If you want to find
out how emerging technologies are going to affect society and
individuals, ask Howard Rheingold. A former editor of Whole
Earth Review and the founding editor of HotWired, Howard has
written a string of astonishingly prescient books about the ways in
which technology impacts the way we live. His 1984 book, Tools
for Thought, foresaw the personal computer revolution years
before most people had even touched a keyboard. In 1991,
Virtual Reality introduced the idea of
computer-generated worlds to popular culture. In 1993, before the World
Wide Web had taken off, Howard wrote The Virtual
Community, which looked at the ways in which groups of people
interact online.
Howard’s latest feat of high-tech
prognostication, Smart Mobs, will be published in
October by Perseus Books. I recently called Howard to ask him about his
book. Despite the best efforts of his 802.11b network to disconnect our
phone call, I managed to learn what smart mobs are and what they mean
for both extraterrestrial life searchers and for fishermen off the coast
of Africa.
TF: What are smart
mobs?
HLR:
Smart mobs are groups of people who use mobile communications and
pervasive computing to organize collective actions in new
ways.
TF: You’ve said that the technology behind
smart mobs represents a third wave in communications technology. Can you
explain?
HLR: If you look at
past 20 years, personal information and communications technologies have
triggered waves of change in our lives and in society and the culture.
The first one was the personal computer. Three things happened with PCs.
The first ones, in the mid-1970s, were literally millions of times less
powerful than what we have now. Then the PC spread throughout the
population, starting with the engineers and scientists who created the
technology, and then spreading to the scholars and enthusiasts, then
into the business world, then to mom and pop and artists and writers and
people who aren’t ordinarily involved with technology. That was the
story I followed in one of my earliest books, Tools for Thought, which
was published in 1985 and looked ahead at the year 2000.
It’s
interesting to note that the PC was a new technology with powers and
capabilities of its own that were the result of combining two other
technologies, one being the microprocessor chip and the other being the
television. What you have is neither a microchip nor a television but a
kind of “mind amplifier.” I think that’s an important principle – that
by combining certain powerful technologies – particularly when they
amplify human capabilities – you get hybrids that are much more powerful
and very different from the components.
The second wave of
change was the Internet. By plugging a computer into the telephone
network you get something that is neither the computer nor the
telephone. You get the Internet, which is a many-to-many medium that
caused a tremendous wave of change through the 1990s. And again we see
the same thing happen over at least a decade. First the technology
itself evolved very rapidly, secondly it diffused from scientists and
engineers to the general population, and as it has done so, the way
people have used the technology has transformed our lives and
institutions. Now, the third wave. In the 1980s the PC was a pretty
teeny thing and wasn’t being used by many people, but you could foresee
as it grew more powerful and as more people used it how the changes
would become more profound. And in the 1990s you could say the same
thing about the Internet. With smart mobs we are really in the very
earliest days, and I’m extrapolating from what I’ve observed happening
worldwide, right now. Once again, it represents a combination of
technologies: the mobile communication device, and the Internet. And
what we’re getting from this hybrid is not going to be the “Internet on
wheels.” It’s not going to be getting stock quotes on your telephone, or
surfing the Web on your PDA. It’s going to be something entirely new and
different. We’re just beginning to see what that is. Tens of millions of
individuals will have computing power in their pockets that all the
governments in the world didn’t have 20 years ago. Secondly – and this
is very important – they will be linked together so that the aggregation
of that computing power and the communications capabilities of the
individuals will be multiplied similar to the way the Internet
multiplies the capabilities of individuals who were sitting in front of
PCs.
TF: What are some of the social phenomena that
you see rising from smart
mobs?
HLR: I looked at a number
of phenomena that I am seeing today. Peer-to-peer sharing, for example,
or peer-to-peer sharing of computing power as is done with SETI@home or
Distributed.net. These are examples of groups of individuals voluntarily
creating something collectively that’s much more powerful than what they
could do individually. You see a kind of emergent property here. Napster
had 70 million users. Intellectual property issues aside, the important
thing about Napster was that people were able to create this kind of
commons in which the act of sharing created more value for everyone. By
the way in which all those millions of computer users shared their
files, the act of finding something that you would find useful
automatically made your resources available to others.
