who are connected by the network. Let’s run a little thought experiment, and imagine a world where all of India’s telecoms firms suffered a simultaneous catastrophic and long-lasting failure. (Perhaps they all went bankrupt.) Do you suppose that the fishermen would simply shrug their shoulders and go back to their old, chaotic market-making strategies? Hardly. Whether they used smoke signals, or semaphores, or mirrors on the seashore, they’d find some way to maintain those networks of communication – even in the absence of the technology of the network. The benefits of the network so outweigh the implementation of the network that, once created, networks can not be destroyed. The network will be rebuilt from whatever technology comes to hand – because the network is not the technology, but the individuals connected through it.

This is the kind of bold assertion that could get me into a lot of trouble; after all, everyone knows that the network is the towers, the routers, and the handsets which comprise its physical and logical layers. But if that were true, then we could deterministically predict the qualities and uses of networks well in advance of their deployment. The quintessence of the network is not a physical property; it is an emergent property of the interaction of the network’s users. And while people do persistently believe that there is some “magic” in the network, the source of that magic is the endlessly inventive intellects of the network’s users. When someone – anywhere in the network – invents a new use for the network, it propagates widely, and almost instantaneously, transmitted throughout the length and breadth of the network. The network amplifies the reach of its users, but it does not goad them into being inventive. The service providers are the users of the network.

I hope this gives everyone here some pause; after all, it is widely known that the promise to bring a high-speed broadband network to Australia is paired with the desire to provide services on that network, including – most importantly – IPTV. It’s time to take a look at that promise with our new understanding of the real power of networks. It is under threat from two directions: the emergence of peer-produced content; and the dramatic, disruptive collapse in the price of high-speed wide-area networking which will fully power individuals to create their own network infrastructure.

II: DIYnet

Although nearly all high-speed broadband providers – which are, by and large, monopoly or formerly monopoly telcos – have bet the house on the sale of high-priced services to finance the build-out of high-speed (ADSL2/FTTN/FTTH) network infrastructure, it is not at all clear that these service offerings will be successful. Mobile carriers earn some revenue from ringtone and game sales, but this is a trivial income stream when compared to the fees they earn from carriage. Despite almost a decade of efforts to milk more ARPU from their customers, those same customers have proven stubbornly resistant to a continuous fleecing. The only thing that customers seem obviously willing to pay for is more connectivity – whether that’s more voice calls, more SMS, or more data.

What is most interesting is what these customers have done with this ever-increasing level of interconnectivity. These formerly passive consumers of entertainment have become their own media producers, and – perhaps more ominously, in this context – their own broadcasters. Anyone with a cheap webcam (or mobile handset), a cheap computer, and a broadband link can make and share their own videos. This trend had been growing for several years, but since the launch of YouTube, in 2005, it has rocketed into prominence. YouTube is now the 4th busiest website, world-wide, and perhaps 65% of all video downloads on the web take place through Google-owned properties. Amateur productions regularly garner tens of thousands of viewers – and sometimes millions.

We need to be very careful about how we judge both the meaning of the word “amateur” in the context of peer-produced media. An amateur production may be produced with little or no funding, but that does not automatically mean it will appear clumsy to the audience. The rough edges of an amateur prodution are balanced out by a corresponding increase in salience – that is, the importance which the viewer attaches to the subject of the media. If something is compelling because it is important to us – something which we care passionately about – high production values do not enter into our assessment. Chad Hurley, one of the founders of YouTube has remarked that the site has no “gold-standard” for production; in fact, YouTube’s gold-standard is salience – if the YouTube audience feels the work is important, audience members will share it within their own communities of interest. Sharing is the proof of salience.

After two years of media sharing, the audience for YouTube (which is now coincident with the global television audience in the developed world) has grown accustomed to being able to share salient media freely. This is another of the unexpected and unpredicted emergent effects of the intelligence of humans using the network. We now have an expectation that when we encounter some media we find highly salient, we should be able to forward it along within our social networks, sharing it within our communities of salience. But this is not the desire of many copyright holders, who collect their revenues by placing barriers to the access of media. This fundamental conflict, between the desire to share, as engendered by our own interactions with the network, and the desire of copyright holders to restrain media consumption to economic channels has, thus far, been consistently resolved in favor of sharing. The copyright holders have tried to use the legal system as a bludgeon to change the behavior of the audience; this has not, nor will it ever work. But, as the copyright holders resort to ever-more-draconian techniques to maintain control over the distribution of their works, the audience is presented with an ever-growing world of works that are meant to be shared. The danger here is that the audience is beginning to ignore works which they can not share freely, seeing them as “broken” in some fundamental way. Since sharing has now become essential quality of media, the audience is simply reacting to a perceived defect in those works. In this sense, the media multinationals have been their own worst enemies; by restricting the ability of the audiences to share the works they control, they have helped to turn audiences toward works which audiences can distribute through their own “do-it-yourself” networks.

