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Interview: Howard Rheingold

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As an adviser to Jay Rosen’s newassignment.net I thought the best way to help the project, and learn in the process, would be to participate. So I signed up to interview Howard Rheingold for NewAssignment’s Assignment Zero, a crowdsourced inquiry into the nature of crowdsourcing.

The full interview is now posted. I didn’t, in truth, do things a whole lot differently than I’d do them were I conducting the interview for Salon or any other more conventional outlet. What may be less conventional is what happens to this material from here on in. My interview was one of dozens that are now up at the Zero site. The material is going to be somehow shaped by Assignment Zero itself, and also I think for Wired, and it will be fascinating to see how Jay and his staff orchestrate everything. It’s not the pure anarchy of the blogosphere; it’s not the traditional writer/editor pipeline of the old-fashioned newsroom. It’s — something we might be discovering. Or at least learning about.

It was a pleasure talking to Rheingold about the state of the participatory Web. I have always found him far less a starry-eyed idealist or utopian than he is sometimes painted. He’s been thinking about how technology and online social practices “coevolve” longer than virtually anyone else, and his perspective continues to be incisive and challenging. Here’s a choice passage:

Crowdsourcing is a name for something that’s new. And the name is connected to the business world. So it’s going to have that connotation. I’m going to bet that “crowdsourcing” is what most people know it as five years from now. And “non-market-incented commons-based peer production” is going to be for professors. Good marketing is engineering memes that really work. You can’t argue with that.

[tags]howard rheingold, technology, crowdsourcing, assignment zero, newassignment.net[/tags]

Code Reads #9: John Backus, “Can Programming Be Liberated…?”

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Code ReadsThis is the ninth edition of Code Reads, a series of discussions of some of the central essays, documents and texts in the history of software. You can go straight to the comments and post something if you like. Here’s the full Code Reads archive.

The annals of programming include a small but significant number of radical thinkers who propose total overhauls of our basic techniques for making computers perform useful tasks. One of them is the late John Backus. Backus was the central figure in the creation of FORTRAN — the archetypal first-generation “higher level” programming language — and the devising of the BNF (“Backus Naur Form” or “Backus Normal Form”), a formal method for specifying programming-language syntax.

In his 1977 Turing Award lecture, however, Backus stepped away from the world he’d helped shape and asked, “Can Programming Be Liberated from the Von Neumann Style?” It’s a question that gets at fundamentals, at breaking free of founding constraints. It’s like asking whether psychology could be liberated from Freud, or physics from Einstein.

Backus describes the prevalent Von Neumann paradigm of computing:

In its simplest form a von Neumann computer has three parts: a central processing unit (or CPU), a store, and a connecting tube that can tramsit a single word between the CPU and the store (and send an address to the store). I propose to call this tube the von Neumann bottleneck. The task of a program is to change the contents of the store in some major way; when one considers that this task must be accomplished entirely by pumping single words back and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck, the reason for its name becomes clear….

Surely there must be a less primitive way of making big changes in the store than by pushing vast numbers of words nback and forth through the von Neumann bottleneck. Not only is this tube a literal bottleneck for the data traffic of a problem, but, more importantly, it is an intellectual bottleneck that has kept us tied to word-at-a-time thinking instead of encouraging us to think in terms of the larger conceptual units of the task at hand.

(I will pause here to note the presence of that word “tube.” Perhaps Senator Ted Stevens, far from being a techno-rube, was actually a student of Backus.)
[Read more…]

Amateur hour

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“Is it always like this?” A business acquaintance who I chatted with briefly at the Berkeley Cybersalon earlier this evening asked me as the panel discussion — titled “New Media Wars: Amateur versus Auteur” — wound down.

“Quite often, actually,” I answered him.

I assumed he was referring to the heated back-and-forth between the attendees and the panelists — and, occasionally, among the panelists themselves (Dan Gillmor, Katie Hafner, Robert Scoble and Andrew Keen). The event’s hook was Keen’s new book, “The Cult of the Amateur.” Keen’s self-described “polemic” is not yet available, and I haven’t read it, so I won’t comment directly on it. But the book’s subtitle tells you where Keen’s coming from: “How today’s Internet is killing our culture.”

Keen said his book was “designed as a grenade,” but this wasn’t really an explosive discussion — partly because, hey, nobody except the people on the panel had had a chance to read his book, but even more because the whole discussion was fragmented into the many shards of today’s complex debate over “old vs. new media.” There is no one argument — instead, many cross-conversations. And they were all represented tonight.

There’s “What’s wrong with the professional media”: Many people still get much of their information from the pros, but they feel more and more that the professional media either (a) doesn’t portray the world the way they see it (Kaliya Hamlin said she was at the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, and what she saw isn’t what the New York Times reported); or (b) gets too much factual stuff wrong to deserve its pedestal. Blogging, Dave Winer told the journalists in the room, is simply “your sources going around the blockage.”

