| Play from beginning |
| 00:00:00 | Interview with Howard Rheingold |
| 00:00:05 | I think it's important to understand
that the radical democratisation |
| 00:00:09 | of innovation was built into
the architecture of the internet. |
| 00:00:13 | The people who created the fundamental structure
f the internet realised |
| 00:00:18 | that they didn't know how people were going
to be using this in the future. |
| 00:00:21 | So rather than centralising control,
as it was in the telephone network, |
| 00:00:26 | in some kind of big central office,
some kind of technology that |
| 00:00:32 | controlled how the entire internet would work,
then control was decentralised. |
| 00:00:37 | That is anyone who's got a personal computer
and plugs it into the internet, as long as their |
| 00:00:42 | communication with all the other computers and
plays by the rules of the internet, |
| 00:00:47 | than they can decide they're going to turn the internet
into the the world wide web as Tim Burners Lee did. |
| 00:00:51 | And they don't have to get anyone's permission,
they don't have to rewire anything, they simply |
| 00:00:56 | persuade enough people to do it.
If you want to invent Google in your dormitory room |
| 00:01:02 | or you want to start open source software
by communicating with a number of friends |
| 00:01:08 | you can do that because the architecture of the internet enables that. |
| 00:01:13 | If you wanted to change the way
the television broadcast network works, good luck, |
| 00:01:19 | you're going to have to get the majority
of the shareholders to agree with you |
| 00:01:24 | or you're going to have to
replace some very expensive equipment. |
| 00:01:29 | The inventors of the telephone thought
it would be a great way to broadcast concerts |
| 00:01:34 | and resisted the social use of the telephone.
The use of the mobile phone for |
| 00:01:41 | sending text messages was invented by teenage girls,
not by telephone companies. |
| 00:01:48 | The internet was not created by the telephone industry, |
| 00:01:53 | the personal computer was not created
by the computer industry. |
| 00:01:58 | People who see what's possible
using existing technologies to create new technologies, |
| 00:02:04 | who want something,
who desire something, who have a vision |
| 00:02:08 | quite often very young people,
quite often people who are not wealthy before they do this, |
| 00:02:14 | have invented much of the digital world.
I think there's a lot of hope |
| 00:02:19 | that we have 3 billion telephones in the world today.
People who were not in on |
| 00:02:25 | the internet revolution or the PC revolution
now have the means of production |
| 00:02:31 | and the means of distribution, not only of culture,
but of innovation in their hands. |
| 00:02:36 | We have some very significant problems
to solve in the world if we're going to |
| 00:02:40 | get through the 21th century.
I think mobilizing and educating the minds of |
| 00:02:46 | the largest number of people we can,
is our only real route to finding some kind of solution. |
| 00:02:57 | And I think to the degree that digital technologies
afford mass education and afford people |
| 00:03:00 | who weren't in on innovation before
to come up with a new idea that might work tomorrow; |
| 00:03:05 | A new medicine, a new means of research,
a new kinds of energy usage, is really our hope |
| 00:03:13 | and that restricting innovation to the incumbents,
to the existing companies, |
| 00:03:19 | to the official holders of licenses for technologies that exist today,
is going to restrict our ability |
| 00:03:27 | to innovate our way out of some of
the very serious problems we have. |
| 00:03:34 | Property is really a a bad word to use
to describe things of the intellect |
| 00:03:40 | because property has to do with exclusion.
You can make something property if you can |
| 00:03:45 | build a fence for it, you can enclose something
if you can build a wall around it. |
| 00:03:51 | Generally there is a physical means of exclusion
and there's a law that goes along with it. |
| 00:03:57 | In England there were the parliamentary enclosure acts
and there were |
| 00:04:01 | the literal enclosures with hedgerows and
stone fences of land. |
| 00:04:10 | In the american west the range land was free
and all could graze it |
| 00:04:17 | because it was too expensive to fence it.
Barbed-wire changed that and you could |
| 00:04:21 | turn it into property.
Now we're seeing that digital means of restricting who can use |
| 00:04:30 | intellectual property, including scientific information, |
| 00:04:33 | is enabling enclosure of what used to be free,
as in scientific knowledge, medical knowledge. |
| 00:04:40 | And at the same time what used to be property
- music, cinema - |
| 00:04:47 | now becomes very, very easy
to transmit across barriers. |
| 00:04:56 | Certainly people who create cultural production
should be able to make a living |
| 00:05:02 | and people who are creating new medicines
or who are creating new works of art, |
| 00:05:09 | should be able to build on the work of others. |
| 00:05:12 | Property gets in the way of finding a solution
- property is looking backwards |
| 00:05:19 | towards a physical world in which physical barriers enabled people |
| 00:05:24 | to exclude others and to control distribution. |
| 00:05:29 | We need other means of controlling distribution
and of rewarding people who create innovations. |
| 00:05:36 | If you're talking about the distribution of cultural material
of music and cinema, |
| 00:05:42 | well, there's a long history of
whatever the incumbent industry happens to be |
| 00:05:49 | resisting whatever new technology provides,
so the video recorder was very strongly resisted |
| 00:05:59 | by Hollywood and it happened that
the electronics industry prevailed and it turned out that |
| 00:06:07 | Hollywood is still there,
and in fact the incumbent entertainment industries make great deal |
| 00:06:13 | of their money from the sale of recordings.
I'm not the first one to document this - |
| 00:06:21 | there's a long history of resistance
in the music industry to any kind of innovation. |
| 00:06:27 | The sheet music people resisted the recordings,
there's a natural tendency for an incumbent |
| 00:06:38 | industry to resist changes in technologies
that are going the threaten their business model. |
| 00:06:45 | I don't think anyone other than the shareholders
of those companies particularly care |
| 00:06:55 | about how those industries survive -
do we really care about buggy whip, manufacturers or |
| 00:07:02 | whale-bone corsets anymore?
Innovations have come along that have made those |
| 00:07:08 | things irrelevant. What we really care about
is a broad and rich and robust distribution |
| 00:07:18 | of culture and some kind of incentive for its creation. |
| 00:07:22 | Now I can envision a world in which |
| 00:07:25 | you have a peer-to-peer distribution
of cinema and of music, and in which |
| 00:07:32 | there's a lot of piracy and in which people do pay creators
- maybe not everyone pays. |
| 00:07:40 | That might be a world in which you don't have
mega stars making billions of dollars |
| 00:07:45 | but maybe you'll have hundreds of thousands of
garage bands who are able to |
| 00:07:51 | make a living from their 4000 fans each,
and quit their day jobs. |
| 00:07:59 | Is that a richer world in which
we have more people making music? |
| 00:08:05 | Maybe they're not making as much money, |
| 00:08:07 | maybe we've eliminated these mega distribution companies in between |
| 00:08:12 | the creators of music and the fans. |
| 00:08:15 | Will big blockbuster mega budget movies go away? |
| 00:08:25 | I don't think so, but what we are seeing is an emergence of a vernacular - |
| 00:08:31 | of all sorts of people making four minute movies
for the internet, or for the mobile phone. |
| 00:08:38 | And I think, you know just as we saw with the printing press,
it was not just |
| 00:08:42 | church scholars writing in latin,
we began to have a vernacular literature that we're seeing |
| 00:08:50 | the emergence of a vernacular literature in other forms as well. |
| 00:08:54 | I think the questions we have to ask
are not about the health of existing industries |
| 00:09:01 | but the health of culture. |