These DIYnets are now a permanent fixture of the media landscape, even as their forms evolve through YouTube playlists, RSS feeds, and sharing sites such as Facebook and Pownce. These networks exist entirely outside the regular and licensed channels of distribution; they are not suitable – legally or economically – for distribution via a commercial IPTV network. Telstra can not provide these DIYnets to their customers through its IPTV service – nor can any other broadband carrier. IPTV, to a carrier, means the distribution of a few hundred highly regularized television channels. While there will doubtless be a continuing market for mass entertainment, that audience is continuously being eroded by a growing range of peer-produced programming which is growing in salience. In the long-term this, like so much in the world, will probably obey an 80/20 rule, with about 80 percent of the audience’s attention absorbed in peer-produced, highly-salient media, while 20 percent will come from mass-market, high-production-value works. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bet the house on a service offering which will command such a small portion of the audience’s attention. Yes, Telstra will offer it. But it will never be able to compete with the productions created by the audience.

Because of this tension between the desires of the carrier and the interests of the audience, the carrier will seek to manipulate the capabilities of the broadband offering, to weight it in favor of a highly regularized IPTV offering. In the United States this has become known as the “net neutrality” argument, and centers on the question of whether a carrier has the right to shape traffic within its own IP network to advantage its own traffic over that of others. In Australia, the argument has focused on tariff rates: Telstra believes that if they build the network, they should be able to set the tariff. The ACCC argues otherwise. This has been the characterized as the central stumbling block which has prevented the deployment of a high-speed broadband network across the nation, and, in some sense that is entirely true – Telstra has chosen not move forward until it feels assured that both economic and regulatory conditions prove favorable. But this does not mean that the consumer demand for a high-speed network was simply put on pause over the last years. More significantly, the world beyond Telstra has not stopped advancing. While it now costs roughly USD $750 per household to provide a high-speed fiber-optic connection to the carrier network, other technologies are coming on-line, right now, which promise to reduce those costs by an order of magnitude, and furthermore, which don’t require any infrastructure build-out on the part of the carrier. This disruptive innovation could change the game completely.

III: Check, Mate

All parties to the high-speed broadband dispute – government, Telstra, the Group of Nine, and the public – share the belief that this network must be built by a large organization, able to command the billions of dollars in capital required to dig up the streets, lay the fiber, and run the enormous data centers. This model of a network is an reflection in copper, plastic and silicon, of the hierarchical forms of organization which characterize large institutions – such as governments and carriers. However, if we have learned anything about the emergent qualities of networks, it is that they quickly replace hierarchies with “netocracies“: horizontal meritocracies, which use the connective power of the network to out-compete slower and rigid hierarchies. It is odd that, while the network has transformed nearly everything it has touched, the purveyors of those networks – the carriers – somehow seem immune from those transformative qualities. Telecommunications firms are – and have ever been – the very definition of hierarchical organizations. During the era of plain-old telephone service, the organizational form of the carrier was isomorphic to the form of the network. However, over the last decade, as the internal network has transitioned from circuit-switched to packed-switched, the institution lost synchronization with the form of the network it provided to consumers. As each day passes, carriers move even further out of sync: this helps to explain the current disconnect between Telstra and Australians.

We are about to see an adjustment. First, the data on the network which was broken into packets; now, the hardware of the network has followed. Telephone networks were centralized because they required explicit wiring from point-to-point; cellular networks are decentralized, but use licensed spectrum – which requires enormous capital resources. Both of these conditions created significant barriers to entry. But there is no need to use wires, nor is there any need to use licensed spectrum. The 2.4 GHz radio band is freely available for anyone to use, so long as that use stays below certain power values. We now see a plethora of devices using that spectrum: cordless handsets, Bluetooth devices, and the all-but-ubiquitous 802.11 “WiFi” data networks. The chaos which broadcasters and governments had always claimed would be the by-product of unlicensed spectrum has, instead, become an wonderfully rich marketplace of products and services. The first generation of these products made connection to the centralized network even easier: cordless handsets liberated the telephone from the twisted-pair connection to the central office, while WiFi freed computers from heavy and clumsy RJ-45 jacks and CAT-5 cabling. While these devices had some intelligence, that intelligence centered on making and maintaining a connection to the centralized network.

Recently, advances in software have produced a new class of devices which create their own networks. Devices connected to these ad-hoc “mesh” networks act as peers in a swarm (similar to the participants in peer-to-peer filesharing), rather than clients within a hierarchical distribution system. These network peers share information about their evolving topology, forming a highly-resilient fabric of connections. Devices maintain multiple connections to multiple nodes throughout the network, and a packet travels through the mesh along a non-deterministic path. While this was always the promise of TCP/IP networks, static routes through the network cloud are now the rule, because they provide greater efficiency, make it easier to maintain the routers, diagnose network problems, and keeps maintenance costs down. But mesh networks are decentralized; there is no controlling authority, no central router providing an interconnection with a peer network. And – most significantly – mesh networks now incredibly inexpensive to implement.