There’s “what’s wrong with blogging”: Bloggers typically work alone, they don’t have travel budgets and editors, they lack both the institutional framework and the professional tradition to support the creation of a full report on the events of the world. Keen’s critique goes further; he says bloggers are “either irreverent, narcissistic or pornographic.” (I think he probably meant “irrelevant” but was typing too fast. Or maybe, in Keen’s world — he advocates a grand restoration of elite authority — “irreverent” is a put-down.)

There’s “how do we rescue journalism now that the business model is falling apart” — complete with mentions of newsroom layoffs, arguments about Craigslist’s impact on classified ad revenue, and laments about the importance of rescuing in-depth journalism from the wreckage of the newspaper business.

These conversations are happening almost exclusively among media people and media obsessives. Meanwhile there’s a wider conversation taking place on the Net among bloggers and participants in Web communities that has very little to do with journalism at all; it’s basically people talking to one another. At several points in the discussion tonight people got up to make this point, including one woman (I didn’t catch her name; she talked about participating in the community of mother-bloggers) who said, “I don’t know what Internet you guys are on” — and wondered how what she was doing could be considered narcissistic when so much of it involved paying attention to other people’s stories.

These conversations are all taking place orthogonally, and progress is limited. Indeed, the discussion tonight dribbled off into a consensus embrace of the notion of “media literacy”: the media have degenerated, so now, it seems, the consumers of media had better shape up!

Of course, the smarter people are at evaluating what they read, the better. But saying the answer to the crisis in journalism today is “better media literacy” is like saying the answer to the crisis in education is “better learning skills.”

Keen has lobbed his bombs before — and in the same place, yet — but I find it hard to take them seriously. (I should mention that he did a podcast interview with me about my book — and he’s charming when he’s not lobbing grenades and building stockades around the ancien regime.) I don’t think he honestly believes that, as his book’s subtitle has it, “The Internet is killing our culture.” Ironically, of course, Keen himself used his own blog as a launch pad for his ideas. He admitted tonight that he is, himself, an “amateur writer.” He claims to be motivated by a desire to “annoy libertarians of the left and libertarians of the right.”

Something tells me he might win a little less attention but a lot more credibility if he stopped trying so hard to annoy. There must be some valuable criticism lodged among all the bluster. When I read “The Cult of the Amateur” I’ll let you know what I find. But I can tell you right now that a book I have read — David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous — offers persuasive (and entertaining!) counter-arguments to those of Keen’s blunderbuss Internet put-downs that I’ve already heard.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten that Winer posted a review of Keen’s book way back in February:

His book, while based on an important and valuable premise, that Silicon Valley is too-much admired for the good of all of us, including the tech industry, fails to enlighten while he props up the egos of obsolete people and businesses. Each of his arguments is easily refuted, too easily.

FURTHER UPDATE: The blogger who asked “what Internet you guys are on” (and who made what I thought was one of the most valuable contributions of the evening) is Grace Davis.

OTHER REPORTS: Dan Farber; Robert Scoble; Renee Blodget.

[tags]berkeley cybersalon, andrew keen, blogging, cult of the amateur[/tags]

Real names

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This week one could read in the Wall Street Journal that the Chinese government has had second thoughts about a plan to require bloggers to use their real names:

The Chinese government, which sees the online world as a conduit for slander, pornography and antigovernment views, believes the real-name system would force the Internet community to watch their words and actions. But the policy received sharp protests from the technology industry.

Now, the Ministry of Information Industry, the agency responsible for the policy, has abandoned plans for a law requiring all Chinese blog service providers to ask their users for verifiable personal details before they can start blogging….

Analysts say the Chinese government is quickly discovering that compliance by fiat doesn’t work, especially now that it also is increasingly aware of the need to balance politics with the business interests….

The government decided to backtrack on the real-name system after industry players argued that it would be impossible to implement.

Then one could read, in the Washington Post, a column by Tom Grubisch arguing that the big problem with online conversation is that we don’t require people to use their real names:

These days we want “transparency” in all institutions, even private ones. There’s one massive exception — the Internet. It is, we are told, a giant town hall. Indeed, it has millions of people speaking out in millions of online forums. But most of them are wearing the equivalent of paper bags over their heads. We know them only by their Internet “handles” — gotalife, runningwithscissors, stoptheplanet and myriad other inventive names….

If Web sites required posters to use their real names, while giving the shield of pseudonymity when it’s merited, spirited online debate would continue unimpeded. It might even be enhanced by attracting contributors who are turned off today by name calling and worse. Except for the hate-mongers, who wouldn’t want that?

It’s tempting just to leave these two articles in pregnant juxtaposition. But I can’t resist adding a few pontificatory wrinkles.

I got my first taste of online conversation on the Well, a paid service on whose private boards every user’s real name is a click or two away. I found that the availability of those names helped dampen the worst flames and enforce some accountability. So in that sense, I actually share Grubisch’s perspective.

But that was 15 years ago. The open Internet and the cross-linked Web have evolved on a different model. When we started Salon’s Table Talk in 1995 we practically begged participants to use their real names. But unless we were willing to demand credit cards and hire customer-support people to phone users and so on, we couldn’t make them — and besides, we were trying to grow fast, and didn’t want to erect too high a barrier to newcomers.

