Notes on Howard Rheingold's opening keynote at the O'Reilly Emerging Tech Conference "Technology Innovation and Collective Action" Cory Doctorow doctorow@craphound.com -- We lived in small groups, hunting rabbits and digging up carrots for a long time, and at some point, we worked out how to team up in groups larger than families to hunt big game and to engage in agriculture, the birth of collective action. The history of Unix is the history of people working collectively to create a common good that was useful to all of them. This was enabled by the architecture of Unix. The end-to-end principle guaranteed that people would invent their own services, unenvisioned by the creators of the Net. The Web is the ne plus ultra: if you had asked five big corps or the govt to create the web, they'd still be working on it in our g'childrens' day. But giving a million geeks the power to post pages about their dogs was the affordance for collective action that gave rise to the Web. P2P and distcomp -- like SETI@Home -- are another good example. 10 years from now, when billions of people are walking down the street, carrying computers that are 100s of times more powerful than ours, with bandwidth, what will they be able to do collectively? WikiPedia: people who don't know each other create a compilation of knowledge without standard editorial or heirarchical structure. Also see WiFi, social software -- wikis, listservs, IM -- they're all affordances for collective action. Now people are using this tech to change the poltical process. The S. Korean election was won with IM and mobile phones. He acknowledged them -- the Korean cyber-generation. 10,000 small groups of antiwar demonstrators coordinated collective action online to organize enromous demonstrations. Howard Dean, a Dem presidential hopeful, is using MeetUp to run his campaign. Rumsfeld used mobile tech to run the GOP electoral campaign. -- Will we be consumers or users of this tech? Until the PC, we were all consumers, without the ability to create. We were broadcast to, by a few entertainment companies. The entertainment companies want us back in the days where there are three TV stations and one phone company and we can't do anything about it. They're politically and economically attacking P2P to lock down PCs to keep us from doing this. Tim Berners-Lee didn't have to get permission to add the Web to the Internet. He sent out software and it spread. It's not just inventors coming up wiith things. It's individuals who use inventions to amplify their experience. We can't assume that we can maintain this freedom: we must fight if we're going to remain users and not consumers. There are organized attacks on this: Trusted computing, Broadcast Flag, control of the spectrum by incumbents. These have been successful attacks -- so far. WiFi is threatening to Feds who took in $150BB for 3G spectrum and to the telcos who paid it and want to recoup their costs. You can't invent your way out of this unless you understand the regulatory constraints. We need a reserve with a rich variety of devices and media that are unlocked. We need to invent micropayment and other solutions. We need a fair price so that artists and audiences can negotiate fair prices among them. Tools like collab filters can displace the recording industry. [[Applause]] When an incumbent industry is threatened, it should give way to capitalism's creative destruction. If they RIAA and MPAA disappeared tomorrow, the quality of music and films would go up immediately. Encourage self-organizing nets. More poeple carry cellphones than sit at desktops. People who never would have used a desktop use a phone -- Indian fishermen use cellphones to find out where to bring their catches. We need reputation networks to help us figure out whom to trust. When walking down the street, you're surrounded by strangers, some of whom have common cause with you. You don't know whom to trust among them, so how do you figure out who's looking for a date or who's willing to buy your bicycle or catch a ride with you. eBay's simple reputation system shouldn't exist, given traditional economic wisdom. It could solve this. We should be able to mark up physical space. When everything has a story, who will be allowed to read or write it. I had a friend who had hooked up a wireless iPaq to a WiFi card and a barcode scanner. I took it into his kitchen and pointed it at a box of dried prunes and it auto-googled them based on their UPC. Seconds later, I had info about legal action against them, etc. So I moved onto Kellogg's Kracklin' Oat Bran and found out that the FDA had recalled the cereal. Will this system remain open? Will we retain the ability to mark up anything? RFID tags will be everywhere soon -- if we can write to and read from these tags, the world will be a better place. -- The end-to-end principle in TCP/IP is the best one we got. It allows future innovators to build atop your tech. Keep your systems open for people in the future to hack on. Link to others, build systems that allow end-users to make their own links flexibly ("small pieces loosely joined") How do we protect ourselves from each other? How to maintain or privacy in a ubicomp future? Is there a default privacy switch on your RFID tags or mobile phone? Will it default to off or on? (Only geeks change defaults) It's not just the state we need to defend ourselves against -- it's everybody. David Brin (Transpaerent Society) says privacy is dead, and the problem isn't the absence of privacy, it's the asymmetry of it. Can we hack systems to make them more symmetrical? Weinberger: DigID is about to flip the defaults from nonymous to anonymous HLR: Trust requires persistent ID, but *not* correlation with meatspace individuals [[ED: How about the possibility that a strong, psuedonymous ID points to groups, bots, or whatnot -- will this work in the context of reputaiton systems?]] How does the First Amendment affect reputation systems (libel, surveillance, etc) Lane Becker: Geek determinism got us here -- how can geek tech solve this? HLR: EFF, CDT and others use the courts, too; we need both