Earlier this year, the US-based firm Meraki launched their long-awaited Meraki Mini wireless mesh router. For about AUD $60, plus the cost of electricity, anyone can become a peer within a wireless mesh network providing speeds of up to 50 megabits per second. The device is deceptively simple; it’s just an 802.11 transceiver paired with a single-chip computer running LINUX and Meraki’s mesh routing software – which was developed by Meraki’s founders while Ph.D. students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The 802.11 radio within the Meraki Mini has been highly optimized for long-distance communication. Instead of the normal 50 meter radius associated with WiFi, the Meraki Mini provides coverage over at least 250 meters – and, depending upon topography, can reach 750 meters. Let me put that in context, by showing you the coverage I’ll get when I install a Meraki Mini on my sixth-floor balcony in Surry Hills:

From my flat, I will be able to reach all the way from Central Station to Riley Street, from Belvoir Street over to Albion Street. Thousands of people will be within range of my network access point. Of course, if all of them chose to use my single point of access, my Meraki Mini would be swamped with traffic. It simply wouldn’t be able to cope. But – given that the Meraki Mini is cheaper than most WiFi access points available at Harvey Norman – it’s likely that many people within that radius would install their own access points. These access points would detect each others’ presence, forming a self-organizing mesh network. If every WiFi access point visible from my flat (I can sense between 10 and 20 of them at any given time) were replaced with a Meraki Mini, or, perhaps more significantly, if these WiFi access points were given firmware upgrades which allowed them to interoperate with the mesh networks created by the Meraki Mini – my Surry Hills neighborhood would suddenly be blanketed in a highly resilient and wholly pervasive wireless high-speed network, at nearly no cost to the users of that network. In other words, this could all be done in software. The infrastructure is already deployed.

As some of you have no doubt noted, this network is highly local; while there are high-speed connections within the wireless cloud, the mesh doesn’t necessarily have connections to the global Internet. In fact, Meraki Minis can act as routers to the Internet, routing packets through their Ethernet interfaces to the broader Internet, and Meraki recommends that at least every tenth device in a mesh be so equipped. But it’s not strictly necessary, and – if dedicated to a particular task – completely unnecessary. Let us say, for example, that I wanted to provide a low-cost IPTV service to the residents of Surry Hills. I could create a “head-end” in my own flat, and provide my “subscribers” with Meraki Minis and an inexpensive set-top-box to interface with their televisions. For a total install cost of perhaps $300, I could give everyone in Surry Hills a full IPTV service (though it’s unlikely I could provide HD-quality). No wiring required, no high-speed broadband buildout, no billions of dollars, no regulatory relaxation. I could just do it. And collect both subscriber fees and advertiser revenues. No Telstra. No Group of Nine. No blessing from Senator Coonan. No go-over by the ACCC. The technology is all in place, today.

I bring up this thought experiment to drive home my final point: Telstra isn’t needed. It might not even be wanted. We have so many other avenues open to us to create and deploy high-speed broadband services that it’s likely Telstra has just missed the boat. You’ve waited too long, dilly-dallying while the audience and the technology have made you obsolete. The audience doesn’t want the same few hundred channels they can get on FoxTel: they want the nearly endless stream of salience they can get from YouTube. The technology is no longer about centralized distribution networks: it favors light, flexible, inexpensive mesh networks. Both of these are long-term trends, and both will only grow more pronounced as the years pass. In the years it takes Telstra – or whomever gets the blessing of the regulators – to build out this high-speed broadband network, you will be fighting a rearguard action, as both the audience and the technology of the network race on past you. They have already passed you by, and it’s been my task this morning to point this out. You simply do not matter.

This doesn’t mean it’s game over. I don’t want you to report to Sol Trujilo that it’s time to have a quick fire-sale of Telstra’s assets. But it does mean you need to radically rethink your business – right now. In the age of pervasive peer-production, paired with the advent of cheap wireless mesh networks, your best option is to become a high-quality connection to the global Internet – in short, a commodity. All of this pervasive wireless networking will engender an incredible demand for bandwidth; the more people are connected together, the more they want to be connected together. That’s the one inarguable truth we can glean from the 160 years of electric communication. Telstra has the infrastructure to leverage itself into becoming the most reliable data carrier connecting Australians to the global Internet. It isn’t glamorous, but it is a business with high barriers to entry, and promises a steadily growing (if unexciting) continuing revenue stream. But, if you continue to base your plans around selling Australians services we don’t want, you are building your castles on the sand. And the tide is rising.

This is the full first talk I gave at Mind States Costa Rica, on 14 June 2007. I consider it among my best.

During the April 2007 Education.AU tour of Australia’s capitol cities with Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), I opened the afternoon panel & workshop sessions with a brief talk about peer-produced knowledge - and how it doesn’t necessarily lead to the truth.

Here it is - with my slides, rather than video footage of me behind a podium (which would be rather dull in any case).

