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Interview with Howard Rheingold

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I think it's important to understand 
that the radical democratisation

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of innovation was built into 
the architecture of the internet.

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 The people who created the fundamental structure 
f the internet realised

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that they didn't know how people were going 
to be using this in the future.

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So rather than centralising control, 
as it was in the telephone network,

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in some kind of big central office, 
some kind of technology that

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controlled how the entire internet would work, 
then control was decentralised.

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That is anyone who's got a personal computer 
and plugs it into the internet, as long as their

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 communication with all the other computers and 
plays by the rules of the internet, 

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than they can decide they're going to turn the internet 
into the the world wide web as Tim Burners Lee did.

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And they don't have to get anyone's permission,
 they don't have to rewire anything, they simply

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persuade enough people to do it. 
If you want to invent Google in your dormitory room

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or you want to start open source software 
by communicating with a number of friends

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you can do that because the architecture of the internet enables that. 

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 If you wanted to change the way 
the television broadcast network works, good luck,

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you're going to have to get the majority 
of the shareholders to agree with you

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 or you're going to have to 
replace some very expensive equipment.

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The inventors of the telephone thought 
it would be a great way to broadcast concerts

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and resisted the social use of the telephone. 
The use of the mobile phone for

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sending text messages was invented by teenage girls, 
not by telephone companies.

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The internet was not created by the telephone industry,

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 the personal computer was not created 
by the computer industry.

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People who see what's possible 
using existing technologies to create new technologies, 

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who want something, 
who desire something, who have a vision

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quite often very young people, 
quite often people who are not wealthy before they do this,

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have invented much of the digital world. 
I think there's a lot of hope

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that we have 3 billion telephones in the world today. 
People who were not in on

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 the internet revolution or the PC revolution 
now have the means of production

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 and the means of distribution, not only of culture, 
but of innovation in their hands.

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We have some very significant problems 
to solve in the world if we're going to

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get through the 21th century. 
I think mobilizing and educating the minds of

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the largest number of people we can, 
is our only real route to finding some kind of solution.

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And I think to the degree that digital technologies 
afford mass education and afford people

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who weren't in on innovation before 
to come up with a new idea that might work tomorrow;

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A new medicine, a new means of research, 
a new kinds of energy usage, is really our hope

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and that restricting innovation to the incumbents, 
to the existing companies,

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to the official holders of licenses for technologies that exist today,
is going to restrict our ability

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to innovate our way out of some of 
the very serious problems we have.

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Property is really a a bad word to use 
to describe things of the intellect

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because property has to do with exclusion.
You can make something property if you can

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build a fence for it, you can enclose something 
if you can build a wall around it.

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Generally there is a physical means of exclusion 
and there's a law that goes along with it.

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In England there were the parliamentary enclosure acts 
and there were

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the literal enclosures with hedgerows and 
stone fences of land.

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In the american west the range land was free 
and all could graze it

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because it was too expensive to fence it. 
Barbed-wire changed that and you could

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turn it into property. 
Now we're seeing that digital means of restricting who can use

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intellectual property, including scientific information, 

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is enabling enclosure of what used to be free, 
as in scientific knowledge, medical knowledge.

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And at the same time what used to be property 
- music, cinema -

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 now becomes very, very easy 
to transmit across barriers.

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Certainly people who create cultural production 
should be able to make a living

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and people who are creating new medicines 
or who are creating new works of art, 

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should be able to build on the work of others. 

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Property gets in the way of finding a solution
 - property is looking backwards

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towards a physical world in which physical barriers enabled people

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to exclude others and to control distribution.

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We need other means of controlling distribution 
and of rewarding people who create innovations.

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 If you're talking about the distribution of cultural material 
of music and cinema,

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well, there's a long history of 
whatever the incumbent industry happens to be

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resisting whatever new technology provides, 
so the video recorder was very strongly resisted

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by Hollywood and it happened that 
the electronics industry prevailed and it turned out that

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Hollywood is still there, 
and in fact the incumbent entertainment industries make great deal

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 of their money from the sale of recordings. 
I'm not the first one to document this -

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there's a long history of resistance 
in the music industry to any kind of innovation.

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The sheet music people resisted the recordings,
there's a natural tendency for an incumbent

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industry to resist changes in technologies 
that are going the threaten their business model.

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 I don't think anyone other than the shareholders 
of those companies particularly care

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about how those industries survive - 
do we really care about buggy whip, manufacturers or

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whale-bone corsets anymore? 
Innovations have come along that have made those

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things irrelevant. What we really care about 
is a broad and rich and robust distribution

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of culture and some kind of incentive for its creation.

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Now I can envision a world in which

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you have a peer-to-peer distribution 
of cinema and of music, and in which

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there's a lot of piracy and in which people do pay creators 
- maybe not everyone pays. 

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That might be a world in which you don't have 
mega stars making billions of dollars

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but maybe you'll have hundreds of thousands of 
garage bands who are able to

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make a living from their 4000 fans each, 
and quit their day jobs.

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 Is that a richer world in which 
we have more people making music?

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Maybe they're not making as much money,

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maybe we've eliminated these mega distribution companies in between

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the creators of music and the fans.

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Will big blockbuster mega budget movies go away?

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I don't think so, but what we are seeing is an emergence of a vernacular -

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of all sorts of people making four minute movies
 for the internet, or for the mobile phone. 

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And I think, you know just as we saw with the printing press, 
it was not just

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church scholars writing in latin, 
we began to have a vernacular literature that we're seeing

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the emergence of a vernacular literature in other forms as well.

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I think the questions we have to ask 
are not about the health of existing industries

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but the health of culture.