Who Owns the Future? (32 page)

CHILDHOOD AND APOCALYPSE

Even the most ambitious outcomes in the most fabulous futures articulated in the moneyed dreamspace of Silicon Valley, those where the world isn’t utterly wrecked by nuclear war or some other disaster, tend to leave people behind. Even the optimism is dismal for people. People will be surpassed and left behind.

And yet Silicon Valley engineers, venture capitalists, and pundits continue to go about their days, zipping up to Napa to frolic in the wine country from time to time, having children, generally living as if nothing unusual is happening.

Do we really believe we are on the cusp of disrupting the human world? Are we on the verge of destroying the cycles of life as we know them, or is that just shtick? Are we just making up stories to get by, to romanticize our own little fog atop the chasm of mortality?

Denial is the human baseline. Fantasy of insulation is our most common habit. We are mortal and can’t possibly be expected to fully grasp death, so we inhabit just enough insanity to keep the absurdity manageable. Pretending to be able to deal with mortality sanely makes room for life.

But in the matters of fantasy and madness, technology is different, just as it is always different. Technology works. It really does change the world.

The normal craziness of the world isn’t enough for Silicon Valley. Going about my day, there is nothing unusual at all about running into a friend at the coffee shop who is a for-real, serious scientist working on making people immortal. Or a neuroscientist who can read what images a person is seeing directly from scanning their brain, and further hopes to someday be able to incite ideas and memories into people’s brains.

Yet I can hardly think of a hard-core Silicon Valley figure who has decided not to have children because of a belief that we will successfully engineer a posthuman future. On some deep level most of us must be in on our own joke.

PART SEVEN

Ted Nelson

CHAPTER 18

First Thought, Best Thought

First Thought

Ted Nelson was the first person to my knowledge to describe, starting in 1960, how you could actually implement new kinds of media in digital form, share them, and collaborate.
*
Ted was working so early that he couldn’t invoke basic notions like digital images, because computer graphics hadn’t been described yet. (Ivan Sutherland would see to that shortly after.)

*
In an even earlier article, in 1945, titled “As We May Think,” Vannevar Bush hypothesized an advanced microfilm reader, the Memex, which would essentially allow a reader to experience mash-up sequences of microfilm content. But as celebrated and influential as that article was, it did not explore the unique capabilities of digital architectures.

Ted’s earliest idea was that instead of reading a text as given originally by the author, a more complex path might be created that uses portions of text to create a new sequence, to create a derivative work, without expunging or losing the original. This is what we might call the idea of the “mash-up” today, but it also was the first appearance, so far as I can tell, of the realization that digital systems could both gather and repackage media to enable new kinds of collaboration and new kinds of expression.

As the first person on the scene, Ted benefited from an uncluttered view. Our huge collective task in finding the best future for digital networking will probably turn out to be like finding our way back to approximately where Ted was at the start.

In Ted’s conception, each person would be a free agent in a universal
online market. It might seem at first as though having only one store would reduce diversity, but in fact it would increase it.

Instead of separate stores like those run by Apple or Amazon, there would be one universal store, and everyone would be a first-class citizen, both buyer and seller. You wouldn’t have to keep separate passwords and accounts for different online stores. That’s a pain and it guarantees that there can’t be too many stores. The way we’re doing things now re-creates unneeded limitations that shouldn’t be inherited from brick-and-mortar commerce. When too many layers of access to culture are privatized, as has happened online, you eventually end up with a few giant players.

This is an example of how thinking in terms of a network can strain intuition. Ted benefited from beginner’s luck. He saw the issues more clearly than we do today.

Ted is a talker, a character, a Kerouac. He was always more writer than hacker, and didn’t always fit into the nerd milieu. Thin, lanky, with a sharp chin and always a smile, he looked good. He came from Hollywood parents and was determined to be an outsider, because in the ethics of the times, only the outsiders were “where it’s at.” He succeeded tragically, in that he isn’t as well known as he ought to be, and it’s a great shame he wasn’t able to directly influence digital architecture more.

Ted began his work years before actual networking existed, so he had to conceive of the whole damned digital world. He called it Xanadu.

He foresaw how digital information could become a new form of expression for people. Instead of conceiving of only a single person in front of a computer, he imagined new networked forms of collaboration and culture. People would create information structures that could be shared, reused, collaborated on, and interacted with. These concepts are utterly ordinary today, but at the time very few could understand them at all. By the time I got into the game, as a teenager in the 1970s, it was still almost impossible to find someone with whom you could talk about this stuff.

Best Thought

There wasn’t only one version of Xanadu, as the project evolved over many decades, becoming ever more obscure as personal computers, the Internet, and all the other familiar digital set pieces appeared. Rather than offering a definitive history of the design, I will relate a few principles that I find most helpful.

The first principle is that each file, or whatever unit of information the thing is built of, exists only once. Nothing is ever copied.

We are utterly familiar with that trio of activations, cut, copy, and paste. The right to copy files on the Internet is held up as a form of free speech in the digital rights community. The Internet has even been described as a giant copying machine.
¹

But copying on a network is actually rather odd and at the very least an extraneous, retro idea, if you think about it from first principles. After all, in a network, the original is still there. It’s a network!