I: The Dhow de Ring

For the past few thousand years, life in the southern Indian state of Kerala has followed the natural flow of tides and seasons. The coast, facing out into the Indian Ocean, is dotted with small ports crowded with ancient, tried-and-true sailing craft, known as dhows. Originally piloted by Arabian traders, the dhow has become the workhorse of the Kerala fishermen, who, when winds and tides comply, sail out into the Ocean, drop their nets, and reap a bountiful harvest of fish. Their boats full, they set sail back to shore, to the fish markets that adjoin the ports of Kerala. The fisherman have their choice of ports and markets; nothing compels them to go to a particular market to sell their fish. They might remember that their fish fetched a good price at a particular market last week, and decide to return to that port – only to find that half a dozen other dhows had the same idea. Now the market is flooded with fish. The fisherman must sell their catch – at almost any price – lest it spoil. So it’s a good day for buyers, but the fisherman won’t cover their expenses. Meanwhile, just a few miles down the coast, there’s a market which has been abandoned by the fleet – perhaps too many dhows showed up there last week – and there’s no fish to be had, at any price. If a dhow pulled into that port, their catch would fetch a pretty price. But none does, so the market and buyers are frustrated. It’s been this way along the Kerala coast for thousands of years, the imperfect meeting of sellers and buyers in markets are all too often oversupplied or undersupplied.

Just a few years ago, some of India’s many telecoms companies blanketed the Kerala coast with GSM mobile service. Nothing particularly unusual in that – India is right behind China as the fastest-growing market for wireless telephony. In the entirely deregulated Indian market, price competition is fierce; call rates average just a penny or two for an SMS, and just a few cents a minute for voice calls. That seems incredibly inexpensive to us – but when you factor in the poverty of most Indians, it’s actually a fairly substantial economic barrier. Nonetheless, the allure of instantaneous and pervasive wireless communication seduced at least one of the Kerala fishermen – probably one of the more successful ones – and a handset made its way onto a dhow. (The GSM signal can reach as far as 25 km offshore.) And, when that handset made its way onto that dhow, something unexpected – yet perfectly predictable – happened. That fisherman made a call into shore. That first call might have been entirely innocuous; perhaps calling a relative, or a friend. And perhaps, during the course of that conversation, the fisherman learned that the market nearest the recipient of that call had no fish that day. So that fisherman set for that port, and made a good bounty on his catch.

Fishermen do not work in isolation; they form a community, and share a lot of their knowledge between them. So, in fairly short order, it would have become common knowledge that a mobile handset on a dhow was a potent combination – it could greatly increase a fisherman’s profits. Soon, even the lowliest of the fisherman had their own handsets, and – once they came into range of those ubiquitous GSM towers, called into port. The fisherman argued and bargained with the fish mongers in the markets onshore – who also realized that a mobile handset could lead to better profits – and, although each fisherman acted independently, created an arbitrage network of sorts. These days, if the catch is good, there’s enough fish in each of Kerala’s fish markets – but only just enough to ensure a good price at that market. The markets are satisfied, and so are the fishermen. Profits are up, for buyers and sellers – so much so that a mobile handset – which cost about a month’s profits for a fisherman – pays for itself in about two months.

Kerala is a fine example of the self-organizing human behaviors that emerge naturally when human beings are connected into far-flung networks, but it is far from the only one. Farmers in Kenya phone ahead to learn which markets are offering the best prices for onions and maize. Spice traders – again in Kerala – send texts back and forth as they bargain and trade their wares. This is all wholly new – and yet these are simply basic human cultural behaviors that have simply been amplified by the omnipresent network.

Here in the Western world, we simply accepted the fact that as mobiles became more widespread, some of the friction of social intercourse disappeared. No one, in a well-networked world, is truly late for an appointment, a meeting, or a date. We can be delayed, yes, but we can also deliver moment-to-moment updates of our progress. We made that transition gently, gradually, but are now so bound to the incorporated environment of the network that we do allow ourselves a flourish of anger when someone who should have called doesn’t. That’s rude behavior in the 21st century – the network has changed our expectations for how we should interact in polite society.

Roughly three months from now, we’ll see the third billionth mobile phone subscriber on the network. That person will probably be somewhere in the developing world; almost all of us in the developed world already have handsets. In a decade we have made an enormous transition: back in 1997 half of humanity had never made a phone call. Sometime in 2007 half of humanity will own a phone. And despite all of the “bling” aspects of the culture surrounding mobile telephony – the hubbub surrounding the recent US release of Apple’s iPhone being only the latest example – these are not just the toys of us decadent Western types. Far from it. Mobile networks are essential tools for human productivity – tools as profound as any yet developed.

If I’d made such a statement a few months ago – and I did, at a conference at UTS – I would expect a strong reaction about the privileged position from which I made this assessment, and how it fed into certain very Western-centric assumptions about productivity and culture. Well, folks, that argument is bullshit. It relies on a culturally-constrained definition of the capabilities of the impoverished, and only tends to keep them impoverished. A poor person with a mobile handset usually becomes less poor – moving up a step or two on the income ladder. In fact, quite a number of the microfinance loans made in Bangladesh and India and Africa pay for the initial purchase of a mobile handset – the first step to improving an individual’s economic effectiveness in the 21st century, irrespective of income level, or nationality, or sex, or culture. This fact is already abundantly clear to the two-thirds of humanity who are nowhere near as rich as those of us in the West. Hence the drive to connect, to become part of the network. It isn’t being driven by marketing, or mobile carriers, or governments. It is a migration of the mass of humanity, onto the network, driven by individual economic interests. It is interesting to note that the same year that saw the majority of humanity living in urban areas will also see the majority of humanity connected into the network; these seemingly-separate phenomena are actually two sides of the same process. We are drawing together, in the perfectly connected hyperspace of the network, and into our ever-more-sprawling urban environments.