That’s pretty much what every online community — and every newspaper that opens up discussion boards — faces: Practically speaking, demanding that people use their real names online is nearly impossible today, and if you try, you risk strangling the participation you sought, for both editorial and business reasons. Hey, even the Chinese government can’t seem to figure out how to do it!

Over the past decade, one further reason has arisen for many people’s reluctance to sign their postings: They understand that Google reassembles every breadcrumb that bears their name into a permanent dossier. And they’re reluctant to put all those opinions and bantering jokes into the clickstream for future employers or other busybodies. There’s a lot of talk about the Web 2.0 generation’s willingness to splay every embarrassing detail of their lives onto MySpace and Facebook without fear. But I don’t think our need for privacy is dead; I think it just slumbers until after graduation, and rudely awakens upon entry into the workforce.

Real names are powerful; they add credibility. I’m still amazed at the number of blogs I land upon, following some link, that lack a prominent credit — not because they’re anonymous (if you click around you eventually find the bloggers’ names), but because the authors somehow haven’t thought their monikers matter. Using your name is a way of claiming words and authority. But there needs to be plenty of room on the Net for people who have reasons for preferring pseudonyms.

What about Grubisch’s “hate-mongers”? We’ll just have to keep working on our moderation skills and refining our community-based filters. That’s a lot more promising than the real-name “fiat,” anyway.
[tags]china, identity[/tags]

JPG Magazine drama

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Derek Powazek has a distressing post about what, sadly, is a fairly common small-business story: Powazek and his wife, Heather Champ, started a cool little photography magazine built around contributions from a community of users. Both of them have a little experience in the online community-building area, and their magazine, JPG, was a smart experiment in combining the talents of online contributors to produce an offline (i.e., paper) magazine. (I’ve known them both for several years and have high respect for their work.)

A little startup company formed around JPG, Powazek formed a partnership with a friend who’d helped build the site’s software, and they took some investment from a tech-publishing mogul. I think you know where this is heading: there was a falling out, and Powazek and Champ have now left the company and the magazine. (There’s a Metafilter discussion.)

As Powazek tells it (and Champ confirms), the dispute was chiefly over their friend’s desire to expunge the record of the first six issues of the magazine’s history. On the face of it that’s a dumb idea. Presumably the partner who now runs the company will step forward and tell his side of the story, but it will take a lot of telling to make that look like anything other than a petty or stupid move: At best it places some wrongheaded notion of market-positioning above honesty, and at worst it’s an effort to revise the company’s story for financial/ownership reasons. A publishing company’s archive is its history. With Salon, we’ve kept our earliest issues live on the Web in all their crude glory; a lot of faces have come and gone since then, some acrimoniously, but we’ve never taken down a whole issue or removed an executive’s bio.

No matter how you cut it, this sort of fight sets a company on a lousy course: users suspect foul play, and often they’re right. The emotions are like those in a messy divorce. The people involved feel it’s difficult to tell the whole story; sometimes (as is the case with Powazek) they still have a stake in the company they’ve left, and are torn — they want their baby to prosper but they’re angry at no longer having custody.

Powazek draws the right lessons from his experience (roles and responsibilities — like, “Who’s the CEO?” — really matter; “communication between partners is mandatory”). But the larger lesson, I think, is that, no matter how idealistic you are when you start a company, the moment you take on investors, everything changes. You may still be an idealist, but the people around you are thinking about maximizing return. No matter what they say, you’d better assume that — or you’re likely to be disappointed, or even cheated.

LATE UPDATE: In the last couple days Paul Cloutier (Powazek’s business partner) and Jason deFillippo (the company’s CTO) have both posted about this story from the other side, and, no surprise, there are multiple perspectives here, and it’s nearly impossible for an outsider to get a clear fix. (Derek has more too.) It’s sad to see all this bad blood flow.
[tags]startups, publishing, online community, derek powazek, heather champ, jpg magazine[/tags]

Snail mail: do I hear a shell crunching?

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Postal mail has been on a slow downward spiral for some time, but it seems to me these new postal rates represent the acceleration of that process.

As email eats away at one end of the service and FedEx, UPS et al. chomp away at the other, the Postal Service’s business shrinks to the center — remnant bills that can’t be paid electronically, personal cards, and commercial messages (mostly unwanted credit card pitches that can become identity-theft bait and forest-devastating catalogs).

I suppose the new rules doubling the fees for bigger envelopes and so on represent the Post Office’s desperate effort to keep bringing revenue in on a dwindling base of use. But it’s a sure way to drive people away: Now there’s one less reason to hesitate about overnighting that full-size 8 1/2 x 11 envelope — who’ll want to scratch their heads and figure out how much to pay?

Too bad. As a teenaged publisher of mimeographed magazines in the 1970s, I was a bulk user of postal services, and there was something wonderful about how you could count on your six-sheets-stapled zine getting where it was going in the continental U.S. with a single stamp. Who knows how such publications would fit into this new postage world — but they’ve pretty much all gone Web anyway.

Links for May 11th

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