The idea that copying would no longer be needed in a networked world was almost impossible to convey for many years. It has finally been made familiar in recent years because it is the principle on which most information services that actually charge for information must operate.

For instance, Netflix does not allow its customers to download a video file that is identical to the master file on its servers. Instead, it provides software that delivers a video experience by accessing that master file in real time over a network, and displaying it to the customer. While Netflix might employ cached data mirrors to back up their data, or to speed up transmittal, that is not the same as creating multiple
logical
copies—as users on a BitTorrent sharing site do.

There’s also only one “logical copy” of each app on the Apple store. You can buy a local cache of it for your phone, and Apple undoubtedly keeps a backup, but there’s just one master instance that drives all the others. When the master version of an app is updated in the store, it’s eventually updated on all the phones as a matter of course. The existence of the app in your phone is more a mirror of the original than a copy.

If someone wants to go to the trouble, there’s usually a way to
make a copy of information offered in a no-copy way, even if that wasn’t the intent of the people who made the information available. The point is that the designs will function without those copies being made.

What’s wrong with making copies? In addition to the problems described already, such as in the section comparing music and mortgages, one huge problem is that you never really know what anything is. If you copy a file, you don’t know where it came from, if it’s been altered, or what other information might be needed for it to make sense. The context is lost, and meaning is dependent on context.

For instance, if you find a copy of a video with a politician intoning some bizarre senseless snippet, you don’t know what the context was. Maybe the full version of the video would tell a different story. One of the reasons not to make copies is to avoid problems like that.

The Right to Mash-up Is Not the Same as the Right to Copy

For Ted, it was
crucial
that people be able to extract such a snippet as they wished! This is an absolutely central point.

Ted’s original concept of hypertext was based on the idea that people must be able to create derivative works. Someone should be able to snip a bit of what a politician says and put it into a documentary, even if the cut is deceptive. Ted recognized that people need to be able to work with what others have done, and that digital technology could expand the ways that could happen. To expand human capability is to express faith that overall people will do well with their new powers, so Ted advocated opening expression up, even if human failings would be empowered now and then.

The pre-digital world had evolved a set of laws and conventions for how people could reflect and reuse each other’s expressions. This is the familiar and uncomfortable web of logistics and procedures including copyright, fair use, libel laws, and so on. As pointed out earlier, it has functioned to provide middle-class levees to generations of creators, and shouldn’t be maligned as being entirely
awful. And yet given the speed and fluidity of digital expression, these old structures feel like lugubrious prohibitions today, and are often ignored.

Ted wanted mash-up rights to become a given. Information would be reusable as a matter of course, without hassle. His original idea for how to evolve ideas like copyright into the network age strike me today as being much more sophisticated than the familiar naïve rallying cries about making mankind’s information free and open.

In Ted’s model, it would be
easier
than it is now to make use of preexisting material. The procedure would be consistent. The ability would become ambient. However, the rights of the masher and the mashed would be balanced.

In a Xanadu-like system, you could extract a misleading, out-of-context passage of a politician’s video because that would be a free speech right. You wouldn’t need permission. But the link back to the original would always be right there. It would become much harder to make the illusions of misleading mash-ups stick.

These days, we wait for unpaid partisan crowds to pore through a controversial speech to document misleading mash-ups. Bloggers will notice when a candidate is quoted out of context in a campaign commercial. Similarly, journalists will eventually notice when inflammatory anti-Islamic videos have been faked and dubbed.

That is not an entirely dysfunctional means of making up for lost context, but it does mean that corrections and context are trapped within online “filter bubbles.” It is not a given that those who might be predisposed to believe in a deceptive mash-up’s point of view will be exposed to a factual correction about what was mashed.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that a person who wants to believe in an idea would actually follow the link to see if a mash-up was deceptive, but at least the link would be right there in front of them. If you doubt the importance of that small change, just look at Google’s revenues, which are almost entirely based on putting links immediately in front of people.

The real sophistication of Ted’s idea is how it would bring about a balance of rights and responsibility while at the same time reducing friction. That’s a rare, magical combination.

Hackles in the digital rights movement are usually raised so
high that it’s often hard to see past the fears. There’s an absurd but entrenched fear that any system other than anonymous copying would lead to an end to free speech. These fears only serve to blind. What we are familiar with today is not necessarily the best we can do.

Traces of Ted’s idea for balance are reflected in some of today’s designs. For instance, each Wikipedia page has a history.

But the economic angle is what concerns us the most here. If the system remembers where information originally came from, then the people who are the sources of information can be paid for it.

That means if a snippet of your video were reused in someone else’s video, you would automatically get a micropayment. Furthermore, a Nelsonian system “scales,” as we say in the trade. A remash of a remash of a remash is facilitated within this system just as easily as the first remash, preserving a balance of commercial and expression rights for everyone in the chain, no matter how long the chain becomes. If someone reuses your video snippet, and that person’s work incorporating yours is reused by yet a third party, you still get a micropayment from that third party.