While economics provides a frame to understand the unpredictable quality of self-organization that goes hand-in-hand with the network, it is not necessarily the most significant emergent behavior of individuals broadly connected together. When people change the way they communicate, they must necessarily all facets of culture. Some of these transformations are decidedly more problematic.

II: This A Private Fight, Or Can Anyone Join In?

“The second police defense line has been dispersed. There is pushing and shoving. The police wall has broken down.”

That reads as though it might be the live broadcast from a reporter covering some sort of riot – or political agitation. Is this a BBC reporter? Someone from CNN or Reuters?

Or just someone standing in the crowd?

This live coverage was, in fact, a text message, sent by Wen Yunchow, a resident of the Chinese city of Xiamen, to a friend of his, hundreds of miles away, in Guangzhow. Xiamen has been a troubled city for the last several months – starting with an announcement by the local council to construct a gigantic plastics factory in Haicang, which sits just across a narrow straight from downtown Xiamen. While the Chinese are rapidly industrializing, city-dwelling, middle-class Chinese are also becoming increasingly aware of the environmental deterioration which has accompanied industrialization. They’ve seen rivers polluted with industrial effluent and sewage, coastal beaches with great heaps of trash washed on shore, and farmland, expropriated from peasants, turned into luxury homes.

China, like Great Britain in the 19th century, has become an industrialist’s playground. In the UK that led to marches and strikes and the beginnings of the labor movement. But in China, unions are banned, and the state isn’t exactly directly accountable to the people. All over China there are tens of thousands of low-level incidents of protest every year – and some of these turn violent. In the absence of a mechanism to vent the political heat generated by this rush of progress, the energy just builds up until it boils over.

China is industrializing in the 19th-century mode – with big factories. But it is also industrializing in the 21st-century mode – with pervasive wireless networks. China is the world’s largest market for wireless communications – growing faster than India – and it’s a mark of one’s emergence into the middle class to be able to afford at least one mobile. (Many Chinese own more than one handset, and buy a new handset every eight months – far more often than in the West.) China Mobile – the world’s largest mobile carrier, with over three hundred million subscribers – provides wireless services to Xiamen. Over the past few years, urban life in Xiamen, as in the West, has re-organized itself around the incorporated environment of wireless communications – they, too, are no longer late, only delayed.

After the chemical plant in Haicang had been announced, it undoubtedly became a topic of conversation in Xiamen – both in person and via mobile. Now that there’s an established record of industrial abuse in China, people know what to expect – and what to fear – from industrialization. This surely featured in those conversations. People traded what bits of information they knew for sure – and also passed along rumors. In the absence of a strong, critical press, rumors tend to flourish. That’s the price you always pay for centrally controlled distribution of information. The drive to know the truth doesn’t disappear, nor is it assuaged by propaganda; it is channeled into other forms of expression. So, as the local officials stonewalled, pressure built up – and the conversations grew more heated. Finally, someone – somewhere – composed the following text message:

“Xianglu Group joint venture has already begun investing in a benzene project. Once this kind of heavily poisonous chemical is manufactured, it will be like all of Xiamen has been hit with an atomic bomb, and Xiamen people’s lives will be full of leukemia and deformed children. We want to live, we want to be healthy! International organizations require this sort of project to be developed a distance of 100 km outside of a city. Our Xiamen is just 16 km away! For our children and grandchildren, send this message to all your Xiamen friends! For our children and grandchildren, act! Participate among 10,000 people, June 1 at 8am, opposite the municipal government building! Hand tie yellow ribbons! SMS all your Xiamen friends!”

The logic of viral media distribution is very straightforward. You find something – in this case, an SMS – and, if it excites you, your next thought is who you’d like to share it with. You filter the message against that social network we all carry around in your heads – and in the address books of or mobile handsets – then you forward the message along. And while that’s explicitly called for in this text message, it’s not at all necessary to be so explicit; when people are excited enough by something, they do it all on their own. Finding, filtering, forwarding. It’s an antique human behavior, but it’s now been accelerated to escape velocity by pervasive wireless networks. This is the engine that made YouTube such a success. And, in this case, it produced a small revolution.

The city officials in Xiamen knew about his text message – it had been forwarded about so widely it would have been difficult for them not to take note of it. They took the first, natural reaction of a censored state – and asked China Mobile to block all text messages to Xiamen mobiles which had the words “benzene”, “atomic”, “demonstration” or “leukemia” in them. By this time, however, that message had been forwarded on at least a million times; the populace of Xiamen all knew about the event, whether or not they’d received a text message. Since that didn’t work, they forbade any demonstrations on the 1st of June, then announced that work on the plant had been “postponed” – hoping the population would soon forget the issue. Another government newspaper openly attacked an individual known only by their handle – XiamenWave22, the purported author of the text message. The people-powered politics of SMS self-organization were about to collide with the power of the Chinese state.