And this
led me to look at issues that aren’t ordinarily considered
technological, which have to do with the nature of cooperation. How is
it that humans come together to do things collectively, and how do those
enterprises succeed and fail? That is an important aspect of how smart
mobs can change the world, because people with these devices linked
together instantaneously worldwide will be able to act collectively or
not act collectively in new ways. I think that will be the really
momentous aspect of this.
TF: What are some other
examples of smart mobs in
action?
HLR: Probably the most
dramatic example was the demonstrations in the Philippines that brought
down the administration of former president Estrada, who was being tried
for corruption. Everyone was watching the trials on television and when
some legislators associated with Estrada shut down the legislative
hearings, millions of people organized by sending text messages to
assemble in the square in Manila. This was a crowd that mobilized and
succeeded in toppling a government. And it was organized with the
endless forwarding of millions of text messages.
Another example
is the WTO protestors in Seattle, who used cell phones, PDAs, laptops,
and the Internet to protest the meeting of the WTO in 1999. Using these,
they were able to outsmart the police. When leaders of the seven leading
industrial powers met in Canada more recently, they met in a remote area
and they blocked out a lot of radio communications in the area in order
to thwart protesters.
I want to emphasize is that political
use, either for good or for evil, is only one example of many kinds of
collective action – most of which we can’t foresee today – which may
arise from smart mobs. A non-political example is that pretty poor
fisher folk off the coast of Africa and India can get text messages
about the market conditions for fish in various ports. So they know
whether they want to sail five miles north or 20 miles south to sell
they fish they just caught. Suddenly they have access to information
technology that only multinational corporations had 10 or 15 years
ago.
TF: The word “mobs” implies some kind of
collaboration. How will you know who to
trust?
HLR: That’s an important
question. It brings in the whole area of reputation systems, such as we
see on eBay and Slashdot that enable people to rate each other. It’s
very crude now, but it will evolve so you’ll be able to know whether to
trust people for certain things, like maybe giving someone a ride home,
or getting together to buy something collectively, even though you may
not know them.
However, not all smart mobs are going to be
benevolent. People get together to cooperate for reasons that are not
very benevolent, hence the word “mobs,” which has a kind of edgy
resonance with “lynch mobs.” I don’t want this to sound too utopian. I
believe that there’s potential – as there has been with the PC, the
Internet, the alphabet, the printing press – for civilization and
individuals to elevate the human condition. But the printing press, the
Internet, and the telephone did not change human nature, and people with
evil purposes have certainly been able to use those technologies to
perform destructive acts more effectively.
TF:
Since peer-to-peer communications seems to be a big part of smart mobs,
can you comment on the issue of intellectual
property?
HLR: Right now, we’re
seeing legislative and regulatory battles over intellectual property. I
believe Larry Lessig is the person who told me that, essentially, this
is a battle over whether people who use emerging technologies will be
“users” as we were in the PC and the Internet revolutions, or whether we
will be “consumers” as the television era treated people. Will we
actively use the technology to create media, as people did with the PC
and the Internet? Or will we be passive consumers of content that is
sold to us by others, as the television viewers are?
That battle
has really begun to emerge, with a lot more heat, if not a lot more
public prominence, in recent months, thanks to the EFF and the Creative
Commons and the bloggers. However, while we’re beginning to see
awareness of this battle among citizens, we’re not really seeing a mass
resistance to the attempts of the recording industry and the motion
picture industry to dictate what kind of technology we’re going to have
in the future and how we’re going to use them. I hope that if nothing
else, Smart Mobs helps make people aware of this
struggle and what it means to our future and helps us influence it to
some degree.
Mark
Frauenfelder is a writer and illustrator from Los
Angeles.