At 8 AM on the 1st of June, a crowd began to build opposite the municipal government building in Xiamen; yellow ribbons were passed around the crowd; red banners were unfurled, proclaiming “Project Xiamen, Everyone Has a Responsibility”. At 9 AM, as if by some sudden, unspoken and spontaneous decision, the crowd – now numbering several thousand – began to march. While the police kept a watchful eye on the crowd, they did nothing to interfere – and this marked it as singular. In most situations the police would attempt to disburse an illegal demonstration such as this one, but the crowd marched peacefully, and the police did not interfere. Instead of an atmosphere of fear and violence, marchers reported an almost jubilant feel to the crowd. Shopkeepers and passers-by joined with the throng, as it grew to perhaps 5000 strong. Protests continued through the afternoon, trailing off toward the end of the day.

(Something else worth noting: the protest march was shot by someone - presumably participating in the protest - from their mobile handset. There are at least 200 million mobile handsets capable of shooting video, and all of this substantially interferes with the state’s ability to control the flow of information.)

And that was that. The national government has put the Haicang plant on permanent hold, pending a review. Municipal officials are being investigated for corruption. For now, the people of Xiamen have won their cause – though everyone touched by this event has learned a lesson. The people of Xiamen (and broadly, across China) have learned that they can self-organize against a government which provides no redress for grievances; the government has learned that although wireless communications reduce friction in social and business relations, these benefits comes at a price. Next time – and there will be a next time, for as long as the government turns a deaf ear to a people empowered by wireless communications, they will continue to use that technology to self-organize – the government might just turn off the wireless services, or censor them so heavily that protesters will adopt a secret language. Both sides have learned, and both sides will continue to adapt their behaviors to meet their ends.

If this example were specific to China, we could adopt a more sanguine point of view, like cultural anthropologists, just noting the intersection of technology and politics in a culture very different from our own. But this example is our example, these people are our people, as became abundantly clear in early December of 2005:

“Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support Leb and wog bashing day.”

This text message made its way from the hard-right racist cliques of New South Wales (such as the Australia First Party, Blood and Honour, and the Patriotic Youth League) out into the greater community of the Sutherland Shire. We all know well enough what followed – one day and two nights of rioting and revenge. Self-organizing protests do occur, even in nations which have adequate and well-tested mechanisms for the redress of grievances; all it takes is a minority sufficiently energized and empowered – with wireless technologies – to spread the word.

While the vast majority of Australians might be horrified at the results of such a spontaneous act of self-organization, the power to do so is always latent, wherever pervasive wireless networking has become part of the incorporated environment. Call it democracy, call it fascism, call it freedom, call it terrorism. The labels matter not at all. We don’t have a good name yet for just what this is; it isn’t mass action – not in the sense that we knew it in the 20th century. These are not peasants storming the barricades, nor unionists fighting private security forces at the gates of the factory. These are arisings, not uprisings. They are the unpredictable moments of emergence, sudden stirrings of self-organization. As each one occurs, we learn a little bit more about how they work. But they can not be predicted, nor can they be controlled. And that means the 21st-century – now that half of us are effectively wired into a whole – is going to be very unpredictable indeed.

III: Us Mob

In January of 2007, a reader of the political news blog Talking Points Memo, sent an email to the editor-in-chief of the blog, Josh Marshall. The reader noted that the US Attorney for his district – in Minnesota – had just been fired and replaced. US Attorneys are powerful individuals, tasked with overseeing the Federal Government’s caseload in 93 districts. Firings of US Attorneys are rare events – a total of three happened during the eight years of the Clinton administration – and are generally surrounded by a halo of press coverage. In this case – as the email noted – no explanation had been forthcoming from the US Department of Justice. The reader asked Josh Marshall if he knew anything about it. Josh didn’t, so he threw the question out to his readership – some hundred thousand people. The answer Marshall received has nearly brought down the US government.

While no reader of Talking Points Memo knew anything about the specifics of the US Attorney fired in Minnesota, other readers had just read about firings of other US Attorneys – in New Mexico, California, Arkansas – a total of eight, six of whom were fired in the same week. Such a blood-letting was unprecedented in the history of the Justice Department, and the fact that it happened without any announcement to the press seemed downright suspicious. The truth, as it has slowly been ferreted out, first by Talking Points Memo, then by the McClatchy news service, and finally, by congressional committees, seems to indicate that, beyond the normal political considerations of appointments to these highly-visible postings, the US Attorneys in question were replaced because they were not sufficiently “Bushie”, and disagreed with the administration’s line on matters larger or small.

Once the congressional committees got involved, document requests were issued to the relevant government agencies – in particular, the Justice Department. Immediately, the Justice Department resorted to a tried-and-true technique for obfuscating the truth in the face of persistent attempts to reveal it: the dreaded “document dump”. In mid-March, the Justice Department released over 3000 pages of documents at 11 PM on Friday evening – to “help” congressional investigators prepare for a hearing to be held at 10 AM on the following Tuesday morning. Document dumps have historically proven effective because they present congressional investigators with too much paperwork to be effectively analyzed; it ruins the investigators’ weekend, and inhibits their performance.

The documents were released on the Justice Department website, free for anyone to download. So Josh Marshall invited the readers of Talking Points Memo to do just that: grab any or all of the 3000 pages, begin reading, and share the results with other TPM readers, in a special area set aside on the blog. There’s a Chinese proverb: “Many hands make light work.” In a few hours, the amateur investigators working on Talking Points Memo had conducted a thorough analysis of the document dump – something that was well beyond the capability of the investigators. The document dump is now a failed strategy – because individuals can now self-organize to handle nearly any task required in the pursuit of truth.

As of today, the Bush administration and the US Congress are in a stand-off; the Congress has subpoenaed records which the administration claims are covered under “Executive Privilege” as the work-product of deliberations within the White House, and therefore won’t be shared with Congress – which has constitutionally-mandated oversight authority over all branches of government. Both sides are nearing a judicial abyss which could transform Bush’s presidency into a carbon copy of Nixon’s. How did this happen? This, too, is an unpredicted consequence of individuals connected together in pervasive networks.

We have seen how more-or-less anonymous individuals can collude to create a shared information resource such as Wikipedia; we are now seeing how a self-selected group of well-networked individuals can dedicate themselves to a specific task, all the while developing and adopting techniques that make them continuously more effective. Josh Marshall realized that he could harness the intelligence of his audience, through the network, to shine a light on the hidden corners of the Bush Administration. In the aftermath of this scandal, we can all repeat Josh’s experiment. And we will.

In 2007, with half of humanity wired into the network, there are a lot of different techniques in practice, constantly being refined, and they’re being shared widely. Every time one of those techniques succeeds wildly – anywhere – it is rapidly replicated across the entire length of the network. Political groups of all flavors and sizes have learned the lesson of Talking Points Memo, just as Chinese protesters have learned the lesson of Xiamen, and Kerala fisherman have learned how to become their own market-makers.

There are three billion nodes on this network now. Three billion highly intelligent, highly active nodes, each optimizing their own behavior, their group behavior, and the behavior of the network. The network itself is relatively unimportant; the services which carriers and ISPs are queuing up to offer don’t matter a good-god-damn, because services mean nothing to the users of the network. The connection of individuals is everything.

Back in 1995, LambdaMOO creator Pavel Curtis informed us that, “People are the killer app.” But somehow we still don’t believe him. We stubbornly believe that there is some magic inside the network itself, a quintessence within the wiring, the routers, the transponders and repeaters, that make the network something more than the sum of its parts. But this has never been true, nor will it ever be true. The value of the network is entirely in its ability to connect us together. Only insofar as a service makes it easier to connect people together – a service, like, say, SMS – will that service be adopted by the users of the network. Digital social networks such as MySpace and Facebook hold out a tantalizing promise of greater connectivity, but so far that promise has gone entirely unrealized. We don’t need them, and we never have. All we need is the means to connect. We’re perfectly able to handle all the rest.

What’s more, once individuals have adapted to the incorporated environment of the network, they resist all attempts to block or censor the network. This is a lesson that Telstra is learning right now, as they attempt to use a combination of economic and political influence to dictate the future direction of Australian broadband. What Telstra has encountered - to its great surprise - is a population who has learned the lessons of the network, and who are capable of out-thinking, out-flanking and out-competing a large, centralized telecoms firm. It won’t be very long now until the individuals on the network start to build their own networks – from wireless mesh technologies such as Meraki, or WiMax, or something entirely new and unexpected – and wrest the final control of the network away from the incumbent carriers who futilely try to steer a ship that they don’t even realize they no longer control. A company can set its own tariff rates, or build out a high-speed infrastructure, but that is not the network. The network is us mob, a mass of individuals connected together in ever-evolving configurations of purpose, with ever-expanding capabilities.

Our capabilities have grown so enormously, so quickly, that all institutions constituted in earlier times, around older and now quite frankly antique ideas of social organization, will be very hard-pressed to adapt to us mob. At the very least, governments will tumble, and businesses will crumble. This is not the hippie-dippy anarcho-syndicalism predicted by Stuart Brand or Ted Nelson or any of the first generation of Internet gurus; this is something more raw, more vital and more dangerous. Us mob still don’t know our own strength; we haven’t really flexed our muscles yet. When we do, there’ll be quite a dust-up. Things will come crashing down: some on purpose, and some quite by accident. This can’t be avoided: the future is entirely unpredictable, contingent upon the spontaneous emergence of behaviors we’ve never seen before, behaviors which will spread like wildfire, transforming all three billion of us nearly instantaneously.

It seems apocalyptic. It seems impossible. But it is already happening. We have so many examples we can point to now – beyond just the few I’ve covered here – that we must admit something new is being born. A new social organization is emerging, thoroughly global, and ignorant of class or race. There’s some cause for hope in that. But the near future is going to be so different from the recent past that we will lack reference points. It will seem as though all of culture is coming to a short, sharp end. It is not. But we do not yet understand what is rising to replace the world we know.

For those of you who may have noticed the new embedded player that YouTube has been gradually rolling out over the last two weeks — have you noticed anything missing? Something so vital, so essential to what YouTube is, that you’ve searched around their new interface looking for it?

I’m talking about the “Share” button. The one feature that made YouTube a star. The one, absolutely indispensable, must-have interface affordance.

And now, as near as I can tell, it seems to be gone. Sure, you can embed, and you can get the URL and copy it to the clipboard, but none of that - none of it - has any of the power of just tapping on the “Share” button, selecting a few friends, and forwarding the video along.

It’s as if - I can only imagine - they have purposely set out to destroy their business. The entire reason that YouTube exists is because they made it so incredibly easy to find, filter and forward videos along from friend to friend. Anything, however small - and this isn’t small, it’s huge - that gets in the way of sharing will slow YouTube’s growth. Perhaps even ruin it.

This can’t be happening. They can’t have missed this. It’s too important, too significant, too central to what YouTube is.

And yet, it’s gone. No more sharing.

Po raz kolejny czekając na wschód słońca przed komputerem zwiedzam otchłanie internetu w poszukiwaniu wiedzy, która może okazać się w czymkolwiek przydatna lub po prostu wprawi mnie w iluzoryczny stan radości.

Zafascynowany tym, że mój współlokator potrafi cały dzień przesiedzieć przed komputerem - albo przed programami do czynienia muzyki, albo przed swoim profilem na niejakim epulsie, postanowiłem odwiedzić i tą cyberświątynię.
Zatem zarejstrowałem się. Wysłałem swoje zdjęcie sprzed czterech lat (jedyne które spełniało ich normy) i rozpocząłem moją zerojedynkową inwazję na te rejony owej świątyni, które dla mnie zdawały się być interesujące.
Nie zważając na dwunastolatki odwiedzające mój profil, zapisałem się do “klubu” (lol?) magia chaosu. Jeżeli przerażają was szesnastoletni magowie na IA czy gdziekolwiek, strzeżcie się tego miejsca, wyszedłem z niego skrzywiony psychicznie i myślę, że tylko takie pojeby jak Khaoi mogą czerpać jakąkolwiek satysfakcję ze swojej tamże cybernetycznej egzystencji.

Wówczas również pojawiła się idea na tą notkę… a raczej powróciła.

Magia Chaosu w internecie… Klub na epulsie rozrywany przez dzieci, grono na gronie założone przez “ksiedza”, któremu “magia chaosu wydała się interesująca”, fnord posiadający więcej spambotów niż userów, dwie organizacje, które mimo potencjału nie potrafią się w sobie zebrać gdyż są organizacjami POLSKICH magów chaosu.
Są jeszcze elfy, nie magowie chaosu, ale okultyści wszechstronni (czyli najbardziej nam pokrewni), którzy i tak nie dorównują poziomem wiedzy ludziom z kręgu m.ch.

Obejrzawszy dziś 10 epizodów Fullmetal Alchemist pojawiły się w mej głowie pewne idee. Magowie Chaosu są indywidualistami, temu nie zaprzeczy nikt. Jeśli chodzi o ich spotkania - są to zazwyczaj dni transgresji i najebki, po których niezbyt często manifestuje się coś konstruktywnego. Magowie Chaosu… pogrążeni w internecie technomanci, którzy w samotności niszczą siebie, a w grupie niszczą siebie a przy okazji wykorzystują nabyte umiejętności do niszczenia czego tylko się da. Alchemicy, którzy poprzez badania nad magiją odkryli daremność i pogrążają się w niej, nie zważając na opinię “ogółu” i “otoczenia”. Ignoranci, egocentrycy… szaleńcy?
Magowie XXI wieku. Nienawidzona lub podziwiana “awangarda”.

Zaakcentowałem słowo POLSCY dwa akapity wcześniej. Tak, jesteśmy inni niż Ci zachodni. Kto pochodzi z roku 1337 - my czy oni - jest pytaniem na które nie chcę odpowiadać. Różnimy się, magia chaosu, która narodziła się w tym kraju jest dalece inna niż ta zachodnia, gdyż ta druga posiada stałe dogmaty. I mimo, że sieję to sprzeczność wewnątrz systemu to a) jest to nieistotne i b) tylko pomaga we wspólnych inicjatywach.

Powrót do błogosławionej niewiedzy, do iluzji szczęścia nie jest już możliwy, glif chaosu został wypalony, biegniemy w stronę przepaści, amen.

4:50, robi się jasno. 273, Mag Chaosu. Obudził się o godzinie 14:40. Dwa razy wyszedł z domu, po Coca Colę i po Papierosy. Po Papierosy, gdyż jak 90% “magów chaosu” jest od nich uzależniony. Mamy 4:56, a on siedzi od 14 godzin przy komputerze i ma zamiar skończyć tę notkę, zanim zrobi się jasno do końca.

Ścieżka, która jest przede mną jest tak samo pełna nonsensu i daremna jak cały ten tekst, ale…
czy mam w tym momencie inny wybór?

Miał to być tekst na temat stanu polskiego cyberokultyzmu. Zamienił się w słodkie pierdolenie maga chaosu, kołpały. wy i tak wiecie, że poziom cyberokultu jest żałosny :)

tekst dedykuję naszemu kochanemu Kowalowi. My wiemy, że jesteśmy daremni. Ty nie wiesz, że jesteś żałosny.

soax